topics: |  history | romance | anthropology

This book profiles a number of individuals, seeking to draw out larger
reflections in the process.  
It set me thinking about how my ancestors lived.  Given that a large
percentage of humanity were serfs for most of history, Zeldin says that most
of our ancestors were slaves.  
Indeed, much of the book is about slavery... and the fact that most of us
don't realize our ancestors were slaves.

Excerpts

The worst sense of failure is to realize that one had not really lived at
all, not been seen as an independent human being, never been listened to,
never been asked for an opinion, regarded as a chattel, the property of
another. That was what happened publicly to slaves. 5-6

Our slave inheritance

We are all of us descended from slaves, or almost slaves.  All our
autobiographies, if they went back far enough, would begin by explaining
how our ancestors came to be more or less enslaved, and to what degree we
have become free of this inheritance.

Saudi Arabia was the last country to abolish slavery, in 1962. 6

Humans became slaves in the past for three main reasons.  The first was fear:
they did not want to die, however much suffering life caused.  They agreed to
be despised by kings and knights and other addicts of violence, ... Slaves
put up with being treated like animals, bought and sold, heads shaven,
branded, beaten, because oppression seemed an inescapable ingredient of
life...  6

Before 12 million Africans were kidnapped to be slaves in the New World, the
main victims were the Slavs, who gave their name to slavery.  6

What we make of other people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at
ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be
possible, what memories we have, and whether our loyalties are to the past,
the present or the future.  11

I start with the present and work backwards, just as I start with the
personal and move to the universal.  Whenever I have come across an impasse
in present-day ambitions, as revealed in the case studies of people I have
met, I have sought a way out by placing them against the background of all
human experience in all centuries, asking how they might have behaved if,
instead of relying only on their own memories, they had been able to use
those of the whole of humanity. 11

Darwin himself complained that his won doctrines made him feel 'like a man
who has become colour-blind', who has lost 'the higher aesthetic tastes' and
that his mind had become 'a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of
large collections of facts', causing a 'loss of happiness' and an 'enfeebling
[of] the emotional part of our nature'.  12

All these thinkers [Alexis de Tocqueville, Darwin, Marx, Freud] put the idea
of conflict at the centre of their vision.  The world continues to be haunted
by that idea.  Even those who want to abolish conflict use its methods to
fight it. [Ref to gandhi? satyagraha?] 12

However, the originality of our time is that attention is turning away from
conflict to information.  The new ambition is to prevent disasters, illnesses
and crimes before they occcur and to treat the globe as a single whole... 12

The Renaissance was based on a new idea of the importance of the individual.
But this was a fragile foundation, because
individuals depended on constant applause and admiration to sustain them. 13