There’s an interesting point here and it applies to the Spanish conquests too.
I’m going to summarise because I read this in dead tree and I’m away from home so sorry for any inaccuracies.
A friar who went out to a Spanish colony (forget which) was appalled by the Conquistadores. He went back and told the King that his new subjects were being maltreated which might turn them against Spain.
The King had not considered that all those American natives were part of the population of his empire and that made it greater than he had realised.
In the same way the King - who, remember, was Elector of Hannover and for whom in a sense both British and American subjects were “foreign” - might well consider that the native Americans might actually be a better bet as subjects of the Crown that the revolting (and sometimes criminal) white inhabitants.
The British gave away land in Canada during the American revolution to encourage resettlement. So there’s one incentive.
As for the rest – I’ve always preferred a primary (if not always completely honest) source like Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush to any analysis decades after the fact. Moodie’s conclusion was that middle-class English people (like she was before she emigrated to Canada) were better off staying in England, because the work to settle and establish oneself in Canada was incredibly hard. However, she also argued that the colonies were a boon to the lower classes, because they were already used to working incredibly hard, and at least in the colonies that hard work would be rewarded.
I appreciate this note, but here the problem is that I don’t know what to make of such sources. I mean, it’s not an inherently bad preference; in the past I have paid more attention to ancient Mediterranean history, and for that have read some primary sources with interest.
But I also see that, though some of their biases are overt, they don’t add up to a very good picture without a lot of context. To get that you need to go through a lot of different evidence, and weigh it, and it takes a lot of effort to do a good job. I think we’re very lucky we can start from historians who do that for us. For someone like me, their analysis is a prerequisite for the primary sources to have meaning.
Maybe it’s not so bad for the 1700s; I simply don’t know. The words of figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Johnson are widely known for all that tells. I presume you’re offering Susanna Moodie as a better picture, but how typical is her experience? I’m still where I need a general anatomy of the elephant first.
Centuries rather than decades in some important cases, I think. De bello gallico is very inadequate by the standards of modern scholarship, and yet that probably represents a high point.
I recently read an argument that the treatment of the lower classes in Great Britain up until after the 1850s was in many cases worse than that of slaves in the US. And the reason was that it was expensive to ship slaves to America - they were valuable property - while the poor in Britain could be recruited for free. When my great-great-great uncles lost their land in the 1840s, the risks of the voyage to the Americas seemed better than staying as paupers in England, so that was how they spent the last of their money. Only one of them survived the voyage, was on the 1846 Mormon trek, and that’s how we come to have a substantial branch of the family in Utah.
I don’t know about worse than slaves, but certainly they weren’t treated well. Moodie writes about how her servants were constantly quitting once they found out how things worked in Canada. Getting new servants often meant importing them from the old country, because no-one in Canada wanted the job.
That right there says it was better than chattel slavery. Quitting might mean starvation, but you could, versus a slave who would be hunted and if lucky, only whipped upon return. Other punishments were… worse.
Besides, even if indentured, a white servant could run away and reinvent themselves: I am not Susie Smith, I am Sally Simpson, and it was hard to prove otherwise. A free black person might be hauled into slavery because no one cared about their true identity, and good luck pretending you’re not black, unless you are very light-skinned.
My background is Irish and that “Irish were slaves too” thing pisses me off. Yes, it was horrible, but not like the horror of being a black, chattel slave.
They are not the same thing.
Also, as property, chattel slave women were forcibly raped in order to create more property children. Because servants were not property, doesn’t mean they weren’t at risk, but the economic incentive to rape was not there.
