Correcting Thomas Sowell’s Claims About Slavery
I wrote a previous article which addressed the popular claim around the British role in the abolition of slavery. The main point of that article was that Britain did abolish slavery in its colonies in the West Indies, but that process was sped up by the continuous slave rebellions in the West Indies. Moreover, the end of slavery in the West Indies was followed by the usage of slave labor in Britain’s African colonies.
Thomas Sowell is a well-known conservative scholar who is also someone who pushes the narrative that Western society stand out in human history for its opposition to slavery. In the video below, he correctly points out that slavery is not unique to the United States or to Western world. Slavery has existed through human civilizations in the world.
The problem is that Sowell uses the widespread existence of slavery across the world to suggest that Western society somehow has stood apart for its opposition to slavery. There is a great deal of history that he leaves out to support this argument. For example, around the 2:40 mark in the video above, Sowell suggested that when President Abraham Lincoln expressed the view that slavery is wrong, he was expressing a view which was “peculiar to Western civilization at that time…” There is some context which is left out here.
In the first place, Sowell’s statement presupposes the fact that slavery was indeed universally practiced, but the reality is that this was not the case. In his book, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, Walter Rodney pointed out: “Deprivation of liberty seems to have been entirely unknown, but with the advent of the Atlantic slave trade Africans were led to become parties in plots which resulted in the lifelong deprivation of the liberty of their fellows.” He was referring to the fact that were some areas of West Africa where there were no forms of slavery. Rodney stated that “one is struck by the absence of references to local African slavery in the sixteenth or even the seventeenth century […].” There were parts of Africa where slavery was not practiced at all.
The second problem is that Sowell’s statement also presupposes that slavery in other parts of the world was the same as slavery in the United States, but this was not the case at all. Olaudah Equiano, who was enslaved in the Americas and whose father had a number of slaves, gave this description of the difference:
Those prisoners which were not sold or redeemed, we kept as slaves: but how different was their condition from that of the slaves in the West Indies! With us, they do no more work than other members of the community, even their master; their food, clothing and lodging were nearly the same as theirs, (except that they were not permitted to eat with those who were free-born;) and there was scarce any other difference between them, than a superior degree of importance which the head of a family possesses in our state, and that authority which, as such, he exercises over every part of his household. Some of these slaves have even slaves under them as their own property, and for their own use.
This distinction is important because the chattel slavery of Africans in the New World was something which was more cruel and brutal than slavery had been in much of Africa. This is not to suggest that there were not aspects of slavery in African societies which were not cruel or brutal, but, generally speaking, slaves in African societies had basic human rights. Slaves in American society did not.
In Mali, the Kouroukan Fouga stated: “Do not ill treat the slaves. We are the master of the slave but not the bag he carries.” American law often upheld the view that slaves were mere property which could be treated as a master saw fit. In my book, A Legally Created People, I gave some examples of this. For example, in State v. Mann, the court upheld that beating a slave was not a criminal offense. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court held that Africans did not even have the rights of an American citizen.
To further demonstrate the difference, in African history one does find examples of slaves or the offspring of slaves becoming prominent rulers. No slave under the American system could have ever hoped to be elected president. Social mobility for the enslaved in America was restricted because of the color-line which ensured that Africans — whether freed or enslaved — could never obtain the same status as the white population.
I think it is important to understand this because in trying to present Western civilization as being uniquely anti-slavery, I think Sowell makes the mistake of failing to address what slavery was in the Western context compared to what slavery was in African societies from which the slave population in the Americas came from.
The other problem is that Sowell claims that Western civilization was the first civilization to turn against slavery. The reality is that Western civilization had never been fully opposed to slavery. It is certainly true that certain Westerners had voiced criticisms of slavery, but slavery as an institution never disappeared from Western society.
I already pointed out that Britain abolished slavery in the West Indies, only to utilize slave labor in its African colonies. In the United States, slavery was never truly abolished. The 13th amendment which abolished slavery actually restricted slavery to certain conditions:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The provision which allowed for slavery as a punishment for crime was exploited in the South. A whole system of convict leasing emerged in which African Americans who were imprisoned were forced into slavery labor. This labor was often so brutal that some were worked to death. This system was also fueled by a vagrancy law which made it a crime for African Americans to be unemployed. It was not until 1942, in reaction to Japanese propaganda, that the American government finally decided to address slavery in the South.
Sowell obviously does not mention any of this history because it hurts his claim that Western civilization spent a century destroying slavery. The reality is that destroying slavery was often a pretext which Western societies used to justify their own imperialism. For example, colonialism in the Congo was justified by this notion that the Belgians were trying to liberate Africans from Arab slavery. The reality is that the Belgians imposed an even more brutal system of forced labor which resulted in millions of Congolese being killed. Sowell makes no mention of this either.
Around the 3:40 mark, Sowell states that slavery has not died out in parts of the Middle East and Africa, while ignoring the fact that slavery is still legal in the United States under certain circumstances. The legality of allowing prisons to utilize the labor of those who are imprisoned is a large part of the reason why the American prison population has rapidly increased over the past several decades to the point that the United States has the largest prison population in the world.
Sowell also argues that the military power of Western nations made the abolition of slavery possible. The reality is that the military power of the West was used to conquer and suppress other people for the purpose of imposing a brutal colonial system which was based on forced labor.
Sowell is correct in noting that for most of human history, the institution of slavery was not based on race, but this is the only distinction that he is willing to draw. He makes no distinction between chattel slavery and non-chattel slavery. In a system of chattel slavery, the slave is reduced to being chattel. This means that the slave is viewed as being a piece of property who has no rights beyond what the slave master is willing to recognize.
Most forms of slavery in Africa were not chattel slavery. I gave the example of the Mali Empire which extended basic rights for the enslaved. George Ayittey noted that in many African societies, slaves were able to participate in making political decisions. He noted that in Senegal, slaves elected their own representative to the king’s court. Atiba was a prominent ruler of Oyo. He was also born to a slave woman who served as one of the chief deputies to the ruling king of Oyo. These examples can be contrasted with slavery in Greco-Roman civilizations in which slaves were often reduced to being chattel with no rights or political representation.
In his book History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams wrote that “an African King of Senegal enacted a law that no slaves whatever should be marched through his territories.” Williams also added that the law “remained a dead letter.” The point he made here is an important one. In situations in which African rulers did attempt resist or fight back against the slave trade, the same Western military power which Sowell mentioned was used to impose European interests in Africa.
The irony of the claim that Sowell and others have made which credits Western civilization with opposing slavery is that for centuries Western civilizations fought to uphold slavery and the slave trade, even as Africans themselves actively fought against it. I close by quoting Walter Rodney again. He wrote: “When the European powers involved in the area (namely Britain, France and Portugal) intervened to end slavery and serfdom in their respective colonies, they were simply undoing their own handiwork.”
