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Conclusion By the dawn of the eighteenth century, race-based plantation slavery would be one of the defining characteristics of the English Empire in the Americas. By that time, tens of thousands of enslaved Africans would be imported into the English colonies, bound into a state of perpetual slavery by labor-starved planters, and compelled to work under threat of physical violence. AngloAmerican legislators passed new laws in all of the colonies between 1661 and 1705 to enhance their ability to control this growing population in order to maximize productivity and guarantee security. Indentured servitude would continue to be an important institution in the Americas, but slavery gradually replaced it during these years as the definitive labor system in the plantation colonies. Indian slavery would also continue to be important, especially in the southeastern region of North America, but Indian slaves were much less likely to be viewed as a distinctive—or redeemable—cohort by the English as indigenous peoples increasingly came to be seen as an impediment to colonial expansion and potentially useful workers. By the early eighteenth century, Indian and African slaves alike were valued for their ability to produce cash crops for English markets. This kind of slavery, which served as the primary engine of economic production and an all-encompassing mechanism for social control in the Anglo-Atlantic world, was born during the last half of the seventeenth century.1 There is considerable merit in beginning the story of slavery in the English colonies with the demographic, economic, and legal transformations that took place during the late seventeenth century. Slavery is certainly much easier to characterize once the institution began to assume some structural coherence and Africans started appearing in larger numbers. But if we focus our gaze too narrowly on the period after 1660—or 1619, for that matter—we 228 Conclusion might mistakenly assume that slavery was unimportant before it manifested itself in familiar fashion.2 As we have seen, what early modern English observers considered worth characterizing as slavery varied greatly between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Sometimes they accepted slavery as natural or even desirable, even as they were often critical of it under certain circumstances. How the English encountered slavery and whether they were its likely victims or potential beneficiaries played an important role in the construction of increasingly well-defined English ideas about the proper place for slavery in the emerging Atlantic world. Few people bothered to challenge the propriety of human bondage, but what they may have thought about it in specific terms depended a great deal on what they thought slavery meant. And that was no simple thing. This book began with a few stories to set the stage, so perhaps a couple more would be appropriate to wind things up. Consider, first, the observations of Fynes Moryson, who traveled throughout Europe and famously published the first volume of his itinerant travels in 1617.3 Moryson was most well-known in his own time for his observations on Ireland, where he had served as part of the English force tasked with putting down Tyrone’s Rebellion , but he wrote even more about Europe and the Mediterranean world. In so doing, he made frequent and predictably commonplace references to slavery. Writing about Poland, for example, Moryson noted without any sense of injustice or sympathy that many of the people are “meere slaves, (as in Bohemia) the Lord having power over their bodyes and goods, and over their Children to make them servants in their household.” At the same time, when writing about Naples, Moryson struck a slightly different tone when he observed that “[m]ore miserable men cannot be found than those who are condemned to Rowe chayned in the Gallyes.” Slavery in this instance was certainly lamentable, but it was hardly unfamiliar: Galley slaves were men who “for Capitall Crimes are condemned to this slaverye for life” while “others guilty of lesse Crimes are condemned to this service for certayne years, and some are so foolish as to sell their liberty for mony.”4 Fellow Englishmen had been saying much the same thing for more than fifty years by this time. In a third instance, however, Fynes Moryson was absolute in his condemnation of slavery. “Nothing can be imagined more miserable,” he wrote, “then a Towne taken by the Turkes” because they not only would lay waste to everything before them but also would not “spare the life of any whose age or lamenes makes him...

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