Title: Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
Author: Ira Berlin
Year of Publication: 1998
Thesis:
In Many Thousands Gone, Berlin charts the ascent of chattel slavery and the greater loss of freedom as slavery lay the groundwork for Africans to become African Americans. In large part, this book is further development of Berlin’s article, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American History” (1980). While the book is mainly a synthesis of work done in response to that germinal article, his early periodization is guided by his 1996 article entitled “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of the African-American Society in Mainland North America.” In 1980, Berlin’s “Time and Space” article broke new ground for scholars of slavery, arguing that for too long scholars had concentrated on southern plantation slavery as representative of American slavery broadly. Instead, he claimed, that when, where, and how were key elements of inquiry. Subsequently, scholars investigate how different times, different commodities, and different locales influenced the development of slavery. Two decades later, Berlin returned to synthesize the work that had been done, dividing the chronology into three distinct periods: the “charter generation,” the “plantation generation,” and the “revolutionary generation.” In the charter generation, Berlin fashions the cosmopolitan “African Creole“ as a class of Africans who, for a brief period in the 17th century, able to use their skill in language and business in order to conduct trade (often in enslaved Africans). The rise of major plantation commodities (sugar, rice, cotton) eroded the “African creole” and contributed to the uneven development of slave societies based on plantation labor and divisions within slave populations (African/American born, free/slave, urban/rural etc.)
Time:
Three generations: Charter Generation (17th century), Planter Generation (early-mid 18th century), Revolutionary Generation (late 18th century)
Geography: Four Regions: New England, Chesapeake, Carolina Low Country, Lower Mississippi Valley
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Questions:
A good question that arises from this, is when and how did arguments about the differences between these two types of societies arise? How would one remove only the economic dependence on enslaved people without considering the social and cultural function of slavery? In essence, this is hinting at the major differences between chattel slavery and other forms of human labor bondage. Even though Phillips’ chapter on “The Early Exploitation of Guinea” is reprehensible in its ignorance, he is correct in noting that scholars need to understand African societies much better in order to understand American slavery.
While Berlin argues there is no fluid evolution from a society with slaves to a slave society (this is his concept of contingency and pushes back on Marxist frameworks), this is an area I would like to revisit more carefully when I have a chance to read this again. For example, to what extent does the degree of autonomy influence the classification of society with slaves or a slave society?
I need to read on the provisioning trade, as I’m curious how these would have functioned in or outside of plantation regime.
Quotes:
Race as a historical construction
"Perhaps this is because the theory is not quite right. Race is not simply a social construction; it is a particular kind of social construction—a historical construction." (1)
Oppression, resistance, negotiation
"All of which is to say that slavery, though imposed and maintained by violence, was a negotiated relationship." (2)
Slavery making race and class
"The stench from slavery’s moral rot cannot mask the design of American captivity: the extraction of labor that allowed a small group of men to dominate all. In short, if slavery made race, its larger purpose was to make class, and the fact that the two were made simultaneously by the same process has mystified both.” (5)
Notes:
As I read Berlin, I couldn’t help but reflect on U.B. Phillips’ American Negro Slavery. Phillips would have loved to take up the idea that there are slave societies and societies with slaves. Though he would likely have argued Africans represented the true slave societies. In contrast, he posited that slavery was not only unprofitable but an imposition on southern planters. As he analyzes slavery as a labor system, he is singularly focused on the control of labor as he mentions in his title, but Philliips clearly considers slavery a matter of noblesse oblige.