The Empire of Necessity (45 page)

  
3
. Description of Bonny is drawn from William Richardson,
A Mariner of England,
London: Murray, 1908, p. 47; Alexander X. Byrd,
Captives and Voyages: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World
, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008 (which stresses that the voyage of inland captives to the coast often equaled in time and suffering that of the Atlantic Middle Passage); Alexander Falconbridge,
An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
, London: J. Phillips, 1788; and George Francis Dow,
Slave Ships and Slaving,
Mineola: Dover, 2002.

  
4
. BN (London) T 70/34.

  
5
. Leitch Ritchie,
Travelling Sketches on the Sea-Coasts of France
, London: Longman, 1834. Byrd,
Captives and Voyages
, p. 55, discusses the reputation for fatalism.

  
6
. Mario Falcao Espalter, “Hipolito Mordeille, Corsario frances al servicio de España,”
Revista del Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay
2 (1922): 473–529. For Mordeille’s success at taking U.S. ships, see Greg Williams,
The French Assault on American Shipping, 1793–1813
, Jefferson: McFarland, 2010; for his taking of the
Hope
after a “desperate resistance” led by its captain, George Astier, see p. 183.

  
7
. Amédée Gréhan, ed.,
La France maritime
, vol. 2, Paris: Postel, 1837, p. 157.

  
8
. For Bolton, see Clement Wakefield Jones,
John Bolton of Storrs
,
1756–1837
, Kendal: T. Wilson, 1959, p. 51; George Baille,
Interesting Letters Addressed to John Bolton, Esq. of Liverpool, Merchant, and Colonel of a Regiment of Volunteers, to Which Is Annexed Sundry Valuable Documents,
London: J. Gold, 1809, p. 34. For Liverpool and French Revolution, see Cecil Sebag-Montefiore,
A History of the Volunteer Forces from the Earliest Times to the Year 1860
, London: A. Constable, 1908, p. 255; Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire,
Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire
, vol. 93, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1942, p. 110;
Patriot
, November 13, 1819. For Wordsworth’s friendship with Bolton, including long evenings at Storrs Hall, see Charles Wordsworth,
Annals of My Early Life, 1806–1846
, London: Longmans, Green, 1891, pp. 13, 93; Juliet Barker,
Wordsworth: A Life
, New York: HarperCollins, 2006, p. 392;
George Canning and His Friends
, vol. 2, London: E. P. Dutton, 1909, p. 288; Ian Goodall, “Storrs Hall, Windermere,”
Georgian Group Journal
15 (2006–7): 159–214; William Angus Knight, ed.,
Letters of the Wordsworth Family from 1787 to 1855
, vol. 2, Boston: Ginn, 1907, p. 129.

  
9
. Manuel Mujica Láinez,
Aquí vivieron: Historias de una quinta de San Isidro, 1583–1924
, Buenos Aires: Sudamérica, 1949, p. 106; Gréhan,
La France maritime
, p. 157.

10
. Here’s an example of how wars and revolutions could serve as tumbling gears, grabbing men up from one situation and leaving them in another, then again, then again, each time resulting in a change of status. Early in Britain’s fight against France, a British merchant ship calling at Cape Coast Castle purchased a cargo of captured Africans. They were considered slaves, locked in the ship’s hold, and destined for the West Indies to work on sugar plantations. That ship was captured by the French navy, which took the Africans not as slaves but as conscripts, distributing them among its frigates and men-of-war. The Africans were now sailors. By 1803, however, the British had recaptured sixty-five of them. After some debate within the councils of the Admiralty, the British deemed the Africans to be not slaves but prisoners of war, subjects—or, as the French preferred, citizens—of a legitimate, if rogue, nation. But since the British couldn’t get France to live up to its customary obligations and provide for these (or any other, for that matter, white or black) captured sailors, the British had them distributed on ships throughout the Royal Navy. They were sailors once again, as well as, presumably, new British subjects (BN (London) ADM 1/3744). See also John Thompson,
The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave
, Worcester, 1856, for the memoir of an escaped Maryland slave who found a life of freedom on the high seas.

11
. J. Aspinall,
Liverpool a Few Years Since
, London, 1852, p. 8. Emma Christopher,
Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 11.

12
. Marcus Rediker,
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750
, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. See also Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker,
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
, New York: Beacon Press, 2001.

2. MORE LIBERTY

  
1
. Samuel Hull Wilcocke,
History of the Viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres
, London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1807, p. 180.

  
2
. Rubén Carámbula,
Negro y tambor: Poemas, pregones, danzas y leyendas sobre motivos del folklore Afro-rioplatense
, Buenos Aires: Editorial Folklórica Americana, 1952, and
Pregones del Montevideo Colonial
, Montevideo: Mosca, 1968. See Lucio V. Mansilla,
Mis memorias: Infancia-Adolescencia
, Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1904, p. 132, for memories of “dark skinned hawkers” in Buenos Aires, their baskets filled with bread, milk, fish, peaches, cakes, hot empanadas, “singing of sweet cider, tripe and giblets.”

  
3
. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,
Obras completas de Sarmiento
, vol. 42, Buenos Aires: Luz del Día, p. 15.

  
4
. John Purdy,
The Brasilian Navigator; or, Sailing Directory for All the Coasts of Brasil, to Accompany Laurie’s New General Chart
, London: R. H. Laurie, 1838, p. 174; Wilcocke,
History of the Viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres
, p. 180.

  
5
. AGN (Montevideo), Archivos Particulares, caja 332, carpeta 4 (“Documentos relativos al Período Colonial. Libro Copiador de correspondencia comercial, a Martín de Alzaga”).

  
6
. Lyman Johnson,
Workshop of Revolution: Plebéian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810
, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 19–20, 299; Jerry Cooney, “Doing Business in the Smuggling Way: Yankee Contraband in the Río de la Plata,”
American Neptune
47 (1987): 162–68. Vicente Gesualdo, “Los Negros en Buenos Aires y el Interior,”
Historia
2; May 5, 1982: 26–49.

  
7
. George Reid Andrews,
The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900
, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980, p. 24; Berenice A. Jacobs, “The
Mary Ann
, an Illicit Adventure,”
Hispanic American Historical Review
37 (May 1957): 200–12; Charles Lyon Chandler, “The River Plate Voyages, 1798–1800,”
American Historical Review
23 (July 1918): 816–26; Ernesto Bassi Arevaol, “Slaves as Commercial Scapegoats: Smuggling Clothes under the Cover of the Slave Trade in Caribbean New Granada,” paper presented at the American Historical Association Conference, New Orleans, January 5, 2013.

  
8
. See Jeremy Adelman,
Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic
, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, ch. 2, particularly pp. 58–73. Adelman writes (p. 72) that “each metropolitan solution, or concession to colonial pressure, yielded to more pressure, and thus accumulated into a sweeping new model of imperial trade: the traffic in slaves was the centerpiece to fuel merchant fortunes and to expand the commercial frontier into imperial hinterlands.” The number of slaves in Spain’s American colonies, which had been steadily increasing for a century—needed to mine gold and harvest cacao in Colombia and Venezuela and pick sugar in Peru and Cuba—exploded at the end of the 1700s (Herbert Klein,
The Atlantic Slave Trade: New Approaches to the Americas
, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 38–40). See also for what follows Frank T. Proctor, “Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de Paños of New Spain, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,”
Americas
, 60 (2003): 33–58; Kris Lane, “Africans and Natives in the Mines of Spanish America,” in
Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America
, ed. Matthew Restall, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005, pp. 159–84; Kris Lane,
Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 67–69. For African and Andean interactions in coastal estates, see Rachel O’Toole,
Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru
, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012; Nicholas P. Cushner,
Farm and Factory: The Jesuits and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Colonial Quito, 1600–1767
, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

  
9
. For Cuba, see Louis Perez,
Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy
, Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2003, p. 5. For discussion of deregulation, see Manuel Lucena Salmoral,
Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886): Documentos para su studio
, 2005, part 1 (on CD-ROM), pp. 170–75; part 2, pp. 247, 257. See part 1, p. 144, for “slavers’ fever.” For the right “to buy blacks wherever they were to be found,” see Mario Hernán Baquero,
El Virrey Don Antonio Amar y Borbón
, Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1988, p. 172.

10
. Alex Borucki, “The Slave Trade to the Río de la Plata, 1777–1812: Trans-Imperial Networks and Atlantic Warfare,”
Colonial Latin American Review
20 (2011): 85.

11
. See letter from Thomas White to Messrs. Gardner and Dean, March 17, 1806, Slavery Collection, series II: Gardner and Dean, New-York Historical Society.

12
. My understanding of the importance of slavery to South America’s market revolution is indebted to Adelman’s
Sovereignty and Revolution
. The deregulation of the slave trade was a central component in Spain’s efforts to adapt the colonial system to the “pressures of ramped-up inter-imperial competition.” But, according to Adelman, unlike the large-scale, export-focused plantations found in the U.S. South and the Caribbean, slavery in South America linked together “ever more diverse and decentralized commercial hubs” throughout the whole of the continent. “It could be argued,” Adelman writes, “drawing on Ira Berlin, that South America’s expanding hinterlands were slave societies (not simply societies with slaves) where slaves were central to productive processes. Plantations existed, but they were embedded in more diversified social systems,” with smaller establishments and hybrid forms of wage and coerced labor. “Slavery helped support rapidly commercialized, relatively diffused and adaptive production in the South American hinterlands integrated by the flow of merchant capital. And as it did so, it helped colonies become increasingly autonomous, economically and socially, from metropolitan Spanish and Portuguese command.” In other words, what became American freedom—independence from Spain—was made possible by American slavery (p. 59). Such an approach opens up new ways to compare U.S. and Spanish American slavery and allows for a consideration of the economic importance of slavery without reproducing old debates about whether slavery was capitalist or compatible with capitalism. In the United States, historians have recently returned to an older scholarly tradition emphasizing the importance of slavery to the making of modern capitalism, examining slavery not just as a system of labor or a generator of profit but as a driver of finance capital and real estate speculation, as well as looking at how plantations served as organizational models for “innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management,” as Harvard’s Sven Beckert and Brown’s Seth Rockman write, in “How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism,” in
Bloomberg
, January 24, 2012 (
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes.html
). See also Beckert and Rockman’s forthcoming edited collection “Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development,” to be published by University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as earlier work, including Eric Williams,
Capitalism and Slavery
, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944, and Sidney Mintz,
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
, New York: Viking, 1985; Sidney Mintz, “Slavery and Emergent Capitalism,” in
Slavery in the New World
, ed. Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969. See also Walter Johnson’s recent
River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.