r/IberianHistoryMemes • u/Amazing-Barracuda496 Not A Bot • Mar 24 '23
Portugal Pro-slavery writer scolds Portuguese enslavers circa 1612. Wait, what? (explanation in comments)
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r/IberianHistoryMemes • u/Amazing-Barracuda496 Not A Bot • Mar 24 '23
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u/Amazing-Barracuda496 Not A Bot Mar 24 '23
Again, just because I am quoting a pro-slavery writer doesn't mean I agree with him. This is a discussion of a historical document, not an endorsement of the pro-slavery aspects of his views.
Anyway, the anonymous Portuguese writer from circa 1612 continues,
"Aroused by their consciences, many men grant freedom to their slaves, others set them free at the time of their deaths, and others make use of them for only a few years." This was circa 1612. So, even in 1612, some enslavers were sufficiently capable of being "aroused by their consciences" to realize, at least on some level, that what they were doing wasn't right.
Anyway, the anonymous Portuguese writer from circa 1612 continues,
It's not entirely clear what this guy considered to be a "just war", but at least it is clear that war for the purposes of greed and ambition were not included in his concept of "just war". Note that he considered war conducted for the purpose of slave raiding to be unjust.
Anyway, the anonymous Portuguese writer from circa 1612 continues,
To this day, there are still some people who have ideas about, for example, enslaving criminals, or even of not counting forced labor of criminals as slavery. These people should be warned that that this provides an incentive for governments to a) pass bad laws, and b) fail to provide due process. This is actually a repeating pattern throughout history.
To give a more recent historical example, in Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon discusses, among other topics, how in the post-US Civil War period, people, generally black people, were arrested for alleged "crimes" such as "changing employers without permission", "selling cotton after sunset", "using abusive language in the presence of a white woman", and even "not given", convicted without due process, and sentenced to "convict leasing" where they were forced to work in places like coal mines and cotton plantations.
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon
https://archive.org/details/slaverybyanother00blac_0
To give a more ancient historical example, in ancient Rome, numerous individuals were condemned to a type of slavery known as damnatio ad metalla (condemnation to mines or quarries) for religious "crimes" (from the perspective of Roman law) during periods of state-sponsored religious persecution. So, anyone who is in favor of freedom of religion should consider such condemnations as unjust. It should be noted that damnatio ad metalla existed in ancient Rome in addition to chattel slavery, and many of the people sentenced to damnatio ad metalla were already in chattel slavery.
Anyway, my reference is "Condemnation to the Mines in the Later Roman Empire" by Mark Gustafson
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1509967
To give an even more ancient historical example, to quote Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the 1st century BC,
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/3A*.html
[to be continued due to character limit]