How America's First Settlers Invented Chattel Slavery: Dehumanizing Native Americans and Africans with Language, Laws, Guns, and Religion

by David K. O'Rourke, Irmengard Rauch (Editor)

Overview

From New England and Virginia to New Spain and the current Southwest, North America’s founding householders – English and Spanish alike – took the limited European practice of coerced labor and, over the course of two hundred years, transformed it into a depersonalized and brutal chattel slavery unlike anything that had existed in Europe. What system of language and logic, what visions of religious and civil society, allowed men who saw themselves both as Christians and cultured humanists to dehumanize and enslave people whose cultures and accomplishments were evident to nearly all? In this book we observe the progressive development of a mindset that allowed the settlers to see both Native Americans and Africans as «others» who did not merit human status.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820468143
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	11/01/2004
Series:	Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics , #56
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

The Author: Theologian, editor, and essayist David K. O’Rourke writes extensively in the area of cultural history with an emphasis on religion. Among his books are Demons by Definition: Social Idealism, Religious Nationalism, and the Demonizing of Dissent (Peter Lang, 1998); A Process of Conversion (1985); and The Holy Land as Jesus Knew It (1983). In addition to his AB from Yale, David O’Rourke has received the theological degrees S.T.Lic. and S.T.Lr. He is Senior Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	1
Chapter 1	Language, Metaphors, and Creating the "Other"	5
	A Note on Metaphor	8
	Focus of this Study	12
	Symbols in Conflict	13
	Guns and Soldiers	17
	Religion and the Language of Coercion	19
	Households and Householders	20
	Re-imaging the Native Peoples	27
Chapter 2	Pilgrims and Visionaries	36
Chapter 3	The Prickly Preacher of Hispaniola	46
Chapter 4	The Merchants of Venice and Visby	58
Chapter 5	The Honorable Householder of Zacatecas	68
Chapter 6	The Seer of Santa Fe, the Iconoclast of Atenango	84
Chapter 7	Coercion and Legitimacy on the Banks of the Rio Grande	98
Chapter 8	Native Resistance and Spanish Repression	117
Chapter 9	Husbanding the "Hideous Wilderness"	128
Chapter 10	Stinking Fumes and Fragrant Profits	138
Chapter 11	The Siren Calafia	149
Chapter 12	The Timid Plowboy and the Periwigged Folk	173
Chapter 13	Laborers in the Mystic Vineyard	181
	Appendix	193
	Bibliography	197
	Index	205