Premodern slaveholding was justified as a form of national domination over “foreigners” or as property. By the nineteenth century slaveholding was increasingly defended by claims that slaves were naturally inferior. Bondage encouraged racial distinctions and reinforced discrimination, whether or not it preordained specific postabolition racial orders. The legacy of slavery was consequential.

South Africa has not figured prominently in comparative analyses of slavery, for slavery was there both somewhat limited and abolished relatively early. The Dutch East India Company, blocked from trading with West Africa by the Dutch West India Company, instead imported slaves from East Asia to supplement their labor needs after the indigenous population diminished. By the end of the eighteenth century, slavery was a major fact of life, with Europeans in the wine-growing Cape outnumbered by and dependent on their 26,000 slaves. By 1821, slaves formed 35 percent of the population of Cape Town. Despite widespread manumission during the seventeenth century, decreasing thereafter, slaves were deprived of “the right to marry, had no rights of potestas over their children, and were unable to make legal contracts, acquire property or leave wills.” Such harsh treatment, provoking a minor slave revolt in 1808, was reinforced by rules against conversion and religious justifications for the exploitation of heathens. British abolitionists condemned slavery, successfully pushing Britain to impose an end of the slave trade in 1807 and legal abolition in 1833 (leading to emancipation by 1838), several generations before the end of colonialism.