Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Julia Jorati calls her excellently written Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries an “amuse-bouche,” which aims to “illustrate the importance and sophistication of early modern debates about slavery and race” and hopefully motivates its reader “to investigate these debates more deeply on their own” (50). One of the first things to note about this book, however, is that it is part of a larger hors d’oeuvre as it were. This larger scale project is to analyze the interplay between slavery and Race, which ranges from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Although it was intended as one book (50n100), the results have been published in two separate works, the monograph at hand and Jorati’s Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2024).1 Thus, I fully support Jorati’s recommendation to read these two books alongside one another (49–50). For while the two books can be considered independently of each other, viewing them in isolation does not do justice to Jorati’s overall enterprise and threatens to obscure the reader’s understanding of the exact nature of her contribution to the discussion. This review, then, aims to discuss Jorati’s monograph with the larger scope of her project in mind and also to draw comparisons between these two monographs where necessary.Jorati’s primary aim in this book is to “provide an overview of the philosophical debates about slavery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and America and the role that race plays in these debates” (3). This aim features two terms—“slavery” and “race”—which are potentially contentious in this context: one (“slavery”) because of terminological issues (37–39) and the other (“race”) because of the danger of anachronism (39–45). An important goal of Jorati’s introduction is, thus, to meet these challenges. She begins by showing how “specifically racial forms of slavery became encoded in law in the early modern period” (5) such as the French Code Noir (1685) or the British Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas (1669) (cf. 5–8). Next, Jorati turns to the philosophical backdrop in front of which these legal frameworks were developed, paying particular attention to various forms of justification of slavery, which range from paternalistic to theological/biblical or political/moral. The crucial difference in this context is the one between circumstantial slavery and natural slavery. That is, between slavery that is justified by certain circumstances such as war, or by specific actions of the enslaved individual like crimes, which justify slavery by the idea that the nature of some (groups of) human beings makes it the case that they can be legitimately enslaved (10–16). Given the aim of Jorati’s book, her focus rests on natural slavery and more specifically the notion that there are racial differences that are taken to ground the alleged inferiority of certain groups of human beings (45). Thus, after providing the historical background to how “slavery” was discussed in the period under consideration, Jorati does the same for “race.” She starts out by considering the “Theological Theories of Human Diversity and Racial Slavery” (20–28), and goes on to discuss “Scientific Theories of Race” (28–34) and to show how “Race is an important motif in early modern fiction” (34–36). Informed by this overview, Jorati suggests treating “slavery” and “race” as “cluster concepts” connected by family resemblances in order to navigate the previously mentioned difficulties (38, 46). That is, similarly to her first book (Jorati 2024, 7) Jorati does not work from a definition that would stipulate necessary or sufficient conditions for employing “race” and “slavery” respectively. For this would obscure the many different meanings these terms have in different languages and across different fields of discussion in the period under consideration (37, 40–42). Instead, she provides a paradigm case and then uses the terms “slavery” for “any form of subjection that bears strong family resemblance to the paradigm” (38) focusing on forms of “personal slavery”—i.e., “someone’s enslavement by one or more other private individuals” (39). In a similar fashion, Jorati employs “race” in a way that the focus rests on the notion that there are “natural differences” between groups of human beings, and that these are “at least semi-permanent, or not easily bridgeable, and determined by factors beyond the individual’s control” (47). Put together, this means that Jorati’s focus is on “racial natural slavery” (13, 15, 45). That is, the “racist idea that there are natural differences between White and nonwhite people that justify the enslavement of the latter by the former” and the aim is “to examine the way in which early modern authors [in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] connect race to slavery” (45).While Jorati’s approach can, in my view, meet the terminological challenge, one might still worry that it does too little to address the danger of anachronism. I will return to this point. Yet before doing so, I will chart how Jorati traces the “history” of this “racist idea” (45) across the five chapters of her deeply insightful book.In distinction to Jorati’s Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century, which, with the exception of the first chapter, was geographically organized by distinguishing five debates about slavery and race in North America (chapter 1), Scotland (chapter 2), England (chapter 3), France (chapter 4), and the Netherlands and Germany (chapter 5), this book contains one chapter on sixteenth-century debates on slavery and race, and four thematically arranged chapters on seventeenth-century debates. The first of these chapters focuses on (four) natural law theorists who all emphasize “natural equality and the natural right to liberty in their discussion of slavery” (103). Jorati stresses, however, that she believes Charles Mills was right to point out that these authors, even though they seem to endorse the natural liberty and equality of human beings, did not intend their principles to apply to all human beings.2 Rather, they (implicitly) restricted the scope of their arguments “to Europeans, or white people” (106, cf. also 41–44). In fact, Jorati goes on to show that some of these thinkers, like Francisco Suárez (116), were “attracted to certain aspects of natural slavery” despite their endorsement of a “natural right to liberty and equality” (107). This result is similar to chapter 3’s, in which Jorati discusses the views of the three English theorists Thomas Hobbes (154–72), Algeron Sidney (172–83), and John Locke (183–97). All of these thinkers endorse “universalist sounding principles” (154). But at least in the case of Sidney (183) and Locke (197), these are seemingly not meant “to apply to nonwhite or non-European people” (154). The focus of chapter 4, on the other hand, rests on the notion that there is a natural inequality among human beings, with a particular emphasis on philosophers who “are sympathetic to natural slavery” (198), which are shown not to be exclusively Aristotelian. This is interesting to note given that Aristotle was, at that time, still the most prominent defender of natural slavery (8). Another interesting aspect of this discussion is that some of these thinkers, e.g., Yves de Paris (204–8), only accept natural slavery and reject circumstantial slavery. In the first chapter, Jorati focuses on debates about the “morality” of three types of slavery practiced during the Spanish conquest: the personal slavery of, e.g., Tlaxclan and Mexica people, the introduction of enslaved Black people to the colonies, and political slavery in the form of “forcible subjection of indigenous people to Spanish rule” (53). Importantly, these debates show that the enslavement of Black and indigenous people as well as the transatlantic slave trade has been critically questioned virtually from its inception—see, e.g., the example of Bartolomé de las Casas (80–93). This point is important to convey for Jorati. As she says in the closing of her fifth chapter, dedicated to antislavery texts from the seventeenth century (259–61), “it is simply false that all Europeans in the seventeenth century took the moral permissibility of colonialism and slavery for granted” (312). Thus, Jorati proves in a striking manner that the “children of their time” defense rings hollow because it is just not the case that canonical thinkers like Locke and Leibniz or, later, Berkeley and Kant “could not have known better” in the sense that these institutions were universally accepted. Even within the narrow confinements of their intellectual context, there have been critical voices concerning colonialism and slavery from the get-go.In bringing attention to these voices, Jorati follows Kim Hall’s method of being “strategically anachronistic” (44),3 which she also believes John Harfouch employs (44n91). For as Jorati notes, with respect to the application of the term “race” to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is a “genuine danger” of being anachronistic (40)—a danger that is even greater in this case compared to the eighteenth century (40n82). But similarly to Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Centuries (cf. Jorati 2024, 18–19), Jorati points to the danger from the opposite direction: the obscuring of “important continuities between these early modern ideas and later ideas” (40). From her point of view, there just are “clear examples of racism” such as the attitudes of white slavers that Morgan Godwyn describes (42, 285), and so she does not believe there are good reasons that we should not categorize such examples as racist. In fact, she points out how similar this description sounds to what Ottobah Cugoano or African American authors describe a century or two later (42). Thus, for Jorati, the crucial point of interest is not whether or to what degree an instance of early modern thinking conforms to a particular definition of racism. Rather, she is interested in whether there are “important lines of continuity” to be traced (46)—such as the one to “present-day racism,” which “often appears to include the idea of racial natural subordination, even if this typically no longer takes the form of racial natural slavery” (45). Jorati’s “strategically anachronistic” methodology, then, might be best described as a “high-risk/high-reward” strategy. And the degree to which readers are convinced of its employments will be tied to how convinced they are with respect to the continuities that Jorati manages to uncover. Put differently, the more one is convinced of the systematic-analytic upshot of Jorati’s endeavor, the less one might worry about the historic-contextualist inaccuracy of employing “race,” “racist,” and “racism” to the thinkers and ideas in question. For my part, I was convinced by the upshot that Jorati’s discussion provides, but I am sure that other scholars will disagree and will have good reasons for doing so.Another aspect worth highlighting is that this book manages to alleviate what I previously called the “worry of emotional over-attachment” in my review of Jorati’s Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century. Simply put, the worry was given how difficult and problematic slavery and racism are, our emotional attachment to certain figures may dilute how we discuss them in relation to these issues. I illustrated the point with Jorati’s discussion of Hume, which offered an instance where Jorati’s otherwise excellent presentation made it, in my view, potentially too easy for someone who is emotionally (overly) attached to Hume to take an apologetic stance and to walk away from this chapter saying to themselves “at least Hume was an abolitionist of sorts” (Fasko 2024, 423). This time, however, Jorati discusses canonical thinkers such as Locke and Leibniz in a way that clearly challenges anyone wishing to “exonerate their philosophical heroes” (41) by clearly highlighting genuinely racist aspects of their thoughts. Take, for instance, Jorati’s discussion of Locke where she—following the groundwork of Mills as well as Bernasconi and Mann4—highlights the tension between Locke’s political philosophy (including the rejection of natural slavery) and his personal involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and suggests that the best explanation for this tension is that Locke “held implicit racist attitudes that prevented him from fully seeing, or being bothered by [it]” (185; cf. also 196–97). In a similar fashion, Jorati shows how Leibniz provides an argument against chattel slavery (239–43) but accepts natural inequality, finds natural slavery appealing, and is at best ambiguous when it comes to the question of whether some forms of slavery are permissible (243–58). To put the point more generally, the discussion of canonical thinkers struck me as even more nuanced than the discussion of them in her first book.Another difference between this book and Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century concerns the prevalence of nonwhite voices. In the case of the eighteenth century, Jorati explicitly aimed to “foreground” voices of Black authors “wherever possible” (2024, 6). But in the case of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, this was not possible. As Jorati notes, “one major problem when writing about slavery and race in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is the dearth of texts written by Black and indigenous authors” (50). In distinction to the first book, therefore, this book features mostly white thinkers and their opinions, which is, as Jorati notes, “problematic because their perspectives inevitably shape their argumentation” (50). Crucially, these authors, even if they had firsthand knowledge of the transatlantic slave trade like Morgan Godwyn (289) or Thomas Tyron (300), do not have firsthand experience of racism or the way it affects a person of color.5 Thus, their rather homogeneous positionality is bound to lead to “blind spots” and threatens to render their discussion of slavery or institutions such as the transatlantic slave trade too much into one of a theoretical construct, neglecting the real-life horror and suffering they inflicted. Jorati (1) attempts to counter such tendencies by opening the book with a passage by the formerly enslaved abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, which describes his abduction in his own words because “it is important to keep in mind the colossal misery that transatlantic slavery caused—especially since many of the texts we explore fail to acknowledge it” (2).Given this absence of nonwhite voices, it is fair to wonder, however, whether Jorati’s book would have profited from a more in-depth exploration of the seventeenth-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob after all. Although Yacob did not have firsthand experience of slavery, he is said to have composed a text that provides an argument against the “permissibility of slavery” (27). The passage containing the argument is quoted in full by Jorati and briefly discussed (27–28). The reason for this confined treatment seems to be that the authenticity of the text is controversial (27n58, 50). Questions concerning authenticity are certainly an important issue that need to be addressed. Still, it would have seemed fitting to give a more in-depth exploration of Yacob, particularly considering the previously outlined “high-risk/high-reward” strategy that Jorati pursues concerning the anachronism worries. After all, the almost total absence of nonwhite voices in this part of Jorati’s project does raise the question whether it would have been a risk worth taking.In the end, however, the absence of a more thorough discussion of Yacob does not undermine the groundbreaking nature of Jorati’s book—in particular if the reader follows her advice and reads Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries alongside Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century, which does an excellent job of integrating nonwhite voices. Thus, in the end those two books, taken either in isolation or together, are sure to “motivate the readers to investigate these debates more deeply on their own” (50). As such, the “outline” they provide (312) must be seen as laying the foundation for future research and teaching. I am convinced that these books will significantly enrich the debate about slavery and race in the early modern period, and the discussions about the ways this debate affects us today for years to come.6