INTRODUCTION

Slavery was an ancient institution known to have been widespread in the Old World. As a part of the Old World, therefore, African societies practiced slavery; it would have been an anomaly if slavery did not exist on the continent. The Bible's Old Testament points to the existence of slavery in Africa, given that Joseph and his fellow Israelites were enslaved in Egypt before their escape (Exodus). Slavery existed in Christian Ethiopia in the fourth century AD. The evidence for the antiquity of slavery in West Africa is not as clear-cut, but it is clear enough that slavery existed alongside various forms of servility in parts of the region well before the fifteenth century, when the Europeans arrived there via the Atlantic Ocean. The question to address, then, is not whether slavery existed in West African societies, but how extensive it was and when it assumed significance in the political economies, as well as its extent, character, and dynamics. The transatlantic trade that ensued with European arrival at the west coast from the fifteenth century onward marked a watershed in the development of slavery in West Africa. Slaveholding in the region spread and intensified during the following four centuries.

Slavery is generally regarded as the most extreme form of dependency and exploitation. This project attempts to cover types of dependency in addition to slavery, although it is clear from both the overall title and the program for the project's third volume that slavery gets considerably more attention than do other types of dependency. This reflects in part the modern preoccupation with individual freedom and equality before the law accorded by citizenship now acknowledged, at least as an ideal, just about everywhere in the modern world. Slavery may not be completely eradicated today, but it had lost irrevocably the ideological struggle perhaps as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, with only minor rearguard actions (in ideological terms, that is) in the antebellum South and less certainly in Hitler's Germany and the Soviet gulags. Such a circumstance – amazing in its rapidity and completeness from a worldwide historical perspective of human behavior and beliefs – is taken for granted today. The more complete the victory of the view that slavery should not exist nor should have ever existed, the more remote slavery itself appears, but at the same time the greater the modern fascination with the institution becomes. And the more remote it appears, the easier it is to treat slavery simply as an evil practiced by evil men, and the harder it is to understand it in human terms. At the very least, modern preoccupations with freedom and individual rights drive the fascination with slavery.

INTRODUCTION

Concepts of Slavery in Southeast Asia and Problems of Definition

The concept of Southeast Asia as a distinct regional entity has been debated by historians for several decades. Indonesia's national motto, “Unity in Diversity,” could well be applied to Southeast Asia as a whole. The historical analysis of slavery in Southeast Asia can contribute to this debate because general patterns of slavery and bondage seem to apply across this broad region. From the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the institution exhibits similar patterns, albeit with distinctive and important local variations. Modern Southeast Asia incorporates Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Sinicized (Chinese-influenced) Vietnam and the Hispanized Philippines have been included in the analysis of Southeast Asia on the basis of shared precolonial structures and historical trends. All these societies were characterized by bilateral kinship, relatively high status for women, wealth in people rather than land, strictly hierarchical social relationships, low population densities, highly personalized concepts of power, relatively fluid ethnic definitions in the period before large-scale state formation (around the seventeenth century), and complex local and regional trading patterns. Such social features have implications for the definition of relationships of bondage and dependency. As a field of study, Southeast Asian slavery is still coming into focus, and the purpose of this chapter is to outline some of the main elements and questions rather than provide a definitive discussion.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the forms of servitude and slaving practiced by indigenous peoples in South America. The principal focus of the chapter is the contrast between indigenous conceptions of captivity and obligatory service on the one hand, and the intrusion of European forms of slavery and servitude on the other. The evidence from the archaeological record, as well as from the history of European conquest in South America, points to indigenous systems of captivity and obligatory service as being quite prominent in many native social orders. The eminence of chiefs and kings, the ritual and political necessity for human sacrifice, and the obligatory nature of exchange relationships were reinforced by and used to justify the presence of human captives. Culturally, the figure of the captive, or sometimes “pet,” was, and still is, important not just at the level of political representation, but also cosmologically, because the key relationship between humanity and divinity is one of predation for many native peoples. Animal pets are socially liminal and arise from the killing of the pet's kin, usually in a hunting expedition. This killing implies an obligation to take on the roles of the dead's kin in feeding and housing the pet, and it is this set of relationships that are also used to picture the status of the human captive.

Despite marked geographical and temporal differences across the Western Hemisphere, white servitude remained a distinct and significant phenomenon to the end of the early modern period. The area is defined broadly to include the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and the specific cases of Russia and Eastern Europe are covered in greater detail in other chapters in this volume. White servitude was present to some degree throughout this vast area, but in a highly asymmetrical pattern of distribution. The largest concentrations were found around the Mediterranean, in Russia, and in the Middle East. Slavery proper was characterized by a lifetime of enforced labor, together with a chattel status that was passed on to descendants. Servitude is defined more widely to include serfdom, penal labor, the transportation of destitute minors, and, with reservations, indentured labor.

Free labor in the modern sense scarcely existed in Christian Europe before the nineteenth century, and yet the continent's experience was very diverse. Serfdom virtually disappeared from Western Europe, whereas it intensified and expanded in the east. Chattel slavery persisted in southwestern and central Europe, and yet it all but vanished in northwestern Europe. Russia's chattel slaves were all technically transformed into serfs by 1725, but at a time when the latter status was fast sinking to approximate that of slaves. Penal servitude was on the increase everywhere in Europe, and the lot of impoverished children and other marginal social groups worsened.

In the language of the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname (descendants of rebel slaves), kióo means “young fellow” and carries implications of inventiveness and outrageous behavior – kióos are expected to do things differently from their parents' generation (whether in styles of speech, woodcarving, or dress). During the first couple of decades of Suriname's settlement, in the new language being created by plantation slaves, the equivalent term (krioro) meant “born here” (i.e., not in Africa). We may surmise that today's Saramaka connotations would have been doubly appropriate back then, when these young people – the first American-born generations – were forging new ways of speaking and much else, and teaching these “creolized” ways to their own children.

The concept of creolization – the process by which people, animals, ideas, and institutions with roots in the Old World are born, grow, and prosper in the New – moved from the field of natural history to linguistics, and thence to anthropology and history only in the course of the twentieth century. (The earliest usage in English that refers to cultural as opposed to biological processes seems to date from 1928, when Jonkeer L. C. van Panhuys, in a letter to Melville J. Herskovits, described culture change among the Suriname Maroons as “creolisation.”)

When historians reflect on involuntary migration in the early modern period, the Atlantic slave trade almost invariably comes to mind first. This is understandable. In the three and a half centuries after its inception in the early sixteenth century, transatlantic slave trafficking was responsible for the forced migration of some 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. This was the largest coerced oceanic migration in human history. Seen by some as a “black Holocaust,” the Atlantic slave trade is now considered to have had profound effects on the repeopling of the Americas following the devastating impact on the post-Columbus demographic history of Native Americans. Some three times as many enslaved Africans landed in the “New World” as white settlers from Europe before 1820. Yet though due attention has to be given to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonization of the Americas had its origins in the Mediterranean, where involuntary labor and slave trafficking, involving Africans as well as non-Africans, was a common feature of life for centuries before 1492 and was to remain so for several centuries thereafter. Moreover, just as involuntary labor was critical to the resettlement of the Americas after 1492, so it became pivotal to the early modern consolidation of state power in land-rich and population-scarce central and eastern Europe in the form of serfdom, where it gave rise to formal systems of labor exploitation that, according to some historians, were akin to slavery and, legally at least, outlived formal African slavery in the Americas.

The emergence and definition of the conservative tradition

Like so much of the vocabulary of modern politics and social science, the term ‘conservative’ can be traced back to the early nineteenth century (Vierhaus 1973, i, pp. 477–85). Its first use was apparently in the title of the weekly journal founded in 1817 by Francois René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), Le Conservateur. Its declared mission was to uphold ‘religion, the King, liberty, the Charter and respectable people [les honnêtes gens]’. In Britain the term was first used as a synonym for the Tory Party in 1830. It rapidly became a part of the vocabulary of politics during the Reform Bill crisis of 1831–2. Daniel O'Connell, the political leader of Irish Catholicism, noted the new coinage in 1832: ‘Conservative – that is the fashionable term, the new-fangled phrase now used in Polite Society to designate the Tory ascendancy.’ It was being used pejoratively against conservatives in Germany by the late 1830s, but there, as elsewhere, the political formations opposed to change came to accept and employ the term themselves. By the middle of the nineteenth century the term was in universal use and it is the purpose of this essay to explain the different ideological positions, groups and individuals who were embraced by it. The essay will consider the different conservative reactions to the mid-century European revolutions and the emergence of mass politics. It will also examine the ways in which conservatism changed over time from the anti-revolutionary creed of 1848 to the more complex, intellectualised and yet irrational forms it had adopted by the end of the century. Because there was no single, dominant conservative thinker in this period the essay will examine different variants of the creed from the United States to the Russian Empire – from the South Carolina of John C. Calhoun to the St Petersburg of Dostoevsky. And because it will be argued that conservatism was more a set of attitudes generated by specific historical situations than a systematic ideology, the treatment will closely relate conservative thought to the history of the era.

The object of this essay is to explore the main philosophical features of Jeremy Bentham's (1748–1832) radical thought and to identify those aspects which were later accepted or rejected by John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in his conception of philosophic radicalism. It is a study in the development and transmission of a set of ideas that helped to define the nature of philosophy and its application to politics in Britain and elsewhere in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It was believed and argued that truth in numerous fields, from politics to logic, possessed great utility (see Mill 1974, CWM, vii, pp. 11–12). The enhancement of understanding could lead to the relief of human suffering and the advancement of happiness. It would be wrong to see these fundamental beliefs as simply a development of a universal rationalism associated with the Enlightenment. Although Mill could write that ‘if there were but one rational being in the universe, that being might be a perfect logician’ (Mill 1974, CWM, vii, p. 6), neither Bentham nor Mill expected everyone to philosophise or seek the truth. But the recognition of the utility of truth led to a new kind of politics, theoretically open to all and inspired by a philosophical concern for truth, which dared, however gradually, to transform the lives of everyone. This transformation was to be achieved through a critical vision of society, released from oppression and ignorance to find security and happiness in new laws, institutions and practices.

Law and political thought

How is law related to political thought in modern European history? There are three different answers to this question that apply here. One derives from what may be called the legislative or statutory model of legal philosophy, which, following good classical precedent, identified law with the will of the sovereign, whether located in a monarchical or in a republican form of government. In the eighteenth century the legislative paradigm can be seen in the theory and practice of enlightened despotism and especially in the codification movement, which touched many European states, including Prussia, Austria and France (Tarello 1976; cf. Wisner 1997). European codes, modelled largely on the Corpus Juris Justiniani (ad 529–33), were intended to organise all private law (especially the law of persons and property) into a single system and in this way, whether directly or indirectly, to politicise it. This agenda was realised most famously in the Napoleonic Code, but it can also be seen in monarchists such as Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Friedrich von Stahl and Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, who defined law simply as a command of sovereign power.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century European intellectual life was enriched by the works of composers, painters, poets and writers who were influenced in a variety of ways by the spirit of ‘romanticism’ (Porter and Teich 1988; Schenk 1979). Romantic ways of thinking had deep roots in early modern culture but between about 1800 and 1850 they played a particularly significant role in theoretically framed statements on fundamental political questions. Issues of definition and taxonomy bedevil the study of romanticism, but at the risk of some oversimplification it is possible to identify three concerns that were shared by a range of prominent exponents of political romanticism. These writers were all preoccupied with the epistemological and moral importance of feeling and imagination; they developed a distinctive notion of the individual; and they stressed ideas of community.

Conventionally German liberalism is held to be one of the main reasons why Germany in the nineteenth century never managed to break the fetters of an authoritarian political system and why it eventually came to be the breeding ground for extremist movements on the right, notably radical nationalism and finally National Socialism. The history of German liberalism has always been seen as an aspect of the so-called German Sonderweg, a departure from the path towards modernity and liberal government which had succeeded elsewhere in Western Europe. In this approach, the failure of liberalism to impress German society with its values was considered a key factor. Recent research has shown, however, that this was at best a partial view. First, the parallels in the development of German and British liberalism are considerable. Secondly, the achievements and the failures of German liberalism ought to be compared with those of other European countries, notably Italy, Austria and Hungary. Such a comparison produces a far more diversified picture of German and European liberalism (Langewiesche 1988b).

From Hegel to Hegelianism

In The Communist Manifesto completed just before the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, its joint authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, depicted communism as a theory which explained how the development of industrial capitalism would lead to a proletarian revolution. In that revolution, private property in the means of production would be abolished, the political state would be superseded, and humanity would enter into a higher state of freedom. Twentieth-century commentators, following the Manifesto's characterisation of modern communism, attempted to relate its genesis to the industrial revolution and the emergence of the working class.

Today we deliberately refer to social sciences in the plural. For much of the nineteenth century, however, writers more characteristically spoke of social science or la science sociale in the singular. Although there was perhaps as little consensus then as now on either the meaning of ‘social’ or the methods of its ‘science(s)’, there was an often unspoken agreement about the relationship of social science to politics: la science sociale would provide the master plan for a new political order. My purpose in this essay is not to canvas all the uses of social science as political blueprint, but rather to reconsider some key debates about the relationship of social science to political argument in France and England from the French Revolution, when the term science sociale became current, to the 1880s, when ‘positivism’ had come to prevail on both sides of the Channel. To this end, I will contrast the reach and resonance of the idea of ‘social science’ in two political milieux.

Introduction

Perhaps no Victorian was more startled by the implications of evolution than Charles Darwin (1809–82). Transformations of nature through natural selection were considered in his private and, eventually, very public writings; but even as they flowed from his pen, these ideas disturbed him. He was perennially torn about their moral and ethical consequences. The imagery of struggle, selection and extinction in nature that Darwin did so much to fashion was also ready-made to describe the rough passage of arguments and beliefs through history, including the struggle for survival of the evolutionary idea itself. Darwin and his followers identified themselves with a cause, but they were not always so sanguine about the social and political repercussions of their intellectual battles. This chapter situates Darwin's struggle – and his concept of struggle – in a wider context of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and explores political and religious consequences of the claim that species (human included) are not definitively fixed in form, but undergo change over time.