The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade

Bibliographic Essay

Bibliographic Essay In a 1991 analysis of black life in the eighteenth-century British Empire titled “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600–1780,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 157–219, Philip D. Morgan suggested that the relative openness and liberty of life in towns and cities effectively created an “urban frontier” for victims of Atlantic slavery. Morgan’s formulation can be seen as a crucial move away from previous scholars of North American slavery, who had argued that slavery and urban life were incompatible because slavery as a labor system could not survive amid the cultural and social autonomy created by urban social relations. Morgan, building on a couple of decades of work on Atlantic history, knew that slavery had flourished for extended periods in many large and vibrant cites in Brazil and the Caribbean despite all of the standard forms of urban disorder. He knew from his own work that the symptoms of social disorder that antebellum historians of urban slavery had interpreted as evidence of slavery’s demise were as present in Charleston during the eighteenth century as during the 1850s (“Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History, n.s. 1 [1984]: 187–232). Scholars needed to rethink urban slavery. North American scholars did so, of course, on the foundation formed by the older literature that had centered on questioning whether slavery could survive in cities. For the classic case that slavery could not, see Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York, 1964); Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York, 1970) explored incompatibilities between chattel slavery and industrialization. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1985) offered a rigorously Marxian case for slavery’s incompatibility with urban life. Claudia Gale Goldin, Urban Slavery Bibliographic Essay 342 in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago, 1976) used quantitative evidence to demonstrate that slavery and urban life were not inherently incompatible. Philip D. Morgan’s work on Charleston, cited above, helped redirect attention away from questions about whether slavery and urban life were compatible by showing that the kind of disorder that Wade had thought indicative of the dissolution of slavery in antebellum U.S. cities had emerged in Charleston prior to the American Revolution. Historians of Latin America—especially Brazil—and the Caribbean had never been attracted to arguments that slavery could not survive in cities, and the demise of that argument in scholarship on North America coincided with the appearance of a number of English-language works on urban slavery that pushed in new directions. Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) revealed the important role that African slavery played in the early history of Mexico City, drawing from Inquisition sources, while Patrick Carroll showed the vital role of the free and enslaved population played in both the urban and rural hinterland surrounding the port of Veracruz in New Spain (Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development [Austin, Tex., 1991]). Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness , 1570–1640 (Bloomington, 2003) and Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington, 2009) built on Palmer’s and Carroll’s work by using Inquisition records and other ecclesiastical sources such as baptism and marriage records to explore the culture of free and enslaved Africans in Mexico City. Over the last twenty-five years the scholarship on urban slavery in Brazil has grown markedly, catalyzed by the centennial of abolition in 1988. Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J., 1987) traced patterns of slavery and the slave experience in a Brazilian city across the first half of the nineteenth century until the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Sandra Lauderdale Graham examined the gendered dimension of urban slavery and in particular the ability of slave and free people of color to form community and family relations both within and outside their masters’ homes in Rio de Janeiro (House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro [Austin, Tex., 1992]). João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore, 1993) reveals much about slave life and culture...