Hull Lecture: Sidney Smith Lecture in Labour History
June 10, 2010
Free Labour vs. Slave Labour from Antiquity to the 20th Century
In 1776, Adam Smith offered what became the classic critique of slave labor for the next two
centuries. “It appears….“that the expenses to a master of paying wages to a free servant generally cost
less than the upkeep, of a slave.” The “disorders which generally prevail in the economy of the rich”,
naturally spilled over into the management of their slaves. Accordingly, he further concluded: “… from
the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the
end than that performed by slaves.”
Smith’s conclusion echoed through two centuries of intense discussion in which the stakes were
very high, for those who enjoyed the power conferred by the institution of slavery, by those whose
status was defined by it, and by those who sought to restrict or destroy it.
Remarkably, the question of the relative cost, efficiency and profitability of a globally ubiquitous
institution had potentially existed for millennia without eliciting either systematic inquiry or political
challenge. In Aristotle’s rare attempt at an analysis of ancient slavery the only comparison of a slave’s
labor was not to free wage labor but to a hypothetical self-automated machine. If every instrument
could accomplish its own work,…“ the shuttle would not want servants, nor masters slaves.” (Politics,
Book 1, chapter 4, par. 2). As for the discussion of the profitability and efficiency of slavery and other
forms of service in antiquity, Moses Finley had a short answer: antiquity “lacked the tools with which to
make such comparisons, and the rare calculations by ancient writers are simply pathetic in their
incompetence”. Such comparative questions of efficiency, productivity and profitability simply played no
part in discussions of the acquisition of slaves then or for nearly two millennia thereafter.
As for the reason why masters, in Aristotle’s time, chose to buy slaves, a contemporary historian
of antiquity concludes that imported slaves were both cheaper and more dependable than free wage-
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labourers, and it may have been profitable to keep slaves and to hire them out.” The masters of ancient
Rome accumulated vast numbers of slaves in the heart of their empire and went on deriving large
incomes from them for centuries longer than the masters of the early modern Americas. For more than
a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman empire the question of slavery’s generic
superiority or inferiority to other forms of labor never seems to have crossed anyone’s mind.
I Theory – The Free Labor Ideology
Well into the last third of the eighteenth century Adam Smith’s fellow countryman, James
Steuart, regarded slavery’s profitability and efficiency as purely circumstantial. In 1767, his Inquiry into
the Principles of Political Economy offered a theoretical justification both for what he called “industry”
(free labor), and “labor” (slavery). Each form had its appropriate sphere. With slaves a master could
dictate even the motions of his workers, as in Aristotle’s image of the obedient machine. Where men
were free, “every head is at work, and every hand is improving in dexterity.”
This did not, mean that free labor was superior. Everywhere in the world of work, some were
slaves to others and some were slaves to their own wants. In large-scale manufacturing and agriculture
employers could take full advantage of the “simplicity of slavery.” So, where did Steuart identify the
most self-evident proof of slave labor’s superiority? In the West Indies. “Could the sugar islands be
cultivated to any advantage by hired labor?” he asked.
For Steuart, the real limit on an employer’s access to the full potential benefits of slave labor,
even in Europe, was not determined by economic criteria but by the “spirit of the times.” Where
Europeans allowed slavery, as in the sugar islands, the slave trade reinforced the Caribbean
slaveholders’ intrinsic advantage. There, a planters’ ability to purchase fresh laborers from Africa gave
them an additional edge: “If the expenses of rearing children were not great,” he asked, “would slaves
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ever be imported? Certainly not.’” So, as long as Africa remained what Steuart called the “warren” or
“nursery” of New World labor, planters could shift some of the costs of reproduction and the risks of
high child mortality from Caribbean plantations to African villages.
So, writing less than a decade before Adam Smith, this British political economist serenely
concluded that New World bondage had been “very luckily, if not politically,” established to promote
the economic well-being of the imperial metropolis. Indeed, since slavery discouraged “invention,” if any
of Europe’s colonies began to compete with the industries of the European mother country, the
metropole only needed to allow the unrestricted introduction of slaves. Its “natural effect” would be to
undercut the competitive economic development of complex industries. In the Americas, where both
forms were permitted, the nature of production and reproduction alone determined the choice
between “slavish” and “industrial” labor. And, in the New World tropics slavery had achieved a
preponderance greater than anywhere else in human history.
Prior to the emergence of abolitionism, geographical economic and climatic distinctions
therefore helped some economists to rationalize the use of coerced labor abroad. Within the British
metropolis, on the other hand, the inferiority of servile labor was a truism long before the emergence of
either abolitionism or classical economics. Everyday experience in England substantiated a perception
that noncontractual, coerced labor was a woefully inefficient way to get work done. For a century
before the 1780s, local social experiments in using coerced labor had been launched under the auspices
of the English Poor Laws. Poor Law experiments in the early and mid-eighteenth century produced
“work-houses” in at least a third of all English parishes. The economic limits of the system soon became
very clear. Coerced labor could not simultaneously offer both improved welfare and efficient
production. In such cases coerced labor was clearly less efficient.
When abolitionists suddenly raised the issue of free versus slave labor performance in the 1770s
and 1780s, free labor superiority could be espoused as an experimental truth: “The fruitlessness of
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compulsive labor” wrote one London newspaper correspondent in the mid-1780s, was proved every
day, “in every workhouse in the kingdom. There is in proof too, in the felons on the hulks, who produce
not a fourth part of the ballast which is raised in adjoining barges, where men are working on their own
account.” Editorials and newspaper letters continued to echo this conclusion through a century of
discussions about British Poor Law and penitentiary systems at home and convict transportation
systems overseas.
Arthur Young, the famous agricultural improver, joined the chorus of those who found
compulsory “personal service” throughout Europe to be cruel, absurd, and counterproductive. Its “last
remnant in England,” he observed, six days of highway repair duty, was “done so miserably” and with so
much time lost that a private man with a work team could do the job for one-tenth of the cost of “parish
work.” Looking eastward, beyond the Channel, Young was still more scornful. He described the
demoralization and outright waste caused by the even greater use of wageless work (corvées) in France
and in western Germany: “We may guess what would be the countenance of an English farmer if his
landlord demanded all his teams in the middle of feed time.” Further east, the “absolute slavery” of
serfdom in Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Russia, was worse still. The result could only be a “very
miserable agriculture…with all the oppression and cruelty arising from the spirit of slavery.” Yet, when
looking westward Arthur Young’s attitude toward slavery also shifted by 180°. In 1772 he advised his
fellow Britons to expand their transatlantic tropical slave populations with all deliberate speed.
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations dramatically challenged the prevailing acceptance of the
inferiority of bondage at home and superiority overseas. Recall his famous pronouncement: “the
experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it
appears to cost only their maintenance, is, in the end, the dearest of any.” This was the uncompromising
formulation of what historians subsequently called the “Free Labor Ideology.”
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Such a statement about all nations at all times raises a question. Why did so many who could
employ non-slaves as workers appear to prefer slaves in most of the world for millennia? And why did
Smith himself warn his own students at the University of Glasgow, in the 1760s, that slavery was likely
to continue for an indefinite period to come, if not forever? The Wealth of Nations offered one noneconomic reason: Pride over profit: “The pride of man loves to domineer, nothing mortifies him so much
as to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Where ever the law allows it, he will generally prefer the
service of slaves to that of freemen.” And so, in the New World: “The planting of sugar and tobacco can
afford the expense of slave cultivation.” The legal sanction to buy slaves and the exhorbitancy of the
profits, arising from their protected sales in the metropolitan market, allowed British sugar planters to
use slave labor. (Ibid, 388 note 27).
Smith invoked history as well as nature. Ancient Roman slaveholders, like Pliny and Columella,
who remarked how unprofitable the cultivation of corn became when farms fell under the management
of slaves. To the examples of ancient Rome and modern plantation colonies were added the vast servile
labor regimes of Eastern Europe. All demonstrated the real cheapness of work done by freemen in all
ages and nations.
What most of Smith’s readers overlooked however, were those numerous passages, dispersed
throughout his book, that discounted most of the supposed disadvantages of slave labor, at least in the
staple-producing transoceanic economies. In terms of management, Smith did not classify planters of
the Americas among the aristocratic owners of massive servile agricultural laborers on ancient Roman or
modern Russian estates. He identified New World masters as rational economic managers of cash crop
enterprises. Smith attributed the competitive success of the French sugar islands in particular to their
planters’ excellent management of their slaves. In the French colonies he wrote, “the slave approaches
more to the condition of a free servant”. (Ibid, 587).
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Recall that Smith assigned to the extra “wear and tear” of slavery – the costs of maintainance
and reproduction. Buried in the Wealth of Nations hundreds of pages later, Smith referred to the
climate in the Caribbean as a factor that probably figured in the migration choices of European laborers.
The culture of sugar-cane, he noted “was carried on by negro slaves.” Those born in Europe, “it is
supposed,” could not support the hard labor of digging in the tropics.
Still more important was Smith’s virtual silence on the major trade by which West Indian
planters reduced the “wear and tear” of reproducing their workforce. The Wealth of Nations made no
mention of James Stuart’s reference to the lower costs that slaveowners derived from buying rather
than breeding a workforce in areas of high infant mortality. It was, indeed, demographics not economics
deficits that dominated early abolitionist tracts.
Elsewhere in his book Smith offered another implicit contradiction to his generic theory of slave
labor inferiority. He repeatedly affirmed that, other things being equal, slaves could never equal a
freeman in their motivation to work, or in sharing a master’s motivation to maximize the quality or
quantity of output: “A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as
much and to labour little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his
own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only and not by any interest of his own.”
(Ibid, 387-388, 587; also in Smith Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762-1763), iii, 114, and Ibid, 138).
However, elsewhere in another discussion of agricultural production, Smith directed the
reader’s attention to vineyards. The quality of the fruit of the vine in Europe, he noted, was especially
sensitive to different environments. It was, “more affected by the difference of soils than any other fruit
tree.” (Ibid, 172). Therefore, in vineyards, skilled and careful attention to production was well-worth
“the extraordinary labour bestowed upon their cultivation, and the profits of the extraordinary stock
which puts that labour into motion.” (Ibid, 173). Smith chose two examples to make his point. For the
ancient Romans, as for the modern French, the vineyard was the most valuable part of their farms.
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What Smith did not say in this discussion of vineyards was that in ancient Italy, large-scale viticulture
was located in the same regions as large-scale slavery. Nor, did he mention that this, most highly prized
and care-intensive form of Roman agriculture was “consistently associated with chattel slavery (even
including servi vincti, chained slaves of ill-repute”). Viticulture is a highly “care-intensive” economic
activity. (Walter Schiel, “Slavery in the Greco-Roman World,” in Slave Systems Ancient and Modern
2008), 105-126; quote on p. 109.) And here is the most important point. Smith’s next paragraph, began
“The Sugar colonies possessed by the European nations in the West Indies, may be compared to those
precious vineyards.” (Ibid, 173).
Remarkably, in this discussion of West Indian sugar cultivation, Adam Smith did not so much as
mention the word slave. These were the very colonies, of which “it is commonly said that a sugar planter
expects that the rum and molasses should defray the whole expense of its cultivation, and that his sugar
should be all clear profit…. – all this, not with-standing “the defective administration of justice in those
lands.” With slaves the ancient Romans worked the most valuable parts of their farms, and with slaves
the British overseas planters were working the most valuable parts of their colonies. As with grapes and
sugar, so with tobacco. In the paragraph after sugar Smith turned to the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia
and Maryland and of rice in Carolina. Here, too, as in the vineyards of France, and Roman Italy, laborers
helped to produce profitable, care-intensive products. Slaves were clearly capable of working on laborintensive tasks that required high levels of skill in existing forms of agriculture.
II From Theory to Practice
Such was the theory of comparative performance on the eve of the age of abolition. What then
of practice? As the world entered the age of abolition and revolution the free labor ideology underwent
its first major test. In 1791 Wilberforce’s first motion to abolish the British slave trade was soundly
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defeated in Parliament by a margin of nearly 2 to 1. Two weeks later, the same legislators, by a margin
of 10 to 1, voted to charter a new free-labor colony in Africa. Some voted for the company as a good
opportunity to test the proposition that free labor, given a proper test, would prove more profitable
than slavery. Parliament thus signaled that it was certainly not opposed to the emergence of a
competitive free labor source of tropical staples. This new Sierra Leone colony was funded entirely with
private capital. It was explicitly designed to be an experiment proving that free labor could prosper even
in a continent where slavery was ubiquitous. In other words, if Sierra Leone successfully competed with
New World slave labor it would hasten the transition to free labor on both sides of the Atlantic.
The moment seemed especially good for the founding of the new colony. As its Directors began
to accumulate capital to launch the venture the most massive slave revolt in modern history broke out
across the Atlantic. French Saint Domingue was the greatest single producer of sugar, coffee and cotton
in the World. After the revolt, prices of tropical staples rose to levels not seen for almost a century. Not
only Wilberforce and his abolitionists, but venture capitalists and West Indian planters, rushed to
subscribe. The Sierra Leone venture was so quickly oversubscribed that abolitionists had to take
precautions to see that West Indians did not attempt to obtain a dominant share of the capital.
No wonder that the Company directors felt that a divinely ordained opportunity had just been
offered to them. They reasoned that their colony could easily compete with West Indian planters who
bore the costs and risks of purchasing and transporting abused, debilitated, and demoralized laborers
from the very continent in which the new colony was being founded. The British press brimmed with
hopes for a surge of cotton and sugar from West Africa.
The colony, however, could not rely upon Providence and venture capital alone. It also
depended upon the recruitment of free workers. Again, almost providentially, it was available. Many
African Americans had just gained their freedom under British protection at the end of the American
Revolutionary War. They were now struggling in very harsh conditions in Nova Scotia. Thomas Clarkson’s
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brother, John, was appointed as the colony’s first governor. He traveled to Canada to recruit settlers for
the new-born African colony. The ex-slaves’ response was overwhelming. Thinking that there was ample
acreage available to ensure an independent existence, nearly 1300 free blacks volunteered to move to
Africa.
Unfortunately, they were deceived in the amount of land they had been assured. They were
equally disappointed by the political voice they were denied in the governance of the colony. The Nova
Scotians’ demands for full political participation in a self-governing settlement did not sit well with the
Director’s. The Sierra Leone experiment managed to endure through other initial difficulties, including
internal strife, heavy mortality and a devastating French raid in 1794. The chief complaint of the
governors and directors, however, turned out to be the difficulty of obtaining steady work, either from
voluntary overseas settlers or from native Africans. A decade after its launching, the company’s entire
capital had shrunk by more than 90 percent.
By 1807, on the verge of complete bankruptcy, the Company petitioned the government for the
colony’s transfer to the crown. The directors acknowledged their inability to compete with the slave
traders. Among their arguments for British retention of the colony, economic potential was no longer
mentioned. The Directors’ only hope was that the imminent closing of the slave trade “might relieve the
shortage of a regular supply of labourers,” at that point “far below the demand.” Only a year earlier, the
British government had even contemplated breaking up the colony. Sierra Leone’s situation was
regarded as so dire that negotiations between the Directors and the government were conducted in
secret until after the passage of the Slave Trade Abolition Act. Wilberforce rightly feared that any news
of the impending transfer would be used against abolition. The outcome was a colonial bailout. Sierra
Leone was quietly shifted from the capitalist to the welfare side of the British imperial ledger.
For a whole generation after the abolition of the British slave trade public discourse was filled
with the search for other demonstrations of the success or failure of similar overseas ventures in free or
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freed labor. As one ex-slave economy after another failed to maintain its pre-emancipation level of
tropical staples, it would disappear from the abolitionist arsenal of arguments.
In the French colonies, plantation economies, whether in permanently free Haiti or in
temporarily free Guadeloupe in the 1790s, sugar production had been sustained only at very reduced
levels and often under conditions of penal sanction. In response Abolitionists always reaffirmed
authority of Adam Smith. Still more emphatically they emphasized the welfare impact on liberated
slaves over the fear of any reduction in production. On the eve of British slave emancipation the
movement’s most popular speaker summed up the abolitionist position. If Haitian exports of tropical
produce fell precipitously, what was gained in its stead? “Would Ireland be any worse off,” he asked if
instead of exporting “so much pork, she were to keep it for home consumption?” The audiences always
responded with loud cheering.
From Africa to Asia to North America, the combatants on both sides identified and exhibited
new varieties of freedom or failure like so many specimens in a naturalist’s collection. Yet the
ephemerality of most examples is striking. When the time finally came to debate the crucial question of
British colonial slave emancipation, most early test cases had long been discarded.
In 1833 the British government brought forward a general emancipation Bill. The driving force
was, as it had been for nearly half a century, a new wave of popular mobilizations, each campaign
accruing more petition signatures than its predecessors. New groups entered the fray. Between 1830
and 1833 women became a major segment of the petitioners. Non-conformists increased their role as
organizer and signatories. Overseas, Jamaica with the largest slave revolt in the history of British
imperial slavery, added a threat of further violence to arguments in favor of immediate emancipation.
When the government brought the question of slave liberation before Parliament it was framed
as a carefully controlled venture. The proposed liberation of the empire’s colonial slaves was termed a
“mighty experiment.” It involved the simultaneous emancipation of nearly 800,000 slaves, the largest
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such undertaking yet witnessed in the history of modern overseas empires. It was deemed mighty
because, in the words of its mover, it would potentially affect the welfare of millions of people in a state
of slavery far beyond Britain’s empire.
It was a controlled experiment because it was adopted in a carefully prescribed formula for
transition and compensation. Anxieties about a poor outcome were tempered by a Parliamentary
Committee report that the British metropolitan market was overstocked. Abolitionist Members of
Parliament dismissed all forecasts of reduced post-emancipation production by reiterating Smith’s
affirmation of free labor’s superior productivity. Anti-abolitionist countered by invoking a version of the
backward-bending labor supply curve. If one day’s labor a week would suffice for tropical subsistence,
how well would the bulk of a reduced number of ex-slaves work to produce five times their current
subsistence needs, rather than opting for greater leisure and control over their hours, pace, and place of
labor?
The hopes and fears expressed by both sides were visible in the final provisions of the
Emancipation Act. The clearest evidence that the majority anticipated a potentially high cost to the
slaveowners lay in the provision of a compensation fund of £20 million pounds for the implicit loss of
property. It represented an enormous metropolitan investment in a single overseas policy-equivalent to
three times the annual welfare expenditure of relief for the English poor, and 40% of the British
government’s average annual income.
III The Debate in Britain After Emancipation
In Britain the issue of the superiority of Free labor remained central to the argument over
emancipation after the passage of the law. The experiment’s outcome proved to be far more difficult
than the abolitionists or the legislators had imagined. After the end of their transitional “apprenticeship”
in 1838, colonial sugar production fell by more than one-third. Because British colonial sugar was
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protected in the home market, its price in Britain rose dramatically. This outcome could not have come
at a worse time for metropolitans. Metropolitan abolitionists happily reported rising incomes, increasing
leisure and a rush to education among the newly freed Caribbean slaves. The metropolis itself sank into
what came to be known as “the Hungry Forties.” Domestic sympathy for the free blacks declined. As a
spokesman for the British government put it bluntly, the legislature now had to turn its attention from
the men and brothers overseas to “our white brethren at home.” Fellow citizens abroad were not
entitled to “something more than freedom.”
A debate between formerly allied civil sectors of abolitionism eventually erupted. The first
World Antislavery Conference, held in London in 1840, had still confidently resolved that, by the
operation of the “beautiful law” of free labor superiority, slave labor “always contains within it the seeds
of its own destruction.” (Mighty Experiment, 152). Only three years later the Second (and last), World
Antislavery Conference split deeply over that issue. A resolution reasserting free labor superiority had to
be withdrawn from discussion. The free trade movement displaced antislavery in its ability to mobilize
British petitioners. Their supporters insisted that the superiority of free labor could be convincingly
demonstrated only by open competition with plantation slave economies. They overrode other
abolitionist protests that unfettered competition would allow slave economies to import new numbers
of African captives and impoverish the stagnating economies of the British colonies.
By 1850 yet another group of free traders also attacked the forty-year old British naval
campaign against the transatlantic slave trade. As long as market forces were not allowed to operate in
the slave trade, they reasoned, demand would always find its suppliers. Even many old abolitionist free
traders who had mocked the protectionists for abandoning their earlier faith in free labor superiority,
now swung behind the motion to withdraw the naval patrol. Threatened by a parliamentary vote to end
the patrol just when the trade was again rising to new heights in Brazil. The same Minister who only two
years earlier had predicted that free British sugar would beat out the slave-grown sugars of Brazil and
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Cuba, now reversed himself. He insisted that if the Royal Navy were withdrawn from the African coast
the British West Indies “would be unable to stand under such competition.” He shifted the argument
from economics to national pride and Britain’s religious obligations. Privately, he threatened to resign if
parliament did not retain the naval patrol. “The noble lord resumed his seat amidst great cheering” and
won the vote.
Nevertheless, it was clear that the situation could not be allowed to continue. Faith in the
market was replaced by faith in an armed solution. The British government called on the navy to turn
westward and engage suspected slavers even in Brazilian waters. Brazil quickly prohibited the further
importation of Africans.
Britain’s emancipation experiment failed to convince any of the major imperial governments
much less the slaveholders of any of their plantation societies The French were the first Europeans after
the British to consider ending slavery in their colonies. In 1842 they established a Royal Commission to
consider the best mode of emancipation. The Commission’s deliberations coincided with the moment at
which the downturn in British plantation output was no longer deniable. The Commission discussion
quickly focused on the problem of post-emancipation labor. Most moderate French abolitionists could
not even envision general slave emancipation without enacting simultaneous laws to compensating
planters for an anticipated loss of income, and periods of extended constraint on labor in order to ease
the transition.
Slaveholders in the United States South reacted even more negatively towards the British
experiment than French legislators. John C. Calhoun, one of the South’s leading politicians and
intellectuals, argued that British slave trade abolition and emancipation could be judged by a single set
of data. In which direction did capital flow to the Americas, towards slavery or towards free labor
colonies after 1807? To Calhoun the answer was obvious. In 1844 he even lectured the British Foreign
Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, on the fatal British reliance on the Free Labor Ideology. The British nation had
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wagered that “the labor of the Negroes would be at least as profitable” to planters as slaves had been.
British emancipation, however, had already cost the British people 250 million dollars. They had put at
risk twice that much capital in land and capital improvements. Meanwhile, capital amounting to $4
billions had been invested in slave labor colonies in less than four decades. Calhoun’s memorandum was
circulated throughout the Atlantic world. The shrinking British colonial share of the world’s sugar and
coffee production was inscribed in world trade statistics.
Brazilians and Cubans seemed equally convinced of Calhoun’s general conclusion. Britain’s own
conversion to free trade in 1846 allowed these slave economies to sell their production on equal terms.
Brazil’s planters went into a buying frenzy to acquire slaves before the British navy slammed the door.
Between 1846 and 1850 more Africans were landed in Brazil than during any similar period in the three
centuries of the Luso-Brazilian trade. During the 1850s, when Cuba remained the last buyer of African
slaves that island became the world’s leading producer of sugar, David Eltis reckons that in per capita
income, Cuba was probably among the top half dozen economies in the world. Just north of Cuba, in the
richest society in the New World, two out of every three of the wealthiest Americans lived in the slaveholding south. (Davis, Inhuman Bondage, p. 298).
Throughout the Americas, British, French, Danish, Spanish, Dutch, and Brazilian emancipations
required a fundamental paradigm shift before abolition could occur. Empires and their colonies had to
focus on the primacy of non-economic considerations in considering emancipation. Masters had to be
reimagined as being in breach of the norms of existing modern society. The institution of slavery had to
be re-imagined as an intolerable affront to the march of civilization. As long as slaves were conceived
primarily as unfree agents in the Aristotelian sense - as persons or things subject to the control of other
individuals and their communities - only outside pressures from below or from without could constrict
or bring an end to the institution.
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What did this mean for slavery in the rest of the world? Just as slavery was being brought to an
end in Brazil, Europe was experiencing a new birth of empire in the Old World. As regards slavery the
most significant fact is that the great scramble for the unappropriated parts of Afro-Asia occurred after
the great paradigm shift in Europe away from toleration of slavery.
As European nations extended their sovereignty they inherited lands in which the institution of
slavery had been embedded for millennia. Just a century after the 1780s the empires of colonial slavery
became empires of antislavery. By the Brussels Convention of 1890 a commitment to end the slave
trade and slave trade became a mark of their adherence to the “civilizing mission” and a primary
justification for the exercise of imperial dominion.
What were the implications for the free labor ideology? Recall Adam Smith’s pronouncement
that, in the end, free labor was cheaper than slave labor. It has been frequently affirmed that
European’s carried this credo into the age of the New Imperialism during the generation after the 1880s.
The fact is that all imperializing nations used “in the end” to defer the shift from slavery to free labor
into the indefinite future. Every imperial nation both affirmed and practiced various forms of forced
labor as integral to the civilizing process. Slave raiding was quickly terminated. Slave trading was
confined. Slavery itself was relegated to a lingering death.
During this imagined transition forced labor came to be regarded as a favored means of
mobilizing uncivilized labor while creating the infrastructure of modern economic development.
Workers would thus be weaned from their traditional preferences for indolence and leisure. The
backward bending labor supply curve remained for imperial Europe the curse of the backwardly inclined
stratum of the uncivilized. Other forms of bondage within the institutions of domestic servitude in AfroAsia, would be among the last and least to be abolished. Adam Smith’s conclusion would be
institutionalized. Free labor would be universal “in the end,” but only then, would it be superior.
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In this gradualist perspective the end of slavery’s history seemed assured a century after the
abolition of the Anglo-American slave trades. No one suspected that only one generation later there
would be far more coerced laborers toiling in the heart of Europe than there had ever been in the midnineteenth century New World.
During the decades of the Great Depression and the Second World War slavery reached its
modern numerical peak. In 1944 there were more slaves toiling within the boundaries of the German
Reich than in all of the slave societies of the Americas a century before. Slavery and racial enslavability
were embedded in the heart of Europe itself. Slavery also reached its peak of intensity in German
underground rocket factories. There the Nazi SS enjoyed an abundance of exactly those human
machines described by Aristotle more than 2,000 years before. For labor-intensive tunneling slavery
was the most practical of choices: “hand held drills, hammers and pneumatic shovels.” This was an
underground world of total slavery, where unskilled laborers became raw material to be expended like
fuel. It was world in which management urged its foremen to drive labor to death: “beat them and when
you beat a thousand to death it doesn’t matter, you’ll get a thousand more.” Time, not wealth, was the
supreme value. It was a world in which Albert Speer, head of German national armament, congratulated
the architect of the underground v-2 installation for having transformed “unbroken ground” in two
months, from its raw condition “into a factory which has no equal in Europe and which is unsurpassed
even when measured against American standards….”
Here, lay a new empire’s “miracle weapons”, their vineyards, where their own “grapes of wrath”
were stored. Here, as never before, modern efficiency went hand in hand in hand with modern slavery:
“Apart from the atomic bomb,” concludes an outstanding historian of the Nazi economy, a “nightmarish
tunnel complex in Thuringia produced one of the two most futuristic weapons of World War II”. Here
was the “ultimate factory. In German eyes, the triumph of the “American” logic of the large-scale,
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setting record times in construction, all fueled by “the ruthless, but highly effective application of slave
labour.” (Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction 623-624).
So, I leave you with this thought. Many historians have still not fully absorbed the implications
of the history of twentieth-century coerced labor for the broader history of slavery. Every major New
World transition process from Saint-Domingue to Brazil attempted retain ex-slaves in a condition of
servitude, whether for temporary or indefinite periods. Historians have also tended to place the great
mass coercions in 20th century Eurasia beyond the purview of the histories of other slaveries. But one
common lesson remains. A deep danger lies in the paradigm that moral superiority creates its analogue
in technological superiority; or that technological superiority equals moral superiority. Robert William
Fogel, a noble laureate in economics, rightly concluded, “this beguiling assumption is false, and, when
applied to slavery, insidious.” If the millennial history of slavery teaches us one thing it is that the casual
equation of productivity with superiority is insidious. It is insidious whether applied to labor or to
learning, to history or to science, to slavery or to freedom.
Seymour Drescher,
University of Pittsburgh
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