The rise of racial slavery in the New World was one of the most significant developments in modern history, shaping the economy, society, politics and culture of at least four continents over the course of centuries. How and why did it happen? The answer to that question is essential to any full understanding of the world we inhabit today. It is not surprising, then, that historians have spent several generations trying to establish how it occurred.
Some form of forced labor has existed in most times and places throughout world history. But the story of New World slavery might be said to begin in the 1400s, when Portuguese and Spanish traders began to venture out into the Atlantic Ocean and down the African coast. They took over Atlantic islands such as the Canaries, the Azores and Madeira, where they introduced sugar production, but in Africa itself they were not strong enough to establish colonies and had to settle instead for trade relationships with the powerful kingdoms that controlled the coast. There they bought—or captured—Africans and brought them to their recently acquired islands, which soon became home to all the features that would characterize the Atlantic slave system: large landowners using enslaved black labor to grow crops (especially sugar) for export. Even before Columbus set sail, the Iberians had developed both an economic model and a supply chain for labor that they could easily redeploy across the Atlantic.
From there, the rise of African slavery in the Americas tends to get told as a global game of dominoes as European powers sought a steady labor supply for new settlements where they wanted to turn a profit. First the Spanish and the Portuguese brought African slaves to replace collapsing populations of Native American workers in their New World colonies. Then every other European empire did whatever it could to claim a piece of the action. The most important new entrants were the Dutch and especially the English, who eventually dominated the market and determined the shape that slavery would take in mainland North America.
The first enslaved Africans famously arrived in Virginia in 1619, brought by a Dutch captain who had taken them from a Portuguese slave ship sailing to New Spain. The first English colony to turn decisively toward slave labor was Barbados, which made the transition after starting to cultivate sugar in the 1640s. It would still take several more decades for the English themselves to become major slave traders, but once they entered the trade in earnest they quickly transformed it. Over the last 25 years of the seventeenth century, the English brought more than a quarter of a million Africans across the Atlantic, rapidly accelerating the development of colonial slavery into a dynamic capitalist enterprise. Every English colony from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean built its society and economy around racial slavery, with consequences that continue to reverberate today.
Now a new book, John Samuel Harpham’s The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, asks us to reconsider that standard account of events. Harpham does not discount economic or imperial explanations for the rise of New World slavery; what he suggests, instead, is that those explanations can make sense only within a culture where “slavery was available as an option.” His goal, as he puts it, is to discover “the reasons for which slavery was understood to be a status about which narrow-minded men could make calculations.”
The result is ironic and tragic in the way of the best history. Initially, Harpham claims, the English hesitated to embrace African slavery. Then, when they did, their decision was not based on any perceived racial difference or inferiority. It was based, instead, on something even more troubling: Harpham believes that English people enslaved Africans not because they were seen as different but because they seemed so very similar.
●
Harpham, who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard and now teaches at the University of Oklahoma, envisions his book as the first in a trilogy that promises to reinterpret the entire history of ideas about slavery in America from their early English origins to emancipation. His project is modeled explicitly on an existing series of books about the ideas behind the anti-slavery movement, David Brion Davis’s Problem of Slavery trilogy, which is considered one of the great scholarly achievements of the past century for the way it explored the cultural origins and social ramifications of anti-slavery thought.
In this first volume, however, Harpham is wrestling even more directly with another giant of American historical scholarship, Winthrop Jordan, whose first book, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812, was published to great acclaim in 1968. Harpham is expanding and to some extent revising the first part of Jordan’s book, which also deals with early English ideas about Africans. Harpham even draws one of his chapter titles directly from the corresponding section of White Over Black.
In that book, Jordan produced a complex and nuanced interpretation of English attitudes toward Africans in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet difference was the keynote of his account. “The Negro’s color set him radically apart from Englishmen,” Jordan wrote. “Africans were different from Englishmen in so many ways,” he continued. “From the first,” he concluded, “Englishmen tended to set Negroes over against themselves, to stress what they conceived to be radically contrasting qualities of color, religion, and style of life, as well as animality and a peculiarly potent sexuality.”
In addition, Jordan described the rise of African slavery in the English colonies as an “unthinking decision.” He would later come to regret the phrase for its suggestion that slavery was somehow an accident, but it aptly captured the lack of active thought that he saw at work in the process. The English had a preexisting conception of slavery; they saw an available group of outsiders—enslaved African war captives—who fit that conception; and they had a century of experience watching the Spanish and Portuguese taking that group of people as slaves. Initially, at least, it was not the sort of thing that seemed to demand much thought.
Harpham’s history reconsiders Jordan’s account of that “unthinking decision.” If the keynote of Jordan’s book was that early English observers saw Africans as different, the keynote of Harpham’s is that English people had a lot of different ideas: about Africa, about Africans, about skin color and about slavery. Nowhere was there broad agreement, he claims, except perhaps about the essence of slavery. But early English ideas about slavery were also different from what we might expect.
Throughout the period when colonial slavery was taking shape, Harpham explains, English writers still relied heavily on a conception of slavery that they inherited from ancient Rome. In contrast to the ancient Greek idea that some people could be “natural slaves,” a view most commonly associated with Aristotle, Roman law defined slavery as the product of convention. Individuals were naturally free, in this view, but could be reduced to slavery if they committed a crime or, more commonly, were captured in war. “In short,” Harpham writes, “slavery arose in Roman law as the result of history rather than nature, as a fact of modern life rather than a timeless feature of the universe.”
Accordingly, the central question for English writers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not what qualities made a person a natural slave—a question that might lead to a racial answer—but instead what circumstances allowed for enslavement. The English showed a special interest in this question, Harpham suggests, because they were simultaneously forging a national self-identity based on “the conviction that theirs was a nation dedicated to freedom.” This conviction grew out of internal developments, such as the decline of villeinage (a kind of serfdom), but it also took shape in direct contrast to England’s chief international rivals, the Spanish and the Portuguese.
Harpham shows that the English did not rush to imitate the Iberian example of enslaving Africans and Native Americans. Instead, they spent several decades defining themselves in opposition to it. In fact, the promise of English freedom became an important justification of colonization in the works of writers such as Richard Hakluyt, perhaps the most vigorous promoter of English imperial ambition in the Elizabethan era. According to Hakluyt, Native Americans who had experienced the “proude and bluddy governemente of the Spaniarde” would welcome the arrival of mild English rule and “crye oute unto us their nexte neighboures to comme and helpe them.” In Africa, too, Hakluyt and other colonial promoters envisioned a peaceful English presence that would be focused on commerce in goods rather than people. In the early 1620s, the Englishman Richard Jobson declined to acquire slaves on the Gambia River, declaring that “we were a people, who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did wee buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes.”
By the end of the seventeenth century, however, something had changed. The English had become so deeply entrenched in the slave trade that it seemed natural. How that transformation took place in such a short time is the question that drives Harpham’s book.
●
One curiosity of Harpham’s book is how closely it sticks with ideas in the Old World—what English people in England thought about slavery in the abstract or about Africans in Africa. It rarely ventures across the Atlantic, to the colonies where African slavery was actively taking shape as a matter of politics and practice. Yet this is precisely Harpham’s point. “It was not America that mattered most in these efforts to defend the development of American slavery,” he writes—“it was Africa.” In the decades before the English fully embraced the slave trade, he claims, there was a fundamental shift in their ideas about Africa, and particularly in their ideas about what Harpham calls “the sources of slavery in African life.”
As the English encountered Africa starting in the late sixteenth century, they wrote about it all the time. The specific nature of that writing was significant. It was done mostly by merchants, and it was designed to provide practical information about the potential for trade: minute and even mundane details about the geography, society, economy and government of particular places. These traders were not yet looking for people, just for gold and other goods.
The authors and compilers of such works rarely stepped back to draw broader generalizations about Africa as a whole, and never did they deploy Africa—as authors often deployed America—to make grand philosophical arguments about human nature and history. Nevertheless, the details themselves led the English to draw two basic conclusions about the continent. The first was that it contained tremendous diversity. In part because each English merchant or traveler wrote about the particular places and peoples that he encountered, the picture of Africa that came back to England was full of different kingdoms, languages and customs.
The key point, for Harpham, is that this cacophonous variety meant that “European observers never attempted to fashion a single essential image from their impressions of the peoples of Africa.” They did not see Africans as uniformly inferior, nor as entirely different. In fact, the second conclusion that Harpham believes English people drew from early accounts of Africa was that many of these diverse African societies were recognizable, even familiar.
Guineans, for example, might speak a different language, but it could be translated into ordinary phrases such as “Give me a knife” or “Give me bread.” They might not mint coins, but they used other forms of currency. They knew how to negotiate a deal and exercised good judgment. They lived together in villages and cities, and they organized themselves in empires, nations and kingdoms. “They could be incorporated into common conceptions of how people tended to live,” Harpham writes. “They fit well within a pattern of human life that European authors supposed to be more or less universal.”
Significantly, one element of that supposedly universal pattern of life was slavery. Perhaps even more significantly, English observers saw slavery among Africans as the product of civilization rather than savagery. African nobles were practically defined by their ability to own slaves. The main sources of those slaves were crime and captivity, and in both cases the practice could be said to preserve stability and civilization. The enslavement of criminals was a means of keeping social order, while the enslavement of war captives was a means of establishing peace—and was certainly preferable to the alternatives. “Those they kill, they eat; those they take, they make Slaves,” Richard Blome wrote in 1670; “and such are those, that the English, Dutch, and other Nations buy of them.” All of this fit perfectly with ideas of slavery derived from ancient Roman law, allowing the English to assimilate African enslavement easily into their own mental model of the world.
●
Harpham has a fine eye for historical ironies and the skill to balance those ironies until they build true suspense. According to his account, it was the very similarity that English observers perceived in African societies, not any stark sense of difference, that allowed them to displace their own sense of responsibility for slavery and embrace the African slave trade. Nevertheless, his book is ultimately frustrating on the decisive question of why the enslavement of Africans was established and sustained in England’s New World colonies. Even if a feeling of familiarity allowed English people to recognize African sources of slavery as legitimate, the English still had to see Africans as outsiders in order to take them as slaves.
Across world history, slave status has almost always been restricted to groups that a society considers outsiders, as with ancient Greeks and the people they called barbarians. In early modern Europe, outsider status was tied most tightly to religion. As Harpham notes, the countries of Christian Europe had somehow “come to a consensus never to enslave each other.” English armies did not enslave French prisoners of war. Yet outside the Christian sphere, the Roman conception of slavery as a legitimate result of crime or captivity was still seen to apply. Only at the end of the book, however, does Harpham note the central role that religion played in ideas about slavery during this period.
Harpham’s most controversial claim is that skin color had little to do with early English enslavement of Africans. According to Harpham, historians writing in the wake of the civil rights movement have been misled by their own concern with race and have misread the sources. “The blackness of the Africans was not often seen to be an urgent concern,” he writes. English observers mentioned it, to be sure, but they mentioned all kinds of things about Africans in their detailed accounts. In Harpham’s telling, skin color “was touched upon in items within lists, clauses within sentences, sentences within paragraphs, paragraphs within chapters, and chapters within immense and sprawling accounts.” This is nicely phrased, and it gestures at a valuable point. Yet it ignores the possibility that it was precisely as one element in a larger matrix of differences that skin color proved important in the development of American slavery.1
It was not an accident that ideas tying slavery specifically to race arose in the New World. Our lives are not just inheritance; they are also experience. Life was different for settlers in the colonies—not only socially and economically but also psychologically and intellectually. They were trying to erect a European social structure from scratch in a place that was functionally the frontier, beset by a bewildering array of opportunities and dangers. Even as their lives and societies were often fluid, they attempted to draw sharp lines dividing civilization from savagery, Christian from heathen, insider from outsider, freedom from slavery, and ultimately white from black.
By the 1660s, at the latest, slave status was being mapped clearly onto skin color. In 1661, as Barbados led the way to a black majority, its Parliament passed a slave code called “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes,” which described them as “an heathenish, brutish and an uncertaine dangerous kinde of people.” A year later, Virginia’s General Assembly enacted a law specifying that “children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman . . . shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother,” and setting a stiffer fine “if any christian shall committ ffornication with a negro man or woman.”
Harpham is aware of how the English colonies were developing over the second half of the seventeenth century, as many of them reoriented their society around African slavery. In fact, he suggests that the structure of ideas about slavery which he has uncovered in early modern England “served to mask some of the radical innovations that were at work in the Caribbean colonies” because, “if pressed, an Englishman could respond that slavery as it had been established there was little more than a new instance of an old pattern.” It may be that what I am looking for will find its proper place in Harpham’s next volumes. In this first one, however, Harpham only gestures at the rise of African slavery in the colonies, and at the new ideas about Africans and about slavery that it was generating. “Here what was needed,” he acknowledges near the end, “was the reason for which an entire order of persons who had been enslaved could never become free.”
●
In the end, what is most likely to linger from Harpham’s account is the irony that English people rested their enslavement of Africans on a sense of similarity rather than difference. Once they were able to assimilate African sources of slavery into their inherited ideas about the institution, then they were happy to acquire those slaves without any evident qualms. This shows the tremendous strength of traditional justifications of slavery and other forms of subordination in early modern Europe.
In that way, Harpham’s account helps us pry apart the overly easy identification of slavery with racism or white supremacy that many educated Americans hold today. He reminds us that slavery has been such a widespread practice throughout human history that it has rarely needed a particular racial ideology in order to take root. And his examination of early English ideas about enslavement shows that racism is not some transhistorical force dictating historical developments but has itself been the product of history, including the history of slavery. Nevertheless, the ancient practice of slavery clearly acquired a starkly racial dimension in the New World. Precisely when and how that happened is one of the problems that Harpham will have to address in his subsequent volumes, and to address it he will have to wrestle much more concretely than he has done so far with the shape that slavery took in the Americas, the role that it played in society, and the ways that it was justified and codified on the ground.
As he does so, Harpham will confront yet another irony in the history of American slavery. As long as Roman conceptions of slavery prevailed, with their emphasis on enslavement as a misfortune that might befall anyone, then it was hard to launch a moral movement against slavery as such. The conception of slavery that took hold in America, on the other hand, more closely resembled the ancient Greek notion of the natural slave, except justified along racial lines. This race-based justification of slavery, backed by pseudoscientific authority and written into law, gave rise to the largest slave system in the modern world and led to the degradation and dehumanization of an entire group of people. At the same time, identifying slavery so specifically with a certain subset of people inevitably raised questions: first about why that particular group should be so set apart; then about why any group of people should ever face that fate. Such questions would eventually generate a mass movement whose ultimate goal was not just the emancipation of millions of black slaves in the Americas but the abolition of all slavery, casting into opprobrium a practice that had previously persisted throughout much of world history.2 Yet the racial ideas that simultaneously supported and undermined American slavery managed to survive slavery’s end and have continued to warp our society ever since.
If Harpham seizes the opportunity to tell that story with the sweep and subtlety that it deserves, then there is every chance that his projected trilogy could end up being worthy of its celebrated model. Call it the Irony of Slavery.
The rise of racial slavery in the New World was one of the most significant developments in modern history, shaping the economy, society, politics and culture of at least four continents over the course of centuries. How and why did it happen? The answer to that question is essential to any full understanding of the world we inhabit today. It is not surprising, then, that historians have spent several generations trying to establish how it occurred.
Some form of forced labor has existed in most times and places throughout world history. But the story of New World slavery might be said to begin in the 1400s, when Portuguese and Spanish traders began to venture out into the Atlantic Ocean and down the African coast. They took over Atlantic islands such as the Canaries, the Azores and Madeira, where they introduced sugar production, but in Africa itself they were not strong enough to establish colonies and had to settle instead for trade relationships with the powerful kingdoms that controlled the coast. There they bought—or captured—Africans and brought them to their recently acquired islands, which soon became home to all the features that would characterize the Atlantic slave system: large landowners using enslaved black labor to grow crops (especially sugar) for export. Even before Columbus set sail, the Iberians had developed both an economic model and a supply chain for labor that they could easily redeploy across the Atlantic.
From there, the rise of African slavery in the Americas tends to get told as a global game of dominoes as European powers sought a steady labor supply for new settlements where they wanted to turn a profit. First the Spanish and the Portuguese brought African slaves to replace collapsing populations of Native American workers in their New World colonies. Then every other European empire did whatever it could to claim a piece of the action. The most important new entrants were the Dutch and especially the English, who eventually dominated the market and determined the shape that slavery would take in mainland North America.
The first enslaved Africans famously arrived in Virginia in 1619, brought by a Dutch captain who had taken them from a Portuguese slave ship sailing to New Spain. The first English colony to turn decisively toward slave labor was Barbados, which made the transition after starting to cultivate sugar in the 1640s. It would still take several more decades for the English themselves to become major slave traders, but once they entered the trade in earnest they quickly transformed it. Over the last 25 years of the seventeenth century, the English brought more than a quarter of a million Africans across the Atlantic, rapidly accelerating the development of colonial slavery into a dynamic capitalist enterprise. Every English colony from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean built its society and economy around racial slavery, with consequences that continue to reverberate today.
Now a new book, John Samuel Harpham’s The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, asks us to reconsider that standard account of events. Harpham does not discount economic or imperial explanations for the rise of New World slavery; what he suggests, instead, is that those explanations can make sense only within a culture where “slavery was available as an option.” His goal, as he puts it, is to discover “the reasons for which slavery was understood to be a status about which narrow-minded men could make calculations.”
The result is ironic and tragic in the way of the best history. Initially, Harpham claims, the English hesitated to embrace African slavery. Then, when they did, their decision was not based on any perceived racial difference or inferiority. It was based, instead, on something even more troubling: Harpham believes that English people enslaved Africans not because they were seen as different but because they seemed so very similar.
●
Harpham, who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard and now teaches at the University of Oklahoma, envisions his book as the first in a trilogy that promises to reinterpret the entire history of ideas about slavery in America from their early English origins to emancipation. His project is modeled explicitly on an existing series of books about the ideas behind the anti-slavery movement, David Brion Davis’s Problem of Slavery trilogy, which is considered one of the great scholarly achievements of the past century for the way it explored the cultural origins and social ramifications of anti-slavery thought.
In this first volume, however, Harpham is wrestling even more directly with another giant of American historical scholarship, Winthrop Jordan, whose first book, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812, was published to great acclaim in 1968. Harpham is expanding and to some extent revising the first part of Jordan’s book, which also deals with early English ideas about Africans. Harpham even draws one of his chapter titles directly from the corresponding section of White Over Black.
In that book, Jordan produced a complex and nuanced interpretation of English attitudes toward Africans in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet difference was the keynote of his account. “The Negro’s color set him radically apart from Englishmen,” Jordan wrote. “Africans were different from Englishmen in so many ways,” he continued. “From the first,” he concluded, “Englishmen tended to set Negroes over against themselves, to stress what they conceived to be radically contrasting qualities of color, religion, and style of life, as well as animality and a peculiarly potent sexuality.”
In addition, Jordan described the rise of African slavery in the English colonies as an “unthinking decision.” He would later come to regret the phrase for its suggestion that slavery was somehow an accident, but it aptly captured the lack of active thought that he saw at work in the process. The English had a preexisting conception of slavery; they saw an available group of outsiders—enslaved African war captives—who fit that conception; and they had a century of experience watching the Spanish and Portuguese taking that group of people as slaves. Initially, at least, it was not the sort of thing that seemed to demand much thought.
Harpham’s history reconsiders Jordan’s account of that “unthinking decision.” If the keynote of Jordan’s book was that early English observers saw Africans as different, the keynote of Harpham’s is that English people had a lot of different ideas: about Africa, about Africans, about skin color and about slavery. Nowhere was there broad agreement, he claims, except perhaps about the essence of slavery. But early English ideas about slavery were also different from what we might expect.
Throughout the period when colonial slavery was taking shape, Harpham explains, English writers still relied heavily on a conception of slavery that they inherited from ancient Rome. In contrast to the ancient Greek idea that some people could be “natural slaves,” a view most commonly associated with Aristotle, Roman law defined slavery as the product of convention. Individuals were naturally free, in this view, but could be reduced to slavery if they committed a crime or, more commonly, were captured in war. “In short,” Harpham writes, “slavery arose in Roman law as the result of history rather than nature, as a fact of modern life rather than a timeless feature of the universe.”
Accordingly, the central question for English writers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not what qualities made a person a natural slave—a question that might lead to a racial answer—but instead what circumstances allowed for enslavement. The English showed a special interest in this question, Harpham suggests, because they were simultaneously forging a national self-identity based on “the conviction that theirs was a nation dedicated to freedom.” This conviction grew out of internal developments, such as the decline of villeinage (a kind of serfdom), but it also took shape in direct contrast to England’s chief international rivals, the Spanish and the Portuguese.
Harpham shows that the English did not rush to imitate the Iberian example of enslaving Africans and Native Americans. Instead, they spent several decades defining themselves in opposition to it. In fact, the promise of English freedom became an important justification of colonization in the works of writers such as Richard Hakluyt, perhaps the most vigorous promoter of English imperial ambition in the Elizabethan era. According to Hakluyt, Native Americans who had experienced the “proude and bluddy governemente of the Spaniarde” would welcome the arrival of mild English rule and “crye oute unto us their nexte neighboures to comme and helpe them.” In Africa, too, Hakluyt and other colonial promoters envisioned a peaceful English presence that would be focused on commerce in goods rather than people. In the early 1620s, the Englishman Richard Jobson declined to acquire slaves on the Gambia River, declaring that “we were a people, who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did wee buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes.”
By the end of the seventeenth century, however, something had changed. The English had become so deeply entrenched in the slave trade that it seemed natural. How that transformation took place in such a short time is the question that drives Harpham’s book.
●
One curiosity of Harpham’s book is how closely it sticks with ideas in the Old World—what English people in England thought about slavery in the abstract or about Africans in Africa. It rarely ventures across the Atlantic, to the colonies where African slavery was actively taking shape as a matter of politics and practice. Yet this is precisely Harpham’s point. “It was not America that mattered most in these efforts to defend the development of American slavery,” he writes—“it was Africa.” In the decades before the English fully embraced the slave trade, he claims, there was a fundamental shift in their ideas about Africa, and particularly in their ideas about what Harpham calls “the sources of slavery in African life.”
As the English encountered Africa starting in the late sixteenth century, they wrote about it all the time. The specific nature of that writing was significant. It was done mostly by merchants, and it was designed to provide practical information about the potential for trade: minute and even mundane details about the geography, society, economy and government of particular places. These traders were not yet looking for people, just for gold and other goods.
The authors and compilers of such works rarely stepped back to draw broader generalizations about Africa as a whole, and never did they deploy Africa—as authors often deployed America—to make grand philosophical arguments about human nature and history. Nevertheless, the details themselves led the English to draw two basic conclusions about the continent. The first was that it contained tremendous diversity. In part because each English merchant or traveler wrote about the particular places and peoples that he encountered, the picture of Africa that came back to England was full of different kingdoms, languages and customs.
The key point, for Harpham, is that this cacophonous variety meant that “European observers never attempted to fashion a single essential image from their impressions of the peoples of Africa.” They did not see Africans as uniformly inferior, nor as entirely different. In fact, the second conclusion that Harpham believes English people drew from early accounts of Africa was that many of these diverse African societies were recognizable, even familiar.
Guineans, for example, might speak a different language, but it could be translated into ordinary phrases such as “Give me a knife” or “Give me bread.” They might not mint coins, but they used other forms of currency. They knew how to negotiate a deal and exercised good judgment. They lived together in villages and cities, and they organized themselves in empires, nations and kingdoms. “They could be incorporated into common conceptions of how people tended to live,” Harpham writes. “They fit well within a pattern of human life that European authors supposed to be more or less universal.”
Significantly, one element of that supposedly universal pattern of life was slavery. Perhaps even more significantly, English observers saw slavery among Africans as the product of civilization rather than savagery. African nobles were practically defined by their ability to own slaves. The main sources of those slaves were crime and captivity, and in both cases the practice could be said to preserve stability and civilization. The enslavement of criminals was a means of keeping social order, while the enslavement of war captives was a means of establishing peace—and was certainly preferable to the alternatives. “Those they kill, they eat; those they take, they make Slaves,” Richard Blome wrote in 1670; “and such are those, that the English, Dutch, and other Nations buy of them.” All of this fit perfectly with ideas of slavery derived from ancient Roman law, allowing the English to assimilate African enslavement easily into their own mental model of the world.
●
Harpham has a fine eye for historical ironies and the skill to balance those ironies until they build true suspense. According to his account, it was the very similarity that English observers perceived in African societies, not any stark sense of difference, that allowed them to displace their own sense of responsibility for slavery and embrace the African slave trade. Nevertheless, his book is ultimately frustrating on the decisive question of why the enslavement of Africans was established and sustained in England’s New World colonies. Even if a feeling of familiarity allowed English people to recognize African sources of slavery as legitimate, the English still had to see Africans as outsiders in order to take them as slaves.
Across world history, slave status has almost always been restricted to groups that a society considers outsiders, as with ancient Greeks and the people they called barbarians. In early modern Europe, outsider status was tied most tightly to religion. As Harpham notes, the countries of Christian Europe had somehow “come to a consensus never to enslave each other.” English armies did not enslave French prisoners of war. Yet outside the Christian sphere, the Roman conception of slavery as a legitimate result of crime or captivity was still seen to apply. Only at the end of the book, however, does Harpham note the central role that religion played in ideas about slavery during this period.
Harpham’s most controversial claim is that skin color had little to do with early English enslavement of Africans. According to Harpham, historians writing in the wake of the civil rights movement have been misled by their own concern with race and have misread the sources. “The blackness of the Africans was not often seen to be an urgent concern,” he writes. English observers mentioned it, to be sure, but they mentioned all kinds of things about Africans in their detailed accounts. In Harpham’s telling, skin color “was touched upon in items within lists, clauses within sentences, sentences within paragraphs, paragraphs within chapters, and chapters within immense and sprawling accounts.” This is nicely phrased, and it gestures at a valuable point. Yet it ignores the possibility that it was precisely as one element in a larger matrix of differences that skin color proved important in the development of American slavery.11. See Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black, 95-98.
It was not an accident that ideas tying slavery specifically to race arose in the New World. Our lives are not just inheritance; they are also experience. Life was different for settlers in the colonies—not only socially and economically but also psychologically and intellectually. They were trying to erect a European social structure from scratch in a place that was functionally the frontier, beset by a bewildering array of opportunities and dangers. Even as their lives and societies were often fluid, they attempted to draw sharp lines dividing civilization from savagery, Christian from heathen, insider from outsider, freedom from slavery, and ultimately white from black.
By the 1660s, at the latest, slave status was being mapped clearly onto skin color. In 1661, as Barbados led the way to a black majority, its Parliament passed a slave code called “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes,” which described them as “an heathenish, brutish and an uncertaine dangerous kinde of people.” A year later, Virginia’s General Assembly enacted a law specifying that “children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman . . . shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother,” and setting a stiffer fine “if any christian shall committ ffornication with a negro man or woman.”
Harpham is aware of how the English colonies were developing over the second half of the seventeenth century, as many of them reoriented their society around African slavery. In fact, he suggests that the structure of ideas about slavery which he has uncovered in early modern England “served to mask some of the radical innovations that were at work in the Caribbean colonies” because, “if pressed, an Englishman could respond that slavery as it had been established there was little more than a new instance of an old pattern.” It may be that what I am looking for will find its proper place in Harpham’s next volumes. In this first one, however, Harpham only gestures at the rise of African slavery in the colonies, and at the new ideas about Africans and about slavery that it was generating. “Here what was needed,” he acknowledges near the end, “was the reason for which an entire order of persons who had been enslaved could never become free.”
●
In the end, what is most likely to linger from Harpham’s account is the irony that English people rested their enslavement of Africans on a sense of similarity rather than difference. Once they were able to assimilate African sources of slavery into their inherited ideas about the institution, then they were happy to acquire those slaves without any evident qualms. This shows the tremendous strength of traditional justifications of slavery and other forms of subordination in early modern Europe.
In that way, Harpham’s account helps us pry apart the overly easy identification of slavery with racism or white supremacy that many educated Americans hold today. He reminds us that slavery has been such a widespread practice throughout human history that it has rarely needed a particular racial ideology in order to take root. And his examination of early English ideas about enslavement shows that racism is not some transhistorical force dictating historical developments but has itself been the product of history, including the history of slavery. Nevertheless, the ancient practice of slavery clearly acquired a starkly racial dimension in the New World. Precisely when and how that happened is one of the problems that Harpham will have to address in his subsequent volumes, and to address it he will have to wrestle much more concretely than he has done so far with the shape that slavery took in the Americas, the role that it played in society, and the ways that it was justified and codified on the ground.
As he does so, Harpham will confront yet another irony in the history of American slavery. As long as Roman conceptions of slavery prevailed, with their emphasis on enslavement as a misfortune that might befall anyone, then it was hard to launch a moral movement against slavery as such. The conception of slavery that took hold in America, on the other hand, more closely resembled the ancient Greek notion of the natural slave, except justified along racial lines. This race-based justification of slavery, backed by pseudoscientific authority and written into law, gave rise to the largest slave system in the modern world and led to the degradation and dehumanization of an entire group of people. At the same time, identifying slavery so specifically with a certain subset of people inevitably raised questions: first about why that particular group should be so set apart; then about why any group of people should ever face that fate. Such questions would eventually generate a mass movement whose ultimate goal was not just the emancipation of millions of black slaves in the Americas but the abolition of all slavery, casting into opprobrium a practice that had previously persisted throughout much of world history.22. This point is taken from Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (1947; Beacon, 2001), 110 n. 236. Yet the racial ideas that simultaneously supported and undermined American slavery managed to survive slavery’s end and have continued to warp our society ever since.
If Harpham seizes the opportunity to tell that story with the sweep and subtlety that it deserves, then there is every chance that his projected trilogy could end up being worthy of its celebrated model. Call it the Irony of Slavery.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.