Through the Lens of Transatlantic Slavery
By Julia O’Connell Davidson
Since 2000, it has become commonplace for politicians, policy makers and many NGOs to speak of human trafficking as the contemporary equivalent of transatlantic slavery. Writing of the horrifying surge in deaths of people crossing the Mediterranean from Libya in April 2015, for example, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi wrote, “Human traffickers are the slave traders of the 21st century, and they should be brought to justice”. The depiction of trafficking as a slave trade fits with a long history of thought in which slavery is defined by its reduction of persons to articles of merchandise. In 1845, George Bourne, one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, described the singular wrong of slavery as the fact it “reduces persons to things”. Present-day trafficking in human beings is understood to be modern slavery because it similarly seems to disregard the line between persons and things that is fundamental to human dignity and wellbeing, treating human beings as nothing but commodities to be exploited for profit. It is therefore, the argument concludes, a trade that must be suppressed by any means necessary.
However, more careful attention to the history of transatlantic slavery points to a rather different set of conclusions about the defining horror of slavery, as well as about why migrants and refugees are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, and the policy measures required to protect them.
Persons, Things, and Slaves
In New Orleans in 1834, a fire broke out in a mansion belonging to Dr Louis LaLaurie and his wife Delphine. Neighbours who arrived to assist found the upper chambers locked, and when they broke in, they discovered seven people, still alive, but suspended from the ceiling by chains and horrifically mutilated. The victims were slaves belonging to the LaLauries, and Delphine LaLaurie was subsequently discovered to have tortured and murdered many more men, women and children. Antislavery publications of the time made much of this case, since it graphically revealed the powerlessness of the enslaved in the hands of their masters and mistresses. Yet it is important to note that in most slave states, the murder of slaves was illegal and Delphine LaLaurie had actually violated Louisiana’s civil code on slavery, which stated that owners must not maim, mutilate or kill their human property.
Property owners are normally free to do as they please with their property. There was nothing in the same civil code to prevent a property holder from, say, ripping up an unwanted book. This alerts us to the fact that whilst the enslaved were legally constructed as objects of property in the Atlantic World, they were not conceived of as “things” like any other. In fact, at the heart of slavery was a body of law that gave the enslaved what Saidiya Hartman describes as a “double character” as both things and persons. In theory, that body of law constrained slaveholders. More crucially, it constrained the enslaved by making them legally and morally responsible, as persons, for any criminal act they committed.
Unlike the livestock to which they were routinely compared, Atlantic World slaves were arrested, tried and punished for committing outlawed acts. These acts included every form of resistance or refusal to submit to the authority of a master or any white person, no matter how arbitrary or extreme. The law also criminalized any effort to escape. Indeed, under Fugitive Slave Law, the runaway slave was liable, as a person, for the crime of stealing herself, as a thing. This contradiction was a necessary feature of slavery. Unless human beings are killed or chained in dungeons, they retain the capacity to act independently, and a dead slave, or a slave securely locked in a dungeon, would not have been a productive asset. Slave law, with its spectacularly brutal punishments, was designed to prevent enslaved people from acting independently, in particular, from fleeing or resisting the conditions under which they were constructed as objects of property ownership.
In law, then, the slave was not quite a “thing”, and not quite a “person”. This ambiguity meant that in practice, the enslaved had no protection against an owner who chose to torture or murder them. Delphine LaLaurie’s slaves would have been committing a crime had they left her house without her permission. Anyone who assisted them in escaping would also have been committing a criminal offense.
Reframing the Parallels between Past and Present
If the history of transatlantic slavery is to be invoked in relation to contemporary crisis-driven migrations, the slave trade that carried Africans into slavery in the Americas does not offer a useful point of comparison. African victims of the slave trade did not wish to move; it took overwhelming physical force to transport them. Refugees and migrants want to move, and for excellent reasons. The more convincing historical comparison is between contemporary migrants and refugees and slaves who attempted to escape from slavery. The latter sought to move to free territory in the hope of saving their lives and/or of radically improving their status and life-chances. Similar hopes motivate those whose movement today is described as a “migration crisis”.
If we focus on this common, strong desire for mobility, another clear historical parallel comes into view, namely, that between slave states and contemporary states, especially regarding the techniques they use to restrict human mobility. Almost all of the strategies currently employed by European Union states to that end were anticipated and deployed by slave states to control the mobility of the slave population, including: passports, visas, border patrols and surveillance, carrier sanctions, detention and also laws penalizing those who offer assistance and support to people who move without state authorization. In March 2016, Lisbeth Zornig, a Danish campaigner for children’s rights, was prosecuted and fined under people trafficking laws for allowing a family of Syrians to hitch a ride with her to Copenhagen. Her husband was also fined for taking the family into his home for coffee and biscuits and then driving them to the railway station, where he bought them tickets to Sweden. In this and similar examples, there is no parallel between what is being legally constructed as “trafficking” and the transatlantic slave trade, but there is a strong resemblance between today’s trafficking law and American fugitive slave law that was used to criminalize those who assisted runaway slaves.
There are also echoes of slavery to be found in the experience of those migrants and refugees who – with or without assistance – do manage to make it across the sea or through the razor wire, past the “border hunters”, sentry points and other heavy and violent barriers to safe movement set in place by European Union states. Unauthorized migrants on European Union soil are increasingly criminalized for undertaking more or less any and all acts necessary to support life itself, from taking employment to renting housing to accessing banking services, and forced into destitution. They are also increasingly being forcibly immobilized, either through immigration detention or by measures taken to prevent them from escaping locations where they can barely access the means of life and are exposed to the elements, disease and fires (camps such as the recently closed Jungle at Calais and at the border to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia).
The similarities between the condition of those who today lack a regular, authorized immigration status and those who historically lacked free status in slave states are striking, but they do not lie in the reduction of persons to things. The similarities lie in the two groups’ construction as particular and unequal kinds of “person”. Just as the free white citizen of a slave state enjoyed, by mere accident of birth, rights and freedoms extending far beyond that of the slave, so today the European Union citizen (again often by accident of birth) has rights and freedoms far in excess of those afforded to the unauthorized migrant standing on the same soil. This inequality opens a space for exploitation and abuse.
Those who do not have rights to what is necessary to live on a given territory (work, housing, healthcare) or rights to move where they need to move, or to stand where they are standing (so that at any moment they may be seized, detained or forcibly moved across a border by state officials), are compelled to depend on others to mediate their access to mobility and the means of life. Given this intense dependency, it is no surprise that we hear reports of migrant and refugee children and women being sexually abused; or learn that migrants and refugees are paying huge sums to, and placing themselves in the hands of, individuals who say they can help them escape or subsist; or to discover that some of the people who offer them assistance turn out to be unscrupulous or even brutal, taking advantage of their vulnerability to cheat, exploit or abuse them.
Certainly, the individuals who abuse child and adult migrants are morally despicable. But the laws and policies that trap migrants and refugees in appalling, insanitary, dangerous and hopeless conditions, that separate them from their partners and children, that render them destitute and homeless, and that refuse them the rights that make (most) European Union citizens into full persons, are surely equally despicable. European Union asylum and immigration policies turn the lives of tens of thousands of peaceable men, women and children, who have moved only in an attempt to secure their own lives and wellbeing, into a mere game of chance.
A Change Has Got to Come
In pre-Civil War America, even white people who condemned slavery on moral grounds did not all believe it was feasible or practical to suddenly abolish it and make free and equal citizens of the enslaved. The abolition of slavery, they said, would depress the wages of free white workers, and lead to economic ruin since freed slaves would be a huge and unaffordable burden on the community. The enslaved were not ready for equal citizenship, they said. Slaves of African descent were too ignorant, too culturally different, too prone to violence. If freed, male slaves would sexually abuse white women, they said. It is uncanny how closely these arguments against the immediate abolition of slavery and the extension of equality to the enslaved resemble the arguments today made against opening the European Union’s borders and ending discrimination on the basis of nationality.
Leaving aside the racism that informs such objections, the fact is that human beings will not stop moving – mobility is part of what it means to be human. People certainly will not stop moving from war zones and other contexts where it is impossible to access the means of life or pursue dreams and aspirations, towards places where the opportunities are greater. If we do not want them to drown, or to suffocate in container lorries, or to be crushed under train wheels, or to be exploited and abused by people who promise to help them move and find work, but then trap and violate them, then we have to remove the barriers, restrictions and inequalities that make them so incredibly vulnerable.
Delphine LaLaurie provides us with the moral case for change. For while it is no surprise that antislavery activists were horrified by her crimes, we should remember that white slaveholding society was also appalled. Indeed, free citizens of New Orleans were so outraged by her depravity that they mounted the city’s first riot to wreak revenge upon the LaLaurie home. Supporting or benefiting from the legal institution of slavery was not the same thing as supporting sadistic torture. It was therefore possible to condemn LaLaurie’s excessive and gratuitous violence without also condemning the legal division between slave and free populations. Likewise today, some people express moral outrage about the individuals who take advantage of the powerlessness of migrants and refugees in order to subject them to the most egregious violence and exploitation, without also condemning the laws that leave all irregular migrants potentially vulnerable to such abuse.
If Europeans do not want to stand in relation to victims of trafficking in the same way that New Orleans slaveholders stood in relation to Delphine LaLaurie’s victims, weeping over the fate that we – in effect – have sealed them into, then we have to start opening borders, resettling refugees, creating more legal channels for migration and working towards equal rights, regardless of nationality.
Julia O’Connell Davidson is a Professor of Sociology at the School of Sociology, Political and International Studies, University of Bristol. The support of the Leverhulme Trust which funded the research on which this article is based (MRF-2012-085) is gratefully acknowledged.