The Other Slavery

                                                  The First Slavery
      An exceptionally well-written book on Indian slavery named The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez is perhaps the first broadly systematic and specifically focused book on the long under-looked and under-researched topic of Indian slavery on the North American continent yet written. Reséndez acknowledges that the topic has long been covered by scholars of South America but I would argue that even here it has gotten the short-shaft in comparison to the far more visible and far better documented subject of  African slavery in the Americas. Certainly to the book's credit it rests on solid historical foundations based on primary sources and is written in a style that lacks the "advocacy" that the anonymous Economist reviewer of Baptist's book apparently found so irksome. I have no small historical interest on the topic of slavery having done both some brief historical research on it as an undergraduate and in writings I've published in this blog: here and here. On that note, the book has helped me make dot a lot of "i"s and make a lot of connections that I had not made previously and I am sure it will probably cause a major shift in Indian studies; perhaps without meaning to it will favorably add to ongoing research on African slavery in the Americas. It includes some well-thought out and somewhat novel arguments that should change the way we talk about the colonization of the Americas.

         The most important argument that Reséndez makes for our broad understanding of post-Columbian American history is on the long hotly debated double-question: how many Indians inhabited the Americas? And what was responsible for their decline? The most popular explanation is the "virgin soil" thesis which holds that between 80-95% of indigenous peoples were killed by the transmission of previously unencountered pathogens to the New World via the Conquistadors.  The single most wide-reaching popularization of this thesis is Jared Diamond's book and documentary of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel which places disease as the primary cause for Indian decline and accords European slavery, land-expulsion, settlement and outright genocide a secondary role in "mopping up" what was left of the Ameridian population. But Reséndez high-lights some major holes in that narrative, holes that honestly scholars should've noticed and drawn correct conclusions from earlier,  in his analysis of the population decline of Hispaniola and the broader Caribbean-Gulf region. Reséndez revises the population estimates of Hispaniola downwards, this might not mean much on its own but it assumes monumental importance after his careful review of the primary source evidence of the conquest of Hispaniola. That large island is home now the two nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic but at the time of Columbus's arrival it was likely the third largest population center in the Americas. It is likely that between two-to-three hundred thousand people lived within a patchwork of 600 sleepy villages and towns; it was perhaps an unlikely place to find such a large and dense population in the New World. The strong archaeological remnants left indigenous peoples of Hispanola, in spite of everything, was one reason why the High Counters' put forth the massive number of ten million. One popular book that took the High Counters' numbers and narratives at face value, often merely regurgitating them in a more radical form, is David Stannard's American Holocaust (published in 1992) which put forth the widely circulating 100 million number for pre-contact populations as well as the claim that over 100 million indigenous people were killed by Europeans. The book haphazardly aimed to plug the decimation of the Indians into the received moralistic discourses of the Holocaust and the gulag, the latter still very much on the mind of people after the freshly ended Cold War. It's notable that when reading the book that Stannard accepts the disease narrative at face-value and describes act after act of genocidal violence without referring much to economic systems or broader power relations, as if the Europeans killed Indians simply because they were insane religious fanatics with untemperable hatred. The truth of the conquest is the opposite for Reséndez of what is is for scholars, even well-meaning ones, still thinking in mainstream paradigms: slavery was the prime cause of Indian population decline.

      Reséndez draws attention to the fact that the year before the arrival of small-pox on Hispanola in 1518 the islands population had been slashed to a mere 11,000 people. Likewise, no major lethal disease outbreaks are recorded and Europeans of the age were intensely aware of the spectre of disease. The likelihood smallpox or most other communicable diseases would survive the months journey aboard a ship is low--making the late outbreak exactly what we would expect. The historical record based on the documents, diaries, and records of the time overwhelmingly place the emphasis on overwork as the primary cause of death for the inhabitants of Hispanola. If anything the small-pox outbreak merely delivered the final blow to a people already hurtling towards extinction after experiencing extreme demographic collapse in the face of the work-loads and violence of the Spanish colonizers. Reséndez presents other grounds for questioning the virgin soil narrative: mainly, such a population collapse of that magnitude on account of disease is unprecedented. The Black Death was perhaps the perfect virgin soil event in Reséndez eyes and it wiped out between 1/3 to 1/2 of the European population but importantly, Europeans recovered relatively quickly and not only surpassed their pre-plague height but even began living better on average. Reséndez argues that the primacy of the virgin soil narrative goes against what we know about the durability of human beings and human society. When left to themselves Indian communities recovered. I would point out that not even the Black Death occurred in a vacuum it coincided with massive famines and a European peasantry that was experiencing declining physical health as result of increasing feudal exploitation; the Hundreds Years war was also ongoing. Likewise, from 1700 to 1820 West Africa experienced a 25% population decline from 25 to 20 million as a result of the acceleration of the slave trade and wars fought over procuring slaves. Since Africans controlled the trade up until the point that slaves were packed into European ships  the majority of slaves traded--from the start of the trade until its finish, were adult men. That West Africa still experienced a major population decline in the face of pseudo-scientific pop biology theories like "the disposable male" is surprising. The Other Slavery though had a very different character its slaves were primarily composed of women and children--the foundational reproductive stock of any human society. Reséndez puts forward 2.5-5 million as a tentative number for  all the Indian slaves traded from Columbus's arrival till the early 20th century. To my mind, that is certainly not an underestimate. Reséndez takes the position that if he had to guess he would say slavery, overwork, and famine, killed more Indians in the Caribbean from 1492-1550.  I think that's conservative given the qualitatively different makeup of the other slavery and the addition of addition of wars, deaths incurred from expulsion or flight,  land theft, wanton murder, and outright genocide.  And the other slavery was a hemispheric trend where much of the pattern was repeated not merely confined to the Caribbean. Of course, slavery also spread disease as we shall see but its somewhat doubtful that any population could survive the travails of slavery and wanton massacre alongside the super-mortality rates of the super-bugs that circulated the New World. And new super-bug seem to be be "discovered" all the time,  such as Charles Mann's assertion that the Indian population of New England was wiped out by a lethal form of hepatitis before it was subsequently slammed again later on by small pox. That Indian nations survived and in great numbers, considering everything, is a testimony to their cultural ingenuity and the human will to survive.
     
                                         The First Middle Passage         
     
     Long before the first slave ship set sail directly from Africa likely in in the year 1526 ships with hulls stuffed full of slaves were disembarking in ramshackle Caribbean ports. Although they mostly moved between islands that were often just a few weeks apart unbelievably the slaves packed in hull suffered a 25-50% mortality rate--as bad or worse than the average mortality rate for the transatlantic African slave trade at its worst point. Loaded down in dilapidated boats too small for the human cargoes they were carrying these ships often ran out of water, food, and suffered all the other ailments of associated with a transatlantic slave ship at its height. Initially, Columbus finding little of value on Hispaniola planned to bring Indian slaves to market in Spain where they would fetch the best price. Like many businessmen, especially established ones, he was too focused on selling to an established market to see the new one opening up before his eyes, but the hesitancy with which the Spanish monarchy tolerated the sale of Indian slaves to Spain put cold water on those plans. After rebelling against his "leadership" gold miners on the island began to put major strains on the available labor force--a Spanish commander was later sent to get the message across that Indian slavery would be frowned upon to prospective colonists,  the Crown desperately attempted to impose something like a European feudal system in the encomienda policy. But such a policy only encouraged the newly minted "Lords"to more intensely exploit and enslave their new"vassals" and to flout, shuffle around and retitle the slaves and slave-system that already existed. The system was designed to fit into the hierarchies already established in indigenous Tainos themselves by working with and through their elites but that was another factor that made it open for abuse. A culture of raw brutality and slavery had already been in place for ten years when the monarchy sent a new commander to enforce the change in policy in 1502.  One guesses that most of the damage had already been done as the islands population crashed to about 60,000 in 1508 a mere 6 years after commander Ovando's arrival. Along with De Las Casas it seems he had been perfectly happy to play the role of good cop which wasn't hard to do; it certainly helped that he was no fan of Columbus or his son personally. Taking new slaves was still sanctioned against the Canib people of the Lesser Antilles and Orinoco basin--a fierce tribe feared by the Spanish for their lethal poison darts and demonized for the practice of ritual practice of eating human flesh. Slaving licenses had been quietly issued before 1518 because the surviving labor force was unable to meet the labor needs of the Spanish colonists and I suspect that the colonists couldn't be controlled and hence the Spanish crown looked on this as a necessary evil that could only really be regulated if it was out in the open--almost like an alcohol tax.

         But the demographic collapse that ensued with the arrival of small pox also led to an explosion of slaving licenses as Ovando in a panic gave up his good cop role in a desperate attempt to preserve what was left of the indigenous population of Hispaniola (spoiler: it did not work). But this colonial attempt to save the Indians of Hispaniola lead to a similar fate for the Indians scattered across the vast Caribbean archipelagos and most of its big islands too. This fits with late 17th and 18th century depictions of the Caribbean that I had come across both fictional and historical that depict it as veritable goldmine for European empires but virtually unpopulated devil's paradises except for their settlers, proletarian sailors, white indentured servants, and their African slaves. There is truth to it, take the Bahamas as an example: a vast archipelago composed of 700 small islands in waters so difficult to navigate that only a crew and captain experienced could navigate its waters without running a ground and/or sinking. This was the reason why Blackbeard and the other great pirates of the Golden Age established their bases there because it was formidable enough geographically to deter and provide sanctuary from the great royal navies of the day but there was another reason too: it was unpopulated.  I found this description hard to believe but it fit with what I knew about the islands which according to wikipedia are 85% Afro-Bahamian and even today 15% "white" but Indians had survived and populated much harder environments and much harder to reach geographical locations. Spanish slavers found these islands a veritable treasure trove of human cargo they would come upon isolated islands in the Bahamas by night and literally carry away whole communities in the hull of their ships. Paradoxically, the small populations and geographic populations of small "useless islands" littered across the Caribbean made the indigenous people who inhabited them easy and attractive prey for slavers. Regions with high-population densities like Mexico and Peru, while attractive in overall numeric terms put limits on the ability of slavers to wantonly take slaves without regard to indigenous and class structures.

       The cost of overland transport was higher and its speed slower; in Reséndez's words it was almost as if the Caribbean had been perfectly designed geographically to accommodate slavery. By the 1520s smallpox outbreaks on the Bahamas began wracking the indigenous Lucayo peoples; I would guess that being trapped on their small islands with nowhere to hide and dozens of slave ships bearing down on them they had been considerably depopulated already. But as mentioned before the transmission of smallpox and other diseases via slavery makes perfect sense. The virgin soil thesis is conceivable in the urbanized and highly-populated centers of Mexico and Peru but the Bahamas presents an altogether different challenge: only accessible by sea, difficult to navigate even still, spread out over 700 on small islands that are far apart especially for peoples who travelled via canoes with island populations in the hundreds and low thousands--this was not the place for a "matchstrike" to set off a smallpox blaze. The virgin soil thesis presents smallpox of taking on a life of its own and spreading rapidly through the Americas, independent of European actions. This certainly can win limited credibility when it comes to the continental landmasses but the Bahamas would've been a poor conductor for such an event and yet highly populated areas like Mexico, Central America and Peru boast some of the largest intact indigenous populations in the Western hemisphere and the Bahamas along with other Caribbean islands like Jamaica and Hispaniola either have no surviving identifiable indigenous populations. Many other islands either experienced the same thing or boast very small-indigenously descended populations. For all-intensive purposes, regardless of Spanish intent, these islands experienced some of the most complete genocides in world history. Another point that should be made is that sick people don't like to move and smallpox pustules are only contagious for two weeks. Cramming into small boats and braving Ocean channels to seek trade and pleasant intercourse with neighboring islanders for days or weeks on it make the Indians of the Bahamas unlikely transmitters of the disease even when introduced. Spanish slavers on densely-packed and much faster caravels in a hurry to make as much money as possible are much more likely carriers. I think that even in the case of land travel over the continent its far-fetched as in Charles Mann's rendering of events in his book 1491 where the smallpox (and/or some other diseases) match was dropped in Central Mexico and burned all the way to New England in the course of a couple years or a few decades. Spanish slavers and slaver-discoverers on the other hand made trips to Florida and as far north as South Carolina. The pre-contact population had no horses or wheel-based contraption for land movement, in my opinion, even assuming the high population densities of North America on the part of the High Counters' it would almost be like every sick Indian was in a hurry to spread the disease to the next Indian or handful of Indians in the next square mile over.

      This open network of labor capture and transport would endure until the passage of the New Laws by the Spanish crown in 1542. By that time, much like the change of regime on Hispaniola, much of the damage had been done and the slaving grounds of the Caribbean had largely been exhausted.  The laws held that it was against the law to make an Indian a slave for any reason and despite resistance to it by Spanish slaveholders the law was implemented but it continued to lack proper enforcement. But this point for Reséndez marks off the divergence point of the other slavery from its African cousin because for the majority of its existence it was not legal. In practice, slavery in the Americas continued and even thrived but with the difference being that Indian slaves were rebranded as captive prisoners of "just wars",  slaves were rebranded as criminals serving terms of legal punishment, child slaves were rebranded as adopted orphans or wards of the state/church, adult female slaves passed off as wives or domestic workers, slaves were passed off as debtors or free workers/peasants, and corruption and criminal stealth enabled it to operate in some regions in broad daylight. Reséndez is not wrong or imposing an anachronism to compare the other slavery to the illicit under-the-table slavery that helps power the global economy in the 21st century.  By the mid-to-late 17th century as the labor-trafficking and catching networks expanded geographically the Spanish crown acted belatedly to pass even broader and far-reaching laws but by this time the other slavery had become so ingrained that it would endure in various forms into the 20th century. While the enforcement of the letter and spirit of the law remained elusive in Spanish America in Spain itself the first victims of the first middle passage, the reverse middle passage to Spain were largely liberated after a lengthy struggle in Spanish courts. The victory of 2,000 or so Indian slaves in Spain put both slave and slavemaster on watch throughout the Spanish Empire.

                                     The Other Slavery And Capital
   
       A criticism that I would make of Reséndez's book is that while it has a keen historian's eye when it comes to primary sources, narrative, demography, social contradiction and power relations it lacks a political economist's eye for major economic trends, economic theory, and history. This is somewhat understandable after 1542 broadly speaking the Indian trade in an open form was not legal in any sense which means that records of sale, taxation, litigation, openly published newspaper and journal articles start trailing off the historical landscape. A business that makes a profit off the labor of Indian slaves generally does not sue over its illegal property or even make public boasts about its profits. But in trying to move this story literally out of the closet and the shadows there should've been more focus on trying to establish its economic importance. This had long been done with African slavery and new historical works aiming to restore the link between modern capitalism and slavery have broken new ground. Spanish America has all-too often been given the image of hopeless backwardness in the Anglosphere and given that Spain did not industrialize itself until the late 19th century the attempt to make the connection may seem like a fools errand. But it still should be made, and not merely for a moral revision to make a more inclusive history, but because as Inikori and Williams are want to point out that Britain (and the other more advanced Western nations) still had to trade with someone. We should also aim to move beyond the strange form of orientalism that Blaut dubbed "Iberiantalism"that seeks to decouple Spain and Portugal from the general sweep of Western European or European history and present them as exceptions. It is not for nothing that the historians who do this are usually Anglo-American or insanely anglophilic. The colonization of Hispaniola holds special interest for Marxist political economy and theory but suffice it to say it is to in-depth to be incorporated into this review and will be incorporated into an aforementioned post on economic history and Enlightenment economics.

        What is fascinating to me about the initial colonization of Hispaniola and the Iberian Americas is how it matches some of the models from Volume II of Capital exactly. European societies of the time can be added to simple reproduction phase of economy outlined in Volume II. Now that is a little vulgar both historically and theoretically, since in the first place traditional societies weren't stagnant, they did innovate and they experienced wax and wane over long-periods and sometimes impressive growth in short-terms in the first place and secondly Marx created the simple reproduction model of a capitalist economy in volume II not a pre-capitalist one. But as Hudson pointed out the long-term growth rate of the European economy since the year of Christ's birth is .2% a year and that includes the take-off period of modern times which adds much more weight to the measure then it would have.  The most theoretically interesting thing for comparison here is a moment in Volume II in the model of expanded reproduction has an expansion in the production of the money commodity (i.e. Gold) essentially drive the expanded reproduction of the rest of sector I and II. Sector I is the production of the means of production it is the most essential sector in an economic system and Sector II encompasses the production of commodities for consumption. When the producer of the money-commodity increases output then it exchanges its product for commodities directly in the model since it is the money commodity itself. Therefore, that enterprise's profit merely entails that it get more money out of the ground then it put into it, it has no need to trade its product for money to complete the process of capitalist reproduction. It exchanges its product directly for use-values. And in such a schema, if I recall correctly, no new technological innovation or increase in the size of the labor force is necessary to expand Sector I & II.  The money in circulation increases and on account of the fact that there is now more money in circulation and more value is being injected from the gold production industry. There are now more buyers and potential buyers in this schema so producers of means of production and means of consumption can increase their output. The personal consumption of the capitalists plays a key part in the schema of Volume II and here we can substitute the extravagant consumption of the Spanish merchants and aristocracy into the schema. So even if no productive investments of the surplus are made we can imagine artisans and well-positioned peasant farmers producing more in response to the increase in buying power and money supply. We do not tackle the issue of the separation of workers from the means of production here either in Spain or elsewhere.

         In the case of the Hispaniola gold rush which was the island's first profitable enterprise after the one-off exports of slaves we can dispense with Westra's emphasis on capitalist pricing because the money commodity is the money commodity.  Out of any commodity of the age it was the one least likely to vary from place to place and thus represented a known quality and crucially it isn't bought but rather buys commodities. This character of being a stand-in universal commodity allows it to circumvent regulation and unite disparate markets for whom international trade makes up a small part of their totality. Even in such cases as when a region is "oversupplied" with gold it is a matter of a radical divergence between the production of other commodities and the relative ease of acquiring and producing more gold, as was the case when West Africans used gold for dog collars or traded it to muslim merchants for salt which was life saving in their environment. Later Europeans took over this trade and Cope drew on some literature that the Portuguese had pillaged a great deal of gold from the intermediary muslims of Cetua and modern Morocco. In this time, it has been argued that silver was far more valuable and a far more global means of exchange,  which leaves open the question of whether the money commodity can change as Marx assumed it was gold in his writings. The relationship of between bullion and fiat money, the latter often manifests itself as a symbol of bullion  being held in reserve or partially contained in a coin and state/private banking debts that are allowed to circulate. The relationship between bullion, credit money, fiat money, public and private theory and their integration into Marxist theory is too complex to handle here.  But I think two questions should be studied: 1. How did the Hispaniola gold boom effect the value of gold as a commodity in Europe if at all 2. did the gold boom allow the Spaniards to create new credit and fiat monies either public or private that helped fund further colonization. The first decade of colonial rule had produced about a ton of gold according to Reséndez which I imagine was quite substantial for the time or at least for the effort that the colonizers put into it.

       The immediate effect of the Hispaniola gold boom in Europe itself aside we know that the gold boom did stimulate productive investment in one place: the New World. Entrepreneurs profited from activities as diverse as selling dyewood from the Haitian coast, to trading pigs and cows to passing ships, to resupplying outgoing ships and specializing in the pearl trade from the coast of Venezuela and perhaps most ominously,  from the first sugar plantations and refineries in the New World. The sale of enslaved labor itself has been known to have been a most profitable endeavor in history with Venice selling other Europeans to muslim masters and English/Dutch dominance over the slave trade arguably yielding more profit then their own plantations at certain points. In the start of the colonization Conquistadors merely took slaves as they pleased paying nothing for them since they were instantly available; the encomienda system romantic and well-intentioned as it was disguised the fact that they got their labor for free, and having got it for nothing, without a real limit on its exploitation, worked it to death. The cost of mounting an expedition and catching slaves it would seem to at least have forced Spanish slavers to consider the cost of transport and the available supply of potential slaves. But such a happy movement towards "market-equilibrium" between supply and demand did nothing to stop the extermination of the Taino, it merely drug more communities into Hispaniola's net.

       Despite Columbus's background as a Genoan businessman it would be far-fetched to assume that medieval Europeans, especially European authorities, would conduct themselves rationally from the standpoint of the modern capitalist mode of production that was only slowly being born. Early Modern colonialism was often a mix of contradictory forms of business/state practices and antique forms of economic production. For example, Reséndez thinks that the encomienda system was far from being just another veil for slavery, as far as my limited knowledge of Mexico goes it seems to have akin to a feudal system though I am sure it had its own indigenous characteristics. In that case, the Spanish crown had a strong precedent to draw on and could impose European-style feudal order in a colonial dominion. But in Mexico, slavery also thrived and it had its place not in the antique production of an exotic agricultural product but in its most modern, global, and industrial sector--silver. The slave-trade from Mexico to the Caribbean and slavery on the ranches themselves also built up the cattle-herds of Northern Mexico, a formation of wealth that brought prosperity to both Mexico and the United States over the long-term. It would've been interesting if Reséndez delved into this subject to determine if the great cattle herds and cowboy culture of Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil had a similar relationship to Indian slavery, I would bet that they do. The Other Slavery was a perverse synthesis it dwelled within and arose out of all the  explosive contradictions of European invasion:  between neo-European feudal interests and institutions in the New World and modern capitalism; between the legal and the illicit; between colonial monarchial protectionism and (neo)colonial free-trade; between chartered monopoly and competition; between slavery and wage labor; and within slavery itself, between the localized tempered systems of slavery inherited from antiquity and indigenous societies themselves and the emerging modern slavery, or "the factory in the fields" to use one descriptive phrase.

       It has been argued by one scholar that the re-export of African slaves, or the "other passages" as they've been called in the Caribbean, between the colonies of various Empires was the original material incentive and proof of the viability of free-trade. But before African slaves were shipped from port to port it was Indian slaves that were being shipped all across the Caribbean-Gulf region from colony to colony. It taught European colonizers to properly value labor in the face of the scarce workforces that it found around it. Before the African slave became the symbol of unfreedom in the European mind it was the starving and ragged Indian in the Spanish mine that held sway. Slavery researcher Kevin Bales argues that aside from the three notorious users of black slavery in the 19th century (the United States, Brazil and Cuba.) most slave-societies or slavery both in the Western hemisphere and elsewhere weren't globalized.  Slavery, horrific though it was, mostly served the needs and demands of local economies, whereas today most slavery is incorporated into the world economy. But the other slavery wasn't just incorporated into the global economy, it was the founding block of its very formation: the silver mines of Mexico and Peru made the Peso the first world currency and linked the Chinese and Indian economies to Europe and its American colonies together on a greater scale and in a fundamentally new way.  Nothing about this point is new but the presence of Indian slavery whether in the form of the mitá conscription practice of the Incas appropriated for state-run Spanish silver mines or the punishment of native "vagrants", "criminals", and captives helped make the transition to free-labor in these mines and the New World itself possible. Broadly speaking,  Indians were not in the habit of working for people other then themselves, of lacking control over the tools to produce for themselves; it was still a slowly evolving process in Europe itself.  Indians may have entered the mines of their own volition but that was after the spectre of slavery and wars had caused them to seek "productive" employment or the fear of the theft of wife and children. It was after slavery and its corollary diseases (metaphorical and literal) had diminished their populations often leading to displacement from the better lands by European colonists. In the nations of Mexico and Peru, but elsewhere too, slavery had been a tool for entrenching the existing class system and accelerating the development of inequality.
   
       This is not to say that in all cases Indians availed themselves of wage-labor in all cases merely out of fear or want, or that they only traded with Europeans and pursued enrichment for similar reasons (slavery being a major factor revolutionizing Indian trade networks) but it formed the backdrop against which so much colonial economic activity played out; it formed the bottom. As Michael Hudson pithily said every economy is planned and with this in mind it should not be a surprise to us if the "free-market" in labor was by design as both Marx and Kalecki argued. To head-off any confusion on this point, it should be noted that Marx and Engels theory of class development and dialectical economic progression still applies in the Indian case, just as the Europeans discovered societies all over the Americas with bondage and some highly-stratified urbanized societies in certain locations, left to themselves some indigenous society would inevitably have developed capitalism as a mode of production at some point. We can confidently say, that ironically they did--it was just for the Europeans! A startling exercise is to look at Reséndez's first appendix laying out the total estimates for Indian slavery from 1492 to 1900 side-by-side with a chart with a chart on the number of African slaves imported to the Americas by year. In the first 60 years of post-Columbian pan-American history, African slaves arrived in the Americas at a glacial pace, usually coming as servants with masters and from slave-markets in Iberian Europe and disembarking in the New World.  During those firsts sixty years the native slavery was at its all-time height and legal sanction was open or very loose and real regulation almost non-existent. Around 1555 African slaves begin trickling into the Western hemisphere at a slightly faster rate but even here its total is low, African slaves are expensive and importation hit or miss as the Portuguese African-turned-Indian slaver depicted in the book learned to his disappointment when he tried to secure a large contract to import African slaves to Spanish America with the Spanish crown around this same period of time, which fell through; he found a more profitable and lucrative career slaving in Mexico despite having insider-familial connections at the Portuguese monarchy and its slaving operations.  The importation of African slaves increases through the 17th relatively slowly but takes a more rapid up-turn post-1650 and absolutely explodes after 1700. Correlating with a relatively slow decline of Indian slaves. The most rapid growth in the transatlantic slave trade,  the period when the great majority of slaves were actually imported, correlates exactly with the 1750-1850 period--the period with the lowest estimate of Indian slaves over the time surveyed. The perplexing upswing in the estimated number of Indian slaves to the highest level seen since the 17th century correlates exactly too with the liberation of African slaves and the final elimination of illicit trans-atlantic slave-trafficking in the second half of the 19th century.

      Before the liberalization of the African slave-trade in Spanish America in the late 18th century, there was a period much like it in the first half of the 17th century. In a reverse of the initial period of Spanish colonization, where slaves were made either in the most densely populated regions of the Americas or brought in from the islands and coastlines easiest to access by ship, slaves in this period were trafficked into European-controlled coastal regions and high-density centers controlled by Europeans from the deep interiors of the American continents. Philip III rescission of imperial protection of Manupache Indians in 1608, effectively turning Chile into free-slaving zone gave new impetuous to the other slavery. The same paths that took African slaves up into Chile from Buenos Aires to be sold there at some point in the 18th century at some point coincide with the paths used used to take Indian slaves from the South American plateau into Buenos Aires. The holds of ships used to transport African slaves from Chilean ships, often after being already marched across the Andes, were at one time filled with Indian slaves who from the same port-of-exit and reached the same destinations: Lima and Quito. Indian slaves were bought from native and blackmarket procurers from the north of Latin America and ended up serving as the fertilizer for Dutch, British, French and Portuguese sugar-tobbaco colonial experiments, all desperately angling to deprive the Spanish of their American monopoly while making a fat profit in the process. Before there was free trade in blacks, there was free-trade in Indians, thought it was largely under the table. Pathways blazed by Spanish slavers in Northern and New Mexico to bring slaves to silver mines and Mexico city would help power the 18th century silver renaissance; along with 19th and early 20th century Mexican development. The slow decline of this era was brought about by renewed abolitionist effort on the part of the Spanish crown in the mid-to-late 19th centuries but with consequence being that African slavery also picked up.

    The Spanish had never litigated against African slavery and deliberately left it open as a loop-hole, even if it was tightly-controlled and regulated--part economic policy of the crown, part fear of the muslim other in the New World garden. But the Spanish crown never really needed African slavery as much as the other colonial powers because they held the largest populations of Indian slaves in their grasp, even if it was illicit and not a mere dead letter in terms of enforcement, there were still benefits from unseen slavery in dark corners. Correlation does not equal causation, of course, but I do not believe it was a coincidence that declining Indian slave populations in the early 18th century and the license granted by the Spanish crown to the British to transport slaves to their colonies is an accident. That was a milestone for British American and British economic history but British territories too exported Indian slaves to the Caribbean;  more Indian slaves were exported out of Charleston than African slaves  imported into it during the cusp of the 17th-18th centuries. The French settlers of Arcadia also took Indian slaves and it is a disappointment that Reséndez did not tell more of the Canadian story, as it is a country with considerable economic power and now a great national reconciliation is ongoing over the Indian schools there that even a government report called cultural genocide.

       The other slavery is a part of moments that even the pickiest economic historian couldn't deny were part of modern capitalism and had important benefits. Like the textile-factories of Mexico and New Mexico for instance, while the latter is fairly small it undoubtedly has some importance to the industrial history of the American West. The former is of great importance as debt-peons and trafficked slaves were locked up in textile factories along with free workers in what was perhaps Mexico's most important industry; the very reason that it holds a somewhat unique and contradictory position as a poor-rich country. Mexico's ruined silver mines during its revolution is perhaps the primary reason for the divergence of the US and Mexico prior to 1848,  that and a Spanish edict banning immigrants from coming to seek their fortunes in the 18th century mining boom. The profits of the other slavery were so zealously guarded that it prevented measures that might aid in replacing it with a free-labor force. The Indian slavery phenomenon itself was a testimony to how little control over things the Spanish crown really had on the ground. The profits and surpluses created by the other slavery helped create in the Americas their schizophrenic character torn between neo-feudal and non-capitalistic legacies of bondage (containing both indigenous, European, and African legacies) on the one hand and modernity on the other. Perhaps the 18th century Mexican mines are the clearest case of capitalist expansion and management of the other slavery during the colonial era. The application of explosives in this period raised output by a factor of two and likely raised labor productivity more then that, since fewer slaves were available and arguably less free labor as well. I am not saying that there are no other examples beyond the Mexican silver mines, but so far it seems a lot like Baptist's observation about  many early modern slaveries, that their expansion was mainly the result of developing more virgin land and adding more laborers--not more efficient exploitation of labor-power itself. The relationship of this phenomenon to capitalism needs to be more clearly worked out as prices of commodities internationally were wildly divergent until the early19th century, Westra argues that European nations prior to 1776 simply wracked their own colonial pillage and being mostly feudal regimes were not motivated to introduce rational pricing and trade policy from the perspective of the capitalist mode of production. In the case of sugar prior to its mass cultivation in the Americas it was more valuable than gold due to the monopoly hold that its producers and merchants had on its export in Europe it is rare for a nation dominated by mercantile capital to embrace free trade as Marx noted, but they almost always have a corollary system of slavery and colonialism. But mercantile nations do not always progress to the stage of industrial dominance that follows this period, sometimes they even regress.

      More work needs to be done theoretically on the relationship of American colonization prior to 1776 and capitalism itself. Blaut argued that capitalism emerged from the colonies to come "home" to Europe and worm its way securely to power there. Blaut in his book The Colonizer's Model Of the World estimated a figure of two million Indian slaves as a minimum figure for the 1492-1550 period and Reséndez presents figures whose high range is half that of Blaut's minimum. But such relatively low numbers would make sense for explaining why capitalism took so long to take hold in Europe itself, the number of slaves that were working in a productive capitalist context is smaller than some of the High Counters' might have anticipated and it slowly declined as the centuries went on thanks to the effects of slavery and disease. Then more of the beneficiaries of that slavery probably spent their wealth in the colonies than most models allow but enough of them sent it back to make a difference. Much like the thriving of the coolie trade after the effective abolition of Atlantic slavery the elite gave up labor compulsion in Latin America very reluctantly. It is a great irony that the legacy of forced labor created the very depopulation that Latin American elites constantly used as a justification for enslavement. European immigrants flooded into Latin America after the 1870s solving many of their labor problems and driving production and innovation but by then a silent economic revolution that Lenin described in Imperialism was already occurring. Only the United States found a solution to this problem in the realm of African slavery in the decoupling of slave-producing states from slave-importing states, so that some states like Virginia and South Carolina primarily produced slaves while the others consumed them. It did not solve the problem that slave-owning capitalists worked the labor-force to early death but merely the matter of home supply. This was not the case with the other slavery because if anything the Indian populations of the Mexican territories collapsed at a far more rapid rate under US rule then had occurred under Spanish or Mexican rule.

                       Addendum: The Post-Colonial Moment 

      Some aspects of the other slavery I left aside such as the widespread use of Indian slaves in domestic roles either as servants such as those who served the Mexican aristocracy or those who served Mormon and New Mexican settlers in the Southwestern territories. That is because productive labor is the main origin of surplus-value, although non-productive labor can help realize the surplus-value of commodities sooner or provide other vital roles. I'm not in the habit of changing of this point to make people happy but perhaps Reséndez could have taken a look at this issue from a marxist-feminist view because the use of Indian slaves either as domestic laborers or for the bearing of children qualifies as "reproductive labor" to use a Marxist feminist term. Slavery in the realm of unproductive labor can leave more free labor available to do productive work at a price suitable to owners under the right conditions and its something worth looking into. The use of Indian slaves as prostitutes does not get much attention unfortunately although it was widely assumed that slaves should provide sexual services to a master in those times even if stems were taken to guard against it. The transfer of women and children to European colonizers through the mechanism of the other slavery was one unspoken source of the demographic primacy that European settlers and so-called "mestizo" populations gained over Indian nations. The other slavery added demographic strength to the process of colonization and was one method through which Indians began to think of themselves as Spaniards.  One imagines that contrary to idyllic depictions of Indian civilization, patriarchy was probably evolving and hardening in many Indian societies if class hierarchies and bondage were relatively common but certainly the European model of it was a highly-developed and sophisticated form that colonists felt they needed to impose. Ward Churchill proposed, and took some pointed flak from other Indian radicals for it, that one reason US racial laws were invented to separate "pure" Indians from individuals with mixed heritage so they would not identify as being Indian as obviously there are so many more people with mixed Indian heritage who think they are "white" or even "Latino" to be provocative. If you think about it this pattern was repeated in other "white" settler-states in the Americas from the United States, to Canada, to Argentina, to Chile, to Uruguay and Southern Brazil. But at this point I'm starting to think that more emphasis should be put on slavery aspect then on the settlement or even land theft aspect, because really all societies in the Americas since 1492 are really settler-societies. And that history can't just be undone at one stroke.

        I'm not in the habit of using the term "reproductive labor" since taken to its furthest logical conclusion it can be argued that a rich housewife is exploited if she has to clean her own house and care for her own kids. Some domestic functions like cooking and sewing can be considered productive even if they are not traded for anything, cleaning a house or watching over another human being is not necessarily productive even if its necessary. The former set of duties would fit the bill for Mexican and Indian slaves of the comanche who were usually female and employed in domestic work like cleaning Buffalo carcasses. This would provide meat and fur that the tribe could trade or use directly but it seems clear that it did add something to their powerful horseback Empire outside of the mere trafficking of human beings. Slavery also seems to have been feature for the Navajo nation who were mostly victims of slavery but possessed a rich class that possessed slaves, orchards, farms, and herds. The key post-colonial moment as far as the other slavery is concerned is the repulsion of the Spanish from the New Mexico territory during the uprising of 1680. They didn't return for 12 years. Long before 1776 and a few decades before the precocious declaration of the pirate republic of the Bahamas, the Indians of New Mexico stood up won. When the Spanish returned they found the rules of the game had changed, Indians now controlled the slave-trade and they executed prisoners in front of them to force them to begin buying slaves again.

       Thus the Apache and Comanche arose as the two most powerful indigenous Empires of North America. The image of the Indian on horseback defines the image of the Indian experience and the American West when it was such a new innovation and drastic change in life style for the Plains and Southwestern Indians. With the onset of the Mexican Revolution control over the Mexican frontier collapsed leading to a historic reversal in the direction of the other slavery, Apaches and Comanches bore down on Mexican frontier towns stealing thousands of Mexican citizens and carrying them deep into the North American interior to be sold. Mexico became in-turn both a victim and a victimizer. Mexico's efforts to combat Apache slave-raiding earned Geronimo's undying hatred an aspect that makes the activity of the Indian guerrilla who spent a lifetime fighting both Mexico and the United States all the more fascinating.

      How the Catholic Church used and profited from the exploitation of Indian slaves should've been treated with greater depth. The closure of the Indian mission of California coming from pressure stemming from post-revolutionary pressure to treat the other slavery like black slavery had the effect of effectively privatizing the Church's Indian slaves. The other slavery passed from the hands of the Catholic Church to that of the private Mexican and Anglo ranch-barons who played a key part in the boom of this Pacific industrial economy before the connection of the country in 1869 by railroad. More then New Mexico which Reséndez spends so much time on, due to its real importance in the slave trade, California has a bigger role in American history and development. The extermination of California's indigenous population is considered by some scholars to be one of histories great genocides as it fell from 150,000 to 30,000 in a mere 17 years; the Spanish-Mexican occupation had halved it before that. If the author had presented a clearer picture of the economic motivation and relationship of the other slavery to the California Indian genocide I believe it would have improved the sections on US history on the other slavery greatly. Likewise, since one of the big traffickers of Indian slaves in the book used his returns to pay credit to the Russian state for a fort he bought from Russia it would have been interesting to learn about the role Russia played in the other slavery, if at all. The present Russian government has done outreach to Alaskan natives and have gotten some warm responses in return but it would be interesting to know if that matches actual Russian colonial history in Alaska and the pacific region.

         Reséndez mentions that debt peonage in New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest continued into the 20th century but did not fully explicate this claim which would've made a fascinating chapter to the book by itself. As an aside, to refute those who argue that slavery could not have expanded into the southwest Baptist points out that the southwestern agricultural workforce was "barely free" in the 20th century and it was one of the most dynamic agricultural regions in the world. One thing that Reséndez did not mention is that at the same time that several hundred thousand Indian slaves lived in Mexico in the early 20th century is that between one third and one half of US overseas investment was concentrated in Mexico. They may have had Mexican masters but they made US corporations profits. I'm surprised that Guatemala does not get an in-depth treatment thought it is mentioned. Maybe Reséndez thinks that the Guatemalan landlord class was more like a feudal aristocracy then a slaveowning class but in some respects that strains the imagination as Guatemalan landlords published detailed newspaper accounts of their peons in the exact same language as antebellum US slaveowners. The Guatemalan coffee boom of the late 19th century may have pushed a vulnerable peasantry into the other slavery in my view. The Guatemalan elite has a reputation for being rabidly reactionary and anti-Indian and during the contras it is estimated that 200,000 Maya Indian peasants were killed by Guatemalan death squads. The Guatemalan military distinguished itself to the point of being the only military in the Western hemisphere accused of genocide.  Although the subject was concerned primarily with North America I feel that the Amazonian rubber boom could've gotten a plug especially because of the undisputed genocidal treatment of Peruvian Indians during it. This is an excellent book and I am sure more research will arise to fill the gap about this most important subject which is essential to understand the fight against slavery in the 21st century as Reséndez rightly points out.