The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Vikings raided northern Europe and Russia hundreds of times in the fifth to the eleventh century, plundering as they went and scooping up human chattel by the thousands. To sell the enslaved, a system of permanent markets evolved around settlements like Novgorod (where Vikings warehoused and distributed the people they captured or purchased along the rivers Don, Volga, and Dnieper) and in Bristol and Dublin (where they gathered hapless westerners from Germany through the Iberian Peninsula). It is said that Dublin was Europe’s largest slave market during the eleventh century. The Viking slave trades, eastern and western, carried northern European slaves to neighboring localities or into wealthy Mediterranean lands.1* These slave businesses changed the face of Europe.

  History’s most famous British slave of the early medieval period is Patrick, born Succat, Ireland’s patron saint, who provides a cogent example. Patrick’s father was a local official and Christian deacon somewhere near the west coast of Roman Britain or perhaps Gaul in about 373 or about 389 or about 456.2 Although much of his life remains mysterious, his saint’s name, Patrick, from “patrician,” emerges conspicuously. Identifying Patrick as no ordinary slave matters hugely, for fourth-century Europeans harbored unflattering stereotypes of those lowest in society. (These stereotypes reappeared centuries later and an ocean away as “Sambo.”) Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature depicts the wealh (a Welsh person, a slave) as drunken and sexually aggressive, and the notion that the Welsh and Celts generally were dark—had hair and skin darkened by exposure to the sun—circulated as the typical coloring of slaves.† In the Old Norse Icelandic poem Rigsthula, thralls (slaves) appear as dirty, sun-tanned people with ugly, quarrelsome, lazy, gossipy, and smarmy children.3 The heroic figure of Saint Patrick had to be lifted out of this squalid mass, even though his enslavement was perfectly routine.

  At any rate, like tens of thousands of his contemporaries living within reach of slave raiders, fifteen-or sixteen-year-old Patrick fell victim to Viking raiders, who carried him far from home. After serving six years as a shepherd and farm laborer, probably in today’s County Antrim, Ireland, he escaped, an event he credited to divine intervention. Certainly the escape inspired Patrick’s permanent vocation, a mission to convert the heathen Irish to Christianity that lasted some thirty years. The year of his death—461, 490, or 493—remains as uncertain as the year of his birth. Legend, however, declares precisely the day of his death, widely celebrated on March 17. Another five centuries passed before the British Isles quieted down.

  In Anglo-Saxon Britain as elsewhere, slaves were valuable property, worth each about eight oxen; in Ireland a female slave represented a unit of currency, like a dollar or a euro.4 Moreover, slavery in Anglo-Saxon Britain applied not merely to the captives themselves, for slave status could also be inherited, as had been the case among the Thracians of antiquity. We cannot know how many of the British poor sold themselves and their children into bondage, but the number must have been significant, for attempts at reform were made repeatedly. Kings Alfred the Great and Canute (1014–35) tried, with uncertain success, to restrict slavery, especially with regard to daughters. Nonetheless, about one-tenth of the eleventh-century British population is estimated to have been enslaved, a proportion rising to one-fifth in the West Country.5 So embedded were slaves in the economy of the British Isles that the Catholic Church, quite a wealthy institution, owned vast numbers of them.6

  The Norman conquest of 1066 and subsequent unification did reduce British exposure to slave raiding by local warlords and Vikings. Relative peace, however, did not end hereditary bondage, for serfdom largely replaced slavery, leaving 40 to 50 percent of the rural population in hereditary servitude, some two million people in England at any one time.7 The British case belonged to a much wider pattern.

  THE MEDIEVAL slave trade exempted no one, as Viking, Italian, and Ottoman merchants moved their captives across long distances for sale. Wealthy Italy was well supplied with slaves, many from Asia. Lumped together as “Tartars,” they might be of Russian, Circassian (Caucasian), Greek, Moorish, or Ethiopian descent. Viking slavers in league with Jewish and Syrian merchants from Asia Minor also shipped some of these Tartar slaves westward from Russia, and others from Poland and Germany for sale in Gaul and Italy. At the same time, Arab merchants sold North African slaves in the Iberian Peninsula.

  Eunuchs were also a facet of the business. Centers of castration—“manufacturers” of eunuchs—existed in the town of Verdun (now in northern France) and on the island of Sicily. Most of the Mediterranean region (except Greece) eagerly employed altered young men, so while the market for eunuchs shrank, it disappeared only around 1900. Farther east, Venice, a cosmopolitan commercial crossroads, controlled the market for all eastern commodities, including slaves, until the middle of the fifteenth century. Genoa and Venice between them regulated the slave trade, and Venice levied a head tax on every slave sold in the Venetian market. Between 1414 and 1423, at least ten thousand slaves were sold in Venice.8*

  These systems held well in place until the sixteenth century, when rising prices and a loss of wealth among the Italian city-states virtually removed them from the slave trade. By then the Ottoman conquest of the Black Sea had closed sources to Italian merchants and deprived many Venetians of their livelihood. As the price of slaves increased and slaves became luxury goods, the Italian trade shifted away from able-bodied workers toward good-looking youth, especially adolescent girls. Women with a more European appearance seemed more attractive and fetched higher prices than strong young Tartars. The rare girl considered beautiful rated a higher prezzo d’affezione. In 1459, for instance, a Venetian slave agent bought his Medici pope a Circassian woman seventeen or eighteen years old, “not too delicate in face, but of good appearance.”9 Obviously a welcome purchase, this union of servitude and beauty would endure in the European imagination, often associated with the Ottoman harem. In Britain, to the contrary, the idea of freedom became more attractive than the image of slavery.

  SLAVERY FIGURES prominently in the notion of English identity, even in the British national anthem, which vigorously proclaims, “Britons never shall be slaves.” Psychologists often label so emphatic a pronouncement a “deception clue,” a hint of something concealed. In this case, the label fits, for, as we saw, Englishmen and women have been enslaved. The hero of Daniel Defoe’s best-selling 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, it may be recalled, was not only a slave trader but also a slave for two years in Morocco before his island shipwreck.10 Crusoe’s story brings together the older story of white slaves with the newer Africa-to-Americas slave trade.

  In a chapter of Robinson Crusoe called “Slavery and Escape,” we find Crusoe on his way to the West African coast when pirates from Salé, Morocco, capture and enslave everyone on his ship.* Crusoe subsequently serves the pirate captain as a slave in Salé for two years before escaping in the company of a young slave boy, “us slaves,” as Crusoe calls them. Their route of escape takes them into the shipping lanes from Africa to Brazil and on to salvation by a Portuguese slaver.11

  Crusoe’s mixed experiences—of both white and black slavery and of enslavement from both sides—were not so unusual at the time. As late as the mid-seventeenth century, some three thousand Britons per year endured involuntary servitude in North Africa, even as the trade from Africa to the Western Hemisphere was gathering momentum and Crusoe was doing his part to profit from it.† It will not be lost on the reader that over more than a millennium, the vast story of Western slavery was primarily a white story. Geography, not race, ruled, and potential white slaves, like vulnerable aliens anywhere, were nearby for the taking.12

  And then sugar made its way into the Mediterranean and on to Europe. The history begins with New Guineans’ domestication of sugar long before the Common Era and continues with its spread through Southeast Asia, China, India, and Persia. The seventh-century Muslim conquest of the Middle East took sugar into the Mediterranean, inspiring the commonplace “sugar follows the Koran,” as Muslims planted
sugar in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Rhodes, Malta, Crete, and Cyprus.13 In the course of their crusades in the eastern Mediterranean, northern Europeans encountered this addictive substance and liked it very much. Thus began another story.

  Sugar came into medieval western Europe around the year 1000 in a linkage of sugar and colonialism.14 In a pattern familiar to Americans later on, Venice processed and sold the sugar that Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Tartar farm laborers (free, slave, and sharecropper) produced primarily in the Venetian colonies of Crete and Cyprus, where cane grew well. After the Black Death of the mid-1300s created a labor shortage, Christian crusader kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean resorted increasingly to enslavement. With increased enslavement of people from the Balkans near the crusader kingdoms of the eastern Adriatic—the European slave coast—the word “Slav” turned into the word “slave.” Faceless masses of slaves from Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, and the Black Sea region grew sugar for western tables until the Turkish conquest disrupted the chain of supply.15

  The fifteenth-century Ottoman occupation of the eastern Mediterranean—of Constantinople, the Balkans, and the sugar islands of Crete and Cyprus—cut those areas off from the West and shut down preexisting trade routes into northern Europe.16 The closure affected trade in sugar, spices, and slaves and, as we shall see presently with the travel narrative of Jean Chardin, in luxuries of all types. Its role as commercial gateway to the east ending, Venice gradually faded from northern view, except as a romantic tourist destination and art market. Though this rich, powerful empire does not figure in American race theory, its multicultural image survives in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merchant of Venice.

  THE MARKET for sugar demanded other sources and other slaves, prompting the westernmost Europeans to seize the initiative. We still recognize Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) as the vanguard, even though he is not well named, since he himself never went long-distance seafaring. Instead, he sent Portuguese sailors into the Atlantic and down the coast of West Africa, planting sugar on islands like Madeira and São Tomé and finding, in the process, Atlantic currents running from Africa to the land they discovered and named Brazil. Fairly soon the Americas, especially the Caribbean islands, proved so productive that sugar making became synonymous with America—and with African slaves. These new plantations with their African workforce have largely obscured the memory of the older, European history of sugar, with its Mediterranean and Balkan workforce, leaving a large conceptual gap. Yet the Gate of the Sugar Workers still marks the old city walls of Syracuse in Sicily and, clearly, western Europe’s critical nexus of sugar and slavery.17 A similar nexus involving tobacco made Europeans, not Africans, the first unfree laborers in British America.

  THIS SHIFT to the west did not, however, signal an end to white slavery, for Britain was still in play. With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world’s premier long-range shippers.18 Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the words of Daniel Defoe, “more properly called slaves.”* First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618 the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hence the children’s sobriquet “Duty boys.” Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.19

  A first shipment of 100 homeless children landed in Virginia around Easter in 1619, some four months before the arrival of “20 and odd Negroes” became the symbolic ancestry of African Americans. And so it went, with Africans and Britons, both ostensibly indentured servants, living under complete control of their masters, subject to sale as chattel at any time. The Virginia Company, ever entrepreneurial, also transported poor women on “bridal boats,” selling them in Virginia and Maryland for 120 pounds of tobacco. At this point in the seventeenth century, Britons, male and female, outnumbered Africans in American tobacco fields; even by the middle of the century, when Virginia’s population of settlers numbered about 11,000, only some 300 were African. Any of them—African, British, Scottish, or Irish—were lucky to outlive their terms of service. Of the 300 children shipped from Britain between 1619 and 1622, only 12 were still alive in 1624.20

  Most of those forcibly transported ended up in the Chesapeake area, but Massachusetts harbored its share of the unfree. One-fifth of the early New England Puritans were indentured servants, including eight who died while crossing on the Mayflower in 1620. John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, philosophized in 1630 that “God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.” Puritans “mean and in subjection,” like all the other unfortunates of any race, could be and were sold into bondage in Virginia.21 Oliver Cromwell’s government had begun sending people abroad as indentured servants as a means of putting down an Irish Catholic insurrection, sending some 12,000 political prisoners to Barbados between 1648 and 1655, where voluntary indentured servants had been going since 1627.22 Field laborer was the role of a white underclass in seventeenth-century North America.

  It was a handsome business, this transport of the unwilling. And it endured. Faced with an overflowing prison population, Parliament passed the Transportation Act in 1718, allowing for the removal of convicts to the North American colonies. Tens of thousands were corralled under the act, convicts seen as scarcely human, already known as “crackers,” and routinely labeled “scum and dregs.”23 Benjamin Franklin, an eloquent spokesman for the colonists’ loathing, proposed that in return for the convicts, Americans send the mother country a like number of rattlesnakes. Between the beginnings of the trade and its ending during the American Revolution, some 50,000 convicts were forcibly transported to British North America.24 Shortly after American independence, Britain, in need of another outlet, began shipping its convicts—some 160,000 before 1868, when the practice ceased—to Australia, continuing the process for another ninety years.

  In sum, before an eighteenth-century boom in the African slave trade, between one-half and two-thirds of all early white immigrants to the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere came as unfree laborers, some 300,000 to 400,000 people.25* The eighteenth century created the now familiar equation that converts race to black and black to slave.

  4

  WHITE SLAVERY AS BEAUTY IDEAL

  As the eighteenth-century science of race developed in Europe, influential scholars referred to two kinds of slavery in their anthropological works. Nearly always those associated with brute labor—Africans and Tartars primarily—emerged as ugly, while the luxury slaves, those valued for sex and gendered as female—the Circassians, Georgians, and Caucasians of the Black Sea region—came to figure as epitomes of human beauty. By the nineteenth century, “odalisques,” or white slave women, often appear young, naked, beautiful, and sexually available throughout European and American art. (The odalisque still plays her role as the nude in art history, though her part in the scientific history of white race has largely been forgotten.)

  Needless to say, this early scholarship was ethnographically imprecise, pairing as it did Africans with Tartars (increasingly termed Kalmucks) on the ugly side. But, clearly, figuring some as ugly and some as be
autiful seemed much more important than ethnographical consistency. The relationship between slavery and racial classification brings the beauty ideal squarely into the history of whiteness.

  Note the earliest known human classification scheme, “Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l’habitent” (“A New Division of the Earth and the Different Species or Races Living There),” originally published anonymously in April 1684 in Journal des Sçavans, the journal of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. The author turned out to be François Bernier (1625–88), a French traveler and personal physician to the last important Mughal (Persian) emperor of India. Bernier put forward an idiosyncratic taxonomy, one keying on four geographical divisions. It was really no odder than the thousands of other racial schemes to follow.

  As usual in Western literature, Bernier’s four races give pride of place to Europe and extend over a vast area, including North Africa and Asia as far away as Thailand and Indonesia. (For some reason, “a part of Muscovy,” i.e., the area around Moscow, is excluded.) More oddly, American Indians belong to Bernier’s first, mostly European species. In the second species are people in sub-Saharan Africa, and in the third are those in Muscovy, part of southeast Asia, China, and the vast lands between China and Russia, including Tartars, all around the Fertile Crescent, and into the Levant. Georgians, Muscovites, Tartars, Usbeks, and Turcomans all belong to the third species. Alone in the fourth species are the Lapps. (Race theoreticians stumbled continually over what to do with the Lapps.)