The fictional Englishman justified African slavery as a lesser evil until civilization arrives

Evidence

There was, though, an even older mythology, one that preceded the development of an American bourgeoisie with its nationalist sentiments and war of independence. Colonialism in America had required a different rationale: the Savage. Conveniently, as we have seen in the previous chapter, English colonialism had had available to it the savagery of the Irish to draw upon. The notion had traveled well. When the need was for labor, the Irish, the poor of the metropole’s cities, the African and the native American were comfortably herded together under the notion of savagery. When the issue had been the expropriation of the lands of the natives, there was little cause to respect the claims of savages or to comprehend their resistance as anything more than savagery. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 873 (#expands, via linked claim)

Condorcet was part of a broad Enlightenment current of antislavery thought that found its expression in the works of philosophes from Montesquieu to Voltaire and Rousseau, in numerous novels and plays whose heroes were rebelling slaves, and in the prophesies of rebellion issued by Mercier and Raynal. Paris had also seen attacks against slavery in the legal realm, where, during the 1760s and 1770s, several hundred slaves successfully sued for their freedom. These advances did not go unpunished; in the 1780s royal administrators passed draconian legislation against people of African descent living in Paris, forcing them to carry an early form of passport under threat of deportation and criminalizing interracial relationships. Indeed, Enlightenment antislavery had many contradictions. Those who accepted the immorality of slavery also often accepted racist ideas about Africans, and many writers accepted that slavery was wrong in principle but was a necessary evil whose benefits ultimately outweighed its disadvantages, both for Europeans and Africans “saved” from “barbarism.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 253 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• English colonial ideology of savagery extended from the Irish to Africans and natives (similarity 0.84)
• French conquest itself drove displaced Africans into slavery while condemning it (similarity 0.80)
• Slaveholders rationalized African enslavement through pre-existing racist ideas (similarity 0.79)
• Nineteenth-century intellectuals justified continued African slavery as preferable to presumed massacre (similarity 0.78)
• Enlightenment antislavery coexisted with racist assumptions about Africans (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• English colonial ideology of savagery extended from the Irish to Africans and natives #expands (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 873
• Enlightenment antislavery coexisted with racist assumptions about Africans #complicates (0.55) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 253
• Colonial powers impose a double moral standard demanding restraint only from the colonized #expands (0.50)
• French conquest itself drove displaced Africans into slavery while condemning it #complicates (0.40) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 350