Children in European systems of slavery: Introduction

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. All these articles derive from a highly successful conference held in Avignon, France in May 2004, one of a series of conferences on slavery and other forms of unfree labour organised by Gwyn Campbell since 1998. Earlier publications emanating from conferences in this series include Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. London: Routledge, 2005; Edward Alpers, Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman, eds, Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia. London: Routledge, 2005; Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller, eds, Women in Western Systems of Slavery – special edition of Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 161–79; Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. London: Routledge, 2004. Further publications in the series include Edward A. Alpers, Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman, eds, Resisting Bondage in the Indian Ocean World. London: Routledge, forthcoming 2006; Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds, Women and Slavery, 2. vols (forthcoming); and Children in Slavery around the World, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, forthcoming 2006). 2. Campbell et al., Women and Slavery. 3. Interests in the formative contributions of Europeans' adventures in the New World are as old as Columbus but, of course, entirely omitted slavery before the mid-twentieth century, when Brazilian and Caribbean intellectuals began to argue the case in terms of the cultural creativity of slaves and their descendents (as “creoles”) or the economic contributions of slavery to European industrialization (Eric Williams' famous Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). The most comprehensive and recent restatements of this these are those of Robin Blackburn, in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso, 1988 and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern. London, New York: Verso, 1996. All ignored the perspectives and/or experiences of the majority of women and children in fact present. 4. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003. 5. Campbell et al., Children in Slavery. 6. See, for example, Tara A. Inniss, “From Slavery to Freedom: Children's Health in Barbados, 1823–1838,” in this volume. 7. Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Children of Slavery – the Transatlantic Phase,” in this volume. 8. Joseph C. Miller, “Overcrowded and Undernourished: Techniques and Consequences of Tight-Packing in the Portuguese Southern Atlantic Slave Trade,” condensed in Serge Daget, ed., De la traite à l'esclavage, vol. 2: 395–424. Paris/Nantes: Société Française d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer and Centre de Recherche sur l'Histoire du Monde Atlantique, 1988. 9. The discussion of these technicalities in the British trade is extensive; a recent entry to this literature may be found in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1664–1864,” Economic History Review 46(2) (1993): 308–23. 10. This collection does not develop the “child” trope in late-nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century representations of slavery in North American – African-American and mainstream (e.g. Twain, Stowe) – literature. From the conference on “Children in Slavery,” 20–22 May 2004, in Avignon, France, we regret the unavailability of Wilma King, “The Literary Imagination and the Portrayal of Enslaved Boys and Girls in Selected Novels by American Writers,” and Beverly D. Miller, “The Invisible Thread: Child Slavery in Gary Paulsen's Nightjohn and Sarny.” 11. See William Golding, Lord of the Flies (edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom). Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999, for the classic literary evocation. 12. For the most recent (and controversial) biography, see Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005. 13. See select bibliography, appended. 14. The WPA narratives are available in many formats and commented on extensively, including in Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau and Steven F. Miller, eds, Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom. New York: New Press, 1998; L. M. Hill, “Ex-Slave Narratives: The WPA Federal Writers” Project Reappraised,” Oral History 26, no. 1 (1998): 64–72; “Slave Narratives” (Orem, UT: Ancestry.com – CD-ROM containing 2300 WPA ex-slave narratives; also see http://www.ancestry.com). 15. Richard B. Allen, A Traffic Repugnant to Humanity: Children, the Mascarene Slave Trade and British Abolitionism, in this volume. Recent careful demographic modelling of West Indian demography is showing a steady growth in island-born (“creole”) segments of the enslaved populations even in the fastest-growing islands of the British Caribbean; see Paul Lachance, “A Model of the Slave Trade and Black Population Growth in the Caribbean, 1500–1830” (unpublished paper, 120th annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Session 40, “The Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trades and Black Population Trends in the Americas before 1820: An Attempt to Assemble the Big Picture,” Philadelphia, 6 January 2006). 16. Eltis and Engerman, “Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios.” 17. Here we are well and uncomfortably aware of the slippery slope of amateur psychologizing that led to such naïve and unfortunate outcomes, now many years ago. Our strong accent on the undeniably formative experience – if not trauma – of growing up in slavery, or being dragged into enslavement as a child, does not imply disability but rather channelling, even intensification, of later adult capacities in psychological channels formed in childhood. By raising the question here, we invite historians to draw on the insights of some of the scholars of contemporary slavery who have begun to explore a “psychology of slavery”; for example, see Kevin Bales, “The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery,” Scientific American 286, no. 4 (2002): 80–88. It is a deep irony that this approach also resonates with the long-discredited notion of the “plantation as school” of the racist defenders of slavery in the United States at the turn of the last century; for example, famously, Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labour as Determined by the Plantation Regime. New York: Appleton, 1918. A century of growing understanding of Africa and Africans has, of course, rendered its “savagery to civilization” thesis so irrelevant as to make it an embarrassment to mention its distortions in this context, but the subject remains so sensitive in twenty-first-century cultures that we prefer to err on the side of this cautious disclaimer. As for the broader implications of reconsidering children in slavery as the children they were, we are also painfully aware of – but not prepared to comment specifically on – its possible impact on the survival strategies of the children brought up in slavery for the children and grandchildren that they grew up to raise, and the possible legacies of these family dynamics down to the present. 18. Gilberto Freyre long ago emphasized the (inter-) familial aspect of slavery in Brazil, in religious, cultural and sexual (though much less so in political) terms, in Casa-grande e senzala. Rio de Janeiro: Olympio, 1933, translated by Samuel Putnam as The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. New York: Knopf, 1946. Berlin has captured this essential dynamic, though still without accenting childhood as an experience, in Generations of Captivity. Other recent work on ante-bellum slavery in the United States is emphasizing the fragility of multi-generation slave families in the Atlantic states broken up by the rush to sell their children off “down the river” to the cotton frontier of the deep South – for example, Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 – but similarly from the points of view of the adults who lost children, rather than the children who lost parents. 19. For the emotional power of “family secrets” of this order, see, for example, Laura Edwards, “Enslaved Women and the Law: Paradoxes of Subordination in the Post-Revolutionary Carolinas” and Felipe Smith, “The ‘Condition of the Mother’: The Legacy of Slavery in African American Literature of the Jim Crow Era,” both in Campbell et al., eds, Women and Slavery. 20. For insights beyond the autobiographical sources used by Diptee and Lovejoy in this collection, see Sylviane A. Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; Oxford: James Currey, 2003. 21. With acknowledgement of the theoretical emphasis on women, though not the children, as labour in Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, “Introduction,” in Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds, Women and Slavery in Africa, 1–48. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Adult labouring capacities are not at issue, however, in this collection. 22. Allen, Traffic Repugnant. 23. Robertson and Klein, “Introduction.” 24. Audra A. Diptee, “African Children in the British Slave Trade during the Late Eighteenth Century,” in this volume. Also, for the women transported, and by extension also their children, see Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 25. Lovejoy, “The Children of Slavery.” 26. Also see the definitional status of enslaved populations' inability to reproduce themselves asserted by Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l'esclavage: le ventre de fer et d'argent. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986, translated by Alide Dasnois as The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold (foreword by Paul E. Lovejoy). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, and anticipated in Claude Meillassoux, “Female Slavery,” in Robertson and Klein, eds, Women and Slavery in Africa, 49–68. This definitive political-economic exclusion of children as a consideration in slavery has also, of course, contributed to the neglect of slave children that we aim here to begin to overcome. 27. Jerome Teelucksingh, “The “Invisible Child” in British West Indian Slavery,” in this volume. 28. Kenneth Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, c.1776–1834,” in Campbell et al., eds, Women and Slavery. Also see Sheila M. Aird, “The Forgotten Ones: Enslaved Children and the Construction of a Labour Force in the British West Indies,” paper given at the international conference on children and slavery, Avignon, 20–22 May 2004. 29. Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica.” 30. For further considerations, Gwyn Campbell, “Children and Slavery in the New World: A Review,” in this volume. 31. Teelucksingh, “‘Invisible Child.’” 32. Morgan, “Slave Infant Mortality in the Caribbean.” 33. Mark J. Goodman, “Slave Discipline, Slave Trade and Social Reproduction in the Antebellum South,” paper given at the international conference on children and slavery, Avignon, 20–22 May 2004. 34. Johnson, Soul by Soul, Berlin, Generations of Captivity, and other recent work on this era. 35. David Eltis, “Fluctuations in the Age and Sex Ratios of Slaves in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Traffic,” Slavery and Abolition 7, no. 3 (1986): 257–72. 36. Jerome S. Handler, “Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 1 (2002): 23–56 and idem, “Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barbados,” Slavery and Abolition 19, no. 2 (1998): 129–41. 37. For example, Robert Martin Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 38. Beyond Morgan, Laboring Women; for the United States, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 39. For women enslaved elsewhere in the world, see Campbell et al., Eds, Women and Slavery. 40. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” (1845), in many modern editions, including William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives, ch. 10. Washington, DC: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1999.