Cruel, unjust, exploitative, oppressive, slavery bound two peoples togetherin bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that neither could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other. Slavery rested on the principle of property in man –of one man’s appropriation of another as well as of the fruits of his labor. By definition, and in essence it was a system of class rule, in which some people lived off the labor of others.

Eugene Genovese, Roll Roll Jordan: The World the Slaves Made (1974), p. 2.

Chattel principle: Ownership of one human being by another, ability to buy and sell human beings

• Violence

• Political sanction

• Legitimacy of enslavement

• Chattel comes from Latin capitale: cattle and capital

Otherness

• Andropon, “man-footed creature”

• “Servus,” to serve, serf

• Slave, “ Sclavus” Slav

• “Negro,” Black

THE MOST UNIVERSAL DEFINITION of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one's country, dishonored and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider. She is the perpetual outcast, the coerced migrant, the foreigner, the shamefaced child in the lineage. Contrary to popular belief, Africans did not sell their brothers and sisters into slavery. They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships, nonmembers of the polity, foreigners and barbarians at the outskirts of their country, and lawbreakers expelled from society. In order to betray your race, you had first to imagine yourself as one. The language of race developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade.

Saidiya Hartman, Lose your mother (2007), 5

Orlando Patterson: Social Death and Natal Alienation: commutation of physical death for war captives.

Personal reduction in rank and status based on natal alienation

Separated from your kin (family and society) by means of violence

Social Death: only social relationship allowed is the master-slave relationship

Perpetual dishonor

Jack Goody (1980): Slavery as most servile status of dependency.Expansion of complex societies biologically (reproduction) and

materially at the expense of other societies (kinship).

• Illustration from: Trevor R Getz and Liz Clarke. Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012

III.2.10The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.

III.2.12Land occupied by … tenants is properly cultivated at the expense of the proprietor as much as that occupied by slaves. There is, however, one very essential difference between them. Such tenants, being freemen, are capable of acquiring property, and having a certain proportion of the produce of the land, they have a plain interest that the whole produce should be as great as possible, in order that their own proportion may be so. A slave, on the contrary, who can acquire nothing but his maintenance, consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible over and above that maintenance.

Adam Smith (1723-1790), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. (Canaan edition, 1904).

"In general, the concealed slavery of wage workers in Europe required, as a prop, slavery sans phrase — in the New World," Karl Marx, Capital, 1867. (Penguin Edition, 1995 Vol. 1, 925)