Participants
Richard Benjamin [RB] gained a BA (Hons) degree in Community and Race Relations at Edge Hill College and then went on to complete an MA and PhD in Archaeology at the University of Liverpool. He was appointed as the head of the International Slavery Museum in 2006. Address: International Slavery Museum, Dock Traffic Office, Albert Dock, Liverpool L34 4AX, UK. E-mail: Richard.Benjamin@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
Seymour Drescher [SD] is professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a long time student of the slave trade across the Atlantic, the history of colonial slavery and of abolition. He has published several books and numerous articles. Perhaps his best-known work is ‘Econocide, British Slavery in the Era of Abolition’ in which he questions the economic rationale behind the abolition of the British slave trade. Until the publication of his study, the explanation for the ending of the slave trade and of slavery usually pointed at economic factors. The plantations were in decline and they no longer could afford to buy slaves from Africa. Professor Drescher has questioned this explanation and that has sparked a new wave of research regarding the profitability of the slave trade and of the slave plantations in the Caribbean. Let me add that at the same time a collaborative research project on the economics of slavery in the US reached similar conclusions. In our discussion today, we will, no doubt, come back to this issue.1 Address: History Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260, USA. E-mail: sydrescher@yahoo.com
David Eltis [DE] teaches at the Department of History of Emory University and has devoted most of his career to the study of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. In addition to several books on the slave trade and on the rise and fall of slavery in the New World, David Eltis with some colleagues has undertaken a long-lasting, if not a never-ending research project: documenting all slave voyages across the Atlantic from the early 16th to the late 19th century. Some of the results of this massive collection of data have changed the way in which historians have analysed both the slave trade and slavery. To just give one example as an illustration: the data set allows us to link the mortality among the slaves during the notorious middle passage from Africa to the New World and the areas along the coast of Africa, where the slaves were purchased. The place of purchase and thus the condition in which the slave embarked was the decisive factor influencing the mortality rather than the skills of the physician, the quality of the food aboard, the space allotted to the slaves and the nationality of the ship. That link could not have been discovered without the data set on the slave trade.2 Address: Department of History, Emory University, 561 South Kilgo Circle, Atlanta GA 30322, USA. E-mail: deltis@emory.edu
Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau [OPG] is by far the youngest historian around this table. He teaches at Sciences Po in Paris and – in spite of his youth – has written a remarkable number of studies on the French slave trade. However, his best known book to date appeared in 2004 and was called ‘Les traites négrières’ comparing the Atlantic, that is the European, slave trade with the internal trade in slaves in Africa and the Arab trade in slaves. This highly original work earned Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau several prizes, most notably that of the French Senate, but at the same time a complaint was lodged in a Paris court as the book seemed to deny that only the Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity as enacted by French law. The court case against the book became a ‘cause célèbre’, not so much because of the contents of the study, but because a group of professional historians called for an end to the ugly habit of the French parliament legislating the way in which we should judge the past.3 Intitut d’Études Politiques de Paris, 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, Paris, 75007 France. E-mail: olivier.petregrenouilleau@sciences-po.org
Finally, I should introduce myself. My name is Pieter Emmer [PE] and I teach at the History Department of Leiden University, the Netherlands, and I have published on the history of the Dutch slave trade, on slavery in the Caribbean as well as on the subsequent migration of indentured labourers from South Asia.4 Address: History Department, Faculty of Arts, Leiden University, PO Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. E-mail: P.C.Emmer@hum.leidenuniv.nl
(1) [PE] Why did the West Europeans ever start to trade in African slaves and was there a different rationale for this among the Iberians and the French, English and Dutch?
[DE] The resources and low population densities of the post-contact New World relative to the Old made for a major imbalance in labour productivity between all countries in Europe on the one hand and the Americas on the other. Thus, people leaving the Old World could expect higher incomes in the New. Migrants who could get others to work for them reaped particular rewards, but with abundant land available in Americas, wage labour was not very attractive to those who had the option of establishing their homestead. The rationale for coerced labour in the Americas was present from Columbian contact and perhaps well before, if indigenous forms of slavery are any guide. But the interesting question is not the origins of slavery in the Americas, but rather why none of the slaves put to work on the plantations were European. Slavery had been widespread in Europe, but had disappeared from the north and west of the sub-continent by the late middle ages. It seems that a conception of Christendom or ‘Europeanness’ had evolved which precluded one European from subjecting another to full chattel slavery, even though torture, capital punishment, and banishment were acceptable. By contrast, Europeans, and increasingly the Islamic world, saw Africans as outsiders and therefore eligible for use as slaves.
(2) [PE] Why were the Africans able to sell increasing numbers of slaves to the Europeans and did this trade replace the internal African and the Arab slave trades? Did the forced exodus affect and indeed harm the economic development of Africa. How was the relative position of Africa in the trading systems of the world affected by first, the rise and then, the decline of the slave trade from Africa?
[DE] Nathan Huggins, the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard in the 1980s, answered the question of why Africans enslaved other Africans with the pithy answer ‘because they did not know they were Africans’. In sub-Saharan Africa, there was no counterpart in the early modern era, to the sense of European identity. One group of peoples considered other groups eligible for enslavement. Thus, African slave traders and European slave traders were both trading ‘outsiders’ at the point where goods were exchanged for human beings on the African coast. The forced removal of 12.5 million human beings from the sub-continent was unlikely to have enhanced the region’s economic prospects, but the sources do not allow us to assess the nature and size of the deleterious impact in even an approximate fashion. One aspect that is possible to measure, however, is Africa’s trade relations with the rest of the world. As long as the slave trade lasted – and from the time that trade data become available – Africa’s external trade kept pace with that of the rest of the world. Moreover, because of the decline in prices of manufactured goods produced in the West, Africa’s terms of trade improved. In other words for a given amount of exports, in this case mainly human beings, sub-Saharan Africa received in return increasing amounts of imports. When the slave trade came to end, just after the middle of the 19th century, this situation changed. The external trade of sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind that of the rest of the world and the terms of trade turned against the region except for short periods and particular parts of Africa.
(3) [PE] Were conditions in the transatlantic slave trade worse in 1800 than they had been in the previous three centuries of its existence?
[SD] The short answer to your question is that conditions on the transatlantic segment of the slave trade were probably better, if only in terms of survival, than they had been a century or two before. Nevertheless, other aspects of the transatlantic trade meant that its impact on Africa may have been considerably more oppressive in 1800 than a century or two earlier. The demand for Africans peaked at the end of the 18th century. By then more than twice as many African slaves were being landed in the Americas annually than a century before. The fall in seaborne mortality per voyage could also certainly not have compensated for the rising number of collateral deaths in the interior of the continent caused by warfare, and raiding, as well as the devastation of family separations and the trauma of inland transportation. None of this devastation could have been substantially less than in earlier periods.
The rapidly expanding oriental slave trade to the Middle East and the Indian Ocean World in the 19th century ensured that the toll remained as high after 1800 as it had before. In evaluating the costs of the slave trade one must note the probable impact of exits from slavery in the Americas through death, flight and manumission. Finally the excess of deaths over births in most New World slave settlements entailed a continuous expansion of demand at the African end of the system. Areas of high manumission also contributed to an increased demand for more African slaves. So the wider the escape hatch of manumission the greater was the demand for fresh captives.
[DE] Conditions in the slave trade were always appalling. Europeans travelling the Atlantic were never subjected to what was the norm for Africans caught up the slave trading business. Over time, the duration of the middle passage shortened somewhat and shipboard mortality decreased. But after 1830, the circumstances associated with making the slave trade illegal and attempting to suppress it induced a new pattern. While voyage length continued to decline, African captives were less likely to survive the crossing. They were also likely to spend more time imprisoned in unhealthy barracoons on the African coast while slave traders waited for the opportunity to escape the anti-slave trade cruisers that patrolled off-shore.
(4) [PE] To ferry so many people across an ocean must be based on a strong economic incentive. Why was it that slave owners in Brazil and in the French, English and Dutch Caribbean could buy so many people, why was the slave trade to North America and to Spanish America rather small in comparison?
[SD] The transatlantic slave system was premised upon the fact that certain products could be profitably grown in the New World using forced labour. In the case of one product, sugar, the use of forced lifetime bondsmen in gang labour, both in the cane fields and the sugar mills, was sufficiently profitable to absorb more than two-thirds of all people offered for sale in the Western hemisphere. The system was equally sustained by an intercontinental social system. Sub-Saharan Africa continually made large numbers of human beings available for sale. An economic system in Europe and America made commodities, capital and means of transportation available for purchasing those Africans. An economic system in the Americas furnished ever more slave-grown products to supply expanding demand in Europe.
In some areas of the Americas, such as the highlands of continental Spanish America, where indigenous populations were found in sufficiently high density, there was less recourse to African labour than in the tropical lowlands. In healthier and more temperate North American lands where crops employed less demanding forms of labour slaves quickly began to reproduce themselves. The relatively high rate of slave reproduction from within the British continental colonies also made for a diminished demand for Africans after a few generations
(5) [PE] The thesis put forward in Seymour Drescher’s ‘Econocide’ in 1977 has been proven right. The main economic indicators of the success of the slave trade and of slavery were slave prices. They increased and increased in spite of slave rebellions, extensive and harmful warfare between the various European nations and in spite of temporary overproduction of slave-grown tropical cash crops. Thus there seems to be no clear-cut structural change to do away with the slave trade or indeed with slavery itself. The African supplies of slaves did not stagnate as the increasing prices assured an increasing supply; the demand for slaves in the New World might have shifted from one region to another, but did not diminish. Without abolition millions more would have been ferried across the Atlantic. The question is: why did abolition arise and why was it important to human history? And why did abolition arise in Britain?
[SD] This is one of the most contested questions in the history of slavery. My own explanation is grounded in searching for peculiar characteristics of that area of Europe and its colonies that founded the most dynamic, wealthy and efficient variety of the institution in human history. Paradoxically, this was also the site of the most dynamic, massive and durable abolitionist movement in the world. Already, before North-western Europeans began to establish their overseas slave systems, the institution of slavery had vanished from their own metropolitan societies. By the beginning of the 17th century both English and French jurists and publicists boasted that their air, or their soil, was too free for slaves. In an extension of more ancient medieval communal liberation policies, early modern governments of England, France and the Netherlands would not enforce obligations to slave service deriving from laws of enslavement outside their realms. Moreover, rights to labour were now vested in the labourers themselves. Workers could only be constrained for specifically designated periods and under specific contractual terms. Rights to labour, in other words were vested in the hired individual themselves.
However, these conditions were believed, by Northwest Europeans, to be confined to their own realms. The rest of the world beyond Western Europe was a zone of bondage. There, in one form or another, slavery was a perennial and ubiquitous institution. Western Europeans themselves might still be subjected to slavery if they were captured by residents of realms where the sale of captives was routinely permitted. As Europeans ventured overseas to establish colonies they recognized each other as continuing to receive immunity from enslavement. Such personal rights were still privileges, not automatically extended to human beings brought to the New World from areas where enslavement by capture or purchase was routinely practised. For North-western Europeans then, both migrant and sedentary, what sustained this practice was the novel idea that slavery under their governments could be practised only overseas – ‘beyond the line’ of metropolitan European legal inhibitions.
In the late 18th century, at the very peak of their colonial slave systems’ performance, this delicate equilibrium was challenged on both sides of the Atlantic. It was challenged by African slaves arriving in Europe. Thousands of Africans were brought to both England and France as servants. What was their status? Did the free soil principle allow Africans to remain enslaved? Europeans were divided. But in the 1770s British high courts declared, in both England and Scotland, that overseas slave law would not be enforced on metropolitan British soil. Such an outcome was not inevitable. In France, a decree of the mid-1770s decided that all slaves brought to France could be temporarily housed in port ‘depots’, pending their owners’ return overseas. Masters could thus temporarily ‘warehouse’ their property, and reclaim it on departing from France. A similar ruling was proclaimed by the Dutch government.
Why was the British outcome different? By the late 18th century Anglo-American societies on both sides of the Atlantic possessed the most highly developed civil (associational) and political (representative) systems in the world. The British American colonies of continental North America were also demographically distinctive. They contained the most Europeanized settler population in the New World. These colonies, the most plausibly ‘European’ racial, social and political societies in the New World, wanted to reduce the growth of the ‘anomaly’ of slavery. It was the institution that most distinguished them from Britain. They also wished to diminish or eliminate the ‘African presence’ in their communities. It was there that the first political mobilizations against the transatlantic trade erupted. It was also there, in the late 1770s and early 1780s, that these now newly independent states pioneered prohibiting further slave imports from Africa.
(6) [PE] We now turn to abolition in France. Why was it so different from abolition in Great Britain? The facts are confusing: in 1794, the National Convention in Paris abolished both the slave trade and slavery in the French colonies. Obviously, the slave owners were none too pleased and the insurrection on Saint-Domingue is well known. Napoleon lost that colony and in 1802 re-instituted slavery and the slave trade in the remaining parts of the French overseas empire without much protest. Then, Napoleon abolished the French slave trade during his 100 days and, admittedly, his successor, Louis XVIII was allowed some time by the British to implement this abolition. But why did it take until 1830 before the French illegal slave trade had been suppressed in actual practice, and why did the slave emancipation in the French colonies not take place until 1848? Was it because abolitionism in France had become part of the agenda of the French Revolution, and during the conservative restoration, that made it difficult to disentangle this issue from the declining appreciation of the revolutionary period?
[OPG] In fact, you did not ask one but three questions. (1) Was abolitionism quite different in France in comparison with Great Britain? (2) Why did it take so long to implement legal reforms in France? And (3) What about the peculiar links between abolitionism and revolution in France?
Let us begin with the first one. I think there were at least four major differences between France and Great Britain. First, abolitionism remained a restricted or an elitist movement in France while it rapidly became a popular and massive movement in Great Britain. By itself that difference did not necessarily constitute an obstacle in the French case, as reforms generally can be enacted either by democratic action or by more authoritarian regimes such as the social reforms introduced in Germany by Bismarck at the end of the 19th century. French abolitionism relied less on social action simply because the democratization of civil society was less advanced in France than in the United Kingdom and because French elites hesitated to rely on popular support after the upheavals of the revolutionary period. Second, abolitionism gained increasing popular support in Britain, while it was subjected to brutal reversals in France. First, the abolition of slavery (but not of the slave trade) in 1794, the restoration of slavery and the resumption of the slave trade in 1802, etc. Third, in their discourses, French abolitionists were perhaps more sensitive to philosophical and political arguments, and the British less reluctant to use religion and economics. Lastly, patriotism and abolitionism went hand in hand in Great Britain, while the French abolitionists were often seen as unpatriotic and as the agents of Great Britain, a country pictured as always ready to further the decline of France.
To return to your second question (as to why it took so long to implement legal reforms in France), one must recall that, in 1794, France was the first independent Western nation to abolish slavery, long before the abolition of slavery in the British colonies (1833). Paradoxically, however, it took a long time to really implement the laws against the slave trade and slavery, until the final French abolition of slavery, in 1848. Compared with Britain, the road towards abolition was more chaotic and that can be explained by the fact that, as an elitist and often anti-national perceived movement, French abolitionism was not able to change the public mentality rapidly. So, in Nantes, which was the capital of the illegal slave trade during the French Restoration (1815–1830), prominent notables could participate in organizing slave voyages to Africa in broad daylight, at least until 1825/1826. That situation really differed from that in Liverpool, the counterpart of Nantes during the 18th century. I would add also the fact that many French citizens were not aware of the daily realities of slavery and that the mentality of the French only changed slowly. These factors facilitated the dramatic changes in the French road towards abolition caused by the short-lived and sometimes contradictory political decisions. For instance, the victory of the revolutionary Left in 1793 favoured the abolition of 1794 but, at the same time, it also signified the quasi end of a French abolitionist movement mainly composed of moderate notables who, then, were often either killed or obliged to flee Paris and even the country.
This leads us to another question, that of the links between abolitionism and revolution in France. To be short, I would say that French abolitionism has been sometimes boosted by revolutionary events. On the other hand, abolitionism was largely used as a tool in political revolutionary fights. Last but not the least, after the Revolution, in public opinion, abolitionism remained associated with upheavals, disorder and chaos such as the revolt in Saint-Domingue (1791), the French Terror, etc. That contributed to frightening people and to slowing down the actions of the abolitionists. In the end, the road towards abolition became blocked and, paradoxically, only the new revolutions, in 1830 and 1848, ensured, respectively, the final end of the French slave trade and of slavery itself. The fear of revolution handicapped French abolitionism and led to a stalemate that only a revolution could undo.
Now, if you allow me, I would like to enlarge the discussion about abolitionism and revolution in general and go beyond the French context. One knows that abolitionism emerged during the occidental revolutionary era, between the end of the 18th and the end of the 19th centuries, with the political, economic, social and cultural revolutions of that period. As a result, some historians perceived abolitionism as the consequence of this peculiar context. But the process of abolition is more complex and chronological coincidences can never be automatically transformed into causal mechanisms. For a better understanding, allow me to use a metaphor, that of man and monkey. The first (man) does not come from the second (the monkey), but the two do have common ancestors. In the same way, abolitionism and the revolutionary era are partly borrowed from the same sources, such as the concept of natural rights. In part, the two can be seen as children of common parents. However, like real children, after birth the two changed, evolved in different ways, and even bifurcated.
Abolitionism was revolutionary because of its scope. Previously, from Antiquity onwards, freeing slaves always meant freeing some slaves and changing slavery meant ameliorating the conditions of slavery. Nobody ever could imagine that slavery could really disappear. For the first time in human history, abolitionists tried to eradicate slavery as a system. That made abolitionism a very radical project. Its radicalism can also be measured by the yardstick of its context. If slavery would have been declining around the middle of the 18th century, as some historians thought during the 1960s, abolitionism would have had an easy run. However, we now know that the opposite situation existed and that slavery was at its economic climax when abolitionism arose, that the volume of the slave trade broke all its records, and that racist attitudes, firstly only entrenched in colonial circles, started to spread through Europe itself, at least in some sections of the elite. Within this context, it is not surprising some contemporaries saw the abolitionists as revolutionaries, crazy men, dangerous people and members of strange sects. Abolitionism was indeed a truly revolutionary concept and movement.
Nevertheless, abolitionists were afraid of revolutionary methods and they wanted to achieve their radical transformation with reformist means. They did not want to change things at every price. Condorcet, for instance, imagined that slavery would only disappear at the end of a process of liberation spread over 77 years. Abolitionism might have been revolutionary in its aims, it was reformist in spirit. Abolition was not conceived as something to be immediately implemented but as an orderly movement that would take time. First to avoid the tensions and the chaos associated with the liberation of the hundreds of thousands of slaves in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, at the end of the 18th century, where there had been roughly half a million slaves and 40,000 whites. Second, as the abolitionists were sensitive to the economic arguments of the pro-slavery lobby, they were reluctant to destroy the colonial economies through a transformation that would be too rapid and abrupt. Third, abolitionists generally did not think that slaves were ready for immediate freedom. Not because they thought – like slave owners and slave traders – that slaves were intrinsically inferior to free men, but because they were convinced that slavery had affected the mind of its victims, and that the slaves, once liberated, would need some time in order to become new citizens. For the racist slave owners and traders, of course, black slaves were by their very nature inferior to whites, and this could not change. For abolitionists, however, all men were equal and everyone could achieve a higher status in life, but some would have to be helped, because of illness, youthfulness, slavery, etc. This attitude explains why so many abolitionists defended the idea of instituting an intermediary period of apprenticeship between the end of slavery and the beginning of total freedom. Today, some of us are tempted to consider the institution of a period of apprenticeship as a continual exclusion of the former slaves from society, while abolitionists saw it as a tool to achieve the integration of the freed slaves into civil and political society.
That dualism between a radical aim and the use of reformist methods to achieve that aim has led some authors, nowadays, to violent attacks against abolitionists. They are pictured as hypocrites, who themselves were involved in the slave economy. However, these unfounded criticisms are contaminated with anachronism. The task of the historian is not to be a judge of human behaviour in the past based on our contemporary and sometimes contradictory perceptions, but to understand how others thought and why they acted as they did. Abolitionists were often in the vanguard of progress and helped to change the mentality of the time. Their actions were based on firm principles, but in order to achieve their goals the abolitionists were also inclined to make tactical concessions. And, at the end of the process, most of them changed from what we call gradualism to immediatism. In other words, they exchanged the idea of a drawn-out process of abolition for that of an immediate one.
(7) [PE] A second question: if God’s work and material forces are not sufficient in explaining abolitionism, as Seymour Drescher said, what other forces could be used to explain the rise of abolitionism?
[OPG] Many factors have been used in order to explain the sudden emergence of such a radical and revolutionary movement. Some pointed to the influence of the Philosophers (notably Montesquieu). Others insisted on philanthropy, on mercantile interests, on religion (which played a major role in Great Britain), slave resistances, geo-strategy, etc. As so often, it is tempting to search for the most important of all the various and sometimes contradictory factors, and this search has produced several trends and fashions in the historiography. Chronologically speaking, historians have first emphasized the role of the philanthropists and philosophers during the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, after the 1950s, the importance of economics was stressed and, subsequently, cultural factor have been given more prominence, such as religion and – especially after the 1970s – slave resistance. I would call these approaches classical and I can think of three critical objections to them: (1) they tend to oppose idealism and interests (philanthropy and philosophy versus capitalism for instance) and seemed influenced by Manicheism; (2) these approaches also seem to be teleological, especially when they consider the question as to how abolitionism served the interests of Western capitalism seen as an independent, ineluctable and self-acting actor in history; (3) I do not think that it is possible to understand a complex phenomenon such as abolitionism by searching for only one big factor, whatever that could be. Today, the historian can try to analyse the respective importance of moral and economic arguments in abolitionist discourse. By so doing, however, such a historian would forget one very essential thing: the fact that many abolitionists at the time linked moral and economic arguments into one kind of moral economy. That approach had gone out of fashion during the 19th century, but it has returned among those who participate in the dispute about globalization. The ideas of the French abbot Grégoire (1750–1831) were symptomatic of another combination of ideological domains: his ideas were not founded on the economy and morality, but on religion and philosophy. The abbot was a fervent abolitionist, based on his conception of God and on the influence of the Enlightenment.
In sum, I would say that abolitionism can only be understood through an association of several factors that were combined in different ways according to the period, the place and the context. That makes it imperative that we do our utmost to understand the abolitionists (the verstehende Methode as recommended by Max Weber), rather than try to explain abolitionism by the search for causal and determinist factors. Trying to understand how abolitionists perceived the world at the time, how they gave a meaning to their actions will allow us to discover that abolitionism was subjected to severe tensions between liberalism and conservatism and that it could be qualified as a radical reform movement.
(8) [PE] A third question: can we say that Western abolitionism is linked to democracy? And since Britain tried to impose the ending of the slave trade internationally using force if need be, can we say that abolitionism was beginning of a new moral international order?
[OPG] Yes, I would say that. Let us look at the values propagated by the abolitionists and you will find some of the major foundations of our modern democracy like the concept of natural rights, of human equality, and of liberty. Abolitionism might have had various foundations, but it functioned as a powerful tool to question slavery, from classical Athens to the society of the Old American South, including the status of servants during the French Revolution. In many regions of Asia and tropical Africa, internal slavery (such as debt and penal slavery) and various other forms of servitude persisted, while they disappeared little by little in Europe. It is during the second half of the 18th century that the concept of Liberty (singular and with a capital L) took the place of the idea of liberties (plural and with a lower-case l) as a privilege specific to some sections of the population in Europe. It is also at this very moment that Western abolitionism emerged as a movement and that was perhaps not a pure coincidence. Abolitionism was inseparable from a certain idea of Liberty.
Abolitionism was also linked to the emergence of a public opinion. Its influence differed according to the country and the religion (more so in Great Britain than in France, more for Protestants than for Catholics), but abolitionism as a popular movement could not have been possible without the aid of public opinion (pamphlets, books, journals), associations and of mass mobilization (such as protest meetings, petitions that benefited in Great Britain from the simultaneous emancipation movement of women). Some historians also pointed to the complex linkages between the campaign of the abolitionists and the extension of the right to vote. The major motivation of all abolitionists was to achieve legislation that would end the slave trade and abolish slavery and would be implemented by the state. And that legislation was enacted at the very moment that parliamentary democracy was flourishing.
Because of its values, methods and goals, European abolitionism has been intimately linked to democracy. These links also existed in the USA, and in Latin America where abolition coincided with independence and democratization. Elsewhere, other linkages existed, usually as part of a whole range of liberal reforms such as the abolition of serfdom in Russia (1861), the debate about the abolition of slavery in 19th century Turkey, and attempts to disallow the sale of slaves in China by Wang Mang (9 BC). In spite of the fact that abolitionism was linked to the democratic and liberal changes, it cannot be seen as an element specific to Western civilisation as it only emerged in some Western countries, at a particular moment.
(9) [PE] Since Britain used force to implement its abolitionist policies, on an international scale can we say that abolitionism was the beginning of a new moral international order?
[OPG] Abolitionism was certainly the first international movement in favour of human rights. Based on universal principles, abolitionism could only aim to achieve universal aims. To use a current term, we might say that abolitionists conceived their mission as a global one. For them, the abolition of slavery in Western colonies was only the prelude of a fight for the eradication of slavery in all regions of the world. And in order to achieve that aim, states had to cooperate if only for technical reasons such as in the maritime fight against the illegal slave trade. In fact, during the initial period the process of internationalization took the shape of a kind of cosmopolitan Republic of Letters illustrated by the case of Anthony Benezet. This French-born Calvinist went to the USA, where he became a Quaker and he established an abolitionist society in Philadelphia, subsequently he went to Great Britain, where he helped to introduce abolitionism there. A second phase of internationalization occurred at the beginning of the 19th century, when continental Europe was at war and hopelessly divided, and when only Great Britain invested its efforts in the abolitionist issue. At the head of a crusade against slavery, Great Britain tried to organise an international league against the slave trade between 1814 and 1816, and subsequently changed its policy and started to produce a whole network of bilateral treaties making the slave trade a criminal offence according to national laws. At the end of the 19th century, a third stage of internationalization followed the beginnings of the colonization of Black Africa. Initiated by Cardinal Lavigerie and Pope Leo XIII, a Catholic crusade was launched in 1888 in order to stamp out slavery in Africa. It was justified by pointing to the urgency of the problem and to a kind of moral obligation to interfere in the internal affairs of Africa, much like the arguments used today. This was the time of international conferences and treaties, such as the Africa conference in Berlin in 1885. After the First World War, international organizations such as the League of Nations took an interest in ending slavery and servitude where it existed.
Did all the efforts to eradicate slavery from the face of the earth lead to a new moral order? Maybe yes, maybe no, as someone from Normandy would usually answer, and in this case that would not be inappropriate. However, a new moral international order would mean the introduction of common rules, based on general principles that were used as international laws in order to solve contentious issues. The reality was somewhat different. The authorization of the British to allow the Portuguese to continue trading in slaves south of the equator until 1830 was tainted with hypocrisy, especially since the French were not allowed such a transitory privilege. It seems that bilateral treaties and international conventions were not always perfectly implemented, and sometimes not even honoured. In order to achieve her goals, Great Britain did not hesitate to use force, boarding and inspecting French or Portuguese vessels, and even sinking Brazilian ships inside their own territorial waters. Through diplomacy, but also through blackmail and diplomatic and economic pressure, Great Britain forced many Latin American and European countries to become members of the British-dominated league for the abolition of slave trade. And, last but not the least, the repression of the illegal slave trade did help Great Britain to become the policeman of the world. And even humanitarian projects are rarely completely devoid of material and political interests. Yet, it should be realized that Britain’s fight against the international slave trade was very costly indeed. According to Seymour Drescher, between 1806 and 1863, the expenses involved could have run into as much as 1.8% of Britain’s National Income. That is more than Britain now spends on development aid and certainly much more than the contemporary profits from the slave trade, which at most could have amounted to 1% of Britain’s National Income. Of course, it should be kept in mind that the people who benefited from the slave trade, such as the merchants and planters, were not the same as the taxpayers, who footed the bill for Britain’s abolitionist campaign.
(10) [PE] It sounds too good to be true. A number of European nations decided to set up a transatlantic slave trade and to import millions of African slaves into their New World colonies. There seems to be little to disturb this success story in Africa, while the resistance and the revolts of the slaves in the New World hardly affected the profitability of the slavery system. Is there no role for the Africans in bringing the Atlantic slave trade to an end?
[DE] Africans restricted the slave trade in two ways. First, revolts on board slave vessels increased the costs of doing business. Ship owners had to have more crew on board than would have been the case if the vessel had carried produce. They also had to ensure more armaments. While few slave revolts were successful, the extra costs associated with the expectation of revolt meant higher shipping costs and thus higher prices in the Americas. Higher prices always meant less captives purchased and thus in a real and direct sense on-board resistance meant fewer captives (one estimate suggests one fifth fewer) crossing the Atlantic.
Second, slave revolts occurred disproportionately on vessels leaving ports in Upper Guinea (the coast stretching from modern Senegal to Côte-d’Ivoire). This was the region of sub-Saharan Africa that is closest in voyage times and distance to both Europe and the Americas. There is strong evidence that European ship captains chose to avoid this area when seeking captives. Instead, they sailed further south to what is now Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique, the source of 90% of those arriving in the Americas from Africa. Such a detour involved extra distance, extra time, and thus higher costs. Additional numbers of Africans were ‘saved’ from death or a life of unremitting toil on plantations by the violent resistance of captives from Upper Guinea.
(11) [PE] Once the Atlantic slave trade was abolished, West and Central Africa no longer needed to ‘produce’ slaves for export. Is there evidence that the number of people who were enslaved diminished? Is there any evidence whether the standard of living in Africa was affected by the closure of the Atlantic slave trade?
[DE] There is evidence that the number of captives employed within Africa itself increased as the slave trade declined. Peanuts, palm oil, cloves and other cultivated products found markets in Europe and were grown in increasing quantities in those parts of Africa from which captives had previously left for the Americas. But it is also clear that the price of slaves in Africa declined as suppression of the slave trade was implemented. Economic logic suggests therefore that the demand for slaves from within Africa was not sufficient to replace the demand for slaves from the Americas while the slave trade was at its height. If one had simply replaced the other then prices would not have fallen as they did. It thus seems probable that the incidence of enslavement within Africa was lower in the 19th century as the slave trade declined and then ended, than it had been earlier. There is no evidence of trends in the African standard of living in the pre-colonial era, although given the number of people thought to have lived in sub-Saharan Africa and the fact that they fed, clothed and sheltered themselves without consuming much in the way of non-African goods, then external trade, whether increasing or decreasing, cannot have had much effect on per-capita incomes.
(12) [PE] Last, but not least, we now turn to the effects of ending the slave trade and of colonial slavery on Europe. I think that we can safely say that the effects of ending the slave trade and of slave emancipation were limited. Slave ships can sail other routes and transport other cargoes. Similarly, capital invested in the West Indian plantations could be invested elsewhere as there were growing investment opportunities in the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe. And, last, but not least, the ending of the slave trade to the British, French, Danish and Dutch possessions was the making of the slave trade to Cuba and Brazil, while a similar mechanism operated when slavery was abolished in one set of colonies.
[DE] Yes, the plantation regions of the New World that were largely unaffected by the abolition of slavery were Cuba and Brazil. This was because, by the late 1880s when abolition took effect in these countries, there were no other areas of the Americas that still practised plantation slavery and could therefore take advantage of the disappearance of the institution in Cuba and Brazil.
(13) [PE] So if the economic effects of the ending of the slave trade and of colonial slavery were not dramatic, what was the result of this unprecedented civil and political mobilization against the use of ‘unfree’ labour?
[SD] By the late 1780s the largest English-speaking polity in the world, Britain, mobilized against the trade. The British launched their first abolitionist campaign in 1787. For 50 years thereafter they massively petitioned organized, propagandized, boycotted, internationalized, policed and ultimately closed down the transatlantic slave trade. Eighty years after their first mobilization the slave trade between the two hemispheres was ended. In the course of this durable, political, moral, military and ultimately global mobilization the British discovered that one of their most cherished axioms, Adam Smith’s declaration, that free labour was cheaper and more efficient than slave labour, could not stand the test of liberation.
In one plantation society after another freed labour production proved unable to compete with slave labour production. In retrospect, historians have found that in terms of economic efficiency and costs, free labour was, and potentially remains, uncompetitive with slavery or other forms of bound labour. This discovery also served to reinforce perceptions of the racial ‘inferiority’ and inherent ‘laziness’ among non-European races. As imperialism spread, the message of emancipation, abolitionism, now justified the imperialist assumption that the dominated ‘backward peoples’ required post-emancipation forms of coerced labour to become modern and productive workers.
(14) [PE] I can think of no study that shows that the Atlantic slave trade or indeed slavery itself somehow produced a programmed end. I think that we are faced with a change of values, like the rather sudden opposition to smoking in public or that women should be equal to men. How did the world move from unquestioning acceptance of forced migration and coercion to current attitudes that see slavery as the apotheosis of evil?
[DE] Several books rather than a few sentences are called for here. If slaves are ‘outsiders’ then in one sense abolition of both the slave trade and slavery is simply an extension of definitions of insidership to include all human beings. To put this point differently, abolition is a function of shifts in identity. Perhaps the slave trade was a function of advances in ocean going technology in a way quite different to how these advances are usually understood. In the Atlantic after 1492, oceans that had hermetically sealed peoples and cultures from each other sprouted sea-lanes almost overnight. Cultural accommodation between peoples, in this case between Africans and Europeans, always took time. The big difference was that before Columbus, migrations had been gradual and tended to move outwards from the more to the less densely populated parts of the globe. But Columbian contact was sudden, and inhibited any gradual adjustment, in terms of values just as much as it did so in epidemiological terms. A merging of perceptions of right and wrong, the erosion and redrawing of group identities, and relations between the sexes, to look only at the top of a very long list of social values that came into conflict, could not be expected to occur quickly in a post-Columbian world. In short, cultural accommodation could not keep pace with transportation technology. The result was first the rise, and then, as perceptions of the insider–outsider divide slowly changed, the fall, of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
(15) [PE] If you do something bad like trading slaves and using slave labour, you do it because there are compensations such as getting rich. The UK not only was the premier slave trading nation, and a successful colonial master of the West Indian plantations (‘the darlings of empire’) but also the first industrial nation. In the past, most scholars accepted that there was a connection and that Britain had grown wealthy by the sweat and misery of the exploited slaves. However, compared with 20 years ago, why do so few modern scholars continue to pursue the relationship between industrialization and abolition?
[DE] I think that many scholars who do not specialize in slavery still subscribe to the idea that abolition had economic roots, but the primary sources offer little empirical evidence of groups that benefited from abolition, or at least did so in sufficient numbers that the benefits would match or exceed the costs. Doubts on the relationship between industrialization and abolition have come from three quite different sources. There is now a literature that focuses on how slaves in effect contributed to their own emancipation beginning with cataclysmic rebellion in St. Domingue. Scholars who in the past might have been sympathetic to a materialist explanation of abolition have now taken their materialism into a different direction and see the ending of slavery as class resistance. A different tack is taken by historians interested in shifts in sensibilities, or awareness of cruelty. Opposition to slavery coincides with a lower incidence of state sanctioned torture, fewer and more humane executions, the first discussions of cruelty to animals and a multitude of other social reforms. Yet a third group in the last few decades have constructed more precise estimates of slave prices, the volume of slaves traded and the value of plantation goods produced before and after abolition. These make it very difficult to sustain the older interpretations of the disappearance of chattel slavery and the traffic that sustained it.
(16) [PE] The ending of the slave and of slavery did not stand by themselves. They were part of a whole scheme to liberate Africa and Asia from the Dark Ages by imposing modern, reformist colonialism. Was the ending of the slave trade and of slavery in Africa and Asia successful?
[OPG] It is true that many Europeans considered Africa and Asia as backward, but recent studies have pointed out that the onset of modernity around 1800 was not confined to Europe. Around the middle of the 19th century, the Europeans discovered the interior of Africa, when the Atlantic slave trade was already in decline. To their dismay, the European colonizers and travellers discovered that the slave trade and slavery were both important and growing institutions in Africa and in addition that there existed a growing oriental slave trade to the Middle East. That is why abolitionism was used to justify the colonization of tropical Africa, even if abolitionism was used more as an alibi than as the real reason for colonisation.
That said, European colonisation of Africa did indeed lead to a process of legal abolition of slavery as well as to the decline of several types of servitude. However, this abolition process had its limits and contradictions. The Germans, for instance, never abolished slavery in their East African territories. Elsewhere, the colonizers continued to use so-called ‘forced labour’ in spite of the abolition of slavery. The colonizers also incorporated slaves into their armies and tolerated many forms of servitude, notably because they had to rely on the local elites who were often dependent on slavery. Even today, half a century after decolonization, slavery and servitude are still present in Asia and Africa, and in some areas the number of slaves and forced labourers is increasing.
(17) [PE] Whatever the nuances of modern scholarship, the slave trade will always remain a black page in the history of Europe. Why was the International Slavery Museum built in Liverpool and why is it called ‘international’?
[RB] The International Slavery Museum (ISM) was created by National Museums Liverpool as a national museum in its own right in the period 2003–2006. In physical terms, the ISM at present consists of three display galleries (plus the Anthony Walker Education Centre) which updated, expanded and replaced the old Transatlantic Slavery Gallery (opened in 1994) within the Merseyside Maritime Museum. Its scope is the story of the transatlantic slave trade (in which Liverpool played such a central role – hence the justification for creating the gallery in the first place) and its legacies.
Phase 1 of the International Slavery Museum opened on 23 August 2007 and features new dynamic, powerful and moving displays about the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. It is the first national museum in the world to deal with such issues. The display galleries seek to increase public understanding of the history of transatlantic slavery and the wider issues of freedom and injustice. Visitors progress through a sequence of themes: Life in West Africa, Enslavement and the Middle Passage and Legacy.
The 23 August is commemorated as Slavery Remembrance Day and the anniversary of the outbreak of a successful slave rebellion. On 23 August 1791, an uprising of the enslaved Africans on the island of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) began. This revolt was a crucial event in the fight against slavery. This date is significant as a reminder that enslaved Africans were the main agents of their own liberation. Slavery Remembrance Day has been pioneered by the National Museums of Liverpool since 1999 with the support of the local black community and the City Council. It has now been adopted by other cities and institutions. This is a central theme of the museum.
‘International Slavery Museum’ was chosen as the name for the new museum during the concept development phase because we wished to reflect the fact that the story of the transatlantic slave trade and its many consequences is a huge and complex international story that spans (at least) four continents. In addition, we envisioned that the scope of the International Slavery Museum will eventually extend beyond the transatlantic slavery story and encompass other human rights issues, the study of which would provide context for and comparison with the transatlantic slavery story and its legacies.
(18) [PE] David, you once posed the question as to why the Europeans used Africans as slaves and not their own kind, and you have pointed out that in fact Western Europe was the only part of the world where slavery was absent, while a truly free labour market was limited to an even smaller area, i.e. the UK, the Netherlands, and parts of what are now Germany and France. That seems to imply that slavery in the European colonies was not a new invention, but a mere adaptation to non-European norms and values. Would you go along with this or would you argue that slavery in the European colonies was unique and different from slavery in other parts of the world?
[DE] Much slavery in human history has been used as a device for incorporating or assimilating strangers into a given social group. Slavery in much of Africa, the indigenous Americas and especially slavery as practiced in Islamic societies has exhibited these characteristics while at the same time, of course, forcing captives to work. Quite possibly slavery in the Europe of the dark ages was similar. Yet slavery aimed primarily at extracting labour was not unique to Europe or territory controlled by Europeans. What made European colonial slavery different was the intensity of the exploitation – the ruthless efficiency of gang labour on sugar plantations for example – and its peculiar (in global terms) racial exclusivity. The fascinating corollary of this is the disappearance of any form of chattel slavery in Europe itself from the late Middle Ages. Why didn’t slavery reappear in the aftermath of the Black Death when labour was in such short supply? After all Eastern Europe, less than two centuries later, began a ‘second serfdom’ when faced with falling labour-land ratios (although the cause of this land abundance was not plague).
(19) [PE] Olivier, one of the most repulsive elements in the history of the European slave trade and slavery was the high death toll and the inhumane conditions aboard the slave ships. There is just one consolation: the Europeans were in it for the money and that meant a constant struggle to bring down mortality. In much of the scarce literature on slavery in the non-European countries there often is a hint at the fact that slavery was more humane and that slaves were treated as poor members of the family. What is your impression in comparing the European, African and Arab slave trades? Was the mortality significantly lower and would you argue that the absence of slavery based on race and the absence of capitalist motives, such as the maximizing profits, did make a significant difference?
[OPG] To put it briefly: you ask me whether some slave systems are more humane than the others. From a humanitarian view point I would say that all forms of slavery are inhumane and condemnable, whatever the actual living conditions of the slaves. Furthermore, it is difficult to compare the degree of harshness of the various slave systems, simply because the living conditions within one single slave system differed so much. A slave – whether male, female or child – can be ordered to carry out any task, such as that of servant, labourer, soldier, eunuch, concubine, confidant, artisan, sailor, etc. Last but not the least, to establish a tentative Richter scale of human suffering would lead us to set ‘soft’ against ‘harsh’ forms of slavery. Automatically, that seems to more or less legitimize ‘soft’ slavery and every slave regime would claim to be ‘soft’. In the slave-holding regions of the New World, the Portuguese felt that they were the better slave owners, while the French slave owners had exactly the same idea. I feel that it is impossible to rank slave regimes according to humanitarian standards.
In much of the scholarly literature, capitalism is seen as technically efficient and advanced, but morally deficient, while the non-Western systems of exploitation are seen as backward, less efficient, but not as harsh as the capitalist ones. According to the arguments of the cultural relativist, child labour in the non-Western world should be seen as proof of child agency and not of exploitation. Yet, even under capitalist regimes, slavery was not only a purely economic institution, but also an institution based on the inequality of power. Theoretically, a slave owner in the New World had every incentive to treat his ‘expensive’ slaves with consideration and care, in practice however, the capitalist slave owner could be a brute and kill them. That slavery always had two sides also came to the fore in the Muslim world, where slaves remained attached to their former master in spite of the fact that many had been freed, more so than in colonial America. All slave systems faced the same problems, and had to find means in order to reduce the tensions and violence resulting from the reduction of people into slavery.
What was true for slavery was also true for the slave trade. Thanks to the invaluable work of David Eltis and his team we now know that, in the capitalist slave trade, the average rate of mortality during the ‘middle passage’ from Africa to America was around 12%, while in the non-capitalist slave trade – such as the caravan slave trade across the Sahara to North Africa – the mortality rate differed from 6 to 20% during the first half of the 19th century, and the mortality rate among the slaves in the internal African slave trade came to 25%, at least in Angola.
(20) [PE] All of you have been long-time students of the European slave trade and of European colonial slavery. All of you have seen and indeed contributed to the dramatic increase in our knowledge and understanding of Atlantic slavery. We know much more than before about the volume and the direction of the slave trade, the profitability of the plantations, the demography of the slaves in North America as well as in the Caribbean, and last, but not least, of the impact of the slave trade/slavery/plantation complex on the economies on both sides of the Atlantic. Looking back, it all seems like a giant mistake. Why did Europe jettison its ideas about freedom and human rights in order to obtain such non-vital products as sugar, coffee and cotton at bargain prices? Why did it Europe take three to four centuries to come to its senses? And if the West made this giant mistake, does it seem reasonable to consider reparations?
[SD] Early Modern Europeans did not ‘jettison’ their ideas about freedom and human rights in order to obtain colonies that grew sugar, coffee, rice. In the 16th century, Europeans moved within a world they did not rule, where individual freedom was neither practised nor desired, even within parts of Europe itself. People thought in terms of ‘liberties’ in the plural, not Liberty in a universal and singular sense. Liberties were exemptions from taxes for nobles, or from military service for the clergy, or from restraints on mobility, as in the case of non-serfs. Even contract labour in Western Europe was a ‘peculiar institution’. Individual freedom was a general right only in particular societies like England, the Dutch republic and in parts of France and the Germanies. Elsewhere, Europeans accepted slavery as a norm. It was a norm to which they could adapt, and a form of domination in which they could prosper and empower themselves. It took centuries for Europeans and Asians and Africans to regard humanity in general, and the planet they shared, as a potential single unit. The process unfolded slowly: in encounters at the individual level; slaves appealing to courts of justice in Europe; slaves finding sympathetic religious defenders, both individual and collective; shrewd plantation owners who saw the wisdom of manumission as an institution that could motivate slaves and protect their own offspring conceived in slavery; needy military leaders who helped to widen the horizons and military value of slaves in arms. The path was uneven. Napoleon, in 1802, could, with the stroke of a pen, re-enslave tens of thousands of liberated French citizens in Guadeloupe; while just a few hundred miles away, tens of thousands of ex-slaves were successfully destroying that same Napoleonic plan for St. Domingue at the ultimate cost of two centuries of non-European Haitian militarism, despotism and a slow decent into national destitution. Slavery was never just a giant Western mistake. Nor was abolition solely a mighty Western achievement. Global slavery was but one more iteration of an institution once shared by Westerners and non-Westerners alike. Antislavery, born in the West, became in the two centuries after the 1770s the consensual standard of world civilization. But we must never forget that, just before the middle of the last century, there were more coerced labourers within Europe itself then at any point in the history of the Americas. As for reparations, as a historian I can see only one utterly uncontroversial obligation for which the world is responsible. Descendants of masters, slaves, or both, or neither, owe it to each other to recount its unfinished history. As for redistributing the benefits and suffering that arose from the institution. Every generation that transpires after the ending of a particular iteration of the institution with its own sequence of exploitations, degradations depredations and wealth entails an ever-greater complication of the heirs of the beneficiaries and victims. Their multitudes of descendants now spread across the globe render any calculus of compensation beyond my capacities as a historian.
[DE] European ideas about freedom were clearly for Europeans only in the early modern period – a few thinkers such as Jean Bodin excepted. As for the incorporation of non-Europeans into discussions of rights and freedoms, see my answer to (14) above. Reparations should certainly be paid whenever actions violate the norms of the times in which those actions occur.
[OPG] Why did it take three or four centuries? It took a long time simply because the conditions for the emergence of an international abolitionist movement did not occur before the second half of the 18th century. You call slavery a giant mistake for the West. However, as a mistake, and more, as a monstrosity, slavery was not an invention of the Western world. And even colonial slavery in the New World had many fathers, European obviously, but also Amerindian, African and Muslim. Some participated in the process of enslaving, some in the process of travel and transport, some bought slaves, others sold slaves, and again other people employed slaves. It is very difficult to establish who was more guilty than others, and, personally, I do not think it is the task for an historian to do so. It is nearly impossible to establish clearly how much some participants profited from the slave trade and slavery, be it in Europe, Africa or the New World. In general, it is extremely complicated to evaluate the impact of past events on past societies. It is even more difficult to try to understand how that past influences the present societies. And last, but not least, can we subscribe to the thesis that the present generation has to take responsibility for the actions of those who lived in the same country centuries ago? Can we accept the idea that there is such a thing as ‘genealogical responsibility’? There are no simple answers to these questions. There is no doubt that the question of reparations is more likely fathered by present-day politics than by history. The task of the historians is to try to understand the past and that of the citizens is to militate against all forms of slavery and servitude that still exist in this world.
