Jan. 22

New World Connections: Silver, Sugar, Slaves, and Furs

I. New World trade

A. Fur
B. Sugar cane
C. Slaves

II. Slave trade: why sub-Saharan Africans?

A. The lucrative trade the Portugese found going down the Gold Coast.
B. The rise to the fore of negative attitudes toward darker-skinned peoples.
C. The sometime view of Native Americans as the "natural man," untainted by the corruptions of civilization.
D. Portugese had pioneered slave trade in the fifteenth century.
E. The numbers are disputed, but probably around 12-14 million Africans were condemned to the Middle Passage.
F. For the first time in human history, slavery was associated with people of a particular phenotype, a particular skin color. Never before in human history had slavery and skin color been so tightly associated as they were in the New World, especially in North America, especially after, first, the Spaniards banned Indian slavery and, then, in North America in the course of the eighteenth century, white indentured servants became more strictly and more legally demarcated from black slaves and the scope of slavery expanded dramatically.
G. In its distinctiveness, the association of blackness and slavery, New World slavery founded the ideology of race.