Slavery

From Hobson's Choice

A type of servitude in which the "master" owns the physical person of his workers. Somewhat similar to serfdom, except that a serf, being tied to the land, could not be a proper article of commerce. But Russian serfdom was, towards the end of the 18th century, remarkably similar to slavery in that landlords were able to traffic in serfs while effectively retaining control of their land.

The position of slaves has varied historically. Legally speaking, slavery in the United States was the most extreme; it formally and categorically denied the slave any rights whatever.^[1] In contrast, many Latin countries acknowledged some slave rights. However, because the slave owners were typically the elites, they did not honor these rights. Moreover, mortality of slaves in Latin countries far surpassed that of North American slaves.^[2]

Contents 1 Context 2 Types of Slavery 3 European-American Slavery 4 Slavery and the Church 5 Results of Slavery 6 Notes 7 External Links

Context

Slavery is often characterized as a regrettable, but universal human institution that was eventually liquidated by the ineluctable march of progress.^[3] In all examples I have found of this, including the more erudite ones, writers use a sleight of hand: they lump together all forms of slavery, including those of pre-monetary societies (where wages would not be a possibility). The implication is that the abolition of slavery is yet another social achievement of the West.

Slavery, as distinguished from peonage and serfdom, is a peculiarity of empires undertaking ecological redemption. The other categories of forced labor may be used by, or adapted to, such campaigns; but when ecological redemption is married to capitalism, there is no institution to compare with slavery. While we may justly say that the Lacedaemonian (Spartan) social order was pre-capitalistic, or pre-commercial, the Spartan conquest of the Messenians was part of an objective to create a total social order ex novo, one in which a defeated society would be totally exploited for the support of the system. At once, the maintenance of the Messenians in a state of total bondage required the total mobilization of Spartan society.^[4] Helotage, however, is not quite the same thing as slavery since a structure of embedded social rules exist for the management of helot labor. A slave of the community is not quite in such a vulnerable position, since he is regarded as part of the commons and hence, protected by group interests.

Likewise, the rare cases of East Asian slavery (prior to WW2, that is) ^[5] Slavery of indigenous Japanese is believed to have occurred in the Heian period of Japan, mostly during the war with the Emishi; again, this represented a major project of ecological redemption. Enslavement was a wartime atrocity during the Japanese Civil War, and affected mostly women and children who survived the worst general massacres of that war. Although the Tokugawa shoguns outlawed this, slavery persisted in the mining of coal and iron.

Slavery was highly regulated under Islam, and was usually just a form of indentured servitude. Slaves under Shari'a had rights, although in regions where the practice of Islam had degenerated, these were/are seldom respected. There was a brief episode of American-style plantation slavery in the Khuzistan region (the Abbasid-era Zanj), but recent scholarship suggests that the parallels have been massively exaggerated.^[6] In any event, plantation slavery was a form of coerced labor that did not survive long in the Islamic world.

(Unfortunately, searches of the literature reveal an immense body of rubbish in circulation about slavery. Most of this seems to take the form of a tu quoque argument with respect to the Islamic world. But slavery under Islam was always hemmed about by laws; there is no Muslim analogue to Dred Scott vs. Sandford. Labor in Southwest Asia is brutally hard, but that's because of the climate. There is absolutely no equivalent in any society to the Middle Passage, which killed at least as many people as the Holocaust did. Add to that the premature mortality in Caribbean slavery, and the figure soars higher still. If readers really need to feel there is some moral equivalence between European-American slavery and anything in Asia or Africa, perhaps psychiatric assistance is in order.)

Types of Slavery

The word "slavery" is a surprisingly complicated concept, and incorporates at least four different modalities:

1. caste slavery
2. chattle slavery
3. peonage
4. predatory slavery

The most common, enduring, and resilient form of slavery is based on caste. Caste slavery is so called because it exists as a social "urge"; there is no compelling economic need for it. People carry out their occupational roles because alternatives do not exist. Some would challenge the use of the term "caste" in this sense, on the grounds that racism arises from egalitarian ideologies, whereas caste arises from extreme hierarchy.^[7]

Chattel slavery is an explicitly economic enterprise in which slaves have no rights, and no social customs govern how they are treated. In the well-documented case of the USA, the treatment of slaves was subject to a moral ceiling; one was obligated to treat them with harshness and contempt, and even brutality. ^[8] However, depending on the circumstances, slave owners were businessmen who ran a going concern and preferred efficiency; while a plantation owner might get it into his head to massacre his slaves, this was highly unlikely as slaves were costly and usually a very lucrative investment. Plantations in the Southeastern USA involved major logistical challenges, such as the great distances for shipping, the newness of the farms, irrigation, and so on. They were usually managed by professionals who often had to create a commercially viable farm hundreds of kilometers from rail lines and major cities. Hence, while slaves were property, they were expensive property that did not belong to the manager or overseer.

In contrast, peonage usually involves a very decentralized enterprise; the owner of the hacienda might cultivate a small share of the land himself and expropriate rent from the tenants. While the object was still to extract as much valuable labor from the tenants as possible, the haciendista relied on the peons to actually organize most of the production themselves; they were tied to the land and subject to the owner's demands ad libitum. Because organization and coercion were less intense, peonage was assumed to be much less harsh, although the haciendista could easily squeeze his tenants so severely they died or fled. After the Usonian Civil War (1861-1865), peonage of this kind became widespread in the rural southeast ("sharecropping").

A fourth form of slavery, directly associated with imperialism, is predatory slavery in which some party attacks a vulnerable settlement, overpowers them, and forces them to labor at gunpoint in about the same location as where they were seized. Also, the labor is likely to not involve a going concern or a business plan; rather, "predatory slavery" usually involves forcing people to extract resources, such as rubber or metal ores.

European-American Slavery

The European conquest of the Americas was ecological redemption par excellence. Initially this system was developed for supplying Southern Europe with sugar (first grown by tenant farmers around the Indian Ocean). When the crop was introduced to Europe, there was an obvious practical obstacle, from the point of view of the European merchants: the climate of all parts of Europe is not suited to it, and there was no sizable territory under the political control of Europeans that was. This changed with the discovery of Madeira, and then the Canary Islands.^[9]

The colonization of the Americas was initially led by Portugal, but after the Treaty of Torsedillas, the initiative fell to Spain. Spanish conduct in the New World has been roundly denounced, and rightly so; although it is true the condemnations were mainly self-serving English and Usonian ones. Initially the Spanish authorities (to speak of them indulgently) used captured Native Americans as slaves, but these died in huge numbers, partly because of the effect of European crowd diseases on the natives, and also because the technology of slavery was in its infancy. The impulse evidently was to work slaves to death en masse.

The Trans-European Project, likewise, was promoted by slavery; prior to the Renaissance, the European landmass consisted of a patchwork of economically detached, mostly poor riverine valleys that were the personal property of a dozen royal families. One of these, the Habsburgs, ruled from Portugal to Italy to Holland to Hungary; but the Hapsburgs contributed almost nothing to the economic unification of Europe. The Kingdom of Spain awarded to Portugal the asiento, or right to sell slaves in the New World (Spain had been barred from Africa by the Treaty of Torsedillas; Portugal, from the New World (except for Brazil).

Initially, Portugal dominated the slave trade. Before the onset of the official asiento in 1595, the Spanish fiscal authorities gave individual asientos to merchants, primarily from Portugal, to bring slaves to the Americas. For the 1560s most of these slaves were obtained in the Upper Guinea regions, especially in the Sierra Leone region where there were many wars associated with the Mane invasions. However, following the establishment of the Portuguese colony of Angola in 1575, and the gradual replacement of Sao Tome by Brazil as the primary producers of sugar, Angolan interests came to dominate the trade, and it was Portuguese financiers and merchants who obtained the larger scale, comprehensive asiento that was established in 1595.
Wikipedia, Asiento

In this way, slavery both stimulated, and was stimulated by, the rise of finance capital as a new form of capitalist organization. This was an especially pure form of capitalism because labor was totally alienated from the laborer; "labor flexibility" was absolute.

Gradually, after 1650, the trade passed to the English and the Netherlanders. The English also began to have a substantial number of colonies in North America and the Caribbean; so did the French. All this time, the main staple was sugar, which was now being used to produce rum and molasses as well as table sugar. Booze was an exceptionally effective tool of conquest—the heroin or crack cocaine of its day. While many of the indigenous people had mildly alcoholic beverages like pulque, spirits had vastly higher alcohol content and were typically coupled with that other dangerous addiction, artificial sweetness. Rum was also used to buy slaves from African chieftains, who almost certainly had a clue what they were consigning their captives to. The proliferation of commodities produced from sugar further stimulated the process of capturing humans and alienating their labor.

According to estimates from Hugh Thomas,^[10] only 4.4% of Africans actually received in American ports arrived in the North American colonies (or the USA). Another source, Phillip Curtain^[11] gives a figure of 10.2 million total arrivals, of whom 5.46% reached the once and future USA. However, it seems reasonable to estimate that at least a million were transported from the West Indies to the USA, given the rate of population increase of the African American population in North America. Demographically, this is still a fairly small proportion of the American total, although today approximately 45% of African Americans presently live in the USA. The reason for this is, of course, the vastly higher rate of survival of slaves in there, although a secondary (and still very important) reason is the "pan-Caribbean" slave trade, which seems to have provided nearly all net imports of slaves after 1810.

This was not a sugar economy, but a cotton and tobacco economy. Both are crops native to North America (although varieties of cotton had been cultivated in Asia and North Africa for thousands of years; the American varieties have largely replaced the others). The growth of cotton "took off" with the development of the cotton "gin," which mechanized the removal of seeds. A huge proportion of the industrial revolution consisted of the mechanization of the production of cotton cloth, which also contributed to the underdevelopment of India, and then Egypt.

Slavery and the Church

Sadly, the Christian church failed miserably as a moral guide during the rise of slavery. There were several bold individuals; Bartolome de las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, was one;^[12] Samuel Wilberforce was another. But the clergy of all denominations mostly conformed to prevailing commercial interests. There were three extremely important papal bulls concerning the Americas. One, in 1452, Dum Diversas, argued that Christians had a right to enslave "heathens." It validated the African slave trade and was official Church doctrine well after 1866. The second was Inter Cetera (1493), granting complete control of the New World to Spain (later modified to allow Portuguese control of the Brazilian coast). The third one was Sublimus Deus (1537), which denounced the enslavement of the Native Americans.

Gradually the abolition of Native American slavery took effect in the Spanish colonies; in Brazil, Native Americans were enslaved as late as the mid-16th century.^[13] The Church's ban was a minor inconvenience, since Africans were preferred to Indians as slaves. The Protestant churches were not much better. The Church of England was entirely acquiescent in slavery during its formative years in North America.^[14]

Results of Slavery

The most obvious effect of slavery and the necessarily concomitant system of imperialism was racism. Today, literally hundreds of millions of humans, either African or Creole, pay a terrible opportunity cost in residual racism.

The institution of slavery played a vital role in the development of capitalism, although we know from the history of Tokugawa Japan that capitalism could have developed without slavery. While Marxist theory of capital accumulation has its problems when dealing with paid labor under competitive labor markets, it is spot on when describing slavery. Under slavery, labor is so completely alienated from the laborer that the slaveowner often requires the mass murder of laborers.^[15] Hence, capitalism developed extremely fast and in a much more ice-hearted manner in the Americas than in Europe, where social relations were much less friable.

It is commonplace for conservatives, down through the ages, to argue that slaveowners (or their contemporaneous analogue) could not have been terribly cruel, because cruelty was against their economic interests; for example, as late as the 1990's, high school textbook expressed scorn at the plot element in Uncle Toms' Cabin in which Simon Legree flogs a slave to death. In many cases, this is assumed without further evidence. However, several points need to be made here. First, slavery is first and foremost an act of violence and terror. Slaves are motivated by the eminent fear of death, or at least, of torture and possible starvation. Attempts by modern economists to treat the matter as if slaves were no different than, say, drill presses or die stamping machines, is just insipid stupidity, if not insidiously meritritious. A slave's life has no value to the slave driver when that slave appears to be a physical danger; or if that slave is in a state of rebellion. The attempt to assess value to individual slaves, even retroactively, is an act of moral turpitude in which the would-be accountant is rationalizing the crime of enslavement, regardless of that person might claim. Slavery itself is not a form of property, not even in an amoral sense of accounting. It is a process of violent terrorism, in which actual death and mayhem are part of the process. The sole value of the slave, economically, is precisely that amount of surplus value that may be extracted from his state of terror.

Notes

1. ↑ Taney, majority opinion, Dred Scott vs. Sandford, US Supreme Court, 1857.
2. ↑ For information on Brazilian slavery, see Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God's Fire, Princeton University Press (1994).
3. ↑ By way of example: Robert W. Fogel & Stanley Engermans's Time on the Cross, W. W. Norton & Company (1974), p.13ff. In particular, Fogel & Engerman make the argument that there was no meaningful opposition to slavery in Europe (and therefore, the world) until the latter 18th century. As moral crusades go, the abolition of slavery was therefore remarkably prompt. This assertion is astonishing; in 1537, Pope Paul III issued Sublimus Deus, which banned enslavement of the Native Americans. This bull was mostly ignored, but the Pope was hardly a marginal figure in Europe.
4. ↑ Veil, The First Messenian War 743 - 724 B.C., Ancient Greek Battles online
5. ↑ See J. F. Moran, [The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth-century Japan], Routledge (1993). According to Valignano, the Jesuits were shocked by the pre-Tokugawa practice of enslaving Wajin by other Wajin. (The Wajin are the majority ethnicity of Japan.)
6. ↑ W. G. Clarence-Smith, The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, Routledge (1989), p.51
7. ↑ This is a severe oversimplification; see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, University of Chicago Press (1980) p.214 & 247ff. I think Dumont's characterization of racism is inaccurate.
8. ↑ Frederick O. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (complete text online), Antislavery Office, Massachusetts (1845) is but one of many sources to this effect.
9. ↑ See, The Sugar and Slave Trades, The Applied History Research Group, University of Calgary (1997).
10. ↑ Hugh Thomas, [The Slave Trade: the Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440 - 1870], Simon and Schuster, (1997), p.804ff; via Wikipedia, Atlantic Slave Trade
11. ↑ Curtain, The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census], Madison (1969) via Herbert S. Klein [The Atlantic Slave Trade (New Approaches to the Americas)]; Cambridge University Press (1999), p.207, see chart
12. ↑ Online sources on Bartolome de las Casas include Oregon State University's page; "Colonization & Print in the Americas" (University of Pennsylvania); excerpt from de las Casas, "[www.wise.virginia.edu/history/wciv2/casas.html A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies]" (1542).
13. ↑ Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Cambridge University Press (1985), p.56.
14. ↑ See, for example, Mark Ellingsen, Reclaiming Our Roots: An Inclusive Introduction to Church History, Continuum International Publishing Group (1999), p.195ff.
15. ↑ I am of course talking about Caribbean slavery, where the death toll was so hihg there was a constant influx of new slaves required to maintain a stable population. In North America, slave revolts were repressed with massive violent retribution. See the excellent Wikipedia article on Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion. Obviously, if slaves were too valuable to murder gratuitously, economics was habituated to taking holidays.

External Links

• Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God's Fire: a Documentary History of Slavery in Brazil, Princeton University Press (1994)
• John E. Cairnes, The Slave Power: Its Character, Career and Probable Designs (complete text online) Macmillan (1863)
• W.E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (complete text online), Longmans, Green and Co. (1904)
• Caleb McDaniel, "Anti-Slavery Scripts" [ 1 | 2 | 3 ], Mode for Caleb (2005)
• Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar And Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 Canoe Press (1994)
• Michael Twaddle, The Wages of Slavery: From Chattel Slavery to Wage Labour in Africa, the Caribbean, and England Routledge (1993)
• Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism & Slavery , University of North Carolina Press (1994; originally published 1944)