Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2pzkn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-08T16:01:15.086Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Slavery, Absorption, and Gender: Frederick Cooper and the Power of Comparison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2019

Lisa A. Lindsay
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

This essay considers Frederick Cooper’s early scholarship on African slavery, which called for and modeled a practice of comparative historiography. His critique of the “absorption model” of African slavery, enabled by comparison with the Americas, anticipated important recent trends in the study of Atlantic slavery. Revisiting this critique helps us to understand key features of cultural continuity and change among enslaved people and can inform future research about gender and the Atlantic slave trade. In particular, it suggests the limitations of an analysis that separates the assumed African assimilation of enslaved women from the export mostly of men.

Résumé:

Cet essai porte sur les premières études de Frederick Cooper sur l’esclavage africain, qui préconisaient et modélisaient une pratique de l’historiographie comparée. Sa critique du “modèle d’absorption” de l’esclavage africain, rendue possible par la comparaison avec les Amériques, anticipait d’importantes tendances récentes dans l’étude de l’esclavage dans le monde atlantique. Revenir sur cette critique nous aide à comprendre les caractéristiques clés de la continuité et du changement culturels chez les personnes réduites en esclavage et peut éclairer les recherches futures sur le genre et le commerce des esclaves dans le monde atlantique. En particulier, cette critique suggère les limites d’une analyse qui sépare l’assimilation africaine présumée des femmes esclaves de l’exportation majoritaire d’hommes.

Type
Frederick Cooper and the Historiography of Africa
Information
History in Africa , Volume 47 , June 2020 , pp. 65 - 74
Copyright
© African Studies Association 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beckles, Hilary, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Blassingame, John W., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).Google Scholar
Brathwaite, Kamau, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).Google Scholar
Brown, Vincent, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Brown, Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114–5 (2009), 1231–1249.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1997 [1977]).Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies,” Journal of African History 20–1 (1979), 103–125.Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip D., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip D., Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).Google Scholar
Davis, Angela Y., Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983).Google Scholar
Eltis, David, and Engerman, Stanley L., “Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1663–1864,” Economic History Review 46–2 (1993), 308–323.Google Scholar
Frederickson, George, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene D., Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974).Google Scholar
Gomez, Michael A., Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill NC: UNC Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Gray White, Deborah, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985).Google Scholar
Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).Google Scholar
Kopytoff, Igor, and Miers, Suzanne, “African Slavery as an Institution of Marginality,” in: Miers, Suzanne and Kopytoff, Igor (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 3–81.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Lisa A., “Women and Enslavement in Atlantic Africa,” paper presented to the African Studies Workshop, Harvard University Center for African Studies, 11 March 2019.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E., “The Characteristics of Plantations in the Nineteenth-Century Sokoto Caliphate,” American Historical Review 84–5 (1979), 1267–1292.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E., “Internal Markets or an Atlantic-Sahara Divide? How Women Fit into the Slave Trade of West Africa,” in: Campbell, Gwyn, Miers, Suzanne and Miller, Joseph C. (eds.), Women and Slavery: Africa and the Western Indian Ocean Islands, volume 1 (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 259–279.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E., Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1983]).Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E. (ed.), Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (London: Continuum, 2000).Google Scholar
Mathurin Mair, Lucille, The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies during Slavery (Kingston: African-Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, 1975).Google Scholar
Midlo Hall, Gwendolyn, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill NC: UNC Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Miller, Joseph C., “Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves: Experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic,” in: Campbell, Gwyn, Miers, Suzanne and Miller, Joseph C. (eds.), Women and Slavery: Africa and the Western Indian Ocean Islands, volume 1 (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 1–40.Google Scholar
Mintz, Sidney W., and Price, Richard, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 [1976]).Google Scholar
Morgan, Edmund, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).Google Scholar
Morgan, Jennifer L., Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Nwokeji, G. Ugo, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,” William and Mary Quarterly third series 58–1 (2001), 47–68.Google Scholar
Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar
Patton, Diana, “Reproductive Labour, Atlantic Slavery, and the Development of Capitalism,” Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, June 2017.Google Scholar
Robertson, Claire C., and Klein, Martin A. (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1997).Google Scholar
Smallwood, Stephanie, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Strobel, Margaret, Muslim Women in Mombasa (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
Sweet, James H., Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill NC: UNC Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Sweet, James H., Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill NC: UNC Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Thornton, John K., Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).Google Scholar