Medieval Mediterranean slavery directly prefigured Atlantic colonial slavery.

Evidence

This variety of uses to which slaves were put illustrates clearly the degree to which medieval colonial slavery served as a model for Atlantic colonial slavery. Slave manpower had been employed in the Italian colonies in the Mediterranean for all the kinds of work it would be burdened with in the Atlantic colonies. The only important change was that the white victims of slavery were replaced by a much greater number of African Negroes, captured in raids or bought by traders. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 159

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Core to the reader’s stated project—this is the origin claim: Atlantic slavery’s mechanisms were already tested in the Mediterranean, only the victims changed.
• SEED: Article angle: the Atlantic slave trade was not an invention but a transfer of an existing colonial-slavery template from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

Related

• Medieval Mediterranean slavery was the template for Atlantic colonial slavery. (similarity 0.95)
• Medieval Mediterranean slavery provided the full model for Atlantic slavery (similarity 0.93)
• Medieval Mediterranean slavery foreshadowed Atlantic colonial slavery (similarity 0.87)
• Medieval slavery in the Mediterranean ran in many directions, not just one. (similarity 0.87)
• Islamic slavery conventions were not adopted into the emerging European world system (similarity 0.83)
• The chattel treatment of African labor had clear European precedents. (similarity 0.82)
• Italian city states pioneered the colonial model later adopted by Spain, Portugal, and Holland (similarity 0.81)
• Italian colonial systems in the Mediterranean foreshadowed Iberian and Dutch empires (similarity 0.81)
• Italian city-states pioneered colonial methods later copied by Iberian and Dutch empires (similarity 0.81)
• African resistance movements slowly built the cross-ethnic integration the slave trade had achieved instantly (similarity 0.80)
• European-African collisions began more than a thousand years before Atlantic slavery. (similarity 0.80)
• Mass Black slavery overturned earlier casual Iberian racial structures (similarity 0.80)
• European racial ideology predated and justified the African slave trade, not vice versa (similarity 0.80)
• European colonization employed slave labor as its foundational institution, not incidentally (similarity 0.80)
• Transported African consciousness infected the slave system with contradiction (similarity 0.80)