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Owen Paine's avatar

The historic recprd allows one to extract the morallistic stuffing

As engels said slavery was progressive compared to genocide

Tribal nations dig genocide

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Larry Koenigsberg's avatar

I used to read many books concerning slavery. I'm going to revive a couple of those memories here, both concerning racial slavery. I no longer recall the title of a book that included, or concerned, material about Cherokees holding Black slaves. They were (or had been) in the South after all. The anecdote concerns a Cherokee man attempting to beat his Black slave, and the Black slave beating right back. A very different view of master/slave relations than elsewhere in the South; one of its less malign forms

The other book was THE REVOLT OF THE ZANJ by the great historian al-Tabari (839–923 CE). Black slaves were put to work, killing work, in the salt flats in the extreme south of Iraq; an Iraqi Muslim led them in a 17 year revolt whose high mark was taking the city of Basra. The Zanj (the rebelling slaves) were defeated. The book is v. 36 in SUNY Press's HISTORY OF AL-TABARI. Racial slavery in one of its more malign forms.

While I'm at it, BLACK MAJORITY: NEGROES IN COLONIAL SOUTH CAROLINA FROM 1670 THROUGH THE STONO REBELLION describes how immigrants from Barbados, trying to find a way to reproduce in South Carolina the great wealth produced by Black slave labor in Barbados, were unsuccessful with various crops (indigo is what I remember) until they came to rice. The slaves often had experience with rice cultivation and it seems that sickle cell anemia improved survival rates in the malarial swamps. So there was something about economics of slavery in this situation, although I suppose that being atop a hierarchy, with faux aristocracy and easy rape, was ultimately of supreme importance to the enslavers.

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