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Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery
Philippe Rosenberg
| HISTORIES of the humanitarian sensibility have an unfortunate tendency to gloss rather quickly over the early modern period. In one narrative after another, humanitarianism springs up in the later eighteenth century as the result of impersonal movements: changing configurations of class interests brought on by capitalism, tamer relations between the genders, epistemic shifts, the Enlightenment, or some combination thereof.1 With few exceptions, these narratives perpetuate a now very old myth of the eighteenth century as the threshold between a "modern" world governed by discipline and a "feudal" one dominated by its exact opposite—harsh and fickle violence. As specialists of the medieval and early modern periods have shown, however, European subjects living before the magical year 1700 actively wrestled with the brutality that confronted them. Concern for charity, safety, and order led them to curtail what strife and oppression they could, either by condemning abuses, exercising clemency, or intervening in disputes. Their methods relied on invective and informal arrangements rather than systematic theories and legislative campaigns, but preindustrial peoples found ways to criticize and contain the abuse of force.2 |
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Why, then, were the noted "strains" accompanying the development of an especially harsh form of slavery in the Caribbean slower to produce any remedies? The received wisdom offers a blunt answer: before the eighteenth century, slavery was invisible, a reality too far distant from the localized references of Europeans to be of direct consequence to them. Long after the sixteenth-century theorists had disputed the enslavement of American natives, the mood in Europe had continued entirely favorable to the enslavement of Africans. Although writers occasionally took offense at some of the evils of slavery, the validity of the institution itself went unquestioned until the tail end of the eighteenth century, when the campaign to end the slave trade began in earnest.3 |
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Though inaccurate, this view remains dominant where the British case is concerned—its prevalence deriving from a somewhat distorted chronology of antislavery that mirrors the histories of humanitarianism mentioned above. The trouble began with Eric Williams's famous contention that slavery came under fire precisely when it ceased to be profitable. Williams's claims mobilized a generation of historians trained on (or against) Marxist paradigms, many of whom disagreed with the simplification involved. These historians set out to show that the ferment for abolition lay in the complex ideological contradictions associated with the coming of industrial capitalism. The cult of wage labor, the psychological effects of market capitalism, and the crystallization of revolutionary aspirations provided them with their dominant themes.4 More recent studies tend to center on the mobilization of an abolitionist "culture," rather than on the clash between slavery and wage labor, but the scholars involved in this newer project have not yet offered any alternative timeline nuanced enough to differentiate between ideas, culture, and mass campaign.5 Antislavery, as a set of positions, has been conflated with the particulars of the abolitionist campaign—its "prehistory" relegated, with only a few exceptions, to scattered remarks in dated works.6 |
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