Abstract
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, assistant professor of political science at the University of San Diego, provides readers with many truly unique, and largely overlooked insights into the world of contemporary slavery in his path-breaking book What Slaveholders Think. He does so by presenting the perspective of a group of actors whose voices are seldom heard in discussions about slavery: those of modern-day slaveholders themselves, and their views on slavery, emancipation, and how they believe they can, and will, respond to challenges to their long-held privileges. This book provides an important contribution to existing scholarship on contemporary slavery by undermining conventional wisdom and by dispelling stereotypes concerning who slaveholders are, and how they actually think about slavery and its abolition.
An important point made by the author is that although the amount of scholarship devoted to contemporary slavery has been expanding rapidly in the past two decades, much of it has been highly specialized: women’s advocacy groups focus on sexual exploitation, workers’ groups zero in on issues surrounding the rights of workers to organize, migrant experts accent matters involving irregular migration, and legal experts focus on topics related to law creation and enforcement.
In this case study account, the enslaved individuals under examination are bonded laborers, and as the author notes, they represent one of the oldest and most persistent segments of the modern-day slave population. In this study, the masters can accurately be characterized as everyday, truly ordinary, small-time landlords. As documented in the authors’ in-depth interviews, as well as in other studies by scholars of modern slavery, contemporary slaveholders are commonly not evil, villainous creatures, but instead can more often be accurately described as pillars of their local communities. By gender, these individuals are as likely to be female as male. The views of these everyday oppressors, according to the author, must be allowed expression, even their legitimizing, self-serving rationalizations, in order to more fully comprehend the world of contemporary slavery and what steps must necessarily be undertaken in order to accomplish ‘sustainable emancipation.’
This case-study focus is calculated to direct attention toward the everyday, normalized world of contemporary agricultural ‘employers,’ and away from the hypersensational view of slavery often portrayed in the media, an image often depicting the exploitation of innocent victims trafficked across international borders for sexual exploitation. These stereotypical portrayals, as the author notes, are inaccurate distortions and distract us from focusing on the problems facing the majority of ordinary bonded laborers who make up a significant subset of the entire modern-day slave population.
In order to achieve this more comprehensive understanding of slavery and emancipation, this monograph focuses on bonded agricultural laborers in northern and southern India. The study’s research involved in-depth interviews with more than 150 individuals, including current and former slaveholders, current and former slaves, community leaders, and key informants. In addition, a group of 150 individuals who had been rescued from enslaved conditions participated in a focus group to elicit further insights into the world of slaves and emancipation.
In addition, Choi-Fitzpatrick’s book makes an important contribution to the specific literature on the impact of social movements surrounding human rights violations. Although beyond the scope of this review, the political-process model advanced by the author, which emphasizes the examination of ordinary, everyday perpetrators, can be applied to situations involving other human rights violations. In short, the lessons gleaned from learning what slaveholders think can be applied to other settings where social movements are targeting oppressive incumbents. As a scholar of social movements, the author is interested in building upon, and advancing theoretical issues in the sociology of social movements, but nonetheless he emphasizes that social movement activity accounts for only some of the reasons movement targets respond in the manner in which they do. In other words, human rights agitation has an impact, but so does the innovation and spread of new technologies, the movement of workers from rural areas to urban locales and back, and the adoption of political and economic measures that affect employment polices, including expanded access to education, and minimum standards for the workweek and pay standards.
Particularly for lay readers and academics new to the field, this book’s account furnishes an excellent narrative about slavery and emancipation, from both the laborers’ and the landlords’ perspectives. And it presents this account within the context of broader social, political, and economic changes currently underway in India, as well as much of the rest of the globe. Throughout the book, Choi-Fitzpatrick spotlights the impact of globalization, urbanization, migration, and new technological innovations as critical social, political, and economic changes that are shaping slaveholders’ behavior and how they perceive their ability to maintain the status quo in a dramatically shifting landscape.
The author’s account of slavery and emancipation illustrates not just the tactics incumbents use when they are targeted, but why they respond the way they do. As the landlords describe in their own words, there a number of ways targets respond to threats posed by social movements and the decline of their traditional sources of support. Some, those who are well-sourced in social, political, and economic resources, are meeting today’s challenges by persisting in old behaviors, through exercising greater repression, whereas others are responding by quitting, and yet others are responding by attempting to reconfigure the existing relationship into a kind of pseudo-slavery that still brings them profit based on exploitation.
The book’s in-depth analysis of bonded labor in India shows that slaveholding rests not so much in the villainous motives of evil slaveholders but in the cultural milieu in which slavery is located, specifically in the nation’s long-standing cultural traditions surrounding paternalism, and more important, the continuing impact of caste on social differentiation. The book emphasizes that the issue of paternalism is a critical factor in understanding how contemporary slaveholders’ world views about slavery are shaped and crystalized. As the author notes, at no time during the course of his interviews did the word ‘slavery’ actually surface. What did emerge, time and again, were the words ‘honor,’ ‘respect,’ and ‘dignity,’ all qualities that contemporary slaveholders formerly took for granted in their laborers, but now see as spiraling out of their efforts to control.
The unprecedented research conducted by Choi-Fitzpatrick into the lives of slaveholders ultimately leads to the proposition that sustainable emancipation must involve an element of reconciliation between landlord and laborer. The oft-caricatured slaveholder has long been a part of a cultural system steeped in paternalistic traditions and cemented by India’s caste system. But now, the landlord is confronting an entirely new social, political, and economic landscape in which his, or her, traditional bastions of support have been torn asunder, and one in which their world, that of agriculture, is in decline. The landlord has long been part of a system that involves a paternalistic mindset, caste privilege, and the support of both mainstream politicians and local law enforcement. As the author explicates, the long-established cooperative arrangement between political parties and slaveholders has been undermined by the rise of identity politics in India. Closer to home, the police, typically staunch allies of local slaveholding interests, now find themselves under ever heightened scrutiny, and unable to help maintain the system of using bonded labor.
Moreover, landlords must now negotiate their increasingly fragile position in the face of a World Bank/IMF bailout that has abruptly exposed them to the vagaries of market pressures, cutting their farm subsidies, which they rely upon for profitability. In addition to seeing these important sources of institutional support vanish, contemporary landlords must also contend with the rise of social programs such as those designed to insure education for all, and those aimed at heightening awareness about human rights violations and violators. As Choi-Fitzpatrick documents, education and awareness, together with government programs and community organizing, go hand in hand, benefitting laborers by generating a kind of cognitive liberation for them to experience, a conceptual space that permits bonded laborers to embrace the idea of walking away from their exploitive conditions.
But for slaveholders, feelings of despair are preeminent as they face declining resources and increased threats, and, indeed, many are sufficiently anguished that they are turning to suicide. Particularly since the World Bank bailout, much has been written and broadcast in the international media about the spike in suicides, particularly among small farmers, who lack the financial capital to mechanize in the toughening economic environment. In short, as part of the solution to slavery, slaveholders’ needs must be considered and integrated into an overall economic development plan designed to strengthen the whole country. They, like the enslaved bonded laborers, must be allowed to find alternate ways to achieve sustenance in the above ground economy without relying on the exploitation of others.