AHR Forum
Slavery at Different Times and Places
STANLEY L. ENGERMAN
THE TITLE OF THE SESSION at which these papers were originally presented, "Looking
at Slavery from Broader Perspectives," can refer to at least three different issues.
First, slavery has been one of the most ubiquitous of human institutions, and has
existed in many places. It has been present in societies dominated by all major
religions and ideologies, and had legally lasted in some places into the second half
of the twentieth century—if not more informally in places until the present day.
Although there are important differences in its economie and legal basis, certain
characteristics regarding who could be enslaved or who could be bought and sold
had important similarities, and the study of these differences and similarities
provides a useful basis for numerous comparative studies related to the understanding of human behavior and social institutions. Second, slavery, when it existed,
should not be examined in isolation from other institutions and happenings at that
or other times. Thus it is important to trace the various linkages of slavery with the
nonslave aspects of different societies. Third, related to the second, the previously
sharp line between slavery as the evil and other labor and social systems that are
therefore seen as quite different, and thus somehow more acceptable, has now
become blurred, pointing to the usefulness of more detailed comparisons of the
legalities and actualities of various types of social and labor institutions.1
One basic problem that must be dealt with is the precise definition of slavery and,
correspondingly, of nonslavery. Definitions are generally a rather dull topic, but, in
the case of slavery, they have been central to the understanding of nonslavery or
freedom. Any specific definition of slavery has legal, cultural, political, and
economie aspects, and it is often hard to know exactly where to draw the line among
labor institutions as well as between legal slavery and the use of slavery as a
metaphor for any form of human poverty and domination. If slavery is regarded as
a unique mode of control of individuals, this would seem to make all nonslavery
appear as freedom and, therefore, to be regarded as a progressive and desirable
development. If however, slavery is regarded as only one part, or one end, of a
spectrum of controls, then some would argue that this makes slavery seem less evil
and more benign than it was, compared to other forms of social control.
The many past and present uses of the analogy of slavery in describing social and
labor systems suggests that few, if any, of slavery's controls are by themselves
1 See the essays in Terms of Labor: Slavety, Selfdom and Free Labor, Stanley L. Engerman, ed.
(Stanford, Calif., 1999).
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481
unique. Nevertheless, the use of the term slavery as a descriptive noun means, as
David Brion Davis suggests, that slavery is usually considered to be the greater evil,
although it remains unclear by how much. Nor, as Davis allo suggests, is it clear that
individual ownership must have always been necessarily worse for the people than
absolute control of the entire population by a state's political apparatus.
Part of the problem of defining and comparing slavery and freedom is indicated
by Davis's description, based on the writings of Ruth Karras, of the ending of
medieval slavery. 2 Slavery ended on economic grounds, in this argument, when
there was no longer a surplus produced by slaves that made it profitable for owners.
The ending of the need to use slavery to get people to labor occurred when all
people, free as well as enslaved, produced only at a subsistence level of income. In
such circumstances, freedom and liberty are not conditions of any great economic
or political advantage to the laborer or to the landowner, since either case implies
coercion of all labor, the mechanism now being hunger and starvation, not force. In
this sense, slavery would end when the need to labor to achieve subsistence by the
free population occurs because of the natural constraints related to hunger. This is
one example of restricted gains to be expected with freedom from slavery. Davis
notes other cases, including those in which ending slavery implies an acceptance of
Spiritual Bondage, which some, of course, might still consider freedom if it was
voluntarily accepted. In many societies, freedom via manumission still implied
obligations to former masters. Thus the end of legal enslavement, to an individual
or society, need not mean unrestricted freedom in the most meaningful sense of the
word. 3 The relation of emancipation to the disappearance of the economie surplus
has long been argued. To Moses Finley, the decline in ancient slavery was due to the
disappearance of the surplus, while George Tucker and Abraham Lincoln, among
others, used a similar argument to predict the date of the probable demise of
Southern slavery in the United States in the antebellum period. 4 Indeed, the
influential writings of the Dutch ethnographer H. J. Nieboer argued that the
existence and the ending of slavery would be based on the possible surplus of
production above subsistence, with higher surpluses making slavery more probable. 5
There is a related problem in defining and understanding slavery that is seldom
discussed, since it obviously does not apply to New World slavery, which was clearly
involuntary in its origin and continuation. Elsewhere, however, there were frequent
examples of what can be described as voluntary slavery, of individuals and/or their
family members being sold into slavery, in order to avoid starvation, murder,
infanticide, abandonment, human sacrifice, or related circumstances. Similarly, in
some explanations of the rise of serfdom, emphasis is given to the desire or
requirement of the serf to obtain political and economic protection from more
Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven, Conn., 1988).
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982),
240-61.
4 M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London, 1980), 123-49; George Tucker, Progress
of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years (1855; rpt. edn., New York, 1964), 108-18;
and Roy Basler, ed., The Collected Papers of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), 181.
5 H. J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague, 1900), 169, 296,
425-26.
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powerful authorities. How is the choice to become a slave or a serf to be evaluated,
since in Western philosophy it has long been argued that the right to enslave (and
also to kill) oneself was prohibited? Are there any conditions under which we would
regard such enslavement as acceptable? For example, while voluntarily enslavement
tended to be more frequent in Asia and Africa, it was no longer formally approved
in early modern Europe, where a similar set of conditions led to infanticide and
child abandonment, not enslavement. Shouldn't we try to better understand the
conditions that made, at that time, slavery seem the lesser evil and voluntary
enslavement a desired choice for individuals to make?
This question of voluntary slavery has certain contemporary implications, given
Davis's discussion at the end of his article on the present-day role of multinational
corporations as users of what are called virtual slaves. Certainly, working conditions
are difficult, but the willingness of members of these populations to accept them
suggests the belief that, given current political and economic realities, the
consequences of what we consider to be a more moral set of actions may not be
regarded as an unmixed blessing. As in the case of slavery in the Americas, we tend
to regard those buying slaves as committing a greater evil than those selling, in
paying for and using the enslaved to produce in order to make profits. Less is often
said about the role of the sellers of slaves, but without them, obviously, the slave
trade and slavery would not have existed. Why were some people willing to enslave
and to sell other people? This may be as puzzling to understand as why some people
were willing to sell themselves into slavery. Until we can better understand the
nature of the alternative available at any time, however, we may find it difficult to
appreciate the social and economic problems that freedom creates.
We have recently learned more about the nature of the origins of the slave trade
within Africa, with the role of African agency as enslavers and buyers and sellers of
people, while others in Africa were being enslaved and sold. There was, in Africa
and elsewhere, a relation between slavery and the development of states and of
increasing wealth. The basis of such a willingness to sell people (as also had taken
place among Europeans, who were earlier willing to enslave other Europeans and
later still willing to kill them), whether for economic, political, or religious reasons,
did vary over time and disappear in some areas, but the long persistence of a
willingness to enslave, and its importance to many societies, is as clear as it remains
difficult to explain, even on what some might regard as purely economic grounds.6
Debates on the link of racism and slavery have a long history, and certainly the
relationship seems clear to many in the modern world. Yet it is useful to remember
that the specific outcome of racism is not always obvious, and detailed examination
of particular historical events is important. At times, racism is necessary for slavery,
providing the basis for the enslaveable outsider. Yet, as William Evans has
indicated, who can be acceptably considered to be an outsider has varied historically.7 The insider and outsider distinction itself may imply a rather wide variety of
different social outcomes. Europeans, after about the start of the thirteenth
6 David Eltis, "Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An
Interpretation," AHR 98 (December 1993): 1399-1423.
7 William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of
the Sons of Ham," AHR 85 (February 1980): 15-43.
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century, began to regard other Europeans, whom they were still willing to kill, burn,
torture, and pillage, as now being unenslaveable.
Racism, moreover, did not always lead to a desire to enslave and to increase the
numbers enslaved. Some variants of racism led to antislavery arguments, or at the
least to the argument to keep slaves out, either to encourage settlement by
nonslaves or else to permit a more homogeneous society for the present population.
In the Americas, the argument to restrict slavery by limiting immigrants from Africa
is found rather early and continued through the ending of the slave trade, forming
an important part of the antislave trade and antislavery crusades. In the United
States, the Northern antislavery movement also included an anti-black component,
as it did elsewhere in the Americas.
The complexities of racism can be illustrated by the Australian experiences with
a particular form of coerced labor, indentured labor from the Pacific Islands, used
to produce sugar in Queensland between 1870 and 1900. 8 Racism at first led to the
purchase (or, some claim, kidnapping) and importing of contract labor; then, when
a generation or so later a white Australia was desired, racism meant keeping the
islanders out, forcing the return of those already there, and paying subsidies to
white producers of sugar. Here, clearly, racial attitudes persisted, but without
leading to an unvarying set of actions over time regarding labor institutions. And in
these debates, there were even some estimates introduced of the probable costs to
white Australians of the second racist policy, exclusion, because of the higher price
of sugar necessarily paid to support production by whites.
There is a central paradox pointed to by Davis, one that had been earlier raised
by Nieboer. Nieboer argued that very poor societies would not have slavery, since
they could not generate the surplus production that would make ownership of
human chattels worthwhile. Slavery would therefore exist only in societies in which
levels of income rose above subsistence, meaning that productive progress would
lead to the rise of slavery. Davis notes that the European nations most involved in
the transatlantic slave trade had high levels of cultural and economic achievement,
which might be considered to be a violation of the spirit of the Enlightenment hope
that all good things would go together. Unfortunately, this paradox can be found in
many other cases, with a rather pointed nonslave example provided by Orson
Welles in the movie The Third Man (1949). 9 Justifying his work in the black market
in post–World War II Vienna, Welles's character, Harry Lime, comments that while
in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder,
bloodshed, they also produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and
what did they produce?—the cuckoo clock. Whatever the accuracy of Welles's
account, this paradox, seen in many slave and nonslave societies, is clearly not an
infrequent historical development, whether in regard to cultural, political, or
economic factors.
I would also like to make explicit another point implicit in Davis's proposals to
broaden historical coverage by calling for a more systematic linking of the study of
8 See Report of the Royal Commission on the Sugar Industry, Government of the Commonwealth of
Australia (1912), particularly xx, xxi, 553.
9 Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (London, 1990), 450-51.
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Stanley L. Engerman
slavery with the study of abolition and with the study of post-emancipation
adjustments in ex-slave societies. By learning more about the behavior of ex-slaves
and examining their behavior when at least some of the previous legal restrictions
were removed, we should also learn much more about the impact of slavery and its
complex psychological and social effects. This would entail the examination of the
rather different circumstances of life under slavery (urban, small farm, or large
plantation, for instance) in conjunction with the post-emancipation responses. We
would not expect the latter to be unrelated to the events of the preceding centuries.
This need not be simple and direct, since both in the discussion linking the slave
family and the black family today and in the examination of the development of
twentieth-century racism, detailed studies remind us that the long period of racial
segregation and legal discrimination, as well as the prior slave era, had a substantial
impact on the emergence of our contemporary conditions.
Looking at post-emancipation adjustments by different societies will also help us
begin to work on an answer to Davis's last question. One characteristic of the study
of post-emancipation societies is the opinion that such dramatic changes as
emancipation had outcomes that were ultimately discouraging and disappointing
for just about everyone. The optimistic predictions for a successful future (as with
those for many other social and political changes) were seldom realized, and, while
things may not have really gotten worse, many problems persisted and things
seldom got to be as good as hoped for. It is these failures that generally seem to
have attracted attention. Perhaps these so-called lessons, pessimistic as they appear,
have influenced subsequent concerns and evaluations of policies to deal with
contemporary conditions. What is called apathy may be due as much to the
pessimism generated by the perceived negative outcome of earlier changes as to
indifference or cynicism about the need for societal changes. The focus on negative
aspects of past changes, whether by those who had their fears confirmed or else
their fondest hopes left unrealized, may, however, lead to an understatement of
what was accomplished. This may have had some unfortunate effects in discussions
of policies for the future. Maybe more studies of past changes such as abolition and
emancipation, incomplete successes though they often seem, can provide important
insights and understanding concerning what can feasibly be done to bring about
social improvement, the goal of which is, after all, why we regard the study of past
slavery as being of such importance.
Stanley L. Engerman is John H. Munro Professor of Economics and Professor
of History at the University of Rochester. Among his publications are Time on
the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavety, with Robert W. Fogel
(1974), Historical Guide to World Slave,. y, edited with Seymour Drescher (1998),
and the three-volume Cambridge Economic Histoty of the United States, edited
with Robert E. Gallman (1996-2000). After receiving a PhD in economics from
Johns Hopkins University in 1962, Engerman began work in economie history.
For the past decades, his major field of interest has been the study of slavery
and other forms of labor institutions.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2000