Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery has several simultaneous goals: to foreground numeracy in the early modern articulation of racial difference, to rethink Western modernity as a product of Black erasure, and to center the commodification of African and African-descended people in the history of capitalism. At its core, though, the book seeks to provide an intellectual and social history of enslaved women as clear-eyed analysts of the system of economic extraction built on their childbearing capabilities. To follow the strategic choices that Black women made within hereditary slavery, then, is to witness the theorization of racial capitalism in real time.Writing with insight and subtlety, Jennifer Morgan knits together the disparate historiographies of “racial ideology, economics, and the political lives of enslaved people” (17). Morgan, who has been at the forefront of Black feminist scholarship of the early modern Atlantic since the publication of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004), carries forward many of the commitments of that original work, while also expanding the field of inquiry to range across the Portuguese, Spanish, and English empires. Readers familiar with the earlier work will notice other departures as well. If fantastical depictions of nursing West African mothers had previously undergirded European race-making, the focus here shifts to Africans’ supposed inability to calculate correctly. The quantifying tendencies gathering in European thought under the umbrella of “political arithmetic” lent themselves to theories of African deficiency and were then deployed to justify the enslavement that followed. Europe's “newly consolidating ideas about wealth, nationhood, and population” presumed the potential value of African women's future reproduction, positioning the Black womb as always already commodified and in the service of colonial ambitions (111). Morgan makes it impossible to unsee this fixation within European political economic writing, and in doing so she advances an argument for recognizing capitalism and anti-Black racism as mutually constitutive.Morgan further entangles capitalism and race-making by foregrounding kinship, which was central to the formulation of enslavement as a hereditary condition but also at the core of a legal regime of private property that facilitated the intergenerational transfer of wealth. Generations of white prosperity would come to hinge on generations of unborn Black children transformed from “kin to inventory” (107). As Europeans denied that the affective ties of kinship held any meaning for African people, they invented another arena for articulating racial difference and an intellectual rationale for shifting enslaved women's children “out of the conceptual landscape of families and onto the balance sheets of slave traders” (134). Here Morgan suggests that racialized slavery has shaped the modern boundaries of public and private. As constructed in the early modern West, the private family (insulated from state power and outside the market) relied on its juxtaposition to enslaved Black mothers and children classified by law as property, plunged into the market, and denied recognition as a family altogether. As with her discussion of political economy, Morgan convincingly charts a new genealogy for long-studied topics too often construed as having nothing to do with Atlantic slavery.Consistent with an “archival turn” within the field of slavery studies, Reckoning with Slavery contemplates the possibilities for excavating a social history of enslaved women from sources that were designed to erase them. Morgan pauses on the surprisingly small number of slave ship registers that recorded sex ratios: Shouldn't the precise numbers of men and women have been important to the captains, investors, and insurers who engineered the transatlantic commerce in human beings? Morgan suggests that the failure to record enslaved women must have been deliberate, especially in light of shipboard practices that very much recognized women as a distinctive category of captive cargo. By contrast, in the service of the broader ideological project of rendering Africans kinless and devoid of familial ties, shipboard recordkeeping chose not to see women. For historians seeking empirical certainty, then, “the very data through which specificity can be achieved are part of the technology that renders Africans and their descendants outside the scope of modernity” (43).Where did this leave enslaved women as they made their way onto New World plantations? African women arrived as “economic thinker[s]” familiar with gendered systems of exchange and valuation that structured internal commerce within West Africa and that were robust in Atlantic-facing ports (3). In other words, enslaved women had tools at their disposal for confronting the logic of commodification and for calculating risk as they contemplated rebellion and fugitivity, as well as the political alliances they might form and the children they might (or might not) bear. The book's final chapter on “enslavement, race making, and refusal” situates Black women within the “nascent political culture of the Black radical tradition” through their own theorizing and their resistive actions (208). Child-rearing occupied a crucial space in enslaved women's politics. How could it be otherwise for those whose relationships of kinship were someone else's relationships of property? Whether embracing the affective ties of motherhood or refusing to enrich their enslavers through reproductive labor, “women's fertility and fertility control under enslavement must be understood as a fundamental conduit for the production of an oppositional consciousness among the enslaved” (222).Reckoning with Slavery requires close reading: its arguments are as complex as they are ambitious and urgent. Morgan recognizes race and capitalism as historically situated and contingent phenomena, and their interactions are multidirectional and at times indeterminate. This perhaps leads to an overreliance on the word alchemy as shorthand for processes of historical change that we can see but not wholly grasp. The term is not meant to obfuscate, but it attests to the fundamental challenges of explaining how the modern world came into being within the crucible of Atlantic slavery. Indeed, this history has erupted to the surface of contemporary American politics, and as Morgan has written since her book's publication, the lamentable US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson reproduces slavery's investment in the womb, as it intrudes on what is rightfully private and pits the state's interest in a hypothetical unborn child against actual living women's bodily autonomy.