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Manumission was possible. A slave could be emancipated by his/her master.
In the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, all of the above conditions were present with two major differences. Atlantic slavery cannot be understood as a process unrelated to the expansion of European colonialism in the 16th century. It was European colonial expansion which created the grounds of Western slavery. In many places both slavery and colonialism were integrated into one historical set of events and became fused. As the bondage of Africans emerged and began to dominate the Americas, different justificatory ideas emerged about this bondage. These arguments ranged from the so-called inferiority of the African and why the African was a natural slave, to issues which circled around religion and the pseudo-scientific; to biological and then to cultural. The core of these arguments became the foundation on which the slave system of the Americas was constructed. They were central in producing a new form of slavery, one based exclusively upon race. Racial slavery became a new form of domination. The second difference between slavery in the Americas and other forms of slavery was the centrality of the plantation as an economic and social entity. Of course there were regions where slavery existed and there was an absence of plantations. But the plantation, which had emerged in Madeira and the Canary Islands, become one of the dominant models for economic production in the Americas. In this context, the permanent outsider, who was a slave, became non-human. As this happened, the African became racialized and race became the ideological justification for slavery in the Americas. Listen to Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia about what he considered to be the impossibility of including emancipated blacks into American society. He writes: “This unfortunate difference of color and perhaps of faculty is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people …Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave when made free might mix without staining the blood of his master.”