The Problem of Slavery As History: A Global Approach - Couverture souple

Miller, Joseph C.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0300113153 ISBN 13 : 9780300113150

Editeur : Yale University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Why did slavery - an accepted evil for thousands of years - suddenly become regarded during the eighteenth century as an abomination so compelling that Western governments took up the cause of abolition in ways that transformed the modern world? Joseph C. Miller turns this classic question on its head by rethinking the very nature of slavery, arguing that it must be viewed generally as a process rather than as an institution. Tracing the global history of slaving over thousands of years, Miller reveals the shortcomings of Western narratives that define slavery by the same structures and power relations regardless of places and times, concluding instead that slaving is a process which can be understood fully only as imbedded in changing circumstances.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Joseph C. Miller is T. Cary Johnson Jr. Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia and a pre-eminent historian of world slavery. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

The Problem of Slavery as History

A GLOBAL APPROACHBy JOSEPH C. MILLER

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Yale University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11315-0

Contents

Preface.................................................................ix1 The Problem of Slavery as History.....................................12 History as a Problem of Slaving.......................................363 Slavery and History as Problems in Africa.............................734 Problematizing Slavery in the Americas as History.....................119Appendix: Schematic Historical Sequences of Slaving.....................163Notes...................................................................173Index...................................................................211

Chapter One

The Problem of Slavery as History

Slavery was and is a tragedy. It provokes outrage among the modern heirs to its divisive damages, as it should. All of us, whether white or black or merely observers to its racialized polarities, are in that same agonized company. These modern legacies of the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas and in Europe remain an emotional field of battle in the culture wars of modern nations. For racially identified descendants of the enslaved in the present, slavery in the past provokes animated claims for justice, apologies, and financial reparations. The complementing heritage on the part of those who seem potential beneficiaries of the slaving past has long provoked equally intense denials, from descendants of planter families to citizens of former slaving ports like Nantes, Liverpool, and Warwick, Rhode Island, to insurance companies, banks, and universities, and to many communities in modern Africa. Only recently have families and institutions begun to acknowledge the intricate embrace of slavers and enslaved in the New World. Everyone in the slaveholding colonies and countries of the Americas, and in the slaving centers in Europe, in one way or another was implicated. It is also now becoming clearer how many people in Africa bear parallel legacies from their own slaving pasts.

Important as these neo-abolitionist politics may be today, their portrayals of "slavery as an institution" transcending time and space have frozen the dynamics of slaving in most parts of the world as a historical process. The prevailing concept of institutionalized slavery in fact primarily represents abolitionist depictions of the U.S. antebellum South, with the enslaved as one-dimensional victims of similarly one-dimensional brutal masters. The whip is the dominating symbol. In American English, Simon Legree is a trope for an abuser. Emblematic fictionalized mothers sacrifice infants to save them from these horrors.

Without diminishing the domineering excesses that the vulnerability of the enslaved encouraged—or the rapes, psychological abuses, maiming, and deaths—these stereotypes have also inhibited academic understandings of slaving as a subject of intellectual inquiry. It is the intellectual challenge of thinking about slavery outside the box of contemporary politicization that I want to introduce in this chapter. Then I will present three efforts to apply an alternative understanding of slaving, as a historical strategy, and enslavement as a human experience prior to the personal brutalities, to selected, illustrative aspects of the history of the world. The last of these applies this global approach to slaving to the familiar, seemingly paradigmatic slavery of the modern Americas, concluding with reasons why this unique North American warping of a practice of introducing outsiders into local fields of political competition led, for the first time, to its institutionalization, and thereby finally to its abolition.

To problematize slaving as a historical strategy asks readers to suspend the images of slavery conventional in modern popular culture—in the United States, essentially African-American men working in the cotton fields of the antebellum South; in England or France, African men toiling in canebrakes under a scorching Caribbean sun; and for others, perhaps girls and women secluded and seduced in exotic harems somewhere in a sexualized Muslim palace. The considerable company of scholars who think about the subject professionally will find similar challenges to their essentially sociological assumptions about "slavery as an institution," "slave societies" or "societies with slaves," "slave modes of production," forms of "unfree labor," "slave/ creole cultures," and "the idea (or ideology) of slavery." I am thus inviting my readers—scholars and others—to reconsider not only what we think about slavery but also the deep-seated assumptions that underlie how we can think most comprehendingly, and hence most productively, beyond existing understandings of slaving. In the parlance of the professional literature on slavery, I want to problematize the utility—even question the elemental accuracy—of the familiar, all-but-ubiquitous phrasing of slavery that historians study as an institution. Hence the play on the word "problem" in the title of this book, and in those of each of its chapters. I hope to problematize slavery as an institution by exploring slaving as a historical strategy.

"Problem" also references the occasion that prompted the present elaborated form of these essays. I presented them as the inaugural David Brion Davis Lectures at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, to honor David Brion Davis, its founding director. Davis is perhaps the defining thinker in the modern field, a writer for the public as well as for the most sophisticated of the professionals. His famous and foundational book, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), set the standard for problematizing historical clichés. The Problem of Slavery is a sweeping survey of the idea of slavery in Western culture over two millennia, from Greek antiquity to its abolition in the nineteenth century. To the amazement of most modern historians at the time, Davis revealed the continuity of slaving throughout the Christian European Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as the resigned toleration of dehumanizing other human beings as things, from Aristotle to Aquinas to the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Las Casas to political economists in seventeenth-century England and France. For him, the problem of slavery was why none of the great humanistic thinkers of Western civilization had developed their consistent unease about the institution toward the abolitionist impulses that finally burst forth in the North Atlantic in the eighteenth century, primarily in England and then in the United States. The capacious discourse of humane justice in which he framed the problem reflects popular discomfort with the very idea of slavery, and it is the framework within which scholars still discuss slavery productively.

In this opening chapter I hope to frame these important moral issues of enslavement in ways that are more capacious still, ways that I conceptualize as historical. The second chapter in this book applies the historical epistemology outlined in the first chapter to explain the contexts—political and ideological—that led discerning commentators (from Aristotle to Aquinas) to lament the personal failings of abusive masters but not to invoke public sanctions of the sort claimed by modern abolitionists. In effect, I add the political and intellectual contexts of slaving to the primarily economic analyses that have otherwise tended to prevail.

By training and experience I am a historian of Africa and a student of the overwhelming prominence of slaving in that continent's recent history. My primary research focuses on Angola, one of the African regions most profoundly engaged in those tragic historical processes. But my studies of Africa—like those of many of my Africanist colleagues working on other parts of the continent—leave me with an acute awareness of the utter irrelevance there of the defining qualities of slavery "as an institution" that we read about, mostly in the Americas. The third of these chapters therefore presents slaving as a historical process within the particular historical contexts of Africa, which include virtually none of what turn out to be quite a few unrecognized and no less particular assumptions underlying the thoroughly modern conception of slavery as an institution. Historians must escape the premises of their own times and places if they are to sense the motivations of people in the other places and times that they study, and so I offer a historical approach that I believe illuminates aspects of slaving in Africa not evident, or seemingly anomalous, to modern understandings.

If one grasps the possibility of seeing slaving in terms radically different from what we modern heirs to the Enlightenment have taken all too comfortably for granted, then one is prepared to look again at slavery in the Americas. Chapter 4 places some of the conventional issues of the large field of comparing New World slaveries—for example, in the United States and Brazil—in this historicized perspective, in a historical framework centered not on comparing geographical regions (or culture areas, or colonies or countries or other abstract entities) as relatively timeless contrasts. Instead, it suggests a historically coherent sequence of incremental developments from fifteenth-century circumstances in the Mediterranean region, and also slightly later in northwestern Europe, that were very different from the challenges that Europeans faced later in the Atlantic. Following this sequence—from sixteenth-century strategies in the Hispanic Americas to seventeenth-century extensions in Brazil and then to the Caribbean, through the distinctive circumstances in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America—historicizes slaving as a process resulting from changing strategies of people in consistent positions of marginality to the quite distinctive times and places in which they resorted to slaving to intrude on older, more established interests.

Perils of Presentism

First, I will need to elaborate what I mean by historicize. As I use the term, it means a good deal more than merely looking at the past or even narrating events then in terms of changes. Here I use the term to emphasize the human meanings that have motivated people's actions (in the past) in contexts that are not only particular to their times and places but also include ephemerality—prominent, pervasive, dynamic, fleeting change itself. Beyond problematizing slaving as strategy, in contrast to slavery as an outcome, the book also problematizes thinking historically, in this specific way. The title of the book as a whole, The Problem of Slavery as History, is meant to emphasize as much. Introducing the problematic of thinking historically is the burden of this introductory chapter in particular. I want here to consider explicitly what the best historians do instinctively to bring earlier times and other places alive for readers and viewers and listeners—all of us, including the historians—very much anchored in the here and now. Generally, we professionals tend to lumber on in the academic modes of abstraction and generalization that we favor, because they highlight orderly aspects of the disorder of human life and—not incidentally—make us look good for making some sense of the chaos. This tendency to favor selective sense in our understanding of slavery over existential ambiguities, I propose to problematize as sociological.

This inclination to find coherence, even if only the brutality of domination, in the essential uncontrollability of a life imagined as entirely subject to the whims of another, adds an emotional edge to the customary contemplation of slavery. The subject, in its academic formulations as well as in its politicized cultural ones, may derive some of its elemental intensity as a kind of distillation of the helplessness and isolation underlying the radical individualism of modern life, not least among scholars. We thus tend to draw curtains of the abstract concepts in common currency today around the exquisite particularities of the past. I will refer later, for examples beyond slavery, to the historical irrelevance of familiar, seemingly unproblematic contemporary notions like kingdoms or states or empires to understanding Africa, or—for that matter, as the second chapter will suggest—anywhere in the world's past. Historians of the ancient Mediterranean have recently become productively critical of their predecessors' tendencies to find straightforward origins of modern forms of democracy in Greece in the fifth century before the current era, an age claimed as classical; Athens in that era was in fact a place very different from both Philadelphia in the 1780s and nineteenth-century republican France.

Historians use the technical term "teleological" to refer to viewing the past significantly, and thereby distortingly, in terms of their own present—that is, painting the purposes of people in the past as though they had meant to invent prototypical versions of whatever we might today claim for ourselves. For readers for whom such technicalities might as well be Greek, this in-group jargon refers to historians' Cardinal Sin, a logical offense that negates the fundamental focus of the discipline on the past on its own terms rather than on ours. The word, which derives from Greek telos for "purpose," means writing about the past as if it could hardly have led anywhere but to the present, however selectively we may understand ourselves here and now. Such arguments eliminate the contingency, indeterminacy, and sheer uncertainty of how everyone everywhere, caught in the flux of time, inevitably blunders along.

One teleological habit, all too common even among historians who claim to know better, is a quest for origins of later outcomes, often those of the historian's own times. In this book I seek to avoid contemplating the problem of slavery in terms of what Robin Blackburn calls this "idol of origins": that is, looking for elements in the past, presumed known to actors then but in fact usually only imagined by the historian, then isolating those elements from their contexts to equate them with similarly selected parts of equally complex more recent practices. It is one of the celebrated sins of the historical profession, at least in theory, because all celebrated sins are condemned so urgently precisely because they are so tempting, and so common. Such self-centeredness is not difficult to achieve, since our limited evidence from those times usually reveals so little about the fullness of lives back then. It is thus easy for the historian to notice, to select as analytically significant, only aspects of the past readily recognizable today; these seeming continuities are, by the standard of familiarity, the ones that seem to have led toward later times, and particularly our own. This myopic misrepresentation of others in the past is also called presentistic. To explain what happened historically, one instead relies on context analytically, rather than merely making passing mention of it, mostly for local color, in a logic subtly (and arrogantly enough) predicated on knowing how it has all turned out now.

Teleology is so tempting to historians, further, because history is inherently perspectival, in two senses. The historian therefore attempts to discern the multiple perspectives motivating the actors in every viably historicized context. But historians live in historical contexts of their own, and so they always add the perspective of the historian trying to make sense of them. Historians' own positionality requires them to write with reference to their own times, at least implicitly, if they hope to be intelligible. Although historians must therefore keep in touch with themselves and with their readers or audiences, they must do so without also imputing these necessary and appropriate presentistic referents onto people in the pasts that they study. Instead historians' reliance on contextualization of their subjects obligates them to distinguish the terms of those, back then, whose motivations alone can explain what they did. Being in the present does not preclude constructive engagement with the past; rather, the historian must merely avoid conflating the two. The historian's engagement with the past is constructive both in the sense that it is productive of understanding the past as well as acknowledging the mental world of the historian-observer. The two senses of "construction" are complementary rather than contradictory; in fact, they are mutually interdependent.

Years ago Moses Finley, the late, great historian of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean, famously showed how the emotionality of slavery as a political issue at the end of the nineteenth century, in the nationalistic aftermath of abolitionism in Europe and of the triumphalism of European imperialism at the time, rendered slavery in the ancient Mediterranean past anything but dead for social and political theorists there. Rather, they resurrected antiquity by imagining classical Greece and Rome as fields of battle over slavery, primarily by analogy with then-recent, often Christian abolitionist formulations of the problem. For some of them, ancient Christians had triumphed over the earlier slaving of Roman pagans and assorted barbarians. For others, the enslaved had rebelled against their miseries. The story attributed to ancient slaving at the end of the nineteenth century paralleled the simultaneous strategies that politicians in late nineteenth-century Europe, bent on justifying imperial conquests of "backward" regions around the globe as a civilizing mission, epitomized by eliminating the slaving of Muslims and "native" people there. This displacement of the present politics of slaving into the remote past paralleled the highly political abolition campaigns of late eighteenth-century England, when reformers had projected the social costs and amorality of growing capitalism onto slavery in politically safely remote West Indian colonies. But reasoning by analogy is hopeless as history, since projecting even viable patterns from one time and place into any other violates the fundamental emphasis of history's epistemology on setting the action in past times and other places in its own distinguishing circumstances. Instead, analogous reasoning, like the originary fallacy, selects easily recognizable aspects out of their historical contexts for their (alleged, usually only nominal or abstract or formal) similarities to political or ethical concerns of the present.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Problem of Slavery as Historyby JOSEPH C. MILLER Copyright © 2012 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Yale University Press
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0300113153
• ISBN 13: 9780300113150
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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