Published by EH.Net (January 2023).

Jennifer L. Morgan. *Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and
Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic*. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2021. xvi + 296 pp. $27.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1478014140.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Matthew David Mitchell, The University of the South.



As Jennifer L. Morgan notes in her introduction to *Reckoning with Slavery*,
“The history of slavery has been routed down one path or the other—economy
or ideology” (12)*. *Morgan persuasively argues that the profession should
break down the boundary between these two parallel lines of inquiry, as
Eric Williams attempted to do with the publication of *Capitalism and
Slavery *as early as 1944. And the fact that the boundary survived
Williams’s intervention and has continued to characterize most scholarship
on Atlantic slavery until very recently is in Morgan’s view due to the very
“nature of the archival traces of the Middle Passage… in which
mathematically fixed data are in the hands of economists” who treat them
with ostensible “neutrality and rigor,” while more “malleable claims rooted
in culture are in the hands of humanists and artists” (53).

Enslaved women and their stories, for Morgan, stand as the great exemplars
of what we have lost because of this division. Yet they are also the reason
why we should challenge that division and think about “gender, kinship, and
capitalism” together rather than separately. For capitalism forced a brutal
paradox upon enslaved women: “the entire economy of the colonies depended
on the claim that African women gave birth to slaves, not to daughters or
sons, not to kin” (155). The attempts of enslaved women to refuse this
“systematic denial of their kinship ties” (60) to their own children are at
the heart of what Morgan seeks to elucidate in her book.

To do so using the usual methods of historical inquiry, however, is a task
of exquisite difficulty; indeed, Morgan positions her book as “not a formal
history, for gathering a series of archive-based linear narratives is not
possible here” (23). She instead follows Saidiya Hartman’s method of
“‘critical fabulation’ in the face of the impossibility of recovering the
histories of those whose absence from the archive is a systemic
manifestation of the violence perpetrated against them” (169). Morgan’s
recounting of the story of Belinda, enslaved in Massachusetts during the
eighteenth century, is a particularly memorable example of this method.
Working from Belinda’s 1783 petition to the General Court of Massachusetts
for her freedom, Morgan states that Belinda’s

“language reflected her acumen about the value of her labor, which
‘augmented’ the ‘immense wealth’ of her owner, the loyalist Isaac Royall.
The vast array of experiences that bolstered her ability to petition the
legislature are lost to us now, but… Belinda clearly articulates the ways
in which her work built Royall’s wealth on the painful ground of her own
severed kin ties. Those ties continued to define her and her relationship
to her past and her present even though in some ways her enslavement was
rooted in the fiction that such ties didn’t exist. Belinda’s petition thus
clarifies that the work of erasing kinship was always incomplete” (157-158).

Morgan casts a wide net in showing how European thinkers contributed to
this “work of erasing kinship” between enslaved women and their children,
even when not directly discussing slavery. John Hawkins’s accounts of his
three slave-catching voyages in the 1560s, and Richard Hakluyt’s
reproduction of them in his *Principall Navigations*, figure in this
discussion. More surprisingly, so do such economic writers as Thomas Mun,
author in the 1620s of *England’s Treasure by Forraign *Trade, whom Morgan
presents together with Hakluyt as having “presented slavery as logically
assigned to the [English] nation’s marketplace” (70-71). She also
implicates the “political arithmeticians” of the later seventeenth century
such as William Petty and John Graunt, whose work marked “a shift in
practices of quantification that had profound implications for those
ensnared by its new terms” (96-99). Morgan devotes a further chapter to the
idea of “numeracy” as a special marker of racial difference, with Europeans
figuring Africans as persons they could count, while “disavowing evidence
of numerical rationality among Africans” (110).

Morgan likewise scrutinizes the ways in which modern historians count
enslaved Africans, particularly by means of the online *Transatlantic Slave
Trade Database.* In keeping with her recognition that the cultural and the
economic stream of scholarship on Atlantic slavery need to be brought
together, she does so generously, hailing the *Database *as “a model of
collaborative empirical scholarship” (30) that “has been extremely
productive for scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade” (44), even as
she perceptively critiques the ways in which it “renders the processes that
put [enslaved persons] there indiscernible” (20).

Even so, her reading of the *Database *falters at times, particularly in
her attribution of the frequent invisibility of women in the records
underlying the *Database* to a deliberate decision on the part of slave
ship owners and captains. Noting that “almost nine-tenths of voyages”
recorded in the online *Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database* do “not
contain information on the sex of the captives” (31), she ascribes this to
“the captains’ silence about the numbers of women on their ships.” Asking
“what productive work such omission did for ship captains involved in a
profoundly violent process of rendering human beings into cargo,” Morgan
draws two inferences (47-48). First, had slave traders chosen to keep
accurate information on sex ratios among their captives, they would have
“r[u]n the risk of ascribing the same human capacity for familial
connection to captives that the captain and crew members ascribed to
themselves” (47-48). Second, “data regarding sex were inconsequential to
the monetary returns on a voyage’s investments: had it been financially
significant to have more men than women, those data would have been more
scrupulously recorded” (51). Similar arguments recur throughout the book,
all based upon the premise that “the evidence [in the *Database*] is
gleaned from merchants, traders, and ship captains” (31).

But the reality is that exceedingly few documents produced by the owners or
captains of slave ships survive to the present day. In many cases, the
existing documentation for a given transatlantic slave voyage comes from
newspapers, government sources, or the records of marine insurers, rather
than being produced by those directly involved in the organization and
execution of the venture. One prominent exception is the London-based slave
trader Humphry Morice, whose papers were preserved by the Bank of England
because he served as its Governor from 1727 to 1729. And while these do not
offer full documentation for all of Morice’s voyages, those documents that
do exist show assiduous record-keeping of “men,” “women,” “boys,” and
“girls,” that were bought by, sold by, or happened to die aboard his ships.

Yet such difficulties are, I think, an inherent part of the process when
the practitioners of two different strands of scholarship on the same
subject begin to learn each other’s languages, borrow each other’s methods,
and share each other’s interpretive concerns. Morgan’s account of the
archival silence around the women who faced the predicament (as she
evocatively terms it) of forced productive and reproductive labor is a
worthy contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to reach
the multiple scholarly communities that study Atlantic slavery.



Matthew David Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at The University
of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is the author of *The Prince of
Slavers: Humphry Morice and the Transformation of Britain\’s Transatlantic
Slave Trade, 1698–1732* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

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