§ 9. Pawns or debtor-slaves.
In the course of our investigation it will be shown, that among some peoples a debtor, unable to pay a debt he has contracted, becomes the slave of his creditor. Sometimes such persons are ordinary slaves; but pawns or debtor-slaves in the restricted sense (who are of frequent occurrence in the Malay Archipelago, Dutch pandelingen) are a class whose slave-state is conditional; they become free as soon as the debt is paid by or for them; the creditor cannot refuse to accept the money. Because of this great difference between pawns and ordinary slaves (who generally have not a right to be ransomed), most ethnographers do not call the former slaves, but give separate descriptions of slavery and pawning.
The question arises, and has to be settled here, whether we for our purpose have to call these pawns slaves. We shall quote here one description of pawning. Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa “a pawn is a person placed in temporary bondage to another by the head of the family … either to pay a debt, or to obtain a loan.… When a person is pawned on account of a debt, the services [[40]]of the pawn, even should they extend over a considerable number of years, count for nothing towards the liquidation of the debt; and a pawn has to serve his master, until the amount of the original debt with 50 per cent. interest, is paid by the person who pawned him”[58].
Here the debtor pawns one of the members of his family; among some other peoples (e.g. in the Malay Archipelago) he pawns himself; this is not essential. The main fact is that the pawn is in “bondage”, however temporarily, that he “has to serve his master.” Therefore, as long as the debt remains unpaid, the pawn is in the same condition as a slave. He has not to perform a fixed amount of labour, he must serve his master without any limitation; the master has over him a power that is, in principle, unlimited. Now we have to inquire: Is this pawn a slave, i.e. is he the property of his master? In a legal sense the creditor has not a right of property over his pawn; his right agrees with a kind of pignus which the Romans called antichresis, i.e. something yielding profit was handed over to the creditor, who utilized it instead of receiving the usual interest[59]. Yet the right of the holder of the pawn bore much resemblance to that of the owner: he had a utilis in rem actio, a vindicatio pignoris[60]. We, for our purpose, may classify the pawns among the slaves, if we can prove that sociologically a system of pawning performs the same function as a slave-system. And this certainly is the case. The same system of compulsory labour, the same subjection of the entire person exists, whether the subjected are perpetually slaves or temporarily pawns, viz. in those cases where, as among the Tshi-speaking peoples, the master’s power is in principle unlimited. Where pawns have a fixed amount of work to do, they are temporary serfs; but where (as is most often the case) no limit is put to the amount of work the master may exact from them, they are temporary slaves, and as long as they are slaves, take the same place as other slaves in the social system. [[41]]
[2] In the second Chapter and in the continuation of this we shall meet with more instances of this metaphoric (sometimes rather dangerous) use of the term “slavery”. [↑]