Profitability Of Slavery Research Articles

The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation by Thavolia Glymph

Reviewed by: The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation by Thavolia Glymph Randall M. Miller The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. Thavolia Glymph. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4695-5363-1. 392 pp., hardcover, $34.95. For the past decade and more, scholars have been discovering, uncovering, and recovering hidden histories of women's experiences, place, and consequence in the American Civil War. At one time relegated to the sidebars of Civil War studies, women now often share center stage with men and have attracted scholars of many stripes who examine women in varied circumstances and contexts—as, for example, Southern plantation mistresses beset by war, enslaved black women seizing freedom during the war, Northern white women mobilizing relief and other services trying to ameliorate the war, and Southern white women memorializing their men to rewrite history after the war. Much of this work, however, has focused on women in a particular location or region, or of one class or race, or in a specific wartime or postwar activity. Not surprisingly, too, much of the literature has followed the lives and doings of women who left written accounts, giving them voice and also primacy in telling the stories of the women's war. What the scholarship has lacked is a work that pulls together the many histories we do know of particular women and experiences while also finding and relating those of women still on the margins of historical inquiries, such as poor white women. In The Women's Fight, a work stunning in its sweep and sobering in its argument, Thavolia Glymph has mined public and private records prodigiously and aggressively to make the case that the war was an all-consuming women's fight that affected every aspect of their, and thus too their men's, lives and defined the meanings of home, freedom, and nation for that generation and later ones. The brilliance and beauty of Glymph's book is her deft weaving of personal stories into a larger canvas showing how women of all classes, colors, and conditions caught up in war made their ways in it, but with no single response that fit all. The women's fight did not bring women together on the basis of sex as much as it often set them against one another, and even their men, based on their racial, class, regional, and family identity and interest. Thus, for example, Glymph follows plantation mistresses fleeing to the upcountry to avoid Union army advances and expecting the non-slaveholding women there to embrace them in common cause by sheltering and feeding them, when in fact class differences and circumstances separated the demanding expectations of the slaveholding women from the hardscrabble realities of the poor women. In that process too, as Glymph details, the rigors of being refugees reduced slaveholding women to begging and becoming more like those they enslaved as they scraped by for food and suffered for want of shelter. At the same time, enslaved black women seized the moment to run, walk, or otherwise move to "freedom," whether in contraband camps or setting up on [End Page 231] their own. But even as they asserted their freedom, most discovered the limits of it as Union officers and then Northern agents of freedmen's aid organizations set them to work on plantations and pushed them to dependences supposedly suitable for their sex, race, and former condition. Glymph points to the persistence of racial stereotypes even in the face of black women's genius and grit in surviving bondage and protecting their families, as, for example, in Northern white female teachers who patronized blacks as being almost hopelessly dehumanized by slavery and incapable of their own uplift, or Northern white women, from families that had gained their wealth from the profits of slavery, who sought to set themselves up as new plantation mistresses with black servants. These and many other examples of women experiencing war show at once the intersections of women's lives and the diversions and divisions of women's interests. Glymph also reveals how concepts of...

Exhibition: William Blake: Lost in Translation.

Tate Britain, London, 12 September 2019 to 2 February 2020 Tate Britain was built partly on the profits of slavery, from the toil on the sugar plantations of Alabama and the Caribbean.1 The Tate & Lyle business flourished with the blood, sweat, and tears of captive Africans forcibly transported or born captive in the British colonies. Perhaps it’s a form of atonement for this legacy for the Tate to embrace an artist who believed in emancipation and social justice. William Blake died almost 200 years ago in 1827, two decades …

Handel Manuscripts and the Profits of Slavery: The "Granville" Collection at the British Library and the First Performing Score of Messiah Reconsidered

The artifacts of slavery are not only the manacles, branding irons, and whips, or the slaves' own possessions, but also the musical scores and instruments funded by slavery's profits. Like other wealthy families, those that engaged directly in the slave economy sought to enjoy the best cultural offerings of the day, which included hiring musicians to entertain and to teach, and purchasing manuscripts and printed scores of favorite works. This article offers two examples of Handel-related manuscripts that were purchased in part thanks to profits derived from the slave economy: the "Granville" Collection at the British Library, and the first performing score of Messiah now held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. No cordon sanitaire protected music collecting from slavery's stain.

Slaveriets profitabilitet. Økonomi og moral i fransk melodrama om den haitianske revolution, 1792-1798

Jonas Ross Kjærgård: “The Profitability of Slavery. Economy and Morals in French Melodrama on the Haitian Revolution, 1792-1798”This article investigates how French revolutionary melodrama depicted the institution of slavery after the outbreak of the Haitian revolution in 1791. Prior to the slave rebellion in France’s most important Caribbean colony, St.-Domingue (present day Haiti), abolitionary writers and intellectuals had presented the argument that slavery was not only morally wrong but also economically unprofitable. For the more radical writers of the 1770s, such as Abbé Raynal and Louis-Sébastien Mercier, slavery was an evil that called for revolutionary violence in the colonies. However, when news of the actual slave revolt and its violent incidents reached France, the stance on violence and the interconnection of morals and economy changed. Through a reading of three plays the article aims to show that the Haitian revolution – as well as the radicalization of the French revolution – caused play writers to condemn violence among the slaves; to urge rebelling slaves to return to the plantations; and to present a colonial system in which slaves became free workers in return for their promise to work hard and accept the continuation of French colonial rule.

The Black Atlantic as Dystopia:

The Black Atlantic as Dystopia:

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735-67) (review)

Reviewed by: Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735-67) Alessa Johns and Clarence E. Walker Megan Vaughan , Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735–67). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 341. $23.95. Creating the Creole Island is an important contribution to the study of slavery. The book is erudite, comparative, interdisciplinary, and it raises important questions about the creation of Creoles in slave societies. Like William St. Clair's The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Afua Cooper's The Hanging of Angelique, Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton's Slavery & South Asian History, Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker's Many Middle Passages, and Ehud R.Toledano's As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East, Vaughan's study of Mauritius examines a slave society outside of the Caribbean and North and South America. These areas have been for over forty years the center of slavery studies. This scholarship has revealed a great deal about the profitability of slavery, the work that slaves performed, master-slave relations, and slave culture. Vaughan's book will enable scholars of slavery to see how the institution developed on an island that was not as important as either Cuba or Haiti. Mauritius is an island in the Indian Ocean and was explored, colonized, and populated by many different groups of people. At various moments in its history, Mauritius was scoured by the Dutch and Portuguese, but from the early eighteenth century until 1810 the island was a French possession. Then it was conquered by Great Britain. The island's population comprised Europeans and slaves brought from Africa and India. Because Mauritius was uninhabited, its population consisted, as Vaughan says, "of no one thing or people but of many more or less foreign, more or less naturalized" (2). Noting that the term Creole is "slippery," Vaughan writes that Mauritius "without natives has always been the product of multiple influences, multiple sources, which to differing degrees merge, take root, and 'naturalize' on new . . . soil" (2). In brief, there were no Native Americans or Zulus to contend [End Page 431] with or displace on Mauritius. The eighteenth-century history of the colony was characterized by both instability and poverty. The island was also ravaged by hurricanes and swarms of rats. Initially Frenchmen did not want to come to Mauritius because economic prospects were not good. The white population of the colony was unstable and did not reproduce itself. "The latter was a function," according to Vaughan, "both of high mortality rates and the island's role as a strategic base rather than as a site of colonial production" (265). The whites also lived in fear of the slave population. From the very beginnings of settlement, the Europeans did have to confront the fact that some of the people imported as slaves ran away to the mountains and became Maroons. These former slaves harassed the settled communities for food, women, and other supplies. Marronage was never the problem on Mauritius that it came to be in either Jamaica or Brazil. Nonetheless, the French colonists were always worried about slave conspiracies. The major contribution to the field of slavery studies in Vaughan's book is its discussion of what I call the variegated slave and free black population of Mauritius. Slaves on Mauritius, who came from India and Africa, were all defined as black under the French and later the English. But whether slave or free, they created "distinct identities for themselves" (266). These differences consisted of dress, hair styles, and the retention/creation of some linguistic forms, which suggest, as other studies of creolite have, that the slaves were never completely socialized by their masters. Vaughan does not suggest that slavery was a benign institution on Mauritius. But she does indicate that there were places based on religious and ethnic distinctions that the slaves and free people created for themselves. This process was facilitated in part by the colonial administrators of the island. Students of American Negro slavery, like me, will be surprised to learn that on Mauritius free people of...

A new perspective on antebellum slavery: Public policy and slave prices

Modern economic historians have focused their attention on the supervision and productivity of slavery and have largely ignored the roles that public policy and slave security played in the profitability of antebellum slavery. Other scholars have focused on the public security policy in the slave codes, but only as a determinant of the legal status of slaves, not their economic value. This paper investigates the relationship between slave prices and two public policies that enhanced slave security: manumission laws and slave patrol statutes. The evidence suggests that these policies were associated with slave prices and that public policy did play a significant role in the security of slave property and, thus, the viability and profitability of slavery in the Antebellum South.

Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South

Author's preface 1. The contours of the debate 2. Slaveholders and plantations 3. Yeoman and non-slave-owners 4. Slaves 5. The profitability of slavery as a business 6. The profitability of slavery as a system 7. New directions, toward consensus Bibliography.

Mountain masters as confederate opportunists: The profitability of slavery in Western North Carolina, 1861–65

(1995). Mountain masters as confederate opportunists: The profitability of slavery in Western North Carolina, 1861–65. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 85-100.

The Profitability of Slavery in the Colombian Chocó, 1680-1810

T HE profitability of slavery has become a question of considerable historical importance. Before the detailed study presented by Alfred H. Conrad and John Meyer, a number of North American scholars argued that slavery in the United States was not economically sound, had reached its natural limits, was inefficient and cumbersome, and within a short time would probably have destroyed itself. Conrad and Meyer refuted this contention concluding, . . slavery was profitable to the whole South.' Recently Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman exhaustively reviewed the secondary and primaly literature and revised estimates presented by Conrad and Meyer upward from 7 or 8 percent rates of profit to slightly over 10 percent.2 Thus, Fogel and Engerman argue that slavery in the United States presented an investment . . that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing.3 Scholars concerned with Latin American slavery have been remarkably remiss in treating the profitability of slavery. Assuredly many scholars have studied certain economic aspects of slavery, especially with regard to manumission movements in the nineteenth century, but rarely do they examine the specifics of profitability. Clearly there is a need for fuirther investigation along these lines. Such research will help provide explanations for the fluctuations in slave importation, slave prices, and investments in slaveholding regions. Of even greater significance, as Fogel and Engerman have related, profitability can also aid in determining and explaining the structure of slave society.

The Profitability of Slavery in the Colombian Choco, 1680-1810

The Profitability of Slavery in the Colombian Choco, 1680-1810

American Slavery: The Newer Exegesis

Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1974. Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods - A Supplement. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1974. 286 and 267 pp. Eugene D. Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.823 pp. Within a single year, two major works on American Negro slavery have appeared, each suggesting a broad reinterpretation of our views on bondage in the Old South. Both have been widely acclaimed; reviews of these books in publications such as Time and Atlantic Monthly indicate an interest extending far beyond the usual academic circles. While the two works share certain common concerns, their methodologies, areas of concentration, and conclusions are strikingly different. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman base their findings, in large part, on various bodies of quantitative data. They divide Time on the Cross into two volumes, one addressed to the general reader and presenting the authors' con- clusions in nonmathematical terms, the other providing the formulae and some of the statistical material that underlie the study. Eugene Genovese's sources are the more traditional ones such as slave narratives and planta- tion diaries. Unlike Fogel and Engerman, he does not discuss such issues as the profitability of slavery or the "rate of exploitation." On the other hand, his exploration of life in the slave quarters and the relationship between blacks and whites is fuller.

Profitability of Slavery in the British Caribbean

Profitability of Slavery in the British Caribbean No one today argues that free labor is an unremunerative economic system. But there are many scholars who claim that the system of slave labor was losing money in the years just preceding its abolition. This article demonstrates the profitability of slavery in the nineteenth-century sugar business. We will show that you cannot bury slavery by praising the superior profitability of free labor regimes. The methodology employed here draws heavily from the work of Conrad and Meyer. We use their method despite the telling criticism leveled at their findings by Genovese.' Although their empirical work was thorough, Conrad and Meyer overstepped the bounds of descriptive studies when they used their results to speculate on long-run historical developments-like the coming of the Civil War. We use their methods while rejecting their historical reasoning. A mere statement of the profits and losses of an economic system cannot summarize the future possibilities contained in any society. But an estimate of the profits of a system can establish one point on which two societies can be compared. We seek to establish such a point between the free and slave labor regimes. In this article, we limit ourselves to a simple description which will show that any differences between the two labor systems does not stem from their abilities to generate an economic surplus. The analysis of Conrad and Meyer was intended to bring the precision of neoclassical capital theory to bear on a frequently discussed historical problem. Specifically, we shall attempt to measure the profitability of southern slave operations in terms of modern capital theory. In doing so, we shall illustrate the ways in which economic theory might be used in ordering and organizing historical facts.2 By comparing the rate of return to a unit of slave capital with the interest rate prevailing in other sectors of the ante-bellum economy, they were able to conclude that slave capital was a remunerative outlet for investment.

Slavery and Saving

SINCE THE RECRUDESCENCE OF INTEREST in the economics of slavery as it existed in the Ante-Bellum South, there has been extensive debate concerning the profitability of slavery and its influence on the economic development of the South. The pioneering work of Conrad and Meyer1 was addressed to the question of profitability which in turn triggered the current controversy over the question of growth and development of the Southern economy. Curiously little attention either on the empirical or theoretical level has been focused upon one of the determinants of the rate of economic progress, namely the ratio of saving to income. A notable exception has been the work of Professor J. E. Moes.2 Moes concluded on theoretical grounds that there were factors inherent in the capitalization of the slave labor force that tended to reduce the saving ratio in the Ante-Bellum South vis-a-vis the free society of the North. In this article the authors suggest some realistic qualifications and modifications of Moes' theory. We conclude that Moes had deduced the results for a special case only and that on a priori grounds there is no reason to believe that in general the saving ratio in the slave society was lower than in the free. Furthermore, the authors take issue with Moes' generalizations with regard to the rate of economic progress in the South.

The Profitability of Slavery: A Historical Perennial

The Profitability of Slavery: A Historical Perennial

The Profits of Slavery: Baltic Forced Laborers and Deportees under Stalin and Khrushchev.

The Profits of Slavery: Baltic Forced Laborers and Deportees under Stalin and Khrushchev.