Forced Labor and Slavery Develop in Tropical

¶ … forced labor and slavery develop in tropical colonies? How was slavery in the Americas different from slavery in earlier societies?

Forced labor in the tropical colonies was created to support the production of 'cash crops' such as sugar cane. The harvesting of these crops was hard, back-breaking work. "Sugar was far more difficult work than cultivating cotton, tobacco, or rice. So many slaves died within a few years of their arrival in the sugar islands, sometimes only months, that a steady fresh supply was always needed" (Davis 2012). Only slavery could provide an efficient means to render such crops profitable. "Before long, British and French plantations in the West Indies began to dominate. British west coast ports such as Bristol and Liverpool thrived on the sugar cane industry and refineries and packaging factories were set up" (Sugar cane and the slave trade, 2012, Plant Cultures). The slave trade was called the Triangular Trade because the route between West Africa where slaves were captured, the West Indies were the cane was harvested, and Europe, formed a triangle. The centrality of slavery in the region is noteworthy because after the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1833, the economy of West Indies entered a sudden, precipitous decline (Sugar cane and the slave trade, 2012, Plant Cultures).

In North America, slavery and the production of cash crops was likewise linked. At first, there were few slaves in North America, given the availability of indentured servants. However, slaves began to present additional potential benefits as sources of labor over indentured whites, such as the fact that slaves could be easily identified if they ran away. And "the supply of white indentured servants began to decline as more working-class whites found employment back home in British industries, commerce, and shipping" (Davis 2012).

American slavery developed unique features because of the racially-based nature of its conceptualization. Slaves had existed since the beginning of time: enslaving prisoners was a common part of wartime practices. Slavery is mentioned in Greek and Roman texts, the Bible, and most other notable ancient histories from a wide variety of cultures. In the Middle Ages, serfdom was a form of slavery that tied a certain 'class' of people to the land. However, in all of these instances, slavery was a legal status rather than something intrinsic to the properties or 'race' of the person. Africans were characterized as innately inferior to whites as a way of justifying slavery and because the practice of slavery had become so interlinked with the African slave trade.

In the Southern colonies, there was particular pressure to use enslaved labor as a means of remaining profitable. Bacon's Rebellion created a fear of the possibility of rebellion of lower-class whites. Virginia and later all of the Southern states "passed laws defining slaves as chattel property whose status was both lifelong and hereditary" (Davis 2012). While there were some attempts to enslave Native Americans, this proved difficult since Native Americans found it easy to escape and hide in the forests they knew better than whites. Africans were accustomed to the tropical climates and hard labor. Southern slaves vastly outnumbered those in the Northern colonies, due to the lack of cash crops in the North.