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Abstract
This article surveys several problems related to the links between slavery and racism, and the frequency of both racism without slavery and slavery without racism. Slavery clearly existed prior to the emergence of racism, scientific or otherwis, and unlike in recent centuries, the enslaved were not always peoples of different color. The linking of race and slavery, with race as the defining characteristic of the enslaved, came mainly after the settlement of the Americas with the transatlantic slave trade from Africa. Indeed, the debate continues on whether racism led to slavery (as argued for colonial America) or whether slavery gave rise to a coherent racism to justify enslavement of others. Racism may be used to justify the harsh treatment of others, or it may simply reflect mainly a belief that some differences among groups exist and race provides the interpretation of why such differences exist. Presumably then, awareness of perceived or argued for racial differences could exist without the imposition of differential treatments, despite the role racial beliefs might play in social organization.

The history of slavery cannot be separated from the history of business in the United States, especially in the context of the relationship between public power and individual property rights. This essay suggests that the American devotion to "sacred" property rights stemsmore from the vulnerability of slaveholding elites than to a political heritage of protection for the "common man."

Although Thomas Hobbes's critics have often accused him of espousing a form of extreme subjection that differs only in name from outright slavery, Hobbes's own striking views about slavery have attracted little notice. For Hobbes repeatedly insists that slaves, uniquely among the populace, maintain an unlimited right of resistance by force. But how seriously should we take this doctrine, particularly in the context of the rapidly expanding Atlantic slave trade of Hobbes's time? While there are several reasons to doubt whether Hobbes's arguments here should be taken at face value, the most serious stems from the highly restricted definition that he gives to the term "slave," one that would seem to make his acceptance of slave resistance entirely hollow in practice. Yet a closer examination of Hobbes's theory indicates that his understanding of slavery is less narrow than it might initially appear—and thus that his argument carries a genuine political bite.