Slaves and/or wage slaves?
An article by Jerry Toner - director of classical studies at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He is the author, with Marcus Sidonius Falx, of the Roman self-help books, Release Your Inner Roman (2016) and How to Manage Your Slaves (2014).
Incentives, rewards, bonuses and bonding experiences – Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists
The successful Roman master understood that slaves were not stupid and would take advantage of opportunities to undermine their master’s authority. Oppression, however, meant that outright rebellion was as rare as labour strikes today. The three big slave rebellions, the last of which was led by Spartacus, all took place between 135-71 BC when slaves were cheap and expendable, thanks to rapid Roman conquests, and so were treated appallingly. Most of the time, it was the small-scale acts of resistance that Roman writers warned against. The surviving ancient manuals on estate management urge the master to guard against slaves gossiping, fiddling the accounts, or pretending to be sick. These all chipped away at the master’s authority, and the manuals make it clear that it is vital to promote the most ambitious slaves to the position of overseer in order to ensure the efficient running of the estate.
For Roman masters, owning slaves was never simply a question of economics. Being followed by a great retinue was a status symbol that made masters feel powerful and important. One prefect of Rome, Pedanius Secundus, had 400 slaves in his household. In the same way that a fine horse reflected well upon its rider, so a well-mannered and deferential slave highlighted the merits of his owner. If there were hundreds of them, then so much greater the glory. So too the modern corporate leader are sometimes tempted to bloat their staff as a means of advertising their own importance to the wider world, whether or not those people are really needed for the task at hand. It is our own form of empire-building.
Owning slaves and employing staff are in a simple sense a million miles apart. A comparison of the two is going to provoke, but similarities do exist. It is an uncomfortable truth that both slaveowners and corporations want to extract the maximum possible value from their human assets, without exhausting them or provoking rebellion or escape. At a deep level, managing others always involves finding solutions to the age-old problems of assessing people from limited information, then incentivising, disciplining and rewarding them, to finally being rid of them. However much we might prefer to disguise the harsher side of wage-slavery behind a rhetoric of friendly teamwork, we could benefit from some straightforward Roman honesty. Everyone knew where they stood then – even if, sometimes, that was in the line for crucifixion.
Capitalism and slavery - the re-sale!
Here is a brief excerpt from Slavery, Commodification, and Capitalism, a paper by Peter Kolchin, published in
Reviews in American History, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 44, Number 2, June 2016:
Slavery was a system of labor in which slaves were valued for their ability to produce commodities for sale. As Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan put it succinctly: “Slaves worked. When, where, and especially how they worked determined, in large measure, the course of their lives.” But slaves also were themselves commodities, valued for the price they could bring on the slave market. The three books under review focus on slaves as commodities; in the process, their authors join a growing number of scholars who see slavery as thoroughly capitalistic and challenge the idea of the slave South as backward, pre- or non-capitalist, and fundamentally distinct from the “free-labor” North. All three are excellent studies that emphasize the centrality of buying and selling human beings to slavery and the slave experience. They will not put an end, however, to the ongoing debate among historians over the relationship between slavery and capitalism.
The transatlantic slave trade has received a good deal of scholarly attention in recent years, but one feature of this trade—the intercolonial trade in slaves already in the New World—has been largely ignored. This is the subject of Gregory E. O’Malley’s fine first book, Final Passages. Focusing, as the subtitle indicates, on the British colonies, O’Malley tells an important story of what often followed the middle passage, as Africans experienced a second—shorter—journey across the water and a second sale as well. Setting forth this process in a thematic introduction followed by eight clearly presented chronological [End Page 217] chapters based on his own database of more than 7,600 voyages, O’Malley finds that about one-quarter of Africans imported to British America experienced this re-sale, which served to compound the traumatic impact of the middle passage, as captives relived the fear of what was to become of them and as families that had managed to remain together so far were often torn apart. Summarizing the commodification of slaves who were “bought, sorted, moved, and sold wherever they would be most valued” (p. 218), O’Malley reminds us that “one must reckon not only with the labor value of the enslaved toiling on American plantations but also with their commodity value in the Atlantic marketplace” (p. 348).
O’Malley tells this depressing story in largely dispassionate but often heart-wrenching detail, along the way making pertinent generalizations and conclusions. A few of the many nuggets the reader encounters are the following: 1) About 4 percent of reshipped slaves died in their second voyage, versus perhaps 12 percent in the middle passage; but given that the intercolonial trips were usually of much shorter duration than the transatlantic ones, the mortality rate (per day or month) was actually higher on these second voyages. 2) Buyers in smaller, more remote markets were especially dependent on re-exports from both the Caribbean and mainland colonies with established sources of supply; North Carolina, for example, received most of its slaves from South Carolina and Virginia, but relatively few directly from Africa. Although planters in the British colonies opposed the practice, British merchants eagerly grasped at the opportunity to re-export slaves to Spanish and French colonies; as O’Malley puts it, “it made little sense to provide workers to one’s rivals, but it made perfect sense to sell commodities to rivals at inflated prices” (p. 348). Unlike antebellum slaves taken to the western United States, most of those sent to the American backcountry during the second half of the eighteenth century were Africans.
Gregory O'Malley's Final Passages: The International Slave Trade of British America 1619 - 1807;
O'Malley explores a neglected aspect of the forced migration of African laborers to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of captive Africans continued their journeys after the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Colonial merchants purchased and then transshipped many of these captives to other colonies for resale. Not only did this trade increase death rates and the social and cultural isolation of Africans; it also fed the expansion of British slavery and trafficking of captives to foreign empires, contributing to Britain's preeminence in the transatlantic slave trade by the mid-eighteenth century.
The pursuit of profits from exploiting enslaved people as commodities facilitated exchanges across borders, loosening mercantile restrictions and expanding capitalist networks.
Drawing on a database of over seven thousand intercolonial slave trading voyages compiled from port records, newspapers, and merchant accounts, O'Malley identifies and quantifies the major routes of this intercolonial slave trade. He argues that such voyages were a crucial component in the development of slavery in the Caribbean and North America and that trade in the unfree led to experimentation with free trade between empires.
Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South by Damian Alan Pargas.
American slavery in the antebellum period was characterized by a massive wave of forced migration as millions of slaves were moved across state lines to the expanding southwest, scattered locally, and sold or hired out in towns and cities across the South. This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.
Juxtaposing and contrasting the experiences of long-distance, local, and urban slave migrants, it analyzes how different migrant groups anticipated, reacted to, and experienced forced removal, as well as how they adapted to their new homes.
Calvin Schermerhorn The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism 1815 -1860
Amazon Customer review
This book is well worth your time. It should be included in the history of capitalism sub-genre that has exploded in the last ten years. There are fascinating and poignant portrayals of some of the nation's largest slave trading firms, including Franklin & Armfield, and Austin Woolfolk. Schermerhorn is a tremendously talented and gifted author. He's a master narrator with a strong vocabulary. Like Edward Baptist, he's able to humanize economic transformations with interesting vignettes.
With expert analysis, he shows us how the commodification of enslaved laborers was tied into--and comprised the very foundation of--a global supply of credit and finance stretching from New Orleans to London.
Amazon Customer review
While there have been a slew of books on slavery and capitalism in recent years, this one stands out for several reasons. First, it does a fantastic job of showing the stark business-side of slavery, where humans were commodified - bought and sold - ripping apart families and ruining lives all in the name of profit. Second, it places the wealth generated by slavery into the larger narrative of American history. And finally, it makes big, sweeping arguments - yet unlike some other books in the field - it makes them soundly, with evidence clearly supporting claims. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the US history, business or economic history, or the history of slavery and race.
Black slave auction in Virginia
Slaves Waiting for Sale: Richmond, Virginia, by Eyre Crowe, 1861. Collection of Teresa Heinz.
In May of 1861, a strikingly original painting was exhibited at the annual show of the Royal Academy in London. The artist, Eyre Crowe, presented the public with a candid vision of the institution of slavery in the United States: A group of eight black women and young children sit within the dusky interior of a slave sale room. At right, a man is seated separately, his arms tightly folded, with a sober, even angry, look on his face. Behind the main group stands the auctioneer, who looks toward the doorway at the left. Three men have stopped there and seem to be discussing their prospects within. Outside flies a red flag, always put out when a slave sale was proceeding….
Along the way, he made sketches of his travels. Supplemented by notes from a diary kept during the trip, these formed the basis for a vivid impression of North-South distinctions in the former colonies just before the Civil War. While Thackeray maintained a reserve discrete from the slavery question, Crowe explored it with keen interest.
Fired by his reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s just-released Uncle Tom‘s Cabin, and having seen advertisements for slave sales in the Richmond, Va., paper, on the morning of March 3, 1853, he ventured into two of the many slave-auction rooms along Wall Street.
Black legends and Social Realism
There are so-called "black legends", "out there", as we say and would like to think, but actually they are in our collective headspace, along with other fake news, heaped with metaphorical spoonfuls of confirmation bias. See Black Legends? Join the Culture Wars! Who owns history? The Nativists? Join the Culture wars! on the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes section.
This is one of several Slavery Myths Debunked at SLATE
“Slaves were better off than some poor people working in Northern or English factories. At least they were given food and a place to stay.”
Is it true?: It was undeniably hard to be a factory worker in the 19th century. White adults (and children) labored in dangerous environments and were often hungry. But slaves were hardly in a better position.
While it makes some intuitive sense that a person would be rationally motivated to take care of his or her “property,” as the Economist’s reviewer suggested, historians have found that American slaveholders were apt to provide minimum levels of food and shelter for enslaved people. They considered black people’s palates to be less refined than white people’s, and this justified serving a monotonous diet of pork and cornmeal. Enslaved workers were expected to supplement their diets when they could, by tending their own vegetable gardens and hunting or trapping—more work to be added to their already heavy loads. Evidence shows that many enslaved people suffered from diseases associated with malnutrition, including pellagra, rickets, scurvy, and anemia.
Even if an enslaved person in the United States landed in a relatively “good” position—owned by a slaveholder who was inclined to feed workers well and be lenient in punishment—he was always subject to sale, which could happen because of death, debt, arguments in the family, or whim. Since very few laws regulated slaveholders’ treatment of enslaved people, there would be no guarantee that the next place the enslaved person landed would be equally comfortable—and the enslaved had limited opportunity, short of running away or resisting, to control the situation.
Bottom line: This is another case of the “two wrongs” fallacy. We could compare levels of mistreatment of Northern factory workers and Southern enslaved laborers and find that each group lived with hunger and injury; both findings are dismaying. But this is a distraction from the real issue: Slavery, as a system, legalized and codified the slaveholder’s control over the enslaved person’s body.
Eyre Crowe ARA (1824–1910) the artist responsible for the painting of the Black Slave Auction in Virginia, was an English painter known for historical art and genre scenes, but with a strong interest in social realism. His work included subject matter representing the workers of northern England in an industrial and urban landscape.
The Dinner Hour, Wigan, by Eyre Crowe (1874), depicting mill girls relaxing at lunchtime
These two paintings by Eyre Crowe cannot be assumed to be an accurate and rigorous documentation process, but the artist has chosen to work with actual subjects and situations. As an artist Crowe evidences in both these painting an approach to creating artworks that represents the slaves of Virginia and the mill girls of Wigan as human beings, as equals. If there is a common element to the aesthetic impact rendered in these representations of people in very different situations, it is that they are fine, beautiful and handsome, dignified and possessed of the same feelings we would expect to experience for ourselves in such circumstances. This is an art that provides a possible leap of imagination for us, the audience, and to empathise and identify with brothers and sisters in these actual conditions of modern life.
Back to the slave market . . .
. . . and the commodification of human beings!
People are commodified or 'turned into objects' when selling their labour on the market to an employer, but modern slavery had been the key means to acquiring the cheap work essential to the formation of European capitalism. Capitalism in its imperialist stage was brutal. In 1885, less that a year after Gérôme's painting was completed and exhibited, a period of horror was to descend on the indigenous population of the Congo, that lasted for more than three decades. In the period from 1885 to 1908, many well-documented atrocities were perpetrated in the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) which, at the time, was a colony under the personal rule of King Leopold II of the Belgians.
These atrocities were particularly associated with the labour policies used to collect natural rubber for export. The boom in demand for natural rubber, which was abundant in the territory, created a radical shift in the 1890s—to facilitate the extraction and export of rubber, all "uninhabited" land in the Congo was nationalised, with the majority distributed to private companies as concessions. Some was kept by the state. Between 1891 and 1906, the companies were allowed to do whatever they wished with almost no judicial interference, the result being that forced labour and violent coercion were used to collect the rubber cheaply and maximise profit.
Picture of "Congolese men holding cut off hands" captured by Alice Seeley Harris in Baringa, May 1904
In 1908, as a result of international pressure, the Belgian government annexed the Congo Free State to form the Belgian Congo, and ended many of the systems responsible for the abuses. The size of the population decline during the period is the subject of extensive historiographical debate, and there is an open debate as to whether the atrocities constitute genocide. Neither the Belgian monarchy nor the Belgian state has ever apologised for the atrocities.
Back to . . .
. . . back.
Slavery in the 21st century
Contemporary slavery, also known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 21 million to 46 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of slaves is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available.
Slavery is most prevalent in impoverished countries and those with vulnerable minority communities, though it also exists in developed countries. Tens of thousands toil in slave-like conditions in industries such as mining, farming, and factories, producing goods for domestic consumption or export to more prosperous nations. Because of these factors, slavery continues and will continue to expand unfettered by international efforts to stop it.
In the older form of slavery, slave-owners spent more on getting slaves. It was harder for them to be disposed of. The cost of keeping them healthy was considered a better investment than getting another slave to replace them. In modern slavery people are easier to get at a lower price so replacing them when exploiters run into problems becomes easier. Slaves are then used in areas where they could easily be hidden while also creating a profit for the exploiter. Slaves are more attractive for unpleasant work, and less for pleasant work. Because the unpleasantness of the work is not internalized it is easier for people to pull slavers in.
Modern slavery can be quite profitable and corrupt governments tacitly allow it, despite it being outlawed by international treaties such as Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery and local laws. Total annual revenues of traffickers were estimated in 2014 to over $150 billion dollars, though profits are substantially lower. American slaves in 1809 were sold for around the equivalent of US$40,000 in today's money. Today, a slave can be bought for $90.
Kevin Bales once said in a TED Talk:
“This is an economic crime,” “People do not enslave people to be mean to them; they do it to make a profit.”
Up front . . .
. . . and back.
. . . on the streets of Rome.
Along with migrant slavery, forced prostitution is the form of slavery most often encountered in wealthy regions such as the United States, in Western Europe, and in the Middle East. It is the primary form of slavery in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, particularly in Moldova and Laos. Many child sex slaves are trafficked from these areas to the West and the Middle East. An estimated 20% of slaves to date are active in the sex industry. Sexual exploitation can also become a form of debt bondage when enslavers insist that victims work in the sex industry to pay for basic needs and transportation.
Many of those who become victims of sex slavery initially do so willingly under the guise that they will be performing traditional sex work, only to become trapped for extended periods of time, such as those involved in Nigeria's human trafficking circuit.
Nigerian gangs have sent thousands of women into the sex markets within Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Italy has the largest population of Nigerians victimized to human trafficking; studies have found as many as 10,000 Nigerian prostitutes in Italy subjected to human trafficking. Human trafficking of Nigerian women to Italy began to occur in the 1980s because of the demand for low-skilled labor in agriculture and services.
This is a long way from the Dublin slave market!
Just as Science Fiction is often closer to Social Fact, so an art that portrays subjects from history often reveals more about what's happening contemporaneously than providing an insight into the essence of past times. There is no safe distance between the contemporaneous and the depiction of brutality, violence and enslavement of periods in a distant past.
And, it is all still happening now!
Modern slavery in the UK: 'They could be sat right in front of you' By Michael Baggs Newsbeat reporter for BBC 10 August 2018
In January this year, three people from Bath were sentenced under the 2015 Modern Slavery Act. Two were jailed for their part in trafficking teenage girls from Vietnam to work in the UK's nail industry.
Police officers swooped on a nail bar in central Bath to arrest a woman on suspicion of modern slavery.
The arrest comes just months after three people, including Thu Huong Nguyen from Southdown Road in Bath, were sentenced for human trafficking offences. Nguyen was found guilty of conspiring to arrange the movement of people for labour exploitation and conspiring to require others to perform forced labour. She was sentenced to five years in jail.
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