04: Plantation Nation

This chapter concludes Section One: Pieces of Slave in my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. It moves from white slavery to African during the 18th century, when the word Jew had just been coined. This is significant from the evidence of The 13 Sugar Colonies from the last chapter. I show why the economic system of slavery made it impossible for anyone to make an honest living, entrapping land and labor in a web of exploitation—all for the benefit of financiers.

Whiteness crossed the continent
a poison fog and where it went 
villages were vacant hearths
and ways forsaken. Whiteness with 
greed and iron makes the deep seas 
barren. Great migrations fly daylong 
into whiteness and are gone.

—URSULA K. LE GUIN

There was not a single great shipowner 
at Nantes who, between 1714 and 1789, 
did not buy and sell slaves; there was 
not one who sold only slaves; it is almost 
as certain that none would have become 
what he was if he had not sold slaves. 
In this lies the essential importance of 
the slave trade: on its success or failure 
depended the progress or ruin 
of all the others.

—GASTON-MARTIN

In the 18th-century the complexion of slavery changed and a tidal wave of African slaves engulfed the Irish, who were washed into the forgotten backwaters of history. All pretense of temporary captivity was dropped, along with the flimsy rhetoric of Christian-to-Christian forbearance. From 1450 to 1600 CE only three percent of the eventual number of African slaves had been abducted. While the 17th-century added another 16%, the middle passage reached its moral nadir in the 18th-century when the majority of African enslavement occurred. It was to eventually reach one hundred million people.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine black slavery as a racialized version of capitalism, in which a handful of people profit by exploiting the labor of all others. The race of the handful doesn't matter, what matters is that they are a handful and the rest of us started out on the same side.

In Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams makes the point that white servitude in the fields prepared the way for black slavery in the fields, which then enabled white servitude in the factories. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney echoes the link between slavery and capitalism by quoting Marx:

... the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the turning of Africa into a commercial warrant for the hunting of black skins signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

The abduction of Africans has been coined the transatlantic slave trade. However, Rodney questions whether trade even applies:

... on the whole, the process by which captives were obtained on African soil was not trade at all. It was through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnapping. When one tries to measure the effect of European slave trading on the African continent, it is essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word.

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shortcircuiting the circuit myth

The confusion between expropriation and trade is even more evident in the term “triangular slave trade.” According to the myth, guns, goods, and trinkets were given to bounty hunters in exchange for African slaves. The slaves were taken to the Caribbean where they were unloaded to make room for sugar and molasses. The sugar was brought to England or to New England where it was made into rum. The rum was then bartered for more guns and goods to take back to Africa to trade for more slaves.

But in truth, no single ship is known to have made this full circuit. Ships designed for the horrific middle passage weren’t suited for molasses or sugar. Instead, the maritime vessels departed Africa with people wedged into living coffins and returned filled with incidentals and mere ballast, plus a trunk of silver and gold for the speculators who had funded the journey.

The guns enabled the abduction of people, whose forced labor created sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, and liquor. These substances—all addictive—enabled the English working class to bear a stultifying life in the military or in the factories. The latter produced the clothes, goods, and guns that enticed the slave hunters in Africa.

Ready-made fashion and finery also put colonial plantation owners into debt, which they could only escape through greater productivity: more land and more slaves. At the top of this pyramid of profit, wielding a ledger instead of a whip, were the invisible few who reaped the greatest rewards at the lowest risk to themselves—the capitalists and bankers.

Without the creation of impersonal, transcontinental money in the form of precious metals, the nightmare of slave extraction could never have happened. Barter, no matter how large the circle, would not have enabled it. Plantation owners are seen as slavery's greatest villains but the financiers, who merely issued tradeable bills against the treasure in their safe vault, enabled ownership of ships, guns, and goods that eventually returned as more gold and silver. Concentrated and imperishable forms of money were necessary to debase the precious mettle of humanity.

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spreading the gilt

Meanwhile in England, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 that dethroned the Stuarts broke the slave-transport monopoly of the Royal African Company. By 1698 slave ships operated as an open stock market for small investors, with free trade in slaves seen as the fundamental right of Englishmen. Business boomed with new speculators pouring in. Where the Royal African Company had transported around 5000 slaves annually, two million slaves were taken annually to British colonies between 1680 and 1786 at a four-fold increase.

Free trade took precedence even where it undermined British dominance. Spain adhered to the papal decree to not engage directly in slave trafficking, which didn’t prohibit them from buying slaves already transported. The privileged contract to supply these slaves was called the Asiento. Withholding slaves from Spain would have eliminated the competition in slave-grown products, allowing British plantations to get a better price. Against this, it was argued that Spain paid in silver, which enriched the bullion available in England. Due to the resulting competition, any cost-savings for British planters only lasted a year or two before the drop in the price of goods left them more dependent than before.

Liverpool became the foremost port for slave vessels in the world. It went from its first ship in 1709 to hosting three-sevenths of all European slave fleets in 1795. Although ten companies owned most of the ships, every profession in Liverpool had a piece of the action, whether supplying them, outfitting them, or investing in them:

... many of the small vessels in the trade were fitted out by attorneys, drapers, grocers, barbers and tailors. The shares in the ventures were subdivided, one having one-eighth, another one-fifteenth, a third one-thirty-second part of a share and so on. ... almost every order of people is interested in a Guinea cargo, it is to this influenza that (there are) so many small ships.

The investment carried considerable risk, however, of mortality onboard or the whole ship going down since one in five “miscarried.”

Moreover the planters were heavily in debt and often needed long credit from the shipowners, during which time they might go bankrupt. When the slave ships did make a profit, it was modest for a high-risk gamble—an 18th-century estimate puts the combined annual profit at just over 30%—compared to the 5000% low-risk profit garnered in spices by the Dutch East India Company. But the spice trade was tightly controlled to keep production low and prices high, whereas the slave trade distributed the risks and the profits widely.

This had the effect of creating many small investors who were hostile to the abolitionists. Abolition threatened the jobs and investments supplied by slavery and the products, particularly sugar, on which common people had come to depend. The government and merchants encouraged this animosity. In 1708 the British Board of Trade proclaimed it “absolutely necessary that a trade so beneficial to the kingdom should be carried on to the greatest advantage.”

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sometimes the crackpots win

But towards the end of the 18th-century, in 1787, twelve innocuous-seeming men met in a London print shop. They were to change the trajectory of history in five short years. Adam Hochschild’s book, Bury the Chains, tells the story:

If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. ... Within a few short years, however ... [t]here was an abolition committee in every major city or town ... More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade.

Ending slavery, however, was easier decreed than done. Plantation owners in the colonies were in favor of ending new shipments of slaves, which would increase their monopoly and the sale-price of slaves from their breeding programs. Smallholders, on the other hand, wanted a more democratic distribution of slave labor by being able to buy direct from the boat. So, even within the group of slaveowners, they were divided by class—with cessation of the slave trade favoring the more established large-plantation masters.

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the pyramid of plantocracy

In effect, therefore, European colonialism echoed the plantocracy of ancient Greece, expanded to mean that a few claimed ownership of the land and granted use of it to some who then added to the wealth of the few through conquest and enslavement of the rest. At the top were those who might be called archons, the very wealthy financiers who owned the precious metals on which the economy turned. At the bottom, most certainly, were the African slaves. But in between, everyone else was both trapped by the system and benefited from it.

Laborers without land couldn’t hope to earn enough money to buy their own plots. A free man couldn’t compete with slave labor by using his own or a few hired hands. Plus, plantations had driven up the price for available land. As subsistence producers they were doomed but as consumers they could obtain food, clothing and goods without doing manual labor.

The smallholder farms, who were unable to hire free men, also couldn’t compete with the self-sufficiency of plantations. Slave owners who wanted to keep their slaves busy in the off-season grew corn and pork for the local market in addition to their cash crop, and trained their own blacksmiths and craftsmen. Therefore smallholders had to either get big or get out.

Owners of only a few slaves were at a particular disadvantage after imports of new slaves ended. However the smallholder did have a fall-back: he could sell his land to the plantations. This would enable his sons to go to college and become accountants or lawyers serving the slaveowners. Or he could use the money to speculate in the import/ export market of slave-grown goods.

Even the plantation owners themselves were trapped by their debt to the merchants and slave ships. Margins were kept tight by competition with other colonies. Just one unprofitable season from illness or misfortune, from a flood or a drought, from runaway slaves or a full revolt, and the family fortune would be lost. Many men of “reputation” ended their lives in suicide rather than face imprisonment and shame.

Once precious metals were made into the measure of land, labor, and lives, everything that happened since was bound to follow. No one could change the ways in which they were servants without addressing the ways in which they were masters. And none could renounce their privilege entirely without a country that did the same. That was the logic of abolitionists in England.

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blood for soil

When England abolished slavery at home, of course, they didn’t stop the import of slave-made products. The undermining of free labor continued for the British working class but in a less obvious form. Money now didn’t buy whole slaves but still bought pieces of slave: forced labor in a commodified form available from the local dry-goods shop or confectionary. Slave labor still backed the money no matter how the English worker earned it.

The difference between the places where slavery persisted and where slavery died out may say less about the character of the people and more about the availability of soil. Williams explains:

According to Adam Smith, the prosperity of a new colony depends upon one simple economic factor—‘plenty of good land.’ The British colonial possessions up to 1776, however, can broadly be divided into two types. The first is the self-sufficient and diversified economy of small farmers, ‘mere earth-scratchers’ as Gibbon Wakefield derisively called them ... The second type is the colony which has facilities for the production of staple articles on a large scale for an export market ... In colonies of the latter type ... land and capital were both useless unless labor could be commanded. ... In such colonies the rugged individualism of the Massachusetts farmer, practising his intensive agriculture and wringing by the sweat of his brow niggardly returns from a grudging soil, must yield to the disciplined gang of the big capitalist practising extensive agriculture and producing on a large scale.

He quotes Wakefield that “The reasons for slavery ... are not moral, but economical circumstances; they relate not to vice and virtue, but to production.” However, slavery had its own limits:

From the standpoint of the grower, the greatest defect of slavery lies in the fact that it quickly exhausts the soil. The labor supply of low social status, docile and cheap, can be maintained in subjection only by systematic degradation and by deliberate efforts to suppress its intelligence. Rotation of crops and scientific farming are therefore alien to slave societies. As Jefferson wrote of Virginia, ‘we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old one.’ The slave planter, in the picturesque nomenclature of the South, is a ‘land-killer.’ ... Expansion is a necessity of slave societies; the slave power requires ever fresh conquests.

Therefore the theft of land from aboriginal peoples was part and parcel of the theft of people from their lands. Without the former the latter would not have existed, at least on the commonplace scale that it did. And without the latter—in other words, if immigrants had been mere 'earth-scratchers' tilling and manuring their own small plots of dirt instead of slaveowners and colonizers—our history might have been different: races living together in peace, with respect for each other and the land. It was not immigration but forced migration that created animosity between white, black, and red.

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CHAPTER 4 EXERCISES

Using examples from the book, or from your own research, logic, and experience, comment on the following and what it means today:

PARADIGM SHIFT #4

It isn't possible to compete with slavery. As long as the products of slave labor are on the market, no free person can make an honest living by farming or producing because the only way to obtain a livable income is by serving the slaveowning class. Moreover, speculation in the peripheral functions of slaveowning, such as commerce, becomes a necessity for middle-class security. Greed becomes survival.

LEXICON

Explain how the following definitions change the dialogue around social problems. What are examples to which the term might apply? Is there another word or phrase that better fits the concept? Is this concept discussed today? If not, how does this affect the potential solutions?

social violence: infliction of pain, seizure of property, and the abduction, captivity, rape, or death of persons that is normalized by law and carried out by those given a mandate by a higher authority.

extraction: putting something in only to get more out.

commodity slavery: ownership of the products of involuntary, nonreciprocal labor rather than ownership of the people producing them. See also p. 77 when applied to countries.

'earth-scratchers': a derisive term for subsistence farmers.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

If Axial Ages are defined as the 500 years before and after the turn of a millennia, we would be in the middle of the Third Axial Age (1500 CE to 2500 CE). In the first centuries of this Axial Age, those who really ruled the empires were the merchant-bankers, to whom the kings and queens were indebted. Royalty was the face of privilege and ran the risks of public uprisings, including beheading, but the merchant-bankers bore the least risk and reaped the greatest rewards. In today's world, these would be the executive board members, bank owners, and venture capitalists—who are often the same people in different roles—making up the shadow government. Is there a word or phrase to describe them? If not, how does it affect our ability to see them, discuss them, much less target them? What name would you coin to encapsulate them? Hint: these are one in a million or a hundred million, not the 1%.

A great difficulty in abolishing slavery was that small business owners had staked their security on its profits, upper- and middle-class professions were employed by it, and working-class consumers derived comfort from its products. Is there a modern equivalent in food, goods, or energy? Does enslavement of the environment fit the same mold? Could any of the techniques used by 18th-century abolitionists be applied today? Like the abolition committee, is it possible that less is more, and a few people with full agreement on the goal could be more effective than a multitude?

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Chapter Three of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, shows how slavery subjugated whites before it subjugated blacks. Slavery was not about race but about economics. Racism was a result of slavery, slavery was not a result of racism. I look at the 1600's with the 'kid nabbing' of Irish children, and 'transportation' of rebels. I quote from Derrick Jensen, Eric Williams, David Graeber, Don Jordan & Michael Walsh, John Isbister and Kate McCafferty.

I read Ch 2 of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, on the origin of money. Citing David Graeber's Debt, I look at the military-coinage-slavery complex and the myth of barter. I explain the gift economy that preceded money, in which relationships were valued above a bargain/ barter-gain. Religions of altruism are seen as a reaction to market-based greed. I conclude that money, from its inception, was trade in pieces of slave and that coinage coopted us into being shareholders in conquest.

"Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians--those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey." Aristotle

I read Chapter One of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. I describe the origins of democracy in ancient Greece as a shrewd move by the archons to quell rebellion. Greek democracy was a pretty word laid over systemic violence. When debt and slavery had reached a boiling point and commoners threatened to unite, this was a concession that divided farmers against the landless, soldiers against the colonized, and citizens against the enslaved.