Colonial Slave Societies Research Articles

Introduction: “The Unexpected Caribbean” Part II

Introduction: “The Unexpected Caribbean” Part II

Une société coloniale esclavagiste à l’échelle du monde. L’empire portugais selon A. J. R. Russell-Wood

Une société coloniale esclavagiste à l’échelle du monde. L’empire portugais selon A. J. R. Russell-Wood

Cor, qualidade e condição

Abstract This article discusses color terms and variants used to refer to subjects in an eighteenth-century colonial slave society. Here we return to discussions about the use of the term “pardo” (brown), emphasizing the specificities of the captaincy of Pernambuco and the constant changes in the color terms used in relation to individuals. Color, in fact, was an integral part of an individual’s identity. We start from the assumption that identity encompassed, in a broad sense, elements such as their social class, religion, occupation, and the subject’s own color, which, in turn, was not only a matter of complexion but also social and economic elements. Their racial identity was a kind of umbrella term that served to qualify or disqualify the subjects, whereas their social condition was related to the legal situation of the subject, being free or enslaved. In short, the present article shows that color classification in the colonial space of Pernambuco was dynamic and changed over time depending on the individuals’ situations. This is where networks of sociability and economic power come into play and enable these changes in color terms.

The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (review)

Reviewed by: The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano Benjamín N. Narváez The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples. Edited by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 624 pp. $95.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper). Writing a comprehensive and accessible account of more than five hundred years of Caribbean history is no easy task. Completing such a project by weaving together thirty-nine essays by forty different experts in Caribbean studies (including historians, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists) is even more difficult to do well. Stephen Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano, the editors of The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, should be commended for doing so successfully. In covering the history of the Caribbean from pre-Columbian times to the present, the editors and their contributors present a number of important concepts with two main arguments standing out. First, the Caribbean was and is an important site of destruction and creation in both a material and a cultural sense. Materially speaking, colonialism led to the virtual elimination of the Caribbean’s indigenous peoples and the subsequent development of plantation slavery with imported African labor. Slavery was a destructive force that ripped people away from their homes and cultures and worked many to death, but it also allowed Europeans to produce unprecedented amounts of wealth through sugar and other commodities. Out of the dislocation and destruction caused by colonialism and plantation society emerged new cultural formations. As this book makes evident, a process of creolization (i.e., massive cultural transformation through the creation of new and blended cultural traditions from the remnants of older destroyed ones) has been a definitive characteristic of the Caribbean. Indigenous and African traditions (especially the latter) merged with European ways to create vibrant creole Caribbean cultures (in terms of language, religion, social relationships, farming techniques, food, and more). During the long nineteenth century, Asians migrated to this region, as did a new wave of Europeans (particularly Spaniards to Cuba), both [End Page 437] of whom further contributed to the creation of hybrid cultures in the Caribbean. The cultures of different societies have constantly come into contact with each other and changed through these interactions, but the Caribbean was particularly a hotbed of cultural blending and new cultural formation. The second main argument is that the Caribbean has played a crucial role in world history and processes of globalization. The book makes this clear in a number of ways. The Caribbean was central to the making of the “Atlantic World.” The region linked Africa to both Europe and the New World more directly through the slave trade. The Haitian Revolution had reverberations throughout the Americas and in Europe, inspiring some and terrifying others. Caribbean colonial slave societies and plantation agriculture (especially sugar which originated in the Old World) allowed European nations to gain massive amounts of wealth and have the capital and markets needed for industrialization and modernization. In fact, the Caribbean sugar plantation, despite (and in part due to) slavery, served as the world’s first modern industry. Abolitionism linked transnational actors. The islands of the Caribbean became important sites of competition among European powers in their battles over the balance of power in Europe. The region loomed large in the U.S. imagination and U.S. intervention contributed to the rise of the United States as a global power. During the twentieth century, the Caribbean may have seemed to have lost much of its global importance, but in reality it continued to play an important role in world developments, particularly through the impact of Garveyism, the Cuban Revolution, and the large-scale migration of many residents of the region to the United States, Canada, and Europe. In making these arguments about creolization and the connection between the Caribbean and global history, the book is right to suggest that the history of this region is one filled with “triumphs and tragedies” (p. 4). Examples abound. Europeans succeeded in dominating the Caribbean, but this “triumph” led to the decimation of the indigenous population, the development of the horrors of plantation...

Scrambling for Slaves: Captive Sales in Colonial South Carolina

Based in part on previously neglected sales records, this article offers the first detailed analysis of slave sales by the method known as ‘the scramble’. In eighteenth-century South Carolina, the scramble was the preferred sales mechanism for newly arrived Africans, with auction sales generally reserved for slaves already in the colony. Analysis of the sales and other records suggest that the scramble was an economically rational way to sell imported slaves, but that it fell out of favor after the American Revolution as problems of currency and credit rendered it too cumbersome. The article concludes by proposing that the scramble helped to shape colonial slave society by allowing poorer whites greater access to slaves than the auction method.

Slavery, freedom, and abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic world

The last New World countries to abolish slavery were Cuba and Brazil, more than twenty years after slave emancipation in the United States. Why slavery was so resilient and how people in Latin America fought against it are the subjects of this compelling study. Beginning with the roots of African slavery in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberian empires, this work explores central issues, including the transatlantic slave trade, labor, Afro-Latin American cultures, racial identities in colonial slave societies, and the spread of antislavery ideas and social movements. A study of Latin America, this work, with its Atlantic- world framework, will also appeal to students of slavery and abolition in other Atlantic empires and nation-states in the early modern and modern eras.

Supervisors of Small Worlds: The Role of Overseers on Colonial South Carolina Slave Plantations

The established historiography of slavery includes a substantial body of work on the colonial period, with particular emphasis upon the Atlantic slave trade and the development of the plantation system and the slave community embedded within it. However, one key element in the organization of plantations has received little attention: the overseers. Slave owners and slaves are well represented in documentary sources, yet overseers, despite their importance in the plantation system, remain shadowy figures in the story of slavery in the colonial era. Overseers were charged with the responsibility of supervising slave labor and maintaining the plantation owners’ human property. With a particular focus on the slave plantations of Henry Laurens, one of South Carolina's most successful and influential slave-owning entrepreneurs, this work explores the precise function of overseers within the colonial slave society of South Carolina. It will challenge the conventional image of overseers as poor, white, brutish task-masters, and show that in fact, only some of those in the occupation conformed to this crude stereotype. The role of overseer was vital to the day-to-day operation of slavery but it entailed neither absolute authority nor social standing. Analyzing recruitment patterns, overseers’ backgrounds, their daily role and activities, payment methods and rewards, their personal ambitions, employer-overseer-slave relations, and the prejudices men in this role faced, reveals much about those from the lower stratum of white society in colonial South Carolina. Using the often fragmentary evidence the overseer emerges from the shadows as a far more rounded and human figure than in the established historiography or popular culture. Many overseers proved hardworking, effective and prospered from their role on the plantation. This work not only reveals why many men became overseers despite the stigma attached to the job, but also sheds light on the complexities involved in slave ownership and ordering multi-racial plantation communities in the early American South.

Marronage, Manumission and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean

This article analyses the permeable boundaries between slavery and freedom which developed in the context of illicit inter-imperial trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Caribbean, focusing on ties between the Dutch island of Curaçao and the neighbouring northern coast of Spanish South America. As smuggling opened opportunities for enslaved people to cross political borders, it spurred authorities to develop flexible legal frameworks to meet the challenge of conducting free trade in colonial slave societies. The evidence indicates that, even in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, slavery sometimes existed along a legal continuum, rather than as an immutable, absolute category.

O universo mágico das curas: o papel das práticas mágicas e feitiçarias no universo do Mato Grosso setecentista

The article analyzes the role of healing agents played by practitioners of magic and witchcraft in Mato Grosso society during the 17th century. It observes that magic and witchcraft were developed as competitors, alternatives or associated with other forms of healing (official and lay). It points out how such roles contributed to the process of subjugating its practitioners, especially Africans, Indians and their descendents, and were appropriated as an opportunity for survival in the colonial slave society. The pastoral visit made by Bruno Pinna in 1785 to Cuiabá and nearby areas served as the principal source of knowledge regarding the practices and practitioners of magic and witchcraft.

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities, c. 1650–1838

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.

Blue and Brown: Contraband Indigo and the Rise of a Free Colored Planter Class in French Saint-Domingue

In 1791 the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue became the site of the only successful slave uprising in the history of the New World. As the French Revolution reshaped the political and social institutions of the mother country, Saint-Domingue's free people of color, led by an indigo planter from the island's southern peninsula, began a campaign for civil reform that helped destabilize colonial slave society. Despite their pivotal role in what would become the Haitian Revolution, relatively little is known about this important population. Widely acknowledged to be the largest and wealthiest group of its kind in the New World, this class comprised a remarkable 47 percent of the colony's free inhabitants in 1788. While elsewhere in the eighteenth-century Caribbean free coloreds tended to be urban based, most of Saint-Domingue'sgens de couleurdwelt in the countryside and a number were successful planters. By 1790 members of this class owned enough slaves and plantations that they were said to possess one-third of the colony.