Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

Musings on Slavery

A while back I received an email from someone asking if it was possible to imagine a POD that would remove slavery from the New World. I considered the possibilities and, as I was bored, decided to write up the musings into this short essay.

The first problem is that slavery fitted too well into the ancient world. It was ideal for short, labour-intensive, projects that required no real skill. The various societies came to grips with it in different ways; the Romans, for example, allowed a slave to buy himself free and gave those free slaves full civil rights. Christianity and Islam both dictated the humane treatment of slaves and promoted freeing slaves. Islam, for example, forbade enslaving Muslims, although, being a cynic, I suspect that that commandment was honoured more in the breach than the observance.

Removing slavery from history all together is probably impossible. However, it might be possible to prevent slavery from coming to America. (Spanish and American slavery, that is, the Aztecs and Incas also kept slaves.) One possibility concerns disease. There are two ways to take that:

The first is greater Indian (native Americans) resistance to disease. If that were to be strengthened somehow, the main Spanish incentive to bring in slaves (lack of a workforce due to disease deaths) would be reduced. However, that has other implications. Cortes defeated the Aztecs because of a smallpox epidemic – take that away and Cortes has to beat them without that advantage. If we assume that the Spanish manage to bring in an army that can beat them without massive casualties, the natives will have a vastly strengthened role in the development of New Spain. A successful revolt then becomes more possible. These are interesting PODs, but not entirely valid. It does not abolish slavery, but merely transferees it on to people who may be more capable of overthrowing their enslavers.

The second is to assume that there’s a disease in the main southwestern part of Africa that’s quickly and massively fatal to people who’ve not been exposed at birth. Ebola or some near relative might fit the bill. That disease has a very high fatality record, combined with being non-air transferable. That prevents epidemics from hitting either the Middle East or Europe. There won’t be many obvious changes at first; A few Muslim missionaries will be killed if they venture below the Sahara, but many of the slaves came from the North of Africa, so that part of history will continue unabated. Islam won’t spread as far south as it did in OTL, but neither will Christianity. As Islam was focused on the west at that point, I suspect no one in the Islamic World will know what happened to them.

What will change is when the demand for slaves hits fever pitch (pun not intended), the Dutch, Spanish, French and British will go looking for new slave ports in the south-western part of Africa. Ebola takes about three weeks to incubate, so the European ship will have time to load up, depart from Africa, set course for the New World – and everyone on board is killed. The slaves, who, one assumes, won’t know how to sail the ship, will probably die when supplies run out, as will any Europeans lucky enough to survive the disease. The ship is absent without trace, even if the vessel itself is discovered, the disease may not survive without human hosts. If it can, then another ship will be lost, but significant damage will not be done. Ebola is not a perfect biological weapon as it’s too lethal to spread far, particularly in the 16^th century.

The most likely outcome is that someone figures out what’s happening (perhaps after finding a wreaked ship) and warns the world not to have any contact with Lower Africa. They might see it as divine punishment for slavers, but as the Dutch colonists of South Africa (assuming that happens here) have also been wiped out, they may not notice that. The absence of large numbers of African slaves probably means that they’ll find others to enslave, perhaps by transporting criminals or immigrants from Europe. That, however, would make slavery far more fragile as the slaves could blend in with the local population.

A final way, not to remove slavery, but to abolish it earlier, would be to delay the invention of the cotton gin. The cotton gin transformed – and therefore saved - the cotton-growing industry because it vastly increased the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day. This made the widespread raising of cotton profitable in the American South, and therefore greatly increased the demand for slave labour. After the American Revolution, there was a widespread sweep of abolishments of slavery, so if the cotton gin was delayed or never invented, slavery might have declined so far that it would be unrecoverable. We’ll never know for sure, but many blacks did well as freeman in America, so absent slavery and they might do better. Certainly, it would be a lot harder to fight the USCW if the only slave states were the deep southern states.

There are a few other possibilities. What if Napoleon’s promise to free the slaves on Haiti was honoured? The black ex-slaves would become very loyal to France and might well lead to slave rebellions in the US. It’s not hard to imagine the US invading Haiti to prevent this ‘sedition’ from infecting ‘their’ slaves – or for the South to demand a private invasion, therefore involving the US in a very messy version of the Napoleonic Wars. A variant on this theme would be an early British conquest of Haiti and the Spanish territories (Cuba, et al) and their incorporation into the British Empire as a ‘black republic’. When (if) the British ban slavery, the blacks could end up running the islands and therefore promote freedom for their enslaved brethren.

I invite comments and discussion. Slavery is such a vast and sensitive part of history that removing or altering it seems very difficult, but perhaps it can be done.

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