The Enlightenment and Slavery: A Central Contradiction

The Enlightenment coincided with the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, in which millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas, and its record on slavery was deeply contradictory. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748) mocked the arguments used to defend enslaving Africans, and the Encyclopédie's 1765 article on the slave trade, by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, condemned it as a violation of natural rights.

In Candide, Voltaire describes an enslaved man in Surinam who has lost a hand and a leg and says, 'It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe. ' Yet John Locke invested in the slave-trading Royal African Company, many philosophes profited indirectly from colonial trade, and Thomas Jefferson, author of the words 'all men are created equal', enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime. Some thinkers condemned slavery in principle while doing little to end it.

Historians debate whether Enlightenment ideas ultimately fueled abolition or whether they coexisted comfortably with slavery for generations.