Blackburn

DIE ARBEITSAUFGABE
*Chapter Summary* VI &VIII
Using the latest research, Blackburn's work confirms the outline developed by Williams. Williams had argued that "slavery was not born of racism:rather racism was the consequence of slavery".2 Blackburn outlines the various ways in which the relationship between skin color and slavery developed to produce racist social formations andideologies. Slave Imports to the islands of the Caribbean began in the early 16th century from Nova Scotia to Buenos Aires. Initially the islands often were settled as well by numerous indentured laborers andother Europeans, but following the triumph after 1645 of the sugar revolution (initially undertaken because superior Virginia tobacco had left the Barbadian planters with nothing to sell) While theconcentrations of slave labor were greatest in England's southern colonies, the Caribbean, and Latin America, where slaves were employed in mines or on sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton plantations,slaves were also put to work in northern seaports and on commercial farms. By the 1600s, it was very common in any family throughout the entire American continent would have owned a slaves. However, it wasnot inevitable that Europeans in the New World would rely on African slaves to raise crops, clear forests, and mine precious metals. In every New World colony, Europeans experimented with Indianslavery, convict labor, and white indentured servants. Europeans imported young African slaves partly for demographic reasons. As a result of epidemic diseases, which reduced the native population by 50to 90 percent, the labor supply was insufficient to meet demand.
Africans were experienced in intensive agriculture and raising livestock and knew how to raise crops like rice that Europeans wereunfamiliar with. Initially, English colonists relied on indentured white servants rather than on black slaves. Over half of all white immigrants to the English colonies during the seventeenth century...