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On racialization, wasn't travel technology a huge factor, too? The ability to move quickly to new places with very large aggregations of internally similar yet comparatively weird-looking humans? Didn't that experience fairly invite the "obvious" naive conclusion that is "race"?

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But you could always do that in the Mediterranean and the Near East, and yet the view was somehow "a slave is a slave". I mean, Aristotle wrote that Hellenes were dope and that many barbarians were "slaves by nature", but that cut no ice whatsoever in the actual slave market...

> Michael Dawson: Market Totalitarianism: 'On [the post-1500] racialization [of the human social practice of slavery], wasn't travel technology a huge factor, too? The ability to move quickly to new places with very large aggregations of internally similar yet comparatively weird-looking humans? Didn't that experience fairly invite the "obvious" naive conclusion that is "race"?

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I guess I was positing that the post-Columbia increase in scale made the slavers/eventual racializers change their benchmarks, not least for themselves.

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