Full Description
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.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Refusing Demography 1
1. Producing Numbers: Reckoning with the Sex Ratio in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1500-1700 29
2. "Unfit Subjects of Trade": Demographic Logics and Colonial Encounters 55
3. "To Their Great Commoditie": Numeracy and the Production of African Difference 110
4. Accounting for the "Most Excruciating Torment": Transatlantic Passages 141
5. "The Division of the Captives": Commerce and Kinship in the English Americas 170
6. "Treacherous Rogues": Locating Women in Resistance and Revolt 207
Conclusion. Madness 245
Bibliography 257
Index 283
