The Anti-Slavery Project

From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking

Joel Quirk

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780812223248
• eBook ISBN: 9780812205640
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Employment Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is commonly assumed that slavery came to an end in the nineteenth century. While slavery in the Americas officially ended in 1888, millions of slaves remained in bondage across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East well into the first half of the twentieth century. Wherever laws against slavery were introduced, governments found ways of continuing similar forms of coercion and exploitation, such as forced, bonded, and indentured labor. Every country in the world has now abolished slavery, yet millions of people continue to find themselves subject to contemporary forms of slavery, such as human trafficking, wartime enslavement, and the worst forms of child labor. The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking offers an innovative study in the attempt to understand and eradicate these ongoing human rights abuses.In The Anti-Slavery Project, historian and human rights expert Joel Quirk examines the evolution of political opposition to slavery from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Beginning with the abolitionist movement in the British Empire, Quirk analyzes the philosophical, economic, and cultural shifts that eventually resulted in the legal abolition of slavery. By viewing the legal abolition of slavery as a cautious first step—rather than the end of the story—he demonstrates that modern anti-slavery activism can be best understood as the latest phase in an evolving response to the historical shortcomings of earlier forms of political activism.By exposing the historical and cultural roots of contemporary slavery, The Anti-Slavery Project presents an original diagnosis of the underlying causes driving one of the most pressing human rights problems in the world today. It offers valuable insights for historians, political scientists, policy makers, and activists seeking to combat slavery in all its forms.

PART I

The British Empire and the Legal Abolition of Slavery

Chapter 1

A Short History of British Anti-Slavery

Slavery and enslavement have existed in a number of different guises throughout recorded history. This pedigree raises a number of difficult and contentious issues. If slavery represents a self-evident wrong, as current legal and moral opinion maintains, why did all of the world’s major religions and civilizations sanction slavery and slave trading for thousands of years? If enslavement represents a clear-cut “crime against humanity,” why was it repeatedly endorsed by leading philosophers, theologians, and jurists from every corner of the globe? These types of questions are understandable, but misleading. If we start with the contemporary assumption that slavery is an obvious wrong, the key question becomes when, and not if, this status would come to be belatedly recognized. If we further assume that the end of slavery was all but inevitable, it becomes easy to mistakenly conclude that individual historical slave systems were not really that significant—or dynamic—in the first place.¹ In any discussion of slavery and abolition, it is essential to keep in mind that slavery is the historical norm, and organized anti-slavery is the historical anomaly. Framed in these terms, the emergence and subsequent success of the Anti-Slavery Project constitutes a truly remarkable development. Rather than being surprised that slavery has displayed such resilience, we should instead be surprised at how much has recently been accomplished.

This chapter examines the early history of the British anti-slavery movement. This begins with an introductory survey of the historical dimensions and distinctive features of transatlantic slavery. From here, I go on to explore an intellectual sea change in attitudes toward slavery in European political culture during the eighteenth century. This sea change laid the groundwork for later political developments, but it did not in itself constitute a direct threat to the ongoing viability of transatlantic slavery. The transition from intellectual revolution to political movement was inaugurated by a national petition campaign against the slave trade in 1787, which elicited an unprecedented response from the British public.² Since this remarkable popular response to anti-slavery ideas was vital to its political success, I explore in some detail the underlying causes of this breakthrough. Weaving together a number of different strands, I argue that Britons’ unprecedented support for anti-slavery can be traced to the advancement of a new set of claims that appealed to prevailing conceptions of religious virtue and national identity. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the Parliamentary contests surrounding the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and the abolition of slavery in 1833. By the end of these protracted contests, anti-slavery was firmly ensconced at both a social and an institutional level. This new consensus not only represented a remarkable turnaround in British attitudes toward slavery, it also had major international consequences.

Historical Starting Points

For the vast majority of recorded history, various forms of slavery could be found in political communities in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. In all these communities, slavery was widely regarded as a natural, venerable, and fairly unremarkable part of the prevailing social order.³ In most instances, slavery also represented a key source of wealth and property, ensuring that political and economic elites were consistently among the most prominent raiders, traders, and holders of slaves. Their long-term activities were in turn legitimated and imperfectly regulated by laws that codified both master-slave and slave-society relations.

Until relatively recently, legal discussion of slavery primarily focused on the terms under which slaving could be legitimately practiced. The two main themes animating these discussions were the conditions under which enslavement could legitimately occur, and the conditions under which slaves could be traded, treated, and manumitted (freed). Most historical slave systems developed elaborate legal and ethical injunctions against enslaving compatriots of the same religion, caste, race, or place of origin.⁴ These injunctions were not always absolute or strictly adhered to, but they nonetheless represent a key illustration of the importance of social membership in determining who could be legitimately enslaved. Some historical slave systems also included mechanisms for enslaving social insiders, but in such cases enslavement was usually viewed as a legitimate punishment for “fallen” individuals who had either been convicted of serious social transgressions, or who were unable to discharge their debts.⁵ As a general rule, enslavement was an intergenerational burden, which required elaborate rules governing the inheritance of slave status.

Resistance to particular acts of enslavement has occurred throughout history, with the most overt strategies being rebellion, flight, and suicide. It is clear, however, that a majority of slaves at least partially reconciled themselves to their status, and instead chiefly focused on improving their lives as slaves. Prior to the emergence of organized anti-slavery, slave resistance does not appear to have constituted a politically significant challenge to slavery as a general institution, but instead found expression in more parochial challenges to either personal enslavement or the enslavement of compatriots. When slaves successfully rebelled, escaped, or obtained their freedom, they sometimes went on to acquire slaves of their own.⁶ Europeans who were appalled by the enslavement of their compatriots in North Africa and the Middle East had few qualms about being members of societies that supported the enslavement of millions of Africans through transatlantic slavery.⁷ Despite this universal opposition to specific instances of slavery, most communities at most times considered at least some portion of humanity to be legitimate candidates for enslavement. On this point, even objections to the “wrong” types of people being enslaved were often colored by a pragmatic recognition that there was often little that could be done about “illegitimate” cases.

Organized anti-slavery first emerged in western Europe and northern America in the second half of the eighteenth century. Before this period, there appear to have been few—if any—politically significant challenges to slavery as a general institution.⁸ The key intellectual and political developments in the early history of anti-slavery took place in the British and French empires and (after 1776) in the United States of America. Like other European participants in transatlantic slavery, these states practiced an especially severe form of economically driven and racially defined slavery that had important legal and social antecedents in both Roman and Medieval practice.⁹ In order to understand the emergence of political opposition to slavery at this historical juncture, we first need to briefly explore i) the distinctive features of transatlantic slavery relative to other historical slave systems, and ii) the distinctive features of eighteenth-century European political and intellectual culture.

Unlike many historical slave systems, transatlantic slavery was organized around a legally defined demarcation between slave and non-slave. This legal model was reinforced by an imperfect yet extremely powerful association between slavery and race. This association was so strong that free Africans in the Americas were often assumed to be slaves unless they could prove otherwise.¹⁰ This ensured that slaves were consistently treated as a clear-cut, readily identifiable category of persons in public discourse. This sharp demarcation can be contrasted with forms of slavery practiced in most parts of Asia and Africa, which regularly involved a variety of evolving and overlapping variations in status, which were rarely compatible with European categories of slave and non-slave, black and white, or free and unfree.¹¹

While all historical slave systems involved systematic human rights abuses, commercial imperatives and this strong racial and legal distinction had the consequence that transatlantic slavery involved unusually heavy burdens, with slaves enduring severe punishments, tenuous family relationships, high mortality, extreme workloads, and comparatively high barriers to obtaining their freedom. For David Eltis, this amounted to “exploitation more intense than had ever existed before.”¹² While life was by no means easy for the white working poor of Europe or the Americas, the hardships that black slaves endured set them apart from all but the most piteous. This was not always the case in slave systems in other parts of the globe, where the lives and lifestyles of slaves varied significantly from (materially) well-off to wretched. While the latter situation was usually preponderant, there were often major variations in the roles different slaves performed, and thus corresponding differences in their relative material comfort and (reflected) social standing.

One illustration of the analytical and political implications of this dynamic is provided by Ehud Toledano, who argues that Ottoman responses to British pressure for abolition in the mid-nineteenth century were significantly influenced by the political elite’s attachment to kul-harem, or “elite” slavery.¹³ These slaves were housed in harems or worked as functionaries, soldiers, or administrators. While elite slaves undoubtedly experienced a significant amount of exploitation and vulnerability, their material circumstances can be favorably contrasted with both black domestic slaves and much of the general population. One of the main reasons political elites resisted external pressures was that they considered Ottoman slavery comparatively “benign.” Toledano argues that this assessment was largely built on a conflation of kul-harem and domestic slavery, with their familiarity with the former blinding elites to the miseries of the latter. Since there were clearly worse fates than being a kul-harem slave, it was difficult to formulate a strong case for general abolition on humanitarian grounds, because other groups in society could suffer equivalent, or even greater, physical and social hardships. These themes are echoed by Igor Kopytoff, who notes that the “placement of a slave as ‘politically and socially at a lower level than the mass of the people’ would have surprised many a Grand Vizier or Janissary.”¹⁴

A somewhat similar situation prevailed in much of South East Asia and India.¹⁵ In his discussion of slavery in Thailand, Burma, and (to a lesser extent) Cambodia, Anthony Reid argues that the “ordinary man” faced three realistic alternatives in earning a living: bondage to the king as part of the corvee system; bondage to a monastery or religious foundation; or private bondage or slavery to the upper class. The first of these alternatives is said to have been the most onerous.¹⁶ In India, slaves often came from intermediate castes because particular roles were not meant to be performed by people of “impure” standing:¹⁷ “unlike slaves in the West, slaves in India did not necessarily belong to the lowest rung of society.”¹⁸ Since these slaves were often symbols of status and consumption, their level of material comfort and (reflected) social standing were in many respects superior to that of lower castes. In places such as the Indian subcontinent, the economics of slavery sometimes involved expenses incurred pursuing other goals, such as prestige, consumption, warfare, or reproduction, rather than commercial enrichment. These noncommercial roles saw slaves forced into service as bureaucrats, concubines, retainers, sailors, soldiers, and sacrifices.

The racial and economic foundations of transatlantic slavery made it possible to approach slaves as a homogeneous group whose individual fates were primarily determined by their shared status. In places such as the Middle East, India, and South Asia, other intervening variables such as caste, work duties, vested authority, and gender roles played a greater role in determining the fortunes of individual slaves. One of the major implications of these variations was that slaves did not always stand out as unusually or uniquely oppressed compared with other members of their community. In the case of transatlantic slavery, there was an unusually strong correlation between slave status and severe hardship which imbued the divide between slave and non-slave with a distinctive social and political resonance. Slavery could be plausibly characterized as “peculiar,” or aberrant, because it evoked images of misery, deprivation, and exploitation that were removed from the everyday expectations and experiences of the wider community.

Transatlantic slavery was also embedded within a distinctive political and intellectual environment. One of the key features of eighteenth-century European political discourse was a collective belief—at least among elites—that human progress was both possible and desirable. For most of human history, slavery appeared as a permanent, unalterable fact of life, somewhat akin to warfare, famine, or disease. This (realistic) appraisal was often sustained and reinforced by a more general pessimism about the prospects of fundamental change. When anti-slavery pioneers began to disseminate their ideas, their endeavors were indirectly facilitated by a larger sociopolitical environment that regarded significant improvements to the prevailing status quo as possible, desirable, and, in more extreme cases, inevitable. This belief in human progress was not specifically concerned with slavery, but was bound up in a larger worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Anti-Slavery Project
• Part I: The British Empire and the Legal Abolition OF SLAVERY
• Part II: Linking the Historical and Contemporary
• Part III: Contemporary Forms of Slavery
• Conclusion: Contemporary Slavery in the Shadow of History
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments