Not in a moral sense, in that the slave system was a crime against humanity. They paid wages, concentrating workers together in a confined place, and synchronized their movements, in relation both to each other and to the most advanced seafaring technology. They could be flogged, tarred, feathered, keel-hauled — dunked in the ocean and dragged under the hull, barnacles doing to backs in a minute what it took the whip fifteen lashes — or executed, made to walk the plank or hung by the yard arm. Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and the author of "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman." Get our print magazine for just $20 a year. They hope to force Cerreño to take them home to Senegambia. He is the author of, among other books, Fordlandia, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft and Beveridge prizes in American history, Kissinger’s Shadow, and Empire's Workshop. Greg Grandin, 22 October 2009 ‘The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. Yet these same individuals show little to no sympathy for the slaves, or even participate in their re-enslavement. Others have made this point, including David Brion Davis, that the struggle over slavery, both for and against, had the effect of reifying slavery as the supreme evil, and reifying freedom — defined as the absence of formal slavery — as the supreme good. Still, as someone who has worked primarily on Latin America, I can’t help but compare that region’s deep tradition of social rights to the US’s antipathy to those rights, at least among a mobilized and consequential sector of the US public. That title is from an epigraph Melville uses in another short story, which he himself probably wrote (though he credited to an “unpublished” manuscript in his possession): “Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity.”. And I know that scholars of the US have shown that conceptions of US citizenship, and freedom, are layered, complex, and contradictory. They took the things they were said not to possess — cunning, discipline, intelligence — and gave the lie to the things they were said to be: loyal, simple minded, faithful. For instance, you note that Delano, though in some way anti-slavery, had and exercised legal power over his own sailors that was equally despotic.

Copyright © 2019 Salon.com, LLC. Hence you have the emergence of metaphysicians like Melville, Emerson, and of course Marx, along with others, trying to figure out the relationship between depth and surface.

Rediker has argued that sailing ships were the first modern factories. What I try to do in the book is demonstrate the centrality of slavery to this process, the way “free trade in blacks” takes slavery’s foundational deception, its original deceit as captured in the con the West Africans were able to play on Amasa Delano, and acts as a force multiplier. He previously taught at New York University. It took the US decades to recognize Haiti as an independent nation, a concrete example of an abstraction: its refusal to yet recognize the empire of necessity. Weeks after their revolt, still adrift in the Pacific near Lima, the rebels cross paths with a New England sealer, the Perseverance, whose captain, Amasa Delano, they allow to board. The Virginian ideologue, George Fitzhugh, for instance, charged that the “doctrine of human equality” espoused by the leader of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society, William Goodell, would destroy the Christian family. The cult of white supremacy that grew out of that history evolved into today’s cult of individual supremacy. He sells his ship, leaves the sea behind, and writes the memoirs that became the basis for Melville’s novella. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, We’re Just at the Beginning of a Long Struggle for Justice, On Election Day, Follow the Money for Both Parties, The Right-Wing Violence Trump Has Encouraged Has Deep Roots in American History, New York’s Elected Socialists Are Building a Movement, Republicans Don’t Want the “Wrong Kind of People” to Vote. And there were many abolitionists who viewed chattel slavery within a broader spectrum of exploitation, including wage slavery, that needed to be abolished. In 1855, Herman Melville published “Benito Cereno,” a novella about a New England ship captain who suppresses a slave rebellion onboard another ship discovered off the coast of Lima, Peru. Could you say a bit more about how you think slavery intersected with other regimes of labor control?

Aware their future hangs in the balance, Babo and Mori engage in a temporarily successful deception, pretending to be enslaved and forcing Cerreño to play captain. But it was also a crime in a technical sense: probably as many enslaved Africans came into South America as contraband, to avoid taxes and other lingering restrictions, as legally. But decades earlier, those invested in keeping the skin trade a going concern saw its potential as a wedge issue, stoking resentment against abolitionists who seemed to care more about Africans than their own. But not all societies in the Americas founded on slavery have spent their post-abolition history trying to deny necessity. I read the phrase as Melville saying that the problem isn’t so much the paradox that our notions of freedom emerge from and depend on slavery. However, lacking adequate sea knowledge, they are unaware that the captain has managed to keep them in South American waters.

Greg Grandin (born 1962) is a professor of history at Yale University. They were also items of conspicuous consumption. The issue is complex, obviously, since for enslaved peoples slavery was indeed the absolute evil, and they valued political freedom as a supreme good. Is it your sense that the struggle against slavery itself, protracted and violent as it was, left us with the thought that we are free so long as we are not slaves? Hegel said that it wasn’t “so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.” In the twentieth century, Arendt wrote that “man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”. There are numerous figures who affirm the value of freedom, the right of self-government, and at least some of whom will go on to engage in republican revolution against colonial domination.

Lances and weapons that had been used to kill and skin seals are used to equally brutal effect on the insurgents.

The story takes place in Melville’s favorite setting, a ship in open water, and deals with one of his main preoccupations: slavery. And since one of the things capitalism is at its essence is an ongoing process to define the arbitrary line that separates “self-interest” from “corruption,” slavery was essential in creating the normative categories associated with modern society. Help Us Stick Around for Many More. All rights reserved.

It seems fairly clear to me that the Right’s inability to escape the rhetoric of slavery, its insistence on framing all political debate within the absolutist antinomy of freedom and slavery, and to assail not even social rights but even the idea of public policy as a form of enslavement, has something to do with the history of slavery in America. Thanks to Greg Grandin’s masterful Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, we now know that history. Associated Press articles: Copyright © 2016 The Associated Press. But this is not the only, necessary consequence of the language we inherited. Take, for instance, Rand Paul’s recent comment that to believe in the right to health care is to believe in the right to slavery. Having retaken the Tryal, Delano sails on to a Chilean port, where some of the leading rebels are executed, and the rest are forced back into slavery. In your mind, what exactly is the connection between the two? Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Another deep theme of the book is the complexity of the relationship between slavery and freedom. You see?” The problem is that the US has had a world of its own, so the idiocy of white supremacy, and its progeny, individual supremacy, is perpetuated. Greg Grandin Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History.

Office: Luce 345. Despite this antebellum containment, the idea of freedom did, as you say, serve as a very powerful postbellum critique. Our new issue – asking whether the US is a failed state – is out soon. The problem is rather the denial of the paradox, the idea that we can escape it by skipping off into the West, or into the Pacific, or into a world of free trade. He is author of a number of books, including Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, as well as for the National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

We’re Celebrating Our 10th Anniversary. Now They’re Fundamentally Illegitimate. But its role in firing the physic imagination of the West is what helps explain, as you put it, the persistence of the entanglement. Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, the creation of modern selves, the illusion of individual autonomy, the cultivation of distinction and preference, the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue. The fact that the US is the only nation in the world where organized social power mobilizes around the concept of freedom (and against slavery) to demand more austerity, more punishing “reforms,” can only be explained by the specific, central form slavery took in creating the nation.

What follows is an interview, edited and condensed, that Jacobin contributor Alex Gourevitch conducted with Grandin, a professor of history at New York University.

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