Slaving and Colonialism

Charles Verlinden, in a broader reflection on colonialism that grew out of his monumental study of slavery in Europe before its Atlantic age, once declared that the only rule regarding slavery and colonialism that he could discern was that the two were incompatible.¹ That is, colonial powers either exploited territories they did not claim to rule directly by importing people from them as slaves or by ruling directly over conquered populations whom they left in place. The Atlantic-world historical referents that Verlinden had in mind were obviously the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Asian and African colonies that European nations claimed at the end of the nineteenth century. This assertion, plausible enough when he made it in the still post-abolitionist and only nascently post-colonialist 1950s, has endured sufficiently that papers on enslaved Africans in the Americas, not to mention an introductory essay attempting to link “slavery and colonialism,” would seem to have no place in a journal of “colonialism and colonial history,” at least not in Verlinden’s sense.

This linkage seems hardly more promising against the background of Immanuel Wallerstein’s sweepingly influential political economy of “world systems.”² Wallerstein united slavery and colonialism by dividing the world into regions related to the economically developing northern Atlantic. Beyond this historically advancing European “core” lay a dependently integrated, largely contiguous and relatively passive “periphery” supplying bulk consumption goods to it; beyond that lay semi-peripheral source-regions contributing luxury commodities and raw materials, with labor there kept in place to produce them. This economic semi-periphery contained areas of the sort that Verlinden had described in terms of the political arrangements of the 1950s as “colonies.” Wallerstein left the remaining regions of the globe, those not directly sustaining the “core” in material terms and therefore not places where “core” interests (and evidently also power to implement them) lay in preserving populations as labor to produce consumer luxuries or industrial raw materials.³ Before the later nineteenth century, Africa remained outside this “modern world system,” and therefore tragically became the source of enslaved workers transported across the Atlantic to bring the Americas within the semi-periphery of plantations and mines. Enslavement accomplished the initial violent phase of integrating semi-peripheries, structurally dependent on accessible labor pools beyond the pale. Nineteenth-century imperialism extended the semi-periphery to the farthest ends of the earth, thus ending slaving on structurally significant scales — that is, significantly contributing to the ongoing consolidation of the European core. Colonialism in Africa proved incompatible with slaving, but colonial occupation of the Americas thrived on slavery.

However, slavery became antithetical to the imperial phase of European expansion. In Verlinden’s terms, the abolition of slavery became the modus operandi, or at least justificandi, of the imperial conquests of the 1880s and 1890s that led to modern colonial rule, nominally to bring the “people [theretofore] without history”⁴ into the global progressive sweep toward millennial modernity. As Wallerstein might have it, the vacuum-like suction of limitless growth in modern industrial productive capacity and consumer demand in the North Atlantic swept all the world’s other peoples into its vortex. In still other terms, modern technology gave Europeans the communications and transport facilities, biomedical techniques of resisting tropical pathogens, sheer military power, and financial resources to impose themselves directly in every part of the globe, thus rendering enslavement unnecessary to control labor anywhere. Liberal economists formulating progressive theories of the accelerating economic growth condemned slavery to the obscurity of a fast-fading past as, they supposed, “civilization” and modernization enlightened and developed the world, in the image of the West, through colonial rule. Slavery depended on forced labor (and corresponding worker reluctance if not resistance) rather than on individual ambition and on personal responsibility rewarded and was thus doomed to extinction as modern colonialism spread the political and economic benefits of civic “freedom” around the globe.

None of this consensus eighteenth-century “liberal” reasoning about the incompatibility of slavery and colonialism was inconsistent with their less optimistic nineteenth-century materialist counterparts. Karl Marx (1818–1883), translating the incompatibility of slavery and industrialized modernity in the abolitionist...