What does slavery mean?

The great British intervention to end the slave trade, and the great American war that freed its slaves are defining events in Western civilisation. They show the extent of our commitment to freedom, and highlight the power of Christianity in shaping the causes for which we will fight.

But these two great efforts also tend to impose on our thought a definition of slavery that misses some complexity of ancient thought on the subject. The action of British and American militaries was taken against the economic practice of ownership of human beings, the power to trade them and determine the conditions under which they lived. This sense of slavery is utterly horrible, and, it seems, almost endemic in human history. Legitimated by Islam; practised by African chiefs long before the arrival of Western colonisers; powering the Roman empire -- economic, or 'positive' slavery is a horror that continues to dog the world outside the West. Some estimates suggest there are more slaves now than there have ever been. Even within the officially slave-free West there are positive slaves hidden within the black economy of people-smuggling and the sex trade.

Positive slavery seems to be challenge enough for mankind. Yet there is another concept of slavery that is latterly ignored, but was common in the ancient world. This may be called, in contradistinction, 'negative' slavery. This is the idea that certain people (sometimes identified by ethnic group, sometimes by their defeat in battle) are slavekind. That is to say they are naturally slaves. Aristotle says that slaves are not fully human. To the Roman mind, to allow yourself to be beaten in war, to accept slavery, was essentially to prove that you were fit for slavery. The condition of Dhimmitude in Islam, for those outside the faith, is, while not positive slavery, a form of treatment that acknowledges some form of negative slavery inhering in the dhimmi.

Thankfully, the twentieth-century fashion for racial science has passed and no serious effort to characterise whole peoples as inevitably deserving of slavery by nature can now be made. But negative slavery as a trap in which individuals may find themselves despite having the power to escape it, that threat still remains. For what negative slavery recognises is that freedom is only half a gift, and perhaps less than that. It is in the main a prize to be won, to be seized by an individual determined to be free. 'Give me freedom or give me death,' the cry of the American patriot. Or, as it became for some slaves with a bleaker outlook, 'Death or freedom'.

We have forgotten that freedom must be fought for, and have retreated into the cosy idea that it can be handed out by the state. The state may, indeed, outlaw positive slavery. Yet there are surely many in the West who could be considered as negative slaves -- they have votes they do not use, faculties of reason they will not exercise, privileges they have not earnt and will not stand up to defend.

What is the duty of government? Less than many think today. For if government begins in the protection of its citizens from those outsiders who would enslave them positively, it must be careful not to act to enslave negatively those within its own reach. That argues for small government and self-reliance. It argues for freedom as something that must be seized and cannot only be given. Above all, it suggests that the first principle of government should be to work for the individual freedom of its citizens -- from both breeds of slavery. That may mean intervention, as Wilberforce showed. It will also mean knowing where to step aside, and knowing that where you intervene it should be in favour of removing the need to do so.