John Samuel Harpham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Letters and Wick Cary Assistant Professor at the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and John Harpham discuss why the standard racial account of slavery’s origins misses the earliest justifications for the practice, how Aristotelian and Roman conceptions of freedom and slavery shaped the intellectual world of the first English colonists, and what this history means for our understanding of slavery today.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You’ve written a really interesting book that is based on a dissertation that you did in the same department where I did my dissertation a few years before you. We knew each other a little bit in graduate school for a good few years apart about the history of slavery in the United States and the historical justifications for slavery. Probably most people who think about this subject assume that the story is relatively simple, that these were white colonists who thought of themselves in some important way as white and had a scheme of racial classification in their minds that perhaps wasn’t fully modern but resembles ours in some key respects. They thought these black people in Africa come from, in some sense, a kind of lower race, and therefore we can be justified in enslaving them. What’s wrong about the standard story that is told about this?
John Harpham: In some sense, the standard story is very powerful and very correct and applies very well to some aspects and some periods in the history of slavery, the history of American slavery. But it is a particularly American story, a peculiarly American story about the history of slavery. It owes many of its points of reference and historical support to the nineteenth century, which is the period that as Americans we tend to think about when we think about the history of slavery. It is less prepared to explain what I want to explain in my book, which is the origins of American slavery.
The premise of the book is that if we’re going to understand the origins of American slavery, we have to move back into an earlier time period and a broader geographical space than as Americans we’re accustomed to thinking about the history of slavery, in order to understand where American slavery came from. You have to move out into a different set of contexts. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my book. I think in the course of that expansion, expansion of the timeframe, expansion of the geographical scope, we immerse ourselves in a different history with a different set of parameters, a different set of ideological references, a different set of classical examples, different understandings of slavery, and indeed different understandings of what we would call race. That new context is what I’ve tried to explore much more than I think has been done so far.
Mounk: I imagine there’s two elements of the standard story that start to look a little askew when you go back earlier in the history of justification of slavery, looking not at what slave owners were saying during the debates about the abolition of slavery to justify continuing the practice, but rather at what people were thinking, saying, and writing at the time in which the American institution of slavery was invented. The first is that presumably there is a kind of notion of race at some point, a kind of pseudoscientific theory of race that develops in the nineteenth and later in the twentieth century, that just didn’t exist in the same way in the seventeenth century. The second, I suppose, and I wonder if that’s what you mean also by the geographic focus, is that from today’s perspective, what we want to understand is how a country that claims to be rooted in liberty, to have those ideals of self-determination, could have tolerated as apparent and as tyrannical an institution as slavery. But when you go back to the incipient moments of this practice in the United States, slavery was in some way normal around the world. There were a lot of parts of the world that were engaging in forms of explicit slavery or in forms of feudal serfdom and so on that have very important distinctions but that lie in a continuum with slavery as well. Are those two things that you have in mind here?
Harpham: Look, I think from the start it’s important to say that this is a very complex field. This is a field that touches upon not only the history of American slavery—it carries great weight and implications for understanding the nature and the character and the development of the American Republic. The story of the origins of American slavery has always been understood to be freighted with contemporary implications. But it’s a story that reaches back into more obscure tenets of early modern intellectual history and the history of the Atlantic world, of Europe and Africa and Asia as well. It forces us to expand our sense of the history of slavery into fields that are unfamiliar for many Americans living today and even for many American historians and historians of American slavery. It’s a very complex field that I think needs to be treated with the care and seriousness that it deserves.
I will also say that I’ve dedicated so far my career to the writing of this book—the full ten years of work to researching and writing this manuscript. But my conviction that I would work on the history of slavery comes from, I think, a familiar place for many Americans now, which is that I was born and raised in New Orleans, the center of the antebellum domestic slave trade. Until I came to Harvard for graduate school and met you and all of our colleagues, Yascha, I had never lived outside of the American South. That’s a part of the world and a part of the country, I think, where you can’t avoid the obvious fact that the past shapes the present and that in part we live in a nation that slavery made. And yet in the field of political theory, and we can talk about this, that history of slavery is not often thought to play a major role. The field of political theory for the most part has taken shape as a field interested in conceptions of freedom and the implications of those conceptions of freedom.
Coming from the background that I came from, I wanted to see if the tools of political theory, the sophisticated tools and methods of political theory, could be turned toward the study of the history of slavery—a topic that had not often been seen to be central to the field of political theory. Obviously one of the insights of the field of political theory is the second point that you point to here, not the first point that you made about race, which we can come back to, but the second point that you made about freedom. In the early modern period, the central tenet of early modern political thought is that all people are by nature free. But that carries with it the implication that the natural freedom of all humankind does not exclude the enslavement of some people who are born free. Indeed, it’s through the mechanisms by which we define freedom, in the case of natural rights in particular, that slavery is said to arise. That is one of the really unusual features of the early modern world and early modern thought that set the background for the origins of American slavery.
Mounk: To understand really what the justification of slavery was in the early years, we need to do this very important detour of understanding how the early colonists would have thought about questions like freedom. What you’re saying here is that those conceptions of freedom in some important way coexisted with, and perhaps even prepared the ground for, justification of slavery. This justification for slavery would not have been in the first instance a racial conception—it wouldn’t have been that white people are born to be free but black people are not capable of self-government and therefore should be slaves, or something like that. It is rooted in an Aristotelian tradition, which had one kind of set of justifications for slavery, and then a Roman tradition, which had a subtly distinct set of justifications for slavery. Tell us about what sort of ancient thinkers these eighteenth century colonists would have been drawing on when they reflect on a question like slavery.
Harpham: There’s more than enough time in the history of American slavery for racialized conceptions of freedom and slavery to develop. My book is planned as the first of three volumes in a series, and I intend to follow that history very closely into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But this book, conceived as the first of three volumes in the series, is focused on the period from 1550 to 1700—the vast Atlantic context around 1619, a date now familiar to many Americans as the date when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English American colonies. From 1550 to 1700, roughly seen as the early modern period in the history of political thought, there were essentially two conceptions of slavery, and of the relationship between freedom and slavery, that were well understood and widely shared.
The first was drawn from the Politics of Aristotle, which held that nature itself marked a distinction within the human species. Aristotle says that within any composite whole composed of parts, those parts arrange themselves into a hierarchical order. According to Aristotle, this has taken place within the human species itself, such that some are by nature meant to be slaves and others are marked out by nature to be their masters. The two parts are intimately related, and so the inequality that slavery inscribes on human life is inherent within the nature of the persons that make up the human species.
The second conception of slavery, the second broad tradition of thinking about slavery, is very different and is drawn not from the authoritative text of Aristotle’s Politics but rather from the Corpus Iuris, the essential texts of Roman law. Roman law starts from a point almost diametrically opposed to the Aristotelian, which is that there are several sources of law, and the original one is the law of nature. Freedom and equality are the rule within the law of nature. According to the law of nature, all people are free and all are equal to each other in that sense. Slavery comes in over time as a result of accident and misfortune, not as an outcome of the different natures to which human beings are assigned, but rather as a result, most often, of the wars that emerge between states, and slavery comes in as a status assigned as an alternative to death for people who are taken captive in war. In other words, on the Roman conception, freedom is the rule for all humankind, and in principle anyone might come to be enslaved.
Both the Aristotelian and the Roman conceptions were well known in the early modern period, the critical period for the origins of American slavery. But over this period, as the Aristotelian conception of slavery almost always universally came to be rejected, especially in English culture, the Roman conception of slavery was received and adapted and became the basis for the ideas about slavery that would have been on offer in the period when American slavery began.
Mounk: The Aristotelian conception does have an idea of natural slavery, that some people are somehow naturally adapted to being slaves, but it’s not one where it’s because you’re born into a particular racial group that you’re naturally adapted to slavery. It can either be because of personal characteristics, or sometimes perhaps because you didn’t grow up in liberty, because you weren’t able to cultivate the virtues of liberty due to a condition you’ve been in from the past. The Roman conception more explicitly talks about circumstance and happenstance—if you are taken as prisoner in war in certain circumstances, that justifies your condition of slavery. There’s nothing that predestined you to fall into that state, but it is legitimate as a result of you losing in a particular battle, for example. You’re saying that it’s really that conception which was more alive in the minds of colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. How do they apply that to the incipient transatlantic slave trade? How is it that they take these ideas developed in the context of ancient Athens, in the context of the ancient Roman Republic and perhaps the early Roman Empire, and apply this to what seems like quite a different situation? When I think about the Romans, a lot of the time we are talking about the Punic Wars and Romans at war with Carthage, for example, and in this military contest they’re able to take some prisoners. Then they say, well, here’s the justification for why these prisoners now become people who we can use as slaves. That seems very different from: we are over here in North America, and why don’t we start seafaring to these parts of West Africa and paying locals to go and capture a bunch of people, and then bind them, put them in terrible conditions, and ship them across the ocean. It doesn’t really seem like an analogous situation.
Harpham: We can take some time to unpack this, because as I said, these are very complicated issues. We have to pay attention not only to change over time but also to difference across space and parts of the Atlantic world. What you just said, Yascha, quite correctly, is that it doesn’t seem that the institution of American slavery neatly fits with any conception of slavery developed on the Roman model. The idea and the institution seem so radically different from each other that it seems impossible for the one to have drawn support from the other—for the institution of American slavery, the origins of American slavery, to have emerged from a world saturated in Roman ideas.
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As I said, these are complicated issues. In order to understand the origins of American slavery, we have to first move beyond the borders of present-day America, North America even, the Caribbean even, and move back across the Atlantic—not to the new world, but rather to the old—and understand the complex process by which American slavery, a radically new institution, a new form of human evil which departed in many respects from any ancient precedent that there was for the institution of slavery, came from the old, from old ideas about slavery, ancient societies that understood themselves to be rooted in customs of slavery that went back as far as the classical past. That is the project of my book. It’s not a neat story. It’s not a unidirectional story, and in many ways I think it’s a surprising story for those of us who come from a background of knowing about the history of American slavery.
Two points in response to your question. The first is that the Aristotelian understanding of slavery has to be realized to have been unusual even in the ancient world. Aristotle posed his conception of natural slavery in opposition to the dominant understandings of the time, which more or less corresponded to the Roman ideas about slavery, in which slavery arose not from nature but rather convention most often—the convention that captives taken in war were enslaved. This convention was not a local custom. It wasn’t applied in small corners of the world in short periods of time.
When slavery entered Roman law, it entered not by means of the law of nature, which established freedom and equality as the rule in human relations. It entered through a separate source of law known as the law of nations. What was the law of nations in Roman law? It was thought to be a collection of the customs common to all the peoples of the world—not only to the Romans, but to their imperial rivals, and also to the ancient Israelites, and the customs of slavery described in the law of nations, at least to some extent, describe the laws on slavery set out in the Hebrew Bible. Slavery is understood to be legitimate under the law of nations not because it is just or good for the person who is enslaved, but because it is one of the common customs of the world.
Still in the early modern period, even if the English colonists and their metropolitan supporters didn’t understand themselves to be living in the legacies of the old Roman Empire, they did understand that the law of nations, best described and captured in Roman law, still adequately encapsulated the common customs of the world, slavery included.
Mounk: To what extent was that a fiction all along? To what extent did that law of nations systematize something that really existed? To what extent was that always the Roman imagination?
Harpham: Of course, my primary interest as a scholar is in imaginations and conceptions. But I can say that in the early modern world, across vast swaths of the Atlantic world, the law of nations’ understanding of slavery—most often a status assigned as an alternative to death for captives taken in wars—continued as the common practice of most of the nations of the world. This is the same period in time, 1550 to 1700, when the English became acutely aware that slavery and its later descendant, villainage in particular, had ended within the borders of the realm. They believed that their nation marked an exception to the common customs of the world, in particular with respect to the practices of slavery. Europeans did not take slaves of one another in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even when taking captives in war. They would kill each other, they would torture each other. Some observers, such as Alberico Gentili, said that wars between European nations would be less brutal if slavery persisted as a custom between them. But by the early modern period, the nations of Europe had decided not to enslave one another even when taken captive in war. We can talk about the sources and implications of that cultural consensus. But across the vast stretch of the nations of the world, you find this very clearly stated in all the surveys of the world and atlases from the time—slavery as a status assigned to captives in war persisted well into the early modern period. There’s no question.
Mounk: In some ways Europeans at this point think that they’re exceptional in that slavery did not play a big role in those societies, at least in that they didn’t enslave each other. What did the American colonists think about this? They think of themselves as English at that period, I assume. They identify with the intellectual heritage of the old world to a very large extent. How is it that they base themselves on the general world of sixteenth, seventeenth century English thought, but then say under our circumstances in the new world, when it comes to dealing with people from the African continent, slavery somehow is justified, or natural, or whatever it is that they would have said?
Harpham: Of course, as scholarship in the last twenty years has shown in a lot of detail, the enslavement of Native Americans is as important a part of the early English colonies, and particularly the early English North American colonies, as the enslavement of African Americans. We can discuss the way those stories fit together, and I think they are parts of a single complex story.
I’ll render the cultural consensus of early modern Europe in more precise terms than I just did. Europeans had believed that they had come to a consensus never to enslave one another, even when taken captives in war. But they stated that consensus not in terms of geography, in terms of the continent of Europe, but rather in terms of their membership in a religious community, which was Christendom. They believed that they had come to a consensus never to practice slavery against other peoples who lay within the borders of Christendom. For the purposes of war, for the purpose of the treatment of captives taken in war, slaves or captives taken within wars within Christendom were treated as captives in civil wars had always been, and captives in civil wars had never been enslaved, despite the obvious and well-known brutality of civil war. That said, outside of the borders of Christendom, the common law of nations’ customs of slavery continued in effect, which is to say that Europeans believed that when the Roman conditions were met, peoples who came from outside of the borders of Christendom might legitimately be enslaved, and that they might legitimately enslave them, but only when those conditions were met.
In the early modern period, those Roman customs, the Roman description of the common customs of the world, had had one exception made to it, which was within the borders of Christendom. The law of nations continued in effect in the rest of the world. In the American colonies, this was the ideological structure for ideas about slavery—even though English servants and servants from the British Isles were notoriously treated horrifically in the early British colonies, and worked alongside enslaved Africans and enslaved Native Americans, and their treatment was widely said to be more or less the same on a daily basis, the distinction between the servitude of people from the British Isles and the enslavement of Native Americans and African Americans continued in effect, drawing on this older cultural consensus that Christians would not enslave one another.
Mounk: That was an important guardrail that limited who could be enslaved in this kind of way. But what was then the justification for saying that, when you’re dealing with Native Americans, when you’re dealing with Africans that you go and search out across the sea, that is a legitimate activity? How does that constrain the treatment of people who convert to Christianity? Presumably, prima facie, you might think that if you cannot enslave Christians, then one way that an enslaved person should be able to escape their condition is to convert to Christianity. That obviously is not how the institution of chattel slavery ends up working in the United States.
Harpham: Yes, of course. This is a very important part of the story, because so many of the debates in the early English Atlantic colonies were debates not so much about slavery as such as they were debates about the implications of conversion. For background here, the most important English American colonies before 1700 were not the North American colonies—not Massachusetts, not Virginia, not even Carolina. The development of slavery and servitude, parallel developments of slavery and servitude in those colonies, have been well examined by historians and examined in minute detail. The canonical treatments of the origins of American slavery are treatments that deal with Virginia, that see slavery developing over the seventeenth century within Virginia, or Massachusetts in more recent years, or in Carolina. But in this period, the early period for the origins of the English Atlantic Empire, the most populous and richest colony in the English Atlantic world wasn’t Virginia—it was Barbados, and soon, in the second half of the seventeenth century, it was Jamaica that came to the fore. These were the sugar colonies, rather than colonies founded upon the production of other staple crops, tobacco or cotton, for example.
Anyhow, the debates about slavery in these English American colonies, as I said, were most often debates about conversion, and they sprang from the set of convictions that we have just introduced: if it is taken to be the case that Christendom makes an exception to the common customs of the world, that Christians will not take one another as slaves even when taken captives in war, what happens when certain people who have been enslaved are converted to Christ and brought within the Christian fold? Many of the metropolitan supporters of the English colonies, including the Crown—this was always the position of the Crown—believed that the conversion of people who were enslaved in the colonies was a seriously important project.
Mounk: You wanted to convert people because you have a religious obligation to spread the good word about Jesus and you want to save people’s souls. But this comes with a very big practical problem, which is that you’re suddenly encouraging the conversion of people on whom you’re relying for your economic production of sugar and other crops to be enslaved. If carrying out this religious obligation means that you’re eating into your own workforce, well, you have a problem.
Harpham: Exactly. Not just a problem, but a problem with explosive implications, which is that if it was the case that enslaved people in the American colonies were converted to Christ and could no longer be held as slaves, then it could no longer be said that the border between slave and free corresponded to the border between Christian and heathen, or Christian and outside the Christian realm. The border between slave and free had to be stated in other terms.
With all the perverse inventiveness that characterized so much of the development of the English Atlantic Empire, the early English colonists, especially in Barbados and Jamaica and to some extent also in Virginia, said that as a result of the success of the project of conversion, the border between slave and free was not between Christian and other, it was between black and white. It’s out of this set of developments and debates, rooted in this very distinctive early modern world, that the English and English colonists first started to state the distinction between slave and free in terms of the distinction between black and white.
Mounk: How close are we here to a racial justification of slavery? As I take it, the point is: how are you allowed to take a slave? This is part of the law of nations. It’s always been the case, nothing that remarkable about it. But it would obviously be totally inappropriate to take a Christian as a slave. So you’ve taken these various people as slaves, and some of them have now converted to Christianity. How can you justify continuing to keep them as slaves, and continuing, in the case of chattel slavery, to keep as slaves people who are born as Christians, the children of those enslaved people? Is the answer here: yes, but they’re black? Is it as straightforward as that? Does it at that point just morph into a straight-up racial justification of slavery, or is it more complicated?
Harpham: We’re dealing not simply with change over time, we’re also going to have to deal with differences across space. But if we zero in for now on the English American colonies, the colonists and the planters, famously, were not interested in the project of conversion. This is especially true on Barbados and Jamaica. The Crown and the metropolitan English authorities were always convinced of the importance of conversion, but the planters themselves were notoriously not interested in any ideas at all. As one early observer said, they had made Mammon their God, the sole deity on the island of Barbados.
There were differences that emerged between the discourses about slavery in the metropole and the colonies, but let’s just focus on the colonies for now. You ask how close we are to a paradigmatic racial justification for slavery. I think the answer is we’re very close already at this point, and this is the point to which I come toward the end of the book, in the final decades of the seventeenth century. In the course of these debates about the borders set down around the practice of slavery, between slave and free, attention was fixed upon the difference between black and white as the dividing line. Some of the early colonists had started to realize that the borders around the practice of slavery could be made into a justification for enslavement themselves—that it was not only the case that the distinction between slave and free corresponded to the distinction between black and white, it could also be said to be the case that people who were black were essentially meant for slavery, that those who were white could never be enslaved themselves, that freedom was their proper condition.
But still, these are debates and a series of horrific insights drawn in small corners of the Atlantic world, in remote, mostly island communities such as Barbados and Jamaica, where some planters were starting to realize what ideas would be required from them in order to defend and justify not only the origins of slavery as an institution, but its persistence over time on a racial basis.
Mounk: In a way, this is obviously the point that is striking to us moderns about the institution as a whole—the answer is also question-begging. What is it about the fact that this person, the colonist, is white, and this person, the enslaved, is black, that justifies it? Over time, different kinds of accounts of racial superiority and inferiority have been offered. One common one is to say that members of a white race are capable of rational self-governance in a way that other ethnic or racial groups are not. What was the justification that one of those planters in Barbados would have made if we were able to travel back in time and ask: okay, well, you had this justification about Christians and non-Christians, that has a set of religious justifications. Now you’re suddenly saying it’s not about that at all, it’s about the fact that you’re white and these people you’re enslaving are black. What is it about you being white and them being black which justifies this dominion?
Harpham: Yes, and as I said, these are complex and very nuanced issues. It’s not so much a matter of, over the course of my book—I try to put it in these terms—it’s not so much a matter of there was one idea and not another idea, this idea was prevalent and that idea was never present. It’s more a matter of the balancing, the way in which you construct the relative priority of ideas that were competing with one another, that were coexisting with one another, that existed within a complex sphere of discussion and debate, that differed over time from author to author and from place to place.
As this small number of American colonists in these remote island communities, operating and innovating in a radically new plantation complex that was created over a short period of time, rapidly, and on the basis of new discoveries and innovations in the cultivation of sugar, started to formulate new ideas that would justify the novel institutions they were just then developing, they did draw upon ideas from the past that had always been available, that had always been perhaps more minor strands in the discourse about slavery. One of them is that the colonists, the planters, and their defenders started to articulate the Aristotelian doctrine that nature makes a distinction between slave and free, that the peoples of Africa are essentially slaves, and that white people, or the English, are essentially free. They also picked up on another ancient justification for enslavement and hierarchy, not from the world of classical philosophy but from the text of the Hebrew Bible, which had come to be known as the Curse of Ham. Some of the early colonists and their supporters started to say that the peoples of Africa in the present were drawn from the descendants of the person who had received the old curse pronounced upon the son of Ham, Canaan, in Genesis.
Mounk: For those listeners who are not up on the Bible, remind us what the curse of Ham is.
Harpham: I’ve laid out a debate about slavery that there was in the classical world between Aristotle and Roman law. But there was also another set of ideas about slavery available in the early modern period, drawn from the ancient world, not from texts of classical philosophy but from the Bible, from the Hebrew Bible in particular. The first mention of slavery in the Hebrew Bible takes place in Genesis, after the flood, after Noah has planted a vineyard and lies drunken in his tent, having drunk from the products of the vine. One of Noah’s sons, Ham, walks into his tent and sees him in his nakedness. When he awoke, Noah knew what Ham had done, according to the text, and pronounced upon him a curse: “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren,” Shem and Japheth. This was often taken in the early modern period to be a curse of slavery, that Ham and his descendants had been cursed to slavery. This is the first mention of slavery in the Bible, because, as in Roman law, in the text of the Hebrew Bible freedom is the original condition of the species. Freedom is the rule at the start, in the Garden of Eden, as it was in Roman law, and slavery comes in over time. But here in the Bible it comes in not as a result of captivity taken in war, but rather as the product of punishment for a wrong act.
Mounk: So these are different ways of starting to say: there’s this curse in the Bible, and now the people we want to enslave so happen to be—isn’t it useful—the descendants of a person on whom this curse was pronounced. How do I put this? What is the evidence for that, I suppose? Is it just a free-floating idea? Is there meant to be some attribute that Ham and his descendants have that you can look out into the world and see in these people? How much substance is there to this idea, other than this kind of reference that one can grasp in a way that makes it feel logically useful to somebody who wants to claim to be a Christian and also practice slavery?
Harpham: Well, of course, Ham and his descendants were always associated with sin. They were associated with the violation of proper order. Sin has always been associated with slavery. This is a point made by one of the great scholars of the history of slavery and antislavery, David Brion Davis, that in the Christian tradition, ideas about slavery were always intimately associated with ideas about sin. Slavery, in a sense, was the result of sin because, like so many other features of the modern world, slavery was a product of the fall. Freedom was the rule in the Garden of Eden. So to tell a story about the origins of slavery, you had to go back to the original act of the fall, which was the source of all forms of hierarchy and subordination, and labor, and property as well. So Ham was associated with sin, and sin was associated with slavery.
At the same time, you and I, Yascha, were both, in a sense, trained by, and at least exposed to, practitioners of what’s called the Cambridge School in the history of political thought. Over the course of my book I make a move that will be well known to practitioners of the Cambridge School but I think less well known to historians of American slavery. It’s a common move in intellectual history: in order to understand the history of an idea, you should first try to grasp as much as possible the context in which that idea was understood, and try to understand the question it seemed to answer. Reconstruct the questions around that idea, and then try to understand the answer that idea seemed to present. Practitioners of the Cambridge School have done this extensively with respect to ideas about liberty, and I try to do it with respect to ideas about slavery.
Now, in the early modern period, in English culture and in European culture in general, the Curse of Ham was available, and was well known. But it was used as an answer to a variety of different questions, most often not an answer to questions about how to justify contemporary practices of slavery. Rather, especially in English discourse, the Curse of Ham most often came up in response to another related question, which was the origins of black skin. Englishmen by this time took for granted that white was the natural or original color of the human species, that people were originally white like themselves, and that blackness was innate and permanent as a skin color among many of the peoples of the world. In order to explain this distinction, in order to explain the origins of black skin over time, there are many answers on offer. One of them, a well-known but almost always rejected, notorious answer, had been put forward by an author from 1578 named George Best. Best said that blackness arose among peoples who lived south of the Sahara Desert as a legacy of the original curse in the Bible—that the curse was associated not in this instance with slavery but rather with blackness, with black skin color, and emerged as a possible answer to the problem for the English of blackness.
This is an ominous development. From an early period in the English American colonies, when the colonists wanted to justify the enslavement of people who were black and the freedom of people who were white like themselves, this curse, which had been most often associated with blackness, was fastened upon as an explanation now for enslavement.
Mounk: That’s interesting, and we can see how that’s both very different from modern conceptions of race and can strangely serve some of the same purposes. Modern racism might say something like: there are genetic differences between groups of people, and this group is in this and that way superior, and that group is in this and that way inferior, and that warrants the superior group treating members of the inferior group in particular ways. Whereas here there’s this kind of quasi, semi-racial and semi-theological justification, which is something like: there’s a group of people in the world who are subject to this curse because they and their descendants are in some way sinful, and black skin is just a mark of having that curse. In a way, it’s epiphenomenal. It might be a useful sign that allows you to determine who is a member of that group, but it’s not the black skin that either causes sinfulness or straightforwardly justifies being enslaved. It’s simply a hallmark of being a member of a group that has those attributes.
Harpham: At the same time, the English in this period never doubted that being white like themselves was a peculiar privilege, and that being black in color was a mark of ugliness and inferiority as well. Not just a mark—in their view, blackness was often taken to be the opposite of beauty, and whiteness was taken to be the ultimate measure of beauty. From this early period, blackness was used as a kind of mark to draw together a variety of different strands of ideas and statuses and practices, and was fastened upon not only as a kind of ancient sign that had come from a curse, but also, in the contemporary world, as a mark used to visibly divide slave from free.
This was all in the service of the aim of the English colonists with respect to the origins of American slavery: to answer the question of why an entire order of persons who had been enslaved far away, thousands of miles off in the distance, in circumstances no one wanted to inquire into, and perhaps long ago as well, could never come to be free. What they wanted to establish was the permanence and heritability of slavery over time. In order to do so, they grounded their conceptions of slavery in what you start to describe as a racial conception—slavery built into the permanent and heritable features of an entire order of persons, into a race. But this is an idea about slavery that comes together in the English colonies. In Africa, by contrast, at the sources of slavery across the Atlantic world, the set of ideas used to describe and justify slavery were actually very different. So now we’ve started to lay out the set of ideas associated with the origins of slavery as an institution in the American colonies. But as we said from the start, a very important piece of the book is to describe the earlier world of ideas from which that set of ideas came.
Mounk: I know you have a three-volume masterpiece in the works, with two more volumes to write. Give us a little preview of how those ideas then change and transmute later on. How is it that the people in the American South who were resisting the abolition of slavery drew upon the ideas we’ve been talking about, and I’m sure changed and transformed them, in order to make a case for why that institution should be preserved? How much continuity is there between those ideas and the kind of racial thinking in which some people engage today?
Harpham: Change over time is such an important factor in describing the history of American slavery. Historians have long recognized this, but it’s a difficult point to keep at the front of our minds—that, like any human institution, the history of slavery marks dramatic changes across space and across time. The aim of this book is to describe origins, and in particular to describe a set of debates about the sources of slavery, drawn from the precedents of Roman law and used to understand the sources of the slave trade in Africa. The sources of slavery refer to those dramatic, calamitous transformations of people who are naturally free into those who are enslaved.
Already by the time of the development of slavery in the early English colonies, a different question needed to be answered with respect to slavery: why an entire order of persons who had been enslaved could never become free—the continuation of slavery over time. Into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the most important fact in debates about American slavery became the fact of American slavery itself. So many of the debates about American slavery well known to us today, from Jefferson up to the point of abolition, are not debates about the sources of slavery or the character of slavery itself; they take their starting point from the fact of the massive institution, and are debates about the possibilities of radical abolition, or the impossibility of uprooting a structure that had already been in place. Over time you see the debates about slavery move from debates about slavery itself and its sources to debates about the ends of slavery, about abolition. That is the vast narrative I think I’ll be telling in the next two volumes of this series, which will take us up to the point of abolition in 1865.
Mounk: That’s really helpful. Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. I’m trying to get into the mind of a listener who hasn’t studied political theory and intellectual history like you and I have, and who’s perhaps less convinced of the importance of these ideas. They might say something like the following: what you’re describing here is a set of societies with very strong economic interests. If you want to make a profit producing sugar in Barbados, or make a profit producing cotton in the American South, having access to very cheap, reliable labor is of utmost importance. These are very labor-intensive processes. All that’s going on here is that Mammon was king. Ideas aren’t that important. People were engaging in the economic institution that best served the bottom line. They were cynically enslaving people in order to have ongoing access to that cheap labor, to expropriate from people any legitimate benefits they could have drawn from their hard work. Sure, as an epiphenomenon of all of that, they came up with justifications—at the beginning, when it was enough to just enslave people who were not Christian, they said this is all about Christians and non-Christians. When suddenly some of these enslaved people convert to Christianity and that justification doesn’t work anymore, well, you cast your eyes around, you come up with the next best explanation, and now you make it about the obvious fact that the people doing the enslaving are white and the people being enslaved are black, and you come up with some justification for that. But somebody who’s looking at a simple economic model here, who’s analyzing the political economy of the cotton trade or the sugar trade, is going to be able to get to ninety to ninety-five percent of everything we’ve talked about—all of these very complex ideas, these very subtle reconstructions of how people tried to make sure they could sleep well at night while engaging in these horrific practices—and ultimately these ideas are besides the point. Perhaps we get to the last three or four percent here or there. But why focus on this rather than these underlying material, political, and economic interests?
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and John discuss the relationship between ideas and material interests, and how these shaped American slavery. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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