[rdm70]

In the early colonial period, the colonizers did use European as near slaves. Many thousands of people came from Europe as indentured servants for seven year contracts, and few survived the harsh conditions for the full seven years.

For forty years (1619-1661), Black Africans came to Virginia as indentured servants rather than slaves. Then Virginia passed a slave law. Slaves were cheaper.

Citation. https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured...

[earthboundkid]

That doesn't go against what I'm saying. The point is that "slavery" had always been around but then it turned into something much eviler and worse. Those European slaves didn't have their condition inherited by their children through to 1865. The African indentured servants didn't go on to gain the freedom of European indentured servants. (Yes, there were many freeman Africans in pre-Civil War America, but the point of Dredd Scott was that their citizenship was only provisional.)

European indentured servants didn't have the women raped and the children of that union enslaved. Look at the skin color of the average African American and the average West African. Virtually every African American alive today has some European ancestry. This process of raping women and then enslaving the children produced by rape was not a normal aspect of global slavery.

Is it fair to blame this on "capitalism"? That question depends a lot on the semantics of what we mean by "capitalism". But at the very least, we need to explain why slavery went from being the equivalent of being alive today and working at Foxxconn (sucks but hey, that's life) to being in the Lord's Resistance Army (hell on earth).