The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,96

to more cost-effective production techniques but had to be obliterated by war and by law.

It took guns and laws to end slavery in much of the rest of the world as well. Britain, once among the most exuberant slave-trading nations, outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833. By the 1840s it was jawboning other countries to end their participation in the slave trade, backed up by economic sanctions and by almost a quarter of the Royal Navy.83

Most historians have concluded that Britain’s policing of the abolition of slavery was driven by humanitarian motives.84 Locke undermined the moral basis for slavery in his 1689 work Two Treatises on Government, and though he and many of his intellectual descendants hypocritically profited from the institution, their advocacy of liberty, equality, and the universal rights of man let a genie out of the bottle and made it increasingly awkward for anyone to justify the practice. Many of the Enlightenment writers who inveighed against torture on humanitarian grounds, such as Jacques-Pierre Brisson in France, applied the same logic to oppose slavery. They were joined by Quakers, who founded the influential Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, and by preachers, scholars, free blacks, former slaves, and politicians.85

At the same time, many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible’s approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own. But these rationalizations withered under intellectual and moral scrutiny. The intellectual argument held that it was indefensible to allow one person to own another, arbitrarily excluding him from the community of decision-makers whose interests were negotiated in the social contract. As Jefferson put it, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately.”86 The moral revulsion was stimulated by first-person accounts of what it was like to be a slave. Some were autobiographies, like The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the African, Written by Himself (1789) and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Even more influential was a work of fiction, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852). The novel depicted a wrenching episode in which mothers were separated from their children, and another in which the kindly Tom was beaten to death for refusing to flog other slaves. The book sold three hundred thousand copies and was a catalyst for the abolitionist movement. According to legend, when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he said, “So you’re the little woman who started this great war.”

In 1865, after the most destructive war in American history, slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Many countries had abolished it before that time, and France had the dubious distinction of abolishing it twice, first in the wake of the French Revolution in 1794 and again, after Napoleon had restored it in 1802, during the Second Republic in 1848. The rest of the world quickly followed suit. Many encyclopedias provide time lines of the abolition of slavery, which differ slightly in how they delineate territories and what they count as “abolition,” but they all show the same pattern: an explosion of abolition proclamations beginning in the late 18th century. Figure 4–6 shows the cumulative number of nations and colonies that have formally abolished slavery since 1575.

Closely related to slavery is the practice of debt bondage. Beginning in biblical and classical times, people who defaulted on their loans could be enslaved, imprisoned, or executed.87 The word draconian comes from the Greek lawgiver Draco, who in 621 BCE codified laws governing the enslavement of debtors. Shylock’s right to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is another reminder of the practice. By the 16th century defaulters were no longer enslaved or executed, but they filled up debtors’ prisons by the thousands. Sometimes they were charged for food, despite being broke, and had to survive on what they could beg from passersby through the windows of the jail. In early-19th-century America, thousands of people, including many women, languished in debtors’ prisons, half of them for debts of less than ten dollars. In the 1830s a reform movement sprang up which, like the antislavery movement, appealed to both reason and emotion. A congressional committee argued