Abstract
As I write this review, the United States Supreme Court has rescinded longstanding protections for abortion care. This decision comes after decades of focused argument over who retains control over women's reproductive health. The unfolding of that debate has kept American women vulnerable to a politics of reproduction that encompasses far more than simply giving birth; it is at the root of issues surrounding individual autonomy, socioeconomic control, and racial equality. Those who are the most vulnerable to these political questions come from working and impoverished communities, especially those descended from enslaved ancestors. That should come as no surprise considering the critical importance that reproduction served to the propagation of slavery from the very beginning of colonial American history. Without procreation, and without enslavers’ ability to seize control over the families produced from it, the institution of slavery could not have functioned in the Americas. Jennifer Morgan's new book powerfully illustrates that for enslaved women, the experiences of childbirth, kinship, and racialized oppression were closely interwoven and interdependent. In the process, Morgan places enslaved women at the very center of early-modern Atlantic capitalism.
A highly ambitious, yet tightly focused, book, Reckoning with Slavery navigates between three interlinking themes of gender, numeracy, and kinship. The first theme runs through each page, but Morgan is particularly interested in the ways that slavery has long been gendered male, both by those who left records as well as by historians examining them. She writes that women have been erased from the archives of slavery, which has not only stunted our understanding of the enslaved experience, but of the very nature of slavery's development and impact on global history. She addresses this problem directly and effectively in the book's first chapter, which is the one likely to arouse the most discussion and debate by scholars of slavery. Her focus here is on the Middle Passage. Like most slavery archives, records of the transatlantic slave trade often failed to account for women. Indeed, the proportion of ships that identified captives’ sex was less than ten percent. This was not, she contends, a simple oversight. Instead, it was the outcome of European dismissiveness of African family units. By de-gendering captives, slave traders could refuse to acknowledge their status as mothers, fathers, and children, along with every other familial relation. Slavers denigrated African family networks, and insisted that kinship stood outside the market in human beings. Eliminating kinship was an elemental step toward commodifying Africans, and assuming control over their heredity and reproduction. Gender, Morgan asserts, was therefore central to Europeans’ conception of African enslavability.
She goes even further, though, to offer a deeper critique about archives and historical argumentation. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which compiles the records of tens of thousands of slave ships, has revolutionized historical investigations into the Middle Passage. It has also served as a kind of model project in Digital Humanities. And yet it contains very little information about the humans who were forced to endure that dreadful voyage. This is in part a product of the silences within the records, and something that the database’s authors and contributors openly recognize. But the gap between the numbers presented and the reality of what it represents is still painfully too large. Morgan offers a measured and diplomatic reflection on the database. She reminds scholars of the problem inherent in presenting datasets without connecting them to human stories. More pointedly, though, she cautions that by fixating on numbers, scholars run the risk of reifying slavers’ attempt to present the trade as rational, mechanistic, and contained.
These archival traps are also to be found when assessing resistance. In her final chapter, Morgan examines the exclusion of women from accounts of rebellion. Owing to their extraordinary surveillance over reproduction, enslavers believed themselves to have full control over women's private lives, and therefore did not register the group's rebellious potential. In cases of New York's 1712 enslaved revolt, most records did not mention the participants’ sex; only when one individual was pardoned from execution for being pregnant was it revealed that women had also contributed to the uprising. Yet even though the obstacles to participation in acts of rebellion were more numerous for women, Morgan shows how vigorously they battled for reproductive control. Not only did enslaved women use abortifacients and contraceptives on the plantation, as many scholars have previously shown, but Morgan asserts that women actively bore children after they had fled to maroon communities as an act of demographic resistance. Because those refugees have principally stood outside the archival record, that form of reproductive revolt has largely gone unnoticed by scholars.
The book's second major theme of numeracy ties enslaved Africans to the foundations of global capitalism. Europeans were just beginning to develop a refined sense of numbers and data when they started to purchase Africans. Attempts to commodify human beings through the Middle Passage proved to be a laboratory of economic experimentation. Scholars writing within the “New History of Capitalism” have made a compelling case for slavery's role in that process. Morgan, however, takes a different approach to this issue. Although she reaffirms the importance of slavery and the slave trade to the growth of capitalism, she is more interested in the ways that the concept of numeracy contributed to the formation of racial ideologies and oppression. Once again, the elimination of gender and kinship were critical to European attempts at denigrating Africans. Morgan also analyzes numerous travel accounts to demonstrate how European visitors labeled African cultures as numerically illiterate in order to present them as uncivilized and thus targets for enslavement. Claims that Africans had no real currency, that they did not understand measured tracts of land, and that their economic transactions were not based on a standardized form of exchange, reinforced a language of difference that was fundamental to racialized slavery in the Atlantic. Under this formulation, Europeans were rational economic actors, and Africans were unsophisticated agents who stood outside the boundaries of shared market participation. These misrepresentations were part of the same efforts at eliminating social, familial, and gendered contexts from African communities.
The third major theme of the book charts the ways that kinship formed the backbone of racialized conceptions of enslavability and heritable bondage. Again, the book's three themes are closely interlinked, but Morgan drills down deeply into the ways that enslavers waged constant warfare over the kinship of those whom they exploited. As with their attacks on African numeracy, Europeans dismissed the idea that Africans retained strong family bonds. She again turns to traveler accounts to show that Europeans labeled African mothers as unloving toward their children. Multiple reasons were put forward for this, including claims that African marriages were rarely sanctified or respected. The racist assumption that Africans were sexually promiscuous contributed heavily to this proposition. Demographic theorists adopted these prejudices, and insisted that Africa was overpopulated. As early as 1520, Johann Boemus claimed that too much sex among too many partners, with little regard for children, made Africa in need of population control. It was the duty of Europeans, then, to remove Africans to new locations. As Morgan carefully lays out, these diatribes were devastating. They brought pseudo-scientific support to the slave trade as a positive force of demographic balance. They also reinforced a notion of cultural and biological distinction: European families were considered the only ones imbued with love and commitment. Enslavers, then, could try to comfort themselves that Africans endured little emotional trauma when families were torn apart. Moreover, these ideas were carried to the Americas, where planters and merchants operated under the same justifications for family separation. Enslavers invalidated Black kinship in order to justify slavery, as well as to take control over the hereditary rights of enslaved people. This was not simply a tragic outgrowth of slavery's brutality, but the elemental force that enabled the institution to function.
Each of these three themes work together through the whole book, but readers will find much more to consider within its individual chapters. Morgan's rich analysis not only leads to engaging arguments, but also to critical questions still to be answered about women in slavery. Scholars should not just be asking how we can find women within histories of slavery, but—as Morgan shows successfully in this book—how a focus on gender can transform our sense of the specific ways that slavery operated. At times, some of her reflections on archival silences and female agency are largely syncretic of the recent historical literature. Yet she can be forgiven for some of this retreading considering how indebted the field is to her seminal work, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), which helped to inspire most of these new scholarly contributions. Morgan's examination of numeracy also builds effectively off that previous book, though her wide-ranging interests in entire English Atlantic World misses some important contexts. The book largely covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the chronology extends well into the eighteenth century. Morgan is certainly attuned to the dramatic changes in racial ideologies during this long period, but some of the subtlety of those transformations—be they legal, social, or cultural—cannot be traced as effectively as one might want within the more expansive themes of the book. Likewise, there is a tremendous amount of geographic territory assessed here. Morgan is to be applauded for her integration of North American, Caribbean, and Latin American colonial dynamics. But some of the key distinctions within Britain's colonies—such as the demographic outgrowths of slavery in Virginia and Jamaica—are overly flattened. Nonetheless, Morgan consistently delivers insightful arguments and probing questions on every page.
The stakes of female reproduction, particularly in the United States, are at their greatest heights in decades. Through her whole career, Jennifer Morgan has blazed the trail for scholars seeking to understand the foundational dynamics of reproduction in the Atlantic World. In Reckoning with Slavery, she has crafted yet more theoretical considerations by which to comprehend the intersection of gender and capitalism, and this book will undoubtedly stimulate yet more rounds of discussion and debate. It is a text that will reach and impact many scholarly communities: those studying slavery, gender, family, the economy, and relations of power. It will also serve as a critical guide to face the new reality of reproduction in the United States going forward.