Reckoning with slavery : gender, kinship, and capitalism in the early Black Atlantic

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Title:

Author:

Morgan, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lyle), author.

ISBN:

9781478013235

9781478014140

Personal Author:

Morgan, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lyle), author.

Physical Description:

xvi, 296 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

General Note:

Source of cataloging data: WCP

Abstract:

"The history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is deeply embedded in the emergence of early modern economic and political institutions. Reckoning with Slavery resituates the early modern as the space out of which race, racial hierarchies, notions of value and trade, and ideas of gender and reproduction are mutually constituted. Through a study of numeracy, trade, counting, and commerce, the lives and experiences of enslaved women in the sixteenth and seventeenth century English Atlantic world come into focus. Rather than treating economy and culture as distinct aspects of social history, Reckoning with Slavery asks what we can come to know about kinship, family, and race through the archives of trade and commerce."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Refusing demography -- Producing numbers : reckoning with the sex ratio in the transatlantic slave trade, 1500-1700 -- "Unfit subjects of trade" : demographic logics and colonial encounters -- "To their great commoditie" : numeracy and the production of African difference -- Accounting for the "most excruciating torment" : transatlantic passages -- "The division of the captives" : commerce and kinship in the English Americas -- "Treacherous rogues" : locating women in resistance and revolt.

Subject Term:

Slavery -- Political aspects -- America.

Slavery -- Economic aspects -- America.

Women slaves -- America.

Women slaves -- Atlantic Ocean Region.

Slave trade -- America -- History.

Slave trade -- Atlantic Ocean Region -- History.

Capitalism -- Atlantic Ocean Region -- History.

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Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Sugar Grove - Todd Library	Book	HT871 .M67 2021	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

In Reckoning with Slavery Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic. From capture to transport to sale to childbirth, these women were demographically counted as commodities during the Middle Passage, vulnerable to rape, separated from their kin at slave markets, and subject to laws that enslaved their children upon birth. In this way, they were central to the binding of reproductive labor with kinship, racial hierarchy, and the economics of slavery. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Morgan demonstrates that the development of Western notions of value and race occurred simultaneously. In so doing, she illustrates how racial capitalism denied the enslaved their kinship and affective ties while simultaneously relying on kinship to reproduce and enforce slavery through enslaved female bodies.