The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston

Abstract

The notion that African bodies survived in hot, wet tropical climates longer and better than European bodies was a cornerstone of white slaveowners’ thought and practice in the Atlantic world. It justified the disproportionate exposure of enslaved African men, women, and children to unhealthy, disease-ridden, and hazardous living and working conditions. This racist doctrine directly contributed to the premature deaths of millions of Black people.Although no serious scholar today openly entertains the idea that race has a material basis in human biology, this book makes clear that historical studies of race and environment have far too often taken at face value the biological rationale of white slaveowners. Studies that test immunity of African- and Creole-born populations to yellow fever and malaria over that of new arrivals from Europe are emblematic of this tendency. These studies unwittingly reinforce the spurious logic of biological race, a notion which assumes an almost transhistorical character of static, unbroken continuity.Johnston’s exciting and timely work forces us to reconsider how we tell histories of race and environment. It reveals that slaveowners and colonial officials repudiated the evidence that environmental and labor conditions, not race, were the primary determinants of death and survival in the tropics. This disavowal facilitated the binary division of Black and white bodies into separate classes of human being, in accordance with a climate-based theory of fixed, immutable racial difference. In the process, the historical development of climatic theories of race over time was effaced and replaced with hollow racial tautologies. To recover this history, Johnston revisits key periods in the expansion of African slavery in the West Indies, colonial Georgia and South Carolina, and the antebellum United States, examining the disjuncture of what contemporaries admitted privately to one another with what they avowed in public forums about the non-racial bases of mortality in plantation colonies.Climatic-racial discourse remained fluid, contested, and amorphous until the early nineteenth century. Whites privately acknowledged in personal correspondence and medical treatises that the survival of newcomers to tropical colonies depended upon “seasoning”—receiving sufficient food, becoming slowly habituated to novel environmental conditions, avoiding the most physically taxing work on plantations—irrespective of race. Observers identified unwise personal habits (such as excessive alcohol consumption) and settlement decisions (such as placing human abodes too close to marshlands and disease-causing miasmas) as more accurate predictors of death for Europeans and Africans equally. It was not uncommon for whites to emphasize that tropical environments were indeed beneficial to the bodily health of Europeans.In public-facing discourse, however, contemporaries appropriated the climatic rhetoric of race to serve the economic imperatives of capital and African slavery. The Malcontents of Georgia in the 1740s and Anglo-American advocates for the continuation of the transatlantic African slave trade in the 1780s, for example, propounded a bogus version of the past in which white indentured servants in seventeenth-century Barbados and early eighteenth-century Georgia never lived long enough to cultivate food and cash crops. In their retroactive telling of history, the enslavement of Africans served as the primary mechanism through which white settler colonists overcame the limits imposed by the natural environment in the first place. Metropolitan elites with little to no experience living in the Americas parroted these falsehoods to enrich themselves through the universal adoption of African slavery over white indentured servitude, under the auspices of environmental necessity. By the early nineteenth century, these lies became gospel, encouraging the expansion of slavery in the United States and forging a dark brotherhood between southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists of the Civil War era, both anxious to deport every free African American to where Blackness and environment predestined that they belonged: the tropical climes of the Greater Caribbean and West Africa.The Nature of Slavery shows that it was the climatic rhetoric of race, and never the physical climate itself, that crucially shaped white contemporaries’ arguments for the perpetual extension and reproduction of racial slavery in American plantation societies. Scholars working on the intellectual history of race and science, Black ecologies, and environmental racism in the Americas must read this book and wrestle with Johnston’s injunction to abolish the environmental ideas of racist slaveowners from their vision of the past, once and for all.