Seasoning, or the Seasoning, was the period of adjustment that slave traders and slaveholders subjected African slaves to following their arrival in the Americas. While modern scholarship has occasionally applied this term to the brief period of acclimatization undergone by European immigrants to the Americas,[1][2][3] it most frequently and formally referred to the process undergone by enslaved people.[4] Slave traders used the term "seasoning" to refer to the process of adjusting the enslaved Africans to the new climate, diet, geography, and ecology of the Americas.[5] The term applied to both the physical acclimatization of the enslaved person to the environment, as well as that person's adjustment to a new social environment, labor regimen, and language.[6] Slave traders and owners believed that if slaves survived this critical period of environmental seasoning, they were less likely to die and the psychological element would make them more easily controlled. This process took place immediately after the arrival of enslaved people during which their mortality rates were particularly high. These "new" or "saltwater" slaves were described as "outlandish" on arrival. Those who survived this process became "seasoned", and typically commanded a higher price in the market.[3][7] For example, in eighteenth century Brazil, the price differential between "new" and "seasoned" slaves was about fifteen percent.[8][clarification needed][failed verification]
- ^ Cates, G. L. (1980). ""The Seasoning": Disease and Death Among the First Colonists of Georgia". The Georgia Historical Quarterly. 64 (2): 146–158. JSTOR 40580681. PMID 11614505.
- ^ Klepp, S. E. (1994). "Seasoning and Society: Racial Differences in Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia". The William and Mary Quarterly. 51 (3): 473–506. doi:10.2307/2947439. JSTOR 2947439.
- ^ a b Mann, Charles (2011). 1493: How the Ecological Collision of Europe and the Americas Gave Rise to the Modern World. Granta Books.
- ^ Mullin, Michael (1992). Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
- ^ Gomez, Michael (1998). Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 168.
- ^ Pinn, Anthony B. (2003). Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. pp. 35-36. ISBN 0800636015.
- ^ Engerman, Stanley L. (1975). "Comments on the Study of Race and Slavery". In Engerman, Stanley L.; Genovese, Eugene D. (eds.). Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere:Quantitative Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 503.Gomez, Michael (1998). Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 168.
- ^ Schwartz, Stuart B. (1985). Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 368.
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