The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas

by David Eltis

Exploring the paradox of the concurrent development of slavery and freedom in the European domains, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas provides a fresh interpretation of the development of the English Atlantic slave system. The book outlines a major African role in the evolution of the Atlantic societies before the nineteenth century and argues that the transatlantic slave trade was a result of African strength rather than African weakness. It also addresses changing patterns of group identity to account for the racial basis of slavery in the early modern Atlantic World.

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction, Race

372 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1999

About the author

David Eltis is an Emeritus Professor of History at Emory University, Atlanta and a Research Associate at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Massachusetts and at the University of British Columbia. His publications include Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (with David Richardson, 2010), The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (1999), and Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1989).

Reviews

[Sohum · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't really agree w the eltis-engerman thesis but there are some interesting arguments here.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Attempts to make sense of the paradox that the two nations most associated with individual political liberty and property rights (Britain and Holland) at the turn of the 18th century were also the two nations most responsible for developing the Atlantic slave-trade. Rather than seeing this as an insoluble problem, Eltis roots the slave system in notions of British/ Dutch freedom, there is a sort of dialectic of the slave society wherein British freedom gives birth to slavery which in turn gives birth to abolitionism. Challenges the notion that slavery can primarily be understood as being caused by economic factors, suggesting that cultural factors were the chief cause. He illustrates the ways in which cultural conceptions of gender difference, insider/outsider status, property rights, Christianity, wage-labor, etc led to the enslavement of Africans, where the enslavement of other Europeans or native-Americans would have been just as good/ better from an economic standpoint.

Also interrogates the assumption that it was African weakness in the face of European strength that led to the slave trade. Assumptions of African weakness carry with them an implicit homogenizing assumption, wherein contemporary readers are confused by a lack of solidarity on the part of natives to the African continent, people who, prior to European slaving, had no reason to seem themselves as part of a discrete community. Eltis suggests that Europeans had more of a sense of "community" in this sense than Africans.

I am intrigued but not wholly convinced, seems like the economic is still more critical than Eltis lets on, and the presentation of the counterfactual: "why no European slaves" has some more obvious answers

[AskHistorians]

Great study of the development of slavery as an institution in the Atlantic World.