Quote:
Originally Posted by Drifter
How and when did modern concepts of racism arise? It seems to me that it was firmly established by George IV's time IF you link ideas about race with the African slave trade. So maybe the change came earlier, effecting the British view of race so that by the time of George IV and Victoria you get a culture that isn't quite so racist and allows a darker skinned person to be treated as an equal.
Per wikipedia John Lok first brought Africans to England in 1555 - voluntary immigrants - with the purpose of teaching them English to start a trade relationship with West Africa. The rise of tobacco farming and later sugar plantations meant the colonies needed cheap labor. Somehow this labor was not supplied by African slaves, but co-opted native Americans. The West African trade did not concentrate on slavery but was lucrative in some other way. Ideas that darker skinned people where naturally inferior didn't take hold - they were trade partners in Africa, labor and political allies in the Americas.
This would take a comb-punch of maybe failures of the tobacco crops in the early American colonies. Or lack of demand - say tobacco gets the same reputation that early tomatoes did; they're poisonous so don't use them. Maybe associate them with witchcraft. The other punch would be a bump in West African trade. Both can be combined in a temporary shift in weather patterns - bad weather in North America, good weather in Africa, leads to stunted American colonies and more close association with native Africans who had been given a boost with Lok's help in facilitating trade.
|
For a LONG time religion played the role of race.
There were black nobles in the Middle Ages in Europe - it was odd, but they were Christians. That same page have a link to a find of skeleton of a black African in 13th Century England.
The slave trade was an integral part of the Kongo Kingdom's economy long before European contact. There was a period before the destabilization when several kingdoms around that area grew very rich, but the end result was internecine warfare. Slavery really is a normal part of society at some technological levels (what else are you going to do with prisoners of war?). It was the weird coincidence of the African societies practicing low tech slavery and the development of plantation agriculture in the Americas that was so hateful. You had an industrial agarian society without a sufficient population base to drive it.