Capital & Ideology Part Two
Slave & Colonial Societies
Chapter 6 Slave Societies:
Slavery is a broad term and not all societies with slavery were the same. For example some small number of slaves served as public officials with high levels of expertise. They were considered to be less fettered by politics as they had no rights.
“In the current state of research, it would appear that the 4 million slaves exploited in the southern United States on the eve of the Civil War (1861–1865) constituted the largest concentration of slaves that ever existed.”
The strict separation of slaves and citizens in the US was the exception not the rule.
Again we see the phenomenon where property owners are made whole by the state at the expense of the people: When slavery was outlawed in Britain, slave owners were compensated for their loss of property based on the estimated value of each slave. In 2018 it would come to about 30 million euros for 4000 slave owners each. (About 150,000 euros per slave) This money came from regressive taxes on consumption and trade. This practice exhibits the political power of slave owners as well as the presuppositions of the proprietarian ideology.
This form of reparations was considered common sense and likely would have been repeated in the US if not for the prohibitive cost & southern response.
One justification for slavery was that if not for the free labor societies would not have the means to develop politically and artistically. “No civilization without slavery.”
“Slaveowners in many countries also insisted that since free labor was more costly but no more productive than slave labor, switching would straightaway make it impossible to compete with rivals in other colonial empires. No one would buy their sugar, cotton, or tobacco, and the nation’s output would plummet along with its greatness if somehow the anti-economic and anti patriotic fantasies of the abolitionists were put into practice.”
“The French case reminds us of what was no doubt the primary reason for the abolition of slavery: not the magnanimity of Euro-American abolitionists or the pecuniary calculations of slaveowners but the rebellions staged by slaves themselves and the fear of further unrest. The crucial role of slave rebellion is obvious in the abolition of 1794, the first major abolition of modern times, which was a direct consequence of fact that Haitian slaves had already freed themselves by force of arms and were preparing to declare their country’s independence.”
Better to accept financial compensation for slaves than let them steal themselves from you.
“The Slaves of Haiti took the (French) Revolution’s message of emancipation more seriously than anyone else, including the French, and it cost them dearly.”
The Haitian Revolution is significant as it was the first abolition of the modern era & the first independence of a black population for a European power.
Haiti was forced then under embargo & threat of invasion to pay 150 million gold francs to compensate the slave owners. (40 billion euros in 2020) This was difficult since much of their sugar production had been moved to Cuba since it was still a slave society. (Capital flight has been around a while.)
The banks later ceded their loans to the US which occupied Haiti from 1915–1934 to “restore order and protect American financial interests.” The debt wasn’t paid off until the 1950s. (For more on the longstanding unjust origins of third world debt and its implications I recommend Jason Hickle.)
“In antiquity, slavery for debt was quite common; we find traces of it in the Bible as well as on mesopotamian and Egyptian steles, which depict endless cycles of debt accumulation and enslavement, sometimes punctuated by periods during which debts were canceled and slaves freed in order to restore social peace.”
“For slaveowners and their supporters, it was inconceivable that they should be deprived of their property without a fair indemnity. But the idea that the full burden should be borne by public treasury and therefore the taxpayers… did not seem quite right. Shouldn’t the slaves, who after all would be the primary beneficiaries of the measure, also pay? Alexandre Moreau de Jonnes, a dedicated abolitionist… proposed in 1842 that slaves should reimburse the entire amount of the indemnity by performing “special work projects” (travaux spéciaux) without pay for as long as necessary. He also insisted that this would be a way of teaching slaves the meaning of work. Some commentators pointed out that this transitional reimbursement period might well last quite some time, which would be tantamount to not emancipating the slaves at all: it would merely transform the servile condition into a condition of perpetual debt, just as the former corvees had been transferred into debt during the Revolution.”
Tocqueville took the radical centrist position that the slaves should pay off half their worth to the slave owners by working for 10 years at low wages to reimburse their masters. Compensation for centuries of unpaid labor was not considered.
“These episodes are fundamental. For one thing they enable us to set in perspective the reemergence of certain forms of quasi-sacrilization of property in the twenty-first century (regarding, in particular, integral repayment of public debt no matter what its amount or duration) as well as the argument that the private wealth of billionaires is fully legitimate and sacrosanct, regardless of magnitude or origin. For another, they shed new light on the persistence of ethno-racial inequalities in the modern world as well as the complex, but unavoidable issue of reparations.”
As long as new interior states were to be free, Lincoln offered an “extremely gradual process of emancipation in the South, with compensation for slaveholders — a process which, had it been accepted, might have prolongued slavery until 1880 or 1900 if not longer. But southerners, like the white minorities in South Africa and Algeria in the twentieth century, refused to give in to a majority they judged to be distant and alien to their world.”
John C Calhoun considered the north to be the side lacking in ethics as the elderly and the sick were not cared for whereas in the south they were respected members of the community.
“look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.”
Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe supported deporting emancipated slaves back to Africa. (American Colonization Society) The project failed. Even the few who were sent back to Liberia led to a problematic divide there. It was basically an extreme form of segregation.
“In fact, the available research suggests that, however people may describe themselves, more than 90 percent of Brazilians today are of mixed origins, European African and/or European Amerindian, including many who describe themselves as ‘white.’”
Not all slave societies leave the same social legacy.
Chapter 7 Colonial Societies Diversity and Domination
Colonial societies can be split into two eras.
1st 1500–1800s American discovery, maritime routes to India & China. Military domination, extraction, extermination.
2nd 1800s peaks in the early 1900s, end ends in the 1960s (or 1990s for S. Africa.) Less stigmatized but not particularly different & with clear continuities.
The second era justified itself via a potentially universalistic though in practice extremely “asymmetrical proprietarian ideology.” It was also justified through debt. Debt the Haitians owed their masters, and debt the Chinese owed for the opium wars. (“Shouldn’t the Chinese government simply have agreed to import opium?”)
“Although the justifications and the forms of pressure have evolved , it would be wrong to imagine that such rough treatment of some states by others has totally disappeared or that naked power no longer plays a role in determining the financial fortunes of states. Consider for example, the unrivaled ability of the United States to impose staggering sanctions on foreign firms as well as dissuasive commercial and financial embargoes on governments deemed to be insufficiently cooperative — an ability not unrelated to US global military dominance.”
Demographic patterns of genocide, & interbreeding varied widely.
Piketty asserts slave societies like the one in Saint Domingue were the most inegalitarian in history, followed by. S. Africa in 1950, and Algeria in 1930.
“Inequality of wealth is above all inequality of power in society.”
The idea of maximal inequality helps us understand why income inequality is never as extreme as wealth inequality. Share of income to the bottom half is always at least 5% if not up to 20%. Property share may be zero, close to zero or even negative. The top 10% regularly owns up to 90% of property.
Inequality in slave societies was determined by ideological and political factors not by economic or technological constraints. (This applies to every society studied.)
No country since the UK and France had in the 1800s and 1900s has ever had such large volumes of foreign assets. This foreign capital added about 8% and 5% to each country’s respective national income. The interests, rents, dividends, profits and royalties from around the world boosted the SOL of the two superpowers. (Or at least the SOL of narrow segments of their population.)
“To view nineteenth-century trade flows as straightforward consequences of ‘market forces’ and ‘the invisible hand’ is hardly serious and cannot explain the manifestly political transformations of the interstate system and global trade that actually occurred.”
“In other words, the rest of the world labored to increase the consumption and standard of living of the colonial powers, even as it became increasingly indebted to those powers.”
“Property relations in general are always more complex than the fairytales one reads in economics textbooks, where they are often presented as spontaneously harmonious and mutually advantageous. It is never simple for a worker to sacrifice a substantial portion of her wage to an owner’s profit or a landlord’s rent or for the children of renters to pay rents to the children of landlords. That is why property relations are always conflictual, and always give rise to institutions whose purpose is to regulate their scope and transmissibility.”
Inequalities sourced in Apartheid South Africa persist since no fiscal or agrarian reform took place, although to be fair redistribution may well have led to international backlash from western nations. The point is that there is no historical origin of wealth which can be deemed unethical enough to justify redistribution.
Chapter 8: Ternary Societies and Colonialism: India
India historically has had a quaternary order. Divisions were somewhat blurry but there were Four varnas. (Classes)
Brahmins: Priests, scholars, vegetarian, and sober.
Kshatriyas: Warriors, Peacekeepers
Vaishya: Farmers, herders, workers
Shudras: Serve the other classes.
Untouchables: lower than shudras, given unclean occupations such as animal slaughter.
Reincarnation implied members of the Shudras could be reincarnated into a higher varna. The system was anti meritocratic. People fulfilled their given roles, with the belief they may occupy another place in the next life.
Conversion to Islam was favorable among those low on the Hindu caste hierarchy, and in modern India Muslims remain the most economically challenged. The attitude of Hindu nationalists towards poor Muslims is a key issue in Indian politics.
After the messianic came the mercantile era, then a civilizational mission. Motivations for expansion were diverse and not contradictory.
“The refusal to historicize ‘oriental’ societies, the insistence on essentializing them and portraying them as frozen in time, eternally flawed and structurally incapable of governing themselves — ideas that justify every kind of brutality in in advance — continued, Saïd argued, to permeate European and American perceptions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: for example, at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.”
The nuances of the caste system have historically been oversimplified. Outsiders frequently describe a snapshot of the society rather than taking a more historical view. Europeans studied skull shapes to understand the racial origins of the caste system to little benefit.
“The keypoint here is that the administrative categories created by the British to rule the country and assign rights and duties frequently bore little relation to actual social identities. Hence the policy of assigning identities profoundly disrupted existing social structures and in many cases solidified once-flexible boundaries between groups, thus fostering new antagonisms and tensions.”
Affirmative action is associated with the US, but it has never been a systematic national policy. In contrast India established a legal framework to correct past discrimination. The lessons to be drawn are open to interpretation but the main points are that it is in fact possible, and that it should ideally be adaptable and temporary.
“Taking the full measure of the successes and limitations of the Indian experience will be useful in thinking about how one might do more to overcome longstanding social and status inequalities in India and around the world.”
Chapter 9: Ternary Societies & Colonialism: Eurasion Trajectories
Modern State development required two great leaps forward.
1500–1800 in Europe tax revenues went from 1–2% to 6–8% with ownership societies at home & colonial societies abroad.
1910–1980 rich countries tax revenues went from 10%- up to 50% of national income in the 1980s leading to various forms of social democracy.
Europe’s first leap may have been stimulated by the fragmentation of Europe into several states of relative size leading to military rivalry. This fragmentation may have been due simply to geographic features.
Rivalry may have led to an increase in fiscal capacity and technological innovations in artillery & warships. Ottoman and Chinese states did not have these incentives. They were more decentralized.
Europe’s industrialization was dependent on coercive resource extraction of fuel and raw material. Europe ran out of forests very rapidly falling from up to 40% of the area to around 10% in 1800.
“In the abstract, Smith’s tranquil, virtuous institutions might have made sense if all countries had adopted them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (although he underestimated the usefulness of taxes for financing productive investment and neglected the importance of educational and social equality for economic development). But in a world in which some countries develop superior military capacity, the most virtuous are not always the ones who come out on top. The history Of European-Chinese relations is a case in point…
The Qing emperor, seeing the enormous increase in opium imports and under pressure from his bureaucracy and enlightened public opinion to stop it, tried to enforce a ban on the recreational use of opium in 1729. Subsequent emperors took a more proactive approach for obvious public health reasons. In 1839 the emperor ordered his envoy in Canton not only to end the traffic but also to burn existing opium stores without delay. In late and early 1840, the British press launched a vigorous anti-China campaign, which was paid for by opium dealers; articles denounced China’s unacceptable violation of British property rights and attack on the principle of free trade. Unfortunately, the Qing emperor had seriously underestimated the UK’s progress in increasing its fiscal and military capacity: in the First Opium War (1839–1842) Chinese forces were quickly routed. British sent a fleet to shell Canton and Shanghai and forced the Chinese in 1842 to sign the first “unequal treaty” (as Sun Yat-Sen would call it in 1924). The Chinese indemnified the British for the destroyed opium and war costs while granting British merchants legal and fiscal privileges and ceding the island of Hong Kong.
The Qing government nevertheless refused to legalize the opium trade. England’s trade deficit continued to grow until the Second Opium War (1856–1860), and the sack of the summer palace in Beijing by French and British troops in 1860 finally forced the emperor to give in. Opium was legalized, and the Chinese were obliged to grant the Europeans a series of trading posts and territorial concessions and forced to pay a large war indemnity. In the name of religious freedom it was also agreed that Christian missionaries would be allowed to roam freely in China (While no thought was given to granting similar privileges to Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu missionaries in Europe.) The irony Of history is this: owing to the military tribute that the French and British imposed on China, the Chinese government was obliged to abandon its Smithian budget orthodoxy and for the first time experiment with a large public debt. The debt snowballed and the Qing were forced to raise taxes to repay the Europeans and eventually to cede more and more of their fiscal sovereignty, following a classic colonial scenario of coercion through debt, which we have already encountered elsewhere.”
Debt accumulated through military spending also gave birth to financial markets and securitization requiring stable banking and financial intermediation.
While Europe’s fragmentation has been less than ideal in the long term (particularly from 1914–1918 & 1939–1945) it gave the continent a significant headstart at the expense of its neighbors.
“It is clear that taken together, these protectionist and mercantilist measures, imposed on the rest of the world at gunpoint, played a significant role in achieving British and European industrial domination. According to available estimates, the Chinese and Indian share of global manufacturing output, which was still 53 percent in 1800, had fallen to 5 percent by 1900.”
Japan
Japan during the Meiji era was very motivated to not allow itself to become a victim of the white settlers investing heavily in education and literacy.
“With the elites, the motive was clear: to avoid Western domination. Japanese students who sailed from Kagoshima in 1872 to study in Western universities told their stories with no sugarcoating. While stopped at an Indian port on their way to Europe, they watched young Indian children reduced to diving into the ocean after small coins for the amusement of British settlers on the shore.”
Japan’s development was less than ideal in that it was still strictly hierarchical with its own nationalism, militarism, and colonialism in China & Korea.
Imperial Chinese society was also very inegalitarian marked by significant conflicts and alliances between classes.
After the Boxer Rebellion several imperial powers worked hand in glove to rape and plunder the defenseless Chinese people. The minimum age for Chinese prostitutes was set at 13. French soldiers were disappointed at the prospect of returning home.
The Middle East is the most inegalitarian region in the world since oil resources have been captured by a very small group of owners who use strict religious dogma possibly to somewhat muddle their financial misdeeds. These regimes including Iran can often be financially opaque which is not reassuring.
“such extreme levels of inequality cannot fail to engender enormous social and political tensions. The perpetuation of such regimes depends on a sophisticated repressive apparatus as well as on Western military protection, especially from the United States.”
This took a while because I switched to fiction for a while. Given some time away I’ve noticed my notes make this book look much more interesting. Make no mistake, it’s pretty dull. But it’s almost halfway over.
Next up is the transition to the modern world and the dynamics of inequality that emerge within & between countries.
