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 As a result of this scholarship, the emphasis on links between slavery and warfare has been replaced by analyses of mechanisms of enslavement that did not rely on perennial and large-scale military violence.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.

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.