The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (The David Brion Davis Series) - Softcover

Miller, Joseph C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300113153 ISBN 13: 9780300113150

Verlag: Yale University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Why did slavery—an accepted evil for thousands of years—suddenly become regarded during the eighteenth century as an abomination so compelling that Western governments took up the cause of abolition in ways that transformed the modern world? Joseph C. Miller turns this classic question on its head by rethinking the very nature of slavery, arguing that it must be viewed generally as a process rather than as an institution. Tracing the global history of slaving over thousands of years, Miller reveals the shortcomings of Western narratives that define slavery by the same structures and power relations regardless of places and times, concluding instead that slaving is a process which can be understood fully only as imbedded in changing circumstances.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph C. Miller is T. Cary Johnson Jr. Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia and a pre-eminent historian of world slavery. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

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The Problem of Slavery as History

A GLOBAL APPROACHBy JOSEPH C. MILLER

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Yale University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11315-0

Contents

Preface.................................................................ix1 The Problem of Slavery as History.....................................12 History as a Problem of Slaving.......................................363 Slavery and History as Problems in Africa.............................734 Problematizing Slavery in the Americas as History.....................119Appendix: Schematic Historical Sequences of Slaving.....................163Notes...................................................................173Index...................................................................211

Chapter One

The Problem of Slavery as History

Slavery was and is a tragedy. It provokes outrage among the modern heirs to its divisive damages, as it should. All of us, whether white or black or merely observers to its racialized polarities, are in that same agonized company. These modern legacies of the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas and in Europe remain an emotional field of battle in the culture wars of modern nations. For racially identified descendants of the enslaved in the present, slavery in the past provokes animated claims for justice, apologies, and financial reparations. The complementing heritage on the part of those who seem potential beneficiaries of the slaving past has long provoked equally intense denials, from descendants of planter families to citizens of former slaving ports like Nantes, Liverpool, and Warwick, Rhode Island, to insurance companies, banks, and universities, and to many communities in modern Africa. Only recently have families and institutions begun to acknowledge the intricate embrace of slavers and enslaved in the New World. Everyone in the slaveholding colonies and countries of the Americas, and in the slaving centers in Europe, in one way or another was implicated. It is also now becoming clearer how many people in Africa bear parallel legacies from their own slaving pasts.

Important as these neo-abolitionist politics may be today, their portrayals of "slavery as an institution" transcending time and space have frozen the dynamics of slaving in most parts of the world as a historical process. The prevailing concept of institutionalized slavery in fact primarily represents abolitionist depictions of the U.S. antebellum South, with the enslaved as one-dimensional victims of similarly one-dimensional brutal masters. The whip is the dominating symbol. In American English, Simon Legree is a trope for an abuser. Emblematic fictionalized mothers sacrifice infants to save them from these horrors.

Without diminishing the domineering excesses that the vulnerability of the enslaved encouraged—or the rapes, psychological abuses, maiming, and deaths—these stereotypes have also inhibited academic understandings of slaving as a subject of intellectual inquiry. It is the intellectual challenge of thinking about slavery outside the box of contemporary politicization that I want to introduce in this chapter. Then I will present three efforts to apply an alternative understanding of slaving, as a historical strategy, and enslavement as a human experience prior to the personal brutalities, to selected, illustrative aspects of the history of the world. The last of these applies this global approach to slaving to the familiar, seemingly paradigmatic slavery of the modern Americas, concluding with reasons why this unique North American warping of a practice of introducing outsiders into local fields of political competition led, for the first time, to its institutionalization, and thereby finally to its abolition.

To problematize slaving as a historical strategy asks readers to suspend the images of slavery conventional in modern popular culture—in the United States, essentially African-American men working in the cotton fields of the antebellum South; in England or France, African men toiling in canebrakes under a scorching Caribbean sun; and for others, perhaps girls and women secluded and seduced in exotic harems somewhere in a sexualized Muslim palace. The considerable company of scholars who think about the subject professionally will find similar challenges to their essentially sociological assumptions about "slavery as an institution," "slave societies" or "societies with slaves," "slave modes of production," forms of "unfree labor," "slave/ creole cultures," and "the idea (or ideology) of slavery." I am thus inviting my readers—scholars and others—to reconsider not only what we think about slavery but also the deep-seated assumptions that underlie how we can think most comprehendingly, and hence most productively, beyond existing understandings of slaving. In the parlance of the professional literature on slavery, I want to problematize the utility—even question the elemental accuracy—of the familiar, all-but-ubiquitous phrasing of slavery that historians study as an institution. Hence the play on the word "problem" in the title of this book, and in those of each of its chapters. I hope to problematize slavery as an institution by exploring slaving as a historical strategy.

"Problem" also references the occasion that prompted the present elaborated form of these essays. I presented them as the inaugural David Brion Davis Lectures at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, to honor David Brion Davis, its founding director. Davis is perhaps the defining thinker in the modern field, a writer for the public as well as for the most sophisticated of the professionals. His famous and foundational book, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), set the standard for problematizing historical clichés. The Problem of Slavery is a sweeping survey of the idea of slavery in Western culture over two millennia, from Greek antiquity to its abolition in the nineteenth century. To the amazement of most modern historians at the time, Davis revealed the continuity of slaving throughout the Christian European Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as the resigned toleration of dehumanizing other human beings as things, from Aristotle to Aquinas to the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Las Casas to political economists in seventeenth-century England and France. For him, the problem of slavery was why none of the great humanistic thinkers of Western civilization had developed their consistent unease about the institution toward the abolitionist impulses that finally burst forth in the North Atlantic in the eighteenth century, primarily in England and then in the United States. The capacious discourse of humane justice in which he framed the problem reflects popular discomfort with the very idea of slavery, and it is the framework within which scholars still discuss slavery productively.

In this opening chapter I hope to frame these important moral issues of enslavement in ways that are more capacious still, ways that I conceptualize as historical. The second chapter in this book applies the historical epistemology outlined in the first chapter to explain the contexts—political and ideological—that led discerning commentators (from Aristotle to Aquinas) to lament the personal failings of abusive masters but not to invoke public sanctions of the sort claimed by modern abolitionists. In effect, I add the political and intellectual contexts of slaving to the primarily economic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Yale University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0300113153
• ISBN 13: 9780300113150
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar