Like Alia Karout states in her blog post, I was surprised by the amount of change slavery underwent in America; I had never considered the process through which it developed either. While completing the reading for this week in Inhuman Bondage,\u00a0<\/i>I was struck to learn the degree to which slavery evolved in America from a system based on economic and labor needs to one integral to the economy (especially in the more southern colonies) which is based on racism. In my other history classes, slavery in America was talked about in a way that made it seem like a very static, unchanging aspect of American society. It seemed as if it had been a part of the colonies since the beginning, however, as Davis shows, this is not the case. Like Davis points out, “…no British founders of North American colonies, except for South Carolina, intended to create slave societies,” therefore slavery developed gradually in different regions (the north, Chesapeake and south) as a solution to economic and labor conditions (Davis 126). For example, in the Chesapeake colonies slavery didn’t begin to take hold until the mid-1670s when improving economic conditions in England meant fewer emigrants were arriving in Virginia and Maryland as indentured servants. Slavery developed according to need<\/p>\n

While it may seem obvious that slavery would develop differently in different regions according to economic need, the degree of diversification described both by Davis and Taylor in this week’s readings came as a surprise to me. Slaves in northern urban centers were working in specialized jobs such as carpenters, stoneworkers, and weaving. Most surprising, was the specialization of slaves in the Chesapeake and southern colonies who were bought specifically for their expertise in areas such as rice farming (in the Carolinas).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like Alia Karout states in her blog post, I was surprised by the amount of change slavery underwent in America; I had never considered the process through which it developed either. While completing the reading for this week in Inhuman Bondage,\u00a0I was struck to learn the degree to which slavery evolved in America from a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Development of slavery”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[110,274,288],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economic-need","tag-slavery","tag-specialization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}