Plantation Slavery in Comparative Perspective

With Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa, which began as his doctoral dissertation and was published in 1977, Frederick Cooper became one of the first Africanists to address slavery in a sustained monograph.^{Footnote 2} He traced the development of plantation agriculture for foreign markets on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba and the nearby mainland towns of Malindi and Mombasa over the nineteenth century, drawing on recent scholarship on New World slavery to frame questions and make comparisons. The book persuasively challenged earlier, widespread views that African slavery was “milder” than in the Americas because it was possible for enslaved people to be incorporated, or absorbed, into African kinship groups. It also refuted scholars of African slavery who emphasized social rather than economic aspects of slavery by tracing changes over time as East Africa became increasingly integrated with transcontinental markets.

Two years after the book came out, in 1979, Cooper published the first of his masterful historiographical articles, “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies.” This built upon many of the themes in Plantation Slavery but was even more explicit in its critique of the then-prevailing notion of African slavery as inherently absorptionist. It began by pointing out that “Americanists have found African slavery to be a conveniently benign foil against which the exploitation and degradation of American slavery stand out. Africanists have been anxious to disassociate slavery in Africa from its bad image in the Americas.”^{Footnote 3} Thus Africanists, inspired by an influential piece by Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, insisted that in Africa, a defining feature of slavery was the potential for slaves to be absorbed into kin groups and societies. Over the course of an enslaved individual’s lifetime or over generations, local ties solidified and occupational or social status could improve.^{Footnote 4}

Cooper’s response was informed by his familiarity with the historiography of plantation slavery in the United States. In the early 1970s, Americanist historians were vigorously analyzing the relationship between slavery and other social structures as well as creatively mining sources produced by the enslaved themselves.^{Footnote 5} Africanists, he suggested, could find much of use in the best of this Americanist scholarship, which revealed slavery as an interactive process shaped by slaves as well as slave holders. Comparative study enabled Cooper to argue that African slavery was not defined by a static relationship to kinship that made it inherently different from American slavery. Indeed, his focus on plantation slavery in Africa made that point clearly, as did Paul Lovejoy’s contemporaneous work on plantation slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate.^{Footnote 6} Rather, like forms of American slavery, African slavery in various contexts derived its characteristics from constellations of cultural background, state power, and market forces.

For instance, in the early 1970s early Americanists debated whether race prejudice predated or sprang from plantation slavery.^{Footnote 7} Out of this came the persuasive view that whatever hostile attitudes Anglo-Americans initially had toward people of African descent, these prejudices developed into racism only as black people were made into plantation laborers for economic and political reasons. The process of imposing domination itself hardened white attitudes into increasingly systematic racial ideologies, which in turn strengthened social control and enabled further exploitation of black labor. This dialectical view of race distinctions in the Chesapeake region helped Cooper shed light on varying degrees of absorption of enslaved people in African societies. On the Swahili coast, one of the major ties between enslaved and free was Islam. Masters considered it their duty to convert their slaves, and Islam was one way of assimilating those newly and forcibly arrived to coastal society. The enslaved could also appeal to Islam as a check on their masters’ abuses. But enslaved people’s assimilation through religious enculturation only went so far: their masters encouraged them to be good Muslims but always considered themselves to be better Muslims. Moreover, as slaves’ economic roles became increasingly specific in the nineteenth century, they became ever more sharply differentiated from non-slaves. Stereotypes emerged of slaves and their descendants as inherently lazy, stupid, and religiously impure. Change in East Africa was thus similar to that in the American South, but it did not go as far. In the absence of a strong state behind them, slave-owners’ power was more fragile, and it was dangerous to create a sharply bounded inferior group. Absorption, then, was not inherent in East African slavery; instead it formed part of a changing set of dynamics.

Two of the most important concepts in the comparative study of slavery were introduced in the 1970s and 1980s, neither of them by historians. First, at the same time that Cooper was writing, two Caribbeanist anthropologists, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, were formulating the notion of “creolization,” which then generated decades of debate about the nature of cultural adaptation and retention among the enslaved in the Americas.^{Footnote 8} Then in 1982, Orlando Patterson published Slavery and Social Death.^{Footnote 9} Based on a global and chronologically vast comparison, this book argued that the fundamental constant of slavery was the alienation of an enslaved person from her/his natal community.

Re-reading Fred Cooper’s “Problem of Slavery” article after these developments, it is apparent that he was thinking about both sets of issues already, with a historian’s eye for process. The absorption model of African slavery, which Cooper criticized for being ahistorical, was in fact premised on the notion of social death – that enslavement created social alienation, but that African societies then assimilated the enslaved into new kinship groups and communities. Absorption, in turn, can be seen as an extreme form of creolization, a process that occurred in both Africa and the Americas. Mintz and Price saw creolization as the creative generation of new cultural forms from different African backgrounds and European cultural impositions. Cooper focused less on cultural products than on the violence entailed in erasing slave ancestry and the struggles of the enslaved to hold on to distinctive features of their backgrounds as an assertion against masters’ power. As much as they converted to Islam and adapted to their conditions, he shows, enslaved people on the Swahili coast also remembered their origins; and it was this foreigner status – described in the term wanyasa – that signaled their collectivity, rather than slave status or race. He wrote:

An emphasis on absorption among slaves in Africa thus wrongly “allowed an elite’s ideology to define slavery as a whole.”^{Footnote 11}

Cultural Assimilation, “Social Death,” and Gender

It may be a measure of how few Africanists and Americanists carefully read each other’s work that it took until the 1990s for Cooper’s point about resistance to assimilation to gain wider currency – ironically, since his own reasoning had been through comparative history. John Thornton, Paul Lovejoy, James Sweet, and others offered a strong critique of creolization by showing how African cultural elements survived the Middle Passage, and cultural adaptation to Euro-American ways was slower and more incomplete than previously thought.^{Footnote 12} For them, African retentions – or the refusal to become creolized – signaled slave resistance. More recently, Stephanie Smallwood and Vincent Brown have emphasized that social death was not a condition but a process and, indeed, an aspiration of slaveholders seeking to turn human beings into units of labor power. Smallwood’s book Saltwater Slavery traces the steps involved in commodifying humans and enslaved people’s deeply disorienting experience of it.^{Footnote 13} On the basis of his study of Jamaica, Brown similarly argued that African slaves in the Americas struggled against the specter of social death.^{Footnote 14}

This insight has much to offer the study of African women and slavery, a topic of my current research, because female slaves in Africa often faced the most intense pressures to be assimilated into their masters’ societies through bearing children for the masters’ group. Female slaves were not the focus of Cooper’s work on East African slavery, though he did not overlook them entirely.^{Footnote 15} As he and many scholars since the 1970s noted, female slaves were valued in Africa for both their productive and reproductive abilities. They worked in agriculture, craft production, domestic service, and trade. In African societies in which wealth was measured in people, women built up households, compounds, followings, kingdoms, and empires. Enslaved women were often in greater demand as wives than free women were, because their families had no claims on the children produced. In other words, their social marginality combined with their productive and reproductive labor made enslaved women especially desirable.^{Footnote 16} But enslaved women also remembered their origins through ceremonies, dance, and language, which they passed on to their (and their masters’) children.^{Footnote 17}

The potential of female slaves for enlarging kinship and political groups in Africa had important implications for the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. Over more than three centuries of slave trafficking, roughly twice as many African men as women were forced onto slave ships at the Atlantic coast. While purchasers in the Americas often preferred to buy African men, it was African suppliers who determined the sex ratio of the overall Atlantic slave trade by offering far fewer women for sale. ^{Footnote 18} Yet in Africa, women and men may well have been enslaved in roughly equal numbers. While captured men were killed or channeled to the coast along with smaller numbers of captive women, other enslaved women were sold into trans-Saharan markets or, more often, to African purchasers. Historians of the Atlantic slave trade, relying on sources produced by those involved in coastal exchanges, rarely consider the experiences of such women.

The comparative interpretation that Cooper critiqued in the 1970s – emphasizing absorption in African slavery and the economic uses of slaves in the Americas – is in fact deeply gendered. It reproduces the structure of the Atlantic slave market, in that it presumes social and cultural integration through kinship in Africa, with its emphasis on female slavery, and something like social death in the Americas, where slave populations were predominantly male until they began to reproduce themselves. Perhaps it is no surprise that the absorption model emerged in an era before the major works on enslaved women in the Americas were published, raising key topics of reproduction, family formation, and sexuality.^{Footnote 19}

This bifurcated way of characterizing slavery obscures the connections between the reproductive and productive labor of enslaved women in Africa – those considered to be absorbed into their masters’ societies – and the Atlantic slave trade. As Diana Paton has pointed out, when African women produced children, who grew up and were enslaved and sent into the Americas, they were creating the workers who in turn cultivated Atlantic commodities like sugar. Many of these African mothers were themselves enslaved. The theft of their grown (or not yet grown) children not only entailed a human tragedy; it also linked these women’s labor in pregnancy, birth, and child care to New World economies.^{Footnote 20} Moreover, as overseas slave trafficking concentrated wealth into the hands of merchant and political elites, it enabled them to amass captive women. The hundreds of slave and free wives held by eighteenth century kings of Dahomey and Asante, for instance, were related to political alliances through marriage, but they also indicate how gendered the Transformations in Slavery, to take Paul Lovejoy’s title, were.^{Footnote 21}

At the same time, the inland demand for enslaved African women meant that those who did board slave ships often arrived there through different routes, sometimes longer and more indirect, than those of captive men. Sources from the West African coast describe women offered for sale who were past child-bearing age and thus presumably less attractive to local or inland purchasers; they also mention women sold as punishment for social or political transgressions. Though more work remains to be done on how African women came to be sold to Europeans, such examples suggest the coercive power of absorption and the penalties attached to those who could not or would not participate.^{Footnote 22}