Suzanne Miers

Contemporary Forms of Slavery

ResumeLe terme d’esclavage suggere habituellement le genre d’esclavage pratique dans le monde occidental, dans un passe lointain et a l’epoque moderne qui objectivisait l’humain. Dans cette perspective, les esclaves etaient une possession propre a la vente; ils n’avaient aucun droit, etaient destines a vivre en esclave pour le restant de leurs jours et leur condition etait hereditaire. Bien que cette forme de servitude ait ete abolie partout depuis 1970, elle n’a pas completement disparu. D’autres formes de servitude, certaines plus anciennes que l’autre et souvent tout aussi exploitrices, non seulement se poursuivent mais encore elles augmentent en nombres. Parmi ces “formes contemporaines d’esclavage,” il y a le servage resultant d’une dette, la prostitution forcee, la main d’oeuvre enfantine, le mariage force et l’union servile, l’exploitation des emigrants illegaux et de la main-d’oeuvre contractuelle et l’esclavage culte. On les trouve partout dans le monde. Cet article les decrit et se demande pourq...

Notes on the Arms Trade and Government Policy in Southern Africa between 1870 and 1890

These notes are merely intended to point out some of the factors governing official policy towards the arms traffic in southern Africa in the years before the Brussels Act of 1890 came into force. They are sadly incomplete, having been collected in the course of other research, but are nevertheless put forward in the hope that they may add an extra dimension to this series of articles on the impact of firearms on the history of southern Africa.

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

Slavery to freedom in sub‐Saharan Africa: Expectations and reality

Emancipation came late to most of sub-Saharan Africa. It took several different forms and, since some areas have been heavily researched and others virtually ignored, there are serious gaps in our knowledge. While much is known about the expectations of the British abolitionists and something of the expectations of colonial administrators, there is little information about those of African slave-owners and even less about those of the slaves, whose descendants are still often reluctant to talk about it. The immensity of the subject is daunting. Sub-Saharan Africa was divided between six colonial powers and the two independent states of Ethiopia and Liberia, each with its own form of government and abolitionist policy. African societies ranged from trans-humant pastoralists and small kin-based village groupings to large empires. Economic, social and political conditions and religious practices were greatly varied. The realities of abolition were not only different in each society but they had varying effects on the different types of slaves and owner even in the same society.

Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (review)

They insist that slave flight accelerated the demise of slavery. They also discuss shrinking criteria of who is eligible for enslavement and shifts in what is considered acceptable levels of cruelty. The question of who can be enslaved is important to our understanding of the emergence of racially defined slavery, but adds little to the debate on Marques. If Marques makes his argument successfully, it is largely that he has defined his target well. Olivier PetreGrenouilleau points out that the views attacked here are not widely held by academic historians. They are more widely held by journalists, political leaders and non-academic intellectuals. There is a rich literature of slave resistance, but slave resistance does not necessarily involve systemic attack on the system. It did, however, shape the system and contribute to its demise. Marques cannot in a relatively short essay tackle the meaning of this literature. Some authors try to do so. Most historians are well aware that plantation slave systems depended on a high level of coercion. That is why African slave systems, which could be harsh, were forced to leave more space for slaves within the system. In all systems, the effort of slaves to achieve space for themselves is as important as resistance because it is part of the way slaves shape the nature of slavery. There is another sub-text that runs through this volume, which is that conflict within the system or outside intervention often provide an opportunity for slaves to find space. For Peter Blanchard it was not resistance, but participation in the wars of independence in Spanish America that contributed to the decline of slavery. Slaves were recruited by both royalists and patriots and generally rewarded with freedom. Slave women filled the void their men vacated. Geggus and Robin Blackburn argue that leaders were more willing to compromise with the established order than their followers. Blackburn insists that the actions of ordinary slaves made plans for gradualist reforms unworkable. The problem for plantation slave systems was that they depended heavily on coercion. That meant that those who held power were easily frightened by limited but violent slave risings. It also meant that the slave system could easily fall apart. In the American Revolution, large numbers of slaves crossed British lines to seek freedom. Marques points out that during the American Civil War the recruitment of ex-slave soldiers was a factor in the war, but more important was the number of slaves who crossed Union lines to seek freedom. This also happened in Brazil, Reunion and elsewhere. Resistance was important not because resisters wanted to end slavery, but because the measures required to control slaves made plantation slavery so repressive that it could not resist the strain of other conflicts.

Slave rebellion and resistance in the Aden Protectorate in the mid-twentieth century

In 1943 a rare event took place in the Aden Protectorate. A group of slaves revolted because they did not wish to be freed. These were royal slaves – a category of slaves whose fate in the twentieth century has been too little studied. This contribution contrasts the position of these royal slaves with that of the far greater number of ordinary slaves in the Protectorate. The former were sufficiently numerous, in close enough contact, and bound by common interests to act en masse to further their interests. In contrast the latter, isolated in households, alone or in small groups, could only act individually, or at best as a nuclear family. They usually required outside help to better their terms of service or escape from slavery. Although it was the hinterland of the strategically important port of Aden, the Protectorate in the 1930s was the veritable stepchild of the British Empire. The town of Aden and its immediate surroundings – an area of some 70 miles in and around the port including the island of Perim – was a Crown Colony. It was closely controlled, and slavery was illegal. The surrounding area, divided into the Eastern and Western Protectorates, stretched from Perim to the Muscat border and northwards to the Yemen and the edge of the Rub’ al Kali desert in Saudi Arabia. Its northern frontiers were not defined. Much of it was not administered or even visited by British officials. Local rulers and peoples ran their own affairs. The Hadramaut had only recently been clearly designated as British territory. The sole aim of the British government hitherto had been to keep out other powers, and to assume only minimal responsibility for the administration. From 1927 the Royal Air Force took over the defence of Aden. Air strikes provided a new weapon against recalcitrant rulers, and opened the way to closer control. However, the British had little desire to extend their administration, and even less to investigate slavery. This ‘hands off’ attitude changed somewhat in the mid-1930s, when the British began a cautious move into some of the hitherto unadministered

Contemporary forms of slavery

Slavery in Brazil: A Link in the Chain of Modernisation: the Case of Amazonia, (A Report by Anti‐Slavery International, no.7 Human Rights Series). ALISON SUTTON. London, 1994. 154pp., bibliography, maps, glossary, photographs. £5.95. ISBN 0–900918–32–2. Britains Secret Slaves: An Investigation into the Plight of Overseas Domestic Workers (with contributions from Anti‐Slavery International & Kalayan and the Migrant Domestic Workers, no.5 Human Rights Series). BRIDGET ANDERSON. London, 1993. 122pp., references, appendices, photographs. £5.50. ISBN 0–900918–29–2. Child Labour in Nepal (A Report by Anti‐Slavery International and Child Workers in Nepal Concerned Centre no.13 Child Labour Series), OMAR SATTAUR. London, 1993. 71pp., bibliography, maps, glossary, appendices, photographs. £5.00. ISBN 0–900918–31–4. Ethnic Groups in Burma: Development, Democracy and Human Rights (A Report by Anti‐Slavery International, no.8 Human Rights Series), MARTIN SMITH. London, 1994. 139pp., bibliography, maps, chronology, p...

The End of slavery in Africa

This landmark book, now back in print, explores the historical experiences of slaves, masters, and colonials as they all confronted the end of slavery in fifteen sub-Saharan African societies. The essays demonstrate that it is impossible to generalize about whether the end of slavery was a relatively mild and nondisruptive process or whether it marked a significant change in the organization of these societies. This wide-ranging inquiry is of lasting value to Africanists and a variety of social and economic historians.