Short Essay 2

In the period covering 1600-1800 the position an African held in European society was significantly enhanced by conversion to Christianity.  Here, African expatriates found an avenue of assimilation, which, by its righteous nature, caused the established order to question whether it could continue to turn a blind eye to what could only be seen as inhumane behavior, and continue to oppress their subjugated fellow man, many now being Christians.  This forced the hand of the religious elite: a choice either to accept that they were on the unholy side of an oppressive system, or to reform that system to continue its moral legitimacy.

In Equiano’s writing, we see that indigenous practices are seen as ignorant and inferior to western European standards.  He demonstrates that his Christian identity was crucial to assimilation into European society.  He is direct in his assertions that he received enlightenment by way of his conversion to Christianity.  This caused him to begin to look at the world through a Protestant filter, questioning each of his life events as to how they revealed the truth and higher understanding of the will of his creator, thereby shaping his entire outlook on every aspect of daily living.[1]  Additionally, he gained status as an Englishman, later in life being requested by Governor Macnamara to travel back to Africa to proselytize on behalf of the British crown – though the Bishop would deny this request.[2]

On an institutional level, the readings present two opposing points of view over what caused the abolition of slavery within England.  Christopher Leslie Brown presents the perspective that the Protestant sects that broke away from the Anglican Church marked increasing momentum of revolutionary institutional changes.  In his article, we see that Quakers within the Society of Friends were among the earliest, most prominent, examples of abolitionist activism.  The Quakers encouraged African conversion to Christianity while encouraging their slave-holding leaders to support abolition.[3]

            Brown’s article, however, focuses on the notion that these splinter groups encouraged positive change and spurred reform.  They are seen basically as leading the cause to abandon slavery.  Nicholas Hudson takes a contrary position, that a large number of these radical groups were actually in large part reactionary on the matter of slavery, citing prominent examples of leaders offering a defense of slavery based on the pragmatic benefit of human bondage to the subsequent lucre of its sugar trade.[4]  A closer look at Brown’s article, after considering this perspective, shows that leadership within the Society of Friends as needed convincing from anti-slavery advocates to abandon their privileged position as slave owners.  They are not, as such, an inherently anti-slave organization.  This would tend to support Hudson’s view that the more traditionally conservative elements of England held the more favorable view of abolition overall.

            On the French side, we see in Boulle’s article a complex matter of jurisdictional conflicts between the sources of governmental power, ultimately conflicted over racial purity and French exceptionalism.  Much of the public debate centered on the idea that the real scourge of African slavery was the dilution of French purity – a mindset in which non-Frenchmen brought a volatile combination of health risks and revolutionary stirrings.[5]  This fear led to the disallowance of black or mulatto marriages, and decrees ordering blacks to the colonies across the Atlantic where they would be unable to cause a stir within the mainland.

            This demonstrates another aspect of the difficulty in recognizing the suppression of a Christian portion of society.  Rather than declare that nonwhite people living in France could receive no education or religious enlightenment, Sartine stated that “religion was better taught in the colonies,” as Boulle puts it.[6]  Rather than making the planter class give up their slaves or concede that French superiority was a flawed notion, rules were made in a sort of “out of site, out of mind” manner, neglecting the fact that the conditions of slavery were equally unjust (and, in fact, harsher) in the colonies.

            To briefly cover the readings not already mentioned, Gerzina’s article supports the notion that Africans looked to religious conversion to improve their station, as well as to come to grips with their forced removal of their homeland.[7]  The focus is more on the freedom presented by a seafaring life, and stories like that of Equiano, as mentioned here prior.  Peabody touches on religion in passing, mentioning that Francisque and his brother were sent to live in France to receive religious education.  Her focus is on racial aspects of French slavery, indicating that Francisque achieved his freedom largely because of an appeal that he was more European than African.[8]  In Walvin’s piece, the focus is on the rise of the slave trade in the New World and the evolving nature of slavery as an institution.  There is no religious focus, though Walvin states that the closer blacks worked to whites the more acculturated they became in European ways, and that the relationship was not as inequitable on the whole as we might imagine.[9]

            In sum, the path to abolition was fraught with debate over moral purity.  The avenue for this was, in the European mindset, Christianity.  Ultimately, though reactionary forces like Poncet de la Grave intervened at times to make cases that legitimized a bigoted suppression encouraged by planters’ economic self-interest, the avowed belief in Christian teachings made the continuance of slave trading unsustainable.  By the early 19^th century the confluence of factors aforementioned caused the system to collapse.

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[1] Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (New York: Random House, 2004): 254.

[2] Equiano, 237.

[3] Christopher Leslie Brown, “Christianity and the campaign against slavery and the slave trade,” The Cambridge History of Christianity, 7, (Cambridge Histories Online 2008): 520.

[4] Nicholas Hudson, "’Britons Never Will be Slaves:’ National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 562.

[5] Pierre H. Boulle, “Racial Purity or Legal Clarity? The Status of Black Residents in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of The Historical Society, VI:1 (March 2006): 32.

[6] Boulle 28

[7] Gretchen Holbrook Garzina, "Freedom of Movement in the Early Black Atlantic," South Atlantic Quarterly, 100:1 (Winter 2001): 43.

[8] Sue Peabody, “Race, slavery and the law in early modern France,” Historian, 56:3 (Spring 1994): 507-508.

[9] James Walvin, "FORGING THE LINK: Europe, Africa and the Americas" in James Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London, UK: Routledge, 1996):15-17.

Introduction

I seem to have missed the instructions to write an introductory post by June 6th, so I will do that now.  My name is Richard Malin.  I am a History and Political Science major at ASU.  Assuming I successfully complete this course, this will be my last class before receiving my degrees this summer.  I am generally most interested in American History, but this topic will be a new experience for me to study something that begins before there are well documented sources and ease of discerning reliable histories.  I look forward to working with all of you for the next month or so.

Short Essay 1

In sum, the image that comes out of the readings focused around 1400-1600 is one of ignorance and ethnocentrism dominating the cold and calculating policies of European and African nations and city-states.  In that they pursue profit and national solidification above any interest in the human condition, I see minor changes taking place alongside a blind and uncritical eye toward injustice, save one notable individual.  However, though these changes may have been small, there was progress nonetheless.

The main difference that we see between Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe at the outset is that it seems Mediterranean Europeans had more actual contact with Africans in this period than did those in the Atlantic region.  The geographically isolated late 15^th century English were fed descriptions like John Mandeville’s 14^th century account in Travels, in which Ethiopians were an altogether mysterious species living in a strange and uninhabitable hot land.  They were said to have had only one foot, so large that it could block out the sun and the rain if held above the body, though they were also capable of marvelous running speeds.[1]  Meanwhile, the Portuguese in this same century were actually encountering and learning to trade with peoples of the upper western coast of Africa.[2]

Though the common conception of slavery seems to be of a large and technologically insurmountable European colonizing force overwhelming the natives of Africa and forcing their citizens into bondage, Ivana Elbl describes the Portuguese-African relationship to be of a more equal trade relationship based on pragmatism.[3]  This respectful relationship was built on the humbling of the mighty Portuguese military by African inhabitants south of the Senegal River.[4]  Through first hand experience that the English to this point lacked, Portugal backed off of military shows of force and conceptions of infallibility to develop a commercial enterprise that gained the confidence of local rulers.[5]  Being the first of the Europeans with access to the area, they learned through shaky trade missions and military skirmishes the true capabilities of the locals believed by many Europeans to be mere subhuman beasts.

However, conditions deteriorated by the 1520s and ‘30s as Portugal became more interested in Asia.[6]  This supports the notion that the pursuit of profitable ventures and national acceleration define decision making in the late medieval period.  The development of African slavery by Europeans is just one of the aspects (though a significant one) of this.  It does not stand out as an unprecedented development, as we see it reemerge throughout the readings that slavery of conquered opponents was a long-standing aspect of the European world, dating back to at least ancient Rome.[7]  Additionally, the slave trade in Africa was already a working institution that was merely expanded upon by the Europeans.

The change that we see is that conditions were ever-worsening.  This is an important point brought up by Lawrence Clayton, writing about Bartolome de las Casas and his initial support for slavery.  As Las Casas saw the brutalities of the native population of the Americas and requested African slaves be brought to relieve them, he did so with an uncritical perspective on the realities of all slave labor.  The traditional conventions of the African slave system was accepted as such to not been seen as injustice even for the man fighting for humanity in the American treatment of the indigenous population.  It was as though Africans were some kind of skilled professionals, immune to the brutalities of slave labor, whereas the Amerindians were an innocent population under threat of genocide.

Clayton offers the possible explanation that Las Casas had not expected the harsh conditions of plantation slavery because he had only witnessed the comparatively comfortable conditions of domestic slavery as a child in Seville.[8]  Besides demonstrating worsening conditions for African slaves, this would also help indicate the trend away from Portugal’s focus on trade with the African continent.

In 16^th century England Richard Hakluyt advanced the notion that the Cimarrones could help the English defeat the Spanish in the West Indies.  However, while we see black crewmen on English ships,[9] Africans were still being captured in large numbers and abandoned when it was deemed expedient to do so.[10]  Additionally, what is seen in the evolution of English slavery is that as generations pass, slaves became more acculturated to being slaves and less likely to feel mistreated or rebel against injustice.[11]  Rodney points out that in revolts, the leaders are often more recent transplants from Africa.[12]  They had experienced less indoctrination stripping them of their humanity than those born into the system, thus making them more susceptible to harsh conditions and greater servility.

Thus the best example of progressive change came through Africans assimilating into European society.  Though Carmen Fracchia would argue that assimilation creates a negative invisibility in which black members of society could only gain acceptance by being basically out of sight by acting as white as possible,[13] Annette Ivory claims this so-called invisibility is an indication of acceptance, or blending in.  The 1620 play about the life of Juan Latino demonstrates a change in Spanish thinking on race relations.  Rather than being an ineffectual bumbling drain on society or a symbol of darkness and evil, Juan Latino is the positive leading role in La comedia famosa, coming out ahead of other ethnic minorities.

With the exception of the strikingly ahead of the curve Las Casas, it seems that although different sections of Europe came to different understandings with their African counterparts at different periods, they all essentially used African relations to advance their position with regards to one another, with concern only for the bottom line.  Essentially, Africans were viewed as inferiors, though in terms of foreign relations the Portuguese appear to have treated some of their rulers with higher regard for a brief period closing the 15^th and beginning the 16^th century.  In large part, however, it seems that from 1400-1600 Africans were seen as less and less worthy of European concern, making for both harsh brutalities and cultural assimilation allowed by societal indifference.

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[1] Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Before Othello: Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, LIV, no. 1 (Jan. 1997): 22.

[2] Ivana Elbl, “Cross-Cultural Trade and Diplomacy: Portuguese Relations with West Africa, 1441-1521,” Journal of World History, 3, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 169

[3] Elbl, 168.

[4] Elbl, 169.

[5] Elbl, 170.

[6] Elbl 203-204.

[7] Walter Rodney, “Africa in Europe and the Americas,” The Cambridge History of Africa, 4 (Cambridge Histories Online 1998): 583.

[8] Lawrence Clayton, “Bartolome de las Casas and the African Slave Trade,” History Compass, 7/6 (2009): 1529.

[9] Michael Guasco, “Free from the tyrannous Spanyard‟? Englishmen and Africans in Spain‟s Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition, 29, no. 1 (March 2008): 9.

[10] Guasco, 10-11.

[11] Rodney, 607.

[12] Rodney, 610.

[13] Carmen Fracchia, “(Lack of) Visual Representation of Black Slaves in Spanish Golden Age Painting,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 10, no. 1 (June 2004): 31.