Of Americans, Africans, and Atlanticists

The Atlanticization of slavery studies has been a long time in the making and shows no signs of slowing down. For several decades historians have recognized that African slavery was not simply a feature or aspect of the early Atlantic world system, but in fact the motor that made it all function. As Barbara Solow argued in 1991, "[w]hat moved in the Atlantic in these centuries was predominantly slaves, the output of slaves, the inputs of slave societies, and the goods and services purchased with the earnings on slave products."¹ Charting the political, economic, and social axes of motion has fueled a generation's worth of monographs, dissertations, articles, and conference papers.

American historians, in particular, once comfortably ensconced within the borders of the United States, have insistently sought wider vistas. Interest in such transnational narratives as abolitionism, the Great Divergence, the Age of Revolutions, and the rise of global capitalism has lured them out across the ocean, to trace strands of connection, commonality, and contrast across the West Indies, South America, and Africa—and indeed most recently, in a wave of studies of the maritime aspects of the slave trade, across the Atlantic Ocean itself. Whatever aspect of slavery studies scholars focus on, a United States-bounded approach feels increasingly blinkered. And as geographic horizons have expanded, temporal ones have come into question, as the Atlantic world paradigm, originally wedded faithfully to the colonial period, has been pushed forward well into the nineteenth century and beyond.

Lest we congratulate ourselves too heartily, all this boundary-busting comes at a cost. Limitations bring coherency; shattering them creates challenges at both the practical and epistemological levels. The historical field of inquiry to which we affix the label "slavery" already covers a staggering expanse of cultural, material, and psychological phenomena and four centuries of diverse individual lived experiences. To then go beyond the confines of a region or nation and explore a vast ocean and deep into the four continents that border it, invites daunting Borgesian problems of boundlessness. How do we formulate coherent questions? How do we prioritize a multitude of overlapping research agendas? How do we forge bodies of knowledge that speak to and not past each other?

Two newer works capitalize on the opportunities, confront the dilemmas, and lay bare the struggle to attain both coherency and capaciousness. Randy J. Sparks and Rashauna Johnson both explore parallel issues of slavery and freedom in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlantic. Their subject matter, methods, styles, and historiographical temperaments differ greatly, but they share key thematic interests in motion through both time and space. Both do run into some conceptual difficulties, especially in their approaches to chronology and change over time; but both make vital contributions, questioning static narratives of slavery and freedom in a dynamic context of global revolutionary transformations and revealing surprisingly fragile and changeable aspects to the constructed categories of race, class, and status.

Randy Sparks's book is not, properly speaking, about slaves at all, but as its title suggests, about "Africans"—not African Americans, either, but people born on the eastern side of the Atlantic. The six chapters of Africans in the Old South recount the experiences and journeys of a racially and socially diverse collection of "exceptional lives" that nonetheless shared a common embeddedness in the linked hemispheric systems of slavery and the slave trade. These remarkable individuals probed, skirted, and crossed multiple boundaries—political boundaries between states and empires, legal boundaries between enslaved and free, and racial boundaries from "black" to "white" and in between—and adopted multiple overlapping national and cultural identities along the way. The author's interpretive goal is not simply to chronicle their crossings but to look through them to better understand the...