World Slavery Research Articles

Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

In this book review, I reflect on a selection from Jennifer L. Morgan’s (2004) book, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. I have returned to this selection several times to process its applicability, not only to the time in which it was written about, but to my existence as a Black woman in the world today. Throughout modern history, Black women’s lives have been marked by contradiction and nuance, in large part because our physical, sexual, and reproductive labour figured prominently in shaping the plantation structure and economy, a central tenant of modern society. In what follows, I share my thoughts about how Morgan engages these insights in her book, giving focus to her introductory chapter.

Capital and World Labor: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

Objective/context: The boom-and-bust of New World slavery in the nineteenth century has always been a major topic of scholarship. In this essay, I suggest that the literature devoted to this theme, the so-called “capitalism and slavery debate,” has made capital invisible as a category of analysis due to its over-reliance on classical and neoclassical economics. As a result, slavery itself has been poorly historicized. My purpose is to put forth an alternative framework to restore the historicity of capital and slavery. Methodology: The article explores critical value theory to conceptualize capital and capitalism in historically meaningful terms. It argues that value creation is never confined to one country. It requires a historically transnational social formation that turns concrete labor into abstract labor and use-values into commodities through the multi-scale operatives of world money and world markets. The history of slavery should be narrated within this broader globalizing setting. Originality: The article’s claim is that the global value relations of industrial capital redetermined spatial relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering overlapping layers of a world geography of accumulation that both stimulated and challenged slavery. Conclusions: While most scholars present the relation between slavery and capitalism as constant for the period 1780-1880, I conclude that New World slavery went through two moments of boom-and-bust (c.1780-c.1820 and c.1830-1880), which were formed through, respectively, the global value relations of cotton production and coal-and-iron industrialism.

Fugitivity and marronage and the study of sex work.

Campaigns against female prostitution used slavery as a rhetorical device to characterize the condition of sex workers, and sex work features prominently in contemporary campaigns against "modern slavery". In both types of campaigning, "the slave" is worked as a symbolic device to represent the abject condition of human beings objectified, controlled by violence or its threat, and stripped of agency and choice. The assumptions and generalizations about prostitution that inform this vision have been extensively critiqued. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that the analogy also rests on a very particular reading of "the slave" and a very partial appeal to histories of Atlantic World slavery. Histories of enslaved people's resistance and flight are entirely overlooked. The latter has recently prompted interest in fugitivity and marronage as analytic concepts, albeit concepts that are defined and deployed in different ways by different scholars and activists. This review asks whether and how they might potentially have theoretical purchase with regard to the contemporary experience (both positive and negative) of sex workers.

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Accounting, slavery and the slave trade: A multi-continental perspective

As in other disciplines, the Atlantic slave-trade and New World slavery have assumed an increasingly contentious role in accounting history. In her Accounting for Slavery, Rosenthal has recently located many current business practices in the nexus between accounting, capitalism and slavery. Other accounting historians have explored slave-trading ventures from Africa, the role of accounting and slavery in New World colonisation, and in accounting and managerial practices in the slave-estates of the Americas. Absent from the extant literature are studies that explore the nexus between accounting, capitalism and slavery from a multi-continental perspective that considers Atlantic slavery as an integrated whole. This study, by drawing on the Trans-Atlantic Slave-trade Database, seeks to fill this gap, examining the correlations between Atlantic slavery and African demographic and social regression, European prosperity and New World accounting and managerial practices. In doing so, it argues that accounting played a fundamentally different role in the slave economy to that which it undertook in emerging systems of industrial capitalism.

Under the Yoke of Ottoman Domination: Slavery and Central European Philhellenism During the Greek War of Independence

Slavery remained a problem for Central Europeans after the defeat of Napoleon. Concerns over White, Christian enslavement animated German-speaking European responses to the Greek Independence movement. As most antislavery advocates turned their attention to the increasing volume of the slaves traded between Africa and the New World, as well as the persistence and entrenchment of New World slavery, Central Europeans turned their attention to the Christian, Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The so-called ‘Barbary Problem’ ( Barbareskenfrage) became enmeshed with the Eastern Question as Greeks revolted in Ottoman lands. Central Europeans had long viewed the domination of Christians in Islamic North Africa as the central problem of slavery until increased German migration and involvement in the New World brought new tensions to the ideas surrounding slavery. Greek insurrectionists against the Ottoman Empire breathed new life into older ideas about Christians enslaved in Islamic portions of Europe and Africa. Greek Independence gave Germans a bête noir closer to Europe than that of slavery in the Americas. Much of this interest owes to an enduring German philhellenic tradition which has been seldom analysed. Indeed, as Sue Marchand has written ‘the obsession of the Schillerian German literary and scholarly elite with the ancient Greeks has become an accepted-if severely underanlaysed-cliché’. This paper uses archival documents to shed more light on how Central Europeans’ interest and participation in the Greek War of Independence helped to revive old ideas about Christian enslavement at a time when New World slavery became the central concern of a broader European humanitarian protest against servitude.

Slavery and Empire-Making: Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt

Slavery and Empire-Making:Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt Antoinette Burton, Kathleen Wilson, Matthew J. Smith, Daniel Domingues da Silva, James Sidbury, and Vincent Brown Introduction to the Book Forum Antoinette Burton University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Histories of slavery tend to be unevenly distributed in studies of anglophone empire. Imperialism is typically an explanatory force in histories of enslavement: acknowledged as a conditional context in accounts about its reach and significance and typically interwoven in and through its foundational narratives. Conversely, histories of empire, especially those that operate at scale, rarely take slavery fully into account, if at all—as the most recent blockbuster in the field, Caroline Elkins' 2022 Legacies of Violence, powerfully testifies.1 That is to say, it's relatively uncommon for scholars of modern empire to start with slavery and track its longitudinal effects on British imperial histories beyond abolition—save perhaps where the afterlives of antislavery movements and ideology or the material reality of indenture is concerned. With few exceptions, work that actively narrates either the episodic or recurrent connections between enslavement as a violent, extractive practice of racializing capitalism and the emergence of British imperial power as a globalizing project is not the norm in contemporary scholarship.2 The same is true for studies which center the role that enslaved peoples have had in shaping what British "slave-empire" configurations looked like by going beyond the confines of the established archive. With the publication of Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt, the impossibility of segmenting slavery from empire-making in imperial history is directly challenged. As is the notion that the archive places insurmountable limits on imagining the consequential part enslaved men and women played in directing how the interdependence of these histories and their contribution to colonial world-making on a global stage should be told. The book lays down a set of interpretive gauntlets that historians of empire eager for a re-mix of historiographies of slavery and imperialism will welcome. Key to the recalibration the book calls for, is an argument about the urgency of making the frame of war and rebellion—indeed, of historicizing rebellion as war—constitutive of our apprehension of the eighteenth century Atlantic world. Brown calls this "the martial geography of Atlantic slavery" (2), a description that reminds us that rebellions against enslavement were militant responses to its atrocities, and that such militance compels us to re-suture the Caribbean and West Africa anew. This, in order to fully appreciate "the hemispheric reach" of slave revolts. It is well-known that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Caribbean was the focus of a deliberate British imperial strategy. But through a vigorous rereading of a wide variety of historiographical work in both slavery and empire history and studies (and beyond) Brown materially links, for example, the Jamaican slave uprising of 1760-61 to histories of war and conflict on the African continent—conflicts between and among indigenous communities (as well as in opposition to slavers) which had a bearing on the way that rebellion unfolded in the recesses of St Mary Parish. Seeing slave rebellion as a species of military campaign underscores how "war and slavery nourished each other as the histories of Europe, Africa, and America became increasingly intertwined," thereby revealing Tacky's revolt and others to be protagonists in the making of the transoceanic history of slavery, to be sure, but of empire as well. Readers will not want to miss the "animated thematic map" of slave revolt that accompanies Brown's book, not least because it dramatizes in visual terms the combination of geographical re-integration and spatial re-orientation that his study offers to those who may be familiar with Caribbean rebellions or Atlantic world slavery but may not fully grasp their interconnectivity.3 Meanwhile, critical to his project as a whole is Brown's investment in reconstructing histories of key rebels—rebels whose specific identities are elusive but whose composite profiles Brown is especially skillful in building out. The book opens with the story of Wager, whose African name was Apongo and who was a major player in Jamaica in 1760-61. There is a lot we can know...

Sexuality and the Second Slavery: Figuring Sexuality in Racialized Labor Formations

AbstractFrom the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, sexuality was a key factor in the reorganization of New World slavery through the period described as the Second Slavery. With the early nineteenth century bans on the transatlantic slave trade initiated by the United States and the British Empire, there was a corresponding transition from prior plantation economies focused on US Upper South tobacco and Caribbean sugar islands toward more differentiated forms of labor based on hiring out in domestic services, manufacture, and the expansion into new frontiers of accumulation in the New South of the Mississippi Delta, Cuba, and Brazil. This qualitative change and expansion of New World slavery carried gendered understandings based on the sexuality and reproductive capabilities of enslaved people. Using Tomich's conception of the Second Slavery, I incorporate an analysis that demonstrates how conceptions of sexuality were integral to racializing and gendering processes of subordination that reveal the heterogeneity of the historical and economic moment.

Can Black Lives Matter in a Black Country?

Abstract This essay probes the project of security (defined as the protection of whiteness, class hierarchy, and heteropatriarchy) in relation to the desire for safety (glossed as “having somebody”). In probing this relation within a context in which police violence and extrajudicial killing are not typically seen as part of the global phenomenon of anti-Black racism, it seeks to contribute to a conversation in which raciality is not tethered to physicality, but instead is grounded in both historical-ideological and onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness as the apex of humanity in the modern West. The essay explores the relation between security and safety through the rubric of diaspora in two senses—first as a phenomenon of Western modernity via plantation-based New World slavery, which catalyzed the development of enduring categories of (non)personhood and their elaboration into hierarchies of humanity; and second as a phenomenon of migration and the constitution of transnational sociocultural spheres. Diaspora, thus, generates forms of pan-Africanism and Black consciousness as much as it produces agendas related to transnational governance and global security infrastructures. The essay argues that to more complexly understand security from the South, these two notions of diaspora must be held in productive tension. In this way, security is revealed as a racializing project grounded in coloniality, even within majority Black spaces. The essay concludes by illuminating other terrains on which to build accountability and safety.

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Race, place, and power in the production of medical knowledge: Perspectives from the Greater Caribbean

AbstractOver the past 10 years, the Greater Caribbean has emerged as an instructive historical concept for scholarly studies on slavery, race, disease, climate, commerce, and culture. During the era of Atlantic World slavery, this region spanned the Carolinas to the Caribbean, was home to racially diverse inhabitants, new diseases, flora and fauna typically not found in Europe, and climates that were equally as unfamiliar. Scholars have increasingly come to recognize this space as an ideal one for studying knowledge production about health and race. On the topic of race, in particular, the Greater Caribbean provided the context in which white commentators challenged or affirmed notions of innate racial difference through what they witnessed while living in the region. Questions about race, disease, climate and constitutions, could be posed at any locale; however, the ability to make side‐by‐side comparisons of how living, breathing Black and white bodies experienced sickness, treated illness, and labored in distinctive disease environments and climates was easier done in the Greater Caribbean than in Europe. Bearing that in mind, we should strive toward recognizing how knowledge about human bodies produced in Europe and the Caribbean worked in tandem to reify race. A number of scholars have made just that point, and amplified the significance of this region in contributing to the development and circulation of knowledge about race, as well as medical therapeutics, and disease.

Far More than Money: British West Indian Slavery, Emancipation, and Australia’s Sugar Industry

As more sources have been made available by the Legacies of British Slavery project, it is clear that ties between Atlantic world slavery and Queensland’s sugar industry are considerably more extensive than previously understood. This article goes beyond looking at money and men to explore what this means for understandings of race, slavery and indenture on Australia’s sugar plantations. It argues that slavery was understood in specific ways by West Indians after emancipation, and that race was increasingly used to bolster white supremacy, both of which adversely affected Pacific Islanders in Queensland.

The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative HistorySteven T. Katz

The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative HistorySteven T. Katz

British Universities and Transatlantic Slavery: the University of Glasgow Case

Abstract On 16 September 2018, the University of Glasgow released the report ‘Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow’. This acknowledged that slave-owners, merchants and planters with connections to New World slavery – and their descendants – donated capital between 1697 and 1937 that influenced the development of the institution. In producing this report, the institution became the first British university to declare historical income derived from transatlantic slavery. In response, a nine-point programme reported as reparative justice was launched, the first British university to launch a project on such a scale. This article traces both the methodological approach undertaken in the study and the historical evidence related to the University of Glasgow. This provides insights into the process of collecting and analysing the evidence on which the report and strategy was based. Current understandings about British universities and transatlantic slavery are shaped by the institutional relationship with owners of enslaved people. This article underlines the importance of merchant capital – in this case, mainly via West India commerce – to the development of one institution.

Archives of the Dispossessed

Archives of the Dispossessed

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.

Aranda’s Skeletonizing in “Benito Cereno”: Finding Its Medieval Provenance and Discovering More of Melville’s Response to New World Slavery

Aranda’s Skeletonizing in “Benito Cereno”: Finding Its Medieval Provenance and Discovering More of Melville’s Response to New World Slavery

Melville and The Torrid Zone

In this essay, I explore Melville's "The Encantadas" as an extended engagement with the Torrid Zone, nineteenth-century geography's inheritance from an ancient geographic concept. While the nineteenth-century Spanish American contexts of the sketches have been carefully elaborated, I attend here to the many epigraphs Melville takes from Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene (1590)—enlisted to signal the historical moment of English belatedness in the hemisphere—while also examining the stunning retort to the Western category of the Torrid Zone that El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega issued in his Comentarios Reales de los Incas ["Royal Commentaries"] (1609). Like Garcilaso, I argue, Melville glosses the unstable category of the human, and in doing so suggests the rootedness of this concept in the history of New World slavery and colonialism—to shadow forth, paradoxically, the human suffering caused by anthropocentrism. Ultimately, Melville's Torrid Zone offers a space of philosophical rupture and a vantage point for meditation on the West: its enduring problem of evil, its invention of the human, and its perpetual creation of theodicies that justify the world's racial and geographical apportionment of suffering.

An Illegitimate Offspring: South Sea Islanders, Queensland Sugar, and the Heirs of the British Atlantic Slave Complex

Abstract This article argues that Pacific Islander labour in Australia was not analogous to earlier Atlantic world slavery and can better be understood as its ‘illegitimate offspring’. Through case studies that connect the Caribbean to Australia, it reveals how the idea of Pacific Islander labour was forged in an environment where the abolitionist battle had been won, but where the interconnected and changing racial constructions of the time, and arguments about what constituted free labour, were very much ongoing. Money, values and personnel moved from the Caribbean and Mauritius to Australia, as explored through the stories of James Williams, a convict of African origin who grew Australia’s first sugar, and Benjamin Boyd, the son of an Atlantic slave trader who first introduced Pacific Islanders to Australia. The final case study is that of Louis Hope, whose mother’s family, the Wedderburns, had previously gained considerable notoriety in the Atlantic world for the way that they treated their enslaved people. Hope was the first person in Australia to employ a large Pacific Islander workforce on his sugar plantation.

Baltic-German pro-serfdom thought in the Russian Baltic provinces from a comparative perspective

ABSTRACT Pro-slavery argumentation was relatively similar both in the context of New World slavery and the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire, where a small autonomous Baltic-German minority governed over Estonian and Latvian serfs. This became apparent from the justification of the way the system of unfreedom was formed and how the slaves/serfs were enslaved, and to the ideas about why the slaves/serfs could not be freed, as well as why the system of unfreedom was the best possible one. Similar rhetoric was also used in countering abolitionist agitation and argumentation, while the worries of the pro-serfdom faction also involved similar topics like the likelihood of insurrections, the negative influence of abolitionist ideas and supposed false claims about the masters and the system of serfdom. Additionally, the Baltic-German pro-serfdom advocates were aware of the peculiarities of New World slavery, yet referred to it relatively rarely, and often only if the local abolitionists brought out such comparisons. All of this serves to reinforce Larry E. Tise's claim about the universal nature of pro-slavery thought, as well as making it possible to consider the Baltic provinces within Peter Kolchin's ideas of other Souths.