Of Human Bondage

The founders of social science expressed a continuing interest in the origins and workings of human bondage. This interest can be traced from Montesquieu and John Millar in the eighteenth century to Tocqueville, Comte, Marx, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir Henry Maine, Spencer, E.B. Tylor, Edward Westermarck, William Graham Sumner, and Max Weber. The ideology of moral and material progress, coupled with debates over the “anomaly” of chattel slavery in the New World, also led by the 1840s to the first systematic histories of Greco-Roman slavery and to theories explaining the institution’s decline and disappearance from Western Europe. In the major European languages scholars and popularizers produced thick volumes on the history of slavery from antiquity to modern times. However superficial or filled with Christian moralizing, this nineteenth-century literature recognized the importance and puzzling variations of an institution that has appeared from the time of the first written and ethnographic records and in virtually every part of the world.

But from the First World War to the mid-1950s (a period that set new records for the mobilization, degradation, and extermination of millions of unfree workers), slavery almost disappeared as a subject of central theoretical and historical interest. As Igor Kopytoff has recently pointed out, anthropology “almost completely forgot slavery” in this period when “so much of its modern world view was being forged.” According to the standard textbooks and general works, “the message has been that slavery is incomparably less important a phenomenon that compadrazco or the distinction between cross and parallel cousins.”¹

For non-Marxian economists slavery raised few promising questions until 1957, when Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer applied to historical data modern mathematical models and statistical techniques. ² During the interwar decades American history was largely dominated by disciples of the “Progressive historians”—notably Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard—who held that slavery had always been peripheral to the major forces and struggles that explained the rise of American civilization. Black slavery became a branch of “Southern history,” a field increasingly devoted to vindicating the Lost Cause, to exposing the imperialist motives of the capitalist North, and to reinterpreting the Civil War as an avoidable and calamitous American tragedy. Between 1918 and 1956 the monumental but frankly racist work of Ulrich B. Phillips, who was strongly influenced by Turner and was the star of the William A. Dunning school of pro-Southern historiography, remained the standard authority on American Negro slavery. The one sentiment shared by the historians who romanticized the antebellum South and the antiracist anthropologists who empathized with “primitive” and often slaveholding peoples was a common antipathy toward the modernizing, moralistic “civilization” that had brought on the First World War and global depression.

Even critics of Phillips and other racist scholars tended to accept the premise that black slavery was an aspect of the essentially southern or West Indian “racial problem.” The pioneering works of such scholars as Melville J. Herskovits, E. Franklin Frazier, John Dollard, and Gunnar Myrdal challenged the myths that helped to justify racial discrimination and segregation, but they were concerned only incidentally with the meaning of human bondage. Knowledge of the structure and dynamics of modern slavery thus depended to a large extent on Afro-American studies.

From 1916 to the 1960s The Journal of Negro History, published by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, provided the main forum for a small group of scholars who defined the issues and did much to start the great revival of interest in slavery during the past two decades. A magazine for such black historians as Carter G. Woodson, William M. Brewer, Charles H. Wesley, Benjamin Quarles, and Eric Williams, the Journal was also one of the few outlets for white scholars who like many of the blacks were interested not only in the consequences of slavery and emancipation throughout the Americas but also in the interrelationship of slavery and other institutions. ³

As might be expected, Marxian writers took a leading part in attacking the plantation legend of southern racial harmony as well as in debating the periodization of slavery and serfdom in world history. It was not until the late 1950s, however, that they became less rigidly doctrinaire, adopting more flexible and subtle forms of Marxist theory, which opened new approaches to the history of slavery, from Japan and central Asia to precolonial Africa. This flexibility and diversification coincided with two developments in non-Marxian scholarship: the “desegregation” of southern and Afro-American history, actively promoted by such distinguished scholars as C. Vann Woodward, David Potter, and David Donald, and immensely accelerated by the civil rights movement; and the independent appearance in Europe of Charles Verlinden’s extensive work on slavery in medieval Europe and the studies by Joseph Vogt and others on slavery in classical antiquity.⁴

These converging and often conflicting approaches have led during the past twenty years to a veritable explosion of books, articles, and international symposia on slavery. Two years ago the most comprehensive “teaching bibliography” (which excludes popularizations) listed 3,259 books and articles on slavery, almost all published since the mid-1950s. While over 60 percent of these works deal with the Atlantic slave trade or black slavery in the New World, only 26 percent of the titles are limited to North America and an increasing number pertain to Africa, Asia, and premodern Europe.⁵ No doubt general readers, together with most social scientists, still identify “slavery” with the antebellum South. During the past few years, however, we have had four important books of essays dealing with slavery in Africa; Charles Verlinden’s second volume on slavery in medieval Europe, a work of 1,000 pages; Richard Hellie’s long study of slavery in Russia from 1450 to 1725; and A.C. de C.M. Saunders’s history of black slaves and freedmen in Portugal from 1441 to 1555.⁶ These are only a few of the recent works that should widen our stillparochial perspective.

Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death is in many ways the crowning achievement of the numerous works of scholarship of the past quarter-century. A Harvard sociologist who has published several novels as well as a detailed analysis of slavery in his native Jamaica, Patterson has read a staggering amount of the economic, historical, ethnographic, demographic, and theoretical literature on slavery in all parts of the world. No previous scholar I know of has gained such a mastery of secondary sources in all the Western European languages. With the help of research assistants, Patterson has even digested texts in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and medieval Welsh and Irish. From the systematic sample of 186 world cultures assembled by the anthropologist George P. Murdock, Patterson has selected sixty-six slaveholding societies on which a sufficient amount of historical or ethnographic data could be found. He has then coded and statistically analyzed the information on these societies, which range from ancient Babylonia to the Bella Coola of central British Columbia and the Tehuelche of Patagonia. In addition, Patterson has studied and collected data on all the “large-scale slave systems” from ancient Greece and precolonial Africa to early modern Korea and the New World. His attempt to view slavery as a global institution is thus far more ambitious and comprehensive than that of H.J. Nieboer, who in 1900 published the only existing work faintly comparable to Patterson’s.⁷

It should be emphasized that this is not a history of slavery. Patterson’s objective is “to come to a definitive statement of the fundamental processes of slavery, to grasp its internal structure and the institutional patterns that support it.” His abstract approach will doubtless irritate humanist historians who, in C. Vann Woodward’s words, hold “a profound respect for the varied particularity of human experience and a jealous regard for the precise integrity of time and place in the remembrance of things past.”⁸ Within four or five pages, Patterson skips from the Third Dynasty of Ur to Icelandic warriors, the Margi of northern Nigeria, ancient Athens and Sparta, eighteenth-century Jamaica, and the American Civil War. Specialists in every field are bound to pounce on errors and dubious generalizations. Patterson is fully aware of this and has at least fortified his assertions by drawing on the assistance of an imposing group of experts.

More serious objections can be made to his disdain for the nuances of specific historical settings, chronological developments, and the ways institutions become diffused. The societies he discusses are discrete units that can be coded and categorized but seldom interact or evolve. For the historian there is an inevitable distortion in juxtaposing the abstract characteristics of scores of societies separated by the greatest reaches of time and space, and then discovering striking “parallels” and “similarities” that may well be the artifacts of a sociological method that owes so much to the work of structural anthropologists. But historians’ methods involve distortions and fictions of a different kind, and Patterson should not be read with an eye to the “precise integrity of time and place.” Histories of slavery largely rest on unexamined and muddled concepts of what the institution is. The great merit of Slavery and Social Death is to offer a coherent theory that challenges deeply rooted assumptions and presents new points of departure for further research.

The book should also bury stale debates on the relative harshness of North American slavery, which some historians have attributed to racial prejudice or the coercions of unmitigated capitalism. Racial or ethnic distinctions characterized most of the slave systems Patterson studied, but this trait seems to have had no distinctive influence on the treatment of slaves or on the laws protecting them. Indeed, Patterson finds no significant correlations between the harshness of legal codes and the economic function of slaves, the material conditions of life, or the frequency of manumission. Patterson’s analysis of such variables helps to identify some of the exceptional features of North American slavery but also underscores the danger of idealizing premodern forms of servitude or of making generalizations about the harshness or leniency of any slave system. No system was static; all involved “a constant struggle between master and slave in the effort of the former to gain as much as possible for himself with the least possible loss, including the self-defeating loss of his slave, and the effort of the latter to minimize the burden of his exploitation and enhance the regularity and predictability of his existence.”

In view of the disparate institutions Westerners have classified as “slavery,” the more skeptical anthropologists have questioned the validity of the term as a concept that can usefully be applied to diverse cultures, especially when it carries the connotations of the New World plantation model. Patterson is fully aware that slaves often occupied a highly privileged status; that slave elites were sometimes valued as professional soldiers, palace guards, and imperial administrators; and that fathers or other heads of free families have sometimes had the right to kill or sell their children and have commonly received a bridesprice for what amounts to the transfer of dominion over a daughter. Patterson also acknowledges that black slaves in the nineteenth-century South generally enjoyed better material conditions than did contemporary industrial workers in Britain, and that although slavery is “one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination,” it is by no means the only such form. Nevertheless, for all the rich empirical detail illustrating the diversity of master-slave relations, Patterson’s central purpose is to establish the “constituent elements” of the institution—the universal characteristics that distinguish slavery from other kinds of subordination.

For Patterson slavery is essentially a relation of human domination or parasitism (a term he introduces, unfortunately, only in the last pages of the book), which can best be understood as an intersecting personal and institutional process. In the archetypal model found in the mythology and ethnology of many peoples, the process begins with the subjugation of a captive whose life is spared in a kind of “gift exchange” in return for acceptance of permanent servitude. Whether, in the absence of such an exchange, actual death would have resulted from execution, starvation, or exposure is in a way irrelevant since the relationship is founded on violent coercion, and the slave who seeks to escape his master’s dominion is always liable to death. Even the most privileged slave janizaries and grand viziers understood that their exemption from death or brutal punishment was contingent upon obedience or even a master’s whim. “There is no known slaveholding society,” Patterson claims, “where the whip was not considered an indispensable instrument.”

As an institutional process, however, enslavement also depended on what Patterson calls an “idiom of power” that legitimized the master’s authority. Borrowing imaginatively from the writings of symbolic anthropologists, Patterson describes the rituals that enlisted communal support in making the master’s rights and the slave’s duties part of “the normal order of things.” Whether captured or purchased from the outside world or recruited from the native population, the slave acquired a new identity as a “genealogical isolate”—a nonperson formally alienated from ancestors, kin, and progeny. Such rituals as hair-shaving, branding, and renaming marked off the bondsman from the recognized classes or castes of the organized community.

Although slaves might be allowed and could seldom be prevented from shaping their own informal communities, Patterson insists that they could never exercise the rights and duties of social beings, such as protecting their kin. The consequence of this “natal alienation,” a key concept which Patterson derives in part from M.I. Finley, was a state of social death—a dependence on the master for even temporary familial security and for mediation with the community at large. Patterson logically concludes that hereditary slavery was a byproduct of natal alienation, since no kin could lay legitimate claim to the offspring of slave women. He might have added that the original model for such alienation was probably the domestication of animals, as may be indicated by the continuing practice of pricing slaves according to their equivalent in cows, horses, camels, pigs, and chickens.

Patterson is most original in analyzing the degradation or “generalized dishonor” of slaves. In many premodern societies, including Islamic ones, the principal motive for acquiring slaves was to enhance the prestige, respect, and honor of people who craved power. The point often over-looked writers who romanticize such paternalistic forms of servitude is that the master’s claim to honor depended not only on his slave’s objective debasement but on the slave’s surrender of any aspiration to honor in his own right.

Drawing on the anthropological work of Julian Pitt-Rivers, Patterson accentuates the distinction between acting honorably and being honorable: “There have been slaves who have been honored or whose acts have been considered honorable, yet who have remained despised as persons without honor.” Hence even privileged slaves have commonly been subject to abuse and ridicule from the nonslaveholding population; and according to A.M. Wergeland, the timocratic German tribes tolerated insults from slaves themselves because “the abusive language of a slave cannot injure anybody’s honor.” In some societies the dishonor of having been a slave has even stigmatized former captives redeemed from an enemy. Patterson concludes that the “Sambo” stereotype of the fawning, docile, childlike, and carefree bondsman has been “an ideological imperative of all systems of slavery, from the most primitive to the most advanced. It is simply an elaboration of the notion that the slave is quintessentially a person without honor.”

In a brilliant discussion of “the ultimate slave,” Patterson applies the themes of dishonor and natal alienation to what appear to be the most unslavelike slaves in history—the administrative servants of the Roman emperors, the Islamic Mamluks and janizaries, and the political eunuchs of the Byzantine and Chinese emperors. Since contemporaries often considered it a great honor to be the powerful servant of an emperor or sultan, these marginal examples pose a test to any theory of the internal and invariable structure of human bondage. But as Patterson proceeds to argue, the slave’s natal alienation removed aristocratic and dynastic barriers to meritocracy and efficient administration, providing a corps of slave bureaucrats “ever ready to move physically, and occupationally, not only upward but laterally, downward, and out; ever ready to retrain for entirely new positions and to accept, without complaint, whatever was offered in remuneration.” Always distinct from that of the patronclient relationship, the power of elite slaves depended solely on the will of the master and might coexist with humililiations no Roman citizen or free Arab would accept. In other words, it was precisely the slave’s position outside the threshold and his lack of honor that allowed him to act as an impersonal surrogate. And for the absolute ruler in particular, the ideal surrogate was the anomalous court eunuch.

This figure, widely stereotyped as foul, cruel, loathsome, and obscene, is Patterson’s “ultimate slave.” Ultimate because his castration signified the ultimate dishonor while simultaneously preventing the reproduction of himself and his class. But why did so many absolute rulers in various parts of the world place trusted eunuch slaves between themselves and their subjects? For Patterson, Mary Douglas’s works on dirt and pollution, coupled with Edmund Leach’s theory of binary oppositions and symbolic mediation, provide the clue. As an androgynous being universally associated with filth and pollution, the eunuch alone could cross otherwise impassable boundaries between good and evil, the sacred and the profane. If the Byzantine emperor was God’s vice-regent on earth, his remoteness from his subjects could be mediated by a eunuch slave who symbolized the distance between the carnal and the divine:

The pollution incurred by the emperor in crossing the line between the sacred and the profane could be explained as resulting from the dirtiness of his chief eunuch, who thus became a symbolic as well as political scapegoat…. The slave eunuch, the ultimate slave, was the incarnation of the emperor, even as the emperor was the incarnation of Christ.

What the imperial eunuch shared with the lowly field hand was his structural marginality.

Paradoxically, the effectiveness of the slave’s marginality usually required as an incentive the reasonable hope of eventual manumission. One of the most valuable innovations of Patterson’s study is the insistence that “it is not possible to understand what slavery is all about until we understand it as a process including the act of manumission and its consequence.” Manumission was the final stage in an extended rite of passage that began with the exchange of physical life for social death and culminated with a symbolic rebirth marking the negation of the negated honor and social existence. Yet because even a fee paid for redemption can never be commensurate with the gift of freedom, the ex-slave was commonly bound to his former master by continuing ties of gratitude and dependency. Thus manumission might be imperative as a reward for faithful service, but it signified only the beginning of a gradual process of assimilation that might require generations of further parasitism as well as the easy availability of slave replacements. No one else has written with such illumination on the contradictory meanings of manumission or on the socioeconomic variables that governed the status of freed people.

The usefulness of Patterson’s ingenious theories can only be tested by future comparative studies. Marginality is such an inclusive category that it tends to lose meaning when divorced from specific settings and content. For the most part, for example, Patterson portrays the marginal slave as wholly dependent on his master for mediation with the nonslave community; yet it is the marginal eunuch who mediates between his master and all free subordinates. Similarly, while Patterson repeatedly stresses that slaves craved honor and refused to internalize the contempt with which they were regarded, he concludes that “none of them [was] ever able to bestow honor or to confirm it, at least not to anyone who mattered.”

This is a surprising statement from a scholar scornful of historians who have either minimized slave resistance or have, in his view, accommodated such resistance to an “equilibrium” model of paternalism. Surely the imperial eunuchs and other palatine slaves “mattered,” and also had some part in defining the rules of “the honor game.” (As Patterson admits, they often exercised a dominant influence over emperors and sultans.) In Patterson’s book we never view honor through the eyes of eunuchs, women, or really through the eyes of any slaves. Dishonor, like natal alienation, is always defined from the vantage point of a master class. In view of the recent studies by such historians as Eugene D. Genovese, Herbert G. Gutman, and John W. Blassingame, it is astonishing how little attention Patterson pays to the slaves’ subjective sense of lineage and honor.⁹

This omission is related to Patterson’s inconsistency in portraying the fundamental contradiction of human bondage. Genovese has summed up the problems “inherent in the contradiction in the slave’s legal existence as man and thing” by concluding that “Hegal was therefore right in arguing that slavery constituted an outrage, for, in effect, it has always rested on the falsehood that one man could become an extension of another’s will.”¹⁰ In an uncharacteristic polemic, Patterson attacks historians who focus on a fundamental conflict “between the treatment of the slave as a thing and as a human being. The formula ends with some ringing piece of liberal rhetoric to the effect that human dignity is irrepressible: ‘You may define a person as a thing,’ goes the flourish, ‘but you cannot treat him as one’ (or some such pious statement). The whole formula is, of course, a piece of irrelevance.” Yet far from endorsing the anthropological position of moral relativism, Patterson continually reaffirms the existential and historical contradictions of human bondage. Consider the following piece of liberal rhetoric:

Against all odds he [the slave] strove for some measure of regularity and predictability in his social life. Because his kin relations were illegitimate, they were all the more cherished. Because he was considered degraded, he was all the more infused with the yearning for dignity. Because of his formal isolation and liminality, he was acutely sensitive to the realities of community…. Everywhere the slave’s zest for life and fellowship confounded the slaveholder class; and in all slaveholding societies the existential dignity of the slave belied the slaveholder’s denial of its existence.

In fairness it should be added that the polemic quoted above is directed against conventional legalistic theories that define the slave as the property of an owner-master. Patterson argues convincingly that there are many forms of human capital and that the “property element” is neither unique to slavery nor a fundamental ingredient of the master-slave relation. Similarly, he argues, definitions that stress the economic function of slaves or a slave “mode of production” confuse changeable historical circumstance, such as the merger of slavery and capitalism in the American South, with the basic structural conditions he emphasizes throughout his book: domination, natal alienation, and generalized dishonor. It is still unclear how this triad of conditions distinguishes slaves from other oppressed peoples, such as prostitutes, convicts, and contract migrant laborers. Nor is it clear from Patterson’s account why in modern times slavery should have been separated out from other forms of oppression and regarded as an obstacle to progress and a crime against humanity. But there can be no doubt that this rich and learned book will reinvigorate debates that have tended to become too empirical and specialized. Patterson has helped to set out the direction for the next decades of interdisciplinary scholarship.