[DSTRen13]

Originally Posted by Little32

Right, and I do not argue that the initial impetus was not economics, but very early on, before the 1700s, it morphed into a institution that was in many ways circumscribed by race. Not to mention that the negative perceptions of Africans that fueled this transition had their roots in early Enlightenment thought, so even if the codification of these beliefs into law did not happen until later, these ideas were certainly a part of the popular European cultural imagination before colonization even begin in earnest (I think that Gould talks a bit about this in The Mismeasure of Man; and I am looking for other sources here). Indeed,the fact that the negative beliefs predate the institutionalization of slavery might have aided in the shift from the indentured servitude, "free labor" institution to the system of chattel slavery.

As I clarified earlier, economics were certainly a factor, but race was just as much of a factor from almost the beginning of the institution and to suggest otherwise is just wrong-headed to me. It seems to me that as race was such a defining characteristic for the majority of the time that the institution existed, we are justified in saying that it was in many ways about race. To cite the economic beginnings as a way of negating the racialized history of chattel slavery is problematic to me (not to say that you were doing that, but that this often happens.)

It seems like this may be a semantics issue on what we're calling "race"? Europeans certainly saw the African as other from the beginnings of the slave trade, but that view's development into modern ideas of race was a process that took a few centuries.