Jared Diamond

[Louis XXIV]

Are we talking Spanish colonization? If so, I have to plead ignorance. I've been meaning to write an article about this related to the philosophy of English colonization, but I haven't had the time. Racial components of English colonization while probably employed, were not a major part of it.

Gucumatz, interestingly, even slavery wasn't initially racially justified. That came much later (around the time of John C. Calhoun).

 

[Gucumatz]

Well I wouldn't say racial justification came into play at that late of a date (I'd say a hundred yearsish earlier). But yea as a whole racial justification only became a thing in the Americas once footholds were stronger established.

An interesting comparison if you want to look at Spanish colonization sometime in the future would be to look at early colonization literature of dividing New Spain into 2 republics, a native Republic and a Spanish Republic and then compare it with the complex casta system of later on.

 

[Lord Baal]

delete

 

[Cutlass]

Didn't slavery initially have a religious justification? I know the Portuguese brought Black Africans back to Europe as slaves on the grounds that they were Muslims and therefore deserved it.

Slavery in North America was plain old economics. The Virginia wannabe great planters just didn't have the labor supply they needed. White indentured servants or petty criminals just died off too fast, or walked away and set themselves up as farmers on their own, and they had no real way to stop either from happening. So a boatload of showed up for sale at the docks, and they just thought it was a neato keen idea, and went with it. It worked out better than the alternatives, and so got institutionalized. Religious and racial justifications came later.

 

[Murky]

Didn't slavery initially have a religious justification? I know the Portuguese brought Black Africans back to Europe as slaves on the grounds that they were Muslims and therefore deserved it.

Slavery is older than religion. Some used to say that there is a natural order to world. The strong prey upon weak. Slavery was thought of as a part of that. It wasn't until much later that religion was used as a justification for it.

 

[Traitorfish]

Lord Baal is talking about slavery in the specific context of early modern Europe and its colonies, not as some transhistorical phenomenon. The Catholic Church had basically stamped out slavery in Western Europe by the twelfth century, and when it re-emerged in the 15th century, in Crete and in Andalusia, it was justified on the basis that those enslaved were Muslims, and Muslims enslaved Christians, so it was acceptable to return the favour. This logic only really fell apart in the 17th century, partly because of the de facto Christianisation of slave populations, and partly because the Wars of the Religion lead to Europeans taking each into de facto slavery in huge numbers.

that is too many uses of 'de facto' in one sentence, isn't it?

 

[Louis XXIV]

Pretty much. Interestingly, Muslim conquests actually blazed the trail in this area because Subsaharan Africa wasn't Muslim either. Although I suspect convenience (it was an area that had an active slave trade) was part of it as well.

 

[Cutlass]

Pretty much. Interestingly, Muslim conquests actually blazed the trail in this area because Subsaharan Africa wasn't Muslim either. Although I suspect convenience (it was an area that had an active slave trade) was part of it as well.

It had an active slave trade, and it was proximate to the trade winds and the destinations. So from the slave trader's point of view, West Africa was about as good as it would get.

It was even somewhat to the benefit of the traders that so many of the slaves they sold were soldiers. Because those men then made poor slaves, and particularly in Central and South America, were fairly successful in running away. Which generated demand for even more slaves.

 

[Mouthwash]

Slavery is older than religion. Some used to say that there is a natural order to world. The strong prey upon weak. Slavery was thought of as a part of that. It wasn't until much later that religion was used as a justification for it.

Didn't Aristotle come up with that? Or was he just repeating the same old justifications they had in ancient times?

 

[Murky]

Didn't Aristotle come up with that? Or was he just repeating the same old justifications they had in ancient times?

He had some statements to that effect. I'm not sure if it it orginated with him. His philosophical take on it may just have been born out of cultural influences.

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?

There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/distance_arc/las_casas/Aristotle-slavery.html

 

[Mouthwash]

SMH

 

[GoodGame]

Slavery is older than religion. Some used to say that there is a natural order to world. The strong prey upon weak. Slavery was thought of as a part of that. It wasn't until much later that religion was used as a justification for it.

Sounds like something attributed to Socrates.

 

[Murky]

Nobody's perfect.

Edit:

Sounds like something attributed to Socrates.

From what I understand from my brief study of ancient history/philosophy was that some of the Greek philosophers thought slavery natural and others thought it wasn't. Plato and Aristotle both wrote that slavery was natural.

 

[Mouthwash]

From what I understand from my brief study of ancient history/philosophy was that some of the Greek philosophers thought slavery natural and others thought it wasn't. Plato and Aristotle both wrote that slavery was natural.

I actually could understand such a position from a political or economic point of view. Slavery really was much more "natural" than liberalism. 2,000 years later, we have the institutions, society, and technology to put an end to such a need for human labor, but it was probably essential in ancient times. I don't think such a thing could ever be justified on a personal level, but was there a culture back then without slavery at all?

 

[Dachs]

Didn't Aristotle come up with that? Or was he just repeating the same old justifications they had in ancient times?

It's from the Melian Dialogue, a conversation made up by Thoukydides for his History of the Peloponnesian War. As Thoukydides related the story, the Athenians besieged the city of neutral Melos, demanding that the Melians render tribute and to all intents and purposes join the Delian League. The Melians protested that they wanted to stay out of the war as was their right as an independent city, whereupon the Athenian commanders (Kleomedes Lykomedou and Tisias Tisimachou) replied,

"You know as well as we do that 'right', as the world goes, is only a question between equals in power - while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."

Unfortunately, this Melian dialogue is not an accurate depiction of events. It almost certainly never occurred (most speeches in classical histories were made up). And even then, the scene Thoukydides set was not accurate. Melos was not a neutral power; it was a Spartan colony and had been aiding Sparta at various times during the war. Now the chickens, as they were, were coming home to roost.

Nevertheless, the Melian dialogue has been taken as being representative of contemporary political thought. The so-called Realist school of international relations in particular has taken it up as a sort of hallmark quote for describing what it is all about: that the primary factor in politics is power relationships between states, with other concerns being secondary.

 

[Lord Baal]

delete

 

[Traitorfish]

Aristotle's argument for slavery was mostly about reason, not strength. He argued that certain populations were incapable of proper reason and required somebody more "rational" (more Greek, in practice) to exercise it for them, creating not only a right but a sort of duty among "rational" populations to enslave the irrational. For their own good, ken?

(Ironically, Aristotle would have regarded a lot of the people involved in the Atlantic slave trade, who were by the 18th century mostly Dutch, Scots and English, as falling under the heading of "naturally slave-y".)

As Lord Baal says, slavers didn't tend to appeal to realist theories of authority, because realism and racism don't tend to fit together very well unless you construct some Hitlerian theory of race war, which really wasn't what the slavers were interested in. Their preference was for corporate theories of slavery, which justified the institution in terms of a benevolent relationship between the master and slave, and between the plantation and society at large. Even the most nakedly bigoted of them would merely assert that the African was possessed of no rights and therefore it didn't matter what was done to them; it would be far too dangerous to suggest that, if their positions were reversed, the African would be within his rights treat the European in the same way.

 

[Louis XXIV]

From what I understand from my brief study of ancient history/philosophy was that some of the Greek philosophers thought slavery natural and others thought it wasn't. Plato and Aristotle both wrote that slavery was natural.

I took Plato's Republic's discussion of slavery to actually be an argument against slavery. First, he suggests that the Republic couldn't enslave other Greeks and then, later, seems to expand that argument to include all slavery. I could be wrong, though.

 

[Flying Pig]

A lot of ancient authors thought that slavery was wrong, but also that it was necessary. This was also the prevailing attitude in the Old South, where it was euphemistically known as 'our peculiar institution', until people like Calhoun came along and defensively argued that it was a positive good.

 

[Pangur Bán]

To be honest, as a historian myself who's read Diamond's work, I find the attacks on it pretty unconvincing. He gives a history of humans in their ecological system, and his basic conclusions are undeniable. He does not deny agency just argues that individual actions count for less and less the bigger the period considered -- actually says that--which only a person completely illiterate in statistics would have any problem with. Unfortunately many of the objections to Diamond are rooted in ignorance of many of the basic premises and insights provided by biological and social sciences.

Unfortunately, the modern media are bombarded with countless pieces of pseudo-scientific bs historical theorizing by narrowly trained scientists ignorant of many historiographic and anthropological practice-based insights. Those guys tend to make historians who've not read Diamond think he's one of those guys and therefore another bs-er.