Slave Trade Abolition

Been quiet on here this summer as I moved, published some, and stated a new position. But there’s no better title to resume my blogging than Roquinaldo Ferreira’s Worlds of Unfreedom. It is a global history of slave trade abolition ventered in West Central Africa. Yet rather than taking a bird’s eye view, as so many global historians do, Ferreira tells the story of the slave trade and its abolition as a “gut-wrenching story of human lives lost, staggering in its scale and cruelty” (2). The major analytic import of the book is to jettison a top-down, Eurocentric account of abolition, and instead to ground the history of slave trade abolition in the agency of Africans themselves. By building chapters around individuals the work “recasts the story of abolition by highlighting the active roles that enslaved Africans played in opposing the transatlantic slave trade” (73). Yet far from telling a happy story of abolition, instead it shows how the end of the slave trade created “the legal framework of abolition” which was “a breeding ground for creating new forms of unfree labor” (178). By stressing that the end of the slave trade triggered new kinds of forced labor at the local and global level, Ferreira follows the story out of Africa to St. Helena, Cuba, and the Indian Ocean world.

There are three things I appreciated most about this work. The first is that it was global in scale, from New York to Havana, Recife to Loango. Yet it does not lose the human dimensions, the local contestations, or the grounded nature of this history. It is both a history of a place and its world. The second is the archival work that the author undertook in Angola to give us histories of people and places that are far too often excluded from the story. As he points out (pp.49-50) the lack of sources about enslaved Africans is a call to do more to center their lives, not permission to rush past them to tell a bigger history. Finally, it is wonderfully historiographic, and provides a valuable reading guide. Whereas many senior scholars remove that kind of work, several key passages tucked into the chapters tell readers where they can learn more, and it is invaluable to have this spelled out.

I’m left with one major tension or question after reading this book. Why, if Africans were the central actors in abolition that Ferrreira shows them to be, did the abolition of the slave trade generate new kinds of suffering for them? How do we add people back into processes of abolition, only to conclude those processes continued to victimize them? If Africans were central actors in abolition (which they certainly were) and abolition was a breeding ground for yet more inequality, then what kinds of frameworks do we need to hold both of those stories together? Worlds of Unfreedom is rich with answers to those questions. But I also think more needs to be done on that front to answer those kinds of questions for other centuries and with other geographies in play.