[ExI] History of Slavery

[Lee Corbin]

On a tangent, John Clark wrote

> For generations Caucasians have observed
> black people and noticed that they seemed
> to have emotions, but they convinced themselves
> that they couldn't have really deep emotion like
> they themselves did because, well., because
> they weren't white. Therefore they could treat
> black people like shit and even own them with
> no guilt.

The actual development was almost exactly opposite
to this.

Slavery of course was an accepted part of a great many
societies for thousands of years.  China and India had
a great many slaves. In fact, there were more slaves in
India than in the entire Western hemisphere at any time.
Naturally the Maya and Aztec and American Indians
held slaves. So did practically everyone. As you know,
the world "slave" in both Arabic and western European
languages evolved from "slav", so common and so
plentiful were they from eastern Europe.

Moreover, the greatest minds of antiquity, e.g. Aristotle
and Cicero---who could normally discern with great
objectivity the tiniest improprieties---failed utterly and
completely to condemn the institution of slavery. It took
some kind of sea-change in Western thought.  I'm not
sure what.

But sometime in the late 18th century a distaste for the
practice arose in England. I'm guessing that the English
were first evolving sympathy for their own working 
classes and then (skipping over the Irish) went on to
sympathize with slaves, and see the world from a slave's
point of view.

As explained in the chapter on slavery in Thomas Sowell's
"White Liberals and Black Rednecks", England alone
deserves the lion's share of the credit for stopping it, 
with the United States in second place. Non-western
nations need not apply. At significant expense over more
than a century, Great Britain patrolled the slave-trading
areas of the world, finally at long last successfully
sweeping it from the seas.

Yet if you had to rank in numerical order

A     the number of slaves sent across the Atlantic
  
B     number of sub-Saharan Africans enslaved by
       Arabs and sent north
  
C    number of sub-Saharan Africans enslaved by
       other sub-Saharan Africans

what would your guess be?

Although at its peak, the transatlantic traffic was 
the greater than B, in terms of total number
of sub-saharan Africans ever made slaves, the
correct order is  C, B, A.  And slavery as an
institution in Africa far preceded, naturally, the
arrival of the Arabs and Europeans.
  
It wasn't until very, very recently that slavery was
linked to racism. It's certainly not so linked today in
Africa, where the slave trade still carries on, out of
the range of Western power.  And it wasn't so
linked, as we know, in antiquity. 

So in America, the link developed like so:  first, 
slavery was an unquestioned institution for over
100 years, from 1609 to 1830 or 1840. Next,
white southerners who depended on slavery or
who greatly profitted from it required early in
the 19th century to develop memes to excuse 
it---for they could feel the temper of the times
as well as anyone else, English, French, or
Northerner.

Thus the kind of theories that John discusses---
such as, perhaps, a contention that black people
couldn't have true emotion or didn't have souls,
or whatever it was---developed only in *response*
to attempts at abolition.  Counter-memes developed
in the early 18th century to expiate slave-owner guilt;
slavery certainly was not a consequence of those
beliefs.

Lee