The enslavement of humans and coerced labor can be found throughout the world in many different periods of time. For the most part, unfree labor was divided into indentured servants, who voluntarily signed contracts stipulating the terms of their service, and those who were held and made to work involuntarily. Though the people targeted for varied by society, the enslaved were usually prisoners of war or criminals. Indeed, the only Europeans ever to be involuntarily forced to migrate for work were convicts and criminals. Those held under contract could fulfill their contract and be free while the length of service for other slave forms was uncertain, but not necessarily permanent. At least as far back as the early fourteenth century, slaves
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Artists began including slave imagery on everything they could sell including textiles, ceramics, fans, prints, and shop signs until the idea of slave-owning became commonplace; becoming commonplace made slavery acceptable. Moreover, Catherine Molineux explains in Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain that these slaves were fetishized to the point of becoming popular art, “inoculating the general public from the responsibilities of slave ownership as artists turned mastery into an iconographic formula. The fashion of black servitude in Britain emerged through not only the acquisition of Africans themselves, but also growing familiarization with an idealistic vision of imperial mastery.” Molineux further claims it can be shown through literary sources and portraiture the idealized European version of the black body is very dark, often presented in a kneeling position with a look of adoration directed at the master. Molineux believes this is because “Britons valued those Africans whose skin was most different from their own because doing so aided their own imagined encounter…the commodity of lustrous black skin reflects how, in elite taste, the blacker the better became the most powerful imperial …show more content…
Beckles working with Andrew Downes attributes the shift from a system of predominantly white indentureship labor to black slave labor to the cost-effectiveness compared to the volatile servant market and increased efficiency of the slave trade beginning in the late seventeenth century. The slave trade peaked in the eighteenth century with about 80% of all slaves shipped after 1700. Britain controlled about 50% of the trade by the middle of the 18th century. Estimates of the number of people sold during the entirety of the transatlantic slave trade ranges from more than nine to fifteen million plus at least another two million who died before ever reaching a plantation. However, the end of the eighteenth century was also to be the beginning of the end for the systemic, lawful form of chattel slavery that had allowed for legal ownership of other humans for roughly four
Artists began including slave imagery on everything they could sell including textiles, ceramics, fans, prints, and shop signs until the idea of slave-owning became commonplace; becoming commonplace made slavery acceptable. Moreover, Catherine Molineux explains in Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain that these slaves were fetishized to the point of becoming popular art, “inoculating the general public from the responsibilities of slave ownership as artists turned mastery into an iconographic formula. The fashion of black servitude in Britain emerged through not only the acquisition of Africans themselves, but also growing familiarization with an idealistic vision of imperial mastery.” Molineux further claims it can be shown through literary sources and portraiture the idealized European version of the black body is very dark, often presented in a kneeling position with a look of adoration directed at the master. Molineux believes this is because “Britons valued those Africans whose skin was most different from their own because doing so aided their own imagined encounter…the commodity of lustrous black skin reflects how, in elite taste, the blacker the better became the most powerful imperial …show more content…
Beckles working with Andrew Downes attributes the shift from a system of predominantly white indentureship labor to black slave labor to the cost-effectiveness compared to the volatile servant market and increased efficiency of the slave trade beginning in the late seventeenth century. The slave trade peaked in the eighteenth century with about 80% of all slaves shipped after 1700. Britain controlled about 50% of the trade by the middle of the 18th century. Estimates of the number of people sold during the entirety of the transatlantic slave trade ranges from more than nine to fifteen million plus at least another two million who died before ever reaching a plantation. However, the end of the eighteenth century was also to be the beginning of the end for the systemic, lawful form of chattel slavery that had allowed for legal ownership of other humans for roughly four