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Article

Creole Languages  

Pieter Muysken

Creole languages have a curious status in linguistics, and at the same time they often have very low prestige in the societies in which they are spoken. These two facts may be related, in part because they circle around notions such as “derived from” or “simplified” instead of “original.” Rather than simply taking the notion of “creole” as a given and trying to account for its properties and origin, this essay tries to explore the ways scholars have dealt with creoles. This involves, in particular, trying to see whether we can define “creoles” as a meaningful class of languages. There is a canonical list of languages that most specialists would not hesitate to call creoles, but the boundaries of the list and the criteria for being listed are vague. It also becomes difficult to distinguish sharply between pidgins and creoles, and likewise the boundaries between some languages claimed to be creoles and their lexifiers are rather vague. Several possible criteria to distinguish creoles will be discussed. Simply defining them as languages of which we know the point of birth may be a necessary, but not sufficient, criterion. Displacement is also an important criterion, necessary but not sufficient. Mixture is often characteristic of creoles, but not crucial, it is argued. Essential in any case is substantial restructuring of some lexifier language, which may take the form of morphosyntactic simplification, but it is dangerous to assume that simplification always has the same outcome. The combination of these criteria—time of genesis, displacement, mixture, restructuring—contributes to the status of a language as creole, but “creole” is far from a unified notion. There turn out to be several types of creoles, and then a whole bunch of creole-like languages, and they differ in the way these criteria are combined with respect to them. Thus the proposal is made here to stop looking at creoles as a separate class, but take them as special cases of the general phenomenon that the way languages emerge and are used to a considerable extent determines their properties. This calls for a new, socially informed typology of languages, which will involve all kinds of different types of languages, including pidgins and creoles.

Article

Truth, Sojourner  

Wilma Peebles-Wilkins

Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) was a reformer and evangelist who was active in the abolitionist movement. In 1843 she began speaking tours to advocate for the abolition of slavery and for women's suffrage.

Article

Atlantic Slavery and the Slave Trade: History and Historiography  

Daniel B. Domingues da Silva and Philip Misevich

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

Article

Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vasa)  

Chima J. Korieh

Olaudah Equiano was an outstanding 18th-century African of Igbo descent. He wrote and published a memoir that documented his life in Africa before enslavement, his life as a slave, his life in freedom, and his life as a writer and abolitionist. By his account, he was born in 1745 in Essaka (Isseke) in what is known as the Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria. Olaudah’s life took a tragic and dramatic turn when he was about eleven years old. He was kidnapped with his sister by slave raiders during the peak of the transatlantic slave trade in the Bight of Biafra in present-day Nigeria. After being sold to European slave traders, he worked as a slave in America and the Caribbean Islands and was later transferred to England, where he bought his freedom. His memoir and advocacy as an abolitionist brought him in contact with other abolitionists in England, where he was destined to play a critical role in the ending of the slave trade. Equiano and his memoir are significant in additional ways. Apart from the uncertainty about his early years, his autobiography provides one of the earliest depictions of the middle passage experience of enslaved Africans and the nature of Igbo society in the 18th century. His description of the political economy of the Igbo and the social organization of the society provides contemporary scholars with an early account of an African society.

Article

Early Slavery in Bantu and Nilotic-speaking Africa: The Evidence from Historical Linguistics  

Marcos Leitão de Almeida and William FitzSimons

The history of slavery runs deep in Africa, yet historians have rarely explored the early contexts in which Africans resorted to slaving. The burdens of remembering and reckoning with the global trades in African slaves have no doubt shaped this state of affairs, but examining the early history of slaveries in the continent is critical for understanding central themes of the African past, such as political formation, ethnicity, and economic development. While archaeology often appears silent on this topic, the method of historical linguistics can reveal how northeastern and central Africans resorted to slaving strategies as they settled new places, developed new ways of life, established polities, and faced climate change. Historical research thus shows that “slavery” was never a static institution in the continent, but a fraught category Africans constructed in diverse, albeit related, ways. Accounting for the ways in which Africans built such categories in particular contexts remains a major challenge facing historians of Africa’s earlier past.

Article

Said, Nicholas  

Mohammed Bashir Salau

The two versions of the autobiography that Nicholas Said published offer insight into 19th-century conditions in five continents as well as insight into life as a child, slave, manservant, and teacher. As a child in the 1830s, Said was enslaved in Borno, marched across the Sahara Desert, and passed from hand to hand in North Africa and the Middle East. After serving as a slave in various societies, Said was freed by a Russian aristocrat in the late 1850s after accompanying the aristocrat in question to various parts of Europe. In the 1850s, Said also traveled as a manservant for a European traveler to South and North America. Ultimately he settled in the United States, where he authored two versions of his autobiography, served as a teacher and soldier, got married, and disappeared from sight. This article compares the two versions of the autobiography that Said published, provides an overview of Said’s life, charts the development of scholarly works on Said, and draws attention to the primary sources related to the study of Said and his autobiography.

Article

Slave Narratives  

John Ernest

Slave narratives emerged in the 18th century to testify to the inhumanity of the practice of slavery. Often autobiographical accounts, but sometimes written by others or dictated to an amanuensis who took dictation, these accounts were celebrated in the United States as a powerful new genre, and they became associated primarily with slavery in the United States. Published both before and after the abolition of slavery, the narratives were never devoted solely to the abolition of slavery. Rather, they were attempts to represent the experiences, and argue for the authority, of those who experienced first-hand the ideological contradictions and the racial oppression fundamental to the maintenance of the system of slavery. These were stories deeply relevant long after the legal end of slavery—but the slave narratives were for many years either overlooked or decidedly dismissed as reliable historical sources, and they were not recognized as valuable literary documents for even longer. Eventually, historians and literary scholars alike began to embrace this genre of writing and recognized as well that it was a genre defined less by form than by purpose. Although often associated with book-length autobiographies by such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, or Booker T. Washington, the genre of slave narratives has come to include virtually any testimony of the enslaved, related in whatever form. What has come to matter, in the end, is precisely the authority of the enslaved that early writers struggled to establish.

Article

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom  

James Delle

The archaeology of northern slavery and freedom began with the excavations of Lucy Foster’s Garden in the 1940s. Following trends then current, in the 1970s, researchers began to consider evidence for the retention of African cultural traits in the archaeological record. Attention to the dynamics of northern slavery exploded following the excavation of the African Burial Ground site in New York during the early 1990s. As the paradigm on African American sites shifted following this project, archaeologists began to consider unsubstantiated assumptions on the nature and scope of slavery in the northern states. Multiple projects were conducted on sites best considered to be northern plantations, and although archaeological evidence for the condition of slavery is sometimes elusive, archaeologists have been able to locate and document northern plantations throughout the greater Northeast. Projects exploring the archaeology of freedom have considered sites associated with veterans of the American Revolution, who were emancipated following their service, as well as sites related to the clandestine and sometimes violent struggle against enslavement. Conditions for freed populations, both before and after the legal abolition of slavery, have also been explored archaeologically, from the gravesites of free communities to the archaeological signature of sanctuary settlements where people fleeing enslavement in the South were able to establish meaningful and free lives in both urban and rural contexts.

Article

African Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Rio de la Plata Region  

María Verónica Secreto

Historiography has traditionally divided the policy of introducing enslaved people to Spanish America into three periods based on the legal framework in effect at the time. These divisions are: the period of licensing from 1493 to 1595; the period of asientos from 1595 to 1789: and the period of free trade in enslaved people from 1789 to 1812. However, Spanish enslaved traffic did not end in 1812; it remained for decades thereafter, with the main destinations being Cuba and Puerto Rico. Spanish colonial expeditions to the Americas included enslaved Black people from the outset. The Instructions to Comendador Fray Nicolás de Ovando, published in 1501, contain the earliest reference to Black slavery in the West Indies. Supply was seen as an increasingly important problem as demand grew. Systematic mechanisms were needed to ensure a regular supply of enslaved people. The joining of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns under Phillip II, known as the Iberian Union (1580–1640), seemed to solve the problem of supplying enslaved labor to Spanish possessions throughout the world. The Rio de la Plata played an important role in the extensive route linking Angola to Potosí, which, together with its hinterland, constituted a rich market made enormously attractive by the silver mined from the mountain for which the city was named. The lure of Peruvian silver hung over the slave trade and the institution of slavery in the Rio de la Plata region throughout the entire slaveholding period. During the 1789–1812 period, local merchants and traders in leather, tallow, and timber vied for position in this profitable market.

Article

Indian Slavery  

Christina Snyder

The history of American slavery began long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. Evidence from archaeology and oral tradition indicates that for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years prior, Native Americans had developed their own forms of bondage. This fact should not be surprising, for most societies throughout history have practiced slavery. In her cross-cultural and historical research on comparative captivity, Catherine Cameron found that bondspeople composed 10 percent to 70 percent of the population of most societies, lending credence to Seymour Drescher’s assertion that “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.” If slavery is ubiquitous, however, it is also highly variable. Indigenous American slavery, rooted in warfare and diplomacy, was flexible, often offering its victims escape through adoption or intermarriage, and it was divorced from racial ideology, deeming all foreigners—men, women, and children, of whatever color or nation—potential slaves. Thus, Europeans did not introduce slavery to North America. Rather, colonialism brought distinct and evolving notions of bondage into contact with one another. At times, these slaveries clashed, but they also reinforced and influenced one another. Colonists, who had a voracious demand for labor and export commodities, exploited indigenous networks of captive exchange, producing a massive global commerce in Indian slaves. This began with the second voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1495 and extended in some parts of the Americas through the twentieth century. During this period, between 2 and 4 million Indians were enslaved. Elsewhere in the Americas, Indigenous people adapted Euro-American forms of bondage. In the Southeast, an elite class of Indians began to hold African Americans in transgenerational slavery and, by 1800, developed plantations that rivaled those of their white neighbors. The story of Native Americans and slavery is complicated: millions were victims, some were masters, and the nature of slavery changed over time and varied from one place to another. A significant and long overlooked aspect of American history, Indian slavery shaped colonialism, exacerbated Native population losses, figured prominently in warfare and politics, and influenced Native and colonial ideas about race and identity.

Article

The Internal African Slave Trade as History and Representation  

Marcos Leitão de Almeida

The internal African slave trade is a key topic to understand the political, cultural, and economic history of Africa. As a colonial category, the concept emerged throughout the 19th century as European imperial powers, spearheaded by European antislavery movements, constructed a discourse of abolition associated with the expansion of commerce, Christianity, and civilization. In the process, European imperial agents increasingly challenged the political sovereignty of African states and laid the ground for the discourse of racial inferiority of Africans. At the same time, the term also refers, then as now, to the expansion of the internal slave trade within the continent after 1850. Slavers in different parts of the continent continued to move people across the landscape to provide human labor, this time not for slave ships along the Atlantic coast but for the development of economic undertakings within the continent itself, such as clove plantations on Africa´s east coast, palm oil in West Africa, and the onset of coffee and sugar plantations in Angola. As a colonial and historical category, the internal slave trade is crucial to understanding 19th-century Africa. Moreover, with discoveries in archaeology and historical linguistics, the internal slave trade has been shown to have a much older history, connected with the making of polities in Northeast Africa such as Egypt and Meroë, the trade in slaves and gold in West Africa from the time of the Garamantes to the expansion of Mali, and the settlement of Bantu-speaking villages in Central Africa in the last millennium bce. In this way, the internal African slave trade was not one but many; internal slave trades were, rather, locally generated and emerged in different periods and places in response to distinct contexts and motivations. Therefore, the 19th-century internal African slave trade, with its spin-off stereotyped representation of a continent without history, needs to be supplemented by an understanding of the multiple slave trades in Africa’s early past, as evidenced by historical linguistics and archaeology.

Article

Sugar and the Formation of Colonial Brazil  

Vera Lucia Amaral Ferlini

Sugar, besides its economic importance, created the foundations of political power in Brazil, based on the monopoly of land and the enslavement of indigenous and African people. Colonization, structured by the hegemony of the external market, created, over three centuries, a free rural population of whites, free blacks, and mestizos who survived on small plots and subsistence farms dependent on the power of the great landowners. From the centrality of the mills in the sugar world, the patriarchal character of this society, the basis and support of its political power, was forged. Sugar production was responsible for the “geography” of sugar, with territorial occupation by subsidiary activities such as subsistence farming and tobacco in the northeast, and with the expansion of sugar production towards the south in the 18th century.

Article

The Abolition of Brazilian Slavery, 1864–1888  

Ricardo Salles

Brazil was the last Western country to abolish slavery, which it did in 1888. As a colonial institution, slavery was present in all regions and in almost all free and freed strata of the population. Emancipation only became an issue in the political sphere when it was raised by the imperial government in the second half of the decade of the 1860s, after the defeat of the Confederacy in the US Civil War and during the war against Paraguay. In 1871, new legislation, despite the initial opposition from slave owners and their political representatives, set up a process of gradual emancipation. By the end of the century, slavery would have disappeared, or would have become residual, without major disruptions to the economy or the land property regime. By the end of the 1870s, however, popular opposition to slavery, demanding its immediate abolition without any kind of compensation to former slave owners, grew in parliament and as a mass movement. Abolitionist organizations spread across the country during the first half of the 1880s. Stimulated by the direct actions of some of these abolitionist organizations, resistance to slavery intensified and became increasingly a struggle against slavery itself and not only for individual or collective freedom. Incapable of controlling the situation, the imperial government finally passed a law in parliament granting immediate and unconditional abolition on May 13, 1888.

Article

Slave Trade to and from Madagascar  

Jane Hooper

An estimated half a million people from Madagascar were enslaved and transported across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans between the 16th and mid-19th centuries. Slave trafficking within the Indian Ocean predated European arrival but would become particularly intense in coastal Madagascar starting in the 17th century. Throughout the following century, European and non-European merchants competed to purchase enslaved islanders, and this demand for people continued into the 19th century, when people were transported both to and from the shores of Madagascar. This coerced movement of people likely had a lasting impact on cultural and linguistic practices in nearby Mauritius, Réunion, the Comoros, the Seychelles, and South Africa. People who trace their ancestry back to Madagascar can also be found in the Americas, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. While scholars disagree about how many people were shipped on vessels from the island, most agree that Madagascar served as a hub for slave trading not only within the Indian Ocean but also between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for several centuries.

Article

Demography of the Transatlantic Slave Trade  

Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez

By the time the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1866, around 12.5 million enslaved Africans had been forcibly embarked from hundreds of coastal slave-trading regions stretching from Senegal to Mozambique to populate most regions in the Americas from Newfoundland to Patagonia. For over three centuries, these displaced people were vital for the western hemisphere’s European conquest, settlement, and economic growth. Every major European nation and some of its colonies, such as Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, outfitted slaving expeditions. Based on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Voyages) and the most recent scholarship, this article addresses a selection of demographic topics which have remained at the core of the historiographical debates on the transatlantic slave trade, such as the number of enslaved Africans carried to the Americas, the mortality rate during the middle passage, African regions of provenance and destination, national carriers in the transportation of Africans, shipboard rebellions, and the gender and age of the captives. These demographic parameters, such as embarkation and disembarkation regions, mortality rate, the nationality of the carriers, or shipboard revolts, were interdependent and experienced significant temporal and regional changes.

Article

Sugar Plantation Slavery  

Klas Rönnbäck

Sugar and slavery became intimately connected in the Americas during the early modern era. Once the cultivation of sugar cane had been transplanted to the Americas in the early 16th century, Spanish and Portuguese planters turned to exploiting slaves as laborers on the plantations. The first slaves were taken from among Indigenous populations in the Americas. In the 17th century, English and French planters tried to recruit indentured servants from Europe. Both these sources of labor would, for several reasons, turn out to be insufficient to meet the great demand for laborers on the American sugar plantations. Planters throughout the Americas therefore came to import slaves from Africa, particularly following the so-called “sugar revolution” during the late 17th century. As sugar henceforth became the preferred crop of cultivation throughout most of the Caribbean and Brazil, it also became the main driver of the transatlantic slave trade. The particular demography of sugar planting—with a natural population decline as a consequence of hard labor, a brutal labor regime, and insufficient diet—did furthermore exacerbate the demand for slave imports even further. The cultivation of sugar, and all economic activities associated with the slave plantation complex, would be of great economic importance for investors, merchants and producers in Europe. The political decision to abolish the slave trade would therefore have large economic consequences both in the Americas, Africa, and Europe.

Article

Slavery and the African Diaspora in Spanish America  

Sabrina Smith

The European demand for African captives in Spanish America began during the conquest and settlement of the New World. This labor demand quickly became a part of the global forced movement of captive Africans. During the colonial period, from the 1500s to the mid-19th century, over 12.5 million captives arrived in the Americas from Africa, primarily West Central Africa. For Spanish America, approximately 2,072,300 people endured the transoceanic and intra-American slave trades and disembarked at Atlantic-facing ports in the mainland of this region. Many of these individuals later experienced the forced migration to the cities and sugar-producing lowlands in New Spain (Mexico) and Peru. Following the military invasion in New Spain and Peru, African and American-born captives formed a supplementary labor force in Spanish America. Enslaved people labored in producing agricultural products, such as sugar and coffee. They also worked with indigenous populations in silver mining and urban textile mills. In Spanish American cities, captives were skilled artisans and shopkeepers, and they offered domestic services in the homes of Spanish elites. Captives often challenged their enslavement throughout Spanish America. Some enslaved men and women challenged enslavers in the colonial courts. Other enslaved people, such as the Wolof slaves in Hispaniola, collaborated with native Taíno people to form one of the earliest slave revolts in the Americas. Many captives also saved their earnings to purchase their legal freedom, while others fled to new locations. Runaways often formed autonomous communities in the remote areas of Hispaniola, Panama, New Granada (Colombia), Peru, and New Spain. In New Granada, for instance, runaways formed palenques (autonomous slave communities) as early as the 1590s. These maroon communities were able to survive because they opposed the colonial state, developed their own system of governance, and at times, negotiated with colonial authorities. By the early 1800s, African-descended people also formed an important part of the wars for independence and the formal abolition of slavery. In Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Central America, the end of Spanish colonial rule and abolition were closely linked in the first three decades of the 19th century. In South America, enslaved people participated in the wars for independence. Similarly, gradual abolition in this region included abolitionist debates, Free Womb Laws, and conditional freedom for the enslaved. Cuba was the last Spanish colony to end slavery in 1886.

Article

helots  

David M. Lewis

The helots were the slaves of the Spartans. Distributed in family groups across the landholdings of Spartan citizens in Laconia and Messenia, helots performed the labour that was the bedrock on which Spartiate leisure and wealth rested. Since they outnumbered the Spartiate class, keeping the helots in line was a significant challenge, and scholars are divided over the degree of tension that marked helot-Spartiate relations and the intensity of oppression inflicted upon the former by the latter. Debates exist over many other aspects of helotage, e.g., the krypteia, the alleged massacre of 2,000 helots, the socio-economic organization of helotage, the demography of the helot population, helot rebellion, and the ancient tradition of comparing the helots to other servile groups (e.g., the penestai of Thessaly, the Mariandynoi of Heraclea Pontica).Crucial to the operation of the Spartan sociopolitical system, the exploitation of the helots was, in Plato’s view (Leg.

Article

Slavery, Race, and the Construction of the Imperial Order  

Hebe Mattos

Despite moral criticism of the institution of slavery from the second half of the 18th century, slavery, racism, and liberalism would be mutually defined throughout the 19th century. The slave economy in the Americas grew in the 19th century as a result of the expansion of the world market, sustained by constitutional states, including two national ones: the Brazilian Empire, a constitutional monarchy, and the United States, a republic. In these national states, representative systems would shape the legitimacy of the institution of slavery, relating the adoption of citizenship rights to processes of racialization. In Brazil’s late colonial period, more than one-half of the free population was defined as “black” or “brown,” and manumission rates were as high as 1 percent per year. Under Portuguese colonial rule, this population of color was denied access to public offices and ecclesiastical positions, but allowed to own slaves. The rallying cry of “equality for people of all colors” served as a cornerstone of popular nationalism in the liberal uprisings of the late Brazilian colonial period. Popular liberalism also called for the passage of laws that would recognize the Brazilian-born sons and daughters of enslaved people as free persons. After independence, the Brazilian Empire experienced more than twenty years of political struggles and localized civil wars around the construction of representative political institutions. The Brazilian coffee production boom inaugurated in 1830, allowed the consolidation of the monarchical order in Brazil with the rise to power of a conservative party, the Party of Order, in 1837. From 1837 to 1853, this conservative party consolidated a slave-based national identity. During these years of conservative pro-slavery leadership, political strategies to legitimate the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade were developed and illegal enslavement was tolerated and even encouraged. Liberalism, race, and slavery shaped the history of the Atlantic world in a very interconnected way. Despite the non-race-based legitimation of slavery in a Catholic and constitutional monarchy, race was a central issue in 19th-century monarchical Brazil. Slavery was legitimated as a historical institution in the Brazilian Constitution of 1824 in the right to own property. The same constitution guaranteed civil rights to the freedmen born in the country and their descendants, denying, however, Brazilian citizenship for free Africans and political citizenship to former slaves born in Brazil. Eventually, after the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1850, the state bureaucracy adopted a norm of racial silence for the free population, racializing slave experience and reinforcing the precariousness of freedom of the Brazilian citizens of African descent. These practices shaped crucial aspects of structural racism still present in 21st-century Brazilian society.

Article

Global Abolitionist Movements  

Benedetta Rossi

Abolitionism succeeded thanks to the struggles of many movements, some genuinely global, others national or local but interconnected at a global level. This article takes a pluralist approach to global abolitionism. Since the late 17th century, the membership, objectives, and strategies of different abolitionist movements have been varied, but they shared the same objective: to impose their understanding of slavery as an aberration that ought to be de-legalized and eventually prohibited worldwide. This article periodizes global abolitionism in three main stages characterized, successively, by the primacy of egalitarianism, imperialism, and internationalism. By the mid-20th century, pro-slavery ideologies were obsolete in Euro-America and had disappeared from official policy globally. They survived in circumscribed contexts in which anti-slavery activists are struggling against the lingering vitality of pro-slavery ideas in the 21st century.