|
|
|
The Chesapeake Slave Trade:
Regional Patterns, African Origins, and Some Implications
Lorena S. Walsh
| THE movement of
peoples from the Old World to the New and the resulting transfers
or transformations of homeland cultures in new physical and social
environments has been a central theme of early American history.
Overwhelmingly, historians have written on the transfers of peoples
from sixteenth- through eighteenth-century Europe and sub-Saharan
Africa to various American destinations in isolation from one another.
When these two contemporary migration flows are considered together,
sheer numbers demonstrate that, up to 1776, the majority of men,
women, and children transported from the Old World to British North
America were, to varying degrees, unfree. And increasingly throughout
most of the eighteenth century, those migrants came from Africa
and were permanently enslaved.1
|
1 |
| But
numbers alone, however refined, tell us little about cultural transfer,
transformation, or annihilation among forcibly transplanted Africans.
Information on the geographic and cultural origins of these migrants
has been presumed lacking. Almost no individual life histories survive,
and even their sex, ages, and names (whether self-stated or assigned)
are often unknown. Moreover, they composed a group set apart from
other migrants by enslavement and by racial prejudice. Consequently,
in contrast to other migrant groups, scant attention has been paid
to the role that ethnicity may have played in forging new African-American
identities, especially in mainland North America. |
2 |
| A
few pioneering studies have made a strong case for the dominance
of one or two African nations in most New World settings and have
posited a central role for ethnicity or nationality in the development
of lives lived in slavery.2
Preliminary findings from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute slave-trade
project, demonstrating strongly patterned distributions of Africans
in receiving colonies, also argue for the need to revise "the
picture of a confusing [or "conflicting"] mix of African
cultures with all the attendant barriers to establishing African
influence on the New World."3
|
3 |
| Even
if one concedes that new evidence on transatlantic migration patterns
is sufficient to contradict the widely accepted supposition of almost
random migration flows, interpretation of the range of surviving
evidence for specific ethnic continuities or discontinuities still
presents heroic challenges. And even where nonrandom migration is
most firmly established, significant cultural mixing between Africans
of varying regional origin, between Africans and creoles, and between
these groups and Native Americans, indisputably complicates the
analysis. Furthermore, the asymmetry of power between the enslaved
and the enslaving precluded any simple synthesis of African and
European cultural forms. The revisionist position "that sees
slaves as forming identifiable communities based on their ethnic
or national pasts" remains strongly challenged.4
|
. . . |
There are about 13950 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
