Thanks for the Slave Trade, and the Mongols

by Cliopatria

Andrew Bernstein links us to a new controversial article on a rather old and often racist theme—that Blacks are better off because their ancestors were enslaved.

I’m not going to get into an argument over the merits of this particular variation by Adele Ferguson, except that it seems more partisan and less eloquent than most. However, I will use it to raise this question. Don’t many historians do something like this on other topics? Don’t we often look at some evil that is done and then go forward to point to some good that resulted? I have in mind in particular an interpretation of the Mongols that I have seen in some recent World History texts. (My motel room is short of World History texts; otherwise I would be more specific.)

Anyway, according to this interpretation, the impact of the Mongols, once the conquests were over, was pretty positive. The Silk Road trade benefited, prosperity expanded, and even the dislocation of peoples resulted in exchanges that brought new ideas to much of Eurasia.

Certainly these historians are not trying to state that the benefits in the future redeemed morally the slaughter of millions. Nor are they suggesting, as Adele Ferguson does about slavery, that the descendants of the slaughter should have been among the grateful. But in the case of the Mongols, they do argue that even great horror may lead to unintended and unanticipated benefits in the coming centuries, and, like it or not, that is one part of Ferguson’s argument, and that one part may be true.

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Jonathan Dresner - 3/28/2006

Which, according to Ferguson's logic, means that the Plague was part of God's Plan for Wal-mart....

Seriously, though, as near as I can tell, Braudel's argument is pretty much universally accepted, at least in the textbooks I use. I tend to focus on how the plague revealed the weaknesses of the feudal system, talking about adaptations rather than positive change.

John H. Lederer - 3/28/2006

I have always found fascinating Braudel's thesis that the plague resulted in a significant improvement in labor's lot in Europe and was a salutary event for the formation of capitalism.

William L Ramsey - 3/25/2006

Ms. Ferguson also posits that God orchestrated the slave trade in order to bring Africans to America, does she not? Apart from the materialist explanations preferred by Historians, what sort of spiritual poverty could lead a person to accept such reasoning?

Andre Mayer - 3/23/2006

The question of how historians weigh the "positive" and "negative" effects of historical events, on the one hand, and that of whether people can reasonably take affront at historical events without which they would never have been born, on the other, are obviously closely related. The difference should lie in the expectation that the historian' perspective, though inevitably shaped by personal and presentist concerns, will be in some sense "professional" and self-conscious about, if not distanced from, those concerns.

Jonathan Dresner - 3/23/2006

there's no question that it has to be balanced.

[One example, which may be the one you're thinking of, is Gregory Guzman's "Were the Barbarians a Negative or Positive Factor in Ancient and Medieval History?" The Historian (August 1988), which I read excerpts of in Kevin Reilly's excellent (first edition, anyway) World History reader]

We just had a discussion of that with regard to Japanese-Asian relations at Frog in a well Japan and China).

Perhaps part of our problem is that we apply the value judgement -- "benefits" -- too soon. It would be vaguer, and yet more effective, to speak of "effects."

I also think that Ferguson's argument, in particular, rests on a highly tendentious counterfactual regarding African development sans Atlantic trade, which makes the whole discussion pretty much moot unless you want to reconstruct it from the ground up.