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The Problem of Slavery in African Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Frederick Cooper
Frederick Cooper
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Harvard University
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Review Article
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The Journal of African History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 103 - 125
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 I am grateful for the reactions to an earlier version of this article by members of the African Studies Program at Northwestern University, as well as to Stephen Baier and Carla Glassman for their careful reading of the manuscript. I also wish to thank Suzanne Miers, Paul Lovejoy, Jan Hogendorn and A. Norman Klein for showing me manuscripts of theirs before publication.

2 The level of anxiety is evident from the very first sentence of the latest synthesis, Kopytoff, Igor and Miers, Suzanne, ‘African “slavery” as an institution of marginality’, in Miers, and Kopytoff, (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, Wise., 1977), 3Google Scholar. They, and many others, feel compelled to dissociate themselves from an equation of slavery in Africa with slavery in the Americas, although I do not know of any modern scholar who has made such an equation. In the colonial period, scholars and officials were more likely to err in the opposite direction – to minimize the significance of slavery in order to avoid having to do anything about it. Even some leading nineteenth-century abolitionists made a point of distinguishing African and American forms of slavery. Colonial reticence is discussed by Meillassoux, Claude, ‘Introduction’, L'Esclavage en Afrique précoloniale (Paris, 1975), 12–13,Google Scholar and Boutillier, J.-L., ‘Les captifs en A.O.F. (1903–1905), Bull. de l' I.F.A.N., ser. B, xxx (1968), 519Google Scholar. For earlier comparisons see Charles, New, Life, Wanderings and Labours in Eastern Africa (London, 1973), 500Google Scholar, and Livingstone, David, The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa from 1865 to His Death, i (London, 1874), 7.Google Scholar

3 Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966)Google Scholar, and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975)Google Scholar. See also Temperley, Howard, ‘Capitalism, slavery and ideology’, Past and Present, lxxv (1977), 94–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Southerners argued that wage labour was in fact the peculiar institution, but the label stuck to slavery (Stampp, Kenneth, The Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956).Google Scholar

4 Within each academic discipline, the basic theoretical and methodological differences thus have a political and ideological dimension. See Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene, ‘The political crisis of social history’, Journal of Social History, x (1976), 205–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 This view dominates general syntheses and has made its way into textbooks and popular accounts. See Kopytoff, and Miers, , ‘African “slavery”’; Arthur Tuden and Leonard Plotnicov, ‘Introduction’, Social Stratification in Africa (New York, 1970), 11–15Google Scholar; Southall, Aidan, ‘Stratification in Africa’, in Plotnicov, Leonard and Tuden, Arthur (eds.), Essays in Comparative Social Stratification (Pittsburgh, 1970), 247–56Google Scholar; Grace, John, Domestic Slavery in West Africa (New York, 1975) 1–20Google Scholar; Bohannon, Paul and Curtin, Philip, Africa and Africans (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), 265Google Scholar; Turnbull, Colin, Man in Africa (Garden City, N.Y., 5), 189–95Google Scholar; and –incongruously, in a Marxist work – Suret-Canale, Jean, Afrique noire occidental et centrale, i (Paris, 1968), 115–16.Google Scholar

6 Almost all the articles in the Miers and Kopytoff collection are bounded by an ethnic group, although Baier, Stephen and Lovejoy, Paul, despite their title (‘The Tuareg of the Central Sudan: gradations in servility at the desert edge’ [Niger and Nigeria], 391–414)Google Scholar, take a regional approach, and the Meillassoux collection has a less rigid view of ethnicity. On the limits of ethnic analysis, see Barth, Fredrick (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston, 1969).Google Scholar

7 Hopkins, A. G., An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973), 23–77Google Scholar. See also Fage, J. D., ‘Slavery and the slave trade in the context of West African History’, Afr, Hist., x (1969), 393–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage.Google Scholar

9 Also important is the literature on slavery and other forms of bondage in Greece, Rome, the pre-Islamic and Islamic Middle East, Russia, India, China, and so on. I have stuck to the Americas, because slave studies there have defined a field, and opposing points of view have been spelled out. For recent reviews of Americanist literature, see Davis, David Brion, ‘Slavery and the post-World War II historians’, in Mintz, Sidney (ed.), Slavery, Colonialism and Race (New York, 1974), 1–16;Google ScholarLombardi, John V., ‘Comparative slave systems in the Americas: A critical review’, in Graham, Richard and Smith, Peter (eds.), New Approaches to Latin American History (Austin, Texas, 1974), 156–74Google Scholar; and —for references beyond the Americas — Patterson, Orlando, ‘Slavery’, Annual Review of Sociology, 111 (1977), 407–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A good starting point is Foner, Laura and Genovese, Eugene (eds.), Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969)Google Scholar, or Rice, C. Duncan, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

10 Elkins, Stanley, Slavery (Chicago, 1959)Google Scholar, and Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946)Google Scholar. For critiques, see articles by Mintz, Sidney, Harris, Marvin, Davis, David Brion and Genovese, Eugene, in Foner and Genovese, 27–47, 69–84, 202–10, 238–55.Google Scholar

11 The first euphemizes a process that was based on violence and coercion; the second distracts from the various possible fates that befell people and their descendants once the act of capture was completed; and the third misinterprets the nature of dependence and the slave's relationship to the land. Allen Isaacman, F., Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution: The Zambeze Prazos, 1756–1902 (Madison, Wise., 1972)Google Scholar; Mason, Michael, ‘Captive and client labour and the economy of the Bida emirate, 1857–1901’, J. Afr. Hist, xiv (1973), 453–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Derman, William, Serfs, Peasants, and Socialists: A Former Serf Village in the Republic of Guinea (Berkeley, 1973).Google Scholar

12 Finley, M. I, ‘Slavery’, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, international encyclopedia of the social sciences (New York, 1968), 307–8Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip D., Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, Wise., 1975), 34Google Scholar; Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 7.Google Scholar

13 For a local person to be reduced to the status of an outsider required the acceptance of the community or more force than most kings or chiefs possessed. See Meillassoux, , ‘Introduction’, to L'Esclavage, 21–2Google Scholar, and nearly all the case-studies emphasize the predominance of capture and the purchase of captives. There are, as with any concept, problems of definition. Debt pawns, for example, would not be slaves in this framework, because they retained connexions with their kinsmen, but if forfeiture of the debt enabled the creditor to treat the pawn as if he were kinless, the process begins to resemble enslavement.

14 Even the most trenchant critics of Elkins's emphasis on these institutions do not deny their importance, but see them as part of a wider picture. See Elkins, , Slavery, the critiques cited in note 10Google Scholar, above, and Goveia, Elsa, ‘The West Indian slave laws of the eighteenth century’, in Foner, and Genovese, , Slavery, 113–37.Google Scholar

15 Genovese, Eugene, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974)Google Scholar. Even in Jamaica, with one of the world's most intense labour systems, customary work rules developed. Patterson, Orlando, The Sociology of Slavery (Rutherford, N.J., 1967), 286.Google Scholar

16 Finley, M. I., ‘Between slavery and freedom’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vi (1964), 233–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kopytoff and Miers rightly stress that ‘freedom’ is an elusive and misleading antithesis to slavery – a point that might be applied to the ‘West’ as well as to Africa (Slavery, 17–18).Google Scholar

17 Bohannan, and Curtin, , Africa, 265Google Scholar. Despite their reservations about ‘slavery’, Kopytoff and Miers write of ‘African “Slavery”’ as ‘an institution’.

18 Genovese, Eugene D., The World the Slaveholders Made (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, ‘The comparative approach to American history: slavery’, in Foner and Genovese, Slavery, 67–8Google Scholar; Knight, Franklin W., Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Madison, Wisc., 1970)Google Scholar; Stein, Stanley J., Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee Country, 850–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)Google Scholar; Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972)Google Scholar; Genovese, , Roll.Google Scholar

19 Kopytoff and Miers, 14. For more detailed criticism, see reviews by Meillassoux, Claude and myself in African Economic History, v (1978)Google Scholar, and Klein, Martin A., ‘The study of slavery in Africa’, J. Afr. Hist, xix (1978), 599–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Indeed, conflict between kings and lineages over who was to get slaves could be important; so too was the question of whether individuals or groups would control slaves. At stake could be the ability to control a society or to shape relations of dependence within a kinship group. These issues are touched on by Joseph Miller, C., ‘Imbangala lineage slavery (Angola)’Google Scholar, in Kopytoff, and Miers, 205–34Google Scholar, MacCormack, Carol P., ‘Wono: institutionalized dependency in Sherbro descent groups (Sierra Leone)’Google Scholar, ibid. 181–204, and Pollet, Eric and Winter, Grace, L'organisation sociale du travail agricole des Soninke (Dyahunu, Mali)’, Cahiers d'études africaines, vii (1968), 509–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Hopkins, , Economic History, 26Google Scholar. To fit slavery into a neo-classical model requires two assumptions that are, arguably, inappropriate: individual autonomy and the commoditization of labour power. The much more elaborate attempt by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman to apply an economic approach based on assumptions similar to Hopkins', to slavery, in the Southern United States has been thoroughly dissected: Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974)Google Scholar, and David, Paulet al., Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

22 Jack Goody has also argued that slavery emerged in Africa, while serfdom did not, because access to land was relatively easy, so that direct control over people was the only way to obtain labour. Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar. He and Hopkins both take off from, but do not fully accept, the analysis of Nieboer, H. J., Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague, 1900)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Nieboer, see also Siegel, Bernard J., ‘Some methodological considerations for a comparative study of slavery’, American Anthropologist, xiv (1947), 357–92,Google Scholar and Patterson, Orlando, ‘The structural origins of slavery: a critique of the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis from a comparative perspective’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, ccxcii (1977), 12–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Hopkins is more aware than Fage of the implications of arguing that the slave trade promoted ‘a sustained process of economic and political development’ (Fage, , ‘Slavery’, 400)Google Scholar. He both questions its effects on other dimensions of the economy and stresses the kind of development that the slave trade and internal slavery promoted. Walter Rodney has also explored the relationship between external trade and internal exploitation, but his eagerness to blame both on Europeans has led him to oversimplify the dynamic: an élite's control of trade –not just of the slave trade – could be a step toward the further exploitation of labour. The more powerful coastal kingdoms in West Africa, as Fage shows, were using slaves before they were selling them. A preliminary attempt to sketch the changing interrelation of slave trading and slave employment in West Africa over the period of the slave trade is made in Martin Klein and Paul Lovejoy, ‘ Slavery in West Africa’, in Gemery, H. A., and Hogendorn, J. S. (eds.), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, forthcoming)Google Scholar. See also Rodney, Walter, ‘African slavery and other forms of social oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the context of the Atlantic slave trade’, J. Afr. Hist, vii (1966), 431–43,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wrigley, C. C., ‘Historicism in Africa: slavery and state formation’, African Affairs, lxx (1971), 113–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Cotton, for example, is a fine smallholder crop, and the efficiency of cotton plantations lay above all in the compulsion which made labourers minimize leisure, the force that made women and children join the work force, and the discipline of the gang system. As soon as coercion ended, so did this system of labour and so did the plantation as a work unit. Ransom, Roger and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar; David, , Reckoning with SlaveryGoogle Scholar; Mandle, Jay R., ‘The plantation economy: an essay in definition’, in Genovese, Eugene (ed.), The Slave Economies, 1 (New York, 1973), 214–28.Google Scholar

25 E. A. Oroge shows that kings and leading chiefs in Yorubaland kept a high concentration of labour to themselves, and Sara Berry has suggested that the old élites might still have controlled marketing – even of smallholder crops – while disorder and insecurity made the protection of the military rulers essential for any kind of economic activity. Hopkins, A. G., ‘Economic imperialism in West Africa: Lagos, 1880–1892’, Economic History Review, xxi (1968), 580–606Google Scholar; Oroge, E. A., ‘The institution of slavery in Yorubaland with particular reference to the nineteenth century’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1971Google Scholar; Berry, Sara, Cocoa, Custom and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria (Oxford, 1975), 25–8Google Scholar. For a Senegalese study raising similar questions, see Klein, Martin A., ‘Social and economic factors in the Muslim revolution in Senegambia’, J. Afr. Hist, xiii (1972), 419–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Hopkins, 227; Kopytoff and Miers, 71–6. Historians of the Southern United States have done less well with abolition than with slavery, perhaps because the conceptual tools of economic history provide no way of confronting the unfreedom of free labour. The best effort stops short of analyzing the new system by which a planter class controlled the economy, and explains the failures of emancipation in terms of flawed institutions and racist thinking left over from the past. See Ransom, and Sutch, , One Kind of FreedomGoogle Scholar, and the penetrating critique by Woodman, Harold, ‘Sequel to slavery: the new history views the postbellum South’, Journal of Southern History, xliii (1977), 523–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Klein, Martin, ‘From slave labour to migrant labour in Senegambia: South Saalum 1880–1930’, paper presented to the African Studies Association Meeting, Boston, 1976Google Scholar; Derman, , Serfs, PeasantsGoogle Scholar. Abolition is touched on by the case-studies in the Miers, and Kopytoff, and Meillassoux, collections, while the beginnings of more specific attempts to grapple with it were made at a conference on agrarian labour, Columbia University, 1977Google Scholar, which included a paper by Weiskel, Timothy, ‘Labor in the emergent periphery: from slave to migrant labor among the Baule peoples, c. 1880–1925’Google Scholar, and a paper by the present author which is being developed into a book, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925.

28 Meillassoux, L'esclavage, p. 25Google Scholar, and ‘Etat et conditions des esclaves a Gumbu (Mali) aux XIXe Siécle’, 221–52. See also Meillassoux, Claude, ‘From reproduction to production’, Economy and Society, 1 (1972), 92–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 This phrase is borrowed from Herbert Gutman's critique of a Marxist analysis of slavery in the Southern United States, Genovese's, Roll, Jordan, RollGoogle Scholar. The rather static picture of the master–slave relationship which Genovese provides is the major flaw of this brilliant work, but Gutman's other criticisms of it are generally wide of the mark: The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), 97.Google Scholar

30 This is least true of Meillassoux's, own essay in L'Esclavage, 221–52Google Scholar. Yet as stimulating a study of the ideological basis of slavery as Olivier, Jean-Pierre de Sardan's ‘Captifs ruraux at escalves imperiaux du Songhay’ (99–134)Google Scholar, assumes that the social relations and beliefs of present day Songhai villages apply to village-level society four centuries ago, while the Islamic notions of a part of the Tarikh-al-Fattasch, now known to be of more recent origin, apply to the ancient empire.

31 The possibility of enslavement very gradually producing a peasantry in Northern Nigeria is raised, although not sufficiently explored, in Lovejoy, Paul, ‘Plantations in the Economy of the Sokoto Caliphate’, J. Afr. Hist, xix (1978), 341–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In all parts of the Americas except for the Southern United States, importation was also the dominant mode of reproducing the slave labour force. This was more the result of mortality than manumission, but manumission practices in the New World were varied and in certain circumstances produced gradations of dependence among slaves and ex-slaves. In Brazil, mining encouraged manumission, coffee discouraged it. Degler, Carl, Neither White nor Black: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Tannenbaum, , Slave and CitizenGoogle Scholar; Cohen, David and Greene, Jack (eds.), Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore, 1972)Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison, Wise., 1969).Google Scholar

32 Wood, Peter H., Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974)Google Scholar. See also Morgan, Edmund S., American Freedom – American Slavery: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975)Google Scholar. Gutman makes a strong plea for studying the development of slave culture over time, seeing how behaviour patterns and traditions built on themselves and were transmitted from generation to generation. His book does not quite fulfil his promise of analysing change, partly because he, like many Africanists, treats culture and kinship as being autonomous from the dominant and themselves changing forces in society. See Black Family and Eugene Genovese's review of it in The Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1977.Google Scholar

33 Curtin, , Economic Change, 34–6Google Scholar. His subsequent chapter, ‘Production for the market’, focuses on the products, not on the productive process.

34 See for example, Southall, , ‘Stratification’, Tuden and Plotnicov, ‘Introduction’, and Fallers, Lloyd, Inequality: Social Stratification Reconsidered (Chicago, 1973), 59–79Google Scholar. Some authors (e.g. Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 3–5)Google Scholar use the observations of R. S. Rattray on Asante slavery in the twentieth century as if they represented precolonial Asante, and the destruction of the Asante state by the British had made no difference. An understanding of the significance of Rattray's observations in historical context will be provided by A. Norman Klein's forthcoming study of Asante slavery. See Rattray, R. S., Ashanti Law and Constitution (London, 1929), 33–46Google Scholar, and Wilks, Ivor, Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975).Google Scholar

35 Cooper, Frederick, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1977).Google Scholar

36 Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage, 221–52Google Scholar; Johnson, Marion, ‘The economic foundations of an Islamic theocracy – the case of Masina’, J. Afr. Hist, xvii (1976), 481–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levtzion, Nehemia, ‘Slavery and Islamization in Africa’, paper presented to the Conference on ‘Islamic Africa: Slavery and Related Institutions’, Princeton, 1977Google Scholar. J.-L. Boutillier also contrasts the conditions of Dyula slaves to the slaves of the Dyula's neighbours in ‘Les trois esclaves de Bouna’, in Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage, 253–80Google Scholar. Other studies of this region may be found in ibid., Sanneh, L. O., ‘Slavery, Islam and the Jakhanke people of West Africa’, Africa, xlvi (1976), 80–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Brown, William A., ‘The caliphate of Hamdullahi ca. 1818–1864: a study in African history and oral tradition’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1969Google Scholar, Olivier de Sardan, J. -P., ‘Esclavage d'échange et captivité familiale chez les Songhay-Zerma’, Journal de la Société des Africanistes, xliii (1973), 151–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cissoko, S., ‘Traits fondamentaux des sociétés du Soudan occidental du XVIle au début du XIXe siècle’, Bull. I.F.A.N., ser B., xxxi (1969), 1–30.Google Scholar

37 Smith, M. G., ‘Slavery and emancipation in two societies’, Social and Economic Studies, 111 (1954), 239–90Google Scholar, 271 quoted. For an extraordinary account of an estate at Zaria, from the point of view of a descendant of its owner, see Smith, Mary, Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Moslem Hausa (New York, 1964).Google Scholar

38 Reliance on the descendants of slave-owners as sources in Africa must be as suspect as the reliance on planter sources alone has become in the historiography of the Southern United States. At the very least, scholars should discuss the implications of the status and biases of their informants. Hill's comment that ‘Reticence about slave origin and ignorance (especially on the part of younger men) were among the factors that would have made it altogether impossible to collect information from slave descendants themselves’ seems questionable in the light of the use made of slave informants by Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn, discussed below, while her comment that ‘most of the information on farm-slavery’ comes from a single informant who was a Hamlet Head raises serious methodological questions. Hill, Polly, ‘From slavery to freedom: the case of farm-slavery in Nigerian Hausaland’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xviii (1976), 395–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Ibid. 406–7. Among Fulani the differences between forms of slavery were as great as they were among Hausa. See, for example, Serfs, Derman, Peasants, , and Stenning, Derrick, Savannah Nomads (London, 1959), 66–7.Google Scholar

40 Smaldone, Joseph, Warfare in the Sokoto Caliphate (Cambridge, Eng., 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tambo, David, ‘The Sokoto caliphate slave trade in the nineteenth century’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, ix (1976), 187–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hogendorn, Jan, ‘Slave acquisition and delivery in precolonial Hausaland’, in Dumett, R. and Schwartz, Ben K., West African Culture Dynamics: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives (Chicago, forthcoming).Google Scholar

41 Lovejoy, , ‘Plantations’Google Scholar; and Hogendorn, Jan, ‘The economics of slave use on two plantations in the Zaria emirate of the Sokoto caliphate’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, X, iii (1977), 369–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lovejoy, Paul, ‘The characteristics of plantations in the Sokoto caliphate’, Princeton Conference.Google Scholar

42 Northrup, David, ‘The compatibility of the slave and palm oil trades in the bight of Biafra’, J. Afr. Hist, xvii (1976), 353–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nair, Kannan, Politics and Society in Southeastern Nigeria, 1841–1906 (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Latham, A. J. H., Old Calabar 1600–1891Google Scholar; Dike, K. O., Trade and politics on the Niger Delta (London, 1956).Google Scholar

43 Manning, Patrick, ‘Slaves, palm oil and political power on the West African coast’, African Historical Studies, 11 (1969), 287Google Scholar. Exactly how labour was organized on the royal plantations is not yet clear, and Manning's forthcoming book on Southern Dahomey will hopefully clarify it. Meanwhile see the description of plantation management in Le Herissé, A., L'Ancien royaume du Dahomey (Paris, 1911), 90Google Scholar. It is clear that other men of power had plantations, while many Dahomeans were small-scale producers of palm oil. The Dahomean state thus had to play off potentially conflicting economic groups. See Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, ‘De la traite des esclaves è 1'exportation de 1'huile de palme et des palmistes au Dahomey: XIXe siècle’, in Meillassoux, Claude (ed.), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1971), 107–23Google Scholar; Herskovits, Melville, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, 1 (New York, 1938), 99–100Google Scholar; Argyle, William, The Fon of Dahomey (Oxford, 1966), 143Google Scholar; Aguessy, Honorat, ‘Le Dan-Home du XIXe siècle était-il une société esclavagiste?’ Revue française d'etudes politiques africaines, 50 (1970), 71–90Google Scholar; Newbury, C. C., ‘An early enquiry into slavery and captivity in Dahomey’, Zaïre, xiv (1960), 53–68Google Scholar. The most recent assessment of this question is Law, Robin, ‘Royal monopoly and private enterprise in the Atlantic trade: the case of Dahomey’, J. Afr. Hist. xvii, (1977), 555–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo, alongside the integration of slaves into households, there developed ‘a more exploitative form’, linked to royal estates, but limited by the small market in slave-grown commodities. In the nineteenth century the slave estates of Yoruba kings became more important. Law, Robin, The Oyo Empire (Oxford, 1977), 206–7.Google Scholar

44 While small-scale productive units in Dahomey may have absorbed their slaves relatively fully, the royal plantations did not. The French conquest brought about a mass exodus of largely unacculturated slaves of Yoruba origin. Report of Penel, J., 1904Google Scholar, reprinted in Newbury, , ‘Early enquiry’, 57Google Scholar, and Mercier, Paul, ‘Travail et service public dans 1'ancien Dahomey’, Présence Africaine, xiii (1952), 88.Google Scholar

45 The importance of work rhythms to defining economic structure is emphasized by Thompson, E. P., ‘Time, work discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present, xxxvii (1967), 56–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the argument is applied to plantation agriculture in Genovese, , Roll, 285–324Google Scholar, and Cooper, , Plantation Slavery, 180–2.Google Scholar

46 Besides agriculture, gold and salt mining also resulted in concentrations of slaves and intense exploitation. Mines and large plantations were found in very particular locations, in forests, deserts or savanna. In both forests and savanna, all three forms of slave labour can be found, although the importance of regional trade networks – reinforced by religious linkages in the Sudan – is clear. The savanna-forest distinction is made too neatly in Meillassoux, , ‘Introduction’, Indigenous Trade, 63–5Google Scholar, and Klein, and Lovejoy, , ‘Slavery in West Africa’Google Scholar. On mining, see Terray, Emmanuel, ‘Le captivité dans le royaume abron du Gyaman’Google Scholar, in Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage, 389–54Google Scholar; Wilks, , Asante, 436–6Google Scholar; and Levtzion, Nehemia, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London, 1973), 172.Google Scholar

47 Even where plantations were the predominant form of export-agriculture organization, slave villages could develop in particular locations where incentives for close control of labour were weak. Cooper, , Plantation Slavery, 173–6, 182Google Scholar. For examples of slave villages, see Derman, , Serfs, PeasantsGoogle Scholar; Mason, , ‘Captive and client labour’Google Scholar; Wilks, , Asante, 52Google Scholar; and Horton, W. R. G., ‘The Ohu system of slavery in a northern Ibo village-group’, Africa, xxiv (1954), 311–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 This is not to say that labour was the only, or even the principal, purpose for which kinship groups acquired slaves. The functionalist approach to slavery does better with this form that it does with the others, but the Marxist conception of kinship has much to offer here. Pollet and Winter, for example, show how an elder's ability to contain slaves contributed to the adhesion of subordinate kinsmen to him, and that the abolition of slavery weakened the elder's capacity to provide for dependants and to control them, leading to greater autonomy in the organization of work within the kinship group (‘Organisation sociale du travail’). See also Olivier de Sardan, J.-P., ‘System des relations economiques et sociales chez les Wogo (Niger)’, Thèse pour le doctoral de troisième cycle, Université de Paris, 1969, 31–4Google Scholar; Meillassoux, Claude, ‘Essai d'interpretation du phénomène économique dans les sociétés traditionelles d'auto-subsistance’, Cahiers d'études africaines, 1 (1960), 38–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Godelier, Maurice, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, trans, by Pearce, B. (London, 1972).Google Scholar

49 My own views of this subject have been influenced by Lloyd, P. C., ‘Conflict theory and Yoruba kingdoms’, in Lewis, I. M. (ed.), History and Social Anthropology, (London, 1969), 25–62Google Scholar. Lloyd, however, sees conflict in overly political terms, while the fundamental basis of kinship– kingship conflict involves inherently contradictory means of mobilizing resources – the one through control of reproduction and agricultural knowledge, the other through institutionalized control over warfare, slaves, tribute collection, etc.

50 Terray, Emmanuel, ‘Long distance exchange and the formation of the state: the case of the Aron kingdom of Gyaman’, Economy and Society, 111 (1974), 315–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. His argument is an advance on the views of Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, ‘Research on an African mode of production’, in Klein, M. and Johnson, G. W. (eds.), Perspectives on the African Past (Boston, 1972), 33–51Google Scholar, and Goody, , Technology.Google Scholar

51 Wilks, Asante. A better case might be made for the East African coast: plantation slavery was essential to the élite's economic power, and it had a great impact on ideology and values. But the slave-owners were so enmeshed in a wider commercial system – involving trade in other items, and dependent on sources of credit outside the slave system – that placing the coast in the pigeonhole of ‘slave mode of production’ conceals as much as it reveals. Meillassoux, is wisely cautious on this point (L'Esclavage, 19–20)Google Scholar, Klein, while and Lovejoy, (‘Slavery in West Africa’)Google Scholar confuse their argument, which they make persuasively, that slavery in West Africa was of great economic importance with an argument that it constituted a mode of production. Much of the literature on modes of production is marred by an obsession with taxonomy: we have lineage, tributary, pastoral, hunting and gathering modes of production, not to mention feudal, capitalist, Asiatic and African. Yet the concept is useful in showing how social structures and ideologies are rooted in material life, and are not just detached structures whose relationships can only be analysed empirically. The present need is to look at modes of production as totalities, not as classifications. See Foster-Carter, Aidan, ‘The modes of production controversy’, New Left Review, cvii (1978), 44–77.Google Scholar

52 For an example of slaves as followers and hunters, while others worked in the fields, in a changing political and economic situation, see Roberts, Andrew, ‘Nyamwezi trade’, in Gray, R. and Birmingham, D. (eds.), Pre-Colonial African Trade (London, 1970), 39–74.Google Scholar

53 For this reason, obtaining slaves was particularly important to chiefs and kings wishing to extend their own descent groups in matrilineal societies (Alpers, E. A., ‘Trade, state and society among the Yao in the nineteenth century’, J. Afr. Hist, x (1969), 405–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilks, , Asante,Google Scholar A. N. Klein (forthcoming)). But the politics of kinship also made sexual control important to other societies (Meillassoux, , L'EsclavageGoogle Scholar, and Cooper, , Plantation Slavery, 195–9).Google Scholar

54 The non-integration of slaves was thus essential to their administrative and military functions (Meyers, Allan, ‘The 'Abīd al-Buhārī: slave soldiers and state-craft in Morocco, 1672–1790’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1974, 30, 145–9Google Scholar; and Sardan, Olivier de, in Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage, 129–30)Google Scholar. On slaves in government see Smith, M. G., Government in Zaszau (London, 1959)Google Scholar; Brenner, Louis, The Shehus of Kukawa (London, 1973), Law, Oyo, 232–3Google Scholar; Oroge, , ‘Slavery’, 2–112Google Scholar; O'Fahey, R. S., ‘Slavery and the slave trade in Dār Fū;r’, J. Afr. Hist, xiv (1973), 29–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klein, A. N., ms. on Asante slavery; and various articles in Meillassoux and Miers and Kopytoff collections.Google Scholar

55 Not the least of slaves' sacrifices to their royal owners' power was their lives – in rituals of power and royal funerals in Dahomey, Asante, Old Calabar and elsewhere. See especially Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, ‘La fete des coutumes au Dahomey’, Annales, iv (1964), 696–716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56 Smith, , ZazzauGoogle Scholar; Klein, Martin, ‘Servitude among the Wolof and Serer of Senegambia’, in Miers, and Kopytoff, , Slavery, 335–65Google Scholar. On breakdowns of control in regimes dominated by slave officials and armies, see Ayalon, David, L'Esclavage du Mamelouk (Jerusalem, 1951)Google Scholar, and Meyers, , ‘'Abid al-Buhārī’, 187–8.Google Scholar

57 Genovese, , Roll, Jordan, Roll.Google Scholar

58 Klein, A. N., MS on Asante slaveryGoogle Scholar. See also Wilks, , Asante.Google Scholar

59 Sheku Ahamdu, leader of the jihad in Macina, received much support from slaves, but when he and his followers continued to exploit them, many assisted another conqueror, El Hajj Umar. In Ilorin, many Hausa slaves helped overthrow the Yoruba kingdom: Brown, , ‘Caliphate of Hamdullahi’Google Scholar; Smith, Robert, Kingdoms of the Yoruba (London, 1969), 141Google Scholar; Law, , Oyo, 206–7Google Scholar; Rodney, Walter, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800 (Oxford, 1970), 269Google Scholar; Baldé, Mamadou Saliou, ‘L'esclavage et la guerre sainte au Fuuta-Jalon’, in Meillassoux, L'Esclavage, 207Google Scholar; Cooper, , Plantation Slavery, 202–3Google Scholar. For different views of slave rebellion in the Niger Delta, see Nair, , Politics, 48–54Google Scholar; Latham, , Old Calabar, 91–6Google Scholar; Dike, , Trade, 154–5Google Scholar. For an example of slaves using opportunities to run away, see Smith, Mary, Baba, 39Google Scholar, while various articles in the two major collections mention the problem.

60 The exodus of Dahomean slaves has already been mentioned, and Klein and Lovejoy, ‘West African slavery’, cite other West African examples of disorder. The complex readjustment of plantation labor in Zanzibar is discussed in Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters.

61 The experience of violence and the symbolic dehumanization of new slaves is stressed by Bazin, Jean, ‘Guerre et servitude a Segou’, in Meillassoux, L'Esclavage, 141–3Google Scholar. Kopytoff and Miers devote much attention to the limbic position of slaves after capture but strip the process of its terror.

62 Terray, , in Meillassoux, 437–8Google Scholar. The connexion between mobility within the slave category and the need to prevent class solidarity from emerging is also stressed by Meillassoux, ibid. 243–4, and Piault, Marc-Henri, ‘Captifs du pouvoir et pouvoir des captifs’Google Scholar, ibid. 347.

63 This might be said of the noted leader of slave origin, Jaja. While a number of slaves did rise – and the overwhelming majority experienced little but hard work and danger – the process produced contradictions in norms and conflict. For differing views, see Nair, Latham and Dike.

64 Lovejoy, and Klein, (‘Slavery in West Africa’)Google Scholar cite examples of both sales and resistance to sales of local slaves. On the other hand, no laws on the East African coast prescribed different treatment for locally born slaves, but actual practice reflected the limits of the slave-owners' power and their fear of the second generation. Locally born slaves were more likely to be artisans or overseers, or to be manumitted. Cooper, , From Slaves to Squatters.Google Scholar

65 Genovese, , Roll, 587–97Google Scholar; Patterson, , Sociology, 274–8Google Scholar; Mullin, Gerald, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Century Virginia (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; and Price, Richard (ed.), Maroon Societies (Garden City, N.Y., 1970), 24.Google Scholar

66 At Gumbu, slave-owners kept an eye on each others' slaves and searched for runaways together. On the mainland of East Africa little such co-operation took place, but slaves were in a dependent position to their own master, for an individual without a protector would be lost in coastal society (Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage, 231‘2, 243Google Scholar; Cooper, chapter 5). The importance of insecurity to maintaining ties of dependence is evident from the accounts of Cissoko, , ‘Traits fundamentaux’Google Scholar, Smith, Mary, BabaGoogle Scholar, and Mason, , ‘Captive and client’Google Scholar. On sacrifice and social control see A. N. Klein, MS on Asante.

67 The wrong way to study accommodation is illustrated by Baldus, Bernd, ‘Responses to Dependence in a Servile Group: The Machube of Northern Benin’, in Miers, and Kopytoff, , Slavery, 435–60Google Scholar, which amounts to a version of Elkins's much-criticized Sambo-personality thesis (Slavery), and fails to discuss accommodation as part of a range of responses by slaves.

68 In a study of the lives of three women in the unstable conditions of East Central Africa in the late nineteenth century, Marcia Wright describes a slave woman who was able to use her relationship with her master to achieve greater security, while another woman, although not enslaved, was left without protection when her husband died and left her to a relative who had little interest in this older woman. The slave's dependence on a single individual was extreme, but the bond of kinship could fail and that of slavery succeed: Wright, Marcia, ‘Women in peril: a commentary on the life stories of captives in nineteenth century East-Central Africa’, African Social Research, xx (1975), 800–19.Google Scholar

69 Cooper, , From Slaves to SquattersGoogle Scholar; Derman, , Serfs, PeasantsGoogle Scholar. For a related argument, see the work of Robert Brenner, who analyses the end of European serfdom in terms of class struggles, stressing that the different ways that control over land and labour evolved reflect the situation in various parts of Europe that favoured serfs or lords to differing degrees (‘The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, civ (1977), 25–92).Google Scholar

70 In Brazil the state was weaker than in the United States and the planter class more rent by personal rivalries. Planters had to develop personal clienteles and often recruited slaves and ex-slaves into them, as did slave-owners on the Swahili coast. At times, plantations became political units, but the coffee estates of the nineteenth century were more fully integrated into a developing capitalist structure than plantations in Africa. Brazilian slave society was a complex hybrid, with relatively fluid social relations in the middle – especially in the case of mulattoes – and brutal exploitation at the bottom. See Genovese, , WorldGoogle Scholar, and a forthcoming study of Brazil by Emelia Viotti da Costa, to whom I am grateful for discussing this subject with me.

71 See, for example, Kopytoff and Miers, 3.

72 An increasingly influential approach to African economic history that sees dependence and underdevelopment as part of the expansion of a European-centred world economy has much to offer from a global perspective, but leaves the economies of Africa as black boxes. It fails to distinguish the vastly different things that went on inside these boxes and draws simplistic conclusions about the impact of becoming part of the ‘periphery’ on class structure in Africa. See, for example, Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘The three stages of African involvement in the world economy’, in Gutkind, Peter C. W. and Wallerstein, Immanuel (eds.), The Political Economy of Contemporary Africa (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1976)Google Scholar, and the searching critique of Wallerstein's assumptions and methodology in Brenner, , ‘Capitalist Development’.Google Scholar

73 The relationship of capitalism, slavery, and class is discussed in a brilliant and controversial interpretation by Genovese, , WorldGoogle Scholar. The earlier work of Williams, Eric is important, but vastly oversimplified: Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944)Google Scholar. For a comparison of slavery in the Southern United States and the East African coast in the nineteenth century see my Plantation Slavery, Conclusions.

74 The best analysis of the increasing ideological isolation and political weakening of slave-owning classes of English origin is Davis, , Problem of Slavery in the Age of RevolutionGoogle Scholar. The slave-owners of the Southern United States were more autonomous and developed a more coherent and independent pro-slavery ideology, but they too could not escape their immersion in an increasingly capitalist world (ibid, and Genovese, , World).Google Scholar

75 Accumulation by slave-owners on the East African coast was involuted: directed only to more slaves and (in Zanzibar) more clove trees. Capital – in itself – was amassed and redirected only by merchants and money-lenders, who employed it within a much wider commercial system linked to the European economy (Cooper, , Plantation Slavery, 136–48)Google Scholar. Genovese makes a rather similar argument for the Southern United States, but his case is not as clear and has been heavily criticized (The Political Economy of Slavery (New York, 1965)).Google Scholar

76 Degler, Carl N., ‘Slavery and the genesis of American race prejudice’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11 (1959), 49–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968).Google Scholar

77 See the penetrating critique of Jordan by George Fredrickson, M., ‘Why blacks were left out’, New York Review of Books, 7 02 1974, 23–24Google Scholar, as well as his The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny 1817–1914 (New York, 1971)Google Scholar. This dialectical process could work itself out in many ways, as the variations in race relations throughout the Western Hemisphere attest. See Cohen, and Greene, , Neither Slave nor Free, Toplin, Robert Brent (ed.), Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America (Westport, Conn., 1974)Google Scholar; Berlin, Ira, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Degler, , Neither Black nor WhiteGoogle Scholar; Wood, , Black MajorityGoogle Scholar; Morgan, , American SlaveryGoogle Scholar; and Genovese, , World.Google Scholar

78 Cooper, , Plantation Slavery, Conclusions.Google Scholar

79 Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage, 230–31Google Scholar; Sardan, Olivier de, ‘L'esclavage d'échange et captivité familiale’, 151Google Scholar; Lovejoy, , ‘Plantations’; Hogendorn, ‘Economics of slave use’Google Scholar; Smith, , ‘Slavery and emancipation’, 239–90Google Scholar; and Smith, M. G., ‘The Hausa system of social status’, Africa, xxix (1959), 242–3.Google Scholar

80 Fallers, , InequalityGoogle Scholar, and Southall, , ‘Stratification’Google Scholar. For a perceptive critique of functionalist approaches to stratification, see Smith, M. G., ‘Pre-industrial stratification systems’, in Smelser, Neil and Lipset, S. M. (eds.), Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development (Chicago, 1966), 141–76Google Scholar. A rather mechanical view of class emerges from Diop, Majhemout, Histoiredes classes sociales dans I'Afrique de I'Ouest: 1, Le Mali; 2, Le Sénégal (Paris, 1972, 1972)Google Scholar, while a more stimulating approach – although not without problems of its own – may be found in Terray, Emmanuel, ‘Classes and class consciousness in the Abron kingdom of Gyaman’, in Bloch, Maurice (ed.), Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology (New York, 1975), 85–135Google Scholar. Another imaginative use of class analysis is Wilks, Asante.

81 Meillassoux, , Indigenous Trade, 64–5Google Scholar. The idea of studying class as a process is stressed by Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), 11.Google Scholar

82 The integrative process is complex and varied, and Kopytoff, and Miers, , SlaveryGoogle Scholar, is most valuable on this question. An extreme example is studied by Isaacman, Barbara and Isaacman, Allen, ‘Slavery and social stratification among the Sena of Mozambique: A study of the Kaporo system’, 105–20Google Scholar. In some societies lineages absorbed their slaves while kings emphasized the non-integration of their own. Oliver de Sardan (in Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage, 99–134)Google Scholar gives a perceptive analysis of the ideological contradictions in such cases.

83 See Baier and Lovejoy, ‘Tuareg’, in Miers and Kopytoff, for an example of this situation. Here, Fallers's point that relationships between superior and inferior do not necessarily result in the formation of strata is useful. Unfortunately, he did not try to specify the conditions where inequality did or did not lead to the development of stratification: Inequality (cited in n. 34).

84 This situation was found in its purest state in plantation societies of the Americas, but strong tendencies in that direction developed as a result of agricultural development on the East African coast and in the Western and Central Sudan.

85 The connexion between despotism and the absence of status groups is illustrated in Lloyd Fallers, A., ‘Status culture, despotism, and social mobility in an African kingdom’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11 (1959), 11–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other instances of ‘lower class identity’ that cut across the category of slave are discussed by Wilks in the case of Asante and Morgan in the case of colonial Virginia.

86 Some writers believe that ‘Islamic slavery’ in Africa and the Middle East had certain characteristics that separate it from slavery in places where Allah was not the only God. But to separate religion from society and simultaneously to see it as a causative agent is artificial. But it does help to see Islamic texts and laws as providing the raw material which people – in particular economic and political situations – could shape into ideologies. For slave-owners, seeing slavery in terms of Islamic norms – rather than in those of a local religion – defined their own superiority in a way that transcended locality and self-interest. Where social and economic networks – as on the Swahili coast and in the Western Sudan – also transcended ethnic boundaries, a universalistic ideology played an important role in establishing slave-holders’ hegemony. But Islam also provided slaves with the basis for an opposed concept of a moral order: conversion denied their inferiority. For a fuller analysis, see my paper for the Princeton Conference on Islamic Africa, ‘Islam and the slave-holders' ideology on the east coast of Africa’. By no means all participants shared my views, nor do Fisher, A. G. B. and Fisher, Humphrey J., Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa (Garden City, N.Y., 1971).Google Scholar

87 Cooper, , Plantation Slavery, chapter 6Google Scholar; Strobel, Margaret, Muslim Women in Mombasa, Kenya, 1890–1973 (New Haven, Conn., forthcoming)Google Scholar; and el-Zein, Abdul Hamid M., The Sacred Meadows: A Structural Analysis of Religious Symbolism in an East African Town (Chicago, 1974)Google Scholar. Another attempt to collect evidence that slaves held a distinct view of slavery may be found in Olivier de Sardan, J.-P., Quand nos peres etaient captifs: récits paysans du Niger (Paris, 1976).Google Scholar

88 This point is also made by Olivier de Sardan in Meillassoux, , L'Esclavage, 119.Google Scholar

89 Kopytoff, and Miers, , Slavery, 73Google Scholar. Despite his fuller understanding of what was done to slaves, Meillassoux does not do much better in explaining what they did (Indigenous Trade, 65).

90 Sidney Mintz emphasizes that culture is not just there; it is used by some to justify domination, by others to deny their inferiority: Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974), 18Google Scholar. On this topic imaginative use of slave sources is necessary, and the rich materials on the Southern United States provide a model. See Blassingame, John (ed.), Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, La., 1977)Google Scholar, and Yetman, Norman (ed.), Voicesfrom Slavery (New York, 1970).Google ScholarGenovese, , Gutman, and John, Blassingame (The Slave Community, New York, 1972)Google Scholar