barbados, and argues that the rise of race-based slavery was created for profit. inhabitants had to rely on other colonies for necessities like food and wood. his classes one hour and 10 minutes. prof. paulett: everyone got a free packet of sugar for stepping in the door. you don't seem particularly grateful. [applause] prof. paulett: so, we're thinking about how we are affected by the past. don't, theyople i are not my close personal friends, i like you all very much, but to do that, to hand out a quarter cup's worth of sugar, this was the middle ages in europe. it was extravagant. 1300s, was a rare

and expensive good. it was medicine. it was prized and available only to the richest of the rich in western europe. to hand up the small amount i gave you would have been seen as an extravagant thing. now, it is so much a part of our diets. into a gas station and grab a handful and take it with you. i pay for it. is so cheap and common, it is hard to avoid it. is there anyone who has had to give it up for dietary r easons? how easy was it? >> terrible. prof. paulett: right, it's hard. it's in medicine and pills. how this came to be how it went a rare and expensive

good to a thing that is so common that it is hard to avoid, this gets to the heart of the class. it goes from being a rare and expensive good to being something everyone has access to, which ties closely to the colonization of the americas. to the development of slavery in the new world. this little good we don't think much about is part of a massive reorganization of all the cultures of the atlantic ocean. that what we are talking about today. the history of sugar in the americas. it gets is not just where food came from, but into some very significant questions. was one of the main motors of the slave trade.

75% of all africans brought into the americas in the 1600s were brought to areas where they were growing and making sugar. it was a huge business. scholars argue it was the first industrial enterprise in the western world. this tiny thing, this sweet auff in packets, it has significant history. that is what we are talking about today. how boring in just evil can be, when we think about slavery, one of these evils in history, the people at the time did not hit that way. -- not see it that way. lots of decisions added up to create this institution of slavery. so, focusing on the english

caribbean, english colonial abouty, we are talking sugar, much more than that. without this commodity, this development, the caribbean, the shape of north american history would be different. sense of the scale, we started 1607. in 1607 in jamestown. there's just that one colony. after 20 or 30 years, there has been some expansion. new--er tins settled in sh new england have

expanded. they tried other experiments, focusing particularly on uninhabited islands in the caribbean. you have a few colonies being formed in small, volcanic places . 60 years later, england has not expanded that dramatically into the caribbean. they conquered jamaica, which is no small price. --prize. in mainland america, you see a rapid explosion of colonies. 12 of the famous 13 have been founded, and are being developed rapidly. that's why sugar is so important.

the development of the east coast of north america is tied closely to the caribbean. becomee tiny islands developed, become planted, home to massive sugar producing englishons owned by the , the east coast of north america develops into a support system to these caribbean islands. traditionally, in american history class, we focus on this part of the map. lose importantwe information on what is happening down here that is pushing the history in those places. again, sugar seems trivial, seems unimportant. the history of sugar, particularly english sugar, is tied closely to everything we do today. the history of how we do things. the history of the country we live in today.

these little islands here, they have a big influence. particularly, if we focus in on downsland of barbados here, which will be the main focus of today's lecture. it's almost impossible to see on the map. you zoom in and it's still hard to see. you zoom in further, and this --ster of pixels is the item island of barbados. it's not terribly large. it's about 170 square miles. that's a quarter of the size of the county where we are right now. this island has an amazingly large influence on the shape of england's empire and the english landing. all of this is driven by sugar.

questions before we jump in? the mike is open. there's more sugar in it for you. all right. -- alright. the history of sugar prior to the english settlements of barbados, we have talked about how it was a rare and expensive good. we talked about portuguese expansion into the atlantic. they had a european love of sugar. it easy to love. --it is easy to love. it gives you a jolt of energy. it makes other food taste better. there's reasons people wanted it so much. there's a buzz. portugal had tapped into it,

expanding sugar. the crop was developed in south asia and has come west. most european sugar in the middle ages came from the mediterranean. in the 1500s, they take sugar technology and expanded even further to the coast of brazil at the bottom of the map. as part of this trade networks, the portuguese had innovated other things. providedding networks a source of labor for sugar growth. not the only source of labor, but an important one. this is what happens to sugar between 1500 and 1600, the slow expansion through the portuguese trade networks.

expanded and innovated and invested in sugar and developed a basic set of techniques, improved upon older techniques. improved in terms of production capacity. the system they developed, this is a later image which shows the basic technologies they had developed. hopefully, looking at this, you are getting a sense that growing sugarcane is one thing, but making sugar is another. to take the raw cane juice that grows in sugarcane, the plant on the slide, and to turn it into crystalline sugar, this is an elaborate science, to refine that juice and turn it into crystallized sugar. if you go to a sugar refinery, it's like an oil refinery. may have to turn raw juice into

crystalline sugar. , youwas all based upon know, the 2015 version of what ,he portuguese have developed it gets easy. it was first developed in the southern parts of asia. is grows easily on its own. the thing about sugarcane is it has a 14-16 month growing cycle. you can't planted anywhere they get trust.--gets frost. trick is taking the raw juice out of the plant and turning it into something people want to eat. this is what the portuguese innovate, building upon older technology.

the processing. this is what we are seeing here in this engraving. of how important sugar was to europeans, that they would take time to engrave and show actual manufacturing. they were interested in the technology, interested as an enterprise. the process of making sugar is shown here on the slide. back here, we had it growing in these tall rose. --rows. it's being cut. once you cut it, you have two or three hours to use it or it will dry up. you have to rush it immediately to some sort of crushing mill to squeeze the juice out. this is a portuguese innovation. this roller mill, these three cylinders are tightly pushed together.

it.feed the stock into --stalk into it. a trough.mmown the tricky part begins when you have to start fighting it.-- refining it. at each stage, this removes a certain impurities. , this is also skilledby a tradesperson called the boiler. he is sort of like a master chef. the jewseone who sees bubbling and skims the impurities, leaving behind the goo -- juice bubbling and

skims the impurities, leaving the good stuff. a labor-intensive process. it requires massive amounts of labor. you have people running cane to the mill from the fields. people must turn it's constantly.it you have to keep the kettles burning. you cannot take a break. you have to have people hauling sugar from place to place, juice from place to place. this is a labor-intensive business. it is around-the-clock. afteren, once it's done, juice,s work, all this

all this boiling, you have a loaf of sugar. one third has too much molasses, and you have one pound of good raw sugar in the middle. it has to be refined again to turn to white sugar. the molasses can be distilled and made into rum. you get money out of the waste product. this is sugar on the brazilian coast. in the 1500s, you get more and more towards this system. to things should jump out about this. need a lot of labor. two, this is a complicated technology for the 1600s. this is not cheap to build or maintain.

any people that know how to make this kind of machinery to make it all work. it is expensive to start a sugar operation. but, europeans loved sugar so people paid it to justify the expenses down the way. easy to grow, the mill needed large labor forces. this is hot, heavy work out in the fields planting and harvesting cane, so it's simple but not easy. you need people to build and maintain the mills. you need carpenters and masons. you need a lot of land. you need a lot of labor.

you need a lot of know-how. you need a lot of material, a lot of skill. there are not a lot of mom and pop operations. what has developed in brazil, because it is so expensive, is kind of a mixed sugar economy. the portuguese, individual subjects, very few ever put together enough money to create a total system. some people can put together enough money to create the mill. some have land and labor. other people can't afford the land, but they can work has to and farmers-- as tenant farmers. of then, you have a mixture slave labor from africa and from

native americans, and contract happen.king this all many of the elements were developed in brazil. they are not being put together into a total system yet. you have a mixture of medieval technology and modern technology. is all kind of mixed together. but, once you take this basic technology of sugar production and insert it into a different changehy, the dynamics countryhat a different with a different resource and a different level of investment money takes the stuff being developed in brazil slowly, and in the span of a couple of

decades, turns it into the modern plantation system. that signals the rapid expansion of modern sugar development. we move from brazil to barbados, get the english involved. heading.ere we're alright. tory of-sugar his barbados matches that of virginia and new england. companies are looking for places to plant colonists and make money. you have small companies putting together expeditions to settle in the caribbean. they are thinking the micro something useful--might grow

something useful. so, in the 16 20's, these various companies settle a number of small islands. barbados is one amongst them. was, in the long run, one of the most successful. just stuck out from the edge of everything. it wasn't occupied by anyone. know native americans. americans, no french or spanish, just volcanic rock. looking for an unoccupied space, the english move in.

there wasn't a lot inviting about the colony except for the tropical climate. for the first 20 years, barbados develops slowly. that offers head rights borrows from the virginia system. all the colonies learn from each other. they both had rights, land, english,, they settled the come, thehe english settled the island. tobacco grows well. good. we've got a caught and goes well too. you develop the small farms. too, you grows well

develop these small farms. eadyinia has alr overproduced tobacco to the point that the price has dropped. slowly, right, they create small, okay-seeming farms. they grow tobacco. there's modest success in barbados. that is the arc barbados is on, looking like a marginal colony for 20 years. around 1640, all the forces of

world history combined to create a significant but small event. barbadosps come to from brazil and bring the technology of making sugar to the english. the technology was closely guarded. in an early version of corporate espionage, they take the technology and bring it to england. this involved world wars. it involved wars between england and holland on one side with spain and portugal on the other. the dutch conquer everything portugal had built. they took over portuguese trading factories. they took over the sugar plantations of presumed.-- brazil. the dutch bring the technology of how to make sugar to the

english settlers of barbados around 1640. we are not clear on the date. we know it just happened around then. this is a significant event no one sat down and recorded. what a big deal it would become. the technology alone was not enough to change the island. but, bringing that technology, that english thing links barbados to england's wealth and economics.ent way to is these tiny, mundane, economic decisions that transform slavery and so much of north america. technologys when the barbados is no

investment opportunities are created. the tobacco plantations of barbados were not turning out as well as planned. but, when english people realize they have a space that could grow sugar, and a space where they can bill sugar -- mill sugar, that's a prime investment opportunity. all the pieces come together. there's a settler class. you've got a small group of tobacco farmers with established credit. has a reputation as a place that is secure. it hasn't been burned by the spanish in the past 20 years. is a safe space for the money to go. they have access to the valuable

technology the portuguese had developed, and through the point they have an access to west african labor. with thehat together most crucial ingredient of all, explodes.bados not overnight, but it is amazing how it happened. it takes time. years, barbados has gone from an island with a few small farms growing slowly to the heart of an emerging modern plantation complex. the process transforms the laws and attitudes and ideas and beliefs of the bush people

englishhe atlantic-- people around the atlantic. investment. they know they can grow it and mill it. sometimes, they build mills just to process other people's sugarcane. new immigrants take up land as tenant farmers. out, becauseed these investors putting money into the island expects to see a return on that investment. because of the geography of barbados, because of the nature of investment, the emerging economy, this is tied closely to the emerging idea of capitalism.

with all these factors coming , theser in a small space investors start pushing more and slavery onelerate the island. this has an effect. land values shoot up. there's not a lot of land to begin with. these are tiny islands. the price of the property shoots up. automatically, the people that can afford it to buy acreage see an increase in their wealth. that's important. that money you can borrow against. that collateral, credit.

--that's collateral, credit. values, there is an incentive. right? prof. paulett: if you spent all of this money on some acreage in barbados, you want to make sure that you get enough money out of it to cover that investment. the land is expensive so you want to get as much out of it as possible. not want to waste valuable acreage with trees and wilderness and docs or whatever might be on it. get as much possible, planned as much sugar as possible, the most viable crop in as many places as you can. there is an incentive to maximize production because of

the nature of the island. but, and this is where the -- nialism begins, no one had yet developed the idea of the law of supply and demand, but they were feeling it. happened is that these people planned more and more sugar and the price starts to come down. which means that if you are going to recoup your investment you have to plant more and more. there is anat, effort to cut costs wherever you can, including labor. the incentives very quickly build in barbados.

to turning from a system of farming that is based mostly upon servant labor to slave labor. because the incentive bills so quickly because it is such a small islands, the value of land goes up so much and the cost is so big. what is so scary about slavery, the thing about the institution that should terrify is how it made so much economic sense to people in the 1600s. to -- that is the terrifying thing. it was not an act of evil done by people for totally irrational reasons, and made a certain kind of sense. is the dangerous thing about it. especially when you take into account that 17th-century englishman were comfortable with the idea of slavery. and they did not have a very well-developed sense of human rights during as we saw in

ireland and in north america at jamestown. there is not a whole big believe in 17th-century england. english people were used to slavery be normal. there are various kinds of captivity and unfreedom going around the rest of europe. together, all of that the economic incentives, the cultural believes of england -- you very quickly lead to thinking like this appear on the screen. so, this is a very short letter, almost the entirety from a inlow to another massachusetts.

a lot of words here, but what is important about this quote is that the english are already thinking about africans. not as just laborers who get something out of the plantation, they are thinking of them as investments. there are thinking about them in terms of cost and increase. they are taking human lives and turning them into commodity value. this is the scary thing. about slavery. it is so much a part of this

economic thing that is developing. the modern english economy. this is what is happening. they believe that certain groups of people are barbarians and are eligible to be slaves. you take the believe that already exists and you add this economic motive to it and you get something that is a little bit different. moving toward something even captivity andan slavery as it existed in medieval europe. we are getting into a dark place here, but history is full of these kinds of dark places. barbadian planters are doing as this quote reveals is that they of thinking about the lives these africans in particular, in terms of how much sugar they produce. and how quickly they will produce it.

and the economics of the time, the late 1600s, after this quote. barbadian planters started thinking in terms that a single enslaved labor will produce enough to pay their purchases in a couple of years. thating they produce after would be mostly pure profit once you subtracted that their level of subsistence given to these workers, shelter, food, clothing. medieval laws and slavery still existed. masters of slaves provide their sustenance to their slaves. now, these human lives, in addition to these old medieval laws are developing this new thing, commodity value. a value in terms of what they produce. a monetary value.

this also means that slave labor, unlike servants -- serving to pay for their term of work. slaves who are kept in bondage can always be sold again. this is part of the investment idea of them. one of the creepy things. a person who is a slave can be sold to another planter and you can recoup the price at some other point. as you can see, they earn as much as they cause. bodies arehat human something that can be invested in for their value. that is something that is being cooked up. decline, and pressure to produce more and , it is muches easier for the english to start emphasizing slave labor in terms of what they produce rather than as people and of themselves. in addition to just the mental

thinking about what it means to hold a person in bondage, the english also change the way work gets done. in the english islands, they are developing a more complete control over their labor forces. these are small spaces. increasingly full of thousands and thousands of forced migrants from africa. so in barbados and in places nearby, the less developed what is known as the gang system of labor. a way of organizing a workforce. to ensure maximum productivity. as a majork of this innovation because it seems fairly simple, but because we live in a world transformed by it. linedea was to basically everybody at the make them work side-by-side with that one person at one spot could supervise a lot of people. the person who works to slow you can see them because the line will move ahead of them.

this is how kate was planted and harvested. season,became harvest these folks could be lined up as a kind of human conveyor belt and move cane from place to place and choose from place to place and feel from place to place. of organizing labor as a kind of military style gang that could be supervised by one or a few supervisors. this is an innovation and labor practice that is going on in the islands. , tollows maximum production force everyone to work at the pace of the fastest worker. you put all of this together, this incentive to maximize production in a small space and this economic incentive of slavery and sugar production, colonial -- , but the moreng you produce a bit the less that it is worth, you have to produce

even more next year. you get caught in the cycle. this adds up to creating a very unique society in barbados. different than what was created in brazil in the 1500s. different than what was going on in jamestown. and a similar time. , because what you have now is in the small islands, you have very unusual situation. you have a very small number of wealthy white planters, and within 20 years the only people that can afford to purchase as much land and is much labor were very rich people. modern -- mom and pop shops operating here. a very small class of wealthy white planters some of them got so rich moved back to england and manage plantations from a distance. very small population of english subjects that on the land and the mills and everything.

slightly larger but not significantly larger class of employees, clerks, bookkeepers, merchants and field supervisors then,ll supervisors, and the vast majority of people in places like barbados or antigua or other english sugar islands -- you have tens of thousands enslaved africans. this system, producing sugar almost exclusively. sugar is still, even at the prices falling, it is still so valuable. the planters feel like is a better use of their land to plant every acre of sugar and use that wealth to buy whatever else they need. this is where the rest of north america comes into play. system,where this gang

the innovations of the sugar in the caribbean all-star to come together and start to reach beyond just these tiny islands. they come north to mainland north america which is ultimately what we are interested in in this class. i have to back up just a second before we moved to mainland north america. this is important to think about, how people survived the system. the human beings involved, this is a dehumanizing system. one thinks historians have had to work to recover is the humanity of the enslaved. because, these were real lives and it is -- we do not want to let the system that dehumanizes them when. we want to recover those lives. how do people deal with these

conditions? tens of thousands of people that so radically outnumbered the people that help them in bondage, you expect to see massive rebellion. it did not happen. you expect to see lots of escape, but that is very difficult on an island. the rebellions are very hard, because even though there are tens of thousands of slaves, they are very closely interspersed with heavily armed overseers, planter class people. bear in mind, they are also community networks and family networks, so while you might be willing to risk your own life, would you be willing to risk the lives of your children? that is a real thing that people had to think about. so how people survived it mostly , something historians are

focusing on, everyday resistance. one of the most profound and powerful things that develop in the slave societies is just the ways in which the enslaved asserted their humanity. they became one of the most radical forms of resistance and a system that dehumanizes them to assert that they are, in fact, people. so, very small things have very profound meaning. not big rebellion. not massive escape. not fleeing to freedom. small things. maintaining some sense of yourself. holding onto african languages and african religious beliefs becomes enormously important and enormously powerful. playing with the rhythm of work, slowing down work, sabotaging equipment, playing with how fast you are being forced to work, asserting the fact that you are a human being with human limits. testing that boundary. it is always risky. there is a lot of violence that

backs up this system. it is always risky. but just to do that is important. and then, in the islands, in particular is important, something that scholars refer to -- the language is french which allows us to develop the studies of french sugar plantations and -- marronage. it is a simple act. you can see on the screen here, these are volcanic islands with a lot of mountains. simply sneaking away from the plantation for an evening to visit friends or family who might have come over from africa and you have been separated from or to have age rink and chat with each other or talk to each other as family, as relatives,

as friends. and then sneaking back in for anyone who is missing you. powerfulmes incredibly , to just member had to be a person in a system that dehumanizes you. know thatrtant to these small acts often become very important, because slaveowners in the islands and in the mainland colonies are always trying to legislate these actions out of existence. we will see that when we talk about slave codes next week. the humanity of slaves is a constant problem for the law. enslaved colonies. we will get to more of that next week. it is very important right after thinking about the brutality of the system to at least not let the brutality take away these people's lives. no mistake. this is a brutal system. backed up with a lot of

violence. to give us a scale of what we are dealing with, this is the map of barbados in 1651, the island is covered in plantations. of violence and images of chasing down slaves that are running away, all of that interspersed on the map margins. this system of slavery is being developed very quickly here. when we think about the relationship between these islands and the mainland north -- the, it is important thing that keeps coming to me as that these islands are sons of consumption. they just consume. so much. they can send people, first and foremost. sugar was a dangerous, dangerous business. this is one of the first industrial sites. it is a dangerous business. long hours working in very hot conditions when you are out in the fields. it was a brutal process.

heavy equipment. being moved. fingers, arms were lost in the mills. people were overcome by the heat of the boiling houses. itself, whenling, we get to the kettles, we are talking about boiling liquid sugar. home? here may candy at no? you do? do ever get on your skin? what happens? it burns and it sticks to you. brutal injuries at every step of the process. thousands and thousands and thousands of people are brought each year to keep this thing running. again, to just kind of give us the extent of the scale here. my numbers here are from an older study and they might have been changed, but in the 1600s, this did -- where we are

studying, 1.3 million africans were brought over to be enslaved. of that number, about 1.3 million, 75% went to sugar plantations or at least those that had sugar plantations a lot of brazil and the west indies. barbados alone, the tiny little 6040 one sugarn 10%, 130 plus, thousands of africans were brought to barbados. it consumes a lot of people. that is also a lot of people who aren't growing their own food. this is where north america comes into play. east coast of north america, by and large, and there are large chunks of it, developed as part of a support system for the caribbean islands. because, down in places like

barbados and places like jamaica and antigua, you have thousands and thousands of people, large populations, essentially, and they are not producing much of their own food. to plantted is everything in sugar and sugar is too valuable to keep for yourself. despite what you might is that when you were three years old, you cannot just eat sugar, you have to have something else. to support these populations, and to keep the sugar machines running, to keep the enslaved populations alive and working, it creates all of these other investment opportunities and all of these other business ventures in other parts of the world for those who can provide support services for the sugar islands. needse, these islands things. they need food for the people that live there. they need fuel. they need a clear-cut island.

it takes a lot of fuel to keep the kettles boiling. to keep the fryer -- fires burning. folks living there need to meet and protein. they need basic nutrition to live. so, sugar is still valuable. a more efficient decision for the planters to produce nothing but sugar and they use some of that value to purchase food from nearby. and here is where mainland north america comes into play. you look at any history textbook on u.s. history and if you look on the chapters dealing with the second half of the 1600 cc lots of stuff happening in all of these colonies at once. a lot of that is being pushed because of what is happening in the caribbean. this colonial system, kind of like billiard balls, one thing moves and one spot affects the

others. they are all tied together. keepve us a sense here, to these tiny islands running. one of the things that they need is that they need boats and ships which also need fish. fisher and easy source of protein and are relatively cheap to get because they do not have to be raised, they just have to because. and the second half of the 1600s, new england, which has lots of forests for ship building and easy access to great shipping grounds -- fishing grounds, doing the colony start to develop a shipping and fishing industry and most of the early business is spent running up and down the coast down to the caribbean islands and back. so, our maritime new england coast, a huge boost to the business with the fact that you have this massive market of islands looking to consume fish. and the need of to carry goods back and forth.

grain and here need basic food. colonies that can produce things like oats and barley and wheat, those are available to market. thousands of people need to eat. places like pennsylvania and new jersey, both founded in the 16 70's and 16 80's, a huge part of those farmers early markets is shipping goods down to the caribbean. south carolina. develops pretty much entirely as a support colony for barbados. other things the islands need, like food and protein and fuel and timber. south carolina, being relatively barbados, becomes a key stop.

south carolina develops pretty much entirely as a subsidiary of the island of barbados. producing goods that are needed on the island. early industries of south carolina, raising cattle. mostly to send livestock to power the mills and fresh meat to feed the folks on the island. timber. cutting down way to send for fire. lumber to construct mills. coming from the big pine forests of the southeast. and then there's also the fact that the islands need people. the 1600, nolf of accident, you can see the rise of a trade in indian slaves, native american slaves being taken to the islands. pretty much every colony in north america engages in it to some extent. south carolina on a larger scale than most, but doing the

sell nativeey americans into slavery in the caribbean. virginians sell native americans into slavery in the caribbean. south carolina on a massive scale. tens of thousands of native americans go to the island. and even for a colony that wasn't directly involved in supporting the islands, the older colony of virginia which still had its tobacco plantations, virginia still becomes closely tied to this. because virginia is another colony. that has this colonial product tobacco and the price keeps falling on it. virginia planters are constantly maximize theays to profits on these tobacco lands. so virginia planters start coordinating with her betas planters and virginia imports the gang system and the plantation model.

new investors from england come to virginia in the late 1600s after the sugar boom to re-create in virginia what the barbadian pet already created. they start training back and forth what the laws of slavery should be and there is a great close correspondence between the two colonies. so, all of these big developments, and i will talk about these in more detail over the next week or two, all of these are killed by the presence of these large tobacco plantations down in the caribbean. so, i think this is a good stopping point for today. but we have time for some questions. hopefully, we have a few. we can move quickly through a lot of material. this is a chance to kind of process and relaxed. questions that you might have.

all ask you to come up to the microphone. how comfortable would you say the indentured servants system was with the slave system? would you compare them to slaves? when you say they are treated a lot more fairly? prof. paulett: excellent question. comparing indentured servants to slavery. it depends. every answer in history begins with it depends. so, in this case it depends on when we are talking about. at the very beginning of this process, there is not a whole lot of light between the system of indentured servitude and slavery. especially in terms of treatment. servants were considered an inferior class of people who could be treated fairly brutally. the laws governing servants and the laws governing slaves are actually very similar.

treatmente day-to-day was similar, the biggest difference being that someone who had a serving contract served a defined number of years which could stretch into an entire lifetime, and someone who was a slave served for life. that was the biggest difference in terms of service. but then once we start getting into the later part of the 1600s and the law start to change, you start to see a much bigger goals which slaveslf in are for been for having firearms and more restrictions on their movements. will talk about this more. as again to the later 1600s, there is a bigger goal opening up between -- gulf between the life of a servant and the life of a slave. they get bigger and bigger as we go on. >> the servants were protected under the laws of christianity?

st. nick and enslave other christians? prof. paulett: they were. the biggest differences was more legal protections. those get stripped out one by one and servants keep -- 1700s, it is still illegal to kill a servant, but is legal to kill a slave. that is a big example. i can give you three more hours of lecture on that. other questions. that's right. curious whatly started the thinking for giving slaves their rights back?

that is antt: excellent question and it is one that we will talk about later in class, because the answer is this system and its offshoots create a kind of slavery and a kind of ideology that actually shapes an idea of freedom and liberty and equality later on. is thisually happens system of slavery gets improvised in the 1600s and in reaction to this system, this idea of freedom and equality and liberty get developed and in the 1700s that comes back and infusystems. -- in the system. >> how does efficiency and invest in -- investment -- we need to make money and profit to get these guys to do this. either they are killing them too

fast or they are not working efficiently or they are not making a math money, does that then create code to treat them better to get more profits, does that work hand-in-hand? prof. paulett: you would like to think. but, again, we would be getting thatthe laws of treatment get into questions of race and difference. reason and rationality gets there and out of the window. these things don't make economic sense that make another kind of logical sense based upon the ideology. if we're talking about brutal calculations of plantation treatments is tied to at what point a person starts producing profit for you. and a system like this, in which a person is paying for the cost of their enslavement, the treatment is tagged to keeping

the person alive past a few years and then purchasing another human being to pay for it. >> i have one more thing. was it more of the whites who thought we should give slaves the rights or was it the slaves that pushed the whites to think about it? prof. paulett: we weren't there. >> was at the slaves or the slave owners? prof. paulett: it was very much the enslaved himself that pushed thelaws that get overturned first and worst -- most sustained cries came from freed african-american communities and the 1700s. the movement only gains steam and success in the people who actually have political power, small subsets of european descendents, not a silly slaveowners -- they very rarely

said we should get rid of slavery. it is other people. this basic question of when does the idea of slavery go away and how does that happen? that is pretty much the rest of this class is talking about the conditions that shape and change and transform that. that is a big question that you asked about how we get from a system where this is ok to a system where it is not ok. >> thank you. all right.tt: >> what is going on in south africa at this point in -- not south africa, south america at this point in history to where we are taking north america which is further away from barbados and using it as a food producing opportunity when south

america is right there, and where we not pulling slaves from the same region -- prof. paulett: not us. >> historical people. the short answer is south america is already settled. by the time that the english are settling these colonies and looking for places to establish. also -- the coast of brazil, for example, is not -- it might be physically and i don't know the actual shipping names in all this, is it worth going to war which costs a lot of money to get these relatively marginal profitable things up and running or just settling areas that you already have an paying a little extra in shipping each trip, perhaps.

part of it is that and there's also the fact that people have already invested in those colonies in north america and they want to see stuff coming out of it, they will not just abandon those and try to settle somewhere else. i know that was the first part of your question. you asked a lot of other things. -- ie second part was guess it is along the same lines as your answer. why not take slaves from that region instead of having to ship them all the way from africa as they can go down to portugal and grabbed him from africa and slip them all the way to barbados? -- well,lett: because not quite. they have no problem enslaving native americans. mostly it has to do with what exists in west africa that doesn't exist in places like brazil or parts of north america, is you have these large civilizations that are at war

with each other, so the wars and politics of west africa -- most slaves are were cap gives greater during internal affairs in west africa and european tapped into that existing slave market which geographically might seem more distant actually is a lot of ways easier for europeans to show up in both and make that trade. the coast of brazil, you have these amazonian cultures who do not have these large state system to do not have this massive warfare do not have these existing captive markets. europeans would have had to create this and that is much more difficult. a -- s, again, sort of one of the tricks of the slave trade. europeans always find it easier, legally and in terms of their conscience and economically, to purchase people that they made

slaves by some one else. that way they can plug them into their own slave system. in many cases, a much more brutal form of slavery than they would have known in west africa or north america or anywhere else. that is by and large how europeans operate. they take advantage and they have boats and they can move people from place to place and tap into existing networks. stage, it was the spanish that were mostly in the mexico and south america area, correct? prof. paulett: central america and the western parts of south america and the portuguese are on the east coast of brazil. make much --oesn't they couldn't build farms on the east coast of the place that is closest to the barbados islands? prof. paulett: bear in mind, when brazil was open for settlement in the early 1500s,

barbados is just volcanic rock. once barbados has been settled and sugar has developed in the 16 40's, the much already have the establish colonies along north america, so it easier to invest in them to produce for barbados that it would be to conquer an entirely new territory and start a large, long war. >> ok. prof. paulett: ok. conquest and occupation are always expensive. said, a few universal laws in history and that is one. other questions? thank you all very much.

if you questions you are not comfortable asking a friend of the microphone, by all means, and talk to me, otherwise we can talk more about all of this stuff in class. all right, thank you very much. see you thursday. joint is every saturday evening at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern to join students and college classrooms to hear lectures on topics ranging from the american revolution to 9/11. lectures and history are also available as podcasts. visit our website at c-span.org or download them from itunes. >> john hinckley of course is the person who shot president reagan and he was not wearing a bulletproof vest that day.

it was a short trip in the white house, the thing is hinckley was stocking jimmy carter before this. >> sunday on q&a, ronald steinman, author of the book about assassinations talks about various assassination attempts and physical threats made against presidents and presidential candidates throughout american history. presidentsve been 16 with assassination threats, though none directly since ronald reagan. 16 though. i also cap the three presents a candidate, huey long who was assassinated. i talk about robert kennedy in 1968 was assassinated. and george wallace who was shot and paralyzed for life in 1972. i cover candidates as well as presidents. it is a long list. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's q&a. >> in her book "a settler's

year: pioneer life through the seasons", kathleen ernst uses photographs from the old wisconsin history museum to show what 19th-century life was like. describes a year in the life of immigrants to rural wisconsin. kathleen: thank you. i am delighted and honored to be here at the national archives. things all for coming and a special thanks to judge swanson and his colleagues here for making this program possible. firstg mentioned, my nonfiction book was set in maryland where i grew up and i was too afraid -- i was looking for the stories of civilians during the antietam campaign and the whole war and that was the first time i was able to make use of the study collections here at the national archives as i looked at accounts that people filed for damages after the armies had moved through. i'm so enormously grateful that so many of our national