Material Culture of Slavery in the British Atlantic

Abstract

The material culture of Atlantic World slavery includes all portable and non-portable objects and structures that were associated with and produced because of the enslavement of Africans from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Defining the geographical extent of slavery’s material culture starts in coastal and interior regions of Africa, which formed the sociopolitical and economic landscape that existed because of and alongside the slave trade, with the objects deployed to capture, brutalize, and transport people to coastal forts and ships that carried captive Africans via the brutal Middle Passage. The material culture of slaves forms a major focus of research, encompassing the varied experiences of slavery in the Americas, with the homes, possessions, agricultural implements, gardens, and foodways of enslaved Africans as well as commodities produced by their labor on and beyond the plantations. This material culture also must consider slavery’s wider context in the plantations, military installations, urban settings, and other locales where slavery occurred and the elites around the Atlantic basin who profited from commodities and wealth produced by enslaved labor. Also, material objects that were in the possession of maroons and the emancipated are not covered here. A wide array of sources preserve evidence of this material culture, and while the work of historians and historical archaeologists figures most prominently, there is a significant crossover among disciplines as anthropologists, art historians, folklorists, geographers, literary scholars, and others make important contributions. Textual sources related to material culture of slavery consist of primary documents, paintings, prints, and other visual media bearing evidence of material things, plus a rapidly growing secondary literature. Though textual and visual sources yield valuable information these represent an incomplete record. Many aspects of slavery were impartially recorded, if at all, and thus the systematic excavations conducted by historical and maritime archaeologists access a material record of Atlantic World slavery that is, in many cases, the only source of information about the lives of slaves as well as elites who enslaved them. To interpret this material culture in its various forms researchers must navigate between local contexts and Atlantic World slavery’s global scale. Interpreting functions or meanings of particular objects, buildings, and spoken or written words relies on the particular temporal and spatial context, but material things were made and used in patterned ways as they were enmeshed in regional or global interests. Moreover, the millions of people involved in Atlantic World slavery actively engaged in the material world of things, places, and people should be comprehended as such without being removed from the context of lived experience.