Does the bottom-line conclusion below necessarily follow? Or, did the market 
expand to utilize an endless supply of African slaves, which simply 
continued centuries-old practices of the Old World (and New.)  What if there 
had been no supply!!  Your point that the degree of slavery matters 
(expansion in the New World, but where slavery practices pre-existed arrival 
of white Europeans), appropriately leads to repeating that only about 7% of 
the slavery expansion within North-, mid-, and South- American societies of 
the 'New World' was attributable to some of our ancestors in what became the 
United States of America -- which was only a drop in the bucket of slavery 
around the world.  Do these observations make anything better?

Why does this group wish to sit around judging ancestors (black and white) 
when an estimated 27 million people are enslaved around the world **today.**

Are our individual indifferences or practices of all colors today any better 
than those of the past?

The slavery discussions that pop up at this list every few months simply 
'rehash' what is contained in the list's archives.  It seems actions never 
result except to nod or shake biased heads as to who has written the most 
scholarly or made the most debate points.

We should do better that includes me.

Neil McDonald

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 8:18 PM
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Slave owner or slave


> Bad analogy.
>
> Slavery is a good many things, but among them it is an economic 
> transaction.
>
> Economic transactions, considered broadly and systematically, require the 
> existence of a market.  A market is simply the systematic arrangement of 
> buyers and sellers.  For a market to exist in slaves, there had to be 
> people willing to buy slaves, just as there had to be people willing to 
> sell them.  Supply and demand are inextricably linked.
>
> If plantation chattel slavery is a bad thing--and I think it is 
> objectively evident and true that it *is* a bad thing--then both buyers 
> and sellers are equally implicated.
>
> The analogy you propose is sequential--one person does a bad thing, by 
> poisoning the well, and others who later drink of it suffer the 
> consequences.  But that is not how economic markets  work--markets 
> represent a reciprocal relationship, that develops over time.
>
> Now there is a grain of truth here to your observation nonetheless. 
> Market relationships can adapt and change over time.  The market in 
> African slaves pre-existed the development of plantations in the New 
> World.  The story of how the market in and for African slaves changed and 
> adapted over the centuries is complex and interesting, although scholars 
> argue that convincingly that it decisively expanded and dramatically 
> intensified as the New World plantation economy developed.  Still, without 
> the demand from the plantations of the Americas, the malevolent 
> consequences of slavery would not have played out the way that they did, 
> either in Africa or in the Americas.  Supply expanded to meet demand.

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