Last Updated on August 20, 2015 by Paulette Brown-Hinds
In the hunting period of primitive Europeans, all captured men were slain and their women became servants or wives of the victors. At the Pastoral Stage unneeded Slaves were sold. When European cultures became sedentary their slave labor was the foundation of their economy, with the Enslaved being deemed private property—providing the slave owner with food and saving him from irksome toil. Such was routine where the military was in charge and the more Slaves present, the more men were freed to fight. Ancient Greece and Rome had three conditions for the emergence of an Enslaved society: concentrated private ownership of large land to require a permanent labor force; the development of the commodity production and markets; and the absence of alternative internal labor supply. These conditions were met easiest when civilizations very different in level or type crossed each other through the sea in the setting of large scale trade and transport carried out with high speed and low cost. Likewise, large-scale Slave systems flourished around the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean in the form of brutal civilization plunder by European barbarians. The appearance of the modern era ended enslaving European soldiers but not Colored Peoples. Hence, the new justification for enslavement was the claim that Africans were “heathen” constructed, spurring the mission of Christianizing the African world. So, Africans were declared to be a beast of burden, delivered by divine Providence to labor for the benefit of the noble and Christian Europe. Supportive to the fashioning of the Immediate Cause of slavery was an interactive relationship between Christianity and slavery, based on religious and military grounds. This was followed by political action in the colonies. The Portuguse initiated the slave trade informally in 1415 but formally in 1433 with arrival of the first shipment of enslaved Africans and gold in Portugal. While slavery was illegal in England and Holland, their laws did not prevent their citizens from engaging in the trade–the Christian nations’ “Custom of Merchants”.
Spurring the Immediate Cause was the entrance of Satanist Europeans wearing a friendliness mask, offering Africans a better “God” than their One Universal High God. They made “pie-in-the-sky” promises to do all sorts of great things so African People could have a better life–offerings Africans really, really wanted. This enabled the European masked invaders to put into action their “Shrewd” (wicked, evil, malicious, dangerous) historically well-worked out patterns of penetration, conquest, occupation, colonization. In 1619, when the nobi system in Korea reached its peak, a Dutch merchant brought 20 indentured Africans to Virginia for the first time (Rhee, Millennial Asia, 2010). Then, those Africans which followed shortly thereafter in pre-racial America occupied the social status of free persons or indentured servants (operating on a basis of equality with Whites). Many Black and White indentured servants ran off together, married, and produced what is called the “Raceless” People. Because of these labor losses, Virginians began to import enslaved Africans who became the basic form of labor on landed estates or plantations. Supposedly, like White indentured laborers, when their obligated time expired, they became freemen possessing their own farms.
However, facing the birth of a nation and socioeconomic forces (especially a worldwide demand for tobacco, cotton, and sugar, and the need for a system of labor), early C17 colonial leaders needed a large labor force to meet market demands from Europe and America. Native American populations proved too difficult to submit to enslavement, and European Christians were reluctant to enslave other Christians [such as the Irish]. Africans were preferred laborers. Despite being declared to be uncivilized or tribal, they were still more civilized and hardy than laborers from other parts of the world. Enslaving Africans, as a practical alternative, emerged in the mid-C17. Prior to that, the price of Slaves was so high that a Slave cost twice as much as an indentured servant. Still, considering the over 50% probability of Black Enslaved dying within five years of arrival, it was far more advantageous to exploit five-year indentured servants. Increasing profits and increasing systematization of the economic infrastructure led to increased fighting competition among European nations vying for power and Slaves.
