View the h-slavery Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in h-slavery's February 2005 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in h-slavery's February 2005 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-slavery home page.
The strictures against trying to develop a linear scale of general oppression/victimization between slaveries and/or other forms of brutality have have already been well articulated. More fruitful comparisons always entail contextualization in time and place as a critical methodological procedure. Ideological imaging is just one part of any complex analysis. Assertions about views of Africans by English, and later by Anglo-Americans are subject to the same caveat as any other. See, for example, the lead article in the last issue of Slavery and Abolition, A.L. Hatfield's, "A 'very wary people in their bargaining' or 'very good merchandise': English Traders' Views of Free and Enslaved African, 1550-1650". A second and separate question involves the salience of any particular imaging in the the realm of action. Racial rationalizations of the enslavement of Africans in the late 18th and early 19th century Atlantic world certainly included novel and ever more elaborate constructions of race. and a continuous emphasis on the salience of race in the defense of that institution. A historian still has to measure the weight of a particular rationale even within the orbit of Western culture. In a study of 20 years of Parliamentary debates over the abolition of the British slave trade references to race were virtually absent from the discussion amongst a plethora of argumnents based upon economics, morality and political/srtategic considerations.When the rare allusion to racial arguments was brought into the discussion it was as a stick with which to beat the slave interest for their appeal to racial images.
|