F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Black Atlantic Ur-Texts

In my reading through Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins, and Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery, one thing becomes abundantly clear: the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade are imbedded in almost every facet of western economics, politics, and national identity. As Williams makes very clear, enslaved African labor transformed the young United States into an economic, capitalist hegemon joining the ranks of imperial superpowers like Spain, Portugal, Holland, Britain, and France. One central thesis Williams makes, one that is similar to James, is that enslaved African labor was not a result of European racism; instead, Williams asserts that slavery was a result of a need for cheap, robust labor. Colonial labor, as Williams notes, came from across the imperial reach of European empires—political enemies, criminals, religious dissidents, vagrants, and colonized subjects (i.e. Irish, Indian, Chinese peoples) were all transported to the New World to fulfill a need for cheap labor. However, as the colonies continued to expand westward, and plantations continued to grow, monopolize, and accumulate capital, empires like Britain struggled provide enough free labor to work on giant plantations and push westward in search for arable land—thus providing economic conditions that made enslaved African labor cheaper in the long run than free labor. In this sense, slavery comes about as a result of capitalistic economic conditions, and in my opinion, coupled with damaging notions of human difference that begin to take on increasing rigid biological, essentialist frames of human identity. Primarily, Williams and James highlight the way in which extractive agricultural crops of sugar, tobacco, and cotton transformed the modern world through a capitalist/bourgeoisie class of Europeans that not only exploited free and slave labor for their gain, but also began to influence colonial government structures that modeled political organization around the ideology of the plantation and Enlightenment liberalism. In this case, it becomes increasingly clear that these texts have laid the foundation for current theories to flourish, namely I am thinking about these texts' influence on ideas of Afro-pessimism, anti-black racism, and even the 1619 project. The debate about the influence of the Atlantic slave trade on American/New World political, societal, cultural structure rage on. Yet, Williams, James, and Gilroy refuse to let us forget the myriad ways in which notions of cultural insiderism, homogenous national identity, and even notions of humanity are fundamentally tied and imbricated with the history of the genocide of indigenous peoples of North and South America and the genocide and enslavement of Africans. 
 

This page has paths:

Contents of this path: