...... 123 !L5 February I 1985 HISTORY Ironies of abolition nature in.imical to democracy and freedom of Empire, slavery and commercial expansion an important. segment of the population not J. Morgan Kousser thoug!lt,.inhospitable to technological and sci typically went together, although Davis de only in plantation areas throughout the Amer entific advances, and anta&onistic to indus· clines to assign causal priprity among them. icas; but in tht more •:modem" colonial ports DA V'!o BRION DA v.S trialization and diversification, which are indis The growth of Roman power after the Punic as weiJ. Thus, i( was those staies thatwere most Slavery and H,uman Prog"l""' pensable for modem economic growth. Wars, the rapid Islamic conquests of the advanced in navi'g3tion andcomnlerce, such as 374pp. Oxford University Press. £17.50. Touching on events that extend over two seventh century, and the world·wide extension the Genoese, the Portuguese. an4, later, the Ot95034392 millennia, from the expansion of the Roman of Iberian influence in the fifteenth and six English, that took the lead in extending slav Empire in the third century BC, to the final teenth centuries were aU concomitant with un e~. and slaves were crucial to the settlement of Histpry is better than ever. More broadly outlawing of slavery on the Arabian peninsula precedented increases in the null\ber of slaves tlje New World, which is.usually·considered a trained th'!n their predecessors and more in 1970, Davis argues persuasively that there· and changes in the character of sla~ery, the progressive development. attracted to the social sciences, the historians ~nship bet:veen slavery and progress, in its most i~rtant being the Spanish and Portu· Before the late eighteenth century no reli who came of professional age in the 1950s, 60s moral, cultural and material senses, was much gtiese restriction of slavery .to people of Afri· gion wa incompatible with' slavery. ~ot even and early 70s often learnt from or even collabo more complex and problematical than is usu· can descent. In none of these empires oi any· the Jews, who we re often persecuted or deni.ed rated with sociologists, political scientists, and ally assumed. Since it brought the "uncultured" where else is there convincing evid.ence that full citizenship in the Mediterranean area as especially economists. Many social scientists, into contact with the "superior" Rofnan, slavery retarded technological, commercial or well as in Europe, developed any .incipient increasingly dissatisfied at being confined to Muslim or Christian civilizations, slavery was scientific a'Ovances, or that slave labour was anti·slavery ideas; they participated in the the relatively static and homogeneous present, almost everywhere initially justified as a pro incompatible with the simultaneous employ· sl~e trade and eVe n operated plantations saw the past as a fresh lode of rich and interest gressive step. Yet when an anti·slavery.move· . ment of at least nominally free labour. when not prohibited from doing,w. ~or was ing data. The resultant commingling of history ment began to develop, for the first time in While the ihstitution was not associated with the Enlightenment, in either its philosophical with neighbouring disciplines produced an world history, during the late eighteenth cen· colour in the ancient or medieval Christian or classical economic guises, more than unprecedented outpouring of monographs, tury, it branded slavei-y as inefficient, un· woflds, the Muslims developed racial equivocally anti·slavery. Locke wrote a pfo. conventionally. grouped under the rubric of Christian and backward in an increasingly stereotypes as bitter and derogatory as those slavefY constitution for South Cafolil'\a, Hume the "'new social history", that have greatly capitalist world in. which individual freedom, common among antebellum Americans or con· thought blacks naturally inferior to w~it~ s . and deepened our knowledge of previously Under· • subject only to the laws of supply and demand , temporary South Africans. According to a Th!_>mas Jefferson and many French philir. explored topics: the history of the demography was th e best guarantee of prOSJ?Crity. tenth--century Arabic account, for instance, sophes believed or hoped that slavery would and living conditions of the masses, of non· In legislating for many post·emanciparion blacks were ''malodorous, stinking. woolly· Somehow automatically die out without the European countries, of diseases and popular societies, with the notable exception of the hrured, w~th uneven limbs, deficient minds, necessity for active human intervention. Adam rituals, of ethnic groups and gays, of women, Smith condemned slavery, but the implicationS and, perhaps especially, of black people. Ever of his raissez·faire ideology were ambiguous. more theoretically and methodologically soph An anonymous conservative follower of isticated, these studies have developed a Smith. whom Davis quotes at length, used it to momentum of their own, which has not, so far, damn government action against slavery as been reversed even by the post·baby·boom futile and perhaps· even 1>9tentially harmful to educational cutbacks of Reagan and Thatcher, black welfare. while the Liverpool East India or the tlllJs for a return to narrowly political merchant J~m es Cropper, a Quaker whose in· and self--consciously patriotic history by Sir fluence in the British anti·slavery movement Keith Joseph and such Americarr'"'neo-con· Davis emphasizes more than most previous servatives as Gertrude Himmelfarb. accounts have, employed it to indict bondage Of all these topics, the greatest aavances as an unnatural restraint on individual h'ave been made in the study ·of slavery, which freedo.m. , has been completely rewritten since 1950. As Instead of secular free·thinkers, it was Pro· David Brion Davis's forty·two pages of foot· tesrant evangelicals - Quakers, New England notes make clear, for the past three decades Congregationalists and English dissenters - scholars have increasingly intensified what who fostered the anti·sla\6Cry movement. They amounts to an international research project did so partly, Davis suggests. as a counter· on slavery and anti·slavery. Social scientific attack against Enlightenment infidelity. Estab· historians have rediscovered and quantified in· lishment discrimination against Nonconfor· numerable documents, which ha~ revealed mi sts , and what theycoitsidered the cOmprom often surprising facts about the death and fer· ising worldliness of the churches and the J3rger tility rates of slaves, the age and sex composi· corruptions of the industrializing Anglo· tion of slave populations, and the national and American cultures. Progressive in represent· international slave trades .. We know much ing a radical atiack on one of the chief institq· more than any Previous generation apo'ut the tions of society. the religious anti·slavery slaves' working conditions. di ets. diseases , movement was at the same time conservative, heights and .weights, about slave prices, aiming to restore a Christianity purified occupations, religions and even sex lives. The thrOugh the struggle against the iniquity~ of nuances of pro-slavery and anti·slavery . .. European traders "''"~in!r contar:t with"t•he inh•rbitr2nU of•Cay'Or
n4 TLS February I 1985 HISTORY
ican abolitionist movement. broadened after struggle d.uring the Civil War, England·, leader · those values; and the expiicit marshalling of Davis knows fa( better than·!, perhaps better mid-century to include many RepublicaQ of the new industrial order. ostenfatio.us cham evidence for and against competing explana:.. t.han anyone else, just what e¥idence exists 9n politicians. fostered wh~ttappears in compara pia~ of world anti·sl~ery, suffocatingly righl lions of their behaviour. such questions. As perceptive as he is learned tive perspective to have been the wOrld's most eous critic of the prac ces of what John Stuart ·,i\pplied to Davis's work, this scheme would and diligent, he offers illuminating comments radical experiment in immediate post-eman Mill termed "the b barous rlations", synl. entail, first , a more straightforward discussion on a whole range of topics besides those men cipation egalitarian reform. None the less, pathized much more with the slave-ho.lding of the ideas of progress and slavery, and of tioned" in the first part of this review- from the wi thout the focus on the relatively clearcut Confederacy than with I he growingly anti-slav changes in them and in their relationship to non-violent Garrisonians' acceptance of vio issue of slaver:y. public support for the cause i.n ery Union. Why were nol only Tory, but Lib each other at different timCs and in different lence by surrogates, · to the reasons for the both countries cooled.- eral n~a pers more critical of Lincoln's than societies. Second , it implies the necessity of Paulistas' changing attitudes toward slavery in The British movement was a deceptive ex of Jctret.on Davis's g~vemment? Why did so making syste m'a~orts to determine the in· Brazil in the 1880s, to echoes of the pro-slavery ample for the world in general and for America many of the British, forgetting how comprom cidence of certain views which Davis asserts argument in the nominally ant.i-slavery reports • in particular. The constitutional power of the ised the West Indian abolition act had been, Jhat particular groups held. How common of the Legue of Nations in the 1920s. It is rather white West Indians to cor\rrol their region's respond so sneeringly to the morally under· were gradualist or immediatist anti·slavery Davis's a priori assumptions about human social institutions was much less secure than . staled Emancipation Proclamation? Why did feelings, as well as pro-slavery opinions among nature, epistemology and the way in which - that of the southern United States. British abo claims that emancipation would disrupt the philosophes and evangelicals? Wero abolition historical arguments should be constrUcted litionists enjoyed superior access to the gov society and economy of the South worry British ist evangelicals more or less sympathetic than that are the source of what J considet ·the ernment. the two James Stephens. father a1.d abolitionists. who had ear lies dismissed similar other Low Churchmen to the Enlighlenment, t>o\lk's failings. To one who begins, as Davis son. actoally helping Jo draft the 1807 and 1834 West Indian contentions as self·serving false· Establi hment latitudinarianism, or .. modern" does, with the supposition that'" human moods anti·slavery acts. Though it appeared frOJll hoods? Straining irl his perpet~al quest for society in general? To what extent did Anglo and outlooks are seldom consistent". the goal afar and in retrospecl as a continuous move· irony. Davis finds the central answer in British American abolitionists endorse the pririciples of analysing belief systems rigorously may ment, gradually and inevitably triuinphing. fears that America represented the vulgar, of laissez-faire? How many offered criticisms, seem irrelevant, if not misleading. To one who Brilish anti·slavery was in fact always sharply democratic future of insatiable materialism, and how many defences of the living ~nditions claims to believe in .. the multiple character of divided over tactics. and its power ebbed sever· raw class conflict and unregulated social of non-Slaves irt America and the British Isles, truth" (are all Jruths equally valid? are some al times over its history. It finally lurched into change. The most self-consciously progressive and what connections, if any, did they make more equal than others?), explicit tests de limited emancipation in the wake of a spon· nation on ear.th. in other words. dreaded the between slavery and the exploitation of free signed to allow a chOice between clearly formu taneous public upsurge of anti-slavery feeling future. workers? What trends were there in the belief lated competing interpretations may appear and oflhe 1832 electoral reform. which greally This insight, typical of many in Davis's pro· in blac.lc inferiority among whites in Europe pointless. To one for whom history is "a kind of reduced the number of pro·slavery representa vocative but deeply unsatisfying book, raises as and America in the nineteenth century? Were moral philosophy teaching by examples" which tives in Parljament. WhereaS tbe Anglican or well as any other ob$ervation that he makes the pro or anti-imperialist sentiments more com· should proceed by seeking to reCapture .. ihe 1 non·religious West Indian planters repeatedly question of how far historical knowledge is mon among anti-slavery activists, and how did varied angles of vision that are also the subject~~ denied Christian instruction to their slaves and advanced by his allusive, oblique and pro· their opinions on empire compare with those of imaginative literature", the Popperian persecuted white dissenting miss_ionaries, fessedly non-social-scientific approach. How who took no part in or opposed the abolitionist falsificationism that is the basis of so much southern slave-owners were often revivalized importanl was Jhis alleged English phobia in movement? social science may ~ee m a naive o~impli evangelicals who sought to employ religion to stimulating anti-Yankee feeling as against, for Third. the programme would involve fication. divert bondsmen's concerns to the hereafter. instance. the desire to restore imports of cotton attempts to specify the extent to which relevant Although Davis is no1 always failhful to his Lacking such a sectarian rallying-cry and usu for the textile-mills or the impulse to weaken a belil!fs were compartmentalized and of lhe "humanistic'' creed of inconsistency and com ally facing much more unified opposition than growing industrial and commercial rival? degree to which verbal commitments to the plexity, those premises do shape his overall the class·splintcred West Indians providCd , Doesn't Davis have the responsibility to spell clicheS ··progress" and the ••advance of civiliza· strategy of presentation , and they vitiate much abolitionists in the United States and else out his reasoning openly , so that the reader can tion" were merely rhetorical covers for actions of the impact of his research and reflection. If where could make li ttle headway by mimicking judge? taken for other, often self-interested reasons. history, like other systematic bodies of know· British tactics. Abolition in the French col· To put the point more generally, it seems to How compatible were the tenets of free-mar ledge- "science", if you will - is to progress, it onies, the United States, Cuba and Brazil came me that the central task of the social history of ket individualism with equal righlS and thewel· must do so not just by increasing the number of about more as a result of temporary liberal ideas is to detennine how importan! particular fare of the freedmen, and when they seemed to scanered, if brilliant insights, but by formulat triumphs in the metropolises, war and the ac· beliefs were, compared to other beliefs, in· clash, why did c~rtai n individuals choose one ing and provisionally accepting some empirical ~ tions of the slaves themselves in deserting terests or constraints, in motivating people's rather than the other? Was religious conver ~ propositions, and by rejecting others. David plantations and enro ll ing as soldiers than as a actions. The pursuit of that goal demands clear sion feally a reason or just an excuse for en· Brion Davis's will persuade ns arly every Consequence of calcu lated long-term cam descriptions of ideas and their connections and statement by Muslims, Jews or Christians? one to pause, henceforth, before equating paigns by anti·slavery movements. contradicti ons; statements, as precise as the Were those who pr;:ofessed an anti-slavery progress with abolition. It will not, however. Not only were the British free with mislead data allow, about the frequency and strength motive fo( esJablishipg or tightening imperial push the study of the history of slavery very ing advice. At the climax of the American with which relevant individuals or groups held control over a colony sincere? far forward. · Building the artisan republic class relations, structurally defined, but of These newly organized workers addressed the is the latest testimony to Thompson's• rsis· ideology. Wilentz is concerned with new forms new forms of exploitatioh in tho capitalist tent influence on American social historians. Mari Jo Bohle of social consciousness, and his re-examination workshop and protested the "line of distinction Despite its breadth, though, this work is not SEAN WI LENTZ , of material conditions serves principally as the beJween Jhe employer and the employed" as the long-awaited American counterpart of Chants Democratic: New York City and I he backdrop to an extended analysis of "artisan 'the source of an economic dependence that Thompson's masterpiece, and Wilentz is right rise o(the American working class, 178S-1850 republicanism". Drawing on the important weakened virtue, corrupted the citizen, and ' ty circumspect in stating its claims. He tempers 446pp. Oxford Uni~ersily Press. £31 .50. contributions of J. G. A. Pocock, he gives a threatened the Republic itself. They articu his ambition to explain the emetgence of a -() 195033426 detailed account of how the artisans adapted lated, according to Wilentz, " the elements ol a workin8;-class presence .. by mid-century by formal republican thought, and elaborated a working-class . . . political economy". emphasizing lhe limils of his specialized re distinct variant "bound to their expectations Wilentz does not restrict his analysis to the search. He does nol argue that New York City Sean Wilentz aptly describes his Chants Demo· about wor.kshop production". Taking to heart familiar institutions of politieal and trade represe nted a typical case of class formation cratic as "an extended historical essay on capi- basic republican ideals ~ such as common- union hislory. Some of his best chapters delin applicable to other regions. Rather, hrs render talism and democracy in the United States". A wealth, virtue, independence, citizenship and eale a popular culture of radicalism. Outside. ing of events in the. Great Metropolis supplies lengthy, detailed st udy of "class formation" equality; American artisans articulated a the workshop and in Jhe boislerous neighbour "an imponant part of this historiCjll puzzle" during the half-century following. the Amer- vision of a co-operative workshop in which hoods of the Bowery, mass entertainments, and merely suggests the contours of a possible ican Revolution, the book is less a narrative ~utual obligation and respect prevailed. As social clubs, volunteer fire companies and even pattern. Wilentz hints, moreover, that his story than an interpretation of the re-ordering of theemergingsystemofwagelabour denied this gangs of prowling youlhs defined•"a republi concludes at the brink of an even more eventful social relations during the transition from mer· possibility, masters and journeymen began to canism of the street". Wilen~ explores these era, one covering the last half oft he nineteenth cantile to industrial capitalism. The theme. diverge in their interpretations Wilentz de- popular forms, including their more distasteful century when a major struggle ensued "over Which is a familiar one to social and labour monstrates how, by 1850 the prevalence of elements such as anti-abolitionism and nativ what the working-class prCsence meant and historians, concerns the fate ,of the artisan's inequality and political corruption in New ism, as well as the alternatives introduced by over whal its project should be". Chants workshop as markets expanded and crafts York City moved' working men to reconsider outsiders. Evangelical religious revivalism and Democratic stands, then, as one very imfx>r underwe~t the ineluctable process of indus- the meaning of the artisan republic. Slowly and temperance 1(311lpaigns drew coriverts from tant chapter in a much larger history still to be trialization. The changing relations of produc- unevenly they transfonned the older system of working-class districts, especially during the written. tion , the erosion of apprenticeship and sub· • belief into a penetrating critique of the class Hard depression years. Wilentz shows how On its own terms, Chants Democratic falls • sequent weakening of bonds between masters relations of industrial capitalism. moral refoinlers utilized sue~ things as lhealre, short