Slave Status Research Articles

Picturing Families between Black and White: Mixed Descent and Social Mobility in Colonial Minas Gerais, Brazil

During the eighteenth century, the Rodrigues da Cruz and the Vieira da Costa families rose to relative prominence in thecomarcaof Rio das Velhas, a judicial district of the captaincy of Minas Gerais (Figure 1). Both families had as their patriarch a wealthy Portuguese man whose fortune was built on the gold-mining industry that dominated the regional economy in the early part of the century. Both families were also the product of relationships between Portuguese gold miners and slave women. The second and third generations of the two families similarly comprised freed or free persons of mixed European and African descent whose own standing in society relied in part on their families' ability to manage the social and legal implications of the circumstances of their birth. The Rodrigues da Cruz and Vieira da Costa families were thus part of a large and rising population ofpardos(light-skinned persons) ormulatos(persons of mixed descent) in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais—not of solely Portuguese origin or descent (brancos), solely African origin (preto), nor solely African descent but born in Brazil (crioulo). Their ambiguous social standing could lie somewhere between the elite status of most brancos and the slave status of most pretos or crioulos.

When the Subject is the Object: Islamic Advice Literature Modes and the Treatment of Slavery in The Qābūs Nāmih and The Nasirean Ethics

This paper investigates the difference of perspective which informs The Qābūs Nāmih's and The Nasirean Ethics’ respective treatments of the topic of slavery. While in various parts of their discussions both works show an engagement with each side of the hybrid status of a slave's existence as both subject and object, The Qābūs Nāmih deals with the issue almost entirely in terms of the slave's status as an object, while The Nasirean Ethics engages this issue with clear acknowledgments to his/her status as a subject. It is possible that the divergent approaches of these two works are a reflection of the two distinct modes of the genre of Islamic advice literature in which they were respectively written.

Custom and law: The status of enslaved Africans in seventeenth-century Barbados

ABSTRACTThe island of Barbados provides an ideal case study to explore the beginnings of slavery and definitions of slave status in England's early American colonies. Africans and Europeans confronted each other earlier and on a larger scale in Barbados than in any other English colony. By tracing the development of slavery from the colony's settlement in 1627 this article argues that the legitimization or legalization of African slavery and the status of slaves were established in custom long before any slave laws were passed. Focus is on slave status as a point of analysis, implicitly defined by three major features: chattel property, lifetime (or permanent) servitude, and inheritance of slave condition from an enslaved mother. In examining the evidence for these features, the article contends they were part of the culture of the Euro-Atlantic world and English worldview by the time the island was settled. None of the features was ever defined in any law; rather, they were implicit in any Barbados law that mentioned slaves.

Japanese, Chinese and Indians in cosmopolitan Lima early seventeenth century

The presence of Asian population in the city of Lima in the early seventeenth century is identified, based on the Census of Indians in Lima in 1613, the Books of Council, marriage and baptismal records from the archives of the Archbishop of Lima and the notary protocols from the General Archive of the Nation. A database containing names, marital status, age, place of origin, time and place of residence in Lima and economic activity wascreated. We noticed that Lima, during the early seventeenth century, was a cosmopolitan city with people from the “four corners of the world”: Europe, Africa, America and Asia. People of American and Asian origin were called Indians, registering 114 Indians from “China and Xapon and Yndia and Portugal” as a generic name comprising, besides India in Malabar a set of Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia. Most Asian people identified came from Japan, India, China, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Java, Burma and Cambodia. They took part in the economic activities of the city, working as servants, official tailors, soleteros and neck openers; although a significant number, despite having the status of slaves or servants, were employed as retailers, the final link in the chain of distribution of smuggled goods. These results question the traditional belief that the first people of Asian descent arrived in Peru in the nineteenth century; and on the other hand, force us to review the history of slavery, migration and trade relations with South East Asia.

Bernard Lewis on Slavery in Islam: An Analytical Study

This article discusses the status of slaves in Islam and analyses the views of Bernard Lewis on this subject. It discusses who and when can one be taken as slave. How the captives of war had been treated during the life of prophet of Islam Muhammad (SAW). Does Qur’an actually support slavery? Why in the Islamic state slaves were subject to some of legal disabilities. What measures Islam has taken to demolish slavery. How Muslims are required to treat their slaves, from the burden of work to calling them. Verses of The Bible, The Qur’an and sayings of Muhammad (SAW) are comparatively studied.

TRAGOM POSLEDNJEG PARAGRAFA POLITIČKOG TRAKTATA

Tema rada je Spinozino delo Politički traktat, s posebnim fokusom na njegovo poimanje političkih prava građana. To uključuje i rasvetljavanje značenja termina građanin u odnosu na kategorije ljudi koje on razmatra kao ne-građane ili kao derivirane građane. Autorka usmerava interes na feminističko situiranje ovog problema kod Spinoze, i pokušava da izgradi feminističku interpretaciju kroz presek pojmova kao što su rod, klasa i rasa. To podrazumeva i drugačiji epistemološko-metodološki pristup ovom pitanju i njegovo proširenje na druge grupacije kojima Spinoza odriče građanski status – robove, sluge koji se izdržavaju nekim ropskim poslom i žene. U radu će biti prikazano da Spinozini stavovi proizilaze iz njegovog koncipiranja prirodnog prava kao moći, odnosno sile, kao i promišljanja bića političkog iz postojećeg stanja, odnosno iskustva. Autorka pokušava da kroz analizu tadašnjih istorijskih prilika u Holandiji, koje su, između ostalog, obeležene trgovinom robovima iz Afrike, razjasni poslednji paragraf Političkog traktata.

‘The State of Slavery': Somerset, The Slave, Grace, and the Rise of Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

From 1772 until the 1830s, the landmark decision in Somerset v. Stewart, which held that a slave must be freed by virtue of his presence on English soil, provided a powerful weapon in the trans-Atlantic battle against chattel slavery. But by the 1840s and 1850s, pro-slavery advocates used another British opinion, The Slave, Grace, as a counterargument to shape a new pro-slavery constitutionalism. This article studies four cases critical to understanding this process of reinterpretation: The Slave, Grace (1827), Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), The Slave, Matilda (1837), and Strader v. Graham (1852). These four decisions reveal the escalating battle of legal doctrine pitting freedom based on the absence of positive law vs. the reversion and reattachment of slave status.

Caught between heredity and merit: the amir Qūṣūn and the legacy of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn (d. 1341)

AbstractFrom medieval times until today ideas of heredity through lineage and of merit through slave status have jostled for pre-eminence as explanations for transitions of Mamluk royal authority. This article contributes to this debate through an analysis of events in late 1341 marking the transition from the reign of one of the sultanate's most successful rulers, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn, to that of his sons. This is achieved by focusing on the whereabouts of one of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad's most powerful agents, Qūṣūn al-Sāqī al-Nāṣirī, and on how this amir monopolized power in Egypt and Syria in such a way that his accession to the sultanate seemed inevitable. The article then demonstrates how things went wrong for Qūṣūn and how his failed attempt to obtain the sultanate triggered a Qalāwūnid dynastic succession practice that was to remain dominant for many decades.

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War NorthPeter JohnBrownlee, SarahBurns, DianeDillon, DanielGreene, and ScottManning Stevens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North Peter John Brownlee, Sarah Burns, Diane Dillon, Daniel Greene, and Scott Manning Stevens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.This beautiful coffee-table sized (8 Zi x 10 lA in.) book accompanied a 2013-2014 joint exhibition by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Newberry Library. In six chapters, it examines issues raised by one hundred sepia-and-white or color illustrations taken from ephemera (letters, broadsides), publications (sheet music, periodical clippings, magazine engravings), photographs, and art (sculpture, oil paintings).Every American schoolchild knows that, at the war's inception, the North enjoyed industrial superiority; it also had propaganda superiority because of its art academies, galleries, publishing houses, and pictorial papers. Nowadays we are used to Matthew Brady's eloquent photographs, but, in the 1860s, most Americans got their images ofqfrom the popular press: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper's Weekly, New York Illustrated News, and the like. Home Front deserves credit for treating popular culture with respect.Take the evolving interrelationship of the cotton and slavery. An 1861 Vanity Fair political cartoon Principle vs. Interest shows John Bull bargaining with Jefferson Davis over a shipment of cotton; meanwhile an African slave, in the background, tries to escape from a cotton bale in which he is almost entirely encased. The economic-political puns are delicious. Although Britain officially banned and abhorred slavery on moral principle, slave-produced cotton generated insatiable consumer interest. So while John Bull hypocritically expresses his warmest sympathy for the slave, he evades personal responsibility for profiting by helping to continue slavery: really, one cannot know friends in trade (17). That same year, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper featured the illustration Morning Mustering of the Contraband, showing the strategic wartime value of freed slaves: they deny the Confederacy the profit of slave labor, perform tasks that allow more soldiers to join the Union Army, and convey useful intelligence about Confederate troop movements. However, they are still objectified with the label contraband. By 1868, several years after the war's conclusion, Samuel Coleman's oil-on-canvas Ships Unloading dramatizes the new citizen status of the former slave. Stevedores, one black and two white, work for wages side by side on the docks as they handle free-labor cotton. …

We Must Overcome: Genealogy and Evolution of Female Slavery in West Africa

Abstract Women’s slavery continues in the contemporary world, especially in West Africa. This article seeks a history useful for abolishing contemporary slavery and reviews the evolution of scholarly perspectives on women and slavery in West Africa in order to determine the roots of contemporary slavery and put forms of contemporary slavery on the same analytical plane as historical ones. The literature on women and slavery in West Africa challenges much conventional wisdom about slavery by showing that lineage rather than chattel slavery was common; most slaves kept in West Africa were female (with local and temporal variations); the African demand for women slaves determined the skewed sex ratio in the Atlantic slave trade; women slaves were more highly valued than men because of their productive and reproductive functions; free and freed women were preeminent in owning and using women slaves; women slaves contributed to culture and identity formation in critical ways; for most women slaves, harems were more about domestic drudgery than sex; and the abolition of slavery failed for women slaves more than men for reasons relevant to the continuation of slavery for women and children in West Africa. Authoritarian family structures and colonialism subordinated West African women, and that subordination has been exacerbated by a world capitalist economy that continues the demand for slaves used in West Africa and elsewhere. If slave status historically has often been marked by race or ethnicity, contemporary slavery is gendered female in most societies.

Between slavery and capitalism: the legacy of emancipation in the American South

At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. Analyzing trajectories among average Southerners, this is perhaps the most extensive sociological treatment of the transition from slavery since W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America. In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today.

Tamás Nótári Law and Society in Lex Baiuvariorum

In this monograph, Tamas Notari investigates certain legal and socio-historical aspects of the lex Baiuvariorum, but also gives ample space to a philological analysis of its Medieval Latin. The first chapter (Historical and social background - Bavaria in the eighth century), examines Bavaria's history and society during the first half of the eighthcentury. Specifically, it deals with Bavaria's home and foreign affairs and church organisation, and certain issues pertaining to the structure of society, namely,the evolution of the Bavarian nobility and the status of freemen and slaves. It furthermore analyses the end of the independent Bavarian Dukedom, focusing on the dethronement of Tasilo III, the last duke of the Agilolfing dynasty, and the legal background of the dethronement.

As Relações do Direito ao Lazer com o Trabalho Análogo ao Escravo

The conditions of slavery remain in contemporary society, manifesting itself through over-indebtedness and / or possession of the person through employment contracts that submit the worker to degrading conditions. The homogenization of the options to enjoy the right to leisure, behavior and thinking is the result of cultural standardization and the dominant discourse propagated by the cultural industry, an element that aids in men’s conformity to a slave status. It is important to conceptualize and distinguish slavery, or modern-day slavery, in order to demonstrate that the non-enforcement of constitutional principles embodied in the concept of dignity lead to the construction of slave labor, in the context of a new reality formed from the notion of alienation of slavery itself, which is not revealed to be presented and conceptualized under the features of a no longer existing social context. In sum, under the guise of an apparently free society, the existence of slave labor is disqualified, adjusting it to the features of a consumer society. For this paper we made use of the deductive method, with research in various literature sources.

Robotnik na wynagrodzeniu w Ml 3,5 jako symbol kryzysu społecznego w i poł. V w. przed Chr.

The main aim of the article is to illustrate the social crisis in the 5th century BC, whose symbol in Mal 3,5 is a hireling working for wages. The grammatical and syntactic analysis of the expression Sükar-Säkîr helps to elucidate the situation of the hireling in the 5th century BC brought almost to the status of slave. The editorial addition, identifiable in Mal 3,1-5, is in turn the evidence of attempt to incorporate the original prophecy of Malachi in the process of extinguishing the embers of the social crisis.

Escravos e Libertos no Boletim Oficial de Angola (1845-1875) II Parte

This article presents and analyzes the results of a research made on the subject of the legal abolition of slavery and the legal status of the freedmen, in the Boletim do Governo-Geral da Provincia de Angola, later denominated Boletim Official do Governo-geral da Provincia de Angola, between 1845 and 1875, trying to determine whether and what to extent the abolitionist measures and the further legislation were actually applied in the Portuguese overseas provinces, more specifically in Angola, during the 19thcentury. This article completes the first part, published on the second issue of “E-Revista de Estudos Interculturais do CEI”, in which I exposed and analyzed the results on the subject of the legal status of slaves and their liberation by manumission or by legal proceedings, in the same journal and time span.

The Erotics of Manumussion: Prostitutes and the πρᾶσις ἐπ’ ἐλευθερίᾳ

This paper explores evidence for third party manumissions, indicated in the sources by forms of λυέσθαι and λυτρώσασθαι. It considers the procedure followed and the legal status of slaves freed in this manner, but the focus is on conceptions of this method of manumission and social mentalities toward it. The paper concludes that this practice was an informal procedure of manumission used to free prostitutes. Oratory and comedy employ it as an example of youthful extravagance and to comment on an opponent’s negative mental state. It also highlights a common stereotype of prostitutes as manipulative and scheming. While the procedure of third party manumission supports arguments for different classes of freed slaves, it also questions the idea that masters imposed formal conditions on the freedom of ex-slaves in classical Athens.

The Term <i>Mamlūk</i> and Slave Status during the Mamluk Sultanate

Scholars of the Mamluk Sultanate generally maintain that the status of all the mamlūk was that of an elite, and that the mamlūk were proud of their slave origin even after manumission. It is here argued that these assertions are based on a misconception of the term mamlūk as used in Mamluk sources. The term mamlūk has a double meaning: slave and servant, and it frequently expresses subordination, obedience and servitude. It is never used to express pride in slave status or slave origin. There is no evidence that manumitted mamlūk were proud of their slave status. On the contrary, manumitted slaves with aspirations made great efforts to repress their servile past by claiming an exalted origin or by creating marital ties with established families. Mamlūks were considered property and they lacked a legal identity of their own. They were often manumitted only upon their master’s death. They perceived themselves as slaves for lacking family ties. Only an outstanding few succeeded in completely freeing themselves of their slave status and become members of a ruling elite with family ties. It seems that starting from al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn’s third reign the enslavement of Turkish mamlūks who had been sold by their families became more of a formality. On the other hand, non-Turkish mamlūks , who were generally Christian war captives, were subject to discrimination. They were disdained, manumitted at a later age and prevented from establishing marital ties with the Qalawunids and creating their own families at a young age. They were perceived by their contemporaries as being “more slaves” than the Turkish mamlūks .

THE WEALTH OF CAPE COLONY WIDOWS: INHERITANCE LAWS AND INVESTMENT RESPONSES FOLLOWING MALE DEATH IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES

ABSTRACT Losing a household member is usually negatively associated with welfare, especially if that person is a breadwinner. Coping methods include disposal of assets to generate cash flow, while other households increase their labour supply. This paper considers a specific case in a pre-industrial society, presenting evidence where male mortality was associated with distinct benefits for widows. In the Cape Colony (during the Dutch East India Company occupation), Roman Dutch inheritance laws favoured widows, who were then able to set up households independently of their children. Their sizable inheritances (relative to other heirs) enabled investment in production assets with otherwise prohibitively high fixed costs (in particularly slave labour and vineyards) and resulted in divestment from other non-productive assets. While the mortality shock would presumably have had negative impacts on income and subsistence crop levels, this was not the case in the Cape: instead, reconstructed asset portfolios set widows up for productive, slave intensive farming and subsequent status and affluence.

Moving Memories of Slavery among West African Migrants in Urban Contexts (Bamako, Paris)

“Moving memories of slavery” are those memories of internal African slavery that move with West African migrants to urban areas. Different types of mobility towards and within urban contexts can be considered as non-discursive, embodied forms of ‘memory work’ of slavery. The focus is on how Fulɓe (and Soninke) migrants in Bamako and Paris ‘move with’ or ‘move back into’ slave status on specific moments in space and time. Even though cities offer opportunities to silence memories about their slave past, this can be only temporal and necessarily intersects with age, class, gender, etc. The data presented demonstrate that under specific conditions, urban contexts can also reproduce – even if temporarily – stigma, labour divisions and hierarchical inequalities related to the memory of slavery.

Till Death Do Us Part: Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima, Peru

This article joins a long-standing conversation among slavery scholars regarding the tensions that emerged from the legal status of slaves as property and as persons. This feature of quasi-personhood and property was perhaps most pronounced in the testamentary devise of freedom granted by slave owners. Posthumous bequests of freedom simultaneously recognised the property rights of the deceased in human beings, while validating the affective ties of loyalty and devotion spawned by the master–slave relationship. The article traces the efforts of Margarita de Torres, an enslaved woman, who waged a nine-year lawsuit for her freedom against the executrices of her owner's estate. In so doing, the article analyses Margarita's motivations for embarking on a protracted and costly lawsuit, given the odds in favour of, and against, slaves seeking to enforce testamentary promises of manumission in seventeenth-century Lima. More broadly, the article explores the affective relationships between owners and slaves, the conditions that accompanied testamentary freedom and the complexities that arose with the legal treatment of enslaved offspring of free fathers.