Ironies of Abolition Nature In.Imical to Democracy and Freedom of Empire, Slavery and Commercial Expansion an Important

............ 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<rt Gop< slavery. • thought have been traced and retraced. Studies the Twelfth to the SiJ:teenth Century, tdiled by D. T. volrumr• for"urthr• Urraco The opponents of ·involuntary servitude of anti·slavery movements throughout the A/rica (75/pp. Htine17Ulnn Educalional Books. /6.50. 0435 948105). were torn between two concepts of progreiS world continue to proliferate. The cycle from United States, ''progressives" joined or com· and depraved passions··, and a fourteenth...cen· gradual reform. which , hoW.ever slow to stem hypothesis to revision, which in· earlier days promised with planters in ba,king appren· tury Arab historian contended that black Afri evil, promised political viability and the least took a half·century, has been reduced to ticeship systems and other legal efforts to pre cans were "the only people who accept slav disruption to the co~munity. and the apoca· perhaps a half-decade. Analyses of abolitions, vent the ex·slaves from leaving the plantations. ery" because of "their low degree of humanity lyptic stroke of immediate-abolition. more dif· reconstructions and race relations in general These abridgements of laissez-faire, as well as and th'eir proximity to the animal stage''. ficult to achieve and dangerous to order, but have joined those of slavery as the chief con· the large·scale importation of contract lab Although Muslims enslaved Christians and · fatal to sin. Each process. Davis contends. also cerns of comparative cross·national history. ourers (which most abolitionists apparently Jews as well, they may have imported as many had more conservatiVe variants or at least Non·historians may not have. fully realized it opposed), we~e designed to ensure that the black Africans intO" territories that they con· possible unprogressive implications. Gradual yet, but slavery and its con s~quence s are now inability to work freedmen like slaves would trolled as Christians later sent to the Americas. ismmight undermine total abolition, as it argu· the hottest of topics in history, and few come not undermine the various countries' socio· and they apparently treated Africans much ably did in the wake of the passage of ernan:._ closer to a mastery of the literature of this economic systems and staple crop economies worse than they did Europeans. cipation acts by the northern states of the ~ burgeoning sub-field than Professor DaVis. that moral progress would not impede material 'Slavery had existed time out of mind in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth Davis's two previous books on the subject, progress. ThUs cQpsti'ained, emancipation, in cosmopolitan international crossroads areas of century, the 1807 curtailment of the African The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture the approvihg phrase of one British abolition southern Italy, Sicily and neighbouring islands.

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