Domestic Slavery: “An Overlooked Way of Enslaving People”

When discussing slavery, the focus is often on Africans who were deported to South America. Researcher Timo McGregor’s new Veni study has shed light on the little-known ways in which Indigenous people were enslaved through colonizer households.

Officially, indigenous peoples in most colonies were exempt from slavery. Antagonizing the original population can be inconvenient and potentially dangerous. Therefore, many colonial rulers established that these populations should retain their freedom. However, recent research has made it increasingly clear that this was largely a paper reality.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that the enslavement of indigenous peoples took place on a large scale, particularly in the early 17th century,” McGregor explains. “The use of indigenous labor was essential to the early development of these small, early colonies.”

Improved attentiveness

Exact employment relationships were often concealed in official documents. “For example, they were described as domestic workers,” McGregor said. “This was supposed to be a free labor relationship, but often a form of forced labor was hidden.” Indigenous workers were placed in households to pay off debts or as punishment for political crimes. I did. And even if labor relations initially appeared voluntary, they often gradually devolved into slavery.

“Recently, such patterns have received increasing attention,” explains McGregor, who previously investigated this form of slavery in Suriname during his doctoral research. “We know these things happened around the world, but we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how legal and social thinking supported the process of enslavement. I aim to map this for both South America and the Moluccas.” McGregor published an article based on this research in Past & Present.

Who had power over whom?

McGregor focuses on legal archives. “These include a variety of everyday conflicts between people,” he explains. “Punishment for servants, transfers between households, etc.” At the root of these conflicts is always the same fundamental question. It’s about who had power over whom.

“Around the world in the 17th century, the head of the household had significant legal power over the members of the household, from family members to servants,” McGregor said. “This made it easy to translate this principle across cultural boundaries. In the colonies, people readily accepted the authority of the head of the household. This made it widely accepted and suitable for comparative analysis. “How did the legal development of slavery occur and what are the similarities?” and the differences between various cultures of slavery and forced labor. ? ”