'Nother Solent

After this I really am signing off.

But this you had to see: Squander Two and Andy have some sewing news.

See you in two weeks.

The economics of slavery.

PJ's email, which I reproduce below, is, I think, deliberately provocative but makes some good points. PJ writes:

"Maybe a little late in coming in on the end of slavery issue but:

"Think economics. Unless you're getting your slaves free as a by-product of war you either have to buy your slaves or breed them. Slaves are perishable goods and attract either considerable costs in transporting them to market or an acceptance that a high proportion will succumb on the journey and the survivors will be in poor condition.

"Breeding slaves, likewise, carries considerable overheads. Humans have small litters (ie usually1) after a relatively long gestation period followed by a lengthy maturation. In effect they don't reproduce much faster than the slaveholders. Nobody is going to get rich breeding slaves although a family might if the economics remained stable over a multi-generational timescale.

"All in all then, a strong slave is a considerable investment. And a considerable financial burden because slaves have to be fed, quartered and constrained irrespective of their productivity. If there's a slackening in demand for whatever they're being used for -say sugar or cotton production- the overheads don't go away. The slaves have to be looked after all the same. Selling's difficult because they'd be selling into a depressed market and if they're simply slaughtered then a replacement workforce is a couple of generations away. Slaves just can't compete with hired labour in anything else but a totally static economy. Hired labour requires no initial outlay, breeds itself, needs no guards and if no longer required, can be fired.

"Incidentally, don't confuse slaves with serfs. Serfdom was a response to the anarchy following the collapse of the Roman Empire and the serfs got as much out of it as the lords did. That's why so many freemen became serfs voluntarily. What's the point in raising crops and herds if the mob up the road can just come and take them away from you whenever they feel like it? Better to put yourself under the protection of the local hardman who'll keep them off of your back for a share of the produce. The going rate was about two fifths which, when you think of it, was a bit less than our government takes off of us in taxes.

"And what ended serfdom? Money. Feudal Europe had essentially no money supply and that produced some really weird economics. The local lord might have the income from all his lands but that income was made up of boon labour and crops and hides. Consume it or lose it. You get anomalies like the rent on an entire farm being 30 shillings per annum yet a meat pie in the town costing 3 pence. (1/120 if you've forgotten how pre-decimal coinage worked.) Enter capitalism and repeat last line of preceeding paragraph.

"Just one more shot at slavery. Slavery as the humanitarian alternative.

"If you're a community of people living an agricultural subsistance lifestyle things are damned precarious. Every year you get in just enough crops to carry you through to the next harvest. Now let's say you have a dispute with the bunch the other side of river. You have yourself a little war and by luck you win it. Now you've got yourself a bunch of prisoners and wounded. What do you do with them? You can't just let them go or they'll come back next year and do it all over again. You've got enough problems feeding yourselves, bearing in mind that you lost some of your workforce in the battle, so you can't just keep them penned up under guard. Best thing is to kill them and just to make sure of things you nip across the river and slit the throats of their women and children who'll be starving to death soon anyway. Tidiness is a virtue.

"There is an alternative. You make some fetters and you put them on the prisoners and their families and you put them to work. Now you've got enough labour to farm their lands as well as yours and even have a little surplus left over. So you get time to invent the wheel and writing.

"Oh and civilisation whilst you're about it. Return to start."

It's true that the Romans considered themselves enlightened because they enslaved their defeated enemies, rather than sacrifice them in the sacred groves as Arminius did to the legions of Varus.

But civilisation a result of slavery? Hmmm. I don't like that idea, but ... Discuss it among yourselves. I won't be blogging for the next couple of weeks.

Of some relevance to our current debate

is the recent vote by the Church of England to apologise for the slave trade.

I can see why the Church of England ought to apologise for slavekeeping on the part of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which I take from the context to have been an Anglican society. The article says:

The organisation owned the Codrington Plantation in Barbados, where slaves had the word "society" branded on their backs with a red-hot iron..."

The irony of a society obstensibly dedicated to spreading a gospel of "love thy neighbour" burning and mutilating its captives jars and should jar.

But the entire slave trade? Plenty of Anglicans were involved, it is true. Although there were also Anglicans who fought for its abolition, Nonconformists were more prominent in the abolitionist movement.

If it were the case that modern Anglicans tended towards complacency or denial about the evils of the slavery, then an apology would be a good thing. They don't, though. I haven't read a full account of this conference, so I might be wrong, but this is looking worryingly like just another example of Anglicans compulsively apologising for everything. Like, really everything. Dr Williams says:

"The body of Christ is not just a body that exists at any one time, it exists across history and we therefore share the shame and the sinfulness of our predecessors and part of what we can do, with them and for them in the body of Christ, is prayer for acknowledgement of the failure that is part of us not just of some distant 'them'."

I've met the idea before now that your sin "helps drive the nails into the body of Christ." More Catholic than Anglican, I'd have thought, and unfashionably intense - not that that has any bearing on whether it is true. But Dr Williams seems to be saying that your sin is shared by other people. Is this a carefully thought out doctrinal pronouncement on original sin, the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons, or some other issue that theologians debate - or is he just winging it? Could be either. The Archbishop is a genuinely clever and good man [UPDATE: now I've said that nice bit, don't start me on this because when I grind my teeth it gives me earache] who does not always think before he speaks.

[ADDED LATER: Since first pressing "publish" I have made several changes to the wording of this post to accomodate the fact that the more I thought about what the archbishop said, the more confused I got. The conference has focused on us inheriting the "the sinfulness of our predecessors" but the first part of the archbishop's forumulation does not privilege either direction of time. Our predecessors could equally well inherit our sin. Or could they? God outside time, I can go with that, but human action - including sin and repentance - does privilege later time over earlier time. As I said, I wish I knew whether what he said was at all thought out.]

Deep waters, Watson. I do hope it's clear that if we are to have this cross-temporal sharing of sin it must be universal. Otherwise it is going to pan out that the whites inherit the sins of all whites, which means the blacks inherit the sins of all blacks, and we're halfway back towards slavery being justified by the curse that Noah laid upon the descendants of Ham. I'm not happy about this focus on descendants. One has a feeling that the next step might be to start talking in terms of "bloodlines".

The debate heard from descendants of the slave trade including the Rev Nezlin Sterling, of Ealing, west London, who represents black churches. She told the synod that commemorations of the 200th anniversary would revive "painful issues and memories" for descendants.

No one now living remembers the enslavement of Africans by Europeans. Memories cannot be inherited.

How do you keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?

JEM writes:

"The deeper one look into this matter of the death of slavery, the more one sees that the reasons are complex, but nevertheless relate most clearly to matters of social change and economics rather than morality.

"And your readers have certainly presented some interesting new suggestions:

"(1) I don't like to do down my old sparring partner Jerry Pournelle, but horse collars? Well perhaps, but... It sounds good, except that when you stop to look you find they were invented in China about 100 BC without noticeable improvement in the conditions of slaves/serfs there, and had become pretty much universal in Europe by about the 8th century, which is far too soon to have ended slavery.

"What they DID do was make the proper agricultural development of what is now Germany possible, a task beyond Roman agricultural technology quite apart from their legions not being made welcome by the locals, as Publius Quinctilius Varus and the three legions he commanded found out the hard way at the Teutoburgerwaldschlacht (Battle of Teutoburg Forest) in 9 AD. Years later, Caesar Augustus would still call out in his sleep, "Quintili Vare, legiones redde!" ("Quinctilius Varus, bring back my legions!") Sorry; I digress.

"(2) General Sherman and the Royal Navy? They certainly had a lot to do with defeating the Confederacy, but that is not what we are discussing here. The US Civil War was part of the dying process of slavery, not the cause of it being doomed. The war may have speeded the end of slavery in the United States, but it would have happened eventually in any case. It, and Sherman, and the RN, were an effect and not a cause.

"And the story of the cotton mill is exactly in line with what I had said earlier; that in the first instance the industrial revolution may have lead to a temporary rise in the numbers of slaves, but in the end it did the opposite.

"(3) The Little Ice Age? This is more plausible. In fact it's very plausible; indeed I wish I'd thought of it first!

"Just a couple of caveats: I don't think the Little Ice Age came upon the world quite as suddenly as all that, although it did happen at the right time, and quickly. (So much for the contention that climate change today is too fast or too big to be natural; this 14th century climatic event was much faster, a greater change, and 100% natural.) And then, I don't quite see what the self-serving eating propensities of the New World had to do with the demise of Medieval European slavery/serfdom.

"So, on with the Black Death.

"First, a slight time-line adjustment, folks. On deeper investigation, it seems that in western Europe at least, the Black Death and the rise of modern banking and capitalism both came alone at about the same time, during the 14th century. Simultaneously England and France, the two nations worst-affected by the Black Death, (as I understand it: NOT the least, as ARC says) were engaged in the Hundred Years War at a time when the whole overpopulated region was in deep economic depression. What's more, government (to use the term loosely) restrictions on the export of basic foodstuffs like grain in response to the plague added famine to the rest of the depredations visited upon the population. (Here the official response was counter-productive in a manner not unlike the reactions of governments to the Wall Street Crash, which greatly deepened the subsequent Depression.) In the case of England, for example, it's known that at least half -- perhaps up to 60% -- of the population was wiped out by the Black Death alone. And now add in the Little Ice Age....

"All in all, not a fun time to be around. Yet in the end, and out of all this suffering, more hopeful developments emerged.

"The power of the Roman Catholic Church was greatly weakened, leading in the short term to anti-Jewish pogroms and attacks on unfortunates such as lepers accused of causing the plague, but in due course to the Renaissance (partly) and the Reformation.

"The feudal system collapsed. The Peasant's Revolt and similar unrest elsewhere in Europe were symptomatic of these problems, but in the end, at least in England, it was collapsing land prices and the soaring cost of labour that did the system in; it become just too expensive to keep people in serfdom. They could basically just walk away... "How do you keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"

"Meanwhile, in eastern Europe, the Black Death was not so severe, there was no current economic depression, and the powers-that-be increased the heavy hand of suppression upon the serfs. Indeed it took until the late 19th century for serfdom to be abolished in Russia, and many believe this different history had a lot to do with the relative backwardness of the region.

"In China, the Middle East, etc., the reaction seems to have been broadly similar to eastern Europe.

"So I suggest that a unique conjunction of events, especially in north-western Europe, brought about a different reaction to the Black Death from that experience elsewhere. Perhaps we should say the Black Death was the catalyst for changes that were possibly coming anyway for other reasons, as described above? Who knows?

"But whatever the cause, it clearly was nothing to do with an outbreak of moral rectitude. I think the evidence is that the asserted moral basis of the change, and even more of that around the Industrial Revolution are fine examples of non causa pro causa, a common logical fallacy defying the principle of causality. Understandable in these instances from their perspective, but false.

"Yet none of this should be taken to be a disparagement of morality, or moralist, or religion. It's just that they tend to be the followers of historical-moral events, not the leaders -- subject to fashion, like most of humanity*. Nor should it be seen to be in any way a moral defence of slavery. Certainly not; that is indefensible. But until James Watt's inspirational game of golf on Glasgow Green in 1765 it was economically inevitable. There will always be enough people out there who put profit before principle. - JEM."

JEM adds as a footnote:

*There's a wonderful future theme, Natalie : The impact of fashion on religion and morality in history.

Slavery killed slavery.

Luke Lea writes:

"I know this may not make sense, but servitude killed servitude, at least in the West. Nietszche was right when he called Chrisianity a slave morality. But it was also a plan to escape from slavery by doubling the effort. Resist not evil, if a man steals your shoes, give him your shirt also, etc. Machines are of course what make us free because they do the work slaves used to do. But where do machines come from? From capital, which our ancestors quite literally dug out of the ground starting with their bare hands. This stuff -- most of it is stuff -- is the accummulated crime and sacrifice of centuries, plus interest. Or, if you prefer, it is a kind of stored servitude."

The cotton gin helped make slavery pay.

Russ Kuykendall of Hamilton, Ontario (the Burkean Canuck) writes:

"In his History of the American People (pp. 307ff), Paul Johnson spends considerable time dispelling the myth that the Industrial Revolution ended slavery. Johnson points out that Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin -- a key invention of the early Industrial Revolution -- allowed for the processing of much larger quantities of cotton, and increased demand for production of cotton on the big plantations of the deep South in the U.S. This, in turn, led to a much higher demand for slaves on the cotton plantations. When the importation of slaves to the U.S. was banned even before the American civil war, demand was increasingly supplied by the tobacco plantations of Virginia. The "production" of slaves became so lucrative for the Virginia planters that they shifted their efforts to the despicable practice of breeding more and more slaves for the cotton plantations of Georgia, Alabama, and east Texas."

What ended slavery? The horse collar.

Tim Worstall writes:

"Re the earlier dying out of slavery in Europe. Jerry Pournelle (of all people) has pointed to the adoption of the horse collar. Pre such while horses were more productive than oxen and men in farming they ate just as much more. With the collar they were more productive per unit of food consumed as well. Thus horses replaced coerced labour in the fields.

"Not entirely sure that I have enough information to back that all up but that's as I remember it."

Tim's name at the base of the email reminds me that I clean forgot to flag up last Sunday's Britblog roundup, despite the fact that it had my ineffable wisdom in it. Not to mention other people's effable wisdom. Toffee Womble made a very good point about an entirely practical reason for the reluctance of the British press to print those cartoons, but Diamond Geezer ("This rather defeateth the point of the exercise thus far") was funnier.

What ended slavery? General Sherman and the Royal Navy.

A reader writes:

"Here is an awkward fact about slavery I picked up while at the University of Georgia, in Athens. Athens, GA is an old town, and had a fair amount of water-powered industry before the civil war. Howell Cobb, one of the great men of the Confederacy and secession lived there before the Civil War. He was freed up for public service when he inherited a failing plantation, and sent his (money-losing) slaves to work in a textile mill in Athens.

"The mill made tons of money. He bought more slaves, and leased them to the mill owner, a personal and political friend. Only the end of the war put an end to the arrangement. So dark satanic mills and the peculiar institution went together nicely. The university's data processing facility was in one of the old buildings, back in the days of punchcard computing.

"My personal observation--Sherman ended slavery, greatly helped by the Royal Navy, and British emancipation. Otherwise, it might have continued on for decades."

They said it for Nixon.

I say it for Briffa. Four more years! Four more years!

Or was it the Little Ice Age?

John Costello writes:

"If Serfdom in Europe was done away with by the Back Death, then Serfdom in Europe was done away with by the Little Ice Age. [This reads to me as if either "serfdom" or "Europe" in the second half of the sentence is a typo and should be replaced by something else. Nonetheless, John's argument is still quite clear - NS]

"The world's climate from around 200 BC to around 800 AD was similar to the 1950s'. Then came the Medieval Cliamactic Optimum, where the world's temperature rose about 2 degrees C. In the New World this led to the fall of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico -- a high pressure zone kept the rains away, and the city of the gods died in warfare and cannibalism. The survivors moved north out of the Valley of Mexico and settled around Tula or Tollan (and became the Toltecs.) Although one suspects they were munching on each other well before then. In the Old World you Brits were growing grape wines in Northumberland. The architecture of the Medieval Castle came about -- not at all drafty, but rather airy towers. Oh yes, there would have been record harvests in Scandanavia, which caused a flood of Scandanavian tourists --the Vikings. Iceland and Greenland could be settled. In north Africa, the increased temperatures produced another high pressure zone over the Sahara which increased desertification (although the depredations of the Arabs didn't help.)

"Eight weeks after Easter in 1315 all this came to an end. Rain, murrains, famine, and physical exhaustion set the people of Europe up for the Black Death. The world's temperature dropped at least 4 degrees C. Charles II would later ice scate upon the frozen Thames and help found the Hudson's Bay Company because Europeans were freezing and needed furs to keep warm. It stayed cold until well into the 1880s.

"All this is well described in Brian Fagan's _The Little Ice Age._

"However, one must point out certain things. The Aztecs who resettled in the Valley of Mexico practiced human sacrfice, cannibalism, and slavery, and thought nothing at all wrong with it. The same climatic diasters that befell western europe affected Eastern Europe and Central Europe and they came very late to both the end of Serfdom and Capitalism.

"As a former anthropologist I trained in a field devoted to materialistic explanations for human behavior. I find such inadaquate. Ideas are just as real and as hardedged as any sword or cottin 'gin. Most of the time we can look at the diasters they produce -- Naziism and Marxism are two good examples, and I won't attract bombthrowers from the Religion of Peace to your site or by adding several others -- but they can have positive results as well. - John Costello"

"What killed slavery" - the debate so far, and one more from ARC.

I'm going to give this debate until midnight on Wednesday night (that's midnight Greenwich Mean Time), because I'm going away on Friday and I need to pack and stuff. OK?

To recap, as part of the big Science vs Religion debate, my correspondent ARC brought up the nineteenth century campaign against slavery as an example of a good thing motivated by religion. Then what had been a sub-debate took on a life of its own. (That's cool. What blogs are for.) My other correspondent, JEM, replied that the industrial revolution was real cause of slavery's demise. He added more here. Then ARC responded that slavery had already died out once in Christendom before the Industrial Revolution was ever thought of. By this time the Religion vs Science debate was officially over, but JEM took the What Killed Slavery debate one step further by discussing the role of capitalism and the Black Death.

Before I go any further, I'd just like to mention that I suspect that there is considerable overlap between all three* participants concerning the superior desirability and productivity of free markets. (I first got to read Milton Friedman's Free to Choose by borrowing ARC's copy some time in the mid-1980s.) I also suspect that there is less difference between ARC and JEM as to the order of events than they seem to perceive; I think they are talking at cross-purposes in a way that it would take too long to describe exactly. Can we all broadly agree that, although slavery in most of the world continued as it always had, strict slavery died out in Britain by the time of the Plantagenets, and serfdom was gone by the start of the Tudors, before (alas) restarting again once the enslavement of Africans became practical?

ARC apologised for giving his reply in a slightly bald bullet-point style. Then he said,

"- That slavery existed in areas not in significant contact with 1500s England is not relevant to my point.

"- Though one would not wish to be either, serfdom _is_ significantly different from slavery, but that's also irrelevant, mid-millenium England having eliminated both.)

"- Re the new argument: true, the black death had a great impact on the death of serfdom. However it was not worse in these islands than elsewhere - rather the reverse. Thus you must explain why it helped the cause of freedom sufficiently in England while leaving that cause in other massively-affected areas still needing more help.

"Suppose you grant that the black death had much to do with the fact that in the UK during the 1700s the idea of a society without slavery was the practical experience of ordinary people, and so left them free to see its existence elsewhere as an anomaly instead of as the norm. They still had the choice of whether to fight it or profit from it. Unless you go far down the path of denying free will in general, the fact that English people discovered (long before the industrial revolution) that a society without slavery was _possible_ does not force them to make a particular choice. It only gives them choices. - ARC."

*John Costello has also contributed. As soon as I do the Annoying Format Thing, you'll see his letter.

Police priorities,

as described by Messrs Photoshop and Drinking from Home.

For those not up to speed with the nuances of modern British police practice, the news stories the picture is referring to are this one and this one.

"The defence of a free society is the defence of its procedures, not its output."

Obviously the reason that I couldn't find the right words to express that thought was that Oliver Kamm had just found them.

I've posted that line as a Samizdata Quote of the Day, but here I will say a little more. Over the last few days I've often found myself wishing that in order to make its original point (the newspaper wished to publicise the way in which the threat of Muslim violence had made a publisher unable to find an illustrator willing to picture Mohammed for a factual book about the Islamic faith), Jyllands Posten had chosen merely to depict Mohammed in a naturalistic style, rather than mock him. How much easier the task of defenders of freedom of speech would be if we could concentrate on defending the right of non-Muslims to breach the Muslim taboo on representations of the prophet Mohammed without having to deal with the question of insult, too.

It seems that the original intention of Jyllands Posten was indeed to simply depict Mohammed. See this Q & A page from the BBC on the affair. I don't know how it ended up with mocking cartoons. One can imagine a junior employee being told to commission some quick pictures, getting his instructions garbled, and, er, starting something. Maybe the Danes sometimes use the word "cartoon" in a way that is closer to its original meaning than we do, and that caused an ambiguity.

[ADDED LATER: A post by Jim Miller reminds me that one of the cartoons was just a straight depiction.]

So I wish the cartoons had just been pictures. But that ain't the way the cookie crumbled. That should be no surprise: cookies tend not to crumble neatly. Over on this Crooked Timber thread I quoted Bernard Levin's clear-headed statement that it is those whose free speech is actually being attacked whose free speech rights must be defended. The Jyllands-Posten cartoonists are the ones in hiding. That is why their cartoons should be on the front page of every newspaper in the Western world.

One urgent reason for doing this is that every new paper that publishes the cartoons reduces the personal risk to the cartoonists and other staff of Jyllands-Posten.

A more fundamental reason is that the dangerous belief is spreading that free speech rights are all very well right up to the moment when you actually use them. When held by the people this belief is nonsensical. When held (or purported to be held) by the governing classes it is nonsensical and repressive. When enemies of freedom see that the governing classes spout this belief (whether sincerely or not) they will use it as a lever to end our liberties.