Slavery

Discussion

Tom Mackaman:

"As a system of forced labor and subordinate social status, slavery was not at all unique to the 13 colonies. It reached back to antiquity—including Babylonia, Egypt, China, Greece and Rome—and rose also in the New World before Columbus in the Aztec, Mayan and other empires. Slavery was a source of surplus value in ancient agricultural societies, and, as a form of legal property, was closely associated with domesticated animals. It is noteworthy that the word chattel has a common origin with cattle and capital in the old Latin capitale.

In Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and East Africa, the slave networks developed in ancient times survived the fall of Rome. Long before the Atlantic slave trade, people were deported into slavery from among the many peoples and cultural groups of Central and Western Africa across the Sahara, and for a thousand years the African rim of the Indian Ocean bustled with slave ships. The captors of slaves in Africa were other Africans. They maintained slavery in their own societies, and sold their slaves to Arabs and Persians, and later to Europeans.

Slaves working in a mine in Laurium, Ancient Greece, 5th century B.C. Nor was slavery confined to Africans. The term “slave” is itself derived from the Latin word for “Slav,” sclavus. The word took on its modern meaning as the pagan Slavic populations of eastern Europe were subjected to servile labor after military defeat; the word’s “transferred sense is clearly evidenced in documents of the 9th century,” comments the Oxford English Dictionary.

What Americans would today call “white people” continued to be subjected to slavery right on up until the 1800s. Between about 1500 and 1700 some 2.5 million slaves from the Black Sea, overwhelmingly eastern Europeans, passed through Istanbul. Further west in the Mediterranean world, according to Ohio State University historian Robert Davis, as many as 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Arab corsairs and taken into slavery in North Africa between 1500 and 1800—precisely the same centuries as the rise of the Transatlantic African slave trade. Entire villages in locations as far away as Iceland were depopulated. Europeans themselves also enslaved people who today would be called “white.” Until 1453, the Italian city-states dominated the Black Sea slave trade, sending Bulgarians and others to labor on the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean.

Karl Marx Thus, when the first European merchants made their way to Africa’s west coast and began purchasing slaves in significant numbers in the late 15th century, they tapped into longstanding networks of slavery that existed in both Africa and Europe. Gradually over the ensuing three centuries, the ancient system of slavery, transplanted to the New World, became bound up with the vast development of key agricultural commodities: tobacco, sugar, rice, indigo, and finally cotton.

In Capital Marx described this period as that of primitive capitalist accumulation:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.... If money according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek', capital comes dripping from head to foot from every pore with blood and dirt.

As we stated in the World Socialist Web Site in our reply to the 1619 Project, far from being a phenomenon unique to the colonies that would become the United States,

Slavery was an international economic institution that stretched from the heart of Africa to the shipyards of Britain, the banking houses of Amsterdam, and the plantations of South Carolina, Brazil and the Caribbean. Every colonial power was involved, from the Dutch who operated slave trading posts in West Africa, to the Portuguese who imported millions of slaves to Brazil.

The mind reels at the horrors of the slave trade—the forced marches from villages in Africa; the dungeons where slaves awaited the “middle passage;” the slave ships in which an appalling number died; the auction block; and then a life of forced labor, degradation and the routine and at times horrific violence that entailed.

However, the 1619 Project’s assertion, put forward by both Hannah-Jones and Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, that the cruelty of slavery was unique to the 13 colonies does not survive even an elementary examination of the slave trade. The British North American colonies received only 6.5 percent of the 9 to 15 million slaves taken across the Atlantic, whereas the vast subtropical and tropical zone stretching from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil took some 90 percent. Yet by 1830 the American slave states accounted for roughly 30 percent of all people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. The only way to explain this staggering statistical disparity is that, horrible as slavery in the American colonies (and then states) certainly was, the survival rate was much higher than in the massive plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil, where a great many were literally worked to death, to be replaced by a steady stream of new arrivals.

Because slavery in the New World ultimately became confined overwhelmingly to Africans and their descendants, it is a deceptively easy step to imagine, as the 1619 Project does, that it was a system of racial oppression and deny that it was first, and always foremost, a system of labor exploitation. As the great West Indian historian Eric Williams pointed out,

A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.

In fact, historians have searched in vain for any sort of racial justification for slavery in colonial Virginia. They have found neither that, nor even an original legal justification. To the extent that there was any ideological rationale for slavery it was first religious, not racial. By custom of both Christian and Muslim societies, slavery was reserved for infidels. Muslims enslaved Christians, and Christians enslaved Muslims, and both enslaved those they viewed to be pagans, including the sub-Saharan Africans. In other words, slavery’s longstanding existence and its religious sanction appears to have been all that was needed to set it afoot in the Chesapeake." (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/01/amer-n01.html)