Commodification and Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Indonesian Archipelago

Slavery did not simply die slowly in the nineteenth century; in some parts of the world, it expanded. Engaging with the literature on slavery in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, this article explains how a rising demand for forest and sea products, pepper and rice, together with a proliferation of firearms, kindled slave raiding and trading in the Indonesian archipelago. Enslavement happened both through capture and debt traps. This article offers an estimate of the number of annually enslaved in the Indonesian archipelago during the mid-nineteenth century and relates this to a conjectured total slave population of this particular region. The commercialization of slavery must have fundamentally changed the character of customary institutions of bondage. The article cites contemporary sources about the conditions of the captives and concludes with an explanation of how commercial slavery in this part of the world could continue into early years of the twentieth century.

Farroupilha and Freedom

Rufino is living in Porto Alegre when the the Farroupilha federalist revolt begins in 1835. Porto Alegre was a town much like other Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife, where slaves made up a large part of the urban population. Manumission rates were also high in Porto Alegre. Most of the manumission letters were bought by the slaves themselves. Mina slaves were not the majority of the slave population, as in Salvador, but they were a significant minority. In 1838, Mina slaves would lead a Muslim slave conspiracy in Pelotas, Rio Grande, where documents in Arabic were found. But Rufino was not there any more, for he had bought his freedom in 1835, when cattle ranchers started the Farroupilha rebellion against the Imperial government. Many slaves seized the oppportunity to escape into the bush or cross the border to Uruguay. That same year, Rufino buys his manumission from the police chief, and somewhat later he moves to Rio de Janeiro.

A Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm Based on Multipopulation Coevolution for Weapon-Target Assignment

Weapon-target assignment (WTA) is critical to command and decision making in modern battlefields and is a typical nondeterministic polynomial complete problem. To solve WTA problems with multiple optimization objectives, a multipopulation coevolution-based multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm is proposed to realize the rapid search for the globally optimal solution. The algorithm constructs a master-slave population coevolution model. Each slave population corresponds to an objective function and is used to search for noninferior solutions. The master population receives all the noninferior solutions from the slave populations, repairs the gaps between the noninferior solutions, and generates a relatively optimal Pareto optimal solution set. In addition, to accelerate the slave populations searching for noninferior solutions and master population repairing the gaps between noninferior solutions, the particle velocity update method is improved. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has higher computational efficiency and achieves better solutions than existing algorithms capable of providing a good solution. The method is suitable for rapidly solving multiobjective WTA (MOWTA) problems.

Iberian linguistic elements among the black population in New Netherland (1614–1664)

Since the slave population in New Netherland (1614–1664) was small compared to that of other Dutch Atlantic colonies such as Curaçao, Dutch Brazil, and Suriname, it has traditionally received little attention by scholars, including creolists. It is, therefore, not well known that traces of Iberian languages can be found among the black population of seventeenth-century Manhattan. While the paucity of sources does not allow us to make any decisive claims with regard to the importance of Spanish and Portuguese for the colony’s black community, this article attempts to reconstruct the language use of this population group on the basis of an analysis of historical sources from New Netherland in a broader Atlantic context.

Poor Man's Crop? Slavery in Brazilian Cotton Regions (1800-1850)

Much of the literature about cotton production in Brazil during the nineteenth century considers cotton as a "poor man's crop" - cultivated by small farmers who did not employ a large slave labor force. However, information provided in population maps from the period between 1800 and 1840 shows that slaves represented half the population in Maranhão, the most important cotton exporter in Brazil until the 1840s. This represented a higher share than in any region in northeast Brazil and was comparable to the slave population shares recorded in the United States' cotton South. This paper shows that, during the cotton boom years (1790-1820), not only was the cotton exported from northeast Brazil to Britain and continental Europe cultivated on large plantations, but also, slave prices were higher in Maranhão than in other Brazilian provinces.

After the Reign of Terror

This chapter examines the agricultural strategies used in Amazonian cacao and sugar plantations. Cacao is a tree native to the region whose fruit was exported since the colonial period. Producers relied on the river tides for soil fertilization and combined its cultivation with the exploitation of wild groves. Sugar producers adopted a similar approach, using tidal energy as a natural fertilizer and as a source of energy to propel their mills. Amazonia was able to successfully develop a slave economy that produced tropical crops for markets overseas. It also discusses the impact of Cabanagem on the region’s slaveholding properties is more complex than previously thought, as this chapter shows. While the loss of slaves in prime working age naturally affected the output of local plantations, the Cabanagem revolt also reinforced the trend toward a sexually and ethnically balanced slave population inherited from the pre-Cabanagem era, which was key to the natural reproduction of the enslaved population in later decades. Despite the damage caused by the rebellion, then, the post-Cabanagem slave demography of Paraense plantations turned out to be favorable to the reconstruction of the state’s plantation sector and to the natural reproduction of its enslaved laborers as well.

Creole Language and Space: Entertaining Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco

My essay explores Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau's novel Texaco (1992) and its idea of a multilingual collective space where the communal resilience of the former slave population finds its expression in the productive encounter between Creole and French. Chamoiseau's revisionary historical novel counters the official history of colonial dislocation with the celebration of infiltration and squatting through which unauthorized communities, languages and histories demand to be accommodated. The linguistic and spatial assertion of the Creole community suggests that its place depends, to a large extent, on the narrative inscription of its communal experience. The very real economic limitations of the slum community do not amount to a flawed or incomplete sense of identity but trigger, instead, a collective struggle for group identity and collective ownership of space and self through the vibrancy and resourcefulness of multilingual and polyphonic narration.

Slaves: African and Indian

This chapter examines the role played by African and Indian slaves in early St. Louis. Indians had practiced slavery long before European explorers, traders, and colonizers arrived on North American shores. Profitable, market-oriented agriculture developed in the Illinois Country as early as the 1720s, and slaves (especially Africans) were used as field hands. In French Illinois, Indian as well as African slaves had been present since the early eighteenth century, and especially at the founding of St. Louis in 1764. Slaves appear only marginally in most studies of colonial St. Louis, which tend to dwell on the fur trade and commercial relations with Missouri Valley Indians. This chapter looks at the village's slave population during the first decade of the settlement's existence. In particular, it considers how slaves became integrated into the life of the growing village. It also describes public auctions of slaves in the Illinois Country and the lives of early St. Louis slaves. Finally, it discusses the Grotton–St. Ange family's firsthand experience with the Indian slave trade.