来源：《BBC历史》2023年6月刊
Slavery has existed for thousands of years, but its association with skin colour emerged only in the past few centuries. When the Spanish arrived in the Caribbean, they realised that the warm, humid climate and volcanic soil were ideal for growing sugar cane. But the Conquistadors needed to find workers to cultivate, harvest and process the crop – and indigenous populations had been devastated by infectious diseases. For centuries, Spain had used as slave labour Muslims captured during the so-called reconquest of al-Andalus. After the fall of the Emirate of Granada in 1492, merchants turned instead to west Africa – a move that unintentionally set the American tropics on the path toward racialised slavery.
奴隶制已经存在了数千年，但它与肤色的联系只是在过去的几个世纪才出现的。当西班牙人到达加勒比海时，他们意识到温暖潮湿的气候和火山土壤非常适合种植甘蔗。但是，西班牙征服者需要找到工人来种植、收获和加工这种作物，而当地的人口已经被传染病摧毁了。在此之前的几个世纪，西班牙一直使用所谓的收复安达卢斯期间俘虏的穆斯林作为奴隶劳工。1492年格拉纳达酋长国灭亡后，商人将目光转向西非——这一举动无意中使美洲热带地区走上了种族化奴隶制的道路。
The Aedes aegypti mosquito, and the yellow fever virus it carries, hitched a ride across the Atlantic on slave ships. Caribbean sugar-cane plantations provided ideal conditions for the mosquito to reproduce. Yellow fever wasn’t a problem for enslaved west Africans who had been infected in childhood and acquired lifelong immunity, but European adults died in such high numbers that it was not viable to use them as labourers.
埃及伊蚊及其携带的黄热病病毒搭乘奴隶船穿越大西洋。加勒比海的甘蔗种植园为蚊子的繁殖提供了理想的条件。黄热病对被奴役的西非人来说不是问题，因为他们在童年时期就感染了黄热病，并获得了终身免疫力，但欧洲成年人患病后的死亡率很高，无法将他们用作劳工。
In the 1620s, the English established the colony of Barbados to cash in on the demand for sugar back home. Plantation owners initially employed indentured servants from Britain and Ireland to work on their plantations. After all, the agricultural revolution had created a glut of landless labourers looking for gainful employment. But after a yellow fever epidemic killed half of the island’s population in the mid-17th century, the plantation owners turned to enslaved Africans instead.
17世纪20年代，英国人建立了巴巴多斯殖民地，以满足国内对糖的需求。种植园主最初雇佣来自英国和爱尔兰的契约仆人在他们的种植园工作。毕竟，农业革命造成了大量无地劳动者寻找有报酬的工作。但在17世纪中叶，一场黄热病疫情夺去了岛上一半人口的生命，种植园主转而使用被奴役的非洲人。
Something similar happened in Britain’s North American colonies. Initially, the vast majority of labourers were indentured servants from Europe. In 1680, for example, black Americans accounted for less than 5 per cent of the population. It was only after malaria made its way to the southern colonies in the mid-1680s that enslaved people from west Africa, who had developed immunity to malaria, began to form the majority of labourers. By 1750, black Americans accounted for 61 per cent of South Carolina’s population, and 44 per cent in Virginia. In the northern colonies, where the climate was too cold for malaria, employers continued to prefer free Europeans over enslaved Africans.
类似的事情也发生在英国的北美殖民地。最初，绝大多数劳工是来自欧洲的契约仆人。例如，在1680年，美国黑人占总人口的比例不到5%。直到17世纪80年代中期，疟疾传入南部殖民地后，来自西非的奴隶才开始成为劳动力的主体，他们对疟疾产生了免疫力。到1750年，美国黑人占南卡罗来纳州人口的61%，在弗吉尼亚州占44%。在北方的殖民地，气候太冷，不适宜疟疾繁殖，雇主们仍然更喜欢自由的欧洲人，而不是被奴役的非洲人。