|
|
|
Slaveries in the Atlantic World
Introduction: Variations of Slavery
in the Atlantic World
Peter Kolchin
| THE onslaught continues. Three decades
after a remarkable wave of revisionist scholarship fundamentally
reshaped our understanding of antebellum American slavery, we are
now in the midst of a second wave that in sheer volume seems certain
to dwarf the first. Unlike the scholarship of the 1970s,
which shifted the historical emphasis from slaves as objects of
white treatment to slaves as subjects who helped shape their own
world, the post-1970s literature
is less thematically unified. Important trends among the new works
include a lengthened chronological focus, with more attention to
colonial and Revolutionary-era slavery as well as to the abolition
of slavery; a widened spatial focus, with new consideration of the
ways in which geographical variation shaped slavery and an expanded
comparative framework encompassing bondage throughout the world
rather than the Western Hemisphere alone; and an enlarged substantive
focus that for the first time pays attention to the great majority
of slaves—women and children. Among interpretive shifts of note
are a renewed consideration of the importance of labor in defining
the slave experience, a concomitant emphasis on the economic (rather
than primarily cultural) basis of slave autonomy, and a willingness
to question exaggerated claims for the felicity of a sometimes poorly-defined
slave "community." Perhaps the most important single theme evident
in slavery scholarship of the past generation, however, is a recognition
of the extraordinary variability of slavery and the diversity of
slave experiences. It is increasingly clear that we must come to
grips not so much with slavery as with slaveries.1 |
1 |
|
The four articles that follow both build on and testify to the vitality of the new slavery scholarship. In some ways, these articles could be said to explore unusual facets of slavery, notable mostly for their atypicality or singularity. Robert Desrochers, Jr., uses slave-for-sale advertisements to examine slavery in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, a colony where slaves, never more than a tiny fraction of the population, served to enhance the prestige and comfort of the masters more than to increase their wealth. Randy Sparks tells the remarkable story of two African princes who were kidnaped into slavery but whose subsequent experiences differed radically from those of almost all other enslaved Africans; eventually, the princes used their status, contacts, and knowledge of English to secure freedom and return to their native land. Michael Jarvis depicts the relatively independent lives of slave sailors from Bermuda, where more than one-third of the adult male slaves in the 1770s went to sea and (counting those working as shipbuilders, caulkers, and related occupations) a majority were engaged in maritime pursuits. Matthew Mason moves even further from the mainstream, examining metaphorical use of the term "slavery" in the war of words (and sometimes more than words) between Great Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century, as spokesmen in each sought to portray their country as the champion of liberty and to challenge the freedom-loving credentials of the other. |
. . . |
There are about 1029 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.
|
