Someone else more specialist in this particular area might say I have this very wrong, but I believe the scholarship on your topic is a bit lacking, compared to our more intimate understanding of later slavery. Nonetheless, I've tried to give you the best answer I can with my knowledge of where the scholarship stands from my own work:

The key thing to understand is that the success of slavery as a labour system didn't just depend on techniques used in the New World to ensure obedience; the mechanisms of the entire enslavement process from start to finish, by design or accident, served to create a more easily controllable labour force.

When Africans were captured or purchased by western slavers, they were typically put into holding pens on the coast. Slaves would be held in these makeshift prisons for months at a time whilst the crew of the slaver ship found enough Human cargo to offset the potential mortality rates of the journey, and a great many would die from malnutrition, dehydration, disease, complications from injury or abuse - we will never know for certain how many Africans died before they could even board slaver ships.

Thereafter, the journey to the New World would entail subjecting Africans to horrific conditions, from the very beginning of the slave trade. Often chained and kept in confined, unbearably hot, putrid compartments, many would die of disease, dehydration or malnutrition during the voyage; most would be weakened by it. Physical beatings, rape and other acts of abuse were far from uncommon. Whilst acts of African resistance were certainly not rare - we know of hundreds of attempts at rebellion on slave ships - they were usually repressed completely and mercilessly by gun and blade. Even some of those who made it to the New World alive might never leave the ship; murder (often by drowning) was always an option for slavers if one of their captives was so visibly diseased or infirm that no buyer would be interested in them.

Furthermore, a single slave ship would often carry Africans taken captive from a vast area of land in Africa. They would usually speak a wide variety of different languages, and might originate from significantly different cultures - even rival cultures. To form successful communities or organise meaningful resistance, they would have to learn to develop an entirely new identity, one based on the common experience of slavery, and that is a long and complex process - one that was severely undermined by both the language barrier and the high mortality rate. Upon arrival, whatever communal bonds had formed between captives in transit were frequently torn apart as a consequence of being sold to different owners.

So even in the early period of slavery, those Africans arriving in the New World for the first time would have already been subject to the kind of gross degradation and abuse necessary to facilitate the moving of Human cargo for months, and were keenly aware of how little value was attached to their lives by their captors. Understanding that process is in many ways key to understanding how the white planter class was able to so effectively control their slave population from day one; methods of control in the New World represent the continuation, not the beginning, of a very specific system of aggressive physical and psychological domination. Many would have seen plenty of reason to cooperate with their new owners' demands after such experiences.

Once in the New World, whipping and physical beating were the main means of instilling discipline in the resistant throughout slavery's existence. What we refer to as 'whipping' might take any number of similar but slightly variant forms; birching and switching were common. Whipping could often be severe and relentless, and there are plenty of examples of white owners requiring another slave to carry out the punishment as a further means of demonstrating their authority and power; it stands to reason this likely happened even in the earliest days of slavery.

It's also important to remember that the institution of African slavery was not the only attempt by colonial powers to implement a system of low cost, high efficiency labour in the New World; experimentation with systems of forced labour involving white immigrants as well as native populations set a precedence for many of the practices of African slavery.

Take for example Barbados; from the outset of its colonisation by the British in 1627, the island began to develop into an export-oriented agricultural economy, the success of which was largely dependent upon the exploitation of forced labour. But before 1650, Britain's share of the Atlantic slave trade - which had already killed 220,000 people and enslaved nearly 750,000 more by this point despite being in its infancy - was only around 4% of all Human cargo. The slave presence in the very early history of Barbados is tiny. It isn't until 1641 that we see the arrival of the first meaningful slave population in Barbados, by which point the island was already well-established as an exporter of cash crops.

Rather than making use of slave labour, the planters of Barbados overwhelmingly preferred to use white labour from Britain in the first decade of colonisation. This labour came overwhelmingly in the form of indentured servants: British people who volunteered (in theory - not all were quite so willing) to work in Barbados under a fixed-term contract, in exchange for free passage, lodging and the promise of a handsome grant of money or land at the end of their service. Unsurprisingly, conditions for many indentured servants were harsh, the work was often gruelling, and mortality rates tended to be high. Many were dis-satisfied with the terms of their service to say the least.

As a result, the planter class recognised the need to develop a stringent system of control over this valuable but resistant pool of forced labourers. Servants became tied to estates for the duration of their service, and were often not allowed to leave the land without written permission. Their contracts - and thus they as people for as long as their contracts lasted - could be traded, sold or gambled. Strict rules were imposed on family life. Though legal protections existed for them, the prominence and power of the planter class in even early colonial society made true recourse to justice difficult for many - complaining about abuse could simply lead the courts to order more abuse on the grounds that a servant was behaving insolently. Corporal punishment was a fully acceptable method of correction, though extension of indentured service was a popular and preferred means of punishment for breach of discipline.

Ultimately, a process began in the 1640s whereby white indenture came to be replaced by black slave labour in Barbados as the island re-geared its economy to the intensive production of sugar. But the slaves arriving there were not arriving into a vacuum; the basic institutional framework required to support a system of mass forced labour, and the degradation of that labour, were already established. The experiment of white indenture, combined with a very small slave presence already, had given the white planter class plenty of experience in how to command the obedience and control the lives of a reluctant workforce. One of the reasons why we see violence, and especially brutal whipping, become such a common means of discipline with slavery is that slaves were already deprived of their civil rights and Humanity - their service could not be extended, their status could not be lowered. Thus violence becomes the main means of keeping slave populations in line.

I use Barbados as an example of this process with good reason. It generally mirrors the pattern of development elsewhere; either colonies first developed systems of alternative forced labour that provided a powerful framework for enforcing absolute slavery of Africans later on, or settlements emerged after slavery had become the primary source of forced agricultural labour. Virginia is something of a hybrid example. It is often cited as the birthplace of real Atlantic slavery, with the arrival of African slaves there in 1619, but for much of its early history it too depended much more on indentured labour. Crucially, before 1680, there is evidence that a sizeable majority of the slaves who were there had been imported from Barbados. Thus many of Virginia's early slaves were either sold or taken there from a society that was already well-suited to enforcing slavery as a labour system and had a constantly growing crop of slaves accustomed to it; it is only later that the mass import of 'unseasoned' slaves from Africa begins. This is typical of the development of slavery in most colonies: either the first large slave population develops after considerable experience of managing and oppressing unfree labour already exists, or the first slaves are generally imported from another colony where that experience exists, making the creation of a new slave economy much easier.

One important exception to note is the small British colony of Providence Island, established in 1630. Here there was an attempt to use exclusively African labour almost immediately; slaves appeared at once in the colony and it seems they had replaced indentured labour largely or wholly by 1635. In 1638, Britain suffered its first ever slave revolt, on Providence Island - though defeated, the colony never did recover. It seems likely that with the lack of experience and an institutional framework for maintaining a complex system of forced labour, Providence's early slavery experiment was in trouble from day one.

There's a lot more that could be elaborated on here - Spanish and Dutch experiences, the use of Native Americans as forced labour etc. But I'm not as versed in these and I've already taken your question far beyond what you probably expected and I'm almost at the character limit, so I'll leave it here!

It depends on the time and the place and which society we are talking about. As far as the earliest years of slavery, I'm most familiar with what happened in New York City and its very different than what you might suppose happened. The first enslaved people in New York City (then New Amsterdam) arrived 1-2 years after settlement. They were not owned by individuals but were the property of the Dutch West India Company, which governed the city. They were held in captivity at The Company Negroes Home and were used as a municipal work gang, being forced to build city infrastructure like roads, forts, docks, public buildings, and also to farm the crops.

Eventually, during a brutal war against the Lenape people the slaves in New York were armed and forced to defend the city against attack, which they did admirably. Afterwards they were given partial freedom and land grants and were settled just outside of city limits as a buffer against native american attacks. Partial freedom meant they were forced to work occassionally and their children would be company property. That said, they were allowed the right to sue, petition for grievances, join the dutch church, have recognized marriages. In short, though they could not have full self determination they were given many rights and were somewhat integrated into the society at large. Almost all of these rights as well as their landholdings would be revoked when the English took over New Amsterdam.

source: slavery in new york by Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris