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

Abstract

At the end of The Nature of Slavery, Katherine Johnston concludes that “in the history of the development of African slavery in the Americas, climate played a minor role” (188). The statement may surprise some, including scholars of slavery and of environment. But the book bears out the claim. Johnston means not that assertions about climate played no role in the history of enslavement but that climate itself barely did. This distinction between what enslavers said and what they believed about climate is the centerpiece of the book. “Slavery’s stakeholders developed and manipulated the climatic defense of racial slavery despite their experiences, not because of them,” Johnston argues, “in the same way that theories of biological race are groundless and yet have caused incalculable harm” (4). Environment had a visible presence within the justifications white people offered for enslaving Black people for profit—though, Johnston establishes, not at the very start of colonization, only once it was well underway in the eighteenth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, Philip D. Curtin, Winthrop D. Jordan, and David Brion Davis identified Europeans’ arguments that sub-Saharan Africans could perform hard work in hot climates without accepting their claims as true. Johnston’s book revisits this historiography, as well as more recent analyses of tropical environments and human health by Ikuko Asaka, Emily Senior, and Suman Seth. Johnston is more overt, however, in labeling assertions about climate “a myth about the rise of African slavery” (5). The myth had three interlocking claims: in early plantation regions, Africans and Europeans had observable health differences; Europeans suffered poorer health and could barely work; and Africans were healthier, stronger, and more productive. The book’s main finding is simple—these justifications were wrong, both factually and morally. The claims were factually misleading because they did not in any consistent way reflect the realities of health on plantations at the start of colonization. They were therefore morally compromised as ex post facto judgments. As Johnston argues, “planters’ climatic defense of racial slavery in the late eighteenth century became a retroactive explanation for its establishment in these colonies” (3).1