Atlantic Slavery Research Articles

Hortense Spillers and the Ungendering of (Re)productive Racial Capitalism

Abstract This article theorizes the reproductive dimensions of racial capitalism. It begins by bringing into conversation Black Marxist theories of racial capitalism and Marxist feminist theories of social and biological reproduction proffered by Cedric Robinson and Silvia Federici respectively. It demonstrates that since its inception, racial capitalism has depended on processes of racialized (re)productive accumulation that are ongoing but not yet fully theorized. At the center of the essay is a close reading of Hortense Spillers’s 1987 contribution “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Though Spillers is not generally regarded as either a Black Marxist or a Marxist feminist, the essay argues that she ought to be recognized as a theorist of racialized (re)productive accumulation—a process that begins aboard the slave ship, persists on the plantation, and endures into the present. Racialized (re)productive accumulation exploited she whom Spillers often denotes as “the captive female,” and, also, paradoxically, ungendered her. Ultimately, through examination of the process of ungendering in Atlantic slavery, the essay suggests that Spillers opens up new ways to think about the history of racial capitalism, (re)productive dispossession, and the possibility of its refusal. The article concludes by considering how Spillers’s complex insights about the process of ungendering might yet be mobilized to secure truly substantive forms of reproductive justice.

“Much-Abused Luke”

Abstract This essay revisits a familiar but seldom discussed anecdote of same-sex sexual abuse in the archive of Atlantic slavery: the story of Luke in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Through a close reading of Luke’s story, the article advances three claims: (1) the history of slavery is also a history of same-sex sexual terror, (2) the sexual terror of slavery included reproductive sexual violence but was not limited to it, and (3) Incidents is ultimately a story about sexual terror and protest against it in the form of fugitivity. In making these arguments, the article intervenes into current conversations in the feminist historiography of slavery, capitalism, and reproduction and contributes to emerging work on same-sex sexual relations in the context of enslavement. It closes with a short reflection on the stakes of Luke’s story for historiography on sexuality.

Fear, gratitude, and the normalization of obstetric violence in Cuban maternity hospitals

AbstractObstetric violence is endemic in Cuba, a highly medicalized society where the obstetrics institution is unquestioned and, in the afterlives of Atlantic slavery and US occupation and intervention, emotions of fear and gratitude work to normalize obstetric violence and control birthing bodies for the state. I draw on ethnographic observations, birth stories, and experiences as a patient to examine how birthing people, providers, and the Revolutionary state negotiate care and responsibility for health. I describe three fears: the fear of failure to protect maternal‐infant health (and its repercussions for clinicians and the state); the fear of physiological childbirth; and fears of inadequate or violent care. Obstetric violence in Cuba is structural. As birthing people shift between primary and tertiary healthcare infrastructures with distinct epistemologies of care, they exert ambiguous agency to domesticate the hostile space of the hospital, building relations of reciprocity and performing docility and compliance. Finally, I look at the gratitude expected of patients and the consequences of refusing to recognize healthcare as a “gift.” This contemporary account of obstetric violence in Cuba contributes to calls by abolition feminists to study the obstetric institution in order to refuse and dismantle it, building life‐affirming futures for maternity care worldwide.

Active Voice, Passive Voice, Narrated Voice: The Diaspora of the Courás in Atlantic Slavery

Active Voice, Passive Voice, Narrated Voice: The Diaspora of the Courás in Atlantic Slavery

Musical Sociability, Atlantic Slavery, and the Portraiture of Carmontelle

This article addresses the transatlantic financing of pre-revolutionary French salons and the amateur music-making that featured within them. It does so by reconstructing the context of a paradigmatic image of enlightened leisure: a portrait by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) inscribed “Mlle Desgots, from Saint-Domingue, with her Black servant Laurent, 1766.” The likeness is representative of Carmontelle’s style in subject and setting. It features a fashionable noblewoman—the French-Caribbean heiress Charlotte Louise-Desgots—who plays a gilded harpsichord. What is unusual about the scene is the identity of Desgots’s interlocutor; the aristocrat poses with a teenaged valet de chambre, Laurent, whom her family had enslaved. The soundscape evoked in the drawing—the domestic repertoire of the midcentury galant—is often described as a sonorous analogue to conventions of salon politesse. And yet, Laurent’s forcible participation in the artistic exchange destabilizes this “sociable” analytic framework. Tracing Laurent’s experiences in the decades before and after the portrait was made underscores how the dynamics of Caribbean slavery were inflected in the most prestigious of Parisian cultural spaces, and through the most anodyne and “convivial” of eighteenth-century sound worlds. Like Desgots, the musical engagement Laurent demonstrated was the result of an education attained in the metropole. Unlike Desgots, this training was not gifted for the pursuit of leisure but imposed in the formation of labor, as adornment to the artistic habits of his repatriated colonial enslavers.

Children, Agricultural Labor, and Engagement à Temps in the 1820s Senegal River Valley

I examine the preference for children under engagement à temps (indenture) in Senegal, especially the Senegal River Valley, in the 1820s. In the late 1810s and early 1820s, Senegal’s administrators wished to build cotton and indigo plantations in the Senegal River Valley to replace profits lost after the turbulence of the Age of Revolutions, especially the loss of colonial Haiti, which had been France’s most profitable colony. However, France’s 1817 prohibition of the slave trade signaled to administrators that they would have to obtain non-enslaved workers for the plantations they wished to build. Thus, they created rachat (redemption) and engagement à temps. Under this system, Senegal’s administrators, colonists, and habitants bought captives on African slave markets, “redeemed” the captive from slavery, then forced a fourteen-year engagement à temps contract on the individual with the promise of eventual “freedom” from servitude. Senegal’s administrators, especially Governor Jacques François Roger, prioritized obtaining children, whom they defined as anyone under the age of sixteen, for this practice because they saw children as a docile labor force which would more easily take root in the colony, especially in its nascent plantation sector. By acquiring children, Roger hoped to create highly coercible workers committed to agriculture who would not abandon the plantations after the expiration of their contracts. Using correspondence among Senegal’s administrators, I trace the reasoning behind the preference for people under the age of sixteen, in addition to the two primary mechanisms used to acquire children. The first mechanism was rachat. An examination of rachats registered at Bakel in 1825, located in the notarial archives of St Louis at the Archives nationales du Sénégal, reveals that 59.5 per cent of rachats involved people under the age of sixteen. Second, the September 28, 1822 decree that regulated engagement à temps in the colony stated that any child born to a mother working as an engagée à temps had to work for the mother’s engagiste until the age of twenty-one, the age of majority in French legislation, in exchange for the care they had received in childhood. While this group of children did not experience rachat, the law enabled administrators to take advantage of their physical labor in addition to the reproductive labor of their mothers. I argue that the abolition of the slave trade forced French administrators, colonists, and habitants in 1820s Senegal to envision new ways to build a stable laboring population for the plantation economy they hoped to build along the Senegal River; because of free labor shortages in the region, rachat and engagement à temps appeared to be a solution. Children, seen as malleable and more coercible than adults, came to be seen as a key component of this workforce because administrators and colonists hoped they would grow up to be adults loyal to the French colonial economy. I also argue that historiographical methodologies pioneered by scholars of gender and reproduction under Atlantic slavery provide a useful way of grappling with the perspectives of people forced into engagement à temps. Overall, a focus on the importance of children to engagement à temps allows us to probe the continuities that tie together slavery and the slave trade, on the one hand, and on the other, the forced labor practices proliferated alongside abolition.

‘Wider than the realm of England’: the Hosack family heritage, Atlantic slavery and casting Mary, Queen of Scots for the nation

In 1871 the Scottish-born magistrate John Hosack (1809–87) was described as ‘the chivalrous and most recent defender’ of Mary, Queen of Scots. After writing a popular historical account of her life, he had presented a plaster cast bust of her Westminster effigy to London’s National Portrait Gallery, which it then used to create an electrotype sculpture with the help of Elkington & Co. This article interrogates the ‘value’ of this sculpture as a cultural heritage object by retracing its history. It places Hosack’s desire to replicate and commemorate Scottish heritage alongside his family ties to Jamaica, including the parallel life of his half-brother William and the wealth John derived from his father’s sugar profits, which relied on African enslavement. It argues the importance of understanding how such legacies enabled individuals to participate in cultural philanthropy in the Victorian period, which simultaneously distanced them from their Atlantic pasts. It also considers how, in its transformation into an electrotype, Hosack’s cast became part of a wider effort by museums and galleries to replicate national heritage using manufacturing methods indebted to the industrial economy intertwined with the British Empire. Sculpture offered a powerful medium through which to fortify national history, but its commemorative capacity can, and should, be unpicked to better understand British legacies of enslavement and colonialism.

Silesia, Serfdom, and Slavery

Abstract From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Silesian linen production was closely linked to Atlantic slavery. Initially, Silesian linen was a commodity of varying quality, strategically adapted to either satisfy free consumers in Africa or serve as clothing for enslaved Africans or European colonists in the Americas. To keep their selling prices low, Silesian merchants adopted serfdom to exploit spinners and weavers. Later industrialists in the region relied on impoverished factory workers to manufacture competitive products, like tropical clothing for the colonies. This study contributes to a better understanding of the interconnectedness of the Silesian economy with Atlantic slavery by examining the practices through which Silesian actors shaped local conditions that became springboards for business opportunities related to slavery.

Confronting Colonial Modernity in a French City: Slavery and Racism in Bordeaux’s Musée d’Aquitaine

ABSTRACT What is the purpose of an exhibit on Atlantic slavery? Does it seek to raise awareness of the trade in enslaved people, with a view to highlighting and overcoming its racist legacy, or to situate the Atlantic trade within the historical – and ongoing – continuum of slavery, or to draw attention to the role of slavery in constituting colonial modernity? Does giving this history its rightful place within the national story of France, Britain or elsewhere ultimately serve to embed racial divisions in contemporary society, or to expunge them? In other words, does a reckoning with Atlantic slavery open a path to tackling racism today? This article addresses these questions in turn. Its principal referent is the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, set in the wider context of the city’s self-image and French debates around commemorating the Atlantic slave trade. The article concludes that even though Bordeaux’s slaving past is integrated into the Musée d’Aquitaine’s guiding chronology, the full ramifications of slavery for colonial modernity have not been understood or represented. Beyond simplistic dichotomies of guilt and innocence, accusation and repentance, the enormous significance of coloniality and slavery in constituting European modernity, not least the Enlightenment, have yet to be grasped and assimilated in Bordeaux.

A Novel Reevaluation of Atlantic Slavery

A Novel Reevaluation of Atlantic Slavery

Historical Archaeology of the Dente Shrine at Peki, Ghana: Landscapes of Power and Memories of Atlantic Slavery in West Africa

Historical Archaeology of the Dente Shrine at Peki, Ghana: Landscapes of Power and Memories of Atlantic Slavery in West Africa

O Engenho de açúcar: André João Antonil and the Anatomy of the Seventeenth-Century Brazilian Slave Plantation

Jesuit João André Antonil’s Cultura e Opulência do Brasil is perhaps the first comprehensive treatise on slave plantation agriculture in the Americas. However, it is neither a manual nor an economic analysis. Rather, it is a moral and ethical guide for the administration of a sugar mill. This article examines the concepts, categories of thought, structures of meaning, and interpretive strategies through which Antonil comprehends the process of commodity production for the world market on the slave engenho. Antonil’s conceptual horizon was constrained by the Jesuit synthesis of Aristotelean thought and post-Tridentine Christian doctrine and the conception of the Last Judgement as the end of historical time. Consequently, he could not conceptualize the modernity of Atlantic slavery, the world market, and the plantation as a new temporality. Instead, he analyzes the engenho through the Aristotelean concept of oikos or household. The categories of thought and action through which Antonil comprehends the slave plantation and world market reveal the contradictory relation between slave production and the world market in the Iberian Atlantic.

Sankofa Imperatives: Black Women, Digital Methods, and the Archival Turn

This essay takes up the archival turn—what the author is calling the “sankofa imperative”—in digital spaces, using the work of the Colored Conventions Project to ask broader questions about the recovery of Black women’s life stories and organizing efforts. Does a collective, distributed model of recuperative history in a digital, digitized, database age change both the equation and the ways in which scholars grapple with the argument that “the violence of Atlantic slavery was so great, and the limits of the archive so absolute, that no amount of historical recovery could properly describe it, let alone undo its damage,” as the editors of Social Text’s special issue “The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom and the Archive” put it? Do historical calculations of slavery, Black unfreedom and its afterlives, and their accompanying archival violence function differently when recovery methods extend beyond the temporal limits that analog intellectual production demands? How does conventional (or pre-digital) scholarship in print formats differ from non-analog timelines that enable additional materials to be recovered, uploaded, and aggregated collectively and over time? This essay examines collective digital practices that can piece together scattered Black women’s archives and historical shards.

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

The history behind Bridgerton

While the Bridgerton () series does not present itself as historically accurate, shows set in the past always lead to historical questions. In this article I argue for using fictional historical series as a tool in the classroom and to engage with the public. Bridgerton is a useful entrée into topics it emphasizes, such as the British aristocracy, fashion and design, courtship and marriage and the British colony of India, as well as those that it ignores: male monarchy, patriarchy, singleness and Atlantic slavery.

Ser y vivir esclavo: Identidad, aculturación y agency (Mundos Mediterraneos y Atlanticos, Siglos XIII–XVIII), ed. Fabienne P. Guillén and Roser Salicruú i Lluch

The study of slavery, and especially of slavery in the Mediterranean, is one of the most dynamic fields of medieval and early modern studies, with scholars in both Europe and the Anglo-American world producing innovative studies that break through long-established presumptions and long-standing but obsolete binaries (such as between enslaved and free, or Islam and Christendom). This is due in part to the training that many graduate students now receive, which enables them to compare sources from both the Islamic and Christian worlds, in part to the analysis of hitherto neglected sources, and in part due to the innovations in methodology and perspective that are emerging both out of interdisciplinary approaches and the cross-pollination of scholars of various national and regional traditions who see themselves working in a Mediterranean or Atlantic, rather than a national, frame. Fabienne Guillén and Roser Salicrú i Lluch’s volume gathers together thirteen essays on various aspects of Mediterranean and Atlantic slavery, bookended by introductory and concluding essays.

Accounting, slavery and the slave trade: A multi-continental perspective

As in other disciplines, the Atlantic slave-trade and New World slavery have assumed an increasingly contentious role in accounting history. In her Accounting for Slavery, Rosenthal has recently located many current business practices in the nexus between accounting, capitalism and slavery. Other accounting historians have explored slave-trading ventures from Africa, the role of accounting and slavery in New World colonisation, and in accounting and managerial practices in the slave-estates of the Americas. Absent from the extant literature are studies that explore the nexus between accounting, capitalism and slavery from a multi-continental perspective that considers Atlantic slavery as an integrated whole. This study, by drawing on the Trans-Atlantic Slave-trade Database, seeks to fill this gap, examining the correlations between Atlantic slavery and African demographic and social regression, European prosperity and New World accounting and managerial practices. In doing so, it argues that accounting played a fundamentally different role in the slave economy to that which it undertook in emerging systems of industrial capitalism.

Communications

Communications Alden T. Vaughan and Miles P. Grier To the Editor: The recent announcement that the 2022 Douglass Adair Memorial Award winner is "Staging the Cherokee Othello: An Imperial Economy of Indian Watching" by Miles P. Grier in the January 2016 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly prompts me to submit a minor correction. Professor Grier wonders if a book that Virginia Mason Vaughan and I coauthored, Shakespeare in America, "doubt[s] the veracity of the story" (78) regarding the Cherokee performance of 1752, the principal subject of his article. Interested readers will find the episode discussed in our book on pp. 22–23.1 Alden T. Vaughan Columbia University, emeritus Response to Letter to the Editor: I met Professors Alden and Virginia Mason Vaughan in May of 2016 when Virginia and I spoke on the same panel at "America's Shakespeare," an event sponsored by the Brown University Library and Rhode Island Historical Society. On that occasion, Alden informed me of the substance of this letter. I had written that the Vaughans' Shakespeare in America "omit[ted] the Cherokees from their discussion of the first season of professional theater offered in North America" (78) in 1752. I speculated in the article that perhaps this omission indicated that they doubted the veracity of the Virginia Gazette's report. He noted that they do discuss the incident several pages later. I was mortified, at first. How could I have made such an error? When I got my hands on a copy, I realized that I was not entirely wrong. After moving from that first season of 1752 to the 1770s, the Vaughans include an interlude without a subheading, stepping out of the chapter's chronological order to loop back and cover together all the records of Cherokees at colonial American playhouses. [End Page 428] I addressed the matter. For the revised version of the article, appearing in my book Inkface: "Othello" and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (forthcoming from University of Virginia Press in late 2023), I moved the Vaughans' book from a footnote listing scholars who pass over the Cherokees' interruption of the 1752 performance of Othello to one containing those who give credence to the Virginia Gazette's implication that the empress of the Cherokees could not grasp the concept of playacting. That decision reflects the fact that the Vaughans eventually credit the "veracity" of the Virginia Gazette's short article on the interrupted performance. At first, though, they adopt a neutral stance: "What the Indians thought of Shakespeare's play is unrecorded, but a newspaper reported that they expressed 'great surprise' at the Harlequin pantomime afterpiece, 'as did the fighting with naked swords on the stage, which occasioned the empress to order some about her to go and prevent their killing one another.'" Here, the Vaughans decline to speculate on what motivated the surprised expressions and the command to intervene in the action. However, later they write that British Atlantic playhouses hosted "overflow audiences [who] came to ogle exotic strangers struggling to comprehend Shakespearian drama." While their choice of "exotic" suggests that the authors are ventriloquizing an imperial view that they do not share, the phrase "struggling to comprehend Shakespearian drama" transforms an inference that depends upon the reliability of the Gazette's depiction into a fact.2 The Cherokees who attended the command performance at Williamsburg in 1752 were seasoned diplomats representing a sovereign polity. Since they were not subject to the pressure to "comprehend Shakespearian drama" familiar to modern-day ticketholders or students taking a compulsory course, I decided a different question was in order. Rather than asking whether Cherokees had enough Anglo cultural competency to understand the speech and action of Othello, I asked whether the Virginia Gazette could be relied upon to "comprehend" what in Othello could have provoked chief Amouskositte's wife to disrupt the ceremonies surrounding negotiations to establish diplomatic and economic ties between her people and Virginia. I concluded that it was likely that the spectacle of a blacked-up personage's arrest at the hands of an armed white guard signaled to her that Virginia would insist on jurisdiction over Cherokees accused of crimes...

Eric Herschthal. The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress.

Over the past few decades, historians have demonstrated the variety of ways in which slavery was wrapped up with modernity. From Joyce Chaplin’s An Anxious Pursuit (1993) to Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), scholars have uncovered how everything from modern science to industrial capitalism relied on the world of Atlantic slavery. In making this argument, Chaplin, Beckert, and others built on the earlier work of African American, Caribbean, and Black British scholars, most notably Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Together, these historians challenged the consensus—which emerged over the course of the nineteenth century—that slavery was fundamentally antimodern, a relic of the past. All this left a significant and, until now, relatively unexplored question. If slavery was so obviously tied to modernity, why did anyone think it was so antiquated in the first place? How, in other words, did slavery come to be seen as the opposite of modern? Eric Herschthal gives the first detailed answer to this question in his brilliant new book, The Science of Abolition. Moving from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century and covering much of the Atlantic world, Herschthal develops a sophisticated account of how the antislavery movement used science to advance its political goals. This is the “science of abolition” of the title (2). In doing so, Herschthal makes a number of important contributions to the historiographies of both science and slavery.

In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 by Jesus Sanjurjo

Reviewed by: In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 by Jesus Sanjurjo Ricardo Raùl Salazar Rey In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870. By Jesus Sanjurjo. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2021. This economically crafted monograph recounts more of the history behind the shape and intensity of the Atlantic slave trade from the Age of Revolutions to its end. Jesús Sanjurjo centers the “ever loyal,” if widely entangled, island of Cuba, as the wealth of its plantocracy became the lodestar of the reduced nineteenth-century Spanish Empire. He weaves the words of the protagonists with his analysis into a compelling narrative that connects the sudden and seemingly unstoppable growth of the Atlantic slave trade into the Spanish Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century and its sudden and dramatic end in the 1860s. Focusing on the colonies that remained under the control of Spain, he illuminates what has been overshadowed by the drama of mainland IberoAmerican independence and its aftermath; Sanjurjo connects his work with the historiographies of imperialism, Atlantic slavery and Iberian history, creating links throughout the chapters. The book opens in 1811 with the Spanish metropolis occupied and the Empire buckling under the relentless pressure of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. From the beginning of European hostilities in 1792, the Spanish government had moved between unwilling alliance with, and active resistance to, French demands. After fifteen years of continuous efforts, not the least of which resulted in the annihilation of the combined fleet at Trafalgar, the Spanish monarchy pushed against French power. With disdain and disappointment Napoleon gambled, invading Iberia and dethroning Ferdinand VII “el deseado,” setting off the Peninsular War (1807–1814) also known as his “Spanish ulcer.” The unfolding crisis rippled outwards, straining imperial bonds that had held for 300 years. Starting in the lead up to the Constitution of 1812, Sanjurjo recurrently features a young liberal deputy named Agustín de Argüelles (1776–1844) who, in alliance and admiration of British abolitionists, led the efforts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade through the Constitution of 1812. His failure to persuade the Cortes comes despite regulation of slavery being a core competency of the Spanish empire. During the centuries that Spain controlled vast mainland American provinces, slavery and the slave trade were taxed and regulated to throttle their full potential. Further strengthening Argüelles’ arguments, the bloody but triumphant rebellion of enslaved and freed people that consumed the murderous prosperity of Saint Domingue and gave birth to Haiti, stalked the nightmares of the powerful. Nevertheless, the Spanish Cortes chose to continue the unlimited Atlantic slave trade into what was left of the empire. Furthermore, in the Constitution they stripped the franchise from Afro-Iberians. Argüelles and the moderates failed despite the moving descriptions, quoted by Sanjurjo, of the evils they were committing and limiting their goal to ending the Atlantic slave trade, not the institution of slavery. The creative destruction of the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic created glittering business opportunities that a preponderance of elites across the Spanish Empire chose to prioritize. In a telling echo of the current practice of multinationals moving wherever regulation is weakest, the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, followed by the USA in 1808, did not disarticulate the human, material or financial infrastructure that had developed over the last 350 years to enable the Atlantic slave trade to keep the plantation complex fed. Concurrently, Spain lost all of its mainland provinces and this caused a change of guard amidst Spanish imperial officials. Liberalism, including the right to dispose of property in the form of people without restraints from state or church, increasingly became the new ideal. Between 1800 and 1870 the Atlantic slave traders, blocked from their usual outlets, poured approximately 700,000 African people into Cuba. Ill prepared to rule and weakened by Napoleonic trauma, Ferdinand VII freed himself from the Constitution of 1812 while keeping the UK on side by capitulating to the anti-slave trade Treaty of 1817. This treaty...