On slavery

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On slavery

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Race and Culture. pp. 186 - 196

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Slavery until recently was universal in two senses. Most settled societies incorporated the institution into their social structures, and few peoples in the world have not constituted a major source of slaves at one time or another. —David Eltis

Although slavery in the United States was referred to as a "peculiar institution," slavery was in fact one of the oldest and most widespread institutions on Earth. Slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus' ships appeared on the horizon, and it existed in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for thousands of years. Slavery was older than Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity, and both the secular and religious moralists of societies around the world accepted human bondage, not only as a fact of life but as something requiring no special moral justification. Slavery was "peculiar" in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which this nation was founded. Historically, however, it was those principles which were peculiar, not slavery.

Although slavery has come to be identified with the enslavement of Africans, that too ignores the long history and vast scope of the institution. The very word "slave" is derived from the Slavs, who were enslaved on a massive scale and were often sold into bondage all across the continent of Europe and in the Ottoman Empire. The Arabic word for slave likewise derives from the Arabic word for Slavs, as did the word for slave in German, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Italian. Nor were the Slavs the only Europeans enslaved. In just one raid on the Balearic islands off the east coast of Spain, the famous pirate Barbarossa carried off thousands of Christians into slavery, and after a later raid on Venice, the booty he brought back included, in addition to such things as cloth and money, a thousand girls and fifteen hundred boys. Europeans living in vulnerable coastal settlements in the Balkans were likewise raided by pirates and were carried off by the tens of thousands, to be sold in the slave markets of North Africa and the Middle East. Russians by the hundreds of thousands were sold into the international slave trade by Turkic raiders, before a strong Russian state, and then empire, was consolidated and able to resist these incursions.

Slavery was at one time common all across the continent of Europe and, as late as 1776, Adam Smith wrote that slavery still existed in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and in parts of Germany—indeed, that Western Europe was the only region of the world where slavery had been "abolished altogether." In the sixteenth century, peace terms imposed by the Ottoman Turks required the defeated Hungarians to send them 10 percent of their population each decade as slaves. It was common for the Ottomans to requisition a certain number of boys from among conquered European populations, these boys to be taken into the service of the imperial government. In the eighteenth century, immigrant German farm communities on the lower Volga were raided by Mongol tribesmen and the captured Germans taken off to be sold in the slave markets of Asia. In the 1820s, 6,000 Greeks were sent to Egypt as slaves and, half a century later, a report to the British Parliament noted that both white and black slaves were still being traded in Egypt and Turkey, years after blacks had been emancipated in the United States.

Slavery was likewise common in Asia. The Manchus raided China, Korea, and Mongolia for slaves. Raiders from the Sulu Archipelago, in what is now the Philippines, conducted large-scale expeditions to capture people as slaves across wide reaches of Southeast Asia. Slavery of various kinds was also common in India, where the original thugs often murdered parents in order to get their children and sell them into bondage. Organized slave markets and international shipments of slaves were also common in Asia. Slaves from India were shipped to Java and Indonesian slaves were shipped as far away as South Africa. Despite its reputation as an island paradise, Bali lost many thousands of its people as slaves, most being shipped off to other parts of Southeast Asia. Smaller or less advanced groups were set upon by marauders in many parts of Asia, as they were in other parts of the world—hill tribes, nomadic peoples, bands of hunters and gatherers, or primitive slash-and-burn agriculturalists being set upon by those who had reached more advanced stages of development and who had more advanced weapons. This pattern was common for centuries in Cambodia, Malaya, the Philippines, Burma, or the islands of Indonesia or New Guinea.

Many peoples around the world—Christians, Jews, and Moslems, for example—exempted themselves from enslavement, while engaging in the enslavement of others. This left as prey those peoples in societies too small or too weak to defend themselves. Many such societies remained in sub-Saharan Africa—often in small, isolated villages—after most of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East had been consolidated into nations too powerful to be victimized in this way. In Africa as well, people from powerful warrior tribes, such as the Masai, were rarely enslaved. Sub-Saharan Africa was unique only in remaining vulnerable longer. Where black Africans were themselves powerful, they often used that power to enslave their weaker neighbors, both for their own use and for sale to Europeans. Conversely, in regions of Europe where there were vulnerable peoples without the military protection of strong nation states—as on the Adriatic coast, for example—these peoples were raided and enslaved for at least twice as long as the 300 years of slavery in the United States. Only after the consolidation of political power in that region and the Catholic Church's intervention after the peoples of the Balkans had accepted Christianity for centuries did the enslavement of Bosnians and others stop—and the Europeans then turn their attention toward Africa as an alternative source of supply.

Over the centuries, somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 million people were shipped across the Atlantic from Africa as slaves, and another 14 million African slaves were taken across the Sahara Desert or shipped through the Persian Gulf and other waterways to the nations of North Africa and the Middle East. Significant proportions of both massive streams of slaves did not live to complete the journey. Mortality rates were even higher among those who were walked across the burning sands of the Sahara than among those subjected to the horrors and dangers of the Atlantic crossing. On the Saharan route, several Africans were enslaved for every one who reached the Mediterranean alive. Nor were these 25 million human beings the only victims of slavery. Africa itself used large numbers of slaves in all sorts of agricultural, domestic, military, and even commercial and governmental enterprises.

Numbers never reached the same magnitudes in Southeast Asia, for example, where there was simply not the large demand for slaves that existed in the Ottoman Empire or in the Western Hemisphere. Supply alone cannot explain the existence or magnitude of slavery. There also had to be a demand from other societies wealthy and powerful enough to have a use for large numbers of people to work in its fields, mines, homes, or other places. Although North African and Middle Eastern nations dominated the slave trade from Africa for centuries before the Europeans appeared on the scene, the latter's insatiable demand for slave labor for their Western Hemisphere colonies caused the slave exports across the Atlantic to exceed during its era even the massive shipments of human beings from Africa into the Islamic world. During this era of European domination of the slave trade from Africa, about four times as many Africans as Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere in the centuries from the time of Columbus' voyages until 1820. It was only the fact that the slave trade to the Islamic countries began earlier and continued longer that made the Middle East and North Africa the largest absorber of black Africans as slaves over the centuries. Moreover, it is only the existence of a vastly greater literature on slavery in the Western world than in the Islamic wor1d which creates the myopic illusion that slavery, or even African slavery, was a predominantly European phenomenon.

For slavery to be understood as a global phenomenon, it must be analyzed beyond any particular national background—and yet in the light of numerous real national and historical settings, rather than as an abstract model. To explain slavery as being a consequence of certain European ideas leading to bondage for Africans is to ignore the glaring fact that slavery extended in time and space far beyond Europeans and Africans, and far beyond those who shared particular European ideas. Nor can a certain crop, such as sugar, be regarded as some kind of key to understanding slavery, even in the Western Hemisphere, where millions of slaves worked on sugarcane plantations in South America and the Caribbean, for other millions toiled in the cotton fields of the southern United States. Worldwide, still more vast numbers of slaves worked in an enormous range of occupations, from the harems and military units of the Middle East to the clove plantations of Zanzibar, the coffee plantations of Yemen, the pearl fisheries of the Red Sea, and in mines from Egypt to Burma, as well as in high government posts in the Ottoman Empire, where enslaved eunuchs especially could acquire fearsome power.

To make some sense of this chaotic complexity, it is necessary to recognize that the stark dichotomy of freedom and slavery concealed degrees and varieties which must be understood, in order to understand the phenomenon as a whole.

GRADATIONS OF SLAVERY

Clearly the circumstances of a plantation slave, laboring under a tropical sun in the sugar cane fields and with the threat of the lash ever present, were radically different from the circumstances of a slave who advised a sultan of the Ottoman Empire on high government policy, or who ruled a province or led an army into battle. Even within a given society, such as the antebellum South in the United States, the circumstances of slaves varied from the classic plantation field hand to urban slaves who often led day-to-day lives not very different from those of ordinary employees, often choosing both their own housing and their own employers, while paying a share of their earnings to their owners. This practice of slaves hiring themselves out to various employers also existed among slaves in ancient Roman society and, in more recent centuries, in Southeast Asia.

While the descendants of slaves carried an indelible stigma for generations in some countries, the male offspring of the Ottoman sultan's harem became his heirs, including his successors as sultan in the Ottoman Empire. In Southeast Asia, Chinese immigrants—overwhelmingly male—often took local slave women as concubines, in some cases selling them again in later years when the men returned to China, taking their children with them. In other cases, where the original intention to return to China faded away over the years, the concubines might become the wives of those men who remained. Among European men sojourning in Southeast Asia, it was more common to set the women free when the men returned to Europe alone.

Clearly, slavery has existed in a very wide range of modifications, so much so that some scholars have spent much time trying to determine where slavery ended and other forms of bondage and dependency began, especially in non-Western societies where words and practices varied in ways not easy to discern.

Rather than attempt the impossible task of exploring all the modifications of slavery, we can examine the characteristics of a few disparate forms of the institution.

The simplest and purest form of slavery is that of the laborer working under the immediate and complete control and direction of some overseer with the arbitrary power of summary punishment. This was the fate of millions of slaves throughout the Western Hemisphere, where the harshness of their conditions was such that few slave populations reproduced themselves, and most had to be replenished with new captives from Africa. Literally working slaves to death has been a practice recurring in a number of very disparate settings, such as in the building of infrastructure in Iraq or in the Nazi slave labor camps in World War II. In some societies in Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, slaves were deliberately killed as human sacrifices. In ancient Rome, slave gladiators killed each other in the coliseum for the amusement of the spectators, and in other societies around the world slave owners arbitrarily killed slaves, sometimes in sadistic ways, with impunity.

It seems almost inconceivable that slaves could have ranged from this abject level of debasement and dehumanization to wealthy and powerful men who ruled over free populations and commanded armies. In between were slaves who were craftsmen, teachers, doctors and, in at least one case, a black captain of a Mississippi riverboat with a racially mixed crew in the antebellum South.

Both within and between societies, there was a systematic relationship between the kinds of work that slaves did and the way they were treated—a fact with wider and deeper implications for the use of power in general. Although slaves were subject to the virtually unlimited arbitrary power of slave owners in many societies—often de facto, even in societies which recognized no such right de jure — many slave owners nevertheless found it expedient to use other incentives than force, including money, autonomy, and even the granting of civil or military power, to get slaves to carry out responsibilities of a higher and more demanding nature. Nothing could more clearly indicate the limited ability of even unbridled power to accomplish all its objectives.

Where those objectives were simply the growing and processing of sugar or cotton, or the mining of salt or other minerals, then pure, stark, and brutal slavery was sufficient to accomplish these objectives. But where the work required somewhat more individual attention and discretion, as in the growing and processing of tobacco or the performing of domestic chores, some relaxation of the strictest slavery became apparent. Ironically, slaves in poorer societies in Southeast Asia were often treated more mildly than in more advanced, commercial, and industrial societies where mass production agriculture or mining absorbed vast numbers of regimented slaves. It was not a difference between European and Asian slavery, as such, that was crucial, but rather the nature of the work. Manacled skeletons of men have been found in a Burma mine and human sacrifice was a practice among various Asian peoples, with those sacrificed being more likely to be recent captives rather than slaves of long service. Among the Circassian women who were prized as concubines in the harems of the Ottoman Empire, their treatment was sufficiently mild to cause mothers to deliberately train their daughters for this role and to sell them into bondage in the harems of wealthy Ottoman men, from which they often emerged later with advantageous marriages having been arranged for them by their owners. As higher and higher levels of responsibility and discretion were required of slaves, they were treated less and less like slaves, so that this status became virtually nominal for those who held wealth and power as advisers or viceroys of Ottoman rulers, for example.

Not all societies permitted slaves to rise to high positions, and in many societies it was taboo to permit slaves to use arms. Weapons, like money or education, were a two-edged sword: They increased the range and value of the tasks that could be performed by slaves, while at the same time providing means to facilitate their escape. The nature of the social, military, and other circumstances determined where the point of balance might be for a given slave-owning society. In the Western Hemisphere, for example, education was in many places explicitly forbidden by law.

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In ancient Rome, individual Romans might be reduced to slavery as punishment for transgressions, but ordinarily slaves were non-Romans captured in battle or acquired in trade. Similarly, in a later era, it was common for the Ottoman Empire to enslave Europeans or Africans, as it was common for some African tribes to enslave others, or for people in Asia to enslave both non-Asians and Asians belonging to a different race or class from themselves. In short except for debt-bondage or bondage as punishment, the process of enslavement has generally been one of enslaving outsiders of one sort or another, whether by race, religion, nationality, or other characteristics. For centuries in Europe, it was considered legitimate for the Christians of Western Europe to enslave "pagans" from the Balkans or Eastern Europe, and it was long after all of Europe became Christian that the Catholic Church finally insisted on an end to the pretense that European slaves were pagans. In short, the choice as to which outsiders to enslave was not a matter of racial ideology, but was based on pragmatic considerations as to availability, including both the military and legal obstacles to their enslavement.

In ancient times, to attempt to raid the Roman Empire to acquire Romans as slaves was likely to prove costly in both immediate terms of armed resistance and in terms of provoking retaliatory raids and warfare from Rome. Such considerations not only determined which groups were more likely to become slaves and which were more likely to be slave masters as of a given time, but also suggest why continued enslavement of particular populations became less common with the rise of powerful nation states. Turkish enslavement of peoples in the Caucasus continued until the Caucasus was conquered by the Russians and incorporated into the Russian Empire. Isolated slave raids might occur afterwards, but for the Ottoman Empire to attempt mass enslavement of subjects of the Russian Empire was to risk war.

The consolidation of nation-states around the world reduced the number of places from which people could be captured and enslaved. Long after it was no longer feasible for one nation-state to challenge another by attempting to enslave its people, free-lance pirates and similar marauders on land were not deterred by such considerations and continued to make raids to acquire slaves in Southeast Asia, for example, particularly in remote and backward regions beyond the effective control of either indigenous or colonial governments. These pirates were sometimes Chinese, sometimes Arabs, sometimes Malays, or members of other groups from within or outside the region. Similarly, armed Arab free-lance marauders moved into Central Africa in the nineteenth century and established their own settlements, acquiring slaves and other forms of wealth as tribute from the surrounding African communities. While pirates and comparable free-lance operators on land were active in the capture of people for enslavement, the actual trading of slaves in the marketplace was often done by merchant peoples who treated slaves as simply an additional form of merchandise.

Around the world, the slave trade was conducted by merchant peoples, such as the Venetians, Greeks, and Jews in Europe, the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, or by the Arabs who played both the merchant and marauder roles in Africa, though even here the same individual seldom handled the slave from initial capture to final sale. When Italian merchants began displacing Jewish merchants in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea in medieval times, they also began displacing Jews in the Black Sea slave trade. Another great merchant people—Gujaratis from India—often financed the African slave trade, though they did not usually conduct it. The Yao, a Central African tribe noted for being the leading traders of ivory in their region, likewise became the leading traders of slaves in that region. Neither a national policy nor a racial ideology was necessary for enslavement to take place. All that was necessary was the existence of vulnerable people, whoever and wherever they might be—and regardless of whether they were racially similar or different from those who victimized them. Slavery flourished in ancient Greece and Rome without any racial ideology.

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Peoples regularly subjected to slave raids might indeed be despised, and treated with contempt both during their enslavement and after their emancipation, but that was not what caused them to be enslaved in the first place. Although there was no religious basis for racism in the Islamic world, the massive enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans by Arabs and other Moslems was followed by a racial disdain toward black people in the Middle East—but this racial disdain followed, rather than preceded, the enslavement of black Africans, and had not been apparent in the Arabs' previous dealings with Ethiopians. In the West as well, racism was promoted by slavery, rather than vice versa. Both in North America and in South Africa, racist rationales for slavery were resorted to only after religious rationales were tried and found wanting. But that is not to say that either rationale was in fact the reason for enslavement. In many other societies, no rationale was considered necessary.

Africa remained prey to other nations, long after mass enslavement was no longer viable in many other parts of the world, because it remained vulnerable longer. Africa was, and is, the least urbanized continent and long contained many smaller, weaker, and more isolated peoples, who were prey to more powerful African tribes, such as the Ashanti and the Yao, as well as to Arab slave raiders. Many of the peoples victimized by the Arabs in Central Africa had lived isolated from the outside world and were easy prey for marauders with firearms, who seized their goods and such people as they wished, leaving behind famine brought on by looted granaries and diseases spread by caravans. Europeans became mass traders of African slaves largely by purchase from Africa's more powerful tribes and empires. A particularly high cost prevented most Europeans (the Portuguese being an exception) from capturing Africans directly—the extreme vulnerability of Europeans to African diseases during the era of slavery. Before the use of quinine became widespread, the average life expectancy of a European in the interior of sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year. Most European slave traders therefore purchased Africans who had already been captured by others, typically by other Africans.

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Among the many negative aftermaths of slavery has been a set of counterproductive attitudes toward work, among both the slaves and their descendants and the non-slave members of slave societies and their descendants. "Work is for Negroes and dogs" is a Brazilian expression that captures a spirit bred by slavery and not unknown in the American South or among the whites in South Africa. Nor is this a purely racial phenomenon. Descendants of the slave-owning and slave-trading Ashanti tribe of West Africa have exhibited similar disdain for work. Free women in Burma were unwilling to do disagreeable work which had become associated with slaves. There were similar reactions by the Egyptian lower classes against doing work associated with slaves and by the white lower classes in the antebellum southern United States against doing work associated with blacks, slave or free. Similarly in Malaya, where manual labor was associated with slavery, an observer in Malacca said: "You will not find a native Malay who will carry on his back his own or any man's property, however much you may offer him for doing so." In Aceh, even those too poor to own slaves would hire a slave to carry things for them, "scorning to do it themselves." A seventeenth-century observer in Sumatra found all the heavy work in Atjeh being performed by slaves from India, with the local people developing an aversion to performing even simple tasks:

No Atjehnese would carry any load if he could help it; if he had no slave of his own he would hire that of another, even if it was only to fetch the rice from a place a hundred steps away.

What was involved here was not mere laziness, but a positive sense of being above various kinds of work performed by slaves, or an aversion to any kind of toil or working under the direction of others, because these too were reminiscent of slavery. What a historian of medieval Spain called "a puerile pride in idleness" has not been confined to that country or to that era. Adam Smith commented on the disdain toward work in ancient slave societies. By contrast, immigrants from non-slave societies have arrived in various parts of the Western Hemisphere, often financially destitute but without such handicaps in their attitudes toward work, and have risen above the native-born white populations of former slave societies, often through very different work habits, often commented on by contemporary observers. Selective migration and other factors may well have contributed to the ability of destitute immigrants to overtake native-born whites in the Western Hemisphere. But patterns of disdain toward work in slave societies around the world, going back to ancient times, are at least suggestive.

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The irony of our times is that the destruction of slavery around the world, which some once considered the supreme moral act in history, is little known and less discussed among intellectuals in either Western or non-Western countries, while the enslavement of Africans by Europeans is treated as unique—and due to unique moral deficiencies in the West. Moreover, what is and is not considered to be a legacy of slavery is too often determined by what advances the ideological visions of today, rather than what accords with the record of history.

Attempts to explain the choice of which peoples to enslave, or the treatment of those already enslaved, on racial or other ideological grounds fail to account for the racially indiscriminate enslavement of whatever peoples were available for capture at particular places and times in history. It was not a change in ideology but such historical developments as the growth of powerful nations and empires which successively removed various peoples in Europe and Asia from the ranks of those whom it was feasible to enslave. Africa south of the Sahara remained vulnerable longer and its peoples paid a terrible price as a result, though other peoples in isolated and vulnerable backwaters in Asia continued to pay a similarly terrible price, long after the descendants of African slaves were emancipated in the Western Hemisphere.

The treatment of slaves also reflected economic and social realities, rather than being simply a function of racial or other ideological beliefs. Plantation slaves were treated worse than domestic slaves in societies around the world, regardless of the race of the slaves or the slave owners, and regardless of the prevailing beliefs. In societies where the enslaved population was large enough to be a potential threat, harsher treatment and greater restrictions (including restrictions on literacy) were imposed. Even in colonies under the same colonial rule, such as the Dutch Caribbean colonies of Surinam and Curacao, slaves were treated much more harshly where the demographic and occupational patterns were the kind that tended to lead to harsh and brutal treatment elsewhere in the world. Surinam had plantation slavery, absentee owners, and a white population outnumbered several times over by the black slaves, and exceeded in size even by the small class of "free persons of color." Curacao, however, did not have the kind of climate required to grow plantation crops, so its slaves were mostly domestic, were treated more mildly than the slaves in Surinam, and were one of the rare slave populations in the Western Hemisphere to have a natural rate of increase, whereas in Surinam the slave population followed the more usual Caribbean pattern by failing to reproduce itself. Manumission was far more common in Curacao, where the instruments of torture used on slaves in Surinam were unknown. Although the slaves in both places were of the same race, and the slave owners in both places shared the same racial and cultural backgrounds, the different circumstances of the two Dutch colonies lead to very different results. Circumstantial realities, not ideologies, were the crucial differences between the two colonies.

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24 July 2024