Children in Slavery through the Ages (review)

Slavery, a topic that has long exercised historians, is undergoing something of a renaissance reflecting meta developments in economic and social history. The new history of slavery locates its subject in a global economic context and emphasizes how slaves themselves experienced bondage. It aims to highlight the humanity of slaves, to depict them as people who showed courage and resilience, even humor; they suffered appalling systemic oppression, but were never mere sufferers. This anthology adds another fresh perspective. Large numbers of those enslaved throughout history were children, but the existing literature has concentrated overwhelmingly on men. The new history of slavery has begun to excavate women's experiences and unpack the gendered nature of enslavement, but Campbell et al. offer the first focus on children, a focus that clearly resonates with international concern about child labor and child sexual abuse in the world today.

The first group of essays identifies when and where slavery included children and the second focuses on the roles that they played. António de Almeida Mendes sees the traffic in slaves as constituting "a cultural and economic bridge of humanity between the Iberian Peninsula, West Africa and the Americas" (1). His data on the composition of this human cargo suggests the dynamism of slavery as it responded to supply and demand. Thus women and children comprised 70 per cent of slaves arriving in Portugal between 1499 and 1522, a much higher share than they made up of the later transatlantic trade. Women and children were easier to capture and met a demand for domestic and sex workers. The genesis of this demand deserves further unpacking but Mendes moves on to contemplate the position of child slaves whom he sees as more readily acculturated into Portuguese society than adults, which helps to explain their failure to return to Africa even after abolition. Richard Allen's chapter concerns the ancient but relatively undocumented Indian Ocean slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Children were a minority of those imported, often sold in desperation by their families in times of economic crisis. Fred Morton and George La Rue describe the fate of children caught up in different trade routes across Africa. The extraordinary story of one child caught up in the Sudanese trade brings La Rue's study to life. We know about little Ali because he was purchased by a traveling doctor, William Holt Yates, who purchased him to assist his research on phrenology, took him home, and sent him to school. His death from whooping cough brought the experiment to a sad close. Yates own distress at this loss, "at the age of six years and a half—a period when children twine themselves about us, and steal away our hearts," (65) perhaps deserves more attention. Why was it that this man could rise above the prejudices of his age and class and take to his heart a destitute black child? Susan O'Donovan's chapter looks at the "Second Middle Passage" whereby more than a million slaves including many children were moved inland from the Atlantic coast and upper south. Here, as elsewhere, slave children were preferred for their docility and suffered separation from family and friends.

Slave children played myriad roles: they were singing girls and prostitutes in the Abbasid Court in the ninth and tenth centuries (Richardson), recruits into the Devsirme in the Ottoman Empire (Yilmaz), castrated and made into eunuchs in pre-modern China and Korea (Kim) and used as bonded domestics in early twentieth century Hong Kong (Poon). These chapters provide windows into more or less hellish experiences, but they lack the analytical edge to make them more than the sum of their parts by identifying recurring themes and the economic, ethnic, and cultural conditions that allowed child slavery to flourish.

The final chapters survey children's fate in commercial slaveries and move...