Before I get to the books, I want to start by asking about the origins of the Atlantic slave trade. how did it really start? Did it start a week after the arrival of Columbus in America, or did it develop as a result of particular limitations in the development of colonialism in the Spanish experience?
This is a very interesting story. you can trace that history back to the crusades without too much interruption. you have, in the Levant, the cultivation of, what we would call in the 18th century, plantation crops, using enslaved people.
You are reading: African american slavery books
The word ‘esclavo’ derives from ‘slav’. the crusaders who controlled the territory in palestine were, like the colonial slavers in the 17th and 18th centuries, eager to use people who were not like them to do slave labor. therefore, you should choose an ethnicity that is understood as alien to you and was often used by Slavic peoples. hence the word ‘slave’.
What happens as the Middle Ages progress, from the 13th to the 15th century, is that the combination of sugar production and the use of slave labor gradually moves west across the Mediterranean. It traverses Cyprus, Sicily, and finally ends up in the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa just before Columbus sets sail. so you have this really interesting coincidence that when the europeans start pushing into the atlantic in earnest and start establishing population centers in mesoamerica and the caribbean the technology of slavery which is the combination of goods and labor slave, is resting there on the west coast of Africa.
What happens in Mesoamerica is interesting because the Spanish make a conscious decision not to enslave the indigenous population there. it has always been very difficult to enslave people in their own territory. what is much better to do is get people from outside. This weakens them physically, but it also weakens them culturally, which is why the solution to the acute problem of labor supply, which exists throughout North America and the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, in South America, is to import people. and they started doing that almost immediately. the possibility of using slave labor already existed in the fifteenth century. if you will, the people who went into the atlantic ocean already had the idea of using africans as slaves. But the crucial thing to say here is that the idea of this slavery doesn’t originate in Africa, it originates in the Middle East.
The other really important thing to note here is that the solution to the US labor supply problem is not automatically African. in fact, most european countries try to solve this problem by first importing their own population and, in the netherlands and england, this is done, we are already in the 17th century, through indentured servitude. they transported you across the atlantic and you didn’t get paid for seven years but, once you went through that process, if you go through that process (a lot of people didn’t; they succumbed to the disease), they would give you a piece of land and some tools later.
What I’m emphasizing here is that it wasn’t automatic for those people to be African. in many cases they were not. It’s not that people in, say, colonial Virginia decided that they no longer wanted to use indentured servants and preferred to use Africans. What happened was that the supply of contract workers from Europe dried up, leaving them with no choice but to resort to buying enslaved African peoples.
That’s very important. there is a tendency to think of this as a default result. but, in reality, there are all kinds of alternatives that could have worked and, in fact, would have been much cheaper. it would be much cheaper to have used indentured servants. the racism at the heart of this system exacts a heavy toll on the way it operates and that’s not often highlighted, though it is highlighted in a couple of the books I’ve chosen.
Wouldn’t it have been an option to use Africans as contract labour, instead of resorting to slavery?
That’s a good question. How can we explain why slave status can be connected to racial or cultural otherness? that goes back to this earlier medieval story, that it was much easier to understand someone who is foreign to you as an object. if you give someone a writing contract, in the process of hiring them you acknowledge their humanity, and that will make it difficult to enslave them.
At the core of the way slavery operated was the use of people understood as “other” and “different” from you and, of course, inferior. ideas of race were central to establishing how this system was established and how it endured. therefore, it is not simply a question of racial superiority, but of cultural separation.
Let’s move on to your slave trade books. In the first place there is the interesting narration of the life of Olaudah Equiano by himself. Was equine born into slavery or was it shipped from Africa?
was sent from Africa. this is a famous book. It was quite famous when it was first written in the late 18th century, but it had a renaissance beginning in the 1960s. The crucial thing about this book, and that’s why I mentioned it in the first place, is that it gives you the lived experience of slavery and neatly brings together nearly all the chapters in the history of the rise and fall of slavery, as well as covering the geography of the slave trade. what you have is the entire life cycle of slavery, freedom, re-enslavement in your case, and direct involvement in the abolitionist movement.
equiano came from West Africa. we have the story of his capture. we have the graphic account of the experience of boarding the slave ship, the journey through the middle of the Atlantic; what it is like to experience slavery on plantations in the caribbean; what it’s like to experience slavery on plantations in colonial North America; what it is to be liberated; what it is like to live as a black person in london in the 18th century and furthermore a black person who, through his skill as a writer, becomes quite wealthy, marries into an english family and becomes a very important lobbyist for the abolitionist causes.
“The great challenge with the history of the slave trade is finding books that truly describe the lived experience of being an enslaved person”
and founds an entirely new genre of writing, the slave narrative. he does all of these things in this text and sums up every aspect of the story in the text. The great challenge with the history of the slave trade is finding books that truly describe the lived experience of being an enslaved person. There is a wonderful and sophisticated economic history of the slave trade, some of it Nobel Prize winning, but much of it has been criticized for neglecting the actual lived experience of slavery.
I think it’s absolutely essential if you’re going to read about the slave trade, to find stories and narratives that take you back to that lived experience before you get into historiography and theory of how you might evaluate, for example. , the economic importance of the slave trade for the development of America, or the development of the Caribbean or the development of West Africa or Great Britain. equiano is the best place to go for that and he established a genre of writing that allows you to get a sense of that lived experience throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. he pioneered the idea that writing a slave narrative was the best way to communicate what it was really like to be an object.
How did you get your education?
the crucial caveat about equiano is whether he is accurately telling his personal story or actually gathering the testimony and experiences of others in his situation. Many people have delved into the claims advanced in his narrative and discovered that he, in fact, was not there when he said he was and did not hit that person when he said he was. but nevertheless he establishes a very important narrative of self-improvement. It’s a story about self-education and that becomes very revealing in many other famous slave narratives, including the one written by Frederick Douglass, where the turning point of self-emancipation is the discovery of how to read and write. In Equiano’s narrative there are several sympathetic white characters, including a group of sailors who help him learn to read and write. but the crucial thing is that he is very interested in playing with the idea that he himself learned as a way to free himself.
You said he was enslaved in both the Caribbean and North America.
one of the great dangers of being a black person in the atlantic economy was that you could (if you had been enslaved) generate enough resources to buy your own freedom, but if you were living in a port city, facing the atlantic, you could be quickly restored to slavery. Being returned to slavery is one of the acute tragedies of Equiano’s narrative. as i said before, one of the important aspects of his storytelling is that he can talk about the experience of being an enslaved person in the caribbean and about the experience of being an enslaved person in colonial north america, and that’s because they take him from back to slavery. His re-enslavement took place in London in 1762, having been freed by his first owner, the English naval officer, Michael Pascal.
Tell us a bit about your role in the abolitionist movement. Was he involved with Wilberforce or others on the political end of the movement, or was he doing something else?
becomes a very effective people gatherer. He clearly had considerable social skills and social capital in London. he attended some of the important trials at the town hall and elsewhere. he’s clearly someone delivering something very important to the abolitionist campaign, which is, again, all about his personal experience of these things. the best way to garner middle class sympathy for the enslaved population was to listen to people who had experienced this and he filled that role very effectively.
let’s move on to the next book, which is about capitalism and slavery by eric williams. tell us a little bit about eric williams first, because he was the first prime minister of the independent trinity, right?
trinidad and tobago, that’s right. he is a really fascinating person. his lived experience is crucial here as well. this is someone who grew up in trinidad when it was still part of the british empire. He went to Oxford as an undergraduate and graduate student in the 1930s and, despite his enormous intellectual capacity, he felt a bit of an outcast there. so what you have here is a lived experience that builds on this sense of injustice and channels that injustice not just into absolutely excellent academic research, but ultimately into national self-determination. it’s about someone who wrote a great book on the history of the transatlantic slave trade that basically became a manifesto for the independence of his own country from him. and he himself led that independence movement. therefore, he is a truly remarkable figure, particularly if he is interested in the way in which certain kinds of observations of injustice can motivate historians’ research that ultimately leads to massive political change.
And what is the thesis of this book?
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there are two aspects. First, that the capital required to develop the industrial revolution came from the profits of the slave trade. He makes the straightforward argument that one of the reasons the industrial revolution seems to emerge in the north of England is because, in places like liverpool and lancaster, there is so much capital available, and that capital comes from profits from trade in human beings. so, if you will, Britain’s economic greatness is derived from profits from the slave trade.
The second thing was more controversial then and still is now, namely that abolitionists were not really disinterested humanitarians. in reality, they were capitalists themselves, who saw the slave trade and slavery as a kind of monopoly that needed to be destroyed in order to create a much freer economic system that they could benefit from. He is particularly critical of William Wilberforce, and clearly dislikes him very much. he thought that the abolitionists were actually arch-capitalists who were using the guise of humanitarianism as a way to cast aside an old system and free up opportunities for their wealth elsewhere.
those are the two aspects of the williams thesis and the implications of the second are a little bigger, but both are still concerns. none of those arguments have been completely dismantled.
Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionist, John Thornton, came from hull-trading families, so their business interests would have been primarily involved in the Baltic trade, rather than the Atlantic. presumably that’s not a coincidence. Is Williams arguing that these people had no interest, or less interest, in the Atlantic economy and wanted to see a redirection of British capital investment towards companies in which they had a more direct interest?
yes, that’s it. there are extraordinary sequences in the book, with williams marxist ideology in the foreground, and this was a debate that was alive at the time in the 1790s and early 19th century, where he argues that these abolitionists had a much higher opinion of enslaved people who had never known the British whom they enslaved in their own factories. that was also what people said about them at the time.
There is a clear connection between the williams thesis and the critique of the abolitionist movement of the time. that is the idea that American slave owners often developed with reference to British abolitionists: that these people were talking about supporting the interests of enslaved Africans while at the same time crushing the economic interests and lives of thousands upon thousands of slaves. your employees.
And the point about the slave trade financing the industrial revolution, how well has it held up?
I think the distinction between the slave trade and slavery is important because, in reality, the profits from the slave trade are much more uncertain and much less in terms of their macroeconomic impact than the profits generated from sugar farming. . and tobacco the sugar economy, once you had a working plantation in jamaica, it was really very profitable. the slave trade itself was much riskier. profit margins were much lower because the slave voyages took place over twelve, fifteen, eighteen months and you had to sail through West Africa, as well as the Caribbean and other places, regardless of six or seven thousand miles of ocean crossing.
If you were to add up all the profits from the slave trade, they would be substantial, but they wouldn’t offer anything close to the amount of money you need to invest in the industrial revolution. however, the profits from slavery itself were large enough to make a difference. so my answer is that i think williams is guilty of suppressing the slave trade and slavery in a general system, when in fact, economically speaking, it makes sense to disconnect them in this context.
let’s move on to the rise of african slavery in the americas by david eltis.
This is a really good book. Williams’ argument is that slavery and the slave trade are really designed to further the economic interests of a capitalist group and that, in reality, profit maximization is the only ahistorical motivation. eltis vigorously challenges him, saying, ‘let’s ask big new questions about how the system of the slave trade was established and how it endured and ask ourselves throughout our examination of that system whether or not it was done as efficiently and profitably as before. may have been’. and this review of every aspect of the explanation for the rise of slavery led eltis to a truly wonderful analysis that has become very influential.
Your first point is to say that it’s not about maximizing profit because if it was about maximizing profit, they wouldn’t have used Africans. that was the most expensive way to do this. if the people had wanted to solve the labor supply problem of the americas in order to maximize profits, they would have sent europeans.
“If it was about maximizing profit, they wouldn’t have used Africans. that was the most expensive way to do this”
This is the fundamental idea that leads to the argument that the cultural parameters of early modern Europe and the first colonizing nations were more important than the drive to maximize profits. And it leads into a really interesting analysis of each of the economies and nations involved in the slave trade, in Europe, North America, and West Africa. he puts West Africa front and center, which is very important to his analysis. all these societies have different attitudes of belonging to their society, which makes it easier or harder to enslave their own people. there are different attitudes towards freedom in these different contexts. And all of these differences in how these peoples relate to these cultural parameters actually explain much more about how and why the slave trade began than an eternal notion of greed.
and what do you say about the paradox, which you address in your own book, about this system of slavery that arises exactly at the same time that Europeans were developing ideas about the importance of freedom on a personal and social level?
He notes the conjunction of the rise of what we would now call ‘liberal ideas’ taking off and taking hold at exactly the same time that the slave trade is re-establishing itself, as he is careful to say, and he wants to understand exactly why that is. And I think that brings us back to the importance of slavery being something you do to other people. As you become more aware of your own humanity and your own rights as an individual, you may become more aware of your ability to deny those rights to other people. it’s very hard to pin down that kind of information through historical data, but it’s pretty compelling and explains a few different paradoxes that I think historians should focus on.
eltis’s version of the slavery paradox is more elusive, more fluid than the versions you’d see in edmund morgan’s book and, I hope, the version I pieced together in my book, freedom’s debt, where you have to the actors in the story—in my case, slave trade lobbyists—saying these things: ‘we want to enslave more people because we’re a free people,’ you actually have it written there. the basic idea it offers is that the people who developed the African slave trade, not surprisingly, did not believe that African slaves were people at all. they were goods. and that is the basic idea that reconciles the paradox of slavery.
What is crucial about the slavery paradox is how it is used as a bridge between the slave trade and the abolitionist movement. ultimately, it becomes the engine room of the abolitionist movement. As Americans break away from Britain, the paradox of slavery gains political force. the point person there is samuel johnson, who asked, “how come we hear the loudest cries for freedom from black slave drivers?” it’s a way britain redefines itself as a free country as opposed to americans: americans (george washington, thomas jefferson) talk about freedom, but they all own slaves. The British talk about freedom, as Johnson would say, and they really mean it and they will prove it by abolishing slavery.
This allowed British liberty to recondition itself around abolition. whereas, in the early eighteenth century, people (Bristolians, Liverpudlians, and slave traders in London) were happy to say that they needed freedom in order to profit from other people’s enslavement. and that liberty is central to the establishment of the united states.
Going back to the labor supply issue: After the abolition of trade, possibly even after the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, did the labor supply issue come up again? Or was the problem largely solved at that stage, either because so many people had already shipped across the Atlantic or because suddenly there were Europeans who were willing to emigrate in large numbers due to population growth in Europe?
Broadly speaking, African slavery solves the labor supply problem, not because of the slave trade (I am now referring to colonial North America, what becomes the United States), but because they establish a culture of slave ownership that supports what they call ‘the natural increase’ of that population. so the slaves are, in effect, servants.
At the time of abolition, there is some concern about whether or not having more access to the slave trade will undermine plantation economies and plantation societies in the united states. but, because this idea of ’natural increase’ is so well established and the population of enslaved people is quite substantial, it does not present a significant problem. and by the way, if you get rid of the slave trade, you increase the value of your existing slaves, which increases your ability to borrow money. so it’s actually quite good for plantation owners, as long as they don’t feel like they need additional access to slave supplies.
what is famous is that what happens in the 19th century is that the populations of europe begin to replace the movement of the populations of west africa, and that leads to the massive influx of southern italian, irish men and women as well as other Europeans. Those people are understood to be the industrial workforce that will lift the United States from its slave roots.
Moving to Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slave Port by Robin Law. What is this book about and why have you included it?
This is about the West African context for the slave trade. Ouidah was, and still is, a port city. but it would become one of the most important “free ports” for Europeans to buy slaves in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. it was a place controlled by Africans, by local African leadership, in which Europeans operated and competed with each other for the supply of slaves. African slave sellers, like the King of Ouidah, established places like Ouidah so Europeans could show up in large numbers to increase the price of slaves. thus, at certain points in the transatlantic slave trade, Africans were raising the price and certain African communities, no doubt distinct minorities, were benefiting from the system and in complete control of how it worked. we should think that the word “African” is in quotes because the concept of a pan-continental identity at that time is a complete fiction. this is a story of much smaller groups, different ethnicities, different language groups, competing and often in violent rivalry with each other to get business from the Europeans.
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robin law is an absolutely excellent scholar of this dimension of west africa which, i would argue, has often been neglected. his work draws heavily on European sources, it must be said, but in the case of this book he has supplemented them with West African oral traditions. he offers a very detailed analysis of this notion of European weakness in Africa. the chronology of the book is also very helpful, because it doesn’t just go through the period of the slave trade. continues until the nineteenth century. So he can begin to understand, reconnecting with Eric Williams, that actually after abolition, Europeans, unsurprisingly, began to penetrate much further into the interior of West Africa. thus, abolition became the kind of friendly face that allows Europeans to expand their control over West African territory.
“the concept of a pancontinental identity at that time is a complete fiction”
he studies this process through ouidah and dahomey. These places benefited greatly from the slave trade, but later experienced European colonialism in Africa in the 19th century. As with Eltis, all of the Robin Law books are absolutely excellent, but this one does a very good job of shedding light on an underappreciated phenomenon. but also, with its unusual chronology (most books discussing this would focus on the period before or after abolition), this book connects the long history of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries through a narrative.
and what you’re saying about the different African groups is that, like the Christians, the Slavs, the Europeans, and ‘the Africans,’ they were enslaving people they considered different from themselves in one way or another.
absolutely. and these differences remain in the 21st century. Some of the divisions in Nigerian society, in West African society in general, stem from tensions between these groups, even though they are now within the same nation. it is difficult both for the descendants of those people who enslaved and for the enslaved. those groups often do not intermarry with each other, for example, even today. therefore, the cultural and ethnic fissures that stemmed from the slave trade, and indeed fueled it in the first place, continue as a direct legacy to this day.
Are there persistent disparities in wealth between these groups? Are the descendants of slavers in Nigeria richer, in general, than the descendants of those who were enslaved?
I think the view is, and I may be oversimplifying here, that those who sprung from the political groupings formed by the economic benefits of running the slave trade are often in privileged positions. they may be closer to political power. those people who descend from those groups that tended to be enslaved tend to work in more entrepreneurial contexts and therefore are just as likely to be rich, but for different reasons.
You mentioned that, with the end of trade, Europeans began to penetrate into the interior of the African continent. we’re talking long before the ‘fight for Africa’ here, right? why were they interested in the interior?
They understood that they had these footholds on the west coast of Africa, which in some cases they had had for centuries: the first English forts in West Africa were established in the mid-17th century. they saw them as assets that they could use as launch pads to secure more natural resources.
The legislation that abolished the slave trade is, if you will, a wartime measure designed in part to suppress the slave trade from other European countries. so to do that, you need a pretty serious naval presence off the west coast of Africa. once you have that significant military presence there and have been able to suppress your rival’s slave trade, that military presence was used to subdue the local population and go on to seize territory and resources in the African interior. So I think what happened in the 1820s and 1830s leads to the process that we understand when they fight for Africa. it is inseparable from that.
let’s turn to his latest book, american slavery, american freedom: the ordeal of colonial virginia, by edmund morgan.
This is the most readable book of my picks. I would say that this book is not only the best book on the slave trade, but one of the best books on the United States. I mean, it’s hard to put limits on the depth of knowledge generated by this idea of the slavery paradox in the US context.
let me explain again the paradox of slavery in this context, i.e. following samuel johnson, why were the leaders of the independence movement in the american colonies slave owners? Morgan traces the sociological importance of the connection between owning people and being interested in an ostensibly egalitarian republican ideology. It goes right back to the colonial period—hence the subtitle, the “Colonial Virginia Test”—and usefully connects the beginnings of the American colonies with the early modern English context, that is, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What he traces is the beginnings of political tensions, class tensions, in the colonies in the 1660s and 1670s. And he notices that slavery is being introduced in earnest around this time and he develops the idea that the Slavery is a way of achieving political stability in the colonies, because if you introduce a racial underclass, you make the existing white population join in: this idea that ‘I might be poorer than you, but at least I’m the same race as you’ you’.
“this book is not only the best book on the slave trade, but one of the best books on the united states”
so, this is the kind of triumph over racing. it is a way of dissolving class stratification, which Americans would always see as European, by introducing race. and that’s why you get that fixation on egalitarianism in the republican thought of the founders of the united states. it’s really just a reworking of racial solidarity among whites.
I think that starts to shed light on all sorts of things about the United States as a place. you know, why are Americans sometimes considered classless? what is the relationship between race and class? What sociological function does the introduction of the slave population serve? everyone is familiar with the economic advantages, or supposed economic advantages, of using slaves, but what effect does it have on your society and what benefits does it bring to your society by stabilizing the relationship between poor whites and rich whites?
That’s all in the book and trying to replicate that analysis in a British context was what I sought to do in Liberty’s Debt. it is, if you will, a kind of projection of some of those ideas and a test of some of those ideas in a discussion of the glorious revolution in england.
Jefferson and Washington, just to take the two most obvious examples, were slave owners, but they were both deeply unhappy with slavery, weren’t they? I mean, fundamentally, they didn’t like it. it’s okay? and it was not one of their difficulties with abolition that they could not imagine a way to free the enslaved black population without creating unmanageable conflicts. Or were those issues quite fringe and ultimately what shaped their actions were fundamental ideas about racial inequality?
the latter. That is certainly the case with Jefferson, who is much more explicit about his views on this issue. he lived a long time and changed his mind. as president, his views were somewhat different than he had earlier in his life and they were different again later. but it is abundantly clear that however uncomfortable he may have initially been with the idea of slavery, he did very little about it, not only with his own slaves, but also with the enslaved population of the country. at several different points he tries hard to do something about it, but he doesn’t.
I think you’re absolutely right that one of the reasons he’s uncomfortable is because he doesn’t know what to do with the emancipated slave population, those who had been previously enslaved. he is absolutely convinced that if the slaves are freed, what he would see as inherent tensions between the two races will undermine his republican project. and that’s why he becomes a proponent, at certain points, of colonization, which is moving former African-American slaves back to Africa. he just doesn’t believe the two races can live together.
was any practical project launched to carry out this colonization?
the precedent of the colony of sierra leone and liberia existed. I think Jefferson has all sorts of ideas about where you could send the formerly enslaved population, but while these were majority views as the US descends into civil war, the plans were generally not well developed or thought through. they were also dismissed as impractical.
when did edmund morgan write this book?
in the 1970s. I think the context of the 1970s is quite interesting because, again, it takes the analysis away from economics and toward an analysis of class, that race trumps class, but that Racial stratification is inspired by class stratification. that’s one of the things he’s done a good job of demonstrating.
do you think things are changing, with the black lives matter movement and that kind of thing? Has the debate about the founding of the United States and its racial basis shifted in a more honest direction about the painful aspects of the past? Or is that fundamental problem at the heart of American democracy as intractable as it has always been?
I wouldn’t say it’s unapproachable. my correspondence with historians of slavery and the slave trade who are descendants of enslaved people would suggest to me that actually, yes, there has been, perhaps, a broader debate about the history of the united states and the painful persistence of racism, but none of that, so far, has translated into a consensus that would actually do much about it. in fact, it is still in a painful process of uncovering and revealing these issues, instead of going to the next stage, which is to say, ‘Look, we have this original sin. our country was established with slavery and race at the beginning. How are we going to uproot our Republican egalitarian ideas from their roots and turn them into the means to create a society that fosters racial equality?’
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