Black-Atlantic counterfactualism: speculating about slavery and its aftermath

This paper critically examines the role of counterfactual thought and argument in a series of interconnected contexts that span what Paul Gilroy termed the ‘black Atlantic’ and what Ali Mazrui described as ‘Global Africa’. The paper aims to show that a more or less explicit use of conjecture and speculative reasoning has characterised attempts to represent and demand recognition for the horror, inhumanity and injustice of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery, and their legacies. To do so, the paper examines a number of interrelated examples, including the campaign for reparations for slavery in the USA; African demands for reparations for slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism that draw on ideas about the continent's ‘underdevelopment’; and speculative writing that imagines alternate historical geographies of slavery. The paper argues that their concerns with Atlantic slavery and its consequences evince a particular way of engaging with the past that might, at first sight, appear to be aligned with a broader temporal sensibility associated with notions of ghostly return, haunting and trauma. The paper argues, however, that such an assumption is mistaken and that the presence of counterfactualism here illustrates a rather different philosophy of history at work. By highlighting forms of making the past present that are speculative rather than spectral, the paper aims to open up new lines of geographical enquiry that will enhance understanding of Atlantic slavery and its aftermath.     

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.     

‘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.     

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.     

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’.     

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.     

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.     

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     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

Conversing with the minority: relations among Christian,Jewish, and Muslim women in the high middle ages

This essay introduces a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History on the topic of ‘Conversing with the minority: relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages’. Despite the fact that both interfaith relations and women's history are now well established subdisciplines within the field of medieval studies, the question of how medieval women themselves established cross-sectarian relations has rarely been explored. Documenting women's history is almost always problematic because of limited source materials, but this essay suggests that much can be learned by looking at areas where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women shared certain facets of their lives: either by reason of social relations tied to religion and ethnicity (money-lending being a common bond between Jewish and Christian women, slavery between Christian women and Muslims) or by reason of events that connected them due to their shared sex and gender (childbirth, caring for the dead, even cosmetics). By actively looking for ‘spaces’ where women would be found, we can begin to hear the dialogues that passed among women across religious lines.     

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.     

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.     

The William James Foundry 1817–1843: An Exposé of Local Metallurgical Enterprise

Abstract

It is a traditionally held view that slavery retarded industrial enterprises, and as such any form of metallurgical industries/activities, for example, would be alien in a slave society. Recent research has, however, indicated quite clearly the technological capacity of slave societies, noting that technological innovations including technical enterprises were evident in slave societies and thus challenges the 'incompatibility thesis' that slavery retarded economic development.     

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.     

Correlating archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records using a Bayesian approach: a case study from Sutton Common,South Yorkshire,England

This paper presents a case study aimed at correlating archaeological ‘events’ (obtained from radiocarbon measurements and dendrochronology) from the site of Sutton Common with a radiocarbon-dated pollen sequence obtained from a palaeochannel deposit adjacent to the area of the main archaeological activity. It demonstrates the use of a Bayesian approach to quantifying whether the timing of palynological ‘events’ interpreted as reflecting anthropogenic impacts are likely to be associated with archaeological ‘events’. The results suggest that Bronze Age activity in the form of a mortuary enclosure and associated cremation burials are probably not contemporary with the palynological evidence for disturbance to the oak–hazel woodland in this period. Subsequent evidence for local woodland clearance and agriculture is estimated to precede the construction of the large Iron Age enclosure in 372 BC, with increases in ‘anthropogenic indicators’ following this ‘event’. The construction of the site does not appear to have had a pronounced impact on the local vegetation, with hazel the only woody taxon to show clear reductions. Despite the use of a substantial number of oak timbers in the enclosure palisade, percentages of oak remain remarkably stable. Later farming activity on the site probably post-dates the end of activity in the enclosures. The value of the methodology is discussed in relation to quantifiable and robust correlations of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental narratives of landscape and human activity.     

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.     

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.     

War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography

In 1885, Kropotkin called for geography to be ‘a means of dissipating [hostile] prejudices’ between nations that make conflicts more likely, and ‘creating other feelings more worthy of humanity’. As a body of scholars, we have risen far more ably to the negative task of ‘dissipating’ than to the positive charge of ‘creating’: Geography is better at researching war than peace. To redress that imbalance, we need both to conceptualise more clearly what we mean by peace, and make a commitment to researching and practising it. These arguments are made with reference to the broader literature and research along the Danish/German, Israeli/Palestinian and Kyrgyz/Uzbek interfaces.     

Topographies/topologies of the camp: Auschwitz as a spatial threshold

This paper, largely inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the camp, reflects on the relationship between the ‘topographical’ and the ‘topological’ in reference to Auschwitz-Birkenau and its spatialities. After having discussed the concept of soglia (threshold), we briefly introduce the ways in which the historiographical literature on the Holocaust treats the relationship between modernity, rationality, and Nazism. The second part of the paper is dedicated to an attempt to read ‘geographically’ the entanglements between the camp, Nazi spatial planning, bureaucratic rationalities, and the Holocaust. The notion of the camp-as-a-spazio-soglia is central to this interpretation. Auschwitz, conceived as a metaphorical and real space of exception, is contextualized within the broader regional geography planned by the Nazis for that part of Poland; while ‘Mexico’, a specific compound within the camp, is described as a key threshold in the reproduction of those very geographies. The aim is to show how the topological spatialities of the camp were a constitutive element of the overall biopolitical Nazi project of ‘protective custody’ and extermination and that, for this reason, they deserve further investigation and need to be discussed in the relation to the crude calculative and topographical aspirations of that same project.