Early Modern Europe: Commodity Culture, Enslaved Experience

slavery in europe

Slavery in Europe is an ancient institution

• Mediterranean slavery & Black Sea slavery & Viking thralls

Medieval slavery: religion, not race is determinative (skin color)

Development of the caravel enables people to sail greater distances faster and more safely

• 1441: Portuguese traders sailing down the African coast first capture and enslave Africans

• C. 1502: the first African enslaved people are transported to South America

Early modernity revisits the debate about who can be enslaved

• who is naturally free vs not

• 16th century: Valladolid debates exclude Africans (see lectures on the New World for a refresher)

• 17th century: John Locke argues that enemies defeated in a “just war” can be enslaved

• 18th century: Rise of scientific racism

race and slavery

In the Medieval period, slavery was linked to religion rather than race

• Conceptions of skin colour and race are very different in the medieval period

• understood skin tones, not linked to what kind of person you are in the same way

Spanish limpieza de sangre was one of the first laws concerning something like race (blood purity =/= race based on skin colour)

• blood purity about how far back your christianity goes

• Spanish casta system obsessed with quantifying people’s heritage and sorting them into a hierarchy →

“Race” first used in English to refer to lineage, by 16th century it refers to complexion

Code Noir (1685) governs the institution of slavery in all French colonies

• Writes that slaves can be of any race or religion, but the subtitle of the document directly refers to Black people

16th century: Rise of the Curse of Ham justification for slavery

• altenative ending of noah’s arc: he is embarassed by son Ham because he was drunk, noah curses ham with blackness (was referring to sin, now used as black people derogatory)

trans-atlantic slave trade

C. 12 – 13 million people were transported from Africa across the Atlantic

• N.b. this does not count for the many million who were born into slavery or died before they could be trafficked aboard slave ships

On average 12.3% of captives died during the crossing

64.5% of captives were male, 21. 7% were children

• only count for initial part on the boat, many died, others dropped off to other places and forced to walk to plantations

The average duration of transpiration across the Atlantic was 60 days

• N.b. this only accounts for the initial voyage across the Atlantic and not subsequent transportation by boat or foot to the final destination of labour

Over 50% of enslaved people were transported on Portuguese ships

• 9/10 enslaved people were transported by Portuguese, English, or French slavers

• Ships of one flag could sell to other nations’ colonies

Most enslaved people came from West Africa (especially, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana,, Nigeria, and Togo)

sugar

Where does sugar grow?

• Sugar requires a tropical climate

• Grows best on flat land, close to water

• Initially grown on the South American continent, but Caribbean islands eclipse the continent by the 1650s

How is sugar grown?

• Sugar cane is a kind of grass & can be propagated from cuttings of the cane

A majority of the world’s sugar cane was still harvested by hand (or by machete) as of 2016

How is sugar refined?

• Boiled in copper pots until the sucrose crystallizes out

cane sugar in europe (now can also be from beets)

sugar islands

An island whose economy was either entirely or principally devoted to the production of sugar

• haiti, carribean

Sugar grows well at scale, you can grow more of it by clear-cutting land and building massive plantations

Initially, plantations and refineries were separate businesses but, on the Caribbean sugar island, planters realized that they can also refine sugar on their own premises

enslaved sugar workers

Two kinds of labour for men

• On the plantation: healthy men and boys

  • Cutting and propagating sticky sugarcane in the hot sun

  • Death and injury due to machete accidents, tetanus and other diseases due to small wounds wounds, exposure to yellow fever and other mosquito-borne illnesses, terrible dehydration

• In the boiling house: injured men, older men, young boys

  • Supervising the boiling sugar syrup in the dark, smoky, humid boiling house

  • Incredibly dangerous work due to the high risk of burns (sugar sticks to you as it burns you)

Women also worked on the plantation, sometimes in the fields but often doing ancillary work

• Enslaved women gave birth to the next generation of slaves: this is an area of resistance

Enslaved people lived in “slave villages,” where they had to cultivate subsistence crops in their spare time

• got sundays off: overseers went to church, slaves had to get their stuff to survive another week

  • 3-6 person per dwelling

• some of these villages demonstrate hierarchy among enslaved people

  • people from particular origins were more prized: west african, creole

    • west africans over central africans

    • from their community of origin they were prominent = maintain status within slaves

  • men over women

Newton Plantation, Barbados

Newton Slave Burial Ground excavations give us clues to the lives of enslaved people on the plantation

Life expectancy of 29 years

Evidence of low infant mortality  contradicts a lot of previous scholarship

Evidence that people retained their cultural practices as best they could: evidence of people shaping their teeth and practicing burial in accordance with some West African customs

• Historians are increasingly aware of how much African heritage enslaved people managed to preserve

• buried next to people (kin ship), with people of their tribes (home cultures)

• goal of slavery: deny personhood, assumed it was successful, this was evidence of resilience

tobacco

Where is tobacco grown?

• Tobacco can be grown throughout the Americas

  • can grown anywhere

• C. 1610: John Rolfe introduces N. Tabacum to Jamestown because they are struggling to cultivate anything

  • had a famine

    • had no agriculture experience, they were land owners in england

    • had to move constantly to get nutrient rich soil

• 1624: Virginia gains a monopoly on tobacco production for the English world

  • Grows extremely well in the marshy soil of Virginia, but sucks up a lot of nutrients requiring planters to move their crops regularly

  • Virginia’s own burgesses enact tobacco inspections, ensuring a high standard of exports

Tobacco harvest

• Whole stalks harvested, dried, before leaves are picked off and cured

  • Different cures produce different flavours and aromas

labour on tobacco plantations

Tobacco work was initially done mostly by indentured workers

• “Culture of assimilation” where race was not a primary concern and the plantation owner often worked alongside the indentured servants regardless of skin colour → this shifts in the 1640s with the transport of African slaves to Virginia

  • race blindness

As tobacco became a greater and greater cash crop, planters pressured enslaved labourers to work at faster paces and produce more tobacco

• virgina had huge demand as monopoly for tobacco

• “Foot-dragging:” deliberately slowing down the work in the field as a form of resistance

  • was harshly punished

Unlike cash crops at scale (like sugar, cotton, or rice), tobacco was treated as an “artisanal” product which required careful cultivation and curing by skilled labourers

• Less “turnover” in tobacco plantations: higher life expectancy

  • skills were recognized by system, efforts to help them when they were sick/injured and keep them alive longer because they know about curing/growing tobacco productively

  • Sought young men to be trained in the work; women and children were often separated from men

    • women and kids went to domestic settings

Tobacco plantations ran work gangs where one white overseer would supervise the work of about a dozen enslaved men: not possible on a Caribbean sugar plantation

• sugar: had hundreds of people on this massive plantation

• higher surveillance but higher life expectancy and better housing conditions

coffee

more like sugar, compliment crop

What does coffee need to grow?

• Nutrient rich soil: volcanic is best

• Indirect sunlight

• Warm weather and moist climate

• It can take 3-4 years for a coffee plant to produce fruit

How to harvest and process coffee?

• Ripe coffee cherries are picked by hand (still)

• The cherries are dried and the coffee beans are removed (by

  hand, again)

• The beans are air or sun-dried

• In early modernity, the beans were roasted in Europe, sometimes by the coffee house proprietors, who also milled the coffee into grounds

enslaved coffee workers

In the Caribbean, coffee grows well in the areas where sugar is untenable (hilly, forested areas)

• By 1760, 80% of the world’s coffee was grown in St. Domingue → mix of trafficked Africans and locally-born creoles

Same regions as sugar, different working and living conditions:

• Coffee is cultivated at 600 – 1,200m above sea level (contrast with lowland sugar plantations)

• Number of enslaved workers varied dramatically from ~15 – ~300

  • Depending on size of plantation: 1 enslaved worker per 1,000 trees

  • Coffee planters tended to rely on enslaved workers that sugar planters did not want (more women, and more Central African, less expensive)

    • sugar: wanted creole and west african

      • west african had good height

Almost all coffee plantation labour is outdoors: no boiling house for the sick or injured

• altitude sickness, exposure to tropical mountain dangers (bugs, injuries)

• no reason to hang on to people who are disabled

Birth rates on coffee plantations are low than sugar plantations for reasons we don’t perfectly understand

• could be kinds of people, fertility is different for trafficked from africa (average 26 years)

tactics of resistance

Affecting the product (e.g. foot-dragging, sabotaging the product) often at a high cost

Preserving original culture and language or cultivating African plants for food

• survived and present in Caribbean, american black culture

Refusing to participate in growing the unfree labour force (birth control, abortifacients, etc.)

• remain pregnant, become pregnant, give birth

Self-liberation: escape

• Often goes together with, e.g. stealing seeds or tools to carry to self-liberated communities

  • seeds for subsistence/food crops

Active rebellion: band together and take up the enslavers

maroon communities (resistance)

Communities of self-liberated enslaved people, often residing in areas Europeans found inhospitable and often in community with Indigenous people

• Subsistence farming and skilled craftspeople

• Growing through both biological reproduction and new arrivals of self-liberated people

  • Highly motivated and organized fighting forces

In the Caribbean, Maroon communities grow to the point where they are a legitimate threat to planter society (especially St. Domingue and Jamaica)

• 1740: Following the First Maroon War, Jamaican Maroons sign a treaty with the British that promises the Maroons 2,500 acres (including 2 towns) in exchange for capturing and returning escaped enslaved people

  • These Maroons are effectively free at this point but they can no longer grow through self-liberation

enslaved people rising up

1733 – 1734: Enslaved insurrection on St. John

• 150 enslaved people from Akwamu (present-day Ghana) revolted, led by Breffu, an enslaved woman

1758: Mackandal Affair, St. Domingue

• Mackandal, a Hatitian Maroon leader, allegedly helped poison slaveholders; after 6 years evading capture, he was burned publicly in Port-Au-Prince

• creates real panic among plantation owner class

  • cannot risk anyone being inspired by him → but he goes down as a great hero

1760 – 1761: Tacky’s Revolt, Jamaica

• Rebellion of self-emancipated formerly enslaved people, led by Tacky who had been a Fante royal prior to his enslavement; eventually defeated by British forces allying with Maroons

  • british leveraged deal with maroons

1763 – 1764: Berbice Uprising

• Led by Cuffy (Kofi?) the enslaved people in Berbice took over the plantations while the slaveholders were at tend to be church; set up a government that ultimately fell to a mix of infighting and mercenaries hired by the Dutch

  • ran it for a year, they come so close to setting up the first free black republic

1791 – 1804: Haitian Revolution

• Successful rebellion, largest slave revolt of the modern era, Haiti is the first free Black republic

major uprisings tend to be clustered towards the second half of the 18th century, why?

• when you enslave people from the same communities, they come together and rise up