Slave Society Research Articles

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur Stanley Mirvis Aviva Ben-Ur. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 392 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000258 Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society heralds the emancipation of the Caribbean experience from the margins of early American Jewish history. Aviva Ben-Ur is the leading voice in a chorus of scholars dedicated to contextualizing Jewish history within the methodological framework of Atlantic studies and "creating a paradigm for Jewish Atlantic history that combines comparison, connection, and localism" (255). She has more than succeeded in achieving this goal. Through a comprehensive investigation of archival sources, particularly the extensive Surinamese Jewish communal records at the National Archives of the Netherlands, Ben-Ur challenges some of the most canonical assumptions of Jewish history. These include religious tolerance as the primary motivation for early American migration, the Jewish desire for emancipation, and the Jewish trend to acculturate "upward." She demonstrates that these historiographic dogmas don't apply to Suriname. As much as it was entangled in the web of [End Page 461] the Atlantic world, Jewish life in Suriname was a singularity that defies categorization using traditional models. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society powerfully contributes to the legacy of Salo W. Baron's antilachrymose model of Jewish history. Ben-Ur reconsiders the ubiquity of premodern Jewish subalterity. In Suriname, Jews held an unparalleled degree of corporate autonomy and were empowered through their mastery over an enslaved majority. She further reminds us that by the end of the eighteenth century, Jews made up two-thirds of the non-African descendent population of Suriname. Among Ben-Ur's boldest antilachrymose rebukes is her challenge to the narrative of religious tolerance as the primary motivation behind Jewish migration. She attributes this persistent view to the skewed self-presentation of Suriname's Portuguese elites, like David Nassy, who portrayed themselves as belonging to a community of refugees empowered by the liberties of their colonial haven. They also sought to propagate an illusion of wealth (47). Ben-Ur demonstrates that Jews in Suriname were overwhelmingly poor, and it was poverty that brought them to the colony. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society is informed by a trend in early modern Portuguese diaspora studies to deemphasize a traditional bom Judesmo approach—highlighting nobility, wealth, and restraint—and instead focusing on indigent and itinerate social welfare recipients. Ben-Ur characterizes Jodensavanne as a paupers' town (54) in defiance of the more standard depiction of the town's wealth and privilege—which might have been the case for only a few Sabbath vacationers from surrounding plantations (61). Instead, she recalibrates the discussion to focus on the mechanics of the despachado system bringing poor Jews to the colony (116–17). Rather than a proto-Zionist promised land, Ben-Ur's Jodensavanne is a nonheroic site of violence, dislocation, and poverty (74). The book's title alludes to the elusive concept of Jewish self-rule, one of the colony's most conspicuous singularities. Ben-Ur finds the closest Jewish parallel in early modern Livorno as well as makes local comparisons to Suriname's Maroon and Indian populations. Autonomy, however, was not synonymous with liberty. Ben-Ur argues that autonomy cast a shadow of tyranny in the way it mandated Jewishness (93) and empowered elite Portuguese over the poor, Ashkenazim, and Jews of color (110). Autonomy was not what all of the Jews of the colony wanted. Jewish autonomy in Suriname translated into a codification of Portuguese ethnic supremacy (62–63). Ben-Ur reexamines some of Jewish history's most sacred ideals about emancipation, the process of acquiring legal parity with white Christians, which occurred in Suriname in 1825. Whereas emancipation is typically portrayed as a Jewish aspiration, in Suriname Jewish leaders swam against the tides of change by clinging to their corporate autonomy (227). Furthermore, Ben-Ur argues that Surinamese emancipation was only a "legal fiction" (254). Emancipation simply transformed the legal definitions of Surinamese Jews from an incorporated ethnic group to a religious community. Analyses of acculturation and emancipation go hand...

Review: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles

Review: <i>All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake</i>, by Tiya Miles

Review: Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries, by Ryan K. Smith

Review: <i>Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries</i>, by Ryan K. Smith

Slavery, Health, and Healing Now: The State of the Field.

The scholarship on slavery, health, and healing has dramatically transformed over the past two decades. This essay synthesizes several themes within the thriving subfield, highlighting its relevance to historians of medicine and science working in adjacent fields, and suggesting new directions forward. The recent scholarship builds on research begun in the 1970s, but where earlier scholarship relied on quantitative methods and retrospective diagnoses, the new scholarship takes a social constructivist approach. Scholars today are exploring how slavery shaped the natural and built environment to create new disease environments in the New World; how Black healing knowledge was either circulated or suppressed by White physicians; and how gender and race intersected in slave societies to influence diagnoses and the categorization of specific diseases. Most importantly, the new scholarship suggests that medical knowledge produced in slave societies was not marginal-but central-to the rise of early modern medicine. The lack of any synthesis of the recent literature, combined with the recent public attention given to racial health disparities, make this literature vitally important to all historians of medicine and allied sciences. It can provide useful insights for scholars working in other areas, and it can diversify and complicate the stories we tell about the origins of modern medicine.

Introduction: “The Unexpected Caribbean” Part II

Introduction: “The Unexpected Caribbean” Part II

Keila Grinberg, A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship

Originally published in 2002, the doctoral thesis of Keila Grinberg, Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, has recently appeared in English for the first time. Nearly two decades separate the Portuguese and English versions of A Black Jurist in a Slave Society. Pointing out the time gap between the original and the translated edition, the author says: ‘Although I have updated some references and edited the text with non-Brazilians in mind, the argument remains the same’ (p xvi). What, then, can this 20-year-old book still add to the current historiographical debate? How does it address the issues of race, civil law, and citizenship in nineteenth-century Brazil? What can we learn about law in a slave society? The book is divided into three parts and eight chapters. In the first part (chs 1–2), Grinberg presents an impressive panorama of the province of Bahia (Recôncavo and Salvador) in...

Slave stealing women, slave-owning women, and stolen slaves in the American South

ABSTRACT Slave stealing has not attracted scholarly attention; the women branded as kidnappers and “Negro thieves” are almost completely absent from the historiography of American slavery. Free women, across the spectra of race and class, played central roles in these dangerous, illegal, “unfeminine” ventures. On the other side of the law, slave-owning women were also embroiled in slave stealing cases. They frequently filed suits attempting to retrieve their stolen enslaved people. Both slave stealing and slave-owning women, despite their differing motivations exposed the fragility of the gendered identity that underpinned social and political authority in the South. Their behaviour complicates traditional definitions of female resistance under slavery. These women protested their treatment by their communities, governors, and family, proving willing to break, or manipulate, the law to advance their interests. Testing the pillars on which a patriarchal slave society rested, placed them at the centre of local and national dramas, which revolved around trafficking and owning human property. Their actions were destabilizing and underlined the ambivalent nature of Southern law and custom, and they contributed to a sense of insecurity over the future of slavery and the growth of sectionalism, which led to the outbreak of the American Civil War.

The Haitian Revolution and Debates on Black Pioneers in the Jamaican Militia

This article critically examines what the opening of the Haitian Revolution meant for Black spaces in the Jamaican militia. While much of the existing literature on the transnational impact of the Haitian Revolution has focused predominantly on notions of security in relation to civilian experiences, this paper turns attention to military actors in a neighboring slave society that relied heavily on Black corps to bolster defense. More particularly, it examines a series of public debates that questioned the expedience of Black pioneers in the Jamaican militia and explores how these arrangements between free people of color and colonial authorities took on new meaning in response to the uprising in Saint-Domingue. While it was not unusual for Caribbean colonies to arm enslaved and free people in times of major political upheaval, the Haitian Revolution created a strategic quandary in Jamaica that threatened to end the practice. By tracing the resulting discourse on Black soldiers, the article draws attention to soft power in productions of freedom and argues that: (1) strong anti-pioneer sentiments emerged in Jamaica as a reactionary response to the revolution and, (2) Black pioneer narratives worked to nullify the revocation of these arrangements for them and, in so doing, reinforced Black space in the militia.

Keila Grinberg, A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), pp. 226, $ 29.95, pb.

Keila Grinberg, A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), pp. 226, $ 29.95, pb. - Volume 53 Issue 3

Noel Lenski and Catherine M. Cameron (Eds.): What Is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective

Noel Lenski and Catherine M. Cameron (Eds.): What Is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective

Citizens of nowhere: illegal slavery and racial silence in the African and Indigenous histories of Postcolonial Brazil

ABSTRACT Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas, proposed a citizenship in its 1824 Constitution that had no race-based criteria. The nation remained steadfastly committed to slavery, however, importing nearly 800,000 enslaved Africans illegally after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1831. The silences and ambiguities in Brazil’s terms of citizenship were precisely what enabled the nation to exclude Africans and keep many in illegal captivity. I focus on two groups of Africans, those who remained illegally enslaved, and those who had been ‘rescued’ from illegal slave ships and granted special status as ‘Free Africans.’ I compare their condition to that of indigenous Brazilians who were similarly enslaved illegally and excluded from citizenship on implicitly racial terms. By revealing how citizenship denial is integral to the history of freedom, their condition offers a necessary critique to studies of the ‘Age of Emancipation.’

Cécile Vidal, Caribbean New Orleans. Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society

En 2014, l’auteure avait deja fortement replace l’histoire de La Nouvelle-Orleans dans le contexte atlantique dans le cadre de l’ouvrage New Orleans, Crossroads of the Atlantic World : Cecile Vidal poursuit et prolonge ici sa reflexion sur l’histoire coloniale de la ville et de sa region en les connectant aux dynamiques caribeennes. La demonstration, particulierement stimulante, s’appuie sur la mobilisation de sources nombreuses et variees, consultees a La Nouvelle-Orleans, aux Archives natio...

A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship

A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship

The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic

Three of the finest Brazilian historians of slavery of their generation have combined their scholarly talents and their varying regional expertise to bring to us an innovative and imaginative biography of a transatlantic enslaved sojourner whose life and travels reveal the complexities of the slave system in the South Atlantic. The book is deceptive because while it seems to be a microhistory, a biography of an obscure African man caught up in the slave trade to Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century, the authors have used his life to illumine the realities of some of the most important and most interesting aspects of the slave trade's final decades and the ways in which slavery as a social and economic system touched everyone—enslaved, freed, and free—who lived within it. Rufino José Maria's odyssey from his native Oyo in Yorubaland carried him across the South Atlantic as a slave to Bahia in about 1822, where he worked as a cook and apparently helped in the apothecary shop of his master. He then accompanied his master's son far to the south to Porto Alegre, where as a cook he came into contact with resident enslaved Muslims and where, in 1835 under a new master, he secured his manumission by self-purchase. Caught up in the regional civil war, the Guerra dos Farrapos, he moved to Rio de Janeiro just at the moment when news of the Muslim Malê Revolt in Salvador had put Brazil's capital on edge, but he found employment again as a cook on a slaving vessel, and so the ex-slave now returned to Africa aboard a slaver to Luanda. Further voyages on slavers brought him to Sierra Leone after a British cruiser suppressing the slave trade intercepted his vessel, and while there Rufino lived with Muslim Yorubas like him and studied the Koran before returning to Brazil to reside in Recife. There, he lived as an alufá, an Islamic spiritual adviser and healer, drawing on his knowledge of Islam and his apothecary training and providing charms, amulets, advice, counseling, and prayer to his clients. In 1853 he was arrested under suspicion of involvement in a slave revolt, and the documents in Arabic in his possession were used as evidence of his complicity.The travails and travels of this former slave, who himself became involved in the slave trade and an owner of at least one slave but also ably circulated between religions and empires, provide the opportunity for a vivid microhistory of the South Atlantic in the nineteenth century. Of course, there are gaps and absences in the documentary trail of this somewhat ephemeral personage, but rather than detracting from the biography, they allow the authors to fill in the lacunae with illuminating discussions of the social, political, judicial, and economic contexts that make this extraordinary biography a masterful general transatlantic study of Brazilian slave society in the crucial decades when British pressure was bringing the trade to an end.The world that Leslie Bethell had outlined with treaties and incidents, diplomats and politicians in The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (1970) is populated here with the people most affected by that change. The authors have used the peregrinations of Rufino as an opportunity to discuss the rise of the popular press in Rio de Janeiro, the settlement patterns in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the corruption of officials involved in the seizure of the slave ships, the residence arrangements and ethnic associations of the Yoruba-speaking Nago in Recife, and the theological debates within the Islamic Afro-Brazilian communities. In other words, they have provided a vision of the quotidian world of a slave society. Perhaps best of all, despite the considerable archival challenges, they have been able to provide a nuanced image of the life and thought of this African traveler, sometimes accused as a sorcerer, his Arabic writings suspected as seditious, but a man devoted to his faith yet tolerant of the beliefs of others; like Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio, he told his interrogator that the question of which religion is best “will only be decided when the world ends” (p. 215).As part of the biographical turn in slavery studies, the authors wisely underline the moral and ethical complexities of slave societies and the fact that Rufino's story was not typical. But even so, Rufino's life story provides a guide to a larger history in which he played “a small but interesting, and sometimes nefarious, part” (p. 244). Fluidly translated, rarely does a book so impressive in its research and conceptualization convey its message in so accessible a narrative that it can be used to great advantage by both graduate and undergraduate students. This is one of the finest books to date on slavery and its complexities in the nineteenth-century South Atlantic.

Brazilian Citizenship - A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship. By Keila Grinberg. Translated by Kristin M. McGuire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 226. $29.95 paper.

Brazilian Citizenship - A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship. By Keila Grinberg. Translated by Kristin M. McGuire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 226. $29.95 paper. - Volume 78 Issue 2

Slavery in Secondary History Textbooks from the United States and Brazil

ABSTRACT The United States and Brazil were the two largest slave societies in the history of New World slavery, and the legacies of that history remain salient in both nations. Slavery and the slave trade are important topics to be taught in history courses, and future generations need to be given accurate information about the history and legacies of slavery to be well-informed citizens. A content analysis of textbooks used in the two countries compared how slavery was presented to students and assessed the degree to which the complexities and legacies of slavery were addressed. All of the textbooks (a) incorporated the history of slavery within national narratives of progress; (b) gave minimum attention to the unique experiences of women and indigenous people; and (c) presented a decontextualized view of slavery.

A Roundtable on Rupa Viswanath'sThe Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern Indiaand the Study of Caste

AbstractIn this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book,The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifiesThe Pariah Problemwith a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues.

Holding the Whip-Hand

Abstract This article examines two female slaveholders, one real and one fictional, to explore the relationship between gender and slave management in both history and popular culture. Annie Palmer, the “White Witch of Rose Hall” plantation in Jamaica, although the creation of folklore and journalistic exaggeration, has functioned for a century and a half as a symbol not only of the evils of slavery but of the idea that female slaveholders’ cruelty threatened the system of slavery in a way in which that practiced by males did not. In New Orleans, Delphine Lalaurie, an elite woman renowned for her elegance and piety, became a figure of monstrosity after a house fire of 1834 revealed that her French Quarter mansion held a chamber of horrors for the enslaved, and offered a similar example of the dangers of female power in slave societies. Examining these women’s continuing presence both as historical figures and as characters in novels, television shows, and other creative productions, this article illuminates the strange career of the slaveholding woman, a figure execrated in her own era and misunderstood or ignored in contemporary historiography, yet simultaneously the subject over centuries of prurient cultural fascination.

Os Direitos Humanos como primado de um sentido holístico de Educação para o Desenvolvimento em contexto de multiculturalidade

A história e as culturas africanas não são conhecidas pelos antigos países colonizadores europeus, nem pelos países que têm uma elevada taxa de afrodescendentes na sua população, devido ao tráfico negreiro, que, no Brasil, terminou com a “Lei Eusébio de Queirós”, de 4 de Fevereiro de 1850. Actualmente, o papel socioeconómico e cultural dos negros no desenvolvimento das antigas sociedades escravocratas, não é relatado nas historiografias oficiais desses países e permanece o discurso da “raça”, como justificação da escravatura e do próprio tráfico de escravos. A globalização fez crescer as desigualdades que existiam entre os países ricos e os países pobres, assim como as desigualdades no interior de cada sociedade, com uma elevada perda de valores necessários ao primado da paz, da democracia, do Estado de direito, da justiça social e dos direitos humanos. As novas gerações terão de ser formadas, no contexto de um sentido amplo de educação para a solidariedade e para o desenvolvimento, que torne possível o progresso económico e o bem-estar social, a partir do respeito ao direito de ser diferente em cada sociedade.

Getting locked up to get free in colonial Cuba

ABSTRACT This essay examines the histories of two enslaved Africans living in Cuba and sent to prison in the mid-nineteenth century, to consider the ways in which prison represented a path to freedom within and beyond slave societies. Formerly enslaved people in Cuba and Puerto Rico, released from bondage upon entering the carceral system, were often resold into slavery upon completion of their prison sentences – but not always. The essay focuses first on the case of Gregorio Lucumí, imprisoned in Cuba, whose civil status post-sentence was debated by authorities seeking to discourage crime as a means to secure prison sentences that might yield freedom from slavery. It then turns to the lengthier case of Isidoro Gangá, sent to prison in Melilla, North Africa, and who, post-sentence, appealed for freedom via free soil principles.