David Richardson, Anthony Tibbles, Suzanne Schwarz, eds. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. xii + 315 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84631-066-9.
Reviewed by Isaac Land
Published on H-Albion (November, 2008)
Commissioned by David S. Karr
The Banality of Evil
Liverpool ships delivered more than one million slaves to the New World. Most of this activity was concentrated in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Liverpool surpassed Bristol and London in the trade. In the 1780s, for example, Liverpool accounted for 70 percent of the slaving ventures that originated in Britain. The contributors to Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery are primarily historians with a background in either economic or demographic history. As a collection of essays, and one that sometimes sinks under the weight of its own apparatus of tables and appendices, this book will be read primarily by advanced students and specialists. Readers will learn a great deal about the day-to-day mechanics of the trade and its impact on various societies around the Atlantic basin. There are chapters on the Chesapeake and Jamaica. Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson’s chapter on "African Agency and the Liverpool Slave Trade" argues that one of Liverpool’s secrets was the creation of strong ties with indigenous African traders who could extend lines of credit and permit slave trading in an atmosphere of what the authors call "trust" (p. 44). Another contributor notes that "only Liverpool captains traded annually with all major African markets," creating a pool of expertise that other ports could only envy (p. 86). The editors deserve commendation for their willingness to situate this English city in its larger Atlantic context.
Specialists in British history will be especially interested in the chapters that attempt to quantify the effects of the trade on the residents of Liverpool itself, and on its region more generally. Madge Dresser’s stimulating social history of Bristol, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port (2001), was a major influence on many of the contributors. For a book on Liverpool, there is a remarkable amount of interesting material here relating to provincial ports elsewhere in England and Wales. Several contributors treat "Liverpool" less as a self-contained urban center than as a regional consortium. Melinda Elder’s chapter on the role of Lancaster and its neighboring ports in the slave trade is the most straightforward example of this. Some captains and merchants built their mansions in Liverpool, but others retired to their place of origin and set themselves up as country gentlemen there. Lancaster was one of dozens of communities that collaborated with Liverpool’s slave trade. The Isle of Man, which enjoyed a unique legal status, served as a tax-free depository for Dutch imports to be sold later in Africa, benefiting Liverpool during the critical decades when it was emerging as a serious competitor to Bristol. The Manx loophole was closed in 1765, but Liverpool benefited from other accidents of geography, such as its proximity to a prosperous and populous hinterland that featured a textile industry specializing in cottons and linens, "the most important type of wares traded for African captives" (p. 22). Stephen D. Behrendt’s chapter on the officers and crews of slavers reveals a sharp regional split between Bristol and Liverpool. While only half of Liverpool sailors were of English origin, over 73 percent of sailors whose English abode is known came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumberland, or the Isle of Man. In contrast, the men who sailed out of Bristol hailed disproportionately from the West Country or from southern Wales (tables 3.4, 3.5). We have been inclined to see sailors as a roving and cosmopolitan lot, but these numbers suggest a high degree of parochialism in a deep sea, transcontinental trade. The statistics on the origin of seamen indicate yet another way that profit from the Liverpool slave trade dispersed across a great penumbra of smaller neighboring communities, finding its way into fishing villages and obscure seaports.
The old jibe that each brick in Liverpool was cemented by the blood of an enslaved African >>
Daina Ramey Berry. "Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe": Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia. Women in American History Series. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 2007. Plates. xvi + 224 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03146-5.
Reviewed by Mary Ellen Pethel
Published on H-SAWH (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Antoinette G. van Zelm
Comparing the Experiences of Female and Male Slaves
Daina Ramey Berry has combined largely untapped sources with thoughtful analysis to produce an innovative approach to issues of bondage and slavery. "Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe" shows how gender, labor, and social relationships were interwoven in the complicated world of slaves and slave owners in Georgia. Although the book focuses on Georgia, it can easily be used as a microcosm for much of the agrarian South prior to the Civil War. The majority of the text focuses on the mid-1800s, but Berry draws on sources dating back as early as the 1700s and as late as the 1870s. The introduction carefully lays out the historical context, geographic scope, and methodology, piquing the interest of the reader and presenting a blueprint for the entire book. Berry also defines the key terms of "slavery/bondage," "open/closed system," and "skilled/unskilled labor."
In the first two chapters, Berry explores agricultural and nonagricultural modes of slavery and the gendered divisions of labor and family life. She primarily uses two Georgia counties to investigate the experiences of people in bondage. In Wilkes County, an open system was employed that allowed greater slave mobility between plantations, which remained relatively small. In contrast, the closed system of slavery was commonly practiced in Glynn County (near Savannah's Chatham County) where plantations were larger and managed more as inclusive communities. Most interestingly, Berry extends the definition of "skilled labor" to include female enslaved workers who performed agricultural labor. By viewing skilled labor as the "ability to do something well," Berry argues that there were more skilled female laborers than male and that, in many cases, women were preferred because of their lower cost-to-output ratio and their ability to reproduce (pp. 16-17). For example, at Glynn County's Kelvin Grove Plantation, more than 60 percent of the workers in the cotton fields were women. Based largely on sources from plantation mistresses, Berry also shows that bondwomen were valued by the planter class as nonagricultural laborers. In addition, Berry found sources showing that many female slaves considered themselves "estate women" and preferred domestic life as "house girls" despite physical demands from their white counterparts and sexual demands from their plantation masters.
Chapter 3 reveals the fascinating and variegated associations >>
Rafael de Bivar Marquese. Administração e escravidão: Idéias sobre a gestão da agricultura escravista brasileira. São Paulo Editora Hucitec/Fapesp, 1999. 259 pp. No Price Listed (paper), ISBN 978-85-271-0487-6.
Rafael de Bivar Marquese. Feitores do corpo, missionários da mente: Senhores, letrados e o controle dos escravos nas Américas, 1660-1860. São Paulo Companhia das Letras, 2004. 479 pp. No Price Listed (paper), ISBN 978-85-359-0561-8.
Reviewed by Kirsten Schultz (Seton Hall University)
Published on H-Atlantic (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Jordana Dym
Slavery, Labor Management, and the History of Ideas in the Atlantic World
Our understanding of the historical experience of slavery in Brazil by now rests on a massive, and rapidly growing, body of scholarship, based on innovative uses of archival sources, manuscripts, and published texts, that encompasses detailed accounts of the transatlantic, regional, and local economies of slavery there, as well as vivid social and cultural histories of what the experiences of enslavement meant for Africans, born in Africa and Brazil, and for Brazilian society as a whole. As Brazilian historian Rafael de Bivar Marquese notes in introducing his incisive Administração e escravidão, however, less studied is the history of ideas within Brazilian slavery, regarded by some scholars, as Antonio Penalves Rocha suggests in his preface, as merely epiphenomenal. Marquese's aim, then, in both Administração and Feitores do corpo, missionários da mente is to integrate a history of ideas into the history of slavery in Brazil and, more specifically, to examine "the intellectual conventions utilized between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries to comprehend the management of Brazilian slavocratic rural properties" (Administração, p. 27). While Administração provides a survey of these conventions in Brazil, Feitores places Brazilian writings on slavery within a broader Atlantic context, illuminating not only comparative and contrasting experiences in the Caribbean and North America, but also the historical trans-imperial and transnational transmissions of ideas about the problem of slave labor.
Although the use of enslaved Africans in plantation agriculture in Brazil began in the sixteenth century, as Marquese notes in Administração, before the nineteenth century those who profited from this enterprise--owners of rural properties and slaves, merchants, royal officials, and many missionaries--did not generate a corpus of writing about slave labor. Setting aside the few who wrote with lament about the merciless traffic in human beings across the Atlantic to work cultivating commodities that Europeans were discovering they did not want to live without, for the first two centuries of the slave trade and slavery in Brazil, there was no "systematic reflection" on slavery as a social and economic institution and no consideration of slaves as laborers who needed to be governed or administered as such (Administração, p. 49). Why not? It is, of course, difficult, if not impossible, to attribute motives for something that does not exist. According to Marquese, however, the absence of writing on slavery and slave labor can be understood with reference to the largely illiterate or semiliterate population of slave owners who neither could nor saw the need to create or consume writing about knowledge (how to run a plantation and deal with slaves) that they regarded as being grounded in practice rather than theology or philosophy.