Capitalism and Slavery: An Interview with Greg Grandin

[NewDeal_Dem]

In 1855, Herman Melville published “Benito Cereno,” a novella about a New England ship captain who suppresses a slave rebellion onboard another ship discovered off the coast of Lima, Peru. The story takes place in Melville’s favorite setting, a ship in open water, and deals with one of his main preoccupations: slavery. As it happens, it is also true.

Thanks to Greg Grandin’s masterful Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, we now know that history.

The remarkable event at the core of the book is a nine-hour charade pulled off by insurgent slaves, led by two West Africans named Babo and Mori...Somewhere off the coast of what would become Chile, the slaves rise up, murdering most of their captors and taking their captain, Benito Cerreño, hostage. They hope to force Cerreño to take them home to Senegambia. However, lacking adequate sea knowledge, they are unaware that the captain has managed to keep them in South American waters.

Weeks after their revolt, still adrift in the Pacific near Lima, the rebels cross paths with a New England sealer, the Perseverance, whose captain, Amasa Delano, (ancestor of the Delano Roosevelts...) they allow to board.

Aware their future hangs in the balance, Babo and Mori engage in a temporarily successful deception, pretending to be enslaved and forcing Cerreño to play captain. For most of the day, Delano believes that Cerreño remains in control of the ship, but when Delano returns to his own ship, Cerreño throws himself overboard, and the ruse is revealed.

Outraged, Delano and his men unleash a bloodbath so gruesome that it surprises Delano himself. Lances and weapons that had been used to kill and skin seals are used to equally brutal effect on the insurgents. Having retaken the Tryal, Delano sails on to a Chilean port, where some of the leading rebels are executed, and the rest are forced back into slavery. Delano eventually receives a reward for retaking the ship, but his failed sealing voyage has left him so deeply in debt that he ends life bankrupt. He sells his ship, leaves the sea behind, and writes the memoirs that became the basis for Melville’s novella...

That this event took place in 1804–5, the highpoint of what Spanish merchants called “free trade in blacks” — the privatization and deregulation of mercantile slavery, which, decades before the expansion of chattel bondage in the US south, kicked off the Atlantic World’s capitalist market revolution — allowed me to take this event and make, as you say, a larger argument about slavery and capitalism.

Much of that argument is embedded in the narrative and development of the characters, but here’s what I imagined myself arguing: Scholars have long examined the ways in which slavery underwrites capitalism. I thought this story, though, allowed attention to slavery’s role in shaping not so much the social or financial dimensions of capitalism but its psychic and imaginative ones.

Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, the creation of modern selves, the illusion of individual autonomy, the cultivation of distinction and preference, the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue. The wealth created by slavery generalized these ideals, allowing more and more people, mostly men, to imagine themselves as autonomous and integral beings, with inherent rights and self-interests not subject to the jurisdiction of others. Slavery was central to this process not just for the wealth the system created but because slaves were physical and emotional examples of what free men were not...

Melville, in his novel White-Jacket, has a great description of how this terror helps consolidate the idea of race: “Thank God! I am a white,” says a sailor as he watches a mulatto seaman about to be whipped. But this distancing thought evaporates when the sailor remembers that he “had seen whites also scourged; for, black or white, all my shipmates were liable to that.”

Melville then takes the sailor a step beyond simple solidarity to realize the role terror plays in keeping men isolated from each other and racially divided: “Still, there is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fancied superiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.”


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/capitalism-and-slavery-an-interview-with-greg-grandin/