Sara Hidalgo
mulesand like mules they belong to their masters. They are slaves. John
Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago: Charles Kerr & Company, 1911),
second edition. Kindle edition, position 122.
2 By that time, Turner was working close to a Mexican anarchist opposition
movement in exile in the United States. He sought to destabilize the Dazs
regime by stirring American indignation, and he knew that in his country few
issues sparked such passions as the issue of slavery. See Claudio Lomnitz,
The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magn (New York: Zone Books, 2014),
slavery and other forms of coerced labor has not been more
transparent to scholars. In a 1974 article analyzing labor conditions in
Mexican plantations during the same period, renowned historian
Frederich Katz was not shy in describing Yucatan plantations as neoslavery.3 Observing similar conditions as those listed by Turner in 18 th
and 19th century Russia, historian Peter Kolchin has more recently
argued that Russian serfdom was not only undistinguishable in nature
from New World chattel slavery, but also an outcome of the same
process:
the
expansion
of
European
markets
and
peripheral
agricultural markets.4
These examples show that far from being a straightforward
issue, the definition of slavery has provoked contentious debates
among scholars, and raised important interpretative questions: What is
the defining feature of slavery? Is it mainly defined by the juridical
ownership of persons? Or should we define it as a form of coerced
labor exploitation, whether legal or illegal? Part of the reason behind
the pervasiveness of these dividing lines lies on the fact that most
scholars have address the issue as part of an examination of New
World slaverynoteworthy for its rapacious form of labor exploitation.
117.
3 Labor Conditions in Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and
Tendencies, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54 (1974) , 23.
4 Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 30.
of
slavery
in
these
pages,
however,
will
soon
be
which the term has been socially and legally defined and redefined
during the Middle Ages and beyond.
Because of its comprehensive and synthetic nature, a good place
to start this survey is Robin Blackburns the Making of New World
Slavery: from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800.5 Although, as the
title indicates, this book is mostly concerned with slavery in the New
World, the author dedicates a long first chapter to discuss the evolution
of slavery after the collapse of the Roman Empire as a precedent to
what would come next. Relying mostly on secondary literature, this
chapter describes the evolution of the institution of slavery from the
collapse of the Roman Empire to the conquest of the new Worlda
period in which, in general terms, slavery dramatically decreased in
the continent. The Iberian Peninsula was a mild exception to this rule;
due to recurrent Muslim wars, slavery in the region preserved some
structural importance. Perhaps because Blackburn is trying to explain
the latter consolidation of African slavery in the Americas, his narrative
highlights those traits that were already visible during the medieval
period and would later become central to New World slavery. Important
among these are the Catholic Churchs acceptance of the institution of
slavery; the somewhat different trajectory of the Iberian peninsula,
where due to recurrent Muslims wars, slavery retained some structural
significance; the growing tendency not to enslave insiders, or people
who shared religious creed; and the rise of a racist justification for the
5 (London and New York: verso, 1997).