Let me suggest that the association of slavery with Southern American  
history (including Virginia) stems from the unique disposition and  
cultural affect of the American colonial and post independence  
periods, which made possible a coherent industrial agricultural  
system built around cotton and tobacco. One which required large  
numbers of workers, in the absence of the machinery which would  
ultimately displace this approach to agri-business.  That these  
workers were African, as opposed to indentured Irish, say, I would  
propose is a product of both historical synchronicity: the rise of  
exploration and the place of slavery at the time, in the Africa the  
explorers discovered, and the evolutionary development that produced  
a resistance to Malaria in Africans, particularly west Africans --  
and which also was the source of this same population's problems with  
sickle cell trait -- about 2 million Americans have sickle cell  
trait. About 1 in 12 African Americans has sickle cell trait.

-- Stephan

On 14 Jun 2007, at 16:29, Anita Wills wrote:

> It is interesting that you now lay the association of Islam with  
> slavery in my lap. I did not make that association, which is why I  
> posed the question. We are supposed to be discussing Virginia  
> history in general and American history in particular. I was simply  
> attempting to bring the discussion back to Virginia History. BTW I  
> was not posing the question to anyway in particular, so please do  
> not take offense.
>
> However, thank you for at least attempting to answer the question.
>
> Anita
>
>
>> From: David Kiracofe <[log in to unmask]>
>> Reply-To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia  
>> history              <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Islamic Slavery (was Re: Slavery and immoral stance,  
>> etc.)
>> Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:21:55 -0400
>>
>> I'm a bit put off with your association of Islam, which is a cultural
>> and religious system, with the institution of slavery as practiced in
>> its various locales.   Yes, Islamic law validated the holding of  
>> slaves,
>> but so did Christianity and numerous other faiths.  But surely the
>> association of the buying and selling of people should be with the
>> people who did the buying and selling and not their presumed belief
>> systems.  Neither the African Muslim seller (and not all sellers  
>> were in
>> fact Muslims) nor the European Christian buyers were behaviing in  
>> ways
>> that one would call specifically religious, rather they were  
>> engaged in
>> a very secular economic activity.
>>
>> To get to your question though (I wouldn't want to be accused of  
>> evading
>> it), Europeans began associating Africans with exploitable labor well
>> before Columbus.   The Portuguese who acquired the first African  
>> slaves
>> (around 1440) did so from Muslim merchants in West Africa.  The
>> degradation of people who were so different from themselves validated
>> Europeans' sense of occupying a higher place in the hierarchy of  
>> nature.
>>   Europeans were quick to exploit Native workers in the Americas as
>> well.  When desease and other problems with Native workers created
>> shortages, the contacts with those West African merchants were  
>> already
>> in place and ready to fill the need.   Muslim merchants didn't create
>> this worldview, their role was simply to make it concrete for  
>> Europeans.
>>
>> To jump ahead to Virginia, we can see that the English came to the  
>> new
>> world with pre-existing social notions about the nature of the  
>> universe
>> -- in which some were of higher order than others -- and economic  
>> ideas
>> about the exploitation of the labor of lower orders, including both
>> Native Americans and Africans as well as other Europeans.   If Native
>> American people resisted coerced labor, those who were prepared to be
>> dominant were ready to turn to other "lower" people.   In Virginia  
>> that
>> meant principally the lower orders of English society and so there  
>> was
>> the massive migration of lower class servants.
>>
>> One result of bringing over people from the English-speaking world  
>> was
>> that the society of early Virginia was very fluid: one could serve  
>> one's
>> time and then acquire freedom, and possibly land and status, and  
>> so move
>> up from the lower ranks.  As the colonial society matured, however,
>> there was a desire to make a more fixed, less fluid, society (more  
>> like
>> that of England where rank was very clearly delineated) and so  
>> there was
>> a need to settle on a labor system where labor was unable to achieve
>> freedom and its material and social benefits.  Therefore we see the
>> movement toward slavery and particularly African slavery.   It wasn't
>> all about race and yet race was so central to the practice of it  
>> as to
>> make the distinction all but irrelevant.
>>
>> I know this is a very truncated history of the beginnings of  
>> slavery in
>> Virginia, leaving out the perhaps anomalous experience of the first
>> Africans brought to Jamestown, and further skipping past the
>> developments in Virginia law pertaining to labor and race, but I will
>> leave it there and if anyone wants to add, subtract or even just
>> quibble, well, that's what we're all here for.
>>
>> David Kiracofe
>>
>>
>> David Kiracofe
>> History
>> Tidewater Community College
>> Chesapeake Campus
>> 1428 Cedar Road
>> Chesapeake, Virginia 23322
>> 757-822-5136
>> >>> Anita Wills <[log in to unmask]> 06/14/07 12:53 PM >>>
>> My question is what did Islam have to do with Europeans enslaving
>> Indians?
>> No one seems to want to answer that.
>
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