Reckoning with Slavery

Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Jennifer L. Morgan

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781478014140
  9781478013235
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478021452
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Refusing Demography
• One. Producing Numbers: Reckoning with the Sex Ratio in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1500–1700
• Two. “Unfit Subjects of Trade”: Demographic Logics and Colonial Encounters
• Three. “To Their Great Commoditie”: Numeracy and the Production of African Difference
• Four. Accounting for the “Most Excruciating Torment”: Transatlantic Passages
• Five. “The Division of the Captives”: Commerce and Kinship in the English Americas
• Six. “Treacherous Rogues”: Locating Women in Resistance and Revolt
• Conclusion. Madness
• Bibliography
• Index