Book Review

Comparative/World

This is a well-crafted, imaginatively constructed, complex account of why slavery in the Americas became exclusively African. Central to the account is David Eltis's belief that certain key ideological/cultural influences, operating through the idea and practice of freedom and the geographical span of the insider-outsider notion, placed Europeans apart from non-Europeans in the early modern era and help to explain the differing trajectories of the history of Europeans and non-Europeans during the period. Thus, the main reason Europeans expanded overseas and non-Europeans did not was not wealth and technology. It was the greater individual freedom of the Europeans. After conquest and colonization, prevailing high shipping costs required that production in the Americas be on a scale beyond family labor to reduce unit costs and find markets in Europe. This meant plantation agriculture and mines worked by coerced labor, given the high land/population ratio. But where would that labor come from, Europe, Asia, or Africa?	1
Eltis explains that transportation cost made the employment of Asian slaves in the Americas uneconomic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, the operation from the sixteenth century of a pan-European insider-outsider ideology among all Europeans, which permitted them morally to enslave non-Europeans but made their enslavement of other Europeans a taboo, eliminated Europe. This left only Africa. Europeans in the Americas could employ hundreds of enslaved Africans without any moral qualms but could not bear the sight of other Europeans working on their plantations as slaves. Africans could capture and sell other Africans to the Europeans, because unlike Europe a pan-African insider-outsider ideology did not exist among Africans at the time. Cultural factors also explain why proportionately more females migrated from Africa than from Europe during the period: Europeans placed less value on female labor than Africans. As for European material benefits, Eltis believes these were minimal. They were limited to lower prices paid by sugar consumers. While stressing that abolition is not the focus of the book, Eltis nevertheless links the central arguments to the origin of abolition. It was the extension by Europeans of their insider-outsider ideology to include Africans as insiders by the late eighteenth century that ultimately ended both the slave trade and African slavery in the Americas. A similar extension to Native Americans had ended much earlier the enslavement of Amerindians.	2
This elegantly written account is tantalizing, provocative, and, at the same time, problematic on several counts. What makes it even more problematic is the fact that the account is founded on a careful and extensive archival research. Very valuable evidence is systematically and felicitously marshalled. With the interpretive problems so well sweetened, the hasty reader may be easily ambushed and disarmed, leaving the problems undetected. It would take a review article to do full justice to a serious discussion of the interpretive problems. What follows is merely a note of caution inviting readers to be on their guard.	3
To start, recent work on comparative history puts in question the empirical validity of the cultural argument that Europeans expanded overseas and non-Europeans did not because of the greater degree of individual freedom from the state and elites, expressed in the "unique" European system of free wage labor and its market. It should be noted that very little free wage labor existed in Europe in the fifteenth century. It is, therefore, doubtful that Portugal and Spain (the countries that led European expansion overseas) developed wage labor and its market to a greater degree than the Lower Yangzi and other coastal regions of southeastern China did in the fifteenth century. If individual freedom from the state and elites was that important, how do we explain the fact that overseas expansion in Portugal and Spain was state-led? Generally speaking, the literature explaining why Western Europe expanded overseas and China did not employs factors other than culture.	. . .