The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (review)

"Why were the countries with the most developed institutions of individual freedom also the leaders in establishing the most exploitative system of slavery that the world has ever seen?" (p. i). The question addresses a historical and moral divide—exploitation and unfreedom, on one side, and dignity and freedom, on the other—that pertains to the period of Atlantic slaving and primary capitalist accumulation in particular European maritime power centers. Its answer necessarily requires a Euro-centric perspective, that is to say "Europe" is constituted as the normative "self" and "Africa" as the "other." In this recent study of the Atlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas Dr. David Eltis of Queen's University attempts to answer the question, which, as he points out, "touches on large issues in western history" (p. 2). His work, in ten chapters and an epilogue on abolition, offers a richly detailed economic history. It focuses on the centuries between 1500 and 1800. It includes thirty-two tables packed with quantitative data, four information-filled appendices, and eight maps (which are barely informative).

How does the author tackle the question? His study develops the thesis that the uniqueness of Europe, "the subcontinent's odd (in relative global terms) social structure and values" (p. 2), was decisive, both in fostering overseas colonial expansion and generating notions of individual freedom. Already one suspects that the deck is being stacked. Still, the questions why slavery as a labor system and why Africans and not Europeans as enslaved laborers remain open? The author's methodological strategy is to employ, on the one hand, binary oppositions (e.g., Europe-Africa; Europeans-Africans; slavery-freedom; insider-outsider) and homogeneous, reified, and totalizing categories (e.g., "ethnicity"). The underlying assumption is that the binaries and the categories are transparent and stable ("unproblematic") referents. While the author is at pains to illustrate African "strength" and "agency," he exhibits a poor understanding of the dynamics of African history. The reasons for this are not hard to find. His methodological approach produces knowledge that by its very structure channels the narrative into "self" ("us") and "other" ("them"). By definition, the African "other" is constituted by ethnographic/typological data drawn from the proverbial "colonial library" and not by historical analysis.

The first four chapters examine themes related to the creation of the early modern world, e.g., ideas and the practices of slavery and freedom, European (specifically English and Dutch) migration to and colonization of the Americas, and the historical nature of African slavery in the American colonies. Interestingly chapter four ("Gender and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World") treats European and African constructions of gender as well as gender relations in the context of plantation slavery. His discussion of the gender relations of European women and African women is organized around the self-other binary and flies in the face of the kind of evidence found in histories of women. Chapter five ("Productivity in the Slave Trade") examines the forced transportation of slaves and the circuits of transnational merchant capital—ships and crews, costs, prices, goods, and so on. Chapter six ("Africa and Europe in the Early Modern Era") investigates the Euro-African trading relationship, but the narrative and analytical emphasis is clearly on the European side of the connection. Chapter seven ("The African Impact on the Transatlantic Slave Trade") addresses the African side of the Atlantic trade through a kind of "ethnographic present" narrative rather than a close historical analysis of the autonomous systems of production and consumption in the five Atlantic African regions that are discussed. Chapter eight ("The English Plantation Americas in Comparative Perspective") provides a focused examination of investments, commodity production, and labor organization in the seventeenth and eighteenth century English Caribbean plantation system. However, the comparative perspective, in this case a discussion of the Brazilian...