Scholars downplay that European indentured servitude preceded American racial slavery.

Evidence

Edmund Morgan, for example in his study of colonial Virginia, in summarizing the character of “private enterprise” in the colony conjectures: “We may also see Virginians beginning to move toward a system of labor that treated men as things.” Though it sounds like Morgan is describing the initial beginnings of this system, this is difficult to square with the evidence he himself has amassed, which led him (one paragraph earlier) to observe: “A servant, by going to Virginia, became for a number of years a thing, a commodity with a price.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1701

Categorization

• XREF: Supports Robinson’s core argument that racial slavery grew out of European labor practices, not a new American invention.