reply by
Thomas Sowell
6/5/2002 (14:55) |
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Race and Slavery
by Thomas Sowell
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 instituion,' 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 world 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.
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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.
Vulnerable people were enslaved around the world and down through history. Sailors from Magellan's ships left stranded in Southeast Asia were sold into slavery by the local people. In Spain, the Moors sometimes enslaved Spaniards and the Spaniards sometimes enslaved Moors, depending upon what the opportunities and the alternatives were. The various peoples living in the drainage basins of the Caspian Sea and Black Sea likewise captured one another to sell as slaves during the Middle Ages. In ancient times, Roman soldiers enslaved enemy captives and expected to be enslaved themselves if captured -- and, in fact, Romans enslaved in Carthage were repatriated after the war against Hannibal. An estimated 97,000 Jews were enslaved by the Romans as a result of war. Germans, Gauls, and Celts were also enslaved by the Romans. Enslavement was based on self-interest and opportunity, not ideology.
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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In assessing the treatment of slaves, and especially in comparing that treatment as between Western and non-Western societies, considerable caution is necessary. Because of the moral revulsion against slavery that developed in the West, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, a large polemical literature emerged, both attacking and defending slavery. Biographies and testimonies of escaped slaves made a major impact, as did the novel _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, which caused Abraham Lincoln to refer to its author as 'the little lady who started the civil war' and which caused Queen Victoria to weep as she read it. Such literature and such powerful emotional, moral, and political reactions were peculiar to Western civilization. Neither the morality of slavery nor the treatment of slaves was an issue of such magnitude in non-Western societies. As a result, there is much less firsthand information on the actual treatment of slaves in non-Western societies. What happened in the privacy of slave-holding households was inherently less observable than what happened in the fields on slave plantations. In some parts of Asia, for example, slaves were expected to prostrate themselves before their masters at home. Among fellow-Africans enslaved by the Mende, it was the practice to 'cringe up and place their hands one on each side of their master's hand, and draw them back slowly without the fillip while the head is bowed.' In a traditional African society where age was accorded great respect, aged slaves were treated as if they were still not yet adults. In the Middle East, wives of slave owners could be brutal to slave concubines who were, or seemed likely to become, his favorite - and who could, under Islamic law, become another wife whose children would be entitled to share the inheritance. Such slaves might be beaten, mutilated, or forcibly aborted against their will. How often this happened will never be known. Nor can anyone ever know how concubines felt about being made available to male visitors. Yet the statements of non-Western slave masters that slaves were treated 'like members of the family' have been uncritically accepted by scholars who would never accept similar self-serving statements from slaveholders in the antebellum South.
The End of Slavery
After lasting for thousands of years, slavery was destroyed over most of the planet in a period of about one century, and over virtually all of the planet within two centuries. The destruction of this ancient and world-wide institution was all the more remarkable because it was accomplished in the face of determined opposition and cunning evasion at every level, from the individual slaveholders to the heads of nations and empires. Moreover, the impetus for the destruction of slavery came not from any of the objective, material, or economic factors so often assumed to be dominant in history, but from a moral revulsion against slavery which began in the late eighteenth century in the country which was the largest slave-trading nation of its day, with highly profitable slave-plantation colonies - Great Britain.
Slavery was so deeply entrenched and seemingly impregnable when the anti-slavery political crusade began among evangelical Christians in eighteenth-century Britain that the most fervent crusaders among them hoped only to be able to stop the continued enslavement and international trading of human beings. Any thought that the very institution of slavery itself could be abolished was considered Utopian. Yet the mobilization of public opinion in Britain against the slave trade produced such powerful and enduring political pressures that successive generations of British governments found themselves forced to push the anti-slavery effort further and further toward its logical conclusion - first to abolish the international slave trade, then to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, and finally to pressure, bribe, and coerce other nations into abolishing slavery as well.
The Quakers were the first organized religious group in Britain to repudiate the institution of slavery and to impose on their members a requirement that they not hold any slaves. But the larger political effort to get the slave trade banned by government was led by others inspired by the Quakers' example. This worldwide political revolution against slavery began with a small and rather conservative group of evangelicals within the Church of England, staid people who distanced themselves from the emotionalism of the Methodists and whose principal leader, William Wilberforce, was such a relentless opponent of the radical ideas arising from the French Revolution that he sought to have those ideas stamped out in England by government censorship. Among the other members of the inner 'Clapham Sect' that began the crusade against the slave trade was the very reserved and dignified Henry Thomton, wealthy banker and a landmark figure in the development of monetary economics. Yet these were the leaders of a movement whose achievement was one of the most revolutionary in the history of the human race. Seldom was there a group of revolutionaries that so defied stereotypes, in a crusade that defied the odds.
Repeatedly and resoundingly defeated in Parliament on bills to abolish the slave trade, Wilberforce, Thornton, and their supporters persisted for 20 years, until finally - on February 27, 1807 - the House of Commons passed such a bill, 283 to 16. It was a remarkable victory from a mass mobilization of public opinion - and, once mobilized, this public opinion proved to be so strong, so tenacious, so enduring, and ultimately so irresistible, that the anti-slavery crusade was swept along beyond its original goals of stopping the international trade in human beings to abolishing slavery itself throughout the British Empire, and eventually throughout the world. Once the moral issue seized the public's imagination in Britain, its support spread far beyond the particular religious group that initiated the anti-slavery drive. Socially, it extended across class lines from the rich to the poor, from the working class to the titled nobility. In an age before mass communication, mass transit, or mass movements, people were astonished to see petitions arrive in Parliament with tens of thousands of signatures, demanding an end to the slave trade. At one point. Parliament received more than 800 petitions within a month, containing a total of 700,000 signatures.
The anti-slavery movement proved to be as unrelenting as it was widespread. British missionaries fueled the public's outrage with their reports from Africa itself, reports widely disseminated by a powerful missionary lobby in London. Not all government officials favored the anti-slavery cause by any means, and some in both the civil and military establishments resented the extra burdens put upon them by this cause, as well as the complications that the anti-slavery crusade made in British foreign relations. But the political pressures forced successive British governments to continue their worldwide opposition to slavery. Though slavery did not exist in Britain itself, it became such a factor in British domestic politics that candidates for political office felt a need to declare where they stood on the issue. By the mid-1820s, being pro-slavery was considered a political liability.
British warships were sent on patrol off West Africa, boarding not only British ships to inspect them for slaves, but also boarding the ships of some other nations who had 'voluntarily' granted them this right. By the early 1840s, Britain began to urge the Ottoman Empire to abolish the slave trade within its dominions. The initial response of the Ottoman sultan was described by the British ambassador:
... I have been heard with extreme astonishment accompanied with a smile at a proposition for destroying an institution closely interwoven with the frame of society in this country, and intimately connected with the law and with the habits and even the religion of all classes, from the Sultan himself on down to the lowest peasant.
Britain was far in advance of most of the rest of the world in its opposition to slavery. However, its example inspired abolitionists in the United States, and the French government later abolished slavery in its own empire and then sent its navy on patrol in the Atlantic to help intercept slave-trading ships. Eventually, opposition to slavery would spread throughout Western civilization, even to despotic governments like that of czarist Russia, which stamped out slavery among its Central Asian subjects. The European-offshoot societies of the Western Hemisphere all abolished slavery before the end of the nineteenth century, and the spread of Western imperialism to Asia and Africa brought slavery under pressure around the world.
Outside of Western civilization, the anti-slavery effort was opposed and evaded, especially in the Islamic world. Repeated pressure on the Ottoman Empire led its government to decree a ban on the slave trade within its domains in 1847, even though this ban led - as expected - to discontent and revolt among Ottoman subjects. However, mindful of the opposition within, Ottoman authorities were not very active at trying to stamp out the slave trade. Eventually, the British government threatened to begin boarding Ottoman ships in the Mediterranean to search for slaves, unless the Ottomans themselves began enforcing the ban on the forbidden slave trade. Nor was the Ottoman Empire the only foreign government to feel the pressure of British anti-slavery policy. In 1873, British warships anchored off Zanzibar and threatened to blockade the island unless the slave market there closed down. It closed.
A sharp distinction is apparent between the ending of slavery in Western civilization and in non-Western regions. By 1888, slavery had been abolished throughout the Western Hemisphere. Yet the struggle to end slavery, or even the slave trade, continued on into the twentieth century in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The British added naval patrols in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf after the Ottoman Empire's formal ban on slave trading provided the legal cover for such intervention. Yet slave trading continued on land until after European imperialism took control of most of the African continent. Only then could the attempt be made to stamp out slavery itself. The difference between the Western and the non-Western worlds as regards the ending of slavery is perhaps epitomized in the words used to describe the process - 'emancipation,' a once-and-for-all process in the Western Hemisphere, and 'the decline of slavery' in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where it was a more protracted process that lasted well into the twentieth century.
Even after Western hegemony extended into many nations of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, slavery continued in remote regions of Borneo, Burma, Cambodia, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Among the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East, the abolition of slavery came especially late, with Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, and the Sudan continuing to hold slaves on past the middle of the twentieth century. Mauritania officially abolished slavery on July 5, 1980 - though its own officials admitted that the practice continued after the ban.
Non-Western societies never developed the crusading zeal which led to the destruction of slavery wherever European power extended. Nevertheless, the national stigma of slavery eventually became a factor in the restriction or abolition of slavery in non-Western countries which did not wish to appear before the world - meaning largely the European world - as backward or uncivilized. Thus the king of Burma took the lead in officially outlawing slavery in that country in the nineteenth century, though it continued to exist on into the twentieth century. Siam began to crack down on slavery in the late nineteenth century, under the influence of foreign opinion. The rise of nationalism among Southeast Asian countries in general gave an impetus to the effort to stamp out slavery in the twentieth century, in order to gain respect from the world's leading nations, which meant Western nations. In the Philippines, at the beginning of the twentieth century, an American report on the continuation of slavery there was seen by Filipino leaders as a blow against their efforts to gain independence. Even within the Islamic world, which retained the institution of slavery longest. Westernized elites began to oppose slavery, whether out of conviction or out of embarrassment. In short, slavery was ultimately destroyed morally, though the chief instrument of this destruction was the overwhelming military power of the West, combined with the prestige of Western civilization, based at this juncture in history on its economic, scientific, and technological achievements. Ironically, after anti-Western views became fashionable among Western intellectuals in the late twentieth century, desperate expedients of rhetoric were resorted to, in order to depict the destruction of slavery by European civilization as somehow serving the economic interests of European powers.
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When the total cost of Britain's naval and military efforts against the slave trade for more than a century are added up, they are comparable to all the profits ever made by Britain from the slave trade in earlier times.
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Implications
The staggering sweep of slavery over thousands of years, and the enormous variety of forms it assumed at different times and places, are almost as remarkable as the scant amount of moral concern it aroused until the late eighteenth century in Britain and the United States. How and why this particular juncture in history produced a moral revulsion against slavery is much less clear than the confluence of circumstances which permitted this moral revulsion to drive a policy which resulted in the stamping out of slavery across most of the planet in a period of a century and a half. The mobilization of this moral concern into a political force that was both powerful and tenacious was historic in its consequences because of the military predominance of the countries in which these anti-slavery movements developed. More specifically, it was European imperialism which stamped out slavery over most of the world. Even in parts of the world which retained their independence or autonomy, the indelible stigma that slavery acquired in European eyes made abolition a policy to be pursued for the sake of national respectability, even in societies which had no strong feelings against slavery itself.
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.
Excerpted from chapter 7 of Thomas Sowell's Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 186-222.
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