Servants into Slaves

"Even in 1700, Africans were hardly the only unfree colonists, for a majority of those laboring in Virginia were people bound to service. They were indentured whites. Population numbers are crucial in understanding the demography of labor in early Virginia. By 1680, only about 7% of Virginians were of African descent; 20% of Virginians were of African descent by 1700, and by 1750, the 100,000 enslaved Virginian men and women accounted for more than half the population. Here lies the demography of enslavement."

Nell Irvin Planter at The Guardian reminds readers that the first Africans in colonial Virginia were not enslaved.

And Olivia B. Waxman at Time discusses August 1619.

"Liberals and the Left Haven't Been Sufficiently Cognizant of the Political Problems Caused by Refugee Flows and Immigration"

"The people who care about maintaining liberal democracies and abiding by international law and giving genuine refugees a fair shake need to push back against this nativist rhetoric and the far-right parties. But we also need to be conscious of the fact that mass migration of people on a regular basis is not going to be sustainable because at a certain point it becomes too much for a society, especially a society that's constructed as a generous welfare state, to handle."

Isaac Chotiner at Slate interviews Sasha Polakow-Suransky, author of Go Back Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy.

"It Is Such a Strong Image, It's So Hard to Resist It"

"In the house (now a museum) where Mondrian grew up, in the Dutch town of Amersfoort, they've put together a sound and light show on what happened to Mondrian's work when he first went to New York in 1940, fleeing the Nazis who considered his art degenerate.
"In the New World, the vibrancy and the music took him further down the road he was already on. Those colors and those shapes took new form, and became what is considered his masterpiece. He called it 'Victory Boogie Woogie.'"

Mark Phillips at CBS Sunday Morning visits the Netherlands for a retrospective of Piet Mondrian's art.

Little Black Peter

"Trying to tell a Dutch person why this image disturbs you will often result in anger and frustration. Otherwise mature and liberal-minded adults may recoil from the topic and offer a rote list of reasons why Zwarte Piet should not offend anybody. “He is not even a black man,” many will tell you. 'He is just black because he came down the chimney.' Then, you may reply, why aren’t his clothes dirty?"

Jessica Olien in Slate reports on the controversy over the Dutch Christmastime figure of Zwarte Piet.

"A Way for Nation States to Outsource Their Colonialist Ambitions"

"It was a very enlightened era, where there were discussions about responsible government, and in the case of the Dutch, struggling against the tyrannical rule of the Spanish Empire. At the same time there were also your more militaristic, narrow-minded people aligned with the hard-core philosophy of Calvinist Protestantism. They found their outlet in people like Jan Coen from the Dutch East India Company. They weren’t getting respect in their own country, but when they got overseas....After a time, news reports began trickling back, people coming back and saying, hey, this is quite foul. That’s why eventually the corporations were stripped of some of their powers, how the colonial outposts actually began—they didn’t necessarily want that, but small incremental steps eventually led to the Dutch having control over all of Indonesia. Who would have thought that when the first ships set out to collect some nutmegs?"

In The Boston Globe, J. Gabriel Boylan interviews Stephen R. Bown, author of Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900.

"The Racism of the Anti-Racists"

"This is cumulatively (and individually) scandalous. The fact that we so rarely hear a peep about the cumulative terror experienced by these writers and artists from the likes of these intellectuals while they find time to sneer at Hirsi Ali is the real scandal to me. The fact that theological censorship backed by death threats has been installed on the continent of Europe with just about everyone deciding it would be wiser to keep silent about it is once again burying the lede. But to my mind, printing it at all is a service."

In Slate, Ron Rosenbaum previews Paul Berman's The Flight of the Intellectuals.