HIP007 Slavery: the indelible stain

In the last five episodes I have covered some introductory issues about three of the major themes of the History's Ink podcast. That is on European encounters in episode 2, on the Protestant reformations in 3 and 4, and on the development of the idea of Europe (vis a vis Islam and the Muslim world) in episodes 5 & 6. Going hand in hand with all this is the development of that aspect of European society — particularly in the rise of colonialism — that was slavery. That is, the kidnapping of people (mostly from Africa), their forced transportation across the Atlantic Ocean, their 'sale' as property, followed by their enforced lifetime of enslaved labour. In short, an economic and political system that was based on the fundamental idea that people could be treated almost entirely as property, and the inevitable violence that was required to enforce this. It was a system that began very early in the westward expansion of Europe, and which largely fuelled the economic development of European settlement in the new colonies, from the sixteenth century onward. Indeed, it was largely hard wired into the formation of the independent US and which helped to power the economic development of the new nation.