Slavery In The 17th Century

Since we have already discussed the conceptualizations of both childhood and adolescence, perhaps it makes sense to start a discussion of a history of African-Americans in the United States with a discussion of the concept of slavery.
When Englishmen first landed in the New World to form colonies on the Eastern shore of what would become America, they did not arrive with the idea of enslaving other people (Jordan, 1968). The first wave of immigrants, just like perhaps every other wave of new arrivals to these shores since the 17th century, came here for various reasons and with diverse goals in mind. Yet, one of those goals was surely not to become wealthy by enslaving others (Friedman, 2007). The English, like the Irish and Scots, had no history of making slaves of other peoples. However, slavery was by no means a novel concept to western civilization when the first settlers landed at Jamestown in 1607. Previously, driven by a need for large quantities of cheap labor, the Greeks and Romans over hundreds of years, enslaved prisoners of war, criminals, and those who had fallen into indebtedness (Davis, 2006). In those societies, however, the term of enslavement was not for life and race played no role. Slaves could be free after they had successfully completed a period of servitude; they could eventually rise to a position of
Later, between the 9th and 15th centuries, the Europeans developed a history of serfdom, a form of servitude that bound peasants to the land they worked (Davis, 2006). Serfs, defined as “a member of a servile