[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Rakesh Bhandari]

>Historians tend to see racism less in terms of intangible ideas than
>tangible institutional functioning and practices.  The curse of Ham isn't
>just an abstract idea, but a justification for such institutional racial
>subjugation...with very tangible economic results.

Africans were not alone enslaved because of the curse of Ham. The 
Curse of Ham was racialized and the tendentiousness of its 
racialization overlooked because for a variety of reasons the 
heredity bondage of Africans alone evolved as a solution to the 
problem a shortage of the exploitable labor by which New World 
plantation production could be made profitable.

For Davis one of those reasons for the return and racialization of 
heredity bondage was that because the Curse of Ham had already been 
racialized by the Muslims, there was already a convenient excuse for 
the early modern Europeans to bring back slavery and to condemn 
Africans alone to it after earlier attempts to use European 
indentured servants had failed.

This is what Davis means by his critique of economic determinism. 
Biblical exegesis selected among the alternatives for the 
organization of labor in New World plantation agriculture.  Here 
Davis proves himself interested in intangible ideas as you put!

Davis in fact spends very little time on the actual Islamic practice 
of slavery--its different nature from Atlantic commercial slavery, 
its practices of manumission, the status of those born to slaves, the 
non racial exclusivity of its practice, the effects of the Koran and 
Islamic political rule on the nature of slavery.

For it was not the practice of Islamic slavery that early modern 
Europeans copied but (according to Davis) its ideological 
justification of black slavery. Yet the Muslims never enslaved 
Africans alone, and the Islamic anti black ideology was more heavily 
qualified than anti black sentiment came to be in the Atlantic world 
especially North America.

It was not the curse of Ham that  prepared the way for racism but the 
abrogation of every customary privilege for and denial of even the 
implicit recognition of the humanity of  slaves in the course of the 
rampant commercialization of Anglo American slavery. It was in light 
of unprecedented human degradation of African American slaves as 
evidenced in the low rates of manumission and the horrifying 
condition of free blacks that Samuel Morton and Louis Agassiz 
developed the ideology of racism.

And this ideology of racism had and has real effect; it mattered and 
matters very much to institutional functioning and practices and has 
tangible economic results. From the failures of the New Deal to post 
war redlining the story is now well known in academic circles.

This practical ideology of racism is not couched in the biblical 
terms of the Curse of Ham.

In fact I am arguing that racism is not continuous with such Biblical exegesis.







>The line between capitalist and "pre-capitalist" has always eluded me.  As
>Marx wrote somewhere, capitalism grew in the pores of the feudal system.
>There was a lot of it about in "pre-capitalist" societies.  And the
>"pre-capitalist" slave trade seems to me a very legitimately capitalist
>enterprise.

But Davis himself underlines that the Islamic slave trade was most 
often not commercial in character!

I am not understanding what your objections are.

Rakesh




ML