Neither Slavery nor Abolitionism: James M. Pendleton and the Problem of Christian Conservative Antislavery in 1840s Kentucky

The case of James M. Pendleton (1811–1891) adds clarity to understandings of the relationship between slavery and Christianity in the nineteenth-century USA. A white Baptist minister in his native Kentucky throughout most of the antebellum period, Pendleton actively opposed slavery because he believed it an affront to biblical teaching and an economically fruitless way to order a society. At the same time, however, Pendleton also opposed abolitionist measures that called for immediate emancipation of slaves, both because he felt immediatism threatened social stability and because abolitionism appeared to flaunt what he saw as Christian orthodoxy. Pendleton's example shows why slavery was such a complicated issue for Southerners, as well as why abolitionism held so little sway among Southern evangelicals – even among those that wanted slavery ended.     

Dealing with Migrants in the Central Mediterranean Route: A Legal Analysis of Recent Bilateral Agreements Between Italy and Libya

Dealing with the current flow of migrants flocking to the shores of southern European countries remains high on the international agenda. At the end of 2016, 276,957 migrants were waiting in Libya to cross the sea. Many of them were subject to human rights violations and abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, unlawful killings, sexual exploitation and even slavery (IOM, 2017). The international response has been, so far, insufficient and new ideas and practices are urgently needed. After providing an overview of the legal framework and of the efforts carried out by the relevant international and regional organizations, this article focuses on recent treaties concluded between Italy and Libya, and argues that the new bilateral agreements represent an example of how States are responding to this challenge in an attempt to strike a balance between the need to strengthen the protection of migrants’ rights and the necessity to guarantee the security of national borders.     

Technology,slavery and the Falmouth Water Company of Jamaica, 1799–1805

Slave societies such as Jamaica were among the earliest regions to adopt new technologies, suggesting that slavery was not synonymous with economic backwardness. This article uses the efforts of the Falmouth Water Company to adopt the new hydraulic ram between 1799 and 1805 to show that this process was also not restricted to the plantation sector and that the island possessed an unexpected capacity for technological adaption. This was based on local skills in mechanical and civil engineering derived from the plantation sector, and a wider political and financial background that supported innovation when the right conditions were in place.     

From slave revolts to social death

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson’s contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson’s previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery.

     

Brazilian slavery: A survey from the cape of recent literature in English

This article surveys some of the rich historical writing on slavery in Brazil which has appeared in English over the past twenty years. This work has made important modifications to the notion that Brazilian slavery was part of a benign seigneurial society, markedly different from that of other New World colonies. By selecting five themes ‐ the transition from indigenous Indian to imported African slavery; slavery and rural production; slaves on the mines and in the towns; treatment of slaves; and the causes of emancipation ‐ the article draws attention to features of comparative interest to slavery elsewhere and particularly to that at the Cape.     

The Persistence of the slave market in seventeenth-century Central Mexico

This study, based on an extensive notarial database, demonstrates the significance of slavery in Central Mexico during the seventeenth century. Thousands of bills of sale from Mexico City and Puebla – the largest and most lucrative slave markets in the region – show that the slave trade did not collapse with the end of the Portuguese asiento in 1640. A growing population of American-born creoles sustained the market during the subsequent decades, along with a modest number of new African arrivals. In 1700, slavery remained integral to Central Mexico's economy.     

‘Tumult and Silence’ in the Study of the American Slave Revolts

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars of the American slave revolts were concerned primarily with what the revolts revealed about the character of slavery and those who resisted it. Recently, in a shift in perspective that has not been fully appreciated, several historians have used the methods of micro-history to focus attention instead on the process by which stories of the revolts were composed. The emphasis of this new approach on silences in the historical record accounts for its immense interest to the historical profession, as well as for its profound limitation as a contribution to our understanding of American slavery.     

Between two Beneditos: enslaved wet-nurses amid slavery’s decline in southeast Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article discusses a series of questions related to the presence of enslaved women, female slaves working toward contractual or bequeathed freedom, and freedwomen in the domestic sphere in the final years of slavery in Brazil, with an initial emphasis on the contradictions between medical and sanitarian discourses that promoted a new, bourgeois vision of the home and the continued existence of the master-slave relationship and tutelary relations derived therefrom in the most intimate spaces of wealthy households in the cities and towns of the country’s coffee-growing southeast. The article also seeks to reconstruct the perspective of these captive and servant-class women at the moment of slavery’s extinction, thus providing a new perspective on the latter process by noting how the abolition of slavery was conditioned by the gendering of household work. A reconstruction of the life of Ambrosina, a slave woman rented out by her owner to serve another family as a wet nurse, then accused of murder after the death of her young charge, is the means by which these contributions are made.     

Beyond plantations: Indian and African slavery in the Illinois Country, 1720–1780

This article offers an analysis of Indigenous and African slavery in the Illinois Country during the eighteenth century. It shows that slavery did not operate as an institution and was not organized around plantation production, but that human bondage was a set of adaptable practices. Slavery took many forms, and masters had to adapt to that diversity and, in so doing, they forged a single, heterogeneous slave system. Frenchmen brought enslaved workers of African descent to the Illinois Country, and masters worked them on grain farms to sustain an export economy. In this way, Illinois’s economy shared much with the wider Atlantic World. Yet they had to revise their slaving practices in light of the reality that indigenous forms of bondage pre-dated their arrival. In Native North America, slavery operated as a kin-based system of captivity that could structure alliances and sustain local politics between diverse groups. Masters participated in this form of slavery, and incorporated Indigenous slaves into their economies. Rather than stressing the differences that existed between diverse forms of human bondage, this article moves beyond an institutional analysis of slavery to show how slavery’s many guises mutually defined each other across generations.     

New slavery,old binaries: human trafficking and the borders of ‘freedom’

This article explores dominant discourse on ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ in relation to the many legal and social fetters that have historically been and are today imposed upon individuals who are socially imagined as ‘free’. It argues that discourse on ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ revitalizes the liberal understandings of freedom and restriction that have historically allowed vigorous moral condemnation of slavery to coexist with the continued imposition of extensive, forcible restrictions on individuals deemed to be ‘free’. In place of efforts to build political alliances between different groups of migrants, as well as between migrants and non‐migrants, who share a common interest in transforming existing social and political relations, ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ discourse inspires and legitimates efforts to divide a small number of ‘deserving victims’ from the masses that remain ‘undeserving’ of rights and freedoms.     

Ancient slavery and modern ideologies: Orlando Patterson and M. I. Finley among the dons

In 1978 and 1979, while a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, Orlando Patterson engaged in a number of conversations about slavery with Cambridge ancient historian M. I. Finley. Both men were at the time writing influential books on slavery that would mark important benchmarks in their careers and defined two approaches to the study of slavery, one fading in significance, the other introducing a comparative approach to the institution more focused on dynamics of power and social alienation. At the end of 1978, Finley delivered at the Collège de France four lectures that summarized his thinking on the topic over more than thirty years; two years later they appeared in print under the title Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. In 1982 Patterson published Slavery and Social Death, a ground-breaking study that to this day remains unparalleled in its attempt to establish a globally valid definition of slavery applicable to some sixty-six slave-owning societies across three millennia. This article explores the intersection of these two works, the intellectual currents of the times in which they were produced, and the influence each exerted on the study of slavery in subsequent decades, as models and paradigms of two approaches to understanding the significance of the institution.

     

Castle Slaves of the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast (Ghana)

This article examines the development of the institution known as ‘castle slavery’ on the Gold Coast (West Africa) in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. It places the lived experiences of castle slaves within a comparative Atlantic World context and argues that castle slavery bore significant resemblances to forms of creole elite slavery in the Americas. It also explores the particularly complex roles of female castle slaves in the daily life and operation of European-trading posts in Gold Coast towns.     

Military Slavery in the Sudan during the Turkiyya, 1820–1885

Our Maryland research suggests that it might be possible to integrate the labour supply and planter preferences approach to the transition to slavery by thinking of it as a process that occurred in two stages. During the first stage a small number of ‘Early Plungers’ demonstrated by example that African slavery could be employed profitably. They also created the legal and institutional structures needed to guarantee property rights in slaves. Prominent among the early plungers was a group of Barbadians, perhaps recruited by Lord Calvert specifically for their expertise operating within that island's slave system. The activities of these early plungers brought a small but noticeable population of African descent to Maryland. During the second stage, late in the seventeenth century, when the labour shortage occurred, their activities helped to persuade a majority of planters to invest in Africans.     

Underwriting slavery: insurance and slavery in the Dutch Republic (1718–1778)

This article shows that slavery was more connected to Dutch society and economy than has been previously assumed. It does so by investigating the people involved in Dutch slavery insurance in the period 1718–1734, when the Dutch slave trade was monopolized by the state-chartered West India Company (WIC) and the period 1763–1778, when the private slave trade reached its peak and slavery insurance was more common. This article analyzes a variety of primary sources that have not been studied in this light before. The analysis shows that a large and varied group was involved and that slavery insurance was not a regional institution that only affected the Dutch colonies.     

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

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

‘Wives of Circumstance’: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Late Nineteenth-century Senegal

Using the example of correspondence between a West African trader and two French colonial administrators, this article examines tensions over authority, slavery and gendered categories in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal in the early 1890s. The debate between the three men concerns two women and their questionable status as wives or slaves. The example of the two women, the options presented to them by both the trader and the colonial administrators, and their ultimate choice over slavery and freedom contributes to the historiography on gender, slavery and emancipation in Africa. The author also raises questions pertaining to the use of colonial administrative records to reconstruct the past of women in slavery in French West Africa.     

Slave Suicide,Abolition and the Problem of Resistance

Shifting calculations about the political palatability of representing slave suicide in American abolitionist print culture reveal the extent to which debates about agency, power and consent – and thus about self-destruction – lay at the heart of that new nation's struggle over the future of slavery. Was a slave's suicide an act of principled resistance to tyranny that challenged the hypocrisy of the revolutionary settlement? Or was it a measure of abject victimhood that begged for humanitarian intervention? That representations of black suicide oscillated so dramatically between these opposing interpretive frameworks testifies to deep divides between moderates and militants, and between whites and blacks, as to who had the power to bring slavery to its knees.     

‘Everyone Knows that Laws Bring the Greatest Benefits to Mankind’: The Global and Local Origins of Anti-Slavery in Abyssinia, 1880–1942

Literature on the development of the Slavery Convention of 1926 often gives Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as the test case and primary target of the international convention against slavery. For the most part, the Abyssinian side in the legal debates is obscured and a strong narrative of helplessness in the face of European pressure to abolish the legal status of slavery emerges. This paper seeks to re-centre the history of specifically Abyssinian legal knowledge about slavery and argue that Abyssinian anti-slavery policy developed in interaction not only with European-led international law but also with a non-Western discourse of modernisation drawn from the example of Japan. In addition, the paper argues that anti-slavery legislation was an integral part of the imperial modernising project.     

Slavery and Bristol's ‘golden age’

Bristol's eighteenth century ‘golden age’ has conventionally been linked to the rise of slavery in British America after 1660. This paper seeks to add substance to this linkage by exploring Bristol's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, without which slavery in the Americas could not have developed to the level it did, and goes on to explore the impact of slave trafficking and the trades in slave-produced goods such as sugar and tobacco on income levels in the city in the 1780s. It suggests that in the late eighteenth century at least 40 per cent of the income of Bristolians derived from slavery-related activities. The paper concludes by offering some brief reflections on the relationship between slavery and British metropolitan development.     

An Angry God in the Hands of Sinners: Enslaved Africans and the Uses of Protestant Christianity in Pre-Revolutionary Boston

This article contends that slaves were able to successfully appropriate Christian institutions to decode the Euro-American world they arrived in and resist the dehumanization associated with African slavery in the Americas. Looking beyond religiosity, eschewing the teleological obsession with freedom that obfuscates our understanding of slavery, and using Boston—an Atlantic port city full of churches and slaves—as a case study, we are able to see how enslaved Africans were able to use what they learned in Boston's churches, including the ability to read and write and a powerful Christian vocabulary, in order to meet the master class and other whites on their own terms and challenge the boundaries of slavery.