Household slavery: 'An overlooked method of enslaving people'

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When discussing enslavement, attention often focuses on Africans forcibly shipped to South America. Researcher Timo McGregor's new Veni research sheds light on a lesser-known method, whereby indigenous populations were enslaved through the households of colonizers.

Officially, the indigenous populations of most colonies were exempt from slavery. It could be inconvenient and potentially dangerous to antagonize the original inhabitants. Many colonial rulers therefore established that these populations should retain their freedom. However, recent research increasingly reveals this was largely a paper reality.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that the enslavement of indigenous populations occurred on a large scale, especially in the early seventeenth century," McGregor explains. "Using indigenous labor was essential for the early development of these small and nascent colonies."

Increased attention

The precise employment relationship was often concealed in official documents. "They were, for instance, described as domestic workers," says McGregor. "This was supposedly a free labor relationship, but often concealed a form of forced labor." Indigenous workers were placed in households to settle a debt or as punishment for a political offense. It was also common for the labor relationship to initially appear voluntary but gradually shift towards slavery.

"Recently, increasing attention has been paid to such patterns," explains McGregor, who previously investigated the Surinamese form of this slavery during his doctoral research. "We know these occurred globally, but we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how legal and social ideas supported the process of enslavement. I aim to map this for both South America and the Moluccas." McGregor published an article based on this research in Past & Present.

Who had power over whom?

McGregor focuses on legal archives. "These contain various everyday conflicts between people," he explains. "Such as the punishment of a servant or people moving between households." Underlying these conflicts is always the same fundamental question: who had power over whom?

"In the seventeenth century, throughout the world, the head of the household had significant legal authority over household members, from family to servants," McGregor states. "This made it easy to translate this principle across cultural boundaries. In the colonies, people readily accepted a household head's authority. This created a widely accepted pattern suitable for comparative analysis: how did the legal development of slavery occur, and what are the similarities and differences between various cultures of slavery and forced labor?"

More information: Lauren Benton et al, A Sea of Households: Ordering Violence and Mobility in the Inter-Imperial Caribbean, Past & Present (2024). DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtae024

Provided by Leiden University