The love of domineering

The “love of domination and tyrannizing,” which “may almost be said to be natural to mankind,” is central to Smith’s explanation of slavery. As an explanation, however, it is worrying for two reasons.

First, it is too particular. Smith appears to be positing an explanatory primitive or quirk in our psychologyFootnote ¹⁰ as a special explanation to a serious problem. Slavery is bad, slavery persists; therefore, there must be a special permanent drive in us to enslave. As I shall argue, the “love of domination and authority” does pivotal work in Smith’s account beyond explaining slavery and shows connections between different areas of human science. Consequently, it is a more general explanation.

Second, it is too general. Insofar as it pushes off the wrong of slavery as a quirk or “an ontological flaw in the make up of humans,”Footnote ¹¹ as opposed to allowing that the wrong of modern slavery is quite specific and connected with the rise of modern extractive mercantilist colonialism. I will suggest, though, that the desire for domination and authority does distinctively connect modern slavery to modern mercantilism.

What is the “love of domination and authority”? Following Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and many others, Smith treats slavery in Lectures on Jurisprudence as one of three “different relations in which the members of a family may stand [in] to one an other” (LJA iii.1), one that belongs to the larger genus of servitude. Unlike his predecessors, Smith presents the historical transformation in slavery from an institution connected with the family to large-scale plantations in Rome and the West Indies. As noted in the previous section, the power of father over child and husband over wife (LJA iii.78–87; LJB 130) tended to be weaker in the Roman Empire and in European commercial society.Footnote ¹² But slavery tends to be crueler in polite, commercial society than in more barbarous societies.Footnote ¹³

This suggests something specific to slavery that blocks amelioration. Smith initially introduces the term “slave” as a general term to describe the conditions of serfs and women in a wide range of societies. Smith then more narrowly defines slavery as involving (1) the power of life and death; (2) the power to dispose of the liberty of the enslaved person however the master chooses, including transferring the enslaved person to a new master; and (3) the exclusive rights to whatever the enslaved person produces or uses (LJA iii.90–91). Familial relations are sometimes mitigated by other relatives—such as brother or mother—because they do not exclude these other relations. But there is no one internal to the larger family who mitigates brutality to servants much less to enslaved persons (LJA iii.89). The arbitrariness and exclusivity of power over another that constitutes slavery rules out relations that offset it.

The “love of domination and tyrannizing” is the source of this arbitrariness and exclusivity. From the word “tyrannizing” one might think that Smith has in mind a brute desire to harm others. But the love of domineering is any desire to render others lower than oneself and incapable of resistance:

In the Wealth of Nations, tyrannizing drops entirely out and the focus is on “to domineer”: “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen” (WN III.ii.10). In Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Usbek’s favorite, Roxanna, is as much his slave as are his other wives who he treats harshly.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, on my view, although Smith holds that love of domineering often takes the form of brutal tyrannizing, the description in the Wealth of Nations is his considered view.

Domineering and its cognates are exceedingly rare in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Lectures on Jurisprudence, and the Wealth of Nations. As far as I know, mention of domineering occurs in only one other context. Prior to Smith’s presentation of the economic argument against slavery, in “Of the Wages of Labour” (WN I.viii), Smith discusses circumstances “where the funds destined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying,” and suggests that this is disastrous for the working poor or “lowest class,” leading to “[w]ant, famine, and mortality” (WN I.viii.26). Smith notes: “The difference between the genius of the British constitution which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot perhaps be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries” (WN I.viii.26). He then offers a general rule: “The liberal reward of labour … is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth. The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they are going fast backwards” (WN I.viii.27). This is an early pivotal moment in Smith’s larger argument in the Wealth of Nations. Free trade, when guided by stable laws, leads, ceteris paribus, to relative prosperity for the nation, while poor, bad, or no laws lead to poverty. Smith describes the East India company as domineering, the word which he used to characterize the natural propensity that promotes slavery despite its imprudence.

In both cases, Smith seems to have in mind “having every (thing) done by their express orders, rather than to condescend to bargain and treat with those whom they look upon as their inferiors and are inclined to use in a haughty way.” In the case of the joint-stock company, this is the desire of the merchants and shareholders who constitute the company to be able to trade without interference through express order with no bargaining.Footnote ¹⁵ In the case of the slaveholder, this is the desire to have laborers who must acquiesce to every demand.Footnote ¹⁶

Smith notes that the “man of system … cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it” (TMS VI.ii.2.17). This suggests that in addition to the love of domineering, the aesthetic pleasure arising from governing a well-functioning whole also motivates the “man of system.”Footnote ¹⁷And it motivates the “rustick hospitality” (WN III.iv.12) and hangers-on of feudal barons. In each case—the mercantilist, the man of system, the slaveholder, and the premodern patriarch—the desire to have others fall in line and directly follow their commands sometimes gives rise to imprudent conduct. Because in these different cases prudence is countered by the motivation to domineer, Smith is providing a general explanation and not just resting his analysis on a psychological quirk.

This is not to suggest that Smith takes these different types of domineering to be morally on par. Mercantilists and men of system each violate one category of natural right, and they do so in a less injurious manner than slavery. But it does not follow that because slavery is least moral, it is the most imprudent form of domination.

In sum, the love of domineering is a motivation that manifests in a number of different arenas and partly explains the persistence of slavery. The love of domineering also explains why slavery is immoral, insofar as it is in direct conflict with all basic natural rights.Footnote ¹⁸

Custom and lack of sympathy

I will treat the other causes of slavery more briefly. Smith criticizes West Indian slavery in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to illustrate the power of custom:

Africans exhibit magnanimity and the “aweful virtues” in submitting to torture with little or no display of emotion. In contrast, Cicero wept before the Senate (TMS V.ii.10), exhibiting the amiable virtues of polite society. The respective preferences for “aweful” and amiable virtues and vices is due not to natural differences between Romans and Africans, but to custom.

Smith concludes the discussion of custom in The Theory of Moral Sentiments with a discussion of infanticide. Among “savages,” infanticide is “excusable” (TMS V.ii.15) insofar as in circumstances of extreme need—for example, when running from an enemy—the choice is between a parent dying with their infant or the infant dying alone. However, in “the latter ages of Greece,” infanticide “was permitted from views of remote interest or conveniency, which could by no means excuse it” (TMS V.ii.15). “Uninterrupted custom … authorised the practice,” and “[w]hen custom can give sanction to so dreadful a violation of humanity, we may well imagine that there is scarce any particular practice so gross which it cannot authorise” (TMS V.ii.15).

Smith does not mention slavery here. But insofar as the passage above concerning the cruelty of slavery appears a few paragraphs prior to it, one might draw the inference that custom also bears on its persistence despite its immorality. This is also apparent in his discussion of the Stoic system in the concluding chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments where Smith returns to barbarian and polite society, custom, and slavery. Smith notes that as a consequence of Greece being roiled “in the most sanguinary wars, in which each sought, not merely superiority or dominion, but either completely to extirpate all its enemies,” the victors would sell “man, woman, and child, like so many herds of cattle, to the highest bidder in the market” (TMS VII.ii.1.28).Footnote ¹⁹ Greeks sold into this “vilest of all states, domestic slavery” (TMS VII.ii.1.28) might be expected to take their own lives. But they mostly did not.

Yet suicide was common among elite Romans both in the late Republic and particularly the Empire. What explains this, because “nature, in her sound and healthful state, seems never to prompt us to suicide”? Smith’s answer is, in addition to the more regular cause of melancholia, a fashion for suicide “among the proud Romans” of the Empire (TMS VII.ii.1.33)Footnote ²⁰ was driven by aristocratic “vanity and ostentation” (TMS VII.ii.1.28). Furthermore, it is in this form distinctly a product of polite societies. In this sense, it provides an analogue to the customary persistence of slavery.

Custom has a close connection to lack of sympathy via customary ranks of men.Footnote ²¹ Smith notes in Lectures on Jurisprudence that “[t]hose persons most excite our compassion and are most apt to affect our sympathy who most resemble ourselves, and the greater the difference the less we are affected by them. {The same will be the case with slaves.}” (LJA iii.109). He goes on to suggest that opulence generates lack of sympathy. In slave societies, all that enslaved persons produce is taken by the slaver. This leads to a greater and greater wealth gap between enslaved persons and slavers. The same mechanisms which explain our admiration for the rich and powerful and our inability to sympathize with the poor (TMS I.iii), and which give rise to the system of ranks, also explain the lack of sympathy with slaves. This is amplified by the quantity of enslaved persons in large-scale slave societies, which keeps the slavers “in continuall dread of them, and the greatest rigour and severity is consequently exercised upon them” (LJA iii.107). Fear leads to a reinforcement of distance from slaves. In conjunction with a tendency not to sympathize with the poor and powerless, this results in a nearly complete inability to sympathizeFootnote ²² and reinforces love of domination.

Slave wealth and political influence

The causes discussed so far provide a motivation to enslave persons, some reason for the persistence of the institution of slavery, and an explanation of why slavers might not morally respond to the suffering of slaves. But it does not give any explanation of why the motivation of the love of domineering might generally offset prudential considerations, given their great motivating power. If “the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves,” why would slavers in general be willing to offset prudence to domineer?

The answer is that they would not in general, although particular individuals might. Slavery persists in general in circumstances where domineering and prudence mutually reinforce one another.Footnote ²³ However, although enslaving persons is less prudent in general than free labor under normal conditions, it may be sufficiently prudent under special conditions to persist in conjunction with the other causes. Furthermore, it may be more prudent to continue with slave labor than to switch to free labor, especially if the slaveowner’s wealth—like the mercantilist’s wealth—can leverage the system in their favor. This is because

This passage, one of the most pessimistic in Smith’s corpus, gets at a fundamental reason for the persistence of modern slavery. Slavers profit from both the labor of enslaved persons and from their sale. “In all countries where slavery takes place the greatest part of the riches of the subjects consists in slaves,” so the slaver wants to hold onto and expand their stock in enslaved persons for prudential reasons. They also want subjects to domineer. Enslaved persons are the means to profit, capital, and subjects to domineer. That abolition would result in “generall insurrection” is a mark of how much the slaveholders depend on the persons they enslave for their wealth.Footnote ²⁴ This is reinforced by Smith’s famous comment that “[t]he late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their negro slaves, may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great. Had they made any considerable part of their property, such a resolution could never have been agreed to” (WN III.ii.10).Footnote ²⁵

In slave societies built on the cultivation of a single crop, there is little possibility of abolition. Sugar and other monocrops provide the avenue to wealth. The secondary avenues all support slavery insofar as they benefit from the redistribution of profits from the enslaved. Consequently, the slavers and the trading companies with whom they trade exclusively maintain monopolies and artificial conditions of extraction. Slavers then flood markets with sugar, thus destroying potential free labor competition and artificially propping up profits in “excess” of those dictated by the natural price.Footnote ²⁶

Furthermore, under such brutal and terrible conditions in places where laborers die in less than ten years and with little extant labor pool, attracting free labor may be difficult.Footnote ²⁷ There is little attractive to free labor to work cultivating sugar under the horrific conditions of the plantation. And even when there are pools of impoverished laborers, the perception of performing the labor of a group for whom all sympathy has been blocked is an impediment.Footnote ²⁸ As Hume notes, “wherever hired servants can be procured,” free labor is preferred, but this assumes that it can be procured. This was likely reinforced by penal servitude in the sugar colonies, which functioned as a threat in British law courts.

Due to the fact that it is locally prudent for slavers to persist in enslavement for the same reasons it is prudent for mercantilists to do so, we should think of Smith’s general rule that free labor is preferable in the end to enslaved labor as an argument for legislators thinking about the long-term future rather than for slavers thinking about present profits. Because Smith thinks that slavery cannot be entirely eradicated due to the causes discussed above, this is a qualified argument. “The science of the legislator” can be of great value to the long-term wealth of a nation if it can curtail slavery to some extent, but it cannot eradicate slavery.

Finally, because “[t]he profits of a sugar-plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America” (WN III.ii.10), sugar cultivation can absorb the relative inefficiency due to the massive profits. Smith, indeed, goes on to note that sugar “can afford the expence of slave-cultivation … better than tobacco” and that “[t]he number of negroes accordingly is much greater, in proportion to that of whites, in our sugar than in our tobacco colonies” (WN III.ii.10).

In an ideal situation, greater profits might ensue if free labor was or could be employed. But the conjunction of effective monopoly, harsh conditions with little free labor, and the extraordinary profit of sugar overshadows any short-term or long-term lack of profitability. Love of domineering, custom, and lack of sympathy all reinforce the practices, however immoral.

In addition, Smith stresses that in republics—societies where individual slaveholders have the say in governance—slaveholders like mercantilists will leverage their wealth to maintain their monopolies and profits despite its imprudence for the society in general. In addition to the profits from exclusive control of sugar, slavery also promises further wealth for slavers from those born into slavery. This results in the entrenchment of the slave trade due to the interests of slave owners.

Consequently, far from being unaware of the importance of slavery to wealth in modern democratic societies, Smith is (as far as I know) the first author to really stress this and point to a basic reason why. Democratic societies, and particularly societies with a senatorial class, will tend to leverage political structures to maintain their wealth. When the wealth is entrenched, however immoral the institution, republics will not be likely to abolish it. As there are more republics in the modern world, there is paradoxically more and worse slavery.

John C. Calhoun, the American senator whose plantation eventually became the grounds of Clemson University, was a plantocratic admirer of Roman Republicanism and owned at least fifty enslaved persons. George Fitzhugh argues for the plantocracy based on contrasting the organic Aristotelian whole of the South with the extraction of Northern labor practices. Cicero similarly was not likely to argue for freedom for the Roman slaves due not just to his elitism but also his vested interest in the inequity. In all of these societies the wealthy classes have an outsized say. This is a further motivation for slaveowners to expand slavery, insofar as it makes the slaveholding class more politically powerful.Footnote ²⁹ It also, again, parallels explanations for the persistence of mercantilism.

Contrary to law

I have argued that slavery begins in the love of domination, is continued by custom, and is reinforced by lack of sympathy to the moral plight of the enslaved. Slavery becomes wholly entrenched in slaveholding republics, such as Rome and the Caribbean plantocracies, with a high relative population of enslaved persons due to slaveholders politically leveraging their monopolies and maintaining their slave stock and artificial profits. The persistence of slavery is thus due to the way in which love of domination—the initial motivation—is reinforced by artificial monopoly, custom, and lack of sympathy. The local profitability of slaver monopolies explains its prudential persistence, despite being generally imprudent in the end.

But why in Rome and the Caribbean did slavery becomes more violent and morally repellent while other relations of authority such as husband over wife or parent over child become less so? Part of the explanation has to with the size of the plantations and the resultant lack of sympathy for the enslaved. Smith ends both sets of Lectures on Jurisprudence with a discussion of the acquisition of enslaved persons. War is the primary source of enslaved persons, and children born of war captives become enslaved persons. Enslavement is used as a punishment and a judicial threat, as a means to absolve debt, and people also sell themselves into slavery. Smith notes, along with Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and against Grotius, that selling yourself into slavery is contractually impossible, and he suggests that self-sale is in reality a species of debt slavery. Smith then adds, in the first set of Lectures on Jurisprudence: “I shall only observe farther with regard to slavery, in confirmation of what I asserted, that it was the weakness of government that gave rise to it; that this was entirely the case with regard to the West Indian [colonies]” (LJA iii.147). A few years later, in the second set of Lectures on Jurisprudence, he says:

Smith is suggesting that the institution of New World slavery took hold in the manner in which it did because it was unregulated and beyond law. By rejecting the authority of Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus and Cortés could do whatever they wanted, and so they extracted wealth for themselves with no restrictions. The manner in which they did this and satisfied their love of domineering became institutionalized and then customary. A lawless practice thus became entrenched within a larger regulated world, not the least due to the political power that safeguarded it and those who profited from its existence.

John Salter takes lack of regulation to be the ultimate origin of slavery whether in war, colonizing expeditions, or in weak states.Footnote ³⁰ Lack of regulation is also a primary reason for its persistence. If no one offsets the interests of slaveholders, if regulation is ineffective or weak, then the institution of slavery persists. It is also instructive that Smith’s reference to lawlessness is made in both sets of lectures directly following Smith’s dismissal of selling oneself into slavery. That a person could fall into debt slavery, and that it might be represented as the consequence of a valid contract with a slaver, is a mark of weak governance. These conditions held in the West Indies and, due to the lack of laws or counterpower, abet the cruelty of the practices involved at the same time as the exercise of violent authority toward family members might diminish.

Smith’s passage strikingly echoes a pivotal claim in David Graeber’s book Debt. Footnote ³¹ Graeber suggests that the conquest of the New World with its attendant horrors was driven by debt. Cortés was in debt and his men were in even greater debt at the end of the conquest than when they began, so they had incentive to continue the devastation. Smith is suggesting, though, that modern slavery arises in absence of law; its violence, artifice, and monopoly thrive in absence of regulation. When entrenched, it can only be countered by the fiat of a monarch or of an absolute religious authority who does not have to fear from the political and economic power of slavers.

Gewgaws and trinkets

Smith’s account of slavery is systematic and insightful, providing a prominent example of Smith’s pessimism about the ability of unregulated markets—much less fair market conditions—to counter immorality (WN IV.ii.43). Slavery is, according to Smith, a persistent and ubiquitous institution. Its ubiquity is due to ubiquitous natural human desires and recurring conditions. It is persistent due to the interaction of these causes with other ubiquitous features of human nature and society. But the depravity of West Indian slavery draws on conditions particular to the modern world: the lawless conquest of the Americas, mercantilism in modern economies, and particularities of the cultivation of monocrops in brutal climates and their fungibility on a world market.

In his discussion of the lawlessness of slavery, Smith is reported to claim that “there is no such thing as slavery among us” (LJB 145).Footnote ³² This claim is perplexing because the colonies were British and this lecture was given before Lord Mansfield’s 1772 decision on the Somerset v. Stewart case. Nor was the claim true as a restricted claim about Scotland. Scotland had no major slave ports unlike England where ports such as Leeds and BristolFootnote ³³ shipped hundreds of thousands of enslaved persons to North America, the Caribbean, or to death in the Middle Passage. But Scots profited from the trade in human beings as workers—such as managers, lawyers, doctors, accountants, and overseers—who ordered and made the trade efficient.Footnote ³⁴ Some used this to then purchase human beings and become plantation owners in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, returning the wealth to Scotland.Footnote ³⁵ Historian Tom Devine concludes that “the story is a complex one, but even when all the qualifications are taken on board, the central argument remains that the Atlantic slave-based economies can be considered key factors in Scotland’s eighteenth-century transformation.”Footnote ³⁶

To give a characteristic example, Alexander Campbell was born on the Isle of Islay in 1739.Footnote ³⁷ Campbell was encouraged in the Jamaican tobacco trade by his older siblings, and in 1763 he bought “two plantations and three hundred slaves in Grenada.”Footnote ³⁸ By 1790 Campbell was wealthy, owned over a thousand enslaved persons, and had become a leading anti-abolitionist and advocate of the Grenadian plantocracy. His anti-abolitionist agitation brought him to London on numerous occasions, including to challenge the right of the Crown to impose duties on sugar. Campbell was also a high-ranking member of the Grenadian militia. He was killed in an uprising of enslaved persons and free blacks known as the Fédon Revolution in 1795.

Campbell’s trajectory is notable but characteristic: from the tobacco trade through the 1750s to slave ownership and the plantocracy in the 1760s, and then on to the accrual of great quantities of enslaved persons in the 1790s. As a Scots younger son of a larger family he could expect no inheritance, so he sought his fortune via the “clannish” networks of Scots merchants and workers in the New World. Campbell’s prominence as an anti-abolitionist—although not his anti-abolitionism as such—was somewhat rarer, as perhaps was his Highland origin.Footnote ³⁹

Even less characteristic was that one of Campbell’s enslaved persons escaped and became free on a trip to London. Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) when he was ten years old and shipped to Grenada where he was eventually purchased by Campbell. Cugoano was an important abolitionist and the author of the most incisive British criticism of the slave trade in the eighteenth century: Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. Footnote ⁴⁰

Carrie Shanafelt contrasts Smith and Cugoano, arguing that Smith’s “mostly optimistic view of the evolution of global mercantilism” is in conflict with his “queasy acceptance” of the slave trade as arising from an ineradicable “quirk” of human nature, which went hand in hand with his optimistic promotion of free commerce that masked his difficult relation to public debt.Footnote ⁴¹ As a consequence, Smith was unable to see, unlike Cugoano, that the hoarding of public debt by an enriched slaveholding class maintained and fed the slave system and was a tool to wield “power over public policy and international relations.”Footnote ⁴²

I hope I have shown, in contrast, that Smith stresses the connection between the persistence of slavery and the wealth and power of a slaveowner class and its capacity to leverage economies through financial and political power. Smith is deeply pessimistic about universal abolition,Footnote ⁴³ but less due to a queasy acceptance of the love of domineering than due to his awareness of how lawlessness and monopoly persist despite legislation in democratic societies. I am in agreement with Shanafelt, though, that Cugoano’s analysis presents a compelling account of the wrongs of slavery and adds something important worryingly missing from Smith. This is connected with Smith’s claim about the exceptionality of Scotland.

Smith tends to separate the immorality of slavery from its imprudence in the sense that he treats them as different explanations of what is wrong with slavery in toto. That it is immoral does not make it imprudent and vice versa. This is important for Smith’s explanation as I presented it insofar as the local prudence of the slaveowner motivates the expansion of slavery despite its immorality. He works hard to separate the two throughout his work, in part because he is aware that the many attempts of moral philosophers to argue for the simple convergence of the good and the prudent are dubious. Smith is clear that although the desire for trinkets and gewgaws may be vicious, its consequences are not consistently vicious and may indeed by prudent (WN II.iii.32). He famously argues that the great proprietors “sold their birth-right, not like Esau for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles” (WN III.iv.15). The point is that the local lure of trinkets results in a momentous historical transformation—leases—which in turn gives rise to prudential benefits and greater liberty.

But why doesn’t the love of domineering stop great European proprietors from giving up their imprudent domination of their subjects and offering them leases on the land they had previously been tied to? Wouldn’t they be willing to absorb imprudence to hold on to their positions? I take it Smith has three answers. First, the transformation was gradual, unlike abolition, and so could take hold imperceptibly and without resistance from a less united class. Second, great proprietors made far less profit than did West Indian planters due to the depopulation of their lands and the lack of foreign commerce, so the former could not absorb the imprudence. Slaveholders depopulate the lands they kidnap enslaved persons from. But enslaved persons expand the population of the West Indies. And third, the sugar trade and the slave trade were a main axis of foreign commerce unlike the mostly local commerce of the proprietors.

Cugoano’s view offers a telling contrast with Smith’s insofar as he focuses on how immorality and prudence interact.Footnote ⁴⁴ The contrast is best made by distinguishing how they respectively understand the lawlessness of West Indian slavery. For Smith, slavery arises from and flourishes in lawless conditions—that is, conditions where there are no regulations restricting the love of domineering—and the lawlessness gives rise to, enables, and makes profitable an immoral, and in the end imprudent, customary institution.

Cugoano concurs with Smith that slavery is a fundamental moral violation.Footnote ⁴⁵ He also notes that New World slavery arose in the explorers’ rejection of Ferdinand’s laws.Footnote ⁴⁶ But for Cugoano, West Indian slavery is contrary to law in a different sense. It is not just contrary to extant legal authority, but also originates in actions—theft of persons, their ability to act freely, and all their property and progeny—that violate moral, natural, and religious laws.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is not comparable with employment or other modes of labor, as Smith understands it in connection with its imprudence. Rather, Cugoano sees slavery as kidnapping and theft.Footnote ⁴⁸

The importance of slavery for wealth production in the economy is not much discussed by Smith, unlike the cases of free labor and serfs who eventually became renters. Because slavery for Smith is imprudent in general and, in the end, ubiquitous and ineradicable, although he acknowledges its role in the global economy via sugar, he does not extensively discuss the ways in which the wealth in enslaved persons and from thievery of their labor is the backbone of the putatively fair economy.Footnote ⁴⁹ That it is theft rather than a mode of labor seems obvious once it is stated—and it was obvious to Cugoano, but not to Smith.

As a consequence, for Cugoano, the markets that profit from the slave trade—whether sugar or other more peripheral markets that support and profit from enslaving persons—are unlawful and immoral. The persons who take part in and profit from these markets are immoral. And the lawless international competition of nations for advantage in and through the slave trade expands its criminality. Persons, liberty, and labor are criminally appropriated and then laundered. Cugoano concludes that all Britons who do not campaign for abolition have responsibility for the slave trade by virtue of knowing of slavery and not stopping it.Footnote ⁵⁰ He is very aware of the fact that there is “slavery among us” insofar as it drives the world economy that links us together.

Cugoano is also far more aware of slavery being among us in a more local sense because, unlike Smith, Cugoano’s knowledge is derived from his first-person experience that West Indian slavery is distinctive in terms of its cruelty and lawlessness: “Some of the Africans in my country kept slaves, which they take in war, or for debt; but those which they keep are well fed, and good care taken of them and treated well.” Cugoano then continues, “but I may safely say, that all the poverty and misery that any of the inhabitants of Africa meet with among themselves, is far inferior to those inhospitable regions of misery which they meet with in the West-Indies, where their hard-hearted overseers have neither regard to the laws of God, nor the life of their fellow men.”Footnote ⁵¹ That there might be less cruel forms of slavery is not inconsistent with Smith’s view, which contrasts cruel West Indian slavery with slavery in North America, remarking that the slaveowner in North America “looks on his slave as his friend and partner, and treats him with the greatest kindness” (LJA iii.110). Smith adds that in North America the slavery system is “humane” due to “poverty” (LJA iii.110) and presumably due to the comparatively small slave population of the colonies in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century. Smith’s humane farmer side by side with his cherished slaves has no basis in fact (as far as I know) but follows from Smith’s attempt to offer a law-like general mechanism for affective attitudes as an explanation in the rise and reinforcement of slavery.Footnote ⁵²

However, this raises a different set of issues for Cugoano. Many societies have forms of limited servitude that differ from the institution described by Smith insofar as they are not the product of domineering or lack of regulation, but are instead customary, regulated, prudential institutions. In other words, for Cugoano “slavery” is not defined by labor or domineering, but is a large class of social institutions that involve restricting individual liberty. In the period in which Cugoano was kidnapped, due to the intercession of and competition between the Dutch and the British Royal African Company, pawnship (the practice Cugoano describes) was “common throughout Atlantic Africa … a carefully regulated institution through which a trader handed over family members or other dependents to be held as a sort of collateral in the advance of credit.”Footnote ⁵³ Pawnship gave way to “panyarring,” hostage-taking initiated by creditors.Footnote ⁵⁴

The area of present-day Ghana from which Cugoano was kidnapped underwent enormous political transformations in the eighteenth century in connection with the shift from trading in gold to trading in enslaved persons. Prominent causes included conflicts between the Fante people, to whom Cugoano belonged, and other groups such as the Asante. In addition, there were conflicts between the English and Dutch to control the trade, which involved stoking inter-African conflicts, as well as transformations in the practices of enslavement. These changes were driven by the profitability of trade in gold having created networks of trading markets—Cape Coast Castle, where Cugoano was taken to be sent to Grenada, was originally a hub of the gold trading network—and then the expanding profitability of the initially peripheral trade in human beings.

Unsurprisingly, creditors took Cugoano and countless others hostage on slim or no pretext. Due to the intercession of the joint-stock companies “the distinctions between pawnship, panyarring, and outright kidnapping became blurred.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Unlike pawnship, which is a voluntary arrangement, or like hostage taking, which may be involuntary but regulated, panyarring is kidnapping, robbery, and piracy.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is thus not comparable to free labor.

As previously noted, West Indian slavery developed, according to Cugoano, from a particular sort of lawlessness: organized theft parasitic on regulated practices, which were taken advantage of and used to justify kidnapping. Slave practices in West Africa and all over the world were different in kind from the sorts of large-scale predatory slavery practiced by Europeans,Footnote ⁵⁷ which was theft rather than social regulation to avoid war and conflict.

In order to use pawnship to justify panyarring, intermediaries were needed to bring persons like Cugoano from the interior to the coast.Footnote ⁵⁸ If slavery is kidnapping and lawless theft of the worst sort, how could fellow inhabitants of the “Gold Coast” be brought to aid the Royal Africa Company? They did not do so under threat, but of their own volition:

In this passage, Cugoano undermines a standard justification of slavery according to which Europeans are merchants who buy enslaved persons from Africans who had enslaved them. He draws in his white readership with the comparison between procuring enslaved persons and soldiers and the infamous practice of luring or kidnapping free British men into colonial service to expand the empire.Footnote ⁶⁰ More importantly, Cugoano is explaining how African middlemen engaged in the slave trade at all. They were lured into the practice by “gewgaws” and “gaudy cloaths” to function as decoy ducks and draw others into slavery while themselves being—although wicked and corrupted—mostly deceived.

What Cugoano describes is the wealthy—in this case, the Royal Africa Company—using the desire of the relatively poorFootnote ⁶¹ to join the higher class as a means to accomplish grossly immoral ends. As a consequence, agents who are ordinary, morally mixed human beings can be drawn to do evil things that they would not do if they were aware of the evil results of their participation. Cugoano is in part offering a criticism of the effects of luxury. But he is also, I think, explaining how agents can be deceived into terrible actions—in this case, into facilitating the theft of their brethren. They are deceived by the immediate allure of trinkets and the life the trinkets point toward and represent. They are also complicit; however, by presenting them as deluded, Cugoano suggests they are less complicit than the general British public are.

This passage offers an uncanny parallel to Smith’s famous description of the poor man’s son who, motivated by trinkets and gewgaws associated with the upper classes, makes a fortune, but finds himself exhausted and deeply unsatisfied. There is a large secondary literature on how exactly to understand this motivation in Smith’s discussion and its relation to Smith’s other views.Footnote ⁶² What is clear is that, for Smith, the lure of “trinkets of frivolous utility” associated with “the condition of the rich” (TMS IV.i.8) can result in a bad life at the exclusion of other sorts of goods while serving the general interest. This is not intrinsic to the frivolous objects themselves, but is a consequence of their association with “the condition of the rich.”

But why is Cugoano’s poor man’s son lured by gewgaws and trinkets into moral complicity, whereas Smith’s poor man’s son is lured into individual unhappiness that may benefit the whole? That Smith could tell the sons of the Glasgow merchants who attended his lectures on jurisprudence that “there is no such thing as slavery among us” suggests a gap between “us” and the enslaved, despite Smith’s deep awareness of the moral depravity of slavery. I think, though, the primary reason is systematic. Lisa Hill argues that Smith is “extremely conflicted about the results of his own social science” and what he takes to be just and virtuous action.Footnote ⁶³ When discussing slavery, Smith mostly maintains a firm distinction between prudential interest and morality, treating slavery disjunctively as either an imprudent form of employment and stock or as a rights violation.

Smith took pains to treat political economy in its own terms, virtue and well-being in their own terms, and not to presume that immoral actions were necessarily economically imprudent and vice versa. There are many points where the two collide, including in his discussion of the poor man’s son and his analysis of slavery. But Smith tends to view them as just that, moments of collision. Consequently, he does not consider in the economy portrayed in the Wealth of Nations how slavery was systematically reinforced and even demanded by distant consumers, nor does he consider the guilt of the accomplices to the slave trade who profited directly from its maintenance or who profited from the blood money derived from it. Slavery is an immoral institution due to the love of domineering, lawlessness, lack of sympathy, and custom, and it is also an inefficient form of production due to monopoly and the leveraging of wealth. It is a further step to think of an economy itself as immoral, as Cugoano does, making everyone complicit in immoral actions. To take this step one must think of the act of wealth production through slavery as itself immoral theft.

I conclude by envisioning a different version of the poor man’s son story that might have been told by Smith. Imagine a youngest son born into a large family. Due to primogeniture—a central object of Smith’s criticism—they have to make their way in the world. They are drawn by the allure of wealthy Scots estates, men and women of leisure, wondrous machines, and the like. Perhaps they become a merchant in the West Indies. They parlay their funds into a more expeditious form—enslaved persons—and they purchase more persons until they are extremely wealthy. Imagine they are examining their life shortly before their death. What do they think of their life? The mechanisms Smith describes will likely insulate them from concern as will the customs and stories they fall back on. Instead, imagine they are not an Alexander Campbell, but one of the countless other cogs in the trade of enslaved persons, perhaps a doctor on a slave ship, perhaps an accountant for Bristol merchants, or perhaps just a shopkeeper in Leeds. If their lives go well, is it due to theft from Cugoano and his brethren?