“The Indians-for-African trade reduced the risk of enslaved Indians fleeing to their own lands or inciting conflicts,” writes Wilder, “and brought a population of African slaves who lacked knowledge of the local geography and languages but possessed important agricultural skills, particularly in rice production.” The slave trade developed in complexity as it grew in scale. At first, land holdings were acquired through conquest of native populations, followed by successive phases of clearance and resettlement. Wilder (History/MIT In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City, 2002, etc.) establishes the interrelationship between slave-cultivated plantations and the academic institutions that lived off the rents gathered through endowments, leases, mortgage debts and other instruments of feudal-style bondage. An eye-opening examination of how America's colonial-era colleges were rooted in slave economies and “stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”
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