From this perspective, rights would seem to be tied to republican nation states. But from another perspective they were not. Revolutionary eras are messy times. From this perspective, natural rights, transcending national borders, were world encompassing, universal.
Common to all, they were, consequently, common to each. Embedded in the individual, they were his, no matter what country he inhabited or whether the people of that country acknowledged his individual rights or not.
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Natural rights thus coexisted within multiple divergent spaces: Will thinking of rights as performed and thus co- existing within multiple, divergent spaces help us think through the quintessential liberal conundrum — the inherent conflict between citizen rights and human rights? Focusing on the Age of Revolution we come upon a second, deeply puzzling aspect of eighteenth-century rights discourse— not so much a conundrum, this time, as a paradox.
Slavery in the Age of Revolution! Simultaneously an oxymoron and a historical commonplace! Is the right to have rights universal and unalienable, crossing color as well as national boundaries?
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How are these two questions interrelated? A cultural analyst, I think of the processes by which modern concepts of rights and citizenship came into being as a complex layering of dialogic exchanges crisscrossing the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic as revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, diplomats and merchants, slaves and common sailors moved back and forth between the US.
Especially in the age of wind and sails, the story of their exchanges could scarcely have been simple or straightforward. Rather, like the currents and winds of the Atlantic, they followed a convoluted and idiosyncratic path. As we will soon discover, Enlightenment philosophers were unable to think about freedom without simultaneously thinking about slavery. We will be guided on our way by suggestions garnered from the writings of political philosopher, Robert Bernasconi.
But in the Second Treatise , Locke introduces — and legitimates — a second, radically different form of slavery, Atlantic or chattel slavery, that is, slavery that is not political, but rather economic and domestic. At the beginning of the Second Treatise, sect. He could do so precisely because with this second form of slavery Locke has moved from the issue of political rights and the power of the sovereign state to the private rights of individual property owners.
The slave, as represented in the Second Treatise, Chapter IV , is either a captive in a just war or a criminal subject to capital punishment. In either case, faced with the choice of death or enslavement he sensibly chooses enslavement. But as a slave, he no longer is a man with sovereign political rights or claims to citizenship. Writing as slavery became a dominant form of labor around the Atlantic, Locke insisted that the slave had become a form of property that could be sold at the will of his owner and whose children will inherit his condition.
Children born to non-persons are neither the children of men nor entitled to claim rights natural of men. Seventeenth-century Europeans could not imagine Europeans as stateless. Nor could they imagine enslaving fellow Europeans. But they easily imagined Africans as existing in an uncivilized state of nature, as stateless and as slaves.
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On the most obvious level, many of the enslaved carried from Africa to the Americas were children, women or elderly men, whom none would claim had participated in any sort of war, just or not — and few of whom could be imagined as homicidal criminals. Of course, claims to life and liberty originated in the state of nature, but that state was a contradictory, dangerous and violent place. Home to natural rights and freedom, it was also home to slavery.
To rest securely in their natural rights, individuals formed political states designed to protect their natural rights. In this way, Locke embodied political, economic and social rights in the political state, seemingly unable to imagine rights — or Europeans — outside protective apparatuses of the nation state. All those who had lost their natural rights through enslavement or, if women, marriage or concubinage, were excluded from participation in the social contract. They could not claim membership in the political state.
Their rights were consequently not protected there. Thus Locke recognized the exclusionary nature of the political state — and its Europeanness — at the same time as he left slaves and slavery in a state of nature which increasingly took on the appearance of Africa. A line was being drawn between Africa and Europe in terms of claims to political self-governance and individual liberty, a line that has proven remarkably impervious to modification.
I refer to the long shadow the Haitian Revolution cast over the Atlantic world. Haitian revolutionaries espoused a far more radical form of Enlightenment liberalism than either the US or French Revolutionaries. Redeemed the Age of Revolution — and terrified it — not only because of the ruthlessness with which rebellious slaves seized and maintained their freedom — burning plantations, entire cities to the ground, brutally torturing and executing slave holders, raping women.
What a terrifying realization for white Americans and Europeans.
In a world of rapidly changing political and social constellations, race had functioned as the one stabilizing constant, a constant an independent black Haiti violently destabilized. The desire to build such links had an immediate impact on the development of political parties in the young US republic. What had been going on in Ireland during these years of political conflict and change? Repeatedly engaging British forces, Irish revolutionaries were as repeatedly defeated. Arrests and executions, dramatic prison escapes and emigration followed , , This last act severely limited freedom of the press.
Twnety-five opposition newspaper editors and printers were prosecuted for seditious libel. Burk was among those convicted. These efforts played an important role in the and Jeffersonian victories, carrying Jefferson to the White House. How did radical Irish celebrants of a universal vision of unalienable political and social rights, but now new formed as Jeffersonian partisans, respond to events in Saint Domingue — the ultimate test of a universalist vision?
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The book opens with a passionate attack on British imperialism. The people were imprisoned in tenders, transported or executed without trial. Fields and cottages were burnt, peasants from large swaths of Ireland dispersed. It was normal British practice, Burk reported, to seize those suspected of United Irish sympathies and flog them, up to lashes on the bare back.
Their heads were cut off, their bowels were torn, reeking from their bodies, and thrown in their faces. Yet Burk makes no reference to Saint Domingue. Only once, and then in passing, does he refer to persons of color fighting for their freedom — and then it is to people far removed from the Americas: Yet through all these rhetorical slippages, Burk himself remains white, assuming alternatively the rhetoric of white British critics of slavery or of French critics of slaves.
The bold celebrant of a cosmopolitan vision of citizenship and human rights never assumes the position of the racialized subaltern other. By the time he wrote his History in , Burk has discarded his earlier cosmopolitan vision of citizenship. Rather Burk works within a narrow nationalist framework. They were citizens of a liberty-loving nation unjustly occupied by a tyrannical empire.
Political rights were coterminous with membership in a republican nation state. In many ways, Thomas Branagan took the far more radical path. Far from ignoring the horrors of chattel slavery having participated I them as a slave trader in Africa and a plantation overseer , Branagan was obsessed by them. In he published a lengthy attack on Atlantic slavery, A Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa … and then in the following year, two book length epic poems on the evils of slavery: Preliminary Essay … [on] the Exiled Sons of Africa details the horrors of the slave trade in Africa, the terrors of the Middle Passage and the atrocities perpetrated by slave owners in the Caribbean.
Rather, Branagan deploys the apolitical rhetoric of pathos and the pastoral to represent enslaved Africans as suffering victims, longing to return to a romanticized and bucolic Africa. Rather, Branagan begins his chapter on Saint Domingue with the amazing statement: To the immortal honour of the French government, it must be acknowledged that, of all the European powers who have slaves in the West-Indies, they use their slaves with the greatest humanity.
What are we to make of this fantastical representation, the obliteration of ten years of brutal warfare, the ending of slavery, the establishment of an independent black nation state. We should note as well that Branagan not only effaces the Haitian Revolution, he makes no reference to the existence of slavery in the US south. Published in , the year after Haitian independence, Avenia celebrates a victorious battle waged by virtuous Africans against marauding Christian slave traders. As telling, and confusing, is the narrative voice Brannagan assumes throughout the epic — he speaks in the voice of a noble African princess.
Fusing such a passionate condemnation of slavery and slave holders with an equally passionate celebration of the rights of the laboring classes, Branagan undermined the very heart of the Jeffersonian political coalition he embraced. How, why did he do this?
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Serious Remonstrances appears only to add to them. But let us look at his dedication to the Serious Remonstrances a bit more carefully. Towards the end of his lengthy Dedication, Branagan announces his book has two main objectives. As he states it: Indeed, appearing at the end of pages of praise for liberty loving artisans and farmers of the US North, the emancipation of the African race seems an add-on, an afterthought.
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More significantly, Branagan draws a sharp grammatical distinction between his fellow citizens , whose happiness and posterity are his principle concern, and the African race. According to research recently carried out in the US and EMEA by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Infoblox, more organisations than ever are reaching out to sources including their peers, industry groups, IT vendors and government bodies for threat intelligence data.
This increase could be attributed to the fact that two thirds of the IT security practitioners surveyed said they now realised that threat intelligence could have prevented or minimised the consequences of a cyberattack or data breach.
Despite this exchange and use of threat intelligence, however, the majority of respondents to the survey claimed not to be satisfied with the current quality of the data. Much of this dissatisfaction may be due to the way in which the data is actually sourced. While two fifths of companies consolidate their threat intelligence data from a number of different sources, most engage in informal peer-to-peer exchange of threat intelligence, rather than taking a more formal approach, such as using a threat intelligence exchange service or joining a consortium.
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Regardless of the approach used, however, around three in five respondents claimed not to trust the sources of intelligence they used. Trust is an issue when it comes to giving too, as well as receiving. While around three quarters of organisations provide threat intelligence in addition to using data from other sources, around half claim that the potential liability of sharing meant they would only partially participate in a threat intelligence exchange programme. Indicators such as suspicious hostnames, IP addresses and file hashes, threat intelligence will typically be disseminated internally through alerts.
However, security personnel in around two thirds of organisations are spending more than 50 hours a week responding to these alerts, when their time could be better spent pro-actively hunting for signs of criminal activity. Currently, only half of the companies surveyed use automated solutions to investigate threats, with just one in five claiming to use advanced technology such as AI and machine learning. Interestingly, the use of slow manual sharing processes were also cited by over a third of businesses as a reason for not participating in the exchange of threat intelligence information.
For the intelligence to be actionable it needs to be received in a timely manager, immediately prioritising the threats contained. However, as shown above, a large number of organisations are not satisfied with the timeliness of the intelligence, believing that it becomes stale within a matter of minutes. A threat intelligence provider is only ever as good as the information it provides, of course.