History Of Slave Ships

Atlantic Historian (history of the sea and colonization) Marcus Rediker, who authored the 'must read ' The Many Headed Hydra, has a new book out on Slave Ships since this is the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the end of Slavery.

For capitalism to expand, forced conscripted labour would be replaced with a new form of exploitation; wage slavery. Which itself was evolving from both indentured servitude and slavery during this period.

Rediker takes a libertarian socialist view of the Atlantic trade and its importance in the creation of global capitalism continuing the social/labour history tradition developed by E.P. Thompson in creating approachable and readable works.

Over more than three centuries, more than 12 million Africans were loaded on ships, bound for the Americas to be slaves.

Aboard the slaver, or Guineaman, as the vessels were also known, the kidnapped Africans frequently had to travel in living quarters as cramped as coffins, and suffered savage beatings, outright torture and death to quell uprisings and forced dancing to keep them fit.

While the plantation system and other aspects of slavery have been widely studied, the history of the slave ship itself is largely unknown, says historian Marcus Rediker, author of "The Slave Ship — A Human History."

"What I'm basically interested in is how captains, ship captains, officers, sailors and the slave interacted with the slave ship. What was the actual reality? Of course, it was quite horrifying," said Rediker, a University of Pittsburgh history professor. "In many respects, the development of the Americas through slavery and the plantation system is unthinkable without the slave ship."

For a couple hundred years, most people thought they knew what happened during the Atlantic crossing, Rediker says. Abolitionists had produced evidence of life aboard slave ships, but many scholars were suspicious of what they'd gathered, thinking it propaganda.

Perhaps the most significant reason for lack of scholarship, he says, is an assumption that "history happens on land, that the landed masses of the world are the real places and that the seas in between are a kind of void."

Marcus Rediker escapes the 'the violence of abstraction' in this history of slave ships that richly mines the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves.

But, as promised, this account of life aboard the "vast machines" is not told with charts and tables. The slave ship, as a floating factory, prison and weapon, was recognized by all as a world-altering technology. Rediker's sources include parliamentary hearings, abolitionist pamphlets and the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves. Chained below decks aboard what some imagined were "houses with wings," Africans were already, according to Rediker, forging new communities.

The slave ship ranged in size and design from 11-ton sloops, capable of carrying 30 slaves, to 566-ton behemoths, capable of carrying 700 to 800 slaves. Such variety belies the slow pace of innovation within the trade. In spite of its centrality to European ventures abroad, the great minds of the Enlightenment added to the slave ship -- over the course of 100 years -- copper-sheathed hulls (to protect against shipworm), ventilation and netting to catch those who tried to jump overboard. Liberté, égalité and fraternité came separately.

Much of Rediker's book also concerns the lives of sailors, the trade's "white slaves." Many were compelled to sea by debt, others by trickery. Half were cut down within months by West Africa's endemic parasites. Those who survived disease had to endure the cruelty of captains driven mad by profit. Some escaped, only to be caught and sold by African traders. Others became pirates. But all were lucky compared with the chronically ill, penniless sailors who, cheated of wages and their passage home, littered 18th-century ports from Kingston to Charleston.

Rediker looks not at that bigger picture but at the slave ship itself, as a microeconomy where the captain was chief executive, jailer, accountant, paymaster and disciplinarian, exercising these roles by maintaining, from his spacious captain's cabin in a very unspacious ship, the mystique of what later military leaders would call command isolation. Slave ships are, after all, a far larger part of our history than we like to think. Our normal picture of an 18th-century sailing vessel is of one filled with hopeful immigrants. But before 1807, ships carried well over three times as many enslaved Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans.

Not only was the business a booming one, it was, until pesky abolitionists started making a fuss in the 1780s, considered highly respectable, as central to the Atlantic economy as is something like oil today. "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is," wrote James Houston, who worked for a firm of 18th-century slave merchants. "It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves." John Newton, who later wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace," spent part of his youth as a slave-ship captain and believed that because of the long periods of time at sea, there was no calling that afforded "greater advantages to an awakened mind, for promoting the life of God in the soul."

Slave ships were death ships for crew and captives

Monday, October 01, 2007

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The typical slave ship began its life as a merchant vessel, and was refitted later for its grim purpose.

The primary remodeling, which often occurred on the outward leg of the voyage, was to build walls below decks to separate men and women, and then build horizontal platforms halfway between the first and second decks on which to stack the slaves.

The height between the first and second deck usually was only about 5 feet before the remodeling, said Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh history professor and author of "The Slave Ship: A Human History." Once the platforms were built, headroom was about 2¹/₂ feet.

"This produced crowding of a kind that is almost incomprehensible," he said. "One of the things that struck almost everybody about a slave ship was the stench of it.

"It was said in Charleston, S.C., that when the wind was blowing off the water a certain way you could smell a slave ship before you could see it. It was a function of sickness, vomit, diarrhea, death and also the way the human body perspires in the condition of fear."

And while it is true that some slave ship seamen joined the crew because they were sadistic or wanted sexual access to African women, many of them were victimized almost as badly as the slaves, Dr. Rediker said.

"One of the great mysteries I wanted to explore was how sailors were recruited to slave ships when they knew the conditions were going to be horrible and the death rates were going to be high."

He discovered that in many cases, ship captains would get sailors to run up debts in taverns, and then would pay off the tavern owners with some of the sailor's advance wages in return for the sailor being handed over to work on the crew.

Slave ship captains also would offer sailors advance wages worth $800 to $1,200 in today's money or to pay part of the sailors' salaries to their wives once a week.

Once they were onboard, many crewmen were treated almost as brutally as the slaves. For a huge variety of infractions, they were whipped, chained, denied food, stabbed and even shot.

In fact, the death rate among slave ship crews was almost as high as among the slaves, Dr. Rediker said, and hit 5 percent even on the healthiest of voyages.

The slave trade was required to create vast accumulations of capital. And it is directly tide to British expansion and so called Free Trade.

People in Norfolk are about to have their eyes opened to the county's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

If you think of the trade in enslaved Africans using British ships, Liverpool, Bristol and London spring to mind. But project historian Richard Maguire is about to shock Norfolk people with the deep links he has unearthed concerning the role the county played in the trade - and its abolition.

His research culminates in an exhibition at the Norfolk Record Office at County Hall from Monday.

He said: “The original idea was to look at something that was never looked at before - Norfolk's connections to transatlantic slavery.

“People have always tended to assume that the slave trade was exclusive to Liverpool, Bristol and London. But research we have done at the Record Office has revealed there to be a goldmine of information relating to Norfolk. Norfolk was connected at all levels of the trade - slave ships left King's Lynn for Africa, county people owned slaves and invested in plantations and traded slaves from here. But on the other hand Norfolk people from the 1780s onwards were equally involved in calling for the end of the slave trade.

“We are trying to give people an understanding of part of the history that nobody knew about before.”

The exhibition also reveals black people have lived in Norfolk since the 17th century. Documents on show reveal that a black man lived in King's Lynn in 1673, a black woman Rachel was baptised in Diss in 1799, and Elizabeth Buxton, from Stradsett, left £10 to her black servant in her will of 1729. Other documents reveal the inhumane treatment slaves received from owners, and a list of the enslaved people on the Hanson Plantation, Barbados, owned by Sir John Berney of Kirby Bedon Hall, lists black people as stock alongside cattle.

And in a related story a freedom ship may be at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

A fantastic story is unfolding along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Indiana.

It involves a 150 year old shipwreck, a Porter County Historian, fugitive slaves and The Underground Railroad.

Legend has it a wooden schooner would stop on the shore in Indiana to pick up fugitive slaves and take them to Chicago where they would hide on ships bound for freedom in Canada.

After the 1850 Compromise was passed it became dangerous to help escaped slaves even in free states like Illinois and Indiana.

According to the law you could be prosecuted, fined and even thrown in jail. The mysterious ship met with a tragic fate.

Now a team of researchers is racing against time and the elements to solve this mystery and prove this was the legendary ship used to smuggle fugitive slaves to freedom.

Again the idea of piracy and privateers arising from the Atlantic Slave trade to become the basis of capitalism in the new world plays an important role later in the industrial revolution created by the American Civil war.

Just as it is important today in the creation of what Phillip Bobbitt calls the New Market State. Which we see in the rise of gang (pirate) controlled countries like Somalia and Jamaica.

Piracy was the origin of capitalism as it evolved within the declining feudal economies of Europe.

The history of capital is not merely the history of wealth accumulated by a few families who hand it down, it is the history of the worlds wealth created by slavery, indentured servitude, serfdom and its transition through the creation of labour saving machinery to replace the degradation of humans to become the degradation of work.

See:

Abolishing Slavery In Canada

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Jamestown; the beginning of Globalization

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Black Like Me

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism;William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics

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The Slave Ship — A Human History, R.Buckminister.Fuller, The Many Headed Hydra, pirates, piracy, freebooters, capitalism, free-association, Marcus Rediker, anarchism, anarchy, libertarian, libertarianism, left-libertarian, primitive-accumulation-of-capital

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

In searching for a pithy definition of Fete Accompli I came across this in Wikipedia.

Like Stephen Harper here is another Tory politician Quebecers liked; Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

But unlike Harper his motto was; if elected I will not serve. Which meant they liked him a lot.

While active with the New Zealand Company, Edward Gibbon had maintained his interest in Canadian affairs. He was involved with the North American Colonial Association of Ireland, NACAI. At his instigation, the NACAI were trying to purchase a large estate just outside Montreal where they wanted to establish another Colonial settlement. Edward Gibbon pushed the scheme with his usual energy; apparently, the government did not object in principle but they strenuously objected to Edward Gibbon having any part of it.

But trusted or not by the politicians, Edward Gibbon was involved in the scheme. The NACAI sent him back to Canada as their representative; he arrived in Montreal in January of 1842 and stayed in Canada for about a year. At this stage , Canada was still coming to terms with the union of Upper and Lower Canada. There were serious differences between the French and English Canadians with the English Canadians holding the political clout. Edward Gibbon skillfully manipulated these differences; it was fairly easy for him to get the support of the French Canadians. By the end of that year he had got himself elected to the Canadian Parliament. It is perhaps typical of Edward Gibbon that, having been elected, he immediately returned to Britain and never took up his seat.

He went back to Canada in 1843 and spent some months there. However when he heard of his brother Arthur's death at the Wairau Affray, he immediately quit Canada and never returned. This appears to be the end of his involvement with Canadian affairs except that he was paid about twenty thousand pounds by the NACAI for his work in Canada. As always with Edward Gibbon, principles and profit seemed to go neatly together.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a scoundrel and a cad, a free land advocate, a realitor , opposed to the British Mercantile State Monopoly, and thus he was not trusted by them. Despite being in business with them in forming colonies as their real estate agent.

Competing schemes of colonial emigration with different implications for equality were promoted to create more consumers of British manufactured goods and producers of food. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plans were designed to recreate in British North America the inequalities associated with labour’s divorce from capital as necessary for social and economic development, but others sought the same end by means of the greater social equality that came from reuniting labour with capital. The poor and dispossessed in Britain who produced and consumed little could be transformed into agrarian property-holders in colonial societies dominated by such petty producers. A degree of inequality would persist, but the resulting colonial societies were far more egalitarian and therefore socially and politically democratic than Britain itself. In such a social context, nineteenth-century liberalism—its celebration of independence and equation of individual economic success with virtue—seemed especially plausible to contemporaries.

Herr Doctor Professor Karl Marx outlines the origin of American Libertarianism, that shocked Wakefield; its exceptionalism as a free soil political economy, not a capitalist one. America was a truly free market economy as long as land was held as a public trust for private use.

As a commercial colonizer Wakefield was shocked his experiment had failed. It had not created a capitalist colony bound to the Mother Country, rather it had given free men, free land. But then again he was an idle speculator, a salesman of colonies for his masters.

And so in desperation as Marx points out Wakefield offers his masters a solution to end the free labour republic, taxation, expropriation of the land by the State and then selling it back to free men at such a high cost they have to become wage slaves instead of independent landowning producers.

This then is the secret of the political economy of Capitalism. That it must destroy the real free market by imposition of Statist taxation for capital accumulation. America as a colonial experiment had evolved into a Republic of Free Labour and Free Soil, something that most American Libertarians acknowledge as their exceptionalism. But this was too much for Old World capitalism and it needed a State that would tax property and then sell it off to the highest bidder. That as Marx says and they would concur;

that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.

While vulgar liberaltarians leave out the capitalist and simply decry the State and Taxation as the villains genuine American descendants of the libertarian independent producers would embrace instead the ideal of the cooperative commonwealth as a way of challenging the State and its taxation of their 'public property'.

It is ironic that Marx who is assaulted as a statist by the right would embrace the libertarian ideal that the truly independent producer is also the owner of his own property, that is land. But as Marx says the secret to this form of private property is its communal ownership as public property of the producers.

• A View of the Art of Colonization by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 1849.

• The Modern Theory of Colonisation last chapter in Karl Marx's Capital, Vol I focused on Wakefield's theory.

It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonization theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonization.” First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.

“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of laborers for hire.” So long, therefore, as the laborer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage-laborers, essential to these, is wanting.

We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labor very dear, as respects the laborer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labor at any price.”

As in the colonies the separation of the laborer from the conditions of labor and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, not the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labor in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.” With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?

But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-country, because many laborers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labor-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labor falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-laborer as wage-laborer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage-laborers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labor-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-laborer remain indecently low. The wage-laborer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage-labor, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labor is always not only small but uncertain.” “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the laborer be large, the laborer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.” The laborers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labor. It avails him nothing, is he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be laborers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labor-market.” Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient laborers — for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilized countries the laborer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.”

What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth. The parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own account, annihilates, along with the centralization of capital, all the foundation of combined labor. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a moment, for the working-class constitutes its living appurtennce, always in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells and extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” laborers. “Our capital,” says one of the characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labor which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retraining the labor of such emigrants, we should have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.”

After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labor with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising, and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural laborer is miserable wretch, a pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labor employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the laborer? ... Undoubtedly , farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.” But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.

How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also — the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labor by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage-labor market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic colonization.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labor must be constant and regular, because, first, as no laborer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant laborers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce capital for the employment of more laborers; secondly, because every laborer who left off working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labor to the colony.” The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient price” — i.e., so high “as to prevent the laborers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.” This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the laborer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage-labor market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more laborers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labor-market, whom the Government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.

However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.

See:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism

William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics

War and the Market State




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capitalism,, history,, slavery,, primitive, accumulation, of, capital,, Atlantic, History,, Britain,, workers,, proletariat,, socialism,, labour, history,, labor, history,, pirates,, piracy,, colonialism,, American, colonies,,

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Without Atlantic Trade, capitalism would not have flourished, it might have remained isolated in Britain.

Where Did Capitalism Come From?

America was founded as a capitalist colony, made up of indentured servants later to be replaced with a slave economy, evolving into the dominant capitalist nation four hundred years later with a new slave economy based on the wage slavery of migrant workers.

The youth who were used to colonize Jamestown were artisans and farmers displaced off the land by the end of the commons. They were indentured servants, not freemen.

Whittenburg Q&A: Who settled Jamestown?

James Whittenburg, associate professor of history and chair of the Lyon Gardiner Tyler Department of History, is a constant visitor to Jamestown. We asked him to help us understand who the first settlers were, what their motivations were and to tell us about the significance of new discoveries at James Fort led by alumnus William Kelso. He told us …

Whittenburg: I was once interviewed at some length by a reporter who ended up asking, “OK, just give me your bottom line as to what the earliest colonists were really like.” To which I said, “Think worst sort of ‘Animal House’ fraternity,” and that’s all that the reporter quoted. The first colonists—104 men and boys—were young. Initially, they were entirely male. … And there was continual turnover. Of the 104 men and boys who arrived in May 1607, only 38 or 40 were alive when the next supply arrived the following January. During the “starving time” in the winter of 1609-1610, the population went down from about 250 people to only about 60. …

W&M News: What were their motivations?

Whittenburg: Trade was at the core of it. What was happening in England was the development of corporations in which entrepreneurs would invest in companies that traded goods all over the world. There actually were two Virginia Companies, one that funded Jamestown and one that established an outpost in Maine in 1607 that failed within a year. Both companies were joint stock companies. Religion was also a major part of it. The Protestant vs. Catholic element was a key factor. The Spanish Catholics were seen by Protestant Englishmen as the overlords of the New World, and the English had the idea that they were going to free the New World from the yoke of Catholic oppression. Nationalism also was a part of it, along with the military element. One thing that is not a part of it is tobacco. Tobacco was known in England. The Spanish already were exporting it back to Europe, and there was a market for it there. However, in 1607 the English at Jamestown had no plans for it as a cash crop. By the 1620s, however, tobacco was driving the Virginia economy.

Making Furniture in Preindustrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii + 295 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, glossary, notes on sources and methods, index. $45.00. Early Americans lived, we increasingly believe, amidst a "consumer revolution." Efforts to explore consumer behavior in the early modern economy have given the study of material culture, particularly household objects--how they were made, how they were used, their multiple meanings, their ownership and accumulation--new importance, and focused inquiry on the artifact collections at places such as Colonial Williamsburg, the Winterthur Museum, and Historic Deerfield. Concern with the consumer revolution has led, as well, to exciting new work--one thinks of Ann Smart Martin's studies of ceramics and pewterware, Adrienne Hood's and Marla R. Miller's on the clothing trade, and now Edward S. Cooke Jr.'s carefully wrought investigation of joiners, the furniture they made, and the neighbors to whom they sold it. ^1 The current exploration of this consumer revolution builds upon a generation of community studies, on material culture studies, and on the work of historical archaeologists. It is Cooke's greatest strength that he has mastered the literature and investigatory traditions of several fields and used them to his advantage. Cooke's study unfolds as a comparison between 1760 and 1820 of two southwestern Connecticut towns, Newtown and Woodbury, situated along the Housatonic River.

Strange Fruit of American Democracy

Both before and after the Revolutionary War, America was a slave-hungry system. In its European form, the nation emerged from scratch, with no prior feudal history or communal traditions, a product of British capital ventures. As British colonists found no gold like the Spaniards did in the Americas, they turned to agriculture. From the Indians they learned to grow tobacco as a profitable crop, but planting and harvesting required intense physical labor. For their sturdiness, vulnerability, and cheap price, the colonists favored Africans over Native American Indians and English laborers for the task.

The first Africans arrived on the North American continent in August 1619, a year before Pilgrims landed the Mayflower on the shores of Massachusetts and decades before the British slave trade began in New England. Exchanged for food, twenty blacks stepped off a Dutch slavery ship to become the first generation of African-Americans. Joining a society not yet lacerated by slavery and racism, they worked as indentured servants to British elites. As such, their status was equal to poor white servants, and servants of either race could gain freedom after their tenure. Like whites, blacks owned property, married, and voted in an integrated society.

This benign situation changed dramatically in the 1660s as ever-more Africans were brought to the colonies to meet the growing need for plantation labor. As slavery became crucial to capitalist expansion and plantation economies organized around tobacco, sugar, and cotton, British colonists constructed racist ideologies to legitimate the violent subjugation of those equal to them in the eyes of God and the principles of natural law. Having survived the shock of capture and wretchedness of their journey, African men, women, and children were auctioned, branded, and sold to white slave owners who grew rich from trading, breeding, and exploiting their bodies. With no consideration of blood ties or emotional bonds, black families were broken apart. Stripped of rights, dignity, and human status, these African citizens and their millions of American descendents were brutalized in the most vicious slavery system on the planet, one whose ugly legacy continues to dominate and poison the US.

One of the longest running of these debates has been over slavery, especially its abolition and its contribution to the wealth of England, which, as the film of Mansfield Park shows, is an issue on which many liberals still feel the need to declare themselves. In the eighteenth century, English merchant ships were the principal transporters of slaves from Africa to the New World, and slave labor on English sugar plantations in the West Indies made fortunes for their absentee owners at home. Yet parliament put an end to this business by banning the transportation of slaves in 1807 and outlawing the ownership of slaves in 1833. Until the 1940s, the consensus among historians was that slavery was ended because of the strength of religious feeling and humanitarianism, expressed through the abolitionist movement of William Wilberforce and his Evangelical Christian followers. However, in a widely celebrated counterthesis, Eric Williams attacked this moral explanation and substituted an economic rationale. In 1938, Williams had been the first student from the West Indies to earn a doctorate at Oxford University. However, instead of undergoing the civilizing process anticipated by those colonial officials who had arranged his tuition, Williams discovered Marxism at Oxford. Returning to Trinidad, he revised his D.Phil thesis and published it as Capitalism and Slavery (1944), arguing that slavery was only abolished because, after more than a century of cropping, the monoculture of sugar cane had exhausted the soil of the West Indian islands, and the estates had become unprofitable. Prohibiting the transport of slaves would prevent French expansion on other islands in the region while the British transferred their plantations to Asia. Moreover, while attacking the traditional explanation for abolition, Williams constructed an even more audacious moral case of his own about the place of slavery in the English economy. The profits from the transport and sale of slaves, he argued, made a substantial contribution to financing the industrial revolution in Britain. Hence, all those subsequent generations of Europeans who have enjoyed the standards of living provided by industrialism have done so from capital accumulated on the backs of black slave labor.

As two of the contributors to these volumes, P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, argued in their persuasive work British Imperialism (1993), after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, England became the first country to develop a modern financial and banking system. The City of London then set out to become the financier to the world, providing short-term credit for trade and long-term credit for investment. Within a century, Britain also underwent the industrial revolution, which gave it a surplus of low-cost, factory-manufactured goods for which it sought world markets. As the leading force in finance and manufacturing, and as the dominant European naval and military power, Britain had every reason to expand across the globe and few to prevent it doing so. From the vantage point of hindsight we can now see that the principal artefact it exported to the world was not “civilization,” as many thought at the time, but modernization. In terms of economics, this meant the systems of finance, transportation, and manufacturing that Britain had developed at home. Rather than a form of plunder that depleted the economies that came under its influence, British imperialism injected many of the institutions of modernization into the territories it controlled.

In those countries where British culture and legal systems already held sway, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, modernization was a comparatively painless process. In others, like India and the Middle East, the political, cultural, and legal systems remained relatively impervious to British influence. As A. G. Hopkins points out in volume V, the latter countries had their own internal dynamics that governed the direction and the pace of their evolution. They were not susceptible to Western brands of social engineering. However, while imperialism might not have dramatically transformed their culture, it could and usually did lead to the modernization of their financial and technological infrastructure. And no matter how hard some historians of these latter regions try, they can no longer argue that these changes were essentially for the worst. For instance, in volume III, D. A. Washbrook, who writes about India between 1818 and 1860, does his best to portray the downside of the equation. Early in this period, he writes, British control led to short-term economic depression and long-term economic backwardness as the factory manufactures of England undermined India’s former export markets and as deficits in British-controlled Indian trade with China led to a contraction of the money supply. By the end of his period, however, Washbrook acknowledges the evidence for the many positive results of the investments made by British financiers in railways, ports, and factories, which gave Indian products world markets, which led to long-term economic growth and some short-term economic booms in the second-half of the century, and which also augmented the resources of the unmodernized agrarian sector of the economy.

The Anti-Slavery Campaign in Africa

Following the victory of the Union forces in the American Civil War, the Atlantic slave trade dried up, leaving the North-Eastern African trade the exception. British pressure on the Viceroy of Egypt intensified. In 1865, Lord Russell instructed Sir Henry Bulwer, the General Consul, that he should impress "upon the Viceroy the deep interest of Her Majesty's Government in the suppression of the slave trade . . . and . . . state that they will be happy at all times to cooperate with his Highness as far as it may be in their powers to do so in any measures having for their object the putting to a stop of this inhuman traffic."²

Inhumanity, however, was by no means Britain's overriding concern. But presenting British policy in the humanitarian clothes of the Anti-Slavery Campaign had several advantages for Britain. First it won support at home for an aggressive African policy. Second it extended British influence through the extension of Egyptian control over slave-trading Africa. And third it allowed Britain to regulate Egypt's status in relation to "civilisation," thereby dominating Egypt, too.

In the first instance the Anti-Slavery Policy was a response to the difficulties faced by European traders in the Sudan where native slave-traders controlled trade and the local authority in Khartoum. Most had sold out to their Arab agents and withdrawn under the threat of rising violence around Bahr al-Jabal and Bahr al-Gazal.³

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Black Marxism is far more ambitious than its modest title implies, for what Cedric Robinson has written extends well beyond the history of the Black Left or Black radical movements. Combining political theory, history, philosophy, cultural analysis, and biography, among other things, Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilization in which it was born or mass movements outside Europe. At the very least, Black Marxism challenges our "common sense" about the history of modernity, nationalism, capitalism, radical ideology, the origins of Western racism, and the worldwide Left from the 1848 revolutions to the present.

Perhaps more than any other book, Black Marxism shifts the center of radical thought and revolution from Europe to the so-called "periphery"--to the colonial territories, marginalized colored people of the metropolitan centers of capital, and those Frantz Fanon identified as the "wretched of the earth." And it makes a persuasive case that the radical thought and practice which emerged in these sites of colonial and racial capitalist exploitation were produced by cultural logics and epistemologies of the oppressed as well as the specific racial and cultural forms of domination. Thus Robinson not only decenters Marxist history and historiography but also what one might call the "eye of the storm."

Yet for all of Robinson's decentering, he begins his story in Europe. While this might seem odd for a book primarily concerned with African people, it becomes clear very quickly why he must begin there, if only to remove the analytical cataracts from our eyes. This book is, after all, a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora. Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism. Thus, several years before the recent explosion in "whiteness studies," Robinson proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe's modern encounter with African and New World labor. Such insights give the "Dark Ages" new meaning. Despite the almost axiomatic tendency in European historiography to speak of early modern working classes in national terms--English, French, and so forth--Robinson argues that the "lower orders" usually were comprised of immigrant workers from territories outside the nations in which they worked. These immigrant workers were placed at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. The Slavs and the Irish, for example, were among Europe's first "niggers," and what appears before us in nineteenth-century U.S. history as their struggle to achieve whiteness is merely the tip of an iceberg several centuries old. [1]

Robinson not only finds racialism firmly rooted in premodern European civilization but locates the origins of capitalism there as well. Building on the work of the Black radical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, Robinson directly challenges the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. [2] Instead, Robinson explains, capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West--most notably in the racialism that has come to characterize European society. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of "racial capitalism" dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. So Robinson not only begins in Europe; he also chips away at many of the claims and assertions central to European historiography, particularly of the Marxist and liberal varieties. For instance, Robinson's discussion of the Irish working class enables him to expose the myth of a "universal" proletariat: just as the Irish were products of popular traditions borne and bred under colonialism, the "English" working class of the colonizing British Isles was formed by Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, a racial ideology shared across class lines that allowed the English bourgeoisie to rationalize low wages and mistreatment for the Irish. This particular form of English racialism was not invented by the ruling class to divide and conquer (though it did succeed in that respect); rather, it was there at the outset, shaping the process of proletarianization and the formation of working-class consciousness. Finally, in this living feudal order, socialism was born as an alternative bourgeois strategy to combat social inequality. Directly challenging Marx himself, Robinson declares: "Socialist critiques of society were attempts to further the bourgeois revolutions against feudalism." [3]

There is yet another reason for Robinson to begin in the heart of the West. It was there--not Africa--that the "Negro" was first manufactured. This was no easy task, as Robinson reminds us, since the invention of the Negro--and by extension the fabrication of whiteness and all the policing of racial boundaries that came with it--required "immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies of the West" (4). Indeed, a group of European scholars expended enormous energy rewriting of the history of the ancient world. Anticipating Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I (1987) and building on the pioneering scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop, George G. M. James, and Frank Snowden, Robinson exposes the efforts of European thinkers to disavow the interdependence between ancient Greece and North Africa. This generation of "enlightened" European scholars worked hard to wipe out the cultural and intellectual contributions of Egypt and Nubia from European history, to whiten the West in order to maintain the purity of the "European" race. They also stripped all of Africa of any semblance of "civilization," using the printed page to eradicate African history and thus reduce a whole continent and its progeny to little more than beasts of burden or brutish heathens. Although efforts to reconnect the ancient West with North Africa have recently come under a new wave of attacks by scholars like Mary Lefkowitz, Robinson shows why these connections and the debates surrounding them are so important. [4] It is not a question of "superiority" or the "theft" of ideas or even a matter of proving that Africans were "civilized." Rather, Black Marxism reminds us again today, as it did sixteen years ago, that the exorcising of the Black Mediterranean is about the fabrication of Europe as a discrete, racially pure entity solely responsible for modernity, on the one hand, and the fabrication of the Negro, on the other. In this respect, Robinson's intervention parallels that of Edward Said's Orientalism, which argues that the European study of and romance with the "East" was primarily about constructing the Occident. [5]

Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History By Ian
Baucom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. x + 387 pp. Index, notes. Cloth, $84.95;
paper, $23.95. ISBN: cloth, 0-822-33558-1; paper, 0-822-33596-4.

Even in the context of the sordid history of the Atlantic slave trade, the decision of the
captain of the British slave ship Zong in September 1781 to toss more than one hundred
live slaves overboard aroused controversy. The owners of the Zong subsequently sought
full compensation for the slaves from their insurers, who in turn insisted that the claims
were fraudulent because there had been no justification for the mass drowning. During
the legal wrangling, culpability for the murder of 133 slaves was not at issue; rather, the
liability of the insurers was in question. Outside the courtroom, a nascent abolitionist
movement charged that the captain’s cavalier destruction of human life typified the
routine barbarism inherent in the trade in human chattel.

Of particular interest to readers of the Business History Review is the significance
that Baucom attaches to the Zong in the history of finance capital. It may be tempting to
conclude that the Zong case was notorious because it established that slaves were
commodities no different from lumber, glassware, or any other exchange good. But the
author insists that the legal principle that slaves were chattel was already well established by 1781.

Nevertheless, the case was a signal event in the history of the slave trade and the modern history of property, because it affirmed that slaves were not only commodities but also “commodities which have become at some or other time the subjects of insurance.” What is at issue here, according to Baucom, is not just the extension of commodity capitalism into the “domain of the human,” but also the “colonization of human subjectivity by finance capital.” The assumption that slaves were the bearers of “an utterly dematerialized, utterly speculative, and utterly transactable, enforceable, and recuperable pecuniary value,” the author contends, was a signal manifestation of the late eighteenth- century revolution of finance capital (pp. 138–39). The point here is that, once slaves were insured, their identities as human individuals (with unique desires, purposes, and wills) were erased. The victims of the Zong, in short, had vanished as individuals long before they were thrown into the Atlantic. For this to happen, value had to be divorced from commodity form and replaced by imaginary, mobile, deracinated forms of property. Baucom goes further, contending that the case of the Zong constitutes a “catastrophically exemplary event” in the arrival of modernity. It marks the “inauguration of a long twentieth century underwritten by the development of an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation,” during which stock, credit, and insurance became essential mediums of exchange and “aesthetic modes, epistemological innovations, subject effects, and value forms” derived from “theoretical realism” enabled and sustained “a culture of speculation” (p. 167).

SEE:

The Truth Shall Set Ye Free

Abolishing Slavery In Canada

History of Slavery

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Era Of The Common Man

The Many Headed Hydra

Migration

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