Sowell on slavery

Miscellaneous History
1

In The Real History of Slavery Sowell writes:

Ending the slavery of all these peoples was a very difficult process and one requiring deliberate and sustained action for many generations. Ironically the anti-slavery ideology behind this process began to develop in 18th century Britain at the time when the British Empire led the world in slave trading and when the economy of most of its overseas colonies in the Western Hemisphere depended on slaves.

Here again the baffling present day disregard of an international saga of strife full of individual dramas as well as historic consequences seems explicable only in terms of today`s ideological agendas. While slavery was common to all civilizations as well as peoples considered uncivilized only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it very late in its history, Western civilization.

Today it seems so obvious that Abraham Lincoln said “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” But the hard fact is that for thousands of years slavery was simply not an issue even among the great religious thinkers or moral philosophers of civilizations around the world. We may wonder why it took eight teen centuries after the sermon on the mount for Christians to develop an anti-slavery movement. But a more profound question is why not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all. There is no evidence according to a scholarly study that slavery came under a serious attack in any part of the world before the 18th century, that is when it first came under attack in Europe.

Themselves the leading slave traders of the 18th century Europeans nevertheless became in the 19th century the destroyers of slavery around the world not just in European societies or European offshoot societies overseas but in non-European societies as well, over the bitter opposition of Africans, Arabs, Asians and others.

Now in the middle of all this tapping the west on the back he says something thought provoking: Today it seems so obvious that Abraham Lincoln said “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” But the hard fact is that for thousands of years slavery was simply not an issue even among the great religious thinkers or moral philosophers of civilizations around the world.

If this is true, if slavery was indeed largely not an issue, does that not have implications for our own cause? The state today is similarly largely not an issue. Taxation, economic restrictions, conscription… Very few people examine these things in terms of morality and reach satisfactory conclusions. Jet if great moral revulsion could suddenly emerge against slavery it could likewise emerge against such things and against the state itself, no?

Of course the other option is that actually the whole time everyone was perfectly aware that slavery was immoral but just chose to be a hypocrite until it was proven to be an inefficient mode of production and that therefore no paralells can be drawn with the widespread acceptance of the state.

I wonder which of these views is closer to truth. Thoughts?

2

I personally think that a serious change in public opinion regarding the state will require some kind of event whereby people become convinced that having a state is worse than not having one.

3

They need knowledge to interpret events. Lets say the public are presented with catastrophic phenomenon. what understanding will they apply to interpreting the phenomenon which would allow them to place their blame on the state.? If they are historicists, or positivists? or whatever other kind of non-praxeologist, the outlook seems bleak.

The answer is the work we are doing here…

Regardless of whether you consider some future catastrophe, or the daily omnipresent catastrophe’s. The only hope of ‘the common man’ coming to realise that the state is the villain of the piece, is exposure to a correct view of social science, and economics,. or more generally Praxeology, that could possibly allow the populace to explicitly, and intellectually reject the state.

or in other words. Hurray for Thomas Woods.

4

There is no general way to view slavery because there is nothing general about slavery.

Just like any historical phenomenon, it differs with respect to the time and place in which it happened.

Slaves in Greece could still own property, could still go out and pursue their own opportunities, and could still own slaves of their own. The rationale for having slaves for Greeks was that they needed the luxury of thinking or working towards intellectual pursuits, because they could not do what they wanted to do if held down by menial tasks.

Slaves in America were for getting work done on plantations, and having some healthy, well-bred labour that could do all the work for no consideration other than being given housing and food.

Slaves in the old Middle Eastern world were sometimes for having exotic people to keep in positions of trust, out of mistrust of fellow indigenous people.

So that said, 19th century European opposition to slavery simply exists with respect to the time and place where they happened - the said time and place being industrialised society with enormous food surplus and immense range of material comforts within very easy and affordable reach. It just defeats the purpose for that time and place.

Surely Sowell sees it this way. Much of what I have come to understand on slavery, migration, and movement of labour around the world is based on things I have read from his very books.

The same way - opposition to state depends on the time and place. Would people in the WW2 era, after having seen bombs fall in their own streets, have been inclined to see the state as evil, when it represented the best possible way for them to have the security they wanted? And would people under the Ottoman Empire have had a favourable view of the state, when for them, it represented a destruction of their ability to live as free men? That’s why in the latter case, everybody moved to have this particular state collapse, never mind that British and French then formed states out of what was left, which just pushed further and ensured that those people would live under a state.