Spheres of knowledge

Slaves were frequently said to be inferior in their intellectual faculties, yet most commentators thought of these distinctions as non-essential, or even what would later be called ‘cultural’. Religion was also the language through which commentators engaged with slaves, and was the measure of their capacities. Testimonies about slaves’ use of language hint that it was thought defective or comical, but it might also edify, or testify to the inventiveness of Creole populations and culture. Manifestations of sensibility in the contact with – even the sale of – slaves illustrates how radically condition separated human experience. Slaves were said to be faithful, but anecdotal and fictional manifestations hint at concerns about their self-interest. In a plantation environment in which restricted knowledge was of great urgency, the secrecy of slaves might be of some concern. This was particularly troubling in cases of magic or poisoning. This was a serious concern for ecclesiastics, and testifies to how radically European, African and Creole epistemologies might be separated.

Narrative and servitude

This chapter explores the tools that were available to early commentators for understanding Atlantic slavery, and what textual and graphic strategies can reveal about the knowledge about, and responses to, slavery. Early accounts of the colonies reflect shared understandings of the social, ecological and religious domains to various extents. These accounts also had recourse to the Graeco-Roman tradition, particularly Roman slave law, and to Scripture to understand slavery, though not without significant interrogations. Colonial-era narratives were historicising narratives, relying on shared understandings of human agency, chronology and knowledge, but excluding Amerindian and African peoples from these domains. Knowledge about slaves, which was produced in a polemical climate in which the script had considerable power to inform and to edify, was essentially oblique. Colonial-era texts that are self-consciously representative can also be instructive about human space and the perception of human coexistence. Engravings of slavery testify to some prescriptive potential, and can also illustrate what was gratifying about plantation power.

The labouring body

This chapter explores how French texts echoed shared ideas about labour in the plantation context. Plantation labour employed the bodies of slaves in new, proto-industrial processes. Within this context the concept of accumulation was central to understanding slaves and the free. Commentators show the importance of numeracy to colonial knowledge, which organised labour, space, and productivity. This knowledge implied forms of belonging and exclusion. Slave labour remained human labour and could be disrupted by social dynamics and desire. The distinctions between slave and free even encompassed time, which was inseparable from accumulation and power. Comparison with free indentured labourers illustrates the condition of the slave, and comparison with animals demonstrates what was gratifying or repellent about slave labour.

Slave economies

Early modern French commentators saw slavery as a practice that was ubiquitous throughout the world, even threatening in its Islamic forms, and that was intimately associated with captivity. A further strand in creating the condition of the slave was made up of discourses of human difference. The site of the difference was very mobile; while there are hints of early proto-racial thinking at the turn of the eighteenth century, religion was one of various strands through which belonging and difference was conceptualised. Contrary to recent criticism, this chapter shows that representations of African slavery were based on ambiguous legal, commercial and societal foundations. Slavery was also justified by early capitalist rationale testifying to European confidence in production. Amerindian slavery was thought non-commercial and honour-based, and fascinated in depictions of the consumption of human beings. French accounts of the Caribbean slave economy illustrate the key strands of what the proprietorship of African slaves meant. The enslavement of baptised Africans was viewed with some diversity by ecclesiastics, with some questioning the principle of slavery, and some actively condoning it. Baptism was a powerful sacrament which implied levels of temporal belonging, but the coexistence of secular and spiritual planes could be complex or uneasy.

Society and slaves

In the early colonies, alternative forms of society could be a source of anxiety. Religious and social cohesion was a concern in what was often an unmastered environment. Accounts of the early colonies reflect on the cohesion of a society made up of settlers and slaves. The self-interest of colonists could be acknowledged as problematic for public order, and the desires of slaves as disruptive to property. In practice, some property was ceded to slaves, and strategies were described to motivate slaves by granting comparative favour. Depictions of the uncultivated environment reflect anxieties about the proximity of unmastered spaces outside the colonies. There were also internal frontiers maintained by shared practices, such as hospitality and the consumption of alcohol. A number of testimonies about the maroon slaves illustrate concerns with culture and subversion, as well as the role of rumour in the early colonies. Further tensions in the colonies developed from desire, and related to questions surrounding marriage, manumission and métissage. Métissage, like manumission, was never considered outside distinct social contexts, and illustrates the instability within the slave society.

Conclusion

The book ends with suggestions about the ways colonial narratives contributed to shaping collective representations of slaves and slavery. Representations were produced in distinct contexts, reflecting the concerns of individuals and collectivities, but they also reflected colonial social structures. The dynamic of reflecting slaves in colonial narratives may be compared with the ‘problem’ of ‘inclusion’ (Miers and Kopytoff). It is, tellingly, the result of multiple interactions. Colonial narratives were, no doubt, received according to individual or collective reading or listening experiences, but they also functioned by creating the social specificity of slaves.

Introduction

The introduction explores the socio-economic, religious, and intellectual context of Caribbean slavery, in a frontier environment marked by demographic transformation. Slavery reflected on the understanding of society and the individual, and was understood through religious discourses and the heritage of antiquity. This book discusses, firstly, the importance to slavery of what French observers called condition; this can be illuminated through anthropological approaches, nuanced by acknowledging the transformative nature of slavery. Secondly, it explores what was new about corporeal labour in the plantation context. Thirdly, it discusses the use of strategies for purposes such as religious conversion or temporal gain, particularly the use of the script. This chapter highlights the fact that critics have focused little on the earliest Caribbean colonies and on the question of human labour. Interdisciplinary approaches from the fields of history, literature, and the social sciences are valuable, but a new approach is called for which both recognises what was shared in the thinking of colonial commentators, and what was heterogeneous in the strategies they used to obtain diverse forms of interest. The introduction ends by summarising the principal printed and manuscript sources analysed in this book.

Tensions, order, and the body

Colonial commentators, aware of the impossibility of dominating the consciousness of slaves, testify to the use of auxiliary strategies to circumscribe them in place or time. Forms of surveillance were essential to power, but hint at exacerbated visibility in the plantation context. A scriptural, patristic and humanistic tradition furnished precedents for the discipline of slaves, but French commentators illustrate that limits to physical violence were prescribed for diverse reasons. Concerns about plantation security centred on the proportion of slave to settler, and on the illusory relationships between slaveowners and their slaves. It is in the script, hidden from the eyes of slaves, that one can find overt avowals of the risk they were thought to pose. There were interrogations about the sexual coercion of enslaved women. Colonial-era narratives also illustrate the use of strategies to control the bodies of slaves; some of these strategies testify to moral limits to the complete possession of other human beings.