‘Various Means of Providing for Their Own Tables’: Comparing Slave Family Economies in the Antebellum South

Recent scholarship has changed our understanding of African‐American slaves’ experiences by shifting our focus from the external factors of slavery (what slavery did to men and women in bondage) to slave agency (slaves’ determination in creating their own autonomous culture). While this has been a positive development, there is a danger in forgetting the framework within which slave culture was created. This article seeks a middle ground by examining the ways in which certain external factors of slavery determined the extent to which slave families could develop internal economies and engage in independent production. Comparing slave families’ experiences in three distinct cash crop regions of the antebellum South, this study’s findings indicate that the varied nature of work patterns and crop‐specific labor incentives in different regions served to either encourage or thwart the development of slave family economies.     

Production Activities in the Household Economies of Plantation Slaves: Barbados and Martinique,Mid-1600s to Mid-1800s

Formerly British and French colonies, the eastern Caribbean islands of Barbados and Martinique were major players in the early development of European overseas empires dependent on African slave labor and the large-scale production of sugar. Utilizing documentary and archaeological data we discuss and compare the independent production activities or household economies of plantation slaves on these two islands. The household economy was one of the more prominent aspects of plantation slave life throughout the Caribbean, and in this paper we examine the multiple adaptive production strategies slaves employed to ameliorate the poverty of their material and economic lives.     

Tartars in Spain: renaissance slavery in the Catalan city of Manresa,c.1408

This article presents a summary and analysis of the slaves and slave owners who were living in a particular late medieval city at a particular time. The data for this overview comes from the 1408 Liber Manifesti of Manresa, a tax document which is quite similar to the Florentine Catasto of 1427. Unlike the Catasto, however, the Liber Manifesti consistently designates slaves as distinct from other servants. As a result, the Manresan document allows us to know many basic but often elusive figures such as the total number of slaves in our town, the proportion of slaves to free people, the percentage of households who owned slaves, the proportion of women and children amongst slaves, and even the market value of female, male, and child slaves vis à vis the cost of hiring a domestic servant. Access to such an unusually complete sample also enables us to make some fresh assertions about the extent and nature of renaissance slavery as a whole. Several of Iris Origo's influential observations, which still stand as a benchmark of renaissance slavery some 50 years after they were presented, are here both corroborated and challenged. For example, to what extent did renaissance slave owners pair male slaves with female slaves, as Origo's anecdotal evidence suggested? Our sample also provides invaluable data on the wealth, occupations, and family background of slave owners. We can gain some insight into the phenomenon of women as slave owners, and also coordinate slave owning with urban political power. In addition we can suggest an answer to the elusive question of just how much of a ‘luxury item’ slaves really were in the post-Black Death Mediterranean. In Manresa, as it turns out, slave owners were anything but a uniform block of ‘wealthy townspeople.’     

Antebellum Southern Political Economists and the Problem of Slavery

This article seeks to contextualize the political economists of the antebellum South. The article analyzes them both as members of a transatlantic set of economic thinkers and as southern defenders of slavery. As such, they paired a commitment to the fundamental precepts of classical economics with a defense of chattel slavery. Some historians have claimed that the simultaneous commitment of the southern political economists to political economy and slavery compromised both their social science and their defense of slavery. In contrast, this article finds that the southern political economists exploited the gaps and tensions in classical political economy on the topic of unfree labor to build a coherent and popular economic defense of slavery. Key to the defense was a view of planters as profit‐seeking capitalists and a racism that necessitated the control of black laborers. In the process of developing the defense, some of the southern political economists championed the prospect of industrializing the economy of the South with surplus slave labor.     

Slavery and plantation capitalism in Louisiana's sugar country

Sugar planters in the antebellum South managed their estates progressively, efficiently, and with a political economy that reflected the emerging capitalist values of nineteenth‐century America. By fusing economic progress and slave labor, sugar planters revolutionized the means of production and transformed the institution of slavery. Slaveholders and bondspeople redefined the parameters of paternalism and recast the master‐slave relationship along a novel path. Louisiana slaves accommodated the machine, holding no torch for Luddism while concurrently shaping the agro‐industrial revolution to achieve modest economic independence and relative autonomy within the plantation quarters.     

Enslaved African Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life of Fezzeh Khanom of Shiraz

Fezzeh Khanom (c. 1835–82), an African woman, was a slave of Sayyed ‘Ali-Mohammad of Shiraz, the Bab. Information about her life can be recovered from various pious Baha'i histories. She was honored, and even venerated by Babis, though she remained subordinate and invisible. The paper makes the encouraging discovery that a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. Scholars estimate that between one and two million slaves were exported from Africa to the Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century, most to Iranian ports. Some two-thirds of African slaves brought to Iran were women intended as household servants and concubines. An examination of Fezzeh Khanom's life can begin to fill the gaps in our knowledge of enslaved women in Iran. The paper discusses African influences on Iranian culture, especially in wealthy households and in the royal court. The limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom when applied to the Muslim world is noted.     

The Supreme Court and the Interstate Slave Trade: A Study in Evasion, Anarchy, and Extremism

Opponents of slavery often argued that the federal government possessed the constitutional authority to outlaw the interstate slave trade. At its founding in 1833, the American Anti‐Slavery Society declared that Congress “has a right, and is solemnly bound, to suppress the domestic slave trade between the several States.” The idea had been endorsed earlier, during the Missouri controversy of 1819–1820, by both John Jay and Daniel Webster. Later on, in the 1840s and 1850s, it was supported by such prominent politicians as John Quincy Adams, Salmon P. Chase, and Charles Sumner. Defenders of slavery were, of course, horrified by the suggestion that the South's peculiar institution might be attacked in this way, and they vehemently denied that the Constitution permitted any such action. The prolonged debate over the issue focused on two key provisions of the Constitution. One was the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), which says that Congress has the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” The other was the 1808 Clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 1), which says that the “Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight.” Abolitionists held that the Constitution sanctioned congressional interference in the domestic slave trade both generally, by virtue of the Commerce Clause, and specifically, by virtue of the 1808 Clause. They argued that since slaves were routinely bought and sold, they obviously were articles of commerce, and therefore Congress had unlimited authority over interstate slave trafficking. Furthermore, they said, the words “migration or importation” in the 1808 Clause meant that as of January 1, 1808 Congress had acquired the right not only to ban the importation of slaves, but also to prohibit their migration from one state to another. Defenders of slavery replied that Congress could not interfere in property rights and that the power to regulate commerce did not include the power to destroy it. They also said that the word “migration” in the 1808 Clause referred, not to the domestic movement of slaves, but to the entry into the United States of white immigrants from abroad. ¹     

Slave Communities and Pottery Variability in Western Brazil: The Plantations of Chapada dos Guimarães

In the region of Chapada dos Guimarães, Western Brazil, planters relied heavily on slave labor during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this article, we examine the locally produced pottery found on slaves contexts in five rural sites of this region. Based in data from probate inventories and the pottery decorative variability we suggest that slaves used decorated pottery to express cultural and social differences.     

Boundaries and opportunities: comparing slave family formation in the antebellum South

Our understanding of the marriage strategies and family formation of enslaved people remains clouded by disagreement among contemporary scholars. A perusal of the historical literature suggests that two issues lay at the root of this disagreement: First, scholars disagree over the extent to which slave family life was shaped by the external factors of slavery, or rather slave agency; and second, scholars appear reluctant to abandon their singular views of the slave family. This article addresses both of these gaps by formulating a middle ground in the slave agency debate and by redefining the slave family in plural form. An analysis of the boundaries and opportunities for family formation in northern Virginia and lowcountry South Carolina, this study shows that while the establishment of co-residential two-parent households was the ideal for slaves, not all were able to realize that ideal, and those that could not adapted their marriage strategies and family lives accordingly.     

英属北美殖民地契约移民性质新论

契约工制度是近代早期英国工场手工业时代劳动力的普遍雇佣方式。当英国人在北美创建殖民地之后,契约工并非是作为奴隶被引进的。一方面,契约工制度的运作始终未超出英国社会经济制度与法律体系的制约,殖民地不过是英国国内经济制度和劳动力市场的延伸;另一方面,在契约从签订到实施的全部过程中,价值规律在契约工交易、劳动力价格和工资等方面都有所体现。各殖民地的法律体系不仅凸显了私有财产不可侵犯的原则,而且也对契约工的社会地位和权利做出了周详的规定。雇主为榨取契约工剩余价值的残酷剥削行为确实存在,但因此在契约工制度上贴上奴隶制度的标签却有失偏颇。     

‘Enslaving Christians’: Greek slaves in late medieval Cyprus

This article explores the functions and perceptions of slavery in late medieval Cyprus, paying particular attention to attitudes towards Christian, and especially, Greek slaves. The island had a predominantly Orthodox population, and received a substantial influx of Greek slaves in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Evidence from notarial accounts, estate surveys and chronicles is utilized to examine the ways in which ‘Greek’ slaves were defined and identified. The article investigates whether belonging to this perceived group played a part in shaping the slaves’ paths towards manumission. The context (urban or rural) in which Christian slaves served also influenced attitudes towards labour use in various ways.     

Slavery in black and white: the racialisation of (male) slavery in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and/vs. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This article revisits Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative as illustrative of the ‘birth’ of whiteness as ideology and, in particular, of the subordination of class to race interests in antebellum America. To do so, it compares Douglass’s text to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), which traces the origins of the slave trade back to the seventeenth century, when American slavery was not fully ‘racialised’ yet. While Morrison focuses on the earliest stage of the increasing (class) animosity among different types of servants and slaves, black and white, Douglass’s nineteenth-century Narrative already reveals the explicitly racialised association of human bondage with non-whiteness. I argue that Morrison’s novel may thus be interpreted as a ‘prequel’ to Douglass, whose Narrative illustrates the increasing racialisation of slavery throughout the nineteenth century, but also elaborates on its class and gender biases. In this sense, the essay concludes that Douglass shows how the assertion by white workers, especially males, of their racial and gender supremacy over both black men and women entailed, paradoxically enough, their class subjugation, which, if not in form, ended up transforming them into virtual ‘slaves’.     

Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama

This article explores the rhetorical comparison of naval sailors' exploitation to that of African slaves in pre- and early-Victorian discourses on naval reform. It is structured around an analysis of J.T. Haines's nautical melodrama My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), in which the hero, having been press-ganged by the navy, risks his life freeing enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage even though he considers himself a slave to his nation. This plot was both timely and provocative: first performed in the immediate aftermath of the illegalization of slavery in Britain's colonies, it dramatizes an analogy between slaves and sailors that was contested by campaigners for naval reform and their opponents. Ultimately, My Poll and My Partner Joe palliates radical commentary on sailors' rights, in its second and third acts, as the sailor patriotically celebrates his freedom in antithesis to African slavery. Rather than read its denouement simply as romantic escapism, I argue that it proposes resolutions to conflicts that had arisen in British understandings of slavery and freedom, and racial and national identity, as a result of the debate on naval reform. To researchers of imperial, humanitarian, and working-class cultures and identities of the nineteenth century, this article reveals the underlying importance of ‘race’ and slavery to debates on maritime labour. It further highlights the complex, dialectical character of pre- and early-Victorian representations of sailors – on the stage and beyond it.     

Missionaries,Evangelical Identity,and the Religious Ecology of Early Nineteenth‐Century South Carolina and the British Caribbean

This article examines a critical question that fraught contemporaries throughout the Atlantic system in the early nineteenth century: could slavery be ameliorated and, thus, by implication, could slaves be ‘improved’? Despite strong eighteenth‐century connections through trade and as provincial outposts of the British Empire, South Carolina and the British Caribbean differed markedly on this issue by the early 1800s. But the reasons for this divergence cannot be adequately explained by the effects of the American Revolution. South Carolina slaveholders believed that slavery could be ameliorated through the adoption of evangelicalism. West Indian proprietors, however, believed that the introduction of evangelical religion among their slaves would only incite them to rebel. Thus, evangelical missionaries were often crucial figures in defining the character of slaveholding societies in South Carolina and the West Indies. These missionaries illustrated South Carolinians' paternalistic, benevolent sense of a permanent slave society, while itinerants in the West Indies described a violent, lawless, and temporary society beyond the pale of British standards of civility and humanitarianism.     

A Note on the Spatial Analysis of Sets of Highly Disaggregated Data

Abstract

Compared with other North American colonies, little scholarship exists on slave-holding in early Georgia. In this article, the author augments this historiography by examining a remarkable and little-used collection of sources. Data gleaned from analyzing more than 400 wills written by eighteenth-century white settlers reveal that roughly 39 percent of early Georgians owned slaves and that slave distribution was pyramidal, as most slaveholders owned but a few slaves, although some elites held many. While these findings support existing research, data from the wills suggest that early Georgia slaveholders owned, on average, about half as many slaves as other scholars contend. Besides informing an understanding of slavery in the colony, this article provides an overview of the early Georgia wills themselves, which, as sources, are highly accessible and contain a wealth of information for future scholars.     

Redrawing the Boundary between India and Britain: The Succession Crisis at Zanzibar, 1870–1873

Abstract

WIDE-RANGING, STIMULATING, AND debatable interpretations of the enforced black diaspora from Africa to the New World are the hallmarks of all of these books, even though they differ in focus and are written by historians at various stages of their careers. Two books contain reflections on slavery and abolitionism by renowned historians of slavery, Gary B. Nash and David Brion Davis. Nash, in an elegant, slim volume (originally the Nathan I. Huggins lectures at Harvard University in 2oo4), returns to a theme he has addressed before, namely the reasons why the founding fathers did not eradicate the blot of slavery from the United States. He argues that action could, and should, have been taken. Davis offers a set of essays - some previously published, some appearing for the first time - that examine the inhumanity of slavery in North America, primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but with a broader contextual and chronological canvas. Tlle three other books are revisions of doctoral dissertations. Eric Robert Taylor and Stephanie E. Smallwood are both concerned primarily with the Middle Passage as a crucial phase of the Adantic slave trade. In Taylor's case, the emphasis falls upon shipboard revolts by slaves during the crossing from Africa to America. Smallwood focuses on the process by which people from the Gold Coast were captured, transported, and fashioned into slaves in the English slave trade of the late seventeenth century. Robert Pierce Forbes's book brings the focus back to the United States and the significance of the Missouri Compromise (a set of congressional acts passed in 182o and 1821) for the political history of American slavery.     

20世纪50年代初期长江中下游地区乡村劳动力市场探微

从土改结束到集体化高潮前,从土地均分造成的土地和劳动力等生产要素的非均衡配置、农业生产的季节性特征以及国家政策的影响等这些劳动力市场的供给、需求因素来看,当时的确存在着一个广大的乡村劳动力市场——雇佣市场。与土改前不同的是,尽管这一时期雇工农户的数量较多、比重较大,但单位农户的雇工数量却很少。在雇佣形式上,长工数量、佣期急剧下降和短工数量显著增加是这段时期的一大特点。从阶层构成来看,雇佣关系主要发生在普通劳动者之间,并且雇工工资的涨落主要取决于各地乡村的劳动力实际供给和需求状况。     

The Passenger Cases Reconsidered in Transatlantic Commerce Clause History

The Supreme Court's 5–4 decision in the Passenger Cases (1849) overturned two Northern states' taxes on poor foreign immigrants. The Court's eight opinions disputed whether destitute transatlantic immigrants arriving in U.S. ports were legally and constitutionally “persons” like fugitive slaves fleeing the South, free African Americans residing in the U.S.‐Canadian borderlands, and black seamen working on ships entering Southern ports. The eight opinions issued in the case, as Charles Warren noted, raised fundamental constitutional questions concerning whether U.S. congressional or state authority was exclusive or concurrent over persons moving in interstate and international business, reflecting wider sectional struggles fostering the Civil War. ¹ More recently, Mary Bilder and others examined connections among indentured contract labor, race‐based American slavery, and the Court's antebellum Commerce Clause decisions to establish that foreign immigrants were commercial objects subject to regulation through the Constitution's Commerce Clause. ² Southerners and Northern pro‐slavery supporters argued, however, that fugitive slaves and free blacks crossing interstate and international borders were “persons” who could be regulated or altogether excluded under state police powers. ³     

Home-grown slaves: women, reproduction, and the abolition of the slave trade, Jamaica 1788-1807

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.     

Capital,Illegal Slaves,Indentured Labourers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation Economy in Mauritius, 1810–60

Previous studies of British plantation colonies, including the island of Mauritius in the south-western Indian Ocean, have paid little attention to the economic dimensions of the transition from slave to free labour that occurred during the early nineteenth century. Reports by Mauritian colonial officials make it possible to reconstruct the transformation of the island's economy between 1810 and 1860 from one oriented towards trade and commerce to one dominated by the production of sugar for the British imperial market. This transformation occurred in the midst of a series of interconnected developments that included an illegal trade in slaves between 1811 and circa 1827, changes in imperial tariff policy in 1825, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, the advent of the modern system of indentured labour in 1834 and the suspension of Indian emigration to the island between 1838 and 1842. The importance of domestically generated and controlled capital in shaping the Mauritian economy during this period highlights the need to examine the extent to which and the ways in which domestic capital framed the contours of social and economic life elsewhere in the nineteenth-century colonial plantation world.