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1 Introduction For every European who crossed the Atlantic from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, four times as many Africans made the journey. This mass, forced migration of people from Africa shaped the historical development of the New World in profound ways. Along with small farming, mining, artisan labor, cattle ranching, and fur trading , plantation agriculture stood at the core of colonial American material life and was the basis of competing European claims on the Western Hemisphere.1 Throughout the Anglo-American plantation-based colonies, English indentured servants and Native American workers were the first to raise crops for export. Yet for a number of reasons the British turned to black labor in their American possessions, particularly when other labor pools faltered. Colonial elites started with small numbers of black workers who toiled next to Indian and English laborers in the Chesapeake region and the Caribbean islands, and over time slavery spread like a virus over the Anglo-American colonial landscape.2 While slaves engaged in a wide range of work, the bulk of their labor was geared toward cultivating cash crops for European markets. Envisioning the profits to be gained from large-scale agricultural production, the English Company of Royal Adventures , which formed in 1660 and was the parent of the Royal African Company, proclaimed in 1662 “that the English Plantations in America should have a competent and a constant supply of Negro-servants for their own use of Planting.”3 Looking increasingly to forced African labor, British American plantations yielded profits from export crops that enabled them to buy more people, a cyclical process that resulted in “the Africanization of the Americas,” as the historian Ronald Bailey terms it.4 This book explores the Africanization of the Americas by focusing specifically on the role of Africans in agricultural and craft production in the Anglo-American colonies and early United States. Under the watchful eye and avaricious demands of the colonial elite toiled a force of unfree laborers, particularly from West or West Central 2 Introduction Africa. First complementing and in most cases replacing indentured servants , enslaved workers from Africa cultivated the sugar, tobacco, indigo, cotton, and rice fields of the Anglo-American world. And while planters owned the land, hired overseers, and employed managers to maintain production, the process depended heavily upon the daily work of enslaved Africans. This book argues that Africans not only added physical might but also transplanted agricultural and craft knowledge into American soil. In parallel to work practices in West or West Central Africa, the enslaved raised food crops and nonfood crops, including cotton, indigo , and tobacco. In addition, some Africans in the colonies transmitted nonagricultural work skills, such as experience in fishing, woodworking, blacksmithing, textile production, and pottery. The Anglo-American colonial project, it will be argued, mobilized Africans not only for their brawn but also for their knowledge. The Anglo-American colonies took on a distinctive African character and were deeply interconnected through trade and migration. The sheer number of Africans imported into the colonies indicates their role in plantation development. Up to 1820, approximately 850,000 white immigrants ventured across the Atlantic for the Anglo-American colonies. Holding positions as commercial, political, religious, or landed elites, working as artisans, doing domestic chores, toiling on plantations, or tilling small farms, they sought to turn the Americas into a replica of England.5 In contrast, during this same time period, over two million Africans landed in the British American colonies. They entered agricultural fields, labored in artisan workshops, and worked on the docks, rivers, and coasts of the islands and mainland. The vast majority of this population landed in the Caribbean islands, with almost one million captives from Africa arriving in Jamaica. An intercolonial trade dispersed them to other American colonies , including those on the North American mainland.6 So if we look at the Anglo-American plantation world from the perspective of the Atlantic crossing alone, the colonial project had essential African dimensions. As a consequence of this mass, forced migration, the New World colonies held by the British incorporated a large influx of African workers. They first endured the Atlantic crossing aboard “floating prisons.”7 They then entered new environments and worked under a nightmarish and deadly work regimen, which meant that planters needed to constantly replace their slave labor force. As a consequence, from the middle of the seventeenth century onward, Africans served as important actors in the British American colonies. For example, from 1655 to 1684...

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