Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

UNIVERSAL HISTORY

1. Haiti and the Creation of Europe Slavery in Europe Could slavery have taken root in the colonizing metropoles of Europe? The answer to this question was contested rather than assured . What made colonial slavery modern was its capitalist form, extracting maximum value by exhausting both land and labor to 0ll an insatiable consumer demand created by the addictive products themselves (tobacco, sugar, cofee, rum). Forged out of the most current economic forces, why would the plantation system not become the dominant form of industrial labor in Europe as well as the colonies? The fact that today we 0nd it di2cult to imagine a Manchester textile revolution powered by the labor of African, Irish, and English slaves, or a form of capitalism not synonymous with “free” labor, or economic modernization as anything but the invention of the (white) nations of the West, attests to the efective limits placed on our historical imaginations by the boundary concepts of race, nation, and UNIVERSAL HISTORY 87 modern progress that were constructed in large part to close of these possible alternatives. “There is no inherent reason that slavery should be incompatible with the ideal of a functional or utilitarian state,” writes David Brion Davis, as he describes for the British case the interconnections among Caribbean slavery, the abolitionist movement, capitalist class interests, and the ambiguous triumph of free labor, stressing the contingency of these elements’ historical coalescence.1 Enslavement of Europeans was far from a shocking idea in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when, as a workforce, the primary issue in evaluating slavery was maintaining social order rather than maximizing pro0ts. Domestic slavery was endorsed by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Samuel Pufendorf as a salutary solution to the problem of providing social discipline for the growing numbers of so-called “masterless men”—idlers, criminals, vagabonds, and paupers .2 Penal slave labor was common.3 Indentured servitude was an universal history 88 1. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 263. 2. “For Thomas Hobbes, slavery was an inevitable part of the logic of power; the bondsman had no cause for complaint when he was provided with sustenance and security in exchange for being governed. Samuel Pufendorf agreed . . . that slavery was therefore a highly useful instrument of social discipline, which might solve the problem of Europe’s idlers, thieves, and vagabonds. John Locke recommended compulsory labor for England’s landless poor, and especially for their small children who needed to be ‘inured to work.’ Francis Hutcheson, one of the prime sources of antislavery thought, also argued that nothing was so ‘efectual’ as perpetual bondage in promoting industry and restraining sloth, especially in the ‘lower conditions of society.’ He therefore argued that slavery should be the ‘ordinary punishment of such idle vagrants as after proper admonitions and tryals [sic.] of temporary servitude, cannot be engaged to support themselves and their families by any useful labours’” (Davis, ProblemofSlavery, 263–64). 3. “It is almost universally believed by European and American writers and readers of history that slavery was abolished in the northern part of Western Europe by the late Middle Ages. Yet in France, Spain, England and the Netherlands, a severe form of enslavement of Europeans by Europeans was to develop and lourish from the middle of the 0fteenth century to well into the nineteenth. This was penal slavery, beginning with galley slavery and continuing with . . . penal slavery in public works” (Patterson, SlaveryandSocialDeath, 44). Recently in the United States, penal slave labor has been proposed as an alternative to illegal immigrant labor for use in private enterprise. established means of supplying workers for the colonies, their bodies sold and their labor exploited with the same callousness and cruelty as slaves. But the mid-eighteenth century saw a quite sudden shift: “[B]y the 1760s, even the most ardent proponents of social utility refrained from recommending slavery as the most suitable condition for England’s poor.”4 The reason for increasing misgivings was an awareness of the reality of New World slavery, as the slave population in the colonies mushroomed and production boomed. Because the cruelty of the system was not only appalling but at the same time clearly efective as a technique of labor discipline, its implications could not be ignored. The slave labor system on the New World plantations bore “a surface resemblance, to say the least,” to the experiments of British industrialists, and the innovations of production described by...