Joseph C. Miller

The significance of Drought, Disease and Famine in the agriculturally marginal zones of West-Central Africa

Some 170 references to drought and disease along the south-western coast of Central Africa between 1550 and 1830 suggest that climatic and epidemiological factors motivated the farmers and herders of West-Central Africa in historically significant ways. Nearly all references come from documentary sources and so bear primarily on conditions in the drier and less fertile areas near Luanda and to the south, where African reactions would have been strongest. While minor shortages of rain occurred too frequently to receive much explicit attention in the documents, longer droughts spread more widely every decade or so and attracted notice. Major periods of dryness, extending for seven years or more and touching all parts of the region, occurred perhaps once each century and produced comments throughout the documentation. Localized minor droughts hardly disrupted the lives of Africans, who had presumably devised agricultural and pastoral strategies to take account of such ordinary climatic variation. Two-or three-year rainfall shortages produced banditry and warfare that often attracted Portuguese military retaliation. Major droughts disrupted polities and societies and hence coincided with major turning points in West-Central African history in the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. In the earlier case, agricultural failures produced the famed ‘Jaga’ or Imbangala warriors, who elevated pillage to a way of life and who joined the Portuguese in establishing the Angolan slave trade. The later, protracted drought from 1784 to 1793 coincided with the historic peak of slave exports from West-Central Africa.

Nzinga of Matamba in a new perspective

Nzinga of Matamba, the seventeenth-century African monarch known primarily for her enmity to the Portuguese in Angola, also faced hostility from her own Mbundu people and the opposition of neighbouring African rulers throughout her long career. Her sex disqualified her from many Mbundu political offices reserved for males, and her origins in the lineageless community at the Mbundu kings royal court made her an outsider in terms of the lineage politics of most Mbundu states. But she overcame these disadvantages by skilful manipulation of the aliens present on the Mbundu borders, Imbangala warrior bands, the Portuguese, and the Dutch, and dominated Mbundu politics and diplomacy until her death in 1663. The domestic forces arrayed against Nzinga triumphed after her death, expelling her chosen successors from the Matamba royal title and omitting her name from the oral traditions of the state. These hypotheses, while not susceptible to direct proof, seem probable on the basis of a re-reading of documentary sources in the light of ethnographic and oral historical evidence collected in 1969–1970.

Capitalism and Slaving: The Financial and Commercial Organization of the Angolan Slave Trade, according to the Accounts of Antonio Coelho Guerreiro (1684-1692)

tury,but not, paradoxically, because the metropolitan financiers of the slaving often took direct ownership of the slaves. The backers of the trade in Europe worked through complex commercial and financial techniques that reserved its most lucrative and secure aspects to themselves, while assigning the high risks of holding captive humans to provincial traders resident in Africa and Brazil. Lisbon merchants bought advantageously into a limited Angolan ivory market when they could, but they took most of their gains in currency and in notes generated from sales of high-priced goods abroad. They saw themselves as earning returns in Angola and America and then sought to minimize the costs of remitting funds back to Europe by investing in more ivory, various credit instruments, and Brazilian sugars and other colonial produce. Slaves, subject to high risks attendant on uncertain prices for labor sold in Brazil and vulnerable to catastrophic rates of mortality at sea, ranked at the bottom of the short list of available options. This specialization of function probably typified the Angola-Brazil slave trade from early in the 1650s at least until the end of Lisbons role in the trade in the 1810s.

Slavery: Annual Bibliographical Supplement (1992)

For 1992, the bibliography continues its customary coverage* of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, notes and articles in scholarly periodicals, substantial reviews and review essays, conference papers, and chapters in edited volumes and Festschriften focused primarily on slavery or slave trading. Readers unfamiliar with other technical aspects of the presentation may refer to the notes introducing previous supplements in this journal. It does not include materials on slavery found in writings focused on other subjects, e.g. Spanish administrative practice, the history of sugar, urban or agricultural history, race relations, or abolitionist movements in Britain.

The Archives of Luanda, Angola

Historians have dimly suspected the long-hidden treasures of the manuscript collections housed in the older archives of Luanda, Angola -the Arquivo Hist6rico de Angola (A.H.A.), the Biblioteca da Camara Municipal de Luanda (B.C.M.L.), and the Biblioteoa do Pago Episcopal de Luanda (B.P.E.L.)-but lack of direct examination of their contents combined with durable dreams of a musty Garden of Eden awaiting the diligent or deserving scholar have sometimes raised hopes that these records may illuminate more of the Angolan past than they do. Recent efforts on the part of authorities in charge of these archives have for the first time made possible a more detailed and accurate assessment of their contents. A task force has undertaken the enormous

Life Begins at Fifty: African Studies Enters Its Age of Awareness

Abstract: The impending fiftieth anniversary of the African Studies Association offers the occasion for a historian to reflect on the maturation of the field as a historical process. The essay employs metaphors from human development to highlight the inevitably incremental, always partial, steps by which people—including professional Africanists—accomplish significant change. For African studies these steps have moved from an initial social-science orientation and reliance on the abstractions of the high modernity of the mid-twentieth century to more experiential ways of understanding that have opened the door to new epistemologically African sensibilities. Africanists based in the United States are already moving beyond the limits of the external and objectifying tendencies inherent in “studying” anything and instead are listening to and learning from their full partners and collaborators in and from Africa.

Kings, Lists, and History in Kasanje

The more we hear about orally-preserved king lists, those initial favorites of the chronophiles among African historians, the less we trust them. Despite some early efforts to convert lists of rulers into rough calendars by applying arithmetic and statistical procedures, historians have since discovered that such dynastic sequences are filled with spuriously regular father-to-son successions, commonly exhibit telescoping in their remoter periods, and are susceptible to structuring that aligns purported kingly figures with local cosmological assumptions. Most worrisome of all is the implication of recent work on the consequences of literacy to the effect that listing may be a habit characteristic only of societies with reading and writing. If people in oral societies do not make lists, what appeared to African historians to be sequentially-ordered lists of rulers may in fact have been no more than conceptual “chunks” of royalty possessing little or no internal order. Thus the purported sequence in orally-preserved lists of kings may resemble chronology, even sequence, less than it resembles what structuralist anthropologists call “diachrony.” By “diachrony” they mean the artificial ordering of essentially unsequenced elements in a myth structure that is produced spuriously by the necessity in a non-literate culture of realizing them orally, in time. If what historians have taken as “kinglists”, imputing order and para-chronology to them, are in fact synchronous unordered categories, they have been even further off the mark than critics have charged.

The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History

Preface vii Alphabetical List of Entries xiii Topical List of Entries xv Contributors xix Maps xxvi Part One 1 Prologue, Joseph C. Miller 3 The Sixteenth Century, Joseph C. Miller 13 The Seventeenth Century, Karen Ordahl Kupperman 26 The Eighteenth Century, Vincent Brown 36 The Nineteenth Century, Laurent Dubois 46 Part Two 55 Alphabetical Entries 57 Index 503

Children in European systems of slavery: Introduction

This special edition on children in western systems of slavery follows last year’s special edition of Slavery & Abolition on women in western systems of slavery in moving beyond the conventional tendency to cast slaves stereotypically as adult males. At many, perhaps most, times and places most slaves were women and children, even in the Americas. While more males than females entered the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas, the age and sex ratios varied geographically and over time. The surviving populations enslaved in the Americas tended to approach sexual parity more often than the general literature acknowledges and involved more sharply gendered dynamics than suggested by the assumption of adult masculinity. Moreover, in nearly all other societies with slaves in world history, women greatly outnumbered men. Except on the West Indian sugar plantations, where intensive demand for field labour heavily favoured adult males, elsewhere – including in Brazil at certain times and places, and especially in North America – women created and sustained the familial and social networks that sustained slaveries in the Americas. They also figured centrally in the fevered imaginations of their masters, both as objects of sexual obsession and as symbols of maternal nurturance. For their sometimesjealous mistresses they were rivals for husbands’ attentions, if not affections, and mothers of children who, if recognized, would compete for their fathers’ legacies. Since slave status throughout the Americas was inherited through the mother, women were literally the life blood of the mature systems of slavery everywhere, particularly as new imports of men from Africa ceased in the nineteenth century. In Brazil, they were symbolic ‘mothers’ of the national culture, and even in the United States, they were unacknowledged partners even of founding ‘fathers’ of the nation. Women’s strategies of surviving enslavement, as workers and as mothers, not only differed from those of men but also channelled the political economy and historical dynamics of slavery in the western hemisphere. Although the commercial demands of slavery in the Americas rendered some of their sisters infertile from overwork and lack of prenatal care, the children these women bore and also the younger people imported from Africa whom they helped raise were the ‘generations [born or raised in] captivity’ who made American slaves the distinctively reproducing populations they became. Childhood experiences of enslavement, of Slavery and Abolition Vol. 27, No. 2, August 2006, pp. 163–182

Women in western systems of slavery: Introduction

Slavery studies have until recently focussed overwhelmingly on male slaves. This reflects in part the emphasis of scholars on the Atlantic system of slavery in which some 12 million slaves, predominantly male, were shipped to the mines and plantations of the Americas. By contrast, non-western systems of slavery, in which the gender ratio was probably the inverse, have until recently received scant scholarly attention. Over the last decade, the literature on women slaves in certain regions of the globe has grown rapidly. However, this volume is unique in that it compares females in western slave systems in a wide variety of geographical settings ranging from the plantations of the Americas to the Dutch Cape, the South African Republic and British Mauritius. These studies show revealing consistencies as well as contrasts in the means of enslavement of women, the differences in their treatment and the manner, speed and consequences of their emancipation. While male slaves outnumbered female slaves on plantations, women accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved than is customarily acknowledged. The literature has largely analysed the slave owner– slave relationship in terms of the power of the legally empowered ‘insider’ and the impotence of ‘outsiders’ deprived of even basic human rights, and of owner violence and resulting slave resentment and sometimes revolt – with consequential brutal owner suppression and slave suffering. Women’s history has emphasized the conflicts between slave women’s experiences as mothers and the demands of compulsory labour. Of critical importance has been the de-mystification of female slaves who, in the traditional view have generally been categorized as belonging to one of two broad groups, the scheming ‘Jezebel’ or the nurturing ‘Mammy.’ In the process of discarding such stereotypes, the issue of the agency of enslaved females has assumed a central place. While discussion of slave agency traditionally focussed on male slaves and their resistance, notably on relatively infrequent incidences of slave revolt, recent literature has explored the subtler ways in which slaves, notably women, have assessed and exploited their environment to create dynamic spaces of their own within slavery. Slavery and Abolition Vol. 26, No. 2, August 2005, pp. 161–179