![]() ![]() ![]() When you start looking at the way that these slaving empires expanded in the Americas, you see that war was always a fundamental part of the way enslavement worked. It’s an extraordinarily violent institution. ![]() Everywhere you find slavery in the world you find it’s maintained through collective violence. But then there’s the kind of more direct, simpler thing, which is that permanent, violent domination. People have thought about natal alienation a lot, which is that enslaved people don’t have any legitimate relationship with their own kin, with their ancestors or their progeny, that’s essentially cut off by enslavement. It’s racial slavery, and that’s one of the ways it’s distinguished from slavery in other parts of the world. A lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about the dishonored part, and the way you recognize that in the Americas is by the color of their skin. He came up with a handy definition of slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and general dishonored persons.” And he called that social death. I’m drawing on ideas from the sociologist Orlando Patterson. You also in the book try to recalibrate what we think of as war. ![]()
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