The Transformation of the World (151 page)

Free Labor

In liberal economic theory, whose basic concepts mostly stem from the “long” nineteenth century, labor is free and obeys only the market laws of supply and demand. People are not compelled to work; they react to incentives. If this is meant as an actual description of reality, then some reservations are in order for the twentieth century. The Soviet gulag, its Chinese equivalent, and the Nazi camp system are the largest complexes of forced labor known to history. Only in the last few decades, has the world been largely free of such systems, although new forms of extreme heteronomy—sometimes referred to as “neoslavery”—have been gaining ground in the wake of globalization. In this respect too, the nineteenth century was an age of transition, when a historically new tendency toward free labor was set in motion. “Free” labor can be defined with reasonable clarity
only in a formal legal sense: that is, as a contractual relationship agreed to without direct external constraint, in which employees hand over use of their labor power to employers in return for monetary compensation, usually for a specific period of time. In principle this relationship may be terminated by either side, and it does not give the employer any further rights over the person of the employee.

By 1900 such a concept of labor was taken for granted in most parts of the world, but in 1800 that was by no means the case. The same may be said if we use a definition that goes somewhat beyond wage labor: namely, free labor is what is performed without any restriction on the civil liberty or physical autonomy of the worker. In the early modern period, slavery (in its many different forms) was an important social institution in half the world: in North and South America including the Caribbean, in Africa, and in the whole Muslim area. China, Japan, and Europe were basically free of it, although the latter pursued it all the more vigorously in the New World.

If we use the more general concept of “servitude,” then it encompasses at least four other forms in addition to slavery: (1) serfdom, (2) indentured service, (3) debt bondage, and (4) penal servitude.
⁸⁷
These terms have universal applicability, but they are Western insofar as the dividing lines between them are less clear in other social contexts than in a Europe that had passed through centuries of Roman law and its training in disambiguation. In Southeast Asia, for instance, the passage from various shades of dependence to outright slavery was much less abrupt.

At least one of the basic categories, however, existed almost worldwide. In Europe in 1800 there was little debt bondage (on the other hand, people soon ended up in a debtors' prison), but serfdom was still widespread. In India the opposite was true. Australia was at first nothing other than a penal colony. So, in 1880—after the beacon of liberty from the French Revolution had faded—forms of legally sanctioned servitude were by no means discredited. Leading liberal nation-states with a constitutional political system, such as France and the Netherlands, abolished slavery in their colonies only in 1848 and 1863 respectively: France in the course of a revolution, the Netherlands because its plantations in Surinam were in danger of becoming unprofitable and reproduction of the slave population was causing difficulties. The tortuous imposition of “free” labor, with its pauses and setbacks (e.g., Napoleon's reintroduction of slavery in 1802 in the French colonial empire), was a complicated process that may be broken down into several strands in the European-Atlantic area.

Slavery
⁸⁸

In the early modern period, European slave production—which had largely disappeared from the Occident—was revived on a large scale in the American colonies and established within the framework of a highly productive plantation economy. The slave labor was imported from Africa, after the indigenous population in various parts of the Americas had been wiped out or proved itself unfit for heavy work duties, and after experiments with the European underclasses had
ended in failure.
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This tropical and subtropical plantation economy produced goods for European luxury consumption, such as sugar and tobacco, in addition to cotton, the main raw material in Europe's early industrialization. The first critique of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, on which the humandevouring plantations depended, appeared in nonconformist Protestant (particularly Quaker) milieux; a broad abolitionist movement grew out of this on both sides of the Atlantic.
⁹⁰
Its first two successes came in 1808, when Britain and the United States (independently of each other) declared the international slave trade to be illegal. From then on, the United States imported no more slaves, while Britain closed its colonies for new slave shipments, stopped the trade on all British ships, and assumed the right to deploy its naval power against the transportation of slaves by other countries.

Slavery was first destroyed in Saint-Domingue/Haiti during the revolution of 1791–1804. In all other cases its disappearance was brought about not by a slave revolution but under the pressure of liberal forces in the respective colonial metropolis. The illegalization of slavery in the European colonies began in 1834 in the British Empire and ended in 1886 in Cuba. The Latin American republics already prohibited it during the independence struggles, but slaves did not make up an appreciable part of the population in any of those countries. In Brazil the last slaves were emancipated in 1888, while in the United States the process dragged on for more than eighty years. Pennsylvania was the first of the North American colonies to come out against slavery, in 1780, and over the following decades all the Northern states in turn passed antislavery legislation. At the same time, the slaveholder system consolidated itself in the Southern states, reaching a climax amid the worldwide cotton boom. Its extension to new western parts of the federation became a central bone of contention and in 1861 eventually led to the secession of the Southern states and the beginning of the Civil War. At the end of the conflict, slaves were legally emancipated throughout the United States.

In countries where millions of African slaves worked in the most dynamic sector of the economy, slavery was anything but a disturbing relic of early modern times. In the Southern part of the United States and in Brazil, Cuba, and a number of other Caribbean islands, it was the fundamental social institution for as long as it lasted; the master-slave relationship expressed itself everywhere in daily life and shaped how people thought of society. Slavery, however one understands it, is an all-embracing form of existence: the slaves cannot define themselves in any other way, and the same is true of the slave owners, who have the institution to thank for their more or less luxurious lifestyle. In essence, however, slavery in the Atlantic world was a relationship geared to the exploitation of labor and should be discussed as such.

Atlantic slavery was no neo-archaic repeat performance of Ancient Roman slavery. The latter had not been based on racial hierarchization and had been closely bound up with a near-total authority of the paterfamilias over all members of his household, such as no longer existed anywhere in the lands of early
modern Christendom.
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Yet there were some legal similarities across the ages. In the Atlantic area, too, slaves were the property of their master: he had the right to use their labor power without limitation of time and to employ violence in extracting it; and he was under no obligation to reward his slaves or to provide for their keep. The general laws of the land did not apply to slaves, or they did so only in a highly restrictive sense. As a rule, slaves had no protection against the master's violence; they could be sold to a third party regardless of their family circumstances—a practice that was described to devastating effect in Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestseller
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852). Slave status usually lasted a lifetime and was often passed on to the children of female slaves. Resistance and flight were criminal acts and subject to the severest punishment.

Such was the basic model of Atlantic slavery—a very strong form of dependence, in which slaves were particularly lacking in rights. Historians have long debated whether the reality on the ground always corresponded to this extreme: whereas abolitionists, for tactical reasons and out of moral revulsion, presented slaves as mere objects, recent studies have uncovered a cultural richness in slave communities and shown that some scope still existed for individual personal action and life choices.
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Yet the fact remains that in the West (and much more rarely in China and very seldom in Japan), in the first half of the nineteenth century and sometimes beyond, millions of people worked under conditions that could not have been further removed from the moral and economic ideal of “free labor” propagated by liberalism at that time. Nor did they do this in archaic or backward spheres of the national economy. There is some evidence—though the question “remains more or less open”
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—that both in the Caribbean on the eve of British abolition and in the antebellum Southern United States, the slave plantation
could have been
, though was by no means necessarily, an efficient, profitable, and therefore economically “rational” form of production.

There was no short or direct path from slavery to the realm of freedom. Slaves freed by a stroke of the pen did not immediately enjoy new positive rights and an economic basis for existence; nowhere did they in fact become fully entitled citizens overnight. In the colonies they remained at first political minors, like the rest of the population, although in the British ones there was some possibility for their interests to be represented. In the United States universal male suffrage was introduced everywhere by 1870, without regard for skin color, but from the 1890s on the Southern states almost completely devalued this by way of special discriminatory rules (arduous registration procedures, property and education hurdles, and so on).
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It took a whole century after the Civil War for blacks to achieve in practice their most important civil rights. In most processes of emancipation, former slaveholders were awarded some compensation: the state often paid out large sums, or ex-slaves might continue to perform labor duties during a transitional period.

Only in the United States was the end of slavery intertwined with the military defeat of slave-owning elites.
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Here the outcome was most akin to a social
revolution, with punitive confiscation of private property, but even so slaves did not change forthwith into free wage laborers in industry or small farmers on land of their own. Rather, the large plantations gave way to a sharecropping system, whereby the old planter remained in possession of the land and his ex-slaves had to share with him the fruits of their labor.
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In general, the Southern plantocracy lost its ownership rights over human beings, but not over the land and other possessions. The plantation slaves thus became a landless underclass, subject to full-scale racist discrimination and the ever more precarious conditions of sharecroppers and wage laborers. Soon they were joined by poor whites, with a resulting intersection of class and race barriers.
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In Haiti the plantations were physically destroyed during the revolution, and with them the whole sugar economy of a once highly profitable colony, so that to this day small farmers with tiny plots are characteristic of the country's agriculture. In the British and French Caribbean too, large-scale production did not continue without interruption. On some islands the planters managed to preserve the sugar plantations, using not so much ex-slaves as newly recruited contract workers (“coolies”) to keep them going. As a rule, the slaves turned into allotment farmers, less discriminated against than their counterparts in the South of the United States, and enjoying at least minimal safeguards under British law.
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The lesson from the experiences of emancipation is that freedom was not an all-or-nothing matter; it came in various shapes and gradations. Whether someone was free or not was an academic question in comparison with the degree of freedom, what it could be used for, and which practices of exclusion, new or old, were in place.
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It made a huge difference whether, as in Brazil, slaves were set free without any prior provision for their material existence, or whether someone showed a disinterested concern for them. Ex-slaves were weak and vulnerable people, without natural allies in society, and they needed some initial cushioning from the rigors of the struggle for survival in a market economy.

Serfs

In Christian Europe, especially north of the Alps, there had been no slaves since the Middle Ages. The characteristic type of servile labor was serfdom.
¹⁰⁰
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this institution survived mainly in Russia, where it had acquired a stricter form in the eighteenth century. To gain some idea of the scale of the phenomenon, we should recall that in 1860 just under 4 million people in the United States had the status of slaves: that is, 33 percent of the Southern and 13 percent of the Northern population. In Brazil, the number of slaves reached its peak in the 1850s (2.25 million, or 30 percent of the total population), a level close to that of the Southern United States.
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The figures for serfs in 1858 in the Tsarist Empire (almost all of them in European Russia) were considerably higher: 11.3 million privately owned serfs and 12.7 million “state peasants,” also not necessarily free. Serfs made up roughly 40 percent of the male population of Russia—or more than 80 percent if the state
peasants are included.
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The main demographic difference between Russia and the Southern United States at that time lay in the concentration of servile labor: in Russia it was not uncommon for several hundred serfs to be attached to a farm, whereas such an order of magnitude was rare on American plantations. Furthermore, the population of the Southern United States was far more urbanized, with a much larger share of whites who owned no slaves at all and many who had only a few domestic slaves. In 1860, only 2.7 percent of all Southern US slaveholders owned more than fifty slaves, while 22 percent of Russian noble landowners (
pomeshchiki
) had more than a hundred serfs at their disposal.
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