Marking the Boundaries of Slavery

Abstract

What is slavery? And what makes it so uniquely wrong? These two questions may at first appear to be of a different order, the first seemingly a question of fact, the second a matter of moral judgment. Yet in Western post-Enlightenment thought they have in fact been deeply entwined, and in discourse on ‘modern slavery’ they are entirely indivisible. This chapter introduces some of the theoretical, philosophical and political problems that the definition of slavery and the identification of its singular moral wrongness present. It looks at how the new abolitionism attempts to circumvent them by articulating an essentially legalistic definition of slavery as the reduction of human beings to objects over which powers of ownership are exercised. It then considers this definition against evidence on the historical experience of New World slaves, and against conceptualizations of slavery offered by scholars of slavery from a number of disciplines. It argues that neither history, nor social science, leaves us with a simple, uncontested answer to the question of what slavery is, and what — if anything — makes it peculiarly unjust.