Abstract
The long half century between the American Revolution and the overthrow of the Restoration monarchy in France in 1830 saw the peak of the transatlantic slave trade (as well as the onset of its abolition), the emergence of the first independent nations of the Americas, a dramatic shift in the distribution and degree of specialization in plantation production in the Americas, and 30 years of maritime conflict in the North Atlantic. The same period saw the largely unrecognized feminization of the slave-labour forces of the major European powers. The connections between all these phenomena and the ways in which contemporary military and political events shaped the development of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade have yet to be fully examined. Many historians have nevertheless accorded revolution a central role in determining the great shifts in the Atlantic slave systems.1 In this chapter I argue, by contrast, that both abolition and changes in constructions of gender evolved gradually in the centuries preceding the Age of Revolution, and that political and military conflict tended to slow down rather than accelerate that evolution.
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Notes
See, for example, the widely cited study by Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988).
Most of my references for this chapter are to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at www.slavevoyages.org, developed by Emory University Libraries, the National Endowment for the Humanities W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, and several other institutional partners accessed in July, 2008. The Voyages section of the website contains details of 35,000 slave voyages, three search interfaces to access this information, as well as estimates of the size and direction of the slave trade. For a breakdown of the information and a summary of findings, see David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘Introduction’, in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, 2008), 3–62.
Estimates of the number of migrants from Europe between 1492 and 1820 are from David Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Migrations from the Old World to the New’, in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. idem (Stanford, 2002), 68–74; for the total number of Africans, see the estimates on the Voyages website. Gender ratios of migrants are discussed in
David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men?’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1992): 237–257. The detailed calculation of the numbers of African females arriving in the Americas to 1820 may be derived from the voyages website.
See Daniel Barros Domingues da Silva, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade to Maranhãco, 1680–1846: Volume, Roots and Organization’, Slavery & Abolition 29/4 (2008): 477–501.
A. C. de M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge, UK, 1982).
Laird Bergard, ‘American Slave Markets During the 1850s: Slave Price Rises in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil in Comparative Perspective’, in Slavery in the Development of the Americas, ed. David Eltis et al. (Cambridge, UK, 2004), 219–235.
For a full presentation of this argument, see David Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 85–113.
B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean (Baltimore, 1984);
Gisela Eisner, Jamaica, 1830–1930: A Study in Economic Growth (Manchester, 1961), 3–23.
David Eltis, ‘Was Abolition of the US and British Slave Trade Significant in the Broader Atlantic Context?’ William and Mary Quarterly 66 (2009): 717–736
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006), 157–174.
Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge, 2006).
Stephen D. Behrendt et al., ‘The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the History of the Atlantic World’, Economic History Review 54 (2001): 454–476.
David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘Productivity in the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Explorations in Economic History 32 (1995): 465–484.
Thomas L. Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1’ and ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2’, in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley, 1992).
See also Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007). For a broad review of the shifts in the debate and a clear distancing from the older economic interpretations, see Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 205–296.
A fuller version of the first part of this argument appears in David Eltis, Rise of African Slavery. For the earlier ideological approach, see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1989), 17–28.
For a fuller presentation of this argument, see Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 281–292; and David Eltis, ‘Abolition and Identity in the Very Long Run’, in Migration, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World: Essays in Honor of Pieter Emmer, ed. Wim Klooster (Leiden, 2009), 227–258.
Emma Christopher, Slave Ships and Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807 (Cambridge, UK, 2006), 178–181. At the time of the Zong trial, Collingwood was already dead, but neither he nor Kimber was convicted of murder, a fact that is in this context beside the point.
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Eltis, D. (2010). Revolution, War, Empire: Gendering the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1776–1830. In: Hagemann, K., Mettele, G., Rendall, J. (eds) Gender, War and Politics. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283046_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283046_2
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