Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
May 18, 2024 9:08 AM Subscribe
Podcast (2:42:24) with transcript. Christopher Brown is a professor at Columbia specializing in the slave trade and abolition. He argues that abolition, though obvious in retrospect, was not inevitable and relied on a particular set of circumstances that could have been disrupted at many points. He has also written about Arming Slaves and has an interesting review of Capitalism and Slavery at LRB.
On the contrary, understanding that economic drivers can push in either direction can provide a great understanding of how to regulate them to prevent such a backslide.
Resting purely on the laurels of the empathetic core of anti-slavery efforts risks blindering us to (a) the tools being employed to undo it all, and (b) how easily it could occur in the West given how easily it has occurred under BRICS.
posted by CynicalKnight at 12:27 PM on May 18 [13 favorites]
Resting purely on the laurels of the empathetic core of anti-slavery efforts risks blindering us to (a) the tools being employed to undo it all, and (b) how easily it could occur in the West given how easily it has occurred under BRICS.
posted by CynicalKnight at 12:27 PM on May 18 [13 favorites]
TFA is fascinating to me because of an unslaked interest I have in the history of slavery, and in particular understanding how American slavery was different from the slave societies of the Old World. But I am not so certain that "was abolition inevitable" is really a worthwhile question. Abolition in fact happened, and the hows and whys of that are of interest. The past probability of counterfactual outcomes, not so much. In my humble opinion.
I am of two minds on the question of whether there is such a thing as human moral progress. It can be hard to think of examples where there's not constant backsliding, but I think if you take a long enough view you can convince yourself that yes, there is, and you don't need to squint too hard to see it. Once upon a time some of the largest, best-organized societies in the world used to maintain large militaries whose primary purpose was to raid neighboring societies for captives, who would then be taken home by the aggressors to be publicly tortured to death.(1) Nobody does that kind of thing anymore, and its eventual replacement by enslaving the captives might be viewed as a step in the right direction. Cf. the whole concept of the "axial age" where people basically discovered the Golden Rule, apparently.
As for "Why no Abolitionism until there was?" I think I recall reading some ancient Greek remarking about slavery, that when the looms weave of themselves and the mines dig themselves and the fields till themselves, then slavery would come to an end. Words to that effect anyway. And yep, by that metric, the Abolitionists showed up a bit early, but only a bit. While the fields don't exactly till themselves even yet, tilling these days is an utterly different kind of work than slaves would do. Likewise for digging mines, at least for the industrialized peoples. And also the Abolition was not absolute: punitive penal slavery is still a thing, though we don't call it that. Anyway, I like Brown's idea that Abolition needed a community like the Quakers to get started, a non-hierarchical one where the first people to broach the idea wouldn't get shut down. And I see another point that Brown doesn't develop, that maybe it needed to be in a place like the US where the local Quakers in New England didn't need to worry too much about what magnates in Charleston or Richmond thought about what they were saying.
TFA is like that all the way through. There's a lot of detail about stuff that happened that probably had to happen before Abolition could become a thing, and to me it's noteworthy that the happening of the stuff (the Quaker movement, the first Abolitionist publicists) followed pretty closely upon the enablement of the happening. It's hard to imagine somebody like Benezet in an age before widespread (if not mass) literacy and at least semi-industrial printing technology, but once those things appear, there he is. The desire to make some point about contingency v. inevitability is a little confusing to me.
Thanks @hermanubis for the interesting read. I am now planning to look at Brown's books.
(1) I'm thinking mainly of Shang Dynasty China here but some pre-Columbian New World societies also.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:29 PM on May 18 [6 favorites]
I am of two minds on the question of whether there is such a thing as human moral progress. It can be hard to think of examples where there's not constant backsliding, but I think if you take a long enough view you can convince yourself that yes, there is, and you don't need to squint too hard to see it. Once upon a time some of the largest, best-organized societies in the world used to maintain large militaries whose primary purpose was to raid neighboring societies for captives, who would then be taken home by the aggressors to be publicly tortured to death.(1) Nobody does that kind of thing anymore, and its eventual replacement by enslaving the captives might be viewed as a step in the right direction. Cf. the whole concept of the "axial age" where people basically discovered the Golden Rule, apparently.
As for "Why no Abolitionism until there was?" I think I recall reading some ancient Greek remarking about slavery, that when the looms weave of themselves and the mines dig themselves and the fields till themselves, then slavery would come to an end. Words to that effect anyway. And yep, by that metric, the Abolitionists showed up a bit early, but only a bit. While the fields don't exactly till themselves even yet, tilling these days is an utterly different kind of work than slaves would do. Likewise for digging mines, at least for the industrialized peoples. And also the Abolition was not absolute: punitive penal slavery is still a thing, though we don't call it that. Anyway, I like Brown's idea that Abolition needed a community like the Quakers to get started, a non-hierarchical one where the first people to broach the idea wouldn't get shut down. And I see another point that Brown doesn't develop, that maybe it needed to be in a place like the US where the local Quakers in New England didn't need to worry too much about what magnates in Charleston or Richmond thought about what they were saying.
TFA is like that all the way through. There's a lot of detail about stuff that happened that probably had to happen before Abolition could become a thing, and to me it's noteworthy that the happening of the stuff (the Quaker movement, the first Abolitionist publicists) followed pretty closely upon the enablement of the happening. It's hard to imagine somebody like Benezet in an age before widespread (if not mass) literacy and at least semi-industrial printing technology, but once those things appear, there he is. The desire to make some point about contingency v. inevitability is a little confusing to me.
Thanks @hermanubis for the interesting read. I am now planning to look at Brown's books.
(1) I'm thinking mainly of Shang Dynasty China here but some pre-Columbian New World societies also.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:29 PM on May 18 [6 favorites]
In my admittedly layperson understanding and as someone whose community has suffered greatly by the imperial colonialism of the British Empire mostly ending chattel slavery is IMO the only decent thing they ever did. You look at the time line of modern abolition and every third entry involves The British Empire banning, buying off, or entering into a treaty with someone.
posted by Mitheral at 2:18 PM on May 18 [3 favorites]
posted by Mitheral at 2:18 PM on May 18 [3 favorites]
I like Brown's idea that Abolition needed a community like the Quakers to get started, a non-hierarchical one where the first people to broach the idea wouldn't get shut down. And I see another point that Brown doesn't develop, that maybe it needed to be in a place like the US where the local Quakers in New England didn't need to worry too much about what magnates in Charleston or Richmond thought about what they were saying.
I thought Brown developed that point pretty well, in a way that I, as a long-time Quaker, hadn't really seen before, or at least hadn't seen in a way that took hold in my mind. His comment on Quakers in Barbados not becoming abolitionists, for instance.
Though brief, he did a good job conveying how long it took for Quakers to reach unity on slavery. If anyone is interested in reading more about Quakers and their relationship to slavery and to African-Americans after abolition, you might be interested in Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice by Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye. It's an in-depth history and it took American Quakers by storm when it came out in 2009. White Quakers tend to like to sit primly on our laurels around abolition and the civil right movement, and McDaniel and Julye complicate that in many ways.
posted by Well I never at 4:05 PM on May 18 [11 favorites]
I thought Brown developed that point pretty well, in a way that I, as a long-time Quaker, hadn't really seen before, or at least hadn't seen in a way that took hold in my mind. His comment on Quakers in Barbados not becoming abolitionists, for instance.
Though brief, he did a good job conveying how long it took for Quakers to reach unity on slavery. If anyone is interested in reading more about Quakers and their relationship to slavery and to African-Americans after abolition, you might be interested in Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice by Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye. It's an in-depth history and it took American Quakers by storm when it came out in 2009. White Quakers tend to like to sit primly on our laurels around abolition and the civil right movement, and McDaniel and Julye complicate that in many ways.
posted by Well I never at 4:05 PM on May 18 [11 favorites]
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