A Transnational History

A historian can follow diverse threads to write the painful history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Most general history books about slavery in the Americas have focused on the United States.

Humans in Shackles stands apart from existing general books studying slavery by providing a wide overview of Atlantic slavery in the Americas. While engaging with the history of slavery in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the book argues that Brazil was a crucial player in the continental and transoceanic history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. I also insist that Brazil is inseparable from the African continent until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, which is also why Brazil, Africa, and Africans occupy a prominent position in the book.

Slavery existed in many societies around the world, even before antiquity. In all these societies, slavery had both similar and contrasting elements. Still, because slavery was a mode of production and also an institution regulated by customary and statutory law, it is hard to make generalizations regarding what slavery is or is not. But despite changing over time and space, human bondage persisted in bearing a set of features that make it identifiable as slavery. I insist on the set of features because if taken individually, each of these elements is not sufficient to define a labor regime or mode of production as slavery, which is also why sociologists and anthropologists examining various societies have disagreed about a definition of slavery.

French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux relied on his fieldwork in West Africa to explain what slavery is and how a person becomes a slave. According to him, “desocialization and depersonalization are at the origin of the slave state.”²⁰ Classical scholar Moses I. Finley also emphasized the alien condition of enslaved persons by insisting on three features: “the slave’s property status, the totality of the power over him, and his kinlessness.”²¹ During the same period, sociologist Orlando Patterson defined slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons,” suggesting that slave status was associated with individuals alienated from their society of origin.²² Meanwhile, historian Paul E. Lovejoy also underscores alienness as a central feature of a slave. As he observes, “outsiders were perceived as ethnically different... [and t]he absence of kinship was a particularly common distinction.”²³ In a later book, Meillassoux again stressed that “through capture and trafficking the captive is engaged in a process of extraneity which prepares him for his state of absolute stranger in the society to which he will be delivered.”²⁴ Despite these definitions, only the first generation of enslaved individuals were foreigners to the society in which they were enslaved.

Historians must take these distinctions into account when examining slavery in the Americas, as it was only with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade that the institution of slavery started specifically targeting Black persons from the regions encompassing West, West Central, and Southeastern Africa. Transplanted to the Americas by European colonizers starting in the late fifteenth century, the institution of slavery was an economic system of dependence. Slavery sanctioned the possession of human beings as movable property and could only exist through violence and coercion, even though customs and laws regulated its existence. Regarded as commodities, enslaved persons could be bought, sold, displaced, overworked, tortured, beaten, violated, and murdered. But more than providing forced labor to an owner, bondspeople were subjected to relations of power.

In societies around the world where slavery existed prior to the late fifteenth century, including the Greco-Roman world, Black Africans were never the majority of the enslaved population. The institution of slavery also existed in ancient Egypt, albeit slaves never existed in large numbers. Moreover, Black Africans represented only a fraction of those living in bondage. Historians pay attention to the number of enslaved people in each society to determine the nature of these societies in terms of the relative importance of slavery as an institution within them. Simply put, slave societies were those with great numbers of slaves and in which slavery played a central role in production, whereas in other societies with slaves, the institution of slavery played only a secondary role in the economy. According to this view, introduced by Finley, the five slave societies were ancient Greece and Rome, Brazil, the US South, and the West Indies, whereas other parts of the Americas were “societies with slaves,” or societies in which slavery existed.²⁵ In recent years, scholars have called for a reappraisal of Finley’s categories by pointing out that his definitions of slave societies and societies with slaves were far too broad, vague, and ethnocentric.²⁶ But at least regarding the Americas, my focus in this book, Finley’s proposed framework remains valuable, even though, as with any other concepts, it can benefit from further nuance.

Slavery as well as internal slave trades were already in place on the African continent long before Europeans reached the shores of West Africa in the fifteenth century. By this time, the African continent had already been supplying captives to the Eastern slave trade (also known as the Muslim slave trade) for at least six centuries. Slave traders transported enslaved people from West Africa, West Central Africa, and Southeast Africa to northern Africa and the Mediterranean, as well as to the Middle East and as far as western India and China.²⁷ Estimates for the internal slave trade remain unclear, but historians have calculated that as many as seventeen million Africans were displaced in the context of the Eastern slave trade. But despite the scale of these slave trades, the Atlantic slave trade remains the largest transoceanic forced migration of enslaved Africans. More important, only with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade in the late fifteenth century did slavery became a racialized institution that specifically targeted Black populations in West Africa, West Central Africa, and Southeast Africa.

Africans and their descendants were not the first populations to be enslaved in the Americas. Slavery existed in Native American societies prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere and persisted after European conquest.²⁸ Moreover, even though this book does not examine the trade and the enslavement of Indigenous populations in the Americas, I emphasize that as Europeans invaded and occupied the territories of these First Nations, they enslaved these men, women, and children and also created other slavery-like institutions to exploit their workforce. Although often illegal and concealed from public view, the trade in Indigenous peoples continued to exist in Brazil in the eighteenth century and in the United States throughout the nineteenth century during the occupation of the West.²⁹