Bret Devereaux

My own view is that both narratives, the - to use a simplistic label - 'America's original sin' narrative and (also simplified) 'America land of the free' narrative are equally true, but incomplete without the other.

The latter obviously goes astray when proponents of it try to deny the very obvious deep flaws and injustices that run like cracks through the founding. Slavery is the most obvious, but by no means the only one.

But the former narrative, I think, errs when it treats those things as unique to the American project, rather than something you can find in the history of basically any current state. The number of countries currently founded on stolen land is all of them...

...and *most* pre-industrial, agrarian societies (and even many nomadic cultures) had some system of non-free labor baked into their social system, at varying degrees of prevalence. Slavery was common, conquest was common, patriarchy damn near universal.

American slavery was unique in some pretty horrific ways though. I don't think there is something in the soul of the US that makes us more prone to evil. These are fundamentally human flaws. But we also can't use that to absolve ourselves.

In what respects? Compared to ancient mediterranean slavery, it is the racialized aspect that stands out, but my understanding is that all of the systems of early modern colonial slavery were heavily racialized, so it is hardly unique there.

Wow, firstly, big fan of your work forgot Twitter works both ways . I'm not a historian just read it casually so thanks for engaging so respectfully, that's really cool!

I guess my thesis is, I don't think American slavery is wholly unique but that it due to technical advances it operated at a scale that led to a mind boggling amount of suffering that wasn't previously possibly.