Commercial vs Domestic Slavery

Posted by Tanos on Mon 16 Jan 06, 1:50 AM

Discussion of the "slave" in BDSM is heavily influenced by American historical slavery. This is partly due to the prominence of the various US scenes, which have the Old South as part of their national history. The power of the US in vanilla culture also plays a part, with depictions such as "Roots", "Amistad" and "Cold Mountain" all promoting a view of the slave as downtrodden, abused and undervalued.

Furthermore, Rome provides the second most visible historical form of slavery, and often leads to a picture of slaves as despised victims, sweating in chain-gangs, fighting to the death in the arena or timidly waiting on their owners without a speaking part. In common with the black slaves of the Americas, Roman slaves are presented as foreigners and considered inferior to all free people, in a class relation rather than as individuals.

However, there is another model of slavery which is far more useful within BDSM: slaves that are part of the household as trusted servants, companions or lovers. This model did occur in historical American and Roman slavery, but is more visible in popular culture in depictions of Eastern households and fantasies derived from them, especially the harem and "Arabian Nights" fantasies. Probably because the East feels safely distant, it is acceptable to present slave girls who dote on their masters in a harem, but not on a plantation or a modern-sounding Roman politician's household.

Based on popular culture, it might seem natural to divide slavery into American and Eastern models, but really the distinction is between commerical and domestic slavery: the commercial model regards the slave as a capital investment ("a tool with a voice" as the Greeks and Romans said) and the slave will be worked in the way which makes the most profit, and in the case of Spartacus, that means being worked to death in a quarry; the domestic model puts the slave as part of the household and within the scope of an extended family, and in the case of concubines and companions, highly valued members of it.

However, racial divisions between free and slave in the Americas, and Christian objections to polygyny and to slavery itself in some quarters, prevented the emergence of a socially accepted and acknowledged harem or concubine system in the parts of the West where slavery was legal.

Such relationships only existed in secret: Thomas Jefferson probably kept his three-quarter white slave Sally Hemings as a long term concubine, both in France and back in Virginia, and this kind of arrangement was common enough to be deplored (by Mary Chesnut) as late as 1861: "like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children", but this reality wasn't acknowledged: "every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody [else]'s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think."

Jefferson himself expressed both a desire to end slavery and a desire to keep the ex-slaves excluded from free, white society: "Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture."

So the US is a country who's founders could feel very mixed emotions about slaves: are they valued or not? Inherently inferior or not? Does their slave status equate to a lack of ability, or is it just an accident of birth? Are they to be saved from slavery, only to be immediately expelled from society?

Against this cultural background, it's not suprising that the attitudes to the slave within the BDSM scene are very mixed too, given the prominence of US cultural influences in the West.

For this reason, I believe we should examine the features of other models for domestic slavery. We see the concubines of the Roman Larcius Marcedo wailing at the sight of him apparently collapsed due to the heat of his bath (in fact, he was being murdered.) We see the love letters and poems exchanged by Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his Ukrainian slave Roxelana, whilst the highest ministers of his government and the generals of his army were slaves.

When Edward Lane came to describe Egypt in the 19th century, he noted that owning a slave concubine was a valid alternative to marriage, as "some prefer the possession of an Abyssinian slave to the more expensive maintenance of a wife, and keep a black slave-girl, or a [free] Egyptian female servant, to wait upon her, to clean and keep in order the apartments of the hareem, and to cook."

Egypt was then a province of the Ottoman Turkish empire, and white slave concubines were obtained from the southern fringes of Russia: "A few, some of whom undergo a kind of preparatory education (being instructed in music or other accomplishments at Constantinople), are brought from Circassia and Georgia. The white slaves being often the only female companions, and sometimes the wives, of the Turkish grandees, and being generally preferred by them before the free ladies of Egypt, hold a higher rank than the latter in common opinion. They are richly dressed, presented with valuable ornaments, indulged frequently with almost every luxury that can be procured."

Such slave women were hardly the sweating field-hands of American historical slavery.

Due to the power of religious and political objections to slavery and polygyny in the West, equivalent socially accepted and acknowledged harem and concubinage systems never evolved here.

This leaves us in Western BDSM with a gap in our historical background: there are no historical accounts describing the section of a Victorian country house reserved for the owner's concubines; or the social etiquette at an Edwardian house party where some guests are accompanied by their free wives and others by their favourite slaves. The closest we have are descriptions of sexual relations with free servants, and the unwritten rules surrounding the parallel society (the "demi monde") that existed for rich men and their courtesans, kept-women and mistresses.

However, if we look at all the components that are available in the societies that I've described, there is enough to create an equivalent Western model of domestic rather than commercial slavery and service, which sits more naturally with our history, our legacy of Victorian housing and the Western forms of dress and manners which we use today.