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ISSN 1749-8155

The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine and Fertility in the Age of AbolitionPrinter-friendly versionPDF version

Book:
The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine and Fertility in the Age of Abolition
Katherine Paugh
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN: 9780198789789; 288pp.; Price: £65.00
Reviewer:
Dr Trevor Burnard
NA
Citation:
Dr Trevor Burnard, review of The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine and Fertility in the Age of Abolition, (review no. 2214)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2214
Date accessed: 10 June, 2023
See Author's Response

The greatest indictment of the hard-driving slave system in the 18th-century British Caribbean was that the enslaved population never achieved natural population increase (except briefly in Barbados but only by 1810). Abolitionists seized on the failure of slave populations to thrive as a sign that slavery was immoral. Thomas Fowell Buxton in 1832 called the decrease in slave populations in most slave colonies in the British Caribbean ‘the best of all tests of the condition of the Negro’. Even slave-owners accepted Buxton’s logic, though not his assumption that a declining slave population showed that slavery should be abolished. In 1786 a group of Barbadian planters argued that ‘if negroes are fed plentifully, worked moderately, and treated kindly, they will increase in most places; they will decrease in no place, so much as to require any considerable expense to repair the loss, in number or in value’. It seems common-sense that the managers of slaves should treat slaves well in order that these very valuable assets could work longer and that they could augment the slave population, and the owner’s pockets, through ‘breeding’. The Jamaican slave owner, Simon Taylor, believed that slaves, just like machines, could wear out from ill-usage and needed to be looked after well: ‘they are not steel or iron and we can see neither gudgeons and capooses [small but vital parts of steel mills prone to break when stressed] last in this country’. Yet not all managers of slaves agreed with Taylor. Much to Taylor’s chagrin, his overseer, John Kelly, cared nothing about slave welfare but everything about the size of the sugar crop which provided him with his bonus, He worked slaves, including pregnant women, so hard that ‘their hearts are broke’. If he continued his practice of killing slaves with overwork so they ‘are harassed to Death’, Jamaica would be ‘a land without Negroes’. Yet Kelly’s techniques worked. In 1775, he produced ‘the most extraordinary crop that was ever made on any one estate in Jamaica’.(1)

Taylor thought Kelly’s strategies foolish and dangerous. He believed that slave reproduction needed to be encouraged, not because he cared much about enslaved peoples’ welfare but because otherwise the profits of sugar planting would be eaten up in having to replace dead slaves with new purchases from the Atlantic slave trade. Taylor knew that in North America, slave populations, first in Virginia from the 1720s and in South Carolina from the 1750s, had begun to enjoy natural increase, meaning that North American planters no longer needed to rely upon the slave trade to get labour. Indeed, as Katherine Paugh points out in her relatively short but generally insightful set of essays on the politics of reproduction in British America before and after the American Revolution, by the 1770s later revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were worrying about another problem – that African-Americans were reproducing so fast that they were becoming a ‘blot upon the country’ (p. 26). As Paugh rightly notes, the demographic differences between the plantation colonies of British North America, where slave populations were growing, and plantation colonies in the British Caribbean, where slave populations were declining, helps to explain the differing responses of planters in British America to the prospect of rebellion in 1776. West Indian planters relied too much on the slave trade for rebellion to be an attractive prospect. When the slave trade briefly declined during the American Revolution, especially in the difficult years between 1780 and 1782 when the British West Indies was buffeted by hurricanes and beset by fears of French and Spanish invasion, the plantation economy faltered as planters could no longer replace dead labourers with new ones from Africa.

The problem of slave reproduction in the British Caribbean during the age of abolition and revolution and the advantages the United States of America gained from having a rapidly increasing native-born slave population are perennial issues within slavery studies and have attracted lots of attention from many authors. It is always good, however, to have a well-trodden subject given a new look. Paugh’s book is a valuable addition to a venerable literature. In her introduction, Paugh makes some very bold claims about the importance of her work – asserting, for example, that her study ‘promises to reshape our understanding of the historical significance of abolitionism, capitalism, slavery and reproduction’. She tends to overstate the importance of her topic, especially in the introduction, where the prose gets overwrought. Her topic is the politics of slave reproduction, mainly in the British Caribbean during the period where planters, politicians and abolitionists believed slavery could be ameliorated rather than ended in ways that would allow the plantation economy to survive. Thus, she promises but does not deliver an analysis based on Karl Marx’s use of Thomas Malthus to show that ‘abolitionism was an attempt to harness and to commodify the tangible, material, productive powers of Afro-Caribbean women’s bodies to the tasks of capital’ (p. 16). Proving this would be a major challenge to existing interpretations of abolitionism but readers wanting such a challenge will be disappointed as few of the bold claims about the importance of the politics of reproduction are explored in the book.

I wish the author showed more circumspection in some of her stronger claims, such as her claim that ‘Afro-Caribbean women’s fertility was at the crux of plans for ensuring the economic health of the British Empire during the age of abolition’ (p. 189). By the early 19th century, the British Empire encompassed much more than just the West Indies and while what happened in the West Indies was important, its importance was less than it had been. This was a period when Britain expanded its rule into India, Africa and Australia and traded extensively with the United States and with Latin America. That the West Indies had declined in the political economy of empire was one of Eric Williams’ major points in his famous linking of the industrial revolution with West Indian slavery. Unlike Paugh, who seems to think that abolitionists and West Indian slave owners were committed together to an ideology of free trade ‘that sought to define sexual behavior in the interests of capital,’ Williams saw planters abandoned in the 1840s by a British state no longer concerned about the protection of sugar duties and under the thrall of an industrial capitalist bourgeoisie gathered under the banner of free trade. Keith McClelland (not in Paugh’s bibliography) shows that West Indian slave owners fought a determined rear guard defence for the maintenance of sugar duties and to an extent were able to thwart abolitionist free traders with the importation of indentured servants from Asia. As Richard Huzzey (also not cited here) shows in his comprehensive study of anti-slavery and empire after 1834, debates over sugar and emancipation were very divisive, making it hard to claim, as Paugh does, that there was unity within a British political class who wanted to ‘mold the reproduction of the plantation labor force to the needs of the emerging global, capitalist economy’.(2)

Paugh’s book is more modest than she claims in her introduction. It is less a unified text but six individual essays (three of which largely repeat articles published elsewhere) on aspects of the politics of reproduction. Essays on the political economy and the politics of medical knowledge of the politics of reproduction alternate with essays on the remarkable elite free coloured slave family of Mary Hylas, her daughter, Doll, and her grandchildren from the well-documented Newton estate in Barbados. These essays are especially good, even if much of the information provided is similar to that in Karl Watson’s biography of the family published in 2000.(3) Paugh shows in an analysis of a little studied but important law case that was a precursor to the more famous Somerset case of 1772 that debates over marriages between enslaved people raised issues in Britain about whether being a slave made it impossible to also be a married woman. Paugh uses the case to develop in later chapters the ambivalent position of elite free women of colour and explicates very well the local power politics that Afro-Barbadian women had to navigate in order to establish various kinds of sexual relationships, from concubinage to marriage. They did this in circumstances that were much more complicated than imagined by moralistic abolitionists wedded to ideas of Christian monogamy.

Events on the ground complicated the ideology of reproduction promoted from Britain.      The essays on the political economy of reproduction also have much to recommend them. She shows how the gradualist position adopted by planters after 1788 was successful in blunting advocates of the immediate abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Although this argument is not new – J. R. Ward in his British West Indian Slavery, the most important work on planter amelioration (not cited by Paugh), made a similar argument – there is a wealth of evidence put forward showing how planters adapted their arguments in favour of slavery when facing powerful abolitionist opposition.(4) Planters were adept at using demographic arguments for their own purposes. The chapter which deals with how doctors built on greater interest in using Afro-Caribbean sexuality and fertility to improve enslaved persons’ demography in order to increase medical knowledge is particularly valuable. Paugh adds to this relatively familiar story by showing how Afro-Caribbean women were vital participants in this developing medical discourse.  Paugh might connect this aspect of her work to the more expansive work of Mark Harrison (not mentioned in the bibliography) in which he shows how commercial and imperial expansion in the tropics enabled doctors experienced in West Indian medicine to become experts in tropical medicine, and able to apply techniques learned in the Caribbean to other places, notably India.(5)

As might be discerned from the comments above, one weakness of a book that is conceived of as a set of narrowly focused essays is that it can lack wider context. Paugh has limited herself in this work to the consequences (her italics) of demographic failure rather than to the more familiar debate on the causes of enslaved women’s infertility in the Caribbean. I can understand the need to delimit of the boundaries of one’s study but in this case ignoring the causes of infertility is a mistake. Her knowledge of the secondary literature is patchy. As well as the works listed above that do not seem to have been consulted, she misses important articles by Ken Morgan and Michael Tadman which explain that the main reason for enslaved women’s low fertility was the harsh demands of working in sugar.(6) This fact is crucially important for Paugh’s argument. Paugh concentrates on how planters and abolitionists argued that it was sexual immorality that led to low fertility but says little about the many abolitionist arguments that what had to be changed in the Caribbean was not slave sexual behaviour but work patterns, especially how slave women worked as field labourers on sugar plantations. At bottom, the reason why Caribbean slave populations could never flourish, especially in the newly opened lands of Trinidad and British Guiana, was that planters insisted on growing sugar and relegated, as did John Kelly in Jamaica in the American Revolution, enslaved women’s reproductive interests in favour of increased sugar production. Slave populations in British North America experienced natural increase because enslaved Virginians worked in tobacco, not sugar.

That the politics of reproduction in abolitionist discourse were closely connected to arguments about how enslaved people were worked would have been more apparent if Paugh had extended her analysis away from the older slave colonies of Barbados (where almost all her archival evidence comes from) and Jamaica to the new slave colonies of Trinidad, Berbice and Demerara. As Nicholas Draper and Alvin Thompson (not cited by Paugh) argue, the slave frontier had moved to these areas by the early 19th century and with the creation of the slave registration system in Trinidad in 1813, lots of data on slave population came from these areas.

Paugh really should have read more deeply into British West Indian historiography than she has done. Many books and articles that I expected to be cited are not mentioned in the bibliography, such as books and articles by Christer Petley on Jamaica, an article by Amanda Thornton on the medical care of slaves, Robert Fogel’s Without Consent, Christina Dierksheide’s important study of amelioration, and most egregiously Richard Dunn’s major comparative study of work and demography in Virginia and Jamaica. Dunn’s book was published in late 2014.(7) Paugh seems to have finished her book in that year, despite it being published in April 2017, as there is only one reference to a book published in 2015. It is also disappointing that Paugh pays so little attention to the voluminous work on Caribbean demography by Barry Higman, citing only one article from 1973 and a book from 1984 and thus ignoring his many works bearing on slave demography written in the last 30 years.(8)

It is unreasonable to expect Paugh to absorb Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin’s definitive work on Malthus as a colonial theorist, as their book was only published in 2016. Yet readers of Paugh’s book, in which Malthus is highlighted as a major contributor to Caribbean demography, making a great effort to ‘reconcile the politics of reproduction in Great Britain and the British Caribbean colonies’, (p. 163) will find her thesis hard to square with Bashford and Chaplin’s argument that Malthus went out of his way to avoid writing about the West Indies, in part, they suggest, because he had West Indian property. Malthus only mentioned the West Indies once, in a footnote that was a last minute final footnote in the 1806 edition of the Essay on Population. It went on, as Paugh notes, for three pages, but Bashford and Chaplin dismiss its importance, saying that it was rushed and that ‘its add-on status betrays avoidance as much as afterthought’. Paugh, by contrast, attaches great importance to this footnote, devoting several pages to what she considers Malthus’ ‘intervention in the abolitionist debates’ (p. 168). Readers of Bashford and Chaplin may find it hard to credit Paugh’s contention that ‘Malthusian demography … continued to lend credence to the links between Africans, sexual promiscuity, and infertility’ (p. 170) given how little attention Malthus personally devoted to slavery in the West Indies.(9)

Of course, others have noticed that Malthus said virtually nothing about New World slavery. Seymour Drescher in The Mighty Experiment argued that Malthus had no interest in slavery as a transatlantic phenomenon, and implies that abolitionists worked around Malthus rather than using him directly. Drescher believes that demographic arguments were always strongly in abolitionists’ favour. Paugh’s work is an extended, if sideways, engagement with Drescher’s work. Paugh mentions Drescher only twice. She does not think much of Drescher’s arguments, disagreeing with him that abolitionism emerged very suddenly as a political issue in Britain in the late 1780s and attacking his well-known argument that abolitionism was a form of econocide – an economically irrational humanitarian gesture on the part of abolitionists. Paugh does not accept Roger Anstey and Drescher’s arguments that abolitionists were motivated by religious rather than economic motives. She supports a modified Williams’ thesis in which slavery helped fuel capital accumulation and industrialisation. Abolitionists provided humanitarians with good feelings about their ‘moral capital’ while ensuring that the plantation system and the global trade that it spawned were retained. Thus she tends towards the view that abolitionism was a form of applied hypocrisy, thought she does not say this directly. She argues, moreover, that Drescher’s arguments about abolitionist contentions over slave demography should make him amend his ‘econocide’ argument as so many demographic discussions were shaped, she believes, so as to keep the West Indian plantations prosperous.(10)

To my mind, Drescher’s arguments still stand and provide a more convincing explanation of why abolitionism, or at least the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, succeeded than do Paugh’s counter-assertions. Drescher downplays the impact of the American Revolution on planter fortunes, and admittedly in parts overstates his case as it is clear from Selwyn Carrington’s work that between 1779 and 1782 the West Indies suffered greatly from commercial blockade and from the diminishment of the slave trade. Paugh, however, relies too much on Carrington and fails to appreciate that the British West Indies rebounded quickly from the economic blip of the early 1780s. Indeed, her reconstruction of net profits from the Newton Estate shows that the plantation boomed after 1785, with profits spiking in 1792 and again in 1798. By then the Atlantic slave trade to the British Caribbean was at its 18th-century peak.

Drescher is right to argue that the abolition of the slave trade occurred when the West Indian was fundamentally healthy. He is also right to say that abolitionism took off from virtually nothing in 1787. Paugh’s argument that it probably took British politicians a few years to formulate a way forward after the American Revolution seems unfounded and incorrect – not least because British politicians, as opposed to evangelical aboliitonists, were, except for William Pitt, mostly in favour of the expansion of slavery in the Caribbean in the 1780s and 1790s rather than being supporters of abolition. And Drescher’s summation that ‘antislavery’s victories came without encouragement from either transatlantic economics or metropolitan economists’ seems to me a good summary – one informed by economics but at bottom a religiously inspired experiment in mass mobilization of a politically conscious public against activities that besmirched Britain’s good name. Yet to Drescher’s arguments it is useful to add a little bit of Paugh’s thesis, especially the notion that Britain’s Caribbean colonies were a pivotal place for the emergence of the politics of reproduction. There is a lot more life still in the question of Afro-women’s reproductive choices and the consequences of those choices, and this will keep historians interested and arguing for some time.

Notes

  1. B. W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica 1750-1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy (Kingston, Jamaica, 2005), pp. 201, 221-2.Back to (1)
  2. Keith McClelland, ‘Redefining the West India interest: politics and the legacies of slave-ownership’, In Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, ed. Catherine Hall (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 127-62; Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2012).Back to (2)
  3. Karl Watson, A Kind of Right to be Idle: Old Doll Matriarch of Newton Plantation (Barbados, 2000).Back to (3)
  4. J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration  (Oxford, 1988).Back to (4)
  5. Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1660-1850 (Oxford, 2010).Back to (5)
  6. Michael Tadman, ‘The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas’, American Historical Review 105 (2000), 1534-75; Kenneth Morgan, ‘Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, c.1776-1834’, History  (2006), 231-53.Back to (6)
  7. Christer Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition (London, 2009); Amanda Thornton, ‘Coerced Care: Thomas Thistlewood’s Account of Medical Practice on Enslaved Populations in Colonial Jamaica, 1751-1786’; Slavery & Abolition, 32 (2011), 535-59; Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, NY, 1989); Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville, VA, 2014) and Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, MA, 2014).Back to (7)
  8. For example, B.W. Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739-1912 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1998).Back to (8)
  9. Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton, NJ, 2016).Back to (9)
  10. Seymour Drescher, Econocide; British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: PA, 1977); idem, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, NY, 2002); and idem, ‘The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism’, Slavery & Abolition, 33.Back to (10)
April 2018

Author's Response

Katherine Paugh
Posted: Thu, 05/04/2018 - 10:33

I should like to thank Prof. Burnard for this provocative review. I appreciate the chance to engage with a respected scholar regarding pivotal questions in the political and economic histories of slavery and reproduction.

The politics of reproduction has certainly long been a theme in the historiography of the early Caribbean. As the introduction to my book discusses, the region’s demographers have debated the causes of persistent decline among the enslaved populations of the British Caribbean, and social historians of the region have documented the emergence of plantation management strategies designed to promote childbearing and preserve the health of the enslaved during the era of amelioration, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. What my book offers that is new is a broad interweaving of this long-standing sense among historians of the Caribbean that reproduction was a concern among slave-owners, with the broader Atlantic histories of slavery, abolitionism, medicine, economics, politics, sexuality, childbirth, and women/gender. What this approach loses in exhaustive historiographic engagement with each subfield, it gains in its power to address some of the big questions of Atlantic world history. Indeed, I made the intentional decision to limit historiographic debate to the book’s introduction and footnotes in order to present an engaging narrative encompassing the broad sweep of Atlantic world history that would appeal to general readers. In sum, what I hope my book offers is the sense that Afro-Caribbean women’s reproductive lives mattered, not only as an episode in the social and demographic history of the Caribbean, but also to the broader political and economic history of empire. In what follows, I will focus on my answers to two big historical questions raised in Burnard’s review.

The first question is this: was the British abolitionist movement motivated by economic factors or is it better characterized as a primarily religious and humanitarian venture? This question is as old as the abolitionist movement itself. Until the publication of Eric Williams’ pivotal Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, the consensus among historians was that the abolitionist movement owed its success to the inspiration of Christianity and the humane sensibilities of the British people.(1a) This assertion persists to this day, as for example in the recent controversial ‘Ethics and Empire’ project, hosted by the McDonald Centre at Christ Church College, Oxford, which lists the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade as one of the ethical achievements of empire. Williams developed a line of counter-argument that had already been suggested in the work of his mentor, the Black Marxist scholar C. L. R. James. He demonstrated that the accumulation of capital in Great Britain arose to a significant extent from the Atlantic slave trade and from trade with the Caribbean colonies, which relied on slave labour. Members of the British political elite with investments in the West Indies (or what James would call the ‘maritime bourgeoisie’) were committed to maintaining the economic viability of Britain’s Caribbean colonies during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.(2a) Yet as the industrial sector of the British empire expanded and with it the industrial bourgeoisie, and as the reach of the empire expanded to new parts of the globe, British ruling elites were no longer so dependent on the Caribbean colonies for their wealth, and thus willingly acceded to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and eventually the emancipation of West Indian slaves. The American Revolution was a pivotal event in this transformation, in that it initiated a period of declining economic and political influence for slave owners and the maritime bourgeoisie. Seymour Drescher, whose work has since its publication been seen by many historians as a persuasive takedown of the ‘Williams thesis’, argued that in fact the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 was an ‘econocide’, inspired primarily by humanitarianism at a time when the British West Indian economy was thriving. He based his claims on an analysis of the share of Britain’s trade that was devoted to the West Indies, which indicated that in the years immediately preceding the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, the West Indian trade had rebounded from the devastation caused by the American war.(3a)

My book’s focus on the politics of reproduction provides a new timeline for comprehending abolitionism and new evidence that the abolitionist movement was deeply intertwined with the economic ambitions of the British Empire’s political elite. Burnard is thus right to say that I find fault with Drescher’s ‘econocide’ thesis. Drescher’s argument turned on a quantitative analysis of British colonial trade, but my book focuses instead on what British politicians debating abolitionism - as well as various other interested parties including slave owners, doctors, and missionaries - actually said about their economic intentions, and particularly their intentions regarding the reproduction of labour. There has not been an extended close reading of British parliamentary debates regarding abolitionism since Roger Anstey’s 1977 study, and Anstey argued that evangelical religion was the primary impetus for abolitionism.(4a)

To begin with, the abolitionist movement certainly did not take off ‘from virtually nothing in 1787’, as Burnard claims. This is not even true if we focus strictly on abolitionism that found a hearing in governmental venues and try also to contain abolitionism within British national boundaries - perhaps Burnard is forgetting Granville Sharp and the Somerset case of 1772? But my book understands abolitionism within a broader, Atlantic world frame. From this vantage point, the origins of political abolitionism are better placed in Virginia in the late 1760s and early 1770s, when the Virginia legislature attempted to stem the tide of the Atlantic slave trade through adoption of prohibitive duties on slave imports. The politics of reproduction help to explain why: unlike Britain’s Caribbean colonies, the Chesapeake was experiencing demographic growth among its enslaved labourers. As Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor wryly observed, Virginia’s most prosperous planters had ‘bred a great quantity of slaves’ (my book, p. 23). Elite Virginians therefore had little need for additional imports. My book shows how the willingness of elite Virginians to condemn the Atlantic slave trade provided fodder for Sharp’s early abolitionism, and helped to inspire Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

Moreover, American opposition to the Atlantic slave trade during the American Revolution caused a virtual halt of the slave trade to the British Caribbean, creating a demographic crisis with which British abolitionists would subsequently grapple. As early as 1784, the year after the war ended, the influential abolitionist James Ramsay argued that promoting childbearing among Afro-Caribbean women would ensure the economic prosperity of West Indian plantations, allowing planters to ‘much more than double their present profit’ (my book, p. 41). Debates about abolitionism in the 1780s and 1790s revolved around how best to implement this transition to a home-grown labour force. Some radical abolitionists endorsed immediate abolition, while politicians with investments in the Caribbean, many of them financiers with capital sunk into West Indian agriculture who had suffered through a wave of foreclosures during the American Revolution, were wary of abrupt changes that might result in further foreclosures. Nonetheless, the latter shared the hope that a crop of children born to enslaved women in the Caribbean could eventually end their need for the embattled Atlantic slave trade, just as it had done for elite Virginians. To say, therefore, as Burnard does, that ‘British politicians, as opposed to evangelical abolitionists, were, except for William Pitt, mostly in favour of the expansion of slavery in the Caribbean in the 1780s and 1790s rather than being supporters of abolition’, is an oversimplification that fails to convey the consensus that emerged in the aftermath of the American Revolution, among both the maritime bourgeoisie and the evangelical advocates of abolitionism: that it would be economically beneficial to make the transition from the Atlantic slave trade to the reproduction of plantation labour by Afro-Caribbean women. During the 1790s, they disagreed only on the timing.

The politics of reproduction also help to explain why this movement to reform reproduction by abolishing the Atlantic slave trade succeeded in 1807. Burnard claims that my book ‘fails to appreciate that the British West Indies rebounded quickly from the economic blip of the early 1780s’. This is nonsense. In fact, my book argues that the rebound of sugar production that Drescher points out was, as David Ryden has pointed out, useless to the British in 1807 because disruptions to re-export markets caused by the Napoleonic Wars resulted in a devastating glut that year, and because Cuban sugar was quickly flooding global sugar markets.(5a) I point out also that the United States was preparing to end its own involvement in the slave trade, which raised the prospect of further disruptions to the flow of Africans to the Caribbean, similar to those suffered during the American Revolution. The timing was thus right for the long-contemplated effort to force slave owners, in the words of Wilberforce, to ‘make breeding the prime object of their attention’ (my book, p. 1). Moreover, when we consider that politicians on both sides of the debates had long described the goal of a self-reproducing labour force as an economic boon to the West Indies, Drescher’s claim that this was a moment of econocide collapses. Drescher’s focus on 1807 was always problematic. Enslaved labourers in the Caribbean were not emancipated until the 1830s. By then, even Burnard and Drescher acknowledge that the West Indian economy was in steep decline. By tracing the political and economic aspirations of British politicians for the fertility of enslaved women’s bodies, it thus becomes possible to understand the history of abolitionism differently.

 

Overall, Burnard’s critique of my book seems to suffer from an old-fashioned vision of the relationship between capitalism and slavery. Because my book is a relatively straightforward attempt to build on the insights of Black Marxism, I have not bothered to outline in the book’s historiographic introduction the fine points of the debate among Marxist scholars about the relationship between capitalism and slavery, but perhaps it will be useful here to clarify where Burnard has gone wrong. Particularly misleading is his assertion that I apparently ‘think that abolitionists and West Indian slave owners were committed together to an ideology of free trade “that sought to define sexual behaviour in the interests of capital”’. Long gone are the days when historians could blithely locate the origins of capitalism in the rise of industrialism, free trade, and wage labour. As Robin D.G. Kelley has discussed, well before the current vogue for Atlantic world history Black Marxist historians were pointing out that the economic webs that grew out of the Atlantic slave trade laid the foundations of the capitalist world system.(6a) There has been some disagreement among Marxist scholars about the particulars. Some have debated whether the profits reaped from the commercial networks spawned by new world slavery should be understood as a sort of primitive accumulation laying the foundation for capitalism, or whether the enslavement of Africans was in fact integral to the early history of capitalism. Marxist scholars have also debated whether enslaved workers themselves were, in the words of C. L. R. James, ‘closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time’, or whether slavery is better understood as a variation on feudalism. Some scholars have argued that the labour of enslaved Africans was (equally with that of wage labourers) a crucial conduit for the production of surplus value and consequent accumulation of capital, and furthermore that the coexistence of free and unfree labour has remained essential to the functioning of the capitalist world system.(7a) But Marxist scholars generally agree, at least, that the accumulation of capital in Europe was fuelled by the Atlantic slave trade and protected markets for slave-grown commodities, even as the contradictory virtues of free labour and free trade became an increasingly central feature of capitalist ideology. My book builds on this relatively uncontested insight, arguing that abolitionists and the West Indian interest agreed that encouraging childbearing among Afro-Caribbean women would help to safeguard capital invested in the West Indies and ensure the continued exploitation of Afro-Caribbean labour.

Burnard raises another big question that is worthy of discussion: Was the science of demography shaped at its inception by the histories of slavery and reproduction? My book traces the history of medical, demographic, and religious ideas about the mechanics of reproduction, arguing that the reforming mentalities that evolved during the age of abolition set an important precedent for governmental management of reproduction under global capitalism. Although there is not room to fully discuss this aspect of my book here, I want to specifically address the role of Malthusian demography in abolitionism.

Burnard apparently believes that Malthusian demography played a trivial role in abolitionist debates. He misunderstands the recent book on Malthus by Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin when he says, about Malthus’ published intervention in the abolitionist debates, that these authors ‘dismiss its importance’. In fact, Bashford and Chaplin claim in their chapter on Malthus and slavery that ‘either Malthus himself or his principle of population were present at each point in the parliamentary process’.(8a) In the course of making this argument, they cite both my doctoral dissertation and my article in Past & Present. Bashford and Chaplin do explain that Malthus was personally reluctant to comment on the situation in the West Indies, perhaps partly because his own family held claims to West Indian property. But they also convey in some detail that Malthus’ personal reluctance did not stop numerous participants in the abolitionist debates from using Malthus’ published observations about slavery and reproduction elsewhere in the world to their advantage. When Malthus did finally deign to comment on Caribbean demography, offering an extended footnote in the 1806 edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, both sides continued to cite him for their cause, with Wilberforce proudly proclaiming the publication of Malthus’ intervention in the midst of the pivotal debates that led to the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Burnard is also wrong to say that Drescher claims that ‘Malthus had no interest in slavery as a transatlantic phenomenon’. Drescher, too, recounts the publication of Malthus’ footnote as a timely intervention in the abolitionist debates.(9a)

My book argues that, in response to the problem of reproduction in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, Malthus developed a facile moralizing logic about the causes of population decline that has become a recurring theme in the government of sexuality under global capitalism. In his extended footnote, Malthus provided fodder for the numerous participants in the abolitionist debates (both evangelicals and those with West Indian property) who attributed the infertility of Afro-Caribbean women’s bodies to racially characteristic sexual promiscuity, even as he acknowledged that the harsh conditions of slavery were also to blame. In particular, Malthus claimed that the causes of demographic decline in the West Indies could ‘be attributed to the excessive and unusual action of vice and misery’ (my book, p. 167). In Malthus’ thinking, the sexual vices of the enslaved populations of the British Caribbean thus created an exception to the natural tendency of human populations to increase. The existence of such exceptions gave new flexibility to Malthusian demography in guiding the governance of reproduction, allowing it to contend simultaneously with surplus labour in the metropole and inadequate labour in the colonies. In Great Britain, governmental assistance for the labouring poor could be derided as only contributing to the poor’s natural tendency to increase, while in the Caribbean governmental intervention could be justified by the unnatural tendency of the labouring poor to decrease. In both cases, the sexual misbehaviour of the poor was to blame: the sexual vices of the British poor were to blame insofar as they neglected to practice sexual abstinence when unable to support children, while sexual vice in the Caribbean paradoxically inhibited reproduction. In this respect, my book is certainly an attempt to comprehend Marx’s insights into the ideological functions of Malthusian demography, and to build particularly on Marx’s long neglected observation that, on the one hand, in cases where labour was plentiful, governmental refusal to assist the poor was frequently justified by Malthusian claims about the supposed need to allow the labour market to achieve its natural equilibrium, and yet on the other hand in cases of inadequate labour supply, as for example in the colonies, ‘capital … rebels against the “sacred” law of supply and demand, and tries to check its inconvenient action by forcible means and state interference’ (my book, p. 15). This flexibility of Malthusian demography, to govern the reproduction of labour in cases of both under and over supply, emerged out of the age of abolition.

These are two examples of how a focus on the political economy of reproduction sheds new light on big questions in the history of the Atlantic world during the age of abolition. Readers of my book will find that it also reflects on a number of other significant themes: how the emerging obsession with Afro-Caribbean women’s fertility fits into the history of childbirth in the Atlantic world; how enthusiasm for data about Caribbean populations fed a growing governmental appetite for information in the British Empire; how British doctors’ medical theorizing about venereal disease and infertility in the Caribbean perpetuated racialized assumptions about sexual promiscuity, even as African medical knowledge preserved by black healers offered a crucial avenue of resistance; how the work of Methodist missionaries in the Caribbean overlapped with the moralizing logic of reproductive reform. The book attempts also to trace out the implications of these big questions at a microhistorical level in the lives of three generations of an extraordinary Afro-Caribbean family, recounting the previously uncharted midwifery practice of Doll of Newton Plantation in Barbados, as well as the previously unexplored abolitionist legal case regarding Doll’s mother, and the experiences of their female descendants. What links these various elements of the book is the contention that the story of women of African descent giving birth on Caribbean plantations is not simply a story about the social or demographic history of a single region, nor is it solely a story about women’s history or the history of childbirth. It is a political story, with the power to address big questions about the historical forces that have shaped our modern world.

Notes

  1. E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994, originally published in 1944). For the earlier view, see, for example: R. Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, (London, 1933).Back to (1a)
  2. For a useful short overview of James’ insights, see ‘The Revolution and the Negro,’ New International, 5 (December 1939), 339-43. Published under the name J. R. Johnson.Back to (2a)
  3. S. Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, (Pittsburgh, PA, 1977).Back to (3a)
  4. R. Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810, (London, 1975).Back to (4a)
  5. D. Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783-1807, (New York, NY, 2002).Back to (5a)
  6. R.  D. G. Kelley, ‘"But a Local Phase of a World Problem": Black History's global vision, 1883-1950’ Journal of American History, 86, 3 (1999), 1045-77.Back to (6a)
  7. C. James, The Black Jacobins, (New York, NY, 1963, originally published in 1938), p. 86. Instructive contributions to these debates also include D. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and World Economy, (Lanham, MD, 2004); R. Brenner, ‘The origins of capitalist development: a critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, 1, 104 (July-August 1977); I. Wallerstein, ‘American slavery and the capitalist world economy’, American Journal of Sociology, 81, 5 (March 1976), 1199-121; E. Genovese and E. Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, NY,1983); B. Solow, The Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade, (Lanham, MD, 2014).Back to (7a)
  8. A. Bashford and J. E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton, NJ, 2016), p. 173.Back to (8a)
  9. S. Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor Versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, NY, 2002), pp. 43-4.Back to (9a)
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