Abolitions

ALESSANDRO STANZIANI

Debates about abolitions have essentially focused on two interrelated questions: (1) whether nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century abolitions were a major breakthrough compared to previous centuries (or even millennia) in the history of humankind during which bondage had been the dominant form of labour and human condition; (2) whether they express an action specific to Western bourgeoisie and liberal civilization.

It is true that the number of abolitionist acts and the people concerned throughout the extended nineteenth century (1780-1914) had no equivalent in history: 30 million Russian peasants, half a million slaves in Saint-Domingue in 1790, four million slaves in the US in i860, another million in the Caribbean (at the moment of the abolition of 1832-40), a further million in Brazil in 1885 and 250,000 in the Spanish colonies were freed during this period. Abolitions in Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century have been estimated to involve approximately seven million people.¹

Yet this argument has been criticized by those who have argued that the abolitionist legal acts take into consideration neither the important rate of manumission and purchase of freedom in Islamic societies, in areas such as Africa, South East Asia and the Ottoman empire^{^[134]} ^{^[135]}, nor the important rate of manumission in Russia and Brazil prior to general abolition, nor the legal and social constraints on freed slaves and serfs.

This chapter seeks to provide answers which go beyond these standard oppositions between ‘before' and ‘after' the abolition, on the one hand, and between the ‘West' and ‘the rest', on the other hand. We will stress interrelations in terms of the circulation of ideas and the economic and social dynamics between various areas - Europe, Russia, Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Americas.

Taking this as our starting point, we will attempt to identify continuities and changes in the long-term process of emancipation and the interaction between different notions and practices of ‘freedom'. We will begin with Russian serfdom and its abolition, before analysing the transatlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery in European colonies in connection with economic and social dynamics in Africa, India, Europe and Latin America. We will then show that abolition in the USA impacted different areas such as Brazil, Egypt, Russian Turkestan, India and, of course, Europe. We will conclude with the abolition of slavery in Africa and in the Ottoman Empire before World War I and a broader reminder of persistent forms of bondage and coercion through to the present day.

The abolition of serfdom

In continental Western Europe and Britain forms of serfdom and slavery were never officially abolished, they simply progressively disappeared between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. This was not the case in Russia and Eastern Europe where, on the contrary, new forms of bondage were introduced from the fourteenth century. Some have found close similarities between the so-called second serfdom in oriental Europe and American slavery.^{^[136]} This approach is misleading for several reasons: serfdom was not practised on foreigners on the basis of racial distinction, but on Russian themselves; unlike American slaves, serfs were not eradicated from their original community, but were fully integrated into the peasant village and the owner's estate; the introduction, evolution and abolition of serfdom followed completely different paths to that in the Americas. Yet before serfdom, Russia knew forms of slavery and bondage knows as kholopostvo. These were heterogeneous forms of bondage, varying from the indentured labour and debt slavery to domestic servants and chattel slavery. At its peak, i.e. at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, kholopy accounted for about 10 per cent of the Russian population.

However, this category was abolished by Peter the Great in 1725 when he introduced the general capitation fiscal system. From that moment onwards, kholopy entered other legal categories - either that of peasants (serfs) or of lower urban groups.^{^[137]} This is where the identification of serfdom became crucial. Unlike interpretations which have remained dominant from the Enlightenment through to the modern day, serfdom as such was never institutionalized in Russia.^{^[138]} Limitations to peasants' mobility entered a wider game opposing Russian elites. These measures were dictated not only by the taxation and military requirements of the rising Russian state, which were linked to Russian territorial expansion^{^[139]} but overlapped with a significant redefinition of the relationships between social groups and that state.^{^[140]} The Russian elites welcomed requests from the provincial nobility to legitimize their properties, as these elites could thereby secure an important ally in their fight against the boyari (big estate owners). As such, constraints were above all a form of institutionalized extortion of peasants by landlords: the latter could forbid marriages, sideline activities and emigration and could also impose labour services.^{^[141]} In practice, all these rules could be negotiated and most landlords simply demanded a fee in order to give their permission. This explains why despite ‘serfdom', and in accordance with its rules, peasants never stopped moving from one estate to another, from one region to another and the government even introduced measures to protect them, particularly if they accepted to move to the newly annexed southern and eastern provinces. As a result, between the mid sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, the colonization of the southern and eastern steppes was the most important event to occur in Russia. With the help of the State, half a million people moved to these new areas, despite the complaints of landowners in central Russia.^{^[142]}

From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, peasants and working people exploited conflicts between the elites in order to contest the latter's rights over them.

Through litigation or administrative decisions, between 1801 and 1861, when serfdom was officially abolished, half of the peasantry abandoned the status of ‘private peasant' and became state peasants or urban inhabitants. Of the other fifty per cent - ten million males, plus their families (still private peasants at the moment of abolition) - barely half were still engaged in labour services, the others paying fees and rent to the landlord. Unlike world-capitalism theory,^{^[143]} ^{^[144]} detailed empirical analyses show that labour services went hand-in-hand with an increasing integration of the demesne in proto-industrial activity as well as in local and national markets for agriculture and commerce.11 Both landlords and peasants took part in this process.^{^[145]} The output of both agricultural produce and proto-industrial products increased throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in turn, this sustained the demand for manufactured goods which was mostly satisfied by local proto-industrial activity utilizing labour-intensive technology.^{^[146]} The well-being of peasants improved, as seen in decreasing mortality rates and the increasing height of conscripts.^{^[147]}

From this perspective, whilst the ‘abolition of serfdom' in 1861 did not mark as big a break as has often been claimed, it was nevertheless a crucial step in the long-term process which had begun in the late eighteenth century and ended only on the eve of World War I. The major novelty of the reforms was not ‘freedom' as such, nor the passage from ‘feudalism' to ‘capitalism', but the very fact that access to the ownership of inhabited estates was now extended to other social classes, namely urban residents and merchants. Peasants purchased lands and sold agricultural and proto-industrial products to the market. Peasants' standards of living strongly increased and recent estimates have shown that between 1861 and 1914 Russian's growth in agriculture, trade and industry kept pace with that of major Western countries.^{^[148]}

These outcomes confirm similar recent conclusions regarding east- European agriculture under serfdom.^{^[149]} Taken together, the experiences of Russia, Prussia, Lithuania and some parts of Poland lead to the conclusion that, as a whole, second serfdom was not so much a form of slavery as, above all, a set of legal constraints on labour mobility.

These rules were dictated far less by scarcity of population in a context of absentee and backward landlords than by increasing demand for agricultural produce and proto-industrial products encouraging growth. Unlike Wallerstein's argument, Russia and Eastern Europe did not constitute the quasiperiphery of industrializing Europe. East-European cereals were not the feudal support of Western capitalism, but an important ingredient of its transformation.

Yet far from closing the file, these issues raise new questions: once one accepts that Russian serfdom was more flexible and market-oriented than is usually suggested and that its abolition was part of a long-term transformation, then analogies and differences with European colonial slavery also require new appraisals.

The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade

Russian emancipation was not so much due to pressure from urban groups as to a circumstantial event (the Crimean war) and the attitude of certain tsarist elites, a group of big estate owners and the peasants' resistance during previous decades. In a quite different manner, the first British abolitionist campaigns combined moral, political, religious and economic arguments. The latter were probably the weakest, not just because slavery was objectively profitable, but also because in England itself Adam Smith's arguments did not become widespread until the mid nineteenth century. Indeed, religious anti-slavery groups were opposed to both materialism and utilitarianism and used this argument to criticize slavery.^{^[150]}

The abolition of slave trade caused Britain to lose profits not only from this trade, but also from the reduced production of sugar in the West Indies in the years following the abolition. After that period, despite the slow recovery of production, on the European markets Britain constantly lost shares of sugar and coffee to the benefit of Spain and Brazil.^{^[151]}

The slave trade was nevertheless a global affair.

In the Atlantic, between 1500 and 1850, 31 per cent of African slaves transported to the Americas went to Brazil; against 22 per cent to the French Caribbean, 23 per cent to the British Caribbean, 9.6 per cent to the Spanish colonies and 6 per cent to North America. In the Caribbean, slaves were mostly employed on sugar plantations. Unlike those in Brazil, these were huge plantations; they were also badly organized and essentially relied upon strong coercion. The history of slavery and sugar in the Caribbean is one of rampant profit-taking and strong slave resistance encouraged by the size of the plantations and by the high proportion of slaves compared to the population as a whole (about three- quarters, as against 44.8 per cent in the deep South USA in 1860). Resistance was also enhanced by the low rate of reproduction and the continuous flow of new slaves from Africa.

Indeed the abolition of the slave trade did not reduce the overall number of slaves carried across the Atlantic but enhanced it for a time. Encouraged by the demand for sugar and coffee in North America and Europe, increasing numbers of African slaves were carried to Brazil and Cuba.^{^[152]} Even worse, at least 90 per cent of the manufactured goods used in this slave trade to Brazil and Cuba came from Britain, while British credit financed half of the Cuban and Brazilian slave trade.^{^[153]}

In Africa itself, the export trade in African slaves northwards to Muslim countries continued to be significant, accounting for about 30 per cent of total slave exports from Africa in the seventeenth century, 20 per cent in the eighteenth century, and about 30 per cent between the seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Overall, between 1500 and 1800, the Muslim trade probably accounted for about 40 per cent of African slave exports. During the first half of the nineteenth century, half a million African slaves were sent to the Indian Ocean and another 420,000 to the Red Sea.^{^[154]} As a consequence of British abolitionism, the initial decline in slave prices stimulated internal demand. The enslavement frontier was pushed further into the interior than ever before. The introduction of so called ‘legitimate trade' (palm oil, coconuts) also contributed to the recrudescence of slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean. In most cases, manumissions were extremely important, in particular in Islamic areas. On the other hand, there was no equivalent of the British notion and practice of abolitionism as they were progressively identified in the nineteenth century.

The abolition of slavery in practice: from slaves

to apprentices

In England many had believed that the abolition of slave trade would lead to the progressive abolition of slavery. This was not the case, as France, Spain and Portugal continued to import slaves, while in the West Indies planters resisted any attempt to improve the conditions of slaves. A new antislavery society was founded; it shifted from gradual abolition to immediate abolition of slavery. A period (usually six to seven years, which typically reproduced the timeframe of individual emancipation as well as the apprenticeship contract) was imposed during which the quasi-former slaves were given an apprenticeship status.^{^[155]} Slaves did not enjoy full legal status inasmuch as they were not yet ‘civilised'.^{^[156]} Apprentices worked 45 hours a week for their former owners in exchange for food, clothing, lodging and medical care. Absenteeism or bad performance (according to standards set by the planters themselves) led to severe penalties and increased the period and the amount of apprentices' obligations. Physical punishment, which had been supressed under slavery during the 1820s, was now re-introduced for apprentices. Abuse was thus extremely frequent.^{^[157]}

Thus, even though former slave-owners had received compensation of20 million pounds, many planters used the apprenticeship programme as additional compensation and, to this end, they sought to extract as much unpaid labour as possible. The final social and economic outcome differed from one colony to another according to the availability of land, previous forms of bondage and types of culture, new forms of labour and their rules (different masters and servants acts enacted in each colony), and to systems of credit.^{^[158]} In Barbados the planters kept almost all the land that they rented in part to former slaves, few of whom therefore left their original plantations. In Jamaica, Trinidad and English Guyana, many former slaves had formal access to land, but many of them ended up indebted to their former masters and found themselves back on the plantations.²⁶ This did not prevent former slaves (when they did not run away) from providing extremely irregular (in their masters' eyes) labour. A fall in sugar output in Jamaica was one of the major expressions of resistance.

In this context India was a special case within the British Empire; public opinion in Britain tended towards the adoption of a broader conception of slavery (from chattel slavery, to debt bondage, domestic and agricultural slaves, cast dependence, children dependence, etc.), a conception which would extend the range of reforms and the areas of the Empire concerned. However, in practice colonial officers supported a relatively restrictive interpretation of slavery, by arguing that many forms of ‘dependence' were far milder than slavery and were part of local customs. In turn, the latter were to be preserved for social and political imperial equilibrium. Ever since, historians have fiercely debated whether the multiple forms of Indian bondage were or were not ‘slavery' and, hence whether slavery decreased or increased over time. Indeed, the British administration openly supported masters' rights until 1843, when it adopted a comparatively neutral attitude up until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when more aggressive anti-slavery policies were adopted.²⁷

The French only abolished slavery in 1848; unlike the British they did not go through an intermediate period of ‘apprenticeship' but rather practised disguised forms of enslavement. Recruitment in India, Madagascar, Mozambique and the eastern coast of Africa relied on networks that had been in place since the eighteenth century and it employed the same practices as the slave trade. It often involved violence, sometimes with the help of local tribal chiefs. Using the slave trade system already developed in the region with the rise of Islam, French traders, helped by local sultans, began importing libres engages from Gabon, Zaire and West Africa - a name which fetished

Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 322.

26 Thomas, Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labour and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore and London: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

27 Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992); Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

freedom while practising enslavement.^{^[159]} There were also ‘prior redemptions' (the term given to such purchases) in Madagascar, Zanzibar and Mozambique, causing conflicts with the Portuguese and the English. Ultimately, these disguised forms of slavery evolved only with the development of new massive worldwide forms of population displacements.

From apprentices to indentured immigrants

According to one approach, the indentured contract resembled forced labour and slavery and contracts were said to express a ‘legal fiction'. This interpretation has an interesting history of its own: it was advanced by colonial elites in the nineteenth century and later renewed in ‘subaltern studies'.^{^[160]} This approach deprives the abolition of slavery of any historical significance.^{^[161]}

Other scholars have opposed this view by demonstrating that the indenture contract was not considered an expression of forced labour until the second half of the nineteenth century, whereas until that date, it was viewed as an expression of free will in contract.^{^[162]} Indeed, indentured labour was not just disguised slavery, but an expression of what free labour was at that time, i.e. a contract based upon unequal rights between the master and the servant, the latter being subject to criminal prosecution. Masters in the colonies gradually obtained broader rights than in Great Britain. In Mauritius, 14,000 indentured and domestic servants were prosecuted every year in the 1860s; during the same period in Great Britain, proceedings were brought against 9,700 servants per year for breach of contract and almost always resulted in convictions. In contrast, masters were seldom indicted and even more rarely convicted for breach of contract, ill treatment or non-payment of wages. They could exercise corporal punishment, authorise the marriage of indentured servants, etc.^{^[163]}

In economic terms, it is not correct to interpret indentured labour as a simple and temporary substitute for slavery in the aftermath of its abolition. Indentured labour began far before slavery and persisted during and after it. The first phase, from the seventeenth century to the 1830s, concerned about 300,000 European indentured servants who were intended for tobacco plantations and to some extent for manufacturing. With the rapid development of plantations, African slaves gradually supplanted them. However, white indentured immigration retained all of its importance in North America and Canada until at least the 1830s and responded to both push factors in Europe (industrialisation, transformation of the countryside) and pull factors in North America.

The abolition of slavery gave new life to indentured immigration. The second phase (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) concerned 2.5 million indentured servants, mostly Chinese and Indian but also African, Japanese and immigrants from the Pacific Islands. They were employed in sugar plantations and in manufacturing. Unlike white settlers during the first phase of indentured immigration, during the 1850s and 1860s, many indentured immigrants returned home (mostly Indians). The proportion was one third in Mauritius, the Caribbean, Surinam and Jamaica but this was far from the 70 per cent repatriation recorded in Thailand, Malaya and Melanesia. Distance and the cost of transport were only two of the variables affecting repatriation; politics, concrete forms of integration and death from disease were also important factors.

The actual conditions endured by workers depended not only on their ethical origin and on the period during which they arrived, but also on the estates on which they worked. Small plantation owners were more concerned about fugitive, insubordinate and vagrant indentured servants.^{^[164]} On the other hand, owners of large plantations who complained of the excessive cost of slave surveillance often imposed a liberal ideology in the colonial systems; they found support for the indenture system in humanitarian and anti-slavery associations by stressing the benefits of free immigration (indenture) as opposed to slavery.^{^[165]}

Conditions for indentured immigrants improved over time. This was due to several factors, not least of which was the endurance of the immigrants themselves, who continued to report abuse despite the difficulties they faced in so doing, and their commitment to passive resistance as well as to absconding, forming groups and taking action through the courts. These approaches met with increasing ‘benevolence' on the part of colonial elites, in some instances because they firmly believed in freedom and/or the virtues of the free market, while others were responding to political pressure from Paris and London. The India Office and officials in India were doubtless inclined to protect Indian immigrants on Reunion Island not only for humanitarian reasons but also to guarantee a labour force for British employers in India.

Market trends strongly affected conditions for immigrants. The steady fall in the price of sugar on international markets (from 39 pounds a ton in the early 1840s to 22 pounds in the early 1870s and down to a low of 9.60 pounds in 1896)^{^[166]} pushed small producers to impose harsh labour conditions, which led to massive worker absconding and resistance. As a result, in Reunion Island and Mauritius, many petits blancs sold their properties and moved to the highlands,^{^[167]} where they were joined by immigrants and former slaves who began buying land or, more often, cultivating it under new forms of renting.

Together with the declining price of sugar, the generally increasing supply of migrants influenced conditions on local and global labour markets. Between 1840 and 1940, 55-58 million Europeans, 2.5 million Africans and Asiatic reached the Americas; during this same period, other 29 million Indian, 19 million Chinese and 4 million Africans and Europeans moved to southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands and the Indian Ocean Rim. Finally, 46-51 million people from north-eastern Asia and Russia moved (or were compelled to move) to Siberia, Manchuria and Central Asia.^{^[168]} Many of these movements were coerced - especially those working for European enterprises - but many others also moved without physical coercion.^{^[169]} ‘Free' migration expanded with the increasing restriction of indentured contracts, imperial dislocations, global economic dynamics and, in particular, the abolition of slavery in the USA.

Abolition in the United States

As in England, US Quakers engaged in antislavery mainly because they were concerned by domestic problems of labour discipline. Yet, unlike England or France, in the USA a civil war was needed for the abolitionist movement to succeed. The origins of this war were far more political than purely economic. Whilst it is true that international tariff policies (protectionism versus free trade), the structure of the economy (agriculture vs. manufacture), monetary and fiscal policies (stability versus. inflation) and the availability of labour (needed by both the North and the South) were real points of disagreement between northern and southern states, the ultimate source of conflict was the equilibrium in the Congress between slave and free states.^{^[170]}

However, this conclusion does not explain, why, in the end, former slaves were granted so few rights. The strong heritage of slavery in post-abolition American society - often evoked in historiography - reflects only part of the story. Former slaves were not granted ‘false freedom' but freedom as it was generally understood at that time for people such as servants, apprentices and children. In the USA a fundamental difference separated wage labour from indentured contracts. By 1800 wage work was different from its equivalent in England, at least for adult white native-born workers, in that penal sanctions had already been abolished; wage forfeiture was the most widespread remedy to enforce contracts. By contrast, criminal penalties were extremely important in the enforcement of indentured and seamen's contracts. With the abolition of slavery, criminal punishments were generalized to all former slaves. In agriculture, in particular in cotton fields, employers found it increasingly difficult to retain freedmen over an entire year.^{^[171]} The fixed- wage system with a year-long contract prevented a midseason reservoir of unemployed workers and contributed towards reducing the number of dismissals for neglect of work. On the contrary, it did not offer the planter enough control over seasonal variations of labour supply. Sharecropping was seen as the best solution to this problem. Under this system, supervision costs would be reduced and the supply of labour over the entire year could be ensured.

The issue was different in sugar areas. In Louisiana, planters sought to face limited credit and financial resources with long-term contracts for gangs of workers and later, with the collapse of the sugar price in the 1870s, with increasing pressure on labour. Workers initially reacted with increasing mobility, which gave rise to an attempt to more strictly enforce the rules on criminal punishments. Another consequence was that small planters stopped processing the sugar themselves, with ‘central stations' receiving the sugar from several units. Faced with this increasing pressure, workers reacted with collective action and strikes. Repression was severe, leading to concentration and mechanization.^{^[172]}

The global impact of American abolition

The international impact of American abolition was recently very firmly asserted.^{^[173]} The lack of cotton on the international markets led to increased production in various other areas such as Egypt, Russian Turkestan, India and Brazil. Yet the long-term impact on local forms of labour and economic growth depended on the one hand on the recovery of US production and on the other hand on local dynamics. By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, US production was approximately 25 per cent above 1860 levels, and exports were almost at the level of the total crop for 1860. Between 1877 and 1900, exports had more than doubled. At the same time, Russian imperialism in central Asia and the development of cotton fields in the Fergana valley were not only a reaction to the American Civil War, but a response to long-term (since the seventeenth century) Russian efforts to stabilize their southeastern frontier while threatening British India.^{^[174]} Attention to cotton certainly increased in the 1860s, but it only really began to develop twenty years later as a combined result of Russian customs policy and railroad construction.^{^[175]}

Egypt was the second major area influenced by the collapse of American cotton production. Higher production levels were essentially achieved through increasing imports of slaves - in part Circassians from Russia and central Eurasia, in part from Africa. Imports from Africa jumped from about 5000 per year during the 1840s and the 1850s to about 30,000 per year in the 1870s, at which point they fell once again due to the recovery in the USA.^{^[176]}

India was the third area where abolition in the USA exerted a major impact. Immediately after the outbreak of the American Civil War, British producers increased their pressure in Indian cotton-producing areas where masters' and servants' rules were far more strongly enforced. At the same time, the rising price of cotton pushed Indian producers to increase their own production. The British were thus competing with the French to obtain the most cotton while at the same time trying to divert it from the Indian internal market. In millions of pounds, Indian exports of cotton grew from approximately 346 in i860 to 806 in 1866. This was not a temporary boom, as unlike the conventional history of Indian deindustrialization, recent works show that Indian demand supported local production throughout the nineteenth century and in particular from the i870s onwards.^{^[177]}

In Brazil, imports of slaves had increased during the nineteenth century, in particular after the British and US abolition of the slave trade. The peak was reached in the 1830s when the number of slaves in Brazil was about 2.5 million. More active policies were only adopted in i850, with the major decline in imports of slaves. With high mortality, the lack of women and the high rate of manumission, the number of slaves decreased to 1.5 million in the 1850s to 750,000 at the eve of abolition in 1886. The slave society of Brazil was also particular in that although they were of African descent, numerous men and women shed their slave status. In the early nineteenth century this accounted for 12.5 per cent of the Brazilian population, similar to Spanish America at that time but very different from southern USA where it barely reached 4.5 per cent. In Brazil, the sugar industry was not based as much on huge plantations as was the case in the Caribbean, and mining and urban slavery also played a prominent role (unlike in the USA). Slave ownership thus rested on a very broad social base and the abolition of trade did not halt the internal market: between 1850 and 1880, a buoyant internal market persisted for slaves.^{^[178]} An abolitionist movement won attention in the 1860s, by echoing the politics of the USA. Yet as in the other cases mentioned above, continuities in social conditions were as important as official abolition. Since the 1870s, many slaves had already signed official contracts of labour, selling, etc. while after 1888, the criminal punishment and harsh treatment of now free slaves were common practice.^{^[179]}

To sum up, the second half of the nineteenth century was not solely a ‘global march towards freedom'. Not only in Brazil, Egypt and India, but also in Russia, expansion was supported by various forms of legal constraint on working people. This analysis is all the more problematic because, on a wider scale, these transformations interacted with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the scramble for Africa.

Last stages? The abolition of slavery in Africa and the Ottoman Empire

In the Ottoman Empire, military, domestic and sexual slaves were added to rural and urban slaves, who were in turn hard to distinguish from other forms of coercion, such as that practised on serfs or convicts. There was a continuum of various degrees of servitude rather than a dichotomy between ‘slave' and ‘free'. Slaves could be public or private and they were imported from Africa, central and southern Asia and the near east, not to mention Christian captives in the Mediterranean. Imports were important not so much because of the high rate of mortality but because of the high rate of manumission.

Abolitionism started when British public opinion and the British government took interest in the abolition of slavery in the Ottoman Empire. This was in the 1840s; geopolitical considerations linked to the decadence and fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire intervened with the usual humanitarian consideration to pump up British pressure. Pressure started with the prohibition of the slave trade in the Persian Gulf and in Africa in 1857. It increased with the emigration of Circassians from Russia to the Ottoman Empire, notably Egypt and Turkey as a consequence of the Crimean war. Britain seized this occasion to warn Ottoman authorities to stop this trade. From this perspective, the Crimean war marked a huge break in both diplomatic equilibria and the global labour market. The war incited the abolition of serfdom in Russia whilst encouraging European powers to exert pressure on Istanbul to abolish slavery. However, despite the Conventions signed with Egypt in 1877 and the Porte in 1880, British pressures significantly reduced the slave trade but had little effect on domestic practices.^{^[180]} There was also considerable abolition impetus within the Ottoman Empire; yet despite their interest in ‘modernization', they opposed any external Western influence. As a consequence, Britain ultimately adopted a cautious attitude towards slavery in Turkey. British pressure was much more effective in Egypt, where anti-slavery movements against Islam converged with the overall movement for the ‘abolition of slavery' in Africa.

Between the 1890s and World War I, European powers decreed the abolition of slavery in Africa. Indeed, Europeans justified their occupation of Africa by the argument that it was necessary to abolish the slavery which still existed in these regions. Public opinion and administrative rulers in Europe stressed the ‘barbarian' and backward attitude of African elites willing to enslave other Africans and called for a ‘civilizing mission' by the West.^{^[181]} This action was intended to have two principal phases: firstly, ‘slaves' had to be freed and the slave trade stopped; secondly, an appropriate labour market had to be established. However, on the ground, these ambitions encountered more pragmatic attitudes. British officials sought to avoid confrontation with Islamic authorities; concubinage was left intact and Islamic customary law was evoked to justify this attitude. Indeed, colonial policy was to refuse to implement immediate abolition for fear of a quick collapse of local societies and maybe even of European control.^{^[182]} The colonial state was therefore supposed to intervene to ease the transition to free labour and to maintain discipline. Officials believed that Africa's development required Africans not being allowed to work when, where and how they chose. In both French and British Africa, there was a campaign against vagrancy, theft, drinking and personal violence. Colonial intentions must not however be taken to be achievements. African slave owners and slaves practised emancipation in a manner which the British (or French) did not necessarily approve. Instead of becoming ‘capitalists', ‘landowners', ‘proletarians' (as the British hoped in Kenya and Tanzania) or ‘peasants' (as the French wished), most Africans worked as ‘peasant-workers' moving back and forth between their own plots and plantations or urban activities.^{^[183]}

These policies took different shapes in different parts of Africa. Important differences existed between colonial policies in the British territories of Kenya and Zanzibar, which were in turn different from the legislation in the Cape, mostly influenced by labour in the mines. Gold Coast legislation, on the other hand, attempted to closely follow the evolution of labour law in Britain and therefore sought to make breach of contract a civil rather than criminal offence. None of these policies was implemented in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. There were prosecutions under these laws but there was little uniformity across British Africa. For example, employers and employees in Nigeria and Sierra Leone appear to have made very little use of the legislation.^{^[184]} Indeed, the rate of prosecution was much higher in the mines, not only in South Africa and Rhodesia, but also in the Gold Coast.^{^[185]}

Analogous differences existed in French Africa.^{^[186]} In 1887, the code of ‘indigenous people' provided criminal sanctions and repressed vagrancy. Obligatory labour was the rule in both private and public companies and plantations.^{^[187]} At the same time, ‘obligatory labour' was carefully distinguished from slavery; to some extent it was even presented as a way of escaping it. Limitation of freedom in the name of freedom was a constant refrain which was not considered to be a contradiction in terms. So-called prestations were legalized in 1912 but they had been in use since the end of the nineteenth century. Local inhabitants were compelled to work to pay their taxes, to work off their sentences or as a form of military conscription. Governors pressured Africans to produce certain crops for export and to work for concessionary companies especially in AEF. In turn, local concessionaires and planters could apply to receive part of this workforce. French attitudes were much more brutal in central Africa (AEF) than in western Africa (AOF). The reasons for this were complex: lack of control, thin population and greater reliance on concession companies. There were also huge differences within regions. In Senegal numerous slaves were found and redeemed by kin; people often moved far away.

As result of this, the three main options open to former slaves (emigrate, stay nearby under new ties with local communities, or stay with their former masters) took on varying proportions and forms in different areas. Spontaneous long-distance movement was always discouraged by colonial authorities for political stability in both Africa and Europe, but they were important in British Nigeria and French Sudan not to forget immigration to South African mines. New settlements were widespread in Senegal (coconut farmers) and in some areas of Guinea.

Resurgence and persistence of slavery in the twentieth century

The ‘march towards freedom' which seemed to be an irreversible achievement at the turn of the twentieth century would not be confirmed. On the contrary, during World War I, requisition, militarization of labour and obligatory labour were practised on a massive scale in Europe and even more so in its colonies.^{^[188]} The heritage of World War I was important: in Europe, German and Soviet leaders took inspiration from their experiences during World War I (and in the Russian Civil War), to develop new forms of coercion. At the end of World War II, the two powers employed about 30 million forced labourers: over 23.5 million by Soviet Russia and about 7.7 million by Nazi Germany. Of this number, over 2 million were in concentration camps. Furthermore, over 5 million were Russians, with 2.8 million put to work by the Nazis as prisoners of war and conscripted labourers.^{^[189]} The Soviet Gulag main aim was political: every real or presumed opponent to the Soviet regime was imprisoned in the camps: peasants hostile to collectivization, small entrepreneurs and traders, specialists, political activists and, ultimately, gypsies and Jewish and ‘ethnical minorities'.^{^[190]} The profitability of the gulag is more difficult to evaluate: like many Western scholars, some Soviet leaders seemed to justify the use of forced labour in remote semideserted areas where any other kind of ‘voluntary' labour would have been more expensive. Yet the camps proved to be extremely inefficient; they caused huge destruction of resources and human capital. It was not by chance that the best economic performances related to the practice of leasing workers to outside employers.^{^[191]}

During the same period, international organizations made their first attempts to fight slavery outside of Europe (1926: League of Nations' Convention) and, more generally, forced labour (1930: Convention of the International Labour Organization (ILO)). The 1926 Convention widened the definition of slavery and marked the beginning of the attack on a wide range of exploitative practices. Yet it was difficult to enforce, partly because of the ambiguity of some formulations, partly because many states, such as France, opposed practices of monitoring as infringements of national sovereignty.^{^[192]}

After World War II, while forced labour was banned in Europe, it was also abolished in the declining French Empire, due to the presence of African members of parliament in the Assemblee Nationale Constituante in 1946. A strong international consensus was reached that forced labour was both identifiable and unacceptable. The ILO tried to argue that social legislation for Europe should apply to colonies - i.e. that labour was a universal social issue. However, this motion was strongly denied in both Britain and France. Liberation in one sense - sovereignty - provided a screen behind which practices agreed in international circles to be unacceptable reappeared, with the connivance of European and American corporations.

Quarrels over slavery were embedded in the broader tensions and framework of the Cold War. Thus in Saudi Arabia, the British complained that because of the increasing involvement of the USA with regard to oil, slavery persisted to a large extent. The French confirmed the importance of the transSaharan slave trade to Saudi Arabia. By 1962, slavery had become a political issue in Saudi Arabia itself; twenty Saudi princes involved in an abortive coup fled to Egypt, where they denounced slavery, thus fuelling Nasser's campaign against the Saudi royal family. After the new coup in 1963, the new Saudi regime declared the official abolition of slavery. Yet charges that slavery still existed in Saudi Arabia continued into the 1980s.

Forms of welfare were introduced in Africa, but the discrepancy between European legal and economic categories and labour practices in Africa made it difficult to implement these rules.^{^[193]} Even worse, most of these rules were preserved in postcolonial Africa and have contributed to legitimizing abuse. Multinational firms and new states such as Ivory Coast evoked formal labour rules to deny any accusation of practising slavery. Quite ironically, these arguments were the same as those used by people who, at the opposite end of the political and intellectual spectrum, criticized the categories and rules derived from the West as a form of neo-colonialism. These orientations ignored the fact that European colonial powers had supported this argument as early as the nineteenth century.

Abolitions

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