Abstract
Atlantic slavery belongs to one of the great slaving systems in world history. According to Michael Zeuske, Atlantic ‘capitalism of human bodies’ and the concomitant ‘slaving-capital accumulation machine’ constitute the deus ex machina allowing for, through ‘strategic slaving’ (Joseph Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (2012)), the rise of ambitious, marginal states and new elites (the so-called ‘Count of Monte Christo phenomenon’) in the West and the emergence and breakthrough of global capitalism in the modern age. It did not only enable the rise of England until 1808, slaveries and the ‘Hidden Atlantic’ smuggle in humans, together with its enormous foundation of the ‘Creole Atlantic’, but thereafter also facilitated the transition from consumption-oriented ‘Biedermeier capitalism’ (here Zeuske cites Robin Blackburn’s keynote address at the bi-centennial international conference at the University of Vienna, ‘The Congress of Vienna and its global dimension’, 19 September 2014, see pp. 46–7) inside and ‘war capitalism’ (Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014)) outside of Europe to production- and export-led industrial/imperialist capitalism across larger parts of Europe, with its resource colonies and various forms of ‘new slaveries’. Historical controversies, then, about the relative importance of silver flows and the role of Europe’s traditional accumulation together with endogenous bases of capitalism in England are ‘sham debates’ in the usual absence of the ‘missing link’, the ‘capital of human bodies’, while the centuries-old thesis of the exceptionalism of the West and England is diagnosed as ‘a kind of European disease’ (pp. 283, 286–7).
Indeed, Zeuske, professor of Iberian and Latin American history at the University of Cologne, minces no words in this ambitious and provocative study allegedly making four major contributions to the field of world history. First, the centrality of both the Atlantic and the accumulation derived from slavery and human trafficking for the development of modern-day capitalism and the rise of the West between 1400 and 1900. This Atlantic ‘capitalism of human bodies’ provided the basis for the ‘great difference’ of the nineteenth century between Europe and the rest of the world, most notably China and India. Based on the ‘minimum figures’ provided by the revised Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD2), between 1651 and 1866 a total of 11.4 million Africans arrived alive in the Americas, representing between 150 and 300 silver pesos (1 silver peso equals ca. 25 Euros current value) per ‘piece’, second only to the value of precious metals exported during this period. The approximate ‘potential capital value’ (two billion silver pesos for the eighteenth century alone) evinces ‘the centrality of the Atlantic space and the significance of the accumulation machine of Atlantic slavery dominated by Europeans and Americans’ (pp. 19, 125, 298, 377). From 1840 onwards, in the wake of the First Opium War, other numbers come into play in the form of the ‘new slaveries’, including some 2.5 million ‘contract labourers’ or coolies, most notably from China, British India and the Dutch East Indies, to the Americas (pp. 368, 372).
Over time this inconvenient truth fell victim to various converging processes of intentional concealment and deliberate marginalisation: the ‘omertà’ of contemporary slaving participants and profiteers, the myth of the ‘dark continent’ propagated by international religious orders, and the spread of ‘scientific’ racism and nineteenth-century Victorianism, along with the professional neglect of these ‘global historical gaps’ by modern historians (esp. pp. 68–9, 124–5, 268, 283). In the empiricist-reflective post-colonial era, Zeuske cautions, the historical profession should be mindful of the processes of the discursive and medial centralisation of Europe (the ‘North’) and the marginalisation of Africa (the ‘South’), especially with regards to the discourse of slavery and migration studies (p. 205).
The second contribution, then, is ‘to regain the centrality of the Atlantic and the centrality of Africa’ (p. 125) or the inclusion of Africa in the overall process of Atlantic slaving, especially the assumption of an (after 1650) institutionalised series of structures of violence made up of ‘rhizomatic networks’ (p. 377) stretching from routine raids, human trapping and abduction in the catchment areas or slaving zones in the hinterland of Africa via the coasts, and the transculturation during the Middle Passage across the ‘third space’ of the Atlantic (pp. 155, 176), to the coasts, port-cities and places of slavery in the Americas, most notably the great continental plantations and barracoons of Brazil, Cuba and the southern United States.
Third is ‘world history from the perspective of the individual’ (pp. 2, 253), that is, a macrostructural view on the Atlantic and the emergence of capitalism (based on Zeuske’s Atlantic ‘capitalism of human bodies’) provided by microhistorical life histories, most notably of the 12.5 million Africans abducted, but also the large numbers of slave traders, slave trading personnel, Atlantic Creoles (including African elites), along with the ships’ crews, doctors, officers and captains of the some 35,000–40,000 slaving voyages. Zeuske strongly correlates these ‘actors-centred microhistory’ approaches to lived life with scientific history (pace Arlindo Caldeira’s ‘learning of the tropics’), lifestyle (cosmopolitanism ‘from below’), along with traumata, food, medicine and consumption (pp. 173–174, 378).
Fourth, the emphasis on the ‘African-Iberian Atlantic’ as the ‘true world-historical [case of] in-depth Atlantisation’ and the basis for all other ‘Atlantics’ in particular during the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Iberian Peninsula and Iberian America constituted ‘the largest modern slavery and slave trading imperium (except for Africa and possibly India)’ and ‘one of the great slave formations in world history’. It involved arguably the numerically largest (some 6–7 out of 12.5 million Africans), most durable and most expansive colonial/slaving history in the world. In this sense, Zeuske asserts, the modern Atlantic can be considered ‘an African-Iberian sea’ (pp. 296–7). Starting out as marginal, peripheral states, all the maritime powers of Europe would use slavery, direct colonialism and slave trade, focused on the function of human bodies and body parts as sources of capital, human energy, labour output, exchange commodity, sexuality and reproduction, along with their productivity and profit, in the form of open market economies and especially, banking and fiscal, institutions for their individual advancement and success (p. 378).
The ultimate product of Zeuske’s ‘life and times’ approach is an unbalanced, top-heavy assemblage with the macrohistorical analytical superstructure precariously resting on the microhistorical descriptive foundation. While the book successfully retrieves, indirectly and directly, many of the ‘voices of the voiceless’ of both enslaved and enslaver (often an arbitrary division, as Zeuske pointedly observes) and ‘lifting the long black veil of silence’ through ‘tears’ in the fabric of ‘cover-up and marginalisation strategies’ (p. 208), the larger theoretical conclusions shaped by Zeuske’s Atlantophile Weltanschauung, though by and large reflecting the current ‘Western Hemispheric’ frame of mind of the Atlantic paradigm dominant in parts of Western scholarship, need to be more fully supported both quantitatively and comparatively.
Publicised as ‘a world history’ and occasional excursions ‘beyond the Atlantic’ into the Indian, and to a lesser extent, Pacific Ocean notwithstanding to show the global reach of ‘the Atlantic as drum’ and the process of transcultural ‘Atlantisation’ (p. 203), there is, again symptomatic of the Atlantic paradigm’s ‘splendid isolation’, little real engagement with various influential strands of current global studies scholarship: Indian Ocean (slavery) studies, ‘bullionist’ and other commodity history (including textiles), the various schools on the Industrial Revolution and ‘New’ or ‘High’ Imperialism, maritime- or ocean-based studies of various ‘parallel Mediterraneans’, the ‘Cambridge school’ of late pre-colonial/early colonial South Asia, and the new Sinocentrism as promoted by the ‘California school’, to name only a few. There are geographical and personal indices, but neither subject index nor list of maps and illustrations are provided, some of which are small, low-resolution and hard to decipher. Nevertheless, the book’s wealth of detailed information and extensive theorisation makes it recommended and engaging reading for historians specializing in the Atlantic world, slavery and abolition studies, international history and maritime studies.