David Eltis Research Articles

Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: A Reply

comment by David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and David Richardson brings to fore issues about productivity in slave-based economies, and about broader interpretations of those societies and their successor economies. Their assessment confirms that prices derived from probate inventories behaved like those derived from market transactions, suggesting that rich data available in probate inventories can be brought to bear on important issues in colonial economic history. We disagree, however, with their finding that slave productivity in Lower South grew much more rapidly than we estimated. They maintain that our estimates of productivity are biased downward because export price series we used to deflate nominal slave prices rises too rapidly for two reasons.' First, they argue that rice price we used for period 17221731 is conceptually different from price we used for period after 1731. Second, they contend that Philadelphia rice prices, which were higher and rose more slowly than Charleston prices, would be a better measure of prices received by rice producers. They also exaggerate differences between their estimates and ours when they contend that The lack of productivity is especially puzzling given our estimate that during period 1722 to 1775 slave prices in South Carolina were increasing somewhat faster than in Caribbean.2 Our finding of the lack of productivity growth to which they refer is for entire period 1722 to 1800, not 1722 to 1775, a period when slave prices were rising rapidly. Their focus on period down to end of century obscures an important point, namely that we also find slave productivity in period before 1775. They alluded to this in a footnote, but it needs greater stress. We estimated that real slave prices rose between 1722-1724 and 1770-1774 at an annual rate of 0.8 percent, well above 0.4 rate they report for Caribbean. Although our estimated increase is well below 1.65 percent annual rate of that they estimate for Lower

Children in European systems of slavery: Introduction

This special edition on children in western systems of slavery1 follows last year's special edition of Slavery & Abolition on women in western systems of slavery in moving beyond the conventional t...

The Yoruba diaspora in the Atlantic world

1. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World: Methodology and Research by Matt D. Childs and Toyin Falola.I. The Yoruba Homeland and Diaspora 2. The Diaspora of Yoruba-Speakers, 1650-1865: Dimensions and Implications by David Eltis. 3. The Yoruba Factor in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade by Paul Lovejoy. 4. The Enslavement of Yoruba by Ann O'Hear.II. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Americas 5. Nango and Mina: The Yoruba Diaspora in Brazil by Joao Jose Reis and Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian 6. The Yoruba in Cuba: Origins, Identities, and Transformations by Michele Reid. 7. Africans in a Colony of Creoles: The Yoruba in Colonial Costa Rica by K. Russel Lohse. 8. Yoruba in the British Caribbean: A Comparative Perspective on Trinidad and the Bahamas by Rosalyn Howard. 9. The Influential Yoruba Past in Haiti by Kevin Roberts.III. The Cultural Foundations of the Yoruba Diaspora 10. The Nagoization: Process in Bahian Candomble by Luis Nicalau Pares. 11. Santeria in Cuba: Tradition and Transformation by Christine Ayorinde. 12. From Gbe to Yoruba: Ethnic Change and the Mina Nation in Rio de Janeiro by Mariza C. Soares. 13. Yoruba Family, Gender, and Kinship Roles in New World Slavery by Kevin Roberts. 14. Revolution and Religion: Yoruba Sacred Music in Socialist Cuba by Robin Moore. 15. Lost and Found: Yorubna Elements in African American Arts by Babatunde Lawal. 16. Yorubaisms in African American Speech Patterns by Agustine AgwueleIV. The Return to Yorubaland 17. Yoruba Liberated Slaves Who Returned to West Africa by Robin Law. 18. The Yoruba Diaspora in Sierra Leone's Krio Society by C. Magbaily Fyle. 19. Liberated Slaves and Islam in Nineteenth Century West Africa by Gibril R. Cole.

Slavery in the Development of the Americas

This collection of essays forms a festschrift for Stanley L. Engerman, who has done as much as any other scholar to promote the study of slavery in the Atlantic world over the past four decades. He has written numerous articles, coedited volumes, and reshaped other historians' thoughts on the socioeconomic context of New World slavery. The volume falls into four parts. Part 1 (“Establishing the System”) offers contributions by Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer. Drescher echoes recent work by David Eltis in explaining the moral, political, and institutional barriers that led Europeans to refrain from employing white Europeans as slaves in plantation America. Emmer analyzes why the Dutch gained only a foothold in the slave Americas after starting out with promising prospects for becoming a major player in Atlantic slavery in the early seventeenth century. Part 2 (“Patterns of Slave Use”) offers three case studies. Lorena S. Walsh looks at mercantile strategies and financial arrangements in the supply of convicts, servants, and slaves to different parts of the colonial Chesapeake. Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein examine African slave production of subsistence crops in the urban setting of nineteenth-century São Paulo. Frank D. Lewis offers a comparative evaluation of slave manumission in Guadeloupe and the United States. Part 3 (“Productivity Change and Its Implications”) again includes three papers. Eltis and David Richardson chart the long-run price trends and regional differentials in the prices of Africans arriving in the Americas from 1673 to 1865. Laird W. Bergad analyzes slave price rises in the 1850s in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. Elizabeth B. Field-Hendrey and Lee A. Craig compare the efficiency of free and slave agriculture in the antebellum United States. Part 4 (“Implications for Distribution and Growth”) includes contributions by James R. Irwin on wealth accumulation in Virginia in the century before the Civil War, by Philip D. Morgan on early American slavery and poverty, and by Robert A. Margo on the wage differentials between the North and the South before and after the Civil War.

Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (review)

Reviewed by: Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World by Trevor Burnard T.K. Hunter Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. By Trevor Burnard. University of North Carolina Press, 2004. The structure of colonialism provided a number of those who were relatively powerless in the Imperial metropole unique opportunities for (a qualified) social mobility and access to power undeserved and of an unprecedented magnitude. Where else could a non-descript second son of an ordinary eighteenth century English tenant farmer build a secure financial profile (with wealth held both in land and human property), and, at the end of his life, die in the knowledge that, having fetched up on foreign shores with precious little to his name his great expectations had been met? Where else but on the shores of an island that constituted one of Britain’s enormously profitable plantation colonies: Jamaica. For Thomas Thistlewood, certainly, Jamaica was the answer. Trevor Burnard’s study of Thistlewood is a welcome contribution to the literature of the British Caribbean that includes scholars such as Hilary Beckles, Michael Craton, Richard Dunn, David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, Richard B. Sheridan and Sidney Mintz to name but a few. Their work is key to understanding the British presence and success in the Caribbean. Burnard’s approach combines a social history of Jamaica from the 1750s (when the young Thomas Thistlewood arrived) to the late 1780s (when, at the age of sixty-five, Thistlewood died), with a biography of Thistlewood as he “made sense of the strange environment he found himself in” (7). Thistlewood wanted the debt-free assurance of “competency” and to establish himself on the land (38). Providing us with rich detail, Burnard draws for us a map of Thistlewood’s life in Jamaica: his early success as an overseer shortly after his arrival, his stint as a pen keeper, his eventual membership in the club of Jamaican planters. Through Thistlewood’s own words, Burnard demonstrates that he was a man of contradictions: eager for success, yet of a prickly temperament; coldly calculating, yet capable of great wonder; as quick to use his female slaves for sexual gratification as he was to derive pleasure from gardening. In short, Thistlewood could be considered both unpredictable and unusual. And, yet, for all of his insatiable and predatory sexual appetite, for all of his savagery (he was not the least bit averse to inventing and employing a mind-bogglingly disgusting punishment for transgressive slaves involving the forced ingestion of feces), for all of his distinct lack of self-reflexivity, Thistlewood, as author Trevor Burnard reminds us, provides us with an obsessively regular diary. Burnard does not suggest that Thistlewood and his diary-keeping was typical of eighteenth century white Jamaican planters. He argues, in fact, that, atypicality aside, Thistlewood’s diary can be mined for singularly detailed information about the interactions between the enslaved – male and female – and their master. At the core of those interactions, in silent operation, was power, and Burnard’s book is an inquiry into the action of that power. When discussing slavery, it seems one can only be at a loss regarding the brutality of the institution; imagination fails us, doubtless because it brings us too close to our own dark capabilities. Still, portions of the physical and psychological reprisals have been well-documented, and so, in some small way, the violence and yes, the immorality of the inhuman systems of New World slavery are familiar. Mutilations can be detected easily, and the grisly catalogue coolly enumerated: a branding here, an amputation there, a psychopathological application of the lash elsewhere. We know a little of the language of horror – although it is more likely that, in our efforts at cultivating an historian’s detachment, we have largely anesthetized our minds, and certainly our modern bodies know no frame of reference. Even in its inaccessibility, we can consider slavery in terms of the physical manifestations. However, the discussion of power present us with challenges altogether different. Embedded in the ability to mutilate, to dictate the comings and goings of lives that ought to have been thriving, self...

Speakin' Power: Notions of Work, Power, Speech, and Transformation in Africa and Coastal Georgia

Speakin’ Power: Notions of Work, Power, Speech, and Transformation in Africa and Coastal Georgia Frederick Knight During the 1930s, artists and intellectuals employed by the New Deal’s Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) combed the Southern United States to interview former slaves and their offspring about their experiences during “slavery times.”1 In particular, a group of interviewers from the Savannah Unit of the FWP searched coastal Georgia and the Sea Islands for “African survivals” or cultural forms that could be traced back to Africa. Black coastal Georgians had become known for their distinctive Gullah language and their cultural practices, and the FWP sought to add to the extant record. As the interviewers moved from town to town and spoke to former slaves and descendants of slaves, they unearthed a number of African survivals including religious practices, words, and material objects. For example, an interviewer recorded the testimony of Ben Washington, who lived five miles from the community of Eulonia, Georgia, in McIntosh County, and gave evidence of African cultural practices among Afro-Georgians. Washington wore a “long frock coat and high felt hat” and, like an African elder, was “carrying a walking stick.” He spoke of a world inhabited by spirits, of root doctors who had the power to heal, of the magic power of crosses, of funeral ceremonies, and of religious services marked with drum music and sacred dance. He also mentioned magic tools and recalled, “I heah lots uh tings bout duh hoe. I heah tell bout how it jis stan right up in duh fiel by itself an wuk fu yuh widout nobody techin it —das ef yuh kin wuk it right.”2 Washington was one of several Afro-Georgians who recounted stories about magic tools, accounts which contained a deeper set of African ideas about work, knowledge, speech, power, and transformation that contested the ultimate authority of the planter class. Though recorded in the twentieth century, the interviews of Ben Washington and others in Drums and Shadows provide a glimpse of the world view of Afro-Georgians in the colonial and antebellum eras. For generations, black Georgians passed on stories about people who mastered magic tools. Given their relative isolation from white planters, who generally lived away from their agricultural estates, the Gullah of coastal Georgia possessed a significant amount of cultural autonomy. In front of their hearths and on their front porches, they maintained a vibrant oral tradition, including tales of people who could make tools work by themselves. To understand the deeper significance of their stories about magic tools, it is useful to place the Afro-Georgian community within an historical context of the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trade, slave labor in the Georgia Lowcountry, and the structure of plantation authority and power. When the tales about magic tools appeared in print in 1940, Africans and their descendants had inhabited Georgia for nearly two centuries and had constituted a majority of the population in some regions since the colonial era. After the colonial government lifted its ban on slavery, prospective Georgia planters bought slaves from South Carolina or followed their neighbors to the north and in other parts of the Anglo-American world into the Atlantic slave trade, establishing slave labor camps for staple crop production.3 The African work force that raised these staple crops came from both West Central Africa and West Africa, though people from particular regions predominated. According to the database compiled by David Eltis, et. al., ships bound to Georgia carried a total of 15,729 Africans to Georgia, of whom 13,782 survived. Of the people disembarking in Georgia, 3,999 (25.4% of the total) came from regions of Africa not specified in the documents. 3,153 came from West-Central Africa (20% of the total; 26.90% of the total when those whose origin was unspecified are excluded). 2,890 people who disembarked in Georgia were from Sierra Leone (18.40%; 24.60%). 2,513 were from the Senegambia Region (16.00% and 21.40%). 1,606 Africans came from Gold Coast ports (10.20%; 13.70%). And 1,568 arrived from the Windward Coast (9.97%; 13.40%).4 While these figures provide...

Reviews of Books:Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives David Eltis

Reviews of Books:Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives David Eltis

David Eltis, editor. <italic>Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives</italic>. (The Making of Modern Freedom.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 447. $65.00

Journal Article David Eltis, editor. Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. (The Making of Modern Freedom.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 447. $65.00 Get access Eltis David, editor. Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. (The Making of Modern Freedom.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 447. $65.00. Nemata Blyden Nemata Blyden George Washington University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 143–144, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.1.143 Published: 01 February 2004

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas

Of Small Things Remembered: Beads, Cowries, and Cultural Translations of the Atlantic Experience in Yorubaland

the ways that Atlantic imports were used as objects of cultural and political capital, altering the physical and cognitive realities of the people, and the impact of the sheer volume and new varieties of commodities on cultural transformations are questions rarely asked in the history of Atlantic Africa, especially in the Bight of Benin, between Allada/Dahomey in the wvest and the Benin Kingdom in the east. Rather, there has been a tendency in the historiography towards an instrumentalist economic approach in which the impact of the Atlantic economy on Africa and the importance of Africa to the Atlantic economy are reduced to dollar/pound values. These approaches often lead to facile questions and analyses that ignore or gloss over the lived Atlantic experience in African societies.3 This instrumental reasoning underlies David Eltis's argument that the slave and

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, David Eltis

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, David Eltis Get access Suzanne Schwarz Suzanne Schwarz Liverpool Hope University College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 467, June 2001, Pages 732–733, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/116.467.732 Published: 01 June 2001

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, David Eltis

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, David Eltis

The South and the Caribbean

The South and the Caribbean. Edited by Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez and Charles Reagan Wilson. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii, 208. Acknowledgments, introduction, notes, contributors, index. $35.00.) More so than by geographical proximity, the U.S. South and the Caribbean are linked by the legacies of plantation slavery-by the complex codes of racism reinforcing hierarchical and exclusive societies on the one hand, and by extraordinarily rich African-American cultures on the other. The essays collected here examine these legacies, reaching towards new understandings of the regions in question. Each of the four research articles that make up the heart of the volume is matched by a brief commentary, a format that stems from the volume's origin as a symposium. This works best when the paired authors disagree substantially, as is the case with Ralph Lee Woodward, who emphasizes large-scale economic causation and dependency theory in his sketch of the foundational political economy of the Caribbean, and David Eltis, who responds with a call for closer attention to historical contingency and to contextual information. In particular, Eltis carefully rebuts Woodward's claim that the profits of Caribbean slavery jump-started the Industrial Revolution. In leaving the work of synthesis for the reader, Woodward and Eltis fulfill the volume's goal of stimulating comparative analysis of regional problems. The format works less well when the paired authors have much the same thing to say, as is the case with Roger Abrahams's essay revealing the similarities between modes of musical expression in the South and the Caribbean and Kenneth Bilby's comment, which merely adds details to several of Abrahams's points. Both of these essays, in turn, are enriched by Charles Joyner's comparison of African culture within the slave systems of the South and the Caribbean. Joyner posits the existence of a common African-American cultural grammar molding local lexicons. This formulation transcends previous dichotomies of African survivals or retentions versus New World inventions, enabling more nuanced comprehension of the real similarities underlying regionally diverse African-American cultural expressions. In one pairing, the first author unintentionally leads the second astray: in the course of developing her rich and provocative comparison of lynching in the South and in Cuba, Aline Helg refers to a Cuban black middle class that failed to defend poor blacks from a massacre perpetrated by the Cuban Army in 1912. …

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas

Why were the countries with the most developed institutions of individual freedom also the leaders in establishing the most exploitative system of slavery that the world has ever seen? In seeking to provide new answers to this question, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas examines the development of the English Atlantic slave system between 1650 and 1800. The book outlines a major African role in the evolution of the Atlantic societies before the nineteenth century and argues that the transatlantic slave trade was a result of African strength rather than African weakness. It also addresses changing patterns of group identity to account for the racial basis of slavery in the early modern Atlantic World. Exploring the paradox of the concurrent development of slavery and freedom in the European domains, David Eltis provides a fresh interpretation of this difficult historical problem.

Terms of labor: slavery, serfdom, and free labor

Introduction Stanley L. Engerman 1. Slavery and freedom in the early modern world David Eltis 2. Free labor vs. slave labor: the British and Caribbean cases Seymour Drescher 3. After serfdom: Russian emancipation in comparative perspective Peter Kolchin 4. From autonomy to abundance: changing beliefs about the free labour system in nineteenth-century America Leon Fink 5. Changing legal conceptions of free labor Robert J. Steinfeld 6. Race, labor and gender in the languages of antebellum social protest David Roediger 7. 'We did not separate man and wife, but all had to work': freedom and dependence in the aftermath of slave emancipation Amy Dru Stanley 8. Free labor, law and American trade unionism David Brody 9. Social mobility, free labor, and the American dream Clayne Pope Notes Index.

Gunpowder Weaponry and the Rise of the Early Modern State

S the 1988 publication of Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, the term ‘Military Revolution’ has become common parlance and accepted scholarship among military historians. Recent books and collections of articles by Brian M. Downing, Weston F. Cook Jr, David Eltis, Clifford J. Rogers, and Andrew Ayton and J.L. Price have even incorporated the term in their titles. All these works agreed that a revolution in military tactics and strategy had been effected by the innovation of gunpowder weaponry. And while it is true that the ‘Military Revolution’ thesis has had its critics, these, like Jeremy Black, John A. Lynn, Bert S. Hall and myself, have specifically targeted Parker’s ideas of technological determinism.

Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System.

Preface Introduction Barbara L. Solow 1. Slacery and colonization Barbara L. Solow 2. The Old World background of slavery in the Americas William D. Phillips, Jr. 3. Slavery and lagging capitalism in the Spanish and Portuguese American empires, 1492-1713 Franklin W. Knight 4. The Cutch and the making of the second Atlantic system P. C. Emmer 5. Precolonial western Africa and the Atlantic economy David Eltis 6. A marginal institution on the margin of the Atlantic system: The Portufuese southern Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century Joseph C. Miller 7. The apprenticeship of colonization Luiz Felipe de Alencastro 8. Exports and the growth of the British economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens P. K. O'Brien and S. L. Engerman 9. The slave and colonial trade in France just before the Revolution Patrick Villiers 10. Slavery, trade, and economic growth in eighteenth-century New England David Richardson 11. Economic aaspects of the growth of slavery in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake David W. Galenson 12. Credit in the slave trade and plantation economies Jacob M. Price Index.

Antislavery and Political Economy in the Early Victorian House of Commons: A Research Note on "Capitalist Hegemony"

Half a century ago Eric Williams argued that a close connection existed between capitalism and slavery. According to Williams, slave trade profits provided a capital base for Western Europe's economic expansion; ultimately a more mature industrial capitalism tumed upon West Indian slavery when it became a liability to the imperial economy. Subsequent studies now refute much of this thesis. Recent literature argues that slavery remained profitable into the 1830s. Scholarly debate therefore has shifted to address the problem of why the British tampered with the sanctity of property rights if West Indian slavery continued to remain a source of national profits.1 Some historians continue to argue that class interests were somehow involved. David B. Davis, in particular, frequently has been understood to suggest that abo litionism diverted attention from metropolitan grievances and that opposition to slavery was not an innovation justified by [the] Rights of Man. His writings indicate that this diversion reinforced capitalist hegemony through a diminished sensitivity toward class exploitation; local evils became blurred by familiarity. According tO Davis, domestic reform energies perhaps were channeled outward toward a symbol of unparalleled oppression. David Eltis, another proponent of the hegemony thesis, writes that anti-slavery was simply a facet of the predominating view of social relations, property, and morality which emerged with the industrialization process; a laissez faire, individualistic and localistic definition of freedom that defined slavery as antithetical to civilized society. While he acknowledges some nice distinctions, Eltis sees the same solution being applied to the West Indian and British labor problems.2 Both Davis and Eltis recognize the importance of state acceptance of and buttress their arguments with analysis of Parliamentary behavior. Eltis concludes that none of the leading figures in Parliament opposed the New Poor Law and by 1833 antislavery appeared entirely consistent with laissez-faire principles. Davis is less extravagant in his claims. He emphasizes that both emancipation and the New Poor Law passed the newly reformed Parliament by overwhelming majorities but also notes a group of thirty MPs who opposed the harshest provisions of the new poor relief legislation.3 The hegemony thesis has not gone unchallenged. Thomas Haskell, for instance, suggests that arguments need firmer grounding in the historical record. He argues that Davis's evidence for thinking that the abolitionists unconsciously intended to legitimate free labor by confining their attack to slavery consists essentially of two classes offacts: . . . (1 ) critics advanced this interpretation . . . [and] (2) the abolitionists did not take the trouble to disavow in writing the intention to legitimate free labor. Another critic, Seymour Drescher, explicitly rejects the notion that was the preserve of a group of evangelicals, operating in the interest of nascent capitalists; nor did displace social tensions by removing focus from evils at home to evils abroad. He concedes that

Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (review)

This is the first study to consider the economic consequences of Britain's abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Why did Britain pull out of the slave trade just when it was becoming important for the world economy and the demand for labour around the world was high? Caught between the incentives offered by the world economy for continuing trade at full tilt and the ideological and political pressures from its domestic abolitionist movement, Britain chose to withdraw, believing, in part, that freed slaves would work for low pay which would in turn lead to greater and cheaper products. David Eltis here contends that this move did not bolster the British economy; rather, it vastly hindered economic expansion as the Empire's great reliance on slave labour had played a major role in its rise to world economic dominance.