“Without that ability to sympathize, we might think that it was perfectly all right* to keep slaves.”
Nearly all people for thousands of years thought it was perfectly all right to keep slaves. Are you saying they didn’t have the ability to sympathize? This is the sort of profoundly ahistorical “thinking” that irritates so many people. Someone who considers his own society’s beliefs to be laws of reality when there is obvious historical evidence in the other direction that they never bothered to think about.
I don’t think it’s perfectly all right to eat meat. And I consider battery farming to be an obscenity which I’d like to see outlawed.
And yet I do eat meat, guiltlessly, and not all of it is free-range ethics-meat.
It occurs to me that I might have trouble explaining this to some future ethicist, and I wonder if that might be the same sort of moral state that the Romans, say, were in.
It occurs to me that I might have trouble explaining this to some future ethicist, and I wonder if that might be the same sort of moral state that the Romans, say, were in.
In most societies, “slaves” were closer to indentured workers than the modern conception of slavery, which descends from the racist North American slave trade, IIRC.
I’m not sure that holds. In my model and priors, the racist NA slave-owners are much less likely to do certain categories of negative things, and are actually on the higher end of the nice-slavery scale on account of them usually being too disgusted or other-negative-feelings to bother doing anything to them but the occasional light no-contact beating and lots of forced labor.
For instance, considering that I’d guesstimate roughly 10% of Roman Empire slaves to be privately-owned females, and that of those a certainly non-negligible amount would be attractive to their owners or people-the-owner-wants-to-be-friends-with somehow, then it’s not that far-fetched to guesstimate that around 5% of Roman Empire slaves were, in fact, used often or mostly for sexual purposes. This obviously includes rape and torture and whatever other fun things the owners/friends-of wanted to do.
I’d also presume that it was much easier to start off a roman sex-and-food orgy with slaves than with free females that are otherwise just interested in having such an orgy considering what I know of cultural gender expectations/roles for that culture and of the numbers of such free vs slave women.
I’ve also heard that the ancient Chinese had some pretty sick ideas (both horrible and genius at the same time) of what to do with slaves during their constant warfare, including but not limited to: Training items (e.g. “These slaves have wooden swords, but we’ve broken half their fingers and wounded their arms. Today, you will be training how to effectively cripple and immobilize an enemy with your ranged weapons before they get within sword range!”), battlefield entertainment, emergency food reserves, literal meat walls (no, not putting them on the front lines to fight; literally slaying and piling them at a particular spot just to hinder the enemy movements and cause psychological damage), and various forms of experimentation, testing of poisons/herbs, or whatever-the-owner-felt-like-doing-to-them.
Likewise, slave life in ancient Babylon-and-nearby or around the middle-east during the european middle age and renaissance don’t sound all that attractive, nor nearly what I’d qualify as “indentured worker”.
The most striking indentured-worker-like slaves I can think of come from some limited data hinting that Egyptian slaves during the ages of grand pharaohs were mostly pretty well treated and considered important belongings equivalent to how we’d value today a car with integrated PC if that was something common.
Of course, a lot of the above is from very limited evidence and there’s surely a lot of just-so mixed in, but considering the current state of modern slave trade and black market (forced) sex trade around the world and its prevalence (and the amounts of money involved), I would strongly favor hypotheses that contain similar horrible conditions in most slave cultures in history on account of not knowing of any particular factor or change in human nature and societies that would suddenly make it more common or likely in our current world and cultures.
In my model and priors, the racist NA slave-owners are much less likely to do certain categories of negative things, and are actually on the higher end of the nice-slavery scale on account of them usually being too disgusted or other-negative-feelings to bother doing anything to them but the occasional light no-contact beating and lots of forced labor.
It’s hard to get estimates for beatings—there appears to have been a great deal of variation - but let’s just say that racism is unlikely to decrease beatings. And American slaves were definitely raped. A lot. Sometimes because they were considered inferior—after all, if the kid is half white, they’ll make a better slave, right?
Roman slaves are the ones I know most about. And while they had essentially no rights, there was no concept of them being inherently inferior—they simply had lost their freedom, whether selling it to cover debts or having it taken as spoils of war. They could not be identified visually, and if freed were the equal of any Roman. Roman slaves gradually acquired more rights as time went on.
The master’s power over the slave was called (dominica potestas), and it was absolute. Torture, degradation, unwarranted punishment, and even killing a slave when he was old or sick, in the eyes of the law, slaves were property who could not legally hold property, make contracts, or marry, and could testify in court only under torture. The death of his master did not free a slave. Under the Empire laws were passed stating that a slave could not be sold to fight wild beasts in the amphitheater; he could not be put to death by his master simply because he was old or ill; if her were ‘exposed’, or turned out on the streets to die, his was freed by the act; and he could not be killed without due process of law. But these laws were generally disregarded, and only the influence of Christianity changed the condition of slaves for the better.
Romans were not a kindly people, but they did not often forget that a slave was valuable property. Much depended on the individual master. Vedius Pollio, notorious for cruelty, once ordered a slave to be thrown alive into a pond as food for the fish because he had broken a goblet. But Cicero had great affection of his slave Tiro. The Elder Cato tells us something about the treatment of farm slaves. He held that slaves should always be at work except for the hours—few enough at best—allowed them for sleep. Slaves were not well fed, but it must be remembered that the diet suggested by Cato (grain, fallen olives or salf fish and sour wine) was very similar to that of the poor Romans. A slave received a tunic every year and a cloak and pair of wooden shoes every two years. Worn-out clothing was returned to the slave manager to be made into patchwork quilts.
If a slave escaped, he had to live the life of an outlaw, with organized bands of slave hunters on his track. A fugitive slave was a criminal, for he had stolen himself. If he was caught, he was branded on the forehead with the letter F, for fugitivus, and sometimes he had a metal collar riveted around his neck. One of these collars, preserved at Rome, says in Latin, “I have run away. Catch me. If you take me back to my master Zoninus, you’ll be rewarded”.
A slave could not legally own property, but he often had peculium, unofficial possessions. Often an industrious, thrifty slave could scrape together a little fund of his own if his master permitted it. City slaves had more chance to do this, collecting tips from his master’s friends and guests or receiving presents from students if he was a teacher. Sometimes a master would allow a slave to have a trade and keep part of the earnings. A thrifty slave’s ultimate goal was to buy his freedom. Sometimes a slave would buy his own slave to hire out. A slave of a slave was called a vicarius. A slave’s property went to his master upon the slave’s death.
Slaves were often punished. The most common one for neglect of duty or petty misconduct was a beating or a flogging with a lash (called a flagrum or a flagellum). Sometimes slaves were punished by having to wear a heavy forked log around his shoulders with his neck in the fork and his arms fastened to the ends projecting in front. This is where the term of abuse furcifer came from. Minor punishments were inflicted at the order of the master or his manager by a fellow slave, called for the time carnifex(executioner). Occasionally a slave would be assigned to harder labour than he was accustomed to. Utterly incorrigible slaves were sold to be gladiators. Punishments were severe for actual crimes, always a possibility since slaves were so numerous and had such free access to their master. Nothing was so much dreaded throughout all Italy as an uprising of slaves. For an attempt on a master’s life or for taking part in an insurrection, the penalty was death for the criminal and his family in a most agonizing form—crucifixion. Pompey erected six thousand crosses along the road to Rome, each bearing a survivor of the final battle in which their leader, Spartacus, fell. The word crux (cross) was used amoung slaves as a curse, especially in the expression [I] ad [malam] crucem ([Go] to the [bad] cross).
A slave might buy his freedom, or he might be freed as a reward for faithful service or some special act of devotion. A formal act of manumission often took place before or praetor, but it was only necessary for his master to declare him free before witnesses. A new-made freedman set on his head the cap of liberty. A freedman was called libertus as an individual or in reference to his master, and libertinus as one of a class. His former master became his patron.
[source]
This is true, but chattel slavery (the type of slavery practiced in the American South) is not the only kind of slavery practiced in history. Some slave cultures (Greek and Roman in particular) allowed a real possibility of manumission into freedom, or even citizenship.
Assuming chattel (or ethnicity-based) slavery was the only kind is a failure mode in the general public.
Edit: I’m not sure where you got this idea:
the racist NA slave-owners are much less likely to do certain categories of negative things, and are actually on the higher end of the nice-slavery scale on account of them usually being too disgusted or other-negative-feelings to bother doing anything to them but the occasional light no-contact beating and lots of forced labor.
The brutality of US chattel slavery varied from place to place and time to time, but there’s mixed evidence at best for genuine sympathy for slaves among the slave-owners or free folks. A lot of pro-slave court cases are successful attempts by slave-owners to punish slave-renters who mistreated the property or free bystanders engaging in destructive “vandalism”.
Re. that quote, I was referring mostly to the kinds of abuse I cite in example in the rest of the comment.
From what I know, it wasn’t particularly common for American South slave-owners to specifically select for attractive female slaves and routinely rape or otherwise abuse them for personal pleasure—having sex with “niggers” was, as I understand it, a deep wrongdoing.
I also don’t imagine the american slave-owners of that culture engaging in all that many orgies or the various practices of viking naval slaves or ancient chinese generals.
I’m not sure where you are getting the violent sex aspect of slavery—I’m not an expert, but I’m not aware of that as a widespread practice. Treating slaves’ lives as cheap (like your examples from Chinese history) doesn’t necessarily imply violent orgies. In my mental model, sex slaves are mentally coerced, not physically coerced. Assaultive rape isn’t the first image that appears in my head for sex-with-slaves.
And US chattel slavery is weird about sex with slaves. For example, Sally Hennings is not an usual story, even if that kind of conduct was considered improper. Further, the idea of slaves as sexually charged beings continues to run through current American ideas about US blacks. Consider the trope that black men have above average sized penii.
In my mental model, sex slaves are mentally coerced, not physically coerced. Assaultive rape isn’t the first image that appears in my head for sex-with-slaves.
This is what I have in mind when I say “routinely rape or otherwise abuse them for personal pleasure”. I’m not sure either where I implied a violent or assaultive aspect. Playing on the helplessness of the victim and various forms of mindbreak or psychological coercion is clearly the dominant tactic in most cultures of sexual slavery as far as I’m aware.
Ah. I’m doubtful that the line between owners doing what they wanted with their slaves and their friends doing the same to same slaves was that clear-cut or actually upheld, but it makes sense now that I think about it—it certainly makes sense that strangers would avoid damaging the slaves of others or when in doubt, since that would legally amount to high vandalism and property damage.
My conception of “torture” is very large. Sure, that includes strapping someone to a chair and flogging them, but I’m not so skewed as to believe such things were commonly practiced onto most categories of slaves unless there were special circumstances.
Things like promising slaves a real meal if they work twice as hard for the day and then giving them authentic dog feed once they’re done counts as torture within this enlarged label. Such things were, I’m given to understand, very widespread among various slavery cultures, sometimes as a form of entertainment.
To my understanding, they’re currently very widespread in current 2012 slavery (though apparently most people nowadays use the term “human trafficking”, which obscures from discussion what actually happens once the person has been trafficked).
There’s a relatively recent post about overly expansive definitions and why the changes in connotation they create are bad—but I can’t find.
I will say that a wildly nonstandard definition of a term increases inferential distance. And there are labels for the concepts you want to gesture towards—expanding the reach of the label “torture” is not necessary.
I wasn’t aware of better labels that could be used in nontechnical discussion, and I can’t think of any at the moment.
In practice I’ve used this expanded “torture” label in discussions with various sorts of people both specialized and not (though this does not include professional sociologists, historians or moral philosophy experts), and found that it was usually understood from context without additional input, and otherwise a single extensional example (like the typical bullying case where a couple of kids take someone’s bag and throw it around while the owner helplessly runs around trying to get their stuff back) was sufficient for them to make the remaining inferences.
Granted, this may in part be due to body language and other unspoken information channels, and I have transmitted neither this nor any examples before the grandparent. I also didn’t think much of it at the time of writing, so I’ll agree that it was a mistake, since I could just as well have rationalized in this manner even if I did not observe it as a successful label in previous instances.
I’m just trying to distinguish between behavior a “law-abiding” slave might never encounter in her lifetime, as opposed to what she probably deals with on a weekly basis (on average—and that’s not intended to count the standard “get back to work” instruction). A substantial part of the confusion in this conversation was my reading your words as asserting the former behavior (archetypal torture) was more frequent than historically occurred. My understanding was that behavior towards escape attempts and such (most of which would qualify as torture) was very different than “ordinary” treatment of slaves in the American South.
A phrase like emotional abuse or just abuse might be reasonable label, depending on what other connotations it brings to the conversation.
A phrase like emotional abuse or just abuse might be reasonable label, depending on what other connotations it brings to the conversation.
Indeed, in retrospect that should have been an obvious choice. I’ve been conditioned by the French word “abus” (also the verb “abuser”) which carries different connotations and which in common usage would generate a lot more misunderstanding, so I tend to underuse the words “abuse” and its subsets.
Raping slaves was common, and was often prompted by racism—after all, if the kid’s half-white he’ll make a better slave, wont he? No-one thought they were unattractive, just “inferior”.
I think I’d take a Southern cotton plantation over a Roman mine any day. And I never heard that the Confederacy lined their roads with crucified rebels.
Bear in mind that most slaves didn’t go to the mines—and they were often used as a punishment.
I had trouble finding details on the punishment of rebel slaves in the Americas—they appear to have been rarer and more successful in escaping capture compared to Roman slaves—but here’s something on “maroons” (self-governing pockets of escaped slaves.)
Maroons and their communities can be seen to hold a special significance for the study of slave societies, for they were both the antithesis of all that slavery stood for, and at the same time a widespread and embarrassingly visible part of these systems. The very nature of plantation slavery engendered violence and resistance, and the wilderness setting of early New World plantations allowed marronage and the ubiquitous existence of organized maroon communities. Throughout Afro-America, such communities stood out as an heroic challenge to white authority, and as living proof of a slave consciousness that refused to be limited by the whites’ definition and manipulation of it.
Within the first decade of most colonies’ existence, the most brutal punishments had already been inflicted on recaptured rebel slaves, and in many cases these were quickly written into law. An early 18th-century visitor to Suriname reported that,
″...if a slave runs away into the forest in order to avoid work for a few weeks, upon his being captured his Achilles tendon is removed for the first offense, while for a second offense… his right leg is amputated in order to stop his running away; I myself was a witness to slaves being punished this way.”
And similar punishments for marronage—from being castrated to being slowly roasted to death—are reported from different regions throughout the Americas.
Marronage on the grand scale, with individual fugitives banding together to create independent communities of their own, struck directly at the foundations of the plantation system. It presented military and economic threats that often strained the colonies to their very limits. In a remarkable number of cases throughout the Americas, whites were forced to appeal to their former slaves for a peace agreement. In their typical form, such treaties—which we know of from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Mexico and Suriname—offered maroon communities their freedom, recognized their territorial integrity, and made some provision for meeting their economic needs. In return, the treaties required maroons to end all hostilities toward the plantations, to return all future runaways, and, often, to aid the whites in hunting them down. Of course, many maroon societies never reached this negotiating stage, having been crushed by massive force of arms; and even when treaties were proposed they were sometimes refused or quickly violated. Nevertheless, new maroon communities seemed to appear almost as quickly as the old ones were exterminated, and they remained, from a colonial perspective, the “chronic plague” and “gangrene” of many plantation societies right up to final Emancipation.
To be viable, maroon communities had to be inaccessible, and villages were typically located in remote, inhospitable areas. In the southern United States, isolated swamps were a favorite setting. In Jamaica, some of the most famous maroon groups lived in “cockpit country,” where deep canyons and limestone sinkholes abound but water and good soil are scarce. And in the Guianas, seemingly impenetrable jungles provided maroons a safe haven.
Many maroons throughout the hemisphere developed extraordinary skills in guerrilla warfare. To the bewilderment of their colonial enemies, whose rigid and conventional tactics were learned on the open battlefields of Europe, these highly adaptable and mobile warriors took maximum advantage of local environments. They struck and withdrew with great rapidity, making extensive use of ambushes to catch their adversaries in crossfire. They fought only when and where they chose, relying on trustworthy intelligence networks among non-maroons (both slaves and white settlers), and often communicating military information by drums and horns.
These guys sound pretty heroic, but I don’t think they’re evidence that the racist transatlantic slave trade was worse than the non-racist Roman world. I’m not an expert on either, though.
Part of what I’m trying to assert is that people are capable of treating other people terribly, even in the absence of theories of racial superiority.
I’m pretty sure that the Romans looked up to the Greeks at the same time as enslaving them. And fairly sure that the Greeks enslaved other Greeks.
But you’d need to know a lot more about the classical world than I do to work out what kinds of racial theories were current.
And maybe they did have foreign groups that they mistreated particularly badly. If we think that xenophobia is a built-in feature of the brain then it would be damned weird if the Romans weren’t superiority-complex racists. After all, consider the amount of evidence they had that their system was superior and that the gods loved them.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t worse to be the slave of someone who despises you and your type than the slave of someone who accepts you as a brother.
I just don’t think any of this is particularly modern.
And on ethical matters I tend to think that progress is upwards (or at least correlated with per-capita GDP). If we think that the recent past was particularly awful it’s usually because we’ve got better records of it.
So here’s a prediction for you: There were things going on in the Dark Ages that were worse than either Roman or early Victorian slavery.
The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
So here’s a prediction for you: There were things going on in the Dark Ages that were worse than either Roman or early Victorian slavery. The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
Well, I’m not exactly an atrocitologist, but I have studied the early medieval period in some detail. There are some problems in comparing it to other periods, especially in subjective terms—the Dark Ages were called “dark” precisely because they left a relative dearth of subjective material—but here’s what I can remember off the top of my head.
There was a widespread slave trade, beginning during or before Roman times and ending in Britain around 1100 AD. It was not racially motivated or justified, as we’d understand race; slaves came from all the European ethnic groups, including those of their holders. Taking slaves seems to have been more common in conflicts between ethnic groups, however. Unransomed captures in wartime and freemen who fell into various kinds of legal trouble could both become slaves; the former seem to have been more common. They generally could be bought and sold and didn’t have legal independence. The law codes of the time prescribed punishments for mistreating other people’s slaves but not your own.
Slave labor was not usually highly concentrated or regimented (there were, for example, no galley slaves in that period); slaveholders came from all free social classes, and slaves performed much the same work as freemen (though usually the harder and dirtier shares of it, where division of labor was possible). At the time of the Domesday Book, slaves made up about 9% of the population.
From what I know of it, this seems more comparable to Roman slavery than to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Early medieval Europe was a poorer place than either Rome or the early modern colonies, and its people probably led harsher lives, but in social terms I don’t see much in the way of unique awfulness.
The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
I’m not quite an atrocitologist so I have no idea whether some of these things I can think of were actually ever put into practice, but I can think of lots of things worse. I can also guarantee you with 90% confidence that there’s a lot of manga (especially doujinshi) out there that do picture things you’d consider much worse, especially when you delve into the darker circles. Some japanese artists have literally become world-renowned ‘experts’ on the topic of fictional mass atrocity.
I’m not comfortable discussing specific examples without a wall of spoiler prevention features requiring the viewer to pass a mental fortitude test to view the content. I might have mentioned this before, but I’ve once had an acquaintance bend down and vomit on the spot upon recounting one of my more horrible nightmares. I try to avoid dishing out such mental damage on unprepared individuals nowadays.
To hear things so bad they make unprepared listeners spontaneously vomit, not to hear things worse than slavery. There are plenty of those, they just tended not to catch on.
I wish I’d thought to pick ‘Atrocitologist’ as a screen name. Oh well.
I can’t think of any medieval atrocities comparable in scope to those of either the Roman or Victorian eras. But I don’t think that has anything to do with philosophy or tolerance, it’s just that Rome and pre-Victorian England were a lot more powerful and effective than any of the intermediate governments, and so were able to achieve greater scope than e.g. Poland ever could.
But to your more general point: modern racism is just a special case of the human tendency to define ingroup/outgroup divisions, right? It’s ok to enslave Them, because they’re not Us. That finding is extremely robust through history: Greeks enslaved other Greeks (but they called themselves Spartans and Helots), Italians enslaved other Italians (but the victims were never Roman citizens so it didn’t count), the Jews wiped out the Amelikites (they worshipped the wrong gods, what can you do?) and French nobles ruled over French serfs (but you can’t compare a noble to a serf).
Italians enslaved other Italians (but the victims were never Roman citizens so it didn’t count)
Romans could be sold into slavery to pay off their debts.
The Romans were reletively free of out-group hostility—they felt the barbarians outside the empire were savages, but they tended to absorb local power structures and religions, granting the local nobles (if they cooperated) Roman citizenship, (which was more exclusive than, say, American citizenship,) and while there was some generic snobbery there does not appear to be any belief that non-Romans were inherently inferior. Once they joined the empire, they gained all the rights and privileges of your average Roman (including protection from those barbarian savages over the hill.)
I don’t think they’re evidence that the racist transatlantic slave trade was worse than the non-racist Roman world.
They aren’t. However,
″...if a slave runs away into the forest in order to avoid work for a few weeks, upon his being captured his Achilles tendon is removed for the first offense, while for a second offense… his right leg is amputated in order to stop his running away; I myself was a witness to slaves being punished this way.”
And similar punishments for marronage—from being castrated to being slowly roasted to death—are reported from different regions throughout the Americas.
grants context to your statement that “I never heard that the Confederacy lined their roads with crucified rebels.”
we think that xenophobia is a built-in feature of the brain
“Without that ability to sympathize, we might think that it was perfectly all right* to keep slaves.”
Nearly all people for thousands of years thought it was perfectly all right to keep slaves. Are you saying they didn’t have the ability to sympathize? This is the sort of profoundly ahistorical “thinking” that irritates so many people. Someone who considers his own society’s beliefs to be laws of reality when there is obvious historical evidence in the other direction that they never bothered to think about.
I don’t think it’s perfectly all right to eat meat. And I consider battery farming to be an obscenity which I’d like to see outlawed.
And yet I do eat meat, guiltlessly, and not all of it is free-range ethics-meat.
It occurs to me that I might have trouble explaining this to some future ethicist, and I wonder if that might be the same sort of moral state that the Romans, say, were in.
I mock you from the safety of my vegetarianism, while desperately downplaying who made my trainers.
It’s the same sort of moral state we’re all in.
My take is that without the ability to sympathize we wouldn’t have stopped. Not that we suddenly learned/developed sympathy.
In most societies, “slaves” were closer to indentured workers than the modern conception of slavery, which descends from the racist North American slave trade, IIRC.
I’m not sure that holds. In my model and priors, the racist NA slave-owners are much less likely to do certain categories of negative things, and are actually on the higher end of the nice-slavery scale on account of them usually being too disgusted or other-negative-feelings to bother doing anything to them but the occasional light no-contact beating and lots of forced labor.
For instance, considering that I’d guesstimate roughly 10% of Roman Empire slaves to be privately-owned females, and that of those a certainly non-negligible amount would be attractive to their owners or people-the-owner-wants-to-be-friends-with somehow, then it’s not that far-fetched to guesstimate that around 5% of Roman Empire slaves were, in fact, used often or mostly for sexual purposes. This obviously includes rape and torture and whatever other fun things the owners/friends-of wanted to do.
I’d also presume that it was much easier to start off a roman sex-and-food orgy with slaves than with free females that are otherwise just interested in having such an orgy considering what I know of cultural gender expectations/roles for that culture and of the numbers of such free vs slave women.
I’ve also heard that the ancient Chinese had some pretty sick ideas (both horrible and genius at the same time) of what to do with slaves during their constant warfare, including but not limited to: Training items (e.g. “These slaves have wooden swords, but we’ve broken half their fingers and wounded their arms. Today, you will be training how to effectively cripple and immobilize an enemy with your ranged weapons before they get within sword range!”), battlefield entertainment, emergency food reserves, literal meat walls (no, not putting them on the front lines to fight; literally slaying and piling them at a particular spot just to hinder the enemy movements and cause psychological damage), and various forms of experimentation, testing of poisons/herbs, or whatever-the-owner-felt-like-doing-to-them.
Likewise, slave life in ancient Babylon-and-nearby or around the middle-east during the european middle age and renaissance don’t sound all that attractive, nor nearly what I’d qualify as “indentured worker”.
The most striking indentured-worker-like slaves I can think of come from some limited data hinting that Egyptian slaves during the ages of grand pharaohs were mostly pretty well treated and considered important belongings equivalent to how we’d value today a car with integrated PC if that was something common.
Of course, a lot of the above is from very limited evidence and there’s surely a lot of just-so mixed in, but considering the current state of modern slave trade and black market (forced) sex trade around the world and its prevalence (and the amounts of money involved), I would strongly favor hypotheses that contain similar horrible conditions in most slave cultures in history on account of not knowing of any particular factor or change in human nature and societies that would suddenly make it more common or likely in our current world and cultures.
It’s hard to get estimates for beatings—there appears to have been a great deal of variation - but let’s just say that racism is unlikely to decrease beatings. And American slaves were definitely raped. A lot. Sometimes because they were considered inferior—after all, if the kid is half white, they’ll make a better slave, right?
Roman slaves are the ones I know most about. And while they had essentially no rights, there was no concept of them being inherently inferior—they simply had lost their freedom, whether selling it to cover debts or having it taken as spoils of war. They could not be identified visually, and if freed were the equal of any Roman. Roman slaves gradually acquired more rights as time went on.
Some links:
http://www.thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASpunishments.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_United_States#Punishment_and_abuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_slave
Roman slaves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome http://www.roman-colosseum.info/roman-life/slave-punishment.htm http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/LX/SlavesRomanEmpire.html
Much thanks for all the extra data! That was some interesting reading.
This is true, but chattel slavery (the type of slavery practiced in the American South) is not the only kind of slavery practiced in history. Some slave cultures (Greek and Roman in particular) allowed a real possibility of manumission into freedom, or even citizenship.
Assuming chattel (or ethnicity-based) slavery was the only kind is a failure mode in the general public.
Edit: I’m not sure where you got this idea:
The brutality of US chattel slavery varied from place to place and time to time, but there’s mixed evidence at best for genuine sympathy for slaves among the slave-owners or free folks. A lot of pro-slave court cases are successful attempts by slave-owners to punish slave-renters who mistreated the property or free bystanders engaging in destructive “vandalism”.
Re. that quote, I was referring mostly to the kinds of abuse I cite in example in the rest of the comment.
From what I know, it wasn’t particularly common for American South slave-owners to specifically select for attractive female slaves and routinely rape or otherwise abuse them for personal pleasure—having sex with “niggers” was, as I understand it, a deep wrongdoing.
I also don’t imagine the american slave-owners of that culture engaging in all that many orgies or the various practices of viking naval slaves or ancient chinese generals.
I’m not sure where you are getting the violent sex aspect of slavery—I’m not an expert, but I’m not aware of that as a widespread practice. Treating slaves’ lives as cheap (like your examples from Chinese history) doesn’t necessarily imply violent orgies. In my mental model, sex slaves are mentally coerced, not physically coerced. Assaultive rape isn’t the first image that appears in my head for sex-with-slaves.
And US chattel slavery is weird about sex with slaves. For example, Sally Hennings is not an usual story, even if that kind of conduct was considered improper. Further, the idea of slaves as sexually charged beings continues to run through current American ideas about US blacks. Consider the trope that black men have above average sized penii.
This is what I have in mind when I say “routinely rape or otherwise abuse them for personal pleasure”. I’m not sure either where I implied a violent or assaultive aspect. Playing on the helplessness of the victim and various forms of mindbreak or psychological coercion is clearly the dominant tactic in most cultures of sexual slavery as far as I’m aware.
Well, from the great grandparent:
In general, strangers-to-the-bond were not permitted the same liberties with slaves as owners.
Ah. I’m doubtful that the line between owners doing what they wanted with their slaves and their friends doing the same to same slaves was that clear-cut or actually upheld, but it makes sense now that I think about it—it certainly makes sense that strangers would avoid damaging the slaves of others or when in doubt, since that would legally amount to high vandalism and property damage.
My conception of “torture” is very large. Sure, that includes strapping someone to a chair and flogging them, but I’m not so skewed as to believe such things were commonly practiced onto most categories of slaves unless there were special circumstances.
Things like promising slaves a real meal if they work twice as hard for the day and then giving them authentic dog feed once they’re done counts as torture within this enlarged label. Such things were, I’m given to understand, very widespread among various slavery cultures, sometimes as a form of entertainment.
To my understanding, they’re currently very widespread in current 2012 slavery (though apparently most people nowadays use the term “human trafficking”, which obscures from discussion what actually happens once the person has been trafficked).
There’s a relatively recent post about overly expansive definitions and why the changes in connotation they create are bad—but I can’t find.
I will say that a wildly nonstandard definition of a term increases inferential distance. And there are labels for the concepts you want to gesture towards—expanding the reach of the label “torture” is not necessary.
I wasn’t aware of better labels that could be used in nontechnical discussion, and I can’t think of any at the moment.
In practice I’ve used this expanded “torture” label in discussions with various sorts of people both specialized and not (though this does not include professional sociologists, historians or moral philosophy experts), and found that it was usually understood from context without additional input, and otherwise a single extensional example (like the typical bullying case where a couple of kids take someone’s bag and throw it around while the owner helplessly runs around trying to get their stuff back) was sufficient for them to make the remaining inferences.
Granted, this may in part be due to body language and other unspoken information channels, and I have transmitted neither this nor any examples before the grandparent. I also didn’t think much of it at the time of writing, so I’ll agree that it was a mistake, since I could just as well have rationalized in this manner even if I did not observe it as a successful label in previous instances.
That makes sense.
I’m just trying to distinguish between behavior a “law-abiding” slave might never encounter in her lifetime, as opposed to what she probably deals with on a weekly basis (on average—and that’s not intended to count the standard “get back to work” instruction). A substantial part of the confusion in this conversation was my reading your words as asserting the former behavior (archetypal torture) was more frequent than historically occurred. My understanding was that behavior towards escape attempts and such (most of which would qualify as torture) was very different than “ordinary” treatment of slaves in the American South.
A phrase like emotional abuse or just abuse might be reasonable label, depending on what other connotations it brings to the conversation.
Indeed, in retrospect that should have been an obvious choice. I’ve been conditioned by the French word “abus” (also the verb “abuser”) which carries different connotations and which in common usage would generate a lot more misunderstanding, so I tend to underuse the words “abuse” and its subsets.
No.
Raping slaves was common, and was often prompted by racism—after all, if the kid’s half-white he’ll make a better slave, wont he? No-one thought they were unattractive, just “inferior”.
I think I’d take a Southern cotton plantation over a Roman mine any day. And I never heard that the Confederacy lined their roads with crucified rebels.
Bear in mind that most slaves didn’t go to the mines—and they were often used as a punishment.
I had trouble finding details on the punishment of rebel slaves in the Americas—they appear to have been rarer and more successful in escaping capture compared to Roman slaves—but here’s something on “maroons” (self-governing pockets of escaped slaves.)
[source]
These guys sound pretty heroic, but I don’t think they’re evidence that the racist transatlantic slave trade was worse than the non-racist Roman world. I’m not an expert on either, though.
Part of what I’m trying to assert is that people are capable of treating other people terribly, even in the absence of theories of racial superiority.
I’m pretty sure that the Romans looked up to the Greeks at the same time as enslaving them. And fairly sure that the Greeks enslaved other Greeks.
But you’d need to know a lot more about the classical world than I do to work out what kinds of racial theories were current.
And maybe they did have foreign groups that they mistreated particularly badly. If we think that xenophobia is a built-in feature of the brain then it would be damned weird if the Romans weren’t superiority-complex racists. After all, consider the amount of evidence they had that their system was superior and that the gods loved them.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t worse to be the slave of someone who despises you and your type than the slave of someone who accepts you as a brother.
I just don’t think any of this is particularly modern.
And on ethical matters I tend to think that progress is upwards (or at least correlated with per-capita GDP). If we think that the recent past was particularly awful it’s usually because we’ve got better records of it.
So here’s a prediction for you: There were things going on in the Dark Ages that were worse than either Roman or early Victorian slavery.
The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
Well, I’m not exactly an atrocitologist, but I have studied the early medieval period in some detail. There are some problems in comparing it to other periods, especially in subjective terms—the Dark Ages were called “dark” precisely because they left a relative dearth of subjective material—but here’s what I can remember off the top of my head.
There was a widespread slave trade, beginning during or before Roman times and ending in Britain around 1100 AD. It was not racially motivated or justified, as we’d understand race; slaves came from all the European ethnic groups, including those of their holders. Taking slaves seems to have been more common in conflicts between ethnic groups, however. Unransomed captures in wartime and freemen who fell into various kinds of legal trouble could both become slaves; the former seem to have been more common. They generally could be bought and sold and didn’t have legal independence. The law codes of the time prescribed punishments for mistreating other people’s slaves but not your own.
Slave labor was not usually highly concentrated or regimented (there were, for example, no galley slaves in that period); slaveholders came from all free social classes, and slaves performed much the same work as freemen (though usually the harder and dirtier shares of it, where division of labor was possible). At the time of the Domesday Book, slaves made up about 9% of the population.
From what I know of it, this seems more comparable to Roman slavery than to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Early medieval Europe was a poorer place than either Rome or the early modern colonies, and its people probably led harsher lives, but in social terms I don’t see much in the way of unique awfulness.
I’m not quite an atrocitologist so I have no idea whether some of these things I can think of were actually ever put into practice, but I can think of lots of things worse. I can also guarantee you with 90% confidence that there’s a lot of manga (especially doujinshi) out there that do picture things you’d consider much worse, especially when you delve into the darker circles. Some japanese artists have literally become world-renowned ‘experts’ on the topic of fictional mass atrocity.
I’m not comfortable discussing specific examples without a wall of spoiler prevention features requiring the viewer to pass a mental fortitude test to view the content. I might have mentioned this before, but I’ve once had an acquaintance bend down and vomit on the spot upon recounting one of my more horrible nightmares. I try to avoid dishing out such mental damage on unprepared individuals nowadays.
Now I’m all curious.
To hear things so bad they make unprepared listeners spontaneously vomit, not to hear things worse than slavery. There are plenty of those, they just tended not to catch on.
Touché. I meant something that was likely to have actually happened on a fairly large scale.
I wish I’d thought to pick ‘Atrocitologist’ as a screen name. Oh well.
I can’t think of any medieval atrocities comparable in scope to those of either the Roman or Victorian eras. But I don’t think that has anything to do with philosophy or tolerance, it’s just that Rome and pre-Victorian England were a lot more powerful and effective than any of the intermediate governments, and so were able to achieve greater scope than e.g. Poland ever could.
But to your more general point: modern racism is just a special case of the human tendency to define ingroup/outgroup divisions, right? It’s ok to enslave Them, because they’re not Us. That finding is extremely robust through history: Greeks enslaved other Greeks (but they called themselves Spartans and Helots), Italians enslaved other Italians (but the victims were never Roman citizens so it didn’t count), the Jews wiped out the Amelikites (they worshipped the wrong gods, what can you do?) and French nobles ruled over French serfs (but you can’t compare a noble to a serf).
Romans could be sold into slavery to pay off their debts.
The Romans were reletively free of out-group hostility—they felt the barbarians outside the empire were savages, but they tended to absorb local power structures and religions, granting the local nobles (if they cooperated) Roman citizenship, (which was more exclusive than, say, American citizenship,) and while there was some generic snobbery there does not appear to be any belief that non-Romans were inherently inferior. Once they joined the empire, they gained all the rights and privileges of your average Roman (including protection from those barbarian savages over the hill.)
They aren’t. However,
grants context to your statement that “I never heard that the Confederacy lined their roads with crucified rebels.”
Xenophobia and racism are different things.
Is that … a Culture ship name?