SLAVERY IN THE WEST

We certainly should not glorify slavery, and nor should we celebrate the role of Western countries such as Britain in participating in it. Slavery is an unethical, inhuman, degrading practice. But the West has already paid its penance for its past crimes – and it did so by being the first to push for abolition of slavery.

The roots of abolition go back to the ancient Greeks, who developed the conception of the unity of man, a common brotherhood that bound all human beings regardless of race or creed. Plato put forward the argument that one of mankind's biggest mistakes was to “divide humanity into two”, treating the Greeks as a separate class while “[a]ll other nations, although their number is unknown and they do not intermingle or share any common language, are called by the single term 'barbarian', and because of this one term it is supposed that they constitute a single class.” Aristotle saw mankind as one race, distinguished from other creatures by the power of reason: “[A]ll men by nature desire to know...the human race lives also by art and reasonings.” Cicero, who introduced Greek philosophy to the Romans, wrote:

“This creature which we call man, endowed with foresight and sagacity, complex, intelligent, equipped with memory, full of reason and understanding, has been created by the supreme deity with a certain distinctive status: out of all the species and varieties of living creatures he alone has a share in reason and thought, which is lacking in all the rest...Since therefore nothing is better than reason and reason exists in both man and god, reason is the first bond of unity between them...Therefore the whole universe must be seen as a single joint community of gods and men.”

There was even direct criticism of slavery during the era of the ancient Greeks. Alcidamas, the fourth-century rhetorician and Sophist, condemned the practice: “God has left all men free; nature has made no man a slave.” And although Aristotle is known to have said that some men are by nature slaves, he also recommended that slaves should eventually be emancipated.

Such views continued to be held in the West long after the Greeks, particularly among Christians, who absorbed Greek and Stoic ethics into their theology. Although it condones and never condemns slavery, the Bible also affirms the oneness of man before God: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) This attitude caused Christians to question the morality of slavery even as far back as the so-called Dark Ages. St. Isidore of Seville declared that “God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman.” In 649, Clovis II, king of the Franks, married a slave, who later began a campaign to halt slavery. The Catholic Church now honours her as St. Bathilda. And in the sixteenth century, a Spanish missionary and bishop named Bartolomé de Las Casas was instrumental in enacting a law prohibiting enslavement of the Indians.

These aren't simply the actions and assumptions of a few; they are part of the grand universalist tradition of the West, and have formed our culture, part of who we are as Brits, or Americans, or Europeans. In time, they would form the basis for the abolition of the slave trade.

The pioneering abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson were British. They were supported in their efforts by influential writers such as William Cowper and Laurence Sterne. In America, there was William Lloyd Garrison, and even Abraham Lincoln, both of whom based their opposition to slavery on Biblical principles. Slavery was pronounced to be against the law in Scotland in 1776. English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham called the British colonies where slavery flourished “a disgrace and an outrage on humanity.”

The eighteenth century was the high tide of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but it also gave rise to the principles of freedom, equality and human rights, which were themselves derived from the ancient Greeks and found primarily in the West. Truly one of the greatest things about Western civilisation is its ability to engage in self-criticism: to subject even its most cherished beliefs and institutions to critical analysis and change. It was this willingness for self-criticism that led to the abolition of slavery, not just in the West, but throughout the world.

Tune in tomorrow to read my examination of the Islamic slave trade.