Today a history of victimization can be used to confer automatic legitimacy on a group, and to found a claim for special treatment. In turn, claimant victims are tempted to exaggerate. It can be rhetorically useful to magnify the degree of oppression experienced by one’s forbears, the better to secure the fruits of victimhood for oneself. Best if one’s ancestors were uniquely victimized, horribly oppressed to an unprecedented degree.
As a white male European, cis-gendered and straight, not disabled, born to a loving intact family in the middle of the middle class, successful in my career, now affluent and comfortable with a family of my own, the victim game is not one I can play. I can only watch, and try to dodge the label of oppressor. Those are the only two seats at the table, true?
An example of current victimization debates would be African slavery, the infamous triangle trade, when millions of innocent residents of West Africa were dragged away and shipped to the New World, then sold as slaves, with the descendants of the survivors enslaved for generations. The Emancipation Proclamation did not set the survivors free from Jim Crow.
Even today, the burden of that initial oppression continues. That makes African slavery a bona fide candidate to be a uniquely awful oppression.
African slavery from the 1500s to the 1800s was awful. Its baneful legacy continues to cause pain.
So far, so good. The truth of the preceding short paragraph seems certain to me.
Now to the next step, the one I wish to forestall. Suppose we were to go further and argue that African slavery in the New World was, in fact, a uniquely horrible victimization. Would it not follow that its perpetrators, European males for the most part, are also uniquely oppressive, a horrible people? And if the burden of that unique victimization has followed Africans in America down to the present, must not the stain of that unique oppression have stuck to the European residents of America down to the present as well?
Politically speaking, I don’t want to cede that argument. Politics is a competition of interests, who gets to do what to whom, under conditions of enduring and essential scarcity. Politically, I wish to be an ordinary American citizen, one among many others, all of whom have to give up something to get something else, and none of whom has a monopoly claim on the scarce public resources available.
I don’t see how I can claim that ordinary citizenship status if I am a member of a uniquely horrible ethnic group, forever stained by my forbears’ barbarity.
Seek refuge in history
One way I defend myself from that charge is by reading history. The more I read, the more wretched the past seems; and the more miserable wretches I read about, the more resistant I become to claims that African slavery or any other recent evil was uniquely horrible, and without precedent. History is full of misery.
If you are an affluent white male like me, it can be weirdly comforting to tally up the roll of past horrors. People have been behaving badly toward other people, and toward groups not their own, for a very long time. It’s not just us white males!
Unfortunately, schoolbooks are far from catholic in their coverage of past horrors. Case in point: I was well into my maturity before I learned the extent to which Europeans had once themselves been the target of slavers and slave raids.
And that’s the gist of this blog post: before about 1500, slavery was more of an equal opportunity affair, rather than something uniquely visited upon Africans. That history is too little known.
The goal of the remainder of the post is to lay out some of this history, without in any way giving aid or comfort to Donald Trump and his ilk. Let me state it up front: there is no prejudice against white males in America today; it is both vapid and vicious to claim otherwise. My goal is only to bracket and hold off the charge that as a white male, I carry the mantle of a uniquely violent and abusive tradition, heir to uniquely horrible oppressors, my ancestors.
Too many Americans are ignorant of the deep history of slavery in human affairs.
Origins of European Slavery
Most people are vaguely aware that the Romans took slaves, and kept enslaved the descendants of these spoils of war (if only because of watching the TV show, Spartacus, which vividly conveys something of what it means to be a slave, with no security of person). In the ancient Mediterranean, losing a battle, but surviving, meant enslavement. There were no prisoners of war; and the slavery to which losers were subjected was as absolute as anything experienced on Southern plantations before the Civil War.
But although many Roman slaves were as white as most of the New Zealand cast of Spartacus, in my judgment this doesn’t really count as “European slavery.” It occurs too early in time, back when everyone did it. Nevertheless, Roman slavery, along with ancient Mediterranean slavery generally, does provide a useful reminder that slavery, as an endemic practice, long predates the African slavery which began to wax after 1500.
Likewise, many people will be familiar with the term serf; and serfdom remains a rhetorically useful device for conveying a state in which liberties have been lost, forfeited, or malevolently seized (e.g., Friedrich Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom). But few college graduates, even those with a liberal arts education, would be comfortable sitting for a final exam that consisted of this question: “Compare and contrast serfs and slaves, taking care to define the constituent properties of each of these two statuses, and also to address other varieties of unfree status as needed to support your analysis.”
If ever you need to prepare for such an exam, you should consult Framing the Early Middle Ages, by Christopher Wickham (it’s a big volume, so search “slavery” in the index, if that;’s your only interest). It is clear from Wickham’s summary that after 800 AD, millions of Europeans, and a majority of the inhabitants of most European regions, were unfree to a greater or lesser degree, generally the greater; and that this “caging of the peasantry” lasted for centuries.
But serfdom also won’t cut it as an analogy to African slavery post-1500. However wretched the European serf after 800, there were no serf-ers, comparable to the slavers who raided the African coast, nor was there transportation of serfs to servitude in another land. Enserfment was gradual, and sometimes voluntary, however constrained the decision options; in other cases, it was individual misfortune. Sometimes the alternative to enserfment was death by starvation, or by pillage, or by exile. No European serf stood on a platform, naked in chains, while the auctioneer called for bids.
A closer but still imperfect analogue to post-1500 African slavery would be the slaves taken by Charlemagne and his ancestors in central Europe, or the slaves taken by Vikings in England, Ireland and France during the following century. The analogy is better because slaving was among the explicit purpose of many of these raids. It also holds because slaves taken in Viking raids were sold, and often transported elsewhere, before or after sale. Plus, this fate befell large numbers of people, as in Africa. But these were still war slaves, just one kind of booty among others equally desired. Viking slaving was only incidentally a commercial endeavor,* and it wasn’t endemic.
*The first episode of the tv show The Last Kingdom, particularly the scenes after the English lord loses the initial battle, gives some of the flavor; but it has been heavily bowdlerized. A cinema verite version of what happened after such a defeat would have left too many viewers retching.
A better analogy, which might be called Islamic slavery, was visited on the ancestors of Slavic peoples in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, and on every part of the northern Mediterranean shore. Here we have dedicated slave raiders and slavers, enslaving thousands as part of ongoing commercial activity. Early Venetian wealth was built on the slave trade,* just as trade in African slaves was a key to early wealth production in the Americas. European women were enslaved for purposes of sexual molestation, as we would call it today (white slavery, as it was once called). European boys were often castrated; it increased their value in the slave markets of the south Mediterranean. It was performed as casually as we would neuter a pet.
*The commercial aspects of European slavery are developed in Michael McCormick’s book, Origins of the European Economy.
For centuries in Italy and other Mediterranean lands, you could not let your children go down to the beach to play unsupervised; it was all too likely they would be snatched up by an opportunistic pirate or raider, to be sold into slavery. And the slaves who served on war galleys were as horrendously maltreated as any African slave in the South.
By 1500, slavery in the Mediterranean had again broadened into a more equal opportunity affair, with Europeans slaving as well as being enslaved, and Arab slavers capturing blacks or whites as the opportunity arose. I hazard the historical guess that African slavery got its start, and was more likely to occur than not, because the initial European slavers were so familiar with the practice of enslaving vulnerable people, of whatever nationality or description, back at home in the Mediterranean. In the centuries before 1500, if you found a vulnerable foreign population which couldn’t defend itself, anywhere in the Mediterranean or surrounding lands, and of whatever race or creed, you enslaved them if you could—the ones you didn’t slaughter outright. It was that kind of world.
*The much greater brutality of past centuries is developed in Stephen Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
Sometimes the local ruler, in Africa and elsewhere, did the dirty work for you, happy to unload a stash of prisoners for a good price, or even to go out and grab another batch, once the lucrative possibilities were understood. Africa was not free of war when the Europeans came south, nor was slavery absent locally.
For some Europeans, whether the African had already been enslaved, as a prisoner of war perhaps, was a very important distinction; in their moral lens, it was ethically acceptable to purchase a person (rightfully) enslaved by another, and to keep that person enslaved, but it was not acceptable to be the initial enslaver.
*This point is developed in Brett Rushforth’s book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous & Atlantic Slaveries in New France. His account is also useful in documenting the prevalence of slavery among the Native American peoples, abuse visited on each other before and apart from any European spur.
A general point of this post is that slavery may have been a universal human practice before 1800, at least among agricultural peoples capable of waging war, and except as enserfment took its place. Whether it was widespread among hunter-gatherer groups before the dawn of agriculture, or before agriculture came to their region, is an interesting question. I suspect that a certain population density is required for slavery to become endemic. There has to be a labor need, else, you just slaughter the men and rape the women, rather than enslaving them.
I repeat: human history before 1800 was miserable indeed.
Although slavery may have been almost universal, slave auctions, slaves as property, slavery as an integral part of commerce, was probably more localized, and not universal. For commercial slavery to occur, you first need a commercial society, plus a labor gap (not present if you have an abundance of serfs), plus vulnerability (as in the technological differences between the Spanish conquistadors and the Native Americans they encountered), plus above all, Otherness.
For centuries, as in the Mediterranean, religious differences were the key to Otherness. Islamic peoples could enslave Christians, and vice versa, in good conscience; but Christian Europeans had long since stopped enslaving each other. When the Spanish encountered the Indians of South America, everything came together: vulnerable populations of (to them) godless people, plus silver mines that needed labor. The Spaniards enslaved hundreds of thousands to work the mines.
After 1500, and in North America, skin color and ethnicity, not religion, became the marker of Otherness. Gradually, but in the end almost completely, only Africans were enslaved.
Summing up: African slavery had ample precedent. It may have been distinct, as examined next; but it is difficult to claim that it was unique, or a horror without precedent.
Slavery, African or otherwise, is always an awful thing. The women are raped and the men are beaten, mutilated, or killed. That’s what makes slavery evil: to be a slave is to be treated badly, and to own slaves is to behave badly.
Quantification of evil?
An argument can be made that African slavery was distinct, even if not unique. One tack would be that more millions of Africans were enslaved than had ever occurred for any previous population. That case is weak, however. Millions of Native Americans were enslaved, and Islamic civilization trafficked in slaves for centuries. And world population reached new heights during the period of African slavery, further undermining any claim based on counts.
In any case, it is difficult to see how a quantitative difference can make one instance of slavery more (or less) awful. Slavery is an evil. Period. Getting slaughtered is also an evil, and way, way more millions of humans have been slaughtered than there ever were African slaves.
Curiously, the best argument for the distinctiveness of African slavery in North America is quite different. Its unusual feature: Africans who were transported to the New World survived, and multiplied. Enslaved Africans who made it to America (many did not survive the journey) lived, had children, and increased in total population. That may be a historical first among enslaved populations.
Roman slaves sent to the mines were worked to death—essentially all of them. The Indians enslaved as miners by the Spaniards were worked to death. The European boys castrated by Venetian slavers did not reproduce.
As mentioned earlier, it might be argued that African slavery was unique in the extent to which it was commercialized, made part of an economic system. African slavery was not opportunistic, in the way that much medieval Mediterranean slave raiding was, and it was more systematized, and probably much greater in volume, than the Venetian trade in east European slaves.
But there is a tautological element to this claim: Atlantic civilization, in the centuries after 1500, was a much more commercialized society than the world had ever seen. Sven Beckert* calls this the era of war capitalism. The degree of commercialization possible—whether of slavery or anything else—grew by leaps and bounds after 1500.
*Beckert’s book, Empire of Cotton, is useful in multiple respects. Most important, it helps to reject a Trump-like (or maybe, Bill O’Reilly) claim that sometimes pops up in discussions of African slavery by white people. The problematic claim is that “wage slaves,” the oppressed workers in early textile factories (aka dark Satanic mills) had it just as bad, or worse, as African slaves on Southern plantations. Beckert’s book, because it carefully describes the misery of early textile workers, makes it clear that slaves, whether African, Native American, or Roman, were treated much worse than wage workers, even at the nadir of factory working conditions in the early 1800s. Most notably, female textile workers were not routinely raped and molested, as female slaves have always been.
Nonetheless, the commercial aspects of African slavery may be key to understanding its distinctive element: the fact that African slaves (who made it to North America) survived and multiplied.
*The horrid conditions on slave ships are also not an argument for the uniqueness of post-1500 African slavery: high mortality during transportation is a characteristic feature of slavery, another thread in the horrible tapestry of it. Read McCormick.
Put simply, African slaves in the New World, and most especially in North America, had economic value that the Native American slaves of the Spaniards, the Roman slaves in the mines, and the galley slaves of the Mediterranean did not. Once you invested good money in the purchase of a slave, with the intention of making a return on your investment by having those slaves work on a lucrative cotton plantation, you needed most of these slaves to survive, and you needed most of these survivors to be able-bodied. And you were best off if these slaves were well-treated enough—just barely—to be able to reproduce and rear children to maturity. Of course, slave owners in the New World, like slave owners throughout history, killed and tortured some, and beat others—whatever was required to terrorize the surviving majority into hard work.
What owners of African slaves in North America could not do was work large numbers of their slaves to death, or let them starve to death, or let their population of slaves wither away by segregating men and women in barracks. After 1800, with the curtailment of the international slave trade, it became harder and harder, and more and more expensive, to replace slaves. Conversely, slaves who were well-treated enough to remain able-bodied became more and more valuable, as the empire of cotton exploded in size. Read Beckert.
Paradoxically then, the unique horror of post-1500 African slavery—the fact that it became a large scale commercial activity, involving industrial levels of enslavement never before seen—laid the foundation for the other distinctive aspect of African slavery, in North America: survival, reproduction, and multiplication. Most enslaved populations die off, worked to death on the one hand, and too miserably treated for reproduction, much less multiplication, to occur on the other.
The benefit was unique to African slaves in North America. It did not hold in the heyday of West Indies and South American slavery, where replacement was easier, economic value less, and the baseline conditions of slavery tended to take hold: mistreatment, followed by death without issue.
Let me make a renewed acknowledgement: slavery is everywhere and always an awful thing. The best-off slave—the figment slave of Bill O’Reilly & Gone With the Wind, well-fed and well-housed by his kindly master–is immeasurably worse off than the most miserable factory worker or immigrant laborer. And this figment slave is exactly that: a rare exception. Most slaves are treated badly, much of the time. That’s what it means to be a slave.
But the truly distinctive aspect of African slavery in North America, relative to all other slave populations throughout history, is not the degree of victimization but the extent of survival, not the level of mistreatment but the level of reproduction.
Paradoxically, then, African-Americans may validly feel uniquely abused. No other large group today is the immediate descendant of slaves, because no other slave population succeeded in reproducing and multiplying. Other slave populations either died off, or merged imperceptibly into local serf populations centuries ago. Only African-Americans can remember being slaves, because their ancestors represent the only slave population that was well-treated enough to survive and multiply, while being unfortunate enough to remain visually distinct, through the evidence of skin color. All other slave populations either died without issue, or disappeared into the lower strata of the surrounding population. You could not pick out the descendants of Venetian slaves in Egypt or Syria today without a DNA test, and maybe not even then, just as you could not pick out the descendants of Dane-enslaved Saxons in east Anglia.
It seems likely to me that I have slave ancestors. My father’s ancestors in Ireland and western Scotland might have contained Viking slaves. My mother’s ancestors in Gaul might have included Roman slaves. Reproduction was not zero, especially among raped female slaves. And certainly, there must have been centuries of serfdom on both branches. But these horrors are too distant to have shaped me.
And that, I believe, is the other valid claim to a distinctive experience, for African-Americans: they make up the only living population with recent memory of enslavement. The horror may have been no different; but the recency, and the number of survivors with that recent memory, is distinct.
Coda
History is misery. All of us are the descendants of rapists, murderers and slavers. You just have to go far enough back in time to locate your own miserable, horribly behaving ancestor. Rousseau, with his talk of the noble savage, was full of it.
The question at issue should not be reparations for past actions of our ancestors, but what actions we will take today and tomorrow, to call ourselves just. Virtue can only be secured in the future; the past is lost.
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