We’ve had very little slavery here

My response to a member of a listserv to which I belong. She observed her book club was dealing with slavery in the coming month and made the observation that there was very little slavery in the history of Australia (where she resides). It struck me as an odd comment given relatively well known historical facts of Australian history. It then occurred to me that this might perhaps be an instance where we fail to recognize an issue simply because we have named it something else. It is also an example, I suspect, of the tendency in some circles to identify slavery as strictly a US phenomenon when in fact slavery is a long lived global institution.

My response in its entirety.

That should be an interesting conversation. I think your statement “we’ve had very little slavery here” is a fascinating example of framing. Not that it is wrong but rather that it serves as a catalyst to understand what we mean by slavery. A rose by any other name is still a rose. Every culture and every nation has slavery in its past, it is only a matter of how recently and what it was called. It is common to fail to acknowledge slavery because it does not fit the common US archetype of agricultural slavery as part of the larger mercantilist system. However, while there were a couple of aspects distinctive to the US, much else was common to all other regions of the world.

The two significant differences were that the US was the one industrializing country where slavery was an integral part of the economy on its home shores. Britain’s slavery was financially vital and integral to the economy but in terms of numbers it was virtually all far away in the colonies. Likewise with France. The second difference was in the timing and means of ending slavery. There were four models. Haiti abolished slavery through slave revolt, though they continued what amounted to serfdom for both plantations and defense construction. The Haitian model was one of violence, both in the revolt itself and the genocide of whites after its success. The second model was that of Britain and France where slavery was abolished in increments from 1810 through 1900, initially focusing on outlawing slave trading and then eventually actual abolition of slavery itself both in the metropolitan as well as, gradually, in each of the colonies. This gradual model was, with exceptions, more peaceful. Britain tended to buy out slave owners and France tended to operate by decree and expropriation. The third model covers most of the rest of the world where slavery in one form or another continued to exist into modern times, falling into abeyance more from social pressure and economic irrelevance rather than through effective enforcement of laws. This model was the least violent but also the longest lasting. The fourth model was the American one where the deep philosophical contradiction between the Enlightenment ideals of the Constitution and the reality of slavery was finally resolved through violent warfare with 600,000 dead (nearly 5% of adult males). While this war brought slavery (trading and ownership) to an abrupt end, and relatively early compared to elsewhere, it did not resolve many attendant economic and social issues.

So, no, Australia did not have the classic New World agricultural form of slavery upon which a whole regional economy depended, but Australia has had its own versions. As a British colony, Australia followed the gradualist model subject to the British laws regarding de jure slavery meaning that the trade of slaves was effectively outlawed in 1810 and ownership eventually outlawed IIRC sometime in the 1830s. But the difference between de jure and de facto was as stark in Australia as in the rest of the world.

Kanakas certainly (60,000 imported to work the Queensland sugar plantations), and arguably the Japanese pearlers in Broome. The last groups of Australian Aborigines were granted the vote in 1967 along with access to government services and benefits but the descendants of the South Sea Island slaves in Australia remained unrecognized. Australians were certainly heavily involved in and drove much of the blackbirding trade across the South Pacific (kidnapping populations from some islands to work mines, fields or guano deposits on other islands) throughout the nineteenth century. The relative scarcity of classic agricultural slaves in mainland Australia is only part of the story. But while we think of slavery in the US as just what occurred in the agricultural fields of the South, other forms existed as well. US 19th century merchants were also involved in blackbirding in the Pacific and Richard Henry Dana talks about Kanakas in California (still a Spanish possession at that time) in the 1830s in his classic, Two Years Before the Mast.

Separate from archetypal slavery, there was the treatment of Aborigines. Both during colonial times and after federation, the states ran various schemes relocating Aboriginal people from their homes to work on stations all across Australia with nominal or no compensation. This was discussed recently on ABC (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bushtelegraph/did-legalised-slavery-exist-in-australia/5580456). Not quite slavery but recognizably close to it. Possibly closer to Russia’s serfdom or something between formal slavery and sharecropping as it existed in the South post Civil War (though in the US, sharecropping included both black and white populations). Ted Egan’s song, The Drover’s Boy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drover%27s_Boy) can be heard as a tragic love song but it barely masks the reality of enslavement.

There is a very interesting discussion to be had of the continuum/definition of slavery. Does indentured servitude (some of which Australia had but not nearly as much as in the US) count? There are good arguments for and against. In an age when average life spans were 35-40, a seven year indentured servitude contract entered into at 25 had a good chance of being a life sentence. In addition, and more pertinent to the Australian circumstance, where do exiled convicts reside on that continuum of circumscribed freedom, particularly when it is in the context of the 19th century when transportation and exile could be for such minor crimes, in our minds, as theft of food. The song Moreton Bay sung by Marion Henderson is a heartbreaking lament of the plight of convicts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moreton_Bay_(song)).

The final element in the Australian example has to do with the British transportation of Irish to the penal colonies. Was it criminal enforcement in a harsher world or was it a form of slavery or was it a form of ethnic cleansing? Or all three? You look at the British authorities’ correspondence and commentary about the “Irish Race” from that period and it is clear that the Irish were viewed as a lesser form of human life with a corresponding reduction in concern for safety and welfare. The topic of slavery is wrenching but a fascinating one in terms of pinning down exactly what we mean by the term. In the US context, we are insularly interested, for good historical reasons, in our own form of Southern agricultural slavery, but tend to overlook the wider historical context (US slavery being a small fraction of the Old World to New World slave trade) and ignoring all the other instances in which one group of people sought to dehumanize and enslave other groups of people, both within the US and in the global context. It is interesting to compare US attitudes with those in other countries. In the US, slavery is inextricably tied up with race but elsewhere, enslavement was most often intra-racial with enslavement being more associated with outsider status, class, or enemy populations.

Regrettably, we are not done with slavery yet. In its economic institutional form, it is gone. But there are some spots in the world where it remains de facto. Across the Middle East, guest workers from poor countries in Asia (Bangladesh and Philippines in particular, but also other poor Arab nations) have virtually no rights. We never speak of it as such but the tens of thousands of amahs across Asia, including among thousands of Western expatriates, come close to indentured servitude.

Finally, there are forms of slavery which are very modern but which we turn away from considering as slavery such as human trafficking in general and sex trafficking in particular. (See for example, Walk Free Foundation slavery report reveals 3000 slaves living in Australia; http://www.news.com.au/national/walk-free-foundation-slavery-report-reveals-3000-slaves-living-in-australia/story-fncynjr2-1227127815145)

While our literary representation of slavery is rich with stories from the US and to a much smaller degree from the British Empire, stories about slavery in all its forms around the world are much harder to find, particularly among children’s books, even though it was far more prevalent outside the Anglosphere. I am not trying to pick on Australia in these comments. In the scheme of things, it was very late to the game and therefore missed most of the worst excesses seen in other regions of the world. I think you could argue that Australia had very little slavery in the model of the antebellum US but you could equally argue that it just had different forms of slavery called by different terms. It is a matter of which tragedies are included and which excluded.

All of which is to say that from a global reading perspective, we tend to view slavery as a US southeastern agricultural economy race phenomenon which ended 150 years ago when in fact it is a global, economic, social, cultural phenomenon taking many shapes and forms and still in existence to varying degrees and called by different names around the world. I imagine your group will have some very interesting discussions.