THE POLITICS OF SLAVERY Laura Brace 55606_Brace.indd606_Brace.indd i 112/01/182/01/18 6:036:03 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Laura Brace, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Palatino LT Std by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0114 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0115 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0493 8 (epub) The right of Laura Brace to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 55606_Brace.indd606_Brace.indd iiii 112/01/182/01/18 6:036:03 PPMM CONTENTS Acknowledgments iv 1 Shining a Light on Slavery? 1 2 Aristotle and the Strangeness of Slaves 16 3 Locke and Hutcheson: Indians, Vagabonds and Drones 37 4 Empires of Property, Properties of Empire 60 5 Humanity, Hegel and Freedom 87 6 Unparalleled Drudgery and the Deprivation of Freedom 115 7 The Subjection of Women: Loopholes of Retreat? 142 8 Incarceration and Rupture: The Past in the Present 169 9 Traffi cking and Slavery: A Place of No Return 191 10 Glimpses of Slavery 219 References 224 Index 241 55606_Brace.indd606_Brace.indd iiiiii 112/01/182/01/18 6:036:03 PPMM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful to the British Academy for the award of a small grant, ‘Beyond Sale or Purchase?’ which allowed me to carry out the research on the eighteenth-century sources on the antislavery campaigns and the proslavery responses in the St John’s Library, Cambridge, the Bodle- ian Library, Oxford and the library at Canterbury Cathedral. Many thanks to the very helpful staff in all those places, and to the Univer- sity of Leicester for a very welcome period of study leave that helped enormously with the writing of this book. I am also grateful to the British Academy for funding a Landmark Conference, ‘Slaveries Old and New’, in March 2014, jointly organised with Julia O’Connell Davidson, Mark Johnson and Zoe Trodd, and to the participants in that confer- ence, particularly Tommy Lott, Nandita Sharma, Sam Okyere, Char- lotte Sussman and Bridget Anderson, whose insights and scholarship inform much of the argument of this book. The ESRC funded a seminar series on ‘The Politics of Victimhood’ which proved a particularly fruitful forum for discussion of many of the ideas behind this book, and I am grateful to them and to my co-organisers, Julia O’Connell Davidson, Kelly Staples and Stephen Hopkins, and to participants including Svati Shah, Tony Burns, Sealing Cheng, Iman Hashim, Andrew Jefferson and Patrizia Testai. Jenny Daly and David Lonergan at Edinburgh have been very kind and patient editors. As will be clear from reading this book, I owe a huge amount to Julia O’Connell Davidson and her work on modern slavery, and in particular her commitment to understanding the role of borders and the signifi - cance of the right to locomotion and mobility in the politics of slavery. It may not be so obvious from reading the book what a privilege it is to have her as an academic sister, but it really is. Many, many thanks to her for everything. I also thank Lucy Sargisson and Chris Pierson, iv 55606_Brace.indd606_Brace.indd iviv 112/01/182/01/18 6:036:03 PPMM Acknowledgments v and the other members of the ‘Politics of Property’ specialist group – John Salter, Colin Tyler, James Penner and Patrick Joseph Cockburn in particular – for allowing me to talk to them about the connections between property and slavery for years on end, and thank you to Anita Rupprecht for joining in the conversation. For intellectual support and encouragement (and excellent conference companionship) at various stages of this project, I would like to thank Moya Lloyd, Kim Hutch- ings, Raia Prokhovnik and Liz Frazer; very many thanks to Vicki Squire and Gary Browning for reading some draft chapters just at the right moment, and to Robbie Shilliam for some very helpful feedback. For their friendship, kindness, solidarity and different kinds of help along the way, heartfelt thanks to Frances Brace, Renie Lewis, James Hamill, Lucy James, Inge Tong Wheeler, Jan Clark, Bob Clark, Emma Swanston, Suzanne Farrell, Roy Redhead, Paul and Monique Fryer, and, of course, Aunt Bette. My parents, Gordon and Anthea Brace, have held the faith in this book, and in me, for a long time and I am very grateful to them for holding on. Thanks to Matt Clark, as ever, for his forbear- ance, and most especially to Aether Blake, for being Aether, and for her alternative title: ‘The Silent Sadness of Savage Slavery Revealed’ by Laura Brace. 55606_Brace.indd606_Brace.indd v 112/01/182/01/18 6:036:03 PPMM 55606_Brace.indd606_Brace.indd vivi 112/01/182/01/18 6:036:03 PPMM Chapter 1 SHINING A LIGHT ON SLAVERY? DEFINING SLAVERY The problem of defi ning slavery as an absolute condition or a fi xed status has been at the heart of the politics of slavery. Liberals have often striven to draw bright lines between slavery as a wrong or a logical impossibility, and liberal autonomy as a good and a right. For socialists, the concept of slavery is more fl exible and the border- lands between slavery, servitude and exploitation are more mobile and contested. The idea of slavery, for them both, carries what Robin Blackburn calls a ‘mythic potency’ that takes it beyond the facts and experience of history (Blackburn 1988, 269). This book is about that mythic potency, about the signifi cance of the status of slavery as a lived experience and as an idea and a political concept. Its aim is to explore the injustice of slavery not just as the opposite of self-owner- ship and liberal autonomy, but also as the opposite of belonging and of free labour. Its particular focus is on chattel slavery, the possibility of defi ning a human being as an animate piece of property and then making that status hereditable. The chattel slave was unable to make a will, to bring formal criminal charges against others or to appear as a witness in most civil cases. A slave’s evidence was acceptable in court only if it had been extracted by torture. People who had been enslaved could be bought, sold, traded, leased, mortgaged, presented as a gift, pledged for a debt, included in a dowry or seized in a bank- ruptcy. What does this mean for our political theories that take the autonomous individual as both their starting point and their goal? We have to ask, who are these chattel slaves, and what made them enslavable? What happened to their status as persons and as humans when they were enslaved? What about the people who enslaved them 1 55606_Brace.indd606_Brace.indd 1 112/01/182/01/18 6:036:03 PPMM 2 The Politics of Slavery and sought to convince themselves that it was possible (for others) to be both person and property? Part of the answer to these questions lies in thinking about the defi nition of slavery, and what might be taken to be its constituent elements. The League of Nations defi nition began with ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attach- ing to the right of ownership are exercised’ (Ste Croix 1988, 19). As Blackburn points out, this defi nition does not specify that the owner must exercise ‘all’ the powers of ownership over their slaves, but ‘some’ of the powers of ownership can be exercised over people such as employees, spouses or children, who are not defi ned as a slaves. It has to be ‘the comprehensive extent of the property rights claimed by the slave owner’ which distinguishes slavery from other forms of owner- ship and exploitation (Blackburn 1988, 274). Even so, this approach makes clear that slavery has signifi cant continuities with other forms of exploitation and servitude, and we need to pay attention to the power relations, the legal structures and institutions, and the political and historical contexts within which the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. It also suggests that the idea of ownership, the property aspect of slavery, might not be enough to distinguish slavery from all other forms of dependency and involuntary labour. Orlando Patterson’s seminal work on slavery, Slavery and Social Death, develops a conception of slavery as a ‘relation of domination’ rather than a category of legal thought (Patterson 1982, 335). His focus on slavery as a relation draws attention to the complexities of depen- dence, and to the personal and institutional dimensions of slavery as a system of parasitism. Patterson concludes that the slave ‘was natally alienated and condemned as a socially dead person, his existence hav- ing no legitimacy whatever’. On this view, the slave becomes the ideal human tool, ‘perfectly fl exible, unattached, and deracinated’, exist- ing only through the master. As the slaveholder fed off the slave to gain the satisfactions of power and honour, the slave lost ‘all claim to autonomous power, was degraded and reduced to a state of liminality’ (Patterson 1982, 337).