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Indentured servitude of Irish and other European peoples occurred in seventeenth-century Barbados, and was fundamentally different from enslavement: an enslaved African's body was owned, as were the bodies of their children, while the labour of indentured servants was under contractual ownership of another person.
Importing indentured labour became viable for plantation owners because newly emancipated slaves refused to work for low wages. This is demonstrated in the sheer number of freed slaves in colonies that imported Indian workers. Jamaica had 322,000 while British Guiana and Barbados had about 90,000 and 82,000 freed slaves, respectively. [13]
As slavery gradually disappeared and the legal status of servi became nearly identical to that of the coloni, the term changed meaning into the modern concept of "serf". The word "serf" is first recorded in English in the late 15th century, and came to its current definition in the 17th century. Serfdom was coined in 1850. [citation needed]
According to the Corpus, the natural state of humanity is freedom, but the "law of nations" may supersede natural law and reduce certain people to slavery. The basic definition of slave in Romano-Byzantine law was: [71] anyone whose mother was a slave; anyone who has been captured in battle; anyone who has sold himself to pay a debt
The scarcity of slaves made Creole planters turn to petits habitants (Creole peasants), and immigrant indentured servitude to supply manual labor; they complimented paid labor with slave labor. On many plantations, free people of color and whites toiled side-by-side with slaves.
[citation needed] The export of slaves to European colonies (and the high death rates there) created an unprecedented population drain. [13] Slave-raiding also led to constant wars between tribes, and eventually destroyed or threatened to destroy most peoples in the vicinity of the colonies.
New York and New Jersey adopted gradual abolition laws that kept the free children of slaves as indentured servants into their twenties. After the 1793 invention of the cotton gin , which enabled the development of extensive new areas for cotton cultivation, the number of manumissions decreased because of increased demand for slave labour.
A slavocracy (from slave + -ocracy) is a society primarily ruled by a class of slaveholders, such as those in the southern United States and their confederacy during the American Civil War. The term was initially coined in the 1830s by northern abolitionists as a term of disparagement and subsequently used in wider senses, including as a term ...