Thread by @kenanmalik

Many people have seen those horrific photos of black labourers in the Belgian Congo having hands & feet (not just theirs but their children’s too) chopped off as punishment. What I hadn't realized was that 18th century American colonies had laws authorizing similar punishment. 1/

A 1707 Virginia law authorised courts in the case of runaway slaves “to order such punishment to the said slave, either by disbembring, or any other way, not touching his life, as they in their discretion shall think fit for… terrifying others from the like practices.” 2/

As for what this entailed, this is from the records of a Virginia court in March 1708, after a complaint about a runaway slave: “It is ordered… That the said Robert Carter Esq. shall have full power according to Law to dismember the said negroes… by cutting off their toes.” 3/

Both quotes from Edmund Morgan’s book “American Slavery, American Freedom”. 4/

Morgan’s book, btw, is one of the best I’ve read on the relationship between attitudes to English indentured servants and to black slaves, how and why planters switched their labour force from the one to the other, and the relationship between slavery and racism. 5/

And talking of attitudes to the poor and slavery, this is Francis Hutcheson, one of the luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, on how to deal with the poor from his “A System of Moral Philosophy”: 6/

“Perhaps no law could be more effectual to promote a general industry, and restrain sloth and idleness, than making perpetual slavery of this sort the ordinary punishment of such idle vagrants as, after proper admonitions and tryals of temporary servitude,… 7/

“…cannot be engaged to support themselves, and their families by any useful labours. Slavery would also be a proper punishment for such as by intemperance or other vices ruined themselves and their families, had made them a publick burden.” 8/

The eighteenth-century philosopher Bishop Berkley proposed that “sturdy beggars… be seized and made slaves to the public for a term of years.” 9/

And if not slavery, then at least, as the economist Arthur Young put it, “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”

(Guess some still think like that, especially when it comes to discussions about benefits) 10/