The history of slavery is, inevitably, a history of contradictions. Of those contradictions, none was more fundamental, as Jennifer Morgan shows in her wide-ranging and perceptive new book, than the contradictions embodied by enslaved women: between their kinship (on one hand) with others, white as well as Black, as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters, and their reduction (on the other) to saleable commodities. As Morgan shows, slavery in the early Black Atlantic consigned women to both roles, encouraging them—often forcibly, and not always successfully—to create families whose members enslavers were free to buy and sell, individually as well as collectively, depending on what the market dictated. For that reason, the history of slavery, especially the enslavement of women, is also a history of omission—of what, in one of the book's many well-turned phrases, Morgan calls the “archival silences around the lived experiences of enslaved women at the birth of racial capitalism” (6). An inevitable result of the commodification of human beings, her book shows, was to conceal the humanity that the commodified shared with their commodifiers.
As the “early” in the book title suggests, Morgan is chiefly interested in slavery's origins in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Although much of her evidence comes from English-language sources, her focus on slavery's origins naturally leads her to spend quite a lot of time in Iberian and African materials. One of the book's most haunting passages comes from Portuguese Lagos, where Gomes Eannes de Zuarara witnessed the arrival of the first slave ship from Africa in 1444. “The mothers clasped their . . . children in their arms,” Zuarara wrote of the partition and sale of the captives, “and threw themselves flat on the ground with them, receiving blows with little pity for their own flesh, if only they might not be torn from them” (60).
In the final chapter and conclusion, the latter aptly titled “Madness,” Morgan explores the possibilities for Black resistance and refusal that came from women's roles as producers (and reproducers) of enslaved wealth. She ends with the story of a female captive on the slave ship Dorothy off the coast of Ghana. The woman smokes a pipe, which she tosses into the hole containing the ship's gunpowder, sending both the vessel and its human cargo to a watery grave. Was the mishap an act of “carelessness or care,” a mindless accident or a deliberate act of sabotage (254)? It is hard to say, but it would be foolish to assume that the perpetrator did not know what she was doing.
Although Eric Williams's classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944) is an important “starting point” for her inquiry (11), Morgan has little to say about the debate that Williams helped initiate over capitalism's role (or not) in slavery's demise. In several places, she notes that abolitionist depictions often dehumanized slavery's victims in many of the same ways as the institution's defenders, though obviously to different ends (153-55). No less a figure than Olaudah Equiano, one of slavery's earliest and most eloquent Black opponents, “came close” to accepting the commodification inherent in his purchase of his own freedom (205). Such passages are tantalizing and may leave some readers wanting to know more—perhaps as the subject of Morgan's next book?
Morgan's primary focus in this book, however, is not the abolition of slavery but the institution's origins. For slavery's early history, especially the role that gender, kinship, and capitalism played in the rise and perpetuation of human bondage throughout the Atlantic World, this is a book to be reckoned with, one that is sure to be required reading. I predict that it will remain that way for a long time to come.
