INTRODUCTION

Between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, millions lived and died as slaves in African Muslim societies. From the Mediterranean coast to the grasslands of West Africa, in the Nile Valley and the Horn, and all along the Indian Ocean littoral, Muslims predominated or exercised great influence. In all these regions slavery was economically, socially, and politically important, and its scale increased throughout our period before reaching wholly unprecedented levels in the nineteenth century. Islamic principles and practices shaped the nature of slavery in Muslim societies, but they did so in uneven and contingent ways. In this chapter, we will examine the ways in which Islamic ideas about slavery were negotiated in the historical experience of Muslim Africans. There are three major components of any system of slavery: reduction of human beings to servitude, distribution of the enslaved within and between societies, and the nature of servitude within a society. These categories are utilitarian, not absolute. Biological reproduction of slaves belongs in categories one and three. Category three implies the continuous reproduction of the meanings of category one without the initial act of capture or birth. Examples could be multiplied. The categories are heuristic aids, not precise hermeneutical tools. In these sections we will survey Islamic legal, intellectual, and moral discourses on slavery in relation to the historical record. This initial discussion will treat themes common to all of Islamic Africa, providing a necessary context.

China's social history offers vivid confirmation of the insights of David Brion Davis, Orlando Patterson, Eric Foner, and others that the existence of an ancient, stable, conceptually absolute institution of “slavery” is a powerful impetus to the production of an equally absolute conception of “freedom.” Although a wide spectrum of unfree labor, dependency, and coercion is discernible in Asian history generally and in China particularly, there is no precise parallel to the Roman legal construction of slavery. In China the absolute legal definition of slave status, or the associations with race and culture that might have inspired an equally absolute ideal of personal or national freedom, never emerged. On the other hand, influence of Roman legal dichotomies of slave and free in the shaping of European and American scholarship on coercion need not so obscure our view of other traditions that slavery is not plainly visible to the modern eye. The cognates of many forms of European slavery persisted in China for millennia. They left a wide trail in law and in the popular lexicon. They also supplied a dimension to modern notions of ethnic identity.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China was conquered and then governed by the Qing Empire, which survived until 1912. The empire was initiated in 1636, at what is now the city of Shenyang in the province of Liaoning, but at the time was territory wrested from Ming China by the founders of the early Qing Empire.

INTRODUCTION

From the middle of the fifteenth century until its demise after World War I, the Ottoman Empire was arguably the most important Islamic power on the face of the earth. At the height of its expansion, it ruled a vast territory from the western Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, from southern Poland to southern Sudan. Many of the sultan's subjects were not Muslim, did not speak Ottoman Turkish, and were illiterate, poor, and lived in villages, not in cities. Yet they were all governed by a Muslim, Turkish-speaking, urban, affluent, and predominantly male elite of officeholders. Perhaps the only phenomenon that cut across all these social barriers was enslavement, for despite the at times enormous differences in lifestyle, enslaved persons came from all walks of life: They were male and female, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, rural and urban, Muslim and non-Muslim, and speakers of all the dialects in the empire, with origins as far-flung as central Africa and the eastern Caucasus. What united them was a shared legal status of bondage, with the variety of social impediments it entailed in each predicament.

Perhaps more than anything else, it was this mélange of types that made Ottoman enslavement unique, complex to study and explain, and highly intriguing as a social phenomenon. For its significance lay mostly in its social and cultural aspects rather than its role in the Ottoman economy.

To trace the development of slavery and its legal manifestations over the early modern period is to tap some of the larger transformations of the Atlantic world as a whole. In the fifteenth century, slaves constituted a small but recognizable segment of most African, European, and American societies. Some societies with strong imperial traditions (Roman, Islamic, Itza, and Aztec) contained many references to slaves in their commercial, marital, inheritance, civil, and criminal law. Others, with no written traditions or living in relative isolation, developed customs surrounding the intersection of military captivity, labor obligations, and kinship ties that define slavery and free status, which they enforced communally. As European maritime activity transformed the Atlantic Ocean from barrier to facilitator of conquest, migration, and commerce over subsequent centuries, slavery became central, or at least implicitly related, to nearly every society on all three continents. The new plantation complex, with its insatiable demand for laborers, generated new legal systems to enforce compliance. As American colonists became increasingly impatient with metropolitan (European) political control toward the end of the eighteenth century, antislavery discourse fueled much of the political rhetoric of the Revolutionary era, ushering in the republicanism, nationalism, and the constitutional framework of the modern period.

In this chapter, I have sought to put the slave's experience at the center of the story. It is important to see law as a product of social relations, reproduced by successive generations of historical actors.

French colonization in the Americas took place in Canada, the Mississippi region, and the Greater Caribbean, including French Guiana. Slavery was a part of all the societies in the French Americas, but while it was of relatively marginal importance in Canada it was the central economic structure in the Caribbean colonies. The French colonies there – and particularly the last to be formed, that of Saint-Domingue – expanded with startling speed during the eighteenth century, prospering and generating enormous wealth for France. After the loss of Canada to the British and the transfer of Louisiana to the Spanish in 1763, when the colonies of the Caribbean became the sole French territories in the America, they reached the peak of their development. During the revolutionary years starting in 1789, however, a series of dramatic transformations took place in the French Caribbean colonies, leading to the abolition of slavery by the French National Convention in 1794, and ultimately the defeat of French armies in Saint-Domingue and the creation of Haiti. As a direct result of this, the recently re-acquired territory of Louisiana was sold to the expanding United States. By the early nineteenth century, the French colonial presence in the Americas had been reduced to the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the territory of French Guiana, and two small islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

This chapter will examine the general theme of forced labor performed by Europeans overseas during early modern times, that is, from 1500 to roughly 1800. First, a general overview will discuss who formed this labor pool and why. Second, a look at the possible totals of forced laborers will suggest the level of impact or social control forced labor represented in a given society. Third, an outline of how various European powers used forced labor during early modern times will reflect how multifaceted this subject was and where it overlapped with related themes, such as the military. Finally, I will turn to the specific case of the Portuguese as an in-depth example of this process. In doing so, I will underline similarities and contrast the differences between the Portuguese use of forced labor and how other early modern European powers used these same marginal figures in their societies. Because of large geographic and thematic gaps in the literature, this chapter is far from complete – even when we limit its scope to Europeans. In spite of this, I hope to provide a broad view of aspects of forced labor performed by them.

Marginal figures such as convicts, sinners, Gypsies, orphans, and prostitutes during early modern times became prime sources for various states to extract labor. At a minimum, these same figures could and did become forced colonizers. In Western societies, the legal basis and underlying model for forced labor is Roman.

Europeans attempting to found colonies on the North American mainland encountered an abundance of land and other natural resources and a chronic shortage of labor to exploit them. Establishing settlements, building forts to shelter colonists from hostile Native Americans and rival European powers, clearing land for farming, learning how to raise suitable crops for food in unfamiliar environments, erecting houses, and building up herds of Old World livestock required massive amounts of labor. Moreover, in order to procure essential supplies from their homelands, settlers had either to produce products in demand in Europe or to earn income to buy them through trade with other regions. With capital for development and workers willing to emigrate to the new settlements in short supply, colonists soon turned to novel solutions to alleviate their labor problems.

Initially some aristocratic investors expected to develop their holdings with European tenants, but the ready availability of land precluded tenancy as a viable option in most regions. Others hoped to persuade or force Native Americans to work for them, a strategy that also proved futile on the mainland. In the early seventeenth century, England was perceived to be overpopulated, so British colonists turned first to fellow countrymen to fill the labor gap. English men and women too poor to pay their passage to the New World were recruited to come to the colonies under indenture, working off the cost of transportation with a number of years of unpaid service.

INTRODUCTION

Scholars' interpretations of African slavery has ranged from emphasizing the weight of external influences, primarily commerce and contacts with Europeans, to framing slavery as an institution that preceded contacts with Europeans and derived from African systems of forced labor. The focus on proving or discarding these two divergent frameworks, as well as efforts to delineate causes and institutional contours of slavery, have prevailed to the detriment of bottom-up social analyses of slavery. More recently, however, a new breed of studies has begun illuminating the complexity of bondage and resistance. As a result of this scholarship, the emphasis on links between slavery and warfare has been replaced by analyses of mechanisms of enslavement that did not rely on perennial and large-scale military violence.

This chapter focuses on regions under formal Portuguese control in Angola to analyze slaving and resistance to slaving in Central Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It first provides an overview of slavery in the African societies in relation to the emergent Atlantic slavery in the region under Portuguese influence. It then surveys changes in the coastal and internal slave trade so as to sketch an overview of changes in the demographic makeup of Luanda and the Luanda hinterland. It then looks at the transition from warfare to more commercialized mechanisms of enslavement in interior regions that supplied slaves for coastal Luanda and Benguela. Furthermore, it seeks to demonstrate African agency in the context of resistance to slaving by examining the emergence of runaway communities.

INTRODUCTION

Africans sold as slaves for the Americas rebelled before they even reached the Americas. Shipboard uprisings were comparatively frequent, affecting as many as one in ten slavers. Shipboard conditions, traumatic wrenching from family and homeland, and fears for the future incited action. Rebels rarely succeeded. On the coast, African factors and traders assisted captains and crew, and even slaves who captured their vessels could be recaptured and resold. Slave ships were designed and equipped to resist takeover at sea; a strategically placed, well-armed crew could contain mutinies, but not prevent slaves leaping overboard or renewed attacks in which captains and crews were at times chopped to death. Where rebellion proved impossible, slaves invoked rescue by supernatural means; fetishes found in ships' water tanks were intended, as experienced captains understood, to kill their captors. Whatever the outcome, shipboard rebels began the fight that workers caged in by slave labor regimes continued.

In the Americas work conditions rapidly generated three forms of revolt, quotidian resistance within, escape from, and uprisings against the system. Everyday resistance had a dual function. At an immediate, practical level it engaged most slaves in wide-ranging covert and overt activities to contest, despite their owners' draconian disciplinary powers, their terms of work and living conditions. Their tactics, richly documented in the literature and briefly summarized here, relied in part on individual and collective verbal pleas and pressures and covert cooperation to lower workloads or to acquire goods for consumption and trade and were laced by acts of violence, crops destroyed, occasional owner or manager murders, and spontaneous, explosive workplace revolts.

This is the third volume of The Cambridge World History of Slavery, exploring the various manifestations of coerced labor in Africa, Asia, and the Americas between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of the new nation of Haiti. Slavery has been among the most ubiquitous of all human institutions, across time and place, from earliest history until, some would argue, the present day. Yet its durability and ubiquity are not widely recognised and, where they are, they seem poorly understood by the general public and scholars alike. A central aim of these volumes, which cover many different times and places, is to help to place the existence and nature of slavery against the backdrop of the broader human social condition.

Slavery has appeared in many different forms and is not always easy to separate from other forms of coerced labor. Nevertheless, there are basic similarities that emerge from the contributions that follow. Most critical of these is the ownership of one human by another, and the ability to buy and sell the human chattel such ownership creates.

The development of markets and the market economy was central to the process of socioeconomic development in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In the main, the process was propelled by the plantation and mining zones located in the New World. Large-scale specialization in commodity production for Atlantic commerce in these zones created markets, which stimulated a second round of large-scale specialization in the production of goods and services for Atlantic commerce in other regions across the Atlantic. The third round in the causal linkages that produced generalized market development and the geographical spread of the market economy in the Atlantic world occurred within the domestic economies in the region. Wherever specialization in the production of goods and services for export to Atlantic markets occurred, a domestic market was created for producers within the domestic economy, as long as all or the bulk of the specialized export producers' needs were not imported from elsewhere. The process in respect of colonial North America has been described by Shepherd and Walton:

In 1691, the regent of the Company of Jesus and the Ouvidor of Rio de Janeiro sent letters to Lisbon denouncing certain outrages suffered by the Company in Campos, a cane-growing region in southeastern Brazil. The general tone of the complaints can be seen in the following example:

The episode, which was not a rare occurrence in seventeenth-century Brazil, highlights a little-explored dimension of Brazilian slavery: the important role Indian and African slaves played in power disputes among the colonial elite – the self-named nobreza da terra, or “good families of the land” – and between these elites and the several factions of the imperial state.

Throughout the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, the Portuguese colonies of the Americas were the largest buyers of Africans in the Western Hemisphere. More than 45 percent of all slaves transported to the Western Hemisphere wound up in Brazil. It is now estimated that 30,000 arrived during the sixteenth century, 784,000 during the seventeenth, and 1,989,000 during the eighteenth century.

Enslaved, enserfed, and otherwise dependent peoples always existed within larger populations, living alongside people with other statuses. Sometimes, the enslaved were the immediate kin of their owners. In other cases, such as eunuchs, they were biologically quarantined. In every population, the enslaved were at least potentially exposed to the same conditions of life as their masters. Just as the social relation of enslavement or dependency did not stem from a natural separation of people, so it is necessary to consider the enslaved as part of the larger population in which they were embedded, capable of contributing to its growth and decline. Slave and free were connected, however unwillingly and unwittingly, by kinship, epidemiology, environment, and governance. It was the character of these connections that determined patterns of shared demographic experience and patterns of difference. In some cases, the difference in wealth and welfare between owner and slave was relatively narrow; in others, the gap was huge, with owner and slave living in different continents, invisible to one another. The consequences of these variations for demographic performance were substantial for both slave and free.

MODELS AND THEORIES

Ideas about the demographic significance of enslavement and other forms of dependency were most often expressed by free people, many of them leisured intellectuals and some of them directly enriched by slaveowning. When proslavery thought came gradually to confront emergent streams of antislavery argument in the eighteenth century, both sides gave substantial weight to demographic factors in the debate over the economics and moral justice of slavery as a system.