Free Soil in the Atlantic World by Sue Peabody Keila Grinberg

Author:Sue Peabody, Keila Grinberg [Sue Peabody, Keila Grinberg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317588726
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Today, many scholars would not classify turcs in France as real slaves. Since they could gain release through ransom, exchange or treaty, since they could correspond with family members and transmit property, and since they could not pass on servile status, Ottoman and Moroccan subjects in French bondage were neither ‘natally alienated’ nor ‘socially dead’.81 As such, they might seem to qualify better as hostages or prisoners of war. To the political theorists, naval officers, jurists and judges of early modern France, however, Muslim rowers helped define both liberty and slavery. Their emancipation provided the basis of France’s freedom myth in the sixteenth century and into the eighteenth century also served as the leading examples of esclaves.

That from the 1690s to the 1780s the status of ‘Turks’ provoked any uncertainty relates to the expansion of French slaveholding rather than the incongruity of the category. In France, before the rise of the Atlantic trade, neither inheritance nor permanence was an essential component of slavery. The kingdom’s ‘freedom principle’ developed in a Mediterranean world where Christians and Muslims, whether captured or purchased, experienced degrees of unfreedom – and liberty could be bought, negotiated, traded or won. Ottoman and Moroccan rowers did not need to invoke sayings about France franc (free France). They had other options. By the eighteenth century, however, the vast majority of slaves in colonial and metropolitan France were black. Just as these sub-Saharan Africans reshaped understandings of slavery, so too did they adapt the maxim, ‘There are no slaves in France’.

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