17 - Slavery, Captivity, and the Slave Trade in Colonial North America’s Global Connections

Summary

Slavery connected North American colonies to a wider world in ways both obvious and subtle. Most obviously, forcing African people to toil in the New World introduced African knowledge, cultures, and languages into American societies, enriching not only slaveholders, but also American culture. African labor, skills, and traditions built American economies, shaped systems of production, and transformed American cuisine, music, and speech. Meanwhile, North American colonists adapted slavery’s caste system from precedents set elsewhere around the Atlantic. Slaveholding North American societies codified and elaborated systems to control the enslaved to suit their own ends and circumstances, articulating a racial division of rights and labor that uniquely constrained African American lives and subjected enslaved people to myriad abuses, but the basics of property in persons and hereditary servile status were imported.