ABSTRACT
New World slavery was sufficiently well known for “slavery” and “Negro” to become almost interchangeable terms. Slavery accentuated belief in Negro inferiority. And slavery even produced explicit arguments that only Negroes could be used as slaves in hot climates. Although the English were slow to enter the slave trade, the long established servile status of Negroes in the Spanish and Portuguese empires was well known. By the late seventeenth century slavery in the New World and English involvement in the slave trade had made the association of racial appearance and status unequivocal. Accompanying the almost automatic connections made between servile characteristics and racial appearance was the persistent argument that Negroes were capable of the tropical labour demanded by slavery. The amount of information published about New World slavery grew enormously through the eighteenth century. To the anti-slavery writer Negroes triumphed over the brutalities of slavery by magnificently futile gestures of revolt or revenge, rather than by preserving their African heritage.
