Alexander Bevilacqua: Under a Cloud

Alexander Bevilacqua

It can be hard to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. In The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), David Brion Davis showed that from classical antiquity slavery received ‘the highest sanction’ from both religion and philosophy. Aristotle made an especially influential argument in its favour, positing the existence of ‘natural’ slaves. Seneca was a rare dissenter. In his 47th letter to Lucilius, he wrote: ‘Remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled on by the same skies and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies.’

Seneca lived in a society in which it was possible for the enslaver to become enslaved. Such a transformation was harder to imagine in Europe or North America during the 15th to 19th centuries. Historians have devoted much effort to explaining how an anti-slavery movement emerged in this period. In his new book, John Samuel Harpham asks not how those who benefited from slavery came to oppose it, but why they accepted it in the first place. His focus is on the English (and, at least implicitly, the Scots), who were latecomers to the slave trade. The Atlantic plantation system originated with the Portuguese, who, first on the West African island of São Tomé and later in Brazil, used enslaved labour to cultivate a new cash crop, sugar cane. Since the average lifespan of a plantation labourer was six years, the system depended on the transport of ever more captives across the ocean. The total volume of the trade grew from around 250,000 African captives over the course of the 16th century to more than a million in the 17th century. During the 18th century, an estimated 6.5 million people were forcibly transported across the Atlantic, 2.5 million of them on British ships. As William Pitt the Younger told the House of Commons in 1792, ‘no nation in Europe [has] plunged so deeply into this guilt as Britain.’

While it was only in the 18th century that the British defined their empire as, in David Armitage’s phrase, ‘Protestant, commercial, maritime and free’, a sense of difference from Catholic Spain took shape much earlier. Critiques of Spanish cruelty sold well; the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552), a denunciation of the Spanish genocide of Indigenous people, was retitled The Tears of the Indians for its 1656 translation. How then did the English come to rationalise their involvement in the slave trade and their establishment of sugar plantations, first in Barbados and later in Jamaica and elsewhere? The canonical answer is supplied by Winthrop D. Jordan in his White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812, published in 1968. Against Eric Williams’s insistence in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that ‘slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery,’ Jordan argued that prejudice had shaped English interactions with Africans from the outset. The English, he wrote, had been ‘startled’ and ‘puzzled’ by the dark skin of sub-Saharan Africans. They had treated African ‘heathenism’ as a ‘fundamental defect’ and dismissed African societies and culture as ‘savage’. They had also compared Africans to apes, emphasised their supposedly boundless libido and traced their ancestry to Ham, whose son Canaan is cursed by Noah in Genesis.

Harpham challenges pretty much all of Jordan’s generalisations. The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery combs through legal treatises, maps and travel books in order to recast the beginnings of what has become known as ‘racial slavery’. Because the main victims of the new economic system were African, and because their enslavement came to be justified by anti-Black sentiment, a book nominally about slavery in the Americas proves to be significantly concerned with Africa and European racism.

Harpham is emphatic that the English didn’t originally enslave Africans out of racial prejudice. In contrast to Jordan, he argues that English travellers of the 16th and 17th centuries recognised Africa’s diversity. (He isn’t the first to challenge Jordan’s interpretation: as early as 1966, Davis observed that ‘historians have sometimes exaggerated Europe’s long ignorance of the Dark Continent.’) Knowledge of Africa grew considerably in this period, thanks in part to traders and seamen who produced accounts of their journeys. These narratives would soon be gathered in collections by Richard Hakluyt and, later, Samuel Purchas. The translator Richard Eden called Africans ‘a people of beastly lyvynge, without a god, lawe, religion, or common welth’, but also speculated that the Christian kingdom of (the in fact legendary) Prester John was located in East Africa. For Harpham, modern interpreters like Jordan have overemphasised Eden’s smear at the expense of a more complex reality.

As travellers spent more time in Africa, they were struck by how much more familiar it was than classical sources had led them to expect. The so-called torrid zone around the equator was not only habitable, contrary to Aristotle’s claim, but was populated by human beings rather than the monstrous peoples imagined in ancient texts. Travel accounts like those compiled by Purchas, whose anthology was published in 1625, offered ‘a torrent of details … about the myriad peoples who inhabited the various parts of the continent’. European maps of Africa in this period distinguished between kingdoms and teemed with information, even if some of it was derived from outdated sources.

The English entered the slave trade gradually. Already in the 16th century, privateers had learned about slaveholding from their Spanish and Portuguese trading partners. Yet the first settlements in Virginia, Bermuda and Barbados focused on tobacco, and relied initially on English indentured servants. An early experiment with slaveholding, the short-lived Providence Island Company, was not without controversy: the Puritan colonist Samuel Rishworth opposed the captivity of Africans and enjoined them to flee. It was in Barbados, at the outer edge of the Caribbean archipelago, where the switch to sugar around 1640 brought about a transformation in economic organisation. Sugar rewarded scale, and sugar planters ran large estates worked by a mixture of white indentured and Black enslaved workers. The demand for sugar was so great that planters soon turned overwhelmingly to enslaved labourers in order to meet it. After the Restoration, Charles II granted a monopoly over English trade along the west coast of Africa to a company led by his brother, James, the duke of York. Its successor, the Royal African Company, was incorporated in 1672. Over the next sixty years the company established permanent fortifications along the coast, undertaking some 650 voyages to buy at least 187,000 people and sell those who survived the passage to planters in the Caribbean. In 1713 Britain would win the asiento, the contract to import enslaved people to the Spanish Americas.

Once they had joined the slave trade, the British had rather less to say about the morality of African slavery. A few people did speak out. During his journey up the Gambia River around 1620, the explorer Richard Jobson was offered several African women by a local merchant; he refused, he later claimed, by saying that ‘we were a people, who did not deale in any such commodities.’ Around the same time the antiquarian William Camden remarked of those who bought enslaved people from Spanish merchants that ‘I know not, with what Honour they might so doe.’

English legal writers in the 16th century accepted slavery as a fact of life, but not because they subscribed to Aristotle’s notion of natural slavery. Rather, Harpham shows, they followed the Roman law tradition codified under Emperor Justinian in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, according to which slavery did not exist in nature, but might arise through warfare or impoverishment. On this account, it could be a form of mercy – when, for instance, it was preferable to being slaughtered after a military defeat. While Roman law did not condone enslavement solely for commercial gain, it understood the enslavement of those who were defeated in war to be part of the natural order. John Cowell, the Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, emphasised that the enslaved never completely lost their natural freedom, ‘albeit it may be under a cloud’. The jurist Edward Coke, writing in 1628, concurred that ‘the condition of villeines from freedome unto bondage, of ancient time grew by constitutions of Nations.’ In other words, bondage was a product of the law of nations, and not of nature – even ‘villeines’, or serfs, had once been free. (Both Cowell and Coke sought to explain the origins of English serfdom, rather than modern chattel slavery.)

The new natural rights theorists of the 17th century – among them Hugo Grotius and John Locke – also rejected Aristotle’s account of slavery. Yet they still argued that slavery could arise within the boundaries of natural law. While Locke insisted that no one could consent to their own enslavement, he also thought that a just conqueror ‘has a despotical right over the persons of all, that actually aided, and concurred in the war against him’.

English travellers interpreted the enslavement they witnessed in Africa as the consequence of warfare or judicial punishment. In Purchas’s anthology, the most detailed account of Guinea – the English name for a long stretch of West African coast – was a translated report by the Dutch explorer Pieter de Marees. De Marees emphasised that slavery in Guinea could arise out of judicial proceedings, as punishment for certain forms of murder, selling false gold or being unable to pay a fine. And when Guinea’s rulers went to war, ‘whosoever is taken Prisoner they make him a slave all his life long.’ European writers reported the same of other parts of Africa. According to these accounts, slavery was not an index of savagery, but an aspect of the political order. It seemed superior to other local practices, such as the massacring of defeated enemies, or cannibalism, which was said to take place in a number of African societies. Above all, the long-standing existence of slavery in Africa, and its origin in what Harpham calls ‘the order and sophistication of African life’, structured no less than Europe by statecraft and law-making, helped the British pass the buck for their own involvement: they were not the originators of the institution.

The distinction between permissible and impermissible slavery may seem academic today, and in practice it was little observed. In the 1560s, soon after the English began operating in the Atlantic, the sea captain John Hawkins carried out raids along the coast of Sierra Leone in a manner hardly sanctioned by Roman law. He raided seaside towns, shot at those he could not otherwise capture, and burned down homes. He also acquired enslaved captives from the Portuguese, and sold more than a thousand people in Spanish America. Some moral embarrassment can be discerned in the silence that in subsequent decades attended these raids. The earliest detailed account of slavery in English Barbados, from 1657, mentions that West Africans had become enslaved for reasons other than warfare: ‘Some mean men sell their Servants, their Children, and sometimes their Wives.’ Such statements indicate that for all the efforts at legitimation, Englishmen participated in forms of human exchange that didn’t meet even their own lax standards.

Over time the sheer brutality of the plantation system gave the lie to the Roman justification of slavery as a form of mercy. The merchant and author Thomas Tryon wrote in 1684 that Caribbean planters had turned slavery into a fate ‘far worse than Death’. Harpham offers a fine reading of Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688), whose protagonist, a captive African prince, speaks the Roman language of slavery. Oroonoko distinguishes between legitimate slavery – ‘Have they Vanquish’d us Nobly in Fight? Have they Won us in Honourable Battel? And are we, by chance of War, become their Slaves? This wou’d not anger a Noble Heart’ – and illegitimate, commercially driven chattel slavery: ‘No, but we are Bought and Sold like Apes, or Monkeys.’

Harpham’s focus on the Roman tradition exposes the curiously ‘passive attitude’ the English adopted. While they ‘sensed that they ought to produce some account of themselves in which their actions figured as legitimate’, they devoted ‘little attention’ to the task. And by the later 17th century, ‘the English never declined to purchase the slaves they were offered on legal or moral grounds’ – Jobson’s high-mindedness was a thing of the past. If anything, Harpham conjectures, the notion that there were legitimate causes of enslavement gave moral cover to slave traders who could at least claim not to know the provenance of their human commodities.

For all its attention to primary sources, Harpham’s book is largely closed off from the wider world in which its intellectual history unfolded. Only muffled sounds of life filter through the walls; little can be heard from the streets of London, where scholars such as F.O. Shyllon, Peter Fryer and Miranda Kaufmann have traced the presence of Africans in the early modern period. The English adventurers along the African coast, the early raiders and later traders, are dimly tangible. The enslaved, whose individual stories survive, in snatches, where a European writer saw fit to record them, are not perceptible at all.

In fact, 17th-century theorists including Grotius and Locke were alive to the realities of European overseas expansion. Grotius wrote his treatise Mare Liberum (1609) to justify the Dutch seizure in the Strait of Singapore of a Portuguese carrack whose cargo was worth almost as much as the English government’s annual expenditure. Locke’s theory of property in the Second Treatise of Government (1689) was conceived at the very moment he was also revising the constitution of the Carolina colony, in which his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was deeply involved. In the hands of writers such as Richard Tuck and David Armitage, intellectual history captures the danger of international competition and warfare on the high seas. Harpham tends to keep global events at arm’s length.

When approached thoughtfully, the printed record does offer glimpses of lives otherwise lost to history. Consider the case of an unnamed enslaved woman in early colonial Boston who ‘in her own Countrey language and tune sang very loud and shrill’, thus conveying to the English traveller John Josselyn that she had been raped. Josselyn’s book is one of the printed travel accounts Harpham examines, albeit with different questions to those posed by the historian Wendy Warren in her attempt to retrieve the life of the unnamed woman. This isn’t the only valid form of recovery: a history of the way enslavers justified their conduct is as necessary as a history of the enslaved. But the printed record does not contain all of what it was possible to think at a given moment. What can be thought differs from what can be put in writing, let alone published. By focusing only on what the texts contain, Harpham fails to imagine the wider world in which the books existed. The risk here is to infer from the silences in print that the English entered the slave trade in a fit of absence of mind. Yet the fact that English writers didn’t justify slavery in print doesn’t mean that they were insensitive to what was happening, or that they thought it needed no moral justification. They may simply have been unable to provide one.

Harpham’s methodology also betrays its limitations when he considers contemporary English perceptions of Black people. He argues that Blackness was of marginal interest to Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries: ‘Black skin was never considered to be so strange as to rank among the marvels that would often elicit the wonder of observers of the natural world.’ It wasn’t regarded as a particularly notable trait, he writes, but as one of many physical and cultural features of Africans. Harpham can make this claim only because he doesn’t look beyond printed sources. Tellingly, when he examines the Masque of Blackness – a Stuart court entertainment of 1605, written by Ben Jonson, at which Anne of Denmark and her ladies-in-waiting appeared as the ‘daughters of Niger’ – he discusses only the libretto and not the staging. In Jonson’s allegory, Britannia is ruled by a sun (James I) that can ‘blanche an Aethiop’ (in defiance of Jeremiah 13:23, ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’). But political allegories, while important, were also pretexts for fancy dress. Left unexamined is why, as Jonson reported with a touch of self-exculpation, ‘it was Her Majesty’s will to have them black-moors.’

Distinction on the basis of bodily characteristics flourished well before modern race theory. In earlier centuries, complexion – the interaction of Galenic humours – was thought to be the key to interpreting human variability. Across premodern Europe, as the historian Mark Dawson has shown, ‘complexions, both female and male, were judged righteous or sinful; innate or superficial; genteel or humble; healthy or diseased.’ Europeans brought these assessments to bear on those they encountered overseas. An unnerving painting from 1682 by Pierre Mignard juxtaposes Louise de Kéroualle, the porcelain-skinned mistress of Charles II, with a small African girl. Embraced by de Kéroualle with a mixture of familiarity and possession, the girl offers her a branch of coral and a shell filled with pearls – luxuries extracted from faraway oceans. When the Royal African Company was chartered a decade earlier, its heralds designed a coat of arms supported by two Black men naked but for short skirts and feathered headdresses.

During the Restoration, many English scholars, including members of the newly founded Royal Society, attended to the puzzle of African skin. Robert Boyle devoted a chapter of his Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours to ‘the Cause of the Blackness of those many Nations, which by one common Name we are wont to call Negroes’. Boyle referred to ‘true Blackness’ as a ‘Discolouring’, and treated it as an anomaly that went beyond the normal variation in skin colour predicted by climate theory. Harpham argues that ‘English efforts to discover the source of Black skin seem above all to be attempts to solve … a scientific problem.’ Yet even if these efforts were not motivated principally by a wish to defend enslavement, they show that Black skin was the subject of persistent fascination. As Nehemiah Grew’s catalogue of 1686 records, the society’s museum contained ‘the entire skin of a MOOR. ’Tis tanned with the Hair of the Head, and even the smallest in all the other parts remaining on it.’ In 1686 the naturalist Richard Waller presented a colour chart to the society that featured ‘Negro black’; the only other colour referring to human bodies was a pale pink called ‘carnation’ (from caro, Latin for ‘flesh’). One can argue that modern anti-Black prejudice did not predate but was rather produced by the Atlantic trade and plantation system without minimising the earlier European preoccupation with Blackness.

As a rule, it’s worth acknowledging a scholarly opinion when attempting to overturn it. Many historians now believe that the development of modern European racism, pace Eric Williams, preceded the rise of Atlantic slavery, and helped lay the groundwork for its justification. Using many of the same sources as Harpham, Jennifer L. Morgan has argued that English travel literature in this period portrayed Black women as both beautiful and monstrous, and that ‘these meanings were inscribed well before the establishment of England’s colonial American plantations.’ Harpham’s disagreement with Morgan and others deserves to be aired, yet he barely acknowledges any historian after Jordan who thinks that modern European racial thought developed before slavery.

Historical debates aren’t necessarily won by the more hopeful interpretation, but Harpham’s argument has liberating implications: if racial prejudice emerged only at a particular moment rather than being an abiding feature of human societies, then it’s a product of history – enduring, but not ineluctable. And perhaps it reflects well on intellectual traditions such as Roman law that they cannot be bent beyond a certain point. English writers didn’t attempt to justify plantation slavery because, even on the generous terms of Roman law, it could not be justified. Still, recognising what Europeans knew about Africans before the growth of Atlantic slavery suggests that we sometimes overstate the power of knowledge. The English understood that the people of West and Central Africa had long-standing traditions and cultures. They enslaved them anyway.

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