APU HIST553 Week 5 Forum Latest 2019 November

HIST553 History of Colonial America

Week 5 Forum

Slavery and the African Ordeal

As a preface to the required reading for this week, Goetz states, “In recent decades, historians of early North America have explored the emergence of the institution of black chattel slavery. They have also investigated ideas of heritable physical differences and inferiorities that justified and defended slavery—concepts that moderns have called race. Chattel slavery and race were critical to the formation of the Atlantic colonial enterprise, even as they were simultaneously the products of it. Unsurprisingly, given the importance of the topic, the mechanisms by which both slavery and race became so firmly entrenched—how, when, where, and why—remain hotly debated questions. The outpouring of scholarship on these questions reveals astonishing regional variations in slavery and in the experiences of enslaved people, as well as the chronologically and geographically uneven development of racial ideologies.” Drawn from the various scenarios offered in the essay, what do you think? Were, as suggested by Goetz, “slavery and race…critical to the formation of the Atlantic colonial enterprise?” Briefly support you position.