The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (The Early Modern Americas) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812223764 ISBN 13: 9780812223767

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

Synopsis

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, vibrant port cities became home to thousands of Africans in transit. Free and enslaved blacks alike crafted the necessary materials to support transoceanic commerce and labored as stevedores, carters, sex workers, and boarding-house keepers. Even though Africans continued to be exchanged as chattel, urban frontiers allowed a number of enslaved blacks to negotiate the right to hire out their own time, often greatly enhancing their autonomy within the Atlantic commercial system.

In The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, eleven original essays by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America chronicle the black experience in Atlantic ports, providing a rich and diverse portrait of the ways in which Africans experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery. Describing life in Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Africa, this volume illuminates the historical identity, agency, and autonomy of the African experience as well as the crucial role Atlantic cities played in the formation of diasporic cultures. By shifting focus away from plantations, this volume poses new questions about the nature of slavery in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, illustrating early modern urban spaces as multiethnic sites of social connectivity, cultural incubation, and political negotiation.

Contributors: Trevor Burnard, Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Matt D. Childs, Kevin Dawson, Roquinaldo Ferreira, David Geggus, Jane Landers, Robin Law, David Northrup, João José Reis, James H. Sweet, Nicole von Germeten.

About this title

About the Author:

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of several books, including How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Matt D. Childs is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and author of The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery. James Sidbury is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Rice University and author of Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury

In 1763 a young enslaved man who went by the name Gustavus Vassa went to sea in the British Caribbean. Like most sailors, he soon began to engage in petty commerce to make a bit of money. Over the next four years he built up his small savings by transporting goods from one island port and selling them in another. Around 1767 he invested all of his savings in limes and oranges that he took on a voyage to Santa Cruz (present-day Saint Croix). When the ship arrived in port, probably at Frederiksted, he and a friend lit out for the city to sell their fruit. Almost immediately "two white men" stopped them and openly stole their three bags of fruit. The two young slaves pleaded for the return of their trade goods, but the robbers "not only refused to return" the citrus, they cursed their two victims and threatened "to flog" them as well if they did not leave them alone. Thus, at the "very minute of gaining more by three times than" he had ever had "by any venture" in his "life before," the young enslaved petty merchants was "deprived of every farthing" he "was worth." Port cities created opportunities for enslaved Africans, but they also held dangers.

Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, lived an amazing life in the Black Atlantic. According to his 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, he was born in 1745 in a small Igbo village called Essaka. Kidnapped as a young boy, he was sold into American slavery. More fortunate than most victims of the slave trade, he ultimately won his freedom and became an antislavery advocate and author. His account of enslavement, the Middle Passage, his life as a slave, and his careers as a free man offers the most powerful first-person account of eighteenth-century slavery to be found in English. Not surprisingly, scholars of eighteenth-century race and slavery use it in discussions of almost every aspect of eighteenth-century black life in the English-speaking world.

And why not? Equiano/Vassa's story lives up to its title—it is, indeed, an "Interesting Narrative." He offers chilling descriptions of being snatched from Essaka with his sister, of being separated from her while traveling to the African coast, and of being purchased by slavers and shipped to America. Once in the New World he was sold to a Virginian and then to a ship captain, after which he traveled throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, going as far east as Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire. He fought on a Royal Navy man-of-war alongside his owner during the Seven Years War. He converted to Christianity in England. Sold back to America, he worked and made money for his owner while engaging in petty commerce on his own account. Finally, despite numerous efforts by whites to defraud him like the one on Santa Cruz, he saved enough to buy his freedom. As a free man he worked as a sailor, a barber and personal servant, and as an overseer. By the time he decided to write his autobiography, he had lived a life well worth telling, a life many would and did want to purchase as text. His Interesting Narrative was a best seller.

That broad range of experience also helps explain the Narrative's appeal to scholars. Equiano/Vassa went so many places, he interacted with whites and blacks throughout so much of Britain's Atlantic empire, he recounted so many fascinating stories that his autobiography can seem like a gold mine for people searching for all-too-rare points of entry into the ways that slaves understood their world. Of course that very variety of experience raises questions about how to use evidence from the text. No one has ever pretended that Equiano/Vassa's life as a slave resembled that of most victims of the Atlantic trade, but relatively little attention has been paid to the prominence of cities in his story.

Though he spent a few weeks as a slave in rural Virginia, and a few months as an overseer on the Mosquito Coast of present-day Nicaragua, he reported precious little experience on plantations, the institution that dominated the lives of most American slaves. Instead, most of his time was spent either in ports or on ships sailing between ports. He tells stories of his time in London and of visits to ports in France, Portugal, and Spain. The list of American cities he spent time in is almost too long to list: Basseterre (St. Kitts), Charleston (South Carolina), Kingston (Jamaica), New Providence (the Bahamas), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Plymouth (Montserrat), and St. Pierre (Martinique). Equiano/Vassa's Interesting Narrative reveals a network of black sailors, craftsmen, stevedores, and laborers who worked in the port cities of the Atlantic World, providing much of the labor and expertise that lubricated Atlantic commerce.

While no one would suggest that cities should replace the plantation as the primary site for making sense of Atlantic slavery, the essays in this volume, when read together, make a strong case that we need to pay much more attention than we have to the black urban Atlantic that played such a central role in Equiano/Vassa's life. While the Interesting Narrative provides occasional glimpses of enslaved Africans and people of African descent working, and playing, and worshipping, and suffering brutal exploitation, these essays look in much more concentrated ways at the texture of black urban life in Atlantic cities. This collection provides a series of detailed case studies of black life in different Atlantic ports—one in Europe, three in Africa, two in Brazil, two on the Spanish American mainland, and three in the Caribbean—as well as an essay discussing slave pilots who worked Atlantic ports. By placing the activities that Equiano saw throughout the Atlantic within their specific urban contexts, these studies provide a rich and diverse sample of the ways Africans and African-descended people experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery. The essays center collectively on the eighteenth century, though they range from the sixteenth to the nineteenth. Together they reinforce and enlarge upon a point that David Northrup makes in his contribution to this volume when he points out that the historiographies of African slaving ports and American slave-importing points not only are asking some of the same questions, but also are beginning to reach similar conclusions about the nature of cultural adaptation and change among the victims of the Atlantic slave trade. That is not to say that blacks throughout the urban Atlantic experienced the social and cultural upheaval of slaving in the same way. It is to say, however, that the essays in this volume fit with much of the new literature on the Black Atlantic in suggesting new directions in our understandings of the cultures of the African diaspora. Over the past decade it has become apparent that long-standing debates about creolization and African cultural survival must give way to more flexible understandings of cultural change and persistence.

Especially after the middle of the seventeenth century people of African birth or descent became increasingly numerous residents of British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese port cities and of American ports, even those that served nonplantation hinterlands. They became or remained demographically dominant in African ports and in the towns and cities of the plantation Americas. This was in part, but only in part, because free and enslaved blacks became increasingly important maritime workers, so Atlantic ports included uncertain but significant numbers of transient black sailors enjoying shore leave while the ships on which they served loaded and unloaded cargoes. In addition, blacks worked in domestic service, in the many crafts necessary to support transoceanic commerce (blacksmithing, sail making, carpentry and other woodworking, etc.), and in the nonartisanal work that took place around docks, where they served as stevedores, carters, sex workers, boarding house keepers, and day laborers. Many slaves in the urban Black Atlantic negotiated the right to hire their own time, enhancing their autonomy and winning the right to participate in the Atlantic commercial system, often acting as agents on their masters' behalf in addition to marketing some of their own goods and services. Self-hired slaves had a much better chance of acquiring sufficient money to purchase their freedom, though opportunities for manumission varied in different imperial legal regimes. Africans did not come to dominate artisanal and day labor positions in all cities, though they dominated them in some, but they established an urban presence throughout the Atlantic World.

This collection of essays brings out the stark contrasts but also commonalities that marked the urban Black Atlantic during the early modern period. In terms of contrasts, the African merchants and others born in Ouidah and Luanda covered in chapters by Robin Law and Roquinaldo Ferreira lived there by choice. Some of these merchants traveled back and forth across the Atlantic—especially the South Atlantic—choosing to live in Brazil or Portugal at various times. Others sent children to be educated in England, France, or Brazil. Less wealthy free people of African descent—sailors and craftsmen who lived outside of Africa—also exerted some control over where they lived, though their choices were certainly more constrained than those of wealthy African merchants. But the vast majority of Africans living in European or American ports had been involuntarily drawn into those urban centers either directly or indirectly by the transatlantic slave trade that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century transported eleven million enslaved Africans throughout the Black Atlantic. Many of the black people living in eighteenth-century Lisbon or London, in Kingston or Le Cap, in Rio or Bahia, but also in Ouidah and Luanda, were victims of slaving. Like most people living in the early modern Atlantic, they had grown up in villages with profoundly local conceptions of identity, but they had been yanked out of them and thrust into a frightening new urban milieu.

In this regard their experiences were not different in kind from those of the majority of victims of the Atlantic trade who ended up on plantations, but the urban setting made a difference. First, in most Atlantic cities, enslaved Africans found themselves in black communities that dwarfed even very large plantations. As James Sweet points out, slaves did not constitute a large percentage of eighteenth-century Lisbon's nearly two hundred thousand people, but the city was home to some ten thousand enslaved Africans. Of course Lisbon was a very large city, but the much smaller Kingston, Jamaica, held roughly seventeen thousand slaves among its almost twenty-seven thousand people in 1788, and Saint Domingue's modest Le Cap in the 1780s was home to about ten thousand slaves (out of a population of fifteen thousand). Even towns serving peripheral plantation hinterlands included sizable enslaved populations: seventeenth-century Cartagena had between three and four thousand enslaved residents (compared to twenty-five hundred whites), and the tiny and newly founded fall line port of Richmond, Virginia, with fewer than fifteen hundred total residents in 1784, was home to more than six hundred slaves. When one remembers that these were geographically constrained eighteenth-century walking cities, it becomes apparent that notwithstanding the relative absence of large individual urban slaveholders or specifically demarcated slave quarters, urban slave communities were substantially larger than plantation communities.

Did the size of Black Atlantic cities matter? It did in a number of ways, and the authors to this volume have studied in detail some of the locations that would be classified as "capitals" of the Black Atlantic for the size of their enslaved and free populations. As is clear in the case studies that follow, cities afforded those victimized by slaving in Africa and slavery in the Americas the opportunity to overcome the dislocation caused by enslavement and coerced migration by creating new communities. Some communities defined themselves through claims to shared places of African origin, in some cases to quite specific places and in others to a single slaving port or language group. Some communities defined themselves through shared religious belief. Some through shared occupations, or shared commitments to collective responsibility for medical and burial costs. The bigger the city, the larger its population of African and African-descended people, the more regular and the more reciprocal its connection with ports on the other side of the Atlantic, the deeper the well of cultural resources available to dislocated slaves in the city seeking to find or forge a new community within which to embed themselves. Urban centers from Luanda, Freetown, Ouidah, and Lisbon, to Rio and Bahia, to Kingston, Havana, and Le Cap, to Cartagena and Mexico City all offered what modern Westerners value as cosmopolitanism—urban settings in which different mixes of African, American, and European peoples lived side by side.

This forceful mix of involuntary African migrants enslaved by European colonial powers produced examples of syncretic cultures that are often celebrated today as examples of globalization and transnationalism. However, one must not be lulled by the similarity to qualities valued in twenty-first-century Western culture into thinking that "cosmopolitanism" was a welcome thing. Catholic brotherhoods with explicit ties to a single African ethnic group welcomed others to their celebrations and sometimes looked beyond their ethnic "kin" for members and beliefs. Africans of various backgrounds who lived in Lisbon turned to bolsas de mandinga in order to ward off dangerous forces. The Atlantic slave trade ripped men and women out of their local cultures, leaving them to coalesce as best they could and create new communities that would give meaning to their existence. The African urban Atlantic was a world of forced cosmopolitanism and desperate cultural adaptation. Blacks in these cities did not choose cosmopolitan ways of life or values, and the processes through which they developed them exacted brutal and inhumane costs. Those involuntarily swept into the black urban Atlantic responded creatively to those costs in ways that continue to enrich the myriad synthetic cultures of the Atlantic basin today.

Cultural Change in the Urban Black Atlantic

The chapters in this volume shed light on some of the common dynamics that influenced these processes. First, they show time and again that however absolute a master's legal power over a slave might have been—and that, of course, varied in different slave regimes—in actual eighteenth-century cities in which the goal of slave owners was to benefit from slaves' labor, domination came through negotiation coupled with brute force. To be sure the parties to these negotiations brought very different resources to the table, and masters never relinquished the threat of violence or the threat to sell recalcitrant bondsmen away from the relative liberty of the city. But urban economies required skilled workers, and they...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0812223764
• ISBN 13: 9780812223767
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Canizares-Esguerra Jorge, Cañizares-Esguerra Jorge, Childs Matt D., Sidbury James