Epilogue Appreciation and Response: Historical Paths Forward from Here

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377

brill.com/jgs

Joseph C. Miller University of Virginia [email protected]

Abstract

A historiographical introduction to slaving, worldwide, accents the productivity of the social sciences in expanding its study from the modern Americas to fully global scales, but also raising challenges to maintaining a single abstract definition for “slavery” appli- cable to increasingly diverse contexts. An epistemological shift to historical analyses built from human motivations and strategies, richly contextualized in particular times and places, characterizes the four innovative essays in this collection, which advance the field by historicizing early maritime slave trading in the southern Atlantic.

Keywords historiography – historicization – context – Iberian Union (1580–1640) – commercial credit – early southern Atlantic – specie

It was a considerable surprise and great honor to find myself acknowledged so generously in the context of so much fine historical work on the Iberian Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans. All the more so, in the company of a younger generation of fine historians who are discovering records and achieving insights far beyond anything that I had imagined, much less written. I offer these summarizing but I hope not concluding thoughts out of my respect for what my colleagues have done here, with all the energy and creativity of youth, at least compared to what I have at this point to offer: experience freed from the hard slogging of wrestling scattered sources into a coherent argument, leading to a series of reflections on where I see them leading the field of slavery studies, increasingly truly global in range and framed historically.

The editors have introduced the four articles in this issue of the Journal of Global Slavery perceptively, and so I do not need to summarize them again. I see the four of them as a particularly apt combination for an early issue of a still self-defining publication dedicated to expanding the already quite vast field of studies of slavery to its fully global potential. The momentum of our collective effort, to date, has lingered within conceptual abstractions inherited from the birth of academic study of the subject at the beginning of the twentieth century. These parameters have been productive, but they have brought the field to a point where it is possible to move on, as these articles creatively do.

The Historical Dynamics of the Field

Lost in the Glare of Triumph: Abolition and Nationalism1 As the twentieth century dawned, for a generation of embarrassed silence about a difficult subject still echoing in living memory, it seemed acceptable to study enslavement professionally only in its ancient Mediterranean man- ifestations, at the safe remove of two millennia in time, and as a story of Christian charity, if not also social salvation, anticipating the recent abolitionist triumph of modern Christianity. In Europe and the Americas, a complex of national cultures simultaneously attempting to come to terms with their own modernity through positivist scholarship framed in terms of “human” or “social sciences,” their recent and rejected reductions of people to property seemed better left aside to make way for the more urgent priorities of consoli- dating “societies” and histories around the unity and integrity, and in extreme cases also an anachronistic attributed antiquity, of the twentieth century’s new and competing nation-states. Enslaved Africans, systematically excluded by the laws defining these imagined political entities, remained obscure, along with their descendants. Only the isolated, courageous, and visionary voices of W.E.B. DuBois and Herbert Aptheker in the United States and C.L.R. James and Eric Williams in the West Indies, each of them unerringly exposing the core conceits of the self-congratulatory national historiographies they challenged,

1 A relationship that I explored in: Joseph C. Miller, “Introduction: Atlantic Ambiguities of British and American Abolition,” The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, 66 (4: Abol- ishing the Slave Trades: Ironies and Reverberations) (2009); “A Abolição como um discurso de apreensão cívica: escravidão como abominação pública,” in Regina C. Lima Xavier, ed., Escravidão e liberdade: temas, problemas e perspectivas de análise (São Paulo: Alameda, 2012).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 339 marshaled the unimpeachable rigor of the social sciences against the politicized refutations they intended to provoke.2 Elsewhere in the world, recently republican Brazil faced the universal paradox of modern nation-states: they were polities premised on constitutional inclusiveness, made safe from serious dissent by assumed cultural homogeneity, but in fact nearly all of them living with legacies of the diversity and divi- sion they were created to overcome. Distinctively in Brazil, slavery was also very recently among these differences, perceived reductively, as elsewhere, through the lens of the era’s confidence in the pseudo-scientific determinism of “race” in molding collective human characters. In Brazil, differences were inescapable on the faces everyone saw every day on every street.3 In the Spanish-speaking Americas, particularly relevant in the articles in this issue, citizens of African descent were only slightly less evident, but nations there mainly opened themselves to recognition of their undeniable Native American heritages on cultural, though not social or economic, planes.4 In the process, as also in the United States, with Native Americans moved aside into pock- ets of backlands legally and securely excluded from the national domain, a century and more of brutal post-contact enslavement of “Indians” remained unremarked in the background of subsequent deaths of genocidal proportions, conveniently explained away by resort to the then-also-new sciences of bacteriology and microbiology. Similar destructions of Maori in New Zealand and indigenous Australians fell into similar obscurity.5 “Embarrassment” at the global recruitment of slaves in the supposedly progressive nineteenth century prevailed, family secrets too touchy to talk about openly.6 Until the end of the Second World War scholarship was silent on slavery, except for occasional nos- talgic resurrections of the racist rationalizations of the masters.7

2 W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1915); C.L.R. James, The Black Jaco- bins: Toussaint l’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: The Dial Press, 1938); Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944); Eric E. Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 3 Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande & senzala: formação da familia brasileira sob o regimen de economia patriarchal (Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Schmidt, 1933). 4 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México, 1519–1810, estudio etno-histórico (Méx- ico: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1946). 5 Hazel Petrie, Outcasts of the Gods? The Struggle over Slavery in Māori New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2015). 6 Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies Over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 7 Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery; A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1918).

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The Europeans who claimed to have taken charge of the rest of the world did no better. Large parts of the globe fell to European military occupations erupting for quite pragmatic reasons of seeking raw materials for the industri- alization of the North Atlantic but rationalized in the prevailing tones of Chris- tian charitable paternalism as rooting out the primitive practices there, like slavery.The call of this secular crusade against others’ enslaving rang out particularly clearly over Africans, the primary objects of Europe’s (and the Americas’) own slaving enterprises for the preceding four hundred years. Riding the virtu- ous momentum of suppressing their own Atlantic trade in human beings and achieving—not without resistance—legal emancipations of the survivors and their descendants in the New World, they found themselves morally and polit- ically accountable abroad for also emancipating seemingly unsophisticated people from their own alleged despotic princes. Africans, in particular, had fallen victims also to a nineteenth-century tidal wave of militarized slaving by raiders seizing captives to send off to the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East, then mobilizing to staff production of still more raw materials for industrializ- ing Europe. Growing wealth and industrial demand in Europe and the United States had provoked what has been called a “second slavery” thriving in the era of nineteenth-century emancipation, captives growing cotton in the United States, cultivating sugar in Cuba, and producing coffee and other commodities in Brazil.8 In fact, slavery and its sequels surged more widely around the nineteenth-century world as well, though often wrapped in the legalities of contracts of indenture for lengthy terms in locations remote from the homes of laborers recruited with no hope of return, to paper over the continued exercise of unrestrained property-like control of human beings.9 In the formative years of a commercialized global economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slaves became primarily property, used to secure the loans necessary to build productive facilities the plantations of the Americas on vastly enlarged scales. In the nineteenth century, banking and other investment vehi- cles caught up to finance these latter-day, coercive recruiting strategies, until the First World War shifted the legalities of recruitment to military drafts.

8 In the sociological framework of Wallersteinian world-systems theory: Dale W. Tomich, The Politics of the Second Slavery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). The so-called “new history of capitalism” has developed a parallel approach for the nineteenth-century United States; Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 9 For the broadest statement, HughTinker, ANewSystemof Slavery:TheExport of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920, 2 ed. (London: Hansib, 1993).

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Also in the nineteenth century, spreading European globalization drew in victims from the Pacific Ocean basin, to build industrial infrastructure, rail- roads, and canals as well as produce agricultural commodities, from Hawaii to Argentina to southern Brazil to California. These outflows of indentured emigrants tapped ancient but still-thriving forced movements of human labor by raiding and trading around the components of an integrated commercial economy centered on the South China Sea but reaching as far north as Japan, west to the Bay of Bengal, and south beyond the Sulu Sea. Several overlapping voluntary diasporas in this area had responded to the rises and falls of regional military dominance. For a thousand years, Muslim merchant communities had worked their ways into these commercial currents, linking them also to the western Indian Ocean, where the Portuguese seized key positions after 1500. Spain shortly after found them convenient to exploit for captives from all around this far-reaching and diverse trading system, sending some of their enslaved across the North Pacific to Mexico aboard the Manila Galleon. The English East India Company and Dutch East India Company added European commercial demand for spices to Java in the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century the French entered and enlarged the similarly ancient slaving routes of the western Indian Ocean. The integration of Asian slaving even brought East Africans into the waters of the Pacific, thus linking to Atlantic shipping lanes carrying other Africans to the NewWorld. Interconnected nodes of slaving literally encircled the globe. As in the better-known process in the Atlantic basin, producers in new and rapidly expanding economic sectors turned to slaving to supplement limited and otherwise-needed local labor with isolated, therefore vulnerable outsiders, to absorb the heavy start-up costs in back-breaking labor with tools inadequate to the new tasks. The commercialization that facilitated expansion in some areas overwhelmed rural communities in others, driving debtors to sell themselves or members of their families, particularly girls, to survive. Where debt did not produce desperate people in adequate numbers, militarized and highly mobile gangs (maritime pirates on enclosed seas, like the medieval Vikings of the Baltic and North and Irish Seas, or the Sulu Sulta- nate and others on the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Borneo—or horsemen on open plains of the African sahel and Central Asia, or later also Comanches in the northern borderlands of New Spain, as well as wide-ranging and well-armed canoes and caravans in central African forests and savannas) took captives in raids and wars from the less commercially integrated regions around them. War leaders in these raiding zones occasionally paused to consolidate military power, dignifying themselves with grandiose titles and occasionally attempting to place clients to consolidate their raiding strategies with

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 342 miller pressure on settled agricultural communities for contributions to loose political networks that Europeans attempted to style as “kingdoms.”10 To stabilize these costly systems they also retained captives in numbers sufficient to support the logistics of their military campaigns and palaces, and to accommo- date the traders who came to buy and take the rest away. Their successors, using debt, rather than destruction, could enlarge these cohorts of enslaved laborers for the production of crops or minerals to sell, but at base they all tended to leave local reproducing peasant, or domestic, communities, drawing on family labor and clients, in place to extract food and other support from them. However, Europeans—in popular culture and in government circles alike— recognized virtually nothing of the pervasive slaving and utilization of enslaved people that they had stimulated around a world they flattered themselves to be “civilizing.” In fact, on the ground, in the backlands of South American nation-states, everywhere in Africa, and throughout maritime Asia, European governments and colonial officers charged with eliminating the slavery their commercial investments had invisibly intensified, confronted the reality but said as little as possible because they could do nothing about it. European governments conducted their colonial conquests as cheaply as possible, even hiring them out to chartered corporate mercenaries. To the extent they could, they halted the drain of indentured workers in maritime Asia to build out transportation and other infrastructure by retaining them at home. In Africa, military conquests had suppressed the organized raiding that had come to dominate nineteenth-century slaving, and they proclaimed their prohibitions of trading the survivors, though to negligible effect. European personnel were as scarce on the ground as were commitments of funds adequate to manage vast territories and large populations that had been attainably cheap to over- whelm but proved demandingly costly to control. Colonial “rule” began as a legal fiction and served less to intrude on most of the communities living under European authority, but for whom European authorities claimed responsibility, than to exclude European rivals from territories barely occupied. The larger African military regimes the European armies defeated had been built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of the slaving supported by earlier European commercial investments, initially by financing outright raiding for people and later, after about the 1820s, pro- moting commodities proclaimed “legitimate” and produced by the slaves the

10 Jeffrey Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas, eds., Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideolo- gies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

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Europeans had ceased buying for themselves.11 The few European officials on the ground depended for the modest influence they could exert on the same African authorities they had nominally subdued and even more for mobilizing workers for building out infrastructure to support private investments needed to generate taxes and other revenues. The local authorities through whom they had to work had no trouble presenting dependents whom they had acquired as slaves as the wives, clients, and children who many of them had become. Administrations even staffed their own operations, as also did the Christian missions, to discomfiting degrees by recruiting employees and converts from among the enslaved, who found relief with these saviors from the marginality and shame of their positions in their home communities. The noble rhetoric of military occupation concealed the dilemma of arriving to rule in the name of abolishing slavery but remaining only by relying on the slavers.12

Becoming Visible If the enslaved everywhere were invisible in public celebrations of the unity and homogeneity of Europe’s nation-states and of their salvational missions abroad, secular as well as Christian, until after the Second World War, they also made few to no appearances in scholarly circles caught up in these enthusi- asms, other than the tiny fringe of radical intellectuals—the Du Bois, James, Williams, and Apthekers of the Anglophone Atlantic—who penetrated the haze of triumphant modernity to recognize the deep debt of modern civilization itself to the slaving that it condemned. But the liberal democracies’ victory over the military authoritarians, which had mobilized for war by resorting to brutally modern forms of enslavement, along with the Soviet Union briefly accommodated by the victorious allies, sufficiently weakened the zealous devo- tion to racist nationalism that scattered descendants of the people brought in through slaving to the Americas, spoke up, particularly in Brazil, though more in contemporaneous cultural terms than by focusing directly on the enslavement of their grandparents in the past.13 They were soon supplemented by prominent liberal historians like Frank Tannenbaum, Kenneth Stampp, and

11 Joseph C. Miller, “Credit, Captives, Collateral, and Currencies: Debt, Slavery, and the Financing of the Atlantic World,” in Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013). 12 Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein, eds., Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (Portland: Frank Cass, 1999). 13 The Journal of Negro History had appeared in the United States in 1916. Better known in the mainstream academy was Melville Herskovits, a cultural anthropologist, began to

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Stanley Elkins, all of them articulating critical, neo-abolitionist visions of the United States’ past and in Tannenbaum’s case, also its future through interpre- tations of its slavery.14 But they all also wrestled with the deep imbrication of slavery in racialism and of race in the familiar recent Americas. So entangled were historical slavery and contemporary racism as twin exclusions from the hallowed liberal demo- cratic body politic that these founding fathers of the modern study of slavery “as an institution” distinguished it from institutionalized racism only uncer- tainly. Tannenbaum in fact deplored post World-War-ii racism more directly than past slavery. For Stampp, the slaves were workers on plantations, private corporate institutions made efficient by the Taylorian discipline then being confronted by a generation of resolutely unionized workers. Stampp, in order to integrate the workers on the plantations of the Old South into the then- emerging liberal narrative of United States history, depicted them as shadowy whites. Elkins approached the dilemma of how enslaved people could have seemed to tolerate so much evil for so long from the opposite direction. For him, they had been brainwashed by the discipline of life on plantations comparable to the “total institutions” of wwii’s totalitarian dictatorships. From their abolitionist predecessors, these pioneers took on the challenges of understanding the enslaved, but they also inherited a reified formulation of slavery “as an institution,” capable of oppression of the human spirit but also fortunately subject to eradication by legal and political means.15 So was framed the academic study of “slavery as an institution,” implicitly black, based on plantation regimens, and quintessentially American. Its origins in a faith in the modern social sciences as rational liberators of the irrationally oppressed in the past prevailed. But “institutions” also confined its study to its more abstract levels, perhaps also relieving its proponents from confronting the

publicize the integrity of African cultures in the 1920s publishing his classic The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990). 14 FrankTannenbaum, SlaveandCitizen:TheNegrointheAmericas (NewYork:Vintage Books, 1946); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). 15 “Slavery” had long been reified as a legal institution, and Karl Marx translated the abstraction into an even more abstract mode of production. With the development of the liberal social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, the initial formulation of the modern subject was a work of sociology, Herman J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial Sys- tem: Ethnological Researches 2ed. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1910), which appeared first in 1900.

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 345 full tragedies of its inhumanity.Black Americans, heirs to its horrors, responded immediately, volubly, and articulately, inaugurating the humanization of the subject that has become the hallmark of the practice, leaving theory aside. However, the premise of institutional oppression remains, paradoxically, even after nearly a half century of monographic studies repeatedly demonstrating the agility with which the enslaved forged lives of their own beyond the abstractions of the laws meant to confine them. As movements for civil rights stirred in the background of Tannenbaum, Stampp, and Elkins in the United States, Brazil remained a less open political culture and sought domestic racial reconciliation in Freyre’s vision of an organically integrated, multi-colored national identity, in some circles even a bit relieved that Rui Barbosa, among their nation’s progressive founding fathers in the late nineteenth century, hero of the first republic, thorough liberal and abolitionist, was reputed to have burned the entire government archive of the country’s dark past of enslavement. The obstacles to building a significant historical understanding of slavery there seemed overwhelming. Elsewhere, the capacity for generalization inherent in framing slavery abstractly as an institution allowed historians of an earlier era to export the modern American plantation as the universal model for exploitation in economic terms. The emphasis on exploitation in the amalgamation of slavery and racism had attracted the radical founders of the field, and the core mes- sage of injustice received an energizing infusion in the work of a sophisticated neo-marxist classicist, Moses I. Finley,who wrapped the “modes of production,” then ill-received, or perhaps badly understood, in the liberalizing (but not rad- icalizing) mid-twentieth-century academic ambiance of the Cold War, in the benign, but no less structural, language of “societies.”16 Finley began by distinguishing the few “slave societies” in world history fundamentally reliant on the labor of slaves, more than faintly congruent with Marx’s slave mode of production, from a contrasting, capacious, but amorphous set of other “societies with slaves” who were incidental to their structures. Finley’s contrast seemed clear enough that imitators scrambled to apply it far and wide, building bridges into places construed as “societies” in ever more remote parts of the world. This all-purpose distinction remains a standard way to sustain the illusion of understanding practices of slaving by reducing them to the terms of a definitional abstraction, “societies,” irrelevant to any part of the world before nineteenth-

16 M.I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (Cambridge: W. Hef- fer, 1960); “Slavery,” in David L. Sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 346 miller century Europe and North America.17 Finley in fact had offered this model as an attempt to lessen his own field’s mechanistic attempts to import American plantations to ancient Roman Italy. Comparative methods, first moving from modern to ancient times, became the process by which studies of ancient slavery began to diffuse geographically in early modern times. As an “institution” slavery was an abstraction that could be discovered wherever in the world any- one looked for it. Tannenbaum inaugurated explicit use of the method by comparing, none too optimistically, the seemingly happily diverse population of Brazil with the rigidly separated and stratified racialized categories of persons in the United States, and a generation of imitators rushed to reinforce the contrast between apparently tolerant nations of Iberian origins and unyielding, somewhat baf- fled, English encounters with people from Africa, whom they saw only as “black.” Seeing “slavery as an institution,” mixed with racialism, allowed this abstract and inherently static structural conceptualization to appear so productive of insight into the causative background of the civil rights movement burning through the 1960s that historians took no note of the anachronism of attributing modern practices to “origins” in the past. An ironic note of mitiga- tion of the moralizing tone of this growing current of research came in David Brion Davis’s acutely ironic observation that slavery in the history of western civilization had flourished most in the moments also regarded as its most progressive, in particular in ancient Greece and Rome and also in the modern Americas, implicitly not least the United States.18 This point could be picked up by historians of other world regions, particularly of the Islamic world, who found slaves concentrated at the great Muslim courts in variants featuring slave corps of palace guards and the bodies of enslaved concubines. Another regional field of the increasingly global recognition of the enslaved had opened.19 As institutionalized slavery appeared in more and more places, one ahistorical

17 A conference in 2014 assembled to celebrate the enduring applicability of this distinction: the proceedings will appear as Catherine Cameron and Noel Lenski, eds., What is a Slave Society? (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 18 David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). The problematic of his paradigmatic masterpiece turned on a static concept of what became so problematic in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. 19 David Ayalon, L’esclavage du mamelouk (Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society, 1951); Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 347 hangover of the contagion of comparison was an accent on differences, with structural overtones of the cultural determinism inherent in “institutions.” The continuing quest for a universal definition kept breaking on the shoals of historical particularity. Africanists consolidated the next generation of slavery studies late in the 1970s, along two parallel tracks often misunderstood as conflictive. The slaves, who had in fact pervaded Africa’s past, had been obscured in the 1920s and 1930s by British social anthropologists, the first colonial intellectuals to attempt to understand African communities on terms other than disheartened and dis- dained. They turned the prevailing assumption of formless chaos in the villages on its head by discovering highly structured, intricately and organically integrated “societies” there, respectable analogs to the rational and integrated modern nation-states of western political theory. Sharply defined lines of descent might tend to divide these people, but marriage alliances pulled them back together as tightly unified egalitarian communities. This classic ethnographic, selective, vision of “societies”—an inherently inclusive, though wholly modern, concept—in Africa had no place for people presumed excluded, like slaves. Their representatives, speaking in the spirit of the corporate solidarity to in- quiring outsiders, saw no reason to mention them either. It was all too easy, as colonial officers had noticed, to present the enslaved among them in the stations they had been given, included as wives or clients or affines, unrecog- nizable to observing European as excluding slavery. The enslaved in Africa, or their descendants, were equally invisible as viewed from the western side of the Atlantic. For American survivors of the turmoil of racism, white and black, enslavement was axiomatically racial, and “blacks” enslaving other “blacks” in Africa was not thinkable. For African-Americans, racial solidarity also gave no reason to suspect that their ancestors had descended to practices that whites had belatedly abandoned in the name of progress; their white counterparts dis- cerned too few distinctions of any meaningful kind behind their homogenizing racial stereotype to consider the possibility. Multiple, converging ethnocen- trisms obscured even the possibility of slavery in Africa. A brilliant French anthropologist, Claude Meillassoux, was not deluded. Working in a formerly French colony in the commercially developed West African sahel and savanna, far removed from the remote villages favored by the British, and guided by a firmly Marxist background to look for exploita- tive divisions, he found them throughout communities still bearing heavy scars of the brutal nineteenth-century raiding that had produced populations there up to 90% enslaved in origin, and still within living memory. He also drew on the prevalent African premise now referred to as “wealth in people,” or valuing people in domestic economies as commercial economies value money, not as

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 348 miller personal possessions but as social capital.20 The reproductive “assets” among them, that is, fertile women, were equivalent to the theory of modern capital investment in their ability to increase a group’s numbers over time. For Meillassoux, personally transient but structurally persisting competition for women, their children, and eventual ancestorhood divided polygynous elders from young men left without wives and drove an institutionalized competition for more females, historically by stepping over the limits of slow and chancy biological reproduction to acquire young females directly through slaving. The window had opened on the undoubted prevalence of females among the enslaved in Africa, and also children, leading to recognition that, for millennia in world history, majorities of the enslaved had not been men, whether in urban domestic contexts, particularly Islamic ones, or elsewhere in Asia and also everywhere in the domestic economies of Native Americans and hill communities in Asia as well as Africans.21 As the predictive lens of the still- prevailing comparative method opened further toward its presently capacious field of vision, a “slave” was no longer presumed to have been a black male pick- ing cotton in the Mississippi sun. The further implication was that throughout the world, before consolidation of post-Enlightenment modern nation-states in nineteenth-century America and Europe, the enslaved had been included in, rather than excluded from, the formal frameworks of social and political life. Two other Africanists, Suzanne Miers, a historian of international anti-slavery politics in the nineteenth century, and Igor Kopytoff, an anthropologist trained in the tradition of the British observers in small, descent-structured communities, articulated many aspects of this contrast between incorporative domestic slaving and the unmitigated commercialization of the stereotyped visions of slavery in the nineteenth- century us. The terminology of the liberal social sciences that they inherited to describe the African contrasts was “assimilation.” The most significant contribution of these scholars was their recognition that contexts mattered. Slaves did not everywhere have the overwhelming char- acter of commercial property, forced to produce commodities that could be

20 The parallelism of “wealth in people,” received as a welcome alternative to modern mate- rialism, and the condemned treatment of “people as property” has gone unremarked in the considerable literature built from the insight. The statement of “wealth-in-people” in formal economic terms is Jane I. Guyer, Marginal Gains: MonetaryTransactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 21 Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds.,Women and Slavery, 2 vols. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 349 sold for cash to cover the monetary investment tied up in them and the ensu- ing cash costs of their maintenance. However, nominal “assimilation” in social terms aside, the contrasting contexts matched in terms of exclusion. Meillas- soux’s formulation of marginalization centered on denial of the slave’s social reproduction, that is, children recognized as legitimate offspring; Miers’s and Kopytoff’s assimilation, while they did not emphasize the point, was selective and did nothing to replace the slave’s loss of ancestry. Where descent opened the door to belonging, the slave’s lack of it was as ineradicable as had been race in the western imagination.22 Miers later approached the precipice of abandoning the quest for an abstract universal definition, transportable anywhere for purposes of comparison, though she pulled back to the level of discourse rather than of conceptualization itself, a kind of nominalism, proposing that observers discuss the subject using the terms that the actors in the contexts observed employed among themselves.23 In the meanwhile, Southeast Asianists reached the same conclusion, which James L. Watson phrased more directly in principle, though still pulling back from putting the prospect into practice: slavery is “distinguishable [only] from other forms of exploitation in the same society,” thus foregrounding context but clinging to the neo-abolitionist rebuke of exploitation and contradicting himself by concluding on the exclusionary aspects of the relevant alternative forms.24 Scholars trained in the epistemology of the liberal social sciences still struggled to escape the premise of institutionalization that implicitly prior- itized the cotton plantations in the United States South as the paradigm of slaving throughout the world.

22 For this accent, Joseph C. Miller, “Imbangala Lineage Slavery,” in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977). David Schoenbrun, “Violence, Marginality, Scorn, and Honour: Language Evidence of Slavery to the 18th Century,” in Henri Médard and Shane Doyle, eds., Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa (Oxford: James Currey Publishers, 2007). Schoenbrun’s title lists reconstructed terms of exclusion for speakers of Eastern Bantu languages in Africa, in communities largely structured around descent. The moral economy of descent, by definition, values higher numbers of known earlier generations, that is, antiquity. The terms distinguishing the enslaved accordingly connote those “most recently arrived” as dishonored, scorned, marginalized, and hence vulnerable to violent treatment and marginalization. 23 Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 1–16. 24 I have been reminded of these revealing phrasings of the dilemma by an unpublished essay by Christopher Lovins.

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It was therefore a triumph of imagination that one of the most eminent practitioners of these disciplines, the sociologist Orlando Patterson, brought the quest for slavery in ever-more unexpected places to its culmination. Patter- son’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death (1982), exhaustively plumbed the record of a century of ethnographic reporting to attempt to preserve the reified entity of “slavery” ubiquitous across human societies and universal in its char- acteristics. Readers of this journal can, by now, recite his formulation of the issue by heart: slavery is “the permanent, violent domination of natally alien- ated and generally dishonored persons,” implying someone physically present but unrecognized in any social-ethical context, thus left vulnerable to others, or—as it turned out—to one other, presumed inclined to “violent domination.”25 The language of this definition was meant to transcend the conventional Atlantic-based framework of “property,” but “permanent, violent domination” bore more than a passing resemblance to secure title. Patterson also presumed the universality of the thoroughly modern liberal moral community of “society,” populated by free individuals restrained from acting on dark urges of Hobbesian, or Freudian, proportions, and capable of excluding people physically present in them. They denied the slave’s humanity as a social being, a lethal condemnation based on the valid axiom that human beings are quintessentially social creatures.26 Psychological propensi- ties to enslave were as human as humanity itself, a sobering insight anchored in Hegel’s universal history. The implication of “social death” allowed Patter- son to soar above the historian’s emphasis on contextualization; for him, social context was negative, absent, thus shifting the object of his analysis from systems to individuals, a dominator and the dominated, or what I have termed the “master-slave dyad.”27 The readily recognizable parallels with the field’s lingering neo-abolitionist accents on unjust deprivation, exploitation, and cruelty as the existential levels of enslavement, however phrased, that Patterson explored in erudite depth, earned the book an immediate and enthusiastic reception as the classic it remains today.28 This welcome, however, as Patterson was at pains

25 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 12. 26 The parallels among the various framings of the same idea continued, in this case with Davis’s similarly iconic phrasing. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 27 Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery As History: A Global Approach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 28 John P. Bodel and Walter Scheidel, eds., On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 351 to emphasize, misread the linking particle in his title, “and,” and treated slavery definingly “as” social death. The more productive opportunity offered by Patterson’s existential explo- ration of social death and slavery was to open the sociological framing of the subject to historical contextualization. Inquiry through the social sciences observes abstractions, and seeing “slavery as an institution,” comparable from place to place and time to time, had expanded the subject’s range from New World plantations to corners of Amazonian forests far removed from a hyper- commercialized anomaly that had been taken, and never quite abandoned, as a prototype. Capitalized enslavement, epitomized in the so-called “second slaveries” of the nineteenth century, was so exceptional in the world’s history that it collapsed of its own weight, a strategy of recruiting personnel that had proved adaptable throughout millennia terminated in a storm of abolitionist condemnation. The conflicting pulls of humanizing the enslaved and attempting to understand slavery as an abstraction collided in an explosion of research on the European slave trades in the Atlantic, the immediate object of the attentions of the authors contributing to this special section on their Iberian beginnings. So entwined were these competing levels that its leading investigators were whip-sawed publically between parties inclined toward each.29 The public demanded identifiable people, but the documentation of the trade—with only occasional exceptions—tracked only ships and money.30 Historians had to choose between their sympathies and their sources. And that is where the field remains, poised at the threshold of peopling a project still lingering within the abstracted confines of the social sciences that enabled its creation. Treating slaving as a strategy, rather than slavery as a fact, motivated from particular contexts of times and places and used to challenge the contexts from which it was created, releases these recurring practices from the bonds of an abstracted institution to see them instead as what people, including the

29 Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). The heroically sustained collective research to fill out Curtin’s numbers from the primary sources and make them publically available in an accessible format, led by David Eltis has culminated in “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Voyages”; http:// www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/. 30 Touching only illustrative examples of numerous imaginative efforts to peer through the gratings covering the openings into the slave decks of the ships: Stephanie E. Smallwood, SaltwaterSlavery:AMiddlePassagefromAfricatoAmericanDiaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: John Murray, 2007).

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 352 miller enslaved, have done to insiders, redirecting the flows of events in their own interests, by recruiting outsiders accessible at opportune moments in historical processes.31 Propitious moments can happen anywhere, and too often have.32 As a strategy, in circumstances favorable to bringing in outsiders in significant numbers, it has allowed the slavers, along with their slaves, to make changes on scales that transform the contexts that enabled them, leaving the exploiters of former times exposed. The seeming paradox of slaving transformed into its self-contradicting commercialized Atlantic version, supporting humanizing contexts of growing commitments to political freedom and legal equality, resolves in practice as a routinely dialectical dynamic of historical change. The paradox appears only as observers juxtapose abstracted aspects of the pairing, taken out of time and sequence. As history, commercialization freed and indi- viduated some and also financed the slaving that isolated others, the former in theory supported by society and the latter excluded from its favors.

The Iberian Early Atlantic

This global framework of contextualized or, some might say, politicized historiographies of slavery frames my appreciation of the historicizing qualities of the articles presented in this special edition of the Journal of Global Slavery. They all reveal historical understandings of the times and places they engage, with a happy convergence on relatively neglected early, and incidentally also Iberian, southern components of Atlantic slaving. In historical terms, the ana- lytically significant aspect of early Iberian slaving is that it inaugurated the slow transformation of the commercial aspect of acquiring and integrating outsiders to a permanent condition. Although people had exchanged money for control of isolated individuals from the beginnings of commercialized circula- tion of values, that is, arms-length transactions between strangers, mediated by money and regulated by contract, commercialization became pervasive only in the Atlantic.33 In domestic economies people have had many other ways of mobilizing obligated personnel. These alternatives are less capable of gen- erating major change than slaving, because they work within smaller ranges of familiarity and tend to zero-sum games, rather than expanding by drawing

31 The historical process at the core of Miller, The Problem of Slavery As History. 32 Catherine M. Cameron, Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World (Lincoln: Univer- sity of Nebraska Press, 2016). 33 Transactions for people appear in the earliest written records in ancient southwestern Asia, ca. 3500bce.

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 353 in the remote populations of strangers that merchants working in commercial contexts can reach. Prior to the formative fifteenth- and sixteenth-century phases of the commercializing Atlantic context of these articles, the commercial aspects of slaves’ experiences had been infrequent moments in sequences of domestic familiarity.The business of investing on the unprecedentedly enormous scale of an entire ocean, devoid of the warrior, aristocratic, and eccle- siastical competition of late-medieval Europe, and integrating parts of four continents expanded these commercialized moments to lives lived as the personal property of others. Slavery expanded from an aspect of a life to life itself, with legal title to it sufficiently secure for its holders to tender as collateral for the credit necessary to underwrite the uncertain start-up phases of new enterprises overseas.34 These four articles converge nicely along the emerging lines of a properly inclusive “Atlantic history,” a field of inquiry still straining to free itself from its roots in the imperial glories of Europeans abroad. In imperial histories the “natives” were not historical actors but rather only objects of European actions, except when they attempted to react oppositionally within the Europeans’ field of vision. In these four articles, where relevant, and particularly in Green’s and Schultz’s, the Europeans are blundering into ongoing dynamic histories in Africa and the Americas that they struggle to comprehend, let alone control. It is clear in Green’s setting of Cacheu in its regional context how dependent the Kristón were on their African hosts. Volumes that have framed Atlantic history in chapters on each of the presumed European “empires,” themselves more propaganda and legal devices than operational networks, have only tentatively recognized Native Ameri- cans and Africans as significant contributors to Atlantic history. Insofar as they have appeared, other than in their dealings with Europeans, editors have side- lined them in token chapters of their own, without taking them in as the inte- gral parts of Atlantic processes that they were.35 Arguably, Europeans didn’t

34 Miller, “Credit, Captives, Collateral, and Currencies.” Schwartz highlighted the distinctly formative organization of the plantations in early seventeenth-century Bahia; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also, John H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Indus- try: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Joseph C. Miller, “O Atlântico escravista: açúcar, escravos, e engenhos,” in João José Reis and Carlos da Silva, eds., Atlântico de dor: faces do tráfico de escravos (Bahia: Uni- versidade Federal da Bahia, 2016). 35 Inclusiveness and balance are the objectives of The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

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“expand” so much as they exploited, and sometimes managed to deflect, the ongoing dynamics of local and regional historical processes that they hap- pened to encounter. Particularly at the start, within the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century frames of three of these articles, Europeans arguably were mostly along for the ride. At first, and primarily in the opening sections of Green’s article, they deployed military force for want of nuanced understandings of the contexts they had entered or capital resources to engage local people otherwise. In the subtly balanced networks of these Native American and African contexts, Europeans’ introduction of outside resources had an efficacy beyond its minor scale, leverage comparable to the game-changing challenges achievable by slaving. The Europeans’ marginality to these other worlds was first, and seminally, formulated—though still in European terms—as the “legal pluralism” in which Green phrases his imaginative explication of managing intricate networks that were relatively easy to enter but very shortly became difficult and costly to occupy, much less to control, without force.36 Legal pluralism, in his imple- mentation of the concept, not only includes the people left in place when their military forces were defeated but also depends on them. Green, Sierra Silva, and Schultz congregate creatively around a current and very productive growth point among studies of Atlantic slaving, the sixty years, 1580 to 1640, when the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united under the Hapsburg monarchs Philip iii and Philip iv. The European components of this Iberian Union are largely familiar, but historians have not fully taken into account how the subjects of the Iberian monarchies out in the Atlantic maneu- vered through this additional, and as it turned out, opportune layer of plural legalities. I plead personally guilty to oblivious neglect of this enabling aspect of the context of my first book on African political systems in Angola in pre- cisely this period, and it is of little consolation that the ultra-nationalism of the Salazar Estado Novo when I began my research in 1968 did little to alert me to the presence of Portugal’s oldest enemy, then in its Franco edition, still looming threateningly across the Guadiana.37 Green’s tracing of the treaties of vassalage—and the baculamento oaths used to confirm them used to consolidate Portugal’s (as it began) military occupation of the conquista of Angola is among the first substantive recognitions of the force of Iberian legal formalism in the southern Atlantic. So high are the conceptual walls separating European

36 Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 37 Joseph C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

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“imperial” projects in the Atlantic38 that my first impression of his attempting to root Angolan baculamentos in Madrid’s encomienda regime in New Spain, a century earlier and an ocean away, bordered on skepticism. But Green is right: encomienda was the legal formula available to Spanish officers as they edged their ways into a continent from which they had been entirely excluded by papal dispensation and where they had no local experience to guide them. As method, Spain’s presence, so elemental a premise in the documentation (extant, or at least known so far) as to go unremarked, was a relevant part of the context of early seventeenth-century Angola. Both Schultz and Sierra Silva follow the operational details of how Por- tuguese slaving thrived under nominally Spanish jurisdiction. By gaining access to Portugal’s century-old infrastructure on the coast of Africa, Seville gained direct access to enslaved workers for new, short-handed cities on the western shores of the Atlantic, principally in the Caribbean and in New Spain, but also Lima in Peru.39 Prior to the 1590s, very few transatlantic passages dedicated to slaving are known through trading posts in Cape Verde and Upper Guinea or from their nascent military beachhead on Luanda Bay. Although records are certainly incomplete, the Voyages database shows only one or two ships in any of the decades before 1591, and the modest numbers of enslaved Africans who had reached Spain’s Indies before then had probably been skilled veterans of time spent in service in Iberia, and traveling with owners more as passengers than as cargo. But from the 1590s through the 1630s, forty to over a hundred specialized vessels arrived every decade direct from Africa, 85 percent of them Portuguese. The “Voyages” database, the standard compilation of the shipping of the trade, though designed to note multiple stops in Africa and successive recorded ports of call in the Americas, primarily accommodates the transatlantic phases of the voyages it contains. However, Schultz reveals the shortcom- ings of this prevailing formulaic image of ventures devoted solely to carrying

38 And still the awkward framework within which North Atlanticists have been struggling to make sense of historical patterns without borders; for a title conceding the dilemma, Eliga Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,”American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 764–786.The permeability of the boundaries drawn on maps in chanceries in Europe makes questionable the use of “empires” to frame European actions outside of Europe. “Empires” do not explain; historians should explain them, defining their specific qualities and utilities. 39 Wheat very competently integrates Africa, as well as the Portuguese, into the slave trade in the northern hemisphere through the period of the Dual Monarchy. DavidWheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press/Omohundro Institute, 2016).

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 356 miller captives. The great strength of her research, diligently combing through the details of voyages that went wrong, at least according to their legally autho- rized itineraries, or rather according to plans filed in dutiful conformity with the law, is to show the complicated, ad hoc, segments of courses that might eventuate in landing surviving captives in an American port.40 Schultz artfully infers strategies from records meant as much to conceal as to reveal, thus historicizing an otherwise abstracted “trade” by bringing out human actors making the best of circumstances only marginally under their control. She also historicizes these initial decades in the extended process of converting maritime technologies for carrying commodities mostly on short, mostly coastal and inland sea courses to keeping hundreds of captive people alive through voyages on the high seas lasting more than a month, and routinely two months and more to the Caribbean from Angola. The touted wonders of the caravela rigging that enabled mariners to sail against contrary winds also created enormous challenges in overcoming the time spent in sailing laboriously against them. Water and provisions, notoriously inadequate on the long Carreira de Índia (India Run), 10,000 miles and six months from Portugal to Goa and other ports in South Asia, were crucial, and the wear and tear on ships and their fittings were unpredictable but inevitable. When Schultz picks up her story in the 1610s, the technology of the transatlantic leg was barely out of its infancy, and orderly intentions routinely yielded to the realities of the sea. So well known, and accepted, were these hazards that officials in Buenos Aires blandly recorded obvious smuggling ventures as distressed landings, forced by weather alleged to have blown vessels on a course from Luanda to Pernambuco 3000 miles south to the Río de la Plata, not a likely scenario with dozens or hundreds of captives on board. The details of voyage strategies, successions of intermediate stops and complex cargoes composed of local commodities carried between them, as well as captives, also reveal the economic realities of a business that grew in part, at least at its southern Atlantic margins, as an add-on to ventures of other sorts.41 Bulk commodities, less perishable than people and far less costly to maintain, were a form of insurance against the notorious fragility of captive passengers.

40 The only similarly detailed account is of two voyages in 1613–1614 and 1617–1619 to Cacheu in Upper Guinea and across the Atlantic to Cartagena and eventually Lima; Linda A. New- son and Susie Minchin, From Capture To Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007). No similarly detailed account of a voyage exists for the southern Atlantic. 41 Shipping in the Indian Ocean and the seas of the Indonesian archipelago carried millions of captives in all directions, often as components of diverse cargoes of commodities.

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That is to say, at least in this early phase of the trade, slaving may not have been as inherently profitable as its heinous inhumanity has enticed critics to assume, implicitly imputing greed to calibrate slavers’ callous disregard for human welfare. Voyage backers’, and probably even more so ship captains’, complex and overlapping strategies, including evading the trade’s legal parameters, seem to indicate that the margins of operational success were thin, particularly sensi- tive to the survival of their cargoes because of “o risco dos escravos” or “the slave risk” of slave property dying on one’s own account, even more in these early decades than they were later on the short, well-oiled direct run from the Mina Coast to Bahia, where Mary Hicks refers to this axiom of the trade.42 The strategies that Schultz identifies all reflect that the shippers she traces were balancing the complex trade-offs involved in learning to manage slaving on transatlantic scales. Hicks’ uniquely detailed reconstruction of a later stage of Atlantic slaving, at its consolidated peak, underlines another, better-known example of con- ducting slaving as an adjunct to other, primary business strategies. Salvador, on the northeastern corner of Portuguese America, had grown wealthy as the first American producer of sugar on significant scales, less damaged than Per- nambuco by the Dutch invasions of the 1630s and 1640s, but in the last decades of the seventeenth century still struggling to recover in the face of proliferating competition from Caribbean islands with less exhausted soils and newer technologies, closer to markets in Europe, and better financed. Adding the region’s secondary cash crop of tobacco to its exports took one step toward regaining prosperity but demanded enslaved hands to cultivate, pick, and cure the leaf for export. Luanda in Angola, one possible source of the people needed, was then firmly under the control of planters in Pernambuco, but northern Europeans, the Dutch, English, and French, were investing in African slaving infrastructures in western Africa developed along what Bahians knew as the Mina Coast. They brought an appealing range of Asian and European textiles, as well as alcohols and manufactures (especially, after the 1670s, muskets and gunpowder) but lacked American commodities like tobacco. In a classic example of oppor- tunistic, or might one say predatory, slaving developed out of other economic strategies and others’ infrastructure at minimal additional investment, Bahians found a place for themselves by offering third cuttings of leaf from their fields

42 The financiers of the eighteenth-century Angolan trade to Brazil organized their operations around avoiding “o risco dos escravos”; accordingly, this strategy became the title of Joseph C. Miller,Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan SlaveTrade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

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Decades Caribbean Spanish mainland America Other Totals

1521–1530 2 0 0 2 1531–1540 0 0 1 1 1581–1590 0 1 0 1 1591–1600 5 76 0 81 1601–1610 2 14 0 16 1611–1620 4 45 0 49 1621–1630 2 107 0 109 1631–1640 0 78 0 78 Totals 15 321 1 337

Decades of the Dual Monarchy highlighted. slave voyages database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search, consulted 5/20/17 table 2 Spanish registered vessels

Decades Caribbean Spanish mainland America Totals

1561–1570 1 1 2 1591–1600 0 11 11 1611–1620 1 25 26 1621–1630 0 21 21 1631–1640 Totals 2 58 60

Decades of the Dual Monarchy highlighted. slave voyages database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search, consulted 5/20/17 of tobacco, unsaleable in Europe, sugar-cured in the molasses drained off the semi-processed raw loaf sugar they could sell for cash, sending twisted ropes of it, as Hicks describes, to Ouidah (Ajudá in Portuguese) to buy captives. Success was immediate and continued until the 1810s when the British West Africa Naval Squadron diverted Bahian slavers to the still-legal trade south of the equator. The economics of this trade from a colonial port are intelligible only in terms of the minimal incremental costs of the product they sold.

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Quarter centuries Bahia

1676–1700 192 1701–1725 509 1726–1750 361 1751–1775 341 1776–1800 431 1801–1825 426 1826–1850 70 Totals 2,330 slave voyages database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search, consulted 5/20/17

Both Schultz’s and Hicks’ articles fill out the vast expansion of slaving as the business enterprise that it became, explaining it in historical terms of how its operators, investors, and traders financed it rather than pulling back behind the conventional, and mystifying, economic abstractions of “demand” in the Americas or “supply responses” in Africa. I frame this productive filling out and historicizing slaving in two senses: geographically, and also adding practices to policies and enterprises to economic models. Geographically, they add initial and mature phases of slaving in the southern Atlantic to the business practices of the British slaving enterprise, increasingly well known for some time, though primarily at the (micro-economic) level of the firm rather than setting these practices in their macro-economic contexts. Comparable analytical levels are now being developed for the nineteenth-century United States as the energetic and productive “new history of capitalism.” This project is demonstrating the centrality of enslaved bodies not only to the production of commodities and thus exports and balances of payments, aspects of conventional nationally framed histories, but also to the “wealth of nations” in the sense of the human assets who secured loans from New York and New England banks that financed economic growth itself and moved the major sources of funds from British and other European banks to the United States. The same analytical shift to macro-economic contexts may be extended to locate slaves at the heart of financing the Atlantic economy as a whole, from its very beginnings, four centuries before Eric Williams’ famous substitu-

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 360 miller tion of accumulation for altruism behind Britain’s eighteenth- and nineteenth- century abolition. In the southern Atlantic, slavers embedded their operations in complex contexts mobilized by others, only a few of which they controlled, as Hicks describes Bahians trading on the initiatives of their northern European competitors on the Mina Coast. This recognition of trading on others’ initiatives leads to an under-appreciated aspect of Atlantic slaving’s indirect but per- sistent dependence on specie. Throughout its history, before the nineteenth- century development of modern financial systems, for its investors, slaving was about gold and silver, not people.43 The first Portuguese mariners who worked their ways south along Africa’s Atlantic shores in the fifteenth century were drawn by legendary gold from somewhere beyond the Sahara Desert. Their first steps in carrying captives back to Europe, and then from central Africa to the Gold Coast to dig it, were leveraged on a struggling monarchy’s need for specie. Sugar grown on the islands of the eastern Atlantic, culminating in the sixteenth century in Sao Tomé, was a further add-on allotted to for- eign merchant-investors, all within the start-up technologies of carrying people over the relatively short stages of those initial phases, all of them eventually abandoned when the catalytic union of the two Iberian Crowns brought richer opportunities. The significant attraction during the Dual Monarchy for investors in Iberia, who cannily avoided “the slave risk” by outsourcing legal ownership of delicate human bodies, vulnerable to the rigors of a transatlantic crossing on the slave desk of a ship, to the operators of the voyages, was the access that slaves would bring to Spain’s fabulous wealth in American silver. The asientos were licenses assigned to Portuguese investors in Lisbon and Angola and worked as equiva- lents of modern franchises, with the licensees guaranteed returns in NewWorld specie from others’ less liquid investments in trade goods and in market organization and in means of transport. The secure returns in coined money covered “the slave risk,” which was predictably high at that early moment on the steep curve of learning to keep captives alive on the lengthy run from Luanda to Cartagena or Havana.44

43 Miller, “Credit, Captives, Collateral, and Currencies.” 44 Not measurable, but estimated at 25% average mortality, compared to 10% on average for the late eighteenth century, and significantly lower than that on the short Mina- Bahia course, which accordingly became the investment opportunity for the wide range of investors, many of them surely ill-prepared to sustain a significant loss, that Hicks describes. She tellingly notes the elaborate (and painful) measures taken to establish legal title to particular enslaved individuals by branding and the maxim that the captives of the captains never died on board.

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Luanda’s officially documented trade, after the restoration of the Portuguese dynasty in 1640, deprived its operators of Spanish silver, and, interrupted further by Dutch capture of the city from 1641 to 1648, struggled to recover, but Schultz’s evidence for that otherwise still very poorly documented phase in the trade may suggest a resumed clandestine trade to Buenos Aires, on the significantly denominated Río de la Plata. One suspects that more slavers sailed there seeking silver from Potosí than are shown in the government records at her dis- posal, although evidence she does not present in this article details the long trail for Africans marched from the estuary through the planalto to the fabled mountain of silver in Upper Peru. Iberians, no strangers to evading trouble- some royal regulations, knew very well how to avoid potentially compromis- ing paperwork. Sometimes, as with the lingering Portuguese connections in Spanish ports that Schultz documents, suitably contextualized silences whis- per loudly enough to be heard, and heeded. The consistent theme in the background of the entire story of early Iberian slaving, including late eighteenth-century Salvador, was the recurring scarcities of the enormous amounts of capital required to integrate economically four continents separated by an entire ocean. In the development of a company or of an industry, capital requirements vary with timing, demanding heavy infu- sions of funds in their start-up phases and few to none later, as the operations they funded then generate returns.45 Further, the competitive demands of the open Atlantic again and again pushed investments, military as well as commercial, along at speeds that exceeded the limited financial capabilities of, first, the merchant communities of the Christian Mediterranean, as Hicks shows in her very useful anchoring of the Atlantic in the Mediterranean roots from which it grew.46 What she sees as “persistence” of Old World practices in New World finance in Bahia, with stronger implicit overtones of conservatism than I think

45 This is basic micro-economics, called the S- (or sigmoid) curve of economic growth. As Hicks observes in another context: “In the initial years of the trade, establishing infrastructure in the form of ships, slaving castles, and military defenses represented a significant outlay of capital. After trading circuits had been pioneered, state provided subsidies became less imperative.” 46 Another strength of Green’s article is his acknowledgement of the legal pluralism prevailing in late medieval Spain. Several historians have traced aspects of the early Atlantic as adaptations or extensions of the juridical tools at hand; for one initial venture, Judith Spicksley, “The Decline of Slavery for Debt in Western Europe in the Medieval Period,” in Simonetta Cavaciocchi, ed., Schiavitù e servaggio nell’economia europea, secc. xi–xviii (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2014). I appreciatively also acknowledge two other contributors to the 2016 Brown workshop on the Iberian slave trade: António de Almeida Mendes, La traite portugaise en Méditer-

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 362 miller are necessary, I would explain more historically as recurring parallel, or perhaps directly imitated, innovations to solve the shortages of capital inherent in the initial stirrings of local commercial expansion into larger trading voyages over longer ranges, at first in Venice, and then elsewhere in northern Europe, and eventually and improbably in Portugal, maritime Europe’s smallest and poorest realm. Commercial municipalities succeeded by mobilizing as corporate bodies in financial as well as in legal terms, effectively crowd-sourcing their own community welfare through ventures returning with wealth from elsewhere. The Portuguese monarchy turned to outsiders, Genoese merchant bankers, for start-up funding of its Atlantic adventures, as Madrid did similarly to the banking community of central Europe for its conquests of the Indies. The colonial port towns in Brazil had no similar option. Bahia’s local context as a colonial dependency of Portugal regenerated, even intensified, the recurring Atlantic scarcities of capital and creative responses to overcoming them. Rolls of sugar-cured tobacco gained Salvador access to slaving on the Mina Coast, but the specie-draining policies with which Por- tugal exploited its overseas possessions left Bahia’s obsolescent sugar planters straining to staff their fields with slaves. Hicks outlines Bahians’ complex uses of gold from the mines of Minas Gerais, accessible from the Bay of All Saints up the valley of the Rio São Francisco after 1700, and concludes rightly that Portu- gal ensured re-export of the bulk of the precious metal to Lisbon, leaving local merchants to mobilize capital from the numerous and diverse local sources she details. Bahians’ early ventures to Buenos Aires surely sought the silver of the Río de la Plata, glimpsed through the optic that Schultz opens on calls at ports en route along the great counterclockwise southern circle followed by slaving ventures outbound from Brazil. Shadows of these stealthy quests for Spanish silver may thus be hidden in Bahia’s second—surely better funded—sources of slaves in Angola, as they resumed openly as soon as Spain liberalized its mer- cantilist restrictions on trade in the later eighteenth century, when, as Hicks notes, Bahians re-exported Mina slaves to Montevideo on the north shore of the Plata estuary. If silver begot slaving throughout the early Atlantic, by the eighteenth century, established slaving begot silver. Bahians’ uses of by-products of their principal export commodities to purchase slaves on the Mina Coast had their counterpart in Rio, as demand for

ranée et dans l’Atlantique, xve–xviie siècles (Paris: éditions Chandeigne, forthcoming); Iván Armenteros Martínez, “La esclavitud en Barcelona a fines de la Edad Media (1479– 1516): El impacto de la primera trata atlántica en un mercado tradicional de esclavos?” (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2012).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 363 table 4 Vessels with slaves from West Central Africa reaching Bahia47

Quarter centuries West Central Africa*

1576–1600 1 1601–1625 4 1626–1650 12 1651–1675 13 1676–1700 42 1701–1725 63 1726–1750 230 1751–1775 215 1776–1800 237 1801–1825 295 1826–1850 174 Totals 1,286

* West Central Africa includes St. Helena. Quarter centuries following the end of the Dual Monarchy are highlighted. slave voyages database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search, consulted 5/20/17 diggers in the mines of Minas Gerais after 1700 drove up exports of enslaved people from both Luanda and Benguela. There the planters around Guanabara Bay distilled the molasses that Bahians used to flavor their tobacco into high- proof cane brandy, ancestral to today’s cachaça and known to the slavers as gerebita, which Rio merchants then sent to Angola to purchase captives.48 Hicks’ description of the broad community participation in Bahian slaving

47 Studies of the Angola-Salvador link, secondary but significant for both ports, show voyages in the range of ten per year for a century after 1725; Mariana P. Candido, An African SlavingPortand theAtlanticWorld:Benguela andItsHinterland, African studies (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Also Cristiana Ferreira Lyrio Ximenes, “Bahia e Angola: redes comerciais e o tráfico de escravos (1750–1808)” (PhD dissertation, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2012). 48 For gerebita, see Miller, Way of Death. For the broader significance of alcohols in the Angolan trade, José C. Curto, Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 364 miller table 5 Vessels leaving Angola with slaves, all destinations

Quarter centuries* Luanda Benguela Totals

1576–1600 9 0 9 1601–1625 212 0 212 1626–1650 220 0 220 1651–1675 28 0 28 1676–1700 81 1 82 1701–1725 152 2 154 1726–1750 561 40 601 1751–1775 553 85 638 1776–1800 555 244 799 1801–1825 802 299 1,101 1826–1850 457 248 705 1851–1875 0 9 9 Totals 3,630 928 4,558

* Quarter centuries including Dual Monarchy, as well as Dutch capture of Angola. Dual Monarchy is highlighted in dark grey, and Minas Gerais mining boom in light grey. slave voyages database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search, consulted 5/20/17 raises the possibility that a planter-centered informal consortium financed slaving voyages from Rio. Their gerebita became an essential component of the assortments of imported goods that merchants in Angola sent into the interior to purchase slaves for export to Rio de Janeiro to be sold for gold. The bulk of the gold from Minas flowed once again to Portugal, but it spawned a secondary trade directly across the southern Atlantic that made Luanda the port through which more captives embarked by the end of the trade than passed through any other port in Africa. The intricacies of both Bahia’s Mina trade and Rio’s tight links with Angola raise the further question of where the nodes of profit might have been located along the series of transactions and chains of debts. None

Luanda and Its Hinterland, c. 1550–1830, translated by Márcia Lameirinhas (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 365 table 6 Numbers of vessels carrying slaves from Angola and Brazilian destinations

Quarter centuries Brazil Totals

Amazonia Bahia Pernambuco Southeast Other Brazil * Brazil

1601–1625 0 4 0 0 0 4 1626–1650 0 12 47 ** 0 1 60 1651–1675 0 13 2 0 0 15 1676–1700 0 38 21 17 0 76 1701–1725 0 63 12 73 0 148 1726–1750 0 230 79 243 3 555 1751–1775 13 215 152 191 1 572 1776–1800 26 234 108 359 0 727 1801–1825 60 104 269 618 6 1,057 1826–1850 11 26 113 503 6 659 1851–1875 0 0 0 2 0 2 Totals 110 939 803 2,006 17 3,875

* Southeast Brazil includes Rio de Janeiro ** Nearly all Dutch, during occupation wic Highlighted cells mark major surges, by dates and destinations in Brazil, illustrating points developed in the text. slave voyages database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search, consulted 5/20/17 was intelligible in itself, and all were no more than elements in arrays of diverse ventures that large merchants kept in play or, for more modest occasional participants in given voyages, only moments in the ongoing struggles of life.49 The abstract concept of the “slave trade,” contextualized, as these articles all do, loses its seemingly sharp edges and becomes a supple aspect of an array of other strategies. Sierra Silva takes us furthest into these worlds, probably the most profitable ones, during the last years of Portuguese operation of Spain’s asiento contracts.

49 For an argument showing the indirect gains in the Dutch slave trade, Karwan Fatah-Black and Matthias van Rossum, “Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Economic Impact,” Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 1 (2015).

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 366 miller table 7 Vessels with slaves reaching Vera Cruz

Quarter Senegambia* Gold Bight of Bight of West Other Totals centuries Coast Benin Biafra** Central Africa Africa***

1526–1550 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 1551–1575 31 0 0 0 0 2 33 1576–1600 7 0 0 2 13 2 24 1601–1625 12 0 1 10 126 7 156 1626–1650 1 0 0 0 26 0 27 1676–1700 0 0 1 0 1 0 2 1701–1725 0 2 3 0 0 1 6 1726–1750 1 1 0 0 0 1 3 Totals 54 3 5 12 166 13 253

* Senegambia includes offshore Atlantic. ** Bight of Biafra includes Gulf of Guinea islands. *** West Central Africa includes St. Helena. encomenderos de negros, grillo-lomelin asiento, slave voyages database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search, consulted 5/20/17

The actions of the New Spain encomenderos de negros in Nueva Vera Cruz and Puebla de los Ángeles give a vivid portrait of the themes that emerge in the other articles, built out of “the motivations of the captors and facilitators of the slave trade,” as he stresses, citing my urgings on this critical point of account- ing for the people who made things happen in order to historicize. His por- trayal, pieced together meticulously from research of intrepid proportions in notarial archives, the rawest and least structured of raw data, also suggests the outlines of the personal networks that comprised another universal aspect of successful financing, delivering and paying for slaves on tri-continental scales, even through the last years of the Iberian trade in the 1850s and 1860s.50 These networks should remind researchers to be all the more wary of limiting their

50 A major component of success even in the last decades of the trade centered on Cuba: Manuel Barcia Paz, “‘Fully Capable of Any Iniquity’: The Atlantic Human Trafficking Network of the Zangroniz Family,” The Americas 73, no. 3 (2016); John A.E. Harris, “Circuits of Wealth, Circus of Sorrow: Financing the Illegal Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Age of Suppression, 1850–66,” Journal of Global History 11, no. 3 (2016).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 367 analytical tools to economistic analyses premised on aggregate behaviors mod- eled as markets. Neo-classical economics, beyond its unrealistic assumptions of wholly rational material optimization based on adequate information, pre- sumes modern individualism and contractual relationships among strangers, circumstances that prevailed only on the margins of Iberian slave-trading in the Atlantic. Personal networks of far-flung family, patrons, clients, compadres, companheiros, paisanos, and friends were the essence of success. It was in this context of familiarity and implicit trust that we should also understand the well-known, and common, arrangements in Brazil of trust- ing slaves with assets to manage on their own, displaying confidence seemingly anomalous in abstraction-derived modern visions of master-slave rela- tions as inherently and entirely oppositional. Hicks’ enslaved protagonists— crew, traders encouraged to conduct their own affairs—were not anomalies but rather living routinely in an eighteenth-century southern Atlantic world taking slaves in as people rather than keeping them out as property. In Sierra Silva’s article we see the credit crucial to selling slaves flowing through carefully constructed and maintained networks, followed by the utter failure of the Grillo-Lomelin regime owing to its neglect of building similar ties. At the level of mobilizing capital, personal networks constituted yet another distribu- tive aspect of Iberian slavers’ strategies. Their worlds were composed of relationships, not striving individuals; no one wanted to be alone, autonomous, and thus left helpless and vulnerable.51 Together, they sustained slaving in the southern Atlantic for more than four centuries without the concentrated financial resources of their northern Atlantic counterparts. The core of the encomenderos’ business was collecting on the credit that nearly everywhere in the Atlantic enabled sales of slaves.52 Captive Africans

51 I read James Sweet’s Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the AtlanticWorld (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), as the saga of a career built around healing the loneliness and isolation of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, for slaves (for whom isolation was the primary existential hardship), for women confined in patriarchal homes, and for others cast-out and impoverished in an incomprehensible world of swirling, individuating commercialization, not yet normalized. 52 Credit is similarly central to Hicks’ articulation of the financial mechanics of Bahia’s Mina trade, although the crowd-sourcing there must have limited the portions of cargoes sold for deferred payments; investors were, in effect, paying directly in Africa, in goods, for the captives with whom those voyages returned. The Rio-Angola, and probably also the Bahia-Angola, trade operated almost entirely on credit extended into Africa, but it was financed significantly by substantial merchants who also sold the captives acquired with their goods on terms of credit.

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 368 miller were significant investments, far beyond operating costs, even for wealthier buyers, whose purchases of whole groups of captives would have approached the limits of their capacities, and so financing was crucial. That recognition raises the question of what or who secured these debts while purchasers assembled the means to pay them off, perhaps refinancing with longer-term loans from established merchant houses. Scattered indications suggest that the slaves themselves were living collateral, so that “sales” were, in effect, conditional, on consignment. The glimpses that Sierra Silva gives us of how the encomenderos de negros provided for the slaves are rare in the literature so far, but indications available for Luanda, Cartagena, and Rio de Janeiro’s Valongo market suggest tempting opportunities for further work on managing the critical transition from sea to land, or in Africa, land to sea.53 Sierra Silva’s article also accents the centrality of law in a business concep- tualized in royal decrees, managed at its highest levels significantly through contracts, and regulated by judges very much on duty in every one of the Iberian ports through which slaves passed. Law has been neglected in the wake of the social-history “turn” of the 1960s and 1970s in which studies of slavery were conceived, and historians of slaving today still have not stepped back to recover and rehabilitate the valuable legacy of the preceding generation of positivist studies of government, politics, and administration. Property, including humans, required secure title. The creators of the concept of “legal pluralism,” with the exception of Green here, have not turned their attentions to slaving.54 The history of Spanish jurisprudence on slaves is significantly more extensive than for Portugal or Brazil, dating from the iconic “New Laws” of 1542 and the fierce Valladolid debates over the subject between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and its applications in Spanish domains. A particularly precise, therefore productive, application of this rich intellectual heritage is Tatiana Seijas’ acute legal framing of the enslaved chinos brought across the Pacific through Acapulco to New Spain in the sixteenth and sev-

53 For Luanda, Miller, Way of Death; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 54 A promising exception is Judith Spicksley, “Contested Enslavement: The Portuguese in Angola and the Problem of Debt, c. 1600–1800,”Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015); Catarina Madeira Santos, “Esclavage africain et traite atlantique confrontés: transactions langagières et juridiques (à propos du Tribunal de Mucanos dans l’Angola des xviie et xviiie siè- cles),” Brésil(s): Sciences Humaines et Sociales) 1 (2012); Roquinaldo Ferreira, “Tribunal de Mucanos: Slavery and Freedom in Angola (17th–19th Centuries),” in O colonialismo por- tuguês:novosrumosdahistoriografiadospalop, ed. Ana Cristina Roque and Maria Manuel Torrão (Porto: Edições Húmus, 2013).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 369 enteenth centuries, properly, though uncommonly, extended according to the relevant jurisdictional boundaries to its trans-Pacific province in the Philip- pines.55 Unfortunately, historians of the Portuguese components of the picture have only rudimentary understandings of the several overlapping jurisdictions and the officers charged with enforcing them that slavers negotiated, or in the southern Atlantic more often elaborately evaded them in Angola and elsewhere. The famous Siete Partidas were in fact a codification, or reconciliation (probably completed by 1265), by Alfonso x of Castille of the seven separate legal domains, criminal, civil, commercial, procedural, personal, and so on, operative in the realm he was forming. Gaining secure title to a person as property lay at the very bedrock of slave trading and hence of slavery itself, and the legal technicalities were accordingly carefully defined in canon and in the derivative monarchical laws, though these key technicalities remain virtually ignored in the literature on slaving. “Angola” itself, for example, routinely appears as a “colony,” when in law it was a military conquista and therefore governed through the treaties of vassalage parallel to those that Spain had employed in its similarly styled conquistas in the Americas, recognizing con- quered, but surviving, local political authorities subject to conditions to which their military defeat left them exposed, but also with the protections of a victorious patron.56 Beyond Green’s framing of his essay around this pluralism, the relevance of law is explicit in Sierra Silva’s contrast between the legal domains in which the encomenderos de negros thrived and the more intrusive domain created for the Grill-Lomelin asiento. Schultz’s argument also revolves around the legal possibilities created by the Dual Monarchy and exploited by the slavers in the southern Atlantic. Diplomatic formalities were no less carefully observed in the Portuguese convention of treating polities in Africa with which they did business as “kingdoms.” In Africa, this distinctively European concept of monarchical singularity was a legal fiction and described nothing about systems there, which were premised on pluralities, a kind of internal legal pluralism both in terms of

55 Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians, (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2014). For an aggregate analysis of Spanish jurisprudence on slavery from the seventeenth century, see Juan de Solórzano Pereira, De Indiarum iure, liber iii: de retentione indiarum (Madrid: csic, 1994). 56 Angolanists have only begun to appreciate the thorough, at least nominal, adherence to these terms, well into the eighteenth century. Flávia Maria de Carvalho, Sobas e homens do rei—relações de poder e escravidão em Angola (séculos xvii e xviii) (Maceió: Edufal— Editora da Universidade Federal de Alagoas, 2015).

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 370 miller the components in larger political systems assembled but not absorbed and also in terms of their situationally allocated, dispersed, and carefully balanced domains of specific authority, enormously diverse in their dynamics. The conventional image of African polities as “kingdoms” derives from historians’ mis- understandings of the formal designation that the Portuguese needed under European laws of nations to recognize their African partners as sovereign and thus capable of entering into binding treaties with their own monarch in Lis- bon. The effect was more to exclude potential European competitors than to portray African political dynamics. The legalities mattered, and the Portuguese were as scrupulous as the Spanish in referring to them, though they no more acted in conformity with these covers than did their Iberian counterparts in the New World. The field will become clearer and more historical still as these historians, and others, follow out the implications of the legal contexts in which the individuals they have brought out of the shadows of social-science abstractions were working.57 The final shadowy elements of Atlantic context that have not yet quite emerged in the historiography toward the prominence that they merit are the Asian components of both Iberian imperial systems. Spain approached its Philippines from the east with its Manila galleons sailing out of Acapulco, while Portugal rounded Africa via the famous Carreira da Índia, to converge on southeast Asia from the west. The abstract line of Atlantic longitude defined by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, leaving the Portuguese with their prior claims on Africa and allotting Christopher Columbus’ new discoveries in the west to Spain, proved to be circumferential once the earth was confirmed as round, after Ferdinand Magellan’s men and Portuguese commanders encountered each other in the Molucca Islands in 1522. The treaty was even more innocent of the actual geography of southeast Asia that it purported to assign than it had proven to have been of Brazil, allotted to Portugal by mistake. It was nonetheless as significant for the course of subsequent events there as it was in the Atlantic. On the opposite side of the world from Portugal and Spain, the forces of both were at their logistical limits, and neither would have been able to operate without the thriving commercial networks of the region, or

57 Brazilian and Portuguese historians have begun to assemble relevant documentation: Waldomiro Lourenço da Silva Júnior, História, direito e escravidão: a legislação escravista no Antigo Regime ibero-americano (São Paulo: Annablume, 2013); Inês Osório, “Políticas régias sobre o tráfico de escravos: Análise da legislação produzida entre 1640 e 1706,” Omni Tempore Encontros da Primavera 2014–2015 (2017), http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ ficheiros/15246.pdf.

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 371 rather, without intruding on key nodes in them, the Spaniards limited to the Philippines and the Portuguese to a chain of posts running from Mombasa in eastern Africa to Goa, Malabar, Melaka, and Macau. Both empires integrated their Atlantic and Asian outposts, with Spain treating the Philippines as part of New Spain, and its inhabitants as indios, although the Portuguese created a separate jurisdiction as their Estado da Índia, with its command post at Goa and authority over its positions in eastern Africa. Portuguese personnel, in particular, blended steadily into their local surroundings, as did others in their African stations, all of them following historical dynamics more African and Asian than European, casualties of the shortages of funding for the Atlantic slave trade.58 Green’s article for this collection narrates how these practicalities played out in and around the Portuguese trading community of Kristón in seventeenth-century Cacheu and thus adds yet another dynamic context to slaving in the Iberian Atlantic. Europeans’ Asian trade was heavily dependent on American silver, but for the Portuguese in the Atlantic, the slave trade also depended heavily on textiles from Asia, mostly cottons from the Malabar Coast but also Chinese silks funneled through Macau and printed patterns from the islands, as well as the cowrie shells that the Dutch East India Company brought to Amsterdam from the Comoros Islands off India’s southwestern tip. The great naus (or car- racks) returning through the Atlantic, laden with these and other treasures of the East, were very much parts of the politics of the southern Atlantic. They found advantages in calling at Salvador to take advantage of its capacious and sheltered bay and the city’s developed marine services. The Carreira da Índia appears prominently, though indirectly, in Hicks’ tracing of shippers’ reliance on mariners’ privileges, a defined volume of space in the cargo hold, in this case termed caixas de liberdade, allotted to attract crew willing to endure these infa- mously punishing runs.59 Lisbon’s strict regulations for these voyages required

58 This well-known phenomenon is usually (still!) treated negatively from the metropolitan perspective, as Portuguese abandoning their native culture but may be seen more affir- matively and historically in terms of the local contexts, and resources, that these people, living beyond the limits of Portuguese authority or finance, had to work with. For a recent, and thoughtfully integrated, overview of the pattern in Atlantic Africa, see Toby Green, ed. Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Precolonial Western Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). The title’s accent on “change” moves the discussion beyond the sociological abstractions conventionally used to discuss it as “creolization” or “cross- cultural trade”. Several of the essays here approach the process at its operative level: the financial resources mobilized through merchant networks, and their boundaries. 59 Shippers calculated their loads in terms of spatial volumes; the “ton” (which varied in

Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017) 337–377 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:04:31AM via free access 372 miller offloading of the entire cargos in the Tagus, but the tempting utility of the textiles they carried for Salvador’s trade in slaves, particularly with Luanda, made this requirement impossible to enforce. Hicks mentions these prohibited purchases in the context of Bahians’ uses of Minas gold for the purpose, perhaps an attraction in Salvador even stronger than its harbor. The mutual appeals of Brazilian gold and the luxuries of India were magnetic and offer a rewarding opportunity for further contextualization of the Atlantic trade in slaves. Doing business in the Atlantic was intricately intertwined with the Indian Ocean.60

In Lieu of a Conclusion

The layers of context that reverberate through even the smallest of historical moments are the methodological core of the productive genre of microhis- tory, epistemologically historical in its anchor in the lives of individuals, no matter how obscure they may be from the conventional perspectives of governments and macro-economic patterns, or groups of people small enough to interact routinely with one another and thus share motivations and act col- lectively. These are the existential contexts in which all lives are lived and the spheres within which people act and react. Their actions reverberate collec- tively out through embedded arenas of context, culminating at the conventional levels of trade and politics, and even, in aggregates, in the history of the world. The articles in this special edition of the Journal of Global Slav- ery repeatedly bring forward the actual historical actors in the Iberian early southern Atlantic context, solidly advancing its study beyond the frameworks of the social sciences that nourished the first, and fatefully formative, generations of the academic study of slavery. The social sciences are invaluable for

its dimensions from port to port with the politics of governments’ attempts to tax or otherwise regulate it) was a unit of space, not weight. The later government efforts to lessen the overcrowding on slave ships, stated in terms of space, were a derivative of this maritime convention. 60 Portugal’s eastern African presence, in the Zambezi valley, Mozambique Island, and Mom- basa was jurisdictionally part of the Estado da Índia, and its trade in slaves until the nineteenth century was directed primarily there. Mozambique was commercially, and in some areas in terms of personnel, Goan. From an African perspective, Edward A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves: Changing Pattern of International Trade in East Central Africa to the Later NineteenthCentury (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). And more recently from the Indian side, Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, 1750–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Journal of GlobalDownloaded Slavery from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 337–377 08:04:31AM via free access epilogue 373 aggregating human behaviors, and historians need them all, but they need not stop with behaviors reduced to aggregates at the cost of sacrificing the intense personalism of the humanities, including history. This paradoxical dehuman- ization of a field dedicated to recovering the humanity of the formerly excluded introduced an agonizing tension from the start, as my preliminary review of the historiography of the field tries to accent, far from least in the laments that followed the initial assembly of the revelatory database of voyages at the base of all work on transatlantic slaving.61 All four of these historians show the revealing results of digging deeper in the archives. Still, as fully as the four articles I discuss highlight the contexts they evoke, and frequently penetrate them, they peel back only the outer layers of this onion of historical understanding. The exercise has no conclusion, and so I end here on an enthusiastic note of encouragement to hold steady on the historical course they are on.

Works Cited

Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. La población negra de México, 1519–1810, estudio etno-histórico (México: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1946). Almeida Mendes, António de. La traite portugaise en Méditerranée et dans l’Atlantique, xve–xviie siècles (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, forthcoming). Alpers, Edward A. Ivory and Slaves: Changing Pattern of International Trade in East Central Africa to the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro SlaveRevolts (NewYork:Columbia University Press, 1944). Armenteros Martínez, Iván. “La esclavitud en Barcelona a fines de la Edad Media (1479–1516): El impacto de la primera trata atlántica en un mercado tradicional de esclavos?” (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2012).

61 I have limited my use here of the database to numbers of the voyages that are the hard data underlying it. Others frequently use the figures of the enslaved people carried on those voyages that it generates, but those numbers contain significant, if necessary, statistical estimations, useful to a degree, though certainly not to the three to eight significant figures in the numbers as calculated. The statistical projections, entirely appropriately rationalized and discussed in the website, are not flagged (e.g. degrees of probability) in the aggregates they generate. The distinction between voyages and imputed numbers of humans is another example of the distinctions between the epistemologies of the social sciences and properly humanistic history.

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