AS Conquest

[Hans-Werner Hatting]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2000 08:24:49 -0000 Peter Gray wrote:

>A better example might be Spanish America.  Did the Spanish still accept
>slavery at the of the conquistadors?

Certainly they did. The problem (for the Conquistadores) was that the
American Indians (at least on the Caribean Islands) seem not to have made
good slaves. They died out under the combined pressures of slavery and
European induced diseases. As a substitute, slaves were imported from
Africa, whose descendants today form the majority of the inhabitants of the
Caribbean islands and a sizeable part of the population of some other
American countries.

More generally, it seems that it is difficult to turn hunter-gatherers and
people from "primitive" crop-planting cultures into slaves, which fact (and
not any scrouples about slavery, which became socially and politically
relevant only in the middle of the 19th century) seems to be the main reason
why North American Indians and Australian Aborigines were killed or driven
into reservations and not enslaved. Also, historically slaves (if they did
not become slaves because of debts or were already slaves by birth) were
enslaved in one place (by conquerors or simple bandits) and then transported
to another. People who were conquered and allowed to stay at their homes
normally became serfs - certainly dependent on their masters and forced to
work for them, but, as a rule, not sellable. This, BTW, is what happened in
big parts of Latin America - mostly in those areas which already knew
hierarchically organised agricultural societies before the arrival of the
European conquistadores.

On the other hand, in Africa wide areas were depopulated and quite complex
cultures (like the kingdom of Congo) were destroyed by the incursions of the
slave traders and their native collaborators.

As the Britons at the time of the arrival of the Saxons certainly lived in a
hierarchically organised agricultural society, the closest analogy is
probably to the population of the Aztec and Inca empires and to African
kingdoms like Congo. Of course, analogies are no substitute for facts. But
putting together these analogies and the facts discussed so far, it seems
that we have different situations in the areas on the SE coast first hit by
the Saxons (plundering, enslavement and selling of the slave to the
continent, expulsion, and killing) and further inland, where the Celts were
turned into serfs and kept their language, religion, and culture for some
time still.

One note on the "Celtic traces in the language" issue: one thing about
French which is cited in language histories over and over again is the small
number of Gaulish substrate words in the language. Normally, "alouette"
("lark") and some agricultural terms are quoted. On the other hand, French
phonology (and to a lesser degree grammar) is regularly described as heavily
influenced by the Gaulish substrate. But nobody doubts that the population
of France was basically Celtic, with only a minority of Roman settlers (and
a later smattering of Franks). So the small number of Celtic loanwords in
English cannot be used as an indicator for a massive eradication of Britons.

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting