The Peculiar Institution, pt. 2

The Color of Slavery

If, when studying any period or event in history, it is difficult to avoid projecting our own perspectives and judgments onto people of the past, it is doubly so when confronted with historical practices now considered barbaric or beyond the pale. During the time of the American Revolution - just seven or eight generations ago - virtually everyone except a few Christian preachers accepted the practice of owning other human beings as a simple (if morally complicated), necessary (if unfortunate) fact of life. People in almost every age celebrate the lucky coincidence of having been born just at the time humanity (or, at least, the part of humanity to which the celebrants belong) sorted out the messy moral problems of the past. Those people have always turned out to be wrong, and today’s revelers are wrong as well. In a hundred years, there will be practices accepted by our mainstream society at which people of the future will shake their heads with the same shocked disbelief that slavery and cannibalism cause in us. Maybe it will be something more or less predictable - like factory farming or running sex-change experiments on small children - but, if the past is any guide, it will be something the morality of which is as uncomplicated to us as slavery was for the Romans.

It can also be difficult to avoid projecting our hindsight knowledge onto historical actors who were working with information at once more limited and more detailed than us. In other words, we have the benefit of taking in the broad history of the time in which these people lived, but we are often blind to the minute contextual details that led them to make the decisions they did. Goethe wrote somewhere that a man’s faults are held in common with his age, while his virtues are his own. Any proverb can have holes poked in it, but in general I think we do better to approach historical eras and figures with the humility that proverb implies, knowing that our own great grandchildren will likely view basic elements of our early-21st century civilization as an incomprehensible horror show.

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In the first essay in this series, we mentioned that slavery was (apparently) relatively rare among primitives - partly because there was no need for agricultural workers or household servants, and partly because tribes lacked the numbers and organization to monitor and control captured enemy males. As a result, the usual practice of a tribe victorious in war was to simply kill all the enemy males on which they could lay their hands. This context is necessary to understand the now-extraordinary statement that, at one time, slavery represented a moral advance made possible by changing social and economic conditions.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam came into existence at a time when slavery was taken for granted. All three Abrahamic faiths attempted to limit and ameliorate the practice, though talk of abolition would have been as anachronistic as talk about giving up agriculture or coinage. The Greco-Roman world was probably the first true “slave society” - in the sense that large-scale slave labor was necessary for the social and economic structures that emerged. In major slave trading centers - Athens, Corinth, Aegina, Chios, etc. - slaves made up at least one-third of the total population, and, by the time of Emperor Augustus, there were an estimated two to three million slaves on the Italian peninsula, living next to a free population of only four to five million. In both cases, slave ownership was much more widely distributed than it was in the antebellum American South. Put another way, the Greco-Roman world, undoubtedly the freest and most enlightened civilization that had yet been born into the world, was also the first to be socially and economically dependent on human bondage. As in North America two millennia later, freedom and slavery advanced together. If this seems like a paradox to us, the Greeks and Romans themselves saw no contradiction: slaves were necessary to afford citizens the time and leisure to participate in civic life. Slavery and freedom were inextricably bound up with one another.

In the pre-modern world, it was taken for granted that everyone was subject to somebody. Hierarchy was a fundamental aspect of the natural order, and every hierarchy has a base, a level below which it is not possible to sink. Moreover, one’s place in a hierarchy was tied to the specific social context in which one was involved, and everyone knew that outside that context they were nobody, as vulnerable to enslavement as a crude barbarian. Although thinkers like Aristotle suggested that some men and peoples carried traits that made them natural slaves, it’s important to remember that these are post-hoc explanations for patterns that had existed since time immemorial. As we’ll see, there are many examples that look to us like justifications, but in their own day were merely attempts to explain why things were the way they were.

Nevertheless, ideas have a life of their own once released into the wild, and Aristotle’s theories regarding natural slaves seem to have provided later civilizations with intellectual justification for enslaving sub-Saharan Africans. The writings of Aristotle and other Classical thinkers did not survive the dark ages in Europe, but they were preserved, and later transmitted back to Europe, by the Islamic world. It was by this circuitous route that the foundation was laid for the transatlantic slave trade. But we’ll return to that later.