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Slaving and Colonialism - Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5:3 | Â© 2004 Joseph C. Miller

Slaving and Colonialism Joseph C. MillerUniversity of Virginia

1. Charles Verlinden, in a broader reflection oncolonialism that grew out of his monumental study ofslavery in Europe before its Atlantic age, once declaredthat the only rule regarding slavery and colonialism that he could discern was that the two were incompatible.1That is, colonial powers either exploited territories theydid not claim to rule directly by importing people from them as slaves or by ruling directly over conqueredpopulations whom they left in place. The Atlantic-worldhistorical referents that Verlinden had in mind wereobviously the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Asian and African colonies thatEuropean nations claimed at the end of the nineteenthcentury. This assertion, plausible enough when he made it in the still post-abolitionist and only nascentlypost-colonialist 1950s, has endured sufficiently thatpapers on enslaved Africans in the Americas, not to mention an introductory essay attempting to link"slavery and colonialism," would seem to have no placein a journal of "colonialism and colonial history," at least not in Verlinden's sense.

2. This linkage seems hardly more promising against thebackground of Immanuel Wallerstein's sweepinglyinfluential political economy of "world systems."2

Wallerstein united slavery and colonialism by dividing the world into regions related to the economicallydeveloping northern Atlantic. Beyond this historicallyadvancing European "core" lay a dependently integrated, largely contiguous and relatively passive "periphery"supplying bulk consumption goods to it; beyond that laysemi-peripheral source-regions contributing luxurycommodities and raw materials, with labor there kept in place to produce them. This economic semi-peripherycontained areas of the sort that Verlinden had describedin terms of the political arrangements of the 1950s as


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"colonies." Wallerstein left the remaining regions of theglobe, those not directly sustaining the "core" in materialterms and therefore not places where "core" interests(and evidently also power to implement them) lay in preserving populations as labor to produce consumerluxuries or industrial raw materials.3 Before the laternineteenth century, Africa remained outside this"modern world system," and therefore tragically becamethe source of enslaved workers transported across theAtlantic to bring the Americas within the semi-peripheryof plantations and mines. Enslavement accomplished theinitial violent phase of integrating semi-peripheries,structurally dependent on accessible labor pools beyondthe pale. Nineteenth-century imperialism extended thesemi-periphery to the farthest ends of the earth, thusending slaving on structurally significant scales â€” thatis, significantly contributing to the ongoingconsolidation of the European core. Colonialism inAfrica proved incompatible with slaving, but colonialoccupation of the Americas thrived on slavery.

4. However, slavery became antithetical to the imperialphase of European expansion. In Verlinden's terms, theabolition of slavery became the modus operandi, or at least justificandi, of the imperial conquests of the 1880sand 1890s that led to modern colonial rule, nominally to bring the "people [theretofore] without history"4 into theglobal progressive sweep toward millennial modernity. As Wallerstein might have it, the vacuum-like suction oflimitless growth in modern industrial productivecapacity and consumer demand in the North Atlantic swept all the world's other peoples into its vortex. In stillother terms, modern technology gave Europeans thecommunications and transport facilities, biomedicaltechniques of resisting tropical pathogens, sheer military power, and financial resources to impose themselvesdirectly in every part of the globe, thus renderingenslavement unnecessary to control labor anywhere. Liberal economists formulating progressive theories ofthe accelerating economic growth condemned slavery tothe obscurity of a fast-fading past as, they supposed, "civilization" and modernization enlightened anddeveloped the world, in the image of the West, throughcolonial rule. Slavery depended on forced labor (and corresponding worker reluctance if not resistance) ratherthan on individual ambition and on personalresponsibility rewarded and was thus doomed to extinction as modern colonialism spread the political andeconomic benefits of civic "freedom" around the globe.

5.


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None of this consensus eighteenth-century "liberal"reasoning about the incompatibility of slavery andcolonialism was inconsistent with their less optimisticnineteenth-century materialist counterparts. Karl Marx (1818-1883), translating the incompatibility of slaveryand industrialized modernity in the abolitionist age inwhich he lived, phrased the contrast as succeedingstructural "modes of production." In Europe, Marx's primary example of his general theory, a mode of landedaristocracy that he designated as "feudal" had intervenedbetween the era of slavery in ancient times5 and modern"capitalism," but he did not systematically contemplate colonial slavery in the Americas as a mode ofproduction. Engels (1820-1895) extended Marx's theoryto the Asian and African colonial conquests of the later imperialist era by defining the European military powerthen being asserted overseas as replacing earlier controlover slaves by masters who had, by the end of thenineteenth century, everywhere (in the Americas, at least) emancipated their former bondsmen and -womeninto citizenship and "free" dependence on wages.

6. Alternatively, some had turned their new colonialdependencies into sources of "paid" â€” or at leastnominally "contracted" â€” workers transported fromtheir under-producing homelands to Europeanplantations and other regions rendered productivethrough colonization. The principal example of thispattern brought impoverished workers from India to theCaribbean colonies, where former slaves emancipatedthere in the middle of the nineteenth century hadabandoned their masters, or to colonial possessions inthe Indian Ocean area as far west as southern Africa. Inthe broad terms of slavery and colonial rule, the massivecollective power of the modern capitalist economy andthe modern military nation-state replaced the personaldomination of individual masters over their slaves.Colonial conquest in Marx's terms was the initial violentwave of capitalist plundering as it swept outward fromearly, local enclosures in the English countryside,through the Americas, and on around the globe.

7. Asia Marx conceptualized in terms of military ruleover resident peasants, parallel to the key elements of his"feudal" mode in Europe, although he characterizedthese as a distinct "mode of production." Africa, essentially "tribal" and primitive so far as he was aware,interested him much less, other than as a lingeringexample of an earlier collectivism ("primitive communism"), a kind of materialist adaptation of thecontemporaneous romanticization of "primitive


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savagery."6 If these unitary and comprehensive "modes"of production â€” enslavement and removal of people asopposed to conquest of territory to hold residentpopulations in place â€” could co-exist in practice, theywere at least theoretically distinct.

9. Colonial rule thus marked an overwhelming apogeeof European capitalism, worldwide, while slaving onceagain represented an implicitly earlier moment in whichEuropeans had not yet accumulated the means, technological or financial, to rule intact communitiesdirectly. Instead they had acquired the captives of warsin Africa, as well as refugees, outcasts, criminals, and aliens otherwise unwanted there and made available tothem, more through negotiated purchases than throughdirect seizures. The contrast between buying slaves taken by others and taking lands themselves applied alsoto the Americas, the first and only sites of significantcolonial adventures before the end of the nineteenthcentury.7 There, the Spaniards raided the Caribbean islands and Central America to capture natives as slaves.Slaving prevailed until the spectacular defeats of theAztec and Inca military aristocracies in the highlands.Then it ended through an extraordinary and very early assertion of colonial authority over the populationsconquered, the so-called "New Laws" of 1542. Theseexposed the native populations to Christian conversion and salvation and hence exempted them fromenslavement. More or less intact populations beyond thereach of government authority continued to be targets of private slave-trading, drawing on the desperation ofnative communities suffering the ravages of pathogensfar more powerful than human weaponry and dissolvingthrough individuating temptations of commercial contact that eroded the solidarity of the survivors. ThusVerlinden's "golden rule" of colonialism'sincompatibility with slavery appeared validated again: colonial governments preserved the populations theycontrolled, if only to exploit their labor, while slaversexploited regions beyond the control of their governments.

Historical Dynamics10.

The incompatibility of slavery and colonialism thatliberal, marxist, and neo-marxist political economistselaborated are abstract and structural. Time matters littlein these formulations of the point, even in Marx's sequenced "stages." Africa, for one glaring instance,appears as a survival of the past, always carefullyexcluded from whatever terms mark historical


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"progress" in all these models. Verlinden's examples ofmutually exclusive slavery and colonialism in factcompare sixteenth-century circumstances of nascent commercialization and monarchical power with themature national capitalism of the twentieth century.

12. In fact, behind these structural contrasts two primaryinterwoven historical processes â€” commercializationand integration of large political communities â€”explain the apparent incompatibility of the two. Eachderived from the strategies of the two main contestantsin the major struggles to organize and benefit fromdevelopment of the early modern Atlantic world.8 Theseprocesses restate â€” and, I hope, also explain â€” thefamiliar thesis of structural incompatibility byintegrating dialectical engagements between the two oramong the three parties (including the enslaved)involved. Historians normally think of slavery as aprimary relationship between slaves and their mastersand consider as "colonialism" the masters' struggles withthe political and economic rivals whom they challengedby resorting to slaving. They thus predetermine, byconceptualizing the topics as separate, the consensuscontrast between the two. But slaving and strategies ofcolonialism were in fact mutually engaged aspects ofcreating the "Atlantic" political-economic space, with"absolute" monarchies in Europe competing to control itby military force, while commercial interests sought touse slaves to escape this growing political control. Overthe three hundred or so years from the mid-sixteenth tothe mid-nineteenth centuries, repeated confrontationsbetween these military and mercantile parties generatedincremental adaptations of strategies of slaving andcolonialism on both (in fact, all) sides.

13. Since both colonial conquests and slaving arose fromunderlying economic realities, the axiomatic premise ofscarcity of resources, I start by distinguishing the partieswho resorted to these very different means toward theirshared, and therefore competitive, goal of gaining from sustained and viable contacts beyond the emergentunitary sphere of Christian western Europe in thefifteenth century.9 On the secular, military, continental side, the initial collaborative successes of the greatknights of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century "crusades"consolidated a shared consciousness of a Europe as"Christian." Would-be heirs to the crusaders competed for dominance within it during the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries, ultimately at unsustainable cost. Themost successful late-medieval military knights


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approached the domestic dominance of monarchs onlyvery slowly and incrementally. The "absolutism" thattheir heirs would claim in relation to competing landed ecclesiastical and military aristocratic interests at homeremained more a dream than a reality. They assertedthemselves by offering guarantees of direct personal protection to the dependents of their aristocratic rivals,replacing the preceding politics of collective andpersonal fealty with individually guaranteed as political"liberties" conceded by grace, rather than claimed by right. These were far short of the "freedoms" laterclaimed as "rights." The Church was either the chiefrival (where military opposition was weak) or the chief ally (against strong military rivals), depending on thestrength of the aristocrats. The historical issue forsubjects was not personal autonomy or recognition butrather which patron defended them, as privilege rather than by right.

15. The costs of the emergent monarchies' militarizingprocess of political consolidation consumed the gains,first, from crusading conquests in the Levant and thenfrom growing commerce with eastern-Mediterranean Muslims. To pay for the growing grandeur required ofplausible kings these late-medieval lords borrowed fromcommercial (and eventually banking) interests connected with Muslim commercial prosperity to the east andsouth, turning initially to western European financialinterests, central European and Jewish, and then to Italians who had profited from the Mediterranean trade.Finally, still nominally united behind the Cross of LatinChristianity they intensified their search for specie andpossibly other, by directly promoting royally-authorized commercial ventures abroad. These exotic resourcesthey could convert to their own advantage withoutdirectly challenging the aristocratic and ecclesiastical "estates" over local lands and the people living on them,laboring there under various unassailable terms ofobligation.10

16. Merchants were external to these internal contestsbetween spiritual and military power at this early stageâ€” in central Europe and in central and northern Italyisolated in "free" cities. Great merchants in the cities ofnorthern and central Italy seized the surroundingcountryside, uncontested by established aristocraticpower, in a kind of inaugural local "colonial" conquest.There, beyond the effective range of other militarypowers, the Medici and other financial dynastiesassembled imposing wealth and power that demonstratedthe explosive potential of commercial strategies.


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Lacking access to resident labor and determined toinvest their currency gains in further profitable tradingventures, rather than to disperse liquid currency â€” theirprincipal advantage â€” through cash payments of wagesto attract employees, they used their commercialcontacts in less-commercialized adjacent regions ofeastern Europe to buy people as slaves â€” the "Slavs"who became the eponymous predecessors of all the"slaves" who followed. By absorbing the women theybought into their large urban households as slaves anddeploying the men they enslaved in municipal and portservices, they discreetly expanded their householdretinues and created the infrastructure of the cities wherethey lived, without directly challenging the aristocraticand ecclesiastical claimants among whom they lived forcontrol of local populations. Slaves served as ways todefend against the early, growing monopolization ofauthority eventually claimed by the modern "state," totax, to wield force, and to settle disputes. The enslavedthus disappeared behind the walls of the domestichouseholds of the urban wealthy, living around theshores of the Mediterranean in cities "free" from thepushy military rulers of northern Europe, where serfsbecame "subjects" and "slavery," as the inverse ofmonarchical power, disappeared.

18. Modern slaving thus appeared as an initialconsequence of commercial investment in lesscommercially organized communities. As examples ofthe latter, Slavic villages essentially specialized inproducing people, while the former â€” in this case theItalians â€” invested in the production (andconsumption) of goods. These complementing differingproductivities generate offsetting outflows of people andof goods and credit: shortages of goods in domesticeconomies relative to the people whom they mightenhance or obligate, and scarcities of people asproducers and consumers in relation to the largerquantities of goods that commercial economies canproduce (and pay for through elaboration of variousforms of credit). The goods of commercial origin may becheap in cash terms because buyers in domesticeconomies value them for their distinctiveness ratherthan for their material aspects that may be expensive toachieve, thus to display the dependency of the retinueswhom they thus dress to distinguish. The peopleproduced by domestic economies may be despised andthus worthless at home, but in commercial economies,where the product is valued rather than the people, theycan work usefully even for owners who disdain them,drawing on near-universal demeaning stereotypes about


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"slaves," and abuse them with moral doubts.20.

Italian merchants exploited exchanges of this naturein the Slavic shores of the Black Sea in the fourteenthand fifteenth centuries and either sold the slaves theyacquired in Muslim markets or absorbed them in their own domestic and municipal services. Slaving, theexchange of commercially cheap goods for valuablelabor, thus lay at the very origin of what would become the broad expansion of commercial enterprise thatmarked the following five centuries in the Mediterraneanand then throughout the Atlantic. It was a strategy thatenabled mercantile interests marginal to the Christian clerics and military lords of Europe, and under-financedin relation to their accelerating needs for specie, tomount the commercial challenge that eventually and significantly, by means of slaving in the Atlantic,overwhelmed the military and ecclesiastical authoritiesof the preceding era.

21. At that early stage in the process of inventing moderncivic polities in northern Europe, the word "slavery"referred primarily to anticipatory (sixteenth-century)fears of the kind of unimpeded monarchical authority that would emerge by the seventeenth century asnormative.11 In corporative Iberian society, slaveryitself was not a public concern, in spite of the heritage ofthe famous thirteenth-century Siete Partidas inCastile.12 Outsiders brought in then as slaves were known not by their exclusion from a civil society,13

since modern civic states did not exist, but rather byethnic designations denoting their personal origin asalien â€” hence "Slav" as the etymological root ofsubsequent designations of people subject to exclusivepersonal ("proprietarial") authority inseventeenth-century environments, in which commercialstrategies had become viable means of assertingindependence of the monarchical absolutism that by thenintruded on private fiefdoms, entourages, and retinues.In the fifteenth century the same ethnic perceptions â€”"blacks," and so on â€” had also characterized thegrowing numbers of sub-Saharan Africans arriving inEurope, sometimes accompanied by religiouscharacterizations of them as "moors" or as non-Christianheathen.

22. In the hands of merchants excluded from the politicsof "honor" in Europe's high Middle Ages, purchasedcaptives were politically less sensitive than locallaboring populations. The Slavs purchased through


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Italian merchants, mostly female domestics, would thushave been conceded to the exclusive control of theirowners, usually resident in the cities. Under these permissive circumstances, the later association of theseSlavs with the more commercial, proprietarial form ofslavery that emerged in the Atlantic would seem to account for the extension of an ethnonym to denote whatwould later became viewed as the absolute andpermanent extreme of a continuum of more qualified forms of personal dependency conditioned on origins.Presumably Africans, also acquired commercially andsimilarly without local political significance, entered thisuncontested form of slavery when they began to arrive in significant numbers in the fifteenth century.

24. Throughout these centuries the constant tension inEurope revolving around slaves â€” or rather, aroundaccess to local and imported pools of labor and servicesâ€” thus divided emergently centralizing politicalauthorities from merchants. Aspiring kings in Europegradually asserted control over home populations,represented ideologically as "liberties" or as royallysanctioned "privileges." Merchants expanded theircommercial strategies abroad, in areas seemingly safelyremote from politics at royal courts, and where theyacquired slaves. Monarchs, focused on local internalchallenges and on the rival kings around them, could notinitially muster military force sufficient to control theseremote regions. Merchants worked almost independentlythrough "trading posts," more at the mercy of Africanand Asian rulers than their own in Europe.

The Americas 25.

The initial political contest between domestic landedaristocracies, whether ecclesiastical or military, andaspiring monarchs allied with foreign merchants (or incontact with distant lands and resources through them)swung decisively in favor of the latter as Portugal, thenSpain, and eventually the northern European monarchiesentered the Atlantic. There they rode its riches â€”primarily silver and gold â€” to the early modernpartnership that became, first, "baroque" monarchicaldominance under the military protection of royal naviesand bureaucracies at the end of the seventeenth century.In the eighteenth century, the struggle shifted subtlytoward "mercantilism," as these military costs mademonarchs more dependent on the commercial allies theyhad so successfully cultivated than the great merchanthouses depended any longer on them. This transitiontoward commerce and consumerism, as in all other


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elements of this process, was an unintended, oftenironic, incremental consequence of the dialecticalconfrontations through which history proceeds.

27. In the mixture of contending interests that would laterbecome "colonialism" military conquest became asignificant element only in Mesoamerica in the 1520s.Cortez and other conquistadores in the name of Latin Christianity and an only nascent Spanish monarchy wereabout to build effectively independent fiefdoms there byasserting full and direct control of the still-numerousnatives of the lands they seized. Enslavement elsewhere in the world had served primarily as a means ofrecruiting private retinues excluded from external,particularly royal or imperial, access. The polities constructed through these strategies were more"composite" (or "compound")14 than centralized, morecompetitive than controlled, more multiple thanmonarchical, more federated than federal. Private enslavement of conquered populations by competinginterests, particularly military aristocrats with strongpolitical connections at home, dissipated the potential gains from exploiting remote resources rather thanconcentrating these American riches in the hands of theunited crown of Castile and Aragon. The centrality of New Spain's silver to the enterprise of early bullionistEuropean expansion, in the era before "colonialism" hadbeen defined, made central control there utterly essentialto the monarchical project of consolidation in Iberia. It was the same problem of powerful military aristocratsrunning amuck that Alfonso X of Castile had sought toinhibit when he issued his Siete Partidas in thethirteenth century.

28. It was against the background of this all-too-familiarcontext of uncontrolled military power over conqueredpopulations that Charles I (V) consolidated what becamethe Spanish monarchy by excluding the nativepopulations of conquered American domains from enslavement by their conquerors. The so-called "newlaws" issued to this end in 1542 marked the definitive moment in establishing the direct metropolitan(monarchical) authority over remote territories seizedmilitarily that became defined later as "colonialism." This moment brought into sharp relief the fundamentalincompatibility of private "slavery" and public (orgovernment) "colonialism": the two were the primarystrategies of metropolitan authority and the tendency of the free-lancing nominal agents of the metropole toappropriate the powers granted them to personal ends, inan age long before "empires" in the twentieth-century


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bureaucratic sense.1530.

Centralized monarchies in Europe had previouslyconsolidated most successfully by allying with merchantcompetitors of their own nominal representatives abroad,on the principal that the enemies of enemies can becourted as potential friends. In the case of emergentSpain in the early sixteenth century this strategy rested,first, on collaboration with a Catholic Church zealous toprotect its domain of sanctity from Iberia's "Moorish"background and from the crassness of the world ofcommerce swirling about the Mediterranean, andsecondly merchants of safely foreign origin. Spain'skings thus shielded Native Americans from enslavementin the cause of their religious salvation and restricteddeliveries of slaves to their New World colonies tomerchants from Portugal, and later from theNetherlands, France, and England â€” anywhere butSpain â€” who held licenses (asientos) granting thisprivilege. They thus converted the mainland Americas to colonies by limiting slavery there to incidental domestic,urban, and skilled functions that continued the politicallybenign "Slavic" slavery of late medieval Iberia. Theyasserted direct control over Native American populations with the aid of their famed legalbureaucracy, thus setting the model for all later colonial strategy: remote and arbitrary legal authority, backed by(costly) military capability, achieved by denyingsignificant autonomous control over resident labor forces to private interests.16 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this strategy was only incipientlyreliable. Stronger kings in England and Francerationalized it and attempted with some efficacy to implement it in the eighteenth century, thus provokingone notable failure in North America. Their successorsall but abandoned direct colonial rule in the early nineteenth century in favor of commercial alternatives,under the banner of "free trade," before moderntransportation, communications, medicines, and machine guns made possible a revival on global scales in the1870s and 1880s.

31. No other European monarch succeeded in thisdelicate seizure of the colonial initiative over the slaversin the Americas, both traders and planters. Spain's laterkings paid the price for this initial triumph, based as it was on an ecclesiastical alliance that eroded steadilyafter the sixteenth century and on the dominance of theraw silver of their American domains that lost its relativeadvantage as the early bullionist phases of Atlantic


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economic growth gave way to paper credits andfinancial conveyances. In effect, Spain had locked itscolonial strategy into circumstances that grew marginal as other kings in northern Europe turned for allies not toforeign traders but rather to domestic merchants.

33. Portugal failed out of monarchical weakness.Portuguese economic success in the Americas developedas the Portuguese crown was taken into the Spanish legaldomain between 1580 and 1640 during the so-called "dual monarchy." The primary merchants of Lisbonremained focused on their declining position in the OldWorld strategy of beating the Italians to the spice trade of the Indian Ocean and to the gold of sub-SaharanAfrica. But the "dual monarchy" also gave them accessto the silver of Spain's Indies through asiento contractsto deliver enslaved Africans there. Slaving itself theyhad earlier consigned to relatively minor traders workingwith Italian financiers to develop sugar on the easternAtlantic islands just off the African coast â€” especiallythe Madeiras and SÃ£o TomÃ© â€” where maritimetransport of large numbers of workers, as slaves, fromthe mainland presented relatively few technicalchallenges. In northeastern Brazil sugar finally took holdwhen struggling sixteenth-century sugar planters usedthis Spanish hiatus in direct monarchical attention tobring Dutch financial resources to sugar plantingthrough Netherlands-based Jewish Portuguese whom theSpain's Inquisition had expelled from Portugal. Brazilwould thus develop without significant colonial controlby the Portuguese monarchy, at least until the Pombalregime in Lisbon in the 1750s.

34. The Portuguese monarchy, restored to independencein the 1640s, then resurrected the strategy of allying withforeign merchants, in this case the English at home inthe peninsula. The Brazilian plantations had fallen to aDutch West India Company invasion in the 1630s, as the Company took advantage of the political weakness inLisbon. Brazilian planters organized their ownrestoration of the sugar colonies, and their sources of slaves in Angola, during the first decade of the restoredPortuguese monarchy. This successful reconquest thusconsolidated local planter control in the 1650s under the famed senhores de engenho (often with militia ranks as capitÃ£es), effectively armed in the wake of the wars,and established solidly on the basis of the large numbersof Africans they then brought in as slaves during the 1660s and 1670s through strategies largely independentof metropolitan investment. In Portugal, the monarchyrecovered only marginally in the last decades of the


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seventeenth century through deep and disabling concessions to financial interests in England. The sugarbarons of Brazil thrived all but independently ofmetropolitan control, building retinues of captives, freedmen and -women, and clients. Portuguese colonialambitions thus fell victim to the autonomy thatcommercial slavery gave to the gentry of its American "colony," thus independent in all but name, and moreinfluential than Lisbon in Portugal's nominal colonies inAfrica, particularly in Angola.17 The Lisbon monarchstaxed the trade that merchants developed among their African, American, Asian, and European domains butcould not access the enslaved majorities of Brazil orAngola, or control their masters.

36. France only later entered the colonial game in theAmericas (as distinct from uncoordinated, earlierattempts to profiteer from Spain's silver by privateeringon the high seas, negotiations for small islands in the Caribbean, and its famed chartered and hence private furtrading networks in mainland North America), at the endof the seventeenth century. As in Spain, the ambitious consolidating monarch, Louis XIV (1643-1715, r.1648-1715), created both kingdom and colonies ascomplementing components of integrating power around his throne. To complete his strategy of gaining at homeby consolidating abroad he, like Carlos V one hundredand fifty years earlier in Spain, and perhaps cannily observant of the contemporary weakness of the House ofBraganï¿½a in Portugal, asserted direct control over theemerging planters on France's Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. These would-be sugarbarons were threatening commercial autonomy bysurrounding themselves with slaves, whom they acquired largely through Dutch, English, and othernon-French merchants.

37. A century and a half after the New Laws of Carlos V,commercial entrepreneurs were succeeding militaryknights as the defining interest throughout the Atlantic.Africans had significantly lesser moral standing in the European imagination than did the natives of theAmericas, to be sure, but allowing unimpeded authorityover slaves to their owners carried political implicationsthat hindered establishing French colonial power in the Americas. France's economic dependence on theenslaved Africans who had replaced the nativepopulations of the Antilles (decimated as much by early Spanish slaving as by disease) meant that slavery inthese American possessions had to be channeled ratherthan abolished. Louis XIV and his energetic minister


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Colbert adapted Carlos' dual strategy of control overdangerously autonomous slavers in the Americas byenlisting ecclesiastical allies at home and rendering the merchants who supplied the slaves to the Americasdependent on the crown, but they adapted these twinstrategies to the commercial age into which they were determined to lead the kingdom. For most of theseventeenth century earlier Bourbon kings had beencodifying a monarchical "French" law that would supersede the numerous local domains that existedthroughout France at the time. One may read theeventual declaration that "there are no slaves in France"18 as an expression of contemporary tensions ofcreating "absolute" monarchical power rather thanseeing it retrospectively (and a-historically) as anticipating civic "freedoms" defined only later. SinceFrance at the time was more a composite than a singlecomprehensive entity, this proclamation registered instead as a royal assertion of the impossibility ofshielding anyone resident in France from direct royalaccess, thus exempt from taxes, military conscription, and the other demands of absolute monarchy andincipient nationhood. It also implied the beneficentprotection that would extend reciprocally to those loyal primarily, if not exclusively, to the king.

39. It was relatively easy thus to assert the ultimate reachof royal authority at home, where few enslaved Africansemboldened their owners to object, but it was riskier, ifnot impossible, to attempt so direct a civil strategy in theAntilles at the trans-Atlantic distances, foreign tradingpresence, and slow sailing times involved. Louis XIVtherefore resorted to the famed â€” if partly foranachronistic reasons â€” Code Noir of 1685. As political strategy,19 Louis' Code Noir inserted monarchical authority into masters' otherwise privatedomains over their slaves in Martinique and Guadeloupe, in the name of protecting the enslaved fromthe worst abuses of their owners.20 As a compromisewith masters thus contained, the Code also offered acertain (and quite unrealistic) amount of government police protection against the growing and unruly cohortsof Africans arriving on the islands. The Code Noir alsoestablished the Catholic Church as protector of theslaves' souls and thus authorized potential clericalintrusion into the critical sacramental moments in thelives of the enslaved â€” births, marriages, deaths â€”again at the masters' expense. It involved no "freedom"in any modern sense of government protection of innatehuman rights, neither for the masters nor for the slaves.


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In principle, it restricted the effective autonomy ofmasters (though this was a goal never fully realized) andignored the individual autonomy of the enslaved. Churchauthority over the salvation of souls would compete withthe commercial rights of property in the bodies of thesaved, to the political gain of the monarchy, not to thesecular benefit of any of the Africans held in slavery.

41. Louis XIV's delicate weaving of monarchicalcolonialism into the supply-side web of unrestrainedcommercial slaving on the far side of a large ocean waseffective as a political strategy, whatever its eventuallyconsiderable economic costs. By the 1680s, Dutch andEnglish merchants had built a decided lead indeveloping Atlantic commerce, and both the Netherlandsand England had taken these national traders intometropolitan strategic plans â€” monarchical in England,and essentially mercantile in the Netherlands.21 Forconsolidating royal French power at home foreign merchants were therefore problems rather than solutions,unlike the militarily insignificant Italian and Germanmerchants who had served the colonial and monarchical strategies of kings in Spain and Portugal in the earlysixteenth century. Merchants in continental France,however, were suitably needy to serve reliably as allies against aristocratic and also ecclesiastical competitors.The French monarchy therefore subsidized slaving in thename of French "national" interest, almost entirely inminor Breton ports with strong regional doubts about the acceptability of the Parisian power that Louis wasasserting.22 Slaving would build loyal â€” becauseheavily dependent â€” mercantile cadres in an otherwiseremote and reluctant part of the realm. The resultingdependence of the slave-owning planters of the Antilleson reliably struggling slaving firms in Nantes andelsewhere would provide a safely independent way ofcontrolling even the great local prosperity that plantersin the large colony of Saint Domingue would attainunder this regime, as they built the New World's largestpopulation of slaves throughout in the eighteenthcentury.

42. The French compromise thus attempted to combinecommercial slavery with monarchical colonialism â€” anunstable mixture at best. Given the incompatibility of thedirect political authority over royal subjects implied bycolonial rule with the independence that private retinuesof enslaved laborers and servants afforded rich andtherefore powerful planters, it could not work for long.The French monarchy accordingly propped up its


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colonial system with ever-more-costly subsidies, as thesubsidized directed the profits of their slaving into theirprivate purses while claiming (and to some extent, atleast, creating) desperate financial need within theirfirms. Planters executed parallel scams, familiar to anycompetent modern accountant, to live luxuriously in theislands, surrounded by enslaved retainers and importedmaterial splendor, while carrying deficits in theircurrency accounts with the suppliers of their slaves, thusallowing the slavers to return again to the royal coffersfor further subsidization. The wonders of capitalist debtthus reconciled local wealth in human property with theillusion of metropolitan control in France's Americanislands â€” thus, private slavery under colonialgovernment sponsorship. This indebtedness became partof the circumstances that moved planters in SaintDomingue to attempt to seize political control forthemselves when the military power of colonial ruleevaporated in the wake of the Revolution in Paris in1789. They then attempted to mobilize the humanproperty whom they thought they controlled in selfdefense but found that the Africans whom they hadenslaved had other ideas of their own.

44. The slaves of the French initiated the "HaitianRevolution" of 1791 in part because of the power of theideas of political independence that another group ofindebted owners of slaves, similarly chafing at the colonial ambitions of a distant monarch haddemonstrated fifteen years earlier in North America. English investors had carried Tudor and Stuart royalbanners abroad in the enterprising spirit of private"plantations" rather than through military conquests byrepresentatives of the crown. In the triumphal wake of the 1588 defeat of Spain's great armada and through the essentially maritime seventeenth-century rivalry with theDutch English military, strategies focused instead on thehigh seas. Systematic English slaving in the Atlantic had begun, as had the slaving of the Portuguese, as ancillaryto the search for precious metals as English navalstrength became dominant. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672, focused on the gold ofwestern Africa and also accepted responsibility fordelivering captives to toil on nascent sugar plantations inBarbados and Jamaica. From the Company's point of view, slaving was as much as a concession as it wasowing to inherent confidence in the profitability of theventure. No doubt some, at least, among its directors expected to find ways to sell captive Africans to theFrench and particularly the Spanish, in return for silver.Port Royal in Jamaica served this underlying strategy


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particularly well.46.

Planters in Barbados and Jamaica framed theirproprietarial interest in the Africans that the RoyalAfrica Company sold them in order to use their laborforce as collateral against the debts they incurred to the Company, which became the primary financier of theinitial investment in sugar-producing capacity in theBritish West Indies. With the start-up capital that the Company provided they then built larger and moreintegrated sugar producing estates than the Portuguese inBrazil had been able to consolidate. But they also ended up considerably more in debt to their metropolitancreditor than had their predecessors in Brazil, and muchmore dependent on metropolitan suppliers of labor.Slaves only partly paid for thus empowered mid-seventeenth-century West Indian slave-owners atthe critical moment of monarchical weakness inrevolutionary England. The restored monarchy thus rested its strategy on the commercial power that slaverywas building in American sugar and directed its colonialmilitary and territorial ambitions toward the great masses of India, the gleaming "jewel in the crown" ofthe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Englishmonarchy. India then became the seedbed and prototype for later attempts at direct colonial rule in Africa andelsewhere. Unlike the incompatibility of privatecommercial slavery with government colonialism in the Americas, the British Raj turned a blind eye toubiquitous domestic slavery of women and childrenthroughout the subcontinent, both among their Indian allies and even in the households of their ownemployees.23 This household form of slavery had notthreatened Spanish colonial control in the Americas inthe same way as did large gangs of enslaved men working productively on sugar plantations, and in Indiait apparently tolerated the illusion of direct colonialcontrol through the East India Company.

47. In the English Americas, what is now loosely termed"colonialism" fell far short of the pro-consularship of theviceroy in British India. The American colonies were"colonial" in the strict sense of monarchical control primarily in relation to the Crown's exclusion offoreigners from the sphere within which Britishcommerce operated. The British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish monarchs of the eighteenth century thussought the only advantage that they could hope to attain,under their unmet needs for cash to pay for these extensive and expensive claims, in collecting taxes onthe trade they fostered within their respective


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mercantilist domains. The resulting national monopolies raised prices for the finished goods, and slaves, sent outto the Americas and restricted prices paid there toproducers of raw commodities, largely employing slaves, thus forcing overproduction. The resultingpersistent cash indebtedness drove American masters,rich in land and in slaves, to question the viability of these indirect increasing tendencies toward colonial ruleas they developed in the second half of the eighteenthcentury. West Indian planters, lacking sufficient land inthe islands to reinvest profits advantageously there, tended to transfer their liquid assets back to England andso developed a stake in the metropolitan economy. Butin North America, where land was cheap in cash terms and available for investing assets held in slaves whowere reproducing abundantly, planters seized theopportunity of openings to the West by declaring their independence of the British crown in 1776. Growingpopulations of slaves maintained independently ofBritish suppliers and available for further deployment on the frontier thus emboldened North American planters,also debtors to England, to realize the fears of Spanishkings two and one-half centuries earlier, by using theirhuman property to reject British attempts to consolidate controls of a directly colonial character. Slavers haddemonstrated their ability to thwart even incipientlydirect colonial rule.24

49. Owners of slaves were sufficiently powerful in thenew United States in 1789 that they forced recognitionof slavery in a national constitution dedicated to freedom(for at least a few), and they defended their human property successfully throughout the first half of thecentury, even in the highest institutions of the federalgovernment. Where there was no heritage of strong,direct colonial rule, slavery tended to prevail. The central United States government essentially acquired itsdominating role in politics in North America insignificant part through the populist campaigns that abolitionists waged in the 1840s and 1850s againstslavery and the wartime mobilization that ended it in the1860s.

50. The United States thus moved from consideringslavery an unfortunate embarrassment to the politicalideals of "liberty" that propelled thirteen colonies toreject the "slavery" of British domination to holding it anabomination so alien to American soil that men and boys eagerly died to eradicate it or defend it, as a newlyconstituted but still pluralistic republic became asingular "nation" straining toward a sense of its own


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unity. In fact, of course, the United States became morediverse in the first half of the nineteenth century eventhan its colonial past, as immigrants from CatholicIreland and eastern and southern Europe and elsewhere thronged to its shores. But a safe war against its Mexicanneighbor to the south in the 1840s and the shared visionof a western frontier of opportunity open to all, as well as popular reform movements began to build a popularsense of nationhood. This populism, both southern andnorthern, then divided over the presence of the slavesamong them, or not, as alien to the coherent and singular "national" identity toward which many strained. Thecompromises of the Constitution of 1789 betrayed thecomposite character of the early Republic, in which gentleman farmers relied on the slaves they held toprotect themselves from encroachment by a strongfederal government that would serve the interests of the very commercial development that had left them badlyindebted. The stronger national government thatdeveloped from the 1830s through the 1860s, and the popular masses who looked to it for the "civil"protections it seemed to offer newcomers and for thelands it distributed to farmers driven west by commercialization in the east, could not continue toconsolidate the "national interest" over the opposition ofthe prosperous slave-owners of the antebellum "cotton south." Strong, centralized government, particularly inits populist North American form, could not tolerate theautonomy provided by holding residents in slavery.25

52. The subsequent formation of similarly "national" (ifonly in theory) governments throughout thenineteenth-century Americas translated theincompatibility of strong government â€” whethercolonial or national â€” with the private autonomies thatslaving supported. Rather than appearing then as aconflict between a distant military monarchy in Europeand commercially oriented slave-holding Americanplanters, the struggle south of the Rio Grande becameone between weak republican governments andsurviving wealthy private interests from the colonialperiod. The former tended to appeal to the popularmasses, both out of the enlightened idealism of theirleaders and also out of their sheer need to find sources ofstrength to oppose the autonomous power of owners ofhundreds, if not thousands of slaves. The independentregimes in the former Spanish colonies, heirs to atradition of monarchical rule from afar, simply abolishedslavery, asserting its incompatibility with strong nationalgovernment of, by, and for all its citizens, includingeveryone resident within it. There authoritarian rule


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tended to remain, often under the coloring of populism,and the diverse Native, African, and Hispanic cultures ofthese countries were not mobilized to assert dominanceon the grounds of politicized "race," as in the UnitedStates, where a participatory civic government meantthat full acknowledgement of citizenship carried with it,at least theoretically, potentially powerful civil rights. Innumerous cases, the descendants of these slavesmaintained strongly "African" cultures, but these tendedto disappear behind the rhetoric of a relatively Hispanicnational political culture.

54. In Brazil, the nineteenth-century heirs to the colonialsenhores de engenho expanded slaving to staff the development of coffee estates as well as sugarplantations. They seized control of a monarchical government at Rio de Janeiro by assimilating thePortuguese royal house when Napoleon's armies drove itfrom Lisbon in 1807. When the British restored the Portuguese throne to the peninsula in 1821, theseBrazilian aristocrats claimed independence not as arepublic but as an empire headed by a royal heir. Slavery presented little threat to this "composite" state, and so itthrived on through a voluminous continuing trade withAngola, directly across the southern Atlantic, in spite ofnaval interference by the British West Africa Squadron and sometimes fervent diplomatic pressure fromLondon. Given the Brazilian imperial state's basiccommitment to slaving, the effective external presence was British financial capital, which flooded Brazil afterits loss of markets in North America. The direct slavingconnection to Africa, in which private British (and NorthAmerican) investors colluded, once again in defiance of the military force and contrary to the policy of theCrown government in London, helped to keep Brazilindependent of the neo-colonialism of nineteenth-century British "free trade."26 Slavesremained the basis of a fragmented Brazilian independence, more a collaboration among regionallanded aristocracies (sometimes headed by militarycapitÃ£es), than an integrated "national" government. Emancipation for the enslaved came only in the 1880s,when "free" immigrants from Portugal, Italy, Germanyand elsewhere, joined by ex-slaves and their descendants, had built a popular base sufficient forpoliticians less invested in slavery to assert themselvesby calling it to "national" arms. For the last time in thewestern hemisphere, an aspirant national regime had found slavery incompatible with centralization of itspolitical authority.


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Colonialism Continued55.

The arena of confrontation between slavery andcolonialism then moved to Africa and Asia, as Europeattempted to extend its unitary conceptualization ofpolitical authority as "imperial" control on around theworld. In broad terms, the slavers there were the wealthyand otherwise powerful among the conquered. Centralauthority, represented by the metropolitan governmentsthat backed colonial military regimes, depended onestablishing direct access to the laboring forces of thecolonies they claimed. However, and particularly inAfrica, large proportions â€” sometimes majorities â€”of the populations whom the Europeans encounteredwere living as slaves.27 The Europeans had justified thisradical extension of political control as defending thepersonal liberty of individuals being seized there and sent as slaves to Muslim regions around theMediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, as well as theothers subjected to enslavement within Africa, and so they could not publicly acknowledge the slaveholdersamong the Africans for whom they had taken politicalresponsibility.28 However, at that early stage of consolidating effective colonial control, rebuilding afterthe disruptions of military conquest, they had no popularlegitimacy and so depended on the coercive powers ofthe slave-holders to mobilize resources of any sort.

56. This always-uneasy tension between central authorityand the relative autonomy that holding slaves gave tothose subjected to it settled into an uneasy stand-off inearly colonial Africa. Most colonial regimes strained toprotect collaborating African slave-holders as "traditional chiefs" or recognized them in othersubordinate roles in local administration, turning a blindeye toward the extent to which their abilities to deliver in those capacities depended on the control theyexercised by including slaves among their retinues.29

They proclaimed formal emancipation for anyone whowished to declare her- or himself a slave, and they often responded effectively to the small number of individualswho presented themselves seeking "freedom." Theymounted slightly more intensive and effective efforts to suppress violent seizure and open trading in slaves. Butthe publicity value of these policies at home in themetropole exceeded their worth to most of the people they thus claimed to rescue. With a few notableexceptions,30 most of those living as slaves preferred theprotection of their masters, especially as these patronsenjoyed the favor of colonial regimes hardly less brutal


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than the daily mistreatment and humiliation that theyendured at home. The colonial cash economy was tooweak to offer any advantage to a slave seeking to earnwages to support him- or herself alone. In early colonialAfrica one can observe the inverse of the apparentincompatibility of private slavery with the strong andunitary governments: weaker, effectively "compound" or"composite" state regimes tended to develop the limiteddegrees of collaboration that they reached bystrengthening willing participants in them throughsupporting â€” or in this case merely allowing â€”slaving.

58. World War I forced direct mobilization of colonialAfrican subjects, slave or not, and metropolitaninvestment in the colonial economies finally offered those living in slavery realistic opportunities to supportthemselves independently of their patrons, in cities, orby contract to plantations and mines. However, such de facto self-liberation came at the often-high cost of subjugation to the erratic and discriminatorilyinadequate provisions of the colonial state for its Africansubjects. From the perspective of one thinking, as most Africans did, of slavery as a matter of loyaltyreciprocated by responsibility, the colonial state and itsentrepreneurial and industrial collaborators were lessattractive patrons than the security of the private patronage they could count on, however humiliatingly,as slaves. In the long perspective of the politics ofslavery and colonialism, the weak colonial state in Africa did not live up to its claims of providing for itssubjects, and slavery thus survived by default and withthe tacit consent of at least some of those enslaved.31

59. It is the same weakness of the subsequentindependent governments in Africa, or their willingnessto allow their own impoverished citizens to emigrate inpursuit of supporting themselves adequately elsewhere,that encourages contemporary slaving at the start of thetwenty-first century. The dialectic of slavery andcolonialism thus represents one historical phase of anenduring tension between recruiting personnel fromexternal sources to compete for position withincomposite polities anywhere in the world â€” Europe aswell as Africa â€” and centralized authorities extendingrecognition, privileges, liberties, and eventually "rights"in the case of the nationalist regimes of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, as well as the "civilization"offered to the subjects of modern colonial rule in Africaand Asia.

60.


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Through all the varying political cultures around theAtlantic and throughout its accelerating commercialeconomic growth from the sixteenth to the nineteenthcenturies, and beyond, slavery indeed appearsincompatible with colonialism, but in ways that variedhistorically, and intriguingly. Confirming Verlinden'sessentially timeless generalization in historical termsrequires making relevant distinctions among the variousinterests contending among themselves behind theideology of unity that large, centralizing states â€”monarchical, nationalist, or imperial â€” adopt tonaturalize themselves at the expense of the alternative,more local or regional, or economic interests that theythus assemble into a single claims political entity. Inbroadly schematic terms, the significant dialectic ofthese centuries in Europe and in the possessions aroundthe Atlantic that its monarchs claimed pitted increasinglycentralized political institutions â€” first monarchies,later "nations" â€” against preceding arrays of local andregional military lords (through the sixteenth century),then against commercial corporations (in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries), and eventually against anyprivate interest excluding dependents as slaves fromtheoretically inclusive, participatory "national"governments. This evolving dialectic suggests a precisedistinction between "colonialism" as the enterprise ofcentral governments within domains they control andslavery as a resort to human resources (whether labor, orservice, or merely presence as retainers of utterlyundivided personal loyalty, or obedience) from outsidethe range of the increasingly comprehensive claims ofstates to residents born within its jurisdiction â€” at firstas subjects, eventually as citizens.

61. Political and military expansion first enables slavingby establishing marginal, initial contact with remote("enslaveable") populations and then makes it necessaryfor marginal participants in the process of political consolidation to use the people enslaved in their ownparticular interests, against the expansive state. Slavingthus dialectically generates a brake, an automaticgovernor, on the consolidating military state. In Europe, monarchy generated slaving in Africa and the Americas.Slavery in the Americas in turn supported the revoltsthat marked the transition to national civic states both there and later in Europe.32 At home, monarchs based their ambitions toward centralized political authority bypromising "liberties" over the heads of competingpatrons, thus intruding on the privacy of domains maintained by serfdom or through slaving. These"liberties" then became the cause that later generations


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asserted on their own accounts as "rights" under "natural" law higher than the laws of monarchicalabsolutism.

63. Seeing slavery and colonialism as a dynamiccompetition between marginal interests using slavingstrategies (expressed first as personal retinues, later interms of commercial law as "property") and stronger andstronger military states â€” later nations â€” suggests adialectical politics that does not emerge from analysespredicated on the unitary ideology of the modern state.Most existing sociological statements of incompatibilityrest on the unproblematized premise of comprehensive"societies" or civic polities. The first logical step ingrasping the underlying dialectic is to view all polities as"compound" or "composite" beyond the unifyingideologies that they must construct to conceal preciselythis complexity.33 Aspirant monarchs in Europe, beforethey became kings, depended on merchants and theiraccess to distant resources to build military powersufficient to claim direct subjugation of the peasants andothers â€” including Native Americans â€” who hadwould otherwise have owed primary allegiance to rivalaristocrats. Merchants then appropriated the access theygained to not only the gold of Africa (ultimately claimedby kings) but also to its populations. With slaving, theycreated private commercial domains in the New World.The very ambitious European monarchs of the lateseventeenth century then faced the challenge â€” onethey generally failed to meet â€” of establishing directcolonial control over the American economies they hadfostered.

64. The politics of the American "colonies" of theeighteenth century bore only a nominal relationship tothe twentieth-century "colonies" in Africa, since most ofthe people in the Americas were enslaved, thus excluded from the direct reach of the government. Theslave-owning planters of English North America and French Saint Domingue claimed formal politicalrecognition of the autonomy they in fact enjoyed, notleast because of the enslaved people they owned. The North Americans, slaving relatively independent ofBritish suppliers of enslaved Africans, succeeded inclaiming independence. They succeeded also because of the acquiescence of their enslaved families of Africandescent, whom they had by then encouraged toreproduce into the third and fourth generations. A few ofthese enslaved claimed the "freedom" that British officials offered them in the ensuing war to undercuttheir American owners, evidently knowing full well the


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sensitivity of the revolutionaries' prospects to the quiescence of the people they owned.

66. Not many of the slaves responded, since for themfamily at home, even under slavery, seemed to offersecurity more reliable than the mercies of people whohad bought their ancestors in Africa and brought them to America in chains. The enslaved populations of SaintDomingue, in contrast, were first-generation, mostlymales, and hence unencumbered with personal responsibilities, other than to themselves. Once Frenchmilitary control weakened after 1789, they took mattersviolently into their own hands. National governments throughout the Spanish Americas abolished slavery intheir national constitutions, since their futures dependedon eliminating private domains of slavery to declare at least theoretical equality among their politicallyparticipating citizenries. Slavery challenged nationalismand its implicit ideal of unitary and comprehensive statepower, as sharply distinct from the compound premises of republicanism, with its conceptual space for genteelheads of large households and clienteles, no less than ithad threatened the similarly unitary claims of absolute monarchs.34 The apparent paradox of Washington andJefferson in the United States, gentlemen farmers withhundreds of slaves on their large estates in Virginia, launching a republic thus resolves.

67. The contradiction between state power and privateslavery continued through the true state colonialism ofthe first half of the twentieth century. In the wake of thecolonial conquests of the 1880s and 1890s weak, reluctant, and otherwise preoccupied governments inEurope conceded virtual enslavement of localpopulations to a spectrum of collaborators in Africa (but less so in Asia), notably private enterprises given virtualautonomy in vast domains. This moment correspondedto the free-booting conquistadores of sixteenth-centuryNew Spain in the challenge that these "concessionarycompanies" posed to metropolitan control, and in their tendency to treat the inhabitants of their domainsessentially as slaves subject to seizure and arbitrarilyharsh demands for their labor. King Leopold's Congo Independent State was the most notorious example.35

Metropolitan governments soon ended these abuses in the name of colonial responsibility (but one may alsoread "control") and "abolished" slavery, of course. Theyused the prospect of legal emancipation to undermine their African slave-holding partners, most of whom heldpositions worth the attention of the colonial regimes


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only because of their retinues of slave dependents gainedduring the chaos of the second half of the nineteenth century.

69. Whatever the limited personal autonomy gained bythe few slaves "freed" in colonial courts, thecontradiction of colonial authority and slave-basedautonomy maintained a viable balance, at least throughthe First World War. The war effort forced the colonialregimes to gain more direct access to these generalAfrican populations, and then the economic challengesof the 1920s and 1930s brought assertions of ever-moredirect government authority over the residents ofcolonies in Africa. Former enslaved dependents soughtautonomy â€” or perhaps better: honorable clientage â€”as subjects of the colonial state, as employees ofEuropean enterprises, as converts in the Christianmissions, or as members of Islamic sufi brotherhoods to lessen the risk of vulnerable isolation that accompaniedindividual opportunity, or opportunism. Slavery inAfrica accordingly became more a humiliating personal legacy than a contemporary obstacle to individualself-assertion through access to money, education, andother resources distributed by the state.

70. World War II extended much more widely theparadoxes â€” hearing the siren song of personalautonomy but too insecure to heed it â€” of people whowere simultaneously colonial subjects in public andslaves within the private domains of their owncommunities. These uncertainties prepared the groundfor the intensely emotional, and deeply paradoxical,collective self-assertion of the "nationalism" of the1950s, at once mobilizing older, more parochial loyaltiesto win the opportunity to build a future "national"integrated civic community that might providecomparable security. For many reasons, few Africangovernments realized this promise for long, and theardent collectivism of the nationalist phase of modernAfrica's history faded toward the weak states andpopular cynicism of the early twenty-first century. Giventhe incompatibility of strong, particularly populist,government with slavery, it should not surprise thatwarlords, ethnic genocides, and "contemporary slavery"have exploded into the power vacuum. Theydemonstrate the ongoing incompatibility of slavery notonly with colonialism but also with every form ofintegrated, unitary political community beyond theprivate collectivities characteristically built throughslaving. Monarchical, national, and colonial regimes alldepend on asserting direct civil authority over resident


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populations; interests marginalized by all these forms ofpolitical consolidation have frequently resorted toslaving to build private retinues immune from the claimsof an encroaching state. In historical terms, slavingtherefore flourished in remote regions of the growingAtlantic world because monarchical regimes needed it."National" governments suppressed it in the name ofcomprehensive â€” "equal" â€” access to all of theircitizens.

The Papers71.

The essays that comprise the principal contents ofthis special issue approach these very broad historicaldynamics through the eyes of those who experienced theisolation of enslavement or the shared subjugation ofconquest and exploitation. Their experiences contrast noless than do the abstractions of "slavery" and"colonialism." Masters resisted central governmentauthority primarily because they could acquire Africansas isolated individuals, culturally disabled (as well asphysically debilitated) by forced removal and dispersionto entirely alien environments in the New World.Colonial conquests, on the other hand, attempted tocontrol people who lived in viable, if momentarilydefeated, communities. In fact, colonial rule in Africadepended on the collaboration of the leaders of theseintact communities, slaves and all, particularly in itsearly phases and often also particularly on former slavesseeking respect from Europeans that they could notobtain at home. The following papers rangeconveniently, for analytical purposes deriving from thiscontrast, from slaves in early seventeenth-centurySpanish America to mid-twentieth-century colonialsubjects in central Africa. They also evoke perspectivesof Africans from immediately after their arrival in theNew World as slaves to the modern heirs of theAmerican-born generations they left behind them. Themeanings of these experiences, especially as evoked inliterary modes, bring to life the abstractions thatstructure this introductory essay â€” an essential step ifwe are to understand the human motivations that createthe historical dynamics of slavery and moderncolonialism.

72. Kathryn McKnight's sensitive probe of a Spanishjudicial inquiry in Cartagena de Indias into the earlyseventeenth-century palenque of LimÃ³n reveals a richarray of implications for understanding the human dynamics of the African diaspora and of slavery. Shecautiously associates "Queen" Leonor's ritualized


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violence in America with similarly intense immolation and even consumption of other victims during thepreceding decades in Angola. The success of thepalenque confirms the dependence of slavery on the isolated vulnerability of its victims, since enslavedAfricans who in this case managed to find companionsof common backgrounds and to appropriate their shared African heritage collaborated effectively to resist slaveryin the Americas. McKnight approaches these dramatic, ifnot also desperate, practices as the strategies of peopletrapped in contexts not of their own making, rather than falling back on such inert abstractions as "culturalsurvivals" to explain their behavior. Rephrasing whatMcKnight shows in the language of culture, one would say that the murders in LimÃ³n were novel adaptationsof previous experience to exigencies of the moment. Ifthere was continuity, it occurred at the abstractpsychological level of the efficacy of such spectacular, even horrifying, techniques in forging functionalcommunities out of strangers thrown on one another formutual survival. In Angola refugees from the chaos of severe and extended drought banded together throughsuch rituals; in Cartagena de Indias they createdcommunity beyond the isolation of their enslavement.

74. The complement of this characteristically Africanemphasis on community solidarity is that for thempersonal identity and dignity flowed not from theisolated autonomy of modern "freedom" but rather from belonging somewhere, in a group. Belonging mattersparticularly in the political context of the polities that Ihave described as "compound" or "composite"; there no comprehensive and inclusive civic state exists to protectindividuals, to guarantee the security provided bymonarchical general "liberties" or democratic "rights" or the rule of law. Rather, security derives from the favor ofa strong patron; unquestioning loyalty is balanced byresponsible patronage. In this universe of relationalidentities, personal duplicity is far more than a disappointment; it is life-threatening. Betrayed trust ofthis vital sort repeatedly punctuates the legal records ofthe LimÃ³n palenque that McKnight cites, asjustifications for the conflicts and violence performed. A party to a partnership, however unequal, whoundermines its purposes is no longer immune from anyform of retaliation, including murder; the moral bond is trust is broken. Complex and ambiguous relationships ofmutual dependency are at the core of Orlando Patterson'ssubtle sociology and psychology of slavery.36 InCartagena McKnight shows these relationships acted out, or acted out in response to violations of them, in a


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complex American invocation of African methods ofresponding to perfidy, no doubt given an urgency all the greater because of the deprivations and brutalities ofenslavement. McKnight gives us a much more nuancedand productive model for handling conflict in the context of slavery than the usual tautological leap fromslavery as "total domination" to slave initiative almostexclusively as "resistance."

76. Michelle Collins-Sibley's readings of OlaudahEquiano's "interesting narrative" and of the poetry ofPhillis Wheatley converge suggestively on the sametheme of deceit by someone who should have been worthy of trust. Equiano's African past, first-hand or not,begins with this key trope, and betrayal recursthroughout his narrative of his early life in the Atlantic world, where he was promised patronage again andagain, and each time was betrayed. The only secureplace, as the narrative develops, is to reinvent himself as a late-eighteenth-century individual, self-creating andself-supporting through writing and selling his ownbiography. With regard to Wheatley, Collins-Sibley'saccent on poetic expression, like Iroquois masks, as an emotional reaction to personal trauma that expressesagony more deeply than words, suggests a furtherovertone to the brutality of "Queen" Leonor's carnage in the palenque de LimÃ³n. Slaughter on the systematic scale that she pursued must also have released thetraumatic stresses of capture, the Middle Passage, and enslavement in the Americas, all capped by betrayal ofthe only thread of security that these slaves and fugitiveshad been able to spin.

77. Elizabeth West's examination of AlexanderCrummell's failure to win the "hearts and minds" of theAfricans in Liberia offers an intriguing reversal of racialroles: Crummell, the American black as colonizer inmid-nineteenth-century Liberia. Like the other papers inthis collection, West contextualizes her subject carefully,to explain how American (and English) Crummell hadbecome, as his predecessor David Walker hadproclaimed in his famous response to Thomas Jeffersonand others, who worried acutely about a future UnitedStates divided into co-resident races of â€” as they saw itâ€” irremediably unequal prospects. However, raciallines in the presence of ongoing slavery had not yetconsolidated to a degree that would forceAfrican-Americans to look to Africa as the "homeland"that it became for their grandchildren andgreat-grandchildren later in the twentieth century. In the1850s and 1860s, Crummell was at pains to represent the


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European civilization that he â€” like Equiano â€” hadworked so hard to obtain. In the context of the presentessay, Crummell represented the direct claims onsubjects, the Africans living inland from Monrovia, thatcharacterize colonialism.

79. The ex-slave as colonialist may not be the anomalythat present-day racial assumptions might make it seem:rather, Crummell represents the intense desire of theenslaved to belong. He came of age in the United States,as an American, during the flowering of nationalism inhis native country and went to Liberia as itsself-appointed representative, intent on "civilizing thenatives" by spreading the gentle gospel of Christianity.The "natives," of course, as colonial subjects hadnetworks and communities of their own that allowedthem to ignore Crummell and the otherAmerico-Liberians â€” unless they applied force.Crummell's failure in Liberia thus demonstrates theelemental dependency of colonialism, particularly in itsearly and weak manifestations, on collaborators, or onviolence. Its subjects are anything but culturallydisabled, anything but needing to look elsewhere than tothemselves to belong.

80. Olivia Smith Storey's exploration of the widespread,and widely studied, literary image of "flying Africans"weaves together a number of themes derived from thefundamental incompatibility of enslavement and colonial subjugation. Like the other scholars writing here, she isat pains to contextualize the relationship between slaveand master, or in her case between heirs to each as theyremembered slavery days from the perspective of the 1930s. In her literary mode of analysis the context is thenarrator of the story, the African-American, the slave orex-slave born into slavery rather than captured (like Equiano, Wheatley, and the malemba of the LimÃ³npalenque) in Africa. In this respect, thetwentieth-century narrators of stories about the "flyingAfricans" are Americans like Crummell. But, unlikeCrummell, they are people excluded from thesatisfactions of the American culture into which theywere born. Rather than adopting and proselytizing itsvalues, they look nostalgically back to an Africaromantically imagined through the strange and exquisitepowers of the true Africans â€” who spoke mysteriouswords and then soared into the skies, presumably back toAfrica, leaving the American-born â€” whom she terms"Creoles" â€” to wonder at what of their powerfulheritage they have lost. Unlike Crummell again, they didnot have the opportunity to learn the realities of Africa


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first-hand. Storey's triangle of African, Creole, andOverseer may also represent â€” beyond the severalaspects of it that she explores â€” the gap between theenslaved and the colonized, the former removed andmobile but the latter rooted and left behind. This parallelimplies that the position of the formerly enslaved in thetwentieth-century United States is like that of thecolonized â€” present but not participating, subject tothe comprehensive authority of excluding law butbelonging in strong networks of family and faith.Enslavement, by contrast, has its advantages from theperspective of the resigned â€” possessed ofunintelligible words that invoke unseen but evidentlyambient energies.

82. Knight describes a parallel energy or force invokedby "talkin' to tools" as an expression of other-worldlypowers asserted by the powerless in the day-to-dayworld of post-slavery subjugation. Like Story's magicalincantations â€” or, for that matter, not unlikeCrummell's faith in The Christian Word and in theempowering qualities of speaking English â€” wordshave powers that exceed the mundane force of the whipapplied by masters, overseers, or colonial police. Thepower of speech has become an axiom in thepost-modern world of European and American culturalstudies, but these nineteenth-century African-Americansevidently understood the point, a century beforeFoucault.

83. With regard to the African antecedents of beliefs likethese in the Americas, Knight touches on several widelyseparated parallel notions in Africa â€” Asante, Kongo,and Songhay. This strategy, unlike McKnight's handlingof the "jaga" tradition in Angola, seems intended not toidentify a specific African locale from which slaves inthe Americas might have derived this image but rather tosuggest a very broad way of believing â€” as distinctfrom specific beliefs â€” around which slaves of manybackgrounds in Africa congregated in the Americas, allbut spontaneously. That is, apparent specificmanifestations of Africans' backgrounds may be lesssignificant than the diffuse commonalities that Africansin the Americas adapted, even unrecognizably to theirown practitioners, to their circumstances in the NewWorld. If these adaptations proved effective, eachgeneration of American-born slaves who followed thegeneration born in Africa expressed them in new ways,applied to and derived from the circumstances of latermoments. The implication of this process is that the lesssuperficially similar to specific African practices these


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unarticulated "memories" were, the more important theywere to Africans' children and heirs who made use ofthem in the Americas.37

85. Stuart Marks's essay carries us forward in time andeast across the Atlantic to British Central Africa in theearly years of European rule. His is a story of a verysmall village in a remote (from the British colonialauthorities' perspective) valley. In this narrative Marksvery clearly shows the background of intense slavingwithin the region during the late nineteenth century andthe weakness of the colonial authorities there early in thetwentieth. He shows us the intricacies of attempting tointrude on intact colonial communities and the ongoingsignificance of slave background â€” whether personalorigin as in the case he recounts of one Makulushya â€”or anywhere identifiable in the background of one'sparents. We see here the personalism of power andauthority; there may be an abstracted political "office"(the Chitala), but the relational identity of the one whoholds it matters enormously. This personalized notion ofpower contrasts sharply with the abstracted notions ofauthority that developed in Europe and around theAtlantic as fiefdoms grew to small kingdoms, and thento large monarchies with colonial extensions on aroundthe globe. The face-to-face qualities of communities likeMakulushya's, or Nkuka's, could only be imagined onthese large scales, beyond shared obligations to amysticized figure of the king as an intimate (often"father") of all his subjects. A similarly relational andpersonalistic notion of society surrounded LimÃ³n, if notalso in the narrative of Equiano and in the poetry ofWheatley.

86. With specific regard to slavery, Makulushyarepresents a tendency widespread in early colonialAfrica (and subsequently) for slaves to use Europeanauthorities, almost entirely innocent of the webs ofranked relationships constituting African communities,to claim places in the colonial sphere much moreadvantageous than their humble positions at home.Colonial subjugation was preferred, evidently by at leastsome, to the isolation and humiliation of slavery â€”particularly early, when colonial power was weak. Thetwo separate but intricately intertwined spheres offeredroom to maneuver to slaves, whose position was definedby lack of options among the multiple and overlappingrelationships that created a degree of autonomy forindividuals able to construct these networks, even in thestrongly communal ethos of Africa. Their relationalidentity was singular, to whomever had acquired them;


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appointment to a position in the "native" level of thecolonial administration in effect added a second, verypowerful patron. The enslaved knew well how to exploitsuch opportunities. Elsewhere (if not also in NorthernRhodesia) chiefs under heavy pressure from colonialofficials to fulfill labor quotas satisfied them by sendingyoung slaves off to work in distant plantations or oncopper, gold, and other mines, under debilitatingconditions, only to find that even the limited cash theyearned there reduced their dependency. Missionaries"ransomed" slaves and welcomed the slave children ofAfrican political authorities to their schools; significantnumbers of the first generation of western-educatedAfricans thus came from slave backgrounds. As they andtheir children assumed prominent positions in colonial(and eventually independent) governments after WorldWar II they had completely turned the tables on the heirsof their former masters. Weak, early colonialgovernments thus recruited the weak among theirAfrican collaborators; the formerly weak had becomestrong. This pattern illustrated in yet another way theincompatibility of colonialism and slavery, as colonialrule empowered the enslaved.

88. The same personalism pervaded the relationship ofslave and master in its classic form, including much ofAfrica, as Patterson develops so elegantly in Slavery and Social Death. However, enslavement in the Americaslost this quality of intimacy, as great numbers of Africanmen, and then also women and families in the UnitedStates, found themselves settled in remote "quarters" (inthe Chesapeake), living under the task system in theCarolina Lowcountry in homesteads and hamlets of theirown (the source of Storey's stories of "flying Africans"),or bunked in barracks or eventually living in villages onthe great West Indian sugar plantations. Thedisproportionately large numbers of enslaved Africansrelative to their masters made it possible for the peopleliving in these circumstances to relate â€” all butuniquely in the long world history of slavery â€”effectively with one another rather than with theirowner. In the United States, these historical intimaciesbetween slave and master persisted only among houseservants, in some cities in domestic environments, andon smaller farms with only a few enslaved personsworking as "hands" alongside the families who ownedthem. Otherwise, New World slavery had come toresemble the remote authoritarianism of colonial rule,and the enslaved lived in families of their own, withnetworks of relatedness extending far beyond theindividual farms and plantations on which they lived.

89


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Thorn elaborates the fundamental insight of all ofthese papers across a diverse range of writers. Wecannot understand the abstractions of slavery orcolonialism until, as she emphasizes, we recognize theindividuals who were enslaved or the people subjectedto colonial authority and experience â€” somehow, ifonly imaginatively â€” something of what they endured.She cites some of the many ways in which writers, oftenthemselves of colonial or enslaved backgrounds, insiston including the perspective of the "subaltern," theslave, the colonized. Thus the central American Maya,peoples of the Caribbean, Africans, Plains Indians, andothers sense their exclusions from the abstractionsdominating the modern social sciences â€” hereincluding political theories of both slavery andcolonialism. It is the same with the famed Equiano andWheatley, both of whom wrote themselves out of theoblivion of enslavement. Thorn insists on therecoverability of "alternative voices" and provides anenergized example of how to hear them.

90. Historians are meant to sense the meanings of eventsto the people who made them, thus to explain not only"who did what," but also "how and why" they did. Theliterary backgrounds of the majority of the contributorsto this collection of papers, notably including Thorn,seem productive in penetrating to the lived experiences,the significances, of enslavement and colonial rule alike.They are not conducting their pursuit of "others" throughdecontextualized abstractions but rather by situating allof the people they encounter in their times and theirplaces, thus historicizing their treatments. Theiremphasis on context parallels the fundamental strategyof the preceding more abstract discussion of theincompatibility of colonialism and slavery, whichexamined neither of these entities in abstracted isolationbut rather considered the competitive contexts on whichindividuals â€” kings, merchants, masters, the enslaved,the colonized â€” had their eyes as they colonized andenslaved.

Notes

1 Charles Verlinden, "Esclavitud medieval en Europa yesclavitud colonial en AmÃ©rica," Revista de la Universidad Nacional de CÃ³rdoba: Homenaje aMonseï¿½or P. Cabrera 1 (1958): 177-91; Translated as "Esclavage mÃ©diÃ©val en Europe et esclavagecolonial en AmÃ©rique," Cahiers de l'Institut des


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hautes Ã©tudes de l'AmÃ©rique latine 6 (1964): 27-45; also translated as "Medieval Slavery in Europe andColonial Slavery in America (trans. Yvonne Freccero)," in The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 33-51.

For the major work, see Charles Verlinden, PÃ©ninsuleibÃ©rique. France, vol. 1 of L'esclavage dans l'EuropemÃ©diÃ©vale (Brugge: De Tempel, 1955), and, laterItalie - Colonies italiennes du Levant - Levant latin -Empire byzantin, vol. 2 of L'esclavage dans l'EuropemÃ©diÃ©vale (Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1977).

2 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1 (New York: Academic Press, 1974), subsequentvolumes, and many papers.

3 Wallerstein, "Africa in a Capitalist World, " Issue: A Quarterly Journal of Africanist Opinion, III, 3, Fall 1973, 1-11. "The Three Stages of African Involvementinto the World-Economy," in Peter C.W. Cutkind& Immanuel Wallerstein, Political Economy of Contemporary Africa. Vol. I of Sage Series onModernization and Development. Berverly Hills: Sge Publications, 1976, 30-57. [Revised ed., 1985, 35-63]

4 Eric Wolf's now-classic phrase as the title of hisEurope and the People Without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), with acknowledged inspiration fromHegel.

5 Roman imperial conquests combined territorial rule (colonies) with slaving. This apparent anomaly callsattention to the "modern" quality of the imperial"systems" that seem to render slavery and colonialism incompatible. Roman armies financed themselves andthe empire they created essentially by plunder, includingcaptives sent to Italy and elsewhere in slavery; cultivators left in the provinces presumably worked aspeasants on domains that sustained the ensuing Romanadministration from local resources. Except for small areas accessible by sea or riverain transport, the"peripheral" (or semi-peripheral) utilization("exploitation") of remote conquests was much less intense in the ancient economy than it became withmodern commercialization after about the seventeenthcentury. The provinces were not "colonies" integrated into an economic "system" but rather primarily localdomains, a kind of cursus honorarum, through which ambitious military aristocrats advanced careers ideallyleading back to Rome.


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6 Not the same emphasis as may be found in athoughtful examination of the relevance of Marx'sthought to Africa; Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, with foreword by Paul E. Lovejoy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); trans. by Alide Dasnois fromAnthropologie de l'esclavage: le ventre de fer et d'argent(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986).

7 The apparent African exception of the Dutch East India Company's colony at the continent's southern tip infact proves the rule, since local Khoi populations theresuccumbed early in the eighteenth century to Europeandiseases, and the Company then tried to develop the economic potential of the region by importing Asiansand Africans as slaves.

Other European outposts in Africa and throughout Asiawere essentially negotiated expatriate enclaves along thecoast (sometimes termed "trading posts," from the point of view of the Europeans), dependent on local sponsorsand also turning to enslaved imported labor out of theirinability to draw significantly on the laboring forcesresident in the surrounding region.

8 A methodological aside: since interpretations,historical or sociological, present arbitrarily selectedaspects of human experiences that are in fact infinitely multiplistic, I claim no particular primacy for the pairthat I accent here. If a rationalization justifies my choice,it is probably that politics and economics (or politicaleconomy) restate in historical terms the principal social-science aspects featured in the existing scholarlyliterature on both colonialism and slavery. One couldextend the effort to historicize into culture, psychology,and other more humanistic recent spheres of understanding the experience.

In making this explicitly historical move, I also distinguish sharply the abstracted implicitly theoreticalfirst part of the title of this journal from its second,explicitly historical component, perhaps moreso than theunproblematized conjoining of the two normally connotes.

9 Both recent major explorations of the origins of the"Atlantic system" focus, in differing registers, on thepreceding process of European self-definition as "Christian," largely in contrastive reaction to thesplendid and threatening unity of the Muslim oecumeneto the south and east; Robin Blackburn, The Making of


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New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern(London, New York: Verso, 1997); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas: The English inComparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

10 The military/merchant contrast, locked in an uneasyembrace of mutual dependency, dominates. Meillassoux,Anthropology of Slavery.

11 A point highlighted very promisingly in MaryNyquist, "Arbitrary Rule, Revolution and Abolition" (University of Nottingham, Institute for the Study ofSlavery â€” "Discourses of Abolition," 13-15 September2004). This broad suspicion of absolute power graduallybecame focused on the status of Africans purchased andowned throughout the Atlantic, though North Americanpatriots resurrected it in the eighteenth century, inprecisely its original sense, to protest what they viewedas the unjustified exertions of British monarchical powerover its subjects in the New World.

12 Often casually viewed through the lens of later NewWorld legislation applied to entirely differentcircumstances than medieval Iberia. In Castile, the issue was the eligibility for enslavement of the many differentethnic and religious groups in the recently reconqueredpeninsula, with the strong interest of the nascentCastilian monarchy lying in limiting the control that competing warlords might gain over the populationswho lived on the lands they conquered, and particularlyalso the often-Jewish merchant community.

13 The actual premise of Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982): that "societal"standing is primary in enabling individual autonomy. The point is valid, insofar as the further premise is theprimacy of the individual. The latter value explicitly didnot apply to a society based on fealty, thus relationships and belonging, rather than individualism.

14 I prefer "composite," since the logic of the wordprioritizes the elements assembled to compose a politicalentity, while "compound" refers to the resulting entity and thus logically backgrounds its components."Composite" thus refers to the multiple interests thattended to resort to slaving to protect themselves fromamalgamation into chemically transformed parts of a singular "compound."

15 This political perspective on slaving â€” incidentally


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â€” resolves the apparent paradox of government (thatis, royal) ownership of slaves. Spain staffed key royalmilitary installations, particularly in the Caribbean, withslaves owned by the monarchy itself. By emphasizingthat royal "government" was not "of/by/for the people"but rather a largely external (and only problematicallyimposing) presence in a prosperous commercial and verycosmopolitan environment like Havana's, it becomesobvious that the most reliable agents of the Crownwould be people no ties in the local society. Militaryofficers, and particularly local militia, werecompromised by conflicting family ties and connectionsof other sorts. Slaves alone were not. See, inter alia,Maria Elena DÃaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in ColonialCuba, 1670-1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2001).

"Royal slaves" thus appeared under government controlin complexly contested political environments in theAmericas, just as they did all-but-ubiquitously in politiesâ€” Muslim or not â€” throughout Africa and Asia. Themost recent and thoughtful study of "royal slavery" isSean Stilwell, Paradoxes of Power: The Kano "Mamluk" and Male Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate,1804-1903 (London: Heinemann, 2004); see Stilwell'sbibliography for the large range of scholarly works on this political strategy of slaving.

16 Compare the use of private corporations, "concessionary companies," structural equivalents ofsixteenth-century conquistadores in the Americas duringthe early phases (1880s-1910s) of Europe's colonialconquest of Africa. Also see further comments below.

17 Roquinaldo Amaral Ferreira, "Transforming AtlanticSlaving: Trade, Warfare and Territorial Control inAngola, 1650-1800" (PhD diss., University of Californiaâ€” Los Angeles, 2003); also Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan SlaveTrade, 1730-1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

18 Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery inEighteenth-Century France (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996).

19 Rather than the intellectual elegance favored bynearly all French scholars, or the hints of modernhumanistic sensibilities sensed by neo-abolitionist


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Anglophone commentators; see Alan Watson, "TheOrigins of the Code noir Revisited," Tulane Law Review, 71, no. 4 (1997): 1041-72, and Vernon V.Palmer, "The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir," Louisiana Law Review 56, no. 2 (1995): 363-90, and reprinted in Judith K. Schafer and Warren M. Billings,eds., An Uncommon Experience: Law and JudicialProceedings in Louisiana, 1803-2003 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of SouthwesternLouisiana, 1997), 331-59.

20 One may note here and elsewhere in this continuingdialectic the advantages that monarchical, and laternational, authority gained from depicting an inhumanesystï¿½me in the worst possible light.

21 The Dutch impulse to territorial control abroad focused on the Indian Ocean, and so Atlantic enterpriseremained essentially commercial, based on commercialslaving, as far east as the Cape of Good Hope. Dutchcolonialism in the Atlantic thus remained muted.

22 The best contextualized study of this process isRobert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through theWorlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002), which nicely frames the ambitions of minormerchants in the small port of Vannes in the 1720s.

23 Indrani Chatterjee, "Colouring Subalternity: Slaves,Concubines and Social Orphans under the East India Company," Subaltern Studies 10 (1999): 49-97; also Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

24 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge MA: BelknapPress, 2003) is the survey of choice of American slavery.In the context of this argument, however, it remains focused on the relations of slaves to their masters, andthose masters' political and social cultures, rather thanon the position of the masters in relation to the British crown, or the government of the United States.

25 Here I summarize a line of argument that I elaboratein "Abolition as Discourse: Slavery as CivicAbomination" ( conference on "Discourses of Abolition," University of Nottingham, Institute for theStudy of Slavery, 13-15 September, 2004).

26 For the larger political-economic dynamics, see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford


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University Press, 1987).

27 Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1988), and many subsequent studies.

28 Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Africana Pub. Corp., 1975).

29 The complex dynamics of using slave dependents to assert personal power against a prevailing ethos ofcollective responsibility and mutual obligation aretreated best in Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology ofSlavery.

30 For a recent and thoughtful survey, see Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

31 Suzanne Miers and Martin Klein, eds., "Slavery andColonial Rule in Africa," Slavery and Abolition, 19, no. 2 (1998), special issue . Also as Slavery and ColonialRule in Africa (London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999).

32 This is a political dimension of the economicconnection between "slavery and capitalism"firstproposed by Eric Williams, and more recently refined by Barbara Solow and Robin Blackburn. See Eric Williams,Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1944), republished with new intro.by Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge MA: W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, andNew York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From theBaroque to the Modern (London, New York: Verso,1996)

33 An adaptation of the point developed by Benedict Anderson as Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed., 2nd ed. (London; New York: Verso, 1991).

34 In this sense the caudillismo of the Spanish republicsand the capitÃ£es in imperial Brazil created a kind ofinformal rough-and-ready republicanism that obviated the theoretical democracy of these nations'constitutions.

35 Recently the subject of a popular history, AdamHochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed,


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Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

36 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.

37 A comment on Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of AfricanIdentities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998): Gomez usesseveral relatively ethnographic characterizations of theparts of Africa from which enslaved people were brought to North America to suggest general regionalorigins for specific African practices of the slavery era inthe United States. However, his use of the same WPAnarratives shows, in effect, how radically the expression of similar ideas had changed by the early twentiethcentury.

Within the set of papers presented here, the samecontrast emerges between the very specific ritual murderin LimÃ³n and Angola and the much more abstracted,coded, and adapted expression of "talkin' to tools" andthe "flying Africans." These dynamics of story-tellingparallel Africanists' understanding of the "oral traditions" that they study. My own (initial) thoughtsalong these lines appeared some while ago in "Listeningfor the African Past,"in The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (Folkestone: Wm. Dawson and Sons, 1980), 1-59.

Copyright Â© 2004 Joseph C. Miller and The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, all rights reserved.

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