Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination

Srividhya Swaminathan, Adam R. Beach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317112983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In the eighteenth century, audiences in Great Britain understood the term 'slavery' to refer to a range of physical and metaphysical conditions beyond the transatlantic slave trade. Literary representations of slavery encompassed tales of Barbary captivity, the 'exotic' slaving practices of the Ottoman Empire, the political enslavement practiced by government or church, and even the harsh life of servants under a cruel master. Arguing that literary and cultural studies have focused too narrowly on slavery as a term that refers almost exclusively to the race-based chattel enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans transported to the New World, the contributors suggest that these analyses foreclose deeper discussion of other associations of the term. They suggest that the term slavery became a powerful rhetorical device for helping British audiences gain a new perspective on their own position with respect to their government and the global sphere. Far from eliding the real and important differences between slave systems operating in the Atlantic world, this collection is a starting point for understanding how slavery as a concept came to encompass many forms of unfree labor and metaphorical bondage precisely because of the power of association.

PART 1
Invocations of “Foreign” or Captive Enslavement

Chapter 1
The Good-Treatment Debate, Comparative Slave Studies, and the “Adventures” of T.S.

Adam R. Beach

Are there “kind” or “good” slave owners? Are there slave systems in which those in bondage are treated in a more fundamentally benign fashion than in others? How should we read a narrative in which a slave is given preferential treatment and subsequently demonstrates affection for or praises a master as good or benevolent? I begin this essay by explicitly formulating these questions because they are of central importance as we continue to explore the global nature of slavery in the early modern world. In particular, recent attention to early modern European and, especially, English slaves in North Africa and their written narratives has raised a host of issues that concern how and why we should compare different slave systems, particularly those of the Ottoman Mediterranean and of the British Atlantic.

In recent work on the experiences and narratives of these slaves, the questions I pose above lurk about in the margins of the scholarly conversation, but they have yet to be explicitly addressed or answered in a satisfactory way. Rather, scholars have been influenced by or have outrightly worked within a problematic and antiquated paradigm for comparative assessment, which Ehud R. Toledano calls the “good-treatment debate” about slavery in the Ottoman Empire.1 As I will demonstrate, this debate has been ongoing since at least the seventeenth century, and its central concern is whether or not Ottoman institutions offered more benign forms of slavery than those found in the Atlantic world. My argument here is that any such debate about relative levels of oppression in different slave institutions is an unnecessary distraction that contemporary scholars should avoid. Further, I argue that an uncompromising anti-slavery critique should guide us to interrogate with extreme skepticism all slave owners and institutions in the early modern world, even those who, at first glance, seem to be benign or humane.

In fact, the good-treatment debate can be productively jettisoned altogether if we work with more rigorous and analytical models of comparative assessment. For my own purposes, I rely on the structuralist approach of Orlando Patterson and the Marxist approach of Claude Meillassoux for analyzing slave systems. Despite their different methodologies, their works come to remarkably similar conclusions about how we should theorize both the differences between various slave systems and the different conditions allotted to slaves within one single system of bondage. Their scholarship inspires us to see that what can seem to be “good treatment” is best viewed as part of an often highly effective strategy to motivate and control slaves and, thus, to maximize their service to the master. The universalizing tendencies of their structuralist and Marxist critiques also help to sidestep unhelpful “good-treatment debates” about the relative levels of oppression operative in different systems of slavery. The anti-slavery paradigm I invoke here helps us to elucidate the dynamics of power and violence that structure the lives of all slaves, even those that are given some degree of autonomy, responsibility, power, or pleasure by their masters.

This interpretive strategy helps to illuminate the narratives of many English slaves in early modern North Africa, especially Thomas Pellow, Joseph Pitts, and William Okeley, all of whom at one time or another report that they received so-called “good treatment” from their masters.2 However, for the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the 1670 narrative of one “T.S.” because it poses the most challenging text for the thesis inspired by the work of Patterson and Meillassoux: namely, that in any meaningful existential or philosophical sense, it is impossible for a master to treat his or her slaves in a humane or benign fashion. T.S.’s text is difficult on this account because he devotes much of it to a description of his life with two particular Algerian owners whom he regularly praises on the grounds that they care for him in a beneficent manner. Thus, we will be faced with the challenge of having to account for and ultimately to argue against T.S.’s interpretation of his own bondage.

For example, speaking of his last owner, Hally Hamez Reiz, the man who uses him in a number of capacities and who eventually frees him, T.S. reports that: “He acknowledged my Care and Love for him by his continual Kindness for me; for he did not treat me as a Slave, but as a Friend, granting me as much Liberty as I could desire.”3 Here, T.S. presents a powerful and attractive picture of a beneficent slave-owner, one who offers tokens of sympathy and friendship to his slave as well as a certain degree of autonomy and responsibility. Nor is this the only time that T.S. uses the term “friend” in relationship to one of his masters, as he also applies that appellation to the woman who bought him in order to be a sexual slave. Yet, as I will argue more fully later, we need to resist T.S.’s own notion that a slave owner can show actual “kindness” to or be a genuine “friend” of his or her slave. After all, even a cursory examination of his statement reveals a certain irony in T.S.’s assertion that Reiz offered him “as much Liberty as I could desire,” since T.S. certainly was not free to leave Ottoman-controlled Algeria whenever he wished.

Rather than ratify such statements in T.S.’s text, we need to analyze them with knowledge of the ways in which “kind” masters in many systems of bondage manipulate certain classes of slaves by offering them conditions that are better than that which most other fellow slaves enjoy. In the end, T.S.’s statements that his masters showed him “kindness” or acted toward him like a “friend” are not evidence that T.S. had, in fact, several good masters or that some slaves were treated in a benign fashion in early modern North Africa. Rather, they should serve as testimony to the powerful hegemony achieved by certain slave owners, to the effectiveness of their particular slave management practices, and to the psychological damage they are able to inflict on their slaves. In our own reading of T.S.’s slave experiences, we should attend to the ample evidence his text provides for the ways that even his supposedly good masters rely on a regime of violence and domination to structure their relationship with him, which will allow us to stage our own critique of them even if he is unwilling or unable to do so himself. Before turning to a fuller reading of T.S.’s text, however, we need to work through the theoretical problems presented by slave owners who treat some slaves in what can deceptively appear to be a “good” fashion.

Theorizing “Good-Treatment” and Comparative Slave Studies

The debate about the nature of slavery in North Africa and the Ottoman Mediterranean and its similarity to other systems of bondage is a long-standing one. Ann Thomson and Robert C. Davis both point to an ongoing controversy amongst early modern writers about the experience of slavery in the Maghreb and whether or not it was, in the words of Thomson, full of “cruel and inhuman torments.”4 Thomson sides with the Enlightenment writers who called into question the descriptions of torture and hardship circulated by both redemptionist monks and ex-slaves and remarks that these open-minded thinkers fought, with little success, against “the myth of barbarity towards slaves” in North Africa (28). Davis takes an entirely different stance in his own work, emphasizing that slavery of Europeans in North Africa was as terrible and horrific as the more familiar enslavement of Africans in the Americas.

Another version of this “good-treatment debate,” as Ehud Toledano helpfully labels it, arose in the mid-nineteenth century, when the British began to pressure the Ottoman Empire to abolish slavery. Toledano explains that, in response, the Ottomans produced a defensive argument about slavery in the empire that represented the institution as:

fundamentally different from slavery in the Americas. In the main, it was far milder because slaves were not employed on plantations, were well treated, were frequently manumitted, and could integrate into the slave-owning society. Islamic law, it was further maintained, encouraged owners to treat their slaves well, and manumission was considered a pious act, for which the believer could expect remuneration. (15)

As Toledano argues, some Ottoman scholars have recently begun to challenge such representations and to undermine notions that Ottoman institutions were benign. For his own part, Toledano argues that: “As often happens, the truth in what I call ‘the good-treatment debate’ lies somewhere in the middle” (19). While he concludes that many slaves labored “under miserable conditions,” others, especially those in the “core areas, most notably in urban elite households,” were treated in ways that “historians of slavery elsewhere would call ‘mild,’ and the treatment of slaves was generally good” (19).

Toledano is not alone amongst modern scholars in documenting that some slaves in the Ottoman Empire were given comparatively better conditions and then concluding that the treatment of these particular slaves was “generally good.” Stephen Clissold states that some slaves “might have little cause for complaint if lucky enough to find a good master.”5 John B. Wolf reports that some North African slave owners “were reasonable, humane men who actually sympathized with their slaves and treated them well, while others either neglected or misused them.”6 Nabil Matar notes that many captives “commented on the latitude shown to them by their captors” and that their written narratives sometimes contain “allusions to moments when their masters expressed compassion and intimacy.”7 Finally, Linda Colley explains that “white captives in North Africa, like black slaves in North America, were sometimes confronted with the phenomenon of the good master,” and she claims that William Okeley encountered “cheerful household slavery with a good man who just happened to be a North African Muslim.”8

All of these scholars construct careful and balanced accounts of slavery in Islamic North Africa and note the varying ways in which slaves were used and treated in the area. However, one unfortunate side effect of their work is that they collectively perpetuate what I argue is a theoretical impossibility: the idea that a slave owner can be genuinely humane, sympathetic, compassionate, or kind to his slave.9 Further, they assert that slave accounts written by Europeans provide evidence of the existence of such “good masters” in early modern North Africa. Perhaps one reason for their uniformity on this matter rests in the fact that scholars working on slavery in North Africa face a highly charged and often controversial subject of study. Matar points out that there is a long tradition in which Western authors discussed European captivity and slavery in the Maghreb in a biased way that “demonized the corsairs and, by extension, their religion, culture, society, history and civilization.”10 All of the scholars I discuss above seem cognizant of this history, and they take pains to avoid demonizing early modern Muslims and inflaming tensions between Christians and Muslims in the contemporary world.

Colley is exemplary in addressing these issues explicitly in her text. For example, she repeatedly points out that slavery in the Mediterranean was not merely an Islamic phenomenon, but that many Christian nations were equally guilty of enslaving Muslims during the period (45–6; 86–7).11 She also addresses another controversial subject when she argues that: “Suggestions made at the time, and occasionally since, that Barbary corsair assaults and the enslavement of whites that sometimes ensued were comparable to the transatlantic trade in black slaves are, for instance, unsustainable” (62). It is clear that Colley is trying to preempt any attempts to use her work to inflame anti-Islamic sentiments or to draw attention away from or to mitigate the experience of African slaves in the Americas. While her efforts are laudatory in many respects, her methods create nearly as many problems as they resolve: she relies on a vague notion of the “comparable,” which leaves under-theorized the best ways that we can engage in comparative analyses of different slave systems, and she perpetuates the idea that there once existed “good masters” or “cheerful household slavery” in the slave institutions of North Africa.

The best antidote for the unhelpful or damaging comparative approaches that Colley is attempting to preempt, as well as for toxic formulations such as the “good master” and “good treatment,” can be found in comparative studies of slavery that engage in an uncompromising critique of all slave owners and institutions. Such an approach has little patience for any kind of good-treatment debate, which is ultimately a distraction from the global critique that should be the ultimate guide of our work. One such study can be found in Orlando Patterson’s powerful Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study—this text is often quoted, but its structuralist analysis and universal critique of slavery has been generally ignored in the scholarship on slavery in the Maghreb. While it is not possible to rehearse fully Patterson’s arguments here, we can note that his insistence on a structural approach preempts the notion that any one slave system can be fundamentally different from another. Certainly, there were economic, material, and cultural differences between Ottoman institutions and those found, say, in the British Caribbean, but the thrust of Patterson’s work is that these differences are less important than the underlying structural similarity found in all systems of slavery.

For Patterson, all slaves have been reduced to a liminal position in which they are natally alienated, dishonored, and socially dead. In his fascinating chapter on elite and powerful slaves, for example, Patterson argues that “if we consider not the content of what the elite slave did, but the structural significance of his role, we find immediately that it is identical with that of the most miserable of field slaves.”12 Both elite and lowly drudge slaves “were alike in being located in the interstices of the social structure, and in the margins of the culture of the societies they served” (332). This structural liminality is only one component of the “social death” that is shared by all slaves, no matter their employment or their day-to-day experience with physical violenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• British Literature in Context in the Long Eighteenth Century
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Invoking Slavery in Literature and Scholarship
• PART 1 Invocations of “Foreign” or Captive Enslavement
• PART 2 Political Invocations of Slavery and Liberty
• PART 3 Invocations of Slavery in British Systems of Servitude
• Review Essay Social Liberty and Social Death: Conceiving of Slavery Beyond the Black Atlantic
• Bibliography
• Index