miller2012

@Book{ miller2012,
    author = {Joseph C. Miller},
    title = {The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach},
    address = {New Haven},
    publisher = {Yale University Press},
    year = 2012,
}

Slavery versus Slaving

According to Miller, historians of slavery have treated it too often as an institution “transcending time and space,” and thus “have frozen the dynamics of slaving in most parts of the world as a historical process” (p. 1). While slaving became institutional (especially in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and nineteenth-century antebellum South), that historically specific form of slavery has been treated by scholars as though it were Slavery with a capital “S” for which slaving practices found earlier or elsewhere were either origins or examples of the same moral contraditions. As an Africanist, Miller has “an acute awareness of the utter irrelevance there of the defining qualities of slavery ‘as an institution’ that we read about, mostly in the Americas” (p. 3), which was “profoundly anomalous” in world-historical terms (p. 19).

p. 12:

Though since 1966 historians and anthropologists have revealed a great many details about slaving in Africa, among Native Americans, in southeastern Asia, even in India, they have tended to retain the modern Western premise of The Problem of Slavery, that slavery—in all times and all places—has been a single institution subject to straightforward comparisons.

Instead of seeing slavery as a recurring problem or moral contradiction, as David Brion Davis did, Miller wants to see it as an ongoing set of historical processes. So whereas Davis’s answer to the question of why abolition suddenly became a live possibility in the eighteenth century has to do with changes in moral reasoning, Miller’s answer is that it has to do with changes in slavery itself: as slavery became more institutional and embedded in political contexts in which it could legally be abolished. (See p. 17, 19.)

p. 34: “the proprietorial accent that became prominent in Atlantic slavery, or at least in parts of the region (and even there only during certain moments), was just that: an emergent, localized accent not inherent in the long-run political efficacy of the historical strategy of slaving”

At times, Miller also particularly blames “abolitionist caricatures” (p. 34) and “neo-abolitionist” historiographical impulses for what he considers a bad problematization of slavery as an “institution.” This leads him to downplay “the whip,” for example, as a “dominating symbol” instead of as the crucial component of labor discipline that other recent scholars like baptist2014 have shown it to be, and to refer to “stereotyped” masters like Simon Legree or rebels like Margaret Garner as “emblematic” and “ficionalized” (p. 2). “Slavery continues to bear this array of negative associations, often more rhetorical than analytical” (p. 18).¹

p. 17:

Broadly, then, the rather stereotyped notion of slavery in both the academic literature and in modern popular culture derives from a nineteenth-century abolitionist negative contrast—in fact a politicized caricature—designed to stir the emotions of an emergently modern world against all limitations of the personal liberties that it seemed to promise.

By contrast, what Miller means by a history of slaving is:

• history of a “historical strategy” (p. 2)
• “a process resulting from changing strategies of people in consistent positions of marginality to the quite distinctive times and places in which they resorted to slaving to intrude on older, more established interests” (p. 4)

Thinking Historically

Miller focuses generally in the first chapter on contrasting historical thinking with “sociological thinking,” by which he means:

• avoiding presentism
• avoiding teleological “quest for origins of later outcomes” (p. 5)
• not reasoning analogically or by comparison, which leads to inherently static views of the processes under comparison (p. 7)
• not relying uncritically on sociological abstractions like “society,” “economy,” “individualism” and so on (p. 7)

Instead, historians “focus on what people actually did, insofar as we have evidence to know about it. … Nor should historians attempt to animate these abstractions, to make religions or nations or slavery itself, into quasi-anthropomorphic actors” (p. 8). They also make imaginative leaps to put themselves “in others’ places, whether or not we like them or what they did” (p. 9).

“Three distinguishing components of history’s epistemology” (p. 25):

1. humans (not abstractions)
2. humans acting in a particular context
3. humans acting primarily in conservative ways to forestall change; “they create change in spite of their best intentions” (p. 28)

p. 27:

The historian sees change as an extension of the philosophical rule of Ockham’s razor. This law of logic, in effect, urges elegance in explanation: what explains most elegantly requires the fewest assumptions. In mathematics, it is a ‘least-moves’ sequence. … Stating the point in yet another way, humans relish changes of dramatic transformational proportions; clear-cut contrasts make great stories. But such stories are not historical.

Historicizing Slaving

For Miller this involves a series of analytical moves including:

• moving beyond the individual “master-slave dyad” as the central object of analysis, which leads to view of masters as only dominators, and slaves as either dominated or resistors²
• abandoning “the recent intensely structural inclinations of the historical discipline generally” (p. 19)
• moving beyond the modern assumption that “individualism” is axiomatic, which prevents historians from seeing slavers and enslaved as “relational beings embedded in social—or, as I would phrase the point, historical—contexts” (p. 21)
• eschewing comparison (p. 23)

p. 9:

But unless we make the effort to step far enough outside of our own lives to at least comprehend what all those slavers, and those whom they enslaved, were all about, we end up lamely lamenting the fates of the enslaved, or condemning the slavers as congenitally evil. We not only leave the enslaved as relatively passive victims but also condemn the slavers as motivated only by greed and sadistic needs to dominate.

Slavers as People on the Margins

p. 10: “Slavers were motivated to dominate outsiders by their own sense of being dominated within historical contexts in which they found themselves marginalized.”

p. 29: “The definable and distinguishing position of slavers is their marginality to the historical context in which they live and compete.”

p. 30: “For slavers, marginality means quite literally ‘on a margin’ of a network of people who were in control of whatever the key resources might have been in the relevant contexts.”

p. 31:

The historical problem of slaving, as I develop it in the following essays, is thus political: who, under what circumstances, by what means, with what ends in mind, and with what failures as well as what successes, managed to get their hands on individuals so culturally and socially isolated that they could induce, if not directly compel, the outsiders they added to internal politics to support the slavers in advancing themselves at the expense of more established interests. The historical issue between the enslavers and the enslaved was appropriating outsiders’ energies in support of insiders’ strategies.

p. 32: “Competition, not domination, motivates and enables masters’ strategies of improving their (relative) positions by slaving” (but why does it have to be either/or?)

Enslaved as Isolated People

Miller thinks that historians of the enslaved experience have focused too much on their domination. “The same historicized sort of understanding [applied to slavers] also allows us to respect the enslaved for what they managed to do, even under severe hardships of enslavement. Some of them suffered flesh flayed by the lash, but we need to see them more fully than as victims, or as mechanically resisting the lack of Freedom that the modern historian imagines as the primary privation that they endured” (p. 10).

In contrast, Miller thinks the primary privation was one of social networks that might have made enslaved people better able to act in ways that would change the larger historical contexts in which they found themselves. “Arguably, isolation is a—if not the—prominent motivating aspect of enslavement as experienced” (p. 32). “The principal historical strategy of the enslaved, living in processual time, is therefore to overcome their initial isolation, to make human contacts with whomever they find accessible” (p. 33).

p. 31: “historical definition of slaving further implies a contextualized definition of the experience of enslavement as isolated helplessness, or helpless isolation”

Comparing Miller and Roberts

It was interesting to read this book soon after completing roberts2015. In many ways, the aims of the two books overlap in:

• challenging idea of slavery as a “static” institution, as well as the conflation of slavery with other kinds of oppression (the “excess” of slavery as a metaphor, as Roberts puts it)
• critiquing sociological approach to slavery of Orlando Patterson in particular
• treating both enslavement and emancipation as processes with multiple stages before, between and after them (“marronage” does some of the same analytical work for Roberts, in this sense, that “slaving” does for Miller)

Despite this, my first reactions to Miller, coming so soon after a reading of Roberts, noticed divergences between them. I think this is because of Roberts’ focus (to a greater degree than Miller) on the experiences of the enslaved, as well as their own theorizations of what slavery meant (especially in chapter on Frederick Douglass). Also, while Miller’s primary aim is to contest the ways that a focus on modern North American slavery (which he views as exceptionally institutional in world-historical terms) obscures the complexities of slaving in African history, his treatment of the Atlantic / North American history seemed to me to veer towards what Roberts critiques as “disavowal,” particularly in Miller’s one-paragraph treatment of the Haitian Revolution (p. 147), his two-page “Note on the Enslaved” (p. 66), and his focus on one aspect of the enslaved experience: their isolation (p. 10).

This relative lack of attention to Haitian Revolution and the like may stem both from Miller’s axiom that human actors are inherently conservative, and also that the primary motivating experience for the enslaved is isolation.

Perhaps a final reason for my initial reactions is Miller’s strong critique of the tendency to define “slavery” as the opposite of “freedom” (see p. 12). Roberts, on the other hand, argues that this tendency is in fact not as widespread as it should be; that scholars and theorists discuss gradations of freedom and liberty more often than they contrast these variegated states with slavery and its variegations; and that listening to the enslaved means beginning with the fundamental premise that the opposite of freedom is slavery. Miller would likely respond by insisting on a historicization of such a premise: that it applies primarily to the way that enslaved people and neo-abolitionist historians in a particular time and place thought about slavery, and not necessarily to the way that slavers and enslaved elsewhere did, particularly in Africa.

That’s a point well taken, but Roberts would (I think) be on high alert to the potential, even if inadvertent, minimizations of the trauma of enslavement and of the conceptualizations of slavery and freedom developed not just by abolitionists or their historian heirs, but by Haitian revolutionaries, fugitives, and formerly enslaved people themselves. For example, Miller’s opening framing of his work as an attempt to cut through the “politicization” and “emotionality” of slavery to get to the history could have the rhetorical effect of disavowing the trauma of enslaved experience in the historical context in which he and his audience are primarily situated, which is the aftermath of the American slavery that Douglass and other enslaved theorists described.

Need to think further about these reactions as I revisit both books, and also be careful to make sure that my reading of Miller on the heels of Roberts isn’t leading me to misunderstand or misrepresent what Miller is trying to do.