Unit 2 Notes: Slavery in the Americas (Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance)

Slavery (colonial Americas)

A system of forced labor in which enslaved people were treated as property and compelled to work without consent, typically under threat of violence.

Racialized chattel slavery

A form of slavery in which enslaved status was legally enforced as inheritable property and increasingly tied to ideas about “race,” especially African descent.

Indentured servitude

Contract labor (often European) in which a person worked for a set term and then became free.

Hereditary slavery

A legal regime in which enslaved status is permanent and passed down to children, making slavery self-reproducing over generations.

Partus sequitur ventrem

Doctrine adopted in Virginia (1662) making a child’s legal status follow the mother’s status, entrenching hereditary slavery and reducing ambiguity for mixed-ancestry children.

Slave codes

Comprehensive colonial laws regulating slavery that limited enslaved people’s rights and protected enslavers’ power through legalized coercion and punishment.

Barbados Slave Code (1661)

Influential English colonial slave code that helped shape harsh legal regimes for slavery in other English colonies.

Virginia Slave Codes (1705)

Virginia laws that codified slavery and reinforced enslaved people’s lack of legal rights while strengthening enslavers’ authority.

Atlantic World

Interconnected system linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas through migration, trade, warfare, and imperial expansion.

Transatlantic slave trade

The forced migration and commerce that transported enslaved Africans to the Americas, driven by European demand and financed through Atlantic trade networks.

Middle Passage

The forced Atlantic crossing of captive Africans; lethal and traumatic, and a key “mechanism” that severed ties to home while intensifying control and confinement.

Plantation economy

Large-scale agricultural production for export that depended on land, capital, and a disciplined coerced labor force (often enslaved people).

Plantation complex

The broader system that turned coerced labor into an export machine by linking plantations to trade, finance, infrastructure, and reinvestment of profits.

Commodification (of enslaved people)

Treating human beings as marketable property—buying and selling them and valuing them for the labor and profits they could be forced to produce.

Chattel slavery

A property-based form of slavery in which enslaved people could be bought and sold, mortgaged, insured, and used as collateral within legal and financial systems.

Collateral (enslaved people as)

Using enslaved people’s legally defined “value” to secure loans, tying credit and investment to the continuation and expansion of slavery.

Mercantilism

Imperial economic idea that colonies existed to enrich the empire by supplying raw materials and buying manufactured goods, encouraging export agriculture and Atlantic trade.

Commodity chain (sugar example)

The linked steps from plantation production to processing, shipping, sale, reinvestment, and customs revenue that show how slavery connected to markets and state power.

Slave society

A society whose economy, politics, and social order are fundamentally structured around slavery (not merely a society that has slaves).

Race as a social and legal construction

The idea that racial categories were built and enforced through laws, court decisions, religious arguments, and everyday practices defining who could be enslaved and who had rights.

Gang system

Plantation labor organization where groups worked sunup to sundown under close supervision, with pace enforced by overseers or drivers.

Task system

Labor system where individuals/small groups were assigned specific tasks; after completion, they might have limited personal time, though coercion remained.

Fictive kin

Non-biological family-like bonds that helped enslaved people build supportive networks despite forced separations and instability.

Everyday resistance

Day-to-day actions that challenged control—e.g., slowing work, breaking tools, feigning illness—carving out limited autonomy within severe constraints.

Hired-out labor

An urban/port-city practice where enslavers rented out enslaved people’s labor to others, integrating slavery into multiple trades and industries beyond plantations.