Yeah unquestionably they reinforce each other. No question. One interesting thing is that Americans tend to think about this as driven mainly by the South. There’s a lot of truth to that. (QTing for easier threading.) https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1273286859507085313

2/ But the impulse is much broader in the geography of North American colonization. My dissertation was on the interplay between economic interaction between settlers and native communities and inter-communal violence in mid-17th century New England. The leaders of ...

3/ settlement process were similarly focused on finding labor sources to make money. For a variety of reasons they weren’t able to do that at scale and the course of history in the northeast moves along a different trajectory. But here are a few examples of the organizers ...

4/ of the Massachusetts settlement in the 1630s discussing how they would never be able to have success unless they found some cheap or coerced source of labor.

5/ As you can see they even brainstormed a plan to provoke a war with the Narraganset Indians (then the population least touched by epidemics) to enslave them and then barter them for African slaves from Barbados. As I say, this gets pushed more towards the margins in the ...

6/ North because these plans don’t really pan out. It’s much more deeply embedded in the South where this model becomes deeply entrenched by the late 17th century. One of the most consistently trends in American history, true to today, is that crimes of violence ...

7/ are much more common in the south than in any other region of the country and they’re higher in the south in those areas where the slave regime was most brutal - Lousiana and to a lesser extent the other Deep South states.

8/ I guess one can look at this from different perspectives and say this is society or state. To me it’s about the society itself, rooted in the society itself. The state embodies that, enforces that and holds t in place. But it’s rooted in the society, at least it’s origins.

9/ In any case, society vs state is perhaps a chicken and egg question or even semantic. My larger point is to agree with JB that this has deep roots in a settler society and practices of land and especially labor use and control.