The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach by Joseph C. Miller (review)

This main aim of this ambitious book is to trace the creation of slavery rather than examine its features as a legal institution. As such, this book is also a refiection on history as a process. The author's hope is that "historicizing slaving will suggest relevant strategies of moderating the circumstances that render some people vulnerable to enslavement and induce others to slave at their expense" (xi). The first chapter, "The Problem of Slavery as History," takes seriously the intellectual challenge of thinking about slavery outside of the box of contemporary views. Motivated human action, carefully contextualized, is thus the starting point for Miller's understanding of slaving. In analyzing slavery as a strategy, the author convincingly ends up explaining the unprecedented manner of how slavery became institutionalized during the late eighteenth-century Americas. From this standpoint, the historical problem of slavery is political—how enslavers (insiders to a given society) appropriated outsiders' (slaves') energies in support of their own strategies.

Chapter 2 ("History as a Problem of Slaving") seeks to discuss slaving in pre-history and antiquity in the Near East, Asia, and the Mediterranean. This chapter (together with the first half of the third chapter, on ancient Africa) is the least convincing one in the book; Miller reduces his discussion to basic second-hand considerations about slavery that are not far from those of Patterson and other authors whose approaches Miller previously qualified as "a-historical."¹

Chapter 3 (at least the second part of it) on African slavery and Chapter 4 on the Americas are path-breaking and challenging enough to make this book a masterpiece. Miller begins with the simple but fertile assumption that Africa was significant to world history well before European colonialism. For example, the period running from 500 to 1500 c.e. was an era of innovative political consolidation among the already existing African communities. Personal networks were formed through commercial contacts, which developed sophisticated systems of credit and slaving. Yet, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch and the English introduced much greater quantities of mercantile credit, which intensified militarized strategies of slaving in Africa. Then, African buyers of European wares delivered nearly all the captives sold for transport to slavery in the Americas.

On the other side of the Atlantic (Chapter 4), the antebellum United States provided a distinctive, even unique, historical context. According to Miller, the motivating, enabling strategy of slaving in the Atlantic era was financial. The slaving Atlantic was built on a limited budget because most of the available capital was needed for agriculture and early industrial development in Europe. Hence, slavers were "marginal" in Europe; they had difficulties raising money, whether from interested monarchies or private lenders, to enhance their business. However, when public debt intensified governments' interests in the slave trade, finance became as efficacious in the Euro-American Atlantic as it was in Africa; slaves became critical collateral behind the debt that financed the rapidly growing Atlantic economy. In other words, commercialized slaving was a core component of the fundamental process of capital accumulation and market organization that permitted the continuing escalation of slaving in Africa and the Americas. From this perspective, Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the slaving period can no longer be seen as separate, let alone inimical, entities, but as a unified world.

These and the many other original arguments in Miller's book will surely provide a solid ground for the next generations of economic and social historians, slavery specialists, and scholars of Africa and world history.