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Remains of First African Slaves Found
An anonymous reader writes to tell us LiveScience is reporting that Archaeologists may have found the oldest remains of slaves brought from Africa to the New World. From the article: "The African origin of the slaves was determined by studying a chemical in their tooth enamel that reveals plant and rock types of their native land. The chemical enters the body through the food chain as nutrients pass from bedrock through soil and water to plants and animals. It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales."
Because 99% (at least) of immigration from Africa to the New World at the time was slavery. It is possibly they weren't slaves, but not very likely.
o rth_America
Almost. That figure might be true once the slave trade boomed, but at first most Africans imported to the Americas were indentured servants.
link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#Slavery_in_N
to quote the article: The first imported Africans were brought as indentured servants, not slaves. They were required, as white indentured servants were, to serve seven years.
It is possible/relatively likely that these skeletons they examined were not slaves, but skip ahead 100 years, and that percentage shrinks to (almost) zero.
The voice of the next generation. "In this tower, in my mind..." Babble - Tower
Sounds like a flaw, except that this tooth enamel is deposited early in childhood. Especially in the early days of the slave trade, children were a rarity to export since you could get much more value per space from a fully grown person.
There is a record of an African slave in Hispaniola as early as 1502, brought by the Sevillian trader Juan de Córdoba.
What is it with Americans?
The house I live in is 200 years old. The school I went to was over 400. And the pub at the end of our road is nearly 700 years old.
Why do you think a lifetime is a long time? Most mature cultures go back thousands of years. Incidentally, though many people would quote the Mansfield ruling of 1779 as marking a legal end of slavery in England, this actually marked a legal rejection of the condition of slavery, a statement that foreigners could not expect to enforce this state in England.
If you are considering when slavery ceased to be an accepted part of life in the countries which later became the UK, this would have been in the early Middle Ages, around 1100 (not long after the Romans left and the Danes settled, around 800. The Vikings would have been the last group living in England who accepted slavery as a normal condition. Habeas Corpus, though codified in the Magna Carta (1215), was part of the common law well before this date, and indicates that freedom is the presumed state for any individual who has not been found guilty of a crime. While slavery was formally abolished in the US around 1865, the acceptance of slavery seems to have persisted in the southern states until around 1960.
Individual English and European businessmen were still free to run enterprises in other countries where the slave laws were different. But the reason why the US is considered so culpable on this question is that it maintained a hypocritical stance of freedom from commercial taxes but slavery for people, which the rest of the Anglo-Saxon community had rejected about 800 years earlier.