The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: A Conversation with John Samuel Harpham
John Samuel Harpham is Wick Cary Assistant Professor of Constitutional Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He completed his doctorate at Harvard University and has held posts at Harvard and at the University of Chicago. His new book, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, was published in October 2025 with Harvard University Press.
Cameron Bowman: Intellectual Origins has its own origins in your doctoral thesis. In the acknowledgements to the thesis, you mention that you were inspired by a passage in the work of one of your mentors, Richard Tuck (Natural Rights Theories.) A tangential argument of Tuck’s was that sixteenth century thinkers confronted slavery directly, while later figures evaded it. He did not develop this insight further. In your view, have historians of political thought avoided slavery and its intellectual history? Similarly, to what extent is your work an attempt to reintegrate slavery into our account of early modern intellectual culture?
John Samuel Harpham: To a great extent. I completed my graduate studies in the Department of Government at Harvard, which was terrific environment in which to immerse oneself in the history of political thought. Richard Tuck was a member of my dissertation committee, as were Eric Nelson and Nancy Rosenblum. But it became clear to me, from almost as soon as I arrived on campus, that I did not have the same kind of theoretical sophistication or educational background as many of my peers. What I did have was a conviction—a conviction that I would write about a topic that was perhaps not at the center of attention for most of my peers and in the field at large. I was determined to write about the history of enslavement and its place in the history of political ideas. I would turn the tools and insights of the field toward the examination of a topic that the field had often overlooked.
That said, of course slavery had not been entirely overlooked in the field. Peter Garnsey had written a survey of ancient ideas about slavery. Anthony Pagden had devoted considerable attention to slavery in his classic descriptions of European ideas about empire. David Brion Davis had authored the standard account of slavery and antislavery in his Problem of Slavery series. Mary Nyquist’s Arbitrary Rule put forward a subtle and propulsive analysis of early modern ideas. There were learned debates across the main journals in the field about canonical authors from Aristotle to Locke. And so on. I studied these works and learned from them.
And then there was Tuck, who had an established interest in slavery—which at times surfaced in his books. That one passage in Natural Rights Theories, from 1979, was an important example. What he did there was, in miniature, what I have tried to do in my book. Having established that early modern political ideas needed to be seen in context of the reception of Roman law, Tuck then connected what often appeared to be abstract lines of argument to contemporary debates about the Atlantic slave trade. For me, this move unlocked the field. It held out the prospect of new directions. I was soon convinced that, to put the matter in reverse, debates about the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic world could be re-examined in view of the insight that early modern European political thought was fundamentally Roman in character.
CB: Intellectual Origins is concerned with the salience of classical ideas about slavery in early modern English discourse. Indeed, it asserts that the ‘most important’ justificatory discourse surrounding transatlantic slavery was a ‘fundamentally Roman one.’ Can you briefly explain what you mean by this?
JSH: What I mean is that, in early modern European political thought, ideas about slavery unfolded within a certain definite structure and that that structure was derived from the culture of the classical world. For early modern authors, ideas about slavery (and freedom, too) had found their clearest and most powerful expression in the canonical texts of Roman law. Even the customs of enslavement that were described in the Hebrew Bible could be seen to fit within the basic terms and categories—that is, the structure—stated in Roman law. Indeed, on the most important issues that had to do with slavery, Roman law had only aimed to synthesize and authorize practices common across much of the ancient Mediterranean world. Slavery was understood to enter Roman law in what was referred to as the law of nations, which was no more and no less than a collection of the customs common to all the peoples of the world. Slavery was not treated as an aberrant or unusual practice—in fact, almost the opposite was the case.
The main features of the Roman structure were that slavery was not introduced as a matter of natural law. According to the law of nature, all persons were free and equal with respect to each other. Rather slavery came in under the law of nations. It arose as a result of accident and misfortune, most often for persons who were taken captive in war. In these instances, enslavement was treated as a substitute for death, as perhaps the condition of life most proximate to death. This series of ideas, as I said, set the structure for the discourse about slavery that took shape in early modern European culture.
Now, it was also clear to early modern authors that the customs of slavery laid out in Roman law had long since disappeared from the contemporary practices of Christian nations. Even the captives taken in wars between the states understood to fall within the boundaries of Christendom were not taken to be slaves. However, these authors also understood that the prohibition upon enslavement established within Christendom represented a local exception to what were still seen to be the common customs of the world. Slavery was still seen to be authorized under the law of nations, which in this respect better described the practices of nations that fell outside Christendom.
CB: A follow up question on the interaction between Roman and Christian ideas. I was struck about what you say about the Hebrew Bible and accident and misfortune. I wonder how you would address David Brion Davis' insight in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, that slavery is intimately tied to sin, both in the sense that slavery enters the world because of sin and that it’s an imperfect institution for imperfect beings, and the sense that it is often sin that leads people to slavery?
JSH: I take this to be a profound insight. In this respect as in many others, my work has been inspired by Davis. Davis was right to observe that, across the span of Western culture, ideas about slavery were tied up in some intimate relation to ideas about sin. As the one transformed, so did the other. That said, in this case, I think Davis missed the much broader point. In the Christian account, everything is tied to sin. Property, labour, commerce, nations, laws, crimes, punishments, wars—all elements of modern life are tied to sin and in particular the original sin that precipitated the Fall. And slavery arises within this distinctive human context, in a world ordered by all the other features of modern life.
If we reflect on this for a moment, we realize that all the stories and myths that early modern authors had at hand to characterize the original condition of the species—from the law of nature to the Garden of Eden and so on—emphasized that freedom was the rule at the point of departure. Slavery had come in over time, as human life assumed its complex modern form. In other words, the rise of slavery was part of a much broader narrative of development. It was a feature of the modern human condition that was marked by sin—to be sure—but also by all the other practices and institutions which humans had developed as they shaped and re-shaped their world.
CB: You mentioned that early modern Europeans understood that they were living in a quite different society, in the sense that slavery had declined almost to the point of disappearance. To bring this discussion to England and English ideas, which is the focus of the book, I think we would say that the English had the most acute sense of their own dedication to freedom. At the same time, they were also becoming increasingly involved in transatlantic slavery. Could you speak about the relationship between slavery and freedom in Intellectual Origins?
JSH: Slavery and freedom are the two conceptual pillars of my work. In Western culture, it seems clear to me that neither freedom nor slavery can be well understood without reference to the other, at least in part because slavery has so often been seen as the ultimate deprivation of freedom and freedom framed as an escape from slavery. The scholar who has served as my most direct source of inspiration on these themes is Orlando Patterson—who became an important mentor to me as I wrote Intellectual Origins. Patterson’s most famous work is Slavery and Social Death, from 1982, but at least as essential to my own scholarship has been his idiosyncratic account of classical and medieval ideas, titled Freedom in the Making of Western Culture.
But that is to speak in broad terms, and your question was about slavery and freedom in early modern English culture. My book covers the period from 1550 to 1700. One reason I started at that early date is that the second half of the sixteenth century was the time when English authors started to come to a consensus that villeinage had disappeared within the realm. As a result, there were no persons in the present, at least in England, whose status could seem to recall that of the slaves at Rome. To that extent, it was often said, all the people of the nation were free. You see, again, the closeness of freedom and slavery: to be free meant not to be enslaved.
The book thus starts with a familiar paradox in scholarship on American slavery: terrible new forms of domination arise within a culture that claims for itself a special relation to freedom. This paradox—or perhaps this contradiction—was much remarked upon around the time of the American Revolution. It supplied the title for what remains perhaps the most important book in the field of colonial American history, Edmund Morgan’s 1975 American Slavery, American Freedom. But I wanted to establish that this classic paradox was present from the start, because the second half of the sixteenth century is also where you need to start if you want to write a complete narrative of the development of the slave trade and slave societies across the Anglo-American Atlantic world.
CB: One of the admirable qualities of this book is the range of material. Included in Intellectual Origins are a range of works written by Europeans that reveal early-modern European attitudes toward Africa and African peoples. Can you explain the importance of European perceptions of Africa to early-modern ideas about slavery?
JSH: Yes, the central chapters of the book are devoted to a full description of early-modern English ideas about Africa and African peoples. But before I explain how important this topic is to my work, I want to note that my close attention to it marks a significant departure from much earlier scholarship on early modern European intellectual history and indeed also on the origins of American slavery. In both fields, Africa has not often been seen to be central.
On the one hand, historians of American slavery have for the most part focused on—and no surprise here—the development of slave institutions across the early English colonies. Dozens and dozens of terrific, detailed studies have been written to describe the parallel processes in which slave societies were established across the greater Caribbean arc that ran from Barbados to Virginia. Africa appears on the periphery of these works, most often simply as the point of origin for persons who came to be enslaved in America. On the other hand, intellectual historians of early-modern Europe have tended to assume that Africa was a distant part of the world not well known to the authors these scholars aim to understand. When Africa has had a role in works of these scholars, it has been treated not so much as a presence but as an absence—a part of the world believed to represent all that Europe was not. It has often been assumed, in this vein, that European attitudes toward Africans were in truth only attitudes about Europeans themselves, expressed in the negative form. This line of interpretation was first laid out in Winthrop Jordan’s 1968 White Over Black, which was in a deep sense a product of its time but which continues to exert a powerful hold on the field.
But as I said, Africa is central to my work. On the one hand, I have worked to establish that ideas about Africa were critical in the development of American slavery. Not least was that the case because in this early period of rapid expansion, the slave trade was the means of expansion—and the trade came from Africa. Indeed, the earliest efforts to defend American slavery as legitimate were not so much efforts to defend colonial slave institutions: their focus was on the slave trade and in particular on the sources of slavery in the common customs of African nations. Africa was thus the central site of ideas and debates about American slavery, and it was America that was peripheral in these debates.
Now, on the other hand, to return to the field of early modern European intellectual history, it has been a profound and consequential error to assume that Africa was not well known. As a matter of fact, there was an immense amount of information about Africa that circulated in early modern European culture. It is simply that the travel narratives, descriptions of the world, maps, and atlases in which Africa was described in such minute detail have not been well understood or in most cases even studied in the first place. The very titles of the texts have sometimes been mistaken. One aim of my work, then, has been to survey the field of European discourse about Africa—its basic texts, its main themes, its shifts over time, and so on. I set out to construct, or re-construct, that discourse, so as at the least to establish that there had been one.
'The City of Louango' in Olfert Dapper, Beschrijvinge der Afrikaanse Gewesten (Amsterdam 1668). A revised English edition soon appeared: see John Ogilby, Africa (London, 1670).
CB: I'm in agreement with the two things you said. First the suggestion that Africa is central to this story about the origins of American slavery, and second that there is almost a total absence of understanding in contemporary scholarship of the early modern depictions of Africa. But what has been covered more are European depictions of some other non-European peoples. For example, the early modern European depictions of Native Americans feature prominently in contemporary scholarship. My question is, then, what differences do you see in the way Africa and African peoples were depicted in comparison with other non-European peoples?
JSH: Yes, and there were differences. To narrow the field, let us consider the two most important areas of English overseas enterprise in the early-modern period: Africa and America. We can start with some well-known facts. From an early date, English ambitions in America took on what we would now call a settler colonial character. They aimed to settle themselves in colonies from Barbados to Massachusetts and did so at scale over the course of the seventeenth century. But this did not happen over the course of the same period in Africa. At most, in this period, there were perhaps around five hundred Englishmen in residence at a time across the entire western coast. They lived for the most part in little coastal forts that controlled no more than a few acres of land outside their walls. For English ambitions in Africa in this period were not settler colonial: they were commercial. They went there not to settle but to trade.
As a result, what Englishmen wanted—the focus of their interested attention—was different in Africa from what it was in America. To be blunt, what they wanted in America was land, whereas in Africa it was commodities: first gold, for the most part, and then enslaved persons. Now, even if we accept that English perceptions were little more than reflections of their material interests, we should be prepared to believe that English ideas about African peoples differed from ideas about native Americans. What was needed in America was to confirm that the native peoples somehow could not claim control over the lands on which they lived. What was needed in Africa was to demonstrate that the native peoples could take part in complex commercial transactions. To continue in this vein, America had to seem as an almost unoccupied wasteland. Africa had to seem full of states and persons—so full as that it could support a commerce in such persons to European colonies abroad. America had to seem devoid of civil states. Africa had to seem to be the site of numerous ordered polities. So now we become aware of one of the bitterest ironies in the history of New World slavery. English reflections upon the civil character of African life never seemed to pose a problem to the rise of the African slave trade—instead the trade seemed to arise from the civil character of African life.
To return to your question, these are some of the complex features I see in the early modern period. I do not see, in English discourse, an effort to set down a simple division of the world between Self and Other. I do not see an effort to establish that all the peoples of the world outside the borders of Europe were at once inferior and the same. But I also see a world marked by the development of terrible new forms of domination and exploitation and the ideas from which these practices drew support. And that is the world that my book aims to describe.
'AFRICÆ, described, the manners of their Habits, and buildinge,' in John Speed, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (London, 1662; orig. pub. 1627)
CB: That leads us into a discussion of, again, with our focus on Africa and African peoples, the development of the concepts of race and the beginnings or origins of modern racism. There's an important tradition of placing race at the origins of American slavery, but also a powerful materialist critique of that view. Where do you position your argument within this debate?
JSH: Well, for a start, you have well described the debate in which my book makes an intervention. It is an old debate. For ever since the study of slavery started to move toward the center of the historical profession in the United States in the decades after the Second World War, American slavery’s origins have been understood to be a vital topic of examination. The first debate into which the field coalesced was termed ‘the origins debate.’ On the one side were scholars like Carl Degler and Winthrop Jordan and Alden Vaughan who held that racial hatred, or the almost instinctual of aversion of white for Black persons, preceded and helped to cause the turn toward slavery in the early-modern period. Now, on the other side were scholars like Eric Williams and Oscar and Mary Handlin who put forward a materialist account in which economic interests were the sole cause of slavery’s rise and racism appeared later as the ideology of American slavery.
In the manner of most academic debates, this one was never resolved. In recent decades, both lines of interpretation have come to dominate their respective fields. Cultural historians and scholars of drama and literature have focused their attention on race and racism and have often maintained that this is the idea that stands above the particular moment of slavery. Race preceded slavery, helped to sustain it, and survived its abolition to disfigure the modern world. At the same time, most historians of slavery have continued to work under more or less materialist assumptions. Almost all recent accounts of the origins of American slavery assume that the mere calculation of economic interests can explain the rise of this pernicious institution in the early-modern Atlantic world. But neither one of these schools has been too concerned to draw upon the insights of the other.
Both sides in this debate—which is of course no longer understood to be a debate—have an important role in my narrative. The materialist account is one I have accepted almost without modification. What I have denied is that it has exhausted the field, and in turn I have aimed to expand the scope of what we need to know in order to understand the origins of American slavery. I think that cultural values set the parameters for even the most self-interested calculations. I think that ideas can place limits upon what it is considered possible to do. In short, I think that the common consensus about slavery in early modern English discourse served as crucial context for the practices of enslavement that arose across the English Atlantic world. I do not treat ideas as a cause of this momentous event, but I do treat them as one of the conditions that made it possible.
In the course of my work, I have come into more direct confrontation with the other side in the origins debate—the one that would trace New World slavery back to the earlier development of race. Like the scholars who have elaborated upon this basic position, I have a serious interest in the relation between practices and institutions and the ideas and values that support them. I also have a serious interest in the intimate relation between slavery and race. More than these scholars, however, I have produced a view of this relation as contingent, unstable, and dynamic over time and across space. I never want to assume that slavery and race were interlocked from the start in the same manner as they later would become. In early modern European culture, in particular, the term “race” was most often used to refer to the human race as a whole. Moreover, race—in the sense that we use it in the present—is a term that does not well describe early modern European perceptions of Africa. European travellers and observers in this period expressed as much interest in what made Africans similar to themselves as in what made them different.
To focus on Africa as a central site of early-modern discourse about slavery is to learn that the relation between race and slavery was much more complex than many earlier scholars have understood. And so I arrive at a position that more materialist historians have defended for decades: that race and racism are best seen as a consequence rather than a cause of American slavery. They were invented and enlisted in support of institutions of enslavement that had been established by force in the Atlantic world. Of course, the situation was more multi-faceted than this, but that is perhaps the simplest formulation of my claim in Intellectual Origins.
John will be at the RAI in Oxford on Wednesday 27 May to talk about Intellectual Origins.
