Slavery and Its Transformations: Prolegomena for a Global and Comparative Research Agenda
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Comparative Studies in Society and History 2021;63(3):566–598. 0010-4175/21 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Common Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S0010417521000153 Slavery and Its Transformations: Prolegomena for a Global and Comparative Research Agenda MATTHIAS VAN ROSSUM International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam, The Netherlands SLAVERY REVISITED In public and academic domains, the history of slavery is still commonly understood through the lens of “classic” slavery in the early modern Atlantic, the nineteenth-century United States, and the Greco-Roman world. The majority of people throughout history who faced conditions of slavery, however, did not live in these classic slavery societies, but in societies with a much wider range of slavery regimes. This was the case before the abolition of the slave trade and legal slavery, especially in the early modern Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds where commercial or chattel slavery systems coexisted with a variety of other regimes. It remained the case after the abolitions, with the continuation of informal “modern” forms of slavery that today characterize the lives and working conditions of an estimated 40.3 million people, again particularly in South and Southeast Asia.1 The focus on “classic” formal slavery has in some ways limited our understanding of the adaptable and persistent nature of slavery regimes and their trajectories of development. The definitions developed for these classical histories have reinforced the often implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that the Atlantic history of chattel slavery was largely different and isolated from the wider histories of informal and also “modern” slaveries. This has de-historicized these other, informal forms of slavery as static and unchangeable; in the words of Michael Zeuske, it has led to “smaller slaveries” being “overlaid by hegemonic slaveries” and “conceptualized as ‘special forms.’”2 This has obscured our understanding of 1 International Labour Office, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage (Geneva, 2017). 2 Michael Zeuske, “Historiography and Research Problems of Slavery and the Slave Trade in a Global-Historical Perspective,” International Review of Social History 57 (2012): 87–111, 106. 566 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.93, on 30 Sep 2021 at 05:49:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000153 SLAVERY AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS 567 the wider historical trajectories of different forms of slavery as they developed across the globe. It long allowed perceptions of the history of slavery to dominate that conceptualized its development in linear fashion, from an Atlantic expansion of slave trade and slavery to “enlightened” abolitions—in short, from “unfreedom” to “freedom.” Such linear conceptions are increasingly being critiqued by scholars who argue that we need to develop perspectives that account for the coexistence, interaction, decline, and emergence of different forms of slavery.3 There is a growing academic awareness of the need to break away from these classical confinements in order to develop more global and encompassing approaches that can better make sense of slavery’s long and complex history.4 There have been important advances in the rich historiography of Atlantic slavery, and in the expanding scholarship on slavery and slave trades in other parts of the world, but the shift remains incomplete. Though new key concepts of slaving and availability are gaining ground, the wider field of slavery studies has been pointing toward new horizons and proclaiming new dawns more than we have actually, systematically explored them. In 2012, Michael Zeuske called for the “analysis of slavery” to “be replaced by the history of slaveries, or of actors in these slaveries, in the tradition of ‘small’ and kin slaveries, which extend up to the present.” So far, this call has not yet been taken up energetically, although we can take hope from the fact that it is apparent in the agendas of some recently developed research centers.5 Thus, although global slavery studies stand on the shoulders of giants, from Nieboer to Patterson, in some respects we have only begun to develop a truly global and encompassing approach, one that addresses not only the enormous variety of slavery forms, but also slavery’s adaptability and persistence, from earliest times to the present. This article aims to contribute to the development of approaches that will improve our understandings of slavery as a persistent social and societal phenomenon from global and long-term perspectives. It explores what can be gained by reversing the dominant perspective, to develop an analytical framework and method that will allow us to integrate and compare the 3 E.g., Ulbe Bosma, The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor (New York, 2019); Christian G. De Vito, Juliane Schiel, and Matthias van Rossum, “From Slavery to Precarity? Labour History Revisited, and Beyond,” Journal of Social History 54, 2 (2020): 644–62; Matthias van Rossum “Global Slavery, Local Bondage? Rethinking Slaveries as (Im)Mobilizing Regimes from the Case of the Dutch Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds,” Journal of World History 31, 4 (2020): 693–727. 4 N. Lenski and C. M. Cameron, eds., What Is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2018); Michael Zeuske, Sklaverei: Eine Menschheitsgeschichte von der Steinzeit bis heute (Reclam Verlag, 2018); S. Conermann et al., “Objective: The Cluster of Excellence ‘Beyond Slavery and Freedom,’” Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/program/about (accessed 1 Aug. 2019). 5 E.g., The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.93, on 30 Sep 2021 at 05:49:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000153 568 MATTHIAS VAN ROSSUM experiences of slavery “outside” of the Atlantic into a global history of slavery. That is, I argue that we need to reverse our perspective from that of the formal to that of the informal, from the Atlantic to the rest of the world, and away from binary understandings toward ones that are more connected and historical- contextual. I will begin by examining the possibilities for, and existing perspectives on, such a global approach and engaging the crucial but often glossed-over distinction between formal and informal regimes of slavery. I then take stock of the growing body of work dealing with slavery, especially in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, to consider what can be gained by incorporating a wider spectrum of historical “slaveries” into our analyses and (re)conceptualizations, as Zeuske has rightfully argued for. This underscores the point that in order to make sense of the highly diverse, adaptable, and persistent nature of slavery we must develop a more systematic comparative agenda that lays the basis for a consistent rethinking of slaveries’ forms and developments. A third section of the article reflects upon what we can gain from renewed comparisons to explore the many- faceted, persistent history of slavery before, after, and beyond the trans- Atlantic slave trade. The fourth and fifth sections propose contours for a global and connecting approach for this comparative endeavor. They lay out the first steps toward an analytical model for rethinking the history and presence of slavery by analyzing slavery regimes and their trajectories through both contrasting comparisons and global connections. The development of such a model requires, first, that we understand both the commonalities and the distinguishing features of different forms of coerced labor regimes, or coercive asymmetrical dependencies. Different forms or regimes did not exist in isolation, but were connected and impacted by their interactions, one of the most important of which was via slave trade—the coerced transportation of people. Secondly, we need to account for these connections by looking at interactions and external impacts. These connections, in turn, remind us that neither the classic nor the smaller slaveries were stagnant, self-contained, or unchangeable. Over time, they developed and adapted along different paths, continuously influenced, again, by their interactions. Thirdly, the focus proposed here, on trajectories of slavery regimes, can help us integrate comparative and connecting aspects with their spatial and temporal dimensions. To enhance our understanding of slavery, we need to undertake a more inclusive, open investigation into the broader spectrum of slavery regimes. We must take an inductive approach that incorporates observations from in- depth, source-based analyses and that systematically compares slavery regimes to understand their characteristics, differences, and commonalities. We should avoid static units of analysis and top-down approaches and Downloaded from