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John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2025)
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Ryan Tripp
Hello everyone. This is Ryan Chipp, your host for New Books in Intellectual History. Thanks for joining us. Today, we're in turn joined by Professor John Samuel Arpam. He's an assistant professor of Classics and letters, and Whit Carry, professor in Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma. Welcome, John.
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Professor Hartin
It's great to be here, Ryan. Thank you for having me.
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Ryan Tripp
So he recently published Intellectual Origins of American English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World, earlier published again by Harvard University Press. So let's get into it. How did you come to research this topic and write the book? And then why Intellectual origins versus ideological origins? And if you could address ideas and interests really briefly, that would be great.
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Professor Hartin
Sure. I think there Are two motives or separate but related origin stories for the book. The one is personal and the other is. Were conventionally academic. Personal is that I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana. I was born and raised in the Deep south in at the city that was the hub of the antebellum domestic slave trade. And if you're from New Orleans, if you've spent time there, you cannot avoid the recognition that we live in a nation that, in part, slavery made the past is present and structures the present in New Orleans. And I always was interested in studying and reckoning with the history of slavery when I went to graduate school. I went to graduate school in the Department of government at Harvard to study political theory and the history of political thought. And it was clear to me that I didn't possess the theoretical sophistication or even, in some respects, the educational background of many of my peers. I was just blown away by what they could do with the history of ideas, the study of complex authors, and complex, very old traditions. And so it seemed to me that I didn't have an original perspective, really, on the canonical texts of political theory or the canonical topics of political theory. But what I did have was this other focus that I wanted to study, the relationship between the history of slavery and history of ideas. And that was a part of history of political thought that was not at the center of the field, because political theory, for the most part, has developed as a discipline concerned with the history of freedom, the opposite of slavery, and the implications that draw from changes in ideas about freedom. And so, over time, this project came together through both personal and academic interests to focus on a single question, which was a question that I think interests a lot of us, not just scholars, not just scholars in the field of political theory. It should interest all of us, I think, and I think it does. That question is, how did what we now understand to be the most terrible wrong in the history of this nation first come to be seen not only is necessary or profitable, but is legitimate from a moral point of view? That was the focus of my question. I wanted to know how it happened in America. Not only that slavery began, but that it was understood to be legitimate at its origins as well. And this book started as an inquiry into that, as an attempt to answer that very basic question. Now, I fixed on the title, the Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, to signal that the book is. Or the book takes up the question of ideas. And as opposed to, for example, ideological origins, this book is very interested in the close relationship between ideas and economic interests. No account of the origins of American slavery could be solely concerned with ideas. But most accounts of the origins of American slavery have been solely concerned with. With economic. Economic interests and have assumed that shifts in supply and demand in the early modern Atlantic world solely account, singularly account for the turn towards slavery in that context. And I wanted to put forward a more expansive account of the origins of American slavery, one that had not determined from the start that economic interests were the sole cause or condition, and had also not determined from the start that the ideas that were present at the time were determined by the economic interests or the mode of production. So I chose a slightly more neutral as well as colloquial. Colloquial term to refer to the history of ideas, which is intellectual origins of American slavery.
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Ryan Tripp
All right, so let's start at your origin of the origins. If you can address Aristotelian thought on natural slavery as well as the Roman law of nations, and you speak about this, excuse me, torrid zone, if you'd engage with that, that would be open.
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Professor Hartin
Yes. The book takes its start from the observation which I think will not surprise many historians of political thought, or any historians of political thought at this point, but might surprise many general readers and even historians of American slavery, which is that in the early modern period, by which I mean the period covered in this book, which is about 1550-1700 in early modern English culture, there were really two traditions of thinking about slavery, two traditions of ideas about slavery that focused on what slavery was and where it came from. And the one was derived from interpretations of Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher, and the other was derived from Roman law, kind of compilation of canonical texts that have been gathered together as a summary of the very complex legal system in the 6th century by the Emperor Justinian. And the two traditions of ideas are at odds on many different points. On the Aristotelian account of, as you said, natural slavery, nature marks a distinction between those who are destined to be free and masters. It's very little difference between being free and being a master, according to Aristotle, and those who are destined to be slaves. The inequality within the human species is established as a matter of nature, on the Aristotle's account. Aristotle is very complicated account. We could go more into it, but that's the basic structure of it. And on the Roman law, or in Roman law, freedom and equality are the rule in the law of nature. And there is no person who is a slave under natural law or indeed under what is understood to be the original condition of the species. Slavery comes in over time as part of the massive process by which humans establish the institutions and customs under which they come to live. So slavery comes in or entered Roman law as matter not of the law of nature, but of the law of nations, which is a collection of the customs common to all the peoples of the world. The distinction between these two might seem pretty small, but it's very important. Aristotle believed that some people were by nature slaves and others were by nature masters. Roman law tried to establish that no one was by nature a slave. But slavery came in over time through the operation and the establishment of human institutions, most often for captives taken in war. Now, you mentioned the torrid zone, which becomes very important over the course of this book. Aristotle, as did many classical geographers, believed that the world was divided into zones which cut across the regions of the earth. And the most important measure and division of these zones was their relationship to the equator. And Aristotle believed that ancient Greece was within the most temperate zone that there was. And the great civilizations of the Mediterranean world were in part a result of the temperate climate in which it fell. But to the south, as well as to the north, by the way, but in particular to the south, there was a barren part of the world that ran along the equator where the heat rendered human life almost impossible. And the only creatures that could survive there were weirdly deformed and half human forms of life. And that was what Aristotle called the torrid zone. Now, much of Africa in this division of the world fell within the torrid zone. And so in order to start to describe European perceptions of Africa, not only to describe, you know, in order to describe early modern European perceptions of Africa, not only to describe early modern European accounts of slavery, you have to start with the ancients and go back to Aristotle.
- [13:11]
Ryan Tripp
All right, you go through a number of intellectuals in this book. By way of introduction, if you touch on Hobbes, Grotius, Pufendorf, and then their sources, like Eden and Hakluyt's sources, I think that would be very hopeful again for our listeners.
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Professor Hartin
Yes, I mentioned these two traditions of ideas about slavery. And I want to be clear that these two traditions were not only. They didn't only enter early modern culture through the works of philosophers, and they weren't only well known to famous philosophers, they're much more popularly known and popularly present, at least in some kinds of shorthand, within early modern English culture. But the most sophisticated and complex and self conscious attempts to reflect on the Aristotelian on the one hand, and the Roman tradition on the other hand, were those of philosophers that, you know, Were the famous or, you know, philosophers of natural rights in early modern Europe, the famous political philosophers of early modern Europe. And so you mentioned three of the most important in Grotius, Hobbes and Puffendorf. And look, I'll just make one first observation which again will surprise no historian of early modern political thought, which is that Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf all in some basic sense, work to reject Aristotelian political theory. One aspect of that rejection is that they reject the doctrine of natural slavery that Aristotle had laid out. Their account of freedom and slavery is much more modeled on the structure of Roman law in which all people are by nature free. Indeed, the attempt to establish the natural freedom of all humankind is, you know, in some sense what defines early modern political thought in general. And in that sense, early modern political thought follows the structure. It's modeled on the structure of Roman law. So they tried to establish the natural freedom and equality of all humankind and then try to describe the extent to which human arrangements depart from or continue in the model of the state of nature and natural law. And Grotius has. Grotius is perhaps the most important political philosopher of the 17th century, not only on the continent, but also in. In England. Grotius has a very complicated account. He says that all people are by nature free. The form this freedom takes is the possession of certain natural rights. But in the course of the ordinary operation of human life, it is inevitable that some people will come to lose these rights. Or it happens to be the case that some people come to lose these rights. These people come to be enslaved. And Grotius believes that people can consent to slavery and indeed entire people can consent to be to, in a sense, the enslavement at the hands of a monarch, an absolute monarch, that people who commit certain crimes can come to be enslaved as punishment for those crimes, and that those who are aggressors in an unjust war can come to be enslaved as well. Now, Hobbes has a slightly. Has a more simpler. Has a simpler account, at least by the time of Leviathan, his most well known text of political philosophy, AB Says that all people are free and equal in the state of nature. He has a much richer description and more vivid description of the state of nature than Grotius does. But Hobbes believes that when people come into a state of conflict or a state of war with one another, that the party that is overcome in that conflict comes to be a slave. And until such time as they agree to abide by the commands of their captor, the person who has overcome them. They are a slave who's never consented to their enslavement. And indeed, according to Hobbes, if a person is enslaved, they retain all the rights of nature to resist their captor. Their captor retains all the rights of nature to kind of keep them in their power. But that is the condition of slavery. Under habs, it's much more focused on the bare state of war. And it, it takes place outside of the condition or outside of the bounds of the commonwealth that Hobbes is much more concerned to establish and validate or authorize. And Puffendorf, through, you know, a deep immersion in such sources as Aristotle, Roman law, Grotius and Hobbes, comes to a, you know, a different account of slavery because for Pufendorf, the. The root of all political association and all, indeed all social association is con. Compact and agreement. And Puffendorf believes that people can come to be enslaved either through agreeing to be enslaved or, or through being taken captives and, you know, being taken captive in war. But in either case, the person who is, you know, considered to be a slave must have agreed in whatever condition to that. To that status. So these are three important philosophers. They stand in for a much broader popular and academic and philosophical and legal and, you know, literary and dramatic reception of ancient ideas about slavery and early modern culture. But these are three philosophers who thought through the implications of Aristotle and Roman law very deeply and, and laid out their own positions on the matter, following in the tradition of Roman law, not in the, in the tradition of Aristotle.
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Ryan Tripp
All right, all right, so Jean Bourie Bell's John Locke. Can you kind of situate them more in context and dialogue between their texts and then Locke's clues on contemporaneous slavery?
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Professor Hartin
Yes, because so far the tradition of ideas that I've laid out is, you know, runs through texts that almost do not mention the contemporary practice of slavery as we would term it and understand it in the 17th century, which is a fact that has long puzzled scholars and scholars have long tried to tease out. What was the relationship, what were the relationships between the ideas that I've laid out, which are, you know, laid out in more or less abstract or general terms, and the contemporary practice of slavery, which we know was taking place at the same time. So I'll get back to the Lockean clues at the end of this answer. But one of the distinctive features of Bodin, who was a 16th century French philosopher and legal scholar and geographer who became very important in English culture toward the Start of the. And the middle of the 17th century was that Bodin wanted to kind of work out the ideal conditions for commonwealth, for the establishment of the commonwealth. What did a commonwealth mean for Bodin? It meant what, more or less what Hobbes would later understand it to mean, which is that a. It was a society, political society, in which all people were free and were under the, you know, the sovereign control, the sovereign authority of a, you know, of a leader or a. Which took the form of a person or a body of persons, but they were under sovereign control and all the people were free. That was what it was. Commonwealth, you know, was for Beaudin and for, you know, later English thinkers. Beaudin became so important because he was writing in a time in French culture and advocating for development in French culture, which kind of added onto or amended this Roman tradition that I've described. And I'll explain what I mean in. In the early modern period, Europeans still believed that Roman law and the law of nations under which slavery entered Roman law were still generally applicable and still basically a collection of the customs common to all the peoples of the world. But they also understood that certain amendments and exceptions to the law of nations had been introduced over time, which helped to explain the fact that the nations of Europe, better known as the nations of Christendom during this period, and especially in the context of this discussion, had agreed for the purposes of wars to treat captives within Christendom as though they were captives in civil wars, not in wars between nations. And so far as we know, captives in civil wars had never been enslaved such that the nations of Europe did not take slaves of, you know, one of one another's citizens, even when taken captive in war. This was an exception, an absolutely important exception to the customs of slavery described in Roman law and indeed to the, you know, to the reception of Roman law in early modern English culture. And another exception was that Bodin had laid out kind of the philosophy of a commonwealth in which all the citizens of the Commonwealth were free. Indeed, all the people of the Commonwealth were free. There were no slaves in France, according to Bodin, and there were no slaves in England, according to many English authors and observers. By the time my book, you know, starts to Count begins. And these are crucial exceptions that Bodin helps to introduce into early modern ideas, exceptions to the law of nations that Bodin tries to introduce into the context of ideas that I laid out. Response to your earlier question. Now, luck. Much to be said about Locke's ideas about slavery. Of all the figures in this book, probably Locke's Ideas about slavery have been most thoroughly analyzed by many, many different scholars. I have my own complex position on them, but Locke's account of slavery, again, I'll just. I'll just be very brief here. Locke's account of slavery is more or less along the lines of the Roman model. Believes that all people are, but you know, by nature free and equal, that slavery arises in human life most often, or in fact, only. Only for people who are aggressors in an unjust war. And again, he speaks of slavery more or less only in abstract terms, perhaps only with reference to slavery as it had appeared in ancient culture and in particular in the Hebrew Bible. But there are a couple of indications elsewhere in Locke's life and work that would lead us to believe that Locke sought a basic alignment between the ideas that he laid out in abstract terms in his philosophical texts and the practices of slavery that were going on and in which he was involved simultaneously in the 17th century. We can go into what those clues were, if you like. I do so in my book. But all this is to say that in Locke, you see the two things coming together a little bit more closely. On the one hand, the ideas about slavery in early modern English culture. On the other hand, the practices of slavery in the early modern Atlantic world.
- [27:20]
Ryan Tripp
So in the context of Native American uprisings and like brutal massacres, what was the wasteland, as well as the Justice Metis in John Donne and Francis Beacon.
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Professor Hartin
So in many ways, this book focuses on texts that have not been well known or often read. And the bulk of the book consists of accounts of early modern European descriptions of Africa, early modern European perceptions of Africa. And I introduce a lot of texts and authors and places that have not been well studied, even by scholars in the field. But the book is also very concerned to run through and touch on canonical figures that a lot more people would have heard from. So I'm trying to associate different levels of discourse and different kinds of authors and different genres at all times. And Francis Bacon and John Donne, the statesman and philosopher and natural philosopher Francis Bacon and the famous poet John Donne, all appear in the work, and they do so, you know, basically in the context of their involvement with the Virginia Company in the first quarter of the 17th century. Now, okay, so I've laid out the basic structure of English ideas about slavery. And I've said it's basically, as I've said, it's, you know, along the lines of Roman law, within the basic structure of Roman law. Now, a common response to that would be to say, look, the English were not the first European powers to establish empires in the Atlantic world. The Iberians were, and in particular the Spanish and the Americas. And it is well known, and was well known at the time, that in the 16th century there had been a prominent debate in Spain about the justice of their conquest of the Indies. And that that debate was conducted. It was kind of complicated, but it was conducted about Aristotle's model of natural slavery. He took the form of were the native peoples of America natural slaves or not? And Las Casas, you know, famously took the position. Bartolome de las Casas, the apostle of the Indians, famously took the position that they were not natural slaves. And for that reason the conquest of the Indies was unjust. Now, the broad outlines of this debate were well known in English culture in part because this was a period of ongoing, very important conflict between England and Spain. And you find this stated in explicit terms even in the records of the Royal African Company that they say, and many of its associated promoters, that Englishmen say that one of the aspects of the barbarousness, one proof indeed of the barbarousness of the Spanish conquest of the Indies, which they understood themselves to be rejecting, was that the Spanish had used Aristotelian arguments to justify their enslavement of Native Americans. And so when the English started on their own colonial enterprises in the Americas, they were determined not to use Aristotelian arguments to justify their actions. They were determined instead to use arguments derived from different parts of Roman law and the Roman tradition, which was much more well established and had a much higher esteem in early modern culture. But there were always specific conditions and pathways and responses that were required from the Native Americans. Even on this English account. English attempt to justify empire. And in the 17th century, and most dramatically and initially in Virginia in 1622, Native Americans rejected the role that the English had laid out for them and into which they had confined them in the course of their justifying their enterprises and killed 347 of the English colonists in Virginia. And in response there was an uprising of. There was an uprising of response. There's dramatic response in England and in the Virginia Company and indeed soon in Virginia itself, which said that even on the Roman model which I've laid out, an unprovoked attack can be met with swift reprisal. Not only war, right, because violence can be used to respond to violence, which a well known principle of the law of nations, but even enslavement. And so along a different path over the course of the first quarter of the 17th century, which is the. The part of, you know, the period in English ideas about America that I trace most in most detail along a different path, along the path of Roman law, English came to more or less similar conclusion as the Spanish had previously done, which is that in the empires that they sought to establish in the Americas, they were justified in attacking Native Americans, committing violence against them, and indeed enslaving them as well. And that is the kind of parallel story about the intellectual origins, Native American enslavement that takes up a large part of the second chapter in this book and runs in parallel to, to the more. The more prominent part of the book which describes the intellectual origins of the enslavement of Africans in Africa and in the English American colonies.
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Ryan Tripp
So guinea seems to play an important role in your book, if you can discuss guinea during the expansion of the English Caribbean as well as Hochlett's reports on inaugural English voyages to Africa, than any of the other ideas that you want to engage with.
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Professor Hartin
So I mentioned earlier that many of the texts in this book are not well known. Many of the texts in which I'm immersed, in which I describe, are not well known even to scholars in the field. And Hakluyt's collection is one of those texts. Now, many scholars will know the Hakluyt collection. Everybody should know about the Hakluyt collection. But the Hakluyt collection is very complicated set of texts and composed of, I think, several dozen accounts of Africa which are very detailed, which are very complicated, which are very hard to read. And so, you know, Hackflit's text is called the Principal Navigations, Voyages and Traffics of the English Nation. And it came out in two editions, first in 1589 and then in 1598-1600. And it's a collection of kind of narratives and documents about English overseas enterprise. And it has a lot of texts on America. To be sure, that's the bulk of its materials on English voyages to America, but it also has a lot of, you know, less well known texts about Africa. And this is the basic move. This is the move I'm trying to make in the book so far. Historians of American slavery, no surprise, have focused on historians of the origins of American slavery have focused on the development of slave institutions in the early English American colonies, Barbados and Virginia and Massachusetts and Jamaica and so on. And I want to expand the sphere that is at the center of our attention out into the Atlantic world. And I want to focus, because this is a period of rapid expansion of slave institutions in the English American colonies. And so the source of that expansion was the slave trade. So the slave trade was everything in this period. And what was the source of the slave trade? It was in voyages from Africa. And so the central site of ideas, which is again, always my concern, was not so much attempts to justify or explain slave institutions as they were developing very rapidly in little areas of the English, you know, American colonies, but it was rather the attempt to justify the sources of African slavery, which were the source of the slave trade, which was the real driver of expansion in the English American colonies. And so we are brought back from the more common American context, back over the Atlantic, across the Atlantic, into Africa. And so I want to describe what is very prominent strain of early modern thought and perception, which is English ideas about Africa, which ideas about peoples of Africa, English ideas about the sources of slavery within African life. And Hakwit has a number of descriptions of Africa that I pick over very, very closely. But there are also a number of other texts and compilations and travel narratives and so on from the time that, that I go into. Does that answer your question?
- [38:18]
Ryan Tripp
Yes, it does. All right, so this is actually a more specific question. Why did certain intellectuals and then just generally people come to the how to come to the conclusion that certain Africans were civil enough to be trade partners? And who is Prester John, this very, very compelling character in your book. And then as well as source selection.
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Professor Hartin
So Pressure John is a compelling character. You can take out the. Take out the qualification Pressure John is a compelling character. And one reason presser John is compelling is that the legend of Professor John, who was a somewhat mythical Christian emperor in eastern Ethiopia, was a descendant of a similar civilization that was believed to be in Africa, placed in Africa in the ancient world. So I mentioned Aristotle earlier and we talked about the torrid zone. But there was one exception to even this view of the torrid. You know, Africa under the torrid zone as devoid of civilization and peopled only by half human forms of life, which is that the civilization at Meroe, which was an island below the island in the Nile around the fifth cataract of the Nile south of Egypt, was thought to be by Herodotus, by Diodorus, by Pliny, by Ptolemy, you know, the classic ancient geographers. Meroe, was thought to be a site of a wonderful advanced civilization. And so it's actually too simple to say that the ancients just believed that Africa was a place devoid of civilizations because it was in the torrid zone, because they also knew and wrote a great deal in particular Herodotus about Meroe is a place with language, riches, culture, civilization, war, gold, luxury, hierarchy, and so on and so forth. And Pressure John kind of comes from that earlier tradition of thinking about basically eastern Ethiopia. And Pressure John had, you know, is more medieval origins in a. In a fraudulent. With what seems to be a fraudulent letter that circulated in. In medieval Europe, reportedly from a great Christian monarch below the Holy Land or south of the Holy Land, who would offer aid to Europeans in the Crusades. And this legend of Prester John actually lasted in European culture much longer even than scholars in the field. Scholars of Prester John, and there are some great ones have. Have understood still in 16th century and indeed in 17th century England. Pressure John was thought to be a great ruler, one of the great rulers in the world. Queen Elizabeth sent him a letter which is collected in the Hacklit collection, by the way, who rolled over, you know, a huge, huge area of the continent. And so to any scholar who would say that European peoples believe that the peoples of Africa were universally degraded and debased in this early modern period, a first response to that view is that you haven't taken into account the important tradition of thinking about Prester John, because Prester John is by no means debased and degraded. And it's thought to rule over a vast empire. That is obviously evident even in the maps of the time. Okay, so that's a. That's an answer to your question about Pressure John, who I. Who I do believe is a. Is a compelling character and makes a large appearance in the book. But you asked another part of the question, right?
- [42:53]
Ryan Tripp
Yeah, the civil. Civil enough to be trade partners.
- [42:58]
Professor Hartin
Yes. Which I think was probably the focus of your question, what you wanted me to talk about. All along, as always, I got distracted by Prester John. I was probably distracted by Prester John. Just the, you know, the. The newness of this reception of Prester John. For years, working in the archives and in the rare book rooms and map collections at Harvard University, I just could not stop reading and writing about Prester John particular because it's such an unusual.
- [43:32]
Ryan Tripp
Fact.
- [43:36]
Professor Hartin
Given the dominant interpretations of European perceptions of Africa. So in. In Scott, in the scholarly literature, it is still a dominant view that in the early modern period, Europeans believed that Africans were almost devoid of civilization. And that more or less followed along the lines of this risottilian thoughts about the torrid zone. And Prester John just gives the lie to that view all at once. And so I kind of recover those texts about Prester John, you know, the shape that ideas about Prester John Took over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries and laid it out in detail here, Illustrated by some of the contemporary maps of africa. Now, how did it come to be the case? The europeans believe Africa, not just in the empire of professor john, but africa in particular along the western coast, Was under the control of civil polities that could be traded with. How do they come to believe that? Well, through trade. You know, by the time of the late. By the time of the, you know, start of the 16th century, the Portuguese had started to enter into stable, ordered trading relationships with states on the western coast. And one thing that the hakluyt collection describes or the travel narratives in the hakla collection describe Are the development of english commerce, you know, the routine establishment of commerce between english merchants and merchants and political rulers on the western coast of africa. So this perception of the civility of african peoples, Their capacity to engage in, you know, stable trading relationships over time, Emerged through the real fact of english involvement with africa during the period. You don't have to, you know, get more complicated than that.
- [45:48]
Ryan Tripp
All right, so can you kind of examine for us Cartographical changes and the impacts of certain texts? I mean, you can go through africanus jobs and whatever, and how they diverge from classical accounts. I mean, we talked at the. The topic here about classical analysis. I'd like to compare. Contrast them with, for example, cartography. And then that's kind of a sub question Connected to race's reflections on juridical enslavement. Getting.
- [46:24]
Professor Hartin
Now, let's just step back here for a second, because, again, as I said, it has been a common few in the field, Going back to winthrop jordan's book, Classic book, white over black from 1968, which still sets the tenor for many accounts of english perceptions of africa in the early modern period. It's been a common view that the peoples of africa Were understood to be different, to be essentially other, to be inferior, to lack all of the elements of civilization. And. But let's just kind of review what we've already discussed here, which is that around the time of the 16th century, or, sorry, around the time of the second half of the 16th century into the 17th century, European observers were coming to the conclusion that ancient ideas about the torrid zone really did not well, describe the character of african life. In fact, that the. That the climate there was not too hot. It was very hospitable, as a matter of fact, and that there were many people there, not very few, that the people there resembled merchants who arrived there from Europe in crucial respects, that they had political orders. They had social hierarchies. There were judicial processes. That africa was covered by regions and kingdoms and empires and cities. And one aspect of the civility of african life. Which departed from models of the torrid zone. Was that peoples of Africa engaged in commerce. And, you know, the early. Some of the early travel narratives that record this transformation, this realization that the legends about the torrid zone were incorrect, Were the narratives he mentioned. You know, they were the ones in the hacklit collection. There were also those of Richard jobson, Who wrote the first english book about africa, which came out in 1623. And was collected in the next important english collection of travel narrative, Samuel perkus's pilgrims. And Leo africanus, Very important, probably the most important source on africa, you know, through 1700, you know, in no way reflected Ancient accounts of the torrid zone. And in his own, you know, very detailed descriptions of africa. Leo was from africa, he was from fez. And it traveled, you know, south to the niger river delta. And Peter demarais, who was a dutchman, Wrote a very important account that came out in english translation Right around the end of the 16th century. All of these people who were travelers who had been to africa. Set down the kind of regular commerce that had developed. And described the regular commerce that had developed between europeans and africans on the coast of africa, all of which belied those old legends about the torrid zone. In other words, if you want to try to establish. That early modern english perceptions. Were structured by perception of difference and universal debasement, you have to come to terms with the fact that it was right around this time. The european authors had started to reject Ancient legends about the torrid zone. And to argue instead that peoples of africa Were not half human forms of life. There were no mythic monsters there. The people engaged in all of the standard practices. Of politics and commerce. As europeans would have understood them.
- [50:52]
Ryan Tripp
So in your book, I detected kind of a. A tension in terms of, like botero, the dolphus ogilvy, between kind of respect and distance and europe distance and Europeans distancing themselves from the polities of africa. If you can elucidate that and maybe reconfigure it, that would be great. And then slavery itself. And then also, I thought this concept of saved from death. Was important to a certain extent. For your arguments in that section of the book.
- [51:29]
Professor Hartin
Yes. Now, in roman law and the roman tradition at large that I've started to describe, My answer is about Locke and grotius, Puffendorf and homs. The most proximate Condition to slavery or to enslavement is death. Slavery is the condition of life most that is closest to death for the following reason. Slavery most was understood to arise most often as a status assigned to captives in war who could otherwise have been killed. And slavery was, at least in the law of nations, thought to be kind of, you know, condition of suspended death. It was the status of people who had been saved from death and who could be killed by their masters at any moment. That's like a, you know, a very bare tenet of the law of nations, which is, say, the absolute power of life or death that a master possesses over slaves. And in early modern perceptions of Africa, this is more or less the context in which slavery was thought to arise. Most often a status assigned to captives taken in war. And in some cases, as de Marais described most, you know, in most detail, a status assigned to people convicted of certain crimes who could otherwise have been punished for those crimes with death. In other words, the common practices, common customs of enslavement that were observed to be in place across the nations of Africa could be understood more or less on the model of the Roman tradition. That is that that argument is a central line throughout the book that I try to establish. It's a very important vein of historical argumentation that I'm trying to establish. And I do this through a full examination of early modern perceptions of Africa. And that is the centerpiece of the book, Early Modern Perceptions of Africa. And what I'm trying to show is what, you know, Europeans and English observers thought about Africa, what they wrote about Africa, what were the most important texts that there were about Africa, who are the most important figures Africanus foremost among them in establishing these European perceptions and how those perceptions changed over time, and how slavery was understood to arise within this broad image of the continent that these authors had laid out most often, as I said, as a status assigned to captives taken in war, which again, thought to be in alignment with the tenets of the Roman model. Now, this observation at once places Africa very much kind of in line with European self understandings of how their own states and societies worked. Africa was thought to be part of the world more or less conformed to a model that European authors understood to be universal. And it also marks a difference between European practices in African ones, because, as I said, the nations of Christendom no longer, by the early modern period, no longer took captive. Sorry, took. Made slaves of the people they had taken captive in war. In this respect, the nations of Africa more closely conformed to the model of enslavement laid out in the law of nations, Than did the nations of europe who had ended the practice of enslavement for captives taken of war, at least within the boundaries of christendom. And, you know, Botero, Giovanni botero, Emerges as a very interesting figure in this context because. And this was not uncommon. There were many other works like this. Butera is an important one, seminal one. Atero describes the nations of africa in most detail in this book. He wrote about, like, the kingdoms and commonwealths of the world in general. And he goes through the kingdoms and commonwealths that there were, Again, you note that phrase, that term, commonwealth, the kingdoms in common. He goes through the, you know, kingdoms and commonwealths of Europe, asia, america, and africa. The ones in africa can be described in broad reflections on the kingdoms and commonwealths of the world. They were not understood to be totally different from kingdoms and commonwealths elsewhere. They more or less be understood Than a single account of all the states that there were in the world. So botero is an important figure in trying to establish the kind of the model and line of Archie that I'm laying out in the book. Does that answer your question? Is there more you'd like to.
- [57:17]
Ryan Tripp
Yes, that's a great example. That's great. So how did. And this is. There are two specific figures. How did Richard baxter and Thomas Try and use African slavery to critique and attempt to critique, but then attempt to reform, but not abolish English slavery?
- [57:36]
Professor Hartin
Yeah, So what I've laid out here now, what I've laid out so far, Is the kind of structure of English perceptions of Africa and the sources of slavery in Africa, which is to say, the sources of the slave trade as well. Because there's a passiveness that marks English discourse About their own involvement in atlantic slavery. In the following sense, Englishmen believed that in this period, they had almost never enslaved Africans themselves. They had not been involved in the kind of original fact of enslavement. They possessed almost no power over the continent of africa, over the peoples and nations of africa. English involvement in Africa during this period Was not a colonial enterprise. This period before 1700 is known as the pre colonial period in African history. Perhaps only in angola, Where Portugal's, you know, where portugal had tried to establish more or less settler colonial rule, you know, what you could almost describe as settler colonial rule. Only there in angola Had European powers tried to, you know, tried to establish themselves as authority in the african continent. Elsewhere, Europeans had, you know, settled themselves only in small forts along the coast. And before 1700, at any one time there were at most, and often much less than 500 Englishmen in residence in Africa. So they believe they possess no control or very little control over the terms of trade, and very little control, perhaps no control over the conditions, the original conditions of enslavement. Again, that passiveness is present. Passiveness, which is striking because the English often depicted themselves as minor actors in their own momentous actions. At the same time, however, across the Atlantic, think about what the slave trade had started to produce, especially in Barbados and Jamaica by the middle of the 17th century. You know, these are the most important English, you know, American colonies in the 17th century, Barbados and Jamaica in the Caribbean. The English had started to establish slave societies in which things were very different from where they. From what they were in Africa. The English could no longer depict themselves as minor actors in their actions in Barbados and Jamaica. They oversaw profitable, rich, populous slave societies. And this transition provoked a wave of. A very small wave, by the way, but a wave of critical responses by people who had visited those columns and were shocked at what they had seen. One thing that Tryon says, Thomas Tryon, who was a well known writer on a variety of topics, he was a vegetarian, early vegetarian, and had visited and worked as a tradesman on Barbados, I think, in the 1660s. And what tryon said is as follows. In the Roman tradition, slavery arises as an alternative for death. It is. It represents, in that form, death, the most minimal possible form of mercy for those persons who could otherwise have been killed. Slavery does. But Tryon visited Barbados and he said that the conditions in Barbados for people who were enslaved were so horrific. They lived such short periods of time, they were subject to such cruel regimes of cruelty. Division between slave and free was now a racial division, strict racial division in which all of the people who understood themselves to be white were free to the extent they weren't enslaved, and all the people who were black were enslaved. That was also not the case in Africa. And the kind of regime of racial control that had been established in Barbados Try on as well, to such an extent that he said that this form of slavery is a state worse than death. So you see, the old balance has been upended or reversed. This form of slavery is a fate worse than death. Whereas in the old Roman tradition, slavery had understood to be. Been understood to be very barely fate, to be preferred to death, because there was no fate worse than death. And this is the really earliest form of English critique of Atlantic slavery and their own involvement in Atlantic slavery in America. Slavery was a fate worse than a jack. He was part of that first, you know, small group of authors to criticize what they saw as the new customs and institutions of enslavement that had been established on the other side of the Atlantic in America.
- [63:59]
Ryan Tripp
So let's go into the study of the causes of, quote, black skin color and how that shifted, via George Best, I believe, to a biblical infection curse on a family distinct from other white families. What were the impacts of these writings? Maybe explain a little bit. And the significance.
- [64:27]
Professor Hartin
Yeah, you'll notice so far, we've talked for a little while about the origins of American slavery, and I've made almost no reference other than, you know, the answer that I just gave you about Barbados in Jamaica made almost no reference to skin color going back to Winthrop Jordan. And the tradition of scholarship that has come from Jordan's 1968 white over black. You know, within that tradition of scholarship, the account of the origins of American slavery is very different. It focuses on English perceptions of the supposed black skin, the peoples of Africa. It tries to trace English ideas about slavery, English attempts to justify Atlantic slavery, to these thoughts about black skin color. And in this different account, you know, one different from my own, let's figure George Best, not the English football player, but an earlier George Best plays and plays an important role. Yeah, when you Google George Best, you have to, you know, when you try to look up the Wikipedia of George Best, you have to make sure you're not looking at English footballer. Because George Best made an ominous gesture which is as follows. In Genesis, in the Bible, there is an event that takes place that has been thought to be of momentous significance for the origins of American slavery, which is what came to be called the, you know, the curse of Ham, which is the event in the Bible where Ham, one of the sons of Noah, soon after the, you know, after the flood, goes into Noah's tent. Noah's drunk off the wine that he has started to cultivate, and Ham goes into the tent and views his father's nakedness. And Noah awakes from his stupor eventually and utters a curse on Noah, or, sorry, curse on Ham. And he says, that curse be Canaan, son of Ham, A servant unto servants shall he be unto his brethren. That's from the Geneva. That's the translation of the Geneva Bible. And so it's a curse of slavery. This is the first appearance of slavery in the Bible, and it takes the form of a curse on the descendants of Ham. Now, when George Best traveled to, you know, George Best was involved in a variety of English enterprises and English expeditions To the new world, but also touched down in Africa on the western coast, you know, on the. On the long guinea coast that was thought to run more or less from, like, the Senegal river to the bite at the knee. Best touched down there and spent some time there. And best had a slightly different concern. Best was trying to establish that Africa was not within the torrid zone, that in fact, the climate there was ripe for habitation. There were peoples and states and commerce and goods there. And one challenge to that view, that Africa was not part of the torrid zone. Again, we're back to this effort to revise the ancient view of the torrid zone. One evidence in favor of the torrid zone theory or count was that the color of the skin peoples in Africa was black. On the torrid zone view, it must have been burned black by the heat of the African sun, Because for ancient geographers, what was the reason why the peoples of Africa were black? Well, it had been burned black by the. By the incredible heat of the sun. They said, look, the sun is not that hot there. They're very long nights around the equator. So how did the peoples of Africa come to be black? And I'll just note to the side, the Bess did not discuss the slave trade, did not mention slavery in the states of Africa, did not discuss the slave trade of the English, did not discuss, you know, Spanish slave trader. Sorry. Or the Portuguese slave slave trade. At this time, his interest was in describing and redescribing the climate in Africa. So how did the peoples of Africa come to be black? Best fastened on this old legend in the Bible, the curse of ham. And he said, this is actually the origin of the blackness of the Africans. Their blackness is descended from that ancient curse that Noah pronounced on ham and some of the descendants of ham. Blackness, best said, was the curse and the blackness of the people. People in the present reflected that ancient imprecation. And to many scholars, Mithra Jordan among them, this has seemed to be the starting point, the first site, the first instance in which blackness and slavery were joined together, because the curse was a curse of slavery, and best had associated with a curse of blackness. It's often been assumed that in later English culture, there's two strands of the curse. Blackness and slavery were interlocked together. But as I've just noted, Bess was not discussing or trying to justify slavery, the enslavement of Africans or the slave trade. He was interested in trying to describe the climate in Africa and interested in the causes of blackness, which he understood to be, you know, to reflect a terrible curse. And over the course of the, you know, the rest of the period described in the book. And Best is writing, I think the first edition of his text was from 1587. He was on Frobisher's voyage to America. Best's view of the causes of blackness is always rejected. Were almost always rejected because it seemed implausible in so many different ways. And the search for the causes of complexion that I describe in my fifth, you know, in. In a lot of depth in the fifth chapter of my book more or less takes the form of different kinds of rejection of Bess account of blackness. Yes.
- [71:53]
Ryan Tripp
Right. So why did English intellectuals begin to search and dissect the precise quote, location of blackness in the body? And some of them conceived this as plural, didn't they?
- [72:07]
Professor Hartin
Yes, absolutely. And look, by the time of 1700, over the course of the 17th century, there was never a consensus in English culture about why the skin of some peoples of the world was black. Now, why did they become obsessed with this search into the causes of blackness? Well, because they understood blackness to be very different from their own whiteness. And they believed that, or many of them believed that white was the original skin color of all humankind. This involved them in some kind of reinterpretations of biblical texts, by the way, because in traditional accounts of the location of paradise and the first, you know, site of human habitation in the world, human humanity began in Asia, not in England. And it wouldn't have begun with people who were white, but people like Best and many, you know, many subsequent Englishmen did come to believe that whiteness, their own skin color, was the original conditioning of the original color of the human species. And that blackness, which they understood to be the opposite of whiteness, was a striking departure from the norm. It must have come in over time. And if it was the case, which was the orthodox account at the time, that all the peoples of the world had come from that single, you know, that single origin described in the Bible of Adam and Eve, then it had to be explained how some people had come to be not white, but black. And by the way, also all the other colors of the peoples of the world, but in particular black, because they thought blackness was the farthest departure from the original whiteness of humanity. And so there were many speculations, debates, discussions, gruesome experiments, scientific inquiries and so on and so forth. In the 17th century into the causes of blackness, Best had laid out one account, but this account, as I said, was almost always rejected. And one running theme of inquiries in the early Royal Society, English Royal Society, was to try to put forward different accounts of the causes of black skin. Now as I said, that inquiry into the causes of blackness was never resolved. There were many competing accounts. Bess was one. Another derived from the works of classical geographers which helped that the real causes of blackness was the heat of the sun in Africa. Another, and there were many, many others. The most prominent kind of searching inquiries into the causes of complexion were two works, two essays written by Thomas Brown and Robert Boyle around the middle of the 17th century. And what they did, as you said, and you mentioned that the causes of complexion were understood to be multiple or plural. What they did was run through the common opinions that there were about the causes of complexion, reject them all in detail and then try to put forward different causes, different proposals of their own. In other words, we have started from this first focus on best and the curse of Ham which has been so emphasized in scholarship. And now we're in a much vaster and more uncertain terrain of thought and inquiry.
- [76:12]
Ryan Tripp
So let's go to Robert Boyles and the Royal Society if you can elucidate the theory of seminal impression, the Royal Society's contributions to all of this and then if you can tack on the observations on black beauty.
- [76:33]
Professor Hartin
Yes. So Boyle, like Thomas Brown, who in many ways Boyle followed in his account of blackness in his treatise on colors in general. One idea that Boyle put forward was that blackness would first have originated in what he referred to as seminal impression, not a view that we. That is common in contemporary culture. Seminal impression is the theory that the objects that, that mothers are. Yeah. That mothers perceive affect their children in the womb. And that if a white woman would have perceived a black person or a black object or a black painting, her child in the womb would have, could have become black as a result of that impression. And Boyle believed that this would have been the original kind of cause or source of blackness, perfect black child. And that it could have been augmented over time by the well known heat of the sun over Africa. And there were, you know, there were a lot of legends and kind of dramas that came from this account of similar impression that circulated in early modern English and indeed in European culture. Because obviously it would be quite a striking fact if the child of a white mother was born and was black. Right. There would be social dramas that would surround that event because of course it would be suspected that the father of that child was, you know, not white. And so seminal impression was one of the ideas, one of the possible causes about the, the blackness of pupils in the present. Now, according to best, and indeed according to most English authors in this period, whiteness was the norm. It was the original condition of the species. Blackness was a departure from that norm present only in a small part of the world. And whiteness was the standard of beauty, often taken to be the standard of beauty, and blackness a departure from that standard of beauty. And so a kind of undercurrent. But an important undercurrent of early modern English culture was impressions or recognitions of the beauty of certain African peoples, which goes back to a different passage in the Bible in which the queen of Sheba says to Solomon, I may be black, but comely. And again in the King James version, and again and again. I think there are maybe 12 works in. In the footnote to this, you know, account in chapter five, Englishmen who came across black peoples across the Atlantic world remarked that they were black but beautiful, which signals two things. On the one hand, it signals that black was often taken to be a departure from the norm of beauty in early modern culture, and that that norm could be upended, and often was upended in the sense that black people, some black people, were thought to be beautiful in spite of their color.
- [80:41]
Ryan Tripp
So he get to the conclusion here. You can only can briefly address this. Why do you focus on the consequences, the debates over the consequences of slave conversion, sort of that conclusion, and this idea that American slavery at the end was, I mean, maybe more akin to notions of freedom than African sociocultural practices.
- [81:09]
Professor Hartin
Now, I'll just pick back up on a thread from the answer that I just gave because I want to dwell on this just for a moment. These reflections about the causes of complexion, inquiries into the causes of blackness, view of blackness as a departure from the norm which must have come in over time, view of blackness and whiteness as being the opposites of each other, of black and white as being the opposite of each other, of blackness as being inherently ugly. These are all aspects or kind of early markers in the development of. Of what would later come to be called racial prejudice and the attempt of white people to place themselves over and against black peoples of the world and to ascribe that, you know, elevation to differences in color. And so it's absolutely not the case that. Well, I'll put it differently. It is absolutely the case that in the period I describe in the book, English came, you know, broadly, Englishmen came to the conclusion that white and black were opposed to each other and that white was better than black. Now, they noted departures from that fact when they describe the beauty of African peoples. But you should also realize that this, you know, racial discourse would become. Would be seized upon in the course of justifications of the enslavement of black people in the Americas, kind of seed of ideas that would later bear horrible fruit. At the same time, there were also many other thoughts and, you know, explicit descriptions of what slavery was and where it came from. And my book is interested in describing those descriptions of, you know, accounting, examining those descriptions of slavery and enslavement. And when the English tried to explain the enslavement of African peoples in the early modern period, they didn't almost always do so by ascribing that enslavement or justifying it on the basis of color. They did it on the basis that we've laid out that all people are by nature free, that slavery arises through accident and misfortune. Most often for people who are taken captive in war, that proximity of slavery and death. Slavery is a juridical category. It's a legal category. It arises in all of the contexts that I've laid out and the. The ideas and perceptions of the enslavement of Africans, the sources of the slave trade and the sources of slavery in Africa, well played out and described very explicitly in these legal terms that I've described. And so the two discourses, the one about color, the other about slavery, are not separate discourses because they're going on at the same time and with respect to the same people, but want to kind of trace the gradual process by which those two discourses are interlocked together and not assume from the start that reflections on blackness. Explain reflections on slavery or that they are kind of the same reflection. In other words, I want to see the process by which the two strands that best thought to have brought together really did come together and not assume from the start two discourses are not just related, but the same. Okay, so to move over to your question, or to return to your question, Talk about slave baptism. And toward the end of the 17th century period, I cover in the epilogue of the book, most debates about slavery in the English Atlantic world, especially in. With respect to the English American colonies, were debates about baptism. Baptism of people who have been enslaved. Now, why would that be a debate? Well, connects back to something I said earlier, which is the nations of Christendom had come to an agreement, were understood to have come to agreement never to enslave other Christians, even when taken captive in war. Okay, Never to enslave other Christians. And the planters, the early planters in Barbados and Jamaica And Virginia had little interest in the conversion of the peoples whom they had enslaved. These were people who were profit maximizing, shall we say, and oversaw horrific regimes of cruelty and degradation. And so they were not enthusiastic about the prospect of conversion. But for many kind of overseers of the army, English colonial enterprise back in the metropole, and indeed for some ministers who went over to the English colonies to pursue the conversion of both native Americans and enslaved Africans, conversion was the most important thing in their minds, or it was at least one of the very important things in their minds. If you accept there is no nothing in life more important than salvation, then you must believe that conversion is important priority for the people whom you hold in your power, who you could convert. And so a kind of. There was a running insistence, especially from authorities back in the metropole, that the players pursued the conversion of their slaves. And a common response to this pressure was to say that this is impossible because if an enslaved person becomes a Christian, they could no longer be a slave. Because, recall, Christians cannot enslave other Christians. And the planters and their allies, who in many ways prevail in this debate, said no. They said, in the case of Africans, even their conversion will not bring them within the. The kind of sacred circle of Christians who can never become slaves. And so now the planters and their allies had to put forward a different theory or a different account of the line between slave and free. They had to say that wasn't just the case, that no Christians could hold other Christians as slaves. They had to say that there was something specific about the peoples of Africa that would mean that even their conversion would not bring their emancipation in the normal manner for Christians. And what was that thing that was different, or at least what line could be drawn that would mark now the divide between slave and free? Well, some people, some planters and their defenders toward the end of the 17th century, started to say the line between slave and free was not necessarily the line between Christian and heathen or non Christian. It was the line between black and white. And when they put forward that new account of the line between slave and free, grounded in the division between black and white, they drew on some of these old tropes about the ugliness of blackness, about the fact of black being a departure from the norm, about the radical opposition between black and white. And indeed, on that very old theory from Aristotle that held that some people are by nature free. So it's with that ominous set of early transitions in the American colonies that my book comes to an end.
- [90:24]
Ryan Tripp
All right, so that book. Well, thanks for joining us. What's up with you, Nick? Are you working on any future projects or anything else?
- [90:35]
Professor Hartin
I am. This book is planned and indeed presented as the first of three volumes in a series that would examine the ideas associated with the origins, development and eventual abolition of slavery in the Anglo American Atlantic world. So this volume, volume one, this book is volume one in that series. It is the one on origins goes up to 1700. And volume two will focus on this. Sorry, we'll focus on the 18th century up to 1787. And volume three will focus on American intellectual history and the prominent the debates about slavery that came to the fore in the 19th century. This series, I should note, runs in parallel to a classic, maybe the most important set of works in the field, which is David Brian Davis Problem of Slavery series on the anti slavery movement, which is also a three volume series that came out between 1966 and 2014. Davis in many ways is my model, although his topic is the anti slavery movement and my topic is slavery and history of ideas. So I am now at work on the transition to volume two and that is the is the focus of my energy and attention.
- [92:01]
Ryan Tripp
Well, I hope you remember new books on intellectual history for that second volume. So the book is Intellectual Origins of American English Ideas on the Early Modern Atlantic World, again, volume one in a three part series published earlier this year by Harvard University Press. Professor Hartin, Very, very thank you for joining us today.
- [92:29]
Professor Hartin
Thank you for your time, Ryan. I very much appreciate it.
- [92:33]
Ryan Tripp
Okay, well, our podcast is New Books and Intellectual History. I'm your host, Ryan Tripp. We're again a channel on the wider New Books Network. Please tune in next time.