by Nancy Reagin
He goes to Watto, only to find that once more his mother has been sold, this time to Cliegg Lars, a rural farmer. Lars is not a typical purchaser of slaves. He fell in love with Shmi, therefore bought and manumitted her, then married her. This was not uncommon in slave societies. Even in the American South, where manumission was difficult, because laws on race made marriage between a master and a former slave illegal, the most likely person to be manumitted was a slave mistress. Some masters lived openly with their slave mistresses, proclaiming their love for them.18 Shmi and Cliegg married for love. This happy ending does not last. Tusken Raiders capture Shmi, subjecting her to ritual torture. This is not dissimilar to the use of slaves for ritual killings in some cultures, such as the Aztec. Anakin returns to Tatooine about a month after his mother was kidnapped. He goes out to find her and rescues her, only to have her die in his arms. In anger and in violation of the rules of the Jedi, he slaughters the entire clan of Tuskens. This is his first big step toward the dark side of the Force and will lead to his transformation into Darth Vader.
The story of Anakin Skywalker is, in the end, a story about the corrosive nature of human bondage. Anakin’s potential as a great man—as perhaps the “Chosen One” of Jedi prophesy—is undermined by his slave past. He is never able to overcome his anger over his bondage, his disrupted childhood, and the separation from his mother and ultimately her death at the hands of yet another band of kidnappers. A Jedi must be dedicated to the Order and to the rules of the Jedi, but Anakin, a former slave, can never control his emotions or separate himself from them. Emotionally scarred by slavery, he cannot in the end be a true Jedi.
Anakin finds his mother at the Tusken Raiders’ camp too late to save her life. (Attack of the Clones)
Throughout human history, slaves faced the hardships of bondage, separation, and not knowing their roots. We never know who Anakin’s father was. Like so many slaves in human history, he can never fully know his lineage; like many slaves he is forced to choose between family and freedom. His anger and, ultimately, the disruption of the galaxy emerge from his bondage.
Slavery and Luke Skywalker
Luke Skywalker grows up on Tatooine, a world where slavery is legal and common. He is not a slave, but in important ways he experiences many things associated with bondage. He is raised by his “uncle” Owen Lars, never knowing that Owen is the step-brother of his father, Anakin Skywalker, and that there is no blood relation. Owen keeps from Luke the true nature of his lineage. In this way, Luke is like his father, Anakin, never knowing who his father is. More important, the young Luke, like the young Anakin, is prevented from seeking his destiny by those who control him. At the beginning of A New Hope, Luke is stuck on Tatooine, working on his uncle’s moisture farm. He desperately wants to continue his education by entering the Academy, where he can become an officer and a starship pilot. His best friend, Biggs Darklighter, goes to the academy to become a fighter pilot, but Owen will not let Luke leave. It is not clear whether Luke can legally leave his guardian, but even if he could, he is trapped on the farm by Owen’s persistent demand that he needs Luke for “just one more season.” Luke is free to leave only after Owen and his wife, Beru, are killed by stormtroopers.
Luke Skywalker on his uncle’s Tatooine moisture farm. (A New Hope)
In the context of labor and education, the early life of Luke, who is the “emancipator” of the galaxy, resembles the early life of the great emancipator of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln was a child, he loved books and thirsted for an education, but his father refused to allow him to get more than the most basic schooling. As a teenager, Lincoln read in his spare time, which angered his father. By age eighteen, he was more than ready to go out on his own, but he could not. Lincoln could not leave home until he turned twenty-one, and he was required to turn over all of his wages to his father until he reached the age of majority. On the day he turned twenty-one, Lincoln left home, never to return. Later in life, he would express sympathy with slaves because he knew he had been treated like a slave by his father. For years, he was forced to labor for free, unable to seek his destiny elsewhere.
Luke’s guardian is not so harsh. As a youth, Luke learns to pilot skyhoppers and drive landspeeders, develops close friendships, and gains a basic education. Yet he cannot leave home, cannot go out on his own, and cannot achieve self-determination, even though, like the young Lincoln, he is old enough and skilled enough to make it on his own. Not quite slaves, Abraham Lincoln and Luke Skywalker were bondsmen, working for others and denied the most basic essential element of freedom: to go where they wished, learn what they wanted to learn, and make something of themselves beyond the narrow confines of their frontier homes. Age, for Lincoln, and the tragic murder of his guardians for Luke, allowed their emancipation and thus enabled them to achieve a destiny of emancipating others. Growing up, both men knew bondage firsthand; as adults, they hated slavery.
Abraham Lincoln, c. 1857.
“You’ll Soon Learn to Appreciate Me”: Sex, Slavery, and Star Wars
Throughout history masters have sexually exploited their slaves. In almost every slave society, masters have had sex with their slaves. Indeed, in some cultures sex has been a prime motive for enslavement. The biblical Abraham had children with his slave Hagar, while his wife, Sarah, was apparently unable to bear children. Later of course he had a child with Sarah as well. Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, had a flock of children with his two wives and their “handmaidens”—slaves in the household. On the African coast, some slave traders refused to sell certain women to the European purchasers, preferring to keep them for their own slaves and concubines. In the colonial period, lonely planters isolated in New World colonies bought slaves to be their sex partners. In antebellum New Orleans, there was a thriving commerce in slave women who were sold to houses of prostitution.19
Cassandra of Troy, kidnapped and raped by Ajax after her city fell, became an enslaved concubine.
On Tatooine in Return of the Jedi, Oola is given to Jabba the Hutt, who chains her to his throne, where she is an ornament of his power, a diversion, an entertainer, and, when he wishes, a vehicle for his sexual pleasure. Stripped of her dancer’s costume, she is dressed in flimsy netting, barely clothed, and on display for all.20 She is eye candy for all who have an audience in Jabba’s throne room. The room itself—indeed, his whole enterprise—is like that of a Mafia don removed to some “oriental” setting, with harems, dancers, prostitutes, and a constant mixture of business, corruption, pleasure, sexual exploitation, violence, pain, and death. It could be a fort on the African coast, set up for slave trading; a decadent pasha’s palace in some far-off corner of the Ottoman Empire; or a similarly exotic palace, somewhere between Timbuktu and the Taj Mahal.
When Oola refuses his demands, Jabba the Hutt pulls her by her chain until she is over a trap door, which leads to his rancor monster. Jabba releases the trap door and Oola drops to the bottom, to be eaten alive. Her resistance—pointless, senseless, and without any chance of success—is motivated by fear, anger, and a sense of hopelessness. Life as Jabba’s slave, chained to his throne, to be his plaything, is not worth living. It is better to die resisting bondage than to be slowly destroyed and then die. Examples of resistance such as Oola’s can be found throughout the history of slavery, in every society, in every culture. Africans sometimes threw themselves overboard rather than endure the transatlantic crossing; slaves physically attacked masters, knowing they would be punished and even executed; in German slave labor camps, some inmates, facing death in any event, threw themselves at guards or barbed wire, knowing their acts would end their lives.
It is not clear that Oola knew her resistance to Jabba would lead to her death. She might have assumed he would not kill such a talented dancer and so beautiful a slave. Yet her resistance to his demands would, at the least, surely lead to painful punishment. Instead, she died, her chain still around her neck.
Shortly after the demise of Oola, Jabba obtains an even b
etter slave as a replacement for Oola: Princess Leia. Captured while trying to rescue Han Solo, Leia is Jabba’s new throne ornament, barely dressed, vulnerable to his sexual demands, displayed for all to gawk at, and chained like a small animal to the immense throne of the gigantic Jabba. Jabba, however, never has time to enjoy Leia or to violate her. She is soon rescued by Luke Skywalker. During this chaotic battle, Leia is still chained to Jabba’s throne, but she becomes the hero of all slaves—especially slave women—as she strangles Jabba with the very chain that holds her in bondage. The slave becomes the agent of her own liberation, and Jabba in turn becomes a victim of his own horrid greed, corruption, and lust. Like the slaves in Haiti who savagely took revenge on their masters in the 1790s, Leia takes revenge on Jabba, ironically killing him with his own tool of enslavement.
Although chained, Oola fights against Jabba the Hutt in his throne room. (Return of the Jedi)
Leia choking Jabba on his barge. (Return of the Jedi).
“We Don’t Serve Their Kind Here”: Beyond Chattel Slavery
So far, this essay has focused on slavery as a form of ownership of human beings. This has been the dominant form of slavery in world history and dates from ancient times. Yet there have also been public slaves: galley slaves in ancient navies, or the Hebrews dragooned to build ancient cities in Egypt, described in the book of Exodus. In the modern world, new versions of public slavery emerged in the mid-twentieth century: Korean comfort women and captured Western nurses, dragooned to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers; political prisoners and captured German prisoners of war sent to Soviet gulags; millions of European civilians and captured Soviet prisoners of war, sent to German factories and concentration camps. In these modern slave regimes, those in bondage were often worked to death because they were expendable “subhumans” who had no true market value. They were indeed “less than slaves.”
In the Star Wars galaxy, this form of bondage is found in a variety of ways. Clone armies are essentially slaves—persons bred to give their bodies and their lives to the authority that controls and paid for them. At a key juncture, the clone troopers are used by their Sith Master to slaughter the Jedi under the programming of Order 66. The Empire’s elite forces, the stormtroopers, are neither volunteers nor conscripts, but are brainwashed members of an Imperial cult. Then there are the droid armies—machines—the ultimate slaves, unquestioning in the devotion to their task. The Empire relies on mindless droids, clones, and stormtroopers to obey commands without thought, in order to force everyone in the galaxy into a kind of universal bondage.
That is where the Star Wars movies begin in A New Hope. There is a Civil War in the galaxy. The Rebels seek “to restore freedom to the galaxy.” Freedom has multiple meanings. On one hand, freedom is the opposite of tyranny. Destroying the Empire and restoring a Republic will bring political “freedom” to the galaxy and get rid of the political “slavery” of the Emperor. Freedom is also the opposite of individual slavery. Emancipation brings “freedom” to those held in bondage. Yet on the other hand, freedom is the opposite of personal dedication (or enslavement) to an idea, a cause, a set of beliefs. A Jedi Knight is not “free” to choose his own direction but is constricted by a monklike obedience to the Order and the Force; a stormtrooper in service of the Emperor lacks freedom to choose on which side to fight; Darth Vader is, in effect, a “slave” to the dark side of the Force. Freedom and its opposites—tyranny, slavery, and selfless obedience—are in constant tension throughout the Star Wars movies.
Free papers for former slave Henry London, signed by Major General David Hunter, Royal South Carolina, 1862.
All of these forms of slavery, or unfreedom, are present in the faraway worlds of the Star Wars galaxy. This makes sense because the movies are metaphors for human history. For most of human history, slavery and unfreedom have been the rule, not the exception. Star Wars reminds us of the profound evil of slavery and the huge social costs that come with a denial of freedom. It is true at the personal level of Anakin Skywalker, scarred for life by the utter unfairness of bondage, and Oola, who sought adventure and excitement, only to be enslaved, defiled, and destroyed. It is also true at the political level. The dark side of the Force is, in the end, the desire to have total control, even life-and-death control, over others. This, ultimately, is what slavery was always about.
Notes
1. See, generally, John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011). I thank Avery Edison, Abigail Finkelman, and Mike Pusatere for their helpful comments on this essay. Their insights from the next generation were particularly useful. I finished this chapter at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan, while on a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. I thank the JSPS for its support of my scholarship. I finished the final work on this essay while visiting at Duke Law School, where I was the John Hope Franklin Professor of American Legal History. I thank Duke Law School for itrs support as well. Portions of this essay dealing with international law are taken from Seymour Drescher and Paul Finkelman, “Slavery,” in Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 37.
2. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
3. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), vol. 2, 371. On the issue of slavery in the Convention, see Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001).
4. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, vii.
5. See Sue Peabody “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
6. Somerset v. Stewart, 98 Eng. Rep. 499 (1772).
7. Ibid., at 510.
8. Ibid., at 509.
9. Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism and Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
10. Quoted in Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 80. See also Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, for a discussion of slaveholding by Jefferson and other Founders.
11. Ratification of a constitutional amendment requires the support of three-fourths of the states. To this day, in 2012, it would be impossible to amend the Constitution if the fifteen slave states that existed in 1860 still had slavery and still opposed emancipation. The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was possible only because the secession of eleven slave states allowed for constitutional change, which they were forced to accept as a cost of military defeat.
12. Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century (New York: Altamira Press, 2003), 20–25.
13. Renee C. Redman, “The League of Nations and the Right to Be Free from Enslavement: The First Human Right to Be Recognized as Customary International Law,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 70 (1994): 759–802.
14. Although Star Wars is clearly “futuristic,” with its technology and space travel, the movie is set “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”
15. Stephen J. Sansweet and Pablo Hidalgo, The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008), vol 1, 122.
16. Ibid., 166–167.
17. Gardulla is described as having a large slave trading operation, The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, 322–323.
18. See, for example, the cases discussed in Bernie Jones, Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).
19. See Judith Kelleher Schafer, Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).
20. Ibid.
Chapter 10
“Greed Can Be a Powerful Ally”
The Trade Federation, the East India Companies, and Chaotic Worlds of Trade
Michael Laver
“Beware, Viceroy. The Federation is going too far this time.”
—Padmé Amidala, The Phantom Menace
Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom.
—Augustine of Hippo1
Fiction rarely springs from the head of its creator without being influenced by the events, characters, and often stranger-than-fiction narratives that make up what we collectively call “history.” Certainly, this is true in the case of Star Wars: its pirates, merchants, and company officials had their counterparts in our history, as well. This chapter explores the parallels between the political and economic situation of the Republic and the Empire and the rather chaotic and fluid situation in the South China Sea region beginning in the sixteenth century. The actions of the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company—multinational mega-corporations with trading bases throughout the Asian maritime world—showed striking similarities to the role played by the Trade Federation and other members of the Separatist Council in the transition from Republic to Empire, as illustrated in Episodes I through III of the movies.2 The region’s history also featured various eccentric figures, both Asian and European, who were at times pirates, legitimate merchants, company servants, or something wildly in between; some are oddly reminiscent of such shady or opportunistic figures as Jabba the Hutt, Lando Calrissian, Nute Gunray, Count Dooku, and indeed Han Solo himself. In other words, the question of where legitimate trade ends and piracy begins is one that depends very much on the circumstances and the economic situation. One person’s pirate, it seems, can be another person’s patriot. As Augustine observed in the fifth century, the line between a band of rapacious merchants and a sovereign government can also become blurred.