Forret Jeff - New directions in slavery studies: commodification, community, and comparison

New Directions in Slavery Studies

Commodification, Community, and Comparison

EDITED BY
JEFF FORRET
AND
CHRISTINE E. SEARS

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS BATON ROUGE

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright 2015 by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing

DESIGNER: Michelle A. Neustrom
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

New directions in slavery studies : commodification, community, and comparison / edited by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8071-6115-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8071-6116-6 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8071-6117-3 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8071-6118-0 (mobi) 1. SlaveryUnited StatesHistory. 2. SlavesUnited StatesSocial conditions. I. Forret, Jeff, 1972 editor, author. II. Sears, Christine E., 1969 editor, author.
E441.N48 2015
306.3'620973dc23

2015019696

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Introduction
JEFF FORRET AND CHRISTINE E. SEARS

1. Commodity Chains and Chained Commodities: The U.S. Coastwise Slave Trade and an Atlantic Business Network
CALVIN SCHERMERHORN

2. Silver Buckles and Slaves: Borrowing, Lending, and the Commodification of Slaves in Virginia Communities
BONNIE MARTIN

3. To Realize Money Facilities: Slave Life Insurance, the Slave Trade, and Credit in the Old South
KAREN RYDER

4. Nat Turner in Print and on Film
KENNETH S. GREENBERG

5. Taking Liberties: Saint Dominguan Slaves and the Formation of Community in Philadelphia, 17911805
JOHN DAVIES

6. A Slave That Will Steal from a Slave, Is Called Mean as Master: Thefts and Violence inside Southern Slave Quarters
JEFF FORRET

7. Bonds Burst Asunder: The Transformation of the Internal Economy in Confederate Richmond
KATHLEEN M. HILLIARD

8. The Problem of Autonomy: Toward a Postliberal History
ANTHONY E. KAYE

9. Slave Women and Urban Labor in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
MARIANA DANTAS

10. In Algiers, the City of Bondage: Urban Slavery in Comparative Context
CHRISTINE E. SEARS

11. The Nineteenth-Century Other Souths, Modernization, and Nation-Building: Expanding the Comparative Perspective
ENRICO DAL LAGO

12. When I Think How Our Family Is Scattered: Comparing Forced Separation among Antebellum Slave Families
DAMIAN ALAN PARGAS

New Directions in Slavery Studies

JEFF FORRET AND CHRISTINE E. SEARS

S ince the early 1970s, scholarship on slavery has proliferated to the extent that it is difficult for most people to remain fully versed on developments in the field. Readers from both inside and outside the academy embark upon well-intentioned efforts to try, only to realize the enormity of the task confronting them. Only a few exceptionally devoted and uniquely talented scholars have undertaken the Herculean mission of synthesizing the enormous body of work on slavery for the literate masses. Peter J. Parishs Slavery: History and Historians (1989), Peter Kolchins American Slavery, 16191877 (1993), and Mark M. Smiths Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South (1998) are three of the most noteworthy examples. In the twenty-first century, slave studies have pursued such imaginative and disparate paths that no one has yet dared attempt a similarly ambitious accounting of where the field stands. The tenth-anniversary edition of Kolchins book, published in 2003, brought with it a welcome new preface and afterword, but the rapid pace at which historians continue to churn out important work on slavery renders labors to remain current with slave historiography almost Sisyphean.

Like other edited collections, this anthology zeroes in on important themes currently explored in slave studies, both to reflect scholarly roads being traveled and to encourage further journeys down those same avenues.

Now a growing number of scholars are not only rediscovering that slaves were indeed the property of their masters but also elaborating upon the many ways in which slaves were commodified. The slave trade is the most readily apparent form of slaves objectification as property. A spate of recent studies has elucidated many facets of the domestic slave trade from the Upper South to the Lower and from the eastern seaboard slave states to those in the Old Southwest. Calvin Schermerhorns opening essay takes a different tack by examining the coastwise slave trade in the United States and its broader place in transatlantic commercial networks, even after the termination of the lawful international traffic in human cargoes.

Yet the slave trade was merely one means through which masters commodified their labor force. For as growing numbers of scholars are making clear, slaves represented not only a form of labor but also a form of capital. In chapter 2, Bonnie Martin demonstrates slaves centrality to the borrowing and lending practices of Virginia slaveholders from the colonial era to the Civil War. The mortgaging of slaves and the use of human collateral grew increasingly significant in her sample communities from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. Dovetailing nicely with Martins work is Karen Ryders account in chapter 3 that shows some masters purchased life insurance on their slavespolicies that lubricated the machinery of slave-based credit arrangements in the antebellum decades. Compared to the first three chapters, chapter 4, dealing with the slave as a subject in modern-day cinema, approaches commodification from a fundamentally different perspective. Kenneth S. Greenberg offers a firsthand account of his experiences as a historian and expert consultant for a documentary on the Nat Turner slave revolt. In light of two recent feature films, director Quentin Tarantinos unapologetically absurd revenge fantasy