Pub Date : 2018-08-08DOI: 10.1163/2405836X-00303004
Karen Y. Morrison
With the social reproduction of slavery in colonial Cuba as its center point, this essay draws on the recent historiographical acknowledgment of the way vassalage mediated the often starkly drawn social distinctions between whites and enslaved people within colonial Spanish America. Inside the region’s emergent, capitalist political economy, feudal vassalage continued to define each social sector’s rights and responsibilities vis-á-vis the Spanish Crown. The rights of enslaved vassals derived from their potential contributions to the Spanish monarchy’s imperial survival, in their capacity to populate the extensive empire with loyal Catholic subjects and potential military defenders. These concerns also justified the Spanish monarchial state’s ability to intervene between its slaveholding vassals and its enslaved vassals, by limiting private property rights over enslaved people and operating in ways that did not fully conform to capitalist profit motives. Awareness of such sovereign-vassal interdependencies challenges historians to broaden their understanding of the relationship between capitalism and slavery to include the remnants of feudal social-political forms, even into the nineteenth century.
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Pub Date : 2018-08-08DOI: 10.1163/2405836X-00303001
Aviva Ben-Ur
This introduction reviews the historiographical trajectory of the “slave community” and “resistance” paradigms and argues that the assumption of group solidarity underpinning them continues to inform much of the current-day scholarship on slaves and free people of African descent in the hemispheric Americas. After briefly reviewing the four contributions to this journal issue, this article proposes as an alternative the “unsentimental approach” to slavery studies and points to a number of recent publications that collectively stand as a harbinger of this historiographical seachange, one that does not shy away from evidence of economically exploitative slaveholding among free people of African origin, intra-slave violence, or alliances that linked enslaved and free people of African descent to other groups.
{"title":"Bound Together?","authors":"Aviva Ben-Ur","doi":"10.1163/2405836X-00303001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2405836X-00303001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This introduction reviews the historiographical trajectory of the “slave community” and “resistance” paradigms and argues that the assumption of group solidarity underpinning them continues to inform much of the current-day scholarship on slaves and free people of African descent in the hemispheric Americas. After briefly reviewing the four contributions to this journal issue, this article proposes as an alternative the “unsentimental approach” to slavery studies and points to a number of recent publications that collectively stand as a harbinger of this historiographical seachange, one that does not shy away from evidence of economically exploitative slaveholding among free people of African origin, intra-slave violence, or alliances that linked enslaved and free people of African descent to other groups.","PeriodicalId":52325,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Slavery","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/2405836X-00303001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43605856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-08-08DOI: 10.1163/2405836X-00303002
K. Freedman
This article uses the case study of the small Quaker community on seventeenth-century Antigua, as well as sources from Quakers on Barbados and from Quaker missionaries travelling throughout Britain’s Atlantic empire, to question the role of Quakers as anti-slavery pioneers. Quaker founder George Fox used a paternalistic formulation of hierarchy to contend that enslavement of other human beings was compatible with Quakerism, so long as it was done in a nurturing way—an argument that was especially compelling given the sect’s desperate need in the seventeenth century to establish itself economically or risk its destruction by the post-Restoration British State. By exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the eighteenth-century North American colonies, this article demonstrates that it was impossible for Quakers to follow through in establishing a nurturing form of slavery, particularly within the brutal context of the West Indian sugar colonies.
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