Royal slaves in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies 1792–1848: Living in autonomy

A group of slaves owned by the King of Denmark-Norway, termed Royal Slaves, performed essential and specific functions in the urban colonial society of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. This article traces the development of this group of slaves and examines their standard of living and level of skills compared to plantation slaves in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. The article argues that the Royal Slaves, through their access to provision grounds, had opportunities for a better life and developed a particular group identity, and that particular Royal Slaves possessed skills which led them to have positions of substantial social status in the social hierarchy of colonial society. Lastly, the article compares the conditions of living of the Danish-Norwegian Royal Slaves to Royal Slaves in other contemporary slave communities in order to further assess how, and if, the Danish-Norwegian Royal Slaves lived and worked under considerably different conditions than other Royal Slaves across the Caribbean.     

Managing the Transition to a Free Labor Society: American Interpretations of the British West Indies during the Civil War and Reconstruction

American reactions to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 reveal that three decades after abolition, British West Indian emancipation was still considered relevant to policy debates in the United States. The early 1860s saw a significant shift in northern views of the British Caribbean colonies, in particular as a result of the writings of William G. Sewell on the subject. For Republicans, escalating social conflict in Jamaica highlighted above all the need to prevent former slaveholders from monopolizing political power after emancipation, and this interpretation of the West Indian experience reinforced the evolving case for equal rights. Many had argued that former slaves’ economic independence had been the major cause of declining plantation production in the West Indies. However, Republicans tended to accept representations of black farmers in the Caribbean as an incipient middle class, and never concluded from the British case that access to land for freed slaves would be fundamentally at odds with maintaining future cotton production.     

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.     

Urban domestic slavery in medieval Ragusa

Medieval slavery and the slave trade are by now well established facts. This study of medieval Ragusa (Dubrovnik) attempts to answer the question: how were slaves employed, in place of free wage laborers, in urban environments? Ragusa is a well documented instance in which slaves, largely female slaves, were employed in the household. They provided non-specialized labor to the household and to commercial endeavors. This method of utilizing unskilled rural workers was cheap but required a cohesive social order and co-ordinated communal efforts.The thirteenth-century slave system was replaced in the fourteenth century by reliance upon contract labor. This study argues that it was competition for trained, domestic slaves from foreign purchasers which priced rural Balkan slaves out of the market for local inhabitants. Contract laborers from rural areas offered a cheap alternative and through adroit communal action came to inhabit a condition closely resembling chattel slavery.Over the long term this cheap labor supply, combined with the domestic and civil tranquility at Ragusa, gave the city-state a competitive edge as a carrying power in the commercial economy. Concomitantly the word sclavi pejorated in meaning.     

Discovering the invisible Puerto Rican slave family: demographic evidence from the eighteenth century

Traditional notions that family life among slaves during the pre-plantation period in the non-Hispanic Caribbean was necessarily unstable are fading in light of new research. Although marriage among this segment of the population in Caguas, Cayey, San Germán, and Yauco--rural parishes in Puerto Rico--involved only a fraction of the overall number of marriages in these communities, the marriage of slaves was much more frequent than previously assumed. Family life among the eighteenth-century Puerto Rican slave population appears to have been quite stable, as shown by the reconstruction of birth intervals for both married and unmarried mothers. Married and unmarried mothers exhibited similar reproductive behavior. These results strongly suggest that a majority of the unmarried slave mothers lived in unions that were not institutionally recognized, but that were nevertheless stable, as indicated by the high percentage of their children born at intervals comparable to those of married mothers. If unmarried mothers were living in stable consensual unions, then our understanding of these slave family units during the colonial period must be reassessed not only for Puerto Rico but possibly for the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America.     

Domestic Economy and Daily Practice in Guadeloupe: Historical Archaeology at La Mahaudière Plantation

Archaeological research has made significant contributions to the study of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean, but until recently researchers neglected the French islands. This paper reports on archaeological fieldwork at Habitation La Mahaudière in Guadeloupe, focusing on the economic and social lives of plantation laborers and exploring articulations between local realities at this sugar plantation and broader historical process of the Caribbean region and the French colonial world.     

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.’     

“The Island of the Clouds”<Emphasis Type="Bold">:</Emphasis> The Archaeology of Life on the Margins in a Small-Scale Caribbean Island Landscape,Bequia (St. Vincent Grenadines) ca. 1700–1900 CE

The study of marginal Caribbean islands and economies remains understated within the wider context of the discipline of Caribbean historical archaeology. Research has tended to focus mainly upon the study of the dominant site form of the colonial period in the region: the industrial sugar plantation, and mainly upon the larger islands. This contribution moves the scale of analysis to the smaller Caribbean island landscape as a whole entity, and attempts to frame an archaeological biography of Bequia in the St. Vincent Grenadines over the last three hundred or so years. Further, we consider how more peripheral economic strategies that developed there over this period impacted upon this island landscape, how they are recognized archaeologically and what they can tell us about wider social and economic processes. Using landscape archaeology survey allied to GIS and historical cartographic analysis, the study presented here charts the emergence and development of a distinctive insular Caribbean socioeconomic identity very much on the margins.     

‘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.     

South Carolina Shipyards: Labour,Logistics, Lumber and Ladies

Southern shipyards, like Hobcaw and Mars Bluff, were established at locations chosen primarily for convenient access to transportation networks, building materials, clientele and labour. The historical record reveals a home front role played by local plantation owners and slaves as shipyard labour. Women served as project fundraisers, shipyard dilettantes, shipwright’s wives and possibly slave mistresses with a paucity of material culture to confirm their presence in the archaeological record. Archaeological investigations on land and underwater yield evidence of artefacts associated with diet, shipbuilding, warfare and ethnicity.     

Spatiality and the Interpretation of Identity Formation: Fugitive Slave Community Creation in Nineteenth-Century Kenya

In the nineteenth century, the coalescence of a plantation economy on the Swahili Coast provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. Increasing numbers of enslaved workers fled inland, and, by the 1840s, some had created independent settlements. In Swahili, runaway slaves were known as watoro. Forged by men and women of diverse cultural backgrounds, watoro communities offer broad insight into how groups form and sustain themselves. This study explores how watoro settlement organization and landscape practices reflect the process of community formation. Particular attention is paid to watoro communities?? participation in regional networks and the degree to which fugitive slaves developed homogenized sociocultural norms or maintained long-term cultural plurality. This paper adopts a spatial archaeological approach centered on settlement location, housing density, and domestic architecture. Dissonances between these spatial data and artifact distributions reveal the ways in which both heterogeneity and homogeneity were expressed and experienced. Articulations and disarticulations between different evidentiary types also help to better reveal the diverse range of inter-group interactions that fugitive slaves pursued and avoided.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar,and elsewhere about him’: Slaves' Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans

Drawing on slave testimony from criminal trials, this article suggests that slaves in French Colonial Louisiana articulated a nuanced relationship to material goods premised less on a static vision of West African culture, than on variable notions of gender and ethnicity. Here, articles of dress could be used by slaves to distinguish among themselves, as revealed in the 1766 investigation against one runaway marginalised in spite of his self‐conscious sartorial identification as a slave and as an ‘African’. This paper thus offers an example of slaves engineering social control within black spaces by manipulating the legal apparatus of the white hegemony. Sartorial performances of ethnicity and masculinity were key to this process.     

Slaves to Sailors: the archaeology of traditional Caribbean shore whaling c.1850–2000. A case study from Barbados and Bequia (St Vincent Grenadines)

The archaeology of the post‐Emancipation Caribbean remains relatively understudied. The collapse of the industrial‐scale sugar plantation systems of the islands in the early 19th century saw a radical re‐organization of socio‐economic life. A new corpus of consumers was created, eking out a living on the margins of island society, but never quite liberated. This period sees the emergence of an Afro‐Caribbean maritime culture focused upon shipbuilding, fishing, turtling and whaling, the latter a particular feature of the eastern Caribbean (Windward Islands). The archaeology of whaling communities, is relatively well understood from the perspective of North America, Australasia and Europe, but less so in the Caribbean. Using two case studies based upon recent excavation and survey work, this paper sheds light on a distinctive maritime cultural response in the post‐emancipation Eastern Caribbean world.     

Where is the Caribbean? French Colonial Archaeology in the English Lake

Archaeological investigation of the Caribbean region has generally incorporated unquestioned assumptions about the nature and scale of the context. Most work has been done in the Anglophone Caribbean, and has implicitly taken the English colonial world as the normative context for comparative analysis. This view leaves out a significant portion of the Caribbean colonial world—that of the French imperial program. The French colonial venture in the Caribbean has, until recently, been overlooked by historical archaeology. Recent survey and excavation of sugar, indigo and coffee plantation sites, as well as urban archaeological work, has begun to shed light upon the nature of French colonial life as distinct from that in the Anglophone Caribbean, and also on the ways that the experiences on specific French islands were different from each other. The individual histories of Martinique and Guadeloupe are contrasted in this paper, with reference to the nature of the archaeological record that has been explored, and that remains to be investigated.     

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.     

House-Yard Burials of Enslaved Laborers in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

Four burials were excavated from discrete house-yard compounds in an eighteenth century African Jamaican slave settlement at Seville plantation. Though only four in number, these individuals provide significant information on burial practices and physical conditions within a clearly defined African Jamaican community. The analysis of material remains illuminate living conditions and social relations within the African Jamaican community. Each individual was interred within a separate house-yard and with a unique set of artifacts that yield information about their unique identities and positions within the Seville community. Bioarchaeological assessments describe the osteological remains and detail findings concerning pathologies. To date, they are the only excavated individuals who represent the African Caribbean practice of house-yard burial.     

Trade and the Construction of Bahamian Identity: A Multiscalar Exploration

Using ceramic data, we explore how a multiscalar approach, framed within Giddens' Theory of Structuration, can lead to a more complete understanding of the construction of New World Creole identities. The two scales of analysis serve to inform one another. We draw upon archaeological and historical data from five plantation sites located on three islands of the Bahamas. On the macroscale level, we demonstrate how regional trade networks limited or facilitated access to ceramics and shaped the ways that individual planters used these goods to construct statements about wealth and prestige. A microscale analysis of ceramics recovered from six slave households demonstrates how families with complete market access used ceramics as a means of creating a sense of community identity and mediating tensions within the quarters.