Refiguring Slavery Through International Law: The 1926 Slavery Convention, the ‘Native Labor Code’ and Racial Capitalism

Abstract

This article charts the refiguration of slavery through international law, the concatenations of slavery, colonialism and their afterlives in the present, and what these might tell us about racial capitalism and international economic law. Drawing on the Black Radical Tradition, it shows how slavery was refigured in two distinct but related respects. First, from the late nineteenth century onwards, international lawyers ‘refigured’ slavery historically, such that ‘antislavery’ became a defining attribute of ‘progressive’, ‘white’, ‘civilization’, and set about building the international legal architecture to confirm this fabrication; culminating in the Slavery Convention (1926) and the League of Nations’ ‘antislavery’ machinery. As a result, as a matter of ‘history’ and international law, the ‘recrudescence’ of slavery could only take place in Africa, and in particular in the two African states not yet under white rule—Liberia and Ethiopia—which laid the basis for the violent interventions in these Black Republics by Italy and the League in the interwar period. Second, the Slavery Convention and the International Labor Organization’s ‘native labor code’—through the figure of the ‘Black Worker’—refigured the afterlives of slavery and colonialism as acceptable, ‘civilizing’ (forced) labor, provided it was under white management. The article ends by showing how white supremacy and Black subordination were refigured, materially and symbolically—at both the international and individual level—through the ‘fabulation of debt’, literal and moral; and, in turn, surfaces slavery and colonialism’s entwined afterlives in the racial capitalist present, including through interntational (economic) law.