Centering Culture
This book also differs from studies that privilege the analysis of economic structures of chattel slavery as well as demographics and statistics.30 It is a cultural history crafted to show the human perspective of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Following a chronological and thematic approach, Humans in Shackles surveys the trajectories of men, women, and children from Africa to the Americas by examining how European powers reached Africa and traded with African societies, and how Africans were captured, were transported to the coast, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of slave ships. The book explores how African captives were sold in slave markets and other settings in the Americas. I look at their living and working conditions on plantations and in urban areas, paying particular attention to the work of enslaved women who often fed the cities by selling food in the streets and urban markets.Humans in Shackles shows how, despite the violence they had to endure, bondspeople created families. The book also examines the ways enslaved women and men were sexually abused by their male and female owners. Several chapters explore how enslaved people daily resisted slavery by joining runaway slave communities, congregating and re-creating their cultures and religions, and organizing rebellions. In all these instances I show how enslaved people’s past and ongoing connections with the African continent mattered. Finally, the book discusses how bondsmen and bondswomen sought ways to be freed or to purchase their freedom, up until the legal end of slavery. I explain how thousands of freedpeople organized themselves to leave the Americas to settle on the African continent, and I also highlight the challenges faced by most former bondspeople who remained in the Americas after emancipation.
Over more than three hundred years, slavery was shaped by economic, social, political, and cultural changes in the Americas.
These changes varied according to regional specificities. I contend here that slave systems were interconnected. Therefore, I seek to show that, whether in Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Saint-Domingue, or Jamaica, the institution of slavery and the individual and collective experiences of enslaved people had many parallels. Addressing the significance of the role of enslaved women in the Americas, Humans in Shackles underscores the importance of urban slavery in which bondswomen played important roles, especially as street vendors, marketeers, and domestic workers. To provide this broad panorama, highlighted by specific examples, I draw on a large array of printed and manuscript primary sources such as travel accounts, pamphlets, newspapers articles, slave ship logs, ship captains’ journals, fugitive slave advertisements, slave narratives, wills, speeches, laws, and correspondence in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish, and I also incorporate visual sources including oil paintings, watercolors, engravings, photographs, artifacts, novels, motion pictures, monuments, and heritage sites, materials that are often overlooked by historians.Humans in Shackles is comprehensive in its scope. I rely and expand on the existing scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas with the goal of contributing to a better understanding of the global legacies of the Atlantic slave trade and human bondage. By doing so, I underscore that the Atlantic slave trade in the South Atlantic world and the history of slavery in Brazil are central to comprehending the full dimensions and multiple complexities of the inhuman institution in the Western Hemisphere. I also argue that the internal contexts of West Africa and especially of West Central Africa not only shaped the rise of the slave trade to the Americas but also continued to affect the patterns of the trade in enslaved Africans until its abolition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here, I remind the reader that Brazil, since its early colonization, developed privileged links with West Central Africa, especially the region of present-day Angola.
These specific ties, favored by the predominance of a bilateral trade between Angola and Brazil and between Brazil and the Bight of Benin, gave birth to the South Atlantic system. In this space, these continuous exchanges were so important that they persisted even after the end of the Atlantic slave trade.31Because of its large annual imports of African-born individuals, Brazil became a crucial spot where African cultures and religions survived, evolved, adapted, mixed, and more than anything else developed a dialogue with European and Native American cultures. Although this process carried features similar to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, these cross-cultural exchanges often contrasted with the British colonies of North America and what later became the United States, where the imports of enslaved Africans were more than ten times smaller than in Brazil. Yet, to juxtapose the South Atlantic and the North Atlantic systems, I also underline that a significant proportion of African-born bondspeople were introduced in mainland North America through the intra-American slave trade, especially through the Caribbean. I highlight the dramatic growth of US enslaved population between 1790 and the years preceding the Civil War (1861–65). This new phase, greatly provoked by the rise of the cotton industry and the invention of cotton gin, marked a new expansion of slavery in the United States. The Saint-Domingue Revolution and its aftermath also contributed to the expansion of the sugar and coffee industries in Cuba and Brazil. This new increase, I explain, propelled a new development of the institution of slavery entangled with the rise of industrial capitalism, a phase that historians have designated as the “second slavery.â€32