Calculation and Morality: The Costs of Slavery and the Value of Emancipation in the French Antilles

by Caroline Oudin-Bastide, Philippe Steiner, Keith Tribe

Overview

Debates about whether to maintain or abolish slavery revolved around two key values: the morality of enslaving other human beings and the economic benefits and costs of slavery as compared to free labor. Various and conflicting arguments were presented by abolitionists, colonists, and administrators in slave-holding societies, all of whom used calculations about the relative cost and productivity of slavery to defend their own point of view in an impassioned debate.

In Calculation and Morality, Caroline Oudin-Bastide and Philippe Steiner consider how economic calculations, estimations, and arguments informed the long debate over French slavery between 1771 and 1848. They show how calculation was introduced into moral debate and became a critical social object in regard both to its consistency and its manifest effects. To do so they trace a process in which phenomena were classified into groups, becoming a category, and then how metrics and calculations were used to analyze the possible effects of emancipating slaves in French colonies. Abolitionists sought to demonstrate that it was in the interest of slaveowners and/or the entire nation to employ free labour in the colonies, and to show the irrationality of the colonial and metropolitan defenders of servitude; their aim was to enlighten various parties as to their real interest, and how that real interest coincided with justice. In turn, colonists accused those opposed to slavery of being blinded by their own philanthropic principles and insisted on the rationality of the slave system as the only means of meeting the interests of everyone, including slaves, at least in the short and medium term.

Oudin-Bastide and Steiner closely examine the positions and reasoning of such influential French thinkers as Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet, Simonde de Sismondi, Jean Baptiste Say, and Alexis de Tocqueville. In doing so they shed light on the interaction of moral precepts and econonomic calculations in a trenchant study in the history of ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190856854
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/07/2019
Series:	Oxford Studies in History of Economics
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	9.40(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Caroline Oudin-Bastide is a socio-historian of slavery in the French West Indies. Her research is focused on the social functioning of slave society and the role of social beliefs concerning witchcraft.

Philippe Steiner is professor of sociology at the university Paris-Sorbonne. His recent research is devoted to the economic sociology of markets, the relation between markets and morals and the history of social sciences. He is currently working on the economic sociology of festivities.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Du Pont: or, the Economic Error of Slavery, as Demonstrated by Calculation
Chapter 2. The Proliferating Use of Calculation among Eighteenth-century Abolitionists
Chapter 3. Colonists also Calculate
Chapter 4. Moving Away from the Rhetoric of Calculation
Chapter 5. The Institutional Inscription of Calculation
Chapter 6. Another Form of Calculation: Productivity
Chapter 7. Self-interest and Needs
Chapter 8. Status and Interest
Chapter 9. Justice and Utility
Conclusion. Freeing the Slaves
References
Index of names

Editorial Reviews

"Calculation and Morality is a major contribution to the study of the French antislavery movement. A history of ideas, it concentrates on the ways abolitionists and their opponents used the tools of political economy. This focus illuminates one of the distinctive characteristics of France's national debate about colonial slavery." — John Garrigus, Journal of Modern History

"An engrossing book that allows us to trace the economic element and its interaction with humanitarianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century French colonial slavery question." -Oeconomia

From the Publisher