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Chapter 23 - Slavery in Precontact America

from Part V - Africa, the Americas, and Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2021

Craig Perry
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
David Eltis
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
Stanley L. Engerman
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, New York
David Richardson
Affiliation:
University of Hull
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Summary

This chapter describes the forms of enslavement that existed in the Americas prior to contact with the Old World. Scholars have long avoided the subject due to their concern that indigenous Americans are already too much associated with savagery. However, the time has come to gather together all that we know of the varied forms of coerced labor. The information only helps us to humanize and comprehend ancient Americans. In Mesoamerica and South America, agricultural states did demand contributions from communities of laboring people; but though these people were diempowered dependents, they were not slaves. The vast majority of those who really were enslaved were prisoners of war who were maintained as domestics, most of them women. We even have some sixteenth-century texts that reveal something of these women's lives. Meanwhile, among the semi-sedentary peoples of North America, slavery likewise existed, as an effect of perennial warfare, but not nearly to the same extent as in the agricultural states to the south.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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