15 - Cycles Actual and Counterfactual
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
Summary
During the past five centuries, slavery helped to transform the world while the world transformed slavery. When Europeans launched their seafaring explorations in the mid-fifteenth century, slavery existed in highly stratified societies on every continent. Most of its variants were separated from each other by great geographic and cultural differences. The two great landmasses of the earth, separated by oceans, were largely sealed off from large-scale exchanges with each other. The earliest reports of intercontinental travelers between them only reinforced the notion that there were large groups everywhere living in conditions of extreme vulnerability and domination. As late as the end of the eighteenth century, European geographers unfailingly identified people as enslaved in every great subdivision of the planet. Their enslavement flowed from varying proportions of war and captivity, birth, destitution, and criminal punishment. The institution's rationale also lay in this sense of universality.
By the late fifteenth century, some northwestern Europeans persistently noted the absence of such an institution in their own small corner of the earth. They identified this situation as an exceptional phenomenon, without immediate implications for the institution of slavery beyond their own realms. Individuals wandering outside of their zone of security understood all too well that they, too, were vulnerable to enslavement. Their own society's “freedom principle” appeared to be the result of a process rarely marked by great upheavals. Their peculiar “revolution” remained in the words of Adam Smith, “one of the most obscure points in modern history.”
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- AbolitionA History of Slavery and Antislavery, pp. 457 - 462Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009