DEFINING SLAVERY

The problem of defining slavery as an absolute condition or a fixed status has been at the heart of the politics of slavery. Liberals have often striven to draw bright lines between slavery as a wrong or a logical impossibility, and liberal autonomy as a good and a right. For socialists, the concept of slavery is more flexible and the borderlands between slavery, servitude and exploitation are more mobile and contested. The idea of slavery, for them both, carries what Robin Blackburn calls a ‘mythic potency’ that takes it beyond the facts and experience of history (Blackburn 1988, 269). This book is about that mythic potency, about the significance of the status of slavery as a lived experience and as an idea and a political concept. Its aim is to explore the injustice of slavery not just as the opposite of self-ownership and liberal autonomy, but also as the opposite of belonging and of free labour. Its particular focus is on chattel slavery, the possibility of defining a human being as an animate piece of property and then making that status hereditable. The chattel slave was unable to make a will, to bring formal criminal charges against others or to appear as a witness in most civil cases. A slave's evidence was acceptable in court only if it had been extracted by torture. People who had been enslaved could be bought, sold, traded, leased, mortgaged, presented as a gift, pledged for a debt, included in a dowry or seized in a bankruptcy. What does this mean for our political theories that take the autonomous individual as both their starting point and their goal? We have to ask, who are these chattel slaves, and what made them enslavable? What happened to their status as persons and as humans when they were enslaved? What about the people who enslaved them and sought to convince themselves that it was possible (for others) to be both person and property?

Part of the answer to these questions lies in thinking about the definition of slavery, and what might be taken to be its constituent elements.