The last twenty years have seen a series of studies dealing,
at least in part,
with the nineteenth-century history of slavery at the East African coast.
Each has, in its own way, focused on transformations associated with
changing patterns of accumulation in the nineteenth century. If there has
been a general theme it is of the increasing constraints placed upon slaves
and
the increasing demands made on them, as owners sought to reorganize labour
time and processes to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by
the
rapid expansion of commerce from the 1830s. While Morton has attacked
Cooper's ‘hegemonic’ perspective and accused him
of presenting slavery as
benign and static, both are agreed on a basic trend: the increasingly
commercial orientation of slave-based agriculture considerably diminished
slave autonomy between 1820 and 1890. Recently, Glassman has offered a
study which is decidedly non-hegemonic in perspective, and has revealed
the
ways in which marginal members of society appropriated and sought to
reinterpret the ideology through which they were subordinated. Yet he too
describes the increasing circumscription of slave autonomy in response
to the
demands of new kinds of production – in his case, the sugar plantations
of
the Pangani valley.