The urban background of Enslaved Muslims in the Americas

Enslaved Muslims constituted a relatively small proportion of the enslaved population in the Americas, and that population was largely male. This article explores an unappreciated dimension of the background of these enslaved Muslims, the fact that most came from towns and had traveled widely, between towns; that is enslaved Muslims tended to come from urban settings, no matter where they ended up in the Americas. This urban background has implications in terms of the experiences and expectations of the enslaved. The urban context was associated with commerce, craft specialization, literacy, and political and social consciousness of slavery and its meaning within west Africa. The study examines available biographical information on enslaved Muslims from the Western Sudan, usually referred to as Mandingo or some variant in the Americas, and those from the Central Sudan, including Hausa, Yoruba, Nupe and people from Borno. The urban setting of Muslim areas of West Africa is then compared with other towns and cities in the Atlantic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in terms of size of towns and multicultural backgrounds of urban populations, further demonstrating that the urban background of many enslaved Africans and the extent to which the enslaved population was moved between towns has not been appreciated.     

Black Purgatory: Enslaved Women's Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Rio Grande do Sul,Brazil

This article explores the cases of two Brazilian-born enslaved women who were convicted of infanticide and murder in the city of Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) in the 1820s. Maria was convicted of slitting the throats of her two children with her master's razor. Mônica was convicted of killing her master, André Dias, with five axe blows. Although the crimes these two women perpetrated differed in some ways, their sentences were similar. They were not sentenced to death, the typical fate of enslaved individuals who committed murder. Instead, they were publicly flogged then sent into degredo (penal exile) in Benguela, two Portuguese colonies in West Central Africa. These cases suggest that in the context of slavery in Rio Grande do Sul, the limited possibilities of negotiation between masters and slaves resulted in enslaved women committing violent acts of individual resistance, which, although apparently desperate acts, were also the result of a larger strategy. The article shows that in both prosperous and poor households in the domestic environment, enslaved women experienced various forms of daily violence. It also sheds light on how early in Rio Grande do Sul's history, public defenders started condemning physical violence by slave owners against enslaved women, and how the judicial system recognized the legitimacy of their arguments by sentencing the women to penal exile rather than the death penalty. For the two unmarried enslaved women who were constant victims of abuse, and who very probably did not have any close relatives, being exiled to Benguela was perhaps a blessing in disguise.     

The nameless and the forgotten: maternal grief,sacred protection,and the archive of slavery

ABSTRACT

Death, particularly of enslaved infants and children, cast a long shadow over the experiences of enslaved mothers. Almost half of all enslaved infants died within the first two weeks of birth and another quarter died by age two. Although profit–loss calculations tabulate the frequent deaths of enslaved youngsters, these accounts reveal very little about cultural conventions on maternal grief or how enslaved mothers responded to their children’s deaths. In addition to using the rhetorical to draw attention to the loss women experienced and archival silences on maternal grief, this article challenges the claims that enslaved Africans welcomed and celebrated death because it freed loved ones from bondage and reunited captive Africans with their ancestors. Attention to expressions of grief and evolving grieving practices reveal the transformation of enslaved people’s culture and the invisible suffering of the enslaved, which are sometimes overshadowed by narratives of resistance and the resilience of African culture and black mothers.     

A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said

Throughout the eighteenth century, advertisements offering enslaved infants and children for free appeared in New England newspapers; historians have not previously discussed this apparently anomalous northern practice of giving away children. Scholars of slavery are increasingly accentuating the implications of human property embodying profit, but this article uses these advertisements to consider what it meant to embody financial loss, and how the ‘giving away’ of enslaved children complicates the current historical framing of American slavery as a capitalist enterprise. That not all enslaved people embodied a positive value only accentuates the calculations at the heart of American chattel slavery.     

Redeeming the "Character of the Creoles": Whiteness, Gender and Creolization in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue

This article examines the political significance of white creolization in pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue. Eighteenth-century Europeans tended to view white creoles as having physically, morally, and culturally degenerated due to the tropical climate, the monotony of plantation life, and their interaction with enslaved and free people of color. Yet elite white colonists in Saint Domingue claimed that white creoles possessed certain positive traits due to their new world birth, traits that rendered them physically stronger and potentially more virtuous than the French. Focusing on little-known publications authored by the white creole Moreau de Saint-Méry, this article highlights the deployment of gendered notions of virtue and noble savagery in debates over white creolization. Moreau's claims, when placed in the context of a conflict between local colonial magistrates and the French Colonial Ministry, challenge interpretations of white creolization as an undesirable, subversive side-effect of colonial slavery. Rather, white colonial men claimed that white colonists knew best how to ensure the obedience of the enslaved precisely because of their creolization.     

Careful The Tale You Tell Fairy tales,drama and moral education

SUMMARY: In this article, I examine theories which argue both for and against the educational potential of fairy tales, with special attention to the field of moral learning. I conclude that, in the contemporary world, stories have a particular importance for such learning but that the hidden moral values conveyed by many traditional tales may well be disquieting for a teacher. I propose that educational drama offers an appropriate pedagogy for exploring such values with children and describe in some detail a case study, in which I used a version of a traditional Hindu tale for these purposes. I offer a brief analysis on how the strategies employed by drama teachers can be harnessed for moral educational purposes and suggest that drama can offer children much needed opportunities to actively and creatively engage with stories and their values in a communal framework.     

Scandalous Scarcities: Black Slave Women, Plantation Domesticity, and Travel Writing in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

This article draws on the writing of North American and European travelers to illustrate the ways in which enslaved black women became central to Cuba's visions of colonial prosperity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such literature highlights the anxieties that plagued Cuban colonial elites as the slave trade consistently brought fewer African women than men to the island. As mothers, wives, and caretakers of domestic space, black and African women became critical to planters' dreams of continued wealth and stability. To further encourage this idealized culture of respectable domesticity, white Cuban elites erected slave cabins and barracks whose physical arrangements could increase slaves' compulsion to marry, and enhance managers' ability to survey and oversee the enslaved populations. Thus white Cuban elites hoped that enslaved women – and the ideas about marriage, home, and family such women were thought to inspire – would help to produce plantation regimes as orderly and disciplined as they were prosperous.     

‘To return to the bosom of their fatherland’: Brazilian immigrants in nineteenth‐century Lagos

This article explores the southern prison system during the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth-century USA, to reveal struggles over landscape and geography. It suggests connections between diverse institutions such as plantation jails, county and city jails, workhouses, state penitentiaries and slave pens that have not been conceptualized as part of a carceral system supporting slavery. Slaveholders' various means of using these institutions are outlined as are their perceptions of these prisons. The article concludes by discussing the perspective of enslaved peoples, arguing that prisons were the site of considerable resistance as slave geographies were unable to be completely confined by the expanding carceral system.     

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

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

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

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

From violence to alliance: Maroons and white settlers in Jamaica, 1739–1795

During the First Maroon War, violent battles between Maroons and British colonists were frequent and violent. How then, after the peace treaties, did former enemies negotiate their new positions as allies? How did colonists accept this new status quo while balancing it with racial beliefs of the era? This article examines Maroon and colonist efforts to progress in a physically difficult and socially charged environment while living side-by-side with a large enslaved population. Ultimately, some influential planters, as opposed to poorer settlers, came to recognise the mutual benefits this uneasy peace provided. That is not to say these colonists were not fearful of the Maroons but that they recognised the usefulness of the Maroon communities.     

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.     

Land of hope and dreams: slavery and abolition in the Dutch Leeward islands, 1825–1865

The asymmetry of laws concerning the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves in the Atlantic world in the early-to-mid nineteenth century led to a range of responses on the part of inhabitants of the Dutch Leeward islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin. These ranged from activism, adaptation, accommodation to, as this article highlights, maritime marronage on the part of the enslaved population of these islands. The Dutch Leeward islands have been understudied in the historiography of abolition and emancipation but, as this article will argue, they should be included into the larger story of how abolition was experienced on the local, regional, Atlantic, and international stages.     

From free womb to criminalized woman: fertility control in Brazilian slavery and freedom

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the abolition of slavery affected the prosecution of abortion and infanticide in Rio de Janeiro. Analysing judicial documents, criminal and civil legislation, and travel writings, it demonstrates that the state did not prosecute enslaved women for fertility control due to the contradictory legal status of their bodies as both property and person. After abolition, the state prosecuted all women, but particularly poor women of colour, for these crimes. The article argues that as patriarchal control over women’s reproductive capabilities moved from the private to the public sphere, fertility control became a central axis on which the state articulated gendered and racialized power.     

‘My master and Miss … warn’t nothing but poor white trash’: poor white slaveholders and their slaves in the antebellum South

While the majority of enslaved people lived on large plantations, there were a significant minority who lived on smaller farms where they and their families were the only slaves owned by their master (or mistress). This article uses 22 Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews conducted in the 1930s with former slaves from across the South to investigate the lives of enslaved people living with masters or mistresses that they described as ‘poor’, and argues that enslaved experiences on small farms owned by poor whites varied widely, but were marked particularly by violence, material deprivation, and intense loneliness.     

The telling or the tale? Narratives and gender in adolescent friendship networks

The paper analyses the narratives told between adolescent friends, recorded in single-sex friendship groups with a fieldworker. It confirms the importance of narratives in the construction of friendship and, specifically, in the interpretation of past experience according to peer group norms. The link between the self and others is different in the narratives told by the male friends and the female friends. The boys establish a sense of group identity through the joint activity of ‘telling’, whilst for the girls the links are between individual selves, constructed through their tales. Key figures in the friendship groups take the lead in demonstrating how events are interpreted. The same speaker uses styles that could be labelled ‘competitive’ and styles that could be labelled ‘cooperative’, depending on the interactional context.     

Mary Prince,Grand Turk,and Antigua

The History of Mary Prince, A West-Indian Slave, Related by Herself, published in 1831 under the auspices of London's Anti-Slavery Society, is of great historical importance because of the rich details it gives about various aspects of enslavement. Its author, Mary Prince, was born in 1788 in Bermuda. She had five owners and was enslaved in three British Overseas Territories – Bermuda, Grand Turk Island and Antigua – before self-manumission in London in 1828. Prince is the earliest known freed black West Indian woman to author such a testimony. Susanna Strickland (later Moodie), a young abolitionist and skilled writer working with the Anti-Slavery Society, compiled the narrative which was a bestseller going to print three times in its first year of publication. It was also a valuable part of the abolitionists' strategy to attract public support for the abolitionist movement of the day. Investigation and authentication of the History's historical dimensions, such as physical remnants of sites where Prince was enslaved and listings in the Slave Registers of Former British Overseas Territories, may put to rest suspicion that it was exaggerated or partially fabricated by abolitionists. Much of this work has been completed in Bermuda but little has been done with regard to Grand Turk Island and Antigua, although Prince spent more than half her life enslaved in those two islands. This article outlines preliminary findings in both territories.     

Private slave trade in the Dutch Indian Ocean world: a study into the networks and backgrounds of the slavers and the enslaved in South Asia and South Africa

This article explores the local and intercontinental networks that underpinned the private trade in slaves and the transportation of the enslaved in the VOC seaborne empire during the eighteenth century. We rely on two sets of complementary VOC records, with their respective shortcomings, to reveal information about those who were involved in this trade as sellers, buyers and traded. Our focus is on the Cape of Good Hope as a node with a high demand for slaves, and Cochin from where slaves were traded and transported to all regions of the empire, including the Cape. It is apparent from these sources that high ranking VOC officials, the Company rank and file, free citizens and Asians under VOC jurisdiction partook in this lucrative trade. Analyses of regions of origin, age, gender, and caste are provided, giving the reader a rare glimpse into the identity of the enslaved.     

Master–Horse–Slave: Mobility,Race and Power in the British West Indies,c.1780–1838

This article examines a particular social practice that attracted attention from visitors to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British West Indies: enslaved footmen accompanying white riders on horseback, often seeking to keep up by holding onto the horses’ tails. Referred to here as ‘master–horse–slave’, this is interpreted as a ‘hybrid co-mobility’ (or co-present mobility involving humans and animals). The article argues that master–horse–slave was a manifestation of slavery as everyday social practice. More broadly, the article argues for the importance of practices of mobility as significant features of Caribbean slave societies and the place of animals in these.     

‘[S]he could … spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: white mothers and enslaved wet nurses’ invisible labor in American slave markets

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the market that white mothers created for enslaved wet nurses, the intimate labor that they performed in southern households, and the ways that this market intersected with slave marketplaces in the antebellum era. It argues that white mothers’ desires and demands for enslaved wet nurses transformed bondwomen’s ability to suckle into a largely invisible, yet skilled form of labor, and created a niche sector of the slave market. In these ways, white mothers were crucial to the commodification of enslaved women’s reproductive bodies, their breast milk, and the nutritive and maternal care they provided to white children.