Enlightement Period. Period of Enlighting BarbarismGiven this, it makes sense that Enlightenment philosophers should so often turn to slavery as a metaphor for oppression. At times writers like Voltaire and especially Condorcet did address and attack the evils of African slavery: the famous passage in Candide where the eponymous hero comes across a miserable slave who mournfully informs him that “it is at this expense that you eat sugar in Europe” is one prominent example.26 For the most part, however, when Enlightenment writers talked about the evils of slavery they did so only in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense. The symbolic enslavement of Europeans by religious and royal oppression rather than the actual enslavement of Africans in the Americas was far and away their primary concern. For example, as Sala-Molins has trenchantly observed, nowhere in The Social Contract does Rousseau mention the French Code Noir of 1685, in which the royal government formally codified slavery in its Caribbean colonies.27 Voltaire was similarly much more interested in slavery as metaphor than in the actual plight of African slaves. In his 1736 play Alzire, or the Americans, set in sixteenth-century Peru, Voltaire condemns royal oppression and corruption but has little to say about Black slavery in that colony.28 This tendency to privilege the metaphorical over the actual experience of slavery spread far beyond the elite circles of Enlightenment writers. As Susan Buck-Morss has noted, the fact that the Dutch in the early modern era profited tremendously from the slave trade did not stop them from bitterly complaining about their enslavement by the Spanish Monarchy and portraying their fight for independence as a struggle against slavery.29 Simon Schama’s landmark study An Embarrassment of Riches tends to replicate this dichotomy, largely ignoring the “embarrassing” fact that much of Dutch prosperity came from investments in African bondage.30
How can one explain this contrast between the Enlightenment’s often militant opposition to slavery as a political metaphor and the lack of concern with the actual slaves during the eighteenth century? One reason could be that some of the movement’s leading figures directly profited from the slave trade. John Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government remains a classic statement of political liberalism, was a major investor in the African slave trade through the Royal African Company. 31 Others, such as David Hume and Voltaire, held investments that benefited from slavery even if they weren’t directly tied to the slave trade. Such examples merely reaffirm the broad importance of = slavery to European economies in the eighteenth
century.
More significant is the relationship between Enlightenment attitudes to slavery and to race. As Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze has demonstrated, Enlightenment writers devoted significant attention to the study of race and racial difference, often in the context of ethnographic research and
analysis. Immanuel Kant, for example, wrote extensively about the different races of mankind as an ethnographer. As noted earlier, this study of race arose out of the Enlightenment’s heritage from the Scientific Revolution, in particular the desire to apply the same level of systematic classification to humanity that scientists had developed for the natural world. Increased European exploration of the broader world had also generated a variety of travel narratives and other first-person accounts that fueled the interest in the comparative study of different peoples. The Enlightenment thus occupied a seminal position in the birth of scientific racism.32
The comparative study of races generally ranked people from high to low in a hierarchical continuum. In 1684, French doctor François Bernier published one of the first modern books on racial theory, entitled A New Division of the Earth, According to the Different Races of Men Who Inhabit It. He argued that the world’s population was divided into four or five races, each with its own physical and mental characteristics. 33 Several Enlightenment scholars followed Bernier’s lead, considering how different peoples (usually Europeans, Asians, Africans, and “Americans,” or Native Americans) resembled and differed from each other in physical appearance and levels of intellect. Invariably, such rankings placed white Europeans at the top of the hierarchy, emphasizing their intelligence and physical beauty, while Africans were usually placed at the bottom of the scale when evaluated with these characteristics. In comparing different races, Immanuel Kant had this to say about Africans: “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr [David] Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of Blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality.”34 While Enlightenment writers strove to go beyond a simple binary analysis of racial difference by their use of scientific observation and analysis, in many cases they tended to replicate the traditional division between civilized peoples and barbarians. Civilization and reason were therefore largely a province of the white races of Europe. As Eze has argued, “the Enlightenment’s declaration of itself as ‘the Age of Reason’ was predicated upon precisely the assumption that reason could historically only come to maturity in modern Europe.” 35
Source :
White Freedom The Racial History of an Idea Tyler Edward Stovall 2021 Princeton University Press page 107, 108, 109