Slavery is not a crime in almost half the countries of the world

AND WAGE SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME

IN 100% OF THE COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD
by Katarina Schwarz and Jean Allain, The Conversation

François-Auguste Biard, Proclamation of the Abolition of 

Slavery in the French Colonies, 27 April 1848 (1849). 

Credit: Wikimedia Commons 

48 YEARS AFTER THE SLAVE REVOLT KNOWN AS THE 

HAITIAN REVOLUTION OF TOUSSAINT OVERTURE 

"Slavery is illegal everywhere." So said the New York Times, repeated at the World Economic Forum, and used as a mantra of advocacy for over 40 years. The truth of this statement has been taken for granted for decades. Yet our new research reveals that almost half of all countries in the world have yet to actually make it a crime to enslave another human being.

Legal ownership of people was indeed abolished in all countries over the course of the last two centuries. But in many countries it has not been criminalized. In almost half of the world's countries, there is no criminal law penalizing either slavery or the slave trade. In 94 countries, you cannot be prosecuted and punished in a criminal court for enslaving another human being.

Our findings displace one of the most basic assumptions made in the modern antislavery movement—that slavery is already illegal everywhere in the world. And they provide an opportunity to refocus global efforts to eradicate modern slavery by 2030, starting with fundamentals: getting states to completely outlaw slavery and other exploitative practices.

The findings emerge from our development of an anti-slavery database mapping domestic legislation against international treaty obligations of all 193 United Nations member states (virtually all countries in the world). The database considers the domestic legislation of each country, as well as the binding commitments they have made through international agreements to prohibit forms of human exploitation that fall under the umbrella term "modern slavery." This includes forced labor, human trafficking, institutions and practices similar to slavery, servitude, the slave trade, and slavery itself.

Although 96% of all these countries have some form of domestic anti-trafficking legislation in place, many of them appear to have failed to prohibit other types of human exploitation in their domestic law. Most notably, our research reveals that:
94 states (49%) appear not to have criminal legislation prohibiting slavery
112 states (58%) appear not to have put in place penal provisions punishing forced labor
180 states (93%) appear not to have enacted legislative provisions criminalizing servitude
170 states (88%%) appear to have failed to criminalize the four institutions and practices similar to slavery.

In all these countries, there is no criminal law in place to punish people for subjecting people to these extreme forms of human exploitation. Abuses in these cases can only be prosecuted indirectly through other offences—such as human trafficking—if they are prosecuted at all. In short, slavery is far from being illegal everywhere.


A short history

So how did this happen?

The answer lies at the heart of the great British abolition movement, which ended the transoceanic slave trades. This was a movement to abolish laws allowing the slave trade as legitimate commerce. During the 19th century, states were not asked to pass legislation to criminalize the slave trade, rather they were asked to repeal—that is, to abolish—any laws allowing for the slave trade.

This movement was followed up by the League of Nations in 1926 adopting the Slavery Convention, which required states do the same: abolish any legislation allowing for slavery. But the introduction of the international human rights regime changed this. From 1948 onwards, states were called upon to prohibit, rather than simply abolish, slavery.

As a result, states were required to do more than simply ensure they did not have any laws on the books allowing for slavery; they had to actively put in place laws seeking to stop a person from enslaving another. But many appear not to have criminalized slavery, as they had undertaken to do.

This is because for nearly 90 years (from 1926 to 2016), it was generally agreed that slavery, which was considered to require the ownership of another person, could no longer occur because states had repealed all laws allowing for property rights in persons. The effective consensus was that slavery had been legislated out of existence. So the thinking went: if slavery could no longer exist, there was no reason to pass laws to prohibit it.

This thinking was galvanized by the definition of slavery first set out in 1926. That definition states that slavery is the "status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised." But courts the world over have recently come to recognize that this definition applies beyond situations where one person legally owns another person.

So let's dig into the language of that definition. Traditionally, slavery was created through systems of legal ownership in people—chattel slavery, with law reinforcing and protecting the rights of some to hold others as property. The newly recognized "condition" of slavery, on the other hand, covers situations of de facto slavery (slavery in fact), where legal ownership is absent but a person exercises power over another akin to ownership—that is, they hold the person in a condition of slavery.

This creates the possibility of recognizing slavery in a world where it has been abolished in law, but persists in fact. Torture, by analogy, was abolished in law during the 18th century, but persists despite being outlawed.
States in which slavery is currently criminalised. Credit: Katarina Schwarz and Jean Allain

Stories of slavery

Slavery may have been abolished, but there are still many who are born into slavery or brought into it at a young age and therefore do not know or recall anything different. Efforts by non-governmental organizations to free entire villages from hereditary slavery in Mauritania demonstrate this acutely, with survivors initially having no notion of a different existence and having to be slowly introduced to processes towards liberation.

This is a country in which the practice of buying and selling slaves has continued since the 13th century, with those enslaved serving families as livestock herders, agricultural workers, and domestic servants for generations, with little to no freedom of movement. This continues despite the fact that slavery was abolished.

Selek'ha Mint Ahmed Lebeid and her mother were born into slavery in Mauritania. She wrote about her experiences in 2006:

"I was taken from my mother when I was two years old by my master … he inherited us from his father … I was a slave with these people, like my mother, like my cousins. We suffered a lot. When I was very small I looked after the goats, and from the age of about seven I looked after the master's children and did the household chores—cooking, collecting water, and washing clothes … when I was ten years old I was given to a Marabout [a holy man], who in turn gave me to his daughter as a marriage gift, to be her slave. I was never paid, but I had to do everything, and if I did not do things right I was beaten and insulted. My life was like this until I was about twenty years old. They kept watch over me and never let me go far from home. But I felt my situation was wrong. I saw how others lived."

As this story shows, slavery turns on control. Control of a person of such an intensity as to negate a person's agency, their personal liberty, or their freedom. Where slavery is concerned, this overarching control is typically established through violence: it effectively requires the will of a person to be broken. This control need not be exercised through courts of law, but may be exercised by enslavers operating outside legal frameworks. In the case of Mauritania, legal slavery has been abolished since 1981.

Once this control is established, other powers understood in the context of ownership come into play: to buy or sell a person, to use or manage them, or even to dispose of them. So slavery can exist without legal ownership if a person acts as if they owned the person enslaved. This—de facto slavery—continues to persist today on a large scale.

The stories of people around the world who have experienced extreme forms of exploitation testify to the continued existence of slavery. Listening to the voices of people who have been robbed of their agency and personal liberty, and controlled so as to be treated as if they are a thing that somebody owns, makes it clear that slavery persists.

In 1994, Mende Nazer was captured as a child following a militia raid on her village in Sudan. She was beaten and sexually abused, eventually sold into domestic slavery to a family in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. As a young adult she was transferred to the family of a diplomat in the UK, eventually escaping in 2002.

"Some people say I was treated like an animal," reflected Nazer, "But I tell them: no, I wasn't. Because an animal—like a cat or a dog—gets stroked, and love and affection. I had none of that."

Human trafficking

Because of this remarkably late consensus on what slavery means in a post-abolition world, only very specific practices related to severe human exploitation are currently covered under national laws around the world—primarily, human trafficking. And while most countries have anti-trafficking legislation in place (our database shows that 93% of states have criminal laws against trafficking in some form), human trafficking legislation does not prohibit multiple other forms of human exploitation, including slavery itself.

Human trafficking is defined in international law, while other catch-all terms, such as "modern slavery," are not. In international law, human trafficking consists of three elements: the act (recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring, or receiving the person); the use of coercion to facilitate this act; and an intention to exploit that person. The crime of trafficking requires all three of its elements to be present. Prosecuting the exploitation itself—be it, for instance, forced labor or slavery—would require specific domestic legislation beyond provisions addressing trafficking.

So having domestic human trafficking legislation in place does not enable prosecution of forced labour, servitude or slavery as offenses in domestic law. And while the vast majority of states have domestic criminal provisions prohibiting trafficking, most have not yet looked beyond this to legislate against the full range of exploitation practices they have committed to prohibit.

Shockingly, our research reveals that less than 5% of the 175 states that have undertaken legally-binding obligations to criminalize human trafficking have fully aligned their national law with the international definition of trafficking. This is because they have narrowly interpreted what constitutes human trafficking, creating only partial criminalization of slavery. The scale of this failing is clear:
a handful of states criminalize trafficking in children, but not in adults
some states criminalize trafficking in women or children, specifically excluding victims who are men from protection
121 states have not recognized that trafficking in children should not require coercive means (as required by the Palermo Protocol)
31 states do not criminalize all relevant acts associated with trafficking, and 86 do not capture the full range of coercive means
several states have focused exclusively on suppressing trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and thereby failed to outlaw trafficking for the purposes of slavery, servitude, forced labor, institutions and practices similar to slavery, or organ harvesting.

Our database

While there is no shortage of recognition of de facto slavery in the decisions of international courts around the world, the degree to which this understanding is reflected in national laws has not—until now—been clear. The last systematic attempt to gather domestic laws on slavery was published over 50 years ago, in 1966.
 

A protest rally in London raises awareness for the fight against human trafficking and slavery. Credit: John Gomez/Shutterstock.com

Not only is this report now outdated; the definition of slavery it tested against—slavery under legal ownership—has been thoroughly displaced with the recognition in international law that a person can, in fact, be held in the condition of slavery. This means that there has never been a global review of antislavery laws in the sense of the fuller definition, nor has there ever been such a review of laws governing all of modern slavery in its various forms. It is this significant gap in modern slavery research and evidence that we set out to fill.

We compiled the national laws relating to slavery, trafficking, and related forms of exploitation of all 193 UN member states. From over 700 domestic statutes, more than 4,000 individual provisions were extracted and analyzed to establish the extent to which each and every state has carried out its international commitments to prohibit these practices through domestic legislation.

This collection of legislation is not perfect. The difficulties of accessing legislation across all of the world's countries make it inevitably incomplete. Language barriers, difficulties of translating legal provisions, and differences in the structures of national legal systems also presented obstacles. But these challenges were offset by conducting searches in multiple languages, triangulating sources, and the use of translation software where necessary.

The findings

The results, as we've shown, are shocking. In 94 countries, a person cannot be prosecuted for enslaving another human being. This implicates almost half of all the world's countries in potential breaches of the international obligation to prohibit slavery.

What's more, only 12 states appear to explicitly set out a national definition of slavery that reflects the international one. In most cases, this leaves it up to the courts to interpret the meaning of slavery (and to do so in line with international law). Some states use phrases such as "buying and selling human beings," which leaves out many of the powers of ownership that might be exercised over a person in a case of contemporary slavery. This means that even in the countries where slavery has been prohibited in criminal law, only some situations of slavery have been made illegal.

Also surprising is the fact that states who have undertaken international obligations are not significantly more (or less) likely to have implemented domestic legislation addressing any of the kinds of exploitation considered in our study. States who have signed up to the relevant treaties, and those who have not, are almost equally likely to have domestic provisions criminalizing the various forms of modern slavery. Signing onto treaties seems to have no impact on the likelihood that a state will take domestic action, at least in statistical terms. However, this does not mean that international commitments are not a significant factor in shaping particular states' national antislavery efforts.

The picture is similarly bleak when it comes to other forms of exploitation. For example, 112 states appear to be without penal sanctions to address forced labor, a widespread practice ensnaring 25 million people.

In an effort to support their families, many of those forced into labour in developed countries are unaware they are not taking up legitimate work. Travelling to another country for what they believe to be decent work, often through informal contacts or employment agencies, they find themselves in a foreign country with no support mechanism and little or no knowledge of the language. Typically, their identity documents are taken by their traffickers, which limits their ability to escape and enables control through the threat of exposure to the authorities as "illegal" immigrants.

They are often forced to work for little or no pay and for long hours, in agriculture, factories, construction, restaurants, and through forced criminality, such as cannabis farming. Beaten and degraded, some are sold or gifted to others, and many are purposefully supplied with drugs and alcohol to create a dependency on their trafficker and reduce the risk of escape. Edward (not his real name) explains:

"I felt very sick, hungry and tired all the time. I was sold, from person to person, bartered for right in front of my face. I heard one man say I wasn't even worth £300. I felt worthless. Like rubbish on the floor. I wished I could die, that it could all be behind. I just wanted a painless death. I finally decided I would rather be killed trying to escape."

Our database also reveals widespread gaps in the prohibition of other practices related to slavery. In short, despite the fact that most countries have undertaken legally-binding obligations through international treaties, few have actually criminalized slavery, the slave trade, servitude, forced labor, or institutions and practices similar to slavery.

A better future

Clearly, this situation needs to change. States must work towards a future in which the claim that "slavery is illegal everywhere" becomes a reality.

Our database should make the design of future legislation easier. We can respond to the demands of different contexts by analyzing how similar states have responded to shared challenges, and adapt these approaches as needed. We can assess the strengths and weaknesses of different choices in context, and respond to problems with the type of evidence-based analysis provided here.

To this end, we are currently developing model legislation and guidelines meant to assist states in adapting their domestic legal frameworks to meet their obligations to prohibit human exploitation in an effective manner. Now that we have identified widespread gaps in domestic laws, we must move to fill these with evidence-based, effective, and appropriate provisions.

While legislation is only a first step towards effectively eradicating slavery, it is fundamental to harnessing the power of the state against slavery. It is necessary to prevent impunity for violations of this most fundamental human right, and vital for victims obtaining support and redress. It also sends an important signal about human exploitation.

The time has come to move beyond the assumption that slavery is already illegal everywhere. Laws do not currently adequately and effectively address the phenomenon, and they must.


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Dismantling the myth that ancient slavery 'wasn't that bad'

SLAVERY IS NOT APPRENTICESHIP

by Chance Bonar, The Conversation

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

As someone who researches slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially in the Bible, I often hear remarks like, "Slavery was totally different back then, right?" "Well, it couldn't have been that bad." "Couldn't slaves buy their freedom?"

Most people in the United States or Europe in the 21st century are more knowledgeable about the transatlantic slave trade, and live in societies deeply shaped by it. People can see the effects of modern enslavement everywhere from mass incarceration and housing segregation to voting habits.

The effects of ancient slavery, on the other hand, aren't as tangible today—and most Americans have only a vague idea of what it looked like. Some people might think of biblical stories, such as Joseph's jealous brothers selling him into slavery. Others might picture movies like "Spartacus," or the myth that enslaved people built the Egyptian pyramids.

Because these kinds of slavery took place so long ago and weren't based on modern racism, some people have the impression that they weren't as harsh or violent. That impression makes room for public figures like Christian theologian and analytic philosopher William Lane Craig to argue that ancient slavery was actually beneficial for enslaved people.

Modern factors like capitalism and racist pseudoscience did shape the transatlantic slave trade in uniquely harrowing and enduring ways. Enslaved labor, for example, shaped economists' theories about the "free market" and global trade.

But to understand slavery from that era—or to combat slavery today—we also need to understand the longer history of involuntary labor. As a scholar of ancient slavery and early Christian history, I often encounter three myths that stand in the way of understanding ancient slavery and how systems of enslavement have evolved over time.

Myth No. 1: There is one kind of 'biblical slavery'

The collection of texts that ended up in the Bible represent centuries of different writers from across the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, often in very different circumstances, making it hard to generalize about how slavery worked in "biblical" societies. Most importantly, the Hebrew Bible—what Christians call "the Old Testament"—emerged primarily in the ancient Near East, while the New Testament emerged in the early Roman Empire.

Forms of enslavement and involuntary labor in the ancient Near East, for example—areas such as Egypt, Syria and Iran—were not always chattel slavery, in which enslaved people were considered property. Rather, some people were temporarily enslaved to pay off their debts.

However, this was not the case for all people enslaved in the ancient Near East, and certainly not under the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, where millions were trafficked and forced to labor in domestic, urban and agricultural settings.

Because of the range of periods and cultures involved in the production of biblical literature, there is no such thing as a single "biblical slavery."

Nor is there a single "biblical perspective" on slavery. The most anyone can say is that no biblical texts or writers explicitly condemn the institution of enslavement or the practice of chattel slavery. More robust challenges to slavery by Christians started to emerge in the fourth century C.E., in the writings of figures like St. Gregory of Nyssa, a theologian who lived in Cappadocia, in present-day Turkey.

Myth No. 2: Ancient slavery was not as cruel

Like Myth No. 1, this myth often comes from conflating some Near Eastern and Egyptian practices of involuntary labor, such as debt slavery, with Greek and Roman chattel slavery. By focusing on other forms of involuntary labor in specific ancient cultures, it is easy to overlook the widespread practice of chattel slavery and its harshness.

However, across the ancient Mediterranean, there is evidence of a variety of horrific practices: branding, whipping, bodily disfiguration, sexual assault, torture during legal trials, incarceration, crucifixion and more. In fact, a Latin inscription from Puteoli, an ancient city near Naples, Italy, recounts what enslavers could pay undertakers to whip or crucify enslaved people.

Christians were not exempt from participating in this cruelty. Archaeologists have found collars from Italy and North Africa that enslavers placed upon their enslaved people, offering a price for their return if they fled. Some of these collars bear Christian symbols like the chi-rho (☧), which combines the first two letters of Jesus' name in Greek. One collar mentions that the enslaved person needs to be returned to their enslaver, "Felix the archdeacon."

It's difficult to apply contemporary moral standards to earlier eras, not least societies thousands of years ago. But even in an ancient world in which slavery was ever present, it is clear not everyone bought into the ideology of the elite enslavers. There are records of multiple slave rebellions in Greece and Italy—most famously, that of the escaped gladiator Spartacus.

Myth No. 3: Ancient slavery wasn't discriminatory

Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean wasn't based on race or skin color in the same way as the transatlantic slave trade, but this doesn't mean ancient systems of enslavement weren't discriminatory.

Much of the history of Greek and Roman slavery involves enslaving people from other groups: Athenians enslaving non-Athenians, Spartans enslaving non-Spartans, Romans enslaving non-Romans. Often captured or defeated through warfare, such enslaved people were either forcibly migrated to a new area or were kept on their ancestral land and compelled to do farmwork or be domestic workers for their conquerors. Roman law required a slave's "natio," or place of origin, to be announced during auctions.

Ancient Mediterranean enslavers prioritized the purchase of people from different parts of the world on account of stereotypes about their various characteristics. Varro, a scholar who wrote about the management of agriculture, argued that an enslaver shouldn't have too many enslaved people who were from the same nation or who could speak the same language, because they might organize and rebel.

Ancient slavery still depended on categorizing some groups of people as "others," treating them as though they were wholly different from those who enslaved them.

The picture of slavery that most Americans are familiar with was deeply shaped by its time, particularly modern racism and capitalism. But other forms of slavery throughout human history were no less "real." Understanding them and their causes may help challenge slavery today and in the future—especially at a time when some politicians are again claiming transatlantic slavery actually benefited enslaved people.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Slavery and trafficking occurs in 90% of recent wars and conflicts, new research shows

ENTERED APPRENTICESHIP IN TRADES CRAFTS SUCH AS CARPENTERS, PLUMBERS, ELECTRICIANS ETC. ARE CALLED INDENTURED, FOR THE FACT THAT IN THE PAST THE APPRENTICE WAS 'OWNED' LIKE HIS TOOLS BY HIS 'MASTER' OF THE TRADE. HE WAS FREED WHEN HE COMPLETED THE APPRENTICESHIP BY PAYING HIS DEBT, OR BECAME A JOURNEYMAN. HE WAS AS HE IS TODAY SUPERVISED BY HIS JOURNEYMAN. I USE HIS BECAUSE MOST TRADESMEN WERE AND REMAIN MEN.

HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 

Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch says historians 'exaggerate' the importance of slavery and colonialism to the Britain's growth as a world power saying it was really down to 'ingenuity and industry'

By DAVID WILCOCK, DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 04:20 EDT, 1 May 2024 | UPDATED: 04:21 EDT, 1 May 2024

Cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch today accused historians of exaggerating the importance of colonialism and the slave trade to the growth of Britain as a world power.

The Business Secretary and Equalities Minister said that UK's economic success is instead the result of 'British ingenuity and industry' as she welcomed a new book by a rightwing think tank.

Despite the British Empire once being geographically the largest the world has ever seen, political economist Kristian Niemietz claimed Britain's growth was not financed by the slave trade or its imperial possessions

Writing for the Institute of Economic Affairs, Dr Niemietz has argued that colonialism made only a 'minor contribution' to Britain's economic development, 'and quite possibly none at all', with the benefits outweighed by the military and administrative cost of running an empire.

He added that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was no more important to the British economy than sheep-farming or brewing, and most trade was with North America and Western Europe rather than the colonies, even if some individuals did become 'very rich' from 'overseas engagement'.

Writing in support of the work, Mrs Badenoch said the book was 'a welcome counterweight to simplistic narratives that exaggerate the significance of empire and slavery to Britain's economic development'.

The Business Secretary and Equalities Minister said that UK's economic success is instead the result of 'British ingenuity and industry' as she welcomed a new book by a rightwing think tank.

Despite the British Empire once being geographically the largest the world has ever seen, political economist Kristian Niemietz claimed Britain's growth was not financed by the slave trade or its imperial possessions.

She said: 'This paper... shows it was British ingenuity and industry, unleashed by free markets and liberal institutions, that powered the Industrial Revolution and our modern economy.

'It is these factors that we should focus on, rather than blaming the West and colonialism for economic difficulties and holding back growth with misguided policies.'

But specialist historians have criticised the claims, saying they are based on 'cherry-picked' data and 'straw man' arguments.

In a blog post, Alan Lester, professor of historical geography at the University of Sussex, said: 'Historians have demonstrated in thousands of research publications that British investors' ability to appropriate land and subordinate people in some 40 overseas colonies, ensuring a supply of commodities such as tea, cotton, opium, rubber, meat and wool produced with free or low-cost labour, made a significant contribution to Britain's economic growth.

'Because this is so self-evident, to challenge it would be absurd.'

Prof Lester said the claim that military costs of empire outweighed the economic benefits was 'risible', and while the Government at times thought the cost of empire was too high, they mostly 'adjudged that the returns to British investors and settlers made such expenses worthwhile'.

He concluded: 'If Britons had continued to invest in the maintenance of colonial rule and the denial of self-determination to their colonial subjects against their own aggregate material interests for over 300 years, what does that say about the spirit of British entrepreneurship.'

Mrs Badenoch, who is seen as a frontrunner to replace Rishi Sunak if the Tories lose the next election, made a similar intervention on the subject earlier this month as she tries to woo grassroots Tories. 

In a speech she attacked claims Britain is only wealthy because of 'colonialism and white privilege'.

The Business Secretary told the CityUK international conference the establishment of Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law was at the heart of the country's success.

She also hit out at calls for mandatory ethnicity quotas in the financial sector, jibing that her job often involved 'killing bad ideas'.

She highlighted that financial services 'exploded' after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when James II was deposed by Parliament and a swathe of reforms were brought in under Mary II and William of Orange.

Ms Badenoch said the ideas that took root in England eventually 'spread around the world, sometimes freely sometimes not, but eventually they do lift billions out of poverty and lead to unimagined wealth globally'.

THE ANTITODE TO THIS REVANCHISM IS:

Capitalism & Slavery PDF

Yale University

https://glc.yale.edu › pdf › capatlism_and_slavery

PDF

slave planter, in the picturesque nomenclature of the South, is a "land-killer." This serious defect of slavery can be counter- balanced and postponed for a ...

Capitalism and Slavery: Reflections on the Williams Thesis

By Guy Emerson Mount  November 21, 2015 1

---

 

              The thing we call slavery and the thing we call capitalism both continue to provoke scholars with their incestuous relationship.  In 1944 Eric Williams published his classic Capitalism and Slavery which sparked a scholarly conversation that has yet to die down in 2015. In many ways, the debates it generated are more vibrant now than ever and promise to be a lasting touchstone for historians well into the future. As a new generation of young scholars insist upon blurring of the lines between our modern world’s two founding institutions, an old guard committed to the transformative power of emancipation similarly demand a careful specificity that will delineate and distinguish capitalism from slavery.   Few doubt any longer that an intersection, or at least a set of shared coordinates, exist between slavery and capitalism.  What is currently at stake, however, is exactly how wide and dense that relationship is and where its causal directionalities can be found.  Also at play are the very meanings of ‘capitalism’ and ‘slavery’ themselves, along with their disaggregated component parts.  Are the current scholarly conceptualizations of slavery and capitalism even productive frameworks to begin with? Do our very thoughts about slavery and capitalism simply obfuscate the underlying realities behind them— substituting an abstract set of intellectually imposed paradigms to construct two discrete categories where none might actually exist?   If not, then what, in fact, is the relationship between a more compartmentalized notion of slavery and capitalism and what kinds of assumptions are we consciously missing by framing the question in a way that asserts their separateness to begin with?

At its most basic, (and setting the question of semantics aside for a moment) the Williams thesis held that capitalism as an economic modality quickly replaced slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital from slavery that they needed in order to bankroll their industrial revolution.  After providing the material foundation and the trade infrastructure that fueled Europe’s dramatic transformation towards modernity, slavery, according to Williams, began a rapid decline in the early nineteenth century. As the new global standard of industrial capitalism took hold, Williams found that antislavery sentiment conveniently accelerated in support of an apparently more efficient and less capital intensive method of commodity production.  Slavery, in short, was no longer needed. Ideological superstructure followed the economic base. Labor coercion continued postemancipation in the form of sharecropping and wage peonage as former slaves quickly experienced proletarianization. In the end, technological change, modern agricultural methods, and industrial factories supplanted traditional agrarianism and ended the older feudalistic relationships of slavery.

Nearly every aspect of this thesis has been scrutinized, amended, embellished, and/or overturned by subsequent scholarship.  Attempts to delineate the precise features of capitalism and slavery while tracing their relationships to one another over time also proliferated well beyond William’s original set of questions.  Perhaps the most sweeping account to recently push outward from the Williams thesis is The Making of New World Slavery (1997) by Robin Blackburn.  For Blackburn, slavery not only enabled European capitalism but also the entire cornucopia of European modernity itself.  In exploring the interdependence of slavery and capitalism it turns out that, for Blackburn, Williams actually did not go far enough.  Blackburn details how a vast cosmos of forces from modern nation-states, tax systems, financial industries, consumer economies, and a host of other political, ideological, economic, and cultural transformations were all built upon the backs of enslaved Africans.  Rather than finding a stark shift in the age of emancipation from slavery to capitalism, however, Blackburn describes an ever thickening dialectic between slavery and modernity at large, with capitalism serving as only one of many transformative processes that grew directly out of slavery between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries.  While Blackburn would argue against the idea that slavery was unprofitable or on a path towards natural extinction at the dawn of the nineteenth century, he does find that Williams was generally correct in describing the role of slavery’s surplus capital in fueling industrialization in the European metropole.  With Blackburn, however, capitalism didn’t replace slavery, instead, slavery was infused into every nook and cranny of modern capitalism.  Whether any particular aspect of slavery at any given time or place crossed some scholarly threshold to qualify as certifiable ‘capitalism’ is not a primary concern for Blackburn. Yet drawing clear lines that define where one system stops and where the other begins seems almost inescapable if one does speak of them as two separate things at all, as Blackburn clearly does.

Yet, Blackburn’s larger synthesis rested upon several previous scholars whose variations on the Williams thesis were also less concerned with these semantics and more interested in the nuts and bolts of slavery as the starting point.  Robert William Fogel and Stanley Engerman produced a detailed economic analysis in 1974—Time on the Cross—indicating that nineteenth century slavery was highly profitable, on the rise, and able, at the least, to compete favorably with agricultural wage labor and yeomen farming if not full scale mechanized agribusiness.   Even though these finding may have shown that Williams got the driving force of antislavery thought and emancipation wrong (at least on economic grounds) it amplified the powerful and durable effects of slavery on the material development of capitalism and the modern world.  By demonstrating how closely slave labor resembled wage labor (at least when analyzed financially for profitability) Fogel and Engerman opened the door for Blackburn and many others to explore the fluidity between slavery and capitalism as conceptual means of organizing labor.

Yet slavery (however modern or traditional it may or may not have been) was much more than a system of labor management.  It was also a property regime, a social and cultural generator, a legal category, and an ideological touchstone that often drove national politics. Notions of freedom during the American Revolution, minstrel-watching white immigrants, and black nationalist projects, all at different times engaged ideologically with slavery as a discursive and cultural category.  Also important was the connection between capitalism as a consumptive enterprise and slavery as a site that produced consumer goods for the metropole.  Sindey Mintz wrote a truly benchmark book in the field of commodity studies that led historians to think increasingly about this connection between consumer capitalism, slavery, and material culture in general.   In Sweetness and Power (1985) Mintz argues that European industrialization, urbanization, and class formation were all fueled by sugar from slave plantations.  Consumers in Europe were at once purchasing an abstract commodity removed from the brutal system that produced it, while at the same time enmeshing themselves in a transatlantic trade network that tied the daily nourishment that they put into their bodies directly to the institution of slavery and the slaves that suffered to produce it.  Surplus calories from sugar thus combined with surplus capital from slavery to provide energy not only to fuel capitalism’s industrial march but also its expanding culture of unbridled consumption.  Slavery consumed slaves in order to produce consumer goods, all while providing a market for finished manufactured goods from European centers.  Slaves would be compelled to consume before they were themselves consumed.

In this way, we see that standing at the center of the Williams thesis are living, breathing slaves and the question of emancipation.  Despite William’s best efforts, capitalism to a certain extent often appears as a liberating force in his account rather than the postemancipation nightmare that it became for the vast majority of the formerly enslaved.  While Williams is certainly critical of the kind of exploitation that the shift to wage labor entailed, his thesis still depends upon capitalism’s invisible hand and the purported virtues of free labor that were espoused by abolitionists and helped cause the end of slavery.  Like many contemporary lay-interpretations of the Civil War, Williams found two competing systems, capitalism and slavery, tangling horns and duking it out.   Capitalism ultimately won because it was in some (vague) way a ‘better’ system by which to organize an extractive economy.  While the value of self-ownership and the end of state-sanctioned slavery cannot be overstated from the perspective of former slaves, Williams’s largely unintended valorization of postemancipation capitalism is a problem in and of itself.  Additionally, with the presumption of slavery’s unprofitability now largely discredited, his causal argument regarding emancipation and the abolitionist thought preceding it still leaves these question largely unexplained.

Combining the ever-compelling Du Boisian thesis of a self-emancipating general strike with a new twist on the old William’s thesis, Thomas Holt’s The Problem of Freedom (1992) offers a potential way out of this dilemma.  Emancipation, for Holt, involves the constant agitation of slaves forcing liberal British capitalists to acknowledge the ideological incompatibility of an Adam Smith inspired free market capitalism with slave labor.  In an argument that also speaks to Edmond Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), and American emancipation in general, Holt argues that freedom (and as well as various forms of unfreedom) were a constant problematic for an emerging capitalist system.  In a system that claimed to believe in free markets populated by non-coerced individuals pursuing their own economic best interests, the freedom to not participate in such an endeavor to begin with was an impulse that had to be quelled at all costs.  Liberal capitalism thus insisted upon the personal freedom of workers all while enforcing strongly coercive labor control mechanisms to keep that freedom at bay (along with any genuine democratic yearnings that might threaten ‘the free market’).  As this moral and logical dilemma worked its way through British and Jamaican politics, emancipation did not require slavery to be unprofitable, only unpopular.  In a nuance not evident in William’s original account, Holt shows how capitalism was as much a political ideology as an economic philosophy.  Slavery, profitable or not, ended for one simple reason in Jamaica: it was voted out of existence.   By tracing the complex political negotiations that got the nation to a vote for emancipation, Holt frees the process of emancipation from being characterized as some kind of a natural death through market forces.  The political struggles between former slaves and former owners, however, were not settled by emancipation but continued long after the coming of freedom.  Under the banner of capitalism, further agitation on behalf of black Jamaicans once again pressured the colonial overseer to formally relinquish legal possession of the island’s peoples and expand the meaning of freedom a second time in favor of independence to match the then current British political rhetoric.  Predictably, mother England responded in kind by installing a neocolonial regime to insure that people of African descent not take their newly earned freedom too far (again).  For Holt, slavery and capitalism as distinct categories need to be disaggregated into their component parts (labor, politics, economics, etc.) with a firm eye towards everyday people and their experiences on the ground.  What slaves, former slaves, and their descendants actually experienced is much more important than what name (capitalism and/or slavery) scholars use to describe these experiences.

At the same time, relationships between the various aspects of slavery and the many forms of capitalism cannot be dismissed as mere scholarly abstractions.  Describing historical contexts accurately and understanding what his actually happening at any given spatial and temporal location is a fundamental prerequisite for good history writing.  Details matter but so do producing useful generalizations that make sense of the world, and at their best, offer a springboard for positive political programs.  Much of the recent scholarship has approached the connection between slavery and capitalism through an admirable critique of twenty-first century capitalism.  By demonstrating capitalism’s deep roots and operational similarities to a chattel slavery (in a way that even the most committed laissez faire capitalists would find repulsive) historians are offering a new moral compass to anti-capitalist struggles taking place around the world.   This move has the added benefit of connecting the African diaspora to the history of global capitalism while at the same time refusing to allow contemporary politics to dismiss slavery as a thing of the past that is best forgotten as a failed project of a bygone era.  But is this good history?  By brining slavery directly into the present, the allure of an ever-thinning line between slavery and capitalism is difficult to resist.   Several unsettling ramifications of this categorical collapse are readily apparent. For one, such a rendering of ‘slave racial capitalism’ poses serious challenges to not only for the meaning of emancipation but also for the underlying cause of the Civil War.  Additionally, it also may unwittingly undermine a full accounting of the distinctive horrors of chattel slavery by collapsing such experiences into just one of many forms of capitalist exploitation.

Writing in the wake of Blackburn and Holt’s reformulation of the Williams thesis, Walter Johnson brought the connection between slavery and capitalism to one of its most intimate and well-studied junctures: the master-slave relationship.  Arguing directly against Eugene Genovese’s long standing contention that slavery was a fundamentally pre-capitalist enterprise that operated hegemonically through a dialectical system of paternalism, Johnson in Soul By Soul (1999) found slavery itself to be thoroughly capitalistic and governed by the brutal realities of the chattel principle through the slave marketplace rather than any traditional patronage relationship.  By focusing on the actual lived realities of slaves being bought and sold, Johnson also called attention to the consumptive nature of slavery. Slaves not only produced commodities but were consumed as commodities.  White planters bought more than just labor on the auction block.  They learned through their purchases how to fulfill their wildest fantasies in a theoretically always open and seemingly limitless marketplace.  They discovered how to affirm their identities based on who they bought.  They taught their children how to ignore any moral inhibitions that might curtail their buying habits or dilute their purchase as anything less than the unrestricted orgy of consumption and self-indulgence that they were designed to be.  As for slaves, Johnson found that they were fully aware of these market realities and skillfully manipulated them to fullest extent possible.  Slaves knew they were little more than a person with a price to their owners but also knew that, as such, they were a valuable financial asset and a crucial source of cultural capital for white owners.  Slavery as a property regime was not only prototypically capitalistic for Johnson, but slaves themselves were the idealized embodiments of not only capital but also labor and consumer products in a capitalist economy.

Johnson’s work inspired a number of other historians most notably Seth Rockman in his 2008 book Scraping By.   Moving Johnson’s story temporally from the antebellum era back to the early national period, Rockman takes Johnson’s welding together of slavery and capitalism to its logical conclusion by exploring the wide continuum between slave and wage labor in Baltimore.  While still concerned with the idea of slaves as human property Rockman is more interested in how slave labor was organized alongside the poverty inducing wage labor that also characterized early Baltimore and, by extension early America.  Rockman found highly entrepreneurial capitalists designing a flexible labor market that depended on a vast spectrum of unfreedoms from poverty stricken white day laborers to legally captive black slaves.  Many would accuse Rockman of skirting the truly distinctive horrors of slavery and the special burden of blackness that people of African descent experienced but when looking strictly at labor procurement, employers seemed to make little distinction between free workers, rented slaves, or bounded slaves except as it related to particular job requirements and capital availability.   Rockman contends that this model in Baltimore was a microcosm for the nation as a whole.  When viewed nationally, producers in early America exploited a mixed labor force using different degrees of free and slave labor as local circumstances, geography, and conditions dictated over time.  For Rockman, there is little doubt that the demands of capitalism governed life throughout America. What is noteworthy in his account is the idea that capitalists pragmatically switched back and forth between slave labor when it suited their purposes and wage labor or hired slaves when that seemed to make more sense.  Overall, wage labor didn’t replace slave labor in Baltimore or in America before the Civil War.  Both operated side by side on a sliding scale for most of American history. The lack of any real freedom at the heart of slavery was never altogether lost on those trying to eke out a living on starvation wages.  This doesn’t mean capitalism is slavery but it does mean that everyday workers in their most desperate moments might reasonably question exactly where they stood along the continuum of unfreedom.

Where does all this leave the history of capitalism and the study of slavery?  Can the master narrative of “slave racial capitalism,” as Walter Johnson described it in his 2013 book River of Dark Dreams, be adequately integrated into the historiography of American imperialism, world history, and geopolitical relations?  Where does this leave the more parochial fields of American and African American history?  On this final point Seth Rockman and Sven Beckert published a New York Times essay in 2011 implying to a general audience that the convergence of slavery and capitalism might necessitate a dramatic rethinking of the cause of the Civil War. Just as Genovese had wondered a generation earlier what a full blown capitalist South might have meant for the Confederate project, Rockman and Beckert—convinced of just such a reality—see a huge hole in current Civil War historiography.  Slavery might not have been its cause.  If a collapsed slavery/capitalism was a national institution, then what was the real rub between the North and the South? Why did capitalist slaveholders still find a reason to secede from their Northern capitalist partners in crime when both were capitalists and both benefited from slavery?  In a new way, Genovese’s old question still stands. If capitalism and slavery were really part of the same globally connected economic order—and essentially compatible with one another—why was the South so resistant to wage labor?  Perhaps more importantly, if James Oakes’s new book Freedom National is to be believed, why was the North so intent on abolishing an aspect of the wider system that they profited so handsomely from?

Part of the answer may involve a return to ideology. The material realities of trade networks, commodity markets, and labor struggles can at times prove largely out of step with how everyday people perceived these forces through thick ideological lenses.  Politics can zig while economics zag. Understanding how people thought about slavery and capitalism might ultimately be just as important as how these systems functioned empirically.  Perhaps a study similar in form to Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract (1998) might help bridge the gap between intellectual, cultural, social, and economic history while insisting on the centrality of emancipation as a transformative event in American life.  Thinking about capitalism as a worldview and political ideology as Holt and others have done in different contexts may also help answer the Civil War and emancipation questions.  A system that was profitable, expanding, and in accord with its Northern business associates might still have seen itself as otherwise while being seen as something different once the complex dance of electoral politics, popular culture, and finicky ideologies start to move.

Lastly, more work needs to be done on how African Americans themselves perceived and interacted with various capitalist forces.  Initial evidence shows that black slaveholders, for example, may have been working on an alternate brand of capitalism—and consequently an alternative modernity—of their own design.  Dylan Penningroth in Claims of Kinfolk (2002) details the informal economy and unique understandings of property that African Americans developed during slavery and that were carried forward after emancipation as a means of challenging dominate conceptualizations of property and ownership in American law and the marketplace at large.  Studies on black nationalism and the reimagining of Booker T. Washington’s self-help philosophy also point to a distinctive brand of black capitalism that gave different meanings to an otherwise disempowering economic regime.  Adam Green’s Selling the Race (2007) brings this tradition firmly into the twentieth century as he points out the often conflicted predicament that African Americans faced as they tried to use their power as consumers and producers in a segregated marketplace to harness the reins of capitalism in the hope of racial uplift.  Even in the post-industrial era, hip hop’s brazen black consumption aesthetic and entrepreneurial spirit  might be read as an attempt to make a favorable deal with the devil in world where power continues to be measured in dollars and cents.

By way of a tentative conclusion, slavery and capitalism might best be described as inseparable yet also irreducible to one another.  They must be understood as both distinctive yet permanently connected.  Certain aspects of each system overlap with one another while other parts of each system seem to stand apart.  Yet thinking of either institution as a fully coherent system with a stable set of principles, ideological foundations, or fixed operational protocols largely misses the point.  It would also be ahistorical.  The contingencies, possibilities, and fluid variations within capitalism and slavery mean that both ideas themselves must be described with extreme care and with a full appreciation of their internal complexities and diverse elements which shift dramatically over different temporal and spatial domains.   While our current political needs are unquestionably urgent, the narrative of slavery and capitalism must not just be a useful story, but a precise one as well.  Seeing connections has its advantages.  Yet understanding the incomparable horrors of slavery and the transformative rupture of emancipation does as well.  In the rush to write ‘the new history of capitalism,’ historians, in short, would be wise  to also remember its past.

Copyright © AAIHS. 

Guy Emerson Mount

Guy Emerson Mount is an assistant professor of American History and African American Studies at Wake Forest University focusing on the intersection of Black transnationalism, Western modernity, and global empires. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2018 where he also served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Social Sciences. He joined the faculty at Wake Forest University after previously teaching at Auburn University. Follow him on Twitter @GuyEmersonMount.