Racial Classification, Slavery, and Human Rights: The Impacts of the Transatlantic Order in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

Racial Classification, Slavery, and Human Rights:The Impacts of the Transatlantic Order in Eighteenth-Century Germany Sigrid G. Koehler and Claudia Nitschke The panel of the DGEJ (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts) at the 2022 ASECS convention in Baltimore was organized by Sigrid G. Köhler and Claudia Nitschke. Based on recent historical studies that have demonstrated how the Germans participated in the transatlantic slave trade (whether directly or indirectly) and the slave plantation system, the aim of the panel was to examine more closely the extent to which German-speaking authors knew of these connections, how this knowledge came to bear on their writing as well as political and theoretical thinking, and, finally, how impactful these considerations ultimately were. The panel not only placed an emphasis on the normative frameworks of (anti)slavery in the eighteenth century but also on the media and strategies of representation that were employed in the discussions revolving around these topics. In his paper There are Slaves in the Past and Nowadays: Slavery in German Natural Law, Frank Grunert examined the justification given by natural law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to legitimize or delegitimize slavery. In the Latin nomenclature of natural law, borrowed from Roman law, the terms servus and servitus stood for different forms of economic and legal dependence, of which slavery is an extreme version. According to Grunert, in Samuel von Pufendorf's philosophy of natural law, slavery is a systematic part of natural law, which Pufendorf saw as justified by an assumed voluntary agreement. However, and this accounts for the ambivalence of his argument, Pufendorf emphatically advocated for the difference between the possession of a person and a thing. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, authors such as Johann Gottlieb Heineccius still argued in keeping with Pufendorf's ideas, even if they already posed the question of legal protection against extreme violence by the lord or owner. In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the institution of slavery could no longer be justified under natural law because, as Gottfried Achenwall and Johann Stephan Püttner argued in their Elementa Iuris Naturae, people could not be property. Such power over people would be despotism, and voluntary consent would not be a declaration of will, but simply madness. In her paper Human Rights, Similarity, and the Knowledge of the Transatlantic World (1770–1800), Sigrid G. Köhler addressed the question [End Page 135] of how human rights can be conceived as a form of speech and, at the same time, a practice of similarity in the eighteenth century. Referring to the considerations of the sociologist Armin Nassehi, Köhler suggested that we should understand globality as a relationship of similarity that makes the experience of difference visible as "structural epistemological similarity." Köhler interpreted the idea of human rights as a reaction to the increasingly global nature of the transatlantic world, which is designed to produce similarities. According to Köhler's thesis, human rights can be understood as a "form of speech" or a habitualized communication practice, following the example of Cornelia Vismann and Michel Serres. With reference to scientific and aesthetic debates, Köhler demonstrated how in the second half of the eighteenth century, an understanding of similarity as a social and communicative practice was developing, which is particularly evident in literary texts dealing with the fight against slavery and the slave trade. The authors of those texts, in order to convince the audience of their moral position, created similarity aesthetically. Drawing on human rights to criticize the contemporary slave system and the colonial order that legitimized it was, as Köhler explained, very much a matter of course in journal reports and popular dramas in the last third of the eighteenth century. In their talk Illustrations of the Slave Trade in Eighteenth-Century German Picture Books: Confronting Children with the Inhuman Aspects of the Transatlantic Order, Jürgen Overhoff and Sebastian Lange analyzed illustrations of the slave trade in children's books, a topic which is still very much a desideratum. As Lange and Overhoff showed, the subject, which was extensively depicted in Germany in various genres and media, found its way into...