INTRODUCTION

In the history of the Atlantic, the literature on the French, British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires continue to dominate the body of historical writing. Yet the Atlantic activities of these nations differed considerably from those of the smaller ones. The larger nations could create their own section in the Atlantic economy, whereas this was impossible to achieve for the smaller nations. Rather than building up a network of transatlantic migration movements of both Europeans and Africans and integrating these with the trade in European, African, and New World goods, the smaller nations first established trade connections on the African coast, mainly trading in produce. Attempts at entering the transatlantic slave trade were more difficult, and the same applied to the trade in European migrants. Only the Dutch and the Danes were able to establish colonies in the West Indies for any length of time, and only the Dutch and the Swedes established colonies of settlement in mainland North America, albeit for a very short period.

The oldest Atlantic empires are those of the Spanish and the Portuguese, which, in spite of their synchronous development, were radically different from one another. The Spanish Empire in the New World was self-contained, whereas Portuguese Brazil was geared to producing products for export destined for Europe and Africa. The Spanish created a string of settlement areas in the New World in which European settlers and the autochthonous population mixed. Exports to Europe were limited to high-value products such as precious metals.

Medieval Russia (Ukraine, Belorussia, Great Russia) did not know serfdom. There was free land everywhere, and no elite social group that depended on agriculture for its livelihood. Population was very sparse, but perceived labor shortages could not be made up by attempts to enserf the peasants en masse. As the number of political jurisdictions multiplied, they had disputes over labor, but there were no political or judicial institutions that could enforce serfdom by binding peasants to the land. Those who indirectly depended on peasant agricultural output had to go to find the peasants to tax them. Agriculture, moreover, was of the slash-and-burn type, with the result that peasants farmed a different site roughly every three years. Landlords were few in the pre-1350 era, and any landlord who tried to control peasant labor had to contend with a peasantry used to moving, and who would pick up and move away from any landlord desirous of collecting rent. Slavery, by contrast, was an ancient institution in Russia and effectively was abolished in the 1720s. Serfdom, which began in 1450, evolved into near-slavery in the eighteenth century and was finally abolished in 1906. Serfdom in its Russian variant could not have existed without the precedent and presence of slavery.

For many years, regardless of their ethnicity and nationality, their age, and their religious preference, women featured scarcely at all in most scholarly accounts of the transatlantic slave trade and the evolving slave systems of the early modern Americas. All too often, the false impression was conveyed to readers as well as to other audiences that this was a trade, and that these were systems, that principally involved either men or sexless and genderless objects, the “slave” and the “slave owner.” When Black women did make what was often a fleeting appearance, then they did so usually in the context of motherhood and the slave family, occasionally in discussions of workplaces and religious cultures, but seldom if ever in the context of resistance and rebellion. Moreover, virtually no attention was paid to the ways in which they interacted either with one another or with those women who were also marginalized in the scholarship: underclass women and those white women who, usually through widowhood, acquired slaves – women who held other women, as well as men, in perpetual bondage.

More often than not, then, when they were to be found, Black women were homogenized and stereotyped in traditional scholarship as being essentially powerless victims, as helpless subjects of their masters' and overseers' sexual whims and fantasies, as abject beings who lived in worlds in which and over which they exercised little or no personal agency.

INTRODUCTION

The early modern era was a watershed in the agrarian history of east central Europe. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, most peasants east of the Elbe paid rent or tribute in cash and kind. Then, however, in a process that began slowly in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and accelerated rapidly after 1500, seigniors embarked on a massive transformation of the agrarian economy, converting their estates into market-oriented manorial economies based on compulsory labor services they were able to impose on their village subjects. Among the seigniors were territorial princes, ecclesiastical property owners, urban corporations, and the landed nobility. After 1500, the latter played the dominant role in establishing both the manorial economy and the harsh forms of rural subjection that accompanied it.

After more than a century of research, the agrarian transformation in east central Europe remains a controversial theme in European history. Manorialism and rural subjection (often termed “the second serfdom”) in the lands of east central Europe developed in vivid contrast to the West, where the manorial economy and its strict forms of rural subjection had largely disappeared by the late Middle Ages.

Many scholars have seized on these divergent paths of agrarian development as the primary explanation for east central Europe's relative backwardness. Robert Brenner, for example, expresses this view when he argues that the second serfdom destroyed the possibility of balanced economic growth and thus consigned the region “to backwardness for centuries.”

Slavery was the central institution in the British Caribbean. No West Indian colony, Barbara Solow emphasizes, “ever founded a successful society on the basis of free white labor.” The region owns the dubious distinction of being the first in the Americas to give rise to the sugar revolution, which in turn rested on slavery. Nowhere was the influence of the unholy trinity of slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system more systematically and intensely felt. Until the slave trade was abolished, about five times as many Africans as Europeans arrived in the British Caribbean. A quarter of all Africans transported to the New World reached the West Indies. Slave-grown products dominated Atlantic trade, with sugar the single most important of the internationally traded commodities. Slavery became the source of reliable labor and of capital accumulation. It made the planters rich, and slaveholders dominated not just the economy but the region's politics and culture. “Nothing escaped” the influence of slavery, as Frank Tannenbaum put it, “nothing and no one.” Slavery is, as Richard Dunn pithily notes, “the essence” of British Caribbean history.

This chapter demonstrates the centrality of slavery in the British Caribbean in various ways. First, it traces the origins of slavery in the region. Second, it explores the peopling of the region and its domination by slaves. Third, it probes the work that slaves performed and the commodities they produced.

Beginning in 1493, Europeans transplanted the slave system of the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western. Old World slavery's trajectory passed through the Atlantic islands before reaching the Caribbean islands and then the American mainland. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the transition was substantially complete. The Iberians created slave systems in their American colonies, and the later colonial powers – British, French, Dutch, and others – followed their lead.

THE ATLANTIC ISLANDS

Europeans first entered the uncharted portions of the Atlantic in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, landing in the Canaries and the Madeiras, Atlantic islands off the west coast of Africa. Portuguese and Castilian ship captains initially visited the islands for easily obtainable items such as wood and the red dye called “dragon's blood,” the resin of the dragon tree. In the fifteenth century, the Spaniards and the Portuguese established sugar plantations on the islands, where the three elements that were to characterize sugar plantations in the Americas were combined: large land holdings, a crop to be sold in the growing markets of Europe, and slave labor. The first two elements had been present earlier in the Near East and the Mediterranean. The third element – reliance on slave labor – may have occurred occasionally in the Mediterranean but was unusual there. The first stage in the transformation took place on Madeira.

INTRODUCTION

Slavery was an ancient institution known to have been widespread in the Old World. As a part of the Old World, therefore, African societies practiced slavery; it would have been an anomaly if slavery did not exist on the continent. The Bible's Old Testament points to the existence of slavery in Africa, given that Joseph and his fellow Israelites were enslaved in Egypt before their escape (Exodus). Slavery existed in Christian Ethiopia in the fourth century AD. The evidence for the antiquity of slavery in West Africa is not as clear-cut, but it is clear enough that slavery existed alongside various forms of servility in parts of the region well before the fifteenth century, when the Europeans arrived there via the Atlantic Ocean. The question to address, then, is not whether slavery existed in West African societies, but how extensive it was and when it assumed significance in the political economies, as well as its extent, character, and dynamics. The transatlantic trade that ensued with European arrival at the west coast from the fifteenth century onward marked a watershed in the development of slavery in West Africa. Slaveholding in the region spread and intensified during the following four centuries.

Slavery is generally regarded as the most extreme form of dependency and exploitation. This project attempts to cover types of dependency in addition to slavery, although it is clear from both the overall title and the program for the project's third volume that slavery gets considerably more attention than do other types of dependency. This reflects in part the modern preoccupation with individual freedom and equality before the law accorded by citizenship now acknowledged, at least as an ideal, just about everywhere in the modern world. Slavery may not be completely eradicated today, but it had lost irrevocably the ideological struggle perhaps as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, with only minor rearguard actions (in ideological terms, that is) in the antebellum South and less certainly in Hitler's Germany and the Soviet gulags. Such a circumstance – amazing in its rapidity and completeness from a worldwide historical perspective of human behavior and beliefs – is taken for granted today. The more complete the victory of the view that slavery should not exist nor should have ever existed, the more remote slavery itself appears, but at the same time the greater the modern fascination with the institution becomes. And the more remote it appears, the easier it is to treat slavery simply as an evil practiced by evil men, and the harder it is to understand it in human terms. At the very least, modern preoccupations with freedom and individual rights drive the fascination with slavery.

INTRODUCTION

Concepts of Slavery in Southeast Asia and Problems of Definition

The concept of Southeast Asia as a distinct regional entity has been debated by historians for several decades. Indonesia's national motto, “Unity in Diversity,” could well be applied to Southeast Asia as a whole. The historical analysis of slavery in Southeast Asia can contribute to this debate because general patterns of slavery and bondage seem to apply across this broad region. From the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the institution exhibits similar patterns, albeit with distinctive and important local variations. Modern Southeast Asia incorporates Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Sinicized (Chinese-influenced) Vietnam and the Hispanized Philippines have been included in the analysis of Southeast Asia on the basis of shared precolonial structures and historical trends. All these societies were characterized by bilateral kinship, relatively high status for women, wealth in people rather than land, strictly hierarchical social relationships, low population densities, highly personalized concepts of power, relatively fluid ethnic definitions in the period before large-scale state formation (around the seventeenth century), and complex local and regional trading patterns. Such social features have implications for the definition of relationships of bondage and dependency. As a field of study, Southeast Asian slavery is still coming into focus, and the purpose of this chapter is to outline some of the main elements and questions rather than provide a definitive discussion.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the forms of servitude and slaving practiced by indigenous peoples in South America. The principal focus of the chapter is the contrast between indigenous conceptions of captivity and obligatory service on the one hand, and the intrusion of European forms of slavery and servitude on the other. The evidence from the archaeological record, as well as from the history of European conquest in South America, points to indigenous systems of captivity and obligatory service as being quite prominent in many native social orders. The eminence of chiefs and kings, the ritual and political necessity for human sacrifice, and the obligatory nature of exchange relationships were reinforced by and used to justify the presence of human captives. Culturally, the figure of the captive, or sometimes “pet,” was, and still is, important not just at the level of political representation, but also cosmologically, because the key relationship between humanity and divinity is one of predation for many native peoples. Animal pets are socially liminal and arise from the killing of the pet's kin, usually in a hunting expedition. This killing implies an obligation to take on the roles of the dead's kin in feeding and housing the pet, and it is this set of relationships that are also used to picture the status of the human captive.

Despite marked geographical and temporal differences across the Western Hemisphere, white servitude remained a distinct and significant phenomenon to the end of the early modern period. The area is defined broadly to include the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and the specific cases of Russia and Eastern Europe are covered in greater detail in other chapters in this volume. White servitude was present to some degree throughout this vast area, but in a highly asymmetrical pattern of distribution. The largest concentrations were found around the Mediterranean, in Russia, and in the Middle East. Slavery proper was characterized by a lifetime of enforced labor, together with a chattel status that was passed on to descendants. Servitude is defined more widely to include serfdom, penal labor, the transportation of destitute minors, and, with reservations, indentured labor.

Free labor in the modern sense scarcely existed in Christian Europe before the nineteenth century, and yet the continent's experience was very diverse. Serfdom virtually disappeared from Western Europe, whereas it intensified and expanded in the east. Chattel slavery persisted in southwestern and central Europe, and yet it all but vanished in northwestern Europe. Russia's chattel slaves were all technically transformed into serfs by 1725, but at a time when the latter status was fast sinking to approximate that of slaves. Penal servitude was on the increase everywhere in Europe, and the lot of impoverished children and other marginal social groups worsened.

In the language of the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname (descendants of rebel slaves), kióo means “young fellow” and carries implications of inventiveness and outrageous behavior – kióos are expected to do things differently from their parents' generation (whether in styles of speech, woodcarving, or dress). During the first couple of decades of Suriname's settlement, in the new language being created by plantation slaves, the equivalent term (krioro) meant “born here” (i.e., not in Africa). We may surmise that today's Saramaka connotations would have been doubly appropriate back then, when these young people – the first American-born generations – were forging new ways of speaking and much else, and teaching these “creolized” ways to their own children.

The concept of creolization – the process by which people, animals, ideas, and institutions with roots in the Old World are born, grow, and prosper in the New – moved from the field of natural history to linguistics, and thence to anthropology and history only in the course of the twentieth century. (The earliest usage in English that refers to cultural as opposed to biological processes seems to date from 1928, when Jonkeer L. C. van Panhuys, in a letter to Melville J. Herskovits, described culture change among the Suriname Maroons as “creolisation.”)

When historians reflect on involuntary migration in the early modern period, the Atlantic slave trade almost invariably comes to mind first. This is understandable. In the three and a half centuries after its inception in the early sixteenth century, transatlantic slave trafficking was responsible for the forced migration of some 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. This was the largest coerced oceanic migration in human history. Seen by some as a “black Holocaust,” the Atlantic slave trade is now considered to have had profound effects on the repeopling of the Americas following the devastating impact on the post-Columbus demographic history of Native Americans. Some three times as many enslaved Africans landed in the “New World” as white settlers from Europe before 1820. Yet though due attention has to be given to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonization of the Americas had its origins in the Mediterranean, where involuntary labor and slave trafficking, involving Africans as well as non-Africans, was a common feature of life for centuries before 1492 and was to remain so for several centuries thereafter. Moreover, just as involuntary labor was critical to the resettlement of the Americas after 1492, so it became pivotal to the early modern consolidation of state power in land-rich and population-scarce central and eastern Europe in the form of serfdom, where it gave rise to formal systems of labor exploitation that, according to some historians, were akin to slavery and, legally at least, outlived formal African slavery in the Americas.

Rome held an empire in which there were cities, and the Roman governors of the West expected to view a provincial landscape in which there were cities that could be recognised as having distinctly Roman urban forms. This chapter seeks to examine how the Roman concept of the city was received and reproduced across the provinces of the former barbarian West. In the past, the excavated remains of the cities of the Roman Empire have been used to establish the spread of civilisation across the West. The straight lines of the grid-plan of the towns were equated at the turn of the twentieth century with the notion of a rational city, whether in the past, present or future. The Roman city in the West was perceived as a bringer of civilisation to the barbarians (see Chapter 5 for further discussion). This perception of the past has been adjusted, but the narrative of the Roman provinces continues to focus on the role of cities and urbanisation. The question for us in this chapter is what features of the Roman conception of urbanism were attractive to these former barbarians in the first or second century AD? Equally important is the question of whether their conception and development of urban forms in the former barbarian West (that is, the Gauls, the Germanies and in Britain) was so different from what was occurring at the same time in other more developed parts of the Mediterranean such as Italy, Spain or North Africa. This chapter will therefore explore the conception of Roman urbanism viewed from the former barbarian provinces of the West rather than from Rome or Italy (a view expressed in the opening quotation, from the late first century AD). These questions have perplexed those studying the origins of towns, particularly in Britain, and have been subject to a reworking of hypotheses and the development of new theories of urbanism.