1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [55]
Of all the nations in western Europe, moreover, England would be the last that one would expect to take up this especially brutal form of bondage, because opposition to slavery was more common there than the rest of Europe. If the continent had an antislavery culture, in fact, it was England. This was less a tribute to the nation’s moral advancement than an enraged response to the constant targeting of her ships by Barbary pirates, who from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century enslaved tens of thousands of English sailors, soldiers, and merchants. Based in northwest Africa, these Muslim corsairs prowled as far north as the English Channel, ransacking seaside villages and seizing ships at anchor; in just ten days, the mayor of Plymouth complained in 1625, buccaneers lurking outside the harbor took twenty-seven vessels. (Inviting charges of hypocrisy, England lionized Francis Drake, who terrorized Spanish colonies in a similar fashion.) Most English captives were sent to the galleys; many were forcibly converted to Islam; others disappeared into slave caravans bound across the deserts to Ottoman Egypt or sub-Saharan Africa. In those days Algiers alone often held 1,500 English slaves; the Moroccan town of Salé had 1,500 more. Some were sold to Spain and Portugal. Escapees published lurid memoirs of their years under the lash, inflaming the public; churchmen denounced Muslim slavery in the pulpit and took up collections in church to ransom captives. Political leaders, Protestant ministers, and legal experts alike vehemently proclaimed freedom as an English birthright and condemned the pagans and papists (Moroccans and Spaniards) who enslaved them.
Slavery had been widespread in England in medieval times, as it was in the rest of Europe. In Spain and Portugal, beset by conflict with Islam and short of labor for sugar plantations, it continued to be a useful enterprise. (I discuss this further in Chapter 8.) In England, though, it became exceptional—not actually illegal, but rare—for political reasons, for the economic reasons described by Smith, and because slavery as an institution had little appeal in a nation aswarm with mobs of unemployed workers. Publicly outraged by bondage and with no domestic slave industry to protect, the English were Europe’s least likely candidates for slavemasters.
In consequence, the English colonies initially turned to indentured servants and largely avoided slaves. Indentured servants comprised between a third and a half of the Europeans who arrived in North America in the first century of colonization. Slaves were rare—only three hundred lived in all of Virginia in 1650. By comparison, the few Dutch in New Amsterdam, the colonial predecessor to New York, had five hundred slaves. As more English ships came to North America, slaves slowly became more common.
Then, between 1680 and 1700, the number of slaves suddenly exploded. Virginia’s slave population rose in those years from three thousand to more than sixteen thousand—and kept soaring thereafter. In the same period the tally of indentured servants shrank dramatically. It was a pivot in world history, the time when English America became a slave society and England became the dominant player in the slave trade.
What accounts for this about-face? Economists and historians have mulled it over for decades. It was not the lure of profits from the trade itself: the slave business was incredibly important as a historical force and moral stain but not all that important as an economic industry. At its height at the end of the eighteenth century, according to the historians David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, slave shipments “accounted for less