10 - Varieties of Bondage in the Early Atlantic

Summary

Racialized subjection in the English Atlantic continues to be associated overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, with Africans, in part because of the magnitude and colossal significance of African chattel slavery to the plantation complex in particular and to the institutions of capitalist modernity in general. To be sure, workforces in the Atlantic became increasingly Africanized in the eighteenth century. Yet laboring people in the early years of settlement were by no means monochromatic; rather, they were, in Gary Nash’s classic account, red, white, and black. In Barbados and other New World colonies, plantation societies were built on expropriated Native lands and the coerced labor of Indigenous and African peoples. This chapter concentrates on a range of literary and extraliterary sources – plays, proto-ethnographic texts, the early novel, and pamphlets – to investigate the conjoined yet distinct histories of territorial dispossession and labor extraction. It argues that the continued expansion of plantation agriculture in the early Atlantic, supported by African chattel slavery, had, as its inevitable corollary, the diminution of Native American territorial sovereignty.