Slavery before race

The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, John Samuel Harpham, Harvard University Press, £23.95

The enslavement of Africans to work on the plantations of the Caribbean was, we would all now agree, a terrible crime. But in the intellectual world explored in this book – English thought about slavery between 1550 and 1700 – no one saw it as a crime. Slavery, after all, had been practised in Greece and Rome, and, if it was non-existent in England, that peculiar land of liberty, it was known to be widely present in non-European cultures. The practice of enslaving people was regarded as essentially unproblematic; and once Africans had been enslaved (usually in wars between African states) it was taken for granted that they could be bought, exported and resold without any sense of moral anxiety or guilt, for the legitimacy of the practice was well-established in Roman law, and, it was held, in the laws of nature and of nations. There was no obligation on a purchaser to enquire whether the original act of enslavement was just or not. After all, defeat in war, which was taken to lie at the origin of slavery, had little to do with justice, and a great deal to do with brute force.

This sharp clash between our moral code and that of the early modern period creates an obvious problem for the historian. Herbert Butterfield argued (and nearly all professional historians feel obliged to agree) that historians should not make moral judgements. But how then to write about slavery, which calls out for moral condemnation? The cool tone in which Harpham writes about enslavement may occasionally shock, but it is necessary when one of his primary tasks is to convey that slavery was not seen as morally offensive.

The core claim of this book is that discussions of the enslavement of Africans, whether by intellectuals such as John Locke or by merchants engaged in the trade, showed almost no interest in anything corresponding to race. Aristotle had thought that some peoples – barbarians – were fit only to be slaves, but the Romans accepted that all human beings are naturally free, yet all may be enslaved. English intellectuals, raised to read and write Latin, followed Rome not Greece. English merchants thought of Africans as being men and women little different from themselves, but still potential slaves. And everyone knew that Europeans, including English men and women, were traded as slaves by the Ottomans.

Skin colour was thought to be of little interest, and, although Africans might be claimed to be descended from Noah’s son Ham (or Cham), who had been cursed by his father, few thought this was of any great significance, and no one was convinced that the Bible justified regarding Africans as essentially inferior. In the 16th century the English took pride in not being like the Spanish, in not profiting from slavery; but when they became slavers they did so without any sense of having crossed a moral Rubicon. What was legitimate in the eyes of Cicero must be good enough for everyone else.

In short, race did not feature in the intellectual origins of American slavery. I don’t think this claim should be particularly surprising: Grotius, Hobbes and Locke, to name but three theorists of slavery, had nothing to say about race, and it used to be conventional to say that racism was a new invention in the 18th century. But it runs against the whole trend of modern scholarship on American slavery, which has read racism back into the 16th and 17th centuries on the basis of virtually no evidence. For Harpham himself it seems to have come as a remarkable, disorientating discovery, one which he made by shifting his enquiry from studying justifications of slavery in America to reading early reports of slavery and enslavement in Africa. It is, quite simply, in Africa, not America, that the origins of American slavery are to be found.

It is only in America and the Caribbean, and only in the last decades of the 17th century, that slave-owners began to argue that African slaves were fit only to be beasts of burden, that they were not properly human beings, that they did not have souls and should not be converted to Christianity. Racism was thus not a cause of American slavery, although it was certainly a product of it. A crucial debate was over efforts to convert slaves: slave-owners were opposed, on the basis that conversion would lead to claims to freedom, while those advocating conversion insisted that Christianity would make slaves more, not less, tractable. Christianity and slavery were thus, by the end of the 17th century, in tension, but an awareness of this tension was new. The Spanish, by contrast, had been happy to baptise slaves en masse. Was there something peculiarly Protestant about this sense that slavery and Christian faith were potentially, if not inevitably, at odds? This is a question that Harpham does not explore.

The study draws on three sets of sources: English merchants trading with Africa, particularly as their reports were collected in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589) and Purchas’ Hakluytus Posthumus (1625); English intellectuals discussing slavery; and English men and women who encountered slavery in America and the Caribbean. It works carefully and systematically through these sources, expounds them clearly, and reaches conclusions that seem entirely robust. It is a serious, and indeed important, book. I noticed only one unforced error: Harpham thinks there were both black-and-white and colour editions of Mercator’s atlas, but this is wrong; maps were hand-coloured, and all ‘editions’ were black and white, though some copies were then coloured.

One can point out that much lies outside the book’s scope. There is no discussion of English attitudes to Ottoman slavery. By narrowing his focus to the American slave trade Harpham excludes discussions of the legitimacy of enslaving European Christians. By concentrating on ideas, Harpham avoids engaging in detail with the money to be made from trading in slaves and forcing them to work, though he has a nicely dry way of noting how principles and interests were brought into alignment. In addition, perhaps, there is a failure to think more broadly about the cruelty of one man to another: a society that practised public executions, the flogging of schoolboys, and the press-ganging of sailors was unlikely to be as horrified as we are at the mistreatment of slaves. That, one can reasonably say, would be a much bigger and more amorphous book. Discovering that racism is not to be found at the origins of American slavery is more than enough to justify a book much longer than this.

In truth, this is the best history book I have read in a very long time. Not because the command of sources is astonishing: the sources are relatively accessible and obvious. Not because the argument is profoundly original: in questioning, rebutting, indeed refuting established assumptions it is original enough. What in my mind makes it outstanding is simply that it is well-written.

It is often lamented that historians no longer write for a non-professional public. Instead, the PhD thesis has become the paradigmatic example of historical writing: even the most distinguished historians think they must deploy vast footnotes and endless discussions of pedantic details in order to confirm their professional credentials. Harpham, by contrast, never allows himself to be caught up in a thicket of detail. His footnotes provide a guide to the literature, but are not ostentatious displays of erudition or extended polemics against the work of other scholars. He wants to get the main outline of the story right, rather than puzzle over the details. This book is both learned and legible.

This means there are topics which are touched on but not explored. Why did Locke, unlike every other intellectual, think a slave-owner ought to have the power of life and death over his slaves? A good question, to which we are not given much of an answer. Why did Locke, unlike everyone else, think it contrary to natural law that slavery should be a heritable condition? That Locke is an exception is made clear; that slavery was assumed to be heritable is stressed; this fundamental problem is identified, but it is not lingered over precisely because it is the norm that interests Harpham rather than the exception, and if contemporaries found the norm self-evident there is little more to be said.

By keeping the big picture always in mind, what Harpham provides is a gripping, lucid argument. Every sentence is well-constructed, but much of the secret of his prose, I think, lies in the variation of sentence length. The prose thus mirrors, if I may so describe it, the way one looks at a landscape. Longer sentences survey the scene; shorter sentences catch our attention and pick out details. I think (though I cannot now find the passage) Jack Hexter once described Christopher Hill’s prose as logs laid end to end. Harpham’s paragraphs are more like log cabins, each log trimmed to fit, and leaving space for windows and doors. His prose is not as elegant as Trevor-Roper’s nor as lively as Hexter’s, but he at least has style. One has to admire the stubborn independence of mind which has led Harpham, not only to attack an intellectual shibboleth, the supposed centrality of racism in western culture, but also to refuse to adopt the scholarly mannerisms of the day.

Anyone who aspires to be an historian should read this book, not just because the subject is important, not just because Harpham can think and argue, but because history is an art as well as a trade, and every artist learns from other artists. The book is, in short, superb.