The Social Contract Research Podcast · Social Contract Research Network

Slavery and the Social Contract, with John Protevi

·1 hr 14 min·4 clips

“Torment” is torture of the mind: forcing someone to watch loved ones being tortured.

The talk starts with a familiar question, then shifts it in a sharper direction. Pratevi places slavery at the center of social contract thinking and treats the plantation system as part of political order, not something outside it. That is the first turn. From there he frames the plantation system as a contract between planters and the home government, a structure that depends on excluding enslaved people from any recognized civic membership. The political field narrows fast. Once that exclusion is named, raid and crime become harder to read in simple terms, because an attack on a plantation can look criminal only from the standpoint of a state that has already denied the attackers standing within the social contract. Pratevi keeps returning to that distinction. He suggests that plantation conflict should be understood as a state of war between enslaved people and colonizers, and that trade, raid, and tribute can start to blur together once plantation owners decide it is cheaper to pay protection than absorb repeated attacks. Maroon resistance then becomes easier to read on its own terms. He distinguishes petit marronage from grande marronage, using the terms to separate smaller-scale flight from more decisive acts of escape and settlement beyond the plantation's immediate reach. That distinction matters because it lets him track different kinds of movement, pressure, and evasion without collapsing every form of resistance into the same political or moral category. He then widens the map. Wild marronage names life in a different physical space from the plantation, while urban marronage names movement inside towns where free people of color, papers, and false papers create a more ambiguous social terrain. Paperwork becomes political. In that setting, freedom can be claimed, borrowed, or forged, and the city becomes a place where legal identity and lived identity do not always line up. That opens another historical problem. Some historians emphasize people arriving recently from slave ships and fleeing immediately, while others stress second- or third-generation enslaved people who knew the languages and routines of settlement life better and could blend in more easily. He does not flatten that dispute. Instead he uses it to show how social background, language, mobility, and urban knowledge shaped the possibilities of escape, concealment, and survival inside plantation modernity.

As heard by us

A clear talk on how slavery sits inside, not outside, the social contract.

The seminar frames slavery and the social contract as bound together by exclusion, and it is strongest when it traces the plantation system from planters and home government through marronage, tribute, and raid.

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Why you'd press play

For a close, theory-first look at slavery and the social contract, with marronage, tribute, and plantation power in play.

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