Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican-born American sociologist, defined slavery as a social process that fundamentally transformed the concept of humanity of enslaved people. This issue is discussed in detail in his book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, which explains the concept. It was a multi-step process that involved social, cultural, physical alienation of people who were first captured, evaluated for their physical qualities, sold, branded, shipped as cargo, assaulted constantly, and forced to work. Moreover, this treatment, equal to the treatment of animals, was followed by forceful baptism, renaming, ban on original practices that led to the loss of identity. That would allow slave owners to alienate people from their origin, heritage, and social bonds. As a result, these measures, aimed at establishing power relations between masters and slaves, would strip a person from everything that made them a social being, completely transforming them into a commodity. Furthermore, this attitude was then expanded onto the native American population. The period of the North American fur trade was characterized by fairly peaceful relations of bargaining and commercial exchange, which at the end of the eighteenth century “began to shift toward European norms” (Curtin, 1984, p. 229). As a result, relatively same practices of social death were applied to indigenous American people, which proves Patterson’s point of view that this attitude was characteristic not only for the African slave trade.
References
Curtin, P. D. (1984). Cross-cultural trade in world history. Cambridge University Press.
Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press.