Glimpses of Slavery

Bringing the slaves back into our conversations about freedom and modernity, and giving slavery a history and a politics of its own, alters our conceptual frames much more radically than the discourse of new slavery allows. Racial and gendered domination and violence, and the production of vulnerability, are structured and constituted through the complicated pasts, presents and futures of slavery. The freedom and status of personhood and its roots in property, possession and exchange can only be understood through the lens of slavery and the uneven distribution of the category of the human. In order to understand how it is that our ideas of universal human freedom can separate some people whose liberties matter from others who are not to included in the category of full personhood, we need to step into the space between personhood, subpersonhood and humanity and confront the ways in which the zone of freedom is rooted in property rights, and in the codification of persons as property.

Unparalleled Drudgery and the Deprivation of Freedom

This book insists on the connections between freedom, belonging and labour for understanding the politics of slavery. This chapter seeks to show how constructions of race and labour were inextricable from one another, and how thinking about slavery as a labour system is inseparable from understanding freedom as a contested concept, forged out of experience and struggle. Part of that struggle was about trying to find and define the limits of enslavability, and its location in a constellation of concepts of self-possession, labour power, race and property. Labour as a moral and political category was caught up with ideas about autonomy, morality and honour that were deeply contested, and the mobile borders between free and unfree labour, labour and capital, persons and property were inseparable from questions about who belonged, and who was eligible to be incorporated into civil society. Through a focus on slave hiring and slave provisioning grounds, this chapter explores how and why the abolitionist arguments about freedom, rationality and shared humanity could not help them to escape the sheer adaptability of bondage, as it resurfaced in questions about the command over labour, trustworthiness, the appearance of inferior capacities, and the division between the industrious and the idle.

Incarceration and Rupture: The Past in the Present

This chapter focuses on the prison industrial complex in the United States to ask again about what gets remembered and how, to take us back to the question of what happens to a manumitted slave, and to revisit the figure of the slave as an uncanny object in the blind spot of modernity. It contests the sharp divide between past and present that lies behind the discourse of new slavery and focuses not on rupture, but on the continuities and persistent connections between the racial slavery of the past and the incarceration of the present. It looks at a past that refuses to pass away by exploring the meanings of imprisonment, the prison itself, the border regime and the status of felons and prisoners as outsiders, shut out of civil society.

Shining a Light on Slavery?

This chapter introduces the problems of defining slavery, and asks what makes a slave a slave? It focuses on powers of ownership and relations of domination, and critically examines Patterson’s constituent elements of slavery and his transhistorical definition of slavery as fundamentally about violence and slaves’ lack of legitimacy. It goes on to explore how Patterson’s emphasis on mortality and social death has been contested by others and what these debates over definition mean for the codification of persons as property and for the category of the human. This chapter argues for the importance of the role of labour in the volatile space between race and the human, and insists that transforming humans into moral beings was (and is) a gendered and racialized process that requires us to rethink the relation between pasts, presents and futures. This is not about a rupture between past and present, but about the afterlives of slavery and about putting slavery at the centre of political thought and narratives of modernity. This approach to defining slavery reveals the limitations of modern slavery discourse, of knowing and not-knowing and the rhetoric of misery, and the risks of taking the slave outside of history.

Trafficking and Slavery: A Place of No Return?

This chapter seeks to interrogate what it means to claim that the brutally exploited and the radically excluded are the property of others, and to understand the victims of trafficking as slaves. The current discourse around trafficking and slavery brings us back to the limits of enslavability, and questions of self-possession, labour power, race and property that structure the meanings of slavery and freedom. This chapter critically interrogates the trafficking-as-slavery discourse and the ways in which women who migrate for work or who sell sex are not seen as engaged in the market as market actors, but are placed outside the pathways and webs of trade unless they are deceived or coerced. The female figure of the migrant in the anti-trafficking campaigns is defined by the violence she has suffered, and she is positioned outside the labour market and its social connections, and outside the ethical life of the family. The underlying suggestion is that labour migration is always risky or reckless for women, and that their inviolability is always threatened by moving abroad, so that ‘the safest option is to remain home’.

The Subjection of Women: Loopholes of Retreat?

This chapter focuses on gender and slavery, and in particular on the rhetoric of thinking about wives as slaves in both the pre and post abolition contexts, and in the different and parallel conversations about empire that went on through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the process of transforming humanity into moral beings, gender as a register of difference played out in complex ways that troubled the concept of personhood as a status and redrew some of the boundaries of enslavability. The complications of home, the ‘collapsed geography’ of the plantation household and the contested meanings of the private /public divide require us to think about the power relations within the household, between women and men, but also between women and women living in constant contact with one another. Through a critical analysis of Wollstonecraft, Thompson and Mill and the analogy of marriage and slavery, and of the characterisation of white women as the survivors of slavery, this chapter argues for the importance of looking at the disavowals and occlusions of those narratives, and thinking instead about the indebtedness of freedom to notions of property, possession and exchange that are predicated on race as well as gender.

Empires of Property, Properties of Empire

This chapter focuses on the colonists’ claim to property in persons. It looks at the arguments of Kant, Diderot and Cuguano contesting the progressive narrative of civilization and refinement and condemning the ways in which the European spirit of conquest created barbarity and ignorance, and allowed the process of commodification to develop. The chapter explores the contested discourse of improvement and what it meant to be ‘fit for freedom’. The complications of the debates over the abolition of the slave trade in the 1790s show us some of entanglements of the relationship between property, slavery, morality and the law. The unjust and uncertain tenure that owners held in their slaves undermined the stability of their landed property in the metropolitan centre, but also drew attention to the uncertain tenure that slaves held in themselves. The radical antislavery of the Haitian revolution was itself a contest over land and ownership, which at the same time as affirming the enslaved people as agents of change and subjects in their own right, also drew attention to the fuzzy boundaries and unclear content of the categories of slavery and freedom which are the subject of this chapter.

Humanity, Hegel and Freedom

This chapter argues that is not enough to tell a story of humanity that takes personhood and autonomy as already accomplished. The process of transforming humanity into moral beings, and of distinguishing between humanity and the status of personhood, was never straightforward, but full of disruptions, ruptures, contradictions and repetitions. The mobility of the border between person and thing, and the intermediate statuses of Hegel’s bondsman and the fugitive slave were inseparable from the development of ideas about epidermalization, colour and inferiority. This chapter examines slavery as part of the forwardness of modernity, of stories that we think of as about progress, freedom and humanity. The drawing of boundaries within humanity, the sense of partitions that became permanent, was contested, and the line between human beings, sub-persons and rational, moral agents was not easily drawn, despite Kant’s insistence on its solidity. In this chapter, the symbiosis of race and the moral-political discourse of Kant and Hegel and the inextricable coupling of freedom and slavery are shown to work together to undermine the possibility of taking autonomy for granted, and of holding the historical past firmly in place.

Locke and Hutcheson: Indians, Vagabonds and Drones

This chapter focuses on Locke, and on the question of how we give slavery a history and think about it as a political relation. It investigates the colonial reading of Locke, his personal involvement in the slave trade and the connections between slavery and civil society. It argues that Locke’s justification of limited slavery needs to be linked to his view of civil society and the state of nature. This helps to explain the Carolinian context of his theory of slavery and the ways in which Native Americans were understood to stand outside the polite and civil world, unable to cultivate their land or their reason. The chapter develops the book’s argument that there are many different kinds of slaveries, rather than one transhistorical pattern. It looks in particular at the scheme for enslaving the English poor put forward by Francis Hutcheson in 1755, and at the status of vagabonds and begging drones. What did it mean to argue that the few were enslavable for the good of the many? The chapter explores the differences between the enslavement of the English poor and slavery in the Caribbean and the salience of race and racialization in understanding seventeenth-century slavery as a historical process and a political relation.

Aristotle and the Strangeness of Slaves

This chapter focuses on Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, in particular the idea of the slave as a living tool. It explores psycho-ethical slavery, the entangled relations between political servitude and chattel slavery, the complications of manumission, and what it means not to be a slave. The chapter asks where the slave fits into the polis, and how Aristotle understands the relationship between slavery, citizenship and freedom. It goes on to explore his theory of the incompleteness of the slaves’ humanity and the significance of the idea that those who are ‘naturally’ slaves do not qualify for full personhood. In Aristotle’s theory, and in this chapter, slavery emerges as a complex set of social relations and as an unstable marker of both property and personhood. The chapter concludes by arguing that slavery has to be understood as a matter for politics, and is always concerned with boundary-setting and keeping.