Atlantic Slavery: A Problem of Cross-Boundary History

1. Slavery in modern times is the subject of one of the liveliest fields of present-day historiography. The scope of research is cosmopolitan, the principal centres of research being located in the United States of America with additional work done in Britain, France, the Netherlands and various African and Caribbean countries.^[1] Long before ‘global' history became fashionable, as it did in the 1990s, slavery studies implemented research designs which transgressed the boundaries of national or regional histories. Since Atlantic slavery owed its existence to long-distance traffic and to the collusion of trading agents in several different parts of the world, it was, from the very beginning, a phenomenon of multi-local origins. Just as in the case of Roman slavery, labour was forcibly obtained from exogenous sources.^[2] In contrast to social history within a national frame of reference or ‘international history' in a conventional sense, the history of slavery involves social discontinuity: large groups of people were transplanted into alien environments with no chance of ever returning to their native place. Slavery itself originated in a process of forcible uprooting, of ‘social death'.^[3] In cases where a minimum of cultural identity could be preserved or recreated, this led to the formation of new communities in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, Atlantic slavery, itself the consequence of various forms of transgression, gave rise to new spatial networks of interaction. The diaspora came to be a fundamental type of social experience. Diaspora studies, today a flourishing field of historical studies, have been developing in tandem with the growing interest in slavery.^[4]
Slavery studies are usually rooted in some immediate political concern. This special context should not be ignored. Where slavery did not exist in modern times, interest in the subject tends to be slight. An American or an African audience would immediately recognize its importance. In those parts of the world, slavery and its consequences are still a virulent and highly contested issue. Slavery is not just an academic, but also a morally and politically potent problem. A growing number of spokesmen for African, among them Wole Soyinka, the great Nigerian writer and winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature, are today demanding reparations, perhaps a kind of Marshall Plan for Africa. In the United States, the juridical success of former forced labourers under Nazi terror has encouraged leaders of the black community to consider suing for damages. In Britain or France, the subject of slavery is likely to evoke less interest, even though these two nations were, by any account, the most active colonialists and the most determined slaveholders in modern European history. Both countries still have sizeable black minorities. The situation is different in Germany and in Italy. The colonial epoch of their national histories began at a time when slavery as an acceptable social institution had disappeared from Western civilization, including the European overseas empires. One of the main justifications for the German conquests in East Africa in the 1880s was exactly the eradication of the Arab slave trade.^[5] A that time slavery was regarded as an attribute of barbarism, unworthy of the allegedly superior Occident. Having missed out on the early modern period of European expansion, the Germans were robbed of the opportunity to become slaveholders.

2. However, this is only one half the story. During the early 1940s, the Germans established a huge system of forced labour and slavery covering large parts of occupied Europe.^[6] The term ‘slavery' is totally appropriate for that system. One of its architects, Hitler's Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, later himself wrote a book entitled Der Sklavenstaat. In some ways, Nazi slavery was worse than anything seen before. Classical or early-modern slavery, with all its unspeakable brutality, had never been based, as Nazi slavery was, on the notion of ‘Vernichtung durch Arbeit', working human beings systematically to death. The slave was an investment and required at least a minimum of care. All in all, between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-nineteeenth centuries,^[7] an estimated 11 to 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to the New World. From 1941 to 1945, about 9.5 million foreign civil labourers and prisoners of war were exploited in German labour camps and on industrial sites, prisoners in Concentration Camps not included.^[8] So, Germany does indeed have a historical experience of slave-holding, but one that has hardly entered public consciousness and that is seldom seen within the context of a broader, a general European historical experience. Being aware of this, leads to a different form of cross-boundary historiography: one that looks at the long-term development of general European labour regimes and manifestations of social power. Slavery appeared in a plurality of individual manifestations, and the term may even suggest similarities that are difficult to substantiate. On the other hand, the uniqueness of Europe from Roman times to the 1940s emerges clearly: No other civilization rivals Europe in the recurring emergence of large-scale systems of extreme coercion.
The vast majority of human societies, as far as evidence survives, knew slavery. A slave, whether man or woman, can be defined as a person of the lowest possible status and devoid of codified and customary rights. In many cases an outsider, perhaps a prisoner of war, he or she, is ‘socially dead', not backed by an ancestral family or enmeshed in a kin group. The slave enjoys no protection other than by her or his own master. He or she can be bought and sold, donated and inherited. The slave is a property, but does not own property. He possesses no independent means of subsistence. Even natural reproduction remains under the control of the master. In other words: Slave families are the exception rather than the rule. Slavery in this sense existed in endless variations and in many degrees of harshness. Slaves could rise to eminent positions of power in the service of Oriental princes. They could also lead most miserable lives at the bottom of a social hierarchy.

3. From among many societies with slaves in all ages and on all continents, very few societies stand out as being true slave societies: societies in which slavery, typically in large-scale plantations, stands at the centre of production, where slave-holders form the dominant, or perhaps the only, ruling class and where slavery penetrates the entire social and political body and leaves no part of it untouched.^[9] Documented history knows only five examples of this kind of slave society: two of them in Antiquity, namely classical Greece and – in a fully articulated form – Italy during the late Republic and the Principate. The remainig three existed in the Atlantic World of the Early Modern Period: in Brazil, on the colonized islands of the Caribbean and in the southern part of North America. These three slave societies in the Western Hemisphere were entirely new, we may even say: revolutionary developments, completely unrooted in local traditions. Nothing remotely similar had ever existed in the Americas. The slave societies were also quite different from more conventional colonial societies such as Mexico. In Mexico, the Spanish conquistadores had removed and – so some extent - physically destroyed the Aztec aristocracy, putting themselves in their place. The traditional social hierarchy continued to exist with a new European power elite at the top.^[10] By contrast, the slave societies were the experimental result of a novel combination of factors. Economically speaking, America provided land, Europa technology, management and power and Africa the labour force. Such a tough-minded way of putting things is legitimate, since profit was the only ‘raison d'être' of these societies. The central resource-consuming and profit-generating mechanism, at the same time the characteristic social institution of these societies, was the slave plantation. Because of the centrality of the plantation for all aspects of life in these societies, the American historian Philip Curtin has suggested the helpful term ‘plantation complex'.^[11]
The plantation complex emerged on several mediterranean islands towards the end of the Middle Ages. By Sixteenth century, it had achieved its fully developed form on the Portuguese Azores and the Kapverdian Islands. Already at that time, its main purpose was the production of the most important commodity in early modern inter-continental trade: sugar.^[12] From the Eastern Atlantic the plantation complex was then transferred to Brazil. This happened around 1550. Several decades later, Dutch entrepreneurs carried it to the West Indies.^[13] By 1630, the plantation complex had taken root on English Barbados, sparking off a spectacular sugar boom. In 1655 the English conquered Jamaica and hurried to transform the island into a slave society. Simultaneously, the plantation complex invaded the French possessions Guadeloupe, Martinique and St. Domingue (today's Haiti). By 1789 St. Domingue had outstripped Jamaica as the quintessential sugar island. On its 8.000 plantations, half a million black slaves produced about two thirds worth of the entire French foreign trade. By many indicators, St. Domingue was one of the most profitable colonies in history.^[14] By the mid-seventeenth century the slave plantation had gained a firm foothold also in the North of the continent. It had expanded slowly first in tobacco-producing Virginia, later in other English colonies in the New World. On the eve of the American revolution of 1776, we find roughly north of Baltimore societies with slaves, south of that point slave societies of a Caribbean type.^[15] The slave trade from Africa grew constantly over the centuries. It reached its peak in terms of average annual numbers of slaves transported during the second half of the eighteenth century. At that time, cities like Bristol or Nantes acquired enormous wealth as the headquarters of British and French slave traders.^[16]

4. The slave societies proved remarkably stable. Slave revolts were supressed with ferocious brutality and unfailing success. There was, however, one exception from this rule: Encouraged by the revolutionary rhetoric of egalité and fraternité, the slaves of Saint-Domingue turned against their white masters and also against a small class of métis (mixed blood) slave-holders which was a special feature of Saint-Domingue. They also managed, supported by tropical fevers, to repel large French and British expeditionary forces. In 1804, the revolution on Saint-Domingue, a little-known contemporary of the great American and the French revolutions, resulted in the founding of the first non-white post-colonial state: Haiti.^[17] However, Haiti was unique. The murderous success of the Haitian slaves put the colonial powers on their guard and prompted them to tighten security. Slavery survived the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. The famous dual revolution around 1800 in politics and economics did not really affec the slave societies. By 1830, Atlantic slavery was at the summit of its vitality. In the North American South it was just entering its Golden Age, because the early industrialization of Europe created an enormous additional demand for cotton, the main staple product of the Southern plantation economy.
At the same time, countervailing forces worked towards the undermining and dismantling of the slave system.^[18] From 1808, the slave trade was banned in the British Empire by mandate of Parliament.^[19] This was soon construed as the right of the British navy to search – even on the high seas, in other words: in neutral waters – any vessel under any flag and to liberate all slaves, if they were found. In 1833 Parliament went one step further and declared illegal not just the slave trade, but slavery itself in all British colonies. This mainly referred to the West Indies and to South Africa. In India, there were no British-run slave plantations. Indigenous forms of slavery in India (in particular debt slavery) were outlawed much later. For some years, Britain stood alone. In 1848, however, a determined group of anti-slavery activists seized the opportunity of revolutionary turmoil in France to push through the abolition of slavery in the French empire.^[20] The American Civil War broke out in 1861, mainly over the problem of extending slavery to new territories. After four years of a bitter and devastating struggle, the Southern Confederation, the most powerful slaveholder-state in modern history, collapsed under dramatic circumstances. The victory of the North terminated slavery in the entire Union. This amounted to a revolutionary act, since the planter oligarchy was regarded as traitors of the nation and lost its slaves without compensation – quite a contrast to the British empire after 1833 where high indemnities had been paid to former owners. The final phase of abolition arrived in 1886, when the slaves on the Spanish sugar island Cuba were liberated.^[21] Two years later, slave resistance in conjunction with a liberal movement secured freedom for the remaining 1.2 million slaves in Brazil.^[22] 1888 marked the demise, at least the nominal demise (since conditions did not improve overnight and new forms of dependency were soon to emerge), of slavery in the Atlantic world. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did, thus, a prime feature of the ancien régime disappear. In a sense, the early modern period came to its close in the 1880s.

5. We can even broaden the picture. Almost simultaneously with the rise of slavery in the New World, a new kind of slave-like serfdom had been introduced in Russia. These two processes, strikingly similar, do not seem to have influenced one another in any way. Russian serfdom departed significantly from the serfdom that had existed in medieval Europe, the most salient feature of which was binding the peasant to the land. Peasants were no longer free to go wherever they wished. On the other hand, they could not be moved against their will independently of land. This changed in Russia from the 1660s onwards: now noblemen began buying and selling serfs without land. By the eighteenth century the practice had become commonplace. Serfs could be bought and sold, traded, won and lost at cards. They were, like slaves, personal property.^[23]
In Russia, too, there were many serf revolts and all of them, including the great uprising led by Emilian Pugachev between 1773 and 1775, ended in utter defeat. Russian serfdom did not succumb to pressure from the victims. It was terminated in 1861, the year when the American War of Secession began, through the personal decision of Tsar Alexander II, encouraged by his top advisers. After Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, they regarded serfdom as a symbol of non-Western barbarism and as an impediment of Russia's modernization. Whatever the motives and reasons behind the policy to improve the status of more than 11 million serfs: it contributed to the fact that in the 1880s the Western world – that is, Europe and its offshoots in the Americas – had achieved an unprecedented degree of civil liberty. This precious moment in history, rarely noticed by historians, was but of short duration. New forms of racism and ethnic exclusion soon restricted its impact and made way for the systems of coerced labour that emerged in the twentieth century.
Even so, if we look back from the vantage point of the 1880s, we witness one of the most extraordinary processes in history: rarely or never before had there been anything like it: the total loss of legitimacy and the practical destruction of an institution which had been uncritically accepted for centuries. At the same time, it has to be said, even at the risk of sounding "Eurocentric", that the West took indeed a special path. The systems of large-scale slavery constructed by Europeans during the so-called early modern period were unparalleled anywhere in the world in terms of cruelty and efficiency. On the other hand, there was never elsewhere anything coming close to the voluntary dismantling of slavery as it occured in Europe and the Americas. Slavery in the Islamic world came to an end not primarily through endogeneous movements of reform, but only after much pressure applied by the European powers.^[24]

6. So much for a sketch of the problem of Atlantic slavery in its entirety. Whole libraries have been written on slavery and abolition. A high percentage of this work is of superior quality, and it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that research on slavery has been one of most productive and most vibrant fields of international historical scholarship during the past two or three decades. Most of the literature is very detailed. Slave studies, twenty years ago a playground for cliometricians and quantifying model-builders, are now firmly in the hands of advocates of thick description, of microstoria, of the history of experience and emotion. At the same time, pure descriptivism has been kept within bounds. Scholarship of all schools and persuasions remains linked to the great explanatory issues that have dominated the field from its very beginning.
The rise, climax and fall of Atlantic slavery forms a cycle of classical elegance.It is difficult to explain a cyclical pattern unless one has recourse to some mysterious historical law. In the case of slavery one can make the interesting observation that we need different kinds of explanation for the various phases of the cycle. To put it differently: The big question has to be broken down into manageable portions. The first of these medium-range questions, in logical and chronological order, has to be this: why did the slave societies of the Western Alantic (or the plantation complex) emerge in the first place? This question is of a special poignancy because Europeans did not simply project their own institutions onto the newly-acquired overseas periphery. At exactly the same time when the plantation complex flourished in America, the last rudiments of unfree labour were disappearing from Britain, the Netherlands and France. Galley slavery and forcible recruitment to the Army and Navy were phased out. In Scotland miners were released from slavery-like working conditions in 1775. Courts ruled that slaves who had absonded from slave ships became free persons upon reaching British territory and were legally protected against persecution by their former masters. Western Europe took pride in being a slave-free civilization. The emerging European identity and sense of superiority over the rest of the world was firmly built around the notion of rejected slavery.^[25] The revolutionary rhetoric of 1688 and 1789 was suffused with professions of a spirit of liberty in sharp contrast to a state of slavery. "Britons never, never shall be slaves," proclaims the famous hymn "Rule Britannia", created in the year 1740 and still chanted at the last night of the Proms in London every September. The American revolutionaries of 1776, many of them slave-owners, railed against ‘slavery' allegedly imposed upon them by King George III.

7. At that time, there were no slaves anymore in Western Europe. Whereas in classical Rome large-scale slavery was practiced in the core rather than at the peripheries of the empire, the reverse was true for early modern Europe. Slavery was an invisible institution, externalized to the distant periphery. While archival materials abound and still fuel extensive research, there were comparatively few published contemporary accounts of the slave colonies, let alone the slave trade. Not until the revolution on Saint-Domingue, which began in 1791, was the European public alerted to the problem – and then in a highly alarmist language. One cannot escape the impression that slavery was simply taken for granted for a very long time. Ancient modes of thought were carried over into the modern period: Aristotle's theory of a ‘natural slavery' of the barbarians as well as the possibility in Roman Law to treat a person as if she or he were a thing, in other words: the concept of chattel slavery. This concept fitted quite well with the new ideology of possessive individualism. Besides one outspoken defender of slavery like Hugo Grotius, it is surprisingly difficult to find explicit apologies, let alone "theories" of colonial slavery. Slavery was treated at best as an embarassment, normally however, as part of the natural order of things.The institution did not seem to require elaborate justification. Only after about 1830 did a pro-slavery discourse emerge in the American South.^[26] At that time this was a defensive reaction against an increasingly vehement abolitionist denunciation of human bondage.
There were Enlightenment critics of slavery: Montesquieu (who was the first philosopher to subject the problem of slavery to the critical tools of les Lumières), the abbé Raynal, above all (but quite late) Condorcet and the young Alexander von Humboldt, who commented on Cuban slavery in the language of the Enlightenment. Still, major thinkers of the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon and David Hume among them, were equivocal about the institution as was John Locke, himself famously involved in the slave-trading business. The predominant attitude of the European Enlightenment towards the African slave trade and colonial slavery was embarassed silence.^[27]

8. This diagnosis is closely related to the question of why the plantation complex could arise at all. Of course it was not just Roman Law plus theological ideas about original sin put into practice. Also, slavery was not the result of racialist fantasies or other kinds of "cultural construction". An idealist explanation for the rise of slavery will not suffice. However, the history of ideas is not entirely irrelevant. The revival of ancient slavery was not made difficult or even impossible by the veto-power of intellectual resistance. That such a veto-power can be efficacious, is demonstrated by the well-known defence of the native Americans by Bartolomé de las Casas and other sixteenth-century Spanish theologians and jurists. These vociferous spokesmen for the victims of the Conquista could not prevent and halt the devastation and depopulation of the Caribbean islands, but they moved the Spanish Crown to forbid the enslavement of the American Indios. (That this facilitated the import of slaves from Africa is a different matter).
In spite of many arguments in favour of a cultural turn in the study of history, we have to resort to an economic explanation of the rise of modern slavery.^[28] Two factors came together: on the one hand rising incomes in Europe and a growing demand for tropical luxury goods such as sugar and tobacco. On the other the existence of advanced technology - in particular for the manufacture of sugar - and the easy availability of factors of production. Land was cheap and abundant in the colonies. Initial profits attracted more and more adventurous capital. The problem was labour. Planting and harvesting sugar cane in a tropical climate is murderous work, no job for the European family farmer, no job for volunteers. The indigenous population of the new world had been exterminated or was physically too weak and also too difficult to discipline since it was easy for locals to run away. In addition, empires have always been reluctant to enslave their own subjects. A second option would have been to import labourers from among the European underclasses. Under the so-called system of indentured labour, this was done for some time. However, indentured labourers were no slaves. Their condition of dependency was limited by contract to a specified number of years, and of course it was not inheritable. When wages rose in Europe towards the end of the seventeenth century, indenture lost its attraction and the supply of labourers dried up. Never since Antiquity, Europeans seem to have considered enslaving each other. Sending enslaved convicts to the tropics might have, economically speaking, eased the labour impasse. Europeans did all sorts of nasty things to their fellow-Christians, but very unfrequently they used them as slaves. This is remarkable since, for example, Africans never had similar scruples. The ethnic and perhaps the cultural solidarity among white Europeans was remarkably strong. This may have helped them in their conquest of the world.

9. The third option – bringing in strangers from outside – offered a solution without major disadvantages. African labourers were used to tropical climates, accustomed to an Old World disease environment and copiously available. The last point was crucial. Provided transport across the Atlantic could be organized at reasonable costs (and it could), the decisive variable was supply. It was the European's good fortune that they did not themselves have to catch slaves in Africa. Slaves were offered along the West African coast by indigenous merchants and potentates. Slave-raiding soon turned into big business with whole states specializing in preying on their weaker neighbours. The slave trade, though European in origin and design, only functioned with African collaboration.^[29] Throughout the history of the Atlantic slave trade, African providers guaranteed a steady supply of slaves at reliable prices. Paradoxically, this peculiar arrangement points to the strength of African institutions rather than to their feebleness. Had African resistance to an European invasion been weaker, it might have been possible to establish the plantation complex in, for example, Angola. As it was, the Africans prefered to keep the Europeans at arm's length by doing offshore business with them.
In summary: like the entire plantation complex itself, its very origins were a combination of an atavistic institution of extreme violence with advanced economic rationality. Slavery for export-production within the early modern world-system was simply rational in terms of business operations. So, the best explanation for the creation of the plantation complex is an economic one.
What about its decline and fall? First of all, the Gibbonian term ‘decline' is misleading. Russian serfdom, being exceptional in this respect, was abolished by a stroke of the pen after a long period of diminishing profitability. The same, however, is not true for plantation slavery in the Caribbean and the United States. There is now consensus among historians that in both cases slavery was brought to an end at a time when its economic efficiency stood unimpaired. At the very least, the plantation owners were convinced of its profitability.^[30] Slavery was assassinated in its prime: a case of ‘Econocide', as the historian Seymour Drescher has put it.^[31] Thus, a purely economic explanation for the end of slavery is not supported by sufficient evidence.

10. At least in the British case, slavery was abolished because many contemporaries were convinced that free labour was more productive than forced gang-labour and that, therefore, slavery stood in the way of advancing capitalism. This very argument had been expounded by the great Adam Smith as early as 1776.^[32] Modern historians respectfully disagree. They tend to see an example here for a divergence of motives and causes. In a sense, slavery was destroyed for the wrong reasons. But then, economic considerations, whether correct or erroneous, did not play a determining role in discrediting slavery.
Basically, only a limited number of objections can be raised against slavery:
(1) that it is economically irrational (Adam Smith's argument of 1776);^[33]

(2) that it is politically harmful in the sense of placing a number of inhabitants of a country under private despotism rather than under the unmediated authority of the sovereign state (a rather powerful argument early on advanced by Jean Bodin);^[34]
(3) that it is unjust in terms of equality and natural rights;
(4) that it is morally wrong or even a religious sin.
A natural rights discourse was not decisive in discrediting slavery. The French revolutionaries vacillitated in their commitment to liberty, and in 1802 Bonaparte reintroduced slavery throughout the French overseas empire (which was not terribly large at that time). Several of the fathers of the United States were slave-holders. For this and other reasons, the U.S. constitution of 1787 bore the mark of ambivalence.^[35] Enemies of slavery would invoke its authority, while advocates of slavery found no obstacle in it to prevent the enormous geographical extension of the plantation complex that took place in the early nineteenth century and contributed decisively to the outbreak of the War of Secession in 1861.

11. Much more potent than a revolutionary natural or human rights discourse, was the fourth of the arguments mentioned above - immorality. This is a peculiarity of the British case. But we have to keep in mind that Britain started the process of slave emancipation. Each of the subsequent steps in this zig-zagging process was burdened with its own specific meanings. The political contexts differed enormously. Morals and religion never again had quite a similar importance. Yet, it was Britain that took the lead. One has to say: Britain, not the British government. Abolition began as a private concern of few individuals. It evolved into the private concern of large segments of the middle classes. By 1830, Parliament – not yet reformed and, therefore, hardly an organ of representative government in a modern sense – was under strong pressure from extra-parliamentary agitation, bombarded with petitions, admonished and implored in hundreds of public meetings. The urban middle classes, and especially their female members, used the issue of slave emancipation as a vehicle for venting their political frustration against the noble oligarchy. This is, however, not to say that it was a means to different and ulterior ends. The moral and religious impulses behind abolitionism have to be taken very seriously indeed.
The Evangelical Revival in Great Britain and other parts of the British world was a powerful movement of spiritual reconstruction and moral self-assertion. Its roots go back to earlier Protestant dissent, and it is no accident that the first group of people to demand an end to slavery were the Society of Friends, the Quakers. In a profound sense, the Evangelical Revival was Britain's cultural response to the politics of the French Revolution. It was a revolution of the souls. A new idea of Christian responsibility in the polical and social world was expressed in terms of moral renovation, and this idea, in turn, was linked to a vision of British superiority and of a British mission to take the lead in the world-wide progress of civilization. How this outlook differed from a natural rights approach is evident. The argument was not that all men were born equal and that everybody had a right not to suffer unduly. The central thought was rather that it is morally reprehensible and even a sin, to inflict suffering on others. In this way the focus of the argument shifted from the victim to the perpetrator. Slavery was first to to be extinguished in the souls of the slave-owners and, just as important, of those who profited indirectly from the evil system. Consequentually, the British abolitionists invented the politically motivated boycott. They ceased buying sugar from Jamaica in the same way in which, until the demise of apartheid, many people in Europe refrained from consuming products originating from South Africa.^[36]

12. The new religious sensitivity and national self-righteousness joined a somewhat sentimental and abstract sympathy for the poor black slaves with a strong desire for moral purity and a clean conscience. The mobilizing effect of this potent mixture was extraordinary. It turned slavery into a symbol of backwardness and evil and made its continued existence politically impossible. Alexis de Tocqueville, the keen observer of the British scene and determined critic of slavery, was correct when he commented that British slave emancipation was "l'œuvre de la nation et non celle des gouvernants."^[37] What were the ultimate motivating forces and causative factors behind this œuvre? Certainly not economic laws or a purely utilitarian calculus. Slavery was not overthrown for economic reasons, but fell where it became politically and morally untenable. The actuality or the prospect of slave resistance or rebellions played an important role as did the instability of existing political orders. A profound factor, still poorly understood by historians and sociologists, is normative change. The public judgement on slavery shifted from tacit acceptance to outrage, the image of the slave-holder from respectable gentleman to evil villain.
In terms of intellectual history, Anglo-American abolitionism used a "language" quite different from that of natural rights philosophy. But it ultimately contributed to the same project. Abolitionism universalized the early modern idea of liberty which was based on the right to private property and the right to political representation, while not denying the right to rob people elsewhere of their own liberty. "Britons never shall be slaves" was one of the motti of the Glorious Revolution. "No-body anywhere shall be a slave" ran the abolitionist radicalization of that slogan. The humanitarian revolution of the nineteenth century completed the political revolution of the eighteenth century. Our present understanding of liberty is indebted to both.
In contrast to Britain, in the United States slavery was not a rallying symbol for reform in general, but a burning domestic and constitutional issue in its own right. Nothing less than the future of the nation was at stake, not just that of a few hundreds of thousands of invisible slaves far away and their handful of proprietors. In the American case, economic factors certainly played a larger role without being preponderant. Again, emotional, moral and religious aspects were enormously important – in the Northern public at large as well as in a complex personality like Abraham Lincoln. The victory of the Union in 1865 was not just a national event.^[38] It dealt a mortal blow to slavery everywhere in the Western world. Slavery in Brazil and in the Spanish Empire was now doomed. But what if the South had won the war? Or if – a much more realistic scenario – the war had ended in a stalemate, perhaps in the co-existence of two separate states on the territory of the former United States with one of them preserving slavery as its defining institution? We should consider the following conclusion drawn by Robert Fogel, the eminent historian and Nobel Prize winner:

13. As Fogel makes clear in his counter-factual speculation, the American war about slavery was a highly dramatic inner-Western clash of civilizations. A dissident political élite revolted against a normative consensus that had evolved in what came to be "the West". The war's outcome was much more than just an American affair. It was an event of world-historical significance.

On several counts, Atlantic slavery is a good example for the framing of historical problématiques in terms of interaction within pluricultural spaces:
First, as a system, the slave-plantation complex emerged from the nautical, commercial and military integration of the Atlantic space by the seafaring European nations. It was forged from European, African and American ingredients. Unlike in ancient Rome, in early modern Europe the slave plantation was not a central element of societal organization. It was a quintessentially colonial innovation which spread its tentacles all over the Atlantic Ocean basin and its adjacent regions.
Second, as a network, the slave trade gave long-term continuity to long-range contacts between different civilizations. These contacts were partly of a direct kind, connecting the African sellers of slaves to their Euro-American buyers. However, there were also indirect linkages: the slave trade had profound repercussions for many interior parts of Africa. Slave raiding destabilized regions far remote from the seaboard. The rise and fall of African states became related to the vicissitudes of the trade.^[40] Many of the interactions within the network were of a uni-directional character. Only a tiny minority of the slaves ever returned to their native Africa. The slave trade gave rise to what Ira Berlin has memorably portrayed as a precarious ‘cosmopolitanism', at least during the first two centuries of New World slavery. Berlin's central passage is worth quoting in full:

14. In simpler words: interaction across cultural boundaries in the Atlantic arena shaped new identities, produced hybrid cultural forms and resulted in translocal mental horizons.^[42]
Third, as a movement, the struggle against slavery was much more than a locally limited phenomenon. In accordance with transatlantic interpretations of the Puritan movement,^[43] the earliest abolitionist creed, Quakerism, has to be seen as an intellectual development spanning the Atlantic. Quaker colonization was, of course, an important element of the American colonial experience. Abolitionism in its later phases criss-crossed the ocean. People, arguments and methods of agitation were exchanged between activists in Britain and the United States. The British movement started and succeeded earlier and provided support and advice to its U.S. counterpart. Revolutionary developments in Europe had an immediate impact on slave emancipation in the New World. The French Revoution triggered the revolutionary uprising in Saint-Domingue. The cruel fate of the planter class on that Carribean island, in turn, served as a warning to two or three generations among the defenders of slavery in the United States. The "reverberating disaster of St. Domingo"^[44] contributed powerfully to the hardening of racialist stereotypes. Proslavery positions in Britain and North America evolved hand in hand. Finally, the question of liberty under conditions of ongoing slavery – as this essay has attempted to show – was redefined in a transatlantic context. In the nineteenth century, slavery ceased being ignored. Liberalism no longer side-stepped the issue of racial oppression, and the world-historical significance of the Northern victory in the American Civil War was widely understood. Slave emancipation was seen as part and parcel of the progress of civilization in the Occident. The very idea of a homogeneous "West" came to full fruition only after the disappearance of slavery from the Atlantic sphere of the globe.

^[1] A good overview can be obtained from S. DRESCHER and S. L. ENGERMANN eds., A Historical Guide to World Slavery, New York and Oxford, 1998; see also J. C. MILLER, Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 3 vols., Millwood, 1993-1999. A topical introduction is D. TURLEY, Slavery, Oxford, 2000.
^[2] For Rome see the recent summary: L. SCHUMACHER, Sklaverei in der Antike. Alltag und Schicksal der Unfreien, Munich, 2001, p. 34.
^[3] See the seminal work O. PATTERSON, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge (MA), 1982.

^[4] See the excellent introduction: R. COHEN, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London, 1997.

^[5] This was, however, not a point of view typical of the Germans only. For case studies on the relation between colonial intervention and the suppression of slavery see S. MIERS and R. L. ROBERTS eds., The End of Slavery in Africa, Madison,WI, 1988.

^[6] There are now a number of excellent new case studies on German occupational policies especially in Eastern Europe. Outstanding is C. GERLACH, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik, Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944, Hamburg, 1999.

^[7] This is the number established, on the basis of an earlier estimate by PHILIP D. CURTIN, by PAUL E. LOVEJOY. See the comparative discussion of the various available estimates in D. RICHARDSON, Slave Trade: Volume of Trade, in DRESCHER and ENGERMAN eds., Historical Guide to World Slavery cit., p. 385-389.

^[8] According to a leading historian: U. HERBERT, "Das Millionenheer des modernen Sklavenstaats", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 March 1999, p. 54.

^[9] This distinction was originally suggested by M. I. FINLEY, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, London, 1980, p. 9.

^[10] For a comparison of social hierarchies in Portuguese and Spanish America and the early modern Caribbean see H. S. KLEIN, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, New York, 1986, chapters 3 and 4.

^[11] P. D. CURTIN, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, Cambridge, 1990. For a a succint analysis of the working of the plantation system see D. ELTIS, The Slave Economies of the Caribbean: Structure, Performance, Evolution and Significance, F. W. KNIGHT ed., General History of the Caribbean, vol. 3: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, London and Basingstoke, 1997, p. 105-137.

^[12] See B. W. HIGMAN, "The Sugar Revolution", Economic History Review, 53, 2000, pp. 213-236. Adding to a large literature on the economic history of sugar, recent research has drawn attention to ‘sugar' as a literary motive. See K. A.SANDIFORD, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism, Cambridge, 2000.

^[13] R. BLACKBURN, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, London and New York, 1997, chapters 4 and 5.

^[14] On the economic success of Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century see J. MEYER, et al., Histoire de la France coloniale: Des origines à 1914, Paris, 1991, p. 241-65.

^[15] Finley's distinction between „societies with slaves" and „slave societies" is successfully applied to North America in I. BERLIN, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Cambridge,MA, 1998, p. 8 and passim.

^[16] See as a case study: M. DRESSER, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port, London, 2001.

^[17] See as an up-to-date summary: F. W. KNIGHT, FRANKLIN, "The Haitian Revolution", American Historical Review, 105, 2000, pp. 103-115.

^[18] The full topical range if abolitionism is explored in H. TEMPERLEY ed., After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents, London and Portland (OR), 2000.

^[19] See R. BLACKBURN, The Overthrow of Colonial slavery, 1776-1848, London, 1988, chapter 8.

^[20] BLACKBURN, Overthrow, chapter 12. On earlier efforts to outlaw slavery in the French possessions see L. C. JENNINGS, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848, Cambridge, 2000.

^[21] R. J. SCOTT, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899, Princeton (NJ), 1985.

^[22] R. J. SCOTT et al., The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil, Durham (NC), 1988.

^[23] The standard account is P. KOLCHIN, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Cambridge (Mass.), 1987. A succint interpretation emphasizing serfdom as a set of practices rather than a closed system is S. HOCH, The Serf Economy and the Social Order in Russia, M. L. BUSH ed., Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, London and New York, 1996, pp. 311-22. A number of authors prefer the overarching term ‚servitude', for example M. L. BUSH, Servitude in Modern Times, Cambridge, 2000, who tends to see Russian serfdom as less oppressive than American slavery.

^[24] See E. R. TOLEDANO, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, Seattle, 1998.

^[25] In the view of John Stuart Mill, the suppression of slavery and, thus, the ‚improvement' of the former slaveholders became the prime example of a successful „war against barbarism". See D. B. DAVIS, Slavery and Human Progress, New York and Oxford, 1984, p. 258.

^[26] See L. TISE, Proslavery: A History of the defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, Athens (OH) and London,1987, chapters 10-13; D. G. FAUST ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860, Baton Rouge (LA), 1981.

^[27] This has to be seen in connection with Enlightenment comments on ancient slavery. See J. DEISSLER, Antike Sklaverei und deutsche Aufklärung: Im Spiegel von Johann Friedrich Reitemeiers ‚Geschichte und Zustand der Sklaverey und Leibeigenschaft in Griechenland' (1789), Stuttgart, 2000.

^[28] See for a largely convincing explanation: D. ELTIS, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, Cambridge, 2000.

^[29] H. S. KLEIN, The Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 103-29.

^[30] This is the conclusion reached in a recent discussion of the literature: M. M. SMITH, Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South, Cambridge, 1998, p. 85-86.

^[31] S. DRESCHER, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, Pittsburgh, 1977.

^[32] See the careful interpretation of Smith's views on slavery in S. DRESCHER, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation, Oxford, 2002, chapter 3, especially pp. 23-24.

^[33] See D. B. DAVIS, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, New York and Oxford, 1966, p. 434.

^[34] See DAVIS, The Problem of Slavery cit., p. 112.

^[35] A more radical view indicts the constitution as a pro-slavery document, for example P. FINKELMAN, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, Armonk (NY), 1996.

^[36] See C. SUSSMAN, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833, Stanford, 2000.

^[37] A. DE TOCQUEVILLE, L'emancipation des esclaves, in: Œuvres complètes, ed. by J.-P. Mayer, vol. 3, Écrits et discours politiques, Paris, 1962, pp. 90-91.

^[38] The most recent assessment is M. VORENBERG, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, Cambridge, 2001.

^[39] R. W. FOGEL, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, New York and London 1989, pp. 413-414.

^[40] See J. THORNTON, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, Cambridge, 1992, chapter 4.

^[41] BERLIN, Many Thousands Gone cit., p. 17.

^[42] See also N. CANNY and A. PAGDEN (eds.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, Princeton, 1987; B. BAILYN and P. D. MORGAN (eds.), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, Chapel Hill (NC), and London, 1991.

^[43] Above all: S. FOSTER, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700, Chapel Hill,NC, and London, 1991.

^[44] W. D. JORDAN, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812, New York and London, 1968, p. 384.