I always wonder, if there had never been a trans-Atlantic slave trade, would modern opinion in the West be that slavery is perfectly fine?
After all, the West still doesn't really care about slavery - there's more slaves today than ever in history. They also do not care about benefitting from slave labour or they would boycott the top countries in the Global Slavery Index: https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc... Slavery continues to be a thriving industry in Africa and the Middle East for example, and for the most part concern about this only comes from a few Western NGOs.
It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern. I wonder if it will ever stop being in political vogue.
>It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern.
It's diabolical. The ruling class, who benefitted the most from slavery, have figured out how to use it to keep people from uniting against them. According to them, it was white people who enslaved black people, not rich people who enslaved poor people, and we should all be upset the former and never think about the latter.
The global elimination of slavery, to whatever incomplete extent that happened, was primarily a British and Christian moral crusade. Christian morality plus the feasibility of replacing slavery with industrialization is what made the global reduction of slavery possible. I say this as a non-Christian. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say the West “doesn’t really care” about slavery.
But he's not talking about the Transatlantic Slave Trade, he's talking about the bad-faith right-wing talking point of "There are slaves all around the world today!!!" None of the groups that OP professes to care about are part of the transatlantic slave trade.
Haitians also continued using slavery - ah, excuse me, forced labor according to academic sources - after their revolution. They don’t really have the moral high-ground there either.
Slavery and forced labor are not necessarily the same thing; thought the former usually implies the latter.
Being forced to work 8-12 hours a day, but free to go about your business the rest of the time is a very different scenario to being owned and having your offspring becoming another persons property.
Chattel slavery goes way beyond forced labor - both are terrible, but not equally so.
Yeah, the "worker" conditions that followed were more like serfdom than chattel slavery. A serf's offspring is still tied to the land like their parents, so the practical difference probably wasn't that great, but it's still an important distinction.
“The revolution ended slavery in Saint-Domingue but not forced labor. Louverture and several of the early governments of independent Haiti used the army to impose forced work on the plantations”
Thanks, the citation I was hoping for would be a published, peer reviewed paper with listed authors rather than a summary from what looks to be a departmental public outreach project, the grunt work of which are typically farmed out to grad students or RAs.
nonetheless I'm disappointed; the assertion looked so juicy and worthy of a deep dive. you made it sound like "academia" was conspiring to demote slavery to forced labor under specific conditions. yet no evidence of this is to be found in the linked text.
rather, the summary makes a point of distinguishing slavery from forced labor. granted, it doesn't define either term (as a proper paper would) but it doesn't pretend they are interchangeable either.
It was less an assassination and more the beginning of a full genocide (a specifically French genocide, not against whites in general) around the country.
Dessalines went around the county killing all (fully white) French males. A lot of powerful Haitians opposed this, especially those of mixed racial background who had white family. The crimes that followed were really pushed forward by Dessalines the man, not the Haitian people in general.
Transatlantic slavery was incredibly cruel, but persecution by "the French" doesn't excuse a genocide of all French people on the island. Ironically, the people most responsible for the crimes against enslaved Africans (the "grand blanc") were largely back in France and so escaped personal harm.
After all, the West still doesn't really care about slavery - there's more slaves today than ever in history. They also do not care about benefitting from slave labour or they would boycott the top countries in the Global Slavery Index: https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc... Slavery continues to be a thriving industry in Africa and the Middle East for example, and for the most part concern about this only comes from a few Western NGOs.
It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern. I wonder if it will ever stop being in political vogue.