A bad business

In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 enslaved people disembarked. Of the roughly 10.7 million people who survived the passage across the Atlantic in the nearly four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, nearly 5 million were sent to Brazil – almost five times as many as to Jamaica and more than fourteen times as many as to North America. More slave ships left for the West African coast from the Americas than from Europe; the majority of those vessels sailed from Brazil, where slavery was abolished only in 1888. The foundations of modern Brazil are poured over the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade.

Yet, though the history of Brazilian slavery is not “untold”, the histories of Caribbean and North American slavery are generally better known among anglophone readers. Two new books by distinguished historians of slavery, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic history of slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo and Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic slave trades by David Eltis, offer a correction, emphasizing the longevity and scale of slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic. In Enslavement: Past and present, another distinguished academic, the sociologist Orlando Patterson, shows the relevance and utility of his theory of slavery as “social death”, a powerlessness whose malignance structures slave societies and persists long after emancipation. What follows, however, from recognizing that Brazil was first, last and largest in Atlantic slavery? Slavery existed long before the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade; are the ruins of the slave-ship dock under Rio relics of the longue durée of enslavement or evidence of the violent birth of the modern world?

Slavery is ancient. Atlantic slavery, however, was meaningfully new – enormous in scale, explicitly racialized and organized to supply labour to plantations producing commodities for a global market. Comparisons of slavery over time show the contrast. In a survey of seventy-six societies where slavery was permitted, Patterson finds that 78 per cent did not have any system of private property. In the Atlantic world, enslaved people were considered not just property, but chattel: property that could be used, sold or exchanged without any restrictions, encumbrances or attention to customary rights. Abolitionists in the nineteenth century referred to the perverseness of this “chattel principle”. As a writer in the Anti-Slavery Record put it in 1837: “THE MAN has vanished! Not a relic left! You have a thing instead”.

Enslavement, a collection of previously published essays with a new introduction, reasserts Patterson’s argument, made famous in Slavery and Social Death (1982), that the many forms slavery has taken in human history have a common defining feature, the “social death” of the enslaved. In the Atlantic version of enslavement, however, plantations gave the exploitation of enslaved labour a new scale and intensity. Jamaica, Patterson writes, combined social death with an emerging capitalist economy to make “a brittle, fragile travesty” of casual violence and fast money.

For Araujo, the travesty began in Brazil. Humans in Shackles follows the development of Portuguese ambitions in West Africa, followed soon after by the first European voyages west across the Atlantic. Spain and Portugal earned windfalls of gold and silver as smallpox and other illnesses killed tens of millions in South America. Araujo sees in sixteenth-century Brazil a template for what happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Caribbean: a general demand for labour hardening into a regime of racialized slavery. By 1512, Portuguese records began to refer to enslaved West Africans in Lisbon as escravos; enslaved status became an ethnonym. This association between West African descent and plantation labour, the author argues, spread outwards from Brazil with plantation technologies such as the Brazilian-designed engenho (sometimes anglicized in the British Caribbean as “ingenio”), used to mill sugar.

The circuit of trade in enslaved people and plantation goods from Brazil, however, differed from the “triangular trade” between West Africa, American colonies and European ports in the North Atlantic. Portuguese and Brazilian ships traded with southwest African ports, taking advantage of the shorter distance across the Atlantic. The southern trade was also organized and financed differently. The North Atlantic system concentrated wealth, creating a class of sugar barons with influence in both Europe and the American colonies. Southern Atlantic slavery distributed the rewards (and risks) of the slave trade and plantation slavery into a larger number of hands, with multiple smaller investors.

In societies where slavery is racialized, race must be made and remade. In Brazil, West African descent remained a marker of enslaved status in a society where far more “white” people had at least one West African ancestor than in North America or the Caribbean. Manumission for enslaved workers was also simpler than in the north, as enslaved people had the right to buy their own freedom. The result was a society where the relationship between race and freedom admitted fine gradations. In a telling example, Araujo analyses a nineteenth-century print depicting a Brazilian slaveholder’s family – the stout, bicorned paterfamilias followed by his free children and pregnant wife, then by an enslaved personal servant, an enslaved wet nurse and an enslaved servant to the wet nurse, all trailed by “a new enslaved boy”, whom the illustrator described as “the slave of all the others”.

Araujo is interested in both the sweep of the slave trade and the human complexities of Brazilian society. She emphasizes the agonizing struggles of people living under extraordinary constraint. A devastating chapter on infanticides committed by enslaved women finds in scant judicial records the impossible choices faced by mothers forced to reproduce the institutions of Atlantic slavery through their children – children who, at the same time, represented enslaved families’ hopes for the future and of resistance.

For Araujo, Brazil should be considered in a broader Atlantic framework as the origin of many of the features that defined plantation slavery further north. “The slave systems were interconnected”, she writes, and enslaved labour was the foundation of “the hemisphere we know today as the Americas.” In Atlantic Cataclysms, David Eltis makes a different, more revisionist argument. Drawing on Slave Voyages – the invaluable database of primary sources related to the Atlantic slave trade that he helped to found – Eltis argues, against recent scholarship on the relationship between transatlantic slavery and capitalist modernity, that in the South Atlantic we can see the slave trade as it really was: not as the beginning of a new form of exploitation, but “simply a maritime – and much better documented – [version] of what had been happening on land for millennia”. Brazil was not only the place with the largest number of enslaved labourers, but also the “organizational heart” of the Atlantic world. Anglo-American slavery, by these lights, was a minor exception to a southern rule, with a similarly negligible effect on the emergence of capitalism.

Drawing on Slave Voyages, Atlantic Cataclysms makes an unassailable case for the significance of the South Atlantic. Historians with their eyes on Liverpool or Charleston must recognize, for example, that three of the four largest slave-trading ports in the world were in Brazil. Eltis notes the high proportion of enslaved and free people of African descent who crewed ships in the South Atlantic. Surveying many hundreds of records of slave voyages, he shows how, at least before the nineteenth century, “there was no such thing as a slave ship, except insofar as it was a ship that carried slaves”. Nearly any ship under a certain size could be refitted with an intimidating wooden barricade of pointed spikes, and with fore and aft chains running along the deck. In comparison with the North Atlantic slave trade, South Atlantic slave-ships were smaller, with fewer crew. The southern slave trade generally had lower costs and carried far more enslaved people per ton of shipping and per crew member. In a penetrating chapter on the hundreds of thousands of “liberated Africans” released from the slave trade, but repatriated around the Atlantic world, Eltis shows both the expense and the futility of British slave-ship interdiction, and the extent of exploitation of formerly enslaved people released from slave ships in Africa and the Americas.

While his argument for the importance of Brazil and the south Atlantic to global histories of slavery is powerful, Eltis’s nested conclusion that the transatlantic slave trade was not new and had no role in constructing the modern world is controversial. He is nostalgic for an era when history was bloodsport, with books written “demolishing the positions of those holding different viewpoints”. He rejects, for instance, the work of historians who claim that the slave trade weakened West African economies. In rebuttal, he argues that the data show the slave trade had a negligible economic effect, and that “any inequality, at least in terms of both market and military power, was typically experienced by Europeans, not Africans”.

Eltis also refutes the claim that slavery made European empires rich, dismissing this proposition as “beyond credulity”. The empires of the British, French and other northern European powers were, he writes, an “incursion” into an essentially pre-capitalist Lusophone transatlantic trade. He also makes a second, even stronger claim. Not only were the northern and southern regimes of slavery and slave-trading effectively separate; neither had a meaningful effect on economic growth. Looking for evidence of plantation slavery building capital in the British Empire, for Eltis, is question-begging. Any historian who believes that “any specific economic activity”, such as whaling or the grain trade, was essential to the emergence of capitalism “would similarly establish the indispensability of [that] activity to general economic growth”. He does not believe that most historians of slavery have done so.

Throughout, Eltis criticizes historians of slavery for failing to support their claims with resort to large, quantitative datasets, particularly Slave Voyages. With these claims, he wades into old debates about whether or not slavery spurred modern capitalism, and about how we can claim to know the past. He draws on an argument made by economic historians who use econometric methods, isolating variables in historical datasets and using regressions and other techniques to pose counterfactuals. To understand the place of slavery in economic growth, these scholars propose, isolate slavery and test its significance in relationship to other variables. What if, for example, there had been no slave trade – would Britain have industrialized sooner? If the answer seems to be yes, then it follows that the slave trade delayed industrialization. For Eltis, data speak for themselves; historians who question the explanatory power of quantification are obtuse in their incomprehension. He shows, using data from Slave Voyages, that the gold, silver and commodities shipped from Brazil to Portugal were enormously valuable, more valuable in total than, for example, Caribbean sugar. For Eltis, it follows that whatever caused capitalism to emerge in the North Atlantic world, it could not have been slavery.

Anglo-American histories of slavery and capitalism have often taken insufficient notice of the scale and persistence of slavery in Brazil and the Portuguese Empire. To this tendency, Atlantic Cataclysms is an important corrective. But Eltis goes further, making not only a point about the significance of the data he has helped to collect and make available to the world, but also a broader claim about the kinds of sources historians can use and the arguments they can make. The history of slavery, he argues, cannot be understood through close reading. Only sets of aggregated data, such as Slave Voyages, are reliable – especially quantitative data gathered from ledgers and other records, supplemented by qualitative data, such as lists of names, that can be smoothed, geocoded and made searchable. Historians who are interested in ideology or culture should either find some big data or give up, since “convincing explanations of shifts in widely held norms of morality will likely always lie beyond the reach of historians”. There is faith in quantitative data, and then there is fervid, fundamentalist regard for large datasets to the exclusion of anything else.

This “just the facts” approach permeates Eltis’s book – beginning with its chin-out epigraph, “In God we trust. All others must bring data”, attributed to W. Edwards Deming, the American economist and management theorist. (According to the sixth edition of the Oxford Essential Quotations, there is “no evidence” that Deming said this.) Many historians, however, have a fundamentally different understanding of historical epistemology. Britain or the US might have developed into the economic and political powerhouses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without slavery, but this is an unanswerable question – slavery cannot be sifted out of the past with econometric modelling, no matter how sophisticated. Most historians are not looking for a transhistorical law relating slavery to capitalist development. They want to show how slavery shaped capitalism in reality, not in theory. For Eltis, the question is settled in part by Portugal’s relative wealth in the present. Portugal, he writes, is “fatal to the argument that slavery enabled industrial capitalism”, since it is now the “poorest country in the EU”. This claim is incorrect – Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Slovakia, Latvia and Estonia are all EU members with a lower per-capita GDP. This data could be interpreted, glibly, as proof of the opposite of Eltis’s argument – that since no major Europe slave-trading powers are to be found among the poorest European states, slavery, on balance, stimulated economic development.

More seriously, historians might argue that, although Britain and its colonies were not the first, or the largest, slave societies in the Americas, the advantages Britain gained in a brutal and brutally successful eighteenth century of slave-dealing and sugar production allowed it to dominate Brazilian trade in the nineteenth century. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain guaranteed the safety of the Portuguese royal family and evacuated the Portuguese court to Brazil. When Brazil declared its independence in 1822 and the United Kingdom recognized the new state, a Brazilian envoy commented, “we can snap our fingers at the rest of the world”. By the middle of the nineteenth century, nearly half of Brazilian imports came from Britain. British firms handled swathes of the export trade as well, such that by the end of the nineteenth century, three British firms exported 80 per cent of Brazil’s rubber. British economic hegemony in nineteenth-century Brazil cannot be modelled out of the tangled, often contingent history of slavery in the Americas. Brazilian slavery was part of the global economy. Being exploited under capitalism is not the same as being outside capitalism.

In another chapter, Eltis attacks many historians who have tried to understand British abolitionism not as a clean break from the past, but as a new form of imperial ambition that rejected slavery, but not the structures of economic and political power built by slavery. “To suggest that the whole abolitionist enterprise was just another case of economic self-interest”, Eltis writes of work (including my own) on the history of British antislavery, is “surely not the most insightful way to deal with complex historical narratives”. British abolitionists were sometimes motivated by economic self-interest – many invested, for example, in “free-labour sugar” in the 1820s. The more important point, however, is intelligible only through close reading. The abolitionists often exalted “legitimate” commerce, sifted free of slavery, as a providential force, part of a Victorian trinity of “commerce, Christianity, and civilization”. For many, it became easy to identify their prosperity with the expansion of British economic power. Eltis is also suspicious of another widely used database, Legacies of British Slavery, which renders searchable the records of the commission that distributed the £20 million borrowed by the UK government to compensate former slaveholders after the abolition of slavery in much of the British Empire, because it “implicitly suggests that enslavers held values that were different … and are thus uniquely culpable”. Quantification, for him, should not be tainted even by implied moral, cultural or political analysis.

Eltis complains that while many historians use the Slave Voyages database, too many persist in pointing out how the methods of counting, sorting and measuring the monetary value and labour power of enslaved people both reflected and contributed to the brutality of slavery and the slave trade. These claims, he writes, are “melodramatic”. However, to critique the data produced by the slave trade is not to ignore it, but rather to show that the forms of record-keeping used comprised a new way of counting, sorting and distributing people as units of labour power and appreciating or depreciating capital. Understanding the material conditions under which slave-trade records were produced, and why, does not mean ignoring data, but rather placing it in context. Historians should attend to the reality that clean data (“scraped”, as economists sometimes call it) was produced by people who were themselves situated in history.

When data appears on Slave Voyages, it is smooth and clean, interchangeable and manipulable. But even that smooth data has a history, shaped by the political economy of modern universities and funding bodies, structured by the hidden architecture of databases and search engines, and by an infrastructure of servers and cables and terminals, the physical plant of the internet. Faith in the idea that numbers, over a large enough timescale, will reveal a “real” world separate from impressions is not neutral. It is an ideology with its own history, material as well as intellectual, and one that recent history shows has tremendous potential to be used as a bludgeon or to vandalize institutions. Turning to quantitative data keeps qualitative analysis honest, and keeps us from succumbing to history-as-anecdote, but no set of data, no matter how large, can transcend history.

Padraic X. Scanlan is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, University of Toronto. His books include Slave Empire: How slavery built modern Britain, 2020, and Rot: A history of the Irish Famine, published last month

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