Abstract
In Reckoning with Slavery, Jennifer Morgan has made a contribution to the history of the early Black Atlantic that has long been missing as she centres enslaved women and their children in discussions around the rise of slavery and capitalism in the Atlantic. Morgan takes Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) as a starting point and Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism (1983) as one of her influences, alongside other key thinkers. As a result, historians interested in texts exploring slavery's role in the emergence of capitalism would do well to seek out Morgan's work. The role of gender, kinship and capitalism is explored in a way that will appeal to maritime historians who are concerned with the wider social, economic and legal history of the Atlantic World.
Of the six chapters, the first four deal with questions about the sea, looking at evidence (and often highlighting the lack of evidence) of sex ratios, demographics, numeracy and the middle passage. The final two chapters focus on arrivals in the Americas and the role of women in early rebellions, although still very much in the maritime world. Morgan aims to move away from an exclusively English Atlantic World to centre Africans, and specifically African women, in the wider Atlantic World of European powers. She manages this international perspective to a degree, especially in relation to early European trade with Africa, although English evidence is found in greater abundance when discussing the Americas.
The book utilizes numeracy – often all that is left in the archives – to relay lived experience. In Chapter 1, Morgan opens with ‘any social history begins with an accounting of subjects. Who was there?’ (29) and is honest in saying that, when studying enslaved women, even accounting for who was there can be difficult. She goes on to question long-held assumptions around the number of women who were enslaved and uses often scant figures to paint a compelling picture beyond the archival silence. On the topic of archival silence, Morgan highlights how it was created through acts of commission as opposed to omission, as many would suspect. Ship's captains and plantation owners refused to record details of women while ‘constantly engaged in acts of accounting’ (214), and so it is the enslaved who had their voices removed, rather than historians lacking the ability to hear them.
On numeracy, Morgan also draws attention to the limitations of having only numbers as evidence, leading the reader to understand that violence is impossible to measure through numbers. When it comes to violence committed on such a scale as the transatlantic slave trade, having a greater amount of statistical evidence does not always lead to a greater understanding. She recognizes the work of earlier scholars and draws on figures from the Slave Voyages Database, while welcoming the move away from seeking to solve a problem. On the latter point, Morgan recognizes that ‘the unintended consequences of approaching the slave trade as a problem of quantification remain’ (30). Numbers, then, can be both useful to historians, when little else remains, and useless, when trying to understand the violence experienced by enslaved women.
One of Morgan's masterstrokes is to highlight colonial society's inconsistent approach to kinship where slavery was concerned. Europeans removed kinship in reports of Africans and ignored paternal kinship in a colonial legal world dominated by a patriarchal system. At the same time, kinship was weaponized to capture mothers through the maternal bonds to their children, and to ensure that any children born during a mother's enslavement were bound to the maternal status and were themselves enslaved. Kinship was enshrined in colonial law to assist commodification but erased when it could humanize Africans or give the legal protection of a European father's status. Morgan analyses early accounts of Africa to show how Europeans aimed to portray Africans as lacking parental bonds, as kinless, and draws on a multitude of European texts to do this, highlighting how ‘this became part of the claim that African women produced children only for the marketplace’ (126). In this analysis, she will assist maritime historians of the Atlantic World in understanding how early capitalism placed profit above all else and how this was used to commodify women, their reproductive systems and the children they gave birth to.
One question Morgan returns to throughout the book is that of how much knowledge enslaved women had of their predicament when it came to enslavement. This question is raised in relation to changing notions of slavery, as newly acquired captives moved from localized slavery in the African world to the emerging systems of slavery in the Americas. It is further explored as the laws within the Americas were solidified around the idea of property over kinship. This questioning starts in the introduction, with the story of Elizabeth Keye, as she navigated seventeenth-century Virginian legal challenges over her status and that of her children, and continues throughout the book. The question is one that historians may never definitively answer but Morgan does well to remind us that this should not preclude posing it, or positing possible theories. She does this when highlighting that ‘the presence of women like Elizabeth Keye in the courts testifies to their prescience, their understanding that enslavement, race heredity, and kinship were amalgamating in ways that boded very badly for them and for their children’ (108).
For the maritime historian of the Atlantic with questions around the rise of capitalism, racism, demographics or property law, Reckoning with Slavery will start to answer many of those questions. It will also be useful for those seeking to further critique archives and their creation, which Morgan does throughout. Reckoning with Slavery is a book to be studied, and should be studied by anyone with an interest in the histories of gender, kinship, capitalism or the Atlantic.
