Slave economies

Abstract

Early modern French commentators saw slavery as a practice that was ubiquitous throughout the world, even threatening in its Islamic forms, and that was intimately associated with captivity. A further strand in creating the condition of the slave was made up of discourses of human difference. The site of the difference was very mobile; while there are hints of early proto-racial thinking at the turn of the eighteenth century, religion was one of various strands through which belonging and difference was conceptualised. Contrary to recent criticism, this chapter shows that representations of African slavery were based on ambiguous legal, commercial and societal foundations. Slavery was also justified by early capitalist rationale testifying to European confidence in production. Amerindian slavery was thought non-commercial and honour-based, and fascinated in depictions of the consumption of human beings. French accounts of the Caribbean slave economy illustrate the key strands of what the proprietorship of African slaves meant. The enslavement of baptised Africans was viewed with some diversity by ecclesiastics, with some questioning the principle of slavery, and some actively condoning it. Baptism was a powerful sacrament which implied levels of temporal belonging, but the coexistence of secular and spiritual planes could be complex or uneasy.