Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 20: The slave trade

This post concerns another New York Review article by historian David Brion Davis: A Big Business 06/11/1998 (link behind subscription), reviewing The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 by Hugh Thomas and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn.

The Robin Blackburn book he reviews stresses the role of slavery in the development of the modern capitalist economy, or "the market system" as business writers blandly call it these days:

Blackburn succeeds in conveying a deep sense of the "superexploitation" of millions of black slaves working millions of uncompensated hours to produce wealth that flowed into white industrial investment and conspicuous display. He shows no hesitation in identifying the historical villains: not the Baroque governments and popes that first authorized the African slave trade so much as the "civil society" that broke with the traditional "moral economy" and unleashed "rampant capitalism and the free market." While Blackburn's arguments regarding civil society and the transition "from baroque to modern" are difficult to follow, he reinforces the often forgotten point made by Robert William Fogel (and many others) that market forces and economic self-interest can produce the most immoral and humanly destructive institutions, epitomized historically by racial slavery in the New World.[7] I should emphasize that Blackburn does not see the New World slave system as the necessary or optimum path to a modern society. But once chosen, because of its absolute centrality to the history of the past four hundred years it left a profound taint on the Western world we know.

... Blackburn carefully considers the diverse views of various economic historians and concludes that while New World slavery did not produce capitalism, profits from the New World slave system made a significant contribution to British economic growth and investment in manufacturing.

Davis reminds us that the severity of slavery is a topic which has been clouded by propaganda of various kinds:

British and American abolitionists initiated a tradition of sharply differentiating New World and especially Anglo-American slavery from all previous forms of servitude. They were particularly intent on showing that modern plantation slavery was more inhumane and oppressive than the bondage recognized and sanctioned in the Bible or the servitude found in contemporary Africa. This line of argument later appealed to Marxists and other critics who were eager to demonize capitalism and market forces as the sources of the world's worst example of human exploitation. Blackburn is surely right when he insists that "the novelty of New World slavery resided in the scale and intensity of the slave traffic and the plantation trades." But because Blackburn desperately wants to see New World slavery as a unique aberration, as a tragic choice dictated by capitalist greed when other choices were available, he tends to romanticize earlier forms of human bondage. He forgets that slaves in premodern societies have often been subject to cannibalism, torture, ritual sacrifice, sexual exploitation, and arbitrary death at the whim of an owner.

When Blackburn asserts that "the slavery of the Ancient World had not denied the basic humanity of the slave," he also forgets the appalling descriptions of slaves in the mine shafts at Laurium in ancient Attica and in Ptolemaic Egypt. One need not dwell on the laws that sanctioned the Romans' pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves convicted of raping a virgin or crucifying four hundred household slaves after the murder of Pedanius Secundas, in 61 CE, in order to agree with the Quaker John Woolman that no human being is saintly enough to be entrusted with the power of owning a slave as a piece of property, a power which has always involved some degree of dehumanization.[11] As Orlando Patterson and other scholars have demonstrated, while small numbers of highly privileged slaves can be found throughout history, even in nineteenth-century Mississippi, the institution of slavery has always depended on violent domination, dishonor, and a kind of "social death." (my emphasis)

Davis also addresses an issue which comes up in rightwing polemics over slavery:

Perhaps the most startling point that Hugh Thomas makes about the early Portuguese slave trade is the way it became dominated by New Christian or converso merchants. Fernão de Loronha, for example, an associate and successor of Marchionni, gained a temporary monopoly of trade in the Bight of Benin and supplied slaves and wine to Elmina (Africans in the Gold Coast region continued to buy slaves from the Portuguese in exchange for gold). José Rodrigues Mascarenhas and Fernando Jiménez were other sixteenth-century merchants of Jewish ancestry who gained control over large segments of the slave trade to the Americas. King Philip II of Spain awarded Portuguese New Christians with asiento contracts to supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves. Some of these merchants had relatives or close friends in Italy, Brazil, or Antwerp, long the major center for refining and marketing sugar.

Thomas, unlike Blackburn, avoids the error of thinking of these converso merchants as Jews. Since there has been recent controversy over the Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade, it is important to be on guard against the Inquisition's or the Nazis' definition of Jewishness: that is, having the taint of Jewish ancestry. In 1492 many of the Jews expelled from Spain settled in Portugal, and in 1497 the Portuguese king banished all the Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Given the frequency of intermarriage between New Christians and Old Christians, many of these New Christian families would have lost their converso identity and been assimilated if there had been no doctrine of "purity of blood" and if the Inquisition had not become obsessed with secret "judaizing" practices. Even so, with the passage of time, the great majority of New Christians became absorbed in the Iberian Catholic culture. As Seymour Drescher has pointed out, most of the New Christians who made their fortunes in Africa, Asia, or the Americas returned to Iberia and "were disinclined to resettle where they could openly practice Judaism or even syncretic brands of family religiosity."

But with respect to their participation in the slave trade, the genuineness of the conversos' Christian faith should be irrelevant. Neither Blackburn nor Thomas fully grasps the central point. The Church and the Catholic crowns prohibited Jews from owning baptized slaves or even traveling to the New World. What qualified men like Antônio Fernandes Elvas and Manuel Rodrigues Lamego to transport thousands of African slaves to the Spanish New World was their convincing Christian identity. According to Thomas, Pope Sixtus V thought so highly of Fernando Jiménez, despite his Jewish ancestry, that "he gave him the right to use his own surname, Peretti." When doubts arose that a converso merchant or planter was not a genuine Christian, he was often burned at the stake. (my emphasis)

Present-day historians seem to put too much credibility in the claims of the Spanish Inquisition which accused so many "conversos" of being secret Jews or "Judaizers" of the Christian religion. There is strong evidence that, for the most part, the Spanish "conversos" largely abandoned Judaism and practiced Christianity. The Inquisition's persecutions of them was unjust on a number of levels. And their confessions to secret Jewish practices were largely exacted by torture or the fear of torture.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, david brion davis, slavery