The Transformation of the World (183 page)

But Ahmad remained an exception from the rule. In the Ottoman Empire, such liberals as Grand Vizier Midhat Pasha were unable to prevail for long. Sultan Abdülhamid II moved only very reluctantly against the slave trade from Africa and the Caucasus, and he did not end the old practice of harem bondage; in 1903 there were still 194 eunuchs and nearly 500 women in his own seraglio.
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Only after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 did slavery start to decline sharply, although after 1915 part of the surviving Armenian community knew a fate akin to that of slaves. In Egypt, the khedive Ismail, so open to the West in other respects, was the country's largest slave owner, and it was only the British occupation after 1882 that put an end to all forms of slavery. Iran, like other Middle Eastern countries, signed the Brussels Convention against the slave trade as early as 1890, but only its radical secular modernization
à la turque
under Reza Shah led to the prohibition of slavery itself in 1928–29.
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Hampered by dissension among the many local schools of law, abolition in Muslim parts of the world was a more gradual, less dramatic process than in the West. Not all moves to end slavery there should be attributed to Western pressure. There was an indigenous basis for its rejection, including in certain readings of the Koran, but before the First World War this seldom led to vigorous action on the part of nation-states.

Passages from Slavery

What came after slavery? Ideally the moment of liberation, symbolized by the springing of chains, should have been carried over into legal-political systems and social structures that safeguarded the new freedom. Such systems and structures could be created with the help of former slaves, but not by them alone; the framework of the national or colonial state also had to be transformed. Mentalities had to change—from contempt, or at best condescending sympathy, to a real preparedness to recognize ex-slaves not only as abstract human beings but as neighbors, citizens and useful members of society. Such a liberal utopia was virtually never realized in the nineteenth century. Suspecting that this would be the case, a number of early abolitionists played down local successes and set themselves more demanding goals based on the idea of a global civilizing mission. The world, it seemed, would be safe from a relapse into barbarism only if slavery was everywhere torn up by the roots. Particularly active in this regard was the African Civilization Society, founded in London in 1840 and supported by a large part of the Victorian establishment, including Prince Albert and several dozen members of Parliament. One of its first actions, in 1841–42, was to send an antislavery mission to the Niger region in West Africa. This ambitious nonimperialist venture, which encountered numerous difficulties and proved unable to achieve its lofty objectives, was a remarkable expression of the sense of mission that sometimes drove opponents of slavery in the early nineteenth century.
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The Niger mission—like the later trips to Africa by the missionary David Livingstone—was rooted in Christian, humanitarian, and patriotic impulses. But these played little role in the construction of systems after the ending of slavery, when problem solving was consistently local in character and involved few international transfers. Besides, the multiplicity of development paths makes comparison especially difficult here.
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Microhistorical investigations have focused on life destinies that can be reliably documented, on the conversion of plantations into mosaics of more or less independent small farms, or on the processes (barely discernible to those involved) whereby bonds of slavery passed into relations of compulsion bearing different names and having a different status in the eyes of the law. The general term used today is “postemancipation societies”
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—which differ from one another in respect of the number and percentage of former slaves in the total population, the type and intensity of racism in society, the employment and promotion opportunities, the prevalence of violence, and gender disparities in life: in short, “degrees of freedom.”
⁶³

The plantation economy was not destroyed everywhere. In Haiti it disappeared along with export production. There was a similar, though less dramatic, development in Jamaica (which remained a British colony). In Trinidad, plantation output was restored after a few decades, although the workforce now mainly consisted not of local ex-slaves but of indentured laborers from Asia; much the same happened on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, also under British
rule. Cuba, which ended slavery eighty years after Haiti, took yet another path: changes in sugar technology and white immigration from Spain smoothed the transition, so that output declined only slightly after emancipation and was back above previous levels within a few years.
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These changes operated within an agrarian framework. For the time being, even in the Southern US states, large-scale industrialization did not occur in the aftermath of emancipation.

The outcomes were interpreted by affected groups on a case-by-case basis. The interests of former slaves were different from those of former slaveholders; colonial governments and abolitionists each nursed expectations of their own. Slave emancipation—one of the most ambitious reform projects of the nineteenth century—was associated with unusually high and widespread disappointment. Sometimes this was hypocritical: the same colonial regimes that complained of the difficulty of eradicating indigenous slavery in Africa had few scruples about establishing new forms of bondage, whether compulsory labor in all its guises (the corvée was prohibited in the French Empire only in 1946), fiscal exactions, or direct intervention in agriculture. Only rarely, however, did these crystallize into stable structures of extreme subjugation. Under pressure from unrest abroad and public criticism at home, the European colonial systems were capable of substantial self-correction. Ultracoercive labor regimes and excesses of violence were therefore much less common after the First World War than they had been before. It would be wrong to underestimate the deep moral and political break that the abolition of legalized slavery represented wherever it came about. By 1910, with minor exceptions, the eradication of slavery had been achieved throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
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Postemancipation Society in the American South

In no other country did the abolition of slavery expand the scope for action as dramatically as it did in the United States. During the Civil War hundreds of thousands of African Americans took their fate in their hands, fighting on the Union side or otherwise assisting it as free blacks from the North or runaway slaves from the South, and taking possession of land in the South that had been left without an owner. At the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, a great uprising of black Americans was already under way.
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In the transition to freedom, former slaves gave themselves new names, moved into new homes, brought their scattered families together again, and looked for ways of becoming economically independent. Those whom a master had previously denied free speech could now openly express themselves in public; black community institutions that had been operating underground—from churches and schools to burial societies—found their way to the surface. As slaves, black women and men had been their master's property and therefore not legal subjects in their own right. Now they could step out into the world, give testimony in court, conclude mutually binding contracts, sit on juries, cast their vote at elections, and stand for office.
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But then this great new start turned into its opposite: into sharp racial discrimination. By the end of the 1870s the gains of the emancipation period had been largely obliterated; and in the 1880s, race relations in the former slave states of the South took a dramatic turn for the worse. True, African Americans were not slaves again after 1890, but they were subject to an extremely restrictive racial system that went hand in hand with white terror and lynch law. For blacks, there could no longer be any talk of exercising their civil rights. There would be only three instances of such a harsh racial order outside the context of slavery: in the American South between the 1890s and the 1920s; in South Africa after 1948; and in Germany after 1933 and German-occupied Europe during the Second World War. If we leave aside the case of Germany, there are rough similarities between the United States and South Africa, whose apartheid system had roots stretching far back into the nineteenth century.
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In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois, the leading, and universally respected, African American intellectual of his time, opened his “electrifying manifesto”
⁶⁹
The Souls of Black Folk
with the prediction that the “color line” would be
the
problem of the twentieth century—not just in the United States, but on a worldwide scale.
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In places where this prognosis proved most accurate, slavery was replaced by white supremacy, and state or nonstate violence enforced privileges for groups defined by nothing other than their skin color.

Whereas hierarchical relations in slave societies had rested on the evident fact that manual work was performed almost exclusively by slaves and freedmen, and that neither of these two groups had much chance of social advancement, the situation in postemancipation society was that ex-slaves competed directly with poor whites on the labor market. Under conditions of political freedom, blacks defended their own interests and did not allow themselves to be downgraded into acolytes of white leaders. Parts of white society responded to this dual challenge by means of discrimination and violent hostility. Racism was a premise of such thinking and structures, and they in turn gave it additional force. Thus, a racist ostracism built on white supremacy appeared in place of the repressive racism of slave society. It had already been a common attitude in the Northern states of the United States that gave up legalized slavery during the revolutionary period; now it became more widespread and more radical in the New South of the late nineteenth century, undermining the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution that declared anyone “born or naturalized in the United States” to be a citizen with equal rights before the law. The laws in individual states did incorporate this formulation, and the departure of the last federal troops from the South removed the protection that the less racist central government might have given to the black minority there. The new racial order in the South, symbolized by the growing activity of the Ku Klux Klan from 1869 on, reached its height of virulence around the turn of the century, then grew milder in the 1920s and was finally toppled by the civil rights movement of the sixties.
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South Africa, United States, Brazil: Racial Orders

Although the differences with South Africa are too great to permit a comprehensive comparison, some instructive cross-references may be found here and there. Developments in the two countries, including a few influential transfers, did not occur synchronously: South Africa emancipated its slaves nearly three decades before the United States, but by 1914 the ideologies and instruments of racist hierarchy and exclusion were present in both. Then, in the 1920s, South Africa once more took the lead by making apartheid a basic principle of national legislation, so that the race system could be removed there only through regime change at the center (as happened in 1994), not through the kind of “gradualist” changes to the law and the justice system that occurred in the United States after the Second World War. In both countries, black civil rights movements supported by white liberals played a very important role. In both too, the racial order of the early twentieth century had old historical roots. Free-labor ideologies—represented in one case by the industrialized North, in the other by the British presence at the Cape—came into conflict with the preference of Afrikaners or Southern plantation oligarchs for race-based subordination and the political power monopoly of a purely white master people. The secessionist wars of 1861–65 in the United States and 1899–1902 in South Africa went in favor of liberal-capitalist forces: militarily overwhelming in the United States, only just so in South Africa. But within a decade and a half in the Southern United States and roughly half that time in South Africa, the two white camps reached a compromise with each other at the expense of the black population.

In 1910 the British Empire granted autonomy to the white settlers in South Africa. In a process of “national” reunification actually limited to whites, the black majority was denied rights that it had previously enjoyed or been promised. In the United States, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the North failed to prevent the Southern states from depriving blacks of their rights and putting a color bar in place. In the North, for all the discrimination it faced in everyday life, the black population never ceased in principle to have access to the ballot box. Legalized discrimination thus remained a local or regional peculiarity, not a national norm.
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The humanitarianism that in both countries drove the process leading to the abolition of slavery—at first in South Africa via impulses imported from Britain—had disappeared from their politics by the early twentieth century. The struggle against white supremacy dragged on for many decades. Colorblind democracy, having asserted itself as a political program in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, had suffered a setback that could be reversed with only the greatest difficulty in both South Africa and the American South.

In the other major nineteenth-century instance of slavery on a mass scale, white supremacy was not the sequel to its abolition. There are several reasons why slavery persisted longer in Brazil than anywhere else in Latin America: not the least important is the fact that Brazilians did not fight a war of independence
against the colonial power, so that, unlike neighboring countries in the struggle against the Spanish, they did not have to recruit any black soldiers. There were repeated cases of black resistance to slavery, but nothing comparable to the black African armed with British approval who could demand something in return for his services. One of the key sources of “modern” politicization was therefore lacking in Brazil. But why did no formal racial order develop there after 1888? After the end of slavery, which coincided with a peaceful transition from monarchy to republic, a long debate began over the country's national and racial identity and its opportunities for modernization. Since manumission had been easier in Brazil than in the United States, and miscegenation had been less severely dealt with, there was not such a strict overlap between skin color and social status, and people generally were less inclined to sharp dichotomies. Freed slaves thus found a place earlier in the conceptions of modernization entertained by sectors of the white elite.