The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach

Abstract

Its inordinate reliance on the published works of David Brion Davis betrays the fact that this book had its genesis in a series of lectures at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery at Yale University. Davis investigated the problem of slavery over the past two millennia. In four relatively short but exceedingly convoluted chapters, Joseph C. Miller reviews some 22,000 years of human history to make a great number of questionable assertions. The titles of the chapters illustrate the trajectory of the argument: “The Problem of Slavery as History,” “History as a Problem of Slaving,” “Slavery and History as Problems in Africa,” and “Problematizing Slavery in the Americas as History.”In the first chapter Miller decries the conventional academic view of slavery as an institution, indicating that such a position freezes views of slavery across time and space and thereby denies any proper appreciation of history as a complex and dynamic process. He distinguishes between slavery, defined as an outcome, and slaving, defined as a strategy. Perhaps unconvinced that he has presented a clear distinction, he repeats these defi-nitions throughout the book. “Slavery presented as an institution,” Miller writes, “is a fait accompli, accomplished, a done deal, general, and static. . . . Without thinking about slaving historically, as contextually motivated strategies, we have logically accepted the moral abomination that we condemn; we have left slavery as an evil lurking eternally in the hearts of men (and women)” (p. 29). Throughout history, the argument goes, slaving was done by socially and politically marginal merchants to enhance their position, while the enslaved sought to build community “to overcome their initial isolation, to make human contacts with whomever they find accessible, to build committed relationships of whatever means available, including imaginative ones” (p. 33).Chapter 2 asserts that history began with community formation, and slaving initially became a mechanism for acquiring women and children for the community, in a process that resulted in the creation of great land empires where horses were available. “Slaving in such composite, personalistic polities — as nearly all such entities were throughout the world before the consolidation of monarchies and their modern derivatives, nation-states — was significantly political” (p. 55). Surprisingly, given the focus of the argument on socially marginalized merchants, there is no discussion of their role in the ongoing conflict between militaries seeking slaves to strengthen themselves and communities seeking slaves to sustain their viability. The assumption, explicitly stated on page 123, is that early slavery was “substantially political, not economic.”“Slaving in Africa served as a strategy of militarization and then of commercialization, though in contexts specific to Africa” (p. 73), Miller boldly states at the beginning of chapter 3. He curiously blames racism for any inability “to see either history or, particularly, slaving in Africa” before the entry of the Europeans (p. 79). Africa utilized ethnicity as a form of differentiation until Europeans arrived to distort the nature of slaving and slavery. Nevertheless, “the historical dynamics of slaving in Africa, doubly difficult as they are for conventional history and modern memory to acknowledge, constitute a problematic essential to understanding the European slaving strategies in the Atlantic that we know better, or at least think we do” (p. 118). Scholars sensitive to variations in time, place, and prevailing circumstances should not encounter problems with the African reality at any time in its history.Chapter 4 examines the American scenario and is the most unsatisfactory exposition of the general thesis about slavery and slaving. Replete with unconventional interpretations, the argument fails in large measure because the author equates his limited individual view of slavery in the hemisphere with the richer historiography. This is abundantly clear when he begins the discussion with the following absurd statement: “And what we think we know about slavery in the Americas derives not from either masters’ or slaves’ actual experiences of it and with it but primarily from the polemical metaphors that abolitionists and masters developed to create the ‘institution’ here, principally in the United States and only in the middle of the nineteenth century, and then debate it” (p. 119).Altogether this is a deeply unsatisfactory and almost unreadable book. The argument is frequently controversial, tortuous, stilted, and deliberately obscurantist. Although richly footnoted, the citations are narrowly selective and unrepresentative of the rich literature on slave systems around the world. No serious historian contests the fact that history is a convoluted process of change. To understand that process requires examining patterns rather than singular explanations. A far better study of this theme is presented in Servitude in Modern Times by M. L. Bush (2000), which examines critically and insightfully global manifestations of different forms of servitude including slavery.