Slavery and Capitalism

Review:  ‘Slavery & the Bank’ Bank of England exhibition running until 23rd April 2023

Slavery was once the dominant mode of production in the world, as capitalism is now.

When slavery was dominant in Muslim lands, the approach of the orthodox, the scholarly, was to regulate and undergird. Now the general will of Muslims globally is that slavery is over, and should never be brought back.

The Muwatta of ibn Malik has a whole section on the fiqh of slavery. Today the most unread believer denounces slavery - be it in the ISIS anachro-state or the Qatari petrostate - in the harshest possible terms.

So it was with slavery, so it will be with capitalism - wage slavery. The scholars and enablers today who support its structures are doing the same work as those that justified slavery.

Capitalism has achieved great wonders. Slavery built the pyramids and built America. But both systems do so on the backs of unspeakable human suffering, misery. Death and violence.

Jonathan AC Brown exhaustively and realistically charted the journey of slavery in Islam from everyday practice to abolition. So let it be with capitalism.

However, it is a mistake to see slavery and capitalism as two distinct systems. They are, and have always been, intertwined. Slavery is the bedrock of capitalism today, as it was the enabler of capitalism then.

The Bank of England attempts to be honest in its exhibition. However, it is wrong and euphemistic, to talk about the Bank’s ‘links with slavery.’ Slavery built the bank, and the bank perpetuated, financed slavery. Directly, materially, openly. Substantially.

Directors of the Bank of England were also slave traders. The Bank financially underwrote Britain’s colonial expansion. The Bank helped invest the gains of slavery. And when the time came to compensate the slave owners upon slavery’s ‘abolition’, it was the Bank that provided the capital.

There is no ‘link with slavery’. The Bank of England was a slaving institution, and capitalism cannot be separated from slavery. Yesterday, or today.

Bertold Brecht said: ‘what is the crime of robbing a bank versus founding one.’ Today, imams and clerics endorse new banking institutions and serve proudly on their boards. 

Capitalism is wage slavery, and in many cases, slavery itself. If orthodox Islam is truly abolitionist, it is time to repudiate, and break from, the capitalist system.

Martyn Rush