Modern Society: Reason, Rights and Revolutions

1The source: an African author questions Europe

In 1789, the year the French Revolution began, a book appeared in London called The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Its author had been enslaved in the Americas, bought his freedom in 1766, and became a leading speaker against the slave trade. Describing a slave market in which families were sold apart, he turned to his European readers:

"O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain?"

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (1789), chapter 2.

This one passage contains much of what "modern" meant. A formerly enslaved man publishes a book (print), argues from shared principles rather than begging for mercy (reason), appeals to public opinion to change the law (a new kind of politics), and exposes the gap between the age's ideals and its practice. The book went through nine editions in his lifetime and is credited with helping to win Britain's Slave Trade Act of 1807.

2The ideas that built modern society

These ideas left the books and entered politics through revolutions. On 4 July 1776 the Second Continental Congress adopted the American Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson; in 1789 the French Revolution began (Unit 4). Meanwhile the Industrial Revolution, which you studied in S2, moved work from farms and workshops into factories paid by wages.

3The features of modern society

4Case study: the contradiction at the heart of modernity

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that "all men are created equal", yet its author Jefferson owned large numbers of enslaved people all his life, and slavery in the United States was abolished only by the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on 6 December 1865. Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and slavery in most of its colonies by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. For almost a century, the most "modern" states defended liberty at home and enslavement abroad.

Equiano's own life is also a test of historical method. In his book he says he was born around 1745 in Essaka, thought to be Isseke in today's Anambra State, Nigeria. In 1999 the scholar Vincent Carretta pointed to a parish register and a 1773 ship's muster as evidence that he was born in the American colonies, and argued that the African childhood was fictionalised for effect. Other scholars, noting how many details in the narrative have been confirmed from other sources, judge that the weight of evidence supports an African birth. Historians still disagree, and that is exactly the kind of question you must learn to weigh.