From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   WHY DIDN'T THE EUROPEANS ENSLAVE OR AT LEAST ATTEMPT TO ENSLAVE PEOPLE OTHER   
   THAN THE AFRICANS?   
   answered by Michael B., Programmer at A Healthcare Company, July 17   
   They did. The whites kept running away and the natives kept dying.   
   Slavery is an old institution. It was once considered a rather humane one.   
   Rather than killing all your conquered foes you could instead enslave them.   
   And this form of slavery was practiced all over the world in antiquity. In   
   fact, it was so common and    
   unremarkable that the Old Testament contains laws governing the treatment of   
   slaves.   
   The early Christians considered slavery a barbaric and pagan institution. By   
   the Middle Ages slavery had become outlawed in Europe. It was instead replaced   
   with serfdom. Which is almost completely identical except that you can’t   
   sell a serf. Just the    
   land they live on.   
   When the Europeans conquered America they conveniently forgot the religious   
   prohibitions on slavery and attempted to enslave the Native Americans. They   
   ran into two problems. The first is that the Americas were currently   
   undergoing a mass extinction    
   event as a result of every single plague to ever hit Eurasia hitting all at   
   once. So their slaves kept dying.   
   And the 2nd is that the European colonies represented a small foothold into   
   the Americas. So a crafty slave could simply escape. Maybe not to their   
   original tribe, but to at least a neighboring one.   
   Then they attempted to enslave white people. They called it “indentured   
   servitude”. A poor person would book passage to America on credit, or a   
   criminal would be sent as punishment. On arrival their contract would be   
   purchased by a landowner, and    
   they would be legally obligated to work for them for X number of years to pay   
   their passage off.   
   But a white person could just run away and start a new life in another colony   
   under an assumed name. And even if they didn’t indentured servitude was   
   temporary.   
   Then someone hit on the idea of taking slaves from Africa. At the time   
   Europeans couldn’t really survive in sub-Saharan Africa. We hadn’t   
   invented a cure for Malaria yet. But Africa was politically fragmented,   
   technologically backwards, and had a    
   culture that already practiced slavery.   
   Thus emerged the triangular trade. Raw materials would be shipped from the   
   Americas to Europe. Manufactured goods, such as guns, would be shipped to   
   Africa, where they would be exchanged for slaves. And those slaves would be   
   shipped to America.   
   The end result was even further destabilization of Africa as those tribes that   
   did business with the Europeans now had even more incentive to take slaves,   
   and even better tools to do it with.   
   But the Africans made for perfect slaves. They had been exposed to all the   
   same diseases as Europeans. They were immediately identifiable, at least for   
   the first few generations. And it’s not like they could run away across an   
   ocean.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)