by Françoise Vergès
History’s contribution to civic education and awareness is to alert to the existence of entangled histories, to bring light to the ways in which consent to political and economic systems is fabricated, the ways in which racist representations are created and circulated, and how networks of solidarity come to be. The group of scholars who created “Historians Against Slavery” have articulated the relation between research and civic education and awareness. They want to “bring historical context and scholarship to the modern-day antislavery movement in order to inform activism and develop collaborations to sustain and enhance such efforts.” This is also the goal of the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes inaugurated in March 2012, which connects the past history of anti-slavery struggle with the present.1
In times of renewed xenophobia and all forms of discrimination and racism, historians have a duty to show society that the narrative of pure ethnos is a myth, that national history is also, always, global history, the colonial and post-colonial history are global history, that we live in a transnational and interconnected world. If we only look at Europe, we notice that for centuries it was in contact with cultures in Africa, the Americas and Asia. The long history of colonization transformed its arts, its laws, its philosophy, its social and cultural life and its politics. The end of colonial empires did not put an end to the circulations of people, ideas, and cultural expressions. We might even talk of ongoing processes of creolization, whereby cultures are meeting and borrowing from each other.
In France, xenophobic impulses have found new ground in the resistance to make sense of the role and place of the colonial past in its post-colonial present. Under the pressure of groups asking for the acknowledgment of a history to which they identify because of family ties, progress has been made to recognize the entangled history and culture of French society with its former colonies. Yet, French history remains framed within the borders of the Hexagon. In France, though the history of colonial slavery and post-slavery imperialism has made important progress in recent decades, allowing better understanding about past and present inequalities, racism, and asymmetries of power, groups which feel connected to the colonized societies still perceive an injustice insofar as republican narrative looks at their history. But in 1962, France reinvented itself within the borders of the Hexagon. As Todd Shepard and Kristin Ross have shown the “invention of decolonization” redrew the borders of France and thus of the Fifth Republic.2 The Hexagon became the frame within which French history was made (and is still being made), foreclosing both the legacies of colonialism and the continuing French presence across the world in overseas territories inherited from the first (Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Reunion) and second colonial empire (New Caledonia, Tahiti and others French territories in the Pacific, Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, St Pierre et Miquelon). Consequently, overseas territories have either disappeared from the French public debate, have come to exist as lands of “hybridity” and “Creoleness” or appeared in the news during time of riots or natural catastrophes. Lumped under the category “outre-mer,” their differences are often ignored. Their regional environment, which has been, and continue to be, so important, is often ignored.
Historians can show that France was never homogenous, that its colonial history is also the history of connected networks, that its current borders were invented in 1962, with the end of its war against Algerian movement for independence, that poverty is not the result of foreigners stealing jobs but of an economic system with a long history of dispossession. The space of the French Republic today covers many time zones, bringing together peoples who have different languages, religions, cultures and memories that are however not yet fully acknowledged in the republican narrative. Current republican narrative has adopted the model of the colonial exhibition, a center, Hexagonal France surrounded by satellites around the world. Connected history shows nevertheless that the republican national narrative is a “mutilating” narrative that excises entire chapters and societies.
Following the paths opened by anticolonial thinkers and a wide range of recent historiography, I argue for a global, interconnected and transnational history. I look at the French case to explore the ways in which history can contribute to civic awareness and education at a time of renewed instrumentalization of history by advocates of a
purified ethnos. History is not there to heal, to absolve or to distribute blame. It is about the unexpected, the unforeseen. It tells history “from below,” of the “anonymous” and of the powerful. Interconnected macrohistory shows that the division of history into well defined periods masks the legacies and traces of the past in the present. It brings back complexity, grey zones, narratives of betrayal and complicity, indifference and cynicism, subversion and rebellion, in other words, a large range of thoughts and actions.
The path for a connected history had been opened by Fernand Braudel though his project remained heavily biased in the direction of European archives.3 An interconnected approach challenges binary models (colonial State/colony, South/North) and suggests maps and representations of the world that connect Africa and Asia in 11th century, or Spain or England to western India in the early 17th century. It questions a periodization that reflects a European domination of the world that however emerged late (end of 18th, beginning of 19th century). Finally, it reveals fraught encounters that “usually did not take place between societies or cultural systems as such” (“Europe” meets “Africa” or “Asia”) but “between particular subcultures or segments of societies”.4
Before getting in examples that illustrate the ways in which history can contribute to civic awareness and education, I would like to describe my first and very concrete encounter with a connected world. I am a Reunionnese, I am from a small island in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Uninhabited, it became a French colony in the 17th century, slaves were brought from Madagascar and East Africa, slavery was abolished in 1848, indentured workers were brought from India, China, Madagascar and Africa, migrants came from Gujarat, China and colonial settlers from France. In 1946, it became a French department and in the 1980s a European region. From Reunion, it was clear that a compartmentalized approach of French and European colonialism (slavery, colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonial) impoverished the understanding of what had been and what was. Reunion history did not make sense if it was strictly studied in its relation with France. It had to be studied transversally in relation with emergences and developments in the Indian Ocean world and beyond, with the flows of people, goods, plants, ideas, languages and beliefs. Writing history from Reunion (not necessary as a tangible place but as an archive on slavery, colonialism, accidents of history…) meant looking at South-South, East-West, East-South, exchanges and encounters, at processes of creolization, routes of solidarity across national borders and ethnic groups, circulation of ideas, tastes, images, objects, music, textiles, vernacular medical knowledge, ideas about servitude, freedom, faith, and emancipation. Writing from Reunion led to a “triple consciousness,” local (the island), regional (the Indian Ocean) and global (Europe and the world). It meant looking at local social formations, local tensions and forms of racism, observing how local reactionary and anticolonial forces had come forth, how new social and cultural classes had emerged after the abolition of slavery (1848), the abolition of the colonial status (1946), how new models of consumption had been adopted, how mutations in the region and in France had had an impact, to what extent the French model was hegemonic, and what had been the role of Reunionnese anticolonial movements.
The Colonial Republic
In France, established historians such as Pierre Nora, have attacked the turn to colonial memories arguing that they threaten their freedom and seek to impose on history a compensatory function for past damages and wrongs. Memory is fickle, subjective and prone to manipulation, they said. Their arguments have merit but it is a known fact that French historians have more than often produced their work in relative ignorance of the history of French colonies and overseas territories. And more than often, historians in French post-colonial territories have embraced republican ideology and adopted its chronology. It may be important to remind them that the second colonial French empire, the one that is associated with the French civilizing mission and the conquest of territories all over the world, was constructed under the Third Republic (1871-1940).
In its effort to build a French republican nation, the Third Republic sought to rework or erase memories of colonial atrocities and repression of the working class. It operated a rupture between the Ancien Régime or Bonapartism and the Republic, associated republican colonialism with the abolition of slavery (the anti-slavery movement was never a vast social movement and it was never entirely constituted of republicans), scientific progress and bringing light and rights to colonized peoples. The rhetoric of the “civilizing mission” (bringing French progress, science and education to peoples still caught in tradition and sorcery) was fully deployed against the “mercantilism” of the British colonial empire. French republican colonialism was generous, secular and bringing progress and science to peoples subjugated by tyrants. Though unity among the colonized was not immediate or spontaneous and settlers did not all adhere to colonial racism, insurrections were always brutally crushed.
The connection between “the Republic” and colonialism has however been refuted by a number of historians.5 In his Les empires coloniaux, XIXe-XXe siècle, Pierre Singaravélou wrote that the notion of “Colonial Republic” did not acknowledge the heterogeneity of the colonial empire and the plurality of its policies and practices; he added that the colonial empire was never supported by a large social base in the Hexagon.6 Yet, as Bill Schwarz has remarked, “To begin to narrate one’s own life in the language of empire did not necessarily require obeisance to the full paraphernalia of high empire jingoism”.7 The lack of a social base in the Hexagon did not hinder the existence in every colony of a French colonial social base founded on a racial divide that transformed French settlers into “whites.” And heterogeneity was produced by local, regional and global context, not just by the diversity of colonial policies. Finally, heterogeneity went along with a common goal, supporting French economy and maintaining French world power. The plurality of practices and policies in the French colonial empire did not stop the Republic to engage in similar repressive policies regardless of local context or to treat the majority of colonized with contempt. If periods of repression could be preceded or followed by politics of reform, the politics of colonization were always in the hands of the Ministry of Marine and the Colonies. Of course, the Army, the government and business had their words to say, but though all these actors could have divergent interests and be at times at odds against each other, they all agreed on the moral superiority of the French civilizing mission and about the fact that colonies had been won to have their resources and populations exploited. Colonial cultural hegemony in France was about winning minds and hearts to the existence of the colonial empire not by asking direct support but by producing consent and consent did not need to be loud. Thus, more important than the creation of a large social base was feeling entitled to sugar, coffee, or tobacco regardless of where they came from and consent to the existence of empire as a proof of France’s grandeur, even if few French traveled to the colonies or could name them. It was about the feeling of belonging to a great nation of white and free men. Too many French historians still ignore that “the idea of a white man has less to do with empirical beings –men with pale skin—than with an entire fantasized discursive complex which underwrites its creation.”8 The politics of consent, which rested on indifference, ignorance or interest, buried the voices of those who protested French republican colonial politics. They were able to build a counter force only in the mid 20th century.
Since the 1990s however, memories of slavery and colonialism have been sites from which to challenge the narrative of the white republican bourgeois. An increasing number of festivals, exhibitions, colloquiums and debates have been exploring the role and place of slavery in the making of France, the fabrication of gender and “whiteness” and the invention of a territory called “France.” They come in a Between 1998 and 2012, I was personally engaged in two practices for which history proved very useful as a tool for civic awareness and education. I closely observed the ways in which memories served as a ground both to write new narratives or to support hegemonic claims in France and in post-colonial territories. Yet, in alternative revisions, French chronology was rarely challenged nor the binary link colonial State/colony and in this revision of history, each colony was seldom inscribed in its cultural and political region. One practice was my work around the memories of slavery and colonialism in France, notably as president of the French national Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery (2009-2012, vice-president 2004-2009) installed in application of the May 2001 Law recognizing slave trade and slavery “crimes against humanity. The other was as scientific director of a cultural project in Reunion Island, a museum on the history of its society. I applied a methodology of crossed memories and histories and looked at itineraries that challenged a mutilated cartography of history. For the memories of slavery, the objective was not simply to fill a lack, an absence, or to try to replace negative with positive images, but to question the logic behind an absence, to discern the invisible behind the visible, to show how social life had been permeated by the colonial past and post-colonial present. In Reunion, the objective was neither to recover the history of the island within the frame of French chronology, as historians of Reunion have done, or to create a Reunion-centered history but rather to inscribe the Reunionnese society within its natural, geographical, cultural and political region, the Indian Ocean in which Europe has been a late actor. It was not either about attaching Reunion to one of the “great civilizations” from which some of its inhabitants’ ancestors came- India, France, China- as the ideology of multiculturalism has invited groups in Reunion to do with some success (in this list, Madagascar and Africa were often forgotten). It was about making visible the global flows of people, plants, ideas, goods, languages, gods and goddesses and the genealogy of a connected world. In both cases, it was about how the past meets the present in a dialectical relation to constitute a constellation of meanings.
To illustrate crossing memories and history in multiple territories and the ways in which they can bring civic awareness to the fabrication of inequalities, racism and legitimacy of dispossession of native peoples, I present two examples. They tell intertwined histories, trajectories imposed by power, histories of solidarities, lives reconstructed on foreign land with practices, beliefs and knowledge that have transformed local culture. They demonstrate that it is impossible to write the history of the colonial slavery without looking at the history of consumption, social status, gender roles, at larger French colonial politics, the circulation of officers and administrators throughout the colonial empire, or the competition among European powers. It is impossible to write about post-slavery colonialism without looking at the circulation between colonies of convicts, political exiles, at new forced migrations, at the new flows of goods, plants, languages, ideas and practices. And finally, it is impossible to write about contemporary France while ignoring the traces of history colonization in its longue durée. The study of the postcolonial present in France (Hexagon and overseas territories) reveals a “prolific multi centredness” which questions historical causality.9 Absolute discontinuity (total rupture between two periods) or complete continuity (nothing has changed) would not do. What is needed is to pull different threads together to bring multiple connectedness, differences and similarities. The diverse elements of connected history present a constellation of memories, a “multidirectional memory”, that again challenges the segmentation of history.10 Reading these events together go further than giving visibility to forgotten chapters of history, it shows the connection between the army, colonization, land and masculinity, how the colon was fabricated even out of the metropolitan revolutionary, how colonialism divided subalterns, and how the State used blind violence and brutality to impose its power.
Connected Histories
Slavery and New Forms of Colonization.
In France, colonial slavery was abolished first in the colony of Saint-Domingue in 1793 following the huge uprising of slaves in August 1791 (The uprising of Saint Domingue led to the victory of the slaves who defeated the Napoleonic armies in 1803 and created the first Black Republic on January 1st 1804). On February 4th 1794, slavery was abolished in all the French colonies. It was re-established by Napoleon Bonaparte in May 1802. The second and final abolition of slavery in the French colonies occurred on April 27th 1848 under the Second Republic (February 24th-December 10th 1848). In the republican narrative, a clear separation was made between slavery and post-slavery colonization. The separation created a fictitious rupture insofar as it masked the difficult history of French abolitionism, persisting traces of the Ancien Régime and aristocratic culture in the Third Republic (between the Second and Third Republic, there was the Second Empire (1852-1870) and the influence of Catholicism in the production of the “civilizing mission.”
If we look at the decree abolishing slavery on 27 April 1848 without looking at connected events in France and in the world, we miss a history of convergent and divergent elements within the global context of emerging new imperialisms. Textbooks tell the story of a colonization moving smoothly from slavery (associated with the Ancien Régime) to its abolition (accomplished by the Republic) to post-slavery colonization. This is not just to point to the persistence of inequalities and racial hierarchy long after the abolition of slavery in the “Old colonies” (as colonies which had experienced slavery became known), but to ask how the conditions of the abolition of slavery was thought along with concerns about the organization of labour, citizenship and rights in new French colonies. The conquest of Algeria had started in 1830, eighteen years before the abolition of slavery. During these eighteen years, debates on the ways in which working and civic rights would be applied in the colonies (old and new) were the subject of intense debate and they were mixed with debates on civic liberties in France, the agitation of the working-class and its repression (June 1848: 10 000 prisoners, 1500 shot), the brutal crushing of Algerian resistance to colonial conquest, a new bourgeois order, new forms of consumption and the importance of reinforcing the colonial empire in the competition with the old rival, England. In the 1840s, France was seeking to establish new colonies in the Pacific (New Caledonia, Tahiti and other islands), in the Indian Ocean (Madagascar, the Comoros islands) and in Asia (Indochina) and West Africa. It was clear that labor in the colonies could no longer be bonded labor. Beet sugar was threatening sugar cane and the colonial sugar lobby was closely following the shift, fighting to keep its privileges. Experimentation with indentured labor had already started in the plantations.
In 1848, the republican government both abolished slavery and transformed Algeria into three French departments. Algeria was from then on, no longer a “colony” but a part of France though its Muslim inhabitants were subjected to a specific status. On the other hand, contrary to the Algerians, the inhabitants of post-slavery societies remained under colonial status though they had become citizens, had the right to vote and to be elected. They were “colonized citizens.” The sugar lobby obtained not only compensation for the lost of the slaves’ owners’ “private property” (enslaved women and men) but also the right, from the government of Napoleon III then of the Third Republic, to bring from India and China thousands of indentured workers whose conditions of transportation, of living and working were barely different than those of slaves. Agreements between French and British imperialism facilitated the second organization on a global scale of a mobile, sexualized and racialized workforce. The first had been the slave trade. The organization of mobility meant a concerted effort from French and British to establish barracks at points of departure and arrival of indentured worker, to install officers of registry and to ensure that ships would be ready to take their human cargo. The workforce was still sexualized because, as in the slave trade, the ratio was 2/3 men for 1/3 women. It was racialized because after anti-Black racism in the slave trade, new racialized categories appeared to tell the difference between Indian or Chinese “coolies” and white settlers. Whiteness as a social and cultural marker was reinforced.
In September 1848, following suggestions of 1847 to replace the entire indigenous population with settlers, the republican French Assembly voted a budget to support the settlement of 12,000 French who would receive upon their arrival, a piece of land (stolen without compensation from Algerians), a home, cattle, seeds, and food for three years.11 Army officers, writers and republican politicians were convinced that colonization went along with agriculture and required the twin policies of spoliation and settlement.
Land Dispossession, Repression of Working-Class and Colonization
A similar interconnectedness brings together in 1871 the Paris Commune, the Algiers Commune, a vast and impressive Algerian insurrection, and New Caledonia. As a detailed history of these events would require a long, complex and careful description, I have chosen to point to the connection between land dispossession, the repression of the working class and colonization. The 1843 defeat of Abd el Kader who had led the resistance against the French conquest of Algeria had not put an end to local discontent. Revolts were followed by revolts. On March 14, 1871, a huge rebellion was launched in the east of Algeria. The heir of a long dynasty of local leaders, Muhammad al-Muqrani, raised around 25,000 troops against the French. Emissaries were sent throughout the country and spread the revolt to the eastern Sahara.
In France, the Second Empire, which was fighting Prussia, had been defeated and the new republic (established 4 September 1870) had signed a Peace Treaty on 26 February in which France lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and agreed to pay 5 millions franc or to Germany. Republican Parisians took to the streets on March 18 and the Paris Commune was proclaimed on the 26th. In May, the French leader, Adolphe Thiers obtained from the German military authorities the agreement to bring back 60 000 soldiers to besiege the Commune. French troops launched their assault on May 21st. At the end of the Semaine sanglante, up to 20,000 Parisian were dead, about 50,000 arrested. 4,500 others were condemned to deportation to New Caledonia and 3,000 to Algeria. Many died in prison or on the transports.
French armies could now go to reinforce local troops in Algeria. Al-Muqrani was killed May 8. Villages and crops were burned, populations massacred, heads of leaders of the insurrection exposed publicly. The French army adopted General Bugeaud’s policy who had declared in 1844 : “I will burn your villages ad your houses; I will destroy your orchards, and you will yourselves to blame.” Repression was “an act of implacable revenge,” the historian Charles-Robert Ageron has written.12 The uprising was finally suppressed in January 1872, one fifth of the population had perished from hunger, disease and punitive expeditions. A fine of millions of franc was imposed on the population of Kabylie, which was used to pay French debt to Prussia. Thousands of Alsatian families were offered land among the 500,000 hectares confiscated without compensation. Overnight, thirty-three Algerian tribes became landless. The fabrication of the colon went along with forced acquisition of land, spoliation, denial of rights and massacres of the native population. The army, colonization, land and masculinity were linked.
The Algerian insurgents were condemned to deportation to Guiana and New Caledonia. They awaited their departure with their fellow exiles, the Communards. They arrived in New Caledonia, where all pre-colonial contracts had been annulled especially around land ownership. The French colonial power seized vast parts of land owned by indigenous communities, which they put into reservations (this was the only instance of a creation of reservations in the French colonial empire). Between 1862 and 1870, French property went from 27 000 to 78 000 hectares. By 1876, the Kanak population had considerably diminished and the French thought their extinction ineluctable. Yet, on 25 June 1878, the Kanak chief Ataï led an insurrection. Algerian exiles and Communards were offered to join the repression. Few accepted. The insurrection was crushed, Ataï taken prisoner and beheaded. His head taken to France to be studied by scientists who would prove that his brain and the shape of his skull demonstrated “Kanaks’ inferiority.” 5 percent of the native population was massacred, entire tribes were displaced, and thousands of hectares confiscated for new colons.
These disparate yet connected events bring together the history of labor, of colonized masculinity, of dispossession and colonial law, of agreements between European imperialisms despite their rivalry, of colonial lobbies and of new diasporic formations. They are not connected because of a coherent and well-planned colonial policy but by a series of decisions and reactions that bring discrete elements in relation.
These two examples show that colonial history is global history, but also regional history. A colony cannot be studied only within the frame of the relation to its colonial metropole, but with attention to what is happening in its region (Caribbean, Americas, Indian Ocean, Pacific), to what are the global geopolitics, to the mutations in the global economic system in which its products are caught, to the transformations of social, ethnic and cultural identities. Even though I have used the term “Algerians,” “Kanaks,” “French,” it is important to pay attention to differences within groups. They are not an indistinct “mass” but are constituted of individuals even when they constitute themselves as a community. Finally, connected history questions French republican national narrative and its masked connection with the colonial past.
The Slave in Le Louvre: An Invisible Humanity
In 2011, for the Paris Triennial, I organized guided visits looking for the enslaved ghost in Le Louvre. Created in 1793, the collections of the museum go up to 1848 (everything post-1848 being in the Musée d’Orsay). These two dates have particular resonance for the history of slavery in the French colonies. In 1793 (29 August) following the 1791 slaves’ insurrection, slavery was abolished in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and in 1848 (27 April) slavery was finally abolished in the French colonies (In May 1802, Bonaparte had rejected the 4 February 1794 abolition in all colonies and reinstated slavery). It was interesting to visit Le Louvre whose collection was framed between these two dates to see how modern slavery had been represented, or not. I explicitly asked not to search in the collections for representations of the enslaved. The guided visits concerned the post-1789 paintings in the galleries of the museum.
It was also important not to confuse representations of Blacks with representations of the enslaved. It is known that from the late 1400s to the early 1600s, Africans living in or visiting Europe during this time included artists, aristocrats, saints, slaves, and diplomats. It was in the second end of the 19th century that abolitionist propaganda, especially British, popularized the representation of the suffering body of the enslaved and the cruelty of slave trade and slavery. Art historians of Le Louvre indicated paintings of men smoking a pipe, women wearing cotton dresses, still lives with cowries or tropical fruits and landscapes. The first part of the visit was about the history of a product (sugar, tobacco, cotton), pulling the thread from the representation to history. Visitors heard first about the artists, then from what was represented —an aristocrat wearing cotton, a man smoking a pipe, the portrait a young Black woman— slave trade and slavery were evoked through the story of tobacco, sugar, cotton, coffee, cowries…, and then a poet, an artist, a writer would freely comment on the painting. The relation between gender and consumption was discussed, sweet sugar with femininity, tobacco with masculinity, prostitution and revolution.
Rather than being about the lives of the enslaved (very few paintings represent them before the second half of the 19th century when British abolitionist propaganda made use of visualized representations of slaves’ suffering), the guided visits was to show that were about the ways in which cultural and social life had been saturated by goods and products whose history brought back the world of colonial slavery. Colonial slavery had deeply and forever affected European taste and consumption, social and cultural life, transformed social gatherings, ways of presenting oneself, of celebrating births and weddings, or representations of gender. It went along with a necessary erasure of the conditions of production, of the itineraries and living conditions of those who produced them. Coffee, sugar, cotton, precious woods, or indigo, were intimately connected with slave trade and slavery but this connection had to be hidden. The creation of the consumer and its rights – easy access to goods at a reasonable price– required a distance with the producer, a naturalization of the economic system of slavery.
The program “The Slave in Le Louvre” was about telling the French public that the centuries of slave trade and slavery were not about “something over there” but about their own society as well, showing how their daily lives had been deeply affected by sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton, all products of slavery and telling about the birth of anti-Black racism, how colonial slavery had constructed a division between consumer and producer, and that even though the colonial empire had not visibly been part and parcel of the French social and cultural life, its existence has had impact on their society. “Slavery is a ghost, both the past and a living presence; and the problem of historical representation is how to represent that ghost, something that is and yet is not”, Haitian postcolonial thinker Michel-Ralph Trouillot has written.13 The program “The Slaves in Le Louvre: An Invisible Humanity” was about this ghost.
Hence, history was used to show slave trade and slavery belonged to a global, economic, social and cultural system. It explains why Dutch paintings figured so prominently goods and products of slavery. Indeed, in the 17th century, ships sailed from Amsterdam to Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and the Americas and back, creating the basis of a worldwide trading network. The city became the port of entry in Europe of spices, tobacco and sugar. The “Golden Age” of the Dutch city rested on slavery and “free trade.” History could explain how and why slave trade became the organization on a global scale of a mobile, precarious, racialized and sexualized workforce. It brought back the importance of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) because for the first time, a transnational treaty spoke of an “idea of Europe.” The work of two European thinkers (English and French) were important in its wording, Abbé de Saint Pierre and Charles d’Avenant. In 1697, d’Avenant argued that “In a trading nation, the bent of all the laws should tend to the encouragement of commerce, and all measures should be there taken, with a due regard to its interest and advancement.” The two pillars of free trade were the plantation in the Western colonies and free trade in the Eastern trading posts. “The wealth England had once, did arise chiefly from two articles: 1st, Our plantation trade. 2ndly, Our East-India traffic. The plantation trade gives employment to many thousand artificers here at home, and takes off a great quantity of our inferior manufactures. The returns of all which are made in tobacco, cotton, ginger, sugars, indico, etc. by which we were not only supplied for our own consumption, but we had formerly wherewithal to send to France, Flanders, Hamburgh, the East Country and Holland, besides what we shipped for Spain and the Streights, etc.” Bonded labor and free trade were connected. In his Project for Perpetual Peace in Europe first published in 1712, Abbé de Saint-Pierre argued that a confederation resulting from a contract and a balance of power among European rival powers would allow the “Powers of Europe to form a sort of system among themselves, which unites them by a single religion, the same international law, morals, literature, commerce and a sort of equilibrium.”14
The Treaty spoke of the necessity of establishing peace “for the perpetual tranquility of the whole Christian world”, the need for “an universal perpetual peace” and for “securing the tranquility of Europe by a balance of power.” It was a truly political program with geopolitical consequences, it gave Europe the power to decide over international affairs in order to preserve a peace it had unilaterally decided to be universal. It asked European powers to forget the wrongs and damages that they had inflicted upon each other. Forgetting crimes at home served two goals: preserving European unity against common external enemies and turning a blind eye to crimes committed outside of Europe by a European power. Though Europe remained divided, its unity meant that European powers agreed that each could freely dispose of the spoils of its conquest. The fiction of the unity of Europe was important to maintain hegemony abroad. The new global order involved deporting captured and enslaved Africans, the pacification of First Nations, and working out internal European competition for the larger objective of preserving European global interests.
Finally, the Treaty gave the asiento to England (the monopole of slave trade wit the Spanish colonies) opening the way for the country to become the 18th century global maritime power and the first slave trader. It gave a boost to the European slave trade, whereas between 1630 and 1640, 20 to 30000 Africans were taken per year as slaves to European colonies, between 1740 to 1840, the number increased to 70 to 90 000 per year. During the European 18th century inaugurated by the Treaty of Utrecht, 60 per cent of the total captives African were deported. The connection between, on the one hand, the demand for goods, precious woods, precious stones, extraction of minerals, or the construction of palaces, fortresses… and on the other, the necessity to enslave is not however specific to colonial slavery. What colonial slavery introduced was the idea that wealth rests on the capacity to move a workforce around and making it disposable.
Colonial slavery also contributed to the fabrication of “whiteness” in Europe. The construction of “whites” vs. “blacks” and of anti-Black racism do not belong only to the history of the colony or of the post-slavery empire. They are anchored in colonial slavery. In 18th century, Europe had its own racialized minorities but the slave trade gave new meaning to racial hierarchy. In the case of France, the decrees taken to regulate the persons of African origin in France bring light to the history of whiteness. On 13 July 1315, the King of France had declared that “the soil of France frees the slave that touches it” (le sol de France affranchit l’esclave qui le touche). France became a land of free men (not yet “Whites”). In 1685, the Code Noir set a series of provisions to govern the lives of the enslaved in the French colonies. Poor French settlers brought as indentured workers became “whites” with the consolidation of slavery.
At the beginning of the 17th century, between 5000 and 7000 of African origin were living in France, mostly in Paris, occupying different positions, as slaves, domestics, workers, craftsmen, tailors, seamstresses, musicians, and so on. In 1694, the first limitations on the entry of slaves were issued. In October 1716, new provisions limited more severely the entry of slaves and for the first time, marriage between Blacks and Whites were forbidden. (In the colonies, it was forbidden by the Code Noir.) A slow shift began to make being Black and being enslaved synonymous. In August 1777, the Police des Noirs was created which forbade the entry of any Black, free or enslaved in France. Colour became the fundamental marker.15 Freed Blacks or métis had to carry a permit, arrested without them, they were imprisoned in barracks set up in every French port until they were expelled to a colony regardless of their wish of destination. On 5 April 1778, marriage between Blacks and Whites was rigorously forbidden. The French Revolution abolished these provisions but they were re-established by Napoleon in March 1802 along with slavery.
The guided visits “The Slaves in Le Louvre” made use of history to reflect on the impact of slavery in France, displacing the gaze from the colony to the metropole. The absence of the figure of the enslaved, or the ways in which he or she was represented, were not the focus of the visits.
History and Civic Education
Against the current abuse of history to support xenophobic and nativistic claims in Europe and the world, history is more than ever needed. Groups whose history has been marginalized or ignored are demanding recognition and inscription. The fact that their demands lead to intense debate or controversy reveals that what is at stake goes beyond the discipline of history. The past acts as a fantastic reservoir of memories and experiences in which to draw sources to think the present and imagine the future. “Ignorance is no excuse for inaction. Getting involved begins with education,” Historians against slavery have written. There is work to do.
Suggested further readings and Endnotes
Most key readings are clearly identified throughout the text and discussed. See in chronological order the work of:
K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
John Thorton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed. Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
Mélica Ouennoughi, Les Déportés maghrébins en Nouvelle-Calédonie et la culture du palmier dattier (1864 à nos jours) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005).
Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent. Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power. A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Emmanuel Laurentin, ed. À quoi sert l’histoire aujourd’hui? (Paris: Bayard, 2010).
Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Enzo Traverso, L’Histoire comme champ de bataille. Interpréter les violences du XXe siècle. (Paris: La Découverte, 2011).
Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolts Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Penguin Books, 2012).
Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony. Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Jonathan Curry-Machado, ed. Global Histories, Imperial Communities, Local Interactions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Françoise Vergès, ed. Exposer l’esclavage: methodologies et pratiques (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013).
Christophe Granger, ed. À quoi pensent les historiens? Faire de l’histoire au XXIe siècle (Paris: Autrement, 2013).
Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World (New York: Holt & Company, 2014).
1 www.historiansagainstslavery.org and www.memorial.nantes.fr
2 Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
3 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol I & II. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
4 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. xiv.
5 Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Françoise Vergès, La République coloniale; Essai sur une utopie (Paris : Albin Michel, 2003).
6 Pierre Singaravélou ed., Les Empires Coloniaux XIXe-XXe siècles(Paris: Seuil, 2013)
7 Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire. Vol 1. The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p.15. 8 Schwarz, op.cit. (2011), p.20.
9 Frank Perlin, Unbroken Landscape. Commodity, Category, Sign and Identity; Their production as Myth and Knowledge from 1500 (Aldershot Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1994), p.52.
10 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)
11 Mostefa Lacheraf, L’Algérie, nation et société (Paris: François Maspéro, 1965)
12 Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine. 1830-1966. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991)
13 Michael-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), p.147.
14 From Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe. Full text: http://www.archivesdefrance.culture.gouv.fr/action-culturelle/celebrations-nationales/recueil-2013/ litterature-et-sciences-humaines/publication-du-projet-pour-rendre-la-paix-perpetuelle-en-europe [accessed 14 August 2014]. My translation. See also, Céline Spector, “Montesquieu, critique du Projet de Paix Perpétuelle? “ in Jean Mondot and Christian Taillard eds., Montesquieu et l’Europe (Bordeaux : Académie Montesquieu, 2006), pp. 139-175 and « Le Projet de paix perpétuelle: de Saint-Pierre à Rousseau » in Principes du droit de la guerre, Écrits sur la paix perpétuelle (Paris: Jules Vrin, 2008), pp. 229- 294.
15 Jean-François Niort, Le Code Noir (Paris: Dalloz, 2012).
Françoise Vergès is a French political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work focuses on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism.
