06: Slavery in Place

This is Chapter Six of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, from Section TWO: Two Ways to Make a Slave.

What honor is left to us when we have 
to take orders from a handful of traders 
who have not yet learned 
to wash their bottoms?

—MUGHAL OFFICIAL NARAYAN SINGH, 1765

Our dangerous class is not at the bottom; 
it is near the top of society. Riches 
without law are more dangerous 
than is poverty without law.

—HENRY WARD BEECHER

It appears from the experience of all ages 
and nations . . . that the work done 
by freemen comes cheaper in the end 
than that performed by slaves.

—ADAM SMITH, WEALTH OF NATIONS, 1776

There are two ways to make a slave. One is to take a people away from their land and the other is to take the land away from a people. The latter is more efficient because, instead of the slaves rebelling, they compete with one another to find a master: they become slaves to their own stomachs. The old and sick can be discarded and a fresh supply deployed. There’s no risky and expensive middle-passage. And the land and all its resources are just the cherry on top.

From the end of the eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, slavery transitioned from its physical form, chattel slavery, to its monetary form, commodity slavery or slavery in place. The violence of ripping a person from their context, which had been outsourced to bounty hunters and slave brokers, was replaced by the violence of armed invasions, proxy wars, and “popular uprisings” sponsored by imperial powers. Sometimes there were the bloodless coups of bribes and coercion, followed by an occupying army to “keep the peace” after the provoked revolution.

In this chapter, we’ll look at four examples of slavery by remote control. First, how a British corporation stole the wealth from India and used it to back the currency that subjugated the same people. Second, we’ll see how the French Revolution spurned the slaves of San Domingo and replaced their chains with debts when they rebelled. Third, the American Civil War will be questioned as an act of abolition or the substitution of chattel slavery with a free trade in self-made slaves. And finally, a shipping clerk will put together the clues that something stinks in Belgium. We also question the traditional narrative of the end of slavery with its replacement in a free trade form, so that individuals were responsible for selling themselves and slave labor was bought by the hour instead of the life.

---

eastward ho the dragons

During the Revolutionary War in America, the British aristocracy was distracted by the travails of the East India Company, in which nearly a quarter of all members of Parliament had a personal stake. William Dalrymple’s essay, “The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders,” tells the story of how the Persian army looted the treasury of the Mughal Empire in 1739, draining the bullion that had backed the currency and leaving the region in chaos. With a vacuum of power to resist them, the French Compagnie des Indes began minting their own coins and training its own savoys or Indian soldiers. The East India Company (EIC), a new model of British business that could raise money by selling shares, did them one better. Headed by a ruthless entrepreneur named Robert Clive, it forced the Shah Alam into exile where he signed over the right to collect taxes.

Backed by a private military, the EIC extracted these taxes through torture and the pillage of whole towns. Using the stolen wealth of the Indian people, the EIC developed a security force of 260,000 Indian soldiers, which was twice the size of the British army and larger than any nation’s in Asia. Within fifty years it had conquered the entire subcontinent and destroyed a culture rivaled only by Ming China.

---

calling a slave a slave

Dalrymple expounds:

It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations ... they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company.

... Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so many slaves” by their new masters, and its markets flooded with British products. . . . No great sophistication was required. The entire contents of the Bengal treasury were simply loaded into 100 boats and punted down the Ganges . . .

The subcontract to collect taxes “on behalf of Shah Alam” belonged to the privately owned EIC even though it was the British navy and army that had protected its acquisitions and thwarted foreign competition. The EIC singlehandedly reversed the flow of trade, in which Indian products had gone west and gold bullion had gone east since the Roman Empire. India was flooded with British goods and opium was foisted on China to undermine the other great Eastern power.

By 1772, however, the EIC had killed the golden cow. Severe shortfalls of land revenue due to plunder and famine left the EIC with deep debts and unpaid taxes to the Crown. Edmond Burke wrote that the EIC could “like a mill-stone, drag [the government] down into an unfathomable abyss ... This cursed Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom.”

As the first too-big-to-fail corporation, British taxpayers funded its massive bailout. The symbiotic relationship between Parliament and the EIC set the stage for modern corporate-government collusion that privatized profits at public expense, enslaving both citizens at home and subjects abroad. While the treasure gained by conquest was passed from royal empire to corporate empire, the gold still bought soldiers in both countries.

---

monopolizing misery

At the same time as Indians, on both sides of the pond, were being divested of their property, French citizens were demanding their own freedom while making a living off the backs of slaves. As Gaston-Martin asserts, the success or failure of the slave trade determined the progress or ruin of all other trades in France. This contradiction of a slave-owning democracy was never reconciled when the French fought for their own emancipation. And the crown jewel of this hypocrisy was San Domingo.

The island of San Domingo, which later became Haiti, was the source of more wealth per square foot of land than any other portion of the earth. It became the richest colony the world had ever known. But France and her maritime merchants controlled this wealth. The plantation owners could sell their produce—raw sugar, indigo, cotton, molasses, cocoa and rum—only through French ships and ports. Refined sugar carried a heavier duty as a further tax.

The importation of goods, including slaves, was the exclusive right of monopolists who kept shipments low and prices exorbitant. The French currency itself was forbidden on the island, except in the smallest denominations, so that colonists couldn’t trade directly with other countries. Although the plantation owners were the backbone of French wealth, they were saddled with greater debts than they could ever repay.

San Domingo accounted for two-thirds of French overseas trade. The sugar refineries and the brandy of Bordeaux and Marseilles, the cotton industry of Normandy, and the slave trade itself in Nantes made the prosperity of millions of Frenchmen intertwined with the misery of San Domingo.

And misery it was: the island population was comprised of 87% African slaves and only 8% whites, whose insecurity exacerbated their cruelty. They controlled 70% of the wealth while the remaining 5% of the population, the mulatto slaveowners, owned the other 30% of the wealth.

---

liberté, fraternité, slaveré

In 1789, the French Revolution was led by the maritime bourgeoisie of Marseilles and Nantes whose fortunes had been made through the slave trade. “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” abolished all caste distinctions and held all people to be born free and equal. But, as in the ancient Athenian Constitution, there were limits to the fraternité of liberté. When San Domingo mulattos tried to join the assembly, offering six million pounds to absolve the debt of the colony, they were turned away.

In San Domingo the fearful white colonists began to terrorize the mulattoes. A leading abolitionist named Ogé came to the island to lead the insurrection, beginning with a proclamation to the authorities. He was captured and broken on a wheel where he was left to die, after which his head was cut off. Horrified Parisians dramatized his martyrdom in a play, which brought the colony to the attention of the masses.

The French Revolution threw into stark contrast the assertion of personal liberty for themselves and their dependence on foreign slavery. When the question of slavery came up in the National Assembly, Robespierre made the following speech:

You urge without ceasing the Rights of Man, but you believe in them so little yourselves that you have sanctified slavery constitutionally. The supreme interest of the nation and of the colonies is that you remain free and that you do not overturn with your own hands the foundations of liberty. Perish the colonies if the price is to be your happiness, your glory, your liberty.

Despite Robespierre, the Constituent Assembly yielded to arguments that, although slavery was barbarous, it gave millions of Frenchmen their livelihoods. When the San Domingo revolution soon followed, it was to last four years and be fought against five forces: the white and mulatto plantation owners, and the armies of the French, Spanish, and English. When they finally won the only successful slave revolt in history, they were once again enslaved through debt to pay their own slave price for their “freedom.”

---

mixed motives

Soon after the British House of Commons banned the slave trade, England went to war against France. The slave trade, called “the nursery of seamen,” was now seen as a patriotic cause and was not finally abolished in England until 1807. Irish historian W.E.H. Lecky has lauded England’s ban of the transatlantic slave trade as “among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations.” This praise is certainly long overdue for the tireless champions of abolition—Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce—and the hundreds of thousands of people who organized petitions and sugar boycotts.

Yet C.L.R. James, author of The Black Jacobins, questions the egalitarian motives of the British capitalists. James writes, “A venal race of scholars, profiteering panders to national vanity, have conspired to obscure the truth about abolition.” He claims that the British found “free trade” more lucrative than the slave trade, particularly with sugar production in India. By abolishing the slave trade, Britain could take the moral high ground while undercutting plantations in Virginia and San Domingo where slave revolts made investment risky. In India there was nowhere for the lower classes to go. Slavery wasn’t needed in order to provide slave labor.

---

seduced by sugar

Commodity slavery, or slavery in place, provided England with more slave-grown products than chattel slavery ever had. And it became a tool to also enslave the British worker. In Sweetness and Power, Sidney W. Mintz looks at how the taste for sugar became widespread among the British after abolition and fueled the Industrial Revolution:

In 1000 A.D., few Europeans knew of the existence of sucrose, or cane sugar. But soon afterward they learned about it; by 1650, in England the nobility and the wealthy had become inveterate sugar eaters, and sugar figured in their medicine, literary imagery, and displays of rank. By no later than 1800, sugar had become a necessity—albeit a costly and rare one— in the diet of every English person; by 1900, it was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet.

While emulation of the higher classes accounts for some of sugar’s vogue appeal, this statistic speaks also to the poverty of the working class diet. As factory work increased and hot meals became few, sweet milky beverages took their place. All the new tropical imports of coffee, tea, and chocolate, called “drug foods” by Mintz, were stimulants dependent on sugar for their palatability. Sugar simultaneously satisfied a craving and created a craving for more.

The British laborer turned to it for comfort in her own hard circumstance. And for the most part, it was indeed “her.” In poor families, costly proteins were primarily consumed by the fathers while the women and children supplemented their diets with sucrose, accounting for more consumption than the average of 90 pounds a year. Men, who did manual labor, and on whose pay the family depended, ate meat once a day while the rest of the family had meat at Sunday dinner. The rest of the time they ate starches modified with sugar. It has even been seen as:

... a kind of culturally legitimized population control, since it systematically deprives the children of protein. . . . ‘In oversimplified terms, death of preschool children due to malnutrition is de facto the most widely used method of population control.’

Mintz elaborates, “All over the world sugar has helped to fill the calorie gap for the laboring poor, and has become one of the first foods of the industrial work break.” While enabling factory work within the British Empire, no other product bears as much responsibility for colonization of the third world:

. . . the steady demand overall and for most epochs has been for sugar . . . Indeed, the world production of sugar has never fallen for more than an occasional decade at a time during five centuries . . . world sugar production shows the most remarkable upward production curve of any major food on the world market over the course of several centuries, and it is continuing upward still.

---

the uncivil war

In the middle of the nineteenth century the United States had its own crisis of conscience over slavery—the Civil War. But in The American Road to Capitalism, Charles Post sees economics rather than abolition as the motivation. According to him, the real problem the North had with the South wasn’t slavery but the relative self-sufficiency of plantation life, which was a non-capitalist economy.

In the North the family farms had been effectively subordinated to ‘market coercion’ so they produced specialized export crops and imported most of what they consumed. But the independent plantations of the South left the Northern farms with no market for their products. It also left capital with no way to get in between the producer and consumer to make a profit.

Post writes:

The masters were able to achieve a considerable degree of plantation self-sufficiency in food and tools. The successful production of corn and cotton, using slave gang-labour under the planters’ direction, ensured that most plantations, at most times, were able to produce sufficient quantities of corn and pork to feed their slaves.

Raising corn and pork utilized slave labor when the cotton harvest was over, so the plantations were efficient and self-reliant. But when it came to their staple crops of cotton or tobacco, the planters were dependent on the merchants, who charged a commission to ship and sell the product and extended credit to the planters for supplies, land and slaves. As debtors, the planters could be ruined and imprisoned as the result of one bad year. As creditors, the merchants could lose no more than their investment, which they could recoup if the default ended in foreclosure.

After the Civil War, slaves were released without land or compensation, nominally free but now at the mercy of a global market where they competed with cheap labor from India, China and Latin America. They became commodity slaves or slaves to their own stomachs. Plantation slavery ended and a new form of slavery was born.

---

no shipping, sherlock

If our money was backed by slavery today, how would we know? In Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, he details the detective work that separated slavery from trade when the only evidence was the comings and goings of commodities.

Hochschild describes how an accounting clerk put together the clues to deduce the slavery behind rubber shipments coming out of the Congo. On the docks of Antwerp in the late 1890s, 28-year-old E.D. Morel noticed that the steamers were leaving loaded with “prodigious quantities” of armaments. When they returned their holds were filled with rubber and ivory. Examining the bills of lading he realized that:

Of the imports going into the Congo something like 80% consisted of articles which were remote from trade purposes. Yet, the Congo was exporting increasing quantities of rubber and ivory for which, on the face of the import statistics, the natives were getting nothing or next to nothing. How, then, was this rubber and ivory being acquired? Certainly not by commercial dealing. Nothing was going in to pay for what was coming out.

Out of this flash of insight was to emerge the most dogged British investigative journalist of his time and the most formidable opponent of the Belgian King Leopold. Although Morel never traveled to the Congo, the newspaper he started became the Wikileaks of his time for disgruntled soldiers and disillusioned missionaries. His evidence was assembled as meticulously as a lawyer and his firm character proved unassailable. From simple columns of numbers that didn’t add up, he inferred that something untoward was going on, but never expected the harrowing atrocities he later found.

Morel, a good friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, explained that:

These figures told their own story. . . Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard-of profits . . . It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman.

Eventually Morel was able to use his evidence to put King Leopold on trial and topple his empire, but only after Leopold had eradicated roughly ten million Congolese or half of the population. Even after Leopold was gone, Morel continued his campaign and tried to keep the public’s attention focused on land ownership. The sordid images of cut-off hands and rhino-skin whips had inflamed a popular furor, but Morel knew that mundane documents buried in file cabinets continued to hold the Congolese captive. He implored his followers that “the root of the evil [will remain] untouched . . . till the native of the Congo become once more owner of his land and of the produce which it yields.”

These clues—weapons supplied instead of return trade, unheard-of profits, control of politics, and land monopoly—indicate that slavery has changed shape without being destroyed. Morel would have done his fictional prototype, Sherlock Holmes, proud.

---

CHAPTER 6 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 #6

Slavery is not form but substance; not the presence of shackles and whips but the absence of reciprocity. Within the spectrum of slavery there are house slaves and field slaves, overseers and overseen, collaborators and rebels. Capitalism, where money usurps resources, is a more stable and resilient form of labor extraction than chattel slavery.

---

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 used in discussion of the examples to which it applies? If not, how does this affect the potential solutions?

chattel slavery: ripping people by force from their context— family, clan, community—so they can be turned into exploitable units through physical violence and torture to coerce cooperation and prevent rebellion.

commodity slavery: interfering with the right of countries, races or communities to provide for their own needs by usurping land and resources and then “saving” them with jobs that serve corporate profits.

coup d’etat: also called a putsch or golpe de estate, the overthrow of a government from within the country or without, or a combination of both. It can be a popular uprising that’s taken over by the military or a proxy war in which both sides are backed by foreign powers.

“soft power”: bribes, threats, coercive diplomacy; the velvet glove.

“hard power”: military invasion, assassination; the fist inside the velvet glove.

corporate violence: the usurping of resources and imposition of rules on the local population to eliminate risks, maximize profits, and quell resistance through authorized evictions, imprisonment, fines, and often torture by militaries or paramilitaries through a complicit government.

“too big to fail”: mega-investments that are mixed with ordinary savings so that any loss by investors would bring down the entire economy.

tax slavery: the depletion of the currency for internal exchange in order to keep the labor and resources of colonies dependent on exports.

non-capitalist economy: direct exchange between producers and consumers without middlemen—whether a slave plantation or a co-op.

---

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

Is there a connection today between jobs in Europe or the US and commodity slavery in the global south? What are some examples? When Adam Smith says that the work done by freemen comes cheaper than slaves, is that a good thing for the workers? Describe a coup or proxy war in which the US was involved in the last century. Did it result in resource extraction, occupation or cheap export labor?

If the revolutions that preserved slavery in their Constitutions—American and French—had never been fought, is there a way that chattel slavery and slave extraction/ transport might have ended sooner? Can you imagine an alternative to the Civil War in which the South could have transitioned to a slave-free society? Does Charles Post’s assertion make sense to you—that capitalists of the industrial North instigated the Civil War to destroy the non-capitalist economy of the plantation South?

Sugar was the primary drug that enabled industrial workers, mostly women, to bear a deadening life in the factories. What are other “drugs” that keep us complicit today?

---

Chapter Five of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, may be the most important because it shows that sovereign money, designed by Benjamin Franklin, worked in colonial Pennsylvania. The revolutionary war was fought over sovereign money but the veterans were tricked. Shay's Rebellion tried to bring it back but the Constitution put merchant-bankers back in charge. I show how it could have gone differently, and could go differently again.