Abolition,Economic Transition,Gender and Slavery: The Expansion of Women's Slaveholding in Ghana, 1807–18741

The British withdrawal from the Atlantic Slave Trade fostered the expansion, rather than retrenchment of slavery within Africa. It also spurred a shift in the pre-nineteenth-century gendered pattern of slaveholding. This paper examines the extent to which radical economic changes altered the gendered structure of slaveholding in post-abolition Ghana. It argues that the British prohibition liberalised slaveholding conditions and resulted in a reconceptualisation of the value of slaves which breached the tradition of restricted female proprietorship of slaves, and also led to increased women's earning capacity, slave acquisition and use, as well as the scale of their holdings.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’: Slavery,Honour and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima,Peru

For elite Spaniards in eighteenth-century Lima, elegant clothing provided a language for expressing their wealth, status and honour. They frequently made their way around town in the company of elegantly dressed slave attendants, whose presence underscored their owners' privilege. Yet many slaves found opportunities to function as more than mere canvasses for the expression of their owners' identities. Indeed, for a surprising number of slaves, elegant clothing was a key tool with which they negotiated their status and laid claim to their own definitions of honour. By mapping the study of material culture onto the study of slavery, this paper brings into relief the social meanings that clothing contained for slaves, and highlights the possibilities that urban life contained for the creation of social identities that fell outside the social and colour lines drawn by the colonial state.¹     

Robert Monroe Harrison,British Abolition,Southern Anglophobia and Texas Annexation

This article contributes to the larger project of situating the United States' struggle over slavery within the Atlantic World. Based on the public and private writings of Southern political leaders and the diplomatic correspondence of Robert Monroe Harrison, consul to Kingston, Jamaica, from 1831 until 1855, the article argues that Southern Anglophobia was a dominant factor in the movement to annex Texas to the United States. Britain's abolition of colonial slavery in her West Indian colonies was a seminal event for the American South. This was especially true for Harrison, a ‘native born Virginian’, who had a fearful personal experience with the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. Harrison came to believe that British abolitionism would be turned against American slavery and he shared his views with the State Department. He even feared that the British would use the West Indies as a staging ground for an attack on America with an emancipated black army that would sow insurrection in the South. Moreover, when several American ships involved in the coastal slave trade wrecked in the Bahamas, British colonial authorities freed the slaves, validating Harrison's central accusation. In 1842, on the slave ship Creole, a group of young men to be sold in New Orleans rebelled, seized control of the ship and made their way to the Bahamas. They had heard through the grapevine of the freedom to be gained there. The white South was outraged. From their perspective, Britain had not only expropriated American property, but now had also instigated violent rebellion. Southern political leaders within the Tyler Administration, especially the Secretaries of State Abel Upshur and then John Calhoun, were deeply concerned with British intentions. They believed that the Republic of Texas was the next target of British abolitionism, and in order to defend civilisation as they knew it, they launched the movement to annex Texas to the United States to protect and expand American slavery. They succeeded in 1845.     

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.     

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.     

An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America

There exists a long-standing historiographical mystery concerning the legal origins of the practice of Spanish American slaves suing their masters for freedom in royal courts. This essay highlights the importance of working judges' judicial philosophy in the formulation of this customary ‘right’. A close reading of two rare eighteenth-century judicial opinions from Lima, Peru, exposes the rationale of the judges, particularly the Creole judges, who admitted slave cases. High court minister Pedro José Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla considered two legal issues that made slavery distinctive in the region: the right to self-purchase and grants of conditional liberty. In a 1746 letter, the judge rendered a relatively liberal opinion on slaves' legal rights by reading Creoles' own political ‘liberty’ into freedom suits. But as Lima's slaves increasingly entered the secular court system, his judicial philosophy would contract.     

Frank Travels: Space,Power and Slave Mobility in the British Leeward Islands,c. 1700–1730

By tracing the regional and trans-Atlantic travels of an enslaved man named Frank, this article examines the relationship between slave mobility, space and power in the British Leeward Islands from 1700 to 1730. Comprising Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, Saint Kitts and several of the Virgin Islands, the British Leewards rest in close proximity to each other. In turn, plantation slaves like Frank lived in a world where acculturation to slavery involved adapting to an archipelagic context. Relying on private letters sent between Frank's plantation manager and his absentee owner, colonial legislation and government correspondence, this article argues that the geography of the Leeward archipelago shaped master–slave relations in the region and, in turn, influenced the ways slaves used their knowledge of the environment as a source of power and even liberation.     

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.     

Black slaves and English liberty: A re‐examination of racial slavery in England

Blacks in eighteenth‐century England were caught in a half‐way stage between colonial slavery and English domestic servitude, and out of the ambiguities of their position they were able to alter their status. Consequently slavery came to an end in England between the 1760s and the 1790s, not from the Somerset Case in 1772, nor from the Act of Parliament in 1833, but from the escape of the slaves themselves. Certain institutional elements, namely the traditions of household servitude, a popular libertarian political culture, and the ideology of the rule of law, provided a climate conducive to black resistance. Nonetheless, the initiative for ending slavery, the force which brought the institutional elements into play, came from individual members of the black community.     

Fugitive slaves and Christian evangelism in French West Africa: a protestant mission in late nineteenth-century Senegal

This article examines a Protestant mission in late nineteenth-century Senegal that served as a refuge for runaway slaves in French West Africa. While slavery in Africa has been understood as benign and the end of slavery as a process of ‘renegotiation’ rather than a struggle for freedom, evidence from the mission shows the complicated and personal nature of emancipation for escaped slaves who joined religious communities. By analyzing the mission’s annual report, this essay sheds light on the lives of individual men and women who fled to the colonial capital and adopted strategies to secure their status as freepersons.     

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.     

Commodities in action: measuring embeddedness and imposing values

Recent approaches in political economy look at the effects of technology and social values on economic action. Combining these approaches with those of economic anthropologists, this article poses that the way the economy is instituted can be understood by looking at reasons actors have for participating in actor‐networks of production, distribution and consumption. Using the author's research on American recycling, this article first shows that much of the‘making’or instituting of the economy happens outside the market, through political machinations, contracts and standards. Second, it suggests that these relationships impose value upon goods differently than do market relations. The details of the recycling‘chain’show the ways actors shape the network and demonstrate that the social values that add‘economic value’to goods are not uniform, but are highly contextual. Starting from Mark Granovetter's notion of 'social embeddedness', the article explains that the measure of social embeddedness is not as important as the values imposed upon other actors through social structure in the economy. It calls for a close observation of economic action in the locales within which production takes place to understand better the‘actions‐at‐a‐distance’where the politics of technology, social movements and power create the empirical, instituted economy.     

Slavery and redemption in the Catholic missions of the Upper Congo, 1878–1909

The French Catholic Société des missionnaires d’Alger, also known as the White Fathers, sought to abolish slavery in the Upper Congo by creating mission outposts of liberated slaves. The missionaries purchased (‘redeemed’) young African slaves, captives, and dependents, and placed them in mission orphanages. The White Fathers claimed to have liberated these redeemed orphans, even while they ensured, often through force, that they remained alienated from their natal communities and subjugated dependents. In much the same fashion as domestic and Islamic slavery in the immediate environs, the slow integration of these orphans drove the expansion of Catholic mission communities. Through studying Catholic mission slave redemptions at the end of the nineteenth century, this article explores the interactions and development of pre-colonial African, Zanzibar Islamic, and European Christian ideas of slavery and freedom.     

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.     

The origin of white supremacy in South Africa: An interpretation

White supremacy in South Africa had its beginning in the initial Dutch colonial settlement of the Cape. The first Dutch settlers brought with them a vision of colonialism in which Europeans were superior to non‐Europeans, and could behave in colonies in ways that were not tolerated at home. The colonial idea of racial slavery corrupted early Cape officials before there were any slaves, and made the introduction of slavery inevitable. Marriages between white men and non‐European women were tolerated at the Cape as elsewhere in the Dutch colonial realm, but raciallymixed couples were not welcome in the Netherlands. The racial exclusivity of the Dutch home community gained ground at the Cape as its European settlers began to see themselves as a home community away from home, and sought to emulate home standards in so far as this was practicable in an overseas colonial setting.     

The concept of piracy in nineteenth-century American abolitionist rhetoric

American abolitionists used the concept of piracy as a rhetorical and tactical device to attack the institution of slavery during the antebellum period. Activists branded slaveholders as ‘pirates’ in order to delegitimize the validity of slave owners' title in stolen people and recognize enslaved peoples' rightful self-ownership. The pirate label further conveyed that slaveholders' violence against slaves was illegal and that enslaved people could lawfully use lethal force to resist those who held them captive, assaulted them, or kidnapped them. Thus, abolitionists characterized slave owners as pirates not only to stigmatize slaveholding but also to shape legal perspectives on slavery by reversing presumptions about property rights and about slavery-related violence.