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Role Of Slavery In Colonial Virginia

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Colonists living in Great Britain’s Virginia colony during the second half of the seventeenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the demographics of their labor force. Although the first African slaves arrived in the colony in 1619, their numbers remained insignificant to the overwhelming English population until the 1670s. From then on, African laborers constituted an ever increasing proportion of the colony’s bound labor force. The British crown’s revoking of The Royal African Company’s monopoly on West African trade in 1698 opened the Atlantic slave trade to private merchants. This resulted in a huge influx of black slaves directly from Africa into the colony. However, it was not simply the sheer volume of slaves in the colony that differentiated the eighteenth …show more content…
It was also the infusion of a racial ideology which meant to permanently and hereditarily subjugate a people based on the color of their skin. Elite planters, beginning in the 1660s, manipulated racist tendencies within society in order to stabilize their labor force and maintain control over the common white population. By the eighteenth century free blacks, some of whom having prospered during the 1600s, had largely disappeared from a landscape which recognized their skin color as a marker for enslavement. The conversion of the colony’s bound labor system from white indentured servants to African slaves has dominated the historiography of colonial Virginia since the early twentieth century. At the center of this debate is the role of racial ideology within that evolution. Was the eighteenth century slave society created out of long-held racist beliefs of the African people’s innate inferiority, or was the introduction of racist policies simply a justification for enslaving the only feasible labor force available to wealthy Virginians? My historiography paper will examine

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