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Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives

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Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives AHR Forum Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives DAVID BRION DAVIS Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/105/2/452/139841 by guest on 29 September 2021 IN 1944, THE YEAR WHEN ERIC WILLIAMS'S Capitalism and Slavery dramatized some of the broad and central meanings of the Atlantic Slave System, Gunnar Myrdal noted the tendency of Americans "to localize and demarcate the Negro problem," which was nevertheless "an integral part of... the whole complex of problems in the larger American civilization." 1 Yet despite such influential voices as Myrdal and Williams, American Negro slavery, often seen as the source of what white Americans termed "the Negro problem," continued to be studied and taught as a chapter in the history of the U.S. South. Even in 1998, after more than three decades of voluminous scholarly research and publication, the average American, upon hearing the words "African-American slavery," will almost certainly think of the South and the Civil War. Many of today's college students would also think of a subject now departmentalized in African-American Studies. I can think of two ways of looking at slavery from broader perspectives that help us move beyond the localizing and demarcating tendencies that Myrdal described. Of course, specialized studies—such as the examinations of slavery in Spanish Florida, French Louisiana, and Dutch New Amsterdam that Ira Berlin drew on for his monumental book Many Thousands Gone — are indispensable for any broader syntheses. 2 That said, the first method I have in mind is the comparative approach in which two or more examples of human bondage are compared, analyzed, and contrasted, as in the pioneering works by Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins. 3 The second method is to take a global or multinational view of the origins, development, and abolition of racial slavery in the New World, which can be thought of as a way of gaining broader insight into world history and the human costs of "modernization." 4 The essays in this Forum were originally read as papers, in somewhat different form, at a session of the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, April 3, 1998, in Indianapolis. 1 Gunnar Myrdal, et al., An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944), liii, italics in original. 2 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 3 Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959). 4 In a way, a book like Berlin's combines both approaches, since he compares the evolution of racial slavery in four distinct regions of North America and also conveys a vivid picture of transatlantic connections over a period of two centuries. Like most historians, Berlin believes that we can use the general terms "slaves" and "slavery" despite the enormous variations and differences in the status, condition, and treatment of people classified as slaves. The now-classic works for defining the meaning 452 Looking at Slave°, from Broader Perspectives 453 During the past thirty years, our understanding of American slavery has been extraordinarily enriched by numerous studies that fall in the first category of rigorous and sustained comparison. One thinks particularly of the work of Carl Degler comparing slavery and race relations in Brazil and the United States; George M. Fredrickson's two volumes on white supremacy and its consequences in the United States and South Africa; and Peter Kolchin's comparison and analysis of American slavery and Russian serfdom, a project that greatly broadened and enriched his subsequent survey of American slavery from 1619 to 1877.5 Mention should also be made of more specialized studies, such as those by Shearer Davis Bowman on U.S. planters and Prussian Junkers, by Eugene D. Genovese and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/105/2/452/139841 by guest on 29 September 2021 Michael Craton on slave rebellions, and by Richard S. Dunn on two specific plantations in Virginia and Jamaica.6 While the comparative method can lead to mechanical listings of similarities and differences, it would clearly be useful to have more comparative studies on such specific subjects as domestic servants, slave artisans, and slaves in urban and manufacturing jobs. Peter Kolchin has candidly pointed to the severe problems comparative history faces, problems that help to explain the somewhat limited number of such full-length studies;7 yet I think that the cumulative benefit of comparative work can be seen in the global awareness of such historians as Thomas Holt, when writing on Jamaica;8 Rebecca Scott, when writing on Brazil and Cuba;9 Frederick Cooper, when writing on East Africa;m and Seymour Drescher, when writing on British abolitionism and other subjectsll—to of slavery are Orlando Patterson's Slave'"? and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982) and Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York, 1991). For a discussion of slavery as the ultimate limit in dehumanization, see my essay, "At the Heart of Slavery," New York Review of Books (October 17,1996): 51-54 (a slightly revised version appears as "Introduction: The Problem of Slavery," in A Historical Guide to World Slavery, Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. [New York, 1998], ix—xviii). 5 Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981); and Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavety and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); and American Slaven?, 1619-1877 (New York, 1993). 6 Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-Nineteenth Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York, 1993); Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, La., 1979); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982); Richard S. Dunn, "A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799-1828," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (January 1977): 32-65. 7 Peter Kolchin, "The Comparative Approach to the Study of Slavery: Problems and Prospects," paper given at the 1996 conference of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). 8 Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, 1992). 9 Rebecca J. Scott, The Abolition of Slave'y and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil (Durham, N.C., 1988); Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, N.J., 1985). 10 Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925 (New Haven, Conn., 1980); Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996); Plantation Slave'y on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977). 11 Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1987); Drescher and Christine Bolt, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkestone, 1980); Drescher, Econocide: British Slavety in the Era of Abolition AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2000 454 David Brion Davis say nothing of the omnipresent economic historian Stanley L. Engerman, whose work on various forms of unfree labor could hardly be broader in perspective. 11 But while careful, empirical comparison is indispensable, especially in alerting us to the importance of such matters as the demography and sex ratios of slave societies, the differences in slave communities, and the social implications of resident as opposed to absentee planters, much recent research has also under- scored the importance of "the Big Picture"—the interrelationships that constituted an Atlantic Slave System 13 as well as the place of such racial slavery in the evolution of the Western and modern worlds. Gordon S. Wood, in a recent essay applauding the cosmopolitanism of American Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/105/2/452/139841 by guest on 29 September 2021 historians, has exclaimed that "[h]istorians of the United States no longer confine themselves to the nation's borders; they now increasingly see the past of the United States as part of the larger history of the Atlantic world, if not of the entire globe." He goes on to say: "Subjects such as the history of the slave trade, slavery, and African-American assimilation can no longer be understood within the confines of what became the continental United States. We now have to range from villages along the Gold Coast of Africa to the Cape Verde islands to Curagao, Martinique, and Barbados to New Orleans."" I wish I could be as optimistic on these points as Wood, since I have been advocating such an approach to American slavery for nearly forty years and am still disheartened by the minimal effect that the vast scholarship on slavery has had on the job market and the course descriptions in most college catalogs. But perhaps this is a promising time to propose making New World slavery and abolition a unified, multinational subject for high school and college curricula as well as for cooperative research. I can think of no better window on the issues of power and exploitation, on outsiders and insiders, on the construction of race, on the expansion of the Euro-American West, on the early stages of consumer-driven economies, and on the promise and limitations of social reform.
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