Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands

Abstract

In Linking the Histories of Slavery Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks expand the narrative of North American bondage by integrating indigenous actors and incorporating regions outside of the plantation South. Their introduction presents the volume’s major themes: the “entrepreneurial qualities of slaving” and the magnitude of enslavers’ and slaves’ migrations (xxiii). In part 1, anthropologist Catherine M. Cameron provides the volume’s foundation by surveying indigenous slave systems across North America, stressing their “considerable antiquity,” and chronicling both the slavelike experiences of captives and captive influence on captor society (10). Parts 2 and 3 feature southern, southwestern, and western case studies that trace the rise of commercial slaving, explain common challenges faced by enslavers, describe the many forms of abuse that slaves endured, and reveal captives’ varied opportunities for social and economic mobility from the colonial period to the present.Although the sociocultural incentives for indigenous slave systems and the economic motivations for Euro-American slaving are well known, analyses of the commercial nature of Indian slavery are far less common. The volume as a whole highlights how slave labor enhanced Native production of subsistence goods and commodities, and Eric E. Bowne’s and Boyd Cothran’s chapters each highlight how slaving became a lucrative enterprise for Native peoples in the South and the Pacific Northwest. Bowne describes how Europeans’ insatiable demand for labor from the seventeenth thorough the nineteenth centuries prompted the Westos, and later the Comanches, to pursue “slaving as a primary mode of production” (36). Cothran chronicles the relationship between the rise of wealthy entrepreneurial chieftains and slave markets in the mid-nineteenth-century Klamath Basin, arguing that commercialized slavery restructured tribal political identities. These authors highlight the political, economic, and social effects of slavery and chart the spread of commercial slaving as colonists encroached and the effects of colonialism radiated westward.Euro-American and indigenous peoples’ pursuit of wealth and status sparked the voluntary and forced migrations of diverse groups of enslavers and slaves. Historian Paul Conrad explores the forced migration of Apache slaves from northern New Spain to the Caribbean. Although these captives supported Spanish colonial development in nineteenth-century Cuba, they also impeded production by resisting enslavement, often allying with African slaves and convict laborers. Historian Calvin Schermerhorn describes the intertwined migrations of Indians, blacks, and Euro-American settlers from the Old South to the Deep South. He explains how the commercialization of this migration resulted from the government and private enterprises funding slave traders, land speculators, and plantation investors to develop the South’s plantation complex.Historian Mark Allan Goldberg’s chapter brings together the volume’s themes by connecting indigenous and Anglo American slave-trading networks at a Texas trading house. Goldberg focuses on how Comanche–Anglo American trade in livestock and slaves facilitated westward expansion by supporting Anglo American farming, connecting the west to bustling eastern markets, and, most importantly, solidifying US land claims in central Texas. As Goldberg explains, by the mid-1850s “the Anglo American system of racial slavery won out,” and Anglo Americans forced Comanches onto reservations by racializing their “benign” and “inefficient” slave-use practices to justify conquest (215).In part 3, legal scholar Sarah Deer and psychologist Melissa Farley describe the continued sexual exploitation of Native women and children due to “persistent socioeconomic realities linked to the colonial past” (xxv). Deer reconceptualizes human trafficking by exploring warfare, boarding schools, and urban relocation and how these processes prevented Native peoples from protecting their women and children. Farley connects slavery and prostitution in the twenty-first century through their “intrinsic nonhumanity” and owners’ “justif[ication of] any violence or abuse perpetrated against those they enslaved” (286). Both authors urge the government to provide an “adequate legal response” to the widespread trafficking of Native women, fighting the vicious cycle of colonial violence Native peoples have endured for centuries (304).Although this volume introduces readers to understudied slaveries, many chapters cover the south and the southwest, where slavery, particularly among indigenous peoples, has considerable historiographic coverage. Natale Zappia’s chapter on the political and economic significance of southwestern indigenous captive and livestock networks, Enrique R. Lamadrid’s chapter on Pueblo music and pageantry as tools used to cope with colonial violence, and Andrew J. Torget’s chapter on slavery and state building in Mexico are compelling but cover familiar ground. Although the volume promises to describe the “intersection of . . . multiple slaving cultures in North America,” the case studies of different indigenous slave systems are more successful than the attempts to link regions and slave trading networks (xix). Despite these shortcomings, this volume expands the spatial, temporal, intercultural, and transnational dimensions of human trafficking in North America. Most important, Linking the Histories of Slavery encourages scholars to continue to piece together the “continental epic” of slavery among and between Native and Euro-American societies (xvi).