Kristin Mann and Philip Misevich
When Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Americas, he bridged two worlds in which slavery of various kinds was sadly commonplace. The great variety and dynamism of local and regional slave systems that permeated Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and the Americas before 1492 continue to fascinate the scholars who study them. Yet the transatlantic slave trade that evolved in the centuries following Columbus’s crossing grew into a particularly pernicious system of human trafficking. In addition to its well-known brutality and racialized nature, the Atlantic slave system was unique because of the widespread economic, social, and political changes that it unleashed across the four continents that ringed the Atlantic ocean, as well as the speed with which it integrated their littorals and hinterlands. In the fifteenth century merchants and political leaders had at best only the vaguest conceptions of the peoples and places that lay scattered around and across the Atlantic Ocean. By the time the trade was abolished in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, they could speak with sophistication about the various combinations of commodities required for the purchase of enslaved men, women, and children in any number of slaving ports along the African coast, the American as well as European sites where such goods were produced, and the American locations where the slaves would be sold. In short, globalization shaped and was shaped by slavery, the African slave trade, and the Atlantic world they played such a pivotal role in creating.
The essays in this volume probe the long and interconnected histories of slavery, the slave trade, abolition, and emancipation throughout the Atlantic world. They are informed by half a century of careful and in particular quantitative research into the transatlantic trade. Since the late 1960s, when Philip Curtin provided the first systematic “census” of the trade, scholars have been developing sophisticated methods to assess participation in the traffic at local, regional, national, and continental levels.1 The launch of Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database in 2008, which makes available to the public a searchable website with information on more than thirty-five thousand Atlantic slaving voyages, has revolutionized slave trade studies, enabling users to, among other things, examine the unique patterns that underpinned the trade.2
Inspired by the digital revolution in slave studies, contributions to this volume pioneer new approaches to the study of the slave trade, employing innovative quantitative and qualitative methods to pose new economic, cultural, demographic, environmental, and political questions. They tap unknown and underappreciated historical sources hidden in archives and memories scattered around the world, ranging from the Netherlands to Nigeria, and from Boston to Bahia. The essays exploit a wide variety of traditional and nontraditional methods and approaches that include, for example, assessments of demographic data, reconstructions of family histories, examinations of court records, analyses of historical images and artwork, and even consideration of African names as historical evidence. Equally important, the years since the launch of Voyages have given the authors represented in this volume time to step back from empirical considerations and reflect in new ways on broader interpretive issues that lie at the heart of scholarship on the Atlantic world, such as the relationship between consumption and the growth of slavery, the diversity and adaptability of slavery, the role of Africans in shaping the slave trade and abolition, and the many contradictions in the as yet incomplete campaign to stamp out slavery and the slave trade. Collectively, the essays in this book recast knowledge about the interplay of global processes and local, regional, and imperial particularity and contingency in shaping the rise, transformation, and halting demise of slavery and the slave trade in Europe, the Americas, and Africa.
Slavery and the Slave Trade
The essays in part 1 focus on the growth, organization, and duration of New World slavery and the African slave trade that supplied it. They shed bright new light on an enduring historical question: why the American demand for African slaves that propelled the trade became so big and lasted so long. It is now well established that over a period of roughly three and a half centuries between 1500 and 1867 some 12.5 million Africans were forcibly removed from their home continent, with about 10.5 million being landed in the Americas. David Richardson’s compelling opening chapter finds an answer to the question of scale and duration by examining the relationship between human consumption and slavery. It looks first at the connection between the dramatic growth of demand in early modern Europe for consumer goods made from New World staples and the “consumption” of enslaved Africans used to produce those commodities. The analysis, which summarizes the latest quantitative research on the chronological, geographical, and demographic patterns of the slave trade, later turns to the role of consumption in Africa itself. Introducing the idea of the social footprint of consumption, Richardson presents his findings in terms relevant not only to the past but also to our own age, when cruelly coerced, deeply exploitative, poorly paid, and often dangerous types of labor throughout the world also are geared to gratifying as cheaply as possible the consumer cravings of distant mass markets around the globe. The essay thus leaves the reader with much to ponder in contemporary, as well historical, human behavior.
Exploding European demand for sugar produced on New World plantations initially fueled the growth of the market for African slaves. The crop’s spread from northeastern Brazil to the Caribbean and elsewhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drove the expansion of the plantation system in the Americas and the African slave trade to supply it with labor. What Richardson calls Europe’s deepening addiction to sugar explains the dramatic expansion of slavery and the slave trade after 1700 when four-fifths of all slaves were forcibly transported from African shores. Indeed, roughly 80 percent of all Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic ended up in sugar-producing regions. Absent the sugar revolution, the African footprint in the Americas would have been quite different.3
Sugar had the harshest work regime of the major New World staples, and this tragic reality exacerbated the growth in the American demand for slaves. As Philip Morgan’s and David Richardson’s contributions drive home, on sugar plantations slaves were commonly worked to death. Owners found it more cost effective to import fresh supplies of labor from Africa than to invest in living and working conditions that would have supported biological reproduction. A prime male slave living in Jamaica at the end of the seventeenth century, for example, generally produced enough sugar during his first year or so on the plantation to cover the price his owner paid for him—a testament to the profits the industry generated and the perception of the expendability of slaves’ lives that those profits helped create among plantation owners.4 With the exception of Barbados, the oldest British sugar island around the turn of the nineteenth century, slave populations in major sugar-producing regions of the New World did not replenish themselves naturally but required continuing replacement from Africa just to sustain their numbers at existing levels, much less to increase them.5 This demographic crisis ensured that the consumption of African slaves in the Americas was substantially greater than it would otherwise have been. As Richardson argues, the human costs to African slaves of producing agricultural crops, notably sugar, for consumption by Europeans were extraordinarily high. Such losses compounded mortality prior to export from Africa and during the Atlantic crossing. The combination of sugar production and a reliable slave trade was deadly for the slaves.
Why did Europeans turn to enslaved African labor to develop and expand the plantation system in the Americas? Rik van Welie’s chapter offers insight into this central question by taking up what David Eltis has called “the slave-free paradox”: how it was that England and the Netherlands, two European nations that had long been moving away from coerced labor at home and granting their countrymen exceptional individual rights and personal freedom, could establish during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “the harshest and most closed systems” of exploiting non-European slaves in the Americas.6 Van Welie examines this paradox from the Dutch perspective. He accepts the role of possessive individualism—the vesting of property rights, especially in one’s own labor and that of others, in individuals rather than social groups within European society—and the importance of the ethnic divide between European owners and non-European slaves, both posited persuasively by Eltis.7 Van Welie also emphasizes, however, the wide spatial, mental, and cultural divide that separated the Dutch metropolis and its colonies in Asia and the Americas. The merchant companies awarded monopolies to administer and develop Dutch possessions overseas operated quite autonomously, van Welie argues. They developed different systems of slavery to meet their severe labor shortages with little or no metropolitan regulation and oversight. Very limited Dutch emigration to the colonies and weak communications networks between them and the mother country meant that within the Dutch Republic itself slavery in the Dutch Americas remained hidden from view and largely invisible to most Dutch people. It did not penetrate the consciousness of Dutch citizens, who could enjoy their sweetened beverages and other slave-produced consumer pleasures with no thought of what was involved in producing them.
If sugar production fueled the initial growth of the appetite for African slaves in the Americas and ensured that it remained insatiable right up until the last slave vessel crossed the Atlantic in the late 1860s, slavery also proved remarkably adaptive to other agrarian orders and indeed to urban labor needs. Morgan’s essay acknowledges that sugar defined the Caribbean, which imported about six million slaves between 1500 and 1867. His contribution recasts knowledge about both slavery and the region, however, by analyzing the great variety and diversity of Caribbean slavery. To revise the usual narrative of the unyielding development of the dominance of sugar and racial slavery in the Caribbean, he masterfully chronicles the history across the islands of early Native American slavery, slavery beyond sugar, and urban slavery. In his discussion of the second of these subjects, Morgan documents the use of slaves in a wide range of economic activities, shaped by time, topography, and imperial preference. Some of them included cattle herding, food farming, salt raking, lumbering, fishing, and diving, as well as tobacco, indigo, coffee, and cotton growing. Caribbean slavery differed across these types of production and the environments where they occurred, including in the conditions of slave life and their demographic consequences, as Morgan’s essay will demonstrate.
By 1790, Morgan estimates, perhaps one in six of all Caribbean slaves lived in urban spaces, which further enhanced diversity. In such settings, slaves, the majority of whom were females, enjoyed economic, social, religious, and cultural opportunities that rarely existed in the surrounding countryside. Creolization occurred rapidly and powerfully, while African sodalities also took root. These differences, Morgan concludes, made slavery more, not less, secure in the urban Caribbean. They underscore his general conclusion that there were many Caribbean slaveries rather than one determined by sugar.
The adaptability and diversity of slavery have also been well documented in Brazil, which developed the first major plantation system in the New World and the largest single imperial and then national market for African slaves overall. The Caribbean and Brazil together imported about 87 percent of all slaves shipped to the Americas.8 Early Portuguese and Dutch sugar planters in Brazil also experimented with Native American slavery, which in São Paulo survived in the production of other commodities until the second half of the eighteenth century. Once African slavery became dominant in the sugar-producing Northeast in the early decades of the seventeenth century, it spread smoothly, if at different dates and rates, to gold and diamond mining and tobacco, cotton, and coffee growing in the central-south districts and other areas of the colony and after 1822 the young nation. In niches within these zones and in more remote areas, African slaves also worked in food farming and cattle ranching, as well as in interregional water and land transportation and intercontinental sailing. As slavery spread and then shifted from region to region with fluctuations in the dynamism of Brazil’s economy, it adapted in detail to the dictates of the work required and organization of the enterprises where it was performed, while conforming to the essential characteristics of the chattel system.9
In Brazil, too, slavery was central to the organization of urban economies, as Kristin Mann’s essay in part 2 of the volume shows. In cities and towns, slaves toiled in trade, transportation, skilled crafts, unskilled labor, and many other activities for their owners, on hire, and independently in return for a regular payment to their owners. Slave holding permeated Brazilian urban and rural society, trickling down to the middling orders of wealth holders. One of the first purchases a newly freed woman or man in an urban setting made on accumulating some capital was usually an African slave, not only because of the labor the slave would perform and income he or she would generate but also because slave owning was taken as an important marker of freedom. In mid-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, slaves were “the most equally distributed of assets,” and slavery aided the ascent of middling groups.10
In summary, while the demand for slaves in the Americas was driven by sugar and while sugar plantations established the classic and deadly model of tightly regimented gang labor in agricultural production, slavery was also a highly adaptive means of organizing work.11 It varied in different empires and environments and also through time, as Morgan has shown, while retaining the essential characteristic that slaves were property in which their owners could exercise all but a very limited number of rights. Slavery’s very adaptability further contributed to the growth and duration of the American demand for African slaves.
American demand, however, explains only part of the tragic history of the Atlantic slave trade. The commerce could not have lasted so long and resulted in the forced removal of so many men, women, and children from the continent without African participation. What was the nature of that involvement? With the partial exception of West Central Africa, where the Portuguese and their Afro-Portuguese descendants took some slaves directly in wars of conquest or alliance with African rulers and warlords and also seized them in compensation for debt, Africans controlled mechanisms of enslavement inside the continent. Both centralizing kingdoms and decentralized village-based societies enslaved free people. Across them capture in warfare or raids of different kinds waged for political, economic, religious, and personal reasons were the most important mechanisms of enslavement, as illustrated by Philip Misevich’s essay on southern Sierra Leone. Judicial processes, oracular condemnation, witchcraft accusations, and the forced removal from societies of political or other undesirables also played a role, as did kidnapping and political tribute. Jelmer Vos’s chapter on the Windward Coast and Olatunji Ojo’s on Igboland (inland from the Bight of Biafra) illuminate a number of these practices. In times of drought, famine, and epidemic, particularly in the precarious natural environments that characterized parts of West Central, West, and Southeast Africa, communities and families sometimes dealt with vulnerable dependents for whom they could no longer care by selling them into slavery or leaving such individuals no alternative but to offer themselves up to slave traders in return for food and protection.12
Africans also organized and operated the extensive regional and longer-distance commercial networks through which, along with other goods, slaves were traded, as they endured the arduous passage from the point of enslavement to the coast. Outside Upper Guinea, where the Senegal and Gambia Rivers made boat traffic to upstream, riverside trading fairs possible and West Central Africa where Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese exercised a limited sphere of influence behind the Portuguese colony of Angola with its capital at Luanda, Europeans and Americans rarely ventured far from the littoral. In many of the ports along the coast from which slaves were exported, moreover, African political and commercial elites exercised as much power as European or American buyers in negotiating the terms and conditions of the trade.
The time required to purchase a cargo of slaves on the African coast fluctuated, and ship captains complained about the inadequacy of supplies and risks involved in doing business with Africans throughout the long history of the commerce.13 Numbers alone, however, attest to the overall effectiveness of African responses to opportunities to trade slaves. Aggregate exports rose slowly, if for the most part steadily, from the beginning of the sixteenth century until they reached 718,000 slaves or 28,700 per year in the final quarter of the seventeenth century. They then expanded by more than 250 percent to 1,926,000 slaves or 77,000 per year from 1751 to 1775 and, despite a temporary decline in the early years of the nineteenth century during the Napoleonic Wars and following the abolition of the trade by Denmark, Great Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands, remained close to that level through 1850.14
All of the major regions of the African coast from Senegambia to Southeast Africa supplied slaves, although most were shipped from the area between the Gold Coast and West Central Africa, with West Central Africa, the Bight of Benin, and the Bight of Biafra embarking 74.2 percent of the total between 1501 and 1867, when the trade finally ended.15 Temporal changes in the volume shipped from different locations occurred, of course, with Upper Guinea (Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast) playing a prominent role early (sixteenth century) and late (1751–1850), Southeast Africa entering primarily late (nineteenth century), the Bight of Benin peaking between 1676 and 1850, and the Bight of Biafra concentrating its exports in the roughly 110 years between 1741 and 1850. The single region of West Central Africa supplied more slaves than any other in all but one twenty-five year period between 1576 and 1867. A staggering 45.5 percent of all slaves taken to the Americas were loaded onto vessels anchored off its shores. Yet, within each of these regions, a limited number of ports, twenty in total, handled about 80 percent of the trade, and seven of them were located on the coast of West Central Africa. From many parts of Africa’s long western shoreline, few slaves if any were embarked.16
The essay in the volume that focuses most directly on the organization and conduct of the trade inside Africa deals with the Windward Coast, a part of Upper Guinea. Jelmer Vos, its author, combines analysis of quantitative and well-chosen qualitative data to show clearly how different aspects of the system of slave supply operated in this hitherto little-studied and not well-understood part of Africa. The Windward Coast entered the commerce late, and it was not one of the major zones of supply. Moreover, the system of African procurement that prevailed there, which Vos characterizes as “small mechanisms of enslavement,” differed from that in other areas such as the Senegambia (also in Upper Guinea), the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, and West Central Africa. At times in these regions, networks of trade stretched considerably deeper into the interior and connected societies there undergoing disruptive political, military, or religious transformations that produced slaves to coastal markets. In such locations, a higher percentage of slaves reaching the coast originated as war captives or political tribute than in the area studied by Vos, and some of them had suffered long journeys to the sea during which they endured multiple sales and owners. Current research is showing, however, that even in certain of these areas peoples from communities within one hundred or so miles of the coast were heavily represented on slaving vessels in the nineteenth century.17 If the small mechanisms of enslavement that Vos discusses did not prevail universally throughout the history of the trade, his analysis of the negotiation by African brokers and foreign buyers on the Windward Coast of trading practices and credit arrangements, essential to the commerce everywhere, show many similarities with practices that existed elsewhere.18
Why did Africans sell slaves for shipment to the Americas? This troubling question preoccupied abolitionists from the end of the eighteenth century, and it has engaged historians of Africa since the birth of the field in the mid-twentieth century. General explanations have stressed that most African societies participating in the Atlantic slave trade already had, like most cultures in the world, indigenous systems of slavery. Although these systems differed, they all provided means of bringing outsiders into households, kin groups, villages, towns, and kingdoms, in a continent where people were the primary form of wealth and a range of relationships of dependency and subordination existed for accumulating control over them. Slave holding and trading were nothing new in many African societies, even if slavery in most parts of Africa was quite different than the New World chattel variety. In addition, Africans normally sold slaves who were not freeborn members of their own societies but rather were outsiders with whom they shared no ethnic, religious, or political affiliations. It must be remembered that no pan-African identity existed on the continent before the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a number of African polities had rules prohibiting the sale of their own people into slavery and deviated from them only in exceptional circumstances. Finally, it needs to be stressed that Africans of different kinds intermittently resisted the slave trade with notable effect on both the overall number of slaves exported and the parts of the continent from which they came. Research has also shown, however, that participation in the slave trade changed both centralized and decentralized African societies in ways that altered their organization, institutions, and worldviews and propelled some of them more deeply into slaving.19
Richardson’s essay advances a different argument about why Africans sold slaves. It emphasizes the role of African consumption in the growth and development of the Atlantic slave trade. Only by selling slaves into the transatlantic commerce, Richardson maintains, could African dealers acquire the imported trade goods they desired. Trade was already an established part of economic life in most of the African societies that were drawn more deeply into the Atlantic slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although market exchange was in general more highly developed in West than West Central Africa. While geographic and temporal differences existed, miners, metal workers, and other types of craftspeople, as well as hunters, farmers, fishermen, and herders, produced fluctuating surpluses of different sizes that traders sold in local and regional markets for purchase by consumers. Longer-distance commerce also occurred in environmentally specialized goods such as salt, metals, metal objects, beads, kola, cloth of different kinds, and certain other commodities. The Atlantic commerce in slaves, however, introduced many new imported wares—colorful textiles, metals, spirits, tobacco, cowries (a shell currency), guns, gunpowder, containers, and miscellaneous manufactures. Textiles from South Asia and later Europe topped the list almost everywhere throughout the history of the trade, but otherwise local preferences varied. These imports created new opportunities for consumption, often of types of goods such as metals, guns, gunpowder, spirits, tobacco, currencies, and even textiles that were not readily available locally. As Richardson notes, Africans who sold slaves on different parts of the coast were very particular about the assortments of imports they received in exchange.20
It is important to bear in mind, however, that imports were consumed very differently in Africa between 1600 and 1850 than in Europe during the same period. In the latter, mass markets for sugar and other commodities produced by slaves in the Americas were growing; by the mid-nineteenth century all but the very poor could buy them in markets, shops, and public gathering places, and their consumption was tied to changes in sociability and other cultural as well as economic transformations. In Africa a mass market for imported goods had not yet developed. Indeed, in many places the access of non-elites to the new imports was generally not mediated by the market; rather, it was controlled by political, commercial, military, and religious elites involved in the slave trade or by ambitious upstarts challenging their authority. Those who acquired imports, often on credit, in return for delivering slaves redistributed them to attract and hold followers of different kinds who built their wealth in people, while also selling some of the goods, usually also on credit, in exchange for more slaves or other commodities they desired. Members of these groups also consumed imports themselves to signal their identity and status. Displays of exotic European elements in their dress, for example, commonly served this purpose, as did imported furnishings in their dwellings. In addition, slave-trading elites incorporated the new imports into religious rituals, ancestral masquerades, and civic festivals that performed their political and religious authority and sometimes also contested and redefined it.21
These processes were often, but not always, associated with a growth in political scale and with political centralization. Imports acquired through the slave trade played a role in building African states and sustaining the authority of their rulers. Guns and gunpowder gave a few armed leaders and their followers new power and escalated violent conflicts with neighbors that accompanied territorial expansion. In decentralized societies in Upper Guinea and the Niger Delta, by contrast, imported iron was fashioned into locally made weapons and tools, which were used both to increase the capture of slaves and to enhance agricultural production. Because the acquisition of imports was tied so often to indebtedness, it gave African as well as European and Eur-African creditors a means of coercing the exchange of more slaves. Although imports are surely mentioned in European descriptions of some African markets, especially those near major coastal ports or inland trade centers, such goods were rarely available for widespread purchase. Indeed, Eltis and Jennings have concluded that in the era of the slave trade the volume of European goods being imported into the continent was not sufficient for them to have had a broad-based impact on everyday African life.22
If African elites, aspiring new men and women of different kinds, and their followers wanted imported consumer goods for their own reasons, why did they not retain African slaves (or incorporate them as other types of dependents or free people) and put them to use in their own societies producing commodities for export to Europe that could have been traded for the imports they desired? In fact, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, Africans in some parts of the continent did produce and trade commodities other than slaves for export to Europe, as well as elsewhere in Africa. As David Eltis has written, overall, the value of slave exports from Africa to the Atlantic world probably surpassed that of other commodities only at the end of the seventeenth century.23 The primary example is the Gold Coast, which imported African slaves and European and African textiles in exchange for gold during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, in terms of value, exported more gold than slaves until the end of the seventeenth century. Upper Guinea, however, also exported commodities, including, ivory, wax, pepper, hides, gum, and gold. Vos documents the preference of many African communities along the Windward Coast for trade in pepper, gold, ivory, and textiles into the eighteenth century. Even West Central Africa, where the Portuguese quest for copper proved a chimera, exported some wax, ivory, animal skins, and bird feathers, as well as a few other commodities.24
The trade in goods other than slaves might have continued to predominate had the price of the latter on the African coast, driven by rising American demand for unfree labor, not moved up so substantially during the eighteenth century. Richardson reports a roughly fivefold rise in the real terms of African coastal prices between 1700 and 1807, with much of the increase occurring after 1750.25 Slave prices on the coast rose substantially more than in most interior markets. During the eighteenth century, the price of slaves along the African littoral overtook that of virtually all locally produced commodities, such that even on the Windward Coast Africans were drawn into selling slaves into the Atlantic commerce to generate income to buy the imports they desired. The sad fact is that in the international division of labor that underpinned early modern globalization, the competitive advantage of African commercial, political, and military elites lay by the eighteenth century in harvesting slaves for consumption on New World plantations. Europe supplied the growing mass market for consumer goods, and New World plantations produced the tropical staples from which many of them were made. Africa’s distinctive role was to supply the slave labor needed to work on the plantations and, indeed, increase their productivity into the nineteenth century. African systems of enslavement and trade did so effectively to the end of the commerce, although in many places, as Richardson’s essay shows, only by increasing the number of children and women sold, precisely the kinds of slaves many African societies preferred to retain for their own purposes. This international division of labor had tragic consequences for those unfortunate enough to be enslaved and exported from the coast. Given the demographic and other costs in a number of regions, moreover, just how long they could have sustained their role in early modern globalization remains an open counterfactual question.
In an age of sail, when winds and ocean currents provided the energy that propelled vessels around the Atlantic and other oceans, nature affected the relationship between the American demand for slaves and African supply of them. As Daniel B. Domingues da Silva’s essay describes, two sailing systems and consequent slave-trading circuits developed during the era of the commerce, one in the North and the other in the South Atlantic. The different directions of the winds and ocean currents north and south of the equator dictated them. In the former, which followed the well-known triangular route, ships left Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and other European and later North American ports, bought slaves generally in a single region of the western African coast north of the Congo River, and delivered them to American markets north of Brazil, before returning to Europe. In the latter, ships departed directly from Brazilian ports, purchased slaves on the West Central African coast south of the Congo River and as time went on also in ports along the Bights of Benin and Biafra, the West Central African coast north of the Congo river, and the southeastern African coast, and transported them back to Brazil. While the triangular trading system has long been described in textbooks and other literature, perhaps a third of all enslaved Africans were transported on the direct and primarily South Atlantic route.
To be sure, those organizing and captaining voyages adapted and modified dominant patterns when circumstances warranted it. Eltis and Richardson have written, “Captives from anywhere could disembark in almost any part of the Americas.”26 Domingues da Silva’s chapter discusses major exceptions to dominant trends. Its main contribution, however, is to demonstrate that winds and ocean currents contributed to the development across time of strong connections between certain regions of Africa and the Americas, such as the Gold Coast and Jamaica, the Bight of Benin and Bahia, the Bight of Biafra and the English Americas, and West Central Africa north of the Congo River and Saint-Domingue. The transatlantic sailing systems and slave-trading circuits defined by winds and ocean currents shaped the peopling of the Americas and the African cultural influences that developed in particular locales. Domingues da Silva examines the relevance of these patterns for slave marriage, family, and identity. Other scholars have shown their impact on religion, ritual, healing, and myriad other lifeways.27 Domingues da Silva’s essay demonstrates the importance of such research for understanding of the origins and early transformation of the African diaspora.
The End of the Slave Trade and Slavery?
In the final third of the eighteenth century when slavery was expanding successfully in many parts of the Americas and the transatlantic trade was delivering more slaves, more efficiently than ever before, reform movements emerged in Great Britain, the United States, France, and elsewhere to abolish them. By 1836, only about fifty years after the founding of the first abolitionist societies in the United States (1784), Britain (1787), and France (1789), all of the nations engaged in the transatlantic commerce had taken legal action to stop the participation of their citizens in it. Britain, moreover, was engaged in a diplomatic campaign to suppress the trade, and it had stationed a naval squadron off the coast of West Africa to pursue that end.28 So far as policy was concerned, a great “shift in moral consciousness” about the terrible inhumanity of the transatlantic slave trade had been achieved in a remarkably short time span. Five more decades would be required, however, to realize the abolition of slavery itself.29
The chapters in the second part of this volume investigate the abolition of the slave trade and later of slavery in the Atlantic world. Taken together, they evaluate both the accomplishments and limitations of what Stanley Engerman’s essay tells us has long widely (if not universally) been celebrated as one of the great moral triumphs of societies over a very long-standing evil institution—in short, “a victory for the good guys.”30 The chapters by Seymour Drescher, Leonardo Marques, and Stanley Engerman deepen our understanding of the origins and impact of abolition in Britain, France, and the United States, while that by Rik van Welie in the first part of the volume touches on the subject in the Netherlands. Those by Marques, Mann, and Misevich illuminate the resistance of some European, American, and African slave traders to abolition and the strategies they developed to continue it at high levels despite suppression efforts. The contributions by Stanley Engerman, Robert Goddard, and Olatunji Ojo then deal with aspects of the abolition of slavery and their legacy in different parts of the Atlantic world, including West Africa. These chapters show that the widespread legal abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century did not end human trafficking then or subsequently any more than the emancipation of the slaves terminated their descendants’ vulnerability and subordination, both economic and political.
Drescher’s chapter comprehensively compares the histories of British and French national and imperial antislavery action to better understand their role in the emergence and globalization of human rights in the modern world. His essay demonstrates that in both countries societies dedicated to ending the slave trade and slavery formed at a time when economic interests in the institution had reached all-time highs. Beyond this basic economic similarity, however, the two nations’ engagement with antislavery soon diverged. In Britain, abolitionist societies began to organize at a time of considerable political stability at home and in the nation’s Caribbean colonies. In this context, antislavery activists first targeted the abolition of the slave trade for reasons discussed in Engerman’s essay. They built popular support for the movement through newspapers, rallies, and petitions that drew citizens into public debate and action and used this mass popular mobilization to pressure Parliament for reform. Waves of civil society protest, organized in part in response to the government’s failure to enact legislation ending the slave trade, broadened and deepened public support for antislavery, including among new groups such as women, children, workers, and religious dissenters. By 1807, after two decades of debate, government ministers had concluded that the public was determined to end Britain’s slave trade, and the two Houses of Parliament joined in declaring it contrary to the principles of “justice, humanity, and sound policy.” Drescher sees the passage of Britain’s Slave Trade Abolition Act as a triumph of civil society mobilization, which the movement then turned to abolishing slavery in Britain’s colonial possessions in 1833 and spearheading a global campaign to end the transoceanic trade in human beings.
In France, antislavery played out very differently between 1789 and the mid-nineteenth century. Revolution and political instability at home shaped its course, as did the most successful slave uprising in history and related foreign military invasions, both in Saint-Domingue, France’s most valuable overseas colony. In this volatile political context, French abolitionists never achieved any popular or civil society mobilization against slavery and the slave trade. On February 4, 1794, the ruling Convention decreed the end of slavery in the French Empire not in response to French popular will but to events in Saint-Domingue. Thereafter, France did not extend the legal rights and protections that citizens enjoyed at home to former slaves in its colonies. Indeed, French administrators, colonists, and soldiers returning from the Haitian Revolution in Saint-Domingue and elsewhere in the Caribbean spread threatening stories that led in the metropole to the identification of antislavery with counterrevolution at home. In this climate, the public viewed abolitionists as antipatriotic. In 1802, Napoleon was able to restore slavery throughout the empire, aside from in Saint-Domingue, where his troops were defeated trying to do so. For years to come, argues Drescher, the French equated abolitionism with humiliation and defeat rather than “justice, humanity, and sound policy.”
Against critics who claim it is misguided to look for the origins of contemporary human rights movements in centuries past or that they date back to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolution but were then diverted from their universalistic potential by nineteenth-century nationalism and imperialism, Drescher argues that British, if not French, abolitionism was a forerunner of the contemporary global human rights movement. He views the British abolitionists’ assertion of a universal humanity, including for those of slave status, their widening collective action against the slave trade and slavery, and their steady globalization of antislavery throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century as an impressive precursor of the human rights initiatives that have proliferated internationally since the mid-twentieth century.
Passing national laws and signing international treaties intended to ban or suppress the transatlantic slave trade was one thing; enforcing them was another. After a temporary lull following the abolition of the trade by the United States, Britain, and certain other nations in the early nineteenth century, slave exports from Africa rebounded almost to their late-eighteenth-century peak.31 An estimated 3.2 million slaves were shipped from the African coast between 1808 and the end of the trade in 1867. About 66 percent of them (roughly 2.1 million slaves) were taken to Brazil and another 24 percent (760,000 slaves) to Cuba.32 These trades were organized primarily by Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish firms, partnerships, or individual traders, whose governments were the last among the major slave-trading powers to enact laws banning the commerce and once they had did not rigorously enforce them.33
Marques’s essay examines the development and implementation of a body of antislavery law in the United States. The author asks how effective it was at curtailing the indirect as well as direct involvement of US citizens in the illicit commerce, particularly to Brazil and Cuba (with which the United States had especially close commercial relations) between the 1830s and 1860s. After a careful review of the evidence, he concludes that the federal government largely succeeded in ending the direct financing and organizing of slaving voyages by US citizens following the introduction of the 1807 act prohibiting the importation of slaves. Their indirect participation in the illegal commerce proved much trickier to eliminate, however, especially in the nation’s successful shipbuilding industry.
Great Britain faced similar challenges ending the involvement of its citizens in activities that indirectly supported the slave trade. One reason for the difficulty in both cases was that by the eighteenth century the slave trade was already a highly international business, and it became more so as governments dismantled mercantilist restrictions on free trade in the early nineteenth century. Following abolition, Portuguese, Brazilian, and Spanish traders purchased slaves on the African coast with assortments of goods bought there and in their home ports that included British textiles and other manufactured wares, as well as American spirits and tobacco. To make matters worse, items were commonly sold on credit financed by British capital, which “remained a mainstay of the transatlantic trade” to its conclusion.34 Marques shows that, following the arrival of British naval vessels on the West African coast after 1816 to enforce suppression, the illegal slave traders turned increasingly to US-built ships, which they bought in Africa, Cuba, or Brazil to transport slaves because of their superior speed, agility, and overall construction. From the 1830s through the 1860s, US-built ships dominated the transatlantic slave trade, and they delivered about 900,000 slaves to the Americas.35 Marques concludes that, in both the United States and Britain, anti-slave-trade legislation largely failed to curtail the economically very important indirect involvement of the two nations’ citizens in the illegal slave trade, and it offers fresh insights into why.
Mann’s essay addresses other organizational changes in the long-standing slave trade between Bahia and the ports along the Bight of Benin that illegal slave traders introduced from the 1820s through the 1840s in an effort to beat suppression. She notes particularly the increased presence in Lagos, then the center of slaving in the region, of resident Spaniards, Brazilians, and Portuguese, who had been sent there as agents of Cuban and Brazilian firms or gone as individual traders to handle the unloading of trade goods and slaving equipment from vessels that, to reduce risk, delivered them to the coast and then sailed home in ballast. These individuals also assembled full cargoes of slaves on shore in advance of the arrival of different ships that loaded them as quickly as possible in out of the way places and departed stealthily, often under cover of night, in hopes of evading the watchful eye of the British cruisers.
Mann views these organizational changes in the illegal slave trade along the littoral of the Bight of Benin through the lens of the biography of an individual male slave who had been captured with two young female “cousins” in the Yoruba kingdom of Owu around 1820 and sold, along with one of the girls, to Bahia. There the man eventually came to be owned by a member of a multigenerational family with connections to the illegal slave trade and to be known by the Portuguese name Francisco Gomes de Andrade. His probable owner, Luis Antônio de Andrade, worked in the illegal commerce between Bahia and Africa in the 1820s and 1830s; during the 1840s he resided in Lagos, where he was also employed in the illegal slave trade. Mann analyzes little-used British colonial court records from Lagos to reveal that in the 1830s, F. G. de Andrade traveled to Lagos, probably in the service of his owner, and while there reunited with kin from whom he had been separated by enslavement two decades before. She probes the implications of his experiences in Lagos while a Brazilian slave for his decision to immigrate permanently to the town following his manumission in Brazil in the early 1840s. While most of the chapters in this volume adopt a wide-angle macro approach to the study of the past, Mann zooms in to see what can be learned from an intimate microperspective.
Misevich’s chapter analyzes the impact in Africa of yet a different kind of organizational adaptation in the era of the illegal slave trade. Sierra Leone, near the middle of Upper Guinea, had become a region of significant slave supply in the mid-eighteenth century, around the same time as the Windward Coast, when slave prices on the coast began to rise. For almost a century, about four thousand slaves embarked from its shores each year. Until the 1790s, most of these slaves were traded to Europeans at two fortified centers of the commerce, on Bance Island in the Sierra Leone estuary and, to a lesser extent, at Iles de Los to the north of it. Following the establishment of Freetown as a home for free blacks in 1787 and a British Crown colony in 1808, the area became the primary focus of British antislavery activity in Africa.36 The British cruisers patrolling the coast to suppress the slave trade found the installations at Bance Island and Iles de Los easy targets, rapidly shutting down their participation in the transatlantic trade and driving most of the British, French, and Portuguese slave traders from the area. In their determination to resist abolition, some slave dealers established new slaving stations farther south in the Sherbro and the Gallinas—parts of the coast that had not previously been much touched by slaving—where they were joined by much larger contingents of Spanish, Cuban, and Brazilian slave merchants. The shifting creeks and swampy waterways that were so characteristic of coastal Gallinas and Sherbro made these areas attractive havens for vessels seeking to evade British cruisers. For the next five decades, Sherbro, Gallinas, and their hinterlands were violently pulled into the Atlantic slave trade, an unintended consequence of the British campaign to suppress the slave trade.
British antislavery efforts also led to the establishment in Freetown of a Vice Admiralty Court and Courts of Mixed Commission charged with adjudicating the cases of vessels seized for illegal slaving. The vessels these courts condemned were impounded and the slaves onboard were liberated, although the courts lacked the authority to take action against the captain, crew, or other people involved in the illicit commerce.37 Officials recorded the names of the Africans they liberated, as well as certain other information about them, in large registers, which are now providing historians a unique source for studying the origins of enslaved Africans embarked from different parts of the continent.38 Misevich’s chapter presents evidence from an ethnolinguistic analysis of the names of 8,871 slaves liberated from vessels seized off Sherbro and the Gallinas between 1808 and 1844. The research has enabled him to draw conclusions about the African homelands of these slaves and others embarked from southern Sierra Leone during the period. Misevich’s chapter provides the most thoroughly documented study of the African origins of slaves shipped from the Upper Guinea Coast in the entire period of the slave trade. It also sheds new light on the composition of Africans entering the African diaspora from Sierra Leone in the first half of the nineteenth century.
As Engerman’s chapter shows, the abolition of the slave trade did not directly touch the institution of slavery. His essay, remarkable for its scope, incisiveness, and brevity, evaluates the abolition of slavery and emancipation of the slaves throughout the Americas. It shows that in most places the movement from slavery to freedom was a slow and gradual process and that in many locales the property rights of owners and needs of staple crop producers for cheap, controllable labor took precedence over the interests of the freed slaves. This constellation of ideological, economic, and political interests ensured delays in freeing slaves via apprenticeship schemes, free womb laws, and other means even after slavery was declared ended. It also led to the introduction of new forms of labor coercion such as sharecropping, labor tenancy, debt bondage, and tutelary servitude designed to capture and control the labor of freed slaves and their offspring, as well as to the government-sponsored migration of indentured workers from East India (and elsewhere) that figures centrally in Robert Goddard’s chapter on the British island of Trinidad. In Brazil, the labor of waves of poor European immigrants with restricted access to land cushioned some owners against the loss of their slaves. Nor in most places beyond the French colonies discussed by Drescher were the ex-slaves ever or for long allowed the full benefits of citizenship. In addition to discussing these commonalities, Engerman identifies demographic, geographic, economic, and political conditions that produced differences across postemancipation societies. He concludes that, despite such differences, more than one hundred years after emancipation in major slave-holding areas, the social and economic conditions of black descendants of slaves remained inferior to those of whites and “‘full freedom’ or equality” had not been achieved. Viewed from the perspective of what happened at the time of the abolition of slavery and in its aftermath, the antislavery movement hardly appears a great moral triumph—a victory for the good guys.39
Goddard’s chapter returns to sugar and the Caribbean, subjects with which the volume begins, but in the critical aftermath of Britain’s 1834 slave emancipation. His essay examines what happened in Trinidad when better-financed English capitalists displaced struggling creole planters descended from earlier French settlers in sugar production and began importing government-subsidized East Indian indentured workers to replace the slaves who, once freed, sought to avoid work on sugar estates.40 The essay charts the development and political mobilization of a cross-race and cross-class creole identity that emerged among whites with French antecedents, mulattos, and blacks of African ancestry (most initially freed slaves) in opposition to English sugar interests, the East Indians imported to work on their estates, and ultimately the British colonial regime. During a crisis in the sugar industry late in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, creoles claiming to be the only true Trinidadians agitated against both absentee sugar producers and their bonded and underprivileged East Indian workers, casting the latter as permanent strangers incapable of acculturation, national integration, and even social uplift. Goddard’s analysis helps explain why, as the anticolonial struggle gained momentum across the Caribbean and nationalist movements took hold, creole identity became primary in Trinidadian politics rather than some other identity rooted in color or class distinctions and East Indians remained marginalized and widely perceived as outsiders. Goddard’s approach combines an analysis of symbolic forms as well as material forces in shaping the social order in postemancipation Trinidad.41
Olatunji Ojo’s chapter concludes the collection by taking up the abolition of slavery in Africa. Between the departure of the last slave vessel for the Americas in 1866 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, a number of European nations colonized the continent. In the wake of their imperial aggression, antislavery slowly penetrated the African hinterland. During the era when abolition had focused on ending the transatlantic slave trade, Britain, the world leader of the movement, had adopted a policy of not interfering with local African slavery. Authorities had instructed the naval officers who were often on the front line of anti-slave-trade negotiations with African rulers to “very clearly point out to them the distinction between the export of slaves,” which Great Britain was determined to end, and “the system of Domestic Slavery with which it claims no right to interfere.”42 Once European powers acquired major new colonies and protectorates on the continent, however, they had to grapple with what to do about slavery and the slave trade inside Africa itself. This subject has by now been well researched, and it lies largely beyond the scope of our volume. Ojo’s chapter, however, on the changing nature of slavery and the slave trade among the Igbo and neighboring peoples inland from the Bight of Biafra in the British Protectorate of Southern Nigeria between 1900 and 1940 provides an excellent example of the best current scholarship in the field. On the one hand, its findings regarding British antislavery policy are consistent in their general outline with what has been reported elsewhere, including in places under the rule of other European powers. As in many parts of the Americas, antislavery policies and practices in colonial Africa were ambivalent, halting, and as concerned with not destabilizing local political orders or disrupting crucial labor supplies as they were with stamping out slavery. A set of assumptions about the mild character of indigenous slavery, which Ojo nicely describes, also informed European policy. Administrators, moreover, usually took a harder and more consistent line on abolishing the internal slave trade than they did on ending slavery itself, in the belief that the former was the greater evil and that once it had been eliminated slavery would die naturally.43
On the other hand, Ojo’s impressive research using local administrative and court records in Nigeria breaks exciting new ground by documenting and analyzing African resistance to colonial abolition. It conclusively demonstrates a shift toward enslaving children—particularly girls—in eastern Nigeria during the early decades of colonial rule and interprets the reasons for this trend.44 Furthermore, the chapter illuminates transformations in mechanisms of enslavement, routes of trade, and patterns of exchange in the colonial period as slavers sought to skirt British oversight and respond to the changing demand for young females and males in households, markets, workshops, and brothels, as well as on farms. Finally, the essay forges a connection between transformations in slavery and the slave trade in the first four decades of the twentieth century and the many forms of coercion used to enslave, trade, and control children in Africa and around the world today.45
Systems of forced labor have continued to adapt to local, regional, and global opportunities and challenges, frustrating the growing international coalition that today is working passionately to prevent human trafficking and other forms of labor exploitation. The chattel principle that shaped slavery in the Americas for four centuries has by now given way to much more diverse and nuanced means of coercing and controlling people, a point that has led to deep debates among contemporary activists over whether “slavery” appropriately defines what is actually a wide-ranging set of practices. Either way, it is clear that the globalized economy of the twenty-first century has opened new spaces in which dangerous and coerced labor profitably and productively operate and that the desire of consumers for cheaply produced goods underpins what is going on. The more than 1,100 textile workers in Savar, Bangladesh, who in 2013 perished when the poorly constructed building where they were forced to toil collapsed and persistent rumors about health and other labor violations at Chinese electronics manufacturing plants that support major global brands provide two salient examples of wealthy and primarily Western consumers tacitly perpetuating exploitative labor conditions in far-off parts of the world for which the consumers themselves would never stand.46
However, the global community has for the past several decades been actively developing tools and techniques to expose, quantify, and improve or eliminate such conditions, and these efforts appear to be bearing fruit. While the Global Slavery Index estimated in 2013 that some 29.8 million people were enslaved worldwide, this figure represents a much smaller percentage of the global population than that during the period of plantation slavery on which this book primarily focuses.47 Every nation in the world has by now passed legislation that makes slave owning illegal, and hundreds of local and international antislavery organizations provide checks on how effectively those laws are being enforced. As such changes imply, legal and popular perceptions of slavery and other forms of exploitation that resemble it have undergone a radical transformation over the past two centuries. In Mauritania, the last country in the world to abolish slavery and the nation in which slave ownership is thought now to be most deeply embedded, dynamic antislavery campaigns have increased pressure for government intervention. They led to the passage in 2007 of a law that for the first time allowed slaveholders to be prosecuted there. Popular pressure to confront and suppress exploitative labor has been equally visible in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, decided on its editorial page not to cover the opening match of the 2014 World Cup in which the host nation itself played, instead using the page to support a constitutional amendment that if passed would impose harsher penalties opposing contemporary enslavement.48 Reports of labor exploitation and antislavery responses to it are posted instantly on the Internet, reaching millions of viewers through news websites, Facebook, Twitter, and hundreds of other digital platforms. In such an interconnected world, maintaining the kind of discreet separation between the realms of production and consumption that was so central to the development of Dutch and other New World colonial slave systems is no longer as easy as it once was. Whether forced labor systems will continue when consumers know more than in the past about commodity supply chains remains an open question.
Notes
1. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
2. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, Manolo Florentino, and David Richardson, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org. The same year saw the publication of David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), a collection based on the analysis of information in Voyages.
3. David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), Map 2, 6; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
4. Philip D. Curtin, “The Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1800,” in History of West Africa, ed. J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (London: Longman, 1971), 1:255.
5. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas, Maps 135 and 136, 196. Morgan’s essay discusses rates of natural increase and decrease among eighteenth-century Caribbean slave populations. Klein and Luna, Slavery in Brazil, 41–43, 164–69, emphasize the role of a sex ratio heavily skewed toward males and an age ratio skewed toward adults in their analysis of the failure of the African-born slave population in Brazil to replace itself. After about 1760, the slave population in the southern part of mainland North America also replaced itself naturally, however, sugar was a less important crop there than in the Caribbean or Brazil.
6. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1.
7. For a discussion of possessive individualism see, beyond van Welie’s essay, Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 22–23; and C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
8. Eltis et al., “Estimates,” Voyages, http://slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates.
9. For excellent recent overviews of Brazilian slavery comparable to Morgan’s discussion of the Caribbean, see Klein and Luna, Slavery in Brazil; and João José Reis, “Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 4, 1804 to the Present, ed. Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, and David Richardson (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
10. Zepher L. Frank, Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 3; Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, O liberto: O seu mundo e os outros; Salvador, 1790–1890 (São Paulo: Corrupio, 1988), 35; B. J. Barickman, “As cores do escravismo: Escravistas ‘pretos,’ ‘pardos’ e ‘cabras’ no Recôncavo Bainao, 1835,” População e Família 2 (1999): 7–8. On the mobility of freed African slaves in Salvador see João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil: A história do levante dos malês em 1835, rev. and enl. ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 484–91; Reis, Domingos Sodré um sacerdote Africano: Escravidão, liberdade e candomblé na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008), 226–314; and Reis, “From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman: The Story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo,” in Biography and the Black Atlantic, ed. Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 131–45; Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés, “Marcelina da Silva: A Nineteenth-Century Candomblé Priestesses in Bahia,” Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010): 1–27; and Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 33–73.
11. As many scholars have shown, sugar production was distinctive in that it required not only abundant field labor but also much skilled, time-sensitive work with costly equipment in mills where the cane was processed. The demands of millwork required that sugar plantation owners grant slaves certain concessions in the conditions of their labor and lives. Slaves were never merely passive and compliant workers. For an excellent, short discussion of this phenomenon on a Brazilian sugar plantation, see Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 39–63. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993); and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) examine the relationship between the labor demands of other commodity production and the character of slave life in specific environments.
12. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, provide overviews of slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Specialized studies include Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capital and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Roquinaldo Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil in the Era of the Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Mariana P. Candido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Bayo Holsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 208); Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011); Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); Richard L. Roberts, Warriors, Merchants, and Slaves: The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); and Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For a moving and accessible account of enslavement during natural disaster, see Marcia Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life-Stories from East/Central Africa (New York: Lilian Barber Press, 1993).
13. For loading times see Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 134; and Nwokeji, Slave Trade, 37–45.
14. See table 1.1, in this volume, for trends in slave shipments from Africa to the Americas (1501–1867), and table 10.1, for the timing of the ending of the slave trade.
15. See table 1.2, in this volume.
16. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas, table 4, 89, table 5, 90; table 1.2 in this volume; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 132, 170.
17. See, for example, Richard Anderson, Alex Borucki, Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Paul Lachance, Philip Misevich, and Olatunji Ojo, “Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862,” History in Africa 40 (2013): 165–91.
18. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,” American Historical Review 102 (1999): 333–55; Shumway, Fante, 59–61; Olatunji Ojo, “ÈMÚ (AMÚYÁ): The Yoruba Institution of Panyarring or Seizure for Debt,” African Economic History 35 (2007): 31–58.
19. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 170, 192; Lisa A. Lindsay, Captives as Commodities: The Transatlantic Slave Trade (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2008), 54–61; Robin Law, “Legal and Illegal Enslavement in West Africa in the Context of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Ghana in Africa and the World: Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen, ed. Toyin Falola (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), 513–33; A. F. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897 (London: Longmans, 1969); Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 68–70; Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 16, 56, 59, 67–71, 85–86; Linda M. Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation in the Kingdom of Kongo,” Journal of African History 50 (2009): 1–22; Nwokeji, Slave Trade, 116–42; David Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 69–92; Sylviane A. Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003). For a brief introduction to the wealth-in-people concept and to seminal texts on African slavery, see Mann, Slavery, 3–4, 10–11.
20. George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Curtin, Economic Change, 15, 197–232; Roberts, Warriors, Merchants, Slaves, 46–75; Hawthorne, Planting Rice, 11, 28, 31, 40–43; Colleen E. Kriger, “Mapping the History of Cotton Textile Production in Precolonial West Africa,” African Economic History 33 (2005): 87–116; Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 12–20; Robert Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba, 3rd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 4–5, 38, 96; Robin Law, The Oyo Empire, c. 1600–c. 1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 202–36; Law, Slave Coast, 33–58; Northrup, Trade without Rulers, parts 1 and 2; Adiele E. Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture (Nsukka: University of Nigeria Press, 1981), ch. 4; K. Onwuka Dike and Felicia I. Ekejiuba, The Aro of South-Eastern Nigeria, 1650–1980: A Study of Socio-Economic Formation and Transformation in Nigeria (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1990), ch. 4; Nwokeji, Slave Trade, 87–90, 94–97; Paul E. Lovejoy, Caravans of Kola (Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980), 29–73; Jan Vansina, How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); David Birmingham, Central Africa to 1870: Zambezia, Zaire and the South Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Joseph C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 36–37; José C. Curto, Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and Its Hinterland, c. 1550–1830 (Leiden: Brill, 2004); David Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-colonial Era,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 945–52; and David Eltis, “The Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic Trade of Seventeenth Century Africa,” Journal of African History 35 (1994): 237–49.
21. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 51–59, 114–19, 183–86; John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Martin Bruegel, “A Bourgeois Good? Sugar, Norms of Consumption and the Labouring Classes in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Scholliers (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 99–118; Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 21, 183, 230; Michael North, “Material Delight and the Joy of Living”: Cultural Consumption in the Age of Enlightenment in Germany, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate), ch. 9. On Africa, see Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, 57; Miller, Way of Death, 40–104; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 216–20; Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 60–61, 66–71; Candido, Slaving Port, 14, 26, 129, 145, 169–74, 189–90, 229; Mann, Slavery, 79–80; Colleen K. Kriger, “‘Guinea Cloth’: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa, before and during the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 105–26; Joel Adedeji, “The Alarinjo Theatre: The Study of a Yoruba Theatrical Art from its Earliest Beginnings to Present Times” (PhD diss., University of Ibadan, 1969), 143–48; John Cardon Willis, “Masquerading Politics: Power and Transformation in a West African Kingdom” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2008), 62–129.
22. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 45; Hawthorne, Planting Rice, 2, 96–110; Law, Ouidah, 147–48; Nwokeji, Slave Trade; Eltis and Jennings, “Trade,” 948–53, 957; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 177–78.
23. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 150. See also Eltis, “Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities,” 237–49.
24. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 173–77; Ray A. Kea, Settlements, ch. 5; Ivor Wilks, Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), ch. 1; Curtin, Economic Change, 327; Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz, and Silke Strickrodt, eds., Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade, and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2013); Miller, Way of Death, 106–15; and Candido, Slaving Port, 31–87, 112, 143, 153.
26. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas, 9. See also Eltis and Richardson, Extending the Frontiers.
27. See, for example, Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Century, trans. Evelyn Crawford (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1976); Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Reis, Rebelião escrava; James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Luis Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil, trans. Richard Vernon in collaboration with the author (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds., The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), part 2; Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Lorena S. Walsh, “The Chesapeake Slave Trade: Regional Patterns, African Origins, and Some Implications,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 139–70; Douglas B. Chambers, Murder and Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005); Vincent Brown, The Coromantee Wars: An Archipelago of Insurrection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming); Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Alexander Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); David Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 119–38; John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Kongo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History, 4 (1993): 181–214.
28. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 81–101, provides an excellent discussion of Britain’s direct attack on the slave trade and the resistance of foreign governments and traders to it. For more on the diplomatic campaign, see Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Africana, 1975); and Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon, eds., Slavery, Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807–1975 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009). Mary Wills, “The Royal Navy and the Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, c. 1807–1867: Anti-slavery, Empire, and Identity” (PhD diss., University of Hull, 2012), presents a recent history of the naval squadron.
29. The phrase comes from David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 41. For a study of how British abolitionists moved from “moral opinion” to “moral action,” see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
30. The Trinidadian Eric E. Williams mounted the most famous attack on the humanitarian interpretation of abolition in Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). For appreciative discussions of that book’s important legacy by one of its major critics, see Seymour Drescher, “Eric Williams: British Capitalism and British Slavery,” and “Capitalism and Slavery after Fifty Years,” in From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 355–78 and 379–98.
31. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas, table 4, 89, and 271–73; table 1.1, in this volume.
32. Eltis et al., “Estimates,” Voyages.
33. Brazil was part of the Portuguese Empire until 1822 when it became independent. Cuba remained a Spanish colony until 1898, although insurrection racked it after 1868. See table 10.1, in this volume. See also Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 129–32; Reis, “Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”; David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Dale T. Graden, Disease, Resistance, and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 101–19, 133–34; Laird W. Bergad, “Slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1804 to Abolition,” in Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 4.
34. Eltis, Economic Growth, 84.
35. To deceive the cruisers that might intercept them, these vessels often carried fraudulent papers and sailed under false flags.
36. Eltis, Economic Growth, 104–5, 108; John Peterson, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone, 1787–1870 (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).
37. Eltis, Economic Growth, 86.
38. See African Origins Portal, http://www.african-origins.org.
39. In addition to the texts cited by Engerman, see Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); da Costa, Brazilian Empire, chs. 5 and 6; Klein and Luna, Slavery in Brazil, ch. 10; Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Nara Milanich, “Degrees of Bondage: Children’s Tutelary Servitude in Modern Latin America,” in Child Slaves in the Modern World, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 104–23. The United States—where Lincoln freed Southern slaves abruptly in the context of the Civil War and freedmen gained the franchise for a time in the era of Reconstruction—was in certain ways exceptional. But even there the freed slaves received no economic compensation, the end of Reconstruction reversed their political gains, and owners soon developed new forms of labor coercion. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); and Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986). Most of these texts also emphasize the struggle of ex-slaves to determine their own conditions of life and labor. For further perspectives on these subjects, see the essays by Celso Thomas Castilho, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Peter Coclanis, and Rosemarjjn Hoefte in Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 4.
40. For similar strategies of freed slaves on the British island of Jamaica, see Holt, Problem of Freedom, 115–76.
41. For a comparable study, see Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
42. Instructions for the Guidance of Her Majesty’s Naval Officers Employed in the Suppression of the Slave Trade (London: T. R. Harrison, 1844), section 2, 7.
43. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); Cooper, “Conditions Analogous to Slavery: Imperialism and Free Labor Ideology in Africa,” in Beyond Slavery, 105–49; Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule; Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein, eds., Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); Mann, Slavery; and Gareth Austin, “Cash Crops and Freedom: Export Agriculture and the Decline of Slavery in Colonial West Africa,” International Review of Social History 51 (2009): 1–37.
44. For evidence of similar patterns elsewhere in colonial Africa, see Mann, Slavery, 178–89; and Richard L. Roberts and Benjamin N. Lawrance, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012).
45. Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Child Slaves in the Modern World, 10. See also the companion to this volume compiled by the same editors, Child Slavery through the Ages (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009).
46. The collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh was widely covered in the news. For a summary report on this tragic incident, see, inter alia, Jim Yardley, “Report on Deadly Factory Collapse in Bangladesh Finds Widespread Blame,” New York Times, May 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/world/asia/report-on-bangladesh-building-collapse-finds-widespread-blame.html?_r=0. For conditions in Chinese factories, see Ross Perlin, “Chinese Workers Foxconned,” Dissent 60 (Spring 2013): 46–52; and Ralph Litzinger, “Labor in China: A New Politics of Struggle,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (2013): 172–78.
47. For a recent overview, see Kevin Bales, “Contemporary Coercive Labor Practices—Slavery Today,” in Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 4; and more generally his Disposable People: New Slavery in a Global Age, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
48. On Mauritania, see Alexis Okeowo, “Freedom Fighter: A Slaving Society and an Abolitionist’s Crusade,” New Yorker, September 8, 2014, 38–46. The Brazilian editorial is discussed in Celso Thomas Castilho’s essay in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 4.