Book review of Humans in shackles: an Atlantic history of slavery by Araujo

This book examines the historiography of nineteenth century slavery from the perspective of the “second slavery.” The concept of the second slavery emphasizes the relationship between local histories and world-economic transformations. It breaks with conventional narratives of slavery by emphasizing the expansion of reconfigured slaveries in extensive new zones of commodity production in Brazil, Cuba and the US South as part of world-economic processes of decolonization, industrialization, urbanization, and the creation of mass markets. Thus, slavery was not a moribund institution. Capitalist modernity, liberal ideology, and anti-slavery from above or from below, faced a vigorous foe that operated within the very economic, political, and cultural premises of the changing 19th century world. This perspective offers an original approach to the history of slavery. It has opened up vigorous debates over slavery and anti-slavery, Atlantic history and capitalism. An international group of scholars critically engage older traditions of scholarship on Atlantic history, the economic history of slavery, and the history of slavery in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States from the perspective of the second slavery. Each chapter reinterprets its subject matter in a way that opens out to dialogue between national historiographies and to a reformulation of Atlantic and world-economic history. This collection of essays contributes to the development of a more productive conceptual framework for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the historical relation of slavery and world capitalism during the nineteenth century.

This book examines the historiography of nineteenth century slavery from the perspective of the “second slavery.” The concept of the second slavery emphasizes the relationship between local histories and world-economic transformations. It breaks with conventional narratives of slavery by emphasizing the expansion of reconfigured slaveries in extensive new zones of commodity production in Brazil, Cuba and the US South as part of world-economic processes of decolonization, industrialization, urbanization, and the creation of mass markets. Thus, slavery was not a moribund institution. Capitalist modernity, liberal ideology, and anti-slavery from above or from below, faced a vigorous foe that operated within the very economic, political, and cultural premises of the changing 19th century world. This perspective offers an original approach to the history of slavery. It has opened up vigorous debates over slavery and anti-slavery, Atlantic history and capitalism. An international group of scholars critically engage older traditions of scholarship on Atlantic history, the economic history of slavery, and the history of slavery in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States from the perspective of the second slavery. Each chapter reinterprets its subject matter in a way that opens out to dialogue between national historiographies and to a reformulation of Atlantic and world-economic history. This collection of essays contributes to the development of a more productive conceptual framework for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the historical relation of slavery and world capitalism during the nineteenth century.

IT HAS BECOME A CLICHE TO PROCLAIM THE NEED TO INTERNATIONALIZE the study of the United States. Well-funded conferences, special issues of prestigious journals, and countless panels at professional meetings have been devoted to discussions of how to overcome the self-perceived provincialism of American historians. I have joined in the parade of historians who have participated in these events. Like most academic fashions, this one is a response, at least in large part, to perceived shifts in the world in which we live--in this case to demographic, political, cultural, and economic transformations that come together under the rubric of globalization. Also like most academic fads, this one has inspired some scholars to do wonderful work, explicating, for example, the way a single crop and its markets can link people's fates across regions, nations, and continents or the way that innovations in journalistic practices helped create a smaller world. (1) This trend has also inspired its share of flashy but superficial scholarship that disguises old ideas by giving them new labels. Historians of slavery and historians of colonial British America can, perhaps, be forgiven for wondering what the globalizing fuss is all about. Through no particular virtues or insights of their own, they have long had to address many questions through transnational approaches. That is in part because scholars of colonial British America are inherently pulled into two distinct national historiographies--that of Great Britain and that of the United States. Scholars of slavery have found themselves in an analogous position as they have attempted to conceptualize the relationships between Old World heritages and New World realities. Atlantic approaches to the history of slavery in the Americas reach back to W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Melville J. Herskovits, and Eric Williams, so it is hardly surprising that the first formal program in Atlantic history and culture at an American university emerged during the 1970s out of the collaboration of historical anthropologists of Afro-Caribbean experiences and historians of the early modern societies that bordered the Atlantic. (2) By the 1970s, then, historians of slavery in colonial British America were being pushed by intellectual traditions and institutional forces to understand the institution of slavery and the experiences of those victimized by it in transnational contexts that included Africa, Europe, and non-English speaking societies in the Americas. If, as a result, the rage for globalizing perspectives did not hit them with the same force that it hit other practitioners of U.S. history, it has nonetheless helped foster important, though subtler, shifts in the field. As it happens, this can be traced with unusual chronological precision, because of a coincidence in timing. Almost ten years ago Philip D. Morgan published Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, and Ira Berlin published Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Each book represents the culmination of over twenty years of work by one of the most respected historians of American slavery. Both are constructed around questions rooted in the historiography of the United States, and both build on the preceding decade's enormous flowering of local studies of slavery in colonial North America. Both books work within the main currents of the field that their authors had helped to shape by taking Atlantic approaches to colonial slavery. Together they all but swept the major professional book prizes in American history in 1998, and together they can be understood to have brought to fruition a generation of scholarship on slavery in colonial North America. (3) Many Thousands Gone is a synthetic work that seeks to bring interpretive order to the mass of information about colonial slavery that had accumulated from the mid-1970s--when books by Peter H. …

This exceptional set of essays explores the “Black Atlantic” through biography. The volume is organized around particular life stories that illustrate the implications for interpreting the interconnected histories of Atlantic societies. Generally, these fine contributions raise issues of how to reconstruct biographies to determine their significance as individualized glimpses into patterns of history; responses to enslavement; and the quest for liberty, dignity, and meaning. Implicitly, biography is interdisciplinary because it draws on written and sometimes oral texts that have to be examined through the lens of literary criticism while explaining the context in terms of historical methodology. This volume addresses this dual orientation carefully and thoroughly. Suitably critiqued, it can help to propel the genre even further as a historical tool of analysis. The book is divided into twelve chapters and an afterword. A number of contributions summarize or extend earlier studies of individuals.One of the great achievements in this volume is the focus on the biographies of women, who are seldom seen or heard in the history of slavery, particularly those women who were enslaved in Africa. Jon Sensbach discusses the lives of Rebecca Rotten and Maria, the “Mooress,” both of whom were Moravians. Cassandra Pybus looks at Jane Thompson, who escaped to British forces in Virginia and ultimately found her way to Sierra Leone in 1791. Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard follow the path of Rosalie of the “Poulard Nation,” identified as Fulbe, during the era of the Haitian Revolution.Martin A. Klein provides a marvelous overview of African biographical studies, as well as an introduction to the problem of finding the voices of the enslaved; he gives particular attention to scholarship about slaves born in Africa that has often been overlooked. Sheryl Kroen uncovers the ideological underpinnings of Atlantic history through the British animated character “Robinson Charley,” who personified the “North Atlantic” community during World War II and the subsequent Cold War. João José Reis reconstructs the story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, who left Hausaland in 1806/7 and, after gaining his freedom in Brazil, became a wealthy merchant and slaveholder who traded in West Africa. Lloyd S. Kramer follows the path of David Dorr who traveled from North America to Europe during the 1850s. Similarly, Roquinaldo Ferreira studies Francisco Gomes, a merchant and colonial official in the Angolan seaport of Benguela, who in the early 1820s was accused of plotting a rebellion to free the colony from Portuguese rule. Gomes was born in Rio de Janeiro, possibly as a slave; in 1800, he was exiled to Benguela as a criminal.Inevitably, a few caveats are warranted in measuring the success of this volume. Vincent Carretta repeats his well-known arguments about the methodological issues concerning the reconstruction of the life of Gustavus Vassa, whom he prefers to call Olaudah Equiano without exploring whether the individual in question was known, or preferred to be known, by that name at the time. Unfortunately, his methodology does not take into account either recent research of others or previous criticisms of his own work. Lisa Lindsay examines the mythology of “tribal marks” in her investigation of James C. Vaughan’s Yoruba background without raising questions about the meaning of facial and body scarification and the inappropriate use of the term tribal in discussing its significance. Nor does Lindsay question the application of the ethnic name Yoruba in the context of Egba history and its relationship to the collapse of Oyo.Jane Landers applies ethnic terminology from the Americas, specifically Mandinga, to ethnicity in West Africa, where the term was not used, without fully comprehending the antiquity and centrality of Islam in the Senegambia region of West Africa. She does not explain who the “Muslim converts” were in the Gambia; in the early eighteenth century, Muslim identity in Senegambia had more to do with the emerging age of jihad than with matters involving conversion to Islam per se.Reis is incorrect in claiming that kola was made into a drink when it was chewed. He also overlooks the practice of murgu in West Africa in the “hiring out” of slaves in Bahia. His subject of study was not “probably” enslaved during jihad; no other explanation is even plausible. Like Landers and Scott/Hébrard, he fails to place jihad in its proper context. Hence, on the one hand, these explorations in life histories reveal interconnections within the trans-Atlantic world, but, on the other, they sometimes betray weaknesses in comprehending the historiography of Africa during the period of Atlantic slavery.

The fall of Jacobus Capitein and the Dutch debate on the controversial legacy of colonial heroes The post-colonial re-evaluation of prominent figures in Dutch history has been resisted fiercely in the public sphere. This article raises the question how lives from the colonial era that are a source of national pride, but are also tainted by their implication in the history of slavery, colonialism and racism can be presented in a way that does justice to their historical context. Jacobus Capitein, who was first enslaved and later became an advocate for slavery in the 1740s, was initially regarded a hero in the eighteenth century, but has received a far more critical evaluation since the second half of the twentieth century. This article takes the way in which professional historians and heritage institutions have dealt with the complex and layered life story of Jacobus Capitein as a model for approaching the lives of the canonical figures of Dutch Atlantic history.

The Brazilian government's insistent fascination with emancipation laws, the outcomes of emancipation, and immigration, both Asian and European, in Spain's Caribbean colonies indicate not only the pressing nature of labor in Brazil but also that, in the nineteenth century, the interactions among different governments and slave societies shaped the destruction of Latin American slavery. Slavery and the African slave trade always figured centrally in the revolutionary and nation-building process, not least because, as the previous report indicates, slaves themselves took up arms to fight for liberation, especially in Spanish America. Slavery was at times undermined by anticolonial and interimperial warfare (Haiti and most of Spanish America) and at other times strengthened (Brazil). This chapter explores the factors that influenced the history of slavery in Cuba from an Atlantic perspective. Different approaches to conceptualizing Atlantic history help to comprehend the dynamics at work in Cuba and other parts of Latin America.

This Special Issue explores new routes in the economic historical research on the Dutch Atlantic history of slavery and slave trade. Each of its contributions tackles important blind spots that have continued to haunt Dutch economic history despite the recent energetic revival of research and debates on the economic impact of Dutch Atlantic slavery. Together, the articles of this Special Issue challenge our perspectives, questions and methods.

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery

In Boni. In het spoor van de Surinaamse vrijheidsstrijder, Tessa Leuwsha reconstructs the life of Boni, the 18th-century Maroon leader who resisted Dutch colonial rule in Suriname. Drawing on colonial archives, oral traditions, myth, and imaginative reflection, she traces his presence across Suriname, French Guiana, the Netherlands, and Ghana. Blending biography, historiography, and literary narrative, Leuwsha interweaves fragmented records with memory and landscape, exposing the limits of colonial discourse while restoring depth to a figure long reduced to stereotype. Her prose highlights the interplay of fact, storytelling, and imagination in recovering Maroon resistance. Praised in both Surinamese and Dutch press, Boni stands out for its literary approach to historical recovery, situating a local freedom struggle within wider Atlantic histories of slavery, resistance, and memory.

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery, by Ana Lucia Araujo

Of Human Bondage: Creating an Atlantic History of Slavery