The Origins of Chattel Slavery in Colonial North America Essay

The Origins of Chattel Slavery in Colonial North America There have been many illuminating studies in the field of the origins of chattel slavery in Colonial North America. Alpert, 1970; Edmondson, 1976; Jordan, 1962: Ruchames, 1967; Starr, 1973, wrote seminal studies that did much to bring insight to the subject. Goetz, 2009; Mason, 2006; Smaje, 2002; Neeganagwedgin, 2012, presented evidence that have either reexamined old questions or used new methods and approaches to ask news questions to add insight to this topic. However, little has been written about indeginous slavery and its pycho-social impacts that still influence North American people today, or the political considerations that led to black society becoming chattel slaves. These topics have been under scutinized and their study would add insight and new perspective to this body of literature. In looking at the body of discourse the recurring themes of what came first; prejudice or slavery first is the most contested. Logically in order to enslave the master must find a means to establish the enslaved â€Å"otherness† and it seems that a primary means of doing so was and is ethnocentric superiority and religion. It doesn’t seem that one could justify morally, subjugating another without â€Å"knowing† that you were culturally, socially and morally superior to those you wanted to subjugate. In the majority of the studies, the idea that imposing values and religion on the subjugated as beneficial to the subjugated, was a primary theme, yet if there was no financial benefit it is doubtful that the slave system in the United States would have developed or had the impact that it has. Because of this reasoning, I believe that Jordan’s model is probably the closest to accurat... ...Press. Ruchames, L. (1967). The Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial America. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from Retrieved from URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2716188 Smaje, C. (2002). Re-thinking the Origins Debate: Race Formation and Political Formations in England's Chesapeake Colonies. Journal of Historical Sociology, 15(2), 193-219. Starr, R. (1973). Historians and the Origin of British North American Slavery. The Historian, 36(1), 1-18. doi:DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1973.tb01523. Tomsett, F. (2000). 1606 and all that: The Virginia Conquest. Race and Class, 41, 29-14. doi:10.1177/0306396800413003 Wareing, J. (2002). Preventive and punitive regulation in seventeenth-century social policy: conflicts of interest and the failure to make ‘stealing and transporting Children, and other Person’s a felony. Social History, 27(3), 288-308. Doi:10.1080/03071020210159685