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Haitians also continued using slavery - ah, excuse me, forced labor according to academic sources - after their revolution. They don’t really have the moral hig
by wyager 5y ago
Haitians also continued using slavery - ah, excuse me, forced labor according to academic sources - after their revolution. They don’t really have the moral high-ground there either.
- ChainOfFools 5y agowouldn't mind a citation of those academic sources which use this term in this context.
- wyager 5y agohttps://www.brown.edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/exhibitions/haitian/pages/part7.html https://www.brown.edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/e... “The revolution ended slavery in Saint-Domingue but not forced labor. Louverture and several of the early governments of independent Haiti used the army to impose forced work on the plantations”
- ChainOfFools 5y agoThanks, the citation I was hoping for would be a published, peer reviewed paper with listed authors rather than a summary from what looks to be a departmental public outreach project, the grunt work of which are typically farmed out to grad students or RAs. nonetheless I'm disappointed; the assertion looked so juicy and worthy of a deep dive. you made it sound like "academia" was conspiring to demote slavery to forced labor under specific conditions. yet no evidence of this is to be found in the linked text. rather, the summary makes a point of distinguishing slavery from forced labor. granted, it doesn't define either term (as a proper paper would) but it doesn't pretend they are interchangeable either.
- Scarbutt 5y agoMix corruption and France teaching them about how to profit from slavery and it's no surprise they might have continued with slavery.
- sangnoir 5y agoSlavery and forced labor are not necessarily the same thing; thought the former usually implies the latter. Being forced to work 8-12 hours a day, but free to go about your business the rest of the time is a very different scenario to being owned and having your offspring becoming another persons property. Chattel slavery goes way beyond forced labor - both are terrible, but not equally so.
- rory 5y agoYeah, the "worker" conditions that followed were more like serfdom than chattel slavery. A serf's offspring is still tied to the land like their parents, so the practical difference probably wasn't that great, but it's still an important distinction.