Y'all should really look at the academics on this instead of going on what you learned in high school. Indentured servitude is a form of slavery and was, in many cases, every bit as bad as chattel slavery. Do some reading into the history of the Caribbean.
Nah. People go too far in saying they were completly and totally different by taking an ideal type of Indentured servitude. Like this
Indentured servants weren't slaves. They weren't stolen from their homes. They weren't split up from their families, never to see them again. Once they served their time, they're done.
is not true in all cases.
But slavery was certainly far worse. Especially as you get into the late 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Because ideologies of race start mixing with those justifying slavery.
It's an awkward place to be put in as an academic. I understand why people downplay indentured servitude, because a lot of racist people use it to downplay slavery, but I feel somewhat uncomfortable with the way in which they do it.
The best approach epistemologically is nuance, but this intersects with very real issues today. American slavery and American racism are so intertwined as to be impossible to disentangle today. To nuance the argument runs the risk of hurting real people being oppressed today. As a result this is one of the few issues than I tend to just not speak on.
Hard to answer this one concisely because Ancient Rome lasted for several centuries and the social mores changed quite often.
I think that people tend to view all slavery as the same and it isn't. The slavery enacted upon the African people and later their American descendants was a particularly brutal and vicious form of it based on ideas of racial superiority, religious ideals and all sorts of other evil bullshit.
I'm not even sure the two systems are worth comparing all that much to be honest.
But to put it simply and leaving out a ton of detail and context
In Ancient Rome you lost a war therefore you have to do what we say.
American/European slavery, God put you on Earth as our inferiors to do our work for us and you aren't even a person anyway so it is ok for us to brutalise and destroy you at our whim.
The same case works for this too. Early slavery, say 1630 Virginia, had little to nothing in common with what we think of when we think of slavery in America.
Sounds like he also needed a history lesson on Colonial Virginia and the fallout from Bacon's Rebellion that lead to the ruling class working to create racial divides between poor whites/indentured servants and black slaves.
I like Morgan's thesis, but it's been criticized from the left and the right. And this is ignoring that most of the south's tradition of slavery comes from the Caribbean not Virginia, Maryland being the exception.
Freakin history. When I was in school they told us that indentured servants were only Africans "migrants" and later became slaves.
What? Where did you go to school? I went to really shitty public schools in the deep south and they did a much better job than this.
Pretty sure that was the argument the South made during the civil war. Guess some of the bullshit believes resurface every now and then.
I'm no Americanist, but that seems totally wrong to me. That equivalence wouldn't fit with the racial ideology of the time. It's the argument that a lot of Americans make
now.
There was no other system in any other culture that I know of that can compare to Western slavery. In most ancient Eastern cultures slavery was a kin to the episode of Seinfeld where they were writing a pilot about a guy being sentenced to be a butler. In Western slavery you weren't even considered to be a human.
This does a good job of reducing the world into West and other. British, Spanish, and French systems of slavery in the early modern period differed from each other and over time. We should analyze each system as it was in its particularities. I agree with your point that the early modern British, Spanish, and French systems were probably noticeably worse than all others by the late 18th century. That being said we shouldn't take them to be the same system.
I never liked the idea of indentured servitude and the servants in the images were always African. Always seemed like another lie.
What do you mean you didn't like the "idea of indentured servitude". I mean it existed, we have extremely extensive records of it, because a number of people signed contracts agreeing to be indentured servants. Though the servants were overwhelmingly not African.
