The Flexible Legality of Indigenous Slavery in the Early Modern Americas

In 1741, the Jamaica legislature passed a law titled “An Act for recovering and extending the Trade with Indian Settlements in America, and preventing for the future some evil Practices formerly committed in that Trade.” The primary concern was not Indian slavery per se, but rather an Indian slave trade that was disrupting trade relations and diplomatic peace with coastal mainland Native nations. This act declared that after June 1, 1741, all Indians who arrived as slaves to Jamaica would be free (in theory, at least). Notably, however, this act explicitly protected individuals who already owned Indian slaves. The law seemingly only targeted the slave trade; it did nothing to change the status of Indian slaves already on the island. As this one little incident in Jamaica illustrates, Native American slavery was ubiquitous in the early modern Atlantic world. Enslaved Natives labored beside Africans on farms, in households, and on plantations in almost every European colony in the Americas. But were both Indians and Africans viewed as equally enslavable by law? Drawing widely on both archival research and secondary literature, this paper investigates across imperial contexts how the enslavement of Natives was understood by colonists and magistrates in different locales. Although there was not one universal approach to indigenous slavery, and although most European colonists and magistrates seemed to be able to justify it most of the time, this paper argues that there was a background concern about the legality and justifiability of Native enslavement that often set it apart from African slavery. Not in every case, and not in every location, but often enough that historians need to be careful not to simply lump the two together.