Slavery

[Alex Linder]

Caribbean Project: Review: Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Hunter Wallace

David Brion Davis, "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery"



New World

In Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery, David Brion Davis sets the American South within the international context of the transatlantic slave trade and the rise and fall of other New World slave societies.

In 1770 on the eve of the American Revolution, African slavery was perfectly legal and stretched from the Canadian Maritime provinces to Argentina and back up the Pacific coast from Chile to Mexico.

By 1888, slavery had been abolished in every country in the Western hemisphere and left behind in its wake a legacy of millions of free negroes who had been deliberately turned loose from captivity by European and American abolitionists.

Inhuman Bondage is a sweeping attempt to explain how and why Europeans created these slave societies in the New World as well as how and why they systematically destroyed them over the course of the nineteenth century.

The Right Ingredients

As I understand the argument that Davis makes in this book, the rise of New World slavery was a perfect storm, or a coming together of a number of cultural and economic factors that evolved into an extremely profitable positive feedback loop:

(1) The Greco-Roman Heritage – In terms of the Western cultural inheritance, Ancient Greece and Rome were full blown slave societies, and “anti-slavery” was virtually unknown in Antiquity where the Romans had no inhibitions about forcing their slaves to fight to the death in the premodern version of the Superbowl.

The Greeks and Romans commonly enslaved “barbarians” for their labor needs: fellow Mediterranean peoples, northern peoples like the Celts, Germans, and Scythians, Jews and other Semites in the Near East, Berbers in North Africa, even a handful of sub-Saharan Africans, although the negro never had much of a real presence in the Greco-Roman world.

More importantly, Greek philosophers like Aristotle had argued that some men were born “natural slaves.” Plato had also argued that the majority of people have “bronze souls” or “iron souls.” This type of thinking would have a major intellectual impact on Western Europeans after Aristotle and Plato were rehabilitated during the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

(2) Christianity – The LORD, an even higher authority than Plato or Aristotle, makes it plainly clear on numerous occasions in the Holy Bible that slavery is justified.

For starters, He advises the Israelites to take slaves from among the numerous alien peoples in their midst. He doesn’t abolish slavery either in the Ten Commandments. And there is that thought provoking line from Noah in Genesis 9:25, “And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”

In the New Testament, Jesus never once condemns slavery, and his disciples Peter and Paul both positively affirm slavery and instruct slaves to obey their masters. St. Augustine later explained that this world has been corrupted by Original Sin and that slavery was a product of the Fall and that slaves should obey their masters in this world and focus on achieving their own eternal salvation in Heaven.

Like the Greeks and Romans, the Roman Catholic Church wasn’t a great bastion of anti-slavery either.

(3) The Arab Legacy – The Arabs greatly contributed to the rise of New World slavery in a number of ways.

It was the Arabs who brought sugarcane from the Persian Gulf to Iberia and Sicily where Europeans were first exposed to sugar. It was the Arabs who created the first sugarcane plantations in these areas. It was also the Arabs who first enslaved negroes en masse to work on their sugarcane plantations. The first negro slave revolt was in Basra in present day Iraq in 869-883 AD.

The Arabs also seem to have pioneered racial theories about black people. The Zanj were often described as being naturally submissive, grossly inferior, and among the dumbest people in the world. Significantly, they seem to have passed on their racial attitudes to the Spanish and the Portuguese during al-Andalus.

(4) The Jewish Contribution – It seems that the Arabs were the first to connect the Curse of Ham, in which Canaan was damned by Noah to be “the servant of servants” unto his brethren, with the particular idea that Canaan had been transformed into the first negro.

What’s more, it seems that the Arabs got this idea from the Jews, who somewhere in their various Talmudic scribblings and commentaries during the Middle Ages came up with the theological innovation of Canaan-as-negro. Somehow this idea was passed along to the Spanish and Portuguese and from them to other Europeans where it would later become the most popular defense of slavery in the Old South.

(5) Capitalism – In the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern Era, the Germans and Italians pioneered capitalism, and after the Crusaders were kicked out of Palestine, the Venetians invested their capital in creating sugar plantations in Sicily and Crete to cater to the expanding European market.

(6) Color Prejudice – Even before the Portuguese first encountered the negro when they discovered Guinea, “blackness” in Europe had always been associated with darkness, with the Devil, with the filthy laboring classes, so there were already prejudices against blackness and in favor of whiteness in Medieval Europe, particularly in England.

(7) The Ottoman Triumph – In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottomans and the Turks began their push into the Balkans – this cut the Italian slave traders off from their White slave markets along the the Black Sea. The English word “slave” is derived from Slav, but after the fall of Constantinople, the Slavic slaves would flow to Turkey and the Middle East instead of to Western Europe.

(8) The Columbian Exchange – As everyone knows, Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492 unleashed the most destructive virgin soil pandemic in world history, in which an estimated 90 percent of the Indian population of the Americas succumbed to European and African diseases.

This quickly created a severe labor shortage in the New World. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish banned the enslavement of Indians and turned to importing African slaves to work in their mines and on their sugar plantations in Hispanolia and the Greater Antilles.

(9) African Complicity – Arguably, the most important ingredient in the rise of New World slavery was the willingness of Africans to capture and sell millions of other Africans into slavery in exchange for European manufactured goods.

From Senegal to Angola, slavery was legal throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and millions of Africans had already been sold into slavery to the Arabs – either across the Sahara desert, or through ports in East Africa – by the time the Portuguese arrived there in the fifteenth century.

The European slave ships that arrived off the coast of West Africa and Central Africa were basically a flotilla of ABC liquor stores, pawn shops, gun shows, and dollar stores selling the Early Modern equivalent of bling and must have Nike Air Yeezy IIs. Their eager African business partners were the equivalent of the entrepreneurs you might find standing on the corner in a place like Bankhead Courts in Atlanta.

(10) Primates – Finally, it is probably significant that Europeans first encountered primates like monkeys, chimpanzees, and gorillas in West Africa and Central Africa, and this led to considerable speculation about the racial origins of Africans, and this undoubtedly made it easier to see negroes as being closer to animals and more suited to slavery than Europeans.

All of this crystallized at the right time to become New World slavery: the profit motive, an overabundance of land, an inexhaustible supply of cheap African slave labor, an insatiable demand for cheap labor after the decimation of the Indians, the capital intensive sugar plantation, the lack of any other source of cheap labor, color prejudice, racial stereotypes and racial theories about blacks, and a cultural heritage derived from Greco-Roman Antiquity and Christianity that positively affirmed slavery.

The Rise of New World Slavery, 1570 to 1776

We’ve already spent a considerable amount of time discussing the rise and spread of the plantation complex: the emergence of the prototype in Madeira, the Canary Islands, Principe, and São Tomé in the Eastern Atlantic off the coast of Africa, how the sugar plantation crossed the Atlantic and established a foothold in northeastern Brazil, and how Sephardic Jews who were driven out of Brazil played a decisive role in bringing it to English Barbados, which became the first “slave society” in the Americas, and the model for the spread of slavery through the British and French Caribbean.

Plantation slavery spread from Brazil and the Caribbean to the Guianas in northern South America and to North America in four areas: the Northern states, the Chesapeake, the Deep South (which was settled by colonists from Barbados), and Spanish Florida and French Louisiana. African slaves were also imported to Mexico, Central America, Peru, Gran Columbia, and Argentina.

Of the estimated 11 million Africans that were brought to the New World, 480,000 (a mere 5 percent of the total) went to British North America, 200,000 went to Mexico, 24,000 went to Central America, 545,000 went to Spanish America, but 3.6 million went to Brazil and another 4.53 million went to the Caribbean and the Guianas.

The Caribbean was the geographic center of New World slavery. It was also sharply divided between rival European mercantalist empires: the Spanish (Cuba and Puerto Rico), the French (Saint-Domingue, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Lucia), Britain (Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados, St. Kitts/Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, Trinidad, St. Vincent, Dominica, Grenada), the Dutch (Curaçao, St. Eustatius, Suriname, Berbice, Essequibo, Demerara), and the Danes (Danish Virgin Islands).

The Europeans each had their own slice of the “Golden Circle.” Far from being part of the “Third World,” the Caribbean was once the richest region in the Americas thanks to sugar and slavery, and was considered vastly more important by the European imperial powers than their North American colonies. The Dutch gave up New York for Suriname. The French gave up Canada to keep Guadeloupe and Martinique. The British even abandoned Philadelphia during the American Revolution to invade St. Lucia and to defend Jamaica.

As we have already seen, Barbados was the cultural hearth of the Deep South: racialism, slavery, white supremacy, the plantation system, and the slave code, not to mention other key aspects of our culture (including “whiteness” itself), were brought from Barbados to South Carolina, which was spawned as a supply colony for the British West Indies in 1670.

South Carolina, originally a marginal colony in the wider scheme of things (440,000 slaves were brought to all of British North America, as opposed to over 1 million to Saint-Domingue alone), would itself later go on to spawn what was by far the largest of all the slave states in the New World, the Confederate States of America, where by 1861 the original 480,000 slaves had grown to nearly 4 million slaves spread across the Cotton Kingdom from Virginia to Texas.

Although 95 percent of the slaves brought to the New World went to the Caribbean and Latin America, the slave population in the sugar colonies (with the exception of Barbados, and then only much later in the nineteenth century) wasn’t self sustaining and could only be maintained by constant fresh reinforcements from Africa. The American South was extremely unusual in that it was really the only place in the Americas where the negro thrived in his new environment.

The Fall of New World Slavery, 1776 to 1888

How did all of this come undone in a little over a century?

Modern economic historians have refuted the myth that African slavery was a backward, dying, feudal institution that was unable to compete with “free labor.” On the contrary, it turns out that slavery was more profitable and efficient than “free labor,” and that the plantation complex was much more like modern agribusiness than its “free labor” counterpart.

Slavery was thriving in Saint-Domingue when the Haitian Revolution exploded in 1791. It was thriving in Jamaica and the British West Indies when the slave trade was outlawed in 1807. It was thriving the American South – slaves prices had never been higher, and planters had never been wealthier – when slavery was destroyed during the War Between the States. Finally, slavery was thriving in Cuba and Brazil when it was abolished there in 1886 and 1888.

David Brion Davis is convinced that the demise of New World slavery is attributable to a moral revolution that swept the Western world in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century which created secular and religious versions of humanitarianism that were ultimately incompatible with slavery – before 1650, there was really never had been such thing as “anti-slavery,” or opposition to slavery on the basis of principle, and before 1750, there was no language of “natural rights” which could be mobilized to attack slavery.

The American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution – the whole so-called “Age of Revolution,” which lasted from approximately 1775 to 1848 – is what really destroyed New World slavery, not any inexorable economic decline. It polarized Europeans along ideological lines and fatally committed them to either Poison #1. utopian religious delusions or Poison #2. highminded abstract principles of liberty and equality which were extremely corrosive to slavery.

To name just a few examples, slavery was abolished in the American North during and shortly after the American Revolution, it was destroyed in Saint-Domingue by the Jacobins during the French Revolution who then imposed abolition on all the other French colonies, it was abolished in Britain after the Reform Act of 1832 expanded the electorate, in France and Denmark during the 1848 Revolutions, in the United States by religious and ideological inspired maniacs in 1865, and even in Cuba following the “Glorious Revolution” in Spain in 1868.

Great Britain was unquestionably the animating force (and British abolitionists were clearly inspired by Evangelical Christainity) behind the worldwide antislavery movement and destroyed its own colonies in three successive waves: the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, gradual emancipation from 1834 to 1838, and free trade in 1846. It was Britain which used its hegemony after the Napoleonic Wars to bully France, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil into abolishing the slave trade.

This was an early form of a moralizing hegemon imposing its bad ideas on the world. The whole Occident is suffering tremendously from BRA’s bad ideas in the 21st century.

Aftermath

These destructive new ideas decisively shaped the world that emerged in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery.

The “free labor” system was applied everywhere in the former slave states. “Liberty” was applied to negroes everywhere. In some cases, “democracy” and “equality” and “civil rights” were applied to negroes in the colonies, and in the most extreme case, which would be Haiti, white supremacy and imperialism were completely overthrown, and there was a fatal land redistribution to the Black Undertow which immediately brought civilization to a crashing end and created the Haiti we are all familiar with today.

It doesn’t matter that these terrible secular and religious humanitarian ideas never worked in practice and produced the social and economic calamity which we have labeled the Black Undertow that endures to the present day. The strength of a fantasy ideology or a religious delusion is that it is impervious to experience. It is irrefutable.

In a nutshell, that’s why the world is such a fucked up place today, and this book points us toward how it all got started.

[with this link I'm restoring the right to link to Occidental Dissent here at VNNF. I do not trust or like the squirrelly proprietor there, but he is doing high-quality work and if I'm going to post it, then I think it's only reasonable to link to it too]
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/201...world-slavery/

[andy]

Slave/Slavery From antiquity until approximately the 1600's slavery enslavement was the default existence for the vast majority of our people.In this modern age of interest and wage slavery we regard enslavement/slavery as the worse thing imaginable,but was it ? Obviously back in the ancient past it was the norm for our people and presumably there was "freedom" to breed.From there it must have been possible for children to become soldiers,sailors,blacksmiths what have you.Granted people did not live too long but this was true for every class.When one considers the modern world and the obligations and costs of maintaining a tolerable position in society was slavery such a bad thing ? Particularly for those undergoing it ?
I am not an advocate of slavery certainly not of racial rivals and aliens,I just wonder when slavery stopped being the norm and people became serfs and villains whether or not the quality of life improved.

[Matthaus Hetzenauer]

Slabery dis and slabery dat! Ah wants mah fo'ty acuhs an' mah mule!...dammit!

Oh, an' befo' ah fuhgitz: a yeah's worf of ebby nigga's fave'it dussurt too! ...you honka-ass muthafukkaz!





All fucking around aside, those with even the slightest, cursory knowledge of the world's great empires know that such civilizations couldn't possibly have come into existence without that "peculiar institution" having played such a major role. Whether or not slavery is morally reprehensible is secondary to the matter; the fact that the pratice enabled the great societies of the past to rise and flourish is undeniable. Besides, what better way to ensure full employment rather than have so many shiftless bastards on the dole...

[Warren Folks]

"The American South was extremely unusual in that it was really the only place in the Americas where the negro thrived in his new environment."

Figures

[Matthaus Hetzenauer]

Originally Posted by Warren Folks

"The American South was extremely unusual in that it was really the only place in the Americas where the negro thrived in his new environment."

Figures

He never had it so good and his life expectancy increased due to his having been afforded a better diet, not being in a state of constant war with other tribes, and not being forced to outrun lions, leopards and crocs at every turn in the bush or bend in the river. And I guarantee that given the choice, the average bushman would rather have been a captive of the White man rather than his "brutha." At least with the former his fears of being shoved into a pot and becoming someone's jungle stew dinner would've been allayed.

[Alex Linder]

Originally Posted by Matthaus Hetzenauer

Slabery dis and slabery dat! Ah wants mah fo'ty acuhs an' mah mule!...dammit!

Oh, an' befo' ah fuhgitz: a yeah's worf of ebby nigga's fave'it dussurt too! ...you honka-ass muthafukkaz!

All fucking around aside, those with even the slightest, cursory knowledge of the world's great empires know that such civilizations couldn't possibly have come into existence without that "peculiar institution" having played such a major role. Whether or not slavery is morally reprehensible is secondary to the matter; the fact that the pratice enabled the great societies of the past to rise and flourish is undeniable. Besides, what better way to ensure full employment rather than have so many shiftless bastards on the dole...

Except...the happiest people I have observed are German farmers. They run their own land. They are rich, but not because they love money (more than others do), rather they are materially successful because they are sober, careful managers and cautious investors/speculators. And they love what they are doing, and they do it with complete commitment of body, soul and mind. The richest Southern plantation owner ever heard of STILL had to have niggers around to make his money! That meant he had to hear niggers. To smell niggers. To look at niggers. To think about niggers. No matter how rich, he still had to fill his mind and senses with niggers. Only a Southerner could stand that, because he's got that British snob in him, and he loves lording it over others. That's my read, anyway.

Is not the German bauer/peasant/famer way better? Is it not self-evident that it is more desirable? Is it not stabler and healthier for all parties over the long term?

Aren't these bring-back-slavery types doing the same thing they find fault with in the north - putting money ahead of every other consideration?

[Matthaus Hetzenauer]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

Except...the happiest people I have observed are German farmers. They run their own land. They are rich, but not because they love money, rather they are sober, careful managers and cautious investors/speculators. The richest Southerner every heard of STILL had to have niggers around. To hear them. To smell them. To look at them. To be in the same environment with them.

Is not the German bauer/peasant/famer way better? How is it not more desirable?

Aren't these bring-back-slavery types doing the same thing they find fault with in the north - putting money ahead of every other consideration?

Obviously an obsession with slavery = money is despicable; nothing could be more jewlike. (Familiarize yourselves with the OT and the Talmud, folks -- no "holy" or instructional books, tracts, are more enamored of slavery and genocide than these two by mankind's "benefactors", the "Light unto the Nations.") But those concerned with building a better society, a greater civilization through the utilization of slavery aren't greedy in the monetary sense of the term; they can't be categorized in the same class as those looking to line their pockets.

[Steven L. Akins]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

Except...the happiest people I have observed are German farmers. They run their own land. They are rich, but not because they love money (more than others do), rather they are materially successful because they are sober, careful managers and cautious investors/speculators. And they love what they are doing, and they do it with complete commitment of body, soul and mind. The richest Southern plantation owner ever heard of STILL had to have niggers around to make his money! That meant he had to hear niggers. To smell niggers. To look at niggers. To think about niggers. No matter how rich, he still had to fill his mind and senses with niggers. Only a Southerner could stand that, because he's got that British snob in him, and he loves lording it over others. That's my read, anyway.

Is not the German bauer/peasant/famer way better? Is it not self-evident that it is more desirable? Is it not stabler and healthier for all parties over the long term?

Aren't these bring-back-slavery types doing the same thing they find fault with in the north - putting money ahead of every other consideration?

Prior to the advent of mechanized farming, it would have been impossible for a White Plantation owner to plant and harvest hundreds of acres of cotton on his own, even with the assistance of a large sized family. Picking cotton is hot, hard, back-breaking work. White people simply are not cut out for that type of labor. Blacks can take the heat and their skin is tougher, so they hold up better than Whites do to the type of physical abuse required to hand-pick cotton.

[Jimmy Marr]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

Is not the German bauer/peasant/famer way better? Is it not self-evident that it is more desirable?

Sure, but depending on their level of political empowerment, these farmers might fit the definition of slaves in other civilizations. Greece?

I don't know. Maybe its just a matter of semantics, but it seems to me like any society that dispenses with the ideology of equality is going to open to classification as slave based in some Jew's imagination.

[ernst blofeld]

[Alex Linder]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Marr

Sure, but depending on their level of political empowerment, these farmers might fit the definition of slaves in other civilizations. Greece?

I don't know. If you have land, you have crops and cattle and water. That's independence. If you need money to buy a pickup or four-wheeler, well, your cows bloop out fresh $1800 bills every spring. Your only real political need is to protect what you've got.

I don't know. Maybe its just a matter of semantics, but it seems to me like any society that dispenses with the ideology of equality is going to open to classification as slave based in some Jew's imagination.

Yeah, they'll start up the waterworks about oppression wherever the underscum, white or colored, gets treated the way sanity would advise.

[Jimmy Marr]

That's independence.

Yeah, but sooner or later some oppressor, like yourself, is going to come along and try to enslave them by limiting their breeding alternatives.

[Steven L. Akins]

Slavery - the last time niggers were ever worth anything.

[Jimmy Marr]

Negroes laboring in silence for fear of 'Tard Corral

[Alex Linder]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Marr

Yeah, but sooner or later some oppressor, like yourself, is going to come along and try to enslave them by limiting their breeding alternatives.

Farmers are professional racists. They understand what breed means. They're going to be the last to oppose a racialist regime.

[Jimmy Marr]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

Farmer's are professional racists. They understand what breed means. They're going to be the last to oppose a racialist regime.

Yeah, I know.

I read a little Hegel last night, and today I fancy myself a dialectician.

I think maybe Hegel gets a bad rap because of the way Marx applied his ideas?

I'm going to try to learn more about it. Someone told me earlier today that Orthodox Nationalist is a Hegelian scholar.

[Fred O'Malley]

You poor stupid mofos!

Ever since the uncivil war (which was in fact NOT a civil war but an invasion and destruction of a peaceful neighboring country) of northern aggression, all Amerikaws have been slaves to those in power via government force.

Do you hear me, yankees, you are slaves, and the only reason you don't know it is because you've been told you won.

Christ on a cracker, y'all are some fuckin' dumb.

[Donald E. Pauly]

Originally Posted by Fred O'Malley

You poor stupid mofos!

Ever since the uncivil war (which was in fact NOT a civil war but an invasion and destruction of a peaceful neighboring country) of northern aggression, all Amerikaws have been slaves to those in power via government force.

Do you hear me, yankees, you are slaves, and the only reason you don't know it is because you've been told you won.

Christ on a cracker, y'all are some fuckin' dumb.

Well said. Here is my butchered version of the quote that I heard.

"There are no slaves more pitiful than those who think that they are free."-unknown

[Fred O'Malley]

Yeppers, if they ever get over their giddiness at having "won" the civil war, and take stock of their lives and country, they will realize that their ancestors actually fought to enslave themselves and their progeny, forever, while butchering and raping their betters and the innocent.

They should be real proud.

[Jimmy Marr]

Do you hear me, yankees, you are slaves

I'm not sure who you're addressing, Fred, but if he has the power to put you in the 'Tard Corral, you might want to think it through a little more carefully.

I'm not trying to say you belong in the 'Tard Corral'. I'm just saying that anybody with the power to put you there isn't your slave, or even your equal, unless you have the power to reciprocate.