Slavery, Redemption, and the Origins of Mathematics
Some folks are offended by claims that slavery played a central role in American history. Did Jamestown colonists purchase enslaved Africans a year before Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock? Indisputably. Whether one is offended by that fact or not is irrelevant: it’s still history.
But does that history matter today? Maybe.
Nicole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project strove to present history in ways other Americans may never have considered. Attacking an academic who makes a controversial point can be lucrative: history does not pay off the mortgage, but denying it might. At least if one can use those denials to spot ‘like-minded’ people who are also prone to snapping to certain judgments, and then exploiting that proclivity with one con after another.
Most people will never read through the 1619 Project all the way through, consider the podcasts, study, learn. Both opponents and proponents will tend to leap to judgment, swallowing the partially regurgitated thought McNuggets cooked up and vomited by one corporate sponsor or another (or by two different sides of the same corporate sponsor). Truth won’t matter to that crowd so much as monetized clicks. Pity.
If there are historical arguments to be made about whether the 1619 project goes “too far” in centering the narrative of slavery (and the post-Civil War eras of racial injustices), a different critique might suggest that perhaps the real problem is that the project doesn’t go far enough?
What if slavery — and the story of family struggles to resist and overcome slavery — played a massively important role in the development of mathematics, writing, and law in Western contexts? One can make that argument about Judaism/Israeli identities, but perhaps every other Western concept of civilization also has some influence that can be linked to efforts to mitigate the institution of slavery. Perhaps the unique horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade arose because that ‘innovation’ on an ancient institution enabled generations of brutality in ways that had been curtailed before.
The Dawn of Math, Writing, and Law as tools to redeem from slavery
For most of human pre-history, families or tribes confronted starvation each winter. Settlements started in locations with plentiful food and water, largely to try to limit that annual terror and the sickness and death it might bring, but even then, food might run out unless people learned tricks to create food themselves.
The birth of agriculture.
In the 21st century, starvation tends to occur when governments actively block people from acquiring necessary food. In the face of a famine, most people will figure out how to grow the crops they can and feed themselves, and sell off everything they have to protect their elders and children.
But for most of human pre-history (and much of human actual history), agriculture would consist of trial and error, and even if a settlement was prosperous, not every farmer would prosper every year. In the face of an egregious miscalculation (or drought, locust plague, injury, raider attack, etc.), a farming family would need to turn to other families for support.
Most of the time, the support provided would be forthcoming — settlements would involve cousins and other kinship ties — and more importantly, a group of 200 people could only fight off raiding bands of 20–30 people if the group cooperated with one another more than they fought.
In the event of a famine, everyone faces starvation. A family that cooperates by feeding another family at the risk of its own children will probably do so only if there is something unusually valuable they receive in exchange beyond a promise of future payment and crops. That might be how slavery started.
“Selling” a family member to another family would serve two goals: potentially acquiring the food needed to see a family through the hard times, and also helping a family member eat at the table of another family as part of their ‘property.’ Families would probably try to redeem the members that they ‘sold.’
How much would that cost? How would everybody know what the original price was, and how much it would cost to pay it back? How would the records of the transaction be proven for everyone in the community? What if people disagreed?
It may be that the institutions of writing, mathematics, and law all originated to resolve these questions. The wealthy owners of large stockpiles of grain and livestock don’t necessarily need to worry too much about precisely how much they have at any given time — so long as they have “enough.” They would tend to inventory their assets exhaustively only when they had good reason.
“Counting” surely came first. Then mathematics to handle exactly how any addition or subtraction changed the total count. Then writing and laws to handle disputes over precisely how much was bought and sold. Inventory would be kept by the wealthy, primarily to keep an eye on how close they were getting to losing their labor forces.
How Math, Writing, and Law would be used to expand slavery
In proposing that slavery (or redemption of enslaved family members) might have created several human institutions, one might overstate the progressive meaning of those institutions. That would be erroneous.
Math used to calculate how much debt remained before a family member could be liberated might also be used to calculate how much it would cost to hire an army and send it out to acquire slaves. Indeed, if two different settlements were to raise raiding parties of their own, they might also promise additional payments to their neighbors and other friends in an attempt to draw as many soldiers as they could and raise the larger army.
Such armies in early agricultural eras are not ‘capitalist’ enterprises. The armies raised by borrowing and lending to hire soldiers (or navies) reflect institutions that have nothing whatsoever to do with ‘capital’ in an economic sense. ‘Slave-takers’ of the early agricultural era who distributed ‘shares of the proceeds’ to various lenders were not corporations, even if the armies that they formed were intended to persist indefinitely (e.g., legions).
The fundamental structure in play remains debt — using one sort of debt (to borrow money for soldiers to join) to pay off another sort of debt (enslaving other people) — and if the balances were struck skillfully enough, entire empires might be formed through such efforts. Brutal, certainly. But a form of brutality far older than capitalism.
In “Stamped from the Beginning,” Ibram Kendi explained a theory of racism that proposes general emergence in the 15th century, as Portuguese enslavers/explorers seeking routes in Africa returned without vast troves of gold, jewels, and spices, but instead, with very distinctive slaves.
It would be unwise to challenge the claims in his book directly, at least not without having conducted a comparable course of study. Don’t like his evidence? Find better evidence. Otherwise shut up. History doesn’t care about your feelings.
The Portuguese probably enslaved sub-Saharan Africans for reasons not all that different from the early agricultural enslavers who raised armies to conquer their neighbors and/or abduct some of their family members for use as slaves. The framework was well-known from the Mediterranean slave trade of that era, in which Christians and Muslims both conducted slave trading and rounds of abductions, largely to impress rowers on their galleons, or to ransom someone notable (e.g., Cervantes).
Kendi credits Prince Henry “the Navigator” in “Stamped from the Beginning” and elsewhere with creating a new form of slavery, one constructed upon a novel concept of ‘race.’
…the Portuguese began to exclusively trade African bodies. Prince Henry’s sailors made history when they navigated past the feared “black” hole of Cape Bojador, off Western Sahara, and brought enslaved Africans back to Portugal
- Ibram Kendi, Literary Hub
True, but what exactly is the value of an African body such sailors might wish to trade? Spices, gold, and other cargo have old mechanisms to establish value.
Enslaving other people could be problematic for Christians (the New Testament compares ‘enslavers’ to other forms of egregious sinners). Those problems would be compounded if the slaves actually converted to Christianity.
More importantly though, away from the interminable Ottoman-Christian wars and the need for disposable rowers on galleys, slavery offered very little that couldn’t be more efficiently attained using peasants, serfs, and servants.
Why house/feed/care for/supervise a slave who could escape and run away? Why maintain the records showing exactly what was owed before the slave could be redeemed, when you could avoid all that bookkeeping? And if you had a large number of slaves, what if a local church asked you to release them or donate them to work on an important church project? Could you defy the local structures? Could you actually own slaves without risking complete loss?
Henry’s henchmen surely proposed the uniquely ‘racial’ recipe to try to raise the price at which they could sell their cargo, and to head off any risk that the Church might interfere, while also pointing out all the other advantages of a group of people that once enslaved might remain enslaved no matter what, creating a permanent value for such acquisitions. Portugal became the largest slave trading empire in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Such slave taking and trading is not ‘capitalism,’ not any more than slave raids of earlier millennia were capitalistic enterprises simply because the raiders agreed to share the profits among one another.
But one key distinction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that every concept of ‘debt’ would be irrelevant vis-à-vis the slaves themselves. Slave traders could dispatch brutes as foremen to manage their overseas plantations: they didn’t need educated people who could actually read, write, apply laws, and determine who owed what to whom in order to pay off debts. Educated elites could stay in Lisbon or colonial capitals, working on whatever political intrigues they deemed pressing. Others did their dirty, brutal work without the constraints they would face back home.
Kendi asserts that “capitalism” drove the early Atlantic slave trade. Maybe, maybe not. I am not certain he actually made that precise case. It seems more likely that the trans-Atlantic slave trade reflected an important racist innovation grafted into the older institution of slavery — an innovation that was powerful because it instantly dismantled concepts of redemption and law that would have applied to slaves taken from the same ‘race.’ Because debts, law, and trade are crucial to preserving any settlement, the invention of ‘race’ was intended to bypass the laws, capitalistic or otherwise, and instead reduce humans to animals in perpetuity.
The 1619 Project doesn’t go in such speculative directions, because it is a work of history more than anything else. But what if capitalism was ‘neutral’ about the form of brutality: a capitalist might profit by buying and selling slaves (and thus acquiring ‘free’ labor indefinitely), by building a more efficient factory (and thus producing more widgets at the same price), by building other forms of infrastructure (if they were capitalized), or other such gambits.
Capitalism could actually create possibilities of increasing production and everyone benefiting collectively — feudalism (and all related forms of ‘feudalism’ in which power is wielded primarily by certain families against other families) required that for every winner, there be at least as many losers.
Capitalism CAN be brutal. Feudalism MUST be brutal.
It is possible that capitalism existed side-by-side with slavery, sometimes making it worse, sometimes making it better , but that parallel identity could work the same way math, writing, and law coexisted with slavery in the ancient agricultural settlements, sometimes alleviating the condition by enabling a redemption to occur in a managed process, sometimes worsening the condition by enabling larger slave-taking enterprises focusing on some ‘other’ group of people.
