Comparative Slavery

The roots of the comparative study of slavery rest on the now largely discredited project of fixing the relative violence and destructive of differing national systems of enslavement. This project was largely kick started by Frank Tannenbaum's 1947, Slave and Citizen. In this slim work, Tannenbaum argued that slavery in the Spanish world was less onerous and violent than Anglo-American slavery. Tannenbaum rooted this argument in a discussion of the law and religion. Prior to American colonization, Spanish law and its Roman predecessors had included slaves within the system of law. Likewise, the Catholic church encouraged (and at times demanded) the baptism and conversion of enslaved persons. For Tannenbaum, the fact that slaves in Iberian America existed at legal persons (and therefore imperial subjects) and coreligionists tempered the power of masters and provided for a more benign slavery. Crucially, Spanish law gave enslaved persons a path to manumission and self-purchase.
So much for Tannenbaum.
While Tannenbaum's specific points can--and have been--debated, more recent scholars have largely shifted away from his interpretive framework.
For this week I focused on the suggested reading, Richard S. Dunn's Tale of Two Plantations. Dunn compares two plantations, one in Virginia (Mount Airy) the other in Jamaica (Mesopotamia). Dunn's initial foray into this work in the 1970s operated within the Tannenbaum framework, an approach Dunn now rejects as misguided. Instead, Dunn proposes to use comparison more as a method than as an end goal. In Two Plantations Dunn uses the differences and similarities that emerge from comparative method as indicators of the importance of specific features of each system of slavery. If two plantation cultures within a broadly similar Anglo-American plantation complex show sharp contrasts, it is a strong indication of the importance of these differences and their constitutive roles in the plantation structures that arose.
Dunn focuses on two primary differences between these two plantation cultures: demography and trajectory. In Jamaica, the brutal regime of sugar manufacture lead to appalling death rates that required planters to continually import slaves to maintain a stable population and labor force. Virginia could not have been anymore different, the climate and crop culture of Virginia required smaller labor forces and ensured a population that grew due to natural increase. This demographic difference had profound influence on the slave cultures that appeared in both places. In Jamaica slave communities had to reckon with frequent deaths within their numbers and the continued arrival of newcomers. In Virginia, separation and sale, not death, was the defining feature.

In general I find Dunn's use of the comparative method more fruitful than direct comparative methods of the approach of Tannenbaum. However, comparative approaches have the danger of disregarding influence. Dunn's two examples do not line up chronologically, and perhaps a more fruitful venture is to look for how the experience of slavery and emancipation in Jamaica shaped the theory and practice of slavery in the United States. Such an approach opens more doors to transnational explorations and explanations.

The Numbers Game

Of all the topics we are to cover in seminar, the Atlantic slave trade is the one I know best. A year ago I did a historiography for Emily Clark's Atlantic World seminar on the project of quantifying the slave trade and the use and misuse of quantitative history in discussing slavery and diaspora.

Therefore, I am more acquainted with Curtin and Eltis than I would perhaps like to be.

While Curtin's project was a game changer in the study of Atlantic/American/European (I still haven't decided which term I prefer) slavery, it was equal parts mainstream and innovative. Curtin's work was only a smaller part of a broader shift toward quantitative history--think Fogel & Engerman  or the New England town studies (Greven especially) for the US or Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran for Mexico. This shift toward cliometrics was driven by an attempt to emphasize the conception of history as a social science and as a means to get at history from below. If subalterns left only minor traces in the archival record, perhaps by aggregating them into large data sets we could say something about their lives and experiences.

Unlike some cliometricians, Curtin was more circumspect and admitted the fallacy of assuming that numbers were "more 'scientific' and reliable than other kinds of data." (Curtin, 272) The aspect of Curtin's work that attracted the most attention and controversy, his new aggregate estimate for the scale of the slave trade, is, in my estimation, the least interesting aspect of his work.

Curtin's data set reveals several important trends. For instance, Curtin shows conclusively that their were major ebbs and flows in the source of enslave person over time. Regions, ports, and empires entered, left, and reentered the slave trade. Curtin's numbers do not explain this, but they do reveal it. This revelation invites further inquiry into the causes--European, African, and American--that led to these developments. Likewise, the revelation that the slave trade was not random--Africans from specific regions were brought en masse to specific places--has great relevance for how we conceive of diaspora. That slave ships did not bring disaggregated masses of people, but rather, people who shared cultural, linguistic, and ethnic traits, has important bearings on the discussion of Africanisms and retentions in the Americas that preoccupied Herskovitz, Price, and Mintz. Again, however, the revelations of the data are suggestive and not final.

Numbers tell a story of the Atlantic slave trade, they do not tell THE story.

Conceiving of Diaspora

The African dispora is a historical phenomenon of almost unfathomable scale, involving millions of people, multiple continents, and half a millenium of human history. This grand human event, however, was comprised of countless smaller diasporas. Every slave ship, every port, every planation was a diaspora unto itself.
My understanding of diaspora is essentially an exploration of how the individual movements of particular Africans to particular places and particular community and cultural formations shaped the history of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. This is a story of deep personal stories and large-scale historical processes. The tension between these two modes of discussion, and the necessity to not lose the human in the discussion of hemispheric movements are central to how I conceive of diaspora.
Having encountered Herskovitz and Gomez in prior courses I am familiar with their approach to the stduy of the African Diaspora and their work has shaped my understanding. The piece by White, however, reminded my to watch my frame of reference. Due to my research interests I tend to think of diaspora as a past event, and the present as perhaps the aftermath of diaspora. A tricky distinction, but I think a vital one.

What This Blog is For/Why I am in this Class

My interest in the African diaspora stems primarily from my interest in the American [read United States] South. Any understanding of the South historically, or presently, must begin and end with a reckoning with slavery and race. Slavery and racism are undoubtedly a national crime/experience, but in the South slavery began first, lasted longest, and shaped the culture most deeply. The post-emancipation reckoning with the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the South cemented the centrality of the African American experience for understanding Southern history.

My particular sub-field, the history of education, must likewise begin with W.E.B. DuBois' observation that "public education for all at public expense was, in the South, a Negro idea." What became of this "Negro idea" in the years between the Civil War and the Progressive Era (say 1920) is my main interest.

I see this course as an opportunity to explore some of the themes that preoccupy my own research in a broader chronological and geographic (and perhaps methodological) focus. When Americans in the 1860 thought about emancipation they thought about two things: Haiti and the British West Indies. At no time was America as insular or exceptional as a glance at the US history section of the library might suggest. I hope to explore aspects of the black experience in the Americas not so much in a comparative perspective, but a transnational one. To examine how ideas, people, and experiences flowed into and shaped one another and what the broader experience of diaspora(s) can tell us about the African American experience in the US South.

Intro

Hello, friends and classmates.

This is my blog for our Africans in the Americas seminar.

I will chart things related to our weekly readings and maybe occassional rantings on my semester paper.

Cheers,
Jason