Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! Patrick Henry
It is humbling to reflect, that in those countries in which the fondness for the mere persons of women is carried to the highest excess, they are slaves; and that their moral and intellectual degradation increases in direct proportion to the adoration which is paid to mere external charms. Hannah More, 1745-1833
No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women
For nearly two centuries many thousands of Negroes every year have been carried off to the West Indies to be worked to death. Literally to death ... I have yet to learn that anything more detestable than this has been done by human beings in any part of the Earth. John Stuart Mill
cf.
You will have to be servants to those who were born Lords of you. Servants to the whites. Thomas Carlyle
Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air
To the corruption of a closed grave?
Can they whose mates are beasts condemned to bear
Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish dare
To trample their oppressors? In their home,
Among their babes, thou knowst a curse would wear
The shape of woman – hoary crime would come
Behind and Fraud rebuild Religion’s tottering dome. Percy Bysshe Shelley
What art thou, freedom? Oh, could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand, tyrants would flee
Like a dream’s dim imagery.
Thou art not, as imposters say,
A shadow soon to pass away
A superstition and a name
Echoing from the cave of fame.
For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
To a neat and happy home.
Thou art clothes and fire and food,
For the trampled multitude
No – in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy
The beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychidion
The spirit that lifts the slave before his Lord
Stalks through the capitals of armed kings,
And spreads its ensign in the wilderness. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas: A Lyrical Drama
The wealth that early nineteenth century people were making was being made out of the sweat of other fellow human beings. If you made a lot of money out of a mill in the north or out of a small factory in the middle of Birmingham, the reason is you’d made your money is a lot of people had worked on your behalf – they’d worked like slaves. A N Wilson, author The Victorians
He [William Wilberforce] actually made a measurable difference to the dignity of millions. Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
Slavery: this business built on human blood and human suffering became one of the most important of the seventeenth century. Adam Nicholson, The Century that Wrote Itself III: A World Re-Shaped by Writing
Britain led the way in abolishing the slave trade. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, How God Made the English I: A Chosen People? BBC 2012
Britain becomes the world’s largest slave trader. The British IV: Dirty Money, Sky Atlantic 2012
He [William Wilberforce] became the conscience of the nation and inspired a generation of eccentric, obsessive yet remarkable individuals. Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders 1/3, BBC 2010
Wilberforce could be seen as the godfather of the do-gooders. ibid.
The British didn’t introduce slavery to the Caribbean but they took to it with enthusiasm ... The plantations devoured slaves ... Each estate was its own little tyranny. Jeremy Paxman, Empire IV: Making a Fortune, BBC 2012
From the first dawn of life unto the grave,
Poor womankind’s in every state a slave. Sarah Egerton, 1670-1723, English Poet, The Emulation
The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. Susan B Anthony
A plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were brought and sold. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. ibid.
Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. George Orwell, You and the Atom Bomb, Tribune 19 October 1945
The subjection of human beings by the organisation of productive labour has increased a hundredfold since Engels wrote that passage. The greater the exploitation, the more miserable the lot of so many workers, and the greater the case for socialism. The worst crime of capitalism is its enslavement and corruption of the human spirit. It binds that spirit to the yoke of productive labour, lobs it back and forth between boom and slump, insults and degrades it as if it were no more than part of the machinery. ‘We are,’ says the Guatemalan peasant in the film El Norte, ‘just arms and legs for them.’ Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism chapter 5
The exterminators, to continue their trade, came to rely increasingly on the slave trade from Africa. Between 1500 and 1800, 30 million slaves were taken by force from Africa to work the plantations of the West Indies and of North America. They were captured by violence or trickery, forced to row their death ships across the Atlantic, starved and beaten into submission by white Christian gentlemen, most of whom were British.
By 1789 Hispaniola had been divided and renamed. The eastern half, Santo Domingo, destitute and desolate, was still governed from Spain. The population was 125,000 of whom 15,000 were slaves. The western half, St Domingue, was run by France. It was heavily populated. In 1789 there were 30,000 whites in St Domingue, 40,000 mulattoes of mixed race, and half a million black African slaves.
... The whole of this vast surplus was entirely dependent on slave labour. The lucky slaves were the ones who died in the boats. In the fields they worked an 18-hour day from 7 a.m. until 2 a.m. The rules that they should be fed by their owners were almost everywhere ignored or flouted. Most slaves got no food at all, and had to spend their few precious hours of ‘free time’ cultivating vegetables.
Childbirth was not encouraged among the slaves. It wasted time which was better spent in the field. Religion was banned, except only for baptism which was allowed as long as it was done collectively and quickly. The Roman Catholic Church happily accepted this fleeting chance to make new converts. In exchange the church agreed to shut up about slavery.
The slaves were allowed no education, no independent thought, no rights of any kind. This was a savage, brutalised society, held together by fear and sadism. When the liberal French writer, Baron de Wimpffen, went to St Domingue in 1790, he marvelled at the beauty of his hostess at one of the interminable banquets. He was less impressed when she ordered her cook, who had annoyed her with some message about the food, to be thrown into the oven alongside the next dish. Such atrocities were not the exception. They were the rule.
... It broke out on 14 August 1791 in a plantation in the north. In a great wave of savagery, slaves slaughtered their masters and burnt their mansions – and were slaughtered in return. By the end of the year a huge leaderless slave army had established itself in the mountains of the north.