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I don’t really agree with this take tbh. Sure, European excess population might have been ample enough for colonizing efforts, although I would debate that in some cases such as Castille and Portugal, but that is not the point. https://twitter.com/alraven3/status/1329335091181522944
Slavery in the Americas started with indigenous people, after disease drastically depleted the supply of slave labour, indenture servitude was used. I don’t know why he glosses over this point.
In fact in 1683 white servants represented one-sixth of Virginia’s population and during this same time two thirds of Pennsylvania’s immigrant population were indentured servants. Almost 250,000 people living in the British colonies were indentured servants up to the 18th century
So profitable became the supplying of labour to the colonies, that kidnaping poor city dwellers was encouraged by some authorities in England to keep supplying quotas.
But indentured servants were not slaves, and that is precisely the problem. One must realize that what we know today as slavery is only one of the many forms this institution has taken throughout history, and its development is closely tied to the rise of the plantation economy.
If we take a “longue durée” approach to the History of the Plantation economy, we can find its origins at the end of the 11th Century when Christians from southern and western Europe conquered and exploited former Muslim lands in Palestine.
From then it expanded to the medieval colonies of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic archipelagoes and parts of Africa carried by the Portuguese and Castillian. All of them were tied to sugar exploitation, although in a very rudimentary form.
The plantation economy wouldn’t experience a major shift until its introduction in the American colonies, specially in the Caribbean where it thrived.
The thing with plantations is that, as an economic unit, they are most productive when large swaths of land are controlled by a single center, since the crops they cultivate are generally very labour intensive.
This is one of the reasons why slaves were preferred to indentured servants. The old imperial historiographic school acknowledge this fact only tangentially, claiming that the heat was “too much for the white man to bear” but obviously that was not true.
For a time white servants and convicts toiled together in the Caribbean, with Barbados being the only community of black slaves in the Caribbean.
This changed in part because of a perceived threat of under-population in many parts of Europe due to the 17th Century crisis, specially in England where Sir Josiah Child claimed that “whatever tends to the depopulating of a kingdom tends to the impoverishment of it”.
Mostly though it came from the fact that, while it was more expensive and inconvenient to bring black slaves from Africa to the colonies, in the long run it was much more profitable.
For starters, indentured servants worked like slaves but were not really slaves, they were subjects of the King and there were laws that protected them from abuse.
This meant that, while they were more skilled than slaves it was much more difficult to discipline them since many of them knew the laws of the old country and were more prone to rebelling from the beginning.
Black slaves on the other hand were completely uprooted from their former societies and placed in completely alien ones without any knowledge of the language, laws or customs of the place. It was thus much easier to alienate them and break them in order to make them more docile.
Not only that, one of the biggest problems was the fact that indentured servants had a time limit for their servitude, after that they were allowed to settle in the land as they saw fit and become small-landowners.
This might have worked in the early days of the 13 colonies, but in the Caribbean a community of small plantation landowners would be dramatically less productive than an economy ran by big plantations.
That is why the influx of white servants in slaver colonies was fought against tooth and nail by big plantation owners, who came to be one of the most powerful lobbies in the first British Empire thanks to the development of the triangular trade.
I think this text from one of the best historians of Caribbean slavery, Eric E. Williams, is pretty illuminating:
