In addition, the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigration made the United States an extremely fluid society, where rags could quickly turn into riches. Alabama was also home to many poor whites who lacked the opportunities available to their better-off racial brothers and sisters. His children, born in the 1880s and 1890s, started life with the same disadvantage – they, too, were born to an uneducated, poor family.īut economic disadvantage was not the whole story. A black person born in Alabama in 1865 thus had much less chance of getting a good education and a well-paid job than did his white neighbours. However, two centuries of slavery meant that most black families were far poorer and far less educated than most white families. In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution outlawed slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment mandated that citizenship and the equal protection of the law could not be denied on the basis of race. Consider, for example, the southern United States immediately after the Civil War. The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect, a vicious circle. Separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom. But, even though the slaves were freed, the racist myths that justified slavery persisted. Notably, this was the first and only time in history that slaveholding societies voluntarily abolished slavery. In the early nineteenth century imperial Britain outlawed slavery and stopped the Atlantic slave trade, and in the decades that followed slavery was gradually outlawed throughout the American continent. They continued to exert their influence long after the conditions that created slavery had disappeared. These myths struck a chord in American culture, and in Western culture generally. Doctors alleged that blacks live in filth and spread diseases – in other words, they are a source of pollution. Biologists argued that blacks are less intelligent than whites and their moral sense less developed. Theologians argued that Africans descend from Ham, son of Noah, saddled by his father with a curse that his offspring would be slaves. Religious and scientific myths were pressed into service to justify this division. Like the Aryan conquerors of India, white Europeans in the Americas wanted to be seen not only as economically successful but also as pious, just and objective. Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans, they ended up as the slaves of European masters! Due to these circumstantial factors, the burgeoning new societies of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans and a subjugated caste of black Africans.īut people don’t like to say that they keep slaves of a certain race or origin simply because it’s economically expedient. It was consequently wiser for a plantation owner to invest his money in an African slave than in a European slave or indentured labourer. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally defenceless and died in droves. Thirdly, and most importantly, American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plagued by malaria and yellow fever, which had originated in Africa. It was obviously far easier to buy slaves in an existing market than to create a new one from scratch. Secondly, in Africa there already existed a well-developed slave trade (exporting slaves mainly to the Middle East), whereas in Europe slavery was very rare. Firstly, Africa was closer, so it was cheaper to import slaves from Senegal than from Vietnam. They chose to import slaves from Africa rather than from Europe or East Asia due to three circumstantial factors. The following is an except from Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind." I was compelled to share it. You can buy the bestselling book here.įrom the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the European conquerors imported millions of African slaves to work the mines and plantations of America.