Bear in mind that most slaves didn’t go to the mines—and they were often used as a punishment.
I had trouble finding details on the punishment of rebel slaves in the Americas—they appear to have been rarer and more successful in escaping capture compared to Roman slaves—but here’s something on “maroons” (self-governing pockets of escaped slaves.)
Maroons and their communities can be seen to hold a special significance for the study of slave societies, for they were both the antithesis of all that slavery stood for, and at the same time a widespread and embarrassingly visible part of these systems. The very nature of plantation slavery engendered violence and resistance, and the wilderness setting of early New World plantations allowed marronage and the ubiquitous existence of organized maroon communities. Throughout Afro-America, such communities stood out as an heroic challenge to white authority, and as living proof of a slave consciousness that refused to be limited by the whites’ definition and manipulation of it.
Within the first decade of most colonies’ existence, the most brutal punishments had already been inflicted on recaptured rebel slaves, and in many cases these were quickly written into law. An early 18th-century visitor to Suriname reported that,
″...if a slave runs away into the forest in order to avoid work for a few weeks, upon his being captured his Achilles tendon is removed for the first offense, while for a second offense… his right leg is amputated in order to stop his running away; I myself was a witness to slaves being punished this way.”
And similar punishments for marronage—from being castrated to being slowly roasted to death—are reported from different regions throughout the Americas.
Marronage on the grand scale, with individual fugitives banding together to create independent communities of their own, struck directly at the foundations of the plantation system. It presented military and economic threats that often strained the colonies to their very limits. In a remarkable number of cases throughout the Americas, whites were forced to appeal to their former slaves for a peace agreement. In their typical form, such treaties—which we know of from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Mexico and Suriname—offered maroon communities their freedom, recognized their territorial integrity, and made some provision for meeting their economic needs. In return, the treaties required maroons to end all hostilities toward the plantations, to return all future runaways, and, often, to aid the whites in hunting them down. Of course, many maroon societies never reached this negotiating stage, having been crushed by massive force of arms; and even when treaties were proposed they were sometimes refused or quickly violated. Nevertheless, new maroon communities seemed to appear almost as quickly as the old ones were exterminated, and they remained, from a colonial perspective, the “chronic plague” and “gangrene” of many plantation societies right up to final Emancipation.
To be viable, maroon communities had to be inaccessible, and villages were typically located in remote, inhospitable areas. In the southern United States, isolated swamps were a favorite setting. In Jamaica, some of the most famous maroon groups lived in “cockpit country,” where deep canyons and limestone sinkholes abound but water and good soil are scarce. And in the Guianas, seemingly impenetrable jungles provided maroons a safe haven.
Many maroons throughout the hemisphere developed extraordinary skills in guerrilla warfare. To the bewilderment of their colonial enemies, whose rigid and conventional tactics were learned on the open battlefields of Europe, these highly adaptable and mobile warriors took maximum advantage of local environments. They struck and withdrew with great rapidity, making extensive use of ambushes to catch their adversaries in crossfire. They fought only when and where they chose, relying on trustworthy intelligence networks among non-maroons (both slaves and white settlers), and often communicating military information by drums and horns.
These guys sound pretty heroic, but I don’t think they’re evidence that the racist transatlantic slave trade was worse than the non-racist Roman world. I’m not an expert on either, though.
Part of what I’m trying to assert is that people are capable of treating other people terribly, even in the absence of theories of racial superiority.
I’m pretty sure that the Romans looked up to the Greeks at the same time as enslaving them. And fairly sure that the Greeks enslaved other Greeks.
But you’d need to know a lot more about the classical world than I do to work out what kinds of racial theories were current.
And maybe they did have foreign groups that they mistreated particularly badly. If we think that xenophobia is a built-in feature of the brain then it would be damned weird if the Romans weren’t superiority-complex racists. After all, consider the amount of evidence they had that their system was superior and that the gods loved them.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t worse to be the slave of someone who despises you and your type than the slave of someone who accepts you as a brother.
I just don’t think any of this is particularly modern.
And on ethical matters I tend to think that progress is upwards (or at least correlated with per-capita GDP). If we think that the recent past was particularly awful it’s usually because we’ve got better records of it.
So here’s a prediction for you: There were things going on in the Dark Ages that were worse than either Roman or early Victorian slavery.
The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
So here’s a prediction for you: There were things going on in the Dark Ages that were worse than either Roman or early Victorian slavery. The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
Well, I’m not exactly an atrocitologist, but I have studied the early medieval period in some detail. There are some problems in comparing it to other periods, especially in subjective terms—the Dark Ages were called “dark” precisely because they left a relative dearth of subjective material—but here’s what I can remember off the top of my head.
There was a widespread slave trade, beginning during or before Roman times and ending in Britain around 1100 AD. It was not racially motivated or justified, as we’d understand race; slaves came from all the European ethnic groups, including those of their holders. Taking slaves seems to have been more common in conflicts between ethnic groups, however. Unransomed captures in wartime and freemen who fell into various kinds of legal trouble could both become slaves; the former seem to have been more common. They generally could be bought and sold and didn’t have legal independence. The law codes of the time prescribed punishments for mistreating other people’s slaves but not your own.
Slave labor was not usually highly concentrated or regimented (there were, for example, no galley slaves in that period); slaveholders came from all free social classes, and slaves performed much the same work as freemen (though usually the harder and dirtier shares of it, where division of labor was possible). At the time of the Domesday Book, slaves made up about 9% of the population.
From what I know of it, this seems more comparable to Roman slavery than to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Early medieval Europe was a poorer place than either Rome or the early modern colonies, and its people probably led harsher lives, but in social terms I don’t see much in the way of unique awfulness.
The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
I’m not quite an atrocitologist so I have no idea whether some of these things I can think of were actually ever put into practice, but I can think of lots of things worse. I can also guarantee you with 90% confidence that there’s a lot of manga (especially doujinshi) out there that do picture things you’d consider much worse, especially when you delve into the darker circles. Some japanese artists have literally become world-renowned ‘experts’ on the topic of fictional mass atrocity.
I’m not comfortable discussing specific examples without a wall of spoiler prevention features requiring the viewer to pass a mental fortitude test to view the content. I might have mentioned this before, but I’ve once had an acquaintance bend down and vomit on the spot upon recounting one of my more horrible nightmares. I try to avoid dishing out such mental damage on unprepared individuals nowadays.
To hear things so bad they make unprepared listeners spontaneously vomit, not to hear things worse than slavery. There are plenty of those, they just tended not to catch on.
I wish I’d thought to pick ‘Atrocitologist’ as a screen name. Oh well.
I can’t think of any medieval atrocities comparable in scope to those of either the Roman or Victorian eras. But I don’t think that has anything to do with philosophy or tolerance, it’s just that Rome and pre-Victorian England were a lot more powerful and effective than any of the intermediate governments, and so were able to achieve greater scope than e.g. Poland ever could.
But to your more general point: modern racism is just a special case of the human tendency to define ingroup/outgroup divisions, right? It’s ok to enslave Them, because they’re not Us. That finding is extremely robust through history: Greeks enslaved other Greeks (but they called themselves Spartans and Helots), Italians enslaved other Italians (but the victims were never Roman citizens so it didn’t count), the Jews wiped out the Amelikites (they worshipped the wrong gods, what can you do?) and French nobles ruled over French serfs (but you can’t compare a noble to a serf).
Italians enslaved other Italians (but the victims were never Roman citizens so it didn’t count)
Romans could be sold into slavery to pay off their debts.
The Romans were reletively free of out-group hostility—they felt the barbarians outside the empire were savages, but they tended to absorb local power structures and religions, granting the local nobles (if they cooperated) Roman citizenship, (which was more exclusive than, say, American citizenship,) and while there was some generic snobbery there does not appear to be any belief that non-Romans were inherently inferior. Once they joined the empire, they gained all the rights and privileges of your average Roman (including protection from those barbarian savages over the hill.)
I don’t think they’re evidence that the racist transatlantic slave trade was worse than the non-racist Roman world.
They aren’t. However,
″...if a slave runs away into the forest in order to avoid work for a few weeks, upon his being captured his Achilles tendon is removed for the first offense, while for a second offense… his right leg is amputated in order to stop his running away; I myself was a witness to slaves being punished this way.”
And similar punishments for marronage—from being castrated to being slowly roasted to death—are reported from different regions throughout the Americas.
grants context to your statement that “I never heard that the Confederacy lined their roads with crucified rebels.”
we think that xenophobia is a built-in feature of the brain
Bear in mind that most slaves didn’t go to the mines—and they were often used as a punishment.
I had trouble finding details on the punishment of rebel slaves in the Americas—they appear to have been rarer and more successful in escaping capture compared to Roman slaves—but here’s something on “maroons” (self-governing pockets of escaped slaves.)
[source]
These guys sound pretty heroic, but I don’t think they’re evidence that the racist transatlantic slave trade was worse than the non-racist Roman world. I’m not an expert on either, though.
Part of what I’m trying to assert is that people are capable of treating other people terribly, even in the absence of theories of racial superiority.
I’m pretty sure that the Romans looked up to the Greeks at the same time as enslaving them. And fairly sure that the Greeks enslaved other Greeks.
But you’d need to know a lot more about the classical world than I do to work out what kinds of racial theories were current.
And maybe they did have foreign groups that they mistreated particularly badly. If we think that xenophobia is a built-in feature of the brain then it would be damned weird if the Romans weren’t superiority-complex racists. After all, consider the amount of evidence they had that their system was superior and that the gods loved them.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t worse to be the slave of someone who despises you and your type than the slave of someone who accepts you as a brother.
I just don’t think any of this is particularly modern.
And on ethical matters I tend to think that progress is upwards (or at least correlated with per-capita GDP). If we think that the recent past was particularly awful it’s usually because we’ve got better records of it.
So here’s a prediction for you: There were things going on in the Dark Ages that were worse than either Roman or early Victorian slavery.
The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
Well, I’m not exactly an atrocitologist, but I have studied the early medieval period in some detail. There are some problems in comparing it to other periods, especially in subjective terms—the Dark Ages were called “dark” precisely because they left a relative dearth of subjective material—but here’s what I can remember off the top of my head.
There was a widespread slave trade, beginning during or before Roman times and ending in Britain around 1100 AD. It was not racially motivated or justified, as we’d understand race; slaves came from all the European ethnic groups, including those of their holders. Taking slaves seems to have been more common in conflicts between ethnic groups, however. Unransomed captures in wartime and freemen who fell into various kinds of legal trouble could both become slaves; the former seem to have been more common. They generally could be bought and sold and didn’t have legal independence. The law codes of the time prescribed punishments for mistreating other people’s slaves but not your own.
Slave labor was not usually highly concentrated or regimented (there were, for example, no galley slaves in that period); slaveholders came from all free social classes, and slaves performed much the same work as freemen (though usually the harder and dirtier shares of it, where division of labor was possible). At the time of the Domesday Book, slaves made up about 9% of the population.
From what I know of it, this seems more comparable to Roman slavery than to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Early medieval Europe was a poorer place than either Rome or the early modern colonies, and its people probably led harsher lives, but in social terms I don’t see much in the way of unique awfulness.
I’m not quite an atrocitologist so I have no idea whether some of these things I can think of were actually ever put into practice, but I can think of lots of things worse. I can also guarantee you with 90% confidence that there’s a lot of manga (especially doujinshi) out there that do picture things you’d consider much worse, especially when you delve into the darker circles. Some japanese artists have literally become world-renowned ‘experts’ on the topic of fictional mass atrocity.
I’m not comfortable discussing specific examples without a wall of spoiler prevention features requiring the viewer to pass a mental fortitude test to view the content. I might have mentioned this before, but I’ve once had an acquaintance bend down and vomit on the spot upon recounting one of my more horrible nightmares. I try to avoid dishing out such mental damage on unprepared individuals nowadays.
Now I’m all curious.
To hear things so bad they make unprepared listeners spontaneously vomit, not to hear things worse than slavery. There are plenty of those, they just tended not to catch on.
Touché. I meant something that was likely to have actually happened on a fairly large scale.
I wish I’d thought to pick ‘Atrocitologist’ as a screen name. Oh well.
I can’t think of any medieval atrocities comparable in scope to those of either the Roman or Victorian eras. But I don’t think that has anything to do with philosophy or tolerance, it’s just that Rome and pre-Victorian England were a lot more powerful and effective than any of the intermediate governments, and so were able to achieve greater scope than e.g. Poland ever could.
But to your more general point: modern racism is just a special case of the human tendency to define ingroup/outgroup divisions, right? It’s ok to enslave Them, because they’re not Us. That finding is extremely robust through history: Greeks enslaved other Greeks (but they called themselves Spartans and Helots), Italians enslaved other Italians (but the victims were never Roman citizens so it didn’t count), the Jews wiped out the Amelikites (they worshipped the wrong gods, what can you do?) and French nobles ruled over French serfs (but you can’t compare a noble to a serf).
Romans could be sold into slavery to pay off their debts.
The Romans were reletively free of out-group hostility—they felt the barbarians outside the empire were savages, but they tended to absorb local power structures and religions, granting the local nobles (if they cooperated) Roman citizenship, (which was more exclusive than, say, American citizenship,) and while there was some generic snobbery there does not appear to be any belief that non-Romans were inherently inferior. Once they joined the empire, they gained all the rights and privileges of your average Roman (including protection from those barbarian savages over the hill.)
They aren’t. However,
grants context to your statement that “I never heard that the Confederacy lined their roads with crucified rebels.”
Xenophobia and racism are different things.
Is that … a Culture ship name?