AHR Forum

The Big Picture: A Comment on David Brion Davis's "Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives"

PETER KOLCHIN

Let me begin by saying that I applaud David Brion Davis's commitment to getting away from a parochial view of American slavery by looking at what he terms "the Big Picture." I am enthusiastic about his evolving course on the rise, development, and fall of the Atlantic slave systems; indeed, I wish that I could take this course. In his essay, he has, with characteristic clarity, shown us how to look at slavery from a broader perspective and at the same time has skillfully synthesized much of the recent historiography on slavery in the modern world.	1
I would like to raise two interrelated questions about the approach that Davis has outlined for us. First, I wonder about the precise relationship between what he proposes and comparative history. Davis suggests that there are two distinct "ways of looking at slavery from broader perspectives": one of these is the "comparative approach" and the other is his "global or multinational view of the origins, development, and abolition of racial slavery in the New World." In fact, of course, there is considerable overlap between these two approaches, and in his "broader perspective" Davis embraces a good deal of what is usually subsumed under the rubric of "comparative" history.1 I would like to see him address more explicitly the relationship between his multinational approach and comparison, and the extent to which he sees the former as incorporating the latter.	2
Comparative history can serve a number of different functions, but in engaging in historical comparison, scholars usually aim to do at least one of three things: create an awareness of how a particular case fits into a broader pattern, thereby reducing historical parochialism; test hypotheses and form historical generalizations; or identify and explain significant differences.2 Davis's multinational approach is well suited to pursuing the first and to some extent the second of these goals, but it seems to place less emphasis on the third. Needless to say, as a pioneer in considering slavery and antislavery in a broad Western perspective, Davis recognizes the utility of historical comparison. His emphasis in this essay, however, is much more on establishing "international interconnections and influence" than on weighing—and evaluating the significance of—similarities and differences. I would therefore emphasize that even while viewing American slavery as part of a common pattern of Western development, it is also useful to explore the ways in which differing historical conditions have shaped variations in this pattern—in this instance, probing the ways in which American slavery differed from slavery elsewhere.3	3
Second, as a supporter of Davis's goal of getting away from a parochial approach to American slavery and painting "the Big Picture," I wonder if it would not be desirable to take an even broader view and to envision an even bigger picture. Although thinking in global terms and seeking "broader insight into world history," Davis presents his Big Picture primarily as one that integrates American slavery, for too long seen as "a chapter in the history of the U.S. South," into the general stream of New World slavery. His focus is on what he terms the "Atlantic Slave System as well as the place of such racial slavery in the evolution of the Western and modern worlds" (italics added). But just as it is extremely useful to put American slavery in the context of Atlantic slave systems, so, too, it is desirable, I think, to put those slave systems in the context of unfree labor in general, and its role in the evolution of the modern world. Viewed in this still broader context, American slavery—and New World slavery in general—is a part of what can be termed the "labor question": who should work for whom, under what terms should work be performed, and how should it be compelled or rewarded? Despite the abolition of slavery in most of the world, the labor question has remained at the top of the agenda for those who would make sense of the way societies are organized.4	4
Examining American and New World slavery in such a broadened context is especially useful when it comes to exploring what Davis refers to as "the cultural construction of race." Although much can be learned about this question by looking at the Atlantic world, a broadened focus is useful here for the simple reason that, whatever their differences, New World slave societies were all based on the subordination of Africans and their descendants to Europeans and their descendants. It is therefore useful to remember (as Orlando Patterson has noted) that slavery did not always involve ethnic distinctions between master and slave. As I have argued elsewhere, comparing the slave-like system of Russian serfdom, which was not based on ethnic or religious distinction, with American slavery underscores the extent to which attributes that have been viewed as "racial" were in fact socially conditioned. The construction of "race" is most clearly evident when we see serfholders who were ethnically indistinguishable from their serfs claiming that those serfs were inherently incapable of freedom—in other words, essentially inventing a racial distinction. In short, a still broader context underscores an important point that is easily lost sight of when all (or almost all) masters are light and slaves dark: exploitation may be facilitated by, but is in no sense dependent on, an ethnic or racial contrast.5	5
In fact, Davis repeatedly approaches the kind of broader contextualization that I am suggesting, without fully embracing it. He describes his lecture course as beginning with the study of slavery in the Bible, which was only by the most generous of definitions a product of the Atlantic world. And near the end of his article, he raises the question of "the great overarching issues regarding slavery, capitalism, and modernity"; pointing to the existence of "virtual slaves" in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he asks, "what effect, if any, have the great nineteenth-century slave emancipations had on twentieth-century forms of unfree labor?" Davis's question about the relationship between nineteenth-century slavery and more recent—slave-like—forms of human exploitation clearly calls for more than an Atlantic perspective. It also calls, I think, for more explicit examination of the status of these exploited workers, and of precisely how and when they can be considered to be "virtual slaves." In short, Davis is raising here the complicated question of the meaning—or definition—of slavery, a question far less self-evident than it at first appears.6 Clearly, not all poorly paid, poorly treated workers should be regarded as virtual slaves (although at various times, both defenders of slavery and defenders of labor have found the notion of "wage slavery" to be useful).7 Davis's assertion that "the twentieth century has clearly witnessed more slavery than all the preceding centuries combined" would seem to depend on a much more liberal definition of slavery than that embraced by most historians, a definition in some ways reminiscent of metaphorical use of the term by eighteenth and nineteenth-century opponents of "tyranny," including resistance by patriots during the American Revolution to "enslavement" by the British.8	6
Finally, I am not entirely convinced that there have been few contemporary counterparts to the "agitators and petition-signers" who struggled against slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course, current activism does not take exactly the same form that it did in the nineteenth century, but it does seem to me that one can point to examples of the kind of action Davis would like to see. One would be the boycott of trade with South Africa and the associated "divestment" campaign, which played a significant role in bringing about the end of the apartheid regime; another would be the widespread protests against the Nike corporation for engaging in exploitative labor practices in Southeast Asia, protests that the cartoon strip "Doonesbury" has brought to the consciousness of millions of normally apolitical Americans and that may have been partially responsible for the plunge in profits that Nike experienced in 1998.9	7
In concluding, I would like to say how grateful I am to David Brion Davis, both for the kind of work he is doing in developing this course and for sharing his expertise with us. As the study of American slavery experiences a renaissance reminiscent of the extraordinary flowering that occurred in the 1970s,10 it becomes more and more important for us to put what we know in context, to provide a proper perspective for making sense of the past. With David Brion Davis, this project is in good hands.	8
Peter Kolchin is the Henry Clay Reed Professor of History at the University of Delaware. His work focuses on American slavery and emancipation in comparative perspective. Recent books include Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987) and American Slavery, 1619–1877 (1993). Kolchin is currently writing a comparative study of emancipation and its aftermath in the United States and Russia. Notes 1 This also is true of his monumental books on the "problem of slavery," in which he provides very much the kind of broad view that he advocates in his essay. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966); The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975); and Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984). 2 On the nature and methodology of comparative history, see Raymond Grew, "The Case for Comparing Histories," AHR 85 (October 1980): 763–82; George M. Fredrickson, "Comparative History," in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writings in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 457–73; and Fredrickson, "From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History," Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 587–604. On applying comparison to American history, and especially to the American South and American slavery, see Peter Kolchin, "Comparing American History," Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 64–81; "The Comparative Approach to the Study of Slavery: Problems and Prospects," delivered at Conference on Les Dépendances Serviles (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, June 1996); and "The American South in Comparative Perspective," delivered at Commonwealth Fund Conference on the Two Souths: Toward an Agenda for Comparative Study of the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno (University College London, January 1999). 3 Historians comparing slavery in the American South with that elsewhere have delineated some significant differences. Two important examples include the unusual natural growth of the American slave population and the unusually stubborn defense—both verbal and military—of slavery shown by the largely resident American masters. See, among others, C. Vann Woodward, "Southern Slavery in the World of Thomas Malthus," in Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston, 1971), 78–106; Richard S. Dunn, "A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799 to 1828," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 34 (January 1977): 40–64; Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969), passim; Kees Gispen, ed., What Made the South Different? (Jackson, Miss., 1990); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 157–91; and Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York, 1993), passim, esp. 37–40, 189–99. 4 For two recent collections of essays that explore this question from a largely New World perspective, see Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher, eds., The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery (Pittsburgh, 1992); and Stanley L. Engerman, ed., Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford, Calif., 1999). 5 Kolchin, Unfree Labor, 171–73. Examining fifty-seven slaveholding societies across time and space, Orlando Patterson found that "in 75.4 percent slaves and masters were of different ethnic or tribal groups; in 15.8 percent the two were of the same ethnic group; and in 8.8 percent some slaves were from the same group as their masters, while others were from other ethnic groups"; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 179. For an influential essay putting forth the now widely accepted notion that race is a social construction (or, in her terminology, an "ideological construct") rather than a "biological fact," see Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), 143–77 (quotations 149, 150). Recently, Ira Berlin has argued that the term "social construction" is "not quite right" because race is, more precisely, "a particular kind of social construction—a historical construction"; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 1. The essential distinction, however, is between the view of race as a fixed biological entity, on the one hand, and as a conceptual category—whether termed "cultural," "social," "ideological," or "historical"—created by human beings, on the other. 6 Scholars have differed sharply over this seemingly simple question. Orlando Patterson, for example, has challenged the prevailing view (often implied rather than spelled out) that being owned is "one of the constitutive elements" of slave status; describing slaves as quintessentially outsiders, he defined slavery as "the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons"; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 17, 13. Such an approach to defining slavery is most common among those who see it as preeminently a system of marginality rather than of labor exploitation; see, for example, Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, "African 'Slavery' as an Institution of Marginality," in Miers and Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthroplogical Perspectives (Madison, Wis., 1977), 3–81. But for assertion of ownership of human property as central to slavery, see, for example, Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983), 1; and Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago, 1982), 29. Noting that "most dictionaries define slaves as property, but most contemporary scholars lean toward natal alienation," Martin Klein recently proclaimed, "I think that both are correct"; Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998), 15. For an essay cautioning against attempting to distill a universal meaning of slavery divorced from concrete historical circumstances, see Peter Kolchin, "Some Recent Works on Slavery Outside the United States: An American Perspective," Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (October 1986), esp. 768–73. 7 See Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830–1888 (Athens, Ga., 1979); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991), esp. 65–92; Roediger, "Race, Labor, and Gender in the Language of Antebellum Social Protest," in Engerman, Terms of Labor, 168–87. Defenders of antebellum slavery routinely insisted that Northern workers were less free than the South's so-called slaves. No one took this argument further than Henry Hughes, who renamed Southern slavery "warranteeism" and insisted that the North's exploited workers were in fact the real slaves, but numerous proslavery ideologues resorted to similar word games; see Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1981), especially essays by William Harper (78–135), James Henry Hammond (168–205), Henry Hughes (239–71), and George Fitzhugh (272–79). See also Kenneth S. Greenberg, "The Proslavery Argument as an Antislavery Argument," in Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985), 85–103. 8 "Virtually every form of oppression has at one time or another been described as a form of slavery," noted Eric Foner in The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998): "In the [Revolutionary] era's political discourse, slavery was primarily a political category, shorthand for the denial of one's personal and political rights by arbitrary government" (29). For a new study that argues that metaphorical "use of slavery as a propaganda vehicle encouraged, and even legitimized, white American prejudices toward black Americans," see Patricia Bradley, Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution (Jackson, Miss., 1998), xiv. See also Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), esp. 55–143, 232–46; and Jack P. Greene, "'Slavery or Independence': Some Reflections on the Relationship among Liberty, Black Bondage, and Equality in Revolutionary South Carolina," South Carolina Historical Magazine 80 (July 1979): 193–214. 9 Mistreatment of foreign workers by Nike "has become a popular cause with people all over the country," reported the New York Times (May 18, 1998): A18. "Grade school children write to Nike about it and the company is regularly pilloried in the comic strip 'Doonesbury.'" Reporting on a demonstration in Denver "as part of International Nike Mobilization to protest reported child exploitation and worker intimidation at Nike's Asian subcontract factories," the Denver Rocky Mountain News noted that "similar marches were held in all 50 states and several countries Saturday" (April 19, 1998): section Local, ed. F, p. 9A. On the decrease in Nike's profits, see the New York Times (September 22, 1998): C22, and (December 18, 1998): C19. 10 On the revisionist slavery scholarship that reached a peak in the 1970s, see Peter Kolchin, "American Historians and Antebellum Southern Slavery, 1959–1984," in William J. Cooper, Jr., Michael F. Holt, and John McCardell, eds., A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald (Baton Rouge, La., 1985), 87–111.

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