Atividade - História do Continente Americano 1 - 2023-2

Texto Aula 8 WHITEHEAD N l Indigenous Slavery in South America 1492 1820 In ELTIS D ENGERMAN S The Cambridge World History of Slavery 3 AD 1420AD 1804 Vol 3 Cambridge ua Cambridge Univ Press 2011 Pergunta Como a interação entre as práticas indígenas de captura de cativos e a introdução das formas europeias de escravidão afetaram as concepções de servidão e propriedade de pessoas na América do Sul durante o período de 1492 a 1820 Resposta A interação entre as práticas indígenas de captura de cativos e a introdução das formas europeias de escravidão na América do Sul durante o período de 1492 a 1820 teve impactos profundos nas concepções de servidão e propriedade de pessoas Algumas das maneiras pelas quais essa interação afetou essas concepções são Mistura de sistemas de servidão As práticas indígenas de captura de cativos muitas vezes envolviam concepções de cativos como parte integrante das relações sociais onde a servidão estava vinculada a obrigações rituais e políticas Com a chegada dos europeus essas práticas indígenas se chocaram com o sistema de escravidão europeu que era mais baseado na propriedade de pessoas como mercadorias Isso levou a uma mistura de sistemas em algumas áreas onde os cativos podiam ser vistos como propriedade mas também tinham papéis sociais e rituais específicos Adaptação às demandas coloniais Os sistemas de servidão indígena foram adaptados para atender às demandas dos colonizadores europeus O sistema de encomienda por exemplo permitia aos espanhóis controlar o trabalho dos nativos mas ainda estava enraizado em ideias de obrigação e prestação de serviços em vez de propriedade pura Isso refletiu a tentativa de adaptar as práticas indígenas à lógica colonial Transformação da escravidão A introdução de cativos africanos como escravos na América do Sul também influenciou as concepções de servidão e propriedade Os africanos eram frequentemente tratados como propriedade dos colonizadores o que contrastava com as práticas indígenas Essa transformação na natureza da escravidão ajudou a estabelecer uma divisão clara entre a servidão indígena e a escravidão africana Resistência e adaptação indígena As populações indígenas frequentemente resistiram à imposição de sistemas de servidão e escravidão Eles frequentemente procuraram manter elementos de suas práticas tradicionais como o sistema de parentesco mesmo quando submetidos a formas de coerção e controle impostas pelos colonizadores Essa resistência contribuiu para a complexidade das concepções de servidão e propriedade Em resumo a interação entre as práticas indígenas de captura de cativos e as formas europeias de escravidão na América do Sul resultou em uma variedade de concepções de servidão e propriedade de pessoas que muitas vezes refletiam a adaptação a resistência e a complexidade das relações sociais e culturais na região durante esse período Texto Aula 9 Contreras Carlos Crecimiento económico en el Perú bajo los Borbones 17001820 Documento de Trabajo Lima PUCP 2014 Pergunta Com base nas estimativas de crescimento populacional e demográfico no Peru durante o século XVIII quais fatores você considera que tiveram um impacto mais significativo no aumento da população indígena e consequentemente no crescimento econômico da região sob o domínio dos Bourbon Resposta No século XVIII durante o domínio dos Bourbon no Peru houve uma série de fatores que influenciaram o crescimento populacional e o crescimento econômico da região particularmente no que diz respeito à população indígena Alguns dos fatores mais significativos incluem 1 Reforma Agrária Bourbon As reformas Bourbons visavam reorganizar o sistema colonial para tornálo mais eficiente e lucrativo A introdução de políticas que buscavam melhorar a agricultura como o estímulo à produção de alimentos e ao uso de técnicas agrícolas avançadas pode ter contribuído para o aumento da produção de alimentos e assim para o aumento da população indígena que desempenhava um papel central na agricultura 2 Diminuição das epidemias No início do período colonial as populações indígenas sofreram muito com doenças trazidas pelos europeus como varíola sarampo e gripe No século XVIII as populações indígenas começaram a desenvolver alguma imunidade a essas doenças e a incidência de epidemias pode ter diminuído o que permitiria que as populações indígenas crescessem 3 Introdução de novas culturas e alimentos Os europeus introduziram novas culturas e alimentos na região como a batata o milho e o feijão que eram ricos em calorias e nutrientes Isso pode ter melhorado a dieta dos povos indígenas e contribuído para um melhor estado de saúde e por conseguinte para um aumento populacional 4 Melhorias na infraestrutura O governo Bourbon fez esforços para melhorar a infraestrutura no Peru incluindo a construção de estradas e pontes Isso facilitou o comércio e o transporte de alimentos e outros produtos o que poderia ter impulsionado a economia e permitido o crescimento populacional 5 Mudanças nas políticas de trabalho forçado Embora o sistema de trabalho forçado tenha sido mantido no Peru houve algumas tentativas de regulamentar e limitar os abusos o que poderia ter melhorado as condições de vida dos povos indígenas e consequentemente levado a um crescimento populacional É importante notar que o crescimento populacional não foi uniforme em todas as regiões do Peru e as experiências das populações indígenas variaram amplamente Além disso o crescimento econômico na região também teve muitos outros fatores em jogo incluindo a exploração de recursos naturais o comércio internacional e as políticas fiscais Elaborar uma pergunta complexa para cada um dos textos a seguir 2 no total essa pergunta pode ser elaborada a partir de seu repertório mas é importante que esteja relacionada com o texto e o tema da aula também não pode ser uma pergunta cuja resposta esteja no google ou demais ferramentas Não fazer perguntas muito óbvias quanto mais específicas melhor Disciplina História do Continente Americano I Ementa O curso tem por objetivo estudar a história da América do século XVI a meados do século XIX Pretendese observar o processo diacrônico que deu origem a esta sociedade enfatizando alguns dos elementos dinâmicos que a construíram Aula 8 Escravidão Colonial de Cheasapeake ao Mar del Plata Texto Eltis David e Stanley Engerman The Cambridge World History of Slavery 3 AD 1420AD 1804 Vol 3 Cambridge ua Cambridge Univ Press 2011 Escolher um ou mais entre os capítulos Indigenous Slavery in South America 14921820 Slavery in the Atlantic Islands and the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic World Slavery and Politics in Colonial Portuguese America The Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries Slavery in the North American Mainland Colonies Slavery and the Slave Trade of the Minor Atlantic Powers Black Women in the Early Americas Favor especificar o capítulo lido junto à pergunta Aula 9 Desempenho Econômico e Reformismo Colonial Texto Contreras Carlos Crecimiento económico en el Perú bajo los Borbones 17001820 Documento de Trabajo Lima PUCP 2014 DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA DEL PERÚ UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA DEL PERÚ UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEL PERÚ DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA DEL PERÚ UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEL PERÚ DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA DEL PERÚ UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEL PERÚ DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA DEL PERÚ UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEL PERÚ DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA PONTIFICIA DEL PERÚ UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DOCUMENTO DE TRABAJO N 376 CRECIMIENTO ECONÓMICO EN EL PERÚ BAJO LOS BORBONES 1700 1820 Carlos Contreras DOCUMENTO DE TRABAJO N 376 CRECIMIENTO ECONÓMICO EN EL PERÚ BAJO LOS BORBONES 17001820 Carlos Contreras Carranza Mayo 2014 DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA DOCUMENTO DE TRABAJO 376 httpfilespucpedupedepartamentoeconomiaDDD376pdf Departamento de Economía Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Carlos Contreras Carranza Av Universitaria 1801 Lima 32 Perú Teléfono 511 6262000 anexos 4950 4951 Fax 511 6262874 econopucpedupe wwwpucpedupedepartamentoeconomia Encargado de la Serie Luis García Núñez Departamento de Economía Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú lgarciapucpedupe Carlos Contreras Carranza Crecimiento económico en el Perú bajo los Borbones 17001820 Lima Departamento de Economía 2014 Documento de Trabajo 376 PALABRAS CLAVE Crecimiento económico siglo XVIII historia económica colonial América Latina Las opiniones y recomendaciones vertidas en estos documentos son responsabilidad de sus autores y no representan necesariamente los puntos de vista del Departamento Economía Hecho el Depósito Legal en la Biblioteca Nacional del Perú Nº 201406943 ISSN 20798466 Impresa ISSN 20798474 En línea Impreso en Cartolán Editora y Comercializadora EIRL Pasaje Atlántida 113 Lima 1 Perú Tiraje 100 ejemplares CRECIMINIENTO ECONÓMICO EN EL PERÚ BAJO LOS BORBONES 17001820 Carlos Contreras Carranza RESUMEN El siglo dieciocho fue uno de robusto crecimiento económico en el virreinato del Perú Pero tanto la cronología cuanto las raíces de este crecimiento son imprecisas El inicio de la expansión suele ubicarse hacia el final de la gran epidemia de 17181723 que afectó a la población indígena de la sierra sur ocasionando severos problemas inmediatos al flujo comercial así como al suministro de trabajadores para las haciendas y minas en los años siguientes Pero otros han apuntado al efecto que tuvieron ciertas medidas relacionadas a la tributación minera y a la introducción de nuevas tecnologías en ese sector hacia 1736 1745 El final del ciclo de crecimiento se ubicaría hacia 1800 o en todo caso durante la primera década del siglo diecinueve Se trataría así de un ciclo de crecimiento que habría durado unos tres cuartos de siglo lo que lo convertiría en uno de los más prolongados de la historia económica peruana El papel que en este proceso tuvieron las reformas borbónicas es otro tema de debate En este documento me propongo ordenar la información pertinente a este proceso de crecimiento económico así como reflexionar acerca de sus determinantes Palabras clave Crecimiento económico siglo XVIII Perú borbónico historia económica colonial América Latina Códigos JEL N16 N46 N56 ABSTRACT The eighteenth century was one of robust economic growth in the Viceroyalty of Peru But both the chronology the roots of this growth are imprecise The beginning of the expansion is usually located towards the end of the great epidemic of 17181723 which affected the indigenous population of the southern highlands causing severe problems to immediate trade flow and the supply of workers for the plantations and mines in subsequent years But others have pointed to the effect that certain measures were related to the mining tax and the introduction of new technologies in this sector towards 17361745 The end of the growth cycle would be located around 1800 or in any case during the first decade of the nineteenth century It thus would be a growth cycle that would have lasted about three quarters of a century which would make it one of the longest of the Peruvian economic history The role that this process had the Bourbon reforms is another topic of debate In this paper I intend to order the relevant information to the process of economic growth as well as reflect on its determinants Keywords Economic Growth eighteenth century Bourbon Peru colonial economic history Latin America JEL N16 N46 N56 CRECIMIENTO ECONOMICO EN EL PERU BAJO LOS BORBONES 17001820 Carlos Contreras Carranza El siglo dieciocho fue uno de crecimiento económico en el virreinato del Perú Los testimonios de los observadores se vuelven contundentes al respecto una vez pasados los dos tercios del siglo Recordando los tiempos económicamente sombríos de finales de la centuria anterior e inicios de la del dieciocho decía por ejemplo el ensayador mayor de la Casa de Moneda de Lima Joseph Rodríguez de Carassa en un Informe al Consejo de Indias que en aquellos tiempos Una mula hacía el porte de la persona porque una calesa era profusión y de las carrozas no se sabía más que el nombre Contrastaba ese panorama con lo que sucedía en el momento 1769 Hoy todo es esplendor en el vestido en la mesa y en todo género de porte Las fiestas se hacen con grandeza El ornamento de las Iglesias hoy se hace con alhajas de plata como antes se hacía con maderos y pieles dorados aparatos que solo tenían de plata y oro el color como hoy tienen la sustancia1 Tanto la cronología cuanto las raíces de este crecimiento son imprecisas El inicio de la expansión suele ubicarse hacia el final de la gran epidemia de 17181723 que afectó especialmente a la población indígena de la sierra sur ocasionando severos problemas al flujo comercial así como al suministro de trabajadores para las haciendas y minas en los años siguientes2 Pero otros han apuntado como factores más efectivos del crecimiento el efecto que tuvieron ciertas medidas relacionadas a la acuñación y circulación de las monedas alrededor de 17281730 y la reducción a la mitad del impuesto a los productores de plata el principal y casi único bien exportable del país Agradezco los comentarios recibidos de los colegas en las reuniones de Madrid y Bariloche donde este documento fue presentado en el año 2012 Especialmente los de Juan C Garavaglia y Roberto Schmidt No siempre pude seguir sus sugerencias por lo que asumo plenamente la responsabilidad del texto 1 Rodríguez de Carassa 1769 en Lazo 2006 ambas citas pag 355 Sobre la situación fiscal de penuria en los inicios del siglo dieciocho ver Moreno y Sala 2004 2 A Pearce 2005 2 en 17363 El final del ciclo de crecimiento se ubicaría hacia 1800 o en todo caso durante la primera década del siglo diecinueve por razones que podrían ser demográficas una nueva epidemia o derivadas de medidas de tipo fiscal4 Se trataría así de un ciclo de crecimiento que habría durado unos tres cuartos de siglo lo que lo convertiría en uno de los más prolongados de la historia económica peruana El papel que en este proceso tuvieron las reformas borbónicas es otro tema de debate5 En este documento me propongo ordenar la información pertinente a este proceso de crecimiento económico así como reflexionar acerca de sus determinantes 1 POBLACIÓN El crecimiento demográfico era por entonces una de las variables que más claramente expresaba al aumento del bienestar de la población a la vez que por la escasez de trabajadores que caracterizó a la economía colonial contribuía decisivamente al crecimiento de la producción y el ensanchamiento del mercado interior Desafortunadamente las cifras de población son escasas y confusas antes del censo organizado por el virrey Gil de Taboada entre 17901792 Este fijó una población censada de 1076122 personas La investigación que hace algunas décadas emprendió Gunter Vollmer 1967 sobre la base de otros recuentos locales lo llevaron a rectificar dicha cifra elevándola a 1149817 habitantes6 Este censo no consideró la intendencia de Puno que había sido integrada al virreinato del Río de La Plata desde 1776 cuando veinte años después Puno volvió al virreinato peruano la población engrosó en unos 150 mil habitantes7 En resumen en los años finales del siglo dieciocho la población del virreinato peruano redondeaba los 13 millones de habitantes y se estimaba que se trataba de una población en crecimiento 3 Brown 1988 Lazo 2006 4 Alfonso Quiroz 1993 5 Céspedes del Castillo 1947 Fisher 2000 6 Vollmer 1967 314 Citado por Magdalena Chocano 2010 p 24 7 Las cifras adjudicadas a la población de Puno varían de cien mil a ciento cincuenta y seis mil según un cálculo de 1797 Esta última parece más confiable de acuerdo a Gootenberg 1995 7 3 Manifestaba por ejemplo alrededor de 1794 el Contador de la Real Aduana de Lima José Ignacio Lequanda La población de este dilatado espacio del virreinato peruano según los padrones últimamente formados solo asciende a 1076122 almas de todos sexos estados y condición aunque casi todos los prácticos y curiosos Investigadores calculan generalmente la existencia de un 1200000 almas de las cuales las 818000 son de la Nación India8 Para averiguar el ritmo del crecimiento demográfico en el siglo dieciocho necesitaríamos contar con un censo anterior Aunque se realizaron recuentos demográficos previos estos estuvieron guiados por propósitos fiscales numerándose básicamente a la población indígena sujeta al pago de tributos Del que han sobrevivido cifras más completas es un recuento realizado en 1754 por el Contador José de Orellana conocido como el censo de Superunda9 Este dio cuenta de una población indígena total de 612780 habitantes de los cuales solamente 404410 corresponderían al territorio que el virreinato peruano mantuvo desde 1796 o sea que la cifra de 404 mil excluye a la población indígena del Alto Perú10 En el lapso de cuarenta años corridos entre 17541794 la población indígena se habría duplicado de 404 mil a 818 mil si tomamos en cuenta el dato de Lequanda creciendo a una tasa anual de 178 Esta tasa es poco creíble para la época máxime si consideramos que la rebelión de Túpac Amaru II entre 17801783 debió causar pérdidas demográficas en la región del sur poblada sustancialmente por los indígenas Si hiciéramos el cálculo no sobre la estimación de Lequanda sino sobre la cifra rectificada de Vollmer la tasa de 8 Lequanda Discurso preliminar en que se manifiesta el patrimonio y recursos del Perú con las demás aptitudes que se reconoce para el comercio En Cheesman 2011 p 596 Llama la atención la relativa precisión de Lequanda para la cantidad de población indígena pero no indica la fuente de donde haya tomado el dato 9 De acuerdo con Adrian Pearce 2005 169170 el virrey Conde de Superunda en ningún texto que se le conozca manifestó haber realizado un censo pero en su Memoria de gobierno sí señaló haber dispuesto que el contador de retasas José de Orellana preparase un mapa e informe acerca de la población indígena 10 VarillasMostajo 1990 19 En la nota 41 pag 43 señalan el error de algunos autores de considerar la cifra de 612780 indios como confrontable con la del censo de Gil de Taboada que resulta prácticamente similar y que llevaría a la conclusión de que entre 1754 y el censo de Gil de Taboada esta población se mantuvo estacionaria Otros autores dan cifras más bajas para la población indígena de 1754 como Jürgen Golte 1980 47 quien indica 343061 habitantes basado en los cálculos de Vollmer 4 crecimiento anual se reduciría a 132 y si lo hiciéramos tomando en cuenta la cifra de la población efectivamente empadronada por el censo de Gil de Taboada se reduciría a 103 Sin embargo estos porcentajes se elevan cuando incluimos la intendencia de Puno que para la época del gobierno de Superunda sí estaba comprendida dentro del virreinato peruano y se encontraba mayoritariamente poblada por indígenas ver cuadro 1 Sobre la base del dato del contador Orellana para 1754 un equipo de demógrafos e historiadores propuso hace algunos años como base para una futura discusión la cifra de 703321 habitantes como la población total del virreinato en la porción que es comparable con la del censo de Gil de Taboada más la inclusión de Puno11 Para ello asumieron que el peso de la población indígena sobre la población total se mantuvo constante en los dos momentos bajo el virreinato de Superunda y el de Gil de Taboada véase cuadro 1 Dadas esas cifras el crecimiento anual de la población entre 1754 y 1792 tomando en cuentas las cifras rectificadas por el estudio de Vollmer resulta en una tasa de 15 que sigue pareciendo elevada para la época en el siglo siguiente entre 17911876 la población peruana creció por ejemplo a una tasa de solamente 092 anual Cuadro 1 Población del virreinato peruano en 1754 y 1792 Años 1754 1792 Censo 1792 Censo Rectificado Tasa de crecimiento anual 17541792 rectificado Indios 404410 608912 762594 168 Porcentaje de indios 575 566 610 Españoles 87915 136032 158560 156 Porcentaje de españoles 125 126 127 Mestizos negros y castas 210996 326178 328663 118 Porcentaje de mestizos 300 308 263 Total 703321 1076122 1249817 153 Hemos incluido aquí la categoría eclesiásticos Aquí hemos incluido Puno asignándole una cifra muy prudente de cien mil como población total de la que ochenta mil serían indios diez mil serían españoles y otros diez mil mestizos negros y castas Fuente VarillasMostajo 1990 20 y Chocano 2010 24 basada en Vollmer 11 VarillasMostajo 1990 20 Para este capítulo señalan en la Introducción haber contado con la asesoría del historiador Franklin Pease 5 La elevada tasa de crecimiento demográfico resultante nos llevaría a la consideración de que el cálculo de la población total de 1754 en 703 mil habitantes subestimó la población real que podría estar alrededor de los ochocientos mil hombres de los que un medio millón serían indígenas También es revelador que los datos de un recuento anterior de la población indígena tributaria realizado entre 17251740 ofrecen prácticamente las mismas cifras que el informe de Orellana de 175412 Esto sugeriría un estancamiento de la población durante el segundo cuarto del siglo dieciocho a raíz de la gran epidemia de 17181723 que habría dejado la población del virreinato en su mínimo histórico En suma las cifras disponibles hasta hoy indican que el crecimiento demográfico que caracterizó al Perú del siglo dieciocho ocurrió fundamentalmente durante la segunda mitad del siglo aunque él pudo estar expresando procesos de cambio sucedidos varias décadas atrás como suele pasar con la demografía Adicionalmente la información deja entrever que la parte indígena de la población creció más rápido que el total Esto habría sucedido a pesar de que durante la segunda mitad del siglo dieciocho aumentó el flujo de inmigrantes peninsulares y africanos hacia el Perú13 Probablemente las bases para el crecimiento demográfico que especialistas como Bruno Lesevic 1986 llamaron recuperación demográfica por la consideración de la crisis ocurrida en el siglo de la conquista española estaban ya dadas desde los inicios de la centuria pero la epidemia de 17181723 impidió una recuperación demográfica más temprana Esta habría causado la muerte de una cuarta parte de la población indígena según el parecer de Pearce 2005 137 Al final de la epidemia la población total del virreinato excluyendo al Alto Perú se reduciría probablemente a menos de setecientos mil habitantes Si la población nativa creció a tasas por encima del uno por ciento anual sus condiciones materiales de vida tendrían que haber mejorado Esto puede parecer 12 Pearce 2005 171 13 Nicolás SánchezAlbornoz 1973 6 sorprendente ya que el aumento de los ingresos por concepto de tributos cobrados a los indios y la mayor presión sobre el trabajo indígena que desplegó una minería y agricultura en crecimiento podrían haber agobiado antes que aliviado a esta población La gran rebelión tupamarista de 1780 estalló precisamente contra los crecidos tributos y las mitas La explicación de esta paradoja tendría que ver con un incremento de la productividad de la economía indígena La política de repartos de mercancías formalizado desde 1754 aunque practicada desde antes facilitó aunque con abusos basados en la fatal coincidencia de lo que un observador de la época llamó la incompatibilidad de la vara de la justicia con la del mercader que resultaban en la imposición de la compra y la aplicación de precios excesivos por los corregidores la provisión de insumos y bienes que permitían volver más productivo el trabajo indígena Los repartos consistían en bienes de consumo como paños de Quito coca ropas y telas europeas y de la tierra pero también en bienes de producción como mulas e instrumentos de fierro para la labranza La información proporcionada por Golte 1980 mapa 18 muestra que en casi todas las provincias de la sierra central y sur peruana donde se concentraba la población indígena el reparto anual de mulas preveía un promedio de una por cada familia indígena Los instrumentos de fierro se repartían por su parte en casi todas las provincias peruanas Golte 1980 mapa 22 El contador de la aduana de Lima José Ignacio de Lequanda estimaba que la población indígena se caracterizaba en general por una extrema rusticidad en su consumo sus necesidades son tan pocas que unos granos de maíz tostado y unas raíces mal condimentadas es su principal alimento su traje se reduce al de los tejidos toscos y groseros que ellos mismos fabrican sus habitaciones son unas tristes y desaliñadas chozas Cheesman 2011 1794 632 No dejó de señalar empero que desde mediados de este siglo en casi todo el Perú el consumo indígena añadía ahora un poco de lencería ordinaria bayetas inglesas y algunos paños entrefinos que llaman de segunda p 67576 además de mucha cera y hierro Tanto así que respecto a este último proclamó que el indio es el principal consumidor del que viene al Perú y de 7 los demás útiles de esta especie p 676 Puntas de hierro en los arados así como el uso de combas lampas azadones y hachas introdujeron a la agricultura y ganadería indígena en la edad del hierro en el siglo dieciocho lo que debió mejorar su productividad El aumento de la presión tributaria sobre los indios durante el siglo dieciocho ocurrió precisamente sobre la base de la idea de los funcionarios coloniales de que en la economía y el trabajo indígenas había bastante espacio para apretar la mano por lo abundante de sus tierras y recursos laborales a disposición El indio que cultiva los campos que tiene en abundancia si no es rico está pobre por ocioso Lequanda p 633 toda su vida la pasan los indios en una perniciosa ociosidad imitando al árabe vagabundo y el Estado no saca de ellos las ventajas que pudiera p 632 El aumento de la población indígena que se habría llegado a duplicar entre la primera y la segunda mitad de la centuria mejoró la dotación de trabajadores en la economía que como dijimos antes había sido uno de los puntos débiles de la economía virreinal en la época anterior Para poder aprovechar esta mano de obra adicional debía atacarse el carácter cerrado de la economía campesina indígena La política de repartos mercantiles el aumento del tributo y la mantención de la mita o trabajo rotativo forzado en medio de muchas voces que pedían su abolición fueron las estrategias desplegadas para ello González 2000 Golte 1980 No hay estadísticas de la evolución de la población esclava en el siglo dieciocho que era la población trabajadora más importante en la región de la costa El censo de 1792 registró 40337 esclavos en todo el virreinato además de un número similar de castas descendientes de negros mezclados con alguna otra raza que también engrosaban la población empleable Vollmer aumentó a 43161 el número de esclavos y en forma proporcional el de las castas Chocano 2010 24 En cualquier caso parece que este número era mayor que en los inicios del siglo14 Nicholas Cushner presentó una serie del 14 Bowser 1974 111 sugiere una población esclava total de unos 30 mil individuos para mediados del siglo diecisiete de los que aproximadamente la mitad residiría en Lima 8 número promedio de esclavos en ocho haciendas jesuitas entre 1665 y 1767 que mostró claramente tres fases una de aumento en el número de esclavos desde un promedio de 99 por hacienda hasta uno de 174 entre 1665 y 1710 una segunda de disminución a 121 esclavos entre 1710 y 1740 y desde entonces una de rápido crecimiento hasta llegar a un promedio de 256 esclavos por hacienda entre 1755 176715 El número de esclavos se habría duplicado en las haciendas jesuitas al pasar del segundo al tercer cuarto del siglo dieciocho Sin embargo otros terratenientes no eran dados a ocupar esclavos como los jesuitas 2 MINERÍA De los ramos de la producción la minería resultó uno de los de crecimiento más dinámico y al que los observadores coloniales ponderaron como aquel cuyo flujo posibilitaba el comercio con España al servir de contrapeso a las importaciones realizadas desde el viejo continente Casi toda la producción minera era para la exportación y como estas exportaciones representaban aproximadamente tres cuartas partes del total una producción mayor significaba elevar la capacidad de importación del virreinato peruano La minería peruana producía principalmente plata y en segundo lugar oro y azogue La cronología de la producción de plata basada en la más reciente edición del trabajo de John TePaske puede seguirse en el cuadro siguiente 15 Citado en Chocano 2010 33 9 Cuadro 2 Producción minera en el virreinato peruano 17011820 en millones de pesos de 272 mvds Décadas Plata Bajo Perú Plata Alto Perú Total plata Total oro Azogue de Huancavelica Total producción minera 17011710 462 2345 2807 041 225 3073 17111720 606 2135 2741 025 259 3025 17211730 1078 1954 3032 022 233 3287 17311740 1427 2238 3635 018 345 3998 17411750 1869 2519 4388 016 317 4721 17511760 2094 3249 5343 012 379 5734 17611770 2142 3615 5757 083 440 6280 17711780 2685 4165 6850 383 323 7556 17811790 3235 3617 6852 783 147 7782 17911800 4758 3938 8696 1061 278 10035 18011810 3978 2909 6887 792 223 7902 18111820 2879 1785 4664 052 4716 Fuente para la plata y el oro BrownTePaske 2010 5455 y 181212 para el azogue Brown 1988 Elaboración propia Fuente Cuadro 2 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 Millones de pesos de 272 mvds Gráfico 1 Producción minera en el Perú 17001820 Plata Bajo Perú Plata Alto Perú Azogue Oro Alto y Bajo Perú 10 El gráfico 1 muestra con claridad el peso determinante que la producción de plata tenía en el conjunto de la producción minera del virreinato La suma de los otros dos metales con una producción significativa oro y azogue no llegó a representar más de un 10 del total de la producción minera hasta 1780 aunque mejoraron levemente después Entre 1780 y 1810 la producción de oro llegó a representar un 10 del valor producido por la minería peruana dejando a la plata con un 87 y al azogue con el 3 restante Entre la primera y la última década del siglo dieciocho la producción de plata se triplicó aunque desde entonces hasta después de la independencia ingresó a un ciclo declinante El protagonismo de este crecimiento recayó en las minas del Bajo Perú Si en la primera década del siglo esta región representaba el 165 de toda la producción de plata contra el 835 del Alto Perú en la última década del siglo la distribución fue de 547 contra el 453 respectivamente La producción de plata en el Bajo Perú creció diez veces durante el siglo al pasar de 46 millones durante el decenio 17011710 a 476 millones en el de 17911800 Las minas de Pasco y Hualgayoc fueron las protagonistas más importantes del crecimiento de la minería bajo peruana durante la segunda mitad del siglo antes lo habían sido las minas de Caylloma Huarochirí Jauja y Chucuito situadas en distintos lugares de la sierra sur y central La producción de plata movía la demanda de un abanico de insumos como azogue instrumentos de fierro sal cueros velas de sebo maderas así como el de servicios de transporte de mulas llamas barcos y el de arrieros albéitares carpinteros y canteros Salvo los instrumentos de fierro traídos desde España el resto de insumos y de servicios era provisto por productores locales que debían ver crecer sus ventas conforme acrecía la producción de plata16 Este efecto multiplicador no necesariamente ocurría si el crecimiento de la producción obedecía a ganancias de productividad antes que a la extensión de la explotación Lo que sucedió en la minería peruana del siglo dieciocho fue una combinación de ambas estrategias De un lado se explotaron nuevos yacimientos como los de Pasco y Hualgayoc La región de la sierra norte apareció por primera vez como una zona de minería desarrollándose la producción de plata en 16 Assadourian 1979 11 asientos como Quiruvilca Pataz Huallanca además del ya citado Hualgayoc De otro ocurrieron innovaciones en los métodos de trabajo que debieron elevar la productividad El fracaso o poco éxito de la expedición de Nordenflicht al finalizar el siglo dieciocho ha difundido la noción de un estancamiento técnico general en la minería peruana de la época17 Esta misión se propuso reemplazar el sistema de amalgamación de la plata realizado en patios de piedra o buitrones por el uso de una máquina de barriles forrados interiormente de cobre el así llamado método de Born Dicha sustitución fracasó debido al elevado costo de la nueva tecnología en el medio local que requería insumos costosos como la madera además de una mano de obra calificada su poca divisibilidad y al tipo de relaciones sociales imperantes en la minería Este fracaso oscureció el éxito logrado en otras áreas como en la extracción de los minerales en los socavones gracias al uso de la pólvora desde los mediados del siglo dieciocho Hasta entonces la pólvora había sido poco utilizada en la minería peruana ya por provocar demasiado derrumbe o lo contrario por ser incapaz de remover las peñas demasiado duras La labor del ingeniero de Almadén Gerónimo de Sola en Huancavelica entre 17361748 permitió dominar el uso del explosivo en las minas de azogue de donde la técnica saltó al Cerro de Pasco18 El uso de la pólvora permitió abrir socavones de ventilación y de drenaje de agua Al reducirse el costo de apertura de los socavones estos no tenían que abrirse solamente persiguiendo la veta como hasta entonces sino que podían usarse para comunicar labores dotarlas de luz ventilarlas o drenar el agua El mejor ejemplo de ello fue el socavón de Yanacancha abierto en el Cerro de Pasco en la década de 1780 y que fuera tan importante para la bonanza de ese campamento en la coyuntura de finales del siglo dieciocho Otra innovación técnica destacable pero ya tardía como para cumplir un 17 Marie Helmer 1987 18 Serena Fernández 1988 ver también Kendall Brown 1988 12 papel en el crecimiento del siglo dieciocho fue la introducción de bombas de vapor para el desagüe en la década de 181019 Sola y Fuente llegó al Perú enviado por el gobierno español por lo que podríamos concluir en que el crecimiento de la producción minera tuvo que ver con varias medidas de la política borbónica empeñadas en aumentar las exportaciones peruanas de metales preciosos y con ellas el comercio ultramarino entre España y sus colonias americanas Entre tales medidas tendríamos que mencionar especialmente la rebaja a la mitad del impuesto a los productores mineros de un quinto a un décimo de su producto bruto aplicada desde 1736 Asimismo el aumento en el precio que pagaba la Casa de Moneda por la plata de los mineros conseguido a partir de la estatización de las cecas entre 1728 y 175020 y la política de crédito a los mineros en las cajas reales al venderles el azogue la pólvora y las herramientas de fierro al fiado y con precios estables La mejora en el abastecimiento de mercurio fue otro de los factores que explicaron la recuperación de la producción minera Para ello se reflotó la producción de las minas de Santa Bárbara en Huancavelica cuya veta principal estaba perdida desde los mediados del siglo diecisiete Sola y Fuente logró dar nuevamente con esta veta consiguiéndose un repunte de la producción de mercurio hasta los años de 1770 véase gráfico 2 El trabajo de este ingeniero de Almadén fue continuado entre 17581764 por el del marino Antonio Ulloa quien obtuvo una producción anual superior a los seis mil quintales que era la cantidad requerida por la minería peruana Huancavelica decayó en su producción desde el último cuarto del siglo dieciocho pero el abastecimiento desde Almadén suplió este retroceso Contar con un abastecimiento local no era desde luego lo mismo que tener que trasladarlo por mar y tierra desde España pero la organización estatal del mercurio el Real Estanco del Azogue consiguió mantener el precio del quintal por debajo de los cien pesos en todos los campamentos mineros por 19 Fisher 1977 20 Lazo 2006 13 apartados que estuviesen21 y aún conseguir una tendencia del precio a la baja A partir de 1808 el precio del quintal se redujo a 50 pesos en un esfuerzo por combatir la tendencia declinante de la producción de plata que se manifestó desde entonces Fuente K Brown 1988 Junto con el mercurio y la pólvora ambos estancados por el gobierno otro de los insumos importantes para la minería cuyo abastecimiento fue organizado y cuidado por el gobierno fueron los instrumentos de fierro combas martillos barretas La reducción de los costos de transporte desde mediados del siglo abarató el precio del fierro beneficiando a los mineros22 Las estadísticas de TePaske y Brown reconstruyen también la producción de oro que de haber sido insignificante hasta la década de 1750 cobró una importancia creciente hasta alcanzar una producción mayor a los diez millones de pesos de plata en el decenio de 179023 Esto representó más de un décimo de la producción de plata en esa misma década La producción de oro se vio beneficiada por los mismos factores que la de plata reducción de la carga fiscal sobre los productores abaratamiento y sobre todo 21 Ulloa 1792 Noticias americanas 22 Sobre los precios del fierro ver Macera et al 1992 23 TePaske y Brown 2010 5455 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 1700 1705 1710 1715 1720 1725 1730 1735 1740 1745 1750 1755 1760 1765 1770 1775 1780 1785 1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 Quintales Gráfico 2 Producción de azogue en Huancavelica 17001813 14 regularidad en el abastecimiento de azogue pólvora y ferretería y una mejor apreciación de los metales por una reorganizada Casa de Moneda vuélvase al gráfico 1 El crecimiento de la producción minera fue un producto de la política borbónica determinada por medidas desplegadas a partir de 1728 que alcanzaron sus frutos en la segunda mitad del siglo No todas las medidas tomadas en esta dirección tuvieron el mismo éxito Hemos mencionado ya el fracaso de la expedición mineralógica del Barón de Nordenflicht 17901810 La creación del Tribunal de Minería desde 1786 y de las Cajas de Rescate en los asientos mineros en los inicios de la década de 1790 y que funcionaron solo unos pocos años aunque tomadas con el espíritu de impulsar la minería fueron medidas de resultados más ambiguos24 La creación de un gremio y un fuero judicial propio para la minería complicó las posibilidades de atracción de capital para la inversión en el sector En el caso de las Cajas o Bancos de Rescate se clausuraron tras una fuerte polémica en la que se debatió hasta qué punto debía el Estado intervenir desplazando a los agentes privados de un rol que les era propio el de la inversión Fue una polémica interesante puesto que mostraría el debate entre mercantilismo y liberalismo que ocurría en el seno del propio gobierno colonial El argumento a favor de las Cajas de Rescate era que se dotaría a los mineros de un fondo de financiamiento independiente del que les venían proveyendo los comerciantes a unas tasas de interés que aquellos juzgaban elevadas Un financiamiento más barato estimularía una mayor producción de plata y esta aparte de mover una parte importante de la economía por el mecanismo de la compra de insumos promovería un mayor comercio de importación desde España con lo que se verían beneficiados los productores y comerciantes ibéricos así como el gobierno que levantaba impuestos de este tráfico ultramarino 24 Sobre el Real Tribunal de Minería ver Miguel Molina Martínez 1986 Sobre las Cajas de Rescate ver Contreras 1995 15 El reparo que se hacía a este argumento era que si el precio del financiamiento que pagaban los mineros era alto este era correspondiente al alto riesgo que se corría Los mineros no tenían fama de buenos pagadores y en ocasiones la propia explotación minera era juzgada como una especie de lotería Si el fondo para los créditos lo aportaba el Estado el incumplimiento en los pagos sería la norma porque tal era la experiencia al respecto dinero del rey era visto como dinero de todos Si el fondo lo aportaban los propios mineros cobrándoles una cuota cuando fuesen a quintar sus pastas significaría premiar a algunos a costa de todos Los mineros reglados y cumplidos no tenían problemas para conseguir financiamiento a buen precio Por qué debía obligárseles a contribuir a un fondo que no necesitaban La relación entre los mineros que producían la plata y los comerciantes que los habilitaban con insumos y caudales era considerada en esta línea de pensamiento como una relación natural que el Estado podía estropear con su intervención 3 AGRICULTURA La reconstrucción del volumen de la producción agrícola conlleva mayores dificultades que la de la minería por el menor control que tuvo el Estado sobre ella y en consecuencia la menor disponibilidad de cifras A través de los registros de los novenos y añadiendo las investigaciones específicas sobre recaudación o remate de los diezmos efectuadas por otros historiadores John Coatsworth y Carlos Newland reconstruyeron un cuadro de la evolución de los diezmos en cuatro regiones peruanas que comprendían prácticamente la totalidad del actual territorio peruano los Obispados de Lima Trujillo Cuzco y Arequipa véase cuadro 3 16 Cuadro 3 Índices del diezmo en cuatro obispados peruanos 17011800 cifras deflatadas sobre la base de los precios de Lima 16811700 100 Décadas Lima Trujillo Cuzco Arequipa Valor de la prod agrícola en pesos corrientes Valor de la prod agrícola en pesos deflatados Indice de la última columna 17011710 66 87 94 99 3741903 3340985 100 17111720 40 172 123 115 2548590 2800648 84 17211730 53 115 133 108 2961475 3150505 94 17311740 56 102 147 163 2962641 3485460 104 17411750 42 84 100 181 2697288 2697288 81 17511760 40 101 244 191 3205334 3237711 97 17611770 35 121 120 296 3167582 2897620 87 17711780 40 178 182 291 3303641 3514512 105 17811790 39 227 183 310 3965896 3672126 110 17911800 45 241 160 353 4221272 3872727 116 Fuente Basado en Coatsworth y Newland 2000 381 y Newland 2002 8081 Gráfico 3 Fuente cuadro 3 17 El panorama resultante muestra contrastes entre la producción agrícola del Obispado de Lima y el de los otros Obispados situados tanto al norte Trujillo como al sur de la capital La producción de la región central Lima habría decaído durante el siglo dieciocho al lado de un crecimiento registrado en los otros obispados Como quiera que el valor de la producción de Lima superaba la suma de todos los otros obispados su peso en el signo general era grande Sin embargo el vigor del crecimiento de la producción agraria en los otros obispados habría neutralizado la caída de Lima al punto de concluir en que al final de la centuria la producción era levemente superior al nivel del inicio Si considerásemos el crecimiento demográfico ocurrido durante el siglo el resultado sería no obstante una caída de la producción agrícola por habitante La decadencia de la agricultura de la región central en Lima al punto de llegar a representar menos de la mitad del nivel alcanzado en los últimos veinte años del siglo diecisiete es no obstante difícil de aceptar Los terremotos de 1687 y 1746 han sido presentados como devastadores para la agricultura de la costa central y podrían explicar el descalabro25 La crisis de la producción de trigo en la costa llevó a su importación desde Chile especializando a la costa peruana en la agricultura de tipo cálido del azúcar y en menor medida el algodón26 Probablemente los recaudadores del diezmo no valoraron el azúcar como el trigo lo que produjo la disminución de las sumas en que se subastó el diezmo De otro lado las investigaciones independientes que publicaron Manuel Burga Nadia Carnero y Miguel A Pinto mostraron un escenario de incremento en la recaudación de los remates por el diezmo en el obispado de Lima a partir de 177627 Pongamos los ejemplos de las parroquias de CallaoMagdalena las más próximas a Lima que crecieron de un monto anual de 3500 pesos en el trienio 17701772 a 7000 en el bienio 18131814 La parroquia de Tarma en la sierra central creció de 10825 pesos en el trienio 17731775 a 14100 en el de 180021802 Las demás parroquias tuvieron una evolución similar Los precios de Lima no subieron como para convertir este crecimiento en algo puramente nominal 25 Ver Bravo de Lagunas Voto consultivo 1755 1761 26 FloresGalindo 1984 27 Carnero y Pinto 1983 Burga 1987 18 La población de Lima creció de unos 37 mil habitantes hacia 1700 hasta un tamaño oscilante entre los 50 mil y 60 mil hacia 1800 Este crecimiento debió estimular la agricultura de la región inmediata Vimos antes que las haciendas jesuitas aumentaron el número de sus esclavos también su producción creció hasta el momento de su expulsión en 176728 Varias de estas haciendas estaban ubicadas en el Obispado de Lima En cualquier caso mientras se esclarece lo ocurrido con la producción agraria de la costa y la sierra central peruanas durante el siglo dieciocho la realidad del resto de regiones fue de crecimiento Este se detuvo empero en el caso del Cuzco vuélvase al cuadro 3 a raíz del surgimiento del puerto de Buenos Aires y de la adscripción de la región del Alto Perú al virreinato del Río de la Plata La competencia que se libró entre el nuevo virreinato y la región del sur peruano para abastecer las zonas mineras altoperuanas frenó el crecimiento de la producción agrícola de Cuzco y Arequipa29 4 COMERCIO EXTERIOR Las cifras sobre comercio exterior escasean antes de la implantación del sistema de administración estatal de la recaudación fiscal en los años de 1770 Los datos aportados por una tesis de George Dilg de 1975 muestran un alza continua de las exportaciones desde la década de 1740 hasta la de 1770 poniendo de manifiesto los beneficios del abandono del sistema de galeones por el de navíos de registro desde el decenio precisamente de 1740 Los despachos de navíos crecieron de un promedio de uno por año a cuatro por año mientras el valor total exportado pasó de un promedio de 13 millones anuales a uno de casi siete millones anuales entre las mismas fechas véase cuadro 4 28 Cushner 1980 29 Sobre Arequipa ver Brown 2008 19 Cuadro 4 Exportaciones desde el Callao hacia Cádiz 17401779 en pesos de ocho reales Décadas N de navíos Plata Oro Cacao Cascarilla Suma de los 4 17401749 7 8810062 1554855 2795003 91955 13251875 17501759 18 19448077 10901553 6198815 1335565 37884010 17601769 28 37251269 12529651 14719220 1376248 65876388 17701779 40 36231398 8434613 20890335 2936573 68492919 Fuente Dilg 1975 46 apéndice J Citado en Mazzeo 2010 248 Estas cifras contienen no obstante varias reexportaciones que hacía Lima hacia Europa de partidas de oro de Chile y sobre todo de cacao de Guayaquil De otro lado no consideran las exportaciones que salían hacia los virreinatos vecinos por lugares distintos al Callao por ejemplo de los puertos de la costa norte llamados puertos de valles salían menestras y jabón hacia Nueva Granada mientras desde Arequipa y Cuzco salía mercadería para el Alto Perú No existen datos para la época anterior a los navíos de registro pero los testimonios cualitativos refieren de un comercio muy decaído lo que hace presumir cifras no mayores a las del decenio de 174030 Para los años de 1780 en adelante se cuenta con las estimaciones de José Ignacio Lequanda Contador Mayor de la Aduana de Lima En un documento escrito en las postrimerías del siglo dieciocho en las que encomió la reforma del libre comercio contrastó las cifras del quinquenio 17751779 con las del corrido entre 17851789 Las exportaciones del Perú a España pasaron de 214 millones en el primero a 36 millones en el segundo31 Estos datos nos llevarían a tomar como algo exagerados los de Dilg puesto que solo un comercio muy potente entre 17701774 haría congruentes sus cifras con las de Lequanda De cualquier manera los datos de Lequanda indicarían un crecimiento de un promedio anual de 43 millones para el lustro 17751779 justo antes de la aplicación del reglamento de comercio libre a 72 millones anuales en el de 1785 1789 Para este mismo lustro Lequanda añadió las exportaciones inter coloniales del Perú hacia Chile 47 millones Guayaquil 29 millones y Panamá y Guatemala 02 30 Véase testimonios en Malamud 1982 31 Cheesman 2011 7071 20 millones que sumarían 78 millones o 16 millones anuales más a las cifras del comercio activo32 Hacia finales de la década de 1780 las exportaciones peruanas sumarían unos 88 millones de pesos aunque en la década siguiente de acuerdo a las cifras de Tadeo Haenke cayeron a 63 millones pero sin contar el comercio intercolonial El comercio de importación tuvo una evolución aproximadamente paralela al de exportación con cierta tendencia al déficit En el quinquenio 17851789 estudiado por Lequanda el monto importado tuvo un valor casi 20 mayor que el de las exportaciones en el caso del comercio con Europa mientras en el caso del comercio intercolonial el déficit de la balanza comercial fue menor al 1033 No obstante estas cifras correspondieron a un ciclo excepcional en que el mercado local quedó saturado de bienes importados lo que produjo una baja de precios y la crisis de los comerciantes del giro De cualquier manera es interesante este relativo equilibrio entre comercio activo y pasivo ya que no es lo que caracteriza a una economía de tipo colonial en una fase de bonanza de las exportaciones Suele ocurrir en estos casos un gran superávit de la balanza comercial a causa de la enorme concentración de la renta que de ordinario caracteriza a las economías coloniales Así sucedió en el Perú por ejemplo durante la bonanza del guano después de la independencia provocando los males conocidos como la enfermedad holandesa abundancia de moneda extranjera que desalienta a los productores orientados al mercado local34 Que en el virreinato peruano las importaciones se hayan movido al compás de las exportaciones durante un ciclo expansivo querría decir que la distribución de las ganancias dejadas por el giro de los bienes exportados no estaba tan concentrada al menos no en los niveles ocurridos después de la independencia Una parte importante de las ganancias de la minería que era el sector más grande de las exportaciones 70 del total durante el período 1760 1779 según las cifras del cuadro 4 debía distribuirse a través de los salarios pagados a 32 Cheesman 2011 73 33 Cheesman 2011 71 y 73 34 Hunt 2011 21 los trabajadores y a través también del amplio circuito de productores y beneficiadores informales que caracterizaba a la minería de esos años35 Las cifras de comercio del Callao proporcionadas por Carmen Parrón 1995 muestran un decaimiento después del decenio de 1790 véase cuadro 5 Debe advertirse que sus cifras no incorporan el comercio con las colonias vecinas de Chile Río de la Plata y Nueva Granada que no salían por el Callao lo que sin duda acentúa la caída y lleva a una exagerada brecha entre el comercio de exportación y el de importación Asimismo que registran solo el movimiento del puerto del Callao que aunque era el principal del virreinato no registraba el movimiento de otros puertos autorizados para el comercio ultramarino como el de Arica que tenía un movimiento no desdeñable se calcula que Arica movía aproximadamente un décimo del tráfico del Callao Cuadro 5 Comercio del Callao promedio anual 17841820 en miles de pesos Decenio Exportación de oro y plata en barras o moneda Exportación de frutos Total exportado Total importado 17841790 6177 1850 8030 6898 17911800 3118 1163 4506 1679 18011810 3240 652 5369 1042 18111820 2732 930 5706 1266 Incluye lo exportado hacia el Asia y países extranjeros pero no el comercio inter colonial Fuente Basado en Carmen Parrón 1995 La disminución después de 1790 debió ser sin embargo real y debe ser explicada De un lado el comercio se vio afectado entre 17971808 por la guerra contra Inglaterra y después de 1810 por las guerras de independencia Los bloqueos de los puertos explicarían el declive de la década de 1790 y la de 1800 A partir de 1817 la guerra de independencia de Chile crearía problemas también en el Pacífico sudamericano lo que provocaría que en la década de 1810 no se retornase a niveles de comercio similares a los del decenio de 178036 El declive de la producción de plata después de 1800 fue otra 35 Véase Contreras 1995 36 Mazzeo 2012 cap 3 22 razón para un movimiento similar en el comercio dado que la exportación de plata representaba gruesamente tres cuartas partes de las exportaciones peruanas Finalmente la descentralización del comercio promovido por la cédula de libre comercio de 1778 desarrolló otros puertos sudamericanos que redujeron el papel intermediario que había tenido el del Callao antes de esa fecha37 El cuadro 5 revela asimismo un marcado declive de las importaciones con el resultado de un desequilibrio en la balanza comercial a favor del comercio activo El descenso de las importaciones obedeció en parte al ya mencionado saturamiento del mercado producido en el quinquenio 17851789 Pudo deberse también al declive de la minería que habría implicado una menor distribución de la renta A partir de la década de 1790 la estructura del comercio adquiriría ahora sí el perfil de una economía colonial 5 INGRESOS FISCALES Los ingresos fiscales fueron el indicador de progreso más notorio en el siglo dieciocho Después de haberse reducido a 13 millones de pesos por año en el decenio de 1710 subieron hasta los 58 millones en el de 1780 y a casi seis millones en el de 1800 Se trató de un crecimiento mucho mayor que el de la población solo comparable al de la evolución de la producción de plata Entre las décadas de 1740 y 1780 la carga tributaria por habitante se incrementó más o menos al doble El cuadro 6 basado en las cifras de Herbert Klein permite una mirada de la estructura de los ingresos fiscales según sus componentes sectoriales mientras el cuadro 7 examina los componentes regionales Las fuentes de los ingresos fiscales se diversificaban en más o menos un centenar de partidas no representando ninguna de ordinario más de unos cuantos puntos de la recaudación total Klein agrupó las partidas de ingresos fiscales según rubros como comercio y agricultura minería estancos y tributos a los indios Resulta claro en el cuadro 6 que fueron los sectores de comercio y tributo quienes sostuvieron principalmente el esfuerzo de acrecentar los ingresos del gobierno Los impuestos al comercio externo e interno pasaron de representar un promedio de 17 del total de los ingresos fiscales durante la primera mitad del siglo dieciocho a representar un 28 durante el ciclo 17501780 Después de 1780 decayó su recaudación por problemas 37 Cheesman 2011 23 aparentemente administrativos los bloqueos navales durante las guerras contra Inglaterra propiciaron el contrabando y un sistema de navíos de permisos extraordinarios a barcos neutrales que probablemente desfiguran la importancia que el comercio tenía realmente en la economía peruana El tributo de los indios por su parte creció desde ser el 8 del total de los ingresos durante la primera mitad de la centuria hasta un 17 para la segunda mitad Hacia 1800 representaba el componente más importante de los ingresos fiscales del virreinato Klein 1994 Cuadro 6 Ingresos fiscales en el virreinato peruano y aporte porcentual por sectores 17001809 en pesos de ocho reales Décadas Minería Comercio Estancos Tributo Total recaudado pesos 17001709 31 158 17 73 2111361 17101719 75 213 41 83 1283928 17201729 94 154 50 36 2047889 17301739 102 170 57 63 2519855 17401749 107 185 29 125 1803036 17501759 93 236 44 182 1921581 17601769 98 314 53 186 2672469 17701779 113 291 68 102 2730640 17801789 96 137 125 168 5846004 17901799 161 21 60 182 5373077 18001809 131 41 91 166 5907361 Los aportes porcentuales no suman cien debido a que no se incluyen todos los rubros de ingresos en especial el de extraordinarios Fuente Basado en Klein 1994 24 Gráfico 4 Fuente Ibid de Cuadro 6 Podría sorprender que habiendo tenido la minería una recuperación robusta desde 1740 su contribución a los ingresos del Estado no hubiese mejorado sustancialmente si en la primera mitad del siglo su peso dentro del total de ingresos fue de 8 durante la segunda mitad fue de 11 Pero debe considerarse que uno de los factores de su despegue fue precisamente el alivio fiscal de modo que lo que habría que destacar es cómo a pesar de que los tributos que afectaban al sector fueron reducidos a la mitad el peso de estos impuestos dentro de la recaudación total aumentó antes que disminuyó Klein 1994 21 Cuanto a la regionalización del crecimiento económico que permite esclarecer la recaudación tributaria el cuadro es ciertamente complejo De entrada contemplando el cuadro 7 advertimos que se trató de una economía donde la recaudación estuvo fuertemente concentrada en la región central donde se ubicaba la capital del virreinato y al lado de ella el puerto principal El funcionamiento de las principales oficinas de hacienda y amonedación en la capital así como el hecho de ser Lima la sede residencial y de operaciones de los grandes comerciantes explicaba que aunque la producción hubiese ocurrido físicamente en otras regiones el pago de tributos se domiciliase en Lima Sin embargo el cuadro 7 deja ver que la hegemonía fiscal de Lima se atenuó a lo 25 largo del siglo cayendo de un promedio cercano al 90 en la primera mitad de la centuria a uno situado por debajo del 80 durante la segunda El crecimiento de la importancia de la región del sur cajas de Arequipa Cuzco Puno y Caylloma basada en una mayor recaudación tanto por tributo cuanto por comercio así como cierta recuperación en la recaudación de la región del norte cajas de Trujillo Piura y Saña dinamizada por la minería de Hualgayoc a partir de 1770 explicaron el descenso de la primacía de Lima en el cuadro de la recaudación tributaria Cuadro 7 Ingresos fiscales en el virreinato aporte porcentual por regiones 17001809 Décadas Norte Centro Sur Total 17001709 40 879 81 100 17101719 46 843 111 100 17201729 24 907 69 100 17301739 15 901 84 100 17401749 35 841 124 100 17501759 30 865 105 100 17601769 25 879 96 100 17701779 64 809 127 100 17801789 59 797 144 100 17901799 95 714 191 100 18001809 74 702 224 100 Fuente Basado en Klein 1994 20 En el largo plazo el cuadro luce más complicado El desarrollo de las minas de Pasco Cajatambo y Huarochirí en la sierra central le dio a la región central y a Lima en particular una autosuficiencia en materia monetaria que explicará la división del Alto y el Bajo Perú en dos países distintos desde antes de la independencia El comercio de Lima dependía antes de la minería altoperuana para poder funcionar actuando las ciudades del Cuzco Arequipa y Arica como las bisagras de esta relación de avío entre los comerciantes de la capital y los azogueros y mineros de Potosí38 El surgimiento de las minas de la sierra central peruana en la segunda mitad del siglo dieciocho desenganchó al comercio de Lima de la minería altoperuana Esta comenzaría a 38 Suárez 2001 26 vincularse más al comercio de Buenos Aires y de los portugueses en el Brasil39 La inclusión del Alto Perú dentro del virreinato del Río de la Plata en 1776 probó que fiscalmente la región central del virreinato peruano podía subsistir aunque las transferencias hacia Lima desde otras plazas sobre todo las del Alto Perú no habían desaparecido en los inicios del siglo diecinueve40 6 REFLEXIONES FINALES El economista Bruno Seminario ha propuesto una reconstrucción del producto bruto interno del Perú desde el año 1700 en un documento aún preliminar basándose para el siglo dieciocho en buena parte de la información que hemos utilizado aquí El resultado muestra un crecimiento del producto de casi el triple entre 1700 y 1800 al pasar de 22 millones de pesos en 1700 hasta los 67 millones en 1804 El despegue de la tendencia ocurrió según la misma estimación hacia 1740 y se aceleró en el último tercio del siglo dieciocho ver gráfico Gráfico 5 Fuente Bruno Seminario 2011 Pesos nominales significa que las cifras no han sido ajustadas de acuerdo a las variaciones de los precios o el poder de compra de la moneda Se asume que estas variaciones fueron muy pequeñas y por lo general a la baja 39 Tandeter 1992 40 Alejandra Irigoin e Irene Graffe 2012 27 El crecimiento del PBI disminuye hasta convertirse en apenas uno del 30 cuando se descuenta el crecimiento demográfico pero aún así habría ocurrido un cambio positivo en el producto por habitante Quienes han estudiado el movimiento de los precios en el virreinato peruano en el siglo dieciocho concluyeron que estos tuvieron una tendencia general a la baja especialmente durante la segunda mitad de la centuria Esta declinación habría sido el resultado de un aumento drástico de la producción de alimentos41 A diferencia de México no hubo situaciones de inflación de precios Los estudios sobre precios se han concentrado sin embargo en la región de Lima y del sur quedando pendiente averiguar lo ocurrido en el norte Cuáles fueron las raíces del crecimiento y por qué se detuvo alrededor de 1800 De un lado hubo un rebote demográfico tras la larga caída de la población ocurrida tras la conquista española La población indígena dejó de caer durante el siglo diecisiete alcanzado una estabilización y desde finales del diecisiete o inicios del dieciocho comenzó a recuperarse La epidemia de 17181723 cortó esta recuperación pero desde los mediados del siglo la recuperación continuó ya sin pausas En la medida que los recursos agrarios eran por entonces abundantes la población pudo expandir su producción de alimentos y aún mejorarlos por las ventajas que daba la aglomeración y una familia más numerosa Un lugar importante le cupo además a la política estatal Esta se propuso desde aproximadamente 1730 impulsar simultáneamente el crecimiento de la producción minera y de la recaudación fiscal aplicando medidas que algún tiempo después se mostraron efectivas La recuperación de la producción de plata era importante porque constituyendo este metal un 90 por ciento de las exportaciones del virreinato a Europa una mayor producción argentífera aumentaba el comercio de retorno al tiempo que favorecía la producción de insumos de lo que Assadourian llamara hace varios años el mercado minero colonial42 Una mayor producción minera debía aumentar el giro del comercio interno y externo y con él mejoraba la recaudación fiscal La estatización de 41 Brown 1992 Tandeter y Wachtel 1992 42 Assadourian 1982 28 las casas de moneda que llevó a un mejor precio para los productores de plata junto con la rebaja del impuesto a los productores fueron medidas dictadas en el segundo cuarto del siglo las que junto con el impulso a la producción de mercurio de Huancavelica llevaron al acrecentamiento de la producción de plata desde los mediados del siglo El otro ingrediente de la política borbónica procrecimiento fueron los controvertidos repartos de los corregidores Estas autoridades provinciales debían mantener un surtido de bienes que a la vez que le dieran salida al comercio manejado desde Lima permitieran a los indios mejorar su productividad Junto con las telas y ropas europeas y de la tierra formaban parte de los repartos bienes de producción como instrumentos de fierro y mulas que quizás por primera vez se pusieron al alcance de la economía campesina Los repartos tuvieron su mayor desarrollo durante el período 17501780 Como se sabe degeneraron en abusos que como dijera Lequanda mostraron que la vara del mercader no debía coincidir con la del juez y el gobernante Tras la rebelión de Túpac Amaru de 1780 los repartos fueron suprimidos Pero en algunas regiones fueron probablemente los responsables de impulsar el crecimiento de la producción campesina Durante el siglo dieciocho creció el consumo de bienes monetarios dentro de la población rural como por ejemplo el del aguardiente los tintes para los tejidos la pólvora ya para la minería ya para las fiestas lugareñas y la cera para la iluminación de los templos y las procesiones religiosas que nos estaría mostrando que el crecimiento económico alcanzó también al campesinado La reducción de los costos del transporte ultramarino ocurrido a lo largo de la centuria en virtud del uso de la ruta del Cabo de Hornos del sistema de navíos individuales en vez del comercio por flotas y de los propios adelantos de la navegación abarataron el precio del fierro y de las mulas que comenzaron a venir de Chile además del norte argentino favoreciendo la ampliación del mercado de estos bienes de producción 29 El aumento de la carga tributaria sobre los campesinos tuvo la doble intención de mejorar los ingresos del gobierno y promover una mayor producción de esta población La premisa detrás de esta política era que dentro de esta población la diligencia en la producción seguía al tributo Se trataba de una política riesgosa como lo mostró la rebelión tupamarista que protestó precisamente por la elevada carga fiscal El incremento del tributo estimuló en cualquier caso un enrolamiento de los campesinos en los mercados laborales de la minería Los nuevos campamentos productores de plata como Pasco y Hualgayoc no tenían una dotación de mitayos o trabajadores forzados por lo que debieron desenvolverse con mano de obra libre Por qué se detuvo el crecimiento económico al finalizar el siglo Primero habría que aclarar que esta detención ocurrió antes del inicio de las guerras de independencia de modo que no puede culparse del estancamiento a la intranquilidad o a la incertidumbre política Pareciera haberse enfrentado otros dos problemas uno fue la restricción de recursos No había más mano de obra Los esclavos escaseaban producido el veto de Gran Bretaña hacia el infamante tráfico desde 1807 y su precio se volvió prohibitivo Los indígenas se contrataban solo estacionalmente fuera de su actividad agropecuaria Su concurso estacional y esporádico acarreaba problemas para su adiestramiento y disciplina laboral Tampoco había capital para financiar la ampliación de la producción No existían bancos que pudieran movilizar capital de un sector a otro y de España no venía capital fresco para nuevas inversiones debido a la política fiscal de los borbones hacia 180043 Alfonso Quiroz 1993 señaló el episodio de la consolidación de vales reales de 18041805 como una razón del fin del ciclo de crecimiento Se trató de una operación financiera por la cual la corona española absorbió una fuerte cantidad de caudales de sus colonias americanas descapitalizando a la economía local Enrique Tandeter 1991 refirió de una epidemia en el Alto Perú hacia 18041805 que trajo un severo daño al comercio y el concurso de trabajadores en esa importante zona minera El hecho es que los últimos quince a veinte años del período colonial fueron testigos de una economía estancada y cuyas posibilidades de comercio exterior se reducían 43 Fontana 1974 30 conforme los virreinatos vecinos iban desafiliándose del imperio español e iniciaban su vida independiente Un segundo ingrediente de malestar para el crecimiento fue una política fiscal depredadora que succionaba casi todo el excedente disponible Cuando comenzaron las guerras de independencia hacia 18081810 esta política se endureció aún más ahogando las posibilidades de una recuperación En su Memoria sobre la pacificación de la América Meridional que el criollo peruano Manuel Lorenzo Vidaurre ofreció al rey de España en 1817 le presentaba un cuadro expresivo de los males de la guerra en el que representaba elocuentemente el malestar de los peruanos al ver que el premio a su fidelidad no era otro que las exacciones fiscales Dijo así Están divididas las Américas en dos partes Pueblos que se mantienen leales y pueblos rebeldes Para sugetar á estos se carga de pensiones á aquellos y su lealtad les trae como consecuencia el castigo en la ruina de sus propiedades en el hambre que sufren y en las vejaciones que continuamente se les causa para extraerles la última gota de sangre de sus venas Y no es regular que esta conducta les haga unirse á los que juraron independencia como un medio de felicidad común El ejemplo y la suerte de aquellos que sacudido el yugo han sabido sostenerse no alegrará la imaginación ofendida por tantos padecimientos Si esta unión se realiza qué será de la España44 La disminución de los capitales en giro se vio agravada mediante la política de retiro de la moneda macuquina realizado en el decenio de 1780 Al comienzo ello se vio compensado por mayores acuñaciones en la Casa de Moneda de Lima pero después de 1800 las acuñaciones disminuyeron ver gráfico 6 44 Manuel Vidaurre Memoria sobre la pacificación de la América Meridional Edición de Rubén Vargas Ugarte 1929 p 18 31 Gráfico 6 Fuente Carlos Lazo 2006 El largo ciclo de crecimiento económico trajo desde luego algunas reacciones sociales entre los sectores afectados El siglo dieciocho es conocido en la historiografía andina como la centuria de las rebeliones La de Túpac Amaru II entre 17801783 es solo la más famosa de varias decenas de movimientos de rebeldía estallados en el virreinato a veces en protesta contra los abusos de las autoridades locales otras veces contra imposiciones fiscales o la forma de cobrarlas Es importante hacer un esfuerzo analítico para que pueda entenderse la asociación entre crecimiento económico y convulsiones sociales en economías como la del virreinato peruano Sabemos que cuando ocurre un crecimiento económico no todos se benefician y hasta puede suceder que numéricamente sean más los perjudicados que los gananciosos La reactivación de las actividades productivas en la minería y la agricultura demandó mayores contingentes laborales La importación de esclavos no fue una alternativa suficiente además de constituir un modelo laboral rígido había que sostener al esclavo permanentemente aun cuando su trabajo sea demandado solo por períodos cortos de elevado costo y bastante riesgo La demanda de trabajadores se volvió entonces contra el sector de subsistencia de la economía alterando el equilibrio alcanzado entre este sector y el de la producción comercial Los empresarios mineros agrícolas y textiles cabildearon al 32 Estado colonial para que aumentase la dotación de trabajadores forzados al tiempo que procuraban atraerlos voluntariamente por medio del enganche45 El crecimiento del siglo dieciocho puede ser caracterizado como de signo primario exportador en el sentido de que los sectores dinámicos fueron los que vendían materias primas al extranjero como la minería argentífera y las plantaciones de azúcar y cacao No existían aún las ideas pesimistas que sobre este tipo de crecimiento aparecieron en el siglo veinte En cambio sí la esperanza de que como propuso el modelo de crecimiento guiado por las materias primas la staple theory de nuestros días él podía ir incorporando progresivamente a la población del sector de subsistencia tanto como mano de obra cuanto como proveedor de servicios o de insumos a las firmas extractoras o procesadoras de los bienes exportables Aguardaban que en el largo plazo el sector de subsistencia se reduciría mientras el aumento del sector comercial modernizaría el consumo del país Una vez que este se hubiese vuelto lo bastante robusto promovería la aparición de industrias orientadas a satisfacer su demanda de bienes de consumo Los gobernantes borbones esperaban que la capacidad de consumo alcanzada por los virreinatos americanos diese una salida a la capacidad productiva de los talleres de la península ibérica Una vez instaurado el gobierno republicano el modelo de crecimiento económico se adaptó a la nueva situación confiando en poder hacer brotar en el suelo patrio las fábricas que aprovechen el nuevo consumo provocado por el crecimiento económico Pero tras la independencia esperaría un largo invierno de postración económica 45 Este era un método de reclutamiento laboral mediante el cual se adelantaba al trabajador algunos beneficios que podían incluir dinero a cambio de que se comprometiese a concurrir a trabajar a un establecimiento por un número de semanas o de meses 33 Referencias bibliográficas References Assadourian Carlos Sempat 1979 La mercancía dinero en la formación del mercado interno colonial El caso del espacio peruano Siglo XVI En Enrique Florescano comp Ensayos sobre el desarrollo económico de México y América Latina México FCE 1982 El sistema de la economía colonial Mercado interno regiones y espacio económico Lima IEP Bowser Frederick 1977 El esclavo africano en el Perú colonial 15241650 México Siglo XXI Bravo de Lagunas 1755 1761 Pedro Joseph Voto consultivo que ofrece al excelentísimo Señor don Joseph Antonio Manso de Velasco Conde de Superunda el Dr D Pedro Joseph Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla Lima Oficina de los Huérphanos 1761 Brown Kendall 1988 La crisis financiera peruana al comienzo del siglo XVIII La minería de plata y la mina de azogues de Huancavelica En 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negociado la trayectoria hispana en la formación del Estado y el Imperio En Carlos Marichal y Johanna von Grafenstein coords El secreto del Imperio Español Los situados coloniales en el siglo XVIII México El Colegio de México e Instituto Mora Klein Herbert 1994 Fiscalidad real y gastos de gobierno El Virreinato del Perú 16801809 Lima IEP Documento de Trabajo N 66 Lazo García Carlos 2006 Historia de la economía colonial Lima Fondo Editorial Pedagógico de San Marcos Lequanda Joseph Ignacio de 1974 Idea Succinta del comercio del Perú y medios de prosperarlo con una noticia general de sus producciones En Cheesman Roxanne El Perú de Lequanda Lesevic Bruno 1986 La recuperación demográfica en el Perú durante el siglo XIX Lima INANDEP Macera Pablo Rosaura Andazabal y Marco Carnero 1992 Los precios del Perú siglos XVIXIX Fuentes 3 vols Lima Banco Central de Reserva del Perú Malamud Carlos 1982 España Francia y el comercio directo con el espacio peruano 16951730 Cádiz y Saint Malo En Fontana 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Aire Pearce Adrian 2005 El censo demográfico peruano de 17251740 En Drinot Paulo y Leo Garofalo eds Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia Lima IEP Quiroz Alfonso 1993 Deudas olvidadas Instrumentos de crédito en la economía colonial peruana 17501820 Lima PUCP Rodríguez de Carassa Joseph 1990 Dictamen de Don José Rodríguez de Carassa del Orden de Calatrava y Ensayador Mayor del Reino del Perú y de la Real Casa de la Moneda 1769 Ed de Carlos Lazo García Lima Banco Central de Reserva del Perú SánchezAlbornoz Nicolás La población de América Latina Desde los tiempos precolombinos hasta el año 2000 Madrid Alianza Editorial Seminario De Marzi Bruno 2012 Las cuentas nacionales del Perú 17002011 Lima Manusc 2012 Suárez Margarita 2001 Desafíos transatlánticos mercaderes banqueros y el estado en el Perú virreinal 16001700 Lima PUCP IFEA FCE 2001 37 Tandeter Enrique 1991 La crisis de 18001805 en el Alto Perú En Heraclio Bonilla ed Los Andes en la encrucijada indios comunidades y Estado en el siglo XIX Quito FLACSOLibri Mundi 1992 Coacción y mercado La minería de la plata en el Potosí colonial 16921826 Cuzco Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas Tandeter Enrique y Nathan Wachtel 1992 Precios y producción agraria Potosí y Charcas en el siglo XVIII En Johnson Lyman y Enrique Tandeter comps Economías coloniales Precios y salarios en América Latina siglo XVIII México FCE TePaske John y Kendall Brown 2010 A New World of Gold and Silver LeidenBoston Brill Ulloa Antonio de 1944 Noticias americanas entretenimiento físicohistórico sobre la América Meridional y la Septentrional Oriental 1792 Buenos Aires Nova Varillas Alberto y Patricia Mostajo 1990 La situación poblacional peruana Balance y perspectivas Lima INANDEP Vidaurre Manuel 1929 Memoria sobre la pacificación de la América meridional 1817 En Rubén Vargas Ugarte Un inédito de Vidaurre Boletín del Museo Boliviariano N 13 Lima Vollmer Günther 1967 Bevölkerungspolitik und Bevölkerungsstrucktur im Vizekönigreich Peru zur Ende der Kolonialzeit 17411821 Berlín Gehlen ÚLTIMAS PUBLICACIONES DE LOS PROFESORES DEL DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA Libros Ismael Muñoz 2014 Inclusión social Enfoques políticas y gestión pública en el Perú Lima Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Cecilia Garavito 2014 Microeconomía Consumidores productores y estructuras de mercado Lima Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Alfredo Dammert Lira y Raúl García Carpio 2013 La Economía Mundial Hacia dónde vamos Lima Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Piero Ghezzi y José Gallardo 2013 Qué se puede hacer con el Perú Ideas para sostener el crecimiento económico en el largo plazo Lima Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú y Fondo Editorial de la Universidad del Pacífico Cecilia Garavito e Ismael Muñoz Eds 2012 Empleo y protección social Lima Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Félix Jiménez 2012 Elementos de teoría y política macroeconómica para una economía abierta Tomos I y II Lima Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Félix Jiménez 2012 Crecimiento económico enfoques y modelos Lima Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Janina León Castillo y Javier M Iguiñiz Echeverría Eds 2011 Desigualdad distributiva en el Perú Dimensiones Lima Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Alan Fairlie 2010 Biocomercio en el Perú Experiencias y propuestas Lima Escuela de Posgrado Maestría en Biocomercio y Desarrollo Sostenible PUCP IDEA PUCP y LATN José Rodríguez y Albert Berry Eds 2010 Desafíos laborales en América Latina después de dos décadas de reformas estructurales Bolivia Paraguay Perú 19972008 Lima Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú e Instituto de Estudios Peruanos Serie Documentos de Trabajo No 375 Assesing the Impact of a Student Loan Program on TimetoDegree The Case of a Program in Peru Luis García Abril 2013 No 374 Incluir socialmente a los adultos mayores Es suficiente pensión 65 Luis García Marzo 2014 No 373 Inclusión social En qué Un enfoque relacional Javier M Iguiñiz Echeverría Enero 2014 No 372 Economic growth and wage stagnation in Peru 19982012 Peter Paz y Carlos Urrutia Enero 2014 No 371 Peruvian Miracle Good Luck or Good Policies Waldo Mendoza Bellido Diciembre 2013 No 370 La educación superior en el Perú situación actual y perspectivas José S Rodríguez y Lisset Montoro Diciembre 2013 No 369 The Dynamic Relationship between Stock Market Development and Economic Activity Evidence from Peru 19652011 Erick Lahura y Marco Vega Diciembre 2013 No 368 TrendCycle Decomposition for Peruvian GDP Application of an Alternative Method Ángel Guillén y Gabriel Rodriguez Diciembre 2013 No 367 Do Labor Reforms in Spain have an Effect on the Equilibrium Unemployment Rate Dionisio Ramírez y Gabriel Rodríguez Diciembre 2013 No 366 The ISLMBB A Model for Unconventional Monetary Policy Waldo Mendoza Diciembre 2013 No 365 Mediciones del cambio estructural en el Perú un análisis regional 2002 2011 Waldo Mendoza Diciembre 2013 Departamento de Economía Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Av Universitaria 1801 Lima 32 Perú Telf 6262000 anexos 4950 4951 httpwwwpucpedupeeconomia THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF SLAVERY VOLUME 3 AD 1420AD 1804 Edited by David Eltis and Stanley L Engerman THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF SLAVERY Volume 3 ad 1420ad 1804 Most societies in the past have had slaves and almost all peoples have at some time in their pasts been both slaves and owners of slaves Recent decades have seen a significant increase in our understanding of the historical role played by slavery and wide interest across a range of academic disciplines in the evolution of the institution Exciting and innovative research methodologies have been developed and numerous fruitful debates generated Further the study of slavery has come to provide strong connections between academic research and the wider public interest at a time when such links have in general been weak The Cambridge World History of Slavery responds to these trends by providing for the first time in four volumes a comprehensive global history of this widespread phenomenon from the ancient world to the present day Volume 3 of The Cambridge World History of Slavery is a collection of essays 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 The authors wellknown authorities in their respective fields place slavery in the foreground of the collection but also examine other types of coerced labor Essays are organized both nationally and thematically and cover the major empires coerced migration slave resistance gender demography law and the economic significance of coerced labor Nonscholars will also find this volume accessible David Eltis is Robert W Woodruff Professor of History at Emory University and research associate of the W E B Du Bois Institute Harvard University He has also held visiting appointments at Harvard Yale and Oxford universities Eltis received his PhD from the University of Rochester in 1979 He is author of The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas coauthor with David Richardson of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and cocompiler of Slave Voyages at wwwslavevoyagesorg He coedited and contributed to Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database with David Richardson and Slavery in the Development of the Americas with Frank D Lewis and Kenneth L Sokoloff and edited Coerced and Free Migrations Global Perspectives Stanley L Engerman is John H Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History at the University of Rochester He has also previously taught at Harvard Yale Oxford and Cambridge universities Engerman received his PhD in eco nomics from Johns Hopkins University in 1962 He is the author of Slavery Emancipation and Freedom Comparative Perspectives and the coauthor of Time on the Cross The Economics of American Negro Slavery with Robert Fogel and Naval Blockades in Peace and War An Economic History Since 1750 with Lance E Davis He is also coeditor of A Historical Guide to World Slavery with Seymour Drescher Finance Intermediaries and Economic Development with Philip T Hoffman JeanLaurent Rosenthal and Kenneth L Sokoloff and The Cambridge Economic History of the United States with Robert E Gallman Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF SLAVERY General editors David Eltis Emory University Stanley L Engerman University of Rochester Volume I The Ancient Mediterranean World Edited by Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge Volume II ad 500ad 1420 Edited by David Eltis and Stanley L Engerman Volume III ad 1420ad 1804 Edited by David Eltis and Stanley L Engerman Volume IV ad 1804ad 2000 Edited by Seymour Drescher David Eltis and Stanley L Engerman Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF SLAVERY VOLUME 3 ad 1420ad 1804 Edited by DAVID ELTIS Emory University STANLEY L ENGERMAN University of Rochester Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 cambridge university press Cambridge New York Melbourne Madrid Cape Town Singapore Sao Paulo Delhi Tokyo Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas New York ny 100132473 usa wwwcambridgeorg Information on this title wwwcambridgeorg9780521840682 C Cambridge University Press 2011 This publication is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press First published 2011 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Revised for volume 3 The Cambridge world history of slavery edited by David Eltis and Stanley L Engerman p cm Includes bibliographical references and index isbn 9780521840668 hardback 1 Slavery History I Eltis David II Engerman Stanley L III Title ht861c34 2009 306362dc22 2009036356 isbn 9780521840682 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or thirdparty Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is or will remain accurate or appropriate Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CONTENTS List of Maps Figures and Tables page ix Contributors xi Series Editors Introduction xiii 1 Dependence Servility and Coerced Labor in Time and Space 1 david eltis and stanley l engerman part i slavery in africa and asia minor 2 Enslavement in the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Period 25 ehud r toledano 3 Slavery in Islamic Africa 14001800 47 rudolph t ware iii 4 Slavery in NonIslamic West Africa 14201820 81 g ugo nwokeji 5 Slaving and Resistance to Slaving in West Central Africa 111 roquinaldo ferreira 6 White Servitude 132 william g clarencesmith and david eltis part ii slavery in asia 7 Slavery in Southeast Asia 14201804 163 kerry ward 8 Slavery in Early Modern China 186 pamela kyle crossley v Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 vi contents part iii slavery among the indigenous americans 9 Slavery in Indigenous North America 217 leland donald 10 Indigenous Slavery in South America 14921820 248 neil l whitehead part iv slavery and serfdom in eastern europe 11 Russian Slavery and Serfdom 14501804 275 richard hellie 12 Manorialism and Rural Subjection in East Central Europe 15001800 297 edgar melton part v slavery in the americas 13 Slavery in the Atlantic Islands and the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic World 325 william d phillips jr 14 Slavery and Politics in Colonial Portuguese America The Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries 350 joao fragoso and ana rios 15 Slavery in the British Caribbean 378 philip d morgan 16 Slavery in the North American Mainland Colonies 407 lorena s walsh 17 Slavery in the French Caribbean 16351804 431 laurent dubois 18 Slavery and the Slave Trade of the Minor Atlantic Powers 450 pieter emmer Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 contents vii part vi cultural and demographic patterns in the americas 19 Demography and Family Structures 479 b w higman 20 The Concept of Creolization 513 richard price 21 Black Women in the Early Americas 538 betty wood part vii legal structures economics and the movement of coerced peoples in the atlantic world 22 Involuntary Migration in the Early Modern World 15001800 563 david richardson 23 Slavery Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World 14201807 594 sue peabody 24 European Forced Labor in the Early Modern Era 631 timothy coates 25 Transatlantic Slavery and Economic Development in the Atlantic World West Africa 14501850 650 joseph e inikori part viii slavery and resistance 26 Slave Worker Rebellions and Revolution in the Americas to 1804 677 mary turner 27 Runaways and Quilombolas in the Americas 708 manolo florentino and marcia amantino Index 741 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 LIST OF MAPS FIGURES AND TABLES maps 91 Culture Areas of Indigenous North America page 216 121 East Central Europe ca 1500 296 141 Brazil Eighteenth Century 348 142 Portuguese Empire in America Eighteenth Century 349 figures 271 Sambabaia Quilombo 730 272 River of Perdition Quilombo 731 273 Quilombo on a Tributary of the Perdition River 732 274 Ambrozio Quilombo 733 275 Sam Goncalo Quilombo 734 tables 101 Debts to be collected by the postmaster of Cuyuni 262 141 Distribution of registered slave baptisms Sao Goncalo 16511668 363 151 Slave populations of the British Caribbean 16501830 383 152 Annual percentage decline and increase in the slave populations of the British Caribbean 16271825 384 181 Imports of slaves in Dutch Brazil 16301653 by African region of origin 456 182 Surinames trade balancebalance of payments 17661776 average per year 461 183 The Dutch slave trade 16001800 465 184 Distribution of slave departures from Africa on Danish vessels 468 201 The African origins of Suriname slaves 518 221 Involuntary migration in the Old World 15001800 estimates and projections 570 ix Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 x list of maps figures and tables 222 Africans and whites taken to the Americas 15001800 by subperiods 574 223 National participation in transatlantic slave trade 15001800 582 224 Numbers of slaves shipped by African region of departure all carriers 15001800 586 251 Merchandise carried to the African Coast by the Mary in 1684 665 252 Cowries carried to the Gold Coast from Britain 18271850 threeyear averages in tons 666 253 Distribution of commodities carried to the Bight of Benin from Britain select years 16811724 666 254 Distribution of commodities carried to the Bight of Biafra from Britain select years 16611791 667 255 Distribution of commodities carried to the Bights of Benin and Biafra from Britain select years 18281850 668 271 Demographic profile of slaves in Taubate 17301830 and Rio de Janeiro 17891835 709 272 Demographic profiles of escaped slaves advertised in newspapers in the Caribbean and the southern United States 17301805 714 273 Population estimates of some Minas Gerais quilombos 17661770 726 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CONTRIBUTORS Marcia Amantino Department of History Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Brazil William G ClarenceSmith Department of History School of Oriental and African Studies UK Timothy Coates Department of History College of Charleston USA Pamela Kyle Crossley Department of History Dartmouth College USA Leland Donald University of Victoria British Columbia Canada Laurent Dubois Department of History Duke University USA David Eltis Department of History Emory University USA Pieter Emmer Department of History Leiden University Netherlands Stanley L Engerman Departments of Economics and History University of Rochester USA Roquinaldo Ferreira Department of History University of Virginia USA Manolo Florentino Department of History Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Brazil Joao Fragoso Department of History Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Brazil Richard Hellie University of Chicago USA deceased B W Higman Department of History Australian National University Australia Joseph E Inikori Department of History University of Rochester USA Edgar Melton Department of History Wright State University USA Philip D Morgan Department of History Johns Hopkins University USA xi Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 xii contributors G Ugo Nwokeji Department of African American Studies University of California Berkeley USA Sue Peabody Department of History Washington State University USA William D Phillips Jr Department of History University of Minnesota USA Richard Price Department of Anthropology College of William and Mary USA David Richardson Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation University of Hull UK Ana Rios Department of History Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Brazil Ehud R Toledano Department of History Tel Aviv University Israel Mary Turner Institute of Commonwealth Studies University of London UK Lorena S Walsh Colonial Williamsburg Foundation USA retired Kerry Ward Department of History University of Michigan USA Rudolph T Ware III Department of History University of Michigan USA Neil L Whitehead Department of Anthropology University of Wisconsin USA Betty Wood Department of History Cambridge University UK Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 SERIES EDITORS INTRODUCTION This is the third volume of The Cambridge World History of Slavery explor ing 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 A second common characteristic is the fact that chattel status is a heritable condition passed down through the mother Such characteristics are not to be found in the more general category of coerced labor as normally practiced The latter typically involves a general loss of citizenship rights but not necessarily ownership of one person by another and inherited status Some scholars regard slavery as part of a spectrum of coerced labor and dependency but the institution has maintained a distinctive legal existence in almost all societies xiii Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 1 DEPENDENCE SERVILITY AND COERCED LABOR IN TIME AND SPACE david eltis and stanley l engerman 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 projects 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 Hitlers 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 This phenomenon an outcome of the Enlightenment shapes the form of the modern assault on slavery General explanations of the rise and fall of slavery have not fared well in recent years as the great resources thrown into the study of slavery from primary sources have revealed the richness and complexity of the institution As this suggests such explanations tend to date from an era predating our present age of extensive empirical research and for the most part focus on slavery or rather separate slavery from other forms of dependency counter to what we wish to do Such explanations are quite good at describing how slavery functions but are weakest at accounting for first its rise second its fall and third why at times nonslave dependency for instance serfdom emerges as more important than chattel slavery 1 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 2 the cambridge world history of slavery Most important of all perhaps they fail to explain the eligibility issue in other words why certain peoples are seen as qualifying for slavery whereas others are not and why this changes over time This last issue has become of much greater interest in the last decade or so as the realization spreads that all peoples in the world have been at some time in their history both slaves and owners of slaves often at one and the same time Having dismissed general theories we will nevertheless mention three of them here as sometimes helpful There is the general Marxist position implicit in the work of those who followed Marx if not Marx himself who had little to say on the subject which in broad terms takes the position that any ruling class would wish to impose slavelike conditions on the rest of society and is prevented from doing so only by resistance on the part of the potential slaves This position is tempered by an argument quite incorrect in our view that chattel slavery is not compatible with industrialization because in crude terms advanced capitalism needs consumers and skilled workers who respond to incentives Thus it is argued slavery exists when conditions hobble the ability of people to resist enslavement and tends to disappear with the onset of industrialization A second general position is that of Jack Goody who accepts the overwhelming power element of the previous argument but interprets it in terms of states rather than classes This has the advantage of recognizing that most peoples in history have not enslaved full members of their own society and have sought slaves from elsewhere It also projects to the level of the state the explanation Adam Smith offered for slavery at the personal level which was mans love to domineer Such an impulse would probably hold for both states and individuals even if using free rather than slave labor might lead to more profits Based mainly on his study of African societies Goody offers the general proposition that any time a state was significantly more powerful than its neighbors one could expect the powerful state to use the weaker as a source of slaves A third general explanation is the now wellknown NieboerDomar hypothesis that focuses on the environment It is a landlabor argument that elegantly lays out the social consequences of land abundance In short it holds that slavery will tend to emerge in such an environment because one cannot have free land in other words a frontier open for settlement free workers willing to work for wages and a nonworking landowning class at the same time Only two of these three elements can exist at once Hence serfdom emerged in early modern Eastern Europe and slavery emerged in the Americas We find this persuasive but there is nothing to account for why serfdom emerged and not slavery and vice versa why slavery never appeared in many landabundant environments especially huntergatherer societies and why slavery disappeared in the Americas at least several generations before the closing of the land frontier on the two continents Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 3 Instead of dwelling further on these general theories we would like at least at this stage of the project to note the different forms of forced dependency that have existed as well as some common patterns in the institution of slavery and how these have changed over time If we are to gain any insight into slavery however it must be assessed as part of a con tinuum of dependency typically seen as occupying the opposite pole from free labor and separated from it by such institutions as indentured servi tude convict labor debt peonage and serfdom to mention just a few of the intervening categories Institutionalized dependency and servitude had been accepted without question in Western and nonWestern cultures alike from the dawn of recorded history until the modern historical era and they have formed one of the basic institutions that have appeared in almost every culture Earlier discussions of dependency and more specifi cally slavery where they occurred were couched in terms of how individual slaves should be treated who should be a slave and how one could fall into or lose slave status but not whether the institution itself should exist Moreover however firmly the modern mind sees free labor as the antithe sis to slavery free labor arguably did not exist at all until the nineteenth century in the sense of the masterservant contract being enshrined in civil rather than criminal law For example free labor emerged first in the United States As late as 1875 in England a worker who refused to comply with the terms of his contract was viewed as stealing from the employer Indeed when the postemancipation British West Indies colonial authorities intro duced what the Colonial Office in London regarded as a harsh labor code it was pointed out that the new code was basically adapted from the British Master and Servant Act More recently Kevin Bales has estimated that 27 million slaves lived in the latetwentiethcentury world It is possible to question the definition he uses it appears to cover a range of dependency relations rather than chattel slavery per se but even accepting it for the moment 27 million constitutes far less than 1 percent of todays global population Two and a half centuries ago as Arthur Young among others pointed out a definition of unfree status similar to that employed by Bales would have encompassed a majority share of the mideighteenth centurys working population whereas a definition of free labor in the modern sense would have covered few if any waged workers in 1750 or in any preceding era Broadly then institutionalized coercive relationships whether for profit or for some more overtly social purpose were normal before the nineteenth century and have diminished rather dramatically since Perhaps the first step is to recognize changes in the way societies have defined the various forms of dependency Thus as already hinted even the nature of free labor has changed substantially within the confines of the period to which volume three of the present project is devoted waged Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 4 the cambridge world history of slavery labor in seventeenthcentury England and even in midnineteenthcentury America being taken as a sign that an individual could not possibly be a full citizen Among the more overt forms of dependency and coerced labor convict labor in the sense of those guilty of offenses being required to labor by the state has increased dramatically since the early mod ern period Prior to this and in many nonWestern environments long afterward those guilty of crimes against the community might be physi cally chastised or expelled Punishment had few implications for labor In Western societies physical chastisement came to be supplemented by or in some instances replaced with incarceration and expulsion became system atized into transportation In both cases however convicts were frequently expected to labor as well The Siberian case is well known Exile was stipu lated as early as 1582 but the forced labor of exiles is an eighteenthcentury phenomenon with in the British case a rapid switch from colonial North America to the antipodes as the place of exile The most striking example is perhaps Australia where shortly before the ending of transportation in the 1850s convicts brought halfway around the world formed a similar proportion of the total population as had slaves in South Carolina less than a century earlier and a far greater proportion than was ever the case in Siberia They were also responsible for much of the infrastructure that accelerated the economic development of Australia Despite this the exac tion of labor was never the major reason for the creation of convicts in the first place or even after conviction for the existence of schemes that used the labor of those convicted such as workhouses prison gangs galleys soviet gulags and transportation to distant colonies Indeed the history of coerced labor in the context of the history of the communitys or states need to punish transgressors seems a story of lost economic opportunity One possible reason for this is that few schemes to harness the labor of convicts appeared to have warranted the expenditures they incurred at least within the norms that most societies regarded as acceptable for the treatment of convicts If convicts had been treated like African slaves then there might have been different economic consequences In classical times prisoners of war were probably the major source of slaves especially in the early expansionary days of the Roman Empire as was also the case more recently in Africa and the indigenous Americas Historically capture in war has always been a justification of slavery If a victor has the power to end a persons life then presumably the victor also has the power to inflict social death or slavery as opposed to biological death A typical pattern at the conclusion of a battle was to inflict the latter on adult males and the former slavery on women and children Such behavior is observed in the struggles between core states in Western Europe and the peoples that spearheaded the great migration prior to the fall of the Roman Empire and on down to the early Middle Ages It was Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 5 also prevalent in struggles between most premodern polities everywhere in the world The first effect of the emergence of large states and empires whether in China Mesoamerica or the aforementioned case of Rome where state structures allowed the control of men as well as of women and children was that men too became slaves Yet in the European world treatment of prisoners of war changed rather decisively around the twelfth century as relative equality of power between European states and also between Islamic and Christian powers and the attendant fear that the defeated power might be the victor in the next conflict meant that gradually more and more prisoners of war came to be exchanged or ran somed Yet when Western European nations ended enslavement of one another they still carried on extensive warfare resulting in largescale deaths rape and pillaging Whatever the reason there is almost no evidence of prisoners of war being enslaved in the European Atlantic world during the era of American slavery and indeed no indication of servitude of any length being exacted by the victors in the many intraEuropean wars of the era except perhaps for Dutch prisoners being put to work draining the English fens in the seventeenth century for the duration of hostilities The major exception was prisoners of civil wars and those on the Celtic fringe that resisted the expansionary impulses of the core states of Western Europe they were sent in large numbers to American plantations at least in the seventeenth century but always as servants with fixed terms rather than as chattel slaves and with offspring who were free Debt bondage was a form of servitude based upon an initial agreement to borrow funds and continued until the time if ever the debt was repaid The debt was payable by the family of the borrower if the latter was unable to repay while alive Lenders were accused of extending too much credit or charging an excessively high interest rate so that repayment was never possible The borrower would therefore become bound for very long periods perhaps for life Debt bondage was a system of coercion sometimes associated with the postchattelslavery era as manifested in nineteenth century India but it was practiced widely and in some cases earlier in other parts of Southeast Asia as well as in Latin America Africa and China Serfdom has a history going back to at least ancient Greece and formed the basis of agricultural production and rural social structure alike in Western European medieval countries The classic explanations of its rise in what might be called its first resurgence in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire allow for some peasant agency The feudal contract provided some protection from marauding invaders for those working the land in return for feudal obligations to the lord who provided the security From the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries serfdom went through a second renaissance in Eastern Europe and on a much smaller scale in Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 6 the cambridge world history of slavery Scotland after seemingly heading toward insignificance in the West Both the scale and the intensity that is the restrictions applied to the peasant increased in the east through to the eighteenth century as the Russian and Prussian states extended the area under their control eastward By late in that century there were probably more serfs in Europe including Russia than ever before Expansion also meant that the term serf came to cover a much wider range of servile relationships than earlier Serfdom may have disappeared in Scandinavia England and the Netherlands but in most parts of Western Europe including Germany and France peasants still owed residual obligations to landholders Indeed in Germany such obligations acted as a major restraint on German migration to both east and west as German peasants had to compensate their lords before they could legally migrate Peasant support for the early stages of the French Revolution is testimony enough to the significance of similar obligations west of the Rhine The new full serfdom that developed in Eastern Europe from the six teenth century varied somewhat from its Western predecessor Although primarily a means of ensuring that landholders would have a supply of labor and the state a pool of potential soldiers a new form of serfdom also showed up stripped of its military aspects in mines in Scotland Germany and even in the lead mines of Elizabethan England In the Scottish case valuations of the collieries reflected the number age and sex of the serf workforce in a way familiar to those who have studied probate records or deeds in plantation regions in the Americas In addition the second serf dom showed much less evidence of the contractual implicit or otherwise basis for serf status that historians have seen in its Dark Ages predecessor The new lands acquired by an expanding Russian state were taken from indigenous mainly Turkic peoples and remained highly insecure Hun dreds of thousands of Russians and other Slavic peoples fell victim to slave raids and died in servitude in Islamic and Christian Middle Eastern regions as indeed the origin of the term slave suggests Nevertheless there is little sense of a contractual relationship between the peasant on the one hand and the state or the local pomeschiki class in Russian history on the other The expansion of serfdom occurred overwhelmingly at the initiative of an expanding militaristic state Equally important some Eastern serfs came to have fewer ties with the land in law in the sense that both state and seigneurial peasants in Russia could be forcibly moved to new lands in a way that would not have been imaginable in medieval Western Europe and which was redolent of chattelslave status Under such circumstances given the heritability of serf status drawing a legal or behavioral line between serf and slave status becomes difficult If the resurgence of serfdom in the east changed the nature of serfdom completely new forms of coercive relationships appeared in northwest ern Europe The aforementioned masterservant contract as it evolved in Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 7 the aftermath of the Great Plague recognized the right of the master to physically chastise the servant and charge the servant with theft in the event that the latter did not meet the terms of the contract From the broad global perspective what is extraordinary about such a relationship is the voluntary nature of the initial contract and the fact that it could be renewed at least once a year Rural fairs in northwestern Europe became not just markets for surplus produce but late in each year nascent markets for labor as well In the global history of dependency and coercive labor this was a watershed in the evolution of agency on the part of those without property or without kin The evolution of the masterservant rela tionship has received very little attention at least from the comparative perspective Equally unique in global terms was the system it spawned for facilitating largescale transoceanic travel As it evolved in England the masterservant contract provided the initial basis for the repeopling of the Americas and much later the first largescale movement of Asian peoples to the semitropical Americas In its first manifestation it came to be called indentured servitude in its second contract labor In both cases there was a largely voluntary contract in which individual workers gave up several years of their working lives in return for the cost of passage During the period of the contract there were clear analogies with slavery in that the contract could be sold and severe restrictions placed on the rights of the worker to move or to avoid the obligations incurred Once more the full weight of the criminal law was applied against the servant for noncompli ance but not against the master The length of the term of labor required appears to have varied closely with key variables such as the age and skill level of the laborer and the distance and thus the cost of the migrants passage Major change occurred within the slavery category over the centuries preceding its abolition There are arguably three aspects of slave societies that at a preliminary view are to be found across cultures although the incidence and distribution of these forms do seem to vary in a systematic fashion As with attempts at definition these may seem vague and indef inite but they help provide some analytical grounding for an important issue First and perhaps most common from a transglobal perspective was slavery as a system of augmenting and sustaining the survival of the group as a social entity whether based on some conception of kinship or set of religious beliefs Such slavery is more likely to be open that is to provide for eventual entry into full membership of society through a process of a gradual reduction in marginality of either the slave or more likely the descendants of the slave though the stigma of slave origins could survive for many generations Slavery of this type could be associated with large state structures as in many Islamic polities or in smaller societies on either side of the shift to settled agriculture as in the indigenous Americas and prenineteenthcentury Africa Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 8 the cambridge world history of slavery A second type of slavery was as a system directly organized by the state to achieve communal goals perhaps the maintenance of public works as in irrigation systems fortifications or the clearing of salt deposits to permit agriculture or to provide soldiers for offensive or defensive purposes Examples could be found in most phases of Chinese history referred to sometimes as Oriental despotism in fourteenth to sixteenthcentury Korea and in Ancient Egypt Both the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire and the genizaros of Spanish New Mexico would also qualify1 A third type is as a system for extracting high levels of output from labor for profit of private individuals Although the state was not directly involved as an owner though in the early modern period Atlantic European navies did ship some slaves across the Atlantic and European armies bought African slaves for military purposes galley oarsmen as well as the regular army the state normally had to provide the legal structure for the enforcement of ownership rights of slaveholders and ultimately the armed force that sustained the private use of slaves There are probably no occupations that have been performed by nonslaves that have not also been performed by slaves yet historically some activities have clearly had a larger slave component than others Concentration of slaves in particular tasks may be attributed broadly to the ability of nonslaves to avoid activities that were particularly unpleasant For two centuries after the midseventeenth century field labor on plantations in the Americas was evidently one such activity In some societies in the classical era the focus on production did not preclude the eventual entry of some slaves into mainstream society We can probably all think of cases that fit none of these three categories the tribute slaves that came into the Aztec Empire from the north many of whom ended up as sacrificial victims to provide one example2 Yet some broad categorization is useful to get an analytical grasp on an institution as ubiquitous as slavery few peoples on the globe have not at some point in their history been slaves and owners of slaves often at the same time Given these changing conceptions of dependency it is somewhat tricky to evaluate the relative importance of the different forms of dependency and coercion over time Even without such a consideration the different types do on occasion occur together Thus the bulk of European convicts sent overseas before 1800 were in fact sold in the same manner as indentured servants to private owners with only a longer term of service separating them from their nonconvict counterparts But as social observers from 1 James F Brooks Captives and Cousins Slavery Kinship and Community in the Southwest Border lands Chapel Hill NC 2002 pp 12142 2 The historiography on slavery in the Aztec Empire is extremely thin but see Robert D Shadow and Maria J Rodriguez Historical Panorama of Anthropological Perspectives on Aztec Slavery in Barbro Dahlgren and Ma De Los Dolores Soto de Arechavaleta eds Arqueologia del Nort y del Occidente de Mexico Homenaje al Doctor J Charles Kelley Mexico City 1995 pp 299323 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 9 Aristotle to Marx and Foucault have noted there can be no doubt that in addition to changes within a given form major shifts have taken place in the relative importance of different forms As already suggested recent interpretations stress that free labor as we understand it today did not exist prior to the nineteenth century But even understood in seventeenth century terms it had neither a long history nor a very wide currency outside relatively small enclaves in Western Europe For convicts and perhaps prisoners of war significant numbers could not be expected before the creation of a state system and bureaucracy to maintain them and administer their activities Galleys in the Mediterranean drew on this form of labor as well as on nonconvict slaves from antiquity to the eighteenth century but it is unlikely that convicts ever formed more than a tiny share of either the labor force or more broadly the unfree even in societies with sophisticated state structures The same is true of indentured servitude and contract labor which did not appear at all until the seventeenth century and thereafter never accounted for anything approaching majority status in any society Serfdom by contrast was usually widespread if it existed at all especially if we define it in the broadest possible way to include all relationships where individuals gained access to land to produce their own commodities in exchange for varying circumscriptions of personal actions and the acknowledgment of obligations to others The chronology of the initial appearance of the three systems discussed in this chapter broadly follows the order in which they were described Slavery dedicated to augmenting the numbers and sustaining the identity of societies or religions is usually associated with Islam subSaharan Africa or the indigenous Americas but it now seems to have application for many parts of the premodern world As that world is also largely pre orthographic historical evidence of it tends to come from oral tradition or from those postorthographic societies with which the premodern society interacted This means essentially that evidence of such slavery is scarce in the years before Chinese and European expansion but there seems little reason to doubt that it existed and indeed may well have been universal in postneolithic societies More broadly an argument might be made that the basic social structure in such environments was not class but kinship and that slavery was a normal component of kinship structures This is not to suggest that slavery then was widespread Too many slaves would be likely to overwhelm the absorptive function of the institution and threaten collective identities as indeed happened in several indigenous American societies in the aftermath of the demographic calamity triggered by Old World contact A slave in the two later types of slave systems described earlier was usually without any rights in law and passed on his or her status to any offspring In kinbased societies by contrast slaves or their descendants might gradually receive back certain rights as they Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 10 the cambridge world history of slavery demonstrated acceptance of kinship identity through their behavior As there is no clear dividing line between slave and nonslave assessments of the extent of such slavery must necessarily be fragile Nevertheless in the absence of severe demographic stress people without rights at any given point in time must have formed a very small proportion of the populations of kinbased societies From another perspective however one that counts as servile all those who were not full members of the kin group and were therefore in part dependents of those who were full members then we might say that the servile would often perhaps normally account for the majority of the population Systems of slavery dedicated to the extraction of labor whether for public projects or for the production of export crops organized for the benefit of private individuals are normally associated with stratified societies that have moved some distance beyond the agricultural revolution When these appear it is possible to think in terms of slave societies instead of societies with slaves to use Moses Finleys wellknown designations It is also probable that slavery of this type was what the major social science modelers of slavery both Marx and Engels Nieboer and Domar had in mind Indeed this form of slavery is what most people have in mind when they think of the subject at all especially those who have used the term slavery to draw attention to abusive or exploitative labor situations from early times to the present day Many Caribbean islands had more than three quarters of their populations as chattel slaves with no prospect of change of status prior to the abolitionist era Brazil probably approached a point where half of its population was enslaved at several points prior to the early nineteenth century Yet because of the absolute nature of the definition of slavery in these societies and the rarity of any intermediary category between slavery and freedom the proportion of the population that had full rights was actually quite high from the global historical perspective adopted here and high too compared to the share of free people using here modern definitions of freedom that existed in the countries of Western Europe that owned these islands Though the share of slaves in Rome Greece and the slave Americas was much higher than was ever the case in kin based societies that used slavery as a way of augmenting their numbers and sustaining their identities there have been relatively few slave societies in history They appeared relatively late in human social evolution and though they have had a very high profile in recorded history being associated usually with imperial systems and human progress to borrow David Brion Daviss ironic association they probably never accounted for anything like the majority of slaves on the globe at any point in history Thus most slaves in history have experienced their servitude in what are today termed premodern social environments It also seems highly probable that the number of slaves in the Americas has always lagged behind the number of serfs in the Old World Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 11 The advent of largescale slave societies did not mean that the original kinbased form of slavery disappeared The two sometimes all three forms of slavery existed at the same time In the Atlantic world some scholars argue that the kinbased system of slavery at the periphery of capitalist development in both Africa and the indigenous Americas was transformed by a burgeoning Atlanticbased market system into something more akin to slavery in the plantation Americas Thus by the nineteenth century the Cherokee in the United States owned cotton plantations worked by African slaves and slaves owned by Africans in different parts of sub Saharan Africa grew peanuts and cloves for sale into the Atlantic economy Yet the total value of such activities is so small when compared to the value of any major crop in the whitedominated plantation Americas that such a slippage into a new form of slavery cannot have been extensive A much stronger consequence of contact between different systems was that plantation societies drew on their kinbased counterparts for slaves first in the Americas then on the African coast and finally in Dutch Asia Slaves traded between the two systems were individuals without any rights whatsoever in either sphere but the trade ensured that they shifted from an environment where a reduction of their social marginality was possible to one in which the gradual reclaiming of rights was an unlikely eventuality Returning to the overview of dependency and coerced labor over the very long run we can observe three major patterns First though slavery was ubiquitous the share of slaves in kinbased slave systems was not likely to have been very great However if we define freedom as emanating from full membership of a given society so that first one has the right to participate in the decision making of the kin or community in which one lives and second one is in possession of most of the bundle of rights that make up possessive individualism then the share of free individuals in kinbased societies was also small Thus the vast majority of people in most societies in history have been neither slave nor free once we consider the limited rights to political participation that existed and not just freedom from labor coercion A second pattern is the polarization process that appears to have been associated with the rise of more complex economies and imperial systems The share of both slave and free in such societies appears to have risen sharply and the intervening categories of dependence have almost disappeared This observation is another way of approaching the paradox that has drawn the attention of Orlando Patterson who has argued that our understanding indeed awareness of freedom was dependent on slavery3 The lines between slave and free defined in terms of citizenship were clearly delineated in Greek Roman and with a religious orientation Islamic societies too The slavefree dichotomy was perhaps at its starkest in the Americas 3 Orlando Patterson Freedom in the Making of Western Culture New York 1991 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 12 the cambridge world history of slavery A third major pattern has been the rise and fall of the incidence of coercive systems in the last five centuries in a world in which kinbased systems of slavery continued to thrive From the fifteenth to the early twen tieth centuries systems of serfdom slavery convict labor and indentured servitude expanded dramatically and in close unison Four out of five transatlantic migrants prior to 1820 arrived in the Americas owing service to another most of them having been physically coerced into leaving their country of origin Yet in little more than a century coercive migrant sys tems had disappeared The last slave ship crossed the Atlantic in 1867 the last transoceanic contract labor vessel with terms of service enforced with penalcode sanctions arrived in 1917 and the last convicts returned from Devils Island to France in 1952 A related and even more important development was the virtual disappearance of all ideological justifications of inequality and dependence In the twentieth century there have been intense debates on the meaning of freedom but none at all on its desir ability The net result is that from the perspective of the early twentyfirst century while inequality is clearly rife in the modern world there is no attempt to justify it in the terms employed in the earlier debates The ideological shift has swept away not only the American slave plantation but almost as comprehensively the kinbased systems of slavery in the indigenous Americas in Africa and in Asia At no point in history has the share of the global population who see themselves as full members of society been as great as it is now Although slavery today is seen as the epitome of evil its stigma is not entirely a function of modern conceptions of freedom However much slavery has historically formed part of a range of dependent relations it has tended to be regarded across cultures at best as a particularly hard and unfortunate fate and at worst as the ultimate degradation for any human being In many social environments it has been viewed not as an alterna tive to death but as a fate worse than death although most societies that had some form of human sacrifice also had slavery Individuals who sold themselves into slavery did so only as a last resort thus suggesting that avoidance of slavery was of paramount importance to them The stigma of a slaveancestor in most nonWestern societies was and in many still is widespread Long before the abolition process was complete Frederick Douglass made it clear to supporters of other social reforms that antislavery should have priority because there was nothing at all to compare with its malevolent impact4 Scholars of the social history of the colonial Americas have equated the conditions of indentured servants convict and contract 4 David Roediger Race Labor and Gender in the Languages of Antebellum Social Protest in Stanley L Engerman ed Terms of Labor Slavery Serfdom and Free Labor Stanford CA 1999 pp 17583 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 13 laborers and even free wageworkers with those endured by slaves5 Nev ertheless there could have been few slaves at any point in the history of slavery in the Americas who would have spurned an opportunity to switch their status with that of any one of these nonslave groups just as few in history have opted to enslave themselves The distinctiveness of slavery in historical as opposed to modern terms seems to lie in the close to absolute onesidedness of power in the masterslave relationship at least in formal legal terms Even where slavery might offer freedom from starvation and on occasion greater life expectancy the disutility of the institution in the form of being in the power of another was overwhelming Nonslaves always had more protection against the power of a social superior or an employer than did slaves In the end social norms offered far more protection for serfs convicts servants prisoners of war contract workers debt peons appren tices and the myriad other forms of dependency including children and wives than they did for slaves Put another way these groups were less marginal to society than were slaves a conclusion that appears to hold for all societies Even in societies where the exaction of labor was not the central function of slavery they were less likely than slaves to be sacrificed sold off in times of social stress or denied rights over offspring and spouses What follows from the uniquely degrading nature of slavery observed here is a central set of questions for the present volume What is it that deter mines who is to be a slave and how does this shift over time and between societies Given that the potential for abolition has always existed in the sense that in every culture there were large numbers of people usually the vast majority who were considered exempt from slavery Is abolition then nothing more than the extension of this exemption to everyone in a given society and eventually the attribution of all the characteristics of full personhood to all aliens as well If so then just as important as the type and function of coercion is the question of which groups are viewed as eligible for coercion and why direct coercion has come to play a very much smaller role in the way societies function than has hitherto been the case It is striking that few of the major models of slavery have made much effort to address the issue of eligibility for enslavement Whether landlabor ratios NieboerDomar or power imbalances between societies Goody or simply the love to domineer Adam Smith general explanations have focused very much on the conditions under which slavery might appear or intensify and on the prerequisites of its abolition For most of the history of slavery such a focus was entirely appropriate Major centers of slavery have often drawn slaves from one particular region so that the name for slave became synonymous with the name of the dominant peoples in the 5 See for example Hilary McD Beckles White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados 16271715 Knoxville TN 1989 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 14 the cambridge world history of slavery region of provenance In French Canada panis an ethnic designation was the standard name for slaves whatever the ethnicity of the slave In colonial Brazil a similar merging came about under the term tupi and the origin of the term slave as is well known comes down to us from a time when the great bulk of slaves entering the Mediterranean area were drawn from slavic regions Yet prior to the fifteenth century it was rare to have eligibility for enslavement defined in terms of physical characteristics or even racial constructions Cranial deformation or its absence among Northwest Pacific Coast peoples comes closest but it was never an abso lute marker for slavery6 For the great modelers of slavery it was enough to acknowledge that slavery was associated with extreme degradation and then move on to the social psychological or environmental factors that shaped how extensive the institution of slavery would be and what form it would take And most of the historiography on slavery has followed suit by keying on rather narrow costbenefit considerations and power relation ships between groups when addressing historical shifts in the composition of people making up slave populations as opposed to explaining why slavery per se has existed7 It is impossible to address the question of eligibility without taking into account how any group responsible for enslavement perceived and defined itself in relation to others In recent decades this has come to be known as the question of identity Societies have tended to reserve enslavement for those whom they have defined as not belonging but this has not always meant that all aliens were enslaved or that all slaves were aliens There have been many instances in history of societies generating slaves from within their own ranks but this has usually occurred only after the potential slave has violated or is thought to have violated the most profoundly held norms of society In addition exposure of infants parents abandoning a child typically practiced by all social ranks was a source of internally generated slaves in many societies including ancient Rome and China which suggests that some acculturation or nurturing process was a prerequisite of belonging or insider status In early Rome citizens could be reduced to slaves and twins in many Igbo communities were sold into the Atlantic slave trade directly from Igboland8 It was easier to become a slave from within some societies than from within others just as the ease of reduction of marginality and 6 Leland Donald Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America Berkeley CA 1997 pp 945 7 H Hoetinks work on somatic norms not often cited recently is an exception to this comment 8 Almost all the twins in a sample of 57000 Africans taken out of slave ships by British cruisers and landed in Sierra Leone between 1819 and 1845 were on vessels that left Bonny New Calabar and Old Calabar Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas Heights of Africans 18191839 Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 1982 45375 as were the vast majority of the small number of recaptives in the Liberated African Registers with disabilities Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 15 thus protection against the worst consequences of enslavement varied In parts of Europe in the Middle Ages the problem of excess children was solved by infanticide and abandonment whereas in some societies in Africa and Asia the same issue was resolved by involuntary enslavement of such children In the slave Americas manumission a clear example of reduction of marginality was more possible in Iberian than in English speaking areas but on the other hand the Iberian Americas were the very last to abolish slavery on the two continents an unexpected negative correlation The most wellknown survey of slavery and kinship in an African context focuses almost entirely on the movement from outsider to insider status9 The reverse process in effect how an insider becomes a slave has received little attention for any society Generally however there was some formal process whereby the erstwhile insider was redefined as an outsider or else as in the case of Russia owners believed that their human chattels were physically different from themselves when the reality pointed in quite the opposite direction Nevertheless the vast majority of slaves in history have originated from outside the group that was responsible for their enslavement The conception of not belonging appears to form the core element of eligibility for slavery across cultures whether or not the institution functioned primarily to extract labor or to add and integrate newcomers to the slave owners social group In addition however gender and age were major considerations at different times Where the main aim of slavery was to augment ones social or religious group then women and children would likely be preferred to adult males who as already suggested might be put to death immediately or as in Tupinamba societies in Brazil held for sacrifice at a point in the future decided by the captor The trade in slaves across the Sahara Desert to the Islamic Mediterranean which grew from a trickle of people in the early days of Islam to a stream ultimately rivaling in numbers the betterknown transatlantic trade was overwhelmingly female and some of the few male slaves involved were destined to be eunuchs As the previous discussion suggests societies seeking to augment their numbers and ultimately their cultures andor religions were extremely eclectic in their selection of potential slaves The whole point of acquiring such slaves was not just to inflict social death but also to facilitate social rebirth The basic aim was to create a new social identity to produce more people who in the end behaved and thought like the host group and might fight alongside them Children from any culture presumably have the potential for assuming new identities and the chief purpose of preserving women after capture was to ensure a broader base for society 9 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff eds Slavery in Africa Historical and Anthropologival Perspectives Madison WI 1977 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 16 the cambridge world history of slavery to reproduce itself in its own image Slavery supported by major state structures could more easily cope with adult male slaves The ultimate aim however was nevertheless to refashion newcomers according to the needs of the host society Most countries in the modern world have had the same attitude toward todays voluntary immigrants In the United States and Europe there is a set of core values loosely described as Western that all newcomers are expected to believe in and accept Assimilation was intended to be the main outcome of the melting pot The major difference between this and enslavement as traditionally enforced is that the decision to migrate today is voluntary Entry into the new society is no longer preceded by social death or in the case of the Mintz and Price formularization of creolization in the Americas by the traumatic relocation inflicted by the Middle Passage But in some cases women and children were simply not available From the point at which Christendom and Islamic societies reached military stalemate in early Middle Ages slaves acquired by one from the other tended to be drawn from the mainly male world of ships and the military and despite the fact there may have been more English slaves held in North Africa than black slaves in the English Caribbean in the second half of the seventeenth century neither were at that time very numerous In recent years historians have begun to draw explicit comparisons between kinship structures and bondage in widely separated parts of the world especially subSaharan Africa and the temperate areas of the indigenous Americas Whereas Europeans carried off 125 million Africans to the Americas in just more than three centuries Africans absorbed few if any Europeans into their own societies10 In the celebrated case of Bullfinche Lambe an Englishman was held captive by the king of Dahomey for several years and was eventually released But the basic reason for the imbalance apart from the fact that few Europeans could survive in subSaharan Africa was the almost total absence of European women and children on the African coast and the essentially nonconfrontational nature of the relationship between African polities and European slave traders Not only were there few Euro pean captives but Europeans could usually pay what was necessary to gain the release of captives before the reduction of marginality had pro ceeded very far11 In the temperate North Americas by contrast there was largescale settlement by Europeans in the aftermath of the demographic disaster that overtook the Indian population These factors ensured that some French English and Spanish and many more of Euroaboriginal 10 David Eltis and David Richardson A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in idem eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2008 pp 160 11 See for example the process described by Suzanne Schwarz Slave Captain The Career of James Irvine in the Liverpool Slave Trade Wrexham 1995 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 DEPENDENCE SERVILITY AND COERCED LABOR women and children and even some men became absorbed into indigenous societies via the enslavement mechanism though obviously the numbers never approached those of Indians enslaved by Europeans 18 the cambridge world history of slavery tasks were assigned to blacks13 Thus the linking of race and slavery in the context of the Americas had little precedent in the Old World By the nineteenth century the overwhelming share of slaves in the Arab world was from subSahara Africa or was of subSaharan African descent and the association of black skin with slavery became ever stronger European expansion into the Atlantic world from the early fifteenth century brought first cheap transoceanic transportation second a demographic calamity in the Americas third the prospect of exportable quantities of precious metals and highvalue crops and fourth labor productivity that was much higher in the New World than in the Old The resulting transatlantic slave trade after relatively modest beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries built up to hitherto unimaginable levels of mass movement of peoples in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries That the vast majority of the people who made this move were unwilling Africans was precisely because the peoples of Europe had some choice over the decision to migrate When the options in the Americas narrowed to working on a sugar estate the major reason for people crossing the Atlantic for nearly three centuries after the late 1500s then voluntary migrants avoided the plantation labor force option and did their moving within Europe rather than between continents but when alternative forms of agriculture developed freelabor migration was renewed on a much larger scale Once again the fact that conceptions of freedom in Europe had shifted to permit most individuals control over the decision to migrate plus as described later the invisible barrier that prevented Europeans from enslaving other Europeans generated more coercion and more slavery for nonEuropeans In both the Atlantic and less certainly the Islamic world for the first time eligibility for enslavement began to be defined not in terms of which group to exclude but rather which groups to include Muslims debated the issue extensively and in addition had a formal proscription against enslaving other Muslims as opposed to automatically manumitting those enslaved chattels who converted to Islam The Spanish debated the enslavement of indigenous Americans but the striking feature of the establishment of African slavery in the Americas was the set of underlying assumptions about who could be enslaved Indeed the absence of a major debate except for the Spanish case is probably responsible for the failure of historians to explore the eligibility issue in the European context There was nothing in European history to suggest either a turning away from coercion or restrictions on who should be subject to enslavement Europe was a conglomeration of competing polities with extensive written records of military conflicts civil wars and the repression of minority sys tems of thought especially religious thought Most states evolved unequal 13 Bernard Lewis Race and Color in Islam New York 1971 pp 634 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 19 and rigid social structures early on that fostered some slavery and a great deal of serfdom as well as centralized judicial systems that meted out punishments for wrongdoing and heresy that appear harsh compared to slavery itself Slavery had been extensive in Roman times and for nearly six hundred years after the fall of Rome a slave trade from the less developed north west and east of Europe sent a stream of slaves drawn from vari ous European peoples to the more prosperous areas of the south and the Mediterranean increasingly Islamic after the seventh century14 Relations between European polities and the fringe areas of Europe especially the marauding leading edges of the Great Migrations had a large enslavement component on both sides and the system of serfdom thought to have developed as a response to these pressures was clearly related to slavery In addition in the late Middle Ages plagues reduced western European populations by onethird and created a large shortage of labor But despite all the precedents and pressures that appeared to point to more coercion and more slavery between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries the internal European slave trade dried up completely slavery itself diminished signif icantly throughout Europe and the institution disappeared altogether in the north and west of the subcontinent More remarkably when Europeans expanded into new lightly popu lated landabundant territories the overseas component of that expansion in the West but curiously not its eastern counterpart demonstrated that Europeans were prepared to enslave the peoples they found in those territo ries and to relocate millions of others Indians Africans and Asians alike Demographic collapse and in the Spanish case some ideological reserva tions soon eliminated indigenous Americans as slaves15 and though the Dutch carried Asians to South Africa as slaves in the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries and all Europeans used enslaved Asians in Asia in mainly domestic contexts only distance from the Americas ensured that no Asians worked in Caribbean cane fields prior to the nineteenth century In early Brazil the Portuguese drew extensively on Indian communities for slave labor to produce sugar The Spanish used variations of corvee labor as well as some Africans to exploit precious mineral deposits of New Spain and South America In the Chesapeake the English in the seventeenth century had some Indian slaves and many peoples of African descent who were not only not slaves but full members of society as well French Canadians were prepared to buy African slaves but could not afford them and they 14 See William D Phillips Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade Minneapolis 1984 for the main slave trade routes across Europe down to the eleventh century 15 Presumably if the Spanish had developed a large export sugar industry in the sixteenth century like the Portuguese their reservations on the use of Indian slaves would have been more in tune with those of the Portuguese Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 20 the cambridge world history of slavery ended up with a slavelabor force that was exclusively Indian16 But from the midseventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries the economic cen ter of gravity of the Americas was in the Caribbean and subtropical South America a centering that was made possible by a labor force of slaves who were exclusively African or of African origin Slavery here came to have a racial exclusivity that was more pronounced than in the Islamic world In both Islam and Europe a core culture characterized a wide variety of ethnicities and languages as major elements of a common identity and therefore insider status Both Islam and Europe traveled a road that began with the exemption of its own members from slavery and by the end of the period both cultures were conferring eligibility for enslavement on only one of the many groups of others or outsiders Africans But was the next step in this process of redefining eligibility necessarily the elimination of the final category such that slavery was seen as inap propriate for any human being The intensity and depth of abolitionism in parts of the West suggests that the final step was more likely to hap pen or to happen first in the Atlantic rather than in the Islamic world and within regions where slavery played a marginal role As Adam Smith described it in the case of the Pennsylvania Quakers the demand curve for emancipation could be downward sloping emancipation occurring first where slavery was less important But interpreting the economic argument is itself often difficult and the current literature has provided at least three arguments the first that slave owners found the institution unprofitable the second that while still profitable slavery was less so than sectors of the economy drawing on free labor and third that slavery came to play an everdiminishing role in the major slaveowning nations and could be abolished without serious implications Each of these arguments has dif ferent implications for the nature of slavery The debates on the causes of abolition have perhaps drawn too sharp a dichotomy between economic and other moral religious cultural factors in the process The greater the costs of emancipation whether because of the ongoing profitability of the slave system or the costs of compensating slaveholders the more likely emancipation will be delayed Nevertheless whatever the cost unless there is a moral argument of some kind pointing to the need for slavery to end the institution will continue Even where the costs to ending slavery were low this situation alone has never by itself led to abolition nor apparently have high costs ever perma nently prevented it from happening Compensation though not always paid was always an issue First should it be paid and to whom and in what form Here the answers were generally clear compensation to the slave owners in cash bonds or labor time Second should emancipation 16 Robin Winks Blacks in Canada A History New Haven CT 1971 chapter 1 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 dependence servility and coerced labor 21 be immediate or gradual and what should be the role of government in the process An argument for gradual emancipation goes back to Jean Bodin and Condorcet if slavery is as destructive to slave psychology and cul ture as the antislavery argument claims then immediate freedom without some adaptive period or government control could only be disastrous In no case were slaves or serfs ever provided with compensation by their owners or the state a pattern that reflects the belief in the importance of property rights There were a few discussions of compensation to freed people at the end of the US Civil War but this was not a source of major debate Claims for compensation to the descendants of the enslaved reparations developed as an issue only in the twentieth century Viewing abolition through the lens of social identity does offer some prospect of finessing these older debates as well as coming to terms with the continuance of slavery in those parts of Asia and Africa that viewed slavery as an integral part of societies organized around kin groupings Such an approach also reduces the distance between slave systems dedicated to the exaction of labor and those whose aim is to augment the social group The former always attempted some assimilation and the latter always had labor needs the most unpleasant of which were invariably performed by slaves or those who were most marginal to society Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 PART I SLAVERY IN AFRICA AND ASIA MINOR Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 2 ENSLAVEMENT IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD ehud r toledano 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 sultans 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 Turkishspeaking 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 nonMuslim and speakers of all the dialects in the empire with origins as farflung 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 predicament1 Perhaps more than anything else it was this melange 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 Whereas practically all historically known societies including Islamic ones enslaved individuals either from within or from outside their bound aries few had evolved such a stratified and highly diversified unfree pop ulation If until the early seventeenth century most of the enslaved were prisoners of war from that point on but mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people were reduced to slavery through capture and trade The main reason for this shift in recruitment was rather simple ter ritorial expansion as a result of military conquest ceased almost completely 1 For the detailed arguments underlying this essay see the following books by Ehud R Toledano As If Silent and Absent Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East New Haven CT 2007 and Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East Seattle 1998 25 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 26 the cambridge world history of slavery and few prisoners of war were available although some were still being enslaved even as late as the nineteenth century Hence during the period of contraction and diminishing military successes demand for unfree labor had to be met through an evolving network of trafficking in humans It was then too that the ethnic makeup of the enslaved population in the empire shifted according to the changing origins from the Balkans and eastern Europe to central and eastern Africa and the Caucasus largely Circassia and Georgia Scattered data and reasonable extrapolations regarding the volume of the slave trade from Africa to the Ottoman Empire yield an estimated number of approximately 16000 to 18000 men and women who were being transported into the empire per annum during much of the nine teenth century2 Estimates for the total volume of coerced migration from Africa into Ottoman territories are as follows from Swahili coasts to the Ottoman Middle East and India 313000 across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden 492000 into Ottoman Egypt 362000 and into Ottoman North Africa Algeria Tunisia and Libya 350000 If we exclude the numbers going to India a rough estimate of this mass population move ment would amount to more than 13 million people During the middle decades of the nineteenth century the shrinking Atlantic traffic swelled the numbers of enslaved Africans coerced into domestic African markets as well as into Ottoman ones Although the numbers were possibly smaller during the eighteenth cen tury the patterns of trade remained fairly stable with seasonal shifts occur ring as a result of local factors Such were the internal wars within Africa between rival Muslim states as between them and nonMuslim ones which resulted in the enslavement of large numbers of men and women Chang ing economic conditions on the continent also affected the reduction of individuals to slavery as a result of debt or the inability of dependent entities to pay the tributes imposed on them in cash or kind Brigandage on the overland routes and corsair activity on the high seas also affected the traffic as did circumstances on the northern Black Sea shores and in the Caucasus One thing remained fairly constant through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Ottoman demand for unfree labor 2 The most reliable work on this is by Ralph Austen The 19th Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa Swahili and Red Sea Coasts A Tentative Census in William Gervase ClarenceSmith ed The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century Special Issue of Slavery and Abolition 9 1988 2144 and The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa A Tentative Census Slavery and Abolition 13 1992 21448 See also Thomas M Ricks thorough consideration in Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf 18th and 19th Centuries An Assessment in ibid 6070 For Lovejoys higher numbers and criticism of Austens figures Commercial Sectors in the Economy of the NineteenthCentury Central Sudan The TransSaharan Trade and the DesertSide Salt Trade African Economic History 13 1984 8795 see also Paul E Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery A History of Slavery in Africa 2nd edn Cambridge 2000 chapter 7 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 27 mainly of domestic and menial workers Agricultural slavery which had been widely practiced until the sixteenth century was abandoned thence forward until it reappeared in the second half of the nineteenth century Even then only in Egypt during the American Civil War was agricultural bondage used to supply global demand for cotton and in the 1860s the empire had also absorbed a large population of Circassian agricultural slaves who were pushed by the Russians with their landlords out of the Caucasus Immigration and emigration in the Ottoman Middle East and North Africa have not been an unusual phenomenon In a region still supporting large nomadicpastoralist communities of various ethnicities Turcoman and Bedouins immediately come to mind inbound and outbound move ments of people have been a common feature of history People moved in and out both as groups and as individuals They brought with them their languages religions and cultures They interacted with the already diver sified populations in the empire they left their mark contributed their share and enriched and were enriched by the melange of traditions that permeated these lands littorals river basins and mountains Out of all this wealth of human experiences our concern here is with the trade in enslaved Africans and Circassians transported into the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries However the traffic which has been treated in a number of studies will be examined here from a rather dif ferent perspective not as an economic or political phenomenon but as a question of cultural inflow interaction and fusion Indeed as has been publicly proclaimed recently the forced movement of enslaved persons was one of the largest migrations of history and also one of its greatest crimes A number of important social and cultural insights concerning enslaved Africans and Circassians in the Ottoman Empire can be gained by examining their forced transportation as a type of migration For our purposes here such an approach to the Ottoman slave trade yields some interesting cultural insights for instance the view that migra tion tends to occur at certain junctions in the life cycle thus becoming a part of the rites de passage The evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of enslaved persons who were taken into the Ottoman Empire whether African or Circassian were very young often in their early to mid teens Their coerced recruitment into the Ottoman unfree labor market occurred in many cases just as they were passing into puberty entering the workforce and for the young females also becoming sexually active either as concubines in urban households or as wives in the countryside Although they would have also gone through these passages in their ori gin societies their enslavement meant that all this took place amidst the heightened stresses of resocialization and reacculturation in unfamiliar sur roundings without the support of family and friends and without the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 28 the cambridge world history of slavery comforting and soothing effects that a home culture would normally pro vide The important elements from that perspective are the construction of individual and collective identity the redefinition of notions such as originhome and destinationhost cultures and their interrelationship and the reevaluation of the concepts of struggle conflict choice and agency with regard to the enslaved The main divide within the enslaved population in the Ottoman Empire was between elite and nonelite slaves or rather between militaryadminis trative slaves and their female consorts or wives hereafter kulharem slaves on one hand and the rest of the unfree laborers that is domestic agri cultural and menial bondsmen and bondswomen on the other This has raised the question whether or not the kulharem class should be consid ered in the same category with the other enslaved populations Alternative terms have been suggested to describe the predicament of people in that group including the sultans servants and state servitors3 Others have rightly argued that the privileges of elite slavery were temporary because they were not allowed to bequeath their wealth or status to their offspring and their property reverted to the treasury upon their death The sultan controlled his unfree servants religious and cultural identity their material environment and their right to life which he could take if he believed they had betrayed his trust As one writer put it elite slavery was a para dox at the heart of the Ottoman system that is that ordinary subjects enjoyed immunity from the sultans direct power of life and death which was denied to those who governed them namely kulharem slaves4 Although certain elements of kulharem servitude were gradually re moved in practice toward and during the nineteenth century all legally bonded subjects of the sultan should for the purpose of social analysis be treated as enslaved persons In fact there was no difference of kind between kulharem and other types of Ottoman slaves although there certainly were differences of degree among them By and large the unfree can be classified according to four main criteria which determined their position in society and affected their treatment and fortune The first criterion was the tasks the enslaved performed whether they served as domestic agricultural menial or kulharem Second was the stratum of the slaveholders whether they were employed by urban elite members rural notability small cultivators artisans or merchants The third was location whether they lived in core or peripheral areas Finally type of habitat urban village or nomad was of central importance 3 See Metin Kunt All the Sultans Servants The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government 15501650 New York 1983 Suraiya Faroqhi The Ruling Elite between Politics and the Economy in Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert eds An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 13001914 Cambridge 1994 pp 564 ff 4 Leslie Peirce Morality Tales Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab Berkeley CA 2003 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 29 In addition two other parameters have to be factored in namely gender and ethnicity Generally women were more exposed to sexual exploitation whereas men were more vulnerable to harsh physical treatment And more often than not enslaved Africans ranked socially lower than enslaved Circassians and Georgians Some preliminary generalizations emerge from this matrix Enslaved domestic workers in urban elite households were better treated than enslaved people in other settings and predicaments The greater the dis tance from the core the lower the enslaved were in the social strata and the less densely populated was the habitat the greater the chances the enslaved would receive worse treatment Finally the lives of enslaved Africans and enslaved women were more often than not harder Thus for example it follows that women in urban elite households where arguably enslave ment was the mildest could be and not infrequently were exposed to uncomfortable compromising situations which we might call today sexual harassment The single most important factor that sustained a fairly stable demand for unfree labor within the Ottoman Empire was the constant dwindling of the enslaved population and the absence of a capacity to replenish the supply of slaves internally Both should be attributed to sociocultural practices that must be considered as mitigating circumstances of Ottoman and more generally Islamic enslavement According to Islamic law as practiced in the Ottoman Empire during the period reviewed here enslaved women could be absorbed into the slaveholding society through concubinage There were no injunctions against crossracial or crosscultural unions If an enslaved concubine became pregnant it was illegal to resell her and if she gave birth her child was considered free and she was to be manumitted upon the death of the father Although little choice on the womans part existed in such cases the status that she came to possess in effect provided her with considerable protection It also meant that such women and their offspring would regularly disappear from the enslaved population reducing its size In addition an Islamic moral encouragement to manumit enslaved per sons after long service in Ottoman practice this meant on average seven to ten years was largely observed although not by all slaveholders Again this imperative constantly released individuals from legal bondage even if they often chose to remain as free servants in the same or another house hold At the same time on the supply side there was in Ottoman societies an absence of slavebreeding practices Enslaved persons were not married to each other in order to produce enslaved children for the household or the farm When such marriages occurred it was usually between freed persons socially and financially encouraged by their former slaveholders to marry within their ethnic group after manumission as an act of benevolent Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 30 the cambridge world history of slavery patronage With such strongly entrenched social mechanisms demand for slaves would persist on the same level as long as slavery remained legal that is until the demise of the empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s Attempts to abolish Ottoman slavery and suppress the slave trade into the empire were launched during the second half of the nineteenth century but do not form a major theme of this chapter Suffice it here to note that British efforts to induce the Ottomans to suppress the slave trade from Africa and the Ottoman governments own actions against the traffic in Circassians and Georgians produced a significant reduction in the volume of the traffic toward the turn of the twentieth century But these measures also pitted two value systems the European and the Ottoman against each other producing a whole set of dilemmas for Ottoman intellectuals and statesmen Part of the reason why the Ottoman elite did not enthusiastically embrace Britishstyle abolitionism lay in different perceptions indeed in a bifurcated view of the Ottoman version of enslavement itself Compared to other modes of dependency in Ottoman society slavery was not necessarily the worst which is probably true for most other pre modern societies Significant social disabilities reflected in law and practice were part of everyday life in varying degrees for all women as well as for all nonMuslims Poor people often suffered greater deprivation than many enslaved people and marriage was also a form of male ownership over women Military service in the sultans armies did not always have a clear end in sight for the common soldier Peasants frequently worked for bare subsistence and when pushed under that line had to abandon the land and fend for themselves as brigands or nomadic beggars in the nearby desert for food and shelter Consequently it has been argued that many slaves were better off that is better cared for than many of the sul tans free subjects especially in material terms Many slaves it was further asserted would not have traded their position for the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of the free poor and other marginals in Ottoman societies Still slavery is rightly considered to be the most extreme form of domi nation There were other at times quite harsh forms of coerced denial of freedom such as incarceration or indentured labor Even in its mild forms slavery seems to remain such a stark instance of deprivation and coercion that it stands apart from the other phenomena of unfreedom Hence what is perhaps sometimes hard to grasp or even simply to realize is that even under enslavement the capacity of slaveholders to extract labor was not unlimited nor was the slaves powerlessness absolute A better under standing of slavery can be gained only if we conceive of it as an involuntary relationship of mutual dependence between two quite unequal partners Within this broad definition there were certainly cases in which slaves had little impact on their lives as were other situations in which they had a Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 31 great deal of influence visavis their masters In all cases the slaves ability to stand her or his ground in the relationship depended on the extent to which she or he could withhold labor in order to attain their minimal requirements In other words their agency depended on denial of services whether in the fields the mines or the household the latter including sex rearing and nurturing in addition to the rest of the domestic package As masterslave relationships went Ottoman slaves had a relatively greater capacity to effect a reasonable balance of power with their own ers In a sense the main types of slaves domestic and agricultural could exercise approximately the same degree of leverage albeit in different cir cumstances Domestic slaves could run away more easily due to the urban environment in which most of them lived but their decisions often had to be made on an individual basis as they were few and not bonded to other slaves in the household who might even have an interest in exposing their plans to escape Also because from the eighteenth century onward most of these slaves were African they were more easily traceable and vulnera ble to capture For Circassian agricultural slaves absconding from a small and often isolated village community was more difficult but because they lived and worked in family units developing concealing and eventually executing a plan to run away was more practicable The kul or elite officeholding slaves on the other hand leveraged their position visavis the sultan and his administration in a different manner They had no incentive to opt out of the system but instead tried to work from the inside and create a power base from within By demonstrating efficiency and loyalty while at the same time working to increase their personal and household wealth they managed to reduce the risks that came with the privilege of holding high office in the sultans service Their performance in the various government jobs they held increased their value to their sovereign and within his administration which reduced substan tially the risks they ran But at times and under various circumstances the system or sections thereof did not function rationally allowing dili gent talented and loyal kul to fall from grace and even lose their lives and fortunes due to arbitrary decisions The mode of operation among this officeholding elite however clearly forms a different area of scholarly investigation namely that of Ottoman power politics and does not fit in here Was Ottoman Enslavement Relatively Mild The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries clearly show that for the most part enslaved people did not wish to remain in servitude Regardless of the alleged mildness of Ottoman and other Islamic slave experiences bondage was a condition from which most enslaved people tried to extricate Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 32 the cambridge world history of slavery themselves Many went to a great deal of trouble took enormous risks and fought against heavy odds to achieve freedom In that enslaved Ottoman subjects were not different from enslaved persons in any other society and their efforts too deserve to be recognized and appreciated In the eighteenth century absconding was perhaps the main manifestation of the desire to be free but with the reforms of the nineteenth century known as the Tanzimat 1830s80s enslaved people learned how to manipulate the system in their favor and actively claim their freedom Not so surprisingly many of the slaveholders themselves realized that slavery was not warmly embraced by the enslaved The very language used in Ottoman government documents and official correspondence reveals that officials knew very well that enslaved persons kept complaining about their situation and that many of them demanded from the courts and from various government agencies that effective steps be taken to redress their grievances Moreover documents include statements to the effect that the enslaved have a natural desire for freedom memluklerin tabii olan arzuyı huriyetleri and recognized that they actively seek to be liberated It was common to refer to such requests as demands to be rescuedsaved from slavery memlukiyetten tahlisi as stated for example in a telegram from the governor of Trabzon to the grand vezir sent in 1872 Thus as the nineteenth century drew to a close the rhetoric deployed by the Ottoman state in dealing with enslavement was evolving toward the discourse on abolition that we find in Western societies Perhaps the most striking is the text of official certificates of manumission issued by the Ottoman government during the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century These documents contain such phrases as This manumission literally freedom in other words certificate is being handed to name of person to clarify that she or he is released from the bond of slavery and that henceforth the said person will be like all other free persons so that she or he cannot ever be claimed by any person or by any means to be a slave5 An Istanbul court of the first instance stated in October 1890 that by granting manumission papers to an enslaved woman she will thenceforward benefit from the pleasure sweetness of freedom The court added that following this act she will be like other free Muslims at liberty to do as she chooses and permitted to live where she desires Another court this time in Salonika in January 1888 also stressed the freedom of movement granted to a freed slave saying that 5 Documents cited in this section are from the British National Archives henceforth BNA FO 19882XM 00518 Certificate of Manumission form nd Istanbul court decision 9101890 and Salonika court decision 3011888 all emphases in this paragraph are mine For a recent assessment of the domestic labor market in the Ottoman Empire see Madeline C Zilfi Servants Slaves and the Domestic Order in the Ottoman Middle East Hawwa 2 2004 133 The author rightly points out that as laudable as IslamicOttoman manumission practices were they helped guarantee a supply of cheap labor in the form of exslaves affecting mostly women 8 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 33 being set free meant that he could move to where he wished without anybody interfering with that Externally however and in the face of European criticism a defensive posture regarding enslavement in Ottoman societies was being projected This opened the door to a debate about the nature of the practice by comparison to other societies most notably those of the New World The Ottomans argued that slavery in their empire as in other Muslim societies was fundamentally different from slavery in the Americas It was they asserted considerably milder because slaves were not employed on plantations and were offered a real opportunity to integrate into Ottoman society through marriage and manumission Slaves were generally well treated and it was further maintained regarded as family members On the whole this view was broadly accepted by scholars and Islamic societies were classified as societies with slaves rather than slave societies Slavery in these societies was believed to have been milder better integrated and more open to inclusion hence its abolition occurred late and never constituted a major political issue Nevertheless perceptions have been changing over the past two decades or so Scholars have become more critical less accepting perhaps less pre pared to tolerate the broader implications of what we may call the good treatment debate There is a fine line it must be acknowledged between studying a culture with empathy and avoiding the required evaluation of its practices including from a moral standpoint Understanding why enslave ment was so natural in so many societies should not lead to condoning it But also appreciating the options available to people in the Ottoman Empire and assessing the choices they made are important and deserve our attention and respect After all one could decide not to own slaves slave holders could choose not to mistreat their slaves and slaveholders could manumit their slaves after a reasonable period of service That enslavement continued to be legal in the empire until its late demise should not obscure the fact that a wide variety of instances of enslavement also existed In addition one should take a more differentiated view with regard to the good treatment debate Evidence from various parts of the Ottoman Empire Brazil and Africa suggests that even domestic slavery especially for women could not be described as mild The intimacy of home family or household did not guarantee good treatment of the enslaved and concubinage was a far cry from the ideal manner in which it was depicted by contemporary witnesses and later scholars who used their accounts A methodologically gendered interpretation of enslaved womens experiences as well as a tendency to privilege views from within and favor a bottom up interpretation have yielded a rather harsh picture of realities under enslavement which was certainly incommensurate with the putatively mild Islamic version proffered by Muslim and nonMuslim observers Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 34 the cambridge world history of slavery Yet another and relatively new kind of argument raises the issue of consent It comes from Africans who see themselves as heirs to the her itage of enslaved Africans who were forcibly transported into the Ottoman and Arab Middle East and North Africa Simply put the powerful here Ottomans and Arabs stand accused of bestowing on the unwilling pow erless here enslaved Africans the questionable benefits of their mild slavery good treatment and high culture6 This is clearly a bottom up rather than a topdown discourse which seeks to speak for the absent and the silenced to stand for those deprived of their agency unable to act in their own lives The debate is thereby charged and politicized urging the historian to reevaluate the assertions about the mild nature of Islamic slavery However this requires us to reexamine also another underlying assumption namely that slaves were indeed as deprived of agency as they are here presumed to have been It will be argued further below that the enslaved themselves managed to find ways to resolve the tangle into which they were brutally thrust indeed to respond to oppression and abuse which they did not see as mild or even acceptable Attachment In the Ottoman Empire as in many other Islamic and nonIslamic societies slavery was one of the modes of belonging to a social unit This notion appears in Ottoman sources as intisap patronage for which we prefer here to use attachment or belonging French appartenance Individuals did not exist in a vacuum each one was attached or belonged to a social group or unit For most of the enslaved in the Ottoman Empire the unit of attachment was the household Here by households we mean the more sociopolitically complex elite urban units not the family unit referred to in demographic and population studies For others the most primary attachment was kinbased usually consisting of the nuclear or simple and extended or joint family and the various structures connecting such units to each other whether clan tribe or any other kinderived formation7 Nonetheless people belonged to other nonkin groups often according to the kind of community they lived in Thus urban communities were usually divided according to quarters and neighborhoods and classified by 6 See the demand for apology and reparations made by an African group at a conference in Johannesburg on February 22 2003 on Arabled enslavement of Africans the quotation marks are mine 7 The most useful introduction to the social structure of Middle Eastern societies is Dale F Eickel man The Middle East and Central Asia An Anthropological Approach 3rd edn Upper Saddle River NJ 1998 For families and households in Istanbul from the 1880s into the Republic see Alan Duben and Cem Behar Istanbul Households Marriage Family and Fertility 18801940 Cambridge 1991 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 35 trade and guild as by religion confession or ethnic group Village and pastoralist communities were normally less diversified but they too were often internally differentiated Other types of groups that overlapped with those mentioned thus far were spiritualmystical or Sufi orders and the variety of possessionhealing Zar and Bori associations Gender played an important role in all of these groups determining the role of women and reflecting their experience of the various modes dappartenance Obviously individuals belonged to a number of groups constantly negotiating the various roles and statuses they were assigned by each More often than not these sets of affiliations complemented and reinforced one another together constructing the persons identity indeed set of identities Properly social ized and in the case of the enslaved resocialized individuals were skillful enough in negotiating these multiattachments on a daily basis During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the household emerged as the basic unit of belonging or attachment throughout the Ottoman lands Although households surely existed before that period they nonetheless came to play a distinct role in Ottoman societies as a result of the largescale transformations that took place in the empire from the end of the sixteenth century onwards8 Suffice it here to note that a dual process of localization and Ottomanization was taking hold in the provinces producing Ottomanlocal elites throughout the empire9 In this process the Ottoman imperial elite was becoming less mobile with posts being assigned within limited regions so that specializations accord ing to needs of specific provincial clusters were developing within the military and the bureaucracy Officeholders developed strong ties to the local economy society and culture and linked their and their childrens future to one province often to one city At the same time local elites urban and rural notables ulema and merchants were seeking to become part of the imperial administration trying to attain government offices and being Ottomanized in the process The localizing imperial elite and 8 The main contributors to the debate over the transformation of the Empires governance in that period are Islamoglu and Keyder Agenda for Ottoman History in Huri IslamogluInan ed The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy Cambridge 1987 pp 4262 Roger Owen Introduction The Middle East Economy in the Period of SoCalled Decline 15001800 in idem ed The Middle East and the World Economy 18001914 rev ed London 1993 pp 123 Faroqhi The Ruling Elite pp 5526 Rifaat Ali AbouElHaj Formation of the Modern State The Ottoman Empire Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Albany NY 1991 Jane Hathaway The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt The Rise of the Qazdaglis Cambridge 1997 pp 1 14 24 idem A Tale of Two Factions Myth Memory and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen Albany NY 2003 46 and Oktay Ozel Population Changes in Ottoman Anatolia During the 16th and 17th Centuries The Demographic Crisis Reconsidered International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36 2004 183 205 on demographic and economic pressures during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 9 The arguments put forth in the following paragraphs are in an article by Toledano The Emergence of OttomanLocal Elites 17001800 A Framework for Research in I Pappe and M Maoz eds Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas A History from Within London 1997 pp 14562 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 36 the cambridge world history of slavery the Ottomanizing local elites gradually merged into Ottomanlocal elites which better served the interests of both sides These merged Ottomanlocal households served as the major social economic political and even cultural unit in Ottoman society until about the last quarter of the nineteenth century During the seventeenth century households were created around leading officeholders in the bureaucracy and within the military Though forming initially around the nuclear and extended family of the founder from the outset they relied on patron age relationships between the head of the household and a broad array of clients An essential component of any household was the founders retainer militia force often small in size and armed which protected household interests Household heads first vied for modest resources usually in a local seat of government but they soon realized that it was essential to build a network that transcended subdistrict district and provincial bounds ulti mately linking up with imperial elite households in the capital By the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century in provinces throughout the empire10 a single householdfaction would emerge as hegemonic securing for its leader and his lieutenants nearfull control of the body politic and economy These men took over the main offices of state thereby ensuring access to and appropriation of prime incomegenerating assets which became the spoils of their householdfaction members and proteges The purchase of enslaved persons for various roles was one of the four most important channels of recruitment to imperialcenter and Ottoman local households The other three modes of recruitmentcumbonding to a household were biologicalkin ties marriage and voluntary offer of loyalty and services in return for patronage Less prevalent were adoption and suckling relationships but the sources occasionally do mention them too Attachment ensured that in households across Ottoman societies patronage would flow from top to bottom and loyalty from the bottom up linking people from various elites to nonelite groups and individuals In that way society was cohesively undergirded both vertically within a household and horizontally between households Not infrequently individuals were attached to a household by more than one of these ties for instance through enslavement marriage and officeholding simultaneously Attachment to a household gave an individual protection employment social status and an identity For the enslaved population in the empire social attachment was a crucial matter perhaps more critical than for any other group This was so because enslaved persons were essentially kinless Except for enserfed Circassians who lived with their families on their landlords estate all other types of bonded persons lost their kin ties when enslaved Kulharem slavery 10 These include the Kazdaglıs of Egypt the Eyubizades of Iraq mainly in Baghdad and Basra the Azms of Syria the Husaynis of Tunis and the Karamanlıs of Libya Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 37 even made kin loss into a major feature in the ideology of the institution The young men and by extension the young women who were recruited into the sultans elite militaryadministrative corps were supposed to sub stitute their loyalty to their parents for loyalty to their sovereign But sometime in the seventeenth century the monopoly of the imperial kapı was broken and high officeholders themselves kuls were allowed to recruit kultype Arabic mamluk retainers known as the kuls of the kuls kulların kulları First the sultan and later also his senior kuls were to possess the loyalty and affection of enslaved recruits kuls harem women and eunuchs In theory severed from their original kin group these enslaved members of the imperial elite were to acquire fictive kin through bonding with their new patrons high officeholders at the center and in the provinces whose household folk kapı halkı they became In fact research has shown that many kulharem slaves maintained their kin ties back home despite the fact that the idea and practice of fictive kin relationships was a major component of the Ottoman system of government However with the entry of nonkuls into the army and bureaucracy fairly early on the pool of recruits was greatly diluted and compromised visavis the idealtype version This process further intensified during the first decades of the seventeenth century after the demise of staterun periodic recruitment campaigns devsirme But reattachment was not less important to enslaved Africans who were brutally detached from their kin groups on the continent and transplanted into an alien milieu socially and culturally so different from the environ ment they had grown up in Bonding with slaveholders was never easy but it was smoother for those who served as domestics in urban house holds and more difficult and bumpier for menial workers in mines pearl dhows crop fields and quarries When successfully achieved attachment to a household partially compensated the enslaved for the loss of kin back home and not infrequently these men and women were accepted into the slaveholders family Enslaved persons were renamed as part of re creating their identity often with the intention of wiping out the older one which was invariably considered uncivilized seriously deficient in religious terms nonIslamic or superficially Muslim lacking refinement and generally primitive Whereas manumission was what many of the enslaved yearned for and freedom was certainly a muchcoveted status the passage from enslave ment to freedom also meant severance of hardearned bonds to slavehold ers and other household members By losing their acquired attachment freed persons risked social marginalization which entailed exposure to many hazards Slaves having already been torn apart from their kinbase now faced the same experience over again with manumission In fact any resale threatened to absolve newly formed attachments although it at Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF SLAVERY least offered a chance of another reattachment and effectively barred the option of renewed kinlessness Things were better for enslaved persons who were permitted to form families while still in bondage enslavement in the ottoman empire 39 quarter of the nineteenth century as the British allowed runaway slaves to be harbored in their consulates throughout the empire and in their naval vessels Although the Ottoman government officially cooperated with the British and other European powers on the suppression of the slave trade individual governors especially in remote slaveimporting provinces often developed their own approach to the problem Leniency toward slaves in the Ottoman Empire was often forthcoming on humanitarian grounds It was not uncommon for the sultan to grant freedom upon the recommendation of his grand vezir or another top official to suffering criminally neglected physically abused and desti tute slaves The imperial fisc then purchased the slaves freedom from a slaveholder who refused to liberate him or her These acts of sovereign benevolence were not infrequently prompted by British consular requests on behalf of runaway slaves who sought refuge at their consulates across the empire There can hardly be much doubt that given the legal injunction against absconding and the determination to enforce it runaway slaves took great risks when deciding to leave their holders We should certainly note that some of these slaves did not fully calculate the risks and were not fully aware of the possible consequences of their action However most slaves were very aware of the realities of urban life in the Ottoman Empire Hence they knew that because success was not guaranteed careful planning preparation and cautionary measures were necessary in order to maximize chances of success Most enslaved persons realized that in order to gain their freedom they needed to rely on outside help Runaway slaves could expect assistance either from Ottoman state officials or from representatives of foreign powers in the empire They could distinguish between those Ottoman authorities who were more committed to hunt down and punish runaway slaves and those who were more likely to be lenient Although the Ottoman state did not run a tightly controlled society for much of its history the technological advances of the Tanzimat period increased the states capacity to impose central authority As the century wore on the deployment of better communications systems the telegraph better transport systems trains and steam ships and better registration and licensing practices travel documents border controls increased the authorities capability to track down and recapture runaway slaves This coincided with the governments move to suppress the traffic in Africans and to reduce the size of the enslaved population which they did partly under foreign mainly British pressure and partly out of their own desire to cope with problems posed by Circassian agricultural slavery Although enslaved individuals found themselves caught between these two contra dictory processes the number of absconders who could expect to end up as freed persons steadily grew Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 40 the cambridge world history of slavery Breaking the law was another form of resistance Although initially based on the Seriat Ottoman criminal law soon developed apart from Islamic principles and penalties13 From the 1840s onward the Tanzimatstate codified existing legislation developing an Ottomanbased and then a Europeaninfluenced penal system through a combination of codification and caselaw evolution In 1845 the Council of Ministers endorsed the High Courts view that enslaved persons should be liable to the same penalties as the free subjects of the sultan This changed the Seriatderived practice that slaveholders were responsible for punishing their slaves bringing the state into the slaveholderenslaved relationship to protect the enslaved and reduce arbitrary punishment Enacted by the Tanzimatstate and enforced by its agents the law only naturally came to be identified by the enslaved with the Ottoman state Gradually they began to consider the Tanzimat state as protector of their right to freedom and as their guardian against abuse and exploitation by the slaveholders When the state was seen as fail ing to live up to its image as their defender some of the enslaved resorted to actions against the sultans government and against what was one of its most explicit representations Ottoman law Whereas in many cases enslaved persons committed homicide larceny or arson for the same reasons that free persons did enslavementrelated factors often motivated their criminal behavior These have to be weighed in when transgressions by slaves are reviewed and analyzed Beyond these major types of crimes enslaved men and women in Ottoman society also resorted to other kinds of action that can be classified under various levels of defiance and resistance Generally speaking we notice two kinds of action under this category individual defiance and group defiance An individuals act of defiance was often a unique expression of anger resistance or protest Group action was a different thing in that it was an organized reaction to a particular situation that had developed in a given locale Enslaved persons acted as a group usually when some form of leadership was present which helped amplify their protest and achieve redress to specific grievances Whereas individual acts of defiance require personal courage group action necessitates organization leadership and goaloriented calculated risktaking Largescale group action would normally qualify as an uprising or a rebellion but the Ottoman government was reluctant to label even considerable organized disturbances of the public order as revolt ısyan 13 For early Ottoman criminal law see Uriel Heyd Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law V L Menage ed Oxford 1973 Ehud R Toledano The Legislative Process in the Ottoman Empire in the Early Tanzimat Period A Footnote International Journal of Turkish Studies 11 1980 99 108 for developments during the Tanzimat see Ruth Austin Miller From Fikh to Fascism The Turkish Republican Adoption of Mussolinis Criminal Code in the Context of Late Ottoman Legal Reform unpublished PhD dissertation Princeton University 2003 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 41 given the cost and difficulty of forcible suppression Instead the Ottomans often preferred to deal with the rebels negotiate with them constructively engage them and finally coopt them into the imperial system The Celali revolts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were perhaps the classic example of that policy14 but the principles of that political culture continued well beyond and into the following centuries The same policy was evident also in the few cases in which the group that launched an organized protest was made up of enslaved persons usually men seeking to end their oppression and gain freedom Group action by the enslaved could only occur where slaves were not isolated in urban households or working in small numbers as for example for an individual farmer in Egypt it could happen only where the enslaved worked in groups In the Ottoman Empire enslaved people who lived and worked in groups were to be found in only three situations First were the enserfedenslaved Circassian families that cultivated the agricultural estates of their feudal lords beys emirs Second were the enslaved Africans who worked on the large agricultural estates ciftliks Egyptian Arabic plural gafalik of OttomanEgyptian elite members The third case comprised the enslaved Africans who worked in small gangs for their nomad slaveholders in the Hijaz The creolization process was as important as overt resistance in the struggle against enslavement The eastern Mediterranean represents one of the most fascinating and fertile grounds for studying cultural diversity fusion complexity struggle and coexistence It was in Ottoman times and still is in fact today one of the worlds best laboratories for ethnic studies We are only too familiar with the past and recent calamities of Middle Eastern ethnopolitics but there is also another side to it all which calls for more scholarly efforts that might in the long run perhaps also defuse some of the intractable political quagmires that make life in this region so frustrating even painful but also so humanly engaging and absorbing The cultural diasporas created within the Ottoman Empire by forced migration were formed by a mixandmatch braiding of cultural components from various origins into a rich and fascinating variety a melange that has sometimes been called hybrid or creolized culture Ottoman cultural creolization is thus the process by which enslaved Africans and Circassians retained ingredients of their origin cultures fused these ingredients with local culture components and disseminated the resulting hybridtype cultures across Ottoman societies15 14 See for example Karen Barkeys account of the Ottoman approach to the Celali revolts in the sev enteenth century in Karen Barkey Bandits and Bureaucrats The Ottoman Route to State Centralization Ithaca NY 1994 15 For a succinct treatment of the terms creole and creolization see Paul E Lovejoy Iden tifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora in idem ed Identity in the Shadow of Slavery Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 42 the cambridge world history of slavery However that process did not happen pellmell there was a certain logic to what occurred at the interface between the cultures of the enslaved and those of the slaveholders where creolized forms were being fused16 Though a byproduct of the coerced migration of enslaved peoples into the Ottoman Empire creolization was also an individual and group response of those victimized people to their passage and integration into Ottoman soci eties Accordingly creolization has rightly been associated with resistance to incorporation but degrees of resistance should be distinguished within that process Strong resistance creates what is sometimes called separate sub cultures that are impervious to creolization whereas the emergence of creole cultures implies a certain measure of assimilation integration and acceptance of the dominant culture In the Ottoman Empire enslavement produced perforce creolized cultural reformulations rather than separate subcultures17 The process began in transit from home to destination as Islam was imposed on the captives initiating a long culturalreligious journey The journey would continue well into the Ottoman households that absorbed the enslaved and integrated them into society with varying degrees of success In principle AfricanOttoman creolization provided a model for other creolization processes allowing for variants in contents and historical cir cumstances Because Africans in the Ottoman Empire were either enslaved or freed or later the offspring of enslaved and freed persons we may gain access to their world by breaking the sociocultural code of their creolized possessionhealing cults Zar and Bori The ritual obviously had a psycho logical healing purpose for these individuals who had been brutally torn away from family community and country to be enslaved thrust into an alien society and relegated to the lowest social rung The initial severance from home and the crossing of nearly unbridgeable cultural boundaries were the most traumatic Even successful reattachment within Ottoman societies was never completely secure nor could it ever be taken for granted for the threat of resale was always lurking in the background As already noted manumission too posed similar risks to freed individuals Despite the Ottomanrecommended norm of manumission after seven to ten years of service many enslaved persons accumulated a sad history of several severances and reattachments in their lifetime with all the emotional London 2000 pp 1319 For the basic concept of creolization with which Lovejoy disagrees see Sidney W Mintz and Richard Price An Anthropological Perspective to the AfroAmerican Past A Caribbean Perspective Philadelphia 1976 The quote in this paragraph is from Paul E Lovejoy Introduction in idem ed Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam Princeton NJ 2004 8 16 Robin Cohen Global Diasporas An Introduction Seattle WA 1997 pp 12734 Steven Vertovec Three Meanings of Diaspora Exemplified among South Asian Religions Diaspora 6 1997 277 99 17 For a generally similar view see John Hunwick The Religious Practices of Black Slaves in the Mediterranean Islamic World in Lovejoy ed Slavery on the Frontiers pp 149172 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 43 and physical wearandtear that these involved In that stressful reality and psychocultural vacuum the soothing role of originculture reenactment most notably in Zar and Bori rituals is quite obvious The rituals and public festivals not only provided AfricanOttomans with a muchneeded sense of community they also served as a compensatory mechanism a substitute for the loss of the original family neighborhood and village structures Within this context we may see the sect leader kolbasıgodya both as a motherfather figure and as a social leader who cemented community ties Economic integration of enslaved Africans in the Americas also brought about the endangerment of their native African languages which did not survive in the plantation colonies In reality enslaved Africans and Cir cassians were rapidly absorbed into Ottoman societies especially in urban domestic settings where most of the enslaved lived This meant that the lexifier whether Turkish or Arabic also effectively extinguished the lan guages and cultures that the enslaved brought with them into the empire Thus the agenda for future research on cultural processes in the eastern Mediterranean during the Ottoman period should concentrate on examin ing the dual phenomena of absorptionintegration of enslaved Africans and Circassians and the concomitant disappearanceextinction of their cultures within the empire The Role of the State As in other societies with slaves and slave societies the Ottoman state upheld the rights of slaveholders and refrained as much as possible from intervening in slaveholderenslaved relationships When it intervened this was in most cases to help slaveholders to recover their absconding slaves or conversely to liberate enslaved persons from abusive slaveholders Until 1845 the state was also reluctant to impose its criminal system upon slaves leaving the responsibility in the hands of slaveholders However that changed as part of the growing role the state assumed in criminal matters in general Regardless of the debate over the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries few scholars would dispute the fact that in the nineteenth century especially during the period of the Tanzimat reforms 1830s 80s the government in Istanbul was gaining strength and becoming more centralized As already mentioned the new technologies imported from Europe were increasing its power and ability to exercise control within society The state is not seen here as separate from society or as standing in oppo sition to it but rather as the tool of the social groups to serve and protect their interests In the Ottoman Empire all these groups had something to do with slavery mostly as slaveholders Kulharem slaves were in the peculiar position of serving as the backbone of the very state that enslaved Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 44 the cambridge world history of slavery them and they resisted attempts to abolish slavery As loyal servants of the sultan and his state the kul served the interests of the slaveholding elite Moreover they themselves owned slaves and they recruited and socialized new kul When the nineteenth century drew to a close however the ideas that fol lowed the technologies won the day Although harem women and eunuchs remained in bondage many vestiges of kul servitude had been dissolving in practice Other types of unfree persons were also being freed albeit gradu ally Runaway slaves as well as illegally captured enslaved and transported persons could expect to be liberated from bondage in all core areas and most peripheral regions within the sultans domains The growing numbers of runaway slaves who managed to regain their freedom began to have a perceptible economic impact With risks of losing slaves to absconding and governmentsponsored manumission slaveholders gradually came to prefer hiring free labor to slaves As the number of slaves decreased the number of free servants increased18 But the shift was not easy because domestic slavery was such a deeply entrenched social institution Many elite households which thrived on it for centuries found it hard to carry on without it Substitute arrange ments evolved for the transitory period and as late as the first decades of the twentieth century such households would unofficially adopt chil dren from poor families and raise and educate them inhouse while also using them as domestic servants In this version of patronage the children known in Turkish as besleme or cırak would later be married off and set up in life by the patrons family Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was at an end further reading The last few years are witnessing yet another cyclical surge in academic and public interest in enslavement Perhaps not since the debates of the 1970s has this interest been both as intense and as pluralistic in orientation However for those sharing an essentially Americanist orientation in the study of enslavement be it North Central or South America work will continue to be driven by economic history with social and cultural concerns taking a backseat Social and cultural historians however are able to deploy readily available comparative tools that are increasingly drawn from social anthropology and cultural studies which treat transnational 18 See for example observations from Jidda in BNA FO54125 Confidential 491481 Consul Moncrieff Jiddas report on runaway slaves for 1882 dated December 1 1883 Gabriel Baer observed for Egypt that the most important change affecting slavery was the emergence of a free labor market in the late 1880s and 1890s in his Slavery and Its Abolition in idem Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt Chicago 1969 pp 16189 the quote is from page 186 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 enslavement in the ottoman empire 45 phenomena such as migration and diasporas For the study of enslavement in Ottoman and other Islamic societies these are the most promising tools for research and interpretation In the past twenty years or so a number of studies on slavery and the slave trade have created the framework for interpreting the history of enslaved people in the Ottoman Empire These have mostly described the system and its working the institution and its complexity The next phase will have to build on early attempts to recover voices of the enslaved and further interpret them with the help of sociocultural tools19 Such a trend accords with the recent changing of the research environment which is likely to open up the field of Ottoman and Middle Eastern slavery studies The incremental growth of studies devoted to these topics over the past quarter century is now coinciding with demands to enrich our research agenda by posing a partially new set of questions pertaining to the life the slaves made in these societies their manumission and the attitude of society toward freed slaves The most important sources for studying enslavement in the Ottoman Empire are Ottoman records whether stateproduced or private For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Seriat court records and state papers form the backbone of available research materials For the nineteenth cen tury the most promising of these are court registers contained in various state archives both Seriat and Nizami courts established by the Tanzimat state often called new administrative courts20 Enslaved persons appear in these records as absconders or alleged offenders thereby rendering court files an excellent source for the social and cultural history of enslavement So far very few studies of Ottoman slavery have been based on Seriat court records21 the use of which has been a subject of some controversy in the 19 For some examples see Alexander Lopashich A Negro Community in Yugoslavia Man 58 1958 16973 John Hunwick Black Africans in the Mediterranean World Introduction to a Neglected Aspect of the African Diaspora in Elizabeth Savage ed The Human Commodity Perspectives on the TransSaharan Slave Trade London 1992 pp 538 idem The Religious Practices of Black Slaves in the Mediterranean Islamic World in Lovejoy ed Slavery on the Frontiers pp 14972 and I M Lewis Ahmed AlSafi and Sayyid Hurreiz eds Womens Medicine The ZarBori Cult in Africa and Beyond Edinburgh 1991 20 Extensive work on Seriat court records has been conducted in recent years Some of the most recent to be published in a long list are Mahmoud Yazbak Haifa in the Late Ottoman Period 18641914 A Muslim Town in Transition Leiden 1998 Peirce Morality Tales articles by Beshara Doumani and Iris Agmon in Beshara Doumani ed Family History in the Middle East Household Property and Gender Albany NY 2003 Madeline C Zilfi Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire The Design of Difference Cambridge 2010 and Iris Agmon Family and Court Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine Syracuse NY 2006 21 This list is not exhaustive but rather gives a general idea of the state of the literature Ronald Jennings Black Slaves and Free Slaves in Ottoman Cyprus 15901640 Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 30 1987 286302 Yvonne Seng A Liminal State Slavery in Sixteenth Century Istanbul in Shaun E Marmon ed Slavery in the Islamic Middle East Princeton NJ 1999 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 field in recent years It is common knowledge that there are no Ottoman slave narratives Although this statement may now be slightly revised to include some such accounts that have come to light in recent years the absence of this kind of source has hampered the study of enslavement in Ottoman and postOttoman societies Owing to the intense British interest in the abolition of slavery and a milder concern on the part of the French and a few other Western nations European diplomatic records mainly consular reports have proven to be a very useful source for the study of the slave trade and slavery in the Ottoman Empire These records have been studied extensively leaving less uncharted territory although scattered private papers in European libraries and archives containing Ottoman documents have not yet been fully exploited CHAPTER 3 SLAVERY IN ISLAMIC AFRICA 14001800 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 specific context But a historians analysis must be rooted in temporally specific pasts so we will move from thematic concerns to summary histories of slavery in four distinct regions western Africa the Nile Valley the Horn and coastal East Africa SLAVING A survey of scholarship on enslavement in Islamic law Sharīʿa and in the history of Muslims in Africa makes it clear that principle and practice were frequently at odds A closer look at academic writings on slavery in the Shariʿa makes it clear that the principles themselves were often ambiguously understood and hotly contested This is true both for the scholars of Islam ulamā and the Islamicists who study them Nearly all of the latter agree that subSaharan Africa was a place of special importance for slavers As a shifting but generally expanding frontier of Islamization where Muslim and nonMuslims were in close and not always friendly contact it was a paradigmatic region of slave supply A close association between blackness and slavery developed This was sometimes the case in Muslim Africa south of the Sahara as well Here the immediacy of enslavement also helped reveal some ambiguities of law and discrepancies of custom that were more easily ignored in Egypt or Turkey Only two means of producing a slave seem to have been unanimously accepted by the ulamā biological reproduction and capture in a legally constituted jihād Some academics state unequivocally that these were the only valid means of making a slave according to the Sharīʿa This is not accurate as a global statement Some ulamā accepted purchase from nonMuslims others did not Some considered the dependents of Muslim criminals to be enslavable for some only the dependents of apostates could be so treated For still others only organized bands of apostates might have their women and children taken as slaves Some early Muslims appear not to have accepted the enslavement of dependents at all permitting only the capture of enemy combatants The fine points are nearly inexhaustible and require booklength discussions These and other matters were debated in Islamic Africa Were darkskinned Africans particularly fit for enslavement Who had the authority to declare a jihād Were simple raids legal as long as those who were raided were nonMuslims What if they were bad Muslims The arguments of the ulamā on these topics constitute a rich body of sources that academics are only beginning to explore in historical context Arguments over the principles were complex and frequently elided or ignored in the real world Many human beings were enslaved by means that enjoyed no sanction in Sharīʿa Slaving had its own logic that could defy the pious and the learned War Slavery and Africa The conquests that brought coastal North Africa under Muslim rule in the seventh and eighth centuries CE produced significant numbers of slaves SubSaharan Africa remained unconquered yielding relatively few slaves to the Muslim world Some were spared enslavement in the short term but remaining beyond the caliphate rule by a temporal successor slavery in islamic africa 14001800 49 of the Prophet meant greater risk in the long term The ulamā radically proscribed slaving activities within the polities established by the conquests No free Muslim was to be enslaved under any circumstances nor was it legal for a Muslim to willingly submit to slavery People of the Book Jews Christians and often other religious groups were exempt from enslavement if they lived within the bounds of a Muslim state upheld public law and paid the jizyā or capitation tax The production of slaves was thus pushed to the margins of the dār alIslām the abode of Islam For the ulamā the surest candidates for enslavement were polytheists who lived beyond its bounds had no treaty ahd with Muslims and had been captured in a legal jihād By the tenth century most Sunni scholars had come to see continuous jihād on the frontiers of Muslim territory as a religious obligation Strong prohibitions against slaving within the dār alIslām and strong incentives to fight those beyond it in what the scholars chose to call the abode of war dār alharb meant that jihād in distant lands of unbelief was considered the ideal means of producing slaves Alongside such seemingly aggressive interpretations of the Qurānic and Prophetic exhortations to struggle jahād in the way of God the ulamā agreed almost universally on the humanistic principle that the inherent condition of the descendants of Adam was freedom alasl huwa alhuriyya Only a narrow range of contingencies could abrogate that original state foremost being capture in jihād For many ulamā only a rightful caliph had the authority to declare jihād and take slaves Enslavement was thus closely linked to the religious legitimacy of political authorities Few political authorities in Islamic Africa during this period could make a plausible claim on the caliphate but some did anyway Often the question of political authority and jihād was literally academic concerning only scholars while the world seemed to ignore it entirely The full weight of academic scholarship on the history of slavery in Islamic Africa makes it clear that many Muslims considered the inhabitants of dār alharb enslaveable even when the formal requirements of jihād were not met Two scholarly notions emergent in the period considered helped produce this notion The first was 2 The traditional reference given for a detailed introduction to the position of slaves in Islamic legal thought is Robert Brunschvigs Abd in Encyclopaedia of Islam Leiden 1960 It is a masterful synthetic piece based mainly on classical sources Chapter 3 Slave Law and Practice in Jonathan Brockopps Early Maliki Law Ibn Abd alHakam and His Major Compendium of Jurisprudence Leiden 2000 is useful for understanding the development of slavery law as process 50 the cambridge world history of slavery that slavery was a punishment for and a prophylactic against unbelief A second and related idea was that slaving provided an avenue to faith and therefore was a proxy for proselytizing Over time those peoples who were known by Muslims mostly as slaves might be imagined to have unbelief and enslavability inherent in their nature This was true at different times for Persians Berbers Turks Caucasians Scandinavians and others In our period however slavery and unbelief were increasingly read onto the bodies of darkskinned Africans Blackness Unbelief and Enslavement The history of blackness and slavery in the Muslim world remains unwritten The documentary sources of Islam make no normative association between skin color and servitude yet we know that by the nineteenth century and indeed long before many in the Muslim world considered darkskinned Africans unusually suited for enslavement Blacks were not the only or even the most numerous slaves in the early centuries of Islam Persians Berbers Turks Europeans Slavs and Asians all served as slaves in Muslim lands Slavery was based on religious not somatic difference but according to Lewis and others by the medieval period the generic Arabic term for slave abd had already come to mean black slave It would ultimately denote black person slave or free in many Arabic dialects Some Arabiclanguage intellectuals argued that the enslavement of darkskinned Africans was ordained by a Prophetic curse The notion that Noah bequeathed both servitude and blackness on the progeny of Ham emerged from misreadings of early rabbinic literature It was reproduced by Jewish Christian and Muslim intellectuals in spite of the fact that it was refuted by prominent scholars including the great fourteenthcentury North African historian alim pl ulamā Ibn Khaldun who believed color difference was a consequence of climate In this model derived from the Greek physician Galen the world consisted of a series of climates The Mediterranean latitudes were considered ideal for the development of the most advanced peoples and civilizations To the north and south extremes of cold and heat were thought to produce deformations of body and character Lightskinned Europeans and darkskinned Africans were thought equally conditioned to barbarism and by extension servitude 51 slavery in islamic africa 14001800 The association between blackness and slavery was apparently so conventional that it spawned a number of treatises enumerating the accomplishments of blacks and rebutting claims of inferiority These date back to at least the ninth century with Jāhiz alBaṣrīs d 869 The Boast of the Blacks Against the Whites So although the central texts of Islam made little of color difference in Qurān 3022 it is but a sign of God and one of His mysteries the ulamā speculated about the bodies character and enslavability of darkskinned Africans All of these discourses have been elaborated and discussed in a number of academic works but whether the ordinary Muslims remains unknown Did Muslim slave traders discuss such matters Warriors and kidnappers did not but what about privileged wellread slaveowners Between 1400 and 1800 subSaharan Africans formed an increasing percentage of the slaves in Muslim societies as indeed was the case in Christian Europe Everywhere darkskinned Africans were being enslaved on an increasing indeed unprecedented scale This simple inescapable fact must help explain the association between blackness and slavery in the Islamic world including subSaharan Muslim societies slave trading The transfer of slaves from subSaharan Africa to North Africa and the Middle East has been the subject of a fair amount of research It is usually and rather casually referred to as the Islamic Arab or Oriental slave trade Thus christened it is framed as an export slave trade from subSaharan Africa and placed in numerical and moral competition with the Atlantic trade The latter is almost never called a Christian or European trade we call it the Atlantic in spite of the fact that it moved people all over the Indian Ocean The socalled Islamic slave trade is understood to have three main parts the transSaharan the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trades All were oriented primarily toward markets in Muslim societies beyond subSaharan Africa Wild estimates of the scale of this trade are sometimes circulated despite the very narrow source base Nonetheless this chapter would be incomplete without some sense of the scale The best scholarly estimate is that roughly 1175 million enslaved subSaharan Africans were exported across the Sahara Red Sea and Indian Ocean from 6501900 CE These figures are based largely on the work of Ralph Austen who pioneered efforts to quantify this trade But the true figure for pre1600 might easily be double or just twothirds of Austens estimates Data for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are better but still very sparse Only the nineteenthcentury data can be considered adequate and even this compares poorly with the evidentiary base for the Atlantic trade Lovejoys estimates indicate that roughly 375 million left subSaharan Africa for Muslim markets during our period with the total numbers increasing in each century from 730000 in the fifteenth century to 13 million in the eighteenth The Saharan trade was by far the largest component of the socalled Islamic trade Its estimated volume was 4300 slaves per year in the fifteenth century and 5500 per year in the sixteenth before increasing to an annual average of 7000 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries It operated on three major axes 1 Greater Nile Valley Nilotic Sudan especially Sinnār and Dār Fūr Egypt 2 Central Sudan and Maghrib Bornū and the Hausa states Tunis and Tripoli 3 Western Africa the western Sudan Morocco and Algiers Egypt received many slaves from the western Sudan particularly before the seventeenth century In the eighteenth century many slaves taken by slavers in Wadai and Kanem were marched overland to the infamous darb alarbaʿīn fortyday road connecting Dār Fūr with Egypt North African termini shifted In short these axes all overlapped They are useful only to sketch the major flows of enslaved people As mentioned earlier most scholarly work portrays this trade as an export trade from Africa to the Muslim world But most of the trade happened on the African continent As E Ann McDougall has argued the decision to portray the Saharan trade as an export trade is an artifact of nineteenthcentury abolitionist discourse It was part of a broader colonialist project to demonize Arabs and Islam by showing that their slave trade was as cruel brutal and large as the Atlantic trade if not more so Further this project imposed European racial categories on slavery in islamic africa 14001800 53 the African map separating white and black Africa the thinly veiled elder sisters of our contemporary siblings North and subSaharan Africa Dividing the Muslim societies of North Africa from those of West Africa to fabricate an intercontinental trade obscures the fact that most of the socalled Islamic export trade was a continental African trade among Muslim societies Twothirds of the total export trade was Saharan It was a shared Islamic identity and juridical context that facilitated much of the trade from the Sudan to North Africa Furthermore the Sudan itself was probably the primary Muslim market in this trade Artificial racial and geographic distinctions distract from the primary dynamic the continuous largescale movement of enslaved populations from nonMuslim areas to Muslims areas Even this pattern however prominent was not absolute Muslims were not always the victors in wars nor were they always the aggressors in raids However their greater access to arms goods and markets must have helped greatly before the rise of the Atlantic trade Once the Atlantic trade was established many Muslims were shipped across the sea after being enslaved by nonMuslims Muslim slaves sometimes formed distinct minorities in the slave populations of nonMuslim societies in Africa as well Hausa Muslims lived as slaves in predominantly nonMuslim Yorubaland in the eighteenth century Their polyglot contemporaries living as slaves in Cape Town were drawn from all over the Indian Ocean These Muslim slave communities defy easy characterization The other components in the socalled Islamic trade might be better qualified as export trades because a greater percentage of the slaves han dled in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean networks were moved outside of Africa But even here we must remember that significant if indeterminate numbers were kept in bondage within Africa The slave trade across the Red Sea into Arabia predates the rise of Islam There were slaves of Ethiopian origin in Arabia at the time of the Prophet A steady supply of slaves moved across the Red Sea along networks operated by Muslim traders in the Christian highlands and through Muslim polities in what is now southern Ethiopia Lovejoys estimates suggest a figure of roughly two thousand slaves per year exported across the Red Sea for twelve and one half centuries In the Muslim coastal cities south of the Horn Swahilis Arabs and others traded some enslaved Africans to seagoing merchants Lovejoy estimates the East African trade at one thousand slaves per year before 1700 The enslaved were sent all over the Indian Ocean though most probably went to southern Arabia Lovejoys estimate for the eighteenth century is four thousand per year reflecting trans formations in the nature of the coastal economy after Omani Arabs introduced much greater reliance on slave trading As noted later it now seems that the coastal trade was much larger than previously believed Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 54 the cambridge world history of slavery but that most of the slaves were obtained on Madagascar rather than the mainland10 The coastal Red Sea and Saharan trades also overlapped with one another In the sixteenth century slaves from Sinnar in the Nilotic Sudan were usually marched to the Red Sea Conversely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries slaves from greater Ethiopia were included in car avans from Sinnar Mogadishu and Brava fit into networks of the Horn and the Swahili coast Escalating religious tensions in the Red Sea and the Swahili coast after the sixteenth century helped further blur the lines Arabs Swahilis Somalis Ethiopian Muslims and Ottoman Turks all fought in Ahmad Grans war against the Christian monarchy of Ethiopia The Ethiopians were in turn aided by their Portuguese coreligionists The close contacts forged in this period accelerated the interpenetration of Muslim merchant networks in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea In fact though the category Red Sea slave trade has become a convention in the literature it may ultimately be repositioned within the context of the greater Indian Ocean slave trade rather than in the socalled Islamic trade The Atlantic Slave Trade from Islamic Africa The slave trades of Islamic Africa overlapped not only with one another but with the Atlantic networks as well Interpenetration and crossfertilization occurred at every conceivable level and in nearly every place on the African continent Only a few examples can be given here Fourteenth and fifteenthcentury Iberian notions of the enslavability of blacks so founda tional in the history of European and American slavery were informed by North African histories of skin color and slavery Many areas of Islamic Africa were exposed to demand from both external Muslim markets and the Atlantic world simultaneously Fifteenthcentury Senegambia was the first By the end of the eighteenth century slaves purchased by Swahili mer chants on Madagascar might wind up in Mauritius or Manhattan Cape Town or Free Town Lamu or Lima Goa or Mecca At the same time Swahili Muslims themselves were sometimes kidnapped by the Portuguese and sold into slavery Substantial numbers of African Muslims were slaves in the New World and many had been sent there by Muslim brigands traders and kings Accusations of enslaving free Muslims for sale to Euro peans were at the heart of a series of Islamic movements in the seventeenth eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries11 The notion that the Oriental 10 Thomas Vernet Le commerce des esclaves sur la cˆote Swahili 15001750 Azania 38 2003 6997 11 This is discussed later but see also Paul E Lovejoy Islam Slavery and Political Transformations in West Africa Constraints on the TransAtlantic Slave Trade OutreMers Revue dHistoire 336337 2002 24782 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 and Occidental trades in slaves can be discretely isolated is fundamentally untenable Between 1400 and 1800 Europeans lived as slaves in North Africa and Turks as slaves in West Africa and Yoruba slaves taught Qurʾān in Brazil This was a true histoire croisée and nowhere was the web more tangled than in Islamic Africa slavery Frederick Cooper has asked What is Islamic about slavery in an Islamic society of Africa The Qurʾān mentions slavery it neither sanctions nor condemns nor eternalizes the institution The classical jurists and later ʿulamāʾ sought to regulate aspects of the creation purchase use and manumission of slaves As Martin Klein has pointed out slavery was justified by many Muslims in religious terms yet as Klein also demonstrates slavery was contested in Islamic terms as well Slaves reproached their owners for not providing Islamic instruction and for not living up to the legal and ethical guidelines scholars provided for the treatment of slaves Islam provided powerful discourses of submission and authority equality and hierarchy destiny and agency that could be struggled over by slave and slavemaster alike All of this means that slavery was a preoccupation of many Muslims and that they often thought of it in reference to religion none of this means that there was an Islamic slavery any more than we could speak of a Christian slavery In a useful survey article on slavery in the Islamic world Hans Müller the worlds foremost authority on slavery in Persian Turkish and Arabic literary traditions before the nineteenth century argues that the history of slavery in Muslim societies must be written as economic history That economic system could be mediated by religious discourse but slavery in the Muslim world as elsewhere was a socioeconomic institution not a religious one 56 the cambridge world history of slavery luxury imports domestics warriors sexual objects and curios Sources on the activities of nonelite slaves are rare everywhere before the nineteenth century We know however that in many parts of Islamic Africa slaves worked in the fields sometimes in great numbers There were extensive slaveworked agricultural estates in Senegambia Southern Morocco and the Mediterranean in the fifteenth century Songhay had massive planta tions in the sixteenth century Kano and Sinnar in the seventeenth century Zanzibar in the eighteenth century and Egypt in the nineteenth Exam ples could be multiplied In the Sahara slaves were often used to cultivate crops whereas slaveowning groups maintained a nomadic social identity and value systems that held cultivators in contempt Slaves work needs more thorough research for our period but tasks were clearly diverse and suited to a variety of economic social and political circumstances Slavery is not a kind of labor but a kind of control and slaves could be made to meet all kinds of perceived societal needs and desires Female Slavery Some academic discussions of female slavery in the Muslim world seem to focus heavily on sexual desires at the expense of societal needs Although it is impossible to overstate the sexual vulnerability of female slaves it is possible to overstate the role of Oriental lust in shaping female slavery Of course slavewomen were sexually objectified and abused in the Muslim world as elsewhere In historical practice as opposed to the imagined harem womens slavery was largely directed to production reproduction social prestige and political power Slave fertility in Africa was low and the labor of enslaved women was more important to the perpetuation of slavery than their descendants When born to their owners the progeny of slavewomen were often incorporated into free lineages When born to others such children were slaves but because they were during this period often locally born slaves rather than tradeslaves they were more likely to be emancipated and become part of the history of clientage rather than slavery proper Most slaves in Africa were female and it is often asserted that the external trade to the Islamic world carried twice as many females as males Women generally cost more than male slaves except eunuchs and specialized elite concubines could cost many times more In Islamic Africa as elsewhere women were in high demand for their labor reproductive capacities and sexual services Because slavewives and concubines usually lacked the protection and arbitration of kin an overall increase in slavery in our period and its increasing feminization probably resulted in a decline in womens position in marriage At the same time the slavery of some women meant enhanced freedom of others Free women might resent sexual and marital competition but female slaves liberated many elite Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Slave Labor In addition to pointing out that slavery is an economic rather than Islamic institution Müller also pointed to the importance of slaves in agricultural work and other largescale laborintensive tasks in the Islamic world Atlantic exceptionalism portrays the capitalist slave plantation as a historical phenomenon without precedent Oriental exceptionalism often obscures the simple fact of slavelabor But were slaves in the Muslim world just women from manual labor Before mechanization domestic labor was time consuming and difficult and women of the slaveowning classes did little of it Slavery also allowed for the possibility of female seclusion a possibility that many women relished because it marked prestige and facilitated independent economic activity Concubines and slavewives were important in Islamic Africa in the same ways and for the same reasons that they were important throughout Africa Women of reproductive age were always in demand because they increased the size of kingroups slaves all the more so because they might be more easily controlled In Islamic Africa women who bore children by their masters had particular Sharʿī protections Unless a slaveowner explicitly disavowed ever having intercourse with his female slave she was granted the status of umm walad mother of children upon bearing a child or in the Mālikī school even upon successful conception not resulting in birth An umm walad could not legally be sold nor could her children whether or not they were explicitly recognized by their owner She was granted freedom upon her masters death as were her children In the case that the owner formally recognized the children as his own they were immediately free There is of course no way of knowing how widely the formal prescriptions of the law were respected but they were not wholly ignored Hausa rulers of Kano kept hundreds of royal concubines from at least the fifteenth century and these provided most of the citys rulers The concubines themselves were central in the administration of grain taxation marking a close link between production and reproduction They also may have played an important early role in cloth dyeing and were critical sources of knowledge on their regions of origin In short Nast demonstrates that they were fundamental to the reproduction of the state though not always in the ways intended by the Sarkī Kano concubines effectively asserted their economic and political agency from within the largely autonomous confines of the royal ḥarīm A major challenge to that autonomy came at the end of the sixteenth century when eunuchs were first installed in Kano palaces female quarters Eunuchs In 1715 an Ottoman edict sent to Egypt source of most of the empires eunuchs forbade the castration of young men calling it inhumane contrary to the Sharʿī and the sultans orders The edict compared the sites of castration to slaughterhouses cited a fatwa by the Grand Mufti of Istanbul and declared the whole business to be bida a blameworthy innovation Edicts in 1712 1722 and 1737 sang a different tune demanding immediate shipments of eunuchs for the sultans harem Here in short was the dilemma faced in the Muslim world on the question of eunuchs There was simply no way the ulamā could countenance the manufacture of eunuchs yet some Muslims would not stop demanding them Eunuchs were valued in guarding women because of their presumed lack of virility and more important in administration and governance because of their inability to develop kinbased interests They had been long used in both capacities in many of the lands that came to be lands of Islam There was no clear Sharīa argument forbidding ownership of eunuchs only their manufacture though there are hadiths wherein the Prophet orders his wives to maintain seclusion from eunuchs after he hears one describing a womans body in detail to a potential suitor The prohibition of castration was universally maintained by Muslim legal thinkers and the problem of eunuchs was handled in much the same fashion as the problem of illegal enslavement There were centers of production all over Islamic Africa meeting continental as well as intercontinental demand Important sites before the nineteenth century included Ethiopia probably the oldest several locations in Upper Egypt Bagirmi south of Bornū and the HausaKanuri state of Damagaram in what is now Niger Prepubescent captives were the usual victims as adults were thought unlikely to recover physically or psychologically from the operation Eunuchs were worth many times more than their uncastrated counterparts but mortality rates could be as high as 90 percent even for young boys Many specialized locations for eunuch manufacture were at the fringes of dar alIslam and run by nonMuslims such as Coptic monks Jews and Mossi traditionalists But some Muslims also performed the mutilations To maximize profits slavers mutilated children at some distance from the site of their capture but before beginning a usually long journey to market In this way food and water would not be wasted on the boys most of whom were more likely to die after being mutilated The extensive use of eunuchs is documented in Muslim societies on both sides of the Sahara The Mamluk and Ottoman ruling elites and wealthy Egyptians more generally bought eunuchs on a grand scale The first ruler to possess eunuchs in the Hausa states was reportedly a female ruler named Amina who ruled in the first half of the fifteenth century Leo Africanus reported their presence at the royal palace in Songhay in the early sixteenth century Eunuchs were extensively used in state administration in Bornū and Wadai in the nineteenth century and probably before For such roles eunuchs are important because they are the quintessential kinless slave Not only have they been taken from their kin group but they cannot produce their own The most common form of castration removed the ability to reproduce not the ability to copulate The eunuch was still valuable even if a sexual threat because he was not a reproductive threat As regional governor the eunuch could not turn his concession into a hereditary kingship Anthropologist Claude Meillassoux argues that slaves in general were denied legitimate kinship and were in a nearly identical position What makes the eunuch unique is that what is a mere social fiction for the slave is for him a biological fact In an early modern world where statecraft was based largely on controlling competing families the inability of the slave to develop kinbased interests made him an ideal administrator for elites looking to centralize power and authority In Islamic North Africa the development of servile military forces sometimes seemed to have a decidedly racial bent In 1523 a rebellious Ottoman governor named Ahmet Pasha attempted to make himself the sultan of Egypt rapidly building a slave army for the purpose It is reported that he ordered the governor of Upper Egypt to raid Nubia for a thousand slaves whom he would arm with guns and train It is also reported that he ordered black slaves confiscated from private owners in Cairo and placed in the army The Saadian sultan Ahmad alManṣūr r 15781603 built a substantial slave army by forcing darkskinned Moroccan men into military service and apportioning wives to them from among the black women of Morocco In a letter to the ulamā of Egypt attempting to justify this forced conscription he claims to have investigated the backgrounds of the slaveconscripts paid the rightful owners and abided by the strictures of the Sharīa with the approval of local ulamā Historians have reason for doubt It is clear from the letter that alManṣūr considers blacks in Morocco to be slaves or runaways Nearly a century later the Alawi sultan Mulay Ismāīl b alSharīf r 16721727 would repeat the episode though on a grander scale establishing the famous abīd alBukhārī or slaves of Bukhārī These free warriors earned the name by swearing their allegiance to the sultan on Bukhārīs collection of hadith In this instance however the resistance of the ulamā was recorded One Moroccan ālim Abd alSalām Jāsūs was executed for his criticism of the enslavement of free Muslims simply because they were darkskinned The criticism did not stop the process however Mulay Ismāīl assembled his army and the abīd alBukhārī though detested by the people were important in Moroccan politics until the 1790s The use of military slaves was rarely popular not only because of societal contempt for slaves but because it often marked a move toward increased centralization and autocracy Military slaves were often particularly despised by free commoners This was true of Mamluks in fifteenthcentury Egypt as much as it was of ceddos in eighteenthcentury Senegal or the Abīd alBukhārī in Morocco Though they were politically privileged slave status could still hang heavy over the heads of such warriors Many slavery in islamic africa 14001800 61 reported that even powerful Wolof ceddo were required to keep iron bars suspended above their beds as a reminder of their servile status21 The Religious Lives of Slaves Wolof ceddo were broadly held to be irreligious They were sometimes accused of being pagan in a society that knew no formal religion other than Islam Throughout Islamic Africa slaves and their descendants were often labeled as lax Muslims As the enslaved were generally though not always brought from nonMuslim societies the slur contained a kernel of truth but it was the power of the freeborn that reproduced the stereotype In many Muslim societies clear religious injunctions to teach faith to slaves were ignored in spite of the notion that enslaving nonMuslims was done for their salvation Other slaveowners did take this seriously and some slaves did achieve prominence through unusual educational achievement The enslaved were thus pushed into a realm between belief and unbelief Paganism was the pretext for slavery but especially in North Africa there was little market for wholly pagan slaves In order to make the enslaved marketable a kind of cursory forced conversion was visited upon them Men and boys were circumcised and their heads were shaved Males and females were given Muslim names often conventional slavenames22 Needless to say the experience did not always produce profoundly Islamic sensibilities among slaves Recent work by Ismael Musah Montana on the religious life of slaves in early nineteenthcentury Tunisia is indicative of a new interest in the slaves religious life23 Recently enslaved women domi nated the Bori religious sphere where mainly Hausa cultic elements com prised an alternative religious life Other recent studies of the Bori in North Africa Zar in Northeast Africa and Pepo on the Swahili coast have greatly enriched our understandings of the spiritual lives of the enslaved Also it has mostly focused on visibly African populations in Arab regions where the racial division between master and slave makes the discussion of slave syncretism and diaspora familiar More historical work on the reli gious lives of slaves and subalterns in subSaharan Muslim societies would be welcome How did the Wolof ndepp or Songhay holey develop in the context of social and gender relations before the nineteenth century We do not yet have full answers It is problematic however to utilize the notion 21 James F Searing Aristocrats Slaves and Peasants Power and Dependency in the Wolof States 17001850 International Journal of African Historical Studies 21 1988 484 22 Slavenames have been studied by Terence Walz in Trade between Egypt and bilad asSudan 17001820 Cairo 1978 See also Hunwick Black Africans in the Mediterranean World p 13 23 Ismael Musah Montana Ahmad Ibn alQadı alTimbutawı on the Bori Ceremonies of Tunis in Paul E Lovejoy ed Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam Princeton 2004 See also John Hunwick The Religious Practices of Black Slaves in the Mediterranean Islamic World in the same volume Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 of an African diaspora only when the enslaved land in societies we see as racially other If the insights and tools developed in scholarship on the African diaspora are useful then we must apply them to the social history of slavery within subSaharan African societies as well WESTERN AFRICA SubSaharan Africans provided the bulk of the slave population in Morocco Algiers Tunis and Tripoli and there was a strong connection between dark skin and slave status Here the harātīn population probably descendants of the indigenous darkskinned inhabitants of the Sahara was often assimilated to slave or freedslave status A folk etymology of the Berber term harātīn even made the equation explicit harātīn being supposed to derive from the Arabic term hurr thānī second class free Darkskinned Moroccans were likely victims of kidnapping and other forms of illegal enslavement but private brigandage may have been a relatively minor concern compared to illegal enslavement by the state for military purposes described above The identification of skin color with slave status was not absolute as the chapter on white servitude in this volume clearly establishes The elite of Moroccan society could be descendants of darkskinned concubines because slave ownership was limited mainly to the wealthy and the powerful and the children of concubines were free and entitled whatever their color It is sometimes claimed that Mulay Ismāʿīl himself was the son of a Sudānī concubine South of the desert in the western Sudan the dominant political theme of the fifteenth century was the fall of Mali and the rise of Songhay The merchant networks developed by the former were largely inherited by the latter Important among them were the Juula who in spite of their pacifist Suwarīan interpretations of Maliki law did not question slavery Indeed as a merchant diaspora in the lands of nonMuslims they were critical in the slave trade By the 1460s the ancient citystate of Gao was becoming the Songhay Empire conquering and otherwise incorporating nearly all of what had been the Empire of Mali It would soon grow to be much larger than its predecessor The empire was established by Sunni ʿAli Ber who himself owned slaves on a vast scale His dynasty was ended by one of his former governors Muḥammad Turé who accused Sunni ʿAli of having enslaved free women and sold free men to an extent that cannot be measured thus raising the related issues of illegal enslavement political authority and Islamic legitimacy themes that run together through the history of the region As a usurper Askīya Muḥammad worked hard to create support for his rule He invited Muḥammad b ʿAbd alKarīm alMaghīlī an ʿālim from North Africa to his court where the latter wrote a series of opinions justifying Turés actions in Sharīʿa terms Notable for our purposes is the fact that he called Sunni ʿAli an unbeliever and qualified Turés coup as a jihād He also ruled that nearly all other military endeavors being pondered by Turé were not only permissible but mandatory In spite of the fact that he condemned Sunni ʿAli as an apostate and an illegal enslaver he permitted Turé to keep possession of his predecessors slaves He ruled that these slaves of the sultanate were akin to an endowment and may be kept forever Turé made the ḥājj early in his rule and while in Cairo met the great ʿālim and dean of alAzhar Jālāl alDīn alSuyūtī The latter apparently arranged an audience for him with the nominally ʿAbbasid caliph in Egypt who allegedly formally deputized the Askīya as ruler over all the lands of West Africa This was important for Turé because this strengthened his case for the right to make jihād A series of annual campaigns against first the nonMuslim Mossi peoples to the south of the Niger bend produced slaves for export to North Africa as well as domestic markets Under the Askīas Songhay elites filled the Niger River valley with slave plantations in the sixteenth century the largest numbering perhaps 2700 slaves authority and Islamic legitimacy themes that run together through the history of the region As a usurper Askīya Muḥammad worked hard to create support for his rule He invited Muḥammad b ʿAbd alKarīm alMaghīlī an ʿālim from North Africa to his court where the latter wrote a series of opinions justifying Turés actions in Sharīʿa terms Notable for our purposes is the fact that he called Sunni ʿAli an unbeliever and qualified Turés coup as a jihād He also ruled that nearly all other military endeavors being pondered by Turé were not only permissible but mandatory In spite of the fact that he condemned Sunni ʿAli as an apostate and an illegal enslaver he permitted Turé to keep possession of his predecessors slaves He ruled that these slaves of the sultanate were akin to an endowment and may be kept forever Turé made the ḥājj early in his rule and while in Cairo met the great ʿālim and dean of alAzhar Jālāl alDīn alSuyūtī The latter apparently arranged an audience for him with the nominally ʿAbbasid caliph in Egypt who allegedly formally deputized the Askīya as ruler over all the lands of West Africa This was important for Turé because this strengthened his case for the right to make jihād A series of annual campaigns against first the nonMuslim Mossi peoples to the south of the Niger bend produced slaves for export to North Africa as well as domestic markets Under the Askīas Songhay elites filled the Niger River valley with slave plantations in the sixteenth century the largest numbering perhaps 2700 slaves When Moroccan invasion ended Songhay dominance in 1591 a number of scholars from Timbuktu were placed under house arrest in Morocco One of them was Ahmad Bābā d 1627 who wrote an important treatise on slavery the Mīʿrāj alSuʿūd during his exile Bābā like alWansharīsī a century before reiterated the position that slavery was a punishment for unbelief Unlike alWansharīsī Bābā took a stand on illegal slaving making strong arguments about the unIslamic nature of enslavement based on skin color He also parted with alWansharīsī by placing the burden of proof on the slaveowner rather than the slave in cases when the latter claimed to be a free Muslim In this he followed rulings by Maḥmūd b ʿUmar Aqiṭ Qadi of Timbuktu until 1548 Bābās works have been analyzed in numerous publications and are now available in English translation Although the notion that a legitimate jihād was needed to produce slaves was largely academic it was never forgotten To the idea that any black African was legally a slave whether or not a Muslim and that all of subSaharan Africa was only a reservoir for slavers Bābā responded This is something we have never heard of nor has any information about it reached us it is very close to being devoid of truth The scholarly class to which Bābā belonged may have relied on slavery for the leisure to study his city of Timbuktu certainly participated in the slave trade and his Berber brethren were not devoid of color prejudice but Bābā drew the line at illegal enslavement of Muslims In the Sahara raiding of Sudānī Muslim populations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries greatly exacerbated the problem Some raiding took place within Saharan societies as well As in the Maghrib local categories of thought came to equate black with slave One incident reported to have taken place among the Tuareg Berbers circa 1665 illustrates both the process of intraSaharan raiding and the extent to which color categories could animate Saharan thought on slavery A Tuareg ruler Khādakḳhā in conflict with another Tuareg group marks his victory in the usual fashion Khādakḳhā raided livestock and slaves Some of these slaves were free men brought into the world by slave women News of this reached the ruler of Agades and he sent a message to Khādakḳhā asking him to liberate the free men made prisoners even if they were black The other replied to him that he made no prisoners of free men All the prisoners were blacks therefore slaves for a Black when he has been raided razzī becomes a slave The tradition was recorded well after the fact and certainly reflects later sensibilities However it is probably not wholly anachronistic New research by Bruce Hall indicates that ideologies of race became more rigid in the desert as Saharans attempted to claim Arab genealogies and tighten the connections between unbelief and blackness blackness and slavery Political economic and environmental factors played a role here as well The seventeenth century probably saw a substantial increase in the level of slaving from the north as the balance of power between desert and savanna changed fundamentally As noted Songhays fall ended the age of empire and the protection it had afforded its tributaries The Saharan gold trade was also declining with perhaps a quarter of West African gold going south to the Atlantic even in the sixteenth century Finally in a process detailed by James Webb there was a progressive desiccation of the entire desertsahel region putting increased economic pressure on Saharans from 1600 to 1850 All of these factors led to an increased incidence of slaving of West Africans by Saharans Banu Ḥṣān Arabs raided Fuutu Tooro in Senegambia and Tuareg raided in the westcentral Sudan Muslims predominated in both the raided regions The development of slave economies in Saharan regions was accelerated during this period Slaves were used in salt mining within the Sahara and in agriculture on its fringes and in its oases Everywhere the enslaved many of whom had been free Muslims were put to work at a wide range of domestic tasks thought to be beneath the free Illegal enslavement of free Muslims was a major theme in the history of KanemBornū as well In fact it was in Bornū that the problem first inscribed itself in the historical record of subSaharan Africa It is striking that the oldest surviving correspondence c 13912 in the Arabic language from a subSaharan West African source is a letter from the king of Bornū to the Mamlūk sultan of Egypt wherein he decries the unjust enslavement of the Muslims of Bornū at the hands of certain unscrupulous Saharans slavery in islamic africa 14001800 67 the faithful could such a right be granted33 According to one version of the story he did so but the aid was still not forthcoming from Morocco so he turned to slave mercenaries In another version the slave mercenaries had been possessions of the Mai of Bornu even before Idrıs Mai Idrıs had a mixed record concerning the enslavement of Muslims in his many wars of conquest On the one hand it is documented that he released the free Muslims after defeating the ruling dynasty of Kanem in 1572 On the other hand as Humphrey Fisher has noted the peoples of Kanem were kin to Aloomas Borno and Aloomas principles did not protect the people of Kano Muslim but not kinsmen against whom Alooma also warred34 By the first decade of the nineteenth century the problem of enslavement of free Muslims had come full circle in nearly every way in the central Sudan The forces of Sokoto initially impelled by a pious but now aged shaykhs rejection of the sale of free Muslims in the Atlantic trade were now threatening to reduce the Muslims of Bornu to slavery Muhammad alAmın alKanamı an Arab born in the Fezzan and educated in Cairo and Medina rose to provide the military and intellectual defense As a governor of one of Bornus provinces he ultimately defeated the invading forces but in the process he also wrote to Dan Fodios caliph to lay bare what he saw as the poverty of this socalled holy war against other Muslims His arguments focused around the problem of illegal enslavement and serve to summarize this issue for western Africa before 1800 Tell us therefore why you are fighting us and enslaving our free people If you say that you have done this to us because of our paganism then I say that we are innocent of paganism and it is far from our compound If praying and the giving of alms knowledge of God fasting in Ramadan and the building of mosques is paganism what is Islam35 the nile valley At the end of the eighteenth century Egypt with its populous and wealthy metropolis of Cairo stood at the apex of a system of slave production distribution and use that reached into Nubia and beyond to powerful African kingdoms whose slaving activities reached further inland to drag East and Central African peoples into servitude The eighteenth and nineteenthcentury picture of Egyptian trade in slaves is often presumed to reflect an ancient reality Although a trade in slaves in the region was old a close reading of the secondary literature suggests that it was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when trading relations with 33 John Hunwick Islamic Law and Polemics over Race and Slavery in North and West Africa 16th19th Century in Shaun E Marmon ed Slavery in the Islamic Middle East Princeton 1999 34 Fisher Slavery in the History pp 1921 35 Robert O Collins ed African History Text and Readings New York 1990 p 71 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 68 the cambridge world history of slavery three powerful kingdoms Sinnar Dar Fur and to a lesser extent Wadai became routinized that the Nilotic Sudan became Egypts main source of slaves In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the trade from European sources was more important than it would later be and there is little evidence of systematic slave trading from the Nilotic Sudan AlMaqrızı d 1442 reports two African caravans bringing large numbers of slaves into Cairo on two separate occasions in the fifteenth century but these are caravans of pilgrims rather than traders and they are from the western not the Nilotic Sudan36 In fact there is little evidence of a structured slave trade from the greater Nile Valley in these sources and little indication that it had become more important than the trade in Europeans Austen records no sixteenthcentury estimates for African slave imports in Egypt before the 1570s when reports indicate that many thousands of blacks are seen for sale on market days and a majority of slaves on the Cairo market are black From this point forward nearly all of Austens entries indicate a predominance of darkskinned Africans Though there was apparently some trade with the antecedent states of Wadai and the Kayra sultanate in Dar Fur the Red Seabased trade may have accounted for a majority of the slave trade into Cairo before the end of the seventeenth century In 1587 a German traveler Lichtenstein reports that many black Moors are brought via the Nile from the land of Prester John presumably meaning Ethiopia The enslaved may have been mostly Cushitic speakers from the Horn of Africa but there were certainly some peoples enslaved in the Nilotic Sudan among them Terence Walz notes that from its inception circa 1500 until the seventeenth century much of Sinnars trade was directed toward the Red Sea port of Sawakin This town along with the Ethiopian port city of Massawa was annexed by the Ottomans in 15567 Walz also confirms that much of the trade came first by sea and then by river from Ethiopia in this period noting that goods from the Sudan were embarked on the Nile River at Qus or Qina He also cites Ottoman sources indicating direct state involvement in shipping slaves from Abyssinia to Egypt and Turkey in the late 1590s37 Slaves from the Horn of Africa probably figured prominently in the total number of slaves imported into Egypt from 1400 to 1600 Substantial though unknown 36 Al Maqrızıs account is cited as a basis for Austens estimates on the volume of trade into Egypt in the charts reproduced in The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa For the fifteenth century there are only three other entries two involve slaves being seized as taxes from Upper Egypt The third is an entry from Felix Fabris 1483 travel account Fabri reports on one of the slave markets where he saw exposed for sale adults youth and children of both sexes black and white in great number See Jacques Masson ed trans Voyage en Egypte de Felix Fabri 1483 Cairo 1975 pp 436 442 91819 37 See Terence Walz Trading into the Sudan in the Sixteenth Century in Annales Islamologiques 15 1979 21213 as well as Trade between Egypt and bilad alSudan pp 78 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in islamic africa 14001800 69 numbers of the enslaved were probably Cushitic speakers originating in greater Ethiopia Women of such origin were prized as concubines by nineteenthcentury Egyptians and the custom was certainly not new After 1600 Egypt received substantial numbers of slaves from the Nilotic Sudan and these generally increased over the next two centuries Accord ing to Lovejoy they reached a total of three thousand to six thousand per annum in the last decades of the eighteenth century38 This would suggest that Egypt dominated the transSaharan trade in this period but again calculations are difficult and estimates imprecise Whatever the real number it was augmented by a much smaller and ever decreasing quantity of slaves of Caucasian origin Mamluk males and Circassian slave girls were the most prized of all Ottoman sumptuary restrictions forbade civilians to own them but the rules were regularly broken As these sources decreased the demand for slaves especially females from the Horn may have increased At least two other minor sources complemented the flow of tradeslaves First the Egyptian military sometimes raided for slaves directly from outposts in Upper Egypt Second the phenomenon of poor parents selling their children into slavery though documented only for the nineteenth century was probably a minor source in our period as well39 Though it is true that Egypt served as a major market for redis tributing slaves throughout the Middle East the great majority of enslaved people brought to Egypt lived and died there Current views of their status and numbers are captured by Michael Winters comment on the enslaved of Cairo At the bottom of Cairos social ladder were the black slaves who were employed as domestic servants and maids many black slave girls were kept as concubines No estimates are available as to the number of the black slaves in Cairo they are seldom mentioned in the sources as individuals and never as a group or a class40 The state of Sinnar to the south was probably the single largest source of slaves for the Egyptian market in the early eighteenth century dispatching more than two thousand enslaved people per year41 The monarch of Sin nar monopolized the domestic market Only he had the right to sponsor caravans and once the caravan arrived his agents sold the royal slaves first before allowing the private traders to deal The sources of Sinnars slaves were diverse Annual statesponsored slaving campaigns against Sinnars nonMuslim neighbors were organized by a court official charged specifi cally with the task Half of the slaves thus produced belonged to the king Slaves were also acquired through purchase sometimes by agents from 38 Lovejoy Transformations 61 39 Gabriel Baer Slavery in Nineteenth Century Egypt Journal of African History 8 1967 419 40 Michael Winter Egyptian Society pp 2445 41 Ralph Austen The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade p 218 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Female slaves were used sexually by royalty and titled elites in Sinnār Their services were also extended to travelers foreign traders and dignitaries in hospitality arrangements According to Spaulding and Beswick this sort of precipitalist prostitution preceded the development of the commoditized prostitution of slaves from the mideighteenth century slavery in islamic africa 14001800 71 Kayra delivered several thousand slaves per year to the Egyptian market more than were dispatched from Sinnar45 The primary sources of slaves in Dar Fur were a collection of nonMuslim and partially converted peoples to their south in western Sudan present day northeastern Central African Republic and presentday southeastern Chad The Fur referred to all of these peoples as Fartıt and held that their enslavement was sanctioned by Islam The Abode of the Fartıt Dar Fartıt was used as a slavehunting ground by the Fur It was likewise raided extensively by Baqqara Arabs resident in the region and at least in the nineteenth century Fulani from West Africa as well Unlike in Sinnar civilians and private merchants were known to organize slaveraids with permission of the sultan Expeditions in Dar Fartıt could take as long as three months and not all of the slaves obtained during these ghazwas were captured The leader of the ghazwa was empowered to accept tribute in slaves from Fartıtı authorities thus displacing the burdens and the risks of capture As in Sinnar slaves were not only exported but also used extensively in military and administrative positions Unfortunately here as in the neighboring state of Wadai information on the use of slaves within Dar Fur is based on mid and latenineteenthcentury documentation Slavery in Wadai is also known only in outline and follows the model of the other main kingdoms of the Nilotic Sudan The kings of Wadai raided substantially to the south among what they considered an undifferentiated mass of enslavable people in this case referred to as Kirdi They also seem to have encouraged raiding by resident Arabs here the Salamat If earlynineteenthcentury usage is any indication of what came before agricultural slavery within the kingdom was practiced on an extensive scale and slaves including eunuchs imported from Bagirmi were heavily used in both the military and administration46 ethiopia and the horn The principle driving force of slavery in the Horn of Africa before the nine teenth century was the Christian highland kingdom of Ethiopia Though its intercontinental slave trade was substantial it was probably the largest consumer of slaves in the region The king was certainly the largest single slaveowner and his armies carried out extensive slaving operations against nonChristians These were believed to be sanctioned by Christian religious 45 The discussion of slaving slave trading and slavery in Dar Fur is based on a series of works by OFahey Religion and Trade in the Kayra Sultanate of Dar Fur in Yusuf Fadl H asan ed Sudan in Africa Khartoum 1971 Slavery and the Slave Trade in Dar Fur Journal of African History 14 1973 2943 and Slavery and Society in Dar Fur in J R Willis ed Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa II See also R S OFahey and J L Spaulding Kingdoms of the Sudan pp 1514 46 Spaulding Precolonial Islam p 121 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 72 the cambridge world history of slavery law Why then should Ethiopias history of slavery figure in our survey of Islamic Africa The reasons are mainly historiographical rather than his torical Conventional approaches to the export slave trades from Africa prominently featured Ethiopia and the Red Sea because in the nineteenth century the region fit the paradigm of Arab slave trading Slaves were brought mainly to Arabia and from there on to other parts of the Muslim world particularly India Focusing on trade rather than slaving or slavery highlighted the Horns coastal Muslim merchants especially the Jabartis who handled the traffic and the Muslim markets that received the bulk of these slaves Contrary to the interpretation of an early generation of Chris tian scholars it is now clear that the Christian kingdom was the driving ideological economic and political force behind the traffic But once this is recognized the reasons why Ethiopia merits consideration here become clear First it is clear that Jabartis did dominate much of the longdistance trade during our period particularly the slave trade Christian participation was forbidden by both church and state though Christians were allowed to buy and keep slaves Of course in practice many Christians sold slaves and indeed other free Christians especially kidnapped children to slave dealers47 Also inspiteofthedominanceofChristianityintheAmhara and Tigrinyaspeaking areas that comprised the core of the Abyssinian state greater Ethiopia included many Muslim polities The southern lowland state of Adal with its capital at Harrar was a major factor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries particularly during the jihad of Ahmad b Ibrahım alGhazı Ahmad Gran which enslaved many Muslims and Christians Extensive slaving by the Abyssinians in the late sixteenth and early sev enteenth centuries physically cleared space in southern and southwestern Ethiopia and left remaining peoples socially dislocated This triggered the ascendancy of pastoral Oromo traditionally the victims of Ethiopian slavers who incorporated the socially dislocated into their own emergent gada system and changed the political face of the Horn48 In the process of occupying many areas that had once been centers of Muslim influence the Oromo progressively embraced Islam becoming one of the most numeri cally important Muslim minorities in the Horn Oromo societies however dynamic were not united Pastoralist Oromo enslaved settled Oromo and others throughout our period Indeed as in West Africa slaving was so central to the political economy of the region by this time that they may have had little choice 47 Mordechai Abir Ethiopia The Era of Princes New York 1968 p 54 48 See Mohammed Hassen The Oromo of Ethiopia A History 15701860 Cambridge 1990 pp xiv 6971 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 According to the laws and customs of both the Muslims and the Christians of Ethiopia polytheists should have been the main targets of slaving The Fethe Nägäst Law of Kings that encoded church legal doctrine was probably translated into Geez from the writings of an Egyptian Copt sometime during the fifteenth century In yet another example of blurred boundaries the Law of Kings echoed the ulamā humanistic legal principle alaṣl huwa alḥurriyya on slavery all men share liberty on the basis of natural law It also offered clear clerical sanction for slaving and slavery based on scriptural grounds including Leviticus 254446 The Fetha Nägäst made it plain that the law of war permitted the enslavement of the vanquished Muslims were not formally protected from enslavement the way the People of the Book were but most Jabarits were native Ethiopians and subjects of the king and thus enjoyed civil protection in principle if not always in practice Various traditionalists were certainly the main targets before the sixteenth century Cushitic speakers in the southern and southwestern portions of greater Ethiopia particularly Oromo and Sidama probably made up the bulk of the socalled habasha slaves in Egypt and elsewhere Warfare kidnapping and juridical enslavement within and between the Cushiticspeaking societies produced significant numbers of slaves for purchase by Jabarits and others Amhara color conventions termed such peoples red Because of their high value in external markets most of these slaves were exported Other slaving targets were groups referred to rather loosely as Bareya or Shanqalla The latter term is first recorded in the fifteenth century to refer to polytheists living on the western fringes of Christian Ethiopia and defined as both black and enslavable by Ethiopian law and custom Because their market value was lower than red slaves most Shanqalla and Bareya were kept as slaves in Christian Abyssinia where both terms came to mean slave Tensions between Muslims and Christian in the Horn probably led to increased incidence of the enslavement of both from the fourteenth century forward Abyssinia warred with the Sultanate of Adal for much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries peaking during the wars between Imam Aḥmad alGhāzī and the Solomonic dynasty in the second quarter of the sixteenth century The war was considered a major reason for the importation of Ethiopian slaves into India during the sixteenth century How many were actually from the area of Ethiopia and the Horn is unknown because the term was used to refer to 74 the cambridge world history of slavery people of diverse African origins Though there was clearly a trade before 1800 the sources give no reliable indication of its size51 The true scale of the Red Sea trade can be meaningfully estimated for the nineteenth century but not before Although a discussion of slaving and slave trading in the Muslim societies of Ethiopia and the Horn is at least possible no substantive discussion of the nature of slavery whatsoever can be undertaken in the present state of research A treatment of slavery in Christian Abyssinia would be out of place here and even fleeting references to slavery within the Muslim polities and highland communities are lacking before the nineteenth century Oromo speakers did not become predominantly Muslim until that time Further I was unable to locate a single systematic analysis of slavery in Oromo society before 1800 The latter statement is equally true for slavery among the Somali though they embraced Islam many centuries earlier Slavery is thought to have played only a very minor role in Somali society before the Omanı slavecomplex at Zanzibar overflowed into all of East Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century Before this it is likely that slaves were extensively employed in coastal merchant towns like Mogadishu Merca and Brava Lee Cassanelli estimates that onethird of the town populations may have been slaves52 These towns had little Somali presence until the more recent past and most indications are that unlike some other nomadic groups surveyed earlier Somalis made little use of slaves for agriculture or other purposes before the nineteenth century coastal east africa and the offshore islands For the period prior to 1750 on the East African coast there is little hyperbole in the claim that the history of its slave trade is currently being rewritten though the history of its slavery remains unwritten For the nineteenth century there is a wealth of literature on both subjects and on slaving as well but these together with prefifteenthcentury material will be included in other volumes of this series53 The history of slave trading is primarily being rewritten by Thomas Vernet and this section will largely 51 James Bruce Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile III Dublin 1791 pp 41620 52 Lee Cassanelli The Shaping of Somali Society Philadelphia 1982 p 26 53 For nineteenthcentury slavery on the coast see Jonathon Glassman Feasts and Riot Revelry Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast 18561888 Portsmouth 1995 Frederick Cooper Plantation Slavery on the East African Coast New Haven 1977 and Abdul Sheriff Slaves Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy 17701873 London 1987 For the perspective from mostly nineteenthcentury India which received some East African slaves see Joseph Harris The African Presence in Asia Consequences of the East African Slave Trade Evanston 1971 See also Thomas Ricks Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf 18th and 19th Centuries An Assessment and Albertine Jwaideh and J W Cox The Black Slaves of Turkish Arabia during the Nineteenth Century both of which appear in W G ClarenceSmith ed Economics of Indian Ocean Slave Trade London 1989 Finally for a recent attempt to revisit Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in islamic africa 14001800 75 reflect the new approaches and findings published in his recent seminal article54 The place of slaves in coastal Swahili society before the nineteenth century is almost wholly unknown though work with Portuguese sources may still reveal details about slavery in coastal society before it was utterly transformed by Omanı Arabs in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth The term Zanj was sometimes used by Arabiclanguage geographers to refer to East Africa south of the Horn or its inhabitants alTabari himself used it almost interchangeably with Sudanı This led to the conclusion that an important slave trade tied coastal East Africa Arabia and the Persian Gulf in the early centuries of Islam The scale of the rebellion which caused half a million casualties in one presumably exaggerated estimate seemed to point to a massive trade An excellent article by G H Talhami demonstrates that both inferences were unjustified and that the majority of slaves involved in the revolt came from sources in the Nilotic Sudan and Red Sea zones55 Another piece of early evidence came from Ibn Battutas rih la Though he says nothing of slave trading Battuta does give very brief accounts of slavery and slaving On the former he makes passing mention of slaves being given as gifts On the latter he writes that the people of Kilwa are a people devoted to the Holy War because they are on one continuous mainland with unbelieving Zunuj sing Zanj Battuta also records that the sultan of Kilwa was much given to razzias upon the land of the Zunuj he raided them and captured booty56 With these two pieces of evidence and little else some scholars sought to eternalize the dynamics of nineteenthcentury coastal slavery projecting them back to the distant past In fact there are few unambiguous references to a slave trade from East Africa in Arabic sources before the tenth century and not many more thereafter57 Battutas report on mainland military slaving from Kilwa is nearly an isolated account Arguing from this silence postcolonial scholars tended to maintain that slaving and slave trading played little role in the economy and political economy of the Swahili coast before the rise of the Omanıcontrolled Zanzibarbased trade in the second half of the the archaeological record in search of evidence for slavery see Chapurukha Kusimba Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa African Archaeological Review 21 2004 5988 54 Much of the later discussion draws upon Le Commerce Azania 38 2003 69 97 55 Ghada Hashem Talhami The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered International Journal of African Historical Studies10 1977 44361 56 See Saıd Hamdun and Noel King ed trans Ibn Battuta in Black Africa London 1975 pp 224 57 See Randall L Pouwels Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean to 1800 Reviewing Relations in Historical Perspective International Journal of African Historical Studies 35 2002 3946 For more on slavery in this piece see pp 40710 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 76 the cambridge world history of slavery eighteenth century With little secondary research available to estimate the volume of the trade Lovejoy published cautious estimates of one thousand slaves per year from East Africa before 1700 and four thousand per year during the eighteenth century As noted Thomas Vernets research on Swahilioperated slavery seems destined to bring about a broader reassessment of the role of slave trad ing in the history of the East African coast and offshore islands The Portuguese sources examined reveal a substantial slave trade operated by coastal merchants and the resident Swahili community on Madagascar the Antalaotra In the seventeenth century the Swahili share in this trade amounted to at least two to three thousand slaves being shipped from Madagascar to the coast As Vernet himself notes evidence of a substantial Muslimoperated trade from the island of Madagascar had long since been published in secondary works on Madagascar Often characterized as an Arab trade it was basically ignored by scholars of the Swahili Even in Vernets detailed account it is unclear how much of the trade was operated by Swahili and how much by Hadrami and Yemeni Arabs resident on the East African coast There were substantial numbers of the latter groups after the sixteenth century and particularly in the cities tied most closely to the trade Lamu and Pate Vernet even suggests that the slave trade may be part of what hastened their migration Nevertheless it appears that this trade was basically run by the Swahili from its origins until at least 170058 In addition to Arabs Muslim merchants from the Comoro islands were also involved On the whole the Arab Swahili and Comorian trades handled three thousand to six thousand slaves per year in the 1700s The overwhelming majority of the enslaved were Malagasies sold to the Anta laotra community on the island by highland elites before being resold to Swahili Comorian and Arab merchants Vernet seems mainly to follow the interpretation of earlier writers on the slave trade from Madagascar in seeing the captives as the products of slaving warfare in the highlands But kidnapping juridical enslavement and enslavement for debt were also significant59 Surely these must have been prominent in supplying Swahili networks as well The Portuguese took notice of the slave trade almost immediately 1506 They took control of Mozambique and Sofala previously the southern extremities of the Swahili world and were soon receiving and reexporting supplies of slaves from Madagascar sold by Antalaotra merchants As in West Africa the overlaps between the Muslimcontrolled trading networks and those controlled by Europeans were substantial From 1638 to 1658 58 Thomas Vernet Le Commerce pp 789 59 Larson History and Memory See especially pp 11860 Strategies in a Slaving Economy Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in islamic africa 14001800 77 the Dutch attempted to develop plantation agriculture on the island of Mauritius using Malagasy slaves purchased from Muslims The Dutch failed but in the 1720s the French renewed efforts to recreate the new world economy on the Mascarenes Part of the key to the French success was that they were able to bypass Muslim merchants on Madagascar and purchase slaves directly from ruling elites but they also purchased slaves from Portuguese Mozambique and the Swahili citystates The most famous symbol of the ties binding the multiple Indian Ocean slave trades together was the 1776 CE agreement signed by the sultan of Kilwa to provide one thousand slaves to the French trader Morice for export to the Mascarene islands Though they were deeply involved in trading the Swahili seem to have done little slaving Vernet argues that between 1500 and 1750 Swahili city states were militarily fragile mainland groups attacked the coastal polities more frequently than the coast attacked the mainland Moreover even these conflicts were exceptional as the Swahili citystates had strong patronclient ties with mainland societies including arrangements for military defense Only at the southern end of the Swahili world in Kilwa and its south ern hinterland were continental Africans traded in substantial numbers Vernet concludes that on the Swahili coast north of Cape Delgado there was little mainland slave trading at all between 1500 and 1800 with the exception of a trade in Somali and Oromo women destined for use as concubines At the same time Portuguese documents make reference to a voluminous mainland trade in ivory foodstuffs and at least in the south gold60 New research is changing our understanding of slaving and slave trading on the Swahili coast in fundamental ways Unfortunately the place of slavery in Swahili society before the later eighteenth century remains almost wholly unknown In a recent study of material consumption on the Swahili coast Jeremy Prestholdt concludes that a paucity of evidence makes the study of slavery in fifteenth and sixteenthcentury coastal society nearly impossible While it is clear he writes that slaves made up a large percentage of the workforce on mashamba farms and served as soldiers their relations with the free people in Swahili society are unclear61 The secondary literature for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scarcely offers more 60 Thomas Vernet Le Commerce pp 823 61 Jeremy Prestholdt As Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain The Social Fabric of Material Consumption in the Swahili World circa 14501600 Program in African Studies Working Papers Northwestern University Number 3 1998 p 23 n 82 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CONCLUSIONS One way to tie our thematic discussion and our regional histories back together is to point ahead to the nineteenthcentury history of slavery Islam and Africa In coastal East Africa and indeed throughout Islamic Africa slaving slave trading and slavery all expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century More important perhaps so did abolitionist and often procolonial invective against slavery in Africa and particularly the Arab slave trade Our study of slavery in Islamic Africa before 1800 has been shaped in basic ways by these related nineteenthcentury developments First the increased European attention to the question of slavery produced voluminous new bodies of sources in European languages This bulge eventually registered in the secondary literature obscuring earlier patterns of slavery or worse inscribing them with nineteenthcentury anachronism Second the rhetorical excesses of abolitionist invective painted a portrait of wholesale Arab enslavement of Africans causing us to miss what did not fit the demonizing narrative for example the Swahili trade in Malagasy slaves Another way the literature on our period reflects abolitionist concerns is its focus on the slave trade at the expense of slavery Part of this stems from the difficulties of reconstructing satisfactory social histories of African societies before the nineteenth century but part is due to the moral imperatives of the numbers game Indeed a dearth of sources has not stopped the attempts to count an uncountable trade from an arbitrarily divided Africa Comparing the damage done by Europeans with that done by Arabs or Muslims has left us with an almost wholly fabricated external slave trade from Africa and little idea of the scale of slave trading or the shape of slavery within Islamic Africa south of the Sahara The major exception to a general disregard for the study of slavery as a social institution in the Muslim world has been a relatively modest Orientalist literature that approached the question mainly on the basis of normative texts and ignored subSaharan Islamic Africa almost completely If abolitionists sensationalized the exotic sexual and brutal aspects of slavery in the Muslim world most Islamicists tended to counter the charges by painting slavery in the Muslim world as benign and paternalistic In short they reproduced one kind of Muslim apologetic for slavery If abolitionists and Orientalists did not see eye to eye on everything at least they could agree that Islamic slavery was decadent and uneconomic thus preserving the essential divide between the backwards East and progressive West Finally and most important abolitionists and Orientalists could agree on the existence of something called Islamic slavery Here the academics colluded with the ulamā they studied to inscribe slavery as an indelible part of Islam as a religion rather than what it patently is a part of humankinds worldly history FURTHER READING Few major secondary works have been written on slavery in Islamic Africa in the early modern period Much more has been written on the nineteenth century and much of what was written on earlier periods reflects nineteenthcentury patterns in basic ways Nonetheless the works listed should allow for a deeper exploration of the topic treated here For a basic introduction to the historical trajectory of Islam in African societies the best work is David Robinsons Muslim Societies in African History Cambridge 2004 Chapter 5 pp 6073 is a thoughtful if brief discussion of Muslim identity and the slave trades The best introductory text on slavery in Africa remains Paul E Lovejoys Transformations in Slavery A History of Slavery in Africa Cambridge 2000 The work is an updated edition of a work first published in 1983 If readers have time to encounter only one text on slavery in Islamic thought law and practice I recommend William Gervase ClarenceSmith Islam and the Abolition of Slavery London 2006 particularly chapter 2 A Fragile Sunni Consensus For two generations the standard though problematic introductory reference to slavery in Islamic law was Robert Brunschvigs Abd in the Encyclopaedia of Islam Leiden 1960 It is an erudite yet accessible synthetic article based mainly on classical texts but it gives little sense of process practice or debate The best discussion of legal controversies surrounding slavery in this period in subSaharan Africa is John Hunwicks Islamic Law and Polemics over Race and Slavery in North and West Africa 16th19th Century in Shaun E Marmons ed Slavery in the Islamic Middle East Princeton 1999 Hunwick also coedited with Eve Troutt Powell eds a useful collection of primary sources on Islam and slavery as well as enslaved Africans in the Middle East entitled The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam Princeton 2002 For the East African coast and offshore islands before the nineteenth century the most important article is Thomas Vernets Le commerce des esclaves sur la côte Swahili 15001750 Azania 38 2003 6997 I am aware of no Englishlanguage piece that transmits the results of this important research E Ann McDougalls Discourse and Distortion Critical Reflections on Studying the Saharan Slave Trade OutreMers Revue dHistoire 336337 2002 195229 is an excellent article that helps frame the distorting effects of nineteenthcentury literature on previous patterns of slavery in Islamic West Africa The same volume pp 24782 contains a fine recent essay by Lovejoy on how Muslim identity served as a brake on transAtlantic slave trading Islam Slavery and Political Transformations in West Africa Constraints on the TransAtlantic Slave Trade 80 the cambridge world history of slavery Finally the substantial amount of material regarding enslaved African Muslims in the New World is carefully surveyed by Sylviane Diouf in Servants of Allah African Muslims Enslaved in the New World New York 1998 This reading might be usefully paired with a recent documentary film Prince Among Slaves Alexandria VA 2008 which explores the well documented life of a literate West African Muslim enslaved in Mississippi in the late eighteenth century Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY IN NONISLAMIC WEST AFRICA 14201820 g ugo nwokeji introduction1 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 Bibles 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 clearcut 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 The relationship of slavery to the market highlights the correlation of the transatlantic trade and the spread of slavery Elements of this relationship relevant to this study are threefold First slavery and the slave trade co existed in most historical situations including West Africa indeed slavery cannot exist without some kind of traffic Second there is the question about whether indigenous slave systems resulted from the Atlantic trade or vice versa Third the means by which a person became captive was impor tant and sometimes crucial in determining whether he or she was sent to the Americas or held captive in West Africa Clearly indigenous slavery co existed with two external slave markets transSaharan and transatlantic 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the University of California Multicampus Research Unit Conference on World Slavery University of California Davis May 2830 2004 I am indebted to the participants especially Bill Hagen for comments 81 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 82 the cambridge world history of slavery The interaction of these overlapping markets had implications for slavery in Atlantic Africa Separating slavery from the market is therefore just as superficial as separating it from the social institutions that underpin both the market and slavery Thus anthropologist Bernard Siegel has argued that slavery must be considered in its relationships to the entire social structure An effective description of a slave system must thus account for interaction between the market and other social institutions as well as in the constitution and diversity of nonIslamic West Africa NonIslamic West Africa in the period covered here was a much larger universe than it is today Many currently Muslim societies were not Mus lim or had not become sufficiently so to be regarded as Islamic societies before the nineteenth century Although the religion had penetrated West Africa by the eleventh century Islam only became widespread in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries For example Jesuit priests in the Upper Guinea Coast in 1605 observed Although these Jalofos practice many rites of the sect of Mohammed for they are neighbors to the Moors nevertheless the ordinary people embrace our holy religion with ease One priest Baltasar Barreira noted in 1606 that Islam took hold only a few years ago among the Fula of northern Senegambia JeanPierre Oliver de Sardin argues that though there were traces of the Islamization that took place during the era of Askia Mohammed in the early sixteenth century the mass of peasants converted or reconverted to Islam only with the Fulbe revival of the nineteenth century Islamic holy wars that started in Futa Jalon in hinterland Senegambia in 1725 only spread to some coastal regions in the middle of the century and it was as late as the nineteenth century that Islam made a partial impact on northern Sierra Leone according to Bruce Mouser And James Searing reminds us that the forest remained the cultural frontier that marked the limits of Islam in much of Senegambia up to the second half of the eighteenth century In much of West Africa including Hausaland the jihads of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were triggered by the belief that these societies were not Islamic enough The West African religious landscape was fluid The nonIslamic West Africa covered here is therefore significantly more extensive than presentday nonIslamic West Africa antiquity of slavery in nonislamic west africa Extant evidence for slavery before the eighteenth century rarely gives useful insight into the character and extent of the institution Some reasonable assumptions about social processes and the history of the region can com plement the available evidence The first such assumption is that slavery was known to Africans in West Africa Although early European visitors reported the existence of slavery in many regions it is hazardous to take Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 83 these reports at face value because they tended to conflate slavery with other forms of servility and dependency When such reports claim as they sometimes did that an inordinate number of Africans were slaves or that all persons in a given African society were the kings slaves or that all Africans were slaves they should be read as indicating the pervasiveness of forms of servility rather than suggesting intensity of the institution2 Such reports are often linked with perceptions that landlabor ratios were very high and created the precondition for largescale slavery consis tent with the NieboerDomar hypothesis Because powerful people would have had to enslave those with access to land slavery is likely to have been widespread in historically underpopulated Africa But the demographic picture of the West African coast emerging from contemporary estimates is that coastal societies were generally characterized by high population den sities a fact confirmed by modern scholars ranging from archeologist Gra ham Connah and historian John Thornton Average population density in seventeenthcentury Lower Guinea from modern Ghana to Nigeria was in the words of Thornton probably well over thirty people per square kilometer or well over the average European density of the time Histo rian Ray Kea has observed that population increase on the Gold Coast was a salient feature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Walter Rodney reported that a continuous drift and migration of people from the western Sudan had resulted in increased population in the area of presentday Sierra Leone in the Upper Guinea Coast by the time of contact with Europeans This process continued in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries High population densities were a feature of the seventeenthcentury Slave Coast west of Yorubaland according to historians Robin Law and Patrick Man ning and archeologist Kenneth Kelly The landtolabor ratio would not have meant much in the putative Niger Delta during the fifteenth cen tury which though lightly populated was swampy and fishing oriented neutralizing the apparent impact of sparse population in fishing societies Even more to the point the fact that adjacent agrarian Igboland located within only thirtyfive miles of the coast had sustained high population densities for centuries before the transatlantic trade era shows that low landlabor ratio was not a major factor even in the Bight of Biafra Thus high population density was a feature even where it may not appear so at first sight 2 Early European observers widely held that every African was the kings slave Commenting on Benin in the midseventeenth century an anonymous Dutch manuscript had this to say There is noone he be the most or the least important who can call himself a freeman everyone must acknowledge he is a slave of the king the more so since everything he has must be missed sic as it pleases His Majesty When a womans husband dies if she has a son by him be he big or small she is given to the son whom she must serve Thus a mother becomes the slave of her son This author assumes that the mother is given to her son to serve him then makes a leap from service to slavery Nicholas Owen describes 1750s Sherbro marriage as slavery Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 84 the cambridge world history of slavery Some societies in the hinterland may have been lightly populated but this was not the norm everywhere From this perspective slavery prior to European contact where it existed at all would have been minimal in societies on or near the coast But abundant land could not in itself have generated largescale slavery in much of West Africa indeed it lagged stratification as a cause of slavery according to evidence from a cross section of predominantly agricultural societies in Africa and Asia compiled by Dutch scholars C Baks J Breman and A Nooij specifically to test the NieboerDomar hypothesis The Sherbro of coastal Sierra Leone for example may have had relatively abundant land as reported by Irishborn Nicholas Owen a slave trader resident in Sierra Leone between the early 1740s and late 1750s but Carol MacCormack points out that slavery did not emerge among them until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries It is risky therefore to assume that slavery was widespread and extensive in the West African hinterland simply because land was abundant in many places Thornton has argued that the absence of private ownership of land in subSaharan Africa ensured that slavery was widespread and endemic in the region According to him the absence of private ownership left slaves as the only form of private revenueproducing property recognized in African law Land was never in short supply the critical ingredient to acquire was labor often in the form of slaves to work the land But generalizing about absence of land ownership is precarious The assumption that landowners inability to sell land proves the absence of private land ownership conflates land ownership with commodification of land The fact that Africans could not dispose of land freely does not necessarily mean that they did not own land Land ownership did exist in some regions where detailed fieldwork permits definitive statement Among the Balanta and Dioula of Senegambia the landtenure system allowed land to pass down from father to son over generations and among the Dioula it also passed from mother to daughter By the eighteenth century Dioula landowners often found it necessary to sell land to acquire cattle These cases may or may not be typical but they do call attention to how little we know about land ownership in early modern West Africa An African law of property if one is to adopt Thorntons singularization of African jurisprudence merely imposed limits on an owners ability to dispose of property including land and slaves3 Given the inadequacies of the landlabor hypothesis what then moti vated Africans to own slaves Unlike Thorntons view that Africans had to resort to slaves as the only source of revenuegenerating private property 3 I rely on the work of Robert Baum for the Dioula and all references to the Balanta are drawn from the work of Walter Hawthorne Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 85 historian Anthony Hopkins has argued that Africans had a choice that they selfconsciously exercised by choosing slave over wage labor because slave labor was cheaper By contrast to these economic models Paul Bohannan and Philip Curtin have argued that noneconomic functions rather than production drove African slavery as whole A third approach championed by Fred Cooper and Richard Roberts integrates economic and social dimensions of slavery casting the institution as one of production dom ination and exploitation These views are not mutually exclusive but the focus on particular uses of slaves diverts attention from the range of uses to which slaves were put Slavery in most African societies was in various configurations a means of labor recruitment a system of domination and exploitation and an important means of expanding the lineage Africans also acquired slaves as status symbols bureaucrats and soldiers It is important to note that Africans did not draw a sharp distinction between economics and other aspects of life If they conceptualized the various aspects of life as distinguishable they also recognized that apparent noneconomic uses did in fact often serve indirect economic functions The presence of slaves as status symbols enhanced the prestige of their master which could translate to economic advantage Slaves acquired to augment a population could enable a lineage to occupy land at the expense of competing lineages and the masters of these slaves could in time enjoy the surpluses the slaves produced Slave warriors could fight for their masters to settle political disputes but such disputes often had economic conno tations Above all the booty they collected often had economic value As anthropologist Claude Meillassoux has persuasively argued some slave warriors must also have worked for their own subsistence at the least Only masters working for their slaves would have prevented slaves from working in lowproductivity economies which most West African societies were When these apparently noneconomic slaves were used in war or political activity they served to establish the political class and as the means of its economic domination As Miers and Kopytoff put it acquired persons were valuable as economic social and political capital as a type of wealth that could easily be converted from one use to another and that had the incomparable advantage of being also selfsupporting They were the currency of political transaction tribute to chiefs gifts among rulers or rewards to subordinates The question then is whether nonproductive slavery would have had the capacity to maintain and sustain massive slaveholding However relevant the abundance of land or the control of its product may be as a condition for slavery the existence of largescale slavery is still dependent on the availability of a market for the disposal of the product of slaves Economic historians Joseph Inikori Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn note that such a market could exist only in societies where Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 86 the cambridge world history of slavery a significant division of labor prevailed with Inikori and Basil Davidson arguing that much of West Africa did not meet the condition for large scale slavery before the arrival of Europeans there in the fifteenth century Thus observations made by Boubacar Barry and Manning that the local economies of Dahomey and Senegambia up to the nineteenth century favored the export of labor rather than widespread productiondriven enslavement are roughly applicable elsewhere Although slavery did exist in West Africa before 1420 the small size of markets and insufficient division of labor in the region suggest that slavery could not have been endemic in Africa before the Atlantic trade era as Thornton has claimed with the exception of the Gold Coast possibly also a few other places and of course the Islamic West Africa that lies outside this chapters mandate This chapter disavows widespread existence of slavesustaining markets in West Africa before the nineteenth century except on the Gold Coast where largescale slavery existed by the fifteenth century and like Paul Lovejoy it posits the historical development and expansion of indigenous slavery in the context of overseas trade Slavery certainly existed in many nonIslamic West African societies before the Atlantic trade era but its intensity was less than sometimes suggested Slavery however did become extensive in trading societies especially those on the coast during the course of the eighteenth century and it continued to develop into the nineteenth Was the apparent absence of largescale slavery outside the Gold Coast before the fifteenth century real or just the consequence of a paucity of cred ible sources In his study of the Upper Guinea Coast Rodney argues that references to slaves are generally absent in sixteenth and even seventeenth century sources By contrast historian John Fage though conceding the Upper Guinea Coast case argues that in the more hierarchical political economies of Lower Guinea such as Benin Oyo and Dahomey frequent references to slavery can be found Thus in place of a general theoretical assertion on the incidence of slavery Fage and Rodney offer two broad empirical scenarios Fage does not argue that slavery was widespread and extensive in the same way that Thornton does From Fages point of view slavery and the commercial valuation of slaves were not natural features of West African society nor was their development and growth simply a consequence of the European demand for slaves for American plantations And Rodney himself warns that though his Upper Guinea Coast case is made the validity of his thesis as a whole is open to question Both men agree that the fact that slavery existed in one part of Africa does not establish that it existed everywhere else Because slavery existed in West Africa but expanded after the takeoff of the transatlantic trade it is useful to reconstruct the history of the institution in two phases the period up Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 87 to the seventeenth century and the period from the seventeenth century to the 1820s slavery from 1420 to the seventeenth century Slavery was significant in parts of West Africa in the first century and a half of the transatlantic trade but its outlines are not clear everywhere Burial sites at IgboUkwu in Igboland southern Nigeria show that the dead were buried with human sacrificial victims probably slaves as early as the ninth century Archaeologists and historians agree that these material remains represent concentration of wealth a high degree of craft specializa tion and significant involvement in longdistance trade involving impor tation of goods from the Mediterranean and India perhaps via Gao on the Niger bend in presentday Mali According to archaeologist Thurstan Shaw who excavated the sites IgboUkwu must have been the center of a social institution which attracted to itself considerable wealth It is possible that this institution was an office which combined the attributes of priest and king and which was recognized over a considerable area the ceremonial regalia recovered belonged to its functioning Although the high concentration of wealth and occupational specialization evident from the sites would have sustained a highly developed market that could have absorbed largescale slaveproduced goods questions remain about the social statuses of the victims of the human sacrifice that the sites uncovered how widespread this degree of social differentiation was and whether the society developed largescale slavery or slavery at all A high degree of social differentiation with possible implications for slavery was also evident elsewhere Oral tradition has it that the Soninke kingdom of ancient Ghana located in inland Senegambia had by the eighth century evolved a complex social hierarchy that had slaves at its base similar to the structures that Klein Searing and Patricia and Fredrick McKissack have described for Atlanticera Senegambia John Iliffe cites the Portuguese who reached the Senegal River in 1444 and who reported that an African king of the area raided his own and neighboring societies for captives whom he enslaved in agricultural production and sold to the Moors in exchange for horses and other goods Around 1500 Senegambian slaves employed in agriculture worked one day of the week for themselves and the rest for their masters According to Thornton this is identical to the arrangement that obtained among slaves working in Portuguese sugar mills on Sao Tome Island during the same period Early seventeenthcentury Senegambian Dioula masters constructed a chain of villages worked by their slaves who provided them with provisions and served as carriers on their commercial expeditions Thus slavery seems to have had some Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 88 the cambridge world history of slavery importance in Senegambia mainly due to the regions role as a part of the goldproducing goldtrading Mali Empire Cape Verdebased Portuguese Jesuit priest Father Manuel de Barros who sometimes traveled to mainland Senegambia and the Upper Guinea Coast suggested in April 1605 the existence of important persons with many slaves Captives were one of the important exports of the kingdoms of West Africa in their trade with peoples from north of the Sahara since Ghana times Still Senegambian slavery was not nearly as extensive as that of the Gold Coast Unlike the Gold Coast Senegambia was never a slave importer in spite of the latter having a smaller domestic population to draw from Indeed Dioula traders of Senegambia even sold captives as well as textiles and other goods to Gold Coast merchants according to early sixteenth century sources Robert Baums research in the Lower Casamance area of the region reveals that the first account of kidnapping people for sale in neighboring markets is in the seventeenth century and that slavery became important there only in the eighteenth In what appears to be an emerging consensus among historians of the western Sudan Martin Klein states that before the heyday of the Atlantic trade slaves in most societies of the region made up a small part of the population lived within the household worked alongside free members of the household and participated in a network of facetoface links This system provided for the gradual integration of slaves as junior members of masters kin Although certain Senegambian societies held and traded slaves the institution was insufficiently entrenched to make Senegambia a slave society before the eighteenth century A similar pattern is apparent elsewhere Although the Portuguese appar ently did not find captives on sale in the Benin market during the 1520s and instead bought Benin beads the kingdom still practiced slavery When oba king Esigie embargoed the export of male Benin captives in the early sixteenth century an embargo that remained in force until the early eighteenth century it was to preserve the pool of slaves on which the kingdom drew Even then the bulk of their products cloth and agri cultural products serviced the demands of the Atlantic rather than the domestic trade We can infer that the industries that produced these goods were probably small before the inception of the Atlantic trade One 1690s Dutch account has Benin importing captives from as far as Allada further west Although slavery existed in western Bight of Benin before European contact the institution escalated only with the deepening social differen tiation that accompanied Atlantic trade In Dahomey a principal power in the region Manning points out that slaves served in domesticlevel production and service throughout the eighteenth century as the market for slave produce was not yet well developed except to the degree that slave produce was sold to supply slave caravans Anthropologist Bernard Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 89 Belasco has asserted with respect to Yorubaland in central Bight of Benin where occupational division of labor was virtually nonexistent before the transatlantic slave trade that external trade was based on a narrow range of goods with limited internal distribution and the dynamic force of change lay principally in the accruals of tribal warfare and the enrichment of certain warriors and their lineages through the acquisition of growing numbers of slaves As this statement clearly implies most captives from these wars entered the transSaharan trade rather than local society Large scale slavery was also lacking in the Bight of Biafra Robin Horton made us aware forty years ago that the eastern Ijo citystates of Bonny New Calabar Kalabari and Brass along with Old Calabar which came to control Atlantic slave exports from the region were fishing villages at the onset of the slave trade With the particular case of Kalabari he detailed how these states transformed into major slaveholders in the course of Atlantic trade In the hinterland the premier slave traders and slaveholders the Aro probably had not even come into existence before the mid sixteenth century All foregoing instances point to significant slaveholding in West Africa before the fifteenth century but not to extensive slavery The only region of nonIslamic West Africa where we might conclude that slavery was intensive and widespread before Atlantic contact is the Gold Coast Here commercial activity was the most intensive in non Islamic West Africa in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries The separation of craft and agricultural production was already well established in parts of the region in the first half of the fifteenth century By this time Gold Coast entrepreneurs put slaves into massive and productive use in miningbased production for foreign markets It is likely that the robust domestic slave market centered at Elmina Axim Winneba and Great Accra as described by Portuguese and Dutch sources in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was already in existence when Europeans arrived This market base according to Kea ensured the emergence of slavery as the principal form of labor It was also likely responsible for goods being priced higher on the Gold Coast than any other African region as James Barbot and Thomas Phillips reported as late as the late seventeenth century As long as the slavebased gold economy held sway the region sent few captives to the Americas a pattern that underlined the positive correlation between a significant productive and commercial base on the one hand and slavery on the other Largescale slaveholding on the Gold Coast promoted the importation of captives not their export4 The Gold Coast was the source of a muchsoughtafter commodity gold which had for centuries been the most valuable West African export 4 The significant slaveholding practiced in European forts and in Cape Verde during the early transatlantic trade era described by Kea Rodney and David Eltis is outside the purview of this chapter Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 90 the cambridge world history of slavery long before European contact This product had been the economic main stay of medieval Ghana and Mali empires which in turn had controlled its production and marketing Mali was thought to have been the richest society on earth at the height of its power in the fourteenth century Kea and Iliffe affirm that after the late fourteenth century the production of West African gold which had passed through Muslim North African hands to European consumers shifted from Mali to Akan goldfields in the Gold Coast But the gold trade remained in the hands of Muslim traders who acted as middlemen between West Africa and Europe In the words of Iliffe Portuguese mariners groped down the West African coast towards the gold sources after the 1415 Portuguese occupation of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast had failed to secure a more direct route to the gold trade They probably secured about half of West Africas gold exports which in 1506 provided about onequarter of the revenue of the Portuguese crown Such a high level of trading activities was possible only because of golds impact on the market structures and occupational specialization that underpinned the delivery of gold to external markets Such highly developed markets were lacking in most other regions of West Africa before the eighteenth century European demand for Gold Coast gold from the Atlantic seaboard added further to marketing and production structures including the sale and use of slaves In addition to Muslim merchants from the north who continued to buy gold Akan goldfields now had a European Atlantic market raising West African gold exports to a level never seen before Oceangoing vessels delivered gold and at lower cost and thus in larger quantities Portuguese traders supplied more than twelve thousand captives between 1475 and 1540 in exchange for Gold Coast gold Portuguese importation of captives into the Gold Coast declined considerably after 1540 largely because of com petition from traders from other European countries Kea and Robin Law report that the Dutch severally purchased captives at Allada and Angola for sale on the Gold Coast during the second and third quarters of the seven teenth centuries The English are also reported to have purchased captives at Allada for enslavement by Gold Coast indigenes according to Law Indigenous Gold Coast longdistance traders were also active importers of outofarea captives ndonko Resident Gold Coast brokers in Whydah to the east acted as correspondents to Gold Coastbased traders By the mid dle of the seventeenth century African traders alone had imported between eighty thousand and one hundred sixty thousand ndonko into the region according to Kea Exports to the Americas did not begin until the 1640s did not reach one thousand per year until the 1670s and lagged behind those from the Bight of Benin until the 1770s No other African region imported anything near the numbers brought into the Gold Coast It was not uncommon up to the late seventeenth century for ships calling on the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 91 Gold Coast to do other trade there and then go to other regions to load up on captives English captain Thomas Phillips reported that while his Royal African Company ship the Hannibal was loading such goods as gold and corn on the Gold Coast in May 1694 two Danish ships which were also on the Gold Coast for a nonslaving business proceeded to Whydah to buy captives for the transatlantic voyage to the Americas The Hannibal itself along with another Royal African Company ship the East India Merchant did likewise about the same time Demand pressures and concomitant price increases called for increased production of gold in both new and existing mines Increased production no doubt led to increased social differentiation population concentra tion and the development of support industries such as provisioning An increasing number of slaves were employed not only in mining but also in forest clearing agricultural production and porterage services According to Kea Gold Coast entrepreneurs also employed slaves to produce food for a growing population with 40 percent to 60 percent of the slaves production going to their owners One Tayi a wealthy ohene of Eguafo established a large number of farming villages presumably inhabited by slaves between the 1630s and early 1640s Trade also came to depend on slaves for porterage services By the late seventeenth century wealth from this trade encouraged struggles for the control of the goldfields and access to coastal ports Slaves on the Gold Coast along with other personal dependents lived in hamlets and villages serving specific towns which were the centers of political and economic power and religious and civic ceremonies as well as of craft and pageantry Powerful states emerged such as Akwamu Denkyra and later the most powerful of them all Asante the armies of which consisted of slaves in part Outside the Gold Coast largescale slavery was virtually absent in non Islamic West Africa before the eighteenth century As Rodney has argued in the case of the Upper Guinea Coast it was the Atlantic slave trade that led to the generalization of slavery and its intensification and when slaveholding eventually became extensive it was most pronounced among the societies most heavily involved in the slave trade in the region the Mande Susu and Fula When slavery emerged among the sparsely populated Sherbro of Sierra Leone in the eighteenth century it was in response to the transatlantic slave trade which the Sherbro had been involved in since the fifteenth century according to MacCormack In the course of three centuries the transatlantic trade created a market and paved the way for the emergence of slavery Slavery developed from Sherbro efforts to meet European demand for laborintensive products Sandra Greene reports that the AnloEwe of the Gold Coast began to retain a significant number of slaves only after their export of captives expanded during the mideighteenth century Slavery did not emerge among the Efulalu and several other societies in Senegambia Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 92 the cambridge world history of slavery before the eighteenth century according to Baum Wealth from the Atlantic slave trade gave immense power to the elite in Senegambia enabling them to take control of institutions and generate captives some of whom they retained for their own use As Searing puts it in his study of Senegambia the Atlantic trade became a dynamic force which put people and goods into motion transforming the economy and reshaping the geography of wealth in the late seventeenth century It also generated slavery in key sectors of the economy commerce agriculture and the military Transatlantic trade expanded the economic significance of slaves slavery from the eighteenth century to 1820 As European trade increased in lateseventeenth and eighteenthcentury West Africa so did slavery The sugar revolution in the Americas called for massive infusions of slave labor which only an expanded captive procure ment area in Africa could meet The value of captives came to surpass the value of trade goods and the Americas replaced Africa as Europes major external source of precious metals Richard Garner reports that Spanish American mines supplied between twentyfive and thirty thousand tons of silver between c 1560 and 1685 and that these figures more than doubled between 1686 and 1810 These developments forced Europeans to aggres sively seek African trade in captives both on the Gold Coast and elsewhere in Atlantic Africa A rapid increase in European trade with western Africa mainly in cap tives had a salutary effect on market structures of the regions outside the Gold Coast Evidence of largescale slaveholding in the eighteenth cen tury emerged as the Atlantic slave trade expanded drastically in the Bights of Benin and Biafra and eventually in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast As old ports became busier and new ones opened to service the traf fic traders acquired large numbers of slaves as paddlers guards porters and domestics The populations of these entrepˆots increased massively as did those of inland slavetrading groups which acquired slaves for pur poses similar to those of their coastal counterparts In Senegambia and Sierra Leone brokers of mixed African and European ancestry referred to as mulattos were prominent According to Owen the influence of the powerful Henry Tucker derived in part from his own slaves and their children There was also John Ormond also known as Mungo John or Mulatto Trader whom MacCormack has described as a paramount chief at Rio Pongas in todays Guinea Ormond took over his fathers slave trading operation at Rio Pongas sometime after 1758 and through slave raiding depopulated the region between Rio Pongas and Grand Bassam He advanced European goods to the chiefs of Rio Pongas and raided their villages if they failed to supply him with captives and other goods Largescale slaveholding was not confined to brokers of mixed African and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 93 European ancestry By the second half of the eighteenth century Old Cal abar slave traders had come to employ large numbers of slaves in multiple sectors Early in the 1730s British slave trader Francis Moore reported seeing a household of two hundred in a Senegambian village that con sisted of one mans slaves wives and children According to MacCormack one eighteenthcentury Sherbro slave master in the upper Kagboro River region Ban Bondo Bondopio acquired considerable numbers of slaves from the Kono ethnic group some of whom he sold into the transatlantic trade The rest either farmed for him in the interior villages or produced salt in coastal villages One of the saltproducing villages survives today as Yondu the Kono word for slave The role of female slave owners contributed to increased slaveholding Of particular note are women merchants often of EuroAfrican ancestry in Senegambia and Sierra Leone between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries The most successful of these brokers mainly Mandinka Wolof Lebou and Sherbro women and their mulatto daughters held numerous domestic slaves Only fragmentary information about female slaveholders exists for elsewhere in West Africa especially in the hinterland In the Biafran coastal citystates on which written accounts abound female slave holders are largely absent from contemporary accounts but oral traditions of the inland Aro show that female slaveholders have existed since the eighteenth century at the latest For example one Mgboro is remembered mainly in the tradition relating to one of her slave boys Ikelionwu who later became an important Aro hero A major slaveholder himself Ike lionwu founded in the mideighteenth century a principal Aro settlement that survives to this day Slavetrading groups that used large numbers of slaves in productive activities became fairly extensive among slavetrading groups during the eighteenth century This was the time when according to some schol ars slavery developed into a mode of production in which slaves pro duced the surplus that supported a ruling class that did no physical labor In such societies slaves were a significant part of the general popula tion and they often lived in separate settlements Nonetheless the fact that European eyewitnesses tended to exaggerate the extent of slavery and that the magnitude of its expansion differed from society to soci ety calls for some caution in the use of the term slave mode of pro duction in characterizing African slavery prior to the nineteenth cen tury characteristics of slavery Slavery in nonIslamic West Africa differed not only over time but also from society to society and even within societies Compounding the prob lem of determining the extent of slavery however is a tendency to conflate Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 94 the cambridge world history of slavery it with other forms of servitude such as pawnship and concubinage Con flating slaves with these categories breeds confusion and thwarts efforts to understand the nature and extent of slavery in Africa Rather than a single category embracing all the elements of the slave as defined in the Americas there was a broad class of acquired people and their descendants embodying a series of different statuses which or only some of which may be called slavery according to Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff Slavery in most nonIslamic West African societies was in various con figurations a means of labor recruitment a status symbol a system of domination and exploitation and an important means of expanding the lineage Because many other statuses include one or some combination of these elements it is important to establish a rule of thumb for distin guishing slavery MacCormack has observed in the case of the Sherbro that though clients could change their patrons wives could leave their husbands kin groups and junior kin could shift their residential affili ation to another cognate group slaves could not change their masters With some qualifications this distinction applies virtually everywhere in West Africa Slaves could and did initiate their change of masters but this process lacked any institutional basis unlike wives change of husbands clients change of patrons junior kins shift of residential affiliation and expiration of pawns bonds Three or four categories of slaves were found virtually everywhere These were trade or transit slaves newly acquired slaves domestic or familial slaves and slaves born within the household In general slaves who had spent some time of service in a household were treated less harshly than those recently acquired whereas slaves born into the household were treated most leniently and had more rights Transit or trade slaves were those acquired through kidnapping war or purchase or were victims of famine or convicts They were found mostly in the residences of slave traders Their owners might decide to retain them but they were treated as commodities and liable to be sold Among the SonghayZarma male trade slaves were so lowly they were employed in womens work such as grinding grain and drawing water Only his labor counted and it could be used wherever it seemed most useful according to Olivier de Sardin It is best to refer to individuals in this category as captives as they had not undergone or were intended to undergo the rite of passage welcoming them into the household A second category comprised domestic slaves Even though they were often acquired with the intention of being retained and were in some societies formally inducted into the household they were usually sold if they did not pass the muster of good behavior These domestic slaves had undergone a degree of incorporation in the household and possibly the kin group but they often did not attain full citizenship rights in their Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 95 lifetimes They were seen at least in theory as property that might be bought inherited and sold but owners enforcement of their property rights tended to recede over time Their children born in their masters households formed the fourth category of slaves According to Francis Moore who claimed to have spent five years in the Gambia River region between 1730 and 1735 if there are many slaves in the family and one of them commits a crime the master cannot sell him without the joint consent of the rest for if he does they will run away to the next kingdom where they will find protection These slaves were treated as nominal members of the family Moore testifies further though in some parts of Africa they sell the slaves born in the family yet this is here thought extreamly wicked and I never heard but of one person who ever sold a family slave except for such crimes as would have authorized its being done had he been free The Gambia region did in fact represent the rule rather than the excep tion One uncommon category of slaves was made up of warriors and administrators Called the tyeddo in the parts of Senegambia where they were commonly found their privileges included pocketing much of the slavetrade revenue and exemption from taxation As kinless people the tyeddo were dependent on the aristocracy they served and whose royal power they manifested Although the origins of the tyeddo are uncertain the expansion of their power was a feature of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries Eighteenthcentury Wolof ruler Lat Sukaabe cre ated a series of exclusive titles for the tyeddo Slaves were also commonly employed in the armies of Gold Coast states from the eighteenth century onward but slave soldiers role and experiences here do not seem to have been adequately analyzed In the final analysis the uses of slaves depended in the main on the economic and social foundations of a given society For example in pre dominantly agricultural societies slaves were employed mainly in agricul tural tasks whereas in trading societies such as the Aro the Dioula and coastal traders everywhere they were employed in trading and often in the production of provisions Although most nonIslamic West African soci eties were agrarian and used slaves in agricultural work trading societies often held more slaves Societies that combined agriculture with trading such as most coastal communities and many inland ones across the region used slaves in both sectors Slave traders in the citystates of the Bight of Biafra used slaves in agriculture and fishing and as canoe boys by the second half of the eighteenth century But enslaved persons could also be used in craft as in the case of the Aro and in industrial production Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 96 the cambridge world history of slavery The massive use of slaves in trading and riverine work sets West Africa apart from New World societies of the early modern era Historian Daniel Vickers has argued that New England did not develop a large slave system mainly because the fishing and ranching that dominated the economy of the region required a spatially fluid work regime that did not lend itself to the close supervision that made slave labor productive Both Senegambian and Aro merchants employed their slaves in trade Senegambian aristocrats had slaves as soldiers and administrators Why then were West African slave owners able to use slaves in essentially unsupervised activities whereas New England owners could not The answer is that the conditions of slavery and the ideologies underpinning the institution were different in Africa from elsewhere It seems that slaves in Africa had more to gain from being loyal to their masters than fleeing Klein and Searing have pointed out that apart from doing military and administrative service for the aristocracy the tyeddo collected taxes represented the aristocracy in trade with Europeans and were placed in charge of territories in the northern and southern margins of the Wolof kingdom Yet as Manning has related being a royal slave could also lead to human sacrifice in eighteenth and nineteenth century Dahomey or long service as food producers household servants wives and concubines for the royal family Apart from the political and administrative responsibilities and material gain that many royal slaves enjoyed they like the rest of slaves in most societies were often excluded from ritual practices and inheritance and the males were often barred from marrying freeborn women Slave marriage highlights gender as a central element of slavery and illuminates the role of labor and reproduction in it African slaveholders generally preferred women because of the dominant role of women in sexual division of labor in the agrarian economies Masters also needed slave women to marry to their male slaves given that marriage created an opportunity for biological reproduction and thus the expansion of mas ters kin groups and labor pool Of course such a role also meant that slave parents had no substantive parental rights over their children Apart from their labor and reproductive ability slave women had a status that obviated any questions over masters claims to their offspring For this rea son freeborn men in most societies especially those with strong matriclan traditions often sought slave women for marriage Olivier de Sardin has argued that although offspring of freeborn people posed the problem of which group paternal or maternal would claim the child for the slave offspring the ownership interests of the masters of the parents were what counted Marrying a slave woman gave a man unhindered ability to appro priate his wifes labor and reproductive power Whereas a freeborn wife could divorce her husband and return to her natal home and fathers com peted with matrilineages over the ownership of their children a slave wife Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 97 usually raised no such issues Sandra Greene has concluded that AnloEwe free mens preference for slave wives was further reinforced by the tendency of free wives to seek slave wives for their husbands in order to free them selves from some of the labor demands of the husband Slave wives were believed to contribute to the labor and reproductive imperatives of the family with greater enthusiasm than free wives Lacking the protection of kin slave wives often gave all to their husbands Their children too lacked the matriclan protection available to freeborn children whose mothers were married in customary fashion with bridewealth payment One must be careful in categorizing these women as slaves Although they were of slave origin it is unclear whether all or even most actually remained slaves after being incorporated into their husbands households despite lacking the natal kin groups protection There were however exceptions in West Africa to the preference for the enslavement of women Igbo society did not have social space for female slaves Any ambiguity in the status of a female outsider was cleared with her marriage to a freeborn There are now also strong indications that men may have dominated the indigenous slave populations in parts of the Upper Guinea Coast To further illuminate the composition of the slave population and other aspects of slavery it is necessary to examine how Africans became slaves5 enslavement Warfare and raiding were the most important means of enslavement Although warfare and raiding were not one and the same as far as slave capture was concerned the distinction between was blurred In the mid nineteenth century a Germanborn missionary and linguist Sigmund Koelle found that war captives kidnap victims and convicts accounted for 75 percent of a sample of overseas bound captives rescued by the British AntiSlavery Squadron The preponderance of war captives in Koelles data gets credence from accounts of contemporary observers over time and in different regions Although warfare and raiding were important sources of captives everywhere their importance seems to have fluctuated over time in different regions The one region where warfare and raiding seems to have been of overriding importance is Senegambia War became the principal occupation in many parts of Senegambia by the eighteenth century The coastal societies of the region seem to have adapted their preslavetradeera cattleraiding skills to slave raiding with male agegrades specializing in 5 Although the Balanta evidence comes from a later period than dealt with here an 1856 census the fact that as in the Bight of Biafra men rather than women dominated agriculture and that again like the Bight of Biafra the societies he studied supplied a higher proportion of female captives to the Atlantic trade than was the norm suggests that the census probably indicated a longestablished pattern in the area Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 98 the cambridge world history of slavery warraiding among the politically decentralized Balanta and tyeddo slave warriors predominating in the armies of Wolof states When added to the number of the Africans that EuroAmerican slave traders captured and car ried across the Atlantic especially before the eighteenth century captives from warfare and raiding would have predominated among overseasbound captives6 It has increasingly become evident that more women and children were captured from raiding and warfare than has usually been assumed Among the SonghayZarma according to Olivier de Sardin adult males were rarely taken in wars and raiding either because they defended themselves desperately or because they were put to death With a man there was a constant risk of escape the exchange value of a female slave was higher than for a male slave MacCormack reports that Sherbro and Mende warriors in Sierra Leone would use the supposed roar of the Poro spirit to scare Temne men into flight thus abandoning their women and children to the raiders Relics of Mende defenses in 1826 left a British colonial administrator in no doubt that raiders would have found only women and children when they breached such defenses In the Bight of Biafra the most effective warriors focused on headhunting They cut off mens heads as a matter of honor an action that led to fullcitizenship status and prestige in their communities thus prisoners tended to be women and children rather than men But though the malefemale ratio of captives sent overseas from the Bight of Biafra was closer to parity the other major slaveexporting regions of West Africa sent higher proportions of males a pattern that reflected a higher preference for female slaves as well as the impact of the femaleoriented Saharan market in the hinterland of those regions If warfare and raiding yielded perhaps more women and children than men while many more men than women were exported West African societies would have held an even higher proportion of slave women than is 6 Thorntons work shows that raiding was important right from Portuguese initial contacts The activities of Englishman John Hawkins in the 1560s are well documented MacCormack informs us that the invasion of the Sherbro by the Mane a Mandespeaking group in about 1545 displaced the population driving people closer to the sea The Sherbro who had sought refuge in Portuguese ships in advance of Mane invasions were carried away into slavery Richard Drake who had a long career in the slave trade between midway through the first decade of the nineteenth century to 1838 describes several slave raids involving EuroAmericans Drake claims that as a young man he joined local raiders in the Gambia River region sometime between 1804 and 1807 At Old Calabar a few years later Drake also claimed that his own uncle Captain Willing of Boston had gone still farther inland on a negro hunt Tom McCaskie has questioned the authenticity of Drakes account in relation to Drakes purported visit to Asante in 1839 and has shown this incident to be improbable However McCaskie cautions against outright dismissal of Drakes account I am grateful to Robin Law for drawing my attention to the skepticism surrounding Drakes account For the preponderance of war captives among Africans sent into the Middle Passage see accounts by William Snelgrave Also see Francis Moore in the Gambia River region in the 1730s Nicholas Owen in the 1750s Sierra Leone and Richard Drake in Abomey between 1804 and 1807 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 99 currently supposed The adult male slaves could only have been the product of judicial convictions political expatriation and especially kidnapping which may have accounted for a higher proportion of the adult male captives sent into Atlantic slavery than is usually allowed Kidnapping was certainly an important source of captives despite the fact that taking ones own kin was viewed as outrageous behaviour culprits were punished accordingly Communities recognized that failure to impose punishment would embolden the kidnapper If insider kidnapping was often illegal kidnapping was more acceptable when it occurred across jurisdictions The kin of the kidnap victim often recognized the property rights of the person keeping him in custody as long as he was not the person who had done the kidnapping Of course the affected kin group could recover their kinsperson either by ransom or by force if they had the means to do so Although the law intervened to free kidnapped people the law and the judicial process became a means of producing slaves Across West Africa enslavement increasingly replaced execution as punishment for murder as well as for noncapital offenses such as adultery witchcraft and theft Redress to a murder victims lineage might require the perpetrators lin eage to produce a suitable replacement for the victim Depending on the prevailing convention the replacement could be a slave or any person of comparable standing to the victim Judicial enslavement escalated with Atlantic trade European visitors describe this process in graphic detail Many societies bowed to Atlantic demand pressures by increasingly adopt ing the enslavement option Why kill an offender if there was money to be made from his sale In some societies not only the alleged perpetrator of a crime was punished his relatives were also sold Judicial systems in many societies were placed in the service of the slave trade7 7 Portuguese Jesuit priests who visited the Gambia River region in 1605 described the judicial process of the Casanga When people were found guilty of crimes the apparent culprits died of the red water ordeal and all their wives children and families become the kings slaves and these he sells to the Portuguese In order to have more slaves to sell so that in exchange for them he can have more of the goods which he needs he also employed other tyrannical devices which they call law According to Frances Moore agent of the Royal African Company in the Gambia River region between 1730 and 1735 Since this slave trade has been used all punishments are changed into slavery and the natives reaping advantage from such condemnations they strain hard for crimes in order to obtain the benefit of selling the criminal hence not only murder adultery and theft are here punished by selling the malefactor but every trifling crime is also punished in the same manner In Cantore in the Gambia River region during the early 1730s the king sold one man and his close relatives as punishment According to Moore the man had fatally but accidentally shot another man while trying to shoot a tiger British government official Joseph Corry who visited the Windward Coast in 1805 and 1806 reports that whereas those proven guilty of crimes by the red water ordeal were killed all his family are sold for slaves In Africa crimes are punished by forfeitures slavery or death they are however rare but accusations are often used to procure slaves whether for domestic purposes sale or sacrifice to their customs Death as a punishment is seldom the penalty of condemnation and if the culprit is rich he can purchase his security Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 100 the cambridge world history of slavery People were also enslaved for political reasons As historian Edna Bay has documented victorious Dahomian princes in succession struggles reg ularly sent relatives and supporters of their unsuccessful rivals overseas a punishment considered worse than execution A distinct group of Igbo political repatriates were known to shipmasters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Captain John Adams specifically refers to a class of Heebos whom masters of slaveships have always had a strong aversion to purchase These men had enjoyed an exalted rank in their own country The line between judicial and political enslavement was thin The Ibibiukpabi oracle among the Aro a kind of supreme court for the Bight of Biafra often became involved in political cases and political intrigues Local Aro traders knew the direction of public opinion and the oracles judgments often corresponded with them The oracle served as a siphon of captives because litigants were sometimes eaten a euphemism for sale into Atlantic slavery but more often they were asked to pay fees and fines in captives Those unable to pay the requisite fines were sold into slav ery The tendency to falsely accuse political rivals seems to have been fairly widespread Such enslavement processes preponderantly served Atlantic slavery rather than the needs of enslavement in West African societies This review of enslavement processes suggests that Koelles sample of recaptives those taken by British antislavery cruisers while en route to the Americas may not be representative of those captives enslaved within African societies For example few of the people enslaved due to debt were sold into the Atlantic Those convicted of witchcraftsorcery were also more likely to be retained than prisoners of war Indigenous slaveholding drew from the categories least represented by overseasbound captives The means by which a person became captive was important and sometimes crucial in determining the fate of the enslaved person Sale into Atlantic slavery was an extreme form of punishment a process that Joseph Miller captures metaphorically as a way of death in his study of WestCentral Africa As the Koelle sample eloquently testifies war captives and kidnap victims were more likely to be exported except perhaps in societies with the ability to regiment large coercedlabor forces By contrast those enslaved within Africa were drawn more from captives procured through less violent means such as debtors or orphans or those sold by families out of economic necessity Debtors or kin groups could sell a debtor to raise funds for the liquidation of the debts Indigenous slaveholders preferred people sold by their families on the basis of economic necessity These people were not usually stigmatized as violent or malevolent their kin sold them reluctantly Captain William Snelgrave who made many trips to various parts of West Africa during the first three decades of the eighteenth century reported that coastal people sold their slaves only in times of extream want and famine Various Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 101 societies evolved rules to regulate such transactions Historian Robert Baum has found that the Esulalu a Dioula group in Senegambia evolved a set of religious and legal impediments to the enslavement of insiders Yet they made exception in the case of parents selling their children to pay off debts Orphans were sold when the extended family was unable or unwilling to look after them or if some family members got greedy The Margi bartered family members especially children for provision in times of famine according to Miers and Kopytoff Among the Igbo whatever the reason for sale members of both the individuals patrilineage and matrilineage had to agree to it Once agreed a ritual was performed to separate the person from his kin Clearly the enslavement process was shaped by whether the victim was entering the internal or external slave trade treatment of slaves Slaves experiences status in society and chances of manumission were related to among other things the position of their masters and the per sonalities of both slave and master Slaves of the elite enjoyed higher posi tions than slaves of lowerstatus individuals For this reason Klein has gone as far as to contrast those who participated in the exercise of power and those who did not as a more meaningful way of looking at social strat ification than mere status A tyeddo slave among the Wolof and Sereer was often better economically than a freeborn Those who participated in the exercise of power included the aristocrats their slaves and those artisans and griots bards who were clients of the aristocrats The freeborn says Klein ranked high on the prestige scale but the vast majority did not par ticipate in power or its rewards For Miers and Kopytoff this phenomenon contrasts with Western conceptions of the slave status which necessarily see a slave as a miserable poor creature consigned both to the base of the social scale and the meanest of tasks A kind slave owner anywhere was likely to treat his slaves more humanely than a cruel owner and a slave whom his masters judged to be enterprising and dependable would likely have a better overall experience than one deemed to be lazy dishonest or malevolent An intelligent and forceful slave could manipulate himself into a position of high importance This position often came with vastly improved status Cruel and kind masters existed in contemporary Amer icas but loyalty to their masters did not guarantee progress for enslaved Africans racism ensured they remained in the margins of society The masterslave relationship in West Africa rested on jural prescriptions and conventions The master had a responsibility to protect the slave from outsider molestation but his ability to provide this protection depended on his social status Masters in agrarian societies normally had a responsibility to give the slave land for his or her subsistence Invariably however the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 102 the cambridge world history of slavery master expected surplus product Religious beliefs guaranteed protection for slaves in some societies Even among the Sherbro whose regimen was strict we learn from MacCormack that slaves were protected from bloody physical violence because the Sherbro believed that bloodletting defiled the land and could be punished by the Poro society By the nineteenth century according to Olivier de Sardin the threat of magical punishment curtailed the mistreatment or sale of domestic slaves horso among the Songhay Zarma of the Upper Niger slaves were feared because they were deemed to have magical power Slave work differed from society to society and according to degree of incorporation but in general domestic slaves did the same kinds of work as the freeborn of their age In Igbo and Senegambian societies slaves were worked harder than free people In Senegambia as early as 1500 and in the Bight of Biafra from the eighteenth century onward slaves worked for themselves on specific days of the week Many were entrusted with substantial responsibilities and could inherit their masters property The fact that many powerful men in the Bight of Biafra coastal citystates had slave origin by the second half of the eighteenth century onward testifies to a level of social mobility not seen in slave systems elsewhere Although slavework regimes were often not unlike those of free people the slave status in West Africa often came with institutionalized social and psychological disadvantages People of slave origin in many societies lacked some of the legal protections that nonslave persons enjoyed and they encountered wider marital restrictions and other disadvantages Enslaved people might in extreme cases be subject to human sacrifice and though free persons might also be sacrificed slaves were particularly vulnerable Nevertheless the absorptive element of African slave systems more than anything else marked them out from New World systems because slavery in the Americas depended on racial exclusion and domination When slaves were accepted as kin in nonIslamic West Africa it was invariably as junior kin There is thus some validity to the insistence of anthropologist Claude Meillassoux that people of slave origin remained perpetual cadets everywhere As clients and affines they were exten sions of the wealth of kin groups but they belonged in the groups only marginally according to Miers and Kopytoff As highlighted in the SonghayZarma Sherbro and Old Calabar cases the kinship idiom was used in reference to slaves masters children called them father uncle and aunt but they were effectively perpetual minors Among the Sher bro slaves were separated from their natal kin groups In the words of MacCormack They were full dependents but with only some rights and privileges They could not build their own political faction from clients and descendants nor claim ancestral legitimacy for seeking high office Although the Aro case shows that slaves were marginal and lacked the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 103 ancestral legitimacy to seek high office in certain situations down to the eighteenth century some individuals nevertheless reached high status in society and even created political factions from their descendants and dependents The Aro maintained a tight system of tribute ihu by which people annually paid allegiance to superior lineages This practice was not however an automatic signifier of cadet status on the part of people of slave origin it was not restricted to people of slave origin Every Aro family head slave free or immigrant maintained this obligation toward the head of a superior family or elder In fact ihu marked free rather than slave status as only slaves proper people who had not established independent homesteads were ineligible to give ihu As will be shown in the discussion of manumission this was not an unusual situation often the means of social mobility were institutionalized though the stigma of slavery often lingered Likewise the Aro system does not conform to Miers and Kopytoffs assertion that the change in the life of the enslaved was usually dra matic and total and that he lost his social personality his identity and status and suffered a traumatic and sometimes violent withdrawal from kin neighbors and community and often from familiar customs and language Among the Aro diaspora the enslaved populations routinely adopted shrines and married from their natal homes They also maintained trade links and noninstitutional supernumerary kinship affiliations with these societies In time the master class came to subscribe to these shrines which became the dominant media of worship among the Aro diaspora The social experience of people of slave origin was hardly consistent with what Miers and Kopytoff characterize as playing dead The Aro case raises a point often ignored in analysis of slave incorporation in Africa The enslaved peoples relationship to society is not just one of incorporation into a dominant culture slaves also influenced the culture of host societies a phenomenon that stands Orlando Pattersons social death on its head Such patterns tend to support the argument that slavery in West Africa was less cruel than slavery in the Americas But the overlaps between the experiences of free and enslaved people in West Africa tend to confuse rather than to clarify the slave experience Both contemporary European witnesses and some presentday historians label as slaves people who were not slaves Some observers and scholars may still consider as a slave a Senegambian person for whom his master paid bridewealth on marrying his wards first wife but who himself paid bridewealth for subsequent wives whereas it seems more plausible to say this person had metamorphosed from slave to client status For Thornton the treatment of slaves in subSaharan Africa was akin to the treatment of tenants and hired laborers Rather than the West African slave expe rience being equivalent to those of European tenants and laborers it is Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 104 the cambridge world history of slavery possible that Thornton has defined slaves too broadly to include nonslave subordinate persons There was no shortage of clients some of whom were comparable to tenants or pawns or indentured laborers but these were not slaves A client could walk away from a patron and remain free as long as he could find another patron or if he was powerful enough to be independent a pawn could theoretically do so upon the settlement of the debt that placed him in pawnship Firstgeneration slaves especially were invariably considered property and could be sold on the whim of a master among other possible indignities Labor was not key to the slave condition everywhere in nonIslamic West Africa before 1820 It was for example more important in the centralized societies of Senegambia than among the Igbo in the Bight of Biafra The property interest of the master seems to have been the characteristic that cut across all systems An enslaved person whether worked hard or not could not walk away without retribution andor the master trying to recover the slave or laying claim to compen sation from whoever was harboring the fugitive Slavery in West Africa before 1820 in the magnitude that Thornton has depicted is not plausible once other categories of dependency have been set aside In any event it would difficult to conceive of a shift in status in the Americas comparable to the West African case manumission Under what conditions did slaves become free in Africa Compared to the rigid closed Asian systems African slave systems were open that is opportunities for manumission were greater in Africa Miers and Kopytoff use the term social mobility to characterize the subtle often gradual manumission processes that marked most African slave systems As with other aspects of slavery manumission mechanisms differed from society to society In Igboland and perhaps elsewhere every man including slaves automatically gained status by killing an enemy or ferocious animal If slave trader Richard Drakes account is to be taken seriously in about 1805 Asante warrior Quobah enslaved by a Dahomey king gained immediate freedom by killing the lions menacing the society Quobah had volun teered the dangerous undertaking in lieu of being sacrificed to Yallabar spirits Enslaved people in virtually every system could ransom themselves at least in theory Selfransom presupposed slaves prior involvement in independent economic activity or at least in some incomegenerating role in one of the commercial enterprises that had become common in coastal Bight of Biafran citystates by the second half of the eighteenth century In Senegambia as early as 1500 and in the Bight of Biafra from the eigh teenth century onward slaves worked for themselves on specific days of the week Belasco reports that slaves could ransom themselves among the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 105 Yoruba even though no formal adoption into the masters lineage took place Assimilation was also possible but usually only after the first gen eration When free exslaves could attain important ranks in nonlineage associations Because Yoruba slaves had so much time to work and accu mulate wealth manumission would have been relatively easy Even among the Sherbro where slaves could not own property and incorporation into the masters lineage was virtually forbidden exceptions abounded Over several generations according to MacCormack the slave status could give way to gradual incorporation It was often to the economic advantage of the masters to provide opportunities for their slaves Economic independence allowed slaves time to care for their children and at the same time work for their masters This practice freed the master from maintaining his slaves and their children while at the same time allowing him to wield influence over them including accessing their labor Because few female slaves owned land or other property they did not benefit from the liberating effect of property ownership Female slaves could however marry free men which as we have seen brought manumission or near manumission in most societies Greene observes that these women gained marginal incorporation into their hus bands households and the degree of their acceptance and that of their offspring was tied to their commitment to the patriarch Effiong Aye reports that in Old Calabar a slave woman who bore her master a child would become free along with her offspring whether or not she was mar ried to the man Young female domestic slaves among the Wolof and Sereer could reduce their marginality through marriage and the produc tion of offspring which provided opportunities for ties into new social units even though full integration happened only to those born into the society according to Klein By contrast male slaves were often debarred from marrying freeborn women This phenomenon often took the form of the absolute rule that JeanPierre Olivier de Sardin found among the SonghayZarma A slave womans marriage to a free man was always a step toward manumission The picture that emerges from all societies on which we have evidence is that slave women married to free men became incorporated into their husbands lineages and their offspring were deemed free However the stigma of slave origin invariably lingered with these wives and to a lesser extent their children The offspring of these unions generally became members of their fathers patriclans The only issue is the degree of their belongingness By contrast male slaves could not usually marry free women and when they did they did not gain automatic freedom and their offspring were rarely regarded as freeborn The patrilineal bias in the incorporation of slaves and their offspring into masters kin groups reflected the system of patriarchy that pervaded West Africa Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 106 the cambridge world history of slavery Manumission became increasingly difficult in most societies as slavery expanded especially in the nineteenth century As the export market for produce expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century masters increasingly came to value slaves role as laborers in the production of commodities Masters accordingly developed tighter regimens and became more inventive in restricting access to manumission resistance Slaves in West Africa did not always wait for their masters to free them Resistance however came at great personal cost including the loss of some opportunities for advancement in society The incentive to leave African slavery was less because it seems to have been benign in comparison to its New World counterpart The kinship ideology was a major factor In comparison to New World slavery there were many avenues through which individual slaves found it more beneficial to work within the lineage structure toward social mobility Because slave was often a status but slaves rarely if ever formed a stratum slaves did not form a collective identity and social consciousness Even if a slave was determined to flee he could not necessarily expect security or a free existence The impression in much of the literature is that resistance was a feature of the colonial period a result of the introduction of European social and ideological ideas such as wage labor and Christianity This view has a strong affinity with the influential view of such scholars as Patterson and Eugene Genovese which claims that ideas of freedom are only a feature of the modern Western capitalist world Implying that freedom was not possible in precolonial Africa some scholars claim that only flight from slavery was practicable because there was no place to run in search of freedom Elizabeth Isiechei and Miers and Kopytoff argue that even flight was meaningless in the forest regions due to the thickness of the forests A comparison with the situation in the Americas where frequent incidence of resistance is well documented challenges these claims The issues raised to explain the supposed nonoccurrence of resistance were not peculiar to the African conditionForexampleRichard Dunnhasargued thatJamaicaexperienced the most frequent incidence of revolt in the Americas not in spite of but precisely because of natural barriers If this is at all true the reason for the dearth of resistance in African slavery lies elsewhere It was virtually impossible for a person to exist for any significant length of time without attachment to a patron master or kin group If a person could not prove affiliation to any of these one was imposed on him either by the slave being returned to his old master or reenslaved by a new one The mechanism differed from society to society and over time but the result was similar flight rarely resulted in freedom for the slave Among the Sherbro Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 107 though the new master saw himself merely as a protector among the Aro he saw himself as the new master if he was willing and able to keep the fugitive But to harbor a runaway slave was both potentially beneficial and potentially destructive depending on the relative powers of the principals Whereas the new Aro master was not bound to return the slave to his old master MacCormack reports that the Sherbro protector was bound to do so through the intermediary of the chief or other responsible official provided the old master begged the slave to return and upon doing so was able to publicly speak well of the slave and offer the officials a kola or other small gift for restoring the slave to him Sherbro masters saw this diplomatic approach as a pragmatic alternative to forcing the slave back to his master and having to deal with his flight all over again This was certainly an attractive option for decentralized societies lacking a state superstructure to enforce the law Slaves in the vicinity of Sierra Leone after 1787 did have options but slaves in the vast majority of societies during the period covered here did not Flight was often a dead end and rebellion would have been rare if it existed at all It is not a surprise therefore that less has been written about resistance itself than about factors militating against it before the nineteenth century Without a doubt resistance was more common in the nineteenth century but the context had changed Slave exploitation had intensified opportunities for manumission had declined and the presence of Europeans and antislavery ideas perhaps stimulated resistance It is of course possible that the inability to pinpoint cases of resistance before the nineteenth century reflects a problem of sources rather than the actual reality If resistance really was unknown there would have been no need for masters to take measures to forestall resistance Even such a simple act as restraining a captive with a chain or other material underscores the existence of resistance It was necessary to restrain the captive because of the likelihood that he might flee andor harm his captors Indoctrination mea sures and the kinship idiom were mobilized to ensure that slaves complied with the existing order Acts of resistance during the Middle Passage and in the Americas are well established Why would Africans resist enslavement in the Middle Passage and the Americas but not resist enslavement in Africa conclusion The character and course of slavery in Africa is usefully understood in the context of trade as a whole The Atlantic trade in particular provides a basis for understanding the spread of slavery in Africa from the sixteenth century onward Slavery existed in West Africa before 1420 before the Atlantic trade era but only in the Gold Coast had slavery become widespread and extensive to the point where it might have helped trigger an Atlantic Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 108 the cambridge world history of slavery slave trade in the manner argued by Thornton If slavery in West Africa did contribute to the beginning of this traffic however the Gold Coast would have been the first and most important slaveexporting region In fact the region did not become a significant exporter until the eighteenth century as long as it remained the epicenter of slavery in West Africa It was the only region where a laborintensive mining sector existed and where Europeans brought captives from other parts of Africa Yet the existence of largescale slavery in the Gold Coast does not seem to have had significant impact on the volume of captives that that region supplied to the Atlantic market If there are any generalizations to be made about the relationship between indigenous slavery and Atlantic trade it is first that the absence of institutional obstacles to slavery and the slave trade in West Africa facilitated the development of the transatlantic slave trade and second that largescale slavery was not the cause but rather a consequence of Atlantic trade The unique history of Gold Coast slavery affects the interpretation of the history of slavery in nonIslamic Africa and its interaction with the Atlantic trade in another way In general fewer females than males were exported to the Americas because females were absorbed by indigenous African slave systems and the alternative Saharan market Females were easier to assimilate and less prone to violent revolts Two regions the Gold Coast up to the end of the seventeenth century and the Bight of Biafra up to the mideighteenth century deviated from this pattern sending significantly higher proportions of females into the Atlantic mar ket We know in the Bight of Biafra that this was because of the marginality of the Saharan market and the premium placed on male labor in the yam dominated agriculture Gold Coast sources for this period hardly mention female slaves and also place males at the center of the slave system The gender division of labor in preeighteenthcentury Gold Coast has yet to be studied closely Nonmining sectors of its economy especially small scale farming and domestic service have yet to receive the attention that scholars have given to the gold economy We might suggest that the high proportion of females seen among captives leaving the Gold Coast resulted from the male focus of slavery there due to the predominance of min ing and plantation labor where male rather than female labor prevailed Perhaps a female majority of slaves is to be expected within Africa for predominantly agricultural societies in which women did most of the productive work but not in a society like the Bight of Biafra where men figured heavily in agriculture or the Gold Coast where the direct labor for the mainstay mining economy was shouldered by men Thus the high proportion of females among captives leaving the two regions deviated from the norm as long as the Gold Coast maintained this pat tern The sharp fluctuation seen in the proportion of females leaving the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in nonislamic west africa 14201820 109 Gold Coast in the seventeenth century is significant for our understand ing of indigenous slavery and its interaction with Atlantic trade In the high gold age of the sixteenth century Gold Coast markets offered more females for export than males but the proportion declined significantly to 47 percent in the course of the seventeenth century when gold exports declined By contrast the proportion from the Bight of Biafra remained fairly consistent over time suggesting continuing reliance on male slaves as opposed to decreasing reliance on males on the Gold Coast occasioned by economic change associated with the collapse of gold exports This evidence confirms the exceptional character of Gold Coast slavery dur ing the early Atlantic trade era a phenomenon that must figure in any analysis of slavery in Africa up to the beginning of the nineteenth cen tury further reading C Baks et al Slavery as a System of Production in Tribal Society Bijdragen Tot de Taal Land en Volkenkunde Deel 122 1966 90109 Robert M Baum Shrines of the Slave Trade Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia New York 1999 Frederick Cooper The Problem of Slavery in African Studies Journal of African History 20 1979 10325 Sylviane Diouf ed Fighting the Slave Trade West African Strategies Athens OH 2003 Richard Dunn Sugar and Slaves The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 16241713 Chapel Hill NC 1972 Sandra Greene Gender Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast Portsmouth NH 1996 A G Hopkins An Economic History of West Africa London 1972 Joseph Inikori Export versus Domestic Demand The Determinants of Sex Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Research in Economic History 14 1992 117 66 Ray A Kea Settlements Trade and Politics in the SeventeenthCentury Gold Coast Baltimore MD 1982 Martin A Klein and Paul E Lovejoy Slavery in West Africa in Henry Gemery and Jan S Hogendorn eds The Uncommon Market Essays in the Economic History of the Slave Trade New York 1979 Paul E Lovejoy Transformations of Slavery A History of Slavery in Africa 2nd ed New York 2000 Patrick Manning Slavery Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey 1640 1960 Cambridge 1982 Patricia McKissack and Fredrick McKissack The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana Mali and Songhay Life in Medieval Africa New York 1994 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff Slavery in Africa Historical and Anthropological Perspectives Madison WI 1977 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 110 the cambridge world history of slavery G Ugo Nwokeji The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra An African Society in the Atlantic World Cambridge 2010 Richard L Roberts Warriors Merchants and Slaves The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley 17001914 Stanford CA 1987 Claire Robertson and Martin Klein eds Women and Slavery in Africa Madison WI 1983 Walter Rodney A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 15451800 Oxford 1970 John K Thornton Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400 1800 2nd ed Cambridge 1998 James L Watson ed Asian and African Slavery Berkeley CA 1980 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 5 SLAVING AND RESISTANCE TO SLAVING IN WEST CENTRAL AFRICA roquinaldo ferreira 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 labor1 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 bottomup social analyses of slavery More recently however a new breed of studies has begun illuminating the complexity of bondage and resistance2 As a result of this scholarship the emphasis on links between slavery and warfare has been replaced by analyses of mecha nisms of enslavement that did not rely on perennial and largescale 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 1 Walter Rodney African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave Trade Journal of African History 7 1966 43143 Claude Meillassoux The Role of Slavery in the Economic and Social History of SaheloSudanic Africa in Joseph Inikori ed Forced Migration The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies London 1982 pp 7499 Martin Klein and Paul Lovejoy Slavery in West Africa in Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn eds The Uncommon Market Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade New York 1979 pp 181221 Paul Lovejoy Indigenous African Slavery Historical ReflectionsReflexions Historiques 6 1979 1962 2 Jan Vansina Ambaca Society and the Slave Trade c 17601845 Journal of African History 46 2005 12 Jose Curto Struggling against Enslavement The Case of Jose Manuel in Benguela 18161820 Canadian Journal of African Studies 39 2005 96122 111 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 112 the cambridge world history of slavery context of resistance to slaving by examining the emergence of runaway communities In addition to the formation of maroon communities and slave flights the chapter also analyzes nonviolent means to resist slavery including legal actions and help from relatives and rulers slavery in african societies Although differing significantly from the more commercialized system established by Europeans African slavery was remarkably similar across the communities most affected by the slave trade In the Kingdom of Ndongo there were two categories of slaves mubika and kijuku Whereas the first were captives of war generally destined for the transatlantic slave trade the latter could not be sold to Atlantic slavery and enjoyed a higher status Kijuku Ijuku formed communities in settlements where they toiled and were governed by a free person designated by the king They provided key political and military support to the governing elite and were so powerful as to participate in the process of selection of kings3 In the Benguela hinterlands by the same token slaves also enjoyed a special status as members of this class could become kings4 Similarly as demonstrated by Anne Hilton only captives of war could be sold into Atlantic slaving in the Kingdom of Kongo5 Scholars have focused on kinship or lack thereof as a central factor to analyze slavery in Central Africa As stated by Vansina a person without a lineage was a slave a person with one was free6 Once incorporated into a lineage slaves were treated as classificatory children7 In the Kingdom of Kasanje the assumption is shaped by the broader institutional history of the kingdom as a polity created by nomadic Imbangala groups that shunned kingship and incorporated its members through kidnapping that generated constant influx of new members According to this viewpoint the intrinsically kinless nature of slaves or at least kijuku slaves was also a function of the role that Kasanje played as an intermediary in the trade between the Portuguese and regions to the east of the Kwango River This 3 Beatrix Heintze Angola nos Seculos XVI e XVII Luanda 2007 4845 4 Jan Vansina How Societies Are Born Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 Charlottesville VA 2004 177 5 Ann Hilton Family and Kinship among the Kongo South of the Zaire River from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries Journal of African History 24 1983 191 6 Jan Vansina Ambaca Society and the Slave Trade 6 See also Joseph Miller Imbangala Lineage Slavery in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff eds Slavery in Africa Historical and Anthropological Perspectives Madison WI 1977 pp 20534 idem Lineages Ideology and the History of Slavery in Western Central Africa in Paul Lovejoy ed The Ideology of Slavery in Africa Beverly Hills CA 1981 7 Hilton Family and Kinship among the Kongo 191 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 113 would have favorably positioned Kasanje to easily incorporate individuals brought into the several markets that existed in its territories8 Such conceptual framework is by no means consensual however and it has recently been challenged by Wyatt MacGaffey who argues that those Africans enslaved were not necessarily either outsiders or criminals9 In MacGaffeys view both slaving and slavery were shaped by whether they occurred in highly commercialized coastal regions or inland regions that had not been entirely affected by the slave trade Thus the social condi tion of the slave varied accordingly depending on where the person was enslaved10 Furthermore politics played a key role in the production of slaves which also derived from matrilineal descent groups11 As demon strated by MacGaffey the ultimate result of such a dynamic was the creation of a system of government that admitted not only holding people as slaves but also the sale of enslaved individuals In this context as indicated by Vansina and Thornton a judicial system susceptible to the demands of the elite and prone to producing slaves by nonviolent means was an essential piece in the architecture of enslavement12 slave communities luanda The major institutional and political landmarks of the integration of Angola into the Atlantic economy in the sixteenth century have been extensively analyzed but significantly less attention has been devoted to the changes brought on by the coastal trade to populations in regions under formal Portuguese control between Luanda and Mpungo Ndongo to the east Information on Angolan demography is sketchy preventing a clear pic ture of the Africans toiling under slavery in Portuguese Angola13 However the fact that the region was both a supplier of slaves to the Atlantic and a corridor through which thousands of Africans from east Angola were taken to the coast might provide some clues on its demographic makeup Because not all enslaved Africans were taken to the Americas one of the outcomes of Angolan integration into the Atlantic economy was the cre ation of a significant slave population in the region including at the two 8 Miller Imbangala Lineage Slavery 9 Wyatt MacGaffey Kongo Slavery Remembered by Themselves Texts from 1915 International Journal of African Historical Studies 41 2008 76 See also idem Changing Representations in Central African History Journal of African History 46 2005 195 10 MacGaffey Kongo Slavery 47 11 MacGaffey Changing Representations in Central African History 1979 12 Vansina Ambaca Society and the Slave Trade Wyatt MacGaffey Kongo Slavery Thornton African Political Ethics and the Slave Trade 13 For demographics studies focusing on the late eighteenth century see Jose Curto The Population History of Luanda during the Late Atlantic Slave Trade 17811844 African Economic History 29 2001 159 Jose Curto As If from a Free Womb Baptismal Manumissions in the Conceicao Parish Luanda 17781807 Portuguese Studies Review 10 2002 31 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 114 the cambridge world history of slavery main slave ports at Luanda and Benguela A later section in this chapter will address how the amalgamated cultural and social landscape of these regions influenced the way their African populations reacted to slaving This section will sketch out an overview of the demographic makeup of the African population in Luanda and adjacent regions In the 1680s approximately eighty Portuguese and LusoAfrican mer chants lived in Luanda and they exerted control over thousands of enslaved Africans in and around the city A missionary who visited Luanda at the time reported a prodigious multitude of blacks whose number is not known14 A few decades later another missionary stated the negroes which inhabit this city Luanda and kingdom Angola except some few that are free as being natives they are all slaves to the whites15 These slaves played a pivotal role in the local economy by performing a variety of occupations in Luanda and adjacent regions They worked as fishermen together with free Muxiloanda people carpenters and soldiers in mili tias and they transported Luanda settlers around the city in hammocks Many of the crewmembers of ships taking slaves to the Americas were slaves Near Luanda slaves were also employed in the arrimos farms in the Bengo region and along the Kwanza River which supplied foodstuff for Luanda and the transatlantic slave trade In addition many enslaved Africans lived in the interior regions under Portuguese influence which stretched to the colonial outpost established in 1672 in Mpungo Ndongo some three hundred kilometers inland Some of these Africans from the interior spent long periods of time away from their masters carrying out activities related to slaving on behalf of their owners or Luanda and Benguela coastal merchants In order to understand the composition of the Luanda slave population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it is necessary to reconstruct shifts both in the internal and the transatlantic slave trade as well as military operations in the Luanda hinterland Benguela and northern Kongo In the early seventeenth century for example Kimbunduspeaking people origi nating from the Luanda hinterland made up most of those toiling under slavery in Luanda and adjacent regions These Africans had mostly been captives of the wars through which the Portuguese and allied Imbangala forces staked out fragile control over regions in the Luanda hinterland16 As demonstrated by Heywood and Thornton after being organized along 14 Michael Angelo and Denis de Carla A Curious and Exact Account of a Voyage to Congo in the Years 1666 and 1667 in John Pinkerton ed A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in all Parts of the World London 1814 p 298 15 Jeronimo Merola A Voyage to Congo and Several Other Countries Chiefly in Southern Africk in ibid p 295 16 Joseph Miller The Paradoxes of Impoverishment in the Atlantic Zone in David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin eds History of Central Africa London 1983 pp 11859 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 115 commercial lines the Angolan trade was then driven by military operations that seriously affected populations in the Luanda hinterland17 Although a significant number perhaps most of the Africans enslaved through warfare were shipped to the Americas many also remained in Luanda In the second half of the seventeenth century the population of Luanda became more diversified as the Luanda trade drew on alternative sources of slaves in northern and southern Angola Kikongospeaking Africans from the north already lived in regions surrounding Luanda in the first half of the seventeenth century as their numbers increased significantly due to the intensification of commerce with Kongolesecontrolled regions The circumstances that led to these changes stemmed from thriving coastal commerce between African and Dutch merchants in northern Angola This trade consisted of sophisticated Africancontrolled commercial networks and was fueled by highly soughtafter products such as textiles brought from abroad by the Dutch These trading networks were far more efficient than the Portuguesecontrolled Luanda trade and the growth of the Dutch controlled coastal trade in northern Angola prompted enterprising African merchants to seek to increase the number of slaves by spreading south in to Mbundu regions and tapping into the supply of slaves for Luanda The situation took a toll on the Luanda trade as slaves that would have been delivered at the city would wind up in northern Angola To prevent this supply from being diverted to northern Angola and to protect their own commercial interests the colonial administration and allied African forces fought several unsuccessful wars against the Matamba and Kongo kingdoms In addition to the growing independent internal slave trade the supply of slaves to Luanda was thwarted by monopolistic practices by highranking colonial officials that harmed private business and created an exceedingly unfriendly business environment in the city The results of inhospitable conditions for merchants in Luanda were twofold First it indirectly bol stered the coastal trade in northern Angola by forcing Luanda merchants to turn to those regions Cabinda and Loango to make up for the dif ficulties of conducting business in Luanda Because of the trade via land with Kikongospeaking peoples from regions south of the Congo River enslaved Africans from those regions were already part of the Luanda pop ulation However growing trade by Luanda ships in Cabinda and Loango further increased their numbers in the city These Africans were known in Luanda as Muxicongo Indirect evidence of the significant number and status of Muxicongo in Luanda was that slave holders paid close attention to their attitudes toward the Middle Passage remarking that Muxicongo 17 Linda Heywood and John Thornton Central Africans Atlantic Creoles and the Foundation of the Americas Cambridge 2007 chapter 3 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 116 the cambridge world history of slavery were those who seemed to be the most affected and prone to depression and suicide when faced with the prospect of being taken across the ocean By the end of the seventeenth century difficulties in conducting slav ing in Luanda triggered changes in the coastal trade anew These changes in turn stimulated further diversity within the Luanda slave population To make matters worse prices for slaves skyrocketed due to the rise of the demand for slaves in Brazil According to reports from the late sev enteenth century there were ten purchasers for each primequality slave pecas da India available in Luanda in 169918 Because of the rise of the demand for labor for the slave trade prices soared to levels that on occa sion reached ten times those prevalent a few years earlier19 With prices of slaves increasing dramatically government officials and wellconnected merchants dominated the trade in slaves to the detriment of private mer chants Against this backdrop Benguela soon became an alternative focal point of slaving drawing on the Angolan central highlands for highly valued but still relatively few slaves Through persistent warfare a basic institutional framework was established that allowed for the growth of commerce In contrast to Luanda where trade was bogged down by exces sive regulations and a corrupt bureaucracy Benguela was loosely controlled by royal officials Access to slaves was not yet as easy or voluminous as in northern Angola but the relative lack of bureaucracy created more propi tious access to forced labor and lured not only Portuguese vessels but also French and Dutch ships to the region Africans shipped from Benguela on Portuguese vessels were first taken to Luanda so traders could pay taxes and duties to the Portuguese crown In Luanda they were named after the port they had been shipped from and became known as Benguela slaves The internal trading networks that the Benguela trade fed on were relatively underdeveloped and drew on limited regions As a result these slaves might have shared a similar cultural background Some of the Benguela slaves living in Luanda were captured during warfare in Benguela and were favored to serve in militias run by Luanda merchants but the majority was brought to Luanda as payoff for loans contracted by Benguela merchants to invest in slaving In the late 1720s when Luanda grew further reliant on Benguela due to diseases that diminished the Luanda slave population and a decline in the supply of slaves from the Luanda hinterland the number of Benguela slaves increased in Luanda These slaves formed communities and eventually several maroon communities were created that greatly disrupted commerce between Luanda and the interior of Angola in the 1740s 18 Carta do Governador de Angola on November 20 1699 Instituto Historico e Geografico Brasileiro lata 72 pasta 8 ff 5252v 19 Roquinaldo Ferreira Transforming Atlantic Slaving Trade Warfare and Territorial Control in Angola 16501800 PhD Dissertation UCLA 2003 chapter 1 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 117 In addition to enslaved Africans from the Luanda hinterland north ern Angola and Benguela the Luanda slave population underwent further changes when the slave frontier advanced eastward past the Kwango River in the early eighteenth century This development brought to the city enslaved Africans known as Muluas perhaps the least exposed to Europeans or the highly creolized cultural milieu in the Luanda hinterland Until then Luanda had relied on regions relatively close to the coast for slaves and thus the introduction of Mulua slaves broke with a wellestablished pattern Per haps more than the internal slave trade in the Luanda hinterland this trade was controlled by the Matamba and Kasanje kingdoms which functioned as intermediaries with the Lunda Empire in the far east and prevented Luanda merchants from directing trade Holo was originally subordinate to Kasanje but it took advantage of commercial links with traders from the Lunda Empire to gain stature in the Luanda hinterland In the 1730s high prices for slaves coupled with an increasing demand for labor in the Atlantic prompted Luanda merchants to establish direct contact with the rising Holo Kingdom Luandas attempts to establish contact with Holo involved elaborated diplomatic efforts but were eventually blocked by the Matamba Kingdom leading to warfare in the 1740s The conventional wisdom has been that the expansion of the socalled slave frontier east of the Kwango River meant that the majority of slaves were no longer from regions under control of the Portuguese between Mpungo Ndongo and Luanda However the attempt to strengthen the flow of slaves from regions east of the Kwango River did not mean the demise of Luandas dependency on regions closer to the coast for slaves Populations living in regions under direct influence of the Portuguese did remain targets of nonmilitary mechanisms of slaving For example a sam ple of earlyeighteenthcentury marital records from the Catholic Church suggests that a significant number of married female slaves had either been born in Luanda proper or in adjacent regions Overall however the slave population in Luanda continued experiencing a process of diversification In addition to Mulua and Creole slaves there was still a visible contingent of slaves from Kongo as well as a renewed number of enslaved individuals from the Benguela highlands though it was significantly smaller than in the early 1700s As for the Muxicongos the flow of Kikongospeaking slaves to Luanda dwindled to a trickle in the 1720s as the French and English excluded slave ships from Luanda and Brazil from northern Angola ports How ever the Muxicongos would again become an important segment of the Luanda population by the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the city began receiving thousands of slaves from Kongo through caravans operated by African merchants In the 1730s the Benguela coastal trade became a fullfledged operation leading to fewer commercial Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 118 the cambridge world history of slavery contacts with Luanda and decreasing the number of slaves being sent from Benguela to Luanda Ships loading slaves in Benguela no longer stopped in Luanda on their way to the Americas In contrast to northern Angola trade with Benguela could not be undertaken via land because the colonial administration lacked territorial control over the Kissama region that lay between them Although Luanda continued receiving thousands of slaves from Benguela in the late eighteenth century few of these individuals were kept in town as most were destined for the slave trade to Brazil Thus in the second half of the eighteenth century the Luanda slave population was very likely composed of a majority of Kimbunduspeaking peoples followed by Mulua slaves a far smaller number of slaves from northern Angola and a very reduced segment of Benguela slaves from warfare to commercial slaving Most historians rightly assert that warfare was at the core of slaving and that most of the enslaved Africans shipped to the Americas were captives of war20 In Angola however different patterns of warfare emerged in Luanda and Benguela in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries In the Luanda hinterland the only time largescale military operations seem to have correlated with a continuous growth in shipments of slaves was in the first half of the seventeenth century By then systematic warfare marked the process through which Portuguese and allied African forces carved out control over the Luanda hinterland Warfare served to both strengthen colonial authority in the Luanda hinterland and generate slaves for the Luanda trade Portuguese forces were so focused on advancing in the Luanda hinterland and setting up a network of administrative outposts along the Kwanza River that early efforts to stake out control over the interior of Benguela were neglected The Portugueses hold of the asiento contract to supply slaves for Spanish America provided the backdrop to the thrust of military slaving Furthermore the drive toward the interior also laid the groundwork for a highly amalgamated cultural milieu in the Luanda hinterland21 This milieu provided much of the framework for the transition from warfare to more commercialized forms of slaving in the eighteenth century In the second half of the seventeenth century several military campaigns were waged in the Luanda hinterland on the Matamba and Ndongo king doms Military operations were also conducted in coastal northern Angola 20 Paul Lovejoy Civilian Casualties in the Context of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade in John Laband ed Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Africa From Slavery Days to Rwandan Genocide Westport CT 2007 pp 1751 21 Heywood and Thornton Central Africans Atlantic Creoles Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 119 against the Kingdom of Kongo These operations were sometimes con ducted with logistical and military support from the allied Kasanje King dom and other Imbangala allies in addition to far more uncertain military support from Brazil They were aimed at stopping independent commerce in the Luanda hinterland and northern Angola and tried to both channel internal slave trade networks to Luanda and strengthen Luandas stakes in the northern coastal trade The operations led to the establishment of a military outpost in Mpungo Ndongo in the early 1670s but they did not attain significant results in terms of strengthening colonial control over commerce nor did they yield as many slaves as campaigns fought earlier in the seventeenth century Part of the reason why these campaigns failed was because traditional African allies of the Luanda administration primarily in the Kasanje Kingdom refocused their strategies away from military cooperation with the administration and toward their own com mercial interests By the end of the seventeenth century therefore the Luanda trade was more than ever dependent on trading networks largely controlled by the Kasanje and Matamba kingdoms In the eighteenth century largescale military operations subsided as a result of strains in the relationship with Kasanje and the colonial admin istrations inability to stand up to African polities Although still playing a pivotal role in providing slaves for Luanda Kasanje not only withdrew sup port for Luanda military campaigns altogether but also sided with rising and competing commercial and military powers in the Luanda hinterland In contrast to the relative weakening of Kasanje Holo a small kingdom that had broken off from Kasanje in the late seventeenth century began playing a pivotal if shortlived role in trading with the Lunda Empire Holo trading contacts with the Lunda Empire seem to have taken place in the wake of successful military confrontations with Lunda forces However the Holo rise was obfuscated by the reemergence of the Matamba King dom which recovered from a military defeat to Portuguese forces in the late seventeenth century to apparently surpass Kasanje as the main player in commerce in the Luanda hinterland In the late 1730s and early 1740s for example Kasanje was forced to side with Matamba when Luanda merchants explored the possibility of direct trade with the Holo King dom Later Matamba further reasserted itself by militarily blocking trad ing networks crossing Holo into Kasanje Portuguese forces waged a war on Matamba but failed to change the structure of internal trade in the region The rearrangement of the political geography of slaving then taking place in the Luanda hinterland affected Luanda on several levels First the Angolan coastal trade was already undergoing dramatic changes with the rise of Benguelan direct commercial contacts with Brazil undercutting Luandan stakes there Until the opening up of the Benguela coastal trade Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 120 the cambridge world history of slavery ships had to stop in Luanda on their way to Brazil for administrative and practical reasons such as purchasing foodstuffs for the transatlantic voyage However in addition to turning Benguela into a safe haven for merchants the direct trade with Brazil meant that Benguela no longer sent significant numbers of slaves to Luanda Second the city had just recently been hit by epidemics that wreaked havoc in the slave and free population Furthermore recent discoveries of gold in Brazil triggered an increased demand for labor from the Atlantic to which the citys commercial and trading networks were unable to respond Against this backdrop Luanda merchants began a strong push to provide logistical and financial backing to open alternative commercial routes in the Luanda hinterland The goal was to open up the commerce with the Holo Kingdom which would not only reinforce the supply of slaves to Luanda but also provide an ideal replacement for the thendefunct alliance with Kasanje Although the military operations conducted in the Luanda hinterland differed from campaigns that took place in the first half of the seventeenth century they were similar both in strategy and results to the operations that occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century Like the war against the Ndongo Kingdom that led to the creation of a military and administrative outpost in Mpungo Ndongo in 1672 direct enslavement was not the main goal of the war on Matamba In fact operations only began after Matamba reacted to the colonial administrations courting of Holo by attacking a colonial outpost in Kambambe A large number of slaves and merchandise from Luanda merchants held there before being taken to Luanda were seized by the Matamba forces and the war was framed as a punitive attack An expedition sent from Luanda seems to have been able to defeat Matamba forces reach the banza court of the Matamba king and wreak havoc in adjacent villages A large number of Africans were enslaved by troops fighting on behalf of the Luanda administration However Luandas stakes in commerce were not strengthened in the wake of the operations By the mid1750s for example Matamba had fully recovered begun punishing subjects engaging in independent commerce with Luanda and blocked the trade from Kasanje to Holo In Benguela the picture was more complex Between the 1680s and 1720s simmering military campaigns were at the heart of the process through which Benguela was integrated into the Atlantic economy Due to inadequate military capabilities and lack of reliable support from African rulers campaigns became drawn out possibly slowing down the growth of commerce At least once colonial troops were on the verge of being driven out of the main colonial outpost in Benguela Attacks by Africans were so bold that they sometimes directly targeted slave ships docked in the city These campaigns elicited a stream of enslaved Africans barely suf ficient to feed the transatlantic trade In contrast to the Luanda hinterland Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 121 where the colonial drive into the interior gave birth to a string of loosely connected but commercially important colonial outposts presıdio oper ations in Benguela resulted in only one such structure in Kakonda Furthermore although military operations conducted between the 1680s and 1730s helped establish the institutional framework for slaving they also led to a highly decentralized internal trade At the end of the eigh teenth century for example the number of traders pumbeiros partic ipating in the internal trade in Benguela stood at approximately eighteen hundred Furthermore the lack of an internal structure to support commercial slaving seems to have somehow contributed to the continuation of warfare to enslave Africans in the Benguela highlands By the end of the eighteenth century although colonial forces would sporadically venture into the inte rior to undertake military operations most Africans taken to Benguela were captured as a result of wars pitting Africans against each other In 1798 for example a single attack on an allied African ruler yielded six hundred slaves Remarks by Benguela authorities in the late eighteenth century provide an indirect glimpse into the simmering nature of warfare in the region According to them it was more difficult to control enslaved Africans shipped from Benguela to Brazil than those shipped from Luanda to Brazil which might have been a result of continuous warfare In Luanda difficulties in establishing direct links with the Lunda Empire in the far east contributed to continuing dependency on the Luanda hin terland for slaves In the absence of warfare enslavement was carried out through an array of methods including judicial punishment kidnapping and smallscale conflicts used to resolve trade and land disputes These were traditional methods of enslavement that might probably have preceded the Portuguese presence in Angola In 1781 for example the African ruler Namboangongo enslaved a subject of Ndembo Amuquiama because the latter had committed a crime in his territory22 According to local cus tomary law Africans retained the right to dispense judicial punishment even in regions under Portuguese influence In the context of Atlantic slav ing however these attributes took on a different dimension because the demand for labor led African authorities to abuse their powers In practice the need to generate slaves altered the way crimes were perceived and pun ishment was meted out often leading to enslavement of individuals who had committed petty crimes and lacked sufficient support of local patrons to guarantee their freedom In 1800 for example Joaquim Jose Ribeiro an African soldier who had deserted from the Benguela army and gone to the Mbailundo territory was sent back to Benguela as a slave by one of the 22 Carta do Governador de Angola on April 22 1778 Arquivo Historico Nacional de Angola AHNA cod 81 ff 6666v Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 122 the cambridge world history of slavery macotas advisors of the Mbailundo ruler Ribeiros fault was the crime of engaging in a personal relationship with a black woman who belonged to the macota23 To some extent the same dynamic was at play in northern Angola as well In the 1850s John Monteiro reported that the majority of the enslaved people shipped from the region had not been made captives in the context of war but had rather been furnished by their own African law24 The pervasive nature of kidnapping undeniably a function of the growth of Atlantic slaving was particularly threatening to ordinary free Africans because the erosion of traditional social institutions motivated petty traders to resort to kidnappings as a way of conducting business Several cases attest to the continuous use of kidnappings to settle matters related to commercial and land disputes without previously submitting these issues for judicial consideration by African or colonial authorities Despite the rising number of cases of free people illegally enslaved which sometimes hurt commerce by Luanda merchants because they could degenerate into smallscale con flicts authorities were slow to forcefully act against illegal enslavement of free people One of the few records of individuals punished due to the illegal enslavement of free Africans took place in 1772 when Governor Inocˆencio de Souza Coutinho sent a slave to Pernambuco for stealing others free people and selling them into slavery25 In 1827 the gover nor of Angola complained that Joaquim Jose Leal had been condemned to only one year in the galleys after stealing in this city Luanda and selling to Brazil seven blacks some of which were free26 Nbelenguenze who had just recently being released from gales jail in Luanda due to accusations of robbing travelers on the roads from Luanda to the inte rior was again arrested after kidnapping a teenage subject of the soba Ndala Tando27 More significantly enslavement might have affected the African social fabric to the point of provoking changes in the nature of pawnship an African institution through which Africans were used by their fellows as collateral for credit As opposed to West Africa where the issue of pawn ship has been extensively analyzed by historians pawnship has received scant attention by scholars of Central Africa28 In Luanda and adjacent 23 Ofıcio do Governador de Benguela on October 19 1800 AHNA cod 442 ff 153v155 24 John Monteiro Angola and the River Congo London 1875 p 59 25 Carta de Inocˆencio de Souza Coutinho on August 8 1772 AHNA cod 249 f 10 26 Carta do Governador de Angola on November 8 1827 AHNA cod 159 f 38v 27 Carta do Capitao Mor de Ambaca on March 28 1798 AHNA cod 366 ff 7374v 28 For comparison purposes see Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson The Business of Slaving Pawnship in Western Africa c 16001810 Journal of African History 42 2001 6789 Robin Law On Pawning and Enslavement for Debt in the Precolonial Slave Coast and Toyin Falola and Paul Lovejoy Pawnship in Historical Perspective both in Paul Lovejoy and Toyin Falola eds Pawnship Slavery and Colonialism in Africa Trenton NJ 2003 pp 2769 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 123 regions several cases of Africans who filed lawsuits to regain their freedom suggest that these individuals had been used by their families as pawns but subsequently ended up being taken to Luanda as slaves The following episode illustrates how pawnship could evolve into slavery A free African Lourenco Kambuta Kabangayala was accused of kidnapping Kambinza a free woman from Axila Bangi an African ruler Kabangayala argued that he had taken Kambinza with the consent of the ruler Bangi on the other hand claimed he had originally received Kambinza as a pawn due to debts that her relatives had contracted with him Further inquiries suggested that Kambinza in fact had sought refuge with Kabangayala after finding out that Bangi wanted to sell her as a slave29 Due to the increase in cases of Africans who were illegally turned into slaves the Luanda administration cracked down on people who offered their relatives as pawns for credit In 1770 and 1791 for example the colonial administration passed a law dictating that free blacks were not allowed to use their relatives as collateral for loans bringing upon them the harsh sentence of captivity30 In the early nineteenth century however the colonial administration acknowledged that pawnship remained at the heart of illegal enslavement According to colonial officials many of those unfairly enslaved were used as collateral for credit by their parents or relatives31 That many Africans who were originally pawns ended up as slaves in Luanda is illustrated by the case of Andre Gaspars child who claimed to be free after being taken to Luanda by Garcia Antonio The child had been enslaved by Garcia Antonio who asserted that he had enslaved Gaspars child with the fathers agreement Gaspar denied allowing his son to be enslaved but might have used him as collateral to pay debts or obtain credit32 resistance Like enslaved Africans elsewhere in the Atlantic Africans brought to slavery in regions under Portuguese control fought slavery through violent means In Luanda for example attempts to escape slavery were recorded from the onset of the slave trade in the early seventeenth century Many runaway slaves who fled the city would join Ndongo armies led by Queen Njinga33 The incorporation of these slaves into the Ndongo army was arguably 29 Acordao da Junta on June 15 1769 AHU Angola cx 53 doc 37 30 Registro de Bando do Governador Francisco de Souza Coutinho on November 7 1770 Biblioteca Municipal de Luanda BML cod 24 ff 66v Carta de Jose de Seabra da Silva on November 21 1791 AHNA cod 253 ff 3336 31 Instrucoes on August 14 1794 AHNA cod 273 ff 149151 32 Carta do Governador de Angola on January 18 1826 AHNA cod 96 ff 16v17 33 Antonio de Oliveira Cadornega Historia Geral das Guerras Angolanas Lisboa 1939 vol I 1323 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 124 the cambridge world history of slavery facilitated by the fact that the slave trade drew primarily on Ndongo com munities at the time In the army they would play an important role as they knew sensitive information that helped Queen Njinga fight Por tuguese forces However the Luanda hinterland was by no means the only region where runaways sought refuge as the Kingdom of Kongo was also said to be a common destination for runaways The Luanda adminis tration even used this practice as pretext to wage wars on Kongo34 Further more runaways would also try to make their way to Kissama which was located south of Luanda and beyond the control of the local Portuguese administration35 Many Africans fully understood that being taken to Luanda as slaves could well mean a journey of no return across the Atlantic Much of the resistance mounted by slaves was aimed at the prospect of being embarked on slave ships and cannibalized by white men In 1652 for example Luanda merchants argued that ladinos assimilated Luanda slaves would run away if they saw other slaves being taken away from Luanda to Sao Tome According to the merchants previous cases had shown that when ladino slaves were shipped from Luanda their fellows escaped to nearby villages and joined enemy African rulers36 Deportation to Brazil played right into Africans fears of being separated from their community in Angola According to Governor Miguel Antonio de Mello for slaves who live in Luanda there is no other punishment so deeply felt and feared than being sent away to serve their captivity in America Brazil37 As elsewhere in Africa the reaction to deportation was in part related to fears of being cannibalized in Brazil38 In Cavazzis words there is no one who could describe how deeply blacks fear this punishment mainly women who imagine endless torments and misery39 Blacks deported by Queen Njinga displayed great fear because they believed that the whites bought them to devour them40 According to a report from the late seventeenth century Africans taken to slave ships absorbed by thoughts about their fate in Brazil 34 Cadornega Historia Geral das Guerras Angolanas vol II p 136 35 Cadornega Historia Geral das Guerras Angolanas vol I pp 1912 36 Assento dos Oficiais da Cˆamara de Luanda on January 6 1652 BML cod 6 ff 105v106v See also Cadornega Historia Geral das Guerras Angolanas vol I pp 1323 37 Extrato de Carta do Governador de Angola on August 25 1801 Arquivo Historico Ultramarino AHU papeis de Sa da Bandeira maco 824 38 Robin Law Ouidah The Social History a West Africa Slaving Port Athens OH 2004 p 151 Rosalind Shaw The Production of WitchcraftWitchcraft as Production Memory Modernity and the Slave Trade in Sierra Leone American Ethnologist 24 1997 85676 Stephanie Smallwood Saltwater Slavery A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Cambridge 2007 pp 165 For Central Africa in the late nineteenth century see also Beatrix Heintze Propaganda Concerning ManEaters in West Central in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century Paideuma 49 2003 12535 39 Antonio Cavazzi Descricao Historica dos Trˆes Reinos Congo Matamba e Angola Lisboa 1965 vol 2 pp 146 171 40 Cavazzi Descricao Historica dos Trˆes Reino vol 2 p 146 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 125 and began banzando getting depressed which makes many of them die Others are so impacted by the impression they will be eaten in Brazil that they have to be taken to the religious person in charge of baptizing them while others attempt to flee on the way to the dock41 By the end of the seventeenth century attempts to flee Luanda were so pervasive that a governor reported business troubles to his agents due to the frequency with which Africans escaped He stated It was very difficult to keep slaves in Luanda because they knew the land and could easily hide Frequently slaves would also take advantage of the absence or death of their owners to flee In 1692 for example a priest appointed to be the chaplain of a slave ship sought to evade the assignment by arguing that his slaves would run away if they knew he was absent42 However the death of an owner was undeniably a moment that Africans seized upon to regain freedom by escaping Many slaves were allowed to live away from their owners a situation also highly conducive to such flights In 1782 the owner of a farm in the vicinity of Luanda stated that 130 of his slaves had escaped when he took a trip to the interior of Angola because they received the news that he had passed away According to him it was a custom in the country not ignored by them authorities that in case of arrest or death of owners slaves would flee and that this was the cause of the flight of one hundred and thirty slaves from the farms and fields of the supplicant43 Another fact that made it possible for Africans to escape slavery was that Luanda merchants commonly sent slaves to carry out business in the interior of Angola In 1798 for example Miguel Assazala confessed that he was a slave after being arrested with his family in Mbaka Assazala said He had been in hiding for several years in the district Mbaka where he had been sent by his master with goods to trade in the sertoes interior His example suggests that Africans who drifted away were able to settle down and form families while at large Assazala for example stated that the woman arrested with him was in fact his wife and that the six young Africans were their children Although he admitted that he was a slave Assazala refuted colonial officials accusations that his wife and the children were slaves by arguing that the womans relatives had freed them44 In the first half of the eighteenth century the number of Africans run ning away from slaving in Luanda and adjacent regions was so high that several maroon communities were created in regions close to Luanda Benguela slaves accounted for most of the maroons who settled in these communities These communities were similar to Ndembo communities 41 Copia de Peticao undated but around 1698 BML cod 12 ff 8990v 42 Provisao do Conselho Ultramarino on January 28 1694 AHU cod 94 ff 253253v 43 Peticao de Jose Pinheiro de Moraes Fontoura in 1782 AHU Angola cx 65 doc 81 44 Carta do Capitao Mor de Ambaca on November 5 1798 AHNA cod 366 ff 143v144 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 126 the cambridge world history of slavery north of Luanda also formed by Africans escaping from slaving but they were far less cohesive because they were less geographically isolated and they received a continuous flow of escaped slaves In addition to disrupt ing the trade to Luanda maroon communities were feared because they welcomed slaves seeking to escape caravans bound for Luanda either when they stationed in the Luanda hinterland or near the city Several campaigns were waged against the maroons but to no avail In 1711 for example fifty soldiers were sent to battle the Benguela communities but most of the runaways escaped into the Libolo region45 In another campaign in 1720 230 soldiers were sent to take on maroon communities46 By the 1740s however the merchants voiced their discontent through the local chamber stating that the insults of the Quilombo of black people from Benguela that exist in the sertao of this kingdom of Angola whenever they wish they come to the roads and take as captives slaves that belong to the moradores settlers47 The resilience of the Quilombos was due not only to the growth of the slave trade from Benguela but also to maroon communities seem ing ability to gain support from local African rulers some of whom were arrested by government forces for complicity with runaways In fact one of the slaves that fled from Luanda Calumba would become a leader of a major maroon community composed not only of enslaved Africans but also of free individuals that were located in Benguela Calumba was very shrewd and brought under his control slaves of several owners in addition to free people to the point that his community was made up of twenty something libatas He commanded respect of many people to the point of replacing and appointing African chiefs and allowing that the members of his community robbed travelers and traders going to the sertoes He was known as regulo ruler and was feared by the most powerful of the rulers48 In Benguela one of the most loyal allies of Calumba was a local chief Luceque who lent support to the rebel despite warnings from the colo nial administration49 The relatively high number of Africans taken as captives during the operations to extinguish Calumbas community sixty four individuals speaks to its magnitude In the main campaign on the 45 Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino on March 2 1736 AHU cod 23 ff 221v222v 46 CCU on February 16 1726 AHU cod 22 ff 178v179v CCU on March 2 1736 AHU cod 23 ff 221v222v 47 Registro de Carta do Senado da Cˆamara de Luanda on October 21 1742 BML cod 18 ff 37v38 48 Carta do Governador de Angola on December 20 1734 AHU Angola cx 27 doc 156 49 Carta do Cabo Joao Silva Coutinho on November 17 1734 AHU Angola cx 27 doc 156 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 127 Quilombo the damage inflicted to it notwithstanding Calumbo was able to escape to Kilengues50 By the end of the eighteenth century to the dismay of Luanda officials the number of maroon communities continued to increase despite frus trated attempts to offer amnesty to those who returned peacefully as well as campaigns to attack maroon communities located near Luanda The fate of slaves who were not able to reach runaway communities was often in the hands of African rulers who might or might not allow them to take refuge in their territories Sometimes the runaways were incorporated into African communities and strengthened rulers armies which were used to attack traders operating on behalf of Luanda merchants In 1733 for exam ple the Mbwila ruler would take them runaway slaves in as his slaves and allow them to attack travelers conducting business between Luanda and the interior of Angola51 Runaways could almost certainly count on finding refuge among the Ndembo communities just north of Luanda In 1784 for example Luanda merchants reported significant financial damage due to the large number of escaping Africans making their way to Ndembo communities in Namboangongo territory52 However they were sometimes welcomed in regions further inland as in the case of Ndongo rulers who controlled islands on the Kwanza River and received many runaways in the late eighteenth century53 By contrast allied African rulers did not hesitate to apprehend and turn in runaways to colonial authorities54 It is worthwhile to point out however that running away or joining a maroon community were not the only ways to resist slaving and slavery Enslaved Africans relied on a variety of means to fight to regain their free dom Some of these means included relatives and rulers using direct negoti ations with traders or bringing cases before the colonial judicial system In the late eighteenth century for example the ruler of Kissangi province in the presıdio colonial outpost of Kakonda attempted to buy back the freedom of one of his subjects Juliana who was a black woman captured during a skirmish and sold as a slave in a market in Kakonda To achieve his goal the ruler offered two pecas da India prime slaves and ten cows to the Portuguese trader who had purchased Juliana The African ruler had been defeated in the war that led to Julianas enslavement and his effort was motivated by the fact that he was acquainted with her relatives55 50 Carta do Governador on December 20 1734 AHU Angola cx 27 doc 156 Carta Regia on November 24 1735 AHU cod 546 f 92v 51 Carta do Governador de Angola on November 28 1733 AHU Angola cx 27 doc 82 52 Portaria para o Capitao Mor do Presıdio de Encoje on July 22 1784 AHNA cod 272 ff 91v92 53 Carta do Capitao do Presıdio das Pedras de Pungo Andongo on April 18 1798 AHNA cod 366 ff 86v87 54 Carta do Governador de Angola on January 23 1809 AHNA cod 322 f 205v 55 AHNA cod 270 f 77 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 128 the cambridge world history of slavery Other times however African rulers would use more forceful meth ods such as seeking to gain support from the Luanda administration to release their subjects In 1798 for instance fourteen subjects of the Holo ruler were taken by two Luanda merchants Jose Rodrigues Alentejo and Tomaz Bezerra56 By then the Holo Kingdoms military power had been significantly reduced by the erosion of central power resulting from inde pendent trade carried out by pumbeiros from Luanda merchants Holo however increasingly served as an alternative source of slaves because of the declining supply from the Kasanje Kingdom To regain the freedom of the Africans the Holo ruler sent actual slaves in exchange for the free men However the two merchants kept the free Africans and the slaves and fled to Mbaka Taking advantage of the key role that Holo played in the trade with Luanda at the time the Holo ruler filed a complaint in Luanda prompting officials to take measures against the two merchants57 One of the merchants Alentejo was arrested in Mbaka with seven of the fourteen Africans while Bezerra was able to make his way to Luanda presumably with the others58 In 1811 Sungo a follower of the African ruler Mulundo who had been taken to Benguela as a slave by followers of another ruler was seen by friends while he was being held captive by a Benguela merchant His fellows traveled back to the interior of Benguela and told their ruler what they had seen As a result Mulundo requested that colonial officials in Kakonda contact Benguela authorities and request Sungos release59 African rulers efforts to regain their subjects freedom sometimes even included traveling to Luanda In 1808 for example the African ruler Nbomba Assamba went to Luanda from Massangano to seek the freedom of one of his subjects Several others had already been shipped to Brazil and the African ruler refused financial compensation offered by the Luanda government When he returned to Massangano he took justice into his own hands and arrested several merchants traveling in his territory60 Despite these examples the majority of enslaved Africans were not able to rely on rulers for help against slaving Africans living in chiefdoms and villages ruled by allied African author ities were however able to use the legal system Tribunal of Mukanos in place in the regions under formal Portuguese control between Luanda and 56 Carta do Governador de Angola on December 26 1798 AHNA cod 97 ff 66v68 57 Carta do Capitao Mor Regente de Ambaca on March 6 1799 AHNA cod 366 ff 172v173v 58 Carta do Capitao Mor das Pedras e Regente de Ambaca on March 14 1799 AHNA cod 366 ff 173v174 Carta do Capitao Mor Regente de Ambaca on April 15 1799 AHNA cod 366 ff 177178 59 Ofıcio do Comandante da Expedicao ao Sertoes de Benguela on September 16 1811 AHNA cod 445 f 97 Ofıcio do Comandante da Expedicao ao Sertoes de Benguela on September 23 1811 AHNA cod 445 f 97 60 Carta do Governador de Angola on May 11 1808 AHNA cod 240 ff 63v64 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 129 Mpungo Ndongo The mukano tribunals stemmed from an African legal system that was referred to as Kituxi and Epanda by Portuguese sources in the mideighteenth century To take mukanos means to be part of a lawsuit or litigious cause that is settled verbally according to the customs of the country In another definition the system was broadly described as every civil and criminal lawsuit61 It was applied to fortuitous cases such as a fire that causes the ruin of houses and loss or cutting of houses62 In Benguela the local expression was Olimbo although mukano was also used due to the influence of the Portuguese63 The term mucano would also be used to refer to fines that Africans would pay each other due to their crimes Thus the black woman Esperanca also known as Mulupa resident in Dombe Grande petitions against the black man Muhululu for forcing her to pay mucanos several times64 As described in the late eighteenth century the system worked as follows A family of blacks because one of his relatives died of a disease that they ignore and because a neighbor already seen as a culprit for being wealthier comes under suspicion and is declared author of the death He is then taken to a Capitao Mor to be judged in a Mukano trial65 Capitaes Mores were officials appointed by Luandabased Angola governors to command colonial outposts in the Luanda hinterland The first step for enslaved Africans seeking to regain their freedom was to make an oral or written presentation of their case to Capitaes Mores If their petitions were rejected they could still appeal directly to the governor of Angola In Luanda an official usually a Catholic priest was charged with the task of hearing cases by Africans In the interior even though the Luanda administration recognized African rulers rights to judge mukanos by the mideighteenth century Capitaes Mores played a pivotal role in the trials66 In Benguela for example the constraints placed on African rulers authority prompted the soba traditional ruler of Kilengues to file a complaint with the colonial administration on the ground that the local Capitao Mor was violating his right to judge mukanos67 In the late seventeenth century reports suggest that the number of cases of mukanos that governors of Angola had to judge was so overwhelming that it kept them from dealing with other administrative affairs However 61 Carta do Governador de Angola on April 30 1798 AHNA cx 2841 62 Copia do Capıtulo do Regimento dos Capitaes Mores on February 24 1765 AHU Angola cx 44 doc 22 63 Carta do Governador de Angola on April 30 1798 AHNA cx 2841 64 Despacho do Requerimento de Mulupa on January 29 1824 AHNA cx 138 f 61 65 Memoria sobre o Abuso Pernicioso do Comercio deste Sertao on November 12 1786 AHU cx 71 doc 60 66 Carta do Governador de Angola on April 30 1798 AHNA cx 2841 67 Ofıcio do Governador de Benguela on July 20 1781 AHU cx 64 doc 35 Informacao in 1793 AHU Angola cx 79 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 130 the cambridge world history of slavery it is virtually impossible to determine how effective the system was or how many people were able to take advantage of it Many of those who might be entitled to use the system came from regions outside Portuguese control and language seems to have been a particularly challenging obstacle In 1748 for example Father Pantaleao Rodrigues who was fluent in local Angolan languages was appointed as the judge and translator for the continuous mukanos happening in this city Luanda68 Four years later the number of officials dealing with cases of mukanos was increased from one to two a result of the growing number of lawsuits filed by Africans69 As late as 1825 the colonial administration reported difficulties in collecting the testimony of an African from the Kongolese region due to language barriers70 Nonetheless examples of mukanos trials mostly from the early nine teenth century are plenty In 1826 for example authorities in Luanda reported that Joana Pedro Maria Mateus and others from Massagano were arrested and sent to Luanda one of them died and only one reached Luanda Another person arrived to Luanda a few days later And these Africans were not the only ones in Luanda facing the same situation71 Around the same time the colonial administration ordered the official in charge of the outpost in Massagano to release several Africans who had been condemned to slavery after a probable dispute over loans led a local merchant Antonio Pires Fragoso to file a lawsuit against them with local colonial officials72 The struggle of Kiakulo a former slave woman from Calumbo who had to fight twice against slavery to remain free demon strates that mukanos could be effective After she was taken to Luanda in April 1825 by Joao Francisco to be sold and shipped to Brazil Kiakulo was able to argue her way out of slavery before the colonial administration One year later she was taken to Luanda by another slave dealer and she was once again able to regain her freedom by arguing that she had been a slave but that her master had passed away73 conclusion Despite the existence of slavery prior to the onset of the transatlantic slave trade African slavery differed in significant ways from the commercial system of slavery established by the Portuguese Although demographic information on precolonial Angola is sketchy it is possible to trace changes 68 Carta do Governador de Angola on February 12 1738 AHU Angola cx 30 doc 75 69 Provisao Regia on July 10 1752 BNRJ doc I12 3 31 ff 105v106v 70 Carta do Governador de Angola on November 14 1825 AHNA cod 157 f 220 71 Carta do Governador de Angola on July 6 1826 AHNA cod 96 f 45v 72 Carta do Governador de Angola on March 9 1826 AHNA cod 96 f 31 73 Carta do Governador de Angola on February 20 1826 AHNA cod 96 ff 25v26v Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slaving and resistance to slaving in west central africa 131 in the demographic makeup of Luanda and the Luanda hinterland because these regions were directly exposed to shifts in the internal and primarily external slave trade In addition to the slave trade to the Americas enslaved Africans were also employed in a variety of activities such as fishery com mercial activities and domestic service which gave birth to a significant Creole population in Portuguese Angola Slave populations in Luanda and the Luanda hinterland grew increasingly diverse in the seventeenth cen tury and first half of the eighteenth century but became far more reliant on eastern Angola and the Luanda hinterland in the eighteenth century Thus the Luanda hinterland continued to be a key slavesupplying region Although these Africans were enslaved primarily through military means in the first half of the seventeenth century slaving relied on means other than largescale violence in the eighteenth century In addition to violent resistance enslaved Africans were also able to rely on rulers relatives and friends to regain their freedom Many of those who lived in regions under formal Portuguese control were also able to take advantage of the colonial legal system to reclaim their freedom Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 6 WHITE SERVITUDE william g clarencesmith and david eltis Despite marked geographical and temporal differences across the West ern Hemisphere white servitude remained a distinct and significant phe nomenon 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 spe cific 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 distri bution 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 continents 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 Russias 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 Master servant contracts were normally enforced in terms of the criminal law and vagrancy laws were draconian at least on paper The majority of the worlds white chattel slaves were held in the Islamic Middle East by the end of the eighteenth century This status was un ambiguously licit whereas the sharia did not permit serfdom convict labor or forced labor even if applied to peaceful infidel subjects Slavery was thus the most common form of labor coercion although Muslim rulers regularly flouted the holy law regarding other types As the formerly abundant supply of mainly Mongoloid Turkic slaves from the steppes contracted sharply from the fourteenth century a result of Islamization and state formation white slaves tended to replace them There was also a substantial black 132 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 133 servile population almost everywhere together with Indians in Persia and Turkistan and a few Chinese slaves in East Turkistan The proportion of blacks probably increased from around 1700 as other supplies contracted White servitude was far less common in the Americas where the black equivalent came to be extremely widespread and many Amerindians were also pressed into servitude Numbers of convicts destitute children and indentured workers remained small and indentured servants important in the early years of north European colonialism cannot unproblematically be included under the label of servitude Only a handful of white Muslims arrived as chattel slaves in the New World colonies mainly in the sixteenth century Not one of the nearly nine million slaves freed in the Americas between 1791 and 1888 was known to have been white though a few were of mixed race Indigenous peoples of the Americas held white slaves but in small numbers As for subSaharan Africa white servitude was even more unusual The very occasional white woman made it into the harems of powerful African men such as the Arab girl from Damascus encountered by Ibn Battuta in the 1350s in a governors household downstream from Timbuktu1 The Portuguese deported a few Jews and convicts to their possessions and miscegenation affected the slave population of Dutch South Africa No white person was recorded among the millions freed in subSaharan Africa from the 1890s although some did have Arab Berber or European blood in their veins Grand totals of white slaves in the Old World probably exceeded those of African descent in the New World before the late seventeenth century This is based on a conservative estimate of one hundred thousand white slaves for the Islamic Middle East and North Africa in the peak period of the early seventeenth century to which can be added an equal number for Russia where slaves comprised 5 to 15 percent of the population prior to their conversion into serfs Thereafter however black captivity in the Americas expanded rapidly with the overall share of the enslaved population reaching slightly more than half of the total North American population including the Caribbean Only Russian serfdom could rival this dramatic increase in black servitude in the Americas Similarly the transatlantic traffic in black slaves probably did not consis tently surpass levels of white slave imports until the end of the seventeenth century The transatlantic slave trade peaked later was much more con centrated and was better documented The collection of white captives by contrast was dispersed from the Newfoundland Banks to Siberia over many centuries and there was no single method of transporting them to 1 Muhammad b Abdallah ibn Battuta Travels in Asia and Africa 13251354 Selections London 1983 p 334 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 134 the cambridge world history of slavery the location of their ultimate use Records are extremely poor even if more could perhaps be done with what exists Potential for growth in the white servile population fell from around 1700 Rising Western military might curtailed the ability of nonWestern populations to obtain Christian captives even if this persisted on a small scale into the nineteenth century Provisions for exchanges of prisoners between Muslims and Christians and between Sunni and Shii Muslims became routine and were better enforced in the eighteenth century Euro peans finally ceased enslaving heretics and came to be more likely to free Muslim slaves who converted to Christianity East European serfdom was thus the most dynamic element in white servitude but growth depended on the natural reproductive capacities of the existing servile population white servitude in the new world Few white Muslim slaves were sent to the Americas for Iberian kings strictly and repeatedly prohibited such exports from 1501 This was partly for immediate security reasons and partly to avoid religious contagion among Amerindians over the longer term A few white slaves slipped through the net however as it proved impossible to prevent settlers from bringing their personal retainers with them Even the Spanish crown sent the occasional Muslim oarsman to work in Caribbean galleys when hands were in short supply The Inquisition at times accused such people of attempting to spread Islam in the New World but references dry up from the midseventeenth century The north European powers never appear to have imported white Muslim slaves although they did have recourse to black Muslims Some white captives were held by indigenous Amerindian groups and peoples of mixed descent in frontier areas of European expansion In total such individuals could not have amounted to more than a few thousand equivalent perhaps to a few weeks supply of captives arriving from Africa in St Domingue in the 1780s or Charleston between 1804 and 1807 That said these cases provide a fascinating insight into varieties of slavery Captures by Amerindians were unevenly distributed The Spanish con quest of Mesoamerica and the central Andes was rapid and overwhelming and the epidemiological consequences of that expansion were devastating so that Amerindians had little opportunity to capture whites However the same was not true of tropical lowlands claimed by Spain and Portugal where several Amerindian groups held out till independence and beyond notably in the Amazon basin Similarly in the temperate Americas white settlement proceeded slowly enough for indigenous groups to capture sig nificant numbers of whites This was also the case in Siberia a neoEurope similar to the temperate Americas Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 135 Captives were typically taken in wars or raids and were most likely to be women and children as men were usually killed on capture As explained in the series introduction the aim of this captivity was not primarily the extraction of labor but rather the expansion or maintenance of the captors group through assimilation Under threat from both disease and territorial incursions some groups relied heavily on captives to maintain their numbers The captives might be so numerous that the identity of the host society altered fundamentally as for example in the case of the Iroquois and the Comanches Their way of life came to occupy a middle ground between the original cultures and those of multifarious captives including a few whites Those of European descent who managed to flee spawned the genre of captive narratives These were primarily written by women given the sex ratio of permanent captives and most autobiographical accounts were authored by shortterm captives Much less common is firsthand infor mation from those who assimilated such as Mary Jemison who lived for seventyeight years among the Senecas Many like Jemison chose to remain with their captors Others taken as children would have lived and died without further contact with European society Widening the focus to other forms of white servitude various chapters in this volume demonstrate that peoples of all colors were subjected to multiple forms of bondage in the early modern Atlantic among them convicts Transportation was never seen primarily as a way of supplying labor however for its main function was to rid the mother country of undesirables whether because of criminal behavior or political and religious dissent Some slave vessels saw service as convict ships but the number of prisoners carried across the Atlantic was tiny in comparison with African slaves The labor performed subsequent to exile was no more than a way of fortuitously reducing the cost of the ocean voyage for governments whether incurred directly or by paying merchants to undertake the task The temporal profile of European penal servitude in exile was similar to that of the rise and decline of the transatlantic slave trade except that it began peaked and ended about eighty years later than the slave trade Some blacks were caught up in the system in the seventeenth century and again in the early nineteenth century but victims were overwhelmingly white Iberian empires were quick to use convicts White galley oarsmen prob ably mainly convicts were employed in the Havana harbor in the mid sixteenth century Their successors built and maintained the impressive fortifications in the same location down to at least the late eighteenth century The Portuguese sent convicted felons to exile in their overseas possessions from the early sixteenth down to the midnineteenth century These degredados were employed in public works wherever the Portuguese Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 136 the cambridge world history of slavery established imperial outposts and might have been paid something for their services By the early nineteenth century the Portuguese were sending out southern Italian convicts to their colonies some of whom prospered and became famous such as the Nosolini family in Guinea and the Albasini family in Mozambique The Iberians usually held deportees under state control for employment in public works but they often rented them out to companies and private individuals North European nations with the striking exception of the Dutch entered the business of exporting convicts from the early seventeenth cen tury selling the labor services of convicts to the highest bidder in the New World For the English transportation began as a publicly subsidized but privately operated institution with convicts sold on the open market as indentured servants at the end of their journey These flows were supple mented from time to time with batches of people taken prisoner in civil wars or during the conquest of Ireland Transportation became publicly funded after the switch from the Chesapeake to Australia in the aftermath of US independence but only because of the greater distance and cost of getting to the antipodes and the initial lack of any market for con victs in the early years of Australian settlement The French were relatively slow in adopting penal exile but long maintained it in Guyane They also redirected part of the flow to their Pacific colony of New Caledonia in the nineteenth century The Russians sent convicts to Siberia from the late sixteenth century the gulags of the Soviet Union in many ways a continuation of this old Russian system will be taken up in a subsequent volume Servitude of this type was less constraining than slavery proper and was not hereditary If any convicts escaped and returned home they were liable to capital punishment but their loss of freedom in the New World was usually temporary Although those convicted of serious crimes served for life the vast majority of detainees were sentenced to limited terms They were not subject to the laws of slavery that almost every early modern community in the Americas enacted Prisoners may have been unfree exiled and subject to abuse but their offspring were not the property of the person who had paid for their labor In short they were not chattels and those who had served their term could find employment as free workers When Royalist prisoners set to work in Barbados during the 1650s claimed that to sell and enslave these of their own Countrey and Religion was a thing not known amongst the cruell Turks they were wrong both about the Turks and in equating their situation with chattel slavery The same was true of destitute minors exported to reduce the cost of child support to the community or sometimes as undesirables For such child migrants bondage normally lasted only into early adulthood Children of conversos converted Jews were sent by the Holy Office of Inquisition to Sao Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 137 Tome in the Gulf of Guinea mostly to meet an early death If they survived they were usually freed as adults were not subject to slave codes and did not pass on their status as coerced workers to their descendants The English planned to dispatch penniless children from London to North America under the auspices of the Virginia Company in the early seventeenth century Children dependent on charity long remained at risk of forced emigration with Dr Barnardos homes for orphans sending thousands of children to Canada as late as the midtwentieth century Whether indentured servants should be placed in the category of servi tude is a moot point They were subject to sale without their consent physical chastisement and restrictions on their personal liberty during their period of servitude Contracts were sanctioned and enforced under criminal rather than civil law and many cases of kidnapping of young people emerged However as explained elsewhere in this volume contracts rested on a market transaction in which future labor services were pledged in return for a passage across the Atlantic For the most part the relation ship was voluntarily entered into by laborer and contractholder In origin it emerged as an extension of annual agreements that were the norm in parts of the metropolitan economy and the arrangement was overseen by courts on both sides of the Atlantic Moreover the term of servitude was limited normally for three years in the French colonies and four in the English with skill levels and age playing major roles in setting particular conditions Plantation slaves would willingly have switched status with indentured servants had the opportunity presented itself Indentured servants greatly outnumbered convicts in the English Dutch and French Americas even though overall numbers of both amou nted to less than five percent of transported slaves Servants formed the basis of the early plantation economy and were an important part of the colonial labor force even in the early stages of the sugar revolution When black slaves came to dominate the fieldlabor force indentured servants remained the major source of skilled labor for plantations well into the eigh teenth century when enslaved peoples of African descent took over this function too A market for indentured servants both skilled and unskilled continued into the nineteenth century in mainland North America white servitude in christian europe By the early sixteenth century serfdom had largely disappeared from west ern Europe even as it intensified in eastern Europe and especially in Russia There remained isolated cases of serfdom in mining regions of Scotland and Germany but the institution eroded gradually even in southwestern Europe It was formally abolished at the very end of the period as part of the great social upheavals resulting from the French Revolution Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 138 the cambridge world history of slavery In contrast penal servitude expanded steadily through this period in most European countries although it was never large in comparison to slavery in the New World Rather than being motivated by a desire for coerced labor this formed part of a process of penal reform New offences were defined and punishments for old offences were changed from public shaming corporal punishment and execution to working for a term of labor often in exile in the colonies as noted earlier Conviction meant social death in that the state appropriated the convicts property He or she had no subsequent standing in law and the term of service was for life The French accepted criminals from other European polities especially German principalities and east European states so that gangs of chained men periodically traversed Europe from the midsixteenth to the mid eighteenth century Penal servitude was particularly significant in supplying manpower to the galleys of national navies a notoriously dangerous and unpleasant occupation Although the Dutch distinguished themselves by eschewing this option the Restoration government in England owned and operated galleys powered by captive oarsmen and serviced by captive dockyard labor Nevertheless the largest employers of such labor were in southwestern Europe Louis XIV brought the French galley fleet to its acme with some twelve thousand oarsmen and fortytwo vessels operating out of both Atlantic and Mediterranean ports although this costly and anachronistic effort scarcely strengthened Frances naval power Other significant players were Spain the Italian states and Malta Criminals were not the only oarsmen Huguenots were sent to the gal leys after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 with Jean Mart eilhe writing the most widely read personal account of the system Catholic prisoners of war might occasionally be pressed into service as with Spaniards serving on French vessels There was also a scattering of free oarsmen in effect debt peons These mainly Italian bonevoglie were quite numerous in French galleys in the sixteenth century but had virtually dis appeared by the dawn of the seventeenth century although they persisted longer in Italy itself Security risks and fluctuating supplies of Muslim slaves led to a greater emphasis on convicts in the early modern era but white slaves continued to be employed as noted later and black slaves were at times imported Galleys thus carried ethnically and religiously hetero geneous crews with widely differing legal statuses that were indicated by varied hair styles for instant recognition There was no equality under adversity for the most strenuous tasks were reserved for slaves The convict did not become a slave could not be resold and did not transfer his status to his children He could be replaced on the galleys by a slave purchased by his family although the French refused to extend this privilege to Huguenots White convicts no longer able to row Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 139 were sent to the Caribbean as indentured laborers with their contracts sold for what they could fetch As galleys declined in the eighteenth century the French also turned to imprisoning or executing more criminals As for wornout or supernumerary slaves they were normally sold as chattels in Mediterranean markets or if African more probably in the Caribbean The French freed seven white galley slaves and sent them to the Caribbean in 16859 but did not repeat the experiment Chattel slavery became effectively extinct in Anglican and Calvinist northwestern Europe Despite the presence of a handful of black and Asian slaves brought back from the colonies such slaves landed in Dutch ports were liable to be liberated in the late sixteenth century The 1569 Cartwright decision held that flogging a slave a Russian could not be justified In the famous Somersett case of 1772 Chief Justice Mansfield stated that any slave by the act of walking on English soil became free though the courts did not prevent the slave Grace returning to Antigua as a slave in 1827 Moreover there were no signs of white slavery in England or the Nether lands In 1604 the Dutch repatriated the 1400 Muslim oarsmen whom they found on a captured Spanish fleet though these unlucky men were reenslaved while crossing France That said the Dutch were not averse to executing Muslim captives Admiral Lambert threatened to hang his pris oners in 1624 if the Algerians did not release Dutch slaves held in Algiers Not only did he carry out this threat but he then seized more Algerians and hanged them as well perhaps contributing through his ruthlessness to the signing of an accord two years later Further east in Lutheran Europe white slavery did persist at least in the Germanspeaking lands Great droves reached Hannover in 1683 following successful campaigns in Morea and Hungary and Balkan wars remained the chief source of supply for German states The best records come from lists of Muslims accepting baptism but one observer noted that the majority refused to renounce their faith No overall estimate exists but thousands were recorded including in places such as Leipzig Muslim slavery persisted late into the eighteenth century albeit on a small scale Chattel slavery was more developed in Catholic southwestern Europe where there had been a marked latemedieval resurgence in the exploitation of slave labor following the Black Death France is included in this desig nation although no country was more divided over the issue There was a long tradition that French soil conferred freedom to all those who stepped upon it and some black slaves arriving in France in the late sixteenth century were set free A royal declaration of 1571 reaffirmed that the soil of France granted liberation though this was prudently glossed in 1607 as applying only to those who had accepted baptism Special legislation had to be passed to allow Caribbean slave owners to visit with their personal slaves without risking the loss of their human property Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 140 the cambridge world history of slavery Black slavery was initially significant in southwestern Europe but it coexisted with an older white slavery which soon became predominant again Blacks coming both via the Atlantic and across the Sahara were particularly common in Sicily southern Iberia the Canaries and Madeira working in domestic service protoindustrial units mines and agriculture Philip Curtin considers that imports of black slaves into Europe fell sharply at the end of the sixteenth century and this seems to fit the Sicilian case However Alessandro Stella suggests that blacks remained numerous in southern Iberia till around the 1640s Adult males were occasionally shipped in from the tropics for galley work but they were expensive and suffered from excessive mortality and morbidity A trickle of nonwhite slaves mostly children continued to arrive in Cadiz and Lisbon from Africa Asia and the Americas down to the mideighteenth century In 1761 however a Portuguese law forbade any further imports on the grounds that the colonies were desperately in need of labor and in 1773 all born to a slave mother were thereafter to be free Most black slaves in the Mediterranean were thus acclimatized Muslims captured in a free or servile condition although recently enslaved Animists were also occasionally seized from Muslim owners Among southwestern Europes white slaves were some Jews and heretical Christians who were nevertheless called Turks When practicing Jews fled from Iberia to Muslim countries in the 1490s they became allies of the enemies of the faith Whether captured or purchased they were thus kept as slaves with a particularly significant group of them in Malta Also enslaved were Orthodox Christians from the eastern Mediterranean especially Greeks whom the Italians called halfTurks when they worked directly for the Ottomans Milo probably the Greek island of Milos in the Cyclades was the main mart for purchasing such people in the 1680s Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians taken as slaves from Ottoman galleys had to perform the same service on Catholic ones To be sure Colbert instructed the French consul in Genoa in 1677 to abstain from buying Turcs chretiens but the latter ignored these instructions due to a pressing need for oarsmen Indeed such was the demand for galley labor that the occasional Catholic was to be found among the Turks Many were Poles originally enslaved by Crimean Tatars or Croats and Hungarians Although two fourteenth century popes had asserted that Catholic rebels against papal authority could be enslaved such strictures did not apply to these people who were usually freed on proving their religious status The Spanish crown strictly forbade the purchase of any Catholic in 1628 but there were still some in Italy in 1680 As for Catholics who had adopted Islam they generally kept very quiet fearing the harsh penalties meted out by the Inquisition to renegades Moreover although social convention held that the baptism Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 141 of Muslims should entail liberation this was not enshrined in law and was often not observed The great bulk of slaves in southwestern Europe by the midseventeenth century consisted of white Muslims whether captured or bought Purchases occurred chiefly in the eastern Mediterranean even though the Ottomans in theory did not permit traders of any faith to sell Muslim slaves to the infidel Some ulama fulminated against sales of Muslims in North Africa although these seem to have been unusual Captures in the eastern Mediterranean were limited by treaties and the considerable power of the Ottoman navy and thus tended to occur in large bursts during major breakdowns in the balance of power In the western Mediterranean capture whether at sea or on land was on a smaller scale but more constant resulting more from regular corsair raiding than from sustained campaigns When treaties became inconvenient Christian privateers switched between flags of convenience Ports in Italy Malta and Croatia specialized in preying on Muslim ships and shores with the navies of two crusading Catholic orders to the fore The Knights Hospitalers of Saint John of Jerusalem expelled from Rhodes by the Ottomans in 1522 took refuge in Malta and sought their revenge The Knights of Saint Stephen were founded by the Medici rulers of Tuscany and approved by the pope in 1562 They had their headquarters in Pisa and their naval base in Livorno Leghorn Their registers show 10115 slaves captured between 1568 and 1688 but their ledgers are incomplete and the real figure was probably 15000 or even 20000 As a new Tuscan dynasty curbed the exploits of the Knights of Saint Stephen from 1737 the papal and Neapolitan navies stepped into the breach Other Italian raiding centers were Sicily Sardinia and Genoa As for the fearsome Uskok Uscocchi privateers of Croatia they had their chief lair in Segna on the Dalmatian coast Farther west the Iberians were other great fishers of men initially within their own borders The fall of Malaga in 1487 yielded some ten thousand slaves and the revolt of Grenadan Moriscos in 1569 led to captiv ity for thousands more In the confusion surrounding the 1610 expulsion of Spains Moriscos yet more were enslaved The Iberians also conducted frequent raids from their forts scattered along the North African coast with the Spaniards taking several thousand slaves when they seized Tripoli in Libya in 1510 Forays by sea were equally significant with the corsairs of the Balearics enjoying a particularly fearsome reputation Assaults generally declined in the eighteenth century however following the advent of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain in 1700 and the rise of the marquis of Pombal in Portugal from 1750 Iberian reformers abandoned the ancient dream of reconquering North Africa and sought instead to establish stable and peaceful treaty relations with Morocco and the Barbary States Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 142 the cambridge world history of slavery Neither France nor Venice captured many Muslim slaves in any century reflecting a tradition of alliance with the Ottoman Empire Indeed Venice was well known for holding fewer enslaved Muslims than other Italian states and for freeing them if the Sublime Porte demanded it France not only played off the Ottomans against the Habsburgs but was also precocious in signing treaties with the Barbary States The French possessed many Muslim slaves but were heavily reliant on purchases from foreign suppliers especially in Genoa Livorno Malta and even in the eastern Mediterranean The French preferred to obtain Bosnian Muslims whenever possible as they held Balkan peoples to be the best slaves Land battles in southeastern Europe yielded yet more Muslim slaves As the Habsburgs first stopped and then reversed the Ottoman advance in the Balkans from around 1500 captives became ever more plentiful in Austria Hungary and Croatia Some were sold across the Adriatic into Italy or north into Catholic and Lutheran parts of Germany but many were held in the Austrian heartlands Similarly the Russians captured numerous Muslim slaves as they reversed the earlier pattern of Tatar domination seizing the khanates of Kazan Astrakhan and Sibir in quick succession in the sixteenth century While a military stalemate followed communities of battlehardened Cossacks regularly seized Muslims all along the lengthy frontier The 1725 Russian assimilation of slavery into serfdom meant little in these rough settlements and Cossacks continued to take de facto Muslim slaves well into the nineteenth century Total numbers are not known but Salvatore Bonos thorough trawl through the patchy evidence leads him to an estimate of four to five hundred thousand in Italy alone from 1500 to 1800 suffering from high mortality rates He also advances a much lower figure of ninety to one hundred twenty thousand raided slaves for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries excluding shipwrecked and purchased individuals Among Italian cities Naples probably had the largest number of Muslim slaves with up to twenty thousand around 1600 and ten to twelve thousand in 16612 Overall Bono tentatively suggests that Muslim slaves in early modern Christendom may well have been as numerous as Christian slaves in Islamdom although much more work is necessary to test this hypothesis especially in Spanish and Maltese archives The state took the pick of captives and employed them mainly in galleys and related maritime tasks in southwestern Europe despite the increase in the proportion of convicts noted The Spaniards used numerous servile Muslim oarsmen in attempting to repress the Dutch independence strug gle in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and still had 2 Salvatore Bono Schiavi musulmani nellItalia moderna galeotti vu cumpra domestici Naples 1999 pp 27 356 83 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 143 some galleys in service in 1751 The theoretical French ratio was one slave to three convicts in the 1680s though the actual number of slaves might have been higher Although sail gradually replaced oars in the eighteenth century France continued to buy slaves for the galleys till 1748 In Italy the ratio of slaves to other oarsmen was often closer to one to two and galleys survived longest in Italy and Malta which lacked an Atlantic coast Stateowned slaves also labored in a variety of public works under appalling conditions Especially notorious was the plight of Muslim slaves in Almadens poisonous mercury mines which reverted to the Spanish crown in 1645 and in which service was equivalent to a death sentence The quarries of southern Italy employed many other unfortunates as late as 1754 and the construction of extravagant buildings and new roads was prominent Perilous work in hospitals was often assigned to Muslim slaves who were made to collect and bury bodies when the plague decimated Marseilles in 1720 As late as 1812 the authorities kept eightysix slaves in Cagliari employed for no pay in the most unpleasant public works and simultaneously held to bargain for possible exchange with Sardinians enslaved in North Africa Much less is known about the slaves of private masters who seem to have shrunk as a proportion of the total in the course of the seventeenth century They generally enjoyed better conditions than state slaves and had a higher chance of liberation on conversion especially if they acted in a domestic capacity The numerous slaves of Romes cardinals and religious officials were something of an elite but there were also many employed in more humble artisanal and agricultural tasks A 1581 document concerning 575 Morisco slaves in Malaga showed that about twothirds of them engaged in directly productive labor mainly in agriculture Officials sometimes commandeered private slaves as in Sicily in 1642 but more often purchased them when necessary Muslim slaves of private owners were mentioned as far afield as Brittany in seventeenthcentury France and the last known French reference dates from 1695 when a Muslim slave escaped from his master In Iberia private servitude persisted longer A Portuguese royal decree of 1773 declared that the children of white mestica and black slave women by free men were all henceforth to be born free but that their mothers would remain enslaved for their lifetime As for Italy a Palermo court in Sicily decided in 1812 that a Moorish male fugitive slave should be returned to his princely master and that baptism did not legally entail freedom Unfortunately there are few accounts by Muslims of their experiences of slavery In Italy letters from Muslim slaves to the authorities have been preserved and their most common requests were to have their own prayer houses and cemeteries This was often allowed in Italy but was prohibited in Spain where the Inquisition discovered a clandestine mosque in Cartagena Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 144 the cambridge world history of slavery in 1769 A Muslim slave building a road in 1767 in the Guadarrama region near Madrid wrote to the sultan of Morocco that he and his fellows worked without rest or relief were constantly beaten and received poor food and clothing The scarcity of such materials may reflect low levels of literacy and the small numbers who escaped or were ransomed but it is also the case that scholars with a command of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish have yet to turn their full attention to sources that do exist Resistance mainly took the form of individual sabotage murder and flight but sometimes entailed cooperative actions Shipboard revolts were particularly feared by Christian captains and with good reason for the exploiters of slaves quite often found themselves taken into slavery by their erstwhile victims There was only one known major rebellion on land in Malta in 1749 when the number of slaves on the island was estimated at nine thousand The Knights brutally put down this rebellion The redemption of Muslim slaves held in Christendom was a pious and meritorious act for Muslims Some rulers even eschewed ransoms accepting only the exchange of slaves in treaties with European states Internationally negotiated returns of Muslim captives became more common from the Kar lowitz Treaty of 1699 in the Balkans although it proved difficult to oblige private Christian owners to agree to cede their slaves for a fair price In 1810 a LusoAlgerian treaty led to the return of nearly one hundred Muslim slaves held in Portugal as part payment for Portuguese slaves detained in Algiers Semiprofessional private ransomers emerged often merchants with Sufi connections Alms collected in mosques pious bequests and the revenues of waqf charitable trusts all served to purchase the freedom of fellow believers The French Revolution swept away white slavery together with other feudal relics The French freed slaves in Genoa on taking over and Napoleon Bonaparte famously liberated the two thousand or so remaining slaves on Malta in 1798 However it is not so well known that he prudently declared that they should remain prisoners of war to be exchanged for European captives in North Africa Moreover he balked at extending liberation to Egypt In 181415 the Congress of Vienna took a decision in principle to put an end to all slavery in the Mediterranean though the Ottoman delegation abstained This helped to justify the British refusal to return Malta to the Knights of Saint John Some Europeans nevertheless tried to turn the clock back and it was not until 1888 that Pope Leo XIII unequivocally condemned the peculiar institution white servitude in the ottoman empire Ottoman conquests from the late fourteenth century flooded the heartlands of Islam with a variety of Christian slaves The collapse of the rump of Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 145 the Byzantine Empire in 1453 followed by that of Christian states in the Balkans yielded huge numbers of captives augmented by daring raids well beyond the limits of Muslim conquest The Balkan frontier began to stabilize from the end of the sixteenth century giving rise to a shifting border zone which continued to be a source of slaves albeit on a smaller scale Unfortunately no historian has attempted to quantify these flows although some kind of rough estimate should be possible from existing documents Supplies from the Black Sea appear to have been larger Muslim Tatar raiders especially those settled in the Crimea in loose vassalage to Istanbul harvested the Christian steppes and forests with ruthless efficiency sack ing Moscow outside the Kremlin walls in 1571 A compilation of partial statistics and patchy estimates indicates that Crimean Tartars seized a little fewer than two million Russians Ukrainians and Poles from 1468 to 16943 Additional slaves from the Caucasus especially Circassia were channeled through the Crimea and were obtained by a mixture of raiding and trad ing Spotty sixteenth and seventeenthcentury customs statistics suggest that Istanbuls slave imports from the Black Sea may have totaled around 25 million from 1450 to 17004 In addition there was an overland trade into Anatolia from the Caucasus The conversion of Persia to heretical Shii Islam from the early sixteenth century opened up a third external source of white slaves for the Ottomans As bad Muslims the inhabitants of the Safavid Empire were fair game even if some ulama continued to express scruples about enslaving schis matics Such doubts were overcome by declaring Shii Persians and Azeri to be apostates which was punishable by death and the forfeiture of their dependants An OttomanPersian treaty of 1736 declared an end to the practice of mutual enslavement by Sunni and Shii armies with the Persian negotiators pressing most strongly for this innovation However Kurdish raiders under loose Ottoman suzerainty long continued to enslave Shii believers as well as Yazidi syncretists Raiding and warfare were supplemented by levies on the empires own population most infamously in the form of the devshirme a tribute in Balkan and Anatolian Christian youths This flouted sharia prescriptions on the treatment of peaceful conquered dhimmi or people of the book provoking bitter laments in Balkan folk songs The system wound down during the first half of the seventeenth century officially netted around two hundred thousand youths between 1400 and 1650 and many more 3 Alan W Fisher Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade in CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies 6 1972 57594 4 Halil Inalcik An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Volume 1 13001600 Cambridge 1997 pp 2835 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 146 the cambridge world history of slavery unofficially5 Not only Christians but also Jews might still be lawfully enslaved if they broke their pact with Muslim rulers which entailed the payment of heavy additional taxes and subjection to sumptuary and other discriminatory legislation This loophole was at times manipulated by the unscrupulous or the fanatical Ottoman sources of slaves shrank in the eighteenth century albeit not to the extent that has sometimes been asserted The second unsuccess ful assault on Vienna in 1683 was probably the last occasion on which the Ottomans took substantial numbers of captives from Christian foes allegedly some eighty thousand in all Subsequently the Austrians pushed southeast insisting on the mutual release of prisoners of war The Russians curtailed Crimean raiding after 1694 pressed ever further south and seized the Crimean peninsula itself in 1783 However Christian rebellions within the Ottoman Empire continued to yield slaves with the last large haul obtained by suppressing a Greek uprising for independence on the island of Chios in 1822 Moreover Polish deserters preferred enslavement to being sent back to the tsarist army The Sublime Porte also compensated by drawing increasing numbers of white slaves from the densely populated Caucasus Chechen Daghes tani and Kurdish Muslims frequently raided their Armenian Georgian and Ossetian Christian neighbors They also raided Muslims of a different sectarian orientation from their own as the Caucasus was riven with dis putes between petty Sunni and Shii khans Many captives were sold to the Ottomans Furthermore Christian elites in the Caucasus provided slaves as tribute to the Sublime Porte or simply sold their enemies and serfs to Muslim dealers The Circassians of the northwestern Caucasus provided particularly large numbers of slaves despite nominally passing from Chris tianity to Islam in the course of the eighteenth century and becoming Ottoman vassals Circassians not only sold some of their numerous slaves whom they encouraged to breed but also reduced free compatriots into slavery in terms of harsh local customary law This Circassian trade lasted till 1909 with a brief interruption in the early 1850s High rates of manumission were a redeeming factor of Ottoman slav ery in the Balkans and Anatolia where white slaves were concentrated Although the evidence comes from the nineteenth century it is reason able to suppose that customary law was similar in early modern times Manumission after nine years was the rule for white slaves compared to seven for blacks who were thought to be less well adjusted to the cold climate Although this was a customary provision it seems that sharia courts enforced it Moreover when owners arranged a marriage for their young slaves it was common to free them at this time However these 5 Peter F Sugar Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule 13541804 Seattle WA 1977 pp 568 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 147 liberal customs were not applied in the Arab provinces of the empire and a British observer of the nineteenth century noted that they increased the demand for fresh imports of slaves This makes it all the more difficult to estimate the size and demographic profile of the white slave population of the early modern Ottoman Empire Drawing on war captives for a long period and having access to a well organized slave trade biased toward female slaves sex ratios would have been fairly even Slave procreation was possible and many adults were freed which would have made for a relatively young servile population Urban numbers were clearly large but there has been a tendency to underestimate the scale of white rural slavery at least in the Balkans and Anatolia Part of this urban bias springs from historians fascination with Ottoman elite slavery both military and civilian The Ottomans inher ited an Islamicate model of military and administrative slavery but gave it a new twist in the form of the Janissary infantry units that conquered much of southeastern Europe This probably inspired the smaller servile Spanishspeaking genizario military units who operated in the southwest borderlands of North America In the Ottoman case Janissaries were rela tively privileged men who often owned their own slaves and stood a good chance of being manumitted However they were forced to convert to Islam were circumcised and were culturally brainwashed to forget their families and cultures of origin They could not marry were subjected to brutal discipline and often found an early grave The Janissaries were over whelmingly recruited from Balkan youths levied through the devshirme although a few of these youths went into elite cavalry units or served in the palace As the devshirme declined in the first half of the seventeenth century the Janissaries were gradually transformed into a free corps with muchrelaxed discipline However some purchased slave boys from the Caucasus continued to be enrolled as soldiers and the administration was largely staffed by white slaves well into the nineteenth century White military slavery loomed even larger in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the form of selfperpetuating elites of purchased and converted slaves typically serving as cavalry rather than infantry units These servile cavalrymen were usually purchased from the Caucasus and the system persisted in Egypt after the Ottomans had defeated the Mamluk state in 1517 Indeed Circassian Mamluk power revived from the late seventeenth century because Ottoman Janissary forces declined in military efficacy allowing Egypt to become autonomous When Napoleon seized Egypt in 1798 he boasted that he had overcome a Mamluk army of ten thousand Circassians and Georgians6 Mainly Georgian Mamluks also became the de facto rulers of Iraq from the 1740s to the early 1830s 6 M Ader Histoire de lexpedition d Egypte et de Syrie Paris 1826 p 393 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 148 the cambridge world history of slavery The harem a source of endless fascination to early modern European intellectuals was another center of elite slavery Few concubines actually shared the rulers bed Even if they did they were denied sexual access to the sultan after they had borne him one son and were vulnerable to sudden shifts in palace intrigues Although the earlyseventeenthcentury empire was called the sultanate of the women only one concubine could become the power behind the throne if her son was the victor in the vicious succession struggle that followed the death of the reigning sultan Many concubines never even reached the sultans bedchamber but were denied the possibility of having a family life as were the domestics in the small army of female slaves who attended upon the inhabitants of the harem As for eunuchs initially employed as harem guards but increasingly as trusted officials they could be of any race with blacks becoming more common from the seventeenth century A handful of eunuchs became truly powerful but they were as vulnerable to political changes as concubines Furthermore the traumatic operation that robbed adolescents of their manhood was reported to kill between 15 and 90 percent of the victims according to the skill and experience of those who performed the operation In theory eunuchs were meant to be purchased only after having been castrated by infidels in the abode of war but the operation was often performed on slave boys in the abode of Islam Indeed in a minority of cases it was Muslims who wielded the knife Castration was prohibited in 1715 in Egypt apparently with little effect The bulk of white slaves in public employment ended up in far less priv ileged positions notably toiling in gangs on colossal construction projects The most dreaded occupation as in Christian ports was the punishing and dangerous work of rowing galleys However the fear of servile uprisings stoked by a number of incidents led to a partial substitution of slaves by conscripted labor with some free labor as well Moreover as sailing ships came to prevail in the Ottoman fleet from around 1700 galley service declined rapidly Of the urban white slaves in private hands a fair number worked in protoindustry commerce and domestic service in the main towns of the Balkans and Anatolia Slave artisans were common especially in the flourishing textile workshops of Bursa where a fifth to a third of the population around 1500 was servile and where an estimated six thousand changed hands every year There were similar concentrations of servile artisans in Istanbul Edirne Sofia and Ankara This type of work usually entailed liberation after a fixed period or on completion of a specified set of tasks which enhanced productivity and lowered costs of supervision Other skilled male slaves acted as business agents for their masters Freed skilled slaves became clients of their former masters and could look forward to a comfortable level of remuneration for their skills Household drudgery Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 149 was most common for urban female slaves for wealthy individuals copied the harems of the sultans complete with servile concubines and eunuchs Ottoman agrarian slavery has been surprisingly little studied perhaps because it has so frequently been assumed to have been negligible or even nonexistent In the Arab lands of the empire rural slaves were likely to be black but in the Balkans and Anatolia they were mainly white There were servile plantations notably in the vicinity of Istanbul to satisfy the gargantuan appetites of the immense capital city Typically on reclaimed land ceded to members of the military elite estates often grew rice or cotton Furthermore surviving inheritance registers indicate that there were many holdings of limited size each employing only a small number of agricultural slaves Far too little is known about this system of smallholder slavery which was more generally characteristic of the Islamic Middle East Descendants of agrarian slaves tended to become free rentpaying tenants so that white agrarian slavery declined over time until an influx of Circassian settlers in the midnineteenth century injected new life into the system The intimate details of the lives of white slaves in the Ottoman Empire are hardly known with the significant exception of some of the great concubines and eunuchs Even then there is a lack of personal narratives by those subjected to servitude Similarly the history of resistance to slavery has hardly begun to be written There are no signs of any major rebellions but many indices of slaves employing the weapons of the weak For military slaves the Bektashi Sufi order suspected of Christian and Shii deviations provided an institutional haven white servitude in iran afghanistan and turkistan After the new Safavid dynasty had made Shiism the religion of the Ira nian Empire at the dawn of the sixteenth century Persians and Azeri were enslaved by their Ottoman Sunni adversaries as noted earlier More dangerous than the Ottomans however were Sunni Turks from Inner Asia whether Uzbek khans or ferocious nomadic Turkmen tribes centered around the southeastern Caspian Sea According to one estimate a mil lion Persians had been taken as slaves to West Turkistan by the nineteenth century7 Sunni Muslims of the Caucasus also raided for Shii slaves espe cially in Azerbaijan In addition Pushto and Baluchi raiders from the east believed it to be meritorious to enslave Shii opponents including Hazara Mongols of central Afghanistan However customs of manumission were quite generous among the Sunni often after ten years in Uzbek areas 7 Richard A Pierce Russian Central Asia 18671917 A Study in Colonial Rule Berkeley CA 1960 p 312 n 23 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 150 the cambridge world history of slavery Iranian armies retaliated by taking Sunni and other heretics as slaves so that the net flow depended on the balance of power at any given time The OttomanPersian treaty of 1736 may have restrained Iranian captures of Kurds and Turks but it did not apply to Sunni enemies to the north and east Moreover Ibadi Khariji heretics were enslaved when Persia intervened in an Omani civil war from the 1720s to the 1740s However Iranians were generally prepared to free Muslim slaves who converted to their Twelver brand of Islam and Shii law strongly recommended the freeing of all slaves after seven years Moreover Shii law insisted that slavery by birth was conditional on both parents being slaves White Christian slaves from the Caucasus were also numerous in Iran A Safavid army reputedly brought back thirty thousand people from the Caucasus in 15334 Georgians Circassians and Armenians Similarly a Qajar force allegedly captured fifteen thousand Georgians after taking Tiflis in 1795 Most Caucasus slaves were probably obtained through tributary and commercial relations similar to those that prevailed in relations with the Ottomans That said Christian Armenians came to have a special protected status in Iran once Shah Abbas I r 15871629 had settled large numbers of them as free subjects close to his capital in Isfahan Other white infidels supplied slaves to Iran and Turkistan Russians were frequently the victims of the endemic violence that pitted Christian Cos sacks against the Turkic Muslims and Mongol Buddhists of the steppes Sold on to the settled areas farther south Russian captives were more numerous in Turkistan than in Iran giving rise to much correspondence between Russian tsars and Uzbek khans in the seventeenth century Pushto raiders in Afghanistan took most of their slaves from the Animist unbe lievers of Kafiristan northeast of Kabul only forcibly Islamized under the name of Nuristan in the late nineteenth century As for the Zoroastrian slaves noted in Turkistan they may have come from either Persia or India South Asians formed a significant segment of the early modern servile population of Iran and Turkistan Mughal armies seized numerous Hindus and Jains from frontier areas or rebellious communities and exchanged them for Inner Asian horses vital for the survival of Muslim rule in India Thus the Persians supposedly swapped horses for as many as two hundred thousand Indian rebels in 161920 Indian slaves numerous up to the early eighteenthcentury decline of the Mughals should perhaps be counted among the areas white slaves as notions of white and nonwhite are hard to establish in this area To add to the complexity of the situation black African slaves were imported through the Persian Gulf while small numbers of Chinese slaves appeared in East Turkistan In occupational terms many white slaves of the Safavids were employed in relatively privileged positions as concubines Mamluks and officials whether castrated or not However Christian slaves from the Caucasus Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 151 may also have been significant in the relatively intensive agriculture of Azerbaijan Reliance on servile soldiers and officials rose sharply in Iran under Shah Abbas I who broke with the millenarian and tribal roots of the Safavid dynasty Under his successor Shah Safi r 162942 concubines replaced princesses as the mothers of rulers on Ottoman lines and hered itary families of elite administrative slaves emerged unlike the Ottoman case There were estimated to be one thousand military slaves and three thousand eunuchs serving the Shah in Isfahan alone Saru Taqi an Azeri eunuch originally castrated as a punishment for homosexuality a violation of the sharia wielded great power as grand vizier from 1634 to 1645 Over time superficially converted Georgians came to dominate the military slave corps in Iran as they did in Iraq Turkistan relied little on military and administrative slaves but employed particularly large numbers in productive tasks even if the ethnic division of labor remains far from clear As with Indians some Russian captives were valued for their protoindustrial skills in the cities which contributed to a great reluctance on the part of Uzbek khans to grant them freedom However other Russians were unskilled agricultural laborers Persian Shii captives worked in increasing numbers as herders in Turkistan and on the grain and cotton estates of the oases especially as supplies of Indian slaves contracted sharply in the eighteenth century By the 1810s Persians were reported to be the chief agrarian laborers in the Uzbek khanates white servitude in the maghrib Although the regencies of Algiers Tunis and Tripoli were technically under Ottoman suzerainty the Sublime Porte exercised very little real authority in this area with the Barbary corsairs increasingly making and breaking their own international agreements In the far west Morocco was never part of the Ottoman Empire and was unique in having direct access to the Atlantic However the Moroccan corsairs of Sale and the Rif again enjoyed a high level of de facto autonomy for much of this period Where corsairs were less influential Maghribi slavery depended more on blacks transported across the Sahara such as those who played an important role as Mamluks in the Moroccan army for much of this period Thus it was noted that the Troubles in Barbary were greater than ever on account of the Natives hatred to the Black standing Army kept up by the new Emperor whose Insolencies were become so insupportable that the Country was in general up in Arms against them8 8 Saint James Evening Post Nov 4 to 6 1729 British Librarys Burney Collection of Early English Newspapers henceforth BL Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 152 the cambridge world history of slavery White captives in the Maghrib were overwhelmingly taken in naval raids as the Mediterranean and North Atlantic formed a maritime border zone between Islam and Christianity Barbary corsairs initially launched devas tating attacks on communities dwelling along the western Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Europe Spain Portugal France and Italy bore the brunt of these attacks which netted thousands of captives at a time well into the seventeenth century Occasional raids on the coasts of Ireland Wales the English Channel and even distant Iceland supplemented these Mediterranean sources especially in the early seventeenth century when the corsairs of Sale in Morocco took to squarerigged sailing vessels Direct seizures of Europeans living in coastal communities became less significant from the second half of the seventeenth century especially in distant lands but such raids long persisted in areas close to the Maghrib Southern Italy and eastern Spain were the main victims together with the islands of the western Mediterranean As late as 1798 Barbary corsairs took nine hundred slaves from a small island off southern Sardinia Indeed they exploited the disorders of the Napoleonic wars to step up land raids on Mediterranean shores Moreover as the Maghribi gradually whittled down the number of Iberian coastal enclaves from the late seventeenth century they placed defeated Christian settlers under the yoke In a strange reversal of fortunes even French slave traders operating along the Senegal River of West Africa were at times seized and marched north across the Sahara Captures at sea from as far as the great European fishing fleets on the Newfoundland Banks compensated for reduced numbers taken on land The amount of shipping leaving European ports in the Atlantic and Mediterranean expanded dramatically in the seventeenth century with six to ten thousand merchant vessels a year each vessel carrying perhaps fifteen men sailing within easy range of Barbary corsairs Among such vessels were some on their way to West Africa to purchase slaves Ships wrecked on the North African coast yielded an additional albeit much smaller quota of captives allowing Berber communal villagers access to white slaves The peak of white slavery in the Islamic western Mediterranean was probably reached around 1700 Over time European nations signed treaties to protect their shipping providing their vessels with duly certified passes Indeed the registers for these passes form an impressive and so far little exploited set of records for European shipping Governments port com munities and religious institutions also made growing efforts to redeem captives Although the latter development created a greater incentive for Muslims to capture Christians for ransom or exchange the pass system gen erally reduced the supply of new captives albeit in return for protection money that allowed for the fittingout of raiding vessels It was only from the late eighteenth century that Europeans and North Americans took more drastic action to curtail white slavery in the Maghrib Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 153 The Portuguese and the English blockaded the Straits of Gibraltar for long periods at a time As the Napoleonic wars dragged to a close in Europe Western newspapers called vociferously for naval action to liberate the Christian slaves of Maghribi corsairs The Congress of Vienna in 181415 solemnly pledged to put an end to Muslim slave raiding and slavery The carrot was that Muslim merchant ships were allowed to ply their trade peacefully and the stick took the form of naval expeditions AngloDutch and AngloFrench naval forces attacked Barbary ports in 1816 and 1819 respectively and the United States forcefully imposed a treaty on Algiers in 1815 The French seizure of Algiers in 1830 ended a process of cajoling intimidating or battering the Barbary states into freeing their Christian slaves Relations between Christians and Muslims were more savage than in the eastern Mediterranean where the Ottoman Empire was part of the concert of Europe A French fleet sailed into Algiers in the late seventeenth century and began an indiscriminate bombardment of the city In return the regent threatened to use the French accredited agent who was attempting to negotiate the release of captives as a cannon ball and did so when the bombardment continued The French responded by slaughtering thirty Algerian galley slaves on board they quartered the corpses tied the body parts to wooden boards and by the waves floated them towards the town9 This behavior was influenced by a perception of the inhabitants of Barbary strongholds as common pirates rather than the duly licensed privateers that they claimed to be The frequently expressed opinion that Barbary corsairs were in a state of permanent jihad holy war against Christian powers is at best a partial truth however It was contested by some ulama for no caliph declared a jihad and rapine was all too clearly the main motive for piratical forays The voluminous literature on Barbary slavery yields some assessments as to the scale of these captures and the slave populations that they supported although the records do not match what is available for the Americas The wealthy were ransomed and even the poor could be redeemed by charita ble bodies but numbers returning to Europe were small overall According to Robert Daviss careful calculations a million to a million and a quar ter Christian captives entered the Maghrib from 1530 to 1780 Of these unfortunates it is estimated that fewer than 5 percent escaped or were ransomed From 1520 to 1830 Algiers alone imported about six hundred twentyfive thousand Indeed Algiers struck newcomers as distinctly Euro pean in appearance just as Kingston in Jamaica was described as looking quite African 9 Richard Lapthorne to Richard Coffin July 21 1688 in Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts Part 1 Report and Appendix London 1876 p 379 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Attrition rates for white slaves were estimated at 20 percent a year in seventeenthcentury Maghrib and this meant that large inflows of newcomers were necessary to sustain the existing servile population Given the age of captives seized from European sailing ships the hostile epidemiological environment of North Africa and the harsh working and living conditions the crude mortality rate among whites was probably higher than among blacks in the Americas even on sugar plantations As long as captives were primarily taken in raids on land in the sixteenth century there would have been a fairly normal population pyramid for the sea passage that followed capture was relatively short The number of white females among captives no doubt accounts for the whiteness of the population of the city of Algiers that contemporaries noted From the midseventeenth century the sex ratio of white captives came to be overwhelmingly male even if a few female passengers were taken from ships and some women were still seized on land One estimate suggests that well more than 90 percent of the white captive populations of the Maghrib after 1650 were men White captives in North Africa were thus at the opposite end of the demographic spectrum from Russian slaves This pattern coexisted with a black slave trade across the Sahara in which the majority of the victims were women so that sexual relations between white and black slaves in the Maghrib blurred the boundaries between the two kinds of servitude Mawlay Ismail sultan of Morocco deliberately mated white males with black females Similarly an entrepreneur outside Algiers sold mulatto children resulting from forced couplings between black women and European captives Conversely The Basha even ordered the Blacks to ravish the women prisoners in presence of their husbands but the women resisted preferring death to the embraces of the Negroes One estimate suggests that half of the Barbary captains between 1580 and 1680 were of European origin An Ottoman observed in the early eighteenth century that these renegadoes are neither Christians Musulmans nor Jews they have no faith nor religion at all The cosmopolitan elites of the Barbary ports even included the odd Japanese and Chinese adventurer Renegade Christians often maintained close links with their areas of origin and might negotiate a further turning of their coats with the Inquisition or the Knights Whatever their nominal faith they lived by the unsanza del mare Mediterranean lore predating any world religion Contrary to stubbornly held stereotypes many of these renegadoes perhaps the majority were free Christians and Jews rather than manumitted slaves Infidels were discouraged from converting to Islam when there were white servitude 155 galleys to be rowed as custom held that Muslim slaves should not perform this harsh task Even when such constraints faded converts were mainly skilled artisans and soldiers nubile women and the male concubines of homosexual corsairs Moreover Maghribi Muslims strictly adhered to Islamic orthodoxy in refusing to accept conversion as a passport to freedom Numbers of white slaves who both converted and were manumitted thus remained very low typically restricted to concubines who bore children to their masters together with a few privileged and trusted men This was a far cry from the relatively liberal customary law of freedom prevailing in Anatolia The numerous captive accounts written from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century not one of which can be authenticated as written by a woman reveal extremely harsh conditions compared by Robert Davis to Soviet gulags Food was scarce and bad work on construction sites and galleys was exhausting and discipline was severe Sixteenthcentury corsairs branded slaves in violation of the sharia and prolonged beatings on the soles of the feet were the usual punishment for slaves An Amsterdam newspaper reported in 1728 that Christian slaves were employed to seal off streets infected by the plague12 Treatment probably improved slightly in the eighteenth century As ransoming became more significant the asset value of captives increased providing an incentive for better treatment Furthermore Christian groups established permanent hospitals and agencies to minister to various reli gious and national segments of the white slave population When Muley Abdallah overcame rival claimants to the throne of Morocco in 1730 one of his first edicts allowed the Spanish Fathers for the Redemption of Captives to establish a hospital He gave them free and protected access to his dominions White captives with only a slim chance of escape ransoming or man umission could be driven to rebellion especially when they had rising expectations In Algiers in 1763 four thousand Christian slaves rose and killed their guards and massacred all that came in their way All the gates of the town were shut a general massacre was apprehended but after some hours carnage during which the streets ran with blood quiet was restored 13 conclusion contrasting styles of servitude Although whereas adherents of Islam and Christianity recognized the civi lized status of their opponents incorporation as a slave occurred whenever the opportunity presented itself for religion made the other a quintessential 12 The Flying Post November 28 1728 BL 13 Georgia Gazette June 2 1763 p 5 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 156 the cambridge world history of slavery outsider However the power of Islam and Christendom was balanced enough in the Old World to prevent either from gaining very large num bers of captives Moreover the difficulty of finding in the other culture a cooperative agent hindered the passage of Europeans into Islamic slavery through trade and limited numbers moving the other way By the time that Islam began to lose significant ground in the late eighteenth century Euro peans had found satisfactory alternative sources of slaves for an increasingly racialized system in their American colonies In any case some Westerners were beginning to view all kinds of slave trade and slavery as immoral Christianity and Islam both erected ideological barriers against enslav ing those with shared religious beliefs which further depressed sources of white slaves although concepts of heresy allowed for significant breaches of such norms Western Europeans continued to seize and enslave Ortho dox believers in the eastern Mediterranean especially if they could show that captives had collaborated with their Muslim overlords In Islam apostasy was a catchall concept that justified the enslavement of a wide variety of bad Muslims well into the twentieth century Both Muslims and Christians saw Animists as eminently eligible for enslavement whereas Jews were caught in an uneasy intermediate sta tus Some thirteenthcentury Catholic theologians asserted that Jews were enslavable as the collective murderers of Christ but this view was not always shared Catholics placed some Jews in limited servitude in the six teenth century and truly enslaved others especially collaborators with Muslims Similarly Jews were theoretically protected from enslavement by the sharia but only as long as they were not judged to have broken their pact with Muslims As for captive whites taken into American or African aboriginal societies they were initially outsiders with enslavement as a potential institutional device to convert them into insiders In terms of closed and open forms of slavery the British and Dutch ran some of the most closed systems the world has ever known in the Americas making any escape from servitude extremely hard Paradoxically however they put an effective end to servitude in northwestern Europe itself the ultimate act of openness In the Catholic and Islamic worlds slavery was hardly questioned but rates of manumission were high and conversion might entail freedom Social integration over time and between generations was encouraged by institutions such as religious brotherhoods and clientage In short Catholic and Islamic slavery combined hard labor and high attrition rates with the possibility of the reduction of social marginality over time The racialization of slavery correlating strongly with closed systems was an anomaly in the long history of servitude for slaves had traditionally come from any and every human group The racialization of slavery devel oped most strongly in the colonies of northwestern Europe Contradictory Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 attitudes toward race and slavery were highlighted by cases of crews of British slave ships seized by Maghribi Muslims with the last known case occurring in 1796 Petitions from home ports seeking the release of these seamen demanded British government action in the name of Christian charity and humanity Similarly Robinson Crusoe could spend time as a Guinea trader and then two years as a captive of a Turkish rover without his creator showing a hint of the irony of his situation For eighteenthcentury Britons eligibility for enslavement and the identities that supported it meant that there was no irony Not until the abolitionist era did observers compare norms of intergroup behavior within Europe with norms that governed relations between Europe and nonEuropeans This was tantamount to saying that nobody should be eligible for enslavement and abolition was in a sense merely the widening of the definition of eligibility for insider status Catholic areas witnessed a slower more incomplete and more uneven racialization of slavery As late as 1773 the marquis of Pombal fulminated against metropolitan Portuguese cohabiting with slave women of every color The French went further down the racial road than the Iberians and Italians erecting the most explicit distinction between black slaves in the Americas and white slaves in Europe Nevertheless the fact that there were white slaves in France set that country off from England and the Netherlands Moreover the Catholic Church exerted a powerful influence on rates of manumission creating a large black and mixedrace free population as a buffer between slaves and masters in the New World In the Islamic case the racialization of slavery was even less developed although Bernard Lewis argues that the common colloquial Arabic term for slave abd gradually came to be coterminous with black by the nineteenth century However the three consonants that are the roots of the word abd carry the principal meaning of worship The Arabic legal term for slavery is alriq literally the yoke the root consonants of which were never employed to denote any human group other than slaves The tradition inherited from Ibn Sina Avicenna was that both extremely fair and extremely dark people were naturally servile Slaves in Islam continued to come from all the major races of humankind into the twentieth century even including Arabs and they were all mixed up together In addition slaves of any color could reach the highest posts in society as military and administrative slaves or as concubines and eunuchs All this made it particularly hard to racialize the institution Indeed early modern white servitude in itself forms a major counterweight to exaggerated views of the racialization of slavery The rise of an oppressive second serfdom in eastern Europe together with the tenacious persistence of white chattel slavery in the Islamic Middle East and Catholic Europe accounted for millions of individuals in all There may 158 the cambridge world history of slavery have been fewer convicts destitute children and indentured servants and even fewer white chattel slaves in indigenous American and subSaharan African societies but they all added to the variety and geographical scope of white servile experiences It is abundantly clear that servitude in the Western Hemisphere was in no sense an exclusively black preserve in the early modern era further reading There is no single overarching treatment of this topic For convicts and children in the Atlantic see Timothy J Coates Convicts and Orphans Forced and StateSponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire 15501755 Stanford CA 2001 The crucial text on Muslim white slaves in Europe mainly in Italy but also beyond is Salvatore Bono Schiavi musulmani nellItalia moderna galeotti vu cumpra domestici Naples 1999 Other important works on this topic are Steven A Epstein Speaking of Slavery Color Ethnicity and Human Bondage in Italy Ithaca NY 2001 Catherine W Bracewell The Uskoks of Senj Piracy Banditry and Holy War in the SixteenthCentury Adriatic Ithaca NY 1992 and Moulay Belhamissi Les captifs algeriens et lEurope chretienne 15181830 Algiers 1988 The best general survey of Russia remains Richard Hellie Slavery in Russia 1450 1725 Chicago 1982 For a general introduction to white slaves in the lands of Islam see William G ClarenceSmith Islam and the Abolition of Slavery London 2006 Essential for European captives in North Africa are two books by Robert C Davis Holy War and Human Bondage Tales of Christian Muslim Slavery in the EarlyModern Mediterranean Santa Barbara CA 2009 and Christian Slaves Muslim Masters White Slavery in the Mediter ranean the Barbary Coast and Italy 15001800 New York 2003 Still valu able are Ellen G Friedman Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age Madison WI 1983 and John B Wolf The Barbary Coast Algiers under the Turks 15001830 New York 1979 For white captives in the Americas see William Henry Foster The Captors Narrative Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier Ithaca NY 2003 Elite Ottoman slavery is treated in Leslie P Peirces The Imperial Harem Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire New York 1993 This can be supplemented by Halil Inalcik Servile labour in the Ottoman empire in Abraham Ascher et al eds The Mutual Effects of the Islamic and JudeoChristian Worlds The East European Pattern pp 2552 New York 1979 and Alan W Fisher Chattel slavery in the Ottoman Empire Slavery and Abolition 1 1980 2545 Two important works focusing on a later period are Y Hakan Erdems Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 white servitude 159 Its Demise 18001909 London 1996 and Ehud R Toledano Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East Seattle WA 1998 Elite slavery in early modern Persia is the province of Susan Babaie Kathryn Babayan Ina Baghdiantz McCabe and Massumeh Farhad Slaves of the Shah New Elites of Safavid Iran London 2004 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 PART II SLAVERY IN ASIA Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 7 SLAVERY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 14201804 kerry ward 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 Indonesias national motto Unity in Diversity could well be applied to Southeast Asia as a whole The histori cal 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 insti tution exhibits similar patterns albeit with distinctive and important local variations Modern Southeast Asia incorporates Myanmar Burma Thai land Malaysia Cambodia Laos Vietnam Indonesia and the Philippines Sinicized Chineseinfluenced 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 char acterized by bilateral kinship relatively high status for women wealth in people rather than land strictly hierarchical social relationships low pop ulation densities highly personalized concepts of power relatively fluid ethnic definitions in the period before largescale 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 Problems of definition are complicated by the fact that slavery existed within a spectrum of bondage forced labor and diminished rights in all Southeast Asian societies Discussions about the distinctiveness of Southeast Asia still raise the question of what defines slavery in the region Slaves could live their lives in hereditary permanent temporary or con tractual forms of slavery depending on the societies in which they lived and the different forms of slavery they could experience through entering into the regional slave trade Debt bondage was by far the most common form of slavery so much so that historians debate whether debt bondage 163 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 164 the cambridge world history of slavery was actually slavery or the basis of social relations within some Southeast Asian societies The pervasive existence of debt bondage in Southeast Asian societies existed alongside other forms of bondage Therefore one of the features of slavery in Southeast Asia was the variety it exhibited within soci eties and over time Social relations of obligation and reciprocity existed through vertical bonding of power and status between individuals slavery constituted the most extreme form of obligation and vulnerable status on the part of the slave Southeast Asian societies were governed by laws and customs that embedded these vertical relations of bondage and reciprocity as the basis of social economic and political relations Although it is inadequate to define Southeast Asian slavery in terms of contrast with the features of South and East Asian slavery it is useful to point out some of the fundamental differences between slavery in these three regions Southeast Asian slavery was not complicated by relations of dominance and subservience based on caste as was the case in South Asia East Asian slavery in the early modern period altered depending on dynastic change from Ming to Qing rulers The feature of powerful slave eunuch administrators in China although diminishing during this period was absent from Southeast Asia except perhaps in Dai Viet Slaves in East Asia were generally a very small minority in these densely populated soci eties Slavery was widespread in Southeast Asian societies but until the incorporation of Europeans into the region slavery was not what is com monly defined as chattel slavery that is slaves as disposable property with severely compromised legal status as persons in relationships of vio lent domination Scholars analyzing indigenous forms of Southeast Asian slavery have generally recognized that Western models of slavery are not relevant to these societies The attempt to construct an analysis of slavery and bondage in this region that does not draw on Western models begins with sources Barbara Wat son Andaya has sensitively argued that the problem of recovering womens voices in indigenous and colonial sources makes the challenge of writing gendered history particularly difficult in terms of balancing the perspectives of men and women The same could be said for the problem of sources in the study of slavery in early modern Southeast Asia Indigenous writ ten sources including histories chronicles literature religious texts and legal codes reflect the perspective of the master class rather than that of the underclasses Slaves are often depicted within indigenous and colonial sources that are equally problematic in terms of reflecting a European per spective on slaves and slavery in the region Nevertheless scholars rely on these sources and on travel accounts diverse colonial records and ephemera and archaeological evidence for European perspectives on indigenous slav ery and on European colonial slavery in the region Indigenous sources also include the archaeological evidence from religious and secular sites Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 165 including temples and graves sculptures tombstone inscriptions and other forms of decorative art these are used to piece together fragments of slave experience in the various societies of Southeast Asia As the brief discussion of sources implies the demographic history of Southeast Asian slavery is highly speculative and problematic as indeed is the general demographic history of the region Although scholars have attempted to estimate the population figures for certain cities or states it is impossible to extract accurate numbers from indigenous or colonial sources Considering that one cannot calculate the population as a whole estimating the number of slaves in any part of Southeast Asia is an equally improbable task Figures exist for specific places but one then runs into the problem of how the person tabulating these figures defined slavery For example Raffles tabulated that there were a total of 27142 slaves on the island of Java including 18972 in Batavia and its environs in 1814 His figures are based on European and Chinese slave owners only as he did not include indigenous slavery in his definition It is suggested that most urban centers in Southeast Asia had a majority of slaves in their populations because slaves were the basis of labor Indigenous sources are also unreliable for population figures in general although historians have tried to estimate indigenous populations To tabulate these figures and extrapolate the approximate ratio of slaves is well beyond the scope of this chapter A better idea of the extensive incidence of dependent relations and bondage in particular may perhaps be derived from linguistics Linguistics is also an important part of the scholarly apparatus in defining slavery and bondage in Southeast Asian societies during the early modern period In attempting a regional survey one must rely on the detailed analysis of case studies by a variety of scholars The linguistic map of Southeast Asia is immensely complex and an introduction to the regional languages helps illustrate the complexity of defining slavery The five major lan guage families of Southeast Asia are composed of SinoTibetan Burma Tai Thailand and Laos AustroAsiatic Laos Cambodia and Viet namand Austronesian and Polynesian Malaysia Indonesia the Philip pines and parts of Vietnam and Thailand The Indonesian archipelago alone has around two hundred indigenous languages and there are innu merable dialects throughout the whole region Indeed the development of national languages has been part of the attempt of nationbuilding in modern Southeast Asian countries Within Southeast Asian language families different words existed for slavery and within the region different languages modulated these terms for both slaves and the institution of slavery Anthony Reid argues that hierarchical social relations are fundamental to Southeast Asian lan guages because people automatically place themselves in vertical social Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 166 the cambridge world history of slavery relationships The fact that the same word can be used for both the first person singular and for slave indicates that status relationships are con stantly being negotiated in speech In MalayIndonesian saya Javanese kula or kawula Thai kha Khmer khnjom Burmese kyuntaw and Viet namese toi all have this double meaning Given how fundamental relations of hierarchy bondage and reciprocity are within Southeast Asian societies this feature of the languages is not surprising The following survey is by no means comprehensive but it does give an indication of the linguistic variety of the Southeast Asian terminology of slavery Surveying the terms used for slave in Southeast Asian languages shows how subtle the social relations of bondage were within these societies Sanskrit terms in Buddhist scriptures used for slavery included dasa the general term for various types of servitude from debt bondage to chattel slavery Other terms included kalpikara bondsmen kapyari proper slave kalpiyakara proper bondsman parivara and aramika Another class of slaves who were mainly state slaves and convicts donated to the monasteries in lieu of capital punishment were fotuhu Buddha households According to Michael Aung Thwin the Burmese word for slave was kyun but this was also a more general term for servant or subject which by extension applied to everyone below the king Three categories of bondage existed kyuntaw crown bondsperson hpayakyun serfs and kyun private bondsperson In Thai the term kha was used both as subject of the king everybody and as the social category below free citizens corresponding with slaves In Cam bodia different Khmer terms were used to differentiate debt slaves prey ngeer as opposed to prey chea free people from other forms of stateroyal slaves pol In Vietnamese the lower classes were divided into the cate gories of free person dˆandinh and those in various states of dependency including slave nˆoty public slaves quan nˆoty and slave heavy laborers khaodinh The linguistic and social diversity of archipelagic Southeast Asia is also mirrored in multiplicity of terms for slave Several Malay law codes set out the definition of a slave According to Matheson and Hooker there were five main categories of slaves in the eighteenthcentury Malacca Laws UndangUndang Melaka Biduanda and sakai translated as royal servant but included ethnic connotations as both these words were the Malay terms for the aboriginal people of the Malay Peninsula Mudamuda the Malay word for children or youths also appears as a category of bondspeople Hamba raja was the term applied to royal slaves Masuk hulur menjadi ulur referred to people condemned to slavery for committing a crime Hamba orang abdi dengan and buduk were more generic terms for slaves as opposed to free people merdehika In Bali where slavery was widespread various Balinese terms for specific types of slave existed Sepangan was the general term whereas debt slaves were called tetonggon Categories of slaves Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 167 owned by the rajas included panjeroan prostitute slave woman women convicted of witchcraft ngeleyak and anak bebinjat illegitimate children In the Philippines the general terms for slave or servant were oripun in Visayan and alipin in Tagalog but within these languages were many more specific terms for types of bondage This discussion provides merely a glimpse into the diversity of the ling uistic terms for slave and slavery But it must also be remembered that slaves in Southeast Asia often came from outside the region and indigenous people were exported to other parts of the world which makes even more complex the mix of languages involved in Southeast Asian slavery One must include the major European languages of traders who were themselves involved in the slave trade or were slave owners particularly Dutch English French Portuguese and Spanish Trade among Southeast Asian societies China and Japan also adds to the linguistic complexity of relationships of bondage given the fact that the purchase of slaves by traders was common in the region religious and philosophical aspects of slavery and bondage The early modern era was a period of profound religious cultural and social change in the entire region that fundamentally influenced the social and legal institution of slavery The cultural complexity of societies in Southeast Asia meant that the major philosophical traditions were all part of the evolution of slavery in the region during the early modern period One of the characteristics of Southeast Asian societies is their capacity for cultural borrowing and adaptation The early modern period was one of intense cultural religious and philosophical ferment that was increased with the process of state formation in the region It is therefore difficult to analyze slavery within Southeast Asia without direct reference to the basic philosophical tenets of the major religions in the region namely HinduBuddhism NeoConfucianism Islam and Christianity A brief periodization of the transmission and spread of these religions in Southeast Asia is necessary in order to make sense of how these religions shaped the societies that adopted them and thereby altered their preexisting prac tices of indigenous slavery The period of Indianization of Southeast Asia wherein HinduBuddhism was first adopted by local societies took place by the end of the first millennium of the Common Era Theravada Buddhism had displaced earlier Mahayana Buddhist and Hindu prac tices in mainland Southeast Asia by the fifteenth century At the same time NeoConfucianism displaced HinduBuddhism in Vietnam as a state philosophy but did so with the retention of Buddhist beliefs among the population The coming of Islam to Southeast Asia was most profoundly felt in the archipelagic regions of the Malay Peninsula Indonesia and the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 168 the cambridge world history of slavery Philippines from the thirteenth century although Muslim traders had been in the region for several hundred years The Portuguese and Spanish incur sions into Southeast Asia introduced the Catholic version of Christianity into the region which was adopted as the dominant religion in various parts of the Southeast Asian archipelago most particularly in the Philip pines from the early sixteenth century and in parts of the eastern Indonesian archipelago When HinduBuddhist philosophies were partially incorporated into Southeast Asian societies in the period before 1000 CE the caste system that developed in South Asia was not adopted in the region The South Asian designation of Harijan some low caste or untouchable groups was sometimes associated with a form of slavery But although slavery was commonly practiced on the island of Bali the only remaining Hindu Buddhist society by the fifteenth century it was not associated with the caste system In Buddhist philosophy slavery exists as both a metaphor of the human condition and as a socioeconomic relationship linked to the sangha monastic institutions and to the royal court Slavery was justified within the doctrines of karma merit and samsara the birth and death cycle of reincarnation One was enslaved within the confines of the human ego until liberated into a state of nirvana enlightenment Confucianism in Vietnam first spread by Chinese influence and con quest was modified by preexisting Vietnamese social structures that pre vented the total application of patriarchal structures in the society Nev ertheless the basic tenets of Confucian thought the duality of heaven and earth as represented in yin and yang embedded hierarchical power relations in the cosmos Social rank and hierarchy are deeply rooted in Confucianism through the moral precept of filial piety In general the harmony of society was protected by the mutuality of moral rule and obe dience throughout society from ruler over ruled parent over child male over female and old over young with master over slave being subsumed within these categories There was no specific doctrine on the status and treatment of slaves in Confucian texts although slavery was a common theme Because Confu cianism is fundamentally about obedience to superiors it is not surprising that Confucian texts exhort slaves to obedience and respect for their mas ters The inferiority of slaves was indicated by external markers of physique and dress Nevertheless Confucianisms fundamental humanism mitigated the position of slaves by stressing their humanity and the mutual obligation of master to slave An idealized construct of the masterslave relationship lies at the heart of Islamic theology whereby all true believers are the slave abd of Allah and all abd are equal in His eyes Slavery is set out in early Muslim law sharia in terms of very specific conditions for the masterslave relationship Slaves Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 169 were both people and property under sharia and therefore masters had a moral and legal obligation to feed clothe protect and educate their slaves in Islam Slaves had the right to marry and were protected under sharia Slave women who were concubines were accorded a particular status within the household which was further elevated by bearing the children of her master Theoretically people of the book Jews Christians Muslims and Zoroastrians could not be enslaved under Islamic law but slave owners were not obliged to manumit their slaves who converted to Islam although this was seen as a meritorious act The relationship of Christianity to slavery is complex and historically the Bible has been used both to uphold and to deny the morality of the institution of slavery in many parts of the world Nevertheless from the beginning of the fifteenth century the papal institutions of the Roman Catholic Church consistently exhorted against the enslavement of native peoples by Catholics particularly by the Spanish and Portuguese over seas Several papal bulls and letters to monarchs coming from generations of popes in Rome condemned slavery Although the Catholic Church and monarchs were firmly committed to the conversion to Christianity of indigenous peoples in their colonies this did not prevent them from importing slaves from anywhere else Christianity and slavery certainly coexisted throughout the Philippines historical patterns of slavery The early modern period was one of extremely rapid and farreaching social transformation within Southeast Asian societies Widespread demands for labor in expanding economies and states generated an expanding regional slave trade Although the open and closed model of slave societies has been of great use in analyzing slavery in the region it is important to recognize that the regional slave trade was part of this system Slaves could move between different systems of slavery within their own lifetimes thus the life experience of enslavement was not static In his comparative study of Asian and African systems of slavery James Watson defined a set of guidelines for the crosscultural and timeless definition of the term slave Slaves are acquired by purchase or capture their labor is extracted through coercion and as long as they remain slaves they are never accepted into the kinship group of the master Slavery is thus the institutionalization of these relationships between slave and owner Watson further modified this definition into two major modes of slavery comprising both open and closed systems A closed system of slavery is defined as a society in which slaves remain a distinct group of labor apart from the free members of society Slaves were perceived as separate on the basis of ethnicity and were only able to reproduce within society among their own kind or Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 170 the cambridge world history of slavery by supplementing their numbers through capture or trade Slaves were permanently stigmatized inferior and were completely outside the kinship system of the dominant members of society Watson identifies this system as primarily characteristic of Asian slave systems particularly in China and India In contrast he argues open systems of slavery existed mainly in Africa Open systems of slavery were characteristic of societies in which slaves were sometimes indistinct from free persons in legal and social terms or they were incorporated into the kinship lineages of their masters over time Societies with open systems of slavery were extremely fluid and absorptive of outsiders because labor was so valuable This form of social organization existed where people were the main indicators of wealth and power in society rather than land and alienable property This bifurcated definition of slave systems has remained fundamentally important for the analysis of slavery in Southeast Asia Although Watson himself admitted that modifications were necessary in his argument about an open African system and a closed Asian slavery because the case of South east Asia was contradictory and characterized by open slavery he argued that the exceptions proved the rule Southeast Asian societies exhibited open slavery because they had similar social organizations to African soci eties where wealth was defined in people rather than land Anthony Reid further refined Watsons model of slavery by demonstrating that Southeast Asian societies could be either closed or open could display characteristics of both and furthermore could change over time from one system to another This presented a major critique of Watson by inserting historical time into the analysis rather than relying on static anthropological models that posited no change over time Southeast Asia exhibited two models of societies in which the closed system of slavery operated in very different ways One model represented the relatively heavily populated laborintensive wetriceproducing agri cultural states which had highly centralized capital cities that characterized the classical states of mainland Southeast Asia like Angkor in Cambodia Pagan in Burma and Ayudhya in Thailand The other was the stateless form of societies that predominated in the highlands of the mainland or in parts of archipelagic Southeast Asia Southeast Asian societies all defined wealth in people regardless of whether they exhibited open closed or transitional systems of slavery Closed systems involved the immutable separation between social cate gories of nobility free and slave In stateless societies social position was exhibited in highly ritualized forms of property labor and social duties The aristocratic class by definition was able to draw upon the labor of slaves Slaves were permanently distinct on the basis of appearance cloth ing diet sexual restrictions and hereditary status In closed systems of slavery sexual relations between free and slave were considered polluting Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 171 for the former and were strictly punished both parties were often executed as an act of purification These societies included the islands of Nias the Melanau of Sarawak on the large island of Borneo Kalimantan the Toba Batak of Sumatra and the Sadan Toraja from the north of the island of Sulawesi in the eastern archipelago Slaves in these societies were relegated permanently to certain forms of labor including carrying water and cut ting wood and those tasks that were considered ritually impure like the handling of the dead Further distinctions were made between agricultural slaves and household slaves The former were relatively free compared to the latter because household slaves lived in close proximity to their masters The closed form of slavery was also characterized by the right to kill slaves for ritual purposes Among the Toraja it was customary for dead chiefs to be accompanied into the afterlife by a number of their slaves who would continue to serve them Slaves could also be legally killed as symbolic replacements for retributive justice in the case where the crime committed by a free person necessitated the death penalty However in Sadan Toraja some slave lineages particularly household slaves were not alienable and could not be redeemed or sold because of their importance to the ruling lineages Slaves recently brought into the society were much more likely to be those who were sold sacrificed or executed for judicial purposes Open systems of slavery were characterized by a much more flexible relationship between slave and free Slaves were not necessarily distinct on the basis of ethnicity from the free population Nor were there the same kinds of ritualized enforcement of separation on the basis of purity between slave and free This system therefore involved a variety of means for changing status of members of the society from slave to free or from free to slave The most obvious was that of debt bondage leading to enslavement Debt bondage was often hereditary creating a permanent slave lineage But this status could also be reversed with the redemption of debt or by manumission Slavery in these societies operated mainly as a mechanism to display wealth and to control labor Open systems of slavery in Southeast Asia became much more common from the fifteenth century with the growth of agricultural states and as commercialization and urbanization increased in the trading entrepˆots of the region and simultaneously created disposable wealth from trade and an intensified demand for manual labor The citystate of Melaka which was founded in the late fourteenth century and quickly became one of the premiere trading ports in the world had no indigenous freelabor market and relied on slaves A flexible system of slavery was essential to the fabric of these cosmopolitan trading entrepˆots in order to accommodate increased labor demands After the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511 the rising Islamic trading states of Aceh and Makassar also used slaves as the basis of labor Slaves were considered the most important personal commodity in these societies and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 172 the cambridge world history of slavery an essential marker of status and wealth Slaves were both hired and traded on open markets and slaves themselves could participate in such markets by purchasing slaves for themselves thereby lessening their own labor obligations Escaping manual labor enabled some slaves to eventually enter the free population Formal manumission was therefore not necessarily a marker of status or socially desirable in these societies Debt bondspeople could increase their own material wealth by selling themselves to a richer master Of course debt bondspeople could also be sold off by their masters Slaves did not ultimately have freedom of movement or control over their individual destinies However there was a social obligation not to sell debt bondspeople outside their natal society Various factors affected slavery in Southeast Asia including commer cialization state formation and religious conversion Increasing commer cialization and concurrent social and economic changes in the region beginning in the sixteenth century and increasing in intensity from the seventeenth century meant that some societies shifted from closed to open systems of slavery Whereas slavery in Nias before the seventeenth century was characterized by a closed system wherein slaves were not alien able within the society the archipelagic slave trade spread to Nias Nias slaves became important export commodities and the women were highly regarded for their beauty and were extremely sought after in the regional slave markets The introduction of Islam to Southeast Asia also altered patterns and practices of slavery in the region As societies converted to Islam peoples perceptions of insiders and outsiders changed Religion became one of the markers of social status NonMuslim status became an important element in defining eligibility for slave status Muslim slaves were not alienable and nonMuslim slaves were supposed to be encouraged to convert This changed the patterns of the slave trade and ownership in the region Non Muslim societies became increasingly targeted as suppliers in the regional slave trade particularly the island of Bali which consisted of small frag mented polities The conversion of societies to Islam from the top down could result in quite radical shifts in the practice of slavery For example the conversion of the Bugis ruler in South Sulawesi in the early seven teenth century was accompanied by the emancipation of all hereditary slaves thereby shifting the basis of slavery in society from closed to open Local Bugis were no longer enslaved and slaves were brought in from else where The role of women in open systems of slavery and particularly in Islamic societies encouraged the incorporation into the dominant group of children born to concubines within a masterslave relationship This is diametrically opposite to the form of reproduction within closed systems of slavery where sexual relations between slave and master were taboo Social mobility through labor and reproduction were therefore embedded Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 173 features of the open system of slavery In short slavery in Southeast Asia provides an incredibly rich example of how systems of slavery can change over time Watson criticized the analysis of slavery based on a slaverytokinship continuum on the basis that it presumed slavery was a linear process in which most slaves would eventually become kin it therefore did not distin guish adequately between the status of slavery and kinship Nevertheless he recognized that his models would not have universal application and that societies could exhibit characteristics of either system on a continuum A review of the major forms of enslavement illustrates this point Debt Bondage Debt slavery existed within a spectrum of Southeast Asian forms of bondage and obligation It was not something foreign to the everyday life of ordinary people in these societies People could sell themselves or members of their family into debt slavery through a variety of means Peasants and poor urban dwellers often bonded themselves during times of economic hardship It was preferable to live as a debt slave than to starve The reason debt bondage is considered a form of slavery is because the debt was transferable People could be sold to someone else through the transfer of their debt obligation However the debt bondsperson could themselves often initiate this transaction to exchange one master for another The primary definition of bondage depending on vertical ties to an individual to whom one was bound was more important than the legal status of bondage Debt bondspeople perceived their social relationships through their ties to their masters rather than considering their common identity with other debt slaves Debt slavery could be temporary but often the debt was not repaid and was inherited by the debtors family It was this aspect of debt bondage that shifted the status of some people into hereditary slavery The social metaphor for slavery was that of extended household relationships Debt bondage was by far the most widespread and common form of enslavement in early modern Southeast Asia Anthony Reid states early modern travelers observed that debt bondage was so common that men would gamble themselves into bondage In the TobaBatak region of Indo nesia men who wanted to gamble would carry a special rope with them to the gambling arenas as an indication that their gambling debts could be paid if necessary through their own debt bondage War Captives War captives were another major source of slaves Southeast Asian societies were often deeply divided among themselves and prone to both internal Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 174 the cambridge world history of slavery succession crises and internecine war as well as regional wars of conquest This was a major element in generating slaves in the region The enslave ment of conquered or raided populations by ethnically different peoples was one of the oldest and most common forms of gaining slaves as in most parts of the world Two different patterns emerged First was the capture and raiding of aboriginal populations or hills people from stateless societies or weak states by members of a stronger state The second pattern was the conquest of soldiers and villagers of neighboring states in wartime where ethnic differences were apparent but different perceptions of race were in play But over generations war captives were usually assimilated into the population of the conquering society as debt slaves Slavery in Angkor Cambodia may be traced though literary sources and temple inscriptions Slaves were often captured during raids on the hill peoples These slaves were considered savages by the dominant population ethnically distinct and inferior to the Khmers who ruled Angkor Sexual relations between slave and free were considered defiling and were frowned upon War captives furnished the largest number of slaves in the early period of Cambodian history Although the capture of aboriginal people and neighboring ethnic groups constituted the most numerous sources war captives came from as far away as India War captives were generated by royal armies and private mercenaries and were either retained by the ruler or sold to private individuals War slaves were often tattooed or branded to set them apart from the free population particularly if they had attempted escape Mabbett speculates that over time the proportion of foreign slaves diminished and the enslavement of local Khmers increased The balance of slavery shifted away from acquiring war captives toward localized debt bondage as the state stabilized The evidence for slavery in the history of Angkor is scanty but the temple reliefs depicting slaves as war captives and royal construction laborers are some of the most vivid images of slavery in early Southeast Asia In Burma the enslavement of Thai and Lao war captives during the sixteenth century and of Thai and Arakanese during the eighteenth cen tury created extra labor for the ruler who then distributed some of these captives to clients and monasteries European mercenaries particularly Portuguese were also sometimes captured Over several generations these captives were assimilated into the Burmese population usually becoming indistinguishable from the local population Judicial Enslavement Judicial enslavement was also widespread in Southeast Asian societies The first major Vietnamese law code Lˆe Code dating from the 1430s specifically outlined the crimes for which enslavement could be the punishment Forced labor and involuntary servitude were the second category of the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 175 Five Penalties the first being corporal punishment the third exile and the fourth and fifth varieties of execution The fourteenthcentury ˆAgama Sanskrit law code of the Madjapahit Empire of central Java detailed that enslavement to the king could result from nonpayment of penal fines imposed upon an individual In the Philippines a 1433 indigenous legal code the Keliatntiaw text of the Panay state emphasized slavery as punish ment for violating laws The Islamic legal codes that are grouped together as the Undangundang Melaka and the various Melakaderived texts of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries make numerous references to bondage being the punishment for specific crimes These law codes derive from other Islamic legal codes in substituting fines corporal punishment and bondage for all but capital crimes The Three Seals Laws of King Rama I compiled in 1805 cites the punishment for bankruptcy as enslavement Royal Slaves Royal slaves formed a smaller category of bondage The general socio political pattern of Southeast Asia constituted power as control over people rather than over land or disposable property Therefore as explained earlier the relationship of rulers to the population they controlled was expressed in vertical ties of obligation and bondage that often used the metaphor of masterslave relations Apart from personal slaves who lived in close proximity to the ruler the most common form of royal bondage was the extraction of corvee labor from free subjects This form of labor extraction by the ruler must be distinguished from slavery Burma Thailand and Cambodia all experienced periods of strong states when corvee was as heavy a burden as slavery Royal slaves were most likely to be part of the royal household or permanently engaged in laboring directly for the state as craftsmen or builders The social position of royal slaves could therefore vary tremendously with some royal slaves being in positions of great political influence and enjoying a high standard of living For example from 1613 to 1885 in Burma Portuguese artillerymen were incorporated into the Burmese army as a distinct hereditary group intermarrying locally but remaining separate through clothing religion and function Slave concubines could also rise to prominence in the royal household as the favorite partner of the ruler or by giving birth to a particularly talented child who could take advantage of their royal parentage despite his or her illegitimacy Nevertheless the chief characteristic of royal slaves remained their status as alienable and transferable property Rulers could transfer their slaves to private individuals usually aristocratic or wealthy supporters or as donations to monasteries and temples As mentioned in states where competition for labor was intense royal corvee demands were heavy burdens upon ordinary people One way to escape this fate was to sell oneself as a slave to a private individual As Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 176 the cambridge world history of slavery the slave of another individuals could escape laboring for the state In strong states this set up a dynamic of competition between the ruler the aristocracy and private subjects over the control of labor Rulers actively tried to minimize private slavery Where the state made use of corvee it was sometimes preferable to be enslaved to a wealthy individual whose labor demands might not be onerous than to be a free peasant submitting to the confiscation of labor or produce to the state Private Slaves Slaves were an essential category of labor particularly in the maritime entrepˆots of Southeast Asia Asian and foreign merchants alike utilized slave labor to do business and in many cases purchased female slaves as temporary wives or concubines for the duration of their stay In the case of Chinese merchants and laborers who settled permanently in Southeast Asian societies they often bought slave women for wives Consequently Chinese and their families acculturated to the local society over genera tions Not all people who purchased slaves were wealthy travelers observed that manual labor was considered of low status so that anyone who could purchase a slave to perform these tasks did so Again the essential charac teristic of private slaves was their alienability as property Even if one sold oneself into slavery ones master could sell ones labor to another transfer ring the debt to the new master The position of being a slave was generally to relinquish ultimate control over ones daily life although customary laws governed the boundaries of masterslave relations Temple Slaves A final category comprises monastery and temple slaves Slaves were often given by rulers and private individuals as donations to the Buddhist monk hood or sangha in order to accumulate karma merit Slaves were also attached to templebuilding projects as artisans and laborers Temple slaves in Buddhist societies could also labor in the fields or engage in trade on behalf of the sangha thereby relieving monks from secular labor to exclu sively perform their religious duties As with private slaves sangha slaves were exempt from corvee labor for the state this could set up a dynamic of competition for labor between the most powerful institutions within Buddhist states Yet one of the primary functions of rulers in these states was to ensure the wellbeing of the sangha and to endow it with property including slaves in order to accumulate karma on behalf of the society as a whole The rulers obligations within Buddhist states with strong sang has therefore generated considerable tension in the control over people as Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 177 property Rulers were obliged to donate their own slaves thereby increasing the labor power of the sangha at their own expense slave trades networks and markets There was a chain of trading networks linking the sale of indigenous produce to the trade in guns and opium by Europeans and finally to the tea trade in China The expansion of the slave trade by professional raiders like the Sulu Sultanate the Bugis and the Butonese also disrupted other preexisting trading patterns through the size and scope of their raiding networks to slave markets in port cities like Batavia Makassar and Manila As slavery was also part of the social fabric of most Southeast Asian societies it is not surprising that there was a vigorous and long standing slave trade throughout the region The Southeast Asian slave trade developed rapidly during this period Precolonial Southeast Asia was by virtue of its geographical position at the crossroads of two major maritime trading networks of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea Indeed one of the earliest names for the region was the land below the winds indicating the importance of the coastal region of Southeast Asia as the meeting place between the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean as well as the bottleneck between the Indian Ocean the South China Sea and the Pacific The complex web of trading networks linking Southeast Asia to the rest of the world existed within both maritime and overland trade The famous Silk Route across central Asia to China and farther on to Europe was also connected to the Southeast Asian trading networks These ancient trading networks existed for at least a thousand years before the development of the Atlantic Ocean trading systems By the beginning of the fourteenth century Southeast Asian trading networks were already part of the very fabric of the societies of the region Commercialization further intensified during the early modern period to the end of the eighteenth century The previous discussion of methods of enslavement points to the trad ing of slaves within Southeast Asian societies But transfers of slaves among Southeast Asian societies were also an important source of slaves Some societies flourished through slave trading but all societies had slave trades As outlined earlier raiding stateless hill peoples was one of the major sources of slaves in mainland Southeast Asia Outsiders were often the captors in this slave trade selling slaves to the settled lowland states However with the increasing importance of firearms in the region from the fifteenth cen tury which intensified with the growing European presence hill dwellers sometimes sold their own marginal people to traders in exchange for guns With the spread of Islam in archipelagic Southeast Asia nonMuslim peo ples of the islands interiors were targeted as slaves for the interior trade Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 178 the cambridge world history of slavery of coastal Islamic polities or as commodities for the regional slave trade This was the case with the upland Toraja of Sulawesi the Batak of Suma tra the Dayak of Borneo and the people of Luzon in the Philippines Merchants carried slaves on their vessels to major slave markets in trad ing entrepˆots like Melaka Banten and Patani from the fifteenth century onward Unlike the transAtlantic slave trade from Africa slaves were usually carried on local vessels as one of many commodities being traded The vision of hundreds of slaves packed in minute spaces and chained below the decks of ships is one unique to the European and Arab transoceanic slave trades not of the regional trades within Africa or Asia Islamization of Southeast Asian societies often ended the slave trade in local people but stimulated the trade in outsiders Such was the case in the Javanese sultanates from the fifteenth century When Islamization ended the trade in the local population these societies looked beyond the island to nonIslamic societies like Nias the Malukus and the Sunda Islands for slaves The conversion of the ruler of Aceh to Islam under Sultan Iskander Muda r 160736 resulted in the subjugation of nonIslamic neighboring polities generating approximately twentytwo thousand captives as slaves into Aceh Some island sultanates expanded rapidly with their involvement in the oceanic slave trade The Sulu Sultanate in the eastern archipelagic zone that now comprises part of Indonesia and the Philippines flourished partly as a result of this regional slave trade they raided the populations of parts of the eastern Indonesian archipelago and the Philippines for slaves using fastmoving fleets of perahus local vessels The Sulu Sultanate is one of the prime examples of the complexity of the slave trade in South east Asia because slaves were a major commodity in the development of the society Certain Southeast Asian societies such as the Sultanate of Aceh were involved in the Indian Ocean slave trade that linked the region to Africa South Asia and the Middle East via Islamic trading networks Slaves from Madagascar the East African coast and the Middle East were traded in Aceh in the fifteenth century by traders from South Asia and to Melaka by Sundanese traders African slaves will be dealt with separately later A tiny minority of Europeans were themselves enslaved in South east Asian societies mostly as war captives but they became important as mercenaries in Aceh some Portuguese slaves were highly valued for their medical knowledge South Asian societies were intimately linked to Southeast Asian trading networks and slave supplies Bengali traders were involved in the transIndian Ocean slave trade Southeast Asian slaves were exported to Sri Lanka and indigenous Sri Lankans traded to Southeast Asian societies Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 179 The involvement of Chinese traders in the Southeast Asian slave trades was ubiquitous and constituted a particular market for the trade in slave women from nonIslamic societies Chinese men who lived permanently in the trading entrepˆots were mostly unable to procure wives from China during the early modern period because of the prohibitions against travel and emigration They resorted to buying slave women as concubines and wives The children of these relationships were mostly raised as the legit imate free heirs of their father and stable family units evolved over time localizing the Chinese trading communities Chinese traders also acted as middlemen for the slavetrading networks in the region Slaves were one of many commodities from which traders gained huge profits despite the high death rate of slaves during their capture and voyaging Slaves traded overland in northern mainland Southeast Asia were also part of the commercial trading networks of the region although less is known about such traffic slavery and european colonialism to c 1800 Europeans entered Southeast Asia from the early modern period with their own notions of slaves and slavery From the sixteenth century Europeans in the region increased the numbers of slaves overall stimulated the slave trade and redefined racial differentiation in those territories where they took control Europeans consolidated the practice of chattel slavery in Southeast Asia and extended the slave networks throughout the region linking Southeast Asian slavery to Africa and the Americas At its height Portuguese influence in Southeast Asia in the late sixteenth century linked its imperial capital Goa in South Asia to Sri Lanka Melaka and the famous spice islands of the Malukus The Portuguese relied on slave labor which they acquired through local purchase regional trade or directly from Africa The Spanish established in Manila and the Dutch in Batavia depended on slaves they purchased locally or whom they hired through subcontractors Royal decrees applied throughout the Spanish Empire for bade the enslavement of the indigenous population of the colonies In the New World this stimulated the slave trade in Africans Portuguese slave traders supplied the Spanish American colonies with slaves from Africa whereas in the Philippines they purchased both African and Indian slaves Manumission rates were high in Spanish colonies and by the seventeenth century most were freed to labor for wages Spanish rulers of the Philip pines instituted a form of corvee labor that became more significant than slave labor because it was obligatory for free indigenous men Debt slavery persisted and even increased during the eighteenth century as colonial taxes and tribute promoted economic hardship among the marginal indigenous population Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 180 the cambridge world history of slavery Europeans entering the region recognized the existence of local systems of slavery and adapted them to their own use Although the use of slave women as concubines was illegal in the Dutch East India Company terri tories it was known to be widespread The manumission of slave women for purposes of matrimony was not uncommon among the lower ranks of European colonists as it was for merchants of all nationalities in the region Many travelers commented that slaves were ubiquitous in indige nous societies but were generally well treated and better off than servants in Europe However European powers also introduced fundamentally dif ferent relations of slavery as legal property they imposed their own legal systems including law codes often based on Roman law These European slave codes were applied as law within their territories and their European subjects were obliged to live by these laws even outside their residence in these colonies Nevertheless the practice of slavery and the use of slaves especially by the urban elite whose slaves were used for conspicuous displays of wealth were very similar to indigenous Southeast Asian patterns of slavery The European elite and their Eurasian wives in Dutch Batavia became so infamous for their conspicuous consumption of wealth that the Dutch East India Company introduced sumptuary laws These were designed to impose a rigidly visible hierarchy that ensured the preeminence of the company elite in strict order of rank over rich burghers The Mossel code entitled Measures for Curbing Pomp and Circumstance promulgated in 1754 reserved a particular section for slaves that is illuminating in terms of the social role of slaves among the European elite Only the wives and widows of the supreme governing council and court were allowed to be accompanied in public by three female slaves These slaves might wear dia monds gold hairpins and chains and gold and silver gauze cloth Senior merchants wives were allowed two slave women attendants who were ordered to wear less expensive clothing and jewelry Other women were allowed only one female attendant in public The number and dress of slave men who accompanied their masters in public were similarly restricted even to the point of what color they could wear The numbers of slaves in these elite households were very high fifty or more was not unusual in the wealthiest Dutch colonial families These slaves were assigned to the most trivial household tasks such as carrying their masters pipe or betel box Others were assigned to more usual domestic duties of cooking and cleaning The Dutch East India Company introduced a completely novel form of slavery into Southeast Asia in the form of Company slaves Unlike royal slaves in indigenous Southeast Asian societies slaves working for the Company did not have the same association with a supreme master Considering the fundamental importance of personal ties in Southeast Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 181 Asian societies indigenous slaves must have made major adjustments as they came to realize they were the slaves of a corporation rather than of a single master These slaves were purchased by the Company and held in ownership as assets to be used for Company purposes They were housed in slave lodges or in the Companys castles fortresses and factories and they performed manual labor of all types The participation of Europeans in Southeast Asian slavery also extended the scope of the slave trade beyond the established patterns of the region For example Southeast Asian slaves constituted onefifth of the slave population imported to the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa Slaves from Southeast Asia South Asia East Africa Madagascar and Mauritius were the basis of the heterogeneous colonial labor force in both urban centers and the rural economy During the seventeenth century most slaves were of Asian origin but this pattern changed by the late eighteenth century with slaves mostly being imported from the southwest Indian Ocean zone The proportion of Asian slaves declined over the Dutch colonial period By the time the British conquered the Cape and ended the official slave trade in 1808 there was a slight majority of locally born slaves The Dutch established nutmeg plantations on Banda after its conquest in the early sixteenth century first deporting the Bandanese population en masse and then reimporting them as slave labor to work Europeanowned plantations Slave labor was also the basis of production in the cloveproducing islands of Ambon The mining sector particularly gold and silver mines in Sumatra used slave labor although the mortality rate in these enterprises was high whether run by indigenous societies or European colonists The Dutch East India Company was dismantled at the end of the eighteenth century as the Dutch were displaced in Southeast Asia most especially by the British who by then were beginning their crusade against slavery worldwide conclusion Slaves fulfilled roles at every level of society but their social status varied in accordance with their position as slaves and the system of slavery in which they existed Slaves were used for a multitude of economically and socially productive roles in Southeast Asia The almost ubiquitous presence of debt slavery and bondage meant that slavery permeated society at every level Most slaves in indigenous Southeast Asian societies were not denied rights of property and could themselves be slave owners They could also have spouses and families and legal rights in family something denied to those who toiled under chattel slavery Slaves held positions at every level of society depending upon their relations of bondage They could be powerful royal administrators and palace retainers or public laborers favorite court concubines and mothers of recognized royalty or domestic Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 182 the cambridge world history of slavery servants officials at every level of state including highranking military and naval officers or lowly servants foot soldiers and common sailors ritually important skilled craftsmen or temple sacrifices powerful merchants or ordinary market women highly prized cosmopolitan translators or easily replaceable urban workers maritime fisherfolk or rural laborers Southeast Asian slavery exhibited a myriad of different dimensions and was not static in any of the societies in which it existed Furthermore people who were enslaved often entered the regional slave trade that then thrust them into forms of servitude in which masterslave relations could have entirely new meanings for them Many systems of slavery in South east Asia had detailed reciprocal social and economic obligations between masters and slaves that were enforced in both customary and written law When slaves were transported from their own natal societies their experi ence of slavery was often more oppressive This was particularly the case for Southeast Asian slaves who entered into slave relations governed by European attitudes and laws One of the understudied dimensions of slavery is that of age Fragmen tary evidence suggests that youthful slaves were the most highly sought after The obvious factors supporting this are the increased labor and reproduc tion potential of younger slaves Written evidence abounds on the high value of sexual attractiveness in younger slave women who were destined for concubinage However one must also consider that the possibility of young slaves adjusting to new social situations was far greater than those wrenched from already established lives Conversely the value of older sick and physically impaired slaves was much diminished Manumission took place in Southeast Asian forms of slavery through numerous mechanisms Slaves could purchase other slaves in order to escape the burden of manual labor Many societies included legal provisions for slaves to manumit themselves or to insist upon being sold to another master Religious conversion to Islam or Christianity or the bearing of a masters child by a slave woman could often be the legal or affective route to manumission or at least the manumission of ones children The old and sick were sometimes manumitted to release masters from the burden of caring for them It is often through legal records that contain cases involving slaves and sometimes testimony from slaves themselves that one glimpses the perspective of slave experience The widespread nature of escape as a form of resistance attests to the fact that slavery in Southeast Asia was not necessarily perceived as a benevolent institution in society Most Southeast Asian legal codes had extensive provisions and punishments for many forms of slave resistance Insolence theft assault rape murder and escape by slaves were detailed in Southeast Asian law codes with harsh punishments as fundamental violations of the social hierarchy Crimes committed against Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 183 slaves were punished to a lesser degree proportionate to the inferior social status of slaves within society This was as much the case for indigenous Southeast Asian slave codes as for the governing European colonial law codes By the end of the eighteenth century patterns and practices of Southeast Asian slavery had changed considerably from those of the early fifteenth century Increasing tendencies toward state formation and successive dis location the commercialization of the region including the intensifica tion of trade in guns and drugs the beginning of territorial conquest by European powers in short the incorporation of Southeast Asian societies into world capitalism in ways that were previously unknown all stimulated slavery within the region Paradoxically it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century that European powers particularly the British began to suppress the slave trade worldwide In 1811 the slave trade was outlawed in those parts of the Indonesian archipelago under European control although formal emancipation in what became the Dutch colony of the Netherlands East Indies Indonesia did not take place until 1860 This of course applied only to those areas under Dutch control European powers debated the desirability of abolishing indigenous slavery but they had a vested interest in not disrupting indigenous social relations to the point where it affected economic production It was during this very period that the slave trade in the Sulu Sultanate reached its peak Slavery in this part of the southern Philippines archipelago was only suppressed around 1900 particularly after the Spanish occupation of the Sulu capital Jolo in 1875 Slavery was abolished in all British territories worldwide in 1834 following the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 But like other European powers the British took much longer to suppress the indigenous slave trade in its territories It was only in 1883 that the British forced the sultan of Perak to abolish slavery and other Malay sultanates were forced to do the same although the official abolition by statute of slavery in Burma only took place in 1926 Emancipation followed the formal colonization by the French in Cambodia in 1884 and also in Vietnam and Laos Siam Thailand the only Southeast Asian state never directly colonized by Europeans nevertheless embraced modernization in the form of the abolition of slavery The reforming King Chulalongkorn r 18681910 abolished slavery by decree in 1905 after several decades of emancipation of slaves that began with those born in the first year of his reign Suppression of the institution of slavery within Siamese society therefore took place through natural attrition over generations By the time slavery was declared illegal the social transition toward freedom for the subjects of Siam had already taken place Despite these legal decrees slavery persisted well beyond formal emancipation in Southeast Asia Indeed the late twentieth century has seen an increase Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 184 the cambridge world history of slavery of slave trading and slavery particularly sexual slavery in the region and worldwide further reading Travel accounts constitute one of the main sources that historians use to glean information about slavery in the region during this period One of the first English examinations of slavery in Southeast Asia was contained in Thomas Stanford Raffless History of Java London 1817 and focused on Dutch colonial slavery and the archipelagic slave trade from the islands of Bali and Sulawesi which supplied the slave markets in Java It was not until the twentieth century that the first academic analyses of slavery that included Southeast Asia were written The first of these was Herman J Nieboer in Slavery as an Industrial System Ethnological Researches The Hague 1910 who defined a slave as the property of another person living at a lower political and economic status than most people within the society and performing compulsory labor Bruno Lasker wrote the first monograph on Southeast Asian slavery entitled Human Bondage in Southeast Asia Chapel Hill NC 1950 Laskers treatise against indigenous slavery and bondage was published six years after his Peoples of Southeast Asia London 1944 which was written as an emotional appeal for the liberation of Southeast Asians from Japanese domination during World War Two and in support of progress in the region in the name of the free world Southeast Asian slavery was also analyzed within the growing field of comparative history particularly as the study of slavery moved beyond concentrating on the New World Robin Winks argued this position in introducing John Gullicks analysis of DebtBondage in Malaya as part of his edited compilation Slavery A Comparative Perspective New York 1972 James Watsons edited collection on Asian and African Systems of Slavery Berkeley CA 1980 examined indigenous systems of slavery from an anthropological perspective He argued following Nieboer and Moses Finleys analyses that slaves were social outsiders The definition of the institution of slavery was firstly the social marginality of slaves and sec ondly their status as property Martin Kleins edited collection Breaking the Chains Slavery Bondage and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia Madison WI 1993 examines patterns of servitude in Africa and Asia prior to emancipation and argues that many precolonial and premodern forms of bondage persisted beyond the existence of formal slavery in both Africa and Asia James Warren in The Sulu Zone 17681898 The Dynamics of External Trade Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a South east Asian Maritime State second edition Singapore 2007 redefined the concept of region periodization state formation and slavery in Southeast Asia Anthony Reids edited collection Slavery Bondage and Dependency Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in southeast asia 14201804 185 in South East Asia New York 1983 brought together the threads of ear lier research and adopted Watsons concept of open and closed systems of slavery Reid also stressed the necessity to examine Southeast Asian slavery in indigenous terms and argued that slavery needed to be differentiated from other forms of vertical social bonding based on differential status and mutual obligation that formed the basis of these societies The centrality of control and mobilization of productive and reproductive labor rather than land in Southeast Asian societies accounted for the fundamental impor tance of dependency and bondage in these cultures Colonial slavery had to negotiate preexisting systems of slavery in order to perpetuate this form of domination in the early modern period David Kelly and Anthony Reid turned their attention to examining the indigenous concepts of freedom in both historical and contemporary political terms in Asia in the edited collection Asian Freedoms The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia Cambridge 1998 Although the study concentrates on the evolution of the notions of freedom in the region the editors recognize that paradoxi cally it is important for the analysis of indigenous notions of slavery The study of gender in Southeast Asia and of womens history has been some what neglected Barbara Watson Andayas edited collection Other Pasts Women Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia Manoa 2000 is an important contribution to this growing field The position of women as slaves and concubines is examined by several authors although none focuses primarily on slavery Slavery also constitutes an essential element of the examination of Dutch colonialism in its imperial capital Batavia the spice producing islands of Amboina and other parts of the Dutch Empire See for example Markus Vinks article The Worlds Oldest Trade Dutch Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Sev enteenth Century Journal of World History 14 2003 131177 on Dutch slavery and slave trade which situates slavery in Southeast Asia within its most significant oceanic networks Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 8 SLAVERY IN EARLY MODERN CHINA pamela kyle crossley Chinas 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 As a conquest state the Qing was heavily dependent upon captured and otherwise coerced labor on its farms in its mines and in its military support units In addition it embraced a Central Asian tradition of military slavery that disseminated the ideal of personal dependency to the highest levels of society In 1644 the Qing conquered north China and in the ensuing forty years consolidated control over south China A century later the Qing had also conquered Mongolia and eastern Turkestan now the province of Xinjiang As the expansion came to a close in the mideighteenth century Qing society and economy entered a transition from an expanding military enterprise to stable civil rule The combination of Central Asian Northeastern Asian and Chinese institutions of coercion produced a wide spectrum of slavery and servitude across all strata of society and diverse economic spheres 186 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 187 However like many early modern societies economic and social change resulted in a weakening of many traditional patterns of deference and dependence In some ways these trends were accelerated by overt attempts by the imperial government to attenuate some of the most pervasive struc tural and ideological underpinnings of social abasement Though the status of most enslaved or legally encumbered people within the empire remained unchanged the trend toward greater commercialization of the economy and liberalization of labor markets was discernible and continuing the conundrum of property If the essential core of slavery is the physical coercion of labor from individ uals who are invisible as legal persons a good deal of Chinas social history will come under the slavery rubric Two other elements however are more difficult to locate in the Chinese case The first is the issue of prop erty Legal and popular definitions of property in China do not compare neatly with those of traditions derived from Roman law In China as in most other places of premodern times rights of use or possession of land things and people were relative and conditional Words in Chinese statutes that are agreed to represent property rights do not distinguish between own ership and control The basic imperial legal code containing criteria for recognition of ownership is extant only from the period of the early Tang Empire seventh century CE It is assumed to reproduce the fundamen tal principles of the legal code of the Han Empire 203 BCE220 CE which is lost Certainly the Tang code was the model for the imperial legal structures of the medieval and early modern periods in China For example the extant elements of the late imperial codes relating to the crime of fraudulently selling the property of another reproduce an element in the imperial code of the Tang The law as interpreted and applied made criminal the alienation of property from a person who had acquired sole rights over its use and income How those rights were acquired or came to be recognized could be a very complex matter but the rights themselves clearly could be and frequently were assigned to an individual and were not corporate In performance Chinese legal practice produced a common sense of personal property that was similar to conceptions of property in other parts of the world including Europe without generating an exact semantic equivalent to property ideas derived from Roman law The difference is particularly striking with respect to slavery Though Chinese law and social institutions provided for instances of complete control by some people over others to whom they had no family relationship people in China could not be reduced to res a thing or object because no res was defined in the law Perhaps the closest that Chinese law came to engag ing such an idea was in 1614 when Ming officials at Guangzhou learned Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 188 the cambridge world history of slavery that the Portuguese at Macao off their coast kept Africans as chattel Ming imperial law immediately forbade the sale of any Chinese to the Portuguese as slaves but otherwise made no further comment on the lawfulness or the morality of the practice A second conceptual consideration after property is that in European societies definitions of coerced labor and legal legibility applied only to those outside the family Theory and practice of familial institutions in China is perhaps too diffuse to construct meaningful dichotomies of the familial and nonfamilial Adoption of males particularly of the same surname for purposes of continuing the paterline was common and legal What might also have been common but was nevertheless strictly prohib ited by law for the entire imperial period in China was misrepresentation of the origin of adopted children for purposes of permitting children of slave or base origin to trespass upon the class status of the commoners or nobles The prohibition of class trespass by detailed legal prescription of sumptuary distinctions demand for proof of identity through genealogical documentation for all degree candidates and government officials the phys ical mutilation of criminals who must forever after remain of base status and heavy punishment of the fraudulent misrepresentation of the identities of adopted children were all characteristic of the wall erected in imperial Chinese law between base or slave status and that of the commoner Such institutions became more pronounced in the sense that punishment for class infractions became more severe in the early modern period than in the medieval and early periods Such increasing severity may have been a response to the gradual crumbling of traditional distinctions under the influences of commercialization of agriculture urbanization and massive migration across the expanse of the Qing Empire In any event the normal role of ascribed familial relationships in the mitigation of slavery is less useful in the Chinese than in most Western cases The discussion in this chapter rests heavily on the facts of coercion and personal legal obscurity rather than issues of property and family the legacy of baseness The history of dependency and coercion in China also presents elements that do not compare easily to the social or legal histories of Europe or North America Concubinage for instance became well defined in Chinese law and social tradition There is a margin at which concubinage and slavery could be blurred in the circumstances of some individuals known from the historical record but as general phenomena concubinage sex slavery domestic servitude and slavery can all be distinguished In addition there are plentifully represented forms of servitude into which individuals entered deliberately often by signing a contract to this effect as their last socially Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 189 visible act This was ostensibly voluntary yet for tenants unable to pay rent the source of the greatest quantity of selfsales there was very little volition involved when traditional interest rates were so steep that a single failure to make a timely payment led ineluctably to catastrophic delin quency Eunuchs too appear to have been poised irreducibly between the realms of voluntary and involuntary servitude Some mature men made a conscious decision to undergo castration in hopes of economic advancement In many more cases however the decision was dictated by economic circumstances or by criminal conviction or the procedure was inflicted upon boys too young to resist and possibly unable to understand the consequences Whatever the cause of a mans castration once made a eunuch the man could never again enter society as a free person unless like some escaped slaves he contrived to hide his true status Concubines eunuchs and rapacious interest rates were not unique to China yet the incidence of each contrasts to many societies for which the history and development of servitude and dependency are more familiar Coercion and dependency in the Qing Empire that governed China in the early modern period was partly derived from longstanding insti tutions of China In very early China circa BCE 2200 to BCE 1050 there was already a considerable servile class in agriculture and in public works However extant records provide little evidence of rigid formal heritable stratification at the time nor evidence of caste Legal institutions supporting a differentiation of class powers and identities are characteristic of the Zhou period circa BCE 1050 to BCE 206 that followed the Shang Certainly by the time of the creation of the first unified imperial order in China the Qin in BCE 221 followed by four hundred years of rule by the Han Empire a coerced stateowned population was defined and spread across the agricultural military and official domains An enduring feature of Chinese social organization and one apparently derived from preimperial times was the differentiation of society into base or mean jian and common populations The commoners variously referred to in the documents as level ping mass shu or good or improvable liang people were the overwhelming majority of the population They included government officials and elites of the learned professions large landholders merchants artisans farmers charioteers foot soldiers and actively employed men or women in any honorable profession Commoner status was like aristocratic status achieved at birth and was inalienable except by action of the state Below the commoners the base people also were normally born into their station sometimes by being the congenitally deformed offspring of commoner parents but could also decline to it by becoming prisoners of war convicted criminals or being identified as the idle which usually referred to surplus agricultural labor Poor people generally and the base population specifically performed Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 190 the cambridge world history of slavery the menial nonagricultural tasks that were popularly despised They guar ded the fields slopped nightsoil pounded earth for building of walls and houses gathered firewood burned charcoal and dug ditches and graves Their range of possible criminal behaviors was greater than those of commoners because of the increased possibility that they would show dis respect for their very numerous betters Their punishments if they should commit the same crimes as commoners were much more severe Not all base people were slaves but the law stipulated that commoners could not be enslaved unless they or their relatives should be convicted of a crime including idleness and thereby be reduced to base status When the state sought slaves it ostensibly was restricted to finding them among the base population Those who profited from the sale of slaves who could legally be sold only to the state were required to sell only base persons or face conviction themselves and demotion to base status The law however clearly represents a tiny fragment of the history of coercion and outright enslavement in early and medieval China In times of war and in times of grand state projects such as the construction of the Grand Canal in the late sixth and early seventh centuries and its rebuilding in the Yuan period 12721368 and the rebuilding of the Great Wall in the Ming 13681644 the state need for coerced labor obvi ously rose in proportions unrelated to the convict populations or to birth rates among the base class Some periods of imperial expansion or pro longed military conflict such as the early formation of the Qing Empire in the seventeenth century brought large numbers of captives into the slave ranks But in other times suppliers to the slave markets were left to their own devices to increase the pool of prospective slaves Prisoners of war and convicted criminals were marked in some way typically removal of a nose or an ear or application of a tattoo In early times convicts were specifically described as being nameless wu minghao and literally not human feiren the latter closely approximating terms used of slaves and of the congenitally deformed Popular culture of imperial times referred frequently to the reputed eagerness of criminals to reap profits in the slave market by kidnapping commoners and lopping off a foot to convert their victims to credible merchandise The threat to the innocent who could be taken unawares while traveling or while their relatives were absent from home was a theme of literature and a recurring scenario in law courts Movement from slave to nonslave status was infrequent but not impos sible Anecdotal representations of slaves whether of base or of common origin who rose high in the official or military ranks and eventually achieved nonslave status do exist In very early imperial times the terms of release from slavery were specified If a highstatus slave surrendered two bureaucratic or military ranks he could buy personal release and surrendering one could secure the release of a parent In all likelihood these releases were achieved by baseborn unmutilated enslaved men taken into Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 191 influential parts of government service who either distinguished themselves in battle typically by beheading enemies or performed unusually merito rious service to aristocratic overlords Thus baseness was a prerequisite to enslavement but not its substance Those specifically referred to in legal documents of the preimperial period as slaves males as nu women as bi were appositely described as half human and half thing Once enslaved they were forbidden to own property or to be paid for their work They never made their own decisions about when to work or what to work at They lived in the compounds of their overseers They could have no rec ognized marriages or legitimate children Their illegitimate children were born slaves Killing the not human was a light offense and depending on the circumstances perhaps no offense at all They could not sue in the courts and could not appear as witnesses in legal cases against their propri etors unless the latter were charged with treason In such cases vindication of the proprietor would mean death by strangulation for the slave Existing alongside the overt slavery that was present in China from earliest political history were other sets of servile classes and dominated persons A group often referred to as bondsmen li in early times more often pu in medieval and early modern documents were legally distin guished from slaves They appear in the records subsumed under the households or military units to which they were assigned They were evidently regarded as menials but do not otherwise appear to have been deprived of the legal visibility that would have approached the condition of the enslaved In many ways their status whether male or female resembled the status of women generally It is perhaps not surprising that slaves are one of the few categories of belongings that women of means were attested to have commanded From the beginning of imperial times in China to the early modern period women could not own land or buildings except as widows when their holdings were extensions of their husbands estates and were never paid for working in their own families Only in unusual circumstances did they make their own decisions about where to live what to work at or whom to marry Before the eighteenth century a married womans labor was customarily not rewarded with wages or goods paid to herself and female participation in skilled trades outside of agriculture or silk processing was rare The same was true of children both male and female In early imperial times men typically listed their wives and children as property as women frequently listed their slaves to be distributed after death along with their lands animals and buildings contracts selfsale and redemption From at least the early medieval period all possession of persons was nego tiated across two independent operative spheres that of formal law and that of private contracts The direct weight of imperial coercion gave force Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 192 the cambridge world history of slavery to the law The approval of local gods the value of personal credibility and fear of retribution by family or associates of the other party gave force to contracts County magistrates who had the responsibility for adjudicat ing civil disputes were typically left to decide cases on the basis of their understanding of local custom of the moral principles in the philosophical classics on their assessment of the characters of the plaintiffs or just their intuition Only criminal cases such as treason and murder came under the jurisdiction of the imperial system of legal review and appeal Household issues which would include normal cases relating to servitude slavery and base or common status were regarded as minor issues which Bernhardt and Huang identify with civil law and were handled at the level of the county magistrate with no possibility of appeal to more elevated strata of the government In the law all land was under the authority of the ruler and could not be privately sold or bought In the world of private contracts control of land constantly changed hands This was often but not always understood as the sale of rights of use or occupation rather than of the land itself Indeed by early modern times it had become a commonplace of Chinese land negotiations to acknowledge multiple ownership the tenant might own the topmost layer the dianpi or earth skin the landlord a deeper stratum which would include surface water and the state the deepest stratum including underground water sources Much land negotiation was done on a general principle of pawning the present owner would surrender its use to one to whom he was indebted with the understanding that he might redeem it at a future date This principle of implied redemptive rights by the seller permeated all transactions in medieval and early modern China including the sale and selfsale of individuals into slavery or servitude The history of farm tenants pawning themselves into slavery in lieu of payment in goods or cash is rich not unexpected in an economy in which the traditional interest rate on loans from rural landowners was 20 percent per month Disputes about alienated or converted property or allegations of fraud would go to countylevel magistrates for adjudication Because the legal statutes before the Qing did not recognize private land ownership the magistrates were in the ironic position of having to use extralegal local precedents customs character assessment and personal inclination to craft legal resolutions of the issues Extant documentation shows that all these dynamics applied to arrangements for slavery In the law private slave holding was not recognized Yet it is clear that when magistrates were not resolving extralegal land disputes they were expending a certain amount of time examining extralegal disputes over flight abduction illicit sale of commoners into slave status fraudulent sale of slaves belonging to another disputed slave status and challenges against servitude all of which Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 193 originated in private agreements but could end up in the magistrates courts for an ostensibly legal remedy Though a tiny fraction of these contracts survive they are sufficient to allow us to understand the practices standards and informal institu tions developed for the negotiation of status and trade Slaves as well as bondsmen concubines and wage laborers were bought and sold under contracts that stipulated the price the physical description of the person sold and the legal disclaimers of buyers and sellers From the seventh cen tury it was stipulated that sales of slaves and livestock between individuals would be reported to the local authorities but the evidence suggests this was only casually observed Sales documents for slaves however did for mulaically state that the individual was of base status The provision and the ways around it for the illegal slave traders were woven into popular literature as when the medieval monk Huiyuan a historical figure but here having a fictional adventure contrives to have himself sold as a slave in order to acquit himself of monetary debts in his present life and moral debts in a previous life When a gang leader who Huiyuan wishes to handle the sale protests that he does not have the proper documents relating to Huiyuans baseborn provenance and will open himself to prosecution if he sells the monk Huiyuan advises him to swear that it was in his own household that Huiyuan was born as a slave which would seal the monks commercial viability Later Huiyuan even dictates the contract which among the conventional obligations also condemns him to be reborn as an animal under which he is to be sold From roughly the same period we have a surviving customary wedding prayer that very vividly illustrates the different categories of slaves as well as the esthetics of slave acquisition Consistent with other documents for the period the prayer carefully distinguishes between the status of house slaves who are desired to be Chinese in this Chinese household and farm and field slaves who should be foreigners Beautiful slaves no gender specified will take care of the entertainment and as a final flourish the link between perceived physical deformity and servility provides the punch line of the recitation Gold and silver to fill my coffers year after year Wheat and rice to fill my barns at every harvest Chinese slaves to look after these treasures Foreign slaves to tend my livestock Fleetfooted slaves to attend me when I ride Strong slaves to till the fields Beautiful slaves to strum the harp and fill my wine cup Slenderwaisted slaves to sing and dance Midgets to hold the candle by my dining couch Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 194 the cambridge world history of slavery Records for virtually the entire imperial period indicate that slaves were held both by the state and by private individuals for not only agricultural labor mining and household tasks but also for entertainment Slaves in the entertainment category included acrobats and wrestlers but are best repre sented in art and literature by the singing girls and allwoman orchestras These women were often not of Chinese origin but were purchased in the stretches of Central Asia where stringed instruments and whirling dances were part of the indigenous traditions Overt slavery in China also encom passed a category overwhelmingly women but including some boys and men who were used primarily for sex This was an explicit status which affected the normal rules of sexual dominion over slaves For instance a generalpurpose woman slave kept in a household was in general subject to any demands made upon her by the householder or his family But once she had been sexually dominated by the father of the house she was off limits to the sons being then subject to normal familial rules of incest and avoidance Sex slaves however were rarely found in commoner households and were understood as being available to anybody their gentry overseers made them available to sex and slavery From the Han legal code forward the normal appellation for sex slaves was the music households yuehu as music and dance had been associated with sexual entertainments from very early times In the medieval and early modern periods music households normally functioned as official brothels attached to military garrisons The enrollment and distribution of sex and entertainment slaves was regulated by the imperial government directly This formal overt aspect of sexual slavery was reinforced by the relationship of female sexual servitude to the penal system The code of collective responsibility universally supported under all empires based in China meant that the conviction of a single male criminal usually supplied numerous women his wives daughters and perhaps even his mother to the states sexual slavery system Under the Ming dynasty the imperial government maintained networks of establishments for storing liquor drinking and dining which catered to bureaucrats and students advancing through the examination system These systems maintained complete records on their entertaining girls and paralleled the traditional music houses in garrison towns State sexual slaves are to be distinguished from the less formal categories of privately coerced females from prostitutes to concubines Diaries travel writings and popular literature from the twelfth century to the early twen tieth century amply attest to a very wide range of statuses and conditions associating with singing women and prostitutes whether female or male Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 195 In medieval China and Japan certain women who were celebrated as beau tiful and talented courtesans acquired wealth and independence It is clear however that such women were rare The historian of Chinas medieval social and cultural history Jacques Gernet referred to the majority of pros titutes as being subject to protection meaning that they were dependent and coerced subjects of maledominated institutions Without doubt private sex slavery was the dominant form of coercion in the cities overshadowing the conventional and traditional state involve ment and the explosive urbanization of China during the medieval and early modern period was accompanied by a proportional growth in sex ual servitude In addition to the independent stars of the prostitution world there were a greater number of contract workers primarily women who were extensively trained as musicians and dancers They were beau tifully dressed and heavily madeup and exclusively employed by private restaurants that kept them out of the main banqueting rooms downstairs but made them available to favored clients who were ushered upstairs In general they represented a privileged minority in the prostitution world The majority of prostitutes including most males who worked the trade congregated in the markets and along the most heavily traveled streets Their extravagant makeup and colorful clothes along with their demeanor instantly identified them to clients They announced themselves as belong ing shuyu to specific taverns and guest houses to which they brought their clients once business had been agreed This population of prosti tutes was entirely without independence It is a safe assumption that some proportion were under a private contractual agreement to an employer or creditor but it is unlikely that the degree of literacy among the women involved was high or that magistrates regarded the contracts as having any real significance A woman wishing to extract herself from prostitution had no means of doing so Women who made enough money in the sex trade to have redeemed themselves from slavery were already independently employed and in no need of redemption For the majority there was no choice but to work for the owner until death or until advancing age caused her or him to be put out on the streets without support The contrast between prostitution and concubinage an exclusive agree ment for sexual service between one man and one woman is clear Con cubines were domiciled and in the conditions of their daily life sometimes enjoyed the comforts and security of wives Once bought concubines were not to be sold and though inferior to wives their lives in the household and their fates were governed by the same rules of familial order as were all other residents Yet legal rulings combined with philosophical literature prescribing social mores clearly held concubines well below the moral sta tus of a wife Concubines found guilty of crimes such as disrespect or theft were punished more severely than wives and the intentional or accidental Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 196 the cambridge world history of slavery killing of a concubine incurred much lighter penalties than the killing of a wife On the other hand the status of concubines was far above that of slaves Concubines were not of base birth their sons were legitimate and of equal status with the sons of wives and concubines could not be sold as slaves or bondservants could be Nor were concubines prostitutes As the historian Matthew H Sommer has demonstrated for the early modern period prostitution outside the official brothel systems was part of the com plex world of private law and private crime its existence not acknowledged in the legal code and thus never explicitly prohibited Surviving contracts show marked regularities in the distinctions between slaves on the one hand and concubines tenants and serfs on the other Girls sold as servants by their parents typically had the phrase inserted into the contracts If something should happen to the girl while she is in the masters home it is her fate and will not provide a pretext for reopening the negotiations This closely resembles phrases routinely inserted into slavery contracts Such a servant girl however if she should win the approval of the head of her assigned household could achieve the rank of concubine Bondsmen and tenants had contracts stipulating terms of service or the interest rates for loans that they were to work off Concubines were pur chased under contracts that roughly paralleled the dowry arrangements made for wives All of these are to be distinguished from slaves for whom no promotion or redemption was possible apart from outright manumis sion by their lord Yet commoners desperate to sell themselves as servants in order to escape starvation or find some physical security often wrote the terms for themselves that were in essence slave terms in order to find a buyer ming economic change and informal servitude The first century and a half of the Ming period from 1368 to about 1540 were marked by increasing trade intensifying commercialization of the Yangtze River system and the eastern coast rising immigration of both rural landowners and rural laborers to the growing cities of the wealthy regions and a general sharp rise in population that more than compensated for the huge demographic losses of Chinas period of Mongol rule The second half of the Ming was marked by different patterns Technological innovations in textile and agricultural industries became less frequent and both Japan and Korea challenged China in the most technologically sophis ticated industries such as cotton production and processing steel printing and some household goods Population leveled off at a maximum of about 150 million people but the previous expansion had raised land prices while lowering wages Ming remained one of the worlds most formidable mili tary presences and certainly its single wealthiest society But the patterns Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 197 of growth innovation and upward mobility that had marked the dynastys first half were less marked in the second despite the fact that the rate of the deceleration or actual decline varied dramatically from region to region The last five decades of the Ming saw growing social disorder official corruption and mismanagement of strategic affairs These were all accom panied by an increasing number of individuals and families assuming servile and sometimes slave status as their sole means of survival Though the numbers cannot be rendered precisely known circumstances suggest a substantial rise in the number of individuals in servitude In all likelihood those regions such as the coastal Fujian province Jiangsu and Zhejiang where there was very intense concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a small group in many areas demonstrably not more than 10 percent of the population were the areas where large landowners were able to bypass the labor market by forcing tenants into effective serfdom and by providing subsistence to the dependent population Such areas were prob ably leaders in specialized and commercialized agriculture and at the same time the source of girls sold into sex slavery The early modern period is remarkable in the long history of coercion and dependency in China because despite the persistence of formal legal distinctions between slaves and the common population the ranks of agri cultural servants were increased by the gradual merging of the status of slave nubi and hired worker gugong or guyong Ming law continued as previous imperial law had done to require that individuals sold into slavery that is sold to the state to work imperial estates or labor on public works should be of base status Accordingly Ming law provided the usual sta tus variations on punishments for similar offenses Specifically slaves who happened to kill intentionally or unintentionally the head of the house hold were to be decapitated whereas hired workers who committed the same crime were to receive the more lenient punishment of strangulation But in practice Ming landowners and magistrates were treating increasing numbers of hired workers or those who appeared to be hired workers as outright slaves There is no evidence that the Ming government encouraged such practice and much that it attempted to discourage it beginning in 1397 when an edict forbade any commoners other than officials of the three highest ranks from commanding bondservants The apparent reason that landlords felt able to reduce hired workers to servitude was that there was no shortage of hired workers or indentured servants Tax rates and demands for corvee from the Ming were crushing The early Ming state had engaged in sponsorship of enormous projects in architecture literature and commercial voyaging while attempting to meet a continuing serious challenge from Mongol federations in the north and in 1592 helping Korea repulse the huge invasion from Hideyoshi Toyotomi To increase government resources a standing exemption from Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 198 the cambridge world history of slavery the corvee for tenants on state lands was rescinded So eager was the Ming government to prevent tax and corvee evasion that it empowered local families of wealth and standing to fill the role of tax captain in Martin Heijdras translation giving them even more leverage over remaining independent holders in their counties In the first years of the Ming the government had dramatically increased the number of independent landholders by distributing lands formerly entailed by the Mongols for use as estates and pastures But a little more than a century later many independent small holders were unable to meet the taxation demands and as a last resort sold first their lands then themselves to local landlords with sufficient means to make the loans Technically these commoner families were unable to sell themselves as slaves and so they agreed to openended contracts in which they were described as gugong workmen or guyong workers which could mean women workers In practice these families were slaves They could not negotiate for wages indeed they were paid no wages because they could never clear their debts and they could not leave the landlords to whom they had contracted themselves Literary juridical and anecdotal evidence suggests that in some areas of the Yangtze valley it was also assumed that they could not resist the demands of the landlord for sexual rights over the women and girls of the household The impression left by these conventions was so strong that in some commercialized agricultural areas the quasiservile class assumed a sort of ethnic identity that persisted into the twentieth century despite the fact that over the years a few members of these groups acquired modest wealth and status In the sixteenth century the magistrates of central and coastal China were increasingly dealing with suits in which the status of certain individuals had to be finally resolved as slave or free before the case could be ended This was often the result of assigning punishment for some crime ranging from murder to escape or attempted escape A few such cases of disputed status required the magistrates to determine whether or not the plaintiffs were genuinely slave and of base status Examining the contracts under which the farmers had sold themselves into servitude rarely provided the definitive evidence however because individuals who languished in servitude or who were born while their parents were servants might be considered to have declined to slave status The imperial government attempted to clarify the issue for magistrates by distinguishing between long and short contracts Contracts that specified no date of termination or that stipulated anything in excess of fifteen years were regarded as long The subjects of these contracts could legally be treated as slaves for purposes of sentencing and determining whether they had the status to sue anybody else in court Only contracts that clearly specified a service period of fifteen years or less could be regarded as short therefore marking their subjects and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 199 their descendants as free hired workers rather than slaves The immediate numerical effect of the ruling cannot be determined from the documents but the impact of the new policy was clear In the Yangtze delta and other commercialized agricultural regions hundreds of thousands of formerly commoner families who had fallen into a legal twilight zone were now regarded by their local magistrates as effective slaves qing conquest and military slavery The conquest of China by the Qing Empire took place in stages each of which bore a distinctive relationship to changing concepts of servitude and the social institutions of dependency and coercion in China The Qing Empire was formed in 1636 at what is the modern city of Shenyang in Manchu Mukden in Liaoning province This ended a period of early state formation in which the local regime was transformed from an informal magnates operation into a khanate and finally into an empire In 1618 the early state then a khanate had declared war on the Ming By 1621 it had established a new capital in the former Ming provincial capital of Shenyang and afterward continued to push westward toward the Great Wall The acquisition of western Liaodong eastern Mongolia and portions of traditional Northeast Asia came quickly In 1644 a consortium of Qing nobles conquered the Ming capital at Beijing Central China as far as the Yangtze River was taken by 1646 but it took another four decades to consolidate Qing control over southern and coastal China The Qing rulers saw their empire as built upon certain traditions of slavery and they featured slavery terms prominently in their political dis course The source of the values behind this slave system was not China but Mongolia The Manchus who comprised the Qing aristocracy mil itary elites and some of the major leaders of the bureaucracy were not Mongols but the Northeast Asian populations from whom the Manchus were largely derived had lived on the eastern perimeter of first Turkic and then Mongol political orders Like most peoples of the area they were equally familiar with the nomadic economy of the Mongols and the dis tinct agricultural economies of China and Korea The Turkic and later the Mongol worlds had their own traditions of slavery and indentured servitude War captives traditionally made up the greater part of the slave populations of nomadic Central and Inner Asia but a minor theme in Central Asia was the voluntary assumption of slave status by individuals or lineages seeking economic sustenance or physical security The caste system differentiating base from good that was characteristic of early China had no counterpart in the Turkic or Mongolian spheres An endur ing class of displaced persons known in the Mongolian and later in the Manchu tradition by the general term of baiˇsen were an important source Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 200 the cambridge world history of slavery of slaves but more commonly of indentured artisans Persons who had become alienated from their lineage groups either by being abandoned or outcast or by surviving the destruction of a lineage or monks leaving the monasteries were often distributed to the nobles to work as house people in Chinese records jiaren or jianu a common term among the Turkic Kitan and Mongolian groups of the ninth through thirteenth cen turies when jianu is a frequently attested element in the personal names of these peoples Others perhaps on the basis of demonstrated aptitude were concentrated in centers of trade or political capitals to be trained in skilled trades blacksmithing decorative iron working glassmaking carpentry tanning carpet manufacture and so forth Such groups parallel the enslaved artisans in Central Asia that produced the advanced crafts manship of the Timurid Empire In the Northeastern lands dominated by the ancestral regimes of the Qing Empire artisans crafting weapons especially arrows were enslaved and bound to live at the home bases of the local magnates In contrast to China Central Asian traditions did not always conflate slave status with a loss of social identity Indeed from at least the time of the first Turkic empire whole federations appear to have proudly referred to themselves as slaves and it was common for the followers of a war leader to refer to themselves as slaves of their leader for the duration of the campaign The meaning of this terminology was complex and clearly not always consistent In general it signified the total dependence of the warrior or the overt slave upon the lord ejen who as figurative father of his followers was their sole support their protector and the object of their love for such were the terms used to express political affiliation in Central and Inner Asia Before the early modern period there appears to have been no strict stable terminology distinguishing household slaves from bondsmen or military slaves The connotations of estate affiliation through the ordo loyalty and political identity were common to all categories of dependency and servitude through the Mongol period Dependency and identity were entwined The Qing ancestral khanate commanded its mil itary and laboring populations through creation of sociomilitary units called banners in which whole families were registered The banner populations referred to themselves as slaves of the khan later of the emperor a selfappellation that would continue in use by Manchu sol diers officials and even private citizens of Manchu descent in the Qing period But slavery and dependency were not merely emblematic in the early Qing It is not too much to say that the economy and political insti tutions developed under the Qing founders constituted a slave state The deployment of resources was not military exclusively or in the early period primarily The ancestral regime of the Qing was a commercial enterprise for the enforcement of the trade dominance of its ruling lineage The factories Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 201 in which ginseng was reduced textiles dyed pearls refined the farms where prize horses and dogs were raised the depots where the pelts of farmed or captured sables were prepared all were in large part operated by coerced labor The documentation from Korea particularly on the growth of a coerced labor population under the Qing is clear and slave narratives also describe the conditions under which the captive population served Like their Mongol predecessors the Qing regarded war captives including the victims of clandestine raids when no formal war was being conducted as a primary source of slaves In the early process of regime formation of the late sixteenth century in Northeast Asia tens of thousands of villagers were sub sumed gui submitted was the term most often used in Chinese annals to describe this process Their fate depended upon the current labor needs of the leaders of the new regime the particular skills they might have and whether or not they were likely to resist or escape Most ablebodied men from the villages were put to military service Men literate in Chinese of whom there were few in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were assigned to the khans court men with knowledge of cannons or who were particularly skilled at riding were assigned to special military units Those with relatives influential in yetunconquered or uncommitted rival federations were kept as hostages All were slaves in Manchu aha under the orders of the nobles to whom they were assigned and were entitled to no compensation Their children would be born with the same status By 1630 the khanates territories were largely consolidated and the major issue was how to maintain the dramatically increased population of depen dents generated by further expansion through the agricultural areas of northern Korea and northeastern Ming The khan himself pursued the acquisition of a new servile population with alacrity Raids into sparsely populated northern Korea netted thousands of farmers who were transpor ted north of the Yalu River to work the fields under the constant scrutiny of armed guards But it was northern China particularly Zhili and Shandong provinces that produced the largest number of captives The khanates annals beginning in 1629 refer to hundreds of thousands of captured peo ple and cattle rounded up in lightning abduction campaigns that the dis organized Ming forces could do virtually nothing to suppress The Qing not only conquered Liaodong province and absorbed its populations of Chinesespeaking farmers merchants and soldiers for its own use but it increased its campaigns for the extraction of more forced labor from Korea and China According to the most noted scholar of Qing slavery Wei Qingyuan soon after the second khans accession to the throne in 1626 the population registers enumerated more than two million domestic and agricultural slaves compared to a probable common population of fewer than six million Not only was political affiliation willing or unwilling with the Qing normally expressed in terms of slave to ruler but the manipulation of Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 202 the cambridge world history of slavery slave and servile conditions became a mechanism for centralization of the power of the nascent Qing emperorship In the Northeast as in Central Asia ownership of slaves was the exclusive privilege of the aristocracy A nobles power proceeded from the size of his estate and his absolute dis cretion to deploy it as he saw fit The second khan and first Qing emperor Hung Taiji 162743 consistently interfered with the ability of Manchu aristocrats his active or potential rivals for power to control their slaves His simplest measure was to establish a schedule setting the upper limit on household slaveowning among members of his ruling council of aris tocrats He himself as khan had personal control of ten thousand slaves Highranking princes were henceforth limited to 950 slaves and junior princes to 270 More subtly he established rudimentary rules for moni toring aristocratic behavior toward slaves including a gradation of punish ments that transferred slaves from the aristocrats to the court if infractions occurred Beating starving raping and other mistreatment of slaves who had committed no crime were to be punished with harsh fines frequently to be paid in slaves Slaves could and did on a few occasions report to the court on treasonous acts by their masters They were rewarded with money silks sables and of course slaves of their own Prior to the conquest of Beijing and north China in 1644 development of Qing law and political organization closely followed the principles of slave ownership and patrimonial identity that had informed the earliest khanate The population of imperial slaves was seen as divided between the bannermen gusai niyalma or families of military slaves and the bondservants or families of slaves engaged in a very wide variety of roles in management of the imperial treasury palaces and estates Bondservants boo i aha all belonged to the ruler directly and as they comprised the overwhelming numerical majority within the slave ranks it is reasonable to associate them with the ten thousand personal slaves that Hung Taiji had granted himself in 1628 The bannermen were divided into first four and subsequently eight large divisions gusa banner These banners were awarded to sons and grandsons of Nurgaci on a traditional patrimonial basis clearly derived from the Mongol patrimonial institution the ulus As part of his concentration of power at the expense of the other princes Hung Taiji appropriated to himself three of the banners in 1631 These banners were not only part of the imperial forces but were explicitly the personal legacy of the emperor In the conquest of China between 1644 and about 1685 a large portion of the banner population was dispersed throughout China settled in garrison communities usually but not always walled and charged not only with defense but also with policing A remnant pop ulation of considerable size remained in the Northeast partly as a defense against possible Russian aggression and partly as a productive agricultural resource of the banner system their attachment to imperial estates added Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 203 an extra theme of serfdom to their underlying status as military slaves Though not the only component of the state farmlabor system these agricultural bannermen were part of a larger state serf population that was stationed in the Northeast as well as parts of Mongolia and what is now Xinjiang province The demographic historians James Z Lee and Cameron Campbell have estimated all state serfs to have constituted 5 to 10 percent of the entire population of the Qing Empire Regulations designed to keep the banner populations occupying China specialized in military affairs were established soon after the conquest and were from time to time elaborated and enforced by the Qing court Bannermen were forbidden to marry with the local population to live outside the garrison or to work at any occupation not connected to the garrison Their officers were expected to be literate in Manchu and to speak the language fluently They were to be regularly examined in archery and horsemanship as well as academic subjects In the late seventeenth century the elaborate education program drawn up for bannermen suggested an intent to develop a class of imperial functionaries roughly paralleling the Ottoman osmanli This never developed however The state did not pay for elementary education and very few bannermen were able to prepare for the examinations Horses and expensive equipment necessary to keep the bannermen trained as archers riders and later musketeers were either never bought or were quickly sold along with vast portions of garrison grazing training and burial land by garrison commanders attempting to meet expenses in the absence of full support from the imperial treasury By the mideighteenth century the court abandoned the ambitious plan and instead concentrated on restoring the bannermen as an effective military force But similar problems frustrated the new plans as well By the eighteenth century the banners had been far surpassed in effective ness by the new hired military force recruited from the professional soldiers and ambitious farmers of China The banners continued to be deployed for the restoration of local order but in many cases they were a source of disor der themselves Housing was a chronic problem in some garrisons and all garrisons suffered from sporadic interruptions in the monthly allowances of rice and silver with which the bannermen were supposed to support themselves and their families Bannermen occasionally rioted even in the capital of Beijing when frustrated with the failures of support and shelter Beyond that the court was clearly caught between an inability to support the growing banner population on the one hand and fears of releasing trained and hungry soldiers into society on the other Schemes to relocate large segments of the garrison populations to state farms in the North east all worked by imperial agricultural slaves dissolved when a majority of the relocated absconded In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the court tried various strategies for mollifying the bannermen Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 204 the cambridge world history of slavery or encouraging them to leave the banners and become civilians chu qi bian min usually by gaining permission to live permanently outside the garrison In general released bannermen rarely made successful transitions to civilian life There were exceptions particularly in families connected to the banner officer class who had drained some of the garrisons resources for their own use But most bannermen were absorbed into the popula tions of the urban homeless or the poorer entertainers of the streets and teahouses Whether in the garrisons or out bannermen and their progeny persisted in describing themselves as slaves aha in Chinese nucai of the Qing imperial court Their selfdescription gained such currency that through the nineteenth century the term slave nu was understood as a reference to the bannermen For the Taiping rebels who fomented the worlds deadliest civil war in 1850s the bannermen were slaves of Satan and Beijing was the slaves nest qing reformation of civil slavery Although financial necessity forced the Qing court of the eighteenth cen tury to weaken the foundations of imperial military slavery a dramatic increase in coerced agricultural labor occurred during the late Ming on the eve of the conquest The experience of conquering China beginning with the acquisition of the Ming province of Liaodong in 1621 dramati cally changed Qing views of slavery and its practice Previously the khanate had relocated captive populations destined for slavery into Qing territories Now it kept the population of newly conquered Liaodong in place The occupying forces commenced to share the housing of the locals partly for purposes of security but primarily because it was impractical to attempt to build the necessary housing for the army of occupation This development and dismantling of the cohabitation policy has been extensively described by Gertraude Roth Li Though the Liaodong natives found the policy coer cive intimidating burdensome and obnoxious it was not slavery nor was it termed so by the occupation government On the contrary the khanate now carefully distinguished between its slaves the bannermen imperial bondservants and the indentured population trusted with military legal and financial affairs and civilians min The first were conquerors the second were the conquered The first were trustworthy the second were perfidious The first were official sharers in the bounty of the khan the second were the source from which the bounty would be extracted Although the Qing refused to refer to civilian Chinese as slaves they were nevertheless determined from the 1660s on to assume guardianship over Chinese traditions This included not only various institutions of agricultural and domestic servitude but also the social hierarchy that had divided the base from the common and had further divided both from Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 205 the virtuous elite The new rulers could not afford to alienate the officials landowners and indeed the general population of the newly conquered areas Troops entering Chinese towns were reminded of the strict Qing law forbidding bannermen to rape or abuse the locals and specifically to refrain from enslaving them Unlike the earlier case of the Ming transition from the Yuan the new court was not in a position to distribute land to farmers to buy their goodwill On the contrary the Qing were in need of much more land for their garrisons than could be gained by dissolving the Ming imperial estates Instead of confiscating land they admitted local Chinese in conquered territories to the banners ostensibly to become slaves under the peculiar status of landbringing capitulators daidi touchong These small independent owners could turn their land over to the new government but continue to work it while paying rent on it but no tax Should the land be sold in the future the higherranking of these sharecroppers would be able to make their own decision to go with the land to the new owner or to stay with the imperial estate and work a new plot They could accordingly negotiate for their keep whenever the land changed hands As of 1681 the estate slaves also gained the right to petition to change status and become commoners gou shen wei min an exact parallel of the phrase chu qi bian min used of the bannermen These policies seem characteristic of a legal predisposition in the Qing that inverted the practices of the Ming In the cases of disputed status dur ing the earlier dynasty magistrates had presumed slave status in the absence of an authenticated contract specifying a short period of service The first decade of Qing rule saw many cases of slaves attempting to resist their masters particularly the right of the former to be able to move and regis ter in another locality Postconquest reconstruction policies encouraging the development of exhausted or abandoned land new roads and recon struction of irrigation systems encouraged working families to relocate A hallmark of slave status was the lack of any right to request reregistration or any other change that would separate them from the landowners service Qing magistrates presumed that a petitioner was free unless the landowner could present documentation clearly specifying otherwise The Qing also bargained for some goodwill by a general shuffling of land from the large landowners to independent holders They did this by reviewing the record of legal disputes in areas where the abusive reclassifi cation of hired workers as serfs or slaves had been most blatant In central China the conquest interrupted late Ming rent strikes by tenants against landlords who demanded large security deposits on rented land imposed surcharges and otherwise manipulated the renting relationship in attempts to force tenants into debt and from there into virtual slavery In 1650 still in the early stages of the process of pacifying and attempting to win some goodwill in the region of the Yangtze River and eastern coast the court Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 206 the cambridge world history of slavery posted notices inviting families who could show they had been cheated of land or of independent status to reclaim the land from their abusers This was followed in 1660 by an edict clearly aimed at landowners accused of falsely enslaving workers in the last years of the Ming forbidding the sale of servile laborers by the their employers and establishing severe punishments for infractions The efficacy of these regulations is doubted by most historians if only because the same edicts were periodically reissued during the later seven teenth and early eighteenth centuries suggesting that they never succeeded in having the desired effect The most characteristically Qing reaction to the complexities of servile status was the series of policy pronounce ments that are sometimes referred to as the Yongzheng Emancipations The Yongzheng emperor r 172235 in the first eight years of his rule attempted to reduce or even eradicate agricultural serfdom specifically the poorly defined but in practice irresistible impositions by landlords of slave like conditions on poor and indebted workers This problem remained widespread throughout central and eastern China The emperor a strik ing polemicist who rarely passed by an opportunity to frame his policies in florid moral rhetoric condemned the practices as contrary to all values of benevolent government and of an ethically cultivated ruling class He condemned not only the usual abuses of crushing rents and landowner arrogation of slaveholding rights but the fact that the landholders had for generations wantonly imposed themselves sexually upon their tenant families Time after time he lamented the government had ordered that all predations upon the tenants and hired workers should cease and they had only been ignored As a solution he decreed all tenants in the offending provinces legally free and established in 1727 an inquisition into landowner abuses He declared that imperial law would not permit landowners to beat tenants rape them or forbid them to leave the locality In addition messengers in local magistrates offices jailers doormen beggars musi cians fishermen living on their boats and workers examining or hauling corpses all of whom had accrued putative base status were also to be considered independent and entered on the tax rolls The emperor sub sequently initiated a program continued after his death to have families locally classified as familials jiaren slaves or serfs reregistered as free households kaihu in most parts of the empire As with earlier laws on the same topics these reforms failed There is no evidence of hired workers suddenly becoming dominant in the com mercialized agricultural sector However it is clear that over the course of the eighteenth century legal and informal impositions upon tenants and workers by landlords became less frequent Certainly the activity in this direction by the Yongzheng emperor who died prematurely in 1735 can not have impeded such a development Nevertheless the more prominent Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 207 impulse behind this development was likely the changes in the rural econ omy of the eighteenth century Renewed profitability of staple crops and the kinds of commercial crops well managed by small holders was a help Wages were low for the entire Ming period and remained low in the early Qing Evidence indicates that from the very early Qing conquest period in China landowners of very large estates calculated that the cost of keeping their dianpu land slaves or serfs was greater than paying them wages and letting them find a way to keep themselves Mass manumissions ended some rent strikes and in other cases accompanied overt capitulation to the occupation government Still status disputes remained a significant enough problem that in 1786 the imperial government finally established a firm dividing line between the free and the unfree Henceforth all work ers were to be considered free unless they actually lived in the employers house and did household work Those working the fields or the outlying buildings and living outside the employers house were free laborers who could negotiate wages and seek the magistrates permission to relocate The phenomenon of absentee landlordism was affected both by the problems of slavestatus negotiations and the Qing responses to it In early modern China absentee landlords ji zhuang hu were a formal category of landowner who had applied for permission to own land apart from the county of his residence Wealthy landowners were inevitably absent from a majority of their holdings and frequently promoted some of the tenants as managers of the estates Until the sixteenth century landlords had traditionally played an active role in cultivation and were responsible for instructing tenants and workers on newly introduced crops such as corn and yams machinery cropping techniques pest control hygiene and of course ethics They called the working men together for lecture sessions often using the blockprinted illustrated books on agriculture and technology that were popular In such circumstances historians argue the paternalistic character of relations between landlord and tenant or serf was reinforced By the same token absentee landlordism promoted more independence in the tenants even as changes in the economy offered more opportunities to negotiate for higher wages or even to sell land if they could prove they owned it The weight of state pronouncements in the early eighteenth century may have helped accelerate these trends so that by the end of the eighteenth century a distinct change had occurred particularly in comparison to the late Ming period Independent holders had risen in number emancipated laborers were abundant Coerced res idence unremunerated work and an absence of personal protections did not disappear from the Chinese countryside But the Yongzheng eman cipations were part of a change that markedly lowered the level of land lord predation while markedly raising the level of agricultural workers independence Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 208 the cambridge world history of slavery The motivation for the Yongzheng emperors actions has been a matter of debate among historians of the period The Qing governments constant search for revenue was clearly at issue all persons and households re registered as independent kai and common liangmin and thereby not liable to future enslavement became taxpayers There are parallels here with later developments In the later eighteenth century the Qianlong court encouraged legal rulings commuting death sentences to enslavement frequently so that the convicted could be sent to perform coerced labor in the mines of the Northeast or in the mines fields and military installations of newly occupied eastern Turkestan today the province of Xinjiang A century later the court attempted but failed to manumit the bannermen expecting new revenue from taxation of the previously taxexempt banner lands as well as taxes to be paid by independent former bannermen In these episodes and others the Qing government showed a propensity for adjusting legal criteria of baseness and servitude as well as the institutions of enslavement to serve its changing economic needs newly taxable lands free families newly liable to taxation and coerced labor were among the benefits the state expected to enjoy from selective manumission commutation and eradication of the authority of informal contracts Huang Pei a specialist on the Yongzheng emperor and his reign saw the emperors program as having more meaning than a search for incremental benefits to the imperial treasury however He argued that the purpose of the reforms was to extend the powers of the emperor and disrupt the informal powers of landlords in some regions This explanation is con sistent with the history of imperial restriction of aristocrats and landed gentry in times when Qing rulers were particularly keen to undermine rivals As we have seen this was not the first time the Qing court had specifically used the ostensible protection of the enslaved as a means of drawing power away from perceived independent power bases within the realm And it is also true that the Qing court was particularly wary of the combined political power which tended to express itself as factionalism among imperial bureaucrats of landowners from the wealthiest and most cultured regions of China William T Rowe has suggested an additional explanation He points out that the Yongzheng manumission of the ambiguously positioned tenants was in fact a way of clarifying status This clarification he argues was the emperors real goal because it was the prerequisite to the reconstruction of the traditional social hierarchy in China The emperors unhappiness in Rowes interpretation was caused not by the fact that so many hired laborers were forced to live as slaves but that so many men and women of commoner birth were forced to live as if they were base The distinction between good and base was what the emperor wished to restore The result as Rowe notes was not the attenuation of base status in Qing society in Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 209 comparison to the Ming but its explicit authorship by the state Indeed as part of the emancipation program the Yongzheng court pledged itself to apprehend true slaves who might try to flee and return them to their lords And if the point should not be clear enough the court also issued prescriptions for the proper way for inferiors to address their superiors with a schedule of punishments for failure to perform proper deference The object Rowe suggests was a reinstatement of deference based on clear ascriptions of status This is a striking suggestion as it places the treatment of servile agricul tural workers among the many other ambiguities of the eighteenth century to which the Qing court was hostile Indeed the Yongzheng emperors demand that the status of the serfs of central China be clarified was very similar to the later demand by his son who became the Qianlong emperor that the genealogical identities of a group of mixed descent within the ban ners the hanjun or Chinesemartial bannermen be clarified by making them either Manchu or Chinese In both cases the problem identified by the court is that arbitrary practices had obscured what are essential dif ferences between groups In both cases the state undertook to rediscover reveal and in the future enforce ostensibly natural distinctions a policy that resembles its approaches to gender legislation family administration rectification of literature and art and classification of cultural minorities In neither case did the group in question disappear But their numbers diminished dramatically by the end of the imperial period More impor tant the state had succeeded in placing itself as the sole arbiter of identity and status both of which had previously been negotiated in local per sonal informal and sometimes subjective frameworks This was part of a generalized phenomenon of the eighteenthcentury Qing court It demon strated itself hostile to ambiguities of gender culture genealogy language or moral values particularly loyalty It became the source of new criteria of status righteousness and beauty Overall these are the characteristics of the end of the period of conquest and expansion under the Qing In the eighteenth century a century of relative stability and relative prosperity was beginning The state was making the transition from a conquest state in which ambiguities were necessary and advantageous to a civil state that legitimated itself through the realization of essential differences in status conclusion In institutional terms the great pattern of the seventeenth century in China with regard to slavery was the transition from progressive subjec tivity and negotiation of slave status under Ming practices to incremental clarification and objectivization of multiple slave statuses under the Qing Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 210 the cambridge world history of slavery Coterminous with this was the introduction of peculiar Qing institutions of household and military slavery with proximate origins in the Mongol legacy of the Northeast Despite the fact that slavery in China in the early modern and modern periods affected the lives of millions of people slavery as a conceptual reference was never salient enough to define and promote a rhetoric of freedom that would accompany the movement toward nation alism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Nor has slavery in China attained prominence as a topic of academic inquiry Despite the vigorous development of critical studies cultural history womens and gender studies demographic studies and many other analytical fields that would touch easily on slavery the question of enslavement and coercion in China is omitted with few exceptions from studies of premodern society There would appear to be two possible explanations One is the concep tual axiom inherited from Marxist and Marxian scholarship that slavery in China was a characteristic of ancient Chinese society and could not have been important in subsequent eras Elements of Marxist discourse first became prominent in the May Fourth Movement 191925 when social ist scholars such as Guo Moruo interwove interpretations of imperialism socialism and nationalism to create a new narrative of Chinas history Because in that paradigm slavery comes after primitive communism but before feudalism China between the dates of about 2200 and 500 BCE is considered to have been a slave society Thereafter in this view China moved to a feudal phase that persisted in various forms until the sev enteenth century at the earliest when a transition to protocapitalism began Despite the theory behind this interpretation documents suggest that the sharpest rise in the numbers of persons in servitude and slavery in China and undoubtedly the greatest absolute numbers of serfs and slaves occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The facts present a certain parallel to the growth of coercion and dependence under European colonialism in Africa and the Americas but they are disconsonant with Marxs concepts of historical stages As a consequence the Chinese nation alist movement was replete with metaphors of the Chinese as intruded upon and exploited by Manchu invaders but not with descriptions of China as enslaved or unfree under the ownership of emperors National ism and personal enfranchisement were very loosely linked if at all in the speech and writing of most revolutionary propagandists This is a vivid contrast to modern Korean history and historiography in which institu tional and moral continuities from traditional slavery to coerced industrial labor under Japanese colonization in the twentieth century has informed both the study and the characterization of nationalist movements The tendency to see slavery as an ethnic issue unconnected to China generally but defining peoples such as the Manchus and the Mongols Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 211 persisted well after the revolutionary movements that ended the empire in 1912 and attempted to establish a unified national republic With the nationalist adjustments to Marxist historical patterning supplied by Stalin and Mao Chinese scholars after 1949 were able to confidently contrast the feudal and protocapitalist condition of the Chinese to the status of the populations of Tibet and southwest China particularly the Yi and the Naxi peoples of Guangxi who in the scholarly estimation continued to live in slave societies Putative slave societies were clearly in need of overt con trol and reorganization by Chinas revolutionary government in order to hoist them over the feudal and capitalist stages and straight into socialism The basic contours of this rhetoric have not changed very much in Chinas historical professions despite the practical abandonment of state socialism Nevertheless below the rhetorical level historians in contemporary China generally have recognized that institutions characterized as slavery varied greatly across time and culture but cannot be proved to have been more common in ancient times than in more recent centuries Although chattel slavery was not part of Chinas history a complex of slave and coercive institutions in China had the same general relationship to cultural eco nomic and technological change that they had elsewhere in the world despite their general absence from the discourses of modernity nation alism and liberation among Chinese nationalists of the early twentieth century further reading The volume of work dedicated to topics of servitude and coercion is small For the early period of Chinese history the seminal work is C Martin Wilbur Slavery in China During the Former Han Dynasty 206 BCAD 25 originally published in 1943 most recently reprinted in 1968 See also E G Pulleyblank The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient I 1958 185220 Robin D S Yatess important essay Slavery in Early China A SocioCultural Perspective Journal of East Asian Archaeology 3 2002 283331 For the Qing period the classic study is Wei Qingyuan et al Qingdai nubi zhidu The Slave System of the Qing Period Beijing 1982 See also Angela Schottenhammer Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Century in Gwyn Campbell ed The Structure of Slavery in the Indian Ocean Africa and Asia London 2004 pp 14354 An important specific study of formal and informal enslavement is Joanna WaleyCohen Exile in Mid Qing China Banishment to Xinjiang 17581820 New Haven CT 1991 The institutional and material conditions of palace eunuchs are given unprecedented examination in Norman Kutcher Unspoken Collusions Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 212 the cambridge world history of slavery The Empowerment of Yuanming Yuan Eunuchs in the Qianlong Period Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 70 2010 44995 The institutional background of the Qing bondservant system is still best referenced in Preston M Torbert The Ching Imperial Household Department A Study of Its Organization and Principle Functions 16621796 Cambridge MA 1977 Bondservant status is also the background to Jonathan D Spence Tsao Yin and the Kanghsi Emperor Bondservant and Master New Haven CT 1966 Early forms of Qing servitude and tenancy are also examined in Gertraude Roth Li The ManchuChinese Rela tionship 16181636 in Jonathan D Spence and John C Wills Jr eds From Ming to Ching Conquest Region and Continuity in Seventeenth Century China New Haven CT 1979 pp 138 On the Qing banner system and bannermen see Mark C Elliott The Manchu Way The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China Stanford CA 2001 for the early period and Pamela Kyle Crossley Orphan Warriors Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World Princeton NJ 1990 for the late period On banner status and its relationship to metaphors of dependency and submission see Pamela Kyle Crossley A Translucent Mirror History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology Berkeley CA 1999 A demographic and social study of bannerrelated servitude is Cameron Campbell and James Z Lee Free and Unfree Labor in Qing China Emigration and Escape among the Bannermen of Northeast China 1789 1909 in The History of the Family 6 2001 45576 In State Peasant and Merchant in Qing Manchuria 16441862 Stanford CA 2006 esp pp 2151 Christopher Mills Isett puts the legal and economic status of banner populations working the imperial estates into historical context Important research and analysis has been presented as part of works focused on social and economic history legal history and womens history An invaluable study of medieval law in practice is Valerie Hanson Negoti ating Daily Life in Traditional China How Ordinary People Used Contracts 6001400 New Haven CT 1995 which provides indepth discussion of the effects of contracts Slavery servitude and labor in the context of late Ming economic history is very thoroughly presented in Martin Heijdra The SocioEconomic Development of Rural China during the Ming in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W Mote eds The Cambridge History of China Volume 8 Cambridge 1998 pp 417578 A work of similar scope dealing with the Qing period and with very thorough discussion of labor and servitude is William T Rowe Social Stability and Social Change in Willard J Peterson ed The Cambridge History of China Volume 9 Cambridge 2002 pp 473562 The study of Qing law has recently deepened and broadened encom passing new facets of encoded status and dependency Important recent studies for general background and significant specifics on slavery include Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in early modern china 213 Marinus J Meijer Slavery at the End of the Ching Dynasty in Jerome Alan Cohen et al eds Essays on Chinas Legal Tradition Princeton NJ 1980 pp 32758 Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip C C Huang eds Civil Law in Qing and Republican China Stanford CA 1994 and Philip C C Huang Civil Justice in China Representation and Practice in the Qing Stanford CA 1996 Matthew Harvey Sommer in Sex Law and Society in Late Imperial China Stanford CA 2000 is significant for among other things bridging legal history social history and gender history bringing new depths to the study of dependence It complements the rich scholarship on marriage households prostitution and property rights as they relate to women primarily See the seminal volume Rubie S Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey eds Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society Berkeley CA 1991 and more recently Susan Mann Precious Records Women in Chinas Long Eighteenth Century Stanford CA 1997 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 PART III SLAVERY AMONG THE INDIGENOUS AMERICANS Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Map 91 Culture Areas of Indigenous North America Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 9 SLAVERY IN INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA leland donald Before contact with Europeans most North American indigenous commu nities were familiar with captives taken in intergroup fighting as a potential source of additional community members Such captives were the proxi mate or ultimate source of most of those in statuses of servitude including slavery in the majority of Native American communities in early historic times1 Statuses of servitude especially slavery within Native American com munities have not attracted a great deal of scholarly scrutiny partly because the positive pole of the idea of the noble savage continues to color both the popular and scholarly image of Native Americans sufficiently to often cause surprise and even resistance to the suggestion that not all precontact and early contact indigenous communities were egalitarian That various forms of bondage including slavery did occur in some indigenous commu nities is also frequently dismissed or their importance in some aboriginal communities minimized2 Careful scrutiny of the earliest available sources on indigenous North American societies however reveals that statuses of servitude were of con siderable significance in some although certainly not all such societies Two major questions are pursued here First as best we can tell what hap pened to captives prior to European impact on indigenous societies How were the fates of captives likely altered as a result of significant European influence I emphasize similarities and broad widespread patterns but consider able variation existed within this framework of similarities that cannot be considered here Because of major variations across the continent a regional approach is adopted The main focus will be on the two regions where the data are best eastern North America and the north Pacific coast 1 Here indigenous North America includes all peoples living on the continent north of what became the MexicanUnited States border at the time of the first European contacts with the continent and their descendants The peoples immediately south of this artificial boundary are strongly connected to those just north of it but the nature of the sources and conventional scholarly divisions of labor dictate this usage here 2 This point is briefly expanded later in the treatment of Lewis Henry Morgans views on the Iroquois 217 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 218 the cambridge world history of slavery of North America but some consideration is given to other parts of the continent eastern north america In aboriginal terms eastern North America includes a band just west of the Mississippi River east to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and south from a westtoeast line that includes the region around the Great Lakes a band just north of the St Lawrence River and the Canadian maritime provinces Although there is a great deal of cultural and environmental variation within this large area practices relating to servitude were broadly similar within it in late precontact times This discussion focuses on two major subareas the Northeast and the Southeast3 Contact with Europeans began sporadically on the coast in the sixteenth century and by the midseventeenth century all the eastern North Amer ican peoples had experienced some indirect consequences of this contact even if they had not yet encountered Europeans directly In late precontact times eastern North American societies practiced agriculture to some extent The importance of agriculture to the subsistence base was considerable throughout most of the Southeast and of moderate importance in most of the Northeast Despite the prevalence of agriculture no peoples ignored the potential of hunting fishing and gathering these were mixed subsistence economies In all these societies the major basis of social relationships was kinship and the standard picture of these societies is that they were relatively egal itarian although the presence of hereditary elites is recognized in many Southeastern communities Traditional political units were either indepen dent local communities often loosely allied along ethnic or linguistic lines or chiefdoms groups of communities forming a single polity but lacking many of the attributes of the state There is ample evidence for intercommunity conflict and fighting throughout the area in late precontact and early postcontact times much of which took the form of raids on enemy communities with a common major objective being to kill or capture members of the attacked community If captives were successfully taken they had one of four fates They failed to survive the journey to their captors communities they were killed if they could not keep up tried to escape or members of the attacking party could not restrain their emotions they were tortured and killed fairly soon after their arrival at their captors community they were adopted into a family and kin group usually to replace a specific deceased member or in a few 3 See Map 91 for the location and approximate boundaries of these two and other indigenous North American culture areas Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 219 cases they remained in the community unadopted in a marginal status outside the kinship system performing menial tasks for their captor or some other community member As Lucien Carr remarked more than a century ago about the early historic sources for this region by almost all of the old chroniclers captive and slave are used as convertible terms4 One of the tasks of interpretation of these early sources is to determine what statuses of servitude if any captives held in these communities The Northeast From the time of Lewis Henry Morgan whose 1851 account of the Iroquois is usually regarded as the first scientific description of an indigenous North American people the native peoples of the Northeast5 have been regarded as egalitarian peoples whose communities were not incorporated into multicommunity polities6 In this view there were alliances between communities but not chiefdoms or states and within communities lead ers led by influence and persuasion and lacked the ability to command There were no hereditary elites Morgan was so struck by what he saw as the liberty equality and fraternity of the Iroquois kinship group and community that he took their kinship institutions as the model for all native American societies going so far as to deny that the Aztec had a state and hereditary rulers at the time of their conquest by the Spanish7 Scholars since Morgan have usually agreed with him about the egalitarian nature of Northeastern native societies but he was wrong about the Aztec and not all North American indigenous societies conformed to his vision of Native American society In earliest contact times and almost certainly before contact many indigenous communities contained individuals who were not regarded as full members of the community and others whose community membership was not due to birth or marriage Both types of people originated as captives 4 Lucien Carr The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley Historically Considered Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1891 Washington DC 1893 p 512 5 This includes the Canadian maritime provinces New England parts of southern Quebec and Ontario and the midAtlantic states See Map 91 6 Lewis Henry Morgan League of the Hodenosaunee Iroquois New York 1851 Morgan was not the first to recognize the egalitarian character of many native American societies egalitarianism was one of the principal themes of the positive image of the noble savage to which early accounts of Indian societies contributed significantly But Morgan fashioned these ideas into a scientific account and produced a coherent theoretical explanation of indigenous American society In the process he bequeathed elements of the noble savage to most subsequent scholarly views of Native Americans For Morgans relationship to the noble savage concept see Leland Donald Liberty Equality Fraternity Was the Indian Really Egalitarian in James Clifton ed The Invented Indian New Brunswick NJ 1990 pp 14567 7 For liberty equality fraternity see Lewis Henry Morgan Ancient Society Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1877 reprint edition 1964 pp 4667 for Morgan on the Aztec see ibid pp 16487 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 220 the cambridge world history of slavery taken in war In the Northeast a significant motivation for intercommunity fighting was the mourningwar Indeed little evidence can be found to support territorial conquest as a major traditional motivation for warfare during this period which is what many anthropologists would expect of horticultural kinshiporganized peoples The nature of mourningwar strongly influenced the fate of captives Among Northeastern peoples a death diminished the kin group To restrengthen the group as much its spiritual powers as its numbers the dead person was requickened via appropriate ritual someone took up the deceaseds name and with it their position and duties in the kin group and community revitalizing the group Important kingroup figures were usually replaced by other kingroup members but captives were often adopted to fill lesser places The grief a death caused the surviving relatives often remained strong and frequently some mourners demanded that a raid be conducted to produce deaths in and captives from an outside community The object of such a raid was to obtain scalps signifying enemy deaths and captives to relieve the grief of those in mourning not simple revenge on those responsible for the death Community leaders assigned any captives to kin groups in mourning The older women of the group decided if the captives were to be adopted or killed under torture8 The origins of adoptees were remembered but there is ample evidence to support the idea that if adoptees behaved as kin should their new relatives treated them as such although those that failed to live up to expectations might suffer mistreatment or worse9 For example Lafitau writing of his experiences among the Iroquois in the early 1700s recounts the rejection with horror of a suggestion by a wellmeaning missionary that a female captive marry a member of the household As the woman had been adopted into the proposed husbands kin group the missionary had inadvertently proposed an incestuous marriage10 8 For mourningwar see Daniel K Richter The Ordeal of the Longhouse The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization Chapel Hill NC 1992 pp 328 for a good account of warfare and the treatment of prisoners see Bruce G Trigger The Huron Farmers of the North 2nd ed Fort WorthTX 1990 pp 5064 9 Reuben G Thwaites ed The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents 75 vols Cleveland OH 18961901 Among their wealth of ethnographic and historical information these volumes contain much on all aspects of captivity and the adoption of captives References in the Jesuit Relations to adoption and prisoners cited in Bruce Trigger The Children of Aataentsic A History of the Huron People to 1660 Montreal 1976 and Daniel K Richter The Ordeal of the Longhouse offer a good entry into this material 10 JosephFrancois Lafitau Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times William N Fenton and E L Moore eds Toronto 1974 Vol 1 pp 3389 Lafitaus general account of the adoption of captives among the Iroquois is also informative see Fenton and Moore eds Customs of the American Indians Toronto ON 1977 2 1712 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 221 The fate of captives who were neither killed or adopted is less clear Some individuals remained in a kind of social limbo for years apparently without a meaningful status within the community as they lacked kin ties there performing menial tasks for those to whom they were assigned The numbers of such individuals within a community seems to have been very small certainly much smaller than either the number of captives who were killed or who were adopted11 Other captives who survived but were not adopted into their captors communities appear to have become pawns in diplomacy between indige nous groups Captives were often presented to other groups as a part of exchanges designed to cement alliances When many Northeastern groups established relationships with European communities they attempted to bind up these new ties with traditional forms of alliancebuilding includ ing the giving of captives to new or old allies Such attempts have recently been discussed in connection with aboriginal alliances with the French by Brett Rushforth who also describes the initial French resistance to such indigenous tactics and the eventual transformation of these captives into slaves in many Quebec households12 As the European presence in North America increased the peoples of the Northeast became increasingly embroiled in the expansion of Euro pean activity in their region Although Northeastern natives were not passive respondents to European initiatives the consequences of the grow ing European presence were great Regarding captivity and servitude the major changes were dramatic population declines brought about primarily by the introduction of the infectious diseases of the Eastern Hemisphere and an increase in warfare due both to population decline increasing the calls for mourningwars and struggles relating to the control of various aspects of trade with Europeans especially the fur trade These changes began in the sixteenth century and by the early eighteenth century were enormous Some peoples had been virtually destroyed in the process and other communities contained as many or more adoptees as locally born individuals Raiding for captives had grown in frequency and in the distance involved in individual expeditions The Iroquois in particular ranged widely over the Northeast and even beyond 11 William A Starna and Ralph Watkins Northern Iroquoian Slavery Ethnohistory 38 1991 3457 argue that adopted captives are best regarded as slaves suggesting that the vocabulary of kinship applied to them was simply a mask of their true status They consider adoptees to conform to Orlando Pattersons social death conception of slavery Orlando Patterson Slavery and Social Death Cambridge MA 1982 and that they were economically exploited as well The evidence in such sources as the Jesuit Relations supports the interpretation that many adoptions of captives were genuine and that the labor expected of them was the same as of other community members of the same gender and age Starna and Watkins also overlook the ritual of capture torture and adoption as a rite of passage and social rebirth rather than one of social death 12 Brett Rushforth A Little Flesh We Offer You The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France William and Mary Quarterly 60 2003 777808 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 222 the cambridge world history of slavery The beststudied intergroup conflicts in the Northeast are those between the Iroquois and Huron which ended with the virtual destruction of the Huron and their disappearance as an independent people in the 1660s This conflict illustrates the importance of captives and captivity during the early historic period Between 1631 and 1663 seventythree recorded Iroquois attacks on the Huron suggest that at least fifteen hundred Huron captives were taken from a population of around nine thousand The records for conflicts involving the Iroquois from 1603 to 1701 indicate that the Iroquois captured around sixtyfive hundred Huron and Algonquin speakers and suffered the loss of around two thousand captured to these peoples The Jesuit Relations suggest that by the late seventeenth century as many as twothirds of the population of some Iroquois communities were adopted captives The influx of captives maintained Iroquois population levels at nearsteady state for a number of decades despite their own losses to disease and warfare and adoptees played this role in many other Northeastern groups as well13 The very large number of adoptees created new problems The old meth ods of enculturating and absorbing captives into their adopting groups were strained Probably more captives than before did not fully accept their new identities and longed for escape leading many more to attempt and suc ceed in escaping The cultures in these communities were becoming cre ative amalgams of the adopting culture and the cultures of various captives Traditional native cultures were newly forged not simply continuations of local cultures with adjustments to the European newcomers14 As European settlement increased the number of British and French prisoners taken in Indian raids increased as well These European captives were treated much like indigenous captives Many were killed shortly after capture or tortured to death in their captors community many were also adopted or ransomed Some adoptees especially if they were chil dren or female seem to have become comfortable in their new homes and actively participated in their new culture They sometimes refused to return to the settler world when given the opportunity Others were not successfully drawn into Indian culture and were eager to escape and rejoin the European world These unwilling adoptees were more likely to have been adult males when captured but not exclusively so A literary genre of captivity narratives developed Dozens of these narratives were published and they offer an additional source of information about the nature of 13 The data on number of captives and so on are drawn from Jose Antonio Brandao Your Fyre Shall Burn No More Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701 Lincoln NE 1997 especially pap 7281 14 For the assimilation of Huron captives by the Iroquois see Trigger The Children of Aataentsic pp 82631 for the process of the assimilation of captives and the increasing strain as the proportion of captives increased see Richter The Ordeal of the Longhouse pp 6674 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 223 indigenous servitude in early historic times even though they are shaped by the conventions of the genre15 The Southeast Aboriginally the Southeast includes the area south of the VirginiaCarolina border and west to a northsouth band beyond the Mississippi River and takesinthesouthernpartsoftheMissouriand Ohio RivervalleysEuropean encroachments began in the sixteenth century with Spanish excursions into Florida The earliest important expedition into the core of the region was by Hernando De Soto in 153943 By the seventeenth century the Spanish were interacting with Southeastern peoples from Florida and from their settlements in the Southwest the French were in contact along the Mississippi The English were increasingly active from the Atlantic coast Accounts of these are much less satisfactory than those available for the comparable period in the Northeast The usual interpretation for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that of peoples organized into a large number of smallscale polities of the type anthropologists call chiefdoms collections of a few or occasionally a considerable number of communities who recognize a central office but the person who holds this office lacks the power to command and must lead by persuasion Ties between individuals are still primarily based on kinship and loyalties to political entities are weak16 These societies were not egalitarian but the ranking that was present was based more on achievement than ascription Warfare was not uncommon in the Southeast and as in much of the rest of indigenous North America the taking of captives was an important outcome of intercommunity violence During earliest contact times the fate of captives in the Southeast was much like that in the Northeast Many were tortured to death some were adopted to replace dead relatives and an uncertain proportion remained in a vague status that left them as outsiders lacking kin ties to other community members In the historic sources they are often termed slaves but whether 15 Alden T Vaughan and Daniel K Richter Crossing the Cultural Divide Indians and New Englanders 16051763 Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 90 1980 2399 although they like many others tends to overestimate the success Indians had in assimilating European captives particularly adult men James Axtell The Invasion Within The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America New York 1985 pp 30227 is a good account of Europeans who preferred to stay with their Indian captors Richard White The Middle Ground Indians Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region 16501815 Cambridge 1991 pp 2613 32330 although he is discussing the Great Lakes area rather than the Northeast gives a more complex account of European captivity and is a useful corrective to Axtell 16 The standard overview of early historic Southeastern aboriginal culture remains Charles Hud son The Southeastern Indians Knoxville TN 1976 for early historic Southeastern chiefdoms see pp 20223 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 224 the cambridge world history of slavery this meant more than dependent is problematical In 1709 John Lawson published one of the few explications of slave in our sources Their Tongue allows not to say Sir I am your Servants because they have no different Titles for Man only King WarCaptain Old Man or Young Man As for Servant they have no such thing except Slave and their Dogs Cats tame or Domestick Beasts and Birds are calld by the same Name For the Indian Word for Slave includes them all So when an Indian tells you he has got a Slave for you it may be a young Eagle a Dog Otter or any other thing of that Nature which is obsequiously to depend on the Master for its Sustenance17 However we label unadopted captives they held a disadvantaged sub servient status outside the kinship groups that comprised the majority of the community Their number is uncertain as are their economic or other roles The standard interpretation is that as the Southeastern indigenous economies were subsistence economies these captives could not have made a significant economic contribution to their masters households18 Cherokee captives however are described as working in the fields assist ing the women accompanying men on the hunt dressing deer skins carrying burdens running errands and collecting the bark needed to build houses19 This array of tasks is reminiscent of those we will encounter later among Northwest Coast slaves The oldest important sources that contain references to the labor of slaves describe them as laboring in the fields and having had a foot mutilated to prevent their escape20 The latter practice suggests that these captives were regarded as valuable enough to take serious precautions to pre vent escape The practice of mutilation continued in some places until the 17 John Lawson A New Voyage to Carolina Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country Together with the Present State Thereof And a Journal of a Thousand Miles Traveld Thro Several Nations of Indians Giving a Particular Account of Their Customs Manners c London 1709 p 201 18 Hudson Southeastern Indians pp 253257 for a fuller treatment of the standard interpretation the negligible economic value of captives is on page 253 The fullest treatment of the fate of captives for a particular people is Theda Perdue Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society 15401866 Knoxville TN 1979 pp 318 Perdue agrees with Hudson that Cherokee captives were not economically important pp 34 1214 arguing instead that these disadvantaged people functioned as necessary deviants who showed the disadvantage of the lack of kin group membership and thus helped establish and strengthen group identity among the Cherokees page 18 This writer does not find this convincing 19 Theda Perdue Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society p 15 Perdue argues that these tasks were not significant economically and would not have violated the strong gender division of labor practiced by the Cherokee although this argument is made from general principles and is not based on evidence about what captives did 20 Lawrence A Clayton Vernon James Knight Jr and Edward C Moore eds The De Soto Chronicles The Expedition of Hernando De Soto to North America in 15491543 2 vols Tuscaloosa AL 1993 2 312 400 439 The various entries relate to different places and suggest that both practices were widespread Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 225 early eighteenth century suggesting that some captives were worth keep ing even then21 Therefore sparse historical evidence indicates that captive or slave labor may have been more significant in some indigenous commu nities than most have thought This possibility is reinforced if we look at prehistory From 900 to 1350 societies known as Mississippian flourished in many Southeastern river valleys By the time of earliest contact these societies were in decline often dramatically so Mississippian culture had developed from a base of earlier mixedsubsistence societies that had some maize agriculture Maize agriculture flourished during the Mississippian period although hunting and gathering remained important It is likely that the post1350 decline was in significant part due to climatic conditions detri mental to the high levels of maize production these communities had obtained The highly stratified Mississippian societies had as their focus ceremonial centers of sometimes imposing size The largest of these was probably Cahokia near presentday East St Louis Illinois whose city center which contained more than twenty thousand people at its greatest extent was a fiftyacre artificial plaza dominated by a temple mound an earth pyramid covering sixteen acres at its base and more than one hundred feet high Altogether there were at least another hundred smaller temples and burial mounds surrounding the plaza and major mound22 Mississippian societies are usually described as chiefdoms partly because the evidence suggests that most lacked political stability but many might wonder if the larger and more longerlasting of these polities shouldnt be called states Labels are less important than recognizing that the elites of these societies managed extensive trade networks conducted relation ships with other similar polities and commanded sufficient labor to build and maintain large construction works in the form of temple and burial mounds plazas and defensive works They were also able to keep agricul tural products flowing to the ceremonial centers from the smaller settle ments surrounding them23 The nature of the management of the labor used to maintain the extensive building program and agricultural production of the Mississip pian polities during their heyday is difficult to determine Archaeological insights and thin historical data that reflect accommodations to both the 21 John Lawson A New Voyage to Carolina p 198 22 Melvin L Fowler A PreColumbian Urban Center on the Mississippi Scientific American August 1975 92101 23 For Cahokia and references to the literature on the Mississippian more broadly see Rinita A Dalan et al Envisioning Cahokia A Landscape Perspective DeKalb IL 2003 and Adam King Etowah The Political History of a Chiefdom Capital Tuscaloosa AL 2003 Charles Hudson among others points out the possibility that at least some of the Mississippian polities may have been states in Southeastern Indians pp 2056 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 226 the cambridge world history of slavery precontact population and production declines as well as the impact of contact provide minimal information on the character of labor organi zation and control Servitude as it appears in the written sources is most likely merely a remnant of what it was like during Mississippian times when social economic and political activity was on a much larger and complex scale a scale requiring more control over labor than kinship ties may have been able to provide By the latter part of the seventeenth century there was a thriving Indian trade in all of the Southeast with English French and Spanish rivalries for control and trading partners The two most important commodities obtained from native peoples were deer skins and slaves The techniques for harvesting and handling both deer skins and captives were well developed before contact24 What was added by European newcomers were new types of goods to be exchanged for local commodities and an increased demand that spurred intensified warfare and hunting The trade in Indian slaves was important throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when thousands of Indians were made captive and traded to various Europeans Most of this slaving was done by aboriginal groups The use of Indian slaves as laborers in colonial enterprises and their exportation outside the Southeast is a part of the larger story of slavery in the Western Hemisphere from the seventeenth century onward but the impact of this largescale enslavement of indigenous North Americans on their communities was significant25 From at least the seventeenth century infectious diseases killed large numbers of people and greatly disrupted community life26 Warfare pro duced large numbers of deaths and removed others from attacked com munities into captivity27 The cumulative results of these twin scourges 24 James H Merrell The Indians New World Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal Chapel Hill NC 1989 36 25 For a study of the Indian slave trade that looks at its wider geopolitical context but that also gives some consideration to its impact on indigenous communities see Alan Gallay The Indian Slave Trade The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 16701717 New Haven CT 2002 26 The exact scale of the population decline is uncertain Studies of aboriginal population size before contact have gone from being very conservative suggesting small precontact popu lations to revisionist studies that raise estimates of precontact populations and hence the scale of the postcontact decline to very high numbers The estimates of both the high counters and the low counters are based on considerable speculation The usual starting point into the estimates is Henry F Dobyns Their Numbers Become Thinned Native American Popula tion Dynamics in Eastern North America Knoxville TN 1983 for a lively critique of Dobyns high counter approach and references to all sides of the controversy see David Henige Native American Historical Demography as Expiation in Clifton ed The Invented Indian pp 16992 27 It is impossible to estimate the total number of Southeastern Indians killed in postcontact warfare but Alan Gallay offers a conservative estimate of southern Indians sold in the British slave trade between 1670 and 1715 as 24000 The Indian Slave Trade p 299 This excludes those sold in the French and Spanish slave trades as well as deaths due to warfare and disease Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 227 was a reconfiguring of indigenous cultural geography European settle ment gradually replaced aboriginal settlement but even before the arrival of European settlers many native communities disappeared or reformed themselves significantly Often surviving inhabitants became part of newly forming communities and ethnic groups forging new and developing rela tionships with other community members with other native communities who were also reforming themselves and with Europeans both near and distant28 New indigenous elites arose in many native groups obtaining status by developing skills to deal with outsiders especially Europeans and by their ability to take advantage of new opportunities within their communities Some of these new opportunities involved the development of enterprises closely modeled on those being developed in the region by Europeans and included the exploitation of slave labor initially both Native American and African but eventually largely African Some of these new elites operated plantations similar to those of their European neighbors When they were forcibly removed to west of the Mississippi between 1829 and 1838 some took their slaves along with their other household goods29 the north pacific coast From the perspective of cultural geography the north Pacific coast of North America runs from the Aleutians south along the coast well down into what is now northern California and extends from the coast for varying distances sometimes as much as several hundred kilometres The pre Europeancontact cultures found in this long relatively narrow region are conventionally grouped into a number of culture areas Various statuses involving servitude or unfree labor were found in most of the traditional indigenous societies of this region although slavery as such was most important and most fully developed in the Northwest Coast culture area which begins at Yakutat Bay in the north of the Alaska panhandle and continues south along the Pacific coast in a fairly narrow band to below the Columbia River perhaps even to northernmost California Because of the importance of slavery there this section focuses primarily on slavery on the Northwest Coast 28 The best study of ethnogenesis in this period is Patricia Galloway Choctaw Genesis 15001700 Lincoln NE 1995 Another important study of a changing Indian group as it was integrated into the developing Southeast is James Merrell The Indians New World 29 The best treatment of the development of slavery along European lines among Southeastern Indians is Theda Perdue Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society for other Southeastern groups see Michael F Doran Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68 1979 33550 Daniel F Littlefield Africans and Creeks From the Colonial Period to the Civil War Westport CT 1979 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 228 the cambridge world history of slavery The Northwest Coast Culture Area Because traditional Northwest Coast societies are not the type usually associated with welldeveloped slavery a brief description of these cultures will provide useful background More than two dozen distinct languages belonging to at least seven major language families were spoken by one or another of the regions communities The complex cultural and linguistic situation existing at European contact represents a complicated history that is incompletely understood30 The aboriginal cultures of this region were based on fishing gathering and hunting subsistence technologies The riverine and maritime resources available were quite rich Various fish shellfish birds and sea mammals were important but the most important source of food for a majority of coastal groups were the five anadromous species of Pacific salmon that spawn in the regions rivers Landbased game was much less significant There were important plant foods but the most noteworthy plant resources were the huge stands of large trees especially cedar which were used for building houses making canoes and so on The resource base was rich but regional and local variation as well as seasonal and yearly variation made extracting a secure living from this environment a more demanding challenge than many outsiders have thought Nevertheless this culture area was one of the most densely populated in native North America The best recent estimate suggests a population possibly as high as one hundred eighty thousand at contact giving a density of more than forty persons per one hundred square kilometres a figure considerably higher than for most other parts of indigenous North America including some populations that practiced agriculture Almost all local populations undertook an annual round of seasonal shifts from one primary resource locus to another so the size and structure of the facetoface community depended on the season For most North west Coast people the main focus was the winter village those who resided together during the winter months when subsistence activity was at its lowest and ceremonial and social activity at its height After the winter season the community dispersed into units based on kinship to exploit various resource loci in turn Most often the winter village was the basic sociopolitical unit There was virtually no political unity or coordination above the winter village level and political coordination and cooperation within the winter village community could be very weak In the late eigh teenth century just after contact there were several hundred independent local groups 30 For documentation and a fuller treatment of the Northwest Coast focusing on slavery see Leland Donald Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America Berkeley CA 1997 The entire Northwest Coast section of this essay is based on that book Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 229 The primary mode of social relations was based on ties of kinship In the north there were matrilinealdescent groups organized into exogamous moieties clans and lineages In the central part of the culture area there were nonunilineal descent groups whereas in the south kin groups were shallower and less important The arts were richly developed and the worlds museums contain many examples of the fine carving of the regions artists The plastic arts were embedded in an extravagant ceremonial complex that was explained and supported by an elaborate mythological tradition Ceremonial perfor mances combined music the visual arts and drama into impressive pieces of ritual theatre The occasion of many such performances were feasts now known as potlatches events at which a host distributed large amounts of property to invited guests By accepting their gifts guests gave public recognition to some claim of the host Feasts were given to recognize the death of an important person validating the heirs claim to the deceaseds position when a new house was built to recognize the coming of age of a child and on many other important occasions At major feasts not only were large amounts of food consumed and given away but the scale of the property dispersal could expend most of the hosts material wealth Gifts often included canoes slaves and other major wealth items and property could be destroyed as well as given away Communities were divided into three ranked hereditary strata title holders commoners and slaves Feasts were given by titleholders for other titleholders Commoners were invited to witness the proceedings and often received some of the less important property through the titleholders they followed but feasting was focused on titleholders Titleholder was an hereditary status associated with kingroup leadership But titleholders were expected to demonstrate their claims to position and one of the most important ways to do this was to skillfully amass a large amount of property helped by commoner followers for distribution at a feast Feasts could have a strongly competitive atmosphere with titleholders trying to outdo and shame other titleholders with spectacular property giveaways Rivalry over status and the scale of the property dispersals that accompanied it have become synonymous with the Northwest Coast in the anthropolog ical literature although the intensity of rivalries and the magnitude of property giveaways and destruction increased dramatically after European contact Winter villages contained members of all three strata Probably fewer than 25 percent of a local groups population would belong to the titleholder category and from 5 to occasionally as much as 25 percent would be slave The remainder of the community were commoners Titleholders attempted to marry other titleholders and in other ways formed the dominant sector Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 230 the cambridge world history of slavery of each community For example resources were normally owned by kin groups but access to resources was usually controlled by the kin units head Although not usually described as such the three strata can be seen as classes In summary we have smallscale societies few winter villages exceeded one thousand persons of the type that anthropologists often label tribal Social political and economic life was kingroup based Subsistence was based on fishing gathering and hunting There was no political unity above the local community level and not even the local community was always politically unified But we also find marked social stratification that looks very much like class and welldeveloped slavery This is not a combination of culture traits expected in indigenous North America or elsewhere Captives as Slaves in the Northwest Coast Culture Area Ideas about property were highly developed Almost anything corporeal and noncorporeal could be owned including resource locales houses house sites canoes the right to use a particular type of ceremonial mask the right to perform a ceremony particular words the right to tell a particular story the right to use a specific name and human beings There was a term in all the Northwest Coast languages that easily trans lates into English as slave Most of those taken in warfare became slaves This meant that their owner had the right to kill them assign them any task they desired punish them if they failed to obey exchange them for other goods or give them away Slaves were often poorly dressed and had obvious characteristics such as special haircuts and there were often special names for slaves The children of slaves were slaves To be a slave was shameful both for the slave and for the kin group to which they had belonged In some languages the word for slave can be etymologically related to the word for to cut off or to be cut off emphasizing that slaves had been forcibly removed from their natal communities and kinship group Any of the commonly used definitions of slavery intended to apply crossculturally fit the slaves found on the Northwest Coast Owners of Slaves At some time slaves were probably present in every Northwest Coast com munity and because slavery is a relationship so were slave owners Most of the data suggest that only titleholders could own slaves The reasons for this are at the heart of Northwest Coast social and economic distinctions One might say that only the wealthy could own slaves but it would be equally accurate to say that only slave owners were truly wealthy Wealth was not simply a matter of possessions Titleholders inherited the right to their positions but they had to validate the rights to their titles Slaves Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 231 played an important role in amassing the wealth necessary to validate a title and were often part of the wealth given away or destroyed at a title validation ceremony Possession of slaves was a significant indication of a persons importance and status and the possession of slaves reflected spiritual power or worth and material wealth equally In many instances slaves were not the property of particular individuals but were the common property of a kinship group The principal titlehold ers of kinship units managed all the groups property including slaves for the benefit of the entire group Most sources describe slave owners as adult male titleholders but female titleholders frequently directed the labors of slaves and often had slaves assigned to them as servants and attendants Often many of these owners of slaves both female and male were prob ably simply enjoying the privileges of being important members of their kinship group Producing and Trading Slaves War and birth were the major sources of slavery The birth rate for female slaves seems to have been low so slaves were produced mostly by war There were many motives for intergroup fighting but slaves were a common outcome In the northern part of the culture area especially the desire for captives was a common motive for an attack on another community There was an active trade in slaves and it is likely that many of a groups slaves had not been captured by the group but obtained in trade Almost anyone could be taken captive in war People from communities who spoke the same or a very similar language were often enslaved Raids for slaves sometimes ranged widely but close neighbors people with whom one had a number of other important kinds of relationships were very common victims Within an attacked settlement anyone was a potential slave although women and children were preferred Many of those captured were already slaves and merely changed owners But members of the free strata including titleholders were also enslaved There were exceptions but extitleholders were often treated like other slaves The victims relatives sometimes tried to ransom the newly enslaved and a member of a prominent titleholder family probably had a better chance of redemption but many extitleholders spent their lives in slavery Europeans were also readily enslaved if the opportunity arose Both the ethnographic and historic record contain many instances of transactions involving slaves most involving exchanging slaves for other types of property Slaves might also be a part of the goods exchanged when marriages were arranged especially those of titleholders and might also be included as parts of compensation payments for murder as part of the exchanges at formal peace ceremonies and as gifts dispersed at feasts Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 232 the cambridge world history of slavery Analysis of the available records of exchanges of slaves for other goods shows several extensive slavetrade networks In the northern part of the culture area one was focused on the Haida Tlingit and Tsimshian peoples and extended south to northern Vancouver Island and adjacent parts of the mainland north along the coast beyond the culture area and northeast into the interior of Alaska and British Columbia The other major network was focused on the Columbia River None of the data connect these two networks via transactions in slaves but this may be because of missing information Slaves along with canoes might be described as the big bills of North west Coast transactions They were part of transactions involving prestige and ceremonial items coppers important ritual items songs and of trans actions involving items with usevalue or potential value in the trade with Europeans guns furs moose hides blankets Some sources state that prices varied according to age or gender but no clear picture of price trends is possible with the information available Uses of Slaves Slave Labor and Ritual Use Most discussions of Northwest Coast slavery treat slave labor as insignifi cant to the overall economy or to owners of slaves arguing that slaves were kept for prestige and that they were if anything an economic drain as the work that they did could at best meet the expense of keeping them Anal ysis of a wide range of ethnographic and historic sources shows however that slave labor was of considerable significance to those who held them and to the households in which they lived and worked Slaves performed a wide variety of tasks Hauling water and cutting wood are among the most commonly mentioned The biblical phrase hewers of wood and drawers of water is invoked or implied in many early observations of slaves Obtaining firewood was an ongoing task because of the enormous amounts of wood necessary to keep the large wooden uninsulated Northwest Coast houses warm especially in winter Other tasks frequently mentioned include subsistence activities picking berries collecting shellfish digging roots fishing hunting and preserving food household work child care cooking serving food and acting as household servants and a range of miscellaneous tasks accompanying the master or mistress on their travels carrying burdens acting as lookout or watchman acting as a messenger and paddling canoes None of these activities was done exclusively by slaves Commoners and some titleholders participated to some degree in all although the one ethnographic source that includes detail on work emphasizes that titleholders did much less labor than did commoners and slaves In at least some Northwest Coast cultures the sources are weak on economic issues there was an important distinction between ceremonial labor and common labor Slaves were excluded from Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 233 ceremonial labor which might include house building burial ear lip and septum piercing wearing labrets was a mark of titleholder status in some of these societies tattooing and the carving of poles masks and other ritual objects Although slave labor was deployed in a wide range of tasks one was of particular value For a majority although not all of Northwest Coast households which were large and the major unit of production the most important subsistence task was catching and preserving salmon The crucial labor bottleneck was in processing not catching salmon There was a fairly rigid gender division of labor associated with salmon harvesting men caught salmon women processed and preserved them for storage Female slaves contributed their labor to processing and preserving and male slaves could also be put to these or other female tasks Ownership of slaves could considerably increase a kin groups productive ability in this and other ways Titleholders could command and control slave labor in a way that they could not command and control commoner labor because commoners as fellow kinship group members had expectations of consideration and reciprocal treatment that slaves lacked In addition to being exploited for their labor slaves were also used in rituals They were often killed as a part of important ceremonies especially in the northern part of the culture area Throughout the region the funeral feast for a communitys leading titleholder usually included the killing of one or more slaves Slaves were also commonly killed at the funerals of other important titleholders These killings showed the heirs power and wealth and provided the deceased with servants in the afterlife but they did not involve the systematic torture found in eastern North America Slave killing during rituals was not as widespread or common in other types of ceremonies but did occur at times in some northern groups Many Northwest Coast ceremonies including funeral feasts involved the giving away of property by the events sponsor in the case of a funeral the heir Slaves were often among the property distributed Because slaves were among the most valuable types of property they went to the most important of those in attendance Slaves to be killed or given away during ceremonies were sometimes acquired specifically for the occasion and sometimes those killed were selected from among the elderly or sick Antiquity of Slavery Slavery was well established at the time of first direct European contact but the antiquity and origins of slavery are less certain The only direct evidence of the existence of slavery well before contact would come from archaeology None of the available evidence can be used to infer the presence of slavery before late precontact times with any confidence What archae ology does indicate however is that many other aspects of late precontact Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 234 the cambridge world history of slavery Northwest Coast culture were in place long before contact This includes a strong marinesubsistence orientation with sophisticated salmon capture and storage technology and marine mammal hunting winter villages with large plank houses and summerfall seasonal food procurement sites exten sive social stratification high levels of warfare considerable intraregional trade and a distinctive art style All of these cultural features began to develop on parts of the Northwest Coast between 500 BCE and 500 CE The succeeding five hundred years saw them develop into early versions of the areas historically known cultures This suggests that slavery also developed during this time frame Linguistic evidence strongly supports the emergence of slavery along side these other traits Vocabulary items relating to slaves and slavery can be traced back before language divergence in some Northwest Coast lan guage families to the same 500 BCE to 500 CE time period Given the archaeological and linguistic evidence and the fact that slavery appears well integrated into early contact cultures we can be fairly confident although not absolutely certain that slavery was a part of Northwest Coast culture from its formative period Changes in Slavery 17801880 The first direct contacts between Europeans and aboriginal peoples of the Northwest Coast came in the 1770s rather late compared with much of North America By the 1880s all of the territory of these peoples was under the control of either Canada or the United States and aboriginal slavery had all but disappeared The most publicized contact event was Cooks 1778 voyage which led to a rapidly developing maritime fur trade involving ships from several nations from one ship in 1785 to ten ships in 1786 to one hundred and four ships in the period 17904 These ships crews eagerly sought every kind of fur but their prime interest was sea otter the mainstay of a brief triangular trade between the Northwest Coast China and Europeeastern North America Northwest Coast peoples were initially most interested in metal but they soon also sought cloth blankets and clothing and ships biscuit and molasses as well as guns and ammunition and whiskey With the decimation of the sea otter interest necessarily shifted to other types of fur and the maritime trade was gradually replaced by one based on land posts The first important land post was permanently established by the Russians in Sitka in 1804 but others came later in the 1820s and 1830s In the 1840s there was an increase in Euroamerican interest in settle ment and the regions division into political units began In 1846 the British and Americans settled the boundary between their respective territo ries and soon after British colonies and American territories were formally Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 235 established Settlement began slowly but the pace increased especially in American territory With the 1867 acquisition of Alaska by the United States and the 1871 joining of the Canadian Confederation by British Columbia the political map was fixed The remainder of the period of interest here saw the consolidation of the political arrangements already made The lives and institutions of the native peoples of the region were increasingly interfered with and subordinated to the interests of incoming settlers and governments In precontact times the trade in slaves as in other goods was between neighboring or at least nearby communities Various goods including slaves sometimes traveled considerable distances the result of a series of local exchanges Trade records strongly suggest that slave trade connections were more widespread and involved longer trading journeys in late rather than in early historic times and also suggest an increase in distance and the amount of the trade in slaves in the early historic period over the late precontact period For example by the early nineteenth century the trade network centred on the Columbia River extended south to northern California and involved the Klamath as slave raiders and traders During the maritime furtrade period there was minor involvement of Europeans in the slave trade The Spanish bought some children to send back to Mexico for religious training a few natives hitched rides on European ships taking along a slave or two to sell in another community when the ship came in to trade there and at least four American ships captains are known to have engaged in the slave trade on their own behalf But the historic period slave trade was mostly in the hands of native people In the landbased furtrade period the slave trade was in places a significant part of the fur trade Native middlemen had become important and many were as eager to trade furs for slaves as for European trade goods At times the demand for slaves was so high that European traders lost valuable furs to indigenous traders who offered slaves for them Some slave trading was the result of entrepreneurial activity The native middleman hoped to conclude a series of transactions with a profit in slaves or furs The profit in furs might then be turned into trade goods The Hudsons Bay Company never completely succeeded in establishing a monopoly in the coastal fur trade so there was enough competition to allow at least some indigenous traders to profit from it There was also native demand for slaves There was some local demand both for labor and for ceremonial purposes but there was also important external native demand for slaves Slaves were one of the items of greatest demand by many of the people who lived inland from the Northwest Coast and who were important suppliers of furs to coastal middlemen The Hudsons Bay Company and others sought to reach this interior Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 236 the cambridge world history of slavery source of furs from the coast and by building interior posts from bases east of the Rockies but for the maritime furtrade period and the earlier portions of the landbased trade coastal middlemen were fairly successful at protecting their interior markets The sources for the coast document this demand but those for the interior have little to say about this trade making it difficult to know what happened to slaves traded or to be sure of the motivation of inland customers for slaves The best hypothesis is that population losses due to smallpox and other epidemics played a major role in the interior peoples demand for slaves There were certainly devastating population losses due to disease in the first third of the nineteenth century and a welldocumented smallpox outbreak in the early 1830s coincides with the high point of the interiorcoast slave and fur trade The interior peoples badly needed to rebuild their decimated populations and the coastal traders need for furs enabled some of them to do so although their numbers never recovered to preepidemic levels Both furs and slaves were valued in precontact times but they became more desirable in early historic times The slave trade and fur trade grew alongside each other Slaves were of sufficient value for raiding to obtain them to become a common motivation for warfare and contemporary sources accurately refer to predatory warfare A cycle of raids for slaves trade of slaves for furs and trade for furs to Euroamericans became part of the rivalry between important titleholders In addition to the increase in frequency of raids the distances involved also increased In earliest contact times most raids were relatively close to home The longerdistance raids so often highlighted in the literature arose later Throughout the historic period slaves continued to perform the same kinds of tasks that they did earlier Social change introduced some addi tional tasks It has been hypothesized that as the fur trade developed the demand for slave labor increased as slaves were used to acquire process and transport furs31 This is plausible but almost nothing is known about the organization of work associated with fur production and trade Later in the historic period slaves were hired out to paddle canoes and transport goods for Euroamericans One other change regarding slave labor deserves mention In the earli est contact period those exploring the coast were sometimes offered the sexual services of young women These mariners often thought that the wives and daughters of important men were being offered them but these women appear to have usually been slaves As the fur trade developed prostitution developed alongside the whiskey trade and other negative 31 Robin Fisher Contact and Conflict IndianEuropean Relations in British Columbia 17741890 Vancouver 1977 p 19 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 237 consequences of contact induced change By the early nineteenth century not all women engaged in prostitution were slaves but female slaves were probably the mainstay of the business Aboriginal women and men exploited their female slaves and female slaves were important in prostitu tion at least through the 1860s when one careful local observer suggested that female slaves had become more valuable than male slaves because of their value as prostitutes A final comment on slave labor Even late in the nineteenth century many aboriginal people were disdainful of hired labor because they asso ciated the control and direction of an employees work with the masters control of the slaves work Even in the earliest historic period in some communities slaves were sometimes freed rather than killed on ceremonial occasions But slaves continued to be regularly killed at ceremonies until at least 1870 and attempts sometimes successful were occasionally made to kill slaves at rituals for at least another decade There is a gradual pattern of increasingly replacing the killing of slaves during rituals with freeing them Information about this comes from communities where Europeans had trading posts and where by both influence and force post residents could sometimes but not always influence the outcome of intended ritual killings Those planning to kill slaves during a ceremony sometimes listened to their European neighbors and desisted partly at least because they wanted approval rather than disapproval and perhaps also because in some ways freeing a slave was also destroying property But ritual slave killing was an important way for titleholders to demon strate their power and fitness to hold their titles The ritual destruction of human life was a dramatic and significant way of demonstrating wealth and power so slave killing was given up with reluctance Increasing out side interference and the increasing rarity of slaves brought about the end of ritual slave killing That it continued so late into the historic period well after the American and Canadian authorities began to assert control over the internal affairs of native communities suggests both the impor tance of these customs in aboriginal culture and that resistance to outsider interference and control was protracted Although slavery was legally abolished in 1834 in British territory and in 1865 in American territory there is little evidence that the authorities in either jurisdiction took strong steps to end aboriginal slavery before or after these dates Runaway slaves were not returned to their owners and the freeing of slaves was encouraged but there was little active interference with slavery within native communities The numbers of slaves was in decline from the 1860s on but some slaves were still held in the 1880s and perhaps a little later There seems to have been a belief that slavery would Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 238 the cambridge world history of slavery wither away of its own accord especially as intercommunity warfare was suppressed The North Pacific Coast outside the Northwest Coast Northwest of the Alaska panhandle the coastal strip is occupied by Eskimo and Aleutspeaking peoples Considered part of the Arctic culture area because of linguistic and cultural similarities these peoples also shared important aspects of their culture with the Northwest Coast and slavery was an institution of some importance among them Aleut slavery looked much like Northwest Coast slavery although only some slaves passed their status on to their children The Pacific Eskimo also practiced slavery but it was less important than on the Northwest Coast or among the Aleut Ritual slave killing was probably absent among the Pacific Eskimo Athapaskan speakers in the interior of Alaska the Yukon and northern British Columbia took few if any prisoners in intergroup fighting so potential slaves were rare Some of these groups were as described earlier the destination of slaves traded from the coast to the interior in the early nineteenth century One interior Athapaskan group the Tutchone did practice slavery and is discussed later East of the Northwest Coast in the western part of the Plateau culture area many groups are described as holding small numbers of slaves The best information relates to the various Salishspeaking peoples of British Columbia Salish languages are spoken on the Northwest Coast and the Plateau Some interior Salish participated in the coastal slavetrade networks and held small numbers of captives in servitude But the adop tion of captives often occurred and only sometimes were captives held permanently in servitude the children of these slaves were rarely slaves themselves The ransom or return of captives to their home communities was frequent on the Plateau but infrequent on the Northwest Coast Ritual slave killing occasionally occurred among the Plateau Salish but nothing like the widespread practice on the Northwest Coast Northwest Coast influences are obvious in the treatment of captives on the Plateau but the overall picture of captivity and slavery is more like the rest of indigenous North America than the Northwest Coast32 In most of the California culture area the taking and holding of war captives was relatively rare although the sources are not very satisfactory on this topic Along the northern California coast a cluster of peoples shared some cultural affinities with the Northwest Coast culture area and a form 32 Leland Donald Slavery and Captivity A Comparison of Servitude on the Northwest Coast and among Interior Salish in Don E Dumond ed Chin Hills to Chiloquin Papers Honoring the Versatile Career of Theodore Stern University of Oregon Anthropological Papers 52 1996 7586 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 239 of bondage that is often termed slavery existed The best described of these peoples the Yurok also appear to have had the most developed form of bondage in the cluster33 The Yurok had a strong wealth and property orientation and most dis putes within and between communities were settled by the payment of compensation Families were responsible for the actions of their members If a family owed another family or individual compensation for property destruction or damage insult or homicide there was a fixed scale of compensation depending on the injury Payment was in valuable items such as dentalium shell money canoes or ceremonial regalia If the family could not pay its compensation debt it could turn over to the aggrieved party a member of the family who became what is usually termed a debt slave This persons labor was owed to their owner with whom they resided A person in debt bondage could be transferred to another owner as part of a similar claim for damages and compensation The status was humiliating to the individual and his or her family A person might be held in debt bondage for years perhaps being released if the family eventually paid a portion of the debt Some individuals also placed themselves into debt bondage in order to obtain food if their family were starving or if they had run up large debts that they could not to pay Sometimes an owner acquired a female debt slave as a wife for his male debt slave Any children of the couple were the owners Those held in debt bondage seem to have accepted their lowly social status and do not appear to have attempted to escape Runaways to other Yurok communities would not find acceptance because to take them in would incur financial liability to the owner Debt bondage was apparently fairly rare in Yurok society The best estimate is that less than 1 percent of a typical community were debt slaves but this is based on guesswork Prisoners taken in intergroup fighting did not become slaves They were held by their captors until peace was made between the warring parties and then returned to their home communities without ransom Altogether northwestern California debt slavery is quite unlike the hereditary slavery found farther north on the Northwest Coast East and north of the Northwest Coast lived groups of Athapaskan speaking peoples At the time of first contact with Europeans these huntinggathering populations exemplified the features of egalitarian val ues and institutions thought to be distinctive of bandlevel peoples who forage for their subsistence 33 Robert F Heizer Indian Servitude in California in Wilcomb E Washburn ed Handbook of North American Indians Volume 4 History of IndianWhite Relations Washington DC 1988 pp 41416 A L Kroebers notes on the Yurok in William Elmendorf The Structure of Twana Culture Research Studies 28 Monographic Supplement 2 1960 especially pp 31819 321 3447 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 240 the cambridge world history of slavery In this interior region resources available for exploitation by hunting were scanty and dispersed and both the noble savage image and anthropo logical theory about low productivity huntergatherers predict egalitarian social systems Yet we have good evidence that at least one people in this region was far from egalitarian Dominique Legross ethnographic and eth nohistoric research shows that among the Tutchone in southeast Yukon social inequality was significant and prominent34 Legross reconstruction of Tutchone social life begins in the mid nineteenth century when Tutchone society was still free from any sig nificant and direct Euroamerican economic political and cultural med dling35 They had the simplest of subsistence technologies traps and deadfalls used to take land mammals and nets and weirs used to capture their most predictable and abundant resource salmon The population of about eleven hundred people was divided into some seventy localized resource exploitation groups Most of these groups were small a third contained a single nuclear family another third probably contained no more than two such fewer than a dozen were by Tutchone standards large containing ten or so nuclear families The Tutchone were organized into exogamous matrilineal moieties Within each moiety the taboo on marriage even on any potential sex ual encounter was strictly enforced but both marriage and sexual relations were allowed between members of opposite moieties irrespective of gen eration or genetic closeness The preferred form of marriage was with a bilateral crosscousin These technical details of Tutchone kinship and marriage are emphasized because such forms of marriage are associated with simple egalitarian societies36 Nonetheless Legros shows that not only was inequality important among the Tutchone but that those who dominated others did so in part by successfully manipulating the culturally ideal practice of bilateral crosscousin marriage Tutchone society was divided into three ranked strata the rich the poor and the slaves Rich families made up about 15 percent of the whole population Rich families formed the core of the ten or so largest resource exploitation groups they controlled the best resource sites and they monopolized trade with the Northwest Coast Tlingit Poor families comprised about 75 percent of the population They were either attached to a rich leaders group or lived in very small groups in the poorer resource areas Slaves made up about 10 percent of the population All belonged to rich Tutchone 34 Dominique Legros Reflexions sur lorigine des inegalites social a partir du cas de Athapaskan tutchone Culture 2 1982 6584 idem Wealth Poverty and Slavery among 19thCentury Tutchone Athapaskans Research in Economic Anthropology 7 1985 3764 35 Legros Wealth Poverty and Slavery p 38 36 Claude Levi Strauss The Elementary Structures of Kinship Boston 1969 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 241 The rich dominated and exploited both poor and slave Although there was a little social mobility rich status was largely inherited and the rich were able to pass their advantages on to their children As Legros writes The Tutchone case demonstrates that socioeconomic inequalities may be present among huntergatherers even in one of the harshest environments in the world Tutchone population density was one of the lowest known anywhere and its spatial distribution was characteristic of the simplest societies of hunters and gatherers Their production techniques their products and the goods they exchanged had nothing exceptional Yet they were divided into socioeconomic strata A few rich families monopolized the best extraction sites and access to extralocal trade and defended their monopoly through the use of naked force Moreover these families used the resources they had appropriated to further exploit poor families going so far as to make some poor individuals their slaves in the full sense of the word37 the southwest and the plains The Southwest and Plains are usually treated as two distinct culture areas Discussion of these regions will be combined here These areas are very different in terms of their prehistory and many important historicera cultural features but in the context of captivity and servitude a combined approach to the two regions has advantages because of the integration of the Southwest and the southern Plains into a complex system of trading and raiding that also influenced developments in the central and northern Plains38 Throughout both the Southwest and the Plains captives were taken in precontact times Some of these captives were adopted this includes taking captive women as wives and others were probably traded For the Southwest sixteenthcentury evidence suggests the adoption of captives and that some were eaten in ritual cannibalism Whether there were also forms of bondage in precontact times is uncertain Some scholars argue that the notion of people as chattels was introduced into the South west by the Spanish but it is equally likely that some captives remained 37 Legros Wealth Poverty and Slavery p 62 38 In contemporary geographic terms the Southwestern culture area is usually taken to include all of New Mexico all but the northwestern corner of Arizona the California portion of the Colorado River valley the western and southernmost parts of Texas a bit of southeastern Colorado and adjacent portions of northern Mexico although the Mexican portion of this culture area is not considered here The Plains culture area is usually taken to coincide with the great plains geographic region In the west it includes the eastern slopes of the Rockies continuing down into central Texas and continues east to about the 100th meridian The prairies east of the Plains proper are sometimes considered a separate culture area but their western regions are often treated as part of the Plains culture area and this inclusion is followed here To the north the Plains region includes the southern parts of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba See Map 91 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 242 the cambridge world history of slavery unadopted uneaten and untraded in the kind of sociallimbo dependant status encountered before in eastern North America39 The first important Spanish intrusion into the Southwestern culture area was the Coronado expedition of 15401 and Spanish activity in the region intensified from the 1580s onward This led to the conquest of the agricultural Pueblo villages along the Rio Grande and elsewhere in New Mexico and Arizona and the gradual establishment of Spanish settlements Aside from the immediate consequences of conquest for the Pueblo peoples important wider events with consequences for the indigenous peoples of the greater Southwest the southern Plains and eventually the entire Plains region were the introduction of the horse and the growing Spanish demand for captives Indian peoples in the vicinity of Spanish settlements began acquiring horses soon after the Spanish occupation began By the 1650s some Apache were trading captives for horses with the Pueblo Indians40 Direct Apache Spanish trade began with the Apache offering bison hides and meat in exchange for maize and cloth By the middle of the seventeenth century after the Apache had obtained horses they offered bison hides and meat horses and captives in exchange for maize cloth horses and metal goods Trade networks focusing on the Spanish settlements spread rapidly and by the midseventeenth century the Eastern and Northern Shoshone based in southern Idaho and western Wyoming were also trading with the Spanish New Mexican settlements These Shoshone were particularly desirous of metal goods horses and mules but the trade involved such long distances that the high bulk of bison hides and meat important to the ApacheSpanish trade made them unattractive as trade goods for more distant Indians so captives were the principal good offered the Spanish in this trade41 As trading and raiding activity expanded and intensified various Plains peoples also became involved with French and English traders from the east who also sought to trade for captives Those who were raided for cap tives did their own raiding in turn and captives flowed in many directions to both indigenous and European customers The following examples illus trate the complexity of this traffic in people From the mid1600s Apachean speakers on the periphery of the southwestern Plains were taking captives from the Caddoans to sell in the Southwest42 In the mideighteenth 39 Albert H Schroeder and Omer C Stewart Indian Servitude in the Southwest in Washburn ed Handbook of North American Indians Volume 4 History of IndianWhite Relations p 410 for sixteenthcentury evidence p 414 for possible Spanish introduction of idea of captives as chattel 40 John C Ewers The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture Washington DC 1955 p 3 41 Frank R Secoy Changing Military Patterns on the Great Plains Seattle WA 1953 pp 24 38 42 James H Gunnerson Plains Village Tradition Western Periphery in Raymond J DeMalllie ed Handbook of North American Indians volume 13 Plains Washington DC 2001 p 239 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 243 century these same Apacheans were also raided by Pawnee and Osage who traded their captives to the Louisiana French who were more interested in human slaves than furs43 British traders encouraged Muskogeon speakers from the Mississippi River area to raid Quapaw to obtain captives to trade to the British44 And much farther north in the 1740s Cree and Assi boine allies of the French raided the Sioux and supplied many captives to the French45 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Plains people were taken into the European slave systems of eastern North America in addition to the Plains and Southwestern people who entered the Spanish system in the Southwest and Mexico The possession of horses transformed many aspects of Plains cultures not just their trading and warfare patterns All these changes were based on alterations of subsistence practices because horses enabled the Plains peoples to exploit the large bison herds much more effectively Horses reached the northern and central Plains groups early in the eighteenth century46 On the Plains raiding and trading captives was important throughout most of the historic period although in the northern Plains raiding for horses may have become more significant than raiding for captives later in the period47 Even if this is the case the adoption of captives espe cially women and children remained important throughout the historic period as a major mechanism for replacing members of the community lost through deaths due to warfare or epidemic disease As with almost all other indigenous North American peoples losses due to diseases intro duced from outside the continent by Europeans had a devastating effect The Piegan for example estimated that they lost more than half their population in the smallpox epidemic of 1781 The idea that adopting captives was a device for replenishing population numbers is not only an interpretation of outsiders In the late 1780s a respected Piegan leader counselled the men undertaking raids to seek both horses and captives and to minimize their own casualties the latter admonition being somewhat counter to the Plains warriors ethic of bravery and disregard for personal safety In this instance captives for adoption were eagerly sought even when the Piegan were planning to raid their bitterest enemies the North ern and Eastern Shoshoneans whom they called Snakes suggesting their 43 William R Swagerty History of the United States Plains until 1850 in DeMalllie ed Handbook of North American Indians volume 13 Plains p 264 44 Gloria A Young and Michael P Hoffman Quapaw in ibid p 499 45 Jennifer S H Brown History of the Canadian Plains until 1870 in ibid p 303 46 Ewers The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture pp 47 47 Ewers The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture p 315 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 244 the cambridge world history of slavery confidence in being able to incorporate even these despised enemies into their community48 Both male and female children were sought as captives but for adults only women were desirable captives adult men were potentially dangerous if allowed to live within the captors community But the status of women and the Plains gender division of labor were also important As Ewers notes for the prehorse and early horse Blackfoot female captives provided needed assistance in the communal hunt performed laborious household chores and carried burdens when the camp was moved Ewers suggests that the horse made the life of women easier as horses took over much of the burden of carrying Nevertheless female labor remained very important in Plains households Ewers also argues that social differentiation and economic inequality increased within Blackfoot society as the size of horse herds grew49 As some men grew richer polygyny may have increased as the number of horses grew Subsidiary wives seem to have been particularly disadvantaged if the Piegan situation is at all typical Young Piegan women often reacted to the prospect of becoming a junior wife of a man by running away with a younger man50 Captive women were in no position to resist such marriages This suggests that many captive women who married their captor or one of his relatives were still in a markedly dependant status It is also the case however that in most Plains societies the situation of women free or captive was very disadvantaged compared with men Women are sometimes described in the ethnographic literature as the chattels of their fathers brothers and then their husbands Among the Comanche for example chattelproperty included horses women dogs and unadopted captives51 For female captives the transition from captive to wife or wife to captive did not necessarily entail a significant change in status as a dependant Captives who were adopted usually became full members of their captors group Even women captives who became wives were in a similar position to many wives born into the community Among the Kiowa there were four ranks of people the two highest being labeled as rich the two lowest as poor Captives were typically adopted by a family of the two highest ranks but were regarded as being of the third rank although meritorious behavior enabled them to move up to the second rank Many of the Kiowa 48 The Piegan were one of the peoples in the Blackfoot alliance The speech referred to is given in detail in David Thompson David Thompsons Narrative 17841812 Richard Glover ed Toronto 1962 pp 2478 49 Ewers The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture pp 310 31516 50 Such subsidiary wives were seen principally as labor to be directed by senior wives Thompson David Thompsons Narrative 17841812 p 257 51 Ernest Wallace and E Adamson Hoebel The Comanches Lords of the South Plains Norman 1952 p 41 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 245 captives were Mexicans taken in raids south of the Rio Grande52 For the Teton and many of their fellow Sioux captives were adopted by families and considered to be tribal members once they had learned to speak their adopters language and male captives were often adopted to take the place of sons killed in battle being integrated into the entire kin network once adopted53 The Comanche at least had a formal ceremony for adopting adult male captives in whom they had confidence This involved oath taking and formal affiliation with a Comanche family Such men were regarded as fully Comanche and some became respected warriors54 To focus on the Southwest again one major difference between the Southwest and the Plains was that even by the early eighteenth century Spanish control over the Southwest especially in its New Mexican core was much greater than what the French British or Americans achieved on the Plains prior to the nineteenth century Spanish influence on the settled agricultural villages was strong even if not complete and Spanish influence over the fate of captives was significant The Spanish were eager to trade for Indian captives and many remained in the Southwest held in various forms of servitude Aside from captives held within Spanish households often technically as indentured servants rather than slaves there arose a new social or ethnic identity the genızaros usually non Pueblo Indians who were ransomed captives or mixedbloods living in Spanish fashion in their own communities Indians held in servitude by the Spanish and the genızaros fall outside the scope of this chapter but they were important in the continuing relationships between the Spanish and the various indigenous peoples who were not under Spanish control but who both traded with and raided the Spanish settlements and those that they controlled55 Spanish treatment of captives strongly influenced the treatment of cap tives by nearby indigenous people who were not under their direct con trol This is illustrated by the Navajo speakers of one of the Apachean Athapaskan languages Like the other Apacheanspeaking groups who entered the Southwest sometime between 1200 and 1500 CE they came to the region as hunters and gathers but while retaining their Athapaskan distinctiveness adopted agriculture and some other Pueblo customs After the Spanish arrived they also quickly took up horses and the herding of 52 Jerrold E Levy Kiowa in DeMalllie ed Handbook of North American Indians volume 13 Plains Washington DC 2001 p 912 53 Raymond J Demallie Teton in ibid Plains Washington DC 2001 p 806 Raymond J DeMallie Sioux until 1850 in ibid p 727 54 Wallace and Hoebel The Comanches p 242 55 For an excellent account of the genızaros Spanish treatment of people of indigenous origin that they held in various forms of servitude and SpanishIndian relations in the Southwest see James F Brooks Captives and Cousins Slavery Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands Chapel Hill NC 2002 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 246 the cambridge world history of slavery sheep and goats developing the same mixture of trading and raiding rela tionships with the Spanish that they had with the Pueblo peoples The Navajo practiced slavery in postcontact times Earlier captives were taken in war and at least some of these captives were adopted but the fate of unadopted captives is uncertain Historic Navajo slavery and Spanish American slavery in the Southwest had many similarities suggesting that Navajo slavery was modeled on the SpanishAmerican variety Linguistic evidence also suggests that Navajo slavery had shallow historical roots and was poorly integrated into Navajo culture The principal differences were that Navajo owners could in theory kill their slaves that former slaves sometimes acquired social prominence that slaves were narrowly rather than widely distributed through the society and that slaves could be inherited56 In historic times Navajo acquired slaves through both war and pur chase rarely trading slaves to outsiders The eventual assimilation of slaves into Navajo communities as free Navajo can be seem from the ample evidence of captives and slaves obtaining membership in a matrilineal clan and in the fact that several clans are acknowledged to be of captive origin57 In the Southwest and the Plains captive taking and captive holding remained significant until well after the American Civil War Many cap tives became adoptive kin others are best described as unfree labor By the middle of the nineteenth century the external demand for Indian slaves was gone But population losses due to warfare and disease continued and some new labor demands developed women were critical labor in pro ducing robes and external demand outstripped most Indian communities productive capacity One solution to obtaining and controlling the needed additional labor was an increase in multiple marriages This maintained or increased the demand for female captives as additional wives and thus intensified warfare58 In conclusion in indigenous North America in most domains of culture and society within a pattern of broad regional similarities there was a considerable range of variation This was true of the fate of captives taken in intergroup conflicts who were the source of most of those in statuses of servitude within Native American societies In many of these societies captives were most often adopted into kin groups and they and especially their children eventually became ordinary members of the community But 56 David M Brugge Navajos in the Catholic Church Records of New Mexico 16941875 Tsaile NM 1985 pp 12744 is the fullest treatment of Navajo slavery known to me See also Brooks Captives and Cousins pp 24150 57 David F Aberle Navaho in David M Schneider and Kathleen Gough eds Matrilineal Kinship Berkeley CA 1961 pp 11011 58 William R Swagerty History of the United States Plains until 1850 pp 2778 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in indigenous north america 247 not all captives were adopted and in many communities a few remained in poorly described and understood sociallimbo statuses of servitude In one region of indigenous North America the Northwest Coast captives were rarely adopted but usually became slaves in the full sense of the word This was also true in a few other societies in the north Pacific coast region Northwest Coast societies were typical smallscale nonstates in most ways and had a fishing hunting and gathering subsistence base but they also had hereditary ranked strata much like classes and fullblown slavery From a world perspective these societies and a few of their neighbors such as the Tutchone show that under appropriate conditions even very small scale societies can develop statuses of bondage and exploit those held in servitude as fully as in the much largerscale and betterknown societies that have practiced slavery further reading James F Brooks Captives and Cousins Slavery Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands Chapel Hill NC 2002 Leland Donald Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America Berke ley CA 1997 John C Ewers The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture Washington DC 1955 John R Jewitt Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R Jewitt while Held as a Captive of the Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island Robert F Heizer ed Ballena Press Publications in Archaeology Ethnology and History No 5 orig 1815 JosephFrancois Lafitau Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Cus toms of Primitive Times William N Fenton and E L Moore eds Toronto ON 197477 Two volumes Dominique Legros Wealth Poverty and Slavery among 19thCentury Tutchone Athapaskans Research in Economic Anthropology 7 1985 3764 Theda Perdue Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society 15401866 Knoxville TN 1979 Daniel K Richter The Ordeal of the Longhouse The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization Chapel Hill NC 1992 Brett Rushforth A Little Flesh We Offer You The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France William and Mary Quarterly 60 2003 777808 Bruce Trigger The Children of Aataentsic A History of the Huron People to 1660 Montreal 1976 Alden T Vaughan and Daniel K Richter Crossing the Cultural Divide Indians and New Englanders 16051763 Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 90 1980 2399 Richard White The Middle Ground Indians Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region 16501815 Cambridge 1991 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 10 INDIGENOUS SLAVERY IN SOUTH AMERICA 14921820 neil l whitehead 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 polit ical representation but also cosmologically because the key relationship between humanity and divinity is one of predation for many native peo ples Animal pets are socially liminal and arise from the killing of the pets kin usually in a hunting expedition This killing implies an obligation to take on the roles of the deads 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 captive1 Likewise indigenous forms of warfare and marriage which are usually seen in native thought as analogous mechanisms for the exchange and flow of persons between groups heavily foreground the obligatory 1 The ritual position of captives whether animal or human was often socially analogous in native society Like pets captives could be well treated and incorporated into the domestic structures and activities of the household In turn dreaming is a mode of relationship with those who are not kin and everything that appears in dream is designated enemy In this way dreams establish the possibility of communication among persons animals and spirits But the nature of the relationship between the dreamer and the dreamed is that of master and pet The dream enemy is said to be a pet of the dreamer or his magicprey In this state of subjection the dreamed becomes ally not enemy and such dream pets are also similar to shamans familiar spirits in other Amazonian groups See Carlos Fausto Of Enemies and Pets Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia American Ethnologist 26 2000 93356 Anne Christine Taylor Wives Pets and Affines Marriage among the Jivaro in Laura Rival and Neil L Whitehead eds Beyond the Visible and the Material Oxford 2001 pp 4556 Loretta Cormier Kinship with Monkeys the Guaja Foresters of Eastern Amazonia New York 2003 248 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 249 and servile status of wifetakers over wifegivers To make the prestation of a woman in marriage created a debt on the part of those receiving the wife such that this a fundamental social fact became an idiom through which many forms of imperial tribute systems and their associated labor regimes were understood Thus there is an important contrast between the emergent systems of servitude as they were practiced by the strongly hierarchical state societies such as the Incan state and those seen among the chieftaincies and ethnic confederations to which they were nonethe less related However these forms of tributary servitude are in turn to be contrasted with the commodified marketorientated systems of colonial labor that the Europeans developed in the Americas In the latter case the obligations of servile labor were transferable through a monetary exchange rather than being defined by ideas of kinship or ritual and political obliga tion Among chieftaincies and ethnic confederations war captives might be integrated into daily life in a number of ways that reflected ideas about warfare and social exchange between groups more generally including rit ual obligations to rulers or theocratic elites that might involve obligatory periods of labor not unlike the systems of feudal serfdom that occurred in Europe The key point is that in neither case was the labor of the captive or commoner alienable for monetary gain that labor remained invested in the social person because the servility of labor was enforced by kinship or ritual obligation not the institution of law Indeed the Spanish system of encomienda which granted title to a period of labor or tribute of its product by fixed units of the native population reflected an adaptation to and compromise with existing indigenous social systems especially in the Andean and northwestern regions of South America Notable attempts to make grants of encomiendas in regions where this kind of hierarchical social system was not present almost always failed because they did not match existing social realities In these contexts a commodification of var ious kinds of war captives became the standard way in which native slaves were produced for the colonial invaders and over time the range of raiding and its focus on the capture of persons expanded to meet the everwidening colonial demands for native labor Thus consideration of the advent of European institutions of slavery in South America both allows a clearer appreciation of indigenous forms of obligatory service and also recasts the meaning of European slavery in a comparative framework The commodification of captives the prof itable labor regimes that controlled them and the existence of specific types of commodity market and economic production mark off Euro pean slavery of Africans and Native Americans from the kinds of social and cultural practices already present in South America in 1492 There fore this chapter discusses forms of captivity and obligatory service in both the imperial contexts of the Andes and the chiefdoms and ethnic Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 250 the cambridge world history of slavery formations of Amazonia and the Caribbean This highlights the impor tance of the cultural disjuncture in European and native South American ideas of servitude and the ownership of persons This is sadly illustrated in the many observations from the colonial literature especially during the sixteenth century of the summary enslavement of persons sent voluntarily as guests and ambassadors aboard European ships For example a trading ship leaving the coast of Brazil in 1515 was described thus Below decks the ship is loaded with brazilwood and on deck it is full of young men and women They cost the Portuguese little for most are given freely the people here think that their children are going to a promised land2 Such treacherous actions quickly led to hostile attitudes being adopted by the native population For native groups the gift of a person was made in order that a kin relationship might emerge with the strangers so that they could gather intelligence on the ways of the paranghiri spirits from the sea and also encourage the return of this new and powerful potential affine and trade partner as did indeed sometimes occur3 For these reasons particular emphasis needs to be given to the concep tual and ideological continuities among South American cosmologies in thinking about persons bodies and domestic animals as well as their corre sponding cultural and social usage by shamans chiefs and warriors At the same time the way in which such ideas of human bondage and obligation were affected and supplanted by European practices allows a better expo sition of the forms of native servitude Native groups also were coopted into both the hunting down of runaway black slaves from the European commodity plantations and the provision of domestic servants for the households of slave owners Thus some institutions of colonial labor con trol such as the encomienda entailed obligatory household service which relied upon and often directly adopted the existing forms of native labor units or kin groupings Moreover this was consciously part of a colonial strategy of limiting the labor demands on native peoples so as to better sustain political control over them Generally the native population was highly alert to the difference between domestic service and the regimes of enslavement in the manner of the plantation labor enforced on black slaves Among the many groups that were involved in the enslaving of native people for the Europeans and in the control of the black slave population of the plantations the Caribs of northeastern South America are particularly prominent and will be considered in some detail as a way of depicting the 2 Quoted in Hemming Red Gold 11 3 Walter Ralegh left Hugh Goodwin and Francis Sparrey both teenage boys in the custody of Topiawari an important chieftain of the lower Orinoco and himself took back to England the chieftains only son Cayoworaco and two other natives who spent many years imprisoned in the Tower of London alongside Ralegh Neil Whitehead The Discoverie of the large rich and Beautiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh Norman OK 1997 p 30 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 251 changing nature of slavery and slaving in indigenous society This also will allow a fruitful contrast with the changing contexts of obligatory service in the Incan world The Caribs were certainly not the only example of active involvement in colonial labor regimes and certainly consideration of the development of the Brazilian plantation economy would be no less relevant The important link between these cases is the presence of a plantation economy with a burgeoning and largely unsatisfied demand for slaves The Caribs as well as their Brazilian counterparts such as the Tupi or the Manoa rose to dominance as a result of their engagement with the colonial regime the nature of their slaving cannot be understood without reference to those changing conditions particularly apparent in the way in which native labor was only minimally used on Caribbean plantations but was used extensively in Brazil after 1600 predation warfare and marriage Before it is possible to appreciate the nature of slaving and servitude as it developed among the indigenous peoples of South America in the period 14921820 it is necessary to examine notions of predation warfare and marriage because they were closely entwined and were the basis on which colonial regimes coopted native groups into the commodification of cap tives and affines as slaves For example among the Tupi peoples of Brazil the status of the kawewi pepicke captives destined for sacrifice through can nibalistic ceremony was often assimilated to that of a pet in that they were members of a household albeit with tenuous ties of kinship or senti ment Nonetheless Tupi war captives were often married off to their captors and could live for some time perhaps even years before they were even tually sacrificed or as happened on occasion escaped with their enemy wife It is also important to note that Tupi warfare itself was predicated on the live capture of the enemy warrior as much as his death whether in combat or sacrifice subsequent to capture The Portuguese exploited this situation by insisting on the rescue of such potential cannibal victims The subsequent enslavement of those res cued within the ingenios factories of the sugar industry was held preferable to their anthropophagic demise a view often vigorously contested by such rescued victims themselves In time such rescues would occur for whole villages as the fiction of Christian redemption from savage pagan ritual masked a useful means for commodifying war captives4 The children of 4 This is still a missionary tactic Catholic and Adventist missionaries in Peru in the first half of the twentieth century became involved in the trading of Arawak children accused of sorcery as a way of rescuing them from possible execution or enslavement see Fernando SantosGranero The Enemy Within Child Sorcery Revolution and the Evils of Modernization in Eastern Peru in Neil L Whitehead and Robin Wright eds In Darkness and Secrecy The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia Durham NC 2004 pp 272305 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 252 the cambridge world history of slavery such captives who might be held alive for an extended period were not considered servile in any way and might rise to eminence within Tupian social systems It is therefore evident that the ritual production of such cap tives was not linked to any need for labor as such but rather to the conduct of warfare which was seen as a generalized medium of exchange between social units fueled by the cosmological promise of divine accession through the exercise of military and cannibalistic sacrifice To consider such war cap tives as slaves despite the extreme physical restrictions placed on them does not adequately describe the complex social situation of such individ uals Moreover it also recapitulates the colonial propaganda that sought to justify its own regimes of captivity and forced labor partly by claim ing that such slavery already functionally existed among native groups Rather warfare ritually produced raw women who had to be socialized or cooked through marriage and cooked men who fed the body politic in emulation of the divine forms of predation that the forms of political authority symbolically invoked and imitated In this way military aggres sion was made politically acceptable through the symbolic links between sacrificial cannibalism warfare and cosmology it became thereby a key cultural site for the expression of violent masculinity itself justified and enjoined by the predatory nature of the cosmos This predator cosmos was envisioned as a situation in which divine beings fed off humanity which necessitated humans if they were to achieve divinity to emulate these predatory gods in combat and anthropophagic ritual In this context the practice of marriage was itself linked to the practice of warfare because ones enemies were also potential affines a kin relationship with the potential for social intimacy as well as social distance As a result warfare was typically conducted against those communities with whom one might also inter marry Conflicts thus united groups into regional systems of exchange in which war captives potential brides and affines all participated Con ceived of in this manner the differences between raiding trading and marriage appear more as ones of the intensity and the form of reciprocity rather than as fundamentally distinct realms of social and cultural life The negative reciprocity of raiding was thus on a continuum with the more balanced reciprocity of trade and the highly positive reciprocity of mar riage The key point to understand is that all facets of such relationships were part of the reciprocal relations between groups and were understood as such In the context of Carib society the social category designated by the kin term poito summates this relational continuum because it could mean soninlaw client or trade partner servant or eventually slave However even when this most negative meaning of the term was applied it was persistently confusing to the Europeans and thus often the source of dispute because the selling of a captive to a European did not imply Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 253 that commodified relationship that was the basis of the colonial political economy of slavery Rather it was more like a temporary grant or gift given in expectation of a reciprocal gift at some future point in time and so unlike European notions of juridical contract with such a transaction being seen as a onetime payment that terminated any social obligation between buyer and seller5 Thus when a few years had passed the native vendor might well consider it time to retrieve the slave and reaffirm what it was never even possible for him to sell or transfer the social related ness of the captive to him and to the wider society from which they both came In this light it can be seen that under European influence trading re lationships moved more often into the sphere of negative reciprocity as European trade goods offered high profit margins in exchanges for native goods and even for natives themselves As a result by the eighteenth century the term poito had passed into colonial documents of this region as the word for a native slave rather than the term indio esclavo which had preceded it The capture of women for marriage certainly was a precolonial practice but for the reasons given cannot be assimilated to European notions of slavery poitos and macos from exchange to slavery The slaving of native groups by native groups thus can be understood as an extension of trading activities for only by trade and intermarriage could those populations from which the slaves were taken be defined as poitos Thus the Caribs would have stood in an affinal relation to the people they raided by virtue of the fact that they married the women and sold the men related to these women their potential brothersinlaw Furthermore the slave status of the poito would have been more pronounced under Euro pean influence both on account of the possibility for profit involved in a commodified slave trade and because of the trading advantages that Caribs had developed through their European alliances Nonetheless evidence as to the existence of a limited form of preColombian obligatory service among native peoples consists of the continual reference of the historical record to a class of persons variously referred to as macos or poitos the former term being of Arawak origin the latter of Carib It should be said at the outset that the nature of such obligatory ser vice bears little relation to the forms of exploitation and subjugation that African peoples suffered at the hands of the European slavers The term poito which appears in various orthographic forms is found among many 5 In North America this misapprehension gave rise to the term Indian giver Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 254 the cambridge world history of slavery different Caribspeaking peoples It has variously been translated as slave client brotherinlaw soninlaw and sisters son and this range of meanings covers a continuum from the potential equal brotherinlaw to the totally inferior slave The suggestion here is that only under Euro pean influence might the situation of the Carib poito or Arawak maco have come to approximate that of the plantation black In preColumbian times only where the affinal relation was customarily one of domination and submissiveness would the term poito take on potential connotations of servant or slave Among Arawak speakers the term maco seems to have had a similar meaning In both contexts the labor such macos or poitos would have performed was likely the kind of obligatory assistance given by kin in collective labor in agriculture or housebuilding as well as daily labor in hunting fishing or tending agricultural fields Various authorities mention the existence of a group known as Macos living all over the Upper Orinoco and Vaupes area The implication here is taken to be that macos of whatever linguistic affiliation are the remnants of hunting and gathering groups destroyed or assimilated by more powerful agriculturally based societies such as the Arawaks and Caribs This process is hypothe sized as taking place via the killing of adults and the kidnap of children who became assimilated as macos or poitos Thus just as poito may express an ambiguous status between captive and soninlaw so among Arawak speakers the term maco is used in the same way The missionaries Jose Gumilla and Jacinto de Carvajal6 say the name poito was reserved for those groups continually attacked by the Caribs Felipe Gilij says the word maco was the equivalent of poito in the Casanare and Meta region It therefore seems relatively clear that macos and poitos formed unique openended social categories in Carib and Arawak society It is far more difficult to tell how important or prevalent they were on the eve of European discovery Julian Steward argued that both Arawak and Carib societies were not suf ficiently advanced to allow the formation of a slave class whereas Irving Rouse and Miguel AcostaSaignes maintain that among the Caribs of the Antilles captured women did represent such a class as with the Caribs and Arawaks of the mainland but that the scope of slavery was curtailed because of limited productive capacity and that this limitation manifested itself in the fact that the children of slaves were free7 Whether or not Rouse is correct in assigning a limited economic capacity as the reason for the 6 Felipe Gilij Ensayo de Historia Americana Caracas 1965 first published 1781 Jose Gumilla El Orinoco Illustrado Y Defendido Madrid 1745 7 Miguel AcostaSaignes Estudios de etnologıa antigua de Venezuela Caracas 1961 Irving Rouse The Island Carib in Julian Steward ed Handbook of South American Indians IV Washington DC 1948 pp 50765 Julian Steward The Native Population of South America in idem ed Handbook of South American Indians V Washington DC 1949 pp 65588 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 255 underdevelopment of slavery among the Caribs and Arawaks it does seem to have been the case that once accepted captives were well treated Felipe Gilij says that among the Caribs young captives learned to speak the language and became totally assimilated being very well treated whereas among the Arawaks macos were similarly well treated being distinguishable only by a particular hair style8 Nonetheless it is difficult to be certain about the status of macos and poitos because the European presence drastically changed the situation by introducing the specter of profits into slaving raids Even the earliest chron iclers may have been witnessing an institution already somewhat changed from the preColumbian form Moreover there was a difference between the way in which relationships between groups may have exhibited certain kinds of hierarchy which emerged from distinct economic orientations and systems of exchange as well the status of individual warcaptives potentially marriageable but thereby also fit for sacrifice as a classificatory brotherinlaw or domestic service in the kinship idiom of a soninlaw Little more can be said about the aboriginal situation but examination of the history of European involvement is less problematic and tends to confirm the notion that what once might have been a limited practice became for the Caribs an activity from which alone that nation derives its livelihood9 the european transformation Within two decades of the arrival of the Europeans in South America the enslavement of natives had become an established lucrative business in which all nations were involved The most important buyers initially were undoubtedly the Spanish who used native labor in the pearl fisheries of Cubagua and Margarita and the mines and plantations of the Antilles For example Las Casas informs us that on the Shore of Pearls the Spaniards committed most wonderful depopulations for they gave themselves wholly to their wonted Robberies enslaving also infinite numbers of men on purpose to sell them for money against all the faith and pledges which they had given them for their security10 Yet there seems little doubt that the European slavers were aided in their efforts by both Caribs and Arawaks of the coastal region For example Walter Raleigh informs us that 8 Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes Historia general y natural de las Indias II Madrid 1959 p 267 9 Commander of Essequibo to West India Company 1746 BGB BC II 46 10 Bartolome de Las Casas The Tears of the Indians Being an Historical and True Account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of Above Twenty Millions of Innocent People Committed by the Spaniards in the Islands of Hispaniola Cuba Jamaica c London 1656 p 44 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 256 the cambridge world history of slavery the Spanish bought slaves from Carib and Arawak groups living on the Barima Pomeroon and Essequibo Rivers Among manie other trades those Spaniards used in Canoas to passe to the rivers of Barema Pawroma and Dissequebe which are on the south side of the mouth of Orenoque and there buie women and children from the Canibals which are of that barbarous nature as they will for 3 or 4 hatchets sell the sonnes and daughters of their owne brethren and sisters and for somewhat more even their own daughters heerof the Spaniards make great profit for buying a maid of 12 or 13 yeeres for three or fower hatchets they sell them againe at Marguerita in the west Indies for 50 and 100 pesoes which is so many crownes Raleigh also says that there was an important slave market on the Orinoco between the Cari and Limon Rivers where there was Carib settlement Apparently Arawak middlemen bought slaves from the Caribs here and exported them to the West Indies11 It is not surprising then to learn that the main cause of population decline in Trinidad in the sixteenth century was Spanish slaving through direct capture associated deaths and the flight of remaining populations Hypocritically the Spanish claimed that it has been the fault of the Caribs that the Island has been depopulated having had many more inhabitants than at present However as the other European nations created stable enclaves in the area they too became buyers in the slave trade For example it was reported to the Council of the Indies in 1614 that English and Caribs had been stealing friendly Indians on the Orinoco to work the Jamaican plantations whereas in 1686 the governor of Cumana reported that the Caribs of the Guarapiche River sell to the French like merchandise the Indians they capture for having tasted this devilish profit the very Indians of the Missions will no longer be safe from them nor will anyone else in the country And in order to fulfil their ambition and that of the French they will make joint incursions with the latter as they have done in other parts and as the Dutch have also done with some settlements on the River Orinoco in the region of the mainland Initial Spanish slaving was undoubtedly disastrous for the native popula tion of the Caribbean coast and Trinidad it was stopped on the orders of the crown in 1652 In terms of Spanish imperial policy this cessation of the armed conquest and initiation of reduccıon evangelization by the missionaries represents the attempt of the crown to bring its colonists firmly under political control Therefore as a strategic resource in the bat tle for colonial territorial possession the native population was not to be wasted at the whim of the colonists The native population was considered 11 Whitehead Discoverie 179 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 257 unsuitable for plantation labor because of their supposed indiscipline ten dency to take off into the forests without warning and alleged incapacity for sustained effort Furthermore the fact that importation of blacks from Africa had become economically viable meant that native enslavement was seen as superfluous However where the conditions were right commodi fied native slaves emerged even being used by the native population For example the Arawaks of the lower Orinoco used slaves in their produc tion of tobacco for trade to the Spanish Notably these slaves were blacks imported from Africa and given or sold to the Arawaks by their Spanish trading partners As this implies the emergence of commodified slaves was thus linked to a particular kind of labor requirement plantation work producing commodities for a distant market Such forms of economic production were apparently not developed in the preColumbian world whose indigenous economic systems were largely directed to the produc tion of usevalue rather than profitvalue production being largely geared to the needs of the domestic household not market trade12 Nonetheless both the high cost of imported slaves during the eighteenth century as well as the later suppression of the regimes of black enslavement in the nineteenth century meant that the slaving of the native popula tion was still an economically attractive activity among newly contacted peoples from the pampas grasslands of Argentina and Paraguay to the Amazon frontier in Brazil Accordingly the descimiento descent of wild Indians from the headwaters of the Amazon tributaries by the euphemisti cally dubbed tropas de rescate rescue militias complete with enthusiastic ecclesiastical participation was a constant feature of Brazilian and Por tuguese relationships with the native population Slaving by native groups in the Brazilian Amazon also increased accordingly and the emergence of notorious slaving groups from among the Manoa or Carib were part of this market After 1652 in the Spanish colonies the missionaries assumed exclusive responsibility for continuing the pacification of the natives But follow ing the lead of the conquistadors who had used the charge of cannibalism to license their slavetaking the missionaries found that their promises to suppress the trade in Amerindian slaves orchestrated by the Dutch and Brazilians in the northeastern region gave them a considerable appeal because these groups want to know whether the Spaniards can defend them against the slave dealers This was highly ironic as it was the Span ish who had initiated such a slave trade in the New World in the first place Nonetheless the missionaries of the eighteenth century were correct in identifying the Caribs and Dutch as principal protagonists of a native 12 Linda A Newson Aboriginal and Spanish Colonial Trinidad A Study in Culture Conflict London 1976 First quote from AGI C 971 2111612 BGB BC I 35 second quote from BGB BC I 193 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 258 the cambridge world history of slavery slave trade and the changes that Carib society had undergone through the pressures of colonial contact since the sixteenth century had by now produced a clear contrast with earlier times as even the missionaries them selves acknowledged this trade in Poytos has so completely altered the Caribs that their only occupation is constantly going to and returning from war selling and killing the Indians It is evident that the growth of the slave trade between the Dutch and the Caribs only reached its peak in the 1700s as the trade in forest products declined following the switch to a plantationbased economy in the Dutch colonies This change in itself resulted in a larger market for native slaves as did the successful coloniza tion of the Antilles by the English and French where the possession of native domestic slaves became quite the fashion Coupled with these fac tors the Carib leaders whose followers expected some kind of return for their allegiance found that profits were relatively easily gained as a result of this trade as the testimony of successive commanders at Essequibo demonstrates13 Why then did the other European powers persist in pro moting a slave trade in native persons when the Spanish acted to suppress it in northeastern South America As may be seen from the extracts of the letter from the governor of Cumana to the king of Spain quoted earlier an important element in intercolonial rivalry was access to and control of the native population For the Spanish this was to be achieved by destroying the basis for autonomous native existence outside of the colonial state that is through the reduccıon of native groups to the mission regime For other European powers particularly the Dutch another method of control was necessary because they lacked the manpower and religious infrastructure of the Spanish To this end the Dutch sought to establish alliances through trade including that in native slaves By establishing economic links with various native groups they aimed to counter the Spanish claims to political authority over the population of the New World In the struggle for the control of Guayana the Caribs were a particularly crucial group in this regard because of their widespread trading links throughout the Orinoco region Indeed at least until the 1750s after which time the effects of the survey work of the Real Expedition des Limıtes sent by the Spanish crown to survey territorial borders and inventory populations and which seems to have discouraged Carib slaving in the interior it was reported from the Capuchin missions of the Orinoco that the Dutch are buying Poytos in Cuyuni for they do not hesitate to carry on that illicit traffic nearer the Missions and as you well know Captain Bonalde encountered a Dutchman about a days journey from the mission of Miamo buying poytos or Indians which the Caribs were selling him and although he did not actually find him in the house of the Caribs nevertheless three Indians 13 BGB BC II 148 149 letter of Fr Garriga Whitehead Lords of the Tiger Spirit pp 15171 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 259 or Poytos some cutlasses and some glass beads were found in his hut and were distributed among the Indians of Miamo Apart from this we well know how frequently the Dutch go to the Paragua Caura and headwaters of the Caroni so that they maintain their position there every year14 Clearly then it was the political implications of Carib slaving rather than its moral aspects that were the basis for Spanish opposition to its practice during the eighteenth century Although as has been mentioned both the French and English dabbled in native slavery until the end of the colonial era the involvement of the Dutch was of more importance because of the proximity of Essequibo to Spanish territories and the extensive links that they had with the Caribs of the Orinoco dutch and carib slaving Although the Dutch colonies of Essequibo Demerara and Suriname largely owed their existence to the African slave trade the scope of native slavery was always severely opposed by the authorities within their terri tories Thus it was always Dutch policy to encourage the slavetaking of natives among those tribes living outside the colony so as to avoid disrup tion of trade at the West India Companys trading posts and instability in their political relations with the local population This policy was enshrined in law first by treaties made in the 1650s declaring tribes living within the colony to be inalienably free and later by a series of ordinances aimed at controlling arbitrary slavetaking by individual colonists For example on the August 23 1686 the governor of Essequibo Samuel Beekman issued a proclamation forbidding the unlicensed taking of native slaves Five years later the commission of his successor Abraham Beekman explicitly stated that there was to be absolutely no trade in native slaves as the directors of the West India Company felt that his predecessor had not been strict enough in controlling their export Then in 1717 against a rising tide of disputes within the colony over the taking of native slaves another proclamation was issued This stated that each colonist was entitled to no more than six Indians who might be got from the Orinoco by purchase or exchange and for each of whom a tax of six guilders was to be paid in addition to the usual tax on slaves of 210 guilders Once within the Essequibo colony they were not to be removed from their river of first residence or sold to any other inhabitant of the colony without a further tax being due to the West India Company Although these regulations were certainly disobeyed on occasion there was more than political and economic expediency underwriting native liberties in Essequibo These laws were also developed and enforced to protect the 14 BGB BC II 146 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 260 the cambridge world history of slavery West India Companys monopoly on the slave trade in blacks This was not just a question of economic profit being affected but also a question of political authority because for the West India Company the control of the supply of labor to their colonies was the basis of the authority of its representatives the governor and his administration It is in this context that the apparent Dutch concern for native liberties must be judged Yet it is clear that the scale of native slavery within Essequibo even if unhindered by the West India Company would never have matched that of African blacks because it was universally felt that the native people were unsuitable for plantation labor and were better utilized domestically as household servants or as providers of manioc game and fish For example the Court of Policy in Essequibo advised the West India Company in 1731 the Plantation Belwijk sometimes buys one or two red slaves in a whole year but they are mostly children of about eight or ten years old who are bought for about twelve or thirteen axes and choppers together with a few provisions The red slaves too cannot work together with a black slave and are mostly used on the plantation for hunting and fishing the women looking after the cassava for all the daily consumption of the plantation15 So too it can be seen that whereas the numbers of black slaves increased dramatically in the eighteenth century the numbers of native slaves kept pace with the small increases in the European population in Essequibo In 1691 there were 48 Europeans 58 Indian slaves and 165 black slaves living at the fort of Kykoveral in Essequibo representing almost the entire population of the colony By 1762 the population of the entire colony had expanded to only 346 Europeans and 244 Indian slaves but a staggering 3833 black slaves Clearly then considerations of the economic monopoly of the West India Company the unsuitability of native labor and the political expediency of maintaining good relations with the indigenous groups of the Essequibo region combined to limit the numbers of native slaves actually in the colony itself However slavetaking was not discouraged as an adjunct to other commercial activities among the Spanish natives of the nearby Orinoco There were many heavily used trading routes employed by the Caribs and Dutch in their infiltration of the Orinoco region and it is clear that the Dutch traders were often prepared not only to travel with a Carib escort to the Orinoco but also to live there to oversee their trade For example the prefect of Capuchins on the Lower Orinoco reported that in the River Aguirre there was a Dutchman domiciled with the Caribs more than eight years buying slaves from them There were also others in the same traffic in 15 BGB BC II 14 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 261 Puruey Caura and Parava from where they used to send to Essequibo and Surinam parties of twenty to fifty slaves though they discontinued in alarm at the arrival of the Real Expedition in the Orinoco16 In 1778 the prefect again reported the Dutch come overland from Essequibo accompanied by porters carrying large baskets filled with articles of barter for the Slave Traffic numbers of them have lived for more than ten years permanently among the Caribs carrying on their Slave Traffic and these without moving send the slaves to their agents in Essequibo and receive in return merchandise arid other articles by which they are enabled to purchase more from the Caribs The least time they remain in these places is a year but more generally they reside there for two or three years17 According to many of the colonial sources the favored practice for seiz ing slaves was the night attack and John Gabriel Stedman18 a mercenary captain in Suriname during the 1760s gives vivid descriptions of such tactics as well as many other insights into the relations with the native population and slavehunting practices Edward Bancroft a wealthy expa triate planter emphasized Dutch culpability in the matter of the Caribs involvement in the native slave trade They have however usually lived in harmony with the neighboring tribes until of late when they have been corrupted by the Dutch and excited to make incursions on the interior Indians for the sake of making prisoners who afterwards are sold to the inhabitants of the Dutch colonies19 It is difficult to tell precisely whether all Carib groups were involved in the slave trade to the same degree Certainly those within Essequibo were concerned with not only the taking of native slaves but also the policing of the black slave population Spanish accounts tend to emphasize the involvement of Carib groups all along the Orinoco but although this may be judged mere propaganda on their part given the traditions of taking captives in war it seems likely that many groups were in fact involved especially during the eighteenth century Thus slavetaking was not necessarily a largescale enterprise despite the range of indigenous groups involved but may have been undertaken sporadically by quite small groups of men who relayed their captives via central collection points manned by Dutch traders into the colony of Essequibo In particular Spanish sources indicate that there was a slave market on the Mazaruni and in 1769 two Capuchin missionaries with an escort from the garrison 16 BGB BC IV 19 17 BGB BC II 148 18 John Gabriel Stedman Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam Transcribed for the First Time from the Original 1790 Manuscript Richard Price and Sally Price eds Baltimore MD 1988 19 Edward Bancroft An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana in South America London 1769 p 257 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 262 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 101 Debts to be collected by the postmaster of Cuyuni Name of Indian slave trader Status of transfer No of Creditor Tribeco delivered 8 slaves Tucanaura delivered 3 slaves Arimamene delivered 3 slaves Uararcicamo delivered 3 slaves Aritama delivered 2 slaves governor of Essequibo Cumdara delivered 2 slaves governor of Essequibo Asabue gift 1 slave To son of Governor of Essequibo Arimamacaca delivered 1 slave To son of governor of Essequibo Marrarban delivered 2 slaves To son of governor of Essequibo Causamama delivered 3 hammocks To son of governor of Essequibo Marrana delivered 8 hammocks To son of governor of Essequibo Canarua delivered 2 hammocks To son of governor of Essequibo Note Appended to this document was a note saying that other Caribs whose names could not be distinguished because of the poor condition of the document had delivered a total of thirtyseven slaves The record of transactions was for a period of eight months Source Extracted from AGI C 2581758 of Santo Tome raided this market and liberated 140 Indians20 Similarly Dutch documents captured by the Spanish during a raid on another slave trading post on the Cuyuni River indicate that slavetaking may have been very much a question of the individual initiative of Carib big men Table 101 shows a list of transactions from among the captured documents The names given in the document are those of Carib big men involved in the trade whereas it was the role of the postmaster to record all trade transactions receive deliveries of goods for storage and make the customary payments It would thus seem that the numbers of native captives being brought out of the Orinoco was considerable for if seventyfive slaves were brought in at this one post over as short a period as eight months then perhaps up to one hundred would pass through in a year In addition to this one post the Dutch West India Companys posts at Arinda and Moruca were also the focus of a brisk trade in native slaves whereas the independent posts set up by the slave dealers themselves in the interior might be expected to have at least matched and probably exceeded the volume of trade at the tightly regulated Company posts Taken together then and over a period of a number of years the volume of this trade in native slaves could easily have been in the thousands However the impression given by the recorded transactions for the post 20 AGI C 30 194l758 AGI C 30 66l769 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 263 on the Cuyuni is that normal slaving practice was for a few individuals to deliver small quantities of slaves over a long period of time rather than for armadas of Carib kanawa warcanoes to appear on the Orinoco and carry off hundreds of people at a single stroke The latter scenario was the impression often misleadingly conveyed by Spanish authors although such a phenomenon was not unknown Despite the potential uncertainties there does seem to be a general agreement in the Spanish sources that the volume of Carib slaving was likely to have been around five hundred captives a year The following extract to the commandant of guayana from the prefect of Capuchin missions is typical in this regard it will not be too much to say that the Caribs sell yearly more than three hundred children leaving murdered in their houses more than four hundred adults for the Dutch do not like to buy the latter because they well know that being grown up they will escape Indeed we know this as some fugitives were seen in the Missions and could be recognized by the brands of their masters which many of them have on their bodies for the Essequibo Company have ordered that the Indian slaves shall be branded on pain of losing them21 Other government reports estimate at maximum seven hundred slaves a year taken from the Orinoco but most agree on some figure between three and four hundred with around twice as many dead as the result of the raids22 In short it would seem that the number of captives being taken out of the Orinoco was significant and the aftermath of these activities was also very disruptive costing many lives According to Jose Gumilla Carib and Dutch traders were liable to make a considerable profit on the sale of poitos paying two hatchets two machetes some knives and glass beads for captives on the Orinoco and receiving some ten axes ten machetes ten knives ten bags of beads and other general trade goods from the Dutch buyers Gumilla also indicates that the seizure of captives might follow previously peaceful trading They take their captives on one or two armed pirogues large canoes to their territory and continue their voyage up river without harming neighboring people who may also be an enemy and to their allies they say they are not to blame for burning and capturing that village because if the village had received them well and sold them provisions for their journey they would not have harmed them but that having removed their weapons with such discourtesy they wished to punish them for they had not treated them with the same courtesy they had shown other peoples This is the ruse by which they ensure another attack for the following year which always succeeds 23 21 BGB BC II 145 22 AGI SD 632 2661735 AGI SD 583 741733 AGI C 30 4121790 23 Joseph Gumilla El Orinoco Illustrado y Defendido 2 vols Madrid 1745 II 324 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 264 the cambridge world history of slavery Dutch sources also indicate that among the Caribs of Essequibo at least the slave trade had clearly altered the traditional economy as had other Dutch commercial activities For example there is the testimony of various governors as to a decline in the lucrative trade in roucou a red dye used in Europe for coloring food and clothing because of the high prices Dutch traders were prepared to pay for native slaves Moreover fully aware of the number of native slaves that would become available itinerant traders and avaricious settlers would sell guns and alcohol hoping to promote further internecine raiding Edward Bancroft itemized CaribDutch trade in the 1760s as being in pirogues hammocks wax balsam woods but chiefly slaves24 Similarly in the Spanish territories at the other end of these native trade networks the prevalence of slavedealing was of continual concern to the Spanish authorities who were also eager that the newly founded missions would be able to maintain a steady stream of new converts For example it was reported to the king of Spain in 1739 that there are twenty leagues of river on which many Caribs are established and espe cially those of Aguirre Caroni and Tacorapo who carry on traffic the latter sailing up the Caroni communicate by land at no great distance with the Indian Caribs who are established above Angostura on the Rivers Caura Rio Tauca Puruey Curumtopo and other places where they sail up river to seize Indians of other tribes whom they sell both males and females as slaves to the Dutch the Dutch in return for these and other products furnish the Indians not only with various kinds of merchandise but also with guns gunpowder ammunition and other supplies with which they wage war making their conversion and that of other numberless Indian tribes more difficult Fearing as they do the power and cruelty of the Caribs they do not venture to receive although many would like to do so the Missionary Fathers25 Again in 1750 it was reported by the prefect of the Capuchins to the commandant of Guayana that the slave trade had completely changed the Caribs and not only the Caribs of the forests but even those of the Missions participate in these wars without our being able to control them in any way and whenever we are making an effort to do so they immediately desert us in great numbers Carib slavetaking also seems to have been very extensive He continues I am unable to name all the nations which the Caribs pursue with the object of enslaving them But the tribes dwelling on our frontiers and the most generally known are the Barinagotos Macos Amaricotos Camaracotos Aruacos Paravins and Guiacas and so great is the spite of the Caribs against them on this account that they work for the Spaniard26 24 Bancroft Guiana 263 25 BGB BCC 185 26 BGB BC II 147 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 265 Jose Gumilla reproduces the words of a Guayquieri who responding a with laconicism which will serve as an epitaph for the Guayquieri nation told of long wars with the Caribs who finally took all these people off into slavery Similarly Felipe Gilij lists over a dozen nations that he supposed to have disappeared as a result of the CaribDutch trade in native slaves27 However it needs to be emphasized that it was not only the Caribs who actively engaged in the slave trade The case of the Manoas in Brazil has already been mentioned and within the colony of Essequibo itself the Akawaio were also heavily involved Edward Bancroft records They frequently make incursions on their interior neighbors like the Carribbees for slaves and the vicinity of their residence particularly exposes them to reprisals from those injured tribes To prevent this all the avenues to their houses are guarded by sharp pieces of wood planted in the earth and poisoned except only one obscure winding path which they use themselves and make known to their countrymen by private marks28 The Arawaks at this time possibly because of a disproportionate decline in their numbers as a result of their proximity to the Europeans and a consequent loss of military strength were no longer slavetakers according to Bancroft Though as AcostaSaignes points out groups as distant from the Dutch and Brazilian traders as the Guahibos and the Guaypuinaves in western Venezuela were eventually drawn into this trade29 In sum the Caribs although deeply involved in the native slave trade were by no means the only group to be so As in the matter of cannibalism a term which derives from their name the Carib have been chiefly associated with slaving in the regional literature But this association was rooted in the geopolitics of Dutch and Spanish colonial rivalry and has led to a persistent distortion of the historical and ethnographic record in which Carib cannibalism and slavetaking is seen as evidence of their innate savagery rather than as a response to the depredations of European colonial regimes In short there seem few parallels between the conditions of captivity and servitude in the preColumbian world and the nature of slavery in the Americas after colonial arrival chieftains empires encomiendas In the Incan world the royal house was owed tribute by its subjects Such tributary relationships were not the invention of the Incan dynasty but reflected common institutions of obligation and service in domestic and ritual spheres that were prevalent among the chieftaincies and other hierar chical societies of this region as they were to varying degrees elsewhere in 27 Gumilla Orinoco II p 314 Gilij Americana I p 133 28 Bancroft Guiana p 268 29 Ibid pp 323 336 AcostaSaignes Venezuela p 73 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 266 the cambridge world history of slavery South America However the formal nature of the tributary relationship was much more developed in the Andean world and to a perhaps sur prising extent was later adopted directly into Spanish systems of colonial control For example if we consider the nature of chiefdom polities in the Andes then it is evident that part of the eminence and authority of the cacique chief or lord derived from the labor of a common class of persons This might have been in the form of specific kinds of work reserved for particular individuals but more generally a pattern of obligatory collec tive labor was evident In the former case the hunting and gathering of natural products wood water game fish was typical whereas collec tive labor was more likely directed toward the maintenance of the chiefs household compound and fields as a physical no less than a symbolic entity Significantly in view of what was said earlier about the intertwining of warfare marriage and authority in the case of such chiefdoms the reg ulation of marriage contracts and the enforcement of marital obligations was an important facet of the chiefly role This might even extend to the formal attachment of whole families to the rulers household although the indications are that this was not a permanent condition but rotated among tributegiving communities Native merchants and traders were exempted from collective labor obligations such as work in the maize fields but they still owed tribute derived from their extracommunal activities in the form of prestige goods goldwork beadwork ceramics and so forth As well as these forms of obligatory labor the chiefly household would also comprise the yanakuna servants who were specifically exempted from these kinds of communal obligation so that they could labor entirely for the cacique It appears that the proportion of such yanakuna in any given settlement might have risen as high as 10 percent but this statistic may also be related to the highly dynamic and unsettled conditions of the colonial conquest Other populations might be physically brought into the compound to per form chiefly service known as mitmajkuna as well as mamakuna women ritually obligated in temple or shrine functions and kamayujkana itinerant specialists in cultivation or handicrafts All these specialized forms of labor were part of the rulers household and were tied there by common codes of obligation and service30 In the context of the Incan Empire such relationships were also em ployed but given the vast extent of roads fortifications irrigation works temples shrines the military ambitions of an expansive dynasty and the need to evince domination and control through the possession of prestige and exotic goods the nature of obligatory service was correspondingly rigorous and farreaching The Inca still owed certain sustaining duties to 30 Frank Salomon Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms Cambridge 1986 pp 12734 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 267 his subjects as befitted a solar deity but the term asymmetric reciprocity is aptly applied to the flow of ritual and material obligations between the Inca and his peoples31 Under the reign of the eleventh Inca Huayna Capac the empire reached its greatest extent spanning more than three thousand miles of the Andean mountains from presentday Chile in the south to Colombia in the north The challenge of maintaining political authority over this vast region was increased dramatically when Huayna Capac died in 1525 from a sudden epidemic probably smallpox emanating from the asyetunseen conquistadors The two sons of Huayna Capac Atahualpa and Huascar eventually fought a civil war over control of the empire and as a result Gonzalo Pizarro was as in the case of Hernan Cortess conquest of Montezuma able to readily recruit lesser native lords to his cause against the backdrop of imperial crisis and conflict Insofar as the Spanish conquest led to a political decapitation of the Incan Empire it left intact the system of obligatory service that underwrote it and chiefly authority more widely This led to a strategy of coopting existing forms of native fealty and obligation and using them to achieve the ends of Spanish colonial rule In the first Spanish settlements in the New World principally in the Greater Antilles the costs of conquest had been borne largely by the crown The first settlers were encouraged to remain by the award of repar timientos allotments of natives to assist in farming or mining enter prises Such repartimientos were in the encomienda custody of the encomendero grantee Even in the relatively uncontrolled contexts of the early Caribbean such a grant of labor carried with it explicit duties and restrictions such as religious instruction and limits on the amount of labor time that might be devoted to the personal service of encomendero Indeed the system was immediately the subject of controversy in Spain and was abolished by royal decree in 1520 However the conquest in Mexico opened up new vistas of vast pools of native labor but Spanish hegemony was politically barely established and lacked the kinds of social and eco nomic consolidation that the award of encomiendas to the conquistadors would achieve In recognition of this relatively weak position of the Spanish colonizers Cortes actually made grants of tribute rather than labor from the encomiendas as it was necessary to keep the few Spaniards physically close for defensive purposes This system was then endorsed by the Span ish crown in ordinances setting up the governance of Mexico in 1526 The prohibition of personal service was therefore quite explicit in the estab lishment of the encomienda system as was the prohibition of forced labor The encomienda system was also transplanted to Peru under the licenses of conquest granted Pizarro in July 1529 As with Cortes Pizarro needed 31 Maria Rostworowski in Laura Minelli ed The Inca World The Development of PreColumbian Peru AD 10001534 Norman OK 2000 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 268 the cambridge world history of slavery to keep his company of conquistadors grouped in distinct communities so that the citizens of each municipality could form an effective militia The result then in both Mexico and Peru was the historically unprece dented phenomenon of the encomienda native people living in designated locales or subject to a named cacique held to be under the protection of the encomendero who himself was forbidden to live in their territories Native people retained their ownership of the land and the crown and its officials also had jurisdiction over them offsetting the temptation on the part of the encomendero to exploit the natives excessively In return the encomienda had to deliver tribute as it had probably done to a cacique in preColumbian times However the potential for increased exploitation through forced labor and unwarranted demands for tribute and service meant this ideal encomienda might also be easily corrupted as it was not always clear how much and what kind of tribute might be owed to the encomendero who was to labor in the mines roads and fortifications or when the grants of encomiendas might expire These factors meant that the experience of native people under the encomienda might differ significantly and the annals of the colonial courts are filled with disputes related to these issues Nonetheless the limits to the predation of the encomenderos were real enough not least because ultimately native labor was the property of the crown and their souls the property of the Catholic Church in which case any analogy between the plight of the native encomienda and the slaves of the European plantation economies is not very appropriate It is only in a rhetorical sense that the term slavery can to be applied to the social and legal relationships of the encomienda conclusion This consideration of indigenous slavery in South America raises some interesting issues for a comparative study of slavery and servitude in par ticular whether or not the term slave is useful to describe pre1500 native institutions and practices The term itself carries with it many connotations reflecting the long history and continuity of forms of servitude in a variety of Old World contexts The interaction sphere of the Mediterranean world with its tenuous but persistent connections to Asia Africa and the fringes of Europe meant there has inevitably been a periodical borrowing and imi tation of social and cultural practices with regard to enslavement through time However just as the absence of certain infectious diseases meant their effect in the Americas were startlingly severe for Huayna Capac the last Inca so too the nature of native South American social and cultural tradition was such that Old World forms of bondage were unknown and unanticipated even if forms of dominance and obligation were apparent in other ways Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 269 Eltis and Engerman this volume suggest that historically capture in war has always been a justification of slavery but the evidence from South America does not accord with the idea that this practice was globally prevalent As has been indicated the conduct of war and the taking of live captives intimately linked to the practice of other forms of social communication and exchange was dedicated to the ritual reproduction of sacrificial complexes As a result war captives were eventually sacrificed rather than used in the provision of servile labor In this way the nature of obligatory service in South America seems more reminiscent of European serfdom than slavery As Eltis and Engerman in the introduction to this volume suggest serfdom has a history going back to at least ancient Greece and formed the basis of agricultural production and rural social structure alike in Western European medieval countries Although the main element of the European feudal contract military protection was not emphasized in South America to the same degree as in Europe the role of the cacique was certainly to provide military and shamanic defense of the community along with regulation of marriage contracts public works and the enforcement of custom In this way the Spanish encomienda can be seen as having intensified the restrictive nature of preColumbian serfdom just as happened with the eastward expansion of the Russian and Prussian states in eighteenthcentury Europe The issue as to whether or not the forms of obligatory service and captivity experienced in South America are properly termed slavery is also critical because it bears on the important question of whether slave status is historically derived from the nature of kinship relations or through other social processes The capture of slaves with a view to sustaining a population demographically would seem to suggest key linkages between ideas of kinship and those of servility In the Americas at least such raiding was definitively a reaction to the population losses induced by severe epidemic disease and the depiction of such captives as potential slaves relates to the presence of a European market rather than to indigenous understandings of the purpose and status of war captives To suggest that slavery was a normal component of kinship structures is therefore misleading and the experience of South American peoples suggests that it was the commodification of captives during European colonial occupation that was the reason for the emergence of slaves as a distinct social class It is important to note that most indigenous societies in any case had no labor requirement beyond domestic needs that a slave class might fulfill It was only the establishment of plantations and the presence of powerful strangers without kin or family to support their households that made a market in native bodies feasible and profitable Such comparison strongly suggests that slavery is best understood as a condition of involuntary bondage and servitude in which the ownership Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 270 the cambridge world history of slavery of persons takes precedence over other forms of social ties The histori cal conditions under which this practice emerged in South America were clearly the advent of European colonial conquest and the entrepreneurial opportunities that this new world presented Both the ferocity and extent of the Atlantic slave trade as well as the rise of powerful chieftains among native groups were thus directly related to this colonial political economy Although forms of captivity and obligatory service were present and preva lent throughout South America this was not slavery a better analogy is with feudal serfdom In the absence of capitalist commodity markets legal and ethical possibilities for financial accumulation and material own ership and developed punitive technologies of discipline and punishment situations of bondage and servility in indigenous South America never coa lesced into the practice of slavery Despite notable social differences and historical trajectories among South American peoples the similarities in the forms and practices of captivity and servitude nonetheless provide a strong contrast with European practices of slavery further reading Most of the original documentary material is relatively difficult to access however as a result of a diplomatic dispute over the border between Venezuela and British Guiana at the end of the nineteenth century a sizable collection of translated documents from the Dutch and Spanish archives was published by the British government in Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela 7 vols London 1899 These are referred to using the following abbreviations BGB British Guiana Boundary BC British Case BCC British Counter Case Material referenced from the Spanish archives in Seville is abbreviated thus AGI Archivo General de Indias C Audiencia de Caracas SD Audiencia de Santo Domingo Early printed materials may also be somewhat difficult to locate but there are an increasing number of modern editions of key texts relating to the occupation of South America For example Neil Whiteheads edition of The Discoverie of the Large Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh Norman OK 1997 and Janet Whatleys edition of Jean de Lerys History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil Berkeley CA 1998 both provide original accounts of discovery and the early relations with the native populations along the Atlantic seaboard of South America Likewise there are a number of accounts of the conquest in Peru but of particular interest is a postconquest account by one of the Incan royal family Garcilaso de la Vega in the Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru Austin TX 1966 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 indigenous slavery in south america 14921820 271 There are also excellent popular works that give both detailed ethno logical information and historical narrative of the sequence of conquest such as John Hemmings volumes The Conquest of the Incas London 1970 and Red Gold The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians Cambridge MA 1978 as well as good introductions to cosmology and beliefs as in Gary Urtons Inca Myths London 1999 More detailed scholarly overviews will be found in Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartzs edited collection The Cambridge History of Native American Peoples Vol 3 South America Cambridge 1999 Scholarly works with a more particular focus on political and eco nomic relations include Alexander Marchants From Barter to Slavery The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil 15001580 London 1966 Linda Newsons Aboriginal and Spanish Colo nial Trinidad A Study in Culture Contact London 1976 Frank Salomons Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms Cambridge 1986 and Elsa Redmonds edited volume Chiefdoms and Chieftaincy in the Americas Gainesville FL 1998 Neil Whiteheads study of the Carib Lords of the Tiger Spirit A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guyana 14981820 Dordrecht Holland 1998 provides detailed information on slaving warfare and trade between native groups and the colonial regimes of northeastern South America Warfare and cannibalism are also the subject of scholarly attention as in Eduardo Viveiros de Castros study of the Tupian cannibalism and war complex From the Enemys Point of View Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society Chicago 1992 and Neil Whiteheads discussion of the effects of colonial contact on captivity and cannibalism Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism Hispanic American Historical Review 80 2000 74172 On native warfare and slaving more generally see War in the Tribal Zone Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare Neil Whitehead and R Brian Ferguson eds Santa Fe NM 1999 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 PART IV SLAVERY AND SERFDOM IN EASTERN EUROPE Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 11 RUSSIAN SLAVERY AND SERFDOM 14501804 richard hellie 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 slashandburn type with the result that peasants farmed a different site roughly every three years Landlords were few in the pre1350 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 nearslavery 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 There are significant juridical differences between slavery and serfdom In the first place the slave is an object of the law whereas the serf typically is the subject of the law As an object the slave like a dog or cow may be protected from the cruelty of an owner by the law for example but it is as an object rather than as the subject of the law The slave has few rights not even the right to claim the clothing he is wearing as his own The serf on the other hand owns not only his own clothing but typically most of his means of production as well his livestock his agricultural implements his seed and often the fruits of his labor The slave only has the rights to come and go that his owner allows him and typically the same is true for the serf He may only move where his landlord permits him to move The serfs juridical status in the Russian case was further refined 1 He was bound to the land that is he was a fixture on the land like a building that the owner had no right to move elsewhere and the serf was supposed to 275 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 276 the cambridge world history of slavery be in place when the next possessor of the land came along 2 completely contradictorily the serf could be bound to the person of his lord in which case his legal and social status differed little from that of a slave which meant that the possessor of the land the serf was working could move him or even sell him without regard to any attachment to the land 3 the serf sometimes was the direct subject of the state but gradually this was whittled away until the serf became the subject of his lord and was even forbidden to address the state In addition the material circumstances of slaves and serfs were similar The lives of both were short with the life expectancy at birth of less than thirty years of age Infant and child mortality rates were extraordinarily high The precise components of this are not yet fully understood but certainly one element was the infamous peasant smoky hut1 Since the time they migrated into Rus in the second half of the first millennium of the Christian era most Russians lived in smoky huts To save 80 percent of their fuel the Russians constructed the famous Russian stove a multi chambered brick or stone and mortar apparatus that extracted most of the heat and radiated it out of the back of the stove into the room The soot blackened the roof and walls The heating season was about half a year during which the peasants sat and slept on benches around the walls all the while breathing the stove effluent with its carbon monoxide and car cinogenic particles This shortened everyones life span from the newborn to the few aged Typically the Russians lived on dirt floors and kept their animals with them during the coldest times of the year Living in the slurry and excrement also did not enhance quality and duration of life Finally the diet before the nineteenth century was extraordinarily monotonous rye barley cabbage cucumbers onions garlic meat or milk perhaps fish and game once in a while Around the middle of the seventeenth century the Russian elite began to live in better structures sometimes built of stone and brick which probably vented their stoves outside Their dwellings had floors they did not keep animals in the house and they ate slightly better than their social inferiors House slaves and after the 1720s house serfs partook of these better conditions compared with the farming serfs living in smoky huts If material conditions of the two groups were similar Russian serfdom continuously borrowed from the institution of slavery as long as the two institutions coexisted It thus makes sense to consider them together This chapter will nevertheless first consider slavery then serfdom 1 The following paragraph is based on Richard Hellie The Russian Smoky Hut and Its Probable Health Consequences Russian History 28 2001 17184 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 277 slavery Slavery preceded serfdom and indeed was an ancient institution among the Slavs before the settlement of Russia The Slavs began to move into Ukraine and Russia around the sixth century Before that time the peoples living in the south Iranians Turkic peoples had regularly enslaved one another as had the peoples living in the north Finns Balts Those people who became the Eastern Slavs Ukrainians Belorussians and Great Russians migrated into what is now Ukraine Belorus and Russia in the sixth through the thirteenth centuries and gradually absorbed or suppressed the indigenous peoples This mix of different peoples may have been important for the subsequent history of slavery and slavelike serfdom because it resulted in a blurring of the conventional insideroutsider distinction so crucial for slavery In addition to these settled and migrating peoples the Vikings must be added to the picture The Swedes first conquered Novgorod in the north then Oleg in 882 conquered Kiev and thus created the Kievan Russian State the unification of northern and southern Rus under one rule The slave trade was one of the primary motivating forces of the Viking world In Rus it went along the route from the Varangians to the Greeks from Sweden to Byzantium Thus it surely is not accidental that the major cache of written materials birchbark documents from Kievan Rus were found in Novgorod at the intersection of Slave and High Streets Novgorord carried on a very lively slave trade for centuries and the slave market at Slave and High Streets was one of the busiest places in Novgorod for the half millennium between the tenth and fifteenth centuries That was why a professional reader and writer set up shop at that intersection reading and writing birchbark messages for the illiterate citizenry of Novgorod Quite a bit is known about slavery from the Old Russian law code the Russkaia Pravda compiled beginning in 1016 and completed a century and a half later The Russkaia Pravda was the fundamental law of Russia from that time until the compilation of the Sudebnik in 1550 Articles 110121 could be termed a slavery statute which was compiled during the reign of Vsevolod in the 1170s although the norms resulted from an earlier period From the Pravda we learn that slaves originated through several means If he or she was purchased from a third party in the presence of witnesses he or she is a slave Captivity almost always of outsiders must have been the source of most such slaves If a man married a slave woman without stipulating that he would remain free he became a slave of the wifes owner He could also become a slave by becoming an overseer or house steward unless he stipulated in advance that he would remain free Unpaid debt could also result in enslavement Curiously the female slave in the Pravda was worth more than the male something that might indicate that female Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 278 the cambridge world history of slavery slaves were viewed as sex objects Most of the other slavery articles involve a slaveowners responsibility for the actions of his chattel in the same spirit that a dog owner is responsible for his canine The East Slavs who settled Rus were grouped into thirteen tribes Oleg began the process of consolidating the tribes under one rule out of Kiev and it was completed in the 1030s A century later Kievan Rus began to disintegrate in 1136 and revert to independent principalities centered around the old tribal groupings Slave raiding into adjacent principalities became one of the major activities of the independent principalities which continued to fragment until in the fourteenth century there were fifty such sovereign principalities all raiding one another In the twelfth century there were so many slaves that they were housed in barracks and put to work farming the land Slavery took on fresh life with the coming of the Mongols to Rus in the years 123640 as the Mongols effected their policy of carting off into slavery a tenth of the population typically those with skills the Mongols could put to use Moscow after 1300 began the process of reconsolidating the Russian lands and by the 1390s it was apparent that the days of the independent principalities were numbered although it took Moscow until 1514 to complete the task This was crucial for the history of slavery because the rise of Moscow gradually reduced the number of candidates for military enslavement By this time however the East Slavs had become thoroughly accustomed to the institution of slavery and owning slaves to perform numerous tasks On the East European Plain household slavery was the major form rather than productive slavery such as that performed by the farming slaves after 1136 These were the people who hewed the wood drew the water did the laundry cooked and performed other such menial tasks for their owners However soon after 1300 Muscovy figured out that slaves could perform other tasks as well Thus over the next couple of centuries a group of elite slaves was created that did the major administrative work in many of the grand princes of Moscows households as was done in some other places in medieval Europe Moscow administered its everexpanding empires through a system of governors who went out to feed collect Moscows revenues as well as funds for themselves both while they were provincial administrators and when they returned to Moscow to serve in the cavalry All of the governors had slaves who did much of their work for them even holding trials In the fifteenth century other forms of slavery developed as well In the second half of the century landownership began to be something that the elite valued in addition to governmentalmilitary posts and they purchased slaves to run their estates Information from the sixteenth century demonstrates that these slaves were often skilled individuals with Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 279 normal families the very slaves that the government was most interested in registering The fifteenth century was a period of enormous social innovation in Muscovy One new development was a form of slavery I translate as lim ited service contract slavery Its likeness in ancient Parthia was called antichresis It worked as follows A person twothirds of the time a male who was temporarily downandout approached someone and asked him for a loan for a year In exchange for the loan the borrower agreed to work for the creditor in lieu of paying him interest If the borrower could not repay the loan within a year he became the permanent full slave of the creditor Apparently repayments were very few so that both the lender and the borrower were aware when the transaction was being consummated that a permanent full slave was being created Presumably about the only way out for the debtor would be to take a loan from a third party to pay off the first creditor As with all other slaves if the limited service contract slave married his spouse became a slave The offspring of such matches were perpetual full lifetime slaves Until the 1590s there were no provisions for any slaves to be automatically manumitted by the pas sage of time as was true in the Roman Empire and Islam logically the outsider within three generations in the Roman Empire or six years in Islam becomes an insider and as now ineligible for enslavement should be freed Russians never came around to the idea that the passage of time made an outsider into an insider and thus unsuitable for enslavement This was graphically illustrated in the 1590s when all slaves were required to be registered or reregistered and slaves were processed whose ancestors had been enslaved a century and a half earlier Similarly in 1812 the romantic novelist great historian and governmental adviser N M Karamzin wrote a memo On Old and New Russia to Alexander I in which he discussed the problem of serfdom Karamzin alleged that the problem was insolvable because the serfs of 1812 were of two origins Some had once been free peas ants who were enserfed and thus really deserved to be free The ancestors of others had once been slaves a century and more previously and their descendants in 1812 did not deserve to be freed As it was impossible to differentiate in 1812 the origins of the serfs the only thing to do was to do nothing and emancipate no one In the sixteenth century the popularity of limited service contract slavery increased and gradually came to replace full slavery The demographic profiles of the two categories of slaves were identical with twice as many males as females among both adults and children so I assume that many full slaves also had sold themselves into slavery The only difference was that the limited service contract slaves still held out of the hope of freedom whereas the full slaves did not The same was true for the hereditary slaves the offspring of both Lest the reader think that limited service contract Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 280 the cambridge world history of slavery slavery was a form of indenture we should note that Muscovy also knew indenture as a separate form of servitude The person sold himself to a buyer for a specific number of years for a specific sum neither mandated by law upon the expiration of the term the owner was obliged to free the indentured slave typically with a sum of cash perhaps with a wife The law specified that the owner was not to harm the indentured slave something that was not specified for other slaves Nowhere is it stated that owners could not kill their slaves but a number of historians have assumed that there must have been some such injunction The 1590s were the decade of greatest change both for slaves and for serfs This followed a period of incredible chaos for Russia the Livonian War and accompanying exorbitant taxation 155883 paranoid Ivan the Terribles mad debauch known as the Oprichnina 156572 famines and plagues 15689 all of these depopulated the Moscow center and Novgorod area to the point that censuses found formerly populated areas 85 percent vacant For the peasants this led to the introduction of the Forbidden Years which will be discussed later The Forbidden Years enhanced the approximation of peasantserfs to slaves with the difference that the former had to pay taxes whereas the latter were typically taxexempt As the government of Boris Godunov acting in the name of the mentally challenged Tsar Fedor Ivanovich witnessed its taxable population shrinking as its peasants fled north and east of the Volga and south of the Oka migrationcolonization which some in the government desired it decided to curtail the shrinkage into the ranks of slaves This might have been done by abolishing at least some of the forms of slavery but this would have denied needy Russians access to welfare of which Muscovy knew no other than slavery The solution was to change the juridical essence of limited service contract slavery by extending the limitation from one year but in reality it was often perpetual to the lifetime of the owner When the owner died the limited service contract slave had to be manumitted This expropriated the owners who no longer were able to pass the limited service contract slaves who almost universally became full slaves to their heirs The slaveowners tried to get around this typically by creating multiple ownerships from multiple generations which the limited service contract slave could never outlive The government was adamant and insisted that after the death of the primary owner the limited service contract slave had to be freed By the midseventeenth century such freedmen were about the only free people in Muscovy but this was only nominal The government did not calculate on the fact that a period of slavery created tremendous dependency in the slaves The result was that most of the freedmen sold themselves back into limited service contract slavery shortly after manumission either to one of the heirs of the recently deceased owner or to someone else Thus the juridical changes of the 1590s did little or nothing to enhance the tax rolls Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 281 In the 1590s one may calculate that the enslaved population including all varieties of slaves comprised 5 to 15 percent of the entire population After the 1590s the infamous Time of Troubles ensued Depending on how they are defined they extended from 1584 to 1618 with the most com mon dates being 1598 the extinction of the sevencenturiesold Riurikid dynasty to 1613 the inauguration of the Romanov dynasty which was to last to the Revolution of 1917 Several important events involving slaves and serfs occurred during the Time of Troubles Two major events were major civil disorders led by slaves Khlopko and Bolotnikov The years 16013 witnessed perhaps the worst famines in Russian history Numer ous slaveowners who could not feed their slaves drove them out of their households In response Boris Godunov decreed that slaves had a right to be fed and clothed by their owners and those who were not had to be manumitted The decree did not provide food that did not exist so many slaves fled to the southern frontier the Oka River region south of Moscow There a slave by the name of Khlopko in 1603 formed them into an army that rebelled and added to the chaos Khlopko was soon sup pressed in September of 1603 when he was wounded and died in captivity He was followed by Ivan Isarevich Bolotnikov who led a major uprising in the southern regions of Russia around Moscow Kaluga and Tula in the years 16067 Bolotnikov was seized by the government in October 1607 exiled to Kargopol blinded and drowned Khlopko and Bolotnikov were able to command armies because of another aspect of Russian slavery the elite military slave Slaves accom panied their owners to the combat zone early in Muscovite history but typically as body servants as in the South during the American Civil War A law of 1556 however changed this It required that all inhabited land provide military servitors one outfitted cavalryman per one hundred cheti of land a chet equals approximately two and onethird acres Landown ers votchinniki and landholders pomeshchiki solved this requirement by buying cavalry combat slaves who with their equipment are described in many extant muster rolls These slaves cost fifteen rubles more than five times the cost of ordinary full or limited service contract slaves The Time of Troubles taught the Muscovites that trained combat slaves were too dangerous to have around in large numbers with the result that after 1613 weapons were taken away from military slaves and they again became body servants assigned to look after the baggage train at the front Occasionally such slaves made their way into the ranks of the land holding provincial cavalry the middle service class who owned most of the slaves Yet such upward mobility presents a window into the fact that there was a stigma attached to slavery Records of suits are extant from the seven teenth century in which cavalrymen sued others for the slander of alleging that they were of slave origin which was claimed to have dishonored them Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 282 the cambridge world history of slavery About 10 percent of the 967 articles of the Ulozhenie of 1649 deal with the sums to be awarded to members of Muscovite society when they were dishonored For cavalrymen it was cash to the value of their annual salary entitlement Even slaves had such dishonor values For elite slaves it was five rubles for ordinary slaves only one ruble the very bottom sum It is unknown whether trials were ever held for the dishonoring of ordinary slaves and whether they collected From the general practice of the dis honor system one could conceive that a slave could have been dishonored if someone falsely claimed that his mother had been a whore for example During the Time of Troubles when there was no Russian tsar on the throne a pretender claiming to be Ivan IVs son Dmitrii who had died or been killed in 1591 appeared on the scene and with Polish assistance seized the throne in Moscow A new law code the fourth Sudebnik was drawn up hastily in 1606 by the Poles in False Dmitrii Is entourage Its section 12 consisting of twentytwo articles was on the subject of slaves hirelings and manumission As has been evident so far slavery was an attractive institution for many individuals from downandouters seeking welfare to peasants wishing to avoid taxes It was also attractive to a number of cavalrymen and their offspring who wanted a diminution of their life long service burden Article 80 of the 1606 code forbade active provincial cavalrymen and their children who had not yet served from selling them selves into slavery The sole exceptions were those who had been discharged from service which only could have been for severe disability this became a major part of the law of slavery The rest of section 12 summarized much of the previous law of slavery Limited service contract slavery continued to thrive in the first half of the seventeenth century A couple of legal changes altered the composition of that group of slaves however Sometime in the 1630s the government established a price of two rubles for each limited service contract slave and in the 1640s this was increased to three rubles The Muscovite government tried price controls from time to time but generally realized that they were counterproductive and soon let them lapse For unknown reasons the price controls on limited service contract slaves remained until the end of the institution of slavery Prior to the introduction of the regulated prices the prices of slaves were established by the market with children and females typically costing less than adult males for example The prices of two and three rubles were more than many slave purchasers believed that they were worth with the consequence that families with children and solitary females found it difficult to find buyers thus denying them the welfare that selfsale into slavery provided Another move on the slavery front makes one question the governments commitment to maximizing the taxable population During the Time of Troubles a measure was enacted stating that anyone who worked for Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 283 someone for more than six months could be converted into that persons slave upon petition of the employer thus removing that person from the tax rolls It became a favorite trick of some individuals to entice people to work for them and then forcibly detain them until the six months had elapsed thus converting the employees into slaves In the 1640s the sixmonth limit was reduced to five months and then the Ulozhenie of 1649 reduced that to three months2 The impact of these measures on the labor market is unknown but it must have been significant One group forcibly enslaved were skilled icon and mural painters such as some of those who worked for the Stroganovs Forcible enslavement was almost certainly illegal but there is no record that such provisions were ever enforced Military captivity remained another source of slaves Russia was regularly at war with the Swedes PolesLithuanians and Turkic peoples and human booty remained a major incentive for campaigning troops Juridically they were treated like all other slaves in Muscovy Slightly separate provisions existed for Tatars but they primarily tried to restrain the abuse of office by officials along the southern frontier Military captives were different from other slaves in one respect When peace treaties were signed one of their provisions usually was the return of captive or enslaved nationals Such provisions did not sit well with their captors however and the Muscovite government had a difficult task locating such slaves and forcing their return This was especially true when the captives had wed Russian women slaves One tactic was for the captors to move their captives as far east as possible to Kazan or east of the Volga in the direction of the Urals where the government could not find them If such captives were able to get to officials however they almost certainly would be freed and returned home3 Slavery remained a real prospect for tens of thousands of Russians annu ally Crimean Tatars Nogais Kalmyks and Kazakhs raided Russia annually with the aim of enslaving as many Russians as they could carry away The enslavers typically offered to allow the Russians to ransom their slaves and a special tax was introduced in 1551 for this purpose If ransom did not arrive in time the Russians were sold into slave markets in the Crimea Central Asia the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere even as far away as Italy Once the western frontier was defined by the Polianovka Treaty which ended the Smolensk War 16324 the Muscovite government began to wall off the southern frontier This was done in the years 163853 and the resulting Belgorod Fortified Line essentially protected the Russian popula tion from continuous Crimean Tatar depredations 2 Richard Hellie trans The Muscovite Law Code Ulozhenie of 1649 Irvine 1987 3 Richard Hellie Slavery Among the Early Modern Peoples on the Territory of the USSR Canadian American Slavic Studies 17 1983 45465 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 284 the cambridge world history of slavery The Ulozhenie of 1649 was the most comprehensive codification of Russian law until Michael Speranskii did it again in 1830 and the Ulozhenie was the starting point of the Speranskii compilation The Ulozhenie consists of 967 articles grouped into twentyfive chapters Chapter 20 is on slavery and its 119 articles make it the secondlongest chapter in the law code The only longer chapter 10 is on civil procedure The length of chapter 20 itself conveys an impression of the importance of slavery in Muscovy The Odoevskii Commission which compiled the Ulozhenie took the 119 articles from the Statute Book of the Slavery Chancellery Muscovy seems to have been unique in that it was the only known country in world history to have a special central government office dedicated solely to the subject of slavery Its records were burned in 1682 by rebels presumably desirous of concealing their slave pasts Writing became especially important in the second half of the sixteenth century in Muscovite law and replaced the oral tradition of the pre1550 era Prior to 1550 the Moscow central government was especially concerned about elite slave stewards but after that time increasingly thorough records of everything involving slaves were kept Particularly important were the selfsales of Russians into limited service contract slavery These recorded the appearance of the buyer and selfseller before an official who inter rogated the selfseller about whether he was acting voluntarily as well as a description of the slave that could be used in case of a dispute Such disputes involved the return of fugitives when the slave would claim to be someone else as well as conflicts over the ownership of chattel between slaveowners Local officials were required to send their records to Moscow semiannually This record keeping became important for the history of serfdom but it should be noted that the Slavery Chancellery was never involved with serfdom in any significant way Slavery continued apace after 1649 even though that was the date of the finalization of stage one binding the peasants to the land of the enserf ment process The peasant serf was being continuously abased but the major distinction between the two categories remained Slaves typically did not pay taxes serfs typically did When taking an agricultural census of households in 1678 the government observed that there were far fewer peasantserfs than it had anticipated Therefore in 1679 the government by fiat converted all agricultural slaves into serfs This put an end to agri cultural slavery This still left the majority of the slaves in place the household slaves With the passage of time the abasement of the peasantry continued and the difference between them and slaves continuously lessened Peter the Great ordered a census taken of all males in 1719 to inaugurate the soul poll tax This precipitated a rush by serfs to sell themselves as house slaves which was observed by Peter In the early 1720s he ordered all male house Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 285 slaves to be counted in the soultax system merging them with the serfs Henceforth those who had been house slaves were called house serfs the term remained the same however domashnye liudi This effectively put an end to slavery although it continued to be mentioned for a few years in odd contexts The influence of the Russian Orthodox Church since its introduction by the state in 988 has been a topic of intense debate There can be no question however that the church had an enormous influence on family law This was most evident in the institution of slavery in the matter of marriage Slaves had a right to be married and that marriage was inviolable The concern of the church did not extend to the children however so slave children could be separated from parents This was particularly evident in the matter of fugitives Fugitive slave A married slave B in Bs household Bs lawful owner had to return the couple to As owner but could keep any offspring resulting from their cohabitation in his household A great deal is known about the slaveowners of this period Most of them were cavalrymen stationed either in Moscow or in the provinces Slave ownership was a matter of prestige with the result that the cavalrymen most of whom were not much better off than most peasants made the acquisition of at least one slave a priority with increasing income granted as a result of meritorious service Merchants also owned slaves and slave ownership was one of the primary devices for expansion of the merchant family firm Elite slaves could be found throughout Muscovy acting on their owners behalf for example by buying pelts for the fur trade Until the midseventeenth century there was no limitation on who could own slaves but at that time slaves were forbidden to own other slaves serfdom Events that led to serfdom can be discerned in the midfourteenth century The Black Death was concentrated in urban areas and forced monasteries to move into the countryside Monasteries gradually went into the landown ing business and the state granted them lands inhabited or uninhabited to produce income for their good works In time some monasteries became vertically integrated conglomerates engaged in raising grain and marketing it producing salt and selling it and so on When monasteries were granted lands inhabited by farming peasants the latter regarded this as usurpa tion But most monastery estates were settled by recruiting peasants from elsewhere The monasteries were able to do this because they were largely taxexempt institutions and they passed the taxexemptions sometimes taxation at much lower rates on to their peasants Thus peasants could pay rent to monasteries and come out ahead because they had to pay no taxes or very reduced taxes Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 286 the cambridge world history of slavery The drawback of this system was that the monasteries had to have peas ants on their estates or the estates were worthless This was fine for all concerned when the general situation was calm but if the economic situa tion became chaotic the monastery peasants might well move elsewhere to escape the chaos Exactly such chaos was endemic during the great civil war in Muscovy between 1425 and 1453 the sole civil war in the history of the rise of Moscow For a quarter century the small armies of the court factions crisscrossed Muscovy plundering and looting as they went This roiled the peasantry who sought safety wherever they could typically away from major population concentrations such as those farming monastery estates which could be easily and profitably found and plundered by the maraud ing armies Consequently the monasteries began to search desperately for ways to detain their peasant labor force At the end of the civil war some monasteries hit on the following tactic They got their political patrons to issue them charters prohibiting peasant debtors to move at any time of year except around St Georges Day November 26 St Georges Day was the end of the pagan agricultural year and corresponds to the American holiday of Thanksgiving The idea was that the harvest would be in and the monasteries could collect their loans before the peasants departed Peasants often took small loans from landlords but they were not large enough so that most peasants would have had difficulty paying them off This was incidentally the time of year when most peasants preferred to move The harvest was in the ground was frozen and therefore easily passable but it was not very cold approximately minus four degrees centigrade or about twentyseven degrees Fahrenheit and thus the weather was suitable for moving Muscovy did not have any concept of human rights and detaining debtors probably would not have been considered much of an infringement in any case because as we have seen debtors were not looked upon favorably by medieval and early modern Russian law How many peasant debtors were inconvenienced by the St Georges Day restriction is unknown but it cannot have been many The crucial thing is that this was the thin edge of the wedge for the central institution of serfdom The next step in the enserfment of the peasantry was taken by the Sudebnik of 1497 This was the first of four Muscovite Sudebniki the oth ers were in 1550 1589 and 1606 but it was a smallcirculation product that in no way shouldered aside the medieval Russkaia Pravda The 1497 code is central to the story of serfdom however because it applied the St Georges Day restriction on peasant mobility to all peasants not just debtors Henceforth peasants could move legally only during the week before and the week after November 26 No one has yet been able to figure out why this restriction was applied to all peasants Perhaps the best expla nation is that neighboring polities Pskov Poland had similar restrictions Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 287 and the Russians believed that this would be a good policy Another expla nation has been advanced that this was in the interest of the middle service class provincial cavalry the pomeshchiki but this seems implausible as the pomeshchiki were just being created and as of yet had little or no political clout although the enserfment process later was definitely at their behest Finally it is not clear how restricting peasant mobility to St Georges Day would have benefited the pomeshchiki At the end of the fifteenth century the struggle for labor seems to have been minimal the land was densely populated enough that the slashandburn system of agriculture was being replaced by the threefield system of agriculture and specific peasants were not assigned to specific lords but apparently a disinterested third party collected the rent from the peasants and doled it out to the cavalrymen who lived apart from the rentpayers Be that as it may the die was cast The 1497 St Georges Day provision was repeated in the 1550 Sudebnik with the added provision that peasants who had sown a crop in the autumn had the right to return to harvest it during the summer This reflected the expansion of the threefield system No peasant protests against the St Georges statute have been recorded and in the first half of the nineteenth century the serfs asked not for manumission but for a restoration of the right to move on St Georges Day which for them would have been tantamount to a restoration of freedom The abasement of the peasantry began during the Oprichnina 156572 Since the introduction of the serviceland pomeste system the practice had come to be to issue the peasants an obedience charter poslushnaia gramota ordering them to pay their traditional rent to the cavalryman and the cavalryman was issued a charter called a vvoznaia gramota saying that he was entitled to collect such rent But Ivan IV changed this formula Now the peasants were ordered to obey their lords in everything In the first place this gave the oprichnikcavalryman the right to set the rent at whatever level he deemed necessary with the result that some of the new lords collected as much rent in one year as previously had been collected in ten When this was done the peasants fled as soon as they could Moreover the new formula gave the lords police powers over what now became their peasants Many of the oprichniki were human beings of the most brutal debased and debauched type who could not refrain from abusing their peasants This also sent them fleeing to the frontiers or to less abusive lords The outcome of Ivan the Terribles reign was chaos Selected landholders resolved that the solution to their individual problem would be to repeal the right of the peasants to move at all to repeal the universal right to move on St Georges Day In the 1580s such concessions were granted to a few cavalrymen Large numbers of the provincial cavalrymen decided that such Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 288 the cambridge world history of slavery a measure would be in their interest and in 1592 the government obliged by repealing the right of all peasants to move on St Georges Day This was only to be in effect until the next royal decree do gosudareva ukazu which certainly no one believed would not be until 1906 The years when movement was illegal were known as the Forbidden Years years in which moving was forbidden Perhaps as a compromise favoring those in whose direction the peasants were fleeing to the frontiers in the north east and south to larger less avaricious and abusive landlords a statute of limitations of five years was placed on filing suit to recover fugitive serfs who moved or fled during the Forbidden Years These provisions were confirmed in 1597 probably by Boris Godunov in his search for votes after the anticipated death of Tsar Feodor and the extinction of the Riurikid dynasty One must re call that it was during this same decade that the crucial provisions were promulgated which changed the nature of limited service contract slavery and is indicative of the fact that slaves and serfs were beginning to be thought of as the same The Time of Troubles introduced chaos into many lives The fourth Sudebnik was drawn up hastily in 1606 by the Poles in False Dmitrii Is entourage section 15 article 87 seems to restore the right of peasants to move on St Georges Day and repeats the provisions of the 1550 Sudebnik about the rent that must be paid if the peasant lived on the particular plot of land for one two three or four years Whether this had any effect is dubious and the fact that is was probably a careless anachronism is evident in the fact that the same article allows a peasant to sell himself into full slavery without paying any rent the historical problem is that full slavery had been replaced by limited service contract slavery in real life prior to the 1590s and it is dubious that anyone was selling himself or herself into full slavery in 16064 More indicative of the reality of the time was the fact that False Dmitrii I was soon overthrown his body burned and the remains shot out of a cannon in the direction of Poland He was succeeded by Vasilii Shuiskii sometimes known as Vasilii IV who was tsar from 1606 to 1610 In 1607 Shuiskii promulgated a famous decree about peasants and slaves It repeated the Forbidden Years and extended the time for the recovery of fugitives to fifteen years back to the time in 1592 when peasants had been forbidden to move on St Georges Day For the first time in a discussion of returning fugitive slaves and fugitive serfs he mentioned them together indicative of the fact that the two categories of the population were beginning to be considered as similar at least by certain circles in the government 4 Richard Hellie Russian Law from Oleg to Peter the Great in Daniel H Kaiser trans The Laws of Rus Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries Salt Lake City 1992 pp xixl Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 289 Considering the chaos that resulted from the Time of Troubles the impact on the peasantry was minimal One interpretation of this is that the government was afraid to proceed further with the enserfment at this time because of fear of the consequences especially in light of the Khlopko and Bolotnikov uprisings but that seems dubious Rather there was little further that the government could do although Shuiskiis equating of serfs and slaves was a step in the further abasement of the peasantry Movement was forbidden and no one wanted to touch the statute of limitations on the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitives which after 1613 reverted to the five years first promulgated in 1592 A few monasteries raised the issue of serfs and their absent labor force after 1613 but in general the issue of serfdom was quiescent until after the conclusion of the Smolensk War That quiescence can probably be explained by the chaos following 1613 until 1619 when Tsar Mikhails father Patriarch Filaretcontrolledthegovernmentwithafirmhanduntilhisdeath in 1633 After the Smolensk War was over in 1634 comparative weaklings took over the government in the name of Mikhail and allowed the middle service class provincial cavalry to coalesce into a coherent political force The cavalrymen in 1637 began a concerted petition campaign demanding the repeal of the fiveyear statute of limitations on the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitive peasants in it they spelled out the reasons why five years was inadequate time to locate their fugitives Here one should note that it was up to both the owners of slaves and the lords of serfs to locate their chattel and file suits for their return The government offered its services for adjudication and nothing more The provincial cavalrymen noted that they were unable to locate their fugitives because of the efforts of the contumacious people powerful individuals who could thumb their noses at the law and move fugitive serfs from one estate to another so that pursuers either the estateholding servicemen themselves or their slaves could not locate them The trouble was that the contumacious people who desired more labor for their estates were the same individuals who ran the government and thus were unsympathetic to the middle service class petitioners In spite of their sympathies the rulers threw the petitioners a bone and increased the time limit from five to nine years In 1641 the petitioners tried again and the government increased the time limit from nine to fifteen years They tried again in 1645 and the government promised that once a planned census was taken the statute of limitations would be repealed The census was taken in 16467 but the promised action was not taken Tsar Mikhail died in 1645 and was succeeded by his sixteenyearold son Aleksei The government was run by Alekseis tutor Boris Ivanovich Morozov perhaps one of the most intelligent avaricious and contumacious individuals ever to grace the Russian scene His assistants were equally Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 290 the cambridge world history of slavery corrupt and on June 1 1648 the people of Moscow petitioned against the Morozov clique and demanded a compilation of a new law code Alekseis protective guard tore up the petition and threw it into the petitioners faces This precipitated a few days of rioting in Moscow and a dozen other towns Inter alia a couple of the Morozov clique were torn to bits and their remains cast on to some of the many dung heaps that were part of the Moscow landscape Morozovs life was spared as a result of the intercession of the tsar but he never again held government office He did continue to increase his wealth however as well as advise Aleksei Aleksei promised that a new law code would be compiled and the fiveman Odoevskii commission was appointed to begin work on it This primarily involved collecting the statute books of the ten major chancelleries and systematizing their statutes In addition a protoparliament the Zemskii sobor which dated back to 1566 was summoned to debate the Odoevskii commission compilation and add the delegates suggestions The middle service class provincial cavalry plus the townsmen comprised most of the representatives in the lower chamber of the Zemskii sobor and they repeated their demands that the statute of limitations for the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitive serfs be repealed Those demands were met and became the essence of chapter 11 articles 1 and 2 of the Ulozhenie of 1649 Chapter 11 became the fundamental law of serfdom down to 1861 and perhaps even to 1906 Fugitives could be recovered almost regardless of when they had fled There was some talk about a census of 1626 in chapter 11 as well as a grandfather clause but those stipulations were nearly irrelevant by 1649 and became increasingly so with the passage of time Many of the thirtyfour articles of chapter 11 dealt with the issue of fugitives and what should occur should a fugitive male marry a fugitive female Here the dogma of the Russian Orthodox Church came into play for the church insisted that marriage was inviolable The same was true for slaves something purists would insist was an unconscionable infringement on the property rights of slaveowners The Russian jurists worked out a very logical solution to the issue If one member of the couple lived on the land of a lord who received another lords fugitive the receiving lord lost the couple to the other lord If fugitives married on neutral ground such as on the frontier contesting owners cast lots the winner got the couple and had to compensate the loser in cash Here we witness the beginning of what amounted to the sale of serfs Children were not part of the church concern for marriage with the result that children could be separated from a parent when that parent was single and married a fugitive the couple would be returned to the fugitives master whereas the single parents child or children would remain with his or her master After 1649 there were few exits from serfdom until after 1861 One exit was to flee to a town As everywhere else in the early modern world towns Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 291 did not reproduce themselves in Muscovy and needed outside recruits to maintain themselves or grow Towns produced cash taxes for the govern ment which seems to have desired their growth At maximum no more than 2 percent of the Muscovite population consisted of townsmen So in the face of the opposition of the provincial cavalrymen the government granted amnesties to peasants who had fled to towns The same was true of the frontiers which the government wanted populated but the cavalry living in the VolgaOka mesopotamia insisted that this not be done at their expense The fact was however that once a peasant had fled to the frontier there was little that his lord could do to get him or her back The government even forced frontier servicemen to pay the lords whose fugitive serfs they wed fifty rubles for the wives The Ulozhenie of 1649 rigidly stratified society which meant that it was very difficult to leave for example the peasant sphere and move to the urban military or religious sphere It was not totally impossible but very difficult Moreover it must be stressed that the legal status of peasant for example did not absolutely mean after 1592 that a peasant could only be a farmer In 1592 in fact he could carry his status of peasant continue to pay his taxes assessed collectively so every individual mattered and be a merchant or artisan in reality This became increasingly less possible as 1649 approached and society became rigidly stratified For example part of being a townsman came to mean that the members of your caste had exclusive rights to own urban property and to engage in urban occupations such as trade and manufacturing Thus after 1649 there was little likelihood that the child of a serf would or could be anything other than a farmer at least for the next threequarters of a century when serfs degraded to the status of nearslaves could be forced to do almost anything Russia generally a poor country remained short of labor after 1649 until at least the last third of the nineteenth century in European Russia and even until today That meant that there was a continuous struggle for labor regardless of the law Lords continued to try to recruit others serfs and the state continued to try to stop them In the second half of the seventeenth century the government began to get more involved with the issue of fugitives see later and one measure was to penalize those lords who received fugitives First the government decreed that one additional peasant had to be taken away along with the fugitive peasant who was returned to his rightful lord This had no impact so the government raised the penalty to two for one and this apparently still had no impact But when the government raised the penalty to four for each fugitive lords began to turn them away This was not sufficient in the eyes of the young Peter the Great so he decreed the death penalty for a lord who received fugitive serfs Whether anyone was actually executed under that provision is unknown Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 292 the cambridge world history of slavery During the seventeenth century the government became increasingly seriously involved with the matter of fugitive serfs Here the thin edge of the wedge was the issue of fugitive townsmen Taxation of townsmen was also collective with the result that departures meant that the remaining townsmen had to pay more Thus the townsmen did not want their num bers to decrease and they petitioned the government to bring them back to where they were registered on the tax rolls beginning in the 1630s The first forbidden year for townsmen was promulgated in the early 1590s The government formed dragnets to search for and return fugitive townsmen which were effective Chapter 19 of the Ulozhenie of 1649 forbade them from moving but only in the future the law was not retroactive unlike that for serfs Because of their effectiveness the members of the middle service class insisted that dragnets be enacted for serfs This was done after 1649 and the result was the return of tens of thousands of fugitive serfs A governmental squad would go to an area and demand that everyone prove that he or she legally belonged there Those who could not do this were asked then where they did belong and were returned there forthwith Slaves as well as serfs were included in these dragnets and compulsory returns As a result of these actions serfdom came to involve a lot more govern ment than it had prior to 1592 Undoubtedly slavery served as the model for this By the end of the 1590s slaves were thoroughly described and reg istered in the Moscow Slavery Chancellery I do not know for sure why the Slavery Chancellery did not assume a similar burden for serfs but it didnt although its records and practices were available to other Moscow central bureaux Perhaps because serfs were viewed as an appendage of the service lands that were allocated to the cavalry to provide their incomes the issues of serfs were dealt with primarily in the Service Land Chancellery Pomest nyi prikaz This was the body that recorded which lands were allocated to which servicemen as well as the resources of those estates The resources included the peasants but they were not enumerated by name family size and physical characteristics as slaves were The census compilations were not conducted by the Service Land Chancellery nor were the land cadas tres the basic evidential bases proving where peasants belonged and the dragnets for fugitives were conducted by individuals appointed ad hoc for the purpose as had been the case for townsmen Once the serfs had been definitively bound to the land by the Ulozhenie the next stage in the enserfment involved their further abasement As mentioned this was initiated by Ivan IV when he changed the formula of the obedience charters To what extent landlords meddled in the personal lives of their peasants before the second half of the eighteenth century remains an unknown but it is known that one right the landowners and landholders wanted was the ability to move their peasants at will This Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 293 violated the basic principle of enserfment that the serf was bound to the land to provide income to whatever military servitor happened to own it However the Ulozhenie permitted estate owners votchinniki to move their peasants from one hereditaryancestral estate to another because this had nothing to do with military service In the historiography there remains a dispute over whether lords could sell their peasants in the second half of the seventeenth century and whether unequal exchanges of land might not have been concealed sales of serfs Be that as it may it seems as though it is unlikely that many serfs were sold before the era of Peter the Great A number of events occurred on the serf front during the reign of Peter 16891725 A major one was the change in legal status of hereditary estate property votchina and service land property pomeste in 1714 with the result that the fiction that the serf was an appendage of a service estate to provide income to a government servitor was by and large discarded The conversion of agricultural slaves into serfs in 1679 had little impact on the institution of slavery but the conversion of house slaves into house serfs in 1724 meant that one segment of the serfs perhaps 4 percent was directly answerable to the caprices of their lords This undoubtedly cast a pall over the slave condition Paralleling this were late Petrine decrees making the landlord directly and personally responsible for the remission of serf taxes to the government This amounted to a restatement of the obedience charter for after the early 1720s the lord had the right to order his serf to do whatever was necessary to meet the polltax obligations Government decrees of the postPetrine era further abased the peasant It probably made little difference to the serfs that between 1730 and 1753 members of the gentry were granted the exclusive right to own land and serfs for they were increasingly chattel regardless of who owned them More substantial was a 1734 decree by Anna obligating lords to feed their serfs during famines and in the 1790s Paul ordered granaries established to feed hungry serfs Recall that Boris Godunov had promulgated simi lar decrees making owners responsible for feeding slaves at the outset of the seventeenth century These measures undoubtedly contributed to the oftenobserved infantilization of the serfs who no longer at least in law were ultimately responsible for their own welfare This infantilization had been enhanced already in the reign of Peter the Great In the second half of the seventeenth century after the publication of the Ulozhenie of 1649 literacy was becoming recognized as a necessity and sufficient ABC books were published for every child of a serviceman and townsman However this rising curve of literacy greatly leveled off during the reign of Peter as the decision was made not to extend literacy to peasants A lengthy discussion by members of the gentry of the issue of literacy and the peas antry can be found in Tolstois great novel Anna Karenina Like American Southern slave owners Tolstois gentry were opposed to extending literacy Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 294 the cambridge world history of slavery to the peasantry This was one of the reasons why the gentry called the serfs childlike and opposed their emancipation from their control prior to 1861 The serfs were too immature to manage their own affairs In 1739 Russianstyle serfdom was extended to Ukraine where peasants henceforth were forbidden to move the abasement of the serfs progressed further in 1760 when lords were permitted to banish serfs to Siberia and got militaryrecruit credits for such serfs This gave the lord complete control over conduct on his estate and especially put the fifteen to thirtyyearold cohort on notice that he had to be obedient or face exile to Siberia Of course this was just an extension of the system of military recruiting which permitted lords to dispatch undesired serfs into the army for twentyfive years that is for life In 1766 the selling of serfs as recruits or military substitutes was forbidden but there is ample evidence that this was never enforced5 Perhaps the most galling pieces of legislation were those that freed the gentry from service While the landowning gentry were obligated to per form lifelong service serfdom at least was rational Everyone was har nessed to state service But in 1736 Anna reduced the gentry service require ment to twentyfive years and exempted the first son from any service Then on February 18 1762 one of the most notorious dates in Russian history Peter III abolished all service requirements for gentry landowners This made serfdom irrational and the serfs expected that they would be soon freed from serfdom little did they anticipate that this freedom would not occur until 1906 They believed that Peter III was going to free them but he was murdered by his wife Catherine II and her gentry conspirators to keep the peasants enslaved This was the core of the legitimacy of the Pugachev uprising 17734 he pretended that he was Peter III and would free the serfs Perhaps the ultimate degradation of the serfs occurred in 1767 when they were forbidden to complain against their masters That essentially set in cement Ivan IVs obedience charter The serf had to obey his lord and could not complain about anything his lord did In 1775 Belorussian serfs could be sold without land meaning they were no different at all from slaves Sales of serfs were going on freely in Russia as evidenced by a decree of 1771 that forbade the public sale of serfs nothing was said about private sales and another decree of 1792 in which auctioneers were forbidden to use gavels at serf sales but the sales themselves were not forbidden In the last quarter of the eighteenth century the land of serfs was increas ingly confiscated from them in the black soil region and converted into landlord property Instead of paying rent in cash or in kind serfs were 5 B N Mironov Sotsialnaia istorii Rossii perioda imperii XVIIInachalo XX v 2 vols St Petersburg 2000 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 russian slavery and serfdom 14501804 295 ordered to work their lords land little different from slaves in the Ameri can South farming their owners rice tobacco sugar and cotton This was called barshchina Rent in cash or in kind called obrok was still popular in the podzol region of Russia where the soil was poor and yielded little Serfs there could be forced to engage in auxiliary enterprises carting work in town manufacturing wooden spoons spinning and weaving to come up with their owners increasing demand for rent which Arcadius Kahan observed was required to finance Russian Westernization that is the consumption of Western luxury imports The zenith of Russian serfdom was in 1796 Its decline commenced in 1797 when Paul forbade Sunday barshchina and forbade serf owners to force their serfs to work on barshchina for more than three days a week the famous threeday barshchina decree After this serfdom began to unravel a theme taken up in a later volume of this series further reading Much of the essential bibliography on this topic is in the Russian language In English the standard source on Russian serfdom is Jerome Blum Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century Princeton 1961 For serfdom in the later period see David Moon The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia 17621907 London 2001 For underlying economic and political structures see Richard Hellie The Economy and Material Culture of Russia 16991725 Chicago 1999 and Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy Chicago 1971 For slavery in Russia in the early modern period see Richard Hellie Slavery in Russia 14251725 Chicago 1982 The movement of serfs and slaves in early modern Russia is covered in Richard Hellie Migration in Early Modern Russia 14801780s in David Eltis ed Coerced and Free Migrations Global Perspectives Stanford 2002 pp 292323 An Englishlanguage translation of laws at the outset of our period is now available Daniel H Kaiser trans The Laws of Rus Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries Salt Lake City 1992 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 0 0 100 100 200 400 km 200 miles 300 Grand Duchy of Lithuania Grand Principality of Moscow Pskov Livonian Order Teutonic Order Kingdom of Poland Holstein Mecklenburg Bohemia Hungary B a l t i c S e a Br a n d e n b u r g P o m e r a nia Map 121 East Central Europe ca 1500 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 12 MANORIALISM AND RURAL SUBJECTION IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE 15001800 edgar melton 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 transforma tion of the agrarian economy converting their estates into marketoriented 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 history1 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 devel opment as the primary explanation for east central Europes relative back wardness 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 centuries2 The more recent literature based on painstaking archival research has focused less on the model and more on the reality of manorial life in east central Europe Thus William Hagens pioneering studies of a Branden burg estate have rescued from the archives the villagers and lords who 1 Christoph Schmidt Leibeigenschaft im Ostseeraum Versuch einer Typologie Cologne 1997 p 7 2 Robert Brenner Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in PreIndustrial Europe in T H Aston and C H E Philpin eds The Brenner Debate Cambridge 1985 p 45 297 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 298 the cambridge world history of slavery peopled the manorial world3 Hagens work has restored many important hues to a dark historical canvas in which both the landscape and the people who inhabited it have been long obscured This chapter traces the history of manorialism and rural subjection in the different lands of east central Europe see map 121 while also discussing the problems and issues connected to the interpretation of that history The chapter also emphasizes the similarities between the manorial transforma tion of east central Europe beginning around 1500 and the earlier manorial transformation which began in northwestern Europe around 600 AD Recent archeological research on agricultural developments in north western Europe in the early Middle Ages has literally unearthed one of the key factors in the manorial transformation there the stepbystep emer gence of a new peasant agriculture that was much more productive than its predecessors The manorial economy that followed was the seigniorial response to what Joachim Henning describes as the high levels of produc tivity attained in the west during and shortly after the late Roman period by individual farmsteads engaged in both cereal production and cattle breed ing by means of a well balanced economic system4 This chapter views the manorial transformation in east central Europe through the prism of the early medieval west In exploring the theme of manorialism and rural subjection in east central Europe discussion will focus on the following questions 1 What were the social economic and political characteristics of east central Europe before 1500 and how did this region differ from the west 2 Why did the elites in east central Europe appropriate western institutions manorialism and rural servitude that the west had largely abandoned by 1400 3 What were the conditions of life for the manorial populations living under rural servitude in east central Europe 4 How did manorialism and rural servitude east of the Elbe compare with the slave plantation system in the New World First however several terms need clarification Most problematic is the term serfdom often dubbed the second serfdom to describe the combination of manorialism and rural servitude that dominated agrarian relations in east central Europe in the period 15001800 Although mano rialism and rural subjection existed almost everywhere east of the Elbe 3 See especially William Hagen Ordinary Prussians Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers 15001840 Cambridge 2002 4 Joachim Henning Ways of Life in Eastern and Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages Which Way Was Normal in Florian Curta ed East Central Europe and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages Ann Arbor MI 2005 pp 4160 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 299 conditions varied greatly from one region to another In regions like East Holstein Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania where lords enjoyed the most power over their village subjects peasants could not move without the lords permission had no secure tenure on their farmsteads and had to provide labor services whenever the property owner demanded normally six to seven days per week Still the peasants there had a legal identity that enabled them to be party to lawsuits even against their landlords if they made demands that put their peasants at risk of harm or economic ruin In PolandLithuania by far the largest region in east central Europe the peasants status had some resemblance of that of serfs but there was often a huge gap between legal status and actual practice Thus though Polish peasants lost the right of legal appeal against their lords 1518 they retained their legal identities at the local level where they continued to buy sell lease and inherit property Law forbade Polish peasants to move without seigniorial permission but competition for scarce labor on the eastern frontier often trumped legal restrictions In other regions including most of the lands under Hohenzollern rule Brandenburg Silesia and East Prussia the peasants generally enjoyed more rights including hereditary tenures and the right though not uncon ditional to leave their seigneurs They also had the right to appeal to Hohenzollern courts and estate owners who tried to increase their peas ants labor services risked peasant lawsuits that would be heard in courts that were not unsympathetic to the peasants plight Labor services in most of the Hohenzollern lands two to three days per week were relatively moderate in comparison to their counterparts in lands like Mecklenburg or western Pomerania This chapter uses the term rural subjection which is less extreme than serfdom and flexible enough to embrace all the regional differences Last there is the term manor which in this chapter means the classic bipartite manor characterized by the division of the landed estate into two basic parts tenancies and demesne The tenancies were farmsteads occupied by the lords peasants whereas the demesne consisted of lands worked directly on behalf of the manorial lord The peasants who occupied the tenancies lived by cultivating their farmsteads but in return they owed various obligations of which the most important was cultivating their landlords demesne lands providing labor services during all phases of the agricultural season from plowing to threshing Admittedly the classic bipartite manor is an ideal type that did not con form perfectly to historical reality To take one example peasant labor ser vices ideally provided the manors entire labor needs but this was rarely the case in practice either in the medieval west or in east central Europe Most manors relied not only on peasant labor services but also on labor from landless or semilandless agricultural workers whom the manor employed Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 300 the cambridge world history of slavery on a permanent or seasonal basis Such qualifications do not invalidate the terms usefulness Mutatis mutandis the classic manor is an accurate term for describing the way that most landlords organized their landed estates in east central Europe europe before 1500 Although the classic manor probably existed as early as the late sixth cen tury it first appears in the sources around 700 AD in the central Frankish territories between Paris and Cologne the lands that would later become the core of the Carolingian Empire There were other forms of agricultural production as well including estates worked by slaves and small farms held by free cultivators These however were gradually disappearing in the central Frankish region In the medieval west the classic manor was limited primarily to the cerealproducing regions of northwestern Europe northern France the Low Countries England northern Italy and much of western Germany After its decline and ultimate disappearance from these lands in the four teenth and fifteenth centuries the classic manor reappeared in a much stronger form in east central Europe east central europe before 1500 This chapter defines east central Europe as the entirety of lands stretching east from the Elbe River to the western borders of the Russian Federation This includes the northeastern parts of presentday Germany the eastern part of SchleswigHolstein and the lands belonging to the German federal states of Brandenburg and MecklenburgVorpommern It also includes Poland the Czech Republic and the Baltic states Lithuania Latvia and Estonia as well as Ukraine and Belarus Unfortunately space does not permit detailed discussion of Hungary and Slovakia even though they also belong to east central Europe Our definition of east central Europe excludes both Russia and the Balkan lands the latter being under Ottoman rule in the period discussed Like western Europe east central Europe in the period 15001800 was not so much a region as a region of regions a political and confes sional welter of dynastic holdings territorial states and sparsely settled borderlands Prior to the twelfth century most of east central Europe resembled the barbarian Europe that had existed in the west before the Carolingian era In some lands like Mecklenburg and Brandenburg pagan Slav uprisings hindered Christianization and German colonization until the twelfth century In other regions like Prussia Lithuania and Livonia Estonia and Latvia the native populations had remained pagan until the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 301 fourteenth century Even in Bohemia and Poland located farther to the west towns and commerce were relatively undeveloped until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries The fourteenth century saw the political cultural and economic flow ering of east central Europe In the political sphere we see the unification and consolidation of powerful states some of which had western rulers like the Teutonic Knights in Prussia the Luxemburg dynasty in Bohemia and the Anjou dynasty in Hungary In Poland the native Piast dynasty pro duced gifted rulers like Casimir the Great r 133370 In their attempts to strengthen and modernize their states these rulers and their elites appropriated or adapted western forms of political social and economic organization When John of Luxemburg son of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII became king of Bohemia in 1310 he brought to Prague a sophisticated western dynasty steeped in the court cultures of Burgundy and France Although John considered his new kingdom a cultural and social backwater he significantly expanded its territory and under his son Charles IV d 1378 who ruled as both king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor the kingdom of Bohemia would reach the apogee of its power and influence in medieval Europe Charles who had been raised at the French court transformed his capital at Prague into one of the intellectual and artistic centers of Europe with the first university in east central Europe 1349 and a new style of painting and sculpture that laid the foundations for the International Gothic of the early fifteenth century In Poland Casimir the Great doubled the size of his kingdom established hundreds of new towns and in 1364 founded one of the earliest universities in east central Europe In 1386 Poland entered into a dynastic union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania whose rulers had already forged a huge though sparsely populated state that included the lands of presentday Lithuania Belarus and much of presentday Ukraine The dynastic union became the basis for a political partnership that evolved in the sixteenth century into the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth an elective monarchy nearly as large as the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire put together Around 1650 PolandLithuania had approximately ten million inhabitants and was the largest and most populous state in east central Europe Most regions in east central Europe appear to have escaped the first wave of epidemics that ravaged the population of the medieval west beginning in 1348 although the east suffered indirectly from demographic collapse in the west which greatly diminished the influx of colonists from western Germany and the Low Countries For most of the fourteenth century however east central Europe experienced not only agricultural growth but also urban expansion that benefited not only the great urban centers like Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 302 the cambridge world history of slavery Prague Cracow and Danzig but also hundreds of newly founded towns and market centers Although the political dynamism and economic growth of the fourteenth century yielded to political crisis and economic regression in the fifteenth century the political and economic importance of east central Europe was firmly established Two of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire ruled principalities in east central Europe Bohemia and Brandenburg and the political structure of many states east of the Elbe closely resembled the Standestaaten literally estate state in the Holy Roman Empire The primary characteristic of the Standestaat was the division of political authority between the ruler who exercised the executive role and the estates especially the landed nobility whose wealth and powers of lordship gave them privileged access to the economic and financial resources of the state Agrarian developments in east central Europe laid the foundation for its political and cultural achievements in the fourteenth century Until the thirteenth century the region had lagged far behind northwestern Europe There as already noted rural cultivators in the early Middle Ages were already creating a new model of peasant farming that would become the basis for agricultural production in northern Europe until the nineteenth century A major indicator of agricultural change in the early medieval west was the shift in rural settlement patterns The older settlement type the Roman villa of Late Antiquity gave way to a new type of settlement the nucle ated village dominated by welldemarcated farmsteads These were villages with welldelineated farmsteads laid out in rows along the village street Farmsteads included not only dwellings but also additional structures for stabling cattle and other agricultural functions The peasants on these farmsteads adapted farm implements from Roman agriculture including the heavy wheeled plough the framed harrow heavy iron forks and the longhandled scythe The rural population was also developing an intensive shortfallow cropping system threefield rotation that was well suited for the expanded cultivation of rye oats and barley the northern counterpart to the Mediterranean triad of wheat olives and vineyards Another important dimension of the agricultural revolution was the new form of rural social organization based on communal regulation of village commons and collective decisions about the agricultural calendar The growth in agricultural productivity and the development of communal selfgovernment reflect the increase in the relative freedom enjoyed by this slowly emerging social entity the medieval peasantry Carolingian conquest and Ottonian expansion helped spread this new agricultural model across the Rhine and into the Saxon regions between Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 303 the Weser and the Elbe By the eleventh century the new agriculture had spread as far east as the Elbe river transforming landscapes occupied by both German and West Slav populations Small dispersed farmsteads and settlements gave way to nucleated village communities dominated by large articulated farmsteads The threefield system which enabled peasants to cultivate twothirds of the existing arable replaced longterm fallowing5 It would take several more centuries for this new agricultural model to take shape east of the Elbe in east central Europe although the transfor mation was doubtless under way well before it began to surface in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries The early Middle Ages had already seen substantial changes in settlement patterns driven by the emergence of political elites within the Slavic tribes living east of the Elbe This process found its clearest expression in the fortified settlements that emerged in regions like east Holstein Mecklenburg and Poland in the eighth ninth and tenth centuries Until the late twelfth century however population density settlement patterns and agricultural techniques there were still archaic even by the standards of northwestern Europe in the early Middle Ages The population lived in small fortified settlements located almost exclusively in lowlands and marshes along the river valleys Attached to the fortresses and political centers that levied tribute on them these settlements consisted of small undifferentiated dwellings with no separate structures for stabling cattle or threshing grain Settlements were concentrated in alluvial lowlands where the soil was mediocre but thin enough to cultivate with the light wooden plows in use Dependence on long fallowing which permitted cultivation of only a small part of the existing arable also limited agricultural production As in the early medieval west creation of a new agriculture model in east central Europe was a piecemeal process in which separate advance ments gradually coalesced into a coherent whole In Mecklenburg and Brandenburg just east of the Elbe pagan Slav uprisings against German colonization had helped to delay the process In the Bohemian and Silesian lands however there is evidence of progress in the twelfth century with the shift from dispersed to nucleated settlements and with the adoption of the threefield system6 In Poland the transformation of the countryside owed in part to the policies of the Piast rulers who encouraged German settlement from the 5 Joachim Henning Der slawische Siedlungsraum und die ottonische Expansion ostlich der Elbe Ereignisgeschichte Archeologie Dendrochronologie in idem ed Europa im 10 Jahrhundert Archaologie einer Aufbruchszeit Zabern 2002 pp 1334 6 On changes in the Bohemian landscape Martin Gayda A Comparative Study of Czech and British Medieval Settlement Archeology Towards Whole Landscapes in D Austin and L Alcock eds From the Baltic to the Black Sea Studies in Medieval Archeology Boston 1990 pp 96112 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 304 the cambridge world history of slavery west while adopting German farmstead and village organization Hufen verfassung as a model for transforming the agrarian structure in Poland Silesia ruled by the Piasts until 1335 functioned as an important conduit for the introduction of these western institutions which integrated higher agricultural productivity with the newly established towns marketplaces and taverns7 Polish rulers and German imports were the only factors driving agricultural change in Poland Some peasants there were already using improved agricultural methods prior to German colonization and the introduction of German law Weather changes in the thirteenth century were probably a factor that encouraged or accelerated agricultural innovation In Poland the clus tering of settlements in alluvial bottomlands made them vulnerable to calamitous floods that struck with increasing frequency in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries The population responded by abandoning the bottomlands and moving to the slightly more elevated plains8 The new settlements located on fertile but heavier soil certainly encouraged use of the heavy plow and other advanced techniques It may seem paradoxical to argue that the manorial economy appeared in east central Europe after the region had achieved a Westernized peas ant agriculture but Westernization has often brought ambiguous results As in northwestern Europe in the early Middle Ages the manor in east central Europe was a seigniorial response to the transformation of peasant agriculture enabling the agrarian elite to capture a share in the peasants rising productivity9 the manorial transformation in east central europe The first documentary evidence of the classic manorial economy in east central Europe is in southwestern Poland where peasants were providing regular labor services on ecclesiastical manors as early as the second half of the fourteenth century The fifteenth century saw further development of the manorial economy in Poland but it was the price revolution when grain prices tripled or quadrupled in the course of the sixteenth century that really sparked the manorial transformation According to informa tion from 275 villages in southwestern Poland province of Cracow only 7 Richard C Hoffmann Land Liberties and Lordship in a Late Medieval Countryside Agrarian Structures and Change in the Duchy of Wroclaw Philadelphia PA 1989 pp 523 8 Teresa DuninWasowicz Environment et habitat la rupture de lequilibrium du xiiie siecle dans le Grande Plaine europeen Annales Economies SocietesCivilizations 35 1980 102646 9 Krzysztof Mikulski and Jan Wroniszewski Das Vorwerk und die Wandlungen der wirtschaftlichen Konjunktur in den polnischen Landern im 1417 Jahrhundert in Marian Dygo et al eds Ostmitteleuropa im 1417 Jahrhundert eine Region oder eine Region der Regionen Warsaw 2003 pp 1256 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 305 28 percent of the villages were providing labor services in 1564 eighty years later all the villages had heavy labor services10 The high market orientation of the manorial economy attests to the role of the price revolution in the manorial transformation In the late sixteenth century the average noble estate in Poland was small averaging only three hundred acres with demesne lands and peasant tenancies claiming roughly equal shares but even these small estates marketed more than half of their manorial production mostly rye and oats The manorial economy on these estates accounted for more than 90 percent of all estate revenues The manorial peasants whose labor services had doubled or tripled in the course of the sixteenth century bore the costs of the transformation The average peasant who lived on a halfholding of twentyone acres owed labor services of two to three days per week peasants on full farm steads fortytwo acres owed four to five days per week Even these high levels of exploitation provided only 60 percent of the labor needs of the average manor which had to hire additional labor11 Despite high labor obligations to their seigniors most peasants also used hired labor and produced for the market see later By the middle of the sixteenth century the manorial transformation had engulfed not only Poland but also many other regions in east central Europe especially the German lands East Holstein Pomerania Mecklen burg and East Prussia Writing in the early sixteenth century the Lubeck cleric Reimar Kock noted that some estate owners in Holstein had already imposed labor services that were so heavy as to leave the peasants little time for their own fields12 Expansion of the manorial economy in East Holstein imposed severe burdens on the peasants not only in greatly increased labor services but also at the expense of peasant landholdings In 1550 the estate of Deutsch Nienhof had less than two hundred acres of land and sixtyfive peasant farmsteads A century later the estate had nearly twelve hundred acres of land but only eighteen peasant farmsteads each of which owed daily labor services on the lords manors In Pomerania the manorial transformation also reached extreme levels Around 1540 Thomas Kantzow a ducal official in Pomerania described manorialism there as a strict system in which some peasants must perform labor services whenever the seignior demands it which is so often 10 Schmidt Leibeigenschaft im Ostseeraum pp 445 11 Andˇrzej Wyczanski Leconomie du domain nobiliare moyen 15001580 Annales Economie Societes Civilisations 35 1980 817 Marcin Kamler Folwark szlachecki w Wielkopolsce w latach 15801655 Warsaw 1976 pp 6573 12 Cited in Reiner Hansen Der Kieler Umschlag Entstehung Konjunktur und Funktionswandel eines internationalen Geldmarktes vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zum Anbruch der Moderne Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur SchleswigHolsteinische Geschichte 117 1992 11617 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 306 the cambridge world history of slavery that they cannot work their own farms as a result of which they become impoverished and often flee13 The manorial transformation in Pomerania continued to gain momentum in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries In one region of western Pomerania noble manors more than doubled in the period 15691625 increasing from thirtyeight to eighty one14 In neighboring Brandenburg the manorial transformation also took place on a large scale Brandenburg had suffered heavily from depopulation in the fifteenth century and demographic recovery was slow lasting well into the sixteenth century Noble landlords suffered from labor shortages but were also able to expand their estate lands by annexing deserted peasant farmsteads In the Uckermark a Brandenburg district north of Berlin noble landlords held only an eighth of the arable land in 1500 but had increased their share to a third of the arable by 1620 We can follow the manorial transformation in Brandenburg through the history of one estate Stavenow in the Prignitz district northwest of Berlin The Quitzows a noble family notorious for its feuds and violence acquired Stavenow in 1405 from the Duke of Mecklenburg as loan collateral In the late fifteenth century the owners of Stavenow initiated a century of manorial expansion based primarily on labor services provided by their peasants By the end of the sixteenth century each peasant household owed labor services of three days per week Stavenows manorial economy paid off handsomely and the assessed value of Stavenow around 1600 was five times its value a century before The sixteenthcentury tower and gables of the castle remodeled by the Quitzows in Renaissance style showed the wealth generated by timely investments in the manorial economy15 Stavenow was much larger however than the vast majority of Bran denburg estates many of which were too small to support their owners noble status let alone pay for a Renaissance castle In the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries approximately onethird of the noble families in Brandenburg disappeared from the historical record16 For the majority of noble landowners the manorial economy thus took on crucial importance as the primary source of noble income The manorial transformation did not always evolve in a linear pattern As in the medieval west misfortunes like war famine flooding and disease periodically disrupted manorial development in many regions or localities 13 Georg Gaebel ed Des Thomas Kantzow Chronik von Pommern in hochdeutscher Mundart 2 vols Stettin 1898 2 245 14 Dirk Schleinert Der landliche Raum in Pommern in der Fruhen Neuzeit Blatter fur deutsche Landesgeschichte 136 2000 203 15 Hagen Ordinary Prussians pp 3946 16 Edgar Melton The Junkers of Brandenburg Prussia 16001806 in Hamish Scott ed The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 2 vols Basingstoke 2007 2 132 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 307 sometimes forcing landlords to shift to other modes of exploitation When disasters led to widespread peasant flight seigniors sometimes used hired labor as a temporary expedient reverting to labor services once they had resettled their farmsteads There were also a few regions especially in West Prussia where nobles farmed their lands almost exclusively with wage labor We find this in the Werder delta the lowlands where the Vistula River flows into the Baltic near Danzig the most important grain port on the Baltic There the proximity to Danzig encouraged capitalintensive agriculture on both noble and peasant farms On the vast Marienburg crown domains the nobles who leased the domains from the crown collected high cash rents from the peasant tenants using the money to help finance large farms based on wage labor Reliance on wage labor required huge outputs of cash because labor costs in the Werder delta doubled in the course of the sixteenth century At the same time however improved productivity and rising grain prices more than compensated for labor costs revenues from the Marienburg domains quadrupled in the sixteenth century17 The capitalistic agricultural economy that emerged in the Werder delta was not however widespread throughout east central Europe On the contrary capitalistic agriculture in the Werder delta owed its rise to the proximity to Danzig which dominated the export of Baltic grain in the six teenth and seventeenth centuries Grain exports from Danzig had risen from only eleven thousand tons in 1492 to a quarter million tons in 1618 on the eve of the Thirty Years War The Baltic grain trade looms large in the literature devoted to the second serfdom in east central Europe Some scholars have even suggested that rising demand for grain in the west caused the rise of the manorial economy in the same way that demand for sugar in the west was responsible for the rise of the slave plantation in northeastern Brazil and the Caribbean during the same period This analogy has not sustained scrutiny Danzigs grain exports were huge averaging more than a hundred thousand tons per year in the six teenth century but 75 percent of the grain exported from Danzig came from West Prussia especially from the Werder delta a region where cap italistic agriculture played a prominent role For Poland as a whole only 10 percent of the marketable grain surplus went for export whereas the internal market took approximately 90 percent18 17 William Dwight van Horn Suburban Development Rural Exchange and the Manorial Economy in Royal Prussia 15701700 unpublished PhD dissertation Columbia University 1987 p 321 18 Michael North Getreideanbau und Getreidehandel im Koniglichen Preußen und im Herzogtum Preußen Uberlegungen zu den Beziehungen zwischen Produktion Binnenmarkt und Weltmarkt im 16 und 17 Jahrhundert Zeitschrift fur Ostforschung 34 1985 3947 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 308 the cambridge world history of slavery High shipping costs were responsible for barring the vast majority of Polish estate owners from the export market Lords with estates very close to Danzig could export their grain surplus but otherwise access to export markets was open only to estate owners who owned their own grain barges Once they reached Danzig the grain barges were broken up and sold for timber which then paid for much of the shipping expenses but this was possible only for rich landowners with sufficient forests for building their own barges Throughout east central Europe most estate owners sold their manorial products on local or urban markets Most of these markets were modest although estate owners near the larger cities enjoyed access to much larger markets The expansion of Berlin for example created a powerful grain market that helped transform agricultural production in Berlins hinter land In the Uckermark the fertile district that emerged as Berlins granary increasing availability of hired labor and the resurgence of high grain prices in the mideighteenth century created an economic environment in which estate owners made increasing use of wage labor on their manors at the same time freeing their peasants from labor services in exchange for high cash rents In the Uckermark long notorious for having the harshest forms of rural subjection in Brandenburg estate owners had demanded unlimited labor services from their peasants since the early seventeenth century By the late eighteenth century however wage labor had increasingly replaced the heavylabor services provided by subject peasants and even the legal terms for peasant subjection had gone out of use19 The manorial transformation just described applies largely to the westernmost lands of east central Europe especially northeast Germany and Poland In the more sparsely settled regions further east however the mano rial transformation also began in the sixteenth century but took longer In Livonia the manorial economy emerged in the first half of the sixteenth century in the course of which the number of landed estates in northern Livonia presentday Estonia quadrupled Under PolishLithuanian rule 15611629 Livonian nobles also strengthened their power over their peas ants Nevertheless decades of war beginning in 1558 took a huge toll on an already sparse population and slowed the development of the manorial economy At the end of the sixteenth century the manorial economy had not yet achieved a dominant position in Livonia The PolishSwedish wars 160029 devastated much of Livonia and further disrupted the manorial transformation The manorial economy all but disappeared on many estates because of peasant flight As late as 19 Lieselott Enders Bauern und Feudalherrschaft in der Uckermark im absolutischen Staat Jahrbuch fur Geschichte des Feudalismus 13 1989 254 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 309 the midseventeenth century the manorial economy still played a largely subordinate role as we can see from the estate complex belonging to the Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna His vast estates in southern Livonia presentday Latvia included nine hundred peasant farmsteads and fifty manors but the manorial economy accounted for less than a quarter of estate revenues Peasant households owed heavylabor services of four days per week but commuted most of their labor obligations with cash rents20 Not until the late seventeenth century was the manorial transformation of Livonia complete In the 1690s manorial demesne accounted for a quarter of all the arable land on both noble estates and royal domains The famine of 16957 and the Northern War 170011 once again devastated Livonia but the manorial economy recovered Around the mideighteenth century full peasant farmsteads were providing their landlords with five to six days per week of labor services21 In Belarus and Ukraine the vast sparsely settled eastern borderlands of PolandLithuania the manorial economy was also subject to long periods of disruption and did not stabilize until the first quarter of the eighteenth century Belarus had entered the sixteenth century with social and economic structures that were still archaic compared to Poland Brandenburg or the other lands closer to the west In the early sixteenth century an estate economy worked by slaves still existed and there were both free and unfree populations who depending on their legal status owed their lords various tributes rendered in cash kind eg honey and labor The manorial transformation in Belarus owed much to the agrarian reforms introduced by the King Sigismund I r 150648 and his second wife Bona Sforza daughter of Gian Galeazzo Sforza Duke of Milan Sigismund eager to increase the rents from his lands introduced a series of agrarian reforms on crown estates in the western districts of Lithuania After Sigismunds death in 1548 his widow Bona Sforza who had already played a major role in bringing Renaissance art and culture to Poland extended the agrarian reforms to the crown domains farther east in Belarus Noble and ecclesiastical landlords soon followed her example by reorganizing their own estates in Belarus along the same lines22 Bona Sforzas reforms sought to reorganize farmsteads and villages according to principles similar to the German agrarian institutions Hufen verfassung that had already helped transform Polands agrarian structure in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries The nobility in Lithuania and Belarus were eager to establish the manors on their estates and clearly 20 Edgar Dunsdorfs The Livonian Estats of Axel Oxensteirna Stockholm 1981 p 74 21 Jurgen Heyde Bauer Gutshoff und Konigsmacht Die esthnischen Bauern in Livland unter polnische und schwedische Herrschaft Cologne 2000 pp 12151 22 On the agrarian reforms in sixteenthcentury Belarus R A French The ThreeField System of Sixteenth Century Lithuania Agricultural History Review 18 1970 10625 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 310 the cambridge world history of slavery understood that fundamental improvements in peasant productivity were the necessary precondition for the manorial economy The reforms tried to eliminate the intermingling of estate and peasant lands by consolidating the arable land into two discrete parts demesne land and peasant land Peasant land was then divided into farmstead units of standard size Each unit włoka had approximately sixty acres depending on the quality of the land of arable fields laid out on a regular threefield rotation The reform also reconfigured rural settlements into large wellordered villages with the peasants dwellings laid out in neat rows along the village street The elongated fields held by each peasant began on the other side of the street stretching out from opposite his farmstead A threshing barn belonged to each farmstead The włoka was the standard assessment unit for both taxes and seigniorial obligations which included rents in cash and kind and labor services of four days per week on manorial demesne which was also cultivated on the threefield rotation At the same time the Lithuanian Statutes of 1566 and 1588 granted estate owners powerful new rights of lordship over their subjects thus clearing the way for the manorial transformation of Belarus In some respects the reforms fell short of expectations especially con cerning peasant productivity A recent study of peasant budgets in late sixteenthcentury Lithuania and Belarus calculates that a full peasant farm stead with six adult workers enough draft animals for two work teams and a crop yield of five to one the yield assumed by the reforms could have provided all seigniorial obligations plus a market surplus for itself23 Unfortunately the reformed peasant farmstead in Belarus did not usu ally conform to these assumptions Belorussian peasants may have lacked the productive forces sufficient to farm an entire farmstead perhaps they refused to accept large farmsteads because of the heavy rents or labor obligations attached In any case most peasants held only half a włoka approximately thirty acres or often less Of the relatively few peasants with full farmsteads less than half had two draft teams Moreover judging from crop yields on three Belorussian manors 1596 yield ratios barely exceeded three to one for rye and even less for oats If low agricultural productivity slowed the manorial transformation in Belarus other factors like the six years of crop failures in the 1570s also played a role Wetlands and forests which covered much of Belarus also hindered agricultural change and in some regions of Belarus the manorial economy never took root Polands wars with Sweden and Russia also resulted in severe depop ulation that disrupted the manorial transformation in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries By 1670 for example more than half the rural 23 D L Pokhilevich Biudzhet krestian Belorussii i Litvy v xvi v Istoriia SSSR 1 1972 14854 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 311 households in Belarus were deserted and the Second Northern War 1700 21 brought new devastation During such periods landlords often had to commute labor services to cash rents Some landlords resorted to hired laborers24 In any case the manorial economy did not regain its stability until the 1720s In the Ukraine the southeastern borderlands of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth landowners also tried to introduce the manorial economy based on labor services but these attempts often led to massive flight of the rural population At the same time Polish magnates also oppressed and angered the Cossack elite whose resentments culminated in a Cossack rebellion 164861 led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky The rebellion did not eradicate the great estates concentrated largely in Volhynia and Podolia northwestern Ukraine but it took thousands of lives destroyed property and resulted in widespread flight and depopulation The rebellion thus put a temporary halt to the manorial transformation there delaying it for more than fifty years In the course of the eighteenth century landowners in Volhynia and Podolia were able to establish or resurrect their manorial economies but the allure of fertile lands farther to the southeast made it difficult to hold on to the rural population and landowners had to moderate their demands for labor services anatomy of the manorial economy Despite disruptions in Livonia and in PolandLithuanias eastern border lands the manorial economy ultimately triumphed almost everywhere in east central Europe By the mideighteenth century manorial landscapes stretched from East Holstein in the northwest to the western Ukraine more than eight hundred miles to the southeast Of course manorial econ omy and organization varied from one region to the next but a comparison of two eighteenthcentury estates at the opposite ends of east central Europe shows the underlying structural similarities Around 1750 the estate of Wittenberg in East Holstein included three villages two manors and a large dairy farm The rural population num bered around four hundred The occupants of the twentytwo peasant farms including their hired hands accounted for half the population while forty cottagers with smallholdings accounted for another fourth In addition there were servants and hired hands employed directly by the estate Peasants in Wittenberg owed heavylabor service obligations that required each farmstead to provide the manor with two horse teams and 24 D L Pokhilevich Kapitalisticheskie zigzagi v istorii feodalnogo pomestia in V K Iatsunskii ed Voprosy istorii selskogo khoziaistva Moscow 1961 p 151 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 312 the cambridge world history of slavery five workers every day of the week The peasants who held farmsteads had no secure tenure and the lord could in theory evict them from their farmsteads whenever he wished In practice however the farmsteads were hereditary25 Eight hundred miles to the southeast the Volhynian estate complex of Wisniowiecs in western Ukraine displays the same basic features charac teristic of the classic manor with peasants providing most of the labor on Wisniowiecss fifteen manors Labor services averaged two days per week per household but the peasants also had to work additional days for lessthan market wages There was also as in Wittenberg a landless or semilandless population that provided additional labor in the manorial economy26 The two estates also reveal contrasts On Wittenberg the fields were enclosed and were cultivated according to a relatively sophisticated seven field rotation system that supported both cereal cultivation and dairy pro duction Dairy production especially after 1650 had become a major source of revenue in East Holstein In addition to manorial income based on grain and dairy production Wittenberg also earned revenue by grazing and fattening herds of cattle driven from Denmark to urban markets in Germany and the Netherlands On Wisniowiecs which used the threefield system manorial revenues came primarily from grain some of which was even exported through Danzig The seigniorial monopoly on beer and vodka sold in estate taverns also accounted for a considerable part of manorial revenue as it did on many estates in east central Europe village life in the manorial system The village populations of east central Europe paid the social and economic costs of the manorial transformation in the form of higher labor services restricted freedom of movement degraded legal status and more intrusive forms of seigniorial authority With a few notable exceptions however the introduction of the manorial economy and rural servitude did not pro voke rural rebellion or uprisings Why did the manorial transformation evoke so little active resistance from the rural population There are no satisfactory answers to this question Robert Brenner one of the few historians to address this problem argues that peasant communities in the west were much older with more established traditions of collective solidarity and resistance and were thus better able to counter the oppressive demands by seigniors in the late medieval and early modern 25 Jan Klußmann Lebenswelten und Identitaten adliger Gutsuntertanen Das Beispiel des ostlichen SchleswigHolsteins im 18 Jahrhundert Frankfurt 2002 pp 315 26 A I Baranovich Magnatskoe khoziaistvo na iuge Volynii v xviii v Moscow 1955 pp 36138 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 313 west In contrast to the west east central Europe was a frontier region with relatively late settlement Consequently the rural communities lacked the cohesion and solidarity to mount successful collective action against manorialism and rural subjection Peasant communities in east central Europe were certainly not auto nomous but they were more effective in deploying collective resistance than Brenner suggests Peasants in east central Europe also used passive resistance on a daily basis to subvert seigniorial authority At the same time manorialism and rural subjection were not an inevitable outcome in east central Europe and more active widespread forms of village resistance might have forced estate owners to limit if not abandon their mano rial ambitions Several economic factors may help explain the peasants acceptance however reluctant of manorialism and subjection The first of these factors is the fall in rents that the peasants paid in cash or kind In sixteenthcentury Brandenburg for example labor services rose but rents in cash and kind fell This was probably the result of a tradeoff in which peasants accepted more labor services but only if their lords agreed to reduce cash and inkind rents27 The second factor relates to the way that peasants provided labor services Contrary to the assumptions of many scholars most peasants did not perform labor services personally preferring to send farm servants to do the work Peasants who held large farmsteads that had heavylabor service obligations often provided two or three farm servants and a larger inventory of draft animals The practice of hiring surrogates to perform the peasants labor obliga tions was typical of manorialism in east central Europe It also distinguishes the manorial system of east central Europe from servile agrarian systems that rested on direct exploitation like some forms of Russian serfdom or like the plantation systems in the New World where the servile populations worked personally for their masters The costs of housing feeding and paying servants along with the out lays for additional draft animals imposed a heavy overhead on the peasant economy Contrary to the assumptions of many scholars the manorial peasant in east central Europe had a clear grasp of the economic con cepts that operated in his daily life The peasant understood not only the fixed costs but also the opportunity costs of sending a worker to perform labor services on the lords demesne Peasants therefore resorted to various expedients including bribery in order to diminish their labor service obli gations Nevertheless labor services were simply costs expenses that were onerous but did not necessarily carry the stain of servility Moreover the 27 William Hagen How Mighty the Junkers Peasant Rents and Seigneurial Profits in Sixteenth Century Brandenburg Past Present 108 1985 105 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 314 the cambridge world history of slavery rise in peasant productivity may have compensated to some degree for the expenses of providing labor to the manor As we have already seen the rise in agricultural productivity beginning in the late twelfth century was a precondition for the emergence of mano rialism The manorial transformation took place after the initial rise in peasant productivity but did not necessarily disrupt the rising curve of peasant productivity Thus Polish peasants in the fifteenth century were harvesting only three to four grains for every grain sown whereas the six teenth century saw yields rise to five to one In addition the sharp rise in grain prices that lasted throughout the sixteenth century helped peasants as well28 The fall in grain prices in the seventeenth century deprived the peasants of this advantage but price depression was far less damaging than war and epidemics Most regions in east central Europe experienced first hand these two horsemen of the seventeenthcentury apocalypse but in Poland civil war and anarchy prolonged the crisis throughout much of the eighteenth century War and internal strife took a heavy toll in productive forces population wagons seed corn livestock and fodder The Polish peasant responded to the loss of seed and livestock by abandoning his farmstead or by diminishing the amount of land he cultivated In the early seventeenth century there were already signs of a crisis in Polands manorial system The amount of manorial land under cultivation which had grown steadily throughout most of the sixteenth century stagnated or even diminished while manorial crop yields declined At the same time the number of large farmsteads in Poland declined probably because the majority of estate owners were themselves too impoverished to restock their deserted farmsteads Unable to resettle their abandoned farmsteads with subject peasants many estate owners brought in foreign colonists especially from Germany and the Low Countries These colonists brought valuable skills but they settled as free hereditary leaseholders who were not obligated to provide labor services In order to get badly needed labor many landlords turned to landless or semilandless cottagers who provided labor services in exchange for garden plots or smallholdings In some cases this led back to the classic manorial economy but only if the landlord could gradually replenish enough of the large wellstocked farmsteads that formed the economic backbone of the manorial economy In other cases the use of landless workers and smallholders led to a more capitalistic agrarian economy In eighteenthcentury Mecklenburg and western Swedish Pomerania noble estate owners brutally dismantled the classic manorial economy 28 Piotr Guzowski A Changing Economy Models of Peasant Budgets in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Poland Continuity and Change 20 2005 925 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 315 When their rulers proved unwilling or unable to protect the peasantry most estate owners simply annexed their peasants farmsteads reducing the occupants to cottagers or landless farm workers The estate owners then introduced new progressive crop rotations that increased the profitability of their farm operations This notorious Bauernlegen expulsion of peasants from their farmsteads reduced the Mecklenburg peasantry from twelve thousand in 1650 to only two thousand by the end of the eighteenth century In western Pomerania twothirds of the farmsteads disappeared Unlike the nobility in Mecklenburg and western Pomerania seigniors in the Hohenzollern lands faced an absolutist government that offered the peasants some protection from seigniorial abuses In most of the lands under Hohenzollern rule Brandenburg East Prussia Silesia and eastern Pomerania the manorial economy thus took a path that was far less prejudicial to the peasants interest As almost everywhere in east central Europe estate owners in the Hohen zollern lands had to adopt new strategies to overcome the crisis of the manorial economy after the Thirty Years War Many nobles focused on consolidating and enlarging their estate lands creating more compact and efficient manorial farms Faced with the expensive and sometimes fruitless task of attracting tenants to their deserted peasant farmsteads many estate owners offered their peasants better terms or else relied more on hired labor The manorial economy had always employed hired workers and now confronted with increasing peasant resistance to labor services many estate owners found it expedient to hire additional workers The shift to wage labor was gradual and initially yielded only modest results In the course of the eighteenth century however noble estate owners in Brandenburg Prussia substantially increased their reliance on hired labor which prepared them for the agrarian reforms that brought an end to manorialism and rural subjection in the nineteenth century The increasing importance of wage labor also reflected fundamental changes in the rural social structure with the landless and semilandless population accounting for the majority of the village population In a rural world where most villagers had little or no land those with large farmsteads were the village elite of which William Hagens study of Stavenow provides a vivid portrait The peasants of Stavenow had the status of hereditary subjects Erbun tertanen which was the most common legal status in the East Elbian German lands Hereditary subjects were under seigniorial jurisdiction but in Brandenburg they were free to move if they could find suitable replace ments They also had strong inheritance rights to their farmsteads which were generally large averaging more than one hundred acres At the same time they owed substantial labor services to their lord On Stavenow each Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 316 the cambridge world history of slavery farmstead owed two days per week which usually entailed keeping at least four horses and one or two hired hands In keeping with their status as the village elite the farm holders in Stavenow observed endogamous marriage practices their children inter married largely with the children of other farm holders and farmsteads thus remained in the hands of the same families In the eighteenth cen tury more than 80 percent of farmstead transfers went to one of the farm holders children usually the oldest son or daughter Despite their prestigious position within the community the Stavenow farm holders did not lead easy lives The family member who took over the farm had to pay marriage shares to his siblings and these payments coupled with obligations to support the parents in their retirement often saddled the successor with heavy debts Moreover even though farm hold ers in Stavenow normally produced a sizable market surplus there is no evidence of significant capital accumulation The only Stavenow villager to accumulate even modest savings 353 talers was the noninheriting son of a farm holder who had migrated to a nearby town to become a tailor29 The farm holder also had to navigate between seigniorial demands on his workforce on the one hand and the needs of his own farmstead on the other Together with the other farm holders on the estate he engaged in an often tense and sometimes expensive tugofwar with the seignior In absolutist Brandenburg where princely law courts offered the peasants some legal redress lawsuits provided an important form of resistance and in the second half of the eighteenth century the Stavenow peasants waged a protracted lawsuit that successfully resisted seigniorial attempts to increase their labor services Nevertheless such struggles also exacted a heavy psychological toll that often suffused lordpeasant relationships with acrimony and bitterness This may help explain why Stavenow farm holders had a much lower life expectancy twentyfive years than male laborers and cottagers thirtyeight years The endogamous tendencies of village elites left the smallholders hired hands and servants with only limited mobility and most villagers spent their lives as farm workers or servants This does not mean however that their careers were devoid of mobility Jan Klußmanns study of village society on the Wittenberg estate in East Holstein shatters many of the assumptions historians have made about the agrarian proletariat As we have already seen many laborers in Wittenberg worked directly for the manor but most began as hired hands on peasant farmsteads The hired hand who entered service in a peasant household could hope for three subsequent promotions ending his work life as head servant Vollknecht on a farm Far from taking a passive or indifferent view of their work farm 29 Hagen Ordinary Prussians pp 123279 and 391422 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 317 laborers in Wittenberg defined themselves largely through their reputations as industrious competent workers This reputation formed the basis for a sense of selfworth and personal honor that transcended social rank in the village community However the villagers reputation for competence and hard work required affirmation expressed through promotions and improvements in pay and status The villager who did not get a promotion often experienced it as an attack on his honor Servants and farm workers thus expected their employers to rec ognize both ability and seniority when making promotions Otherwise the sense of wounded honor would have made life in the village unendurable30 manorialism and rural subjection in bohemia an exception In Bohemia the classic manor based on peasant labor services did not appear until after the Thirty Years War Bohemian estate owners vigorously expanded their agricultural production in the sixteenth century but estate farming in sixteenthcentury Bohemia rested on hired labor Like their counterparts elsewhere in east central Europe Bohemian nobles enjoyed very powerful lordship over their village subjects but did not demand that they provide labor services Instead peasants in sixteenthcentury Bohemia paid high cash rents while their lords used hired workers on their estate farms Though not technologically advanced some estate farms took full advantage of local markets as we can see in the case of Frauenberg a large estate complex in southern Bohemia Frauenberg did not enjoy particularly fertile soil its estate farms pro duced average crop yields of only four to one Profits from Frauenbergs estates came from their diversified products and stable local markets Estate breweries producing mostly wheat beer accounted for 30 to 40 percent of estate revenues Frauenbergs peasants also gained from the estate brew eries their lord bought additional wheat from them at market prices thus providing the peasants with a large local market for their grain31 For reasons that are not clear estate farms based on wage labor seem to have faltered in the early seventeenth century and the Thirty Years War a conflict that cost Bohemia a third of its rural population ushered in the classic manorial economy with heavylabor services and much harsher forms of rural subjection In the course of the war small aristocratic elites had acquired huge estate complexes two hundred princes and counts ruled over 90 percent of the subject population This titled elite possessed both the power and the solidarity to impose its will on the rural population 30 Jan Klußmann Lebenswelten pp 315 31 Jaroslav ˇCechura Adelige Grundherrn als Unternehmer Zur Struktur sudbohmischer Dominien vor 1620 Munich 2000 pp 2581 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 318 the cambridge world history of slavery The war had taken a huge toll on Bohemias productive forces and des pite the shortage of draft animals and other resources estate owners demanded unlimited labor services from their rural subjects The classic manor based on peasantlabor services had finally arrived in Bohemia The harsh measures imposed by Bohemian lords provoked rural upris ings that swept Bohemia in 1680 affecting more than one hundred landed estates and leading the Emperor Leopold I to issue the Labor Services Decree of 1680 which restricted labor services to three days per week except during the harvest The Bohemian peasants continued however to complain of excessive labor services and other seigniorial oppressions and to some contemporary observers like the Czech Jesuit Bohuslav Balbin 162188 the Bohemian aristocracy had reduced its peasants to the status of serfs Rural subjec tion in Bohemia though not as extreme as in Mecklenburg or Pomerania was certainly as harsh as in most regions in east central Europe Aside from limiting labor services to three days per week except during har vests the state rarely interfered in the lords treatment of his peasants Thus peasants in Bohemia could not appeal the decisions of manorial courts nor could they leave the estate without permission of the seigniorial authorities At the same time however rural communities in Bohemia governed their own affairs in many important spheres of rural life like marriage control of property and inheritance On some estates villagers were even free to marry outside the estate although other estate owners might be much stricter On the huge estate complex of Friedland in northern Bohemia villagers wishing to marry had to request permission from the seigniorial authorities who normally refused permission in cases where the applicant wanted to marry and live outside the estate In those areas that did not affect their landlords interests peasant com munities generally managed their own affairs The estate authorities on Friedland clearly saw it in their own interests to regulate their subjects land transactions Villagers wishing to buy or sell land had to get permis sion from the authorities who did not hesitate to refuse it if they believed the transaction ran counter to seigniorial interests Peasants could sell their farmsteads only if the estate authorities deemed the buyer a capable farmer The authorities in Friedland were especially arbitrary in their treatment of female householders often forcing widows to marry or sell out Again however the degree of seigniorial intervention in village affairs varied from one estate to the next On some estates villagers freely entered into land transactions even with outsiders in the seventeenth century In the eighteenth century as farmsteads became more valuable Bohemian peasants themselves turned to tighter regulation of land transactions Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 319 adopting strategies designed to keep their farmsteads in the family32 On several estates in the agricultural regions of southern and western Bohemia more than twothirds of the property transfers in the eighteenth century took place within the farm holders family33 In northern Bohemia and in neighboring lands like Upper Silesia largescale protoindustry emerged on many estates where there was a large landless or semilandless population By 1750 the estate complex of Friedland had more than four hundred linen weavers who produced linen for an export trade organized and dominated by merchant houses in Nuremberg Friedlands estate owner played a largely passive role in its protoindustry but profited immensely from it because their landless or semilandless subjects earned cash incomes that translated into effective demand for the manorial monopolies especially beer that generated most of the estate revenues34 On Friedland linen weaving coexisted with agriculture and peasant farm holders like their counterparts in other regions of east central Europe kept hired hands for performing labor services on seigniorial manors The large number of villagers in Friedland who were dependent on proto industry gave rural society there a somewhat different coloring but the social structure of the villages there was otherwise quite similar to manorial villages throughout east central Europe Peasant farm holders and cottagers together accounted for only 40 percent of the eighteen hundred households on Friedland in the early eighteenth century whereas the landless and semi landless population accounted for the clear majority of village households conclusion was the manor like the plantation The manorial system in east central Europe shared some important char acteristics with what Philip Curtin has termed the plantation complex in the Caribbean world Like the classic manor the plantation complex was a system based on unfree labor Both the plantation complex and the manor had originated in the medieval west and had declined there before migrating elsewhere The classic manor had moved to east central Europe whereas the plantation complex moved first to the Canary Islands then to northeastern Brazil and finally to the Caribbean Both manorial and 32 Dana ˇStefanova Zur Stellung der Untertanen in einer gutsherrschaftlichen Gesellschaft 1558 1750 20627 33 Hermann Zeitlhofer Besitztransfer in fruhneuzeitlichen landlichen Gesellschaften in Markus Cerman and Hermann Zeithofer eds Soziale Strukturen in Bohmen Ein regionaler Vergleich von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in Gutsherrschaften 1619 Jahrhundert Munich 2002 pp 24061 34 Markus Cerman and Dana ˇStefanova Wirtschaft und Sozialstruktur in den Herrschaften Frydlant und Liberec 15901750 in Cerman and Zeithofer eds Soziale Strukturen pp 7087 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 320 the cambridge world history of slavery plantation economies were intensely marketoriented with the manor pro ducing grain dairy products beer and spirits and the plantation complex specializing in sugar and rum Both the manor in east central Europe and the plantation complex in Brazil and the Caribbean also shared parallel chronologies sixteenth century rise eighteenthcentury apogee and finally nineteenthcentury demise Both manor and plantation owed their rise not simply to market demand but also to fundamental social and technological changes in production In both the manor and the plantation complex the state played a decisive role in determining regional variations In east central Europe seigniorial oppression of the village population was highest in the lands where the state was weak or noninterventionist Mecklenburg western Pomerania and Poland In the Caribbean the manumission of slaves was most common in the more closely governed colonies belonging to France and Spain and least common in English colonies where the state played a much smaller role Much more important than the similarities however are the differences The villagers who made up the manorial labor force in east central Europe were indigenous and demographically selfsustaining the Caribbean plan tation depended on an African slave population whose low birthrates and high mortality required constant replacement with new slaves Seigniorial constraints and burdens weighed heavily on the rural pop ulation in east central Europe but even under extreme forms of rural subjection east of the Elbe agrarian life there was much closer to western Europe than to the slave plantation Village social structures in east central Europe were remarkably similar to early modern rural societies in the west Both were hierarchies with a small elite of farm holders above and a larger population of landless and semilandless villagers below The rural labor force was similar in both regions peasant family members smallholders servants and hired hands The Elbe River separated two different agrarian structures but it did not flow between two alien rural worlds35 further reading Works noted here are in addition to those cited in the text and follow the subheadings in the text Emphasis is on works in English For an over view of agrarian developments in east central Europe see Edgar Melton Gutsherrschaft in East Elbian Germany and Livonia 15001800 A Critique of the Model Central European History 21 1988 31549 Unmatched in breadth and depth is Heinrich Kaak Die Gutsherrschaft 35 Hagen Ordinary Prussians p 184 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 manorialism and rural subjection 321 Theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum Agrarwesen im ostelbischen Raum Berlin 1991 For east central Europe before 1500 see Jeno Szucs The Three Historical Regions of Europe An Outline Budapest 1983 On the economy before 1500 Marion Małowist The Problem of the Inequality of Eco nomic Development in Europe in the Later Middle Ages Economic History Review 19 1966 1528 For those reading German two important works include Marian Dygo Strukturen und Konjunkturen in der Wirtschaft des ostmitteleuropaischen Lander im 1415 Jahrhundert in Marian Dygo et al eds Ostmitteleuropa im 1417 Jahrhundert eine Region oder Region der Regionen Warsaw 2003 pp 6180 also Michael North Geldumlauf und Wirtschaftskonjunktur im sudlichen Ostseeraum 14401570 Sigmarin gen 1990 On agricultural change Benedykt Zientara Melioratio Terrae the Thirteenth Century Breakthrough in Polish History in J F Fedorow icz ed A Republic of Nobles Studies in Polish History to 1864 Cambridge 1982 pp 2848 For manorial transformation in east central Europe see Jerzy Topolski Sixteenth Century Poland and the Turning Point in Euro pean Economic Development in Fedorowicz ed A Republic of Nobles pp 7090 For Mecklenburg Brandenburg and the Prussian lands see Edgar Melton The Feudal Revolution and the Agrarian Transformation of Eastern Europe 14001600 in Troels Dahlerup and Per Ingesman eds New Approaches to the History of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe Copenhagen 2009 pp 273300 On East Holstein see Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen Corvee and Paid Work Work and Workers in Schleswig and Holstein in the 18th Century in Kerstin Sundberg ed Work and Pro duction on Manors in the Baltic Sea Region 17001900 Stockholm 2002 pp 16592 On Belarus P G Kozlovskii Magnatskoe khoziaistvo Belorussii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v Minsk 1974 for Ukraine west of the Dniepr I D Boiko Selianstvo Ukraini v drugii polovini xvipershi polovini xvii ct Kiev 1963 In addition to the works cited in the text the manorial econ omy and village life is covered in the article by William W Hagen Village Life in EastElbian Germany and Poland 14001800 in Tom Scott ed The Peasantries of Europe From the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries London 1998 pp 145190 Outstanding among the many fine German works on this topic are the articles in Jan Peters ed Konflikte und Kon trolle in Gutsherrschaftsgesellschaften Uber Resistenzund Herrschaftsverhal ten in landlichen Sozialgebilden der fruhen Neuzeit Gottingen 1995 The best works in English on manorialism and rural subjection in Bohemia include the following articles by Sheilagh Ogilvie The Economic World of the Bohemian Serf Economic Concepts Preferences and Constraints on the Estate of Friedland 15831692 The Economic History Review 54 2001 43053 Communities and the Second Serfdom in Early Modern Bohemia Past and Present 187 2005 69119 For detailed studies of both village life and the manorial economy on large estates in different regions Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 322 the cambridge world history of slavery of Bohemia see the essays in Markus Cerman and Hermann Zeitlhofer eds Soziale Strukturen in Bohmen Ein regionaler Vergleich von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in Gutsherrschaften 1619 Jahrhundert Munich 2002 and the pioneering study by Dana Stefanova Erbschaftspraxis Besitztransfer und Handlungsspielraume von Untertanen in der Gutsherrschaft Die Herrschaft Frydlant in Nordbohmen 15581750 Vienna 2009 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 PART V SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 13 SLAVERY IN THE ATLANTIC ISLANDS AND THE EARLY MODERN SPANISH ATLANTIC WORLD william d phillips jr Beginning in 1493 Europeans transplanted the slave system of the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western Old World slaverys trajectory passed through the Atlantic islands before reaching the Caribbean islands and then the American mainland By the middle of the seventeenth century the transi tion 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 thir teenth 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 dragons blood the resin of the dragon tree In the fifteenth century the Spaniards and the Portuguese established sugar plan tations 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 Mediter ranean 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 Madeira and the Canaries were the links between Mediterranean sugar production and the system that was to dominate New World slavery and society into the nineteenth century Madeira was uninhabited but fertile Careful and extensive preparation ensured that sugar or other crops would be successful Forests were cleared by burning Irrigation canals and terracing were necessary because rainfall was irregular and insufficient The agricultural exploitation of the islands was first based on mixed farming and grazing but quickly sugar became important The Portuguese built a waterpowered mill on Madeira in 1452 Thereafter sugar production and other agricultural pursuits led to increases in the population of the islands 325 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 326 the cambridge world history of slavery From the midfifteenth century slaves had been brought in to meet the labor demands in the sugar industry Their numbers reached a peak in the early sixteenth century Some came from Morocco and the Berber lands immediately to the south others were black Africans obtained from among the groups with whom the Portuguese were steadily making contact and still others were Guanches from the Canaries The use of slaves soon began to decline and there were even proposals to expel the Guanches Most of the sugar plantations were relatively small and were occupied and managed by their owners None approached the size and scale of the later Caribbean and Brazilian plantations This of course meant a limit on the number of slaves who could be employed As a consequence of a rising population in sixteenthcentury Portugal many free laborers left the mainland to go to Madeira further depressing the market for slaves In its early history Madeira was a precursor of the future American colonial areas but by the early sixteenth century it resembled a province of Portugal By the late fifteenth century Castile had taken over the Canary Islands where unlike on the other Atlantic islands there was a native population distantly related to the Berbers The first European captains who visited the Canaries in the fourteenth and fifteenth century armed with Castilian crown patents found the islands inhabited by natives related to the Berbers of northwest Africa Primarily herders only on Grand Canary had the natives developed an agricultural economy They were organized politically into bands European actions in the Canaries foreshadowed the events in the Americas regarding the relations between European and native peoples The Castilians made treaties with some of the groups of islanders and conquered and enslaved others but the enslavement of the Canary Island natives was a shortlived phenomenon Of the enslaved a number were exported to Europe or the Madeiras whereas others were employed on Canarian sugar plantations as were blacks and Berbers from Africa In the initial phases of the conquest of the individual islands the con querors needed quick profits to pay for their expeditions mainly financed on credit The sale of slaves offered a quick and easy way to make the profits necessary to repay the loans Many enslaved remained in the islands and found themselves put to work by the Europeans Household service was the most frequent use for Canarian slaves In 152931 ordinances in Las Palmas prohibited nonCanarian slaves from being used in the home The conditions they lived under resembled not surprisingly those of the slaves in late medieval Spain Native slaves in the Canaries had various ways to attain freedom The process was called ahorramiento and a freedman was designated as a horro To achieve freedom the individual slave almost always needed the assis tance of a third party Bishops of Seville and the Spanish crown itself aided Canarians who had been illegally enslaved A frequent method of Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 327 obtaining freedom was for relatives or other members of the slaves band to offer financial aid Free Canarians constantly aided their enslaved com patriots to obtain freedom and in numerous wills Canarians left money to executors charged with the redemption of Canarian slaves The executor could purchase the slave outright or he could purchase an African slave and exchange him or her for the Canarian Such exchanges were more easily arranged for slaves who remained in the islands because relatives could not easily determine the whereabouts of those who had been sold in European markets The island population was relatively small to begin with its numbers diminished by epidemic disease after the European incursion Members of many bands could not be enslaved at least legally and those enslaved fre quently attained manumission Consequently the natives of the Canaries did not make a substantial or a longlasting addition to the international slave trade In the early years of the sixteenth century the Canarian slave trade to Europe ceased as the islanders increasingly assimilated European culture and intermarried with the colonists Native workers never filled the labor needs of the Canaries and other sources of labor were necessary before the islands could be developed fully So the Canaries witnessed the influx of other workers including a number of free Castilian and Portuguese settlers Wealthier settlers brought their own slaves with them from the peninsula Portuguese slave traders brought in blacks from West Africa and Castilian mariners raided the coast for North Africans Berbers and other slaves Many of the Africans especially the North Africans were soon freed and there was even a voluntary immigration of Moors and Moriscos from Spain and North Africa Following the first Spanish contact with the Americas a few American Indians were sold in the Canaries but the Spanish crown outlawed the slave trade in Indians Black African Muslim and Morisco slaves came to constitute a signif icant component among the work force in the Canaries The settlers in the Canaries acquired imported slaves in a variety of ways Some slaves who had already spent time in Spain accompanied their Spanish owners when they migrated to the Canaries Others arrived on Portuguese ships that stopped in the Canaries Castilians engaged in raids mounted from the Canaries to acquire captives and cattle along the African coast north of Cape Bojador At times a complicated process ensued Most of the human booty from the raids consisted of Muslims Some were enslaved converted and later freed More often the Muslim captives who were able to do so negotiated for their ransoms and frequently they paid for their ransoms with variable numbers of black slaves This became one of the common means by which blacks entered the islands From the Canaries the Castilians also went directly to black Africa to obtain slaves In the Cape Verde islands they purchased African slaves Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 328 the cambridge world history of slavery directly from the Portuguese residents there From the Canaries they also circumvented the Portuguese by going to Senegambia and the Upper Guinea coast to acquire slaves This trade was illegal until the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns under Philip II The expeditions to black Africa were always less frequent than the slaving raids to Morocco Over the course of the sixteenth century some ten thousand slaves were brought to Gran Canaria and slaves made up some 10 to 12 percent of the islands population Blacks made up from twothirds to threefourths of all slaves sold on that island Moriscos and mulattos were less numerous than black slaves each group representing some 12 percent of the total number of slaves Grouped as Indios were all those slaves from Asia Brazil and Spanish America Together the Indios accounted for less than 1 percent of the total slaves The ratio of men to women reveals a male predominance Men were 62 percent whereas women were 38 percent This imbalance similar to that of the transatlantic trade indicates that more of the slaves who were sold were destined for work outside the home The work of slaves encompassed all aspects of the economy of the islands especially sugar cane production Though slave labor had not been a major feature of sugar cane agriculture in the Mediterranean it may have been used there on occasion Slaves came to be used in greater num bers on the farms and in the mills of the Atlantic islands but there too free labor was often used as Portuguese and Spaniards migrated to the newly discovered islands The connection between slavery and sugar though had been established The groundwork was set for the plantation system in the American colonial areas It would bear its bitter fruit in the Americas where large tracts of land suitable for sugar cane production were brought under European control by the Spaniards in the Caribbean islands and on the mainland of North and South America and by the Portuguese in Brazil European expansion into the Americas inaugurated a new stage in the history of slavery The vast numbers of Africans who crossed the Atlantic transformed the social and physical complexion of the Americas The treatment of slaves in the Canaries in the sixteenth century mirrored that of other slaves in other times and places Examples of good treatment afforded the slaves are matched by counterexamples of harsh punishments meted out to them Masters were supposed to govern the conduct of their slaves and the masters could be punished if their treatment of slaves was too inhumane Although the church and civil authorities encouraged their conversion to Christianity and permitted them to marry slaves who trans gressed the laws were subject to strict penalties and brutal punishments Regardless of how mildly or harshly they were treated most slaves wanted out of slavery and sought freedom by all the means available to them Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 329 One method was to flee There are many examples of fugitive slaves in the Canaries but probably very few attained freedom in that way On the islands they could not hope to evade capture for long and sure safety lay only in reaching Africa That however required a voyage Stealing boats was not easy and even if the fugitives secured a vessel the fugitives had to know how to sail and to navigate Of the many slaves in the Canaries few achieved freedom by flight Most who obtained freedom did so through manumission All the meth ods of manumission available in Castilian law operated as well in the Canaries Many attained freedom by purchasing it either by money or by services which could be rendered before freedom or contracted to be accomplished for a defined period after manumission Sugar production probably reached a peak in the Canaries in the first quarter of the sixteenth century The Welsers a German banking family invested in sugar cane in Palma on Gran Canaria They owned four plan tations at the height of their activity before withdrawing in 1520 Sugar was used as an alternative currency in these years an indication of its impor tance in the economy In 1526 a year near the peak of the Canarian sugar boom there were twentynine mills in the islands compared with sixteen in Portuguese Madeira A decline made worse by an infestation of caterpil lars in 1530 was soon apparent and its most important probable cause was competition from other producers Before the decline the Canaries acted as a way station for Spanish sugar manufacturing and sugar cane cuttings and sugar processing techniques were taken to Spanish possessions in the newly discovered Caribbean islands to be installed there Within the expanding European Atlantic world of the sixteenth cen tury slavery in the Canaries and on Madeira came to occupy a minor role compared to slavery in the Americas In the new colonies across the Atlantic the vast land areas and the expanded demand for labor cre ated the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade That the demand for labor could be met with black African slaves was due to the network of trade that the Portuguese had stitched together along the western coast of Africa the early spanish americas That Europeans would import and employ African slaves on a massive scale was not predictable for alternatives were present at the beginning The story in each of the colonial cases is one of failure to fill labor requirements by using sources other than black slaves This was true for the Spanish the Portuguese the English the Dutch and the French but our discussion focuses on the Spanish Free white labor was out of the question Europe at the time was not overpopulated and white settlers were in short supply in Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 330 the cambridge world history of slavery the first centuries after the discoveries Free Europeans were not accustomed to gang labor in the Old World and would not willingly cross the Atlantic to do something they would refuse at home Moreover Europeans like many groups of slave owners elsewhere in the world were reluctant to enslave members of their own group The Spaniards and the Portuguese attempted at first to use Amerindians and the English who occasionally enslaved Amerindians initially made use of indentured servants from the British Isles Eventually all turned to imported slaves mainly Africans as they developed plantation agriculture Philip D Curtin one of the founders of the modern school of slavery studies described the changes that slavery as an institution underwent as it developed on the American side of the Atlantic Continuity with Mediterranean slavery was only part of the story The institution of slavery that continued in the New World became far different from slavery as it was practiced in Europe the Muslim world or in subSaharan Africa The old European slavery in short had suffered a sea change American slavery had roots in Europe but was nevertheless so profoundly modified through time that it became a new invention devised for a new situation the highly specialized plantation society1 Robin Blackburn took up the same theme He argued that the slave systems of the New World beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese were different from what had gone before even though slavery in the Americas made ample use of the Old World precedents It was difficult to theorize because an older form of labor organization gained new vigor in a changed economic environment as capitalism developed in a context of increased trade in lucrative commodities such as sugar The American slave systems were radically new in character compared with prior forms of slavery yet they were assembled from apparently traditional ingredients2 The continuities and changes that can be observed in European colonial society in the Americas from 1492 to around 1650 set the foundations for the plantation societies of the New World with their heavy or exclusive reliance on slave labor and with substantial modifications in the practice of slavery The first contact with the New World has taken on mythic importance in popular history but the discoverers themselves took it rather prosaically Columbus constantly focused his attention on profitmaking ventures and because of his experience among the Portuguese slavery was one of the first things he considered Soon after he landed he composed a letter 1 Philip D Curtin Slavery and Empire in Vera D Rubin and Arthur Tuden eds Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies New York 1977 pp 910 2 Robin Blackburn The Making of New World Slavery From the Baroque to the Modern 14921800 London 1997 p 3 Blackburn went on to say that the type of slavery which came to dominate the New World was not already seen in medieval and early modern Europe but that certainly some of its causes are to be found there p 84 n1 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 331 to his Spanish royal sponsors that specifically addressed the possibility of enslaving the islanders During Columbuss second voyage to the Caribbean the policy of enslavement he had mentioned during his first voyage grew in signifi cance Although Columbus never abandoned his firm belief that he had reached Asia he soon came to realize that the lands he found did not fit the traditional descriptions of that continent Nonetheless he was keen to make the new Spanish possessions profitable hence his efforts to establish a slave trade to extract gold and to encourage European agricultural ven tures The slave trade in Caribbean and mainland natives was not to last long as the crown prohibited it Gold extraction in the islands proved not to be profitable In the decades following Columbuss first contact with the New World Spanish policy underwent fundamental shifts as further lands were explored and conquered Spaniards quickly abandoned the idea that they could establish a commercial network for there were no preexisting trading centers with goods that could be exchanged for European items They followed then aspects of their own recent colonial history in their actions in the Americas Successful and profitable development required strenuous efforts to subdue the natives to mine the mineral wealth of the continents and to begin the production of commercial crops that could be sold in the European markets The model the Spaniards used was based in part on the experience of their own reconquest of the Muslim lands in southern Spain during which they had distributed the newly acquired lands among the leaders of the conquering armies and in part based on their exploitation of the Canary Islands where they had subdued the natives and used the new lands for agriculture One of the first profitmaking ventures was the production of sugar cane a crop that offered numerous advantages The soil and climate of many tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas were well suited to sugar growing Spaniards had experience with sugar growing in Spain and in the Atlantic islands and were in the forefront of refining technology Labor was the only questionable factor in the equation for it rapidly became apparent that there were steep barriers to the employment of native labor on a large scale The most important factor was the sharp demographic decline of the indigenous population a consequence of excessive mortality in the face of disease war and the social disruption that accompanied the conquest At the same time the Spanish rulers considered the natives as their sub jects with certain safeguards placed on them and prohibitions established regarding the manner in which they could be exploited These measures were never totally effective but they reflected the humanitarian impulses of the home government and hindered the colonists who tried to extract the maximum labor possible from the Amerindians Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 332 the cambridge world history of slavery Given the rapidly declining native population and the rapidly expanding need for labor in the colonies Spaniards in the Indies very quickly began to report the high death rates the natives were suffering and to question the excessive reliance upon native labor Bartolome de las Casas was one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the plight of the Amerindians and in 1516 he suggested that white and black slaves be imported as laborers to relieve the burdens shouldered by the natives The intellectual and ecclesiastical attacks on the exploitation of the native laborers coincided with the insistence of the Spanish colonists that Amerindians were unsuited for intensive labor and that Africans perceived to possess a much higher capacity for work should replace them A constant stream of letters from the Indies reached Spain bearing the message that one African could do the work of four to eight Amerindians Africans did offer several advantages Many came from societies that practiced largescale agriculture and were accustomed to the labor disci pline inherent in such pursuits unlike many Amerindians Many knew metal working especially in iron a field of endeavor alien to the Native Americans who used metal primarily for decorative rather than productive purposes Africans had been born in a region that shared a pool of several diseases with the Europeans Therefore they were less susceptible to the Europeanborne diseases that were devastating the native population of the Americas and to certain tropical diseases such as malaria Epidemiolog ically there was an advantage to the use of Africans African slaves were not covered by the restrictions on exploitation that the colonial powers established for the Native Americans The fateful choice that Africans were to be preferred to Indians as laborers assured the development of the transatlantic slave trade At first a thriving slave trade in Native Americans developed through out the Caribbean and the adjacent mainland Queen Isabel established the initial Spanish policy and claimed the native population as vassals who could not be legally enslaved By 1495 however those captured in just war could be enslaved and Spaniards were allowed to purchase captives held as slaves by other native groups The Laws of Burgos in the early sixteenth century and later provisions limited the ability of the colonists to enslave natives or practice other forms of forced labor Native slavery was declared illegal in 1542 and in 1550 the encomienda system was abolished Passage of these laws did not end the previous practices overnight but at midcentury a new system for providing native labor came to be used This was repartimiento a system under which Spaniards who could demonstrate a need for labor would be provided with Amerindian workers on a rota tional basis from nearby communities In Peru the mita system served the same function The Spaniards were expected to provide decent working conditions for the repartimiento laborers and to pay them a predetermined Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 333 wage but again practice diverged from legal doctrine and because of abuses the crown ended the repartimiento system except for mine labor By the seventeenth century labor in colonial Spanish America generally rested on a base of the wage labor of free native workers naborıos and mestizos and mulattoes and on the slave labor of the blacks even though coerced Amerindian labor continued illegally and could not be abolished completely the organization of the slave trade Even as the policies of the first European colonists were forming a trans atlantic trade in African slaves was developing Blacks were dispatched to the new colonial possessions almost from the start and free blacks as well as slaves made the voyage In the first stages of the slave trade the crown hav ing just instituted a nearuniformity of religion in Spain specified that only ladinos Christianized Spanishspeaking slaves should be allowed passage to the Indies In 1501 royal decrees prohibited Jews Muslims conversos or moriscos from going to the New World and in the same year the trans atlantic trade in Africans began In 1503 Isabel prohibited the slave trade Some slaves had continued to slip through after 1503 usually in special shipments authorized by Ferdinand This trickle grew after 1513 when the licensing system was introduced Those who secured a license and paid a fee could ship slaves legally to the Indies The crown in this fashion could satisfy part of the colonial demand for labor and at the same time provide itself another source of income while regulating the flow of slaves In 1518 the Hieronymite friars on Espanola called for the importation of bozales unacculturated slaves directly from Africa In Spanish America the term ladino at first described a slave who had been born in Spain or who had resided there long enough to acquire the language It soon became apparent that in some respects the colonists preferred bozales to ladinos They could be molded more easily into the Spanish pattern All the bozales were black and their skin color would aid in their identification and control Many of the ladinos in the early period were mulattoes or moriscos Christian converts of Muslim origin and could escape detection more easily Even after the licensing system began in 1513 it was apparent that there was a greater demand for slaves than could be supplied In 1518 Charles V gave exclusive slaving licenses to Laurent de Gouvenot one of his Flem ish favorites and to Jorge de Portugal Gouvenot received permission to ship four thousand slaves over a fiveyear period and Jorge de Portu gal received permission for four hundred Gouvenot sold his licenses to Genoese merchants The Genoese with a flourishing merchant commu nity in Seville already were involved in the slave trade and would remain Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 334 the cambridge world history of slavery so Licensed slaves were to be taken from Guinea or any other part of Africa and shipped to Cuba Espanola Jamaica Yucatan or Mexico this last after 1523 These initial licenses set a pattern that lasted for more than a century They established an annual quota a fee for each slave acquisition in spec ified African zones thus permitting bozales to be shipped and delivery directly to the Americas bypassing Spain When the first licenses ran out in 1528 Heinrich Ehinger and Hieronymous Seiler agents of the German banking firm of the Welsers received a new license on similar terms After the licenses of Ehinger and Seiler expired a new period began lasting from 1532 to 1589 during which the merchants and officials of Seville members of the Consulado and the Casa de Contratacion regulated the slave trade Licenses granted by the Casa could be obtained in a variety of ways some by purchase some by royal grant and some as repayments for forced loans to the government Crown and church officials could take their slaves with them free of duty when they left Spain to fill official positions in the New World Institutional grants of slave licenses often went to corporate groups such as urban councils hospitals monasteries and convents in the Americas Individuals could get licenses for various reasons exceptional service to the crown in the conquest of new lands occupying a position at court being a member of the Council of the Indies or the Casa de Contratacion or securing a special grant from the king In practice the licensee did not actually deliver the slaves to America he usually sold part or all of his block of licenses to merchants who then resold them Genoese merchants in Seville controlled the trade until midcentury Eventually the Portuguese traders who were familiar with West and Central Africa and whose country controlled important African trading centers secured the licenses Once they got them they were able to deliver the slaves to the New World The Portuguese were also in a position to transport far more slaves than the number of licenses delivered in Seville Smuggling was a constant problem in the sixteenth century and its prevalence renders any attempt to determine the exact numbers of slaves delivered virtually impossible Contraband trade was relatively easy because at the same time that the Portuguese were shipping slaves to Spanish America they were also pro viding them to Portuguese colonists in Brazil Portuguese slave licenses for trade to Brazil were only one half the cost of Spanish licenses for slaves bound for the Spanish colonies and as a result the Portuguese listed many of the slaves taken from the African coast as bound for Brazil Once in American waters the slave ships would head for Spanish ports and their masters would claim that their ships had been diverted and damaged by storms Because Spanish port officials were legally bound to render aid to distressed ships they allowed the Portuguese to land and sell their cargoes In this way unlicensed slaves were introduced into the Spanish American markets contravening official regulations Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 335 In 1580 King Philip II of Spain secured the throne of Portugal for himself He and his successors ruled jointly over Portugal and Spain until 1640 Because these years were ones of a high demand for black slaves in the New World the Portuguese traders were in an excellent position to prosper from the new arrangement Philip saw numerous benefits to be obtained from a more highly regulated trade and in 1580 began to sign contracts with Portuguese wholesale contractors in the African trade in return for a royal share in the business There were three major areas of slaving in the 1580s the Cape Verde islands Sao Tome and Angola Philip signed contracts for the supply of slaves from these three regions either with individuals or partners In return for their licenses the rendeiros would pay the crown a percentage of their profits onefourth for the contracts on the Cape Verdes and Sao Tome and onethird on those of Angola In addition the license holders were granted an important concession They could deliver their human cargoes to American ports in ships sailing on their own outside the normal annual fleets of the Carrera de Indias From 1580 to 1595 the Portuguese gradually expanded their participation even though they had not yet received a monopoly Contracts to non Portuguese for slaves as yet undelivered were still outstanding and it was not until 1595 that the new asiento system of exclusive contracts emerged Pedro Gomez Reinel signed a contract in 1594 and 1595 in which he agreed to deliver 4250 live slaves to the Indies each year He would have the exclusive right to sell individual slave licenses during the term of his asiento He could sell the licenses freely to subcontactors at a price not to exceed thirty ducats per slave and in return he pledged to pay the crown one hundred thousand ducats annually guaranteed by a bond of one hundred fifty thousand ducats All slaves were to be taken first to Cartagena but Gomez Reinels agents could take them on to be sold in other places A series of asentistas succeeded Gomez Reinel and the system lasted with a brief interruption from 1609 to 1615 until 1640 when Portugal rebelled against Spain the slave voyage The documents produced in the administration of the asientos and pre served for historians allow us a detailed picture of the transatlantic slave trade far better than is possible for the mostly undocumented Mediter ranean trade of the same period Those who wished to participate in the trade had to comply with a complex set of legal requirements The shippers purchased licenses from the asentista usually in lots of eighty or more but at times in smaller or much larger numbers The purchasers of the licenses usually sold to groups of investors to share the expenses and divide the profits A crucial participant was the ships master who held shares of the stock and who had full charge of the ship and its cargo during the voyage Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 336 the cambridge world history of slavery Regulations required the use of Iberianbuilt and owned ships but later in the period of the asientos vessels of Dutch or English manufacture engaged in the trade as well The striking feature of the ships involved was that they were quite small Most were less than one hundred tons burden and few exceeded two hundred tons The asientos specified that 12 piezas a pieza equaled one adult male could be carried for each ton or some 120 slaves for a onehundredton vessel but sometimes more were loaded The slavers preferred small ships because the initial capital investment was less and because smaller ships could maneuver in and out of the shallow rivers and estuaries more easily The ship proceeded to Seville to be inspected and registered by the Casa de Contratacion The master presented the slaving licenses and obtained an official register from the Casa The ship then underwent three separate inspections First officials determined the conditions and carryingcapacity of the ship as well as the gear and artillery it carried Slave ships needed to be armed for they sailed outside the convoy system and had to provide their own defense Next the officials inspected the interior and specified the provisions the ship should carry The final inspection made sure that the first two had been performed properly and that the master had complied with any special requirements the first two sets of inspectors had imposed When all three were completed the ship could legally to sail for Africa The officers and crew had to plan for a long voyage The quickest round trip was about a year and a half and it could last up to four years The first stage was down the African coast to one of the Portuguese slaving stations Santiago in the Cape Verde islands was the closest but international piracy conducted by the French Dutch and English beginning in the 1570s and culminating in Sir Anthony Sherleys capture of Santiago in 1596 rendered it less attractive than the more distant stations The island of Sao Tome was more isolated from the raids of other Europeans and it was linked with its main source of slaves the kingdom of the Kongo through Mpinda a port near the mouth of the Zaire River In the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries Sao Tome was reaching its rather shortlived peak based on slaving and sugar growing Still farther south was Angola whose principal city Sao Paulo de Luanda became the most important slaving center in the first half of the seventeenth century At times it took a ship a year or more to obtain a cargo of slaves depending on the state of local market conditions Long stays on Africas Atlantic coast were hard on crews and vessels alike The men might fall victim to tropical diseases and worms attacked the wood of the hull especially in Angolan anchorages When the ships cargo of slaves was complete a resident agent of the asentista visited the ship He required that the slaves be unloaded onto small boats bobbing on the water around the ship while he went on board to search for any hidden slaves Then he counted the slaves as they reboarded the ship from the boats and turned a Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 337 copy of his register over to the master who then could begin the second stage of the trip across the Atlantic to America Dependent as the vessels were on wind and ocean currents the voyage to America usually took two months or more The shorter quicker route was from Sao Tome or the Cape Verdes northward to the westwardflowing equatorial current If the trip originated at Luanda one of two long and arduous passages could be chosen The first called for sailing close to the wind with frequent tacking northward through the Gulf of Guinea to the equatorial current The second was to sail to the west until the other side of the Atlantic was reached The slaves miserably crammed below decks with no way of knowing their fate suffered regardless of how long the voyage took There were almost always slaves perhaps as many as 30 percent in this period who died on the voyage victims of overcrowding disease and malnutrition Recent estimates of the African slaves who arrived at their destinations in the period from 1492 to 1650 are 112040 to Europe 25000 to the Atlantic islands 94900 to Sao Tome 300000 to Spanish America and 335000 to Brazil3 When those hundreds of thousands of Africans finally reached their American destinations the ships they traveled in anchored and officials carried out the landing formalities In Spanish American ports two officials met every slave ship ordered the slaves to be offloaded onto boats standing by and inspected the ship for any hidden slaves The slaves then reboarded the ship and the inspectors counted them When this was done the legal formalities were completed and the ship master turned the surviving slaves over to local factors The newly arrived slaves spent their first days on American soil in warehouses or encampments where they ate rested and cleaned themselves up After a period of ten to fifteen days they were delivered to prior purchasers or offered for sale either at auction or by direct arrangements between purchasers and sellers Those who had survived the oceanic voyage were then on the verge of beginning their lives as slaves in the Americas the labor of slaves in the americas Once in the Americas slaves faced an unknown future and a variety of fates that they could not foresee Many slaves suffered lives of unrelenting toil in the fields mills and mines after having been deprived of human 3 Herbert Klein The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650 in Stuart B Schwartz ed Tropical Babylons Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World 14501680 Chapel Hill NC 2004 p 230 The figures from Spanish America and Brazil are from wwwslavevoyagesorg Kleins figures for those two areas are smaller 262700 for Spanish America and 250000 for Brazil See also Antonio de Almeida Mendes The Formations of the System A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2008 pp 6394 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 338 the cambridge world history of slavery dignity physical comfort and legal rights Others though they remained slaves found that less burdensome situations awaited them and that their talents and skills which they either brought with them or acquired later afforded them a better life than that of the unskilled workers For some freedom was eventually possible In the first century and a half of slavery in Spanish America there were two systems of slavery one for the domestics artisans and assistants of all sorts and another for the gang slaves on the plantations and in the mines The first was a continuation of the pattern of acquiring slaves as supple mental laborers and domestics that was practiced in the medieval Christian states of the Mediterranean The second stemmed from a different pattern of gang slavery that can be seen in the ancient Roman world and in some Islamic examples in the Middle Ages The first system predominated in the sixteenth century later the second system eclipsed it This distinction was never enunciated fully but the conditions and prospects for the slaves differed considerably depending on the occupations to which they were assigned Some free blacks were willing immigrants and some black slaves won their freedom and from the beginning of the colonial period a free black population developed None of this could be known by the unfortunate captives as they left the stinking slave ships and went ashore at a totally unfamiliar port Some of the slaves would be put to work almost immediately close by the place they disembarked in the Caribbean islands or on the Spanish mainland Others faced still longer journeys lengthy trips across Panama to the Pacific and then to Peru or an overland passage to the Valley of Mexico The occupations to which their owners assigned them were the first indication of what the rest of their lives would hold for them In the early decades of the conquest and subordination of Mexico and Peru some blacks both slave and free participated in valuable roles as auxiliaries of the Spanish conquerors4 Assimilated into European cul ture slaves in auxiliary roles had easier lives as slaves and had greater opportunities for advancement and manumission They served as soldiers and occupied an intermediate position between the Spaniards and the indigenous population A black freedman Juan Garrido participated in the conquest of Mexico and black slaves accompanied the expeditions to Peru In the early pacification of Chile Juan Valiente a black slave from Mexico rose to become an infantry captain and secured an encomienda for himself He sent money back to Mexico to purchase his freedom but the money never reached his owner who was still trying to force his slaves return when Valiente died in battle These individuals are but two examples 4 See the comments of Matthew Restall Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest Oxford 2003 pp 4463 and the sources cited there Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 339 of the blacks in mainland Spanish America who were used to fill the gap between the demand for skilled laborers assistants and troopers and the available supply of Europeans in the early postconquest period Africans were present as free and slaves in the local militias throughout the colonial period Nevertheless one of the most significant reasons for bringing slaves to the Americas in the first century and a half of the colonial period was the desire for plantation labor For many Africans who survived the Middle Passage life on a sugar estate and labor in the cane fields or in the mill was their first and for many their last experience in the New World The first American sugar plantations began on Espanola in 1503 The geography and climate of the Caribbean islands favored sugar produc tion The tropical climate meant that freezing weather which occasionally threatened Mediterranean fields was not a problem In some parts of the Caribbean rainfall provided sufficient water for the crops without irriga tion Elsewhere water for irrigation was easily available and more reliable than on the Atlantic islands Forests covering parts of the islands could be harvested for fuel to fire the refineries boilers With steady progress in the sugar industry thirtyfour mills were in operation on Espanola from the 1530s to the 1570s compared to around a dozen in the Canaries Sugar production spread to other Caribbean islands Jamaica had mills in pro duction by 1519 Construction of mills again with royal loans from the 1530s to the 1550s established the sugar industry in Puerto Rico Cuban sugar development though began in the 1570s Sugar production in the Caribbean suffered from the relative stagnation of the region following the conquest of Mexico in the 1520s and of Peru in the 1540s Sugar began to be grown and processed in New Spain shortly after the conquest Hernan Cortes himself was a prime proponent of sugar The conqueror of Mexico first went to the Caribbean in 1504 at the age of nineteen and witnessed the beginning of sugar production in the islands When he wrote his fourth letter describing the conquest to the Spanish king he asked that seeds and cuttings of European plants including sugar cane be sent to Mexico By the late 1520s he was building two water mills in the region of Veracruz In the 1530s and 1540s he also built mills on his lands in the province of Cuernavaca and contracted with Genoese merchants to exchange sugar directly for slaves Other colonists began to build mills aided by land grants from the crown The great expansion of the Mexican sugar industry took place in the second half of the sixteenth century By 1600 there were more than forty licensed mills in operation and possibly there were some unlicensed ones Sugar in Peru arrived with the conquerors or shortly after the conquest By the end of the sixteenth century sugar plantations were common in several parts of the colony where suitable soils and water for irrigation Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 340 the cambridge world history of slavery could be found In the seventeenth century labor for the sugar estates came from both wage workers and black slaves Black slaves worked in all the steps necessary to produce sugar and Amerindians often provided supplementary unskilled labor The majority of the unskilled slaves worked in teams directed by overseers often slaves themselves There were numerous skilled positions to fill on the sugar estates which were both agricultural and manufacturing centers Almost from the beginning some slaves found themselves assigned to tasks with more responsibility for which skill not brute force was needed The skilled positions that slaves held in the sugar mills did not necessarily mean easier lives for them Conditions of labor in the mills were so harsh that the Spanish crown prohibited Amerindians from working in them A more limited range of occupations held in most other largescale agricultural enterprises The owners of grainproducing estates indigo plantations and cattle and sheep ranches all employed some slaves But they needed fewer slaves with a more restricted range of skills In Peru Spaniards established a number of small truck farms chacaras or estancias around the towns and cities A few black slaves provided the labor for these farms supplemented at harvest time by Amerindians In the 1580s and 1590s the authorities forbade the use of Amerindians in sugar mills and vineyards and in 1601 also excluded them from work in the olive groves This created a greater demand for black slaves in Peru an expansion of the slave trade into Peru after about 1580 and a consequent growth in the black slave population In the seventeenth century landowners in the region of Caracas made increasing use of black slaves in the cacao industry The cacao planters first used encomienda labor but the importation of black slaves began in the early years of the seventeenth century and grew substantially during the cacao boom of the 1630s and 1640s Mining provided some of the harshest environments and the highest death rates of all occupations From Roman times slaves and other coerced labor were prominent in mining It was no different in Spanish America Amerindians were forced into gold panning in the Caribbean islands at the beginning of the colonial period Silver mines in central Mexico began to be exploited in the 1530s and 1540s especially those discovered in 1546 in the Zacatecas region The silver deposits in the region of Parral discovered as early as 1550 underwent a boom in the 1630s Indigenous people as naborıa and repartimiento workers provided most of the labor in the Mexican mining districts Black and mulatto slaves were valued components of the labor force as well because they could be retained permanently whereas the natives had the right to temporary terms of service Slaves also worked in mining in seventeenthcentury Colombia and the need for mining labor created the greatest demand for slaves in the early settlements of Chile In the rich Andean mines of Potosı black slaves supplemented indigenous labor Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 341 Slaves also worked in transport on land and sea They were carters and muleteers sailors and galley oarsmen Many black slaves and later free people of color worked in providing food for the markets and tables of the colonial towns They were fishermen on the boats that plied the Peruvian coastline They were bakers and confectioners in the cities In Peru they worked in pulperıas establishments that combined the functions of grocery stores and taverns One AfroMexican was an innkeeper in sixteenthcentury Puebla It was a decided advantage for a slave to know or learn some skill Although the majority of the slaves in the New World worked as unskilled laborers some brought with them skills they had learned in Africa such as weaving and iron working and others learned artisan techniques from the Europeans Skilled slaves offered obvious advantages to their artisan masters They were useful helpers in the artisan shops and they could be hired out for wages paid to their owners When possible artisans bought previously trained slaves whereas others trained their slaves in artisan techniques through apprenticeship Such skilled slaves were more highly valued and as a result better treated and more likely to attain manumission Some masters even allowed them to work for others and to save part of what they earned to purchase their freedom Slaves worked in all the trades necessary to provide shelter and clothing for the population They hewed timber from the forests and turned it into lumber They quarried and dressed stone and transported it to the towns They made tile and brick and served as carpenters Slaves provided firewood and charcoal to heat the houses and candles to light them They worked in all parts of the clothing trade as tailors dress makers hat makers and cobblers Black slaves worked along with Amerindians in the clothweaving factories obrajes that sprang up in Mexico They were generally used for the operations that required skill whereas the native workers provided the unskilled labor Slaves worked in the shops of gold and silversmiths although the masters of these lucrative professions usually relegated them to the role of helpers The slaves working in artisan pursuits generally lived in the towns and cities At the same time however some blacks held artisan occupations in rural areas Slaves sometimes worked on sugar plantations in skilled positions as we have seen Slaves also made pottery and leather containers for wine for the Peruvian vineyards Many estates had slave carpenters and masons Nonetheless such rural opportunities were limited and talented slaves in the urban areas found the most extensive outlets Domestic service was also a frequent occupation for slaves In the Americas as in all other parts of the Hispanic world many free people employed slaves as servants buying as many as the owners means would permit At first Spanish settlers employed Amerindians as domestics but as time passed blacks became the majority of the household servants Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 342 the cambridge world history of slavery Spaniards regarded the Africans cut off from their homelands as more pli ant and reliable than the Amerindians who retained close and potentially threatening ties with their native communities Spanish women taught the slaves the necessary skills and supervised their labor as they served as maids and nurses cooks and launderers gardeners and other func tionaries Wealthy and pretentious slave owners had troops of armed and liveried slaves who escorted their masters and mistresses through the streets with displays of great pomp Numerous communities employed slaves in militia units Black domestic slaves were also owned by institutions the government offices the monasteries convents and hospitals slave life Treatment of slaves and their reactions to that treatment were also complex The Spanish establishment settlers officials and clergy devised means of social control which their slaves either accepted or sought to avoid As the number of slaves in the colonies grew government and church officials established regulations to assimilate slaves into colonial society The officials tried to improve the conditions of the lives and work of the slaves provided that their economic usefulness would not be compromised Christianization and hispanization were the two pillars of the process Bap tism was the first step toward assimilation followed by language training which was informally conducted by masters and other slaves Other stages in the process involved marriages and manumissions Slaves had a legal right to marry but obstacles faced those who wished to do so Thus slave men significantly outnumbered slave women prob ably by three or four times In law onethird of all slaves shipped to the Americas were to be female In practice the slavers responded to colonial demands and imported more men For example only 245 percent of the newly arrived slaves sold in Lima from 1560 to 1650 were women Masters reduced the available pool by taking black women as concubines or wives Concubinage was prevalent throughout the period with the consequent birth of mixedrace children Many of the slave women ended up in house holds in the towns whereas in the countryside there were far more men than women and a black slave who wished to marry faced numerous diffi culties in finding a wife of his own race As a consequence many black men formed personal alliances with Amerindian women Early in the colonial period blacks could derive advantages from marriage to native women because marriage to a free Amerindian woman would permit a black slave to claim freedom Later the slave could no longer claim to be free but the children of such marriages would be free The opportunities for marriage were more restricted for rural slaves Even in the towns there were obstacles to slave marriage Some slave Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 343 owners refused to allow their slaves to marry because marriage limited the masters ability to sell their workers or to move them to different locations Some owners prohibited their married slaves from exercising their conjugal rights or sold their children in defiance of the laws The church leaders consistently supported the right of slaves to marry their right to conjugal entitlements and their right to keep families intact Shrewd slaves faced with their masters obstinacy could occasionally get ecclesiastical courts or the Inquisition to intervene on their behalf Other masters did not try to deny their slaves a family life Some encouraged slave marriages and preferred to own married couples because they would produce slave children owned by the masters Spanish colonial society had a rich vocabulary to describe the people according to their racial status and their level of assimilation The terms bozal and ladino are discussed earlier Eventually ladino came to be used to designate a slave who had been assimilated in Spain or in Spanish territory overseas and criollo negro was used to describe an Americanborn black As time passed ladino and criollo negro came to be used indiscriminately In addition sale documents for slaves often used other terms to record variations in skin color atezado blackened prieto blackish pardo dark dusky moreno dark brown loro tawny membrillo quince or color de membrillo corcho the color of cooked quince After the first generation the children of parents of different races themselves produced children whose complex racial background was indicated by as many as fortysix specific designations The children of whites and Indians were called mestizos those of white and black mulatos and those of Indian and black pardos or zambos The children of a black and mestizo couple were called mestizos prietos When pardos and Amerindians produced offspring these were called mulatos lobos Several series of contemporary paintings illustrated the popular images of people of mixedrace birth5 The policies allowing marriages and manumissions were beneficial for the slaves but at the same time the policies served as a means of social control Slaves who wished to marry and become free were more likely to exhibit the docile behavior their masters wanted Masters held out the possibilities of marriage and manumission as positive inducements but there were also negative means to control the slaves One important com ponent of the latter was the system of punishment Slaves who committed minor infractions could find themselves beaten or placed in leg irons Branding could be used for more serious crimes Hanging was the normal mode of punishment for capital crimes Persistent male runaways could be castrated Another punishment was pringar which consisted of the 5 See for example Ilona Katzew Casta Painting Images of Race in EighteenthCentury Mexico New Haven CT 2004 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 344 the cambridge world history of slavery dropping of molten fat or pitch onto the slaves naked flesh Government officials physically mutilated certain convicted slaves and masters could bind their slaves with iron fetters chains and stocks resistance flight and manumission Flight was the most widely practiced method of resistance If Spaniards found a land of opportunity in the Americas their slaves discovered more limited opportunities including the possibility of successful flight Fugi tives caused problems for colonial officials almost from the beginning of the slave trade Black runaways could not hope to regain their homeland but there were always isolated lands in the backwoods in the mountains and in the jungles where runaways might find asylum either on their own or with isolated Indian communities Flight was quite frequent More than half the convictions of slaves in Peru in the period 15601650 were of fugitives and that of course covered only those who were caught The number of convicted fugitives shows that assimilation and the attempts to ease the slaves conditions of life were at best only partially successful Despite all the initiatives to create a docile labor force some slaves would not accept their condition and slave resistance lasted as long as slavery In the early seventeenth century the slave Josef Criollo fled from Lima reached Mexico and lived there for three years before being apprehended and sold to a new master Usually however fugitives did not get very far before being caught Fugitives and those who aided them were subject to strict punishments but often slaves were not punished as severely as the law allowed Their masters intervened for them possibly out of humane feelings and probably from a desire to avoid having their slaves harmed and thus reduced in usefulness Flight even if not successful could often be a successful method of obtaining better treatment or a change of owner Slaves were chronically in short supply and those who needed them would be willing to take the risk inherent in purchasing or retaining a fugitive in order to ensure labor service Other slaves sought to escape from Spanish control by engaging in two types of guerrilla activity One was attempted revolt to free all slaves and to dislodge and drive out the Europeans Black slaves first took part in an upris ing when they aided the Amerindians of Espanola in their revolt against the Spaniards in 1519 Three years later some forty black slaves owned by Diego Columbus Christopher Columbuss son rose on their own on the island Columbus raised a volunteer force in Santo Domingo crushed the rebels and executed the survivors The other more widespread activity was designed to establish independent enclaves away from European centers We have no way of knowing how many succeeded because most of the documents relate to the runaways who were recaptured and the revolts that failed Many of the black slaves had originally been warriors sometimes Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 345 highranking ones and their military experience was of great benefit to them To maintain themselves they plundered European or Amerindian settlements for their needs thus reinforcing their outlaw status In Mexico cimarrons as the fugitives were called developed true com munities palenques that lasted for considerable periods and exacted a great toll in lives and resources before they were finally vanquished The best known community of fugitives in Mexico the earlyseventeenthcentury palenque of the Yanguicos near Mount Orizaba was never defeated and its leaders secured an accommodation with the Spanish authorities after troops failed to conquer them The palenques leader agreed to stop his raids The viceroy promised that longstanding members of the commu nity would be freed and that the palenque would receive a charter as a town under its own government and a Spanish magistrate justicia mayor The town received the official name San Lorenzo de los Negros and prospered at least through the seventeenth century By no means did the pacification of Yangas group bring an end to all cimarron activity in Mexico for it lasted throughout the colonial period Fascinating and spectacular as these cimarron communities were they still involved only a fraction of the slaves in the Americas The majority did not run away and thus remained inside the slave system Most who escaped slavery did so legally through manumission that the Spanish colo nial laws based on Castilian and ultimately Roman precedents provided for but a slaves freedom was almost always dependent on the masters wishes Masters who were convicted of having mistreated their slaves could be forced by the civil authorities to free them Slaves could gain their free dom by performing exceptional services for their masters or the state For example many of the Africans who accompanied Pizarro and Almagro in the conquest of Peru won their freedom for having fought alongside the Spaniards The legal formalities for manumission were slight and did not require a court appearance only that both parties present themselves before a notary to file a document of manumission known as a carta de libertad In the case of manumission by testament the masters executors would be expected to file the carta with a notary Cartas de libertad could be written to indicate that a future schedule of payments or services was to be met Several circumstances made the path to freedom easier for some slaves In periods of economic crisis a temporary surplus of labor could arise and masters who could not sell their excess slaves might allow them to purchase freedom on relatively easy terms Urban slaves were more likely to be freed than rural ones mulattos more likely than pure blacks and women and children more likely than adult men In a period when concubinage was common many of the manumissions involved slaves who were biologically related to their masters or who were related to those who purchased their freedom for them Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 346 the cambridge world history of slavery A group of free people of color was present in Spanish America from the beginning of colonization The group grew in time with manumissions Many of them had marketable skills and they and their children often prospered Although they were subject to discriminatory legislation at times and to hostility on the part of some whites they had their own social ties and religious brotherhoods to give the free black and mixedrace population a feeling of community conclusion By l650 slavery was well entrenched in the New World It was a logical outcome of patterns existing in Europe the Near East and North Africa for more than a millennium and a half Nonetheless conditions were different by the early seventeenth century and the slave system had changed There were more European settlers The indigenous population had declined and a complex set of rules and regulations prevented the uncontrolled exploitation of the remaining Amerindians There was by then a sizable free population of mestizos and mulattos They filled the intermediary roles that some black slaves had previously occupied After the middle of the seventeenth century Spaniards imported African slaves almost solely for their labor value for the work they could do in the plantations mines and other largescale establishments New World slavery became more exclu sively gang slavery and important parts of Spanish America became slave societies The same sort of demand for gang laborers was also found in Brazil and in the English colonies in the Caribbean and North America which from the late seventeenth century on imported more and more slaves From Spanish and Portuguese America slavery spread to the colonies of other European powers in the Americas including the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean Americanborn slaves of African origin born and raised in the Iberian colonies were the first to serve British masters This charter generation of American creoles helped set the patterns for slave life in British America6 Slaverys peculiar development in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is due primarily to the emphasis on gang slavery during that period Regardless of real or perceived differences between the systems of the various European groups slavery in the Americas in the two centuries before its final abolition was as harsh a system as the world has known Slavery of any variety is abhorrent but the particularly grueling conditions that most eighteenth and nineteenthcentury New World slaves endured came primarily from the dominance of gang slavery within the plantation system 6 Ira Berlin Many Thousands Gone The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America Cambridge MA 1998 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the atlantic islands 347 further reading For the Atlantic islands see Felipe FernandezArmesto The Canary Islands after the Conquest The Making of a Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century Oxford 1982 Eduardo Aznar Vallejo La integracion de las Islas Canarias en la Corona de Castilla 14781526 Aspectos administrativos sociales y economicos Sevilla 1983 Manuel Lobo Cabrera La esclavitud en las Canarias orientales en el siglo XVI Negros Moros y Moriscos Gran Canaria 1982 Alberto Vieira Os escravos no arquipelago da Madeira seculos XV a XVII Funchal 1981 and Alberto Vieira Sugar Islands The Sugar Economy of Madeira and the Canaries 14501650 in Stuart B Schwartz ed Tropical Babylons Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World 1450 1680 Chapel Hill NC 2004 pp 4284 The Atlantic slave trade has a long historiographical tradition The start ing point for modern statistical studies is Philip D Curtin The Atlantic Slave Trade A Census Madison WI 1969 For a monumental assembly of material on the slave trade see wwwslavevoyagesorg and David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transat lantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2008 See particularly the essay in that volume by Antonio de Almeida Mendes The Formations of the System A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Ivana Elbl The Volume of the Early Atlantic Slave Trade 14501521 Journal of African History 38 1997 3175 For a general account see Herbert S Klein The Atlantic Slave Trade 2nd edition Cambridge 2010 An overview of Latin American slavery is Herbert S Klein and Ben Vinson III African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean New York 2007 For Mexico see Colin Palmer Slaves of the White God Blacks in Mex ico 15701650 Cambridge MA 1976 and Herman L Bennett Africans in Colonial Mexico Absolutism Christianity and AfroCreole Consciousness 15701640 Bloomington IN 2003 For Peru see the relevant sections of James Lockhart Spanish Peru A Colonial Society Madison 1968 and Frederick Bowser The African Slave in Colonial Peru 15241650 Stanford CA 1974 Numerous works trace the close connections of sugar and slavery Schwartzs edited volume Tropical Babylons contains several essays per tinent to this period in colonial Spanish American history see Genaro Rodrıguez Morel The Sugar Economy of Espanola in the Sixteenth Cen tury pp 84114 Alejandro de la Fuente Sugar and Slavery in Early Colonial Cuba pp 11557 A classic work is Ward Barrett The Sugar Hacienda of the Marqueses del Valle Minneapolis MN 1970 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Map 141 Brazil Eighteenth Century Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Map 142 Portuguese Empire in America Eighteenth Century Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 14 SLAVERY AND POLITICS IN COLONIAL PORTUGUESE AMERICA THE SIXTEENTH TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES joao fragoso and ana rios In 1691 the regent of the Company of Jesus and the Ouvidor1 of Rio de Janeiro sent letters to Lisbon denouncing certain outrages suffered by the Company in Campos a canegrowing region in southeastern Brazil The general tone of the complaints can be seen in the following example The negroes of Jose de Barcelos and others of Martins Correia Vasques armed with arrows javelins and firearms went to one of the Fathers corrals and opened fire upon the negroes working there leaving many wounded threatening to kill those who returned to that farm and not yet satisfied burning the houses and knocking down the corral2 The episode which was not a rare occurrence in seventeenthcentury Brazil highlights a littleexplored dimension of Brazilian slavery the important role Indian and African slaves played in power disputes among the colonial elite the selfnamed 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 Por tuguese 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 30000 arrived during the sixteenth century 784000 during the seventeenth and 1989000 during the eighteenth century3 This exponential growth in slave imports came as a result of LusoAmericas internal socioeconomic dynam ics especially the enormous population growth of the eighteenth century which in turn incited urbanization diversification of economic activities exploration and colonization of the continents interior and the consequent increase in the amount of territory under colonial control It is impossible to analyze all the highly diversified slave experiences within Portuguese America which absorbed both a very large number of 1 This may be broadly translated as judge 2 Lisbon Arquivo Historico Ultramarino henceforth AHU Rio de Janeiro document 1779 from the Castro Almeida Colection 3 See the estimates page of wwwslavevoyagesorg httpslavevoyagesorgtastassessmentestimates facesyearFrom1501yearTo1866 and David Eltis and David Richardson Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade New Haven CT 2010 pp 25768 350 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 351 Africans as well as a broad range of African cultures Slaves could be found in all areas of colonial Brazil engaged in every sector of the economy Though the majority of slaves worked on sugar plantations and in other agricultural endeavors many could also be found laboring as musicians painters artisans factory workers and cowboys and in every kind of urban employment imaginable Aside from the defining condition of slavery the cold hard fact of being another persons property they had little in common Africans perceived themselves and were perceived as different from those slaves born in Brazil crioulos Furthermore Africans were divided into different cultural linguistic religious and political groups often seeing members of other groupings as rivals or even deadly enemies African in its use as an identifying mark was a label invented and applied by the colonial masters not one often used by Africans as a self constructed and accepted marker But diversity went beyond place of birth Slave populations were divided by work regimes gender the fact of belonging to large or small property owners and the political contexts in which they found themselves These elements defined the warp and woof of the vast variety of slave experiences that could be found in the immense territory that was Portuguese America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see maps 141 and 142 One thing however remained constant and omnipresent in the colonial experi ence throughout this period and across Brazil the need for understanding and negotiation across all levels of colonial society and in particular with the slaves themselves The construction of the Portuguese colonial system in the Americas was a dynamic process full of conflicts whose principal structural element was slavery Politics was naturally the preferred domain for negotiation and conciliation Even then use of brute force that irreducible pillar of the slave order had to obey political criteria The contemporary expression just punishment offers us a window into the thought processes that underlay the colonial subordination of force to political concerns During the period under consideration here slave complaints were not directed against the use of force per se but against what was socially perceived as abusive or disproportional force Escapes and revolts certainly occurred and it is not our intent to minimize their impact However it is important to realize that these kinds of behaviors were the exception and not the rule and that the colonial state and the slave masters went to great lengths to ensure that this was the case A slaveocratic society that was able to maintain itself for more than three centuries can be said to have had a certain degree of success in socially constructing slavery in such a way as to include the slaves as integral elements of the social body To a large degree this success was due to the fact that negotiation between masters and slaves was an everpresent factor in colonial lives Slaves of course used this to their maximum benefit where and whenever possible from pushing for Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 352 the cambridge world history of slavery reorganization of daily work regimes to their insertion in disputes among the colonial power elites In this chapter we propose to discuss negotiations and politics between masters and slaves in colonial Brazil and the role slaves had in the larger political game between free elites In particular we shall focus on the role slaves had as in the example furnished regarding the captives of Jose Barcelos and Martins Vasques as the armed forces of their masters in power struggles within the colony We shall begin by discussing how these elites using their slave warriors struggled for control of territory in the colony and for strategic positions within the Portuguese Empire the dynamics of overseas empire In the 1990s historiographic discussion about centerperiphery relations and colonial society gained new perspectives The Iberian colonies of the Americas and Brazil in particular began to be looked at not as mere canebrakes but as key players capable of conducting relatively sophisticated negotiations with the metropolis Toward the end of the 1980s several authors began to question the reigning concept of absolutism and its relations with the European societies of the modern period Up until then the modern state had been understood to be synonymous with the total power of monarchs over civil society The new view of ancien regime empire forged in the 1990s emphasized the understanding that royal authority stemmed in practice from constant negotiations between central power and the many and varied local powers with their corresponding social groups aristocrats urban communes peasants and so forth The crown arose not as Leviathan but as the guardian of the natural order resolving conflicts in a society made up of different estates Seeing as how earlier concepts of the colonial system were derived from ideas about absolutism these revisions inevitably affected the interpreta tions of overseas empires during the ancien regime Currently some histo rians defend the idea that the history of empire should take as its axis of analysis negotiations between the metropolis and the colonies Approaches that focus on colonial submission or autonomy through an excessive emphasis on the colonies internal dynamics have been replaced by a more refined notion of empire now understood as a product of tensions and negotiations between the kingdom and the conquered lands In this view imperial dynamics are the result of transoceanic networks of alliances formed between different social segments of metropolitan and colonial elites which spanned the length and breadth of the empire interfering in its commercial routes and political fate In this view for example the transatlantic slave trade of the seventeenth century is better apprehended as a construct that involved merchants the metropolitan aristocracy royal Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 353 ministers and the Brazilian good families of the land extending along different stretches of the Lusitanian ocean from Goa to America passing through Portuguese Africa and Portugal itself According to this perspective the colonies should be understood as societies with their own interests that were however embedded within a tropical ancien regime Because of this change of perspective traces of the logic of LusoAmericas social hierarchy have recently acquired the status of historical objects This hierarchy is now understood as being based upon the old estate model in the sense that the colonists subordinated wealth to social and political status To belong to the highest ranks of society meant having a mandate over the republic in the final analysis it meant belonging to the governing class Because of this the colonial elite were defined as being the best families of the land However it was one thing to be eligible to govern and quite another to actually exercise this power This situation generated tensions and con flicts between factions of the colonial elite as each group attempted to dominate the republic a scenario that in turn involved other segments of colonial society In Brazil the armed forces involved in such struggles were principally made up of slaves and reciprocal relations between senhores and slaves became essential and strategic for both segments not only in order to guarantee the orderly functioning of the plantations but also to gain dominance in the local political struggle and in the reproduction of the colonys social hierarchy Guaranteeing the loyalty of groups of armed slaves was as important an element in the senhores overall political strat egy as negotiating this loyalty with the slaves was within the context of a coherent stable and productive strategy Understanding the negotiations between senhores and slaves has thus become important for comprehending certain salient characteristics of Brazilian slavery and its subsequent social effects Alongside the obvious tensions which resulted in the escapes revolts and foundation of quilom bos maroons that marked colonial life there also existed cooperation and complicity For the slaves or more accurately for a portion of the slaves this situation gave access to family land equipment the widening of social networks and even liberty Such concessions created within the individual conflicts and differences that manifested among the slave barracks inhabi tants and added to the tensions produced by the slaves ethnic differences For the senhores these increased their power over society at the cost of interfering in the economic calculus of slaveholding and thus in the ability of the slave economy to reproduce itself The game of alliances and cooperation between senhores and some of their slaves stretched beyond the immediately useful and involved freedmen in alliances with the great colonial kinship groups and made the free black population an integral part of the colonys political arena This was the social construction that Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 354 the cambridge world history of slavery ultimately bridged the gap between colonial societys two extremes slaves and nobles and that tied in all other intermediary social groups Borrow ing a term from medieval Portuguese the colonists and their metropolitan interlocutors called the resulting alliances bandos or bands These bands can be found in embryonic form in colonial Brazil and as early as the second half of the sixteenth century During this early stage alliances with Indian groups were of strategic importance in stabilizing the colonial endeavor on American shores and in enslaving part of the native population At this point we can already see differences in the uses and lifestyles of slaves throughout the various regions of Portuguese America The formation and activities of bands however can perhaps be best per ceived in the conquest and consolidation of what was to become the capitania and city of Rio de Janeiro which by the end of the period un der discussion here had become Portugals most important colonial city Africans actively participated in the constitution of bands in Rio even though they were an absolute minority in comparison with the Indian presence and early on distinguished themselves completely substituting for Indians in slave labor and politics by the end of the eighteenth century For this reason it is interesting to track the differences originating in the sixteenth century and becoming more aggravated throughout the period in question in the dynamics of slave production and in the lifestyles of the slaves the logic of bands The country today known as Brazil only finally stabilized its borders at the beginning of the twentieth century In the period under consideration here the northern captaincies Amazonas Para Maranhao formed a separate political unit known as Grao Para e Maranhao which reported directly to Lisbon In this region Indian slavery was the rule Europeans were spread quite thin on the land as were African slaves and the principal economic activity was the extraction of forest products especially the so called drogas do sertao Pernambuco and Bahia formed the nerve center of sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Portuguese America and they had an everincreasing African slave population due to the regions sugar industry This underwent exponential growth during the century stretching from 1580 to 1680 when the Brazilian northeast administered through the regional seat in Salvador became the worlds largest sugar producer Throughout the period under consideration here African slaves and their descendants were gradually substituted for Indian slaves In 1570 Africans made up less than onethird of the plantation workforce but by the end of the century their share had climbed to almost one half From Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 355 that point on African slaves predominated The majority of slaves lived and worked on smallscale holdings that contained five to ten captives their owners lacking capital generally sold their sugar harvest to the larger plantations for processing Work was long hard and dangerous in both the fields and the sugar mills The field slaves day began at sunup during planting and weeding and only intensified during the harvest Snake bites and accidents with cutting instruments caused deaths and mutilations In the mills shifts could run to eighteen or twenty hours when operations were moving along at full steam Grinding and processing cane required different abilities and levels of specialization Women normally fed the cane presses and the most common risk they were subject to usually due to inexperience was mutilation when the presses caught their arms The only emergency aid available in such a case was to stop the presses or immediately amputate the victims arm so that the slave wouldnt be sucked farther into the machines maw Workers laboring at the stoves rendering cane had an even more difficult life This job was usually given to men often as a punishment It involved the constant risk of falling into the flames and a slow horrible death by burning Even if a slave managed to avoid such a fate exposure to the flames smoke and high temperatures of the rendering plant generally lowered his life expectancy A policy of negotiation and providing incentives was enacted along with reliance on brute force in order to obtain the slaves collaboration The nature of work in the sugar mills where sabotage could result in costly damages to equipment or product was such that masters felt compelled to offer positive incentives to their slave laborers sometimes even including cash payments in order to encourage efficient production Slaves were responsible for a number of jobs on the plantation but depending upon the moment in the planting and harvest cycle could often count upon free time for their own activities Holidays and saints days also belonged to the slaves who usually utilized the time off to reinforce their precarious diet through gardening hunting or fishing With luck some of this production would be sold for cash at the local market Hope for emancipation for adult male African slaves the type most commonly encountered in the canebrakes was slim Freedom generally had to be purchased Emancipation thus commonly presupposed prior accumulation of funds and was also dependant upon the market price for slaves Urban slaves crioulos and especially women were able to buy emancipation with greater frequency than field slaves Children adolescents and women also had more access to opportunities for free emancipation or for freedom for services rendered Even so field slaves worked hard in order to obtain the freedom that was for them usually a mirage In 1623 in a rare moment of sincerity a Jesuit plantation administrator in Bahia wrote that the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 356 the cambridge world history of slavery mulattoes and crioulos are all very willing to work and all with hopes of manumission God forgive whoever gave them this notion but thanks to God I have them all in good service4 The sugarproducing slaves access to family was also fraught with dif ficulties The continuous importation of mostly male Africans had two perverse side effects among the captive communities In the first place it produced an enormous disparity between the male and female populations men often outnumbering women by as much as two to one Secondly it kept alive the flames of African national rivalries Legal marriage between slaves was further complicated by masters reluctance to place limits on the disposition of their property even though they often feared church intervention on behalf of the black flock On the other hand consensual unions could and did form especially those involving crioula women who had a wider range of choice in selecting a partner from the slave popula tion because they could choose from among both crioulos and Africans of several different nations Formal or no the marriage possibilities of African women increased in direct proportion to their possibilities of finding a partner of the same nation though a crioulo was also usually considered to be eligible If the sugarproducing Brazilian northeast was the most economically dynamic pole of the colony during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen turies the southeast enjoyed an important position in Portuguese imperial geopolitics In this second region and especially in Rio de Janeiro we can see important differences in the slaveholding regime and moreover we can accompany the construction of power relations and slaves and blacks involvement in these from the colonys founding onward The captaincy of Rio de Janeiro was constituted through conquest in conflicts with Tamoio Indians and the French beginning in 1560 Because of economic difficulties throughout the empire the crown resorted to activating mechanisms much utilized during Portugals medieval period the command of the resources of vassals in this case the colonial elite and the system of mercˆes or boons Flocking to the call of then governor general Mem de Sa bush captains fidalgos and squires mobilized their relations proteges Indian bowmen and African slaves and set out from Sao Paulo and Bahia for Rio de Janeiro With the end of the war and the founding of the captaincy cohesive and hierarchically organized groups were able to see themselves and were recognized by others as the best families of the land because they had organized the conquest and settlement of the region through their own labors expenses and valor The new captaincy thus began its 4 See the letter from Father Mathias to Father Estevao da Costa in 1623 cited in Stuart B Schwartz Slaves Peasants and Rebels Urbana IL 1996 p 48 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 357 history with an inherited hierarchy and social structure complete with welldefined rules and objectives Royal posts were to be had through mercˆe regia by appointment of the crown and were given during the first generation in exchange for services rendered to the king during the conquest Such positions gave their holders the ability to pressure the colonys nerve points influencing everything from the justice system to the economy Aside from the power and prestige they bestowed they also made possible lucrative financial gains whether through bribes or through the control of discretionary capital used for money lending as was the case of the position of judge for orphan affairs The royal letters bestowing title upon the kings officials and ministers for example often refer to the expectation that gratifications would be received for their holders labors The captain of one of the fortresses guarding the entrance of Guanabara Bay for example could expect to receive tips from the ships that passed under his guns These mandates were restricted to a handful of families Power crystal lized in the offices of the republica which were always fewer in number than the quantity of candidates for them Being qualified for a public position or concession implied having good relations with important families in the general government of Brazil andor on the Overseas Council as well as having distinguished oneself in some way in the colonys affairs The families who sought such positions developed strategies that included the control of local parishes negotiations with other social strata alliances with their counterparts in other colonies especially through marriages with influential cousins and political pacts with family members ensconced in the metropolitan centers of power But above all else what in prac tice enabled such families to reproduce their status within the colony and expand their web of influence and alliances beyond its borders was the ability to mobilize a band generally made up of Indian and with the passing of the decades black African slaves These made up the armed forces of the several factions struggling for position within the republica ensuring protection and power projection in the colonys state of perma nent potential conflict Friction between nobles was a structural trait of early Brazilian colonial society Band formation was the result of a series of negotiations with diverse social segments through which the medieval Portuguese estates were reproduced Within this game the bargains that obtained slave loyalty were essential and strategic guaranteeing factions internal cohesion and social legitimacy and in this manner the reproduction of slavery occasionally became tied up with power disputes for dominance within the republica A given factions attainment of power meant that it could interfere in the functioning of the market by using its web of clients to dominate the municipal council or through the occupation of such royal posts as Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 358 the cambridge world history of slavery customs judge Such a faction could impede or even entirely block the kings ministers application of norms and measures On the other hand a dominant factions tolerance of such measures could legitimize royal authority and guarantee the order and loyalty of a given region This was especially true in the case of Rio de Janeiro From the beginning to the end of the period under consideration here the power axis of the Brazilian colonies was transferred from Bahia to Rio with the latter city finally becoming the colonial capital in 1763 During the occupation of Portugal by the troops of Napoleon Bonaparte Rio de Janeiro was in fact the capital of the entire Portuguese Empire Within this context and beginning in the seventeenth century Rio together with Sao Paulo enjoyed a role of accentuated importance in the empires expansion over American and South Atlantic territory The captaincys participation was also decisive in the metropoliss struggles to preserve imperial integrity In 1616 Martin de Sa asked the crown for a grant in exchange for the arduous labor carried out at great cost to his and his fathers patrimony of defending the southern coasts5 Some years later the metropolitan authorities themselves recognized the southern captaincies importance In 1634 the Count of Prado conceded to Martin de Sa then the captaincy of Rio de Janeiros governor the post of Superintendent of ordinance in the captaincies of the South and Administrator of the Indians along those same coasts6 This because that captaincy Rio de Janeiro is the most opulent of those parts Southern Brazil and because it has the most men at arms canoes and Indians being able to aid wherever necessary7 Ten years later in the midst of preparations for the reconquest of Angola from the Dutch the Overseas Council recommended that the citys governor Francisco Soutomaior treat its residents with prudence and clemency even though they deserved certain punishments The reason for such clemency was quite simple The defense of the Portuguese South Atlantic depended totally upon the will and union of the people of Rio de Janeiro That the noble elite of Rio were quite aware of the role they played in the empires preservation was amply demonstrated in 1667 when the Municipal Council reminded the king of the citys aid in reconquering Bahia Pernambuco and Angola during the war with the Dutch In this way Rio de Janeiro a secondclass economy encountering dif ficulties in inserting itself in the export and slavebuying markets and whose sugar production was laughable in comparison with that of the Brazilian northeast became an important player in imperial geopolitics 5 AHU Rio de Janeiro Documentos Avulsos case 1 document 6 6 AHU Rio de Janeiro Documentos Avulsos case 1 document 47 7 AHU Rio de Janeiro Castro Almeida Collection document 333 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 359 Its formation with the wholesale transference to the colony of entire bands complete with captains clients and alliance networks replicated with necessary adaptations to the new land and environment the inter band rivalries and strongly hierarchical characteristics of medieval Portugal Among the necessary adaptations was the inclusion of slaves in the bands with all the historical peculiarities that such a condition represented slaves and bands In 1660 part of the best families of Rio de Janeiro with their servants bowmen armed slaves and allies rebelled against the captaincys gov ernor General Salvador Correia de Sa e Benevides and his family At the time the general was out of town and the acting governor his uncle Tomas Correia Vasques was deposed and slapped into stocks along with other members of the family The revolts chiefs accused Benevides and his relatives of several crimes including the murder of political opponents most particularly Francisco da Costa Barros fidalgo and several times the citys royal properties administrator Upon returning to Rio the general took quick and drastic action Arming his slaves and Indian bowmen he arrested his adversaries and to the Overseas Councils supreme horror executed one of the movements leaders Jerˆonimo Barbalho after summary judgment Lisbons reaction was to remove Benevides and his relatives from the captaincys government Despite this the generals relatives continued to be involved in struggles against numerous political factions in the city and even against the power ful Company of Jesus As we saw at the beginning of this chapter Martin Correa Vasques Benevidess younger cousin sent his armed black slaves who appear in the relevant historical documents together with Indian bow men to destroy the Jesuits corrals and threaten to kill the Fathers slaves Several times during the first decades of the eighteenth century Lisbon was to hear complaints about the doings of Sa e Benevides descendants band the Viscondes de Asseca and of the violent ways in which it employed its armed blacks and free allies especially against the noble families of Cam pos in the north of the captaincy The descendants of Rios conquerors the great band led by Viscodes de Asseca appear throughout the periods documentation as the most active participants in the violent disputes that mobilized their slaves and free allies These lords and masters of the land were not afraid to arm their slaves and did not hesitate to do so when pushed They did not worry that the weapons that they gave out might ultimately be used against them Why not What led slaves to risk their lives in defense of their masters interests What was their loyalty able to contribute to these struggles aside from work Why did they involve themselves in power struggles that were not Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 360 the cambridge world history of slavery in their direct interests In other words what did slaves want and expect in exchange for their role in these disputes The answer to these questions is not a simple one The saga of the band leaders and their families has been much better documented than that of their slaves We believe that the internal relationships of the bands and the advantages that attracted slave loyalties were created through a negotiation process that involved a multitude of aspects some quite difficult to pin down and others clearly shown in the available documents The literature regarding slavery in the Americas has already established what some of the slave demands probably were and we can see these reflected in the cases under study here The possibility of constructing a family and some degree of stability improvements in life and working conditions access to monetary savings of ones own and possibilities for manumission were all factors that influenced slaves decisions But there was yet another aspect in play in band relationships We are of course discussing a society in which the modern understanding of the term liberty had little to no meaning After all the people who suffered most in the disputes between bands were the slaves themselves and in such a situation belonging to a powerful clientele structure even as a slave was a guarantee of protection of sorts The slavery of the bands presents characteristics previously unseen in the seventeenthcentury colony which continued into the eighteenth century We have records of slave groups belonging to the most famous bands of the period and we shall begin with those owned by General Salvador Correia de Se e Benevides senior of the Asseca band In 1652 the general sold a sugar plantation with fiftyfour captives Fiftytwo of these slaves were united by family ties Some of the nuclear families on this particular plantation had three or more children In 1692 a public scribe described a plantation belonging to the Asseca in Campos This property contained 225 slaves of which 215 95 percent were related to one another Again on this plantation we find stable families containing three or more children The presence of these families is a valuable clue as to the quality of the relations that existed between Benevides and his slaves One could argue that Rio de Janeiros difficulties in obtaining captives via the African trade could contribute to the presence of stable families This was doubtless true among many of the captaincys plantation owners but not in the case of the Benevides band After all the general had been governor of Angola between 1648 and 1652 a post that gave him privileges in the transatlantic trade In 1697 Diogo Correia de Sa e Benevides the third viscount of Asseca married Ignez de Lencastre the niece of Joao de Lencastre and daughter of Luiz Cesar de Menezes Ignezs uncle was governor of Angola between 1688 and 1691 whereas her father had held the same post between 1697 and 1701 It is a wellknown fact that both of these governors participated in a vast network of imperial commerce the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 361 principal activity of which was the slave trade Ignez and Diogos wedding certainly reinforced preexisting ties between the Asseca Lencastre and Cesar de Menezes clans and everything indicates that these three groups had no trouble at all in stocking their plantations with African slaves The presence of true slave communities of stable families on these properties instead of the usual workforce of rootless young men recently arrived from Africa is indicative both of the slaves desires and the masters necessity for slave loyalty and sense of belonging to the band What is most intriguing about the relationship between the Asseca and their slaves however can be seen in two bits of news found in scribes reports dating from 1692 The first in the earliermentioned document dealing with the Campos plantation explicitly refers to a mill built so that the slaves could grind their own cane for their own uses This shows that the Asseca not only ceded part of their land to the slaves so that they could plant their own cane they also provided processing equipment for the slaves use equipment that represented a significant investment Thus in the economic calculations of these masters not an inconsiderable part of the plantations profits were destined to keeping the slaves content The second bit of news is even more enlightening One of the plantations slaves the cabra Francisca had a son with Inacio another masters slave In order to unite the family the Asseca acquired Inacio via a trade with his owner Such a modus vivendi which resulted in concrete benefits for the slaves in terms of stable families land and equipment also included without a doubt the notion of just punishment Perhaps not as just as one might think seeing as how Francisca and Inacio even after being united through their owners concessions eventually ran away However even though they resulted in economic loss following the calculations of the times concessions to slaves allowed the Benevides and other members of the elite to acquire from their captives a measure of social legitimacy which in turn worked to strengthen band cohesion based as this was upon notions of loyalty It is important to keep in mind that the armed forces of these nobles were composed of not Swiss pikemen but armed and equipped slaves united in a pact that protected not only owners interests but those of their captives as well After all when a plantation was attacked by rival bands slaves not only suffered physical violence they also risked losing whatever property and goods they controlled In this manner they not only contributed to the expansion of their masters power and property they were also to a certain degree complicit with this project If it is true that in the perspective of the slaves the logic of belonging obeyed criteria that reinforced internal differences these were also the product of the diaspora experience and of adaptation to American lands Slaves brought to the bands elements of their varied backgrounds Though these did not Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 362 the cambridge world history of slavery necessarily conflict with Lusitanian medieval logic they also produced a differentiated and specific history Part of this dynamic can be grasped by analyzing ties of compadrio and alliances established by the slaves of the bands the slaves ties The act of godparents presenting a slave child to the baptismal font was preceded by prior considerations It was not a casual act but a choice one that was generally left up to the parents Baptismal records thus present two clues in terms of helping us reconstruct the slaves social networks In the first place they unveil strategies involving the creation of alliances through the construction of ritual kinship in the second they are one of the few document collections that reveal slave choices and desires during the period under consideration here For eighteenthcentury Rio de Janeiro the largest series of baptismal registers accessible today belong to the 864 slave children baptized in Sao Goncalo between 1651 and 16688 The parish of Sao Goncalo possessed 4554 inhabitants in 1665 or 55 percent of the captaincys total population counted in that year 83244 and was a principal sugarproducing region as well as the largest parish outside of those that comprised the citys center In the years covered by the records 197 masters appear listed as the owners of the 864 baptized children The majority of these 124 or 63 percent registered from one to three children 28 percent of the total As an indirect indicator of how slaveholdings were concentrated we note that only twentytwo of the masters 11 percent were responsible for more than 40 percent of all registers baptizing more than ten children each throughout the period Up to where weve been able to confirm through public documents and wills the size of these mens slaveholdings were roughly proportional to the number of slave children they presented for baptism Among the twentytwo principle slaveholders noted one can find the largest property owners in the region such as Domingos Pedrozo Among the 124 masters who presented one to three children for baptizing one finds Elizeu Batista a smallholder of little means Table 141 It is among the holdings of the largest slave owners that we find the largest contingent of stable slave families which for our purposes here are defined as those that had two or more children baptized during the period under consideration Of the twentytwo largescale slave owners twentyone owned families that had more than one child baptized In fact 132 families in this group baptized two or more children accounting for 8 Sheila Castro Faria kindly granted us a copy of the Sao Goncalo baptism records 165168 that were originally summarized in her book A Colˆonia em Movimento Rio de Janeiro 1998 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 363 Table 141 Distribution of registered slave baptisms Sao Goncalo 16511668 of baptisms of of of of per master masters masters baptisms baptisms 10 22 112 361 418 79 16 81 120 139 46 35 178 143 165 13 124 629 240 278 Total 197 1000 864 1000 Source Livros de batismos de escravos da freguesia de Sao Goncalo Guanabara Bay Area Metropolitan Curate of Niteroi a considerable proportion of the 361 baptisms that the group conducted In short this group had by far the greatest number of masters with slave families on their plantations and also contained the greatest number of slave children a clear majority in fact with at least one sibling It is also the group containing those masters with the most unobstructed access to new African slaves Jerˆonimo Barbalho for example one of the masters with the greatest number of stable slave families on his property had bought 18 slave pieces of the folk of Guine during the early 1660s It is within this group that we find the most varied forms of relationships both between free and slave as well as between slaves of different owners Of the twentytwo largest slaveholdings sixteen included children from unions of free fathers and slave mothers Among the slaves of the masters with the largest holdings such as Francisco Barreto de Faria and Francisco Ferreira e Domingos Pedroso one finds the most popular and requested slave godmothers as well as the grouping of godmothers who baptized the most children of different masters On these plantations one also finds the most widely varied ties of compadrio including free godfathers with slave godmothers free godmothers and fathers and godmothers of other masters In order to better comprehend these dynamics we shall now analyze in a more detailed manner the relationships exposed in the baptismal records of the slaves belonging to Francisco Barreto de Faria In 1655 Serafina and Antˆonio Barreto slaves baptized their daughter Paula The girl was the first to appear in a series of baptismal registers for this couple though we dont know if she was their firstborn Serafina and Antˆonio went on to baptize four more children after Paula and three of the girls brothers like herself had slave godmothers who belonged to other owners than the Barretos Paulas fourth brothers godmother was the Barreto slave Maria Maria slave of Francisco Barreto de Faria we do not know if she is the same woman appears in the registers as the godmother for twelve other captive children of six different owners In Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 364 the cambridge world history of slavery total Barreto slaves appear as godmothers for more than twentynine chil dren they were the slaves most requested as godmothers in the entire group analyzed here Behind them came the slave women of Francisco Ferreira with fifteen godmothers those of Francisco Fernandes da Costa fourteen godmothers and those of Domingos Pedroso thirteen godmothers Between 1651 and 1668 twentyseven slave children were registered as being baptized from the holdings of Barreto de Faria In these ceremonies we can observe a series of different arrangements among the slaves In three baptisms the mothers were Barreto slaves and the fathers were slaves of other masters Madalena for example one of these mothers had as her childs father one of Manuel Diass slaves Among the slave godmothers eight were the property of other masters and among the slave godfathers fifteen were likewise not from the Barreto holdings One of these god mothers and three of the godfathers belonged to the same Manuel Dias as the father of Madalenas child In the twentyseven baptisms cited six included slave mothers who named free men as the fathers of their children in these ceremonies single mothers were allowed to name the father of their child Two of these couples had slave comadres and free compadres at their childrens ceremonies At least two of the free compadres Damazio Barboza and Domingos Rodrigues de Carvalho were small slaveholders themselves We have also found three cases of children baptized without registered fathers and in these cases curiously enough all the godfathers were free One of these was the same Damazio already mentioned and the other Goncalo da Costa was also a smallscale slave owner It is not very probable that these men were the childrens fathers as this would have been an impediment to godfather status but this could be an indication that the true fathers were free men who were impeded in some way from declaring their paternity Goncalo da Costa for example had no problems in declaring his status in the case of the son he had with Inacia a Barreto slave aside from being the godfather of one of the plantations other children as noted Stable families slaves declaring compadrio alliances with other owners slaves slave children with free godfathers and slave godmothers small scale slave owners as the declared fathers and godfathers of mestico slave children this is a small selection of the myriad forms of relationships reflected in the baptismal records of a large slave plantation in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro during the seventeenth century Such ties are evidenced in the records regarding all the regions large slaveholders such as Caudio Antˆonio Besanson twentyseven registers Antˆonio Rodrigues da Veiga twentyfive registers and Gregorio Lopes Cerqueira eighteen registers but no other group of records shows quite the diversity of those pertaining to the Barreto baptisms Those families slaves also looked for godparents Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 365 for their children from outside of their masters holdings more often than those slaves belonging to the other big slaveholdings However Francisco Barreto de Faria was no simple plantation owner His wealth certainly could not be compared to that of his nearest peers in the colonys richest sugarproducing regions Bahia and Pernambuco Yet he was socially and politically one level above slave owners who were perhaps even more wealthy than he Francisco was part of a select group of senhores da republica aside from being a wealthy man in his own right The Barreto de Farias were descended from the captaincys sixteenthcentury conquerors From the settlements beginning family members had often occupied the city council or were counted among the kings officials Fran cisco himself was an infantry captain In the same manner that the Barreto de Farias formed alliances with other important families both within and outside of the captaincy their slaves spread their own alliance networks throughout the properties of other masters and the various levels of free society Both impulses extended and increased the bands resources and commitments throughout the entire social hierarchy However if the logic of bands amplified and diversified the network of ties formed by Franciscos slaves on the one hand it imposed limits on the nature of these ties on the other The Barreto de Farias were allies of Salvador Correia de Sa e Benevides which meant that in the 1660s they were in turn the enemies of Jerˆonimo Barbalho another big slave and plantation owner in Sao Goncalo who appears in the baptismal records of twenty six slave children between 1651 and 1661 The profile of the relationships established by Jerˆonimos slaves was quite different from those of Francisco One fundamental piece of data is that none of the first mans slaves appear as parents god or otherwise to the children of the other If the two slave groups were not actively hostile to each other there is at least no record of any kind of ties between them Aside from this the Barbalho slaves did not register any marital unions with free people and few with other masters captives Marriage and compadrio was restricted to the slaves of Cordula Gomes Jerˆonimos motherinlaw and four other local slaveholders Jerˆonimo and Cordulas slaves still established ties among themselves however forming stable families and demonstrating a preference for cer tain godmothers for their children Among the children baptized from Jerˆonimos property at least ten come from stable families Sixteen were baptized by women from the same plantation and four slave women were clearly preferred as godmothers Esperanca with four baptisms Izabel Cristina and Valeria with three baptisms each Valeria from Cordulas property was also preferred as a godmother baptizing two of the chil dren originating in stable families Based upon her kinship relations and the number of slave children baptisms that she registered twentyfour Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 366 the cambridge world history of slavery it appears that Cordula occupied a different status from that of the other masters whose slaves found godmothers in the Barbalho barracks Of these four masters one registered eight baptisms and the others around six each We can thus suppose that through his slaves Barbalho also sustained a net work of client relationships though on a smaller scale than that evidenced by Barreto This network was also simpler than those maintained by certain other bands because it didnt include marital relations with free men or other masters slaves and had few free men standing as godfather to captive children It is important to note however that the kinds of negotiations carried out between Barbalho and his slaves also included the possibility of establishing stable families and that his captives had clear preferences for certain godparents for their children We cannot know for sure what other paths the negotiations between Barbalho and his slaves traveled What we do know is that they were quite effective in stimulatingslaveloyaltyjudgingbyhow Barbalhosarmedslaves stood by their master when he openly defied the governors authority a risky and stubborn attitude as the band was defeated in its rebellion Barbalho was executed and his allies were imprisoned Many of his slaves also paid a high price for defeat Aware of the logic driving band formation and reproduction slaves demonstrated certain preferences when choosing mates and compadres In order to more closely accompany these choices we need to expand our research in both time and scope so that we may show that they remained constant in other periods and in different areas of the captaincy To this end let us look first at Nossa Senhora da Assuncao de Cabo Frio a region in the captaincys northeast This area was originally colonized in the sixteenth century due to its strategic location along the northern seaboard During the seventeenth century it began to be integrated into the exportation circuit and established regular access to the markets via the production of indigo and cochonilha Throughout the eighteenth century however low prices for dyes provoked a turn to sugar producing and subsistence farming for the local markets Even so the regions five districts maintained a very significant slave presence Of the 11316 inhabitants recorded in 1797 47 percent were slaves In the baptismal records for slave children running from 1795 to 1810 however only one master appears with more than ten registers Capitain Francisco Garcia da Rosa Terra who registered twenty five baptisms Of these only three children had a free couple as godparents and another four combined manumitted slaves free men and captives Eighteen however had as godparents two slaves Some of the slave godparents of Franciscos captive children had other masters and here we find an important factor behind godparent choices that does not appear in the Sao Goncalo documents In those cases where the slaves region of origin is mentioned none demonstrates marital or Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 367 compadrio ties between slaves hailing from different debarkation ports Rosa for example baptized in November 1804 was the daughter of ˆAngela and Jose an Angolan couple and had as her godparents another pair of slaves originally from Angola Jose and Damiana The couples third child Ana also had two Angolan godparents Caetano and Maria Angola The port of embarkation does not tell us what nation slaves were from of course but it is highly indicative of their general original region in Africa at the very least Research into nineteenthcentury baptismal records from throughout Brazil reinforces the pattern noted when the documents speak of the slaves nation of origin African slaves linked up with Brazilianborn slaves man umitted slaves and free men but at least up to now weve found no indication that they formed ties with slaves from other African nations This may have made it imperative for slaves to seek out mates and god parents for their children among other masters barracks if compatriots couldnt be found closer to home Its thus easy to imagine that the most requested godmothers in Sao Goncalo aside from holding positions of relative importance in their respective groups were probably crioulas or accessible fellow countrymen of the childrens parents Another interesting piece of data revealed by the Cabo Frio baptisms is that the slaves of Captain da Rosa Terra chose more often other slaves as compadres and comadres than did the slaves of less important and wealthy masters Of the 303 baptisms during the period 56 percent of the god fathers and 44 percent of the godmothers were free During the period stretching from 1870 to 1885 in Cabo Frio there was a marked decline in the preference for free godparents with only 43 percent of godfathers and 26 percent of godmothers in 581 baptisms being recorded as free Even so slave godparents were still statistically far more preferred among the slaves of the large plantations This movement accompanied the concentration of slaves in largescale properties a trend that was especially accentuated after the end of the transatlantic trade in 1850 If in the first period 17951810 we found only one master registering more than ten baptisms in the years from 1870 to 1885 there were ten even though the proportion of slaves in the population had fallen from 47 percent to 33 percent according to the 1872 census During the last years of slavery when the absolute major ity of slave children being baptized were the children of Brazilians the slaves of the big plantations of Rios coffeeproducing region Paraıba do Sul showed a clear preference for slave godparents generally from the same plantation Of the 2668 baptisms registered there those belonging to slaves of small holders one to three baptisms showed a preference for a pair of slave godparents 27 percent of the time and for a free cou ple in 43 percent of the cases Those belonging to owners who registered from eleven to twenty baptisms showed a preference for slaves and for Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 368 the cambridge world history of slavery free godparents 42 percent and 25 percent of the time respectively But on the large plantations those belonging to masters registering sixty or more slaves the inversion of preferences becomes quite clear These properties accounted for almost half of all slave baptisms and their slaves chose slave godparents for their children 70 percent of the time while choosing a free couple in only onetenth of the cases In all of these examples the remaining baptisms combined different mixes of free manumitted and enslaved godparents with a predominance of slave godmothers and free godfathers Though outside of the period covered by this article the data from this last era of slavery clarify the choices slaves made and the contexts that influenced them In moments of sustained conflict between the slavehold ing elites the captives contributed to band cohesion and legitimacy and in this way were able to obtain crucial advantages such as protection and the possibility of constructing stable families among other benefits in exchange for their loyalty Our hypothesis is that the end of the bands was also reflected in changes in slave alliance strategies with the captives opting to tighten the linkages between themselves Another constant encountered in slave baptismal records in Brazil though one more clearly displayed in periods beyond that studied here is that owners generally did not baptize their own slaves The case of Crispim da Cunha Tenreiro a great landowner of the Rio de Janeiro region who was the godfather of many of his slaves baptized between 1704 and 1707 is a rare exception to the rule We have also not found any indications that the great band leaders baptized the slaves of other owners This may indicate that these men thought it beneath their dignity to be a slaves compadre but it does not explain why small landowners who became the godfathers of other mens slaves did not become the same for their own Other studies that have studied this phenomenon have explored the profound divergence between the meaning of baptism which made Christians brothers and washed away original sin and slavery In this way part of slaves choices were determined by reasons whose logic was inherent to certain cultural traits though these apparently didnt openly enter into conflict or impede the construction of bands Though most apparent during the early colonial period when metropolitan control was slack the structuring logic and function of bands continued to be in evidence beyond the period dealt with here The eigh teenth century saw deep and widereaching changes take place in all areas of colonial life bringing new segments of the population to the fore and opening up new opportunities for negotiation between masters and slaves We will now discuss how bands adapted to these changes and the openings they presented to slaves Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 369 the systems capacity for change The dawn of the eighteenth century saw the opening up of new areas in the interior by the old colonial families who in the course of this process followed the previous centurys pattern by constituting themselves as local potentates based upon clientele relations alliances with their regions of origin and negotiation with slaves West central Portuguese America starting with the rich and famous region of Minas Gerais and continuing on through Goias and Mato Grosso saw the confluence of two different processes The first was the reproduction of the characteristics of the ancien regime in the tropics formation of bands and a local landed elite followed by disputes for power within the republica The second process was a result of the characteristics of the land being colonized which was rich in precious metals and diamonds The discovery of mineral wealth came after a long search for such riches that had begun in the sixteenth century Since the colonys foundation Lisbon had pushed its subjects to search for the gold and jewels apparently so readily discovered in Spanish America and to pay for these searches out of their own funds These appeals were answered by the fidalgos of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro not simply out of their love for the king but also because it was the best way to widen their own power base The new lands were to be incorporated into the empire following the logic of the conquista They were to be scouted out and taken from their Indian inhabitants at the conquistadores own expense The conquering nobility would then qualify for royal boons and government posts The discovery of mineral wealth unleashed immense conflicts among the colonys alreadyestablished bands whose tentacles spread throughout all the most important capitanias principally those of the northeast as well as Rio and Sao Paulo The struggle between these bands for control of the mining territories known as the Emboabas War 17089 divided the mining regions among the many factions fighting for them The inter vention of officers of the crown ultimately rewarded those who had the power and the ability to put men into the field Land grants for prospecting were distributed among slave owners in direct proportion to the number of hands they could mobilize Grants were preferentially given out to those who could prove that they had at least twelve slaves designated for work in the mines It was hierarchically structured bands who established the villages that began to spring up through the central west not adventurers or peasants The children of the landed nobility of Sao Paulo and Rio well connected to relatives in the capital in the northeast widened and diversified their bands power structures in the mining regions New alliances formed Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 370 the cambridge world history of slavery structuring the relations that were necessary for the reproduction of social hierarchies reinforcing alreadyexisting alliances and increasing the wealth and power of the original bands The Leme family of Sao Paulo for example occupied several mineralrich areas in Minas and Goias together with the Azeredo Coutinhos of Rio de Janeiro This second family had branches situated along the paulista plateau since the seventeenth century and were already related to the Lemes by marriage a situation that was reinforced by additional marital unions in the new territories One of the most significant marriages between the two families one that resulted in several powerful lineages in the central west occurred in Sao Paulo in 1728 with the union of Francisco Amaral Coutinho of the Azeredo Coutinho and Catarina Madalena Leme One of the couples children was Ana Maria de Jesus Coutinho who later married Antonio Mendes de Almeida in Goias This man went on to hold two of the most important positions in the new mining regions gold supervisor for the Royal Foundry and administrator of the kings property in Goias The conquest of the mines helped to enrich the prestigious but economically shaky first families of Rio enabling their descendants to marry well The business of supplying the mines and the massive increase in shipping through the captaincys ports reflected the widening of the settlements commercial circles linking the central west to the seaboard and both of these to the wider empireranging circuits of trade that brought in a variety of goods but most important slaves This process drastically increased the number of Africans entering the colony through the port of Rio de Janeiro and effectively incorporated Mozambique into the transatlantic slave trade with Brazil Mining was of course an economic activity based upon slave labor The harsh and unhealthy working conditions of the mines were no better than those of the sugar plantations and were in fact in some ways worse In sugar production the owner of a young recently acquired slave could expect to get something close to a dozen years of labor out of his captive The characteristics of mining in the Brazilian central west which principally used alluvial panning and shallow rudimentary mines to extract minerals produced all sorts of accidents involving high risks of slaves suffering bone fractures being buried alive in caveins or drowning in flash floods The use of dams to change the course of rivers and hillside detritus heaps resulted in many deaths due to caveins and avalanches But even for those slaves who managed to survive such disasters the generally unhealthy conditions of the mines guaranteed that life would be short A contemporary chronicler described the slaves work environment in the following terms The black miners inhabit the water where they work the low veins of ore there they labor there they eat and there they often sleep When they work they are bathed in sweat with their feet always covered by cold earth rocks or water Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 371 when they rest or sleep their pores become constipated and they catch bad chills which give origin to dangerous diseases such as pleurisy violent stupors paralysis convulsions pneumonias and many other infirmities9 The second process that accompanied the new conquests derived from the importance and potential wealth of the newly discovered resources gold and diamonds A great mass of Portuguese immigrants mostly capital residents or merchants moved into the region along with an increased presence of oversight by metropolitan authorities As soon as the first brushfire wars had been put down in 1720 the crown separated the captaincy of Minas Gerais from Sao Paulo and sought to intensify its presence throughout the colony especially in the growing urban centers Free slaveless men from all over Brazil and Portugal swarmed into the mining regions It wasnt in the interest of the king however and even less the bands that the free and the landless be allowed to compete for dominance in the extraction of mineral wealth On this point the crown and the bands heartily agreed Overseeing the production of independent individuals would be a difficult task for the state and the large slaveholders obviously werent interested in dividing their newfound pie with masses of free laborers Even with all the restrictions imposed upon them however free men made their presence felt in the mining regions and were the object of constant complaints regarding disorders and insubordination The free both Brazilianborn and Portuguese began to become scarce in their regions of origin especially in Bahia Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro and appearing in the documents of the period as rural intractable and violent Restrictions on the production of aguardente in the mining region attempted to deal with the problem and affected both slaves and the free small holders of the region The crown also unsuccessfully tried to impede the sale of slaves from the other captaincies to the mining regions All of this however still couldnt resolve the crowns main problem the fact that it was almost impossible to extract the royal fifth in taxes from small independent mining operations Many new urban centers were established in Brazil during the period as outfitters for the mining region and centers of the colonial fiscal bureau cracy most of these farther inland than had previously been the case with the colonys settlements Between 1711 and 1714 alone seven new villages were established in the mining regions among them Vila Rica de Ouro Preto described by Simao Ferreira Machado in 1734 in the following terms In this village live the largest merchants whose trade and importance exceed in comparison those of the greatest of Portugals great men To the village as to a port travel the enormous sums of gold from all the mines which fill the Royal 9 See Erario Mineral Lisbon 1732 cited by Junia Furtado in Chica da Silva e o Contratador dos Diamantes Sao Paulo 2003 p 148 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 372 the cambridge world history of slavery Mints vaults In her reside all the most learned men both secular and ecclesiastic In her are settled all the nobility and the strength of the militia By natures grace the village is the head of all America and due to the opulence of her riches the most precious stones of all Brazil10 In his rush to describe the opulence of Vila Rica and its importance to the Portuguese Simao forgot to mention that the Brazils most precious stone was at least in part a black diamond In 1716 the village already had 6721 slave residents and in 1743 this number had more than tripled rising to 21746 Manumission was generally easier to come by in the mines than on the plantations The possibilities of masterslave negotiation were imbedded in many of the mining enterprises most salient characteristics Slaves knew about and were often complicit in their masters efforts to evade fiscal oversight by the crown and even when masters watched over slaves with an eagle eye the possibility of hiding away small quantities of gold or diamonds was always present The possibilities slaves thus had for gaining personal wealth were constant Established mining quotas permitted slaves with luck to fill their masters demands and spend the rest of the time mining for themselves Manumission was also often given to slaves who found exceptionally valuable stones The cities of the colony concentrated even further possibilities for free dom especially for women One of Brazilian slaverys most marked char acteristics was the importance slaves had in the organization of all sorts of urban services even outside of the mining region This gave slaves access to the economic possibilities of the urban landscape allowing them to accumulate wealth especially in the biggest cities The socalled escravidao ao ganho was a form of slavery often encountered in the biggest colo nial settlements In it masters set a certain daily monetary quota that the slave had to hand over Everything made beyond that was the slaves own property This form of captivity was very common among slaveholders especially widows who owned three or fewer slaves The deal generally struck stipulated that the slave would be responsible for his own food clothing and living expenses but would gain the ability to make money for himself and through luck hard work and talent perhaps eventually buy his own freedom Work hauling people water or domestic goods construction and all other urban services created temporary labor needs for those who could not own a slave but who could rent their services Women both manumitted and captive dominated the sale of readytoeat food in the streets 10 From Triunfo Eucarıstico Lisbon 1734 cited in Francisco Vidal Luna and Iraci Costa Minas Colonial Economia e Sociedade Sao Paulo 1982 p 18 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 373 For adults paid manumission clearly dominated over granted manu mission or those offered for merely symbolic prices Greater opportunities for acquiring cash thus led to greater opportunities for freedom With increased economic opportunity also came increased opportunities for social ascension once the chokepoint of manumission had been passed The mining regions are thus illustrative of another salient characteristic of Brazilian slavery its concentration of slaveholding exslaves Though not an extremely common phenomenon there were certainly very few exslaves among the higher ranks of the nobility it occurred often enough to excite constant comment Xica da Silva the famous slave woman manumitted by her lover the diamond contractor for Tejuco and who owned 104 slaves and Jacinta de Siqueira another freed slave who possessed sixtytwo cap tives were exceptions to the rule But in the mines slaveholding exslaves were a significant fraction of all slave masters In two villages in the mining regions Serro do Frio and Sabara they accounted for 20 percent of all slave owners and held some 10 percent of the villages captives The establishment of these diverse groups and interests their encounters with the landed nobility and their internal disputes marked the eighteenth century and put a new spin on colonial history as a whole Populations became ever more complex and diversified and included the presence en mass of slave manumitted and free Africans and Africandescended Brazilians Conflicts between foreigners and colonials and between local potentates and imperial administrators were added to the traditional stew of interband rivalries It is important to remember however that none of the new factions even the legions of agents of the king was able to completely liquidate the alreadyexisting structures The old logic of colonial society was maintained throughout the century always slowly changing but never entirely substituted Merchants and the crowns ministers conformed to the alliance networks of the local landed nobility in the struggle for economic and political control of the colony Moreover masters continued to call their slaves into action in these fights and Africans and African descendants were clearly dominant in these endeavors replacing the Indians who were the colonys first captive warriors A significant example of the continuing presence of the bands occurred in Minas in 1730 In a letter to the Overseas Council D Lourenco de Almeida governor of Minas said that in the Rio das Mortes county where Dr Antˆonio da Cunha Silveira is ouvidor geral reside Felisberto Caldeira Brant and his brother Joaquim Caldeira As these are the sons of a woman from Sao Paulo they periodically fall into the perverse nature that is the mark of most paulistas With the death of their parents they came into a great number of slaves and much goldbearing and planting land though they also acquired such a great quantity of debt that they couldnt pay them even with the liquidation of all their worldly goods Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 374 the cambridge world history of slavery Though the Brant brothers had found a rich vein of gold they couldnt pay off their debts to their mostly Portuguese merchant creditors The ouvidor geral thus resolved to defend said creditors and because of this the Brants decided that it would be convenient to kill the Dr Ouvidor Geral Antˆonio the ouvidor survived the assassination attempt and tried unsuccessfully to arrest the Brants His attempt failed because these had on call more than one hundred negroes many firearms and devoted free white associates who lived within their house11 The more than one hundred negroes and their weapons many of whom were inherited from the brothers paulista parents were a key element in the power that protected the Brants from their creditors and the law Another element was their connections in Salvador and in the highest levels of the court When the brothers were finally arrested and sent to Bahia in 1732 the viceroy himself Count Sabugosa interceded in their favor in another letter to the council arguing that the bachelor Antˆonio da Cunha who had already been removed from the position of ouvidor was well known for his outrageous demands ever since he had been stationed in Pernambuco The Brants were released and Felisberto was even able to later obtain the Tejuco diamond contract for himself in 1748 establishing the principal mining concern for gems in Brazils richest diamondbearing region Unfortunately for him neither his armed blacks nor his noble friends could release him from prison a second time after he was accused of diamond smuggling12 Merchants selling on credit like those who encountered the Brants had to be careful when extending such credit to the great lords of the bands Many times the road to repossession ran straight through multitudes of armed slaves who protected their indebted masters properties which ironically enough included them and their families Slaves were of course the first and foremost resource sold off in hard times and were thus subject to being dragged off by creditors a compelling reason for them to close ranks and protect the band All that was left to the creditors was appeal often without success to the kings officials The widowed D Antˆonia Maria de Lima had no other recourse but to repeatedly beg authorities for the imprisonment of Manuel Freire Alemao a large slaveholder with an extensive clientele network who refused to pay the debts he incurred with her deceased husband According to D Antˆonia Manuel didnt honor his commitments because he was a powerful man On the other hand foreign officers and those who wished to win honors and royal boons could often do so in battle against the slave armies of local potentates During the 1740s the candidates for the paid post of 11 Both quotations are from AHU Minas Gerais code 1643 document 35 case 17 12 The Visconde de Sabugosas letter is in AHU Minas Gerais code 1982 document 5 case 20 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 375 field master of infantry one of the highest positions in the military hierarchy emphasized their roles in defeating the armed slaves of the Amaral Gurgel family in 1712 In other words the system of conquests and boons that originally worked to establish the bands could now be used against them as well Despite the constant disputes and intrigues however bands were still essential in maintaining some legitimacy for the royal order During this period the bands and their armed slaves often functioned as the kings means of power projection in the overseas colonies In some cases armed slaves even fought other armed slaves Those of Gregorio de Moraes Castro Pimentel a descendant of the sixteenthcentury conquistadores were responsible for the destruction of a quilombo in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro There are many examples that demonstrate that the logic of bands persisted into the eighteenth century The legitimacy of this logic was supported by the many levels of the social body but especially those situated in fragile positions within the political game such as the free poor and manumitted slaves Among the possible examples one in particular is quite useful for showing how band logic could be important for blacks even when they were no longer slaves In 1745 a group of manumitted mulattoes from Rio de Janeiro and its outskirts zealous in the service of the King requested that Lisbon allow them to form a mounted auxiliary regiment In their request the free men insisted that command be bestowed upon Joao Freire Alemao de Cisneiro Joao was the son of Manuel Freire Alemao a powerful man and the same widowcheating deadbeat we mentioned earlier The crown refused permission as it was certainly not in its interest to give even more legitimacy to an armed faction that was not under its direct control In this case we can clearly see that the Cisneiros family could count free black men as well as slaves among its allies and that these free men could obviously belong to an influential band In more remote regions where even bitter disputes among the elites did not result in the clear hegemonic dominance of any one band the challenges of maintaining order in a slaveocratic society were even greater In 1800 Governor Silva Pontes was sent to Vitoria da Conquista in the captaincy of Espırito Santo to the immediate north of Rio de Janeiro with instructions to put the city in order The internal disputes of the local elite were notorious but the governors numberone problem was putting an end to the problems caused by escaped slaves Some three hundred of these had taken refuge in areas around the city where they lived by small scale agriculture and fishing Vitoria is on an island situated at the mouth of the Rio Doce a river that descends from the mining regions farther up its course The lands facing the island along the continent were inhabited by hostile Indians so the slaves chose to establish their refuges near the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 376 the cambridge world history of slavery outskirts of the city No one up to the governors arrival had been able to recapture them Silva Pontes was able to put together a force of some one hundred men for this job but he preferred to negotiate a nonviolent solution to the problem He established a thirtyday limit for the runaways to peacefully return to their owners with the promise that none would be punished Many of the slaves returned thus resolving the citys worst problem Only then was Silva Pontes able to begin a policy of pacifying the local elites by constructing alliances with the most powerful factions13 In the village of Vitoria in 1790 67 percent of the 7225 inhabitants were slaves potentially rebellious slaves to boot with a quilombo forming nearby The resolution of interelite disputes thus had to be put on the back burner as the first and potentially most explosive conflict as well as Silva Pontess test of authority over the captaincy was the removal of the threat to the slaveholding order Vitoria during this same period was also interesting in terms of its free population In 1824 only 39 percent of its 7912 free citizens were considered to be white Free blacks accounted for 22 percent of the population free mesticos for another 33 percent and Indians for 6 percent The eighteenth century saw the coloring of Brazils free population to such a degree that when independence came in 1822 around half of the new nations free population was not white In the case of Vitoria the settlement was not able to expand its control over the surrounding territory as Rio de Janeiro had done in spite of successive appeals to the crown and the declared policies of its governors The settlement produced insignificant amounts of the principal colonial commercial goods It had been founded with the express purpose of combating smuggling and impeding access to the mines of the interior by colonizing the banks of the Rio Doce The settlers were unable to achieve these goals however and at the end of the colonial period Vitoria was still isolated and surrounded by hostile Indians No band originating in Vitoria was ever interested in closing ranks with its rivals and eliminating the Indians in the name of the king It is worth noting that even the settlements free population of color couldnt be enticed or pressured into settling the continental shore not even the manumitted slaves whose liberty could theoretically be revoked Governing a free population that was 61 percent of color Silva Pontes couldnt risk such measures He thus resorted to using a group of Azorian families whose ship had been wrecked near the settlement The whites from the Azore Islands were sent out to confront the Indians and tame the land they disappeared from history shortly thereafter 13 For Vitoria da Conquista and the Governor Silva Pontes see Patrıcia Merlo A Sombra da Escravidao Masters thesis submitted to Niteroi Universidade Federal Fluminense 2003 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and politics in colonial portuguese america 377 conclusion LusoAmerican society from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries was possessed of a history and thus subject to change In other words this society had mechanisms that were flexible enough to permit adaptation to new situations and conjunctures The discovery of gold and the subsequent changes it wrought are excellent examples of this flexibility in action Following this the transatlantic slave trade gained an importance never before seen in Brazilian ports and slavery and its associated relations was disseminated throughout the interior of South America Urban activity multiplied and the hierarchy of estates saw greater social mobility as exemplified by emancipations These modifications however had as their base a preexisting society in which slaves had a role that transcended their attributions as mere laborers Slaves produced wealth but also generated social legitimacy In the period that we have covered here a significant part of Brazils slaves were thus far from being completely excluded from the colonys political struggles and structures further reading For the rise of the sugarplantation economy readers should consult Stu art B Schwartz Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society Cambridge 1985 A good introductory survey to Brazilian history of this period is provided by the essays in Leslie Bethell ed The Cambridge His tory of Latin America Colonial Brazil Cambridge 1984 For the mining economy and society see Junia Furtado in Chica da Silva e o Contratador dos Diamantes Sao Paulo 2003 Francisco Vidal Luna and Iraci Costas Minas Colonial Economia e Sociedade Sao Paulo 1982 is a good source of information on manumissions freed slaves and slave owners in Minas Gerais For slave trade estimates see David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2008 and wwwslavevoyagesorg The notion of the old regime in the tropics is developed in the book organized by Joao Fragoso Maria de Fatima Gouveia and Maria Fernanda Bicalho O Antigo Regime nos Tropicos a Dinˆamica Imperial Portuguesa Seculos XVI e XVII Rio de Janeiro 2001 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 15 SLAVERY IN THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN philip d morgan 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 regions 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 history1 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 com modities they produced Fourth it investigates the lives that slaves led the family and social structures in which they were embedded and the worlds that they made particularly in relation to their masters Fifth it examines the resistance of slaves Finally it gauges the impact and character of slavery in the region rise of slavery Slaves became so central to the early British Caribbean that it is difficult to imagine the regions history without them But at first and in most places 1 Barbara L Solow ed Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System Cambridge 1991 p 3 Frank Tannenbaum Slave and Citizen The Negro in the Americas New York 1946 p 117 Richard S Dunn Sugar and Slaves The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 16241713 Chapel Hill NC 1972 p 224 378 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 379 the British had little need or demand for slaves Tobacco cotton and indigo the earliest cash crops could be cultivated on smallscale farms and plundering was an activity that Europeans did best Furthermore European indentured servants proved adequate to the modest labor needs of the early Caribbean farmers and they dominated many of the earliest island workforces Chattel slavery was a novel departure for the British As late as 1620 Richard Jobson could reject a Gambians offer of slaves claiming that the English were a people who did not deale in any such commodities neither did wee buy or sell one another or any that had our owne shapes The English had the example of the Spanish and Portuguese before them of course but part of their rationale for being in the New World was to be different from their LusoHispanic rivals English trading companies and individual proprietors also thought of the first settlers as employees rather than entrepreneurs As tenants rather than landowners the first colonists lacked the incentive to invest in plantation agriculture In all of these ways the founders of British colonies did not set out to establish slave societies They had no blueprints to establish slavery2 Even the beginnings of the sugar revolution on Barbados rested as much on white as on black labor On that island white indentured labor was critical to the early years of sugar planting There were simply insufficient Africans carried to Barbados in the 1640s and 1650s to make possible the scale of the transformation that occurred In the 1640s as earlier the island received by far the greatest proportion of indentured servants who left England for America and the English Civil War and the Cromwellian defeat of Scots and Irish ensured a steady supply of prisoners in the early 1650s White labor was the basis of the early British Caribbean economy The reasons why farmers and planters in the English Caribbean most particularly in Barbados the first island affected shifted from servants to slaves are complicated The transition occurred there between about 1640 and 1660 The usual explanation is that the turn to sugar production was crucial because of the greatly increased demand for labor that its cultiva tion required The supply of servants could not meet the new demand and fortunately for sugar planters another source of labor Africans became more readily available There is much truth to this explanation but slaves also became more plentiful before sugar became the dominant crop suggesting that supply might have been just as important as demand Furthermore not just sugar but the increased production of tobacco cot ton indigo and ginger fueled the need for more labor By the middle of the seventeenth century increased efficiencies in the slave trade lowered slave prices and with their greater availability planters discovered the greater 2 Richard Jobson The Golden Trade or a Discovery of the River Gambia London 1932 orig publ 1623 p 120 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 380 the cambridge world history of slavery productivity of slave versus servant labor At least by 1650 twice as many slaves as servants were found on most Barbadian plantations Prospective servants soon learned of the horrors of the sugar fields and they had the ability either to bargain for shorter contracts or simply to go elsewhere As early as 1645 a New England visitor to Barbados described slaves as the life of this place and noted that the more Africans Barbadians buy the better able are they to buye for in a year and halfe they will earne with gods blessing as much as they cost A generation later according to a Barbadian governor island planters had found from experience that they could keepe three Blacks who work better and cheaper than one white man3 Possibly some slaves with prior experiences of growing sugar in Brazil played an important role in the agricultural transformation on Barbados Apparently some blacks bred up amongst the Portugals had some extraordinary qualities and were a key component of James Draxs labor force Perhaps they applied their knowledge effectively enough to help explain why Drax founded the first great Barbadian sugar fortune although his AngloDutch lineage and mercantile connections may have been even more important He was certainly a foundational member of the earliest sugar planters By 1654 he had two hundred slaves and was the richest planter on the island4 As Drax might have conceded whites in the early Caribbean valued some traits of their African slaves but in general they considered them an inferior people Longterm stereotypes whether derived from Islam the Spanish or the Portuguese weighed against Africans and the cultural associations of the color black were largely negative Nevertheless a thoughtful early observer such as Richard Ligon could admire the slaves quickness to learn their physical attributes and their musical talents Some whites seem to have enjoyed the company of blacks why otherwise would the Nevis Assembly in 1675 complain of whites and blacks drinking together in common upon Sabbaoth days Ligon even went so far as to describe some slaves as honest faithful and conscionable as any European Yet he also noted that most people considered blacks a bloody people and he acknowledged that the most of them are as near beasts as may be5 3 Sir George Downing to John Winthrop 1645 Winthrop Papers 5434 cited in John J McCusker and Russell R Menard The Sugar Industry in the Seventeenth Century A New Perspective on the Barbadian Sugar Revolution in Stuart Schwartz ed Tropical Babylons Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World 14501680 Chapel Hill NC 2004 pp 2923 Jonathan Atkins to Lords of Trade 1675 cited in Russell R Menard Sweet Negotiations Sugar Slavery and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados Charlottesville VA 2006 p 71 4 Richard Ligon A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes London 1673 orig publ 1657 p 52 Larry Gragg Englishmen Transplanted The English Colonization of Barbados 16271660 Oxford 2003 pp 66 140 5 Dunn Sugar and Slaves p 244 Ligon A True and Exact History pp 53 46 47 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 381 This use of animal imagery was pervasive and revealing Planters bought slaves Ligon noted much as Horses in a Market the strongest youth fullest and most beautiful yield the greatest prices Using another ani malistic analogy creditors might sell an estates slaves leaving bare land without Negroes to manure it In their accounts planters combined slaves and livestock negroes and cattle as key components of their capital stock Not only buying and selling but branding collaring chaining and whipping were parallels in the treatment of slaves and domesticated live stock Whites disparaged a people who in their view seemed to live naked like beasts One of the standard punishments applied to rebellious slaves castration was what one did to bulls or stallions as a way of subdu ing or emasculating them Some likened slaves to apes others goats yet others dogs In 1652 an observer of Barbadian slaves dwellings described them as almost like doghouses and an early eighteenthcentury list of slaves described one as a runaway dog Even in urging his overseers to treat slaves with humanity as one late seventeenthcentury owner did the justification was that it was no more than what every good man will afford even to his very beast About the same time a medical doctor in Jamaica described blacks as animal People The characterization of blacks in the famous early Barbadian slave code of 1661 as an heathenish brutish and an uncertaine dangerous kinde of people summarized the prevailing sentiments Blacks were people white West Indians conceded but only just Indeed in the preamble to the Barbadian consolidated slave law of 1688 the legislators went so far as to describe the slaves barbarous wild and savage nature which wholly unqualified them to be governed by the Laws customs and Practices of our nation From the earliest times then white West Indians accepted the naturalness of Africans as slaves and likening them to animals was one key justification6 peopling Between 1625 and 1807 the British Caribbean was the destination of about 27 million Africans About half of all the Africans shipped to the Caribbean arrived in the British sector more than twice as many as arrived in the French islands Jamaica was by far the biggest recipient More than 1 million Africans 11 percent of all the Africans reaching the New World arrived on this one island Jamaica received more Africans than did Bahia the Spanish Caribbean or even St Domingue although a significant proportion of the Africans who reached Jamaica almost immediately left for the island was a major reexporter In addition another half a million 6 Ligon A True and Exact History p 46 Dunn Sugar and Slaves pp 241 239 322 Gragg Englishmen Transplanted p 128 Acts of Assembly Barbadoes 16481718 London 1738 pp 238 13744 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 382 the cambridge world history of slavery Africans arrived on Barbados a mere 166 square miles in size this island probably received more Africans per square mile than any other society in the Americas although it too reexported many slaves though not on the scale of Jamaica The British Windward Islands and Trinidad received well more than 350000 Africans in less than half a century African arrivals in the British Caribbean grew markedly averaging about 1000 per year in the second quarter of the seventeenth century rising to the high point of the trade the third quarter of the eighteenth century when the annual average was 25000 Particular islands came to the fore over time Barbados was the primary importer of Africans in the seventeenth century By the first quarter of the eighteenth century Jamaica had overtaken Barba dos as the leading recipient In the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century the annual average dropped for the first time and Barbados and the Lee ward Islands in particular imported just about onefifth the numbers of the previous quartercentury Jamaica and the Windward Islands were still expanding and indeed in the last quarter imported more Africans than ever before As a result of the heavy influx of Africans the British Caribbean slave population grew rapidly During the second half of the seventeenth century the slave population multiplied almost eightfold from 15000 in 1650 to 115000 in 1700 In the eighteenth century the growth was not quite as dramatic but it still increased five times rising to almost 600000 in 1800 After 1710 the two decades of fastest growth were the 1760s at 27 percent per year and the first decade of the 1800s at 29 percent per year both reflecting the addition of new colonies with substantial preexisting slave populations as well as heavy slave importations see Tables 151 and 152 At the same time as the slave population increased rapidly it experienced a demographic disaster Of the roughly 27 million Africans shipped to the British Caribbean about 350000 died on the Middle Passage alone in addition to countless numbers within Africa Once the enslaved Africans reached the region perhaps on average one in three died within the first three years although seasoning mortality declined markedly over time from perhaps as many as onehalf of new arrivals before 1700 to one fourth after 1790 The scale of the tragedy is evident in the size of the slave population on the eve of the abolition of the slave trade about 775000 a mere 28 percent of the total number of Africans who had arrived in the region The subsequent period of slavery from 1807 to 1834 was unprecedented because the British Caribbean slave population then experienced a continuous absolute decline in numbers Between 1807 and 1834 the slave population dropped about 110000 a decrease of about 14 percent or 05 per annum which was a direct result of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade By 1834 the British Caribbean slave population stood at 665000 a quarter of the Africans shipped to the region Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 383 Table 151 Slave populations of the British Caribbean 16501830 in thousands Windward Leeward Islands British Marginal Barbados Jamaica Islands Trinidad Guiana colonies Total 1650 128 25 15 1660 271 05 64 34 1670 404 72 43 04 52 1680 449 180 134 04 76 1690 478 320 178 02 98 1700 501 420 227 01 115 1710 523 592 370 01 148 1720 588 796 378 03 176 1730 653 1009 551 04 221 1740 721 1179 602 08 250 1750 788 1451 712 12 295 1760 866 1729 819 17 341 1770 920 2017 892 510 21 436 1780 824 2432 910 720 48 493 1790 754 2756 984 696 120 519 1800 750 3116 897 1000 150 591 1810 750 3470 811 1391 1063 155 765 1820 783 3424 731 1212 1008 169 733 1830 820 3190 688 1103 888 155 685 Notes Leeward Islands St Kitts Nevis Antigua Montserrat Virgin Islands Windward Islands Dominica Grenada St Vincent Tobago Trinidad St Lucia British Guiana Berbice DemeraraEssequibo Marginal Bahamas Anguilla British Honduras Barbuda Cayman Islands Sources John J McCusker Rum and the American Revolution The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies 16501775 New York 1989 pp 692705 idem Growth Stagnation or Decline The Economy of the British West Indies 17631790 in Ronald Hoffman John J McCusker Russell R Menard and Peter J Albert eds The Economy of Early America The Revolutionary Period 17631790 Charlottesville VA 1988 pp 2779 Barry Higman Slave Populations of the British Caribbean Baltimore MD 1984 pp 74 41718 Data for 1800 are estimated Marginal colonies data are simply Bahamas before 1810 J R Ward British West Indian Slavery 1750 1834 Oxford 1984 p 122 estimates Jamaicas slave population as 250000 in 1789 and 354000 in 1808 Annual rates of natural population decrease generally improved over time They may have been as high as 50 percent in the late seventeenth century but dropped to about 24 percent in the first half of the eigh teenth century they rose to about 31 percent in the second half of the eighteenth century before substantially falling to about 10 percent in the early nineteenth century The reason why rates were so high in the seven teenth century was because the population was almost entirely immigrant a majority of whom were male and adult With comparatively few women and children fertility was bound to be low and mortality high especially when allied to the rigors of sugar production and the unhealthiness of Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 384 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 152 Annual percentage decline in the slave populations of the British Caribbean 16271825 Barbados Jamaica Leeward Islands Windward Islands 16271650 58 35 77 16511675 30 38 46 28a 28 35 16761700 57 41 48 30 26 40 17011725 50 49 21 36 11 44 17261750 28 36 25 35 34 48 17511775ˆ 48 37 34 27 30 44 113 48b 17761800 08 26 06 59 18011825 02 05 10 07 Notes a Jamaicas rate calculated only from 165575 b Windward Islands rate calculated only from 176375 Sources Calculated from population totals in table 151 using the formula in Richard Sheridan Sugar and Slavery An Economic History of the British West Indies 16231775 Baltimore MD 1973 pp 2467 M I P C A 25 P1 M annual rate of population decrease or increase signified by I net slave imports during the 25year period P increase of slave population during the 25year period C compounding factor or 325 in a 25year period A annual net increase in slave population or P25 P1 slave population in year one of the 25year period Sheridans estimates based on different data are included in brackets Barbadian arrivals reduced as follows 162750 by 13 165175 by 20 16761775 by 10 17761800 by 84 and 180125 by 88 Before 1775 these percentage reductions are based on Sheridan Sugar and Slavery p 247 idem Slave Demography in the British West Indies in David Eltis and James Walvin eds The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade Origins and Effects in Europe Africa and the Americas Madison WI 1981 p 279 for 84 and 88 estimates See also Selwyn H H Carrington Management of Sugar Estates in the British West Indies at the End of the Eighteenth Century Journal of Caribbean History 33 1999 43 who reports 75 reexports 17881800 and 90 18003 Jamaica arrivals are reduced as follows 16551700 by 15 as David Eltis has suggested in The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade William and Mary Quarterly 58 2001 36 although Sheridan suggests 8 reduction in 165175 and 17 in 16761700 After 1700 reduction of arrivals is based on actual numbers reported in Sheridan Slave Demography in the British West Indies pp 25985 especially p 274 and idem The Slave Trade to Jamaica 17021808 in B W Higman Trade Government and Society in Caribbean History 17001920 Kingston 1983 pp 116 especially p 2 Overall these adjustments are consistent with an estimate of 207900 slaves transshipped from Jamaica Leeward Island net arrivals estimated at 5000 for 162650 Eltis estimates gross arrivals of 1000 but this is almost certainly too low Sheridan reports no arrivals in that quartercentury and 10200 for 165175 based on Sheridans net numbers because again Eltiss estimate of 5600 gross arrivals seems too low net arrivals for 16761775 are derived from Eltiss arrival numbers and percentage reductions in Sheridan Sugar and Slavery p 247 for 17761800 arrivals are reduced by 50 a guess and for 180125 arrivals are reduced by 60 also a guess Windward Islands net arrivals reduced by 20 throughout Sheridans estimates for 176375 of 177300 arrivals in Sugar and Slavery p 247 are much too high and his 85700 net arrivals are probably too low The Windward Islands slave population is estimated at 45000 in 1763 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 385 the new disease environment Once a significant number of creole women reached the age of reproduction as happened during the eighteenth cen tury a substantial drop in rates of natural decrease occurred The reason why the rate rose in the second half of the eighteenth century seems to be explained by the sheer growth in immigration Net migration of Africans to the British Caribbean more than doubled from about 296000 between 1715 and 1750 to 643000 between 1751 and 17907 There were significant variations within the British Caribbean The slave population of Barbados peaked earliest It reached its high point around 1770 at 92000 and then with a diminishing African trade to the island it received only as many Africans in the quartercentury after 1775 as it did in the quartercentury before 1650 declined to about 75000 two decades later Its number of slaves then remained stable the island became the only British sugar colony to experience an absolute albeit small increase in its slave population from the closing of the Atlantic slave trade to emancipation Barbados was of course a classic sugar colony with sugar and its byproducts accounting for almost all its exports and with more than threequarters of its slaves engaged in the crops production The arduousness of sugar production is usually held to explain the natural decrease of the slave population so why did Barbadoss slave population begin to grow albeit slowly by natural increase by the early nineteenth century Part was due to its early female majority Between 1750 and 1834 the colony had a larger percentage of creole black women in the population than any other in the West Indies Part was also due to the less onerous sugar regime in Barbados than other islands Its first gang workers toiled for fewer hours than did for example Jamaican slaves The island also shifted to greater selfsufficiency in food production than some other islands If a modest birthrate was the key to demographic failure among British West Indian slaves about half British West Indian slave women never bore a child in the mideighteenth century and those women who did bear children suffered infertility by their midthirties then perhaps these three reasons more nativeborn women less harsh labor and a better diet explain why Barbadian slave women were beginning to produce enough births to offset deaths Other islands such as Antigua were close to having a naturally reproducing slave population by the early nineteenth century and nonsugar colonies such as the Bahamas already possessed one Thus the slave population in some British Caribbean territories became able to sustain itself without replenishment from Africa 7 David Eltis and Paul Lachance The Demographic Decline of Caribbean Slave Populations New Evidence from the Transatlantic and IntraAmerican Slave Trades in David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Database New Haven CT 2008 pp 33563 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 386 the cambridge world history of slavery There were also variations in the proportion of slaves in the populations of the various British West Indian territories Providence Island was the first British colony in the circumCaribbean region to have a black majority Barbados more consequentially was the second By 1700 blacks outnum bered whites by a 31 ratio on Barbados rising to almost 51 by the middle of the eighteenth century The Leeward Islands became more heavily black over the same period its blackwhite ratio rising from almost 31 to 81 whereas Jamaica was already the most polarized in 1700 with its black white ratio 61 which grew even more imbalanced to 111 by midcentury By the early nineteenth century the ratio was still about 51 on Barbados but was now 121 on Jamaica and 141 on the Leewards By then however the most heavily black societies were the new acquisitions The Ceded or Windward Islands had a blackwhite ratio of 201 DemeraraEssquibo 351 and Berbice a whopping 561 work The dominant economic experience of most slaves in the British Caribbean was work on a sugar plantation one of the largest and most productive private agricultural enterprises in the world The average size of a sugar plantation was upwards of one hundred slaves in Jamaica in 1770 for exam ple it was 154 Those slaves were subject to one of the most regimented forms of labor ever devised The lockstep discipline and hard driving of the gang system made it a ferociously rigorous mode of labor organization As one overseer noted a great number of Negroes are hurried to their grave by the pace of a work gang8 By grading laborers according to physical ability into several usually at least three gangs sugar planters engaged in an impressive division of labor specialization of tasks and synchronization of operations all designed to make each unit work as hard as possible The productive efficiency rested directly on the oppression of the workers In the late seventeenth and eighteenthcentury Caribbean about 90 percent of all slaves worked probably one of the highest labor participation rates anywhere in the world Only small children and a few aged and invalids were exempt from labor The frenetic and urgent demands of night work during the harvesting season a process that lasted about half the year made sugar production especially laborious No other crop was produced under conditions of such stress and strenuousness Furthermore few other regions of the world were more exclusively committed to a single economic activity than was the Caribbean Some islands were little more than one vast sugar plantation By the end of the 8 Testimony of William Fitzmaurice Mar 9 1791 in Sheila Lambert ed House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century Wilmington DE 1975 82 p 220 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 387 eighteenth century nine in ten slave workers in Nevis Montserrat and Tobago toiled on sugar estates Up to the American Revolution sugar became more important over time displacing alternative export crops such as tobacco indigo and cotton Afterwards islands tended to diversify producing a wider variety of export crops and becoming more selfsufficient in the growing of food The cultivation of indigo cotton and especially coffee expanded after the war These crops accounted for 6 percent by value of exports in the 1760s but double that amount by the late 1780s Still by the early nineteenth century about 60 percent of slaves in the British Caribbean worked on sugar plantations a further 20 percent on coffee cotton and livestock estates 10 percent in other rural activities and 10 percent in towns A longrun fall in sugar prices in the second half of the eighteenth century accompanied by a sharp rise in slave prices produced a sharp increase in labor costs The slave system had to become more efficient and it did Aggregate production increased The average productivity of a sugar slave as measured by pounds of sugar per worker doubled between 1750 and 1810 Sugar planters worked all kinds of efficiencies but they also drove their slaves even harder than before Apparently slaves worked even more strenuously by the end of the eighteenth century than they had done earlier After the abolition of the slave trade the demands became even greater Although sugar was the greatest of the slave crops many British Caribbean slaves worked at other activities A few territories the socalled marginal colonies grew no sugar In Belize most slaves were woodcutters in the Cayman Islands Anguilla and Barbuda a majority of slaves lived on small diversified agricultural holdings and on the Bahamas cotton culti vation was important for some decades and fishing and shipping occupied a significant minority of slaves Even in a monocultural economy like that of Barbados about one in ten slaves produced cotton provisions ginger arrowroot and aloes Even more notable by the late eighteenth century prime field hands on Barbadian plantations probably spent the majority of their time growing provisions working with livestock and improving the soil rather than cultivating cash crops Livestock ranching was especially important on Jamaica where specialized pens emerged But the major sec ondary and in some cases primary crop at least by the second half of the eighteenth century was coffee which employed a sizeable number of slaves on Jamaica Dominica St Vincent Grenada St Lucia Trinidad DemeraraEssequibo and Berbice Coffee plantations tended to be more diverse and smaller than sugar estates provided less occupational diversity and because of their highland locations were more isolated The single most important advantage possessed by slaves on coffee cotton cocoa pimento or provisions plantations was a less arduous work regime than sugar estate slaves Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 388 the cambridge world history of slavery Many slaves escaped field labor because they practiced a trade super vised other slaves or worked in domestic capacities Mature slave societies generally distributed their employed slaves in the following rough propor tions 7085 percent as field hands 1020 percent in skilled semiskilled and supervisorial positions and about 510 percent in domestic service These proportions varied considerably from place to place Sugar planta tions for example often had twice as many skilled personnel but only half as many domestics as did coffee or cotton plantations On some sugar plantations at any rate tradesmen were remarkably versatile even spend ing about a quarter to a third of their time doing unskilled agricultural work Slaveowners generally allocated jobs according to the slaves gen der age color strength and birthplace Men monopolized skilled trades and women generally came to dominate field gangs age determined when children entered the workforce when they progressed from one gang to another when field hands became drivers and when field hands were pen sioned off as watchmen colored slaves of mixed racial descent were often allocated to domestic work or in the case of men to skilled trades drivers were taller and often stronger than the men and women who labored in the gangs creoles were more likely to fill craft slots than Africans and some African ethnic groups had greater success in avoiding field work than others Managers craftsmen and specialists formed a privileged cadre of slaves A number handed down skills from parent to child Access to manumission was more widely available to them than other slaves They often had larger issues of clothing and food somewhat more commodious houses and more possessions than other field laborers Those slaves who lived in towns and cities also escaped field labor They tended to live on small units often under the close watch of their master Within the urban slave population women usually outnumbered men and colored slaves were often prominent as were Africans Most urban slaves worked as domestics but hawkers and hagglers many of whom were women and transport workers were far more numerous in town than countryside and roughly twice as many skilled tradespeople fishermen and general laborers lived in urban than rural settings Slaves worked not only for their masters but also for themselves This ability however varied greatly It was probably most extensive on marginal islands such as Barbuda and Great Exuma in the Bahamas where slaves were virtual peasants farming extensive provision grounds owning much livestock and spending a good deal of time hunting and fishing Only a small minority of British Caribbean slaves experienced such conditions Somewhat less advantaged were those slaves who had access to large provi sion grounds and owned livestock on the larger sugar islands such as Jamaica and St Vincent The ability to work for ones self was least extensive on a small island such as Antigua although one should not underestimate the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 389 ability of even smallisland slaves to produce substantial food crops Such happened on eighteenthcentury Barbados Still the distinction between homefed and foreignfed colonies was not a fiction The crisis of subsis tence when at least 15000 slaves died during the American Revolution ary War and its aftermath a series of major hurricanes hit the islands in the 1780s encouraged more homefed production By the early nineteenth century about threequarters of slaves in the British Caribbean grew their own food The impact of the slaves economy was doubleedged The drawbacks were the lack of time slaves often had to tend their provision grounds the distance separating slave huts from outlying grounds the pressures on the aged infirm and young slaves the extra burdens that provision grounds entailed and the greater ill health lower life expectancy and lower fertility that usually accompanied provisionground rather than ration systems The benefits were the variety of the slaves horticultural repertoires the material benefits that accrued to slaves from selling and bartering their produce the increased average size of provision grounds in many places rising from about half an acre in 1750 to threequarters a halfcentury later and the firm foundation that independent production gave to the slaves domestic religious and community life The percentage of self purchased manumissions in Jamaica doubled between the 1740s and 1780s by the latter decade they constituted 35 percent of all manumissions This growth can be attributed to the opportunities available to slaves in the cash economy Planters noted that some slaves had estates equal to those of lowerclass whites By the late eighteenth century Edward Long claimed slaves controlled roughly 20 percent of the circulating currency in Jamaica9 social and cultural life Relations in slave societies can be divided into those social forms that regulated the encounters between the free and the unfree and those that linked and divided slaves In the highly polarized world of a slave society standardized patterns of interaction and carefully defined codes of behavior arose quickly to govern relations both between whites and blacks and among blacks themselves The law was one vital means of institutionalizing interactions between the free and unfree Barbados was the first British Caribbean territory to develop an elaborate slave code which was then imitated by many other colonies Police regulations as Elsa Goveia has emphasized lay at the heart of the slave system Thus common features of the black codes were the prohibition and suppression of the unauthorized movement of slaves the 9 Edward Long The History of Jamaica 3 vols London 1774 1 537 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 390 the cambridge world history of slavery large congregation of slaves the possession of guns and other weapons the sounding of horns and drums and the practice of secret rituals The punishment for actual or threatened violence against whites was severe Special slavetrial courts provided summary and expeditious justice The primary focus of prosecutions was property crime theft or possession of stolen goods with flight another major concern The dominant experience of the law from the slaves perspective was terror The courts legislated a spectacle of suffering bodily mutilation removal of ears or feet and splitting of nostrils was frequent long after it had become rare in Europe flogging was the most common punishment and transportation involving its own psychic terrors was widely practiced The public execution of rebellious people by burning them alive hanging them from gibbets and decapitation and the display of severed heads on poles were common methods of instilling fear Bryan Edwards was correct in noting that in places where slavery is established the leading principle on which the government is supported is fear10 The law was not static Over time some slaves formed informal courts among themselves slaves testified for or against other slaves especially in conspiracies against whites occasionally whites might ventriloquize slave testimony in a trial of a free person and whites sometimes brought suits on behalf of slaves By the end of the eighteenth century local legislators often responding to metropolitan demands engaged in some amelioration of their law codes providing minimal requirements for food clothing and housing and some moderation of punishments Gradually legislators con ceded that slaves might have recourse for complaint against the worst abuses of the system In 1811 for example slave testimony helped rid Tortola of the notoriously cruel planter Arthur Hodge who was hanged for the murder of a slave Perhaps the most notable development however was the rise of penal institutions or workhouses which allowed masters to distance them selves from punishing slaves while at the same buttressing their authority The workhouses for example routinized the capturing and returning of runaways The growth of statesupported prisons also encouraged planters to consider more progressive management techniques adding imprison ment and solitary confinement to their more traditional methods such as flogging Custom was always as important as law in shaping the black experi ence The way in which slaveowners ruled their slaves varied from person to person and from society to society but certain common features held true One of the most important a defining characteristic of slavery was 10 Elsa V Goveia The West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century Kingston 1970 Vincent Brown Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society Slavery and Abolition 24 2003 2453 Bryan Edwards The History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies 3 vols London 1807 orig publ 17931801 3 13 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 391 the highly personal mechanisms of coercion the whip rather than resort to law was the institutions indispensable and ubiquitous instrument On the plantation or in the household the master and his delegates used a variety of methods of physical coercion without recourse to and usually unchecked by any external authority If a slave died as a result of punish ment the master almost always escaped retribution essentially the owner could punish as he wished although theoretically he might be fined for wantonly killing his slave Brutality and sadism existed everywhere but times of crisis and newly settled places when and where masters felt most insecure and isolated tended to produce the worst examples Masters hoped that rewards would offset punishments Over time a number of allowances and privileges became entrenched in both custom and even law Granting slaves half days or full days to tend their provi sion plots became commonplace Allowing slaves to attend extraordinary social functions such as a neighborhood funeral became a standard prac tice Masters generally allowed slaves time off during the Christian holi days Christmas in particular became a time for permissiveness and social inversion a black Saturnalia Special gratuities became routine an extra allowance of food here some tobacco there a ration of rum for complet ing the harvest cash payments for Sunday work Masters dispensed favors and indulgences selectively Concubines domestics drivers and trades men were the primary beneficiaries Incentives tended to be most elaborate where plantations were large the privileges of position within a specialized labor force based on rank and seniority generally did not apply to smaller units Another customary feature of slave societies in the British Caribbean was the sexual exploitation of black women Female slaves were vulnerable to rape and sexual harassment Relations between white men and black women were rarely subject to legal regulation or even community surveil lance the Antiguan law of 1644 forbidding Carnall Copulation between Christian and Heathen and the Leeward Islands law of 1789 fining white men for having sex with enslaved married women were exceptional For a white man to engage in sexual relations with and father children by a black woman was nothing unusual living openly with a black concubine brought no social condemnation As black concubinage became normal white women became the embodiments of respectability as well as the victims of a rigid doublestandard that allowed only white men full sex ual license Black men faced draconian punishments if they had sex with white women the women in turn experienced disgrace and ostracism Conversely white men left accounts of being enraptured by the sensuality of black womens bodies Church of England clergyman Isaac Teale friend and mentor to Bryan Edwards praised black womens beauty in his poem Sable Venus c 17603 and a naval lieutenant described the practice Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 392 the cambridge world history of slavery of market women staying overnight on board ship with the sailors as a charcoal seraglio11 Not just owners but even more so the single white men who predominated as estate managers overseers and bookkeepers routinely took slave mistresses These slave women often were able to use their sexuality to extract material advantages and sometimes to gain their freedom Female slaves gained their freedom more frequently than men Furthermore a population of mixed racial descent coloreds in contem porary parlance rapidly emerged Their proportion of the slave population roughly doubled over the course of the eighteenth century and by the end they comprised about 10 percent White fathers often freed their colored progeny Rising manumissions and rapid natural increase among the free coloreds meant that their numbers rose from 3000 or 1 percent of the total British Caribbean population in 1750 to 70000 or 8 percent by 1815 Custom dictated relations between whites and blacks in everything from cuisine to etiquette West Indian whites ate foods strongly influenced by Africa whether coucou made with cornmeal and okra dukuna a pud ding made from among other things a mixture of grated sweet potatoes grated coconut and spices and wrapped in a seagrape leaf or piece of banana or plantain leaf or fufu made by pounding boiled green plantains White women imitated slave women in their use of the headscarf or head wrap and many of them also abandoned their stays In his brief visit to Barbados at midcentury George Washington criticized the ease with which Barbadian white women adopted the Negro Style Observers noted that many whites spoke with the intonations of their slaves drawling bro ken English was the standard complaint12 West Indian whites danced to slave musicians who introduced Africaninfluenced rhythms and musical instruments into the culture Masters liked to think that the enthusiastic greetings they received from their slaves whenever they returned to their estates were genuine They spoke of ecstatic welcomes tears of joy enthu siastic processions warm handshakes and in turn they dispensed favors rewards and treats while usually proclaiming a day off for dance and song This ritual brings to mind Cudjoes meeting with Colonel Guthrie in 1739 when the maroon leader apparently threw himself to the ground embrac ing the white mans legs kissing his feet and asking his pardon Such an extravagant show of humility probably involved a subtle expression of contempt an example of puttin on ole massa 11 Antigua Law 1644 cited in Dunn Sugar and Slaves p 253 Isaac Teale The Sable Venus An Ode in James G Basker ed Amazing Grace An Anthology of Poems about Slavery 16601810 New Haven CT 2002 pp 1469 12 Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig eds The Diaries of George Washington 6 vols Char lottesville VA 19769 I 901 Long History of Jamaica 2 413 The Importance of Jamaica to Great Britain Considerd With Some Account of that Island from Its Discovery in 1492 to This Time London c 1740 p 7 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 393 Although masters and slaves were locked into an intimate embrace blacks were not just objects of white action but subjects who regulated social relationships among themselves One crucial distinction was birth place Sometimes Africans from a particular region dominated the forced migration into a particular colony thereby providing at least a major build ing block for communal action Before 1725 perhaps threequarters of the Africans retained in Jamaica were from either the Gold Coast or Bight of Benin Thereafter the Gold Coast remained a significant provenance zone for Jamaican slaves although its importance declined over time the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa rose to prominence as the primary sup pliers The major catchment areas of Jamaican slaves thus moved eastwards and southwards over time That socalled Koromantis named after one of the trading forts of the Gold Coast apparently mounted many early Jamaican slave rebellions therefore seems explicable although their leader ship of Tackys Rebellion of 1760 is a little less easy to explain Even though particular African ethnic groups played disproportionately influential roles in particular islands ethnic heterogeneity was the primary characteristic of most Caribbean slave populations Africans from one background had to find ways to communicate and deal with other Africans Over time they increasingly ran away with members of other ethnic groups and intermar ried with one another A panAfrican identity among blacks emerged from these involuntary and voluntary associations in their new homelands In the middle of the eighteenth century Africans comprised 60 percent of the slave population of the British Caribbean but the percentage was halved by the early nineteenth century The proportions varied widely from island to island Thus in 1807 the slave populations of the recently developed sugar colonies of British Guiana and Trinidad were twothirds African born whereas in the older settled colonies of Barbados and the Leeward Islands less than a fifth The key social institution among slaves was the family Slavery obviously subjected slaves familial aspirations to enormous stress often to breaking point yet slave family life was not simply a tale of instability promiscuity casual mating and near anarchy True wherever Africans were in the majority family life was tenuous In societies dominated by Africans about a half or more of them lived with friends or other solitaries not relatives Nevertheless Africans often practiced a form of fictive kinship particularly toward shipmates who looked upon each others children as their own In earlynineteenthcentury Trinidad the fortunate Africans who found mates generally found other Africans but not from their own ethnic group or even region When Africans formed families they tended to be nuclear in form In fact in earlynineteenthcentury Trinidad Africans were more likely to be grouped in nuclear families than creoles At this point throughout the British Caribbean a majority of slaves lived in some form of family Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 394 the cambridge world history of slavery grouping most frequently children with a single woman whose partner probably belonged to another estate The coresident slave nuclear family though fairly common was less evident than in North America Dense islandsettlement patterns facilitated crossplantation mating and visiting relationships Names are one clue to African and European influences in slave family life Even as early as the midseventeenth century about a half of Barbadian slaves had English names and by the eighteenth century the proportion had risen to threequarters Johnnies Sams Tonys Toms Jacks Bettys and Marys outnumbered Cuffys Sambos Phibbahs and Jubas Masters thought it appropriate that slaves receive only diminutive English names and slaves sometimes shared names with livestock Furthermore some popular names among whites Matthew Daniel Ann Martha seem to have been offlimits to slaves Conversely some classical names that ap parently amused whites Cato Caesar Venus became wellknown slave names The proportion of African names among eighteenthcentury Jamaican slaves was a little higher about 30 percent than among their Barbadian counterparts Moreover six African names were among the ten most popular eighteenthcentury Jamaican slave names Quashie Quacow Cuffee and Quamino male Cuba and Mimba female African naming practices probably survived more than African names themselves Slaves tended to be inventive with their names and were much more likely to name children after events or incidents the use of daynames for example than Europeans were Over time slaves assumed much of the responsibility for naming themselves as is indicated by the growing practice of naming children after kinfolk Slaves lived in houses often clustered in close proximity arranged in an irregular nongeometrical alignment traceable to African spatial arrange ments Masters generally set aside a tract of land for a village site and permitted the slaves to locate houses as they wished White observers described such plantation settlements as similar to an African village or town The most common dwelling also influenced by African architec tural forms was a small low rectangular wattleanddaub structure with a dirt floor and thatched roof Slaves lived spartan lives Their clothing was minimal their diet insufficient and their household furnishings almost nonexistent They commonly used locally made coarse earthenware bowls and pots termed AfroCaribbean ware or in Jamaica yabbas as water storage cooking and serving vessels Lowfired these pots could be glazed or burnished perhaps wheel thrown but more often coiled or made from slabs Perhaps their most notable feature compared to African pottery was their simplicity they generally lacked the cord roulettes stamps and paints common on African vessels They speak to the impoverishment both culturally and materially of slave life Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 395 As much as life was minimally utilitarian for most slaves they neverthe less strove to express their creativity and bring a little beauty into their lives Buying a European ceramic plate or bowl was one possibility Geometric design elements found on some ceramics excavated at a Jamaican slave site were analogs of West African patterns Or carving designs onto calabash bowls was another way to make life a little more aesthetically pleasing Slaves might adopt a certain hairstyle sport a cocked hat or fine headtie combine items of clothing in unusual ways and with contrasting colors or wear a wire earring or a bead necklace In one burial on a Barbadian estate the slave perhaps an obeah man wore copper bracelets metal rings and a necklace of glass and stone beads with perforated canine teeth fish vertebrae and cowrie shells Apparently blues and reds were the pre ferred colors both in beads and cloths Slaves liked to smoke tobacco out of clay pipes The attachment slaves had to such pipes is evident in their prevalence as grave goods They were the most frequent artifacts associated with slave burials Africans were able to transfer some native plants to the Caribbean which they grew in their provision grounds house gardens and subsistence plots More than fifty species native to Africa became part of circum Caribbean botanical resources The famed eighteenthcentury Jamaican maroon leader Queen Nanny reputedly used her mastery of medicinal herbs to kill soldiers sent to reenslave fugitive blacks African grasses made it to the Caribbean where they were used for bedding and fodder for cattle Guinea grass had appeared in Barbados by 1684 and Jamaica by 1745 African rice yams cow peas pigeon peas melegueta peppers palm oil okra sorghum millet and groundnut also survived the Middle Passage Slaves used the castor bean for lamp oil the maiden apple or African cucumber became an important medicine and many African plants became central ingredients in Caribbean dishes including the ackee apple and the wild spinach or pigweed that gives calalou the regions popular pepper pot soup its distinctive flavor as well as bitter leaf and brassica the greens favored in diaspora dishes Perhaps language was the domain in which slaves most effectively chal lenged European dominance Most slaves spoke a distinctive language a new creation a creole whether Bahamaian Belizan Guyanese or Caymanian not a debased version of an older standard language The vocabulary was predominantly European it is true but not the phonol ogy syntax and word formation African grammatical constructions and inflections together with a sprinkling of African words such as the ubiq uitous ki an exclamation of surprise or backra for white man infused these new languages Creoles certainly varied Barbadian or Bajan now a regional nonstandard variety of English was probably always closer to Standard English because it seems to have decreolized rapidly than Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 396 the cambridge world history of slavery say Jamaican Creole Nevertheless all Atlantic creoles shared structural features that are not found in European languages and that can be traced in large part to a substratum of African languages and pidgins that arose on the West African coast but also in part to universal processes of second language acquisition These Atlantic creoles also contained many proverbs that expressed a slave view of the world as in Massa horse massa grass Massas eye makes the horse grow fat Negar tief lilly ting buckra tief all When black man tief him tief half a bit when backra tief him tief whole estate No Massa me no steal but me takee Massa No me tief for you till me get flog African loanwords were infrequent but African loan translations or calques such as dayclean for dawn bigeye for greedy cuteye for a visual gesture of scorn handmiddle for palm or outside child for a child born out of wedlock were common The language most slaves spoke was not as in the parlance of the day broken English a corrupt bastardized variant of the standard but a new form with its own rules As its derivation from the Latin creare to create suggests a creole language was a novel development Music was important in the lives of the slaves More than mere accom paniment it was fully integrated into ordinary life whether work activity or religious ceremony Songs functioned as important social commentary as in the lateeighteenthcentury Barbadian work song Massa Buy Me He Wont Killa Me which was sung in the typically African callandresponse mode Dances often referred to as plays were significant outlets where slaves found one of their few opportunities to relax Slaves usually formed circles around the musicians the dancers notable for their rhythmic pre cision and their physical expressiveness their leaping twisting hand clapping foot stamping and body slapping stepped into the ring Slaves routinely used Africanstyle instruments including rattles usually made from a calabash or gourd shell clappers rasps tambourines and banjos but most ubiquitous were the hollow log drums Africans blended different musical styles Thus in lateseventeenthcentury Jamaica the two African musicians playing homemade string instruments alongside the dozen men and women with rattles tied to their legs and wrists who performed three discrete songs which apparently originated in Angola West Central Africa Papa from Popo a port on the Bight of Benin and Koro manti a port on the Gold Coast respectively had already borrowed from each other These songs bore only passing resemblance to that of their homelands interAfrican syncretism had already occurred Similarly when on Christmas Day 1750 overseer Thomas Thistlewood heard and saw what he termed Creolian Congo and Coromantee music and dance he witnessed not just a hybrid local innovation but two more ethically dis tinctive African versions that in turn likely involved mixing and experimen tation A fusion of African and European musical instruments and musical Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 397 forms also took place Slaves incorporated Africaninfluenced rhythms into Europeanstyle fiddle playing and they melded fife and drum music drawn from European military traditions with their own West African flute and drum ensembles Their local carnival traditions most notable John Canoe or jonkonnu were also syncretic forms mixing Africanstyle masks and horned headdresses with European traditions of mummery and morris dancing That the festival occurred at Christmastime and yet derived its name from a historical figure on the West African coast symbolizes this blending of African and British forms For Africans the funeral was the true climax of life Many slaves thought death brought a return to Africa For this reason planters burned the bodies of those slaves who committed suicides as a way of depriving their friends and relatives from having funerals for them a denial that was a greater Punishment than Death itself Similarly in 1768 the governor of Barbados ordered that the bodies of executed slaves should be buried far out to sea so that their compatriots could not conduct their own funerals Archaeologists have discovered some burials in houseyard compounds under the floors of slave huts which was an African practice Slaves not only danced feasted sang and drank at funerals but they placed specific items inside the grave with the corpse to establish relationships between the living and the dead These grave goods included food and drink pottery cloth money beads cowrie shells jewelry and personal articles such as knives and tobacco pipes Graveyard dirt was an important ingredient in divination and most importantly in swearing an oath The religious worldview of most slaves in the eighteenthcentury British West Indies was primarily magical not Christian Obeah a term widely used throughout the British Caribbean referred to a complex of beliefs and practices concerned with the manipulation and control of supernatural forces usually through the use of material objects the use of charms and recitation of spells It served many functions discovery of personal and social ills healing gaining revenge predicting the future and protection from harm and involved specialists or shamans who offered services in response to perceived physical or spiritual needs Nanny was perhaps the most famous obeah woman of the eighteenthcentury British Caribbean She gave her name to the main rebel town of the Windward maroons in Jamaica played a key role in maintaining loyalty through her oaths of secrecy and was killed by a slave in 1733 The boundary between sorcery folk medicine and divination was undoubtedly porous Christianity only gradually made inroads among British Caribbean slaves In the eighteenth century most African and creole slaves had lit tle interest in Protestantism which seemed an austere and unwelcoming creed to them Slaveowners were generally opposed to conversion because they feared that spiritual equality would lead to claims for social equality Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 398 the cambridge world history of slavery Baptism they claimed rendered slaves intractable and in any case Africans were simply unfit for the privilege In part because of their depen dence on lay patronage the clergy generally supported the institution of slavery and could of course find much in the Bible to justify the institu tion Even on the plantation that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel SPG owned in Barbados missionaries failed to convert many slaves Gradually however the missionary arms of the Anglican Church which came to include the Associates of Dr Bray as well as the SPG together with various dissenter groups began to proselytize among the slaves They had limited success before the American Revolution with the Moravians being the most active but thereafter Methodists and Baptists became much more vigorous By the 1780s Antigua had 6000 enslaved converts making the island as one historian puts it one of the single largest concentrations of AfroProtestants in the world13 At the turn of the century more than a quarter of the Leeward Islands 89000 slaves had been converted by Moravian Methodist and Anglican missionaries Black Baptists had also established footholds in Jamaica hitherto an inhospitable place for AfroProtestantism Some planters now welcomed missionaries seeing Christianity as less dangerous than they once had resistance Creating a distinctive language music and religion in short a culture had political implications of profound ambivalence On the one hand it can be considered an act of resistance By carving out some independence for themselves by creating something coherent and autonomous from African fragments and European influences by forcing whites to recognize their humanity slaves triumphed over their circumstances To maintain a family cultivate a provision ground and sustain a spiritual life were ways of opposing the dehumanization inherent in their status as slaves To that degree they resisted the stereotype associated with their legal standing On the other hand the slaves cultural creativity eased the torments of slavery gave them a reason for living and made them think long and hard before sacrificing everything in an attempt to overthrow the sys tem It thereby encouraged accommodation to the established order This ambivalence is at the heart of the issue of slave resistance By its recurrence in the face of great odds slave resistance appears structurally endemic and yet given that the slave system lasted for hundreds of years without seri ous challenge its stability also seems paramount Ambivalence is present too in that some slave plotting may have been figments of the planter 13 Jon F Sensbach Rebeccas Revival Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World Cambridge MA 2005 p 240 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 399 imagination It is not easy to differentiate between actual plots and con spiracy scares Still slave rebellions and planned uprisings occurred regularly in the British Caribbean The earliest known slave insurrection in the region took place on Providence Island on May Day 1638 and the last was the great Jamaican rebellion of 18312 often referred to as the Baptist War In that long span perhaps five major waves occurred over the course of the long eighteenth century the 1670s80s 1730s40s 1760s70s 1790s and 181632 Wars and imperial crises help explain some of the timing but there were many local catalysts In some ways Caribbean slave revolts were a continuation of African resistance that began with shipboard revolts which occurred on average one in every ten voyages Before the Revolutionary era most Caribbean revolts were African led Indeed whites attributed a leading role to socalled Koromanti or Coromantees who gained a rep utation throughout the Americas as a particularly rebellious people even though shipboard revolts from the Gold Coast were more infrequent than from other African coastal regions In 1675 Barbadians discovered a plot apparently led by Coromantees who allegedly planned to crown a king in a Chair of State exquisitely wrought and Carved using horns made of elephant tusks and gourds as a mode of communication Sixtyone years later an extensive Antiguan plot seemingly masterminded by Court alias Tackey a Coromantee actually he was a Ga also involved his corona tion as King of the Coromantees The investigation into the plot also uncovered a prominent aged Coromantee obeah man or Wizard named Quawcoo and an Akan ceremonial ikem or shield dance which was inter preted as a formal declaration of war although it might have been as Courts owner maintained an innocent play of Courts country The Antiguan authorities put to death eightyeight slaves and banished forty seven for their alleged role in this plot In 1760 another Coromantee named Tacky led the most serious uprising that the British Caribbean had then experienced It began in northern Jamaica but spread throughout the island It also involved obeah men oaths signals of war such as shaved heads and feathered swords and another coronation this time of Cubah who became queen of Kingston perhaps a role akin to the Queen Mother of the Ashanti The insurgents killed about sixty whites and in turn white Jamaicans killed an estimated three to four hundred slaves in sup pressing the revolt before executing a further one hundred and expelling another five hundred Tackys Bridge became the name of a wellknown crossroads just north of Spanish Town a memorial to the uprisings most prominent military leader Africanled revolts often became the basis for maroon communi ties Withdrawal and flight seemed the only realistic options to many not regime change Once fugitive slaves banded together and sustained Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 400 the cambridge world history of slavery themselves they became true maroons rather than individual and short term runaways whose flight approximated truancy Whether grand or petit maronnage running away was the most common form of slave resistance At any one time one or two slaves per hundred might be absent although perhaps no more than 10 percent of plantation slaves ran away even once in their lives because many escapees were persistent offenders Most ma roon communities whether it was the many hundred rebel Negro slaves in the woods in midseventeenthcentury Barbados or the Severall Runn away Negroes who established a camp in the Shekerley Hills in late seventeenthcentury Antigua were shortlived The notable exceptions were the maroon communities of Jamaica From the midseventeenth cen tury onward two groups of maroons gradually emerged eastern or wind ward bands consisting of remnants of socalled Spanish Negroes and western or leeward bands consisting exclusively of plantation runaways The Leeward maroons coalesced under the leadership of Cudjoe who seems to have been born in the Cockpit country in about 1700 whereas the focal center of the Windward maroons was Nanny Town named after the formidable priestess A constant thorn in the British governments side these maroon groups could not be defeated militarily In 173940 the Jamaican authorities signed treaties granting the maroons a mea sure of autonomy in return for policing and wartime auxiliary support Thus maroons the ultimate symbol of rebellion were eventually forced to accommodate After all they were seriously outnumbered At mid century they were about one thousand persons just under 1 percent of the Jamaican slave population For the most part the posttreaty maroons proved effective allies tracking down slave runaways and rebels adopt ing a Europeanstyle military hierarchy and living in an uneasy symbiosis with their white neighbors This relative harmony came to an end in 1795 when the Maroons of Trelawny Town engaged in one last twoyear war with government troops When they finally surrendered apparently on the understanding that the government would listen to their grievances they were transported to Nova Scotia and later moved on to Sierra Leone Creoles played substantial roles in many of the lateseventeenth and eighteenthcentury revolts but the first to have been entirely led by them seems to have occurred in 1776 in Jamaica Apparently slaves in one parish planned an islandwide insurrection that was timed to break out after a British military unit was dispatched to North America Some whites thought that these slaves had been inspired by the ideals of the Ameri can Revolution Of the 135 tried 17 were executed 45 transported and 62 acquitted There were no other major incidents during the American Revolutionary War in large part because of the steppedup presence of so many soldiers and sailors After the war the British government spent more on the defense of the West Indies than it had spent on all of British America Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 401 before 1776 It took the inspiration of St Domingues massive revolt and the chaos that then ensued to produce further major revolts in Grenada and St Vincent in 17956 These rebellions part of the AngloFrench struggle led by colored planter Julian Fedon in Grenada and paramount chief Joseph Chatoyer of the Black Caribs in St Vincent probably destroyed more lives and property than any other slave uprising in the British Caribbean Only after another two decades did the peacetime contraction of military estab lishments reports of British antislavery agitation a predominantly creole population attuned to these opportunities and the focus for collective consciousness supplied by increasingly influential Christian missionaries provoke new rebellions on Barbados 1816 Demerara 1823 and Jamaica 1831 that led to emancipation The record of slave resistance is therefore mixed Hardly a decade went by in Jamaica without a serious slave revolt whereas many small islands never encountered a single rebellion Barbados saw its first in 1816 and the rebels killed just one white civilian and one black soldier Furthermore the threat of collective resistance seems to have diminished as the slave pop ulation creolized Especially in the older colonies slave revolts occurred less frequently over time Similarly although slave resistance culminated in insurrections or mass desertions more commonly it crystallized as local private struggles for rights and freedom These minor acts of resistance should not be discounted but they never threatened the wider regime Gender as much as geography also added to the variation Men orga nized plots and rebellions even if they drew on the organized support of women The types of resistance most closely associated with women were infanticide abortion and verbal abuse of whites Finally blacks were on the opposite sides of most disputes Whites soon came to repose trust in those they considered loyal slaves Planters relied on active assistance from a minority of trusted slaves to maintain discipline catch runaways and guard crops They used slaves as soldiers in formal corps such as the Black Shot in ad hoc units during emergencies such as a local rebellion or a foreign invasion and routinely as auxiliaries and pioneers During the American Revolutionary War the arming of slaves became extensive The even graver threat posed by the French Revolutionary War led first to slaverecruited ranger regiments under the jurisdiction of local assemblies and then in the mid to late 1790s to the creation of twelve imperial black corps known as the West India Regiments By 1799 the British government decided that onethird of the total British force in the West Indies would consist of black soldiers Between 1795 and 1807 the British government purchased about 10000 Africans as recruits for these regiments Overall 30000 black regulars served If slave resistance was therefore mixed it cer tainly defined the choices available to planters In times of peace they had to sustain local militias or soldiers to discourage rebellion and mass flight Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 402 the cambridge world history of slavery and in times of war they faced the risk of a fight on two fronts against an internal and external enemy impact Still slavery was hardly moribund in the lateeighteenthcentury British Caribbean Indeed during the last years of the eighteenth century the decade of the St Domingue revolution British Caribbean slavery was as one historian notes the most rapidly expanding system in the world More British slaves aided British colonial rule and slave expansion than rebelled against it14 The West India interest was still an influential lobby as the opening of the West India Dock in London in 1802 demonstrated Although absenteeism has been exaggerated in the lateeighteenthcentury British Caribbean it was undoubtedly on the rise especially among the most wealthy sugar planters Their burgeoning wealth making some of them the richest men in the world allowed a minority but a rapidly growing one perhaps about 5 percent of Jamaican landowners but a third of the islands sugar planters on the eve of the American Revolution to live in the metropolis where they transformed sugar profits into political power The West Indies played a central role in the British imperial system its governors for example were the highest paid That Britain launched three great expeditions to the West Indies in the 1790s and lost 62000 men or 70 percent of its forces is another indication of the importance attached to the region and Caribbean wealth sustained this enormous British war effort All this wealth and power rested ultimately on slavery the institution dominated all human relations Slaverys impact on white society had mixed consequences It gave white men the ability to be hospitable and generous Effusive hosts presiding over groaning tables displaying delectable dishes greeted visitors West Indian whites were also inordinately proud of their political rights and liberties Just being white was a badge of privilege and the general fear of blacks helped bind all whites together In some ways then whites shared a considerable measure of solidarity and egalitarianism At the same time the savagery and brutality at the heart of slavery infected everyone Too often children grew up petty tyrants women were excessively callous and men were ostentatious extravagant and selfindulgent As one Jamaican put it The more I see the more I am convinced that every vice and every depravity must exist in a country where Slavery is tolerated He singled out seeing a lady who is admitted to the first circles here herself presiding at the punishment of her waiting maid a young mulatto girl which she had 14 Seymour Drescher Capitalism and Antislavery British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective New York 1987 p 98 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 403 entirely stripped of all clothing and tied to a post while she ordered her own son a boy of 19 years old to handle the cow skin and lacerate her unprotected body How can there be female decency in such circumstances he asked And if the woman could hardly preserve her delicacy the man must turn beast or misanthropist15 This indictment is all the more telling because it came from an insider Of course the late eighteenth century saw slavery come under seri ous attack for the first time but antislavery sentiments it is important to note often had West Indian roots and quite deep ones In the late seventeenth century George Fox preached to slaves in Barbados and even suggested that their terms of bondage be limited to thirty years Puritan Richard Baxters Chapters from a Christian Directory 1673 castigated the African slave trade and those planters who bought slaves Anglican Morgan Godwyn attacked Caribbean slaveholders for not converting their slaves Thomas Tryon an urban tradesman in Barbados for five years in the 1660s wrote polemics twenty years later about the moral vices of slaveowners in which he emphasized the cruelty and violence of slavery He also was one of the first to employ ventriloquism giving voice to the oppressed In 1709 an anonymous person assuming the persona of a Jamaica merchant precociously used naturalrights theory to attack Jamaican slavery vehe mently and coupled it with a speech purportedly from an actual enslaved African who delivered it as funeral oration on Guadeloupe The author of An Essay Concerning Slavery 1757 wanted the slave trade abolished Jamaican planters to be less cruel and the gradual emancipation of some privileged slaves After two decades of failing to persuade plantation owners in his St Kitts parish to endorse the conversion of slaves to Christianity the Reverend James Ramsay an extremely influential figure in the early antislavery campaigns in Britain during the 1780s became committed to slave trade abolition As the antislavery forces strengthened a powerful proslavery counter assault emerged The initial catalyst was Lord Mansfields decision in 1772 in the famous Somerset case making it impossible to return a slave to the colonies against his will which outraged West Indians Edward Long the Jamaican historian Samuel Estwick a Barbadian and Samuel Martin Sr an Antiguan all responded with substantial pamphlets Long and Estwick in particular argued effectively that the principles and practices of British commerce together with English common law traditions as well as colonial slave codes and parliamentary statutes supported Caribbean slavery Martin anticipated an argument that would become typical in the 1780s and 1790s by painting Caribbean slavery in benign terms as a 15 Henry Senior to Feb 22 1815 Nassau Senior Papers in Clare Taylor Aspects of Planter Society in the British West Indies Before Emancipation National Library of Wales Journal 20 19778 3701 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 404 the cambridge world history of slavery deliverance from the cruel slavery of Africa whereas Long and Estwick espoused embryonic racial theories that would crystallize over the next halfcentury Estwick claimed that blacks differed from whites not just in kind but in species whereas Long in his threevolume History of Jamaica engaged in the grossest racial slanders as he contended that blacks were inferior and closely related to apes The writings of white West Indians such as Long Estwick Philip Thicknesse and James Tobin depicted blacks in poisonous ways Finally the impact of slavery on the slaves was also mixed The British Caribbean gave rise to one of the most ruthless savage forms of slavery in world history The sheer loss of life involved in its slave trade and in the inability of most West Indian slave populations to grow naturally was staggering As a system of labor British Caribbean slavery was notable for its productive efficiency but this achievement rested on an almost unimaginable oppression of its workers The sugar regime produced a greater per capita output than almost anywhere else but its intensity and urgency led to a vicious system of labor exploitation At the same time West Indian slaves lived in worlds that were overwhelmingly black they built resilient families and robust communities under the most severe constraints they adopted various strategies to limit the planters power by rebelling escaping and committing suicide and they constructed rich lan guages musical repertories and religious traditions Slavery in the British Caribbean was as one historian puts it physically more cruel and debil itating than in most other places and yet psychologically perhaps less traumatic16 further reading For the rise of slavery in the British Caribbean the reader should begin with a classic work written well over a generation ago but still valuable Richard S Dunn Sugar and Slaves The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 16241713 Chapel Hill NC 1972 It should be supplemented by David Eltis The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas Cambridge 2000 and Russell R Menard Sweet Negotiations Sugar Slavery and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados Charlottesville VA 2006 The best overview of the demography of the British Caribbean is Stanley L Engerman and B W Higman The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Franklin W Knight ed The Slave Societies of the Caribbean vol III General History of the Caribbean London 1997 pp 45104 Also valuable is David Eltis and Paul Lachance The Demographic Decline 16 Dunn Sugar and Slaves pp 2256 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the british caribbean 405 of Caribbean Slave Populations New Evidence from the Transatlantic and IntraAmerican Slave Trades in David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2008 pp 33563 The best overall accounts of the Caribbean economy can be found in Richard B Sheridan Sugar and Slavery An Economic History of the British West Indies 16231775 Baltimore MD 1973 and David Eltis The Slave Economies of the Caribbean Structure Performance Evolution and Significance in Knight ed Slave Societies of the Caribbean 10537 For some excellent essays on sugar and nonsugar see in particular Verene A Shepherd ed Working Slavery Pricing Freedom Perspectives from the Caribbean Africa and the African Diaspora New York 2001 and idem ed Slavery without Sugar Diversity in Caribbean Economy and Society since the 17th Century Gainesville FL 2002 The doyen of Caribbean historians B W Higman has also produced important studies of the major islands plantation system see for example Plantation Jamaica 17501850 Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy Kingston 2005 For the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century J R Ward British West Indian Slavery 17501834 The Process of Amelioration Oxford 1988 is a powerful and provocative study For the social world of Caribbean slavery there are many relevant stud ies On the legal system Elsa V Goveia The West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century Kingston 1970 is still useful but should be sup plemented by Diana Paton No Bond but the Law Punishment Race and Gender in Jamaican State Formation 17801870 Durham NC 2004 For emphasizing creolization Edward Brathwaite The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 17701820 Oxford 1971 still ranks as one of the most innovative works See also David Barry Gaspar Bondmen and Rebels A Study of MasterSlave Relations in Antigua with Implications for Colonial British America Baltimore MD 1985 and Elsa V Goveia Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century New Haven CT 1965 For slave life much can be gleaned from archaeology for examples of which see Jerome S Handler and Frederick W Lange Plantation Slavery in Barbados An Archaeological and Historical Investigation Cambridge MA 1978 B W Higman Montpelier Jamaica A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom 17391912 Kingston 1998 and Laurie A Wilkie and Paul Farnsworth Sampling Many Pots An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition at a Bahamian Plantation Gainesville FL 2005 On language two appealing works are Frederic G Cassidy Jamaica Talk Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica London 1961 and Richard Allsopp ed Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage Oxford 1996 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 406 the cambridge world history of slavery On family particularly the role of slave women see Barbara Bush Slave Women in Caribbean Society 16501838 London 1990 and relevant essays in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine eds More than Chattel Black Women and Slavery in the Americas Bloomington IN 1996 For cultural analysis see Richard D E Burton AfroCreole Power Opposition and Play in the Caribbean Ithaca NY 1997 Vincent Brown The Reapers Garden Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery Cambridge MA 2008 and B W Higman Jamaican Food History Biology Culture Kingston 2008 On resistance the major work is Michael Craton Testing the Chains Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies Ithaca NY 1982 On maroons see Richard Price ed Maroon Societies Rebel Slave Commu nities in the Americas Garden City NJ 1973 and Kenneth M Bilby TrueBorn Maroons Gainesville FL 2005 For the Revolutionary era the standard work is Andrew Jackson OShaughnessy An Empire Divided The American Revolution and the British Caribbean Philadelphia PA 2000 Moving forward see some important essays in David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus eds A Turbulent Time The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean Bloomington IN 1997 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 16 SLAVERY IN THE NORTH AMERICAN MAINLAND COLONIES lorena s walsh Europeans attempting to found colonies on the North American main land encountered an abundance of land and other natural resources and a chronic shortage of labor to exploit them Establishing settlements build ing forts to shelter colonists from hostile Native Americans and rival Euro pean 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 More over 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 Orphans vagrants convicts and war prisoners were also rounded up and shipped to the colonies involuntarily None of these measures proved adequate in the long run Former servants who survived their terms either obtained land of their own or would work for others only for exorbitant wages Moreover the hostile disease environment in the more southerly colonies decimated the ranks of recent immigrants and cut short the lives of more seasoned settlers The Spanish and Portuguese had more than a centurys head start over the Northern Europeans in New World colonization Unable to recruit substantial numbers of fellow countrymen and women to emigrate to their New World colonies the Iberians had turned first to coercing or enslaving the dense Native American populations living in the lands they conquered 407 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 408 the cambridge world history of slavery But increasingly the Iberians resorted to transporting enslaved Africans to work their mainland and Caribbean holdings Puritans on Providence Island during that settlements brief existence between 1630 and 1641 became the first English colony in which African slaves were the primary source of labor the workers acquired through trade with the Dutch and through privateering European colonists on the mainland soon sought to develop their settlements by the same means As one colonist wrote in 1645 I doe not see how wee can thrive untill wee get into a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our business for our childrens children will hardly see this great Continent filled with people soe that our servants will still desire freedome to plant for themselves and not stay but for verie great wages And I suppose you know verie well how we shall mayneteyne 20 Moores cheaper than one Englishe servant1 Ninety years later another colonist similarly maintained that it is morrally impossible that the people can ever gett forward in their setlements or even be a degree above common slaves without the help and assistance of negroes2 The second writer was speaking not surprisingly of Georgia The first however resided not in the West Indies or in Virginia but in Salem Massachusetts Wanting African slaves and getting a supply of them proved however two entirely different matters for the mainland colonists Between 1640 and 1660 English settlers on Barbados shifted from raising tobacco and cotton to growing more lucrative sugar and the ensuing sugar revolution in the West Indies permanently and drastically altered New World labor markets First the Dutch and eventually the English and French contested the Portuguese monopoly of trade with Africa including the trade in slaves The Northern Europeans then concentrated their efforts on supplying slaves to the more lucrative West Indian markets As the sugar revolution spread to other European holdings in the West Indies the focus of Atlantic slave traders shifted further away from the North American mainland The rising demand for slaves drove up their prices Marylands governor Calvert lamented in 1664 Wee are naturally inclind to love neigros if our purses would endure it but I find wee are nott men of estates good enough to take a 100 or 200 neigros every yeare from the Royal African Company3 Planters along the tobacco coast offered too small a market to attract most English traders and the less wealthy Northern mainland 1 Emmanuel Downing to John Winthrop 1645 quoted in Elizabeth Donnan Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade 4 vols New York 1969 III 8 2 Peter Gordon Peter Gordon Journal 17321735 ed E Merton Coulter Athens GA 1963 p 59 quoted in Jeffrey Robert Young Domesticating Slavery The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina 16701837 Chapel Hill NC 1999 p 22 3 Charles Calvert to Cecil Calvert 1664 The Calvert Papers Baltimore 1889 p 249 quoted in David W Galenson Economic Aspects of the Growth of Slavery in the SeventeenthCentury Chesapeake in Barbara L Solow ed Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System Cambridge 1991 p 269 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 409 colonies remained relegated to the far periphery of the transAtlantic slave trade a market of last resort when island markets became glutted they became the dumping ground for refuse Africans too old young or sick to attract West Indian buyers or for seasoned African and creole slaves West Indian masters found too troublesome In Mexico and South America Iberian colonists also lessened their labor shortages by using Indians along with Africans as coerced workers But nowhere in the mainland colonies did enslaved Native Americans form a significant proportion of the bound labor force Conflicts over land foreclosed any chance for amicable relations resident Native American populations initially less dense than those living in the areas conquered by the Iberians were drastically decimated by European diseases and the sur viving Indians would not willingly work for the settlers nor could they be effectively coerced into doing so On the mainland Indians were primarily employed as soldiers slaveraiders and police forces and as hunters and pro cessors of pelts Massachusetts settlers found it expedient to sell most Indi ans captured in the Pequot Wars of the 1630s and King Phillips War of the 1670s in the West Indies as slaves Those retained locally primarily women and children tended to become assimilated into enslaved African popula tions or else were reclassified by the colonists as blacks Virginians enslaved Indians captured during the 1676 Bacons Rebellion and from 1670 to 1715 as many as fifty thousand Indians from the Carolinas and Florida were sold as slaves to the West Indies and to the Northern mainland colonies After the Tuscarora War in the Carolinas 171113 many Northern colonies prohibited the importation of Indian slaves from the south cap tives who proved more troublesome than profitable and certainly inferior to British servants whom the Northern colonists hoped to lure to New England by banning the import of enslaved Indians Briefly in the early eighteenth century Carolinians employed enslaved Indians within their colony as did some Virginia planters along the James and upper York Rivers However following the 1715 Yamasee War trade in southern cap tives ended In most cases mainland colonists treated captured or kidnapped Native Americans primarily as export commodities at a time when they were hard pressed to find other viable products to exchange and they used the profits garnered from the trade in Native American peoples to purchase more readily exploitable African slaves in the West Indies The English governments decision to wage a campaign against Dutch commercial supremacy in the 1650s and 1660s and to prevent the Amer ican colonists from trading with merchants of rival states however cut off the settlers main supply of black workers Subsequent measures insti tuted by the crown granted a monopoly of the African trade first to the Company of Royal Adventurers and later to the Royal African Company RAC Plagued by heavy debts laggard remittances from planters and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 410 the cambridge world history of slavery illegal competition from interlopers these monopoly companies were unable to adequately supply the sugar islands with laborers The RAC sent few ships to the mainland on its own account preferring to contract out the few slaves it shipped to the Chesapeake to private merchants who paid the company a fixed price in London Once Dutch carriers were excluded from English colonial markets wellconnected laborhungry colonists were forced to rely on private arrangements with West Indian merchants to obtain a trickle of slaves from the islands Substantial supplies from the West Indies however awaited the development of provisioning and carry ing trades with the islands a commerce that grew but slowly in most parts of the mainland colonies across the 1600s Some direct shipments were sent from Africa to the Chesapeake beginning in the 1670s However the min imum of around 7500 slaves imported up to the turn of the century were insufficient to offset a decline in European servant emigration in the final quarter of the century A marked shift in labor supply to the mainland colonies began in 1698 when Parliament opened the African trade to all Englishmen upon pay ing the company a 10 percent duty on exports to Africa after 1712 free trade prevailed Bristol merchants began aggressively to contest Londons dominant role in the African trade and by the 1720s Bristol become for a time Britains leading slaving port Some Bristol merchants concentrated entirely on the slave trade but others who had earlier dealt in tobacco and indentured servants exploited commercial connections they had already formed in the Chesapeake colonies to market slaves The supply of slaves to the Chesapeake increased threefold in the first five years of the new century and doubled again by 1725 a shift prompted in part by declining sugar prices in the islands A minimum of twentyfour thousand slaves were imported between 1701 and 1725 Settlers in the newer South Car olina colony began exporting naval stores and growing rice another staple crop in demand in Europe in the 1710s A substantial influx of Africans to the Carolinas followed in the 1720s and ten years later equal numbers of enslaved Africans were marketed in the tobacco and rice colonies By midcentury slave imports to the Chesapeake tapered off for reasons dis cussed later and the Carolinas emerged as the leading market for black laborers until the closing of the transAtlantic trade in slaves in 1808 In the more northerly areas few slaves were brought directly from Africa until the second half of the eighteenth century and then amounted to no more than a few thousand individuals With the exception of New England and the Middle colonies after the 1690s the West Indies were not a major source for mainland slaves Although the number of ships bringing slaves from the islands into the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry greatly outnumbered the number of ships Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 411 bringing slaves directly from Africa vessels involved in the intercolonial trade carried so few captives that these slaves did not amount to more than 10 percent of the total number imported Moreover many of the slaves brought from the islands were new Africans transshipped from overstocked West Indian ports Consequently creolized West African slaves seldom if ever made up a significant proportion of enslaved peoples on the mainland Throughout the mainland colonies it was the provincial and subse quently the lesser local elites who could afford and who first opted to turn to slaves as an important or in the plantation colonies the principal form of bound labor Everywhere planters patroons and major merchants gar nered a disproportionate share of the land These groups were also optimally placed to take maximum advantage of international trading connections and access to credit in Britain that enabled them to buy African workers to develop their vast holdings Moreover as the principal officeholders in their respective colonies they could enact laws securing their rights to human property draft measures to police their chattels and generally manipulate the system to their maximum advantage In Virginia between 1660 and 1690 major officeholders registered nearly threequarters of the headrights claimed for importing blacks In estates of major officeholders inventoried between 1640 and 1669 more than 50 percent included one or more black workers whereas only 6 percent of the inventories of lesser planters mentioned slaves In the last quarter of the seventeenth century 70 percent of elite decedents owned some slaves whereas only 11 percent of ordinary planters held them Similarly in Mary land up to 1720 the transition to slave labor was confined to the richest 20 percent of planters In the Middle and New England colonies the majority of slave owners were merchants professionals and wealthy farmers who produced crops for intercolonial and international export markets rather than for mere subsistence Examples include major merchants in Philadel phia Boston and Newport Hudson Valley manor lords and Pennsylvania proprietor William Penn Especially as in New England where slaves were employed primarily in domestic service and subsistence agriculture even their productive activities served to enhance the marketoriented produc tivity of other household members4 In South Carolina slaves were almost from the outset concentrated on the large plantations of rich planters many of them immigrants from Barbados who brought black laborers with them from the islands Everywhere in the mainland colonies the embrace of slave labor appears to have been a thinking decision initiated by elites adopted in the face 4 Joanne Pope Melish Disowning Slavery Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England 17801860 Ithaca NY 1998 p 20 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 412 the cambridge world history of slavery of erratic and inadequate supplies of European or Native American bound labor Had they truly preferred white servants elites would have been able to monopolize the servant market as effectively as they cornered the initially much smaller market in slaves Slavery however was a strategy that allowed maximum exploitation of workers NonEuropean bound laborers could be denied the legal protections available to European servants They could be forced to work harder and longer than could servants and could be subjected to harsher punishments when they resisted Costs of feeding and clothing slaves could be pared down to the bare minimum required to keep them alive and fit to labor The Africans distinctive appearance made it easier to police their movements and to identify and capture those who ran away And perpetual bondage obviated the need to continually replace workers whose terms of service were completed At first slave owners seem to have thought little about the benefits of natural increase thinking primarily in terms of increasing the ensuing seasons crop rather than of encouraging reproduction as a means for multiplying their initial investment for the benefit of subsequent generations However enslaved Africans especially in the Chesapeake did begin having children The heirs of elites who acquired slaves early in the seventeenth century had a distinct advantage over families whose progenitors purchased slaves later for they could more readily buy additional hands with the profits of the crops the slaves they inherited produced Nonetheless inadequate supplies of slaves along with their continued high prices precluded a wholesale conversion to black labor in the North ern and Middle colonies and rendered the transition to a slave system in the Chesapeake a long drawnout process In most parts of the Chesa peake elites continued to employ racially mixed workforces throughout the seventeenth century Black slaves began to outnumber white servants on the plantations of the Virginia elite in the 1670s and in Maryland by the 1690s But still at the end of the century some servants could be found on most large plantations where they were usually employed as artisans Middling planters relied longer on indentured servants when they could get them but by the 1670s the supply became inadequate to meet the needs of expanding numbers of tobacco growers and their prices were bid up Servant emigration declined still further in the 1680s and 1690s as fewer English men and women opted to move to an area where opportunities for freed men to obtain land and to improve their fortunes were greatly reduced Smaller operators were largely squeezed out of the labor market For example servants could be found in half of Maryland estates worth between thirty and fifty pounds inventoried between 1658 and 1670 but in fewer than 10 percent by the decade ending in 1720 It was not until the third quarter of the century when shipments of British convicts increased that small planters farmers and artisans of modest means were able to buy Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 413 inexpensive European laborers Purchasing a slave was a risky investment for those who could afford only one for if the slave died the family might face financial disaster Across the seventeenth century English colonial elites enacted a patch work of laws to protect their interests in the enslaved human property that they acquired through plunder trade or inheritance Lacking any body of English law that could have been transferred to justify and sus tain slavery colonial lawmakers enacted piecemeal measures in reaction to issues arising from runaways miscegenation manumission conversion to Christianity and blackwhite interactions Slavery received protection in the various colonies as the common course practised among Englishmen to buy negars to the end that they may have them for service or slaves forever5 At first slavery was thought of only as service for life a condition too close to existing practices for European indentured servants to require elaborate definition or justification Establishing hereditary servitude how ever required positive legislation as there could be no contractual basis for this novel requirement Colonial legislatures and courts composed almost entirely of men who were already or hoped soon to become slave owners began in the 1640s and 1650s to restrict blacks rights to carry weapons and to move freely and made African women free or enslaved subject to head taxes Across the remainder of the century in all the colonies laws further secured slave own ers property by declaring that conversion to Christianity did not exempt slaves from bondage made slavery hereditary by ruling that the status of children followed the condition of the mother exempted whites from punishment for accidentally killing slaves while correcting them or when capturing runaways deprived slaves of rights to hold property increased punishments for miscegenation and established arbitrary procedures for punishing slaves accused of committing capital crimes The institution came to be viewed as a special kind of local custom the practice of merchants rather than defined or justified in statutes Ulti mately according to Jonathan Bush the basis for colonial slavery and the explanation for the absence of substantive law directly on the matter lies in the constitutional relationship between the English Crown and its colonies Because all the colonies were under the authority of the crown but not of Parliament almost any local practice could be adopted by or made acceptable to English law Limited royal oversight or interfer ence throughout most of the seventeenth century afforded colonists suffi cient time to develop laws and practices that relegated blacks to a unique and inferior status By viewing Africans as selfevidently different from 5 Rhode Island law of 1652 quoted in Winthrop D Jordan White over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro 15501812 Chapel Hill NC 1968 p 70 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 414 the cambridge world history of slavery Europeans English colonists were able to retain the benefits of common law for themselves while denying similar protection to blacks A cultural predisposition among the English to view darkskinned peo ple as morally and culturally inferior evolved into a more virulent racism that informed and justified increasingly harsh slave codes and that warped interactions and relationships between whites and blacks Initially not all ordinary white colonists shared the attitudes of the elites So long as labor forces remained racially mixed slaves and servants often lived worked ate and socialized together It was at first primarily from interactions with European servants that most Africans learned the languages of their captors and the customs of the communities into which they had been forcibly brought Servants and slaves not infrequently ran away together and lower class whites and blacks traded in stolen goods engaged in consensual sex and more rarely collaborated in attempted revolts that struck fear in the rul ing groups But as servant immigration declined in the plantation colonies interactions between ordinary whites and enslaved blacks diminished In order to guarantee tight control over an expanding enslaved labor force elites had to drive a wedge between laboring whites and blacks In all the mainland colonies the increasing legal debasement of blacks fostered contempt for them throughout white society Although the decision to embrace slave labor as a solution to colonial labor shortages appears to have been a conscious choice the necessity for establishing coercive regimes to support racial slavery had not been antic ipated Lawmakers and judges responded haltingly and largely reactively to secure the colonists investments in human property and to maintain public safety Chattel slavery was not fully institutionalized in the colonies until at the turn of the eighteenth century a regular supply of new slaves became assured Private matters including the regulation and discipline of slaves within households and on individual plantations policies regarding slave marriages and bondspeoples liberty to attend religious services and to receive baptism were left almost entirely to masters Laws dealt primar ily with the policing of slaves in public spaces in the plantation colonies taking the form of slave patrols regulating the movement and congregating of slaves in order to suppress crime deter or capture runaways and prevent or suppress violent insurrections Mainland colonial slavery was thus based on the dual underpinnings of property rights and slave owners right to use virtually unlimited force including whipping dismemberment and death with the sanction of colonial governments Slave owners also devised an evolving series of rationales for justifying holding Africans as slaves The theoretical basis shifted from the contractual conditions under which a laborer entered the colonies to after the 1670s Africans alleged paganism and lack of civilization As African captives adopted more elements of European culture and some became Christians Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 415 elite masters turned to other more elaborate ideologies of social relations to justify their actions casting themselves in the role of metaphorical fathers Scholars generally agree the dominant ideology shifted from one of patri archialism to paternalism sometime in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century However considerable disagreement among them as to the timing of the change variously posited as occurring at the beginning middle or end of the eighteenth century raises questions about the usefulness of such constructs for characterizing colonial masterslave relations Although in theory the slave owners held all the power in practice slaves were not entirely powerless Slaves resisted their captivity by work slowdowns sabotage and running away Everyday interactions between slaves and masters were mediated by local custom and by the customs of particular plantations Such issues as food rations clothing allowances daily tasks hours of work holidays and subsistence gardening and mar keting privileges were established by negotiation assuredly unequal but nonetheless essential for extracting work with a minimum of force Such customary arrangements varied markedly from one region to another For example in the Lower South masters supplied minimal allowances of food and clothing but allowed slaves more leeway for selfprovisioning and more control over the pace of work In the Upper South ownersupplied rations of food and clothing were more generous but slaves were allotted less time for selfsufficient activities and their work was more closely super vised Violence could elicit only so much work and surely not careful work Incentives in the form of extra food or clothing and privileged work assignments were also employed and many slave owners opted to mini mize resistance among their workers by respecting established plantation customs Constant tension characterized the relationship between masters and the enslaved Black resistance forced owners either to use violence to control their workers or to agree to compromises that reduced the profits the owners garnered to unacceptable levels A Virginia minister observed in 1743 that slavery from being an instrument of wealth had become a molding power leaving it a vexed question which controlled society most the African slave or his master6 In the mainland colonies unlike the Caribbean slave revolts were infre quent localized and usually discovered prior to their execution Nonethe less from the 1680s as the importation of Africans increased the specter of violent resistance began to worry colonial officials They feared that blacks gathering in secluded places to celebrate African rituals would use these occasions to plot strategies to escape bondage and in periods of heightened fear they instituted measures to suppress such gatherings 6 Anthony S Parent Jr Foul Means The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia 16601740 Chapel Hill NC 2003 pp 2334 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 416 the cambridge world history of slavery Insurrection scares in Virginia in 1687 1710 1722 and 1730 Connecticut in 1657 Massachusetts in 1690 New York City in 1712 and 1741 New Jersey in 1734 Maryland in 1738 and South Carolina in 1714 1720 and the 1730s culminating in the Stono Rebellion of 1739 elicited cycles of interrogations deportations and executions Levels of fear and repres sion were greatest in the 1730s and 1740s when the proportion of new Africans was high in most of the colonies and concerns about local unrest were compounded by repeated reports of widespread and largerscale slave revolts in the Caribbean Thereafter until the outbreak of the American Revolution organized resistance diminished But even then incidents of murder arson and poisoning continued periodically to heighten fears of servile revolt However the increasing proportion of nativeborn slaves as yet found few reasons to combine with Africans in desperate attempts to overthrow their captors Moreover slave owners found threats of separating slave families a more potent form of control over creole slaves than threats of violence against individuals Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries slavery in New England and the Middle colonies was largely of the domestic variety Most New England and Middle colony farms were smallscale enterprises for which family labor sufficed supplemented in seasons of higher labor demand by shortterm hired workers or with help from neighbors The majority of families who owned slaves owned only one or two The blacks were usually housed in outoftheway spaces in the owners dwelling or in adjoining outbuildings and were employed primarily in agriculture in domestic service as jacksofalltrades and in rural industries Most worked alongside their owners or with other whites More substantial slaveholdings of ten to twenty were found primarily in those areas that could support largerscale and more intensive agriculture such as the Naragansett district in Rhode Island and Hudson River Valley manors or in ironworks Slave labor was even more widely used in Northern cities where gentlemen merchants and artisans employed blacks as carters dockworkers sailors whalers ship carpenters and domestic servants as well as in craft and service industries In urban areas slave ownership was nearly universal among the elite and common among middling householders In counties around New York City blacks constituted a third of the population and half of the workforce In the North decisions to use bound European or enslaved African labor ers often depended on relative prices and supply When war diminished the supply of servants and Africans could be procured northern merchants artisans and farmers had few scruples about buying them The enlist ment of white servants in the military in Pennsylvania during the Seven Years War led employers to make more general use of slaves Farmers of Dutch origin in New York and New Jersey were particularly attached to Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 417 slave labor In New England the enslaved black population grew at about the same rate as the white but slavery expanded in the Middle colonies from the 1740s when increasing integration into transAtlantic markets generated more prosperity increased the demand for labor of all sorts and improved the supply of slaves Slavery scored its greatest gains in the most economically productive portions of the North If not essential to the Northern economy the growth of slavery was both a result of and contributed to improvements in the fortunes of many Northern families Unlike the Chesapeake and Lowcountry no significant reorganization of productive systems resulted especially in New England However by the later eighteenth century slaves were increasingly employed in Northern workshops that had previously been the province of white workers7 Despite the presence of substantial numbers of blacks in cities and com mercial farming districts New England and the Middle colonies remained societies with slaves rather than slave societies Blacks made up only 2 to 3 percent of New Englands population overall only in Rhode Island did they constitute as much as 10 percent in the mideighteenth century Aside from concentrations in port cities and rural areas participating in staple export trades blacks were widely scattered on farms throughout the coun tryside Residential scattering rendered family life difficult to establish and slaves efforts to maintain such family ties as they were able to form were further undercut by slaveholders discouraging bondspeople from marry ing seldom allowing husbands wives and children to live together and extending few visitation rights Masters discouraged procreation usually considering the children enslaved women bore a nuisance to the household rather than an increase of their capital In contrast to the Northern colonies the greater availability of slaves led to a complete transformation of systems of production and of the society in the Chesapeake Slave labor became essential to the functioning of an exportcentered economy and the whole society became engaged in main taining the system Nonslaveholders came to support the institution in part to maintain racial boundaries but perhaps primarily because families who did not own slaves hoped to acquire them The capital requirements for raising tobacco for export and corn for food remained low and there were fewer economies of scale than in other staples such as rice and sugar Bound labor could be employed profitably on small farms as well as on large plantations As a result of the continuing demand for more laborers as tobaccogrowing white households multiplied the black population of the Upper South increased from 20 percent of the whole in 1700 to more than a third in 1750 Importation of African slaves peaked in the second 7 Ira Berlin Many Thousands Gone The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America Cambridge MA 1998 quotations from pp 178 179 180 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 418 the cambridge world history of slavery quarter of the eighteenth century when about forty thousand Africans were brought in Thereafter natural increase of slaves in older tidewater areas obviated the need for large planters to purchase replacement workers Chesapeake slave owners made somewhat greater concessions to accom modate slave families than did Northerners Large planters recognized the advantages of encouraging slaves to marry so that they would be less prone to run away and engage in other forms of violent resistance Natural increase began early on the largest plantations but was slower to appear in the region as a whole due to the continued mass importation of new Africans among whom sex ratios were imbalanced and fertility low and also because of the continued high death rates among black infants and children In the older areas the increasing density of the black population enabled more men and women to find mates on nearby plantations and crossplantation kin networks began to emerge For many slaves multigenerational families rather than fellow countrymen and women or fictive kin became the most important form of community organization The enslaved population of the region was definitely maintaining itself through natural increase by 1720 and by midcentury creoles formed a majority of decisionmaking adults Across the eighteenth century the size of units on which slaves lived also rose However the widespread scattering of slaves on numerous small plantations as well as large planters tendency to divide their holdings into separate work units composed of no more than fifteen to twenty adult laborers continued to make it difficult for some enslaved individuals to find partners and to maintain a stable family life Crossplantation marriages common in the region were more often broken when one of the owners moved or died and resulted in many enslaved children growing up in households where the mother was the only parent regularly present In the third quarter of the century the final quinquennium of their participation in the transAtlantic trade Chesapeake colonists bought an additional thirty thousand African laborers most of them destined to toil in the newer Piedmont areas or on the farms and in the workshops of middling planters and craftsmen No longer having to compete with elites for newly imported slaves planters of more modest wealth began either to buy new Africans or increasingly to purchase nativeborn slaves from their wealthier neighbors Most parents divided their enslaved property relatively equally among their heirs so gifts of human property swelled the ranks of slave owners as children were endowed with slaves either upon marriage or when their parents died Inheritance and local sales rather than the purchase of new Africans became the most common means by which tobacco coast residents obtained slaves Others acquired the use of slaves by short or longterm hiring In the last quarter of the century slave owning spread ever further even more prosperous tenant farmers Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 419 who could not afford to buy land began to acquire slaves By the 1780s in older tidewater counties up to 85 percent of white householders held one or more black laborers Widely diffused ownership led to the continuation of relatively small residential units In the 1730s and 1740s half of all slaves in Virginia lived on estates of ten or fewer slaves and a third still did so in the 1760s and 1770s In the early 1700s only 10 percent lived in holdings of twentyone or more bondspeople and still only a third did so in the 1760s Diffusion rather than further concentration of slaveholding became the general pattern after midcentury in the Chesapeake At the same time slavery also spread geographically Until the middle of the eighteenth century most forced African migrants and their descen dants continued to live in the seaboard areas of the mainland British colonies Beginning in the 1740s Virginia planters developed many new tobacco plantations in the interior Piedmont region By 1755 black men and women over the age of sixteen accounted for 40 percent of the 103318 taxables working in the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley On the eve of the Revolution the proportion had increased to 50 percent Many of the blacks residing in the inland areas were transAtlantic migrants Piedmont planters likely purchased just under half of the estimated fiftynine thou sand Africans imported into Virginia between 1725 and 1755 and almost all of the approximately fifteen thousand newcomers who arrived after 1755 In addition about seventeen thousand largely nativeborn tidewater Virginia slaves were also forced to move to the Piedmont between 1755 and 1782 Some went west to develop new tobacco farms on absentee owned quarters whereas others moved with migrating owners The focus of tobacco agriculture shifted westward and by the end of the Revo lutionary War more Virginia slaves lived in the Piedmont than in the tidewater The internal migration apparently had less devastating demographic results for the black population than had the earlier transAtlantic migra tion In the Virginia Piedmont prior to the Revolution among newly imported Africans proportions of women and children were unusually high Moreover migrating planters took substantial numbers of native born tidewater slave women and children with them As a consequence sex ratios among slaves in the new settlements became relatively balanced within a short time with high rates of reproduction soon following Those slaves who were moved from the tidewater to higher drier inland farms likely benefited from more favorable local disease environments where malaria was less prevalent than in the tidewater In addition more fertile soils in the newer areas permitted at least for a time higher crop yields from less labor than could be obtained in many parts of the older seaboard Prospering Piedmont planters could thus afford to build up their labor forces more quickly than had tidewater planters at the turn of the century Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 420 the cambridge world history of slavery Slavery began slowly and on a small scale in South Carolina as it had in the Chesapeake Into the first decade of the eighteenth century a mix of European servants and Native American and African slaves were set to work at clearing land working in mixed agriculture and raising live stock for export to the West Indies Demand for labor escalated with the development of rice as a lucrative staple export crop In the second quarter of the century Carolinians imported about twentysix thousand Africans Unlike the Chesapeake slaveholding and rice growing in the Lowcountry remained largely confined to the elite Rice plantations required a large capital investment and this staple could be grown profitably only on a large scale By the 1720s more than half of all bondsmen and women lived on estates of planters owning twenty or more slaves by the 1760s eight out of ten resided on such estates and by the 1770s more than half were held in estates of fifty or more The planter elite quickly established economic social and political dominance pushing out small operators consolidating farms into large plantations and eventually turning inland swamps and coastal marshes into huge ricegrowing factories on a scale approaching that of the sugar islands The slave trade came to a virtual halt in the decade following the 1739 Stono Rebellion when the South Carolina legislature imposed a pro hibitively high duty on newly imported Africans and attempted instead to encourage white immigration The pause was but temporary however as any increase in white immigrants failed to materialize and the lure of making money from additional enslaved laborers overcame planters fears of servile revolt By 1750 the primary focus of the transAtlantic slave trade shifted to the Carolinas and the recently settled colony of Georgia The Lowcountry trade was fueled by the expansion of rice into coastal tidal swamps and by the addition of indigo as a second staple both of which further increased the demand for labor Moreover a lethal disease environ ment in which slaves perished at a rate only marginally lower than in the charnel house of the sugar islands meant that workers had to be acquired to replace those who died for a much longer time than was the case in the Chesapeake The Georgia proprietors intended that colony to serve as a buffer protecting South Carolina from Spanish Florida and strong Native American confederations to the west Their plan to people the new settlement with white yeoman farmers however produced few settlers and little economic development Once a prohibition on slaveholding was removed in 1750 South Carolina planters flooded into the region stark Mad after Negroes to develop more rice plantations The Carolinas and Georgia absorbed more than sixtyeight thousand new Africans in the next twentyfive years double the number transported to the Chesapeake The shift in the geography of the slave trade was accompanied by a shift in suppliers By midcentury Liverpool surpassed Bristol as the premier Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 421 British slaving port Fewer Liverpool merchants were directly involved in staple trades than were Bristol or London slave merchants and they tended to direct shipments to the most promising colonial labor markets American slave traders primarily operating out of Newport Rhode Island also began supplying the Lowcountry with captive Africans Unlike the Chesapeake trade which was dispersed among all the regions major rivers almost all African captives were funneled through a single port Charleston which became the mainlands largest transatlantic slave market8 Since few whites chose to migrate to the notoriously unhealthy and elitedominated Lowcountry by 1700 blacks made up more than 40 per cent of the population and by 1720 were nearly twothirds a proportion maintained up to the Revolution White indentured servants never formed a substantial group in South Carolina and consequently contacts between blacks and lowerclass whites were few By 1790 in the coastal parishes around Charleston more than 70 percent of householders held slaves and nearly a third owned more than twenty The planter elite retreated to coastal cities especially Charleston in the malarial season further distanc ing themselves from most of their slaves whom they managed through a cadre of stewards overseers and black drivers However even Lowcountry cities had substantial black workforces engaged in maritime craft and service sectors In Charlestown blacks were half its population of twelve thousand on the eve of the Revolution and the proportion engaged in skilled labor steadily rose Lowcountry urban slaves including a sizeable proportion of mixed race enjoyed special standing and like their masters sought to distance themselves from the black majority in the countryside The Lowcountry thus became transformed into a slave society much like those of the sugar islands As Ira Berlin has put it The demand for slaves was greater the importation of Africans more massive and degradation of black life swifter and deeper in South Carolina and Georgia than in any other mainland region Substantial black majorities emerged in the coastal areas physically separated and psychologically estranged from the EuropeanAmerican world and culturally closer to Africa than any other black people in continental North America Lowcountry slaves spoke creole languages rather than a dialectical form of Standard English and retained more elements of African cultural and religious practices Slavery was slower to spread geographically in the Lowcountry than in the Chesapeake It was not until midcentury that migrants from Pennsyl vania Virginia and North Carolina flooded into South Carolinas Pied mont region These predominantly ScotchIrish settlers lacked the wealth of coastal planters and only the more substantial among them began by the 1760s to acquire and use slaves for the production of commercial crops 8 Ibid p 144 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 422 the cambridge world history of slavery of indigo tobacco hemp and wheat and in raising livestock for export Dependent on Lowcountry merchants who were tied economically and socially to wealthy rice and indigo planters for their supply backcountry settlers were not able to purchase as many slaves as they wanted In the third quarter of the century more than half of inventoried Piedmont decedents owned no slaves and even wealthy estates averaged only eight laborers in more remote areas and nineteen in counties closest to the coast By 1790 the enslaved made up about a third of the population of the lower Pied mont but the majority of householders still farmed without slave labor The upper Piedmont remained a region of small farmers most of whom held no slaves Due to the slow geographic spread of slavery in the Lowcountry enslaved peoples there continued to live primarily on large units and were more likely to be kept together because Lowcountry planters distributed them among fewer heirs Consequently the odds for maintaining family ties improved and coresident twoparent families were more common than in the Chesa peake However given the more deadly disease environment the harsher work regimes that rice culture entailed and less nutritionally adequate diets natural increase did not begin in South Carolina until the 1750s at the earliest Reproduction among Lowcountry slaves became sufficient in the third quarter of the century to replace the existing workforce but was not sufficiently robust to sustain the spread of slavery into households of lesser wealth or geographic expansion Initially mainland colonists everywhere bought Africans primarily to perform the heavy largely unskilled labor required to clear land and to build farms Subsequently most of the enslaved worked in the fields rais ing subsistence and staple crops Given the abundance of land and shorter supplies of labor and capital farmers tended to practice extensive rather than intensive agriculture especially in the Chesapeake Most slaves cul tivated the land with hoes rather than plows and processed grain with mortars and flails The nature of the slaves labor differed from one region to another shaped in the plantation colonies by the seasonal cycles of the staple crops they tended and by customary modes of labor organization adopted at the point in time when blacks first predominated in the work force Northern slaves were set to a variety of tasks that they performed either working alongside their owners or other whites or else singly or with one or two others with minimal oversight Tasks were divided along the same gendered lines adopted by whites with men assigned to heavier outside farm work and women to domestic chores in and around the house such as gardening and dairying In the Chesapeake working arrangements were similar to those of the more northerly colonies for slaves living on smallholdings However those residing on larger plantations were increasingly subjected to regimented Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 423 gang labor under the direct and close supervision of white overseers Both women and men were routinely put to work in the fields and adults of both sexes were expected to raise equal amounts of tobacco and corn Children were put to work alongside their parents by the age of nine or ten The workday extended from sunrise to sunset and often into the night six days a week leaving most slaves only Sundays free to cultivate their gardens Lowcountry slaves in contrast were required to perform a set amount of work each day Once they had completed their task they were free to work their provision grounds or to hunt or fish White oversight was more sporadic and less intrusive but an unhealthy environment and scanty rations of food and clothing forced Lowcountry slaves to work no less hard and often harder than their counterparts in the Chesapeake As in tobacco in the Lowcountry enslaved women had the same days work as the man in the planting and cultivating of the fields9 As the mainland colonial economies matured and became more com plex slave labor also began to be used in more diverse activities The third quarter of the eighteenth century saw marked changes in character and intensity of the work slaves were forced to perform a result of both the diversification and expansion of transAtlantic commerce and of changes in the composition of the enslaved population In the Northern colonies slave labor played an important role supporting expanded maritime commerce in fishing and whaling in favored areas in the raising of food and livestock for the West Indian trade and in the production of substitutes for imported manufactured goods In the Chesapeake slaves were employed on larger plantations raising surplus corn and wheat for export to southern Europe and the West Indies in addition to growing the regions staple Instead of substituting grains for tobacco planters sought to maintain or increase plantation revenues by using plows and draft animals to expand grain pro duction and forced the enslaved to work longer hours and more intensively year round Acculturated nativeborn slaves were also more often trained as country artisans and were increasingly employed as carpenters coopers blacksmiths shoemakers boatmen and wagoners On the tobacco coast their labor supplemented that of free white indentured servants and con vict craftsmen and service workers In the Carolinas slaves work also intensified as big rice planters shifted from growing rice in upland swamps to heavily capitalized lowland tidalirrigated fields The labor required to maintain the irrigation systems was immense as was the work required to process the greatly augmented yields Some large and middling planters also added indigo to their crop mix a combination that again intensified work requirements And given the shortage of free or indentured white 9 Philip D Morgan Slave Counterpoint Black Culture in the EighteenthCentury Chesapeake and Lowcountry Chapel Hill NC 1998 p 196 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 424 the cambridge world history of slavery workers in the Lowcountry slaves became the main source of craft and service workers both in the port cities and on plantations Colonial buyers sometimes expressed preferences for Africans from par ticular regions or from particular ethnic groups whom they prized for supposed traits of stature strength or tractability or for their expertise in raising important staple crops such as rice However international trading networks between merchants in particular English African and main land ports trade conditions in the predominant West Indian markets local market size and seasonal transAtlantic trading patterns seem to have determined the provenance of the Africans slave traders sent to mainland markets Sometimes the slaves supplied matched stated planter preferences as in the shipping of captives from Sierra Leone to ricegrowing regions of the Lowcountry in the third quarter of the eighteenth century More often however mainland colonists had to accept captives from those regions of Africa in which their British or American suppliers were currently trading Slaves from different African regions were not however randomly mixed in mainland receiving areas as has often been believed As we have seen the bulk of slave imports into the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry were concentrated in relatively brief periods and involved primarily a limited number of carriers operating from one or two predominant European ports The supplies of slaves offered for sale in Africa also varied from place to place over time These patterns tended to produce concentrations of new Africans from a limited number of geographic areas and often from a limited number of ethnic groups in mainland receiving areas Captives from the Bight of Biafra and secondarily from West Central Africa were concentrated in tidewater Virginia whereas slaves from Senegambia made up a larger percentage of those sent to Maryland South Carolina slaves came primarily from Greater Senegambia and West Central Africa Concentrations of peoples from one or two sending regions likely afforded more possibilities for retaining and adapting more elements of African cultures than has often been posited Nonetheless the extent to which rapid creolization assimilation into the dominant EuroAmerican culture or retention of African ways prevailed remains a muchdebated subject Comparisons and contrasts between the circumstances that Africans and their descendants encountered in the Northern colonies the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry are employed to explain differing demographic and cultural outcomes In the North ern colonies for example blacks were a distinct minority in the pop ulation widely dispersed in smallholdings and in daily interaction with whites These circumstances likely necessitated greater adaptations of Euro American culture than in the Chesapeake where by the mideighteenth century one in three residents was black and especially than in the Lowcountry where two out of three residents were Africans or African Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 425 Americans The proportion of Africans among the enslaved population however did not follow a continuum from North to South The earlier onset of natural increase among Chesapeake blacks accompanied by a decline in new imports in the third quarter of the eighteenth century resulted in a black population on the eve of the Revolution in which nine out of ten had been born in the region Interactions with nativeborn slaves rather than with whites became the primary means by which new Africans were acculturated around the turn of the century likely speeding their adoption of a creolized culture In contrast continued massive importa tion of new Africans into the Lowcountry between 1750 and 1774 and an influx of Africans into the North whose presence seems to have awakened Northern blacks to their African origins may account for the evidence of more Africaninfluenced culture that observers recorded in both the North and in the Lowcountry in the final years of the century The struggle for independence from Britain severely challenged the institution of slavery in the mainland colonies Their economies were badly disrupted sometimes by actual warfare but more often by the closing of transAtlantic and intercolonial markets Unable to export slaveproduced tobacco rice and indigo or to trade agricultural products and lumber with southern Europe and the sugar islands planters shifted their workers into selfsufficient activities raising more grain and fiber crops and setting them to the manufacture of previously imported cloth tools and salt Denied income from sales of staple crops customary supplies of European cloth and metalwares and West Indian rum the provisioning of slave workforces posed grave difficulties Planters responded by relaxing work requirements and giving the slaves more time to raise their own food Maintenance of local order was an even greater problem The state authority on which slave owners relied to keep slaves in subjection could no longer be taken for granted At the outset of the war Virginias Governor Dunmore promised freedom to slaves who would fight with the British a strategy that threatened to deprive slaveholders of their most valuable property and worse opened the prospect of slave insurrections Through out the colonies slaves men women and children took desperate chances to escape to British lines Many more took advantage of general disorder to run away The war forced both Patriots and Loyalists to employ slaves in ways that compromised their owners authority In the Middle and Southern colonies slaveholders feared that the enlistment of blacks in Loyalist militias might result in an internal armed rebellion Patriots eventually also armed their slaves and offered some of them freedom in return for military service Southern blacks ran in large numbers to join British or French forces or to find refuge in the Carolina backcountry and Britishheld Florida Estimates of the number of wartime runaways vary widely The most conservative estimate is roughly twenty thousand Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 426 the cambridge world history of slavery others range from eighty to one hundred thousand At the wars end more than three thousand blacks left with the British forces evacuating New York City Some few went to England but most initially migrated to Nova Scotia subsequently many of these refugees established expatriate African American settlements in West Africa The number of involuntary migrants was even greater In order to prevent largescale slave desertions during the war many coastal Southern masters forcibly moved their slaves from vulnerable lowlands to more remote upcountry districts At the wars end thousands of Southern blacks who were the property of Loyalist slave owners were forced to leave the country with their owners the majority were transported to the West Indies especially to Jamaica and the Bahamas Others who had escaped to or been taken up by British forces were resold into slavery somewhere in the islands Those slaves who remained soon embraced the Patriot ideology of lib erty and universal equality a revolutionary doctrine that once proclaimed could not be contained Wartime disruptions and the retreat to subsistence activities increased the slaves autonomy and what they had gained they were loath to give up when planters attempted to resume business as usual at the wars end Stewards and overseers widely reported that their workers had become more insolent and discontented laboring more grudgingly under the conviction that they too were entitled to freedom Until the middle of the eighteenth century few colonists aside from Quakers questioned the morality of holding slaves The coming of the American Revolution ended unthinking acceptance of chattel slavery Many former colonists recognized the incompatibility between Revolu tionary ideals and continuing to embrace slavery As part of the colonists strategy of resistance to Parliament in 1774 and 1775 individual colonies ceased importing new Africans In the Northern and Middle colonies public opinion quickly turned against the institution and many Chesa peake residents began to question it as well influenced by a combination of political egalitarianism and the growing influence of Protestant evangel icals Measures for ending slavery were debated everywhere to the north of the Carolinas and at the end of the war restrictions on manumission were relaxed In New England and the Middle colonies programs for ending slavery were adopted either by the courts or by the state legislatures enacting schemes for gradual emancipation Northern slave owners retained suffi cient political power to forestall uncompensated loss of their human prop erty Nonslaveowning citizens however were unwilling to pay taxes to reimburse the slaveholding minority Compromises were forged by which adult slaves were freed only after additional years of service and their chil dren were obliged to serve as unpaid apprentices into their midtwenties Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 427 more than compensating owners for the expenses of raising them Thus in the end it was the victims of enslavement who bore the costs of their own manumission The road to freedom in the North became a long jour ney that was immensely costly to black families As a result of gradual emancipation and apprenticeship requirements most black families were for years composed of individuals of whom some were free some enslaved and others quasienslaved apprentices It remained extremely difficult for husbands wives and children to live together much less to establish inde pendent households and for black parents to retain custody of their off spring The process of emancipation dragged on for decades in many states and for generations in some giving Northern whites ample time to devise other means for keeping blacks economically and socially subordinate In the Chesapeake the number of slaves lost in the war amounted to only a small fraction of the enslaved population losses that prolific natural increase would soon make up Finding themselves with no shortage of bound labor planters were content not to resume the international slave trade that had already been winding down before the outbreak of the Revolution Indeed slave owners in older tidewater areas were facing a need either to send surplus workers to new plantations in the West or else to pare down their workforces by selling off surplus slaves Immediately after the war Chesapeake elites seriously debated whether or not to continue slavery In the end programs for a general emancipation stood no chance of success for no politically feasible means could be found for compensating the slaveholding majority for their losses Even gradual emancipation with enslaved bearing most of the costs by gaining freedom only at the close of their productive years and their children relegated to a similar period of servitude proved unpalatable to the majority of slave owners For a time restrictions on private manumission were lifted and after the war numerous masters began freeing at least some of their slaves Other bondspeople especially enslaved artisans working in the booming cities of Baltimore Richmond and Norfolk were able to purchase their freedom The free black population of the Upper South grew rapidly In 1800 more free blacks lived in the Chesapeake than in any other region by 1810 nearly one in four Maryland blacks was free as were almost one in ten in Virginia This rapid expansion of free people of color challenged the equation of people of African descent with enslavement and began to alarm whites The enlarged free black population enhanced the ability of fugitive slaves to successfully escape and moreover actively encouraged and aided runaways Unwilling to extend full rights of citizenship to free blacks or to incorporate them into the larger society legislators again tightened manumission requirements in order to stem the increase in freed men and women The pace of manumissions slowed and the promise of freedom came to be employed both as a means to end slavery and a means to extend Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 428 the cambridge world history of slavery its life10 Eventual freedom became more often contingent on additional years of service or on selfpurchase and in Baltimore a market emerged in slavesservingforalimited termwho wereconsequentlycheaperto buyElite whites became convinced that programs for a general emancipation would have to be accompanied by even more expensive schemes for resettling freed blacks outside the region either sending them back to Africa or to the far frontier Other Chesapeake slave owners ever more committed to perpetuating chattel slavery found ways to make the institution more flexible hiring out slaves to work in agriculture in cities and in industries apprenticing youths to trades or allowing those with skills to work on selfhire Great planters further diversified their farming operations transferring slaves between quarters to optimize their labor and introducing new managerial techniques to rationalize production and increase the profitability of their estates11 The economy of the Upper South recovered more slowly after the war than planters had hoped but by 1790 a combination of agricultural diversification growing urban markets more flexible use of slave labor the spread of tobacco culture beyond the Appalachians and sale of surplus slaves to the Lower South ensured the continued economic viability of slavery in this region Economic motives were however not the only reason behind Chesa peake slaveholders attempts at the turn of the nineteenth century to reassert and tighten control over the enslaved majority of the region As blacks hopes for benefiting from the promise of Revolutionary ideals faded new insurgencies followed In addition to individual acts of resistance and evi dence of growing general restiveness the 1790s also produced a sharp increase in reported slave conspiracies some believed to be inspired by the successful slave revolt in Saint Domingue Gabriels conspiracy involving slaves in and around Richmond in 1800 followed a year and a half later by another insurrection scare along the James River along with unrest and rumors of slave conspiracies in the Lowcountry revealed the continuing need to employ vigilance and sometimes violent measures to maintain the slave society Although the American Revolution led to the gradual abolition of slavery in the former Northern colonies and the ending of the importation of new Africans into the Chesapeake the mass exodus of slaves from the Lower South almost a quarter of the preRevolutionary slave population created a severe labor shortage that could not be compensated for either by natural increase or by buying slaves from the North South Carolina and Georgia planters were adamant about overcoming it by resuming the African slave trade as soon as peace was declared Fearing for a time the destabilizing 10 Berlin Many Thousands Gone p 279 11 Ibid p 268 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the north american mainland colonies 429 effects of the resulting influx of slaves some from the West Indies likely infected revolutionary fervor the Lowcountry states for a time in the late 1780s and 1790s halted the transAtlantic trade but they resumed it with a vengeance from 1803 to its legal end The constitutional compromise that sanctioned the continuance of the trade up to 1808 provided a loophole for the importation of more than sixtyfour thousand additional Africans into the Carolinas and Georgia and at least two thousand into the Mississippi Delta between 1783 and 1808 Resumption of the international slave trade in the Lowcountry was accompanied by further spread of slavery geographically Even before the peace treaty was signed white planters and small farmers resumed expansion into the Southern backcountry Prefiguring more substantial outmigration across the next three decades during the 1780s migrating lowland planters took familyowned slaves into Kentucky Tennessee and Spanish Louisiana Some cashstrapped tidewater Chesapeake slave owners also began selling surplus slaves to professional slave traders for eventual resale in the West Many South Carolina and Georgia slaves were also forced to move into the backcountry after the war In South Carolina for example more than 90 percent of that colonys slaves were located in the low country in 1760 By 1810 almost half lived farther upcountry Similarly in 1775 twothirds of Georgias slaves lived within twenty miles of the coast but by 1790 more than half resided in the backcountry Migration in the Lower South was fueled by the emergence of cotton as a viable staple crop in the Carolina backcountry between 1790 and 1800 The familiar pattern of dispossession of Native Americans in the Southern territories and of large slaveowning planters pushing out small subsistence farmers soon ensued Profits from cotton afforded backcountry and migrating lowland planters the resources with which to buy more enslaved laborers For a short time they were supplied with new Africans until the legal ending of that commerce and for some few years thereafter in part by slaves smuggled in illegally At the turn of the nineteenth century it was the new cotton South and Louisiana that emerged as the prime market for slaves one that was eventually supplied internally by forced migrants from the Upper South The resurgence of the transAtlantic slave trade in the Lower South after the Revolution the acquisition of slaves by tidewater and backcountry farmers who had previously not participated in slave owning and the extension of slavery into newly acquired southwestern territories after the war guaranteed the continuance of slavery in the mainland South The ending of the international slave trade in 1808 had no longterm impact on slaverys advance for natural increase soon became sufficient to supply new Western markets It did however have significant implications for the development of African American society on the mainland With no further Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 430 the cambridge world history of slavery additions of new captive Africans an increasingly creolized nativeborn population emerged whose members began to develop a more uniform African American culture and to adopt a common African American identity The slaveholding classes were forced to find new justifications to bolster their peculiar institution justifications based solely on race rather than on purported African cultural failings such as paganism and lack of civilization Meanwhile in the Northern states a new wave of European immigration began to satisfy that regions demand for cheap labor Support among Northern whites for a national solution to the problem of slavery evaporated as hostility toward emancipated blacks within their own region intensified Northern leaders lamely hoped that with the ending of the international trade slavery in the South would wither and die Instead in the Chesapeake proposals for a general emancipation fell on increasingly deaf ears as the estimated costs of compensation for slave owners and wholesale resettlement of freed men and women soared to infeasible heights Lowcountry leaders vehemently rejected the idea of a wholesale emancipation Although they acquiesced to ending the importation of foreign slaves they began to take measures to isolate the region from antislavery advocacy and to defend human bondage as a positive good rather than a necessary evil Meanwhile the inexorable march of slavery westward and the rise of cotton and sugar as new staples proceeded unabated setting the stage for inevitable conflict between North and South Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 17 SLAVERY IN THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN 16351804 laurent dubois 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 SaintDomingue 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 SaintDomingue and the creation of Haiti As a direct result of this the recently reacquired 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 Lawrence1 Although the past of slavery continues to shape contemporary culture in these three areas in important ways for a long time the history of slavery was little discussed in metropolitan France even in academic circles That has changed in recent years in part thanks to the commemorations of Frances two emancipation decrees that of 1794 and that of 1848 The events in 1998 included the placing of plaques to the Caribbean heroes Toussaint Louverture and Louis Delgres in the nations Pantheon of heroes Nevertheless there is a need for a more sustained investigation and debate about the broader significance of the history of slavery in the French 1 For an analysis of the bureaucratic structures of the French empire in the Americas and beyond see Kenneth Banks Chasing Empire Across the Seas Communication and the State in the French Atlantic 17131763 Montreal 2002 431 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 432 the cambridge world history of slavery Americas both to other societies in the Atlantic world and to the history of metropolitan France This chapter begins with an examination of the development of the different colonies in the French Americas and an overview of the changes in governance and economy that took place within them from the early seventeenth through the late eighteenth centuries It then examines the evolution of legal administrative structures and the social order in the colonies with a particular focus on slave life in the Caribbean colonies It concludes with a few broad comparisons between the French Americas and the other slaveholding empires in the region i In the first decades of the seventeenth century permanent French settle ments were created in Quebec eventually expanding westward into the Great Lakes region The colony of New France evolved primarily through relationships between French settlers and missionaries and Native Amer icans into a society based less on largescale settlement than on the fur trade The French depended extensively on Native American groups in their pursuit of the fur trade and these alliances shaped the practice of slavery in the colony From the earliest years of the colony diplomacy between the French and Native Americans involved the indigenous prac tice of exchanging captives who were usually individuals captured in wars Captives were often used to repay or cover the losses a group suffered in warfare but though they were often subject to brutal treatment they also often ended up being adopted into the communities in which they lived and being treated as equals2 But in the colony of New France the trading and ownership of individ uals was shaped not only by indigenous practices but also by the particular exigencies of colonial settlement As indigenous captives became increas ingly coveted by French settlers looking for labor the demand for captives sometimes drove conflict rather than only resulting from it In 1709 the French administration in the colony legalized Indian slavery guaranteeing owners complete property rights over those they owned creating a juridical context for enslavement that was similar to that in other Atlantic societies and in the decades until the loss of the colony many indigenous people were enslaved Indian slavery in New France however was never racial ized in the same way as the enslavement of people of African descent was elsewhere and free indigenous people vastly outnumbered those enslaved 2 For an excellent overview of French colonization in North America see Gilles Havard and Cecile Vidal Histoire de lAmerique francaise Paris 2003 pp 47980 On Indian slavery see Brett Rushforth A Little Flesh We Offer You The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France The William and Mary Quarterly 60 2003 777808 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 433 throughout the history of the colony This contrasted with the treatment of slaves of African descent in New France in the 1740s the governor in response to the arrival of increasing numbers of black slaves some of them runaways declared that all negroes were slaves a policy that was a marked departure from the policy in other French colonies in the Americas where free people of African descent were accepted3 The French colonies in North America in contrast to the British colonies attracted comparatively small numbers of settlers A maximum of 70000 settlers departed for French Canada with another 7000 to French colonies in Acadia Ile Royale and Terre Neuve Louisiana mean while received no more than 7000 settlers during its time as a French colony with about 6000 slaves arriving during the same period Many more French settlers meanwhile went to the French Caribbean though no historian has established a precise figure about this migration Some have estimated as many as 300000 over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries although that number is probably too high and the total may have been as low as 1000004 From Canada French travelers journeyed further and further south along the Mississippi over the course of the seventeenth century In 1699 the French established a small settlement at Biloxi populated by settlers from Canada and the Caribbean laying claim to the territory they called Louisiana During its first decades the colonys population remained very small in 1717 there were four hundred settlers there Then the territory was taken over by the Company of the Indies which oversaw a rapid expansion of the colony through the construction of indigo and rice plantations With royal encouragement they brought European indentured laborers many of them convicts and deserters for whom shipment off to Louisiana was an alternative to prison as well some incorrigible individuals deported at the request of their families Women from orphanages were also brought to the colony Many Europeans however considered deportation to Louisiana tantamount to a death sentence and in 1720 prisoners who were about to be sent to the colony rioted and the king stopped further deportations Of the 7000 Europeans sent to the colony through deportation only 2000 were left in 1726 If New Orleans did not turn out to be the kind of settler colony that the French crown hoped it would be it did succeed in becoming something extremely important a center for merchants and trade that connected the interior of North America to the expanding economies 3 See Rushforth Origins and his dissertation Savage Bonds Indian Slavery and Alliance in New France PhD dissertation UC Davis 2003 4 On French emigration to Canada see Leslie Choquette Frenchmen into Peasants Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada Cambridge 1997 p 279 Havard and Vidal LAmerique francaise pp 139 164 On the early history of the French Caribbean see Philip P Boucher France and the American Tropics to 1700 Baltimore MD 2008 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 434 the cambridge world history of slavery of the Caribbean notably Cuba and the Gulf Coast of Mexico This world of trade was largely illicit constantly breaking the rules set by the French crown as well as other empires and largely for this reason was both very profitable and very important for the expansion of the economy in the region5 In contrast to Canada Louisiana came to have a significant population of African slaves The Company of the Indies used its foothold in Senegal to import African slaves into Louisiana bringing 6000 between 1719 and 1731 Arriving in the colony many of these Africans found themselves enslaved alongside Native Americans and sometimes the two groups collaborated in resisting their masters As in Canada the French in Louisiana depended a great deal on Native American allies sowing ties with the Choctaw as well as other groups but they also had consistent conflict with the Natchez Repeatedly rebellious African slaves notably individuals from the largest group of Africans in the colony the Bambara joined up with the Natchez in fighting the French notably during a 1729 attack on a French settlement In 1731 Bambara slaves organized a largescale conspiracy to rise up against the French but it was discovered and crushed before it began Native American and African resistance contributed to the stalling of Louisianas economic development The Company of the Indies facing bankruptcy handed the colony back to the French crown which did little to develop the colony in the next decades When it was ceded to Spain in 1763 there were 4730 Africans and 3000 Europeans in the colony This population played a central part in shaping the culture and institutions of Louisiana under Spanish and then US rule in the decades to follow notably in developing a rich practice of AfroCatholicism in which women of African descent played a central and defining role6 ii The heart of the French colonial empire during the eighteenth century however was the Caribbean The centrality of the Caribbean within the French Atlantic is well illustrated by a debate that took place at the end of the Seven Years War The British had occupied several French Caribbean colonies during the conflict including Guadeloupe Guadeloupe had been relatively neglected by the French imperial administration for the first half of the eighteenth century but the British occupiers put a great deal 5 See Shannon Dawdy Building the Devils Empire French Colonial New Orleans Chicago IL 2008 on slavery in Louisiana 6 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall Africans in Colonial Louisiana The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century Baton Rouge LA 1992 Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould The Feminine Face of AfroCatholicism in New Orleans 17271852 The William and Mary Quarterly 59 2002 40948 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 435 of energy into expanding its plantation economy They imported huge numbers of slaves in fact British slavers brought more people directly to the island during four years of occupation than French slavers did over the course of the entire eighteenth century and created new plantations as well as a major new port PointeaPitre which became the economic capital of the island When negotiations for peace began a debate erupted among both British and French commentators about the relative value of Canada versus the small island of Guadeloupe The position of a number of leading figures on both sides of the imperial divide was that the Caribbean colony was of much more interest for their empires than all of Canada The startling difference in territorial size between the two colonies was more than compensated for they argued by the massive economic productivity of this island It was much easier furthermore to assert political control over the residents of the island than over the residents of the sprawling territory of Canada The French ultimately got what many considered the winning end of the bargain they retained Guadeloupe rather than Canada France like Britain began its colonial expansion into the Caribbean through piracy against the Spanish The famous boucaniers buccaneers so named because of their assimilation of a Taino method for smoking the beef they hunted who settled on Tortuga and the nearby coasts of Hispaniola in the seventeenth century lay the foundation for the colony of SaintDomingue The illegal settlement there gradually evolved from a sanctuary for pirates into a zone of smallscale cultivation of tobacco and provisions The French sent a governor there in 1664 and began recruit ing settlers from France The Spanish having tacitly accepted the French presence in the territory which they had essentially abandoned for decades officially ceded the western portion of Hispaniola to the French in 16977 SaintDomingue was to become the center of the French Caribbean but its foundation postdated that of several settlements in the Eastern Caribbean In 1625 a small group of French settlers sent by Cardinal Riche lieu arrived on the small island of St Christopher The previous year a British settlement had been created on the same island but the two groups partitioned the island with the French occupying both extremities and the British in the center It was not long however before the French settlers began thinking of expanding to other nearby islands In 1635 Richelieus newly formed Compagnie des Indes dAmerique funded colonization mis sions in Martinique and Guadeloupe On both islands relationships with 7 On the early colonization in the Caribbean by the French see Boucher France and the American Tropics on which I draw in the next paragraphs I present an overview of the history of Guadeloupe in A Colony of Citizens Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean 17871804 Chapel Hill NC 2004 and of the early history of SaintDomingue in Avengers of the New World The Story of the Haitian Revolution Cambridge MA 2004 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 436 the cambridge world history of slavery the Caribs quickly deteriorated within a few decades the French had expelled most Caribs from both islands The French also occupied the small islands of St Barthelemy and St Martin which they partitioned with the Dutch The French also eventually gained control of Tobago and a part of the Guianas known then as Cayenne from the Dutch In 1650 the French lay claim to St Lucia and Grenada as well as St Croix In 1660 in an attempt to still continuing war with the Caribs in the region the British and French jointly agreed in negotiation with Carib leaders that the indigenous groups would be allowed to remain on two reserve islands Dominica and St Vincent The agreement stipulated that European colonists would not settle on these two islands In fact however French settlers soon moved onto St Vincent though they generally managed to maintain a peaceful relationship with the Caribs particularly the large group of Black Caribs that emerged from the mixing of indigenous communities with escaped slaves of African descent Indeed during the Seven Years War the two groups joined together to fight against the British Over the course of the eighteenth century St Vincent St Lucia and Grenada switched hands between the British and the French repeatedly and only after the revolutionary wars of the 1790s did they remain firmly in British hands Frances other colonies in the Eastern Caribbean Martinique and Guadeloupe also went through repeated periods of British occupation the last of them in the early nineteenth century When they were first set up in the seventeenth century the colonies of Martinique Guadeloupe and St Christopher were run by a corporation called the Compagnie des Iles dAmerique Then in 1664 another com pany the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales gained a monopoly of French Caribbean commerce These companies granted concessions to settlers who created a growing number of plantations during the seventeenth cen tury while a steady stream of white engages indentured laborers and slaves were brought in to work on them In 1655 there were 13000 whites and 10000 African slaves in the French Caribbean colonies The Companys control of the colonies ended in 1674 when it was dissolved by the royal government which took over the direct administration of the colonies During the seventeenth century a relatively diversified plantation econ omy existed in the Caribbean islands There were small plantations focused on the production of provisions for local consumption and tobacco for export Tobacco was an attractive crop in the French Caribbean as else where because it required little capital to begin producing it Its importance was however relatively shortlived changing colonial policies and com petition from Virginia and other British colonies pushed settlers in other directions In addition to the tobacco plantations there were also a small number of plantations focused exclusively on the production of sugar cane Tobacco producers in the Caribbean islands had difficulty competing with cheaper tobacco produced in the Chesapeake region and Virginia Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 437 and during the second half of the seventeenth century increasingly turned to producing sugar a more capital and laborintensive but also more profitable crop The Dutch played a major role in the development of the sugar industry on the French islands contributing their expertise in growing and processing sugar as well as their commercial ties indeed in 1647 the first cargo of sugar that left Guadeloupe did so on a Dutch ship By the end of the seventeenth century sugar was the dominant crop in the French Caribbean Eventually tobacco cultivation all but disappeared and sugar cultivation in parallel with some production of indigo and cotton and increasingly coffee came to dominate the economic life of the islands As in the British Caribbean colonies during the same period the expansion of sugar went handinhand with a steady decline in the use of European indentured labor and a sharp increase in the amount of African slave labor imported into the colonies Sugar production required relatively flat land and adequate water and planters quickly took over the areas best suited for it The four flat plains in SaintDomingue each of them served by a port boasted large planta tions with sophisticated processing equipment as did several regions in Martinique and Guadeloupe In all three islands sugar coexisted with other crops Cotton ginger and provisions were grown in small quantities Indigo persisted as a crop particularly in certain areas such as the southern province of SaintDomingue And especially in the last decades of the eighteenth century coffee plantations boomed in the mountainous areas that were unfit for sugar cultivation This combination of different crops meant that with the exception of some particularly inaccessible moun tainous areas the French Caribbean islands became densely settled and cultivated both in the hills and plains By the second half of the eighteenth century SaintDomingue was the most productive colony in the Americas outpacing its closest rival British Jamaica8 Each of the three French island colonies took different routes in their development and the regions within them developed differentially as well In SaintDomingue which received the greatest attention from the French administration and from merchant and slaving ships the northern and western provinces were the wealthiest and most populous Their respec tive port towns Le Cap and PortauPrince were important economic centers though Le Cap far outshone PortauPrince in its architectural and cultural qualities The southern province meanwhile had a different character with a higher proportion of its planters focused on indigo pro duction and a great deal of trade carried out illegally with the British in nearby Jamaica In the Eastern Caribbean Martinique was privileged over 8 For a comparison of the development of the British and French Caribbean see Robin Blackburn The Making of New World Slavery From the Baroque to the Modern 14921800 London 1997 esp chapters 6 7 and 10 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 438 the cambridge world history of slavery Guadeloupe starting as early as 1667 when the central administration of the Company of the Indies was transferred to Martinique from St Christopher Planters in Guadeloupe often had to work through middle men in Martinique in shipping their products out and in gaining access to slaves a very small percentage of French slavers went to Guadeloupe preferring the richer ports of SaintDomingue and Martinique Contra band was therefore very prevalent in Guadeloupe supplying the island with many of its slaves Planters in St Lucia St Vincent Grenada and Dominica became adept at pursuing their own interests under the back andforth control of French and British administrations Meanwhile the colonization of French Guiana took place very slowly with one major attempt at settlement ending famously in nearcomplete disaster9 There were two intertwined realities in the French Caribbean one an official vision that saw them as useful extensions of the metropole wor thy of protection and responsible for the production of commodities for export the other a more unruly economy in which planters consistently disappointed in the habits of their administration and merchants turned to the alwayseager merchants from other empires in seeking out economic advancement for themselves From its earliest days under the command of Richelieu French colonization was a very centralized affair with royally sanctioned companies ceding to direct royal control which remained in place through the revolutionary years Only in 1787 were local assem blies allowed and then only in Martinique and Guadeloupe though during the revolutionary years they were created in SaintDomingue as well Planters did have some institutions through which to express themselves particularly the local Conseils that registered royal edicts As in metropoli tan France these courts sometimes voiced resistance to royal authority most notably in 1785 and 1786 when planters vociferously attacked a series of initiatives meant to reign in the abuses of masters against slaves Planters and other colonial residents also sometimes took their grievances directly to the royal government The freecolored Julien Raimond petitioned for an end to certain aspects of racial discrimination in the 1780s Residents also took advantage of the consistent power struggles that existed with the colonial administrations which were split between a governor who in principle was in charge of military questions and an intendant meant to be in charge of civilian administration In fact the zones of action of the two administrators were confused and conflicts within the administration hobbled their capacity to effectively govern in the colonies Nevertheless many planters were frustrated with their lack of power and some looked 9 On Guiana see Emma Rothschild A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic Past and Present 192 2006 67108 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 439 admiringly on the assemblies of the British colonies and on the successful bid for independence in North America One of the most consistent targets of planter displeasure was the Exclusif or monopoly regulation imposed by the French royal government Accord ing to this policy put in place by the Cardinal Richelieu commercial ties were to be pursued exclusively between the mother country and its own colonies This policy had its advantages for the sugar industry guaranteeing a protected domestic market for sugar and other crops But it also meant that planters were in many ways under the control of French merchants when it came to the prices at which they sold their sugar Furthermore the metropole almost never supplied enough provisions and other goods for the colonies which because of their obsessive focus on plantation pro duction desperately needed imports of many basic necessities As a result contraband trade flourished in all the colonies particularly in the areas least patronized by French merchants ships such as Guadeloupe and the south ern province of SaintDomingue Dutch ships sailing from St Eustatius were constant visitors to the French islands as were ships from North America particularly New England Contraband involved a set of exchanges that very useful on all sides French planters used the subproducts of sugar particularly molasses to buy badly needed provisions lumber and other necessities from merchants supporting New Englands rum industry itself tied into the slave trade Many planters completely circumvented French merchants trading what they produced on their plantations directly for slaves from Jamaica and other Caribbean colonies Administrators constantly railed against this illegal trade but they were essentially powerless to stop it even the wealthiest and most widely respected planters participated with relative opennessand eventuallytheFrenchadministrationsoughtto compromise with the planters opening several ports to foreign commerce after the Seven Years War Such concessions however did not satisfy most planters and anger against the monopoly regulations drove their political mobilization during the revolutionary period Another pillar of French colonial governance that was a bone of con tention in the colonies was the Code Noir Promulgated in 1685 by the royal government with a revised edition produced in 1723 for Louisiana it was meant to govern the treatment of slaves in all the French colonies Its provisions guaranteed the right of property of masters and outlined punishments to be inflicted on rebellious slaves prescribing whipping for plantation infractions and mutilation including branding by a fleurdelis from runaway slaves but also outlined a set of responsibilities for masters These included feeding and clothing the slaves and providing them with Sunday as a day of rest The Code Noir also called on masters who fathered children with a slave to free and marry her and free their children and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 440 the cambridge world history of slavery outlined the process for manumission of slaves In an important article it decreed that manumission would be the equivalent of naturalization so that people of African descent who were no longer slaves were in principle accepted as equal subjects a provision freecolored activists would draw on during the revolutionary period Many of the provisions of the Code Noir were brazenly ignored by planters throughout the French Caribbean They never restricted them selves to whipping slaves devising other tortures outlawed by the admin istration and inflicting them with impunity while also often avoiding the prescribed mutilation of runaways so as not to diminish their property Following a common practice in the Americas they generally opted to grant their slaves small garden plots rather than providing them with food providing the slaves with an important foundation for autonomy many slaves marketed their provisions and indeed whites throughout the colony depended on them for their fruits vegetables and meat but also expos ing them to hunger in times of drought And with the active collusion of local administrators the relatively liberal provisions of the Code Noir regarding manumission were whittled away in the course of the eighteenth century by an increasingly harsh set of racist decrees that outlawed people of African descent from practicing professions such as medicine and law discouraged interracial marriages and went so far as to regulate their dress and furnishings These laws racialized many individuals who in earlier years had been considered no different from whites forcing them to use racial labels when they carried out legal transactions Such laws were a response to the steady increase in numbers and in wealth of free people of color in the French colonies most particularly in SaintDomingue where by 1789 they probably equaled the number of whites In Guadeloupe in contrast the freecolored population was only onefifth the size of the white population while in Martinique it was one half as large Many free people of color were quite successful Indeed in the early eighteenth century white newcomers to the colony often got their start by marrying women of color gaining access to land in the process In the countryside they often owned large coffee or indigo plantations with many slaves In the cities there were successful merchant families some made wise investments by buying up lots along PortauPrinces harbor early on for instance as well as men who served in military units or in the colonys marechaussee or police force which came to be dominated by free people of color There were also free individuals who were closer to slavery and maintained ties with slave communities in which they had relatives One of the major justifications given by commentators and administrators for racist legislation was that it was crucial to contain the masses of the slaves in part by demonstrating forcefully that even after freedom was gained people of African descent were never equal to whites There were also Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 441 fears of collusion between free people of color and slaves In fact though free people of color played a central role in policing the slaves through the marechaussee and when the revolution arrived in SaintDomingue it would become clear that many though not all were deeply invested in preserving slavery Nevertheless their attempts to overturn racist laws and gain political rights issued notably by two important leaders Julien Raimond and Vincent Oge played a crucial role in the beginning of the Haitian Revolution10 In attempting to finesse the contradictions of an order in which whites constantly contributed to the growth of the freecolored population by fathering children with slaves and often freeing the children and provid ing them with some land while publicly supporting the suppression of interracial sex some writers crafted images of women of color as powerful seducers who enticed otherwise reasonable white men into irrational sexual liaisons The discourses surrounding interracial sex were extreme and often quite bizarre one writer Michel Etienne Descourtilz claimed that it was from imbibing the milk of libertine slave wetnurses that white men in the colony gained a destructive attraction to black women but played a crucial ideological role in justifying the increasingly harsh laws against free people of color Writings about the sexual promiscuity of free peo ple of color were part of a broader racial discourse that circulated within the French empire in a variety of forms travel writing political essays plays and novels and that shaped eighteenthcentury thinking about slavery There were however also important strands of antislavery thought that found voice in the writings of several Enlightenment intellectuals con cerned with the brutality of slavery in the French colonies Enlightenment antislavery was informed by the actions of slaves themselves both those in metropolitan France many of whom sued successfully for their freedom in the courts and those in the colonies intellectuals in France were familiar with writings of French administrators in the Caribbean some of whom were concerned with both the violence of masters and the violent resistance of slaves French Enlightenment antislavery found a famous expression in a passage published within the Abbe Raynals Histoire des Deux Indes that warned of the danger of a slave insurrection led by a Black Spartacus Its most eloquent spokesman was the Marquis de Condorcet who advo cated gradual emancipation in the French colonies in a 1781 essay entitled Reflexion sur lesclavage des Negres Condorcet later became a member of the Societe des Amis des Noirs a group inspired by British antislavery activ ity Though this group did play an important role in early revolutionary 10 On the free people of color of SaintDomingue see the studies of John Garrigus Before Haiti Race and Citizenship in French SaintDomingue New York 2006 and Stewart King Blue Coat or Powdered Wig Free People of Color in PreRevolutionary Saint Domingue Athens GA 2001 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 442 the cambridge world history of slavery debates about slavery and the rights of free people of color they were unable to pass legislation reforming or abolishing slavery before their proposals for gradual emancipation were surpassed by the much more revolutionary and more forcefully presented demands of the tens of thousands of insurgent slaves who rose in SaintDomingue in 1791 iii At the center of all the societies of the French Caribbean were the large majority of the enslaved They were by far the largest group of arrivals in the Caribbean during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth cen tury and indeed made up the majority of the population in the French Americas as a whole According to the most recent calculations a total of approximately 1118000 enslaved Africans were imported into the French Caribbean between the seventeenth and nineteenth century The vast majority of these just under 800000 arrived in SaintDomingue while just more than 200000 arrived in Martinique Guadeloupe which received most of its slaves via transshipment from Martinique nevertheless received more than 37000 from the French transatlantic trade and at least another 30000 from the British slave trade during periods of occupation French Guiana received 26000 with several thousand of those brought by the British The slave trade to SaintDomingue alone accounted for approximately a tenth of the total volume of the slave trade during the eighteenth century Guadeloupes slave population increased from 4300 in 1674 to 85500 in 1790 and SaintDomingues from 117411 in 1720 to at least 465000 and probably more in 1789 Even if French migration is esti mated generously and slave imports estimated very conservatively enslaved Africans made up at least twothirds of the population that came into the French Americas This parallels the larger demographic patterns in the Atlantic world The slave population came to dwarf the population of the free in all the colonies with about 90 percent of the population enslaved Because many whites and free people of color were concentrated in the townsinmanyrural areasthosewho werenotenslaved wereatinyminority In the parish of Acul in SaintDomingue for instance two years before the massive slave insurrection of 1791 began there there were 3500 slaves and 130 whites11 In SaintDomingue the colony on which French slavetraders focused their attention throughout the eighteenth century and where the origins of slaves are therefore most easy to track the majority came from two main areas in Africa In the first decades of the eighteenth century most arrived from West Africa supplied through a variety of ports primarily in the Bight 11 These numbers are calculated from wwwslavevoyagesorg Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 443 of Benin In the French colonies slaves from these regions were generally described as Arada a deformation of the name of the port Ardra and many were of Yoruba culture The slaves from this region formed a majority early on laying an important cultural foundation for the emerging religious practices that eventually came to form Haitian Vodou Over the course of the eighteenth century however more and more slaves were brought from the Kongo region to SaintDomingue Africans from this region known as Congo in the French Caribbean comprised 40 percent of the slaves whose arrival into SaintDomingue was registered during the eighteenth century In the colony they were the largest group among the slaves by the time of the Revolution and indeed the term Congo came to be used to refer to all Africanborn slaves during the revolutionary period In addition to slaves from these two major regions there were many other groups present in SaintDomingue such as Ibo Fulbe Wolof and so on Many of these enslaved Africans brought with them a skill that they would put to good use during the course of the Haitian Revolution They were African veterans who had fought in wars on the continent and had the knowledge and experience to mount successful military campaigns in the Caribbean12 The origins of slaves arriving in Martinique were broadly similar although over the course of the eighteenth century imports from the Bight of Benin always outnumbered those from the Kongo region Because slavetraders rarely stopped in Guadeloupe and therefore most slaves were acquired through transshipment and contraband it is more difficult to know which parts of Africa they came from It does seem that the slave population of Guadeloupe included many fewer Africanborn individuals than SaintDomingue where in 1789 they in fact comprised a majority of the slave population and indeed of the population as a whole African culture played a central role in religious and musical developments in the colony and African military tactics and political ideologies helped to shape the course of the Haitian Revolution Slave life in theFrenchCaribbeanvariedwidelybetweendifferentregions and different kinds of plantations For those who lived on large sugar plantations the daily details of work in the cane fields was usually overseen by a commandeur or driver himself a slave who carried a whip andor and machete In addition to the driver there were small groups of somewhat privileged slaves who worked as artisans notably in sugarprocessing which was often overseen by a white maitresucrier Domestic slaves had access to certain privileges as well and were emancipated more frequently though particularly for women the closeness to masters and managers also increased 12 See John Thornton African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution Journal of Caribbean History 25 1991 5880 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 444 the cambridge world history of slavery their danger of sexual assault Many sugar plantations were owned by absentee owners often French merchant companies who had gained control over plantations after their owners defaulted on startup loans in which case an appointed manager and often a few white overseers ran the plantation On absentee plantations there were often protests about the brutality of managers by slaves who repeatedly attempted and in some cases succeeded in having the plantations owners replace managers through strikes13 Protests against managers were one part of a large spectrum of resis tance practiced on the plantations French commentators wrote about two kinds of marronage petit and grand the former temporary departures from the plantation and the latter escape to permanent maroon groups SaintDomingue and the other French Caribbean colonies always had small maroon bands operating in the colonys mountainous regions though these groups were never of the size and strength of those of Jamaica or Suriname The French and Spanish administrations in Hispaniola signed a treaty in 1785 with a group of several hundred maroons operating in the moun tains between the two colonies and throughout the French Caribbean the marechaussee carried out consistent raids and apprehensions of maroons Although some historians have seen the maroon communities as ancestors of the 1791 uprising it was in fact practices of shortterm escape that were more important in laying the foundation for revolt by creating and sus taining the crossplantation networks throughout which the uprising was organized The enslaved also sometimes used poison to attack masters and their property as well as to settle scores with other slaves Because whites felt rampant paranoia about poisoning it is quite difficult to separate out imagined from actual uses of poison but precisely because of the fears it generated poison played an important role in defining masterslave rela tions in the colony The most famous slave to use poison was Makandal who developed an underground network on the northern plain of Saint Domingue in the 1750s that used poison against masters and animals on the plantation He was caught and executed in Le Cap though a near escape from the flames left many believing he was still operating in the hills for the next decades Seeking to counter the use of poison many masters developed particularly brutal methods of interrogation and torture often burning alive slaves they suspected or mutilating them In one particularly famous case that took place in 1785 a man named Nicolas LeJeune tortured two women who later died inciting a group of his slaves to report the case to local officials Although the officials pursued the case and charged 13 The best study of slave life in the French Caribbean remains Gabriel Debien Les esclaves aux Antilles Francaises BasseTerre Guadeloupe 1974 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 445 the master they eventually relented to planter pressure and he was never punished14 Of course overt resistance was difficult to carry out and sustain and most slaves focused on survival in the context of an extremely harsh situation Slave mortality rates in SaintDomingue were astoundingly high by some estimates half of all arrivals died within a year and the same was true of children born on plantations Deaths far outnumbered births and the population was only sustained through the steady importation of slaves Skirting the provisions of the Code Noir and various reformist moves supported by administrators planters essentially calculated that replacing slaves with new ones was cheaper than creating conditions that were less deadly In this context the enslaved made what they could out of the small garden plots they were usually granted control over growing food and raising livestock and often selling some of what they produced in town markets in order to buy food and clothes As in other Caribbean colonies the products from slave garden plots played a crucial role in feeding the population of the island The markets also allowed for meeting and socializing outside of the plantations Religion also provided a space outside the plantations for the enslaved to meet and worship Catholic institutions in the colonies at times pro vided religious attention to the enslaved organizing special masses for them though administrators were often unhappy with this and indeed the ministry of the Jesuits among the slaves contributed to their expulsion from SaintDomingue in 1763 More important but also more difficult to trace were the independent religious practices and networks developed by the slaves on and between the plantations as well as in the towns There are a few fragmentary descriptions of these practices which involved a rich encounter among African religious traditions and between these tra ditions and Catholicism Administrators consistently sought to suppress gatherings of the enslaved the Code Noir included provisions outlaw ing them but many masters seem to have tacitly accepted them and in any case the enslaved carried them out despite occasional arrests and repression Administrators were worried that conspiracies were planned at religious gatherings with some justification such gatherings played a crucial part in the leadup to the 1791 insurrection in SaintDomingue15 The French Revolution provided an opening for the enslaved of the Caribbean by destabilizing the local administration and inciting conflicts among whites and between whites and free people of color in the colonies 14 See my Avengers of the New World chaps 12 and for a detailed analysis of the legal culture of SaintDomingue Malick Walid Ghachem Sovereignty and Slavery in the Age of Revolution Haitian Variations on a Metropolitan Theme PhD dissertation Stanford University 2001 15 On missionaries in the French Caribbean see Sue Peabody A Dangerous Zeal Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles 16351800 French Historical Studies 25 2002 5390 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 446 the cambridge world history of slavery News of the political transformations and of abolitionist moves in France helped to inspire slaves who launched a revolution founded on local practices of religion but also shaped by the emerging political culture of Republicanism Revolts took place in Martinique Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue but it was only in the latter that they led to the creation of a strong insurgent army16 The mass antislavery movement in SaintDomingue one of the largest and certainly the most immediately successful abolitionist movement in history began in August 1791 when an assembly of slaves in the northern province of the colony met to plan for a coordinated uprising aimed at striking a deathblow against the sugar plantations on which they labored and against the ruling planter elite more broadly Rising up at the same time on the sugar plantations of SaintDomingues northern plain the richest sugargrowing region in the colony and indeed in the world the insurgents rapidly turned cane fields and plantation houses to ash and smashed the sugarprocessing machinery on the plantations The details of the successful revolt are described in Chapter 26 of this volume but it should be noted that liberty was won by the slaves of SaintDomingue not by attacks on French metropolitan authority but by making an alliance with it against planters who were resisting colonial power Slave rebellion found its ally in metropolitan colonial power In the process Republican rights were expanded to those who had been completely excluded from all legal rights After 1794 France and its colonies were united in principle under one set of laws that were understood as truly universal as applicable on both sides of the Atlantic regardless of social or economic differences For a time racial hierarchy was defeated by assimilationist universalism Racially integrated armies defended French colonies against the British and even attacked British colonies in the Eastern Caribbean playing a crucial role in the worldwide conflict between the two imperial powers The British nevertheless occupied Martinique Guadeloupe and part of SaintDomingue They held on to Martinique through the revolution and abolition was never decreed there as a result The French recaptured Guadeloupe in 1794 however in large part thanks to the abolition decree that rallied slaves to their side From there they recruited exslaves and launched campaigns against Grenada St Vincent and St Lucia and cap turing the latter for a few years though eventually the British turned back these advances In SaintDomingue Toussaint Louverture held off the British and eventually forced them to evacuate the island in 1798 16 See my A Colony of Citizens and Avengers of the New World as well as the classic works on the Haitian Revolution C L R James The Black Jacobins Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution New York 1963 Carolyn Fick The Making of Haiti The SaintDomingue Revolution from Below Knoxville 1990 and the essays in David Geggus Haitian Revolutionary Studies Bloomington IN 2002 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 447 Slavery was also abolished in French Guiana With emancipation how ever came new labor regulations that forced most exslaves to continue working on plantations where they were paid for their labor with part of what was produced In SaintDomingue slaves were also given a certain control over the functioning of plantations Exslaves sought to extend their freedom notably by seeking land of their own as administrators in SaintDomingue many of them exslaves and free people of color used coercion to keep them on the plantations convinced that the survival of the plantation economy was vital By the early 1800s the consensus in favor of emancipation in France had dissolved and Bonaparte moved to reestablish control over the increasingly autonomous regimes of the colonies In 1802 after a short but brutal conflict in Guadeloupe blacks were stripped of citizenship and in 1803 slavery was officially reestablished When Martinique was returned to the French they maintained slavery there In SaintDomingue the attempt to restore the old order failed and JeanJacques Dessalines proclaimed the birth of the nation of Haiti in January of 1804 Napoleons ambition of rebuilding and expanding the French empire in the Americas collapsed and he sold Louisiana recently reacquired from the Spanish to Jeffersons administration Slavery continued in Martinique in Guadeloupe however for the next four decades iv The broad history of slavery in the French Americas and particularly the French Caribbean paralleled that in the British Caribbean Indeed though repeatedly at war during the eighteenth century the imperial rivals con structed and administered their slave societies in very similar ways Still there were important differences The centralization of the French admin istration and the absence of local assemblies created a different political culture among planters In this sense the French Caribbean had some similarities with the Spanish empire in particular with regards to the administration of slavery centralization of power in the hands of royal authorities encouraged petitioning of these authorities on the part of free people of color and even slaves and religious institutions at times pro vided some alternative spaces of community for people of African descent The economic role played by the Caribbean within the British and French empires diverged in an important way while the British consumed most of the sugar produced in its colonies domestically the French exported nearly half of it Finally though over the long term the British colonies saw many slave revolts including the formation of powerful maroon commu nities in Jamaica they never experienced the total war against slavery that transformed the French Caribbean during the 1790s Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 448 the cambridge world history of slavery It is perhaps this dramatic era of revolution that remains the most significant legacy of slavery in the French Americas Having created a slave society in SaintDomingue that was the most profitable in the Atlantic pushing the level of exploitation and expansion of the slave population to an extreme on the eve of the revolution approximately 40000 slaves a year were being imported into SaintDomingue the French colonial project was unraveled in a process with massive implications for the Atlantic world The Haitian Revolution both enabled the spread of slavery in the United States by triggering the Louisiana purchase and the expansion of sugar plantations in Cuba in the nineteenth century It also transformed and heightened debates over abolition on both sides of the Atlantic inspiring slaves and frightening masters throughout the Americas for decades Haiti suffered a great deal for its victory isolated by the United States and weighed down by an indemnity levied by France in 1825 in return for the reopening of diplomatic and trade relations but in a broader sense people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world ultimately gained a great deal from the revolution for it was a crucial step on the road to the end of slavery in the Americas further reading I have drawn in this chapter on my two works on the French Caribbean A Colony of Citizens Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean 17871804 Chapel Hill NC 2004 and Avengers of the New World The Story of the Haitian Revolution Cambridge MA 2004 Several overviews of Atlantic and Caribbean history provide useful details and analysis about the French Americas most importantly Robin Black burns The Making of New World Slavery From the Baroque to the Modern 14921800 London 1997 and The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 17761848 London 1988 which is excellent on the comparison between the French and other empires in the Americas Franklin Knight The Caribbean 2nd ed Oxford 1990 and Eric Williams From Columbus to Castro The His tory of the Caribbean New York 1970 are also helpful for the Caribbean colonies On slavery in New France see Brent Rushforth Savage Bonds Indian Slavery and Alliance in New France PhD dissertation UC Davis 2003 on Louisiana the classic work is Gwendolyn Midlo Hall Africans in Colonial Louisiana The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century Baton Rouge LA 1992 and an excellent recent study is Shannon Dawdy Building the Devils Empire French Colonial New Orleans Chicago 2008 On early French expansion in the Caribbean and relationships with the Caribs the best work is by Philip Boucher in his Cannibal Encounters Europeans and Island Caribs 14921763 Baltimore MD 1992 and France Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery in the french caribbean 16351804 449 and the American Tropics to 1700 Tropics of Discontent Baltimore MD 2008 see also Peter Hulme Colonial Encounters Europe and the Native Caribbean 14921797 London 1986 The stillunsurpassed classic work on slavery and slave life in the French Caribbean is Gabriel Debien Les esclaves aux Antilles Francaises Basse Terre Guadeloupe 1974 Debien was also a prolific publisher of innu merable articles that are an essential resource for the study of slavery in the French Caribbean On religion in the French Caribbean see Sue Peabody A Dangerous Zeal Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles 16351800 French Historical Studies 25 2002 5390 on slaves in metropolitan France see her There Are No Slaves in France The Polit ical Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime Oxford 1996 On planter ideology and issues surrounding the administration of slavery see Malick Walid Ghachem Sovereignty and Slavery in the Age of Revolu tion Haitian Variations on a Metropolitan Theme PhD dissertation Stanford University 2001 On slavery and the Enlightenment the clas sic work is Michele Duchet Anthropologie et histoire au siecle des lumieres Paris 1971 Numerous scholarly studies have been produced in French about the history of specific islands including Lucien Rene Abenon La Guadeloupe de 1671 a 1759 Etude politique economique et sociale Paris 1987 Josette Falloppe Esclaves et Citoyens Esclaves et citoyens les noirs de la Guadeloupe au XIX siecle BasseTerre Guadeloupe 1992 and Dale Tomich Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar Martinique and the World Economy 18301848 Baltimore MD 1990 On the free people of SaintDomingue see Stewart King Blue Coat or Powdered Wig Free People of Color in PreRevolutionary Saint Domingue Athens GA 2001 and John Garrigus Redrawing the Colour Line Gender and the Social Construction of Race in PreRevolutionary Haiti Journal of Caribbean History 30 1996 2850 There is a rich literature on the revolutionary period The most impor tant are the classic work by C L R James The Black Jacobins New York 1963 Carolyn Fick The Making of Haiti The SaintDomingue Revolution From Below Knoxville TN 1990 a recent collection of essays by David Geggus Haitian Revolutionary Studies Bloomington IN 2002 the collec tion edited by Marcel Dorigny Les abolitions de lesclavage de LF Sonthonax a V Schoelcher 1793 1794 1848 Paris 1995 and Claude B Auguste and Marcel B Auguste Lexpedition Leclerc 18011803 PortauPrince 1985 An excellent account of the struggles in Guadeloupe in 1802 is presented in Jacques AdelaıdeMerlande Rene Belenus and Frederic Regent La Rebellion de la Guadeloupe 18011802 BasseTerre Guadeloupe 2002 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 18 SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE OF THE MINOR ATLANTIC POWERS pieter emmer introduction In the history of the Atlantic the literature on the French British Spanish and Portuguese empires continue to dominate the body of historical writ ing 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 migra tion 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 differ ent 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 highvalue products such as precious metals The Spanish did not develop a sizeable plantation sector producing tropical exports until the end of the eighteenth century Why they did not start earlier is not easy to explain There is no doubt that the Spanish Atlantic Empire contained regions that were suited perfectly for the cultivation of tropical cash crops In spite of the fact that a large part of the Caribbean had been lost to England and France Spain retained some of the largest islands in the region all of which showed a great potential for the profitable cultivation of sugar and coffee That potential however was not used until the second half of the 450 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 451 eighteenth century That Spanish America lacked capital seems unlikely in view of the extensive mining of precious metals even if much of these had to be shipped to Spain as tax payments There were in fact extremely wealthy families in Spanish America who owned large haciendas producing exportable crops such as cocoa tobacco and small amounts of sugar Why these haciendas did not show the dramatic growth rates of the Caribbean and North American plantations is a matter of some debate but the main reason for this difference must have been the limited labor supply Spain did not have a system of indenturing poor migrants for service in the New World nor did the country participate in the Atlantic slave trade The pope had decided that West Africa belonged to Portugals sphere of influ ence and that meant that Spanish America was dependent upon foreign suppliers for the most dynamic element in the development of its econ omy slave labor As a result more than anywhere else in the colonial New World did the economy of the Spanish colonies rely on the insufficient supply of Amerindian labor and on the supply of soldiers and sailors from Spain who chose not to return Both these types of labor were limited in volume and not sufficiently reliable Only the elastic supply of African slaves made the considerable investments in plantations pay The supply of Amerindian laborers could not easily be adjusted to the need for plantation labor In addition Amerindians were prone to die from diseases imported from Africa and Europe The supply of European labor was also difficult to adjust to the demand and only a small section of the European immigrants such as convicts and prisoners of war could be forced to perform the type of gang labor that plantation agriculture required1 Portugal reacted differently to the new challenges offered by the Atlantic First it established a network of trading contacts along the African coast before colonizing Brazil And right at the start of the Portuguese settle ment in Brazil the colonists concentrated on the development of sugar plantations in addition to mining precious metals Amerindian labor was used but the native labor supply seemed to have been less adequate and it declined even more rapidly than in Spanish America The volume of invest ments in Brazil also seemed to differ from those in Spanish America The first investments must have come from Portugal but in addition investors from elsewhere in Europe were also involved in sending settlers and financ ing plantations such as those from the burgeoning southern Netherlands The international character of the investments in Brazil seems to be an indication of the fact that the dynamic and profitable sections of the Atlantic economy were better served in Portuguese than in Spanish Amer ica The Portuguese were the first to shape the transatlantic slave trade 1 Introduction in David Eltis Frank D Lewis and Kenneth L Sokoloff eds Slavery in the Development of the Americas Cambridge 2004 pp 57 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 452 the cambridge world history of slavery according to the demand for labor rather than the reverse as the Spanish did2 After a long interval France and England started to imitate Portugal not Spain in that they first directed their colonizing efforts toward the development of capitalist agriculture in the Caribbean and in the south of mainland North America As mobile labor in France and England was cheaper than in the Iberian Peninsula the new imperial Europeans first used their own indentured laborers and only turned to Africa in order to obtain slaves later Over time both their home and colonial economies were far more dynamic than those of the Spanish and the Portuguese There is no doubt that the northwest Europeans had a more efficient merchant marine than the Iberians and were able to offer more and cheaper services such as maritime insurance shipping and both European and colonial goods The same applied to their efficiency in the African slave trade In spite of these substantial differences in efficiency none of the large Atlantic empires disappeared because its economy was outcompeted The age of sail wind and currents divided the Atlantic in two parts and the Iberian empires were able to draw their own settlers from Europe and their own slaves from Africa and were able to produce for separate consumer markets There existed some leakage along the northern coast of Spanish America as well as in the River Plate region and substantial amounts of export products from Spanish and Portuguese America were shipped to Europe on foreign carriers However it is remarkable how resistant Portugal Spain and their respective colonial empires were to international competition3 What happened to Iberian America repeated itself with the French and British colonial empires in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland These were remarkably resistant to differences in economic effi ciency in shipping trade and production as well as in naval power During the many naval wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Great Britain usually gained the upper hand but it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that some small French islands in the Caribbean and the French settlement colony in North America changed hands The major part of the economic activities in the French and British empires did not cross the national compartments but there existed an additional interna tional market for goods slaves and services The compartmentalization of the Atlantic economy was probably most difficult to achieve on the African coast None of the European nations were able to conquer and occupy part of West Africa due to the extremely high death rates among Europeans 2 Stuart B Schwartz A Commonwealth within Itself The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry 1550 1670 in Stuart B Schwartz ed Tropical Babylons Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World Chapel Hill NC 2004 pp 15866 3 Pieter Emmer The Dutch and the Making of the Second Atlantic System in Barbara L Solow ed Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System Cambridge 1991 pp 7596 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 453 as well as to the fierce African opposition to European penetration True the Portuguese British and French all had African regions where they traded traditionally but none was able to exclude others Changes in sup ply did occur and over time the competition among the European traders increased and that forced them to conduct trade outside the usual areas on the coast The plantation areas in the New World constituted the other extreme as compartmentalization was rather easy to achieve there whereas the establishment of a truly international and competitive market was virtually impossible Most slave owners preferred to buy slaves on credit and that practice favored the establishment as well as the longevity of such national compartments of trade slave trade and finance Foreign slave traders usually had to conduct their business illegally and that forced them to sell slaves for cash only The sale of slaves for credit explains why the less efficient French and Portuguese slave traders remained in business and could even expand in spite of the fact that the British slave traders were more efficient Only in the relatively small international slave market was efficiency rewarded That international slave market in the New World consisted of the illegal slave trade to Spanish America and of the slave trade in the Caribbean to nonBritish colonies in times of war Similarly the credit arrangement customary in the trade in European and New World products forced the merchants to remain within their national compartments but the trade in goods and services allowed for more inroads into the national monopolies than did the slave trade In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch were able to siphon off almost half the unrefined sugar from Portuguese Brazil whereas during the eighteenth century the British were able to penetrate the markets in Spanish America and the North American traders were instrumental in supplying the French and Dutch Caribbean with victuals4 It should be stressed however that only the larger Atlantic empires of Spain Portugal France and Great Britain allowed for the compartmental ization of the greater part of their Atlantic activities The smaller nations invested more in the direct trade in goods with Africa as well as in the trade in goods and slaves along the African coast However colonies of settlement as well as the transatlantic slave trade were far less important and except for the Dutch and Danes virtually nonexistent In the New World the smaller nations did strive to obtain plantation colonies or at least the right to sell slaves but only the Dutch and the Danes succeeded in creating a sizeable demand for slaves in their own colonies Yet those small slavetrading nations that were involved in the transatlantic slave 4 John J McCusker and Russell R Menard The Economy of British America 16071789 Chapel Hill NC 1985 pp 196 and 199 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 454 the cambridge world history of slavery trade relied heavily on foreign slave markets For the Danes the inter Caribbean slave trade to foreign colonies was more important than the slave trade to their own possessions and the Dutch also sold a relatively large percentage of their slaves to buyers from nonDutch colonies Last but not least the Dutch and Danish plantation colonies were not linked to settlement colonies under the same flag and had to rely on importing foodstuffs from British North America Planters in the Dutch colonies also lacked protection for their products on the home market Toward the end of the eighteenth century neither the Dutch nor the Danish West Indies experienced anything like a second sugar revolution as took place in the British West Indies Trinidad Demerara French West Indies St Domingue Cuba and Brazil The Dutch came closest to the big four Spain Portugal Great Britain and France in establishing their own compartment in the Atlantic in which there were colonies of settlement plantation colonies and free ports as well as trading establishments along the west coast of Africa The Dutch were the first to follow the Iberians in exploiting the Atlantic for commercial purposes and they also dominated many of the Atlantic ventures of the Danes Swedes Kurlanders and Brandenburgers In view of this chronology this chapter will first discuss the early Dutch exploits in the Atlantic and their initial attempts at constructing a fullfledged Atlantic empire centring on Dutch Brazil After the Dutch were driven out of Brazil they attempted to create a second production region of tropical cash crops in the Caribbean by trading with the newly founded French and British island settlements Again they were ousted from these settlements and started to increase the transit trade via the Dutch Antilles notably Curacao and St Eustatius in addition to developing several Dutch planta tion colonies between the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers situated on the South American mainland Then we turn to the Danish slave trade which became a genuinely Danishowned and organized branch of commerce only after the initial phase dominated by Dutch capital and Dutch personnel The following section lists the available quantitative data regarding slavery in the Dutch and Danish West Indies The final section deals with the slave trade efforts of the Swedes Kurlanders and Brandenburgers which hardly went beyond the trade to from and along the coast of West Africa the dutch slave trade in the atlantic The Iberian monopoly on trade and colonization in the Atlantic lasted for more than a century after the voyages of Columbus The British and the French made some incursions into the Caribbean and the South American mainland but these attacks were unsuccessful More effective was the informal penetration of the Dutch who were Spanish subjects at the time Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 455 As early as 1520 two Dutchsounding names appear as asentistas probably Belgian merchants contracted by the Spanish crown to supply slaves to Spanish America It also is certain that at the end of the sixteenth century several Dutchmen took part in the creation of the Brazilian sugar industry both as investors and as owners of sugar mills5 The revolt of the Netherlands against Hapsburg Spain and the subse quentsecessionofthenorthernNetherlandshad aslow butdramaticimpact on the geopolitics of world trade It became increasingly difficult for the Dutch merchant marine to limit itself to the role of European distributor relying on the Iberian ports to obtain products imported from America Africa and Asia In the last two decades of the sixteenth century the Dutch merchants displayed a flurry of activity The Dutch sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in order to establish their own trading links with Asia in defiance of those of the Portuguese they again defied the Portuguese and established their own contacts with West Africa And perhaps more profitably they continued their efforts to siphon off some of the wealth of Brazil and Spanish America in spite of several Spanish measures banning the Dutch from entering the Iberian colonial world which after the Span ish occupation of Portugal in 1580 included everything outside of Europe6 At the beginning of the twelve years truce with Spain 160921 the Dutch had a wellestablished informal trade empire both in the Atlantic and in Asia without having invested in expensive ventures against the Hapsburg crown or in creating settlements under their own flag Locally organized groups of merchants in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland had founded companies and cartels trading with West Africa and North America and sailing to the saltpans of Venezuela In addition various Dutch shipping firms illegally transported half or perhaps as much as twothirds of the Brazilian sugar to Amsterdam7 The truce with Spain between 1609 and 1621 slowed Dutch expansion in the Atlantic Dutch ships could again obtain Atlantic products in Spanish ports However in 1621 hostilities were resumed and in that year the Dutch West India Company WIC was founded Many merchants trading in the Atlantic were opposed to the creation of a company monopolizing all Dutch trade in the Atlantic That resulted in a stalemate The company could not sell enough stock or collect sufficient capital in order to start its operations in full and some of the Dutch state and city governments had to come to its rescue by buying shares and giving loans The Dutch government 5 P C Emmer The History of the Dutch Slave Trade A Bibliographical Survey Journal of Economic History 32 1972 pp 72847 6 Jonathan I Israel Dutch Primacy in World Trade 15851740 Oxford 1989 pp 569 7 Christopher Ebert Dutch Trade with Brazil before the Dutch West India Company 1587 1621 in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven eds Riches from Atlantic Commerce Leiden 2003 pp 4975 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 456 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 181 Imports of slaves in Dutch Brazil 16301653 by African region of origin Arrivals from Guinea Arrivals from Angola Other regions Total 1630 280 280 1636 1046 1046 1637 1211 346 1557 1638 1267 66 419 1752 1639 1393 326 77 1796 1640 1316 1316 1641 1062 297 1359 1642 1616 762 2378 1643 1553 2461 4014 1644 1111 4354 4465 1645 594 3179 3773 1646 24 251 275 1649 290 200 490 1651 785 785 16301651 11347 14353 496 26286 Source Emmer The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy p 50 was interested in setting up the company as it could serve as a powerful instrument in the war against the Spanish by cutting their lifeline with the riches of South America In spite of all these commercial drawbacks the Dutch West India Company enabled the Dutch government to wage a constant war against the SpanishPortuguese colonial empire by allowing the company to issue letters of marque In addition the company received financial and naval support from the Dutch government in this war By conquering northeastern Brazil it seemed that the Dutch had succeeded in dismantling the Portuguese Atlantic Empire After the initial conquest however Dutch Brazil or New Holland remained the pivot of the Dutch Atlantic for only a very short period The sugar industry stayed mainly in the hands of those Portuguese planters who had not fled In order to provide those planters with slaves the Dutch could no longer rely on capturing Portuguese slavers and the West India Company had to establish a regular triangular slave trade In order to do so the company conquered strongholds on the African coast Sent from Brazil a Dutch fleet succeeded in taking Elmina on the Gold Coast and later Luanda in Angola and as Table 181 shows between 1636 and 1644 the Dutch slave trade developed a capacity for transferring twentyfive hundred slaves per year On the surface the Dutch seemed to have divided the sugar production of Brazil The Portuguese continued to produce sugar in Bahia whereas the Dutch revived the sugar production in Pernambuco The reality however Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 457 was quite different Dutch Brazil could not be turned into a good location for the development of a reliable sugar industry Most cane growers and mill owners in the Dutch colony remained Portuguese and their loyalty could never be taken for granted The Portuguese enemy had to be held at bay at great expense both in Brazil and in Angola The Dutch slave trade to Brazil was a financial disaster because it was conducted mainly on credit and did not adjust itself to the limited purchasing power of the Portuguese planters In short the Brazilian adventure not only cost the Dutch West India Company all its capital it also put the company solidly into debt from which it would never recover8 The Dutch attack on the first sugar colony in the New World did not destroy it and by themselves the Dutch could no longer create a second one However there was no more money for extensive conquests elsewhere in the New World because the Dutch West India Company had almost bankrupted itself The company was unable to finance a new plantation colony in the Caribbean and the small island possessions in that region that the Dutch did acquire were meant to serve only as transit harbors between the Dutch colonies in North America New Netherlands and Dutch Brazil Yet in spite of the continued existence of an Iberian system in the South Atlantic and in spite of the absence of Dutch settlements in the Caribbean the Dutch withdrawal from Brazil laid the foundations for the second Atlantic system by forcing the Dutch to offer their expertise in slave trading and transportation to the French and the British First the IberianDutch world war left the Spanish with little energy to further defend the Caribbean which anyway had become a marginal region within Spanish America economically in decline with the possible exception of Cuba The lack of Spanish defensive capabilities enabled the British and the French finally to break through the Spanish defenses and to start colonizing the Caribbean Second in 1654 the Dutch were left with a relatively large supply system of African slaves but without a market because the Dutch slave imports into Brazil had come to an end Third the revolt in Dutch Brazil suddenly diminished the exportation of clay sugar to the Dutch refineries Sugar prices in Europe increased9 The Dutch tried to make up for the loss of their sugarproducing colony by continuing their previous policy of buying sugar from others First they turned to Portuguese Sao Tome then to Barbados Guadeloupe and Martinique At the same time they directed the supply of African slaves to Sao Tome to Curacao which functioned as a transit harbor for Venezuela Barbados and the French Antilles 8 Henk den Heijer The Dutch West India Company 16211791 in Riches from Atlantic Commerce pp 97100 9 Schwartz A Commonwealth pp 1702 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 458 the cambridge world history of slavery The story of the beginning of sugar cultivation on Barbados has been told many times It is important to note that during a crucial period in the his tory of Barbados the Dutch were able to bring down the prices of slaves of imported victuals of equipment and of transportation by strength ening international competition The importance of the supply side is further demonstrated by the fact that the Dutch needed buyers for their wares First of all the Spanish should be mentioned they offered cash for the slaves who were delivered to Curacao Also attention should be called to Dutch slave supplies to the planters of Martinique and Guadeloupe Contemporary authors mention the arrival of twelve hun dred Dutchmen in the French Antilles from Dutch Brazil mainly slaves with about fifty Hollandais naturels Contemporary authors also confirm that until 1664 the Dutch supplied most of the slaves to the French Antilles For Barbados the cutoff period is considered to have been between the years 1660 and 1663 when the English slavers were able to offer more slaves arresting further Dutch involvement in the trade to the English Caribbean10 The growth of the new cashcrop area was largely due to this initial phase of free competition between 1624 and 1665 The Dutch importance in the early slave trade to the English and French West Indies was based on the infrastructure that the Dutch West India Company had built up during its Brazilian years The attempts to create a British monopoly company for the slave trade did not really succeed until 1672 with the founding of the Royal African Company However long before that year private British slavers were perhaps as important as the Dutch In the French Antilles French ships belonging either to companies or to private shipping firms did not seriously counter the Dutch dominance in the early slave trade The French observer Du Tertre mentioned not only that the Dutch had larger and betterbuilt ships than the French but also that their crews were more experienced less numerous and better paid than those on French ships Also the vital food imports from Europe became cheaper for the Caribbean planters The prices of Dutch imports were lower than those from France in the case of salted beef the difference was as much as 50 percent It was not until 1667 that the Dutch navy conquered Suriname an English settlement colony on the South American mainland where largescale sugar cultivation was possible After the Dutch concluded a peace treaty with Spain in 1648 Curacao became an attractive transit harbor for the trade between the Dutch Repub lic and the nearby regions on the Spanish Main After the British capture of Jamaica in 1655 one of its governors hoped that this British colony would 10 Russell R Menard Sweet Negotiations Sugar Slavery and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados Charlottesville VA 2006 pp 4961 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 459 obtain a position in the transit trade similar to that of Curacao Dutch merchants reputedly paid little attention to political and religious differ ences when conducting trade The Dutch believed according to Thomas Lynch a Jamaican governor that Jesus Christ was good but trade was better As was to be expected the British also managed to develop trade with the Spanish colonies on the mainland albeit on a different section of the coast from where the Dutch traded Over time a division of spheres of influence came into existence the Dutch trading east and the English trading west of Panama although with some overlap In addition Spanish colonists also came to Jamaica to trade In a similar fashion the small wind ward island of St Eustatius became a transit harbor for the neighboring French islands and for the Spanish planters from Cuba Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico Neither Aruba nor Bonaire developed as did Curacao to which they remained port subsidiaries saltproducing The development of the Dutch part of St Maarten and of the tiny island of Saba also remained quite limited11 Curacao and St Eustatius were the main transit harbors for the Dutch slave trade the other islands hardly figured in that trade During the high tide of this transit trade in slaves from 1658 to 1675 Dutch slavers brought more than 50 percent of their cargoes to the Dutch Antilles One hundred years later this percentage had dropped to only 13 percent The overall growth of the Atlantic slave trade inversely affected the transit slave trade to and from the Dutch Antilles Before 1675 the yearly arrivals averaged around fifteen hundred slaves between 1675 and 1730 around one thousand and after 1730 around five hundred12 Why did the Dutch Antilles fail to keep their place in the slave trade The relative decline after 1675 occurred when the volume of the slave trade to the English and French Caribbean increased disproportionately in response to the rapid growth of the plantations both in numbers and size The transit slave trade via Curacao was mainly aimed at the Spanish colonists in Venezuela where the economy was not as expansive as that of the Caribbean sugar islands The demand for slaves on the Spanish American mainland although constant did not increase as rapidly as in the plantation Caribbean The transit trade in slaves via St Eustatius however targeted the neighboring Spanish and French plantation islands Slavetrading firms who traded directly with Africa it appears largely met the demand of their planters An exceptional situation existed between 1722 and 1726 when more than six thousand slaves beyond the normal yearly 11 Pieter Emmer The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy Trade 15801880 Slavery and Emancipation Aldershot 1998 pp 91109 12 Johannes Postma A Reassessment of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade in Riches from Atlantic Commerce pp 11538 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 460 the cambridge world history of slavery average changed owners on St Eustatius There is as yet no indication of their destination13 An explanation for the decline in the absolute number of slaves in transit on the Dutch Antilles can be found in the increasing costs of keeping the slaves on the islands for periods longer than a few weeks The various components of the Atlantic slave trade proved difficult to harmonize Sometimes months elapsed between the arrival of the slaves from Africa the transportation to their buyers the payment for the slaves and the availability of cargoes for European destinations In the burgeoning and increasingly sophisticated Atlantic slave trade techniques developed to save time between the arrival of the slaves in the Caribbean and their purchase by their new owners If possible transit harbors were avoided Nevertheless the transit trade in slaves may have had an important advantage over the direct trade In the latter case the shipping firms were usually forced to sell the majority of their slaves on credit and debt collection could take more than a decade In the transit trade slaves were sold only to the customers who paid cash Recent research however has demonstrated that the WIC sometimes had to wait for years to receive payment It could not easily counter late or bad payments by quickly halting the sale of slaves on Curacao for the Dutch Antilles could not increase the cultivation of foodstuffs in order to feed large numbers of stranded slaves The Dutch plantation colonies in the Guiana consisted of Suriname with about fifty thousand slaves in 1770 and its three smaller neighboring colonies situated to the west Essequibo Demerara and Berbice with about eight thousand slaves each In all of these colonies slavery was the basis of the economy The slaveworked plantations in the Dutch Guianas fully resembled the plantations in the British and French Caribbean Little is known about the financial development of the Guianas during their first eighty years as Dutch colonies Whatever their productive capacities it seems safe to assume that the major portion of the sugar imported into the Netherlands always came from foreign producers The Dutch interest in their own sugar colonies increased after 1750 when the sugar from the French Antilles no longer went to the Netherlands in order to be marketed in northern Europe but was distributed by the French themselves The idea to have your own sugarproducing colony appealed to many Dutch investors and between 1750 and 1770 more than 60 million guilders of new investment poured into the sugar sector of the Dutch Guianas The outcome of this speculative wave of investments was disastrous The influx of money from Holland into the Dutch Guianas did increase the importation of slaves but it did not sufficiently increase the income derived 13 Rik van Welie Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World 15931863 in Gert Oostindie ed Dutch Colonialism Migration and Cultural Heritage Leiden 2008 p 179 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 461 Table 182 Surinames trade balancebalance of payments 17661776 average per year Debit Credit Balance 1 Trade with the Republic a Export of cash crops 6525091 b Import of European goods 1337513 c Service charges auctions transportations insurance 2000401 3186177 2 Trade with North America a Exports molasses dram firewood 90096 b Imports foodstuffs cattle building materials 282333 192237 3 Trade with Africa Average imports of 4000 slaves per year at 325 guilders each 1300000 1300000 Positive balance of trade 1693000 Payment of taxes and mortgages 2600000 Negative balance of payments 903000 from the sale of cash crops Having absorbed these large investments most Suriname plantations were faced with high debtservicing costs In fact as Table 182 makes clear the colony developed a considerable deficit in its balance of payments14 The reasons behind this dramatic development have not all been discov ered Contemporaries mentioned that the plantation loans had allowed the planters to buy too many slaves for nonproductive purposes Also far too much financial credit had been given to the Suriname planters because the influx of money from the Netherlands had inflated the prices of the plan tations in Suriname and this in turn had enabled the planters to get even higher mortgages because they used their plantations as collateral The massive influx of money after 1750 did increase the value of the Suriname exports but not sufficiently as to allow for the payment of the interest on the loans let alone for the repayment of the principle Surinames negative trade balance also explains why the Dutch slave trade declined at the end of the eighteenth century By then the Dutch had long since lost their position as international slave suppliers In the course of the eighteenth century the Dutch slave trade had become increasingly dependent on the demand for slaves in the Dutch Guianas As a result of the large investments in that region the Dutch slave trade reached its zenith during the decade 17609 transporting more than seven thousand slaves per year By the same token the Dutch slave trade suffered immediately once further investments were stopped due to the sudden decline in the market value of the West Indian 14 Emmer The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy pp 196201 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 462 the cambridge world history of slavery plantation loans Other slave markets in the region had been lost After the French occupation of the Netherlands between 1795 and 1813 the British conquered all of the Dutch colonies in the Guianas and slave imports increased again as planters could no longer send the debtservicing pay ments to the Netherlands In fact the former Dutch colony of Demerara attracted so many British slavers that the British government in London issued an Order in Council abolishing the slave trade as of January 1 1807 to that colony in order to yield to the protests of the abolitionists The slave trade to the other occupied Dutch colonies was halted on March 1 1808 like the slave trade to the British colonies15 Another explanation for the financial difficulties among the planters in Suriname is the damage caused the large number of runaway slaves At the end of the eighteenth century about 10 percent of the slaves had absconded from the plantations Marronage seemed to have been much less of a problem in the smaller Dutch plantation colonies In addition to losing valuable slaves the planters had to invest heavily in preventing the maroons from pillaging their properties The rapidly growing number of runaway villages in the interior of the colony was in need of weapons and household utensils such as knives fishing hooks and saws as well as women In order to obtain these the maroons organized attacks on the plantations killing those who opposed them To counter the attacks the colonial authorities built a defense line between the plantations and the jungle with watch towers brought over extra mercenaries from Europe and forced the planters to give up some of their best slaves who were to serve in black regiments and who would be liberated after they had served their tour of duty16 The main difference between the profitability of the Dutch and British plantation colonies pertains to the way in which both countries financed their West Indian activities In the British case there was a constant flow of investment money going to the plantations Part of that money was the capital that a new planter took with him to the West Indies and another part was provided by merchant houses that had specialized in the importation and sale of plantation produce and that were used to advance loans and mortgages to their customers Until the mortgage boom of 1750 the same pattern existed in the Dutch Caribbean The irregular pattern of over and underinvestment severely hampered the expansion and modernization of the Suriname plantations As a result some areas of Dutch Guiana could only develop their plantation sector due to the immigration of British planters especially after the British takeover in 15 Seymour Drescher Econocide British Slavery in the Era of Abolition Pittsburgh PA 1977 p 244 note 28 16 W Hoognbergen De Bosnegers zijn gekomen Slavernij en rebellie in Suriname Amsterdam 1992 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 463 1796 In addition to slowing down the development of new plantation areas in Suriname the lack of new investment capital also affected the buying power of the Dutch planters on the Atlantic slave market Before the crash on the Amsterdam stock exchange planters used bills of exchange drawn on the merchant houses cum mortgage providers in the Netherlands in order to pay the captains of the slave ships That meant that slaving firms could obtain full payment for their slaves upon the return of the slave ship to its homeport After 1775 this method of payment came to a grinding halt as most bills of exchange were no longer honored and as a consequence the shipping firms themselves were forced to collect the price of their slaves in cash or in kind from the planters It sometimes took years and years before a slave cargo had been paid in full That explains why after 1775 and again after the end of the fourth AngloDutch War in 1784 the Dutch slave trade declined while during that same period the British slave trade experienced a dramatic increase in volume In order to survive at all the Dutch slave trade had to be freed from the usual taxes and levies The continuous growth of the British slave trade was in part based on its superior productivity and in part on the way in which those who bought slaves in the West Indies paid the slave traders In the Dutch case the slave traders had to accept the bills of exchange directly from the planters and these bills were drawn on the merchant house in the Netherlands that handled the commercial affairs of the planter In the British case the bills came from the agents of these metropolitan merchant houses residing in the West Indies That provided the British slave traders with much more security than the Dutch slavers By comparison with their French and Dutch counterparts the Liverpool slave traders appear to have been much more independent of colonial credit and relatively unencumbered with the heavy indebtedness of the plantation economy Yet the buying power of the planters in the British Caribbean must have also contributed to the remarkably high profit rates in the British slave trade as the planters in the British West Indies enjoyed incomes that were in part based on the protective tariffs for their sugar on the British home market The British consumer not only bought more sugar but also had to pay more for it than elsewhere The figures are telling In the 1720s Britain reexported about 20 percent of its sugar to foreign markets and during the last quarter of the eighteenth century this percentage had fallen to less than 5 percent The planters in the Dutch West Indies on the other hand did not receive such a subsidy and had to compete with the most costeffective producers anywhere resulting in relatively low profits in the slave trade as well as in plantation agriculture17 17 B L Anderson The Lancashire Bill System and Its Liverpool Practitioners in W H Chaloner and Barrie M Ratcliffe eds Trade and Transport Essays in Economic History in Honour of TS Willan Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 464 the cambridge world history of slavery Many slave economies in the New World received a new lease on life after the American War of Independence In the Spanish Caribbean Cuba finally became a major producer of sugar and coffee In Brazil exports of these items particularly coffee grew from the mid1770s The French Caribbean also experienced an upswing in plantation output due to the development of Tobago as well as further expansion in St Domingue and the British Caribbean increased its production by incorporating Trinidad In response the slave trade increased beyond prewar levels Even the smallest slaving nation Denmark carried more slaves partly by exploiting its neutral position in the major wars of the period and after 1790 the economic future of the American South looked bright for those willing to exploit new areas and invest in cotton The Dutch alone proved unable to respond to this new Atlantic chal lenge They failed to develop a new plantation frontier and they failed to take advantage of the increased demand for slaves outside their own colonies Between 1785 and 1805 the value of the Suriname exports of sugar coffee and cotton declined by 20 percent despite rising sugar prices and the volume of the Dutch slave trade fell by 75 percent Why were the Dutch such an exception Usually the reasons for this unique decline are attributed to international political factors outside Dutch control such as the loss of the Dutch neutrality during the War of American Independence and the AngloFrench Wars after 1795 However the poor performance of the Dutch plantation sector and the Dutch slave trade during ten years of peace between 1784 and 1794 suggests that the Dutch private sector was unable to cope with the new challenges of the Atlantic slave economy It was in the slave trade that the failure of the private sector in the Nether lands showed most clearly All other national carriers managed not only to transport more slaves but also to decrease shipboard mortality Only Dutch slavers experienced a decline in the number of slaves carried and an increase in mortality Dutch slave vessels supplied so few slaves to the Dutch colonies that the planters of Berbice decided to legally admit British and North American slavers in the colony until The Hague reversed the decision Even the introduction of the Dolben Act restricting the number of slaves on board British vessels and therefore British ability to compete did nothing to increase the Dutch slave trade Table 183 summarizes the trend in arrivals over the long term The Dutch Caribbean counted about eighty thousand inhabitants in 1750 fiftyfour thousand of whom lived in Suriname and twentysix thou sand on the Dutch Antilles In Suriname the whites made up less than 5 percent of the population and the free persons of color slightly more Manchester 1977 pp 5997 and Kenneth Morgan Business Networks in the British Export Trade to North America 17501800 in John J McCusker and Kenneth Morgan eds The Early Modern Atlantic Economy Cambridge 2000 pp 3664 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 465 Table 183 The Dutch slave trade 16001800 Period Average per year 16601664 1150 16651709 3900 17101779 3900 17801795 1800 Source Calculated from the estimates page of www slavevoyagesorg than 1 percent as more than 90 percent of the Surinamese were slaves In 1800 the number of free persons of color had almost doubled On the Dutch Antilles whites constituted more than 18 percent of the population the free persons of color 26 percent and the remaining 56 percent were slaves18 In Suriname the slave population would have declined without slave imports Between 1750 and 1775 mortality has been estimated at 47 per 1000 and 24 per 1000 between 1775 and 1790 The fertility in Suriname has been calculated at 144 per 1000 slaves between 1780 and 1810 on sugar plantations and 205 on coffee plantations Until 1800 the key variables regarding the production of cash crops in Suriname do not indicate decline Compared to the older plantation areas in the Caribbean the cashcrop production of Suriname was competitive In 1775 Suriname produced 3 percent of all Caribbean sugar and 14 percent of all coffee Average slave prices increased between 1750 and 1800 from 475 guilders to 629 guilders while slave prices paid for newly arrived Africans moved from 235 guilders to 613 guilders The increase in the price of slaves was surpassed by the increase in the price of plantations as slaves made up 34 percent of the value in 1750 against 305 percent in 1800 As elsewhere in the Caribbean sugar outcompeted other crops In 1750 the average value of an acre with sugar cane has been estimated at 50 guilders and an acre with coffee at 371 guilders In 1800 these estimates were 119 and 341 respectively The reason for the decline in the coffee sector can also be demonstrated by the fact that the average field slave on a coffee plantation produced 219 kilograms of coffee per year in 1790 and only 135 kilograms of coffee in 1810 For sugar the figures were reversed in 1700 435 kilograms per slave and in 1810 871 kilograms A similar story is told by the profits and losses During several decades after 1770 many sugar and coffee plantations in Suriname were operating at a loss but coffee plantations incurred larger losses and 18 Stanley L Engerman and B W Higman The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Franklin W Knight ed General History of the Caribbean Volume III The Slave Societies of the Caribbean London 1997 pp 4857 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 466 the cambridge world history of slavery did not become profitable again until after 1810 whereas sugar plantations returned to profits after 179019 It is no wonder the number of sugar plantations barely increased in this period and that few sugar plantations were started in new areas of the colony between 1785 and 1805 in spite of the prospect of productivity increases such areas offered The many new British planters in the Dutch colony of Demerara did much better their slaves produced on average twice as much cotton as those of their Dutch colleagues On the new slavery frontier British planters were able to produce sugar without protection of their products on the British home market In addition British planters were able to produce cotton more competitively than the Dutch without a protected domestic market of any kind Thus cotton production in Demerara boomed as soon as the British had conquered this colony in 1796 It became the most rapidly expanding slave colony ever in the course of the next decade Slave imports increased from an average of four hundred per year in the period between 1785 and 1795 to more than ten times that number under British rule The Dutch response to the new challenges was negligible by comparison The societies of the six Dutch Antilles deviated in many respects from those of the British and French plantation islands as well as from the Dutch plantation colonies in the Guianas Because the economies of the Dutch Antilles engaged the world market in only a limited way they diversified more than the plantation colonies Slaves comprised only one half of the population of the Dutch Antilles Nowhere on any of the Dutch islands did large concentrations of slaves exist such as those on the sugar plantations of Jamaica and Suriname More than 80 percent of the slave owners of the Dutch Antilles owned less than ten slaves These figures suggest that masterslave relations in the Dutch Antilles were less anonymous than in colonies with large plantations Many slave owners on the Dutch Antilles belonged to European families who had lived on the islands for generations Most plantations on the Dutch Antilles only shared the name with the agricultural operations that produced cash crops elsewhere in the region The plantations of the Dutch Antilles produced some foodstuffs for local consumption There is no indication that these gardens were operated according to the demands of the global market Plantation income for many plantation owners constituted only a supplement to their income from trade The Dutch planters appear less involved in the constant struggle to compete and to improve agricultural efficiency During bad times however the inflexible and inefficient plantations forced many slave owners in the Dutch Antilles to abandon or sell their slaves because they lacked the money to feed and house them Consequently the Dutch Antilles had 19 Emmer The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy p 200 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 467 many more manumitted slaves than did other plantation colonies such as Suriname20 Contemporary observers found Dutch Antillean slavery relatively mild Most visitors to the Dutch Antilles wrote home that the slaves on the islands behaved much more freely than did their counterparts in Dutch Guiana Unfortunately there is little information about the living conditions of the slaves on the Dutch Antilles Whether the relatively poor results of subsistence farming could provide the same level of food consumption as did the plantations that earned their primary income from exports seems doubtful The relatively uncertain availability of food could explain why slave revolts in Curacao were more frequent than they were in Suriname The most important gap in our knowledge about the economy and soci ety of the Dutch Antilles pertains to demographic data It is possible that all ethnic groups of the Dutch Antillean population had the capacity to repro duce themselves naturally without immigration and that in this respect the population of the Dutch Antilles like the Spanish Caribbean con stituted an oddity in the demography of the Caribbean Early metropolitan complaints about the economic weakness of the Dutch islands reflected to a great extent the limitations of their earning capacity without a large and growing export sector the danes The Danish Atlantic Empire never resembled that of the Iberians French and English It also deviated from the Dutch Atlantic in that Danes did not have a settlement colony in the New World The only Baltic country that managed to organize a substantial transatlantic slave trade was Denmark The first attempts at the slave trade were made by the Danish Africa Company founded in Gluckstadt many more companies were to follow and none of them survived for very long In the beginning the Dutch opposed the Danish Atlantic activities and the ships of the Dutch West India Company in spite of the protests took many Danish merchantmen Again the Dutch actions were instigated by the fact that several Dutch merchants had invested heavily in the early Danish African and West Indian companies Like the other Baltic states the Danes were successful in establishing footholds on the African coast In 1666 an agreement was reached with the Dutch leaving three settlements in Danish hands Christiansborg Frederiksborg and a small fortress near Cape Coast In 1672 and 1718 the Danes conquered the Caribbean islands of St Thomas and of St John and St Croix was purchased from the French in 1733 After 1720 the Danes were no longer involved in major conflicts with 20 W E Renkema Het Curacaose plantagebedrijf in de negentiende eeuw Zutphen 1981 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 468 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 184 Distribution of slave departures from Africa on Danish vessels Total Annual average 16601733 33200 450 17341765 15500 500 17661792 27800 1000 17931806 33100 2400 Source Calculated from the estimates page of wwwslavevoyagesorg their neighbors and were able to use their neutrality in buying and selling slaves from other nations Not all Danish slave ships originated in Danish ports in Europe as several slaving voyages were undertaken by planters in the Danish West Indies Elsewhere in the Caribbean those direct voyages only became more common after the slave trade had been declared illegal Another unique feature of the Danish slave trade was the fact that the Danes bought and sold slaves in the interCaribbean trade in numbers almost equal to those brought in directly from Africa No wonder the share of triangular voyages in relation to other expeditions in the Atlantic was extremely low Between 1747 and 1807 about three thousand voyages between Denmark and GuineaCaribbean were undertaken and less than two hundred followed the triangular route21 Table 184 summarizes the results of this activity in terms of the volume of the Danish traffic Last but not least mention should be made of the Danish slave trade to Cuba during the 1790s the existence of which suggested that the profits in bringing Africans to Cuba were larger than in bringing slaves to the Danish islands In spite of the increase in the volume of the slave trade during the 1790s Denmark was the first European country to announce the suspension of the trade In 1791 the Great Negro Trade Commission submitted a report suggesting that Denmark should abolish the slave trade in 1803 as it assumed that Britain was about to do the same The Danish slave trade was not particularly profitable unlike the sugar industry in the Danish West Indies That is why the commission recommended that slavery should continue to exist and that the Danish West Indies should continue to offer facilities to nonDanish slavers During the 1790s Denmark was able to profit from its neutral position The profitability of the Danish plantations and that of the free ports 21 Dan H Anderson DenmarkNorway Africa and the Caribbean 16601917 Modernization Financed by Slaves and Sugar in P C Emmer O PetreGrenouilleau and J V Roitman eds A Deus ex Machina Revisited Atlantic Colonial Trade and European Economic Development Leiden 2006 p 298 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 469 increased However most of these profits were not repatriated to Denmark as most planters in the Danish West Indies were not of Danish origin Denmark did benefit from the importation of sugar and the steady growth of the number of refineries However most of that expansion was based not on competitive costs but on the high duties levied on the importation of foreign sugar Sugar consumption in Denmark increased considerably from a few hundred grams in the 1740s to 15175 pounds per head of population in 1770 to perhaps 25 pounds by the turn of the century That is far less than the British per capita consumption of more than sixteen pounds in the 1770s but at the same level as French consumption22 slavery in the danish caribbean In the Danish Caribbean the total number of inhabitants in 1770 was about seventeen thousand of whom about 11 percent were white and less than 1 percent were free persons of color Over time the percentage of whites and freedmen increased In 1846 the total population of the three Danish islands compromised about fortyfive thousand persons but their composition deviated sharply from that found in any of the Dutch territories Only 49 percent were slaves 39 percent were free whites and 12 percent were freedmen Most of this increase was due to imports from Africa although in some years natural demographic growth of around 2 to 3 percent occurred In 1804 census records show that the crude birthrate was 29 per 1000 stillbirths included while the mortality rate was 36 per 1000 The male slaves made up 525 percent of all slaves and 544 percent of all slaves were born in the West Indies The field slaves made up 771 percent of the slave population Only oneseventh of the slave population lived as married or commonlaw couples The average age of the slaves was high more than 40 percent were more than thirty years of age Most plantations in the Danish West Indies produced sugar and half the slaves worked in the field Detailed information regarding the Danish Caribbean is not available However there are strong indications that the bulk of the plantations went through a period of severe losses The result was an increase in the number of indebted planters Denmark could not provide a sufficient number of loans which is why Dutch investors stepped in As a result more and more sugar was shipped to Amsterdam rather than to Copenhagen As happened in Suriname many planters went bankrupt and in 1786 the Danish crown bought sixteen heavily indebted plantations in order to secure that their produce would go to Denmark However an increasing number of plantations came into the hands of Irish and Scottish plantation 22 Ibid p 304 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 470 the cambridge world history of slavery owners and during the nineteenth century most plantation produce from the Danish West Indies was shipped to foreign ports23 the brandenburgers swedes and kurlanders The fact that the Dutch West India Company monopolized the Dutch slave trade for so long stimulated Dutch merchants and investors alike to cir cumvent that monopoly by founding slavetrading companies in Sweden Denmark Kurland and Brandenburg However most of these attempts did not result in transatlantic slave voyages but in trading expeditions along the West African coast Only the Danes managed to carry many slaves across the Atlantic see Table 184 After the end of the Thirty Years War Sweden attempted to enter the slave trade A Swedish African company was founded in 1647 or 1649 in the city of Stade near Hamburg then in Swedish hands The main investors were of Dutch origin such as the Liewert Wolters in Hamburg and Louis de Geer in Stockholm Ten years later the Danes conquered the Swedish possessions on the African coast and the Swedish African Company was dismantled It seems doubtful whether any Swedish ships brought slaves to the New World All of them were involved in the trade between Europe and West Africa In order to induce the Swedes to stop even considering another attempt at trading slaves across the Atlantic the Dutch government paid one hundred thirty thousand rixdaalders to the Swedish crown in 1663 This payment also gave the Dutch a claim on the four Swedish forts on the African coast which had all been conquered by the Danes24 It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Sweden showed a renewed interest in the slave trade In exchange for the right to establish a French entrepˆot in Gothenburg in 1784 Sweden received the tiny island of St Barthelemy in the Caribbean which housed four hundred slaves and six hundred free persons No doubt the island was used to buy and sell slaves by ships of other nationalities as well as by illegal slave ships Illegal slave ships might have obtained Swedish papers as some of the ships landing slave cargoes in Cuba and Charleston between 1800 and 1810 flew the Swedish flag but there is no proof of any slave ships originating in Sweden The freeport activities attracted a great number of immigrants In 1812 the population had increased fivefold and consisted of five thousand inhabitants two thousand of whom were free whites eleven hundred free blacks and twentyfour hundred slaves The triangular slave trade of the Brandenburgers was nearly as short lived as that of the Swedes In 1676 Benjamin Raule a Zeeland merchant 23 Anderson DenmarkNorway 306 24 Leos Muller Great Power Constraints and the Growth of the Commercial Sector The Case of Sweden 16001800 in A Deus ex Machina Revisited 326 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 471 employed by the Dutch West India Company left the company under a cloud offered his services to the great elector of Brandenburg and con vinced this energetic ruler in 1682 to set up a slave trade Brandenburgisch Africanische Compagnie BAC in the city of Emden Many of the share holders were Dutch The BAC founded some trading forts on the Gold Coast notably Fort Grossfriedrichsburg and obtained permission from the Danes to use the island of St Thomas to sell their slaves In 1692 the BAC went bankrupt partly because the Dutch West India Company considered the Brandenburg slave ships as Dutch interlopers and interrupted their trading activities In the same year a successor company was founded the Brandenburgische Africanischamerikanische Compagnie BAAC mainly financed by Dutch investors as was its predecessor Again the Dutch West India Company considered the BAAC slave ships as Dutch interlopers but had to refrain from stamping out the Brandenburg slave trade as the great elector was an ally of the Dutch during the War of the Spanish Succes sion Once that war was over the Dutch government offered to pay for the suspension of all Brandenburg slavetrading activities and to take over the BAAC forts on the African coast In 1717 agreement was reached and the Dutch West India Company consented to pay six thousand taler to the king of BrandenburgPrussia as he now called himself for taking possession of Fort Grossfriedrichsburg and to provide the court in Berlin with twelve young slaves Actually the Dutch could not take possession of the Brandenburg fort because an African trader by the name of John Conny had occupied Grossfriedrichsburg received his visitors in full Prus sian uniform sold slaves to anyone who paid for them and for seven years fended off all attempts by the neighboring Europeans to put an end to his reign A recent study estimates that the Brandenburgers carried about nineteen thousand slaves from Africa to the West Indies between 1680 and 1706 The buyers were the Danes on St Thomas and those planters and merchants who came to the island to buy slaves notably for importation into the neighboring Spanish colonies25 In 16501 an expedition from the Baltic duchy of Kurland managed to rent St Andrews Island in the Gambia estuary from a local ruler In a short time the Kurlanders were able to build Fort St James on the island and established a string of seven other forts each manned by twenty or more Europeans In total the number of Europeans amounted to three hundred but only onefifth of these came from Kurland itself The others were an international mix of Dutch British and Germans Between 1651 and 1658 Kurland sent out more than thirty ships to Africa In 1661 the British took the African possessions of Kurland and a subsequent treaty stipulated that 25 Hans Georg Stelzer Mit herrlichen Hafen versehen BrandenburgPreussische Seefahrt vor drei hundert Jahren Frankfurt 1981 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 472 the cambridge world history of slavery ships from the Duchy of Kurland could trade at British forts by paying a 3 percent tax on the trade goods they brought It is doubtful however that any Kurland slave ships ever crossed the Atlantic The Duchy of Kurland did attempt to create a colony on Tobago and in 1654 eighty families from Kurland settled there Most of the settlers were involved in cultivating tobacco for export to Russia In 1658 the Dutch who had also created a settlement on Tobago learned that Kurland had been invaded by Sweden and they used that as a pretext to conquer the Kurland colony All attempts from the Duke of Kurland to recover his colony came to naught In 1677 1678 and 1681 new settlers were brought to Tobago but all them were killed or driven off the island by Amerindians In 1691 the Duke of Kurland relinquished his claim on the island26 conclusion Most general studies of the slave trade and of slavery are based on the experience of the larger participating nations the British French and Portuguese This study of the smaller national participants in Atlantic slavery suggests several broad conclusions First the organization of a transatlantic slavetrade network seems to have been virtually impossible for the smaller nations with the exception of the Danes and the Dutch It was far easier to sail back and forth to West Africa than to make an additional trip across the Atlantic and back again Military and naval power was of little lasting importance on the African coast whereas in the New World it was imperative to have such power Obviously there existed an economic barrier against slavetrading merchants or companies that could not rely on the exclusive right to sell slaves in at least a section of plantation America Small nations need to profit from free trade by offering cheaper shipping and goods but large sections of the Atlantic economy did not know a free market In the slave trade the price of a slave was only one of the factors determining the demand and longterm credit arrangements were more important to the buyers of slaves in the New World than the sale price alone The ships of the small slavetrading nations could not afford to offer these credit arrangements Selling slaves in foreign colonies or selling slaves to nonnationals via free ports such as on the Dutch and Danish Antilles required cash payments and the majority of the slave buyers preferred to buy on credit Such conditions were absent in the trade along the African coast where individual ships and small and large companies had equal chances to obtain goods and slaves on equal terms The Africans preferred to have as many 26 Alexander V Berkis The Reign of Duke James in Courland 16381682 Lincoln NE c 1960 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 473 trading partners as possible and that explains why even small companies were able to acquire footholds on the coast In addition it required very little military and naval strength to conquer strongholds and fortresses of other European nations and these became less and less important in conducting trade on the coast anyway No European nation was able to establish a sizeable colony or foothold due to the extremely high death rate among the Europeans in combination with the fierce resistance of the Africans Those conditions did not favor even those Europeans that came from one of the powerful nations in Europe and were backed by an expensive navy and military force That explains why the small slaving nations and individual merchants had more success in participating in the trade along the African coast and in the trade between West Africa and Europe than in the transatlantic slave trade In order to succeed in the transatlantic slave trade it seemed that the slavetrading companies needed an area in the New World where they could dominate the market using mercantilist policies Only then were they able to participate in the intercolonial slave trade by selling slaves to buyers in foreign colonies The Swedes Brandenburgers and Kurlanders did not have such a home base in the New World The Dutch and the Danes both did and their participation in the trade between the colonies in the New World was sizeable compared to their share in the transatlantic slave trade However their participation in the intercolonial slave trade took an opposite course Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Dutch were driven out of the intercolonial trade whereas the Danes increased their participation by bringing slaves to Cuba The Dutch shipping firms had incurred severe losses because of the financial crisis on the market for plantation loans after 1775 and because of the loss of Dutch neutrality between 1780 and 1784 during the fourth AngloDutch War The Danish slaving firms were able to expand whereas the Dutch slave trade decreased in volume and only catered to the Dutch colonies As far as investments were concerned mercantilist barriers were far less important In fact the Dutch and Danish Caribbean were able to attract capital from nonnationals like no other area in plantation America The Dutch invested in the Danish Caribbean and British investors bought property in both the Dutch and Danish colonies In both the Dutch and Danish Caribbean the majority of the planters were foreign nationals The international character of the Dutch and Danish plantocracy is also reflected in the destination of the plantation produce Sugar from the Danish Antilles was sometimes shipped to Amsterdam and the British planters in the Dutch colonies probably marketed some of their produce in London The Dutch Antilles served as a transit harbor for sugar from the neighboring French Antilles in time of war and before 1750 the Dutch handled most of the distribution of French sugar in Europe Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 474 the cambridge world history of slavery This evidence suggests that the Dutch and the Danish played a vital role in the constant fight against the mercantilist tendencies in the Atlantic First the loss of Brazil forced the Dutch to develop international trading contacts resulting in fierce competition in the Caribbean and forcing down the prices of transportation commodities and slaves Mercantilist measures in addition to the increased productivity of the British and French slave trades brought this international phase to an end However in many branches of the economy of the nonSpanish Caribbean international competitiveness was maintained the supply of slaves and the imports as well as the distribution of Caribbean produce remained at least partly international further reading To see how the Dutch slave trade in the Atlantic was instituted developed and ended consult Johannes Postma The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 16001815 Cambridge 1990 as well as his more recent calculation of the numbers involved A Reassessment of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven eds Riches from Atlantic Com merce Leiden 2003 11538 A survey of the Dutch slave trade in the Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean has been composed by Rik van Welie Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World 1596 1863 in Gert Oostindie ed Dutch Colonialism Migration and Cultural Heritage Leiden 2008 155260 The beginnings of the Dutch slave trade in the Atlantic are studied by Klaas Ratelband Nederlanders in WestAfrika 16001650 Angola Kongo en Sao Tome Zutphen 2000 and his Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel Sao Jorge da Mina Elmina aan de Goudkust 16451647 Klaas Ratelband ed SGravenhage 1953 The slave trade to Dutch Brazil is surveyed in Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter Emmer The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade 15961650 in Henry A Gemery and Jan S Hogendorn eds The Uncommon Market Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade New York 1979 35375 There exists no comprehensive comparative study of Dutch slavery in the Atlantic but slavery features prominently in a survey study of the Dutch expansion in the Atlantic E Van den Boogaart et al La expansion holandesa en el atlantico 15801800 Madrid 1992 One single survey text on the Dutch slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic might be lacking but there are two volumes with essays that cover various aspects of Dutch slavery and the Dutch slave trade Riches from Atlantic Commerce and P C Emmer The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy 15801880 Trade Slavery and Emancipation Aldershot 1998 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery and slave trade of minor atlantic powers 475 In English the most comprehensive text on slavery in Suriname is still R A J van Lier Frontier Society A Social Analysis of the History of Suriname The Hague 1971 the newer research on slavery in Suri name is only available in Dutch R Beeldsnijder Om werk van jullie te hebben Plantageslaven in Suriname 17301750 Utrecht 1994 and A van Stipriaan Surinaams contrast Roofbouw en overleven in een Caraıbische plantagekolonie 17501863 Leiden 1993 Slavery in the Dutch Antilles has been analyzed by W E Renkema Het Curacaose plantagebedrijf in de negentiende eeuw Zutphen 1981 and the abolition of the Dutch slave trade and slavery in a comparative perspective can be found in Fifty Years Later Antislavery Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit Gert Oostindie ed Leiden 1995 Over the years the maroon societies of runaway slaves in Suriname have attracted a constant flow of anthropologists resulting in an extensive liter ature H U E Thoden van Velzen and W van Wetering The Great Father and the Danger Religious Cults Material Forces and Collective Fantasies in the World of the Surinamese Maroons Utrecht 1988 A wellknown clas sic of the permanent attempts by the colonial government of Suriname to eradicate the communities of runaway slaves is the Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam by John Gabriel Stedman edited and with an introduction and notes by Richard Price and Sally Price Baltimore MD 1988 The Danish slave trade has been studied in Per O Hernaes Slaves Danes and the African Coast Society Trondheim 1998 and by Erik Gobel Danish Trade to the West Indies and Guinea 16711754 Scandinavian Economic History Review 31 1983 2149 The Danish presence on the Gold Coast features prominently in R A Kea Settlements Trade and Politics in the SeventeenthCentury Gold Coast Baltimore 1982 whereas slavery in the Danish West Indies is studied by Neville Hall Slave Society in the Danish West Indies Baltimore MD 1992 The archives with information on the slave trade of BrandenburgPrussia were destroyed during the war and the two studies on this topic are based on circumstantial evidence Hans Georg Stelzer Mit herrlichen Hafen versehen BrandenburgPreussische Seefahrt vor dreihundert Jahren Franfurt 1981 and Andrea Weindl The Slave Trade of Northern Germany from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries in David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven 2008 25071 The only text in English on the Courland slave trade is Alexander V Berkis The Reign of Duke James in Courland 16381682 Lincoln NE c 1960 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 PART VI CULTURAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS IN THE AMERICAS Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 19 DEMOGRAPHY AND FAMILY STRUCTURES b w higman Enslaved enserfed and otherwise dependent peoples always existed within larger populations living alongside people with other statuses Some times 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 con nected 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 In this debate many referred back to earlier periods of world history particularly classical forms of slavery located in the Mediterranean and most notably the examples of ancient Greece and Rome In turn many of the questions and debates that preoccupied contemporaries in the eighteenth century have remained issues for modern historians 479 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 480 the cambridge world history of slavery Four central questions stand out The first concerns the impact of slavery and dependency on global population growth Did populations that con tained enslaved people grow faster or slower than those that did not This question has generally been linked to broader debates about the relation ship between slavery and civilization One side of the argument expressed strongly only after 1700 was that slavery was a degrading and backward social institution that inhibited technological progress and economic pro ductivity and thus limited population growth The other side contended that slave and other forms of coerced labor particularly when associated with forced migration enabled substantial increments to output of com modities that would not otherwise have been produced at affordable prices thus populating regions that would have remained mere wilderness and also supplying food to growing numbers in distant markets Few contem poraries pondered these questions on a global or even oceanic scale and generally limited their interpretations to political units or occasionally continents Most considered only the receiving populations particularly examples that depended on longdistance forced migration though a few did wonder about the impact on the supplying populations particularly Africa Modern historians notably Patrick Manning have developed more comprehensive demographic models with an emphasis on the distorting impact of slave trading on the internal structure of populations and their potential for growth1 The second central question concerns the capacity of enslaved popula tions to reproduce independent of growth or decline in the larger popula tion Contemporary European debates drew to some extent on the demo graphic experience of the period 14201804 but more often depended on classical sources and the ancient examples of Greece and Rome Some contended that there was a natural law underlying the failure of slave populations to replace their numbers through natural increase the excess of births over deaths and that this tendency demonstrated conclusively the immorality of enslavement The debate took on an Atlantic scope connecting with questions about the capacity of populations depleted by forced migration to replace the numbers lost By the end of the eighteenth century however the issue became complicated by the emergence of sig nificant examples of strong growth through natural increase contrary to accepted doctrine The most outstanding exception was the rapid growth of the slave population of the United States In modern historical analysis this contrast between the United States and the rest of the Americas occu pies a central place in debates over patterns of natural increase and decrease 1 Patrick Manning Slavery and African Life Occidental Oriental and African Slave Trades Cam bridge 1990 pp 3859 idem The Slave Trade The Formal Demography of a Global System in Joseph E Inikori and Stanley L Engerman eds The Atlantic Slave Trade Effects on Economies Societies and Peoples in Africa the Americas and Europe Durham NC 1992 pp 11741 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 481 Studies in the comparative history of slavery build on this demographic foundation Demographic interpretations of the rise and fall of slave systems the third big issue were rare during the period to 1804 but emerged soon after along with attempts to understand contrasting patterns of adjustment to abolition in the early nineteenth century The fundamental driver of the theory was population density Thus it was argued that slavery ceased to be profitable when the density of population became so great that hired free labor proved cheaper than the cost of holding slaves On the other hand where slavery was abolished but population remained sparse relative to land resources new forms of coerced labor would inevitably emerge A more sophisticated version of this hypothesis was developed by the Dutch scholar H J Nieboer whose Slavery as an Industrial System of 1900 outlined a global analysis based on ethnographic observation Nieboer talked of open and closed resources rather than a crude index of population density to explain both the origins of new slave economies and their decline and fall The hypothesis has been applied to serfdom as well as slavery notably in the work of Evsey Domar who argued in 1970 that free land free peasants and nonworking landowners were mutually incompatible Orlando Patterson applied statistical analysis to ethnographic data in 1977 and found wanting the cruder versions of the relationship2 The theory has however exhibited great resilience Varieties of the populationdensity hypothesis continue to be deployed globally in studies of labor relations before during and after slavery sometimes associated with other varieties of environmental explanation such as older ideas about climatic determinism and the concept of the hydraulic society The theory has at least been fruitful in encouraging comparative analysis and worldscale interpretations The fourth central question connects general demographic performance with the structure of family life under slavery and other forms of depen dent social relations The importance of this issue varies widely between societies reflecting differences in the embeddedness of the enslaved and dependent within the larger social structure Archetypes generally portray the enslaved person as stripped of family and kin as occurred most starkly in the Atlantic slave trade and incapable of any kind of viable family life The role of the father is replaced by the master and the mother becomes the dominant figure within the slave community Modern historical stud ies have however found evidence of resilience and slave agency From a demographic point of view the question concerns not only the structure 2 Evsey D Domar The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom A Hypothesis Journal of Economic History 30 1970 1832 Orlando Patterson The Structural Origins of Slavery A Critique of the Nieboer Domar Hypothesis from a Comparative Perspective Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 1977 1234 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 482 the cambridge world history of slavery of family and household units but also the impact of these compositional patterns on fertility and hence the potential for population growth These four central questions are often treated separately in the modern literature but they are obviously strongly interconnected Fundamentally demographic factors can be deployed to provide explanations of the rise and fall of slave systems as well as to contribute directly to analysis of inter nal and external population growth and decline Although demographic variables can be separated from other areas of life generally they prove most fruitful when associated with a wide range of environmental characteristics Demographic experience responds to that wider context of influences just as demographic patterns can have a determining influence on economic social and political developments population geography World population grew from an estimated 450 million in 1420 to 900 million in 1804 This doubling was a rate of increase roughly twice as rapid as in the previous five hundred years but more strikingly less than onetenth the vastly accelerated growth of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Thus the period 14201804 lies at a major turning point in world population history However growth was not evenly distributed The major demographic event of the period was the reduction of the population of the Americas and the consequent westward migration across the Atlantic The period was also marked by European imperial expansion on a global scale By 1804 almost all of the territories that were to become major centers of European population had been established as colonies new since 1420 including the whole of the Americas southern Africa and Australia It was not however a period of massive European migration That great movement of people was to come in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Down to 1804 colonization was built on the forced migration of non European people particularly Africans Significantly the period 14201804 also contains the most prominent examples of largescale slave societies Moses Finley found only five such slave societies in the whole of world history two of them in the ancient Mediterranean Greece and Rome and the other three in the modern Americas Brazil the Caribbean and the US South3 The origins and flowering of all the modern examples occurred in the period 14201804 and by 1888 they had gone All of them were located in the less densely populated continents Overall Asia accounted for about twothirds of the worlds population at the beginning of the period around 1420 and maintained its position throughout But it had no largescale slave societies 3 M I Finley Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology London 1980 p 9 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 483 How was the rise and fall of slavery associated with the larger pattern of global population growth and how far was slavery interchangeable with other forms of social dependency and forced labor To begin with the Americas the total population was at least 50 million in 1420 some would say perhaps twice as many A series of complex societies most of them including slavelike components had collapsed centuries before and by 1420 only the hierarchical civilizations of Mexico and the Andes where half the population lived contained significant numbers of enslaved people most of them captives desired for incorporation These densely populated agrarian economies were not to be the sites of the major slave societies identified by Finley Rather the modern slave societies were imposed on regions that were relatively sparsely settled In some cases the sparseness of population already existed in 1420 in others it was the creation of later dramatic depopulation Depopulation is the central feature in the history of the Americas begin ning with the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and continuing with devastating impact down to about 1600 when the total population had fallen to around 10 million The causes of this demographic catastrophe remain a matter of controversy but it is certain at least that a significant part of the loss resulted directly from European attempts to enslave the indigenous peoples of the Americas Combined with disease and genocide the effect of this enslavement was massive mortality In the densely settled agrarian civi lizations of Mexico Peru and Hispaniola perhaps threequarters of the population was wiped out Systems of plantation slavery took a century to emerge in the Americas after the coming of the Europeans appearing first in Brazil then spreading to the islands of the Caribbean and mainland North America Some of the people who comprised the enslaved labor forces on the plantations were Native Americans but the vast majority were Africans carried across the Atlantic in the slave trade Enslaved Africans were brought not only to work in the fields of the plantations but also to labor in other parts of the Americas from Canada to Argentina but it was the plantationdominated slave societies that absorbed the greatest proportion In the northern and southern extremes slaves never became numerous and there the institution was whittled away even before formal abolition Overall the movement of Africans exceeded the concurrent migration of Europeans into the Ameri cas until about 1830 From the early eighteenth century Africans had in fact made up an increasing proportion of Atlantic migration peaking at around 90 percent in the 1820s4 By that date several European nations had already made illegal their Atlantic slave trades and slavery itself had been abol ished in Haiti Particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 4 David Eltis The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas Cambridge 2000 p 12 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 484 the cambridge world history of slavery then the Atlantic slave trade was central to the population history of the Americas and slavery was central to the economic life of the Atlantic world The net effect was a total population in the Americas of about 25 million in 1804 with Africans and Europeans predominating an out come vitally associated with the role of slavery Why was plantation production located in tropical America rather than tropical Africa and why was it Africans rather than other peoples who were enslaved to labor on those plantations Why was it not Europeans who could have supplied the basis of favored settler colonies Complex answers to these difficult questions have been argued by David Eltis5 In terms of the role of demographic factors it was long believed by Europeans that Africans were best able to survive the diseases of the tropics and in this belief they were supported by the evidence of heavy mortality among European troops and traders on the West African coast The mortality of Europeans was less catastrophic in the American tropics though still high compared to temperate Europe and North America Initially particularly during the seventeenth century European laborers were in fact brought in substantial numbers to the American tropics to work under a variety of bonded contractual arrangements notably indentured servitude The numbers of the indentured were however quickly overtaken by the slave trade from Africa and their importance declined rapidly in the later sev enteenth century Penal servitude mostly of Europeans provided coerced labor to the Americas longer than indenture but the numbers were even smaller Within Europe the period beginning in 1420 followed the great depop ulation of the fourteenth century when the Black Death bubonic plague killed at least onethird of the people and combined with environmental factors to create a subsistence crisis In western Europe a consequence of these crises was the decline of manorial bondage and other claims on labor services and the effective disappearance of slavery in all its forms The pattern in eastern Europe was quite different There the population was less dense less urbanized and more vulnerable to distress In eastern Europe the population was forced into varieties of servitude notably serf dom that proved more rigorous and demanding than anything seen in western Europe for five hundred years In Russia the landless poor sold themselves into slavery in increasing numbers after 1500 seeing no viable alternative and this was followed by the second serfdom After 1420 Europeans were occasionally caught up in slave trades includ ing capture and trade to the Barbary states There were also minor slave 5 David Eltis Europeans and the Rise of African Slavery in the Americas An Interpretation American Historical Review 98 1993 13991423 idem Rise of African Slavery Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 485 trades into southern Europe from North Africa For example small num bers of slaves worked in Italy Cyprus and Turkey from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth most of them carried across the Mediterranean The opening of the slave trade from the west coast of Africa in the middle of the fifteenth century brought blacks to Portugal and the Atlantic islands in numbers that outweighed the trade across the Atlantic down to the middle of the sixteenth century The establishment of the plantation systems of the Americas also produced a small flow of black slaves to Europe most of them domestic servants accompanied by their owners Slavery remained a customary status in Britain though without legal foundation until 1772 and in France until the Revolution Down to 1724 the scattered marginal slaves of western Europe were far outnumbered by the thriving enslaved population in Russia Slaves were a vital element in the agricultural economy of Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accounting for 1520 percent of households on the steppe where demesne farming was most extensive Their numbers declined during the seventeenth century and reforms that limited selfsale and required slaves to pay tax eventually made their status equivalent to that of serfs The ending of slavery in Russia in 1724 thus served to augment the enserfed population Even before the tax reforms of Peter I the slaves of Europe were swamped by the very large numbers of serfs stretching across the east from Poland to Russia Africa was the great source of enslaved people for longdistance trading In addition to those taken across the Atlantic to the Americas and the small flows north to Europe the period saw a continuing trade north and east across the Sahara This last was an ancient trade Between 1420 and 1804 the transSaharan trade together with an East African traffic supplied the Middle East and South Asia with roughly 5 million enslaved people African slaves were a relatively common element in the Middle East throughout the period some attaining positions of political status but parts of the Islamic world saw a significant contraction in slavery after about 1500 By comparison the slave trade across the Atlantic was new and even more massive The total number of enslaved people taken from Africa to be shipped to the Americas within the period has been put at about 10 million The outcome was that by the second half of the eighteenth century Africa was established as the center of a vast interconnected world trade in people Each year some one hundred thousand people were traded out of the continent As well as the massive export of people from Africa varieties of slavery flourished within the continent and particularly in reaction to the great external demand Plantation slavery was absent however appearing only in the later nineteenth century In 1420 slavelike forms of dependence were concentrated in specific regions but spread much more intensively Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 486 the cambridge world history of slavery in response to European slave trading particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries By 1804 significant slave populations existed along most of the African coast and in parts of the interior Most of the enslaved were embedded in African communities and lived among peoples subject to a range of social relations often coerced and dependent but with opportunities for longterm incorporation into free society Europeans had only a tenuous footing on the coast and owned and exploited relatively few Africans The only firmly rooted slaveowning colony of Europeans was at the Cape of Good Hope where the slave and free populations were small based on farming rather than plantation agriculture Some of these slaves were Africans brought from Madagascar and the eastern coastal strip but others were brought by the Dutch from Southeast Asia Slave and other forms of coerced labor were also common throughout India China and Southeast Asia Here the coerced were generally drawn from local populations and used in subsistence and commercial agriculture as well as domestic service In India at the end of the eighteenth cen tury proportions of enslaved people varied greatly from region to region forming between 5 and 30 percent of the total population When detailed statistics first become available in 1840 the Bengal presidency counted some 4 million and together with Bombay and Madras the total under the East India Company was perhaps 8 million On the northern fron tiers beyond the Companys domain slavery was equally prevalent British colonial rule encouraged the maintenance of the institution Chinas slave population decreased over the period Household slaves were consistently used to perform domestic service but the most exploita tive varieties of agricultural servitude were gradually replaced by looser forms In particular the hereditary serviletenant system went into decline and by the early eighteenth century bondservants were allowed to occupy independent households though remaining indentured E G Pulleyblank has argued that in China there is little evidence that slaves formed a large part of the whole population at any time or outweighed in economic importance the attached retainers hired labourers sharecropping tenants and unattached peasants6 From the seventeenth century European colonial enclaves began to play a role as slaveowners in Asia but only in Java did a substantial system of plantation agriculture emerge Dutch planters used enslaved Indonesians to work on sugar and coffee plantations but over time slavery was replaced by other varieties of servitude and coercion Elsewhere in the islands of Southeast Asia the Pacific and Australia slavery was uncommon before and after 1804 Systems of indenture and penal servitude were also rare 6 E G Pulleyblank The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 1958 220 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 487 Looking broadly at the changing world map of slavery from 1420 to 1804 the Americas emerge dramatically as the center of dominating largescale slave societies By the end of the period almost all of the enslaved people of the Americas had their origins in Africa and the development of the Atlantic slave trade had in turn stimulated the growth of slave populations along the continents west coast Enslaved people were much less common in the rest of the world Forms of coercion and social dependency other than chattel slavery were however almost universal and dominated the populations of much of eastern Europe Asia and Africa How many people were enslaved in 1420 and how many in 1804 and what proportion did they bear to the populations of which they were part Precise quantitative answers are hard to achieve for the world at large and depend in any case on definitions of slavery A brave estimate suggests that the worlds slave population reached its maximum around 1800 numbering perhaps 45 million or 5 percent of the population of the world In terms of absolute numbers slaves were most numerous in China and India where more than onehalf of the worlds population lived but in those countries slaves were less than 10 percent of the population In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries slaves made up a minimum 10 percent of the Russian heartlands population but the status disappeared in 1724 In the slave societies of Brazil and the US South on the other hand enslaved people made up 30 percent of the total populations In the South this proportion was reached by about 1730 Korea also had about 30 percent around 1420 but the proportion then declined as in China At the extreme in the truly intense plantation economies of the French and British Caribbean the proportion rose as high as 90 percent These concentrations were unique to the eighteenth century How did these populations of enslaved people compare with the enserfed In eastern Europe and Russia the second serfdom captured more than half of the total population The proportion rose above 70 percent in Hungary Poland Bohemia and the Baltic provinces of Livonia and Estonia and declined only marginally through the eighteenth century Elsewhere particularly in Asia and parts of the Americas dependent labor ers and peasants under the landlords heel accounted for large numbers Varieties of indentured servitude were also important but the relation was generally temporary in contrast to the permanence of slavery and serfdom Penal servitude was less significant Looked at from the other side of the fence truly free working people were hard to find around 1800 outside of western Europe and temperate North America For enslaved and otherwise dependent peoples the structure of the larger population in which they found themselves was a major determinant of their demographic experience Where slaves were a majority as in the Caribbean they tended to live on large plantation units the populations of Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 488 the cambridge world history of slavery which were overwhelmingly slave and African and spatially isolated from other settlements In the US South and in Brazil where the enslaved lived among relatively large populations of free people and belonged to smaller agricultural units this was a much less common experience Where the enslaved made up less than 10 percent of the population they were much less likely to be drawn from other ethnic groups or have had to endure longdistance forced migration On the other hand their slave status cut them off from full participation in their communities This was the typical experience of the enslaved during the period but the full flowering of the capitalist system of plantation slavery naturally drew attention to the characteristic patterns of that extreme form Serfs however generally remained fixed in their location living among other serfs and indeed were enserfed as whole populations composition To what extent were enslaved and otherwise dependent peoples selected populations and how might this have affected demographic behavior The owners of slaves generally sought to choose through selective purchase and sale but the mechanism of the market meant that physical and other desired qualities were always balanced against price Longdistance slave trades were structured to maximize the profits of the traders but once again the process of selection was governed by price and by supply factors that did not always match the pattern of demand The outcome was slave populations composed of people who diverged significantly from the population composition of their original communities in response to the very particular demands of specific economic activities Whereas serfs were selected as whole organic communities slaves were generally selected as individuals who just happened to be plucked from complete communities The consequences were far reaching Variations in the demographic characteristics of enslaved and dependent peoples were quite considerable reflecting their varied social and economic roles and their relations to the larger societies in which they were located Whereas the enserfed tended to roughly match the larger populations to which they belonged slave populations came to this state only slowly and in many cases remained distinct in the longer term In the period after 1420 difference was strongly and increasingly emphasized The oceanic slave trades supplying the plantation slave societies of the Americas demonstrated this most clearly Before 1420 longdistance slave trading had been relatively rare From the middle of the sixteenth century it came to dominate The traditional idea of the slave as an outsider took on new meaning The idea remained flexible and was always perceived or constructed however so that enslavement proceeded apace in Russia in the sixteenth century without Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 489 any true notion of who was an outsider The rise of colonial Europeans as slaveowners in South and Southeast Asia created a pattern newly marked by racial distinctiveness The Atlantic slave trade was founded on general principles of selec tion that defined the rules of who might be enslaved of who was an outsider The fundamental exclusions were based on notions of race and ethnicity that determined the populations seen as appropriate suppliers Legal definitions of color also resulted in exclusions In the Americas persons with set proportions of white ancestry became legally free Reli gion sometimes worked as an exclusion most systematically in the Islamic world where the enslavement of free Muslims was illegal though the rule was sometimes broken particularly in Africa The spread of Islam into Southeast Asia during the period resulted in some reversals notably in the case of Java which became an importer rather than an exporter of slaves Christians were less unwilling to enslave other Christians though the theology and morality of the issue did come to be debated after 1492 A second less strict level of exclusions had to do with the characteristics of individuals within the target populations making unlikely the enslave ment of people with physical disabilities such as blindness or the loss of limbs Extremes of height and weight were also significant but far less exclusive Within the normal healthy population the characteristics that mat tered most were age and sex Literacy education and skills mattered little What the planters wanted and were willing to pay for was strength and staying power At slave markets they poked and pushed at the bodies of the enslaved wary of pale lips big bellies and deformed legs Although there were attractions in a slave population so structured that it could repro duce itself and thus lessen dependence on the Atlantic slave trade down to the end of the eighteenth century the masters of the most profitable slaveexploiting enterprises in the Americas put their faith in a continuous supply of fresh recruits ready to begin work more or less immediately after purchase The sugar planters of the Caribbean the most wealthy of all were said to have made calculations that it was more profitable to work slaves to death within seven years of purchase than to raise them from birth Probably few planters made such calculations on paper but the attitude was near to universal The outcome was a continuing demand for slaves selected for very particular physical characteristics What was the pattern outside the extremes of the highly selective Atlantic slave trade and the effectively indiscriminate whole populations of Euro pean serfdom Where slavery was common but smallscale as in most of Asia and Africa the enslaved individual might be carefully selected but drawn from a wide range of preferences and possibilities This was particularly true where the enslaved were to be assimilated to kinship Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 490 the cambridge world history of slavery Debt slaves similarly represented a wide range of individuals sometimes choosing themselves for enslavement or committing a child Selfenslave ment in Russia provided a clear example of this pattern Indentured and penal servitude on the other hand produced populations more similar to those created by the longdistance slave trades and often served the same markets In India down to the eighteenth century all types of forced labor were particularly directed at persons of low caste Variations in rates of expansion and in rates of mortality and fertility resulted in differences in the balance of slaves birthplaces Where the expansion of slavebased settlement was rapid as in the Americas enslaved people born in other places were dominant Such dominance was short lived where expansion was limited and natural increase quickly created a reproducing population On the other hand where expansion continued on a large scale and natural increase was insignificant or negative the proportion of enslaved born outside the society remained high for long periods For example the total number of Africans taken to the British colonies in the Caribbean through the Atlantic slave trade was five times greater than the number taken to British North America but as early as the 1770s the North American slave population outnumbered that of the British Caribbean It was these Caribbean colonies that contained the highest proportions of slaves in their populations 90 percent by the later eighteenth century and this pattern meant they also depended on a disproportionate share of the Atlantic slave trade In the Caribbean plantation colonies Africanborn slaves outnumbered locally born creoles down to the beginning of the nineteenth century and the ending of the slave trade In North America the Americanborn outnumbered the Africans as early as 1720 Males dominated in the longdistance slave trades as they did in penal servitude and indenture but were almost always accompanied by substantial contingents of females In the Atlantic slave trade the ratio favored males 32 How far did this pattern reflect supply conditions in Africa and how far was it a response to demand in the Americas The question has been debated with some vigor but the most convincing argument seems to be that supply and demand worked in concert rather than competing In Africa the societies that held slaves tended to value females most highly for their children and potential for incorporation as kin as well as for agricultural labor Women and children dominated among the captured The planters of the Americas on the other hand sought only a healthy strong labor force and they believed this was best satisfied by males Equally important the planters systematically allocated males to the skilled occupations in commodity production particularly in the sugar factories and totally excluded females from these roles The consequence was high proportions of females in the field gangs Thus the supposed planter Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 491 preference for males based on their supposed superior strength was not always reflected in practice Much the same principles applied to the dominance of males among indentured and convict populations In Asia as well as in the domestic slavery of Africa females were sought after However even in the smaller scale slave trade around the eastern Mediterranean in the sixteenth and sev enteenth centuries where both black African and white European women were highly valued for domestic service and concubinage the sex ratio was roughly balanced or slightly favored males In the Middle East eunuchs were a special category commonly associated with harems and household positions of trust Where slave populations came to reproduce themselves as in the United States by the early eighteenth century the sex ratio shifted from male to female dominance as a result of the relatively higher mortality of males Even where slave populations failed to become selfreproducing the long term trend was always toward relatively greater growth among the females Where slaves were integrated into kinship systems and were only a small proportion of the total population the chances of evolution were much more limited In these societies the processes of selection persisted over time in replacing the enslaved with similar proportions of males and females The age structures of enslaved and otherwise dependent populations varied quite widely Among the enserfed a normal age distribution was to be expected and the same applied to selfreproducing largescale slave populations as in the US South by the end of the eighteenth century Elsewhere such normality was rare On the plantations of the tropical Americas the slave trade not only constantly replenished the male com ponent but also brought a preponderance of people between the ages of fifteen and twentyfive years These were the ages of peak productivity the planters believed when the chances of death from disease were least Younger and older slaves were less valuable and traded at lower prices Once again indentured and penal servitude showed similar age patterns Debt bondage on the other hand involved a wider range stretching from the mature to their young children Selling a child into slavery some times served to preserve the lives of the parents or to protect siblings from starvation Throughout Asia and Africa young children were favored for domestic service and for incorporation as kin dynamics All forms of slavery serfdom and social dependency relied on recruitment from free populations to maintain their numbers Only some however were potentially selfreproducing In the first place any variety of coerced Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 492 the cambridge world history of slavery labor that was not heritable was necessarily reliant on external recruitment Penal servitude indenture and most types of debt slavery fell into this category their populations growing only so long as fresh recruits could be found among the free The same applied though less systematically to children enslaved in societies that sought to incorporate them as family and kin Often the objective of recruitment was to increase the size of the larger population the children of the enslaved being regarded as belonging to the free or as some intermediate transitional status In slavery and serfdom by contrast status was normally heritable The children of enslaved and enserfed women were legally slaves and serfs thus creating the conditions for selfreproducing populations Among serfs births exceeded deaths according to the rhythm of resources feast famine and epidemic in much the same way as experienced by the free Free men fathered some of the children born to serf women but the populations were effectively closed On the other hand slaves particularly slaves in the capitalist plantation economies of the Americas generally did not main tain their numbers through natural increase These populations depended heavily on continuous recruitment through longdistance slave trading with significant consequences for the composition of the populations For different reasons including a high rate of manumission and religious pro hibitions the substantial slave population of the Islamic world was unable to sustain its numbers through natural increase There were as already noted some striking exceptions to these broad patterns notably the strong positive natural increase of the slave population of the United States in the eighteenth century Free people recruited to slavery serfdom and other forms of coerced labor were obtained from a variety of sources and by a variety of meth ods Voluntary selfenslavement was rare confined chiefly to the debt bondage that was relatively most common in Asia and Africa Indentured servitude was also entered into freely in many cases though impressment became common in England for example in the seventeenth century when demand from the American plantations was strong People who entered such contracts voluntarily generally had expectations of freedom after a certain number of years of service and in the case of the indentured monetary rewards In India into the eighteenth century the selling of children and relatives often accompanied by famine was a means of preserving life through the protection that could be afforded by a landlord and often served as a preliminary to voluntary selfenslavement Under Islam selfenslavement came to be prohibited as was the enslavement of free Muslim people the sale of children and enslavement for debt or crime In all other cases force was essential to recruitment Slavery in the Islamic world during the period was effectively confined to slave birth Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 493 the capture of infidels in war or jihad and the importation of people from outside the frontiers by purchase or tribute The longdistance slave trades all depended ultimately on the capture of individuals in war and raids In the early stages of the Atlantic slave trade capture was sometimes undertaken by the European traders themselves but by the seventeenth century the trade was supplied directly by Africans with implications for the demographic characteristics of the people offered for sale to the Euro pean traders Kidnapping of men women and children was a significant source of slaves in India Enserfment was carried out in eastern Europe and Russia by government edict using military and judicial might The status of serf was both defined and created by the state denying the right to migrate from an estate and demanding labor on demesne land Penal servitude similarly depended on the strong arm of the law How effectively might these modes of recruitment be directed at increas ing the supply of coerced people in response to changes in demand Were there counterbalancing mechanisms to reduce supply Where the state directly controlled the sources of recruitment numbers could be manipu lated fairly easily Legal systems could be modified to increase or decrease the categories of crimes punishable by penal servitude and the duration and conditions of such punishment The same applied to debt slavery In Southeast Asia debt was the most common cause of bondage and was encoded in law Enserfment on the other hand was generally understood as a oneoff event affecting whole populations with limited opportunity for further recruitment once the system had been set in place It was a closed system Slave traders responded to increased demand by offering higher prices to their suppliers In Africa particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this process was followed by expanded warfare and raiding and the spread of slave trading into the interior In China on the other hand lateseventeenthcentury legislation prohibited landlords selling servile laborers to other households and this effectively liberated many people though the wealthy continued to employ bound labor Within Europe the supply of indentured servants by kidnapping was less easily increased because the practice became socially unacceptable and expensive During the seventeenth century indentured servants were swiftly replaced by enslaved Africans partly because of the relative costs of supply and partly because Africans were seen by their European captors as superior producers The owners also saw potential wealth and labor in the children of enslaved adult Africans a consequence of the heritability of their status which was in turn a creation of colonial legislation Whether their servile status was temporary or permanent individuals were lost to the populations through death liberation and escape Escape by running away as a fugitive individual was typically the act of a male generally a young adult Liberation and escape might also affect groups or Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 494 the cambridge world history of slavery even whole populations The major example of liberation resulting from emancipation by state legislation occurred in the north of the United States following independence with laws enacted between 1777 and 1804 to effect either immediate or gradual emancipation Escape led to the establishment of free populations of former African slaves living in generally isolated communities quilombos and maroon towns particularly in Brazil Suri name and Jamaica Only in the great St Domingue revolution beginning in 1792 did an entire slave population succeed in overthrowing its colonial masters and establishing a free republic Haiti in 1804 With the exception of the western outpost of Catalonia where armed uprisings ended serfdom in the late fifteenth century serfs revolted but never achieved freedom by violence Where the enslaved made up only small scattered populations as in most of Asia and Africa the possibilities of group resistance were limited and even individual escape was difficult For most slaves and serfs before 1804 death was accompanied by the knowledge that their chil dren were enslaved and would almost certainly remain unfree until death These people made up the true slave populations and serf populations Such populations were not closed but equally possessed their own internal dynamics To what extent was the mortality experience of the enslaved and the enserfed determined by their status and how did the experience vary between the different statuses The period 14201804 was marked by epidemic disease subsistence crises and generally poor standards of public health European imperialism created the conditions for the more rapid spread of disease around the world and more directly exposed people to new disease environments Thus the native peoples of the Americas lacking immunities to diseases such as smallpox and influenza died in great numbers when they came in contact with Europeans Such great mortality often occurred whether or not people were enslaved Further in some cases the exposure of the enslaved was no greater than that of their masters resulting in high levels of mortality across the board and independent of wealth and status Thus European whites suffered heavy mortality throughout the tropical world partly because medical knowledge remained primitive and medicines to fight malaria and yellow fever were unknown but largely because they found themselves in an exotic disease environment Within the period death often came from causes unrelated to wealth and status At its extremes however slavery was directly associated with catastrophic mortality and nonviable populations Most obviously the longdistance slave trades were marked by heavy losses beginning with the moment of capture in war and raids and continuing into the initial period of adjustment to the environment of the American plantations The Atlantic slave trade became notorious for its Middle Passage the crossing Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 495 from Africa to the Americas in which the enslaved were packed into ships that faced uncertain sailing times with limited supplies of food and water The mortality in the Middle Passage averaged 1215 percent dramatically higher than the mortality experienced in comparable voyages including the much longer convict passages from Europe to Australia at the end of the eighteenth century Even when landed in the Americas enslaved Africans faced a grim period of seasoning in which they had to adjust not only to new disease environments but also to the rigors of plantation labor Mortality of 10 percent during the first year was typical In addition to the mortality extremes of the Atlantic slave trade enslaved Africans suffered most severely on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil These plantations were the great consumers of people Sugar production particularly when practiced with the technologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created the conditions that encour aged slaveowners to extract greater amounts of hard and hazardous labor than was possible under any other agricultural system Mortality rates were particularly high during the establishment phase of plantation agri culture when the forest was cleared the land first hoed the buildings constructed and the first crops planted and while food might be in short supply Most of this groundbreaking work was done during the sev enteenth and eighteenth centuries Examples of heavier mortality under slavery may have occurred as in mining and quarrying but it was the sugar plantation that accounted for the greatest numbers Even where slave populations experienced natural increase overall as in the US South sugar was consistently associated with the highest levels of mor tality Even when grown in comparable physical environments as on the coastal plain of Guyana crops like cotton and coffee had significantly lower mortality Why was mortality so high on sugar plantations The question has attracted comparative analysis most recently in the work of Michael Tadman7 Fundamentally the combination of cultivation and manufacture in a single enterprise meant that a double demand on labor was possible stretching hours of work to an upper limit The work of cultivation and harvest went on sidebyside the factory operating day and night for more than half the year The tasks were arduous and dangerous and in the field they were performed by workers in gangs under the whips of their drivers The role of women in field labor spread exposure through the adult pop ulation Only those employed in domestic service escaped the rigors On top of these demands many planters particularly in the British Caribbean required slaves to produce their own food in their own time such as it was 7 Michael Tadman The Demographic Cost of Sugar Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas American Historical Review 105 2000 153475 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 496 the cambridge world history of slavery resulting in severe nutritional pressure Even when plantation slaves were fed rationed allowances distributed by the masters the hazard of subsis tence crises remained Starvation caused by an absolute shortage of food was not unknown as for example in the British West Indies during the American Revolution Down to the end of the eighteenth century medical knowledge was limited and its practice often hazardous to the patient This was certainly true of the European branch of medicine applied to the treatment of slaves on plantations in the Americas Although the planters employed qualified practitioners built hospitals and supplied medicines from the European pharmacopoeia morbidity and mortality rates remained high Inoculation against smallpox was perhaps the most significant innovation of the period and that came only at the end of the eighteenth century African people brought their own tradition of medical knowledge to the places they were carried and their practice was generally preferred and safer because it was less invasive than the European style of heroic surgery and purges Overall the medical treatment of enslaved people in the Americas was not dramatically different from the treatment of the free and this was equally true of dependent peoples in Africa Asia and Europe Wealth was not particularly important in obtaining superior access to effective medical attention Contagious disease was most dangerous in crowded unhygienic situa tions most obviously in the towns and cities that were also ports of entry for epidemics Enslaved people in the Americas particularly those on the highmortality sugar plantations existed as relatively isolated communi ties This isolation served as a protection Fresh contingents of enslaved people might bring disease with them but the cocktail of viruses was gen erally less lethal than in the port cities Where slaves and serfs were more firmly embedded in their larger populations the chances of falling victim to epidemic disease were much the same for everyone What dependent people lacked especially in the extreme versions of slavery was adequate nutrition and hygiene Although the workers villages on large sugar plan tations had the advantage of isolation housing was commonly of a poor standard packed closely and lacking sanitation and fresh water The con trast between town and country and slave and free should not be drawn too starkly however and these environmental and medical factors generally accounted for much less of the variation in mortality levels than the work regimes of the enslaved Work regimes also played a role in determining levels of fertility These levels and their variation from situation to situation were however deter mined by several other variables many of them deriving directly from the internal demographic dynamics of systems of slavery serfdom and depen dency Fertility was controlled first of all by patterns of age and sex In Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 497 the Islamic world high rates of adult manumission removed their poten tial children from the slave population and a proportion of the males imported were eunuchs Under serfdom age and sex patterns were essen tially normal and thus no impediment to the typically high fertility of the period Other systems were essentially abnormal Thus where enslaved and otherwise dependent peoples existed as scattered individuals within larger free populations their children were often incorporated into free society and indeed contributing to the growth of the free kinship group was often the ultimate objective of such enslavement The consequence was that the fertility of the enslaved did not contribute to the growth of an identifiable slave population and the very notion of natural increase within a separately defined segment of the population was not an issue The question here was whether enslavement and other forms of coercion increased overall population growth A definitive answer is hard to find but it is at least certain the societies in which such systems were practiced particularly in Asia showed quite high fertility and growth Generally however the objective was the more limited one of increasing the weight of a specific kin group and here the outcome could be positive while at the same time reducing total fertility It was in the slave systems of the Americas that fertility was most likely to be manipulated by the masters Such manipulation could be both direct and indirect Although the evidence is hard to pin down it has sometimes been argued that planters conducted slavebreeding enterprises with the conscious goal of producing people for sale by selecting mates and forc ing reproduction Certainly some regions of the US South came to have a surplus population selling young people to new regions of relatively high productivity and high prices though most of this trading occurred in the nineteenth century On the sugar plantations of the Caribbean on the other hand planters generally complained of a failure of repro duction or made the cynical calculation that buying was more profitable than breeding This assessment was facilitated in the centuries before 1804 by the Atlantic slave trade the gradual closing of the trade in the nine teenth century changed the situation by making dependence on internal reproduction essential Throughout the period miscarriage was common among the women forced to labor under the extreme regime of the sugar plantation Infant mortality was high and abortion common An addi tional factor that helps explain the difference between the US South and the Caribbean was the length of breast feeding In the Caribbean mothers maintained the African practice of breast feeding for two to three years accompanied by a common denial of sexual intercourse in order to preserve the lives of their young In the South breast feeding was much reduced and birth intervals shortened resulting in increased total fertility Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 498 the cambridge world history of slavery As well as the balance of births and deaths and the maintenance and expansion of enslaved populations through trade a sometimes significant factor was individual liberation or manumission Almost all systems of coerced labor contained mechanisms for release even when the status was heritable but the rates at which people were freed varied dramatically The highest rate seems to have occurred in the Islamic world The Quran praised emancipation as an act of righteousness Liberation often went together with the embrace of Islam though conversion did not in itself require the freeing of slaves Skilled slaves also had the capacity to purchase freedom The freed person under Islam however commonly remained a client of the master and remained in the service of his family High rates of manumission also occurred in the Spanish Americas and in Brazil In the former the established system of coartacion ensured that slaves could buy their way out of slavery according to an agreed formula In the British and French zones of the Americas manumission was much less common and down to the end of the eighteenth century generally a function of gratuitous release by owners It can be argued that manumission was most common where enslaved people had the least value as workers outside the highly profitable plantation regions but there was also a cultural factor The British were consistently less likely to manumit or to enable manumission than the Spanish Manumission was demographically selective Generally women were twice as likely to be freed as men Where the enslaved could buy their way out it was those with marketable skills who had the greatest capacity to accumulate the required cash Where manumission was facilitated by free people it was generally fathers who released their own children by slave mothers In this way manumission came to be associated with miscegena tion especially in the Americas The result was a distinct population of free colored people often distinguished from the parallel population of free blacks Down to 1804 a large proportion of these people had themselves been slaves but the populations quickly became selfreproducing In the Americas free colored and free black people came to make up significant proportions of the total free population by the end of the eighteenth cen tury but only in some territories The largest proportions were in Brazil the Spanish colonies and the French Caribbean islands where they made up 3040 percent of the free Rates were much lower in the British colonies and in the United States owners Who were the people who held other people as property to buy and sell In rare cases the owners were themselves enslaved or otherwise dependent or had previously held such status Broadly however the owners were free Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 499 people with sufficient wealth to pay the costs of acquiring the bodies and labor of others Most were adult males Most held their property rights as individuals The ownership of coerced laborers by states and smaller units of govern ment was common in most societies between 1420 and 1804 though the proportions varied considerably The initial enslavement of Native Amer icans by the Spanish was an act of the state carried out by armies but associated with assignment to private individuals On the other hand state ownership was relatively rare in the plantation economies of the Americas though examples occurred in the South American colonies of the Dutch Colonial rule via corporate enterprise as in the East India Companies of the Dutch and British created opportunities for such ownership By the end of the eighteenth century some colonial governments employed slaves as soldiers in the Americas following longestablished Islamic practice Religious institutions also became important owners of slaves particularly among the Christian churches in the Americas In South America the Roman Catholic orders depended heavily on African slaves for labor in their monasteries missions and landed estates In Russia church and state held large numbers of serfs on large estates Convicts in penal servitude generally belonged to states though were sometimes hired out to individual private employers Slaves convicted of crimes in the Americas were regu larly forced to labor in gangs on public works None of these groups added to large numbers however when compared to the vast populations on private plantations and farms In Africa state ownership was also relatively rare though wealthy indi viduals of high rank sometimes possessed large retinues In sixteenth century Timbuktu a rich man might own as many as one thousand slaves it was said as might the prazeros or crown overlords of Portuguese Zambezi in the eighteenth century8 In Mughal India zamindars or rural chiefs some times held two hundred or more slaves but such large holdings accounted for no more than 12 percent of all slaves in agriculture and domestic service Under East India Company rule slaveowning was widespread but smallscale among both Indians and Europeans Forced labor for civil and military purposes extracted by governments and religious institutions as well as landlords increased in the eighteenth century In China and South east Asia major public works frequently employed contingents of coerced laborers As in the Americas however it was private individuals or families that owned most slaves scattered as they were in small units The same applied to the enserfed in eastern Europe though state regulation and state power were always fundamental to the maintenance of the system 8 Humphrey J Fisher Slavery in the History of Muslim Black Africa New York 2001 p 34 Allen F Isaacman Mozambique The Africanization of a European Institution The Zambesi Prazos 17501902 Madison 1972 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 500 the cambridge world history of slavery Most owners lived with their slaves or serfs on agricultural holdings or in urban households Where the enterprises of the owners were smallscale the numbers of coerced people were generally few and physical occupation of the same household unit was typical Even where the agricultural units were large as in the demesne and latifundia of eastern Europe the owners generally lived at least part of the year on the same properties as their serfs and slaves In the Ottoman Empire by the late sixteenth century nonMuslims were theoretically prohibited from owning slaves though the practice was not always so exclusive The major exception to this rule of coresidence occurred in the capitalist plantation slave systems of the Caribbean There especially in the colonies of the British and the French the wealth of the sugar planters enabled them to choose to live as longdistance absentees Generally these absentee proprietors were descended from colonists whose families had spent two or three generations in the Americas building up their fortunes begin ning in the seventeenth century Once the planter families had established themselves as absentees they often never even visited their plantations completely breaking the possibility of a demographic link between masters and slaves Such absentees as well as wealthy planters resident in the Americas frequently became the owners of multiple plantations sometimes widely scattered across the region By the late eighteenth century the most wealthy of these people owned thousands of slaves The slaves lived on separate plantation units with up to five or six hundred slaves populations that easily exceeded most independent towns and villages Growth beyond this number was prevented only by technological logistics The typical sugarplantation slave lived on a unit of about two hundred people all belonging to a single owner Even where the concentration of ownership was great the typical owner held few slaves generally less than twenty Much the same applied to serfdom in regions of demesne farming There was a significant contrast between the typical slaveowner who owned a few people and the typical slave who belonged to an owner with a large holding Elsewhere outside the extreme varieties of plantation slavery this contrast was much less marked with the typical coerced person belonging to an individual who held only one or two such persons In these smallscale systems contact between owner and owned was intimate and everyday In the extreme varieties of plantation slavery contact was often rare and slaves were ruled by managerial intermediaries most of them single young adult males The masters of slaves and serfs were typically men Women and children did hold legal ownership however and in some circumstances mistresses exercised practical management as well Where slavery and other forms of dependency were part of a familial model the notion of ownership went Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 501 together with the authority of the head of household Where slavery was essentially capitalist males owned the vast majority of the larger enter prises whereas women held around onehalf of the slaves held in small units of less than ten In the Americas female ownership was consequently concentrated in the towns where the slaves they owned were most often also females Similarly female owners of slaves were relatively rare in the Islamic world and when they did hold slaves the slaves they held were generally female Smallscale urban slaveholding was also associated with the emergent free colored and black population in the Americas Women of color in particular frequently came to play a major role in the owner ship of slaves in towns where domestic and pettytrading functions were paramount Whereas the typical owner was an adult male across the globe patterns of ethnic difference were much more varied In the smallscale versions of slavery and coercion where isolated individuals lived closely with their owners ethnicity was generally shared The enslaved came from nearby though regularly distinguished as outsiders by poverty debt or caste In the Americas and the Middle East on the other hand reliance on Africa as a source of slaves was associated with the development of very strong racial and ethnic difference Particularly in the Americas slavery came to be highly racialized in the period the typical owner a white European male and the typical slave a black African In part this pattern can be explained by the development of the plantation as a capitalist institution in which labor came to be starkly commodified without any intention of incorporation or desire to use slavery as a means to increase the population at large In turn it was the character of these objectives that determined the structure of the slave family and household as well as its relation to the family and household of the owner family and household The idea of the slave family runs parallel to the notion of a slave population Just as a slave population with its own internal dynamic was possible only where enslaved people made up a significant proportion of the whole so the slave family composed strictly of enslaved people was a possibility only where they lived together in substantial numbers Similarly the slave household depended on the chances of coresidence Where owners prevented slaves belonging to them from living with the slaves of other owners the enslaved were able only to form households with persons drawn from a narrow range Even on the largest plantations with five hundred or more slaves individuals found mates on other plan tations Thus it is necessary to understand slave family and household structure within these definitional limits imposed by owners but with Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 502 the cambridge world history of slavery much leakage beyond the boundaries of particular slaveholdings to include the slaves of other owners as well as a variety of connections with the free population Were enslaved people permitted to marry other slaves There was no con sistent rule and always a large gap between theory and practice In Islam slaves could marry with the consent of their master Where Roman Catholi cism ruled both civil and ecclesiastical law allowed marriage between slaves even against the wishes of the master and owners were prohibited from separating families by sale or transfer If a man and his wife had dif ferent masters living within a town they were to be permitted visiting nights In practice however Catholic slaveowners frequently discouraged marriage by threats and whipping and described children as the products of illicit liaisons in order to justify offering them for sale Marriage was not common Under British colonial rule in the Caribbean and North America the marriage of slaves was not recognized by the state Christian marriages were performed in increasing numbers during the eighteenth century mostly by dissenting denominations Slaveowners generally saw customary unions as conducive to natural increase and social control but often discouraged unions between slaves belonging to separate plantations fearing loss of labor and the monetary benefit of reproduction when the mother belonged to another Were enslaved people permitted to marry free people In theory in the Islamic world a male slave could marry a free woman but custom made this rare A master could marry his own slave woman only if he freed her first In sixteenthcentury Ottoman society marriage between slave and nonslave was said to be socially acceptable but generally these seem to have been marriages between Muslim women and freedman converts Marriage between slave and nonslave was common in Southeast Asia but there the image of bondage was assimilated to the model of the extended family household with captives entering at the bottom of the system and secondgeneration slaves occupying less precise statuses The slave was in much the same position as the child In China an etymological link has been found between terms used to identify slaves and wives and children9 Bondservants in agriculture were seen as dependents of the landowners household and were forced to bury their dead among the graves of the owners family By the early eighteenth century however most of these agricultural bondservants were permitted to reconstitute themselves as independent households under indenture In India under the Mughal Empire where wealthy families were based on domestic slavery masters and mistresses might have sex with younger slaves of both sexes In the harem with its strict hierarchy many of the 9 Pulleyblank Chattel Slavery in China 185220 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 503 numerous maidservants were slaves slave eunuchs served as intermediaries for the household protecting the harems purity Harsher versions of the landlords demand for sex from his slave and free tenants occurred in China but such access became limited by state control in the eighteenth century In eighteenthcentury Bengal marriage or cohabitation of a free person with a slave might be followed by reduction to slavery This however occurred only in cases where a poor individual wished to marry the slave of a particular master and chose to come within his household European officers of the East India Company commonly kept slaveconcubines and had children by them Sometimes the European man saw such a woman as a prostitute at other times as an unmarried wife He distanced himself from his children by calling them halfcastes or even orphans and denying them the use of his surname The male slaveowners desire to have free sexual access to his slaves and at the same time the legal right to deny his paternity resulted in the creation of a matrilineal model of descent that ran counter to the patrilineal chain of wealth inheritance that applied in most slave societies In these ways the structure of potential slave family life stretched along a continuum from complete and easy incorporation into the household of the free master to separation and rejection Where separation was the fundamental model as in the plantation systems of the Americas other demographic variables played a more vital role in determining family struc tures internal to the slave community The chances of slaves forming family units of any sort were limited by their isolation Where a single slave lived within the household of the owner of a farm distant from other settlements it was simply impossible Thus the opportunities increased along with increasing population den sity and size of slaveholding Along this scale it was the slave living on a very large plantation within a closely settled village who had the best chances except that these units were the same sites that suffered extreme mortality rates and population replacement through slave trading Family formation was particularly difficult in the earliest stages of settlement in the Americas because the overall density of population was generally low settlements scattered and slaveholdings small By the eighteenth century however many regions particularly in the slave societies of the south ern colonies of North America the Caribbean and Brazil had become quite densely populated with high proportions of slaves and large planta tion villagesettlements These conditions made possible family formation increased fertility and relative stability Outside of these regions in the northern colonies and throughout most of Central and South America the earlier pattern of settlement generally applied to slaves but with the advantage of higher manumission rates in the Spanish and Portuguese Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 504 the cambridge world history of slavery colonies that facilitated family formation with connections in the free or freed population What kinds of family household groups were formed where enslaved people lived in large populations on relatively isolated plantation settle ments It is sometimes argued that nuclear families and relatively evenly balanced sex ratios in the slave trade were typical of British as well as French Caribbean settlements in the middle of the seventeenth century at the beginning of the sugar revolution This argument is poorly supported by demographic data however and awaits detailed analysis In the French Caribbean colonies slave family formation was encouraged by church and state and it was said that in the seventeenth century enslaved people were even given the chance to select husbands and wives from arriving ships choosing partners from their own language groups In Guadeloupe in the 1660s some 70 percent of slaves were listed in family groups Small plantation size remained a barrier but as village settlements expanded fam ily compounds developed with children occupying houses close to their parents The pattern of development in the British Caribbean is best understood for the very end of the period around the time of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade For example on the island of St Lucia slaves living outside the towns in the early nineteenth century were much more likely to be attributed kin if they lived in large units the proportion increasing from 40 percent in holdings of two slaves to 73 percent among those living on plantations with populations of 250 or more On the larger sugar plantations of Barbados as many as 80 percent of the slaves were attributed to families in the late eighteenth century The proportion was at least as high on the islands of the Bahamas where sugar was not pro duced In the towns of the British Caribbean the proportion was always low because of the small scale of slaveholding Whereas twothirds of the rural slaves of St Lucia were listed in family groups only onehalf of the urban slaves were attributed to families In addition to the simple fact of belonging to a family there were significant differences in the types of family households in which enslaved people lived In the towns and on the smaller rural holdings throughout the British Caribbean the dominant unit was composed of mother and children On the larger plan tations on which most slaves lived however the nuclear family man wife and their children came to dominate by the end of the period The proportion of plantation slaves living in such families varied with stage of settlement Thus for example the proportion living in nuclear family households was lower in the frontier regions of Trinidad than on the long established plantations of Barbados where the balance between males and females was more normal and the percentage of Africanborn people much less Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 505 These patterns known best for the very end of the period suggest that nuclear polygynous and extended family households must have been rare in most parts of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the nuclear family first emerging as the dominant form in North America only after about 1730 Some of the same principles of scale and distribution applied to the Russian slave population of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries What was the impact of the slave trade on family structure in Africa Generally the drawing off of a disproportion of males was least disruptive in the patrilineal societies of West Africa though the probable increase in polygyny had uncertain consequences for the position of women and the institution of marriage The impact of polygyny on fertility is equally uncertain John Thornton looking specifically at the case of Angola has argued that although the eighteenthcentury slave trade took more males than females and encouraged in turn the increased formation of polygynous families fertility remained high and the population was indeed able to replace itself10 On the other hand in the Americas it has often been contended that polygyny within the plantation slave populations worked to reduce fertility because there the unbalanced sex ratio favored adult males What significance did these varied patterns of family formation have for the population dynamics of slavery and serfdom In North America child woman ratios remained low until the early eighteenth century but then increased to about two live births per female in the 1730s and continued to rise into the nineteenth century Enslaved women generally had their first child before they reached twenty years of age and typically gave birth to eight children impacts How did slavery serfdom and other forms of coerced labor affect the demography of the larger populations to which they related Most discussions of these issues focus on the impact of forced migration partic ularly its significance for the stability and growth of the populations that lost people The first point to note here is that there were fundamental differences between the various types of coercion in the role of migration Serfdoms revival and extension during the period 14201804 occurred essentially to prevent the migration of peasant farmers and to tie them to the lands of their ancestors in order to supply the labor demands of overlords What serfdom did was to hinder population movement 10 John Thornton The Slave Trade in Eighteenth Century Angola Effects on Demographic Structures Canadian Journal of African Studies 14 1980 41727 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 506 the cambridge world history of slavery and thus contribute to maintaining existing patterns of distribution Its gradual breakdown in Asia and Europe was associated with the emer gence of new patterns of outmigration at first on a small scale and then long distance but these movements became substantial only after 1804 Similarly debt slavery was most often associated with keeping peo ple in place Indenture was also most commonly used to tie people to local masters During the period it spilled over into longdistance moves but because indenture normally permitted returnmigration the net effect was minor Penal servitude worked in much the same way only small numbers being sent to places from which they had little opportunity of return In general the role of migration associated with these forms of coerced labor was conservative and overall negative working toward the mainte nance of traditional patterns of distribution both in geographical terms and in terms of the social dominance Only a small proportion of the people in these social relations were migrants Serfdom indenture penal servitude and debt slavery all served to prevent from moving people who might otherwise have moved It may be argued that they operated in a Malthusian fashion inhibiting the free movement of people to better opportunities thus creating demographic pressure on resources once population began to grow rapidly Calculation of the demographic impact of the retentive char acter of these forms of coercion applying closely specified counterfactuals remains to be undertaken Slavery stands in strong contrast The development of longdistance trading of chattel slaves in the period 14201804 extracted very large con tingents of people from their homelands Contemporaries and modern scholars have disagreed on the impact of this forced migration but the question remains a vital one Throughout the world chattel slaves were increasingly people who had been forced to move and increasingly they became the slaves of masters who were themselves migrants living in distant colonies It is not surprising that the question has attracted attention and not surprising that the impact on Africa has been at the center Malthus at the end of the eighteenth century used the example of the Atlantic slave trade to support his general theory of population He argued that the trade had no impact on Africa because the people removed were quickly replaced by others through natural increase the population con stantly pressing on the limits of subsistence Antislavery advocates argued the opposite Modern scholarship has not finally resolved the issue but counterfactuals have been built J D Fage became famous in the 1960s for his argument that the slave trade was insufficiently large to offset popula tion growth by natural increase in the long term though his hypothetical population growth curve what would have happened in the absence of the slave trade did show that the population of West Africa remained static Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 507 throughout the eighteenth century11 Patrick Manning in 1990 published the results of a simulation finding that the population of subSaharan Africa would have been double its actual 1850 population in the absence of the slave trade12 What is certain is that Africa was a substantial loser in terms of its share of world population stagnating or actually declining absolutely in the face of global growth The Americas also declined within the period and were only saved from an even greater fall by the forced migration from Africa The impact on Africa was uneven Coastal settlements particularly the sites of slave trading castles in West Africa actually increased their populations They did so directly through slaveowning and indirectly through the opportunities offered by commerce and commodity supply The great numbers taken across the Atlantic came mostly from regions inland from the coast and it was there that the impact was greatest In some places there was an immediate impact on settlement structure the threat from raiders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forcing people to abandon smaller settlements for larger fortified enclosures A number of scholars have pointed to the low modern population densities of the Middle Belt of the West African savannah as the imprint of the slave trade further reading Contemporary thought on the viability of slave populations is discussed in B W Higman Slavery and the Development of Demographic Theory in the Age of the Industrial Revolution in James Walvin ed Slavery and British Society 17761846 London 1982 pp 16494 For modern theoret ical argument and demographic models see Patrick Manning Slavery and African Life Occidental Oriental and African Slave Trades Cambridge 1990 pp 3859 idem The Slave Trade The Formal Demography of a Global System in Joseph E Inikori and Stanley L Engerman eds The Atlantic Slave Trade Effects on Economies Societies and Peoples in Africa the Americas and Europe Durham NC 1992 pp 11741 H J Nieboer Slavery as an Industrial System Ethnological Researches The Hague 1900 Evsey D Domar The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom A Hypothesis Journal of Economic History 30 1970 1832 Orlando Patterson The Structural Origins of Slavery A Critique of the NieboerDomar Hypoth esis from a Comparative Perspective Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 1977 1234 Recent valuable studies along different lines are David Eltis Europeans and the Rise of African Slavery in the Americas 11 J D Fage The Effect of the Export Slave Trade on African Populations in R P Moss and R J A R Rathbone eds The Population Factor in African Studies London 1975 pp 1523 12 Manning Slavery and African Life p 85 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 508 the cambridge world history of slavery An Interpretation American Historical Review 98 1993 13991423 and his more extended argument in The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas Cambridge 2000 The period 14201804 was largely barren of censuses globally and mod ern regional population estimates vary widely For compilations of relatively recent attempts see Massimo LiviBacci A Concise History of World Popu lation Oxford 2001 third edition Angus Maddison The World Economy A Millenial Perspective Paris 2001 Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones Atlas of World Population History Harmondsworth 1978 A useful survey of world economic history placing population and labor in broad con text is Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal A Concise Economic History of the World From Palaeolithic Times to the Present New York 2003 fourth edition Broad surveys of slavery and other forms of dependent labor with a strong emphasis on demographic aspects include M L Bush ed Serfdom and Slavery Studies in Legal Bondage London 1996 M L Bush Servitude in Modern Times Cambridge 2000 David Turley Slavery Oxford 2000 Stanley Engerman Seymour Drescher and Robert Paquette eds Slav ery Oxford 2001 David Eltis ed Coerced and Free Migration Global Perspective Stanford CA 2002 For the first part of the period and ear lier see William D Phillips Jr Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade Minneapolis MN 1985 For the depopulation of the Americas a good survey of the evidence and estimates is provided by Russell Thornton American Indian Holocaust and Survival A Population History Since 1492 Norman OK 1987 A broad treatment of many issues is found in Michael R Haines and Richard H Steckel eds A Population History of North America Cambridge 2000 For slavery in the United States some particularly useful sources selected from a vast literature include Robert William Fogel and Stanley L Enger man Time on the Cross The Economics of American Negro Slavery Boston 1974 in two volumes an important comparative contribution extending beyond the United States is Michael Tadman The Demographic Cost of Sugar Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas American Historical Review 105 2000 153475 The early history of the Caribbean is treated broadly in recent surveys provided by Jalil SuedBadillo ed General History of the Caribbean vol 1 Autochthonous Societies London 2003 and Pieter C Emmer and German Carrera Damas eds General History of the Caribbean vol 2 New Societies The Caribbean and the Long Sixteenth Century London 1999 For the later part of the period see Stanley L Engerman and B W Higman The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Franklin W Knight ed General History of Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 509 the Caribbean vol 3 The Slave Societies of the Caribbean London 2007 pp 45104 For the French Caribbean see Gabriel Debien Les esclaves aux Antilles Francaises XVIIeXVIIIe siecles BasseTerre 1974 and Bernard Moitt Women and Slavery in the French Antilles 16351848 Bloomington 2001 Detailed demographic data are much more readily available for the period after 1804 than the centuries before and some of the findings specific to the early nineteenth century can be used to throw light on the process of development over time See B W Higman Slave Populations of the British Caribbean 18071834 Baltimore 1984 An example of stateowned slaves is provided in Alvin O Thompson Unprofitable Servants Crown Slaves in Berbice Guyana 18031831 Kingston 2002 On Brazil the most systematic demographic analysis comes for the last decades of the period Laird W Bergad The Comparative Histories of Slav ery in Brazil Cuba and the United States Cambridge 2007 The most valuable study of Brazilian plantations is Stuart B Schwartz Sugar Plan tations in the Formation of Brazilian Society Bahia 15501835 Cambridge 1985 and of mining A J R RussellWood The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil London 1982 Important literature on other parts of South America includes Frederick P Bowser The African Slave in Colonial Peru 15241650 Stanford CA 1974 For assessments of the transatlantic slave trade see wwwslavevoyages org launched in December 2008 and two books by David Eltis and David Richardson an edited collection Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2008 and the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade New Haven CT 2010 For comparative studies of longdistance voyaging see Philip D Curtin Death by Migration Europes Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century Cambridge 1989 and Ralph Shlomowitz Mortality and Migration in the Modern World Aldershot 1996 Africa is covered broadly in Paul E Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery A History of Slavery in Africa Cambridge 1983 and in the essays in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff eds Slavery in Africa Historical and Anthropo logical Perspectives Madison 1977 Connections with the wider world are in John Thornton Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 14001680 Cambridge 1992 More focused is Claire C Robertson and Martin A Klein eds Women and Slavery in Africa Madison WI 1983 For early southern Africa see Robert Ross Cape of Torments Slavery and Resistance in South Africa London 1983 Allen F Isaacman Mozambique The Africanization of a European Institution The Zambesi Prazos 17501902 Madison 1972 Valuable studies of some less commonly treated areas at the intersections of Africa and Asia are found in James L Watson ed Asian and African Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 510 the cambridge world history of slavery Systems of Slavery Berkeley 1980 and Gwyn Campbell ed The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia special issue of Slavery and Abolition 24 2003 Useful work on China is to be found in Willard J Peterson ed The Cambridge History of China vol 9 part one The Ching Empire to 1800 Cambridge 2002 Still useful is E G Pulleyblank The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 1958 185220 For India see the founding work of D R Banaji Slavery in British India Bombay 1933 as well as Amal Kumar Chattopadhyay Slavery in the Bengal Presidency 17721843 London 1977 Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney eds Chains of Servitude Bondage and Slavery in India Madras 1985 John F Richards The Mughal Empire vol 5 part 1 of The New Cambridge History of India Cambridge 1993 and V S Kadam Forced Labour in Maharastra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries A Study in Its Nature and Change Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 34 1991 5587 An antieconomic kinbased approach to slavery in India is advocated persuasively by Indrani Chatterjee Colouring Subalternity Slaves Concubines and Social Orphans in Early Colonial India Subaltern Studies 10 1999 4997 and Indrani Chatterjee Gender Slavery and Law in Colonial India New Delhi 1999 Detailed studies of Southeast Asia with a good deal of demographic material are collected in Anthony Reid ed Slavery Bondage and Depen dency in Southeast Asia St Lucia 1983 Valuable contextual treatments include Nicolas Tarling ed The Cambridge History of Southeast Asiavol 1 From Early Times to c1800 Cambridge 1992 and Anthony Reid South east Asia in the Age of Commerce 14501680 vol one The Lands Below the Winds New Haven CT 1988 On the Islamic world most useful are Bernard Lewis Race and Slavery in the Middle East An Historical Enquiry New York 1990 Yvonne J Seng Fugitives and Factotums Slaves in Early SixteenthCentury Istanbul Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 39 1996 13669 and for Africa Humphrey J Fisher Slavery in the History of Muslim Black Africa New York 2001 A general work with a heavy emphasis on the period after 1804 is Murray Gordon Slavery in the Arab World New York 1989 Important works on Europe include A C de C M Saunders A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal 14411555 Cambridge 1982 and Ruth Pike Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain Madison WI 1983 The major work on Russia is Richard Hellie Slavery in Russia 1450 1725 Chicago IL 1982 A useful older work is Jerome Blum Lord and Peasant in Russia From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century Princeton NJ 1961 For the marginal Mediterranean societies see Ronald C Jennings Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 demography and family structures 511 Black Slaves and Free Blacks in Ottoman Cyprus 15901640 Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 30 1987 286302 The impact of slavery on Africa and the Atlantic world generally is the focus of the essays in J E Inikori ed Forced Migration The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies London 1982 and Joseph E Inikori and Stanley L Engerman eds The Atlantic Slave Trade Effects on Economies Societies and Peoples in Africa the Americas and Europe Durham NC 1992 Particular studies of value include John Thornton The Slave Trade in Eighteenth Century Angola Effects on Demographic Structures Canadian Journal of African Studies 14 1980 41727 and the models of Patrick Manning mentioned earlier In addition to the references provided for other chapters of this work recent broad surveys of slavery with essays on demography include Sey mour Drescher and Stanley L Engerman eds A Historical Guide to World Slavery New York 1998 Paul Finkelman and Joseph C Miller eds Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery New York 1998 For an article by David Richardson on slave demography see Joel Mokyr ed The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History Oxford 2003 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 20 THE CONCEPT OF CREOLIZATION richard price New creole new god Jamaican Maroon proverb In the language of the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname descendants of rebel slaves kioo means young fellow and carries implications of inventiveness and outrageous behavior kioos 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 Surinames settlement in the new language being created by plantation slaves the equivalent term krioro meant born here ie not in Africa We may surmise that todays Saramaka connotations would have been doubly appropriate back then when these young people the first Americanborn 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 lin guistics and thence to anthropology and history only in the course of the twentieth century The earliest usage in English that refers to cul tural 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 creolisation1 But it wasnt until the 1960s that creolization became common coin among lin guists anthropologists and historians particularly after the 1968 University of the West Indies conference that resulted in the pioneering collection Dell Hymes ed Pidginization and Creolization of Languages Cambridge 1971 After that creolization quickly gained prominence as an analytical 1 Letter dated 4281928 Melville J Herskovits Papers Northwestern University Evanston Illinois Because Panhuys a prolific Dutch author on Suriname Maroon art and culture was hardly a theorist or innovator it seems likely that the concept was very much in the air especially in the Netherlands for example in regard to discussions of the incomplete creolization of Afrikaans in South Africa For example Dirk Hesseling Het Afrikaansch Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis der Nederlandse Taal in ZuidAfrika Leiden 1899 see also H D Benjamins and Johann F Snelleman eds Encyclopedie van Nederlandsch WestIndie The Hague 191417 513 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 514 the cambridge world history of slavery tool for understanding the unusual processes of culture change that first took place in the violent colonial cauldron of the early New World pro cesses that had previously been conceptualized in anthropology in terms of nowoutmoded theories of acculturation transculturation or cul tural interpenetration associated respectively with the work of Melville J Herskovits Fernando Ortiz and Roger Bastide More recently theres been a great deal of debate about the ultimate usefulness of creolization to describe historical and cultural realities in the Caribbean and elsewhere in AfroAmerica From cultural nationalists in Martinique claiming their special place in the world on the basis of creolite to cultural theorists in California claiming that thanks to creolization we are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos the idea has been thoroughly hung out to dry2 But as an analytical concept limited to a precise and unusual set of historical circumstances in which individuals from diverse societies and cultures are suddenly brought together under conditions of vastly unequal power and then out of dire necessity and over the course of only a generation or two create new shared institutions it continues to have its uses When we move from creolization as a vague and totalizing concept to the nittygritty of analyzing this special kind of culture change in particular places and periods in other words once we historicize creolization it remains a powerful analytical tool For as MichelRolph Trouillot argues creolization helps us better understand the African American miracle From the family plots of the Jamaican hinterland the Afroreligions of Brazil and Cuba or the jazz music of Louisiana to the vitality of Haitian painting and music and the historical awareness of Surinames maroons the cultural practices that typify various African American populations appear to us as the product of a repeated miracle For those of us who keep in mind the conditions of emergence and growth of ideals patterns and practices associated with African slaves and their descendants in the Americas their very existence is a continuing puzzle For they were born against all odds3 The scholarly work most closely associated with the idea of creolization among New World slaves is probably Sidney W Mintz and Richard Prices The Birth of African American Culture 1992 originally written in 1973 which built on and extended the work of anthropologist Melville J Herskovits Recognizing that creolization involved rupture and loss creativity and transformation and celebration as well as silencing of cul tural continuities and discontinuities that essay tried first and foremost to 2 The quotation is from James Clifford The Predicament of Culture TwentiethCentury Ethnography Literature and Art Cambridge 1998 p 173 3 MichelRolph Trouillot Culture on the Edges Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context in Brian Keith Axel ed From the Margins Historical Anthropology and Its Futures Durham NC 2002 pp 189210 the citation is from p 191 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 515 propose an approach for studying African American pasts For the study of slavery across the Americas it attempted to lay out the kinds of con stants eg the realities of power differences and the kinds of variables eg demographic cultural geographic specificities that merited scholars attention It assumed that despite certain commonalities based on rela tions of power slavery in nineteenthcentury Virginia for example was in significant ways a different institution from slavery in seventeenthcentury Mexico or slavery in eighteenthcentury St Domingue and it tried to point to the kinds of processes that brought about these differences The clarion call of that essay was historicization and contextualization the same care ful exploration of sociohistorical particulars that Mintz had first called for in the study of creole languages at the 1968 conference in Jamaica4 The present chapter makes several linked arguments that creolization remains a useful analytic concept for describing the special kinds of culture change brought about by Africanborn slaves and escaped slaves and their descendants throughout the Americas during the formative period of AfroAmerican institutions that given the current state of knowledge generalizations about slave creolization may be less useful than carefully historicized and contextualized analyses and that the field of creolization studies continues to be highly charged politically with US identity or racepolitics exercising a powerful and often counterproductive influence on scholarly conclusions Because creolization varies with historical context a series of questions must be asked about each case How ethnically homogeneous or het erogeneous were the enslaved Africans arriving in a particular locality in other words to what extent was there a clearly dominant group and what were the cultural consequences What were the processes by which these Africans became African Americans How quickly and in what ways did Africans transported to the Americas as slaves and their African American offspring begin thinking and acting as members of new communities that is how rapid was creolization In what ways did African arrivals choose to and were they able to continue particular ways of thinking and of doing things that came from the Old World What did Africa or its sub regions and peoples mean at different times to African arrivants and their descendants How did the various demographic profiles and social condi tions of New World plantations in particular places and times encourage or inhibit these processes In a similar vein MichelRolph Trouillot trying to specify the major variables that influence slave creolization focuses on 1 the regimentation of labor 2 the frequency and nature of contact 4 Sidney W Mintz The SocioHistorical Background to Pidginization and Creolization in Dell Hymes ed Pidginization and Creolization of Languages Cambridge 1971 pp 48196 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 516 the cambridge world history of slavery between creolizing slaves newly imported Africans and Europeans and 3 the participants consciousness of their situation cultural ideals and power relations including the actors understandings and interpretations of the stakes and forces available to reach their selfdefined goals5 This chapter begins with an extended example of creolization among the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname one of the six Maroon peoples of Suriname and French Guiana who today number some one hundred twenty thousand people In this case creolization emerges as a rich complex set of processes of which the most important is interAfrican syncretism the blending of various African traditions with relatively little admixture from European and Amerindian sources Moreover we see that modern Maroons have their own historical metaphors for describing their ancestors early creolization which they view as a process not of invention but of discovery A second section is devoted to creolization among slaves in North America where a number of historians are hotly debating the speed of early creolization and the tenacity of African ethnic contributions to slave culture Despite the richness of documentary evidence on slave life for North America scholars are far from having reached a consensus on the nature of creolization in part because ideology and politics continue to shape the inquiry A final section considers future directions in studies of slave creolization arguing for comparison across the Americas along with continued attention to the details of historical context I plead here not only for careful descriptions of process but for increased attention to the tension between slave ideology for example ideas including nostalgia about Africa and actual culture change and for an examination of slave agency and strategic selfdefinition which often occurred in situations of conflict a south american example maroons creolize their environment It may be useful to offer an extended example of this approach to demon strate how sociohistorical specificities operate to produce particular forms of creolization in a particular case Because a general analysis of creolization among Maroons would require too much historical detail this discussion is limited to a particular aspect of the creolization experience that revolving around the Saramaka encounter with the unfamiliar physical and spiritual environment of the New World Throughout the Americas enslaved Africans and their descendants engaged their new physical environment developing ritual beliefs and prac tices that were part and parcel of the general process of creolization a pro cess that involved interAfrican syncretisms relations with Amerindians 5 Trouillot Culture on the Edges pp 1956 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 517 and relations with Europeans Maroons runaway slaves and their descendants provide a privileged window through which to try to make out these early processes of creolization because in some cases at least they have been less subject than other African Americans to subsequent pressures to acculturate to a more European model After the initial process of creolization the creation of new institutions by people of diverse African backgrounds these Maroons have been less subject than most African Americans to processes of decreolization of assimilation or acculturation toward a more standard EuroAmerican norm The earliest generation of enslaved Africans who escaped to freedom in the inhospitable forests of the Americas had to quickly develop means of survival appropriate to their new environments Rituals of an enormous variety were created based largely and loosely on African models to assist them in coping Thus they discovered kinds of gods previously unknown to them who inhabited the trees and boulders and streams of their new surroundings And each new kind of god as well as each individual deity taught these pioneers how to worship them how to lay out gardens safely and successfully how to hunt in their territory and much else From the perspective of Saramaka Maroons who are the descendants of escaped slaves in the Dutch colony of Suriname and who still live in their forest domain their ancestors literally discovered America revealing all sorts of usually invisible powers that continue to make their world what it is today The early bands of Suriname Maroons confronted challenges of remark able complexity Seeking refuge in a harsh and hostile environment they were faced with the task of creating a whole new society and culture even as they were being relentlessly pursued by heavily armed colonial troops bent on the destruction of their communities Let us consider briefly the cultural resources these displaced Africans brought to bear6 First the members of a Maroon band did not share any particular African culture Each early band was composed of Africans who had for the most part been slaves on the same or neighboring plantations in coastal Suriname but who came from a number of different ethnic tribal and linguistic backgrounds in Africa Table 201 illustrates the geographical spread of African regions of shipment for Suriname slaves through time Although most of these early Maroons had spent their formative years somewhere in Africa they came from a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups spread across the whole of West and Central Africa Except in very limited realms they were in no position to try to carry on the cultural traditions of their individual home societies which differed substantially 6 The following paragraphs borrow freely from Mintz and Price Birth of African American Culture S and R Price Maroon Arts Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora Boston MA 1999 and R Price Africans Discover America The Ritualization of Gardens Landscapes and Seascapes by Suriname Maroons in Michel Conan ed Sacred Gardens and Landscapes Ritual and Agency Washington DC 2005 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 518 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 201 The African origins of Suriname slaves 1650s1700 17011725 17261750 17511775 Totals Windward Coast Mandingos 6 5 7 5 Gold Coast Koromantees 10 8 44 31 26 Slave Coast Papas 37 72 26 4 25 Bight of Biafra Calabaries 12 3 LoangoAngola Loangos or Kongos 35 19 25 59 42 Note For present purposes Windward Coast corresponds to the coastal regions of modern Guinea Bissau Guinea Sierra Leone and especially Liberia and Ivory Coast Gold Coast is roughly cotermi nous with modern Ghana Slave Coast corresponds to the coastal regions of presentday Togo and Benin LoangoAngola stretches from Cape Lopez south to the Orange River Source Calculated from slavevoyagesorgtastdatabasesearchfacesyearFrom1514yearTo1775 mjslptifmp3224032241mjbyptimp6010060200603006040060500606006070060800 from one member of the group to the next Immense quantities of knowl edge information and belief were transported to Suriname in the minds of the enslaved Africans but the human complement of their traditional institutions was not Members of tribal groups of differing status came but different status systems did not Priests and priestesses arrived but priest hoods and temples were left behind Princes and princesses crossed the ocean but courts and monarchies did not In short the personnel respon sible for the orderly perpetuation of the institutions of specific African societies were not transferred intact to Suriname The escaped slaves faced the monumental task of creating institutions languages family systems religions and much else that would respond to the needs of their new life in a largely unfamiliar forest environment Second the members of each band did share at least some familiarity with the recently developed culture of Suriname slaves This cultural core which had been developed on plantations by seventeenthcentury Africans interacting with one another as well as with Amerindians and Europeans formed an important base that Maroons drew on as they elaborated their own way of life Finally although early Maroons did not share any particular African culture they did share certain general cultural orientations that from a broad comparative perspective characterized West and Central African societies as a whole In spite of the striking variety of sociocultural forms from one African society to the next certain underlying principles and assumptions were widespread ideas about causality how particular causes are revealed the active role of the dead in the lives of the living and the intimate relationship between social conflict and illness or misfortune ideas about social relations such as what values motivate individuals how one deals with others in social situations the complementarity and relative independence of males and females and matters of interpersonal style Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 519 ideas about reciprocity and exchange including compensation for social offenses and the use of cloth as currency and broad aesthetic ideas such as an appreciation of callandresponse rhythms and sharp color contrasts and attitudes toward symmetry and syncopation These common orientations to reality would have focused the attention of individuals from West and Central African societies upon similar kinds of events even though the culturally prescribed ways of handling them were quite diverse in terms of their specific form To cite a specific example Traditionally the Yoruba deify their twins at birth enveloping their lives and deaths in complex rituals whereas the neighboring Igbo summarily destroy twins at birth7 but both peoples may be seen to be responding to the same set of underlying principles having to do with the supernatural significance of unusual births In other words the sharply divergent practices of deifying twins or killing them may be considered at a deeper level variations on a shared cultural theme For the ethnically diverse Africans who made up any early Maroon group such deeplevel cultural principles would have represented a cru cial resource providing mutually acceptable frameworks and catalysts in the complex process by which new practices institutions and beliefs were developed The process of culturebuilding or creolization by Maroons involved contributions by individual Africans with unique cultural knowl edge but who shared a general openness to new cultural ideas and a firm commitment to forging a way of life together as well as a familiarity with plantation culture and with certain more abstract often unconscious understandings that were part of a generalized African heritage A hypothet ical example involving ritual may help illustrate how this process unfolded Imagine that one of the women in an early Maroon band gives birth to twins or becomes insane or commits suicide or experiences any one of a number of events that would have required some kind of highly specialized ritual attention in almost any society in West or Central Africa It is clear to all that something must be done but neither the young mother herself nor any of the others from her particular ethnic background possess the special expertise needed However another woman one of whose relatives had been the priestess of a twin cult in another part of Africa takes charge of the situation and performs the rites as best she can remember them By dint of this experience then this woman becomes the local specialist in twin births Performing the necessary rites if the twins fall sick or die 7 David Eltis notes that twins in many Igbo communities were sold into the Atlantic slave trade directly from Igboland Almost all the twins in a sample of 57000 Africans taken out of slave ships by British cruisers and landed in Sierra Leone between 1819 and 1845 were on vessels that left Bonny New Calabar and Old Calabar David Eltis Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas Heights of Africans 18191839 Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 1982 pp 45375 as were the vast majority of the small number of recaptives in the Liberated African Registers with disabilities Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 520 the cambridge world history of slavery and caring ritually for their parents she eventually transmits her ritual knowledge which represents a fairly radical selection and elaboration of what her relatives cult had been to others who carry on and further elaborate the new knowledge as well as the statuses and roles associated with it Such processes and events multiplied a thousandfold created societies and cultures that were at once new and immensely dynamic African in overall tone and feeling they were nonetheless wholly unlike any particular African society The governing process had been a rapid and pervasive inter African syncretism a kind of radical creolization among Africans carried out in the new environment of the South American rainforest Twentiethcentury Maroon historians show their awareness of the role of such processes in the formation of their societies but they narrate them in more human less abstract terms embedding them in their own cul tures understandings about interactions between the worlds of humans nature and spiritual forces For modern Saramakas the key process was one of discovery They recount for example the experiences of their ear liest remembered ancestors at the end of the seventeenth century soon after their successful rebellion and escape from the Suriname plantation of Imanuel Machado which documentary sources allow us to date to 16908 These stories invoke individual names and personalities those of Lanu Seei Ayako and other specific ancestors in describing how during the groups stay at Matjau Creek while fomenting new rebellions among slaves they had known in white folks captivity and conducting periodic raids on vulnerable plantations the Matjauclan people were engaged in building new lives in the unfamiliar forests forging anew everything from horti cultural techniques to religious practices drawing on their diverse African memories as well as their New World experiences with both transplanted Europeans and local Amerindians The stories tell how as these early Maroons prepared their fields for planting they encountered for the first time local forest spirits and snake spirits and had to learn by trial and error to befriend and pacify them and integrate them into their understanding of the spiritual landscape of their new home They tell how a mother of twins from the Watambıi clan inadvertently discovered through the inter vention of a monkey the complex rituals that would forever thereafter be a necessary accompaniment to the birth of Saramaka twins And they tell how newly found gods of war joined those remembered from across the water in protecting and spurring on Saramaka raiders when they attacked plantations to obtain guns pots and axes and to liberate their brothers and particularly sisters still in bondage 8 Richard Price FirstTime The Historical Vision of an AfroAmerican People second edition Chicago IL 2002 pp 4352 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 521 The trial and error by which early Maroons learned about local forest and snake spirits involved a tightly interwoven complex of pan subSaharan African ideas and practices regarding illness divination and causality A misfortune whether an illness or other affliction automatically signaled the need for divination which in turn revealed a cause Often this cause turned out to be a local deity previously unknown to them as they had never before lived in this particular environment The idea that local deities could cause illness when they were offended for example when a field was cut too close to their abode in a large tree or boulder was widespread in rural West and Central Africa But the classification of local deities as well as the identities of individual deities in Africa varied significantly from one society to another The early bands of Maroons engaged in communal divination with people from diverse African origins asking questions together through a spirit medium or other divinatory agent of a god or ancestor in order to grasp the nature of the kinds of gods that now surrounded them The detailed pictures that emerged of the personality family connections abode whims and foibles of each local deity permitted the codification by the nascent community of new religious institutions classes of gods such as vodus boa constrictor deities and their close cousins watawenus anaconda deities or apukus forest spirits each with a complex and distinctive cult including shrines drumdancesong plays languages and priests and priestesses Indeed such public divination an arena for the communal creation of new cultural forms worked effectively in part because of the widespread African assumption that additivity rather than exclusivity is desirable in most religious contexts Two specific moments of the process of garden making illustrate the ways that people discovered and continue to discover today hidden aspects of their environment how the creolization of the environment proceeds in concrete terms When Saramaka men go into the forest to choose a garden space for a wife or sister they consider such physical variables as slope and exposure and soil but also look to see whether there are nearby boulders or silk cotton trees which may be the abode of forest spirits or termite hills that are the abode of redoubtable spirits called akataasi Once they find a potentially appropriate site they ask the godwhohastheplace for permission using any of several divinatory techniques they might for example leave a calabash with an offering on a forked stick for a week to see if the god accepts it or suspend a palmfrond on poles overnight for the same purpose Sometimes the domestication of a piece of forest in preparation for making gardens is more complex and involves sacrifices and other rites performed over many days Often however despite the good intentions of Saramakas a forest spirit is offended by having a field cut Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 522 the cambridge world history of slavery too close to its abode or by being seared when a field is burned too close Eventually it possesses a person and becomes an avenging spirit for that persons lineage for time immemorial In spirit possession it announces its name reveals its kinship relations and elaborates its likes and its dislikes and whenever apuku rites are held it will come to dance and often speak through its new medium The second moment of discovery in the standard gardening process is the burning of the field after the brush and trees have been cut and left to dry for some weeks The day after the raging fire has consumed all but the large stillsmoking trunks men and women walk gingerly through the ashes looking for the skeletons of boa constrictors that may have been caught in the fire If found the remains are placed in a tiny specially built coffin and buried ceremonially Before many weeks pass the spirit of the vodu god who lived in the snake will possess someone usually a woman in the matrilineage of the woman who owns the garden The god once domesticated by a long and complex series of rites will speak intelligibly tell its name disclose details of its family and residence and reveal its special likes and dislikes That womans lineage will thenceforth remain in a special relationship with that god now an avenging spirit These two examples show how Saramakas interacting with their environ ment in the process of making gardens discover normally invisible spiritual beings who enter into longterm relations with them and through spirit possession and other forms of divination become active agents in the ritual life of the village Through such gods Saramakas discovered and continue to discover the workings of the spiritual world And with the advice of these gods they make remake and come to understand in everexpanding detail the specifics of the landscape in which they live Whereas twentiethcentury Maroons recounting their ancestors early years in the forest envision a repeated process of discovery an unfolding series of divine revelations that occurred in the course of solving the practi cal problems of daily life anthropologists or historians might describe the process rather as one in which these particular spirits were being created or invented to fit into a generalized religious model that was familiar to most members of the various African ethnic groups present Anthropolo gists and historians in other words would describe this process as part of creolization Saramaka accounts of the origin of their twin rituals provide another example of how Maroons envision this discovery process Here the metaphor is not divination but a different kind of divine intervention Nevertheless it represents a precise Maroon way of speaking about the process of legitimizing a newly created institution that took place nearly three centuries earlier The story as recounted in 1978 by my late Saramaka friend Peleki runs as follows Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 523 Ma Zoe was an early Watambıiclan runaway Once in the forest she gave birth to twins One day she went to her garden leaving the infants in a nearby open shed But when she returned for them she saw a large monkey sitting right next to them So she hid to watch what would happen She was afraid that if she startled the animal it might grab the children and carry them into the trees She was beside herself and didnt know what to do So she just kept watch She saw that the monkey had amassed a large pile of selected leaves It was breaking them into pieces Then it put them into an earthenware pot and placed it on the fire When the leaves had boiled a while it removed them and poured the leaves into a calabash With this it washed the child Exactly the way a mother washes a child Then it shook the water off the child and put it down Then it did the same with the other child Finally it took the calabash of leaf water and gave some to each child to drink The woman saw all this Then when it was finished the monkey set out on the path It didnt take the twins with it And the mother came running to her children She examined the leaves which ones it had given them to drink which had been used for washing And those are the very leaves that remain with us today for the great Watambıi twin obia9 Today this Watambıi cult services all twins born in Saramaka involving their parents and siblings in a complex set of rituals that from a historical or anthropological perspective we can assert draws on ideas and practices from a variety of West and Central African societies such as the widespread African association of twins with monkeys From this anthropological perspective Peleki who was himself a twin and therefore a frequent witness to the Watambıi rites is describing through this metaphorical historical fragment relating a Saramaka discovery a particularly pure example of the process of interAfrican syncretism or creolization Our first outsiders view of what Saramaka religion looked like dates from the middle of the eighteenth century thanks to the detailed diaries of the German Moravian missionaries who were sent out to live in Saramaka villages right after the 1762 peace treaty with the whites What we learn is that Saramaka religion was already in its main lines very similar to its present form with frequent spirit possession and other forms of divination a strong ancestor cult institutionalized cults for the apuku and vodu gods encountered in the forest and a variety of gods of war But even the great Saramaka war obias magical powers including those with names that point to a particular African people or place such as Komantı were in fact radical blends of several African traditions forged in processes very similar to that of the Watambıi twin cult They too were largely developed in Suriname via processes of communal divination In early Saramaka rapid intermarriage among Africans of different origins with no efforts to preserve African ethnic lines through endogamy quickly created a highly 9 Price FirstTime pp 601 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 524 the cambridge world history of slavery creolized society but creolized mainly in the interAfrican not African European sense By the time Saramaka Maroons signed peace treaties with the Dutch crown in 1762 after nearly a century of guerrilla warfare there were few Africanborn Saramakas still alive and their culture already represented an integrated highly developed African American synthesis whose main processual motor had been interAfrican syncretism radical and rapid creolization viewed in Saramaka logic as an ongoing process of discovery Because of the particularities of Suriname Maroon history the relative heterogeneity of African origins the early and relatively strong isolation from coastal populations the harsh wartime environment these peoples had both the freedom and necessity to create new cultural forms quickly drawing largely on their diverse African backgrounds In the comparative context of New World plantation societies creolization among Suriname Maroons was probably at the relatively rapid end of the continuum For example if one were to compare the culture of Suriname slaves to that of Maroons in the mideighteenth century one would find that despite the constraints of slavery and living under the authority of whites the plantation slaves maintained various African practices and identities more strongly than did Maroons This makes sense when one considers that in 1750 more than 75 percent of Suriname plantation slaves were still Africanborn with more than half having left Africa only within the previous decade and about a third having left only within the previous five years Meanwhile in 1750 only a small minority of Maroons would have been born in Africa with most Maroons having not only parents but grandparents and even greatgrandparents who were born in Suriname Moreover among Saramakas marriage was not endogamous by place of African origin further encouraging a rapid shift from African to New World identities This meant that although the dancedrumsong performances called Loangu Nago Papa or Komantı on the eighteenthcentury plantations could have included a number of individuals who actually came from the parts of Africa these names refer to among contemporary Maroons the cultural complexes associated with each had already been separatedisolated from the actual origins of the practitioners and they developed and changed through time In other words among Saramaka Maroons in 1750 in contrast to what might have been true on the large coastal plantations most people who for example chose to participate in playing Komantı were no longer genealogically related to people who had been shipped through the West African port of Coromantin A young Maroon who might be a fourthgeneration AfroSurinamer having great grandparents who hailed from as many as eight different African groups would learn Komantı or Papa or Nago rites not because he was a Gold Coaster or Dahomean or Yoruba by origin but because of the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 525 particular meanings and uses these rites already creolized had taken on in contemporary Maroon life The process of Saramakas ritualizing their environment did not stop with the pioneer generations Gods speaking in possession or through other means of divination have continued to instruct them about landscapes and gardens their layout the use and misuse of particular plants and much else ever since Among Maroons these kinds of culture change the creationdiscovery of new gods and rituals have continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centurie and they continue today In certain respects they resemble initial creolization in that they use various kinds of communal divination to draw on fragments of African beliefs and practices combined and recombined in complexes whose grammar in some sense remains deeply African as opposed to Western Scholars differ about the usefulness of applying the model of creoliza tion to such ongoing change in creole societies Should creolization be restricted to the initial cultural processes in each New World colony the moment of the creation of institutions or should it be used as well to describe subsequent changes Creole linguists provide useful guidelines noting that although the conceptual boundaries remain fuzzy between creolization and normal language change initial processes of creoliza tion do represent a radical moment The extreme to which social factors can go in shaping the transmission and use of language Linguistic creolization implies creativity the adaptation of means of diverse prove nience to new ends10 It might be more analytically rigorous then to limit creolization to the initial processes of culture change and to describe subsequent processes of change in these societies insofar as it is useful in terms of their similarity and divergence from those initial processes creolization in north america what have we learned Immense progress has been made since the pioneering North American slavery studies of the 1960s and 1970s which for all their significant revi sionism tended to view slavery as a monolithic institution and derived its particulars largely from the nineteenthcentury antebellum South More recent studies engage instead in systematic comparison among regions and through time and emphasize the complexity and unevenness of cultural de velopment Taken together these recent studies point to the importance of historical particulars the significance of local and temporal variation in 10 Hymes Pidginization and Creolization pp 5 76 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 526 the cambridge world history of slavery understanding creolization which proceeded at different rhythms and paces in different regions As Ira Berlin has argued for North America as a whole Understanding that a person was a slave is not the end of the story but the beginning for the slaves history was derived from experiences that differed from place to place and time to time and not from some unchanging transhistorical verity Rather than proceed from African to creole or from slavery to freedom people of African descent in mainland North America crossed the lines between African and creole and between slavery and freedom many times and not always in the same direction11 We now know for example that most of the first generation of enslaved Africans to land in North America did not come directly from Africa but had labored first in other Atlantic regions where they had learned European languages and other aspects of European culture In some regions such as Florida these cosmopolitan Atlantic Creoles and their culture managed to survive into the eighteenth century But in other regions such as the Chesapeake there was a process of reAfricanization in this case under the new harsh tobacco regime and there was a consequent reshaping of the culture of the original generation of slaves Nevertheless the multiplicity of these new Africans origins assured that creolization and interAfrican syncretism would dominate the reshaping process As Berlin notes the slave trade in the Chesapeake operated to scatter men and women of various nations and diminish the importance of African nationality12 And then the tide turned again By 1720 in the Chesapeake African Americans once again came to outnumber those who had been born in Africa and as Philip Morgan writes it was these African Americans also called Creoles who set the tone and tenor of slave life in the region remarkably early Africans learned the ropes from them The lessons largely flowed from Creoles to Africans13 Indeed by 1780 95 percent of Virginia slaves were Americanborn and by that time as in other regions of North America race consciousness had become a primary factor in identity politics To take another example in the Carolina Lowcountry the course of cre olization was different The cosmopolitan creole generation was swamped by new Africans imported directly to labor on the great rice plantations that sprang up at the end of the seventeenth century As John Thorn ton writes of that moment African culture was not surviving it was 11 Ira Berlin Many Thousands Gone The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America Cambridge MA 1998 pp 3 5 12 Ibid p 115 13 Philip Morgan Slave Counterpoint Black Culture in the EighteenthCentury Chesapeake and Lowcountry Chapel Hill NC 1998 pp 4601 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 527 arriving14 Morgan describes how during the relatively lengthy period of largescale African slave arrivals in the Lowcountry in Charleston even the most sophisticated creole slaves lived cheek by jowl with Africans but that in the long run Africans even in the Lowcountry were aliens in a strange land15 By the middle of the eighteenth century several decades after the corresponding shift in the Chesapeake Americanborn slaves once again held a majority in the Lowcountry Another significant contrast with the Chesapeake was the overall black majority in the Lowcountry in 1720 for example when African Americans formed no more than a quarter of the population in Virginia they formed twothirds in the Lowcountry It should be clear that these demographic and other local variations had significant cultural consequences for example on the languages slaves spoke with one another the religions they practiced the way they buried their dead as well influencing the ways enslaved Africans and their descen dants conceptualized their identities as Ibos or Congos as belonging to the Smith Plantation or the Jones Plantation as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers and as field hands or skilled workers In North America as among Suriname Maroons creolization based on interAfrican syncretism was a driving force yet in some historical situations in North America where slavemaster contact was strong there was clearly more influence from the European side on the new African American culture that was emerging Likewise in those moments and places when massive importations from Africa demographically swamped those who had been living as slaves African contributions to emerging culture once again often in the form of interAfrican syncretisms or blendings came to the fore Studies of North American slavery like AfroAmericanist research more generally remain enmeshed in the realities of North American racism Studies of creolization are no exception and continue to be deeply affected by scholars ideological and political positions Nowhere is this influence of the present on the interpretation of the past clearer than in considerations of the role of African ethnicities in the development of African American culture and society Most recent studies agree that because of the diversity of labor regimes and the demographic mixes they brought with them creolization pro ceeded in different ways at different times in North America but that everywhere there was constant reshaping of African ideas and practices to the necessities of local North American life Whether they take as their 14 John Thornton Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 14001800 Cambridge 1998 p 320 15 Morgan Slave Counterpoint pp 461 456 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 528 the cambridge world history of slavery focus the development of slave institutions material life work in the fields skilled labor exchanges between whites and blacks family life reli gious life and so forth or the comparison of regions through time the best of these studies suggest that African ethnicity was important at certain moments in certain places but was a variable that faded relatively quickly in terms of the slaves own identity politics As Berlin writes of North American slaves For most Africans as for their white counterparts identity was a garment which might be worn or discarded Choice as well as imposition or birthright determined who the new arrivals would be In short identity formation for African slaves was neither automatic nor unreflective neither uniform nor unilinear16 There is however an alternative perspective that argues forcefully for the longterm persistence of African ethnicities in North America and for their identifiable influences on the life of African Americans In line with earlier cultural nationalist positions about North American slavery17 this perspective equates creolization with Europeanization largely dismissing the realities of interAfrican syncretism in the Americas Its adherents mainly historians of Africa sometimes call themselves Africancentric scholars One of these Michael Gomez organizes his study of the development of African American society by presenting chapters devoted to the fate in North America first of people from Senegambia and the Bight of Benin then of Islamicized Africans next of Sierra Leoneans and the Akan and finally of Igbos and West Central Africans reflecting a hypothesis of ethnic persistence that remains unproven He concludes that the development of African American society through 1830 was very much the product of contributions made by specific African ethnic groups18 In my view such an Africancentric perspective underestimates both the agency of enslaved Africans and the inherent malleability and strategic uses of ethnicity in identity politics Much of the difficulty with an approach that places such emphasis on African ethnicities in the Americas is the historically contingent nature of these identities in Africa as elsewhere in the world which has consis tently hobbled efforts to establish an African baseline for New World studies J Lorand Matory whose ethnographic work in Nigeria and Brazil is exemplary writes of Yoruba identity that to call the selfidentified Oyo Egba Egbado Ijebu and Ekıtı captives of even the late 19th century 16 Berlin Many Thousands Gone pp 1035 17 For example Sterling Stuckey Slave Culture Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America New York 1987 18 Michael A Gomez Exchanging Our Country Marks The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South Chapel Hill NC 1998 p 291 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 529 Yoruba is in most cases an anachronism Calling these peoples of the 19th century and their pre19th century ancestors Yoruba reads a commonsense reality of the late 20th century back onto a period in which that reality was only beginning to be produced19 Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has also written eloquently on this issue citing as an example Chinua Achebes remarks about the relative recency of the Igbo identity in Nigeria For instance take the Igbo people In my area historically they did not see themselves as Igbo They saw themselves as people from this village or that village And yet after the experience of the Biafran War during a period of two years it became a very powerful consciousness Appiah then cautions that recognizing Igbo identity as a new thing is not a way of privileging other Nigerian identities each of the three central ethnic identities of modern political life HausaFulani Yoruba Igbo is a product of the roughandtumble of the tran sition through colonial to postcolonial status Modern Ghana witnesses the development of an Akan identity as speakers of the three major regional dialects of Twi Asante Fante Akuapem organize themselves into a corporation against an equally novel Ewe unity Identities are complex and multiple and grow out of a history of changing responses to economic political and cultural forces almost always in opposition to other identities20 Historian Joseph C Miller offers the example of the complexities hiding behind such ethnic labels as Congo when he writes Central Africans would have discovered new social identities beyond these local and already multiple ones along their tortured ways toward the coast Yoked together in slave coffles with others of unfamiliar linguistic and cultural back grounds they must have gained a sense of familiarity with one another and would have created alliances out of it which the Europeans labeled Congo The slaves further experiences of confinement during the Middle Passage and the spe cific circumstances they encountered in the Americas created changing incentives for Central Africans to draw on differing aspects of their home backgrounds as they searched for a morally restorative sense of humane community among themselves The meaning of being Congo in the Diaspora changed accordingly21 Such considerations undermine Africancentric representations of African American society as a surviving mosaic of African fragments If as social science theory teaches ethnicity is indeed malleable and used strategi cally by actors then the Africancentric approach must be seen as a 19 J Lorand Matory Black Atlantic Religion Tradition Transnationalism and Matriarchy in Afro Brazilian Candomble Princeton NJ 2005 pp 567 20 Kwame Anthony Appiah In My Fathers House Africa in the Philosophy of Culture New York 1992 pp 1778 21 Joseph C Miller Central Africa During the Era of the Slave Trade c 1490s1850s in Linda M Heywood ed Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora Cambridge 2002 pp 2169 The citation is from pp 423 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 530 the cambridge world history of slavery form of anachronistic essentialism Indeed anthropologist Stephan Palmie characterizes it as a themepark approach that compresses African cul tural geography in such a way that someone might imagine that in certain New World settings the lower Zaire nowadays abuts southwestern Nigeria22 Anthropologist MichelRolph Trouillot wisely counsels that the way to transcend political and ideological partipris in creolization studies is to focus on the historical conditions of cultural production to give a more refined look at historical particulars23 Indeed when Africancentric historians move from generalizations where ideological preferences often drive their narratives to the concrete circumstances faced by the individ uals engaged in the process of creolization their approach can provide provocative insights and raise problems for further study For example John Thorntons explorations of the role of Kongoborn slaves among par ticipants in the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina and in the Haitian Revolution open intriguing new perspectives24 It would appear that the more specific the more limited in time and space the Africancentric study of American phenomena the better its chances of being historically persuasive Studies emphasizing shared African origins clearly make sense in those relatively unusual cases where large groups speaking the same language and sharing cultural understandings landed together in the Americas and together shaped a new culture One such case is the eighteenthcentury Danish West Indies Historian Ray Kea a specialist on the Gold Coast has analyzed an eighteenthcentury slave rebellion in these Danish islands in which he teases out the consequences of the Amina backgrounds of the slaves involved with considerable sub tlety helping us imagine something of the mindset ideologies notions about authority ideas about death held by people being shipped out of a particular port at a particular time because of particular local circum stances in Africa Kea describes how these ideas played themselves out in a specific event in the New World25 In short there is little doubt that such an Africanist perspective has its place in our toolkit for understanding creolization the ways enslaved Africans and their descendants created 22 Stephan Palmie Wizards and Scientists Explorations in AfroCuban Modernity and Tradition Durham NC 2002 p 159 23 MichelRolph Trouillot Culture on the Edges Creolization in the Plantation Context Plan tation Society in the Americas 5 1998 828 the citation is from pp 89 24 John Thornton African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion American Historical Review 96 1991 110113 idem I am the subject of the King of Congo African Ideology in the Haitian Revolution Journal of World History 4 1993 181214 25 Ray Kea When I die I shall return to my own land An Amina Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies 17331734 in John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler eds The Cloth of Many Colored Silks Papers on Ghanaian and Islamic History and Society in Honor of Ivor Wilks Evanston IL 1996 pp 15993 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 531 communities and institutions in their new homes If used in the service of greater contextualization and historicization such perspectives informed by rich knowledge of African history cannot but add to our understandings of events on this side of the Atlantic whither creolization studies Given the variety of historical circumstances in which New World cre olization took place and the weight on the field of presentist ideological concerns the best strategy would appear to be some combination of careful historical contextualization and broader comparisons across the Americas Three such recent studies emerging from different scholarly traditions help point the way Each demonstrates that creolization like the continued transformation of individual and group identities through time is a com plex process and that later nostalgia for Africa or claims about African origins may mask the actual nature of earlier cultural processes In Chi ma nkongo Lengua y rito ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio Colombia 1996 Swiss linguist Armin Schwegler demonstrates that sacred songs sung at the most apparently African of all Palenquero rites the lumbalu are in the words of one reviewer not the partially decreolized outcome of original African songs but rather are essentially modern that is eighteenthcentury or nineteenthcentury creations based on a com bination of regional Spanish and Palenquero the local creole language to which African and pseudoAfrican words and onomatopoeic elements have been added and that the active use of spoken African languages in Palenque disappeared very early if in fact the population ever used an African language as the primary means of communication26 This observation about the early development and predominance of a creole language is especially interesting in that Schwegler is able to show that the Africans who founded Palenque were characterized by a relative linguistic homogeneity with Bantu languages particularly kiKongo providing the main substratum for the new creole language Palenquero In his review John Lipski calls this book at once a masterful analysis of the elusive lum balu language and a major breakthrough in Afrocreole studies a bench mark against which future studies of creole languages and cultures will be measured Wizards and Scientists Explorations in AfroCuban Modernity and Tra dition 2002 by German anthropologist Stephan Palmie is devoted to Cuba where for much of the history of the island in the words of David 26 John M Lipski Review of Armin J Schwegler Chi ma nkongo New West Indian Guide 72 1998 35660 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 532 the cambridge world history of slavery Eltis there was no dominant African group27 The thrust of his argu ment which derives both AfroCuban religious tradition and Western modernity from a single transAtlantic historical matrix is that a focus on the putative African origins of locally coexisting New World traditions for example regla ocha long associated by anthropologists with Yoruba speaking slaves and palo monte similarly associated with speakers of west ern Central African Bantu languages both obscures the history of such forms of cultural complexity and fails to address the role of representations of difference as a meaningful component of contemporary practice We are dealing Palmie writes with an aggregate formation in which notions deriving from western Central African minkisi cults and Yorubaderived forms of worship of divine beings known as orisha were jointly conjugated through a single New World history of enslave ment abuse and depersonalization In the course of this process Yorubaderived patterns of orisha worship and western Central African forms of manipulating minkisi objects not only underwent parallel changes but also became morally recalibrated in relation to each other He describes how in the course of the nineteenth century with the arrival of large number of Yorubas a process of creolization occurred in which the two traditions Yoruba and Central African not only merged into a larger complex of partly overlapping conceptions and practices but came to offer functionally differentiated ritual idioms that spoke and continue to speak to fundamentally different forms of historical expe rience and contemporary sociality Neither ocho or palo he continues could have evolved to their present phenomenology and moralized posi tions along a spectrum of differentiated ritual idioms without the presence of the other within the same social framework Like other contemporary anthropologists plumbing the mechanics of creolization in a particular historical context Palmie stresses shifting social contexts in the shaping of meaning and practice and he fully expects the course of creoliza tion to be complex as well as extremely difficult in retrospect to tease out28 27 David Eltis The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas Cambridge 2000 p 257 28 The citations from Palmie Wizards and Scientists Explorations in AfroCuban Modernity and Tradition Durham NC 2002 come from pp 25 26 27 and 193 David H Browns Santeria Enthroned Chicago IL 2003 takes us even further in demonstrating the essential newness and marvellous hybridity of such fundamental Cuban institutions as regla de ocha or abakua Palmie in a laudatory review Santerıa Grand Slam AfroCuban Religious Studies and the Study of AfroCuban Religion New West Indian Guide 79 2005 281300 writes that Brown demonstrates regla de ocha does not represent a diasporic variant of Yoruba religion something that cannot be said to have existed in Africa even as late as the nineteenth century that was imported wholecloth by the thousands of enslaved Yorubaspeakers who reached Cuba in the first half of the nineteenth century Rather regla de ocha and specifically the cult of Ifa was literally cooked up no earlier than in the last two decades of the nineteenth century by fewer than a dozen Africans and their creole descendants living in or near the third barrio of the town of Regla and it continued to undergo dramatic and contentious Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 533 African American anthropologist J Lorand Matorys Black Atlantic Reli gion Tradition Transnationalism and Matriarchy in AfroBrazilian Can domble 2005 analyzes the intensely ideological role of African ethnicity and the ongoing creation and redefinition of particular African ethnicities through time in Bahia Brazil Set in the context of other recent stud ies of the early black Atlantic world that stress transnationalism and the widespread movement of peoples ideas and even crops Matorys study expands on Palmies remark that interaction between indigenous and scholarly conceptions of traditionality and African purity have engendered considerable discursive slippage29 Matory explores a case where practi tioners convictions about the history of their AfroBrazilian religion and its fidelity to one or another African nation can be shown to be discur sive formations that emerge directly from historical creolization In this sense the several branches of Candomble like the Brazilian martial art of capoeira involve an ideology among participants that stands at the other end of a continuum from that of Saramaka Maroons who stress their ancestors New World spiritual discoveries more than fidelity to particular African practices Matory analyzes the oftenconflictual historical processes by which certain continuities become privileged and certain discontinu ities become officially masked both in Brazil and on the African coast over the course of several centuries Throughout he stresses the agency of a host of actors on both sides of the Atlantic and their ongoing inter actions in everchanging relations of power and conflict and solidarity with the emergence of new ethnic identities as one result He demon strates for example that what many scholars have taken to be direct African continuities in twentiethcentury Candomble are the result in part of the active agency of priests traders and others who under specific historical circumstances during the nineteenth century fostered a pro cess of anagonizacao Yorubaization long after Bahian Candomble had first developed And in stressing continuing historical relations through out the southern Atlantic world he demonstrates the contingency of such identities as Jeje important in Candomble which depended on continu ing BrazilCubaNigeriaDahomey interactions and culminated in the late nineteenth century with AfroBrazilian returnees to Africa transforming the Bight of Benin however briefly into the Djedje coast Throughout Matory insists on the slaves and other Africans strategic practices of selfrepresentation Creolization and all it involved was ultimately effected by enslaved Africans and their own descendants These three studies placed alongside those on Suriname and North America strongly suggest that African ethnicity remains one among many transformations throughout the first half of the twentieth century as it spread through western Cubas provinces of Havana and Matanzas 29 Palmie Wizards and Scientists p 161 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 534 the cambridge world history of slavery of the ways that enslaved peoples who were brought to the New World thought about and in some parts of the Americas continue to think about themselves and that it played varied roles in different aspects of life for varying periods in different places in the New World30 A thoughtful summary of this position may be found in an article by Philip Morgan in which he draws on the latest data about the Atlantic slave trade to consider the overall cultural implications for early New World societies31 Any study of early creolization among slaves ultimately butts up against an epistemological stone wall Part of the reason has to do with the location of New World historys beginnings in what I have elsewhere called the post Columbian space of death a zeromoment that was marked by irremeable rupture and pain32 Miracles ultimately depend on faith and the miracle of creolization has not yet proved to be an exception Berlin and Morgan writing on North America or Matory and the Prices on South America provide extensive historical contextualization for the processes of culture change among the recently enslaved and their descendants in the New World When such works are at their best we feel almost as if we are witnesses to the particular conflicts and acts of solidarity and imagination involved in the shift from one kind of identity to another or from an Old World tradition to a new one But however far we are able to push back in time the documented beginnings of such cultural developments we find ourselves stuck in the paradoxical position like Achilles in Zenos paradox of never quite being able to catch the tortoise Like physicists with their Big Bang birth of the universe we can theorize the event or the process but we seem ever unable effectively to observe it So the ultimate miracle of creolization remains at least for now impenetrable We can imagine or theorize how the women and men on plantation X worked out the procedures the rites the music the beliefs appropriate to the birth of twins beginning when that first hypothetical mother brought her babies into the New World but we can never be present at the blessed event itself 30 The studies by Palmie and Matory also suggest differences between creolization as it occurred in the early plantation and Maroon context and as it occurred much later within the slave sector of such cities as Havana and Salvador Bahia In these urban contexts the arrival of large numbers of enslaved Africans in the midnineteenth century meant that creolization was ongoing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when Santerıa and Candomble were largely created The relative recency of creolization in these cases makes them particularly useful for an understanding of processes of culture creation and change and it also gives their cultural products their specific character 31 Philip D Morgan The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade African Regional Origins American Destinations and New World Developments Slavery Abolition 18 1997 122 45 For some important recent materials from the African side that afford support to this position see David Northrup Igbo and Myth Igbo Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World 16001850 Slavery Abolition 21 2000 120 and Africas Discovery of Europe 14501850 New York 2002 also Joseph C Miller Central Africa During the Era of the Slave Trade 32 Richard Price The Convict and the Colonel Boston MA 1998 p 166 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 535 We know that it must have happened and that it happened over time in tens of thousands of oftenindependent cases throughout the Americas A miracle that repeated itself endlessly For the Saramaka Maroons we can reliably push its date back before the mideighteenth century three decades of archival research since the Mintz and Price essay permit unequivocal demonstration that in general African ethnicities were not by that time primary for Saramakas culturally in terms of individual identity or as markers for groups In other words we can show that Saramaka society at the time of the Peace Treaty of 1762 was far closer to Saramaka today in terms of cultural development than it was to Africa Yet though we have been able to situate the major creolization processes ever earlier in time we are still unable to examine them directly Anthropologists and historians thus remain in the same epistemological position as creole linguists who must infer what earlier stages of a language were like on the basis of later documented speech forms As scholars this leaves us considerably humbled with our task to once again put our collective noses to the grindstone In the end it is only when the competing narratives are confronted and weighed carefully against each other that we can begin to develop reasons for giving greater credibility to one or the other We have little choice but to keep on tilling the fields At the beginning of the twentyfirst century creolization even if resistant to direct observation still remains in Trouillots characterization a miracle begging for analysis33 Today in Moore Town capital of the earth for Jamaican Maroons a venerable proverb says New creole new god meaning that with the younger generation comes new ways According to Kenneth Bilby the ethnographer who recorded the saying its implication is bittersweet on the one hand a sense of the inevitable loss of traditions and on the other all the hope wrapped up in the creation of new ones the miracle of creolization incarnate34 further reading During the first half of the twentieth century AfroAmerican studies was dominated by the polemic between anthropologist Melville J Herskovits who from the 1930s to his death in 1963 stressed the continuing influence 33 Trouillot Culture on the Edges p 8 34 Bilby notes further that the proverb embodies the tensions in creolization the fact that opposing forces and ideas and uneven power may be involved in the creation of the new tensions that images of happy callaloo culture in the Caribbean tend to gloss over Moreover he reports that for a Maroon Kromanti practitioner in the 1980s the kind of men who cited the proverb to him its implications were probably more bitter than sweet more about loss than creation But he adds who knows what its implications would have been for Maroons a couple of hundred of years ago if the proverb existed then when the original miracle was fast unfolding personal communication March 2003 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 536 the cambridge world history of slavery of what he called Africanisms in the life of Afrodescendants in the Americas and African American sociologist E Franklin Frazier who argued that the Middle Passage had effectively wiped out every trace of culture that enslaved Africans ever had and who derived all differences between African Americans and other Americans from the formers political and economic oppression Herskovitss most eloquent formulation of his ideas can be found in The Myth of the Negro Past New York 1941 Fraziers in The Negro Family in the United States Chicago IL 1939 The framing of this debate was closely tied to contemporary racial politics as inevitably were perspectives on the study of slavery particularly in North America In the 1960s with the civil rights movement and changing North Ameri can sensibilities about African Americans as well as Africa AfroAmericanist scholarship saw a renaissance and the metaphor of creolization was one of its constituents The introduction of creolization as a model to replace acculturation in the social sciences dates mainly from that period marked by the University of the West Indies linguistics conference that led to the publication of Dell Hymes ed Pidginization and Creolization of Lan guages Cambridge 1971 The influential 1973 essay by Sidney W Mintz and Richard Price An Anthropological Approach to the Caribbean Past now available as The Birth of African American Culture Boston MA 1992 followed quickly in its wake attempting to transcend the Herskovits Frazier debate by drawing on creolization as a model for the early creation of culture by enslaved Africans throughout the Americas Other roughly contemporary works on the development of African American societies that also stressed cultural creativity and blending include Roger Bastide The African Religions of Brazil Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations Baltimore MD 1978 Charles W Joyner Down by the Riverside A South Carolina Slave Community Urbana TL 1984 and Lawrence W Levine Black Culture and Black Consciousness AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom New York 1977 By the 1970s creolization had also become part of an active debate about the development of West Indian societies particularly through the pioneer ing historical work of Edward Kamau Brathwaite The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 17701820 Oxford 1971 which emphasized African slaves agency and assumed that they created a new creole society out of what they brought with them in the Middle Passage This position was vigorously contested in Orlando Pattersons The Sociology of Slavery London 1967 which stressed rather the destructive effects on identity and culture of Jamaican slavery In Creolization and Creole Societies A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean History O Nigel Bolland pro vides a useful overview of the lively ongoing creolization debates in the West Indies in Alistair Hennessy ed Intellectuals in the TwentiethCentury Caribbean vol 1 London 1992 pp 5079 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 the concept of creolization 537 Studies bearing on creolization among Maroons are included in Richard Price ed Maroon Societies Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas 3rd edition Baltimore MD 1996 Creolization among Saramakas is covered in R Price FirstTime The Historical Vision of an AfroAmerican People second edition Chicago IL 2002 R Price Alabis World Baltimore MD 1990 and particularly S and R Price Maroon Arts Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora Boston MA 1999 which contains a further relevant bibliography In North America a number of recent historical studies have fueled the debate between those stressing the persistence of African ethnicities and those stressing instead relatively rapid creolization On the African persistence side one might begin with Michael A Gomez Exchanging Our Country Marks The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South Chapel Hill NC 1998 and Linda M Heywood and John K Thornton Central Africans Atlantic Creoles and the Foundations of the Americas Cambridge NC 2007 For analyses stressing creolization in all its varieties one might con sult Ira Berlin Many Thousands Gone The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America Cambridge MA 1998 and Philip D Morgan Slave Coun terpoint Black Culture in the EighteenthCentury Chesapeake and Lowcountry Chapel Hill NC 1998 An analysis of these debates with a considerable additional bibliography may be found in Richard Price The Miracle of Creolization A Retrospective New West Indian Guide 75 2001 3564 and a trenchant commentary in MichelRolph Trouillot Culture on the Edges Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context in Brian Keith Axel ed From the Margins Historical Anthropology and Its Futures Durham NC 2002 pp 189210 Three overviews of creolization studies with a focus on the Caribbean but containing general bibliographies relating to the use of creolization in cultural and postcolonial studies are Aisha Khan Journey to the Center of the Earth The Caribbean as Master Symbol Cultural Anthropology 16 2001 271302 Raquel Romberg Ritual Piracy or Creolization with an Attitude New West Indian Guide 79 2005 175218 and Mimi Sheller Consuming the Caribbean From Arawaks to Zombies London 2003 espe cially pp 174203 A special issue of the Journal of American Folklore edited by Robert Baron and Ana C Cara 116 2003 is devoted to creolization with articles by a number of important contributors to the field most notably Roger D Abrahams Finally creolization is situated both histor ically and as a concept in contemporary analysis in Kevin A Yelvington ed AfroAtlantic Dialogues Anthropology in the Diaspora Santa Fe NM 2005 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 21 BLACK WOMEN IN THE EARLY AMERICAS betty wood 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 con veyed 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 discus sions 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 over seers sexual whims and fantasies as abject beings who lived in worlds in which and over which they exercised little or no personal agency These bleak negative and altogether inaccurate images only started to be chal lenged during the late 1970s and early 1980s when contemporary Black and feminist concerns coalesced and sometimes collided to spawn entirely fresh theoretical and methodological approaches to both Black history and to the history of women A number of female scholars including the sociologists Marietta Morrissey and Barbara Bush and the historians Deborah Gray White and Jacqueline Jones were among those who pioneered the effort that set out to retrieve to reclaim and to proclaim Black womens history and histories1 1 Marietta Morrissey Slave Women in the New World Gender Stratification in the Caribbean Lawrence KS 1989 Barbara Bush Slave Women in Caribbean Society 16501838 Bloomington 538 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 539 What they and those who followed them over the next few years offered was an entirely new and theoretically sophisticated research agenda True it was an agenda that could not totally divorce itself from what had gone before but it was one that from the outset and completely unlike its pre decessors would be deeply influenced by contemporary feminist and by the 1990s gender theory The premise that underpinned this new research activity could not have been simpler or more deceptively simple From first to last its practitioners claimed the transatlantic slave trade and Black slavery throughout the Americas had been deeply gendered Accounts that failed to appreciate and to explore this most basic of facts were by definition deeply flawed accounts The point could not have been expressed more succinctly or eloquently than it was back in 1975 by Lucille Mathurin Mair one of the prime and most influential voices of this new scholarly endeavor Black women she insisted had traveled and had shared every inch of the mans physical and spiritual odyssey Perhaps rather more controversially in the light of some more recent scholarship she went on to add that a crucial outcome of the enforced undertaking of this unsought odyssey had been a crude levelling of sexual distinctions2 Over the last thirty years very few of the stages or spatial contexts of the physical and spiritual odyssey depicted by Mair have remained entirely unexplored Quite understandably and often most profitably scholars have tended to adopt a thematic approach within the contextual framework of a particular locality or region defined by manmade political boundaries The bulk of this scholarship has been concerned with the gendered dimensions of the social economic and cultural lives that slaves struggled to carve out for themselves in different mainland American and Caribbean settings and much of it has focused on the interrelated themes of work family and religion In her influential first book Deborah Gray White opened up an entirely new avenue of research and successfully laid the groundwork for future investigations of the nature and significance of the relationships forged between Black women slaves3 Over the years other scholars beginning most notably with Catherine Clinton and Elizabeth FoxGenovese4 have been rather more concerned with issues of class race and gender and in IN 1990 Deborah Gray White Arnt I a Woman Female Slaves in the Plantation South New York 1985 Jacqueline Jones Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow Black Women Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present New York 1985 2 Lucille Mathurin Mair The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies During Slavery Kingston 1975 cited by Bush Slave Women p 3 3 White Arnt I a Woman 4 Catherine Clinton The Plantation Mistress Womens World in the Old South New York 1982 Elizabeth FoxGenovese Within the Plantation Household Black and White Women of the Old South Chapel Hill NC 1988 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 540 the cambridge world history of slavery depicting the oftencomplex interactions between Black women slaves and their white mistresses and female owners in the mature plantation societies of the antebellum Southern United States5 Building upon the earlier work of Lucille Mathurin Mair Hilary Beckles one of the first male scholars to work on the gendered dimensions of the slave societies of the early Americas and Barbara Bush alerted us to Black womens involvement not only in the rebellions but also in a wide range of behavior that is sometimes referred to as the daytoday resistance to slavery6 that occurred in the British Caribbean7 Subsequently this is a theme that has been investigated further not only in the context of the West Indian sugar islands but also in that of the North American mainland by among others Gaspar Moitt and Wood8 Other scholars have followed a somewhat different track and empha sized the gendered nature of the religious lives of enslaved peoples in the Americas noting the complex roles of women in both the reworking of tra ditional African religious cultures and in the creation of African versions of Christianity9 Simultaneously Kathleen Brown and Jennifer Morgan have been at the forefront of those who are beginning to apply recent develop ments in gender and sexuality theory to the evolving racially based slave systems of the early Americas10 Drawing in large measure from anthro pological methodologies the very latest research is focusing on the body and more specifically the ways in which slaves could decorate and clothe 5 See for example Marli F Weiner Mistresses and Slaves Plantation Women in South Carolina 18301880 Urbana IL 1997 6 This phrase was coined by Raymond and Alice Bauer in their DaytoDay Resistance to Slavery Journal of Negro History 27 1942 388419 More recent research has been heavily influenced by the anthropologist James C Scott and particularly by his monograph Weapons of the Weak New Haven CT 1985 7 Hilary McD Beckles Natural Rebels A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados New Brunswick NJ 1989 Bush Slave Women pp 5182 8 Samples of this newer historiography include David Barry Gaspar From the Sense of their Slavery Slave Women and Resistance in Antigua 16321763 in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine eds More than Chattel Black Women and Slavery in the Americas Bloomington IN 1996 Bernard Moitt Slave Women and Resistance in the French Caribbean in ibid and Betty Wood Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery in Low Country Georgia 17631815 Historical Journal 30 1987 60322 9 See for example Sylvia R Frey and Betty Wood Come Shouting to Zion African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 Chapel Hill NC 1998 Bush Slave Women pp 15160 Maria Rosa Cutrufelli Women of Africa Roots of Oppression London 1983 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly eds Women Religion and Social Change Albany NY 1985 10 Kathleen M Brown Good Wives Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs Gender Race and Power in Colonial Virginia Chapel Hill NC 1996 Jennifer Lyle Morgan Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder Male Travelers Female Bodies and the Gendering of Racial Ideology 15001700 William and Mary Quarterly 54 1997 16792 See also Anne McClintock Imperial Leather Race Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest New York 1995 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 541 their bodies in often ingenious ways that asserted their humanity and their individuality not only to slave owners but also to other enslaved people11 Taken as a whole these often very different spatial and thematic interests have presented us with an everincreasing wealth of information about and insights into the lives and experiences of Black women slaves throughout the early Americas In many respects though readers have been left to their own devices when it comes to teasing out the broader comparative implications of these studies Even the most cursory survey of this new scholarship points to two crucial facts Firstly although on one level Mair was correct to talk in terms of an odyssey that West and West Central African women and men were forced against their wills to venture on together in reality their lives under slavery also followed somewhat different trajectories if only because as White put it women were forced to bear the double oppression of their race and their gender12 Secondly the lives of Black women slaves were by no means identical by no means homogeneous There were it is true crucial inter and intraregional similarities for example in Black womens legal status and in their workplaces but there were also some fundamental differences that stemmed from such things as their ages and their religious preferences In the first instance several of the similarities and some of the differ ences in womens lives and experiences stemmed directly from what appear to have been universal attributes of the transatlantic slave trade in respect of the number the sex ratio and the age structure as well as the West and West African origins of those women and men who were herded like beasts of burden onto the slave ships Regardless of their ultimate destination if they survived the Middle Passage once in the Americas similarities and dissimilarities in womens experiences as well as between those of women and men would also be deeply influenced by the essentially identical signif icance that all European colonizers soon came to attach to the reproductive as well as to the productive value of Black women Although there were variations over time and region Black men always comprised the majority of those transported against their will to the Americas13 For example in part by being taken as prisoners of war in West and West Central Africa this could reflect the circumstances of their 11 For a pioneering contribution see Shane White and Graham White Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Journal of Southern History 61 1995 4576 12 White Arnt I a Woman p 23 13 Morrissey Slave Women pp 3245 Herbert S Klein African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade in Claire C Robertson and Martin A Klein eds Woman and Slavery in Africa Madison WI 1983 J E Inikori Export Versus Domestic Demand The Determinants of Sex Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Research in Economic History 14 1992 11766 Allan Kulikoff Tobacco and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 542 the cambridge world history of slavery initial capture and sale However it also reflected the deeply gendered early modern European understanding of the worlds of work in which both heavy manual agricultural labor and skilled and semiskilled occupations were generally regarded as being male preserves One part of this gendered perception of work would continue virtually unchanged throughout the Americas Increasingly in both urban and rural contexts and for purely financial reasons Black men could be trained or could employ the skills that they had brought with them from Africa to fill a very wide range of skilled and semiskilled jobs From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century the records simply do not reveal Black women being employed in such capacities as blacksmiths carpenters and coopers However minuscule numbers of them did come to be employed in such traditional domesti cally based skilled female crafts as spinning and sewing Throughout the Americas Black womens working and domestic lives would be dramatically altered by two critical changes in European coloniz ers perceptions of them Beginning first in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in the evolving sugar economies of Brazil and the Caribbean and subsequently in the tobacco and rice colonies of the North American mainland avaricious planters soon realized that they could force Black women to undertake arduous and often physically hazardous field work a kind of work that European women were reluctant to do In every plantation colony for as long as chattel slavery persisted the vast majority of Black women slaves would be employed as field hands The profitability of plantation agriculture and the wealth of those of European ancestry who were directly or indirectly involved in it on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were directly related to Black womens work to the often brutal exploitation of Black women There were of course several important differences in the culture of early Americas three main staple crops sugar rice and tobacco However some of the basic agricultural tasks required of Black women field hands for example planting weeding and hoeing were broadly similar regardless of the crop being grown What was rather more important especially when it came to defining the relationships forged between field hands was the way in which their daily work was organized Sugar and tobacco planters favored the gang system which meant that women and men sometimes from different parts of West and West Central Africa were forced to work alongside one another for most of the day This would be one of the two most important contexts in which Black women slaves who lived and worked in the countryside encountered one another where they formed Slaves The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake 16801800 Chapel Hill NC 1986 p 232 Betty Wood Slavery in Colonial Georgia 17301775 Athens GA 1984 p 105 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 543 impressions of one another and where they began to communicate with one another on a regular basis Theoretically the task system that came to characterize the ricegrowing regions of the North American mainland physically separated field hands during the time it took them to complete their allotted daily task With very few exceptions those tasks tended to be allocated according to age rather than gender Although field hands worked separately and had a direct personal interest in completing their task as soon as they could in practice there was nothing to stop them helping other people once their days work was done14 Throughout the era of slavery the overwhelming majority of Black women and men worked in agricultural capacities of one sort or another However enslaved Black people became increasingly important to the urban economies that began to spring up throughout the Americas and particularly to those of the port towns Black men filled a variety of skilled and semiskilled niches in these economies They loaded and unloaded sea and rivergoing vessels and were often highly visible in the carrying trade of towns and their hinterlands More often than not their work was conducted away from their direct supervision of their owners and it tended to be of a kind that took them away from their homes for much of their working day Most urbanbased Black women on the other hand labored in various and essentially nonproductive domestic capacities such as maids nurses and cooks which kept them tied to their owners households for most of the time In many ways in most of the duties they were required to perform their working lives closely replicated those of the small minority of enslaved Black women who played a key role in servicing the households of wealthy owners in the plantation colonies Whether they lived in the town or in the countryside Black women and men slaves encountered one another on a daily basis in the different circumstances of their workplaces Another very different context in which they interacted with one another on a regular basis was after their days work in the semiprivacy of their quarters The ways in which they wished and in the main were often able to organize their living arrangements reflected two things first a perfectly natural desire to live with or as close 14 For the task system see Philip D Morgan Work and Culture The Task System and the Work of Lowcountry Blacks 17001800 William and Mary Quarterly 39 1982 56399 and for a comparison between the task and gang systems see Morgan Task and Gang Systems The Organization of Labor on New World Plantations in Stephen Innes ed Work and Labor in Early America Chapel Hill NC 1988 For patterns of enslaved Black womens work in formal plantation economies see Bush Slave Women pp 3346 Morrissey Slave Women pp 6280 and Carole Shammas Black Womens Work and the Evolution of Plantation Society in Virginia Labor History 26 1985 528 Daina Ramey Berry Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia Urbana IL 2007 See also Claire Robertson Africa into the Americas Slavery and Women the Family and the Gender Division of Labor in Gaspar and Hine eds More than Chattel Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 544 the cambridge world history of slavery as possible to women and men who came from the same West or West African background as themselves and second an equally natural desire to form sexual partnerships often but necessarily with a view to recreating their traditional patterns of family life For varying lengths of time in each of the plantation colonies the imbalanced sex ratios of the transatlantic slave trade were a decisive factor in the determination of sexual partnerships and family formation15 But so too would be the planters recognition of the reproductive value of Black women slaves of the possibility of using their bodies to secure a self perpetuating enslaved workforce It was entirely in the planters interest that fruitful although not necessarily permanent sexual partnerships were formed in the slave quarters In some ways but not in others and with varying degrees of success owners would seek to control those partnerships and the children who were born of them During the initial stages of plantation formation Black men outnum bered Black women and often significantly so on most estates and in most localities The evidence is somewhat ambiguous as to the significance of this imbalance for Black women On the one hand at least in theory it ought to have enhanced and in some cases seems to have significantly enhanced their choice and thereby their bargaining power when it came to the selection of a sex or marriage partner Yet it was also the case that in these maledominated worlds initially without the support and protection provided by family and kinship networks women could find themselves vulnerable to sexual harassment and abuse if not from enslaved men then certainly from those men of European ancestry who claimed complete ownership of their bodies Nowhere did the public laws of slavery grant Black women an automatic right to protection from sexual abuse from whichever quarter it might come In practice though they were by no means defenseless At exactly the same time as some planters were branding newly imported West and West Central African women sometimes symbolically on the breast in a way that denied both their humanity and their femininity they were nonetheless often willing to have sex with them and to rape them if the mood took them or if the woman resisted their advances The blame or responsibility for this sexual activity came to be heaped on Black women particularly young Black women who were often depicted as scheming alluring Jezebels whom no man could easily resist16 Some indication of the extent of sexual relationships between Black women slaves and white men which in many places were legally forbidden 15 See note 13 16 Winthrop D Jordan White over Black American Attitudes towards the Negro 15501812 New York 1971 pp 13678 Bush Slave Women pp 1122 Morgan Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 545 were often tacitly acknowledged by the men concerned in references for example in estate records and advertisements for runaways to the children born of these relationships17 Legally such children followed the status of their mother and in practice most were allowed to stay with their mothers at least for some years It seems that the convention in most plantation colonies was not to separate mothers and children before the latter reached the age of six or seven But the fact of the matter was that no enslaved mother or father could count on being able to see her or his children grow to adulthood The support given and the affection shown to mothers and their mulatto children by white fathers varied from complete indifference and a will ingness to permanently separate them to the granting of their freedom usually by the terms of their last will and testament In the absence of Black womens voices it is difficult to do anything other than speculate as to the ways in which they regarded these sexual relationships and the children they produced Similarly we have very little evidence prior to the early nineteenth century as to how these relationships and the children born of them helped to shape the interactions between white and Black women From the first and as they likewise saw the financial benefits to them selves of productive sexual partnerships in the slave quarters slave owners also intervened in other ways as Black women and Black men strug gled to forge meaningful sexual partnerships and tried to recreate as best they could the patterns of family life they had known in West and West Central Africa Nowhere was slave marriage legally recognized nowhere did enslaved couples enjoy the right even to their own children Owners claimed but not always successfully so the right to the choice of a marriage partner sometimes insisting that enslaved people must choose a partner from among those of their number resident on the plantation or estate In some cases probably because of the pressure that was brought to bear by the couple concerned they allowed marriages off the plantation There is virtually no evidence from anywhere in the early Americas about the ways in which Black women and men chose their marriage partners or the patterns of courtship that presumably preceded marriage What we do know is that the rituals associated with marriage often involved the giving of gifts and that the ceremony also included feasting and music making in which Black women played a prominent part It is also evident that for varying lengths of time in different parts of the Americas the vast majority of enslaved people neither sought nor were they forced by their owners to submit to the rituals associated with Christian marriage On the one 17 For a study that examines the divergence between legal requirements and social practice see Paul Finkelman Crimes of Love Misdemeanors of Passion The Regulation of Race and Sex in the Colonial South in Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie eds The Devils Lane Sex and Race in the Early South New York 1997 pp12438 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 546 the cambridge world history of slavery hand this reflected the positive preference of Black women and men for their traditional ceremonials and on the other the reluctance of owners to guarantee the permanence of the relationship that formed the very basis of Christian marriage18 The number of children born to enslaved couples and thereby the begin nings of family and kinship networks varied over both time and place19 Although owners fully appreciated the reproductive value of enslaved Black women in practice they made little effort to promote the phys ical wellbeing of those of childbearing age regardless of whether or not they were pregnant In the plantation colonies and particularly in the sugarproducing regions of the Americas a poor diet combined with often backbreaking work scarcely fostered Black womens fertility What is less clear is the extent to which enslaved Black women might have sought to avoid pregnancy or even aborted their babies as deliberate acts of defiance There is some suggestion that in the plantation colonies they breastfed any children they did have for up to two or three years almost certainly in the hope and expectation that this would be a means of avoiding another pregnancy during that time20 If Black woman field hands did conceive then they would almost cer tainly be forced to carry on working throughout their pregnancy without any significant lessening of their workloads There is simply no way of knowing how many of them miscarried as a result If they came to term the often less than hygienic circumstances under which their babies were delivered resulted in high rates of neonatal death often from tetanus 18 Bush Slave Women pp 8491 Frey and Wood Come Shouting to Zion pp 4851 Kulikoff Tobacco and Slaves p 334 19 There is an extensive literature on the formation and structure of the enslaved family See for example Herbert Gutman The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 17501925 New York 1977 Robert W Fogel and Stanley L Engerman Recent Findings in the Study of Slave Demography and Family Structure Sociology and Social Research 63 1979 56689 Morrissey Slave Women pp 8199 Bush Slave Women pp 83108 Allan Kulikoff The Beginnings of the AfroAmerican Family in Maryland in Aubrey C Land Lois Green Carr and Edward G Papenfuse eds Law Society and Politics in Early Maryland Baltimore MD 1977 Kulikoff The Origins of AfroAmerican Society in Tidewater Virginia and Maryland 17001790 William and Mary Quarterly 35 1978 22659 Peter H Wood Black Majority Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1660 through the Stono Rebellion New York 1974 pp 13941 15965 24851 Ira Berlin The Slave Trade and the Development of AfroAmerican Society in English Mainland North America 16191775 Southern Studies 20 1981 11236 Michael Craton Changing Patterns of the Slave Family in the British West Indies Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 1987 135 and Herbert J Foster African Patterns in the AfroAmerican Family Journal of Black Studies 24 1983 20131 20 For discussions of pregnancy and childbirth see Jennifer Lyle Morgan Laboring Women Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery Philadelphia 2004 Cheryll Ann Cody Cycles of Work and Childbearing Seasonality in Womens Lives on Low Country Plantations in Gaspar and Hine eds More than Chattel and Barbara Bush Hard Labor Women Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies in ibid Morrissey Slave Women pp 10843 See also Herbert S Klein and Stanley L Engerman Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies A Note on Lactation Practices William and Mary Quarterly 35 1978 35774 and John Bongaarts Does Malnutrition Affect Fecundity A Summary of Evidence Science 208 1980 pp 5649 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 547 Within a few days of giving birth the mother would be forced to return to the fields and if her child had survived it was likely that she would work with it strapped to her back in the traditional West and West Central African fashion If they lived on the same estate it was the usual practice for enslaved couples and their children to live together in the comparative privacy of a cabin which would form the base in which and from which they developed their domestic or household economies If the couple lived on neighboring estates then their domestic economy tended to revolve around the wifes residence which the husband and father visited as often as he could In the meantime the wife would assume the main responsibility for the house hold including the care of any children These familybased economies which in recent years have attracted a considerable amount of scholarly interest involved a complicated nexus of work and material goods and they always entailed the giving and receiving or the withholding of affec tion and respect21 They were economies that like the formal economies supervised by owners and overseers were deeply gendered In the effort to enhance their standard of living enslaved people spent much of their spare time growing hunting and making commodities either for their own use or to barter and sell in exchange for the goods they sought On most estates in the plantation colonies each enslaved family was allocated a plot of land often known as a provision ground or a garden which formed the productive basis of its domestic economy Over time families came to claim these pieces of land as theirs by right a demand that owners were usually willing to concede Such evidence as there is suggests that when time permitted family members worked alongside one another on their plots upon which they grew a wide range of fruits and vegetables Other activities associated with the slaves domestic economies were rather more explicitly gendered For example in the main hunting and fishing were exclusively male pre serves These were activities that were important not only economically for the enslaved family but also for the process of male bonding sometimes between male friends but particularly between fathers and sons Men also assumed the main responsibility for manufacturing from locally available materials a range of commodities such as furniture for the family cabin and other items that could be sold or bartered 21 For examples of this scholarship see Beckles Natural Rebels pp 7289 Philip D Morgan Black Life in EighteenthCentury Charleston Perspectives in American History 1 1984 187232 Betty Wood Womens Work Mens Work The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia Athens GA 1995 Ira Berlin and Philip D Morgan eds The Slaves Economy Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas London 1991 and Morgan and Berlin eds Cultivation and Culture Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas Charlottesville VA 1993 For archaeological evidence see Jerome S Handler An Archaeological Investigation of the Domestic Life of Plantation Slaves in Barbados Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 34 1992 6472 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 548 the cambridge world history of slavery Women were principally responsible for making and mending clothes as well as for the preparation of food and it is reasonable to assume that they passed on these domestic skills to their daughters On larger estates particularly these domestic activities were often carried out by groups of women after their days work These were informal social gatherings that were both initiated and controlled by women and they provided an important and supportive setting in which news and information hopes and fears could be freely exchanged and expressed Together with the workplace these gatherings were the contexts in which plantation women both forged and reinforced friendships with one another they were an important context in which acceptable patterns of womens behavior were both defined and judged Over time with the growth of slavebased urban economies many Black slave women were able to extend their household economies in a way that enabled them to secure for themselves not only a significant degree of quasiautonomy but also access to public spaces that in practice if not in the eyes of the law they largely controlled Everywhere in the Americas from Barbados to Brazil and from Massachusetts to Louisiana towns of any size had at least one public market In many if not most of these markets and in a way that closely paralleled their West and West Central African equivalents22 Black slavewomen vendors or hucksters as they were sometimes known came to dominate the sale of fruit vegetables and dairy produce to the point where by the middle years of the eighteenth century they virtually monopolized the supply of these essential foodstuffs23 Often they were selling these commodities on behalf of their owners but many women seized the opportunity to vend surpluses of one sort or another from their own household economies Generally speaking most of their customers were other women sometimes Black women slaves who were sent to market to purchase foodstuffs by their owners and sometimes underclass white women who were shopping for themselves or on behalf of their white employers Middling rank and elite women were seldom to be found in the marketplace Public markets in effect where town and countryside interconnected provided Black women slaves drawn from a wide area a place to interact regularly with one another as well as with underclass white women 22 On women in African markets see Paul Bohannon and George Dalton eds Markets in Africa Evanston IL 1962 B W Hodder and U I Ukwu Markets in West Africa Studies of Markets and Trade among the Yoruba and Ibo Ibadan 1969 and F Steady ed The Black Woman CrossCulturally Cambridge MA 1981 23 For Black womens dominance of one early American market see Robert Olwell Loose Idle and Disorderly Women in the EighteenthCentury Charleston Marketplace in Gaspar and Hine eds More Than Chattel See also Morgan Black Life in EighteenthCentury Charleston and Wood Womens Work pp 80139 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 549 If their work in both the formal and the informal economies was one of the prime determinants of Black womens as well as Black mens lives and relationships then so too were their religious beliefs and practices Scholars have long debated the extent to which these beliefs and practices survived the transatlantic slave trade and the ways in which they were reworked and reinvented in different American contexts24 Although it is true that West and West Central African religious structures could not be expected to survive the Middle Passage completely intact the same was not the case with memory and experience Moreover some traditional sacred specialists including women as well as men found themselves being loaded onto a slave ship simply because they were seen by their rulers as posing a potent threat to the existing social political and religious order These specialists carried their expertise and influence with them to the Americas There in albeit unfamiliar physical and social environments they would play a key part in the continuing struggle to adapt traditional belief systems and ritualistic practices in ways that would give meaning to the new lives that enslaved people were now being forced to lead Everywhere and reflecting the continuation of roles that were both rec ognized and highly valued in many parts of West and West Central Africa enslaved Black women were highly visible participants in the communal rituals that were devised not only for the marriage of the living but also for the burial of the dead25 The rituals associated with burial or the first funeral often involved a procession to the grave which would be marked by the playing of musical instruments and the singing of songs often by women Women were also centrally involved in the rituals that as in their traditional religious cultures became an integral part of what in many parts of the Americas became known as the second burial or funeral This com memoration of the dead took place some weeks or months after the initial burial of the corpse and as in Antigua and elsewhere it might become an annual event26 With respect to these rituals associated with death Black women played a central and accepted role as guardians of albeit somewhat modified traditional religious cultures 24 See for example Frey and Wood Come Shouting to Zion pp 3562 Michael A Gomez Muslims in Early America Journal of Southern History 60 1994 671700 John K Thornton Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 14001680 Cambridge 1992 Elsa V Goveia Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century New Haven CT 1965 Karen Fog Olwig Cultural Adaption and Resistance on St John Three Centuries of AfroCaribbean Life Gainesville FL 1985 and Margaret Washington Creel A Peculiar People Slave Religion and CommunityCulture Among the Gullah New York 1988 25 For the role of women in traditional religious cultures see Benetta Jules Rosette Privilege without Power Women in African Cults and Churches in Rosalyn TerborgPenn Sharon Harley and Andrea Benton Rushing eds Women in Africa and the African Diaspora Washington DC 1987 26 Frey and Wood Come Shouting to Zion p 54 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 550 the cambridge world history of slavery Whenever the need arose and whenever it was feasible for them to do so enslaved people turned to their traditional sacred specialists for a wide range of advice and not least of all for various forms of protection Everywhere in the Americas but particularly in the plantation colonies these sacred specialists were by far and away the most influential and feared people in the slave quarters and significantly women were included among them For a price which was thought to reflect the efficacy of what they had to offer Obeah women as well as Obeah men were willing to provide their clients with a variety of charms and potions that promised protection against an enemy or would even kill that enemy as well as more benign concoctions that might help in the courting process With what was widely accepted and dreaded as their awesome ability to cast spells and to bewitch Obeah women and men were not on any account people to be crossed Indeed it was sometimes said by European commentators that if they were ever faced with the choice enslaved people would prefer to disobey their owner or overseer rather than fall foul of an Obeah man or woman These highly influential sacred specialists would be at the forefront of the drive to preserve traditional religious beliefs and practices they would comprise one of the most insurmountable barriers to any and all attempts made by Europeans to introduce and in some cases to impose their versions of Christianity on enslaved people27 The Christianity of their European owners but especially that of their Roman Catholic owners was not something that all enslaved people neces sarily encountered for the first time in the Americas From the late fifteenth century Portuguese missionaries had worked in parts of West and West Central Africa and had been particularly successful in Angola28 In varying degrees from the early sixteenth century onward that missionary activity would be extended to enslaved people in those parts of the Americas that were colonized not only by the Portuguese but also by the Roman Catholic countries of Spain and France Wherever it occurred in early America the Roman Catholic mission ary effort is usually associated with male religious orders most notably perhaps with the Jesuits and generally speaking this is an entirely accu rate assessment However recent scholarship has begun to explore and to emphasize the significance of the missionary activities that were undertaken in different parts of the Americans by European nuns For example very shortly after the first French settlement of the southern portion of Louisiana 27 Ibid pp 5662 John Thornton On the Trail of Voodoo African Christianity in Africa and the Americas Americas 44 1988 26178 28 For this early Roman Catholic missionary activity see Frey and Wood Come Shouting to Zion pp 134 John Thornton Early KongoPortuguese Relations A New Interpretation History in Africa 8 1981 18398 idem The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo 15501750 Journal of African History 25 1984 14767 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 551 in the early eighteenth century a small group of Ursulines established a convent in New Orleans Thereafter they assumed a crucial and contin uing role in the missionary activity that took place in and around that town These nuns fully accepted that there was no inherent contradiction between Christianity and chattel slavery indeed their growing prosperity stemmed in large measure from the ownership of land and slaves including enslaved women It is difficult to say whether Black women were more likely to be influ enced by the missionary activities of nuns of other women than they were by those of male priests but from the careful records that they kept it seems that the Ursulines were particularly successful in their proselytizing activities If nothing else they presented Black women with a model of female religious agency and authority albeit an agency and authority that theoretically if not always in practice was subordinated to that of male priests and ultimately to a single white male god29 Similar models of organized female missionary activity were largely absent in the Protestant worlds of British America and so for that matter was any organized attempt to proselytize enslaved people before the open ing years of the eighteenth century Such interference as there was during the course of the seventeenth century in the religious lives that Black men and women were seeking to construct for themselves came not so much from Protestant churchmen as it did from Protestant slave owners Own ers were not particularly interested in the religious belief systems of those they were in the process of enslaving but what did concern them was the gathering of enslaved people from neighboring estates usually during the hours of darkness to engage in the ritualistic ceremonies associated with marriage and burial Such gatherings it was widely believed were no more than pretexts for the real purpose of the participants the organization of armed rebellions Every effort was made to suppress these meetings but whether in the countryside or in towns and cities such efforts were never particularly successful In many ways the organized Anglican missionary activity that got under way in 1701 with the formation in London of the Society for the Prop agation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was genderblind That is to say it did not regard one sex women as being more receptive or suscep tible than the other to their version of Christianity Through the middle years of the eighteenth century the Anglican priests who held livings in the plantation colonies succeeded in attracting only a minuscule number of enslaved people women or men to their churches In part as they frequently complained this was because of the often fierce opposition of 29 For an extended discussion of this point see Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould The Feminine Face of AfroCatholicism in New Orleans 17271852 William and Mary Quarterly 59 2002 40948 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 552 the cambridge world history of slavery owners to the attempted conversion and instruction of their slaves They seldom acknowledged the strong preference of enslaved women and men for religious beliefs and rituals of their own construction as opposed to those of an Anglican church that sanctioned their continuing bondage and thereby offered no prospect whatsoever of any change in their secular status The number of enslaved people who for one reason or another were persuaded to become practicing members of the Anglican Church was so small as to make any attempt at gender analysis meaningless It would be a very different matter however during the middle years of the eighteenth century when religious revivals erupted over the length and breadth of Britains mainland American colonies These revivals the blossoming of evangelical Protestantism and the growth of Methodist and Baptist con gregations would mark the beginnings of what eventually would prove to be a sea change in the religious preferences of enslaved African Americans A similar process would only begin to get under way in the British West Indies during the latter part of the century in part prompted by Black emigres from the mainland in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and in part by an influx of Baptist and Methodist missionaries from the British Isles From the outset Black women would be intimately involved in this religious transformation and they would assume a pivotal role as cultural innovators The religious revivals that occurred throughout Britains mainland American colonies in the thirty or so years before the American Revo lution sometimes referred to as the first Great Awakening are often associated with the powerful preaching of such men as George Whitefield Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley To begin with the conversion of enslaved people was not their principal concern but this soon became a central feature of their mission In fact what would become John Wesleys lifelong commitment to the religious instruction of enslaved people and by 1774 to an antislavery position predicated on religious grounds was prompted by a conversation he had with a Black woman in Charleston South Carolina in 173630 Wesley was both shocked and dismayed by her limited knowledge of even the most basic tenets of Christian teaching by what he considered to be the abject failure of Anglican ministers and planters to tend to the most basic spiritual needs of enslaved people The evangelical message presented by Wesley Whitefield and other lesswellknown itinerant preachers was not targeted specifically toward enslaved Black people and neither did it have an explicitly gendered dimen sion Yet from the beginning it was a message that appealed to growing numbers of enslaved people and not least to enslaved women The reasons 30 Wood and Frey Come Shouting to Zion pp 889 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 553 why evangelical Protestantism struck a chord with enslaved people in a way that Anglicanism failed to do are not difficult to unearth The simple fact of the matter was that evangelical preachers presented enslaved women and men with an empowering version of Christianity that laid emphasis upon their value as human beings upon their ability to assume the sole responsibility for their spiritual health and wellbeing Arguably for the first time enslaved people found themselves being depicted as equals and not simply as spiritual equals important as that was by the whites who preached to them In the Anglican Church formally recognized leadership roles were strictly limited to men who had undergone years of prescribed education the sole qualification to be accepted as a lay preacher in evangelical congre gations was that of having undergone conversion of having experienced spiritual rebirth In other words ethnicity legal status and gender were entirely irrelevant considerations Given this it is immediately apparent why evangelical Protestantism had the appeal it did to Black women They could claim and were accorded both a respect and a legitimate spiritual authority that was elsewhere denied them Enslaved people constituted the greater part of the membership of the biracial Baptist and Methodist congregations that began to spring up in the Southern colonies during the middle years of the eighteenth century and church records suggest that everywhere Black women formed a significant component of that membership The conversion experience was spiritually empowering church membership and regular church attendance offered enslaved women new opportunities to interact with one another as well as with white church members of both sexes Very often Black women helped in the building of their churches a form of voluntary work that often earned them the esteem of male church members This might mean working alongside women they had known for a while either as family members or as friends it could mean meeting at least some of their female coreligionists for the very first time A shared religious ideology and regular church attendance served to foster these new bonds of association and friendship In many ways enslaved Black women church members were instrumental in creating for themselves another semi private space that served a not dissimilar function to that of the secular public market Church attendance on Sundays and midweek classes which were usually held in the evenings offered them regular opportunities to meet and to talk with one another about any number of things As Baptist and Methodist churches began to organize themselves and determine the rules that would govern the behavior of their members they were soon offering their enslaved members something that outside New England was universally denied them in the worlds outside their churches the right to air their grievances and the right to demand certain Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 554 the cambridge world history of slavery standards of conduct from their fellow church members including their coreligionist owners Access to and the acknowledgment of these rights was made possible through the disciplinary mechanisms that were universally adopted by the Baptist and Methodist churches The ways in which individual congregations including biracial congre gations set up their disciplinary bodies varied somewhat some consisted solely of white male church members others were made up of small com mittees Yet whatever their composition they provided enslaved church members with the possibility of seeking certain kinds of rights and cer tain kinds of protection some of which were explicitly gendered Black men and Black women were allowed to bring charges against their owners including their women owners whom they often successfully accused of inflicting excessive physical punishments upon them Black husbands and wives also appealed to their churches again often successfully to prevent their owners from permanently separating them But Black women could and did approach their church disciplinary bodies in the hope of securing something else protection from sexual abuse and harassment by either their white or their Black male coreligionists Numerically though by far and away most of the charges heard by church disciplinary bodies were brought against rather than by Black church members mainly in an effort to ensure that they conformed to the basic tenets of Christian sexual morality Accusations of what Christian teaching depicted as the sins of adul tery and fornication and less frequently of what were often referred to as doublemarriages were made against Black men and women in roughly equal gender proportions and they constituted a potent threat to the per sistence of traditional patterns of marriage At the same time Black church members might have regarded the possibility of Christian marriage with the permanence it promised as an equally potent protection against the possibility of being forcibly separated What white Baptists and Methodists could never completely agree upon was the possibility of remarriage in those cases where Black couples had been permanently separated31 For those Black women and men who adhered to it and this was a matter of choice rather than compulsion evangelical Protestant Christian ity offered a profoundly important sense of spiritual freedom and inde pendence It also provided them with a religious ideology and identity and through their church membership a loyalty that competed with and superceded ideologies identities and loyalties that stemmed from shared West and West Central African roots Yet at the same time Protestant Christianity and the church membership that accompanied it also deeply 31 Ibid pp 18390 Betty Wood For Their Satisfaction or Redress African Americans and Church Discipline in the Early South in Clinton and Gillespie eds The Devils Lane pp 10923 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 555 divided at the same time as it unified Black women and for that matter Black men The rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in the thirty or so years before the American Revolution by no means went uncontested Enslaved people made different choices There were those and during this time they remained the majority in Britains mainland American colonies who remained deeply attached to their traditional belief systems and practices as well as to their traditional sacred specialists Even within evangelical Protes tantism enslaved converts made different sectarian and denominational choices which if nothing else physically separated them at those times when they attended their churches Like all differences within enslaved populations these different religious choices were very much in the slave owners interest From the outset from the moment they were first taken on board the slave ships enslaved West and West Central African women and men insisted upon exercising choice exerting agency in the determination of their individual and communal spiritual religious and family lives Fun damental to this endeavor was the resolve to persuade their enslavers and to constantly remind each other of their humanity and their individuality This resolve was expressed in various ways some of which were more phys ically violent than others some of which were decidedly more successful than others some of which were engaged in by both women and men and some of which were restricted solely to women Whether on board the slave ships or once in the Americas enslaved Black men did not enjoy a monopoly on expressing their humanity their unconditional refusal to be treated as soulless beasts of burden as unthinking and unfeeling objects in physically violent ways One extreme statement of this unconditional refusal was selfviolence suicide an act of utter defiance that took place both on board the slave ships and after arrival in the Americas The accounts of European ships captains and crews are threaded through with details of the ways in which women and men starved themselves to death or threw themselves overboard rather than face captivity and of their unshakeable conviction that after their death they or their souls would return to Africa32 We also know from the same European accounts that whenever it proved possible Black women did all that they could to promote shipboard upris ings en route to the Americas That they were able to do this in part reflected the gendered perceptions of captains and crews who believed that women offered little physical threat to them and for that reason did not always keep them chained together Similarly whether in Brazil or Barbados New York or Carolina Black male rebels could usually rely on the support 32 Frey and Wood Come Shouting to Zion pp 369 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 556 the cambridge world history of slavery of the women close to them Enslaved people quickly learned that on the slave ships a failed rebellion resulted in the quite gruesome death of those who were known or believed to have been involved in it The willingness to run that risk was by no means gender specific Exactly the same was true of individual acts of physical violence that were perpetrated against owners and their families or against overseers and other whites Most women of course did not have the same bodily strength as men but when the need arose for example to protect themselves or their loved ones there were those who were willing to lash out with a hoe an axe or whatever it was that they had on hand Through their sacred specialists and sometimes through their domestic responsibilities women as well as men also had access to something that owners and their families came universally to fear herbal poisons The natural environments of the Americas were often quite different from those they had known in Africa but enslaved people quickly began to learn the benign and the malign properties of different plants and herbs and they used them accordingly33 Although at one time or another every enslaved woman and man must have thought about engaging in an organized rebellion or violently assault ing their owner this was a path that most chose not to follow They knew only too well the consequences for themselves of such actions Executions brutal physical beatings and the very real possibility of being sold away from their family and friends were prices that quite understandably the majority of enslaved people of both sexes were reluctant to pay However they were always both willing and able to devise ways of assert ing themselves and their individuality that challenged and defied the total authority claimed by their owners Accommodation did not necessarily equate with an unthinking collaboration let alone with total submission One highly creative means that enslaved women and men universally developed in order to express their individuality and selfrespect involved the ways in which they clothed and decorated their bodies Sometimes using herbal dyes and sometimes pieces of fabric that they had managed to acquire they refashioned the usually drab clothing issued to them by their owners clothing that was mostly of the same color and style Whenever they could and often through their informal economic transactions they acquired readymade clothes or cloth to make up into garments that were an alternative to those they wore during the working day These were clothes that were reserved for special occasions in the case of Christian slaves of whatever sect or denomination this came to mean particularly for their church services 33 Susan A McClure Parallel Usage of Medicinal Plants by Africans and their Caribbean Descen dants Western Journal of Black Studies 4 1982 For the use and alleged use of poisons by enslaved people see Philip J Schwarz Twice Condemned Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia 17051865 Baton Rouge LA 1988 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 557 Men and women alike were also widely reported to have acquired jewelry usually in the form of earrings Hairstyles too were also a way in which both sexes expressed their individualism34 Often though it was the self fashioning of enslaved women that tended to attract more comment usually adverse comment than that of enslaved men Indeed there were times when enslaved women usually urbanbased women were said by some disconcerted European commentators to be clothing themselves far better far more extravagantly than their mistresses Attempts to stamp out a practice that belied the supposedly lowly status of enslaved people and challenged the supposed superiority taste and civility of their colonial owners were never successfully implemented35 Even more disconcerting and threatening to the interests of owners than their selfstyling was the way in which enslaved people sought to assert themselves and to safeguard various of their interests not by violent rebellion or by appealing to their owners or to their churches but by the defiance they displayed in their workplaces and by their willingness to abandon those workplaces to take flight Several means were available to enslaved workers to express their dis content short of running away For example although not always able to avoid physical punishment if they were caught Black workers could work more slowly or more carelessly than their owners and overseers demanded of them Feigning illness was another ploy that enslaved people were said to resort to although the unhealthy conditions of many plantation regions meant that many of the ailments reported by field workers were probably only too genuine One ruse that by definition was restricted to women of childbearing age was that of pretending to be pregnant in the hope often the vain hope that this might lessen their workload Of course there was only so long that they could keep up the pretense and once their ruse was discovered they were likely to be severely punished Throughout the Americas despite their rural slave patrols and urban watchers the act of selfassertion that owners were simply unable to stamp out was running away Enslaved women and men took flight for many different reasons and their destinations were as varied as their motives Sometimes they ran away for a few hours or a few days and hid out locally in order to avoid a particularly heavy workload or a threatened punishment Others took flight in search of their permanent liberation from bondage a flight that might take them into the more remote regions of their colony or to one of its port towns in the hope of making their escape by sea Some made for those same towns with the intention of blending in 34 White and White Slave Hair 35 In 1775 for example the Georgia Grand Jury insisted that a law be enacted for preventing the excessive and costly apparel of Negroes and other slaves in Savannah Such legislation was never enacted Wood Womens Work p 134 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 558 the cambridge world history of slavery with the Black urban crowd and eking out a quasiautonomous existence Universally though one of the main reasons why enslaved people took flight was to try to be reunited with those of their family members from whom they had been forcibly separated There were three important respects in which the act of running away appears to have been gendered There was no discernible difference in the reasons enslaved women and men had for running away but occupation and more especially motherhood were of crucial significance in determin ing womens choices and the options that were open to them once they had decided to take flight All the evidence suggests that enslaved men and often young men in their teens and early twenties ran away in greater numbers than enslaved women One of the main reasons for this gender imbalance in runaways was the universal reluctance of enslaved mothers to abscond if this meant abandoning their children particularly their very young children Whatever her reason for wishing to run off the enslaved mother who did so and who took her young children with her faced enor mous difficulties and sometimes lifethreatening situations More often than not mothers who absconded tended to take their children with them only when they reached an age at which they were able to be able to fend for themselves Fathers too were unwilling to desert their children and it is likely that many of the enslaved men who ran away were young men who had not yet entered into a marital relationship Several of the options open to male runways were simply closed or enormously problematic for women regardless of whether or not they were accompanied by their children For example it was extraordinarily difficult for women runaways to find work in the towns Employers were understandably wary of employing Black women who were unknown to them and who arrived without references in their households most of the heavy work associated with the fetching and carrying of goods was mens work rather than womens work Exactly the same was true of most artisanal and craft skills Another ploy was also closed to them because of their sex They could not hope to make their escape from port towns by persuading ships captains to employ them as sailors Perhaps though they were able to use their sex their bodies or the promise of their bodies to talk sailors into taking them on board36 The fact remains however that female runaways who made their way into towns were at a distinct disadvantage on account of their gender In 36 For discussions of enslaved runaways see Gerald W Mullin Flight and Rebellion Slave Resistance in EighteenthCentury Virginia New York 1972 Daniel E Meaders South Carolina Fugitives as Viewed through Local Colonial Newspapers with Emphasis on Runaway Notices Journal of Negro History 60 1975 288319 Philip D Morgan Colonial South Carolina Runaways Their Significance for Slave Culture Slavery and Abolition 6 1985 5778 Wood Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery and Wood Womens Work pp 956 11118 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 black women in the early americas 559 some ways their best hope of survival was if they had urbanbased family members and friends who were willing to run the risk of hiding them out This possibility probably grew over time with the formation of family and kinship networks but it was not something that Black women runaways could automatically count on In many parts of the Americas by the third decade of the eighteenth century owners were taking advantage of a rapidly growing print culture and particularly the appearance of newspapers to advertise for enslaved runways Their advertisements provide a wealth of information about such things as the age birthplace occupation health and clothing of those who had taken flight but they also offer important glimpses of a gendered dimension of slavery that thus far has received comparatively little attention from historians of the early Americas the fact that often through widowhood there were many women who were not simply the wives and daughters of male slave owners but who held slaves in their own right Estate records of one kind or another as well as wills reveal that there were women who ranked among some of the largest slaveholders not only in their immediate locality but also in their particular colony37 Thus far the recent scholarly research into the interactions between religious women such as the Ursulines and their prospective Black female converts has not been matched by a similar interest in the relationships that came to characterize the relationship between enslaved Black women and their female owners in the secular worlds of the early Americas The published advertisements for enslaved runaways provide some tan talizing glimpses of the intersection of race social rank and gender in the evolving slaveholding and slave societies of the early Americas Enslaved Black women as well as men ran away from female owners who often described them in derogatory terms as wenches and girls a language that scarcely suggested an empathy with those they were depicting let alone female sensibilities that questioned the continuance of racially based slave systems What does seem to be emerging from the research thus far undertaken in this area is a picture of slaveowning women and plantation mistresses who always prioritized their social rank and who fully appreci ated the extent to which their social rank and all that it entailed in terms of the material wealth and the prestige that went with it depended upon the continuing exploitation of enslaved Black people women as well as men38 37 Two such women on the eve of the American Revolution were Heriot Crooke of Georgia and the betterknown Eliza Pinckney of South Carolina For a recent and rare study of women slave owners in colonial British America see Ingeborg Dornan A Study of Female Slave Owners in the Low Country of South Carolina and Georgia c17301775 Unpublished PhD diss University of Cambridge 2001 38 For studies that address the intersection of race rank and gender in Britains mainland American plantation colonies see Joan R Gundersen The Double Bonds of Race and Sex Black and White Women in a Colonial Virginia Parish Journal of Southern History 52 1986 35172 idem Womens Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 560 the cambridge world history of slavery During the past thirty years or so our understanding of the racially based slave systems that evolved in the Americas between the sixteenth and the mideighteenth century has been transformed virtually beyond recognition Fundamental to that transformation has been a veritable torrent of often highly creative research that has made visible those who in traditional scholarship had been marginalized to the point of invisibility True there is still work be done but the fact remains that during the past few years giant steps have been taken in the attempt to enable the Black women of the Americas to retrieve and thereby to reclaim that part of their history which for far too long was denied them Networks in Colonial Virginia in Clinton and Gillespie eds The Devils Lane pp 90198 Betty Wood Gender Race and Rank in a Revolutionary Age The Georgia Lowcountry 17501830 Athens GA 2000 pp 2856 and Dornan A Study of Female Slave Owners Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 PART VII LEGAL STRUCTURES ECONOMICS AND THE MOVEMENT OF COERCED PEOPLES IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 22 INVOLUNTARY MIGRATION IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD 15001800 david richardson 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 125 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 postColumbus 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 nonAfricans 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 landrich 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 Any investigation of involuntary migration in the early modern period must recognize that trafficking in human beings was an important feature of life in both the New and the Old Worlds in the period 150018001 This chapter is divided into four sections Section I looks at involuntary migration in the Old World We focus primarily though not exclusively on involuntary migration in the lands bordering the Mediterranean and 1 The figure quoted here is based on estimates derived from some 35000 slaving voyages from Africa to the Americas David Eltis and David Richardson A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the new Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2007 pp 160 On the expansion of serfdom see Richard Hellie Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy Chicago IL 1971 p 120 563 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 564 the cambridge world history of slavery the Middle East and on slavery and the rise of serfdom in eastern Europe The evidence relating to such movements of people is patchier and more conjectural than that relating to transatlantic flows of enslaved Africans but nevertheless provides an important reference point and comparative perspective for transatlantic involuntary migration in the years 15001800 The scale and geographical and temporal parameters of transatlantic move ments are the focal point of section II The establishment in sections I and II of the contours of the various involuntary migrations allows us in sec tion III to explore the factors shaping such migrations and specifically to examine what determined that the transatlantic slave trade had eclipsed all other migrations by the eighteenth century In section IV we offer some conclusions i For several millennia servitude was an important element of life in soci eties bordering the Mediterranean underpinning successively the Egyptian Greek Roman and Byzantine empires It continued to be a major insti tution in the Mediterranean and Middle East at the time of Columbuss voyages of discovery and indeed in the immediately succeeding centuries Slaves were to be found throughout the lands ruled over by the Ottomans whose formal empire centered on Constantinople stretched by 1500 from Basra on the Arabian Sea to the Caucasus to the Crimea to the Balkans and to Egypt Slave ownership was also common in the North African Barbary States of Tripoli Tunis and Algiers which were nominally under Ottoman rule and in Morocco which lay outside it In these latter areas white slaves were common Many of those owning slaves in the lands around the Mediterranean and the Middle East were Muslims but slave ownership in these lands was not just confined in 1500 to the world of Islam It existed in Christianbased Mediterranean societies from Spain and Portugal in the west to Venice in the east It was to be found too in the lands to the north and east of the Mediterranean including the emerg ing Muscovy Empire the Caucasus Asia Minor and Central Asia where slave raiding was a regular feature of state activity from time immemorial It was endemic too in African societies within and south of the Sahara desert which had long been a source of slaves to the worlds bordering and beyond the Mediterranean and the Middle East In short slavery and the slave trafficking that accompanied it was ubiquitous throughout the borderlands of EuroAsia and Africa2 2 Paul W Bamford The Procurement of Oarsmen for French Galleys 16601748 American Historical Review 65 1959 3148 Charles Verlinden Esclavage Noir en France Meridionale et Courants de Traite en Afrique Annales du Midi 78 1966 33543 T M Ricks Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf 18th and 19th Centuries An Assessment in W G ClarenceSmith ed Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 565 Research in the Ottoman archives has revealed good documentation on slavery but has so far failed to generate large amounts of hard informa tion about the size or distribution of slave populations in the Ottoman Empire before the nineteenth century3 A similar paucity of data affects our understanding in varying degrees of slavery in the Christian lands of the Mediterranean in Muscovy in Asia Minor in Central Asia and in northern and subSaharan Africa With the probable exception of sub Saharan regions however it seems unlikely that chattel slavery embraced more than a minority of the population in these regions in the early modern period Cadastral surveys and tax records for the Ottoman Empire show that in sixteenthcentury Crimea and in eighteenthcentury Rumelia in the Balkans slaves commonly constituted less than 10 percent of the pop ulation These figures may be misleading because the records upon which they are based relate only to nonMuslim slave owners but even when Muslim slave owners are included the proportions of chattel slaves in the population still tended to be modest Tereke registers of the property of the dead show that in the period 15491659 in Edirne province near Istanbul where slavery was said to be widespread slaves still comprised less than 3 percent of the wealth of members of the Askeri class middleranking gov ernmental officials a group likely to own proportionately more slaves than the population at large Similar patterns are to be found in other provinces under Ottoman rule though the ratio of slaves to total population could vary sharply through time and may have reached up to 20 percent at cities on the Barbary Coast In varying degrees moreover the Ottoman picture seems to have been replicated in the Barbary States in Portugal in Venice in Asia Minor and in Muscovy In the last case it appears that slavery may have increased in certain periods notably during the reign of Ivan the Terrible 153084 Slavery in the Muscovy Empire took various forms but probably affected no more than one in seven of Ivans subjects and remained at or near this level until it was subsumed under serfdom in 1723 A one in ten ratio or less was probably the norm for the number of The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century London 1988 pp 6070 on white slavery in North Africa see Lucette Valensi Esclaves chretiens et esclaves noirs a Tunis au XVIIIe siecle Annales 22 1967 126785 Robert C Davis Counting European Slaves on the Barbary Coast Past and Present 176 2001 87124 idem Christian Slaves Muslim Masters White Slavery in the Mediterranean the Barbary Coast and Italy 15001800 Basingstoke 2003 pp 326 in Africa see Paul E Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery A History of Slavery in Africa second edition Cambridge 2000 Patrick Manning Slavery and African Life Occidental Oriental and African Slave Trades Cambridge 1990 3 The neglect of the movement of enslaved Africans into the Islamic world is a theme of more recent studies Janet J Ewald Slavery in Africa and the Slave Trades from Africa American Historical Review 97 1992 46585 Eve Troutt Powell and John O Hunwick ed The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam Princeton NJ 2002 This contrasts with work on the nineteenth century Ottoman slave trade and its abolition see Ehud R Toledano The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression 18401890 Princeton NJ 1982 idem Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East Washington 1997 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 566 the cambridge world history of slavery people in slavery in most of the lands of the Mediterranean of Asia Minor and of Central Asia This was almost certainly lower than that found in subSaharan Africa in the years 150018004 The geographical size of the Ottoman and Muscovy empires and the not inconsiderable populations that they contained meant that though in a minority slaves still comprised millions rather than thousands of people at any one time To the slaves in these two empires one needs to add those held in slavery outside them Slavery was moreover not the only form of debasement of human beings in the Eurasian and African borderlands in the early modern period Throughout the Mediterranean convicts were regularly condemned to a lifetime of servitude in the galleys the principal weapon of warfare at sea before 1700 Within the Muscovy Empire by 1649 the peasantry was subject to a system of serfdom that entailed restrictions on rights to move measures to recover fugitives and ultimately the tying of peasants and their descendants to the land for life The growth of serfdom in Muscovy was largely driven by external threats and by considerations of national security in a context of massive expansions of territorial domain low population densities and the rise of the middle service class In this respect the rise of serfdom in Muscovy had parallels with servitude throughout the Eurasian and African borderlands where slavery was closely tied to state power and disproportionate shares of those in bondage were owned or controlled by political and commercial elites By 1649 up to threequarters of Muscovys peasants perhaps 1314 million people were serfs whose material lives and human rights were barely distinguishable from those of slaves Moreover what happened in Muscovy in the period 15001800 was mirrored to some degree in rival states notably in eastern Europe When one allows for other people in bondage within and outside the Muscovy Empire it is possible that in the midseventeenth century up to 20 million people in the Eurasian and African borderlands lived under forms of bondage akin to slavery If true this suggests that more than half the people in bondage in the Old World north of subSaharan Africa in 1650 were in the Muscovy Empire The rest were largely in the Ottoman Empire eastern Europe North Africa and Asia Minor To these people are to be added indeterminate numbers of subSaharan Africans who lived in some form of slavery or bondage Slavery and other forms of servitude were major and possibly growing elements of life in the Old World during and after the Age of Discovery5 4 On Ottoman surveys see Alan Fisher Chattel Slavery in the Ottoman Empire Slavery and Abolition 1 1980 2541 pp 312 and on the Barbary Coast see Peter Earle Corsairs of Malta and Barbary London 1970 p 82 On slavery in Russia see Hellies Russian Slavery and Serfdom 1450 1803 in this volume for the importance of limited service contract slavery to slaverys expansion in Russia in the century or so after the fifteenth century and where slaves are estimated at 515 percent of the Russian population in the 1590s 5 On French use of convicts see Bamford Procurement pp 3740 A classic statement on the relationship between land abundance low population density and bondage is Evsey D Domar The Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 567 Wherever slavery and other forms of bondage existed they were almost invariably accompanied by involuntary migration Linked to national defence the enserfment of the Russian peasantry became identified with its forced relocation to fortified frontier lines and after 1700 to the lifelong draft of a portion of males into the armed forces Such measures were largely driven by efforts to protect the empire from external threat from Poles Lithuanians Latvians and Swedes on the western front and from predation on the southern frontier by nomadic Crimean Tatars Nogais Kalmyks and Kazakhs The former created harvests of military captive slaves some of whom were dispatched to Siberia As for predation the Poles Ukrainians Russians and Slavs seized by Tatars and others on the southern frontier were dispatched to Central Asian markets at Bukhara Samarkand and Khiva or via the market at Kefe in the Crimea to destinations in the Mediterranean and Ottoman Empire Strengthened defenses by Muscovy reduced the losses of people to slave raiders from the midseventeenth cen tury but it took the conquest of the Crimean Khanate in 1783 to end the raids that for centuries had populated Eurasia with Russian slaves6 Other patterns of involuntary migration within the Old World were characterized by the removal of people from one political jurisdiction to another Portugal before 1550 and France in the late seventeenth century received slaves from Atlantic Africa Venice replenished its slave population in the sixteenth century as in earlier periods by taking slaves from Islamic and subSaharan Africa southeast Europe the Crimea Russia and the Caucasus Most were female Maltas slave population included socalled Turks often seized in conflict with the Barbary Coast states whereas the latters slave populations included Christians from northwestern Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean as well as Africans from the Sahel south of the Sahara The Ottoman Empire which exercised nom inal control over most Barbary Coast powers received slaves through the Crimea as we have seen but this was just one of several routes through which the Ottomans obtained slaves Others came from the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as from subSaharan Africa and eastern Africa as far south as Kilwa whence they entered Middle Eastern markets via the Red Causes of Slavery or Serfdom a Hypothesis Journal of Economic History 30 1970 1832 On Russian serfdom see Hellie Enserfment chs 78 The 1649 fraction is that of Hellie who also assumes that 90 percent of Russias population at that time was peasant Hellie Enserfment p 146 If we take estimates of the male population of Russia in 1719 provided by another source Arcadius Kahan The Plow the Hammer and the Knout An Economic History of EighteenthCentury Russia Chicago 1985 p 8 and double this to calculate the total population of Russia in 1719 this gives an estimated total Russian population in 1719 of 156 million Assuming that this figure is broadly indicative of that for 1649 then on Hellies assumptions there would have been more than 11 million serfs in midseventeenthcentury Muscovy This figure excludes slaves who according to Hellie comprised a further 10 percent of the Russian population 6 On the draft and other evidence relating to Russia in this paragraph see Richard Hellie Migra tion in Early Modern Russia 1480s1780s in David Eltis ed Coerced and Free Migration Global Perspectives Stanford CA 2002 pp 30710 quotation p 307 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 568 the cambridge world history of slavery Sea and the Gulf Finally slaveowning societies in subSaharan Africa typically sustained and expanded their slave populations by drawing on sources of slaves from outside their own borders This is not to deny that within subSaharan Africa many were born into slavery7 Involuntary migration and international trafficking in people were vital corollaries of the growth and consolidation of forced labor across much of the Old World in the years 15001800 Some of the migratory routes such as those out of Africa and through the Crimea began before the early modern period The earliest routes out of Africa continued into the nineteenth century and beyond Other routes developed during the early modern period and in some cases were confined to it With the exception however of the Muscovy Empire which made slaves and serfs of its own people forced labor typically involved a remixing of peoples of different ethnicities and cultures8 In many if not most instances involuntary movements of people were associated with warfare and other forms of violence At the same time they often assumed regular even seasonal patterns giving rise to welldefined persistent and highly articulated flows of bonded labor Trafficking in people was of great antiquity in some parts of the Old World but in the early modern period it rose to new and unprecedented levels as a feature of international exchange within and between Africa the Mediterranean the Middle East and Eurasia Estimating the directions and magnitude of flows of involuntary migrants in the Old World presents formidable problems The greatest problem is the paucity of reliable data There are no usable data for slave trafficking within precolonial subSaharan Africa For every other part of the Old World where human trafficking occurred the evidential base for estimating its scale is for the most part patchy circumstantial and often indirect Some customs records relating to slave sales or movements exist but these are of questionable reliability and limited in scope and like most of the relevant sources more abundant for the nineteenth century than earlier periods Most assessments of involuntary migrations before 7 On France and Portugal see AC de CM Saunders A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal 14411555 Cambridge 1982 James Pritchard David Eltis and David Richardson The Significance of the French Slave Trade to the Evolution of the French Atlantic World before 1716 in Eltis and Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers p 211 on Venice see Verlinden Recrutement for the ethnic and gender patterns before 1500 and Monica Chojnacka Working Women of Early Modern Venice Baltimore MD 2001 for female dominance thereafter for the Indian Ocean see Ricks Slaves and Slave Traders in Persian Gulf R A Austen The 19th Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa Swahili and Red Sea Coasts A Tentative Census in ClarenceSmith ed The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade pp 2144 Abdul Sheriff The Slave Trade and Its Fallout in the Persian Gulf in Gwyn Campbell ed Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia London 2005 pp 10119 and for subSaharan Africa Akosua Adoma Perbi History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana Oxford 2004 8 The exceptional nature of Muscovy is highlighted in Richard Hellie The Manumission of Russian Slaves Slavery and Abolition 10 1989 2340 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 569 and in many cases after 1800 are projections or conjectures derived from timelimited official or travelers reports and from demographic data They include estimates of enslaved Africans taken from Atlantic Africa to Spain Portugal and France and across the Sahara and via the Nile into the Islamic world of the Christians enslaved by the Barbary States of Russians and others passing through the Crimea and of the serfs and others forcibly displaced in the Muscovy Empire in the eighteenth century The last was according to historian Arcadius Kahan the most important single social event in Russian history at that time It was also identified with an increase in sales of serfs in the eighteenth century in tandem with continuing debasement of their condition including separation from the land All these movements are summarized in Table 221 To these data we might project estimates of arrivals in the Ottoman Empire via the Red Sea and Gulf drawn from eighteenth and nineteenthcentury sources Note that the figures in Table 221 do not include involuntary migration to the Dutch Cape Colony or European colonies in the Indian Ocean though estimates of these movements are indicated in the notes to the table The margins of error involved in the calculations underlying Table 221 are indeterminate but probably large The table provides nevertheless some indication of the broad magnitudes of people forcibly displaced within and between Eurasia and Africa in the age of European expansion9 The fragile nature of most of the calculations of involuntary migra tions requires us to interpret Table 221 cautiously Even however if the data are seen as only indicative they nonetheless point toward substan tial levels of involuntary migration in the early modern Old World On an annual basis twenty to forty thousand people may have been forcibly displaced between 1500 and 1800 This excludes movements of enslaved people within subSaharan Africa as well as movements within the Russian Empire before 1719 and within eastern Europe throughout the period10 9 On data limitations see for example Austen Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa Projection was the basis upon which Austen made his initial effort to calculate the scale of the transSaharan slave trade R A Austen The Transsaharan Slave Trade A Tentative Census in H A Gemery and J S Hogendorn eds The Uncommon Market Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade New York 1979 pp 2376 More reliable sources exist for the movement of enslaved whites into North Africa Davis Counting European Slaves On displacements of people in Russia see Hellie Russian Slavery and Kahan Plow Hammer and Knout p 16 where he claims that other social processes during the eighteenth century are dwarfed in comparison with the massive redistribution of population in Russia 10 Making some heroic assumptions allows us to project possible levels of internal trafficking within some parts of subSaharan Africa If we assume that the population of West Africa was 25 million in the early eighteenth century Manning Slavery and African Life that 10 percent of the population was enslaved that is 25 million and that sustaining the slave population through trafficking was equivalent to just 1 percent per year of those in slavery then the projected annual internal slave trade in West Africa would be some 25000 slaves This is equivalent to 25 million people over a century and 75 million over the whole period covered by this chapter Confined only to West Africa this would imply a slave trade within Africa roughly equal to that projected by Table 221 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 570 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 221 Involuntary migration in the Old World 15001800 estimates and projections Panel A 15001580 Arrivals in Portugal from Africa 15001550 50000 Whites seized by Barbary corsairs 270000 TransSaharan to Libya 1800 a year 1500 arrivals plus 20 for mortality 144000 Arrivals in Egypt 3000 a year 240000 Outflow through Crimea 10000 a year 800000 Flows through Red Sea and Gulf assume 1000 a year 80000 Subtotal 1584000 Panel B 15801680 Whites seized by Barbary corsairs 850000 TransSaharan flows to Libya 180000 Arrivals in Egypt 300000 Outflows through Crimea 10000 a year 1000000 Flows through Red Sea and Gulf 100000 Subtotal 2430000 Panel C 16801800 Whites seized by Barbary corsairs 175000 TransSaharan to Libya 1800 a year through 1700 then 2700 306000 TransSaharan to Algeria 17001800 60000 TransSaharan to Tunisia 17001799 80000 TransSaharan to Morocco 17001799 200000 Arrivals in Egypt 360000 Outflow through Crimea at half previous levels 600000 Flow through Gulf 17221800 51000 Flow through Red Sea assume equal to Arabian Gulf 51000 Displaced serfs in Muscovy Empire 17191795 median figure 1800000 Subtotal 3683000 Panel D 15001800 Overall Total 7697000 Sources Portugal Saunders Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal Barbary corsair Davis Count ing idem Christian Slaves Muslim Masters pp 326 transSaharan Egyptian Red Sea and Gulf Ralph A Austen The Transsaharan Slave Trade A Tentative Census in Henry A Gemery and Jan S Hogendorn eds The Uncommon Market pp 2376 idem Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa idem Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa Ricks Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf Sheriff Slave Trade Toledano Ottoman Slave Trade p 10 Crimean Fisher Chattel slavery Hellie Migration Russian Kahan Plow Hammer and Knout Hellie Russian Slavery Note We have not included here involuntary migration into European colonies at the Cape or in the Indian Ocean notably the Mascarene islands of Mauritius and Reunion and Portuguese Goa One estimate suggests 65000 captives entered the Dutch Cape Colony in 16581807 with maybe 1520 percent coming from Africa and the rest from South Asia Nigel Worden Indian Ocean Slavery and Its Demise in the Cape Colony in Campbell ed Structure of Slavery p 30 The most comprehensive estimates suggest that up to 388000 captives left for the Mascarenes in 16701848 Of these 243300 left before 1811 Malagasy and Africans mostly from East Africa comprised more than 90 percent of total departures as well as departures before 1811 the rest coming from South Asia Richard B Allen The Mascarene SlaveTrade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Campbell ed Structure of Slavery p 41 idem The Constant Demand of the French The Mascarene Slave Trade and the Worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Journal of African History 49 2008 25 In terms of Portuguese Goa figures compiled by Pedro Machado show that up to 7400 captives left Mozambique for Diu Daman and Goa in 17701834 Machado A Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean Gujarati Merchants Portuguese India and the Mozambique SlaveTrade c17301830 in Campbell ed Structure of Slavery pp 201 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 571 It is likely that the total for 15001800 represents an increase over earlier periods as movements of enslaved Africans to Portugal of Christians into the Barbary States and of serfs and slaves within the Muscovy Empire were superimposed on preceding flows of slaves through the Crimea and within and out of Africa Whether or not the overall annual flow of displaced peo ple changed across the period 15001800 is unclear but notwithstanding the lack of data for population displacements in Muscovy before 1719 as well as eastern Europe some increase in overall displacements is conceiv able What is clear however is that as before 1500 involuntary migration and bondage continued to affect both Africans and nonAfricans with new patterns of white bondage contributing to an already complex set of migration flows before 1500 The rise of serfdom in the Muscovy Empire added substantially to such trends and probably as much as a century earlier than the figures in Panel C of Table 221 indicate Bearing in mind that the figures in Table 221 exclude slave trafficking within subSaharan Africa it is quite conceivable that more than 8 million people were forcibly displaced in the Old World in the period 15001800 with more than two in five or more than 35 million as Panel C in Table 221 shows being displaced in the years 16801800 The pace of involuntary displacement of people did not apparently slow down therefore though its location and direction evidently changed Together with developments in the Russian Empire the Mediterranean world and its interface between Christianity and Islam continued to be a crucible of global involuntary migration for much of the early modern period It was the Mediterranean world too that gave birth in the early sixteenth century to the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans ii The transatlantic slave trade is commonly regarded as the largest oceanic coerced migration in human history Its rise is usually linked to the eco nomic and political impulses that prompted the fifteenthcentury Iberian powers of Portugal and Castile sometimes in tandem with Genoese financiers to explore the Atlantic Ocean This gave rise to commercial exchange with Africans and to the extension of centuriesold sugar plant ing in the Middle East and Mediterranean often with slave labor to the islands off Africa as far south as Sao Tome From there sugar cultivation migrated to northeastern Brazil by 1560 and to the Caribbean though only Brazil exported sugar across the Atlantic to Europe before 1640 In both cases sugar became indelibly identified with slavery and specifically the enslavement of Africans Captive Africans also toiled in mining activ ities and in time in other forms of agricultural activity in the Americas notably coffee cotton rice and tobacco cultivation But it was sugar that Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 572 the cambridge world history of slavery consumed the time of most enslaved Africans in the Americas and that dictated their life chances in captivity The reasons for the migration of sugar cultivation from the Mediterranean islands via the Atlantic islands to Brazil rather than mainland Africa and its subsequent association with the most infamous of all slave trades are complex They relate among other things to epidemiology African and European ideologies of enslavement and the balance of power between Europeans and nonEuropeans in the Age of Discovery Whatever causal weight one attaches to such factors the outcome of the migration of sugar cultivation to the Americas was the creation of the modern worlds first slave societies in the Americas Such societies were rooted in an extreme reliance on African labor unprecedented outside the continent itself they were dependent for centuries upon con stant supplies of new slaves from Africa and they ultimately fostered radical shifts in consumer demand in Europe and North America Wherever sugar went in the Americas slavery and enslaved Africans followed It was an alliance that was to make fortunes for a minority of slaveholders and slave traffickers and to inflict untold misery and reduced life expectancy on millions of Africans11 Compared to the coerced movement of people within the Old World we have much firmer evidence on which to trace the magnitude and temporal and geographical patterns of the forced migration of Africans to the Americas between 1500 and 1800 Modern quantitative research on the Atlantic slave trade began with Philip Curtins pioneering census of the Atlantic slave trade published in 1969 which drew heavily on demographic and shipping surveys in order to estimate the scale and distribution across time and space of slavecarrying activities Curtins findings especially his conclusion that the scale of the Atlantic slave trade was considerably lower than most previous estimates had proposed provoked considerable debate and fresh research notably on shipping records The outcome of this activity has been the creation of a database of transatlantic slave trafficking that currently comprises close to thirtyfive thousand voyages This was probably close to 80 percent of all voyages dispatched from Europe and the Americas to Africa for slaves This body of material based on a prolonged and truly international scholarly collaboration in archival 11 On the Mediterranean roots of Atlantic expansions see Charles Verlinden Italian Influence in Iberian Colonization Hispanic American Historical Review 33 1953 199211 idem Precedents medievaux de la colonie en Amerique Mexico 1954 pp 159 On the diffusion of sugar cultivation and of the crops centrality to transatlantic slavery see Richard S Dunn Sugar and Slaves The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 16241713 Chapel Hill NC 1972 Philip D Curtin The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex Essays in Atlantic History Cambridge 1990 Stuart Schwartz Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society Cambridge 1984 David Eltis The Slave Economies of the Caribbean Structure Performance Evolution and Significance in Franklin W Knight ed General History of the Caribbean Volume III The Slave Societies of the Caribbean Kingston 1997 pp 10919 B W Higman The Sugar Revolution Economic History Review 53 2000 21336 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 573 research allows a reconstruction of the whole history of the transatlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century at a level of detail unimaginable when Curtin initiated debate on this subject in 1969 Where Curtin sought to track slaving activities by centuries or quartercenturies we can now do this on annual basis at least from the midseventeenth century onwards Where Curtin grouped ship departures to Africa by nationality and embarkations and disembarkations of slaves by African coastal regions or American colonies we can now do the same on a port byport basis Where Curtin could only identify places of embarkation and disembarkation of slaves separately we can now make links across the oceans and track how such links changed over time Where Curtin could only measure shipboard mortality by reference to the percentage of slaves embarking who died in transit we can now estimate annualized mortality rates of slaves on board ship and compare them to those of other contemporary migrant groups One could add to the list None of this is intended to belittle the importance of Curtins census It is simply to underline how the evidential base for the study of the Atlantic slave trade and the computational capacity for storing information and interrogating it has been revolutionized over the last forty years We now have more comprehensive data about this aspect of the human migration experience coerced or chosen than probably any other in history12 Estimates of the overall numbers and temporal trends of enslaved Africans taken to the Americas from 1500 to 1800 are given in Table 222 The table also includes recent estimates of white migration to the Amer icas in the same period Focusing for the moment on enslaved Africans Table 222 shows that some 865 million Africans were deported to the Americas between the early sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth cen turies This accounted for almost seven out of ten of the total of 125 million enslaved Africans estimated to have been forced into the Atlantic slave trade through 186713 Column 9 of the table shows that the intensity of trans atlantic slave trafficking increased through time rising from less than three thousand captives a year in the sixteenth century to nearly ten times that number by the last quarter of the following century and to close to thirty times the sixteenthcentury mean at the height of the transatlantic traffic in the late eighteenth century In effect more than twice as many Africans were moved across the Atlantic in the quartercentury before 1800 as during 12 For the most recent estimates of the size and direction of the transatlantic slave trade see David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontier Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2008 For mortality see Herbert S Klein Stanley L Engerman Robin Haines and Ralph Shlomowitz Transoceanic Mortality The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective William and Mary Quarterly 58 2001 93117 Simon J Hogerzeil and David Richardson Slave Purchasing Strategies and Shipboard Mortality DaytoDay Evidence from the Dutch Slave Trade 17511797 Journal of Economic History 67 2007 16090 13 Eltis and Richardson New Assessment Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 574 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 222 Africans and whites taken to the Americas 15001800 by subperiods 000s Period African Total white Unfree white African share 15001580 140 197 3 412 15811640 661 396 57 601 16411700 1331 532 259 627 17011760 3204 741 189 775 17611800 3291 515 82 846 15001800 8648 2381 590 Sources For enslaved Africans Eltis and Richardson New Assessment and www slavevoyagescomestimatesflags all others Eltis Introduction in Eltis ed Free and Coerced Migrations pp 612 67 the whole period before 1650 and more than four out of ten or over 39 million of the 865 million moved in from 1500 to 1800 were taken away in the last halfcentury of the period The intensity of transatlantic slavelabor flows in the years 17501800 was reduced after 1800 by abolitionism but the total number of enslaved Africans entering the transatlantic traffic in the halfcentury beginning in the period 18001850 was second only to that in the period 17501800 At its height the Atlantic slave trade reached levels unprecedented in terms of coerced oceanic migration Comparisons with other migration flows from 1500 to 1800 underline the significance of the last point One comparison is with white or European migration to the Americas The relevant data are shown in Table 222 They show that 24 million Europeans migrated to the Americas in the years 15001800 or less than onethird the numbers of captive Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic in the same period Time trends for both migrant streams however show that major shifts in the balance between African and European flows occurred between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries In the first century of European colonization of the Americas European migrants matched if not outnumbered their captive African counterparts This pattern began to change in the period 1580 1640 as the scale of African slave shipments rose sharply relative to that of European migration and moved even more decisively in favor of enslaved labor over the following century By the second half of the eighteenth century slaves leaving Africa for the Americas outnumbered European migrants by a factor of five Forced migration thus comprised a growing share of total migration to the Americas from 1580 to 1800 This point is further reinforced if we look at the changing structure of white transatlantic migration This saw a sharp rise in the share of unfree that is convict and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 575 indentured migration to free migration through time The repopulating of the Americas from the Old World in effect was increasingly reliant before 1800 on people whose lives were subject to varying degrees of control by others Equally revealing are comparisons between transatlantic flows of enslaved Africans given in Table 222 and involuntary movements of people within the Old World shown in Table 221 The cautions about the reliability of the data in Table 221 need to be kept in mind But even with those caveats on the basis of the available data it seems possible maybe even likely that almost as many people were displaced involun tarily in the Old World in years 15001800 as were forced to cross the Atlantic Indeed if one allows for the incalculable numbers of people dis placed within Africa independently of the Atlantic slave trade this may be a conservative statement Comparisons between Tables 221 and 222 also show however that in the sixteenth century involuntary movements of people across the Atlantic were but a small fraction of total displacements of people in the Old World Thereafter they rapidly caught up with and eventually outstripped them by the late eighteenth century by a sub stantial margin This shift in the balance between displacements within and exodus from the Old World was complicated by changes through time in the geography of both types of displacement It seems neverthe less to have greatly reinforced a longstanding exodus of people as slaves from subSaharan Africa to the rest of the world What is equally evi dent is that from the sixteenth century onwards the rate of growth of that exodus mostly driven by the Atlantic slave trade was greater and more sustained than that of similar population displacements within the Old World Explaining this Africanization of international migration is critical to understanding trends in involuntary migration in the period 15001800 iii Internal factors largely determined trends in involuntary migration within the Old World in years 15001800 where the largest users of slave labor were to be found in the Ottoman Empire and its satellites in North Africa Portugal the Venetian Republic the Muscovy Empire Central Asia and subSaharan Africa As elsewhere demand for slaves and other involuntary workers in such places was to be found in a variety of agricultural commer cial handicraft household military and sexual activities Some largescale concentrations of slaves existed but most slaves probably lived in small to mediumsized establishments many singly with their owners and as we have seen they typically constituted a minority of the population in Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 576 the cambridge world history of slavery most places In some places demand was largely for adult males including eunuchs in others for females including prepubescent girls In the case of females attention has often been focused on their role in harems and as concubines notably in Muslimdominated areas but females were widely employed too in other activities notably in agriculture and in domes tic service thereby reinforcing local market price differentials in favor of females in Oman in Venice in subSaharan Africa and in parts of the Ottoman Empire In places where slaves were often largely employed in military and commercial activities such as in galley service and in the pearl fisheries of the Gulf premium prices were commonly paid for young adult males14 Many slaves in the Old World inherited their status but maintaining and increasing slave populations depended too on recruitment of new slaves through predation tribute and purchase The first method was the one preferred by the Barbary Coast corsairs the Crimean Tatars and their fellow raiders and many subSaharan slaveowning societies the second tribute was preferred by some subSaharan societies and purchase largely determined the flows of slaves out of Asia Minor and Africa to the Mediter ranean and the Middle East The last ensured that in addition to Venice places such as Kefe and Tana in Asia Minor Valetta in Malta Timbuktu Marrakesh Benghazi Tripoli and Cairo in North Africa and Muscat and Sur in Oman became important entrepˆots in the Old World slave trade Like the predatory activities out of North Africa and around the Crimea purchase of course largely depended on violence for the initial recruit ment of slaves Price evidence for slaves within the Old World is sparse between 1500 and 1800 but there are indications that demand for slaves by whatever means they were acquired increased at times and in tandem with geographical expansion and increased wealth of slaveowning states Underlying such expansions in demand were also replacement demands for slaves We have little evidence of the longevity of slaves in captivity in the Old World and given the variety of tasks to which slaves were 14 On patterns of ownership in the Ottoman Empire see Fisher Chattel Slavery On eunuchs see Hunwick Black Africans pp 214 Eunuchs typically fetched high prices On the female preponderance among slaves arriving in Venice see Verlinden Recrutement p 184 where he notes there was a preponderance des femmes among arrivals in Venice but males constituted the majority of arrivals in Sicily and Naples in the late fifteenth century Females comprised the majority of slaves sold in Istanbul Tripoli and Arabia in the nineteenth century and probably earlier Toledano Ottoman Slave Trade pp 656 as well as those entering the transSaharan slave trade where prepubescent girls were especially valued Austen TransSaharan On slave prices see Sheriff Slave Trade in the Persian Gulf p 104 in Venice Verlinden Recrutement in subSaharan Africa Paul E Lovejoy and David Richardson Competing Markets for Male and Female Slaves Slave Prices in the Interior of West Africa 17801850 International Journal of African Historical Studies 28 1995 26193 and in the Ottoman Empire Toledano Ottoman Slave Trade p 65 Hellie suggests that demand for adult male slaves and serfs was greater than that of children and women in the emergent Russian Empire and was reflected in higher prices for males Hellie Russian Slavery Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 577 allocated it would be unwise to generalize about their treatment by their owners Nevertheless in some occupations such as galley and military ser vice and pearl fishing mortality risks for slaves were evidently higher than others Moreover we know that disease carried off slaves in some urban communities that some slaves were manumitted on conversion to Islam or in accordance with other customs and that some predatory activities were undertaken with a view to ransoming captives Estimating the overall attrition rate of slaves in Old World societies is close to impossible but even if it were less than one percent a year the Ottoman Empire alone would still have required probably a steady import of several thousand slaves a year to sustain its slave population15 Whereas new and replacement demand for slaves ensured that slave trafficking remained an important feature of commercial life in the bor derlands of Africa Asia and Europe trafficking in people was increasingly subjected to military and political intervention by some European states whose people fell victim to slaving activities Two primary examples of such intervention are worth noting The first involved efforts by western European states which at the same time as encouraging participation in the Atlantic slave trade sought to use diplomatic and other resources to persuade the Barbary corsairs not to assault their nations vessels and to enslave their crew and passengers Such efforts culminated in treaties with the corsair bases For example in 1684 the English entered into agree ments with the Barbary corsairs which exempted English vessels carrying an appropriate pass from predation in return for an annual payment to the corsairs by the English state The provisions of these treaties extended to English colonial vessels and after 1707 those from Scotland These treaties also became the model for efforts by others to reduce the risk of enslavement of their nationals by the corsairs Such bribery or protec tion money to the corsairs evidently achieved its goal as enslavement of Europeans and Christians declined sharply in the century after 1680 The second notable intervention involved the tsarist state which for centuries had lost people especially Russians to raids by nomadic Turkic groups These slaves were deported south through the Crimea or east to Central 15 For information on markets at Kefe Caffa where tax records suggest some 17500 slaves were sold in 1578 alone and at Tana see Fisher Chattel Slavery p 32 W Heyd Histoire du commerce du Levant au Moyen Age 2 volumes 1978 Leipzig 1923 edition 2 55563 Verlinden Recrutement Hellie Migration p 307 at Valetta Mathiex Trafic et prix at North African Venues Colley Captives pp 4373 Davis Christian Slaves pp 2769 John Wright The WadaiBenghazi Slave Route and Daniel J Schroeter Slave Markets and Slavery in Moroccan Urban Society in Savage ed Human Commodity pp 17484 185213 and at Muscat and Sur Sheriff Slave Trade in Persian Gulf pp 1046 For evidence on price trends see Fisher Chattel Slaves p 35 who notes that in the Ottoman Empire prices of slaves generally rose by 450 percent in 15001630 or more than the cost of living and attributes this partly to constraints on supply and partly to a quickly growing upper and ruling class whose demand for slaves grew Ransoming was also a particularly important feature of slavery in the Mediterranean Davis Christian Slaves pp 14474 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 578 the cambridge world history of slavery Asia From the sixteenth century efforts by the tsars to protect their bor ders were fundamental to the rise of serfdom in the expanding Muscovy Empire and to the internal displacement of people to frontier posts to provide security Pursuit of the latter however also encouraged extending political control over the Crimean peninsula The first steps toward this were taken in the midseventeenth century and the final one in 1783 In the intervening years slave exports through Crimea seem to have declined and from 1783 onwards they more or less completely ended The cost of such intervention to the Russian peasantry in terms of loss of personal freedom within the Muscovy Empire was high At the same time the loss of opportunities for the Ottoman Empire to acquire Russian and other slaves through the Crimea may have encouraged Ottoman slave dealers to increase supplies from other sources such as the Caucasus and Africa Whether on balance freedom was increased in the Old World as a result of Catherine the Greats conquest of the Crimea is therefore open to ques tion But by closing one of the Old Worlds major slavetrafficking arteries Muscovys conquest of the Crimea like the western powers diplomatic agreements with the Barbary corsairs a century earlier probably helped to stem the growth of slavery in some areas of the Old World in the early modern period It also probably increased the Ottoman Empires reliance upon Africa as its principal source of slaves from the eighteenth century onwards16 If state intervention helped to check trafficking in people of European descent from the late seventeenth century onwards the opposite tended to occur where Africans were concerned There is evidence of resistance to the sale of Africans into external slavery within some African societies At the same time the rise of abolitionism in western Europe and the United States and its impact on slave trafficking throughout the Western Hemisphere is well documented But for most of the early modern period trafficking in enslaved Africans often after wars or raids was politically and ideologically a widely accepted form of international commerce among Europeans Arabs and Turks or Christians Jews and Muslims and the African states with which they came into contact In the Islamic world and in subSaharan Africa slavery and slave trafficking were legitimized by tradition and sanctioned by authorities many of which were active par ticipants in promoting them for economic and political purposes Here too wars sometimes the results of jihads were often the means of gener ating captives From the earliest days of the transatlantic slave trade the support of and regulation by European states of the activity was common place It continued to be an important feature of the transatlantic traffic 16 On the treaties with the Barbary Coast states and their background see the introduction to David Richardson ed The Mediterranean Passes Wakefield 1981 on the Crimea see Hellie Russian Serfdom and Migration Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 579 in Africans throughout the early modern period as the sixteenthcentury Portuguese and Spanish pioneers of the Atlantic slave trade were later joined by Danish Dutch English French and German traders With out exception statechartered monopolies were fundamental to the initial entry of northwestern European powers into competition with Portugal and Spain for African slaves Furthermore even when in some cases these monopolies were breached and then ended in the face of competition from private traders the forts and trading factories established in Atlantic Africa by chartered companies remained important bases of slaving activity17 If political hands in Europe helped to guide the early development of transatlantic slave trafficking so too did African ones Whereas some ini tially raided coastal villages in Africa for slaves European slave traffickers quickly learned to rely on African merchants to supply them with slaves In doing so they came to understand the need to forge working relation ships with African states in order to expand their slavetrading activities This remained the case at the height of the Atlantic slave trade when dominance of slave carrying by Europeans had shifted from statechartered companies to private traders It is indeed difficult to explain the depor tation of almost 65 million Africans to the Americas in the eighteenth century without acknowledging that this involved some orderly collabo ration between European and African traders within judicial and security frameworks largely dictated by local African commercial and political lead ers What was true of the export slave trade on the Atlantic coast of Africa was probably equally true of its counterparts in other parts of Africa though the intensity of slave exports from such regions never matched that of those supplying the Atlantic slave trade in the period 17001800 None of this of course denies the brutality and violence associated with the Atlantic slave trade or other export slave trades from Africa whether during the enslavement process or during the transit of the enslaved to external markets18 17 On African resistance see Sylviane A Diouf ed Fighting the Slave Trade West African Strategies Athens OH 2003 Walter Hawthorne Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves Transformations along the GuineaBissau Coast 14001900 Portsmouth NH 2003 on abolitionism see among many David Brion Davis Inhuman Bondage The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World Oxford 2006 on Islam and slavery see W G ClarenceSmith Islam and the Abolition of Slavery London 2006 and on political support in Europe for expansion of slave trading see Waldemar Westergaard The Danish West Indies under Company Rule 16711754 New York 1917 K G Davies The Royal African Company London 1957 Abdoulaye Ly La Compagnie du Senegal Paris 1958 Statesponsored companies continued to be employed in the eighteenth century notably in the Asiento trade to Spanish America C A Palmer The British Trade in Slaves to Spanish America 17001739 Chapel Hill NC 1981 and to parts of Brazil 18 On the role of African states in the slave export trade see among others Walter Rodney A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 15451800 Oxford 1970 Robin Law Here Is No Resisting the Country The Realities of Power in AfroEuropean Relations on the West African Slave Coast Itinerario 18 1994 5064 E W Evans and David Richardson Hunting for Rents The Economics of Slaving in PreColonial Africa Economic History Review 48 1995 66586 For examples of the institutional Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 580 the cambridge world history of slavery European and African polities helped to shape the framework within which the trade in enslaved Africans developed but demand for enslaved Africans in the colonies established by the European powers in the Americas largely dictated the pace at which the transatlantic slave trade grew between 1500 and 1800 That demand was shaped largely by a preference for young adult males and was reflected in trends in slave prices which notwith standing rising imports saw the market value of such males rise several fold in real terms in the century and a quarter before 1800 Prices of other categories of slaves rose in proportion19 Demand for slaves in turn was linked to a number of factors within and outside the Americas The most important were the demographic crisis within American indigenous populations caused by contact with Europeans high American landto population ratios preferences among Europeans for enslaved Africans competition among European nationstates for colonies and last but not least European demand for the specie tropical and semitropical goods and other commodities produced by enslaved Africans in the Americas Precious metals tobacco and rice were at various times important slave produced exports from the Americas to Europe before 1800 but the crop that dominated American demand for slaves throughout the early mod ern period was sugar cane First transplanted to northeastern Brazil by the 1530s and migrating a century later to Barbados whence it gradually spread to most European colonies in the Caribbean by 1800 sugarcane culti vation became identified from the 1640s with the slaveplantation model that characterized most agricultural activity in the tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas in this period It is estimated that up to 80 percent of those entering the Atlantic slave trade would disembark in sugargrowing regions of the Americas Enriching planters and other owners of slaves sugarcane cultivation exacted a heavy toll on those who labored to satisfy the sweet tooth of Europeans Though slaves in some areas of the Americas reproduced few if any sugarproducing regions managed to achieve populations of slaves that were selfsustaining before 1800 To the growth of demand for slaves to meet an everexpanding demand in Europe for cane sugar and other slaveproduced goods was added therefore a replacement demand for slaves who died prematurely in sugar cultiva tion As the total slave population in the Americas grew this replacement demand for slaves came to constitute a substantial part of the total demand for new slaves in the colonies Without the demographic deficit of the frameworks within which slaving activities developed along the Atlantic seaboard of Africa see Paul E Lovejoy and David Richardson Trust Pawnship and Atlantic History The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade American Historical Review 104 1999 33255 idem This Horrid Hole Royal Authority Commerce and Credit at Bonny 16901840 Journal of African History 45 2004 36392 19 Eltis Lewis and Richardson Slave Prices Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 581 enslaved population and the demographic crisis suffered by the indige nous American population the Atlantic slave trade would likely have been much smaller than it actually was In terms of its severity the mortality of its victims was a feature of the transatlantic slave trade that together with the mortality of slaves in transit probably distinguished it from almost all other involuntary migrations between 1500 and 180020 Table 223 offers data that underpin some of these arguments while also highlighting the shifting patterns of involvement in slaving by various national carrier groups Most national carriers delivered the majority of the slaves they shipped from Africa to their own colonies There was however one notable exception This was the slave trade to Spanish America which for most of the period under review here was commonly subcontracted by treaty to traders of other nations The Spanish and Portuguese were initial holders of the socalled Asiento but were later succeeded in turn by Dutch French and British traders21 Spanish America aside the scale of slave shipments by different national carriers provides a good indication of the demand for slaves within those parts of the Americas under their juris diction Thus the dominance of slave shipments by the Portuguese and Spanish traffickers before 1650 reflects the overwhelming importance of Brazil and Spanish America as markets for slaves at that time Brazil contin ued to be a vibrant market for slaves through to and beyond 1800 though the pattern of imports shifted relatively through time from the north east where Salvador da Bahia as well as Recife Pernambuco were major entry points to the southeast where Rio de Janeiro emerged as a key slaving port by the late eighteenth century Many of the Portuguese slav ing voyages though initially financed from Portugal actually began their voyages from Brazilian ports returning home directly from Africa Spanish carriers were also important through 1650 but then diminished rapidly as the right to deliver slaves to Spanish America passed thereafter to a succession of holders of the Asiento based in other countries The Dutch who before 1650 had earlier expanded their involvement in the slave trade through seizing temporary control of Portuguese territory in Brazil were 20 On European consumption of sugar and its consequences see Richard B Sheridan Sweet Malefactor The Social Costs of Slavery and Sugar in Jamaica and Cuba Economic History Review 29 1976 23657 Sidney W Mintz Sweetness and Power The Place of Sugar in Modern History London 1986 On the demographic and other implications see Barry W Higman The Economic and Social Development of the British West Indies from Settlement to ca 1850 in Stanley L Engerman and Robert E Gallman eds The Cambridge Economic History of the United States The Colonial Era Cambridge 1996 pp 3079 David Eltis and Paul Lachance The Demographic Decline of Caribbean Slave Populations New Evidence from the Transatlantic and IntraAmerican Slave Trades in Eltis and Richardson Extending the Frontiers pp 33563 21 On the Asiento see Georges Scelle The SlaveTrade in the Spanish Colonies of America The Asiento American Journal of International Law 4 1910 61261 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Table 223 National participation in transatlantic slave trade 15001800 000s Period Portuguese Brazil British French Dutch Spanish British N Amer mainland Danish Baltic All nations Annual mean all nations 15001600 15 2 1 120 277 28 16011650 469 34 2 34 128 1 1 669 134 16511675 245 122 7 101 13 1 489 196 16761700 297 272 29 86 6 3 27 720 288 17011725 474 411 121 74 3 6 1089 436 17261750 537 554 259 83 34 5 1472 589 17511775 529 832 326 132 4 85 18 1926 770 17761800 673 749 433 41 6 67 39 2008 803 15001800 3378 2975 1177 551 277 193 95 8650 288 Shares 391 344 136 64 32 22 11 1000 Note Totals may not add up due to rounding Source Eltis and Richardson New Assessment wwwslavevoyagescomestimatesflag 582 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 583 among the initial beneficiaries of the Asiento22 After losing the Asiento to the Portuguese in 1696 they nevertheless were able to continue to expand their slaving activities through 1775 largely on the back of demand for slaves in Suriname their principal colony in the Americas Even before losing the Asiento however the Dutch were already being challenged as the major slave carriers from northwestern Europe Their main rivals were the English and the French who like the Dutch had acquired colonies in the Caribbean by 1650 The most immediate challenge came from the English who largely through demand for slaves in Barbados during and after the sugar revolution that began there in the 1640s eclipsed the Dutch as slave carriers as early as 1670 Thereafter the English and later British enthusiasm for slave trading grew remorselessly in response to the spread of sugar cultivation to other British West Indies notably Jamaica to their capture of the Asiento in 1713 and to the increasing use of slaves in tobacco and rice cultivation in its mainland North American colonies from 1700 onwards Through most of the eighteenth century and until their activities were curtailed by parliamentary intervention in 1807 the British demonstrated an unequalled appetite for slave trading the scale of their involvement offering testament to their success through war in acquiring new colonies and to their ability to infiltrate slaves even into the colonies of other nations The British however were not alone in rapidly expanding their slaving activities in the century after 1670 for as column 3 of Table 223 shows after a stuttering start in the second half of the seventeenth century French participation in slaving grew multifold from 1700 to 1791 At that point rebellion in St Domingue then the greatest sugar colony of all combined with political changes in France and with war against Britain brought French involvement in slave trafficking to a stop temporarily at least until 1814 Nevertheless largely because of the enormous growth of demand for slaves in St Domingue up to 1791 the French were third only behind the British and Portuguese as slave carriers in the eighteenth century Together these three national carriers dominated the Atlantic slave trade before 1800 accounting for more than nine out of ten of all Africans deported to the Americas in the eighteenth century The rise of slaving activity from countries in northwestern Europe from the second quarter of the seventeenth century was part of a wider shift in the balance of political and economic power within Europe away from the Mediterranean lands that had served as the cradle for early European colonial and slavetrading ventures In many respects the expansion of slav ery constituted a major discontinuity in European history It was to have 22 On the Dutch in Brazil see Charles Boxer The Dutch in Brazil 16241654 London 1957 Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter C Emmer The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade 15961650 in Gemery and Hogendorn eds Uncommon Market pp 35377 Pieter Emmer The Dutch Slave Trade 15001850 Oxford 2005 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 584 the cambridge world history of slavery a profound impact on wealth creation and accumulation in the Americas and some would argue on the economic history of western Europe itself The surge of slaving activity from northwestern Europe from 1625 onwards begun by the Dutch and then continued by the Danes English and French was tied initially at least as much to politics and international relations as to economics The statechartered companies that reflected this political commitment have commonly received a bad press from historians usually because of perceived weaknesses in their management and their restrictions on entry into the trade Some notably the Danish companies survived in the long term but most others withdrew from slaving activities before the 1730s Collectively however even those that failed to sustain slaving activities laid down a platform in terms of African trading bases and com mercial knowledge upon which longterm expansion in such activities by the Dutch British and French could take place That expansion ulti mately involved the dispersal of investment in slaving activities away from ports such as Amsterdam London and La Rochelle which dominated the early corporatebased slave trade of northwestern Europe and toward rival groups of private merchants commonly based at other ports Prominent among these were merchants at Middelburg Nantes Bordeaux Bristol Lancaster and most important of all Liverpool Traders based in British America notably Bridgetown Barbados and Newport Rhode Island also entered the business As in the Portuguese Empire where the center of slaving activity migrated from Lisbon to Pernambuco Bahia and Rio de Janeiro so in northwestern Europe expansion of investment in slaving voyages became identified with the entry of new merchant groups that injected fresh capital and energy into the activity That energy continued to be nurtured and supported in various ways by the state notably in the form of naval protection against pirates in Africa and the West Indies and in some cases by subsidies for slaveproduced colonial crops and in the case of France for slave trading itself Nevertheless changes in the way that slaving activities were financed and managed helped to ensure that the bur geoning demand for slaves in the Americas would elicit an equally dynamic growth in slavecarrying capacity among western European merchants and their colonial allies from the late seventeenth century onwards23 Changes within and between Europe states and their American colonies may help us to explain the evolving pattern of national participation in transatlantic slave carrying in the period 15001800 but understanding how the Atlantic slave trade became so large requires us too to explore the capacity of Atlantic Africa to supply evergrowing numbers of slaves and the efficiency of carriers in shipping them Both raise important and 23 For an overview of European and American ports involved in dispatching voyages to Africa for slaves see David Eltis and David Richardson Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade New Haven CT 2010 pp 3786 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 585 contentious issues The first concerns the relationship between local and European traders in Africa and the impact of that relationship on African development the second involves among other things the conditions of slaves in transit notably in the notorious Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas The latter has rightly been seen largely in moral terms but it also had implications for the economics of slave trafficking We shall deal with each set of issues in turn Data on the patterns of slave shipments from Africa in the years 1500 1800 broken down by region of embarkation are provided in Table 224 The regional definitions follow those of Curtin in his pioneering census of the slave trade published in 1969 The data show that in the sixteenth century when Portuguese and Spanish carriers dominated the slave trade the two regions at the northern and southern extremities of the coast Senegambia and West Central Africa contributed the bulk of the slaves taken away The only other region to contribute any significant number of slaves at that point was the Bight of Biafra In the age of sail this pattern reflected the geography of trade winds and ocean currents of the north and south Atlantic linking respectively Senegambia to the Caribbean and the northern parts of Spanish America and West Central Africa to Brazil It was to be reinforced by the Portuguese establishment of trading bases just south of the Gambia River and at Luanda in West Central Africa24 These establishments had enduring importance enabling the Portuguese to take disproportionate shares of slaves from these parts of Africa in the following centuries They created too a model that later entrants into slave trading were to follow at least on those parts of the coast such as the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin where epidemiological and other conditions did not preclude European residence Even in regions where such conditions did hinder settlement such as the Bight of Biafra building commercial connections and social capital with local traders were to be important factors in shaping slave exports The pattern of European slave trading in Africa shifted after the sixteenth century as Dutch English French Danish and other groups ended the early dominance of the Iberian powers over slave carrying West Central Africa at Luanda and also at places in the vicinity of the Congo River continued to be the principal source of slaves throughout most of the seventeenth century but relatively and in some periods even absolutely Senegambia dwindled in importance as in tandem with widening partic ipation in trafficking by Europeans other regions were drawn more and more into supplying slaves Slave exports from the Bight of Biafra grew but two regions in particular the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin 24 On the geography of slaving and specifically the patterns of transatlantic links in the northern and southern Atlantic see ibid Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Table 224 Numbers of slaves shipped by African region of departure all carriers 15001800 000s Period Sene gambia Sierra Leone Windward Coast Gold Coast Bight of Benin Bight of Biafra West Central Africa South east Africa All regions combined 15001600 147 1 2 8 118 278 16011650 54 1 2 10 36 563 669 16511675 28 1 31 53 81 278 17 488 16761700 54 5 1 75 207 69 293 15 720 17011725 56 7 9 229 378 67 331 12 1089 17261750 87 17 38 231 357 182 557 3 1472 17511775 135 84 169 268 289 320 655 5 1925 17761800 85 95 74 286 261 336 822 50 2009 15001800 647 210 293 1123 1554 1099 3618 103 8648 Shares 75 24 34 130 180 127 418 12 1000 Note Totals may not add up due to rounding Source Eltis and Richardson New Assessment wwwslavevoyagesorgestimates 586 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 587 known also as the Slave Coast accounted for most of the growth of slave exports from Africa outside West Central Africa before 1725 Both regions became centres of competition for slaves among Dutch English French and Danish traffickers and attracted large amounts of investment particularly by the Dutch English and Danes in creating and extend ing local trading establishments As with the Portuguese at Luanda these were to become a permanent feature of trading relationships with local communities in these regions Both regions attracted Portuguese traders as well many of them from Salvador da Bahia in Brazil They continued to be major sources of slaves through to the end of our period Their relative importance however dwindled from the 1720s onwards as other African sources of slaves helped sustain the surge in transatlantic trafficking that continued through to the American Revolution The most striking growth of slave exports in the second and third quarter of the eighteenth century occurred as Table 224 shows at the Bight of Biafra at parts of West Central Africa outside Luanda and at Senegambia Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast the three most northerly regions of Atlantic Africa sometimes known collectively as Upper Guinea The British were in the vanguard of developments at the Bight of Biafra and together with their North American colonial counterparts at Upper Guinea outside of Sene gal The French were most prominent at Senegal and the Loango Coast and were accompanied at the latter by the Dutch Portuguese traders con tinued to dominate trade south of the Congo where they also pioneered direct trade with Benguela from the 1720s onwards These changes in the orientation of European slave trafficking in Africa were not sustained in equal measure through 1800 but the growth of slave exports from Africa to the Americas from 1600 onwards evidently hinged on the integration of new sources of African slave supply into transatlantic commercial systems Exploitation of these new sources in turn was associated with initiatives by particular groups of traders thereby promoting patterns of concentration of trade by such groups at different parts of the coast Because such traders largely shipped slaves to their own colonies in the first instance these regional concentrations of European slave traders in Africa had important implications for the ethnic composition of slave arrivals in the different colonial jurisdictions in the Americas25 Overall the levels of contribution of different African regions to slave exports to the Americas differed greatly Regional shares of slave exports shown in Table 224 show that more than two out of every five slaves taken from Africa to the Americas in the years 15001800 came from West Central Africa and that of the remaining threefifths three out of four or almost 25 On national patterns of activity in Africa see Eltis and Richardson New Assessment Eltis and Richardson Atlas pp 87185 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 588 the cambridge world history of slavery 38 million people came from the Gold Coast the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra regions that had barely figured in the transatlantic slave trade before 1650 By contrast the regions of Upper Guinea that were closest to Europe geographically and in terms of winds and ocean currents had the shortest sailing times to the Americas only figured prominently in the slave trade in the sixteenth century when trafficking was largely confined to Senegambia or in the period 17251800 when the Atlantic slave traffic was at its height Concentrations of activity were in some respects even greater than these regional data suggest for within some of the principal slavesupply regions trade centered heavily on just a few venues Prominent among these were Cape Coast and Anomabu on the Gold Coast Ouidah in the Bight of Benin Bonny and Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra and Loango Malembo Cabinda Luanda and Benguela in West Central Africa Together these ten sites were the likely boarding places for close to twothirds of all enslaved Africans deported to the Americas through the Atlantic slave trade26 They were the African equivalents of European and Brazilian slavetrading ports such as London Nantes Liverpool Recife Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro and served as centers for collecting and dispatching slaves to a wide variety of venues in the Americas They provide in turn windows into the impact of the export slave trade on Africa and into the efficiency of the slave trade as a business enterprise There has been much debate over the impact of the slave trade on Africa Its origins lie in lateeighteenthcentury abolitionism which highlighted the politically and socially regressive effects of slavetraderelated violence in Africa Historians have since added to the catalogue of harmful effects of the trade by exploring its demographic consequences and by creating economic costbenefit balance sheets of the impact of slave trafficking on African societies Both tend to show a substantial net damage to Africa and Africans caused by the slave trade especially in the eighteenth century though it is also evident that some indigenous groups typically those in positions of political or commercial authority gained from slave trading accumulating significant levels of wealth and personal slaveholdings in the process as well as contributing to poverty Identifying the items on the balance sheet of profit and loss to Africa from the slave trade however is one thing establishing the extent of the harmful effects and their impact on the longterm efficiency of the slave trade itself is another Some notably Rodney Nunn and Inikori have seen the slave trade as a prime cause of African underdevelopment and a continuing drag on the continents economic potential This may begin to make some sense if one takes account of the historical totality of slaves taken from Africa rather than just those dispatched to the Americas In the case of the latter there are 26 Based on wwwslavevoyagescom and Eltis and Richardson Atlas table 4 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 589 conflicting signals of the trades socalled collateral damage as well as its impact on the efficiency of slave trafficking Sophisticated models that purport to show that the slave trade to the Americas slowed or even totally checked population growth in West Africa and on the analogy with fisheries arguments thus made recruitment for the export slave trade more difficult are countered by the lack of congruence between local inland or coastal population densities and levels of slave exports through time There are also signs that the Atlantic slave trades economic reach into the interior of Africa may have been more circumscribed than is often assumed The variety of locales in ecological political and cultural terms in which slavetrading activity became concentrated alerts one to the need to focus on specific ports and their trading networks rather than general models of demographic and economic behavior if one is to understand how in spite of the violence associated with enslavement in Africa more than twelve times as many captives left the continent per year for the Americas between 1776 and 1800 than two centuries earlier27 Widening the frontiers of slaving activity coastwise clearly contributed to increasing the flow of slaves out of Africa to the Americas in the years 15001800 Shifts in the regional concentrations of slaving through time may also have brought efficiency gains to slave carriers some of them linked to innovations in local trading practices It appears for example that turnaround or loading times of slave ships at the African coast varied by trading venue as well as across all regions through time Neverthe less loading times were both noticeably faster and more susceptible to improvement at key trading venues such as Bonny than at other places along the coast Such improvements were tied to innovation and regular ization in commercial arrangements including credit provision to local traders These innovations relied on the adaptation of local institutions and political practices to suit crosscultural trading needs and were an important ingredient in lubricating internal African trading networks that fed slaves to export ports Historians often focus with some justifica tion on the destructive effects of slaving activities in Africa However the commercial nexus that allowed Europeans to purchase so many slaves in Atlantic Africa between 1500 and 1800 was built around the creative 27 On those who gained from slave trading see Philip D Curtin The Abolition of the Slave Trade from Senegambia in David Eltis and James Walvin eds The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade Madison WI 1981 pp 8397 Evans and Richardson Hunting for Rents Robin Law Ouidah The Social History of a West African Slaving Port 17271892 Oxford 2004 The classic statement of the harmful impact of the slave trade on Africa is Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa DarEsSalaam 1973 it was challenged by John D Fage African Societies and the Atlantic Slave Trade Past and Present 125 1989 97115 but more recently see Nathan Nunn The LongTerm Effects of Africas Slave Trades Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 2008 13976 For suggestions that the impact of the slave trade was more circumscribed see David Eltis and L C Jennings Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the PreColonial Era American Historical Review 93 1988 93659 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 590 the cambridge world history of slavery adaptation by African and European slave dealers of local institutions to foster trust and promote efficiency in delivery of contracts This did not always work as attacks on slave ships by local groups or other break downs in market relationships indicate but it worked sufficiently well at the key trading venues to allow growth in slave exports in the long term28 Innovations in commercial arrangements in Africa should be seen as part of broader changes in slave trading across all its spheres of operation that contributed in various ways toward promoting efficiency Therefore in some respects these offset some of those elements in slave trading such as protection against shipboard slave rebellion that served to raise the cost structure of voyages29 In common with other oceanic trades slave traders benefited from reductions in piracy at the Atlantic coast of Africa from the 1720s onwards They were able to appropriate from their own navies methods of protection against the wear and tear on ships at sea caused by the Teredo worm in tropical waters They were equally able to draw on naval practice and other developments in public health in Europe to reduce the incidence of scurvy and other diseases on board ship thereby increas ing through time survival rates of captives in the Atlantic crossing There were also innovations linked to shifts in control of voyages from chartered companies to private merchants and to changes in European financial prac tices in the mechanisms for underwriting slave sales in the Americas and in remitting the proceeds of slave sales30 The commercial and institutional sophistication of slaving voyages as well as the knowledge networks within which they operated thus grew immeasurably through time It evidently developed more rapidly among some carriers than others but the increas ing openness of entry into the trade also probably helped to ensure that innovations among some carriers would sooner or later spread to others In short productivity improvement was probably an important contribu tor to the continuing growth of transatlantic slave trading by Europeans and their colonial allies helping to ensure that everincreasing numbers of 28 On loading times see David Eltis and David Richardson Productivity in the Slave Trade Explorations in Economic History 32 1995 46584 On trade breakdowns see Stephen D Behrendt David Eltis and David Richardson The Costs of Coercion African Agency in PreModern Atlantic World Economic History Review 54 2001 45476 29 Behrendt Eltis and Richardson Costs of Coercion David Richardson Shipboard Slave Revolts African Authority and the Atlantic Slave Trade William Mary Quarterly 58 2001 6992 30 On public health see Robin Haines and Ralph Shlomowitz Explaining the Decline in Mortality in the Eighteenth Century British Slave Trade Economic History Review 53 2000 26283 on financial innovations see Kenneth Morgan Remittance Procedures in the Eighteenth Century British Slave Trade Business History Review 79 2005 71549 Robin Pearson and David Richardson Social Capital Institutional Innovation and Atlantic Trade before 1800 Business History 50 2008 76580 Management structures of voyages and remittance practices differed in the French slave trade from those in the British see Guillaume Daudin Profitability of Slave and LongDistance Trading in Context The Case of EighteenthCentury France Journal of Economic History 64 2004 14471 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 591 laborhungry American planters could count on regular supplies of African slaves to meet their needs in the years 15001800 iv There is a huge imbalance in evidence relating to the transatlantic slave trade and other forms of involuntary migration in the early modern world Whereas the former is unrivaled in terms of coverage and density of data with few notable exceptions involuntary migration flows within Africa Arabia and other parts of the Old World are much more difficult to doc ument This does mean however that the latter were negligible On the contrary there are indications that some grew during parts of the early modern period and that overall if one takes nonslave forms of involun tary migration into account notably in the Muscovy Empire perhaps as many people were forcibly displaced within the Old World as crossed the Atlantic Moreover it is also evident that the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans evolved out of the Mediterranean world which defined broadly to include the Black Sea and Caucasus was and remained a crossroads between Europe Africa the Middle East and Central Asia for the traffick ing in people of various origins and cultures throughout our period It is important therefore to see the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans in this broader hemispheric context even if our knowledge of other forced migrations is more circumscribed It is equally important however not to allow comparisons with Old World involuntary migrations to cloud our judgment about the signif icance of the transatlantic slave trade Unlike the trafficking in slaves or other people in the Old World the transatlantic trade in Africans was highly racially based The point is emphasized by the fact that whereas western European states took steps to protect their own people against enslavement they tended to support efforts to promote the flow of enslaved Africans to Europe and increasingly to their American colonies In encouraging the latter they were also aided by traditions in Africa that allowed the enslave ment of outsiders to ones own ethnic group It is also clear that though the movement of enslaved people within the Old World was probably larger than we sometimes imagine it was unlikely to have overshadowed other forms of internal movement of people to the extent that the forced migration of African captives to the Americas increasingly did from the late sixteenth century onwards The scale of the latter largely reflected the desire of Iberian and other western European states to exploit their land rich and often underpopulated colonies and their willingness to forge alliances with commercial interests within and in some cases outside their own state in order to do so It also reflected the capacity of American sugar plantations mineralextraction operations and other users of slave Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 592 the cambridge world history of slavery labor to consume the lives of Africans on an unprecedented scale thereby ensuring that as slavelabor use increased in tandem with widening land cultivation so replacement demand for enslaved Africans increased His torians commonly use the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas as a metaphor for the horror and brutality of the Atlantic slave trade but the scale of replacement demand for enslaved Africans reminds us that the survivors of the Atlantic crossing were faced with a working life that all too often proved to be brutish and short Comparing the life experi ences of enslaved or bonded people across different cultures and working environments is notoriously complicated but there seems little reason to doubt that Africans were among the principal casualties of a rising tide of involuntary migration in the early modern period further reading Additional information on the movement of involuntary migrants black and white within and between parts of Europe Africa the Middle East and Asia Minor may be found in R A Austen The Transsaharan Slave Trade a Tentative Census in Henry A Gemery and J S Hogendorn eds The Uncommon Market Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic SlaveTrade New York 1979 Alan Fisher Chattel Slavery in the Ottoman Empire Slavery and Abolition 1 1980 A C De C M Saunders A Social History of Black Slavery and Freedmen in Portugal 14411555 Cambridge 1982 W G ClarenceSmith ed The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century London 1988 Elizabeth Savage ed The Human Commodity Perspectives on the TransSaharan Slave Trade London 1992 Richard Hellie MigrationinEarlyModernRussia1480s1780sinDavid Eltis ed Coerced and Free Migration Global Perspectives Stanford CA 2002 Robert C Davis Christian Slaves Muslim Masters White Slavery in the Mediterranean the Barbary Coast and Italy 15001800 Basingstoke 2003 and Gwyn Campbell ed Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia London 2005 Modern quantitative assessment of the trade began with Philip D Curtin The Atlantic Slave Trade A Census Madison WI 1969 It contin ues most recently with David Eltis and David Richardson eds Extending the Frontiers Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database New Haven CT 2007 and idem Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade New Haven CT 2010 which draw extensively on wwwslavevoyagesorg The factors contributing to the emergence of African slavery in the Americas are discussed in David Eltis The Rise of African Slavery in the Ameri cas Cambridge 2000 Its harmful impact on Africa is argued in Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa DarEsSalaam 1973 Joseph E Inikori ed Forced Migration The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 involuntary migration in the early modern world 593 African Societies London 1982 and Patrick Manning Slavery and African Life Occidental Oriental and African Slave Trades Cambridge 1990 It was questioned by John D Fage African Societies and the Atlantic Slave Trade Past and Present 125 1989 Trends in slave prices in the Americas are considered in David Eltis Frank D Lewis and David Richardson Slave Prices the African Slave Trade and Productivity in the Caribbean 16741807 Economic History Review 68 2005 Resistance to enslave ment is explored in different ways in Stephen D Behrendt David Eltis and David Richardson The Costs of Coercion African Agency in Pre Modern Atlantic World Economic History Review 54 2001 Sylviane A Diouf ed Fighting the Slave Trade West African Strategies Athens OH 2003 and Eric Robert Taylor If We Must Die Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade Baton Rouge LA 2006 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 24 EUROPEAN FORCED LABOR IN THE EARLY MODERN ERA timothy coates 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 indepth 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 pros titutes 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 That being said it is also true that earlier cultures such as Ancient Egypt also used forced labor in one form or another and that such labor was not always enslaved However the legal foundation for using forced labor as a punishment was laid down by the ancient Romans and their use of galley rowers forced laborers in mines and others put to public works Roman law also established the legal basis for relegation or banishment in most Western societies Roman law relating to these issues was then incorporated into many Western legal traditions notably the French Spanish and Portuguese Because we are discussing a very wide range of marginal figures perhaps it is worth pausing a moment to question what these people did in order to become pawns in a larger system Those convicted by a regional court or national judiciary were guilty of a litany of crimes from petty theft to murder Sinners banished by church courts in Catholic countries 631 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 632 the cambridge world history of slavery normally had to commit a relatively serious infraction in order for the punishment to merit relocation overseas In both cases state and church generally speaking the more serious the infraction the greater the distance from Europe imposed as a sentence Gypsies were unique in this collection as their only crime was belonging to a minority group easily identifiable by its distinctive language and dress Both male and female orphans were used by early modern European states with notably more care and concern shown for the young girls than with the little orphan boys Boys as young as nine or ten left orphanages under the loose guidance of the state the church or maritime authorities Young orphan girls were used as prospective brides in both French and Portuguese colonies Prostitutes had to renounce their way of life and repent typically in Catholic countries especially after the Council of Trent before they too would be sent to the colonies as possible future wives If this odd and unequal collection of marginal figures were not already sufficiently complex we need to add one more the indentured servant Indentured servants are unique in this blend of figures at the fringes of early modern European societies Unlike most of the others listed they entered into a labor system by their own free will Indentured labor was a system that was limited to northern Europe especially France and Great Britain because of the factors that will be outlined later Indentured ser vants could enter into servitude either before they left Europe or after they arrived in one of the colonies In either case that individual would be sold as a servant to serve his or her new master for an established time period typically three years in French America and four in British colonies How can one explain this new effort on the part of European states to extract labor from their citizens during the early modern period There is no clearcut answer to this question but certainly one important factor was that the nature of the relationship between the state and its citizens shifted radically during the early modern period Before roughly 1500 medieval states had neither the interest nor the ability to supervise groups of convicts at labor For that matter medieval states had little ability and no incentive to jail or hold large numbers of people Centralization of authority directed and fueled much of growth of the early modern state This could and did take many forms such as tighter financial control and an increased ability to collect taxes from the population The early modern state also demanded and obtained more social control over its citizens by using tools such as new national law codes and more powerful judicial systems This would lead to the systems of control and punishment discussed later in the chapter In short the early modern state became more centralized and powerful This new power allowed it to be more creative and more thorough in extracting labor from groups that had previously been beyond its reach the marginal figures discussed here Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 633 The first and most obvious aspect of this process is that it assumes the existence of a system or rather an interrelated series of systems That is the use of forced labor demands structures to identify sentence and supervise and in some cases transport individuals guilty of breaking social norms in a given society In short forced labor in this sense requires the existence of a state Some of the best examples of forced labor actually come from early modern empires as forced labor became an important tool for building and maintaining imperial outposts Over time specific unhealthy or unfavorable regions of a given empire became closely identified with forced labor because these locales consistently failed to attract sufficient free immigration This became a selffulfilling cycle the presence of convict laborers in such a colony made it even less attractive to those who could choose another locale Two good examples of this process are the French problems in populating its Louisiana colony and the Portuguese use of Sao Tome Island off the coast of Gabon Convicts typically became a main source of colonizers for such regions during early modern times Louisiana suffered from a negative public perception in France hot damp climate swamps and alligators Sao Tome was equally unhealthy for most Europeans malaria yellow fever but eventually evolved into an early modern penal and slave colony Portuguese convicts directed African slaves working the sugar plantations In the case of Louisiana the relative percentage of convicts among the European population was very high Governor Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville who ruled the colony four times some twentynine years total during the eighteenth century complained that royal policies on forced emigration left him with a bunch of deserters contraband salt dealers and rouges1 In 1718 the European population of the Louisiana colony was around 1800 Of these almost 1300 were petty criminals deported to the colony the year previously with another 160 prostitutes These two segments represented 81 percent of the population at that moment In the next four years they would be joined by an additional 7020 people 20 percent of whom 1400 were sent against their will Another 2400 were indentured servants2 The Portuguese arrived on Sao Tome in the late 1400s and began sugar production and export based on slave labor Population figures for early modern Sao Tome and neighboring Prıncipe are impressionistic and largely based on estimates In the first census of the two islands in 1756 1 James J Cooke France the New World and Colonial Expansion in Patricia K Galloway ed La Salle and His Legacy Jackson MI 1982 p 82 He extracted this quotation from Glenn R Conrad Emigration Forcee A French Attempt to Populate Louisiana Ibid p 94 2 Peter Moogk Manons Fellow Exiles Emigration from France to North America before 1763 in Nicolas Canny ed Europeans on the Move Studies on European Migration 15001800 Oxford 1994 p 251 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 634 the cambridge world history of slavery Europeans formed a very small segment of the overall population 1200 people of a total of 29000 or 4 percent of the population3 Although small in number convicts probably represented 90 percent of this segment of the population and had done so consistently since the island was originally populated In some regions of northern Europe forced labor became more closely identified with workhouses rather than with the forms of forced coloniza tion described earlier In particular the British Isles the Low Countries and Germanic lands used workhouses to extract possible labor from their poor and criminal populations Within such institutions labor was fre quently directed at rasping wood making and using various dyes and re lated cloth industries Women isolated in separate houses were frequently spinning This was certainly the case in the Netherlands and northern Germanic lands as well as Scandinavia After all the original intention of such shelters was to provide housing for the poor This population could then be put to work and joined by another group that threatened society criminals In turn the shelter could then be walled in other words it became a prison Spierenburg has discussed the link between prisons and workhouses at some length in his work as well as the reasons why workhouses first began to appear in these regions He concludes that though the older theories of the prisonworkhouse being a child of the Reformation may have some validity the inauguration of prison workhouses received a major impetus from relatively independent commercial and entrepreneurial elites4 Spierenberg and others have noted that the growth of early modern crime developed concurrently with swelling population of cities Would it be accurate to say that these early modern states redefined crime in an effort to provide additional manpower for the various tasks such as the galleys Or did they simply attempt to direct and use the convict manpower provided by judicial systems In my view I see three interconnected features 1 cities were growing in population and part of that growth was in the criminal element 2 the jails courts and other state agencies were burdened by this growth and 3 stronger national in some cases regional law codes attempted to provide a more uniform application of the law In other words there were more criminals apprehended and convicted during early modern times than previously because the state was better equipped to do so In my own work other than the judiciary becoming professionalized I fail to see statesupported attempts to label more subjects as lawbreakers Rather the growth in the population especially the urban sector the application of 3 Carlos Agostinho das Neves S Tome e Prıncipe na Segunda Metade do Sec XVIII Funchal Madeira 1989 p 150 4 Pieter Spierenberg The Prison Experience Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe New Brunswick NJ 1991 pp 30 1258 274 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 635 national legal codes and the increased abilities of various state judiciaries translated into more individuals prosecuted in courts Various states were simply confronted with a greater number of criminals and they were forced to find creative expedient and most of all inexpensive methods to deal with them One of the most obvious solutions for serious offenders was capital punishment The costs were low but what benefit does it provide Capital punishment assumes a surplus population where people are expendable and not urgently needed elsewhere It is for this reason that it appears in places with large populations Great Britain France and is notably absent not in theory but in practice in smaller counties such as Portu gal Another earlier punishment corporal punishment eg cutting off an offenders ear or nose was equally cheap and did leave a lasting stigma Though it punished the transgressor it failed to extract anything of use for society from the individual Holding convicts in prisons for long periods was expensive jailers costs building maintenance Through bribery or simply by fleeing prisoners were also prone to escape whenever the oppor tunity presented itself Banishment was a logical timehonored alterna tive punishment Banishment simply sending an individual away from a given locale solved only half the problem It removed guilty from that society Given the massive labor requirements in the colonies and their comfortable distance from Europe it is not so large a step to see the sys tematic development of exile as a punishment Properly directed penal exile or what the British would call transportation solved colonial labor shortages while removing individuals who threatened social stability in the homeland Another important aspect that defines this debate is the shifting impres sion of the causes and remedies of poverty The early modern concept of poverty normally divided the indigent population into two very different groups On the one hand were the deserving poor people incapable of providing for themselves such as the blind These people were perceived as worthy of charity In some societies they were even awarded licenses or given official metal tokens that validated this status On the other hand were the idle or undeserving poor vagrants able to work yet parasitically living from the labor of others In the British case this distinction was codified in the 1601 Elizabethan Poor Law Although both groups were linked by poverty the early modern state normally was as charitable as pos sible to the first and frequently brutal in its treatment of the second It is this second group that threatened society and that was associated with the criminal underworld5 So that whereas poverty charity crime 5 Hilary McD Beckles White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados 16271715 Knoxville TN 1989 pp 3646 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 636 the cambridge world history of slavery and forced labor are interconnected in the literature by excluding the deserving poor from our discussion we are able to focus on the group that would provide labor for the state or its agents These were the lazy idle vagrant criminal underworld figures at the margins of early modern society How many people are we discussing In terms of overall numbers of convicts used for forced labor during early modern times the totals are sketchy and modest This is especially true when viewed against the back drop of the Middle Passage and the plantation slave system that would develop in the Atlantic Nevertheless forced labor extracted from convicts represented an effort to rid the homeland of undesirables while populating distant colonies In the period from 1550 to 1755 a total of some fifty thou sand Portuguese convicts faced a sentence of exile In the second half of the eighteenth century another nine to twelve thousand would have to be added to reach a total around sixty thousand6 In the case of the British Smith outlines a total of almost 10400 indentured servants departing from Bristol from 1654 to 16867 Most of these were sent to Virginia Barbados and Nevis Ekirch has estimated that fifty thousand British convicts were sent to the North American colonies Virginia Maryland and Pennsyl vania in particular from 1718 the passage of the Transportation Act to 1775 By his estimates one quarter of all British emigrants to colonial America during the eighteenth century were convicts8 Many American colonists had voiced their objections to the continued use of North Amer ican colonies especially the Chesapeake as a dumping ground for British convicts After American independence Britain faced a real dilemma as to what to do with its convicts first detaining them in hulks on the River Thames By 1788 it would turn to Australia as the great nineteenth century experiment in the use of forced labor9 Portugal faced a similar situation with the independence of Brazil in 1822 It would eventually imi tate the penal practices of the British in Australia and French in the south Pacific and Guyana and direct the vast bulk of its convicts to Angola by 1880 The overall totals for the French and the Spanish are not as clear due to large gaps in the records In the case of France Huetz de Lemps has esti mated that some thirteen thousand indentured persons left Bordeaux for the French West Indies in the eighteenth century This total includes salt 6 See my discussion of these numbers in Convicts and Orphans Forced and StateSponsored Colo nization in the Portuguese Empire 15501755 Stanford CA 2001 pp 401 7 Abbott Emerson Smith Colonists in Bondage Chapel Hill NC 1947 p 309 8 A Roger Ekirch Bound for America The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies 17181775 Oxford 1987 pp 217 9 Colin Forster Convicts Unwilling Migrants from Britain and France in David Eltis ed Coerced and Free Migration Global Perspectives Stanford CA 2002 p 259 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 637 smugglers vagabonds and beggars as well as other prisoners sent largely to Louisiana as compulsory indentured labor for periods of five years10 Peter Moogk estimates the total number of indentured laborers in all of French America before 1763 at no more than thirtyseven thousand11 Early modern French emigration to Quebec may have totaled thirty thousand Some of those particularly during the eighteenth century were poachers wifebeaters and other common criminals They were later joined by smugglers12 The French also had a unique category that blended criminal and indentured labor the forced indentured servant engage forcee Indi viduals in this category were permanently exiled not allowed to ever return to France Around four hundred thirty thousand Spanish emigrated to the New World in the period from 1500 to 1650 but very few of those were forced to do so Unlike several other powers the Spanish were vigilant in controlling access to their colonies in North and South America Spain did later use convicts as miners galley rowers and soldiers However Pikes study of this process never provides a total number of people due in large part to the incomplete nature of the records A roughandready estimate might be based on early modern Spains overall population 65 million in 1500 rising to 115 million by 1800 This is a smaller population than the British Isles during the same period 5 million in 1500 16 million in 1800 Lacking any hard data upon which to make an estimate it would be reasonable to assume that the Spanish legal system sentenced more or less the same numbers of convicts as the British figure of sixty thousand These prisoners would have been used at home for mercury mining and as galley rowers overseas Spain used convicts as soldiers in its North African and Caribbean fortresses The Dutch focused on the use of workhouses and not the use of colonial exile as punishment The one exception to this statement is the Dutch East India Company and its use of its scattered outposts in the Indian Ocean as exile locations for prisoners convicted in Batavia Batavia Ceylon Banda and the Cape of Good Hope were the primary sites of exile Secondary sites of exile were linked to these major settlements Ward estimates that several hundred people were exiled to Cape of Good Hope from Batavia during a period of over one hundred and thirty years13 10 Christian Huetz de Lemps Indentured Servants Bound for the French Antilles in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in Ida Altman and James Horn eds To Make America European Emigration in the Early Modern Period Berkeley CA 1991 pp 18690 11 Moogk Manons Fellow Exiles p 252 12 Leslie Choquette Recruitment of French Emigrants to Canada 16001760 in Altman and Horn eds To Make America pp 1601 13 Kerry Ward The Bounds of Bondage Forced Migration from Batavia to the Cape of Good Hope during the Dutch East India Company era c 16521795 Ph D dissertation University of Michigan 2002 pp 72 and 123 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 638 the cambridge world history of slavery The Russian use of Siberia as an exile location for its prisoners is fre quently mentioned in the literature but it is difficult to ascertain any total numbers of Russian prisoners used in this fashion We do know that the population of Siberia during early modern times was modest two hundred thousand in 1500 rising to around one million by 1800 What percentage of these totals was forced to reside there Exile had been used as a punishment in Russian legal codes since 1582 Throughout the seventeenth century the government used exile in lieu of other punishments By 1760 exile to Siberia sometimes combined with forced labor had become a common punishment for Russian peasants14 One guiding question in examining the various uses of forced labor by European powers is to determine if the Portuguese system was a good representative of this overall process In order to understand the Portuguese system we first need to turn to patterns and rationales of sentencing The mildest form of punishment and one that should at least be mentioned in passing is banishment although it does not necessarily imply labor free or forced The Portuguese state and Inquisition were exceedingly fond of banishment as a punishment for minor transgressions and used this punishment with great frequency Banishment in this sense simply means being sent away from ones normal place of residence for a given period The sentence may or may not have directed the individual to reside in another specific place but it always included a length of time In the Portuguese case simple banishment was frequently sentenced as six months to two years of forced residence out of town and its neighboring lands Banishment though it sounds humane was a cruel punishment for most people because it separated them from the social and economic networks that supported them This becomes clearer when we see how an early modern peasant identified himself or herself in the documents parentage family street parish and ultimately the town That is I am Joao da Silva son of Antonio and Maria resident on the Street of the Basket Makers in the parish of Santa Marta in the town of Porto Banishment separated the exile from all these ties while forcing him or her into totally new and unfamiliar surroundings without this nexus of support Those sentenced to internal exile to one of the frontier towns along the border with Spain would make their way individually on foot to their new homes Convicts sentenced to time overseas were normally held together in jail until they could be placed on board a departing ship The Portuguese example used a tripartite division to categorize crimes and sins minor major and unpardonable The perceived order was ban ishment simply being sent away from a town or parish and internal exile 14 Richard Hellie Migration in Early Modern Russia 1480s1780s in Eltis ed Coerced and Free Migration pp 3167 Andrew A Gentes Exile to Siberia 15901822 New York 2008 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 639 within the country followed by a list of exile locales overseas In all cases the sentence would be exile the more serious the crime the farther away from the sentencing court Minor transgressors before the Lisbon court might end up in Castro Marim extreme southeast Portugal whereas major offenders would be sent to the fringes of Portuguese America or Angola In this sense the Portuguese system is very similar to other European legal systems Only in exceptional cases did any power want to banish its citizens to regions beyond its control many used colonies as favored sites for exile The Portuguese case of matching the seriousness of the crime with the distance of the place of exile is in marked contrast to the British and French The French and the British appear to have used exile or transportation to the same locations for a wide range of crimes both minor and major One of the most noticeable differences between southern European systems as outlined earlier and the English and to a much lesser extent the French system is the use of indenture referred to earlier The indenture system according to Slicher van Bath has three defining characteristics the existence of a market for white labor the price of the labor and the transferability of white labor contracts15 The relocation process was conducted by merchants not the state and the length of the indenture typically four years in the British case reflected the cost of relocating the individual across the Atlantic This system was also used by the British for convicts For the British before the 1718 Transportation Act seven years was the common term for convicts sent to the New World After 1718 sentences could be set at fourteen years or even life English public opinion of this process held it to be excellent and humane16 For example Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders published in 1722 presents Molls mother a felon transported to Virginia as a woman who redeemed herself in the eyes of God and society while prospering in the colony By the end of his work Moll herself was destined for the same fate I suspect this view was shared by most of those who remained at home be it in England France Spain or Portugal Banishment or transportation had a double edge it removed a social threat while simultaneously populating a remote region It was a cheap alternative to holding criminals in prisons or supervising their labor in workhouses The next aspects we need to examine are the methods of collection and transport of the convicted The Portuguese used a collection system based on a nationally organized judiciary that sentenced convicts according to general guidelines Once collected from the provincial jails regional chain gangs periodically moved convicts from interior cities to a central prison 15 Slicher van Bath The Absence of White Contract Labor in Spanish America during the Colonial Period in P C Emmer ed Colonialism and Migration Indentured Labour before and after Servitude Dordrecht 1986 p 29 16 Smith Colonists in Bondage pp 97 11214 and 128 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 640 the cambridge world history of slavery in Lisbon From there convicts were transferred to ships departing for the overseas colonies From time to time a second prison in Porto would complement this pattern but Lisbon was the primary focus of the national system Sinners before tribunals of the Inquisition received sentences of exile identical to those handed down by the states courts Both convicts and sinners then converged at Limoeiro Prison the strategic central point in Lisbon The Spanish French and others used similar chain gangs to move prisoners across the country to ports for departure Such chain gangs were common sights in many countries In what must be the most famous literary reference to a chain gang Cervantes in part 1 chapter 22 of Don Quixote published in 1605 notes The knight looked up and saw coming toward them down the road which they were following a dozen or so men on foot strung together by their necks like beads on an iron chain and all of them wearing handcuffs They were accompanied by two men on horseback and two on foot That said Sancho as soon as he saw them is a chain of galley slaves people on their way to the galleys where by order of the king they are forced to labor Before departing for one of the overseas colonies it would be safe to say that the state closely watched these figures In spite of this escapes such as the one detailed later in this passage from Don Quixote were also common not only along the way but also from the prison itself All convicts carried with them legal papers called the cartas de guia detailing their sentences This was submitted to the judge governor mayor or town council upon arrival depending on the authority in the place of exile Once the convict arrived in his or her place of exile supervision overseas was minimal to nonexistent The only two restrictions placed on the individual were that he could not leave the immediate vicinity of the town and he could not hold any sort of municipal or government office Both these restrictions were frequently violated Because of the scarcity of Europeans in these colonies on Sao Tome Island convicts served on the town council and in sixteenthcentury Brazil they served as judges In places as diverse as Brazil West Africa and South Asia there were a number of favored destinations for runaway convicts places beyond the political control of the Portuguese world But these were the exceptions the examples that jump from the doc uments The reality for these folk was that they had to make their way in a world that was foreign to them Far more common was the lowly convict who served his sentence as a soldier in a company in a remote garrison or who labored in the galleys or one of the royal factories making gunpowder or rope This is especially true as we move forward in time Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 641 from 1500 to 1800 Assuming the convict remained in the colony where he was directed to reside his only option for survival was to engage in some form of labor That labor might or might not be for the state depending on the options available to the individual Convicts faced widely differing opportunities for labor in the wide array of colonies Portugal maintained globally In fringe regions of Brazil such as Maranhao in the north or the Colonia do Sacramento in the far south the most pressing need and greatest opportunity for the convict would have been military service In Sao Tome Luanda and elsewhere in coastal Africa obtaining and selling slaves was the dominant economic activity and convicts would have been logical middlemen in this process In Asia military service or private trade or both were possibilities Unfortunately given the humble status of these folk documentation on their activities is scanty It is only when tragedy strikes or when the authorities make a special effort to use them effectively that they appear in the records For example we know that convicts were sent overseas but rarely do we ever encounter lists of how many were sent in a given year to a specific locale or on a specific ship until the ship sinks in a storm and someone drafts a report on the loss In South Asia many convicts from Europe as well as those sentenced by courts in Goa were fond of running off to join the army of the Mogul Emperor where they brought European expertise in manning cannons and smaller weapons We only know about this activity because the Goan authorities issued repeated amnesties in the seventeenth century with the explicit intention of luring these runaways back to the Portuguese fold This is another major difference between the Portuguese system and those using an indenture Indentured laborers were under close personal supervision and had to work for a given number of years for their masters before being released from the contract Other than serving in the military the Portuguese system was virtually devoid of any meaningful supervision It was also free for the state at least after the convict arrived in the place of exile It functioned under the premises that the convict would rather remain in the Portuguese world than outside of it and that he would work usually for the state in the military or some task closely associated with it A third aspect we need to examine is the link between convict and colonizer The Portuguese use of convicts as colonizers was one of the states strongest ties with labor as was the case of most early modern powers The problem is that although we know the intention was to use a group of convicts as colonizers it not always clear what exactly they may have ended up doing Were they soldiers as was frequently the case Were they intended to perform some other role in colonial society With a global empire stretching from Salvador Brazil to Macau in China the manpower requirements were staggering for a country with as small a demographic base as pre1800 Portugal Groups of convicts were collected and sent out on Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 642 the cambridge world history of slavery ships for Brazilian African and Asian destinations yet we can only make educated guesses as to what function they may have performed Some became soldiers for the Portuguese crown of that there is little doubt Others became soldiers for other powers notably the Mughal emperors or other Asian monarchs Still others became priests husbands merchants slave traders or runaways and disappeared from the documents This global stretch was understandable for the Portuguese but a more common pattern was that applied to regions of North America where a number of powers concentrated on selected individual colo nies The early modern colonization of North and South America offers a number of striking examples of forced labor as it was used by a series of major powers First the French in both New France and Louisiana used orphanbrides and convicts as colonizers The British experimented with both indentured and convict labor in many of its North American and Caribbean colonies Early in this colonization process Barbados Nevis and Jamaica had figured prominently as destinations for indentured servants Barbados stands out in this first British phase as it received both common criminals and political prisoners resulting from Cromwells Protectorate Even nonconforming religious groups such as the Quakers were exiled to Barbados However later and in much larger numbers the British would focus on their colonies on the mainland of North America as destinations for convict labor No colonies are more closely associated with this process than Virginia and Maryland and to a much lesser extent Pennsylvania The Dutch considered using forced labor in Brazil and the New Nether lands but eventually sent a group of twentyfive impoverished children as agricultural laborers for their North American colony They would use Suriname as a destination for convict labor The Spanish populated a series of presidios on the northern borders of New Spain with convictsoldiers sentenced by the courts in Mexico City and elsewhere in New Spain St Augustine modern Florida was another destination for convicts from jails in Spain and Mexico Other Spanish and Mexican convicts were sent to the far northern border of New Spain to the Spanish West Indies and even to the distant Philippine Islands Elsewhere in South America for most of Portuguese America it was not necessary to use forced colonizers After 1600 Brazil was able to attract sufficient numbers of people to live in its growing central regions of Recife Salvador Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro It was in the fringe regions of the far north Para and Maranhao and the Brazilian far south Sacramento or modern Uruguay where the state had to use forced colonizers Forced colonization ended rather quickly in the south due to political treaties with Spain Before that occurred the Portuguese crown had relocated families from the Azores while Brazilian courts used Sacramento as an exile locale in two separate but obviously coordinated efforts to populate this critical Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 643 outpost opposite Spanish Buenos Aires However forced colonization to the Maranhao and adjacent regions continued until Brazilian indepen dence in 1822 At that point the Portuguese faced the same dilemma confronting the British in 1776 when they could no longer send convicts to the Chesapeake A new locale was needed In its last seventy years as a colony Brazil especially the Maranhao received an everincreasing num ber of convictcolonizers from the high courts to the south in Salvador and Rio but even more from Portugal By 1750 Brazil was receiving upward of two hundred convicts from Portugal annually by 1800 that figure was around two hundred fifty Looking elsewhere around the globe both the Spanish and the Por tuguese sentenced convicts to military duty in the string of outposts main tained along the North African coast Spanish and Moroccos Atlantic coast Portuguese Sao Tome Island was a favored site for Portugals most serious offenders for much of the early modern period Angola and Mozam bique both received convicts from Portuguese courts In the Indian Ocean the Portuguese high court in Goa and its Dutch counterpart in Batavia relocated hundreds of people around their respective holdings in the region With the exception of the galleys see later in the chapter it is the connection of convict labor with the military that provides the clearest and most concrete cases of convict labor This link also shows the direct connection between the histories of crime and of the military during the early modern period Bars taverns houses where card games were played and similar estab lishments fell under the watchful eye of incipient police forces in several early modern states it was from these establishments that many a future soldier would be impressed into military service The typical response to a military crisis requiring the recruiting or impressing of soldiers would be a quota allocated to each district and city After rounding up suspects in these usual places the normal pattern was to fill the local quota by emptying the jail As a result there are direct links among crime poverty and military service In one example of a group of men rounded up on the island of Madeira in 1783 to be sent to Angola for military service criminals thieves vagrants and trouble makers accounted for seventynine of the one hun dred men listed Those with military experience numbered fifteen and only five of the entire one hundred were volunteers These links connecting the military to crime would be broken once two seemingly unrelated events were to occur around the same time The military became a respected profession ie standing armies increased training dependable salary and the greater social status these provided and prisons emerged as longterm places to hold those convicted by the courts In the case of the military both the Spanish and the Portuguese were publishing military books with the intention of providing technical training Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 644 the cambridge world history of slavery or practical information by the middle of the 1700s This process was well under way earlier in northern Europe The first European prisons ie places where convicts were sent for punishment for long periods and not simply held until trial originated around 1600 throughout northern Europe Their widespread use both geographically as well as for a wide variety of crimes would only come at the end of the early modern period Until then prisons were largely confined to larger towns in northern Europe eg London Amsterdam Copenhagen and many were populated with vagrants Prisons as places for longterm punishment do not appear in many regions of southern Europe until the nineteenth century Until then there was a great deal of interplay and overlapping between the terms soldier and convict Early modern maritime states all faced a common demand for labor to staff their galleys a demand that none could adequately solve without turning to forced labor provided by convicts Providing manpower for the galleys was a separate and parallel system to colonizing schemes and other uses of forced labor In slave societies slaves were frequently used for this task such as in Portuguese Asia or Brazil Spain France England the Ottoman Empire Malta and Venice all used convicts to man their galleys In the case of Venice and Genoa their numbers were supplemented with the addition of German convicts17 The number of convicts required for this labor varied depending on both the number as well as the size of the ships specifically the length of the oars All these powers as well as the Portuguese turned to convicts as their main source of manpower for galleys In the Portuguese case convict labor destined for the galleys also originated from the central prison in Lisbon The Portuguese system was unique in that it allowed men already sentenced to galleys to be shifted to serve as soldiers in a given region or soldiers to be used as galley rowers depending on which of the two needs was more pressing at the moment It would seem that galley service as practiced by Venice or Spain was more typical Service on galleys was for a long period and rarely commuted Under most circumstances ten years in the galleys was a life sentence However most naval authorities agree that galleys became obsolete after the early 1700s A sentence to forced labor in galleys was unique in one very important aspect Because of the arduous nature of the labor and the difficult and dangerous working conditions combined with minimal nourishment and the physical exclusion of the rowers from society sentences to the galleys were generally reserved for those guilty of serious transgressions against social norms Galleys were often staffed by those convicted of murder blasphemy heresy sodomy and bigamy Because of these factors those lucky few that completed their sentences in the galleys were tainted with 17 Spierenburg The Prison Experience p 262 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 645 infamy and disgrace in the public eye In France such convicts were not allowed to reenter French society and were sent to the colonies as forced indentured servants In a sense galleys were not too distant from both the workhouse and the prison In this case their difference was only that galleys were mobile Once the naval effectiveness of galleys was countered by newer ship designs prisoners sentenced to galleys were sentenced to labor in public works in places such as Spain and Portugal and to overseas exile in France The sentence of public works was very flexible but frequently reflected its roots in the galleys by being centered on other navalrelated tasks The vast majority of galley prisoners were illiterate commoners and left no records of their experiences We are fortunate that one atypical prisoner named Charles Dellon a French medical doctor sent to the galleys by the Inquisition in Goa published a detailed account in 1688 of his former labor in Lisbon The galley slaves are sent daily to work in the shipyards where they are employed in carrying wood to the carpenters unloading vessels collecting stones or sand for ballast assisting in the making of rope or in any other labor18 Another frequent use of convict labor can be found in mining Unlike several other powers the Portuguese did not use convicts as miners I sus pect this is a reflection on the lack of a critical mineral to mine in Portugal rather than a reluctance to use convict labor in this fashion Elsewhere we find convicts linked to mining in a variety of ways Next door in nearby Spain convicts were the main source of manpower for the mercury mines in Almaden Mercury was a critical element in the production of silver Mercury was a Spanish state monopoly for this reason The deadly conditions surrounding mercury mining made it an ideal task for convict labor Incomplete records make it impossible to provide any totals of this manpower19 Another arduous task associated with convict labor was salt production Salt was normally produced in early modern times by one of two methods mining or evaporation of salt ponds at the edge of the ocean The Por tuguese used the latter and forced labor within Portugal became identified with salt production in the little town of Castro Marim extreme southeast Portugal From 1550 to 1850 Castro Marim received between three to five thousand convicts and sinners largely but not exclusively to work the saltpans surrounding the town Those not involved in salt production also built and repaired boats served in the local military garrison and worked 18 Charles Dellon as quoted in Anant Karba Priolkar The Goa Inquisition Bombay 1961 pp 757 19 Ruth Pike Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain Madison WI 1983 p 29 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 646 the cambridge world history of slavery in local agriculture This forced labor supplied by the tribunals of the Inquisition as well as by state courts supported Castro Marims economy from 1550 to 1850 Once the convict completed his or her sentence what barriers kept him or her from reentering society In the case of the Portuguese once the convict completed the obligatory time sentenced by the court in theory he or she was free to leave The only stipulation was that the now former convict had to obtain a certificate of completion of sentence from the presiding justice in that jurisdiction This certificate would prove that he or she had served the sentence in its entirety This certificate was required for all forms of banishmentexile and labor outlined here including the galleys After obtaining this paper the individual was free to leave the area and could return home or could relocate to anywhere available to other countrymen That was the legal theory how did this work in reality Most of the outposts in Portuguese Africa Luanda Sao Tome Mozam bique Cacheu were deadly locales for Europeans and the typical eight to tenyear sentence to these places was a death sentence as were sentences of ten years in the galleys Sentences to internal exile or to Asia or Amer ica were milder The reality of this system was that by default it created colonizers overseas If a convict had survived three to five years in Asia or the Maranhao for example he or she had in all probability entered into the local society perhaps getting married and had joined the economy opening a business or beginning a trade and would not necessarily be eager to pay for the return journey to Portugal Internal exile was the great exception to this pattern Those sent to work and reside in Castro Marim did not remain after completing their sentences Certificates of completion of sentence are rare but several were found in the lists of those sentenced to the galleys This suggests that at least some of the justices were following the guidelines outlined here Many British convicts sent to the New World attempted to return home before completion of their sentences in spite of the death sentences they faced for early return Portuguese convicts too tried to return home before their sentences were completed In a similar vein to British courts the Portuguese frequently threatened death as a punishment for convicts who returned before the end of their terms However unlike the British Portuguese courts rarely if ever enforced capital punishment In addition to convicts several other marginal figures were used in creative ways by early modern states to provide labor or useful service Although forming a much smaller number of forced laborers Roma peoples were also subjected to types of forced labor Romas were unique in that their only crime was that of their ethnicity that is being Romani They faced the same sentences as the convicts listed earlier and were usually exiled from Portugal for life In fact the Portuguese state never ceased in Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 647 its efforts to rid the European homeland of Romas by issuing a series of decrees ordering their expulsion to Angola Brazil the galleys Spain and so forth This process was still continuing at the close of the early modern period in 1800 In Angola Romas served as soldiers and acted as merchants In Brazil they specialized as horse traders Orphans were another group that the early modern state found promis ing both as possible colonizers as well as sources of labor The Jesuit fathers were keenly aware that children learn foreign languages faster than adults and placed orphan boys among groups of Native Americans Such orphan boys acted as interpreters for Jesuit missions in New France and Brazil Else where both France and Portugal used orphans as sailors typically starting their maritime training at very young ages Two such orphansailors were the first Europeans to live among the Tupi of Brazil when they ran away from Cabrals expedition in 1500 Orphan girls typically could become brides for men in the colonies Both France and Portugal used similar systems to send marriageable young women to New France Portuguese America and Goa For example in 1618 in recognition of valued services to the crown by her deceased father D Maria Careira a young orphan girl from Lisbon was awarded the position of secretary to the treasurer of Goa as a dowry for her future husband This position would have been for three years and the award was conditional upon her relocation from Lisbon to Goa at state expense As in the case of female orphans prostitutes were used by a variety of early modern states chiefly to encourage the growth of families and eventually a white colonial elite in distant colonies In Catholic countries prostitute colonizers could be linked to Magdalene Houses where the Catholic Church reformed these women and the state provided for their future dowries Conversely prostitutes were also simply rounded up in larger cities and sent to a colony A large shipment of such ladies was sent from Paris to Louisiana in the 1700s This process so popular with the British French and others was immortalized in Manon Lescaut by Antoine Francois Prevost 1731 the story of the fallen women exiled to New Orleans to eventually die in the wilderness presumably for her sins In Protestant countries such as Great Britain the London authorities used this same procedure to send prostitutes to Barbados in the 1600s Magdalene Houses were hardly unique to Portugal After the Council of Trent such reforming efforts aimed at transforming prostitutes into respected citizens appeared throughout the Catholic world in places like France and Venice In most cases however this is where the effort stopped The Portuguese took this process one more step and linked the trans formation of prostitutes in Magdalene Houses in Lisbon and Goa with stateawarded dowries and relocation to one of the colonies especially Angola and Mozambique In fact the growth and development of the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 648 the cambridge world history of slavery Portuguese landholding system in the Zambesi River valley known as the Zambesi Prazos was founded on female retention of land through three generations A closer examination of who these women were and from where they came would undoubtedly reveal this Lisbon Magdalene House connection I began this essay questioning how typical were the varied uses of convicts and other marginal figures by the early modern Portuguese state It would appear that the Portuguese case was a good example of a much larger global process conducted by a host of early modern powers All totaled the early modern powers discussed here may have directed a forced labor population of two to three hundred thousand from 1500 to 1800 Certainly the variety of tasks assigned to Portuguese convict labor were similar to those facing the Spanish French English and many other forcedlabor regimes around the globe What stands out about the Portuguese case is its longevity some four hundred plus years if one considers internal exile within Portugal and its flexibility After the empire was in place after 1550 Portugal sent its convicts where they were most needed at the moment in spite of a legal code that often mandated specific destinations elsewhere What happened to this system of punishment of exile banishment or transportation combined with forced labor as we look forward into the nineteenth century and later If as I have argued this punishment was invaluable inexpensive creative and useful for these European powers what happened to it The forms and structures applied here in this chapter largely to North and South America ended by the late 1700s however forced labor by convicts did not end in the nineteenth century On the contrary it continued in another incarnation more tightly controlled and with more stringent expectations All four of the European powers discussed here would follow the same double solution of attempting to redeem and punish convicts through penal reform long sentences to prisons where the individual would be reborn as a productive member of society and penal colonies where they would contribute forced labor and sometimes combinations of both further reading For reading on early modern crime and criminality see the fundamental study by Georg Rusche and Otto Kircheimer Punishment and Social Struc ture New York 1939 I also suggest Muir and Ruggierio eds History from Crime Baltimore MD 1994 Several important collections examine colonization in a broad context In addition to the edited collections by Ida Altman James Horn David Eltis and Nicolas Canny cited in the footnotes I would add P C Emmer and M Morner eds European Expansion and Migration Essays on the Intercontinental Migration from Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 european forced labor in the early modern era 649 Africa Asia and Europe New York 1992 and V A C Gatrell Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker eds Crime and the Law The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 London 1980 On workhouses and related topics see Pieter Spierenbergs The Body and the State Early Modern Europe in Norval Morris and David J Rothman eds The Oxford History of the Prison New York 1998 On banishment and its importance in northern European society see the recent case study by Jason Coy Strangers and Misfits Banishment Social Control and Authority in Early Modern Germany Leiden 2008 Both Robert Juttes Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe Cambridge 1994 and Mitchell Merbacks The Thief the Cross and the Wheel Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe Chicago IL 1999 are good examples of the many links among crime poverty punishment and social control among other issues The British case of transportationforced colonizationindentured labor is by far the most studied In addition to the works of Abbott Emerson Smith and Roger Ekirch cited in the footnotes see David W Galenson White Servitude in Colonial America Cambridge LA 1981 the numerous articles by Farley Grubb and regional studies done of this process such as that by Donna J Spindel Crime and Society in North Carolina Baton Rouge LA 1989 On early modern France see Paul Bamfords classic work Fighting Ships and Prisons The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis XIV Minneapolis MN 1973 Mathe Allains Not Worth a Straw French Colo nial Policy and the Early Years of Louisiana Lafayette 1988 and the various invaluable works of Philip Boucher On the Spanish in addition to Ruth Pike cited in the footnotes see Ellen Friedman Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Period Madison WI 1983 Mary Elizabeth Perrys Crime and Society in Early Modern Seville Hanover 1980 and Colin MacLachlan Criminal Justice in Eighteenth Century Mexico A Study of the Tribunal of the Acordada Berkeley CA 1974 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 23 SLAVERY FREEDOM AND THE LAW IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD 14201807 sue peabody 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 commer cial 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 bar rier 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 eigh teenth 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 slaves 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 To this end I have tried to identify the personnel institutions and concepts of the law that a slave might encounter at each step of the way from enslavement through daily life to efforts to win free status How are these processes similar in the various African European and American societies for which we have records and how do they differ Most important by tracing the changes in slave law from the fifteenth through the early nineteenth centuries we can glimpse the greater transformation from tribal and feudal forms of justice to the judicial institutions embedded in the modern nation state 594 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 595 slave law in societies without writing Anthropologists have long wrestled with the problem of recognizing law in societies with minimal social stratification Bronislaw Malinowski pro claimed that the difference between custom and law was in the latters enforcement by a direct organized and definite social sanction1 E Adamson Hoebel studying the political structure of the North Ameri can Comanche Indians pushed this distinction further by emphasizing that a social group must designate certain of its members to apply physical force to maintain specific social norms When society authorizes the use of force to police its members whether or not a formal state is in existence that society can be said to have law One of the key developments over the early modern period is the degree to which peoples lives became increasingly inscribed within systems of writing Scholars have not fully analyzed the relationship between writing and systems of law but one certain effect of writing is the ability to transmit information and authority beyond facetoface contact That is for societies without writing most law is community based Once a system of writing is employed legal authority has the potential to be sustained and regularized beyond the immediate confines of time and space As a consequence written systems of law tend to be conservative bringing older legal categories and understandings into new situations Conversely however writing also facilitates legal disputation with past authorities thus permitting both fundamental attacks on older systems of understanding and the dissemination of these challenges to wider audiences Written records are key not only to the functioning of modern legal institutions but also to the writing of history itself When we try to understand the development of slavery and the law particularly for the early modern period we are hampered by the preponderance of written evidence from societies and empires that generated text and the relative paucity of detail for societies without writing systems Many pre Columbian American and African societies had no system of writing and as European literacy was confined primarily to elites associated with the church during the Middle Ages many Europeans too only appear in the historical record as they come into contact with systems of religious or political authority including judicial courts Islam and commerce also helped to create records of slave law from the Mediterranean to the Middle East Evidence of legal understandings of slavery in the nonliterate societies therefore comes primarily through contact with outsiders who left records of their encounters 1 Bronislaw Malinowski The Family Life of the Australian Aborigine London 1912 p 115 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 596 the cambridge world history of slavery Even so outsiders do provide some vivid evidence for how judicial systems functioned in some nonliterate societies As in medieval Europe many West African societies resolved their disputes in a trial before the king noble governor or chief However African rulers generally consulted community elders for their advice and in some kingdoms eg the Papels the Beafadas and the Sapas of Upper Guinea the prospective king was bound and beaten as a fundamental rite of coronation to teach him how to administer justice fairly The Portuguese traveler Andre Alvares dAlamada writing at the end of the sixteenth century describes a judicial trial in the kingdom of Borcalo Gambia One party presents its case the other argues against it evidence is then brought forward and the matter is resolved between them When the evidence in a given case was inconclusive West Africans like some Europeans used a trial by ordeal to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused Alvares describes an ordeal by iron this way They bring to the place a blacksmith or they go to his house He puts a small piece of iron in the fire and works the bellows until the iron becomes as red as a live coal The person who has to undergo the ordeal says these words God knows the truth if I have done such and such a thing as is said of me may this iron burn my tongue so that I never speak again As soon as these words are said the blacksmith picks up the iron with his tongs so that a thousand sparks dart from it and the person who said the words takes the tongs in his hand and licks the redhot iron with his tongue thrice If he is unharmed he and his supporters prance around and sentence is given in his favor But those who do not dare to take the ordeal are condemned Alvares may not have been aware that blacksmiths are not mere tradesmen in Wolof society but are ritual specialists believed to possess supernatural powers Thus the trial had spiritual overtones One should not assume that societies without writing systems had sim plistic legal cultures or that judicial systems built on writing were inher ently rational or sophisticated In the sixteenth century the Papels of what is now Liberia distinguished between five categories of property and the secret societies of Sierra Leone developed complex judicial insti tutions and rituals to name but two examples Lack of evidence about indigenous systems of justice should not be taken as an absence of legal institutions At the same time there is ample evidence that legal decisions based on random or divine intervention continued under European aus pices into the nineteenth century For example in the 1850s a Spanish priest mediated the dispute between two rival Pueblo communities in New Mexico by asking two little girls one from each group to draw Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 597 lots The priest rendered his judgment for the winner declaring it Gods decision2 imperial justice systems in america africa and western europe Not all preColumbian American societies were illiterate The highly strati fied Aztec and Incan empires had developed both systems of slavery and law as well as writing systems that make them accessible to historical research Of the two empires the Aztecs seem to have had the most differentiated legal structure with a supreme legal council devoted to judicial functions An early Aztec legal code represented in pictorial glyphs served the needs of a huntergatherer society this became elaborated into eighty laws by the time of Spanish contact Many of these indigenous courts persisted into the period of Spanish conquest functioning almost as lower courts beneath the Spanish audiencias Castilian society in Spain during the time of American conquest was extremely litigious with lawsuits countersuits and appeals prolonging legal disputes for many years Since the Middle Ages Spanish civil law was heavily dependent upon written procedures The plaintiff filed an initial written complaint to which the defendant was required to reply All testimony and evidence was presented in writing At a hearing the jurisconsults abogados argued the case before the judges The court ren dered its final decision sentencia in writing typically without justification so that unlike in English law Spanish and Latin American courts did not develop a tradition of using the prior decisions as a source of law The frantic legal activity of Spains early imperial period declined at least in Europe during the second quarter of the seventeenth century until the early eighteenth century English judicial practices diverged significantly from systems on the European continent English law dictated that the accused receive a trial before a jury of their peers presided over by a judge whereas in Europe most cases were tried before a panel of judges Moreover English judges generally delivered reasoned opinions which established precedent for future cases Although continental law took prior decisions into account judges were expected to deduce law not make it and hence did not provide an account of their deliberations or rationale for their conclusions Though numerous schools of Islamic jurisprudence have emerged over the centuries Sunni Islam recognizes four complementary schools each 2 Deborah A Rosen Acoma v Laguna and the Transition from Spanish Colonial Law to American Civil Procedure in New Mexico Law and History Review 19 2001 51346 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 598 the cambridge world history of slavery dominant in a particular area Maliki Spain northern and western Africa Hanafi Turkic Asia Shafii Egypt eastern Africa and Southeast Asia and Hanbali Saudi Arabia whereas Shiite jurisprudence jafari is prominent in Iran and other enclaves in the Middle East The Maliki school founded by Malik ibn Anas c713c795 in Medina had the strongest influence on Atlantic slave law Muslim imperial policy favored allowing subject non Muslim populations to maintain their own legal systems this was true in the Iberian peninsula before the reconquista as well as in West African societies Because slavery is such an ancient and pervasive institution it is rarely defined succinctly in legal codes Rather one must piece together the defi nition of slaves out of numerous provisions Under both Islamic law and in most Atlantic regimes slaves were heritable property In medieval Spanish law the slave was represented as part of the extended familia and the distinction between slaves and serfs was not clearcut Spanish law makes it clear that the slave had no power of movement and lived in servitude to a master Modern historians have made much of the inherent dual nature of the slave as both person and thing slaves have both will and agency yet they are also considered property by law Conversely slavery implies its opposition free status In Spanish medieval law liberty is defined as the power which every man has by nature to do what he wishes except where the force of law or privilege prevent him Siete Partidas of 1555 Vol 3 Tit 34 Regla 2 In Botswana slaves status batlhanka is compared with that of children but the com parison only holds up so far Unlike the child the slave could not inherit the masters property nor could slaves establish independent households upon reaching adulthood Less a matter of law than of custom the preference for women and children as slaves in pagan and Muslim Africa meant that the descendents of slaves were often absorbed into the extended kinship structures over several generations Legal statutes regulations laws and codes generally reflect the desire of societies leaders to control their subordinates However as prescriptive texts they are not necessarily an accurate reflection of lived experience Indeed written legislation is often an inverse indicator of the behavior it tries to control as for example repeated issuance of regulations prohibiting slaves from gathering in public places or requiring masters to pay a poll tax Once committed to writing laws can be recalled by successive generations to try to preserve or renew the privileges of a particular social class or group Laws are relatively easy to study for historians and much has been written about them The behavior of regulated people is much messier and more difficult to recover for the early modern period though the records of judicial enforcers police courts etc provide a rich wealth of evidence that is still under exploration Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 599 Most societies with slavery in Africa Europe and America and cer tainly all of those who built empires gave certain of its members the privilege of making laws Islamic law shariah is based upon four textual sources the Quran the example of the Prophet as related in the core biographical texts hadith Muslim consensus ijma understood to be consensus of doctors of law and reasoning by analogy qiyas According to this system all human action can be evaluated as obligatory meritori ous permissible reprehensible or forbidden Two legal texts that enjoyed wide influence in west and central Muslim tropical Africa are the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd tenth century and the Mukhtasar of Kahlil ibn Ishaq four teenth century In Europe canon law had no direct bearing on slaves per se though in the Americas missionaries sometimes interceded in secular courts on behalf of slaves European lawgivers were generally monarchs but the legislation itself was often drafted by noble officeholders bureau cratic functionaries or jurists In some part of Europe laws could also be written by elected bodies such the British Parliament though the privilege of electing was severely circumscribed by age gender and wealth Most European monarchs appointed governors to rule their overseas territories but due in part to their distance from the metropole local councils arose in many colonies Spanish America cabildos English assemblies or House of Burgesses Dutch Raad who made laws that applied only within their territories Islam Islamic law or shariah contains many references to slaves and slavery in a wide range of contexts inheritance marriage commercial law criminal law etc reflecting the importance of this category to medieval and early modern Islamic societies Islamic law does not permit Muslims to enslave other free Muslims though as in other religious traditions the determina tion of who is a legitimate believer of the true faith was often contested As a result captives taken in a holy war jihad could be enslaved even though they considered themselves Muslims The seventeenthcentury scholar Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu rejected the idea that free black Mus lims could legitimately be enslaved though apparently the practice was widespread in his time and continued to occur at least into the late nine teenth century He specifically rejected the justification that blacks were marked for enslavement by the curse of Ham Rome Since the Roman imperial era European law considered slaves to have a double nature On one hand they were property on the other they were Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 600 the cambridge world history of slavery people As such Roman law treated slaves as both as chattel much like horses or cattle and as persons with the capacity to be held responsible for their actions However Roman law treated slaves as dependents dif ferently from free adult male citizens As things and as persons slaves appear in many areas of Roman private law including inheritance law criminal law commercial law and so on Roman slaves constituted slightly more than a third of the Roman population coming from all reaches of the Roman Empire and they were employed in a wide range of posi tions from agricultural workers and servants to medical doctors and bankers The one area of Roman law that dealt exclusively with slaves was the law of manumission which regulated the transition from slave to free status Roman law favored manumissions and they were very common A master could free his slaves with relatively few restrictions whether by an act of manumission or by testament Freedmen who had been manumitted during their own lifetime did not enjoy the same rights as freeborn people but their children did In the sixth century the Roman emperor Justinian completed a major overhaul of the wideranging and fractious legal code Justinians new organized Corpus Juris Civilis influenced most continental European legal systems allowing many threads of continuity with both the past and among the Atlantic colonial slave regimes Spain and Spanish America The most important legal codes bearing upon slavery in the Spanish Empire originated in the kingdom of Castile In the midst of the Christian recon quest of Muslim Iberia the Castilian king Alphonso X promulgated a model set of laws heavily influenced by Romes Justinian Code This compilation known as the Siete Partidas 1265 formed the backbone of Spanish private law including slave law for more than five hundred years These laws applied to Castile itself as well as to Spanish territories overseas European crowns and colonial governments also promulgated new laws that would apply only to their new world colonies For example the Laws of Burgos of 1512 prohibited the enslavement of Indians in Spanish America though conquistadors and their descendents found other ways to compel Native Americans labor through encomiendas forced mining and other forms of tribute Indian slaves who successfully sued in colonial courts proving their enslavement unjust could win exemption from tribute payments and forced labor at least temporarily Spanish town councils or cabildos passed innumerable pieces of legislation aimed at controlling slaves and free people of African descent For example many prohibited slaves from carrying arms traveling from their homes at night without a pass attending Indian markets engaging in trade or cutting down trees Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 601 In 1680 Carlos II promulgated the Recopilacion de las Leyes do los Reinos de Indias a consolidation of all previous Spanish American colonial law The Recopilacion took the myriad local colonial laws each issued for specific jurisdictions and extended them to be consistent throughout Spanish American territory Portugal and Brazil The Spanish and Portuguese crowns were unified from 1580 until 1640 after which Portugal and Brazil became independent from Spanish rule In contrast to the heavily bureaucratic and centralized Spanish crown Por tuguese slave legislation tended to be more local in nature originating in the town councils with occasional royal intervention Under Hapsburg rule the Spanish prohibition of enslaving Indians was extended to Por tuguese territory in 1587 A subsequent Hapsburg law of 1595 renewed the prohibition against enslaving Indians and formally codified the theory that slaves could only be legitimately captured in a just war in this case a military action authorized by the crown The Netherlands Suriname and Dutch Antilles Unlike the Iberians whose proximity to Mediterranean trade made slavery a persistent legal category throughout the Middle Ages the Dutch had very little medieval contact with slaves Hence the seventeen provinces that comprise Belgium and the Netherlands found themselves with no indigenous legal traditions regarding slavery when they were drawn into the wider Atlantic empire under Charles V in the early sixteenth century Some historians feel that the Dutch therefore fell back on Roman legal traditions eg status follows the mother but it seems likely that they were equally influenced by the pragmatic needs and developing customs of slaveholding in the American colonies In 1686 the Dutch governor of Suriname Van Sommelsdijck con cluded a treaty with three Native American peoples the coastal Caribs the Waraus and the Arawaks which declared them all free unenslavable peo ple except as punishment for specific crimes However this did not apply to inland indigenous people and soon there developed an economy of captives with coastal peoples raiding those in the interior to supply Euro pean colonists demands During that same year Van Sommelsdijck issued the first Plantation Regulations that would be modified by his successors during the eighteenth century As Dutch colonial slave law developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the regulations of the Dutch Antillean trading centers of Curacao and St Eustatius were considerably milder than those of the plantation colony of Suriname Throughout the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 602 the cambridge world history of slavery Dutch Atlantic laws forbade marriages between blacks and whites and sought to preserve the social distance from their masters by such measures as prohibiting slaves from smoking a pipe in public or wearing shoes France and Its Colonies While slavery persisted along Frances Mediterranean coastline in the region of Provence throughout the medieval period and into the seventeenth century it disappeared more or less completely from the legal system of northern France Ile de France and the Roussillon region of southwestern France Parisian customary law and royal statutes made no mention of slavery Whereas the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic empires expanded rapidly in the sixteenth century Frances few attempts at American colo nization in Brazil and Florida were brief illfated and overshadowed by civil religious strife In 1570 the French writer Francois de Belleforest fanned nationalist flames by celebrating a supposedly ancient seafaring tradition The custom is such that not only the French but foreigners arriving in French ports and crying France et liberte are beyond the power of those that possess them their owners lose the price of the slave and the service of the slave if the slave refuses to serve them Subsequent French jurists fashioned a legal maxim or Freedom Principle from this custom that courts upheld with the force of law All persons are born free in this kingdom and as soon as a slave has arrived in the borders of this place being baptized is freed Although merchants of the Norman cities of Dieppe and Rouen financed slavetrading companies to transport slaves between West Africa and Brazil in the second half of sixteenth century African and Native American slaves appeared in continental France only rarely generally as servants or exotic curiosities As in the Netherlands and Britain there was no royal or provincial legislation to regulate their status treatment or sale Indeed the lack of unified French policy toward slavery can be seen in the famous case of 1571 when a Norman slaver attempted to sell a cargo of slaves in Bordeaux The regional parlement high court intervened with the proclamation that France the mother of liberty doesnt permit any slaves Yet surely the Norman merchants were as much a part of the French polity as the burghers of Bordeaux Over the seventeenth century slavery grew steadily in the French colonies of New France Canada Martinique Guadeloupe and Guiana with customs adapting to circumstances and no formal royal regulation save several letters patents beginning in 1634 authorizing exclusive African slavetrading monopolies to private companies Royal and local officials Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 603 issued piecemeal slave legislation as plantations became central to the Caribbean colonies Under Louis XIV French slave law was systemized as the Code Noir 1685 The Code Noir comprised sixty articles regulating religious uniformity of the colonies treatment and policing of slaves slaves as heritable and commercial property and their passage to free status Viewed by many historians as somewhere between the protective and humane Spanish codes and the harsher laws of the British and Dutch the Code Noir would gradually lose many of its moderating provisions to subsequent colonial legislation of the eighteenth century which sought to control the overwhelming expansion of the slave population Over the course of the eighteenth century the French crown sought ways to accommodate slaveholders who wanted to bring their slaves to France from the colonies without fear of losing them to the Freedom Principle The king issued edicts in 1716 and 1738 designed to permit masters to bring a handful of slaves to France temporarily for training in trades or religious education Provincial judicial courts parlements along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts registered these laws immedi ately because their economies were already tied to slaverelated economic activity However the Parlement of Paris whose jurisdiction comprised a third of the territory of France refused to register these laws invoking the Freedom Principle that slavery was antithetical to France Not until the Minister of the Marine substituted the word blacks noirs for slaves esclaves in the 1777 Declaration pour la Police des Noirs did the Par lement of Paris retreat from its earlier scruples By then the racist doc trine of the inherent inferiority of blacks had received widespread accep tance among Frances elites who were now ready to prohibit the entry of all nonwhites into French territory The 1777 law appears to have been enforced only selectively as Thomas Jefferson for example is known to have brought several black slaves including Sally Hemings to Paris in the 1780s England and Its Colonies Much like the Dutch and the French the English had no tradition of statutes regulating slaves per se The medieval category of villein or bonds men though still mentioned in certain early modern legal tracts had virtually died out in practice by the second half of the sixteenth century As English colonization expanded rapidly in the seventeenth century proxim ity to Spanish Dutch and Portuguese Caribbean supplies of African and Indian slaves led to increased reliance on slave labor Englishmen used the existing property law to cover the sale inheritance mortgaging and so on of slaves as both real and chattel property But as the slave populations of many American colonies grew in the seventeenth century English colonial Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 604 the cambridge world history of slavery assemblies in Barbados South Carolina Virginia New York and other colonies each established their own independent regulations In practice these laws generally resembled one another through the mideighteenth centuries As the enslaved populace came to outnumber free colonists British American slave law developed increasingly harsher mechanisms of control and punishment For example in the 1690s South Carolina imported the mature Barbadian slave code wholesale The absence of a strong missionary impulse early in the Protestant colonies also militated against the humanistic elements of some Latin American slave codes enslavement There is remarkable continuity in the ways that European African and American societies legitimated the process of enslavement Robin Law surveying many European travelers records with an eye to what they tell us about West Africans ideas about lawful and unlawful slavery notes many consistencies with the ChristianEuropean and Muslim traditions Like Muslims and Christians nonMuslim West Africans permitted only outsiders to be legitimately enslaved The difference is in the social bound ary between insider and outsider Ethnic or political ties were the crucial distinction in West Africa rather than the religious boundaries enforced by Muslims and Christians For example many African kingdoms prohibited the enslavement of those born within the kingdom some extended this category to those who wore the abaja or facial scarifications Like Euro peans Africans accepted warfare as a legitimate means of taking people captive whereas enslavement through kidnapping or banditry was pro scribed In practice however such distinctions merely validated the power of certain leaders royalty chieftains while fending off rivals of a lesser scale Yet many West African societies came to allow for the enslavement of their own people through judicial processes In the late sixteenth century men of Beafares found guilty of adultery or murder could be punished with enslavement sometimes to the man whom they had offended Spanish Capuchins reported disapprovingly that judicial proceedings were used to enslave commoners along the Upper Guinea Coast in the late seventeenth century According to them upon conviction the poor person starts to clamor saying Senor dont kill me sell me for rum Oral traditions in Botswana tell that poaching on fishing grounds could be punished with a kind of enslavement If members of one village poached on the fishing grounds of another the headman of the aggrieved villages seized the offenders who not only were deprived of their Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 605 catch and fishing gear but also were forcibly incorporated into the village of their captor where they rendered him service for some time after which they were allowed to enjoy full citizenship3 Other sources suggest that when a convicted criminal was not able to pay a fine the sentence might be transmuted to slavery The sixteenth century Portuguese traveler Alvares dAlmada wrote Often men become slaves through judicial sentences along with their whole lineage In particular they condemn witches whom they sell with all their lineage down to the fourth generation Indeed historians Walter Rodney and Walter Hawthorne argue that the Atlantic slave trade was responsible for transforming the penalty of fines into enslavement throughout much of West Africa The early modern African judicial system may have been considerably more humane than its European counterpart because it limited capital punishment solely to the crime of homicide Yet it is clear that African elites who benefited from the Atlantic slave trade took advantage of their positions as judges to arbitrarily condemn their enemies and vulnerable commoners to slavery It is important to emphasize that the proportion of people enslaved through judicial processes was considerably smaller than those who were taken as captives of war There are many parallels between slavery as it functioned in West Africa and in indigenous North America societies such as the Apache Comanche Navajo Pawnee Pueblo and Ute peoples In both regions warriors enslaved their captives with a predominance of women and chil dren who then became absorbed over several generations into kinship networks However evidence of indigenous legal practices in nonliterate North American societies prior to European conquest is very limited In preconquest Aztec and Texcoco societies certain crimes such as petty theft were punished with enslavement though in Texcoco only if the stolen item was recoverable theft involving property damage or valuable items was punished by death Spanish conquerors took many Indian captives from these regions during the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries whereupon they came under Spanish imperial law Though the enslavement of Indians was prohibited from 1542 such captives could be purchased by new Spanish owners through the fiction of paying their ransom Between the 1685 and 1825 France condemned more than ten thousand criminals to terms as galley slaves galeriens Many such prisoners in the 3 Thomas Tlou Servility and Political Control Botllhanka among the BaTwana of Northwestern Botswana ca 17501906 in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff eds Slavery in Africa Historical and Anthropological Perspectives Madison WI 1977 p 373 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 606 the cambridge world history of slavery late seventeenth century were Huguenots persecuted for their religion By the eighteenth century most of the French galeriens were convicted of petty crimes such as theft smuggling or military desertion Most were young unemployed or laboring men in their twenties sentenced to serve out their lives in the galleys It may be questioned whether a sentence of hard labor on these ships in fact constitutes enslavement Certainly this punishment was not passed on to the slaves children which distinguishes these sentences from the Atlantic slave system Yet one cannot deny that the convicts experiences on ships subject to the whip and other brutalities were as wretched and hopeless as those experienced during the Middle Passage or on American plantations Perhaps only forced mining or the harvesting of sugar can compare in terms of violence mortality and depredation Two additional types of enslavement were generally recognized as legiti mate by both Europeans and West Africans pawning and panyarring In the case of pawning Africans might place one of their family or clan with European traders as collateral for goods advanced by the Europeans When the Africans returned with the slaves the relatives would be released and if not the Europeans would theoretically be entitled to enslave the pawns and sell them Panyarring from the Portuguese penhorar to dis train was similar except that in this case Europeans or other Africans might seize a debtors relative or associate to enforce the payment of debt Robin Law notes that when Europeans acted on these rights they ran the risk of alienating the trading communities Indeed sometimes Euro pean traders went to great lengths to recover the enslaved African affili ates even from the American slave colonies so as to restore the con fidence and partnership of their African trading partners Law correctly points out that by supporting such notions of legitimate and illegit imate enslavement traders merely reinforced the system of slavery as a whole Aztecs permitted people to become enslaved through capture in battle being sold by ones parents selling oneself or as punishment for a crime Not all slaves were equal in Aztec society however those with a contractual relationship with their master were on a higher footing than those who became slaves as punishment for a crime However unlike slavery in Europe and African law slave status was not heritable that is the children of Aztec slaves were free Africans and indigenous Americans were not the only Atlantic peoples enslaved during the early modern period From at least the Middle Ages North African corsairs preyed upon European sailors and coastal residents and sold them into the Arab slave market of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire The wealthier captives were usually held for ransom sometimes paid by their families or municipal councils or increasingly over the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 607 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the case of French subjects by the crown regulating conditions of slavery If Muslim West African and European legal traditions all concurred on the principle that enslavement was justified through the capture of enemies as prisoners of war the status and conditions of the enslaved and their ability to be absorbed into the kinship structures of the ruling elites varied considerably over place and time Roman law neglected to regulate many areas of private relations includ ing masterslave relations according to the principle law keeps out Consequently many aspects of early modern legal codes that attempted to regulate masterslave relations in the Atlantic world were innovations arising out of the circumstances and desires of the slaveholding class It is also important to underscore that merely creating law about the conditions of slavery did not assure that the law was enforced There was often a discrepancy between what the codes prescribed and the actual conditions of slaves and free people Protection Most American slave societies had laws on the books aimed at protecting slaves from abuse and neglect The seventeenthcentury Spanish jurist Juan de Solorzano 1648 emphasized that masters who abused their slaves by working them too hard feeding clothing or housing them inadequately sexually abusing them or prostituting them to others could be punished with fines or the slaves manumission The French Code Noir 1685 and the regulations of the Dutch West India Company required masters to provide their slaves with shelter adequate food and clothing But many planters dispensed with this obligation by designating garden plots for slaves that the slaves themselves had to maintain in their meager spare time Though a Barbadian law of 1688 required masters to provide their slaves with caps for men and petticoats and caps for women the penalty for failing to comply was only five shillings per slave And although the South Carolina Black Code of 1690 required all slaves to be furnished with convenient clothes once every year the revised code of 1696 did away with this provision The lack of variety in the diet could easily lead to malnutrition and drought hurricane or overwork often pushed slaves to starvation Slaves in the British West Indies were legally subject to their masters discipline which meant that prosecution for physical abuse was rare In Spanish America the punishment for harming or abusing ones own slave Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 608 the cambridge world history of slavery was the freeing of the slave which in combination with prosecutorial advocacy gave slaves in Spanish America more leverage for better treat ment Slaves Capacity as Plaintiffs Witnesses Defendants Slaves had limited legal personhood under all of the legal systems that touched upon the Atlantic world Under Roman law slaves could not be parties to a civil suit that is they could neither be plaintiffs nor defendants except in cases where their status was in dispute freedom suits Nor could Roman slaves accuse others of a crime though they could be tried for criminal actions However Roman slaves were permitted to offer testimony in certain cases except that their testimony was never admitted to contradict that of citizens and the law required that they be tortured prior to giving testimony presumably to ascertain that they would tell the truth Within Islamic law slaves were not permitted to testify in court unless to confess to a crime and then only if it did not relate to his masters property Though the evidence dates from the later more documented colonial period it is clear that Mende slaves nduwanga in Sierra Leone were prohibited from suing in the customary courts though others could act for them In many American colonies eg Suriname Jamaica neither slaves nor free blacks were permitted to testify against whites If wronged their only hope was to find one or more white intermediaries to testify on their behalf Virginia law prohibited blacks access to jury by peers the right to counsel and the right to address the court on their own behalf In 1711 the French royal government restricted the slaves right to appeal his or her sentence only to cases involving hamstringing or the death penalty Since Roman times there were legal provisions for those who were unjustly enslaved to challenge their enslavement in court Although slaves generally did not have standing to bring a suit in court there was an exception for those who claimed to be free because if they were indeed free they would have the capacity to sue In this way the law tended to presume freedom until slave status could be proven In English colonies slaves whose masters had promised to free them by testament could petition the court through free people next friends Some lawyers and judges particularly as the abolition movement took hold in the late eighteenth century took on the cases in forma pauperis without payment Work During the early modern period prior to the organized labor movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were few limits on the hours or conditions anyone could be required to work This was true Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 609 in Europe as well as for slaves in the Americas Most European colonies forbade masters from making slaves work on Sunday though at the height of sugar harvesting such niceties might be waived so as to process the cane before it spoiled In 1707 Jewish masters in the Dutch colonies resisted the Christian regulations preferring to keep Saturday as the Sabbath and to work their slaves on Sunday instead Control Aztec law required that masters treat their slaves well However for repeated misbehaviors an Aztec owner could punish a slave by applying a wooden collar by sale to another owner or by selling the slave for human sacrifice Many of the slave regulations in the Americas particularly as the planta tion complex heightened the demographic gulf between white elites and the slaves they depended upon were essentially designed to prevent individual and organized resistance by slaves Many American slave societies prohib ited slaves and sometimes free people of color from gathering in large groups playing drums dancing fighting drinking carrying weapons and so on The Dutch Curacaoan council passed numerous regulations along these lines with increasingly harsh threats of punishment over the course of the eighteenth century but to little apparent effect Religion Religion was a fundamental epistemological framework for all societies in the early modern Atlantic world Christian and Muslim authorities legitimized the enslavement of religious outsiders moreover slavery was justified as a recruitment tool for Catholicism and Islam Spanish as of 1538 Portuguese and French 1685 legal systems required that all slaves be baptized and instructed in religion By contrast the early laws of the English and Dutch Protestant slave colonies paid no attention to the slaves religion Seventeenthcentury French laws prohibited Protestants and Jews from owning slaves but these regulations were not enforced Both Christians and Muslims wrestled with the problem of whether religious conversion guaranteed emancipation but concluded that it did not Muslim slaves were not required to make the pilgrimage haj to Mecca to do so without the masters permission would render the rite in valid Some Islamic schools allowed a master to deputize a slave to make the pilgrimage in his place Highranking slaves or freedmen might the oretically act as imam or religious leader for free men but not a judge qadi In practice enslaved imams were rare or nonexistent Throughout the early modern period some Muslim Africans found themselves enslaved and transported to the Americas Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 610 the cambridge world history of slavery European and colonial attitudes toward witchcraft are complicated Although prosecution for witchcraft declined sharply in Europe by the late seventeenth century belief in slaves capacity to harm free people through witchcraft or more secularly poisoning were prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenthcentury American colonies Tituba a slave of African or Native American origin was the first resident of Salem Massachusetts accused of sorcery in the 1692 witch trials French colonists accused Francois Macandal as the leader of many other slaves executed for sorcery and poisoning in St Domingues witchhunt of 17578 The Jamaican legislature passed a law in 1760 against obeah a Caribbean com plex of beliefs and practices aimed at manipulating the natural and social worlds which is usually glossed as witchcraft or sorcery At least five slaves were tried on these grounds in the late eighteenth century Sex and Marriage One of the greatest differences between slavery in Africa both tradi tional and Islamic and slavery as it developed in the early modern Atlantic world is the degree to which slaves were held as an extension of the kinship structure Muslim law African traditions and even medieval Spanish law recognized slaves as part of the masters extended family In both Muslim and pagan Africa the great majority of slaves were women and children who were readily absorbed into the masters familial lines over one or more generations It could be argued that this was func tionally true in much of the Catholic Atlantic world as well because many masters recognized and promoted some of their mixedrace chil dren by enslaved concubines or free women of color manumitting them and sometimes recognizing them as heirs By contrast the Atlantic slave regimes of the northern Protestant European countries did not frame slaves as part of the family structure Of course EuroChristian coun tries and colonies did not recognize the polygynous traditions of pagan or Muslim Africa but because those societies typically reserved multiple partners for only the wealthiest or most prominent men the differences between the Christians and nonChristians are not as far apart as one might presume In ancient and medieval Europe the expansion of Christianity had gen erally favored slaves marriage rights Under pagan Roman law which did not recognize slaves as legal personalities slaves were not permitted to marry anyone including slaves belonging to the same master Since the seventh century however Iberian Visigoths and subsequent Christian rulers departed from the Roman precedent formally encouraging mar riages between slaves Pope Hadrian ruled that a slave could marry even Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 611 over his masters objections but that he would still remain a slave this was eventually codified in the Corpus Juris Canonici in 740 AD The medieval Spanish Siete Partidas finally extended this privilege further Slaves who married free people thereby became free themselves American colonial law reversed this trend In order to prevent slaves from becoming free by marrying Indians Spanish Queen Juana directed the viceroy and governor in 1538 that marriages between slaves and free people would no longer automatically manumit the slaves In the British American colonies there were no provisions for slave marriages and such religious ceremonies or common law relationships that might take place had no legal standing Still in practice some slaveholders found that facilitating these couples increased compliance and increased productivity Just as often however owners separated husbands wives and children through sale to distant owners Portuguese colonial law permitted a freed male slave to purchase the freedom of his wife and children and if a free man voluntarily allowed himself to be enslaved to the master of his wife and children they would all be freed upon the masters death Legal historian Alan Watson traces these Brazilian provisions unique in American colonial law to a tenthcentury Byzantine precedent adopted as part of Brazils Roman slave law The French Code Noir required that slaves who wanted to marry acquire their masters permission in lieu of their parents but also forbade masters from forcing slaves to marry against their will Few marriages between slaves were actually recorded in French parish records especially in rural areas Although white mens concubinage with black women was formally banned in all EuroChristian colonies in the New World the prohibition tended to be honored only in the breach In fact some EuroAmerican legal codes contained provisions that tacitly recognized and sometimes gave legitimacy to extramarital liaisons between masters and female slaves For example the Spanish government decreed in 1563 and reaffirmed in 1680 that if a slave were to be sold the owner must give preference to the slaves Spanish father who wanted to buy him and set him free According to the Code Noir 1685 French men who sired children by their women slaves faced heavy fines and the confiscation of the woman and child unless he agreed to marry her However though few such marriages occurred the free population of mixed lineage increased rapidly during the eighteenth century especially in the Caribbean colonies of Martinique and St Domingue The Louisiana Code Noir of 1724 mirrored its Caribbean predecessor in many ways but it prohibited all marriages between whites and people of color regardless of free or slave status Black mens and white womens sexuality was more heavily policed The Dutch governor of Suriname issued a regulation at the beginning of the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 612 the cambridge world history of slavery eighteenth century forbidding sexual relations between white women and black men To prevent such unnatural whoredom and adultery we order that if it is proven that any white female not being married has had sexual intercourse with a black said female will be severely flogged and banished from this colony for life And in case any married female should lapse into such a misdemeanor she will not only be severely flogged but also branded and banished from this colony for life while the black in question will be punished by death Before long two white women who became pregnant by black slaves were banished from the capital city in 1721 Yet class could override racial stigma In 1764 a wealthy free black woman with multiple plantations in Dutch Suriname announced her intention to marry a white man twenty years younger than she Despite its initial opposition the State Council Raad von State approved her marriage to a second white when her first fiance died before the wedding could take place White Spanish colonial patriarchs used the royal ordinance of 1778 designed to prevent the abuse of contracting unequal marriages to prevent their children from allying with those descended from Africans or Native Americans A French royal proclamation of 1781 prohibited marriages between whites and those of African descent though it is unclear whether the decree was ever enforced in the metropole Peculium Islamic law permitted slaves to earn money and own property including other slaves but upon their death this property reverted to the master slaves could not pass their estate to heirs or inherit Although most Atlantic slave regimes following the Roman tradition did not permit slaves to own property outright many allowed slaves to accumulate and manage a small amount of property known as the peculium in Roman law The peculium technically belonged to the master but the slave had some control so that some slaves usually those in urban areas were able to save up money and eventually purchase their freedom or that of their children or other loved ones The English colonies in America made no legal provision for a peculium though the practice certainly existed Yet slaves belonging to Englishmen who tried to save up funds toward selfpurchase or for other uses were at the mercy of their masters who could legally claim the savings at any time Once the plantation economy overtook any particular colony it was not unusual for the local authorities to try to restrict slaves participation in local commerce Many colonies issued laws sometimes repeatedly over several decades prohibiting slaves from selling staple crops or livestock and whites Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 613 from trading with slaves because authorities felt that this encouraged theft or commercial competition with whites A second probably intentional effect of these laws was to prevent slaves from saving up the capital for self purchase and to reduce the growth of the free black population except through patronage by elite whites for loyal service Regulating the Slave Trade All European governments sought to regulate the slave trade seeking to secure steady profits for themselves Spanish royalty granted the asiento or exclusive right to the Atlantic slave trade with its American colonies beginning in 1518 The Portuguese won the asiento from 1595 to 1640 after which Dutch and Genoese merchants broke the Portuguese monopoly followed by the French and English in the eighteenth century though by then Spanish purchase of slaves had dwindled to but a small portion of the Atlantic trade According to the prevailing early modern economic theory of mercan tilism colonies were only permitted to trade with the metropole Colonial merchants meanwhile sought to evade taxes by smuggling slaves illicitly outside of the prescribed boundaries For example between 1606 and 1626 colonists in Buenos Aires bought numerous contraband African slaves from Brazilian merchants in exchange for Peruvian silver until the illegal trade was suppressed by the Relacao of Bahia Occasionally legislation but more often the captains economic self interest regulated conditions aboard slave ships Though mortality rates generally improved over time along with maritime technology faster crossings meant fewer deaths the captains authoritarian justice prevailed aboard ships falling harshly on both sailor and slave alike enforcement judicial personnel and institutions Legal codes were only as good as their enforcement Slaves who wished to challenge a violation needed access to the sites of legal disputation intermediaries and advocates who would support their challenges In the colonies of continental Europe which were based on Roman law slaves and free people appealed to the same court system but English colonies with the tradition of trial by jury generally established separate slave courts to deal with slaves accused of crimes There are relatively few studies of legal practices among tribal peoples In the North American Comanche society wives were seen as quasichattel to their generally older husbands If a young man sought to build a romantic relationship with a woman who was already married to another he might steal her away as his group left on a hunting expedition The womans Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 614 the cambridge world history of slavery husband was expected to try to seek legal redress through negotiation He was represented by his male relatives in subsequent bargaining between the two parties The warrior who claimed the woman however was custom arily not entitled to such representation In instances where the wronged man had no kin to represent him a man of high standing war leader would help him negotiate a settlement with his opponent Under the reign of Nezahualcoyotl 140373 the Central Ameri can state of Texcoco was restructured Nezahualcoyotl established four supreme councils including an advisory supreme legal council and two tribunals under the central authority of the ruler tlatoani The rulers tri bunal tlatocaicpalpan heard mundane cases whereas the Divine Tribunal Teoicpalpan was reserved for more serious and capital cases Texcocos provinces and towns were divided into six jurisdictions each with two judges There was also an office of bailiff achcauhtli Beneath these high courts were the provincial judges who performed both investigatory and sentencing functions There is some evidence that nobles and commoners were tried in different courts According to one source all cases involving slaves as well as homosexuality treason sumptuary regulations adultery theft drunkenness property lands status and offices were under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Legal Council Contemporary reports suggest that the neighboring Aztec Empires legal structure was not as sophisticated as that of Texcoco In Islamic courts plaintiffs pled their own cases before a religious judge qadi a free man appointed by authorities with advanced religious and legal training The qadis decision not subject to appeal was to be based entirely on shariah without resorting to interpretation Slaves were pro hibited from holding the office of qadi In Spanish America most of the judicial functions resided within the audiencias which began as governing bodies with legislative executive and administrative functions specific to certain jurisdictional areas such as Mexico Peru or Santo Domingo under the authority of the viceroy However starting with the appointment of the threejudge court in Santo Domingo in 1508 the role of the audiencias soon shifted to become pri marily judicial in nature These judges oidores specialized in either civil or criminal law often with other duties such as probate commercial tax or other functions and the courts were often severely understaffed The audiencias also served as appellate courts over lower local courts Ecclesi astical courts also ruled on such matters as the legitimacy of marriages or births and therefore could bear upon the right to inherit property Portuguese judicial and administrative functions were organized around the township conselho Initially each town council typically included two elected judges juiz ordinario or juiz de la terra who lacked formal legal training and whose term of office was a year Over the course of the sixteenth Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 615 century a royal judicial system presided over by the juiz de fora literally judge from afar came to supplant the local magistrates In Portugal decisions of the municipal courts could be appealed to one of twentyone corrective courts commarca or correicao presided over by the traveling superior crown magistrate corregedor The next level in this highly devel oped bureaucracy were the three high courts of appeal Relacao The two subordinate tribunals in Lisbon Casa do Cıvel and Goa Relacao da India and the superior Casa da Suplicacao which administered the kings justice Though nominally headed by a great noble high churchman or in the colonies the resident governor or viceroy the ranking judicial officer was the chancellor with extensive legal training The kings advisory council Desembargo do Paco advised the king on all matters pertaining to justice and law and developed into the chief administrative bureaucracy of the Portuguese Empire In 1532 Dom Joao III created a new advisory board on matters relating to the church and morality the Mesa da Consciˆencia e Ordens This board played an increasingly influential role as it reviewed legal and judicial issues arising from the Portuguese Empire including the legality and morality of Indian and African slavery Though the sugar plan tocracy eventually controlled the municipal councils in northeastern Brazil after 1609 the royal magistrates of the Relacao provided a countervailing judicial force throughout the remaining colonial period A series of royal officials were created in Portuguese American colonies charged with adjudicating disputes arising between Indians and whites After 1560 the civil office of momposteiro was designed to protect the liberty of Indians The Hapsburg statute of 1595 created a new magistrate to settle Indianwhite complaints including accusations of illegal enslavement the former office apparently having lost its efficacy In 1711 the Brazilian archbishops of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia petitioned the king to create a new office that would be charged with investigating slaves complaints of abuse by their masters however the crown rejected this appeal The Dutch colonies of Suriname and Curacao had an officeholder fiscal whose responsibilities included advocating for slaves who were mistreated He could initiate legal proceedings on their behalf presuming that they could reach him which meant either by stealth or improbably with a signed pass from the master According to the governor of Suri name in 1766 a white found guilty for committing physical injury against a black could be fined However if only verbal injury has occurred the black or colored person will not be permitted to initiate judicial proceedings against the white unless the circumstances are of unusually great importance Even if corrective measures against the white will then be unavoidable they must be applied civilly and secretly Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 616 the cambridge world history of slavery so that he will not be publicly humiliated which would increase the boldness of the blacks and coloreds If a free black or colored person offends a white by words or actions the white if of good repute will be taken at his word the more so if signs of blows are present4 At this time the fiscal of Suriname Herman Coerman was representing free men of color so well that the governor complained about him to the Prince of Orange on the Board of the Dutch West India Company in the United Provinces Cases in English colonies on behalf of mistreated slaves would have been heard in the common law courts of assizes quarter sessions or petty sessions However the vast majority of judicial cases concerning slaves were those prosecuting slaves under criminal law In Barbados Jamaica and the Carolinas there were two parallel criminal courts one for free people entitled to a jury of their peers and one for slaves composed in Jamaica of five persons three freeholders and two magistrates According to the Barbados legislature 1688 being Brutish slaves deserve not from the Baseness of their Condition to be tried by the legal trial of twelve men of their peers or Neighbourhood which truly niether can be rightly done as the Subjects of England are Magistrates of the English slave courts were typically planters with no formal legal training Diana Patons study of the St Andrews parish shows that though the Jamaican slave code prohibited many actions by slaves only theft running away for periods longer than six months which might be construed as selftheft and violence against masters were prosecuted with any frequency Moreover the conviction rate in one Jamaican parish 76 percent was somewhat higher than in English South Carolinian or Virginian courts of the same period generally 6070 percent In the French Caribbean slaves cases like those of free persons initially came before ordinary judges In 1645 the king established judicial bodies conseils superieur for each colony to hear judicial appeals Each conseil superieur was composed of between eight and fourteen militia offi cers drawn from the wealthiest and highestranking colonists selected by the royally appointed colonial governor Initially the parties represented themselves before the court colonial authorities resisted the encroachment of private lawyers and reportedly banished them from Martinique per haps in part because they posed a threat to the judicial ignorance of the colonial justices In the early seventeenth century missionaries sometimes advocated for slaves in court but beginning in 1685 the Code Noir des ignated the royal attorney general procureur general to represent slaves 4 Quoted in Cornelis Ch Goslinga The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas 16801791 Assen 1985 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 617 before the court in cases of abuse However the procureur general was also the official charged with prosecuting slaves accused of crimes a mission typically undertaken with much greater diligence The conseil initially met once a month later this extended to one day every other month For complex cases a temporary conseil extraordinaire was established In 1686 the Martinique Council protested the Code Noirs article 30 which held that slaves could only testify against other slaves on the grounds that this would result in impunity for many crimes committed against slaves As a result the crown modified the code so that slaves might give evidence in the absence of testimony by whites in all cases except against their own masters Punishment Although Europeans might be punished for breaking state laws with such sentences as prison terms forced labor on the galleys or hanging slaves in the American colonies were already subject to forced labor and restricted movement so punishments tended toward the infliction of bodily pain These included flogging dismemberment breaking on the wheel burn ing alive and hanging Many slaves deemed unruly were sold to another master or another colony presumably to harsher labor such as salt pan ning or mining Mutilation had largely been abandoned throughout much of Europe by the late seventeenth century but was commonly employed against slave convicts in the English colonies Branding though some times used to punish criminals in Europe was routinely applied to slaves for identification purposes by Europeans in Africa and America Though prohibited in England and for white colonists castration was authorized as a punishment for slaves in seven English American colonies over the course of the eighteenth century Antigua the Carolinas Bermuda Vir ginia Pennsylvania and New Jersey Whipping or flogging reserved for convicts of low social status was the most common punishment adminis tered in both eighteenthcentury England and in the colonies However English civilian courts as opposed to military tribunals typically limited the sentences to a dozen or so blows whereas colonial sentences were much harsher averaging thirtynine to seventyfive strikes for whites and blacks respectively in eighteenthcentury Jamaica In English colonies the state explicitly delegated its power to punish to the slaveholder for lesser infractions For example the 1664 Jamaican slave code stated that all small misdeamenours shall be heard and deter mined by the master of the Slave or Slaves Jamaican legislation gave judicial officials wide latitude in punishing slaves for many crimes per mitting any penalty as the court shall see fit French officials prohibited masters from mutilating or killing their slaves reserving these punishments Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 618 the cambridge world history of slavery as state judicial sanctions Yet though the French crown occasionally chas tised Caribbean colonists for brutality toward their slaves early on by the second half of the eighteenth century it conceded that the need for abso lute control over an enormous slave population overrode the niceties of moderate treatment recommending that abusive masters be reprimanded secretly Punishments were designed to exact retribution on those who trans gressed the social order but also as a display of power to terrorize the rest of the population In early modern Africa Europe and the Americas punishments were typically meted out in a public place or in the case of masters private punishment before an assembly of slaves It was not uncommon to display the hanged body or the head ears or other severed parts of a convict in a public place as a deterrent to others American courts typically prescribed humiliation such as the pillory or stocks only for the free population though many masters used the stocks to mete out private justice on the plantations In America as in Europe the state employed certain people to inflict punishment such as the English common whipman or the executioner Many American colonies used slaves in these roles the Dutch had a name for the enslaved enforcer the bomba In French colonies the state exe cutioner was sometimes a convicted slave whose death sentence was com muted in exchange for taking on the position of executioner The cabildo of Angostura in lateeighteenthcentury Caracas Venezuela sought to purchase a black slave to fill the vacant post of executioner Islamic law prescribes particular punishments for specific crimes but these correctives were generally less harsh for slaves than for free men who were to be held to a higher standard But in many American colonies Dutch Suriname French St Domingue slaves and free blacks were punished much more severely than whites especially if they committed a crime such as assault against a white For example a slave who wounded a master might be hanged whereas a white who harmed a black might be punished with a fine In 1669 the Virginia House of Burgesses established that masters might kill their own slaves with impunity as they administered due correction More than a century later in French St Domingue the council of Le Cap dismissed charges against a slaveholder accused of killing four of his slaves and severely burning two more in response to white public opinion Racial Codes Scholars debate the origins of antiblack racism but it is generally acknowledged that during the early modern period coincidental with the widespread trafficking of black African slaves elites throughout the Arab Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 619 and European empires embraced a color hierarchy that favored lighter skinned people over the darker hues of subSaharan Africans and their descendents on other continents A clear pattern of legislating these hier archies emerges in the EuroAtlantic regimes over the course of the early modern period generally in response to growing populations of freed for mer slaves and their descendents in any particular population Islamic law grounded in the Prophets sayings and life takes no notice of racial distinctions and subsequent Muslim legal experts rejected the notion that black Africans were especially destined for slavery Still within the greater Islamic world a color hierarchy developed so that lighter skinned slaves were given preferential treatment while black slaves were often given the most menial tasks The Spanish crown officially banned Jews Moors foreigners and heretics from settling in its American colonies With the exception of clerics and common soldiers only fullblooded Castilians with testimo nials by six witnesses notarized by three notaries could receive the royal license to emigrate In 1542 the Spanish crown banned the enslavement of Native Americans on the grounds that they were vassals thus paving the way for exclusive enslavement of blacks Spanish colonial leaders passed regulations designed to prevent racial mixing between Indians and blacks and eventually to reduce upward mobility of nonwhites In seventeenth century Cuba for example free people of color were supposed to live under the supervision of a patron In both Mexico City and Cuba they were not allowed to wear gold silk cloaks or other finery or to carry arms unless under certain circumstances Over the course of the eighteenth century as the plantation economy became central to many English Dutch and French colonies local and royal governments also instituted laws designed to prevent racial mixing and the social advancement of nonwhites English colonial slave codes expanded the metropolitan notion of petit treason whereby murder by a subordinate such as wife child servant or appren tice of a person in legitimate authority over him or her became analogous to treason against the state to apply to slaves actions against all whites whether slaveholders or not Particularly following the Seven Years War 175663 the colonial government of St Domingue issued numerous restrictions against the social advancement of free people of color reflect ing the growing wealth and status of some of them the law of freedom manumission lawsuits maronnage If the legal condition of slavery varied widely in the early modern world so did free status Like Roman and Islamic law Spanish law considered slavery to be contrary to nature The section of the Siete Partidas pertaining to manumission opens with the words All creatures of the world naturally Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 620 the cambridge world history of slavery love and desire liberty especially men who have authority over others and in general those who are of noble heart The French Freedom Principle implies the universal desirability of free status Yet throughout the early modern world nearly all societies were divided hierarchically with privileges accorded to those of higher rank or in certain associations such as guilds Achieving free status in these societies did not therefore translate into universal equality It is worthwhile to distinguish between freedom pursued individually for a single person or a family and slavery rejected outright as an institu tion through collective action Individual manumission tended to reinforce the system of slavery as a whole by reinscribing the master or the state as the grantor of freedom and singling out particular slaves as worthy of free status Escape and particularly assisting slaves to escape into a territory outside the control of the slave regime whether to a community of maroons or a free state could destabilize the slave system but it still left other slaves behind Slave revolts necessarily tended to focus first on achieving the freedom of the participants though this goal expanded tremendously during the cataclysmic Haitian Revolution 17911804 The abolition movement which sought to eradicate slavery throughout the world gained momentum in the late eighteenth century but would not realize widespread success until the nineteenth century Manumission The older Mediterranean slave systems Roman Islamic Iberian offered many sanctioned means by which individual slaves might be manumitted that is freed from their owners control There is wide variation in Islamic manumission policy and practice In general the Quran lauds masters who free their slaves as a worthy act but does not require it Islamic law designates several categories of slaves that should be automatically freed upon the death of the master For example manumission is assured to any enslaved woman who has born her master a child umm walad or to slaves who were promised their freedom upon the masters death mudabbar though the master may rescind the latter arrangement at any time If a master dies in debt the repayment of debts supercedes the promise of emancipation Slaveowners found guilty of certain crimes such as invol untary manslaughter or intentionally breaking the Ramadan fast might be required to free a healthy fully owned slave as a form of expiation kaffara The correct formalization of Islamic manumission varied from state to state A standardized template from Timbuktu incorporated expres sions of piety Nineteenthcentury evidence from the African Sokoto caliphate suggests that a letter of manumission had to be witnessed and signed before a judge qadi to be valid Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 621 Under Aztec law slaves could be manumitted in various ways by means of a legal act through marriage to ones owner through selfpurchase or escape or by royal asylum In neighboring Texcoco escaped collared slaves could win their freedom by successfully entering the royal palace In Teotihuacan a local official the barrio ward calpulli had the power to free escaped slaves who reached him In most Atlantic slave societies at the outset of colonization masters had full authority to manumit their slaves as they saw fit But some regimes began to restrict this policy as the shift to plantation agriculture brought rapid increases in both the slave population and the free nonwhite pop ulation For example though the 1685 French Code Noir initially placed no restrictions upon manumission eighteenthcentury royal and colonial legislation severely hampered masters capacity to manumit their slaves through taxes and by requiring administrative permissions character wit nesses and so on Dutch colonial legislatures instituted similar restrictions during the eighteenth century beginning in 1733 One rationale for restrict ing manumission was to prevent unscrupulous masters from releasing slaves who could no longer work to become burdens on the colonial treasury or the churchs poorrelief system Yet a greater concern seems to have been a desire to maintain old systems of hierarchy and privilege Colonial admin istrators sought to prevent the disorders that occurred when slaves and free people of color could tap into colonial commerce to advance their station They tried to prevent not only theft and prostitution by which slaves might try to purchase their freedom but they also in some cases tried to block marketing activity and certain occupations to free people of color Even so white colonists themselves must have advanced the for tunes of their own mixedrace children especially in the Caribbean and Latin American colonies since by the late eighteenth century there existed a large free nonwhite population in many slave colonies Some of these free families of mixed descent had amassed property including slaves and land rivaling the wealth of many white planters In lateeighteenth century French St Domingue free people of color supported their own aging and impoverished freedmen Coartacion Although it does not appear in any Spanish royal legislation until the sev enteenth century the practice of coartacion selfpurchase by installments is in evidence since at least the sixteenth century in both Spanish and later and more rarely Portuguese America5 It may derive from the Islamic legal 5 Alejandro de la Fuente has dated the practice of coartacion at least to sixteenth century Slave Law and ClaimsMaking in Cuba The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited Law and History Review 22 2004 33969 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 622 the cambridge world history of slavery practice of katiba a contractual arrangement whereby a slave might pur chase his or her freedom in installments toward a fixed mutually agreed upon price Under Islamic law if the slave fell behind in payment the installments were forfeited to the master and if the contract was resumed it must begin again from the start Spanish coartacion Portuguese coartacao was very similar to both Islamic katiba and a form of conditional manumis sion spelled out in the Siete Partidas Once slaves and their masters agreed on a fixed purchase price the slave could make partial payments toward his or her freedom As soon as the purchase price was fixed the master could not sell or mortgage the slave for a higher price Moreover in some regions of Spanish America once slaves began making payments toward freedom they literally owned a portion of themselves and owed the master only a fraction of their labor for example seveneighths or one half Coartacion was especially prevalent in occupations where slaves had access to cash such as gold panning or shop keeping Surviving legal records make it clear that at least since the end of the eighteenth century and perhaps much earlier Spanish colonists accepted and affirmed the basic principles of coartacion that slaves who paid their value had the right to manumission that after receiving this amount the owner had the obligation to provide a letter of manumission that coartacion was a personal right that could not pass from mother to daughter for example and that after being set the price of a slave could not be changed for example an owner could not increase the price by alleging that he had taught the slave a trade By contrast coartacion did not emerge as a standard legally enforceable practice in the English Dutch or French Atlantic empires though selfpurchase certainly occurred especially in urban areas Escape and Marronage Of course slaves did not necessarily wait patiently for their masters to authorize their freedom or enter into contractual negotiations Many claimed their liberty by running away Selfliberation was obviously a threat to the whole slave system and so was punished severely especially in societies that depended heavily upon slave labor Spanish called escaped slaves cimarrones wild horses from which the French marrons and English maroons are derived European colonists attempted to prevent such flight through harsh punishments in 1520 the Cuban Licentiate ordered some captured maroons to be whipped and their ears cut off However slaves continued to escape with some establishing independent communities in the regions beyond Europeans control often sustaining themselves by raids on colonial or Indian villages throughout the sixteenth century The English privateer Francis Drake allied with maroons in 1572 to attack the Spanish in Panama prompting the local government to promulgate an Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 623 antimaroon code in 1574 which was extended to the whole of Spanish America in the Recopilacion de las Leyes do los Reinos de Indias in 1680 Through warfare some maroon communities came to pose a significant threat to certain European colonies in America and were able to negotiate treaties with their Eurodescended neighbors in Brazil Columbia Cuba Ecuador Hispaniola Jamaica Mexico and Suriname especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Such treaties typically recog nized the maroons freedom and territorial integrity and provided for their economic needs such as access to colonial marketplaces in exchange for the termination of all hostilities return of future runaways and aid in tracking them down Not all maroon societies achieved sufficient military success to force whites to treat with them and not all treaties were honored but such documents formed the basis of some African American states that have persisted to the present time By the late seventeenth century the French king Louis XIV had affirmed the maxim that setting foot on French soil freed a slave The Parlement of Paris Frances supreme court upheld this decision in 1759 Two years later Portugals enlightened Marquis de Pombal issued a law establishing the Freedom Principle for the metropole such that slaves who came to Portu gal from the colonies achieved their freedom and could not be compelled to return to the colonies English abolitionists won a court decision affirm ing the Freedom Principle for England in the Somerset decision of 1772 though slaves who willingly returned to the colonies faced the prospect of reenslavement The Dutch States General issued a similar ruling in 1776 affirming the freedom of slaves brought to the United Provinces For the Dutch freedmen however their condition would theoretically follow them back to the colonies provided they could offer proof of the means to earn a living and that the master could provide sufficient guarantees that the former slaves would never burden the colonial treasury The India Section of the Spanish Royal Council would free slaves resident in Spain in 1836 but it was not until 1861 that the Spanish crown would legislate the right of freedmen in Spain to return to the colonies and retain their free status there Several states sought to undermine their enemies by encouraging slaves to escape their freedom being guaranteed by the government Spanish American territory was often a safe haven to slaves under French Dutch or English control in the eighteenth century During the American Revo lution British armies offered freedom to those who joined royalist forces During his jihad against the king of Gobir 18048 Usuman dan Fodio founder of the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria offered freedom to all slaves who would flee to join his forces As the abolition movement took hold in the Northern United States and Britain these territories became a safe haven for escaped slaves at least until the midnineteenth century Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 624 the cambridge world history of slavery when legislative and judicial acts affirmed slaveholders property rights across state boundaries revolt revolution and abolition Slaves have taken up arms against their masters since ancient times Within the early modern Atlantic slave system slaves revolted in Africa on the transatlantic passage and in the Americas One recent study found 485 acts of violence by Africans against slave ships and their crews alone not including those that took place on land in Africa or the New World All of these actions were of course held to be illegal by the slaveholding regime though the slaves themselves no doubt held their own actions to be just Indeed it is likely that many Africans were illegally enslaved according to both African and EuroAmerican legal principles By the second half of the eighteenth century royal European mercan tilist policies which had prohibited colonists from trading with any but the mother country were undermined throughout the Atlantic world threatening the legal status of the slave trade Widespread smuggling unde pendable connections between Europe and America particularly in times of war and new ideas about economic growth all pressured Spanish French and British crowns to abandon their exclusive monopolistic slave trade policies At the same time abolitionists in North America where the slave population had stabilized demographically and Britain began to challenge the slave trade on humanitarian grounds and as more politically expedient than outright abolition of slavery itself Though this is not the place to detail the growth of the abolition movement in the Atlantic world it is important to recognize that some of its roots originated within the framework of colonial slave law Political Reorganization In the late eighteenth century the Spanish crown instituted important colonial administrative reforms that impacted the judiciary in its Ameri can colonies Until 1776 the legislative and judicial functions were con centrated in the viceroy governor of each Spanish colony However with the Instruccion de Regentes the king created a new administrative office the regent and assigned the viceroys judicial functions to the regent at least when the viceroy was absent As part of this rationalizing Enlighten ment reform the Spanish crown also streamlined the colonial court system replacing some hundreds of local judges corregidores and alcades mayors with a handful of royally appointed intendants At the same time of course thousands of British colonists in North America protested the taxation policies of the crown culminating in the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 625 War of American Independence and the establishment of the United States In the early stages of independence each former British colony established its own legal policies concerning slavery Vermont with fewer than thirty slaves in the entire colony was the first to expressly prohibit slavery in its 1777 constitution Three years later the Pennsylvania leg islature passed its Gradual Emancipation Act which provided that all children born to enslaved mothers would be held as indentured servants until their twentyeighth birthday upon which they would achieve their freedom Thus slavery would gradually be eliminated as the last genera tion of slaves reached maturity In other states such as Massachusetts and New Hampshire slaves successfully sued for their freedom on the basis of the state constitutional natural rights clauses all men are born free and equal When it came to the national Constitutional Convention in 1787 how ever Southern slaveholding states were able to hold out for important proslavery provisions For example the threefifths compromise Arti cle 1 Section 2 counted slaves as threefifths of a person for the purpose of governmental representation and taxes a federal ban on the importation of slaves was postponed until 1808 though there had been considerable support for such a provision at the outset of the War of Independence Article 1 Section 9 and Article 5 and a fugitiveslave clause required free states to deliver up those slaves who escaped into their borders Article 4 Section 2 Most US states including Connecticut Rhode Island Penn sylvania Delaware New Jersey Maryland North Carolina and Georgia went on to individually ban the importation of slaves before 1800 South Carolina had passed a series of temporary measures beginning in 1788 to prohibit the importation of slaves but this ban was repealed in 1803 due to political backlash Finally in 1808 a new federal law banning the importation of slaves went into effect coinciding with the British abolition of the slave trade Amelioration In Portugal between 1761 and 1773 the Marquis de Pombal instituted a series of reforms based on Enlightenment precepts designed to improve the conditions of slavery in the American colonies Yet it is not clear that royal legislation was enforced in Brazil Charles IV of Spain promoted the similarly humanitarian Codigo Negro in the Spanish American colonies in 1789 but it met with protests in Caracas Havana Bogata and Santo Domingo and had to be repealed within a few years Dutch Curacao always milder toward slaves than its harsher sister colony to the south Suriname introduced ameliorative regulations in 1789 and following a major slave revolt in 1795 took measures to reduce the number of runaways and prevent Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 626 the cambridge world history of slavery further uprisings In addition to receiving Sundays and holidays off slaves were to work only from 5 am to 11 am and 1 pm until sunset The law specified slaves minimum food and clothing allotments and prohibited the arming of slaves Suriname by contrast with its much higher slaveto white ratio continued to use harsher more sadistic punishments to control the slave population The humanitarian sentiments of the late eighteenth century led to reforms of punishment in the colonies Prisons or gaols were used increas ingly for white convicts Castration was eventually proscribed in Pennsylva nia Bermuda Jamaica New Jersey Georgia Virginia and North Carolina Many of these reforms were based in Europe and resisted by colonists In the early nineteenth century Dutch slaveholders in Suriname argued for the right to cut off their slaves head and mount it on a pole as a warning to others without first gaining governmental permission in defiance of new metropolitan measures The Legal Status of Slavery and the Haitian Revolution It is appropriate to conclude this summary of the early modern transfor mations of the law of slavery and freedom with an account of the Haitian Revolution because this event more than any other signals the transition from oldregime legal framework of slavery to the modern constitutional revolutionary antislavery nationstate Beginning with the largest slave revolt to date in the wealthiest American colony of the eighteenth century the slaves and free citizens of French St Domingue harnessed the opportu nities of the simultaneous French Revolution to fashion a new state ruled by former slaves and predicated on the abolition of slavery The key moments with regard to law came in 1789 with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen fashioned with assistance from American patriot Thomas Paine as the preamble to the new French constitution Colonists took advantage of the new political institutions to establish their own representative assemblies and to seek representation in the new national government in Paris Meanwhile free men of color the sons and grandsons of white planters and their black wives and concubines who had been socially promoted and were often slaveholders themselves grabbed the revolutionary moment to rectify their racial discrimination by demanding Parisian representation and overturning discriminatory laws Dissatisfied with the lackluster response in Paris the lightskinned mixed race merchant Vincent Oge returned to St Domingue where he tried to instigate an armed revolt among free people of color but not slaves White colonists put down his party and executed him in a most horrific manner This incident apparently embarrassed the Parisian legislature into Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 627 action On May 15 1791 the National Assembly voted to acknowledge equal political rights for free coloreds born of free parents Independently slaves in the northern plain of St Domingue near Cap Francais secretly organized the slave revolt that began in August 1791 Some insisted that they were fighting to uphold the law of the king of France whom it was rumored had abolished slavery but which the masters refused to acknowledge Others the majority of whom were recently captured in African warfare and only recently enslaved and brought to America claimed that they were subjects of the King of Kongo Most free people of color did not fight with the slaves unless they were overrun and had no choice at least until the National Assembly rescinded the equal rights declaration of May 15 This pushed free coloreds to consider an alliance with the slaves against the whites A year later progressive forces in Paris pushed through the declaration of April 4 1792 which now granted full citizenship to all free people regardless of color or status at birth an ironic return to the original provi sions of the 1685 Code Noir which had declared all freedmen as having the same rights as Frenchborn subjects As civil war and more general war in Europe and the Americas further destabilized Frances antiroyalist gov ernment in the metropole and the colonies the republican commissioners to St Domingue Sonthonax and Polverel desperately offered freedom to those slaves who would fight on behalf of the revolutionary government At first there were few takers They upped the ante by offering freedom to the soldiers wives and children Finally facing an imminent English invasion Sonthonax announced an unconditional general emancipation on August 29 1793 The Paris legislature affirmed Sonthonaxs emanci pation decree and extended it to all French territories on February 4 1794 Shortly after general emancipation was declared the rebellious general in theSpanisharmyformerslaveToussaintLouverturethrew hisconsiderable force behind the French republicans thus propelling his own rise to power Toussaints military success over the entire island driving back both the English and Spanish and finally expelling Sonthonax culminated in his 1801 constitution naming him governor for life and antagonizing his French counterpart Napoleon Bonaparte who soon thereafter declared himself consul for life The story of Napoleons treacherous orders to his brotherinlaw Leclerc to capture Toussaint and restore slavery and racial segregation to the French Caribbean is well known Toussaint was captured and imprisoned in the mountainous French Jura where he died of exposure The colored officers in Leclercs party realized that they were in danger of being suppressed once again and switched their allegiance to the formerly enslaved insurgents On January 1 1804 their leader Dessalines Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 628 the cambridge world history of slavery proclaimed independence for the new state of Haiti which was named with the original aboriginal word for the island This survey of slavery freedom and the law in the Atlantic world demon strates that the legal history of slavery cannot be studied divorced from the social and political realms If as the anthropologists say law is custom mar shaled by a societys officers of force the study of law necessarily brings us to consider the changes in political order Slavery envisioned and regulated at the outset of the early modern era throughout the Atlantic as an exten sion of patriarchal personal power became the symbolic anathema to the new republican ideologies of the Revolutionary era As the intense com mercial activity generated by sustained contact between Europe Africa and the Americas in the early modern period created opportunities for some both enslaved and free to rise above their initial station some mer chants and colonists began to challenge the old legal order that prevented them from enjoying the political privileges of their wealth Similarly a portion of fortunate slaves who found themselves with access to commer cial activity in urban areas were able to make use of custom coartacion to purchase their own freedom and that of their families However as the proportion of people of African descent grew larger in any given commu nity whites looked for ways to prevent slave revolts and to inhibit free blacks and people of mixed lineage from competing for wealth prestige and political power Finally the mechanisms of the judicial system allowed those who began to question the very justice of slavery to challenge the institution in courts of law whose decisions in turn inscribed increasing territories of freedom Wars of liberation secured by legislative and con stitutional texts made possible the establishment of new states based on the principles of legal antislavery a wider franchise and legalized racial segregation further reading Alvares dAlamada Andre Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea trans P E H Hair Africa Digitization Project httpdigitiallibrarywiscedu1711dl AfricanaAlmada01 Benton Laura Law and Colonial Cultures Legal Regimes in World History 1400 1900 Cambridge 2002 Blumenthal Debra Sclaves Molt Fortes Senyors Invalts Sex Lies and Paternity Suits in Late Medieval Spain in Women Text and Authority in the Early Mod ern Spanish World Edited by Marta Vicente and Luis Corteguera Aldershot 2003 BranaShute Rosemary and Randy J Sparks eds Paths to Freedom Manumission in the Atlantic World Columbia SC 2009 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slavery freedom and the law in the atlantic world 629 Brooks James F Captives and Cousins Slavery Kinship and Community in the Southwest Boarderlands Chapel Hill NC 2002 Cope R Douglas The Limits of Racial Domination Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City 16601720 Madison WI 1994 Davis David Brion The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 17701823 New York 1975 Fisher Humphrey J Slavery in the History of Muslim Black Africa London 2001 Fuente Alejandro de la Slave Law and ClaimsMaking in Cuba The Tannen baum Debate Revisited Law and History Review 22 2004 33969 Garrigus John D Before Haiti Race and Citizenship in French Saint DomingueNew York 2006 GordonReed Annette The Hemingses of Monticello An American FamilyNew York 2008 Goslinga Cornelis Ch The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas 16801791 Edited by Maria J L van Yperen Assen 1985 Goveia Elsa V The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century London 1970 Hawthorne Walter The Production of Slaves Where There Was No State The GuineaBissau Region 14501815 Slavery and Abolition 20 1999 97 124 Hebrard Jean Hebe Maria Mattos and Rebecca J Scott eds Ecrire lesclavage Ecrire la liberte Pratiques administratives notariales et juridiques dans les societes esclavagistes et postesclavagistes Approche comparative Bresil Antilles Louisiane Cahiers du Bresil contemporain 5354 2003 Henriques Isabel Castro and Lous SalaMolins eds Deraison esclavage et droit Les fondements ideologiques et juridiques de la traite negreiere et de lesclavage Paris 2002 Hoebel E Adamson The Political Organization and LawWays of the Comanche Indians Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 54 1940 1 149 Hunwick John and Eve Troutt Powell The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam Princeton NJ 2002 Kagan Richard L Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile 15001700 Chapel Hill NC 1981 Law Robin Legal and Illegal Enslavement in West Africa in the Context of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade in Ghana in Africa and the World Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen Edited by Toyin Falola Trenton NJ 2003 51333 Mellafe Rolando Negro Slavery in America Berkeley CA 1975 Mirow M C Latin American Law A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America Austin TX 2004 Morris Thomas D Southern Slavery and the Law 16191860 Chapel Hill NC 1996 Offner Jerome A Law and Politics in Aztec Texcoco Cambridge 1983 Ogle Gene Slaves of Justice Saint Domingues Executioners and the Production of Shame Historical Reflections 29 2003 27593 Paton Diana Punishment Crime and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth Century Jamaica Journal of Social History 34 2001 92354 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 630 the cambridge world history of slavery Peabody Sue There Are No Slaves in France The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime New York 1996 Peabody Sue and Keila Grinberg eds Slavery Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World New York 2007 Slavery Abolition Special Issue on Free Soil 32 June 2011 Price Richard ed Maroon Societies Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas Baltimore MD 1979 Rodney Walter A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 15451800 Oxford 1970 Schwarz Philip J Twice Condemned Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia 17051865 Baton Rouge LA 1988 Slave Laws in Virginia Athens GA 1996 Schwartz Stuart B Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges 16091751 Berkeley CA 1973 Watson Alan Slave Law in the Americas Athens GA 1989 Zysberg Andre Galeres et galeriens en France a la fin du XVIIe siecle une image du pouvoir royal a lˆage classique Criminal Justice History 1 1980 49116 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 25 TRANSATLANTIC SLAVERY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD WEST AFRICA 145018501 joseph e inikori 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 While overseas trade and market activity may not have comprised the major por tion of all colonial economic activity the importance of the market was that of improving resource allocation We argue that while subsistence agriculture pro vided an important base to colonial incomes and was a substantial part of average per capita income changes in incomes and improvements in welfare came largely through overseas trade and other market activities Not only did improvements in productivity occur primarily through market activity but the pattern of settlement and production was determined by market forces This pattern changed slowly and unevenly spreading from the waterways and distribution centers along the Atlantic seaboard into the interior2 1 An earlier version of this essay entitled Changing Commodity Composition of Imports into West Africa 16501850 A Window into the Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on African Societies was presented at the UNESCOGhana International Conference on the African Slave Trade Accra August 30September 2 2004 2 James F Shepherd and Gary M Walton Shipping Maritime Trade and the Economic Development of Colonial North America Cambridge 1972 p 25 650 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 651 The domestic market thus created a third round of specialization local and interregional within the domestic economy Again the study of the process in the United States by Douglass North is illustrative The growth of cotton production for export to Atlantic markets England in particu lar from 1790 to 1860 stimulated the development of the tripartite inter regional division of labor that was central to the evolution of the US domestic market Brazil and Spanish America followed the same pattern The economies of western Europe that continued to have extensive sub sistence sectors in the midfifteenth century were similarly transformed This typical operation of Adam Smiths ventforsurplus mechanism was at the heart of market development and the spread of the market economy in the Atlantic world between the midfifteenth and the midnineteenth centuries The cumulative buildup of the process ultimately induced invest ment in transportation transatlantic and domestic the construction of sea transportation facilities wellequipped harbors the building of steam and steel ships and the construction of turnpike roads canals and railroads By the late nineteenth century the end result of all this was the establishment of an integrated Atlantic economy with a single Atlantic market linking together the domestic markets in the region3 One major region of the Atlantic world Western Africa was left behind in this development of markets and the market economy during the period The main focus of this chapter is to explain why As argued elsewhere4 the growth of Atlantic commerce which was at the center of the process was a function of transatlantic slaving that brought diasporic Africans and their descendants as forced specialized largescale producers of commodities for Atlantic commerce in the Americas We propose to demonstrate in this chapter that the peculiar characteristics of the trade in captives exported for enslavement in the Americas explain in the main the stagnation of market development in Western Africa between 1650 and 1850 This retardation of market development meant that the economies of the region remained dominated by subsistence production production for direct consumption by the producer as opposed to production for market 3 Douglass C North The Economic Growth of the United States 17901860 Englewood Cliffs NJ 1961 Joseph E Inikori Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England A Study in International Trade and Economic Development Cambridge 2002 pp 20110 213 At the peak of market development in one of late medieval Europes most commercialized economies England a detailed study of the most commercialized manors in the unusually commercialized region of London shows that only 45 percent of seigneurial production in 1300 was marketed Bruce M S Campbell Measuring the Commercialisation of Seigneurial Agriculture c1300 in Richard H Britnell and Bruce M S Campbell eds A Commercialising Economy England 1086 to c1300 Manchester 1995 pp 17493 Because peasant production was much less commercialized this is a clear indication that subsistence production was still very dominant in west European agriculture on the eve of the medieval crisis of subsistence and must have remained largely so by the midfifteenth century 4 Inikori Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England pp 156214 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 652 the cambridge world history of slavery exchange For this reason they were not properly speaking integrated into the circuit of production for market exchange in the Atlantic world in the midnineteenth century despite the fact that Africans as labor capital and currency shaped the terms of integration over four hundred years5 It will be shown that the region had been part of the market development process for the two hundred years from the midfifteenth to the midseventeenth centuries when European demand was largely for African products The change came when European traders shifted their demand decisively to captives The reintegration process resumed only in the middle decades of the nineteenth century following the ending of the trade in captives and the growth of commodity production for Atlantic commerce the socalled legitimate trade For purposes of clear understanding a summary statement of our method may be helpful Information on economies and societies in West Africa in the centuries immediately preceding the arrival of the Portuguese in the midfifteenth century6 when combined with later developments provides a useful foundation for examining the impact of the European presence on the process of socioeconomic development in West Africa in the centuries that followed Rather surprisingly empirically based rigorous analyses linking pre and postPortuguese developments are rare in the literature especially in the field of socioeconomic development In partic ular despite the large amount of increasingly sophisticated research on the transatlantic slave trade in the last several decades not much has been done by way of rigorous empirical analysis linking what is known about the pre slavetrade economies and societies and the socioeconomic and political processes of the slave trade era For this reason the role of the transatlantic slave trade in the development of market economies in West Africa has not been properly understood The argument that the transatlantic slave trade stimulated market development in Western Africa is not uncommon in the literature In an article that contains much useful information on the development of commerce in West Africa Marion Johnson seems to imply that the transatlantic slave trade helped to extend the preceding ongoing process of market development in West Africa She claims that a substantial part of the commodity currencies imported to pay for export captives remained in circulation and was employed in payment for local products thereby helping to expand and extend geographically the market economy in West 5 Richard Drayton The Collaboration of Labor Slaves Empires and Globalizations in the Atlantic World ca 16001850 in A G Hopkins ed Globalization in World History New York 2002 p 100 6 The early volumes of the UNESCO General History of Africa contain particularly helpful infor mation especially the various chapters in D T Niane ed General History of Africa IV Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century London 1984 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 653 Africa According to Johnson increases in the import of these currencies and the growth of the market economy followed the growth of the slave trade all of which was halted by the abolition of the slave trade The growth of currency imports and the commercializing process only resumed again in the nineteenth century with the rapid expansion of palmproduce exports7 Somewhat similar claims concerning the role of the slave trade in the process of economic development in southeastern Nigeria were made by David Northrup in the late 1970s8 More recently Ralph Austen and Dennis Cordell have argued that although Africa traded with Europe after 1500 African economies were much less radically transformed than those in the Americas and Asia because African economies were largely protected by the physical environment against direct competition with European economies except in the southern regions where whites settled Austen and Cordell believe that this absence of direct competition allowed continued growth in the early modern period but may be linked to the major crises of the modern period Austen and Cordell view the slave trade only in terms of physical victimization of Africa through the removal of millions of its people but not in terms of its impact on the process of socioeconomic transformation9 A combination of evidence on the preslavetrade economies and soci eties in West Africa and statistical data from the slave trade leads to conclu sions that are contrary to these claims and arguments This chapter based on ongoing research employs longrun changes in the commodity com position of European imports into West Africa along with evidence on the preceding ongoing process of market development in the region to show that among other things the slave trade had farreaching adverse effects on the process of market development in West Africa effects that were largely responsible for the rather low level of commercialization of West African economies in the late nineteenth century relative to the major economies in the Americas and Asia at the time The structure of the chapter may be briefly stated First we present evidence showing the growth and direction of interregional and intercontinental trade in West Africa in the centuries preceding the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and the impact this had over time on the expansion of market economies as production for market exchange grew at the expense of subsistence production In the second part secular changes in the commodity composition of European 7 Marion Johnson The Cowrie Currencies of West Africa Part II Journal of African History 11 1970 3489 8 David Northrup Trade Without Rulers PreColonial Economic Development in Southeastern Nigeria Oxford 1978 9 Ralph A Austen and Dennis D Cordell Trade Transportation and Expanding Economic Networks Saharan Caravan Commerce in the Era of European Expansion 15001900 in Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola eds Black Business and Economic Power Rochester NY 2002 p 108 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 654 the cambridge world history of slavery imports into West Africa are deployed to show the adverse impact of the slave trade on the preceding ongoing commercializing process It is pertinent to state from the outset that Western Africas overseas trade statistics show two major longterm changes in the four hundred years from 1450 to 1850 One was in what the region exported by way of the Atlantic trade and the other in the things it imported As is well known in the first two hundred years of West Africas Atlantic commerce the region exported mainly products derived from its natural resources such as gold ivory wood pepper hides and skins and some cotton cloths A few captives were also exported but their value constituted a very small percentage of the total value of the regions seaborne exports But from 1650 to 1850 the export of human captives became increasingly dominant By the late eighteenth century the value of captives exported was more than 90 percent of the total with African products making up less than 10 percent10 What is not well known is that the longterm changes in the composition of exports were matched by longrun changes in the commodity composition of imports during the period The discussion in this chapter is conducted with emphasis on Lower Guinea from modern Ghana to southeastern Nigeria i The center of gravity for the prePortuguese economies and societies in West Africa was located in the savanna interior usually called the Sudan11 that part of West Africa lying between the Sahara to the north the forest lands to the south the Nile region to the east and the Senegambian forest lands to the west The major medieval and early modern states Ancient Ghana Mali Songhay and KanemBorno were located there The evi dence shows that the early socioeconomic and political developments in the region centered on the Niger Bend that stretch of territory watered by the River Niger between where the river takes a sharp northward turn near the modern city of Segu and where it enters modern Nigeria It would seem that environmental conditions favored population concentration in the Niger Bend as the desiccation of the Sahara forced a southward popu lation movement As John Hunwick has shown there is clear evidence of urban population in the Inland Delta of the Niger Bend by 250 BC which developed over the first millennium AD to become the city of Jenne12 10 Richard Bean A Note on the Relative Importance of Slaves and Gold in West African Exports Journal of African History 15 1974 3516 Ernst van den Boogaart The Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World 160090 Estimates of Trends in Composition and Value Journal of African History 33 1992 36985 Joseph E Inikori West Africas Seaborne Trade 17501850 Volume Structure and Implications in G Liesegang H Pasch and A Jones eds Figuring African Trade Berlin 1986 pp 4988 11 This must not be confused with the modern state of Sudan 12 John O Hunwick Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire AlSadis Tarikh alsudan down to 1613 and Other Contemporary Documents Leiden 1999 pp xxivxxv Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 655 The evidence indicates that by the time of Mali and Songhay from the midthirteenth century to 1591 much of West Africas total population was in the territories that formed part of those two empires Based on evidence from Arabic sources D T Niane has estimated the population of the Mali Empire to be 4050 million with its capital Niani having one hundred thousand inhabitants in the fourteenth century13 Given Nianes estimate of the total population of the entire African continent at 200 million in Ibn Battutas life time the fourteenth century14 Mali had between onefifth and onequarter of Africas population in the fourteenth century according to Nianes figures This suggests that the bulk of West Africas population and the major centers of highpopulation density were located in the inte rior savanna the Sudan in the first half of the second millennium AD Thus possibly with some exaggeration an Arab visitor Mahmud Kati reported that there were four hundred towns in the Mali Empire15 In the late sixteenth century the three Niger Bend towns of Jenne Timbuktu and Gao were the largest in West Africa Based on a latesixteenthcentury census of Gao which gave a figure of 7626 houses excluding the straw huts in the suburbs Cissoko estimates the towns population at nearly one hundred thousand that of Timbuktu during the reign of Askiya Dawud 154983 he puts at eighty thousand and Jenne thirty to forty thousand16 These relatively high population densities the ease of movement arising from the openness of the savanna the availability of river transportation over long stretches of the Niger and the security provided by the govern ments of Ancient Ghana Mali and Songhay over extensive territories17 all these combined to make the interior savanna the center of manufac turing and trade in West Africa down to the beginning of the seventeenth century Differences in population size and density and differing natural resource endowments created socioeconomic conditions that encouraged trade between the interior savanna and the forest lands of the Atlantic coast and its hinterland trade that was focused on the major population centers in the savanna and controlled by the merchants located there Two forest products kola nuts and gold dominated the trade These were exchanged for the manufactures of the interior savanna Internal factors encouraging the growth of interregional trade were strongly reinforced by the growth of 13 D T Niane Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion in Niane ed General History of Africa IV 156 14 D T Niane Conclusion in Niane ed General History of Africa IV 684 15 Niane Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion p 156 16 S M Cissoko The Songhay from the 12th to the 16th Century in Niane ed General History of Africa IV 206 17 According to Hunwick the Songhay Empire extended over 1400000 sq km 500000 square miles and its capital Gao had between 38000 and 76000 people in the late sixteenth century not counting the squatting population living in huts no doubt in the outskirts as in modern Timbuktu Hunwick Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire p xlix The population figures may be compared with Cissokos mentioned earlier Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 656 the cambridge world history of slavery trade with Saharan communities and across the Sahara to North Africa and the Middle East both of which trades were again based in the commercial and manufacturing centers in the interior savanna Thus apart from the domestic products of the interior savanna which were largely manufac tured products the savanna merchants also reexported to the forest lands products imported from the Sahara and from the Mediterranean the latter including European and East Asian products The trade in kola nuts was extensive although its volume and value cannot be quantified As the empires of the Sudan became increasingly Islamic in the first half of the second millennium AD the demand for kola the only stimulant Muslims are allowed to consume increased As an indication of the importance of kola nuts in the social life of the Sudan the gifts Askiya Dawud reigned from 1549 to 1583 sent to the chief of his servile dependents on a rice estate in Dendi at harvest time included a thousand kola nuts18 Kola nuts could be found in the forest lands from Liberia to modern Ghana but in the preslavetrade period the Asante forest lands were the main production center the same region that became the main gold producer after the fourteenth century The growth of demand for gold in Europe in the fourteenth century was added to that for kola nuts as the former was passed on to the Sudan by North African traders Some captives were also exported to and across the Sahara Because the yearly numbers were small the main trade in products was not seriously disrupted The merchants of the Niger Bend responded to the increased opportunities by developing a regular trade route from Jenne to Begho on the edge of the Akan forest in Asante Ivor Wilks suggests that Niger Bend traders from Jenne colonized Begho in about 140019 Ac cording to Hunwick after the establishment of the JenneBegho trade route in the fourteenth century other members of the trading diaspora advanced from the Niger Bend to Hausaland and by the late fifteenth century had opened up a traverse route from the Volta Basin to Hausaland supplying the Hausa states with both gold dust and the much soughtafter cola nut20 Thus by the fifteenth century a network of interregional trade cen tered in the Niger Bend linked together the whole of the interior savanna to which the forest lands from Senegambia to southeastern Nigeria were connected directly and indirectly21 For a comprehensive view four regional 18 Hunwick Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire pp liiliv The rest of the gifts were a slab of rock salt a black tunic and red cap and a piece of black broadcloth 19 Ivor Wilks A Medieval Trade Route from the Niger to the Gulf of Guinea Journal of African History 3 1962 3378 20 Hunwick Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire p xxix 21 Niane Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion fig 611 p 155 Niane Relationships and Exchanges among the Different Regions in Niane ed General History of Africa IV fig 251 p 626 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 657 economies were involved In the context of West African history the inte rior savanna or the Sudan was at the center of the network and then the forest lands to the south the Saharan economies and the economies of the Mediterranean and North Africa The last two regions were important markets for the products of the two West African regions the forest and the Sudan and for the import goods they supplied The Saharan economies supplied two critical products salt and copper Salt from Teghazza and Ijil or Idjil was distributed to all parts of the interior savanna where little or no salt was produced but not very much went to the forest lands that had more local production especially on the Atlantic coast Copper from Takedda was distributed in both the Sudan and the forest lands The account of the fourteenthcentury traveler Ibn Battuta shows that Takedda producers shaped the copper into thick and thin bars The thick bars were exchanged at the rate of one gold mithkal 425 grams to four hundred bars and the thin at one mithkal to six or seven hundred bars The copper bars served as currency for small purchases in the interior savanna and in several parts of the forest lands22 From the Mediterranean and North Africa came Euro pean textiles and East Asian cowries Cowries were particularly important as currency in the interior savanna and the forest lands Because of their importance in the Songhay economy the government intervened in their import forbidding their import from Morocco where they were very expensive insisting they be imported from Egypt or Mecca where they were cheaper23 Marion Johnsons account of the spread of the cowrie currency in West Africa provides some helpful evidence on the growth of interregional trade and the evolution of the market economy in West Africa The earliest currency area of the cowrie which we can trace in West Africa she nar rates was the upper and middle Niger in the medieval period24 By the thirteenth century the area covered by the cowrie currency included the city of Ghana and in the fourteenth century the Mali empire with its eastward extension to Gao by the early sixteenth century it included Timbuctu and there is no reason to doubt that cowries were in continuous use at least in the major markets of the middle Niger Niger Bend area from at least the eleven century when El Bekri noted them as imports to Kougha From the sixteenth century onwards cowries were in use in Timbuctu and Jenne and probably also in the Bambara country which occupied the western part of the old Mali empire25 22 Niane Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion p 170 Niane Relationships and Exchanges pp 61819 23 Hunwick Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire p liii 24 Marion Johnson The Cowrie Currencies of West Africa Part I Journal of African History 11 1970 32 25 Ibid p 33 According to Johnson cowries were never established as currency in the area of modern Senegal Gambia Portuguese Guinea Sierra Leone or Liberia nor in any but the most northern part of modern Guinea and only in north and northeast Ivory Coast Cowries reached Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 658 the cambridge world history of slavery There is strong indication that the export trade in kola nuts and gold between the Akan forest lands and the Niger Bend through Begho ex tended the cowrie currency area to the Gold Coast and from there to Whydah Ardra and Benin several decades before the arrival of the Por tuguese in these places The Portuguese therefore simply increased the supply of a currency that was already in use in these lands Johnson sug gests that the longdistance trade between the coast and the Niger Bend was based on a goldcowrie exchange rate that had remained constant since the fourteenth century26 there may have been a single goldcowrie currency system from the Niger Bend to the Guinea Coast some three centuries or more before Dupuiss time early nineteenth century This would strengthen the suggestion that cowries were already in use on the Benin coast when the Portuguese arrived27 The cowriecurrency area did not extend to southeastern Nigeria28 where metal currency copper and iron was in use It is clear enough from the foregoing evidence that the evolution of the market economy in West Africa that had been in place since medieval times had made considerable progress by the late fifteenth century with inter connected networks of interregional trade centered in the Niger Bend and served by relatively welldeveloped currency systems The major regions linked together commercially had their own subregions Trade between these subregions and local trade within them expanded over time as they were stimulated by developments associated with the larger system of inter regional trade The evidence indicates that the process of specialization which fueled the growth of trade and the expansion of the market econ omy was linked strongly to population growth and longdistance trade The growth of population in the Niger Bend gave rise to the development of large urban centers whose needs created markets for imports and local prod ucts especially foodstuffs Urban merchants specializing in longdistance trade urban and rural producers of export products manufactures and primary products state functionaries engaged in defining and protecting property rights urban religious clerics and scholars all these specialists offered domestic markets whose growth over time stimulated the growth of specialized producers for the domestic markets in West Africa In the Niger Bend with a long history of population growth and urban development there is evidence of agriculture moving increasingly from the Hausaland in the first half of the eighteenth century and the rest of modern Northern Nigeria in the nineteenth century 26 Johnson The Cowrie Currencies Part II pp 3323 Johnson talks of large imports of cowries into the Gold Coast in the sixteenth century p 333 As will be shown later by the late seventeenth century little or no cowries were imported into the Gold Coast 27 Johnson The Cowrie Currencies Part I p 36 28 Ibid p 35 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 659 subsistence sector into the market economy by the fifteenth century To illustrate the staple food of the large population of Songhays capital city of Gao comprised millet guinea corn and rice Whereas the rice needed by the state functionaries numbering in the thousands was procured in large quantities by the Askiyas directly from their own personal estates along the banks of the Niger29 the rest of the citys huge population estimated at about a hundred thousand in the late sixteenth century as mentioned earlier must have offered a large market for the private rice farms that dotted the Niger banks On the other hand the millet and guinea corn were brought from territories at least a hundred miles south of Gao30 Like the other regions of the longdistance trade network inland rivers and canoes played a major role in the transportation of goods and traders in the Niger Bend According to Robert Smith In the eleventh century ElBekri implies that the Sorko fishermen of the Upper Niger bend carried merchants and mercandise along the river section of the route from RaselMa to Gao and in the fifteenth century the Songhay used the river Niger to take salt and cereals to their farflung provinces31 Southeastern Nigeria constitutes the eastern limit of the forest lands connected directly and indirectly to the networks of interregional trade centered in the savanna interior Because the adverse impact of the trans atlantic slave trade on its developing prePortuguese interregional trade is well demonstrated by documented evidence already organized it is pertinent to treat the region in some detail The Aro a subgroup of the Igbo people were central to the regions developing longdistance trade The joint research of Dike and Ekejiuba presents considerable information on their activities as the interior middlemen32 in the interregional trade that had been growing since the fifteenth century Evidence from research going back to the 1930s shows that southeastern Nigeria was part of a long distance trade already well established by the ninth century AD33 Analysis of the archaeological finds at IgboUkwu radiocarbon dated to the ninth century indicates that the Igbo heartland was at this time involved in trade with northern and northwestern Nigeria a trade that ultimately connected 29 Hunwick Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire pp lli 30 Ibid p l 31 Robert Smith The Canoe in West African History Journal of African History 11 1970 523 32 Kenneth Onwuka Dike and Felicia Ekejiuba The Aro of SouthEastern Nigeria 16501980 A Study of SocioEconomic Formation and Transformation in Nigeria Ibadan 1990 33 E J Alagoa LongDistance Trade and States in the Niger Delta Journal of African History 11 1970 31929 David Northrup The Growth of Trade Among the Igbo before 1800 Journal of African History 13 1972 21736 A E Afigbo PreColonial Trade Links Between Southeastern Nigeria and the Benue Valley Journal of African Studies 4 1977 11939 A J H Latham Currency Credit and Capitalism on the Cross River in the PreColonial Era Journal of African History 12 1971 599605 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 660 the cambridge world history of slavery the region through the merchants of the Niger Bend to the trade across the Sahara to North Africa and the Middle East34 On the other hand Alagoas research shows that the peopling of the east ern Niger Delta had been going on long before the arrival of the Portuguese in the region in the late fifteenth century In the prePortuguese period the eastern Niger Delta communities traded regularly along the Niger to the Igbo kingdom of Aboh to Onitsha and as far North as the Igala kingdom of Idah There was also an eastwest trade linking the eastern delta to the western delta whose main port Warri was linked through the Benin River to the lagoon ports of the Ijebu country and in all probability to Lagos as well Among the goods traded in the eastwest trade were cotton cloths produced in several of the communities linked together including Ijebu and the Benin kingdom Canoes being the main means of transportation in the northsouth and eastwest trade of the Niger Delta communities in the eastern delta endowed with the appropriate natural resources suitable trees specialized in canoe production giving rise to a flourishing trade in the sale of canoes35 Further growth of interregional trade in southeastern Nigeria from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century was associated to an important extent with population growth in the hinterland According to Dike and Ekejiuba the period of Nri hegemony in Igboland ninth to fifteenth century what may be called the priesthood period of Igbo history was characterized by a long reign of peace during which iron production developed trade increased agriculture prospered and population expanded36 This popu lation growth gave rise to interregional migration and interregional dif ferentiation in resource endowments The Igbo heartland located in the savanna to the north being the area of early settlement became more densely populated and therefore had a higher ratio of population to land as compared with places to the south especially the Cross River valley area The relatively high ratio of population to land combined with the natural endowment of iron and coal to encourage the development of nonagri cultural activities in northern Igboland These nonagricultural activities included iron production manufacture of metal products cloth produc tion and trade They stimulated considerable trade between the northern Igbo and their neighbors The Atlantic coast communities were linked to this growing trade of the fifteenth sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The movement of popu lation from the hinterland to the river valleys and the Atlantic coast was intricately connected with the expansion of population in the hinterland 34 Thurstan Shaw Archaeological Discoveries The Example of IgboUkwu in Thurston Shaw ed Discovering Nigerias Past Ibadan 1975 pp 4757 35 Alagoa LongDistance Trade pp 3235 36 Dike and Ekejiuba The Aro of SouthEastern Nigeria pp 11415 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 661 and the growing trade between the hinterland the river valleys and the Atlantic coast In fact Dike and Ekejiuba suggest that the early rise of the Aro as traders was a product of this prePortuguese interregional trade and their founding of Arochukwu in the seventeenth century was originally intended to locate them strategically as middlemen in the interregional trade between the river valleys and coastal communities and those in the interior37 The extent of this interregional trade which connected the coastal com munities to the hinterland is indicated by the observations of the early Portuguese who were in the region Duarte Pacheco Pereira who was in the eastern Delta between 1505 and 1508 described in his book the communi ties he encountered in the combined estuary of the New Calabar Kalabari and Bonny Rivers At the mouth of this river within the creek above mentioned Rio Real is a very large village of some 2000 inhabitants where much salt is made The bigger canoes here made from a single trunk are the largest in the Ethiopias of Guinea some of them are large enough to hold eighty men and they come from a hundred leagues or more up this river bringing yams in large quantities which in this district are very good and nourishing38 The large population of this very large village Bonny by this early point in time is an indication of the extent of economic activity in preAtlantic trade and of the level of trade linking it to the interior The preEuropean trade in southeastern Nigeria involved the use of several local currencies Using locally produced iron northern Igbo manu facturers produced an iron currency in the form of small hoes called anyu These were used at the Bende market39 and in all probability in other parts of southeastern Nigeria as well The large quantity of copper wristlets and other copper products found at IgboUkwu would suggest that cop per rods were part of the currencies in use at this time40 The growth of the interregional trade in the fifteenth sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries mentioned earlier must have generated great demand for these currencies 37 Ibid p 117 38 Duarte Pacheco Pereira Esmeraldo De Situ Orbis translated and edited by George H T Kimble London 1937 p 132 Kimbles analysis of the evidence indicates that the Esmeraldo was written by Pereira between 1505 and 1508 pp xvixvii The village mentioned is clearly Bonny According to Ardener the Portuguese league was four miles Edwin Ardener Documentary and Linguistic Evidence for the Rise of the Trading Polities between Rio del Rey and Cameroons 15001650 in I M Lewis ed History and Social Anthropology London 1968 p 84 39 Dike and Ekejiuba The Aro of SouthEastern Nigeria pp 2378 40 As mentioned earlier copper rod currency was already in use in parts of the upper Niger River in the midfourteenth century as was observed by Ibn Battuta See also Latham Currency Credit and Capitalism p 602 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 662 the cambridge world history of slavery ii Between the 1440s and 1480s the Portuguese explored the Atlantic coast of Africa The exploration went handinhand with the establishment of trade relations with the coastal communities in the forest lands As is well known a major motivation for the exploration was the growth of the demand for gold in Europe that was mentioned earlier West African gold had met that demand through the intermediation of North African traders After the flamboyant display of Malis imperial gold wealth by Mansa Musa during his pilgrimage in the 1320s the Portuguese state committed resources to the development of a direct seaborne route to the sources of West Africas gold It is not surprising therefore that the main product traded by the Portuguese and their European rivals in the first two hundred years of European commerce in West Africa was gold Other African products such as pepper hides and skins and ivory were also traded A few captives were taken directly in raids or purchased for shipment to Portugal and to islands off the African coast Because their numbers were limited in these early decades like the one thousand to two thousand sent across the Sahara earlier the adverse impact on production and trade was minimal Hence European trade in African products during the first two hundred years provided an additional stimulus to the preceding ongoing development of markets and the market economy in West Africa Because of its gold wealth and the level of market development associ ated with the preceding trade in gold and kola nuts the early development of markets and the market economy caused by European trade probably reached the highest level in the area of modern Ghana With the addition of European purchases on the coast the Akan gold trade expanded phe nomenally in the late fifteenth century Most of the gold was produced in and around the forested PraOfin basin In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the region supplied more than half of the gold exported from the coastal ports and the inland commercial centers like Begho There is clear evidence that in the two hundred years from the midfifteenth to the midseventeenth century many new towns and villages were founded in and around the basin41 However the impact was not limited to the basin In general population grew and urban centers multiplied in numbers and increased in size Division of labor between town and country developed as manufacturing concentrated in the towns giving rise to the growth of trade between town and country This stimulated market expansion and the extension of the market economy offering profitable opportunities for investment in land and agriculture 41 Ray A Kea Settlements Trade and Polities in the SeventeenthCentury Gold Coast Baltimore MD 1982 pp 856 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 663 These opportunities were exploited by rich merchants who had accu mulated huge wealth from the trade in gold and other products Beginning in the sixteenth century these wealthy trading families moved northward to invest their wealth in largescale forest clearing and the creation of farm lands42 These developments stimulated the rise of a land market As Kea reports43 The site on which the town of Kumase was later built was purchased for the sum of 25920 dambas in gold and that on which the town of Nsuta was built cost 24830 dambas Only persons of wealth could have afforded to buy land Investment in land was a prerogative of the rich Thus the early trade in products with the Europeans extended and further intensified the preceding ongoing development of commerce and the market economy in the area of modern Ghana Again Keas summary of the evidence is pertinent Various orally transmitted histories refer to the importance of towns or urban centers in many parts of the Gold Coast region prior to 1700 Indeed they indicate explicitly that certain districts were more urbanized and populous in the seventeenth century than they were in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth cen turies Both archaeological evidence and contemporary written accounts support this view44 The study of Senegambia by Boubacar Barry45 suggests similar develop ments Here the most important products demanded by the early Euro pean traders were gold and hides in that order The leather trade peaked in the midseventeenth century with an export of about one hundred fifty thousand hides per year46 This gave rise to a largescale trade in cattle which by the seventeenth century had made the Fulani cattle owners the richest and most powerful social group in Futa Jallon47 The pepper and cottoncloth trade in Benin48 and the copper trade in Kongo49 may have produced somewhat similar effects The commercializing economies in West Africa suffered a major setback when the European traders shifted their demand massively from products 42 Ibid pp 8591 43 Ibid p 90 At the rate of 384 dambas to 1 oz of gold Johnson The Cowrie Currencies Part II p 332 these figures amount to 675 oz and 6466 oz respectively At 4 sterling per oz the cost of these lands comes to 270 and 25865 respectively These were certainly large sums at the time 44 Ibid p 11 45 Boubacar Barry Senegambia from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century Evolution of the Wolof Sereer and Tukuloor in B A Ogot ed General History of Africa V Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century Oxford 1992 pp 265 289 46 Ibid p 265 47 Ibid p 289 48 Kwame Yeboa Daaku Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast 16001720 A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade Oxford 1970 p 24 John Kofi Fynn Asante and Its Neighbours 17001807 London 1971 pp 1112 A F C Ryder Benin and the Europeans 14851897 London 1969 49 Anne Hilton The Kingdom of Kongo Oxford 1985 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 664 the cambridge world history of slavery to captives as largescale exploitation of the New World resources required slave labor This development occurred at different times in the West African subregions depending on when they became heavily drawn into the trade in captives In the area of modern Ghana it began in the mid seventeenth century Dutch officers on the Gold Coast reporting to their employers in the Netherlands were very precise dating the process to 1658 In about 1730 they noted that that part of Africa which as of old is known as the Gold Coast because of the great quantity of gold which was at one time purchased there by the Dutch West India Company as well as by Dutch private ships has now virtually changed into a pure Slave Coast50 As this radical shift played out there followed a similarly radical trans formation of European imports into the Gold Coast The commercializing economy had needed extra labor to transport goods and clear forests for agriculture Between the midfifteenth and midseventeenth centuries the European traders imported into the Gold Coast from other parts of Africa an estimated total of about one hundred thousand people51 It would be recalled that Johnson talks about large imports of cowries into the Gold Coast by the European traders during this period52 The precise quanti ties are not known Nor do we currently know the quantity and value of other goods imported into the Gold Coast by the Europeans at this time although information exists on the quantity of cotton cloths brought from the Benin kingdom However the available evidence does suggest that the value of the cowries and the people imported must have constituted a large proportion of the total value of imports brought by the Europeans during the period The imports underwent a radical transformation from the mid seventeenth century Labor imports ceased Cowries were no longer imported The imports were now overwhelmingly dominated by consumer manufactures especially European and East Asian textiles and firearms that were rarely imported during the gold trade era The imports brought by one of the Royal African Company ships in 1684 shown in Table 251 may be taken as representative Contrary to Marion Johnsons view stated earlier it was only after the slave trade diminished significantly following British abolition in 1807 and the export of palm oil rubber and other products began to grow in the nineteenth century that cowries began to be imported again in large quantities The threeyear average quantities imported from Britain in 182750 are shown in Table 252 50 Joseph E Inikori Africa in World History The Export Slave Trade from Africa and the Emergence of the Atlantic Economic Order in B A Ogot ed General History of Africa V 1067 51 Kea Settlements Trade and Polities pp 1056 52 Johnson The Cowrie Currencies Part II pp 3323 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 665 Table 251 Merchandise carried to the African Coast by the Mary in 1684 Value in sterling Column percent Textiles 10740 789 Firearms 1040 76 Iron bars 133 10 Manilas 46 03 Beads 337 25 Spirits 122 09 Brass ware knives jugs 597 44 Tallows 296 22 Cover lids blankets 16 01 Charges 299 22 TOTAL fob value 13626 100 Source British National Archives henceforth BNA T 70914A pp 13 and 713 Invoice of Goods shipped on board the Mary Captain Henry Nurse Commander bound for Cabo Corso Castle on February 2 and 29 1683 Note that the percentages do not add to exactly 100 because of rounding Relative to the rest of West Africa the Bights of Benin and Biafra the coastal region from modern Togo to southeastern Nigeria both inclusive were drawn into the European trade in a significant way rather late Because of their late entry the middle decades of the seventeenth century were the early years of European trade in both regions53 For this reason British trading companies records covering West Africa which become more plentiful from the midseventeenth century are more helpful in showing changes in the commodity composition of imports into both regions over time The early changes in the imports into the Bight of Benin are shown in Table 253 Quantifiable data for the earliest decades of European trade in the region are yet to be procured The same is true for the late eighteenth century But the trend in the table shows clearly that the imports were dominated by the value of cowries in the early years of the trade The proportion fell over time By the 1680s cowries still made up more than 50 percent of the total value of the imports in the opening decades of the eighteenth century the proportion was less than onequarter Firearms were rarely imported in the seventeenth century Their imports began to grow in the eighteenth century The trend in textile imports was the converse of that of cowries Textile imports rose proportionately from the late seventeenth century and by 1724 they made up about twothirds of the total 53 Robin Law The Slave Coast of West Africa The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society Oxford 1991 A J H Latham Old Calabar 16001891 The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society Oxford 1973 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 666 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 252 Cowries carried to the Gold Coast from Britain 18271850 threeyear averages in tons 18279 254 18302 580 18335 588 18368 1088 183941 900 18424 746 18457 3044 184850 2814 Sources Compiled from BNA Customs 825Customs 871 Customs 1018Customs 1041 See Inikori West Africas Seaborne Trade appendix III5b p 87 Changes in the imports into the Bight of Biafra southeastern Nigeria in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are shown in Table 254 As the table shows copper rods weighing about one pound each used as currency of exchange in local trade and as currency of account by the European traders dominated the imports from 1661 to the early eighteenth century Some manilas iron copper or brass bangles weighing less than a pound each and small amounts of cowries both forming part of the commodity currency in the region were also imported Iron bars which functioned as intermediate goods also constituted a large percentage of the imports in these early decades of the regions Atlantic trade What is particularly significant about the imports of these early decades is that they contained very few consumer goods Up to 1681 textiles did not exceed Table 253 Distribution of commodities carried to the Bight of Benin from Britain select years 16811724 Commodities Currencies cowries Intermediate goods iron bars Firearms Textiles All other commodities Total value Year sterling 1681 592 55 none 284 70 3180 2 1684 524 none none 427 49 1005 1 1690 1692 386 137 33 320 124 9369 5 1701 205 18 96 381 301 4684 2 1724 221 none 89 661 29 3707 1 Sources and Notes BNA T 70911 T 70914A T 70916 T 70919 T 70924 The figures in parenthesis represent the number of cargoes in each case These cargoes represent only a small part of the actual total for each year Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 667 Table 254 Distribution of commodities carried to the Bight of Biafra from Britain select years 16611791 Commodities Currencies copper rods manillas cowries Intermediate goods iron bars Firearms Textiles All other commodities Total value sterling Year except 1790 1661 676 94 67 16 146 889 1 1662 694 97 69 16 125 866 1 1680 381 561 none 07 50 4157 7 1681 442 459 none none 101 6673 9 1684 649 215 none 79 58 2822 3 1690 1692 306 354 none 107 233 2598 3 1693 357 255 none 146 243 926 1 1701 299 355 32 93 221 2602 2 1724 332 none 76 303 289 937 1 1790 63 100 397 379 62 8310 bars 1 1791 29 28 270 466 207 7326 1 Sources and Notes BNA T 701221 T 70309 T 70911 T 70914A T 70916 T 70917 T 70919 T 70924 C 1075 C 1076 The figures in parenthesis represent the number of cargoes in each case These cargoes represent only a small part of the actual total for each year The 1790 total cargo values are shown in bars currency of account often used by European traders in the Bight of Biafra in the eighteenth century in the source 16 percent of the goods imported Also important to note firearms were rarely imported in the early decades Over the eighteenth century all this changed The proportion of com modity currencies diminished greatly so too did the import of interme diate goods The imports became predominantly manufactured consumer goods especially textiles firearms also became a large proportion of the imports With some minor changes this trend continued in the first half of the nineteenth century Table 255 shows the composition of imports into the Bights of Benin and Biafra in 182850 As can be seen from the table currency imports into both regions cowries and some metals remained limited The dominant imports during the period were textiles firearms and alcohol A new development in the first half of the nineteenth century was the growth of alcohol imports At this juncture the analytical task is to demonstrate that the long run changes in the commodity composition of imports into West Africa presented thus far are a clear reflection of the changing state of economy and society in the region The movement of currency imports is particu larly telling These currencies cowries copper rods and manilas were employed in small domestic purchases only They were not accepted by the European traders in the sale of imported goods The European traders Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 668 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 255 Distribution of commodities carried to the Bights of Benin and Biafra from Britain select years 18281850 Commodities Currency cowries All metals guns excluded Firearms Textiles Alcohol Total value sterling 182830 01 53 328 268 144 387257 183243 17 31 215 344 155 3277546 184550 12 50 157 320 210 3024691 Sources and Notes BNA Cust 825871 Cust 1018Cust 1041 By this time the British government had abolished the Atlantic slave trade for its nationals but other European nations and their offshoots in the Americas were still carrying on the trade The Yoruba wars at this time made the Bight of Benin a major slavetrading region with the port of Lagos as its headquarters Slave exports continued to flourish in the Bight of Biafra up to the 1830s when it began to decline In contrast slave exports from the Gold Coast had been reduced to a minimum by this time The African region specified in the records is the West Coast of Africa from the Volta to the Cape of Good Hope both exclusive For all practical purposes however the imports went virtually to southern Nigeria Places beyond southern Cameroon were hardly involved That is the justification for using Bights of Benin and Biafra in the table See Inikori West Africas Seaborne Trade appendix III4 pp 84 and 85 employed them only as currency of account but not as a medium of exchange Trade with the Europeans was by barter and the imported currencies formed part of the assortment of goods exchanged directly for purchases from West African traders The import of these currencies was therefore determined by the level of demand for currency in West Africas domestic market transactions Rising import of currencies is thus a reflection of growing market transactions at the domestic level calling for increases in the quantity of currency in circulation Conversely declining import of currencies signals contraction in market transactions It follows from the foregoing that the large proportion of currencies in the imports of West Africas subregions during the early decades of their trade with the Europeans depicts growing market exchanges and the expansion and geographical extension of the market economy in those regions This confirms the evidence presented earlier showing continuing growth of regional markets and increasing interconnections between them at the time European traders arrived in the midfifteenth century The sustained growth of currency imports in the early decades of the trade is also consistent with the evidence presented earlier showing the positive impact of the early European produce trade on the ongoing process of market development and the growth and spread of the market economy especially in modern Ghana The subsequent decline in some cases total disappearance of currency imports corresponding in time with the expansion and intensification of Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 669 the transatlantic slave trade is a telling reflection of that trades destructive effect on the development of markets and the market economy in West Africa As we have seen West Africas coastal regions and their hinter lands what we call Atlantic Africa had been linked in a network of inter regional trade to the more developed economies and societies of the interior savanna before the arrival of the European traders The regions of Atlantic Africa exchanged largely primary products such as gold and kola nuts for the manufactures of the savanna economies and some reexports from North Africa and the Middle East The growth of the Atlantic slave trade severely weakened this interregional flow of goods In the first place the interior economies ceased to be the source of manufactures for the coastal consumers Instead the dense interior populations became the source of captives brought to the coast for sale to the Europeans who supplied in exchange the manufactures needed by the coastal communities and their immediate hinterlands The exchange of manufactures and primary prod ucts between Atlantic Africa and the interior stimulated further production and trade in both regions leading to the extension of the division of labor and the market economy The violent seizure of people just like the stealing of goods did not involve any market exchange with victim communities It therefore did not stimulate further production and trade in the victim regions As the captivetaking regions sold their captives to middlemen who took them to the European exporters some market transaction did grow but largely in the coastal communities and their immediate hinterlands Like stolen goods the selling price of the captives decreased steeply as the transaction got closer to the original captors More important the exchange of captives for imported goods did not involve directly the production of goods for market exchange hence there was a major break in the circuit of production and market exchange Added to this was the adverse effect of the sociopolitical conflicts engendered by the sale of captives and the attendant population loss on the growth of local and interregional spe cialization and trade All these conditions favored the growth of enclave economies in the coastal regions Without growing production for market exchange at the domestic level demand for currency declined and with it currency imports Some direct evidencefromtheGoldCoastandtheBightofBiafrasouth eastern Nigeria should make the foregoing points more comprehensible On the Gold Coast modern Ghana the growth of markets and the market economy between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries discussed ear lier culminated in the establishment by the Akani traders of what may be called a merchant empire following the development of a largescale system of trade based on a comprehensive caravan organization and guilds or captaincies of merchantbrokers54 Between the midseventeenth and 54 Kea Settlements Trade and Polities p 286 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 670 the cambridge world history of slavery eighteenth centuries the socioeconomic and political conditions associ ated with the procurement of captives in response to the shift of European demand from gold to captives gave rise to warlords and political organi zations dominated by military aristocracies Under these conditions the Akani trading system collapsed and with it came the deurbanization and depopulation of several coastal and forest districts a decline of peasant mar ket production and the movement of craft production from urban centers to the countryside thus ending the division of labor between town and country reestablishing the integration of agriculture and manufacturing and promoting the propagation of subsistence production at the expense of production for market exchange55 More or less similar developments occurred in southeastern Nigeria Bight of Biafra The exchange of manufactures from the densely popu lated Igbo heartland for products from the Atlantic coast and river valleys stated previously was replaced by the capture of people from those densely populated regions for sale on the coast Whereas the exchange of north ern Igbo manufactures for products from the coast and the river valleys generated multiplier effects that stimulated further production for market exchange and therefore further trade between the regions the taking of captives generated no such multiplier effects On the contrary it gener ated disruptive multiplier effects which provoked an unending cycle of sociopolitical conflict This is demonstrated by the activities of the Aro in the hinterland where they established colonies whose main function was the violent procurement of captives for the Aro56 Certainly the rela tionship between these colonies and the victimized communities did not involve the market exchange of goods and services hence their activities stimulated no trade On the contrary they disrupted trade What hap pened at Itu the most important hinterland market for captives helps to illustrate the point As Dike and Ekejiuba narrate Itu on the borders of the Efik territory was the most important entrepot on the Cross River for slaves To Itu market held every four days were brought women and children seized or taken from the upper parts of the Cross River and from the remote hinterland to be sold as far away as possible In view of the chronic warfare and unstable political conditions very little retail trading was done at Itu57 Taken together in all three subregions from the Gold Coast to southeast ern Nigeria the decline of intermediate goods and the predominance of consumer manufactures in the imports during the slave trade period shown 55 Ibid pp 2867 56 Joseph E Inikori The Development of Entrepreneurship in Africa Southeastern Nigeria during the Era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Jalloh and Falola eds Black Business and Economic Power pp 578 57 Dike and Ekejiuba The Aro of SouthEastern Nigeria p 254 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 671 in the tables presented is a further confirmation of the decline of inter regional trade and production for internal markets The goods brought by the Europeans were exchanged for people who were the producers of goods in the interior As market exchange of goods and services between the coastal communities and the densely populated interior regions was replaced by the forceful capture of the latters people for sale on the coast the bulk of the consumer manufactures needed by those coastal communities and their interior middlemen were met directly by European imports brought to pay for the captives Because the trade did not involve the exchange of imports for goods produced in these regions nor did it create conditions for investment in production for the domestic market producer goods intermediate goods were not needed Hence the imports became pre dominantly manufactured consumer goods This led to the development of enclave economies on the Atlantic coast and the immediate hinterlands economies not strongly linked to other regions Changes in the import of firearms over time are also instructive On the Gold Coast firearms hardly featured in the two hundred years of the gold trade The shift to the trade in captives from the midseventeenth century was accompanied by growing import of firearms Similarly few or no firearms were imported in the Bights of Benin and Biafra in the early decades of their trade with the Europeans But with sustained growth of the trade in captives over several decades firearms imports grew considerably as the tables presented show The Ghanaian historian Kwame Daaku explains the Gold Coast case in terms of European trade policy Limited importation of firearms into the Gold Coast before the midseventeenth century was due to legal restrictions imposed by the European powers the lifting of the restrictions account for the subsequent increase58 However combining the Gold Coast evidence with that of the Bights of Benin and Biafra indicates that this explanation is inadequate As we have seen firearms flooded the Gold Coast in the late seventeenth century while they were rare in the imports into the Bights of Benin and Biafra during the same period This shows that demand rather than trade policy was the real determining factor The causal sequence consistent with the evidence may be briefly demon strated The rare import of firearms in the early decades of the European trade indicates the prevalence of relatively general peace in the regions at the time the Europeans arrived For as long as European demand was dominated by products this general peace continued59 With the shift of demand to captives sociopolitical conditions changed over time Con flict conditions within and between communities emerged Continued and growing demand for captives meant that the conflict conditions were 58 Daaku Trade and Politics pp 14950 59 Ibid p 149 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 672 the cambridge world history of slavery endemic and permanent giving rise to prolonged and widespread warfare In turn prolonged and escalating warfare stimulated the growth of demand for firearms which is reflected in the import statistics iii To conclude it is clear from the combination of import statistics and other evidence that the transatlantic slave trade seriously retarded the development of markets and the market economy in West Africa over the period 16501850 The combined demand of seaborne Europeans and transSaharan North African traders for African products especially gold from the midfifteenth to the midseventeenth century extended the pre ceding ongoing process of market development and the growth and geo graphical spread of the market economy in West Africa This is because the product trade involved the exchange of imported goods for commodi ties domestically produced in West Africa This allowed Adam Smiths ventforsurplus mechanism to operate stimulating local and interregional division of labor which fueled further growth of markets and the market economy The evidence presented for the Gold Coast modern Ghana is a good illustration of the process The process was dealt a fatal blow by the decisive shift of European demand from African products to African captives after the mid seventeenth century For the next two hundred years European traders in West Africa limited their demand virtually to captives as largescale production of commodities for Atlantic commerce in the Americas opened up a huge market for slave labor in that part of the Atlantic world The problem with the trade in captives is that it involved the exchange of imported goods not for commodities produced in West Africa but for human captives the very producers of traded goods Trade in captives like trade in stolen goods was thus incapable of triggering the operation of Adam Smiths ventforsurplus mechanism On the contrary it gen erated negative externalities the sociopolitical conflicts engendered and the loss of population at a time when population growth was needed to stimulate the extension of the division of labor which produced a serious setback for the development of markets and the market economy in West Africa Again the direct evidence presented for the Gold Coast and that for southeastern Nigeria Bight of Biafra are good illustrations of the adverse impact After being held back for two hundred years the process of market development resumed again following the ending of the transatlantic slave trade and with the growth of trade in products from the middle decades of the nineteenth century It is this devastating impact of the transatlantic slave trade not the physical environment that explains the extremely limited extent of the market economy in West Africa in the late nineteenth century Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 transatlantic slavery and economic development 673 relative to the economies of the Americas which had been far behind West African economies in market development in the midfifteenth century On the other hand this low starting point in the late nineteenth century also explains the subsequent disparity between West African economies and those of Asia D T Niane got it right when he wrote It would appear that the economic and commercial expansion of Africa was in full spate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but the contacts with the West which were opened up by the slave trade meant the breaking off of a lively start which if trade had developed in other merchandise might have changed the course of African history60 60 Niane Relationships and Exchanges p 614 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 PART VIII SLAVERY AND RESISTANCE Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 26 SLAVE WORKER REBELLIONS AND REVOLUTION IN THE AMERICAS TO 1804 mary turner 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 wellarmed 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 wideranging 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 Local leaders of slaves supported by village authorities including obeahs and prophets calibrated these activities and in moments of crisis were joined by elite slave labor managers headmen and foremen who risked punishment in supporting resistance And under these pressures slaves won varying privileges such as conducting funeral rites traveling to market and earning cash for extra services Most however served 677 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 678 the cambridge world history of slavery the owners convenience and none impinged on their property rights Quotidian resistance left the bars of their cage intact Within the cage however over the long term daily battles against white authority entrenched slave enmity in patterns of resistance habits of defi ance and deception which protected slaves sense of selfworth and the conviction that this is not how the Gods told us how to live against the onslaughts of a system that rated them little better than orangutans and classified them and their progeny as marketable commodities In short it created and sustained throughout the period the workplace constituencies from which the rebels broke out of the system and tried to overturn it the focus of this chapter Escaping the system proved the most flexible and frequent form of slave revolt Two methods took shape First individuals with enough command of the local language acquired in two or three years to pass for free moved into the wagework economy a move facilitated by labor shortages inter island and crossborder connections and for women in particular by urban developments Second collective or group flight ranging from workplace breakouts that destroyed all behind them not always distinguishable from smallscale revolts to family and friend groups seeping quietly out of the slave workforce to take over land on a new frontier and become black settlers and exceptional circumstances aside rebels for life This survey focuses on the latter group often called maroons whose initial leaders not always identified in the literature included both new Africans and slave elite They established despite physical hazards and harassments by militias what can be termed to avoid linguistic variants independencies which differed in scale from regional polities to settler villages and which constituted pockets of permanent opposition to the colonial state Slave revolts that aimed to kill whites and take over their land were ambitious and dangerous projects for workers and were always partly dependent on captured guns They were led by politicalmilitary lead ers who consistently emerged like onsite strike leaders from the ranks of the owners Janusfaced elite trusties a pattern sustained throughout the period Revolts were sparked by intense popular discontent food shortages increased punishment regimes and struck when whites were weakened Most comprised putsches Small core groups acquired a few arms and launched attacks hoping to incite enough support to achieve their goals Others were based on longterm planning and both methods could promote insurrection and takeovers This survey focuses on rural revolts british colonial north america and the united states British North America imported slave workers from the first decades of seventeenthcentury settlement By 1770 they constituted a population of Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 679 some half a million both African and countryborn in addition to the two million white settlers indentured servants and wage earners Unevenly distributed they averaged only 4 percent of the population in northern colonies but in the tobaccoproducing Chesapeake Maryland Virginia North Carolina they comprised a significant minority 36 percent and were numerically the largest slave population Virginias numbers for exam ple rose from 27000 in 1720 to 187000 fifty years later Slaves comprised a narrow majority 53 percent in semitropical indigo and riceproducing Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia opened to slavery in 1750 Slave numbers in South Carolina alone expanded from 12000 to 82000 Rapidly growing slave worker populations combined with access to continental spaces and opportunities to ally with enslaved Indians and marginalized wage workers made it possible to take advantage of colonial wars with Indian nations and Britains imperial rivals All this enabled rebels to resist slavery as and when they could Their forced labor enclaves were embedded however in wellarmed settler populations backed up in emergencies by garrison troops a balance of force that impinged on the prospects for slave rebellion This brief overview focuses on rebel activities in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry where regional variations emerge reflecting primarily differences in workplace bases Most Chesapeake slaves were thinly spread over smallscale tobacco and subsistencecrop production units of ten or fewer and were vigilantly supervised by owners and overseers And some one hundred largescale Vir ginia River tidewater owners with three to seven hundred slaves subdivi ded them to work holdings spread across different counties in the interest of security There were no mass bases here for runaway breakouts but rebel groups their leaders rarely identified but often incorporating indentured servants and Indians are observed throughout the period founding fron tier independencies This was not apparently a major recourse perhaps curtailed as much by a short growing season as by white settlers or Indians contracted as slave hunters But they gradually made the Dismal Swamp on the VirginiaNorth Carolina border marginal land to settlers but rich in fish and game into a regional stronghold paralleling swamp bases established in Spanish Louisianas Delta region More characteristically slaves escaped individually or in twos and threes Longdistance runners joined Indian nations taking with them military skills including African expertise in fort building dazzling colonial militia as much as Spanish military by their subtill contrivances for Defence but more usually they took their chances passing for free in the urban wagework economy or in rural forestproduct regions where white settlers asked able hands few questions Others lived like shortterm absentees in connivance with plantation slaves lodging with trading with and being protected by them They hid from militia in hot pursuit and occasionally defended themselves from arrest by attacking the overseer attempting it Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 680 the cambridge world history of slavery Lowcountry rice production which required minimally three times as much land as tobacco and demanded more strenuous work such as build ing irrigation systems and pounding rice compared more closely to the Caribbean sugar islands than the Chesapeake Slaves worked in dense con centrations constituting between 70 to 90 percent of the population in South Carolinas coastal parishes and were supervised especially in the malarial months when owners retreated to Charleston by slave foremen and white overseers Slaves here escaped in larger groups often with shipmates and their own countrymen taking tools guns and canoes with them Some settle ments known to the colonists were targeted by name in runaway wanted notices but others were well hidden in swampbased ricegrowing com plexes equipped with early warning systems against attack a pattern followed after 1750 in Georgia which like Spanish Treaty settlements attracted free blacks and coloreds The colonists pragmatically acknowl edged selfliberated slaves as black settlers and their landclaims as black settlements Runaways also took advantage of Indian territory and from the 1680s Spanish territory as well escaping by land and sea to a refuge in Floridas St Augustine where Spain in 1738 officially guaranteed British runaways liberty and land at Pueblo de Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose Afro Americanized as Moosa it extended Floridas attractions to slaves in northern ports including Boston How many people took their chances to win free status and a life land or wages outside slavery is difficult perhaps impossible to ascertain1 Whatever their numbers escaped slaves in North America in contrast to Spanish America and the Caribbean posed little threat to white lives or property rights Slave worker revolts by contrast threw into relief their threat to both Revolt leaders and their recruits faced severe internal and external con straints Those in the Chesapeake in particular had limited opportunities to organize and inadequate command of guns and ammunition was off set only in part by slave numbers determination and the slaves strategic capacity to strike when whites were weakened These circumstances were complicated by the fact that in the event of failure all slaves felt the reper cussions in rolledback rights and new legal restrictions increasing the risk of exposure by informers Most revolts were consequently small scale putsches rather than mass uprisings This strategy consistently used across the Americas was adumbrated by revolts in the Chesapeake 16631730 and clearly demonstrated in South Carolina 1739 1 Existing figures for runaway slaves are insecurely based on advertisements in newspapers with limited circulation that reflect at best the number of owners who wanted their property well hunted down Others preferred to write off losses andor leave discipline problems unpublicized Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 681 The Stono putsch launched by some twenty Angolan Africans some perhaps professional soldiers from the Kongo kingdom and their country born leader Jemmy exploited a moment when the balance of power between rulers and ruled inclined slightly to the slaves advantage Increased slave numbers seventeen thousand over the previous decade 66 percent African discontents intensified by reduced food supplies hopes raised by Spains wellpublicized 1738 offer of liberty and land at Moosa and rumors of AngloSpanish war had already significantly increased runaway numbers Revolt struck just twenty miles from Charleston when a yellow fever epidemic decimating the white population had closed the city down The rebel core seized small arms and powder from a local store and headed not to Charleston but south toward the border possibly aiming to found a settlement marching in military formation drums beating and flags flying destroying property killing whites excepting as was commonly the case in slave revolts the few considered friends and crying Liberty By late afternoon they had recruited a force sixty to one hundred strong However they were caught offguard by one hundred wellarmed militia alerted by a chance midmorning sighting of the rebel army They were not readily defeated it required a second battle days later before all were captured killed or dispersed And as was often the case the Stono slaves example led to new initiatives such as repeated arson attacks in Charleston and a more ambitious attempt by leaders based in its nearby riceproducing heartlands to organize a 150 to 200strong rebel force that seized arms and attacked the city in one fell blow an effort defeated by informers These events precipitated new security measures that included deterrent punishments such as gibbeting alive and execution by slow torture for convicted rebels and also resulted in a new 1740 slave code substantively in place for the following century which rolled back slave workers cus tomary rights to earn money raise food travel and increased rewards for slave informers More innovatively a decadelong attempt was also made unprecedented in a slavelabordependent colony to curtail the slave trade a measure that mistakenly and perhaps wishfully identified revolt with new foreign workers and that revealed the depth of owner anxieties concerning slave worker revolt In the following decades however the balance of force between slaves and whites tended to make escaping the system the main recourse for Lowcountry rebels Chesapeake slaves outnumbered by whites and with narrower vents for escape resorted to utopian hopes of freedom at the hand of their owners more powerful rulers The expected arrival in 1730 of Virginias new royal governor raised hopes that he was to free them by the kings command However disappointment carried their traditional work place clamors out into widespread public meetings Speakers demanded liberty until suppressed by arrests jail sentences and floggings And in Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 682 the cambridge world history of slavery 1755 when French victories in Virginias backlands promised invasion and freedom a significantly larger slave population brought more aggressive and threatening pressures to bear from largescale slave combinations that immobilized the militia by besieging white settlements This obliged British troops to fortify each county In the upshot the French did not advance and insurrection was suppressed defeated once more by militia and imperial forces But the events underscored the slaves hunger for liberty and their conviction that they needed arms and allies to succeed Just twenty years later when the colonists revolt against imperial Britain 177583 breached the old alliance that had secured their subjection a continentwide slave insurrection the largest to that date in the Americas inevitably followed The ground for this development was well prepared The vigorous colo nial debates about the liberty to shape their own nation in vitupera tive diningroom exchanges street demonstrations and public meetings alerted slaves to an unprecedented breach between their owners and the king and resonated with their aspirations for liberty from slavery Though the slaves claim was supported at home by only a few mostly Methodist and Quaker preachers and a small antislavery movement in the north it was unexpectedly strengthened in 1772 by news that Britain had made slavery illegal there a popular interpretation of Mansfields judgment Slave unrest gained new impetus In New England slaves petitioned as a freeborn African people in a free and Christian country for rights to liberty and land and south of the Potomac runaway numbers increased and conspiracies proliferated The war that divided colonists into Patriots and British Loyalists also divided slaves and free blacks In New England the slaves supported the colonists hoping for abolition in Virginia for the same reason they offered their services to the British In November 1775 the governor Earl of Dunmore pressed for troops followed this lead he issued a proclamation promising liberty for all slaves and indentured servants willing to join the British forces reconfiguring pragmatically the Virginia slaves 1730 dream solution emancipation by the kings gift Within months the promise was dramatically embodied in Dunmores threehundredstrong Ethiopian Regiment with jackets emblazoned Liberty to Slaves This recruitment policy was never endorsed by an imperial government given its Caribbean sugar interests and its implications for slave emancipation in the event of victory were never considered but by marrying slave aspirations and British manpower needs it became standard military and naval practice minus the exuberant uniforms throughout the war The alliance stimulated popular insurrection melding together a rapidly expanding mosaic of smallscale revolts that sent recruits and runaways families groups and whole workforces trekking to British lines and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 683 occupied cities Boston New York Philadelphia and taking boats to naval ships They were driven by high hopes of liberty for all as much as Dun mores contract terms And during the war shifting battle lines British victories and destroyed plantations increased these flows despite camp fevers and smallpox The new recruits energy skills and local knowledge were useful to the British in every capacity in one to twohundredstrong infantry and cavalry companies in intelligence transport supplies forti fication building and as ships pilots On the colonists side by contrast slaves served outside New England under duress either as substitutes for their owners or from 1778 outside the South Maryland excepted as enlisted men No less than a third deserted to the British taking cavalry horses with them In the upshot the colonists crucially assisted by the French defeated the British and their black troops destroying slave hopes of immediate eman cipation However the scale and persistence of slave escapes from and fight against the slaveowning colonial order massively confirmed their deter mination to be free and contributed to dividing the new republic on the slavery issue Northern states not substantively dependent on slave labor decided that internal security was best served by abolition Vermont New Hampshire and Massachusetts where slaves were just 2 percent or less of the population chose immediate emancipation 1780 and by 1800 gradual emancipation was on the books in Pennsylvania Connecticut Rhode Island New York and New Jersey though implementation was delayed in the two latter states until 1799 and 1804 respectively By con trast in the South military victory confirmed that the labor system that had successfully developed the colonies was best suited to secure in George Washingtons phrase a rising American Empire to the west This fissure in the new republic representing contradictory needs and perceptions was contained and institutionalized by 1787 the antislavery states secured the prohibition of slavery in the windswept halffrozen Northwest Territory but subsequently the Constitutional Convention in carefully composed clauses omitting the term slave made ownership in persons a constitu tional right guaranteeing prospectively slaverys expansion into the rich alluvial Mississippi valley The slavefree bridgehead in the North was the most positive longterm consequence of the insurrection securing wage work for resident blacks and a runaway refuge more ample despite fugi tive slave laws than St Augustine in Spanish Florida had been while also providing the slave systems safetyvalve In more general terms the geo graphical frontier between slave and freestatus labor marked the political limits of the new republic Immediate benefits accrued primarily to the thousands who by one means or another won their freedom in the conflict Just how many did so is not clear current estimates suggest twentyfive thousand from the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 684 the cambridge world history of slavery Lowcountry alone Most probably passed for free and were facilitated by forged free papers economic restructuring in the Chesapeake and urban labor shortages Their number was perhaps only partially reflected in the 1790 census returns And slaves in general gained a stronger sense of their collective weight and a sharpened conviction that all should be at their liberty2 Inevitably however the system introduced tighter slave codes new laws stratifying the black population by black blood percentages freedmens rights were cut back and by the 1790s attacks on the system recommenced A rash of rebel activities encouraged in part by the wellpublicized 1794 French emancipation decree embracing slaves as citizens broke out from New York to Charleston Disturbances were most intense in urban and rural Virginia where a few Quaker and Methodist missionaries preaching Christian egalitarianism and promoting black preachers won enthusiastic crossrace support in the state capital Richmond and its vicinity In this context Gabriel Prosser a firstgeneration American slave a symbolic Fourth of July baby and his cohort all recruited from a growing stratum of skilled slaves working independently attempted to seize power in 1800 Lacking a workplace base the organizers recruited support from preach ers and politicians traveling the country far inland with the assistance of river workers and planned an ambitious crossclass crossrace ruralurban uprising a march on Richmond synchronized with a free black and slave takeover but they were frustrated by rainstormflooded rivers and urban informers Active supporters included dedicated upcountry recruits who were ready to march the following week if Richmond had fallen and white abolitionists such as the Methodist ship captain who tried unsuccessfully to assist Prossers escape but plans remained unrealized By 1807 the slavelabor system was reconsolidated and its frontiers expanded Entrepreneurs in both the North and South secured the repub lics hold on onefifth of the international slave trade by the period 18057 and post1776 they carried off 171000 slaves with onehalf of their cargoes intended for home use They secured the slave worker phalanxes required to develop a new frontier expanded in 1803 by the Louisiana Purchase following Napoleons first defeat at the hands of Haitis black citizen army For the republics slaves a generationslong freedom struggle lay ahead the caribbean Caribbean islands and territories the Spanish Antilles excepted in con trast to mainland settler colonies had slave worker majorities from the 2 Lorena S Walsh Work and Resistance in the New Republic the Case of the Chesapeake 1770 1820 in Mary Turner ed From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves the Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas London 1995 p 118 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 685 early seventeenth century and these proportions grew to 7090 percent of the population by 1700 Demographically slaves dominated They pro duced primarily sugar the regions most profitable export which required comparatively large agroindustrial workforces and confronted conditions in which death rates exceeded birth rates to the point that slave imports were needed to sustain and expand production The combined profitability of sugar and slave trades generated complex legal and illegal trade routes along the island archipelago and across the region the Americas and the Atlantic These routes centered on Caribbean port cities serviced by slave workers who funneled news into local mar ket networks and linked densely settled slave populations with the world outside their plantation villages Profitability also dictated that in the eigh teenth century the region became integral to the intensifying global strug gle for empire Sugar islands and new sugar frontiers were among the glittering prizes fueling almost continuous regional conflicts in the years 17501804 which impacted more strongly and consistently on Caribbean than continental slave rebels These circumstances combined with internal factors ultimately made the Caribbean the crucible in which slave rebels made revolution Advancing internal sugar frontiers put particular pressures on many islandbased rebel independencies from the earliest days of settlement and their capacity to resist varied In small lowlying rapidly developed islands such as Barbados and Antigua successive waves of runaways were gradually eliminated by the 1730s and even in mountainous andor forested islands such as Martinique and Guadeloupe they survived largely by keeping a low profile In more spacious St Domingue bordering on Spanish Santo Domingo however mountainbased independencies in the rugged northeast and northwest behind Le Cap and the mountainous south survived although forced intermittently to regroup And in Jamaica and the eastern Caribbean islands they fought off their enemies until the last decade of the century Independencies proliferated in Jamaica as slave imports expanded after its conquest by Britain in 1655 and escaped slaves consolidated two inac cessible mountain frontier strongholds at the east and west extremities of the islands 140mile central spine From these bases they contested sugar frontier expansion on adjacent lowland territory and as pressures grew in the first decades of the eighteenth century they established tracts of no mans land raided estates robbed travelers and forced planters to sell up Efforts to extirpate these problems as well as fears of general insurrection incited by food shortages and rumors of Spanish invasion involved colo nial and imperial governments in a ten years war The independencies were perhaps just one thousand strong but like some Spanish Ameri can counterparts they comprised wellorganized politicalmilitary polities Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 686 the cambridge world history of slavery under effective military and religious leaders Cudjoe in the west and Quao and Nanny one of the few women leaders named in these accounts in the east Skilled use of guerrilla tactics kept at bay colonial militia and subsequently British troops using the latest military hardware expert slave marksmen and Mosquito Indian trackers Their determined fight almost exhausted their resources but it also destroyed the islands London credit rating and pressured imperial and colonial governments into peace negotiations The 1739 treaties legalized the black settlers rights to free status self government limited land holdings trade and hunting but corralled them into colonialimperial state service including police and labor duties returning runaways suppressing rebels and building roads Black settler numbers increased as a result but their police duties impinged on the trajectory of workplacebased slave rebellions for the rest of the century Similar conflicts followed Britains acquisition 1763 Peace of Paris of the eastern Caribbean hitherto neutral officially neither British nor French islands lightly settled mountainous Dominica and St Vincent and unoccupied Tobago together with wellsettled French Grenada now became centers of sugar production In Dominica independencies prolif erated as slave imports increased acquired arms when the island briefly reverted to the French 177882 and united under one leader Pharcell to fight military expeditions In St Vincent longestablished AfroIndian Black Carib settlements accustomed to sharing the island with a few French settlers also united to fight invaders under an elected commander in chief Chatoyer and in this case secured their customary landclaims by treaty in 1773 In Tobago where slaves established some fifty sugar estates by the 1770s independencies combined with persistent slave revolts helped to put a brake on settlement And runaways in Grenadas mountains added to crossclass and crossrace opposition to strenuous British efforts to replace coffee and cacao crops with the more laborintensive sugar production In the last decade of the century however independencies and free black and slave populations were exposed to unprecedented opportunities and intensified military pressures when Republican France at war with Britain from 1793 and confronted by massive slave rebellion and British invasion in St Domingue abolished slavery and embraced blacks as cit izens The February 4 1794 decree added a new dimension to imperial conflicts for land in the Caribbean compounding it with a struggle to sustain or destroy the slavelabor system Guadeloupe seized by the British in 1794 was reconquered by French Republican troops who mobilized a black citizen army to defend this beacon of freedom which survived until 1802 and liberate eastern Caribbean islands Britain countered with a seventeenthousandstrong expeditionary force that suppressed a briefly successful crossclass crossrace freecoloredled revolution in Grenada Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 687 starved out St Vincents Republican allied independency and deported its five thousand survivors who were kept in nominally British St Lucia and Dominica Jamaica the base for the invasion of St Domingue was fortified by an expanded imperial garrison and militias were strengthened by cavalry units but the island experienced increasing slave imports and recurrent reports that elite slaves were talking revolution abounded The Treaty settlers in the west were identified as an internal security threat and were destroyed in a bitter ninemonth war by forces using how itzers and one hundred manhunting dogs from Spanish Cuba The five hundred survivors offered amnesty were treacherously deported to Nova Scotia Throughout the eighteenth century however as most island indepen dencies struggled to survive escaping the system became the characteristic form of rebellion in mainland Dutch Suriname where rebels established numerous substantial and difficulttolocate forest polities that rivaled in scale Spanish American regional rebel conquests Rapidly increasing slavetowhite ratios 111 in 1701 241 in 1754 largescale sugar pro duction spacious back lands with an Indian population alienated by early 1650 British efforts to enslave them and a colonial state reliant on small locally recruited militia forces all contributed to their success By 1740 they were closing off central regions of the country and successive colonial governors were pressing for SpanishBritishstyle peace negotiations The United Provinces finally undertook this route during the 175663 conflict of empires by which time wellestablished independencies could negotiate from a position of strength in population numbers size of land holdings and fighting capacity They wanted to establish a legally defined position with the Dutch freeing their hands in other directions The Dutch keen to divide and rule concluded separate treaties with each one to reinforce existing divisions The Dujkas agreed to terms first in 1760 winning rights to free legal status selfgovernment all the land they occupied and not mentioned in the record yearly gifts from the colonial government provided they returned runaways an obligation impossible to enforce Public celebrations and redcarpet treatment for the Djuka delegation in Paramaribo marked this deal and led to others 1762 1767 But work conditions generated more rebels new forest polities and fresh conflicts with each other and the Dutch developments dealt with in chapter 27 which contributed to perpetuating Suriname slavery until 1863 In most sugar colonies however escapes complemented revolts Some of these comprised small group uprisings with limited targets such as killing their owners but many envisaged conquest This revolutionary purpose first recorded in Barbados in 1649 reverberates with variations throughout the period Remarkably two such attempts temporarily succeeded and in planter perceptions two threatened to do so The rebel experiences Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 688 the cambridge world history of slavery encapsulate the problems facing successful revolts that were subsequently overcome in unique circumstances in St Domingue Takeovers and takeover bids sprang like other revolts from intensified material hardships that maximized rebel recruits and exploited an unusu ally wide breach in white defenses This was the case in St John in the Danish West India Company islands where the first conquest took place in November 1733 in a period of regional unrest sparked by a succession of natural disasters drought floods hurricanes and blight These disas ters affected food and export crops throughout the Leeward Islands in the 1720s and 1730s Opened up in 1716 as a small twentysquaremile sugar and cotton frontier by 1733 St John had twentyone sugar estates and a predominantly African Gold Coast slave population of one thousand that outnumbered their Danish and Dutch owners by a 51 ratio and was entirely dependent on locally grown food Crop failures reduced slaves to starvation levels and where owners faced severely reduced profit margins threatened them with sale Action in this case was precipitated not by elite sugar workers but by the elite of the slave elite domestics owned by the exgovernor Henry Suhm Confronted by his decision to sell them to the Danish West India Company and their subsequent demotion to common laborers and denied despite protest their customary right to find themselves new owners they threw in their lot with local runaways and organized revolt The island invited capture its defenses comprised one small stonebuilt fort near Suhms property strategically located on a steep hill with two cannon and ammunition but garrisoned by just six soldiers and at the other end of the island a fortified plantation house with two fourpounder cannon The putsch was well planned the fort was taken by rebels delivering firewood who fired the cannon to raise the slaves and alarm the whites who hurried to the fort only to be ambushed From this base the rebels reputedly eighty strong launched a putsch attracting support as they advanced across the island killing captured whites forcing others to hide or escape by sea and collecting arms Except for a few planters and their slaves who fled to the fortified house kept besieged it played no further part the island was theirs within twentyfour hours It was a small victory on a peripheral sugar island property of a weak aspiring imperial power but it was unprecedented The free black settlers subsequently formed villagebased polities that united as in St Vincent under Chatoyer for defence and repelled militia invasions 50 to 120strong from Danish St Thomas the seat of government neighboring British Tortola December 1733 and St Kitts March 1734 successes that depleted their limited stock of ammunition and masked their fundamental weakness Denmark meanwhile embroiled in deals with France had secured its assistance to recapture St John and in Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 689 April 1734 French troops white and free colored militia and expert slave hunters invaded from Martinique Confronted by this force the settlers took to the woods and in a fourweek search and destroy campaign conducted in torrential rain French forces found only one empty village to destroy and another already burnt Just eight settlers surrendered and they were either immediately burnt at the stake or sent to St Thomas to suffer more thoughtful public tortures3 Most however resolved collec tively on suicide their bodies subsequently found with their useless guns beside them Tradition maintains that three hundred others like defeated shipboard mutineers leapt to their death from a high cliff The initial success of the St John rebels however may well have encour aged takeover plans two years later and two hundred miles away in long settled droughtscourged British Antigua 110 square miles slave popula tion of twentyfour to twentyfive thousand whitetoslave ratio of 16 which had a hitherto adequate British garrison and onethousandstrong militia that included armed slaves Elite slaves here organized islandwide to blow up their owners at the Kings Coronation Anniversary Ball October 11 1736 but were betrayed on the eve of action Eightyeight slaves were executed of whom seventyseven were slave elite A cull touching almost every estate tighter slave laws and an imperial garrison enlarged to reg imental strength forced resistance into other channels But similar plans were made in Danish St Croix purchased from France before St John was reconquered 1746 1759 and in 1760 slaves attempted a twinpronged takeover bid in Jamaica Britains most important sugar island The revolts took place in difficult circumstances The slave popula tion of one hundred fifty thousand largely dependent on their provision grounds and exposed to regular seasonal starving times were geograph ically divided by mountain ranges and outcropping hills that confined sugar estates to comparatively smallscale plains and valley bottoms The rebels struck when overall military and naval defenses had been strength ened in the course of the 175663 war The revolts based on the islands shrinking sugar frontiers erupted sequentially 120 miles apart first in north east St Mary and subsequently in southwest Westmoreland in the vicin ity of treaty settlements where mixed countryborn and African mostly Gold Coast locally termed Coromantee slaves numbered respectively ten thousand and nine thousand They were launched as in St John by putsches The St Mary rebels were led by Tacky a Gold Coast born Jamaicanbred headman Colleagues from neighboring estates with support from villagebased obeah men proved the core element in what contem poraries called Tackys War The rebels struck at Easter April 25 1760 3 All had flesh removed with hot pincers one was burnt to death slowly one was sawn in half one was impaled and two women had hands and heads cut off Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 690 the cambridge world history of slavery when properties were lightly supervised and a small local coastal fort near Port Maria was unmanned The rebels seized its arms some forty muskets and ammunition and moved up the valley burning cane sugar mills and houses and killing whites collecting more arms and recruiting as they went Countermeasures facilitated by new mountain roads built by Treaty settlers to the colonys capital in Spanish Town were swift within twenty four hours the lieutenant governor Jamaican planter Sir Henry Moore declared martial law dispatched two companies of regulars substantial militia forces and Treaty settlers and within days established military posts to block roads and guard adjacent sugar parishes These efforts however proved ineffectual in St Mary where Tackys band retreated to the woods and although the Treaty settlers appeared to fulfill their obligation to support government forces managed to hold attackers at bay with guerrilla tactics It was perhaps their continuing success that incited emulation in the southwest at the Whitsuntide holiday six weeks later The Westmoreland putsch also launched by committed recruits from neighboring estates used different tactics The rebels seized control of the main road inland successfully ambushing the combined force of local mili tia and Treaty settlers sent to suppress them Numbers then flocked to their support established a fortified camp and extended the circle of burning estates obliging planters to choose whether or not to arm their slaves in the hope of defending their property But within days military reinforce ments disembarked at Savannahlamar deterring potential recruits The reinforcements took the fort and killed captured or dispersed the rebels Tackys war in the woods however succumbed only gradually months later to increasing military attacks backed up by armed sailors from naval vessels He was reputedly shot by a Treaty settler months later By August 1760 the lieutenant governor judged law and order substantively restored but at the assemblys insistence he prolonged martial law to facilitate a yearlong hunt for runaway rebel survivors One hundred captives were publicly tortured and executed electric shock torture was used to force religious leaders to repudiate their Obis power before execution but with little success Five hundred rebels and suspects were transported for sale at cheap rates to mainland Belize where some raised a new revolt 1765 The events of 1760 are widely identified in the literature as an attempted islandwide takeover bid Edward Long Jamaicas planter histo rian described it as such in 1774 in his magisterial History of Jamaica4 and he also identified the culprits as Coromantee The frontier putschists based in illdefended parishes may have hoped for responses from the 4 3 vols London 1774 2 44755 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 691 populous island center but as the evidence stands the ready availability of military forces limited repercussions there to increased runaway num bers and reported conspiracies Jamaica in 1760 in contrast to St John in 1733 demonstrates the controlling effects of an effective imperial mil itary presence Longs account perhaps reflected slave wishes as well as slaveowner fears and published in the wake of Lord Mansfields 1772 judgment certainly served as shrewdly persuasive proplanter propaganda Further rebellion in Jamaica however was limited to two small group ris ings by new Africans 1765 1766 and a frontier parish takeover planned in Hanover in 1776 which was suppressed by garrison troops The shortlived revolution in Dutch Berbice overturned weak colonial authorities but in this case slave leaders organized colonywide for a militarystyle takeover Opened up in the 1730s by the United Provinces Berbice Society the colony bordered east and west by Suriname and Demarara was similarly large scale twenty thousand square miles but largely undeveloped beyond its sugarproducing heartland In 1763 this comprised some one hundred estates most with managers in charge concentrated along a twentymile inland stretch as the crow flies of the Berbice River The fourthousandstrong mixed African Gold Coast and Congo and countryborn workforce outnumbered the white pop ulation by an 111 ratio Its military defences were vestigial just two small forts with cannon and ammunition St Andres was located at the Berbice River mouth and at Fort Nassau at the head of the settlement The core rebel organizers were seven elite slaves from centrally located estates where punishment regimes already severe were stepped up to curb rising discontent about food shortages and four from Lilienburg notorious for its brutal punishments including the future Governor Kofi and his second in command Akara both Gold Coast They built up a colonywide network of colleagues to recruit rebel bands ready to take over when the moment came ensure houses were destroyed but mills kept intact and once the takeover was completed become part of the new governments military and political structure When the rebels struck in the last week of February 1763 colonial authority already verged on breakdown epidemic dysentery put the white population out of action and left just ten soldiers fit for duty at Fort Nassau and by March 6 the country was in their hands Whites were killed or captured or holed up with the governor van Hoogenheim at Fort Nassau Two days later Kofi now Governor of the Negroes of Berbice Akara and their councilors ordered him through interpreters to leave for Holland and to take only white refugees with him The ships left that day The new government took over Fort Nassau and settled a few miles upriver with six to seven hundred troops Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 692 the cambridge world history of slavery Just twentythree days later the first regional counteroffensive began Four ships with ninetyeight troops recruited by van Hoogenheim from British Barbados where planters owned land in Demerara and Suriname anchored just upriver from Kofis headquarters repelled repeated attacks with the ships cannon and remained at anchor waiting for reinforcements They arrived six weeks later two more wellarmed ships and 150 merce naries and on May 13 Berbice forces massed for what proved a bitter five hour battle They again suffered substantial casualties and were forced to withdraw The ferocity of the resistance was such however that the Dutch determined to strengthen their naval presence by fortifying a neighboring estate and to encourage divisions in Kofis regime but not to attempt to advance without more troops In the end a sevenmonth stalemate ensued Subsequent developments in black Berbice are variously interpreted in the literature It is clear Kofis government initially survived these mili tary defeats and was strengthened by professional soldiers deserting from Suriname border duties French and German mercenaries whose skills included gun repair With the Dutch blockade presaging reinforcements however the Kofi government faced a military impasse and evidence suggests made longterm preparations for defense People were sent down river to Upper Berbice to prepare provision grounds and guerrilla hideouts while frontline skirmishes with the Dutch were avoided to prevent more casualties Kofi meanwhile perhaps as a cover for defense preparations negotiated with van Hoogenheim for a Surinamestyle treaty unsurpris ingly without success By August tensions and frustrations led as the Dutch had hoped to internal divisions reflected by leadership changes in the governing council A CongoGold Coast partnership replaced Kofi who committed suicide and Akara who was demoted to field work Under the new leaders the Negroes of Berbice evidently remained united when the imperial Dutch counteroffensive began in December 1763 News of the revolt had reached the United Provinces in May Strate gically important to its mainland colonies and a blow to the countrys diminishing imperial prestige the event gradually stirred a national cam paign for reconquest Naval forces were accumulated at St Andres and six hundred volunteers were recruited and dispatched in November to back them up Van Hoogenheim anticipating their arrival began the Dutch offensive December 19 with forces already on hand three hundred men two merchant ships and three men of war As this flotilla advanced people melted into the bush systematically burning property as they went They reemerged as substantial guerrilla bands commanded by their leaders from bases prepared in the forest border region of Upper Berbice A fivemonth guerrilla war ensued that stretched Dutch forces despite their stateoftheart missile projectors to the limit Kofi had promised van Hoogenheim we will not become your slaves again and many died rather Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 693 than do so until outgunned their leaders killed or captured bands divided surrenders began and a few informers including Akara emerged Of the 800 rebels captured 101 were tried Over a threemonth period fifty three including a French mercenary who had fought to the end were tortured and executed some broken on the wheel at public spectacles The destruction of these shortlived revolutions paralleled the con tainment andor destruction of the island independencies and reflected the increasing scale and technological sophistication of imperial military resources used to compete for and protect colonial territory and suppress popular resistance to slavery By the closing decade of the eighteenth cen tury their continued success appeared inevitable until they were routed in St Domingue the st domingue revolution The rebellion that made a revolution and transformed a slave colony into a black republic erupted in August 1791 Three factors were key to this aston ishing political achievement The slave rebellion took place in the context created in St Domingue by the unfolding revolution in metropolitan France ideologically committed by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to the proposition men are born free and equal in rights and the international counterrevolutionary wars that followed 17931802 These circumstances created unique opportunities for rebels predecessors to find allies and guns and to build an army trained in Euro pean military techniques as well as guerrilla warfare These opportunities were turned into achievements by a small closeknit group of military leaders The revolt was recruited and led by a middle aged exslave characterized as a leader of genius Toussaint Louverture His army together with slavesturnedcitizenworkers built the de facto revolution even as they were officially designated French Republicans At issue from the outset however was the question Who owned the land The answer came when invaded by Napoleon Bonapartes newly restored proslavery imperial France 1802 a mass uprising by the people about to call themselves Haitian successfully defended their liberty and their land and declared independence St Domingue 10700 square miles bordering Spanish San Domingo was the largest and most profitable slavelaborbased economy in the Caribbean It had a slave population of close to half a million onethird Africanborn which produced twofifths of the worlds sugar and half its coffee indigo and cotton and accounted for 40 percent of Frances foreign trade Colonial policy consequently focused primarily before and after 1789 on the need to keep it French Ruled like many French provinces from Paris by wellpaid royal officials headed by a governorgeneral it Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 694 the cambridge world history of slavery had a distinctive social structure Almost 50 percent of the free population 59000 were free coloreds 28000 who outnumbered the whites them selves divided between grands and petits blancs in two of the three island provinces south and west The free colored included not only small settlers and artisans the backbone of the militia and the slavehunting mounted police but also uniquely in Caribbean slave societies a sub stantial elite many educated in French academic and military academies They reputedly owned half the land a third of the slaves and significant commercial interests Relegated however by Royalist laws to secondclass status their alliance with the whites was uneasy The French Revolutions 1789 proclamation men are born free and equal in rights first affected this alliance by inciting the free colored to claim equality and the right to joint participation in a new autonomous colonial regime In St Domingue they competed with whites to seize power from royal officials and in Paris delegates pressed their case in the National Assembly They did not succeed France granted internal selfgovernment March 8 1790 decree on terms confirming white supremacy Civil war resulted in the south and west A brief uprising in the north where the free colored dominated only two parishes whose leader Vincent Oge chose not to recruit slave support was rapidly suppressed Oge and two associates were publicly executed in Le Cap February 1791 on the site and by methods limbs broken tied to a wheel and left to die used for rebel slaves The executions intended to intimidate instead confirmed and publicized in a town with a slave population of fifteen thousand the massive breach between whites and free coloreds and the unprecedented opportunity it presented to rebel The opportunity was matched as in all slave revolts by intense mate rial pressures on slave workers particularly in the north the longest settled twothirds of the slaves were Caribbean born and most produc tive province with more acreage under cane than the rapidly developing sugar and coffeeproducing west or the mountainous frontier south Labor exploitation was intense few lived to be forty and in the 1780s periodic drought ravaged the slaves provision grounds reducing subsistence to starvation levels These factors facilitated an unusually largescale rebel organization in a province with a slave population of one hundred sixty thousand The organizers as throughout plantation America were the slave elite usually Caribbeanborn skilled workers and the Janusfaced headmen and drivers They had professional connections to other estates and worked with andor served as priests of the slaves syncretic religion vodun They were assisted by coachmen licensed to travel also by market traders using market hubs linking estates to parish centers Kinship affiliations were also important No less than two hundred delegates representing all the central parishes met Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 695 on Sunday August 14 1791 at an estate ten miles from Le Cap for the final planning session And the rebellion was blessed reputedly the following Sunday at a ceremony in the forests near Bois Caiman by Boukman Dutty driver coachman and priest the first of many outstanding rebel leaders He rallied his forces invoking the power of our god as opposed to the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears to support the goals common to all slave rebels vengeance and liberty The revolt broke out in full force August 24 and rapidly became a mass uprising involving some 80 percent of the slave population including women children and some free coloreds The rebel hub surrounded Le Cap with a circle of fire and spread east and west as the best crop in four years went up in flames The rebels in contrast to Berbice 1763 and Jamaica 1831 destroyed all before them sledgehammering to bits the copper boilers they had fired twentyfour hours a day turning cane juice into sugar In two weeks the rebels were twelve to fifteen thousand strong and by the end of September had ruined all twentyseven parishes in the north From the outset the sheer scale and ferocity of the rebellion dwarfed all its predecessors in the Americas Captured sugar estates became rebel bases Despite the usual shortage of guns fighters grouped in bands often under their own exheadmen and drivers initially won some outright military victories And when Boukman was killed new leaders JeanFrancois and Georges Biassou took charge Nevertheless persistent French military attacks drove them back into northeast mountain bases where they began to rely on guerrilla tactics The Spanish in neighboring Santo Domingo fomenting problems for revolutionary France bought booty and sold guns and ammunition provided military advisers kept resistance alive But by the end of the year rebel leaders faced the question of how to secure the freedom they had seized At this uncertain moment what proved a crucial development took place in the rebel camp Toussaint Breda soon Louverture who had abandoned hardwon privileges he was freed in 1779 and had turned small coffee planter and confidential servant and joined the rebels as assistant to Biassou began to select and train his own army The rebels continued existence affected the west and south New insur gent independencies took shape some large scale eg the Souths ten to twelvethousandstrong kingdom of Les Platons destabilizing the slave system and driving whites and coloreds into local alliances In Paris the French government determined to secure free colored support conceded April 4 1792 decree the political equality denied in 1790 and sent commissioners with six thousand troops three times the standard garri son size to implement it sanctioning de facto free colored control of the south The initiative succeeded Insurgent slave independencies including Les Platons were destroyed in the south and rebels in the north appeared Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 696 the cambridge world history of slavery to be reduced to a moppingup operation But a rollercoaster of revolu tionary events in France and counterrevolutionary international reaction opened new ways forward for them In France a new radical wave of revolution gathered strength under pop ular pressure from August 1792 A republic was proclaimed the National Assembly replaced by an allpowerful National Convention which was elected by universal male suffrage and in January 1793 the king was exe cuted In response Great Britain and Spain declared war February 1793 France and its Caribbean colonies faced invasion The British sent the substantial forces that seized Martinique Guadaloupe and St Lucia and prepared to invade St Domingue from Jamaica Spain offered the rebels free status land and military commissions to serve as Spanish auxiliaries for an invasion from Santo Domingo Jean Francois and Biassou accepted Toussaints price was slave emancipation and he negotiated with the French who already embraced the free coloreds as equals His offer rejected by French military commander General Etienne Laveaux he pragmati cally accepted Spanish terms he became a colonel and in the following months he expanded his army defining its purpose as liberty and equality for all The Republics commissioners short of troops threatened by invasions and confronted July 1793 with a white Royalist coup detat at Le Cap whose leaders expected the British to restore white supremacy faced the fact the Republic could lose St Domingue In desperation they tried to buy slave support by offering individuals free status and citizenship to little effect Immediate rescue came from a wellestablished insurgent independency leader in the hills above Le Cap whose forces swept into town drove ten thousand whites onto US ships and returned to the hills but in August Spains new auxiliaries began advancing across the northern plain In these circumstances Commissioner Sonthonax made a definitive bid for mass slave support On his own initiative but backed up by well orchestrated public meetings in Le Cap he issued the August 29 1793 decree that freed slaves in the north and made them Republican citizens Eman cipation in the west and south soon followed and a multiracial delegation was sent to France to win sanction from the National Convention Son thonax acted because as C L R James says he could not help himself Toussaint Louverture at this same moment August 29 alerted no doubt by events at Le Cap matched the decree with his first public proclamation of intent Addressing his brothers and friends he declared I have under taken vengeance I want Liberty and Equality to reign in St Domingue I work to bring them into existence Unite with us brothers and fight for the same cause He adopted the language of the Rights of Man to explicate more fully their concept of liberty and he projected himself and his army Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 697 as the authentic force to achieve these goals It was a careful diplomatic translation of the blacks plain statement to white soldiers this land is not for you At that moment power was still wanting but within months events pushed Toussaint and his army to center stage The British invaded on September 20 1793 The blacks did not rally to the Republican flag but colored slave owners in the south and west delighted to have their rights to slave property protected rallied to the British They lost just fifty men occupying a third of the colony while diehard Royalists in the north handed over one of most important and bestequipped naval stations in the Americas Mole St Nicholas But in Paris the British occupation contributed to the spectacular political success of St Domingues multiracial delegation and its passionate advocacy of slave emancipation The National Convention in a heady mix of radical Republican principle and national interest abolished slavery in all French colonies February 4 1794 The revolutionary leader Danton declared it was Death to the English and a naval expedition was sent to reclaim its eastern Caribbean islands Three months later in St Domingue General Etienne Laveaux aristocratturnedradicalRepublican and a highly experienced soldier was impressed by Toussaints military skills Pressured by his conquests for Spain in the north and expected British reinforcements in the west and south he invited Toussaint Louverture and his army to join the Republic Lou verture accepted immediately evidently assured that abolition had been confirmed but he cautiously waited on official confirmation June 5 1794 before attacking the Spanish and recapturing for the French the mountain forts that ran from San Domingo to the sea Four thousand seasoned sol diers a hard core of wellchosen officers including exslaves Jean Jacques Dessalines Henri Christophe and Moise Toussaints adopted nephew a leader whose talents rank him as among the most outstanding in the history of the Americas joined the Republic The Haitian revolution had begun The massive 1791 slave uprising in conjunction with the 1789 Revolu tion in France destroyed the old colonial order and obliged the French government in an effort to restore control to expand their interpretation of the Rights of Man and Citizen to colonial free coloreds beyond the domestic class interests it was written to serve However in the upshot the persistence of the rebellion forced a fundamental new interpretation of the Rights of Man that abolished rights to property in persons and made chattel slaves citizens In July 1794 when Toussaint now brigadier general and his army joined the Republicans multiracial forces only parts of the northern plain and most of the predominantly mountainous south where experienced colored military men under Andre Rigaud ran in effect an autonomous Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 698 the cambridge world history of slavery regime were free from slavery Laveaux and Louverture from observa tion of their respective campaigns already had the highest respect for each other as military men Over the following months they also became de facto political partners Toussaints reports to Laveaux headed Republique Francaise une et indivisible were interlaced with multiracial recommen dations for whites and coloreds as well as blacks The recommendations were to military and civil offices that would ensure the maintenance of law order and agricultural production as each parish was taken over The candidates were described as bons francais intrepide republicains Building the new republican order went handinhand with military con quest Laveaux and colored colonel JeanLouis Villate cleared the northern plain Toussaint with Moise and Jean Jacques Dessalines invaded Santo Domingo capturing much artillery cash and ammunition October 1794 Months later Spain defeated also in Europe allied with the Republic July 1795 and ceded its colony to France Jean Francois and Biassou took early retirement in Spain and Florida respectively while some of their troops joined the British or established themselves in the northeast mountains However the Republican victories in the north and the threatened abo lition of slave property rights in the west incited disaffected coloreds led by JeanLouis Villate commander of the territory around Le Cap and prob ably in connivance with Rigaud in the south and the proslavery British whose ships hovered offshore to an attempted counterrevolutionary coup detat Laveaux now governor was jailed Villatte took over and sought popular support by spreading rumors that Laveaux and Toussaint intended to restore slavery The exercise was illjudged and rapidly sup pressed by Toussaints troops who were supported by armed laborers shout ing power to the law Villatte and his followers were later arrested and subsequently tried in France The suppression of the coup made Toussaint and his officers the Repub lics only reliable ally in St Domingue and produced the result it was intended to preempt further promotions for Toussaint and his officers Officers became brigadier generals and Toussaint was promoted to general of division More significantly at a large public meeting in Le Cap April 1 Laveaux identified Toussaint as the black Spartacus who as Abbe Raynal predicted had emerged to avenge the outrages done to his race Laveaux proclaimed him deputy governor officially confirmed August 17 1796 It was an unprecedented public affirmation of republican egalitarianism and the black army commanders political authority as leader of his people The coup also prompted France now victorious in Europe for the first time in two years to strengthen its presence in St Domingue Three thousand troops and National Guards military supplies and five civil commissioners headed by Sonthonax hero of the emancipation proclamation arrived in Le Cap May 11 1796 Their purpose was to affirm French authority by Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 699 embracing the whiteblack republican alliance and finally suppress colored aspirations to independence In France however a fundamental political shift was taking shape that threatened the Republics commitment to slave emancipation and the February 4 1794 decree A new constitution 1795 replaced the radical National Convention with a fiveperson executive directory and a two tier legislature which comprised a council of elders and a council of five hundred elected on a propertybased franchise As a result a strong clique of emigre colonists became councilors who backed by maritime interests campaigned vociferously for the restoration of slavery in St Domingue To assist in countering this proslavery faction in the heart of the Republic Toussaint invited Laveaux to stand for election as one of the colonys representatives in Paris August 1796 and be a zealous defender of the cause for which we are fighting Laveaux agreed and vindicated Toussaints judgment fighting consistently to defend general liberty and becoming Toussaints most reliable informant on French political developments Laveauxs departure to defend St Domingue was a mea sure both of the threat posed by the colonial reaction and of Tous saints confidence that he could deal with the countrys internal prob lems restoring law and order increasing productivity and dispatching the British The political developments in France lent a new urgency to completing the drive toward general liberty The campaign against the British began in February 1797 after Toussaint had solidified Republican support in the north by dealing with the insurgent independencies proliferated by war He successfully appealed for Unity against the Invaders with some and sup pressed others and restored agricultural production He then moved swiftly southwest scoring spectacular victories that led Sonthonax to promote him to governor and commander in chief in May 1797 although brutal bat tles continued for another year The British however whose troops were mostly slaves levied from their owners on promise of freedom for five years service were fighting a rearguard action Early in 1798 Toussaint and Rigaud launched the coordinated campaign the British had always feared and completed the conquest of the west In April the British offered to withdraw a process facilitated by Toussaints reputation for fair dealing with defeated enemies Treaty negotiations were completed in August and the last British troops left in October By a twisting turning political road the slaves who made the 1791 rebellion had triumphed and St Domingue became the first free black territory in the Americas The destruction of slavery and Sonthonaxs glowing accounts of Tous saints regime as governor general further incensed the colonial interest in Paris which had stepped up its attack on the emancipation decree while Toussaint was still fighting the British He had responded in November Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 700 the cambridge world history of slavery 1797 with a magisterial letter to the Directory calling on France to ensure that her most beautiful achievement her Decree of 4th February which so honors humanity would not be revoked Should this happen however I declare to you that it would be impossible we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty we shall know how to brave death to maintain it He gave France due notice that he and his people would bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery The colonial interest succeeded however in recalling Sonthonax and selecting his replacement General Hedouville who arrived in St Domingue without troops April 1798 just as the British surrendered and treaty negotiations were in progress Toussaint was facetoface in Laveauxs terms with the villains who abhorred him Hedouville acted as an agent provocateur he treated the Directorys governor and commander in chief fresh from defeating the British with contempt disputed his authority at every turn and actively undermined his alliance with Rigaud Meeting both leaders for the first time in public he showered courtesies on Rigaud a colored man assured him privately in writing that Toussaint was sold to the British and invited him to take command of the South implying a French colored alliance to overturn Toussaint was possible Resolutely diplomatic Toussaint resigned as commander in chief and Hedouville seized the moment to further weaken the military by dismissing Moise Toussaints most popular general Widespread public protest ensued which the army did nothing to restrain forcing Hedouville to leave for France October 1798 but essentially his job was done And the episode demon strated from first to last the growing power of the proslavery colonial interest in France In this context Toussaint had secured secret clauses in the British treaty rapidly leaked to the British press guaranteeing future neutrality and trade relations subsequently complemented by trade rela tions with the United States He told Moise when Hedouville left I do not want to fight with France I have saved this country for her up to the present but if she comes to attack me I shall defend myself like the Jamaica mountain blacks who have forced the English to make treaties with them At the same time leaving no diplomatic stone unturned he sent dispatches and explanations to France Toussaints immediate political problem however was with the south There the colored minority held substantial land and slaveowners under the ancien regime had seized power under Rigaud early in the revolution They sustained a significant army the Legion du Sud staffed with one exception by colored officers some of whom like Rigaud were trained in France They kept close control of their exslave workers The south was an enclave of colored privilege attached to provinces where privilege was to a degree multiracial but predominantly black Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 701 Toussaints racial egalitarianism his army despite Villattes attempted coup included colored officers his contacts with Rigaud which had continued after the coup despite proscription by France and their mil itary cooperation against the British pointed the way to unification as did the northsouth demographic 45000 versus 15000 and military 14000 versus 8000 imbalance After Hedouvilles intervention how ever it was clear that Rigaud brilliant soldier but less brilliant politi cian might well succumb to the lure of a possible French colored Rigaud proslavery alliance to supersede its free blackToussaint alliance In the end Rigaud chose in fact to follow the coloreds class interest and attacked Toussaint in June 1799 winning over some of the latters best colored officers most notably Alexandre Petion A hardfought and immensely destructive war followed hastened to an end ironically by news from France that Napoleon Bonaparte had overturned the Direc tory November 1799 and he established himself as head of a consular regime and convinced that Toussaints big battalions would win con firmed him as governor and commander in chief Rigaud his constitu tional claims destroyed left with most of his officers for France and the south impoverished embittered and warweary surrendered to a general amnesty The news from France that confirmed Toussaints authority how ever also presaged war Proclamations to the citizens of St Domingue Napoleon wrote nothing to Toussaint established that the colonial inter est was in charge of Napoleons colonial ministry and had shaped the new constitution It repudiated Republican universalism destroyed the single legal order La France une et indivisible that had united France and its colonies and substituted the doctrine of difference between metropolis and colonies and among the colonies All were to be ruled by special laws adjusted to their differing needs as decided in Paris It was the planters revenge a charter for restoring slavery at discretion while promising for the moment that liberty and equality would continue in St Domingue5 Commitment to the principle that no man can be the property of another had created the blackRepublican alliance and its rejection destroyed it Toussaint now swiftly and systematically prepared to defend the revolution He turned first to his political base the citizenworkers Since 1794 the military struggle to implement emancipation ran in tandem with a political struggle to get newly liberated citizenworkers back to work and to rebuild the agricultural economy food for the people and exports to buy arms 5 Laurent Dubois Avengers of the New World The Story of the Haitian Revolution Cambridge MA 2004 p 241 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 702 the cambridge world history of slavery Toussaint used the only instrument available to administer this process the army Generals of division took over abandoned estates as generals of department combining military and civil power with rights to rent out or cultivate some for themselves while acting as agricultural inspectors respon sible for any neglect of cultivation by civil and military subordinates in charge of districts towns and villages Land and labor managers were con sequently predominantly black although some coloreds and whites who accepted abolition kept their property The aim was to create an army of citizenworkers whose disciplined commitment to production matched the armys disciplined commitment to defending liberty Toussaint used his immense personal authority as well as labor decrees to achieve this But there was a sharp contrast between the citizenworkers expansive visions of a free life less work more choices wages land ownership and the grind of regular working days rewarded by crop shares and parttime plot cultivation Smallscale rebellions resulted managers were killed for attempting to make them slaves and Toussaint himself tirelessly mediating labor disputes on one occasion got a bullet in his leg But many citizenworkers understood the priorities circumstances dictated and where managers and officials adjusted to dealing with citizens as opposed to slaves and took account of wartime labor short ages they hammered out deals to resolve their conflicts The workers commitment was arguably symptomatic of the profound changes effec ted in their habits and ideas as a result of achieving their oldest and deepest political aspiration freedom itself They were a different peo ple from those the planters had known Toussaint himself embodied the transformation in its most dramatic comprehensive and authoritative form In economic terms the system in place only briefly four to six years in the north and west and two in the south was successful Official figures show exports recovered at a remarkable rate By 1801 coffee exports rose from zero to twothirds of their 1789 level and by 1802 sugar exports recovered to onethird of earlier volumes Such exports sustained the inter national trade links Toussaint established in 1798 with Britain while Britain and France were still at war and with the United States the following year The latter supplied armaments guns and cannon In 1800 with his military supremacy secured and French invasion threat ened Toussaint armed the agricultural workers and linked them with the military The October 12 1800 decree created a citizenworker soldier army in which as in the 1791 rebellion headmen foremen and workers became officers subalterns and soldiers but were strictly obedient to their superior officers The decree also attempted to gather back the plantation workers who had left by giving them eight days to return to their workplaces and to Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 703 curb the spread of small peasant holdings by prohibiting land sales of less than 159 acres6 This attempt at mass mobilization limited freedoms to secure our liberty With defenses strengthened in St Domingue Moise was sent to resolve the strategic problem posed by San Domingo legally French but occupied by Spain and affording an easy invasion route Spain capitulated in January 1800 and Toussaint now master of Hispaniola consolidated his political power He convened a constituent assembly on February 4 1801 the seventh anniversary of the Abolition Decree to draft particular laws preempt ing the imposition of the special laws threatened by the 1799 French constitution for the government of St Domingue The constitution was drawn up by elected members of the old elite Moise was elected but refused to serve a symptom of developing differences with Toussaint Completed in May and published in July 1801 it put the stamp of official approval on the principles and power structure of the status quo The colony comprising all Hispaniola was part of the French Empire in this territory slaves cannot exist servitude is permanently abolished all res idents regardless of color could pursue any employment and distinctions were to be made only with regard for virtues and talents Toussaint was declared governor for life with a right to choose a successor for a fiveyear term of office All appointments civil and military were in the governors hands and the army was at his disposition The constitutions social con tract confirmed the requirements of the October 1800 Labor Decree and limited citizens political rights to presenting petitions Its one innovation was its key omission There was no place for agents special envoys or advisers from France To underline this point splendid public celebrations took place to honor the constitution before Toussaint presented a copy of a printed version to Napoleons commissioner The constitution proved timely it reached Napoleons hands when preparations to rid the colony of its gilded Africans were under way Napoleon massed the largest fleet ever to leave France Fifty ships with twentytwo thousand soldiers and twenty thousand sailors were ready to sail as soon as preliminary peace terms were agreed to with Britain in October 1801 The scale of the expedition was intended like the Dutch expedition to Berbice 1763 to intimidate the entire population In the face of a challenge to racism and slavery throughout the Americas the French defined the expeditions political purpose as an international cru sade by the civilized West to destroy black barbarianism andor black Jacobinism and to preserve rights to slave property7 6 The 1801 Labor Decree aimed to limit peasant holdings by making sale of land in blocks of less than 50 carreaux 159 acres illegal 7 Dubois Avengers p 256 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 704 the cambridge world history of slavery At this dangerous moment with French invasion imminent Toussaint confronted the first major popular challenge to his authority compounded by the first split in his officer core Grievances often articulated to Tous saint directly about the states demand for disciplined agricultural export production about whites managing plantations and acting as policy advis ers and about the French alliance prompted a series of small rebellions in the revolutions heartland the parishes surrounding Le Cap The rebels targeted whites as embodying the threat of counterrevolution and in some districts reputedly cried Long Live Moise Serious enough in themselves the timing of these events threatened the defence of the revolution The rebels were suppressed and Toussaint called Moise to account as their soul and leader Moise denied involvement but as general of division and agricultural inspector in the north he had done nothing to prevent the unrest He was executed by military tribunal These unprecedented events sent shock waves through the country and among Toussaints colleagues and drove Toussaint to impose new security controls and deport some officers whose loyalty he suspected He did not however alert his generals or his people to the imminent invasion Possibly he was keeping open a diplomatic door in case Napoleon acknowledged both his services to France and black equality by granting his government the autonomy ceded to the whites in 1790 Whatever the case Napoleons expedition arrived off Le Cap on February 3 1802 The testing time of the revolution had begun The French met with strong resistance Toussaint despite some defec tions from commanders and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the invasion and French occupation of the ports fought a brilliant campaign that com bined military action and intensive countrywide guerrilla warfare includ ing the destruction of crops and the poisoning of springs By early April he fought the French to a standstill and looked forward to the rainy season that would bring yellow fever Toussaint however always kept diplomatic balls rolling he sent Henri Christophe to discuss terms of surrender with Le Clerc Disease was already thinning French ranks ten thousand dead in June 1802 but reinforcements were expected Surrender would mean that Toussaints soldiers would be inserted into French ranks where they could watch for the moment of maximum weakness to strike the enemy while living at French expense The policy promised a relatively swift victory but threatened to divide the army and confuse the people Henri Christophe perhaps forced Toussaints hand by agreeing to his own terms with Le Clerc taking fifteen hundred men with him It was the second split in the core leadership group in eight months Habituated to highrisk strategies Toussaint took one more and paid with his life To keep the army together Toussaint and Dessalines agreed to the same terms as Henri Christophe Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 705 with Le Clerc liberty preserved and officers and men incorporated at rank in the French army Toussaint himself retired at rank Within weeks Le Clerc had him arrested and deported he was confined and left to die in the high Alps The comprehensiveness of his political vision had always made such a fate likely On departure he affirmed his belief in the political purpose that had fueled his own and his peoples life since 1791 and accurately forecast the next stage of the struggle In overthrowing me you have cut down in St Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep The roots produced men with the guns he gave them in their hands Toussaints deportation sparked the first stirring of mass resistance among the exslaves and their children With the army now under French orders resistance reconfigured among the citizenworkers who had most to lose if the French took over The popular movement resurged in the north and fanned in July by news from Guadeloupe also invaded in 1802 that resistance was defeated and slavery restored spread to the west and south People who had fought naked as worms on two bananas a day to secure their freedom once turned a round and did it again Mass resistance combined with yellow fever swung the balance against the French soldiers and officers seeped away and in midOctober Toussaints generals led by Dessalines Petion and Christophe defected Black and colored united once more against the French The French response was genocide Le Clerc convinced slavery could only be restored by exterminating the population and importing African slaves first targeted the soldiers one thousand were drowned at Le Cap and four thousand more were killed across the country loyal or disloyal some with their wives and children And on Le Clercs death in November 1802 his successor General Rochambeau ordered all prisoners civilian and military colored and black exterminated hanged crucified asphyxiated by sulphur fumes in ships holds shot burnt alive buried in anthills consumed by fifteen hundred manhunting dogs imported from Cuba Some of these executions provided public entertainment in Le Cap But terror intensified memories of slavery and hardened defiance and in early 1803 a mass Indigenous Army emerged its name neatly eliminating all questions of color or origin identifying the fighters with the land they worked It had its own flag Dessalines and his officers tore the white out of the tricolor and replaced RF Republique Francaise with Liberty or Death But Napoleon sent reinforcements until May 1803 when war resumed with Britain The south surrendered in June but Rochambeau holed up in his bunker in Le Cap fought on killing as many blacks as possible until a confrontation in November that combined astounding Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 706 the cambridge world history of slavery acts of courage and stupendous carnage and finally drove the French onto British ships as prisoners of war Dessalines immediately proclaimed independence The formal declara tion written by a passionate young colored officer and issued by Dessalines and his officers on January 1 1804 celebrated past achievements and the expulsion of the barbarians who bloodied our land for two centuries It defined the nations purpose to forever assure liberty in the country and repudiated France The 1805 constitution generalized this repudia tion ruling that no whites of any nation could become property owners or employers unless they were naturalized citizens and became officially black And it named the newly independent nation Haiti a version of its Taino name a choice that reached behind French colonial terminology to identify Haitis people of African origin with their Indian predecessors in the Americas Haitis revolution in itself unique in the history of slave societies classical and modern reflected in part its exceptional domestic and international context As this brief survey indicates however it also shared essen tial characteristics with slave rebellions throughout this period All were rooted in closely comparable material circumstances developed similar trajectories and most importantly reached for the same political goals Claims for customary rights at the work place created the confidential slaveled constituencies from which rebels sprang to claim freedom land and selfgovernment aims occasionally achieved temporarily pre1804 by colonywide rebel takeovers or more commonly by rebels claiming land on colonial frontiers And the political will which drove these rebels to chance their lives despite limited arms and often limited numbers identifies them with the Haitians in 1791 whose different circumstances enabled them to pursue the long twisting road to victory further reading Michael Craton Testing the Chains Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies Ithaca NY 1982 Gabina La Rosa Corza Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba Resistance and Repres sion Chapel Hill NC 2002 Laurent Dubois A Colony of Citizens Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean 17871804 Chapel Hill NC 2004 Avengers of the New World The Story of the Haitian Revolution Cambridge MA 2004 David Eltis The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas Cambridge 2000 Carolyn E Fick The Making of Haiti The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below Knoxville TN 1990 David Barry Gasper Bondmen and Rebels A Study of MasterSlave Relations in Antigua Baltimore MD 1985 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 slave worker rebellions and revolution 707 David P Geggus Slavery War and Revolution The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 17931798 Oxford 1982 ed The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Atlantic World Columbia SC 2001 Jerome S Handler Slave Revolts and Conspiracies in Seventeenth Century Barbados New West India Guide 56 1982 538 Aline Helg Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia 17701835 Chapel Hill NC 2004 C L R James The Black Jacobins Toussaint LOuverture and the San Domingo Revolution London 1938 Anthony MacFarlane Cimarrones and Palenques Runaways and Resistance in Colonial Colombia Slavery and Abolition 6 1985 13151 Philip D Morgan Slave Counterpoint Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry Chapel Hill NC 1998 Gerald W Mullin Flight and Rebellion in Eighteenth Century Virginia New York 1972 Colin Palmer Slaves of the White God Blacks in Mexico 15701650 Cambridge MA 1976 Richard Price FirstTime The Historical Vision of an AfroAmerican People Baltimore MD 1983 J R Ward British West Indian Slavery 17501834 The Process of Amelioration Oxford 1988 Peter H Wood Black Majority Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion New York 1974 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 CHAPTER 27 RUNAWAYS AND QUILOMBOLAS IN THE AMERICAS manolo florentino and marcia amantino 1 runaways In the Americas as in precolonial Africa slaverys reproduction was struc turally linked to the reproduction of power Things could not be any other way Slavery was not a selfreproducing system it presupposed unequal power relations Long before their connection in production slaves and masters were united through a private culturally legitimated power rela tionship In other words before he or she became property the slave was the captive of another man For this reason escapes and quilombos though typical strategies of resistance to slavery were not only direct attacks on property They were extreme political acts whose very existence as possi bilities restricted the masters reach guaranteeing slaves a small yet crucial space from which they could make demands We must not forget that slav ery prevailed for four centuries in the Americas fully four times as long as universal emancipation In many ways the slave past is still greater than the free present For this reason though escapes and the establishment of communities of runaways constituted classical forms of resistance to slavery their study may in fact teach us much about slaverys great relative stability We begin our analysis with the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro Brazil a region highly integrated into the international market for tropical products In 1789 there were 65000 slaves in the region and 15000 in the city of Rio de Janeiro alone Thirty years later these numbers had increased to 150000 and 40000 respectively The trade in African slaves explains this growth Annual imports averaged 9000 during the last decade of the eighteenth century and increased to 23000 between 1808 and 1830 the greater part of these being quickly dispersed throughout southeastern Brazil Probate inventories of captives indicate that this increase further unbalanced the gender ratio and diminished the dependency ratio among slaves Similar patterns appeared in the Taubate region in the captaincy of Sao Paulo a rural area geared to production for the internal colonial market whose connections to the African trade also increased after 1808 cf Table 271 708 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 709 Table 271 Demographic profile of slaves in Taubate 17301830 and Rio de Janeiro 17891835 Taubate Rural Rio de Janeiro Urban Rio provision economy export economy de Janeiro 17301807 180830 17891807 181035 17891807 181035 of probate inventories 219 91 150 256 120 393 of inventories with runaways 23 22 07 27 08 18 of slaves 1431 390 2212 5835 867 3088 Africancreole ratio 261 543 973 1478 1835 3632 sex ratio 1154 1161 1361 1759 1624 1880 Dependency ratio 138 10 095 076 064 050 of runaway slaves 06 08 01 02 01 06 number of Africans per 100 creoles number of men per 100 women childrenelderlyadults Sources Probate inventories of the Rio de Janeiro Arquivo Nacional 17891835 and probate inven tories of Taubate 17301830 Arquivo Historico Dr Felix Guizard Filho Taubate Sao Paulo Less than 3 percent of the more than 1200 probate inventories from Rio de Janeiro and Taubate register names of escaped slaves a total of less than 1 percent of the almost 14000 slaves listed Because these runaways were listed by dying masters or their heirs as irretrievably lost in order to reduce doubts as to the value of goods to be distributed upon death we can presume that they are relatively accurate The data suggest that escape was a less frequent occurrence than commonly supposed especially escapes that allowed for the formation of wellled bands or junction with preexisting quilombos There were few of these kinds of relationbreaking escapes called grand marronages hereafter and those that existed were limited to a handful of plantations Another source runaway slave advertisements published in newspa pers reveals other aspects of this style of resistance In the first place in assuming that fugitives could be recovered owners usually detailed the circumstances of the escape and the origins and appearance of the fugi tive as well as giving some indication as to expectations that he or she could be captured again This allows us to create sociodemographic pro files for and to understand the perceptions of the actors involved in escape attempts Second though these announcements also refer to grand mar ronage they mainly deal with the more frequent truancies resulting from either the shock of disembarking in the Americas the captives personality the nature of the labor that was demanded of him or her or even of his or Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 710 the cambridge world history of slavery her desire to change owners A significant part of these truancies stemmed from the breaking of traditional accords such as that which occurred in 1745 in Bahia when during his stormy management of the Petinga engenho Father Luis da Rocha sold a slave to a neighbor an act that resulted in said slaves lover running away to be with his loved one and refusing to return to Petinga Called petit marronages in the literature these truancies more often involved individuals or rarely small groups of slaves who hid themselves in the work place in relatives homes or in neighboring slave barracks Such activity might be termed retribution escapes as opposed to the relation breaking nature of grand marronage Their objective was often merely to obtain small privileges that would increase the slaves autonomy within slavery These escapes were designed to pressure masters into conceding better living conditions a fact characterizing such behavior as part of quoti dian resistance that might nonetheless bring about some change in living conditions In 1609 the perceptive Father Alonso de Benavides detected a sort of floating population among the slaves of the Vera Cruz region in Nueva Espana individuals who had escaped from the plantations in order to join the cimarrones of the surrounding mountains but who returned in short order One of Benavides flock Francisco Angola ran to the mountains when his master refused his request to marry another mans slave Colonial French and Spanish law recognized the differences between grand and petit marronage prescribing different punishments for both The newspapers of Rio de Janeiro also confirm that slave rebellion in the early nineteenth century though often spawning runaways did not neces sarily imply a definitive break with captivity The number of these types of reported escapes ran to around 2 percent of the slave population of the city almost three times more than the grand marronages cited in urban probate lists from the same period Most of these fugitives eventually returned to their owners on their own or as a result of being recaptured They included the shirkers recorded as fujao calhambola or muito calhambola or habitual absentees in the inventories some of whom are described in advertisements as still wearing chains as well as the habitual drunk who might sober up kilometers from home Also in this category was the thief who stole money and jewels from his or her master hoping to begin life anew the beaten slave who while nursing wounds quenched a thirst for vengeance the pregnant woman who wandered alleyways in the forlorn hope that her child would not inherit her condition and the crioulo or acculturated African who having just been sold returned to his or her old dwellings to meet up with relatives and loved ones Most of all it included the bocal the African just arrived in the Americas whose fresh scarification revealed a recently ended adolescence and who could only manage a few Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 711 phrases in Portuguese wandering through the strange streets often not knowing the name of the master and thus perhaps ignorant of the power that turned human beings into property The procedures used to estimate the incidence of these situations require care and precision Researchers have generally relegated quotidian resistance to the background of their studies and focused instead on the great slave revolts and large wellstructured communities of fugitives even though most resistance did not manifest itself as either Additionally many scholars too quickly accept the estimates produced by masters and colonial author ities whose desire to enlist government aid in controlling slavery often led them to exaggerate the impact of large groups of runaways and quilombos The sensitivity of masters to loss of control over their slaves fueled a ten dency to exaggerate the real scale of escapes revolts and quilombo activity in the Americas One of the first examples was perhaps the estimate of a sixteenthcentury Castilian who calculated that there were seven thousand African cimarrones dispersed through settlements across the island of La Espanola a number that few modern scholars would accept This para noia can also be seen in the Portuguese crowns determination that in eighteenthcentury Brazil quilombo should be defined as any group of five or more fugitives living together in the wilderness whether or not they could support themselves Nearly half of the seventy slave insurrections reported in the British Caribbean between 1649 and 1833 appear never to have actually begun The great Jesuit establishments of the Rio de la Plata experienced low rates of escapes In 1768 shortly after the religious order was expelled no runaways at all were reported at the San Miguel de Tucuman and Santiago del Estero estancias at La Rioja only 11 percent of the 273 captives were counted as absent The institutionalization of manumission typical of Catholic regions certainly contributed to these low rates Greater yet still not large were the rates observed in Protestant colonies such as the Danish islands of St Croix St Thomas and St John In 1789 the pedagogue Hans West reported 1340 habitual or definite runaways in St Croix that is 6 percent of the islands 22448 slaves A more precise estimate was made in 1792 by P L Oxholm a military engineer who later became governor general He reported 96 slaves as definitively escaped or 05 percent of the 18121 St Croix captives His report also revealed that there had been 2082 petit marronages during the previous year 115 percent of the slave population which meant that grand marronage accounted for perhaps only 5 percent of all runaways In 1802 the 86 captives listed as definitively escaped represented less than 3 percent of the 3150 slaves on St Thomas In local situations the numbers of runaways could be much larger than these estimates would lead us to expect These were largescale escapes Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 712 the cambridge world history of slavery that occurred both in periods of economic expansion and depression often before or after slave revolts or during conflicts between metropolitan powers Massive escapes followed the 1522 defeat of the slaves who tried to establish an African republic near Santo Domingo and who plunged that region into waves of cropburning and murders of owners The same thing occurred fifteen years later in Mexico City following an aborted slave conspiracy When Dutch pirates sacked the ports of La Espanola in 1626 many slaves escaped to the mountains The famous maroon communities of Jamaicas interior were already established when the British took over in 1655 and expanded thereafter Likewise many of the palenques of the Guyanas were born during foreign military invasions that destroyed the plantations ability to watch and control their slaves resulting in escapes of dozens of slaves at a time In 1687 Diego de Quiroga then governor of Florida informed Madrid that eleven slaves had arrived from the Carolina in a stolen canoe and immediately requested that they be baptized into the true Catholic faith These escapes generally originating in South Carolinas Port Royal accelerated when blacks began to outnumber whites in the Carolinas especially after 1741 when the Spanish crown confirmed the liberty of all those slaves who escape from the English colonies In 1690 in Jamaicas Clarendon parish some four hundred slaves burned down Suttons plantation and escaped into the woods where they survived for some time by robbing neighboring properties Even in the small Danish islands families of planters were ruined due to the escapes of twenty to twentyfive slaves in a single night as Reimert Haageenssen who lived in St Croix in the 1750s reported Cases like these reveal the complexity of the social processes involved in escapes and indicate the need for prudence in using data from the Brazilian southeast and Danish Caribbean To be useful such data need to be treated as suggesting orders of magnitude rather than exact numbers Thus under normal conditions perhaps ten out of every one hundred slaves ever escaped the vast majority absconding temporarily This relatively low rate of escapes is one of the most expressive characteristics of American slaverys longterm stability It was a result both of social control mechanisms and most importantly of processes that accelerated acculturation and partially mitigated oppression Ultimately it stemmed from the peasant or proto peasant elements of slave culture and the struggle for such rights as wage labor and free time to engage in private activities Slave societies in Brazil in the Caribbean and in the southern United States were more likely to exhibit such traits as they became less dependent on the Atlantic slave trade In other words slave protest evolved toward relative economic and social autonomy within slavery Slaves certainly aspired to be free but it was a liberty conceived as a partially independent peasantry or of a workforce that had some limited control over its activities Such an elaboration demanded Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 713 time to work itself out time above all spent in an acculturation that slowly transformed captives prisoners into slaves 2 patterns Table 271 also reaffirms a classical historiographical lesson the positive cor relation between the frequency of escapes and fluctuations in the arrivals of slaves in the Americas It is thus plausible to suppose given that the eigh teenth century saw twothirds of all slaving voyages reaching the Americas that this era was the golden age of slave escapes This logic also suggests that though escapes were registered across the Americas they were proba bly more frequent in Brazil and the Caribbean than in continental Spanish America and above all in the southern United States where quilombos were smaller and less enduring It has been written that every newly arrived African was potentially a cimarron Although such statements have a romantic element it is clear that escapes of bocais plural of bocal were relatively common occurrences from the very outset of colonization In Guatemala in 1640 for example seventeen of ninetyeight slaves who shipped from Angola on the Nuestra Senora de los Remedios y San Lorenzo escaped between their port of arrival and their final destination in the interior five died Caribbean newspapers often warned of the presence of bozales Spanish for bocais near the ports seeking passage back to Africa The results of this could be tragic In 1801 in Jamaica four Fante convinced other Africans to accompany them in an escape from the plantation to which they had been sold They made their way to the sea and embarked in the first canoe they found for their native land without having the slightest notion of the distance to Africa The large number of bocais among the fugitives noted in probate inven tories and above all in newspaper articles suggests that these were the reason for the strong relationship between rises in escape rates and fluctu ations in the Atlantic slave trade Bocais represented from 20 to 30 percent of all fugitives announced in Rio de Janeiro newspapers during the first decades of the nineteenth century a similar percentage to that detected in different British colonies between 1730 and 1805 A sampling of the almost ten thousand fugitives reported in the newspapers of the British Caribbean and the southern United States shows that in both Barbados and the Chesapeake Bay region where positive rates of natural population evolved relatively early diminishing contact with the Atlantic trade was accompanied by both fewer escapes and a lower ratio of recently disem barked Africans among escapees In Jamaica South Carolina and Georgia regions much more dependent upon the slave trade the number of bocais was almost three times greater 125 percent cf Table 272 In other words though escape represented the other face of colonial slavery it is Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 714 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 272 Demographic profiles of escaped slaves advertised in newspapers in the Caribbean and the southern United States 17301805 Total men women men new slaves 1 Caribbean Jamaica 2612 1981 631 758 201 Barbados 431 283 148 657 51 2 Chesapeake Bay Virginia 1280 1138 142 889 50 Maryland 1031 901 130 874 17 3 Lowcountry South Carolina 3267 2582 685 790 74 Georgia 998 816 182 818 116 Total 9619 7701 1918 801 103 Source Michael Mullin Africa in America Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 17361831 Urbana IL 1994 p 289 plausible that it was largely a response to isolation and the elimination of the cultural codes that structured life in Africa Up to a point we can thus say that escapes can be understood as one of the tangible effects of a kind of cultural seasoning whose impact was obviously greater in those regions that imported more African slaves The dynamic of emancipation also reinforced the positive correlation between escapes and the intensity of connections with the transatlantic slave trade There are strong indications that more escapes occurred where there were fewer emancipations From the point of view of the masters moments of economic expansion meant both the incorporation of new hands and limiting the loss of the existing labor force through the restric tion of emancipation In the same way the greater frequency of manu mission during recession was justified by the need to cut down on main tenance costs andor recover part of the price of captives that were not now so necessary In the first situation when slave prices were high what manumissions took place tended to be without cost to the slave The total number of manumissions was not as high as during the second situation and selfpurchased manumission became the rule Without being able to establish the true dimensions of each of these moments it is probable that successive waves of high slave prices restricted slaves possibilities for acquiring the necessary cash to buy their own liberty This in turn re defined slaves expectations options and attitudes regarding liberty Such conditions saw more escape attempts than those in which slave prices were lower and selfpurchase cheaper This model obviously is only applicable to those regions where man umissions were culturally incorporated as an element in the relationship Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 715 between masters and slaves This was the case in the majority of the Iberian colonies where long periods of little integration with the Atlantic slave trade coincided with relatively low slave prices and where the majority of liberated slaves thus achieved manumission through selfpurchase In eighteenthcentury Guatemala for example 70 percent of the manumit ted slaves almost always women bought their own liberty generating a significantly large free population of color There were few fugitives but those that did escape tended to organize themselves in palenques similar to those that existed around Mount Mico devoting themselves to pillag ing caravans and organizing new escapes from neighboring plantations In the same way the Yucatan peninsula in Nueva Espana received few slaves direct from Africa the greater part of the demand for workers being met by the native population The few slaves that existed there were either gradually manumitted for free or more commonly bought their own freedom with the aid of a relative or community funds set aside for this purpose by the Spanish government Absconders both within and to the Yucatan usually returned to their owners within eight weeks There is no solid evidence that there were palenques in the Yucatan though it is possible that San Fernando de los Negros in Ake served as a refuge for runaways Though both male and female slaves constantly ran away male adults were predominant among runaways In the Brazilian southeast at the begin ning of the nineteenth century three out of four fugitives who made a definitive break with slavery were men the majority of these Congos or Angolans due to the regions intense connections with southwestern Cen tral Africa Probate inventories indicate that most of these men were adults settled on large plantations who were engaged in diverse forms of manual labor Some carried marks on their bodies resulting from hard work and disease The fact that they often escaped together in small groups sug gests that a good part of these grand marronages were the result of prior planning with a set destiny and logistical support available from social networks established both within and outside of the plantation As for the petit marronages announced in newspapers in the Brazilian southeast four out of five slaves involved were men and the vast majority of these were Africans five to ten for every crioulo Though the CongoAngolans predominated there was also a large contingent of runaways from other regions of Africa Mozambique in particular and of crioulos originally from the northeastern and southern provinces of Brazil Children from ten to fourteen years of age made up onethird of the fugitive total and 45 percent of the Africans Like those involved in grand marronage the majority of the runaways reported in the newspapers had been engaged in unskilled labor though some exercised stable specialized functions as cobblers tai lors cabinetmakers and above all sailors and domestics which leads Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 716 the cambridge world history of slavery us to believe that some slaves thought they could live indefinitely on the fruits of their own labor outside captivity but within slave society These slaves sometimes ran away in groups of two or three but generally escaped on their own Some received aid from other slaves and free men who hid and even hired them Mostly however the escape was not meticulously planned nor aided by extensive social networks Portuguese Americas enduring connections with the slave trade certainly helped ensure that the majority of fugitives were adult men Evidence from other American regions suggests however that this was not simply a reflection of the slave populations overall gender imbalance For example we know that between 1730 and 1805 in economic systems that were not very dependent upon the transatlantic slave trade such as those of Virginia Maryland and Barbados 85 percent of fugitives were men This is greater than the 78 percent found in South Carolina Georgia and Jamaica regions that had much stronger ties with the slave trade and where the participation of recently disembarked captives in escapes was three times greater than in the Chesapeake Bay region and Barbados adults predominated over other age groups in all cases cf Table 272 We can thus see that aside from the slave populations gender and age imbalances other factors were at work in making adult men the majority among fugitives Tellingly among Carolina slaves who reached the Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose sanctuary in 1738 few were women This was due in large part to the fact that children complicated mothers journeys across the dangerous Florida swamps where only the strongest and fastest fugitives escaped slave catchers and natural predators Eighteenthcentury probate inventories of Portuguese America show few slaves who had families made a definite break with captivity All this suggests that up to a certain point the slave family operated as a strong stabilizing mechanism creating links between its principal components mothers and children and the slavocratic status quo 3 the quilombola bands Though some fugitives quickly reinvented themselves as free men changing their names and living off their earnings in the field or city and others more rarely attempted a return to Africa the greater part of those runaways who were never recaptured encountered a distinct alternative to life within slavocratic society From the Rio de la Plata to the southern United States palenques quilombos cumbes marrons and mainels formed and reformed along the margins of plantations mines and cities In Nueva Granada alone between the Cauca and Magdalena rivers and near Cartagena more than half a hundred palenques were identified between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries San Basılio La Ramada Santa Cruz de Mazinga Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 717 Betancur Ure Matudere and San Jacinto being the most famous of these In Minas Gerais Brazil there were more than 150 quilombos between 1711 and 1795 Today descendants of cimarrones live in enclaves across Central and South America and the Caribbean Fugitives generally found refuge in the wooded or swampy regions that were then so abundant in the Americas partly to inhibit the activities of slaves catchers and militias but also because such regions offered many of the resources necessary for survival such as abundant fish game firewood and vines Security and supplies were initial unavoidable prerequisites for the survival of these small settlements which had the potential to trans form themselves into stable nuclei of autonomous peasants Because of the removal of the forests and swamps that gave them cover and sustenance during the first half of the eighteenth century many fugitives from the islands of St Croix St Thomas and St John began to run to Puerto Rico or merged with the black populations of the Danish islands cities Similar patterns emerged in Barbados and Antigua As frequently as palenques formed they were repressed with recaptured slaves being slapped in irons punished with hundreds of lashes or even mutilated The Black Code of Santo Domingo 1768 stipulated that run aways absent for up to four days could be punished with fifty lashes and tied to a trunk until sunset The number of lashes was increased to one hundred if the absence lasted eight days In this case the foot of the slave could also be chained to a twelvepound weight for two months Absences of up to four months were punished by two hundred lashes with an additional two hundred added if the fugitive had associated with cimarrones Expulsion from Santo Domingo was the rule for repeat offenders The Code Noir of Louisiana 1724 was even more brutal Absences of more than a month resulted in the fugitives ears being cut off Escapees would also have their backs marked with a fleurdelis If he or she was a repeat offender an arm would be amputated and the fugitive would have another fleurdelis cut into his or her body A third escape meant death Whippings branding the cutting off of ears and hands mutilation of corpses and public exhibition of heads were the rule during the suppression of the Brazilians quilombos in the eighteenth century Likewise a traveler in Suriname at the beginning of that century wrote if a slave runs away into the forest in order to avoid work for a few weeks upon his being captured his Achilles tendon is removed for the first offense while for a second offense his right leg is amputated in order to stop his running away I myself was a witness to slaves being punished this way Sometimes violence and persuasion alternated with one another espe cially during the first centuries of colonization In La Espanola during the midsixteenth century for example as a response to cimarron attacks Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 718 the cambridge world history of slavery against miners and haciendas of the central La Veja valley local authorities mixed military repression with pacification by sending religious repre sentatives to the palenques In 1577 in what is today Ecuador priests were likewise charged with contacting fugitives who had founded a palenque two generations earlier in Esmeraldas Cimarron leaders accepted these first contacts pretending to accept the Catholic faith in order to later escape from the missionaries In the same way during the midseventeenth century the archbishop of La Espanola Francisco de la Cueva Maldon ado tried to engage peacefully with the cimarrones of four palenques in the islands mountains Known as the Bahoruco these people had already rejected other offers of peace and likewise turned their backs on this one claiming to no longer believe the white mans word Because they were written by those involved in suppression the sources we have on the history of palenques are generally fragmentary and ethno centric especially when they deal with the settlements internal dynam ics In very few cases notably Suriname and Jamaica where quilombolas were able to establish treaties with the colonial authorities and where their descendants survive today there are a few rich sources available especially oral tradition The records of interrogations of the Lower Louisiana quilom bolas in the 1760s also offer a vivid panorama of the situations encoun tered by recent escapees and the settlements they formed After running away these slaves generally wandered unarmed through the swamps feed ing themselves with corn and potatoes that they carried with them from the plantations and whatever they could hunt or gather They generally returned to their owners in less than a month Those who did not built cabins or more frequently sought to join the fragile fugitive settlements in nearby bayous often surviving by theft from nearby plantations Others involved themselves in alternative subsistence activities cultivating small corn or rice fields hunting alligators and small game or gathering palm hearts A few even produced enough to sell their surplus in New Orleans markets Lists of recaptured slaves show an extremely unbalanced demo graphic profile with three men to every woman Due to the regions minor association with the Atlantic slave trade the Louisiana fugitives were almost all crioulos During the American Revolution a charismatic leader named St Malo arose among the maroons of the Delta region He founded the settlements of Ville Gaillarde and Chef Menteur Interrogations revealed that runaways continued to arrive in these settlements often bringing barrels of rice fishing rods and firearms with them This indicates that an intelligently organized support and communications network was well established between the quilombolas and plantation slaves There were even quilombolas associated with owners of sawmills to whom they sold logs The normally low rates of permanent escapes and the notable gender and age imbalances tended to reduce quilombos like those in the Delta to fluent Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 719 and temporary associations of people better described by the term bands than social formations Often numbering ten or fewer people and without a permanent base such groupings had poor demographic prospects and organized around gathering hunting and stealing rather than agriculture Most lacked a stable legitimated civil or military authority or indeed any strong social ties Unity occurred only insofar as basic objectives such as the search for food and protection needed to be achieved This was the configuration of the vast majority of palenques cumbes quilombos marrons and mainels in the Americas though such a condition also made them harder to destroy Some such groups took over cave complexes But the risk of total disappearance was also constant Over time quilombolas were decimated by recapture and diseases such as measles chickenpox malaria dysentery and above all smallpox For this reason fugitive hordes generally found themselves on the defensive always seeking refuge in regions where geography complicated their discovery and destruction Hiding in swamps and forests could guarantee quilombolas bands a measure of survival but it did not aid their demographic reproduction much less growth In Lower Louisiana for example St Malo was betrayed and killed Significantly the Delta settlements declined when under attack by Spanish troops aided by free men and even some slaves lines of com munication with the plantations were cut as well as those of important supply and information routes The list of recaptured slaves shows that most belonged to easily identifiable masters and therefore could not have belonged to established quilombo societies notwithstanding the presence of some slave families In mid1784 more than 103 fugitives had been cap tured but this is perhaps an incomplete total Even so the quilombolas were a miniscule portion of Lower Louisianas slave population Even the fifty or more escaped slaves of the Engenho Santana Bahia Brazil were little more than a band when in 1789 led by the crioulo Gregorio Luiz they murdered their overseer and escaped into the nearby jungle For two years they were a persistent nuisance to their old master Manuel da Silva Ferreira Hunted by military expeditions they ended up sending him a written peace accord in which they established the terms under which they would voluntarily return to captivity They asked for better working conditions a chance to grow and sell their own food more material com forts and the right to play relax and sing when they wanted to Ferreira accepted the fugitives proposal but upon their return to Santana arrested Gregorio and sold the revolts leaders to Maranhao Life soon returned to normal on the engenho Characterized by a low degree of social and demographic complexity and for this reason hard to root out quilombola bands fueled the free populations principal fear especially when they associated themselves with other socially deviant groups such as clandestine goldpanners and highway Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 720 the cambridge world history of slavery bandits It quickly became difficult to distinguish free poor men from the slaves and quilombolas especially if the first are emancipated an ecclesiastical investigation undertaken in seventeenthcentury Brazil noted In 1769 a military expedition sent against a quilombo captured eighty people of diverse origins some of whom had established themselves on quilombo lands with their families gardens children and women even without being quilombolas Twentyfive years later in Minas Gerais another large quilombo was discovered this one very old containing not only black and mulatto fugitives but also some whites In St Domingue along the Chesapeake Bay and in the Carolina Lowcountry the association of black slaves and white indentured servants attempts to escape was as old as slavery itself Such cases permit us to think of the quilombola phenomenon not strictly as or exclusively slave resistance but more generally as social exclusion the product of poverty and marginalization 4 quilombola societies Some few palenques whose existence only can be surmised through a few traces remaining today managed to remain isolated generally in the inte rior of South America The Black Code of Santo Domingo prescribed hanging for any fugitive who had been absent for more than six months while maintaining contact with quilombolas Other Spanish codes and the Code Noir prohibited the employment of fugitives and impeded slaves from selling anything without their masters approval that might aid the quilombolas The reason for such draconian penalties was simple The palenques interacted with slaves Indians and free men of all colors who were their neighbors Colonial authorities were aware that such interaction was of fundamental importance for the reproduction and growth of fugi tive societies Thus a 1795 letter to the governor of Minas Gerais Brazil complained that plantation slaves allied themselves with those from the jungles sharing the supplies of their masters storehouses Another doc ument emphasized that small stores were important for the quilombos as it was there that the spoils from raids and the surplus from agriculture could be sold Small general stores became so important to quilombola reproduction that in 1754 the Cˆamara of the city of Vila Rica complained that every store is a quilombo Stable aid networks helped the quilombolas acquire food weapons muni tions money and information that could guarantee survival Through these runaways were conducted to the quilombos and quilombolas met up with enslaved relatives some quilombolas were even able to sell their labor power to plantations By encouraging the sale of part of what quilombo las produced these networks encouraged quilombola participation in the market Summing up together with the protection offered by forbidding Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 721 terrain the information and goods obtained through interaction with the margins of colonial society functioned as a sort of primitive accumulation helping transform loosely organized groups into rural quilomba communi ties with relatively complex sociopolitical structures and identities Once this transition was complete the combination of social networks security due to the strategic location of refuges and the groups greater economic and demographic reproductive capacity could provide a basis for quilom bolas to interact with the plantation sector and to use such interaction to extend their own viability Dialectically this increased the chances of new fugitives joining the group a process that in turn contributed to greater economic growth and demographic sustainability It is possible that the palenques of the Valle de Carabayllo in eighteenth century Peru were passing through this transitional stage They were non fortified settlements that relied on their ability to reproduce themselves in dispersed form throughout inaccessible refuge areas The existence of numerous sources of potable water favored their dissemination and there are indications that each settlement controlled a stretch of territory around a spring Contributing to their segmentation was the relative lack of labor available for forest clearing which meant that many of the Carabayllo fugi tives ended up hired by adjacent properties In exchange for their labor they were authorized to sell some of the wood for their own benefit some thing that certainly helped them to build social connections with several levels of Peruvian colonial society Throughout the Americas the transition to a settled community was essential to longterm viability New runaways sought wherever possible to join with already existing quilombolas There are good reasons to believe that he is in the Tijuco quilombo read the announcement of the slave Felix Mocambiques escape referring to one of several fugitive groups sheltering in the mountains around Rio de Janeiro since the seventeenth century We know that in Jamaica where the Indians disappeared as a distinct com munity shortly after the Spanish conquest many captives founded new palenques both during the English invasion of 1655 and the slave revolts at the end of the seventeenth century Many more simply joined existing marron settlements in the mountains An open frontier facilitated interaction and sometimes merging with indigenous communities The military power of the natives inhibited colo nial forces and integration with a native community greatly reduced the difficulties of recent runaways Cooperation between runaways and indi genes stretched back at least to 1503 when Governor Nicolas de Ovando of La Espanola complained that Africans were finding refuge with the Taıno Indians of the islands mountains The African cimarrones also aided the Taıno Enrique in his unsuccessful revolt against the Spanish in 151932 In Puerto Rico Indians and blacks lived together in the jungles causing such Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 722 the cambridge world history of slavery panic among the Spanish colonists that in 1526 Francisco de Ortega said that the island had lost its metropolitan population in December of 1550 the governor told the king that the situation was still unresolved During the sixteenth century cooperation between Indians and fugitives was also seen in Zapoteca region in Nueva Espana 1523 Cuba 1529 Nicaragua 1540 in the Venuzuelan region of Santa Marta 1550 and in Panama 154650 In Brazil by contrast Indians often served colonial authorities in repress ing quilombolas as was the case of the Tapuias who helped the Portuguese destroy the Palmares quilombo by 1700 In February 1612 however Sancho de Alquiza informed the king of Spain that the Caribs possessed more than two thousand African slaves in their islands in the Antilles It is likely that Indians in the southern United States held escaped blacks as slaves or even arranged a sort of feudal structure whereby blacks lived in their own settlements the black villages referred to in English sources giving their native masters annual tribute and services On the other hand there are also numerous episodes in which free and enslaved blacks helped to suppress unassimilated Indians Colonial authorities openly used quilombos to further their own goals as in Panama in 1570 when the English allied themselves with the cimarrones against the Spanish In general when Indians were finally conquered or when they maintained stable alliances with colonial authorities they tended to reject contact with quilombolas even returning many of them to the Europeans as the Carib did in Martinique and San Vicente after 166080 Even in the southern United States some of the fugitives who reached Florida during the eighteenth century had already fought alongside the Yamasee Indians against the English During the same period in French Louisiana a mixed settlement of Africans and Indians was discovered stealing supplies and weapons from planters Under interrogation in 1727 a recaptured Indian slave revealed the existence of the Natanapalle settlement inhabited by fifteen other Indian and African fugitives who were heavily armed Later on in Louisiana in 1748 the Western Choctaw who had attacked German colonists along the Cˆote dAllemagne defeated a military mission sent to capture them with the aid of the black fugitives and indigenous slaves whom they had previously taken in Even deeper interaction is suggested by the analysis of pottery encoun tered in archeological sites around the city of Santo Domingo Though produced by African cimarrones the pottery incorporates Indian elements suggesting an intense cultural exchange between the two groups and lead ing to a reevaluation of styles that were previously understood to be exclu sively indigenous Indian pottery has also been encountered in the heart of Palmares along the Serra da Barriga suggesting that cultural mixing in that quilombo was also considerable About onefifth of the prisoners captured Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 723 by the Dutch in raids on the major quilombo were Indian in 1644 These examples point to the possibility that cimarrones and Indians could unite and even create mixed communities something also seen in the Antilles the Amazon Bahia Ecuador and in some places in colonial Florida Mixed quilombos united Indians and African cimarrones in the mountains around the copper mines of Buria Venezuela in 1552 Some mixed Caribbean communities apparently originated in slave shipwrecks as was the case with the Zambos Mosquitos of Nicaragua 1641 and the black Caribs of San Vicente 1675 Mixing was also common in the captaincy of Mato Grosso Brazil where in 1770 the Piolho quilombo was destroyed for the first time Though seventynine blacks and thirty Indians were captured on this oc casion the blacks soon escaped and returned to the original settlement forming families with the Indian women Twentyfive years later during another raid authorities captured six old black men the communitys patriarchs eight male Indians nineteen female Indians and twentyone cabures mixed children of Indians and blacks ranging from two to sixteen years old The large number of women compared with only eight Indian men suggests that the Indian women were more willing than their men to stay in the original quilombo making possible the formation of families in the absence of black women When Diego de Frıas captured the Rio Pinas settlement in Panama in 1580 he observed that the community contained a few Indian women captured in wars against the neighboring natives A similar occurrence may have happened in Mato Grosso The mestizo nature of these communities acquired even stronger tones as in the Esmeraldas palenque whose origins stretched back to a vessel wrecked on the coast of Ecuador in 1533 that contained a shipment of African slaves from Panama The black Anton led an escape by sixteen men and six women into the surrounding jungle where they met the Pidi Indians According to the clerk Miguel de Cabello Balboa though the Africans initially served the Pidi as warriors their demands for resources and women soon provoked conflicts The remaining Africans mixed with the coastal natives forming the first mixed peasant settlement in Esmeraldas Among the quilombos that certainly reached the peasantcommunity stage were those that established formal peace treaties with the colonial au thorities Typically as noted in Colombia Mexico Brazil Cuba Ecuador Jamaica Hispanola and Suriname these treaties included the recognition of cimarron liberty the groups territorial integrity and even provided for supplies to meet immediate needs In exchange the cimarrones were required to end hostilities against the colonial powers and the plantations return such slaves as would seek refuge among them in the future and often aid in the capture of new fugitives It is not certain whether all these treaties were fulfilled The Saramakas of Suriname for example though Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 724 the cambridge world history of slavery required to return all people who werent members of their communities before the treaty hid an illegal part of their population from white eyes One of the first to sign a treaty with a colonial power was Yanga or Nanga an African who was possibly of royal lineage and who settled in 1570 with other fugitives along the Serra de Zongolica in the sugar region of Orizaba Nueva Espana In 1609 the palenque suffered a strong attack from colonial forces and Yanga led the retreat to another nearby fort Shortly thereafter he established a treaty with the authorities whereby he obtained freedom for all those who had lived with him prior to 1608 as well as the incorporation of a village San Lorenzo de los Negros and a church a strong indication of acculturation He and his heirs governed the region from which the Spanish were excluded except on market days In exchange the cimarrones swore to live peacefully to return all fugitives who sought shelter among them to their owners and to serve the king in war when required After surviving initially via theft the hundreds of fugitives from the Sutton plantation in Jamaica responded to colonial repression by uniting under the command of an Akan named Kwadwo For years his daring attacks prevented the establishment of new English settlements Unable to defeat the maroons militarily English authorities tried for peace signing a treaty with Kwadwo in 1739 that guaranteed 1500 acres of land to the quilombolas A similar treaty was signed the next year with the maroons of St George parish recognizing cimarron liberty in exchange for pro hibiting new fugitives from joining their community The maroons were also charged to take kill suppress or destroy any slave rebellion on the island either at their own initiative or upon orders from the governor of Jamaica The lineage of the quilombola chiefs was also recognized and two Europeans were chosen by the governor to reside in the communities as liaisons with the English colonists Some treaties were actually part of a greater strategy to exterminate the cimarrones as was the case with Nueva Granadas most famous palenque San Basılio Situated near Cartagena San Basılio was founded at the begin ning of the seventeenth century by Domingo Bioho allegedly a member of African royalty who recreated his dynasty in the New World as King Benkos After arriving at agreement with Benkos the governor of Carta gena betrayed him hanging him in 1619 San Basılio itself however was only destroyed in 1686 after sixty years of survival despite the early loss of its most noted leader At its high point the palenque had more than three thousand inhabitants of which six hundred were warriors Sometimes fugitive communities dispensed with treaties entirely and maintained informal but harmonious relations as between peasant com munities of equal standing A January 1770 letter to the judicial authorities of Portuguese America relating the capture of some quilombolas is quite Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 725 illustrative in this sense the information I have on the negroes captured in the quilombo was passed to me by some residents of Estrada who assure me that these negroes never killed nor robbed that they had settled in the area planting food to eat and cotton for clothing Though we do not know the exact location of this nameless quilombo only that it was in Minas Gerais the letter suggests rather placid relations between the fugitives and the surrounding settlements characterized by decades of interaction between free and quilombola peasants The Bacaxa quilombo in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro was another example of relatively peaceful interaction Apparently founded at the begin ning of the seventeenth century it was discovered by authorities in August 1730 in a mostly uninhabited region This quilombo contained more than sixty people including many women and children which suggests a degree of longrun stability given that they had all been born in the quilombo itself Bacaxa sustained itself in part from the produce of its gardens and in part by robberies from nearby farms Largely however the quilombo lived in relative harmony with the surrounding population and irritated princi pally the authorities who unable to destroy it had ultimately to accept its existence This situation changed when two free men were brutally mur dered by a group described as numerous negroes who have been settled in homes and gardens for many years which is acceptable when they do not commit insults but which after this can no longer be allowed to conduct similar outrages According to a letter sent to the governor of Rio de Janeiro because of this it is necessary not only to extinguish said quilombo but to capture all the negroes negresses and the children which theyve had in the jungle Twentythree quilombolas were caught but the rest were able to escape into the woods or to neighboring villages where they mixed even further with the local population We can conclude that though quilombos in theory represented a threat to security and property local communities forged many different ways of dealing with them putting in question the idea that every quilombo necessarily constituted an inassimilable focus of resistance to slavery Nev ertheless by pointing to alternative ways of life these quilombos exposed colonial vulnerabilities This is the reason why though the majority of the palenques of the Americas were formed by Africanborn until abolition of the Atlantic slave trade some communities incorporated Indians poor whites and poor free mulattos 5 community population kinship and agriculture Aside from the varied relations between quilombos and their neighbors survival and viability of major palenquera communities hinged on a com bination of a growing population maintained by reasonably productive Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 726 the cambridge world history of slavery Table 273 Population estimates of some Minas Gerais quilombos 17661770 Number of houses Minimum estimated or farms population Quilombo de Paranaıba 76 380 Quilombo do Catigua 150 750 Quilombo da Tabua 200 1000 Quilombo do Gondu 80 400 Quilombo Quebra Sˆe 80 400 Quilombo do Cascalho 80 400 Quilombo das Goiabeiras 90 450 Quilombo do Oopeo 137 685 Quilombo da Boa Vista 200 1000 Quilombo Nova Angola 90 450 Quilombo do Pinhao 100 500 Quilombo do Caete 90 450 Quilombo do Zondu 80 400 Quilombo do Cala a Boca 70 350 Quilombo do Careca 220 1100 Quilombo do Mamoı 150 750 Quilombo do Indaia 200 1000 Quilombo do Pernaıba 70 350 Source Marcia Amantino Sobre os quilombos do sudeste brasileiro nos seculos XVIII e XIX in Manolo Florentino and Cacilda Machado eds Ensaios sobre a Escravidao I Belo Horizonte 2003 pp 25762 agricultural systems with increasingly complex kinship relations and well structured internal hierarchies The number of structures and ranchos in a quilombo settlement is an important indicator of both social complexity and population size In 1645 Captain Johann Blaer the commander of a Dutch expedition described in his diary the settlement of Velho Palmares as a halfmilelong abandoned village whose main street was 22 meters wide containing two cisterns at the villages center along with a square where the king had his house and conducted military exercises with his followers Three days later Blaer saw the settlement of Novo Palmares where he counted 220 houses Assuming that each of these sheltered five people the settlement contained something on the order of eleven hundred quilombo las which considering Palmares total of ten large settlements suggests that the quilombola federations total population was at least eleven thousand people Table 273 shows a similar procedure and indicates an average of six hundred inhabitants per large quilombo in Minas Gerais during the second half of the eighteenth century These settlements had been founded in the early part of that century during the intensive importation of Africans to work the provinces gold deposits Since then they had grown through the incorporation of fugitives and natural reproduction Their populations Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 727 varied in size from 350 inhabitants at Pernaıba to 1100 in Indaia The Minas Gerais case suggests a range of size but also that few communities were as large as one thousand The division of cultivated fields in these large communities reflected the dominant nuclear family structure though there is evidence of lots cultivated by the entire community The 1759 census of the Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose sanctuary in Florida shows gender imbalance persisting twenty years after the communitys founding with twice as many men present as women In part this was due to the sanctuarys continued attraction of fugitives from South Carolina and Georgia But a generation was usually enough for structured families to supersede the initial sex and age imbalance Solid kinship networks were in place in Mose by 1759 and the settlement was already enjoying internal growth Almost a fourth of the population was younger than fifteen and all these youths had been born in the sanctuary Thirteen of the settlements twentytwo houses were inhabited by nuclear families and three out of four residents lived with close relatives Church records reveal that the founding runaways had woven intricate kinship patterns based above all on the institution of compadrio These are all indications that under certain conditions palenques could quickly achieve large rates of population growth through nuclear families and that these were organized hierarchically with older families assuming a distinctive role in the community overseeing the marriage market and the distribution of land Data from the Caribbean is even more revealing showing that some times paradoxically the continued accession of new fugitives caused prob lems for the communities that took them in Sources from the end of the eighteenth century indicate that the maniel of Neyba on the Spanish side of Hispaniola was inhabited by 133 people living in 57 houses the small numbers of inhabitants per house fewer than three was attributed by the cimarrones themselves to the recent epidemics of mumps and dysentery signs of a large number of bozales in the group The social weight of the groups elders indicates a peasant community organized around the princi ple of anteriority similar to structures then common in both African and Native American societies in which the elderly were the guardians of the collective memory and of agricultural architectural magical linguistic and martial traditions There were eighty adults in the group fortythree men and thirtyseven women of whom twenty had been born in the maniel and all other residents were children a clear indication that the population had grown in spite of the epidemics The age of the female elders such as Catalina and Maria sixty born in Neyba suggest that the maniel may have been founded at the beginning of the eighteenth century The growth of the slave trade in St Domingue contributed to Neybas growth eleven women and thirtyone men had at one time been slaves on French Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 728 the cambridge world history of slavery plantations In relative isolation without fortifications or public buildings the cimarrones lived in conditions similar to those of the poor peasants of Spanish origin who inhabited the island They grew rice corn banana sugar cane and other foodstuffs on individual parcels of land measuring about one thousand varas across on average Nuclear families worked these plots together with their many children each family generally working two plots or when there were no children a single plot It is possible that time and age guaranteed additional parcels to some of the settlements members with couples of sixty years of age and older working two plots Population growth agriculture and trade with neighbors were at the root of the Yanga palenques strength in Mexico helping the settlement extract a peace treaty from the colonial regime at the beginning of the 1600s On terrain that had been abandoned then reoccupied palenque members grew peppers sweet potatoes tobacco zapallos beans and corn typical elements of Native American diets as well as sugar cane and cotton There were also chickens horses and cattle In sixty houses which sheltered perhaps three hundred people there were found swords arquebuses and money obtained in exchanges with nearby communities Here was a well established peasant economy that far from being an autarchy combined diverse strategies for survival including commerce The wellknown Bahoruco community of Hispaniola was also thriving by the midseventeenth century The six hundred families settled there rep resented a population of perhaps three thousand quilombolas that given the low incidence of grand marronage indicates a long process of demo graphic evolution that probably began in the preceding century By 1660 Bahoruco no longer relied on theft but upon a combination of hunt ing fishing and agriculture The men were skilled archers and smiths whereas the women panned for minerals their production allowing them to buy clothes alchohol iron and other goods in the capital of Santo Domingo There is also evidence that the triad of kinship relations natural popu lation growth and interaction with surrounding communities was essen tial for the survival of several large palenques in Nueva Granada When destroyed by Spanish forces at the end of the seventeenth century the Matudere palenque contained more than 250 people who upon interroga tion revealed elements of their social organization Sophisticated political and military institutions developed over the settlements many decades of existence Each family cultivated its own fields of corn rice black beans bananas and potatoes a situation that suggests enduring relationships between the people and the soil The residents maintained contact with the Arara of Cartagena acquiring weapons and munitions through them It is likely that a similar situation held for the settlements of the Santa Maria mountains that colonial forces attacked in 1683 The forces encountered Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 729 a fortified village and Spanish arms that the cimarrones had acquired in earlier confrontations as well as spears bows and arrows Before escaping the fugitives burned their dwellings and their fields of corn and cassava in a classic example of quilombola military tactics The situation in the mestizo palenque of Esmeraldas during the last quarter of the sixteenth century also shows viability rested on population growth viable family structures and commerce The community possessed more than one hundred canoes that they used to extract resources from the regions rivers There must have been at least two hundred adults in the population of this palenque Here too inhabitants dedicated themselves to hunting and gathering and the cultivation of corn cassava cacao tobacco bananas rice cotton and sugar cane They practiced metalworking and raised chickens both for internal consumption and to sell to the surrounding communities Other quilombola communities in the Brazilian southeast combined largescale agriculture storage facilities and even the cultivation of export crops In 1770 near Serra Negra a black man was captured who told of having run away from a quilombo He claimed to have been taken along with four others to a great village of many Blacks where there were large fields and canebrakes orchards shelling equipment and much cotton which according to him is a big thing Vast plantations were also found at a quilombo in Mariana in 1733 The quilombos of Pitangui 1767 Catigua 1769 and Santos Fortes 1769 planted an abundance of corn beans cotton watermelons and other fruits Manioc fields abounded at the Samambaia 1769 and Rio da Perdicao 1769 quilombos where cotton was also planted Horticulture was one of the most salient characteristics of the Sao Goncalo 1769 Campo Grande 1746 and Paracatu 1766 quilombos which also possessed vast cultivated fields and storehouses to keep their surpluses The Moquim quilombo in Rio de Janeiro not only possessed plantations but even produced such luxury items as sugar cane brandy suggesting the existence of a cane mill somewhere in the quilombos territory Cases like these indicate a high degree of social division of labor sophisticated agricultural techniques and large wellestablished popula tions The presence of cotton implies clothmaking and the existence of groups specialized in its manufacture On the maps of the Minas Gerais quilombos one can find constructions that had been built for special uses such as forges and smithies This aspect of quilombo life has been supported by archeological finds Figures 271 272 273 274 and 275 In the Cabaca quilombo dozens of forged iron fragments were found as well as metal plate tin strips pans cauldrons tea pots spoons and other items Johann Blaers diary confirms the existence of a church and four forges in one settlement he visited in Palmares Among the inhabitants he noted were all sorts of craftsmen Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 730 the cambridge world history of slavery Figure 271 Sambabaia Quilombo Map with Translated Key Source Anais da Biblioteca Nacional vol 108 Rio de Janeiro 1988 p 112 I Council house II Cornfield III Manioc field IV Cultivated field V Tannery VI Blacksmith shop VII Houses VIII Lookout hill IX Scale of 5 steps 6 defense and hierarchy Quilombolas had ambivalent relations with surrounding communities The Barba Negra quilombo located in the Brazilian captaincy of Rio Grande do Sul during the first half of the eighteenth century supplied labor at key periods of the year to local ranches and several times the quilombo escaped destruction because the local population warned the fugitives about expe ditions sent to liquidate the settlement This is an example of how social networks woven between quilombolas and the surrounding communities could constitute a major defensive resource Other communities had gen erally hostile relations with their nonquilombola neighbors Contributing to this was the fact that although quilombos constantly adopted Indian and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 731 Figure 272 River of Perdition Quilombo Map with Translated Key Source Anais da Biblioteca Nacional vol 108 Rio de Janeiro 1988 p 110 I Council house II Weaving house III Tiger hill IV Vulture hill V Cleared field VI Woods European cultural patterns they retained an otherness quality in the eyes of colonists of European origin Their founders were typically African and African elements in their cultural practices beliefs and social organization remained strong The specifics of African influence varied in accordance with the patterns of the Atlantic slave trade the natures of the societies in which runaways were born and of course interactions between peoples that began the creolization process It is plausible however that some of this African heritages most important contributions could be found in the field of military prowess given that many fugitives had been soldiers in Africa The military and aristocratic cultures inherited from Africa powerfully influenced the strategies adopted by the quilombolas and also played a role in the emergence of strong leaders a hierarchical structure and even of slavery in some of the larger palenques Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 732 the cambridge world history of slavery Figure 273 Quilombo on a Tributary of the Perdition River Map with Translated Key Source Anais da Biblioteca Nacional vol 108 Rio de Janeiro 1988 p 108 I Kings house II Weaving house III Stream IV Cotton fields V Manioc field VI Woods Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 733 Figure 274 Ambrozio Quilombo Map with Translated Key Source Anais da Biblioteca Nacional vol 108 Rio de Janeiro 1988 p 111 I Ditch 15 palms wide II Lookout mound III Guard shelters IV Swamp with pits and stakes V Sandbanks VI Stakes between ditch and trench VII Main houses of the quilombo VIII Trench IX Cleared field X Scale of 5 steps The palenques tended to be obsessive about defense and protected them selves from attacks by slave hunters and colonial militias as well as by Indians and other quilombolas To this end they generally employed crude but efficient weaponry such as spears and bows which they themselves produced Firearms shot and powder as already noted were often obtained through commerce with colonial society or were collected in attacks against plantations villages and travelers In at least one case that of the Hispaniola cimarrones in 1540 the quilombolas even used cavalry to raid plantations These continuous attacks damaged the economies of many regions and ruined many colonists In Brazil in 1746 authorities reported that the Campo Grande quilombolas had invaded small farms and Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 734 the cambridge world history of slavery Figure 275 Sao Goncalo Quilombo Map with Translated Key Source Anais da Biblioteca Nacional vol 108 Rio de Janeiro 1988 p 107 I Forge II Escape holes III Garden IV Entrance to two houses V Trench of 10 palms height VI Wall joining two houses VII Pestle house VIII Exit with stakes IX Woods X Blacksmith shop settlements taking from them not only the good slaves but also killing masters and taking care to remove negroes in lots of 10 12 from each farmstead who followed them with little violence In 1770 quilombolas attacking farms destroyed everything reducing things to a miserable state and taking away the slaves without leaving one behind Attacks like these stoked slaveowner rage to a fever pitch and they were quick to strike back The quilombolas defenses depended upon the location and type of their settlement The cimarrones who defended themselves against Spanish attacks in 1603 in Cienega de Mantua Nueva Espana combined the use of swords arquebuses spears and bows Many quilombos used Africanstyle traps as well as other snares and ruses more appropriate to the Americas At the Buraco do Tatu quilombo in Bahia in 1764 the Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 735 defense strategies were clearly African in origin The pointed sticks and covered pits that defended villages from Nigeria to the ancient kingdom of the Congo were also found at Palmares and palenques throughout the Americas Many quilombos set aside a special area for setting up security systems between the settlements and the surrounding jungles Generally fortresses moats and barriers were found spread through this zone In the case of the Yanga settlement which resisted the attacks of Viceroy Luıs de Velascos forces defenses were enhanced with rock walls vine snares and cleverly designed bridges The cimarrones even tried to hold off the Spanish with scythes and metal and flintpointed arrows Even those quilombos lacking such elaborate defenses were still con structed to maximize protection In Brazil the Tabua quilombo destroyed in 1769 contained two hundred houses with tiled roofs half of these pro tected by a fortification In the Campo Grande quilombo in 1746 there were more than six hundred blacks living behind so many fortifications traps and snares that it is obvious that they mean to defend themselves The quilombos members resisted attacks by colonial forces for more than twentyfour hours forcing the attackers to rake them with fire and launch a third assault to take a kind of trench to which they had retreated after the first palanque was destroyed The maps of the Sao Goncalo 1769 Figure 275 Samambaia 1769 Figure 271 and Ambrozio 1757 Figure 274 quilombos indicate that these settlements all old and socially and demographically stable had their territories well demarcated by moats artificial thickets and trenches Quilombolas used the environment to maximum advantage Archeolog ical data from the Brazilian southeast shows that the Ambrozio quilombo sites contains the remnants of a moat whose dimensions ranged from 15 to 2 meters wide and 2 to 3 meters deep surrounding a 90by70meter area To the north lies a swamp to the west is the Morro do Espia the highest point in the region which was used as an observation post Arti ficial swamps restricted access to the quilombos to boats making attacks by large groups difficult Having negotiated these invaders were forced to cross wide open fields increasing the risk of discovery Such systems were more efficient to the degree that quilombo commu nities were more complex which almost always meant a higher degree of social stratification As elsewhere stratification was intimately linked to the adoption of agriculture as the material base something that was in turn based upon stable wellestablished social relations Hierarchiza tion was intensified by the constant necessity of defense brought about by palenques deviant status within colonial society One can detect traces of political institutions on quilombo maps Structures like the audience house with seats Samambaia quilombo council house Rio da Perdicao and Kings house Bracos da Perdicao indicate wellstructured political Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 736 the cambridge world history of slavery systems even though there is no way of telling what precise type of organiza tion they refer to References to kings queens princes and captains among the quilombolas almost all use European terms and for this reason probably do not reflect the content of what they label In 1604 Domin gos Bioho shared governing responsibilities with his Capitan General Lorencillo Their settlement possessed a complex organizational system that included the presence of a Teniente de Guerra and an Alguazil Mayor King Bayano who reputedly had aristocratic origins led the cimarrones in Castilla del Oro Venezuela and made neighboring Indians do agricultural work for him An official document from 1764 affirms that quilombolas in the Brazilian southeast kidnapped white women from the surrounding villages and also took slaves to reinforce the troops of their chiefs giving the most frightening and strongest among these the titles of captains lieutenants alferes and sergeants in hopes of creating greater public terror and of impeding the destruction of these harmful gangs Also in Portuguese America a quilombo was destroyed in the woods of Forquim in 1776 and among the prisoners was a king and a queen The first had been a fugitive slave for more than ten years and the second had recently joined the quilombo of her own free will Whatever such titles may indicate the subversive nature of these settlements and their command structures meant that a great part of their success depended upon their leaders qual ities Among the most capable of the Caribbean leaders was Nanny a woman and Cudjoe in Jamaica Macandal in St Domingue and Ventura Sanchez in Cuba These leaders combined religious and political functions that reinforced their authority something that was likewise enhanced by their skills in contacting and negotiating with colonial authorities as in the cases of Yanga and Kwadwo Quilomba hierarchical structures often took their members origins into consideration as well as the way they entered quilombola society In some Caribbean palenques new members were carefully tested and those judged to be deserters or spies were brutally murdered The hierarchy sometimes reflected the conflicts between crioulos and Africans in the plantations and colonial cities a pattern that reemerges in the widespread preference for endogamous marriages based upon origins This tension can also be seen in the peace proposal made in 1798 by the crioulo runaways returning to the Santana engenho in Bahia already mentioned The more difficult and risky activities such as spearfishing were henceforth to be undertaken by the Mina African Blacks There are also indications that strong distinctions existed between those who joined the quilombos by their own free will and those who were brought in through kidnapping In the Forquim quilombo though the queen had joined through her own free will the majority of women residents had been forcibly incorporated from surrounding plantations Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 737 When the quilombo was destroyed in 1776 it was determined that all these women would be returned to their respective owners whereas those who had joined through their own free will would be punished In other cases these differences could result in internal slavery Some quilombola raids tried to free slaves but in other circumstances captives kidnapped from the plantations maintained their status in the new society as with residents of the Hispaniola community in 1540 Cartagena in 1632 and Palmares itself In this last quilombo according to Dutch sources only those slaves who escaped at their own initiative were considered free if they made it to Palmares Palmarian slaves could obtain their liberty however by cap turing others to take their place Other data indicate that in at least some circumstances there were considerable degrees of internal tension within quilombos separating leaders from each other but more often separating leaders from the quilombola social base We cannot forget for example that upon establishing formal peace with the colonial authorities the Por tuguese were finally able to destroy Palmares after a long and costly struggle because they were able to exploit dissensions that had opened up among the quilombo aristocracy In conclusion there is much in the histories of runaway slaves and quilombos in the Americas that does not conform to bipolar conceptions of slavery and freedom or the simpler preconceptions of relations between peoples of European indigenous American and African descent The great age of the quilombos occurred well before the emergence of the revolutionary era of the Atlantic world and we should not expect the behavior of quilombolas to conform to the ideology of either abolitionists or democrats What emerges most clearly from this survey is first that escaped slaves were a part of everyday reality of the slave systems of the Americas but also that permanent escapes grand marronage did not account for a very large portion of total escapes Runaway communities held out hope for a life that was a genuine alternative to toiling on plantations but such communities were neither numerous nor large and did not threaten the overall system Quilombos were not responsible for the St Domingue revolution that destroyed the richest slave colony of the Americas and there is no counterpart in the Americas to the impact of slave runaways on the plantation system of the island of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea where runaways and quilombos effectively brought about the suspension of the export economy for two centuries or more further reading Throughout most of the Americas until the 1970s slavery was seen as a form of social organization whose effects were so debilitating that slaves were vir tually transformed into socially alienated beings Few captives were thought Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 738 the cambridge world history of slavery to have left the stigma of slavery behind through manumission brought about either by their activities within the Christian church or through their proximity to their masters Escapes and the occasional construction of communities of runaways were understood to be a counteracculturative effort a resistance against the domineering allpowerful masters Quilom bola communities were thus an attempt to restore traditional Africa in the New World This culturalist point of view was succeeded by an uneasy equilibrium with neo Marxist materialist explanations which tended to reinforce the idea that escapes to quilombos represented the typical form of support to the resistance often military against the rule of the slave masters Paradoxically culturalists and materialists have each in their own way stimulated the commonsense notion that the quilombos palenques and cumbes were essentially alternative communities situated along the margins of slaveholding society Many Marxists have also criticized fugitives for their lack of clarity with regards to class issues which in turn was thought to have inhibited runaways ability to destroy the slaveholding regime Though they have not been completely superceded the culturalist and Marxist views of American slavery have recently been forced to cede ground With the exception of a few small enclaves no one insists today that palenques cumbes and quilombos were radically isolated from slaveholding society and many studies have focused upon the interactions between slaves and fugitives in the urban environment For the most part the mainly Englishlanguage bibliography that follows indicates only those whose works are situated within the most recent phase of Americanist historiography regarding runaways and fugitive communities Beckles Hilary Caribbean AntiSlavery The SelfLiberation Ethos of Enslaved Blacks Journal of Caribbean History 22 1988 119 Craton Michael Testing the Chains Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies Ithaca NY 1982 Florentino Manolo and Machado Cacilda eds Ensaios sobre a escravidao I Belo Horizonte 2003 Goulart Jose A Da fuga ao suicıdio aspectos de rebeldia dos escravos no Brasil Rio de Janeiro 1972 Hall Gwendolyn M Africans in Colonial Louisiana The Development of Afrocreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century Baton Rouge LA 1992 Hall N A T Maritime Maroons Grand Marronage from the Danish West Indies William and Mary Quarterly 42 1985 47697 Landers Jane La cultura material de los Cimarrones los casos de Ecuador La Espanola Mexico y Colombia in Rina Caceres ed Rutas de la esclavitud en Africa y America Latina San Jose Costa Rica 2001 pp 14556 Mullin Michael Africa in America Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the Amer ican South and the British Caribbean 17361831 Urbana IL 1994 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 runaways and quilombolas in the americas 739 Price Richard ed Maroon Societies Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas Third edition Baltimore MD 1996 Reis Joao Jose and Gomes Flavio dos Santos Liberdade por um fio historias dos quilombos no Brasil Sao Paulo 1996 Schwartz S B Slaves Peasants and Rebels Urbana IL 1990 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011 Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge University Press 2011