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If we choose to worship God, argued Immanuel Kant, the German philosophe of Königsberg later in the century, ‘we finite creatures can never understand the infinite nature of reality’. Kant summed up the Enlightened spirit in two words: Sapere aude! – Dare to use your own intellect!
The vaunted Enlightenment was actually the intellectual movement of a feverishly interconnected European elite close to a nervous breakdown and identity crisis, still honeycombed with snobbery, bigotry, conspiracy theories and magical hucksterism.
Little Mouse’s infidelities intensified her priggish piety: nude paintings were covered, and her Chastity Commission spied on love affairs, expelled saucy actresses and packed prostitutes into barges to be settled further down the Danube – earning her the mockery of enlightened Europe. Although
It is currently estimated that 6,494,619 slaves were traded across the Atlantic in the period 1701–1800, over half the total of the entire Atlantic slave trade between 1492 and 1866. British ships transported over three million persons between 1618 and 1807, mostly during the eighteenth century.
The French transported over two million between 1625 and 1848. It was a well-tried coercive system, but there was resistance.
Out of 36,000 voyages, there were 500 rebellions. The story of the Dutch slaver Neptunus demonstrates why they so rarely succeeded: on 17 October 1785, off the west African coast, 200 enslaved prisoners were delivered via canoes by African slave traders to Neptunus. The prisoners rebelled and seized the ship, but African slave hunters – paid to recapture escapees – surrounded it, aided by British slave...
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‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt [a fellow slave] shit in his mouth.’ When another slave, Port Royal, ran away, Thistlewood ‘Gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put a gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.’ Thistlewood recorded 3,852 of his own rapes (including gang rapes) of 138 women, many underage, carelessly spreading VD.
Most of the Enlightened luminaries – from Diderot in Paris to Samuel Johnson in London – were horrified by slavery. Voltaire had a mixed record, deploring the institution, regarding Africans as cousins – ‘no one could treat their relative more horribly’ – and in his novel Candide asking, ‘At what price do we eat sugar?’ Yet he regarded Africans as having a different origin to Europeans.[*3] Diderot and Guillaume Thomas Raynal denounced slavery in their Histoire philosophique des deux Indes and approved slave rebellion. Yet the German philosophe Kant opposed any ‘fusing of races’ and in his
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The Atlantic trade was one part of a world of bondage, but its record-keeping allows historians to estimate that in total over four centuries around 12.6 million were enslaved. The Portuguese/Brazilians transported almost half of the 12.6 million; the British a quarter; the French 10 per cent, the Dutch 5 per cent. During the four modern centuries, it is likely that over thirty million people were enslaved: twelve million across the Atlantic, approximately ten million from east Africa across the Indian Ocean, and ten million Turks, Russians, Georgians and Circassians from the Eurasian steppes.
That does not include the Barbary–Moroccan trade in western Europeans nor the several million Serbs and Albanians enslaved by the Ottomans: some of these enslaved children became viziers and valide sultans, but that does not diminish their tragedy. Many Islamic slaves were females who served in households – but domestic service almost always included sexual abuse. It is estimated that the Crimean khans alone enslaved four million. Since there is no paperwork whatsoever for any of these trades, it is likely they are grossly underestimated.
In 1662, the Virginians had ruled that partus sequitur ventrem – if the mother was a slave, the child was.
Martha married a self-made frontier lawyer and slave broker named John Wayles, born in Lancashire, England, who had been brought over as a gentleman’s indentured servant and had gained an estate and wealth – an early version of what would one day be called the American Dream.
It is clear that sexual bondage was always a part of enslavement, whether in pagan Rome, Islamic Istanbul or here in Virginia: sex between owners and slaves was ‘on the terms of the males, beyond the eyes and scrutiny of the outside world…either through rape, using outright or implied force, or, in some cases, when men and women were genuinely attracted to each other’. It is impossible to evaluate such relationships on our terms: ‘enslaved women practically and legally could not refuse consent’ and testimony ‘makes clear the prevalence of rape during slavery’.
Code Noir
At the same moment, these two remarkable Americans, Toussaint and Jefferson, were reading the same books – Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal – and yet dreaming of different versions of freedom.
baronetcy.
Frederick was amazed: ‘What dependence may be placed on human affairs if the veriest trifles can change the fate of empires?
Such are the sports of fortune.’
‘divine i...
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At a vital moment in the American crisis, Britain was run by an alcoholic manic depressive hiding in a dark room who was too unstable to govern but too prestigious to fire.
Uzbekistan.
from our parents no more than animal life, hence there’s not the slightest difference between king, count, bourgeois and peasant.’
‘Don’t you think the pleasures of unstable capricious love affairs don’t even come close to the blessing of true affection?’
America was gone,
frizelating
Their fashions were reported in news-sheets and cartoons, then copied by the middle classes who shopped for drapes, hats, gloves, dresses in new shops that sold accessories manufactured in the factories of Manchester, often by female and child workers paid half what men earned. The middle classes could now afford servants, usually poor women from the countryside. This contrast encouraged a cult of middle-class women who not only did not work, protected by their industrious husbands, but personified frail, idealized virtue.
This intense commercial system offered families undreamed-of opportunities and penalties. The affluent became more restricted by bourgeois convention and the need to earn salaries: men had to work long hours at offices and obey a new sort of master, now known as the ‘boss’ – from the Dutch baas; virtuous middle-class women were confined to work unpaid at home; and the regimented poor, including women and children, toiled in unrelenting factories, often under abusive bosses.
The idea of a Protestant work ethic has been overdone – Catholic France was also sophisticated – but these northern nations had developed the spirit of self-starting motivation, creating a singular European psychology that favoured individualism, self-improvement and a society of trust.
Jefferson, aged forty-four, who had written on how racial intermixture delivered ‘improvement in body and mind’, now started a relationship with Sally, still only fifteen. ‘During that time,’ as their son Madison put it, ‘my mother became Mr Jefferson’s concubine.’ SAINT-GEORGES, DANGEROUS
A Liverpudlian slave ship, the Zong, owned by William Gregson, a mayor of Liverpool and slaving mogul, sailed from Cape Coast Castle, the RAC headquarters (Ghana), with 442 slaves crammed into its hold, double the number for which it was designed. Sixty-two Africans died at sea. When water and supplies ran out with disease rife, the captain, aware that slaves who died onshore could not be claimed on insurance, murdered 142 men and women by throwing them into the sea. Another ten killed themselves. The murders allowed Gregson to declare that the slaves had ‘perished just as a cargo of goods had
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Like all the revolutionaries, they were influenced by Rousseau, whose Du contrat social argued that the people expressed themselves through ‘la volonté générale’ – the general will. ‘The law,’ Lafayette wrote, ‘is the expression of the general will.’ The Assembly passed the Déclaration along with a draft constitution. In Paris, royal authority had almost vanished.
Mozart fell ill. Horribly swollen, he kept scribbling multiple scores. On 5 December 1791, he died. Constanze believed he worked himself to death, that his only fault was ‘too soft a heart’ and not knowing ‘how to handle money’. He was buried according to Joseph’s decrees in a communal grave.
the interpreter of the general will: ‘Legitimately, sovereignty always belongs to the people,’ but a select elite must decide the general will of the people, who ‘want what is good but don’t always see it’.
‘I’m inflexible to oppressors because I’m compassionate toward the oppressed.’
Nationalism, the identification with a bigger community that shared language, fortified by race and history – both often invented and garnished with plangent myths – developed to justify the nation state. If it looked like reason and virtue would remove families from power, that did not happen: dynasties, old and new, shapeshifted easily and adapted to the new dynamics.
feel sincerely those sentiments of sympathy,’ wrote President Washington, ‘for the distresses of suffering brethren [slave masters].’
In May 1796, an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, noticing that milkmaids were immune to smallpox, scraped pus from a milkmaid’s cowpox blister and injected it into a boy, who himself became immune: he called this vaccination, after vacca, cow. As with many advances, the discovery was not recognized by most doctors. It took amateurs and then leaders to deliver the benefits to the public, and that often required decades. In 1801, Jefferson heard about vaccination from a Harvard professor who – astonishingly – had received the vaccine by post across the Atlantic and sent it in a corked vial
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Most politicians struggle to differentiate between their own interests and those of the state, but dictators believe the two are identical.
The congress was the world’s biggest junket, a diplomatic summit, an interminable ball, a social carousel, a feast of gourmandism, a VD-infested super-brothel, attended by Alexander, Wellington, Talleyrand and hundreds of diplomats, spies, bankers, mountebanks and panders, as well as thousands of prostitutes and 18,000 members of the public, with a soundtrack by Beethoven:
She had disapproved of his purges, and may have protected a male baby born of his concubines: he either killed her in a rage or had her killed, like Nero. She was buried as Zulu royalty, sitting up supported by the bodies of sacrificed henchmen, servants and concubines, strangled or buried alive. Killing anyone suspected of disloyalty, Shaka supposedly killed 7,000 people.
Later in a delirium he dreamed of climbing the volcano of Chimborazo, ‘giant of the earth’. On reaching its summit, ‘I fell in a swoon…I felt as if inflamed by strange, supernatural fire. The God of Colombia had taken possession of me. Suddenly Time stood before me…’ ‘I am the father of centuries!’ said the God. ‘Surely, oh Time,’ he replied, ‘the miserable mortal who has climbed this high must perish!’ ‘Hide not the secrets which Heaven has revealed to you! Speak the truth to mankind!’
‘European ambition forced the yoke of slavery on the rest of the world,’ agreed Bolívar, already an abolitionist, ‘and the rest of the world was obliged to answer.’ He never forgot that ‘Pétion is the true liberator.’
El Supremo ruled the nation with barely a minister, observing the stars with astrolabes, studying and sketching botany, smoking his cigar and sucking up the national delicacy, the stimulating yerba mate tea, with a straw.[*4]
But Peru ‘contains two elements that are the bane of every just and free society’, said Bolívar, ‘gold and slaves. The first corrupts all it touches; the second is corrupt in itself.’ He might have been talking about America.
But their toasts to American liberty scarcely concealed the rising tensions between the spirit of continental conquest, Christian mission and the institution of slavery on one hand and the liberal values of American democracy on the other.
Bolívar died with a curse: ‘America’s ungovernable; he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. The country will pass into the hands of an indistinguishable string of tyrants of every colour.’
‘The secret of all great fortunes, when there is no obvious explanation for them,’ wrote Balzac in his Le Père Goriot, defining a rule of modern capitalism, ‘is always some forgotten crime…forgotten because it’s been properly handled.’
‘that no longer believes in anything but money’.
Dahomey, assisted by the notorious ‘viceroy of Ouidah’ and his female army, resisted abolition. One visitor to Ghezo’s palace in the capital Abomey passed ‘three human heads…the blood still oozing’ on each side of the doorway. ‘The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people,’ Ghezo told British envoys. ‘It’s the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.’
Joining as early as eight and banned from sex or marriage (except with the king), the women were trained to endure pain by barefoot tramping over thorns. They wore striped armless tunics and a crocodile-emblazoned cap, and carried daggers, short swords, maces and rifles. They would chant: As blacksmiths forge iron and change its nature, So we change ours! We’re no longer women, we are men.
