Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Modern slavery was not like that: the very idea of the slave trade was itself degrading and horrendous. ‘It began on the morning of 8 August 1444 when the first cargo of 235 Africans, taken from what is now Senegal, was put ashore at the Portuguese port of Lagos. A rudimentary slave market was improvised on the docks and the confused and cowed Africans, reeling from weeks confined in the insalubrious holds of the tiny ships on which they had come, were herded into groups by age, sex and the state of their health.’

¹¹ No trading was allowed until Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ had been notified and arrived at the quayside. As sponsor of the voyage, he was entitled to a fifth of the booty, in this case forty-six humans. This is how the traffic in ‘black gold’ (as slaves became known) began.

While it was new to Europe, a slave trade had existed in Africa for hundreds of years. What changed now was the size of the demand. The European slave trade was driven by a new form of commercial enterprise – the sugar plantation. And Europe’s taste for sugar turned out to be such that, between 1492 and 1820, according to Anthony Pagden, ‘five or six times as many Africans went to America as did white Europeans’. This statistic, however well-known, still has the power to shock. It shaped the Americas and provided the United States with, arguably, its most intractable problem. One deep reason for this abiding American dilemma arose from the fact that modern slavery involved a new understanding of the relationship between master and slave.¹²

Neither Aristotle nor Cicero was ever comfortable with the idea of slavery. On occasion they tried to argue that slaves were a different ‘type’ of person, but they knew that was unconvincing when in many cases slaves had merely been on the losing side in a war. The main monotheisms took much the same view. Both the Old Testament and the Qurʾan authorise the taking of slaves, but only after a ‘just war’.¹³ The early Christians did not look favourably on the enslaving of other Christians but did not extend the same charity to non-Christians. In the early years of the trade, there were some attempts by Catholic clerics and jurists to claim that the wars deep inside Africa were ‘just’ but few took their arguments seriously and an advance of sorts was made in 1686 when the Holy Office condemned the slave trade. But, significantly, it did not condemn slavery itself.

¹⁴

The Vatican’s view reflected what was for a time the general opinion – that the slave trade was more offensive than slavery itself – but protests continued to snowball and drew attention to the fact that, underneath it all, there was a paradox. It was held by many that Negroes were ‘an inferior type of people, little better than animals’, and as if to confirm this they were often given the names of pets – Fido, Jumper and so on. Yet this attitude was flatly contradicted by the fact that masters often required their slaves to undertake tasks that demanded a full mental equipment.¹⁵

No less dangerous was the possibility that female slaves would be found sexually attractive by their masters, producing mixed-blood offspring and a new type of social problem. So the new relationship was fraught with inconsistencies and tensions.

Racist views remained strong, right up to and beyond the time slavery was finally abolished. William Wilberforce was just one of the abolitionists who could not dispel his belief that European Christian culture was a civilising force. At one point he confessed that the emancipation of the slaves ‘might actually be less important than that the reign of light and truth and happiness might be brought among them through Christianity and British laws, institutions and customs’. But Wilberforce did join the sponsors of an experimental colony, Sierra Leone, founded in 1787 to ‘introduce civilisation among the natives and to cultivate the soil by means of free labour’. Sierra Leone flourished and its capital, Freetown, became one of the bases for the new Royal Navy anti-slaving squadron.¹⁶ In the event, it was Denmark which, in 1792, became the first European nation to outlaw the slave trade. Britain took action to end the trade in 1805 and slaving had become a hanging offence by 1824. But elsewhere it went on for another half-century – the last landing was made in Cuba in 1870.¹⁷