Slave Research Articles

Bloody Edification: The Violence of Education in Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio

Abstract: This article contends that scenes and themes of education in Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio deploy the threat of corporal punishment as a means of reincarnating antebellum plantation systems of surveillance and punishment in the postbellum school space. By copiously tracing the logic and references in a commentary on education by a parson early in the novel, the article shows that Griggs's book makes learning, violence, and space inextricable in Black Reconstruction life. Drawing on theorists like Hortense Spillers and Karen Sanchez-Eppler, who argue that violence on the body renders Black bodies legible, I suggest that Black education manifests itself through the same bodily terror that dictated life for enslaved persons. Griggs, I propose, depicts knowledge accumulation and dissemination as harmful to the Black populace not only physically but politically as well. With an eye towards the book's eponymous Black insurrectionary state, this article argues that the plantation's regime of intimidation, which continues to impose itself through the illusion of academic installation, might be overturned through a motivated manipulation of space.

Population and Slavery in Vila Rica de Ouro Preto (1712-1770)

The discovery of gold at the end of the 17th century and of diamonds during the 1730s in central-southern Brazil caused profound dislocation in the slave trades, turning the Minas Gerais region into an unprecedented pole of attraction for migrant and slave labor. In this work, we perform a sociodemographic analysis of the slave population in Vila Rica de Ouro Preto, the capital of the captaincy of Minas Gerais, in a period ranging from 1712 to 1770. For this purpose, and based on previous literature, we use the data series gathered from the two parishes that made up the urban geography of the region, as well as the notarial records preserved at the Arquivo Histórico do Museu da Inconfidência - Casa do Pilar. The reconstruction of families and the study of the relationship between the sociodemographic data of the slave contingent and those of the rest of the population, the processes of manumission, and the evolution of the slave import market have allowed us to prove the dependence of the slave population on slave trade.

Illegal markets and contemporary slavery: Evidence from the mahogany trade in the Amazon

Modern slavery is a major global concern, with an estimated 49.7 million people enslaved in 2022. This paper explores the impact of illegal markets on this phenomenon, focusing on the complete shutdown of the mahogany market in the late 90s in Brazil. Utilizing a quasi-experimental research design that exploits the natural variation in the occurrence of mahogany trees in Brazilian municipalities, we employ novel administrative data on labor inspections to assess the effects of this shutdown on modern slavery. Our results indicate that the mahogany market shutdown significantly increased the probability of labor inspections discovering slave labor in affected municipalities. The outcomes are not influenced by coordinated police efforts targeting locations following the alteration in the law. We validate our findings with several robustness exercises.

The Making of Jamaica's ‘First Composer’: Rethinking Samuel Felsted

AbstractThis article examines the links between the music of Anglo-Jamaican organist and composer Samuel Felsted (1743–1802) and his environment of late eighteenth-century Kingston, building on research published since the 1980s. Although Felsted, a person of English-American heritage who was born in Jamaica, was part of the island's European-origin community, most of his local contemporaries were people of African descent. Like many of his friends, family members and acquaintances, Felsted was a slave owner, and, as I argue here, his various literary and artistic outputs demonstrate how he was influenced by the kinds of issues – such as slavery, servitude, sovereignty and nationhood – that surfaced in the public and private discourses of his time. Considering what Felsted's cultural legacy might mean today, I turn to his undated and virtually unknown oratorio The Dedication, for which he wrote both the text and the music. The Dedication contains literary themes that allow its connections to Felsted's world and its setting of ancient Babylon to be explored. I also suggest the early 1790s as a possible time of composition for this work.

Whaling in Brazil and its historical iconography

The objective of this study is to analyze iconographies that show the whaling in the Brazilian Colony, dates back to the sixteenth century and had socioeconomic importance in the formation and implementation of people in the cost. This extractivist activity that involved the settlement of large cetaceans was a common scene in coastal areas, such as the Guanabara and Todos os Santos Bays, and Santa Catarina Inlets. In these visual documents we identified the main characteristics of whaling in Brazil: proximity to the coast, slave labor, specialization of work at sea, techniques of capture and processing, and the boats launched in the calm waters of the bays. The whaling iconography produced in Brazil have common elements, recognizable in the redundancy of certain visual arrangements: the chase, the harpooning, the towing, the shredding, the melting, and the storage. The most representative image of fishing is the dramatic moment in which man and animal meet since, in the Basque tradition, being close was paramount.

Between “Slave Labour” and “More Freedom” in Working Life

Between “Slave Labour” and “More Freedom” in Working Life

Practice-Based Pedagogies for Counter-Memorial Performance: Teaching to Address and Shift “Plantation Energy”

This article discusses History, Memory, Performance, Place: Activating Davidson’s Submerged Histories, a practice-based course I developed and taught in spring 2020 and spring 2021 at Davidson College, a small liberal arts college twenty miles north of Charlotte, NC, established in 1837 by white slave owners. Drawing together dance, performance studies, and Black studies methodologies, the class centred the body through both practice-based research and critical engagements with power, history, and legacies of white supremacy on campus. Coalescing these three fields amplifies multifaceted practice-based research approaches to antiracist reflective and body-based engagements with history, place, and self. In the class, I brought together embodied creative modalities with archival, historiographic, place-based, theoretical, and dialogic approaches to knowledge production. I facilitated student development of practice-based research projects invested in building new and ongoing relationships to Davidson College’s violent history and its pervasive continuities felt by members of the community in the present. This article considers how practice-based research can be integrated into critical performance pedagogies to contribute to campus historical reckoning projects. Outlining the course methods and integrating student reflections and projects, the article discusses how a process-oriented conception of performance, combined with a “counter-memorial” approach to pedagogy and practice, can underscore ongoing embodied work required to address what one student defined as “plantation energy” on campus.

Slave labor productivity and wine output: Stellenbosch, 1680–1828

AbstractThis paper examines wine output and slave labor productivity in the Dutch and British Cape Colony, leveraging annual tax censuses. We document a substantial increase in wine production, but, despite substantial institutional changes over more than a century, we find surprisingly stable median wine yields. Exploiting the farm-level nature of our data, we observe increasing heterogeneity in wine yields, suggesting that some farmers were able to realize productivity increases. We show that efficient slave labor utilization was a critical driver of productivity enhancement, largely unaffected by external factors.

The Elder Family: Intergenerational Slaveholding in Early American Catholicism

ABSTRACT For at least five generations, the Elder family held enslaved persons as part of their agricultural, commercial, and domestic pursuits in Maryland, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Though scholars have highlighted slaveholding by US religious orders, especially the Jesuits, little attention has been paid to how lay Catholics bought, sold, and treated their bondspeople. This study explores how the Elder family was connected to slavery, including the intergenerational transfer of human property—and the practices and mentality that sustained it.

Reconnecting Memory and Recovering from Trauma: The Adaptation ofThe Deepfrom a Song to a Novella

AbstractThe Deep (2019), a novella achieved through collective authorship by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes, is adapted from Clipping’s song of the same name ‘The Deep’ (2017). The novella contemplates collective memory, generational trauma, and identity issues. This article compares the song and novella, discusses how both song and novella express historical issues of slavery and contemporary issues of environmental destruction, traces diverse inspirational source materials, and examines the novella’s depictions of negotiation and reconciliation between individual versus communal identities within a context of generational trauma. This article argues that, with wajinru representing a bridging of humanity and nature, and with complex thematic interplay between forgetting, remembrance, and healing, the novella constitutes an Afrofuturist, magical realist, counternarrative challenge to dominant historical narratives, and illuminates the importance of reconnecting communal memory to individual identity-construction for recovering from generational trauma, and of building a more utopian world through cultivating love that transcends species and gender. In addition, this article analyzes how Solomon’s novella and its diverse source materials highlight the palimpsestic and intertextual nature of artistic adaptations and encourage audiences to engage in egalitarian, boundary-defying cultural production, and innovative blurring of genres, media, and authorship.

‘No commercial activity leaves greater benefit’: The profitability of the Cuban‐based slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century

AbstractIn this paper, we discuss the basis of the illegal slave trade between Africa and Cuba, measuring its volume and profit during the first half of the nineteenth century. Due to its illegal nature, the sources for exploring this trade were systematically destroyed, but we have been able to locate the accountancy of 17 expeditions that gives us a comprehensive understanding of the profits, margins, and risks. The basis to understanding this business was the murderous use of enslaved persons in the sugar mills, which forced a continuous repositioning through an illegal, although tolerated by the Spanish authorities, business. We demonstrate that from an economic point of view, the slave trade after illegalization was highly profitable, as the financial return of successful expeditions was near 100 per cent of the invested capital in less than a year. The risk of capture by the British authorities, associated with its illegal nature, was only high during the initial moments, and became steadily lower afterwards. In terms of volume, the trade of a half million enslaved persons illegally smuggled into Cuba produced what was probably the island's most important market.

Slavery in Suriname. A Reconstruction of Life Courses, 1830–1863

The slavenregisters or slave registers of Suriname offer a unique perspective on the social and demographic history of a people in bondage. Thanks to a citizen science project, the archival sources were transcribed in 2017 by hundreds of volunteers. The transcriptions were used to create a longitudinal database of more than 90,000 enslaved persons. This paper describes the sources, data entry, and cleaning to create a standardized database as well as the matching needed to construct life courses. We discuss the best practices we have learned along the way. Finally, it offers prospects for research and expansion of the database to other population sources and areas.

Reading for Efficiency in Ancient Rome: The Case of Pliny the Elder

ABSTRACT Readers in ancient Rome did not have efficiency of reading as a goal. The much-cited exception that proves the rule is a letter of the Younger Pliny (Letter 3.5, early 2nd c. CE) that describes the extraordinary reading habits of his uncle the Elder Pliny, as he read and digested the 2000 works used as sources for constructing his encyclopedic Natural History. Famously, the Elder, as he rode in his carriage or litter, would have a lector read to him and a stenographer take notes. This article examines in detail how an ancient reader would imagine such a scene. The aims of the article are two: (1) to shine further light on the enslaved persons enabling Pliny’s project; (2) to elucidate how and why an ancient reader would see (as modern commentators have not) the comical impracticalities behind the Elder’s extreme “efficient” reading behavior.

What It Means to Be Black in Saudi Arabia: Slavery and Racial Discrimination in Saudi Women’s Fiction

Abstract Significant among the various taboos broken by contemporary Saudi women writers is the issue of slavery and its concomitant racial and colour prejudice. To explore the treatment of this subject, which remains strikingly understudied, this article focuses on three fictional works by two Saudi writers, Badriyya l-Bišr and Laylā l-Ǧuhanī, who have boldly faced a grave matter with complex psychological and socio-political aspects in order to expose and redress the oppression directed towards not only slaves but their descendants and other black-skinned individuals, male and female. My research argues that both writers, employing literature as a platform for reform, reveal that to a mainstream, tribe-conscious, colour-conscious Arabian culture, black skin can still signify and invite tacit and open forms of stigmatization, denigration, and abuse. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, coupled with textual analyses, this paper shows that the novels aim to restore legitimacy and dignity to a social segment long degraded and objectified due to their race and skin colour.

Numismatic Insights into Pauline Ethics: ΕΥΕΡΓ- on Roman Provincial, Parthian and Seleucid Coinage

AbstractNumismatic inscriptional evidence consistently employs the ΕΥΕΡΓ- word group in describing a superior providing some material public benefit to an inferior, typically an entire city, nation or kingdom. This is evidenced in the present study's comprehensive survey of several hundred numismatic types, extant in many thousands of specimens from the second century bce to the first century ce. Within this context, 1 Timothy 6.2 is discussed, wherein it is noted that the apparent identification of a slave's labour as ɛὐɛργɛσία not only heightens the significance and value of that service but is a deliberate inversion of expected social and linguistic norms.

Jesuits as Petitioners: Antonio Ruiz de Montoya and the Issue of Indigenous Slavery in the Early Seventeenth-Century South Atlantic

AbstractIn the Spanish monarchy, corporations, religious orders, and other petitioners kept procurators in Madrid to lobby the royal councils on their behalf. Drawing on an efficient network of information, the Madrid-based Jesuit procurators were known for their insistence on solving the financial and personnel needs of several missions throughout the New World. This article analyzes a series of petitions composed by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in the late 1630s on behalf of Jesuit missions in Paraguay. These missions had been harassed by Portuguese slavers, who captured tens of thousands of natives in this region. Ruiz de Montoya's petitions reveal that the Jesuits’ lobbying actions had a much greater impact than has been assumed. Far from confining themselves to asking for material and human resources for the missions, the Jesuits proposed that the Spanish crown make a large-scale intervention in the administration of Portuguese domains in the South Atlantic, a program that Madrid would have implemented were it not for Portuguese independence in 1640.

The Impact of the American Revolutionary War on the Slave Trade to Cuba

Abstract: Scholars intent on considering the American Revolution's relationship to and influence on systems of slavery must be sure to look outside of the United States. In mid-September 1783, the schooner Eagle , captained by David Miller, landed 104 enslaved Africans in Charleston. This is the first known U.S.-flagged transatlantic slave voyage arriving in the United States after independence. Before bringing these captives from Africa, Miller had conducted a previous voyage on the Eagle , which landed fifty other captives in Havana in May 1783. The latter group of enslaved men, women, and children, whom Miller brought from the Danish colony of Saint Thomas in the eastern Caribbean, were some of the nearly 14,500 captives we have found who were shipped to Havana, mainly from other Caribbean ports, by merchants based in Cuba, the Danish West Indies, and the United States from 1781 to 1785. Examining the actions of U.S. slave traders in Cuba during the American Revolution also opens up the chance to dramatically increase our understanding of the broader traffic in enslaved people to the island during this period, emphasizing the merchant networks connecting Saint Thomas, Saint Domingue, and Charleston with Havana.

Culture training for strategic marketing : Case study of a Juneteenth block party

Juneteenth, the annual cultural celebration also known in the African American community as Emancipation Day, was made a national holiday in 2021. Today, the holiday that commemorates 19th June, 1865, the date when news of emancipation and the end of slavery finally reached enslaved peoples in the farthest reaches of America’s south-western states, is challenging companies and organisations to figure out how best to honour this shiny new and momentous holiday. And while many organisations struggle to get smart about this ‘new’ holiday, organisations that seek to understand the cultural ethos of the celebration — and their part in it — have demonstrated success. To better understand a successful campaign, this case study will examine how an event and training model with a block party theme succeeded in ‘getting Juneteenth right’ to create an informative, engaging and inspiring workplace initiative. The brand and shopper marketing agency extended the implementation of its agency-wide diversity, equity and inclusion reorientation strategy to include its Juneteenth celebration. Taking this cultureforward approach, the agency sought to educate, inform and enlist its own employees in a uniquely authentic way to build cross-cultural knowledge to strategy, creative, media and retail marketing for its list of Fortune 500 clients, including EJ Gallo, Procter & Gamble and White Castle.

Cimarrón and the Reordering of the Living World

This essay examines three historical moments in the signification of the term cimarrón across the hispanophone Caribbean. It explores its origin during the conquest, simultaneously naming runaway livestock and Native and Black enslaved peoples who challenged colonization. In the twentieth century, the cimarrón became attached to masculinist nationalist tropes key to postwar anticolonial movements. In the new millennium, Black and Brown women and LBTQ+ folks use the term to convey an ethos of antipatriarchal, community-centered activism. The essay argues that the origins of the term demand a close consideration of the relationship between conquest, othering, racialization, commodification, and the reordering of the animal world with human animals as supreme beings. The contemporary reappropriation of the term alludes to a decolonial reframing, a unique opportunity to reject Western ontologies grounded on the violent practices of othering while also pointing us toward new conditions of possibility based on relationality.

‘Slaves’ Without Coercion? Work-Related Classification Patterns Among Romanian Migrant Workers

Tens of thousands of Romanian migrants work in the German construction sector. Their work is often characterized by unpaid wages, long workdays and by the withholding of sick or holiday payments. The risky and exploitative nature of the conditions under which Romanian migrants work on German construction sites is reflected in their negative evaluation of their engagements as “slave labor” by Romanian workers. Starting from such a clearly negative evaluation, the paper asks how Romanian construction workers in Germany classify their work and what role such classifications have within the context of labor exploitation. Based on qualitative interviews with and participant observation among Romanian construction site workers in Germany and in Romania, the article reconstructs four work classifications. Work may be interpreted as the fulfillment of obligations or as necessary for economic revenue; hard work itself can be a symbolic contribution to one’s own sense of identity or it can have the meaning of being part of everyday normalcy. Each of the work classifications offers a different reason to make hard work plausible in the eyes of the workers and employers actively turn such interpretations into a mechanism of vulnerability. Without direct physical coercion, these ideas motivate workers to take on work that they themselves criticize as ‘slave labor.’ The paper concludes by arguing that the recognition of such classifications and their social effects are crucial for an understanding of labor exploitation.