Slavery is not merely forced labour but where said labourers can be bought and sold, where they become a form of property. That makes it different than, say, serfdom, military conscription or prison labour.
Some slaves were worked to death, like in Haiti, Barbados or in the mines of the Roman Republic, while others got Sundays off or became military commanders. In some societies, slaves were seen as less than human, while in others they were seen as merely unfortunate. Cruelty and dehumanization are not necessary features of slavery.
Slavery started out as a side effect of war: the losers would be made into slaves, like the women of Troy after its fall. Societies grew to depend on slave labour. That increased demand, which led to slave raiding, slave trading, slavery as a punishment for crime, slavery as a way to pay off debts, and so on.
That meant that slaves were often foreigners, but often they were not. The idea that slavery is about “race” was rare before the 1700s, even though masters and slaves were often from different races.
Also rare before the 1700s were people who questioned the morality of slavery. It was seen as an evil, yes, but a necessary one. In the Bible, for example, St Paul urges slave masters to be kind to their slaves, if not free them, but he never condemns them for owning slaves. It was common for people to want to reform or limit slavery, but it was not common for them to want to outlaw it completely.
At the heart of slavery lies a paradox: a slave is property and yet is also human.
Most societies have dealt with this paradox by trying to balance the property rights of the master against the human rights of the slave. As humans, slaves were seen as wanting to get married, own property, go to court, be freed, etc. And, from Sarah and Abraham in the Bible all the way down to Muslim law, a slave woman who gave birth to her master’s child was protected against being sold off. Said child was often made free or even legitimate.
This balancing was true for Greeks and Romans, for Arabs and Turks, for Africans – and even for the Spanish and Portuguese.
But not for White Americans.
As their name suggests, they built their society and their sense of who they are on race. That comes in part from how they dealt with the paradox of slavery. Instead of trying to balance the property rights of masters against the human rights of slaves – they denied that slaves were truly human! To make this believable, they said that Africans looked different than Europeans because they belonged to a different “race”, a heretofore unsuspected division of mankind, made up almost on the spot (and later dutifully “proved” by Western science), so that they could say that people who look even a little bit African are not truly human. Black lives do NOT matter.
– Abagond, 2015.
Source: “Race in North America” (2012) by Audrey and Brian D. Smedley.
See also:
- Arab slavery
- American slavery
- Does the Bible say that slavery is wrong?
- The term “race”
- gaslighting
- Chinua Achebe: Africa’s Tarnished Name
- There is absolutely nothing wrong with being Black
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Abagond, what are you doing, don’t you know that Haiti is off topic? Don’t let the blog moderator, a fellow who goes by a name very similar to yours catch you discussing that place.
First, I must object to your calling St-Domingue Haiti, such practice leads to absurdities such as Alexandre Dumas’s grandmother was a “Haitian slave”. This is anachronism, plain and simple, and mocks the struggle to get rid of slavery from that part of the earth. New World slavery wasn’t all that different from the others, except for one fact, the doctrine of racism that robbed the slave of his human attributes. That doctrine was riddled with contradictions because the master could not overlook the talents of their slaves because that was the source of his wealth. St-Domingue is an interesting case since people of color, i.e. blacks and mixed race people owned a third of the wealth and a quarter of the slaves. The idea that slavery was a living hell, and the sole reason why the slaves revolted, is simple minded in my view. In late 16th century India, A talented Ethiopian, Malik Ambar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malik_Ambar), could become de facto ruler of Ahmadnagar Sultanate(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmadnagar_Sultanate) and marry his children into the aristocracy, but two centuries later, in the West, the reaction to another black talent of that caliber was to move heaven and earth to destroy him. A number of blacks managed to become successful in places like Jamaica( Francis Williams and family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Williams_%28poet%29)) and St-Domingue (the Angoumard brothers). Talented blacks have always existed, that’s the reason they fetched them from Africa in the first place.
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I can’t look at those whips above without thinking of the pain, lacerations, blood loss and possible death on those poor slaves.
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So where do we classify debt bonded indentured labour?
Technically, they are not a form of property, but that does not stop them from being bought and sold. In that case, it is a matter of buying and selling a debt, for which the labourer is acting as a sort of collateral. That is probably more common today than actual chattel slavery.
In some places, the debt could even be transferred to the children of the indentured labourer. And employing enterprise could survive the death of any of its owners.
I would classify them both as slavery. One is chattel; the other is debt bonded indenture.
Even today, agents scour the countryside looking for would be labourers, offering them a chance to make money, but saddling them with debt that they cannot pay off and withholding their travel documents so that they cannot escape. Every single thing mentioned above re: chattel slavery can happen to debt bonded indenture labour.
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[…] Slavery is not merely forced labour but where said labourers can be bought and sold, where they become a form of property. That makes it different than, say, serfdom, military conscription or prison labour.Continue reading […]
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“Enslavements Compared” – a way to phrase the article to put the guilt on the oppressor.
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I was able to dig up some slavery abolition dates in the “new world”:
Haiti: 1793
Dominican Republic: complicated due to the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the same island of Hispaniola but I think final abolition was 1822
British Empre: 1834
United States: 1865
Puerto Rico: 1873
Cuba: 1886
Brazil: 1888
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The abolition of the African slave trade was immediately replaced by the growth in the Asian coolie trade, especially in the British and Spanish empires (to a lesser extent in the USA).
Part of the motivation was to regulate and control the wages and working conditions of the newly freed black slaves. In many places, the coolies even exceeded the number of freed slaves.
(https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/coolies/)
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Found this article on slavery in America, the Caribbean, and South America.
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/slavery-and-anti-slavery/resources/facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery
An interesting point in that article is that most American slaves arrived between 1720 amd 1780 while white Americans’ ancestors arrived, on average, in 1890. If that’s true, then their racism is not due to former slave masters looking down on their slaves. Most white Americans’ forefathers arrived after slavery was already abolished. They just came and participated in a culture of racism that already existed. They cosigned it in order to get ahead since many of the immigrant groups were also hated at first. Italians were the second most lynched after African Americans.
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It also underscores that “slavery” is a very tame term for what took place. Over 11 million people were forcibly transported across the Atlantic and over 1 million died in transit. Then they were dying at such a high rate on the plantations in some areas that their population would decrease if not for continual replenishment from Africa. They were disposable people.
It’s reminiscent of the Konzentrationslager in Germany but it was going on for centuries before Hitler’s Jewish Holocaust. Yet people ignore the history of what was happening to non-people outside Europe and wonder where THAT came from. It was amply foreshadowed.
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Reblogged this on One Tawny Stranger.
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Reblogged.
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“Dominican Republic: complicated due to the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the same island of Hispaniola but I think final abolition was 1822”
Toussaint Louverture Abolished slavery on the Spanish side of the island, present day Dominican Republic, in his 1802 constitution.
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@gro jo
Yes, but I read that it was re-established in 1809.
eg.
http://old.antislavery.org/breakingthesilence/slave_routes/slave_routes_dominicanrepublic.shtml
Is that correct? However, if slavery was never legally re-established under a new constitution I guess we could use the 1802 date.
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1. India’s Malik Amber (PBUH) was a slave who became a military commander.
2. Arabia’s Bilal Ibn Rabah (PBUH) was a slave who became a loyal companion of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), muezzin (caller to prayer), and third of the Islamic faith.
3. According to the Biblical scriptures, Moses was a slave who became an emancipator of his people – the children of Israel.
4. Russia’s Abram Petrovich Gannibal (PBUH) was a slave who became a nobleman, military engineer and general.
5. The ancestors of Black people in the Americas were slaves who got Sundays off to worship Jesus.
6. The ancestors of some Irish and Black Americans were slaves who became free people.
7. The ancestors of some Africans, Europeans and Pacific islanders were prison laborers who became members of the royal family.
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@Origin,
May I ask you where you got this information?
I know that Italians were lynched. For example, there was a large lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891.
That was not the largest mass lynching in US history. That was of Chinese in Los Angeles in 1871, which is larger than any single lynching of blacks.
I also do not know where you got the information that African Americans were the most lynched in the first place. I understand that American Indians, Mexicans and Chinese each were all lynched at higher rates than blacks. Or do we call that kind of murder by mob violence something other than lynching (ie, more akin to ethnic cleansing)? Or is it just because we don’t have as many photos of that?
Actually, one reason is because statistics before around 1882 are spotty at best and even after 1882, they are pretty good in the south and midwest, but not in the western states.
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Have you read a book called SLAVERY AND SOCIAL DEATH by Orlando Patterson? It’s a very good book that addresses patterns of slavery all over the world.
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@ jefe
You raise an interesting point. But I have always reckoned a difference between lynchings and massacres. I guess when I think Lynching there is usually an element of kangaroo court involved—some pretense of meting out justice rather than just pure slaughter.
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Origin, there was no Dominican Republic or Haiti in 1802, and Louverture did not “invade” the eastern side of St-Domingue, present day Dominican Republic, because that territory was ceded to France under the treaty of Bale(Basel in English) on July 22, 1795. After forcing the British to decamp in 1798, and reestablishing peace, Louverture took control from the remaining Spanish representatives. He marched his army east to persuade any recalcitrant Spaniard that resistance would be futile. What he did was done in the name of France. The French did not welcome his action because they found him too independent to their liking. On July 26, 1801, Louverture’s constitution was published outlawing slavery on the island “forever”. In 1799, during the Quasi War with France, Congress passed the non-intercourse laws prohibiting Americans from doing business with France and its territories but added the “Toussaint ‘s Clause” to allow such activity with St-Domingue, thereby the USA, provided a form of recognition to Louverture’s government. One of the questions debated was whether the eastern side should also be deemed a part of St-Domingue, it was. The official position changed when Jefferson became president and agreed to work with Napoleon to restore slavery in Guadeloupe and St-Domingue. In 1805, Dessalines invaded the eastern side to clear out the remnants of the French army under Ferrand. The French army, under siege in Santo Domingo, caught a break and avoided defeat, when rumors circulated that a French fleet was headed to Haiti. The siege was abandoned and the Haitian army went home after making sure that a French army would find nothing of use to their attempts at re-conquest. Between 1806, when Dessalines was murdered, and 1822, Haitians were to busy fighting each other to bother with the eastern territories. In 1822, when Haiti was finally reunited under Boyer and the inhabitants of the eastern side were divided into several parties proposing unity with Colombia, Haiti, etc, Boyer moved in and was welcomed, thus the island was reunited. Some zealous Dominicans like to claim that they were ‘invaded’, a half truth, since they omit the will of the “Dominicans” who called for the union of the island under the flag of Haiti.
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@jefe
The term “lynch” usually applies to a particular kind of extra-judicial ritual murder that involves hanging. I was using it in that sense. Lynching is terroristic. I think mob violence and massacres, as part of ethnic cleansing, fall into a different category. I never considered the Tulsa “race riots” or the pogroms against Chinese Americans in Denver to be lynching.
@gro jo
Thanks for the info. That’s why I said determining the end of slavery in the “Spanish side”, which became the Dominican Republic, was complicated by the political dynamics on that island. It would appear that it continued longer on the “Spanish side” so I used the date of later reunification as the end. Though, if official abolition was 1802 and Toussaint’s rulership of the whole island is considered legitimate (you implied that some people might disagree) that date should be fine as well.
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@King, @Origin
Much of that mob violence against Indians, Mexicans and Chinese was indeed in the form of lynching (“extra-judicial ritual murder that involves hanging”), the result of mob justice or kangaroo court. The fact that whites felt they needed to pass laws to prevent them from testifying against white men indicates that the courts were used to enforce some of the actions.
Also, the largest single lynching in US history was on Chinese.
Since lynching statistics are only semi-reliable in the midwest and south and only after 1882, it might be impossible to gauge the true extent of lynching in the US, not only for Indians, Mexicans and Chinese but for whites and blacks as well.
That is why it is dangerous to widely speculate which groups may have been lynched more than others. At this juncture, we cannot even be sure that blacks were the largest victims (only that black victims were recorded more frequently in East Coast and midwest newspapers during post-reconstruction Jim Crow). Personally, I highly doubt that they were. Hopefully, we can agree that lynching was prevalent across a wide spectrum of the population, perhaps some more than others.
Does anyone have any source that has really delved into the history of lynching in the US that is not biased by the newspaper reports in a few major cities in the East?
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@jefe
I wasn’t “wildly speculating”. Some sources do claim that Italians were the second most likely to be lynched. Granted, those sources are usually dedicated to Italian-American history. As you know, the murders were not carefully documented so there are other possibilities. I know Mexicans were also lynched at a horrific rate out West.
Anyway, I won’t belabor the point because I could have easily, and probably should have, said that Italians were also frequently lynched since I wasn’t trying to establish a persecution ranking. I was only indicating that the new European immigrants, who later became part of the racist establishment, were also despised.
One thing is evident, being victimized together by the system won’t necessarily lead groups to work to together to undermine it. Instead, history has shown that they often try to become a more powerful part of it. Consolidation at the top; fragmentation at the bottom. The power structure understands the advantage of keeping the mutually disenfranchised separated. Despite the historical persecution they have faced I think the Euro-American notion that (esp. East) Asian Americans are a “model minority” is consistent with that strategy. Being a “model minority” doesn’t make them white but they are separated from others by a kind of honorary status.
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Sorry for the OT in a topic about slavery.
It’s jefe’s fault. 😛
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@Origin
Sorry that lynching is a bit off topic, I just wanted to know where sources of information about lynching come from and how reliable they are. I finally got a hold of the book “Driven Out: The forgotten war against Chinese-Americans” and they discuss a lot about how they also cleared out much of the western states of Native Americans and Mexicans in addition to Chinese, and often employed lynching techniques. I now wonder if it is indeed blacks that were lynched the most or not. I am starting to think not.
However, your points about persecuted Europeans joining the white club is not lost.
Yes, history does seem to show this to be true.
I have been trying to learn more about Native Americans too, and find out stuff like how Jim Crow had forced American Indians to jockey the system not too unlike how it forced Chinese-Americans to do something similar in the South. The whole system of Federal Recognition of Indian tribes has indirectly disenfranchised blacks.
Getting back on topic, what I now know about debt bonded indentured labour, esp. that that involves human trafficking is very similar to chattel slavery in many respects, even to the point of the buying and selling of human beings, and in some cases may include transferring the debt to survivors. No wonder they call it modern day slavery (although it has been common ever since the western power colonies abolished slavery in the 1800s).
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Yes, slavery continued under various guises. The post-emancipation “convict lease system” and heavily indebted sharecroppers will also testify to that. Even today, there is corporate reliance on cheap prison labour while America has a higher incarceration rate than any country that keeps transparent records. The innocence project claims that there have been 330 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the USA with the following breakdown:
205 African Americans
99 Caucasian
24 Latinos
2 Asian American
http://www.innocenceproject.org/free-innocent/improve-the-law/fact-sheets/dna-exonerations-nationwide
There are multiple incentives to keep prisons populated apart from justice.
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..This is a good comparison of the differences between slavery systems (and the motivations, policies, etc.) that formed them.
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Village writer,
If you didn’t want to argue you wouldn’t have responded. What you don’t want is to admit your answer is bs. The only expensive thing about natural hair is changing people’s mindsets that it is difficult. You still need moisturizer for your hair if you wear weave! You still have to wash your hair.
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I think it’s benefiting to think of un-freedom as a spectrum with chattel slavery as one extreme and the Western European serfdom of the 18th centruy, where the serfs were pretty close to a taxpayer-state relationship with their masters, as the other. Two factors would determine where a specific form of unfreedom would fall on this spectrum of oppressivness: life chances and legal rights.
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Only 5% of all slaves that were brought to the new world come to the USA . THEY were aloud to marry and have children in the USA . every were else they were worked to death .and the reason slavers lasted so long was because the muslims in Africa keep the slave trade alive by keeping the supply of slave up. And the muslims castrated all the slave they brought to the middle east .and the black in the Usa also owned black slaves and slave markets .and dumacraps fought to keep slaver alive but the Republicans known as abolitionists think fourth against slavery and freedom slaves in the end thank God for the Republicans
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@ Thomas
“…the Republicans known as abolitionists think fourth against slavery and freedom slaves in the end thank God for the Republicans….”
Very potent drugs creates raving gibberish. Find somewhere to sleep it off.
LOL!
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Lorazepam doesn’t come cheap there, hence the delusions. LOL!
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