Sentell – Prospectus

Freedom and Food, Slavery and Agriculture:

A Philosophical Ecology of Democracy

C.J. Sentell
15 February 2011

In this dissertation I examine the relationships between freedom and slavery through the

intersections of food and agriculture. With aims both critical and reconstructive, that is, I

inquire into specific forms of slavery in the production, distribution, and consumption of

food and agricultural goods so as to analyze their consequences for those particular

experiences of freedom associated with the theory and practice of democratic politics.

The motivating hypothesis of this project is that there are important connections

between the potential experiences of agency in a given society, and the means and ends

around which its subsistence is organized. My thesis in particular is that the various

experiences of freedom taken by Western philosophers as central to human nature and

politics are inextricably linked to specific configurations of power operative within the

realm of human necessity. As necessary elements of human biosocial reproduction, food

and agriculture are constitutive aspects of this realm; as a central place for the

transmission of habits of human agency across generations, the household is its

contingently universal form. In this way, I situate the realm of human necessity as both

an originary economy of domination and dependence, as well as a potentially necessary

ecology for cultivating new habits of resistance and radicalism.

My aims in this project, then, are simultaneously critical and reconstructive. On

the one hand, my critical aim is to trace the historical relationships of slavery and

agriculture through several theories of human nature central to traditional Western

narratives of democratic freedom. On the other hand, my reconstructive aim is to analyze

1
Sentell – Prospectus

the intersections of freedom and food to elaborate how the experiences of each inevitably

incorporate certain behavioral technologies that obscure the politics of eating in late

capitalist, democracies. Put differently, by analyzing those networks of power thriving

between the contingency of need and the education of desire – particularly the need to eat

and the desire to be free – I aim to elaborate how a particular confluence of institutions

and practices form the continuous basis of surplus extraction that is required for the

realization of certain concepts of political agency. In this way, through my critical

examination of agricultural slavery in the development of democratic politics, I

reconstruct the concept of sovereignty as ineliminable from subsistence, and argue that

biopower is the constituent basis of agriculture.

Thus opposed to traditional theories of human nature – or philosophical

anthropologies – that seek the essential what of human nature in universal space, the

method I employ throughout this project is what I term philosophical ecology, which

seeks instead the relational how of human experiences in particular times and specific

places. By shifting the methodological emphasis from anthropos to oikos, that is, I am

able to advance a theory of slavery that neither depends upon nor reinscribes traditional

conceptions of human nature and political agency; rather, I frame slavery as a

pedagogical process – or educative project – determinate upon a range of practices proper

the realm of human necessity, and freedom as an experience contingent upon the

possibilities organized through its various economies. From this perspective, freedom is

neither a thing nor a right nor even a capacity unique to human beings, but a substantive

experience the specific qualities of which are always already habituated as agency in the

course of undergoing the necessities and pleasures proper to different forms of life. In

2
Sentell – Prospectus

this way, the intersectional significance of freedom and food lays precisely in the how the

activities of everyday life comprise the ineliminable background against which the habits

of human agency are reproduced or reconstructed, which I elaborate through a synthetic,

diachronic, and ecological hermeneutic framed by the relational continuity of slavery and

agriculture within the history of democratic theory.

By way of this project, then, I seek to provide a timely, consequential, and novel

contribution to the emerging transdisciplinary body of scholarship that traces the origins

and development of freedom in the West to its institutions and practices of slavery. With

several notable exceptions, Western philosophers and political theorists have occluded

the significance of slavery in the development of one of its most basic political values,

and elided the consequences of agriculture from its central theories of human nature and

politics. To be sure, while many writers in this tradition address these aspects in the

course of their overall analysis, they are often embedded tangentially within a type of

conjectural prehistory – or theoretical fiction – that aims to naturalize the authority of the

state through a developmental narrative concerning its origins in human nature. The

importance of such narratives for my thesis concerns in the way they legitimate a

particular form of political life around a specific conception of development, the

ostensibly empirical basis of which functions to demarcate humans from animals,

civilizations from savages, and those by nature fit for citizenship from those by nature fit

for slavery.

Motivating my analysis is the general hypothesis that there are rapid and

consequential connections between various experiences of agency in a given society, and

the ends and means around which its subsistence is organized. The broad contours of this

3
Sentell – Prospectus

claim – accepted among anthropologists and sociologists of various stripes, as well as

tacitly incorporated into the work of many other social scientists and historians more

generally – links the advent of civilization with the transition from nomadic bands of

hunter-gatherers to settled tribes of agrarian-pastoralists. As a necessary condition for

civilization, agriculture provided the surpluses required for humans to live in greater

population densities, amid permanently inhabited territories, which in turn enabled the

growth of villages, towns, and cities, as well as long-distance trade and the relative

differentiation of cultures. Interestingly, by almost all accounts these developments

antedate that other civilizational sine qua non – the invention of writing – by tens of

thousands of years or more, and when such inscriptions do in fact begin to appear in the

archaeological record, they overwhelmingly concern matters comestible and agricultural.

Importantly, however, for each of the four classic Old World civilizations –

Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Northern China – as well as the six

modern locations where an independent, autochonthous origin is confirmed with

contemporary methods – the Levant, sub-Sahara Africa, China, Eastern North America,

Mesoamerica, and South America – the transition to agriculture also corresponds to

several other notable changes in human societies, including the marked increase in social

stratification, a generalized division of labor, and the growth of state-level political

formations. Contemporary research across disciplines suggest that, prior to agriculture,

hunter-gatherers did indeed live in relatively egalitarian social formations where the

accumulation of wealth tended to be communal and hereditary inequality almost

nonexistent. And so while the holding and trading of slaves in particular was no doubt

present in many of these early human social groups, it rarely seems to have been of

4
Sentell – Prospectus

significant economic consequence. Rather, within such societies slavery appears to have

been largely symbolic, and functioned primarily as a primitive form of alterity by which

the community identified itself through various rituals of segregation and solidarity.

As communities increasingly settled in permanent places over time, then, the

functions and characters of their slaveries changed as well. Thus while vestigial aspects

of the symbolic roots of slavery no doubt persisted, the advent of agriculture does in fact

coincide with the advent of the wide-spread economic and extra-economic significance of

slavery. From supplementing household labor and fulfilling jobs of toil and drudgery, to

serving in military, financial, and administrative roles and satisfying the sexual desires of

masters, as societies gradually became dependent upon domesticated plants and animals

to satisfy the necessities of everyday life there is a striking correlative increase in the

direct, personal, and often violent domination of human beings in satisfying the direct

necessities of life. In this way, not only does the sheer number of slaves held by

agricultural societies differentiate them quantitatively from their hunting and gathering

counterparts, the functions and consequences of their respective enslavements distinguish

them in important qualitative ways as well.

In short, despite ongoing scholarly debate about the details, there is a certain

consensus surrounding a general developmental narrative tracing state coalescence

around the transition to agriculture. On the one hand, as I have already intimated, this

link is rather straightforward and agrees with many common sense understandings of the

urban-rural dialectic in the history of human cultures. On the other hand, however, from

a certain theoretical point of view it raises more questions than it answers. Not only are

there problems of definition and demarcation – there are, for example, leaf-cutting ants

5
Sentell – Prospectus

that have cultivated a fungus as subsistence for some 23 million years – but there are

issues of causality and chronology, as well as questions of metaphor and modality, which

significantly compromise the integrity of this overall framework. Directly relevant to my

concerns in this project, however, are those particular relations that intersect ostensibly

democratic forms of state apparatus and ideology, and the seemingly requisite

technologies of production and consumption that condition the formation of agencies

between the satisfaction of everyday needs and education of individual desires.

Throughout, that is, I interrogate precisely those relationships of power intersecting the

evolution of the democratic state, particular forms of agricultural production, and the

historically continuous institutions of slavery necessary for the development of each.

Of course, philosophers and political theorists have long both recognized and

relied upon certain features of this traditional narrative, deploying its scope and content in

various ways to circumscribe their respective theories of human nature. From Aristotle’s

account of the origin of the polis and its affiliations with farming and democracy, to

Hegel’s narrative of the birth of the state and its reliance upon agriculture and property,

problems of subsistence and production on the one hand, and questions of sovereignty

and power on the other, flow as a susurrus of necessity beneath the clamor of freedom so

characteristic of Western democratic politics. In this sense, my basic “philosophical”

task in this project involves interrogating the conceptual integrity of this developmental

narrative, analyzing its normative assumptions and implications, and reconstructing its

potential consequences for the theory and practice of democratic politics. Suggesting that

the reductive developmental link between civilization with agriculture belies the ways in

which violence, mastery, and domination are central to both, I question the efficacy of

6
Sentell – Prospectus

agriculture as a sustainable human subsistence strategy, examine the value of equality

from an ecological point of view, and inquire into the ways in which capitalism is itself a

recombinant form of domestic slavery.

To structure my inquiry into these relations and intersections I orient each chapter

of this dissertation around a particular well-known and well-documented period in the

traditional narrative of Western freedom. From its ostensible origins in the ancient Greek

polis to its development in the Roman republic, from its alleged rebirth in the modern

European nation state to its migration to the New World, the compelling coherence of

this tradition turns in many ways on a historiography of freedom that figures its

development as the embodiment of progress, and its concept the West’s beneficent

philosophical gift to the world. Thus while my scholarly claims are modest and include

synthesizing the historical, sociological, anthropological, and economic research at the

intersections of slavery and agriculture in the history of Western freedom – an admittedly

vast, though sufficiently discrete field of footnotes, which I sow for now in the

bibliography to this project – my critical aims are ambitious and include arguments

concerning capitalism as a form of slavery, the household as a site of radical resistance,

and autarky as a concept central to the reconstruction of democratic theory.

To support such aims and claims, I begin each chapter by outlining the social and

historical intersections of agriculture and slavery for each period. From this context, I

isolate two specific historical cases to illustrate and contrast particular aspects of my

argument. In this way, I organize each chapter into three principal sections,

corresponding to three lines of interconnected inquiry. After a brief, scene-setting

introduction to the period, in the first two sections of each chapter I present detailed

7
Sentell – Prospectus

genealogies of slavery and agriculture at two important moments in the history and

theory of democratic freedom. By contrast, in the third section I withdraw from the

socio-historical scene, so to speak, to integrate contemporary theoretical sources into the

concluding arguments of each chapter.

This is not, strictly speaking, a historical project. Neither is it an inquiry into

historiography, nor a history of ideas as such. I do not aim to trace what a particular

lineage of thinkers wrote or did not write on these topics. Importantly, such a project

would be one of transmission and recovery, which is precisely the dynamic I aim to

interrogate and interrupt. Through this study, rather, I pursue a certain history of

knowledge that seeks, by way of slavery and agriculture, the conditions of possibility

operative within and attendant upon the systematic production of ignorance so

characteristic of Western freedoms. While many have noted the associations between

slavery, agriculture, and various forms of liberal and neo-liberal political theory, I take

this as my point of departure, instead developing an inquiry around understanding their

consequences for the theory and practice of democratic politics.

In what follows I outline the narratives, concepts, and norms central to this

project, elaborating the structure and substance of the claims to come. As such, I am

confronted throughout by the challenges of articulating the contours of this project

sufficient to motivate interest and signify import, while simultaneously providing

substance to demonstrate the quality and consideration of my thesis. In this way, this

prospectus also presents in condensed form the basic content of my Introduction, where I

explicate in detail the keywords and waypoints central to this dissertation. While in the

first part of that chapter I examine the relationships of freedom and slavery relevant to the

8
Sentell – Prospectus

general scope of this project, in the second I situate the intersections of food and

agriculture relevant to its particular substantive claims.

Yet because there is no substitute for an example to clarify the abstract, I begin

my introductory chapter with the address of Frederick Douglass to the Tennessee

Agricultural and Mechanical Association in Nashville, 1873. For Douglass and his

audience the meanings of freedom are immediately associated with the conditions of their

recent enslavement – a slavery overwhelmingly agricultural by experience and

legitimated by way of a racial ideology grounded on agrarian metaphors of domination

and domestication. That novel forms of agency are possible for these newly born

citizens, Douglass is certain to reassure the audience; but, he argues, to limit the potential

content of such freedoms to the political economic metaphors of free votes and free labor

is to ignore and obfuscate how their actualization turns on satisfying basic human needs.

In his address Douglass argues that while the formal, legal abolition of slavery

was no doubt necessary for securing those supposedly inalienable rights of life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness, he nevertheless insists on its ultimate insufficiency. By

situating the political importance of agriculture in terms of its potential to secure a

subsistence outside those orders organized to produce precisely such privation, Douglass

recalls how immediately following emancipation the prevailing attitude across the South

was “let the Negro starve!,” a sentiment predicated on “the theory that the Negroes – like

the Indians – will ultimately die out.” Even as emancipation freed the slaves legally and

politically, then, a constellation of sentiments and habits characteristic of the former order

continued to control the lives of these new citizens, effectively killing them by means of

privation. “‘Let the Negroes starve!’” he concludes forcefully, “thus executes itself.”

9
Sentell – Prospectus

But as Douglass spoke to those black farmers and mechanics that autumn day in

Nashville, there was a flurry of activity across town in the white community. Just months

before, “Commodore” Vanderbilt announced his first and only major philanthropic gift to

establish a university as a symbol of his legacy. Entrusting the million-dollar gift to a

young Methodist bishop – also the cousin of his young second wife – Vanderbilt

envisioned an institution that would “contribute to strengthening the ties which should

exist between all sections of our common country.” Such ties, of course, were as literal

as they were metaphorical, for Vanderbilt accumulated his fortune in the shipping and rail

industries just then tying the eastern metropolitan centers to the burgeoning western

frontiers and the war-torn southern states.

Just four generations prior to his amassing what remains one of the largest

fortunes in the nation’s history, however, Vanderbilt’s New World patriarch emigrated

from Holland as an indentured servant, or white slave, which was quite common

throughout the seventeenth century. In fact, between 1619 – four months before even the

first Africans arrived enslaved in America – and 1800 – roughly when the transatlantic

slave trade began in earnest – a full half to two-thirds of all European immigrants to the

British colonies in the Western hemisphere arrived by way of this form of personal

bondage. But unlike their African counterparts, the 300,000 to 400,000 people arriving

under varying conditions of white slavery were actually able to improve their collective

and individual circumstances over time. By way of contrast, then, the rise of Vanderbilt

in three generations from indentured servitude to one of the richest men in the world is

part and parcel of the American drama staged in Nashville that September day.

10
Sentell – Prospectus

In this way, I begin with Douglass and Vanderbilt as representative of two

concepts of freedom the essential tensions of which motivate my analysis throughout this

project. On the one hand, as a former slave, abolitionist, and public intellectual,

Douglass exemplifies the moral victory of the Civil War, and the advent of freedom for

some four million Africans brought to the land of liberty in chains; on the other hand, as

the descendant son of immigrants, the industrial capitalist and onetime philanthropist

Vanderbilt embodies the economic victory of Reconstruction, and a decisive moment in

the American conflation of capitalism and slavery with democracy and freedom. And so

while the moral victory of emancipation lay in the abolition of slavery as a political and

juridical category, the economic victory of Reconstruction lay in the effective integration

of its more efficient replacement – i.e., wage labor – whereby the free worker appears on

the free market to sell their labor freely to live as a free citizen.

But – and in a moment capturing the essential tensions of this project – following

his account of the ongoing oppression of his people by way of starvation, Douglass

immediately turns to “hail agriculture as a refuge for the oppressed” while recognizing its

central role in the history of that very oppression. By linking the practices of agriculture

to the politics of freedom, in other words, Douglass frames the conditions required for

certain experiences of agency through their association with those activities required for

the reproduction of daily human life. In making this argument, Douglass invokes a long

and varied tradition of theorizing the realm of freedom through its relation to the realm of

necessity. But Douglass there departs from most of these predecessors who, comforted

with and by their abstractions, find it unnecessary to address and redress the particular

habits, rituals, and institutions constituting the realm of necessity in fact. Precisely

11
Sentell – Prospectus

because the satisfaction of basic human needs – food, water, shelter, clothing, community

– forms a singular horizon for the actualization of any agency whatsoever, Douglass

suggests that the settled cultivation of the soil forms a natural nursery for culture and a

necessary provision ground for politics.

In this way, his argument for the political importance of agriculture is also framed

by that common developmental narrative concerning its role in the evolution of human

societies, the general arc of which traces how agriculture is a – if not the – constitutive

condition that enabled the general development of human civilizations. The function of

domesticating certain plants and animals – including, importantly, human begins

themselves – functioned to allow particular peoples to settle in particular places over the

span of generations. The importance of such activities lay in the powers associated with

control of the surpluses afforded by agriculture, which both enabled the survival of

communities over the course of winters and famines, and allowed some individuals

within those communities to pursue other, non-subsistence endeavors and experiences.

Douglass thus illustrates in brief how questions of food and agriculture are always

political. Not only do their intersections with freedom and slavery raise issues of

sufficiency and surplus relevant to any general theory of value, they simultaneously

invoke a range of questions concerning technology and behavior pertinent to any general

theory of power. When such questions are joined with those framed by the realm of

human necessity in general – and the human household in particular – the result is a

theoretical landscape that is both wide and diverse enough to accommodate a plurality of

perspectives. By locating the experiential preconditions of freedom within certain

economies of necessity, that is, Douglass is my point of departure for analyzing the

12
Sentell – Prospectus

structures and functions of such economies as they are sheltered – or not – by the walls of

the human household. As such, the food politics that Douglass advances in his address,

and which I elaborate in this project, is in an important sense already a feminist one as

well. By examining those forms of patriarchal domination and dependence transmitted

across human generations by the sexual agencies of reproduction and the gendered

divisions of household labor, I provide an alternative, ecological framework for the

reductive conception of gender so commonly reproduced in everyday discourses of

human nature and politics, as well as in contemporary academic fields such as

evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.

In Chapter One, “Domestication and Domination,” I examine ancient and

classical political theories for how they figure the household as an economy of necessity

on the one hand, and domestication as its requisite technology of power on the other.

From the agrarian origins of democracy to the pastoral economies of empire, I situate

Greek politics and Roman citizenship in terms of their respective organizations of

subsistence production, both of which turned – in different ways and toward different

ends – on the large-scale slave labor. In the first section, “Horticulture as Violence,” I

begin with Hesiod, Xenephon’s Socrates, and Aristotle to frame the nature of necessity in

both agriculture and slavery as analogues to the conceptions of growth, education, and

development entailed by their various visions of politics. I examine the associations

between forms of extensive agriculture developed in the early centuries of Greek culture

and technologies of war, empire, and domination that were central to their political and

economic success. In the second section, “Husbandry as Dominion,” I follow the

traditional trajectory of the West to Rome, analyzing the ways Cicero, Epictetus,

13
Sentell – Prospectus

Augustine, and others figure slavery within different metaphorical hierarchies of animal

husbandry and pastoral power. Central to my analysis in this section of the chapter is the

rise of the Roman latifundia complex and its relationship to the practices and institutions

of slavery that reached unrivaled articulations in the republican period. In the third and

final section of this chapter, “Domestication as Mastery,” I argue against the theoretical

slippage outlined by the previous sections, which reduces domination to a relation of

physical or even physic violence. From this analysis, rather, I integrate insights from a

variety of contemporary thinkers – including Bourdieu, Foucault, Patemann, and others –

to highlight the ways in which slavery is an educative project, or a pedagogical process,

of the human household.

In Chapter Two, “Subsistence as Sovereignty,” I examine early modern concepts

of sovereignty for how they locate the dynamics of subsistence production within a series

of developmental narratives that convert actual forms of violence and domination into

metaphors for juridical and economic tyranny. In the first two sections of this chapter, I

juxtapose early modern England with pre-Revolutionary France so as to correlate their

social and political developments to their respective configurations of legal and economic

power that worked to define land as private property, and the state as its formal

institution. Using Hobbes, Locke, and others in the first section, “Enclosure and

Coercion,” and Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others in the second, “Governance and

Dependence, I frame sovereignty and citizenship against their underlying conceptions of

human nature, analyzing in particular the forms and functions of conjectural prehistory in

each. I argue that central to the modern concept of sovereignty is a theoretical fiction that

functions to legitimate a particular form of political power through a developmental

14
Sentell – Prospectus

narrative that depends upon various versions of the “state of nature” or a “primitive”

nature of humanity. In the third section, “Bare Life and Social Death,” I conclude my

analysis of early modern slavery, subsistence, and sovereignty with a discussion of the

theoretical work of Agamben and Patterson. Between the peasant, the serf, and the

bondsman, I argue, an important cleavage emerges at the intersections of power between

life and death on the one hand, and the relationships of technology to nature and culture

on the other.

In Chapter Three, “Life, Labor, and Land,” I follow the migration of these

relations and intersections to the New World, exploring how rights to land and

independent food production worked both to perpetuate and undermine agrarian slavery

in the Americas. In the first two sections, “Topologies of Tenure” and “Ecologies of

Toil,” I contrast the destinies of New World slavery between the American and Haitian

Revolutions. Drawing on a wide range of sources – from Jefferson and Paine to early

American slaves and de Tocqueville in first, to Smith and Hegel as well as C.L.R. James

and Buck-Morss in the second – I explore in each how democratic freedoms in the

Americas are founded between the twin pillars of agriculture and slavery. In the third

section, “Economies of Life,” I use the work of Arendt and Foucault to frame the

material and ideological basis of American hegemony in terms of the surplus wrenched

from the bodies of African slaves by way of plantation capitalism. Identifying key

structural affinities between colonial agricultural and mercantile capitalism, I argue there

an important sense in which wealth derives from the surplus originating from the

dynamic confluence of the topsoil and various forms human toil.

15
Sentell – Prospectus

In Chapter Four, “Agriculture as Biopower,” I trace the transition from slave-

based to industrial forms of agriculture, framing its significance with respect to the

emergence of nineteenth century biopolitics. In the first two sections of this chapter –

“Production and Power” and “Consumption and Slavery” – I juxtapose the consequences

of this transition in the American context through the divergent cases of agricultural

development in the United States and Cuba. Between Marx, Malthus, and others in the

first section, and Du Bois, the Southern Agrarians, and others in the second, I interrogate

the relationships between state power, scientific agriculture, theories of race, and the rise

of global capitalism that followed the nineteenth century revolutions of each. From this

analysis, in the third section of this chapter – “Development as Force” – I use Nietzsche,

Fanon, Esposito, and others to theorize capitalism as a recombinant form of slavery. In

fact, I examine how the transition from agrarian slavery to agrarian capitalism was

necessary for the emergence of industrial capitalism, and how the material and

ideological dynamics of this period lay the groundwork for those modern developmental

norms that characterize the immediate political and economic background to the

twentieth century.

In Chapter Five, “Seeds and Machines,” therefore, I turn my analysis to that

century to examine the rise of global corporate agriculture, the neo-liberal philosophical

anthropology of Homo economicus, and their intersections with modern day slavery and

global food insecurity. With the close of the second World War, agriculture and food

began a dramatic transformation the consequences of which are very likely to be

unprecedented in the history of the species. In particular, not only did the processes of

cultivation and harvest undergo dramatic mechanization, but the number of farms and

16
Sentell – Prospectus

farmers plummeted while the size of farms ballooned to unprecedented proportions.

Since then, however, international institutions have structured the global economy around

particular centers of industrial, monoculture production in the highly developed nations,

while orienting the periphery around comparative advantages specific to various lesser

developed countries. Thus in the first two sections of this chapter – “Organism as

Artifact” and “Topsoil as Technology” – I follow the different developmental paths

outlined by U.S. and Latin American agricultures in the last century. While in the first

section I analyze the epistemological and legal foundations of modern intellectual

property rights that underpin contemporary American hegemony in the global agro-foods

market, in the second section I examine the agrarian politics of structural adjustments,

from the perspective of modern peasants in Guatemala. In the third section of this

chapter, “Gene as Environment,” I use the work of Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Haraway and

others to reconstruct the theoretical relationships of nature to nurture, and argue that the

traditional dualism between gene and environment is fundamentally flawed.

In the Conclusion, “Autarky and Democracy: Toward a Biotechnics of Slavery

and Freedom,” I return to and reconstruct the theoretical perspective linking democracy

and agriculture in substantive and consequential ways. Integrating elements of the

ecological conception of freedom developed throughout the project, I situate the concept

of autarky as a central component to the theory and practice of democratic politics.

Examining these connections in detail, I outline two basic elements of democratic autarky

in terms bioregional self-sufficiency and global human rights, developing specific

analyses of each in terms of contemporary global slavery and corporate industrial food

production. In this way, I conclude that the potential for particular experiences of

17
Sentell – Prospectus

freedom within ostensibly democratic forms of political organization is inextricably

linked to its respective distribution of productive property, how such organizations effect

the social ends of self-determination, as well as the means by which both communities

and individuals experience various kinds of freedom in the course of reproducing their

daily forms of bread.

And so at the close of the twentieth century – a century so often celebrated for the

triumphs of freedom and democracy over totalitarianisms with various faces – it may be a

surprise that more human beings are estimated to be living as slaves than ever before in

human history. Such facts and figures, of course, are “merely” numerical, which is to say

they fail to accurately reflect the proportion of the global population held in slavery. But

such a statistical caveats, themselves, at once expose a rift as old and as ordinary as the

institution itself. As Orlando Patterson argues at the beginning of his global comparative

study of the institution, Slavery and Social Death, there is nothing particularly “peculiar”

about the institution of slavery:

It has existed before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth

century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There

is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably

there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or

slaveholders.

And yet. Somehow it remains nonetheless striking that the last time such a proportion of

humans worldwide lives as slaves was 1861. That year the citizens of the United States,

primarily in the South, held some 3.8 million slaves as chattel property, which –

numerically as well as proportionally – was more than the entire world combined. And

18
Sentell – Prospectus

while a century earlier, at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, that ongoing democratic

experiment founded on the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

was importing the smallest percentage of the nearly 12 million Africans brought in chains

to the New World, by 1825 it possessed the largest proportion of slaves in the Western

hemisphere.

Yet, with Frederick Douglass as one of its representatives, this very same period

marks for many the beginning of the end to this iniquitous institution. Indeed, at least in

the United States – among the last colonial nations to abolish slavery – the half million

lives lost in the Civil War is often construed as the morally necessary and politically

sufficient sacrifice to the redress the injustices of its national institutionalization. But, in

the United States in particular, whose triumphant conflation of freedom and capitalism

has become a model for global democratic governance, there have been seven successful

federal anti-slavery prosecutions since 1997 alone. As I have intimated throughout this

prospectus, I hold it as no coincidence that these modern day slaves and masters were

thriving – and continue to thrive – in the balmy fields of Florida agriculture. Locally and

increasingly nationally, the organizing center of resistance for such laborers finds a

powerful voice in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (C.I.W.), whose tireless efforts to

improve working conditions and pay for thousands of migrant workers in the region stand

as a model for hope and inspiration.

It is precisely this cognitive dissonance produced between the statistics of slavery

and the experiences of freedom that motivates my developing throughout this project the

conceptual tools central to understanding the contemporary characters, functions, and

consequences of these relationships. Developing new forms of agency amid the

19
Sentell – Prospectus

hegemonies of late capitalism, I argue, requires a return to the household – and so to its

attendant economies of necessity and excess – as the contingently universal basis for

reconstructing the habits of freedom educated by everyday ways of life. Even amid soils

still burning with slavery, therefore, the cultivation of such experiences requires a

specific and rigorous accounting organized by those economies of power and

technologies of behavior whose intersections in the realm of human necessity form the

central components of food politics in late capitalist democracies.

20