essay on slaves

Slavery Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on slavery.

Slavery is a term that signifies the injustice that is being carried out against humans since the 1600s. Whenever this word comes up, usually people picture rich white people ruling over black people. However, that is not the only case to exist. After a profound study, historians found evidence that suggested the presence of slavery in almost every culture. It was not essentially in the form of people working in the fields, but other forms. Slavery generally happens due to the division of levels amongst humans in a society. It still exists in various parts of the world. It may not necessarily be that hard-core, nonetheless, it happens.

Impact of Slavery

Slavery is one of the main causes behind racism in most of the cultures. It did severe damage to the race relations of America where a rift was formed between the whites and blacks.

The impact of Slavery has caused irreparable damage which can be seen to date. Even after the abolishment of slavery in the 1800s in America, racial tensions remained amongst the citizens.

In other words, this made them drift apart from each other instead of coming close. Slavery also gave birth to White supremacy which made people think they are inherently superior just because of their skin color and descendant.

Talking about the other forms of slavery, human trafficking did tremendous damage. It is a social evil which operates even today, ruining hundreds and thousands of innocent lives. Slavery is the sole cause which gave birth to all this.

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The Aftermath

Even though slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, the scars still remain. The enslaved still haven’t forgotten the struggles of their ancestors. It lives on in their hearts which has made them defensive more than usual. They resent the people whose ancestors brought it down on their lineage.

Even today many people of color are a victim of racism in the 21st century. For instance, black people face far more severe punishments than a white man. They are ridiculed for their skin color even today. There is a desperate need to overcome slavery and all its manifestations for the condition and security of all citizens irrespective of race, religion , social, and economic position .

In short, slavery never did any good to any human being, of the majority nor minority. It further divided us as humans and put tags on one another. Times are changing and so are people’s mindsets.

One needs to be socially aware of these evils lurking in our society in different forms. We must come together as one to fight it off. Every citizen has the duty to make the world a safer place for every human being to live in.

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Lesson plans

Learning About Slavery With Primary Sources

In this lesson, students will use primary sources from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture to better understand the history of slavery in the United States.

By Nicole Daniels

Find all our Lessons of the Day here.

Lesson Overview

Featured Article: “ A Brief History of Slavery That You Didn’t Learn in School ”

In August 2019, The New York Times Magazine published The 1619 Project , an ongoing initiative that aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

In this lesson, you will read an essay that uses primary sources as a point of entry to making sense of the history of slavery in the United States. The primary sources were selected by Mary Elliott, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The featured article was written by both Ms. Elliott and Jazmine Hughes, a New York Times writer and editor.

Note : If you are looking for more teaching resources related to The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine partnered with the Pulitzer Center to create a free curriculum that includes a reading guide, extension activities and other curricular resources.

The article uses primary sources to tell the story of slavery from 1619 to 1865. To begin thinking critically about primary sources, look at the cover image for the article, which uses this broadside from the museum’s collection . As you look closely at the image, make some observations about what you notice, wonder and feel. You can share in small groups or in a larger class discussion, “I notice…,” “I wonder …” and “I feel …” Or, you can create a chart with three columns to record your observations and reactions.

Then, if you would like to further investigate the broadside from a historical lens, you can use a document analysis worksheet from the National Archives. There are two worksheet options for written documents: one for secondary students and one for younger students and English-language learners .

If you would like more background, take some time to read the two-paragraph introduction to the article, either to yourself or aloud as a class.

Why do you think Ms. Elliott and Ms. Hughes chose to start their exploration of primary sources with these words? What drew you into the text? How did their use of language and imagery affect your reading experience?

According to the authors, why was the moment in August 1619 significant? How was the arrival of “20 and odd Negroes” different from the earlier presence of people of African descent in North America?

Questions for Writing and Discussion

Note to Teachers: Given the length and structure of the featured article , we have created questions for each of its three sections. Depending on how much time you are able to dedicate to this lesson, it may be most effective to have students work in small groups, with each group focusing on one section and then sharing their findings with the class.

No. 1: Slavery, Power and the Human Cost, 1455-1775

What is the connection between the Roman Catholic Church, colonialism and slavery?

How does the painting “Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam” illustrate the relationship between the slave trade and wealth and power? Use both the authors’ text and the image to explain the connection.

In what ways was race encoded into law? Use historical examples from the text to support your answer.

What acts of resistance did you find most powerful to read about? What role did memory play in the lives of enslaved people? Do you think the act of preserving memories was a form of resistance? Explain.

No. 2: The Limits of Freedom, 1776-1808

The text of this section begins with the following lines:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So begins the Declaration of Independence, the document that eventually led to the creation of the United States. But the words point to the paradox the nation was built on.

How would you describe that paradox in your own words, citing laws and beliefs from that period?

In what ways did enslaved people fight for their freedom?

What role did religion and churches have in resistance, advocacy and community?

What was the connection between westward expansion and the trans-Atlantic slave trade? How did the country respond to the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which took effect in 1808?

No. 3: A Slave Nation Fights for Freedom, 1809-1865

Why do you think Ms. Elliott chose to feature the portraits of Rhoda Phillips and Sgt. Jacob Johns? What do their stories illustrate about emancipation and the fight for freedom?

How were enslaved women and their children central to slavery? The article states, “there was no alliance of sisterhood among slave mistresses and the black mothers and daughters they claimed as property.” Why do you think the authors chose to emphasize that point?

In the wake of slave revolts, such as Nat Turner’s rebellion, white people became more fearful of slave uprisings and resistance. What new forms of surveillance did fearful white people instill? What was the Fugitive Slave Act? How did it expand the surveillance of slaves?

What does Joseph Trammell’s method for storing his freedom papers illustrate about the nature of freedom for free black people?

Going Further

In the featured article, Ms. Elliott selected 13 artifacts from the museum’s collection to tell the story of slavery. Based on what you have read and heard presented by your classmates, what artifacts would you choose to tell the story of slavery?

Take on the role of curator and choose three artifacts from the article that you believe are key to telling the story of slavery in the United States.

If you were to summarize slavery in the United States, what would be the three most important points for someone to walk away with? Do any objects from the article correspond to those points?

What objects do you find most visually compelling in the article? Are there objects that you think relate to one another naturally or that help to weave a narrative together?

Once you have selected three artifacts, decide how to present them — for example, digitally, on paper or as a gallery exhibit. Can you enhance your narrative by arranging your artifacts in a specific way? What happens if certain artifacts are placed close to one another or far apart? What about lower or higher on a wall?

Then, write a paragraph of no more than 200 words to accompany your three images. Use the text from the article as inspiration and try to find ways to draw the reader in by making meaningful links between your selected artifacts.

If you are in classroom, take a gallery walk to see your classmates’ work. What is similar or different in your interpretations and curatorial choices?

If you have additional time, browse the museum’s digital slavery collection and choose one additional source to add to your curation. You may want to pick an image that enhances one of the artifacts you already selected. Or you may want to select something that sheds light on a different element of slavery discussed in the article.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

Introductory Essay: Slavery and the Struggle for Abolition from the Colonial Period to the Civil War

How did the principles of the Declaration of Independence contribute to the quest to end slavery from colonial times to the outbreak of the Civil War?

• I can explain how slavery became codifed over time in the United States.
• I can explain how Founding principles in the Declaration of Independence strengthened anti-slavery thought and action.
• I can explain how territorial expansion intensified the national debate over slavery.
• I can explain various ways in which African Americans secured their own liberty from the colonial era to the Civil War.
• I can explain how African American leaders worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

Essential Vocabulary

Slavery and the struggle for abolition from the colonial period to the civil war.

The English established their first permanent settler colony in a place they called Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Early seventeenth-century Virginia was abundant in land and scarce in laborers. Initially, the labor need was met mostly by propertyless English men and women who came to the new world as indentured servants hoping to become landowners themselves after their term of service ended. Such servitude was generally the status, too, of Africans in early British America, the first of whom were brought to Virginia by a Dutch vessel in 1619. But within a few decades, indentured servitude in the colonies gave way to lifelong, hereditary slavery, imposed exclusively on black Africans.

Because forced labor (whether indentured servitude or slavery) was a longstanding and common condition, the injustice of slavery troubled relatively few settlers during the colonial period. Southern colonies in particular codified slavery into law. Slavery became hereditary, with men, women, and children bought and sold as property, a condition known as chattel slavery . Opposition to slavery was mainly concentrated among Quakers , who believed in the equality of all men and women and therefore opposed slavery on moral grounds. Quaker opposition to slavery was seen as early as 1688, when a group of Quakers submitted a formal protest against the institution for discussion at a local meeting.

Anti-slavery sentiment strengthened during the era of the Revolution and Founding. Founding principles, based on natural law proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and in several state constitutions, added philosophical force to biblically grounded ideas of human equality and dignity. Those principles informed free and enslaved blacks, including Prince Hall, Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and Belinda Sutton, who sent anti slavery petitions to state legislatures. Their powerful appeal to natural rights moved legislators and judges to implement the first wave of emancipation in the United States. Immediate emancipation in Massachusetts, gradual emancipation in other northern states, and private manumission in the upper South dealt blows against slavery and freed tens of thousands of people.

Slavery remained deeply entrenched and thousands remained enslaved, however, in states in both the upper and lower South , even as northern leaders believed the practice was on its way to extinction. The result was the set of compromises the Framers inscribed into the U.S. Constitution—lending slavery important protections but also preparing for its eventual abolition. The Constitution did not use the word “slave” or “slavery,” instead referring to those enslaved as “persons.” James Madison, the “father” of the Constitution, thus thought the document implicitly denied the legitimacy of a claim of property in another human being. The Constitution also restricted slavery’s growth by allowing Congress to ban the slave trade after 20 years. Out of those compromises grew extended controversies, however, the most heated and dangerous of which concerned the treatment of fugitive slaves and the status of slavery in federal territories.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 renewed and enhanced slavery’s profitability and expansion, which intensified both attachment and opposition to it. The first major flare-up occurred in 1819, when a dispute over whether Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state generated threats of civil war among members of Congress. The adoption of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 quelled the anger for a time. But the dispute was reignited in the 1830s and continued to inflame the country’s political life through the Civil War.

A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum by Tom Murphy VII, 2007.

“U.S. Cotton Production 1790–1834” by Bill of Rights Institute/Flickr, CC BY 4.0

Separating the sticky seeds from cotton fiber was slow, painstaking work. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (gin being southern slang for engine) made the task much simpler, and cotton production in the lower South exploded. Cotton planters and their slaves moved to Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama to start new cotton plantations. Many planters in the Chesapeake region sold their slaves to cotton planters in the lower South. This created a massive interstate slave trade that transferred enslaved persons through auctions and forced marches in chains and that also broke up many slave families.

In 1831, in Virginia, a large-scale slave rebellion led by Nat Turner resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 whites and more than 100 blacks and generated alarm throughout the South. That same decade saw the emergence of a radicalized (and to a degree racially integrated) abolitionist movement, led by Massachusetts activist William Lloyd Garrison, and an equally radicalized pro slavery faction, led by U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

The polarization sharpened in subsequent decades. The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) brought large new western territories under U.S. control and renewed the contention in Congress over the status of slavery in federal territories. The complex 1850 Compromise, which included a new fugitive slave law heavily weighted in favor of slaveholders’ interests, did little to restore calm.

A few years later, Congress reopened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery, thereby undoing the 1820 Missouri Compromise and rendering any further compromises unlikely. The U.S. Supreme Court tried vainly to settle the controversy by issuing, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the most pro-slavery ruling in its history. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, a rising figure in the newly born Republican Party, declared the United States a “house divided” between slavery and freedom. In late 1859, militant abolitionist John Brown alarmed the South when he attempted to liberate slaves by taking over a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was promptly captured, tried, and executed and thereupon became a martyr for many northern abolitionists.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video: Dred Scott v. Sandford for more information on the pivotal Dred Scott decision.

Leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and James Forten all worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

As the debate over slavery continued on the national stage, formerly enslaved and free black men and women spoke out against the evils of slavery. Slave narratives such as those by Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, and Harriet Jacobs humanized the experience of slavery. Their vivid, heartbreaking accounts of their own enslavement strengthened the moral cause of abolition. At the same time, enslaved men and women made the brave and dangerous decision to run away. Some ran on their own, and others used the Underground Railroad, a network of secret “conductors” and “stations” that helped enslaved people escape to the North and, after 1850, to Canada. The most famous of these conductors was Harriet Tubman, who traveled to the South about 12 times to lead approximately 70 men and women to freedom. Free blacks faced their own challenges. Leaders such as Benjamin Banneker, James Forten, David Walker, and Maria Stewart spoke out against racist attitudes and laws that sought to limit their political and civil rights.

This map shows the concentration of slaves in the southern United States as derived from the 1860 U.S. Census. The so-called “Border states”—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and after 1863, West Virginia—allowed slavery but remained loyal to the Union. Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

By 1860, the atmosphere in the United States was combustible. With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November of that year, the conflict over slavery came to a head. Since Lincoln and Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery and called it a moral evil, seven slaveholding states declared their secession from the United States. And in April 1861, the war came. The next five years of conflict and bloodshed determined the fate of enslaved men, women, and children, and of the Union itself.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• What actions were taken to oppose slavery in the colonial period and Founding era?
• Why did the Constitution not use the words “slave” or “slavery”?
• The invention of the cotton gin
• The Mexican-American War
• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• The election of Abraham Lincoln as president
• How did formerly enslaved and free black men and women fight to end slavery?

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Article contents

Atlantic slavery and the slave trade: history and historiography.

• Daniel B. Domingues da Silva Daniel B. Domingues da Silva History Department, Rice University
•  and  Philip Misevich Philip Misevich Department of History, St. John’s University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.371
• Published online: 20 November 2018

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

• slave trade
• historiography

From the 16th to the mid- 19th century , approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly embarked on slave ships, of whom only 10.7 million survived the notorious Middle Passage. 1 Captives were transported in vessels that flew the colors of several nations, mainly Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Ships departed from ports located in these countries or their overseas possessions, loaded slaves at one or more points along the coast of Africa, and then transported them to one or more ports in the Americas. They sailed along established trade routes shaped by political forces, commercial partnerships, and environmental factors, such as the winds and sea currents. The triangular system is no doubt the most famous route but in fact nearly half of all slaves were embarked on vessels that traveled directly between the Americas and Africa. 2 Africans forced beneath the decks of slave vessels were captured in the continent’s interior through several means. Warfare was, perhaps, the commonest, yielding large numbers of captives for sale at a time. Other methods of enslavement included judicial proceedings, pawning, and kidnappings. 3 Depending on the routes captives traveled and the ways they were captured, Africans could sometimes find themselves in the holds of ships with people who belonged to their same cultures, were from their same villages, or were even close relatives. 4 None of this, however, attenuated the sufferings and appalling conditions under which they sailed. Slaves at sea were subjected to constant confinement, brutal violence, malnutrition, diseases, sexual violence, and many other abuses. 5

Upon arrival in the Americas, Africans often found themselves in equally hostile environments. Slavery in the mining industry and on cash crop plantations, especially those that produced sugar and rice, significantly reduced Africans’ life expectancies and required owners to replenish their labor force through the slave trade. 6 By contrast, slave systems centered on less intensive crops and the services industry, particularly in cities, ports, and towns, often offered enslaved Africans better chances of survival and even the possibility of achieving freedom through manumission by purchase, gift, or inheritance. 7 These apparent advantages did not necessarily mean that life was any less harsh. Neither did the prospect of freedom significantly change slaves’ material lives. Few individuals managed to obtain manumission and those who did encountered many other barriers that prevented them from fully enjoying their lives as free citizens. 8 In spite of those barriers, slaves challenged their status and conditions in many ways, ranging from “quiet” forms of resistance—slowdowns, breaking tools, and feigning illness at work—to bolder initiatives such as running away, plotting conspiracies, and launching rebellions. 9 Although slavery provided little room for autonomy, Africans strove to maintain or replicate aspects of their cultures in the Americas. Whenever possible, they married people with their same backgrounds, named their children in their own languages, cooked foods using techniques, styles, and ingredients similar to those found in their motherlands, composed songs in the beats of their homelands, and worshipped ancestral spirits, deities, and gods in the same fashion as their forbears. 10 At the same time, slave culture was subject to constant change, a process that over the long run enabled enslaved people to better navigate the dangerous world that slavery created. 11

This overview may seem rather free of controversy, but it is in fact the result of years of debates, some still raging, and research conducted by generations of historians of slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps no other historical fields have been so productive and transformative over such a short period of time. Since the 1950s, scholars have developed and refined new methods, created new theoretical models, brought previously untapped sources to light, and posed new questions that shine bright new light on the experiences of enslaved people and their owners as well as the social, political, economic, and cultural worlds that they created in the diaspora. Although debates about Atlantic slavery and the slave trade go back to the era of abolition, historians began grappling in earnest with these issues in the aftermath of World War II. Early scholarship focused on the United States and tended to articulate views of slavery that reflected elite sources and perspectives. 12 Inspired by the US civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and wider global decolonization campaigns, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of approaches to the study of slavery rooted in new social history, which aimed to understand slaves as central historical actors rather than mere victims of exploitation. 13 Around the same time, a group of scholars trained in statistical analysis sparked passionate debates about the extent to which quantitative assessments of slavery and slave trading effectively represented slaves’ lived experiences. 14 To more vividly capture those experiences, some historians turned to new or underutilized tools, particularly biographies, family histories, and microhistories, which provided windows into local historical dynamics. 15 The significance of the penetrating questions that these fruitful debates raised has been amplified in recent decades in response to the growing influence of transnational and Atlantic approaches to slavery. Atlantic frameworks have required the gathering and analysis of new data on slavery and the slave trade around the world, encouraging scholars from previously underrepresented regions to challenge Anglo-American dominance in the field. Finally, the digital turn in the 21st century has provided new models for developing historical projects on slavery and the slave trade and helped democratize access to once inaccessible sources. 16 This article draws on this rich history of scholarship on slavery and the slave trade to illustrate major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and raise questions about the future prospects for this dynamic field of study.

Models of Slavery and Resistance

While each country in the Americas has its own national historiography on slavery, from a 21st-century perspective, it is hard to overestimate the role that US-based scholars played in shaping the agenda of slavery studies. Analyses of American plantation records began around the turn of the 20th century . Early debates emerged in particular over the conditions of slavery in the American South and views of the relationship between slaves and owners. Setting the foundation for these debates in the early- 20th century , Ulrich Bonnell Phillips offered an extraordinarily romanticized vision of life on the plantation. 17 Steeped in open racism, his work compared slave plantations to benevolent schools that over time “civilized” enslaved peoples. Conditioned by the kinds of revisionist interpretations of Southern slavery that emerged in the era following Reconstruction, Phillips saw American slavery as a benign institution that persisted despite its economic inefficiency. His work trivialized the violence inherent in slave systems, a view some Americans were eager to accept and, given his standing among subsequent generations of slavery scholars, one that prevailed in the profession for half of a century.

Early challenges to this view had little immediate impact within academic circles. That primarily black intellectuals, working in or speaking to white-dominated academies, offered many of the most sophisticated objections helps explain the persistence of Phillips’ influence. In the face of looming institutional racism, several scholars offered bold and fresh interpretations that uprooted basic ideas about the slave system. Over his illustrious career, W. E. B. Du Bois highlighted the powerful structural impediments that restricted black lives and brought attention to the dynamic ways that African Americans confronted systematic exploitation. Eric Williams, a noted Trinidadian historian, took aim at the history of abolition, arguing that self-interest—rather than humanitarian concerns—led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. Melville Herskovitz, a prominent white American anthropologist, turned his attention to the connections between African and African American culture. 18 Though many of these works were marginalized at the time they were produced, this scholarship is rightfully credited with, among other things, shining light on the relationship between African and African American history. Turning their attention to Africa, scholars discovered a variety of cultural practices that, they argued, shaped the black experience under slavery and in its aftermath. Even those scholars who challenged or rejected this Africa-centered approach pushed enslaved people to the center of their analyses, representing a radical departure from previous studies. 19

Similarly, works focused on the history of slavery and the slave trade in other regions of the Americas, especially those colonized by France, Spain, and Portugal, were often overlooked. The economies of many of these regions had historically depended on slave labor. The size of the captive populations of some of them rivaled that of the United States. Moreover, they had been involved in the slave trade for much longer and far more extensively than any other region of what became the United States. Researchers in Brazil, Cuba, and other countries often noticed these points. 20 Some of them, like the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, received training in the United States and produced significant research. However, because they published mainly in Portuguese and Spanish, and translations were hard to come by, their work had little initial impact on Anglo-American scholarship. The few scholars who did realize the importance of this work used it to draw comparisons between the Anglophone and non-Anglophone worlds of slavery, highlighting differences in their patterns of colonization and emphasizing the distinctive roles that Catholicism and colonial legal regimes played in shaping slave systems across parts of the Americas. A greater incidence of miscegenation and slaves’ relative accessibility to freedom through manumission led some scholars to argue that slavery in the non-Anglophone New World was milder than in antebellum America or the British colonies. 21

In the United States, the dominant narratives of American slavery continued to emphasize the absolute authority of slave owners. Even critics of Phillips, who emerged in larger numbers in the 1950s and vigorously challenged his conclusions, thought little of slaves’ abilities to effect meaningful change on plantations. Yet they did offer new interpretations of American slavery, as the metaphors scholars used in this decade to characterize the system attest. Far from Phillips’ training school, Kenneth Stampp argued that plantation slavery more appropriately resembled a prison in which enslaved people became completely dependent on their owners. 22 Going even further, Stanley M. Elkins compared American slavery to a concentration camp. 23 The experience of slavery was so traumatic that it stripped enslaved people of their identities and rendered them almost completely helpless. American slavery, in Elkins’ view, turned African Americans into infantilized “Sambos” whose minds and wills came to mirror those of their owners. While such studies drew much needed attention to the violence of plantation slavery, they all but closed the door on questions about slave agency and cultural production. Emphasizing slave autonomy ran the risk of minimizing the brutality of slave owners, and for those scholars trying to overturn Phillips’s vision of American slavery, that brutality was what defined the plantation enterprise.

It took the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s to move slavery studies in a significantly new direction. Driven by their hard-fought battles for political rights at home, African Americans and others whom the civil rights movement inspired added critical new voices and perspectives that required a rethinking of the American past. Scholars who emerged during this period largely rejected the overwhelming authority of the planter class and instead turned their attention to the activities of enslaved people. Slaves, they found, created spaces for themselves and exercised their autonomy on plantations in myriad ways. While they recognized the violence of the slave system, historians of this generation were more interested in assessing the development of black society and identifying resistance to plantation slavery. Far from the brainwashed prisoners of their owners, enslaved people were recast as producers of dynamic and enduring cultures. One key to this transformation was a more careful analysis of what occurred within slave quarters, where new research uncovered the existence of relatively stable—at least under the circumstances—family life. Another emphasized religion as a tool that slaves used to improve their conditions and forge new identities in the diaspora. The immediate post-civil rights period also saw scholars renew their interest in Africa, breathing new life into older debates about the origins and survival of cultural practices in the Americas. 24

What much of the scholarship in this period shared was the idea that no matter how vicious the system, planter power was always incomplete. Recognizing that reality, slaves and their owners established a set of ground rules that granted slaves a degree of autonomy in an attempt to minimize resistance. Beyond mere brutality, slavery thus rested on unwritten but widely understood slave “rights”—Sundays off from plantation labor, the cultivation of private garden plots, participation in an independent slave economy—that both sides negotiated and frequently challenged. This view was central to Eugene Genovese’s magisterial book, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made , which employed the concept of paternalism to help make sense of 19th-century Southern slavery. 25 Paternalist ideology provided owners with a theoretical justification for slavery’s continuation in the face of widespread criticism from Northern abolitionists. Unlike in the urban North, Southerners claimed, where free African Americans faced deplorable conditions and had little social support, slave owners claimed to take better care of their “black and white” families. Slaves also embraced paternalism, though toward a different end: doing so enabled them to use the idea of the “benevolent planter” to their own advantage and make claims for incremental improvements in slaves’ lives. Slavery, Genovese argued, was thus based on the mutual interdependence of owners and slaves.

The degree of intimacy between slaves and owners that paternalism implied spoke to another question that occupied scholars writing in the 1960s and 1970s: given the violence of the slave system, why had so few large-scale slave rebellions occurred? For Phillips and those whom he influenced, the benevolent nature of Southern slavery provided a sufficient explanation. But undeniable evidence of the violence of slavery required making sense of patterns—or the seeming lack—of slave resistance. Unlike on some Caribbean islands, where slaves far outnumbered free people and environmental and geographic factors tended to concentrate the location of plantations, conditions in the United States were less conducive to widespread rebellion. Yet slaves never passively accepted their captivity. The literature on resistance during this period deemphasized violent forms of rebellion, which occurred infrequently, and reoriented scholarship toward the variety of ways that enslaved people challenged the domination of slave owners over them. Having adjusted their lenses, historians found evidence of slave resistance seemingly everywhere. Enslaved people slowed the paces at which they worked, feigned illnesses, broke tools, and injured or let escape animals on plantations. Such “day-to-day” resistance did little to overturn slavery but it gave some control to captives over their work regimes. In some cases, slaves acted even more boldly, committing arson or poisoning those men and women responsible for upholding the system of bondage. Resistance also took the form of running away, a strategy that long preceded the famous Underground Railroad in North America and posed unique problems in territories with unsettled frontiers, unfriendly environmental terrain, and diverse indigenous populations into which fleeing captives could integrate. 26

This shift in scholarship toward slave agency and resistance was anchored in the creative use of sources that had previously been unknown or underappreciated. Although they had long recognized the shortcomings of Phillips’s reliance on records from a limited number of large plantations, historians struggled to find better options, particularly those that shed light on the experiences and perspectives of enslaved people. Slave biographies provided one alternative. In the 1970s, John Blassingame gathered an exhaustive collection of runaway slave accounts to examine the life experiences of American slaves. 27 Whether such biographies spoke to the majority of slaves or represented a few exceptional black men became the subject of considerable disagreement. Scholars who were less trusting of biographies turned to the large collection of interviews that the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration conducted with former slaves. 28 Though far more numerous and representative of “typical” slave experiences, the WPA interviews had their own problems. Would former slaves have been comfortable speaking freely to primarily white interviewers about their lives in bondage? The question remains open. Equally pressing was the concern over the amount of time that had passed between the end of slavery and the period when the interviews were conducted. Indeed, some two-thirds of interviewees were octogenarians when federal employees recorded their stories. Despite such shortcomings, these sources and the new interpretations of slavery that they supported pushed scholarship in exciting new directions. Slaves could no longer be dismissed as passive victims of the plantation system. The new sources and approaches humanized them and reoriented scholarship toward the communities that slaves made.

Across the Atlantic, scholars of Africa began to grapple in earnest with questions about slavery, too. Early contributions to debates over the role of the institution in Africa and its impact on African societies came from historians and anthropologists. One strand of disagreement emerged over whether slavery existed there at all prior to the arrival of Europeans. This raised more fundamental questions about how to define slavery. The influential introduction to Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff’s edited volume, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives , took pains to distinguish African slavery from its American counterparts. It rooted slavery not in racial difference or the growth of plantation agriculture but rather in the context of Africa’s kin-based social organization. According to the coauthors, the institution’s primary function in Africa was to incorporate outsiders into new societies. 29 So distinctive was this form of captivity that Miers and Kopytoff famously deployed scare quotes each time they used the word “slavery” in order to underscore its uniqueness.

Given their emphasis on incorporation, the process by which enslaved people over time became accepted insiders in the societies into which they were forcibly introduced, and their limited treatment of the economically productive roles that slaves played, Miers and Kopytoff came in for swift criticism on several fronts. Neo-Marxists were particularly dissatisfied. Claude Meillassoux, the prominent French scholar, responded with an alternative vision of slavery in Africa that highlighted the violence that was at the core of enslavement. 30 That violence made slavery the very antithesis of kinship, which to many scholars invalidated Miers and Kopytoff’s interpretation. Meillassoux and others also pointed to the dynamic economic roles that slaves played in Africa. 31 Studies in various local settings—in the Sokoto Caliphate, the Western Sudan, and elsewhere—made clear that slavery was a central part of how African societies organized productive labor. 32 This reality led some scholars to articulate distinct slave, or African, modes of production that, they argued, better illuminated the role of slavery in the continent. 33

In addition to these deep theoretical differences, one factor that contributed to the debates was the lack of historical sources that spoke to the changing nature of slavery in Africa. Documentary evidence describing slave societies is heavily concentrated in the 19th century , the period when Europe’s presence in Africa became more widespread and when colonialism and abolitionism colored Western views of Africans and their social institutions. To overcome source limitations, academics cast their nets widely, drawing on methodological innovations from anthropology and comparative linguistics, among other disciplines. 34 Participant observation, through which Africanists immersed themselves in the communities they studied in order to understand local languages and cultures, proved particularly valuable. 35 Yet the enthusiasm for this approach, which for many offered a more authentic path to access African cultures and voices, led some scholars to ignore or paper over its limitations. 36 To what extent, for example, did oral sources or observations of social structures in the 20th century reveal historical realities from previous eras? Other historians projected back in time insights from the more numerous written sources from the 19th century , using them to consider slavery in earlier periods. 37 Those who uncritically accepted evidence from such sources—whether non-written or written—came away with a timeless view of the African past, including as it related to slavery. 38 It would take another decade, during which the field witnessed revolutionary changes to the collection and analysis of data, until scholars began to widely accept the fact that, as in the Americas, slavery differed across time and space.

The Cliometric Debates

Around the same time that some scholars in the Americas were pushing enslaved people to the center of slavery narratives, a separate group of academics trained in economics began steering the focus of studies of slavery and the slave trade in a different direction. While research on planter power and slave resistance allowed historians to infer broad patterns of transformation from a limited collection of local records, this new group of scholars turned this approach upside down. They proposed to assess the underlying forces that shaped slavery and the slave trade to better contextualize the individual experiences of enslaved people. This big-picture approach was rooted in the quantification of large amounts of data available in archival sources spread across multiple locations and led ultimately to the development of “cliometrics,” a radically new methodology in the field. Two works were particularly important to the establishment of this approach: Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery . 39

Philip Curtin’s “census” provided the first quantitative assessment of the size, evolution, and distribution of the transatlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries . Previous estimates of the magnitude of the transatlantic trade claimed that it involved somewhere between fifteen and twenty million enslaved Africans—or in some cases many times that amount. 40 However, upon careful examination, Curtin found that such estimates were “nothing but a vast inertia, as historians have copied over and over again the flimsy results of unsubstantial guesswork.” 41 He thus set out to provide a new figure based on a close reading of secondary works that themselves had been based on extensive archival research. To assist in this endeavor, Curtin enlisted a technology that had only recently become available to researchers: the mainframe computer. He collected data on the number of slaves that ships of every nation involved in the traffic had embarked and disembarked, recorded these data on punch cards, and used the computer to organize the information into time series that allowed him to make projections for the periods and branches of the traffic for which data were scarce or altogether unavailable. Curtin’s findings posed profound challenges to the most basic assumptions about the transatlantic traffic. They revealed that the number of Africans forcibly transported to the Americas was substantially lower than what historians had previously assumed. Curtin also demonstrated that while the British were the most active slave traders during the second half of the 18th century , when the trade had reached its height, the Portuguese (and, after independence, Brazilians as well) carried far more enslaved people during the entire period of the transatlantic trade. 42 Furthermore, while the United States boasted the largest slave population by the mid- 19th century , it was a comparatively minor destination for vessels engaged in the trade: the region received less than 5 percent of all captive Africans transported across the Atlantic. 43

Curtin’s assessment of the slave trade inspired researchers to flock to local archives and compile new statistical data on the number and carrying capacity of slaving vessels departing or entering particular ports or regions around the Atlantic basin. Building on Curtin’s solid foundation, these scholars produced dozens of studies on the volume of various branches of the transatlantic trade. Virtually every port that dispatched slaving vessels to Africa or at which enslaved Africans were disembarked in the Americas received scholarly attention. What emerged from this work was an increasingly clear picture of the volume and structure of the Atlantic slave trade at local, regional, and national levels, though the South Atlantic slave trade remained comparatively understudied. 44 Historians of Africa also joined in these discussions, providing tentative assessments of slave exports from regions along the coast of West and West Central Africa. 45 The deepening pool of data that such research generated enabled scholars to use quantitative methods to consider other aspects of the transatlantic trade. How did mortality rates differ on slave vessels from one national carrier to another? 46 Which ports dispatched larger or smaller vessels and what implications did vessel size have for participation in the slave trade? 47 Which types of European commodities were most highly sought after in exchange for African captives? 48 As these questions imply, scholars had for the first time approached the slave trade as its own distinctive topic for research, which had revolutionary consequences for the future of the field.

Time on the Cross had an effect on slavery scholarship that was similar to—indeed, perhaps even greater than—that of Curtin’s, especially among scholars focused on the antebellum US South. Inspired by studies that challenged the view of plantation slavery as unprofitable, Fogel and Engerman, with the help of a team of researchers, set out to quantify nearly every aspect of that institution in the US South, from slaves’ average daily food consumption to the amount of cotton produced in the US South during the antebellum era. 49 Consistent with the cliometricians’ approach, Fogel and Engerman listed ten findings that “contradicted many of the most important propositions in the traditional portrayal of the slave system.” 50 Their most important—and controversial—conclusions were that slavery was a rational system of labor exploitation maintained by planters to maximize their own economic interests; that it was growing on the eve of the Civil War; and that owners were optimistic rather than pessimistic about the future of the slave system during the decade that preceded the war. 51 Further, the authors noted that slave labor was productive. “On average,” the cliometricians argued, a slave was “harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.” 52

While cliometrics made important contributions to the study of slavery and the slave trade, the quantitative approach came in for swift and passionate criticism. Curtin’s significantly lower estimates for the number of enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic were met with skepticism; some respondents even charged that his figures trivialized the horrors of the trade. 53 Although praised for its revolutionary interpretation, which earned Fogel the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 , Fogel and Engerman’s study of the economics of American slavery was almost immediately cast aside as deeply flawed and unworthy of serious scholarly attention. Critics pointed not only to carelessness in the authors’ data collection techniques but also to their mathematical errors, abusive assumptions, and insufficient contextualization of data. 54 Fogel and Engerman, for example, characterized lynching as a “disciplinary tool.” After counting the number of whippings slaves received at one plantation, they concluded that masters there rarely used the punishment. They failed to note, however, the powerful effect that such abuse had on slaves and free people who merely watched or heard the horrible spectacle. 55 More generally, and apart from these specific problems, critics offered a theoretical objection to the quantitative approach, which, they argued, conceived of history as an objective science, with strong persuasive appeal, but which silenced the voices of the individuals victimized by the history of slavery and the slave trade.

Nevertheless, the methodology found followers among historians studying the history of slavery in other parts of the Atlantic. B. W. Higman’s massive two-volume work, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 , remains an unparalleled quantitative analysis of slave communities on the islands under British control. 56 Robert Louis Stein’s The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century also makes substantial use of cliometrics and remains a valuable reference for students of slavery in Martinique and Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti). 57 But outside of the United States, nowhere was cliometrics more popular than Brazil, where scholars of slavery, including Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Herbert Klein, Francisco Vidal Luna, Robert Slenes, and others, applied it to examine many of the same issues that their North American counterparts did: rates of profitability, demographic growth, and economic expansion of slave systems. 58 Africanists also found value in the methodology and employed it as their sources allowed. Patrick Manning, for instance, used demographic modeling to examine the impact of the slave trade on African societies. 59 Philip Curtin compiled quantitative archival sources to analyze the evolution of the economy of Senegambia in the era of the slave trade. 60 Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson traced the circulation of cowries, the shell money of the slave trade, noting that “of all the goods from overseas exchanged for slaves, the shell money touched individuals most widely and often in their day-to-day activities.” 61

In many ways, the gap between quantitative and social and cultural approaches to slavery and the slave trade that opened in the 1970s has continued to divide the field. Concerned that cliometrics sucked the dynamism out of interpretations of the slave community and reduced captives to figures on a spreadsheet, some scholars responded by deploying a variety of new tools to reclaim the humanity and individuality of enslaved actors. Microhistory, an approach that early modern Europeanists developed to recover peasant and other everyday people’s stories, offered one such opportunity. 62 Biography provided another. By reducing its scale of observation and focusing on individuals, families, households, or other small-scale units of analysis, such research underscored the messiness of lived experiences and the creative and often unexpected ways that slaves fashioned worlds for themselves. 63 But such approaches raised a separate set of questions: do biographical accounts reveal typical experiences? In an era when few slaves were literate and even fewer committed their stories to paper, any captives whose accounts survived—in full or in fragments, published or unpublished—were by definition exceptional. Moreover, given the clear overarching framework that decades of quantitative work on the slave trade had developed, one would be hard-pressed to ignore completely the cliometric turn. As two quantitatively minded scholars noted, “it is difficult to assess the significance or representativity of personal narratives or collective biographies, however detailed, without an understanding of the overall movements of slaves of which these individuals’ lives were a part.” 64 While an emphasis on what might be described as the quantitative “big picture” is not by nature antagonistic toward social and cultural historians’ concerns with enslaved people’s lived experiences, the two approaches offer different visions of slavery’s past and often feel as if they sit on opposite ends of the analytical spectrum.

Women, Gender, and Slavery

In the roughly two and a half decades that followed the major interpretive shifts that Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins introduced into scholarship on slavery, the field remained an almost exclusively male one. With rare exceptions, men continued to dominate the profession during this period; their work rarely probed with any degree of sophistication the experiences of women in plantation societies. While second-wave feminism inspired women to enter graduate programs in history in larger numbers beginning in the 1960s, it took time for published work on women’s history, at least as it related to slavery, to appear in earnest. Revealingly, it was not until 1985 that the Library of Congress created a unique catalog heading for “women slaves.” Yet in the three decades since then, women’s (and later gendered) histories of slavery have been published at an ever-increasing pace. Scholars in the 21st century would struggle to take seriously books written about slavery that fail to show an appreciation for the distinctive experiences of men and women in captivity or more generally across plantation societies.

Several forces worked against the production of studies on enslaved women. If sources detailing slaves’ lives are in general sparse, evidence on women slaves is particularly spotty. Deborah Gray White’s pioneering work, Aren’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South , the first book-length study of enslaved women, triumphantly pieced together fragments of information from Federal Writers’ Project interviews with scattered plantation records to breathe life into the historiography of black women. It revealed the powerful structures that served to constrain enslaved women’s lives in the 19th century United States. As White famously concluded: “Black in a white society, slave in a free society, women in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of Antebellum Americans.” 65 Yet publishers and academic peers did not immediately take seriously work focused on women slaves. White noted, for example, how colleagues in her department warned her that she would be unlikely to earn tenure writing about such a topic. This environment was hardly the type of nurturing one required for sustained research. 66

Though it was an uphill struggle, an influential group of scholars gradually developed a framework for understanding slavery’s realities for women. Early work focused on the foundational tasks of recovering female voices and using them to challenge standard narratives of the plantation system. It made clear the complex and multifaceted roles of women captives—as mothers, wives, fieldworkers, and domestics—and in the process reshaped scholarly understanding of the dynamics of the plantation enterprise. Social relations within plantation households commanded particular attention. Some scholars emphasized bonds between black and white women whose lives, they argued, were conditioned by a shared and oppressive patriarchal culture. Catherine Clinton, for example, characterized white mistresses as “trapped” within plantation society. “Cotton was King, white men ruled, and both white women and slaves served the same master,” she argued. 67 While she sympathized with the plight of plantation mistresses, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, another leading figure of American women’s history, offered a contrary view of gendered relations within Southern households, one that highlighted division. Far from sharing common interests with enslaved women, mistresses clearly benefitted from slavery’s continuation. Their status as white and elite took priority over the bonds of womanhood. 68

The first sustained studies of women’s resistance to slavery also appeared in the 1980s. The historiographical pivot toward day-to-day resistance, which more effectively revealed the sophisticated ways that enslaved Africans and their descendants challenged their captivity, also opened a window of opportunity to view women as disruptors of the slave system in their own right. No longer dismissed as, at most, timid supporters of male-led revolts, women were in this period redefined as “natural rebels” who exploited white perceptions of female docility for their own benefit. Enslaved women, for example, were not generally chained onboard slave vessels, which gave them greater opportunities to organize revolts. Those few women who worked in privileged positions within plantation households took on responsibilities that gave them unique access to white families and exposed them to white vulnerabilities. Cooks could theoretically poison their owners, a threat that seemed all too real given the world of violence that underpinned the plantation. And while the coercive realities of slavery rooted every sexual relationship between white men and black women in violence, some scholars pointed to the possibility that women slaves who endured such abuse saw marginal improvements in their material circumstances or the prospects for their children. 69

Within a decade of the publication of Deborah White’s book, scholarship began to shift away from analyses of women and toward investigations of the worlds that men and women made together under slavery. Scholars of Africa brought valuable insights into this issue, drawing on decades of careful research into local constructions of gender and, in particular, the gendered division of labor within Africa. Women, Africanists illustrated, performed many of the most important tasks in agricultural regimes across the continent. 70 Some historians argued that it was their physical rather than biological roles that led slave owners in Africa to prefer and retain female captives, challenging earlier rigid emphases on women’s childbearing capacities. 71 These polarized debates eventually gave way to local and more nuanced analyses that revealed the complex range of contributions that enslaved women made to African societies: Women had children that increased the sizes of households; they cultivated and marketed crops that fed and enriched kingdoms and other less centralized societies; they served as bodyguards to local elites; and they even bought, retained, and traded their own captives. 72 If slavery in Africa was widespread, it was precisely because women had such wide-ranging productive and reproductive value.

These insights had wider implications for the study of the slave trade and the Atlantic World. African conceptions of gender conditioned the supply to Europeans of men and women captives along the coast, illustrating the close relationship between gender issues and economic concerns. 73 Gendered identities that emerged in Africa were adapted and transformed in the Americas depending on demographic, economic, or cultural concerns. 74 Whereas in low-density slave systems, African women and their descendants might follow work regimes that resembled those of their homelands, the gendered division of labor in large slave societies often more closely reflected European attitudes toward women and work. 75 Grappling with such complex realities required historians to dig into local records across a staggering variety of geographic settings. It was in that context that scholars began to broaden their horizons and embrace an increasingly Atlantic orientation—a trend that mirrored broader changes in studies on slavery and the slave trade in the 1990s. 76

The Atlanticization of Slavery Studies

It may seem redundant to identify a shift toward the Atlanticization of slavery studies. Enslaved Africans, after all, were brought to the Americas from across the Atlantic. How, then, could these studies be anything but Atlantic? The reality is that historians have generally looked at the institution through rather parochial eyes, as something limited by regional, national, or cultural boundaries. There were several early and noteworthy exceptions to this trend. Indeed, calls for studies to look at the societies surrounding the ocean as an integral unit of analysis date as far back as the late 1910s. Several scholars took up that call, the most notable perhaps being Fernand Braudel in his 1949 masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II . 77 However, in an increasingly polarized world, the idea faced significant resistance and obstacles. Following World War II, Atlanticization could be easily read as a stand-in for imperialism or westernization. It was only toward the end of the Cold War that historians were able to move past these ideological barriers and understand the value of looking at the Atlantic as “the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer of Europeans onto American shores,” an interaction that was the result of “a sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.” 78

This realization deeply shaped subsequent studies of the history of slavery and the slave trade, some of them reviving earlier debates about cultural continuity and change in the African diaspora. One of the most successful examples to focus on the influence of Africans in shaping slavery on both sides of the ocean is John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World . In it, Thornton argues that slavery was the only form of “private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.” 79 Consequently, African political and economic elites had significant leverage over the institution, giving them some control over the transatlantic traffic. Thornton’s argument offered a new logic for African participation in the slave trade while also providing a new interpretation of African culture in Africa and the Americas. Although enslaved Africans came from several different regions and societies, Thornton stresses the similarities between their cultures and languages. Based on research on the traffic’s organization, he notes that slave ships rarely purchased captives in more than one port and that they normally sailed along very specific routes. 80 Such an organization favored the transmission of some of the cultural practices enslaved Africans brought with them to the Americas. Nevertheless, Thornton points out, “slaves were not militant cultural nationalists who sought to preserve everything African but rather showed great flexibility in adapting and changing their culture.” 81 His approach thus emphasized the systematic linkages that the transatlantic slave trade forged while leaving space for creolization within slave communities.

Another important contribution that emphasized cultural transformation was Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . 82 Looking to identify the first generations of blacks who chartered their descendants’ fate in mainland North America, Berlin located them among a group he called “Atlantic creoles,” people who traced their beginnings to the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa, but who ultimately emerged from the world that Europe, Africa, and the Americas collectively created. Cosmopolitan by experience or circumstance, familiar with the commerce of the Atlantic, and fluent in its languages and cultures, these individuals laid down the foundations for black life in the New World. 83 They arrived not as Africans desperate to replicate their culture, or flexible to adapt, but rather as profoundly changed individuals. Although they permeated most of the colonial societies of the Americas, Berlin claims that in mainland North America at least they were soon swept away by subsequent generations born under the expansion of large-scale commodity production, which ended the porous slave system of the early years of European and African settlement. 84

Although these were important contributions, the Atlanticization of slavery studies opened many more avenues to understand the experiences of Africans and their descendants during the years of bondage. It allowed for comparisons between Africans’ trajectories with those of other players in the formation of the Atlantic world. Paul Gilroy’s well-known Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is in a way a precursor, expressing “a desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.” 85 Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan’s edited volume, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal , views a handful of European nations—Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands—as creating this new world centered around the Atlantic, but it also places Africans as well as the indigenous populations of the Americas in comparative perspective. 86 One immediate problem with this approach is that it conflates several hundreds of groups, nations, or peoples into a single category, “Africans,” a term that gained traction only as the slave trade expanded and, consequently, recognized by just a fraction of the people it intended to describe.

A more adequate approach, favored by the Atlantic framework of analysis, would focus on specific African regions or peoples. Here historians have made some progress, mainly in the form of edited volumes. Linda M. Heywood’s edited book, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora , looks at how Kikongo and Mbundu speakers, often times grouped under designations such as Angola, Benguela, or Congo in places in the Americas as distant from one another as Havana, Montevideo, New Orleans, Recife, and Port au Prince, culturally shaped the African diaspora. 87 Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz’s volume attempts a similar approach, centered on the societies of precolonial Ghana, mainly the Asante and Fante. 88 Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs’s book, by contrast, focuses on a single African people, the Yoruba. 89 Not only were they a sizable group forced into the Atlantic, but they also left an indelible mark in several regions of the Americas. Interestingly, the Yoruba started calling themselves as such, that is, through their language name, only years after the transatlantic slave trade had ended, probably as a result of religious encounters leading up to the colonization of Nigeria. 90 During the period of the slave trade, the Yoruba lived divided into a number of states like Oyo, Egba, Egbado, Ijebu, and Ijesa, located in Southwest Nigeria, and were called outside the region by different terms, such as Nagô in Bahia, Lucumí in Cuba, and Aku in Sierra Leone. 91

Not only did the Atlantic approach contribute to the development of new historical frameworks and perspectives, it also encouraged historians to use traditional sources and methods in more creative and interesting ways. In Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation , Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Hébrard trace the paper trail that members of the Tinchant family left behind to reconstruct over multiple generations the saga of an African woman and her family from slavery to freedom. 92 In addition to tracing individuals and families, historians have also paid greater attention to cultural practices embedded in traditions of agriculture, healing, and warfare, which were disseminated around the Atlantic during the period of the slave trade. Judith A. Carney, for example, looked at the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas, connecting particular rice growing regions in Upper Guinea to their counterparts in places like South Carolina in the United States and Maranhão in Bazil; James H. Sweet examined the intellectual history of the Atlantic world by following the uses and appropriations of African healing practices from Dahomey to Bahia and Portugal; and Manuel Barcia explored the similarities and differences between warfare techniques employed by West African captives, especially from Oyo, in Bahia, and Cuba. 93 Although urban history has a long tradition among historians, most studies have focused on cities and ports in Europe and the Americas. 94 Historians, including Robin Law, Kristin Mann, Mariana Cândido, and Randy Sparks, however, are redressing that imbalance with studies focused on African ports—Ouidah, Lagos, Benguela, and Anomabu—that emerged or expanded during the slave trade era. 95

Finally, although removed from the Atlantic, the very effort of looking at slavery and the slave trade from a broader perspective has influenced studies on these issues in other parts of the world or even within a global framework. Research on the intra-American slave trade has gained a renewed interest with publications like Greg O’Malley’s Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . 96 The same could be said of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean with works like Richard Allen’s European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 . 97 One central debate that has recently been revived concerns the relationship between capitalism and slavery. 98 Inspired by Eric Williams’s path-breaking work and, more recently, by Dale Tomich’s concept of “second slavery,” which highlights the creation of new zones of slavery in the United States and other parts of the continent during the 19th century , historians, including Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, and Seth Rockman, are now enthusiastically assessing the connections between the expansion of slavery in that period and the formation of global financial markets and industrial economies in Europe and North America. 99 Clearly, the scholarly potential occasioned by the Atlanticization of slavery studies is still unfolding and should not be underestimated.

Into the Digital Era

The digital revolution sparked a radical change across the historical profession that has had particularly important ramifications for the study of slavery and the slave trade. Despite the major theoretical, methodological, and interpretive differences that divided scholars throughout the 20th century , the means of scholarly communication and dissemination of research during that period remained virtually unchanged: books, journal articles, and very occasionally interviews, opinion pieces, and documentary films enabled scholars to explain their work to each other and, to a much lesser extent, a wider public. The emergence of the internet and its rapid infiltration of academic and everyday life has disrupted this landscape, opening new and once inconceivable opportunities to engage in open-ended inquiry unencumbered by publication deadlines, and to share the fruits of that labor with anyone who has access to the web. The digital turn has also inspired scholars to offer creative visual interpretations of the history of both slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps most importantly, the web has provided a site for the presentation and preservation of digitized archival sources that would previously have been accessible to only those people with the means to visit the repositories that hold them. While the consequences of the digital turn are being actively discussed and debated, it is clear that digital history is here to stay.

Digital projects focusing on slavery and the slave trade emerged in the 1990s and tended to be somewhat rudimentary in both their aims and scope, reflecting the limited capacity of the internet itself and, perhaps more appropriately, scholars’ limited comfort using it. These projects had as their main purpose the collection and presentation of primary sources—scanning and loading onto a web page images of captives, owners, slave ships, and forts that teachers or students had collected for pedagogical purposes. Among the first large-scale initiatives to bring together these scattered materials was Jerome Handler and Michael A. Tuite’s website, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas . 100 Created first as a portal to search through images that Handler had used in lectures, this website grew exponentially over time. From the roughly 200 images organized into ten categories with which the site first launched, it now provides access to 1,280 images arranged under eighteen topical headings. Other digital projects focused on the presentation of scanned archival documents. Libraries and historical societies used the web to advertise their holdings and entice interested viewers to further examine their collections. Many of these sites were free of charge, democratizing access to rare scholarly records—at least for those individuals who had access to the internet.

As the technology associated with digitization has improved, a number of organizations have dedicated vast resources to scaling up digital projects. Though its focus goes well beyond slavery and the slave trade, Google Books has been among the most prominent players in the field. 101 Beginning in the early 2000s, Google quietly began scanning published volumes held in major academic libraries. By 2015 , Google estimated that it had scanned 25 million books—nearly one-fifth of the total number of unique titles ever published. Though copyright laws limit full access to the collection, Google Books is nevertheless unparalleled in its scope and offers unrivaled access to published sources on slavery from the pre-copyright era. Other companies have taken more targeted approaches. The Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice portal, for example, offers access to original archival materials focused primarily, though not exclusively, on the Atlantic World that covers the period between 1490 and 2007 . The project enables users to interface with scans of primary sources and use keyword searches to find relevant materials. 102

As this implies, digitization initiatives have not been limited to the Western world, even if, at times controversially, Western institutions have funded the majority of them. Indeed, one of the enduring consequences of the Atlanticization of slavery scholarship has been the growing dialogue it helped generate between scholars living in or working on areas outside of the Anglo-American world. The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is one example: it has supported the digitization of entire archival collections in repositories situated in developing countries, where resources for preservation are extremely limited. 103 Local archivists have become valuable collaborators; young students with interests in digital preservation have gained important training and exposure to scanning methods and technologies. Since the early 2000s, major digital initiatives have been launched or completed in places as wide-ranging as Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Saint Helena, with important implications for slavery scholarship. 104 One such example is the Slave Societies Digital Archive , directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbuilt University, which preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and people of African descent. 105 Since 2007 or so, a truly global conversation about slavery and its long-term effects has been nurtured by more widespread access to relevant archival sources.

The growing sophistication of the internet and its users has transformed digital projects on slavery and the slave trade. Websites now go well beyond mere presentations of scanned primary sources. They tend to emphasize interactivity, encouraging site visitors to search through and manipulate data to generate new research insights. Some projects employ “crowdsourcing,” partnering with the public or soliciting data or assistance from site visitors to further a project’s reach. African Origins , for instance, provides to the public some 91,000 records of captives rescued from slave ships in the 19th century , including their indigenous African names. 106 Historians, with the help of other researchers, particularly those people familiar with African languages, have been identifying to which languages these names belong and thereby tracing the inland, linguistic origins of thousands of slaves forced into the Atlantic during the 19th century . 107 This has helped expand insights into slavery and the slave trade well beyond the limited confines of the ivory tower. Moreover, the internet has the added benefit of providing a space for individuals who are passionate about history but whose careers limit their abilities to publish books and articles to share their knowledge with a large pool of readers.

Few digital initiatives have done more for slavery scholarship than Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database . The Voyages site is the product of decades of collaborative research into the transatlantic slave trade. Building on Curtin’s Census , it now provides access to information on nearly 36,000 unique slave voyages that operated between the 1510s and 1867 . The site is made possible by the basic reality that, given the vast amount of money they laid out, owners and operators of slave vessels carefully documented many aspects of slaving excursions. Some of the details captured in written records lend themselves to coding and quantification: the names of captains and owners; the places to which slave ships went; the numbers of enslaved people loaded onto and forced off of slave ships; the ratios of males to females and adults to children among captives; and the prices paid for enslaved people. The vast amount of data to which the site provides free access has enabled scholars focused on virtually any aspect of the slave trade or slavery to benefit from and contribute to the Voyages project. Among its most important features is the site’s capacity to expand or revise its records based on contributions from users who uncover new or contradictory evidence. 108

Based in part on the Voyages model—or, in some cases, as a critical response to it—since the 2000s, historical research has witnessed the creation and expansion of important digital projects about enslaved Africans and their descendants. Slave Biographies: Atlantic Database Network , a project spearheaded by Gwendolyn M. Hall and Walter Hawthorne from Michigan State University, offers an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. 109 Liberated Africans , developed by Henry Lovejoy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, brings together information about the lives of some 250,000 Africans rescued from slave ships between 1807 and 1896 . 110 Final Passages , a project under development by Greg O’Malley and Alex Borucki at the University of California system, plans to provide a database of the intra-American slave trade to be deployed on the same platform as Slave Voyages . 111 And what to say of Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade , winner of a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation? The project seeks to bring such digital resources together by focusing on individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading at any time between the beginning and the end of the transatlantic slave trade. 112 It is no doubt the epitome in amassing and interconnecting historical data. Conversations about long-term institutional support for these sites and the data on which they are based—a central and underappreciated aspect of digital history—have also begun to take place in earnest. That they are happening at all is indicative of the revolutionary impact that the digital turn has had on the profession.

All in all, it is no easy task to synthesize decades of research on the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Although relatively new in comparison to more established fields of Western history, it has grown quickly, amassing a significant body of literature that incorporates some of the most sophisticated methodologies available. Historians have proven so adaptable in their approaches and uses of sources that it is nearly impossible to indicate the direction in which the field is moving. Moreover, in the wake of movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, public interest has turned again to the complex and thorny issue of reparations. Consequently, historians have had an unprecedented opportunity to engage with the public on this question and related ones concerning how societies represent and memorialize the history of slavery. In 2013 , Laurent Dubois noticed in an opinion piece in The New York Times that calls for reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Caribbean offered an important opportunity to face the multiple ways in which the past continues to shape the present. 113 In the following year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a cover article in The Atlantic making a powerful case for reparations in the United States. According to him, “until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” 114 A leading advocate for public memorializing of slavery, Ana Lúcia Araújo, has recently published a book dedicated exclusively to the issue of reparations for slavery and the slave trade. 115 While the most recent iteration of this debate draws on fresh materials and perspectives, Araújo notes that “since the eighteenth century, enslaved and freed individuals started conceptualizing the idea of reparations in correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims, written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.” 116 That such issues continue to spark passionate debates and scholarship provides a strong indication of the enduring relevance of slavery’s past to the shaping of the present.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alex Borucki, David Eltis, Greg O’Malley, and Nicholas Radburn for their comments on earlier versions of this article. All interpretations and conclusions reached here are, of course, the authors’ responsibility.

Further Reading

• Allen, Richard Blair . European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 . Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.
• Araújo, Ana Lúcia . Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History . New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
• Campbell, Gwyn , Suzanne Miers , and Joseph C. Miller , eds. Women and Slavery . 2 vols. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007.
• Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge , Matt D. Childs , and James Sidbury , eds. The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
• Cooper, Frederick . “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies.” Journal of African History 20, no. 1 (1979): 103–125.
• Domingues da Silva, Daniel B. The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Eltis, David . The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Falola, Toyin , and Matt D. Childs , eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
• Gilroy, Paul . The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness . London: Verso, 1993.
• Green, Toby . The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Lindsay, Lisa A. , and John Wood Sweet , eds. Biography and the Black Atlantic . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
• Miers, Suzanne , and Igor Kopytoff , eds. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.
• Mintz, Sidney , and Richard Price . The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (2nd ed.). Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
• Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
• Mustakeem, Sowande’ M. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage . Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
• Nwokeji, G. Ugo . The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• O’Malley, Gregory E. Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
• Rediker, Marcus . The Slave Ship: A Human History . New York: Penguin, 2007.
• Scott, Rebecca J. , and Jean M. Hébrard . Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Scully, Pamela , and Diana Paton , eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Shumway, Rebecca , and Trevor R. Getz . Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora . London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
• Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Stilwell, Sean . Slavery and Slaving in African History . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Wheat, David . Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

1. David Eltis et al., “ Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database ,” 2008.

2. Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, “Winds and Sea Currents of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 152–167.

3. Mariana P. Cândido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017) ; Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa , 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) ; Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011); and Sean Stilwell, Slavery and Slaving in African History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) .

4. John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 , 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) ; and Olatunji Ojo, “The Slave Ship Manuelita and the Story of a Yoruba Community, 1833–1834,” Tempo 23, no. 2 (2017): 361–382.

5. Stephanie E Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) ; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007) ; and Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016) .

6. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 , 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); David Richardson, “Consuming Goods, Consuming People: Reflections on the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 31–63; Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1534–1575; and J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

7. Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2013); Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); and Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) .

8. Cowling, Conceiving Freedom ; Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region ; and Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers .

9. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia , trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).

10. John Blassingame, The Slave Family in America , 7th ed. (Gettysburg, PA: National Historical Society, 1972); Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Emma Christopher, They Are We , Documentary (Icarus Films, 2013); Laurent Dubois, David K. Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold, “ Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica ,” 2017; Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Luis Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil , trans. Richard Vernon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

11. Alex Borucki, “From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in Montevideo, 1770–1850” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2011); Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective , 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) ; and David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) .

12. The classic example is Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime (New York: D. Appleton, 1918). For an outstanding historiographical overview of slavery scholarship in the United States, see Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).

13. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956); Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1974); and Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

14. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974). For a broader reflection on the quantitative turn, see Robert William Fogel, The Slavery Debates, 1952–1990: A Retrospective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).

15. John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Robert W. Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet, eds., Biography and the Black Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) .

16. Jorge Felipe, “ Digital Resources for the Study of Global Slavery and the Slave Trade ,” H-Slavery (blog), 2016.

17. Phillips, American Negro Slavery .

18. See, among his many other books, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: Holt, 1915); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Knopf, 1947); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941); Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); and Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933).

19. E. Franking Frazier and several other scholars feared that connecting African Americans to Africa would further ostracize African American families and limit their ability to integrate and gain full rights in American society.

20. Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime de Economia Patriarcal , 10th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio Editora, 1961); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1938); Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio: El Complejo Económico-Social Cubano del Azúcar , 3 vols. (Havana: Comisión Nacional Cubana de la UNESCO, 1964); Fernando Ortiz, Los Negros Esclavos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975); and Arthur Ramos, O Negro Brasileiro , 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1940); and Williams, Capitalism & Slavery .

21. James, The Black Jacobins ; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1972); and Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Knopf, 1946).

22. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution .

23. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

24. John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1977); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974). Literature on African American religion took off in the 1970s. Representative works include E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken, 1974); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll ; Milton C. Sernett, Black Religion and American Evangelicalism: White Protestants, Plantation Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787–1865 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975); and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).

25. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll .

26. Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts ; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution ; Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1984): 296–313. Scholars of the Caribbean were around this time also grappling with questions about the scale and frequency of slave revolts. See, for example, Craton, Testing the Chains .

27. Blassingame, The Slave Community .

28. George Rawick, for example, edited a 41-volume set of WPA interviews, in George Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography , 41 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972). See also George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972).

29. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 3–81 .

30. Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold , trans. Alide Dasnois (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

31. Claude Meillassoux, ed., L’Esclavage en Afrique Précoloniale (Paris: François Maspero, 1975).

32. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Martin A. Klein and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Slavery in West Africa,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 181–212; Paul E. Lovejoy, “Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate,” in The Ideology of Slavery in Africa , ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE, 1981), 201–243; and Claude Meillassoux, “The Role of Slavery in the Economic and Social History of Sahelo-Sudanic Africa,” in Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies , ed. Joseph E. Inikori, trans. R. J. Gavin (New York: Africana, 1982), 74–99.

33. Frederick Cooper, “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies,” Journal of African History 20, no. 1 (1979): 103–125 ; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Recherches sur un Mode de Production Africain,” La Pensée , no. 144 (1969): 3–20; Martin A. Klein, “The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Societies of the Western Sudan,” Social Science History 14, no. 2 (1990): 231–253; and Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery .

34. Some examples are available in John Edward Philips, ed., Writing African History (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005).

35. Sara Berry, Cocoa, Custom, and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade , 2 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); and David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

36. A candid reflection about this issue is available in Jan Vansina, “It Never Happened: Kinguri’s Exodus and Its Consequences,” History in Africa 25 (1998): 387–403.

37. David Henige, “Truths Yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact,” Journal of African History 23, no. 3 (1982): 395–412; and Elizabeth Tonkin, “Investigating Oral Tradition,” Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (1986): 203–213.

38. Adam Jones, “Some Reflections on the Oral Traditions of the Galinhas Country, Sierra Leone,” History in Africa 12 (1985): 151–165; and Donald R. Wright, “Uprooting Kunta Kinte: On the Perils of Relying on Encyclopedic Informants,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 205–217.

39. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); and Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross .

40. Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London: Cass, 1964), 21; Basil Davidson, Black Mother: The Years of the African Slave Trade (Boston: Little Brown, 1961), 89; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 9; Daniel Pratt Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 32 and 71; and Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen , 29–32.

41. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 11.

42. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 265–267.

43. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 87–88 and 247–249.

44. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); and Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to the 19th Century (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1976).

45. Ivana Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic Slave Trade, 1450–1521,” Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (1997): 31–75; David Eltis, “Slave Departures from Africa, 1811–1867: An Annual Time Series,” African Economic History no. 15 (1986): 143–171; J. E. Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey,” Journal of African History 17, no. 2 (1976): 197–223; Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,” Journal of African History 23, no. 4 (1982): 473–502; Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joseph C. Miller, “The Numbers, Origins, and Destinations of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Angolan Slave Trade,” Social Science History 13, no. 4 (1989): 381–419; and David Richardson, “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution,” Journal of African History 30, no. 1 (1989): 1–22.

46. Stephen D. Behrendt, “Crew Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 49–71; Raymond L. Cohn and Richard A. Jense, “The Determinants of Slave Mortality Rates on the Middle Passage,” Explorations in Economic History 19, no. 3 (1982): 269–282; David Eltis, “Fluctuations in Mortality in the Last Half Century of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Social Science History 13, no. 3 (1989): 315–340; Stanley L. Engerman et al., “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 93–118; Herbert S. Klein, “The Trade in African Slaves to Rio de Janeiro, 1795–1811: Estimates of Mortality and Patterns of Voyages,” Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 533–549; and Joseph C. Miller, “Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 3 (1981): 385–423.

47. Roger Anstey and P. E. H Hair, eds., Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research (Liverpool, UK: Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1976); David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Klein, The Middle Passage ; and Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt, eds., Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra): Papers from a Conference of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, June 1998 (Stirling, Scotland: Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, 1999).

48. Richard Bean, “A Note on the Relative Importance of Slaves and Gold in West African Exports,” Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974): 351–356; José C. Curto, Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese–Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and Its Hinterland, c.1550–1830 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004); David Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 936–959; David Eltis, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World before 1870: Estimates of Trends in Value, Composition and Direction,” Research in Economic History 12 (1989): 197–239; David Eltis, “The Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic Trade of Seventeenth-Century Africa,” Journal of African History 35, no. 2 (1994): 237–249; Eltis and Jennings, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era”; George Metcalf, “A Microcosm of Why Africans Sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s,” Journal of African History 28, no. 3 (1987): 377–394; Joseph C. Miller, “Imports at Luanda, Angola: 1785–1823,” in Figuring African Trade: Proceedings of the Symposium on the Quantification and Structure of the Import and Export and Long-Distance Trade of Africa in the Nineteenth Century, c.1800–1913 (St. Augustin, 3–6 January 1983) , ed. Gerhard Liesegang, Helma Pasch, and Adam Jones (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986), 162–244; and David Richardson, “West African Consumption Patterns and Their Influence on the Eighteenth Century English Slave Trade,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 303–330.

49. Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 2 (April 1958): 95–130; and Yasukichi Yasuba, “The Profitability and Viability of Plantation Slavery in the United States,” Economic Studies Quarterly 12 (1961): 6067. See also Fogel, The Slavery Debates , 18–23.

50. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 4.

51. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 4–5.

52. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 5.

53. David Henige, “Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic,” Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (1986): 295–313; and Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade.”

54. Paul A. David et al., Reckoning with Slavery: Critical Essays in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Thomas L. Haskell, “The True & Tragical History of ‘Time on the Cross,’” The New York Review of Books , October 2, 1975; and Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of “Time on the Cross” (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

55. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 144–148.

56. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 .

57. Robert Louis Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

58. Manolo Florentino, Em Costas Negras: Uma História do Tráfico Atlântico de Escravos entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro, Séculos XVIII e XIX (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1997); Manolo Florentino and José Roberto Góes, A Paz das Senzalas: Famílias Escravas e Tráfico Atlântico, Rio de Janeiro, c.1790–c.1850 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Civilização Brasileira, 1997); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Slavery and the Economics of Labor in Brazilian Coffee Plantations, 1850–1888 (Santo André, Brazil : Strong Educacional, 2017); Robert Wayne Slenes, “The Demography and Economics of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1976); and Robert W. Slenes, Na Senzala, Uma Flor: Esperanças e Recordações Na Formação Da Família Escrava, Brasil Sudeste, Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1999).

59. Manning, Slavery and African Life . See also his earlier work, Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

60. Curtin, Economic Change .

61. Jan S. Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2.

62. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller , trans. Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

63. In addition to the sources cited in note 15, see Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America , ed. Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2007); Sean M. Kelley, The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kristin Mann, “The Illegal Slave Trade and One Yoruba Man’s Transatlantic Passages from Slavery to Freedom,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 220–246; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers ; and Randy J. Sparks, Africans in the Old South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

64. David Eltis and David Richardson, “The ‘Numbers Game’ and Routes to Slavery,” in Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.

65. Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 15.

66. Deborah Gray White, “‘Matter Out of Place:’ Aren’t I a Woman? Black Female Scholars and the Academy,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (2007): 5–12. See also the reflective contributions to this journal issue by other pioneers in the field of black women’s history. Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow was published in the same year as White’s Aren’t I a Woman , though it had a broader scope and agenda. See Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

67. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 35.

68. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

69. The expression “natural rebels” comes from Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). For a small but representative sample of women’s resistance to slavery in the Americas, see the many contributions in Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

70. Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970); Leith Mullings, “Women and Economic Change in Africa,” in Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change , ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 239–264; G. Ugo Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 47–68; and Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, “Women’s Importance in African Slave Systems,” in Women and Slavery in Africa , ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 3–25.

71. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men?,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 2 (1992): 237–257; Herbert S. Klein, “African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Women and Slavery in Africa , ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 29–38; and Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender.”

72. The related bibliography is, of course, too vast to cite here, but see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Women, Marriage, and Slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Medieval North Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 43–61 ; Claire C. Robertson and Marsha Robinson, “Re-Modeling Slavery as If Women Mattered,” in Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 253–283; Joseph C. Miller, “Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves: Experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic,” in Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Medieval North Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 1–39 ; and Joseph C. Miller, “Domiciled and Dominated: Slaving as a History of Women,” in Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 284–310.

73. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 100–121; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85–113 ; Klein, “African Women”; and Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender.”

74. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) ; and Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

75. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Thayolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

76. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) .

77. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

78. Donald William Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), i, 64–65. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 55–56.

79. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 74.

80. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 192–193.

81. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 206.

82. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998). Berlin later refined his argument in Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press, 2003).

83. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone , 17.

84. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone , 64–65.

85. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 19 .

86. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

87. Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

88. Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) .

89. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) .

90. J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

91. Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–219; David Northrup, “Becoming African: Identity Formation among Liberated Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 1 (2006): 1–21; and Robert Sydney Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba , 3rd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

92. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers .

93. Manuel Barcia, West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Carney, Black Rice ; and James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

94. See, for instance, Anstey and Hair, Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition ; Mariana L. R. Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (New York: Macmillan, 2008); Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Holger Weiss, ed., Ports of Globalisation, Places of Creolisation: Nordic Possessions in the Atlantic World during the Era of the Slave Trade (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2016).

95. Cândido, An African Slaving Port ; Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port”, 1727–1892 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004); Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City ; Randy J. Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds., The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) .

96. Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) .

97. Richard Blair Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014) .

98. Although not always acknowledged, these debates clearly started with Williams, Capitalism & Slavery .

99. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 56–71. See also Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and Dale W. Tomich, ed., Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). An excellent review of the literature on this theme is available in Marc Parry, “ Shackles and Dollars: Historians and Economists Clash over Slavery ,” Chronicle of Higher Education , December 8, 2016.

100. Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr., “ The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record ,” 2008.

101. “ Google Books .”

102. “ Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice: Digital Primary Sources ” (Thousand Oaks, CA: Adam Matthew).

103. “ Endangered Archives Programme ” (London: British Library).

104. “Endangered Archives Programme.”

105. Jane G. Landers, “ Slave Societies Digital Archive ,” 2003.

106. David Eltis and Philip Misevich, “ African Origins: Portal to Africans Liberated from Transatlantic Slave Vessels ,” 2009. Another related project is Henry Lovejoy, “ Liberated Africans ,” 2015.

107. Richard Anderson et al., “Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862,” History in Africa 40, no. 1 (2013): 165–191; Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade ; David Eltis, “The Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers, 1650–1865: Dimensions and Implications,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World , ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 17–39 ; Philip Misevich, “The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the Nineteenth Century,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database , ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 155–175; G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, “The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana,” History in Africa 29 (2002): 365–379; and Ojo, “The Slave Ship Manuelita.”

108. Eltis et al., “Voyages.”

109. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Walter Hawthorne, “ Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network ,” 2012.

110. Lovejoy, “Liberated Africans.”

111. This database will be launched on the same website as “Voyages.” A description of it as well as its scholarly potential is available in Gregory E. O’Malley and Alex Borucki, “Patterns in the Intercolonial Slave Trade across the Americas before the Nineteenth Century,” Tempo 23, no. 2 (2017): 314–338.

112. Dean Rehberger and Walter Hawthorne, “ Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade ,” 2018.

113. Laurent Dubois, “ Confronting the Legacies of Slavery ,” New York Times , October 28, 2013, sec. Opinion.

114. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “ The Case for Reparations ,” The Atlantic , June 2014.

115. Ana Lúcia Araújo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) . Her previous publications include Ana Lúcia Araújo, Living History: Encountering the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2009); Ana Lúcia Araújo, Public Memory of Slavery Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010); Ana Lúcia Araújo, ed., Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Araújo, Public Memory of Slavery Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic .

116. Araújo, Reparations , 2.

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ENGL405: The American Renaissance

Essay on the slave narrative.

The slave narrative can broadly be defined as any first-person account of the  experience of being enslaved. Read this introductory essay on the slave narrative as a literary genre.

No experience of enslavement has been as fully recorded as that of African Americans in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite the large numbers of first-person accounts of slavery in the United States – hundreds from the early-nineteenth century (e.g. pamphlet-length documents and numerous book-length texts), significant numbers from the post-Civil War era, and thousands collected through the WPA during the Depression – these resources were commonly dismissed as merely abolitionist propaganda or skewed memories until the late-twentieth century. Over the past half century, however, the slave narrative in its various incarnations has helped reshape our understanding not just of slavery in the U. S. but of American culture and American literature more broadly. At the same time that these narratives are significant for the picture they paint of African-American life and culture (and American life and culture more broadly), they repeatedly emphasize the importance of the individual former slave and his or her struggles against a system that would deny his or her individuality as a human. For the purposes of this class, we will focus on what could be seen as the classic era of the slave narrative, the decades immediately preceding the Civil War when hundreds of such works were produced, including its most popular and most influential individual texts, all part of the larger anti-slavery movement intent on making Americans, especially white Northerners, recognize the true crime of slavery and the essential humanity of those enslaved.

The slave narrative can broadly be defined as any first-person account of the experience of being enslaved. Modern slave narratives, emerging from the transatlantic slave trade of Africans, first appeared in English in the late-eighteenth century with the development of a broad abolitionist movement in Britain. The first slave narratives tended to be short and often focused more on the writer's conversion to Christianity and acceptance of God's grace over the horrors experienced in slavery. The most prominent slave narrative of this period, Olaudah Equiano's The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), mirrors this tendency even as it begins to approximate the more focused abolitionism of later narratives. In his narrative, Equiano narrates being kidnapped from his home in Africa and taken to the new world, producing a picture of Africa as a kind of Edenic region being despoiled by European greed. Over the first half of his narrative, he focuses on his experience as a slave, as he serves during the Seven Years' War on board a British privateer, expecting to earn his freedom only to be sold to a new owner in the Caribbean. He escapes the worst treatment in the Caribbean by becoming a valuable sailor for his owner, eventually accumulating enough money to buy his freedom. Unlike in many later slave narratives, however, Equiano's acquisition of freedom does not become the culminating moment of his narrative, as the second half of the narrative continues, describing his adventures (including his participation in an attempt at exploring the North Pole) and his experiences of racism and dangers of being re-enslaved, foregrounding, in the end, his religious conversion and concluding with him making an economic argument for abolitionism. Equiano's narrative reveals the formal instability of the slave narrative at the time, as it draws on several disparate literary traditions, most notably the Protestant conversion narrative, the related captivity narrative, natural history and travel narratives, and picaresque adventure fictions such as Daniel De Foe's Robinson Crusoe .

Over the course of the first decades of the nineteenth century, numerous former slaves produced published accounts of their lives, often through the help of a white amanuensis, but frequently on their own. As anti-slavery sentiment began to become both more wide-spread and more radical in the 1830s, black and white activists began to seek out more first-hand accounts of slavery's cruelties. Accounts written by the former slaves themselves served an important second purpose, providing evidence of the intellectual capacity of African Americans and thus countering claims of their mental inferiority. These dual purposes came together most forcefully, famously, and influentially in Frederick Douglass's The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). Douglass had already established himself as a well-known abolitionist lecturer, and, in fact, he produced the narrative largely to counter claims that he had never been a slave. Much of the focus of the narrative, then, is on authenticating his life story, as he provides names and locales and, as often as possible, dates to corroborate his account. The work was immediately quite popular, with seven American and nine British editions appearing over the next five years, and more than 30,000 copies being sold. Douglass's Narrative helped to consolidate the slave narrative as a form, bringing together some of the key thematic and structural elements of earlier narratives into a more unified form, and it thus often serves as representative of the form as a whole. Douglass's Narrative begins with introductory letters from William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, two of the most prominent white abolitionists of the time. The letters attest to Douglass's truthfulness and to the fact that he wrote the narrative himself, at the same time providing readers with a template of the narrative's chief points. While many slave narratives, especially those published by the authors themselves, did not have such introductory frames, they were common to many of the more widely disseminated, longer works. This prefatory material authorized the text that followed, thus empowering the former slave to tell his or her story, but the apparent necessity of such authorization reinforced the former slave's dependence on white power structures and readership.

Like many slave narratives, Douglass's begins with a simple statement of the fact that he was born, an announcement of his existence as a human being. This standard opening of many slave narratives – "I was born" – announces the existence of the slave as a human. But in what follows, he emphasizes all the ways that the system of slavery attempted to deny that humanity and treat him like an animal, by keeping him ignorant of his birthdate, by separating him from his mother and his family, by leaving him naked and assessing his worth alongside that of farm animals. Douglass thus reinforces Garrison's overarching argument against slavery: slavery's chief crime lies in the fact that it "reduces those who by creation were crowned with glory and honor to a level with four-footed beasts". This point introduces the central rhetorical problematic of Douglass's and most other slave narratives, the need to demonstrate how slavery destroys the humanity of the slaves (and of the slave-owners) while contending for the slaves' fundamental humanity. Douglass, in other words, must at once show how the slaves have been dehumanized while simultaneously humanizing them in the eyes of his readers.

The production of the work itself by the former slave played a central role in this operation. Like many other slave narratives, Douglass's title reinforced that it was "written by himself". In a culture and society that prized literacy as one of the markers of intelligence and within an intellectual tradition that ranked non-literate, non-European cultures as fundamentally inferior, African-American literary production could provide strong evidence of black intelligence, thus rebutting pro-slavery arguments that Africans were intellectually incapable of freedom. That focus on literacy and on writing one's self into existence becomes a central theme of Douglass's and many other slave narratives. Douglass repeatedly recurs to the importance of literacy in his developing desire for freedom and in his actual escape from slavery. He recounts how Sophia Auld began to teach him the alphabet only to be warned by her husband that it was dangerous and worthless to do so, a warning that only spurred Douglass's desire. He then tells us how he used poor white boys in his neighborhood in Baltimore to teach him and how he found an old copy of the The Columbian Orator , a common primer of the time, that he used as his textbook. In describing the impact of the Orator on him, Douglass states that it "gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance". As such, he seems to suggest that literacy helps to consolidate an innate desire for freedom that slavery and enforced ignorance darkens but cannot destroy.

Foregrounding the importance of literacy, Douglass characterizes the slaves who remain illiterate as living in a darkened world where they have only an inkling of the fundamental wrongs they suffer. He furthers this depiction of how slaves are kept enslaved – but not happy – through his account of his time with the slave-breaker Covey. In this episode, Douglass emphasizes how a combination of work, discipline, mental and emotional manipulation, and violence breaks down even the most resistant slave: "I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!" Yet he also emphasizes his individual ability to rise above this dehumanization and to violently resist and re-establish his manhood and his humanity when he resists Covey and proclaims his refusal to be a "slave in fact" no matter how long he might remain a "slave in form". Despite all the deprivations of slavery, some innate human desire for freedom remains. It is in convincing his audience of that innate desire and of the importance of defending that desire that Douglass makes his strongest case to his audience.

As much as Douglass's Narrative provided a template later writers would follow, it cannot stand in for the wide-range of experiences former slaves would narrate and their often very different emphases on the slave experience. In particular, part of the success of Douglass's Narrative derived from its ability to reformulate the already standard American narrative of the self-made man. To an extent that many other slave narratives do not, Douglass emphasizes his own agency in overcoming the trials of slavery, his ability through sheer will and some luck to put himself in a position where he can escape to freedom. Such an emphasis is particularly lacking in slave narratives by women, in which the former slave's relationship to her family, especially her children, tends to be emphasized. For example, in what is now the best-known slave narrative by a woman, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), she foregrounds how familial connections both drive her desire for freedom and curtail her ability to achieve freedom. She also stresses her position as a woman, as the victim of sexual assault, directly addressing Northern white women to work on behalf of their black sisters who receive none of the protection they are supposedly guaranteed. In particular, she faces a different but parallel rhetorical position to Douglass. Like Douglass, she must make a case for her own humanity – and by extension the humanity of all slaves – while also emphasizing the dehumanizing nature of slavery. As Douglass describes how slavery emasculates male slaves, yet he is able to prove his own manhood, so Jacobs explains how slavery strips women of the kind of moral (sexual) protections that Victorian American society supposedly provided. For Jacobs, though, she feels compelled both to apologize for her sexual activity and to use it as evidence of slavery's immorality. While the turning point in Douglass's Narrative is his physical resistance to slavery in the form of Covey, Jacobs's describes how she attempts to escape the advances of her master by having a child with another white man, asking white readers not to judge her by the same standards as other women even as she evidences her place as a true woman through her devotion to her children.

In addition to the different position they take in respect to their audience, Jacobs also differs from Douglass in her emphasis on family and community. Jacobs finally attempts to evade her master – and to convince him to sell her children to their father or one of her relatives – by hiding, for seven years, in the attic of the house of her grandmother, a freed black woman. During this period of hiding, she highlights the torture of being disconnected from her children and her reliance on the support of her family and the broader slave community. While Douglass describes his commitment and intense feelings for his fellow slaves in his first attempt at escape and elaborates the significance of slave songs early in his narrative, his more individual-focused text de-emphasizes the slave community and slave culture in a way others do not. Given the incredible importance of those connections to African-American survival in slavery, it is important to recognize Douglass's relative lack of attention to those areas.

Douglass's Narrative may have been the most influential and popular work of its sort, but many others also found wide audiences, including that by William Wells Brown, another influential African-American abolitionist who would go on to publish the first African-American novel, Clotel (1853). Other popular slave narratives often featured sensational tales and escapes, such as Henry "Box" Brown's account of boxing himself up and shipping himself to the North; William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), in which the married couple narrates how Ellen passed as a white man with William as her slave in their escape (Wells Brown included a fictional version of this tale in Clotel ); and Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853), which describes how he, a free man in the North, was kidnapped in New York and taken South. Much of the popularity of these texts derived from increasing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, but recent scholars have begun exploring in more depth the ambivalent psychological, sometimes prurient interest readers may have taken in these texts. For example, slave narratives frequently pushed accepted boundaries in discussing sexual matters, straddling a line of accusing slavery of rendering the South a den of sexual iniquity while drawing readers in through hinting at sexual details largely kept out of respectable literature of the time. Similarly, these narratives' compelling stories of psychological and physical torture, emotional turmoil, and life-threatening escapes could potentially, for some readers at least, overwhelm their political thrust. Finally, many slave narratives made quite sentimental appeals to their readers, attempting to inculcate strong identifications with the slaves by accessing readers' own familial connections, emotional ties, and moral sense of right and wrong. At the same time, though, such emotional connections could become the end themselves, offering a kind of vicarious pleasure of identification and rendering slaves nothing but pitiable victims and thus potentially lessening their political effect.

These possibly ambivalent effects of the slave narrative carry over to some of the works influenced by them during the antebellum period, most notably Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52), and can be seen as one reason a number of African-American writers began exploring fictive literary forms in the 1850s. Stowe drew heavily on Josiah Henson's slave narrative in crafting her incredibly popular, groundbreaking work. As we will see, however, Stowe's interlacing of a form of racialism with her anti-slavery appeal and her overall characterization of the slaves as largely passive victims has, from its first appearance, been seen as problematic by black writers. For African-American authors writing in the wake of the Civil War, the slave narrative became a foundation to build on, a template of black life, and a model to escape from. For example, Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901), the most famous post-bellum slave narrative, stresses how far Washington – and the African-American people – has come since the end of slavery, in many ways attempting to erase slavery as an influence on black life. Even as it does so, however, Washington's text, as with many African-American fictional works of the era, continues the slave narrative's emphasis on describing and explaining African-American life and culture from a sociological and political framework. For many African-American writers of the twentieth-century, this emphasis seemed somewhat limiting, and slave experience in itself tended to remain in the background in African-American literature until late in the century, when a number of writers began writing what has been called the neo-slave narrative – fictional accounts of slave narrative that grew out of the reformulation of the history of slavery that emerged alongside the Civil Rights Movement. Among the most important works that fall into this genre are Margaret Walker's groundbreaking Jubilee (1966), award-winning works such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), and revisionary, experimental works such as Octavia Butler's time-travelling science-fiction novel Kindred (1979) and postmodern works such as Ismael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976) and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990).

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The transatlantic slave trade.

Necklace: Pendant

Figure: Seated Portuguese Male

Pipe: Rifle

Alexander Ives Bortolot Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

October 2003

From the seventeenth century on, slaves became the focus of trade between Europe and Africa. Europe’s conquest and colonization of North and South America and the Caribbean islands from the fifteenth century onward created an insatiable demand for African laborers, who were deemed more fit to work in the tropical conditions of the New World. The numbers of slaves imported across the Atlantic Ocean steadily increased, from approximately 5,000 slaves a year in the sixteenth century to over 100,000 slaves a year by the end of the eighteenth century.

Evolving political circumstances and trade alliances in Africa led to shifts in the geographic origins of slaves throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Slaves were generally the unfortunate victims of territorial expansion by imperialist African states or of raids led by predatory local strongmen, and various populations found themselves captured and sold as different regional powers came to prominence. Firearms, which were often exchanged for slaves, generally increased the level of fighting by lending military strength to previously marginal polities. A nineteenth-century tobacco pipe ( 1977.462.1 ) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Angola demonstrates the degree to which warfare, the slave trade, and elite arts were intertwined at this time. The pipe itself was the prerogative of wealthy and powerful individuals who could afford expensive imported tobacco, generally by trading slaves, while the rifle form makes clear how such slaves were acquired in the first place. Because of its deadly power, the rifle was added to the repertory of motifs drawn upon in many regional depictions of rulers and culture heroes as emblematic of power along with the leopard, elephant, and python.

The institution of slavery existed in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans and was widespread at the period of economic contact . Private land ownership was largely absent from precolonial African societies, and slaves were one of the few forms of wealth-producing property an individual could possess. Additionally, rulers often maintained corps of loyal, foreign-born slaves to guarantee their political security, and would encourage political centralization by appointing slaves from the imperial hinterlands to positions within the royal capital. Slaves were also exported across the desert to North Africa and to western Asia, Arabia, and India.

It would be impossible to argue, however, that transatlantic trade did not have a major effect upon the development and scale of slavery in Africa. As the demand for slaves increased with European colonial expansion in the New World, rising prices made the slave trade increasingly lucrative. African states eager to augment their treasuries in some instances even preyed upon their own peoples by manipulating their judicial systems, condemning individuals and their families to slavery in order to reap the rewards of their sale to European traders. Slave exports were responsible for the emergence of a number of large and powerful kingdoms that relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans. The Yoruba kingdom of Oyo on the Guinea coast, founded sometime before 1500, expanded rapidly in the eighteenth century as a result of this commerce. Its formidable army, aided by advanced iron technology , captured immense numbers of slaves that were profitably sold to traders. In the nineteenth century, the aggressive pursuit of slaves through warfare and raiding led to the ascent of the kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now the Republic of Benin, and prompted the emergence of the Chokwe chiefdoms from under the shadow of their Lunda overlords in present-day Angola and Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Asante kingdom on the Gold Coast of West Africa also became a major slave exporter in the eighteenth century.

Ultimately, the international slave trade had lasting effects upon the African cultural landscape. Areas that were hit hardest by endemic warfare and slave raids suffered from general population decline, and it is believed that the shortage of men in particular may have changed the structure of many societies by thrusting women into roles previously occupied by their husbands and brothers. Additionally, some scholars have argued that images stemming from this era of constant violence and banditry have survived to the present day in the form of metaphysical fears and beliefs concerning witchcraft. In many cultures of West and Central Africa, witches are thought to kidnap solitary individuals to enslave or consume them. Finally, the increased exchange with Europeans and the fabulous wealth it brought enabled many states to cultivate sophisticated artistic traditions employing expensive and luxurious materials. From the fine silver- and goldwork of Dahomey and the Asante court to the virtuoso wood carving of the Chokwe chiefdoms, these treasures are a vivid testimony of this turbulent period in African history.

Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “The Transatlantic Slave Trade.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/slav/hd_slav.htm (October 2003)

Further Reading

Hogendorn, Jan, and Marion Johnson. The Shell Money of the Slave Trade . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Additional Essays by Alexander Ives Bortolot

• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Portraits of African Leadership: Living Rulers .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Portraits of African Leadership: Memorials .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Portraits of African Leadership: Royal Ancestors .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Trade Relations among European and African Nations .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Ways of Recording African History .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Art of the Asante Kingdom .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Asante Royal Funerary Arts .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Asante Textile Arts .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Gold in Asante Courtly Arts .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ The Bamana Ségou State .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Women Leaders in African History: Ana Nzinga, Queen of Ndongo .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Women Leaders in African History: Dona Beatriz, Kongo Prophet .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Exchange of Art and Ideas: The Benin, Owo, and Ijebu Kingdoms .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Women Leaders in African History: Idia, First Queen Mother of Benin .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of Madagascar: Malagasy Funerary Arts .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of Madagascar: Malagasy Textile Arts .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of Madagascar: Maroserana and Merina .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of the Savanna: The Kuba Kingdom .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of the Savanna: The Luba and Lunda Empires .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Women Leaders in African History, 17th–19th Century .” (October 2003)
• Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Portraits of African Leadership .” (October 2003)

Related Essays

• The Manila Galleon Trade (1565–1815)
• Portraits of African Leadership
• Religion and Culture in North America, 1600–1700
• Trade Relations among European and African Nations
• Visual Culture of the Atlantic World
• Women Leaders in African History, 17th–19th Century
• African Christianity in Kongo
• The Age of Iron in West Africa
• American Federal-Era Period Rooms
• Art of the Asante Kingdom
• George Washington: Man, Myth, Monument
• Gold in Asante Courtly Arts
• Kingdoms of the Savanna: The Luba and Lunda Empires
• Kongo Ivories
• The New York Dutch Room
• The Portuguese in Africa, 1415–1600
• Ways of Recording African History
• Women Leaders in African History: Ana Nzinga, Queen of Ndongo

List of Rulers

• Presidents of the United States of America
• Arabian Peninsula, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Central Africa, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Central America and the Caribbean, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Eastern and Southern Africa, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Guinea Coast, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Guinea Coast, 1800–1900 A.D.
• Maya Area, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Mexico and Central America, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Mexico, 1400–1600 A.D.
• South Asia, 1600–1800 A.D.
• The United States, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Western and Central Sudan, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Western and Central Sudan, 1800–1900 A.D.
• Western North Africa (The Maghrib), 1600–1800 A.D.
• Arabian Peninsula
• The Caribbean
• Central Africa
• Central America
• Guinea Coast
• North Africa
• North America
• South America

An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species

• Thomas Clarkson (author)

The first of many anti-slavery tracts written by the Quaker Thomas Clarkson. This one began as a prize-winning Latin dissertation submitted to Cambridge University in 1785. In it he examines the history of slavery, the slave trade, and the nature of slavery in the European colonies.

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An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, which was Honoured with the First Prize, in the University of Cambridge, for the Year 1785, with Additions (London: J. Phillips, 1786).

The text is in the public domain.

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Slavery and the Civil War Essay

Theme essays. diversity, extra credit option. reconstruction, works cited.

During the period of 1820-1860, the life of white and black people in the South depended on developing the Institute of slavery which shaped not only social but also economic life of the region. The Institute of slavery was primarily for the Southern states, and this feature helped to distinguish the South from the other regions of the USA.

Slavery played the key role in shaping the economic and social life of the South because it influenced the trade and economic relations in the region as well as the social and class structure representing slave owners, white farmers without slaves, and slaves as the main labor force in the region.

The development of the South during the period of 1820-1860 was based on growing cotton intensively. To guarantee the enormous exports of cotton, it was necessary to rely on slaves as the main cheap or almost free workforce. The farmers of the South grew different crops, but the economic success was associated with the farms of those planters who lived in the regions with fertile soil and focused on growing cotton basing on slavery.

Thus, the prosperity of this or that white farmer and planter depended on using slaves in his farm or plantation. Slaves working for planters took the lowest social positions as well as free slaves living in cities whose economic situation was also problematic. The white population of the South was divided into slave owners and yeoman farmers who had no slaves.

Thus, having no opportunities to use the advantages of slavery, yeoman farmers relied on their families’ powers, and they were poorer in comparison with planters (Picture 1). However, not all the planters were equally successful in their economic situation. Many planters owned only a few slaves, and they also had to work at their plantations or perform definite duties.

Slaves were also different in their status because of the functions performed. From this point, the social stratification was necessary not only for dividing the Southern population into black slaves and white owners but also to demonstrate the differences within these two main classes (Davidson et al.).

As a result, different social classes had various cultures. It is important to note that slaves were more common features in spite of their status in families, and they were united regarding the culture which was reflected in their religion, vision, and songs. The difference in the social status of the white population was more obvious, and the single common feature was the prejudice and discrimination against slaves.

Picture 1. Yeoman Farmer’s House

The Civil War became the real challenge for the USA because it changed all the structures and institutions of the country reforming the aspects of the political, economic, and social life. Furthermore, the Civil War brought significant losses and sufferings for both the representatives of the Northern and Southern armies.

It is important to note that the situation of the Union in the war was more advantageous in comparison with the position of the Confederacy during the prolonged period of the war actions.

As a result, the South suffered from more significant economic and social changes as well as from extreme losses in the war in comparison with the North’s costs. Thus, the main impact of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery which changed the economic and social structures of the South and contributed to shifting the focus on the role of federal government.

The Civil War resulted in abolishing slavery and preserving the political unity of the country. Nevertheless, these positive outcomes were achieved at the expense of significant losses in the number of population and in promoting more sufferings for ordinary people. A lot of the Confederacy’s soldiers died at the battlefields, suffering from extreme wounds and the lack of food because of the problems with weapon and food provision.

During the war, the Union focused on abolishing slaves who were proclaimed free. Thus, former slaves from the Southern states were inclined to find jobs in the North or join the Union army.

As a result, the army of the Confederacy also began to suffer from the lack of forces (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the situation was problematic off the battlefield because all the issues of food provision and work at plantations and farms challenged women living in the Southern states.

The forces of the Union army were more balanced, and their losses were less significant than in the Southern states. Furthermore, the end of the war did not change the structure of the social life in the North significantly. The impact of the war was more important for the Southerners who had to build their economic and social life without references to slavery.

The next important change was the alternations in the social role of women. Many women had to work at farms in the South and to perform as nurses in the North (Picture 2). The vision of the women’s role in the society was changed in a way.

However, in spite of the fact that the population of the South had to rebuild the social structure and adapt to the new social and economic realities, the whole economic situation was changed for better with references to intensifying the international trade. Furthermore, the abolishment of slavery was oriented to the social and democratic progress in the country.

Picture 2. “Our Women and the War”. Harper’s Weekly, 1862

Diversity is one of the main characteristic features of the American nation from the early periods of its formation. The American nation cannot be discussed as a stable one because the formation of the nation depends on the active migration processes intensifying the general diversity. As a result, the American nation is characterized by the richness of cultures, values, and lifestyles.

This richness is also typical for the early period of the American history when the country’s population was diverse in relation to ethnicity, cultures, religion, and social status. From this point, diversity directly shaped the American nation because the country’s population never was identical.

The Americans respected diversity if the question was associated with the problem of first migrations and the Americans’ difference from the English population. To win independence, it was necessary to admit the difference from the English people, but diversity was also the trigger for conflicts between the Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen as well as Indian tribes.

The ethic diversity was not respected by the first Americans. The further importations of slaves to America worsened the situation, and ethnic diversity increased, involving cultural and social diversity.

Diversity was respected only with references to the negative consequences of slave importation. Thus, the Southerners focused on using black slaves for development of their plantations (Davidson et al.). From this point, white planers concentrated on the difference of blacks and used it for discrimination.

Furthermore, slavery also provoked the cultural and lifestyle diversity between the South and the North of the country which resulted in the Civil War because of impossibility to share different values typical for the Southerners and Northerners. Moreover, the diversity in lifestyles of the Southerners was deeper because it depended on the fact of having or not slaves.

Great religious diversity was also typical for the nation. White population followed different branches of Christianity relating to their roots, and black people developed their own religious movements contributing to diversifying the religious life of the Americans (Davidson et al.).

Thus, the aspects of diversity are reflected in each sphere of the first Americans’ life with references to differences in ethnicities, followed religions, cultures, values, lifestyles, and social patterns. This diversity also provoked a lot of conflicts in the history of the nation.

The role of women in the American society changed depending on the most important political and social changes. The periods of reforms and transformations also promoted the changes in the social positions of women. The most notable changes are typical for the period of the Jacksonian era and for the Civil War period.

The changes in the role of women are closely connected with the development of women’s movements during the 1850s and with the focus on women’s powers off the battlefield during the Civil War period.

During the Jacksonian era, women began to play significant roles in the religious and social life of the country. Having rather limited rights, women could realize their potentials only in relation to families and church work. That is why, many women paid much attention to their church duties and responsibilities.

Later, the church work was expanded, and women began to organize special religious groups in order to contribute to reforming definite aspects of the Church’s progress. Women also were the main members of the prayer meetings, and much attention was drawn to the charity activities and assistance to hospitals (Davidson et al.).

Women also played the significant role in the development of revivalism as the characteristic feature of the period. Moreover, the active church work and the focus on forming organizations was the first step to the progress of the women’s rights movements.

It is important to note that the participation of women in the social life was rather limited during a long period of time that is why membership and belonging to different church organizations as well as development of women’s rights movements contributed to increasing the role of women within the society. Proclaiming the necessity of abolishment, socially active women also concentrated on the idea of suffrage which was achieved later.

The period of the 1850s is closely connected with the growth of the women’s rights movements because it was the period of stating to the democratic rights and freedoms within the society (Davidson et al.). The next important event is the Civil War. The war influenced the position of the Southern white and black women significantly, revealing their powers and ability to overcome a lot of challenges.

The end of the Civil War provided women with the opportunity to achieve all the proclaimed ideals of the women’s rights movements along with changing the position of male and female slaves in the American society.

The development of the American nation is based on pursuing certain ideals and following definite values. The main values which are greatly important for the Americans are associated with the notions which had the significant meaning during the periods of migration and creating the independent state. The two main values are opportunity and equality.

These values are also fixed in the Constitution of the country in order to emphasize their extreme meaning for the whole nation.

Opportunity and equality are the values which are shaped with references to the economic and social ideals because all the Americans are equal, and each American should have the opportunity to achieve the individual goal. Nevertheless, in spite of the proclaimed ideals, the above-mentioned values were discussed during a long period of time only with references to the white population of the country.

The other values typical for the Americans are also based not on the religious, moral or cultural ideals but on the social aspects. During the Jacksonian era, the Americans focused on such values as the democratic society. Following the ideals of rights and freedoms, the American population intended to realize them completely within the developed democratic society (Davidson et al.).

Moreover, these ideals were correlated with such values as equality and opportunity. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that for many Americans the notions of democratic society, opportunity, and equality were directly connected with the economic growth. That is why, during long periods of time Americans concentrated on achieving freedoms along with pursuing the economic prosperity.

Thus, it is possible to determine such key values which regulate the social attitudes and inclinations of the Americans as equality and opportunity, freedoms and rights. In spite of the fact the USA was the country with the determined role of religion in the society, moral and religious aspects were not proclaimed as the basic values of the nation because of the prolonged focus of the Americans on their independence and prosperity.

From this point, opportunity, equality, freedoms, and rights are discussed as more significant values for the developed nation than the religious principles. The creation of the state independent from the influence of the British Empire resulted in determining the associated values and ideals which were pursued by the Americans during prolonged periods of the nation’s development.

The period of Reconstruction was oriented to adapting African Americans to the realities of the free social life and to rebuilding the economic structure of the South. The end of the Civil War guaranteed the abolishment of slavery, but the question of black people’s equality to the whites was rather controversial.

That is why, the period of Reconstruction was rather complex and had two opposite outcomes for the African Americans’ further life in the society and for the general economic progress of the states. Reconstruction was successful in providing such opportunities for African Americans as education and a choice to live in any region or to select the employer.

However, Reconstruction can also be discussed as a failure because the issues of racism were not overcome during the period, and the era of slavery was changed with the era of strict social segregation leading to significant discrimination of black people.

The positive changes in the life of African Americans after the Civil War were connected with receiving more opportunities for the social progress. Thus, many public schools were opened for the black population in order to increase the level of literacy (Picture 3). Furthermore, the impossibility to support the Southerners’ plantations without the free work of slaves led to changing the economic focus.

Thus, industrialization of the region could contribute to creating more workplaces for African Americans (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the racial and social equality should also be supported with references to providing more political rights for African Americans.

Reconstruction was the period of observing many black politicians at the American political arena. The question of blacks’ suffrage became one of the most discussed issues. From this point, during the period of Reconstruction African Americans did first steps on the path of equality.

Nevertheless, Reconstruction was also a great failure. The South remained unchanged in relation to the social relations between the whites and blacks. After the Civil War, segregation was intensified. The economic and social pressure as well as discrimination against the blacks was based on the developed concept of racism (Davidson et al.).

The Southerners preserved the prejudiced attitude toward the blacks, and prejudice and discrimination became the main challenge for African Americans in all the spheres of the life.

In spite of definite successes of Reconstruction, African Americans suffered from the results of segregation and discrimination, and they were prevented from changing their economic and social status.

Picture 3. Public Schools

Davidson, James, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff. US: A Narrative History . USA: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.

• Slavery in the Southern Colonies
• American Reconstruction Period
• American History: Reconstruction, 1865 -1877
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American Slavery Documents

Legal and personal documents related to the institution of slavery in the United States from 1757-1860s. More »

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About the Digital Collection

The American Slavery Documents Collection contains an assortment of legal and personal documents related to slavery in the United States. Nearly all of the documents are singular and otherwise unrelated to the other, but as a composite, the collection brings to light the details of the lives and deaths of free and enslaved African Americans during the Antebellum and early Reconstruction Eras. The type of materials include bills of sale, manumission papers, emancipation notes, bonds, auction notices and other assorted items. The documents represent nearly all of the states of the American south including: North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, but a few documents are from northern states like New York and New Jersey.

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Items in This Digital Collection (214)

1. Bill of sale for Bett, an enslaved girl, from Lawrence Lancaster to Thomas Cook, 1757 March 18 :autograph manuscript signed.

2. Bill of sale for Leander, an enslaved person, from N.C. Trowbridge to E.H. Simmons, 1851 April 17 :autograph manuscript signed.

3. Draft bill of sale, 1787 :autograph manuscript.

4. Bill of sale for Bett, an enslaved girl, from Absalom Lancaster to Thomas Cook, 1761 May 15? :manuscript copy.

5. Bill of sale for Porter, an enslaved man, from Archibald Cunison to Thomas Cook, 1771 April 14 :autograph manuscript signed.

6. Bill of sale for Feby, Jammie, and Jacob, enslaved persons, from Zachariah Flurry to James Brown and Ely Kershaw, 1779 February 11 :manuscript signed.

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Source Collection

This digital collection comprises selected materials from the following archival collection at David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library:

American slavery documents collection 1757-1878 and undated

Collection #RL.11093 | 2.0 Linear Feet (5 boxes and 5 oversize folders)

ABSTRACT Collection of manuscript items relating to American slavery assembled over a number of decades by the staff of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. Collection contains items documenting the sales, escapes, and emancipations of enslaved people from colonial times through the Civil War, and to a lesser extent, materials relating to slavery in the United States dating from the post-emancipation period.

Collection Guide »

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Elizabeth Bohls is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770–1833 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She co-edited the anthology Travel Writing 1700–1830 (Oxford World’s Classics) with Ian Duncan and has published numerous articles and chapters on the novel, aesthetics, travel writing, Caribbean visual culture, and Black Atlantic literature and culture.

• Published: 22 May 2024
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The national debate over slavery and the slave trade spanned the Romantic era, fought in nonfiction genres: pamphlets, periodical essays, autobiographical narratives, travel writing, and colonial history. Antislavery polemics projected an imaginary geography, contrasting a pastoral Africa with depraved sugar colonies; some presented first-hand colonial experience. Slavery’s defenders, conversely, painted Africa as a hellhole and the slave trade as ‘rescue’. Planter-historian Bryan Edwards interviewed captives on his plantation, seeking evidence of African savagery, and narrated the Haitian Revolution as a cautionary tale. Politicized travel writing supported each side, though some, like Mungo Park’s African travels, took no overt stance. Black autobiographers supported antislavery activism, offering first-hand experience of the Middle Passage and enslaved life. The push to abolish the slave trade succeeded in 1807; a second wave of activism, starting in 1823, generated more prose polemics and helped to achieve British emancipation in 1833.

Colonial slavery, practised by the English since the founding of their New World colonies in the early 1600s, steadily expanded. By around 1770 two and a half million enslaved people were at work ‘in the fields, mills, mines, workshops and households of the New World’. 1 The national political debate over slavery and the slave trade spanned the Romantic era, heating up in the 1780s in the lead-up to the founding of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) in 1787, and culminating with Parliament’s vote to emancipate enslaved Britons in 1833. Much ink was spilled on the topic in various genres of nonfiction prose, including straightforward polemic in pamphlets and periodical essays; personal testimony in autobiographical narratives by enslaved or formerly enslaved people; travel writing about the West Indies and Africa, often overtly or covertly enlisted in the political fray; and colonial history, which doubled as pro-slavery propaganda. I will take a roughly chronological approach, beginning with the formation of the abolitionist movement in the 1780s. The movement had two discrete phases: the push to abolish the slave trade, a goal achieved in 1807; and the later movement for emancipation, which gathered steam in the 1820s and succeeded in 1833, in the wake of parliamentary reform.

England got involved in the slave trade before planting its own colonies when Captain John Hawkins shipped the first cargo of enslaved Africans in 1560. When England colonized North America and the Caribbean, the Spanish were already using enslaved African labour there. The English followed suit, though numbers were relatively small until sugar cultivation took off in the 1640s. The use of enslaved labour then expanded rapidly with growing opportunities for profit from sugar and other tropical crops. Until the 1770s, slavery was widely accepted among the British. Clergy, Quakers, and others raised isolated voices against it, but in general, slavery was taken for granted, though some of the values underpinning the anti-slavery movement were already in place in British political culture. British liberty—the image of the nation as ‘distinctively free’—took root in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 2 Britons contrasted themselves with their old frenemies, the French, and other European nations they viewed as enslaved to absolute monarchy and Catholic superstition. 3

The onset of imperial crisis in North America in the 1760s coincided with the first anti-slavery activism by Granville Sharp, who brought suit on behalf of James Somerset, the enslaved man whose owner abused him and cast him off, then tried to reclaim his human property to ship him back to the Caribbean. Lord Mansfield’s landmark 1772 decision, ‘a Delphic verdict’, prohibited Somerset’s owner from taking him out of the country, but did not, as many thought, make slavery illegal in England. The American Revolution made the ‘problem of slavery … a talking point in the transatlantic debate’. Britons targeted American hypocrisy: ‘yelps for liberty’, as Samuel Johnson scornfully put it, from the ‘drivers of Negroes’. Pre-Revolutionary Americans worried about their public image. Liberty became an issue when colonial rebels made it one, exposing themselves to accusations of bad faith. The ‘injustice of colonial slavery became the subject of comment in British political discourse for the first time … through the much wider debate on the rights of the thirteen colonies’. 4

The 1760s and 1770s saw writings on slavery by precursors of Romantic-era debates, including Sharp and the Pennsylvania Quaker Anthony Benezet, with whom Sharp corresponded, as well as the Methodist clergyman John Wesley. Benezet, a Huguenot immigrant, began his initially isolated anti-slavery activism as early as the 1730s. In the 1770s he sent Sharp his book, Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771), compiled from first-hand accounts of Africa and the slave trade. It was reprinted in London in 1772 and again in 1788. Benezet contributed a ‘global worldview’: ‘a colonial understanding of the interconnectedness of trade and the complex relationship between Great Britain, her colonies, and Africa’. 5 Benezet’s writings launched an imaginary geography—a politics of place—on which abolitionist writers would build. This was ‘a spatiotemporal schema in which geography and history intersect: Britain and Africa occupy different points on the same historical track of progress toward higher civilization’. 6 Benezet’s Africa is a pastoral society where industrious, moral people live in peace, disturbed only by European slave traders.

This vision was taken up by Thomas Clarkson, indefatigable activist and founding member of SEAST, in his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1788). Clarkson built on James Ramsay’s influential Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784). Ramsay had been a clergyman on the Caribbean island of St Christopher (St Kitts) and drew on first-hand experience of colonial slavery. His book is eclectic: ‘He writes about the history of slavery in the style of an historian, about the economics of slavery in the style of the new political economists, about the theology of slavery in the style of an Anglican clergyman, and about the humanity of slavery in the style of a sentimental novelist’. Much of the Essay details the daily lives of enslaved people on plantations, letting facts speak for themselves. Ramsay mobilizes sentimental rhetoric, attacking the racism of Hume and others. Sentimental parables debunk racial stereotypes, depicting enslaved Africans with an ‘elevation of sentiment’ equal to a European’s. 7

Ramsay’s book drew heated responses from pro-slavery writers, including James Tobin’s Cursory Remarks upon the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay (1785), critiqued in turn by Ottobah Cugoano in Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787). Tobin, like many pro-slavery writers, was concerned that the ‘candid, and judicious part of mankind’ not think him ‘among the advocates of slavery; as I most sincerely join Mr. Ramsay, and every other man of sensibility, in hoping, the blessings of freedom will in due time, be equally diffused over the face of the globe’. 8 This anxiousness not to offend bespeaks the hegemonic power of sentiment by the 1780s. Tobin diverts attention from enslaved Africans to sufferers closer to home—the English labouring classes, whom pro-slavery advocates presented as worse off than well-cared-for enslaved workers in the colonies.

Clarkson’s Essay gives a dramatized rendering of coastal Africa in the slave trade era, which influenced numerous representations of Africa in the 1780s and 1790s. 9 Building on Benezet, Clarkson imagines a ‘melancholy African’ watching a coffle of enslaved people on their way to the coast, torn from their happy lives. The African tells how they came to be enslaved: some as prisoners of war, motivated by leaders’ greed to sell to Europeans, others sold by their prince for ‘spiritous liquors’—and describes their perilous journey. In the ‘kidnapped people’, Clarkson writes, ‘we … thought we beheld in one of them a father, in another a husband, and in another a son, each … forced from his various and tender connections, and without even the opportunity of bidding them adieu’. 10

Clarkson also introduces an enduring theme of the slavery debate. Each side claimed ‘real’ Christianity; a stock defence of slavery asserted a biblical sanction for servitude. 11 The ‘intelligent’ African asks rhetorically, ‘What is Christianity , but a system of murder and oppression?’ Clarkson replies,

[T]he people against whom you so justly declaim, are not Christians . They are infidels . They are monsters . They are out of the common course of nature. Their countrymen at home are generous and brave. They support the sick, the lame, and the blind. They fly to the succour of the distressed. They have noble and stately buildings for the sole purpose of benevolence. They are in short, of all nations the most remarkable for humanity and justice. 12

The imaginary geography projected by Clarkson’s Essay and other abolitionist writings strove to separate British enslavers in Africa and the colonies from metropolitan British readers—to obscure the connection between colony and metropole, with the constant circulation of resources and people that sustained it. A rhetoric dependent on the idea of British liberty needed to present the slave trade and slavery as aberrations, and to distance them, spatially as well as morally, from British soil. Benezet poses a paradox: ‘It is a matter of astonishment how a people, who as a nation, are looked upon as generous and humane, and so much value themselves for their uncommon sense of the benefit of liberty, can live in the practice of such extreme oppression and inhumanity, without feeling the inconsistency of such conduct, and feeling great remorse.’ 13 Denying slavery’s integration into the mainstream of British life would make it easier for metropolitan Britons to renounce it and feel good about themselves for doing so.

The abolitionists were re-drawing a map of the Atlantic most fully elaborated in Edward Long’s influential History of Jamaica (1774). For defenders of slavery, Britain represented the height of civilization, Africa its barbaric opposite, and the Caribbean colonies the triumphant spread of European civilization in the New World. The pro-slavery image of Africa was supported by another important prose genre: travel narrative. Already a robust sector of the print market, travel writing expanded rapidly during the Romantic era. 14 British travel to Africa was primarily by those involved in the slave trade, though this changed near the end of the eighteenth century. As the slavery debate heated up, its defenders used travellers’ first-hand experience to portray Africa as a place from which it was humane to rescue people, even by enslaving them. In A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone (1788), John Matthews, a Royal Navy officer serving as an agent for the African Company of Merchants, gives a matter-of-fact account of the topography, natural history, and inhabitants of this slave-trading area. Not until late in the book does Matthews launch a full-scale polemic: since ‘slavery can never be abolished in a country like Africa’, and prisoners would be slaughtered unless bought by Europeans, enslavement in British colonies ‘may be considered as the only effectual relief that, under the present circumstances of Africa, can be administered’. 15

Less low key was Robert Norris’s Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahadee, King of Dahomy (1789). The former slave trader presents the West African kingdom of Dahomey as ‘an aggressively militaristic and despotic state, practicing human sacrifice on a large scale’, using graphic images of the king’s palace roof thatched with enemies’ heads and his bedroom carpeted with their skulls, which he claimed to have seen on a journey to the king’s court in 1772. 16 Enslavement as rescue takes a less lurid form in Bryan Edwards’s History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) . Edwards, a Jamaica planter and member of Parliament, was a prominent plantocracy spokesman. As such he is pragmatic, aware that humanitarian sympathy for the enslaved had put slaveholders on the defensive. Embedded in an impressive intellectual edifice, including natural as well as political and economic history, Edwards’s defence of slavery takes the ameliorationist stance that was broadly shared on both sides of the debate by the 1790s. ‘[N]othing is more certain than that the Slave Trade may be very wicked, and the planters in general very innocent’, he proclaims, implying that planters and the British public actually share the same interests and could agree on a solution to the problem of slavery, if not for misinformation spread by extremists. 17 On Edwards’s map of the Atlantic, Britain and its Caribbean colonies form an axis of civility.

Edwards also claims privileged access to ‘the manners and dispositions of the native Africans’—gained on his Jamaica plantations from newly imported enslaved people. He has interviewed ‘many young people, from different parts of Africa, concerning the circumstances of their captivity and sale’. The majority admitted to having been slaves in Africa. These ‘are … removed to a situation infinitely more desirable, even in its worst state, than that of the best and most favoured slaves in their native country’. 18 He cites funeral sacrifices and brings up cannibalism, by 1793 a well-worn trope of African barbarity. Edwards influenced other writers, including the novelist Maria Edgeworth, who names the good planter in her 1804 story ‘The Grateful Negro’ Mr Edwards. Like Long’s History , but in a milder tone, Edwards’s History marshals first-hand experience and the prestige of the history genre to defend the institution of slavery and the honour of the planter elite.

Travel writing entered the abolition debate in other ways as well. A Swedish abolitionist living in London, Carl Wadstrom, published Observations on the Slave Trade and a Description of Some Part of the Coast of Guinea in 1789, based on his visit to west Africa with an expedition sponsored by the king of Sweden. Wadstrom followed the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), who believed the ‘human form divine’ could be found in the African interior. (Swedenborg also influenced the poet William Blake.) 19 A passionate abolitionist, excoriating ‘detestable markets for human flesh’ and the ‘corrupted system of commerce’ they fed, Wadstrom published the two-volume Essay on Colonization in 1794–1795. 20 With Henry Smeathman and Granville Sharp, he laid the foundation for the colony of Sierra Leone. This project had roots in the arrival in Britain after the American war of thousands of North American Black people, many of whom had gained their freedom by joining the British army. The slave trade, the abolitionist movement, and the fates of many formerly enslaved Britons intersected in the Sierra Leone experiment. Sharp and others formed a ‘Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor’ and set out to found a self-governing ‘Province of Freedom’ on the African coast in 1786. Troubled from the first, the project was plagued by peculation—Olaudah Equiano, hired as commissary, was fired as a whistle-blower—as well as bad luck at sea and disputes with local leaders. Ottobah Cugoano identified the main problem, writing sceptically, ‘[C]an it be readily conceived that government would establish a free colony … nearly on the spot, [where] it supports its forts and garrisons, to ensnare, merchandize, and to carry others into captivity and slavery?’ 21 Of the original 411 settlers, nearly a hundred died in the wet season of 1787. Over the next two years, the rest joined the slave trade or worked in slave factories; some were sold into slavery themselves. 22

In 1791, the Sierra Leone Company hired Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon formerly employed in the slave trade, to try to get the colony back on its feet. Falconbridge had contributed to the abolitionist movement with his 1788 Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa . He and his wife, Anna Maria, returned to England in 1792 and then sailed again for Africa. In 1794 Anna Maria published her own book, Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone During the Years 1791–1792–1793. She had meanwhile been widowed and remarried; Alexander, an abusive alcoholic, died during their second African sojourn. Anna Maria promptly married another Sierra Leone Company employee, the American Isaac Du Bois. By the end of her stay she had changed her views on the slave trade, which she initially viewed ‘with abhorrence’. Sailing back to England via Jamaica on a slave ship, she proclaims herself ‘agreeably disappointed’: ‘I believe [the enslaved people] experienced the utmost kindness and care, and after a few days, when they had recovered from sea sickness, I never saw more signs of content and satisfaction’. She concludes: ‘so widely opposite are my ideas of the trade from what they were, that I now think it in no shape objectionable either to morality or religion, but … consistent with both, while neither are to be found in unhappy Africa’. 23

Black writers contributed to the debate, offering first-hand experience of another kind. Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, involuntary travellers and committed abolitionists, combined autobiography with polemic in different proportions. Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787) devotes only about seven of its 154 pages to the author’s kidnapping as a boy in his African home of ‘Agimaque’, his journey to the coast, sale to white slave traders, imprisonment in the fort, transfer to the ship, and ‘horrid brutal slavery’ in Grenada. Of the Middle Passage itself he says almost nothing, except to note a thwarted mutiny while the ship was at anchor on the African coast: ‘death was more preferable than life, and a plan was concerted amongst us, that we might burn and blow up the ship, and to perish all together in the flames; but we were betrayed by one of our own countrywomen’. Other than this, Cugoano writes, ‘it would be needless to give a description of all the horrible scenes which we saw, and the base treatment which we met with in this dreadful captive situation, as the similar cases of thousands, which suffer by this infernal traffic, are well known’. The rest of the book is a jeremiad against not only the slave trade, but slavery itself—a highly unusual position at this early stage of the movement when mainstream abolitionists had made the tactical decision to limit their agitation to slave trade abolition for the time being. Cugoano’s critique takes in colonialism more broadly, calling out the ‘barbarous inhuman Europeans’, and proclaiming ‘that all their foreign settlements and colonies were founded on murders and devastations’. 24 More radical and far less successful than his friend Equiano, Cugoano is an under-appreciated pioneer among Black British writers.

Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) is better known, as are Vincent Carretta’s 1999 discoveries casting doubt on the authenticity of his account of his African childhood, kidnapping, and Middle Passage. 25 A first-person account was obviously valuable to the abolitionist movement in 1789. 26 Critics note the Narrative ’s hybrid genre, with elements of spiritual autobiography, political polemic, and, importantly, travel writing. Equiano’s choice to include so much about his travels after his manumission (halfway through the book) deploys the authority gained through travel for his political aims. To track his life at sea—from human commodity, to enslaved Navy seaman in wartime, to the free ‘sable captain’ who pilots a vessel to port and saves its cargo when the captain falls ill—is to track his painstaking rhetorical construction, against the odds, of his personhood. 27 George Boulukos analyses Equiano’s deft navigation of the eighteenth-century debate on Africa, deploying the imaginary geography mapped by white abolitionists. 28 Equiano’s Africa is pastoral, but eminently civilized, in some ways more so than Europe. The Interesting Narrative portrays Britain’s Caribbean colonies as a degenerate zone where cruel colonists, unrestrained by law or morality and fundamentally different from Britons at home, buy, sell, and abuse Africans like the young Equiano. Distancing metropolitan readers from the practitioners of colonial slavery is central to Equiano’s abolitionist politics of place. The Interesting Narrative sold very well—nine editions in the author’s lifetime (he died in 1797).

The year the Interesting Narrative was published saw the start of the French Revolution, which would transform Europe and the Caribbean and launch more than two decades of war. The 1791 uprising by the enslaved population of French St Domingue (present-day Haiti) sent shock waves through the British colonies. Bryan Edwards travelled to St Domingue in late 1791 with a delegation from Jamaica. His Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo (1797) describes what he saw in a tone geared to the reactionary British political climate of the mid-1790s. Similarities to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) include purple prose and graphic depictions of atrocities, such as the probably apocryphal white infant impaled on a stake, carried by the insurgents as a ‘ standard ’. Edwards’s portrayal of the rebels follows pro-slavery imaginary geography, comparing Africans to wild animals: ‘Upwards of one hundred thousand savage people, habituated to the barbarities of Africa … fall upon the peaceful and unsuspicious planters, like so many famished tygers thirsting for human blood’. 29 The violence of colonial slavery, of course, appears nowhere in his book.

A different representation of Haiti was published in 1805 by the Anglo-Irish officer Marcus Rainsford, who spent several months there in 1797–1798. With an extensively researched history of the colony (among its sources Edwards’s Survey ), Rainsford’s Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti offers first-hand observation of Haitian society as it had evolved since France proclaimed emancipation in 1794. Rainsford posed as an American to avoid Haitians’ well-grounded suspicions of the British, who invaded the island in 1794 and occupied parts of it until 1798. He went behind enemy lines to Cap Français, where he claims to have played billiards with Toussaint L’Ouverture. At dinner in the Hotel de la Republique the Irishman experiences ‘a real system of equality’: ‘officers and privates, the colonel and the drummer, at the same table indiscriminately’. He mingles with Haitians of all ranks and enjoys their hospitality, from the ‘superior order’ to the ‘negro hut’; sees a performance of Molière ‘that would not have disgraced the first theatre in Europe’; and visits ‘the cottage of a black laborer’ with three wives and thirteen children who keeps a ‘volume of Volney’s Travels’ on a ‘neat shelf’. 30 Rainsford’s Introduction pushes against the imaginary geography of planter-historians like Edwards to assert that civilization and barbarism are neither geographically locatable nor race based. In this optimistic view, the new nation of Haiti is poised to fulfil the promise of the Age of Revolution. Sadly, as we know, it did not happen that way.

Other 1790s travel writers reporting on slavery include the Scottish officer John Gabriel Stedman, who served the Dutch colonial government of Surinam in the 1770s, chasing insurgent maroons through the rain forest. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) includes numerous engravings from the author’s drawings of tropical landscapes, species, and people. Best known are his graphic depictions of the torture of enslaved people (some engraved by Blake). Stedman’s sprawling book is formally heterogeneous, including natural history as well as military narrative, a soldier’s harrowing account of working in a hostile tropical environment. Despite the book’s value as an exposé of colonial slavery, Stedman does not identify as an abolitionist, but defends slavery; he owned one enslaved person, the boy Quacoo. He tried to purchase his ‘Suriname wife’, Joanna, but did not succeed, nor could he persuade her to go to Europe (she died by poison shortly after he left). An alien ecology and a colony in crisis, described by a member of colonialism’s expendable corps of enforcers, yield a deeply divided text—a ‘disturbingly incoherent glimpse into the human cost of Europe’s imperial projects’. 31

Another Scotsman was one of the first travellers to Africa not overtly involved with the slave trade. Mungo Park was hired by the African Association, whose members included prominent Britons on both sides of the slavery debate—William Wilberforce as well as Bryan Edwards—and whose goal was to gather information about the African interior. Edwards served as Park’s writing coach, helping turn his notes (famously stored in the crown of his hat) into the enduringly popular Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799). The book maintains a painstakingly neutral stance toward slavery. Both sides of the debate tried to claim Park, who died in Africa in 1805 during a second and larger expedition. In the 1770s, after his harrowing journey to the Niger, Park landed, sick and alone, in the village of the African slave trader Karfa Taura. Karfa hosted Park and let him travel with the coffle or caravan of enslaved people whom he took to the coast to sell. Park’s account of the treatment of the captives on the 500-mile journey is one of the few surviving sources depicting the First Passage, enslaved Africans’ involuntary travel from the interior to the coast. Fluent in Mande, Park conversed with the captives, answering their anxious questions: would they be eaten by Park’s ‘countrymen’? What would happen to them ‘after they had crossed the salt water’? 32 Though no slave trader, the explorer’s relationship to the business was equivocal. He owed a debt of gratitude to Karfa Taura and the British slave traders who hosted him on his arrival and gave him a line of credit with traders in the interior. Regaining the coast, he left for Britain via the Caribbean on an American slave ship. The conventions of Romantic-era travel narrative, segregating dry information in interpolated chapters, let Park’s book suggest an Africa that was separate and self-contained, obscuring European responsibility for African suffering. The narrative, in contrast—especially Park’s journey with the coffle—reveals the damage done to West Africa by Atlantic slavery. 33

After two decades of organized struggle, delayed by war and counter-revolutionary backlash, Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade in 1807. This legislative victory was by no means inevitable. Thomas Clarkson chronicled the movement in his two-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808). Clarkson had been deeply invested in the anti-slavery movement since he was an idealistic college student. Unlike earlier activists, no-nonsense Quakers, Clarkson nourished a ‘romantic sense of self’. 34 His History casts abolitionists as Hercules, fighting the ‘hydra’ of slavery. (He omits the contributions of Black activists like Cugoano and Equiano.) His account of the movement’s launching is highly autobiographical, describing his struggle with the decision to go forward and drawing on the language of emotion. Boarding a slave ship, ‘the sight of the rooms below and of the gratings above, and of the barricade across the deck, filled me both with melancholy and horror’. En route to the slaving port of Bristol, the sound of church bells ‘filled me … with a melancholy for which I could not account’ as he ‘began now to tremble … at the arduous task I had undertaken’. 35 Clarkson worked hard for the cause, to the extent that he had to take ten years off from 1794 to 1804 to recover his health. His involvement then continued through the second phase of the movement to the passage of emancipation in 1833.

Abolitionists expected that banning the slave trade would result in better treatment of enslaved people. Planters would need to take better care of their workers when they could no longer replace them. This did not happen. Moreover, colonial legislatures stonewalled efforts to oversee workers’ welfare, notably the 1815 Registry Bill. Meanwhile, enslaved people continued to intervene on their own behalf in Bussa’s Rebellion on Barbados in 1816 and the massive uprising in Demerara (present-day Guyana) in 1823. During the fifteen-year lull in organized activism, an unlikely writer made a quirky contribution to Romantic-era prose about slavery. Matthew Gregory Lewis became famous with his lurid 1796 Gothic novel, The Monk , published at age 19. When his estranged father died, Lewis unexpectedly inherited two Jamaica plantations and several hundred enslaved people. He interrupted his successful career as a playwright to travel to the Caribbean in 1815–1816 and 1817–1818. Sailing back from his second visit, he died of yellow fever; his Journal of a West India Proprietor was published posthumously in 1834. Friendly with abolitionists in England, Lewis, though no abolitionist himself, was liberal enough to draw hostility from neighbouring planters. He tried to introduce reforms, banning the whip and rewarding enslaved women who bore healthy children, but grew frustrated. On one plantation, Hordley, ‘I expected to find a perfect paradise, and I found a perfect hell’. His manager had misled him. ‘I felt strongly tempted to set off as fast as I could, and leave all these black devils and white ones to tear one another to pieces’. Lewis narrates day-to-day interactions with captive workers from the perspective of an idiosyncratic outsider. His prose is humorous and densely allusive, lending the journal an air of self-conscious artifice, as when he compares a cove near Bluefields to ‘the most beautiful of the views of coves to be found in “Cook’s Voyages” ’. 36 The language of aesthetics, in particular the picturesque (widespread in writings about the West Indies) helps establish a defensive distance from the realities of plantation life, suggesting Lewis’s profound unease with his position as ‘Massa’.

The second wave of antislavery activism started in 1823 with the founding of the Anti-Slavery Society, including veteran abolitionists Wilberforce, leader of the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade, and Clarkson, as well as younger activists such as James Stephen and Zachary Macaulay. The Society ‘had a Duke as president, five other royals and fourteen MPs as vice presidents. It was backed by hundreds of corresponding societies throughout the nation … it enjoyed support from the full range of the British population: royalty and aristocracy, gentlemen, middle-class merchants and professionals, the working classes both rural and urban, men and women’. 37 In the face of worsening conditions in the colonies, with increasing mortality among the enslaved and documented abuses, the Society supported amelioration, or reform, and gradual progress towards emancipation. The Society’s agenda included abolishing the stiff duties on East India sugar that artificially supported West Indian sales. Supporters of slavery attributed rebellions—notably Bussa’s Rebellion, with seventy plantations laid waste on Easter Sunday—to proposed reforms, blaming the violence on the introduction of the Registry Bill.

Wilberforce’s Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (1823) emphasizes the nation’s collective guilt for the evils of slavery. Abolitionists ‘deceived ourselves’, he admits, ‘by expecting much more benefit to the plantation Negroes from the abolition of the Slave Trade … We … judged too favourably of human nature’. He attributes the persistence of slavery to the ignorance of the British public. Following first-wave abolitionists’ imaginary geography, he draws a bright line between innocent Britons and guilty West Indians. He also emphasizes the prevalence of vice in the colonies, including among the enslaved. Without Christian instruction, he contends, they are worse off than in Africa. Citing Mungo Park, he writes that Africans in Africa were ‘industrious, generous … seldom chargeable with licentiousness, distinguished for their domestic affections’, while they are ‘in the West Indies the very opposite’. Enslavement itself, he maintains, leaves Africans ‘depressed even below the level of the human species’. Parliament must regulate slavery because the white population of the colonies does not ‘think and feel like ourselves’. It isn’t regulating slavery that incites revolt—just keeping 800,000 people enslaved. ‘[R]aise these poor creatures from their depressed condition, and if they are not yet fit for the enjoyment of British freedom, elevate them at least from the level of the brute creation into that of rational nature’. At that point the enslaved ‘will soon be regarded as a grateful peasantry’. The redoubtable Tory concludes by cautioning fellow activists to ‘treat with candour and tenderness the characters of the West India proprietors’. 38

James Stephen, in England Enslaved by Her Own Colonies (1826), strikes a very different tone in energetic prose. He decries the ‘contumacy’ of the ‘refractory colonists’, emphasizing the ‘enormous insatiable drains on the treasure and blood of the Mother Country’ in maintaining slave colonies. Why, Stephen asks, should Britain spend millions to protect these people? He calls them ‘speculators’, playing a ‘desperate game’ in the risky business of sugar planting, but feeling entitled to government subsidies. He deplores colonial influence in not just Parliament but the Cabinet, the aristocracy, and the ‘commercial body’, and condemns the ‘foul tactics’ of the colonial lobby. Finally, Stephen exhorts ‘fellow-countrymen and fellow-Christians’ to get busy forming committees, denying votes to candidates with colonial interests, and petitioning Parliament. 39

Clarkson’s contribution, Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies, with a view to their ultimate emancipation (1823), outright declares slavery a crime. Citing ‘a peculiar softness, and plasticity, and pliability in the African character’, he claims Sierra Leone and Haiti exemplify the potential of emancipated people of African descent to become civilized. 40 This left Clarkson open to the ad hominem attacks typical of this pamphlet war. James Macqueen, a Scottish businessman and amateur geographer, formerly an overseer on a Grenada sugar plantation, pulled no punches: ‘never before were so many misrepresentations and deviations from truth collected into … fifty-seven octavo pages’ as in Clarkson’s Thoughts . Sierra Leone and Haiti, Macqueen contends, are actually ‘in a most wretched state’, proof that savages will be savages forever. Macqueen declares himself an ‘enemy to personal slavery in the abstract’, but given what he sees as obvious—the unchangeable ‘ignorance and barbarity’ of Africans, ‘sluggish uncivilized natives of the torrid zone’—enslavement at least keeps them ‘directed by civilized knowledge’. Citing Matthews and Norris, he touts funeral sacrifices, mass executions, and heads displayed on poles. ‘Nine out of ten’ enslaved Africans, he reports, ‘rejoice at falling into our hands’. Abolishing the slave trade was an ‘enormous and useless sacrifice’ by the British Empire. If emancipation is enacted, ‘British property, the British name, and European civilization, will vanish in the tempest which folly and philanthropy have raised in the West Indies’. A ruthless player in the war of opinion raging through Romantic-era periodicals, Macqueen slammed the anti-slavery Edinburgh Review for ‘calumnies and misrepresentations’. 41

On the other end of the spectrum was a remarkable woman, the ‘foremost female antislavery pamphleteer’. Elizabeth Heyrick (1769–1831) was a well-off Quaker widow and philanthropist who opened a school, campaigned against cruelty to animals, and visited prisons. In the 1790s she was one of the isolated supporters of emancipation. Her anonymous pamphlet, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition (1823), was the first to flout the Anti-Slavery Society’s gradualist policy. ‘In opposing slavery from the perspective of natural rights philosophy and … the religious perspective of moral sinfulness, Heyrick drew on the eighteenth-century foundations of antislavery thought.’ 42 Her style telegraphs her enthusiasm with strings of rhetorical questions and plentiful italics and dashes. Ideological purity trumped political pragmatism for this idealistic woman: ‘truth and justice are stubborn and inflexible;—they yield neither to numbers or [ sic ] authority’. Politically, she urges, delay is fatal, sapping the ‘zeal and ardor’ of antislavery campaigners. She agrees with Clarkson on Haiti, asserting that in thirty years there is no instance of emancipated slaves’ ‘having abused their freedom’. The vices and miseries of the enslaved are the consequences of slavery, not some essential African character. With emancipation, Heyrick adds, planters should not be compensated (as Macqueen demanded and Parliament eventually mandated), but rather the enslaved. 43

First-hand testimony about colonial slavery appeared in an incongruous location: the sporting weekly Bell’s Life in London , which in 1824 published a letter from Robert Wedderburn, a biracial Jamaican, son of a Scottish planter and an enslaved woman whom Wedderburn Sr. ‘made the object of his brutal lust, then insulted, abused, and abandoned’. Wedderburn’s life as an immigrant in Britain, after a spell in the Navy (like Equiano), was plebeian and marginal. With no influential connections, he made his way as a tailor, eventually joining the radical movement around the communitarian Thomas Spence. Wedderburn spent time in jail in 1819 for seditious libel, missing Peterloo, and later on charges of running a bawdy house. He died in poverty in 1835, aged 72. His two letters to Bell’s were published separately as The Horrors of Slavery , dedicated to Wilberforce, who visited him in prison and gave him ‘two books beautifully bound in calf’. Wedderburn’s letters are a memoir of his Jamaican childhood and a tribute to two feisty women: his mother, Rosanna, who negotiated her son’s freedom, and his grandmother, Talkee Amy, a Kingston higgler who raised him. Amy took Robert to visit his father; when he refused to do anything for his son, she ‘called him a mean Scotch rascal, thus to desert his own flesh and blood’. Wedderburn describes Amy being flogged at age 70 on suspicion of witchcraft, as well as his mother’s earlier abuse by his father, an associate of the notorious Thomas Thistlewood, whose diaries detail his habitual rape of enslaved women. ‘My father’s house was full of female slaves, all objects of his lust; amongst whom he strutted like Solomon in his seraglio, or like a bantam cock upon his own dunghill’. 44 Wedderburn’s editor describes the semi-literate author’s ‘breathless, hortatory style, erratic punctuation and vernacular language’ in Horrors and his earlier periodical, The Axe Laid to the Root (1817), which connects the oppression of working people in Britain and enslaved people in the colonies. 45

Travel writing played a role in the emancipation debate, as it had in the struggle for slave trade abolition. Henry Nelson Coleridge, nephew of the poet, travelled around the West Indies in 1825 with his other uncle, the Bishop of Barbados. Six Months in the West Indies in 1825 tries to be witty as well as informative. Its preface telegraphs an awareness that travel writing about the West Indies is assumed to be politicized. Coleridge claims to speak for neither side, but as part of the ‘silent body of wise men … of no party but that of England’, rejecting the ‘puerilities of the African Institution’ as well as the ‘excesses of Macqueen’. He stakes out a position that is ameliorationist, but follows pro-slavery talking points, claiming enslaved workers are better off than free British labourers. He quotes one: ‘what for me want free?’ In the twelve colonies he’s visited, he claims to have seen no planter cruelty whatsoever. Colonists are just like metropolitan Britons: landing in the Caribbean does not transform ‘youth educated at Oxford’ into ‘monsters of avarice and bloodthirstiness’. ‘Of the relations between master and servant, of the pride of protecting and of the gratitude for protection given’, Coleridge editorializes, ‘of the sense of mutual dependence, of natural affection and natural kindness … of all these things which defeat the definition of slavery and make it an exact lie, the inhabitant of England knows nothing.’ 46 Such mystification is reminiscent of the antebellum American South.

Near the end of the emancipation campaign the British public was offered extensive and harrowing testimony of colonial abuse in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Written by Herself (1831)—a slave narrative that is also a travel narrative. Unlike Wedderburn, Mary Prince was sponsored by white abolitionists. Her autobiographical narrative was published with an extensive apparatus, including a preface by its editor, Thomas Pringle, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and a letter by Pringle’s wife to the Birmingham Ladies’ Antislavery Society describing the scars on Mary’s back, which the Society required in exchange for monetary support. Prince’s History presents textual challenges: dictated to a white woman, Susanna Strickland, it was then ‘pruned’ by Pringle. It is silent on Mary’s sex life before her marriage to the free carpenter Daniel James, though she mentions earlier liaisons in her testimony at the libel trial that followed the History’s publication. Any ‘hint of sexual impropriety could have destroyed Prince’s credibility’ with pious readers. 47 Prince narrates the sale that broke up her birth family and her brutal treatment by a series of sadistic owners. She emphasizes slavery’s emotional toll in language featuring the image of the heart. During the auction, her ‘heart throbbed with grief and terror so violently, that I pressed my hands quite tightly across my breast, but I could not keep it still, and it continued to leap as though it would burst out of my body’. Throughout the narrative, the heart registers ‘grief and terror’ both individual and collective; it becomes ‘an alternative to the material measure of the marketplace as a measure of … moral and ethical sensibility’. 48

The History is also a narrative of involuntary or quasi-voluntary travel from Prince’s birthplace in Bermuda to the remote Turk’s Island, where she endures horrific conditions in salt ponds; back to Bermuda; and then to Antigua, when she helps arrange her sale to Mr and Mrs Wood. There she can earn money, attend church, learn to read, and get married (without her owners’ consent). Her next journey is to London, where she believes (implausibly) that the climate will help her rheumatism and the Woods may set her free. Both prove false: they threaten, when she speaks up, to turn her out of doors in a strange city. ‘I might go and try what freedom would do for me, and be d[amne]d’, Wood snarls. Eventually Prince walked out the door, a short but momentous final journey. 49 Her History drew an outraged reaction from Macqueen : ‘By tools like Mary Prince … PRINGLE, and the band of which Pringle is the tool and the organ, mislead and irritate this country, browbeat the Government, and trample upon … our most important transmarine possessions’. 50 The Scotsman’s attack testifies to the power of the emancipation movement and the power an enslaved woman could achieve, based partly on knowledge gained through travel.

The Emancipation Act technically ended British slavery, but controversy continued through the period of ‘apprenticeship’ ending in 1838. Spanning the Romantic era, the national debate over slavery played out in a range of prose genres. Authors marshalled tactics from imaginary geography to personal testimony, sentimental rhetoric to racist polemic, in their efforts to shift public opinion. Though taking place across the Atlantic, colonial slavery ran through the warp and weft of Romantic-era British culture.

1   Robin Blackburn , The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848 (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 3 .

2   Christopher Leslie Brown , Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 46 , 47.

3   Linda Colley , Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 5 .

  Brown, Moral Capital , 97, 114, 115, 133–134.

5   Srividhya Swaminathan , Debating the Slave Trade (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 53 , 52.

6   Elizabeth A. Bohls , Slavery and the Politics of Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 101 .

7   Brycchan Carey , British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 110 , 111–119.

Qtd. in Carey, British Abolitionism, 121.

Carey, British Abolitionism , 133, and see his discussion of Clarkson, 130–137.

10   Thomas Clarkson , An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (London, 1786), 118 , 123, 125. Printed by J. Phillips, George-Yard, Lombard-Street, and sold by T. Cadell, in the Strand, and J. Phillips (London).

Swaminathan, Debating , 34.

Clarkson, Essay, 125, 126 (italics in original).

Qtd. in Bohls, Slavery, 102.

14   William St Clair , The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 233 .

15   John Matthews , A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa (London: Printed for B. White and Son … and J. Sewell, 1788), 148 , 158; and see George Boulukos , ‘Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Africa’, Eighteenth-Century Studies , 40 (2007), 241–255 .

16   Robin Law , ‘The Slave-Trader as Historian: Robert Norris and the History of Dahomey’, History in Africa , 16 (1989), 220 ; Deirdre Coleman , Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 97 .

17   Bryan Edwards , The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies , 2 vols (London: printed for John Stockdale, 1793), ii . 35.

Edwards, History , i. pp. xv, xvi; ii. 105, 106.

Coleman, Romantic , 64, and see 63–105.

20   Carl Bernhard Wadstrom , Observations on the Slave Trade: and a Description of some part of the Coast of Guinea (London: James Phillips, 1789), 6 , pp. iv–v.

Cugoano, Evil of Slavery , 106.

22   Deirdre Coleman , ‘Introduction’, Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women’s Travel Narratives of the 1790s , ed. Deirdre Coleman (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), 3 .

Anna Maria Falconbridge, Two Voyages to Sierra Leone , in Maiden Voyages , ed. Coleman, 134, 13 (italics in original).

Cugoano, Evil of Slavery , 17, 15, 61, 62.

25   Vincent Carretta , ‘Questioning the Identity of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African’, in The Global Eighteenth Century , ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 226–235 . For a dissident view, see Paul Lovejoy , ‘Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African’, Slavery and Abolition , 27 (2006): 317–347 .

Vincent Carretta, ‘Introduction’, in Equiano, Interesting Narrative , p. xiv.

Will Conable, ‘ “The Sea Hath Taught Him Other Rhetorics”: Personhood and Maritime Labor in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative ’, unpublished work, by permission.

Boulukos, ‘Olaudah Equiano’.

29   Bryan Edwards , An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo (London: J. Stockdale, 1797), 70 , 63.

30   Marcus Rainsford , An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti , eds Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013 [1805]), 133–134 , 138–139, 140.

Bohls, Slavery, 81.

32   Mungo Park , Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa , ed. Kate Ferguson Marsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000 [1799]), 277 .

33   Elizabeth A. Bohls , ‘Romantic Exploration and Atlantic Slavery: Mungo Park’s Coffle’, Studies in Romanticism , 55 (2016), 350 .

  Brown, Moral Capital , 461, 441, 442.

35   Thomas Clarkson , The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament , 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), i . 25, 238, 293.

36   Matthew Gregory Lewis , Journal of a West India Proprietor , ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1834]), 228 , 229, 99.

37   Debbie Lee , ‘Introduction’, Vol. 3, The Emancipation Debate , in Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period , ed. Debbie Lee (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), p. viii .

William Wilberforce, Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (1823), in Emancipation Debate , ed. Lee, 34, 68, 62, 75, 76, 78.

James Stephen, England Enslaved by Her Own Colonies (1826), in Emancipation Debate , ed. Lee, 275, 274, 308, 287, 313, 322.

Thomas Clarkson, Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies, with a view to their ultimate emancipation (1823), in Emancipation Debate , ed. Lee, 105.

41   James M’Queen [Macqueen] , The West India Colonies; the Calumnies and Misrepresentations Circulated Against Them by The Edinburgh Review, Mr. Clarkson, Mr. Cropper, &c. &c. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1824), p. ix , 90, 83, p. xvi, 147, 86, 362, 4.

42   Clare Midgley , Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780 – 1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 75 , 104.

43   Elizabeth Heyrick , Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition (New York: James V. Seaman, 1825), 7 , 10, 7, 8, 16.

44 Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery , in The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings , ed. Iain McCalman (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1991), 45 , 44, 49, 47.

45 McCalman, ‘Introduction’, 18. See also Elizabeth A. Bohls , Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 74–78 . On Thistlewood, see Trevor Burnard , Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) .

46 [ Henry Nelson Coleridge ], Six Months in the West Indies in 1825 (London: John Murray, 1826), 9 , 309, 314, 316, 311–312.

47   Jenny Sharpe , Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 121 .

48   Mary Prince , The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave , ed. Sarah Salih (New York: Penguin, 2000 [1831]), 11 ; Sandra Pouchet Paquet , ‘The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince’, African American Review , 26 (1992), 142 .

Prince, History , 32, 33.

Qtd. in Bohls, Slavery, 180.

Further Reading

Boulukos, George , The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 ).

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Carey, Brycchan , Markman Ellis , and Sarah Salih , eds, Discourses of Slavery and Abolition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 ).

Coleman, Deirdre , Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 ).

Gikandi, Simon , Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011 ).

Levecq, Christine , Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008 ).

Sandiford, Keith A. , The Cultural Politics of Sugar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ).

Thomas, Helen , Romanticism and Slave Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ).

Wheeler, Roxann , The Complexion of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000 ).

Wood, Marcus , Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 ).

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Topic: Slavery in America

Slavery used to be an important resource in America, and the first workers were imported to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. There the African slaves were used to aid in the tobacco and cotton productions. There were many different opinions on this subject, but slavery was here to stay, at least for the next couple of centuries. Around the 1860s, the bloody Civil war broke out and Abraham Lincoln, as the president, ratified a law which would eventually free the nations four million slaves. Five years later, the North won the Civil war, the slaves were freed and slavery was abolished. Even though black people were free at last, life would not be easy for them.

Slavery had always had its critics in America, so as the slave trade grew, so did the opposition. The slave labor enabled the colonies to become so profitable, that in 1660 England’s King Charles the second established the royal African company to transport humans from Africa to America. When England finally outlawed its slave trade in 1807, America relied on its own internal slave trade. By 1860, millions of slaves were still moved and sold in the colonies, but no new slaves were imported into the US after 1808. In 1820, the Missouri compromise banned slavery in all new western states, this concluded mostly the southern colonies. The country began to divide around the 18th century over the North and South issue.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected for president in 1860, he convinced many southerners that slavery would never be permitted to expand into new territories acquired by the US. He also declared the emancipation declaration during the war, in 1863. Though Lincoln’s antislavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery but to preserve the United States as a nation. Eventually, the confederate surrendered in 1865 and the Northside won. The 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery, but freed blacks’ status in the post-war South remained problematic.

Opinions were based on your beliefs and how the world around you evolved. In the North, people were against slavery, but in the South, they thought something else. In the South, people were taught to think that slavery was a natural concept. The defenders of slavery meant that they could not end servitude, considering that slave labor was the foundation of their economy. They also meant that freeing the slaves would lead to anarchy and chaos, and that slavery had existed throughout history and was a common state of mankind. The Northside didn’t rely on slave work as much as the Southside did. The Northside did not like slavery and meant that it was heartless. Other groups (religious groups), thought that it was gruesome and inhuman, while others were busy thinking about their beliefs.

The life of an African-American, after the Civil war, was a world transformed. There were no more of the brutal beatings and the sexual assaults, the selling and forcible relocation of family members, the denial of education, legal marriage, homeownership and so on. Congress enforced laws that promoted civil rights and political rights for African-Americans. The three most important laws the Congress passed was the Amendments. There was the thirteenth amendment which ended slavery, the fourteenth amendment which gave African-Americans the rights of American citizenship, and the fifteenth amendment which gave black men the right to vote. Life after the years of slavery would also prove to be difficult. The South established laws known as the black codes, which meant that they had no right to own land, there were own laws for punishments, they had no rights to carry weapons, no rights to vote and it was illegal not to have work. Most of the African-American, though free, lived in severe poverty.

Slavery began in America when the first slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619. The slaves would aid in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. Slavery was of central importance to the South side’s economy. The differences between the South and the North would provoke a big debate, that would tear the nation apart in the gruesome Civil war. Slavery ended after the North won the civil war in 1865 after Abraham Lincoln ratified the thirteenth amendment law. There were many opinions, especially in the South. The southerners meant that slavery had always been around and that it was natural. The Northside meant that it was not right, while other religious groups thought it was horrific. After the Civil war, problems would still appear for the freed slaves. Despite that the beatings, the sexual assaults, and the selling were long gone, life would not be easy for the African-Americans. The South made new laws, known as the black code. It indicated that «negroes» were not allowed to do certain things such as own land, or even carry weapons. Although it was a new law and a new era, it would not change peoples hearts.

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Were the Pyramids Constructed by Slaves? a Historical Inquiry

This essay about the construction of the Egyptian pyramids examines the long-held belief that they were built by slaves. It explores the hierarchical nature of ancient Egyptian society, the role of corvée labor, and recent archaeological findings. Evidence suggests that skilled craftsmen and conscripted laborers, rather than slaves, were primarily responsible for the monumental effort, highlighting a more complex and cooperative system than previously thought.

How it works

In the shadows of Egypt’s ancient sands, the majestic pyramids rise as silent sentinels of a civilization steeped in mystery. Among the myriad questions these monumental structures evoke, one inquiry has stirred debate for centuries: were the pyramids constructed by slaves? To unravel this historical enigma, we embark on a journey through the annals of time, delving into the heart of ancient Egypt’s labor force and the complexities of its socio-political landscape.

The popular perception of pyramid construction often conjures images of downtrodden slaves toiling under the scorching sun, their backs bowed beneath the weight of colossal stones.

This narrative, perpetuated by Hollywood epics and sensationalized accounts, paints a grim picture of exploitation and suffering. However, the reality may be far more nuanced than this simplistic portrayal suggests.

At the dawn of pyramid construction during the Old Kingdom period (circa 2700-2200 BCE), Egypt was a highly stratified society governed by divine kingship. At its apex sat the pharaoh, revered as a god in human form, wielding absolute authority over the land and its people. Beneath the pharaoh stood a hierarchical pyramid of power, with nobles, priests, and bureaucrats occupying privileged positions in society.

Central to the functioning of this hierarchical order was the institution of corvée labor—a system of compulsory service imposed on subjects by the state. While corvée laborers were not technically slaves in the chattel sense, they were bound by obligation to contribute their labor to the state’s monumental projects, including the construction of pyramids. This distinction is crucial, as it highlights the complex relationship between coercion and cooperation within ancient Egyptian society.

Recent archaeological findings have shed new light on the workforce behind the pyramids, challenging the long-held notion of mass enslavement. Excavations at pyramid sites such as Giza have revealed evidence of well-organized work camps, complete with barracks, bakeries, and other facilities indicative of a structured labor force. Moreover, inscriptions and graffiti left behind by laborers provide further insights into their daily lives, dispelling the myth of widespread oppression.

Rather than hapless slaves driven by whip and chain, these laborers were skilled craftsmen, artisans, and farmers conscripted for temporary service during the annual flooding of the Nile—a period known as the “inundation.” Far from being coerced at the point of a spear, many workers likely volunteered for these labor gangs in exchange for rations, shelter, and social prestige.

Furthermore, the construction of the pyramids served a dual purpose beyond mere monumentality. In addition to honoring the divine authority of the pharaoh and ensuring his eternal legacy, these architectural marvels functioned as economic engines, employing thousands of laborers and stimulating trade and commerce throughout the kingdom. The pyramid complexes, with their vast networks of quarries, workshops, and supply chains, represented a triumph of state-sponsored infrastructure projects—a testament to the ingenuity and ambition of ancient Egypt’s ruling elite.

Of course, this is not to discount the presence of forced labor within ancient Egypt. Inscriptions and papyri attest to the existence of prisoners of war and criminals who were pressed into service on public works projects, including pyramid construction. However, it is important to recognize that these individuals constituted a minority within the broader labor force, and their role in pyramid building was likely limited compared to that of corvée laborers.

In light of these findings, the narrative of pyramid construction as a testament to slave labor must be reevaluated. While coercion undoubtedly played a role in mobilizing the workforce, it is clear that the construction of the pyramids was a collaborative effort involving a diverse array of laborers—both free and conscripted. To reduce the agency of these individuals to that of passive slaves is to oversimplify the complexities of ancient Egyptian society and diminish the ingenuity and resourcefulness of its people.

As we stand in awe before the towering edifices of the past, let us not forget the hands that shaped them—the craftsmen, artisans, and laborers whose toil and sweat have echoed across the ages. In their stories, we find not only the legacy of a civilization lost to time but also a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. And in unraveling the mysteries of the pyramids, we gain not only insights into the past but also a deeper understanding of ourselves and our shared human experience.

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