Women, Unfree Labor, and Slavery in the Atlantic World

Reviewed by: Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference by Jenny Shaw David M. Stark (bio) Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference JENNY SHAW Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013 259pp. Try to imagine what life was like on a sugar plantation in the seventeenth-century English Caribbean, where African slaves and Irish servants lived and worked together under the watchful eye of English planters. How did they view each other? What were their interactions like? How did they negotiate status and hierarchy? These are important questions because they speak to broader debates about the origins of racism and slavery: the “origins debate” in the English colonies. The long-standing assumption is that difference was based solely on race. With the rise of the sugar plantation economy in the mid-seventeenth century, the need for [End Page 825] labor increased and greater numbers of Africans were brought to English colonies. As this process unfolded, society became racially bifurcated, and labor was used to separate individuals into distinct categories consisting of those who were free (whites) and those who were unfree (blacks). Jenny Shaw challenges this view in her well-written and convincing book Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean. She notes that Africans were not the only (or the first) unfree laborers in the early modern English Atlantic world. Europeans, more specifically Irish Catholic indentured servants, were sometimes used like slaves. In addition, she explores how race was not the only factor that shaped prejudice; religion also played a prominent albeit overlooked role in the construction of difference. Shaw is part of a growing number of scholars who argue that the racial bifurcation model needs to be revised, and she provides a much-needed, more nuanced account of how difference was constructed in the early English Caribbean. The everyday experiences and interactions among Irish servants, African slaves, and English planters contributed to the construction of difference. However, the lack of surviving source material from this period has complicated our understanding of this process. To recover the everyday life of ordinary colonial subjects, Shaw (re)reads traditional sources (plantation records and inventories, wills, deeds, and travelers’ accounts) as much for what they omit as for what they include. Her methodology of focusing on the “presence of absence” allows readers to learn more about marginalized populations who left little (if any) paper trail and who are largely invisible in the historical record. English ideas about difference were initially worked out in Ireland, the site of England’s first imperial project. Through the lens of their own ideas about what constituted civilized behavior, the English perceived Irish cultural practices related to land use, sexual mores, clothing, and religion as barbaric. This became the basis of the perceived inferiority of the Irish. The English would later draw attention to similar cultural practices among Native Americans and Africans as markers of uncivilized peoples. They believed that cultural differences among inferior peoples, such as the Irish, could be overcome if they adopted Protestantism. However, the 1641 Ulster uprising, which devolved into an ethnic conflict between Irish Catholics on one side and English and Scottish Protestants on the other, hardened attitudes toward the Irish. Following the Cromwellian war in England [End Page 826] (1649–53), the English deported about fifty thousand Irish Catholics as indentured laborers, many to the West Indies, and their persecution of Irish Catholics intensified both at home and abroad. By then the English no longer believed the Irish capable of redemption, and religion became the most important cultural marker of difference. This influx of Irish in Barbados and the Leeward Islands coincided with the rise of the sugar plantation economy across the English Caribbean. To meet the increased need for labor, English plantation owners imported large numbers of African slaves. Before long Irish servants and African slaves outnumbered English colonists, prompting concerns about the destabilizing potential of subjugated populations. Colonial authorities found it necessary to identify and count disruptive populations, as the English had done in Ireland with the Down Survey in 1652. English authorities attempted to minimize—in their minds, at least—the threat holding people...

Book Review| May 01 2016 Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Guasco, Michael. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014328 pp., $45.00 (cloth); $45.00 (e-book) John Donoghue John Donoghue Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2016) 13 (2): 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3460888 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Donoghue; Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Labor 1 May 2016; 13 (2): 90–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3460888 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

These words by the German poet Christian Johann Heinrich Heine encapsulated the new financial connections of the Atlantic world during the nineteenth century. When Spain and Portugal opened the Atlantic world with their voyages of exploration and colonization, the conquistadors searched for wealth and brought masses of gold and silver from the colonies to the mother country. In the course of the colonial period, wealth tended to flow to Europe and states were reluctant to allow specie to accumulate in the Americas, even prohibiting bullion to go back into the colonies. Nevertheless, the early modern Atlantic world contained a web of financial connections. The financial ties that bound the various parts of the Atlantic region together continued after independence and into the nineteenth century.

Slavery in cities created unique communities of coercion, and the study of urban slavery in coastal West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries combines three sometimes distinct fields: histories of the Atlantic slave trade, African slavery, and the study of urban history in West Africa. The study of urban slavery in West Africa provides unique insights into the impact of cities on forced labor and how these labor relations shaped the growth and evolution of urban space. The urban history of coastal West Africa became entangled with the Atlantic slave trade beginning in the 15th century, but it is also an outcome of longer regional histories of urbanism. From northern Senegal to southeastern Nigeria, coastal communities that had once been on the periphery of larger interior settlements grew in importance with the expansion of Atlantic commerce that by the 18th century was dominated by slave trading. By putting slavery and urban history into the same analytical framework, scholars have explored distinctions between rural, plantation, and city-based slavery, while also exploring the ways in which these cities are tied to the West African interior and the wider Atlantic world. In distinguishing between the experiences of men and women, and the impact of age on slavery, they have shown how urban slavery was often characterized by the paradoxes of forced labor and increased mobility and autonomy. To review the nature and evolution of urban slavery over time and space in these towns and cities, scholars draw on conclusions from the literature on cities on the West African coast: including Saint Louis du Senegal, Cape Coast, Ouidah, Lagos, Bonny, and Old Calabar.

Archaeological examination of the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa largely began with investigations of European trade posts and forts on the coast and on major West African rivers. The predominant focus of subsequent work has been on African states and societies affected by or involved in Atlantic commerce and the slave trade. Major themes of research include African–European interactions and trade, political and economic effects in African societies, and the integration and consumption of Atlantic goods in daily life. Work has also expanded geographically beyond West African towns and states into hinterland and frontier landscapes far from the coast. Archaeological investigations of Atlantic era slavery developed in dialogue with the archaeology of the African diaspora in the Americas, yet their foci and objectives have not always been completely aligned. Slavery is more of a central theme in African diaspora archaeology—being the primary formative historical force in the creation of the diaspora—than it is in West African archaeology, where it is more often examined as a major feature of social, political, and economic life with uneven regional and societal effects. Archaeologists are also involved in the study, interpretation, and politics of African diaspora heritage tourism. Emerging approaches to the archaeology of Atlantic era slavery in West Africa include maritime archaeology and the archaeology of the formerly enslaved that returned to West Africa.

Households did not figure prominently in the early Atlantic migration to the Americas. The opportunity for innovation in household structure, given the ethnicities, economies, and colonial regimes involved, was great. Large portions of the Americas diverged from the prescribed patterns of marriage in the Western European empires that had laid claim to the territory. The potential for differing versions of the early modern American family can be grasped best by looking at how the population had evolved towards the end of the colonial period. This article explores household formation, lineage, and gender relations in the early modern Atlantic world, as well as differences in the household organisation of Atlantic migrants and Native Americans, household and land, and whether creole women's advantage can be attributed to an African woman's later age at birth of first child or her higher probability of being a sugar-field worker.

HistoryVolume 95, Issue 320 p. 503-505 Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World – Edited by Caroline A. Williams MALYN NEWITT, MALYN NEWITT King's College LondonSearch for more papers by this author MALYN NEWITT, MALYN NEWITT King's College LondonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 September 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.2010.00496_26.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume95, Issue320October 2010Pages 503-505 RelatedInformation

Written by one of the leading authorities on trade and finance in the early modern Atlantic world, these fourteen essays, revised and integrated for this volume, share as their common theme the development of the Atlantic economy, especially British America and the Caribbean. Topics treated range from early attempts in medieval England to measure the carrying capacity of ships, through the advent in Renaissance Italy and England of business newspapers that reported on the traffic of ships, cargoes and market prices, to the state of the economy of France over the two hundred years before the French Revolution and of the British West Indies between 1760 and 1790. Included is the story of Thomas Irving who challenged and thwarted the likes of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

This essay discusses the 1779 report on quina by Miguel García de Cáceres, a customs official in Guayaquil, for the Visitador General to the Audiencia of Quito. Quina, a medicinal tree bark, was an important export commodity in the region which had been recognized since the mid seventeenth century by medical practitioners throughout the Atlantic world as an effective treatment for periodic fevers, one of the most prevalent ailments in the early modern world. In 1751, the Crown had established a royal monopoly of quina – a mechanism for asserting an exclusive claim to annual shipments of quina from Loja, the province reputed to produce the best bark. The remainder of quina was open to private harvesting and trading. In the late 1770s, the Crown wanted to know if it would be useful and profitable to expand its monopoly of quina. Cáceres was in favor of the proposed expansion, but his final report provided much more than a simple policy recommendation. In fact, the majority of his report was a critique of what he called the “vain science” employed primarily, but not solely, by European scientific and medical practitioners in the study of quina. He argued that this “science” produced “verisimilitude” rather than true knowledge, and that this false knowledge had a negative impact on the quina trade and threatened the very survival of the cinchona trees from which quina was harvested. More than a case of Creole patriotic epistemology, this essay argues that Cáceres’ report demonstrates how local debates among Creoles shaped the production of knowledge about quina – an object that moved within overlapping transatlantic networks of trade, empire, and science. Such entanglements of knowledge, politics, and economics at the local level characterized many of the knowledge-making enterprises in the early modern Atlantic world.

Missionaries were often the most prolific writers on non-European peoples and cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. As a result, their sources have proven to be indispensable for early modernists. For decades, historians have explored missionary encounters and the sources they inspired to gain insight into a wide variety of topics including native history, the history of religion, labor history, environmental history, the history of the African diaspora, and the history of capitalism. While missionary sources are used widely, most scholarship on the encounters themselves focuses on either a particular denomination or a particular region. Rarely is the surprisingly cohesive barrier between Protestant and Catholic missions breached within single volumes or monographs. This special issue seeks to break down these divides. By making inter-denominational and inter-imperial connections, this volume asks new questions about the meaning of missionary encounters in the early modern world.

This book deals with slavery in West Africa and the trajectories followed by slave descendants, as well as the transformations in how slavery has been perceived and experienced by different categories of actors under various circumstances. Such trajectories reconfigure slavery into new meanings and practices, resulting in a new kind of enslavement that is embedded in new processes and institutions. The book looks at the persistence of pre-colonial forms of enslavement such as the resilience of old hierarchies in hinterland areas and the voluntary retention of slave–master relations. It also discusses strategies of upward mobility of former slaves trying to hide their own and their children's slave origins, including migration and the reinvention of history. The book discusses manifestations of ‘slavery’ in West Africa under four different rubrics: the circumscribed resilience of historical forms of enslavement (slavery); forms of exploitation reminiscent of slavery (metaphorical slavery); stigmatisation based on inherited or putative slave status (categorical slavery); and exogenous discourses opening up new fields of thought and action based on the notion of slavery (extraverted slavery).

A prominent Mediterranean port located near Islamic territories, the city of Valencia in the late fifteenth century boasted a slave population of pronounced religious and ethnic diversity: captive Moors and penally enslaved Mudejars, Greeks, Tartars, Russians, Circassians, and a growing population of black Africans. By the end of the fifteenth century, black Africans comprised as much as 40 percent of the slave population of Valencia. Whereas previous historians of medieval slavery have focused their efforts on defining the legal status of slaves, documenting the vagaries of the Mediterranean slave trade, or examining slavery within the context of Muslim-Christian relations, Debra Blumenthal explores the social and human dimensions of slavery in this religiously and ethnically pluralistic society. Enemies and Familiars traces the varied experiences of Muslim, Eastern, and black African slaves from capture to freedom. After describing how men, women, and children were enslaved and brought to the Valencian marketplace, this book examines the substance of slaves' daily lives: how they were sold and who bought them; the positions ascribed to them within the household hierarchy; the sorts of labor they performed; and the ways in which some reclaimed their freedom. Scrutinizing a wide array of archival sources (including wills, contracts, as well as hundreds of civil and criminal court cases), Blumenthal investigates what it meant to be a slave and what it meant to be a master at a critical moment of transition. Arguing that the dynamics of the master-slave relationship both reflected and determined contemporary opinions regarding religious, ethnic, and gender differences, Blumenthal's close study of the day-to-day interactions between masters and their slaves not only reveals that slavery played a central role in identity formation in late medieval Iberia but also offers clues to the development of racialized slavery in the early modern Atlantic world.

Why were the countries with the most developed institutions of individual freedom also the leaders in establishing the most exploitative system of slavery that the world has ever seen? In seeking to provide new answers to this question, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas examines the development of the English Atlantic slave system between 1650 and 1800. The book outlines a major African role in the evolution of the Atlantic societies before the nineteenth century and argues that the transatlantic slave trade was a result of African strength rather than African weakness. It also addresses changing patterns of group identity to account for the racial basis of slavery in the early modern Atlantic World. Exploring the paradox of the concurrent development of slavery and freedom in the European domains, David Eltis provides a fresh interpretation of this difficult historical problem.

David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 368 pp., £37.50, ISBN 0 521 65231 6 (hard covers), £13.95, ISBN 0 521 65548 X (paperback). - Volume 71 Issue 4

Reviewed by: Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolitionby Bronwen Everill Rebecca Shumway (bio) Slavery, Capitalism, Free produce, Abolition, Trade, West Africa Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. By Bronwen Everill. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 328. $39.95.) The transatlantic relationships that developed among Europeans, Africans, and Americans during the formation of the Atlantic world changed in important and complex ways at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The most widely noted of those changes stemmed from Britain and the U.S.A.'s abolition of the trade in captives from Africa; the Haitian and [End Page 151]other Atlantic Revolutions; and technological innovations associated with industrialization. Other profound changes in intercontinental transatlantic relations were less visible, and, in many respects, less linear in their evolution. This is especially true of ideological changes among Europeans and Americans with regard to Africa and unfree labor. In Not Made by Slaves, Bronwen Everill delves into these murkier waters surrounding abolitionist ideologies, so-called legitimate commerce, the formation of racialized nationalist identities, and proto-imperial positioning by the governments of Britain and the U.S.A. vis-a-vis West Africa. The book shows how present-day notions about the ethics of consumerism, including "fair-trade" commodities, socially conscious corporate practices, and considerations of inequity in the relationships between producers and consumers, originated in this era in tandem with other better-known transformations within the connective tissues of the Atlantic world. The book's seven chapters are organized thematically and discuss topics such as important commodities of transatlantic trade in this period (tobacco, cotton, sugar), commercial brands and branding, credit and debt, and nationalism. Everill's Introduction describes the vast historiography relevant to the study as well as some of the principal places, individuals, and trading firms discussed in the text, and summarizes each chapter. While the precise argument of the book remains somewhat elusive here, the Introduction clearly links the book's subject matter to the modern-day issue of ethical consumption. Similarly, the Epilogue stops short of drawing specific conclusions about the historical matter covered in the book but reviews the contradictions and complexities described in previous chapters and stresses that these are inherent in both past and present attempts to make international commerce simultaneously ethical and profitable. Not Made by Slavesstands out from other scholarly studies of nineteenth-century abolitionism and economics by deliberately including a West African perspective on the commercial, political, and ideological changes associated with the ending of the transatlantic slave trade and the development of new export streams from West Africa. While Everill's analysis of West African historical developments is rather slim compared to her discussion of how British and American abolitionists envisioned what ethical trade with Africa might look like, she provides concrete examples of antislavery sentiment and consumer consciousness among West Africans during this era. In the mostly Islamic hinterland of Senegambia, for [End Page 152]instance, some African rulers prohibited the sale of enslaved people to Europeans because they opposed trading with Christians. They sometimes also stamped out the market for imported alcohol and tobacco for religious reasons. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, a variety of settlers, missionaries, and colonial agents pursued antislavery agendas. They called international attention to the widespread use of slave labor in producing and transporting the "legitimate" African trade goods upon which British and American commerce there depended. Everill provides even more significant insight into the African side of this story when explaining the ideological shift that occurred toward the middle of the nineteenth century among Britons and Americans regarding unfree labor. As white people in these countries invested more and more in the belief that they were both culturally and biologically superior to other people, they also became more comfortable with the notion of "domestic slavery" in Africa and other places inhabited by people of color. Political and business leaders in Britain, in particular, were committed to the notion that overseas commerce was an important and necessary means of expanding Christian influence and what they considered "civilization" to what they considered the more "barbaric" parts of the world. This belief, in turn, fueled...