Free packet of sugar for stepping in the door. You dont seem particularly grateful. So, were thinking about how we are affected by the past. To do what i had just done, handing out a quarter cup of sugar to people who are not my close personal friends, to do that, hand out a quarter cups worth of sugar, this was the middle ages in europe. That is an incredibly extravagant gift. Sugar, in the 1300s, was a rare and expensive good. It was treated as medicine. It was prized and available only to the richest of the rich in western europe. To hand out the small amount i gave you would have been seen as an extravagant thing. Today, it is so common. It is so much a part of our diets. You can go into a gas station and grab a handful and take it with you. I paid for these. Sugar is so cheap and common, it is tougher to avoid it. Is there anyone who has had to give up refined sugar for dietary reasons . How easy was it . Terrible. Prof. Paulett right, its hard. Its in everything. Medicine and pills. It is everywhere. How it came to be, how it went from being a rare and expensive good to a thing that is so common that it is hard to avoid, this gets to the heart of the class. The story of sugars development as a commodity to being something that everyone had access to, it ties closely to the colonization of the americas. And to the development of slavery in the new world. This little good we dont think much about is part of a massive reorganization of all the cultures of the atlantic ocean. That is what we are talking about today. The history of sugar in the americas. It gets to not just where food came from, but into some very significant questions. Sugar was one of the main motors of the slave trade. 75 of all africans brought into the americas in the 1600s were brought to areas where they were growing and making sugar. It was a huge business. Some scholars argue it was the First Industrial enterprise in the western world. This tiny thing, this sweet stuff in packets, it has a very significant history. That is what we are talking about today. As a lesson in just how boring evil can be, when we think about slavery, one of these evils in history, the people at the time did not see it that way. It was made of thousands of tiny decisions that added up to create this institution of slavery in the americas. So, focusing on the english caribbean, because this is a course in english colonial history, we are talking about sugar, but we are talking about much more than that. Without this commodity, this development, the caribbean, the shape of north American History would be different. To give us a sense of the scale, we can chart a timeline. We start in 1607 in jamestown. Chesapeake bay. English colonies and the new world. After 20 or 30 years, there has been some expansion. The puritans of new england have expanded out from Massachusetts Bay to form new colonies. The second tobacco colony is founded in virginia and maryland. Seekingish are investment in colonial wealth. They focused particularly on uninhabited islands in the caribbean. You have a few colonies being formed in small, volcanic places. Mostly on the eastern edge of the caribbean sea. 60 years later, england has not really expanded that dramatically into the caribbean. They conquered jamaica, which is no small prize. When we look at the mainland of north america, you see a rapid explosion of colonies. 12 of the famous 13 have been founded by this point and are being developed rapidly. Thats why sugar is so important. The development of the east coast of north america is tied closely to the caribbean. As these tiny islands become developed, become planted, home to massive sugar producing plantations owned by the english, the east coast of north america develops into a support system to these caribbean islands. Traditionally, in American History class, we focus on this part of the map. By doing that, we lose Important Information on what is happening down here that is pushing the history in those places. Again, sugar seems trivial, seems unimportant. The history of sugar, particularly english sugar, is tied closely to everything we do today. The history of how we do things. The history of the country we live in today. These Little Islands here, they have a big influence. Particularly, if we focus in on the island of barbados down here, which will be the main focus of todays lecture. Its almost impossible to see on the map. You zoom in and its still hard to see. You zoom in further, and this cluster of pixels is the island of barbados. Tough to spot from a satellite view. Its not terribly large. Its about 170 square miles. That is one fourth the size of madison county, where we are right now. This island has an amazingly large influence on the shape of englands empire and the english atlantic. All of this is driven by sugar. Questions before we jump in . The mike is open. Theres more sugar in it for you. Alright. The history of sugar prior to the english settlements of barbados, we have talked about how it was a rare and expensive good. We talked about it back in the day. We talked about portuguese expansion into the atlantic. Portugal had tapped into a european love of sugar. It is easy to love. It makes other foods taste better. It gives you a jolt of energy. You miss it when it is gone. It is an addictive substance. Theres reasons people wanted it so much. It gives you a buzz. Portugal had tapped into it, expanding sugar. The crop originally developed in south asia and had come west. Most european sugar in the middle ages came from the mediterranean. Portugal sort of gets this technology, expands it into the aisle of madera. In the 1500s, they take Sugar Technology and expanded even further to the coast of brazil at the bottom of the map. As part of this trade networks, the portuguese had innovated other things. Tapping into west african slave Trading Networks provided a source of labor for sugar growth. Not the only source of labor, but an important one. This is what happens to sugar between 1500 and 1600, the slow expansion through the portuguese trade networks. Throughout the 1500s, the portuguese had expanded and innovated and invested in sugar and developed a basic set of techniques, improved upon older techniques. Improved in terms of production capacity. The system the portuguese developed, this is a later image which shows the basic technologies they had developed. Hopefully, looking at this, you are getting a sense that growing sugarcane is one thing, but making sugar is another. To take the raw cane juice that grows in sugarcane, the plant on the slide, and to turn it into crystalline sugar, this is an elaborate science, to refine that juice and turn it into crystallized sugar. If you go to a sugar refinery, its like an oil refinery. Smokestacks everywhere. This was all based upon, you know, the 2015 version of what the portuguese have developed, growing sugarcane easily. It grows well in tropical climates. It was first developed in the southern parts of asia. Is grows easily on its own. As long as you keep the rats gnawing on it. The thing about sugarcane is it has a 1416 month growing cycle. You cannot plant it anywhere they gets frost. The trick is taking the raw juice out of the plant and turning it into something people want to eat. This is what the portuguese innovate, building upon older technology. The processing. This is what we are seeing here in this engraving. A sign of how important sugar was to europeans, that they would take time to engrave and show actual manufacturing. They were interested in the technology, interested as an enterprise. The process of making sugar is shown here on the slide. Back here, we had sugarcane growing in these tall rows. Its being cut. The thing is, once you cut it, you have two or three hours to use it or it will dry up. You have grown it for nothing. Once it is cut, you have to rush it immediately to some sort of crushing mill to squeeze the juice out. This is a portuguese innovation. This vertical roller mill, these three cylinders are tightly pushed together. They roll against each other. You feed the stalk into it. It runs down a trough. The tricky part begins when you have to start refining it. At each stage, this removes a certain impurities. As you boil, this is also supervised by a skilled tradesperson called the boiler. This person is a master chef, someone who can see the juice bubbling and skims the impurities, leaving the good stuff. Knows the exact moment when the juice has to go from one kettle to the next. Burned, youugar is take it off the last fire and leave it to cool. So this is a laborintensive process. It requires massive amounts of labor. You have people running cane to the mill from the fields. People and animals turning it constantly. You have to have people cutting firesod and stoking the to keep the kettles burning. You cannot take a break. You have to have people hauling sugar from place to place, juice from place to place. This is a laborintensive business. It is aroundtheclock. And then, once its done, after all this work, all this juice, all this boiling, you have a loaf of sugar. One third of which has too much it,sses, and you cannot use and you have one pound of good raw sugar in the middle. It has to be refined again to turn to white sugar. The molasses can be distilled and made into rum. Just a kind of recoup money out of the waste product. This is sugaring on the brazilian coast. In the 1500s, you get more and more towards this system. Two things should jump out about this. One, you need a lot of labor. Two, this is a complicated technology for the 1600s. This is not cheap to build or maintain. You have to have people that know how to make this kind of machinery to make it all work. It is expensive to start a sugar operation. But europeans loved sugar so much that people paid it to justify the expenses down the way. While cane is easy to grow, the mill needed large labor forces. This is hot, heavy work out in the fields planting and harvesting cane, so its simple but not easy. You need boilers, you need people to build and maintain the mills. You need carpenters and masons. It is expensive. Creating a plantation is pricey. You need a lot of land. You need a lot of labor. You need a lot of knowhow. You need a lot of material, a lot of skill. There are not a lot of mom and pop operations. What has developed in brazil, because it is so expensive, is kind of a mixed sugar economy. The portuguese, individual portuguese subjects, very few ever put together enough money to create a total system. What happens in brazil is some people can put together enough money to create the mill. Some have enough money for land and labor. Other people cant afford the land, but they can work has to as tenant farmers. And then, you have a mixture of rich mill owners, smaller farmers, and a mixture of slave labor from africa and from native americans, and Contract Labor making this all happen. Many of the elements were developed in brazil. They are not being put together into a total system yet. You have a mixture of medieval forms, Medieval Technology and modern technology. Is all kind of mixed together. But once you take this basic technology of sugar production and insert it into a different geography, the small Little Islands in the caribbean, the dynamics change enough that a different country with a different resource and a different level of investment money takes the stuff being developed in brazil slowly, and turns it in the span of a couple of decades, into the modern plantation system. That launches the rapid expansion of modern sugar development. We move from brazil to barbados, get the english involved. Thats where were heading. The presugar history of barbados matches that of virginia and new england. English companies are looking for places to plant colonists and make money. You have Small Companies putting together expeditions to settle in the caribbean. They are thinking they might grow something useful. Looking for something in these parts of the world that england cannot get. , these various Companies Settle a number of small islands. Barbados is one amongst them. Barbados was, in the long run, one of the most successful. It has to do with basically barbados, which just stuck out from the edge of everything. It wasnt occupied by anyone. No native americans, no french or spanish, just volcanic rock. Looking for an unoccupied space, they move in. There wasnt a lot inviting about the colony except for the tropical climate. For the first 20 years, barbados develops slowly. The company that offers head rights borrows from the virginia system. They overland. The english come, they settle the island. They slowly carve out small tobacco farms from the rain forest. Tobacco grows well. The kind of tobacco that made West Virginia successful was grown in the caribbean. Great, weve got a good. Two strains of congress well, so you develop these small farms. But they are not profitable. Virginia has already dominated the tobacco economy and is already overproducing tobacco to the point that the price has dropped. They are starting to glut the market. There is not a lot of profit in tobacco. There is some. Slowly, right, they create small, okayseeming farms. They import servants to help them form the field, give them more rights to grow tobacco. Some farms carved out of the rain forest slowly growing. That is the arc barbados is on, looking like a marginal colony for 20 years. Around 1640, all the forces of World History combined to create a significant but small event. Dutch ships come to barbados from brazil and bring the technology of making sugar to the english. Sugar is so valuable, the technology was closely guarded. In an early version of corporate espionage, some dutch folks take the technology and bring it to england. I will not go into detail, but this involved world wars. It involved wars between england and holland on one side with spain and portugal on the other. During these wars, the dutch conquer everything portugal had built. They took over portuguese trading posts in west africa, sugar plantations in brazil. The thing we want to focus on is the dutch bring the technology of how to make sugar to the english settlers of barbados around 1640. We are not clear on the date. We know it just happened around then. It is one of these significant events that no one sat down and recorded. It did not seem like a big deal at the time, but what a big deal it would become. The technology alone was not enough to change the island. But bringing that technology, that english space, links barbados to englands wealth and in a different way to economics. I promised last week we would economics unless we need to. But it is these tiny, mundane, economic decisions that transform slavery and so much of north america. What happens when the Technology Comes to barbados is an Investment Opportunity is created where one had not been before. The tobacco plantations of barbados were not turning out as profit. But, when english people realize they have a space that could grow sugar, and a space where they can mill sugar, thats a prime Investment Opportunity. What happens when this Technology Comes to barbados is that all the pieces come together. Theres a settler class. There are people on the island that have established it as english domain. Youve got a small group of tobacco farmers with established credit and connections with england. Barbados has a reputation as a place that is secure. It hasnt been burned by the spanish in the past 20 years. It seems like a relatively safe space for the money to go. It has access to the valuable technology the portuguese had developed, and through the dutch, they have an access point to west african labor. It has tapped into the west african slave market. You put that together with the most crucial ingredient of all, money, barbados explodes. Not overnight, but it is amazing how rapidly it happened. It takes time. But within 20 years, barbados has gone from an island with a few small farms growing slowly to the heart of an emerging modern plantation complex. Dominated by rich planters, producing sugar on a scale per and that is hard to fathom, the process transforms the laws and attitudes and ideas and beliefs of the english people around the atlantic. The process is slow. England buy up land in barbados, knowing if they can grow it they can mill it. Mills,nvestors build sometimes on land they own. New immigrants take up land as tenant farmers. They are quickly pushed out, because these investors putting money into the island expects to see a return on that investment. Because of the geography of barbados, because of the nature of investment, the emerging economy, this is tied closely to the emerging idea of capitalism. With all these factors coming together in a small space, these investors start pushing more and more to accelerate slavery on the island. Investment has a number of effects. One of the first, land values shoot up. People start buying all the land, theres not a lot of land to begin with. The price of the property shoots up. Automatically, the people that can afford to buy acreage see an increase in their wealth. Thats important. That money you can borrow against. Thats collateral, credit. Investment leads to more investment. But, if the land values rise, there is an incentive. Right . If you spent all of this money on some acreage in barbados, you want to make sure that you get enough money out of it to cover that investment. The land is expensive so you want to get as much out of it as possible. You do not want to waste valuable acreage with trees and wilderness or whatever might be on it. Get as much possible, planned as ant as much sugar as possible, the most viable crop in as many places as you can. This is where the colonialism begins. No one had yet developed the idea of the law of supply and demand, but they were feeling it. And, what happened is that these people plant more and more sugar and the price starts to come down. Which means that if you are going to recoup your investment you have to plant more and more. Alongside that, there is an effort to cut costs wherever you can, including labor. The incentives very quickly build in barbados. To turning from a system of farming that is based mostly upon servant labor to slave labor. The incentives build so quickly because it is such a small island. The value of land goes up so much and the cost is so big. What is so scary about slavery, the thing about the institution that should terrify us is how it made so much economic sense to people in the 1600s. That is the terrifying thing. Slavery was not an act of evil done by people for totally irrational reasons. It made a certain kind of sense. And that is the dangerous thing about it. Especially when you take into account that 17thcentury englishman were comfortable with the idea of slavery. And they did not have a very welldeveloped sense of human rights, as we saw in ireland and in north america at jamestown. There is not a big belief in 17thcentury england. English people were used to slavery being normal. There are various kinds of captivity and unfreedom going around the rest of europe. So, we put all of that together, the economic incentives, the cultural beliefs of england you very quickly lead to thinking like this here on the screen. So, this is a very short letter, from a fellow to another in massachusetts. A lot of words here, but what is important about this quote is that the english are already thinking about africans. Not as just laborers who get something out of the plantation, they are thinking of them as investments. There are thinking about them in terms of cost and increase. They are taking human lives and turning them into commodity value. This is the scary thing. About slavery. It is so much a part of this economic thinking that is developing. This is what is happening. When you take folks who believe that certain groups of people are barbarians and are eligible to be enslaved, you take that believes that already exists and you add this economic motive to it and you get something that is a little bit different. It is moving toward something even more brutal than captivity and slavery as it existed in medieval europe. We are getting into a dark place here, but history is full of these kinds of dark places. What barbadian planters are doing as this quote reveals is that they are thinking about the lives of these africans in particular, in terms of how much sugar they produce. And how quickly they will produce it. And the economics of the time, the late 1600s, after this quote develops. Barbadian planters started thinking in terms that a single enslaved laborer will produce enough to pay their purchases in a couple of years. Anything they produce after that would be mostly pure profit once you subtracted the bare level of subsistence given to these workers, shelter, food, clothing. Masters of slaves provide their sustenance to their slaves. Now, these human lives, in addition to these old medieval laws, are developing this new thing, commodity value. A value in terms of what they produce. A monetary value. This also means that slave labor, unlike servants, where you pay for their term of work, slaves who are kept in bondage can always be sold again. This is part of the investment idea of them. One of the creepy things. A person who is a slave can be sold to another planter and you can recoup the price at some other point. As you can see, they earn as much as they cost. This idea that human bodies are something that can be invested in for their value. That is something that is being cooked up. Sugar prices decline, and pressure to produce more and more increases, it is much easier for the english to start emphasizing slave labor in terms of what they produce rather than as people and of themselves. In addition to just the mental thinking about what it means to hold a person in bondage, the english also change the way work gets done. In the english islands, they are developing a more complete control over their labor forces. These are small spaces. And increasingly full of thousands and thousands of forced migrants from africa. So in barbados and in places nearby, the english developed what is known as the gang system of labor. A way of organizing a workforce. To ensure maximum productivity. We do not think of this as a major innovation because it seems fairly simple, but because we live in a world transformed by it. The idea was to basically line everybody up and make them work sidebyside with that one person at one spot could supervise a lot of people. This is how cane was planted and harvested. Once it became harvest season, these folks could be lined up as a kind of human Conveyor Belt and move cane from place to place and fuel from place to place. This idea of organizing labor as a kind of military style gang that could be supervised by one or a few supervisors, this is an innovation and labor practice that is going on in the islands. It allows maximum production, to force everyone to work at the pace of the fastest worker. You put all of this together, this incentive to maximize production in a small space and this economic incentive of slavery and sugar production, this colonial trap of always producing, but the more you produce of it, the less that it is worth, you have to produce even more next year. This adds up to creating a very unique society in barbados. Different than what was created in brazil in the 1500s. Different than what was going on in jamestown. What you have now is in the small islands, you have a very unusual situation. You have a very small number of wealthy White Planters, and within 20 years the only people that can afford to purchase as much land and as much labor were very rich people. Again, no mom and pop shops operating here. A very small class of wealthy White Planters some of them got so rich moved back to england and manage plantations from a distance. A very small population of own thesubjects that land and the mills and everything. Slightly larger but not significantly larger class of employees, clerks, bookkeepers, merchants and field supervisors and mill supervisors, and then, the vast majority of people in places like barbados or antigua or other english sugar islands you have tens of thousands of enslaved africans. This system, organized according to the gang system, producing sugar almost exclusively. The idea is sugar is still, even as the price is falling, it is still so valuable. The planters feel like is a better use of their land to plant every acre of sugar and use that wealth to buy whatever else they need. This is where the rest of north america comes into play. This is where this gang system, the innovations of the sugar in the caribbean, all start to come together and start to reach beyond just these tiny islands. They come north to mainland north america which is ultimately what we are interested in in this class. I have to back up just a second before we move to mainland north america. It is important to think about how people survived. Dehumanizing system. These were real lives. We do not want to let the system dehumanizes them win. How do we deal with this issue . Tens of thousands of people that so radically outnumbered the people that held them in bondage, you expect to see massive rebellion. It did not happen. You expect to see lots of escape, but that is very difficult on an island. The rebellions are very hard, because even though there are tens of thousands of slaves, they are very closely interspersed with heavily armed overseers, planter classes. Bear in mind, they are also Community Networks and family networks, so while you might be willing to risk your own life, would you be willing to risk the lives of your children . That is a real thing that people had to think about. So how people survived it mostly, something historians are focusing on, everyday resistance. One of the most profound and powerful things that develops in the slave societies is just the ways in which the enslaved asserted their humanity. They became one of the most radical forms of resistance in a system that dehumanizes them to assert that they are, in fact, people. So, very small things have very profound meaning. Not big rebellion. Not massive escape. Not fleeing to freedom. Small things. Maintaining some sense of yourself. Holding onto African Languages and african religious beliefs becomes enormously important and enormously powerful. Playing with the rhythm of work, slowing down work, sabotaging equipment, playing with how fast you are being forced to work, asserting the fact that you are a human being with human limits. Testing that boundary. It is always risky. There is a lot of violence that backs up this system. It is always risky. But just to do that is important. And then, in the islands, in particular is important, something that scholars refer to as the language is french which allows us to develop the studies of french sugar plantations and petit marronage. Running away a little bit. It is a simple act. You can see on the screen here, these are volcanic islands with a lot of mountains. Simply sneaking away from the plantation for an evening to visit friends or family who might have come over from africa and you have been separated from simply to have a drink and chat with each other or talk to each other as family, as relatives, as friends. And then sneaking back in for anyone who is missing you. This becomes incredibly powerful, to just remember how to be a person in a system that dehumanizes you. It is important to know that these small acts often become very important, because slaveowners in the islands and in the mainland colonies are always trying to legislate these actions out of existence. We will see that when we talk about slave codes next week. The humanity of slaves is a constant problem for the law. Enslaved colonies. We will get to more of that next week. It is very important right after thinking about the brutality of the system to at least not let the brutality take away these peoples lives. But no mistake. This is a brutal system. It is backed up with a lot of violence. This is to give us a scale of what we are dealing with, this is the map of barbados in 1651, the island is covered in plantations. Images of violence and images of chasing down slaves that are running away, all of that interspersed on the map margins. This system of slavery is being developed very quickly here. When we think about the relationship between these islands and the mainland north america, it is important the thing that keeps coming to me as is that these islands are zones of consumption. They consume people, first and foremost. Sugar was a dangerous, dangerous business. This is one of the First Industrial sites. It is a dangerous business. Long hours working in very hot conditions when you are out in the fields. Process, in particular, was brutal. This is heavy equipment being moved. Fingers, arms were lost in the mills. People were overcome by the heat of the boiling houses. The sugar boiling, itself, when we get to the kettles, we are talking about boiling liquid sugar. Anyone here make candy at home . No . You do . Do you ever get boiling sugar on your skin . What happens . It burns and it sticks to you. Brutal injuries at every step of the process. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people are brought each year to keep this thing running. Again, to just kind of give us the extent of the scale here. My numbers here are from an older study and they might have been changed, but in the 1600s, 1. 3 million africans were brought over to be enslaved. Of that number, about 1. 3 million, 75 went to sugar plantations or zones that had sugar plantations a lot of brazil and the west indies. Barbados alone, the tiny little and 1700,tween 1640 10 , 130 plus thousands of africans were brought to barbados. It consumes a lot of people. That is also a lot of people who arent growing their own food. This is where north america comes into play. East coast of north america, by and large, and there are large chunks of it, developed as part of a support system for the caribbean islands. Because, down in places like barbados and places like jamaica and antigua, you have thousands and thousands of people, Large Population centers, and they are not producing much of their own food. The incentive is to plant everything in sugar and sugar is too valuable to keep for yourself. Despite what you might is that when you were three years old, you cannot just eat sugar, you have to have something else. To support these populations, and to keep the sugar machines running, to keep the enslaved populations alive and working, it creates all of these other Investment Opportunities and all of these other Business Ventures in other parts of the world for those who can provide support services for the sugar islands. Because these islands need things. They need food for the people that live there. They need fuel. These are clearcut islands. It takes a lot of fuel to keep the kettles boiling. To keep the fires burning. Folks living there need meat, protein. They need basic nutrition to live. And so, sugar is still valuable. It is, in many ways, a more efficient decision for the planters to produce nothing but sugar and they use some of that value to purchase food from nearby. And here is where mainland north america comes into play. You look at any history textbook in u. S. History and if you look on the chapters dealing with the second half of the 1600s, you see lots of stuff happening in all of these colonies at once. A lot of that is being pushed because of what is happening in the caribbean. This colonial system, kind of like billiard balls, one thing moves and one spot affects the others. They are all tied together. To give us a sense here, to keep these tiny islands running, one of the things that they need is that they need boats and ships , but you also need fish. Easy source of protein and are relatively cheap to get because they do not have to be raised. And the second half of the 1600s, new england, which has lots of forests for ship building and easy access to great fishing grounds, doing the colony start to develop a shipping and fishing industry and most of the early business is spent running up and down the coast down to the caribbean islands and back. So, our maritime new england coast, a huge boost to the business is the fact that you have this massive market of islands looking to consume fish. And they need boats to to carry goods back and forth. Folks down here need grain and basic food. Colonies that can produce things like oats and barley and wheat, there is a market for their produce. Thousands of people need to eat. Places like pennsylvania and new jersey, a huge part of those farmers early markets is shipping goods down to the caribbean. South carolina. South carolina develops pretty much entirely as a support colony for barbados. Other things the islands need, like food and protein and fuel and timber. South carolina, being relatively close to barbados becomes a key stop. South carolina develops pretty much entirely as a subsidiary of the island of barbados, producing goods that are needed on the island. Early industries of south carolina, raising cattle. Mostly to send livestock to power the mills and fresh meat to feed the folks on the island. Timber. Cutting down wood to send for fire. Lumber to construct mills. Coming from the big pine forests of the southeast. And then theres also the fact that the islands need people. ,he second half of the 1600s no accident, you can see the rise of a trade in indian slaves, native american slaves being taken to the islands. Pretty much every colony in north america engages in it to some extent. South carolina on a larger scale than most, but new england colonies, they sell native americans into slavery in the caribbean. Virginians sell native americans into slavery in the caribbean. South carolina on a massive scale. Tens of thousands of native americans are sent down to the island. And even for a colony that wasnt directly involved in supporting the islands, the older colony of virginia which still had its tobacco plantations, virginia still becomes closely tied to this. Because virginia is another colony. That has this colonial product tobacco and the price keeps falling on it. Virginia planters are constantly looking for ways to maximize the profits on these tobacco lands. So virginia planters start coordinating with barbados planters and virginia imports the gang system and the plantation model. New investors from england come to virginia in the late 1600s after the sugar boom to recreate in virginia what the barbadians had already created. They start training back and forth what the laws of slavery should be and there is a great close correspondence between the two colonies. So, all of these big developments, and i will talk about these in more detail over the next week or two, all of these were fueled by the presence of these large tobacco plantations down in the caribbean. So, i think this is a good stopping point for today. But we have time for some questions. Hopefully, we have a few. We had to move quickly through a lot of material. This is a chance to kind of process and relax. Questions that you might have. I will ask you to come up to the microphone. How comparable would you say the indentured servants system was with the slave system . Would you compare them to slaves . Would you say they are treated a lot more fairly . Prof. Paulett excellent question. Caleb is asking about comparing indentured servants to slavery. It depends. Every answer in history begins with it depends. So, in this case it depends on when we are talking about. At the very beginning of this process, there is not a whole lot of light between the system of indentured servitude and slavery. Especially in terms of treatment. Servants were considered an inferior class of people who could be treated fairly brutally. The laws governing servants and the laws governing slaves are actually very similar. Though, the daytoday treatment was similar, the biggest difference being that someone who had a serving contract served a defined number of years , which could stretch into an entire lifetime, and someone who was a slave served for life. That was the biggest difference in terms of service. But then once we start getting into the later part of the 1600s and the laws have started to change, you start to see a much bigger gulf in which slaves are for bid and from having firearms and more restrictions on their movements. We will talk about this more. As we get into the later 1600s, there is a bigger gulf between the life of a servant and the life of a slave. They originally start closely. But they get bigger and bigger as we go on. The servants were protected under the laws of christianity . Thats a you cannot enslave other christians . Prof. Paulett they were. The biggest differences was more Legal Protections for slaves. Those get stripped out one by one and servants keep by the early 1700s, it is still illegal to kill a servant, but it is legal to kill a slave. That is a big example. I can give you three more hours of lecture on that. Other questions
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