Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wyager 1806 days ago
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.
3 comments

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.
wouldn't mind a citation of those academic sources which use this term in this context.
https://www.brown.edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/e...

“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.

Mix corruption and France teaching them about how to profit from slavery and it's no surprise they might have continued with slavery.