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Caius -> RE: Racial Issue...Any Advice? (7/22/2007 8:04:43 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: thetammyjo
Have you studied slavery across time and cultures?
I have, which is why the anachronism, selective referencing, and semantic flexibility on just what constitutes a slave that you employ are not in the least new to me. I find it interesting that you quote and respond to that paragraph, but you fail to address the list of list of examples contrary to your claim that I directed you towards earlier in the thread (again, just a modest selection of most obvious and well known examples) where slavery was every bit as much an economic pillar of the societies involved, when not even more-so, than it was in America.
quote:
ORIGINAL: thetammyjo
I have. New World slavery is unique.
Slavery in Europe, Asia, Africa, and if you wish to be even more divided, the Middle East were never based on what someone looked like or coupled with concepts of "blood" ...
I'm sorry, never? I think you have a lack of appreciation for racism's very long history in human culture. I already granted you the point that racial-distinction and bias was whipped into an unprecedented fervor during the age of European colonialism as a means of justify an increasingly barbaric and massive slave trade, but it didn't just suddenly spring into existence some few hundred years ago. It had precursors in history -- extensive precursors. Phenotype was long a feature of slavery, though not carved in the standard European mold of "Well, they are lost heathens, so, no matter how horrifically we treat them on Earth, at least they will be baptized and saved for eternity, so it's a more than fair trade!" but usually with more direct philosophies. Do you know the etymology of the word "slave" itself? It derives from Slav; Slavic people were long the victims of racialized slavery under conquering peoples long before the European global slave trade and their white skin was defintely a mark of their status. But this is really a moot point -- the justification for why certain people were "meant" to be slaves is really rather inconsequential; the actual choice of who to enslave was typically based on two practical factors -- geographical proximity and the ability of the people in question to defend themselves. Whatever labels were put upon the system and the trade once they were established were applied after-the-fact, and largely ignored by those who initially captured the slaves, who had few illusions about the nature of their work, as evidenced by what documents remain to us from these traders and their willingness to work with interior slave hunters who looked more or less exactly like the slaves they purchased from them. So I really don't care to debate the point with someone who's set in thinking that racism is only a product of phenotype and that it burst spontaneously into existence with the coming of the modern world. Especially when I've already mentioned that the race factor was heightened during this period and that really ought to be enough for us to agree on so that we can concentrate on more relevant factors. Such as of the economic sort, where your misrepresentations are even more egregious.
quote:
ORIGINAL: thetammyjo
Economics was very very rarely the primary drive in earlier slave owning cultures where status was the primary drive. It was very common in most slave owning cultures for a slave owner to actually be in financial difficulty in order to support a large number of slaves. Most farms were self sufficient and if they were lucky they might have extra to sell at market. Farms could focus on one trade good but then they had to get the necessities elsewhere cutting into any profit.
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But in the New World farm work was the primarily use of slaves and their economic value was of primary concern.
The percentage of slaves used in specific roles is very different between New World and other slave owning cultures.
I think you fail to appreciate the variation that existed in pre-colonial economies. You've reduced thousands of cultures, including some massive imperial powers, to subsistence farmers. Most farms were self-sufficient and produced largely only for themselves? Several societies of note employed massive farming complexes manned largely by slave labour, which put the American plantations to shame in their scope, especially relative to the size of the "nation"(or more often than not, it's chief principalities, where the slave ratio tended to be highest). Again I direct you to the Roman colonii system, one of the best-documented in history but hardly unique. This is a more-or-less prototypical argument that one hears not only with regard to slavery but countless other social phenomena, an attempt to form a clean break between a past era and the current one by glossing over and homogenizing all history that came before, losing vital details as to how these structures evolved in the first place in the process. It seems that even in their atrocities people want to believe that they've just recently began to excel to a degree hitherto unheard of in history. It's a common sentiment to be found in American universities in particular , so I'm not in the least surprised you encountered in comparative slavery classes in that environment. Well, it's progress anyway; not so many decades ago those same courses would have been hyper-fixated on recent history in exactly the same way, but skewed to downplay the seriousness of American slavery.
quote:
ORIGINAL: thetammyjo
Things like mining were often done by criminals rather than traditional slaves in the Near East and ancient Europe. By and large it was a death sentence so a traditional slave finding himself in a mine was likely because he pissed off a previous owner too much. The salt trade in Africa used slaves and life was cheap there but again this was a minor number of slaves compared to other types of slaves on the continent.
First off, this isn't true -- slaves from conquered peoples long comprised the bulk of slave labour sent into mines and it was a massive economy, but let's assume for a moment it is in fact true. So....people sentenced to slavery for "crimes" were not real slaves? I think maybe you need to crack open some of those books from those courses, or get new ones if you're aware of the history of the forming or abuse of law for the sole purpose of generating a strong slave labour force. This was, in fact, a significant factor in how the African slave trade began. Throughout portions of Africa, it had long been custom to punish certain very serious crimes with enslavement, such slaves often being traded to Arabs. However, as increased demand for these slaves -- first minimally generated by Arabs and later increased significantly by Europeans -- began to become evident, the number of crimes for which slavery became applicable as a penalty and the frequency with which it was applied began to grow. Only a portion of the interior slave trade came from one black culture attacking another and selling these persons wholesale to European traders; a large portion of slaves were fed into the maw of colonial slavery by their own people, the higher echelons (priests and chiefs), grown powerful and gluttonous on the trade and ever-willing to sacrifice as many of their people -- using the most trivial or manufactured offenses -- as they could get away with. These unfrotunates weren't slaves? I think this peaks rather deeply to the issue of why you are so willing to dismiss pre-colonial slavery as not of the same fiber. Many peoples were udnoutably slaves to my eyes who, for various historical and linguistic reasons, have failed to enter into the modern jargon defined as such.
I want to close here by once again reiterating the point that I very much believe the nature and severity of slavery is undoubtedly linked to the scale of the trade and the economic function of the labour the slaves perform. This is a point I whole-heartedly agree with you on and was trying very hard to stress before you joined the thread. However, to claim that such conditions as led to the abuse of slaves in the time of European colonialism were without precedent in the thousands of previous years of human history that preceded them reflects a profound lack of understanding of human diversity, to say nothing of the explicit documentation of similar systems throughout the ages. Slavery was rarely arose simply from the need for status symbols, as you suggest, but rather more often from the human tendency to exploit one-another, a trait which certainly extends as far back as history itself.
In other words, I think you're on the right track in what you regard as the defining evils of slavery, but I also you just have limited infromation on how many times human society has been able to give rise to the monster. We've been at this for a very long time. We're still at it today.
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