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Antislavery Debates: Tides of Historiography in Slavery and Antislavery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2011

Seymour Drescher
Seymour Drescher*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article reviews the changes in historical writing about slavery and the slave trade over the last 50 years.

Type
Articles
Information
European Review , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 131 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2011

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References

References and Notes

1. See, Oldfield, J. R. (2007) Chords of Freedom: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester: Manchester University Press) ch. 4.Google Scholar
2.Drescher, S. (1985) The historical context of British abolition. In: D. Richardson (ed.) Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context (London: Frank Cass, 1985) ch. 1.Google Scholar
3. See, for example, Hochstetter, F. (1905) Die wirtschaftlichen und politischen Motive für die Abschaffung des Britischen Sklavenhandels im Jahre 1806–1807 (Leipzig).Google Scholar
4.Drescher, S. (1985) The historical context of British abolition. In: Abolition and its Aftermath (London: Frank Cass), pp. 3–26; also quoted in K. Charles Belmonte (2002) William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity (Colorado Springs: Nav Press), p. 166.Google Scholar
5.James, C. L. R. (2001) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin, 2001), originally published in London by Secker and Warburg (1938).Google Scholar
6.Williams, E. (1944 [1994, 1966]) Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 211. Williams relied primarily on Lowell Joseph Ragatz’s work of 1928, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833 (reprinted in 1966 and 1971) (New York: Octagon Books).Google Scholar
7.Drescher, S. (1986) The decline thesis of British slavery since Econocide. Slavery and Abolition, 7 (May), 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8.Drescher, S. (1977) Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press) reprinted, with a New Preface, and a Foreword by David Brion Davis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. xiii–xxx.Google Scholar
9. For the dissenters, see Carrington, S. H. H. (2002) The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida) who identifies Econocide as ‘one of the most polemical books since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations’ (p. 4); and D. B. Ryden (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press). Alvin O. Thompson, a Caribbean historian, notes that ‘within the last few decades more polemical literature in the form of monographs and journal articles, has been written on this subject than perhaps any other aspect of slavery.’ A. O. Thompson (2002) Unprofitable Servants: Crown Slaves in Berbice, Guyana 1803–1831 (Barbados: University of the West Indies), p. 3.Google Scholar
10. Quotes from Morgan, K. (2000) Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 53; D. Richardson (2007) The ending of the British slave trade in 1807: the economic context. In: S. Farrell et al. (eds) The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 127–140 (quotation on p. 133). D. B. Davis (2010), Foreword In: S. Drescher Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd edn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press); Drescher; and S. Drescher (1997) Capitalism and slavery after fifty years. Slavery and Abolition, 18(3), pp. 212–227; also in Cateau and Carrington, Capitalism, 81–98.Google Scholar
11.Eltis, D. (1987) Economic Growth (New York: Oxford University Press) esp. chs 1, 12, 13; and D. Eltis, S. D. Behrendt, D. Richardson and H. S. Klein. Voyages: the trans-atlantic slave trade database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces.Google Scholar
12.Inikori, J. E. (2002) Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 176, Table 4.2. Inikori’s data for 1784–1856, are mainly derived from R. Davis (1979) The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press) appendix, Tables 57-64. It should be noted that Inikori’s book is primarily a defense of another of Williams’s arguments. Capitalism and Slavery asserted that the profits of the slave trade and plantation slavery were the principal sources of capital for the British Industrial Revolution. For a succinct response to this other thesis, see the article by D. Eltis and S. Engerman (2000) The importance of slavery and the slave trade to industrializing Britain. Journal of Economic History (March). In his Introduction, Inikori states that the main arguments concerning the economic basis of abolition have stood the test of time ‘in spite of voluminous opposition,’ (J. E. Inikori (2002) Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England : A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 6–7. Although Inikori does not refer to abolition in the text, he emphasizes (p. 118) that the most dynamic part of English overseas trade was with the slave-based Atlantic economies right down to 1850 (i.e. the year of Britain’s most decisive naval intervention against the slave trade outside its own empire (in Brazil). The views of the main participants in this debate are collected in B. L. Solow and S. L. Engerman (eds) (1987) British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13.Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L. (1974) Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown).Google Scholar
14.Fogel, R. W. (2003) The Slavery Debates: A Retrospective, 1952–1990 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press).Google Scholar
15.Eltis, D. (2000) The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
16.Davis, D. B. (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 298. Davis reminds us that, of course, the GNP was small by today’s standards.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17.Adelman, J. (2006) Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 56–58, and 90–100.Google Scholar
18. On the widespread American historiographical assumption of antebellum subscription to free labor superiority, see Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L. (1989) Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2nd edn (Boston: Little, Brown), pp. 286–287. On European skepticism towards the proposition of free labor’s inherently productive superiority, see S. Drescher (2002) The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press). For Western skepticism of its applicability in the European dominions of the Old World see, inter alia, F. Cooper (1996) Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press) ch. 2; and P. C. Emmer (1996) The ideology of free labor and Dutch colonial policy. In: G. Oostendie (ed.) Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), pp. 207–222.Google Scholar
19.Davis, D. B. (1965) Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
20.Drescher, S. (1997) Capitalism and slavery after fifty years. Slavery and Abolition, 18(3), pp. 213–221; D. B. Davis (2010) Foreword In: S. Drescher Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd edn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), p. xix.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21.Anstey, R. (1975) The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan).Google Scholar
22. Compare Davis, D. B. (1975) Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) ch. 5, 8, 9, with D. B. Davis (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press) ch. 11.Google Scholar
23.Haskell, T. L., Davis, D. and Ashworth, J. (1992) in what was ultimately published in a volume entitled, The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1992) Haskell’s quotation is found on p. 107.Google Scholar
24.Ibid., p. 107.Google Scholar
25. Both Davis, D. B. (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press) and Williams devoted space to the slave uprisings in the French or British colonies but they were not at the center of their argument. Williams’s final chapter, on ‘The slaves and slavery’ was a coda, added on to the manuscript at a late stage in the process of publication. For Davis’s own shift of attention to mass mobilizations of both slaves and citizens in the ending of New World slavery see, his five chapters on slave resistance and Anglo-American abolitions in D. B. Davis (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 205–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26. See Blackburn, R. (1988) Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London: Verso); and R. Blackburn (2006) Haiti, slavery and the age of the democratic revolution. William and Mary Quarterly, 63(4), pp. 643–674; For varying assessments of Haiti’s pivotal position in the history of emancipation, see E. D. (1979) Genovese. In: From Rebellion to Revolution Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the New World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press); L. Dubois (2004) Avengers of the New World: the Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press); and D. P. Geggus (2001) The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press).Google Scholar
27. For an overview seeDrescher, S. , S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press); For the most mobilizing decrees in the early 20th century, see M. A. Klein (1998) Slavery and Colonial rule in French West Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press) ch. 10; P. E. Lovejoy and J. S. Hogendorn Slow Death for Slavery: The course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936; On the formal transition to empires of antislavery, see S. Miers (2003) Slavery in the Twentieth Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield) chs 2 and 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28. On the Atlantic slave trade, see, inter alia, Behrendt, S., Eltis, D. and Richardson, D. (2001) The costs of coercion: African agency in the pre-modern Atlantic world. Economic History Review, 54(3), pp. 454–476; On a version of the Haskellian expansion of increasing identification with slaves as victims, via reports of shipboard revolts, see D. Eltis (2009) Abolition and Identity in the very long run. In: W. Klooster (ed.) Migration, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World (Leiden: Brill), pp. 227–257; In some slave revolts, in Demerara (1823) and Jamaica (1831) the leaders attempted to minimize violence in favor of negotiation, and succeeded in strengthening metropolitan abolitionism and accelerating the pressure for British emancipation. See D. B. Davis (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press), ch. 11; and S. Drescher Civilizing insurgency: two variants of slave revolts in the age of revolution. In: E. R. Toledano (2010) Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques, eds S. Drescher and P. C. Emmer (New York: Berghahn Books), pp. 120–132. There are now abundant histories of slave resistance in the Western hemisphere and a less developed scholarship on slave resistance in the East. E. R. Toledano (2007) As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
29. For the theory and practice of the two variants of abolitionism, see, Drescher, S. (1999) From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York: NYU Press), chs 2, 3, 5 and 6; and S. Drescher, Abolition and its Aftermath (London: Frank Cass) chs 8, 9 and 11. On the evolution of a new civil/political society, see C. Tilly (1995) Popular Contention in Great Britain 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 197–204. For British abolitionism other relevant studies are, inter alia, S. Drescher (1987) Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford); S. Drescher (2009) History’s engines: British mobilization in the age of revolution. William and Mary Quarterly, 66(4), pp. 737–756; J. R. Oldfield (1997) Popular Politics and British Antislavery (Manchester: Manchester University Press); and C. Midgley (1995) Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (1992) (New York).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30. For the significance of popular mobilization in the United States, see inter alia, Fogel, R. W. (1989) Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton); D. N. Gellman (2006), Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press); in the Spanish empire, see C. Schmidt-Nowara (1999) Empire and Antislavery : Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press); R. Scott (1985) Explaining abolition: contradiction, adaptation and challenge in Cuban slave society. In: M. M. Fraginals, F. M. Pons and S. L. Engerman (eds) Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press), pp. 25–53; and for Brazil, C. T. Castilho (2008) Abolitionism matters: the policy of antislavery in Pernambuco, Brazil, 1869–1888 (PhD dissertation, University of California Berkeley). On France’s less robust second metropolitan abolitionist movement and second slave emancipation, see L. C. Jennings (2000) French Anti-Slavery: the Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
31. See Pétré-Grenouilleau, O., (ed.) (2008) Abolir l’esclavage: Un réformisme à l’epreuve (France, Portugal, Suisse), xviiie-xixe siecles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes); J.-P. Marques (2006) The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade trans. Richard Wall (New York: Berghahn Books); T. David, B. Etemad and J. M. Schaufelbuchl (2005) La Suisse et l’esclavage des noirs (Laussanne: Èditions Antipodes).Google Scholar
32. I will not here attempt an extensive overview of the recent historical works on abolition in Africa and Asia. Its historiography is less systematically embedded in or contrasted to the Western historiographical tradition. But for an introduction, see Pétré-Grenouilleau, O. (2004) Les Traites négrières: Essai d’histoire global (Paris: Gallimard); G. Campbell, S. Miers and J. C. Miller (eds) (2008) Women and Slavery, 2 vols (Athens, OH); S. Miers (2003) Slavery in the Twentieth Century (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press); M. Klein (ed.) (1993) Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press); E. R. Toledano (2007) Introduction. In: As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press); W. G. Clarence-Smith (2006) Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press); and E. Keren (2009) The transatlantic slave trade in Ghanian academic historiography: history, memory, and power. William and Mary Quarterly 66(4), pp. 975–1000.Google Scholar
33.Drescher, S. (1985) In: D. Richardson (ed.) Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context (London: Frank Cass, 1985) ch. 14.Google Scholar
34. See Engerman, S. L. (2009) Apologies, regrets and reparations. European Review, 17(3,4), pp. 593–610; and G. Oostendie (ed.) (1996) Public memories of the Atlantic slave trade in contemporary Europe. In: Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), pp. 611–626.Google Scholar
35.Brown, C. L. (2006) Moral Capital: The foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); D. B. Davis (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press) ch. 12 which now emphasizes the moral dimensions of free labor.Google Scholar
36.Morgan, P. D. (2010) Ending the slave trade: a Caribbean and Atlantic context. In: R. Peterson (ed.) Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press), pp. 101–128. Concluding his study of the economic context of British slave trade abolition David Richardson emphasizes ‘the more enlightened moral content of an emergent political economy and their own humanitarian belief.’ D. Richardson (2007) The ending of the British slave trade in 1807: the economic context. In: S. Farrell et al. (eds) The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 127–140, quotation on p. 140. For geographic extensions of the use of the moral dimension of antislavery see Peterson’s Introduction and Jonathon Glassman’s essay in the same volume: ‘Racial violence, universal history, and echoes of abolition in twentieth-century Zanzibar,’ ibid pp. 175–206.Google Scholar
37.Fogel, R. W. (2003) The Slavery Debates: A Retrospective 1952–1990 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press), pp. 45–48; R. W. Fogel and S. L. Engerman (1989) Afterword. In: Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown), p. 289.Google Scholar
38.Blackburn, R. (2006) Haiti, slavery, and the age of the democratic revolution. William and Mary Quarterly, 63(4), pp. 643–674. For a fine synthesis of the British and Haitian paths to abolition see A. Hochschild (2005) Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York: Houghton Mifflin). The revalorization morality in accounting for the outlawing of slavery does not preclude studies of shifts and ambiguities in the understanding of ‘morality’ during the past century. See also K. A. Appiah (2010) The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W. W. Norton), ch. 3.Google Scholar