The chattel treatment of African labor had clear European precedents.

Evidence

In some sense, even the most careful scholars are still reluctant in their recognition of the European precedents for a slave system of African labor. 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.” Further, Morgan had already encountered this system in the mother country: “In England itself, after labor became more valuable, the demand produced a certain amount of buying and selling of industrial apprentices.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1701

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s arc on the origins of the Black radical tradition — racial slavery’s European, not American, precedents supply the oppression the tradition rises against.