essay on slavery in america

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Slavery in America

By: History.com Editors

Published: April 25, 2024

Millions of enslaved Africans contributed to the establishment of colonies in the Americas and continued laboring in various regions of the Americas after their independence, including the United States. Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619 , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia . The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista. Yet, enslaved Africans had been present in regions such as Florida, that are part of present-day United States nearly one century before.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than Indigenous populations and indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Existing estimates establish that Europeans and American slave traders transported nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas. Of this number approximately 10.7 million disembarked alive in the Americas. During the 18th century alone, approximately 6.5 million enslaved persons were transported to the Americas. This forced migration deprived the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern Atlantic coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

Slavery in Plantations and Cities

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. Starting 1662, the colony of Virginia and then other English colonies established that the legal status of a slave was inherited through the mother. As a result, the children of enslaved women legally became slaves.

Before the rise of the American Revolution , the first debates to abolish slavery emerged. Black and white abolitionists contributed to the enactment of new legislation gradually abolishing slavery in some northern states such as Vermont and Pennsylvania. However, these laws emancipated only the newly born children of enslaved women.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the end of the American Revolutionary War , slavery was maintained in the new states. The new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it determined that three out of every five enslaved people were counted when determining a state's total population for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, European and American slave merchants purchased enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas and forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco, wheat, indigo, rice, sugar, and cotton. Enslaved men and women also performed work in northern cities such as Boston and New York, and in southern cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Baltimore.

By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War . Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

In the late 18th century, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop planted and harvested by enslaved people, but whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a U.S.-born  schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region’s dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery was never widespread in the North as it was in the South, but many northern businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Although gradual abolition emancipated newborns since the late 18th century, slavery was only abolished in New York in 1827, and in Connecticut in 1848.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many enslavers raped women they held in slavery, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their enslavers.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Enslaved people organized r ebellions as early as the 18th century. In 1739, enslaved people led the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the largest slave rebellion during the colonial era in North America.  Other rebellions followed, including the one led by  Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. These uprisings were brutally repressed.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered as many 50 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Like with previous rebellions, in the aftermath of the Nat Turner’s Rebellion, slave owners feared similar insurrections and southern states further passed legislation prohibiting the movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

As slavery expanded during the second half of the 18th century,  a growing abolitionist movement emerged in the North.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by formerly enslaved people  such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison , founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator .

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Black abolitionists  and antislavery northerners led meetings and created newspapers. They also had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and “ stationmasters ” included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although no one knows for sure how many men, women, and children escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, it was in the thousands ( estimates range from 25,000 to 100,000).  

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America’s explosive growth—and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century—would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War .

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed —in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party . In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his enslaver had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry , Virginia—in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal—resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown’s hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America ; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t officially end all slavery in America—that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War’s end in 1865—some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples’ status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment , but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping .

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy —including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

Ana Lucia Araujo , a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, edited and contributed to this article. Dr. Araujo is currently Professor of History at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Projects. Her three more recent books are Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History , The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism , and Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery .

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A Brief History of Slavery in the United States

When Europeans first colonized the North American continent, the land was vast, the work was harsh, and there was a severe shortage of labor. White bond servants, paying their passage across the ocean from Europe through indentured labor, eased but did not solve the problem. Tensions between settlers and former indentured servants increased the pressure to find a new labor source.  Early in the seventeenth century, a Dutch ship loaded with African slaves introduced a solution—and yet paradoxically a new problem—to the New World. Slaves proved to be economical on large farms where labor-intensive cash crops, such as tobacco, sugar and rice, could be grown.

By the end of the American Revolution , slavery became largely unprofitable in the North and was slowly dying out. Even in the South the institution was becoming less useful to farmers as tobacco prices fluctuated and began to drop. Due to the decline of the tobacco market in the 1760s and 1770s many farmers switched from producing tobacco to wheat, which required less labor leading to surplus of slaves. However, in 1793 northerner Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin; this device made it possible for textile mills to use the type of cotton most easily grown in the lower South. The invention of the cotton gin brought about a robust internal slave trade. As the lower South became more established in cotton production the region required more slave labor, which they received from upper South slaveowners looking to offload their surplus of slaves. In 1808, the United States banned the international slave trade (the importation of slaves),  which only increased the demand for domestically traded slaves. In the upper South the most profitable cash crop was not was not an agricultural product but the sale of human lives.  Although some southerners owned no slaves at all, by 1860 the South’s “peculiar institution” was inextricably tied to the region’s economy and society.

Torn between the economic benefits of slavery and the moral and constitutional issues it raised, white southerners grew more and more defensive of the institution. They argued that black people, like children, were incapable of caring for themselves and that slavery was a benevolent institution that kept them fed, clothed, and occupied, and exposed them to Christianity.  Most northerners did not doubt that black people were inferior to whites, but they did doubt the benevolence of slavery. The voices of Northern abolitionists, such as Boston editor and publisher William Lloyd Garrison, became increasingly violent. Educated blacks such as escaped-slave Frederick Douglass wrote eloquent and heartfelt attacks on the institution and spoke on abolitionist circuits about their experience enslaved.

Anti-slavery proponents organized the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape north to freedom. Although fictionalized, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 immensely popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin opened northerner’s eyes to some of the horrors of slavery and refuted the southern myth that blacks were happy as slaves.

In reality, treatment of slaves ranged from mild and paternalistic to cruel and sadistic. Husbands, wives, and children were frequently sold away from one another and punishment by whipping was not unusual. In 1857 the United States Supreme Court in the decision Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that all blacks, whether free or enslaved, lacked the rights to citizenship and thus could not sue in federal court. The Supreme Court took their decision a step further by deeming that Congress had in fact exceeded its authority in the earlier Missouri Compromise because it had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories. The Supreme Court also ruled that popular sovereignty, where new territories could vote on entering the union as a free or slave state, lacked constitutional legitimacy. Thus, slaves had no legal means of protesting their treatment. Due to the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry , and other earlier slave uprisings, Southerners feared servile insurrection above all else but this was rare. Instead as a form of resistance slaves would pretend illness, organize slowdowns, sabotage farm machinery, and sometimes commit arson or murder. Running away for short periods of time was common.

The outbreak of the Civil War forever changed the future of the American nation and perhaps most notably the future of Americans held in bondage. The war began as a struggle to preserve the Union, not a struggle to free the slaves but as the war dragged on it became increasingly clear to President Abraham Lincoln the best way to force the seceded states into submission was to undermine their labor supply and economic engine which was sustaining the south—slavery. Many slaves escaped to the North in the early years of the war, and several Union generals established contraband policies in the southern land that they conquered.  Congress passed laws permitting the seizure of slaves from rebellious southerners as the rules of war allow for the seizure of property and the United States considered slaves property. On September 22, 1862, following the strategic Union victory at Antietam , President Abraham Lincoln presented the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation .

This document decreed that, by the power of the United States armed forces, all slaves in states that were still in rebellion one hundred days after January 1, 1863 would be "thenceforward and forever free."  Furthermore, Lincoln established an institution through which free blacks could join the U.S. Army, an unprecedented level of integration at that time.  The United States Colored Troops (USCT) served on many battlefields, won numerous Medals of Honor, and ensured eventual Union victory in the war. 

On December 6, 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, the United States adopted the 13th Amendment to the Constitution , which outlawed the practice of slavery. 

• Patricia L. Faust, ed., Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War , (Harper Perennial, 1991)
• John S. Bowman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Civil War , (Dorset Press, 1992)
• Bruce Catton, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War , (Bonanza Books, 1982). 

Further Reading

• Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America  By: Ira Berlin.
• Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South  By: Stephanie M. H. Camp.
• Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy  By: Eric Foner.
• Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market  By: Walter Johnson.
• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era  By: James M. McPherson.
• Slavery: A World History  By: Milton Meltzer.
• The Slaves Cause: A History of Abolition  By: Manisha Sinha.

"Negro, Mulatto, or Indian man slave[s]": African Americans in the Rhode Island Regiments, 1775-1783

Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens

African Americans at Antietam

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Learning About Slavery With Primary Sources

In this lesson, students will use primary sources from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture to better understand the history of slavery in the United States.

By Nicole Daniels

Find all our Lessons of the Day here.

Lesson Overview

Featured Article: “ A Brief History of Slavery That You Didn’t Learn in School ”

In August 2019, The New York Times Magazine published The 1619 Project , an ongoing initiative that aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

In this lesson, you will read an essay that uses primary sources as a point of entry to making sense of the history of slavery in the United States. The primary sources were selected by Mary Elliott, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The featured article was written by both Ms. Elliott and Jazmine Hughes, a New York Times writer and editor.

Note : If you are looking for more teaching resources related to The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine partnered with the Pulitzer Center to create a free curriculum that includes a reading guide, extension activities and other curricular resources.

The article uses primary sources to tell the story of slavery from 1619 to 1865. To begin thinking critically about primary sources, look at the cover image for the article, which uses this broadside from the museum’s collection . As you look closely at the image, make some observations about what you notice, wonder and feel. You can share in small groups or in a larger class discussion, “I notice…,” “I wonder …” and “I feel …” Or, you can create a chart with three columns to record your observations and reactions.

Then, if you would like to further investigate the broadside from a historical lens, you can use a document analysis worksheet from the National Archives. There are two worksheet options for written documents: one for secondary students and one for younger students and English-language learners .

If you would like more background, take some time to read the two-paragraph introduction to the article, either to yourself or aloud as a class.

Why do you think Ms. Elliott and Ms. Hughes chose to start their exploration of primary sources with these words? What drew you into the text? How did their use of language and imagery affect your reading experience?

According to the authors, why was the moment in August 1619 significant? How was the arrival of “20 and odd Negroes” different from the earlier presence of people of African descent in North America?

Questions for Writing and Discussion

Note to Teachers: Given the length and structure of the featured article , we have created questions for each of its three sections. Depending on how much time you are able to dedicate to this lesson, it may be most effective to have students work in small groups, with each group focusing on one section and then sharing their findings with the class.

No. 1: Slavery, Power and the Human Cost, 1455-1775

What is the connection between the Roman Catholic Church, colonialism and slavery?

How does the painting “Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam” illustrate the relationship between the slave trade and wealth and power? Use both the authors’ text and the image to explain the connection.

In what ways was race encoded into law? Use historical examples from the text to support your answer.

What acts of resistance did you find most powerful to read about? What role did memory play in the lives of enslaved people? Do you think the act of preserving memories was a form of resistance? Explain.

No. 2: The Limits of Freedom, 1776-1808

The text of this section begins with the following lines:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So begins the Declaration of Independence, the document that eventually led to the creation of the United States. But the words point to the paradox the nation was built on.

How would you describe that paradox in your own words, citing laws and beliefs from that period?

In what ways did enslaved people fight for their freedom?

What role did religion and churches have in resistance, advocacy and community?

What was the connection between westward expansion and the trans-Atlantic slave trade? How did the country respond to the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which took effect in 1808?

No. 3: A Slave Nation Fights for Freedom, 1809-1865

Why do you think Ms. Elliott chose to feature the portraits of Rhoda Phillips and Sgt. Jacob Johns? What do their stories illustrate about emancipation and the fight for freedom?

How were enslaved women and their children central to slavery? The article states, “there was no alliance of sisterhood among slave mistresses and the black mothers and daughters they claimed as property.” Why do you think the authors chose to emphasize that point?

In the wake of slave revolts, such as Nat Turner’s rebellion, white people became more fearful of slave uprisings and resistance. What new forms of surveillance did fearful white people instill? What was the Fugitive Slave Act? How did it expand the surveillance of slaves?

What does Joseph Trammell’s method for storing his freedom papers illustrate about the nature of freedom for free black people?

Going Further

In the featured article, Ms. Elliott selected 13 artifacts from the museum’s collection to tell the story of slavery. Based on what you have read and heard presented by your classmates, what artifacts would you choose to tell the story of slavery?

Take on the role of curator and choose three artifacts from the article that you believe are key to telling the story of slavery in the United States.

If you were to summarize slavery in the United States, what would be the three most important points for someone to walk away with? Do any objects from the article correspond to those points?

What objects do you find most visually compelling in the article? Are there objects that you think relate to one another naturally or that help to weave a narrative together?

Once you have selected three artifacts, decide how to present them — for example, digitally, on paper or as a gallery exhibit. Can you enhance your narrative by arranging your artifacts in a specific way? What happens if certain artifacts are placed close to one another or far apart? What about lower or higher on a wall?

Then, write a paragraph of no more than 200 words to accompany your three images. Use the text from the article as inspiration and try to find ways to draw the reader in by making meaningful links between your selected artifacts.

If you are in classroom, take a gallery walk to see your classmates’ work. What is similar or different in your interpretations and curatorial choices?

If you have additional time, browse the museum’s digital slavery collection and choose one additional source to add to your curation. You may want to pick an image that enhances one of the artifacts you already selected. Or you may want to select something that sheds light on a different element of slavery discussed in the article.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

Background Essay: The Origins of American Slavery

How did enslaved and free Blacks resist the injustice of slavery during the colonial era?

• I can articulate how slavery was at odds with the principle of justice.
• I can explain how enslaved men and women resisted the institution of slavery.
• I can create an argument supported by evidence from primary sources.
• I can succinctly summarize the main ideas of historic texts.

Essential Vocabulary

Written by: The Bill of Rights Institute

American Slavery in the Colonies

Throughout the colonial era, many white colonists in British North America gradually imposed a system of unfree and coerced labor upon Africans in all the colonies. Throughout the colonies, enslavement of Africans became a racial, lifelong, and hereditary condition. The institution was bound up with the larger Atlantic System of trade and slavery yet developed a unique and diverse character in British North America.

Europeans forcibly brought Africans to the New World in the international slave trade. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, European slave ships carried 12.5 million Africans, mostly to the New World. Because of the crowded ships, diseases, and mistreatment, only 10.7 million enslaved Africans landed at their destinations. Almost 2 million souls perished in what a draft of the Declaration of Independence later called an “ execrable commerce.”

Europeans primarily acquired the enslaved Africans from African slave traders along the western coast of the continent by exchanging guns, alcohol, textiles, and a broad range of goods demanded by the African traders. The enslaved were alone, having been separated from their families and embarked on the harrowing journey called the “ Middle Passage ” in chains. They were frightened and confused by their tragic predicament. Some refused to eat or jumped overboard to commit suicide rather than await their fate.

This diagram depicts the layout of a slave ship. (Unknown author – an Abstract of Evidence delivered before a select committee of the House of Commons in 1790 and 1791, reprinted in Phyllis M. Martin and Patrick O’Meara (eds.) (1995). Africa third edition. Indiana University Press and James Currey.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage#/media/File:Slave_ship_diagram.png

Most Africans in the international trade were bound for the European colonial possessions in the Caribbean and South America. The sugar plantations there were places where disease, climate, and work conditions produced a horrifying death rate for enslaved Africans. The sugar crop was so valuable that it was cheaper to work slaves to death and import replacements.  About 5 percent of the human cargo in the slave trade landed in British North America.

The African-American experience in the 13 colonies varied widely and is characterized by great complexity. The climate, geography, agriculture, laws, and culture shaped the diverse nature of enslavement.

Enslaved Africans in the British North American colonies did share many things in common, however. Slavery was a racial, lifetime and hereditary condition. White supremacy was rooted in slavery as its victims were almost exclusively Africans. It was a system of unfree and coerced labor that violated the enslaved person’s natural rights of liberty and consent. While the treatment of slaves might vary depending on region or the disposition of the slaveholder, slavery was at its core a violent and brutal system that stripped away human dignity from the enslaved. In all the colonies, slaves were considered legal property. In other words, slavery was a great injustice.

Differing climates and economies led to very different agricultural systems and patterns of enslavement across the colonies. The North had mostly self-sufficient farms. Few had slaves, and those that did, had one or two enslaved persons. While the North had some important pockets of large landowners who held larger numbers of slaves such as the Hudson Valley, its farms were generally incompatible with large slaveholding. Moreover, the nature of wheat and corn crops generally did not support slaveholding the same way that labor-intensive tobacco and rice did. Cities such as New York and Philadelphia also had the largest Black populations.

On the other hand, the Chesapeake (Maryland and Virginia) and low country of the Carolinas had planters and farmers who raised tobacco, rice, and indigo. Small farms only had one or two slaves (and often none), but the majority of the southern enslaved population lived on plantations. Large plantations frequently held more than 20 enslaved people, and some had hundreds. Virginian Robert “King” Carter held more than 1,000 people in bondage. As a result, in the areas where plantations predominated areas of the South (especially South Carolina), enslaved people outnumbered white colonists and sometimes by large percentages. This led to great fear of slave rebellions and measures by whites, including slave patrols and travel restrictions, to prevent them.

Robert “King” Carter was one of the richest men in all of the American colonies. He owned more than 1,000 slaves on his Virginia plantation. Anonymous. Portrait of Robert “King” Carter. Circa 1720. Painting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carter_I#/media/File:Robert_Carter_I.JPG

The regional differences of slavery led to variations in work patterns for enslaved people. A few Northern enslaved people worked and lived on farms alongside slaveholders and their families. Many worked in urban areas as workers, domestic servants, and sailors and generally had more freedom of movement than on southern plantations.

Blacks developed their own cultures in North and South. Despite different cultures and languages brought from Africa and regional differences within the colonies, a strong sense of community developed especially in areas where they had greater autonomy. Slave quarters on large plantations and urban communities of free blacks were notable for the development of Black culture through resistance, preservation of traditions, and expression. The free and enslaved Black communities kept in conversation with each other to transmit news and to hide runaways.

Different systems of work developed on Southern plantations. One was a “gang system ” of labor in which planters or their overseers drove groups of enslaved people, closely watched their work, and applied physical coercion to compel them to work faster. They also worked in the homes, laundries, kitchens, and stables on larger plantations.

On the massive rice plantations of the Carolinas, enslaved people were often assigned tasks and allowed to stop working when they reached their goals. The “ task system ” could foster cooperation and provide incentives to complete their work quicker. Plantation slaves completed other tasks including cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare, and worked as skilled artisans.

The treatment and experience of enslaved people was rooted in a brutal system but could vary widely. Many slaveholders were violent and cruel, liberally applying severe beatings that were at times limited by law or shunned by society. Others were guided by their Christian beliefs or humanitarian impulses and treated their slaves more paternalistically . Domestic work was often easier but under much closer scrutiny than fieldhands who at times enjoyed more autonomy and community with other enslaved people. Slaveholders in New England were more likely to teach slaves to read or encourage religious worship, but enslaved people were commonly restricted from learning to read, especially in the South.

Enslaved people did not passively accept their condition. They found a variety of ways to resist in order to preserve their humanity and autonomy. Some of the common daily forms of resistance included slowing down their pace of work, breaking a tool, or pretending to be sick. Some stole food and drink to supplement their inadequate diets or simply to enjoy it as an act of rebellion. Young male slaves were especially likely to run away for a few days and hide out locally to protest work or mistreatment. Enslaved people secretly learned to read and that allowed them to forge passes to escape to freedom. They sang spirituals out of religious conviction, but also in part to express their hatred of the system and their hope for freedom.

Slaves developed their own culture as a way to bond together in their hardships and show defiance to their owners. This image depicts slaves on a plantation dancing and playing music. Anonymous. The Old Plantation. Circa. 1790. Painting. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Slave_dance_to_banjo,_1780s.jpg

The enslavement of Africans in British colonies in North America developed differently in individual colonies and among regions. But, the common thread running throughout the experience of slavery was injustice. Blacks were denied their humanity and natural rights as they could not keep the fruits of their labor, lived under a brutal system of coercion, and could not live their lives freely. However, a few white colonists questioned the institution before the Revolutionary War.

Comprehension and Analysis Questions

• How did slavery violate an enslaved person’s natural rights?
• How did slavery vary across the 13 British colonies in North America?
• How did Blacks resist their enslavement?

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Atlantic slavery and the slave trade: history and historiography.

• Daniel B. Domingues da Silva Daniel B. Domingues da Silva History Department, Rice University
•  and  Philip Misevich Philip Misevich Department of History, St. John’s University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.371
• Published online: 20 November 2018

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

• slave trade
• historiography

From the 16th to the mid- 19th century , approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly embarked on slave ships, of whom only 10.7 million survived the notorious Middle Passage. 1 Captives were transported in vessels that flew the colors of several nations, mainly Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Ships departed from ports located in these countries or their overseas possessions, loaded slaves at one or more points along the coast of Africa, and then transported them to one or more ports in the Americas. They sailed along established trade routes shaped by political forces, commercial partnerships, and environmental factors, such as the winds and sea currents. The triangular system is no doubt the most famous route but in fact nearly half of all slaves were embarked on vessels that traveled directly between the Americas and Africa. 2 Africans forced beneath the decks of slave vessels were captured in the continent’s interior through several means. Warfare was, perhaps, the commonest, yielding large numbers of captives for sale at a time. Other methods of enslavement included judicial proceedings, pawning, and kidnappings. 3 Depending on the routes captives traveled and the ways they were captured, Africans could sometimes find themselves in the holds of ships with people who belonged to their same cultures, were from their same villages, or were even close relatives. 4 None of this, however, attenuated the sufferings and appalling conditions under which they sailed. Slaves at sea were subjected to constant confinement, brutal violence, malnutrition, diseases, sexual violence, and many other abuses. 5

Upon arrival in the Americas, Africans often found themselves in equally hostile environments. Slavery in the mining industry and on cash crop plantations, especially those that produced sugar and rice, significantly reduced Africans’ life expectancies and required owners to replenish their labor force through the slave trade. 6 By contrast, slave systems centered on less intensive crops and the services industry, particularly in cities, ports, and towns, often offered enslaved Africans better chances of survival and even the possibility of achieving freedom through manumission by purchase, gift, or inheritance. 7 These apparent advantages did not necessarily mean that life was any less harsh. Neither did the prospect of freedom significantly change slaves’ material lives. Few individuals managed to obtain manumission and those who did encountered many other barriers that prevented them from fully enjoying their lives as free citizens. 8 In spite of those barriers, slaves challenged their status and conditions in many ways, ranging from “quiet” forms of resistance—slowdowns, breaking tools, and feigning illness at work—to bolder initiatives such as running away, plotting conspiracies, and launching rebellions. 9 Although slavery provided little room for autonomy, Africans strove to maintain or replicate aspects of their cultures in the Americas. Whenever possible, they married people with their same backgrounds, named their children in their own languages, cooked foods using techniques, styles, and ingredients similar to those found in their motherlands, composed songs in the beats of their homelands, and worshipped ancestral spirits, deities, and gods in the same fashion as their forbears. 10 At the same time, slave culture was subject to constant change, a process that over the long run enabled enslaved people to better navigate the dangerous world that slavery created. 11

This overview may seem rather free of controversy, but it is in fact the result of years of debates, some still raging, and research conducted by generations of historians of slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps no other historical fields have been so productive and transformative over such a short period of time. Since the 1950s, scholars have developed and refined new methods, created new theoretical models, brought previously untapped sources to light, and posed new questions that shine bright new light on the experiences of enslaved people and their owners as well as the social, political, economic, and cultural worlds that they created in the diaspora. Although debates about Atlantic slavery and the slave trade go back to the era of abolition, historians began grappling in earnest with these issues in the aftermath of World War II. Early scholarship focused on the United States and tended to articulate views of slavery that reflected elite sources and perspectives. 12 Inspired by the US civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and wider global decolonization campaigns, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of approaches to the study of slavery rooted in new social history, which aimed to understand slaves as central historical actors rather than mere victims of exploitation. 13 Around the same time, a group of scholars trained in statistical analysis sparked passionate debates about the extent to which quantitative assessments of slavery and slave trading effectively represented slaves’ lived experiences. 14 To more vividly capture those experiences, some historians turned to new or underutilized tools, particularly biographies, family histories, and microhistories, which provided windows into local historical dynamics. 15 The significance of the penetrating questions that these fruitful debates raised has been amplified in recent decades in response to the growing influence of transnational and Atlantic approaches to slavery. Atlantic frameworks have required the gathering and analysis of new data on slavery and the slave trade around the world, encouraging scholars from previously underrepresented regions to challenge Anglo-American dominance in the field. Finally, the digital turn in the 21st century has provided new models for developing historical projects on slavery and the slave trade and helped democratize access to once inaccessible sources. 16 This article draws on this rich history of scholarship on slavery and the slave trade to illustrate major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and raise questions about the future prospects for this dynamic field of study.

Models of Slavery and Resistance

While each country in the Americas has its own national historiography on slavery, from a 21st-century perspective, it is hard to overestimate the role that US-based scholars played in shaping the agenda of slavery studies. Analyses of American plantation records began around the turn of the 20th century . Early debates emerged in particular over the conditions of slavery in the American South and views of the relationship between slaves and owners. Setting the foundation for these debates in the early- 20th century , Ulrich Bonnell Phillips offered an extraordinarily romanticized vision of life on the plantation. 17 Steeped in open racism, his work compared slave plantations to benevolent schools that over time “civilized” enslaved peoples. Conditioned by the kinds of revisionist interpretations of Southern slavery that emerged in the era following Reconstruction, Phillips saw American slavery as a benign institution that persisted despite its economic inefficiency. His work trivialized the violence inherent in slave systems, a view some Americans were eager to accept and, given his standing among subsequent generations of slavery scholars, one that prevailed in the profession for half of a century.

Early challenges to this view had little immediate impact within academic circles. That primarily black intellectuals, working in or speaking to white-dominated academies, offered many of the most sophisticated objections helps explain the persistence of Phillips’ influence. In the face of looming institutional racism, several scholars offered bold and fresh interpretations that uprooted basic ideas about the slave system. Over his illustrious career, W. E. B. Du Bois highlighted the powerful structural impediments that restricted black lives and brought attention to the dynamic ways that African Americans confronted systematic exploitation. Eric Williams, a noted Trinidadian historian, took aim at the history of abolition, arguing that self-interest—rather than humanitarian concerns—led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. Melville Herskovitz, a prominent white American anthropologist, turned his attention to the connections between African and African American culture. 18 Though many of these works were marginalized at the time they were produced, this scholarship is rightfully credited with, among other things, shining light on the relationship between African and African American history. Turning their attention to Africa, scholars discovered a variety of cultural practices that, they argued, shaped the black experience under slavery and in its aftermath. Even those scholars who challenged or rejected this Africa-centered approach pushed enslaved people to the center of their analyses, representing a radical departure from previous studies. 19

Similarly, works focused on the history of slavery and the slave trade in other regions of the Americas, especially those colonized by France, Spain, and Portugal, were often overlooked. The economies of many of these regions had historically depended on slave labor. The size of the captive populations of some of them rivaled that of the United States. Moreover, they had been involved in the slave trade for much longer and far more extensively than any other region of what became the United States. Researchers in Brazil, Cuba, and other countries often noticed these points. 20 Some of them, like the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, received training in the United States and produced significant research. However, because they published mainly in Portuguese and Spanish, and translations were hard to come by, their work had little initial impact on Anglo-American scholarship. The few scholars who did realize the importance of this work used it to draw comparisons between the Anglophone and non-Anglophone worlds of slavery, highlighting differences in their patterns of colonization and emphasizing the distinctive roles that Catholicism and colonial legal regimes played in shaping slave systems across parts of the Americas. A greater incidence of miscegenation and slaves’ relative accessibility to freedom through manumission led some scholars to argue that slavery in the non-Anglophone New World was milder than in antebellum America or the British colonies. 21

In the United States, the dominant narratives of American slavery continued to emphasize the absolute authority of slave owners. Even critics of Phillips, who emerged in larger numbers in the 1950s and vigorously challenged his conclusions, thought little of slaves’ abilities to effect meaningful change on plantations. Yet they did offer new interpretations of American slavery, as the metaphors scholars used in this decade to characterize the system attest. Far from Phillips’ training school, Kenneth Stampp argued that plantation slavery more appropriately resembled a prison in which enslaved people became completely dependent on their owners. 22 Going even further, Stanley M. Elkins compared American slavery to a concentration camp. 23 The experience of slavery was so traumatic that it stripped enslaved people of their identities and rendered them almost completely helpless. American slavery, in Elkins’ view, turned African Americans into infantilized “Sambos” whose minds and wills came to mirror those of their owners. While such studies drew much needed attention to the violence of plantation slavery, they all but closed the door on questions about slave agency and cultural production. Emphasizing slave autonomy ran the risk of minimizing the brutality of slave owners, and for those scholars trying to overturn Phillips’s vision of American slavery, that brutality was what defined the plantation enterprise.

It took the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s to move slavery studies in a significantly new direction. Driven by their hard-fought battles for political rights at home, African Americans and others whom the civil rights movement inspired added critical new voices and perspectives that required a rethinking of the American past. Scholars who emerged during this period largely rejected the overwhelming authority of the planter class and instead turned their attention to the activities of enslaved people. Slaves, they found, created spaces for themselves and exercised their autonomy on plantations in myriad ways. While they recognized the violence of the slave system, historians of this generation were more interested in assessing the development of black society and identifying resistance to plantation slavery. Far from the brainwashed prisoners of their owners, enslaved people were recast as producers of dynamic and enduring cultures. One key to this transformation was a more careful analysis of what occurred within slave quarters, where new research uncovered the existence of relatively stable—at least under the circumstances—family life. Another emphasized religion as a tool that slaves used to improve their conditions and forge new identities in the diaspora. The immediate post-civil rights period also saw scholars renew their interest in Africa, breathing new life into older debates about the origins and survival of cultural practices in the Americas. 24

What much of the scholarship in this period shared was the idea that no matter how vicious the system, planter power was always incomplete. Recognizing that reality, slaves and their owners established a set of ground rules that granted slaves a degree of autonomy in an attempt to minimize resistance. Beyond mere brutality, slavery thus rested on unwritten but widely understood slave “rights”—Sundays off from plantation labor, the cultivation of private garden plots, participation in an independent slave economy—that both sides negotiated and frequently challenged. This view was central to Eugene Genovese’s magisterial book, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made , which employed the concept of paternalism to help make sense of 19th-century Southern slavery. 25 Paternalist ideology provided owners with a theoretical justification for slavery’s continuation in the face of widespread criticism from Northern abolitionists. Unlike in the urban North, Southerners claimed, where free African Americans faced deplorable conditions and had little social support, slave owners claimed to take better care of their “black and white” families. Slaves also embraced paternalism, though toward a different end: doing so enabled them to use the idea of the “benevolent planter” to their own advantage and make claims for incremental improvements in slaves’ lives. Slavery, Genovese argued, was thus based on the mutual interdependence of owners and slaves.

The degree of intimacy between slaves and owners that paternalism implied spoke to another question that occupied scholars writing in the 1960s and 1970s: given the violence of the slave system, why had so few large-scale slave rebellions occurred? For Phillips and those whom he influenced, the benevolent nature of Southern slavery provided a sufficient explanation. But undeniable evidence of the violence of slavery required making sense of patterns—or the seeming lack—of slave resistance. Unlike on some Caribbean islands, where slaves far outnumbered free people and environmental and geographic factors tended to concentrate the location of plantations, conditions in the United States were less conducive to widespread rebellion. Yet slaves never passively accepted their captivity. The literature on resistance during this period deemphasized violent forms of rebellion, which occurred infrequently, and reoriented scholarship toward the variety of ways that enslaved people challenged the domination of slave owners over them. Having adjusted their lenses, historians found evidence of slave resistance seemingly everywhere. Enslaved people slowed the paces at which they worked, feigned illnesses, broke tools, and injured or let escape animals on plantations. Such “day-to-day” resistance did little to overturn slavery but it gave some control to captives over their work regimes. In some cases, slaves acted even more boldly, committing arson or poisoning those men and women responsible for upholding the system of bondage. Resistance also took the form of running away, a strategy that long preceded the famous Underground Railroad in North America and posed unique problems in territories with unsettled frontiers, unfriendly environmental terrain, and diverse indigenous populations into which fleeing captives could integrate. 26

This shift in scholarship toward slave agency and resistance was anchored in the creative use of sources that had previously been unknown or underappreciated. Although they had long recognized the shortcomings of Phillips’s reliance on records from a limited number of large plantations, historians struggled to find better options, particularly those that shed light on the experiences and perspectives of enslaved people. Slave biographies provided one alternative. In the 1970s, John Blassingame gathered an exhaustive collection of runaway slave accounts to examine the life experiences of American slaves. 27 Whether such biographies spoke to the majority of slaves or represented a few exceptional black men became the subject of considerable disagreement. Scholars who were less trusting of biographies turned to the large collection of interviews that the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration conducted with former slaves. 28 Though far more numerous and representative of “typical” slave experiences, the WPA interviews had their own problems. Would former slaves have been comfortable speaking freely to primarily white interviewers about their lives in bondage? The question remains open. Equally pressing was the concern over the amount of time that had passed between the end of slavery and the period when the interviews were conducted. Indeed, some two-thirds of interviewees were octogenarians when federal employees recorded their stories. Despite such shortcomings, these sources and the new interpretations of slavery that they supported pushed scholarship in exciting new directions. Slaves could no longer be dismissed as passive victims of the plantation system. The new sources and approaches humanized them and reoriented scholarship toward the communities that slaves made.

Across the Atlantic, scholars of Africa began to grapple in earnest with questions about slavery, too. Early contributions to debates over the role of the institution in Africa and its impact on African societies came from historians and anthropologists. One strand of disagreement emerged over whether slavery existed there at all prior to the arrival of Europeans. This raised more fundamental questions about how to define slavery. The influential introduction to Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff’s edited volume, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives , took pains to distinguish African slavery from its American counterparts. It rooted slavery not in racial difference or the growth of plantation agriculture but rather in the context of Africa’s kin-based social organization. According to the coauthors, the institution’s primary function in Africa was to incorporate outsiders into new societies. 29 So distinctive was this form of captivity that Miers and Kopytoff famously deployed scare quotes each time they used the word “slavery” in order to underscore its uniqueness.

Given their emphasis on incorporation, the process by which enslaved people over time became accepted insiders in the societies into which they were forcibly introduced, and their limited treatment of the economically productive roles that slaves played, Miers and Kopytoff came in for swift criticism on several fronts. Neo-Marxists were particularly dissatisfied. Claude Meillassoux, the prominent French scholar, responded with an alternative vision of slavery in Africa that highlighted the violence that was at the core of enslavement. 30 That violence made slavery the very antithesis of kinship, which to many scholars invalidated Miers and Kopytoff’s interpretation. Meillassoux and others also pointed to the dynamic economic roles that slaves played in Africa. 31 Studies in various local settings—in the Sokoto Caliphate, the Western Sudan, and elsewhere—made clear that slavery was a central part of how African societies organized productive labor. 32 This reality led some scholars to articulate distinct slave, or African, modes of production that, they argued, better illuminated the role of slavery in the continent. 33

In addition to these deep theoretical differences, one factor that contributed to the debates was the lack of historical sources that spoke to the changing nature of slavery in Africa. Documentary evidence describing slave societies is heavily concentrated in the 19th century , the period when Europe’s presence in Africa became more widespread and when colonialism and abolitionism colored Western views of Africans and their social institutions. To overcome source limitations, academics cast their nets widely, drawing on methodological innovations from anthropology and comparative linguistics, among other disciplines. 34 Participant observation, through which Africanists immersed themselves in the communities they studied in order to understand local languages and cultures, proved particularly valuable. 35 Yet the enthusiasm for this approach, which for many offered a more authentic path to access African cultures and voices, led some scholars to ignore or paper over its limitations. 36 To what extent, for example, did oral sources or observations of social structures in the 20th century reveal historical realities from previous eras? Other historians projected back in time insights from the more numerous written sources from the 19th century , using them to consider slavery in earlier periods. 37 Those who uncritically accepted evidence from such sources—whether non-written or written—came away with a timeless view of the African past, including as it related to slavery. 38 It would take another decade, during which the field witnessed revolutionary changes to the collection and analysis of data, until scholars began to widely accept the fact that, as in the Americas, slavery differed across time and space.

The Cliometric Debates

Around the same time that some scholars in the Americas were pushing enslaved people to the center of slavery narratives, a separate group of academics trained in economics began steering the focus of studies of slavery and the slave trade in a different direction. While research on planter power and slave resistance allowed historians to infer broad patterns of transformation from a limited collection of local records, this new group of scholars turned this approach upside down. They proposed to assess the underlying forces that shaped slavery and the slave trade to better contextualize the individual experiences of enslaved people. This big-picture approach was rooted in the quantification of large amounts of data available in archival sources spread across multiple locations and led ultimately to the development of “cliometrics,” a radically new methodology in the field. Two works were particularly important to the establishment of this approach: Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery . 39

Philip Curtin’s “census” provided the first quantitative assessment of the size, evolution, and distribution of the transatlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries . Previous estimates of the magnitude of the transatlantic trade claimed that it involved somewhere between fifteen and twenty million enslaved Africans—or in some cases many times that amount. 40 However, upon careful examination, Curtin found that such estimates were “nothing but a vast inertia, as historians have copied over and over again the flimsy results of unsubstantial guesswork.” 41 He thus set out to provide a new figure based on a close reading of secondary works that themselves had been based on extensive archival research. To assist in this endeavor, Curtin enlisted a technology that had only recently become available to researchers: the mainframe computer. He collected data on the number of slaves that ships of every nation involved in the traffic had embarked and disembarked, recorded these data on punch cards, and used the computer to organize the information into time series that allowed him to make projections for the periods and branches of the traffic for which data were scarce or altogether unavailable. Curtin’s findings posed profound challenges to the most basic assumptions about the transatlantic traffic. They revealed that the number of Africans forcibly transported to the Americas was substantially lower than what historians had previously assumed. Curtin also demonstrated that while the British were the most active slave traders during the second half of the 18th century , when the trade had reached its height, the Portuguese (and, after independence, Brazilians as well) carried far more enslaved people during the entire period of the transatlantic trade. 42 Furthermore, while the United States boasted the largest slave population by the mid- 19th century , it was a comparatively minor destination for vessels engaged in the trade: the region received less than 5 percent of all captive Africans transported across the Atlantic. 43

Curtin’s assessment of the slave trade inspired researchers to flock to local archives and compile new statistical data on the number and carrying capacity of slaving vessels departing or entering particular ports or regions around the Atlantic basin. Building on Curtin’s solid foundation, these scholars produced dozens of studies on the volume of various branches of the transatlantic trade. Virtually every port that dispatched slaving vessels to Africa or at which enslaved Africans were disembarked in the Americas received scholarly attention. What emerged from this work was an increasingly clear picture of the volume and structure of the Atlantic slave trade at local, regional, and national levels, though the South Atlantic slave trade remained comparatively understudied. 44 Historians of Africa also joined in these discussions, providing tentative assessments of slave exports from regions along the coast of West and West Central Africa. 45 The deepening pool of data that such research generated enabled scholars to use quantitative methods to consider other aspects of the transatlantic trade. How did mortality rates differ on slave vessels from one national carrier to another? 46 Which ports dispatched larger or smaller vessels and what implications did vessel size have for participation in the slave trade? 47 Which types of European commodities were most highly sought after in exchange for African captives? 48 As these questions imply, scholars had for the first time approached the slave trade as its own distinctive topic for research, which had revolutionary consequences for the future of the field.

Time on the Cross had an effect on slavery scholarship that was similar to—indeed, perhaps even greater than—that of Curtin’s, especially among scholars focused on the antebellum US South. Inspired by studies that challenged the view of plantation slavery as unprofitable, Fogel and Engerman, with the help of a team of researchers, set out to quantify nearly every aspect of that institution in the US South, from slaves’ average daily food consumption to the amount of cotton produced in the US South during the antebellum era. 49 Consistent with the cliometricians’ approach, Fogel and Engerman listed ten findings that “contradicted many of the most important propositions in the traditional portrayal of the slave system.” 50 Their most important—and controversial—conclusions were that slavery was a rational system of labor exploitation maintained by planters to maximize their own economic interests; that it was growing on the eve of the Civil War; and that owners were optimistic rather than pessimistic about the future of the slave system during the decade that preceded the war. 51 Further, the authors noted that slave labor was productive. “On average,” the cliometricians argued, a slave was “harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.” 52

While cliometrics made important contributions to the study of slavery and the slave trade, the quantitative approach came in for swift and passionate criticism. Curtin’s significantly lower estimates for the number of enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic were met with skepticism; some respondents even charged that his figures trivialized the horrors of the trade. 53 Although praised for its revolutionary interpretation, which earned Fogel the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 , Fogel and Engerman’s study of the economics of American slavery was almost immediately cast aside as deeply flawed and unworthy of serious scholarly attention. Critics pointed not only to carelessness in the authors’ data collection techniques but also to their mathematical errors, abusive assumptions, and insufficient contextualization of data. 54 Fogel and Engerman, for example, characterized lynching as a “disciplinary tool.” After counting the number of whippings slaves received at one plantation, they concluded that masters there rarely used the punishment. They failed to note, however, the powerful effect that such abuse had on slaves and free people who merely watched or heard the horrible spectacle. 55 More generally, and apart from these specific problems, critics offered a theoretical objection to the quantitative approach, which, they argued, conceived of history as an objective science, with strong persuasive appeal, but which silenced the voices of the individuals victimized by the history of slavery and the slave trade.

Nevertheless, the methodology found followers among historians studying the history of slavery in other parts of the Atlantic. B. W. Higman’s massive two-volume work, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 , remains an unparalleled quantitative analysis of slave communities on the islands under British control. 56 Robert Louis Stein’s The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century also makes substantial use of cliometrics and remains a valuable reference for students of slavery in Martinique and Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti). 57 But outside of the United States, nowhere was cliometrics more popular than Brazil, where scholars of slavery, including Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Herbert Klein, Francisco Vidal Luna, Robert Slenes, and others, applied it to examine many of the same issues that their North American counterparts did: rates of profitability, demographic growth, and economic expansion of slave systems. 58 Africanists also found value in the methodology and employed it as their sources allowed. Patrick Manning, for instance, used demographic modeling to examine the impact of the slave trade on African societies. 59 Philip Curtin compiled quantitative archival sources to analyze the evolution of the economy of Senegambia in the era of the slave trade. 60 Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson traced the circulation of cowries, the shell money of the slave trade, noting that “of all the goods from overseas exchanged for slaves, the shell money touched individuals most widely and often in their day-to-day activities.” 61

In many ways, the gap between quantitative and social and cultural approaches to slavery and the slave trade that opened in the 1970s has continued to divide the field. Concerned that cliometrics sucked the dynamism out of interpretations of the slave community and reduced captives to figures on a spreadsheet, some scholars responded by deploying a variety of new tools to reclaim the humanity and individuality of enslaved actors. Microhistory, an approach that early modern Europeanists developed to recover peasant and other everyday people’s stories, offered one such opportunity. 62 Biography provided another. By reducing its scale of observation and focusing on individuals, families, households, or other small-scale units of analysis, such research underscored the messiness of lived experiences and the creative and often unexpected ways that slaves fashioned worlds for themselves. 63 But such approaches raised a separate set of questions: do biographical accounts reveal typical experiences? In an era when few slaves were literate and even fewer committed their stories to paper, any captives whose accounts survived—in full or in fragments, published or unpublished—were by definition exceptional. Moreover, given the clear overarching framework that decades of quantitative work on the slave trade had developed, one would be hard-pressed to ignore completely the cliometric turn. As two quantitatively minded scholars noted, “it is difficult to assess the significance or representativity of personal narratives or collective biographies, however detailed, without an understanding of the overall movements of slaves of which these individuals’ lives were a part.” 64 While an emphasis on what might be described as the quantitative “big picture” is not by nature antagonistic toward social and cultural historians’ concerns with enslaved people’s lived experiences, the two approaches offer different visions of slavery’s past and often feel as if they sit on opposite ends of the analytical spectrum.

Women, Gender, and Slavery

In the roughly two and a half decades that followed the major interpretive shifts that Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins introduced into scholarship on slavery, the field remained an almost exclusively male one. With rare exceptions, men continued to dominate the profession during this period; their work rarely probed with any degree of sophistication the experiences of women in plantation societies. While second-wave feminism inspired women to enter graduate programs in history in larger numbers beginning in the 1960s, it took time for published work on women’s history, at least as it related to slavery, to appear in earnest. Revealingly, it was not until 1985 that the Library of Congress created a unique catalog heading for “women slaves.” Yet in the three decades since then, women’s (and later gendered) histories of slavery have been published at an ever-increasing pace. Scholars in the 21st century would struggle to take seriously books written about slavery that fail to show an appreciation for the distinctive experiences of men and women in captivity or more generally across plantation societies.

Several forces worked against the production of studies on enslaved women. If sources detailing slaves’ lives are in general sparse, evidence on women slaves is particularly spotty. Deborah Gray White’s pioneering work, Aren’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South , the first book-length study of enslaved women, triumphantly pieced together fragments of information from Federal Writers’ Project interviews with scattered plantation records to breathe life into the historiography of black women. It revealed the powerful structures that served to constrain enslaved women’s lives in the 19th century United States. As White famously concluded: “Black in a white society, slave in a free society, women in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of Antebellum Americans.” 65 Yet publishers and academic peers did not immediately take seriously work focused on women slaves. White noted, for example, how colleagues in her department warned her that she would be unlikely to earn tenure writing about such a topic. This environment was hardly the type of nurturing one required for sustained research. 66

Though it was an uphill struggle, an influential group of scholars gradually developed a framework for understanding slavery’s realities for women. Early work focused on the foundational tasks of recovering female voices and using them to challenge standard narratives of the plantation system. It made clear the complex and multifaceted roles of women captives—as mothers, wives, fieldworkers, and domestics—and in the process reshaped scholarly understanding of the dynamics of the plantation enterprise. Social relations within plantation households commanded particular attention. Some scholars emphasized bonds between black and white women whose lives, they argued, were conditioned by a shared and oppressive patriarchal culture. Catherine Clinton, for example, characterized white mistresses as “trapped” within plantation society. “Cotton was King, white men ruled, and both white women and slaves served the same master,” she argued. 67 While she sympathized with the plight of plantation mistresses, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, another leading figure of American women’s history, offered a contrary view of gendered relations within Southern households, one that highlighted division. Far from sharing common interests with enslaved women, mistresses clearly benefitted from slavery’s continuation. Their status as white and elite took priority over the bonds of womanhood. 68

The first sustained studies of women’s resistance to slavery also appeared in the 1980s. The historiographical pivot toward day-to-day resistance, which more effectively revealed the sophisticated ways that enslaved Africans and their descendants challenged their captivity, also opened a window of opportunity to view women as disruptors of the slave system in their own right. No longer dismissed as, at most, timid supporters of male-led revolts, women were in this period redefined as “natural rebels” who exploited white perceptions of female docility for their own benefit. Enslaved women, for example, were not generally chained onboard slave vessels, which gave them greater opportunities to organize revolts. Those few women who worked in privileged positions within plantation households took on responsibilities that gave them unique access to white families and exposed them to white vulnerabilities. Cooks could theoretically poison their owners, a threat that seemed all too real given the world of violence that underpinned the plantation. And while the coercive realities of slavery rooted every sexual relationship between white men and black women in violence, some scholars pointed to the possibility that women slaves who endured such abuse saw marginal improvements in their material circumstances or the prospects for their children. 69

Within a decade of the publication of Deborah White’s book, scholarship began to shift away from analyses of women and toward investigations of the worlds that men and women made together under slavery. Scholars of Africa brought valuable insights into this issue, drawing on decades of careful research into local constructions of gender and, in particular, the gendered division of labor within Africa. Women, Africanists illustrated, performed many of the most important tasks in agricultural regimes across the continent. 70 Some historians argued that it was their physical rather than biological roles that led slave owners in Africa to prefer and retain female captives, challenging earlier rigid emphases on women’s childbearing capacities. 71 These polarized debates eventually gave way to local and more nuanced analyses that revealed the complex range of contributions that enslaved women made to African societies: Women had children that increased the sizes of households; they cultivated and marketed crops that fed and enriched kingdoms and other less centralized societies; they served as bodyguards to local elites; and they even bought, retained, and traded their own captives. 72 If slavery in Africa was widespread, it was precisely because women had such wide-ranging productive and reproductive value.

These insights had wider implications for the study of the slave trade and the Atlantic World. African conceptions of gender conditioned the supply to Europeans of men and women captives along the coast, illustrating the close relationship between gender issues and economic concerns. 73 Gendered identities that emerged in Africa were adapted and transformed in the Americas depending on demographic, economic, or cultural concerns. 74 Whereas in low-density slave systems, African women and their descendants might follow work regimes that resembled those of their homelands, the gendered division of labor in large slave societies often more closely reflected European attitudes toward women and work. 75 Grappling with such complex realities required historians to dig into local records across a staggering variety of geographic settings. It was in that context that scholars began to broaden their horizons and embrace an increasingly Atlantic orientation—a trend that mirrored broader changes in studies on slavery and the slave trade in the 1990s. 76

The Atlanticization of Slavery Studies

It may seem redundant to identify a shift toward the Atlanticization of slavery studies. Enslaved Africans, after all, were brought to the Americas from across the Atlantic. How, then, could these studies be anything but Atlantic? The reality is that historians have generally looked at the institution through rather parochial eyes, as something limited by regional, national, or cultural boundaries. There were several early and noteworthy exceptions to this trend. Indeed, calls for studies to look at the societies surrounding the ocean as an integral unit of analysis date as far back as the late 1910s. Several scholars took up that call, the most notable perhaps being Fernand Braudel in his 1949 masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II . 77 However, in an increasingly polarized world, the idea faced significant resistance and obstacles. Following World War II, Atlanticization could be easily read as a stand-in for imperialism or westernization. It was only toward the end of the Cold War that historians were able to move past these ideological barriers and understand the value of looking at the Atlantic as “the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer of Europeans onto American shores,” an interaction that was the result of “a sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.” 78

This realization deeply shaped subsequent studies of the history of slavery and the slave trade, some of them reviving earlier debates about cultural continuity and change in the African diaspora. One of the most successful examples to focus on the influence of Africans in shaping slavery on both sides of the ocean is John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World . In it, Thornton argues that slavery was the only form of “private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.” 79 Consequently, African political and economic elites had significant leverage over the institution, giving them some control over the transatlantic traffic. Thornton’s argument offered a new logic for African participation in the slave trade while also providing a new interpretation of African culture in Africa and the Americas. Although enslaved Africans came from several different regions and societies, Thornton stresses the similarities between their cultures and languages. Based on research on the traffic’s organization, he notes that slave ships rarely purchased captives in more than one port and that they normally sailed along very specific routes. 80 Such an organization favored the transmission of some of the cultural practices enslaved Africans brought with them to the Americas. Nevertheless, Thornton points out, “slaves were not militant cultural nationalists who sought to preserve everything African but rather showed great flexibility in adapting and changing their culture.” 81 His approach thus emphasized the systematic linkages that the transatlantic slave trade forged while leaving space for creolization within slave communities.

Another important contribution that emphasized cultural transformation was Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . 82 Looking to identify the first generations of blacks who chartered their descendants’ fate in mainland North America, Berlin located them among a group he called “Atlantic creoles,” people who traced their beginnings to the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa, but who ultimately emerged from the world that Europe, Africa, and the Americas collectively created. Cosmopolitan by experience or circumstance, familiar with the commerce of the Atlantic, and fluent in its languages and cultures, these individuals laid down the foundations for black life in the New World. 83 They arrived not as Africans desperate to replicate their culture, or flexible to adapt, but rather as profoundly changed individuals. Although they permeated most of the colonial societies of the Americas, Berlin claims that in mainland North America at least they were soon swept away by subsequent generations born under the expansion of large-scale commodity production, which ended the porous slave system of the early years of European and African settlement. 84

Although these were important contributions, the Atlanticization of slavery studies opened many more avenues to understand the experiences of Africans and their descendants during the years of bondage. It allowed for comparisons between Africans’ trajectories with those of other players in the formation of the Atlantic world. Paul Gilroy’s well-known Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is in a way a precursor, expressing “a desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.” 85 Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan’s edited volume, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal , views a handful of European nations—Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands—as creating this new world centered around the Atlantic, but it also places Africans as well as the indigenous populations of the Americas in comparative perspective. 86 One immediate problem with this approach is that it conflates several hundreds of groups, nations, or peoples into a single category, “Africans,” a term that gained traction only as the slave trade expanded and, consequently, recognized by just a fraction of the people it intended to describe.

A more adequate approach, favored by the Atlantic framework of analysis, would focus on specific African regions or peoples. Here historians have made some progress, mainly in the form of edited volumes. Linda M. Heywood’s edited book, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora , looks at how Kikongo and Mbundu speakers, often times grouped under designations such as Angola, Benguela, or Congo in places in the Americas as distant from one another as Havana, Montevideo, New Orleans, Recife, and Port au Prince, culturally shaped the African diaspora. 87 Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz’s volume attempts a similar approach, centered on the societies of precolonial Ghana, mainly the Asante and Fante. 88 Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs’s book, by contrast, focuses on a single African people, the Yoruba. 89 Not only were they a sizable group forced into the Atlantic, but they also left an indelible mark in several regions of the Americas. Interestingly, the Yoruba started calling themselves as such, that is, through their language name, only years after the transatlantic slave trade had ended, probably as a result of religious encounters leading up to the colonization of Nigeria. 90 During the period of the slave trade, the Yoruba lived divided into a number of states like Oyo, Egba, Egbado, Ijebu, and Ijesa, located in Southwest Nigeria, and were called outside the region by different terms, such as Nagô in Bahia, Lucumí in Cuba, and Aku in Sierra Leone. 91

Not only did the Atlantic approach contribute to the development of new historical frameworks and perspectives, it also encouraged historians to use traditional sources and methods in more creative and interesting ways. In Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation , Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Hébrard trace the paper trail that members of the Tinchant family left behind to reconstruct over multiple generations the saga of an African woman and her family from slavery to freedom. 92 In addition to tracing individuals and families, historians have also paid greater attention to cultural practices embedded in traditions of agriculture, healing, and warfare, which were disseminated around the Atlantic during the period of the slave trade. Judith A. Carney, for example, looked at the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas, connecting particular rice growing regions in Upper Guinea to their counterparts in places like South Carolina in the United States and Maranhão in Bazil; James H. Sweet examined the intellectual history of the Atlantic world by following the uses and appropriations of African healing practices from Dahomey to Bahia and Portugal; and Manuel Barcia explored the similarities and differences between warfare techniques employed by West African captives, especially from Oyo, in Bahia, and Cuba. 93 Although urban history has a long tradition among historians, most studies have focused on cities and ports in Europe and the Americas. 94 Historians, including Robin Law, Kristin Mann, Mariana Cândido, and Randy Sparks, however, are redressing that imbalance with studies focused on African ports—Ouidah, Lagos, Benguela, and Anomabu—that emerged or expanded during the slave trade era. 95

Finally, although removed from the Atlantic, the very effort of looking at slavery and the slave trade from a broader perspective has influenced studies on these issues in other parts of the world or even within a global framework. Research on the intra-American slave trade has gained a renewed interest with publications like Greg O’Malley’s Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . 96 The same could be said of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean with works like Richard Allen’s European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 . 97 One central debate that has recently been revived concerns the relationship between capitalism and slavery. 98 Inspired by Eric Williams’s path-breaking work and, more recently, by Dale Tomich’s concept of “second slavery,” which highlights the creation of new zones of slavery in the United States and other parts of the continent during the 19th century , historians, including Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, and Seth Rockman, are now enthusiastically assessing the connections between the expansion of slavery in that period and the formation of global financial markets and industrial economies in Europe and North America. 99 Clearly, the scholarly potential occasioned by the Atlanticization of slavery studies is still unfolding and should not be underestimated.

Into the Digital Era

The digital revolution sparked a radical change across the historical profession that has had particularly important ramifications for the study of slavery and the slave trade. Despite the major theoretical, methodological, and interpretive differences that divided scholars throughout the 20th century , the means of scholarly communication and dissemination of research during that period remained virtually unchanged: books, journal articles, and very occasionally interviews, opinion pieces, and documentary films enabled scholars to explain their work to each other and, to a much lesser extent, a wider public. The emergence of the internet and its rapid infiltration of academic and everyday life has disrupted this landscape, opening new and once inconceivable opportunities to engage in open-ended inquiry unencumbered by publication deadlines, and to share the fruits of that labor with anyone who has access to the web. The digital turn has also inspired scholars to offer creative visual interpretations of the history of both slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps most importantly, the web has provided a site for the presentation and preservation of digitized archival sources that would previously have been accessible to only those people with the means to visit the repositories that hold them. While the consequences of the digital turn are being actively discussed and debated, it is clear that digital history is here to stay.

Digital projects focusing on slavery and the slave trade emerged in the 1990s and tended to be somewhat rudimentary in both their aims and scope, reflecting the limited capacity of the internet itself and, perhaps more appropriately, scholars’ limited comfort using it. These projects had as their main purpose the collection and presentation of primary sources—scanning and loading onto a web page images of captives, owners, slave ships, and forts that teachers or students had collected for pedagogical purposes. Among the first large-scale initiatives to bring together these scattered materials was Jerome Handler and Michael A. Tuite’s website, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas . 100 Created first as a portal to search through images that Handler had used in lectures, this website grew exponentially over time. From the roughly 200 images organized into ten categories with which the site first launched, it now provides access to 1,280 images arranged under eighteen topical headings. Other digital projects focused on the presentation of scanned archival documents. Libraries and historical societies used the web to advertise their holdings and entice interested viewers to further examine their collections. Many of these sites were free of charge, democratizing access to rare scholarly records—at least for those individuals who had access to the internet.

As the technology associated with digitization has improved, a number of organizations have dedicated vast resources to scaling up digital projects. Though its focus goes well beyond slavery and the slave trade, Google Books has been among the most prominent players in the field. 101 Beginning in the early 2000s, Google quietly began scanning published volumes held in major academic libraries. By 2015 , Google estimated that it had scanned 25 million books—nearly one-fifth of the total number of unique titles ever published. Though copyright laws limit full access to the collection, Google Books is nevertheless unparalleled in its scope and offers unrivaled access to published sources on slavery from the pre-copyright era. Other companies have taken more targeted approaches. The Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice portal, for example, offers access to original archival materials focused primarily, though not exclusively, on the Atlantic World that covers the period between 1490 and 2007 . The project enables users to interface with scans of primary sources and use keyword searches to find relevant materials. 102

As this implies, digitization initiatives have not been limited to the Western world, even if, at times controversially, Western institutions have funded the majority of them. Indeed, one of the enduring consequences of the Atlanticization of slavery scholarship has been the growing dialogue it helped generate between scholars living in or working on areas outside of the Anglo-American world. The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is one example: it has supported the digitization of entire archival collections in repositories situated in developing countries, where resources for preservation are extremely limited. 103 Local archivists have become valuable collaborators; young students with interests in digital preservation have gained important training and exposure to scanning methods and technologies. Since the early 2000s, major digital initiatives have been launched or completed in places as wide-ranging as Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Saint Helena, with important implications for slavery scholarship. 104 One such example is the Slave Societies Digital Archive , directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbuilt University, which preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and people of African descent. 105 Since 2007 or so, a truly global conversation about slavery and its long-term effects has been nurtured by more widespread access to relevant archival sources.

The growing sophistication of the internet and its users has transformed digital projects on slavery and the slave trade. Websites now go well beyond mere presentations of scanned primary sources. They tend to emphasize interactivity, encouraging site visitors to search through and manipulate data to generate new research insights. Some projects employ “crowdsourcing,” partnering with the public or soliciting data or assistance from site visitors to further a project’s reach. African Origins , for instance, provides to the public some 91,000 records of captives rescued from slave ships in the 19th century , including their indigenous African names. 106 Historians, with the help of other researchers, particularly those people familiar with African languages, have been identifying to which languages these names belong and thereby tracing the inland, linguistic origins of thousands of slaves forced into the Atlantic during the 19th century . 107 This has helped expand insights into slavery and the slave trade well beyond the limited confines of the ivory tower. Moreover, the internet has the added benefit of providing a space for individuals who are passionate about history but whose careers limit their abilities to publish books and articles to share their knowledge with a large pool of readers.

Few digital initiatives have done more for slavery scholarship than Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database . The Voyages site is the product of decades of collaborative research into the transatlantic slave trade. Building on Curtin’s Census , it now provides access to information on nearly 36,000 unique slave voyages that operated between the 1510s and 1867 . The site is made possible by the basic reality that, given the vast amount of money they laid out, owners and operators of slave vessels carefully documented many aspects of slaving excursions. Some of the details captured in written records lend themselves to coding and quantification: the names of captains and owners; the places to which slave ships went; the numbers of enslaved people loaded onto and forced off of slave ships; the ratios of males to females and adults to children among captives; and the prices paid for enslaved people. The vast amount of data to which the site provides free access has enabled scholars focused on virtually any aspect of the slave trade or slavery to benefit from and contribute to the Voyages project. Among its most important features is the site’s capacity to expand or revise its records based on contributions from users who uncover new or contradictory evidence. 108

Based in part on the Voyages model—or, in some cases, as a critical response to it—since the 2000s, historical research has witnessed the creation and expansion of important digital projects about enslaved Africans and their descendants. Slave Biographies: Atlantic Database Network , a project spearheaded by Gwendolyn M. Hall and Walter Hawthorne from Michigan State University, offers an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. 109 Liberated Africans , developed by Henry Lovejoy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, brings together information about the lives of some 250,000 Africans rescued from slave ships between 1807 and 1896 . 110 Final Passages , a project under development by Greg O’Malley and Alex Borucki at the University of California system, plans to provide a database of the intra-American slave trade to be deployed on the same platform as Slave Voyages . 111 And what to say of Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade , winner of a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation? The project seeks to bring such digital resources together by focusing on individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading at any time between the beginning and the end of the transatlantic slave trade. 112 It is no doubt the epitome in amassing and interconnecting historical data. Conversations about long-term institutional support for these sites and the data on which they are based—a central and underappreciated aspect of digital history—have also begun to take place in earnest. That they are happening at all is indicative of the revolutionary impact that the digital turn has had on the profession.

All in all, it is no easy task to synthesize decades of research on the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Although relatively new in comparison to more established fields of Western history, it has grown quickly, amassing a significant body of literature that incorporates some of the most sophisticated methodologies available. Historians have proven so adaptable in their approaches and uses of sources that it is nearly impossible to indicate the direction in which the field is moving. Moreover, in the wake of movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, public interest has turned again to the complex and thorny issue of reparations. Consequently, historians have had an unprecedented opportunity to engage with the public on this question and related ones concerning how societies represent and memorialize the history of slavery. In 2013 , Laurent Dubois noticed in an opinion piece in The New York Times that calls for reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Caribbean offered an important opportunity to face the multiple ways in which the past continues to shape the present. 113 In the following year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a cover article in The Atlantic making a powerful case for reparations in the United States. According to him, “until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” 114 A leading advocate for public memorializing of slavery, Ana Lúcia Araújo, has recently published a book dedicated exclusively to the issue of reparations for slavery and the slave trade. 115 While the most recent iteration of this debate draws on fresh materials and perspectives, Araújo notes that “since the eighteenth century, enslaved and freed individuals started conceptualizing the idea of reparations in correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims, written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.” 116 That such issues continue to spark passionate debates and scholarship provides a strong indication of the enduring relevance of slavery’s past to the shaping of the present.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alex Borucki, David Eltis, Greg O’Malley, and Nicholas Radburn for their comments on earlier versions of this article. All interpretations and conclusions reached here are, of course, the authors’ responsibility.

Further Reading

• Allen, Richard Blair . European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 . Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.
• Araújo, Ana Lúcia . Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History . New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
• Campbell, Gwyn , Suzanne Miers , and Joseph C. Miller , eds. Women and Slavery . 2 vols. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007.
• Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge , Matt D. Childs , and James Sidbury , eds. The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
• Cooper, Frederick . “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies.” Journal of African History 20, no. 1 (1979): 103–125.
• Domingues da Silva, Daniel B. The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Eltis, David . The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Falola, Toyin , and Matt D. Childs , eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
• Gilroy, Paul . The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness . London: Verso, 1993.
• Green, Toby . The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Lindsay, Lisa A. , and John Wood Sweet , eds. Biography and the Black Atlantic . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
• Miers, Suzanne , and Igor Kopytoff , eds. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.
• Mintz, Sidney , and Richard Price . The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (2nd ed.). Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
• Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
• Mustakeem, Sowande’ M. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage . Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
• Nwokeji, G. Ugo . The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• O’Malley, Gregory E. Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
• Rediker, Marcus . The Slave Ship: A Human History . New York: Penguin, 2007.
• Scott, Rebecca J. , and Jean M. Hébrard . Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Scully, Pamela , and Diana Paton , eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Shumway, Rebecca , and Trevor R. Getz . Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora . London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
• Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Stilwell, Sean . Slavery and Slaving in African History . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Wheat, David . Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

1. David Eltis et al., “ Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database ,” 2008.

2. Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, “Winds and Sea Currents of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 152–167.

3. Mariana P. Cândido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017) ; Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa , 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) ; Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011); and Sean Stilwell, Slavery and Slaving in African History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) .

4. John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 , 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) ; and Olatunji Ojo, “The Slave Ship Manuelita and the Story of a Yoruba Community, 1833–1834,” Tempo 23, no. 2 (2017): 361–382.

5. Stephanie E Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) ; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007) ; and Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016) .

6. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 , 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); David Richardson, “Consuming Goods, Consuming People: Reflections on the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 31–63; Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1534–1575; and J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

7. Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2013); Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); and Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) .

8. Cowling, Conceiving Freedom ; Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region ; and Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers .

9. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia , trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).

10. John Blassingame, The Slave Family in America , 7th ed. (Gettysburg, PA: National Historical Society, 1972); Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Emma Christopher, They Are We , Documentary (Icarus Films, 2013); Laurent Dubois, David K. Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold, “ Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica ,” 2017; Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Luis Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil , trans. Richard Vernon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

11. Alex Borucki, “From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in Montevideo, 1770–1850” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2011); Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective , 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) ; and David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) .

12. The classic example is Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime (New York: D. Appleton, 1918). For an outstanding historiographical overview of slavery scholarship in the United States, see Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).

13. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956); Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1974); and Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

14. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974). For a broader reflection on the quantitative turn, see Robert William Fogel, The Slavery Debates, 1952–1990: A Retrospective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).

15. John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Robert W. Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet, eds., Biography and the Black Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) .

16. Jorge Felipe, “ Digital Resources for the Study of Global Slavery and the Slave Trade ,” H-Slavery (blog), 2016.

17. Phillips, American Negro Slavery .

18. See, among his many other books, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: Holt, 1915); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Knopf, 1947); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941); Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); and Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933).

19. E. Franking Frazier and several other scholars feared that connecting African Americans to Africa would further ostracize African American families and limit their ability to integrate and gain full rights in American society.

20. Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime de Economia Patriarcal , 10th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio Editora, 1961); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1938); Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio: El Complejo Económico-Social Cubano del Azúcar , 3 vols. (Havana: Comisión Nacional Cubana de la UNESCO, 1964); Fernando Ortiz, Los Negros Esclavos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975); and Arthur Ramos, O Negro Brasileiro , 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1940); and Williams, Capitalism & Slavery .

21. James, The Black Jacobins ; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1972); and Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Knopf, 1946).

22. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution .

23. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

24. John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1977); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974). Literature on African American religion took off in the 1970s. Representative works include E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken, 1974); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll ; Milton C. Sernett, Black Religion and American Evangelicalism: White Protestants, Plantation Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787–1865 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975); and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).

25. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll .

26. Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts ; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution ; Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1984): 296–313. Scholars of the Caribbean were around this time also grappling with questions about the scale and frequency of slave revolts. See, for example, Craton, Testing the Chains .

27. Blassingame, The Slave Community .

28. George Rawick, for example, edited a 41-volume set of WPA interviews, in George Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography , 41 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972). See also George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972).

29. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 3–81 .

30. Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold , trans. Alide Dasnois (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

31. Claude Meillassoux, ed., L’Esclavage en Afrique Précoloniale (Paris: François Maspero, 1975).

32. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Martin A. Klein and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Slavery in West Africa,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 181–212; Paul E. Lovejoy, “Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate,” in The Ideology of Slavery in Africa , ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE, 1981), 201–243; and Claude Meillassoux, “The Role of Slavery in the Economic and Social History of Sahelo-Sudanic Africa,” in Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies , ed. Joseph E. Inikori, trans. R. J. Gavin (New York: Africana, 1982), 74–99.

33. Frederick Cooper, “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies,” Journal of African History 20, no. 1 (1979): 103–125 ; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Recherches sur un Mode de Production Africain,” La Pensée , no. 144 (1969): 3–20; Martin A. Klein, “The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Societies of the Western Sudan,” Social Science History 14, no. 2 (1990): 231–253; and Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery .

34. Some examples are available in John Edward Philips, ed., Writing African History (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005).

35. Sara Berry, Cocoa, Custom, and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade , 2 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); and David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

36. A candid reflection about this issue is available in Jan Vansina, “It Never Happened: Kinguri’s Exodus and Its Consequences,” History in Africa 25 (1998): 387–403.

37. David Henige, “Truths Yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact,” Journal of African History 23, no. 3 (1982): 395–412; and Elizabeth Tonkin, “Investigating Oral Tradition,” Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (1986): 203–213.

38. Adam Jones, “Some Reflections on the Oral Traditions of the Galinhas Country, Sierra Leone,” History in Africa 12 (1985): 151–165; and Donald R. Wright, “Uprooting Kunta Kinte: On the Perils of Relying on Encyclopedic Informants,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 205–217.

39. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); and Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross .

40. Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London: Cass, 1964), 21; Basil Davidson, Black Mother: The Years of the African Slave Trade (Boston: Little Brown, 1961), 89; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 9; Daniel Pratt Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 32 and 71; and Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen , 29–32.

41. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 11.

42. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 265–267.

43. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 87–88 and 247–249.

44. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); and Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to the 19th Century (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1976).

45. Ivana Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic Slave Trade, 1450–1521,” Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (1997): 31–75; David Eltis, “Slave Departures from Africa, 1811–1867: An Annual Time Series,” African Economic History no. 15 (1986): 143–171; J. E. Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey,” Journal of African History 17, no. 2 (1976): 197–223; Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,” Journal of African History 23, no. 4 (1982): 473–502; Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joseph C. Miller, “The Numbers, Origins, and Destinations of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Angolan Slave Trade,” Social Science History 13, no. 4 (1989): 381–419; and David Richardson, “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution,” Journal of African History 30, no. 1 (1989): 1–22.

46. Stephen D. Behrendt, “Crew Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 49–71; Raymond L. Cohn and Richard A. Jense, “The Determinants of Slave Mortality Rates on the Middle Passage,” Explorations in Economic History 19, no. 3 (1982): 269–282; David Eltis, “Fluctuations in Mortality in the Last Half Century of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Social Science History 13, no. 3 (1989): 315–340; Stanley L. Engerman et al., “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 93–118; Herbert S. Klein, “The Trade in African Slaves to Rio de Janeiro, 1795–1811: Estimates of Mortality and Patterns of Voyages,” Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 533–549; and Joseph C. Miller, “Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 3 (1981): 385–423.

47. Roger Anstey and P. E. H Hair, eds., Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research (Liverpool, UK: Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1976); David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Klein, The Middle Passage ; and Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt, eds., Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra): Papers from a Conference of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, June 1998 (Stirling, Scotland: Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, 1999).

48. Richard Bean, “A Note on the Relative Importance of Slaves and Gold in West African Exports,” Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974): 351–356; José C. Curto, Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese–Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and Its Hinterland, c.1550–1830 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004); David Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 936–959; David Eltis, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World before 1870: Estimates of Trends in Value, Composition and Direction,” Research in Economic History 12 (1989): 197–239; David Eltis, “The Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic Trade of Seventeenth-Century Africa,” Journal of African History 35, no. 2 (1994): 237–249; Eltis and Jennings, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era”; George Metcalf, “A Microcosm of Why Africans Sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s,” Journal of African History 28, no. 3 (1987): 377–394; Joseph C. Miller, “Imports at Luanda, Angola: 1785–1823,” in Figuring African Trade: Proceedings of the Symposium on the Quantification and Structure of the Import and Export and Long-Distance Trade of Africa in the Nineteenth Century, c.1800–1913 (St. Augustin, 3–6 January 1983) , ed. Gerhard Liesegang, Helma Pasch, and Adam Jones (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986), 162–244; and David Richardson, “West African Consumption Patterns and Their Influence on the Eighteenth Century English Slave Trade,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 303–330.

49. Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 2 (April 1958): 95–130; and Yasukichi Yasuba, “The Profitability and Viability of Plantation Slavery in the United States,” Economic Studies Quarterly 12 (1961): 6067. See also Fogel, The Slavery Debates , 18–23.

50. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 4.

51. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 4–5.

52. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 5.

53. David Henige, “Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic,” Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (1986): 295–313; and Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade.”

54. Paul A. David et al., Reckoning with Slavery: Critical Essays in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Thomas L. Haskell, “The True & Tragical History of ‘Time on the Cross,’” The New York Review of Books , October 2, 1975; and Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of “Time on the Cross” (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

55. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 144–148.

56. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 .

57. Robert Louis Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

58. Manolo Florentino, Em Costas Negras: Uma História do Tráfico Atlântico de Escravos entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro, Séculos XVIII e XIX (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1997); Manolo Florentino and José Roberto Góes, A Paz das Senzalas: Famílias Escravas e Tráfico Atlântico, Rio de Janeiro, c.1790–c.1850 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Civilização Brasileira, 1997); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Slavery and the Economics of Labor in Brazilian Coffee Plantations, 1850–1888 (Santo André, Brazil : Strong Educacional, 2017); Robert Wayne Slenes, “The Demography and Economics of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1976); and Robert W. Slenes, Na Senzala, Uma Flor: Esperanças e Recordações Na Formação Da Família Escrava, Brasil Sudeste, Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1999).

59. Manning, Slavery and African Life . See also his earlier work, Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

60. Curtin, Economic Change .

61. Jan S. Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2.

62. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller , trans. Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

63. In addition to the sources cited in note 15, see Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America , ed. Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2007); Sean M. Kelley, The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kristin Mann, “The Illegal Slave Trade and One Yoruba Man’s Transatlantic Passages from Slavery to Freedom,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 220–246; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers ; and Randy J. Sparks, Africans in the Old South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

64. David Eltis and David Richardson, “The ‘Numbers Game’ and Routes to Slavery,” in Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.

65. Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 15.

66. Deborah Gray White, “‘Matter Out of Place:’ Aren’t I a Woman? Black Female Scholars and the Academy,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (2007): 5–12. See also the reflective contributions to this journal issue by other pioneers in the field of black women’s history. Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow was published in the same year as White’s Aren’t I a Woman , though it had a broader scope and agenda. See Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

67. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 35.

68. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

69. The expression “natural rebels” comes from Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). For a small but representative sample of women’s resistance to slavery in the Americas, see the many contributions in Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

70. Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970); Leith Mullings, “Women and Economic Change in Africa,” in Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change , ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 239–264; G. Ugo Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 47–68; and Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, “Women’s Importance in African Slave Systems,” in Women and Slavery in Africa , ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 3–25.

71. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men?,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 2 (1992): 237–257; Herbert S. Klein, “African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Women and Slavery in Africa , ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 29–38; and Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender.”

72. The related bibliography is, of course, too vast to cite here, but see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Women, Marriage, and Slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Medieval North Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 43–61 ; Claire C. Robertson and Marsha Robinson, “Re-Modeling Slavery as If Women Mattered,” in Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 253–283; Joseph C. Miller, “Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves: Experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic,” in Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Medieval North Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 1–39 ; and Joseph C. Miller, “Domiciled and Dominated: Slaving as a History of Women,” in Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 284–310.

73. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 100–121; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85–113 ; Klein, “African Women”; and Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender.”

74. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) ; and Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

75. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Thayolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

76. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) .

77. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

78. Donald William Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), i, 64–65. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 55–56.

79. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 74.

80. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 192–193.

81. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 206.

82. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998). Berlin later refined his argument in Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press, 2003).

83. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone , 17.

84. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone , 64–65.

85. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 19 .

86. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

87. Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

88. Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) .

89. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) .

90. J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

91. Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–219; David Northrup, “Becoming African: Identity Formation among Liberated Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 1 (2006): 1–21; and Robert Sydney Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba , 3rd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

92. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers .

93. Manuel Barcia, West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Carney, Black Rice ; and James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

94. See, for instance, Anstey and Hair, Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition ; Mariana L. R. Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (New York: Macmillan, 2008); Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Holger Weiss, ed., Ports of Globalisation, Places of Creolisation: Nordic Possessions in the Atlantic World during the Era of the Slave Trade (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2016).

95. Cândido, An African Slaving Port ; Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port”, 1727–1892 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004); Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City ; Randy J. Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds., The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) .

96. Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) .

97. Richard Blair Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014) .

98. Although not always acknowledged, these debates clearly started with Williams, Capitalism & Slavery .

99. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 56–71. See also Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and Dale W. Tomich, ed., Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). An excellent review of the literature on this theme is available in Marc Parry, “ Shackles and Dollars: Historians and Economists Clash over Slavery ,” Chronicle of Higher Education , December 8, 2016.

100. Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr., “ The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record ,” 2008.

101. “ Google Books .”

102. “ Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice: Digital Primary Sources ” (Thousand Oaks, CA: Adam Matthew).

103. “ Endangered Archives Programme ” (London: British Library).

104. “Endangered Archives Programme.”

105. Jane G. Landers, “ Slave Societies Digital Archive ,” 2003.

106. David Eltis and Philip Misevich, “ African Origins: Portal to Africans Liberated from Transatlantic Slave Vessels ,” 2009. Another related project is Henry Lovejoy, “ Liberated Africans ,” 2015.

107. Richard Anderson et al., “Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862,” History in Africa 40, no. 1 (2013): 165–191; Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade ; David Eltis, “The Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers, 1650–1865: Dimensions and Implications,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World , ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 17–39 ; Philip Misevich, “The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the Nineteenth Century,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database , ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 155–175; G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, “The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana,” History in Africa 29 (2002): 365–379; and Ojo, “The Slave Ship Manuelita.”

108. Eltis et al., “Voyages.”

109. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Walter Hawthorne, “ Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network ,” 2012.

110. Lovejoy, “Liberated Africans.”

111. This database will be launched on the same website as “Voyages.” A description of it as well as its scholarly potential is available in Gregory E. O’Malley and Alex Borucki, “Patterns in the Intercolonial Slave Trade across the Americas before the Nineteenth Century,” Tempo 23, no. 2 (2017): 314–338.

112. Dean Rehberger and Walter Hawthorne, “ Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade ,” 2018.

113. Laurent Dubois, “ Confronting the Legacies of Slavery ,” New York Times , October 28, 2013, sec. Opinion.

114. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “ The Case for Reparations ,” The Atlantic , June 2014.

115. Ana Lúcia Araújo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) . Her previous publications include Ana Lúcia Araújo, Living History: Encountering the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2009); Ana Lúcia Araújo, Public Memory of Slavery Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010); Ana Lúcia Araújo, ed., Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Araújo, Public Memory of Slavery Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic .

116. Araújo, Reparations , 2.

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Historical Background of Slavery in America: The Issue of Race

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Slavery Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on slavery.

Slavery is a term that signifies the injustice that is being carried out against humans since the 1600s. Whenever this word comes up, usually people picture rich white people ruling over black people. However, that is not the only case to exist. After a profound study, historians found evidence that suggested the presence of slavery in almost every culture. It was not essentially in the form of people working in the fields, but other forms. Slavery generally happens due to the division of levels amongst humans in a society. It still exists in various parts of the world. It may not necessarily be that hard-core, nonetheless, it happens.

Impact of Slavery

Slavery is one of the main causes behind racism in most of the cultures. It did severe damage to the race relations of America where a rift was formed between the whites and blacks.

The impact of Slavery has caused irreparable damage which can be seen to date. Even after the abolishment of slavery in the 1800s in America, racial tensions remained amongst the citizens.

In other words, this made them drift apart from each other instead of coming close. Slavery also gave birth to White supremacy which made people think they are inherently superior just because of their skin color and descendant.

Talking about the other forms of slavery, human trafficking did tremendous damage. It is a social evil which operates even today, ruining hundreds and thousands of innocent lives. Slavery is the sole cause which gave birth to all this.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

The Aftermath

Even though slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, the scars still remain. The enslaved still haven’t forgotten the struggles of their ancestors. It lives on in their hearts which has made them defensive more than usual. They resent the people whose ancestors brought it down on their lineage.

Even today many people of color are a victim of racism in the 21st century. For instance, black people face far more severe punishments than a white man. They are ridiculed for their skin color even today. There is a desperate need to overcome slavery and all its manifestations for the condition and security of all citizens irrespective of race, religion , social, and economic position .

In short, slavery never did any good to any human being, of the majority nor minority. It further divided us as humans and put tags on one another. Times are changing and so are people’s mindsets.

One needs to be socially aware of these evils lurking in our society in different forms. We must come together as one to fight it off. Every citizen has the duty to make the world a safer place for every human being to live in.

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Struggles for Freedom: Essays on Slavery, Colonialism, and Culture in the Caribbean and Central America

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Darién J. Davis; Struggles for Freedom: Essays on Slavery, Colonialism, and Culture in the Caribbean and Central America. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 February 1999; 79 (1): 110–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-79.1.110

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This important collection of essays brings together newly edited materials and previously published work by the author on the English-speaking Caribbean. Bolland, a sociologist, aims to look at the economic, political, and cultural forces that have shaped Caribbean societies from colonial times to the present day. Divided into four sections— “Colonial and Creole Societies,” “Colonization and Slavery,” “From Slavery to Freedom,” and “Class, Culture and Politics”— Struggles for Freedom is diverse in its approach and subject matter. In the introductory essay, “Creolization and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History,” Bolland makes clear that “creolization” constitutes a central dynamic of Caribbean social history, and this assertion reverberates throughout the book.

Bolland begins part 2 by looking at the colonization of Central America and the enslavement of its inhabitants, while demonstrating the economic links that existed between Central America and the Spanish-dominated Caribbean prior to 1550. He focuses on indigenous slavery and offers the generally accepted argument that the impact of African slavery in any particular region was inversely related to the availability of indigenous labor. The chapter on Belize is more specific, as it examines labor practices related to timber extraction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bolland makes clear that Belize’s creole culture evolved from the complex interaction among slaves from different cultural backgrounds, slaves and their masters, and men and women who were not primarily engaged in plantation slavery. The final essay in this second section examines changing European perceptions of Amerindians in Belize, from the early European colonizers of the time of Columbus to the British overlords of the nineteenth century. Bolland surveys the perceptions of colonizers and chroniclers during the initial phase of contact and colonization, although he pays particular attention to the ethnocentric views of the British, a legacy that persists to this day.

In part 3 Bolland questions the notion that social relations changed after the abolition of slavery. He demonstrates that in many cases slaves had opportunities to engage in wage labor while so-called “freed men and women” were often coerced. This same theme is more specifically treated in chapter 6, which examines how after abolition the British ensured continued control over land and labor in the West Indies in general and Belize in particular. This section concludes with an essay on the politics of freedom in the British West Indies. Bolland tackles the complex question of how former slaves gave meaning to their freedom by examining issues of worker autonomy after emancipation. As he shows, the answer to this question varied, and must be interpreted within the complex relationship between “dominance, resistance and accommodation” (p. 187).

In part 4, Bolland analyzes four important West Indian novelists (Victor Stafford Reid, Ralph de Boissiére, John Hearne, and George Lamming). Although his frame of analysis is not as clear as in other chapters, he does offer us a glimpse into the cultural history of the region in the preindependence era of the 1940s and 1950s. As he searches for authentic articulations of “Creole culture,” Bolland offers little in the way of a historical or nationally-specific context for understanding the novelists and their novels. Moreover, the reader is never quite sure why the author has chosen to examine these four novelists. Nonetheless, Bolland makes us understand why he believes it is Lamming who best “makes the concept of an authentic Caribbean nation possible” (p. 256).

The final essay of the book focuses on the role of ethnicity in decolonization and political struggle in two English-speaking Caribbean nations on the mainland: Belize and Guyana. Both countries have remarkably similar histories and thus make for a superb comparison. Bolland forcibly argues that party politics, which many have analyzed through the prism of ethnicity, in fact cuts across ethnic lines. Moreover, in both countries, as in the region as a whole, cultural and ethnic identities are intimately related to class formation, emerging nationalism, and state formation.

This volume is an important contribution to the literature on the English-speaking Caribbean. It is particularly helpful in placing Anglophone communities in a context that extends beyond the island-nations (although comparative material from the major island-nations of Jamaica, Barbados, or Trinidad is minimal). Bolland inevitably faced the challenge of many Caribbean scholars who must balance broad regional trends with in-depth analysis of specific nation-states. In light of this, it is remarkable that one author is able to provide so much depth and breadth to the subject. For the historian, many of the general essays may not be historically specific enough. Others will lament the lack of comparison with the Spanish, French, and Dutch Caribbean. Yet, these essays provide important themes and issues that will allow for cross-cultural comparison. This volume is well organized and conceptualized (although it does not include the index listed in the table of contents) and will be an important reference for years to come.

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The Demonization of Rural America

B y the time I was seven or eight years old, I was keenly aware of my father’s drug use. He didn’t snort pills in front of me yet—he saved that for my teen years—but he talked about pills freely and I knew he took them. He was meaner than usual when he couldn’t get his pills, and I learned to recognize the signs of withdrawal long before I ever heard that term. Any hope for stability in our lives probably vanished before I could walk. And by the time I became an adult, everyone in my nuclear family—and plenty of my extended family members—was struggling to cope with the impacts of violence, incarceration, and addiction.

I grew up in Appalachian Eastern Kentucky, where systemic poverty has been a challenge for many decades. We always joked that Kentucky was 20 years behind the rest of the country but as a kid, I didn’t understand what we really faced: underfunded schools, inadequate transportation systems, poor healthcare, unreliable utilities. Prescription pain pills flooded into our region and did nothing to cure our collective pain, but instead exacerbated the personal and social struggles that the region is often associated with.

I was born in 1979, so most of this unraveling and destruction took place during the 1980s and 1990s . But it was sometime in the early 2000s when I read about the opioid epidemic online for the first time. At first, I was shocked to learn prescription pills had become a mainstream problem. But next, I was angry. By this time, pain pill manufacturers had changed their formulas so pills could no longer be crushed and snorted or injected; right away, heroin became widely available, which shocked me. When I was little, heroin was a city drug, scary and distant. Someone must have known that opiate-addicted hillbillies were a ripe market for a replacement opiate, just as someone had first found a way to saturate the Appalachian region with highly addictive pills without drawing attention to their crime.

But why wasn’t it talked about until now? Why wasn’t it an epidemic when it was ravaging my family for the last 20 years? Why wasn’t it newsworthy when my father chose pain pills over feeding his family, or when the same thing happened to families all around me?

I already knew the answer to those questions, though. Eastern Kentucky had been a throwaway place for a long time. Through a wide range of experiences, I learned at a young age that we were poor white trash. The stereotypes about us were, and continue to be, disdainful and dismissive, mixed with a potent disgust for good measure. Our accents are signs of ignorance and stupidity; we’re presumed to be shoeless and perpetually pregnant, sometimes—repulsively—even as a result of incest. Lawless and toothless, who would decry a manmade epidemic that wiped out thousands of hillbillies and their worthless children?

Read More: Kentucky Floods Destroyed Homes That Had Been Safe for Generations. Nobody’s Sure What to Do Next

Americans have discarded and scapegoated various socioeconomic groups throughout our history—this is not a new phenomenon. Unlike many biases that we have reckoned with, though, the vitriolic view of Appalachia—and to some extent, other areas of rural America—stems from an entrenched classism that remains unchallenged in our collective moral consciousness.

The most popular Mexican restaurant in our small town of Berea, Kentucky, has several machines where you can buy gumballs, small toys, and even temporary tattoos. When they were little, my kids always begged for a quarter or two so they could buy something after we ate there. But there was one novelty that made me cringe each time and I forbade my children from spending quarters on it: the hillbilly teeth , which are “the first line of fake teeth purposefully designed to look trashy, hillbilly-like, and downright gross.”

The teeth didn’t offend my sensibilities as a young mother; they publicized my shame. I grew up in a holler and the well my father dug for our house never functioned quite right. My parents often had to pump creek water into the well so we would have water pressure and I knew we weren’t supposed to drink it. But we still mixed it into Kool-Aid and coffee, cooked with it, and brushed our teeth with it. Most of the time, we drank milk or pop.

My brother and I both had visible black cavities on our baby teeth and I looked forward to the day they would fall out. But when my permanent teeth grew in, they were spaced too far apart on top and crowded against each other on the bottom; my gums bled at humiliating moments. Somehow, I always knew my teeth were a sign of the particular kind of poverty I came from.

Why didn’t my parents get us clean drinking water and ensure we had proper dental care? The first reason for these oversights was my father’s drug addiction; the second was his relentless abuse of my mother, my brother, and me. Visits to the dentist, fixing the well, braces for my permanent teeth—those concerns fade into the background for both the drug-addicted and traumatized minds.

When I moved away from my hometown, I found a way to hide my accent at college and work, as so many Appalachians do. But I couldn’t hide my teeth or fix them until I was well into adulthood. The hillbilly teeth at the Mexican restaurant served as a cruel reminder that it’s socially acceptable to mock the socioeconomic class I was born into; our problems are a joke.

Another popular, insidious sentiment loomed large in the 2016 election, and I suspect it was infused into early conversations about our opioid problem: “They deserve what they get.”

The 2024 book, White Rural Rage , highlights the problematic conversations around Appalachia in interesting ways. Early in the book, the authors claim that rural America poses “a quadruple threat to democracy” and they begin their critique with Mingo County, West Virginia. The authors decry the fact that this county’s majority vote went to Trump in both 2016 and 2020, but fail to acknowledge an important fact in Appalachian voting and indeed, in voting among many vulnerable populations: less than half of the registered voters cast a ballot in either election.

Even though this book doesn’t claim to focus on Appalachia, Mary Jo Murphy at The Washington Post suggests early in her review of it that “Someone write a new elegy for the bilious hillbilly, because these authors went for his jugular.” She addresses rural Americans from that point after. “Hillbillies” are historically associated with Appalachia, but the poor, white inhabitants of this handful of states don’t represent rural America as a whole. They’re used as an easy target—a convenient stand-in for the diverse population that actually comprises rural America—because they’re considered to be poor, ignorant, white trash that no one will defend.

There will be no social backlash against overt and covert claims that rural Americans deserve everything they get. Poor whites remain a safe target for political commentary and cheap humor alike.

Classism is not just a problem when someone writes a book about it. And it’s not just a problem when people take to social media to blame election results on some of our most disenfranchised citizens. Classism distracts us from solving our collective problems because it keeps us from asking the right questions. Classism tells us to blame rural whites for our country’s ills—just like other populations have been blamed in the past—demonizing our neighbors instead of the dysfunctional systems and perhaps even individuals who hold incredible power over our political and financial wellbeing.

Whether they are poor or not, white or not, rural Americans grapple with the same issues as everyone else: poverty, violence, addiction, and social decay are obviously not unique to rural areas. But this population faces those problems with fewer resources than their urban and suburban neighbors. Just as there is no excuse for bigotry, we cannot justify blaming our country’s challenges on a disempowered socioeconomic group. Placing blame fuels divide. We need to do some collective soul-searching to understand our biases and find a way to move past them.

Finding solutions is the harder work and the right work. That work requires that everyone has a voice and a seat at the table—especially the people who have historically been excluded. If we can find the courage to set aside classist prejudice, we might discover that there are no throwaway places and more importantly, no throwaway people. Not even hillbillies like me.

Photographer Stacy Kranitz has been documenting life in Appalachia for over 13 years to challenge stereotypes and provide an honest look at a complex region .

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The Significance and Impact of the 13th Amendment in American History

This essay is about the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on December 6, 1865, which abolished slavery. It explores the historical context of slavery in America, the political challenges faced in passing the amendment, and its immediate and lasting impacts. The amendment ended the legal practice of slavery, but the transition to freedom for African Americans was difficult, marked by discrimination and the enactment of restrictive Black Codes. The essay also discusses how the 13th Amendment laid the groundwork for future civil rights legislation and movements, influencing ongoing efforts to combat inequality and injustice both in the United States and globally.

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The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution stands as a pivotal legal milestone in American history. Ratified on December 6, 1865, it heralded the cessation of the institution of slavery, fundamentally reshaping the social and legal fabric of the nation. To fully comprehend the essence of the 13th Amendment, one must delve into the historical milieu in which it arose, the profound transformations it instigated, and its enduring ramifications for American society.

Preceding the Civil War, slavery entrenched itself deeply, particularly in the Southern states.

The Southern economy leaned heavily on the labor of enslaved individuals, toiling on plantations and yielding profitable cash crops such as cotton and tobacco. This economic reliance engendered a formidable, ingrained interest in upholding the existing order. Moreover, social and quasi-scientific rationales were wielded to legitimize slavery, with advocates contending it as a benign institution fostering care and order among the enslaved. This degrading outlook sharply clashed with the fervent advocacy of abolitionists, championing the intrinsic rights and dignity of every individual.

The rift between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions heightened over time, escalating into mounting political turmoil. The election of Abraham Lincoln, representing the anti-slavery Republican Party, to the presidency in 1860 proved the tipping point for numerous Southern states, prompting their secession from the Union to form the Confederacy. The ensuing Civil War, spanning from 1861 to 1865, primarily revolved around the issue of slavery, albeit encompassing broader themes of states’ rights and national cohesion.

Amid the Civil War, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. This executive decree proclaimed the freedom of all enslaved individuals within Confederate-held territories. While symbolically significant and strategically aimed at undermining the Confederacy, the proclamation fell short of outright abolition. It pertained solely to rebellious states, leaving slavery intact in Union-aligned border states and regions already under Union control. Thus, a more enduring and inclusive remedy was imperative to eradicate slavery in its entirety.

Enter the 13th Amendment. Its language stands unequivocal: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This provision ensured the constitutional proscription of slavery nationwide, obliterating any legal ambiguities that might perpetuate the institution in any guise. The amendment’s unambiguous renunciation of slavery represented a definitive departure from an era where humans could be lawfully owned, traded, and exploited.

The path to the 13th Amendment’s ratification brimmed with political hurdles. Securing the requisite two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress demanded ardent lobbying and negotiation. The amendment encountered fierce opposition, especially from Southern Democrats and border states. Nevertheless, President Lincoln and his Republican allies remained undaunted in their endeavor. Lincoln, evolving from a moderate anti-slavery stance to a fervent abolitionist stance during the war, leveraged his considerable political acumen to shepherd the amendment through Congress. His assassination in April 1865, mere months before the amendment’s ratification, cast a poignant pall over its enactment, underscoring the monumental sacrifices made in the pursuit of justice and equality.

With the 13th Amendment’s ratification, millions of African Americans attained legal emancipation. However, the transition from bondage to freedom proved far from seamless. The immediate aftermath of emancipation witnessed substantial social upheaval. Newly liberated individuals confronted daunting obstacles, including rampant discrimination, economic adversity, and violent reprisals from those resistant to societal change. In the South, many states enacted Black Codes—restrictive statutes aimed at curtailing the freedoms of African Americans and preserving a labor force reminiscent of slavery. These laws sought to regulate the movements, employment, and conduct of African Americans, effectively seeking to subvert the liberties guaranteed by the 13th Amendment.

The federal government countered these challenges with additional legislative measures safeguarding the rights of African Americans. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 represented an early bid for legal parity, conferring citizenship and equal protection under the law upon all individuals born in the United States, irrespective of race. This statute laid the groundwork for the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, which further enshrined the precepts of equal protection and due process in the Constitution. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, aimed to safeguard the voting rights of African American men, barring the denial of suffrage on the basis of race, color, or prior servitude.

Despite these endeavors, the quest for genuine equality proved protracted and arduous. The termination of Reconstruction in 1877 heralded the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the resurgence of white supremacist factions like the Ku Klux Klan. These groups employed violence and intimidation to stifle African American political engagement and civil liberties. The Jim Crow era, spanning from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, epitomized by institutionalized racial segregation and disenfranchisement, subjected African Americans to systemic discrimination across all spheres of life, from education and employment to housing and public accommodations.

The mid-20th century civil rights movement emerged to contest and dismantle these entrenched systems of inequality. Activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and myriad others orchestrated protests, marches, and legal challenges in pursuit of equal rights and justice. The movement notched significant victories with the enactment of landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, striving to dismantle segregation, safeguard voting rights, and ensure equitable opportunities for all Americans, regardless of race.

The legacy of the 13th Amendment reverberates into the present day. It stands as a foundational charter in the ongoing struggle for civil rights and social equity. The amendment has been evoked in various legal contexts to confront contemporary manifestations of involuntary servitude and exploitation, such as human trafficking and certain forms of prison labor. The amendment’s exception clause, permitting involuntary servitude as a penal sanction, remains a subject of contention, particularly in debates surrounding prison labor and the criminal justice system. Some critics contend that this provision has been abused to perpetuate coerced labor under the guise of criminal penalty, advocating reforms to rectify these concerns.

In contemporary American society, the principles enshrined in the 13th Amendment continue to galvanize efforts to combat inequality and injustice. The Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, draws upon the historical legacy of abolition and civil rights advocacy to confront systemic racism and police brutality. Activists and advocates labor tirelessly to ensure that the liberties promised by the 13th Amendment and subsequent civil rights legislation are fully actualized for all individuals.

The impact of the 13th Amendment transcends national borders. Its tenets have shaped global discourse on human rights and contributed to the formulation of international norms against slavery and human trafficking. The amendment’s unequivocal stance against involuntary servitude has furnished a template for other nations endeavoring to eradicate analogous practices within their territories.

The 13th Amendment stands as a testament to the enduring struggle for human rights and equality. Its ratification heralded a momentous juncture in American history, heralding the demise of the odious institution of slavery and laying the groundwork for subsequent strides in civil rights. While the amendment’s immediate ramifications were profound, its broader legacy continues to inform the nation’s ongoing endeavors to forge a fairer and more just society. The 13th Amendment serves as a poignant reminder of the potency of legal and societal transformation and the imperative of vigilance in safeguarding the liberties and rights of all individuals.

In synthesis, the 13th Amendment represented a monumental triumph, not solely in abolishing slavery but also in paving the path for sustained advancement in the struggle for civil rights and social equity. Its mission was unequivocal: to eradicate the dehumanizing scourge of slavery and affirm the entitlement of all individuals to liberty. The amendment’s impact was immediate and sweeping, shaping subsequent legislation and social movements dedicated to achieving parity. As we reflect on the significance of the 13th Amendment, we are prompted to contemplate the ongoing voyage toward a society where freedom and justice truly reign for all.

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African American Culture: A History of Slavery Essay

By 1750, most slaves in America were not African born but America born. Several slaves worked in sugar, cotton and tobacco plantation. Very few of these slaves were African born, because the reduction in the importation of slaves from Africa.

Majority of these slaves were born in America, but they were descendants of Africans who were imported in America (Ira 112-115). During this time, there were three slavery systems.

Slavery in South Carolina and Georgia low country was very harsh than the one in the Northern colonies. Most Slaves were imported from Africa to work on sugar, cotton and rice plantations. The slaves were forced to work in very harsh conditions including working in very hot marshy areas. they were affected by tropical diseases such as malaria which led to the death of several slaves.

The number of enslaved population imported from Africa reduced in Chesapeake area, and in the Carolina Georgia low country. By 1750, the Chesapeake had the largest number of slaves in the mainland British America, but the majority of these slaves were American born or the Creoles.

Slaves in Chesapeake enjoyed good working conditions with less exposure to subtropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever (Edmund 111-112). Most of these Slaves were given permission by their slaveholders to have to choose their sex partners and subsequently give birth to children.

Consequently the bearing of children naturally increased the number of slaves in this region leading to a reduction in number of slaves imported from Africa. Children worked with their parents in large plantations and lived with them in the slave cabins. This led to Creole slaves dominating this area (Allan 145-148). As the number of slaves imported from Africa reduced, the slave culture became more American. This led to the formation of African-American communities in America.

The whites less controlled these slaves. They were more exposed to the culture of the whites than those slaves from other regions. The American born slaves introduced Christianity on their traditional ceremonies such as emotional singing, and on death rituals (Edmund 111-112).

The slaves combined their musical instruments with American musical instruments to develop songs that expressed had African rhythm All these led to the development of Africa-American communities in America. The slaves who were born in America developed African American culture out of slavery. The development of afro-American culture had a significant effect on the establishment of African American communities (Ira 112-115).

The new African-American culture influenced children of the white who were put under the care of black servants on the plantations. Many of the African practices, values, and beliefs were blended with white culture. African American traditions were evident in American literature and religion and in other fields. The African American culture developed to become a significant part of American culture.

African American culture led to a transformative impact on the American culture, which developed, into African-American communities (Allan 145-148). The culture of African slaves who were born in America has greatly influenced the American culture. The African-American communities were developed out of the American born slaves in America.

Works Cited

Edmund, Morgan. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia . New York: Wiley, 1975. Print.

Ira, Berlin. The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, October 31). African American Culture: A History of Slavery. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-america/

"African American Culture: A History of Slavery." IvyPanda , 31 Oct. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-america/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'African American Culture: A History of Slavery'. 31 October.

IvyPanda . 2018. "African American Culture: A History of Slavery." October 31, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-america/.

1. IvyPanda . "African American Culture: A History of Slavery." October 31, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-america/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "African American Culture: A History of Slavery." October 31, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-america/.

Adam Smith’s guide to life, loveliness, and the modern economy

• Christopher Culp • Fred L. Smith, Jr. • Iain Murray • Jeremy Lott • John Berlau • Kent Lassman • Ryan Young • Stone Washington • 05/22/2024
• Human Achievement Hour

Photo Credit: Getty

• View Full Document as PDF

Introduction: Going strong at 300

This essay collection celebrates Adam Smith’s 300 th birthday. He is best known for being the first modern economist, but his influence goes beyond any academic discipline. The Great Enrichment that has grown global living standards by about 30-fold since about 1800 owes much to Smith’s brand of liberalism. This is a grand claim, but it is no exaggeration.

Countries across the world have modeled their economic institutions on Smith’s ideas and prospered, as in America and Hong Kong. Other countries designed their systems against Smith’s ideas and remain poor and oppressive, as in Russia and China. Either way, Smith is part of the debate. His tercentenary deserves all the recognition it gets and more.

Most of the essays here originally appeared in places such as Forbes , the Foundation for Economic Education’s The Freeman magazine, Liberty Fund’s brilliant AdamSmithWorks website, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) blog, OpenMarket. They cover nearly 35 years out of CEI’s 40-year history. The oldest essay here dates to 1989 and the newest are published here for the first time. Like Smith’s scholarship, they cover diverse topics. These include empathy, economics, philosophy, government, slavery, the American founding, Greek tragedy, and even science fiction.

Assembling those essays in one place, lightly edited, accomplishes several things. It highlights Adam Smith’s enduring influence on liberal thought in general and on CEI’s work in particular. It gives those pieces a longer shelf life, and helps them reach new audiences. And despite their distance from each other in time and topic, the essays all share Smith’s universal themes of empathy, cooperation, optimism, and progress.

Another reason to revisit Smith is more timely. The world is at an ideological crossroads. Populism and authoritarianism are on the rise around the globe. A worldwide political realignment has mostly tossed aside positive-sum economic issues in favor of zero-sum identity issues like nation and race.

In America, progressives on the left and national conservatives on the right are joining forces on issues as disparate as trade protectionism, industrial policy, and aggressive antitrust enforcement. At the same time, they grow more divided on cultural identity issues, sometimes violently.

Populists and nationalists have won elections in Mexico, Italy, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere. The United Kingdom, European Union, and other traditionally liberal places have seen their own nationalist and populist movements grow more disruptive. China under Xi Jinping has undone many post-Mao economic reforms, and India under Narendra Modi has taken a nationalist turn. These last two countries contain more than a third of the world’s population.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has adopted nationalist and anti-democratic rhetoric while attempting to justify his Ukraine invasion, which as of this writing is the largest European war since World War II. Hamas’ October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel risks sparking a larger war in the Middle East.

Adam Smith offers a calming influence to a world that could use it. To the extent that this essay collection helps to promote Smith’s vision of liberalism, free markets, and empathy, it can help the political conversation mature from adolescent chest-thumping into an adult conversation about ideas. A revival of Smithian liberalism would make people’s lives longer, wealthier, and more fulfilling. Three centuries after his birth, Adam Smith is as important as ever for human progress.

Smith’s life in brief

In his History of Economic Analysis , vaunted economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote of Adam Smith that “Few facts and no details are needed about the man and his sheltered and uneventful life.” Schumpeter could not have been more wrong. Adam Smith was born in just the right time and place in history, in June of 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, just outside Edinburgh. Those facts and details greatly matter for Smith’s thought, his place in history, and for the Great Enrichment that has improved billions of lives and is still in progress today.

Smith’s childhood was during the Industrial Revolution’s earliest beginnings, while Edinburgh was located near its English epicenter but most definitely not in it. This allowed Smith to take an outsider’s perspective on economic progress while still participating in it. Smith also had the good fortune of reaching adulthood just as the Enlightenment was reaching its peak, and when rising commerce and industrialization were noticeably starting to improve everyday lives.

Smith’s Scottish heritage also influenced his thought. The Industrial Revolution began in earnest in Britain, which Scotland joined in 1707. Their union was not seamless, however. The English tendency to treat their northern neighbors as a lesser people never went away. A combination of disparate political forces led to two Jacobite uprisings in Scotland, in 1715 and 1745. The ’45 ended in the Battle of Culloden, the worst military defeat in Scottish history. Smith was 23. The fractious rebel coalition splintered at the last minute, and the English put down this final Scottish uprising with special brutality. Culloden remains a sensitive topic in Scotland to this day.

Smith and many of his Scottish Enlightenment contemporaries, including David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Francis Hutcheson, for all their accomplishments, all felt the sting of discrimination. This may help explain some of their relatively egalitarian beliefs, democratic sympathies, and skepticism of aristocracy. Smith even publicly supported American independence in The Wealth of Nations .

For all the noise he created, Smith led a quiet life. Schumpeter had that part correct. The most dramatic event in his life happened at age three when was briefly kidnapped by Romani and reunited with his family, with no harm done. Smith never married or had children, and had no romantic relationships that we know of. His father, also named Adam Smith, died shortly before he was born, and Smith remained close to his mother until her death in 1784, when Smith was 61. Smith wanted his papers burned upon his death, and his friends mostly honored his request, frustrating historians, economists, and philosophers ever since. While these likely did not contain anything scandalous, the world will never know.

He first left Kirkcaldy to attend Glasgow University. Glasgow was one of the world’s fastest-growing trading centers at this time, giving Smith a close-up view of early Industrial Age commerce he could not have gotten in Edinburgh. Further studies were funded by a scholarship intended to enable backward Scots to study at civilized Oxford, though that was not Smith’s experience. He was disappointed by Oxford’s drunken students, indifferent faculty, religious stifling of intellectual creativity, and the cronyism and corruption he saw all around him in England. Smith learned about civilized behavior in this period less by example than by counterexample.

Although Smith was neither wealthy nor of noble birth, he experienced a Grand Tour of Europe as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch. On this tour Smith was able to meet in person the French physiocrat economists, such as Quesnay, Turgot, and Helvetius, whose economic ideas influenced The Wealth of Nations . He attended some of the famous Paris salons, where he met the liberal economist Turgot, who would later have a difficult tenure as Louis XVI’s finance minister; Diderot, who compiled the Encyclopedie , the world’s first encyclopedia; and Benjamin Franklin, the American printer, inventor, entrepreneur, and revolutionary. Smith and the young Duke also traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, where he met Voltaire more than once.

Between these travels and his frequent trips to London to participate in the many social clubs of which he was a member, Smith knew nearly every major figure in Enlightenment thought. In Edinburgh, through his membership of such groups as The Select Society and The Poker Club, he rubbed shoulders with distinguished men such as Lord Kames and “Jupiter” Carlyle. He was especially close with David Hume, and they considered each other best friends despite a 12-year age difference. He was also an active correspondent. Despite his personal papers being burned, enough of Smith’s correspondence survives to fill a 495-page volume.

Smith spent most of his career as an academic, teaching at both the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow, where he was Chair of Logic and Rhetoric. In his later years he was given a patronage job as a customs inspector, which was somewhat ironic given his free trade beliefs. But Smith valued the hands-on experience, and surprised his superiors by actually working at what was supposed to be a mostly no-show job.

Smith wrote only two books. Theory of Moral Sentiments was published in 1759. It has always been overlooked in favor of 1776’s more famous The Wealth of Nations , but modern scholarship has revived the book’s reputation and rightfully put the two together as part of a unified system of thought. The Glasgow edition of Smith’s works contains eight volumes, also including his Lectures on Belles Rhetoric, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Essays on Philosophical Subjects , his surviving correspondence, plus an index.

Neither Theory of Moral Sentiments nor Wealth of Nations were ever truly finished works, and he continued to revise them and issue new editions until his death in 1790. Smith’s intellectual descendants around the world have continued his project to the present day.

The real Adam Smith

Adam Smith is not who most people think he is. High school civics classes get the basic facts right: division of labor, free trade, the invisible hand, The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and all that. But they usually get the man’s spirit almost exactly wrong, and that is the most important part. Many teachers tell their students that Smith was a selfish calculator of a man who was obsessed with material gain. The real Adam Smith was a much better person.

Empathy is the core of Smith’s thought. He wasn’t obsessed with money, he was obsessed with exploring human nature. He was interested in how people get along with each other—and how they don’t. Smith’s two books are a masterclass on human interaction. There is a reason why economics and its offshoots are called social sciences, and Smithian empathy is a big part of it.

Smith wrote quite a bit on self-interest, and this is one reason he is often misunderstood. Many people have a hard time keeping apart facts from opinions. The technical term for this is low decoupling. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, since nearly everyone has it to some degree.

For Smith, it is a fact that self-interest is built into human nature. His opinion was that he did not like this fact. But from a low decoupler’s perspective (or a reader who has prejudged that they don’t like Smith or free markets), to explain something is to favor it. Smith wrote about self-interest, therefore he favored it.

This is wrong. Humans are imperfect creatures, and excessive self-interest is one of our most common imperfections. What fascinated Smith is that, under the right conditions, self-interest can make people more compassionate. And not only that: The interplay between empathy and self-interest can make people not just richer, but more virtuous.

That Smith thought this way shows in The Wealth of Nations ’ full title: An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations . This wonky title is rarely written out in full, which is another source of misunderstanding. Each word does some work in explaining what Smith is trying to say.

Poverty has no cause. If someone wants to be poor, all they have to do is nothing. Wealth has causes. It takes action. It takes intent. Wealth has to come from somewhere, and that is Smith’s enquiry. If human nature is the same all around the world, why are some places rich and others poor? Smith has several answers, which all tie together. All of them are rooted in empathy.

People can create more wealth by cooperating with each other than they can alone. That idea is where the division of labor comes from. It is also where trade comes from.

If people agree to specialize in different things, they can become fabulously productive. If everyone trades their specialized surplus for things other productive specialists are making, well, then everyone is more productive. There is more of everything. That is where the wealth of nations comes from.

But division of labor only scratches the surface. How does that specialization-and-exchange process emerge? Smith’s answer is the invisible hand. That hodgepodge process of specialists trading with other specialists is chaotic and unplanned. It clearly works. Paris is fed every day even though there is no centralized food distribution plan, as Smith’s admirer Frédéric Bastiat later pointed out. But how does that order emerge from unplanned chaos?

To answer that, Smith digs down one more layer and discovers institutions. Readers familiar with CEI’s regulatory reform work know that one of our mantras is that institutions matter. A lot of that is Adam Smith’s influence. Think of institutions as the rules of the game, such as respecting property rights, keeping your word, and agreeing on ways to settle disputes.

The right institutional structures can give even the most flawed, self-interested people an incentive to cooperate with each other. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest,” Smith wrote. Market institutions channel self-interest in such a way that everyone gets a dinner, even if they do not how to make their own food.

Smith was no purist about institutions. For Smith, a good set of institutions is what he described as the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” requiring little else than “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” Just as people are imperfect, so are the institutions that people improvise while trying to cooperate with each other. But they do not need to be perfect to work well.

There is one more layer. Where do institutions come from? At the bottom is empathy, holding up everything else. It’s always about empathy for Adam Smith. It takes empathy to understand other people’s needs, so you can specialize in making something they value, instead of wasting your time on something nobody wants. It takes empathy to offer trades at prices other people will accept. It takes empathy to respect another person’s dignity enough to trade with them rather than steal from them.

If we step back from Smith’s digging and take in a larger view, we’ll notice that the layers aren’t neatly separated. They are entangled. They shade into each other, receding here and protruding there, much like the ongoing duel between self-interest and empathy in Smith’s real subject, human nature.

High school civics teachers were right that Adam Smith liked free markets. But he didn’t like them because he was selfish. He liked them because empathy was so important to him. That is the real Adam Smith. He deserves to be better known than his classroom caricature.

– Published on CEI’s OpenMarket blog, June 13, 2023.

How to love and be lovely

Happiness was more important to Adam Smith than anything in economics. In some ways, The Wealth of Nations was a side project. For Smith, wealth is not valuable for its own sake. Wealth is good because it enables people to pursue meaningful lives and make deep connections with other people. Contrary to Smith’s reputation, he believed one of the most important things in life is love.

Smith had little regard for the fleeting happiness that comes the instant gratification that many people wrongly associate with free markets. He was interested in longer-term Aristotelian happiness. For Smith, this has two main ingredients. Neither of them is money, and both are related to love.

As Smith put it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments , “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” He uses those words differently than we do today, but the ideas are timeless.

To love, in Smithian terms, is to be the type of person who is able to feel love. To be lovely, in normal 18th century usage, means worthy of being loved. Loveliness in the sense of “you look lovely today” did not emerge until after Smith’s lifetime. A good person has the emotional capacity to feel love, and the character to deserve it in return. The two concepts are intertwined.

Feeling love takes empathy, which is Smith’s eternal theme. To love means being kind and giving to those you love. It means being a good listener. It means saying sorry and meaning it. It means forgiving human shortcomings, and having the grace to not take slights personally. It means helping people when they need it, and being able to ask for help when you need it. It means both giving and taking, without ulterior motives.

Deep friendships are not transactional. There must be genuine concern for the other person’s well-being. If people are selfish, is it really friendship?

There are many different types of love, not just romantic love. There is also love between friends, and between family, and between parents and children. Smith had a number of deep, lifelong friendships that he valued above all else. There is even a whole book about Smith’s friendship with David Hume. Most of Smith’s thought focuses on this type of love.

Smith was a lifelong bachelor, and may or may not have known romantic love. Smith also never experienced the love a parent has for their child, though as a doting son he experienced the flip side of that relationship. As Liberty Fund’s Christy Lynn Horpedahl has pointed out, that left a gap in Smith’s thought, not just his life. If he had known those loves too, it may have further deepened what he had to say about the love he shared with his family and friends.

Smith had this deep emotional capacity despite his well-known social awkwardness. He was an absent-minded professor type who would drift off into his own thoughts at odd times and get lost in conversation. His unique speech and gait were well-known around Edinburgh and Glasgow, and people often imitated his mannerisms. The historian Jim Powell shares that “Once, reportedly, he was giving a tour of a Glasgow tannery, and he absent-mindedly fell right into the tannery pit, from which his friends extricated him.”

Smith knew nearly every major Enlightenment thinker, often through their joint membership in The Select Society, The Poker Club, or the Oyster Club. Almost nobody had anything bad to say about him as a person, even when they disagreed with his ideas. In circles as catty as academia and intellectual salons, this is almost unheard of. Smith apparently practiced what he preached.

A life filled with Smithian love sounds nice, but it is incomplete. One must also be lovely. Again, that means worthy of being loved. A lovely person, for Smith, is a virtuous person. They keep their word, are quick to help, and are quick to forgive. They are honest and reliable. They lift people up when they are feeling down, and gently bring them back to Earth if they are a little too exuberant. A lovely person is fun when the occasion calls for it, and is serious when the occasion calls for that.

Part of loveliness is a skill for taking a room’s social temperature and keeping it from getting too hot or too cold, while still letting it fluctuate on its own. Creating this kind of dynamic social comfort for people takes tremendous empathy.

Loveliness cannot be faked, as my colleague Jeremy Lott and artist Douglas Curtis illustrated in a one-page comic at Liberty Fund’s AdamSmithWorks website. Adoration feels nice, but a person who lies about their accomplishments, or who befriends other people only to take advantage of them, knows he is a fraud. His friends don’t love him, they love a false idea of him. Even if nobody ever finds out, that secret knowledge is a blow to self-esteem severe enough to prevent someone from feeling the type of happiness Smith seeks.

Being lovely is a process, not an end result. It takes work, maintenance, and long-term self-improvement. Putting in all this effort is more than a life’s work. It is its own form of loveliness.

Smith had an adult’s view of materialism. He didn’t worship Mammon, nor did he condemn material wealth. He had a nuanced view that saw prosperity as giving people the means to pursue the important things in life: to love and be lovely.

– Published on OpenMarket, June 16, 2023.

Adam Smith’s ‘tolerable administration’ vs. America’s increasingly intolerable one

Iain Murray

In celebration of Adam Smith’s 300th birthday, it is interesting to note that one of the great man’s most thought-provoking sayings appeared not in either of his great works, the Theory of Moral Sentiments or The Wealth of Nations , but in notes from his 1755 lectures in the possession of his popularizer, Dugald Stewart. The saying went:

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical. (Emphasis added.)

Most commenters regard the emphasized words as a simple comment on the legal system. I suspect that more weight should be given to the words “tolerable administration.”

It is incumbent upon any legal or regulatory system (if we take that as synonymous with “justice”) that it not be burdensome. This is, indeed, the very etymology of “tolerable” – from the Latin tolerare, “to bear, endure, or support.” This suggests that every law or regulation be understandable to anyone who comes across it, and that every form that has to be filled and every box that has to be checked can be done so with an appropriate level of ease.

Now think about how long it takes to do your taxes. They are unlikely to be “easy,” especially if you are a small business person who has suddenly been saddled with issuing Form 1099s to every vendor or sub-contractor you have paid over $600 to, with a penalty of over $50 for each late form.

Then think about the 212,000 rules issued by the federal government since 1976, and the literally countless pages of guidance documents issued to support them. At some point the line separating tolerable form intolerable will have been crossed, and if it hasn’t been already, it surely will be soon. There are, however, ways in which we could measure these burdens, if Congress would make this a priority.

Then there is the administration aspect of justice. Recent Supreme Court decisions have cast doubt on whether the way we administer regulation is compatible with the requirements of the Constitution, including its insistence on due process. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission has announced that it will do away with some of the pesky due process aspects of its administrative proceedings. The problem became so severe that a commissioner resigned over the Chair’s “disregard” for the rule of law.

The administration of justice requires procedural fairness – one might even say procedural justice. Yet for too many people caught up in the web of bureaucracy, the result is either costly (and therefore intolerable) or life-destroying (and therefore unjust.)

There is a human cost to intolerable administration. Indeed, if we wish for reform and a more humane government, perhaps “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” would make for a good manifesto.

– Published on OpenMarket, June 14, 2023.

How trade makes us better people

Economists love efficiency. That is why most of them love free trade. Countries with relatively free trade also tend to be wealthier than more protectionist countries. But there is more to life than maximizing utility. Today’s economists should take a cue from Adam Smith, the father of free trade. For him, trade is about more than efficiency. It is also about empathy.

Smith’s larger project was human cooperation. Trade is a key ingredient in Smithian cooperation, and many of the reasons why have little to do with efficiency.

First and foremost, trade respects individual dignity. If another person has something you want, there are two ways you can get it. One is to steal it: take it by force or deceit. The other is to trade them something they value in return. Actually, it’s better than that. You have to give them something they value even more than what they give up. But you will not persuade anyone to trade unless you have enough empathy and compassion to engage with them on equal terms.

To do this, you have to see things from their point of view. You have to make an effort to understand their values, even if they differ from yours. Then you have to persuade them in ways that appeal to them, and not necessarily yourself. You have to be able to have a two-way conversation with the other person, give and take. Not one or the other; both. You not only need to say what you want, you have to listen closely to what others want. Every transaction has two sides, and both count equally. Smith found these empathetic parts of trade far more interesting than the efficiency gains.

Trade doesn’t work without the idea of property, which is another staple of liberal (in the correct sense) economics. As the Smith-influenced scholar Bart Wilson points out, even property is more about empathy than efficiency. It is a cliché to point out that dogs know what property rights are. Just try and take away their stick and see what happens. That dog’s growl says, “This is my property.”

But Wilson, in Smithian spirit, says that this is only half the story. Just as every transaction has two sides, so does the idea of property: “This is mine, and that is yours.” It is both of those things. Not one, but both. Dogs do not get that second part; humans do. Again, a Smithian concept of property rests on treating other people with dignity. Property is not selfishness. It is a social custom based on cooperation. The fact that property is economically efficient is just the cherry on top of the moral sundae.

Peace is human cooperation on a national scale. Trade between individuals in different countries not only helps to build peace among countries, it helps to sustain it. The very first thing McDonald’s teaches its teenage employees is to not kill the customer. It’s bad for business. Instead they are told to be helpful and polite.

The deeper two countries’ trade ties are, the less likely they are to go to war. Voltaire, the French philosopher who Smith met in the 1760s, made a similar point in one of his most famous quotes:

Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.

Smith might not have approved of the infidels valuing only money, but he would have enthusiastically endorsed trade as a way to promote tolerance and cooperation. Trade can turn enemies into friends, as Mises and Hayek would both point out in the 20 th  century.

Trade is not a guarantee against war, as we are finding out with Russia’s Ukraine invasion. Both countries until recently had McDonald’s. The larger point holds. War and violence have both been in long-term decline, with rising commerce playing an important role, as Steven Pinker has documented in  The Better Angels of Our Nature , as has Michael Shermer in  The Moral Arc .

Being nice to people is good for business. It also gives people moral practice, as Virgil Storr and Ginny Choi argue in their Smith-influenced book  Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals?  Successful traders are trustworthy, and can trust in others. They listen to what other people want, and try to provide it.

Cheating and stealing might work once, as in a dine-and-dash at a restaurant in a town you’ll never visit again. But most trade is not a single transaction. It is a repeat-play game. Getting a bad reputation can be death in the marketplace. Keeping your word, paying your bills, being trustworthy, and learning when to trust others—and when not to—are all learned skills. They take practice, and markets are moral playgrounds where people can do exactly that. Markets are an ongoing process, not an end result.

The late Steve Horwitz, who won CEI’s Julian Simon Memorial Award in 2020, loved to tell a story about the double thank you of the market, that little moment when customer and merchant both thank each other:

But in the market, the Double Thank You says something different. That turkey is not a gift, as the grocer gets my $9 per pound in return. It is instead a mutually beneficial exchange. We are genuinely thanking each other for having made us each better off. I am happier with the turkey than the $9 and the grocery store prefers the $9 to the pound of turkey. When we thank each other, we genuinely mean it. We are both grateful for the exchange.

Trade makes strangers cooperate every day. It also makes people richer. Those material gains are important. They let people live longer, more comfortable lives, and pursue their versions of lives well lived. But as Smith and his intellectual descendants point out, it is the moral goodness behind trade that makes all that efficient wealth creation possible.

– Published on OpenMarket, June 28, 2023.

Adam Smith slavery controversy can be settled by his writings

According to Britain’s Independent , the grave of Adam Smith in his home city of Edinburgh has been included in a citywide review as being a site linked to “historic racial injustice.” The Independent summarizes:

“The inclusion was justified with a comment that said he ’argued that slavery was ubiquitous and inevitable but that it was not as profitable as free labour’”.

Smith’s gravestone and his statue on the Royal Mile will now be considered by the council’s “Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group” led by activist Sir Geoff Palmer, which will report on how memorials linked to “oppression” can be “re-configured”.

The Edinburgh review must have been superficial. If they had read his works they must somehow have missed the many condemnations of the institution of slavery and the sympathy with which he viewed the enslaved.

The Adam Smith Institute in the UK pointed to passages from the Theory of Moral Sentiments or The Wealth of Nations . In his Lectures on Jurisprudence , Smith was even more explicit—slavery was economically inefficient and for that reason, slaves should at the very least be paid but economic reasoning itself led to the conclusion that the institution should be abolished, as had happened in Western Europe. There is no justification for Edinburgh’s linking of Smith’s grave to slavery.

However, let us accord Smith the title of “the father of modern capitalism.” Many believe that capitalism was based on slavery, particularly in America. Is this not enough to condemn Smith? Once again, Smith’s own writings refute that.

Smith’s brilliant insight about capitalism was that there is an invisible hand in free markets that guides economic interaction to promote the general welfare. Smith makes it clear in his writings that in societies dependent on slavery, the invisible hand does not work that way. Instead, it benefits the rich at the expense of the poor and enslaved—precisely what the anti-capitalists believe, yet Smith makes it clear that this is not the free market at work.

Indeed, it was the early free marketers’ insistence that pursuing prosperity required the abolition of slavery that led pro-slavery writer Thomas Carlyle to dub economics the “dismal science.” In a racist tract called (sic) “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Carlyle says:

And the Social Science—not a gay science but a rueful—which finds the secret of this Universe in ‘supply and demand,’ and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone—is also wonderful. Not a gay science, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we may call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

It takes quite some twisting of the ideas to equate Smith’s anti-slavery thoughts with those of the racist hacks who rejected his economic insights.

Another fine article on the subject by the Adam Smith Institute’s Matt Kilcoyne is available at The Spectator .

– Published on OpenMarket, March 9, 2021.

Adam Smith, George Washington, and the invisible hand in America

John Berlau

Although Adam Smith would have been 300 this year, his birth date is unknown, and his baptism date has shifted from different dates in June due to the 1750’s change in the English calendar. So many of his admirers – including those of us at CEI—are celebrating his birthday the entire month.

This means celebrations of Smith’s birthday will soon be followed by celebrations of the birth of the United States of America on the 4th of July. Recent scholarship – some of which has been conducted by me in my book  George Washington, Entrepreneur  – shows how fitting this is. Many of the founding fathers of the new American nation read Smith and took his teachings to heart. As Katherine Mangu-Ward  notes  in  Reason , Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that “in political economy, I think Smith’s wealth of nations the best book extant.”

New scholarship also shows that George Washington almost certainly read Smith’s 1776 book  The Wealth of Nations  and may have also read Smith’s earlier tome,  Theory of Moral Sentiments , published in 1759.

In 2001, a research assistant to Princeton economics professor Alan Krueger discovered Washington’s signature in the 5 th  edition of  The Wealth of Nations , published in 1789, in Princeton’s Rare Book Library. Additional research confirmed Smith’s book was part of Washington’s library. Later, historian Kevin J. Hayes documented in  George Washington: A Life in Books – an ambitious intellectual biography of Washington that traces the books he read – that Washington actively engaged with Smith’s facts and arguments by underlining passages in  The Wealth of Nations .

Furthermore, letters of Washington published in the 1990s show Washington buying Smith’s earlier book  Theory of Moral Sentiments . He purchased the book for his stepson Jack Custis when the young man was attending King’s College in 1773. Though it is unclear if, or how extensively, Washington read this book by Smith, the fact that he purchased it shows Washington had at least some familiarity with its content.

Princeton economist Krueger’s New York Times piece also quotes an Enlightenment scholar saying the discovery that Washington read Smith “is genuinely thrilling news for historians,” and notes that “some of Washington’s sentiments were clearly Smithian.”

Washington stated, for instance, in his farewell address as president, “Even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand: neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences.” This echoes Smith’s many statements against cronyism and the government favoring certain businesses over others.

As I write in  George Washington, Entrepreneur , Smith’s critique of British mercantilism would likely have resonated with Washington, who chafed at the red tape that “Mother England” showered on him and other colonial entrepreneurs.

With limited trade routes and heavy shipping costs for goods from Britain, colonists began to make things as well as grow things, just as Washington did with his enterprises at Mount Vernon. The British Parliament saw colonial manufacturing upstarts like the enterprises at Mount Vernon, small as they were when compared to companies in Britain, as a threat to British manufacturers.

As I write in my book, seeing the arbitrary nature of new British taxes and regulations, “Washington increasingly perceived a threat to all he had built.” He expressed this fear in a 1769 letter to his neighbor George Mason, who would also become a significant Founding Father. In the letter, Washington worries that if Great Britain can “order me to buy Goods of them loaded with Duties,” they may also “forbid my manufacturing.”

A few years later, Washington would be appointed head of the Continental Army and lead the American colonies to independence. Then, a few years after setting an example for the world by voluntarily giving up power at the end of the Revolutionary War, Washington would be called to lead the new nation as president.

In his first inaugural address upon taking office in 1789, President Washington uttered a phrase very familiar to readers of Smith. Washington proclaimed in that speech, “No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men, more than the People of the United States.” (Emphasis added.)

As I note in my book, there were some slight difference in the context of Washington and Smith’s use of the phrase “invisible hand.” But there were also some definite commonalities. Both men focused on decentralization, and to some extent, on the higher power they each referred to as “Providence.” As I write:

Smith was writing in the context of trade and wealth distribution, whereas Washington was speaking of the several decisions of individuals that led to the transformation of the 13 colonies into an independent nation, which he believed was guided by “providential agency.” Yet … Both men believed that the best results are most often achieved by the individual decisions of several people uncoerced by a centralized political authority. [And] both argued that such individual human actions leading to a greater social good could indeed be coordinated by a higher power. Just as Washington spoke of a “providential agency” in the inaugural address, Smith expounded on a “Providence” that “neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.”

Both men should be remembered and praised this 4th of July when we celebrate the underpinnings of our liberties.

– Published on OpenMarket, June 30, 2023.

The wealth of America

Stone Washington

Adam Smith’s magnum opus,  The Wealth of Nations , was published during the same year that America gained its independence as a nation. Perhaps no other country in the world benefited more from harnessing the ideas on capitalism advanced in Smith’s work. America’s free-market system continues to flourish today as a testament to Smith’s ideas.

One of the great advantages of America’s free-market economy is illustrated by Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor. In Smith’s view, the spontaneous interactions of everyone in a market system tend toward the optimal use of available resources, producing benefits across society, despite those benefits not being the goal of any individual or supervising authority.

Also, while individuals are primarily guided by their own self-interest in making economic decisions, Smith did not necessarily view them as “selfish” or “greedy,” because they’re collaborating with other free individuals for mutual gain. In a voluntary market, both buyers and sellers are better off when they do business together.

This interdependence encourages producers to supply the market with products that are essential to consumer wellbeing, while simultaneously financing their own enterprise. A component of this is the nature of “arms-length transactions.” These are commercial engagements between two or more dissimilar parties which agree to do business. Their collaboration is driven purely by financial self-interest and an equal moral agency to accept or reject offered terms. To ground this in the human element, even though a producer may care first and foremost about his profit-margin, he also cares about how his products are being consumed and enjoyed by his customers.

Smith’s revolutionary notion of the division of labor—separating workers’ daily responsibilities based on their relative specialties—has multiplied productivity and thus overall economic growth in industrial societies more than any other factor. Less government involvement in the economic affairs of a country by central planners enables more leverage on production from dispersed private actors. Smith understood that a healthy combination of private competition, legal protection for property rights, and rational self-interest among market participants provides a roadmap toward economic prosperity.

Smith’s ideas were inspirational to succeeding generations of economic thinkers. Those who carried up his mantle were known as mainline economists, encompassing the fundamental tenets of economics research. Mainline economics as a body of scholarship actually predates Smith, going as far back as St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13 th  Century. Prominent disciples of Smith include Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek, Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Douglass North, Vernon Smith, and Elinor Ostrom.

These individuals were on the forefront of applying sound economic theories and empirical data toward resolving real-world problems. Such ideals have been championed by current-day research and advocacy organizations like the Mercatus Center and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, as well as many others.

In bridging the gap between theory and public policy, mainline economists seek to resolve a host of ongoing conundrums, such as “Why are some societies fabulously wealthy while others are miserably poor?” and “How can we as humans live together peacefully and prosperously?”

Nudged along by Smith’s ideas on wealth, these researchers have found that economic growth in society is largely dependent upon the standard of living for a majority of its citizens. Economic growth produces a diverse array of opportunities for working and middle classes, leading to a greater propensity for participation in the market and access to financial mobility. Smith argued that consistent human exchange of goods, services, and ideas is what drives the economy. Mainline economists focus their efforts on explaining the societal benefits of these exchange-based relationships, from both market and non-market collaborations.

Adam Smith’s invaluable contributions to the study of economics continue to ring loudly 300 years after his birth. He provided the theoretical framework for why a free, market-driven economy is able to produce both expanding prosperity and a flourishing civil society, all without a central planner. American economists today would be wise to remember and pay their respects to that legacy.

– Published on OpenMarket, June 27, 2023.

Classical liberals aren’t naive about big business

Big business has become a point of friction between conservatives and classical liberals, especially social media and other internet companies that fall under the heading of Big Tech. Conservatives are increasingly likely to say that large companies need to be constrained by law, such as antitrust, to prevent them from threatening American values. Classical liberals disagree, which sometimes leads to accusations of naivety from our conservative friends. I respectfully dissent; classical liberals have always been wary of big business.

We can trace that skepticism all the way back to Adam Smith, who famously noted that, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” While this is often used to suggest that Smith would have endorsed economic regulation, the opposite is true. The rest of the passage notes that such conspiracies are normal reactions to regulatory restraints. We place burdens on businesses, so they raise prices, hurting consumers. Jen Psaki and Elizabeth Warren should take note.

Conservative business critics often make a similar mistake in reasoning. Businesses offshoring production hurting heartland towns? Clearly a conspiracy against the public inspired by love of Mammon! No, far more likely is the final breaking of the camel’s back after years of regulations and taxes piling on. Technology companies restricting speech? They obviously hate us and want to silence us. No, that’s far more likely a reaction to laws around the world that punish companies for “misinformation” and to threats of stricter regulation in the U.S. Companies going green or pandering to racial agitators? Look at the number of laws and regulations around the world pushing them in that direction.

We have seen the results of businesses attempting to stand up to government over the years. It rarely ends well for them. Lobbying is one of the few tools they possess, but their ability to do that is always under attack. And now they have vice presidents of environmental and diversity acting as government agents from within, often using the company’s lobbying power to call for more restrictions.

Nor do classical liberals naively think that all businesses are champions of freedom or doing God’s work. Again, Adam Smith is our guide. He noted that, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

In other words, businesses are selfish, perhaps even greedy. However, the market turns those sins to virtuous results. We do get our dinner because of them, and market discipline prevents the sins from being too much of a problem. When regulation gets in the way, market discipline breaks down. For instance, that discipline gives us good customer service, but in a jurisdiction where tips are banned, the incentive for better service goes away.

This suspicion of business, combined with the recognition of the beneficial effects of the market economy, is why most classical liberals describe themselves as pro-market, not pro-business. We might celebrate some of the great advances Amazon has brought us in terms of bundled services, quick delivery, and lower transaction costs, but we would have no problem with Amazon being outcompeted into oblivion.

It is that relentless process of competition that leads classical liberals to celebrate what we call creative destruction. Old companies crumble as new ones arise, delivering greater value to consumers and new jobs for workers. Yet, that process can be short-circuited by regulation, which creates entry barriers against innovative newcomers and entrenches old businesses in place.

Curiously, that would be the effect of policies many conservatives now endorse. Notice how many streaming videos these days show an ad from Facebook touting the company’s support for “updated Internet regulations,” such as amending the law known as Section 230? Those “updates” would make it harder for an upstart social network to compete against Facebook.

Ah, say conservative critics, but what about monopolies? Adam Smith knew the source of monopoly power was government, and wrote that “monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price.” But competition is relentless, so monopolists require a government charter or its regulatory equivalent to maintain their position.

All antitrust law does is to substitute government action for competition, with all that implies. Government regulates, companies achieve monopoly status, government breaks them up, and the extant regulations help to create new monopolies. It’s ever decreasing circles of bureaucracy.

– Published in The Dispatch on December 28, 2021.

We still struggle with Smith’s Man of System: Natural liberty is the antidote

Kent Lassman

Liberals have been debating the meaning of liberty for centuries. What are the proper boundaries for individual action and the scope of the state?

When understood properly, liberty offers an expansive private sphere of action where different talents can combine with ingenuity for an infinitely wondrous world. Liberty is often discussed as a normative value. What ought a person do? When does the liberty of one person affect the liberty of another? Where ought we draw the limits of state action?

Liberty is found throughout the work of Adam Smith. For him, it informs how individuals understand their own potential, as well as the dignity of everyone else. It creates limits to action by incorporating a sense of others’ value into the understanding of self. It is, as Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations , “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way.”

The pursuit of the good life, including natural liberty, centers liberty in public, or social, discourse and informs how we govern ourselves. Securing liberty is found, for example, in America’s Declaration of Independence: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is the stated reason for government.

Smith explains that by removing governmental restrictions and preferences on certain people, activities, or trades, we can rediscover natural liberty. The sovereign, he says, is “completely discharged” from the duty of overseeing “the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.”

It is not government’s proper role to tell people how to advance social goals. He grants that at this point, the sovereign has only three duties: defense, justice, and certain public works which ought to be locally managed and financed principally by the users of the works, as with toll roads. But in that same passage Smith says: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way.” Here we find the essence of natural liberty and the strong presumption for it in society.

What liberals must do, as Smith did elsewhere, is to understand how state action and state institutions can become instruments of illiberality.

Two errors from the man of system

It is not enough for government to establish conditions under which natural liberty can flourish. It must also limit ambitious people from forcing their plans, their ambitions, and their wills on others. Smith, in a chess metaphor, diagnoses a common problem with many political leaders.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board.

Smith’s man of system, and the conceit of having knowledge enough for effective planning, echoes in Friedrich Hayek’s 1988 book The Fatal Conceit . Both men had experience with political leaders who understood social and political change as a top-down command, rather than a bottom-up emergent order. Smith, like Hayek after him, understood and highlighted how natural liberty was the great catalyst for activity among individuals and the “great interests” alike.

The man of system becomes, in his arrogance, a danger to society and an obstacle to social change. He misunderstands the limits to planning and makes a fundamental error about human nature. The man of system, the government planner, sees himself in the role of a deus ex machina , “very wise in his own conceit.”

There is a second mistake of government planners. As Smith points out in the next few lines, they often forget that each individual has agency, which means we all have our own mind and motivations.

He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess–board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess–board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.”

Adam Smith presents an alternative to high-handed politicians and rigid bureaucrats of system. This is the man of humanity and benevolence. This approach eschews violence and is willing to moderate abuses and injustices incrementally: “When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavor to establish the best that the people can bear.”

Both types of men focus on the role of public administrators and how to govern. But only the second is premised on goodwill toward others, even those who pursue their interests in unconventional or imperfect ways.

In this way, Smithian liberalism includes recommendations on how to govern, a topic too often ignored by contemporary liberals of all stripes. Smithian liberalism is premised in a moral vitality inherent to each person. This is an idea that stands the test of time and is essential to understanding the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s guiding principles.

Prudence in political life involves compromises, but the Smithian liberal always maintains a sense of direction. Even after teaching moderation, Smith says: “Some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy and law, may no doubt be necessary for directing the views of the statesman.”

Smith is clear about his North Star: allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way. Under liberty, action is limited by its effects on others within a society, as well as by external threats. For Smith, granting the sovereign, or the government, a few essential duties, such as defense and justice, is the best way to maximize natural liberty. No government program, and no politician or man of system, can move the interests or prejudices of society around like pieces on a chess board. For liberals, and anyone of goodwill who seeks effective government, governance begins with the premise that each individual has and maintains moral capacity, regardless of what the legislature might decree.

National ruin and human progress

During the American Revolution, John Sinclair, a member of British Parliament, wrote a letter to Adam Smith. He was worried about how badly the war was turning out for Britain. “If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined,” he wrote, emphasis in the original. Smith’s response was one of the wisest things he ever said. “Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” This was his way of saying that things would be fine.

In this case, Britain lost the war and thirteen of its colonies. But things did turn out fine. British living standards continued to improve, and its population continued to grow. America also prospered and grew. Yet, most people continued to think more like Sinclair than Smith. In 1830, after a couple generations of rising living standards, the Smith-influenced thinker Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote:

On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but betterment behind us, we are to expect deterioration before us? If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty million, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands,, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now are, that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, many people would think us insane.”

At the time, people thought Macaulay was nuts. But his crazy predictions were almost spot-on. In 1930, the UK’s population was just under 46 million.  Automobiles, radios, and electricity, undreamt of in Macaulay’s time, were within reach of ordinary people by 1930, even with the Great Depression setting in. Growth and prosperity in the US were even more dramatic. Over time, the two warring countries developed a special relationship as one the world’s closest alliances.

Today, by almost every measure, nearly every country in the world is more prosperous than ever before in terms of life expectancy and income, as well as the percentages of houses having appliances, air conditioning, and high speed Internet. Even places still struggling with extreme poverty are seeing growth in sanitation and literacy, and declines in disease rates and malnutrition.

This is wonderful news. But there is still a lot of ruin in the UK, the US, and in all countries. There always has been, and there always will be. There is not a place on Earth free from corruption, crime, addiction, rent-seeking, over-regulation, over-taxation, and every other form of ruin known to humankind. And yet, progress still happens. Generations of human have slowly been making make each other better off for more than two centuries, with no end in sight, despite all the problems we face.

Smith’s point to Sinclair—and to us—is that things do not need to be perfect to be good. Every age has its problems. We can’t ignore them, but we can make progress against them.

There is a lesson here for today’s liberal movement. Many libertarians insist on ideological purity tests, and will not work with anyone who doesn’t pass muster, no matter how much common ground they have. They put on performance displays for other free-marketers about how radical and principled they are in order to gain status in the movement. The libertarians who put on these displays are similar in this respect to the left’s campus radicals and environmentalist purists, and to the right’s social conservatives and right-populists. Left, right, and libertarian all routinely make fools of themselves trying to increase their status in their in-groups, while doing nothing to advance their agendas.

This need to preen was one of those quirks of human nature that amused Smith. But through the smile, he would counsel his free-market friends to calm down a bit, just as he did his young friend Sinclair. There has never been a free-market golden age, and there never will be. And that’s ok.

Stay committed to your principles, and work to advance them. At the same time, in a world like ours that is filled with democratic debate, differing good-faith opinions, and bad-faith special interests, the full liberal policy program will never happen. There is a lot of ruin in a nation.

Look at how much people have been able to improve each other’s lives despite all that ruin. The highly imperfect governments that Smith criticized were filled with mercantilists and rent-seekers, colonizers and imperialists. Smith pointed out as ably as anyone how these forces made people poorer. He also pointed out that the forces of everyday liberalism were stronger.

Even in Smith’s time, when the Great Enrichment was just beginning, the difference from previous generations was noticeable. Fewer people were tied to the farm, new industries were coming into being, port towns like Glasgow were alive with growing commerce, and living standards were improving for regular people, not just the aristocracy.

Smith thought that the better the government stuck to the simple system of natural liberty, the faster this progress would happen.

If Smith were alive today, he would likely encourage today’s liberals to push as best they can for peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice. He would also likely warn against insisting on ideological purity for two reasons. One, there is no single correct regulatory policy, or trade policy, or any other policy. And two, as he reminded young Sinclair, there is a lot of ruin in a nation. Things do not have to be perfect to be good. And things do not have to be perfect to improve. The last two centuries are proof.

– Published on OpenMarket, February 12, 2024.

Das Adam Smith problem? Nein!

Do Adam Smith’s two books contradict each other? It sure looks that way sometimes. His first book, 1759’s Theory of Moral Sentiments , is about the virtues of empathy. The Wealth of Nations , published in 1776, is about how self-interest can enrich societies. This disconnect has so puzzled scholars over the years that there is a German phrase for it: Das Adam Smith Problem. On closer examination, Smith’s two sides are not only consistent, but each makes the other stronger. They are part of a unified system. There is no Das Adam Smith Problem.

Part of this shows in the books’ publishing history. Theory of Moral Sentiments is Smith’s first book, published in 1759. It is also his last book. He issued revised editions every so often as he refined his thoughts. The sixth and final edition came out in 1790, the year Smith died, and 14 years after The Wealth of Nations was published. Similarly, The Wealth of Nations went through five editions in Smith’s lifetime, the last appearing in 1789. Both works evolved together and influenced each other.

A more subtle key to resolving Das Adam Smith Problem is in his prose style. Smith’s 18th century prose can seem formal and stilted to 21st century readers. But as with any writer, if you invest an hour or two in reading him, you will develop an ear for his style. It is much easier going once that happens. You will also discover repeated phrases in Smith, such as frequent use of the word “approbation,” and the phrase “or, what comes to the same thing,” along with other little stylistic quirks that may be hard to verbalize.

Another of Smith’s prose hallmarks is that he tends to explore all aspects of an argument in order. This is one reason why his books are so long. This systematic nature is also in part because Smith’s books began as his notes for lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh, where he taught for many years. Smith’s third-best-known work, Lectures on Jurisprudence , has similar roots, but consists mostly of Smith’s students’ class notes, and not Smith’s own prose.

Just as Smith’s paragraphs will treat one part of an argument and then the next, his books do the same thing on a larger scale. For Smith, the interplay between empathy and self-interest was fascinating enough to merit a whole book about each. While both books each contain plenty of material on both empathy and self-interest, in general Moral Sentiments focuses more on empathy, while Wealth of Nations focuses more on self-interest. That may be one reason Das Adam Smith Problem arose in the first place. Scholars weren’t seeing the big picture.

Admittedly, the books have other differences. Theory of Moral Sentiments is more inward-focused, and Wealth of Nations is more outward-focused. Both look through the lens of empathy, but point it in different directions; one at the mirror, the other at the world.

The impartial spectator theory from Theory of Moral Sentiments is a way for people to judge if their own actions are just: Would an imaginary impartial third-party observer reasonably believe that I am treating other people fairly? This takes a keen enough sense of empathy to see things from other people’s perspectives. But even though the impartial spectator’s judgments all occur in one person’s imagination, it is still a social concept. The point is to gauge how well one is treating other people. Even this inward-looking book sees more than the person in mirror.

Economic concepts from Wealth of Nations are about dealing with other people. Trade, division of labor, and human progress are also the result of people using empathy to find ways to cooperate with other people. Yet they also involve the self. People won’t trade or specialize in a job unless they think they will benefit. Civil and political institutions are important because they can guide people’s self-interest in different directions, some more desirable than others. Incentives matter because people are self-interested, as well as empathetic. Seen that way, the two books are not that different. Even if they differ in degree, they both involve self-analysis and taking others into account. Not one or the other, but both.

A second difference is that Theory of Moral Sentiments is about empathy itself, while Wealth of Nations is more about applied empathy. Moral Sentiments ideas like the impartial spectator, and Smith’s ideal of to love and be lovely are all about empathy. Wealth of Nations takes those ideas and shows how empathy is the engine that drives successful political and civil institutions, trade, money, and other parts of economic life. It is in one’s self-interest to have a keen sense of empathy.

Das Adam Smith Problem itself has a problem. Human beings have a natural tendency to think in binaries; things must be black or white, on or off, left or right. The real world is more like a spectrum, full of gray areas and in-betweens. Empathy and self-interest are not opposites set apart from each other, as Das Adam Smith Problem assumes.

Empathy and self-interest interact, advance, retreat, and bleed into each other. While Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations focus on different parts of that spectrum, it is still the same spectrum. They have the common themes of human nature and human betterment. In that sense, a better way to read Smith’s unified project is as Das Adam Smith Solution.

– Published on OpenMarket, June 20, 2023.

Happy birthday, Adam Smith!

Fred L. Smith, Jr.

June 16, 1723, is the birth date of Adam Smith, a Scottish intellectual greatly admired for clarifying the virtuous, self-organizing nature of free markets. Smith noted that humans’ evolved self-interest trait encouraged people to seek wealth-creating exchanges. That was the key element of his famous work, The Wealth of Nations . But Smith also realized that such exchanges require that each party have some knowledge of what the other party seeks, and what it would view as a fair deal. And that realization led Smith, in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments , to focus on another human trait, empathy. This is the social skill that we all possess to varying degrees to get inside the mind of the other, to understand what they value. This trait is equally critical if markets are to exist and wealth creation is to occur.

Empathy deals with our awareness of how others will react to our actions and our choices. It permits us to get into the skin of another person and understand, to some extent, their motives and values. These dual traits distinguish mankind from other social animals. Animals, too, are self-interested and sometimes cooperate. But, as Smith notes, they don’t bargain—they lack the empathetic traits that would allow them to know what the other wants and reach a mutual win/win agreement. Smith notes humanity’s innate “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” This is unique to humans: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.”

Long after Adam Smith’s time, another great economist, Ronald Coase, expanded on some of these observations. He noted that any bargain—any exchange—requires overcoming a number of challenges: how do I know what others have to offer? How do I estimate what (and how much) they want in exchange? How should I handle the bargaining process? Self-interest drives people to seek deals; empathy allows one to surmount the challenges, reducing transaction costs.

Most people know Smith as the defender of free markets, free enterprise, and capitalism—and, indeed, he was that. But most focus only on The Wealth of Nations , the book that explains the wealth creation potential of voluntary exchange. There he explains the market’s self-organizing potential (spontaneous order) by the example of a pin factory. Someone organizes a set of tasks, acquires specialized equipment for these tasks, and then employs people to perform the tasks. Smith demonstrated how rational capitalism (the self-interest trait) achieved greater wealth creation via specialization and division of labor. He noted that one individual seeking to do all the tasks himself might make a few hundred pins a day, but a team each performing one task could produce tens of thousands.

Smith was writing at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, before modern corporations. The pin factory he discussed was a transitional institution, in which the loyalty of the workers reflected the earlier feudal duties that a peasant owed to the lord or the monastery.

But as capitalism’s rational nature weakened such feudal loyalties, managers had to become more than mere taskmasters. Capitalists had to find ways of ensuring a positive working environment. Employees, after all, are not serfs. They can and may well quit, moving onto to jobs offering greater satisfaction. Thus, successful managers must seek a win/win cooperative relationship with their employees (and their customers, suppliers, and investors). That challenge requires attention to self-interest, like encouraging greater productivity and efficiency, but also to empathy, ensuring that the concerns of these cooperators are met as well. The firm itself also operates in a competitive environment. Failure to achieve these cooperative results is indicated by losses of customers, higher turnover of employees, less responsive suppliers, and fewer investors.

Smith may well not have foreseen how the firm would become a training ground for inculcating both the efficiency-enhancing traits of self-interest and empathetic outreach traits. Nor did he likely realize fully how the benefits of such cooperative win/win arrangements would carry over into non-economic aspects of life, strengthening civil society. But Smith did point the way to that glorious future, the virtues and values of what economist Deirdre McCloskey and others have labeled “doux” (meaning gentle or sweet) commerce.

Capitalism is a moral order. Its defenders must realize that fact and become more effective at communicating it to others. Re-reading Adam Smith and recognizing the critical duality of self-interest and empathy is a good starting point and a great way to celebrate his birthday.

– Published in Forbes on June 15, 2017.

Speculators: Adam Smith revisited

Christopher Culp and Fred L. Smith, Jr.,

Financial middlemen are in disfavor everywhere. From the movie  Wall Street  to the pages of  The Wall Street Journal , they have become the villains of our age. Our modern media and intellectual leaders recognize a range of legitimate economic activities such as farming, distribution, storage, and manufacturing, but see little value in such unfamiliar, “immoral,” and “unproductive” activities as corporate takeovers, insider trading, and junk bond financing. These activities involve too much mental acumen and too little honest sweat.

To reinforce these biases, journalists quickly assign pejorative labels to those things they don’t understand: “insider” trading, “junk” bonds, “leveraged buy-outs,” “hostile” takeovers, “poison pill” defenses, “greenmail,” and those old favorites, “speculation” and “profiteering.” The plot outline of the media story varies, but when the story ends, the middleman always winds up wearing the black hat.

Those in the media are not alone in their condemnation. Politicians and other social commentators find it useful to chastise such middlemen as serving no useful purpose. In fact, these entrepreneurs are typically portrayed as being mere paper-pushing, tape-watching profit maximizers who exist only to skew the distribution of wealth. But if middlemen are so non-productive, we might well ask why competitive capitalist societies have created so many types of them. Some insight into this question is gained when one realizes that today’s respected service and distribution workers were once also condemned as parasitic middlemen.

We should not be surprised that the Michael Milkens of today are caricatured and pilloried. What is not understood is often condemned, and few people understand the value of entrepreneurial activities. Mankind is reactionary—the new, the novel, and the unusual may be essential, but such activities rarely receive honor in their own day. Today’s insider traders and junk bond salesmen were yesterday’s draymen and warehousemen. In their day, transportation and storage were viewed as suspiciously as innovative financial vehicles are today.

The story is told well in Adam Smith’s discussion of the Corn Laws in  The Wealth of Nations . Smith reviewed 18th-century public attitudes toward two new forms of wealth creation: “forestalling” and “engrossing” (terms picked for the same connotative reasons that “junk” and “hostile” are the adjectives of choice for high risk, high yield bond financing and changes in corporate control today). “Forestalling” was a new economic activity involving corn purchases during times of plenty in the hope that the corn could later be resold at a profit. “Engrossing” described a similar arbitrage activity focusing on price differentials among different locales within England. Engrossers, for example, bought low in Birmingham and sold high in London—or rather they hoped to do so. Both activities had become possible only as storage and transportation costs dropped.

The role of the middleman

Forestalling and engrossing were soundly criticized as sterile middlemen activities that produced no new corn but only raised prices. Such speculation, the conventional wisdom held, could only hurt the general public.

However, Smith explained clearly that such middlemen played an essential role. If speculators predicted scarcity and it failed to materialize, they lost money. They not only had to sell the corn at a loss, but also pay its storage and/or transportation costs. When the scarcity was real, however, Smith explained that “the best thing that can be done for the people is to divide the inconveniences of [that scarcity] as equally as possible through all the different months, and weeks, and days of the year” and, of course, across the nation. Smith noted that the corn merchant—the specialist in this commodity—was the most appropriate party to carry out this “most important operation of commerce.”

Moreover, Smith noted, the risks were clearly shifted from the consumers to these specialists. When engrossers and forestallers were wrong (a situation all too likely in commodity markets) and prices fell rather than rose, they bore the consequences of their follies. On the other hand, when these speculators were correct and shortages did occur, both they and the citizenry benefited. As Smith explained, “By making [the people] feel the inconveniences of a dearth somewhat earlier than they might otherwise do, he prevents their feeling them afterwards so severely as they certainly would do, if the cheapness of price encouraged them to consume faster than suited the real scarcity of the season.”

Smith detailed the consumer advantages of making uniform the supply of foodstuffs over time and avoiding the feast or famine problems that existed before there were middlemen. In modern terms, forestalling and engrossing were creative forms of voluntary risk-shifting, in which risks were transferred from risk-averse consumers and growers to risk-taking speculators.

Smith stated that “after the trade of the farmer, [there is] no trade contributing so much to the growing of corn as that of the corn merchant.” He continued, “The popular fear of engrossing and forestalling may be compared to the popular terrors and suspicions of witchcraft. The unfortunate wretches accused of this latter crime were not more innocent of the misfortunes imputed to them, than those who have been accused of the former.” To Smith, “the corn trade, so far at least as concerns the supply of the home-market, ought to be left perfectly free.”

Moreover, Smith explained that entrepreneurs seek profits not necessarily because their actions will benefit consumers; clearly, entrepreneurs have profit-maximization in mind. Yet, speculative entrepreneurship carries positive external benefits for society a priori. It is ironic that the profit-seeking activities of forestallers and engrossers yield such residual benefits, while the actions of politicians, who are generally viewed as those responsible for promoting the welfare of society, often do more harm than good.

The reader will notice the clear similarity between the speculators and arbitragers of today and Smith’s corn merchants. Indeed, the forestallers and engrossers were simply pioneers specializing in the fields of risk management, information provision, and information processing. As in Smith’s time, such middlemen provide society with services that are no less valuable bemuse they are intangible; speculators are willing to take risks that consumers would prefer to avoid.

The benefits of speculation

Speculation comes in many forms and has many benefits. Speculators, for example, constantly question the validity of conventional market wisdom by taking risks which others view as foolish. Even when conventional wisdom is correct, speculators provide a de facto cushion of insurance that improves the resiliency of society against economic risks. Speculators also serve a moral purpose by making entrepreneurial activity, and resulting economic growth and prosperity, possible.

Additionally, speculators enhance the efficiency of firms and the deployment of capital in the economy at large. If inefficient management of a corporation, for example, is detected by speculators, capital can be redistributed through the takeover process, with substantive residual benefits arising in society through better allocation of resources. Furthermore, the threat of takeovers serves as an implicit economic regulator of corporate management. Publicly held corporations typically become takeover targets when their stock becomes undervalued. This is generally the result of mismanagement or the inefficient use of capital resources. To avoid becoming takeover targets, then, firms have the incentive to operate efficiently.

Forestallers and engrossers in Smith’s day—and corporate raiders and junk bond specialists today—are merely entrepreneurs, and thus inseparable from capitalism. Unfortunately, unlike 18th-century England, we have no Adam Smith to explain their role to the American public. Our society finds it all too easy to shift the blame for declining moral standards and failing projects to today’s forestallers and engrossers.

Rudolph Giuliani, Anton R. Valukas, and Oliver Stone play before the masses on their respective theatrical stages when they portray and prosecute the evil speculators. Adam Smith did not have to contend with television and Hollywood or crusading prosecutors; he was able to argue directly to policy makers. He did not need to simplify his message for the 30-second soundbite. Nonetheless, Smith did make a strong case and his viewpoint eventually prevailed. The pejorative terms gradually lost their evocative power as people began to understand what these activities entailed.

Our challenge is to teach the American public about the value of the modern counterparts of Adam Smith’s forestallers and engrossers. This task is made even more difficult by the absence of any great Corn Law debate today. Accusations of embezzlement and corruption on the financial markets pale in comparison to the melodrama of impending starvation in 18th-century England. Despite the absence of a life-threatening crisis, though, this issue is as important today as it was in the days of Smith. Failure to consider the necessity of speculation for a growing economy will lead to the decline of entrepreneurial activity.

Attacking speculators deprives society of the vital economic and moral functions they serve. Morality cannot be restored to society by regulating and censuring the speculative class; this action would only sell our future short.

– Published in the The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty , October 1989.

Virtuous capitalism in theory and practice

Fred Smith and Ryan Young

Capitalism has a bad reputation. Many people see it as corrupt, uncaring, and in bed with politicians. And popular wisdom isn’t always wrong. For example, take the Export-Import Bank’s pending renewal. How dare large, healthy businesses such as Boeing and General Electric receive billions of dollars’ worth of special privileges?

Has Big Business thought through the political and social costs of such self-aggrandizement? Is sacrificing long-term moral standing for short-term dollars really wise?

Most businesses, after all, rarely lobby. Lobbying at the national level is largely a phenomena of the largest corporations. Why don’t more business leaders recognize the strategic value of asserting their superiority in creating wealth rather than having funds transferred to them via politics?

Fortunately, it turns out, most businesses do at least implicitly recognize these tradeoffs. As the late, great academic Gordon Tullock noted, lobbying’s apparent payoff is far lower than generally believed. Measuring the full extent of lobbying “investments” is difficult, but a simple analysis find less than $10 billion being spent annually on lobbying to gain perhaps $100 billion of government largess. Tullock outlined four factors which suggest that the costs of lobbying are greater than generally presumed, while its benefits are less.

First, when multiple companies are competing for a single government grant, a lottery situation emerges in which one company might win big, but the losing companies still incur lobbying expenses which bring down the overall corporate returns.

Second, if a company purchases the support of one politician, the firm and the politicians must generally still negotiate with a requisite number of others and that requires additional political investment.

Third, since most people view special political favors as unseemly, companies and politicians have to spend time and money building cover stories. GM’s bailout was purchased in part with a multi-million dollar national advertising campaign in which the company draped itself in patriotic nostalgia. GM also gave up significant decision authority to the government, even allowing President Obama to fire the CEO.

Finally, as markets adjust over time and eat away at the returns on government privilege, the beneficiaries must still invest to retain their eroding benefits. Think of the struggle between New York City’s taxi medallion owners and upstart ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft.

Even with these considerations, the level of lobbying seems lower than one would expect. This suggests that many businessmen also have some sense of propriety, believing that earned income is morally superior to granted income. This does much to inoculate them against Washington’s temptations. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter noted of the average businessman long ago: “He wants to be left alone and to leave politics alone.”

The Adam Smith problem sheds further light on why lobbying efforts may be low. Scholars have long noted a tension between The Wealth of Nations’  focus on self-interest and the other-regarding, empathetic message of his earlier book,  Theory of Moral Sentiments . As Smith observed, most people simultaneously hold both values – other-regarding values encourage people to get along with each other peacefully and escape the Hobbesian war of each against all, and self-interest encourages people to seek the win/win arrangements that make trade, the free market, and wealth creation so viable.

To the populace and perhaps many business leaders, cronyism seems a form of political sharp dealing that threatens voluntary win/win arrangements and capitalism itself. This may well dissuade many business leaders to focus on the world they know best – a world characterized by a creative mix of cooperation and market, rather than political, competition – to produce a close approximation of moral (rather than crony) capitalism.

Nonetheless, cronyism remains a serious challenge to capitalism. It must be condemned and corrected. This will require creative alliance-building by both free-market intellectuals and true capitalists who reject rent-seeking. Capitalism, after all, is unlikely to be defended adequately if capitalists fail to engage. Such a coalition of moral, intellectual, and economic forces could be a powerful force for economic liberalization, ensuring a positive future for capitalism – and for America.

– Published in Forbes, November 17, 2017.

Empathy, Adam Smith, and Greek tragedy

Adam Smith has a way of popping up in unexpected places. One of those is Ancient Greece, as a recent Liberty Fund Virtual Reading Group discussed. One reason people still read Sophocles and Aeschylus after nearly 2,500 years is because their tragedies are a way to practice empathy—a subject dear to Adam Smith’s heart. 

Khalifa University’s Arby Ted Siraki argues in “Adam Smith’s Solution to the Paradox of Tragedy” that Greek drama was a major influence on Smith’s thought (Thanks to Smith scholar and VRG participant Thaís Alves Costa for sharing this essay with the group):

Dramatic theory and the theatre in general were, however, never far from his thoughts. In his biographical memoir of Smith, Dugald Stewart mentions that Smith was especially interested in ‘the history of the theatre, both in ancient and modern times’, and that drama and the theatre ‘were a favourite topic of his conversation, and were intimately connected with his general principles of criticism’ (Stewart 1980, ‘Account’ III.15)

It wasn’t just in conversation. Greek tragedies and other dramas come up throughout  The Theory of Moral Sentiments ,  Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and Essays on Philosophical Subjects . If they are mostly absent from  The Wealth of Nations , it is perhaps because that book is more about applied empathy than the thing itself. 

Why were the Greek tragedies so important for Smith? One likely reason is their moral ambiguity, which requires empathy to navigate.

In Sophocles’  Oedipus the King , Oedipus claims self-defense in murdering his father, King Laius. Years before the events of the play, Laius’ chariot nearly runs Oedipus off the road, which starts a brawl. The lone surviving member of Laius’ party claims instead it was an attempted robbery. There is no way to know who is telling the truth. That is one source of ambiguity.

Another is that Oedipus and Laius did not recognize each other. Oracles foretold their fates before Oedipus’ birth, which led his parents to abandon him as an infant, though Oedipus survives. Laius and Oedipus never see each other again until the murder. When Oedipus later marries his mother Jocasta and becomes king of Thebes, he again has no way of recognizing her.

Do these mitigating circumstances matter? If so, how much? Sophocles does not answer these questions. He leaves them for the audience to ponder. 

That pondering requires empathy, which likely fascinated Adam Smith. Oedipus is as horrified by his fate as everyone else. Would you try to avoid that fate if you were him? Can you blame him or his parents for trying to outrun it? How at fault is Oedipus?

Antigone, which takes place later, follows Oedipus and Jocasta’s daughter Antigone, and her quest for revenge against her uncle Creon, who took over Thebes’ throne. Antigone’s brothers both die in battle at each other’s hands, yet Creon refuses to give a proper burial to one of them, Polynices. 

Antigone does the job herself in defiance of both king and custom. Creon imprisons her for it, and she hangs herself. This sets off a chain of events where Creon loses his wife and son (Antigone’s betrothed.)

Who is in the right, Antigone or Creon? As with Oedipus, it isn’t clear. Both were too stubborn to listen to calmer voices around them. But both were also committed to doing what they thought was right, even at great personal cost. Antigone wanted to do her duty to her family, while Creon wanted to do his duty to the state and to the gods. How much do their good intentions matter? How much does it matter that Creon repents, though too late to change events? 

Tough questions like these are a hallmark of Greek drama, and may have helped Adam Smith come up with the impartial spectator as a moral guide—what would an objective outside observer think of these actions? Or about my actions in real life?

Sophocles’ characters often mean well, but they lack balance and empathy. We can learn from their mistakes and embrace empathy, try on other points of view, and maybe avoid the flaws that took down Oedipus, Creon, and Antigone. 

Nobody is perfect, but everyone can improve. Part of that process is using empathy to see things from other perspectives. The Greek tragedies teach us that morality is not a conclusion. It is a never-ending process, similar to the way Israel Kirzner views markets, or how James Buchanan or Elinor Ostrom view institutions. 

Adam Smith’s impartial spectator is a fantastic tool for working through the moral process. And maybe, just maybe, he was inspired in part by the Greek tragedians and the spark they gave to his sense of empathy.

– Published at AdamSmithWorks, January 2023.

H.L. Mencken as impartial spectator?

H.L. Mencken is one of the sharpest-tongued satirists America has ever produced. But did he also offer a guide to life? It turns out that Mencken offered his own curmudgeonly version of Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, even if it was hidden beneath mockery and negativity. A recent Liberty Fund Virtual Reading Group explored this question in Mencken’s self-curated collection, A Mencken Chrestomathy.

The impartial spectator is a key concept in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments . It is a way for people to judge their own behavior. If a complete stranger were observing how I treated people, would that person say that I was treating them well? If I were having a disagreement with someone, who would this unbiased stranger side with?

Mencken, in his own way, is also an impartial spectator. He made fun of almost everybody, but his lampooning had a few common themes. These include status-seeking, greed, gullibility, and, above all, being a killjoy. One way to judge your own conduct is to ask yourself, would H.L. Mencken make fun of me for this? If the answer is yes, you might need to make some changes.

Mencken does not provide as wholesome a guide to life as Adam Smith. Some of his jabs were mostly for entertainment purposes. He punched down at opponents who couldn’t fight back. Mencken also shared many of the common prejudices of his day about race and gender; these should not be a part of anyone’s guide to life. But compared to some other figures who have become popular in recent years, especially on the populist right, one could do worse than the Sage of Baltimore.

Like Smith’s impartial spectator, the Mencken mockery test can be a useful check against our own excesses. It can also be a way to make sure we are enjoying life as we should. One of Mencken’s few positive recommendations is that happiness is ok.

Mencken wrote that “There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.” He goes on: “What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom for moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance—in brief, what is commonly called good sportsmanship.” That sounds like a version of Aristotle’s Golden Mean.

A less temperate impulse may have animated Mencken’s vocal opposition to Prohibition, but underneath it all was a belief in the right to happy, and the moral duty to put unsportsmanlike busybodies in their place. Not only that, but Prohibition didn’t even work. “The instant they realized what was upon them they applied the national ingenuity and the national talent for corruption to the problem, and in six months it was solved.” Bootleggers, Baptists, and drinkers all reached an uneasy détente.

Mencken also lampooned businessmen who bought and sold politicians as readily as they did their other products. He went after charities when he felt the people running them cared less about doing good and more about donations, social status, and virtue signaling. While Mencken admired great men and great accomplishments, he mocked rent-seekers and social climbers as mediocrities.

When it comes to a guide to a life well lived, Theory of Moral Sentiments has more to offer than does A Mencken Chrestomathy or Happy Days, and the competition is not close. Smith’s impartial spectator theory is a foundational idea in moral philosophy that is also easy to use in everyday life.

But there is value in Mencken, too. A good life needs humor, and Mencken could find a laugh on nearly any subject; this is its own life lesson.

Mencken also gives a guide in pitfalls to avoid. For example, don’t believe everything you read. Some people took as true Mencken’s satirical article on the invention of the bathtub, which then went viral, and led to a fresh round of mocking from Mencken. How many thousands of people failed this impartial spectator test?

One of the few people Mencken admired was Voltaire, the French satirist, philosopher, playwright, and activist, who in some ways was the Enlightenment’s version of Mencken. Voltaire once said that “I have only made but one prayer to God, and it is very short. Dear God, please make my enemies ridiculous. God has granted my wish.”

If your impartial spectator tells you that you are not Voltaire’s enemy, and that you are not acting like a target for one of Mencken’s broadsides, then you’re probably on the right track.

– Published at AdamSmithWorks, October 31, 2023.

Can the invisible hand solve a murder?

Jeremy Lott

Protagonists of detective fiction are drawn from a long list of occupations: police, of course, but also private investigators, aristocrats, housewives, philosophers, priests, precocious children. Economists, however, have not been well represented among the gumshoe set. The Henry Spearman mystery series aims to remedy that market failure. The series is authored by “Marshall Jevons,” a recognized pen name used by Kenneth Elzinga, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia, and the late economist William Breit. The authors chose the pen name as a nod to economists Alfred Marshall and William Stanley Jevons.

The Mystery of the Invisible Hand  begins with a tease for what is to come – the anonymous outline of a murder by strangulation – and then with a Nobel Prize presentation in Sweden. Henry Spearman, a professor at Harvard in his early fifties, finally receives top honors for his contributions to the field of economics. That award brings him to the attention of Annelle Cubbage, a moneyed up trustee of Monte Vista University in San Antonio, Texas, who wants a Nobel laureate to help put the school on the map. She is persuaded to give that idea a trial run by bringing in a visiting Nobelist for one semester. Spearman and wife Pidge are in turn persuaded to trade the cold of a Cambridge, Massachusetts winter for a Lone Star lark.

“Many people…claim that one book brought them to an inflection point in their lives,” Spearman says in his first public lecture to students, faculty, and the public as a visiting Nobelist. “I have met people who claim it was for them the Bible.” For this economist, the literary inflection point was  The Wealth of Nations . In fact, he could “scarcely sleep for excitement the night after I read Adam Smith for the first time,” because it seemed to have “brought the whole, vast, and seemingly chaotic universe of economic activity to an all-embracing order” with its metaphor of the invisible hand to describe the decentralized coordination of markets that make so many things possible.

Spearman thought Smith’s book had “a quality of the miraculous” and “of genius about it.” Because of  The Wealth of Nations , Spearman realized that “economic theory might be equipped to decipher the deepest secrets of human behavior,” up to and including the who, what, and why of murder. Which is fortuitous, because one of his new neighbors, another project that Cubbage is deeply invested in, turns up dead. The death of artist-in-residence Tristan Wheeler appears at first blush to be a suicide, but SAPD Homicide Detective Cherry Fuller suspects foul play.

Because of Wheeler’s constant womanizing, Monte Vista turns out to be a target rich environment for suspects. The mystery that Spearman and Fuller have to untangle is this: Was the artist’s death truly a suicide, a crime of passion, or are deeper market forces at work?

Spearman’s conjectures along the way are exactly the sort of counterintuitive proposals we have come to expect from economists. For instance, an economist once proposed installing spikes protruding from all steering wheels to cut down on tailgating as a way of illustrating how people respond to incentives. Drivers would certainly give more room to fellow motorists if the alternative was to end up like Dracula on a bad day.

Spearman never says anything quite that far over the top, but he does at one point recommend wearing a tie that costs a small fortune to a colleague worried about getting food on it. That way, the economist posits, he will be extra careful about how and what he eats. All told,  The Mystery of the Invisible Hand  is a decent whodunit with prose to match. Some might complain that the resolution is a little obvious, yet there are many red herrings for the reader to slip up on along the way to the big reveal.

– Published at AdamSmithworks, May 9, 2022.

Sci-fi circle of concern: A review of Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The circle of concern is one of Adam Smith’s most important insights into human nature. The general idea is that people care most for those closest to them, and those feelings tail off with social distance.

Imagine a person standing at the center of a circle. People tend to care most about themselves, which is why they are at the center. Those closest to them, such as their children, spouses, and closest friends, are right next to them inside that circle. Grandparents and grandchildren, cousins, colleagues, acquaintances, and second cousins are all progressively farther out. Their exact arrangement varies from person to person, but the general idea holds. The closer to the self, the more the person cares about them.

Once most people get beyond second cousins or so, the circle of concern tends to fade away. The rest of humanity, emotionally speaking, are a bunch of nearly invisible distant objects, a bit like the Kuiper Belt that surrounds our solar system. Most people wish strangers well in a general sense, but without much depth of feeling.

This circle of concern is behind Smith’s most famous quotes, about how a European man of compassion would respond to an earthquake in China, compared to a minor tragedy that affects him directly:

If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

Smith disapproved of this fact of human nature. But he also knew that caring less about more distant people is part of who we are as a species. This is why for Smith and many others, expanding people’s circles of concern is an important part of the liberal project. This can lead to more open trade and immigration; more peaceful foreign relations; lower crime rates; and can calm social tensions over race, gender, sexual preferences, nationality, and religion. Animal rights activists even argue for expanding the circle of concern to include other species to varying degrees.

What does all this have to do with a science fiction novel? For Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2019 book Children of Ruin , the answer is quite lot. I do not know if Tchaikovsky has read Adam Smith, and I know nothing about his political or economic beliefs. About the only thing I do know about him is that I like his books. But intentionally or not, Children of Ruin explores Smith’s circle of concern in great detail, and shows the good that can happen when people expand their circles.

Children of Ruin is the second book in a trilogy, each with a different overarching theme. All three books take place thousands of years in the future on various partially-terraformed planets, after humanity has nearly gone extinct, twice. The first book, 2015’s Children of Time , is evolution-themed. The third book, 2022’s Children of Memory , is about the nature of reality. Children of Ruin , the middle volume, is about different forms of consciousness and empathy—and the circle of concern.

In  Children of Time , the first book, a botched attempt at seeding an alien planet with Earth life leads to an advanced civilization of spiders and ants, instead of the intended apes (a literal barrel of monkeys accidentally burns up while entering the atmosphere, in a deft comedic touch). All of these species were enhanced with a nanovirus that speeds up evolution by orders of magnitude, in order to make the planets habitable more quickly.

Over thousands of years, the nanovirus-enhanced spiders build their own civilization and develop spacefaring technology. Around this time, humans on an ark ship which escaped a dying Earth thousands of years before reach the planet and meet the spiders. After a tense battle, the two species become allies, widening their circles of concern to include two very different sentient species.

Where the first volume was evolution-themed, Children of Ruin is about psychology and consciousness. It explores how different species think, feel, and communicate. Doing this takes a great deal of empathy. It as though Tchaikovsky is expanding Adam Smith’s circle of concern as broadly as he possibly can, and seeing what comes of it.

In addition to the humans, there is the uploaded consciousness of Dr. Avrana Kern, one of the original terraformers. She died thousands of years before the ark ship’s arrival, but lives on as an artificial intelligence in her still-orbiting ship’s computer. The AI Kern retains the original’s humorously arrogant personality, but is an imperfect copy of the original that is just a bit off. She is vaguely aware of this, and has complex emotions about it.

Tchaikovsky’s nanovirus-enhanced spiders are called Portiids; the female protagonists of each generation are named Portia. Like real spiders, Portiids are unable to hear human speech. They communicate instead through sensing vibration and touch. Both the spiders and the humans come up with all kinds of translators and ways to understand each other, and though their friendships are sincere, some differences are too vast for them to overcome; some feelings and experiences are unique to certain species and defy communication.

A nice touch is the spiders’ own gender disparity, in which males are discriminated against and discounted as inferior, reversing our own species’ issues. Like us, the spiders have even been making progress in recent generations, with male spiders advancing to prominent scientific research positions, though workplace politics are touchy, and there is still discrimination.

The stars of Children of Ruin are nanovirus-enhanced octopuses, who are the product of another botched terraforming on a planet in a different star system. Tchaikovsky based these on his research on real octopuses (he includes a short bibliography). The nanovirus-enhanced octopuses are curious, impulsive, emotional, factional, and quick to change their minds as their emotions explore different sides of an issue. Their civilization builds its own water-filled spaceships and encounters the human/Kern AI/Portiid spider alliance.

Not being able to use speech like humans or vibrations like spiders, octopuses instead communicate by changing colors. Different feelings are involuntarily expressed in different colorations, which they are unable to hide, making them unable to lie. They almost literally wear their emotions on their sleeves, and their real-time intellectual deliberations are plainly visible. This makes first contact very difficult and not entirely peaceful, even after the different species are able to figure out how to communicate with each other, however awkwardly.

Also putting in a turn is an alien life form with a collective consciousness, something like an intelligent slime mold with a long collective memory. It has the ability to interface with other organisms and assimilate their emotions and memories. Their first encounters with Earth life go horribly wrong, setting the stage for the book’s other major conflict. This species lets Tchaikovsky explore a whole other form of consciousness, one with no known parallels on Earth.

The plot throws all these very different consciousnesses together—human, AI, spider, octopus, and alien collective consciousness—and has them try to sort out who is on whose side, improvise ways to overcome communication barriers, understand what each side wants and how they think, and try to come to some kind of peaceful understanding. The extent to which they succeed requires a circle of concern rather greater than most people on Earth have today.

If Adam Smith were a fan of modern science fiction, he likely would have had good things to say about this book. As it is, it is a fantastic illustration of how Smith’s circle of concern works, and shows how growing it is essential for peace and progress. This is just as true of real life as it is of science fiction.