Monarchy & Republic in the Laboratory of History by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

How Monarchies and Republics Have Approached Slavery

In ancient and premodern societies, slaves possessed the fewest rights and the least liberty. They had little or no control over where they lived, what work they performed, the fruits of their labor, and, in many cases, even whether and how they could form a family.

I initially intended to construct a historical indicator comparing the timing of the abolition of slavery in monarchies and republics. Such a comparison, however, faces serious methodological difficulties. Many present-day countries have changed their form of government during the past two centuries, and some republics inherited the prohibition of slavery from the monarchies that preceded them. Moreover, legal abolition did not always mean that slavery disappeared in practice. For these reasons, constructing a consistent and reliable indicator that would permit comparison across all countries is neither straightforward nor sufficiently robust.

Nevertheless, several historical examples are useful for illustrating the issue.

The United States declared independence from Britain in 1776 and adopted a republican form of government. Its Declaration of Independence proclaimed that human beings were created equal, yet in practice this principle did not extend to enslaved people or women and did not guarantee their political and legal equality.

Slavery was abolished throughout much of the British Empire in 1833, while it continued in the United States. The dispute over slavery was one of the principal causes of the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, and abolition was secured following the victory of the federal government. This experience illustrates that majority rule or the existence of republican institutions does not, by itself, guarantee recognition of the rights of minorities or groups lacking political power.

In Iran, too, although the Constitutional Revolution led to the establishment of the Majles in 1906, the legal prohibition of slavery came more than two decades later, during the reign of Reza Shah, through legislation passed by the National Consultative Assembly.

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania formally abolished slavery in 1981, but the prohibition long lacked sufficient enforcement mechanisms, and slavery was subsequently made a criminal offense. This example illustrates the important distinction between the formal recognition of a right in law and its effective enforcement in practice.

These cases alone are not sufficient to establish the superiority of monarchy or republic. They do, however, make one point clear: a republican form of government does not necessarily guarantee the rights of minorities. Even in an electoral system, a political majority may disregard the rights of a weaker group. This is the danger described in political philosophy as the “tyranny of the majority.”

The main method of this study, however, does not rest on a limited number of historical examples or case-by-case judgments. To reach more general conclusions, we need broad datasets and comparable indicators. Liberty is multidimensional and cannot be adequately measured by a single index. Accordingly, as in the preceding chapters, this chapter examines liberty from several different perspectives in order to determine whether any differences between forms of government recur consistently across multiple indicators.

We therefore begin in the next section with the International Property Rights Index, examining the extent to which monarchies and republics recognize and protect their citizens’ property rights.