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
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?