This essay has outlined how early modern writers perceived, described and classified what we today define slaves, serfs and servants, or free and unfree servants both in their own countries and in other European ones. It has offered examples from different places, periods and cultures showing that slaves were generally described as part of larger categories of different serving people: in some cases, such categories were so large that almost anybody could be included in them. This did not imply that all those who were included were considered equal, or that differences among them were overlooked: rather the opposite.
The essay has mainly concentrated on the classification of slaves and servants and on the features associated with them. In most texts there is no simple dualistic opposition between free and unfree servants: rather, slaves are considered one kind of servant within a wide range of cases. It would be interesting to analyse how such categories were used, for instance in court cases,
1 For instance, Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, ‘Verhandelte (Un-)Freiheit. Sklaverei, Leibeigenschaft und innereuropäischer Wissenstransfer am Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 43 (2017), 347–80. and how people in their everyday life suffered, used, manipulated and challenged the labels of slave, servant or serf.
2 Raffaella Sarti, ‘The True Servant. Self-definition of Male Domestics in an Italian City (Bologna, 17th–19th Centuries)’, The History of the Family, 10 (2005), 407–33; Sarti, Servo e padrone, pp. 89–154; Raffaella Sarti, ‘Le “nom de domestique” est un “mot vague”. Débats parlementaires sur la domesticité pendant la Révolution française’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines, no. 131/1 (2019), 39–52. Yet such endeavours lie beyond the scope of this essay, which focuses on categories found in books.
As for the absence of slaves, it was seen as a distinctive feature of more civilised people. This implied ignoring or minimising the slaves’ actual presence, or resorting to inconsistent arguments to reconcile the rejection of slavery in principle with its acceptance and/or justification in practice. In the
Encyclopédie, the heading
esclavage denounced that ‘almost in the space of the century following the abolition of slavery in Europe, the Christian powers, having conquered different countries, allowed the buying and selling of humans in those countries where they thought it was advantageous to them to have slaves, … forgetting the principles of Nature and Christianity, which make all men equal’.
3 De Jaucourt, ‘Esclavage’, p. 936. In many cases, such ‘forgetfullness’ led to inconsistent statements. According to Leti, for instance, ‘peoples of Holland enjoy a liberty, which any republic in the world has never had a greater’.
‘Holland’, he wrote,
does not bear slaves nor bought servants, and when a gentleman who has a slave enters the lands of Holland [the slave] is immediately understood to be frank, and free, and the right of the master above him is void, being [the slave] able to go at his pleasure or remain free in Holland without fear of any violence, and the master will lose the servant, and the money with which he has bought it.
At the same time, he described the Dutch slave trade in detail, complaining that – because of inhuman treatment – at least half the Africans transported on Dutch ships normally died during the passage, which reduced the trade’s profitability. He defined the Africans as unhappy but seemed to consider it natural that they were enslaved; nor did he apparently perceive any inconsistency between the Dutch love for freedom and their engagement in the slave trade.
4 Gregori Leti, Teatro Belgico. Parte Seconda (Amsterdam, 1690), pp. 29–30, 310–11. The situation of slaves arriving in Holland was less fortunate than argued by Leti; see Dienke Hondius, ‘Access to the Netherlands of Enslaved and Free Black Africans: Exploring Legal and Social Historical Practices in the Sixteenth–Nineteenth centuries’, Slavery & Abolition, 32 (2011), 377–95.In fact, things were even more complex than denounced by the French
Encyclopédie. Christians allowed slavery not only in their colonies. In some European contexts, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, slavery was never abolished;
5 Sarti, ‘Tramonto’; Giuffrida, ‘La legislazione’. in others, as shown above, there were laws allowing the import of slaves, be it medieval Bologna or eighteenth-century France; in others still, the import of slaves, though forbidden, was tolerated, thus creating ambiguous situations, as in England and Holland. Most authors were rather reticent to recognise that there were slaves in early modern Europe. Yet they spoke of slaves and did not simply contrast their condition with that of free people. Rather, they suggested that there might be several ranks of dependence and freedom, as was actually the case in most contexts.