Read an Excerpt
Terms of Labor
Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor
By Stanley L. Engerman STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1999 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3521-6
CHAPTER 1
Slavery and Freedom in the Early Modern World
DAVID ELTIS
WHY IN THE LAST FOUR CENTURIES has the Western world developed the most extreme forms of both freedom and unfreedom, and what has this development to do with transatlantic migration, coerced and free? Assertions about the emerging uniqueness of the Western world's experience — or at least the part that had to do with freedom — were common in popular eighteenth-century literature, and as late as the mid-nineteenth century Southern United States newspapers could argue that slavery is "the natural and normal condition of the laboring man, white or black," and that free labor was an unfortunate "little experiment ... in a comer of western Europe," that had "failed dismally." Advocates of free labor agreed with all but the "failed dismally" part of this statement. Adam Smith, Arthur Young, and others had pointed out that all Africans, all Asians, and most of those in the Americas were, if not under slavery, at least unfree in the Western sense, and that free labor was a term that could be applied to only a small percentage of the world's population — almost all of it living in northwestern Europe and related settlements.
Western exceptionalism was not of recent origin, nor was it shared equally by all of western Europe. The observations of Smith and others would have had almost the same validity if made three centuries earlier — at the time of the Columbian contact. There were certainly more slaves in southern Europe in 1492 than in 1772 — slaves made up ten percent of the population of Lisbon in the 1460s. However, north and northwest Europe had been free of chattel slavery since the Middle Ages. Indeed the incidence of chattel slavery everywhere in western Europe had declined irregularly since Roman times, but the pace of the decline had been greater in northern than in southern Europe. More generally, free labor in the modern sense scarcely existed anywhere before the nineteenth century, but by 1800 the coercive element imposed on those who worked for others had been in decline for a better part of a millennium. From the Neolithic Revolution to the Middle Ages, every society had had some slaves. Suddenly there was a culture, and the larger part of a sub-continent, that did not. Perhaps we should regard abolition as originating before 1500, not after 1750.
Why did this trend fail to continue when Europeans established transoceanic societies? Social structures and the ideologies that sustain them have proved to be the most malleable of the cultural traits that migrants carry with them. But Europeans not only reaccepted slavery in the face of New World realities, they gave it dimensions that had not previously existed. All the major slave societies in human history have been either European or under European control — Greek, Roman, Brazilian, Caribbean, and United States South. Three of these emerged in the Americas in the aftermath of European overseas expansion, and the slavery they imposed involved exploitation more intense than had ever existed before. It is inconceivable that any societies in history — at least before 1800 — could have matched the output per slave of seventeenth-century Barbados or the nineteenth-century United States. European exceptionalism thus extended beyond the slave-free dichotomy noted by Young and Smith in that the slavery European migrants imposed had a large economic element that made it totally different from what existed in non-European societies — at any time. But if there were no slave plantations in the pre-contact Americas and Africa, neither was there a counterpart in the European Americas to the open systems of slavery that existed in Africa, the indigenous Americas, and the Middle East. Peoples of African descent — the only peoples brought across the Atlantic as slaves — had small chance of non-slave status, and smaller again of full membership in European settlement societies.
In Europe itself, on the other hand, the entrenchment of certain individual freedoms was such that there were frequently doubts about the legal status of those few enslaved peoples brought to Europe from the slave Americas. The slavery that evolved in the Americas in the three centuries between Columbus and Arthur Young was imposed by the very countries that occupied the "free" enclave to which the latter drew attention. It evolved during the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment — shifts in European thought that helped the rights of the individual to evolve into recognizably modem form. In summary, at the end of the fifteenth century slavery did not exist in most of western Europe. At the end of the eighteenth century, it still did not exist in western Europe, but it had greatly intensified and expanded in those parts of the non-European world that Europeans had come to dominate. Europe was exceptional in the individual rights that it accorded its citizens, and in the intensity of its slavery, which, of course, was reserved for non-citizens.
I
Free and Coerced Migration
In the early years after Columbian contact it was by no means clear that a paradox of the scale and type suggested above would develop. Tables 1 and 2 chart the divergence of Europeans in Europe and of Europeans overseas. In table 1 the African arrivals in column 1 and the European departures in column 3 provide a rough sum of migration into each national jurisdiction in the Americas, whereas the sum of columns 2 and 3 gives the numbers carried on board the ships of each major national carrier. Table 2 reduces some of the raw estimates in table 1 — specifically the number of slaves carried — to percentages. Europeans took African slaves to the Americas and enslaved the Amerindians that they found there from the beginning. But initially, northwestern Europeans were little involved in transoceanic migration, and the proportion of Spanish- and Portuguese-controlled migration comprising slaves before 1530 was little different from the proportion of the Iberian population that was enslaved. Moreover, the institution of indentured labor — seen by many scholars as temporary slavery, and under which most English made their transatlantic passage between 1650 and 1780 — was virtually unknown to Spanish and Portuguese migrants of the early modem period. Elaborate systems of dependency bound the majority of Iberian migrants to their social superiors, but these ties were not well suited to extracting intensive labor in mines and on plantations and were never used as such. After 1540 the transatlantic slave trade increased markedly with the result that between 1492 and 1580 — covered by panel 1 of table 1 — almost one quarter of the migrants to the New World were African slaves.
Panels 2 to 4 of table 1 show that after 1580, as more of the Americas came under European control and as the control of transatlantic migration passed steadily from southern to northwestern European hands, the coercive element in the migrant flow increased. Table 2 shows that the slave component increased from less than one quarter between 1492 and 1580 to nearly three quarters between 1700 and 1780. With few exceptions it would seem that within three generations of Columbian contact Europeans imposed or at least accepted slavery wherever they settled outside Europe. At the same time the trend toward less coercion within Europe continued unabated. Of the 23 percent of transatlantic migrants that were not slaves in the 1700 — 80 period, most crossed the ocean under indenture, or carrying a "labor debt." Indentured servitude grew out of the annual master-servant contract in English agriculture. However, the length of the term and the master's power that evolved in the Americas would not have been tolerated within Britain itself. The position of the servant was not only inconsistent with modem conceptions of free labor, it was at odds with concepts of full membership of the community that held in early modern Britain.
The trend toward a large African component in transatlantic migration continued after 1780. By 1820, just prior to a transatlantic shift from Europe that saw over 50 million Europeans relocate in the Americas in less than a century, 90 percent of those coming across the Atlantic were African, not European. The peak years of the transatlantic slave trade, say 1680 to 1830, were sandwiched between early Iberian, then English emigration on the one side, and the later mass migration emanating from first northern and then southern Europe on the other. The forced, African component was much larger than the European component before the nineteenth century and occurred in part because of the voluntary nature of the latter. And much of the later European migration occurred because abolition denied employers in the Americas access to slaves.
The shift north in the control of migration was very pronounced. Before 1580 the Iberian nations accounted for almost all transatlantic movements of peoples. By 1700 to 1760 on the other hand, Britain, France, and the Netherlands were carrying twice as many people across the Atlantic as were the Iberians, with the British alone carrying nearly half of everyone shipped. Except for the Spanish, all European nations carried more Africans than Europeans to the Americas in the first three centuries after Columbian contact, but it was the nations of northwestern Europe that carried the most Africans and the most bound Europeans. Despite the size and high scholarly profile of British migration, the British actually carried three Africans to the New World for every European down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and almost nine out of every ten people on British ships before 1800 were there under some obligation to labor for others upon their arrival in the Americas. It was the northwestern Europeans in particular who were likely to impose slavery or employ indentured labor whenever they found themselves in transoceanic lands. Yet over the preceding three centuries, it was these very nations that had developed concepts of the modem liberal state (and notions of personal freedom) that have become central parts of the western cultural domination of the late twentieth-century world.
Both the predominant labor regime and the nationality of the leading carrier were heavily influenced by exports from the Americas. Coerced and non-coerced migrant streams alike gravitated toward export-producing regions. Plunder and trade may have dominated the early decades of European expansion, but the main focus quickly became production, and between 1500 and 1760 the peak decades for migration within each national group coincided broadly with peak years of exports produced by coerced and free migrants and their descendants. Despite much scholarly attention, trade with indigenous peoples in the Americas was trivial. And in Africa, while African-produced gold predominated before 1700, the raison d'etre of the slave trade, which after 1700 became many times more valuable than gold, was the production of commodities in the European-dominated Americas. Long-distance migration in the pre-contact Americas and within Africa, or indeed Asia too, had never been as closely associated with commerce and production and the intensive forced involvement of other peoples. The terms of the charter for the Virginia Company of 1612 and the Royal African Company 60 years later are similar in the sense that the companies expected to profit from the production of goods on the other side of the Atlantic. If transatlantic migration was an extension of migration within Europe, then productive enterprises located across the Atlantic, whether they used slave or non-slave labor, were initially very much replicas of Old World organizations. They drew upon the same pools of capital, management expertise, and in the non-slave sector, markets for European labor.
Thus it is not difficult to see why slaves formed an increasing proportion of transatlantic migration down to the nineteenth century, and but for abolition, might have done so down to the twentieth. From the standpoint of New World users of labor, slavery was an institutional arrangement particularly well suited to both transoceanic transportation and the kinds of tasks necessary to produce most New World exports. The best data concern British-directed migration. After an early period without a dominant crop, during which English settlement hung in the balance, tobacco and sugar exports correlated well with the movement of both Europeans and Africans to the English Americas. Similarly, the early Portuguese slave trade was tied to bullion exports from Spanish America and Brazilian sugar production. The Dutch were the only exceptions, in that (leaving aside the temporary Dutch occupation of northeastern Brazil) production in the Dutch Americas was trivial until the development of Surinam in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Yet, as with the Portuguese, prior to the English Navigation Acts and Colbert's reforms of the 1660s, the Dutch organized, fetched, and carried for other nations.
The advantages of slave labor over free were not confined to relative productivity in the plantation Americas. Potentially, at least, slave labor was cheap to obtain in the Old World, and cheap to transport relative to free. Societies in all parts of the world have always generated criminals and prisoners of war, the conversion of whom into full chattel slaves could have occurred with few costs beyond those normally involved in keeping order and waging war. In addition, as millions of Africans found out, the preferences of involuntary migrants could be ignored during the transatlantic voyage. The crowding, feeding, selection and organization of people into barracoons and ships that followed from the voicelessness of slaves translated into large savings in migrants per ton. On the American side, because a buyer of a slave obtained the balance of a life of labor instead of a fixed term of years (and would be prepared to pay more for the former), transatlantic slave merchants could afford to organize longer and more costly voyages and thus draw on a wider range of provenance zones. It is thus not slavery that is difficult to understand, but rather the ethnicity of the slaves. In no case were Europeans brought as slaves and, apart from occasional members of an African elite on a business, diplomatic, or educational visit to Europe, Africans were never carried over as anything other than slaves. The switch from European to African migration thus also implied a switch from non-slave to slave labor in the dominant export sector. If the traffic in people from Africa to the Americas had been restricted to shorter terms and voluntary recruitment, it would have no doubt started later than the slave trade (if at all) and carried fewer people.
But why use Africans instead of Europeans? And, to pose a very much related question, why do so without any self-questioning — given the long absence of slavery from northwestern Europe? The divergence of slave and non-slave regimes within the European world via the revival of slavery and its imposition on the Americas is extraordinary. On the continent of Europe, Bartolomé de las Casas and, later, Jean Baptiste du Tertre encouraged reflection, and in the former case real change in the way aboriginal peoples were treated, but both accepted the idea that some peoples — specifically Africans — were natural slaves. Samuel Johnson's question, why "drivers of Negroes" should make "the loudest yelps for liberty," was not even posed more than a century earlier as the English Commonwealth, fresh from overcoming the tyranny of the Crown, vigorously laid out the foundations of a Caribbean slave empire. Some English Levellers were prepared to countenance slavery as a punishment for Englishmen, though unlike African slavery in the Americas this never became a reality. In the early- and mid-seventeenth century it was the remnants of villeinage in England rather than the emergence of chattel slavery in the Americas that preoccupied English observers. More than a century later, as their slave empire approached its zenith, the British could still sing "Rule Britannia" including the line "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves" with no sense of irony.
II
Gender in Europe and Africa
A parallel situation existed with respect to European gender roles in that the scope for individual action that evolved in northwestern Europe in the early modem period was much more fully developed for males than for females. Women may have had slightly better occupational opportunities than they were to have during and after the Industrial Revolution, but they were hugely underrepresented in all skilled occupations and professions in seventeenth-century England and the Netherlands. Likewise their legal rights were better than they were to become under the nineteenth century marriage property acts, but again primogeniture practices throughout the West — to take just one example — denied them anything approaching a legal status that matched that of males. Women were clearly not slaves in the sense that non-Europeans were to become. In addition, women in northwest Europe had significant reproductive rights compared to non-European women, particularly with respect to whether to marry and the choice of mate if they elected marriage. Yet the fact remains that the substance as well as the discourse on marriage that emerged in the pre-nineteenth century West demonstrated an unawareness of gender inequality. As with the slavery issue, even radical groups shared mainstream attitudes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Terms of Labor by Stanley L. Engerman. Copyright © 1999 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
