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AGENCY, IDEOLOGY, AND VIOLENCE IN THE HISTORY OF TRANSATLANTIC SLAVERY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2007

DAVID RICHARDSON
DAVID RICHARDSON
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF HULL
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Type
Review Article
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The Historical Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 971 - 989
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution (1938; London, 1980 edn), p. x.

2 For studies which emphasize economic factors, see Ryden, David Beck, ‘Does decline make sense? The West Indian economy and the abolition of the British slave trade’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31 (2001), pp. 347–74CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The sugar industry and the abolition of the British slave trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville, FL, 2002).

3 David Eltis, The rise of African slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2001). This colour-bar on enslavement was not uniform across Europe, nor did it extend to Africa.

4 In a later study, James described the revolt led by L'Ouverture and the subsequent founding of Haiti as ‘the most outstanding event in the history of the West Indies’ (C. L. R. James, Beyond a boundary (London, 1963), p. 119).

5 Interestingly, James seems almost to have anticipated Williams when he argued that today (i.e. 1938), ‘we tend to a personification of the social forces, great men being merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny’ (Black Jacobins, p. x).

6 Ibid., p. 249.

7 John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, ‘The sugar industry in the seventeenth century: a new perspective on the Barbadian “sugar revolution”’, in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: sugar and the making of the Atlantic world, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), pp. 289–330.

8 The point was made by James again in a different context: according to James, West Indians, notably through cricket and in his own case the works of Thackeray, imbibed a code of behaviour that owed much to British values, with Barbados, which he observed ‘has known no other strain [of European values] but British’, having a code that was ‘unadulterated and even more severe’. He went on that ‘as far back as I can trace my consciousness, the original found itself and came to maturity within a system that was the result of centuries of development in another land, was transplanted as a hot-house flower is transplanted and bore some strange fruit’ (James, Beyond a boundary, pp. 39–42).

9 This argument has been most forcibly made by Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 2002).

10 Paul Finkelman and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Macmillan encyclopaedia of world slavery (2 vols., New York, NY, 1998), i, p. 149.

11 For examples in the Cuban context as well as further references to Brazil, see Barcia, Manuel, ‘Fighting with the enemy's weapons: the usage of the colonial legal framework by nineteenth-century Cuban slaves’, Atlantic Studies, 3 (2006), pp. 159–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For estimates of numbers of shipboard revolts and their patterns, see David Richardson, ‘Shipboard revolts, African authority, and the Atlantic slave trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001), pp. 69–92; Eric Robert Taylor, If we must die: shipboard insurrections in the era of the Atlantic slave trade (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006).

13 Sheila Lambert, ed., House of Commons sessional papers in the eighteenth century (132 vols., Wilmington, DE, 1975), lxxi, p. 265. This was said in 1788 to be a ‘stigma which has been thrown upon the whole body of Slave-holders’.

14 David Brion Davis, Challenging the boundaries of slavery (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 81.

15 On Denmark Vesey and the recent controversy surrounding the conspiracy see David Brion Davis, Inhuman bondage: the rise and fall of slavery in the New World (Oxford, 2006), pp. 222–6; on Bahia, see João J. Reis, Slave rebellion in Brazil: the Muslim uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore, MD, 1993).

16 This was true of revolts and conspiracies in the United States as well as in British America, as Fox-Genovese and Genovese note in Mind of the master class, pp. 35–8.

17 Lovejoy, Paul E., ‘Background to rebellion: the origins of Muslim slaves in Bahia’, Slavery and Abolition, 15 (1994), pp. 151–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Davis, Inhuman bondage, pp. 8 (quote), 205–30.

19 See David Richardson, ‘The ending of the British slave trade in 1807: the economic context’, Parliamentary History Supplement (2007), pp. 139–40n.

20 For a further treatment of this issue, see Gelien Matthews, Caribbean slave revolts and the British abolitionist movement (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006).

21 Vincent Carretta, ed., Olaudah Equiano: the interesting narrative and other writings (London, 1995), p. xxix. See also Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: biography of a self-made man (Athens, GA, 2005), pp. 330–67.

22 The key work here, of course, is Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery, first published in 1944.

23 See, for example, Carrington, Sugar industry.

24 Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British slavery in the era of abolition (Pittsburgh, PA, 1977); idem, Capitalism and antislavery: British mobilization in comparative perspective (Houndsmill, 1986); idem, From slavery to freedom: comparative studies in the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery (Basingstoke, 1999).

25 Davis, Inhuman bondage, pp. 11, 331.

26 On costs to owners, see Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the cross: the economics of American Negro slavery (London, 1976 edn), pp. 35–6.

27 Cited by Davis, Inhuman bondage, p. 322.

28 For data on the human and economic costs of the war see Sellers, James L., ‘The economic incidence of the civil war in the south’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 14 (1927), pp. 179–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldin, Claudia G. and Lewis, Frank D., ‘The economic cost of the American civil war: estimates and implications’, Journal of Economic History, 35 (1975), pp. 299–327CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On alternative scenarios involving peaceful emancipation, see Goldin, Claudia D., ‘The economics of emancipation’, Journal of Economic History, 33 (1973), pp. 66–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who concluded that ‘the Union erred’ in not looking ‘to other slavocracies for advice in solving its slave problem, for the realized costs of the Civil War were far greater than those of various emancipation schemes’ (p. 84).

29 For slave numbers in the United States, see B. W. Higman, ‘Demography’, in Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., A historical guide to world slavery (Oxford, 1998), p. 169.

30 Davis, Inhuman bondage, p. 324.

31 We should perhaps note in this context that events in the United States in 1861–5 were probably more important in shaping abolitionism in Cuba and Brazil in the 1870s and 1880s than earlier British abolitionism. As presented here, the argument may be seen as a variant on that posed by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in 1974, which noted that ‘[c]onsidering the large proportion of the wealth of slave-holders represented by their bondsmen, what needs to be explained is not so much why the slavocracy of the U.S. resorted to open warfare but why other slavocracies did not’ (Fogel and Engerman, Time on the cross, p. 35).

32 This did not prevent of course some children from taking a different stance on issues from their parents, as George Thompson Garrison did when he enlisted for service in the 55th regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, despite his father's non-resistance beliefs (Alonso, Garrison children, pp. 137–77).

33 See Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A new economic view of American history (2nd edn, New York, NY, 1994), pp. 75–7 and the sources cited therein.

34 For evidence of productivity see Fogel and Engerman, Time of the cross, pp. 191–209. Such evidence challenged claims, often associated with Adam Smith, that free labour was inevitably superior in terms of productivity to slave labour, claims also questioned by Drescher's Mighty experiment and by some other recent research (David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and David Richardson, ‘Slave prices, the African slave trade and productivity in the Caribbean, 1674–1807’, Economic History Review, 58 (2005), pp. 673–700).

35 For such arguments see Douglass C. North, The economic growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1960).