Calculation and Morality: The Costs of Slavery and the Value of Emancipation in the French Antilles

In two papers dealing with the abolition of slavery in the French West Indies and published in Les Ephémérides du citoyen, the Physiocratic journal, Pierre-Samuel Du Pont made use of a new intellectual tool: the comparative cost of free and slave labor. His conclusion was straightforward: slave labor is much more costly than free labor. This way of thinking did not mean that Du Pont believed that economic calculation superseded the moral principles used in arguments for freedom within the abolitionist discourse of that time; economic calculation was intended to demonstrate the irrationality of the point of view held by the colonists and those defending slavery. Calculation and morality went, according to Du Pont, hands in hand. From the 18th century self-interest, rationality and calculation became the building blocks of the economic and moral modernity of the human subject; such subjects would evaluate their own best interest on the various markets in which they participated. The various categories of actors (economists, abolitionists, colonists, politicians) who participated in this long debate, terminated by the Schoelcher commission with the abolition decree in 1848, upheld this line of thinking, even if they reached opposite conclusions. Condemning the philanthropic ideas that clouded the minds of the abolitionists, colonists claimed that slavery was a socially and economically efficient system, the only one that was, at least in the short run, able to preserve the interests of all the parties involved, black slaves included. Abolitionists, on the contrary, were eager to demonstrate that colonists and the whole nation would benefit from the use of free workers in the colonies; they sought to explain to each of them where their true interest and morality stood.

About the Author :
Caroline Oudin-Bastide is a socio-historian of slavery in the French West Indies. Her research is focused on the social functioning of slave society and the role of social beliefs concerning witchcraft. Philippe Steiner is professor of sociology at the university Paris-Sorbonne. His recent research is devoted to the economic sociology of markets, the relation between markets and morals and the history of social sciences. He is currently working on the economic sociology of festivities.