justifying slavery --7/14/26

14 Jul 2026

justifying slavery --7/14/26

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Today's selection -- from They Called It Peace by Lauren Benton. Justifications for slavery by the Spanish in their New World exploits, including by Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish lawyer, clergyman, and writer, known for his work as a social reformer and historian:

“There are some reasons to contrast ‘domestic’ captivity in Iberian households with the enslavement of Native peoples in the Americas for work in mines and on plantations. But Las Casas and other contemporaries did not make this distinction. Indeed, Las Casas identified the household as the principal entity for holding and disciplining captives seized in war. Household heads exercised control and authority, dominium, over all subordinate household members, including women, children, servants, and slaves. Households, like the one headed by Pedro de las Casas, were the main repositories for captives in both Iberia and the New World.

“The principle that captives could be justly seized in war was cited regularly by slavers, often more as casual slogan than formal legal argument, and often as mere cover for unauthorized slaving. Many Christian raiders in Iberia labeled their captives ‘Moors’ regardless of their origins or religion to justify keeping or selling captives seized in raids. Iberian raiders did the same in North Africa, where early sixteenth-century raids became the main source for captives sold in Spanish and Portuguese cities. By one estimate, 60,000 women seized in Moroccan raids were sold in Spanish ports in 1522. The links between households and raiding extended into distant sites of empires in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds.

“As sojourners, settlers, and soldiers jockeyed to seize women and children, they were driving to gain wealth and status for households. Factions of different status found common ground in advocating broad authority for household heads over their tiny commonwealths. Officials who opposed raiding or placed limits on the power of heads of household over captives faced harsh criticism, and even sometimes rebellion. Servants and captives, meanwhile, chafed against control over their own possibilities of forming families and households. The political character of early settlements was deeply bound up with the politics of households.

Bartolomé de las Casas y Sosa

“Nowhere is this connection clearer than in what I call ‘garrison empires,’ collections of fortified enclaves of early European overseas ventures. Metropolitan instructions or charters provided imperial agents in far-flung garrisons with incomplete and vague instructions about the political nature of these communities. Household formation represented not just a possible pathway for turning fortified outposts into settled colonies. It was in most cases the only pathway available. Imperial officials recognized very early the importance of encouraging household formation–to shore up the legitimacy of their rule, to enhance the viability of settlements, and to ensure Europeans' ability to ensnare or attract the coerced labor they regarded as key to profit taking through continued raiding.

“Yet forming households in early empires was no easy trick. The demand for labor was usually high in imperial enclaves, but securing laborers, from dependent kin to servants to enslaved people, was irregular and costly. It also presented risks, from insubordination to rebellion. Even as raiding promised to secure captives for struggling households, it drew men away from garrisons and placed them outside the command of households. Again and again, incentives to promote stability and trade by containing raids clashed with local incentives to pursue plunder.

“The close relationship between imperial violence and households found support among European political theologians and jurists. They regarded households as essential to the formation of political communities and linked them to settlements' right to make defensive war. Officials quickly figured out that arguments about self-defense could be stretched creatively to justify ongoing raiding, even against crown instructions to preserve regional peace. As raids produced captives, households completed the punishment of captives seized in raids. Consequently, at the heart of slaving and slavery was the idea that slave masters and enslaved people were locked in a permanent state of war. Yet, there was nothing fixed or definite about authorization for raids and captive taking. While the demand for payment in booty by sailors and soldiers gave rise to opportunistic captive taking, early colonial policies were wildly inconsistent, at times limiting and Jt other times tolerating, or even actively sponsoring, the seizure and sale of captives. The profitability of trafficking in human beings depended on having someplace to put them. Imperial officials and community members in early settlements were acutely aware that armies on the move and jerry-rigged garrisons were less conducive to household formation than permanent colonies with municipal governments and stable religious institutions.

“To show how households were foundational to complexes of raiding and slavery, this chapter begins with Portuguese enclaves in the Indian Ocean and moves to English garrisons in the Caribbean. In sixteenth century Goa under the Portuguese Estado da India and in seventeenth-century English Caribbean colonies, officials encouraged household formation as a means of attaching footloose raiders to imperial enclaves, fashioning a colonial right to make war, and multiplying entities authorized to hold and discipline captives. In the same period and also later, European jurists and political theologians sought to define the relation of private violence to public war. Debating what conditions turned quasi-private raiding into legitimate public war, European writers sketched a legal framework for peacetime plunder. Their approach matched in its broad outlines (and some particulars) the logic of distant efforts to transform collections of colonies into empires. In both theory and practice, defining households as essential to the legitimacy of political communities helped to justify imperial plunder, and vice versa. Both European writers and officials far from Europe settled on households as the link between opportunistic plunder and organized violence and, ultimately, between ad hoc captive taking and slavery as an imperial institution.”