INTRODUCTION

A major theme of this volume is that slavery was a formal institution but also a negotiated relationship. Enslaved people formed their own communities, with value systems and forms of behaviour that differed from the social norms of non-enslaved people, but these communities were set within larger social groupings that exerted their own pull over enslaved people’s desires. While the focus in this book is on the individual and collective experience of enslaved people, that experience was modified and influenced by their relationship with their owners and with people who were not enslaved. It was also modified in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds by race. Gwyn Campbell (Chapter 3) makes the important point that we need to move on from a simplistic, blackand-white dichotomy that does not really work for an Atlantic World where Native Americans and people of mixed race were enslaved alongside Africans. And such a model, he argues, makes no sense for an Indian Ocean World where most slaves were of the same race as their owners and where some slaves, especially female slaves, lived better than their masters. Nevertheless, race was very important, especially in the Atlantic World, both in shaping relations between slaves and free people and in providing an intellectual justification for enslavement. A noticeable feature of slavery in the period and place on which we concentrate

most – the Americas from the time of the Columbian encounter in 1492 through to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888 – is that enslaved people were differentiated from free people by virtue of race. Slaves were either Native American or else African or of African descent; free people were meant to be persons of European descent (although in practice a number of free people, as John Garrigus notes in Chapter 14, were either of mixed race or solely of African descent). Nevertheless, race is a slippery concept ideologically and an even more slippery biological construct. What happened when the “races” of African, Native American and European mixed? Several chapters describe the complications that developed in relation to slavery when a class of people emerged in the Americas who were both mixed race and also free people rather than enslaved. How enslaved people got their freedom and what freedom meant for ex-slaves is also

a major part of this volume. We are suspicious of tendencies within the historiography of slavery to treat every disagreement between enslaved people and their owners as a manifestation of slave resistance. We are also careful to stress how unsuccessful both individual and collective slave resistance normally was in the face of overwhelming owner power, buttressed usually by the power of a supportive state. Yet it is undeniable that enslaved people disliked their condition and often worked actively to try and alter what they most detested about enslavement. Sometimes, this resistance took the form of trying to reform particular abuses within the parameters of slavery. At other times, most notably in the slave rebellion that destroyed the greatest slave society of them all, Saint Domingue, enslaved people turned to violence to counter the violence that customarily governed their lives as slaves. Two chapters in this volume, by James Sidbury (Chapter 12) and Gad Heuman (Chapter 13), look explicitly at slave resistance and rebellion. Other essays focus on how slavery was weakened and then abolished by forces outside the slave system itself. Laurent Dubois (Chapter 16) stresses the importance of the Age of Revolution (American, French, Haitian and Latin American) between 1776 and 1825 in changing opinion about the morality of slavery. Christopher Brown explains in Chapter 17 the intellectual and political underpinnings of this developing abolitionist campaign, one of the more surprising and undoubtedly more important social movements in human history. We are particularly concerned in this volume to understand

why social reformers focused so intently on slavery as an especial evil that needed to be eradicated. We note that these reformers, just like slaves, faced powerful opposition. As Trevor Burnard argues in Chapter 11 on the planter class in the Americas, and as Tim Lockley explores in his treatment of the many interactions that slaves had with free people (Chapter 15), there were large and powerful groups in the Americas who were as committed to maintaining slavery as a social institution as there were slaves and abolitionists who wanted to make slaves free. The strength of the supporters of slavery was considerable, even as the moral case in favour of slavery declined: slavery did not end in the nineteenth or even in the twentieth century. Indeed, slavery flourished, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, and continues to thrive, as Joel Quirk makes clear in Chapter 20, in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the intellectual underpinnings that supported the subjugation and

exploitation of certain groups of human beings by other humans came under unprecedented attack following the American, French, Haitian and Latin American revolutions. While the main protagonists in this intellectual tussle against slave owners were European and white North American abolitionists, slaves and ex-slaves played a significant role in their own liberation. More importantly, in their struggles against slavery, they developed understandings of freedom that were different from the ideas of freedom that abolitionists imagined for them and which their ex-owners wanted to impose upon them in the aftermath of the owners’ losing battle to keep slavery intact. Edward Rugemer (Chapter 19) points out that ex-slaves did not feel any sense of gratitude or obligation to other people for their emancipation. Moreover, ex-slaves commemorated their emancipation in highly distinctive ways, in which the main focus was on the role the enslaved themselves played in their own emancipation. The gaining of freedom for slaves did not, of course, mean the end of conflict between

ex-slaves and their erstwhile helpers and antagonists. Freedom was forged, as Steven Hahn explains in Chapter 18, within a maelstrom of expectation on the part of the recently freed, bitterness on the part of those who had lost their enslaved property, and racial and class condescension on the part of people outside the slave system – people who had opposed slavery but had little affection for the people who had suffered under slavery.