Origins of American Slavery
Philip D. Morgan
lavery is often termed "the peculiar institution," but it was hardly ued simply by using classical names), the notion that slaves could pos- peculiar to the United States. Almost every society in the history sess a peculium (a partial and temporary capacity to enjoy a range of S of the world has experienced slavery at one time or another. The goods), the common pattern of making fugitive slaves wear a metal col- aborigines of Australia are about the only group that has so far not lar, to clothing domestic slaves in special liveries or uniforms. The Life revealed a past mired in slavery—and perhaps the omission has more of Aesop, a fictional slave biography from Roman Egypt in the first cen- to do with the paucity of the evidence than anything else. To explore tury C.E., is revelatory of the anxieties and fears that pervade any slave American slavery in its full international context, then, is essentially society, and some of the sexual tensions so well displayed are redolent to tell the history of the globe. That task is not possible in the available of later American slavery. Yet, of course, ancient slavery was funda- space, so this essay will explore some key antecedents of slavery in North mentally different from modern slavery in being an equal opportunity America and attempt to show what is distinctive or unusual about its condition—all ethnicities could be slaves—and in seeing slaves as pri- development. The aim is to strike a balance between identifying con- marily a social, not an economic, category. Ancient cultural mores were tinuities in the institution of slavery over time, while also locating sig- also distinctive; Greeks enslaved abandoned infants; Romans routinely nificant changes. The trick is to suggest preconditions, anticipations, tortured slaves to secure testimony; and even though the Stoics were and connections without im- prepared to acknowledge plying that they were neces- the humanity of the slave, sarily determinations (i). neither they nor anyone else Significant precursors in the ancient world ever se- to American slavery can be riously questioned the place found in antiquity, which of slavery in society. Aris- produced two of only a hand- totle, after all, thought that ful of genuine slave societies some people were "slaves by in the history of the world. A nature," that there were in slave society is one in which effect natural slaves (2). slaves played an important Arabs and their Muslim role and formed a signifi- allies were the first to make cant proportion (say, over 20 use of large numbers of sub- percent) of the population. Saharan black Africans. They Classical Greece and Rome developed a long-distance (or at least parts of those en- slave trade, which began tities and for distinct periods in the seventh century and of time) fit this definition lasted into the twentieth. It and can be considered mod- delivered many millions of els for slavery's expansion Africans across the Sahara in the New World. In Rome Desert, Red Sea, and Indian in particular, bondage went This illustration^"ln the Slave Market of Cairo"—appeared in Egypt &. Nubia: From Drawings Ocean to North Africa, the hand in hand with imperial Made on the Spot by Dawid Roberts. . . (1846-5849) and demonstrates the long history of the Mediterranean, and Per- expansion, as large influxes slave trade in North Africa and the Middle East. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress sian Gulf Although over a of slaves from outlying areas Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-4043.) much longer period of time were funneled into large- and comprising far more fe- scale agriculture, into the latifundia, the plantations of southern Italy males, the number of Africans exported via these trans-Saharan or In- and Sicily. American slaveholders could point to a classical tradition of dian Ocean slave trades probably equaled, or even outmatched, those of reconciling slavery with reason and universal law; ancient Rome pro- its trans-Atlantic counterpart. The pre-existence of these export trades vided important legal formulas and justifications for modem slavery. facilitated Atlantic trade; systems of slave marketing were already in Parallels between ancient and New World slavery abound; from the place. So numerous were black Africans at certain times and in certain dehumanizing device of addressing male slaves of any age as "boy," the places that they were able to launch massive slave revolts—in 869, for use of branding and head-shaving as modes of humiliation, the comic instance, in what is now southern Iraq, where the so-called ZanJ (who inventiveness in naming slaves (a practice American masters contin- came from the Swahih Coast and lands further north) worked in large
OAH Magazine of History • July 200$ 51 gangs draining marshlands. While the Qur'an and Islamic Law were gan colonizing the Atlantic islands off their coasts, first using as slaves essentially color-blind and while Muslims enslaved many so-called Guanche natives of the Canary Islands. The Spanish and Portuguese "white" people, medieval Arabs came to associate the most degrading enslavement of the Berber-like Canary Islanders is a prelude to the later forms of labor with black slaves. The Arabic word for slave, 'abd, came fate of Caribbean, Mexican, Central American, and Brazilian Indians. to mean a black slave. Many Arab writers had racial contempt for black Furthermore, the Atlantic islands of Madeira and Sao Tome became people, and the racial stereotypes of the medieval Middle East were forerunners for the spread of racial slavery and sugar plantations in probably transmitted to the Iberian Peninsula (3). the New World. Admittedly, Madeira's slave forces were limited, its As the long-standing trans-Saharan slave trade reveals, slavery properties often small, and small farmers and sharecroppers supplied existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade. In much of its cane. Nevertheless, by the end of the fifteenth century it some—perhaps most—places, slavery tended to be a minor institution, was Europe's largest producer, and its model would be the one later with the slave able to pass in time from alien to kin member; in oth- followed by Brazilians, who soon became the Atlantic world's major ers, most notably a number of Islamicized regimes, slavery was more suppliers of sugar, and who drew directly on the expertise of Atlantic central, with violence, economic exploitation, and lack of kinship rights Islanders. From the late fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, more evident. In large part because Africa was underpopulated, a broad Sno Tome—situated in the Gulf of Guinea—imported more African spectrum of dependent statuses, with slavery just one variant, existed; slaves than Europe, the Americas, or the other Atlantic islands com- and slaves played a wide range of roles from field workers to soldiers, bined. Particularly in the universality of slave labor, Sao Tome was the from domestics to administrators. The ethnic fragmentation of sub-Sa- nearest approximation to an American prototype (7). haran Africa meant that there were few states strong enough to prevent As slavery underwent a resurgence in southern Europe, it gradu- opportunistic African kings or merchants profiting from slave raiding. ally disappeared from the northwestern part of the continent. Economic Those kingdoms that opposed exporting slaves did not have the means changes help to explain this development, but perhaps more important to stop the traffic. Lacking an overall religious or political unity, Afri- were cultural constraints. Over the course of the Middle Ages, Chris- cans could enslave other Africans because the concept of African-ness tians always committed awful atrocities on each other, but increasingly had no meaning. Accustomed to tropical climates, inured to agricul- they avoiding enslaving one another. Apparently, a sense of unity had tural labor, and reared in a harsh epidemiological environment, sub- emerged in Christian Europe that effectively barred the enslavement of Saharan Africans made productive slaves (4). those deemed fellow Europeans. Christianity's long struggle with Islam As Europe's economy began to expand in the tenth and eleventh no doubt played a major role in this development. That from 1500 to centuries, attention focused on the rich Mediterranean region. By the 1800, Muslims enslaved well over a million Western Europeans, many of twelfth century, various Grusader states had been established at the east- whom were subsequently ransomed and celebrated as symbols of free- ern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Venetian and Genoese merchants dom, was a major element in the growing sense that Europeans should pioneered the development of these conquered Arab sugar-producing never be slaves. Nevertheless, these so-called free-labor nations would regions and began supplying them with slaves. They first victimized the develop some of the harshest slave regimes in the Americas. As David Slavic inhabitants of the Dalmatian Coast and then transported Circas- Brion Davis puts it, "it is an astonishing paradox that the first nations in sians, Georgians, Annenians, and the like from the Black Sea region. the world to free themselves of chattel slavery—such nations as England, At this time, the Latin word for people of Slavic descent, sclavus, became France, Holland, and even the Scandinavian states—became leaders dur- the origin of the word slave in English (and in French esclave, in Span- ing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in supporting plantation ish esclavo, and in German sklave), and replaced the non-ethnic Latin colonies based on African slave labor." He likens this divide to a primitive term serious. In Europe in the Middle Ages, then, the slave population Mason-Dixon line, "drawn somewhere in the Atlantic, separating free was predominantly "white." Sugar production gradually spread from soil master-states from tainted slave soil dependencies" (8). the eastern Mediterranean, through Cyprus and Sicily, to Catalonia in This paradox illumines the unpredictability of events in the Ameri- the west; and the white slave trade followed in its wake. This trade mir- cas. No European nation embarked on New World ventures with the rored the later trans-Atlantic version, with its complex organization, intention of enslaving anyone. They had no blueprint, but rather pro- permanent forts, and long-distance shipment by sea to multinational ceeded haphazardly and pragmatically Their first resort was to forced markets. When in 1453 the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople, Indian labor (the encomienda, or a semi-feudal system of tributary la- Christian Europe was cut off from its major source of slaves. The only bor), as the Tainos found to their cost on Hispaniola. To make up for available alternative became sub-Saharan Africans (5). the rapid decline of these earliest Indian laborers, over the course of the Two sources of African labor were then available. First, the Arab sixteenth century Spanish conquistadors first raided islands such as caravan trade across the Sahara, long in existence, gathered impetus to the Bahamas and then shipped more than fifty thousand Indian slaves provide more black slaves to Libya and Tunisia and then to the western from Central America to Panama. Peru, and the Caribbean. Similarly, Mediterranean region. Second, Genoese capital and technology aug- from roughly the 1550s to the 1580s, the Portuguese in Brazil relied on mented Portuguese sea power, and from the 1440s onward the Por- Indian slave labor to produce sugar. Early South Carolina resorted to tuguese began importing significant numbers of black African slaves Indian slaves who. in the first decade of the eighteenth century, com- into Lisbon via the Atlantic. Still, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centu- prised one-third of the colony's slave labor force. From 1670 to 1715 an ries. North African and Muslim slaves exceeded black slaves in Iberia. active Indian slave trade saw as many as 50,000 Indians from the Caro- Nevertheless, by the early seventeenth century black slaves numbered linas and Florida sold to the West Indies and to the Northern mainland about 15,000 or 15 percent of Lisbon's population. This influx of African colonies. There were basic problems, nevertheless, with using Indians slaves into Iberia owed much to a transfer of personnel and knowledge as slaves. First, Indians regarded any kind of agriculture as work fit only from the Black Sea-Mediterranean slave nexus to that of an emerging for women. Second, European opinion was decidedly ambivalent about Atlantic system (6). enslaving Indians, as the famous debate in Spain in 1548 between Juan Sugar production meanwhile was making its way westward in Gines Sepulveda and Bartolome de las Gasas revealed. Most important, search of fresh lands. Thus by the late fifteenth century the Iberians be- Indians were remarkably susceptible to Old World diseases. Indian
52 OAH Magazine of History 'July 2005 slaves were not able to survive long enough to be profitable. Suffering is a complicated subject and space will not permit a full accounting catastrophic losses, Indian labor literally wasted away. On Hispaniola, here. Ancient Greco-Roman art and writing offers caricatures of black the Taino Indians, numbering perhaps 500.000 pre-contact, were al- Africans, although their relative scarcity is perhaps most telling. Medi- most extinct a half-century later; in central Mexico perhaps 15 million eval images of Africans ranged from the black magis to agents of the Indians in 1500 fell to just 1.5 million a century later. The scale of the Devil. In various settings—in medieval Europe where peasants were of- disaster is staggering (9). ten depicted as "black" because of working in the sun and in close prox- Consequently Europeans faced a huge labor shortage. The Ottoman imity to dirt, or in modern Russia where noblemen even claimed that Turkish empire blocked access to Black Sea or Baltic captives. European Russian serfs had black bones—blackness and debasement had a long nations no longer enslaved Christian prisoners of war. Some dreamers connection. In western culture the color black evokes a highly negative talked of enslaving the poor, or other marginal groups, but the practical symbolism, conjuring up images of death and sin. While these pejora- and principled problems of reviving European slavery were considerable. tive associations existed, European ambivalence toward sub-Saharan Another expedient was the transportation of convicts, but their numbers Africans seems the dominant response. Medieval Europeans did not, were never sufficient. Temporary bondage—indentured servitude—-was for example, automatically associate the biblical Ham with Africa; Asia the most obvious and most widely used other option, particularly in the was often identified with Ham and his "Curse" was also used to justify early years, but servants, if they survived, eventually became free and in European serfdom and the enslavement of Slavs. Nevertheless, however any case most servants would not travel to the areas where most labor it happened, slavery became indelibly linked with people of African de- was needed. Thus, al- scent in the Western most by default, Afri- hemisphere. The dis- can slaves proved by honor, humiliation, far the best available and bestialization labor supply. Conse- that were universally quently, from 1500 to associated with chat- 1820 almost 9 million tel slavery merged African slaves left for with blackness in the New World, com- the New World. The pared to less than 3 racial factor became million whites. In one of the most dis- terms of migration, tinctive features of the New World was slavery in the New more black than white World (12). (10). New World slav- The center of grav- ery's other most dis- ity of slavery did not, tinctive aspect was its however, immediately highly commercial shift to the western character. While it shores of the Atlantic. is true that planta- Not until 1700 did Afri- tions—that is, large ca eam more from the agricultural enter- expwrt of its slaves than prises, managed for it did from precious profit, producing a metals and spices. In (_rop for export, with addition, not until the a hierarchically strati- late seventeenth cen- in Brazil, enslavement of Indians gave way to the enslavement of Africans, until emancipation in 1888. fied labor organiza- Brazilian Africans are pictured here in "Peddlers or Hawkers from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1819-1820," tion—existed outside tury did black slaves from Henry Chamberlain, Views and Costumes of the City ar\d Neighborhood of Rio dejar^eiro, Brazil, from in the New World out- Drawings Taken by Lieutenant Chamberlain, Royal Artillery, During the Years 7819 and 1S20, with Descriptive the New World, yet number white slaves Explanations (London, 1822). they reached their in the Old World (then apogee there. The located primarily in the Islamic Middle East, North Africa, and Russia). economies of scale, the expansion in unit size, the almost exclusive White slaves in the Maghrib became so numerous that they mounted se- use of black slaves, a highly regimented and commodified labor force, rious rebellions—in 1763 in Algiers four thousand Christian slaves rose and a system of close management all raised profit levels significantly. and killed their guards, making it "perhaps the largest slave revolt in the Such a productive system placed enormous demands on its laborers. Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds between the end of the Roman Empire As early as the 1630s a visitor to a Jesuit-owned sugar plantation in and St. Domingue rebellion" (11). Brazil vividly describes the unbearable horror of what had transpired: If the sheer availability of African slaves and the lack of available "People the color of the very night, working briskly and moaning at alternatives is the primary explanation for the development of racial the same time without a moment of peace or rest, whoever sees all the slavery in the New World, did racism have nothing to do with it? Did confused and noisy machinery and apparatus of this Babylon, even if anti-black racism or proto-racism point particularly to African slaves they have seen Mt. Etna and Vesuvius will say that this indeed is the to supply the immense labor demands of the New World? Or did rac- image of Hell" (13). ism intensify only after long-term interaction with black slaves had oc- Variations over time and space existed within New World slavery. curred? Was it there from the beginning or was it a consequence? This Three stand out. First, although all New World regions imported more
OAH Magazine of History • July 2005 53 African men than women (thereby in part explaining the harshness of Endnotes New World slavery because of the policing problems associated with 1. Tlie term "peculiar institution" became commonplace among Southerners large gangs of men), over time, the gender ratio among New World in the nineteenth-century United States: Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar slaves became increasingly balanced. In that regard, the North Ameri- Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956). can slave population is most notable, because, as its number of slave 2. Moses I. Finley, "Slavery," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. in David L. Sills and Robert King Merton, eds. (New York: Macmillan, women increased the most rapidly, so it became one of the few self-re- 1968) 14: 307-I}; Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modem Ideology, reprint producing slave populations in world history. This early and rapid natu- (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983, 1980) 9, 96, 102, in, 113-14; Keith ral increase explains why North America received such a small percent- Hopkins. Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, vol. i age of the overall transatlantic slave trade—about 5 percent. Second, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Hopkins, "Novel Evidence North America was also distinctive in being much less tolerant of racial for Roman Slavery," Past &. Present. 138 (1993): 3-27; Keith Bradley, Slavery intermixture than Latin America or the Caribbean. Once again demog- and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 12-13, 87; Peter Carnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: raphy—particularly the ratio of white men to white women (more bal- Cambridge University Press, 1996); Keith Bradley, "Animalizing the Slave: anced in North America than in Latin America and the Caribbean), and The Truth of Fiction," Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000): 110-25. For the availability of black women—was a crucial part of the explanation, studies that explore the classical legacy over a long sweep of time, see but also important were the role of the Church and cultural mores, David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: based as much in Old World patterns of racial coexistence or segrega- Cornel) University Press, 1966). especially 29-90, and William D. Phillips tion. The Spanish had mixed with Muslims for centuries; the English Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: had created a Pale in their settlement of Ireland. Only in North Amer- University of Minnesota Press, 1985). In addition to the sanctions for slavery that the classical literature of antiquity provided and that assumed new force ica did the extremely arbitrary concept of "Negro"—denoting anyone during the Renaissance, the religious undergirding for slavery evident in the with allegedly visible African ancestry—assume such a marked stigma. Hebrew and Christian Bibles ideally should be explored. Third, the chances of gaining freedom varied from one society to the next. Except for the period surrounding the American Revolution, the 3. Ralph A. Austen, "The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census," in North American colonies, and later the states, imposed the severest Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds.. The Uncommon Market: F.ssays in the Economic History of Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic restrictions on the chances of a slave becoming free. Again, demog- Press. 1979). 23-76; Austen, "The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of raphy—the proportions of whites and blacks in the population—has Africa: A Tentative Census." Slavery & Abolition 13 (1992): 214-48; and his some explanatory power as do economic and cultural forces (14). most recent, "Slave Trade; The Sahara Desert and Red Sea Region," in John North American slavery itself was hardly of a piece. The range en- Middleton, ed.. Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Scribners, 1997} 4: 103; Pier Urson, "African Diasporas and the Adantic" (unpublished compasses New England's intimate "family slavery," the Mid-Adantic's paper, 2004); Ghada Hashem Talhami, "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered." mixed forms of slavery and servitude, the Ghesapeake's patriarchal, small Intemational Joumal of African Historical Studies 10 (1977): 443-61; Alexandre plantation, mixed farming and tobacco, heavily native-born form of slav- Popovic, The Revolt ofAJncan Slaves in Iraq in the lllrd-lXth CeMury. trans. ery, and the lowcountr/s impersonal, large plantation, rice and indigo, Leon King (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998); Bernard Lewis, Race and more heavily African system of slavery. In addition, various borderland Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical fnijuify (New York: Oxford University forms existed: from a fluid world of interracial alliances in the Lower Press, [990). For newer works on Ottoman and Islamic slavery, see Ehud R. Toledano. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University Mississippi Valley to a flexible one of fugitives and ex-slaves in Spanish of Washington Press, 1998); Shaun E. Marmon, ed.. Slavery in the Islamic Florida to one in which Indian slaves were transformed from symbols of Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998); Minra Tora and John alliance into commodities of exchange in French Canada (15). Edward Philips, eds.. Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Racial slavery played an intrinsic and indispensable part in New Study (London: Kegan Paul Intemational, 2000); |ohn 0. Hunwkk and Eve World settlement. The institution was no abnormality, no aberration, Trout Powell, eds.. The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam no marginal feature; rather, its development is the grim and irrepress- (Princeton. NJ: Markus Wiener, 2001): and Paul Lovejoy, ed.. Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2004). ible theme governing the development of the Western hemisphere. The truly distinctive features of North American (and to varying de- 4. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and grees. New World) slavery were its racial bedrock and its thoroughly Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, commercial character. Increasingly, the stark polarity between free- [977); Patrick Manning. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and dom and bondage became glaringly evident, for the debasement of African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400- slaves liberated others to take control of their destiny and to dream of 1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992); Paul E. Lovejoy. liberty and equality. This profound contradiction lay at the heart of the Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: United States, a country conceived in freedom but based on slavery. Cambridge University Press, 2000). The American dream always had its dark underside. Yet the dream- 5. Charles Verlinden, "L'Origine de 'sclavus-esdave,'" Archivum latinitatis ers would eventually try to rid themselves of the nightmare—with con- medii aevi 17 (1943): 97-128; Verlinden, L'Esclavage dans I'Europe medievale. siderable prodding from the victims, it might be added. Unlike other Vol. 1; Penisute Iberique—Erance (Bruges: De Tempel, 1955}; Vol. 2: Italie, previous forms of slavery, the New World version did not decline over a Colonies Italiennes du Levant. Levant Latin, Empire Byzantin (Ghent: 1977); long period, but came to a rather abrupt end. The age of emancipation and Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an Introduction, Yvonne Freccero. trans. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, lasted a little over one hundred years; beginning in 1776 with the first 1970). For newer work on medieval slavery, see Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery antislavery society in Philadelphia, through the monumental Haitian and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Revolution of 1792, and ending v^ith Brazilian emancipation in 1888. 1988): David A. E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England: Erom the Reign An institution that had been accepted for thousands of years disap- of Alfred Until the Twelfth Century (Woodbrldge. UK: Boydell Press, 1995); peared in about a century. One last watershed, therefore, is the unprec- Steven Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage edented novelty and speed of the abolitionist moment (16). G in Italy (Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press, 2001): and Sally McKee. "Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete." Past &.Present 182 (Feb. 2004): 31-53.
54 OAH Magazine of History 'July 2005 6. A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC: The Portugal. 1441-1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Hugh Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996); the essays in "Constructing Race; Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modem World," William and Mary York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 21-24, 48-86. Quarterly, 3d Ser., 54 (January 1997): 3-252; David M. Goldenburg. The Curse 7. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. The Canary Islands afier the Conquest: The Making of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christionity, and Islam (Princeton, of a Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Clarendon NJ: Princeton University Press. 2003); and the best account is David Brion Press, 1982); Stuart B. Schwartz, ed.. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making Davis, "The Origins of Anti-Black Racism in the New World," chapter 3 of of the Atlantic World, 14^0-1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and FaU of New World Slavery (forthcoming). Press, 2004), especially 1-26, 42-84, 201-236. For more on Sao Tome, which 13. Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American requires more study, see Tony Hodges and Malyn Newitt, Sao Tome and Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989); Schwartz, ed.. Tropical Babylons, 3. Principe: From Plantation Colony to Microstate (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 14. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: 1988) and Robert Garfield, A History of Sao Tome Island, 1470-1655: The Key to Alfred A. Knopf, 1946); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Guinea (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press. 1992). Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971). 8. David Brion Davis, "Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives," American 15. For some examples, see William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development Historical Review 105 (April 2000): 458, and his Challenging the Boundaries of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 14; Robert C. University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Graham Russell Hodges, Davis. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, Rool and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, i6iyi86} the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999); Philip D. Morgan, 2003). For more on the development of freedom and slavery, see David Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Daniel University Press, 2000) and Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The H. Usner. Indians, Settiers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy. The Lower Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien R6gime (New York: Oxford Mississippi Valley before lyS} (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, University Press, 1996}. 1992); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of 9. Carl Ortwin Sauer. The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Illinois Press, 1999); and Brett Rushforth, "'A Little Flesh We Offer You": Press, 1966) and Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise ^ Decline of the People who The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France," William and Mary Quarteriy Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); William L. 3d Ser., 60 (October 2003): 777-808. To this list might be added other forms Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln: of aboriginal slavery: see Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Stuart B. Schwartz. Sugar Plantations in Society, 1^40-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979); William the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1^35 (Cambridge: Cambridge A. Starna and Ralph Watkins, "Northern Iroquoian Slavery," Ethnohistory 38 University Press, 1985); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of (Winter 1991): 34-57; and Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest the English Empire in the American South. 1670-1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale Coast of North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). University Press, 2002); Joyce E. Chaplin, "Enslavement of Indians in Early 16. Slavery, however, continued in Africa until about the 1930s. There the America; Captivity without the Narrative." in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole abolitionist moment was rather prolonged and slavery underwent what has Shammas, eds.. The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore; The been termed a "slow death." Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005), 75-121; for a recent discussion of Indian population decline, see David S. Jones. "Virgin Soils Revisited," Sources William and Mary Quarterly. 3d Ser.. 60 (October 2003): 703-42. Blackburn, Robin. The Mafcing of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the 10. David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis Modem, 1492-1500. London; Verso. 1997. Covers all the European slave (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1981); Timothy Coates, "Convict systems in the Americas and connects them to the advent of modernity. Labor in the Early Modern Era." in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, Brooks, James F. Captives & Cousins: Slavery. Kinship, and Community in the eds.. Die Cambridge World History o/Siavery (forthcoming); David Eltis, "The Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment," 2002. Reveals the importance of slavery and slave-raiding to the intercultural William and Mary Quarterly, jd Sen, 58 (January 2001): 17-46. Two good exchange networks that emerged in the early American Southwest. microhistories of the transatlantic slave trade are: Robert Harms, The Diligent: Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the A Voyage through the Worlds of the Siave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002) English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Lexington: University and Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar. An Eighteenth-Century Press of Kentucky, 1996. Features such black voices as Briton Hammon, Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Banneker, 11. David Eltis and William G. Clarence-Smith, "White Servitude," in Eltis and and Venture Smith. Engerman, eds.. The Cambridge World History of Slavery (forthcoming). For Conrad, Robert Edgar, comp. Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of slavery compared to other forms of coerced labor, see M. L. Bush. ed.. Serfdom Black Slavery in BraziL Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. An and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondoge (London: Longman, 1996); Stanley L. excellent source book for the American slave society that received the most Engerman, ed.. Terms of Labor. Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford, Africans. CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Bush, Servitude in Modem Times Davis, David Brion. Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery. Cambridge, MA: (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000). Harvard University Press, 2003. The first short essay in the volume is a 12. Frank M. Snowden jr.. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman superb introduction to the origins of New World slavery, but it should be Experience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University complemented by a number of other books by this great historian of New Press, 1970); Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks World slavery. I particularly recommend his Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Benjamin Isaac, The Fall of New World Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Inventionof Racism in ClassJL"a/>\Mtiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Davis, Robert C. Christian Sia^es, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Press, 2004); Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, eds.. The Image of the Black Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1^00-1800. Basingstoke, UK: in Western Art. Vol. 2: From the Early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery" Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. A useful reminder that slavery arose and (Cambridge, MA: Menil Foundation, 1979): Paul Freedman. Images of the flourished in the Mediterranean world at the same time as across the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1999), 133-73. Atlantic. Explores the dimensions of white slavery and slave life. 300-03; Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom Drescher, Seymour and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., A Historical Guide to World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 170-73; Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A useful reference work Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, that covers most regions where slavery was important, together with topical 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Ivan examinations of the subject.
OAH Magazine of History • July 2005 55 Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge OAH-ADVANCED PLACEMENT University Press, 2000. A stimulating exploration of the paradox that the JOINT ADVISORY BOARD ON northem European countries most renowned for their commitment to individual freedom created the harshest systems of slavery in the New World. TEACHING THE et al., eds. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. U.S. HISTORY SURVEY CD-ROM. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Contains information on 27,233 transatlantic slaving expeditions. An expanded, on-line version (with GARY W. REICHARD information on 35,000 voyages) should be available by 2008. Finklelman, Paul and Joseph C. Miller, eds. Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Chair and Project Editor, Slavery. 2 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmiltan, 1998. Another California State University, Long Beach useful reference work that covers similar ground to the volume edited by Drescher and Engerman, but is more comprehensive in nature. JOYCE E. CHAPLIN Finley, M. L Ancient Slavery and Modem Ideology, reprint. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983,1980. An exploration of the emergence, functioning, and decline Harvard University of the slave societies of classical Greece and classical Italy, witli comparisons to New World slavery, by the greatest historian of ancient slavery. TED M. DICKSON Fredrickson, George M. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Provid&nce Day School, Charlotte NC University Press, 2002. An authoritative introduction to the subject. Handler, Jerome S. and Michael L. Tuite Jr., "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record,"
Philip D. Morgan is the Sydney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Ameri- can Revolutionary Era at Princeton University. He is the author 0/Slave Counterpoint; Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, lggS) AMU,.. ,:- ,.,...... ,,vNS and co-editor (with Sean Hawkins) o/Black Experience and the Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). He would like to acknowledge in particular the assistance of David Brion Davis, who generously sent him two early chapters from his L^CoUegeBoard forthcoming manuscript. "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New Advanced Placement World Slavery." Program
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