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.