Simon P. Newman - A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic

THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS

Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor

Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

The Development of Plantation Slavery
in the British Atlantic

SIMON P. NEWMAN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation,

none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means

without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Newman, Simon P. (Simon Peter)

A new world of labor : the development of plantation slavery in the
British Atlantic / Simon P. Newman.1st ed.

p. cm.(The early modern Americas)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4519-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Slave laborBarbadosHistory. 2. Contract laborBarbados

History. 3. PlantationsBarbadosHistory. 4. Slave laborGhana

History. 5. Contract laborGhanaHistory. 6. Contract laborGreat

BritainHistory. 7. Slave tradeGhanaHistory. 8. Slave tradeGreat

BritainHistory. 9. BritishBarbadosHistory. 10. BritishGhana

History. I. Title. II. Series: Early modern Americas.

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The small and remote island of Barbados appears an unlikely location for the epochal changes in labor that overwhelmed it and then much of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lying some sixty miles farther out into the Atlantic than any other Caribbean island, and 166 square miles in size, Barbados is only twenty-four square miles larger than the city of Philadelphia and smaller than the combined boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Its location and small size meant that the Spanish and Portuguese had largely ignored Barbados, and it was uninhabited and densely forested when English settlers arrived in 1627. Yet within a quarter-century Barbados had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking world, the center of a circum-Atlantic exchange of people and goods between the British Isles, West Africa, and the New World. Between 1627 and 1700 some 236,725 enslaved Africans disembarked onto the island, part of a mighty exodus, without equal in seventeenth-century Englands New World colonies. By contrast, during those same years, as few as 16,152 enslaved Africans arrived in the Chesapeake colonies, while 119,208 traveled to the island of Jamaica. By 1808, a further 371,794 Africans had arrived in Barbados, meaning that during the era of the transatlantic slave trade well over 600,000 enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island.

This exchange stimulated the creation of an entirely new system of bound labor, for on Barbados enslaved Africans were deployed in new ways in order to make it possible to grow, process, and manufacture sugar and its by-products on single, integrated plantations. The Barbadian system informed the development of racial slavery on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina and then the Deep South of mainland British North America. Drawing on British and West African people and precedents, and then radically reshaping them on Barbados, the islands planters had not so much discovered a New World as they had invented one.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the need for skilled and unskilled labor in the expanding Atlantic World encouraged Britons to employ free and bound white workers, and free and enslaved African workers, in different ways in different locations and contexts. British understandings of bound labor thus existed on a continuum and encompassed white vagrants, convicts, and prisoners of war, bound Scots, Irishmen, and Englishmen, as well as African slaves and pawns in West Africa, and African slaves in Barbados. When given the opportunity the mid-seventeenth-century Englishmen who became Barbadian planters did not hesitate to use bound white laborers in brutal fashion, and many of these laborers died in service, while few of those who survived were able to rise out of abject poverty once nominally free. The transition to African slavery, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, resulted in little improvement for white bound laborers and their descendants, and in terms of labor was not a radical shift from the English, Scottish, and Irish men and women who had worked the early Barbadian plantations. In stark contrast, British-owned slaves on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gold Coast of West Africa worked in a more West African form of slavery, enjoying relatively high degrees of freedom while British bound workers often fared less well. Similarly, African-owned slaves, free mulattoes, local free Africans, and pawns (individuals held in temporary debt bondage, sometimes held as collateral for debt or as security for an agreement) were all part of the workforce that powered the British transatlantic slave trade. Free and bound laborers, including slaves, did not just produce commodities such as sugar and tobacco in New World colonies; their labor facilitated the trade in enslaved labor that made such plantation labor possible.

Free labor, bound labor, and enslaved labor have often been regarded by historians as relatively static categories, with the result that slavery is cast at one end of a continuum as an absolute denial of freedom, which renders it a unique and peculiar form of labor. The representation of slavery as radically different from other forms of early modern labor has encouraged scholars to focus on slave resistance, searching for evidence of the ways in which the enslaved resisted total domination and struggled to obtain freedom from bondage. When seen in this light, slaves appear as political actors more than they do laboring people, and that has helped to shape and define historical research into the lives of the enslaved. This approach has had the unfortunate effect ofat least to a degreesimplifying slavery. Viewing the enslaved as would-be freedom fighters, always resisting and always seeking freedom, we have failed to fully contextualize the ways in which bondage, resistance, and freedom were both defined and experienced quite differently in particular places and at particular times. Even within the British Atlantic World, slavery was defined, enforced, and experienced in dramatically different ways.

In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Atlantic World most workers were dependent, bound, or coerced in some way, and they were all denied various rights and liberties. True, slavery was a brutal and violent institution, and the chattel principle did indeed make it distinct from other forms of coerced labor such as impressment or indentured servitude. But the labor and violence of slavery must be understood as part of the spectrum of coercion of laborsome of it violentin the early modern world. In terms of the daily experience of workers, slavery was not completely different from other systems of forced labor. Forced labor systems were more flexible and adaptable than scholars have recognized. The difference between slavery and other forced labor systems was more a matter of degree than of kind.