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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

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Whitewashing Slavery: Legacy of Slavery and White Social Outcomes

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Robert L Reece, Whitewashing Slavery: Legacy of Slavery and White Social Outcomes, Social Problems , Volume 67, Issue 2, May 2020, Pages 304–323, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spz016

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Legacy of slavery research has branched out into an important new niche in social science research by making empirical connections between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and contemporary social outcomes. However, the vast majority of this research examines black-white inequality or black disadvantage without devoting corresponding attention to the other side of inequality: white advantage. This study expands the legacy of slavery conversation by exploring whether white populations accrue long-term benefits from slave labor. Specifically, I deploy historical understandings of racial boundary formation and theories of durable inequality to argue that white populations in places that relied more heavily on slave labor should experience better social and economic outcomes than white population in places that relied less on slave labor. I test this argument using OLS regression and county-level data from the 1860 United States Census, the 2010–2014 American Community Survey (ACS), and the 2014 United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS). The results support my hypothesis. Historical reliance on slave labor predicts better white outcomes on five of six metrics. I discuss the implications of these findings for race, slavery, whiteness studies, and reparations.

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• > Journals
• > Comparative Studies in Society and History
• > Volume 63 Issue 3
• > Slavery and Its Transformations: Prolegomena for a...

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Slavery revisited, towards a new global history of slavery, defining slavery—the formal and the informal, exploring alternatives: the indian ocean and indonesian archipelago worlds, mapping trajectories of slavery regimes, a global comparative approach to trajectories of slavery regimes, towards a global comparative and connecting model, practical ways forward—on methods and sources, to conclude, slavery and its transformations: prolegomena for a global and comparative research agenda.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2021

This article argues that we need to move beyond the “Atlantic” and “formal” bias in our understanding of the history of slavery. It explores ways forward toward developing a better understanding of the long-term global transformations of slavery. Firstly, it claims we should revisit the historical and contemporary development of slavery by adopting a wider scope that accounts for the adaptable and persistent character of different forms of slavery. Secondly, it stresses the importance of substantially expanding the body of empirical observations on trajectories of slavery regimes, especially outside the Atlantic, and most notable in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction. Thirdly, it proposes an integrated analytical framework that will overcome the current fragmentation of research perspectives and allow for a more comparative analysis of the trajectories of slavery regimes in their highly diverse formal and especially informal manifestations. Fourth, the article shows how an integrated framework will enable a collaborative research agenda that focuses not only on comparisons, but also on connections and interactions. It calls for a closer integration of the histories of informal slavery regimes into the wider body of existing scholarship on slavery and its transformations in the Atlantic and other more intensely studied formal slavery regimes. In this way, we can renew and extend our understandings of slavery's long-term, global transformations.

In public and academic domains, the history of slavery is still commonly understood through the lens of “classic” slavery in the early modern Atlantic, the nineteenth-century United States, and the Greco-Roman world. The majority of people throughout history who faced conditions of slavery, however, did not live in these classic slavery societies, but in societies with a much wider range of slavery regimes. This was the case before the abolition of the slave trade and legal slavery, especially in the early modern Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds where commercial or chattel slavery systems coexisted with a variety of other regimes. It remained the case after the abolitions, with the continuation of informal “modern” forms of slavery that today characterize the lives and working conditions of an estimated 40.3 million people, again particularly in South and Southeast Asia. Footnote 1

The focus on “classic” formal slavery has in some ways limited our understanding of the adaptable and persistent nature of slavery regimes and their trajectories of development. The definitions developed for these classical histories have reinforced the often implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that the Atlantic history of chattel slavery was largely different and isolated from the wider histories of informal and also “modern” slaveries. This has de-historicized these other, informal forms of slavery as static and unchangeable; in the words of Michael Zeuske, it has led to “smaller slaveries” being “overlaid by hegemonic slaveries” and “conceptualized as ‘special forms.’” Footnote 2 This has obscured our understanding of the wider historical trajectories of different forms of slavery as they developed across the globe. It long allowed perceptions of the history of slavery to dominate that conceptualized its development in linear fashion, from an Atlantic expansion of slave trade and slavery to “enlightened” abolitions—in short, from “unfreedom” to “freedom.”

Such linear conceptions are increasingly being critiqued by scholars who argue that we need to develop perspectives that account for the coexistence, interaction, decline, and emergence of different forms of slavery. Footnote 3 There is a growing academic awareness of the need to break away from these classical confinements in order to develop more global and encompassing approaches that can better make sense of slavery's long and complex history. Footnote 4 There have been important advances in the rich historiography of Atlantic slavery, and in the expanding scholarship on slavery and slave trades in other parts of the world, but the shift remains incomplete. Though new key concepts of slaving and availability are gaining ground, the wider field of slavery studies has been pointing toward new horizons and proclaiming new dawns more than we have actually, systematically explored them. In 2012, Michael Zeuske called for the “analysis of slavery” to “be replaced by the history of slaveries, or of actors in these slaveries, in the tradition of ‘small’ and kin slaveries, which extend up to the present.” So far, this call has not yet been taken up energetically, although we can take hope from the fact that it is apparent in the agendas of some recently developed research centers. Footnote 5 Thus, although global slavery studies stand on the shoulders of giants, from Nieboer to Patterson, in some respects we have only begun to develop a truly global and encompassing approach, one that addresses not only the enormous variety of slavery forms, but also slavery's adaptability and persistence, from earliest times to the present.

This article aims to contribute to the development of approaches that will improve our understandings of slavery as a persistent social and societal phenomenon from global and long-term perspectives. It explores what can be gained by reversing the dominant perspective, to develop an analytical framework and method that will allow us to integrate and compare the experiences of slavery “outside” of the Atlantic into a global history of slavery. That is, I argue that we need to reverse our perspective from that of the formal to that of the informal, from the Atlantic to the rest of the world, and away from binary understandings toward ones that are more connected and historical-contextual.

I will begin by examining the possibilities for, and existing perspectives on, such a global approach and engaging the crucial but often glossed-over distinction between formal and informal regimes of slavery. I then take stock of the growing body of work dealing with slavery, especially in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, to consider what can be gained by incorporating a wider spectrum of historical “slaveries” into our analyses and (re)conceptualizations, as Zeuske has rightfully argued for. This underscores the point that in order to make sense of the highly diverse, adaptable, and persistent nature of slavery we must develop a more systematic comparative agenda that lays the basis for a consistent rethinking of slaveries’ forms and developments. A third section of the article reflects upon what we can gain from renewed comparisons to explore the many-faceted, persistent history of slavery before, after, and beyond the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The fourth and fifth sections propose contours for a global and connecting approach for this comparative endeavor. They lay out the first steps toward an analytical model for rethinking the history and presence of slavery by analyzing slavery regimes and their trajectories through both contrasting comparisons and global connections. The development of such a model requires, first, that we understand both the commonalities and the distinguishing features of different forms of coerced labor regimes, or coercive asymmetrical dependencies. Different forms or regimes did not exist in isolation, but were connected and impacted by their interactions, one of the most important of which was via slave trade—the coerced transportation of people. Secondly, we need to account for these connections by looking at interactions and external impacts. These connections, in turn, remind us that neither the classic nor the smaller slaveries were stagnant, self-contained, or unchangeable. Over time, they developed and adapted along different paths, continuously influenced, again, by their interactions. Thirdly, the focus proposed here, on trajectories of slavery regimes, can help us integrate comparative and connecting aspects with their spatial and temporal dimensions.

To enhance our understanding of slavery, we need to undertake a more inclusive, open investigation into the broader spectrum of slavery regimes. We must take an inductive approach that incorporates observations from in-depth, source-based analyses and that systematically compares slavery regimes to understand their characteristics, differences, and commonalities. We should avoid static units of analysis and top-down approaches and instead consider slavery regimes at the most localized level and in their historical contexts. We should reassemble our knowledge from the ground up by mobilizing sources and observations that provide insight into the everyday realities of how different regimes functioned and how they were enforced and challenged. The histories of these different regimes need to be scrutinized over the longue durée and through multiple time frames, while also accounting for external influences and especially how different regimes were connected and interacted.

The approach advocated here can provide a basis on which to investigate how and why local formal and informal regimes of slavery developed along specific trajectories and how these multiple trajectories influenced long-term global historical transformations of formal and especially informal forms of slavery. This will allow us to move beyond dominant models of “classic” and Atlantic histories of slavery, not by dismissing them but by inverting our academic focus in such a way that we can reassemble our knowledge of the diverse range of local cases and bridge the current divides between historiographies of slavery across the globe, especially, as emphasized in this article, in early modern South and Southeast Asia. The broader goal is to contribute to a larger breakthrough in our understanding of slavery by developing an approach to guide future research, collaboration, and comparative analysis. For the field of (global) slavery studies, the approach will shed new light on key debates about the perceived unique natures or the comparability of slaveries in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds, how the slave trade transformed slavery regimes, and the heterogeneous yet global nature of slavery. Beyond these more disciplinary concerns, this is important for considering how we might push forward “global history” scholarship that navigates between deeply rooted differences in regionalized explanations and scholarly traditions and the dangers of overly top-down, flattening, or universalistic global historical approaches.

Understanding the many faces of slavery, while accounting for both the commonalities and distinguishing features of different forms of coerced labor, has been an ongoing, much-debated challenge. Such are the difficulties in creating analytical models that both differentiate and unify, that some scholars have concluded that “no single definition has succeeded in comprehending the historical varieties of slavery or in clearly distinguishing the institution from other types of involuntary servitude.” Footnote 6 It is difficult to do justice to the rich tradition of slavery scholarship over the past century and a half, but three influential models stand out.

First, in line with the work of Moses I. Finley, the five “slave societies” of ancient Greece and Rome, modern Brazil, the Caribbean, and the U.S. South have been set apart from other “societies with slaves,” based most importantly on the fundamental importance of slave labor for those economies. Footnote 7 Despite its influence, scholars have increasingly recognized that this model is too simplistic and needs reevaluation. Footnote 8 A well-developed comparative scholarship on American and classic slavery has greatly advanced insights into “the European background to Atlantic slavery” and “the novel features of Atlantic slavery's exploitative capitalist system.” Footnote 9 But it seems time to ask what happens when we take these questions beyond the horizons of the Atlantic world and formal slavery regimes. Footnote 10 For example, it has been recently argued that we should also understand “the slave-based economies in Island Southeast Asia” in terms of their “engagement with the global market [as] marked by a diversity of trajectories” in relation to colonialism and capitalism. Footnote 11

In a second influential model, the many variants of coerced labor are analyzed through the lens of the single broad category of “bondage.” Footnote 12 Its advantage is that it brings to the fore commonalities and ambiguities across the wide spectrum of slavery, bondage, and labor coercion. This approach stands alongside a third model in which different coerced-labor regimes are analyzed through contrasting comparisons, which has the advantage of drawing out differences but has often reinforced perceived dichotomies of slavery versus serfdom, or European versus Asian slaveries. Footnote 13 The difficulty here is that despite clear commonalities between varieties, differences between them clearly do matter from analytical as well as contemporary standpoints, and yet the differences are not clear-cut. Forms of slavery could extend to variations of caste and land-based slavery that, in turn, bore similarities to corvée and serfdom regimes, while all of these regimes at times allowed for hiring and selling subjects in ways comparable with commodified slavery. Footnote 14 The takeaway is that we need to move beyond perspectives that either compartmentalize or blur different forms of slavery and instead strive to understand its versatility and persistence. And this effort must consider not only the histories of regimes of formal slavery, or the “hegemonic” or “great” slavery traditions of Roman and Islamic law, but also those of the “smaller” kinship and informal slaveries across the world. Footnote 15

The renewed attention paid to the history of slavery in recent decades urges us to reconsider several divisions and gaps that have developed. Within the Atlantic, attentions have expanded beyond North America and the Caribbean to the history of slavery in Africa Footnote 16 and the multiple slavery connections and experiences in the southern Atlantic. Footnote 17 Important historiographic turns have shifted the focus to “urban” and “borderland” spaces and have encompassed broader variations in slavery, control, and resistance in the Atlantic world. Footnote 18 Scholarship on West Africa, in particular, has made two important contributions: First, it has stimulated a perspectival shift from seeing slavery as an institution to understanding slaving as a historical practice. Footnote 19 This has inspired research that tries to understand the dynamics of slavery within different contexts Footnote 20 and looks more closely at the impact, regulation, and contestation of enslavement and enslavebility. Footnote 21 Second, this scholarship has called for understandings of the impact of slave trade on local slavery regimes, and of the “trajectories” of change that slavery underwent under colonial rule and especially after abolition. Footnote 22

These advances have underscored that slavery is not a static phenomenon, and they indicate the importance of understanding not only why slavery occurred, but also, through more comparative and contextualized approaches, why specific regimes of slavery and labor coercion occurred and how these developed along different trajectories in interaction with external influences. The urgency of shifting our attention in this direction is increased by the advances made in scholarship on early modern slavery outside of the Atlantic realm. This rapidly expanding historiography indicates the existence and diverse natures of slavery and slave trade in the Mediterranean, the Islamic world, the Western Indian Ocean world, South Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. Footnote 23 These studies also indicate that in many regions of the world formal slavery and commercial slave trading coexisted with a large variety of non-commodified and often informal forms of slavery, most importantly caste, debt, and kinship slavery. There have been important advances in expanding the scope of the global history of slavery, in increasing our understanding of the impact the slave trade had on the development of slavery, and in deconstructing the complexities of the spectrum of coerced labor. However, these advances have yet to generate a fully encompassing global-historical analytical framework that allows us to interrogate the full range of slavery regimes and their transformations and persistence.

Exploring the transformation of slavery through the trajectories of different regimes requires a clear delimitation of what we mean by slavery and slavery regimes. This article takes as starting point that slavery is defined only in part through legal systems and must be primarily understood as a practice. Footnote 24 The definition of slavery proposed here includes all coercive relations that involve formal or informal possession or usage right claims over people (or groups of people) that bind them to what contemporaries see as distinct, inferior social conditions with fewer or even no rights. Footnote 25 This contextualized definition engages with all historic forms of slavery, bringing together “the ‘great’ hegemonic slaveries” with the “most varied local ‘small’ slaveries.” Footnote 26 It also allows us to make useful distinctions between slavery and other regimes of coercion and bondage. One of these is regimes of coercion that extend to entire populations based on their subjecthood, especially corvée and labor tax regimes (though slaves could be used to perform or pay such obligations on behalf of their masters). A second type is convict labor regimes, although this distinction applies especially to societies where convicts generally retain many of their rights. The latter contrasts with societies where people lose most of their social rights, more or less permanently, and can become enslaved or slave-like through punishment.

It is important to note that this implies that different practices of slavery can coexist, interact, or conflict within the same society, Footnote 27 and that such slavery practices are regulated by sets of organizing mechanisms that together make up slavery regimes . It is useful to think about regimes as “a particular way of operating or organizing a system”—or more specifically here, about slavery and bondage as sets of social asymmetrical dependent and coercive relations—because that brings into play not only the who (actors) and what (forms) of these relations, but also how these are upheld—by what or by whom. This makes visible a distinction that is as simple as it is crucial, but nevertheless is too often overlooked in work on slavery. Slavery regimes can be either formal, meaning that they are regulated by polities such as local chiefdoms, states, and empires, or they can be informal, not meaning that they are unregulated but rather that they are regulated by “other” social entities, such as the community or households rather than by polities or formalized laws.

In contrast to what we may be inclined to think, historically these “classic” or “hegemonic” formal regimes of slavery, with their malleable but nevertheless laid down and enforced rules, provided a large degree of continuity in shaping slavery, especially because they were marked by a familial resemblance to “‘great’ slavery in a tradition of ‘Roman Law.’” Footnote 28 In contrast, the informal regimes of slavery seem more susceptible to change, more fluid and adaptable. Actors upholding such regimes, such as communities, villages, and households, are bound much less by legal norms of law and property and more by practices, customs, and expectations that can shift in the face of internal and external pressures.

It is important to mark this distinction because doing so allows us to develop a new logic for investigating the history of slavery. First, it warns against discarding informal, smaller forms of slaveries as irrelevant, non-standard, “local,” or “special.” Second, and more important, we must consider whether what shaped the nature of slavery and bondage over time was not so much the trajectories of formal slavery regimes and their abolitions, but that it was the trajectories of the more adaptable and widespread informal slavery regimes, especially, that were key factors in its transformation. Third, this implies that we cannot attribute slavery's persistence only to transformations of slavery regimes that occurred after slave trade and legalized slavery were formally abolished. In fact, the expansion and development of the pervasive and many-sided informal forms of slavery encountered today seem, to a large extent, to have taken place during the early modern expansion of commodified legal regimes of slavery and slave trading across the globe, especially in those environments where formal slavery occurred alongside and in interaction with existing local and informal slavery regimes.

What is proposed here is that we need to explore the idea that it is slavery's versatility, its capacity to transform and adapt, that explains its persistence over time. Put another way, slavery manifested itself through different formal and informal regimes, with their own trajectories, which existed and developed alongside each other. This implies that the long-term and global transformations of slavery were shaped by these multiple trajectories of slavery regimes, which did not develop in isolation but responded to external influences and each other. This was perhaps more explicit in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds than in the Atlantic, and it is no coincidence that those two regions figure most prominently in the persistence of modern forms of slavery.

The early modern Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds therefore provide a crucial arena in which to test and improve conceptualizations and understandings of the historical transformations of different forms of slavery, because these regions were marked by great diversity in the regimes of slavery, which interacted with the rapid expansion of the slave trade. Footnote 29 The history of slavery we encounter here is not entirely different from that of the Atlantic world, but it is more intertwined and integrated with aspects that were, geographically, much more distanced in the Atlantic. Throughout the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, enslavement regions, slave-based production areas, consumer markets, and strong, developed states were mixed together in complex configurations. First, the connections forged by the long-distance slave trade were multidirectional, coercively circulating enslaved people on a large scale between Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and South Africa, and Madagascar. Second, regions of enslavement and the export slave trade were not separated from slave importing regions by a single trans-oceanic crossing but could be located along the same coast; importing and exporting regions could be one and the same. South and Southeast Asian slavery regimes therefore offer a range of complex and nuanced manifestations of slavery forms that were connected, but also developed along different trajectories.

The myriad of slavery regimes and related forms of coerced labor has been a central theme for historiographies of societies in South and Southeast Asia. Footnote 30 Debt slavery was common throughout the Indonesian Archipelago, but also played an important role in enslavement in South India. Footnote 31 Slaves could be tied to the land in Timor Footnote 32 and on the southwest Indian Malabar coast. Footnote 33 This resembled the corvée systems in, for example, Sri Lanka, Java, and the Moluccas. Footnote 34 Caste could play a role in slavery and corvée relationships in Sri Lanka and the Malabar coast, while on Bali debt and legal punishment were reported to be prominent in enslavement. Footnote 35 Enslavement through war played a role in Bengal, Sulawesi, Bali, Java, and elsewhere. Footnote 36 Several large-scale slave raiding polities existed at different times, most notably in Arakan and Makassar in the seventeenth century Footnote 37 and, in the late eighteenth century, the Sulu Sultanate. Footnote 38

Image 1. Arakanese and Dutch slave traders in Pipli (India) in the Bay of Bengal. In Wouter Schouten, Oost-Indische Voyagie III (Amsterdam, 1676), p. 10.

Image 2. Merchant of the Dutch East India Company with his wife, soldiers, and enslaved or captive individuals. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, SK-A-4988-00.

Recent research has begun to uncover the concurrence of widespread commercial slavery and the expansion of slave trading in the wider Indian Ocean world in the early modern period. Footnote 39 Although commercial slave trading was known to exist throughout Asia, earlier scholarship mostly disregarded it as a less important exception to the wider landscape of forms of bondage that were mainly status-based and local phenomena. Footnote 40 Explanatory models for slavery in Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian studies thus often focused on patterns of state formation that, especially in Southeast Asia, relied on collecting large followings by attracting and binding subjects, Footnote 41 or on low population density and high labor scarcity patterns, following from the “high land to labor ratio” of the Nieboer-Domar thesis. Footnote 42

Earlier research showed the importance of slavery and slave trading to the European plantation economies on the Western Indian Ocean islands, especially the French sugar plantations on the Mascarenes. Footnote 43 Later studies extended that perspective to the slave trade and slave-based production in the region more widely, and included the role of Arab and Indian merchants. Footnote 44 Moving away from the exclusive focus on the Western Indian Ocean, scholars have indicated the importance and spread of commercial slavery and slave trading in the wider Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago regions. Portuguese merchants in the Bay of Bengal “transformed from traders to slavers” in the early seventeenth century, organizing the Bengal slave trade and “supplying slaves to faraway markets in Europe, Africa, and other parts of Asia.” Footnote 45 Research into the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) archives has revealed the importance of commodified slavery in and around the VOC empire, Footnote 46 supported by large flows of slaves traded from a variety of societies throughout the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago. Footnote 47 The increase of commercial slavery and slave trading in early modern South and Southeast Asia has been linked to the role of slaves in peopling cities, Footnote 48 the rise of European empires, Footnote 49 and the expansion of colonial-capitalist production for global trade. Footnote 50

With regard to colonial societies, this work has undermined dominant assumptions about so-called “Asian” forms of slavery, characterized as “mild” or even “cozy” urban household slavery, Footnote 51 and the idea that slaves in Asia were a luxury and not a production factor, mainly serving as “objects of conspicuous consumption by elites.” Footnote 52 These studies have undermined Boomgaard's argument that “if it is accepted that debt was the chief cause of enslavement, most slaves were not aliens—unless it can be proven that they were subsequently sold outside the community.” Footnote 53 Slave trading did exist on a larger scale than has been previously assumed, not only in the Western Indian Ocean but also in the wider Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago regions. Footnote 54

This should encourage the revision of perspectives on slavery and its transformations, not only in the colonial contexts, but especially outside European colonial contexts. New research shows that throughout the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago different slavery regimes coexisted and that regions sending and receiving enslaved subjects were deeply connected. Most importantly, we have important indications that slave trade and wider forms of coerced mobility created interconnections that deeply affected the trajectories of slavery regimes in both receiving and sending societies. Footnote 55

Although much more research is needed to scrutinize the dynamics of the wide variety of slavery regimes, we can already distinguish four types of regimes that are relevant to understanding the varieties of slavery regime trajectories in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago and that help us to see links with the Atlantic and the wider global history of slavery.

The Use of Conflict in Enslavement—War and Raiding Regimes

The “gun-slave cycle” is one of the most explicit links between war, enslavement, and slave trading that can be derived from the Atlantic history of the slave trade. Footnote 56 In his study of the Sulu Archipelago, Warren argues along these lines that it was the incorporation into global trading patterns in the eighteenth century's second half that stimulated slave raiding polities, and turned Jolo Island into “the most important slave center by 1800.” Footnote 57 He challenges the thesis that it was the weakening of European monopolistic trade policies that forced local polities into slave raiding and points out that “commercial and tributary activity became linked with long-distance slave raiding and incorporation of captured peoples in a system to service the procurement of trading produce.” Footnote 58 However, the late eighteenth-century transformation of the Sulu Archipelago did not stand alone. Similar links between the export slave trade and the rise of war and enslavement have been established for the Western Indian Ocean Footnote 59 and other parts of South and Southeast Asia in earlier centuries. Footnote 60 One can draw direct parallels to developments in parts of West Africa, for example in the Bight of Benin, where states such as the Kingdom of Dahomey used proceeds from slave raiding and the sale of captives to acquire goods which, in turn, were used to strengthen the polities’ power. Footnote 61

Different types of polities became involved with large-scale enslavement, varying from maritime states focused on raiding for slave exports to states involved “in the transplantation of huge population groups onto state-controlled rice plantations.” Footnote 62 The development of the Arakan Kingdom of Mrauk U in Southeast Bengal in the seventeenth century, for instance, was based strongly on its expansion of maritime slave-raiding activities and export slave trade. Footnote 63 Around the same time, the merchant polity of Makassar in politically fragmented South Sulawesi was an essential link in Southeast Asia's trading system and regional slave trade. After the conquest of the city of Makassar by the VOC, small-scale warfare and enslavement continued to provide large-scale slave exports. Footnote 64 The mainland Southeast Asian Kingdom of Ayutthaya was marked by warfare, slave capture, and large-scale resettlement, but also by the development of a corvée system imposed on populations within the polity. Footnote 65 How the impact of enslavement by war and slave raiding impacted the regimes of coercion and slavery within these respective polities, as well as in their surrounding targeted societies, should be studied and compared much more closely to understand the effects of slave raiding and war in relation to the slave trade.

European colonial expansion undeniably had an important impact in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago world, not unlike the Atlantic world. The Dutch East India Company, for example, used not only glass beads but also guns and gunpowder for its slave trade in Madagascar and parts of the Indonesian archipelago. In many instances, European early modern colonial powers even acted as overlords, influencing and regulating local dynamics of war, enslavement, and slave trade. The new ruler of Buton, for example, felt it important to send an envoy to the VOC Governor General Willem van Outhoorn in January 1701 to ask his permission to export slaves to Batavia. His petition does not make explicit where these enslaved would come from, but it does hold a clue: it asks for the VOC's consent to wage war against the local rival polity of Tambako in retaliation for their having recently “attacked and conquered” several villages “and robbed all the people from there.” Footnote 66

The Shaping of Enslavebility—Local Bondage Regimes

War and slave raiding may have been the most visible forms of enslavement, but they were far from the only routes to slavery. In several regions we see distinct patterns of slavery and enslavement in relation to local socioeconomic relations of dependency grounded in oppressive differentiations. These patterns of enslavement linked to local dependencies seem to have been particularly common in the more developed market societies existing throughout South and Southeast Asia. In “idealized” form these dependencies were intended to keep bonded subjects within a society—we might call these immobilizing forms of bondage based on, for example, debt, caste, and land-bound slavery. In practice, however, this norm to keep bonded subjects within a society was continually transgressed. Footnote 67 Here again, it is worthwhile to explore interesting parallels with regional developments in West Africa, for example in the shifting use of coerced labor in the Asante Kingdom in response to external demands of slave trade. Footnote 68

The areas of southeast India (Coromandel) and southwest India (Malabar) were important slave-exporting regions, but their patterns of enslavement and slave trading seem to have been subjected to somewhat different dynamics. Poverty has traditionally been indicated as the main mode of enslavement in the Coromandel Coast, leading to practices of self- and child-selling during times of crisis. Footnote 69 At the Malabar coast, there are indications that, alongside local systems of land-based slavery, enslavement and widened transferability for the export slave trade may have been related to the adaption of local customs of caste, social expulsion, and local conflicts. Footnote 70 In Java, too, debt slavery and kidnapping were also reported to be widespread, even after the expanding VOC prohibited both the enslavement and pawning ( pandelingenschap ) of Javanese populations. Forms of bondage existed here next to systems of corvée and commercial slavery. Footnote 71 For this cluster of slavery regimes, it would be interesting to employ detailed comparison to uncover how the dynamics of internal enslavement patterns related to the impact of slave trading and trafficking networks and the export of locally enslaved or bonded people.

The issue of enslavebility—or as literally formulated in original references in Dutch sources, slaafbaarheijd —was most urgent for these societies with regimes based on largely internal processes of enslavement, perhaps even more than it was for those largely raiding or importing “aliens.” The story of the fourteen-year-old slave girl Cali from Chettuva (Kerala, southwest India) is telling in this respect. Before the Dutch Court of Justice in nearby Cochin (Kochi) she testified on 22 June 1743 that she had served “since childhood” in the house of Toepas Joan Dias within the Company's boundaries ( liemiet ), but that she was “subject and belonging to the landlord of Chettua Paijencherij Naijro.” Footnote 72 She was categorized as being of the Bettua caste, which was considered a low status group of “praedial” or land-bound slaves belonging to the owner of the land. Footnote 73 Notwithstanding the restrictions implied by her land-bound slave status, Cali worked outside the territories of the polity of the Chettuva landlord, and foresaw the danger of being sold and exported. She testified before the court that she fled the house of Dias, because she had learned “that the commander of the fort, the lieutenant Jan Doorn, had sent for her, to apprehend her, and then buy her from her lijfheer (master) the Paijencherij Naijro.” Footnote 74 Despite her land-bound status, the threat of being sold must have been serious to Cali. Various court cases from the Court of Justice of Cochin indicate that masters would threaten their male and female slaves of both local and non-local origins that they would “sell her on board” or “sell him to the scheepsvrienden (shipmates).” Slaves were frightened by the specter of losing all known social connections and entering an unknown world. In their testimonies before court, enslaved often referred to these threats as the reason for intense “sadness” and “bitter crying,” and also escape attempts. Footnote 75

Navigating in a complex, multi-sovereignty landscape, the VOC interfered with the regulation not only of who could be alienated and exported from the Malabar coast as a slave, for example through the private trade of the officers on VOC ships or via slave trade conducted by European, Indian, and Arab merchants along the coast, but also of who could actually be enslaved. Court cases on illegal abduction, deception, kidnapping, and other forms of enslavement testify to the expanding influence of colonial powers. Footnote 76 Vernacular sources are available that might provide key evidence to validate, test, and expand on the insights we can gain from deep readings of the colonial archive.

The colonial archival references to a blunt term like enslavebility ( slaafbaarheijd ) in regions such as Dutch Cochin or the wider Malabar coast highlight hard questions behind the local and imperial reshaping of slavery in societies that faced the impact of slave trade: who could be enslaved, through which means, by whom, under what conditions, and in order to make them do what? Similarly, who could be turned away from a society—sold or otherwise exported—and under what conditions? Thus, enhancing our understanding of local forms of enslavement, alienability, and the impact of the slave trade can help us better grasp the impacts these “internal inequality”-based slavery regimes had on social relations. The nineteenth-century abolitions of slave trade and slavery seem to have pushed these relations between slavery and oppressive differentiations (caste, ethnic, or racial) into the informal sphere, rather than unraveling or diminishing them.

Image 3. A slave sale in nineteenth-century Batavia (Jakarta). In Wolfer Robert van Hoëvell, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië (Batavia, 1853).

Image 4. Portrait of Flora, enslaved woman in the household of VOC-servant Jan Brandes in Batavia, ca. 1780. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, NG-1985-7-3-13.

The Shaping of Alienability—Slave-Export Regimes

Various regions developed systems in which slaves were exported on a massive scale from local slavery regimes. Whereas traders from Jolo and Macassar mainly sold “others” as slaves, most exports from these regions involved bonded or enslaved people taken directly and openly from those societies themselves. Nai or Wange Hendrik Richard van Bali described this in his unique memoires. He was the son of a free man and an enslaved mother in a village on Flores and born in the late 1790s. After his mother died he was sold to slave traders in Sumbawa (and later Java) by “the Lord and the Master.” Footnote 77 The existence of bondage, slavery, and slave trading in the Indonesian archipelago in the early modern period has been widely acknowledged, yet their interrelations have not been examined extensively, most studies having focused on local aspects of such bondage systems. Footnote 78 Some have touched on slavery, trade, and raiding in important centers of slave trading such as Jolo, Macassarm, and Bali, Footnote 79 but little attention has been paid to how local slavery regimes were transformed into large-scale export systems. The difference with the patterns of war and slave-raiding is important: in contrast to slave-export polities that sold mostly “outsiders,” people exported from Bali, Nias, and the Lesser Sunda Islands were mainly their inhabitants. The slave trade from these regions developed into large-scale export trades. For example, some 100,000 to 150,000 enslaved people are estimated to have been exported from Bali in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It has been noted that this slave trade significantly impacted the trajectories of such regimes. Bali was one of the Hindu societies of Southeast Asia, and it has been argued that slave trading strengthened existing societal hierarchies there since it “led the common people to seek the protection of a strong ruler, in spite of the fact that these were the major slave traders.” Footnote 80 Before the seventeenth century, Nias was characterized “by a closed system wherein slaves were not alienable within the society,” Footnote 81 but under the pressure of the slave trade spreading throughout the Indonesian Archipelago slaves became an important export commodity. Especially Acehnese and European slave traders and raiders increasingly drew people from Nias, which was characterized by tribal cultures.

Sources on the slave trade written by European merchants can throw light on these dynamics. An April 1688 Dutch report from the VOC ship Goudvis , for instance, narrates how the human expulsion from Nias was a trickling trade, as local kings and villagers came to the beach to sell just one, two, or three people at a time. Often these were young men or women, or people that were ill, or perhaps convicted of a crime. Within a few days, the Dutch merchants refused one male slave because he had “a large swelling above the chin (being infected)” and was “too expensive.” Footnote 82 Others were considered too “young and small for the Company” and the sellers were told that the Company “did not desire such young slaves, but some strong boys of twenty to twenty-five years old.” The sellers replied that “now they know that the Company desires large slaves, they would go forth to get slaves of such age and strength as were said.” Footnote 83 The role of local orankaijs (rulers) and villagers seems to indicate the enslaved were locals, exported based on forms of social expulsion that may have been expanded under the pressure of the demands of external slave trade. In some areas, local rulers claimed a role in regulating and profiting from this. The ship's interpreter, for example, “warned that it was a custom here, that one had to present gifts to the regents before they would grant their inhabitants permission to come with slaves, and without their consent no one was allowed to come to the beach with us.” Footnote 84 Much more research is needed on these often underdocumented societies; in many cases few local sources have been preserved, but colonial archives can play an important role. Key questions surround the dynamic interplay between local slavery, networks of commercial slave trading, and regimes that allowed a large-scale slave export trade to develop. Answering these questions will help explain local bondage and slavery export regimes and how they were transformed.

The Use of Enslaved Labor—Slave Import Regimes

It is clear that throughout the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago slavery regimes existed and developed that depended primarily on import slave trade, with the enslaved being imported mostly from or via societies marked by the abovementioned categories of slavery regimes. This does not mean that those regimes were exclusively exporting slaves, because those societies also had slavery and import slave trades. In contrast, the marked characteristic of these import regime societies was their strong dependence on slave trade to sustain enslaved populations. Slavery in these import societies was primarily commodified slavery—slaves were bought and sold for the purposes of economic production, household labor, or to acquire social status. In Southeast Asia and South Asia, this could result in slave-based societies in which one-third or more of the population consisted of enslaved persons. For the colonial societies there, these are often seen as urban regimes: from Cape Town to Hugli and Calcutta, and from Malacca to Batavia. Footnote 85 Yet, in most cases, these extended into or were directly connected to rural environments that were geared toward slave-based agricultural production, such as the ommelanden of Batavia and the hinterland of the Cape. Outside the Atlantic, too, the wide variety of slave import regimes included places created around mining (e.g., in Sumatra and Java) or plantation production (e.g., Mascarenes and the Banda Islands). Footnote 86 This invites an exploration of the parallels here with slavery regimes in the Atlantic, such as in Brazil, the Guyanas, the Caribbean, and North America.

All this needs to be developed further by more source and comparative work. What, then, are the challenges for a global approach to slavery? First, our understandings and categorizations must be refined and rearranged by systematically scrutinizing historical case studies. Second, we must develop a deeper understanding of the everyday functioning of these regimes. The goal here is not to develop comparisons based on ahistorical abstractions, but to organize historical comparisons in a systematic new and open manner in order to reconceptualize things from the ground up. This inductive approach will allow us to advance the field of global slavery studies through historically localized and contextual knowledge, based on and tested by micro-historical explorations of everyday perspectives. Third, none of these local slavery regimes were isolated or self-contained; despite their differences, all related in distinct ways to external connections, perhaps most notably the slave trade. The differential impacts the trade had on local societies and their slavery regimes help explain their different trajectories.

So, we need to understand the history of the development slavery to be the interplay of all of the historical trajectories of these different, but coexisting and entangled local regimes. We therefore face the daunting task of tracing that history through a wide, comparative base of thick-description historical case studies of slavery regimes across the globe, from the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago to the Atlantic, from East Asia to Europe. Only then will we begin to understand (1) the differential impacts the slave trade had on local regimes; (2) the relations different slavery regimes had with other, non-slavery forms of coercive relations such as contract labor and corvée labor; and (3) the complex ways in which these interacted and influenced each other through competition, replacement, or transformation into new forms.

These questions are especially important to understanding slavery's afterlife and persistence. With the formal abolitions of the slave trade, and later slavery itself, labor coercion became increasingly channeled through various “other” forms of coercion, from corvée regimes organized by colonial states to coercive coolie contract labor regimes. Slavery itself did not completely disappear, but rather became increasingly less formalized, manifesting as “bondage” or what we now recognize as “modern slavery.” Throughout South and Southeast Asia, as well as in former European colonies, these transformations seem to have been masked by local variations of nineteenth-century, often colonial notions that local slaveries were “traditional,” “indigenous,” and more “benign,” conceptualizations that still haunt our understandings of slavery outside the Atlantic. They survive via not only older academic discourses but also public debate in once-colonizing countries in Europe as well as in places like Thailand, India, and Indonesia. Footnote 87 For this reason, revisiting the nature and trajectories of slavery in different parts of the world is not just important to global academic debates; it carries contemporary local and social urgency as well.

How then to proceed, if we want to better grasp how specific formal and informal slavery regimes developed across the globe, both within and outside the Atlantic, and how their multiple trajectories influenced long-term global transformations of slavery? This article contends that a breakthrough in the understanding of slavery and its persistence will require a collaborative effort, based on an approach that is both comparative and connecting, informed by new source-based studies of a broad range of cases. Developing such an inductive, connecting, and comparative global-historical approach will rely on the wealth of information that can be generated through in-depth studies of different coercive labor regimes and their dynamics, developments, and interactions. This requires that we formulate and apply a more explicit framework of interrogation to guide thick descriptions of the multitude of historical cases by providing thematic intersections through which to compare them.

The remainder of this article provides an initial contribution toward building such a framework. My intent is not to create a top-down, universalizing mold, but rather to enable a systematic and comparative analysis of how local slavery regimes developed. Building upon existing frameworks that address different aspects of slavery and its adaptable nature ( table 1 ), our analytical model must allow for the integration of different elements of slavery regimes while it considers the role of internal and external mobility, the interactions between different regimes ( connections ), and their political-economic contexts ( external influences ). Taking together the dynamics of these regimes, their connections, and external influences ( table 2 ), we can begin to better understand the trajectories of slavery regimes and their impacts in world history.

Table 1. Existing Perspectives on Slavery and Their Aspects

Table 2. Integrated Framework for Analyzing Slavery Regime Trajectories

1 Key questions here are: What are the origins into specific regimes of bondage and enslavement? (a) What are the criteria for bondage or enslavebility? Under what conditions are people (allowed to) be bonded or enslaved? (b) What are the real, existing practices? (c) Local or non-local origin? Were people bonded before? (d) Type of entry into host society: How did people find their way into dependency—hereditary, tribute, impoverishment, sale, punishment, abduction, war, or slave raid (hereditary, commodified, political, criminal, war)?

2 Key questions: What is the method of binding. Through what mechanism or feature are the subjected tied to a master or ruler, or enslaved persons bound to a master, and on what basis (legal property, land, debt, caste, status)?

3 Key questions: What is the function or object of coercion, and the coerced labor relation? Is it social reproduction, subsistence, public (non-market production), or market-oriented (private or state)?

4 Key questions: How is the relation organized in terms of social mobility and integration into the host society? Are there specific regulations regarding assimilability and social mobility? What is the discourse or ideology, and what are the practices?

5 Key questions: How is the relation organized in terms of transferability? Is there formalization and regulation of (i.e., restriction of) transferability of subjected or bonded people? (a) What are the criteria for transferability? Under what conditions can people be transferred, and on what basis? (b) What are the real, existing practices? (c) Does this involve commodified transfers (i.e., are people sold?), or other kinds of transfer, such as tribute?

6 Key questions: What are the exits from specific regimes of bondage and enslavement? (a) Within the regime: are there exits from bondage or enslavement, such as emancipation, buying freedom, upward social mobility, or escape, and what are the routes? Are they legal or illegal? (b) Outside the regime: are there exits from society, into other regimes of bondage or enslavement (this relates to aspect v), or otherwise? Are they legal or illegal?

Despite the vast and expanding body of research into slavery and other forms of labor coercion, its historiography is still marked by “wide disagreement about the concepts needed to analyze coerced labour.” Footnote 88 The reason for this is slavery's adaptable nature. One traditional solution to this has been to confine the definition and study of slavery to a “property” relationship, where slaves are a commodity or a means of production. Although slavery has been defined in legal terms of ownership in different cultures, from Roman to Islamic, legal practices of property claims and rights are historically manifested in diverse ways and are not always clear-cut. They consist of a range of elements concerning the rights and duties of ownership, including the right to partially, fully, or exclusively possess, use, manage, exploit, punish, and transfer. Footnote 89

Even when slavery is restricted to property relations, it is clearly insufficient to reduce slavery to mere taxonomies of different relationships. Understanding it requires research into the manifestations of slavery regimes with their often-multiple claims and positions, assigned roles, norms, and regulations. Conventionally, a distinction has been made between “open” and “closed” systems, Footnote 90 where the former are based on social ties, providing opportunities for slaves to become part of the kinship structures of slave owners. In such systems, the enslaved are “outsiders who are in the process of being incorporated as kinsmen” ( assimilability ). By contrast, closed systems of hereditary slavery are rooted in institutionalized possession relationships that ensure the enslaved “remain outside the dominant kinship system,” turning them into permanent outsiders. Footnote 91 This distinction is important, but has recently been criticized because the concepts of “closed” and “open” are used in two potentially conflicting ways, referring not only to social exclusion or inclusion in slave-owning social (or kin) structures, but also to the (in)alienability of slaves. Footnote 92

Scholars of African and Asian slavery have recently advanced the slavery debate with the insight that it is crucial to consider that systems of bondage and slavery are not only about the possession of people, but more generally about the availability of people—or in essence, their bodies—for different possible purposes (obligated labor, social status, kinship, etc.). Footnote 93 Zeuske thus speaks of “slaveries” in the plural, emphasizing the different and changing manifestations of slavery that he defines, not by alienability, but by the core element of the partial or complete availability ( Verfügbarkeit ) of people's bodies. Footnote 94 The notion of availability, in turn, has inspired the development of a framework built around the function (or object) of the different coercive labor regimes of bondage, corvée, and slavery. Elsewhere I have argued that there is a distinction between the ways in which coercive regimes organized this availability of coerced labor, by either mobilizing or localizing people. Footnote 95 In this distinction, the key commonality of the many and pluriform localizing or immobilizing regimes was that they were oriented toward maintaining local orders of obligations and “unfreedom.” They were intended to keep bonded subjects inside these social or political orders, tying down people socially and spatially to their community, polity, ruler, or land (as in caste, land and debt slavery, corvée, or serfdom). This contrasts with mobilizing regimes—such as commodified or market slavery, but often also war slavery and captive slavery—in which the coercion and control of people was based on their movement across community boundaries, on their mobilizing effect. Footnote 96

A framework guiding thick descriptions of coercive labor regimes should not focus on one or the other of these viewpoints ( table 1 ) but should employ and combine the different elements underlying these different perspectives ( table 2 ). The elements of existing comparative frameworks are not mutually exclusive—they overlap and interrelate. We can identify and integrate the key elements that correspond across these approaches. The “moments” of coercion—entry, work/relationship, and exit—directly relate to pivotal elements of the open-closed dichotomy, namely the alienability of the enslaved (entry and exit) and the assimilability of the enslaved (during the relationship). The perspective of the (im)mobilizing function of regimes, in turn, focuses on the work/relationship moment, as well as the methods of binding and of organizing entry and exit. This is important to note, because it lets us overcome the scattered usage of the different existing perspectives, which illuminate different aspects of the same phenomena. In short, an inductive comparative agenda needs to bring together the key elements within a single, renewed, and open framework of inquiry that allows for thick descriptions of slavery regime case studies. The research framework provided does so by inviting the description of practices and regulations of regimes of slavery, as they are shaped by: (i) the origins and entry of the enslaved; (ii) the methods of binding the enslaved; (iii) the function of the labor relation or regime; (iv) the regulation of assimilability ; (v) the regulation of alienability or transferability ; and (vi) the opportunities for legal or illegal exit .

This framework of interrogation should be used, not for merely static or contrasting comparisons of supposedly different local variations, but rather as a tool for analyzing regime trajectories over time through integrative comparative analyses. Footnote 97 The slavery regimes of interest were not self-contained phenomena but were transformed in interactions with each other and other external influences. This means the exchange of slaves between societies was crucial in shaping local regimes, in both receiving and sending societies. Slaves moved between societies, though not always in the same way. The analytical framework therefore should not only compare, but also address connections through the paths that channeled the internal and external mobility of enslaved people, as well as the direction of the coerced mobility (sending, receiving, or both) and the type of transfer , either commodified (slave trade) or non-commodified (e.g., tribute, war, or deportation).

The connections between regimes of slavery and, most visibly, the external slave trade, influenced not only the spread of commodified and other slavery regimes, but also the wider set of internal and external political, economic, and social factors that shaped the trajectories and characters of those regimes. Footnote 98 The slave trade could, for example, lead to shifting restrictions on the transferability of enslaved subjects, as it did in Nias, Footnote 99 and the methods of controlling and binding enslaved subjects, as in Malabar, Footnote 100 but also to increasing enslavement through poverty, as in Coromandel, Footnote 101 or enslavement as legal punishment, as in Bali. Footnote 102 The impact such slave exports had on the commodification of local regimes has been extensively explored for West Africa and for the Western Indian Ocean. Footnote 103 With regard to South and Southeast Asia and elsewhere, we know fairly little about the extent of slave trading or other forms of coerced transfer or mobility, or their impact on local slavery regimes. Footnote 104

This article has called for an inductive comparative approach that incorporates and analyzes source-based observations of a multitude of case studies of slavery regimes, in relation to reconstructions and analyses of the connections or interactions forged through regional patterns of coerced mobility. The goal is to analyze different trajectories and their place within the long-term, diverse, and global development of slavery. What are the practical implications of this endeavor, and what is needed to push it forward?

First, an inductive comparative research agenda requires a multiplicity of thick descriptions of slavery regimes. Research is necessary into practices and regulations for each case, integrating multiple source-types through a method of “triangulation” that contrasts “intensive observations” with “external analyses” and “local narratives.” Second, we must account for the connections through patterns of coerced mobility for each case study region, especially via the slave trade, but including also other forms such as tribute, deportation, and war. This has already been developed for the Atlantic, but will require large efforts elsewhere, with new initiatives only recently started for the Indian Ocean, the Indonesian Archipelago, and China. Footnote 105 Third, for each case study, the wider local and regional socio-political and economic context must be accounted for. Only then can we, fourthly, begin to analyze and compare the specific trajectories of slavery regimes and their roles in the long-term global transformation of slavery.

The development of the first steps, especially—thick-descriptions of regimes of slavery, their development over time, and their relation to external impacts and connections—requires a heightened attention to methodologies, the possibilities and limitations of sources, and how best to develop thick-description case studies in largely non-European historical contexts. Let me expand on this a bit. As stated, the study of slavery and coerced-labor regimes entails exploring how social relations are shaped. The norms, institutions, and practices that shaped slavery and coercive regimes were enacted, enforced, and contested at the level of everyday life. The different key elements for thick descriptions of slavery regimes (in the integrated framework) are therefore best examined through sources that provide researchers with observations on historical everyday realities. Footnote 106 An example is court records and their rich investigations and testimonies, which can be used to explore dynamics within, for example, the realm of the Dutch Asian and Atlantic empire, Footnote 107 and even those beyond the borders of colonial societies, for example the control of enslaved people's mobility as indicative of the characteristics of different forms of slavery. Footnote 108

Unfortunately, for many societies outside of or on the fringe of European empires, like in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian Archipelago, few quotidian written records have been preserved. Footnote 109 Many valuable local written sources from non-European societies are of course available, ranging from legal texts and contracts to chronicles and histories, but most do not record practices at this crucial level of everyday life. This lack of readily available local sources detailing the everyday dynamics of slavery and coerced labor regimes might help explain the relatively late development of academic interest in the topic, and why older assumptions with regard to the characteristics of “Asian” slavery as “mild” and “local” have remained unchallenged for so long. This demonstrates one danger of over-reliance on just one type of source: it is difficult to counterweigh its inherent biases. Like colonial records, Footnote 110 South and Southeast Asian court chronicles and legal texts cannot be considered neutral, unproblematic sources. Footnote 111

I therefore suggest a strategy of “triangulation” as a way forward that can help us to overcome these obstacles by optimizing the use of the many source types available for this region and period. This triangulation strategy should bring together and balance different types of material offering “local narratives,” “intensive observations,” and “external analyses.” In this way, we can offset the limitations of relying solely on either colonial or local sources. It has the added advantage of providing different perspectives that together can enrich and improve the thick descriptions of slavery regimes as well as the analysis of coerced mobility and the socio-political context.

A crucial factor in the success of such a strategy will be the availability, accessibility, and quality or richness of source materials. Ideally, all three source types will be present and accessible, but sometimes they will not be. An initial, rough inventory of types and coverage of source material is presented here to explore the limitations of the proposed method. Footnote 112 Based on this, we can conclude that the availability of specific “key” sources seems ensured for many regions, even those typically considered poor in terms of source materials, and that there seems to be a sometimes random, but often relatively rich variety of material available from additional source types. Underlining the importance of European archival material, it becomes clear that for many regions “key” sources are available at some level to provide “intensive observations,” especially through the Dutch East India Company administrations (in the Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren ) and Portuguese archival material (for example, for Bengal, Sulawesi, Malabar, Coromandel, Nias, and the Lesser Sunda Islands region). Sources of “external analyses” are available through European and translated non-European travel accounts, missionary sources, and contemporary political or geographic-cultural treatises in Dutch, Portuguese, and other European languages. And, to conclude, for many regions there are also sources that either provide “local narratives,” local or European legal sources, and/or anthropological studies.

Finally, it is important to discuss some challenges of the proposed method. First of all, any comparison of sources for different case studies entails a great deal more research and analytical work than does a case study based on a single set of sources. Second, while a source-intensive triangulation method is pivotal for advancing a comparative agenda, the variety of source material will require both a wide range of language skills and intensive international collaboration. This will, in turn, help with the third point, that a multi-comparative approach helps to avoid the trap of understanding cases by comparing only one or two (formulating characteristics of cases only with dichotomies). Fourth, it will be important to bring in the multitude of historiographies existing for different regions across the globe, which offer valuable insights into the wider context of political, cultural, and (to a lesser extent) social and economic history for the precolonial and colonial periods. For some regions, there are extensive historiographies that deal with the history of slavery and other coercive regimes. Yet, it is crucial to note that many existing studies that relied on older interpretations of Asian “local” and “mild” bondage or slavery developed their arguments based on a single source type. Others simply did not have slavery as their main interest. The wealth of in-depth, source-based case studies for this project is therefore not only crucial for a global comparative agenda, but also to overcome previous conceptualizations of “othering”—that is, the “special” status of “smaller” slaveries. This again emphasizes that only a truly global and inductive comparative-connecting approach, carried out via international collaborations that bridge linguistic, regional, and historiographic divisions, will enable a breakthrough in the academic and public understanding of the history of slavery.

I have argued here that we need to move beyond the “Atlantic” and “formal” bias in global slavery studies and develop a better understanding of the long-term global transformations of slavery through the variety of slavery regime trajectories. I have proposed several ways forward. First, we should focus on understanding the persistence of slavery beyond its classic and legal forms. That is, we need to revisit the historical transformations of slavery through a wider spectrum of trajectories, based on an improved conceptual understanding of what slavery is, by accounting for its adaptable yet universal character.

This implies that we should, as Zeuske points out, substantially expand the body of empirical observations on cases, especially outside the Atlantic and most notably in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction.

The cases of informal slavery regimes should at the same time be connected to the wider body of existing scholarship on slavery and its transformations of Atlantic, and other more intensely studied formal slavery regimes across the globe both during the period of legal slave trading and after abolition. Rather than employing multiple, diverging frameworks, we need to work toward an integrated analytical framework that will allow analysis of the trajectories of slavery regimes in their highly diverse manifestations, both formal and informal.

Finally, the integrated framework proposed here can be used for a collaborative global-historical research agenda that focuses on not only comparisons of different regimes, but also connections and interactions between them. Taking in the myriad of cases of slavery regimes throughout the history of the world in such a systematic and bottom-up exploration will renew our understandings of slavery and its long-term global historical transformations.

1 International Labour Office, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage (Geneva, 2017).

2 Zeuske , Michael , “ Historiography and Research Problems of Slavery and the Slave Trade in a Global-Historical Perspective ,” International Review of Social History 57 ( 2012 ): 87 – 111 CrossRef Google Scholar , 106.

3 E.g., Bosma , Ulbe , The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor ( New York , 2019 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; De Vito , Christian G. , Schiel , Juliane , and van Rossum , Matthias , “ From Slavery to Precarity? Labour History Revisited, and Beyond ,” Journal of Social History 54 , 2 ( 2020 ): 644 –62 Google Scholar ; van Rossum , Matthias “ Global Slavery, Local Bondage? Rethinking Slaveries as (Im)Mobilizing Regimes from the Case of the Dutch Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds ,” Journal of World History 31, 4 ( 2020 ): 693 – 727 CrossRef Google Scholar .

4 N. Lenski and C. M. Cameron, eds., What Is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2018); Michael Zeuske, Sklaverei: Eine Menschheitsgeschichte von der Steinzeit bis heute (Reclam Verlag, 2018); S. Conermann et al., “Objective: The Cluster of Excellence ‘Beyond Slavery and Freedom,’” Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies , https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/program/about (accessed 1 Aug. 2019).

5 E.g., The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS).

6 D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford, 1988), 32.

7 M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York, 1980).

8 P. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983); Zeuske “Research Problems of Slavery”; Lenski and Cameron, What Is a Slave Society?

9 E. Dal Lago, “Comparative Slavery,” in Mark M. Smith and Robert L. Paquette, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford, 2010), 664–84.

10 E. Dal Lago and C. Katsari, “The Study of Ancient and Modern Slave Systems: Setting an Agenda for Comparison,” in E. Dal Lago and C. Katsari, eds., Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern (Cambridge, 2008), 3–31.

11 Bosma, Making of a Periphery , 68.

12 A. Stanziani, Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2014); A. Reid with J. Brewster, eds., Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia, 1983); A. Reid, “‘Slavery so Gentle’: A Fluid Spectrum of Southeast Asian Conditions of Bondage,” in N. Lenski and C. M. Cameron, eds., What Is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2018), 410–28.

13 M. L. Bush, Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (New York, 1996).

14 David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia (London, 2014).

15 Zeuske, “Research Problems.”

16 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (London, 1977); Lovejoy, Transformations ; R. Law, S. Schwarz, and S. Strickrodt, Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (Rochester, 2013).

17 H. S. Klein and F. V. Luna, Slavery in Brazil (Cambridge, 2010); W. Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (Cambridge, 2010); D. Richardson and F. Ribeiro da Silva, eds., Networks and Trans-Cultural Exchange: Slave Trading in the South Atlantic, 1590–1867 (Leiden, 2014); A. E. Dalrymple-Smith, Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 (Leiden, 2019).

18 Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York, 2014); Mary Niall Mitchell, “Lurking but Working: City Maroons in Antebellum New Orleans,” in Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, eds., A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility and Capitalism 1600–1850 (Oakland, 2019), 199–215; B. Hoonhout, Borderless Empire: Dutch Guiana in the Atlantic World, 1750–1800 (Athens, Ga., 2020).

19 Miller, Slavery as History .

20 Juliane Schiel and Christian G. De Vito, eds., “Contextualizing the History of the Enslaved Modalities of Coercion and Shifting Labor and Power Relations,” special issue, Journal of Global Slavery 5, 2 (2020).

21 M. van Rossum, A. Geelen, B. van den Hout, and M. Tosun, Testimonies of Enslavement: Sources on Slavery from the Indian Ocean World (London, 2020).

22 Benedetta Rossi, ed., Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (Liverpool, 2009). See also Lovejoy, Transformations ; and Dalrymple-Smith, Commercial Transitions .

23 On the Mediterranean, see S. Hanss and J. Schiel, eds., Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500–1800): Neue Perspektiven auf mediterrane Sklaverei (500–1800) (Zürich, 2014). On the Islamic world: W. G. Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (Oxford, 2006). For the Western Indian Ocean: J. Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914,” American Historical Review 105, 1 (2000): 69–91; P. Machado, “A Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujarati Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave-Trade, c. 1730–1830,” Slavery & Abolition 24, 2 (2003): 17–32; Jane Hooper and David Eltis, “The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 34, 3 (2013): 353–75; M. Hopper, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven, 2015); and S. Subrahmanyam, “Between Eastern Africa and Western India, 1500–1650: Slavery, Commerce, and Elite Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, 4 (2019): 805–34. For South Africa: N. Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, 1985); and R.C.H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Johannesburg, 1994). On South and Southeast Asia: S. Arasaratnam, “Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” in K. S. Mathews, ed., Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History (New Delhi, 1995), 195–208; I. Chatterjee and R. M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington, 2006); and Van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek: De geschiedenis van slavernij in Azië onder de VOC (Verloren, 2015); Bosma, Making of a Periphery . And on Central Asia: J. Eden, Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge, 2018); and S. Whitfield, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas Material Culture of the Silk Road (Oakland, 2018).

24 J. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, 2012).

25 Thus, it relies partly on Patterson and Van der Linden, and more loosely, H. J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague, 1900); Van der Linden, “Dissecting Coerced Labour,” in M. Van der Linden and M. Rodríguez García, eds., On Coerced Labour: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Leiden, 2016), 291–322; and O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 22.

26 Zeuske, “Research Problems,” 105.

27 Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” Slavery and Abolition 24, 2 (2003): 1–16; Van Rossum, “Global Slavery.”

28 Zeuske, “Research Problems,” 87.

29 K. Ward, “Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420–1804,” in D. Eltis et al., eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 3, AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge, 2011), 163–85.

30 Ward, “Slavery”; Chatterjee and Easton, Slavery .

31 P. Boomgaard, “Human Capital, Slavery and Low Rates of Economic and Population Growth in Indonesia, 1600–1910,” Slavery & Abolition 24, 2 (2003): 83–96; R. B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens, Oh., 2015); Van Rossum et al., Testimonies of Enslavement .

32 H. Hägerdal, Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea: Conflict and Adaptation in Early Colonial Timor, 1600–1800 (Leiden, 2012).

33 K. Saradamoni, Emergence of a Slave Caste: Pulayas of Kerala (New Delhi, 1980); A.K.K. Ramachandran Nair, Slavery in Kerala (Delhi, 1986).

34 N. R. Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant: Agrarian Society in Western Sri Lanka under Dutch Rule, 1740–1800 (Leiden, 2008); J. Breman, Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market (Amsterdam 2015); G. Knaap, Kruidnagelen en christenen: De VOC en de bevolking van Ambon 1656–1696 (Leiden, 2004).

35 Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery ; H.G.C. Schulte Nordholt, The Spell of Power: A History of Balinese Politics, 1650–1940 (Leiden, 2010).

36 M. Vink, “‘The World's Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” Journal of World History 14, 2 (2003): 131–77.

37 S. van Galen, Arakan and Bengal: The Rise and Decline of the Mrauk U Kingdom (Burma) from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century AD (PhD thesis, Leiden University, 2008); J. Nagel, Der Schlüssel zu den Molukken: Makassar und die Handelsstrukturen des Malaiischen Archipels im 17. und 18. Jahrhhundert: eine exemplarische Studie (PhD thesis, Trier University, 2003).

38 J. F. Warren, The Sulu Zone: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore, 1981).

39 Vink, “World's Oldest Trade”; Hooper and Eltis, “Indian Ocean”; Allen, European Slave Trading ; Van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek ; Bosma, Making of a Periphery ; M. van Rossum, “Towards a Global Perspective on Early Modern Slave Trade: Prices of the Enslaved in The Indian Ocean, Indonesian Archipelago and Atlantic Worlds,” Journal of Global History (forthcoming).

40 Boomgaard, “Human Capital”; G. Campbell, “Slavery in the Indian Ocean World,” in G. Heuman and T. Burnard, eds., The Routledge History of Slavery (New York, 2011), 52–63.

41 Reid and Brewster, Slavery, Bondage ; Jennifer L. Gaynor, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture (Ithaca, 2016).

42 Nieboer, Slavery ; E. D. Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History 30, 1 (1970): 18–32.

43 G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, The French at Kilwa Island (Oxford, 1965); Edward Alpers, “The French Slave Trade in East Africa (1721–1810),” Cahier du Etudes Africaines 37 (1970): 80–124.

44 Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire in the World Economy, 1770–1873 (Athens, Oh., 1987); Richard Allen, Slaves, Freedman, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge, 1999); Hopper, Slaves .

45 R. Mukherjee, “Portuguese Slave Ports in Bengal 1500–1700,” in A. Polónia and C. Antunes, eds., Seaports in the First Global Age: Portuguese Agents, Networks and Interactions (1500–1800) (Porto, 2016), 215–36, 234.

46 Vink, “World's Oldest Trade”; Van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek .

47 L. Mbeki and M. van Rossum, “Private Slave Trade in the Dutch Indian Ocean World: A Study into the Networks and Backgrounds of the Slavers and the Enslaved in South Asia and South Africa,” Slavery & Abolition 38, 1 (2017): 95–116.

48 Reid and Brewster, Slavery, Bondage ; R. Raben, “Cities and the Slave Trade in Early-Modern Southeast Asia,” in P. Boomgaard, D. Kooiman, and H. Schulte Nordholt, eds., Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History (Leiden, 2008), 119–40.

49 Allen, European Slave Trading .

50 M. Mann, Sahibs, Sklaven und Soldaten: Geschichte des Menschenhandels rund um den Indischen Ozean (Darmstadt, 2012); “Labouring Transformations of Amphibious Monsters—Globalization, Diversity and the Effects of Labour Mobilization under the Dutch East India Company (1600–1800),” International Review of Social History s64 (2019): 19–42.

51 E. Jones, Wives, Slaves and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb, 2010), 144.

52 Campbell, “Slavery,” 61; see also Reid and Brewster, Slavery, Bondage ; Boomgaard, “Human Capital.”

53 Boomgaard, “Human Capital,” 90.

54 Warren, Sulu Zone ; A. van der Kraan, “Bali: Slavery and Slave Trade,” in Reid and Brewster, Slavery, Bondage , 315–40; Vink, “World's Oldest Trade”; Raben, “Cities”; Allen, European Slave Trading ; Van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek .

55 Ward, “Slavery”; Van Rossum, “Global Slavery.” See also the example of Western India by Subrahmanyam, “Between Eastern Africa and Western India.”

56 Warren C. Whatley, “The Gun-Slave Hypothesis and the 18th Century British Slave Trade,” Explorations in Economic History 67 (2018): 80–104.

57 James F. Warren, “Slave Markets and Exchange in the Malay World: The Sulu Sultanate, 1770–1878,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 8, 2 (1977): 162–75, 162.

59 J. Hooper, “Pirates and Kings: Power on the Shores of Early Modern Madagascar and the Indian Ocean,” Journal of World History 22, 2 (2011): 215–42; R. Thiebaut, Traite des esclaves et commerce néerlandais et français à Madagascar (XVIIè et XVIIIè siècles) (PhD thesis, Paris 1 and Vrije Universiteit, 2017).

60 Joseph Baumgartner, “Notes on Piracy and Slaving in Philippine History,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 5, 4 (1977): 270–72; Nagel, Der Schlüssel zu den Molukken ; van Galen, Arakan .

61 Angus Dalrymple-Smith and Matthias van Rossum, “Capitalism, Slavery and Labour Coercion in Early Modern Asia and Africa,” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschatsforschung (forthcoming); Dalrymple-Smith, Commercial Transitions .

62 Reid, “Slavery so Gentle.”

63 Van Galen, Arakan .

64 Reid and Webster, Slavery, Bondage ; Heather Sutherland, “The Makassar Malays: Adaptation and Identity, c. 1660–1790,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, 3 (2001): 397–421; “Chasing the Delfland: Slave Revolts, Enslavement, and (Private) VOC Networks in Early Modern Asia,” P. Brandon et al., eds., Navigating History: Economy, Society, Science and Nature. Essays in Honor of Prof. Dr. C. A. Davids (Leiden, 2018), 201–27.

65 B. Beemer, The Creole City in Mainland Southeast Asia: Slave Gathering Warfare and Cultural Exchange in Burma, Thailand and Manipur, 18th–19th c. (Honolulu, 2013).

66 NA, VOC, inv.nr. 1647, Makassar I, f. 1–4 (scan 446).

67 The distinction between mobilizing and immobilizing forms of slavery is made in Van Rossum, “Global Slavery.”

68 Dalrymple-Smith, Commercial Transitions .

69 M. Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 2015), 288; E. Gobel, The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolition (Leiden, 2016), 57.

70 A. Geelen, “Defining Slavery in Cochin, Social Backgrounds, Tradition and Law in the Making of Slaafbaarheid in Eighteenth-Century Dutch Cochin” (Research Master Thesis, Leiden University, 2017); Van Rossum et al., Testimonies of Enslavement.

71 Reid and Webster, Slavery, Bondage ; Jones, Wives ; Van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek ; Breman, Mobilizing .

72 NA, Nederlandse bezittingen in India: Digitale Duplicaten van Archieven aanwezig in de Tamil Nadu Archives te Chennai, archive number 1.11.06.11 [hereafter NA, Chennai], inv.nr. 360, f. 283–84 (scans 175–76). For a more elaborate analysis of this case: Matthias van Rossum, “Enslavebility, Slavery and Global Micro Histories: Reflections through the Case of Cali,” in H. Hägerdall, ed., Slavery in the Indian Ocean World (Athens, Oh., forthcoming). The Dutch source text of this court case is translated in Van Rossum et al., Testimonies of Enslavement .

73 E.g., Krishnat P. Padmanabha Menon, History of Kerala: A History of Kerala Written in the Form of Notes on Visscher's Letters from Malabar , vol. 2 (New Delhi, 1983), 272. For a wonderful treatise on caste and slavery in early modern Malabar, see Geelen, “Defining Slavery.”

74 NA, Chennai, inv. 360, f. 285 (scan 176).

75 See, for example, the cases of Maria and Cruz in Alexander Geelen, Bram van den Hout, Merve Tosun, Mike de Windt, and Matthias van Rossum, “On the Run: Runaway Slaves and Their Social Networks in Eighteenth Century Cochin,” Journal of Social History 54, 1 (2020): 66–87.

76 Van Rossum et al., Testimonies of Enslavement .

77 Titas Chakraborty and Matthias van Rossum, “Slave Trade and Slavery in Asia—New Perspectives,” Journal of Social History 54, 1 (2020): 1–14; based on the memoires of Wange Hendrik Richard van Bali, “De Herinnering van Levens Loopen van Naı^ op het Dorp Leeot op het Eiland Magarij na bij Bima, bij het Eiland Java, nu Wange Heindrik Richard van Balie.”

78 J. L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley, 1980); Reid and Webster, Slavery, Bondage .

79 Warren, Sulu Zone ; H. Sutherland, “Slavery and the Slave Trade in South Sulawesi, 1660s–1800s,” in A. Reid with J. Brewster, eds., Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia, 1983); Van der Kraan, “Bali”; Schulte Nordholt, Spell of Power .

80 Schulte Nordholt, Spell of Power , 43–44.

81 Ward, “Slavery,” 172.

82 NA, VOC, 8493, s. 176.

83 Ibid ., s. 176.

84 Ibid ., s. 183.

85 For example, see literature on Cape Town, but also the excellent work of Titas Chakraborty, “The Household Workers of the East India Company Ports of Pre-Colonial Bengal,” International Review of Social History 64 (2019): 71–93; H. Niemeijer, Batavia: de samenleving van Batavia in de 17de eeuw (Amsterdam, 2005).

86 Van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek ; M. van Rossum, “The Dutch East India Company and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds, 1602–1795,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Feb. 2020).

87 On Thailand, see O. Tappe, “Variants of Bonded Labour in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” in S. Damir-Geilsdorf et al., eds., Bonded Labour: Global and Comparative Perspectives (18th–21st Century) (Bielefeld, 2016). On India: Ramachandran Nair, Slavery ; Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition”; Indrani Chatterjee, “Abolition by Denial: The South Asian Example,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London, 2004), 150–68. On Indonesia: N. Peters, Depok Slaves: The Dream of Cornelis Chastelein (Volendam, 2019).

88 M. van der Linden, “Dissecting Coerced Labour,” in M. Van der Linden and M. Rodríguez García, eds., On Coerced Labour: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Leiden, 2016), 291–322, 291.

89 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death ; Clarence-Smith, Islam ; Van der Linden, “Dissecting.”

90 Watson, Asian and African Systems ; Reid and Webster, Slavery, Bondage ; Reid, “Slavery so Gentle”; Ward, “Slavery.”

91 Watson, Asian and African Systems , 6.

92 E.g., Reid and Webster, Slavery, Bondage ; Ward, “Slavery;” see also Van Rossum, “Global Slavery.”

93 Miller, Slavery as History ; Zeuske, “Research Problems.”

94 Zeuske, “Research Problems,” 11.

95 Van Rossum, “Global Slavery.”

96 This is elaborated in Van Rossum, “Global Slavery.” On the immobilizing effects of corvée regimes, see Matthias van Rossum and Merve Tosun, “Corvée Capitalism: The Dutch East India Company, Labour Regimes and (Merchant) Capitalism in Early Modern Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming).

97 M. van der Linden, Het naderende einde van de vaderlandse geschiedenis en de toekomstige studie der sociale bewegingen (Inaugural Lecture, University of Amsterdam, 1999).

98 Lovejoy, Transformations ; Dalrymple-Smith, Commercial Transitions.

99 Ward, “Slavery.”

100 Van Rossum et al., Testimonies of Enslavement.

101 Vink, “World's Oldest Trade.”

102 Schulte Nordholt, Spell of Power .

103 For West Africa, see e.g., Lovejoy, Transformations ; P. Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, 1990); and Dalrymple-Smith, Commercial Transitions. For the Western Indian Ocean, see Alpers, “French Slave Trade”; Joseph E. Harris, The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (Evanston, 1971); and Thomas Vernet, “Slave Trade and Slavery on the Swahili Coast (1500–1750),” in B. A. Mirzai, I. M. Montana, and P. Lovejoy, Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Trenton, 2009), 37–76.

104 Ward, “Slavery”; Reid, “Slavery so Gentle.”

105 Examples are the Exploring Slave Trade in Asia project ( https://iisg.amsterdam/nl/research/projects/slave-trade-asia ); and the Human Trafficking and Slaving in China project ( https://chts.hypotheses.org/author/chts ).

106 Anderson , C. , Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 ( Cambridge , 2012 ) CrossRef Google Scholar .

107 For example, in the Resilient Diversity project, Leiden University and IISH, 2017–2022.

108 Van Rossum et al., Testimonies .

109 Kuruppath , Manjusha , “ In the Company of Global History ,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 134 , 2 ( 2019 ): 103 –14 CrossRef Google Scholar .

110 Stoler , A. , Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense ( Princeton , 2009 ) Google Scholar .

111 Gaynor, Intertidal History .

112 A short overview of this inventory: (1) sources for “external analyses”: (a) Travel accounts (translated and untranslated: Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, French, twelfth–eighteenth centuries): published and translations series, e.g., KNAW-Collection; L'Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen; Linschoten-series; Hakluyt Society; Ferrand, Instructions. (b) Political or geographic-cultural analyses (especially Portuguese, Dutch, and missionary texts, sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, and also later anthropological studies): Archival series, especially Nationaal Archief [NA], 1.04.02 (VOC), OBP-series; 1.10.78 (Sweers); Goa Archives, letters and reports (Livros das Monções do Reino), published series overview: Pearson 1981; Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu [ARSI], “Old Society,” (annual) letters received. Published sources, e.g., Van Vliet (Siam), Visscher (Malabar); NEHA-merchant guides. (2) Sources for “intensive observations”: (a) European administrative series (especially Dutch, Portuguese, also Danish, French, and English, sixteenth–eighteenth centuries): archival series: NA, VOC, OBP; Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, VOC-archives; Goa Archives; Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer; Rigsarkivet, Ostindisk and Asiatisk Kompagni; British Library, India Office Records. (b) European legal records and inquiries (especially Dutch, sixteenth–eighteenth centuries): archival series: NA, VOC, OBP; Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia. (c) Local non-European everyday source material (translated and untranslated sources, fifteenth–eighteenth centuries): published sources, e.g., Hikayat Patani; see also Creese 2009; Central Record Office Ernakulam. (3) Sources on “Local narratives”: (a) Southeast and South Asian historical accounts (translated and untranslated sources, fifteenth–eighteenth centuries): published and translated court narratives, chronicles, and histories. See also Gaynor, Intertidal History .

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• Volume 63, Issue 3
• Matthias van Rossum (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000153

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Yale’s Ties to Slavery Confronting a Painful History, Building a Stronger Community

Introduction.

Founded in 1701, Yale has a complex past that includes direct and indirect ties to slavery. That history cannot be remade. What can be done is to reveal, share, and learn from that history, so we can strengthen our community and advance Yale’s mission of education and research to create a better future.

To that end, Yale in 2020 launched the Yale and Slavery Research Project to study the institution’s historical involvement with slavery. The discoveries made by the project’s historians and scholars were made public and addressed by Yale throughout the research process. You will find on this website much of what the team learned. For those who wish to know more, we encourage you to read the full account in Yale and Slavery: A History , by Sterling Professor of History David W. Blight with the Yale and Slavery Research Project.

In the webpages that follow, you will also be able to discover what Yale has done, is doing, and will continue to do to address the legacy of slavery.

Violence between Pequots and English colonists intensifies in areas surrounding Long Island Sound. Disease, displacement, and warfare have taken a toll on Indigenous communities. By this time, the Pequot population has declined by nearly 80 percent to around 3,000 people. Pequot culture and security are under tremendous threat.

Map of New England, Yale University Library .

English troops with some Native allies massacre an entire village of 400 Pequot men, women, and children in their fort near the Mystic River. “The fires… in the centre of the fort blazed most terribly,” writes a captain in the English force, “and burnt all in the space of half an hour.”

William Hubbard, “A narrative of the troubles with the Indians in New-England…” Yale University Library .

The first known Africans in Massachusetts, purchased with proceeds earned by selling Pequot captives, arrive on a ship with cotton and tobacco. This trade continues, and in 1646, the New England Confederation codifies that Native captives should “be shipped out and exchanged” for enslaved Black people.

English Castle at Anamabou, Yale University Library .

New Haven Colony, led by John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, is founded.

The Reverend John Davenport, Yale University Art Gallery .

1638 September

The Treaty of Hartford is forced upon the Pequots, designed to both humiliate and liquidate them as a people. The term “Pequot” is outlawed and the Pequot people are declared extinct (though they still survive until today). The first Africans in the Connecticut colony, meanwhile, likely arrive during the Pequot War, probably in trade for Indigenous people who are taken prisoner and enslaved.

Although it is uncertain exactly when the first Africans arrive in Connecticut, their presence is initially recorded at this time, when an enslaved Black boy named Louis Berbice, from Dutch Guiana, is killed by his owner in Hartford. Africans may have been present in New Haven even earlier, likely from its founding; Lucretia, a Black woman, belonged to the colony’s founder and governor, Theophilus Eaton, and may have arrived with him. 

CHAPTER  1 African Captives Arrive in New England

The first Africans in the Connecticut colony likely arrived during the years of the Pequot War, perhaps as a result of trade in Native men who were taken prisoner and enslaved. In fact, the first known Africans in neighboring Massachusetts were bought from the proceeds of selling Pequot captives; they arrived in 1638, on a ship with cotton and tobacco. This trade continued, and in 1646, the New England Confederation codified that Native captives should “be shipped out and exchanged for Negroes.”

New Haven, home of Yale College, was an integral node in the vast world-wide network of commerce in human beings and cultural transformations.

Although it is uncertain exactly when the first Africans arrived in Connecticut, their presence was initially recorded in 1639, when an enslaved Black boy named Louis Berbice, from Dutch Guiana, was killed by his owner in Hartford. And Africans may have been present in New Haven even earlier, likely from its founding. Lucretia, a Black woman, belonged to the colony’s founder and governor, Theophilus Eaton, and may have arrived with him.

Africans came to New England generally via British colonies in the West Indies, although some were transported directly from Africa. They hailed from the Senegambia basin of West Africa, the Grain Coast, the Windward Coast, Benin, Biafra, Dahomey, West Central Africa, and once in a while even as far east as Madagascar. But after 1700, the majority had been swept from the coastal and inland regions of modern-day Ghana, known by the eighteenth century as the Gold Coast or the “slave coast” to European slave traders.

The ghastly business of the slave trade was a three-to-four-century-long commercial enterprise in which Africa provided the one product Europeans most wanted—people—in exchange for firearms, textiles, and other manufactured goods. Its scale, methods, and consequences have defined the meaning of inhumanity, as well as forged humane mass movements against oppression, ever since the emergence of a modern world. New Haven, home of Yale College, was an integral node in the vast world-wide network of commerce in human beings and cultural transformations.

In 1700, on the eve of the creation of the Collegiate School that would soon become Yale, one in ten property inventories in the colony of Connecticut included enslaved people. The prominent property-holding families in the principal towns of New London, New Haven, Norwich, and Hartford were slaveholders. Fully half of all ministers, doctors, and public officials in the colony owned at least one or two enslaved Africans. One could not live and work in or near a Connecticut town without seeing enslaved Black people.

They were, of course, people—with identities, although too often recorded only by first names. In Farmington, an Isaac Miller owned Phebe, Cuff and their son, Peter. Cuff was sold to a Joseph Coe in 1744, and Phebe to the same slaveholder ten years later. A notation in Coe’s deed of sale demonstrates the enslaved man’s demand for a last name that he himself chose: “Cuff desires to have the Sir Name Freeman annexed to his Name.”

This excerpt has been condensed and lightly edited to fit a shorter format.

New Haven Colony is incorporated into the larger colony of Connecticut. 

King Philip’s War breaks out, pitting Native inhabitants of coastal Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut against English colonists supported by some Indigenous allies. The war is fought over land and water, but also stems from hatred and fear among the English that, in living so close to people they consider barbarous, they are losing their faith and purpose. Many Natives, for their part, have come to loathe the English for their greed, arrogance, and conquests; many Indigenous leaders, or sachems, also fear the conversion to Christianity of some of their rival neighbors. Despite opposition from some (not all) clergy, kidnapping and a regional slave trade in Native refugees intensifies as a profitable business during and after the war.

1676 August

A Native marksman serving the English kills King Philip, a sachem of the Wampanoag of southeastern Massachusetts whose real name is Metacom. The sachem’s body is dismembered and decapitated, and his body parts are circulated as mythic objects by English colonists for years to come. His son is one of countless Native children sold into slavery by the English.

Image above: A 19th century depiction of Metacom, known to the English settlers as “King Philip,” Yale University Library .

Chapter 1 Yale’s Beginnings

In the fall of 1676, during the brutal and destructive conflict that came to be known as King Philip’s War, James Noyes wrote to John Allyn, a colonial military and political official, pleading for Native captives. Noyes, a Harvard-educated minister, was serving as chaplain to a company of colonial settlers. Feeling wronged and overburdened, he reminded Allyn he had “been 3 times in your war service,” and on each occasion he was cheated out of the wages and captives rightfully due him. 

The Reverend James Noyes, who would become one of Yale’s founding trustees, wanted a captive to enslave who “maye be worth having.” 

Already in possession of four captives—a fourteen-old girl, a five-year-old girl, their sick mother, and “a Gentleman never used to work, [who] had been sick & lame in his limbs”—Noyes wanted Allyn to send him a young, healthy captive. The minister had sent the sick man away, presumably to die, but, regrettably, he returned to him, and Noyes had been nursing him with food and medicine for three weeks. 

Noyes seemed well informed about the other available captives and was not interested in any of them; “I know of none I like lately come in,” he said. Still others, he knew, had been sent to Barbados—a reminder of this war’s global reverberations in the West Indies and throughout the Atlantic. Noyes was willing to keep the girl, her mother “if she live,” and the five-year-old, but he hoped to receive “a young man a fourth when I can light of one that maye be worth having.” Worth having; the Reverend Noyes wanted a laborer to own in body and perhaps soul. 

In this wartime emergency as well as in more stable times, the Reverend Noyes viewed enslaved Native Americans and eventually Africans as saleable property, commodities at his disposal as a Christian Englishman in a colonial frontier society. In their ambitions, their theological certainties, and their material quests, the Puritans at war in seventeenth-century Connecticut were also the drivers of an early form of commercial expansion and conquest. 

As the theologian Willie James Jennings writes, the Christian “imagination” of the English colonists in New England produced a “breathtaking hubris” demanding that “the natives, black, red or everyone not white, must be brought from chaos to faith. The land, wetlands, fields, and forests must be cleared, organized and brought into productive civilization.” In this lethal mixture of historical circumstances forged by mercantile empire, religious migration, displacement into new worlds, and war for survival and dominance, the Christian imagination, writes Jennings, fell into a “diseased form” increasingly linked to slavery and conquest, to a concept of property in man that demanded ever more creative justifications. 

Twenty-five years after writing his letter to Allyn, in 1701, Noyes was one of the ten trustees who established the Collegiate School, the forerunner to Yale College, in Saybrook, on the shoreline of Long Island Sound. When Noyes and his contemporaries set out to found their school, they did so within a political, cultural, and demographic landscape that had been transformed by decades of warfare—by the blood shed—between settlers and indigenous peoples. Yale’s New England origins lie in these seventeenth-century stories of destruction, migration, and enslavement, both Indigenous and African. 

The Connecticut Colony bans Black and Indigenous people from occupying public roadways after 9 p.m.

On the eve of the creation of the Collegiate School that would become Yale, one in 10 property inventories in the colony of Connecticut includes enslaved people.

1701 October 9

The General Assembly in New Haven authorizes the creation of a college and names 10 clergymen as trustees. The following month, seven of those ministers gather in Saybrook, Connecticut, for their first meeting. Enslaved people are likely present; at least seven of the 10 minister-trustees owned enslaved people. An early 20th-century history of Yale College describes the clergymen as “followed on horseback by their men-servants or slaves, into old Killingworth Street.”

Image above: 1701 Yale Charter, Yale University Library .

Images below, left to right: A New Map of the Most Considerable Plantations of the English in America. Dedicated to His Highness William Duke of Glocester, Yale University Library ; Portrait of Mary Hooker Pierpont, Yale University Art Gallery .

CHAPTER  2 Yale’s Founders and Slavery

On October 9, 1701, the general assembly in New Haven authorized the creation of a college and named ten clergymen as trustees of the new school. The next month, seven of these ministers, all but one trained at Harvard, gathered in Saybrook, Connecticut on the shores of the Long Island Sound, for their first meeting.

Enslaved men, women, and children in the archives of Yale’s founders have remained nearly invisible for three centuries, but to a degree they have been hiding in plain sight.

In attendance were Samuel Andrew of Milford, Thomas Buckingham of Saybrook, Israel Chauncey of Stratford, James Pierpont of New Haven, Abraham Pierson of Kenilworth, Noadiah Russell of Middletown, and Joseph Webb of Fairfield. Together, what they established was essentially the idea of a college, with a few rules about how degrees were to be administered and a stipulation that its leader would be called “rector.”

Fledgling to say the least, this school had been authorized by the colonial assembly, which began with a grant of £120 as well as the assembly’s approval to spend an additional £500 per annum. A wealthy landowner, James Fitch, also donated a farm the college might use for rental revenue. And so instruction of a sort began, with one undergraduate degree given in 1702, along with a handful of master’s degrees.

Some slaves were likely present at the first trustees’ meeting. An early twentieth-century history of Yale describes the journey to Buckingham’s house, picturing the clergymen “followed on horseback by their men-servants or slaves, into old Killingworth Street.” In early eighteenth-century Connecticut, laborers of all sorts, particularly those who served the clergy class, were frequently enslaved or indentured servants. Indeed, of the ten first trustees of what became Yale College, at least seven, and possibly others, owned one or more slaves.

The Reverend Buckingham, in his will, left to his son, Hezekia Buckingham, “my negro boy called Peter to be his Slave Servant,” and to his “son-in-law John Kirtland of Saybrook my negro boy called Philip to be his Slave Servant.” The Reverend Chauncy, in the inventory of his estate, listed “A Negro girl” valued at £40, below “An horse” and “eight sheep” and above “a Great Brass kettle.” Other founders left similar such calculations and matter-of-fact statements of human chattel property in their estates and inventories.

Enslaved men, women, and children in the archives of Yale’s founders have remained nearly invisible for three centuries, but to a degree they have been hiding in plain sight. Of the founding trustees, the Reverend Woodbridge—namesake of Woodbridge Hall—was the largest slaveholder. Church records show that he and his wife owned and baptized Black individuals named Isabella, Cesar Diego, Thomas, and a thirteen-year-old boy named Thorn, whom he sold “in plain and open market.” Furthermore, Abigail Woodbridge, his wife, inherited from her first husband a man named Andrew, who eventually married Tamar, a slave owned by the Reverend Woodbridge. Tamar and Andrew had children named Lydia, Isabella, and Daniel.

Parents, children, and siblings were often separated, sometimes as gifts or when an estate was broken up.

• View enlarged image

Elihu Yale, a wealthy Bostonian who had moved to England as a child, sends hundreds of books, a portrait of King George I, and “goods and merchandizes” to support the Collegiate School of Connecticut. Some portion of Elihu Yale’s fortune is derived from his commercial entanglements with the slave trade; as the governor of Madras, India, for the East India Company, he had a direct role in the trafficking of enslaved people.

Images, left to right: Elihu Yale Snuffbox, Yale University Art Gallery ; Elihu Yale with His Servant, Yale University Art Gallery ; Fort St. George, Yale Center for British Art ; Elihu Yale, Yale University Art Gallery .

Thirteen-year-old Jonathan Edwards begins his studies in Wethersfield, Connecticut, just south of Hartford, one site where Collegiate School students are educated at the time. That same year, the Collegiate School, after conducting classes in Saybrook, Wethersfield, and other Connecticut towns for more than a decade, moves permanently to New Haven.

In honor of the contributions of Elihu Yale—and to entice him to make additional donations—the Collegiate School constructs a building called “Yale College.” This house, the first school building for instruction in New Haven, stands three stories high, 170 feet long, and 22 feet wide, and contains some 50 studies for students.

Elihu Yale with Members of his Family and an Enslaved Child, Y ale Center for British Art .

CHAPTER  2 How Yale Got Its Name

The small Collegiate School, Yale’s precursor, conducted classes in Saybrook, Wethersfield, and other Connecticut towns until it moved permanently to New Haven in 1716. During this period the college found a major benefactor and future namesake from abroad.

Elihu Yale oversaw many sales, adjudications, and accountings of enslaved people for the East India Company. 

Elihu Yale was a wealthy man, born in Boston, who had moved to England as a child and grown up as landed aristocracy in Wales. He spent many years in Madras, India, first as a clerk, then as a writer, eventually becoming governor of the East India Company in that lucrative outpost of the British empire.

The East India Company conducted enormous commerce out of Madras, on India’s southeast coast, and it sanctioned and regulated part of the Indian slave trade. Yale himself oversaw many sales, adjudications, and accountings of enslaved people for the East India Company. When he was governor, the “Consultation Books” frequently would report such decisions, as in 1687, when he and his agents, over Yale’s signature, “Order’d that ten Slaves be sent upon each of the Europe ships for St. Helena, to supply that Island.”

Because of a famine in 1687, enslaved people were frequently sold off to Indian Ocean coastal ports and islands. The governor’s office reported that year “that one hundred Slaves bee sent them … they being by the famine, extreamly cheap.” In 1689, Yale reported that the frigate Pearle returned from Vizagapatam. Part of the cargo was shackles “for well secureing the slaves.”

Sometimes Yale and his fellow agents dealt out enslavement as punishment for crimes, as on September 24, 1687, when “Three people were punished for a crime by being sentenced to life slavery for the company.” Dozens more of these kinds of reports exist in records of Fort St. George.

Precisely whether or how many people Yale personally may have owned is not yet discernable, nor perhaps even the key question. Some portion of Yale’s considerable fortune, amassed while British governor-president in Madras, derived from his myriad entanglements with the purchase and sale of human beings.

In an otherwise highly favorable history of Yale College’s origins, written in 1918, Franklin Bowditch Dexter leaves a remarkable statement about the governor’s character, saying he left a “record of arrogance, cruelty, sensuality, and greed,” and compares him to the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar.

Between 1713 and 1721, Yale sent hundreds of books, a portrait of King George I, and “sundry goods and merchandizes” to support the Collegiate School of Connecticut. As per Yale’s instructions, the goods were sold, and the proceeds went to the building of the college house. It was not an insignificant donation, but in the context of Yale’s enormous wealth, the college was hoping for more.

In honor of his contributions, and to entice him into additional donations, the Collegiate School constructed a building called Yale College. From that day forward, the third-oldest institution of higher learning in America would be known by that name.

1718 September 12

Yale College holds a “splendid Commencement” ceremony, presided over by Connecticut governor Gurdon Saltonstall, a passionate defender of slavery. From this day forward, the third-oldest institution of higher learning in America is known as Yale.

Image above: First Commencement, Held in 1718, Yale University Library .

Image below: Governor Gurdon Saltonstall, Yale University Art Gallery .

Jonathan Edwards receives his baccalaureate degree from Yale College. Over the nearly four decades that follow, he becomes America’s most renowned theologian.

Images, left to right: Valedictory Oration, in Latin, delivered at the Yale College commencement of September 1720, Yale University Library ; Jonathan Edwards, Princeton University Art Museum . 

CHAPTER  1 The Contradictions of Jonathan Edwards

In 1720, Jonathan Edwards, an extraordinarily well-read teenager, completed his baccalaureate degree in New Haven at what had become Yale College. Over the next nearly four decades he became America’s greatest theologian.

Edwards, perhaps Yale’s most prominent graduate in its first century, was a willing and representative slaveholder, a famed model for so many other Yale leaders and graduates.

Edwards viewed all races of people as descendants of Adam and Eve, and therefore of the same original sin and human possibility, and he saw Africans and Native Americans as equal to Europeans in their potential for godliness and evil.

In 1739, he surmised that when the millennium arrived in a few hundred years, “Negroes and Indians will be divines.” They would write “excellent books,” become “learned men, and “shall then be very knowing in religion.” Edwards contended that a slaveholder should not abuse his servant because “we are made of the same human race.”

Although he would condemn slave trading in the Atlantic, he never opposed the ownership of enslaved Africans in his community and his household. Indeed, Edwards, perhaps Yale’s most prominent graduate in its first century, was a willing and representative slaveholder, a famed model for so many other Yale leaders and graduates.

A genius with rhetoric and the most probing founder of American theological and philosophical literature, Edwards embodied multiple contradictions or “Puritan dilemmas.” Piety and oppression, deep personal religious faith and a fully hierarchical view of human society, marched together in the Puritan worldview.

The Puritans came to accept the existence of slavery, while endeavoring to control and condemn the abuses of slaveholders. They tried to infuse the inhumanity of slavery with ethical guards against the tyranny of the slave owner. Servitude was somehow natural, including chattel slavery, but the slaveholder must not abuse his terrible power, an ethically untenable proposition. Such a complex paradox in the life of Edwards informs much of the evolving early history of Yale College as well.

During his undergraduate years at Yale, the young Edwards kept a spiritual diary, attempting to record the nature and growth of his faith. Intensely intellectual, anti-social, and constantly questing to embrace an elusive “holiness,” Edwards struggled with inner “wicked inclinations,” as “God would not suffer [him] to go on with any quietness.” And there is little surprise that Edwards’s inward “violent struggles” did not concern the fate of the Black and Native people he saw around him, free or enslaved. Their fate, though, walked within and without his life and that of Yale College.

As Yale expands, much of its funding comes from commerce dependent on enslaved labor—including the West Indies rum business. The Connecticut General Assembly this year passes “An Act for the better Regulating the Duty of Impost upon Rhum,” which includes the provision, “That what shall be gained by the impost on rum for two years next coming shall be applied to the building of a rectors house for Yale College.”

Map of New Haven, Yale University Library . 

The Connecticut Colony passes a law stating that Black, Indigenous, or mixed-race people would be “whipped with forty lashes” if they “uttered or published… words” about a white person that were deemed “actionable” under law. At this time, Africans number roughly 700 out of 38,000 people in Connecticut, or 1.8 percent of the population.

Jonathan Edwards surmises that a few hundred years hence, “Negroes and Indians will be divines,” and will write “excellent books,” become “learned men,” and “shall then be very knowing in religion.” Although he condemns slave trading in the Atlantic, he and his wife enslave several Black people. Edwards never opposes the ownership of enslaved Africans in his community or his household, which serves as a model of behavior for many other Yale leaders and graduates.

Philip Livingston Sr. a businessman and human trafficker, donates the considerable sum of £28, ten shillings to Yale College in recognition of the education his sons have received there. The Livingston fortune is derived in part from investments in slave ships transporting hundreds of Africans from the continent to forced labor in the Americas, and from the provisioning of plantations in the Caribbean. In 1756, Livingston’s gift becomes the basis for the Livingstonian Professorship in Divinity, the college’s first professorship and one of its most prestigious for many years.

Robert Livingston, Yale University Library .

CHAPTER  3 Follow the Money

From its founding, Yale received financial and political support from some of the most influential and prominent families in Connecticut and beyond. These same families were often involved, personally and through their business interests, in slaveholding.

By the 1730s, Philip Livingston, Sr., with his own sons attending Yale, owned shares in at least four slave ships operating out of New York harbor; all told, he and his sons invested in at least fifteen slave voyages to and from Africa. 

Among the wealthiest and most significant family benefactors of Yale were the Livingstons of New York, a dynasty of three generations of human traffickers and merchants. In 1690, New Yorker Robert C. Livingston first invested in a slave voyage to the west coast of Africa.

Robert’s son, Philip Livingston Sr. (1686-1749), patriarch of the eighteenth-century extended family, sent four of his six sons to Yale College, including Philip Livingston, Jr., who later signed the Declaration of Independence. For the senior Livingston, an education at Yale for most of his sons represented the kind of learning as well as prestige he sought for his family’s ascendance into the world of the New York mercantile elite.

By the 1730s, Philip Livingston, Sr., with his own sons attending Yale, owned shares in at least four slave ships operating out of New York harbor; all told, he and his sons invested in at least fifteen slave voyages to and from Africa. The family’s trade routes reached all the way to Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean.

The Livingstons imported enslaved Africans directly from the continent; records exist for at least seven ships that disembarked 549 slaves in New York. Their wealth also stemmed from a steady trade of grain, flour, and meat to the islands.

Many in the family, moreover, were significant slaveholders. A Columbia University study found that, by the 1790 federal census, a tally of all branches of the family tree came to some 170 people enslaved by the Livingstons.

In 1745, Philip Livingston Sr. donated the considerable sum of £28 10s. to Yale College “as a small acknowledgment of the sence [sic] I have for the favour and Education my sons have had there.” Livingston’s gift, one of the largest in the middle of the eighteenth century, was originally intended to finance building projects. However, the ambitious president of Yale, Thomas Clap, asked that the money instead be used to create an endowment for the college’s first professorship. Combined with other funds, Livingston’s gift became the basis for the Livingstonian Professorship in Divinity in 1756, one of the most prestigious at Yale for many years. The New York clan remains well commemorated at the university: at the Memorial Quadrangle, the Livingston Gateway was dedicated in 1921.

Without such merchant families, the college would not have prospered into the leading American institution of higher learning that it became by the time of the American Revolution. The West Indian trade, rooted so deeply in slavery, was an indispensable element in Yale College’s birth, growth, and eventual prosperity.

The Black population of the Connecticut Colony reaches 1,000, a number that will grow to 3,587 by 1756.

A plan of the town of New Haven with all the buildings in 1748… Yale University Library .

1750 April 17

The first stone is laid in the construction of Connecticut Hall. This prized work of architecture—now the oldest surviving brick structure in the state—is built in part by Black workers enslaved by Yale luminaries.

Image above: Osborn Hall and South Middle College, Yale University Library .

Images below, left to right: Plan of the City of New Haven, Yale University Library ; Connecticut Hall ca. 1930s, Yale University Library ; Connecticut Hall ca. 1890s, Yale University Library .

Chapter 3 Building Connecticut Hall

Constructed from 1750 to 1753, Connecticut Hall is a prized work of architecture at Yale, the oldest building on campus, and the oldest surviving brick structure in the state. Its large meeting room on the second floor, lined with portraits of Yale deans, long served as the site of Yale faculty meetings. The building is well-marked with commemorative dates on plaques, but nowhere does it record how and by whom it was constructed. Connecticut Hall was built, in part, by Black workers who were enslaved by Yale luminaries.

One can only wonder if Clap and the trustees of Yale College ever arranged any recognition of the many people, enslaved and free, Black and white, who built this new edifice.

Yale’s first president, the Reverend Thomas Clap, had to secure donors to pay the bills and provide the construction materials. He was remarkably assiduous in pursuing both aims. Among eight donors Clap recorded who specifically made gifts to the building of the “new college,” at least three were slaveholders. They included Reverends Jared Eliot of Killingworth, Solomon Williams of Lebanon (brother of Elisha Williams), and Jonathan Todd of East Guilford, Connecticut.

In 1748, Clap’s construction team, under the direction of Thomas Bills and Francis Letort, began to purchase and amass the materials, which included door locks, shingles, masonry of all kinds, hay, thousands of bricks, kilns, lime, stones, carts for hauling, long beams, joiners, pine boards, nails, “oyl,” “White Lead,” “41 Squares of Glass for Round Windows,” and various tools.

Clap was extraordinarily meticulous in his recordkeeping, assembling notes on the approximately twenty-two laborers who worked over two to three years. Some were paid, and some were not. “Jethro’s Gad,” a free person of color, and the son of Jethro Luke, worked 161 ½ days. “Mr. Noyes’s Negro” (named Jack) put in 172 ¾ days. “Theophilus Munson’s Negro” (named Dick) labored 68 days. “Mr. Bonticou’s Negro” (his name as yet unknown) spent 96 days on the job. “Mingo,” enslaved by Archibald McNeil, worked 92 ¾ days. Finally, “Mr. President’s Negro”—that is, one of the people enslaved to Clap himself, possibly George—gave 83 days of strength, sweat, and skill to the job. This record demonstrates that Black workers (almost all unpaid) worked a total of at least 672 days in building this prominent Yale structure.

Many of the white workers, though perhaps not all, are named with their days of labor as well in the president’s “Account of the Cost of New College.” They include Letort and Bills, Samuel Tharp, Samuel Griffin, Daniel Sperry, Joseph Stacey, Nicolas Wood, Abel Wood, John Osborn, Daniel McConnelly, and Richard Cutler.

One can only wonder if Clap and the trustees of Yale College ever arranged any recognition of the many people, enslaved and free, Black and white, who built this edifice in the heart of the educational enterprise at the corner of Chapel and College Streets. Gad Luke worked elbow to elbow with Samuel Sharp and Joseph Stacey, and they may have spent days mixing mortar together. Mingo must have carted bricks and lifted beams with Daniel Sperry. Dick and Abel Wood likely dug the cellar or fired up a kiln on numerous mornings.

On several pages of Clap’s accounts, he describes payments for “team work,” a term with no irony in the listing of people and numbers at that time. It took a team to raise beams or install a window or large door. Some days Gad broke from the “team” on the construction site and worked “culling tobacco” personally for President Clap.

The students, rectors, teachers, and anyone who lived or worked around Yale College as it grew from the 1730s to 1760s would have known Jethro Luke and his family, and perhaps Jack, Dick, Mingo, and other enslaved workers. Do these early workers who laid the foundations of Yale also deserve the title, “founders?” How might we break the silence about their vivid visibility in the university’s archives?

James Hillhouse graduates from Yale. He will go on to serve in the state legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate, and will leave his mark on both Yale and New Haven, helping design Old Brick Row, draining and beautifying the New Haven Green, organizing Grove Street Cemetery, and serving as Yale’s treasurer for 50 years. Though he takes public stances against slavery, he and his wives own enslaved people.

Images, left to right: A view of Old Brick Row, including Connecticut Hall, Yale University Library ; James Hillhouse, Yale University Library ; Elevations and Plans of Present and Projected buildings of Yale College by John Trumbull, Yale University Library . 

Jonathan Edwards, Jr., son of the famous theologian, writes a series of five articles anonymously in The Connecticut Journal and the New-Haven Post-Boy , entitled “Some Observations on the Slavery of Negroes.” The articles establish a theological basis for the antislavery cause, challenging slavery and the slave trade as Christian hypocrisy.

The Connecticut colony outlaws further importation of enslaved people into its borders, a statute not easily enforced. A census the same year counts 6,464 Black people in Connecticut, the largest number in any New England colony, representing 3.2 percent of the population. New Haven County contains 854 enslaved people, and the town of New Haven records 262 people held in bondage.

Interlude Names of the Enslaved

Enslaved people were part of New Haven and Connecticut from the beginning days of European settlement and of the extended community of Yale University from its founding as the Collegiate School in 1701. The people whose names are recorded here were enslaved by the founding and successor trustees, rectors and presidents, and major early donors in Yale’s first century.

The vast majority of the people listed here were identified as Black, but in some cases they were identified as Indigenous. Records of inheritances, sales, baptisms, and other events provide some details, such as family relationships and ages, but in many cases, their names are all that the surviving evidence provides.

This list, although it contains the names of over two hundred human beings, is incomplete. Research has focused on wills, estate papers, church records, and the federal census. Estate documents present an accounting of a household only at the time of a person’s death. Yale’s leaders, like fellow elites of church and society in Connecticut, often enslaved other people earlier in their lives whose names were not recorded in their wills (because they died, were sold, or were manumitted). For this and other reasons, further research would likely show evidence of additional enslaved people connected to Yale.

The names listed are those given, in most cases, to these people by slaveholders. Individual names listed may thus differ from names given at birth by their parents. In some instances, the available records note a person without including any name, and these people are included as well. The absence of a name in the records does not constitute the absence of a life.

• James 
• Phillis 
• Polag 
• Sylvanus 
• unnamed man 
• unnamed person 
• Bristo 
• Agnes 
• Anthony 
• Philip 
• Peter 
• Devonshire 
• Jethro 
• unnamed girl 
• George 
• Pompey 
• Sylva 
• Tamar 
• Dinah 
• Primus 
• Aaron 
• Lettice 
• Ollive 
• Maria 
• Naomi 
• unnamed “next youngest” 
• Binney 
• Joseph 
• Titus 
• Venus 
• Hager 
• Lilly 
• Samson 
• Kedar 
• Dauphin 
• Toney 
• Jenny 
• Benjamin 
• Cesar 
• Daniel 
• Hannibal 
• Joe the Miller
• Pietvlek 
• Son of Joe the Miller 
• Jenne 
• Chiman 
• Chloe 
• Daphnis 
• Eolus 
• Exeter 
• Fortune 
• Rubie 
• Scipio 
• Sylve 
• unnamed 14th child of Dinah 
• unnamed 15th child of Dinah 
• unnamed 16th child of Dinah 
• unnamed 17th child of Dinah 
• unnamed 18th child of Dinah 
• unnamed 19th child of Dinah 
• unnamed 20th child of Dinah 
• Betty 
• Dolle 
• Linus 
• Michael 
• Ceaser 
• unnamed girl
• unnamed man
• unnamed woman
• Sabina 
• Arabella 
• Thomas 
• Sampson 
• Andrew 
• Presey 
• Annise 
• Clary 
• Jerusha 
• Lowes 
• Rachel 
• Rhoda 
• Newport 
• Hagar 
• Zylpha 
• Easter 
• Williams 
• London 
• Grigg 
• Lemmon 
• Mabel 
• Bristol 
• Grace 
• Hector 
• Isaac 
• Flora 
• Isabel 
• Tully 
• unnamed boy 
• unnamed woman 
• Desire 
• Merea 
• Polan 
• Prince 
• Sarah 
• Silvi 
• Candace 
• Diego 
• Isabella 
• Jacob 
• John Waubin 
• Lydia 

1774 October

In Connecticut, “a humble petition of a number of poor Africans,” signed by Bristol Lambee on behalf of many others, asks for “deliverance from a state of unnatural servitude and bondage.” The petitioners assert “that LIBERTY , being founded upon the law of nature, is as necessary to the happiness of an African, as it is to the happiness of an Englishman.” Lambee and his friends beg those inclined toward revolution against Great Britain to “hear our prayers.” Just as the revolutionaries of the colony protest those who “would subject you to slavery,” they write, African Americans demand that those same revolutionaries reflect upon their own “unnatural custom” of holding people as property.

John Trumbull, The Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775, Yale University Art Gallery .

Chapter 4 Questions of Freedom

Many Africans and African Americans, some born in Connecticut or Pennsylvania or Virginia, some fighting as soldiers in the Continental army or the British Army, demanded their “rights” to the various “liberties” at stake in this inspiring, if bloody, new age. As the historian J. Franklin Jameson wrote, “the stream of revolution, once started, could not be confined within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land.”

The Black petitioners asserted “that LIBERTY , being founded upon the law of nature, is as necessary to the happiness of an African, as it is to the happiness of an Englishman.”

In late 1774, a “ humble Petition of a Number of poor Africans ,” addressed to the “Sons of Liberty in Connecticut,” declared the case boldly. Signed by Bristol Lambee on behalf of many others, the petition considered the radical Sons of Liberty the “most zealous assertors of the natural rights and liberties of mankind” and asked for help in their own “deliverance from a state of unnatural servitude and bondage.”

The petitioners further asserted “that LIBERTY , being founded upon the law of nature, is as necessary to the happiness of an African, as it is to the happiness of an Englishman.” They claimed, “in common with other men, a natural right to be free.” Their “services” could only be exerted by “voluntary compact,” they maintained, stating in clear language the doctrine of consent. They had been captured and taken to “this distant land to be enslaved… to serve like a horse in a mill,” and they established, in light of such dehumanizatioun, a right to resist in self-defense.

Their deepest sense of family, of “endearing ties,” had been sundered; they were “strangers” in their new land. They felt blocked from properly serving God because they were chattel, under “absolute controul “of a “master.” And finally, Lambee and his friends knew the religious teachings of slaveholders. “So contrary is slavery to the very genius of Christianity,” they argued, that the good men of Connecticut risked their own eternal damnation.

The Connecticut petitioners begged those with the revolutionary spirit against Great Britain to “hear our prayers.” As the revolutionaries of the colony protested those who “would subject you to slavery,” the petitioners demanded they reflect upon their own “unnatural custom” of holding property in man. All of Jefferson’s four first principles in the later Declaration of Independence are addressed in Lambee’s eloquent petition: natural rights and consent explicitly, equality and the right of revolution more implicitly.

Black people, enslaved and free, did not stop articulating their hopes that the country would make good on the promises of the Revolution. In the 1780s, a group of Black New Haveners, living not far from Yale College, produced yet another extraordinary petition for freedom. It likely found its spirit in resistance to the nature of Connecticut’s long-term gradual emancipation scheme.

The petition was crafted with verve and passion for the same natural rights and Christian religious inclusion as the earlier document. These people considered themselves “Africas Blacks,” declared themselves still in “Chaine Bondage” and “Cruil Slavirre.” They wanted their “human Bodys” recognized as such. They had “fought the grandest Battles… in this War,” the petition maintained, demanding “Rite and justes” if America was ever to become a “free contry.”

They felt the power of natural rights in their bones and their souls. The New Haveners, in the shadow of the famous college at Yale, declared their right to “Pubblick woship,” and to “larning… our C A B or to reed the holy BiBle. Simple justice, born of a revolution for human liberty, had rarely been stated so directly.

Samuel Hopkins, Yale Class of 1741, delivers a sermon appealing to the consciences of American patriots. “Rouse up then my brethren and assert the Right of universal liberty;” Hopkins declares, “you assert your Right to be free in opposition to the Tyrant of Britain; come be honest men and assert the Right of Africans to be free in opposition to the Tyrants of America.”

Samuel Hopkins, The New York Public Library .

Chapter 4 Yale’s Christian Abolitionists

Yale-trained white ministers laid the foundations for biblically grounded abolitionism in the nineteenth century. One of the most prominent among them was Samuel Hopkins (Yale 1741). 

“Rouse up then my brethren and assert the Right of universal liberty,” pronounced Hopkins. “You assert your Right to be free in opposition to the Tyrant of Britain; come be honest men and assert the Right of the Africans to be free in opposition to the Tyrants of America.”

Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the Reverend Hopkins came under the profound influence of the New Light revivalists while at Yale, especially Jonathan Edwards. But Hopkins did not merely adopt Edwards’ teachings; he undertook, according to scholars Kenneth Minkema and Harry Stout, a “major revision” of Edwards’ theology. 

To Hopkins, slaveholding was a mortal personal and social sin. He was a staunch supporter of American independence but converted republican ideology into a rationale for abolitionism as well as for resistance to Britain. He became Edwards’ “most renowned intellectual heir.” 

In a sermon Hopkins delivered in 1776, he appealed, as firmly as the latter-day radical abolitionists of the early nineteenth century, to the consciences of American patriots. “Rouse up then my brethren and assert the Right of universal liberty,” pronounced Hopkins. “You assert your Right to be free in opposition to the Tyrant of Britain; come be honest men and assert the Right of the Africans to be free in opposition to the Tyrants of America.”

Hopkins was considered dull in the pulpit, but with his pen he penetrated to the heart of the matter: “We cry up Liberty but know it the Negros have as good a Right to be free as we can pretend to.” Hopkins may rightly be said to be present at the creation of moral suasion, the appeal to the conscience and the heart in American abolitionism. 

Another disciple of Edwards forged his own approach to abolitionism in these years. Jonathan Edwards Jr., the theologian’s own son, was born in 1745—a full generation younger than Hopkins, although very much his protégé. Always in the shadow of his famous father, Edwards Jr. was orphaned by age thirteen. While a boy living in Stockbridge at the Indian School, he studied Indigenous languages and was sent to live with the Iroquois near Albany, New York, in preparation for future missionary endeavors. Graduating from the College of New Jersey in 1765, Edwards Jr. eventually moved to New Haven where he pastored the White Haven Church for most of the rest of his life (1769-95). He developed many associations at Yale and delivered examinations to students, although it appears President Stiles passed him over for a professorship of divinity in 1781. 

In 1773, Edwards, Jr. published a series of five articles anonymously in the Connecticut Journal and the New Haven Post-Boy , entitled “Some Observations upon the Slavery of Negroes.” The articles established a New Divinity theological basis for the antislavery cause. They challenged slavery and the slave trade as Christian hypocrisy. 

Edwards Jr. countered specific proslavery arguments, rejecting all biblical justifications for slavery. He noted that although God had permitted the ancient Israelites to invade Canaan and enslave the Canaanites, that did not give Europeans and Americans the right to do the same thing to Africans. He also condemned the idea that slavery benefitted Africans by making Christians out of heathens—an idea that would take generations to weaken or die—asserting that religion had nothing to do with why Africans were enslaved. By repudiating the argument that war captives were fair game for enslavement, he took on one of his father’s own weakest justifications for slavery. 

These early antislavery writings would have been relatively well known around Yale College in a year of increased resistance to British authority, although the younger Edwards’ parishioners frequently found him too radical and theologically rigid. 

In the year of American political independence, fully one-quarter of wills probated in Connecticut include enslaved property.

Signing of the Declaration of Independence begins. Four of the signatories are Yale graduates—Philip Livingston (New York), Lewis Morris (New York), Oliver Wolcott (Connecticut), and Lyman Hall (Georgia)—all of whom are enslavers.

Dunlap Broadside of the Declaration of Independence, Yale University Library .

Two enslaved men, Prince and Prime, submit a petition to the state General Assembly demanding their freedom in the name of both Enlightenment doctrine and Christian virtue.

The British invade New Haven.

Images, left to right: Sketch of the British Invasion of New Haven from Ezra Stiles Papers, Yale University Library ; Ezra Stiles, Yale University Art Gallery ; Map of the British Invasion, Yale University Library ; New Haven Green, Yale University Library .

The state of Connecticut enacts a gradual abolition law, stating that anyone born to enslaved parents after March 1, 1784, would become free on their 25th birthday. An addition in 1797 changes the age to 21 for girls.

Interlude Gradual Emancipation in Connecticut

The name of James Hillhouse, perhaps the town’s most prominent citizen of the early republic, is inscribed across the city of New Haven, including on the city’s oldest public high school and one of its famous avenues. In 1782, Hillhouse was appointed treasurer of Yale College—a position he held until his death fifty years later.

Hillhouse himself recorded his ownership of two enslaved children: a girl named Hagar, born on March 17, 1786, and a boy named Jupiter, born on June 22, 1789.

An astute money manager and a builder, Hillhouse left an enduring mark on the college and the city. Among other things, he helped design Yale’s famed Old Brick Row, drained and beautified the New Haven Green, and organized Grove Street Cemetery, the first cemetery of its kind in the country. Hillhouse also became a powerful politician, serving in the state legislature (1791-96), U.S. Congress (1791-96), and U.S. Senate (1796-1810). As a U.S. Senator, he introduced amendments that would have restricted slavery, particularly in the new lands added to the United States through the Louisiana Purchase.

Yet in the same years that Hillhouse was building an illustrious career as a public servant, he was enslaving people. According to New Haven vital records, Hillhouse himself recorded in front of the justice of the peace his ownership of two enslaved children: a girl named Hagar, born on March 17, 1786, and a boy named Jupiter, born on June 22, 1789.

The children Hagar and Jupiter grew up in the shadow of Connecticut’s Gradual Abolition Act, which gave them only the nebulous future hope of freedom and autonomy. Passed in 1784, the act stipulated that boys born to enslaved mothers after March 1, 1784, would be free on their twenty-fifth birthday, and girls would be free on their twenty-first birthday. Another act, in 1788, required Connecticut slaveholders to register the birth of enslaved children, which explains why Hillhouse recorded his ownership of young Hagar and Jupiter when he did. The Connecticut law was the most prolonged among Northern states that passed such enactments.

Tragically, Hagar would not live to experience freedom. Hillhouse, a member of the First Congregational Church in New Haven, had the young girl baptized “in private” on July 21, 1794. Hagar died two days later at the age of nine, and like her biblical namesake, one of Abraham’s wives, she died a slave.

The little boy named Jupiter outlived Hagar, but only to endure other trials of slavery, separation, and hardship. In 1795, the boy’s mother, Judith Cocks, wrote to Hillhouse, bereft and confused. Cocks and Jupiter had been taken to Marietta, Ohio, by Hillhouse’s first cousin, Lucy Backus Woodbridge and her husband, Dudley Woodbridge (Yale 1766). (This fact alone suggests a disregard for the law, since it was illegal to transport enslaved people outside the state.) Cocks told Hillhouse that Mrs. Woodbridge and her sons “thump and beat [Jupiter] as if he was a Dog” and begged for clarity about Jupiter’s status.

Living in a “strange country without one friend,” Cocks asked Hillhouse to “be so kind as to write me how Long Jupiter is to remain with them.” Woodbridge had told Cocks that Jupiter “is to live with her untill he is twenty five years of age,” something she “had no idea of.”  Cocks further implored Hillhouse not to sell her boy to Mrs. Woodbridge. Even more wrenching, she mentions her daughter Hagar, apparently unaware that the girl had died the year before.

In this rare document, an enslaved mother speaks directly to one of the most powerful men in the country about her fears, and in doing so, articulates the grief, frustration, and sense of powerlessness many enslaved parents felt. Unable to navigate the gradual abolition law with any certainty or genuine hope, Cocks was trying as best she could to protect her children from the violence and cruelty of slavery. In starkest terms, it dramatizes the painfully slow and extended process of abolition in Connecticut, which made children property and subject to the violence and whims of their owners through early adulthood.

Young Jupiter’s fate is unknown, but slavery continued in the Woodbridge household.

Jupiter Hammon, a man enslaved by the Lloyd family of Long Island—relatives by marriage to James Hillhouse, in whose New Haven home he spent time—writes a poem, “An Essay on Slavery”—a revelatory work of Christian devotion and moral condemnation of slavery. Hammon is today recognized as the first published African American poet.

Image above: A View of Old Brick Row, Including Connecticut Hall, Yale University Library .

Image below: Yale College and the College Chapel, Yale University Library .

Chapter 4 ‘Tis Thou Alone Can Make Us Free’

In 1779, when the British invaded New Haven, Sarah Lloyd Hillhouse was twenty-six years old and pregnant with her first child. Her husband James Hillhouse, a Yale graduate and future college treasurer, was off commanding a company of volunteers—including many Yale students—as they attempted to defend the city.

This rare find from the depths of the Yale archives can leave one breathless at the brown paper, the slightly faded ink, and the careful writing.

Sarah described her ordeal to a relative: “You who have gone through a like scene can easily imagine the consternation this town must be in on the occasion,” she wrote. “However we fared much better than we feared as we expected nothing but to see the town reduced to ashes…the rest of the inhabitants were plundered & abused without regard to friend or foe.”

Fortunately for young Hillhouse, she was not alone: an enslaved Black man named Jupiter Hammon was with her at the time of the invasion. “I am happily reassured & have abundant reason to rejoice in the merciful protection of a kind providence—Our old faithful Jupiter happened to be here & was a great comfort to me in my flight.” In the years to come, “faithful Jupiter” would decry slavery in verse and claim his place as America’s first published Black poet.

In 1786, Hammon wrote a poem, “An Essay on Slavery”—a revelatory work of Christian devotion and moral condemnation of slavery. Hammon was a devout Christian and much of the poem reads like an expression of faith, a prayer for deliverance for all the enslaved, and a praise song for Jesus, an all-powerful and liberating God. The manuscript was a working draft, including revisions by Hammon himself.

This rare find from the depths of the Yale archives can leave one breathless at the brown paper, the slightly faded ink, and the careful writing. Here as well is tactile evidence of the paradox of slavery and freedom in the Age of the Revolution.

Hammon was born enslaved in 1711, the property of a wealthy family on Long Island. Yet well into his seventies, he used his considerable literary gifts to envision an end to slavery and the suffering that African and African American people had experienced at the hands of their fellow Christians. Hammon gave keen attention to his rhyme and meter; his handwriting was strong. He repeatedly references both salvation and America through the metaphor of a “distant shore” and the “Christian shore.” He names the Middle Passage with fatefulness and controlled emotion:

Our forefathers came from africa  tost over the raging main  to a Christian shore there for to stay  and not return again.

Exuding Christian humility and supplication in the face of the awesome power of God, Hammon demands that the enslaved and free pray together for “Liberty.” Hammon’s language is King James in style and tone; many a “thee,” “thou,” and “ye” give beauty to the verse. “Tis thou alone can make us free,” the poet declares. In stanzas 11 and 12, Hammon enters briefly the actual voice of God: “Come unto me ye humble souls… bond or free.” After freedom itself, the poem insists on human equality. As he moves the poem with refrain toward crescendo, Hammon returned to the idea of the “shore”:

Come let us join with humble voice  Now on the christian shore  If we will have our only choice  Tis slavery no more…  When shall we hear the joyfull sound  Echo the christian shore  Each humble [voice with songs resound]  That Slavery is no more.

The population of enslaved people in New Haven is declining. The county contains 433 enslaved people, a little more than half the number 16 years earlier. The town of New Haven includes 76 enslaved people, less than a third of the number in 1774.

1790 October 20

Joseph Mountain, a 32-year-old Black man, is convicted of rape and hanged on the New Haven Green. A reported crowd of 10,000 people, more than twice New Haven’s population, gathers to watch the spectacle. Mountain’s notoriety traveled broadly thanks to a purportedly autobiographical account of the crime, Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain , likely ghostwritten by David Daggett (Yale 1783), one of the future founders of the Yale Law School. Daggett claimed to have only taken dictation, but he was the magistrate who recorded the confession and saw that it was published. The popular text widely disseminated ideas of Black criminality, threats to social order, and propensities to sexual violence.

The Connecticut state legislature passes a law forbidding enslavers from selling their human property outside of the state.

Eli Whitney, a recent graduate of Yale, obtains a patent for a new type of cotton gin. The innovation revolutionizes cotton production and fuels slavery’s expansion in the South.

Image above: The Eli Whitney Gun Factory, Yale University Art Gallery .

Image below, left to right: Drawing of a Mechanical Cotton Gin, Yale University Library ; Eli Whitney, Yale University Art Gallery .

Chapter 5 Eli Whitney and the Cotton Boom

In 1792, a twenty-seven-year-old Eli Whitney arrived at the Mulberry Grove plantation, some ten miles north of the city of Savannah, Georgia, where he seemed untroubled by the large number of enslaved Black men, women, and children on the rice operation. The Yale graduate had first gone to South Carolina in search of a tutor’s position on a plantation but failed to land the job. Through connections, Catherine Greene, widow of the Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel Greene and mistress at Mulberry Grove, invited Whitney to take up residence at the bend in the Savannah River. There he would tutor and begin to study for the law.

Whitney strove to control his invention as it revolutionized cotton production, the explosion of the textile manufacturing business in the North, and indeed slavery’s expansion in the South.

After overhearing conversations among local planters lamenting that they could not grow short staple cotton to any profit because of enormous difficulty in extracting the green seeds, Whitney did what he had always done—he found some tools and wire and experimented. He constructed a small box with two cylinders rotating in opposite directions and wire teeth in the middle. It worked; after demonstrating it to the locals and showing that the seeds in the cotton could be removed mechanically, all around him he saw the potential for “ginning” the crop at ever increasing scale.

Whitney returned to New Haven. With excitement and vigor, he began to make the cotton gins in his own shop and quickly tried to achieve a patent. But he was too late; his idea and model wereduplicated that same year in Georgia and soon other Southern states. He eventually obtained a patent in 1794, but the machine was out of the bag. Through some sixty or more lawsuits over several years, Whitney strove to control his invention as it revolutionized cotton production, the explosion of the textile manufacturing business in the North, and indeed slavery’s expansion in the South.

In 1790, the U.S. produced 1.5 million pounds of cotton but exported far less. In 1800, after Whitney’s invention, the U.S. produced 36.5 million pounds, and then, in 1820, 167.5 million pounds.

The number of African Americans enslaved grew in proportion with the cotton revolution. In 1790, there were approximately 700,000 people enslaved in the new United States; by 1800, 908,000; in 1810, 1.19 million; in 1820, 1.55 million; in 1830, 2.02 million; in 1840, 2.53 million; in 1850, 3.2 million people were enslaved.

On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, when the South produced its largest cotton crop ever and dominated the nation’s exports, almost 4 million people lived and labored in bondage.

Timothy Dwight, an enslaver and a minister who regards antislavery activities as socially disruptive, succeeds Ezra Stiles as president of Yale College.

Timothy Dwight, Yale University Art Gallery .

The United States produces 36.5 million pounds of cotton, up from 1.5 million pounds produced a decade before. The number of enslaved people in the United States grows to 908,000, up from roughly 700,000 in 1790—and continues to increase significantly along with the expansion of cotton production.

Image above: Drawing from an 1840 Book Showing Enslaved Black People Picking Cotton, Yale University Art Gallery .

John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina graduates from Yale, after which he studies law for one year. He becomes an influential congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, presidential candidate, and vice president—as well as a zealous protector of the “minority rights” of enslavers and a proponent of slavery as a “positive good.”

Images, left to right : John C. Calhoun Portrait , Daguerreotype of John C. Calhoun , John C. Calhoun Portrait , Stained Glass Window of John C. Calhoun , A. B. Doolittle Engraving of Yale College , Yale University Library.

Chapter 5 The Legacy of John C. Calhoun

Yale College produced no more influential political actor or thinker in the half century after the revolution than John C. Calhoun. He studied law for one year, and after practicing as a lawyer back in the town of his roots, Abbeville, in the South Carolina upcountry, as the cotton boom and slavery surged, he entered politics to stay by 1810. The brilliant and ambitious politician would become congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, presidential candidate, and vice-president. In his path he would leave a trail of awe, loathing, failure, and collective tragedy.

Calhoun was revered and feared for his genius, but also obsessed with duty and zeal in protection of the “liberty” and the “minority rights” of slaveholders.

Calhoun was revered and feared for his genius, but also obsessed with duty and zeal in protection of the “liberty” and the “minority rights” of slaveholders. He strove most of his career for the failed dream of a unified South. He believed liberty had to be earned and checked by power, and that democratic virtues were no match for the darkness of human nature. The former Yale historian David Potter once called Calhoun “the most majestic champion of error since Milton’s Satan.”

Above all, through his arguments first honed in the nullification crisis of 1828-33, Calhoun became the principal voice of the compact theory of government, an increasingly rigid states’ rights doctrine first rooted in his Jeffersonianism and with time transforming into secessionism. He advanced a theory of the natural inequality of humankind, based in the widespread claim that humans are divided by nature into laborers and property holders. Finally, and most lastingly, he defended slavery as an eternal “positive good,” rooted in part in the historical claim that African peoples had never created a civilized polity and never could do so in the Americas.

In his time, these ideas were anything but fringe constitutionalism or lonely historical theories; tragically, they served as the intellectual fuel of what many Northerners came to call the “Slave Power,” a radical proslavery persuasion satisfied only by vigorous expansion and then by withdrawal from the federal union. With singular force of mind and logic, Calhoun advanced this cluster of constitutional and moral positions to such a powerful extent that some abolitionists by the 1840s and 1850s referred to the South itself as “Calhoundom.” As his biographer Robert Elder writes, “We do not have to honor John C. Calhoun, nor should we. But he has not left us the luxury of forgetting him.”

Connecticut’s General Assembly passes legislation formally prohibiting Black men from voting. Despite eloquent petitions from Black New Haveners William Lanson and Bias Stanley, the restrictions are incorporated into the Connecticut constitution of 1818.

The American Colonization Society ( ACS ) is formed in Washington, D.C. It fosters a scheme to send willing Black Americans to the new colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa and develops a popular following across the U.S. political spectrum.

Jeremiah Day, a staunch social and religious conservative, becomes president of Yale. He presides during a period when the divinity and law schools are founded.

Jeremiah Day, Yale University Art Gallery .

Black residents of New Haven come together with Simeon Jocelyn, a white man, to form a separate Black congregation, soon known as the African Ecclesiastical Society. In 1829, it receives formal recognition as a Congregational church and is known as the Temple Street Congregational Church, a center of Black education, abolitionism, and community life in New Haven.

The last sale of enslaved people in New Haven takes place on the New Haven Green. The buyer is an abolitionist, Anthony P. Stoddard, who immediately frees Lois and Lucy Tritton, a mother and daughter.

John Warner Barber, New Haven Green, 1825, Yale University Library .

William Grimes, living in New Haven and running a shop near the Yale campus, authors the first published narrative by an American-born slave: Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself .

Leonard Bacon, an 1820 graduate of Yale, together with prominent Yale graduate and science professor Benjamin Silliman Sr. establish the Connecticut branch of the American Colonization Society.

William Lloyd Garrison, a white Bostonian, begins publishing the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator .

1831 August 7

A group calling itself the Peace and Benevolent Society of Afric-Americans meets in New Haven and unanimously passes a set of resolutions condemning efforts to push Black people to move to Africa. “Resolved, That we know of no other place that we can call our true and appropriate home,” one resolution reads, “excepting these United States, into which our fathers were brought, who enriched the country by their toils, and fought, bled and died in its defence, and left us in its possession—and here we will live and die…”

1831 September 10

An abolitionist alliance, with $10,000 from Black donors and $10,000 from white donors, prepares to build in New Haven the first college for Black men in the United States. In response, New Haven Mayor Dennis Kimberly, a Yale graduate, hosts an “extraordinary meeting” of white property owners “to take into consideration a scheme (said to be in progress) for the establishment, in this City, of ‘a College for the education of Colored Youth.’”  At the packed whites-only meeting, 700 people oppose the college and only four vote in favor. The plan is thwarted.

Engraving of Yale College Scene by S. S. Jocelyn, Yale University Library . 

CHAPTER  6 Dashed Dreams of a Black College

Only months after a new state house opened on New Haven’s Upper Green in 1831, the city’s freemen—the white male property owners, many affiliated with Yale—gathered for an extraordinary town hall meeting that would obliterate bold hopes for the nation’s first Black college.

The white male voters of New Haven spoke with in a near-unanimous voice: seven hundred stood opposed to the college and only four in favor.

The idea had been brought to life by a coalition, both local and national, of free Black leaders and white allies. They considered New Haven a prime location in part because it was vibrant and urbane, had ties to the Caribbean, and was a noted center of higher education as home to Yale.

The September 10 meeting was held in the State House, the co-capital building that had opened earlier in the year. A contemporary account describes that intense afternoon: “So great was the interest to hear the discussion,” declared the New Haven Advertiser , “that, notwithstanding the excessive heat and the almost irrespirable atmosphere of the room, the hall was crowded throughout the afternoon.”

At question was whether New Haven would make history as home to the first college dedicated to the education and advancement of the Black race—or whether it would gain notoriety as a city where those dreams died.

The white male voters of New Haven spoke with in a near-unanimous voice: seven hundred stood opposed to the college and only four in favor. Contemporary newspapers reported that five people addressed the meeting. The speakers against it—Isaac Townsend, Ralph Ingersoll, Nathan Smith, and David Daggett—included three Yale alumni. Only the Reverend Simeon Jocelyn spoke in favor.

On the table were resolutions put forward by a committee that Mayor Kimberly had appointed. The committee included ten people, at least six of whom were Yale alumni. Opposition to the proposal stemmed from several quarters, but the committee members began by expressing their disapproval of—even horror at—the abolitionist impulses latent in the scheme to educate Black Americans.

The committee’s resolutions had two parts. The first part read: “The immediate emancipation of slaves in disregard of the civil institutions of the States in which they belong, and as auxiliary thereto the contemporaneous founding of Colleges for educating colored people, is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States, and ought to be discouraged.”

Thus the entire abolition movement, along with plans to open educational and other opportunities to free Black people, was depicted as an “unwarrantable and dangerous interference” in Southern institutions—that is, slavery. In voting to support this resolution, seven hundred to four, New Haven’s leading citizens went on record. These Northern gentlemen of standing, in opposing the college proposal, stood together in defense of the South’s proslavery regime.

Other objections hit closer to home, particularly concerns about the potential damage to Yale’s reputation. The second part of the resolution stated: “Yale College, the institutions for the education of females, and the other schools already existing in this city are important to the community and the general interests of science, and as such, have been deservedly patronized by the public and the establishment of a College in the same place to educate the colored population is incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning, and will be destructive of the best interests of the city….we will resist the establishment of the proposed College in this place, by every lawful means.” New Haven’s white freemen, including the elites of “town and gown,” were clear: they believed a Black college would be a threat to Yale and other schools in town.

1833 May 24

The Connecticut state legislature passes what becomes known as the “Connecticut Black Law,” preventing Black people from outside of the state from being educated in Connecticut.

James W. C. Pennington becomes the first Black person known to attend classes at Yale. Pennington, who had escaped from slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, was denied formal admission on account of his race, but he was allowed to be a “visitor” at the Yale divinity school. “My voice was not to be heard in the classroom asking or answering a question,” Pennington later wrote. “I could not get a book from the library and my name was never to appear on the catalogue.”

Image above: Yale College, J. W. Barber’s View, Yale University Library .

Image below: The Reverend James W. C. Pennington, National Portrait Gallery .

CHAPTER  8 Yale’s First Black Student

The Reverend James W.C. Pennington’s experience in Yale classrooms provides a marker in the university’s history, now commemorated with a portrait and a room named for him at the divinity school. But it also represents a historical moment—one that followed from the failure, in 1831, to establish a Black college in New Haven.

“I beg our Anglo-Saxon brethren to accustom themselves to think that we need something more than mere kindness. We ask for justice, truth, and honour as other men do.”

From the fall of 1834 into at least the summer of 1836, Pennington attended theology lectures by professors Nathaniel Taylor and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Both were among the four original faculty of the Yale Theological Department. Pennington later called this period his “visitorship,” since he was never officially admitted. “My voice was not to be heard in the classroom,” Pennington wrote in an 1851 article, “asking or answering a question. I could not get a book from the library and my name was never to appear on the catalogue.”

He boarded in quarters given or rented to him by [white abolitionist] Simeon Jocelyn who, though he had moved away from New Haven after its white residents had refused to allow a Black College a few years earlier, still owned property in the city. Indeed, Jocelyn smoothed Pennington’s transition to Yale and likely helped him get part-time work at the Temple Street Church, of which Jocelyn had been a founder. Pennington, who had escaped slavery as a young man, now helped pastor the African American congregants at that church while studying at Yale.

Pennington earned an international reputation as an abolitionist and the author of two books, including a first attempt to tell the story of Black people’s history, culture, and achievements, A Text Book of the Origin, and History, &c. &c. of the Colored People , published in 1841. But in the preface to his classic autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith: Or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington , he told a different, unforgettable story, exploiting the irony of slaveholders and their Northern defenders who repeatedly argued that many bondspeople lived and were “reared in the mildest form of slavery.”

“In the month of September 1848,” wrote Pennington, “there appeared in my study, one morning, in New York City, an aged coloured man of tall and slender form.” He had “anxiety bordering on despair” on his face. The old man also hailed from Maryland, like Pennington. He laid out a batch of letters in front of the minister. The letters demonstrated that the desperate man had two daughters, age fourteen and sixteen, who were about to be sold South. Their enslaver demanded large sums of money from their father to prevent the sale.

On the following Sabbath Pennington “threw the case before my people” (his congregation). They and other churches managed to raise some $2,250 to purchase the two girls’ freedom. Pennington did not miss the opportunity to employ this story for antislavery propaganda against the “chattel principle,” the idea that there can be property in humans. He made it clear that Black people were fed up with the notion of “property vested in their persons.”

By the time he wrote his autobiography in 1849, Pennington declared on behalf of his fellow free Blacks in Connecticut that they were also fed up with a certain kind of moderate, paternalistic racism. He was grateful for his Yale educational opening in the 1830s but wrote nonetheless: “I beg our Anglo-Saxon brethren to accustom themselves to think that we need something more than mere kindness. We ask for justice, truth, and honour as other men do.”

Samuel F. B. Morse, the famous inventor, artist, and one of Yale’s most notorious proslavery advocates of the antebellum and Civil War eras, tests his first telegraph. He spurs a technological revolution but rejects the principles of democracy and abolition. By the early 1850s he defends slavery as “a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom.”

Images, left to right:  Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, Library of Congress ; Samuel F. B. Morse, Yale University Library .

CHAPTER  8 Samuel F.B. Morse: Artist, Inventor, White Supremacist

No residential college is named for any of Yale’s antislavery advocates of the antebellum era. But there is one for Samuel F. B. Morse, the famous inventor and artist, and one of Yale’s most notorious proslavery advocates of the antebellum and Civil War eras.

Morse was an aggressive white supremacist in an era when that was often no special distinction; he was doggedly anti-Catholic and anti-abolition.

Born in 1791, Samuel was the son of Yale graduate Jedidiah Morse, the famous geographer and Calvinist preacher. Jedidiah helped spread the conspiracy theory of the Illuminati at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and politically became a Federalist, suspicious of all liberal or radical legacies of the French Revolution. Samuel Morse’s rigid conservatism derives from this influence and background, but he forged his own worldview.

Entering Yale College in 1805 at age fourteen, Morse cultivated his talent as an artist, painting portraits, and imbibed lectures by Benjamin Silliman on electricity and other scientific subjects. After graduating from Yale in 1810, the Anglophile studied painting in London, the first of many sojourns in Europe to forge an artistic career.

Returning to America, Morse created a studio in Boston and later moved back to New Haven where he painted portraits of eminent Yale “worthies” Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, and President Jeremiah Day. Morse struggled for commercial success as a painter, but the young artist always had an eye for business ventures, especially as he entered the competitive world of scientific invention.

Morse made a series of partnerships with some scientists and especially with investors, and by 1837, he managed to string ten miles of wire and test his first telegraph. Soon patent wars and legal battles began over who would take ownership of the amazing new technology.

Morse was hardly the first or the only person to perfect the telegraph, but he surely knew how to take and get credit. He demonstrated the telegraph in a university studio, and then in Congress and to President Martin Van Buren at the White House. By 1840, he obtained his United States patent and was on his way to almost unparalleled fame as an inventor.

Simplifying messages into a system of signals soon known as “Morse code,” the former painter was ready to cash in and transform how people passed information, did business, checked a credit rating, gambled their money, gained news of sporting events, and even fought wars. The “news” itself now spread “on the wires.”

Morse and his associates had changed the world, but the inquisitive man had other keen interests, both political and ideological. His thought was a synthesis of science and religion, of Enlightenment and latter-day Calvinism. He was a technological revolutionary and an ideological counterrevolutionary.

Above all, he seems to have despised the idea of America as a pluralistic nation dedicated to any goal of equality, whether in law or in morality. He did not believe in the natural rights tradition, nor in the nod to equality in the Declaration of Independence. Morse was an aggressive white supremacist in an era when that was often no special distinction; he was doggedly anti-Catholic and anti-abolition. He changed how humans used technology but rejected most social change and the principles of democracy.

Morse judged abolitionists, especially immediatists, as “demons in human shape.” A more “wretched, disgusting, hypocritical crew, have not appeared on the face of the earth,” he wrote his brother in 1847, “since the times of Robespierre.” The more he considered the slavery issue, he wrote by 1857, “the more I feel compelled to declare myself on the Southern side of the question.”

The Reverend Amos Gerry Beman becomes pastor of the Temple Street Church. Beman, a national leader of antislavery, temperance, suffrage, and other reform efforts, serves the church for two decades. His scrapbooks document a rich period of organizing and activism in New Haven’s Black community.

Southern students make up roughly 10 percent of the Yale student body, and their numbers continue to grow. “Yale was the favorite college of the southern planters,” wrote Julian Sturtevant, an 1826 graduate, in a later memoir. “From the days of John C. Calhoun, almost to the war of the rebellion, the number of southern students was large.”

1839 June 30

Enslaved Africans aboard the slave-trading vessel La Amistad revolt and take over the ship. After a tortuous journey in which several captives die of hunger and disease, the ship is eventually captured by the U.S. Navy and brought to New London, Connecticut. The Africans are put on trial in New Haven, becoming the focus of both local and national attention.

Images, left to right: Death of Capt. Ferrer, the Captain of the Amistad, Yale University Library ; Cinque: The Chief of the Amistad Captives, Y ale University Art Gallery .

CHAPTER  7 Strangers in a Strange Land

The African survivors of a rebellion aboard La Amistad , a coastal schooner from Cuba, were the talk of New Haven and of the nation in 1839-40. Hailing from the Gallinas coast and Sierra Leone region of West Africa, these people had been captured in Africa, enslaved, and transported across the Atlantic. Then, bought and sold like chattel in Cuba, they had—through an unfathomable combination of daring, courage, and luck—overthrown their captors and seized a kind of tentative, uncertain freedom. Yet in 1839, forty-three of the original captives were imprisoned and put on trial just steps from Yale’s campus.

“Some people say Mendi people crazy dolts,” Kale wrote, “because we no talk American language. Americans no talk Mendi. American people crazy dolts?”

Their ordeal—years of incarceration and complex legal battles—attracted thousands of onlookers, gawkers, and what might be called slavery “tourists” from all over the northeastern United States. The famous white New York abolitionist Lewis Tappan came to New Haven to help organize the defense and publicity for the survivors, and a cast of Yale characters became involved in the unfolding legal and cultural drama. Over the next two years, the African people of the Amistad would leave their mark on the city of New Haven, on Yale, and on the American abolition movement.

Immediately, numerous legal questions arose about just who and what the Amistad Africans were. Were they slaves and murderers, and the property of their Cuban owners, or were they free people exercising their natural rights to liberty and the right of revolution? Were they Spanish property, seized on the high seas by the United States in violation of Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795? Would this ship’s story and the fate of its passengers grow into an international crisis between the United States and Spain that might itself stoke the flames of the slavery issue in American politics? And as abolitionists quickly seized on the Amistad survivors’ legal case, if a Northern state like Connecticut could “free” captive Africans, what might it mean for enslaved African Americans in the South?

Everyone who worked with the Amistad captives in jail and beyond, including Yale professors, graduates, and students, raved about their zeal for education, language, and human connections. They took especially to maps, almanacs, grammar books, and the Bible.

Cinqué, Kinna, and Fuli were often leaders of these study sessions, and the best pupils were the youngest, especially Kale. In their own letters, many of the Africans clearly felt the need not only to describe their conditions but to make appeals to be returned to their home continent, as Cinqué did on behalf of the group.

They also seemed compelled to defend themselves against the various accusations they had endured. “Mendi people,” contended Kinna, “no lie, not steal, no swear, no drink rum, no fight.” And Kale, one of the young boys, complained with a sense of humor. “Some people say Mendi people crazy dolts,” he wrote, “because we no talk American language. Americans no talk Mendi. American people crazy dolts?” 


The abolitionists, the Amistad Committee, and all their allies greatly feared that neither legal logic nor moral arguments would carry the day before this proslavery U.S. Supreme Court, presided over by chief justice Roger Taney, a Maryland slaveholder. The Africans themselves, back in Westville on the edge of New Haven, waited in agony for news as they underwent considerable humiliation and bad treatment in the jail.”

On March 9, Justice Joseph Story of Massachusetts rose in the Court chamber and announced the ruling, a vote of seven to one to deny all the Spaniards’ claims, free the Amistad captives, and asserted their legal, if not their natural, rights. Story, who was antislavery but contemptuous of abolitionists, wrote for the majority that the captives were free-born, were illegally enslaved even under Spanish law, and had struck for freedom by the right of “self-defense.”

Morally, as historian Howard Jones remarks, the Amistad decision was a “Pyrrhic victory,” since it clung to the notion that the slavery question only hinged on positive law, not natural law. The Supreme Court, therefore, made certain that this decision would in no way threaten American slavery where it was lawful. The abolitionists who had spent more than a year and a half fighting for the captives celebrated for the moment; they had won the Africans’ freedom and their liberty to return to Africa if they chose, but they had not won a victory over any legal underpinnings of slavery in their own country.

1841 March 9

The Africans who survived the Amistad ordeal, backed by abolitionists—including some Yale graduates and students—win their case before the Supreme Court. The Court denies Spanish claims to ownership over the Africans, who are set free. The verdict, however, does not challenge the underpinnings of slavery where it is legal in the United States.

1841 November 26

Thirty-five surviving Amistad rebels, along with five missionaries, board a vessel in New York Harbor to begin a voyage to Sierra Leone. Their eventual homecomings are difficult. Most shed their Western clothes to the chagrin of the missionaries who accompany them. Some find their parents and other family members and experience emotional reunions. Yet they soon find themselves back in an African society ravaged by war and slave-trading.

1846 October 21

Theodore Dwight Woolsey becomes president of Yale, serving in that position until 1871.

Reverend Theodore D. Woolsey, President of Yale College, Yale University Library .

1850 September 18

Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring that enslaved people be returned to their owners even if they reside in a free state. One of a series of compromises meant to forestall disunion, the legislation is a turning-point for some moderate abolitionists from Yale who become more committed to antislavery causes.

Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed receives an MD from Yale, becoming the first known Black person ever to graduate from the medical school. (Richard Henry Greene graduates from Yale College in the same year.) Creed’s family has deep roots in New Haven.

The fiercely pro-slavery merchant Joseph Sheffield purchases the old Medical Department building on College Street in New Haven, adds two wings, and remodels the entire structure. With a supporting gift of $50,000 for “the maintenance of Professorships of Engineering, Metallurgy, and Chemistry,” Sheffield makes Yale a training center for scientists. Over time, Sheffield’s financial gifts to Yale reach $1.1 million, a figure not matched by any Yale donor until well into the 20th century.

Images, left to right: Sheffield Mansion, Yale University Library ; Joseph Earl Sheffield, Yale University Art Gallery ; Joseph Earl Sheffield, Yale University Library .

CHAPTER  8 The Anti-Abolitionist Who Bolstered the Sciences at Yale

The largest nineteenth-century donor to Yale was the fierce anti-abolitionist Joseph Earl Sheffield. Born in Southport, Connecticut in 1793, Sheffield became a wealthy cotton merchant, eventually headquartered in the port of Mobile, Alabama. He inherited some wealth and business acumen from his father, who was deeply invested in the West Indian trade, particularly sugar production and slavery in Cuba.

“… although an outspoken hater of slavery as such, I was the defender of the slave holders from the foul aspersions of the abolitionists.”

By 1835, Sheffield moved his family back north to New Haven because he did not want his children to grow up in a slave society, even as he owned the people who worked in his house. He continued to spend winters in Mobile managing his lucrative trade interests. With major donations, the merchant established the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and helped put the college on the world map for science education.

Sheffield purchased the old Medical Department building on College Street in 1858, added two wings, and remodeled the entire structure. With a supporting gift of $50,000 more for “the maintenance of Professorships of Engineering, Metallurgy, and Chemistry,” Sheffield made Yale a university to train scientists. He lived in a handsome house on Hillhouse Avenue, behind the school that by 1861 carried his name.

In the end, Sheffield’s financial gifts to Yale before his death in 1882 reached $1.1 million, a figure not matched by any Yale donor until well into the twentieth century.

Sheffield despised abolitionists. He warmly defended his many friends among Southern planters and believed the enslavement of African Americans was a benevolent practice that could never be terminated suddenly without enormous social and economic upheaval. When the Civil War erupted in 1861 and caused great disruption at Yale, Sheffield was among those Northern merchants who blamed the radicalism of abolitionists for the entire crisis.

When the trans-continental railroads emerged as a Republican party initiative during the war, he hatched an elaborate proposal to use Black labor to build the railroads through the Pacific West. “By the employment of the emancipated slaves,” Sheffield imagined, “they may be gradually withdrawn from our midst and ultimately diffused through the fertile region of the West… now inhabited by the Indian and the Buffalo; so that in the course of time when these regions shall have been peopled by the ever moving Anglo-Saxon, we shall find the negro so mixed and amalgamated, so improved by cultivation, precept and example, so  diluted  as a people, that their presence will hardly be noticed or detected in the mighty nation which is to inhabit these regions.”

Even though his terrible scheme never materialized, Sheffield demonstrated the extent to which cunning and racist theory could be put to material ends in the nineteenth century.

Sheffield’s political positions in the Civil War era provide a window into the worldviews of many others around Yale, as well as a stark contrast. In his “Personal Reminiscences,” he wrote, “Of course, then although an outspoken hater of slavery as such , I was the defender of the slave holders from the foul aspersions of the abolitionists and often predicted the results which would be precipitated if the people of the North persisted in fanning the flames.”

When Abraham Lincoln was elected and secession exploded in the Deep South, Sheffield was “so certain of the consequences, that I sold, at great sacrifice, my remaining property in Mobile. I had always been an ardent  old-line Whig of the Clay and Webster School , but when that party began to run after the abolitionists and other gods, for the sake of votes; when in fact they began to  run away  from  their principles , I could not follow them.”

On the eve of the Civil War, the number of enslaved people in the United States reaches nearly four million people.

During the war, virtually no Southerners remain enrolled at Yale. By the end of the war, according to one authoritative account, 511 Yale men have served the Confederacy as soldiers and civil officials, of whom 55 die in the war. Among Yale Confederates, 68 are from Northern states; Connecticut contributes an astonishing 28 Yale men who serve the Confederate cause. There is no definitive account of how many Yale students and alumni serve in the Union Army, but researchers have estimated that total at roughly 700 to 850 men.

Image above: The Army of the Potomac — Our Outlying Picket in the Woods, from Harper’s Weekly, Yale University Art Gallery .

1861 April 12

Confederate troops fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor—the first shots of the Civil War.

Image above: Interior of Fort Sumter: During the Bombardment, April 12, 1861, Library of Congress .

1861 June 10

Theodore Winthrop, Yale class of 1848 and President Woolsey’s nephew, becomes the first Yale death in Civil War combat. His killing in eastern Virginia at the battle of Big Bethel, an early and humiliating Union defeat, is reported by the Yale Literary Magazine 10 months later. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.

Theodore Winthrop, Yale University Library . 

CHAPTER  9 Heroic Sacrifice

In March 1862, the Yale Literary Magazine reported the first Yale death in combat. Theodore Winthrop, an 1848 graduate, had been killed in eastern Virginia at the Battle of Big Bethel, June 10, 1861, an early and humiliating Union defeat.

“It was worth a life, that march,” wrote Winthrop. “Only one who passed, as we did, through that tempest of cheers, two miles long, can know the terrible enthusiasm of the occasion.”

Born in New Haven, an admired student and a poet, novelist, and travel writer, Winthrop was Yale President Theodore Dwight Woolsey’s nephew. Only a few days after the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, on April 17, 1861, Winthrop told his uncle Theodore that he had enlisted in the army “for the purpose of lending my aid to the great work of attempting to get rid of slavery in this country.”

As he went to war, Winthrop wrote dispatches for the Atlantic Monthly . In his first, he described in vivid terms the spectacular march through Manhattan of the Seventh Regiment in April. “It was worth a life, that march,” he wrote. “Only one who passed, as we did, through that tempest of cheers, two miles long, can know the terrible enthusiasm of the occasion. I could hardly hear the rattle of our own gun-carriages, and only once or twice the music of our band came to me muffled and quelled by the uproar. Handkerchiefs, of course, came floating down upon us from the windows, like a snow. Pretty little gloves pelted us with love-taps.”

When the regiment reached Washington, DC , they encamped inside the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. Winthrop exploited the irony of the moment in the Atlantic . “Our presence here was the inevitable sequel of past events,” he said. “We appeared with bayonets and bullets because of the bosh uttered on this floor; because of the bills—with treasonable stump-speeches in their bellies—passed here; because of the cowardice of the poltroons… the arrogance of the bullies, who had here cooperated to blind and corrupt the minds of the people.” These images of nearly a thousand men sleeping on their knapsacks in the House chamber would be unforgettable to his eager readers in those early months of the war, especially after they learned of the journey of his flag-draped coffin to New York City and to the honored burial in New Haven.

Official recruiting of Black soldiers to the Union Army and Navy begins. Before war’s end, they number nearly 200,000, including both former slaves from the South and free men of the North.

1863 January 1

President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, which declares that all enslaved people within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Emancipation Proclamation, Yale University Art Gallery . 

CHAPTER  9 A Meaningful Death

Yale student Uriah Parmelee enlisted immediately when the war commenced in April 1861. He dropped out in his junior year and joined a New York regiment of cavalry as a private because no Connecticut unit was yet available. His letters, as well as his diary, which he kept in 1864 and 1865, provide glimpses of the war’s brutality and one soldier’s effort to make sense of the suffering.

“I do not intend to shirk now there is really something to fight for—I mean freedom,” Parmelee declared.

Parmelee had attended sermons by the famous antislavery preacher Henry Ward Beecher while a student at Yale, and he carried into the army as strong a commitment to abolitionism as one may find in such a young Union soldier. In early 1862 he declared his passion for the cause. “I am fighting for Liberty, for the slaves & for the white man alike,” he wrote to his mother.

Parmelee believed the constitutional questions would surely be solved by the war, “but the great heart wound, Slavery, will not be reached” without an aggressive emancipation policy enacted by the Union forces. On September 8, 1862, only a week and a half before the pivotal battle of Antietam, the young soldier lamented that this cruel struggle had not yet resulted in “universal Emancipation.”

But in the wake of President Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, and then one hundred days later with the final proclamation, Parmelee changed his tune. By March 1863, anticipating the spring and summer campaigns in Virginia, the Guilford farm boy turned intellectual soldier refused to apply for a furlough to take a break back home. “I do not intend to shirk now there is really something to fight for—I mean freedom,” he declared. “Since the First of January it has become more and more evident to my mind that the war is henceforth to be conducted upon a different basis…. So then I am willing to remain & endure whatever may fall to my share.”

With his patriotic commitment to emancipation and Union refurbished, and believing in a kind of redemption through bloodshed that became a popular Northern attitude, Parmelee nevertheless betrayed his caustic, hardened sense of what soldiering and war had done to his psyche. “We are liable to become mere machines,” he complained in that same spring of 1863, enduring endless camp life. “One can make no plans in the army, indulge no hopes in any particular direction, have no independence, no voice in anything.”

“If it were not for that spark of hope which lives with nothing to feed upon,” he “would soon give up everything,” concluded the lonely son to his frightened mother. Fifty-six percent of the First Connecticut died before the war ended; he was increasingly a scribe to the bereaved back home.

Parmelee made the final entry in his diary on March 30, 1865, saying he “went out alone seeking intellectual clearness.” After two days of pelting rain, and with spring blossoms of red bud and dogwoods now in full bloom all over central Virginia, the last major battle of the war occurred at Five Forks on April 1. About mid-day, the First Connecticut saw Confederates at a short distance in a peach orchard in full bloom. Parmelee, as was his way, stood up and led his men in a charge as cannon opened up from the orchard. He was struck in the chest by an artillery shell and fell dead on the field.

Only eight days later, the end that everyone sought came as Lee surrendered some twenty-two thousand malnourished soldiers to Grant farther west at Appomattox Court House in one of the signal events of American history.

1863 November

The Connecticut General Assembly authorizes the organization of an African-American regiment to fight in the Civil War; Governor William A. Buckingham thereupon calls for the recruitment of the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Volunteers. Black men from some 119 towns and cities around Connecticut ultimately enlist.

Alexander Herritage Newton (left), Quartermaster Sergeant, and Daniel S. Lathrop, Quartermaster Sergeant, both of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, Yale University Library . 

CHAPTER  9 Black Soldiers Help Turn the Tide

One of the most revolutionary aspects of the Civil War was the enlistment of Black men in the Union army and navy; before the war’s end, nearly two hundred thousand Black men, formerly enslaved in the South as well as free in the North, served in both state and federal regiments.

“What we now want is a country—a free country—a country nowhere saddened by the footprints of a single slave—and nowhere cursed by the presence of a slaveholder,” Frederick Douglass declared.

Official recruiting of Black soldiers began in the spring of 1863. Some Black men from Connecticut sought their chance in the famous Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, recruited in the Bay State by summer of that year. Not until November 1863 did the Connecticut General Assembly authorize the organization of an African American regiment; Governor William A. Buckingham thereupon called for the recruitment of the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Volunteers.

These enactments were highly partisan in the state: Democratic Party representative William W. Eaton of Hartford called the legislation “the most disgraceful bill ever introduced” at the New Haven State House. Eaton declared he would rather “let loose the wild Camanchees [sic] than the ferocious negro.” Black soldiers would only “spread lust and rapine all over the land.”

Against such racist perceptions, hundreds of men came forward immediately, and by early January 1864, the ranks of the Twenty-Ninth, eventually over 1,200 strong, were filled. The response was so robust that a second regiment, the Thirtieth Connecticut, was formed at the same time.

Soldiers of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment came from several Northern states, but more than half hailed from Connecticut’s cities, towns, and countryside. Crowds came to watch them over the more than three months they trained and practiced; the sounds of marching feet and officers’ shouted commands, the smell of cook fires, and the sight of flags around an African American regiment were scenes that staid Connecticut had never witnessed.

On January 28, 1864, the great orator Frederick Douglass came to town for two extraordinary speaking events—one to the general public, another to the Black regiments. The Palladium advertised his first speech, “The Mission of the War,” as “Fred. Douglass To-night,” at the Music Hall in New Haven on Crown Street, at twenty-five cents per person.

The Music Hall, later known as the New Haven Opera House, was filled beyond its capacity for Douglass’s speech. In this, one of the great orations of Douglass’s life, which he delivered many times, he offered perhaps his clearest description of the war as an apocalyptic, purposeful collision in history, in which “Providence” (God, nature, or fate) entered human affairs and turned that history in a new direction. In stirring terms, Douglass declared a new day possible with a Union victory: “What we now want is a country—a free country—a country nowhere saddened by the footprints of a single slave—and nowhere cursed by the presence of a slaveholder. We want a country… which shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.”

The following day Douglass rode out to Grapevine Point and delivered a different kind of address to the assembled troops of the Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Connecticut. “You are pioneers of the liberty of your race,” Douglass announced. “With the United States cap on your head, the United States eagle on your belt, the United States musket on your shoulder, not all the powers of darkness can prevent you from becoming American citizens.” He left no doubt of the heavy burden on these men. “On you depends the destiny of four millions of the colored race in this country.”

1864 August

The New York Times attacks Yale for its alleged “draft-shirking,” accusing Yale students and their faculty and administration of “plotting evasion and desertion.” At the college, claims the Times , “how to escape the draft” is the issue of the day. “The gutters are dragged for substitutes… Negro slaves who owe to the Republic nothing but curses, are driven to the rescue.”

Image above: Soldiers Assembled on the New Haven Green, Yale University Library . 

1865 April 9

Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, symbolizing the end of a long and bloody civil war.

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett is appointed United States Minister Resident to Haiti, becoming the nation’s first Black diplomat. He had studied at Yale and was the first Black graduate of the State Normal School. Two of his sons go on to attend Yale, including Ulysses Simpson Grant Bassett, Class of 1895, named for the president who appointed his father to the diplomatic service.

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett Jr., Yale University Library . 

Congress passes the Third Enforcement Act, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which enables the president to suspend habeas corpus in his efforts to combat the KKK and rein in what was beginning to seem like a second civil war.

1871 April 10

Mary A. Goodman signs her last will and testament, leaving her entire estate, except a small annual bequest to her father, to the Yale Theological Department to “be used in aiding young men in preparing for the Gospel ministry, preference being always given to young men of color.” Goodman had worked her entire life in domestic service and as a washerwoman taking in laundry. But when she died in 1872, her real and personal property was worth the substantial sum of about $5,000.

James W. Morris becomes the first Black student to graduate from the Yale Theological Seminary. His contemporary Solomon M. Coles, born enslaved in Virginia, matriculated first but graduated a year later. Coles was the first African American student to complete the entire three-year course of study in theology at Yale.

Solomon M. Coles, Blackpast.org .

CHAPTER  10 Dreams Deferred

On April 10, 1871, Mary A. Goodman signed her last will and testament, leaving her entire estate, except a small annual bequest to her father, to the Yale Theological Department to “be used in aiding young men in preparing for the Gospel ministry, preference being always given to young men of color.”

“Of African Descent,” it was written on Mary A. Goodman’s tombstone, “she gave the earnings of her life to educate men of her own color in Yale College for the Gospel ministry.”

Goodman, a Black New Haven woman, had worked her entire life in domestic service and as a washerwoman taking in laundry. But when she died in 1872, her real and personal property was worth about $5,000. A church newspaper out of Boston, reporting on the gift, said that Goodman had been a member of the College Street Church and “felt that the time was coming, in the rapid progress of her race and people, when they would require a more highly educated ministry.”

The university had her buried in the Grove Street Cemetery, inscribing the tombstone, “Of African Descent, she gave the earnings of her life to educate men of her own color in Yale College for the Gospel ministry.”

James W. Morris became the first Black student to graduate from the Yale Theological Seminary in 1874. His contemporary Solomon M. Coles, born enslaved in Virginia, matriculated before Morris but graduated the next year; Coles was first African American student to complete the entire three-year course of study in theology.

Other Black students were making inroads in the School of Medicine. Bayard Thomas Smith and George Robinson Henderson both transferred to Yale’s medical school from Lincoln University, a Black institution in Oxford, Pennsylvania, when its medical department closed. They graduated in 1875 and 1876, respectively. Between 1876 and 1903, when Cleveland Ferris graduated, at least eight Black students received medical degrees from Yale. This number, while small, exceeds all the known Black graduates of the Yale School of Medicine for the forty years after Ferris’s graduation.

During Reconstruction, some observers believed that widening educational opportunity at Yale presaged hopeful trends in the country at large. In 1874, the Connecticut Courant reported that the U.S. Senate had passed an amended version of a civil rights bill. They noted that one of the senators, Orris S. Ferry of Connecticut, Yale Class of 1844, opposed the bill “because the wisdom, expediency, and right of such legislation were doubted.” The editors of the Courant were dismayed by Ferry’s opposition, suggesting that much of the opposition to the bill centered on school integration. But, as a counterargument, they pointed to Yale:

“The battle has been fought and won in New England, and the prejudice was effectually killed here when Yale opened its doors to the colored student. If the new bill shall in the end accomplish the same good for the country at large, it will prove the best piece of legislation of any congress since slavery was abolished.”

Their optimism was premature.

Bayard Thomas Smith graduates from Yale’s medical school. His fellow student George Robinson Henderson, who like Smith transferred to Yale from Lincoln University, a Black institution in Oxford, Pennsylvania, graduates a year later. Smith and Henderson are the first Black graduates of the Yale medical school since Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed graduated in 1857—a hiatus of nearly 20 years.

New Haven native Edward Bouchet, just two years after finishing his bachelor’s degree at Yale, earns his PhD in physics from Yale. He is the first African American to earn a PhD in any subject in the United States and only the sixth person of any background or race to earn a PhD in physics from an American university. His research delves into geometrical optics and refraction in glass.

Edward Alexander Bouchet, Yale University Library . 

CHAPTER  10 ‘A Good Story from Yale’

A May 1871 headline in the Connecticut Courant promised “A Good Story from Yale.”

The article told of a Democratic politician from New York who was upset his son was forced to sit next to Edward Bouchet, a student in the Yale College Class of 1874. The politician wrote to the professor on his son’s behalf, asking for a new seat, “as it was for many reasons distasteful to sit so near a negro.”

Despite Bouchet’s sterling academic credentials, the professional obstacles he faced throughout his adult life presaged the challenges to come for African Americans.

But according to the article, “The professor wrote back that at present the students were ranged in alphabetical order, and it was not in his power to grant the favor, but ‘next term the desired change will be brought about, for the scholarship then being the criterion, Mr. Bouchet will be in the first division, and your son in the fourth .’”

Edward Bouchet’s arrival as a student at Yale was in many ways the product of decades of growth and organizing within New Haven’s African American community. Born in 1852 on Bradley Street in New Haven, Edward was the youngest of four children. His mother, Susan Cooley Bouchet, was a native of Connecticut; his father, William Francis Bouchet, may have come to New Haven in 1824 as the “body servant” of a student from South Carolina.

Young Edward, a prodigy, first attended school at his church, where children were taught by Vashti Duplex Creed, the city’s first Black schoolteacher. He later went to the Artisan Street Colored School and from there to the New Haven High School from 1866 to 1868. From 1868 to 1870, he attended the prestigious Hopkins School in New Haven. Bouchet was not the first Black student to enroll in that preparatory school, but he flourished there, graduating as valedictorian in 1870.

Bouchet was soon admitted to Yale College, where he excelled in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, graduating sixth in his class of 124 students, and was nominated to Phi Beta Kappa. Bouchet attracted the attention of philanthropist Alfred Cope, who encouraged him to return to Yale to pursue further study.

In 1876, just two years after finishing his bachelor’s degree, Bouchet earned his PhD in physics from Yale. He was the first African American to earn a PhD in any subject in the United States and only the sixth person of any background or race to earn a PhD in physics. His research delved into geometrical optics and refraction in glass. Yet despite his sterling academic credentials, the professional obstacles he faced throughout his adult life presaged the challenges to come for African Americans, even for those, like Bouchet, who had reached the highest tiers of educational achievement.

With a Yale doctorate in hand, Bouchet could not find a job in the universities or laboratories of Jim Crow America. Instead, he did what several of his fellow educated African Americans did in this period: he taught in segregated schools until, at the age of fifty-two, Bouchet sought a teaching position at his alma mater.

His Yale application, dated 1905, delineated his sterling qualifications—six years of Latin, six of Greek, ranked sixth in his Yale class—and described teaching as his “life work.” Bouchet listed Arthur W. Wright, professor of experimental physics at Yale, as his reference. In a confidential questionnaire attesting to Bouchet’s personality, scholarship, and “force of character and ability,” the eminent faculty member recommended Bouchet without reservation.

Yale did not hire Bouchet. Over the next fourteen years he lived a peripatetic life, crisscrossing the country to hold teaching jobs in Missouri, Ohio, and Virginia. He became ill and eventually returned to New Haven, where he died in 1918, in a house on the same street where he had grown up. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Evergreen Cemetery.

Edwin Archer Randolph becomes the first Black graduate of Yale Law School. He is also the first African American admitted to practice law in Connecticut, although he never does. Instead, after graduation he moves to Virginia where he goes into private practice, is elected to political office, and founds the Richmond Planet , a Black newspaper.

Edwin Archer Randolph, Yale University Library .

John Wesley Manning, an early Black student whose parents escaped slavery in North Carolina, graduates from Yale College. Like many other academically gifted Black graduates, he spends his post-graduate career working at segregated schools. After moving to Tennessee, he teaches Latin and serves as the principal of a school in Knoxville. Active in church and civic affairs, Manning holds leadership positions in the East Tennessee Association of Teachers in Colored Schools and the Tennessee Conference of Educational Workers and participates in the Southern Sociological Congress in 1915.

John Wesley Manning, Yale University Library .

Interlude A Yale Family in Slavery and Freedom

During the Civil War, a couple named Alfred and Eliza Manning boarded a steamship off the coast of North Carolina with their young son. They found an empty steamer drum, drilled holes in it, and placed their child, John, inside. Like the mother of Moses hiding her baby in a basket of bulrushes, they covered their own boy with clothes and told him to be quiet.

Being able to raise a family, unburdened by the threat of sale or estrangement, was one of the great distinctions between slavery and freedom.

The vessel belonged to the Union navy, part of a northern blockade intended to prevent the Confederacy from transporting—and profiting from—plantation goods. Alfred and Eliza said goodbye to John and asked the Union sailors to take him to safety. The ship was bound for New Haven, Connecticut, and the Mannings, along with other family members, eventually joined the little boy there. Many years later, in 1881, John Wesley Manning graduated from Yale College. When his own wife gave birth to their first child, they christened her “Yale.”

Stories like this one—of separation and unification, daring and sacrifice, death and new life—played out in ways both spectacular and mundane during the Civil War. And in the years following Appomattox, the country had to reckon with the consequences of a conflict that had torn apart both families and a nation. African Americans searched for loved ones who had been sold away, sometimes many years earlier, or others who had escaped of their own volition when the timing was right. Others sought new opportunities away from those who had held them as chattel, sometimes in faraway cities like New Haven.

Being able to raise a family, unburdened by the threat of sale or estrangement, was one of the great distinctions between slavery and freedom, and the Mannings achieved it. In another turn, John Wesley Manning, his brother Henry Edward Manning, and Samuel Johnston, their family’s onetime enslaver, all came to share the same alma mater. In time, the Manning family, along with many other wartime migrants, would leave their mark on both the university and the city of New Haven.

Henry Edward Manning, brother of John Wesley Manning, receives a three-year certificate from the Yale School of Fine Arts. (The art school did not begin granting degrees until 1891.) Manning may have been the first Black student to receive a certificate from the Yale art school. After graduation, he teaches drawing at a school in Knoxville, Tennessee, and at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, but he spends most of his career as a sign painter in New Haven. In the 1920 census, he is listed as self-employed, owning his own business and his own house.

Photographs of Classes, Including for Art, Yale University Library . 

Thomas Nelson Page published his story “Marse Chan,” one of his most popular works offering a sentimental vision of antebellum Southern life, depicting slavery as benevolent and enslaved people as unwaveringly loyal to their enslavers. Part of a national turn toward reconciliation, in which the advances of Black rights during Reconstruction were viewed as a terrible mistake, Page’s writing received glowing reviews in the Yale Daily News , and he was invited to speak on campus.

A statue of Yale science professor Benjamin Silliman Sr. is unveiled on campus. His “faithful” associate Robert M. Park, a free Black man who contributed to Silliman’s work, is on hand to draw aside the veil. Park’s commitment to movements for Black rights paid some dividends in his lifetime: He lived to see one of his grandchildren, Ulysses S. Grant Bassett, graduate from Yale only months before he died.

Ulysses Simpson Grant Bassett, Yale University Library .

CHAPTER  5 A ‘Faithful Servant’ and Abolitionist

Yale science professor Benjamin Silliman is honored today for establishing and promoting scientific education both at Yale and in the United States more broadly. More recently, historians have explored Silliman’s status as a slaveholder and his views on the institution of slavery. Few if any, however, have noticed his close relationship with his longtime assistant, a free Black man named Robert M. Park.

Silliman accompanied his Black assistant, Robert M. Park, in a second-class car because he had been “unwilling to disturb the feelings of one who had served me so well, and contributed materially to my success.”

In the census and city directories, Park was described as a “custodian” and “sexton.” Yet Silliman’s own accounts suggest Park’s duties extended far beyond cleaning or janitorial tasks; he participated in and contributed to the professor’s scientific work. In fact, the elder Silliman came to rely on and credit Park with some of his own success.

In 1835, the celebrated professor was invited to give a series of lectures to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge at the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street in Boston. Already well known as a scientist, textbook author, and founder of a leading scientific journal, Silliman was keen to further bolster his reputation and attract funding. The opportunity in Boston was well paying and promised to connect him with even larger audiences. Park accompanied Silliman to Boston, staying for over a month while Silliman delivered his lectures.

Park’s role was not only behind the scenes but out front during the lectures. On March 9, Silliman wrote, “I am well, and all goes well—charmingly indeed,—cordiality and interest and numbers far beyond my expectations. Robert is well and does exceedingly well; he is much admired in his station, and is regarded by the audience as a sub-professor!” Perhaps the audience was able to see what Silliman could not.

The great scientist may have thought it was amusing to consider his “faithful Robert” a “sub-professor.” But he acknowledged Park’s contributions. On their return home to New Haven several weeks later, Silliman decided to sit with his assistant in the second-class car since, he wrote, “objections might be made to the admission of a colored man into the passenger cars of the first class.” Silliman continued, explaining that he accompanied him in part because he had been “unwilling to disturb the feelings of one who had served me so well, and contributed materially to my success.”

Decades later, at the 1884 unveiling of Silliman’s statue on the Yale campus, Andrew Dickson White—a former Silliman student and by then president of Cornell University—told the story of his old professor choosing to sit in the second-class car. To White, an erstwhile abolitionist, the anecdote illustrated Silliman’s humanity and humility. But he also told another story that perhaps better illuminates the place of Robert M. Park—and no doubt others like him—in Yale’s history: Professor Silliman says to a student. ‘How would I test sulphuric [sic] acid?’ The student answers: ‘You would taste it.’ Silliman, indignantly, ‘Taste it, sir; it would burn my tongue out. Tell me, how would I test sulphuric acid?’ Student: ‘You would make Robert taste it.’

The joke “works” because those hearing it would have known Park and would have recognized him as a “faithful” associate who stood by Silliman’s side and did what he was asked to do—whether to further the cause of science or because his job depended upon it. Silliman had been dead twenty years when White recounted those stories, but Park was there, on hand to do a job both dignified and menial: drawing aside the veil covering the statue of his late employer.

Park lived a life that went well beyond his job. In the 1820s, he was one of the four men who, with twenty-one women, founded the Temple Street Congregation in New Haven, a center of Black community and anti-slavery organizing. In 1849, he was a delegate to the Connecticut State Convention of Colored Men, held at the Temple Street Church, “to consider our Political condition, and to devise measures for our elevation and advancement.” Black suffrage and increased educational opportunities “for our children” were on the agenda. Park’s commitment to antislavery and social and political movements for Black rights paid some dividends: he lived to see one of his grandchildren graduate from Yale only months before he died.

Student publications and alumni reminiscences, including Sketches of Yale Life , published this year, often feature racist and derogatory accounts of Black custodians and “campus characters.” These men made their living by cleaning dormitories or selling candy and other goods to Yale students. They had lives beyond their work at Yale of which most students were unaware.

Images, left to right: Candy Vendor Theodore Ferris ; Candy Vendors Theodore and Mary Ferris ; Candy Vendor Hannibal Silliman ; Custodian John Jackson ; Yale Custodians Osborn Allston, Isom Allston, John Jackson, and George Livingston ; A Group of Yale Custodians, Including Isom Allston and George Livingston ; Custodian Osborn Allston , Yale University Library. 

Interlude Black Employees at Yale

In the decades after the Civil War, it was still far more likely to find African Americans cleaning rooms or selling their wares on campus than it was to see them sitting in those rooms as students. The war changed much about New Haven, but employment opportunities for Black men and women remained limited. Given these constraints, a job at Yale as a custodian or a “sweep,” as they were known, was desirable.

Memoirs by Yale alumni include perhaps the most disparaging and caricatured accounts of the men who held these jobs, full of racist slurs, dialect, and stereotypes.

Sweeps made students’ beds, swept the dormitory rooms weekly, and were responsible for keeping campus buildings clean. For many years, there were both private sweeps, paid by individual students, and “regular sweeps” employed by the university. Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg, a member of the Class of 1869, identified a private sweep as “a negro who, besides making the beds and doing the ordinary chamber work, builds the fires, draws the water, blacks boots, buys the oil, fills and trims the lamps, and runs on miscellaneous errands.”

Memoirs by Yale alumni include perhaps the most disparaging and caricatured accounts of the men who held these jobs, full of racist slurs, dialect, and stereotypes. Pontificating on the advantages of living in the dormitories as opposed to lodging in town, one alumnus wrote that in the dorm he “is his own master. His room is his castle. And if he can’t ‘wallop his own n——,’ he can at least swear at his private sweep.”

In addition to the sweeps, a cast of so-called “campus characters,” nearly all African American, were part of Yale life and lore in these years. “Apple Boy,” “Candy Sam,” “Old Clothes’ Man,” “Fine Day,” and “Free Bill” were among the itinerant salespeople, known also as “nondescript purveyors, vendors, beggars, ragamuffins, and other nuisances,” mentioned in the Yale Banner .

Members of the Class of 1868 remembered them as part of their first initiation into college life: “We made an early acquaintance with Candy Sam, who was always to be found, just before recitation, in his place leaning against the wall of the old Atheneum, and, with his dejected smile, trying to persuade us to part with our fractional currency.” “Candy Sam,” whose real name was Theodore Ferris, was blind, and he was often accompanied by his wife, whom the students called Mrs. Candy Sam. A lengthy profile of Ferris in the Yale Literary Magazine reflected students’ affection for and interest in him, declaring his “life more adventurous than many of us imagined. We hope it may long be preserved, for if the Candy Man were removed, college life would lose much of its sweetness.”

Another confectioner, George Joseph Hannibal, L.W. Silliman (known as “Hannibal”) was distinguished by his speeches, which were as long as his full name. “‘Notwithstanding, even under the most superlative temptation, to interrupt the gentlemen in their studies, I beg to ask whether they are not moved to purchase a package of my old-fashioned, home-made molasses candy,’” quoted Clarence Demming in his 1915 book Yale Yesterdays . Demming said “every graduate of Yale since the later sixties” would be able to recall this speech and remember Hannibal, whom Demming deemed the “alpha” of the “original Campus characters.” Around him others like Candy Sam and Fine Day “twinkled as minor stars.”

Other observers were less generous than Demming and the alumni whose memories were steeped in nostalgia. One anonymous member of the Class of 1868 complained about the “the uninvited and usually unwelcome guests who knock at the college doors,” including Candy Sam. With a less than charitable attitude, this author remembered that freshmen would take up a collection for Ferris at Thanksgiving and that he would receive donations of old clothes from the students. He recalled his “chief rival,” Silliman (aka Hannibal), as a “crafty black man.”

The students knew little about the lives of these men. A native of New Haven, Silliman had served with the Black Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Infantry in the Civil War. When he enlisted on December 8, 1863, at the advanced age of twenty-five, he gave his occupation as “confectioner.” Silliman served for the duration of the war, mustering out on October 4, 1865, and returning to his work making and selling sweets. It is unknown whether many students knew about Silliman’s wartime service or considered his life outside campus, but it was reported in the newspapers when he died in 1907.

The Southern Club is established at Yale, open to “all men whose homes are or were south of the old Mason and Dixon line.” Five years later, the club occupies an entire page of the Yale Banner yearbook, with a long list of members and a racist cartoon featuring a buffoonish Black figure.

CHAPTER  11 The Southern Club

Established in 1890, the Yale Southern Club was a student organization open to “all men whose homes are or were south of the old Mason and Dixon line.” At the initial meeting, the founders decided “no party lines [would] be drawn so long as a man comes from the South and is in full sympathy with the Southern people and their best interests.”

The same year that the Yale Daily News “joked” that the Southern Club was planning to “lynch” “a n—— … on the Green,” President Hadley announced plans for a Southern tour.

Although fledgling at first, the Southern Club came into its own only five years later. In 1895, the club occupied an entire page in the Yale Banner , the yearbook, with a long list of members and a cartoon featuring a buffoonish, stereotypical Black figure. And in 1901, the club took up two full pages and featured a new image—a white female figure as well as two cartoons of Black figures.

Trends on campus aligned with the university’s broader plans for courting the South. The same year that the Yale Daily News “joked” that the Southern Club was planning to “lynch” “a n—— … on the Green,” President Hadley began announcing plans for a Southern tour. The Yale Alumni Weekly reported in 1904 that before the Civil War, about 11 percent of students “came from the Slave states,” whereas that figure stood at about 6 percent in the 1903-1904 academic year. However, the organization of alumni groups in Texas, Alabama, New Orleans, and Savannah, and soon Charleston, heralded “a revival of Yale interests at the South.”

The alumni magazine looked favorably on the president’s plans to visit “for the first time” “Yale’s far away children.” The tour of Southern Yale alumni clubs would, it was hoped, bring about a “closer union” and “the forging of fresh links of sympathy and of interest.” It was important, they believed, that Hadley was making “a definite and official expression of the fact that the University, as a national seat of learning, tolerates no sectional divisions.”

Hadley and his wife, Anne, visited alumni clubs in Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, Dallas, and New Orleans. The president spoke of the university’s needs—new dormitories, a new library, and “sufficient money to help the University out of her difficulties”—but he also invoked Yale’s broader ambitions. Bringing the South back to Yale, he suggested, meant recapturing some of the honor and grandeur that Southern students had once brought to the college.

Whether due to the university’s outreach campaign or for other reasons, the composition of Yale’s alumni body began to change. In 1908, the Yale Daily News rejoiced that the number of alumni living in the South Atlantic and the South Central divisions of the country had increased by 20 percent and 21 percent, respectively, over the previous four years.

Yale’s efforts to court Southern students and alumni yielded a public and tangible result in 1915, with the establishment of the John C. Calhoun Memorial Scholarships. Founded and funded by the Southern Club of Yale and the Yale Southern Alumni Association, with blessing and praise from university leaders, the Calhoun scholarships were to be awarded to two Southern students each year. The Yale Daily News reported that the dean of Yale College, the alumni registrar, the Southern Club president, and “two Southern Yale graduates,” yet to be named, would form a committee to raise the requisite $15,000.

“The Southern Club has long felt the need of establishing a memorial of some sort to J. C. Calhoun, and it seems most fitting that the scholarships for general excellence in athletics and scholarship should be dedicated to this eminent Yale graduate and national statesman,” the Southern Club president declared.

The Reverend Joseph Twichell—an 1859 graduate of Yale College, longtime member of the Yale Corporation, and close friend of Mark Twain—speaks at the dedication of a new statue commemorating former Yale President and Union stalwart Theodore Woolsey. Hearing that the senior class aims to plant, as its “class ivy,” a sprig from the grave of Robert E. Lee, Twitchell is horrified. He tells the gathering that Woolsey’s face would, if it could, be “averted from the scene.”

Joseph Twichell, Yale University Library .

CHAPTER  11 Honoring Robert E. Lee

“For God, for country, and for Yale.” These were the pillars of the Reverend Joseph Twichell’s life. An 1859 graduate of Yale College and a longtime member of the Yale Corporation, Twichell was the pastor of Asylum Hill Congregational Church, a prominent white parish in Hartford, Connecticut. Beyond the pulpit, he was known widely as Mark Twain’s closest friend, and he traveled in distinguished literary and social circles.

Just before giving his speech, Twichell learned that the senior class had chosen to plant a sprig of ivy from the grave of Robert E. Lee. The very idea of it horrified Twichell.

Yale was a central feature of Twichell’s Gilded Age life. He organized reunions, gave toasts at alumni dinners, and said the benediction at commencement. But above all, the pastor and writer considered the Civil War a defining experience for himself, his generation, and the nation at large. The pages of his journal, kept for over forty years, document his dogged determination to honor those who had served—and died—for the Union cause.

From the 1870s until his death in 1918, Twichell was involved in an array of efforts to memorialize the war: he organized reunions of the Third Army Corps, served on the committee to erect the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Hartford, spoke at the laying of the cornerstone of the Excelsior Brigade monument at Gettysburg, advocated for a monument in Georgia to Connecticut soldiers who died in Andersonville prison, and eulogized Ulysses S. Grant from his pulpit.

And so it was fitting that Twichell was invited to speak at the dedication of a new statue of [former Yale President] Theodore Dwight Woolsey during the commencement festivities in June 1896. Later that afternoon, the senior class, in keeping with tradition, would plant its “class ivy.” But just before ascending the platform to give his speech, Twichell learned that the senior class had chosen to plant a sprig of ivy from the grave of Robert E. Lee.

The very idea of it—honoring the “Confederate chief,” as Twichell called him, on the same day as they gathered to remember Union stalwart Woolsey—horrified Twichell. How could such a thing be happening at his beloved Yale? “I disliked the thing so much that I could not forbear an open protest against it,” he later wrote.

Twichell ascended the platform and began delivering his prepared remarks about Woolsey. And for a time, he largely followed his notes. But then he spoke extemporaneously. The Yale Alumni Weekly reported that Twichell paused, turned, and looked “into the face of the statue…showing the intense-est feeling in his voice and manner” and then spoke: “And if I may be pardoned, I must say that if it were possible that face would be averted from the scene, when it shall happen this afternoon…that an ivy from the grave of Robert Lee, a good man, but the historic representative of an infamous cause, shall be planted on this campus to climb the walls of ever loyal Yale.”

“The ivy was planted nevertheless,” Twichell wrote in his journal, “but I had the satisfaction of speaking my mind.” And Twichell learned he was not alone in his feelings. After his remarks, Charles Lane Fitzhugh, a brevet brigadier general in the Union Army and a fellow Yale graduate, “heartily embraced” Twichell. Rumors spread that alumni who graduated during the war years “had expressed the intention of tearing up the ivy tonight,” so the seniors posted a guard to protect it. And in the weeks following, the pastor received many letters supporting his public declaration—and others, “chiefly from the South,” he said, “condemning it.”

Twichell’s rebuke made headlines and elicited support from older alumni, but it did not alter the trajectory of how Yale, or the nation as a whole, would remember the Civil War. Major university celebrations, including the bicentennial in 1901 and the university pageant in 1916, provided special opportunities to embrace the white South and make room for it in the Yale pantheon — especially for that Southerner par excellence, John C. Calhoun. For as the university celebrated, and refashioned, its own history to suit the national mood of reconciliation, it also undertook a deliberate campaign to attract Southern alumni and students back to New Haven.

The Sheffield Debating Club at Yale decides to address the topic, “Resolved: That lynching is justifiable.” Two debaters take the affirmative position and two the negative. The judges and “the house” decide in favor of the affirmative. The same year, more than 120 Black people are lynched in the United States.

CHAPTER  10 Open for Debate: Lynching

From the 1880s into the early decades of the twentieth century, Yale students engaged with the most pressing issues of the day as they flocked to hear national figures speaking on their campus. A sampling of topics from these years reflects the urgency with which the college, and the nation, wrestled with the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps most striking is the extent to which the questions of Black rights, political inclusion, and humanity were considered valid topics of debate.

William Pickens and George W. Crawford, two African American students, won the most prestigious awards for oratory in 1903 and 1904. Despite these accolades, Pickens was denied a spot on the university debating team.

The subjects for junior disputes and essays in the 1880s included “Lynch law as now practiced in the United States,” “Are the Southern Negroes Better Off than in the Days of Slavery?” and “The Future of the Negro in America.” The Dwight Literary Society debated the resolution “That lynch law is sometimes justifiable.” The sophomore composition topics in 1890 included the question, “Should the emancipated negro have received unconditional citizenship?”

Colonization and disenfranchisement were floated as solutions to “the Negro Problem.” In 1895, the first meeting of the Freshman Union attracted seventy-five students to consider the following: “Resolved: That the Southern States should take steps to disfranchise the negroes by means of state constitutions.” The Yale Daily News reported that “the affirmative won the debate.” In 1896, the Political Science Club considered the ‘Negro Problem from a Southern Standpoint.’”

In 1897, the Sheffield Debating Club took as its topic, “Resolved: That lynching is justifiable.” Two speakers argued in the affirmative and two in the negative; “The decision of the judges and the house was in favor of the affirmative.” That year, more than 120 Black people were lynched in the United States.

When Yale faced Princeton in 1901, the intercollegiate debate was featured in multiple front-page articles of the Yale Daily News . Princeton submitted the debate question—“Resolved, that the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States has been justified”—giving Yale the choice of which side to argue. At the final trials, eighteen students vied for a spot on the Yale team; fourteen of these would-be orators chose to argue against the Fifteenth Amendment.

All six of those who made the team took the position that the Fifteenth Amendment, giving African American men the right to vote, was not justified. In making their case, the Yale debaters repeated racist stereotypes of Black inferiority and laziness. The first speaker noted that the Fifteenth Amendment had “enfranchise[ed] a race of utterly ignorant freedmen.” Students insisted that even Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman had seen the error of their ways. “The Republican party has since repudiated universal suffrage, and the whole country tacitly acquiesces in the practical nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment.” Based on these and other arguments, the News deemed it an “Unusually Interesting Contest.”

And the longevity of such topics is notable. The repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment was still being debated by the Freshman Union in both 1909 and 1911, and John Brown’s legacy was a topic for the Porter Prize as late as 1910, the year after the fiftieth anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. 

Given debate’s importance on campus, it is all the more noteworthy that William Pickens and George W. Crawford, two African American students, won the most prestigious awards for oratory in 1903 and 1904. Despite these accolades, Pickens was denied a spot on the university debating team, depriving Yale of one of its best speakers when the team competed against Princeton. One newspaper declared, “Reason Seems Obvious to Many Why Winner of Ten Eyck Prize is Not to Face the Tiger Debaters.”

Yale celebrates its bicentennial, using the occasion to welcome white Southerners back to the college. One speaker declares that Yale has “ever been proud” of its Southern alumni of the antebellum era, praising them as “eminent as statesmen, as soldiers, as scholars, and as divines.” Thomas Nelson Page is among a number of Southerners who receive honorary degrees at the bicentennial celebration.

Image above: Bicentennial Buildings, View from Corner of College and Grove Streets, Yale University Library .

Images below, left to right: Yale Alumni Weekly: the Bicentennial ; Booker T. Washington , Delegate to the Bicentennial from Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute; Graduates Passing Hendrie Hall , Elm Street, During Yale’s Bicentennial Celebration; Commons Set for Dinner , Yale University Library.

George W. Crawford graduates from Yale Law School, where he is awarded the prestigious Townsend Prize for oratory. He goes on to ascend the highest ranks of Black professional life in New Haven, practicing law in the city for decades and serving four terms as the city’s corporation counsel. Crawford establishes an NAACP branch in New Haven and is a longtime member of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church (formerly the Temple Street congregation). He serves on the boards of Howard University and, for over 50 years, Talladega College.

George W. Crawford ( LL .B., 1903). The Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. MssA C858  flat.

Thomas Nelson Baker, born enslaved in Virginia in 1860, completes his second Yale degree, becoming the first Black person in the United States to earn a PhD in philosophy.

William Pickens graduates from Yale College. He goes on to teach at Talladega College in Alabama and at Wiley College in Texas and serves as dean of academics at Morgan State College in Baltimore. He helps to build the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he works for over two decades.

William Pickens, Yale University Library . 

Edward Bouchet graduates from Yale College in 1874 and earns a doctorate in physics from Yale University in 1876. He is the first Black person to earn a PhD in the United States. In 1905, he is turned down for a teaching position at Yale despite his sterling qualifications—six years of Latin, six of Greek, ranked sixth in his Yale class—and a ringing endorsement from Arthur W. Wright, an eminent Yale professor of molecular physics and chemistry. Over the next 14 years, Bouchet lives a peripatetic life, crisscrossing the country to hold teaching jobs in Missouri, Ohio, and Virginia. He becomes ill and eventually returns to New Haven, where he dies in 1918 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Evergreen Cemetery.

Edward Alexander Bouchet, Yale University Library .

A Black student at Brown University, Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, plays football in the newly built Yale Bowl—the first Black person to do so. A halfback, Pollard must enter the field separately from the rest of his team to avoid hostile crowds. When he gets the ball, Yale fans yell racist epithets at him. Pollard goes on to distinguish himself as the first African-American player to appear in the Rose Bowl, the first African-American quarterback, and the first African-American head coach in the National Football League, among many other barrier-breaking achievements.

Fritz Pollard, Brown University Library .

CHAPTER  11 A Bitter Victory

Later in the same year that John C. Calhoun was feted and honored with a scholarship in his name, a Black student played football in the newly built Yale Bowl for the first time—but not for the Blue.

Brown’s win against Yale that day was one stop on the team’s—and Pollard’s—journey to the Rose Bowl. But the victory was not sweet for Pollard.

Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, a halfback for Brown University, had to enter the field separately from the rest of his team to avoid the hostile crowds. William M. Ashby, a student in the divinity school, went to the game with a handful of other Black students. As Ashby recalled later, they had heard of Pollard, who was rumored to be an exceptional player. Yet they, like Pollard, expected to face insults and perhaps injury—even from their fellow Yale students.

Ashby wrote, “We went to the Brown side of the field, wanting to give Pollard as much moral support as possible, but also because we knew that there would be animosity toward us in the Yale stands. We would be baited with the foulest and vilest epithets hurled right into our teeth, and we could do nothing about it.”

Over the course of an outstanding career on and off the field, Pollard would distinguish himself as the first African American player to appear in the Rose Bowl and the first African American quarterback and the first African American head coach in the National Football League, among many other barrier-breaking achievements. On that November day in 1915, however, he was something else to the white Yale fans. When Pollard had the ball, Ashby remembered, “The Yale stands arose, ‘Catch that n——. Kill that n——,’ they screamed.”

Brown’s win against Yale that day was one stop on the team’s—and Pollard’s—journey to the Rose Bowl. But the victory was not sweet for Pollard. “For all the glory he achieved in New Haven, Pollard later expressed bitterness about his playing in the Yale Bowl. He had never felt so ‘n——ized,’ as he put it,” said one historian of the game.

The John C. Calhoun Memorial Scholarships are established. Founded and funded by the Southern Club of Yale and the Yale Southern Alumni Association—with the blessing and praise of Yale’s leadership—the Calhoun scholarships are to be awarded to two Southern students each year. “The Southern Club has long felt the need of establishing a memorial of some sort to J. C. Calhoun, and it seems most fitting that the scholarships for general excellence in athletics and scholarship should be dedicated to this eminent Yale graduate and national statesman,” the Southern Club president declares.

1915 June 20

In an elaborate ceremony, the Yale Civil War Memorial is dedicated. It honors fallen soldiers from both the North and South and makes no mention of slavery.

The Yale and Slavery Research Project completes its study of Yale’s history here. The research team chose 1915 as the endpoint in part because the dedication of Yale’s Civil War Memorial was the capstone to decades of deliberate forgetting, both at Yale and in the country as a whole, about the reasons for the Civil War. Yale’s collections are available for other faculty members, scholars, and students to conduct further research on the legacies of slavery and racism in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Images below: Yale’s Civil War Memorial, Yale University Office of Public Affairs and Communications. 

CHAPTER  12 Yale’s Civil War Memorial

A 2021 study of memorials in America counted 5,917 monuments of various kinds that memorialize the Civil War. In that total, only 1 percent include the word “slavery”; Yale’s striking Civil War memorial, carefully and artfully designed, located in a very public setting, and dedicated in 1915, is not among that 1 percent.

The Yale memorial masks the deep meanings of the Civil War as it also almost perfectly reveals the solemn tragedy of the national culture of reunion and reconciliation that came to dominate American society.

For more than a century, the Yale Civil War Memorial has honored the sacrifice of Yale men on both sides in the struggle of 1861-1865 and encouraged the deliberate forgetting of the deepest meanings of that event.

On the floor of the slightly sloped hallway, some verses of the reconciliationist poem, “The Blue and the Gray” were etched into stone as part of the 1915 memorial. By then the poem, by 1849 Yale graduate Francis Miles Finch, was a national classic that had already appeared and still does on monuments and wayside markers at national cemeteries and Civil War battlefield sites.

As the story goes, Finch was deeply moved by an incident he read about in spring 1866, when white Southern women in Columbus, Mississippi, had gone to a Civil War cemetery and adorned with flowers the graves of both Confederate and Union dead buried there. In September 1867 in the Atlantic Monthly , he published his nine-verse poem that soon became a sentimental symbol of national reconciliation of North and South around the elegiac memory of the mutual valor of soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

In 1868 when an “official” beginning to Memorial Day was announced by the Grand Army of the Republic, the growing Union veterans’ organization, Finch’s poem suddenly soared in significance as people who wished to believe in a reunion devoid of cause and conflict, but steeped in the solemnity of soldierly virtue and sacrifice, now had lovely, well-timed verses through which to advance their cause. No one need be blamed for all the bloodshed; everyone who fought with courage and died for devotion to a cause, whichever they believed in, was equal and heroic in death. Finch’s sweet mutuality intones,

No more shall the war-cry sever,  Or the winding rivers be red;  They banish our anger forever,  When they laurel the graves of our dead!  Under the sod and the dew,  Waiting the judgment day; -  Love and tears for the Blue;  Tears and love for the Gray.

That single verse is carved into the floor of the corridor of Memorial Hall near the following inscription:

TO THE MEN OF YALE   WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE CIVIL WAR   THE UNIVERSITY HAS DEDICATED THIS MEMORIAL   THAT THEIR HIGH DEVOTION   MAY LIVE IN ALL HER SONS AND THAT THE BONDS    WHICH NOW UNITE THE LAND MAY ENDURE   MCMXV

The inscriptions, which are badly faded and worn by foot traffic, with some of Finch’s words unrecognizable, are today hidden beneath industrial strength removable carpets protecting the floor; the burgundy-colored rugs have a special effect in afternoon sunlight from the doors. Any casual visitor to the Memorial Hall will note the sounds of thuds and clicks of shoes on the uncarpeted sections of the rotunda and the larger spaces commemorating the Yale dead of the twentieth-century world wars and other conflicts. Voices echo in this hallowed space, depending on how crowded it is.

One will also witness an endless array of people hurrying by, faces leaning into cell phones, unaware of anything hallowed around them. Indeed, as scholars working in a range of disciplines, cultures, and time periods have shown, no monument means anything without knowledge of its conception and purpose, of its significance at its unveiling and then over time. The Yale memorial masks the deep meanings of the Civil War as it almost perfectly reveals the solemn tragedy of the national culture of reunion and reconciliation that came to dominate American society after the beginning of the twentieth century.

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Journal of Economic Perspectives

• Spring 2022

American Enslavement and the Recovery of Black Economic History

ISSN 0895-3309 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7965 (Online)

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Our Purpose 

In announcing the establishment of the Yale and Slavery Working Group on October 14, 2020, Yale University President Peter Salovey stated, “To understand where we are today and to move forward as a community, we must study the history of our university. As an American institution that is 319 years old, Yale has a complex past that includes associations, many of them formative, with individuals who actively promoted slavery, anti-Black racism, and other forms of exploitation. We have a responsibility to explore this history, including its most difficult aspects; we cannot ignore our institution’s own ties to slavery and racism, and we should take this opportunity to research, understand, analyze, and communicate that history.”

In response to President Salovey’s mandate, the Yale and Slavery Research Project undertook a deep and thorough investigation of Yale’s historic involvement and associations with slavery and its aftermaths. Building on the labor of generations of scholars, archivists, descendants, staff, and community members, the research team drew on a rich array of sources, from the Yale archives and beyond, to better understand the role of slavery and enslaved people in the making of this university.

The research team, led by David Blight, Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, received vital assistance from faculty, staff, librarians, and New Haven community members. The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center provided administrative leadership and support.

In a major milestone for the project, Yale and Slavery: A History , by David W. Blight with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, was published by Yale University Press in February 2024. This narrative history is a comprehensive examination of how slavery and resistance to it have shaped this university.

To download the free ebook, or to view videos, a walking tour, and other related resources, visit the new website launched in conjuction with the book.  Print copies of Yale and Slavery may be purchased at bookstores, online retailers, or the Yale University Press website.

Get in touch

With questions about the Yale and Slavery Research Project, including queries about ongoing and future research, please contact Hope McGrath , Research Coordinator for Yale, New Haven, and Connecticut History at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

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• Published: 28 December 2016

The legacies of slavery in and out of Africa

• Graziella Bertocchi 1  

IZA Journal of Migration volume  5 , Article number:  24 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper, I illustrate their long-term consequences on contemporaneous socio-economic outcomes, drawing from my own previous work on the topic and from an extensive review of the available literature. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the “sending” countries in Africa, with attention to their economic, institutional, demographic, and social implications. Next, I evaluate the consequences of the slave trade on the “receiving” countries in the Americas. Here, I distinguish between the case of Latin America and that of the USA. Overall, I show that the slave trades exert a lasting impact along several contemporaneous socio-economic dimensions and across diverse areas of the world.

JEL Classification: J47, J15, O15, N30, P48, Z10

1 Introduction

This contribution has been prepared for presentation as the Julian Simon Lecture at the 12th IZA Annual Migration Meeting held in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2015. Just off the coast of Dakar, Gorée Island hosts the House of Slaves, a museum and memorial to the slave trade out of Africa, one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history and the main inspiration for this lecture.

While the slave trades and slavery have long been the object of investigation by historians, a recent stream within the economics literature has focused on its potential long-term consequences on socio-economic outcomes. The aim of this paper is to present my own work and thoughts on this topic, and at the same time to collect a survey of the small but growing related literature.

More broadly speaking, this contribution follows the tradition of Engerman and Sokoloff ( 1997 ), Hall and Jones ( 1999 ), and Acemoglu et al. ( 2001 ), who have searched the fundamental, rather than proximate, factors that have determined socio-economic outcomes, with special attention for the potential role of institutional factors such as those shaping labor markets. My goal is to demonstrate that the institutions that permitted the slave trades and slavery, long after their abolition, are still exerting a profound influence on a variety of contemporaneous outcomes, across very diverse areas of the world.

Partly because empirical investigations on the slave trade require often hard-to-find historical data, partly because research is simply in its infancy, the available literature including my own contributions has not so far been able to cover all the potentially affected geographical regions and all spheres of possible influence in a homogenous fashion. Nevertheless, it is possible to organize a presentation along two main axes. First, it is natural to distinguish between the long-lasting influence of the African slave trade for the “sending” countries on the one hand and the “receiving” ones on the other. Second, for each set of countries, it is useful to highlight a number of specific economic, institutional, demographic, and social implications which have attracted the attention of the literature. For a selection of issues, I will present new data elaborations based on datasets collected for my previous work. Since African slavery has represented one of the largest—albeit coerced—migration experiences in history, the paper will also emphasize the link between research on the slave trade and the literature on migration, even though this link is still relatively undeveloped.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section  2 , I provide a short history of the African slave trades. In Section  3 , I consider their influence on the sending countries in Africa, with attention to its economic, institutional, demographic, and social implications. In Section  4 , I evaluate the consequences of the slave trade on the receiving countries, drawing a further distinction between Latin America and the USA. For the latter, I also briefly discuss the subsequent experiences of the Second Middle Passage and of the Great Migration. Section  5 concludes and collects ideas and suggestions for future research.

2 A brief history of the slave trade

Over the five centuries running from 1400 to 1900, the slave trade encompassed four distinct waves: the trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and trans-Atlantic slave trades. The last one was by far the most significant in terms of volume and duration: over the 1529–1850 period, over 12 million Africans were embarked, mostly along the coasts of West Africa, and forced to undertake the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean (see Berlin 2003 for a historical account, and Eltis et al. 1999 and Curtin 1969 for data). The peak was reached between 1780 and 1790, with 80,000 slaves per year being transported, but the traffic remained very intense during the nineteenth century, when between three and four million people were embarked. Throughout the period, the Portuguese were always at the center of the trade: they were the ones that initiated it and they continued it long after Britain outlawed it in 1807. The involvement of Britain culminated in the eighteenth century. France also had a prominent role, followed by Spain, the Netherlands, and the USA. The decline started after 1807, even though the process was very slow and became significant only after mid-nineteenth century when Brazil joined in. The three other slave trades pre-dated the trans-Atlantic wave and followed different paths: the trans-Saharan trade took people from the sub-Saharan regions to Northern Africa, while both the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea trades took people from Eastern Africa and delivered them to various parts of Asia. Overall, the volume of these three waves comprised half of that involved in the trans-Atlantic one. The trans-Atlantic trades are by far the better documented ones, thanks to the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST) Database (see www.slavevoyages.org and the description in Eltis et al. 1999 ). Based on these data, Table  1 reports the number of slaves embarked from Africa, by broad embarkation regions and by 100-year periods. West-Central Africa represented the main source, with 45 % of the overall volume. Next came Benin (16 %), Biafra (13 %), the Gold Coast (10 %), and Senegambia (6 %).

Slavery was already present in Africa before the slave trades and in fact continues, in some parts of the continent, to the present day. Europe experienced slavery as well. The Roman Empire was in fact a slave society. However, by 1400, slavery had long disappeared from Europe, which motivated the European search for a supply of forced labor in the African continent. African slaves were collected by kidnapping by other Africans or as the result of local wars among Africans. The captives were then sold to foreign traders, together with gold and ivory, in exchange for imported goods including firearms. The consequent so-called gun-slave cycle fueled the perpetuation of the slave trade for centuries. In turn, the incentive to purchase slaves on the part of the Europeans rested in the need to collect manpower for the expansions of the plantation economies being developed in South and Central America after Columbus, to satisfy the quickly increasing taste in Europe for colonial goods such as tobacco and sugar. Again based on the TAST Database, Table  2 reports the number of slaves disembarked in different regions, by broad disembarkation regions and by 100-year periods. A comparison with Table  1 reveals that almost two million people were lost during transportation. The main destination was Brazil (45 %), next came the Caribbean (22 and 10 %, respectively, for the British and French portions) and the Spanish Americas (12 %). Less than 4 % were taken to North America.

The coerced population movement set into place by the trans-Atlantic slave trade was only the beginning of a very long mobilization process that has not yet stopped. Indeed Berlin ( 2010 ) has influentially portrayed the history of people of African descent in the USA as framed by four great migrations. The first was the Middle Passage, which in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took people from Africa to North America. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Second Middle Passage involved the transportation of one million African American slaves from the Atlantic coastal regions to the plantations in the interior. The third migratory round, which was no longer forced by voluntary, witnessed the relocation of six million free people of African descent from the rural South to the Northern cities, starting from 1915 with the Great Migration and continuing until the 1970s. Lastly, between the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, new Global Passages of migrants of African descent arrived in the USA from the regions that had hosted the previous out-of-Africa coerced diasporas, i.e., the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.

3 The consequences of the slave trade in Africa

This section is devoted to the long-run consequences of the coerced migration of millions of people from Africa, with a focus on the trans-Atlantic experience. To organize the presentation, I first look at the impact on local economic development and institutions. The second sub-section turns to the influence on demographics, family structure, and gender roles.

3.1 The impact on economic development and institutions

A first wave of research on the influence of history on African economic and institutional development has focused on the colonial period (e.g., Acemoglu et al. 2001 , Bertocchi and Canova 2002 , and Bertocchi 2011 ). The long-term implications of pre-colonial institutions in Africa have been discussed among others by Manning ( 1990 ), Herbst ( 2000 ), Bockstette et al. ( 2002 ), Gennaioli and Rainer ( 2007 ), and Michalopoulos and Papaioannou ( 2013 ).

A new research line initiated by Nunn ( 2008a ) has instead concentrated on the slave trade period. Nunn ( 2008a ) presents a systematic empirical analysis of the effects of the slave trades on current economic performance. His first contribution is a database reporting estimates of the number of slaves exported from each contemporary African country in each century from 1400 to 1900. The estimates, which are based on shipping records including the TAST Database (Eltis et al. 1999 ) and a variety of historical sources, also report the ethnic identity of slaves. The second contribution is to show a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and per capita income in 2000, despite evidence that the slave trades were more intense in the most developed and most densely populated areas in Africa. Through two-stage least-square estimation (where the sailing distances from each country to the nearest locations of demand for slaves are employed as instruments), he can also establish that this relationship is causal. Moreover, he suggests that the channels behind the observed relationship have to be found in the fact that the slave trades impeded the formation of broader ethnic identities. By stopping the homogenization of ethnic differences, they lead to fractionalization and weak and fragmented political structures. The impact of the slave trade on ethnic stratification has also been studied by Whatley and Gillezeau ( 2011 ), who establish the existence of a positive relationship between current ethnic fragmentation and slave exports from West Africa.

Following the lead of Nunn ( 2008a ), several authors have further explored the long-term influence of the slave trades along a number of dimensions. Nunn and Wantchekon ( 2011 ) investigate the link between the slave trades and trust. Given the importance of trust for economic and institutional development, it may well be the case that it is through this channel that the slave trade still exerts its influence today. The hypothesis is that the slave trades may have generated a culture of mistrust, because of the way slaves were captured by other Africans through raids involving neighboring communities, thus breaking the social bonds upon which trust is built. The hypothesis is tested over the data by Nunn ( 2008a ) on the number of slaves by ethnic group and contemporaneous survey data by Afrobarometer providing measures of trust. They find a robust negative link between slave trades and trust, i.e., individuals whose ancestors were more exposed to the slave trade are today less trusting. Historic distance from the coast is employed as an instrument for the slave trades to perform two-stage least-square estimation indicating that this link is indeed causal. The authors investigate two potential channels of transmission, culture and institutions. The former runs through the diffusion of cultural norms, beliefs, and values founded on distrust, the latter through the weakening of trust-enforcing institutions. They conclude that both channels are at work but that the former is much stronger than the second.

Again using the data by Nunn ( 2008a ) and Nunn and Wantchekon ( 2011 ) combined with the Afrobarometer surveys, in Bertocchi et al. ( 2015 ) my coauthors and I examine the relationship between trust and attitudes toward citizenship acquisition. We find that individuals who are more trusting show more positive attitudes toward the acquisition of citizenship by migrants, both at birth and by naturalization (see Bertocchi and Strozzi 2010 , 2008 on the link between citizenship laws and migration). These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the slave trade generated a culture of mistrust that increased the incentive to distinguish insiders from outsiders, with implications for the shaping of immigration policies in contemporary Africa.

The implications of the slave trade can also be shaped by its interaction with geography and the climate. Nunn and Puga ( 2012 ) look at the interaction between ruggedness and the effects of the slave trades on current development. Ruggedness can represent a protection from slave raids despite its simultaneous negative effect on trade and economic activity. They find that a beneficial effect of rugged terrain is only present in the African continent and can therefore be explained by the history of slavery. More broadly, these results suggest that geography can affect development through its interaction with past historical events. Fenske and Kala ( 2015 ) examine the interaction between the slave trade and climate. They compile a yearly panel of temperatures and slave exports and find that the latter declined in warmer years, which can be explained by the positive association between temperature and mortality and the negative association between temperature and agricultural productivity. In turn cold weather—which reduced participation in the slave trade—predicts higher economic activity in contemporary Africa.

Turning to the impact of the slave trade on political institutions, Whatley ( 2012a ) focuses on political authority in West Africa using data from the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1967 ) and finds that, in the pre-colonial era, the trans-Atlantic slave trade increased absolutism and reduced democracy and liberalism. This negative influence on West-African political institutions persisted past the colonial era. In particular, he shows that British colonies that exported more slaves were subject to a larger degree to indirect rule. In turn, under indirect rule the colonial administration relied more heavily on local absolutisms as a means of control. Absolutist political customs developed into the rule of law, persisted to post-colonial days, and can still explain state failure in the African continent (see Bertocchi and Guerzoni 2011 , 2012 on the determinants and consequences of state fragility in contemporary Africa).

While the consequences of the slave trade are received increasing attention within the economics literature, still scarce attention has been paid to the determinants of the slave trade itself. One exception is Whatley ( 2012b ), who looks at the causes of the expansion in the trans-Atlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century. While the trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted over 400 years, a rapid, five-fold growth episode in fact occurred in the eighteenth century. He combines data from the TA Database and the Anglo-African Trade Statistics (Johnson et al. 1990 ) to build a time series of annual observations on the British slave trade that spans the period 1699–1807, i.e., until the abolition of the slave trade by Britain. For the first part of the century, he finds evidence of a gun-slave cycle, suggesting that African people were enslaved by other Africans and traded in exchange of firearms, which in turn sustained internal wars. These findings confirm the British abolitionists’ claim that the slave trades caused African conflict rather than the opposite.

A paper by Fenske and Kala ( 2014 ) focuses instead on the consequences of British abolition. The authors argue that abolition increased the incidence of conflict in the areas within Africa affected by the slave trade. Using geo-coded data on conflicts, they show a discontinuous increase after 1807, which occurred both in West Africa, where the slave trade declined, and West-Central and South-East Africa, where the trade increased as a result. They interpret these findings as follows. In West Africa, the decline of the slave trade challenged pre-existing political authorities who defended their interests through violence. In the other regions, enslavement intensified and was often achieved through violent means. The persistent effect of abolition translates in harsher conflict today in the regions where slave exports increased after 1807.

3.2 The impact on demographics, family structure, and gender roles

Even though to separate the existing contributions on the slave trade in Africa according to the chosen two sub-sections is somewhat arbitrary, it makes it easier to identify and describe a parallel line of research that starts with Fage ( 1980 ), Thornton ( 1980 ), and Manning ( 1981 ), who highlight the implications of the slave trade for population growth in Africa (see also Manning 2010 and Frankema and Jerven 2014 , for more recent projections). As a result of the enslavement and shipping of captives, among whom men often outnumbered women, population declined and the gender balance was distorted. As a result in 1850, Africa had a population of about 50 million, while the level it would have reached in the absence of the slave trades was estimated to be 100 million: thus, the continent lost to the slave trades half of its population. The unbalanced sex ratio provoked a further reduction of population growth, with implications for family structure and male-female relations. Polygyny spread, while matrilinearity weakened. Classic references on the African family structure, from an anthropological and historical perspective, include Boserup ( 1970 ), Goody ( 1973 ), and Todd ( 1984 ), who describe the conditions that, long before the slave trades, determined the diffusion of polygyny in Africa, due to agricultural conditions which made female labor valuable. The diffusion of polygyny in Africa was reinforced by the slave trade, because of male scarcity and the simultaneous need to sustain reproduction rates.

The connection between the slave trade and contemporaneous polygyny is investigated by several related studies. Dalton and Leung ( 2014 ) combine the historical data on the slave trades from Nunn ( 2008a ) and Nunn and Wantchekon ( 2011 ) with contemporaneous polygyny data from the female Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). They show that the higher polygyny rates in Western Africa, if compared to Eastern Africa, can be explained by the slave trades, since the preference for male slaves was a distinctive feature of the trans-Atlantic trade out of Western Africa, while the opposite occurred for the Indian Ocean and Red Sea trades out of Eastern Africa. These results are robust to controls for age, religion, urban location, education, and wealth, as well as to instrumental variables estimation. Edlund and Ku ( 2011 ) stress that polygyny in sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by late but universal marriage for men (general polygyny), which differs from the case where only high-quality men obtain more wives thus leaving lower-quality men unmarried. While the latter form of polygyny tends to be driven by inequality, they confirm that general polygyny is linked to the slave trade. Their measure of polygyny is based on United Nations data on the number of married women over the number of married men (for 15 to 49 years old). Within a broad analysis of the determinants of African polygyny, Fenske ( 2013 ) uses the DHS household-level codification and confirms the existence of a link with the slave trades, albeit with the warning that the latter can only predict polygamy across broad regions, i.e., West Africa against the rest of the continent.

In Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2015 ), my coauthor and I build on the relationship between the trans-Atlantic slave trade (from the Nunn and Wantchekon 2011 dataset) and contemporaneous polygyny, which is confirmed across the household, male, and female DHS samples. In particular, we employ a proxy for the intensity of the slave trades represented by the implied, negative demographic shock, since data on population growth present the advantage of being available at a finer, district level.

Using the dataset compiled for Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2015 ), based on the household sample, in Table  3 , I run a simple bivariate regression where polygyny enters as the dependent variable while the trans-Atlantic slave trade enters as the regressor. The highly significant and positive coefficient illustrates the strong link between the two variables.

In Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2015 ), we further extend the analysis of the influence of the slave trade by looking at sexual behavior and HIV infection. What is peculiar about sub-Saharan Africa is that HIV incidence is much more common among women, particularly younger ones. Violence against women, poor health services, lack of education, and unsafe sexual behavior are commonly suggested in order to explain these facts. The paper starts by showing that, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the slave trades are associated with a negative demographic shock. Next it shows that polygyny is strongly associated with higher HIV infection rates. To establish the causal nexus running from polygyny to HIV infection, the demographic shock following the slave trade is used as an instrument for polygyny. The paper also investigates the underlying transmission channel, by arguing that polygyny is associated with unsatisfying marital relationships, particularly for the women involved. As a consequence, women tend to be more prone to extramarital partnerships. Since promiscuous sexual habits represent one of the main channels of transmission of HIV, there should then be an association between the prevalence of polygyny and the risk of infection. This effect is reinforced by co-wives cohabitation, since the presence of several women sharing the same roof with a single husband exerts a multiplying influence on exposure. The above hypothesis is tested using DHS indicators of sexual behavior. Sexual activity, measured as the likelihood that an individual had sexual activity within the last 4 weeks, is confirmed as being positively associated with infection rates. Female infidelity, measured with the number of extramarital partners within the last 12 months, is also strongly connected with HIV. To establish causality, the paper again relies on the link between the demographic shock that followed the slave trade and sexual behavior, thus uncovering a sort of primordial risk factor for HIV which finds its roots in the slave trade epoch.

Again using DHS data, another related contribution by Teso ( 2014 ) turns the attention on the influence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on gender roles. He argues that the unbalanced sex ratios determined by the enslavement of men pushed women into the labor force and changed their role in the labor market by altering the division of labor in society. He uses the data from Nunn and Wantchekon ( 2011 ) on the number of slaves by ethnicity and matches them with DHS data on employment status, women’s participation in household decisions, and attitudes toward domestic violence, as well as with Afrobarometer data on opinions about women in politics. He shows that ethnic groups that were more severely affected by the trans-Atlantic slave trade are today more likely to exhibit higher female labor force participation and more equal gender-role attitudes.

4 The consequences of the slave trade outside Africa

This section is devoted to the influence of African slavery outside of Africa, with a focus on the trans-Atlantic experience and thus on New World economies. The impact of the influx of slaves from Africa on the countries in the Americas has been emphasized in seminal work by Engerman and Sokoloff ( 1997 ), who argue that differences in factor endowments implied differences in the reliance on slave labor, with dramatic consequences for the degree of inequality. Extreme historical inequalities—in wealth, human capital, and political power—then exerted a permanent influence on economic development, since they favored the endogenous formation of institutional structures that, rather than promoting growth, maintained the privileges of the elites against the interests of the masses. Nunn ( 2008b ) tests the Engerman-Sokoloff hypothesis in two settings: across 29 former New World countries and across US counties and states. In both settings, he finds a negative impact of past slavery on current development (even though this impact is not driven by plantation slavery). He also investigates whether inequality is the channel through which slavery adversely affects current performances, but he finds no support for this mechanism. Over a world-wide sample of 46 countries including also North-African and Southern-European recipients of African slaves, Soares et al. ( 2012 ) find a significant correlation between past slavery and current levels of inequality. The economics of labor coercion from the perspective of productive efficiency is modeled by Lagerlöf ( 2009 ) and Acemoglu and Wolitzky ( 2011 ). Apart from the exceptions just mentioned, most of the research on the long-term effects of African slavery has focused on individual countries. In the first sub-section below, I report evidence on Latin America and the Caribbean, while the subsequent sub-section covers the USA.

4.1 Latin America and the Caribbean

The Eastern coast of Latin America and the Caribbean by far received the largest share of African slaves, albeit with marked cross-country heterogeneities. As shown in Table  2 , the highest number of slaves was transported to Brazil and the Caribbean (particularly Haiti and Jamaica), while other countries, such as Bolivia, hardly received any. Since this area is currently characterized by deep inequalities, past slavery is a candidate explanation that deserves close attention.

Drawing on Bertocchi ( 2015 ), I will start with Brazil, which was the destination of almost half of the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic, ten times the number of those sent to today’s USA. Brazil was also the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888. On the other hand, for centuries Brazil witnessed the coexistence of free and enslaved blacks: at the end of the eighteenth century, 25 % of the blacks were already free. At the same time, the local elites encouraged the formation of a sort of class division among blacks, used as a means to divide and control a huge and thus potentially dangerous black population, which represented 50 % of the total in 1822. However, because of high mortality and low fertility, the slave population declined very quickly after the end of the trades in the central years of the nineteenth century, while at the same time the flow of European immigrants was fast growing. As a result, by the time slavery was abolished in 1888, slaves were only 5 % of the Brazilian population. Together with the custom of inter-racial marriage, these demographic dynamics can explain why in this country slavery never produced the forms of segregation observed, for instance, in the USA. The empirical evidence on Brazil brings mixed results. Within a county-level analysis of the state of São Paulo, the largest in the country, Summerhill ( 2010 ) finds that the intensity of slavery has a negligible effect on income in 2000. Moreover, a measure of agricultural inequality for 1905 exerts no negative influence on long-term development. He therefore concludes that neither slavery nor historical inequality have a discernable economic effect in the long run. However, a negative influence of past slavery emerges in other studies that concentrate on human capital formation. Across Brazilian federal units, Wegenast ( 2010 ) uncovers a negative correlation between past land inequality, which was strongly correlated with the presence of crops suitable for the use of slave labor and thus with slavery, and quantitative and qualitative measures of contemporary education, such as secondary school attendance in 2000 and school quality in 2005. In the latifundia system based on slave labor, landlords historically had no incentive to develop mass educational institutions, and this attitude persisted even after abolition in 1888, with consequences still visible today. Similarly, Musacchio et al. ( 2014 ) show that over the 1889–1930 period Brazilian states with a lower intensity of slavery were able to exploit positive trade shocks and invest the resulting export tax revenues in elementary education expenditures. The opposite occurs in states with more slaves. The effects persist on the contemporary distribution of human capital.

For the case of Colombia, Acemoglu et al. ( 2012 ) investigate the impact of slavery on long-run development by exploiting the variation in the presence of gold mines in different municipalities, since gold mining was strongly associated with demand for slave labor. The empirical findings show that the historical presence of slavery is associated with higher poverty, land inequality, and black population shares, and with lower school enrollment and vaccination coverage. For Puerto Rico, Bobonis and Morrow ( 2014 ) report evidence on the impact of the libreta system, a local form of labor coercion introduced in 1849 after an agreement between Spain and Britain to enforce the abolition of the slave trade. The libreta de facto replaced slavery and remained in place until 1874. By exploiting variation in the suitability of coffee cultivation and changes in world coffee prices, they estimate how the response of schooling to coffee price changes across municipalities. They find that coercion depresses the effective wages of unskilled labor, inducing more schooling than in the case without coercion. In other words, the abolition of forced labor reduced the incentive to accumulate human capital, consistently with the fact that abolition increased the relative wages of unskilled laborers. Incidentally, parallel evidence of the effect of the enslavement of the American indigenous population is provided by Dell ( 2010 ), who examines a region within modern-day Peru that experienced another form of labor coercion, the mining mita. The effects of the mita are detrimental for current household consumption and children’s growth, while its influence on education has faded over time.

In summary, the available evidence points to heterogeneous effects of slavery on long-term development. These mixed results may be due to the confounding influence of other interacting factors common to the South-Central America experience, such as the generally slow expansion of mass education, irrespectively of race (see Mariscal and Sokoloff 2000 ) and a culture of assimilation favoring integration and racial mixing.

4.2 The USA

Slavery was introduced in the territories that today represent the USA in the sixteenth century, much later than in Spanish South America and Brazil. The scope was to replace European and African indentured servants as the main source of plantation labor, at the time mostly employed for the cultivation of rice and tobacco. Between 1675 and 1695, the import expanded rapidly. By the 1720s, Virginia and Maryland had been transformed into slave societies. Overall, the inflow to the USA, throughout the next centuries, amounted to an estimated 645,000 slaves, brought in mostly from Africa. The slaves were initially disembarked along the Atlantic coast and forcibly settled in the coastal Southern colonies. Even though the USA absorbed less than 4 % of the entire volume of the trans-Atlantic trade, the local reproduction rate was much higher than elsewhere so that the slave population, unlike in the rest of the Americas, expanded. By the 1730s, births to slave women outnumbered import, with an increase of the African population at an annual rate of 3 %. As a result, at the start of the American Revolution, the region was no longer an immigrant society. Later on, in the 1789–1860 period between the Revolution and the Civil War, most slaves were relocated in the inland regions where the plantation economy was quickly expanding following the booming international demand for cotton. This Second Middle Passage ended only with the Confederate defeat in the Civil War. Despite the fact that the Revolution broke the coincidence between blackness and slavery, between 1800 and 1860 the slave population increased from one to four million, so that by the 1860 census the USA had a slave population of about 13 % of the total, distributed within 15 slave states, mostly belonging to the South. The American Civil War led to the abolition of slavery in 1865. The Reconstruction period, running from 1865 to 1877, witnessed a transformation of Southern society and the enactment of legislation favoring the rights of former slaves. However, soon afterwards the white elites were able to restore their control and to introduce restrictive Black Codes and disfranchisement provisions. The next massive movement of the African American population occurred between 1916 and 1930, with the so-called Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North, pulled by new job opportunities in the Northern cities and pushed by the crisis of the cotton economy. The latter was caused by the boll weevil beetle infestation and also by the social and political conditions of blacks in the South. Black emigration from the South slowed down after 1930 but picked up again after World War Two. It continued at differentiated speeds until the 1970s, reaching a total volume of six million, with a partial reversal after that.

Early contributions on the economic impact of slavery in the USA include the influential although controversial book by the economic historians Fogel and Engerman ( 1974 ), where they argue that slavery in the antebellum South was an efficient production arrangement. Contrasting views were expressed among others by David and Stampp ( 1976 ) and Ransom and Sutch ( 2001 ). The more recent literature I focus on has investigated the long-term consequences of slavery on development. Across states over the 1880–1980 period, Mitchener and McLean ( 2003 ) find a negative and persistent effect on productivity levels. Lagerlöf ( 2005 ) explores the link between geography and slavery and also uncovers a negative relationship between slavery and current income. Both across states and counties, Nunn ( 2008b ) reports a negative effect of slavery on per capita income in 2000.

Using the dataset collected by Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2010 ), in Table  4 I provide empirical evidence on the cross-county influence of slavery on the contemporaneous level of development in the USA. Slavery is measured as the share of slaves to the total population in 1860, while the dependent variable is per capita income in different years. After entering geographical controls meant to capture structural differences among different regions of the USA (i.e., dummies for counties within former slave states and for counties within North-Eastern and South-Atlantic states), the relationship is not significant for per capita income in 2000. Across previous decades, the relationship was still significant in 1970, but no longer so in 1980 and 1990. This suggests that the effect of slavery on income is not a robust one.

Turning to the link between slavery and current inequality, in Table  5 I present results for different indicators, all measured in year 2000: income inequality and racial inequality (both computed as Gini indexes) and the fraction of the population below the poverty level. Using the same specification as in Table  4 , i.e., controlling for structural differences across regions, for all dependent variables, slavery always retains a positive and significant coefficient. Thus, there is robust evidence that the distribution of per capita income is more unequal today in counties associated in the past with a larger proportion of slaves in the population, and so is the racial dimension of inequality, while poverty is more widespread.

Furthermore, over a state-level panel dataset of educational attainment across races over the 1940–2000 period collected by Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2010 ), in Table  6 I regress the educational racial gap, at the high-school and bachelor level, on the share of slaves in the population in 1860: the coefficient is significantly positive, which suggests that the impact of slavery may run through the evolution of the educational gap (Table  6 ). Indeed, after the Civil War and abolition, illiteracy was predominant among blacks and progress was very slow until the eve of World War Two.

The hypothesis according to which human capital formation may represent the channel through which the effect of slavery still lingers on in American society echoes of a large literature on race and human capital including Smith ( 1984 ), Margo ( 1990 ), Sacerdote ( 2005 ), and Canaday and Tamura ( 2009 ). The same hypothesis is further developed and tested in Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2014 ), where my coauthor and I employ a Theil decomposition to disentangle the two components of income inequality: inequality across races (racial inequality) and inequality within races (within inequality). The negative and significant influence of slavery is confirmed after controlling for factor endowments and running two-stage least-square regressions. An alternative hypothesis might attribute the effect of slavery on current inequality to racial discrimination. Indeed the bond between slavery and racism, which was non associated with slavery in the Old World and is much weaker in today’s Latin America, is perceived as particularly strong in the USA. To test this additional hypothesis, we create a measure of racial discrimination based on returns to skills, estimate returns to education for blacks and whites, and compute the ratio of average returns for blacks to average returns for whites. The latter turns out to be well below 1, consistently with the presence of discrimination. Using this proxy, we do find that racial discrimination contributes to inequality, but to a much lesser degree if compared to the human capital transmission channel. This conclusion is consistent with Fryer ( 2011 ), who argues that relative to the twentieth century the relevance of discrimination as an explanation for racial inequalities has declined, since racial differences are greatly reduced when one accounts for educational achievement. We conclude with suggestive evidence that the underlying links between past slavery and current inequality run through the political exclusion of former slaves and the resulting negative influence on the local provision of education for black children.

In a companion investigation also by Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2012a ), my coauthor and I shed further light on the evolution of racial educational inequality across states from 1940 to 2000, extending the results illustrated in Table  6 . Despite a gradual reduction of the gap over this period, the evidence shows that the racial gap at the high-school and bachelor level is determined by the initial gap in 1940, which is in turn largely explained by past slavery. The correlation between the racial educational gap in 1940 and the share of slaves over population in 1860 is in fact 0.90 and 0.81, at the high-school and bachelor level, respectively. Two-stage least-square regressions where slavery is used as an instrument for the initial gap confirm this conclusion. The issue of the excludability of slavery is addressed by instrumenting it with the share of disembarked slaves from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, i.e., accounting for the link between the geographic slave distribution following the Middle Passage and the one prevailing after the Second Middle Passage. We also find that income growth over the same period is negatively correlated with the initial racial gap in education, which suggests that slavery also exerts an indirect effect on growth through the education channel.

In Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2012b ), my coauthor and I extend the analysis of the political implications of slavery using a unique dataset on voting registration by race assembled for the counties in the state of Mississippi in 1896, in the middle of the period that witnesses the restoration of the white elites’ supremacy. We show that the disfranchisement measures introduced with the new 1890 state constitution (i.e., the requirement of a poll tax and a literacy test for voting registration) negatively affect the political participation of blacks. However, we also show that the decline starts even earlier, reflecting a process of institutionalization of de facto disfranchisement and thus supporting the fait accompli hypothesis advanced by Key ( 1949 ). Black registration is shown to be more limited in the presence of a larger share of black population, which is in turn highly correlated with a larger share of slaves before abolition. This can be explained by the fact that a majority of black voters represents a more serious threat to white supremacy. The paper also shows that restrictions in black political participation affect educational policies in a persistent fashion, consistently with the previously mentioned contributions. Naidu ( 2012 ) also contains an analysis of the consequences of the disfranchisement measures introduced in Southern states on political and educational outcomes. Acharya et al. ( 2016 ) show that contemporary differences in political attitudes still reflect the intensity of slavery in 1860, with Southern whites more likely to support the Republican party and oppose affirmative action policies in counties more affected by slavery historically. They interpret these results as the long-term consequences of the conservative political attitudes that developed after the Civil War.

Again with special attention to Mississippi data, Chay and Munshi ( 2013 ) focus on the subsequent epoch which, between 1916 and 1930, witnessed the Great Migration of one million of former slaves from the South to the North of the USA. They find that blacks coming from counties characterized by labor-intensive plantation crops represented a disproportionate share of Northern migrants. They attribute this finding to the development of social network externalities that became instrumental in the mobilization process when large coalition of blacks moved together to Northern cities.

As for the case of Africa, the influence of slavery on gender roles and cultural norms has been investigated also for the case of the USA. Mohinyan ( 1965 ) argues that the structure of the black family has been undermined by slavery, with broad consequences on crime and the social condition of blacks. Slavery has also been proposed as an explanation for the racial gap in female labor force participation. Boustan and Collins ( 2014 ) show that for over a century, that is from 1870 until at least 1980, black women were more likely than white women to participate in the labor force and to hold jobs in agriculture or manufacturing. They also show that differences in observables cannot fully account for this racial gap, which confirms the intuition in Goldin ( 1977 ). The latter suggests that female labor force participation reflects a “double legacy” of slavery. A direct effect may have come from the low levels of income and education for blacks, which pushed more black women into the labor market. Moreover, an indirect effect may have come from an intergenerational transmission channel: since black women were forced to work intensively under slavery, African Americans developed different cultural norms about women’s work, with consequent long-term effects. Another cultural implication of slavery is examined by Gouda ( 2013 ), who shows that the slave share in 1860 is correlated with contemporary violent crime, suggesting that the culture of violence that developed under slavery still exerts a lasting effect.

Beside education, human capital is also shaped by health conditions. The hypothesis that the racial gap in life expectancy may be linked to the slave trades has been advanced by Cutler et al. ( 2005 ), who present evidence suggesting that racial differences in sensitivity to salt, a leading and largely hereditary cause of hypertension, may be due to selection during the Middle Passage. Because of intense water loss, the ability to retain salt and hence water substantially increased the chances of survival, which induced slave traders to select captives on the basis of the salt on their skin. Bhalotra and Venkataramani ( 2012 ) find that the impact on adult education and labor market outcomes of the reduction in pneumonia in infancy—thanks to the introduction of antibiotic therapies in the 1930s—decreases with the intensity of slavery in 1860. They interpret this result as a consequence of pre-Civil Rights barriers to realizing returns to human capital investment for blacks born in the South. The genetic resistance to malaria of African slaves has been suggested by Mann ( 2011 ) as the reason why slavery developed in the USA, and indeed Esposito ( 2013 ) documents a correlation between malaria suitability and the diffusion of slavery as well as slave owners’ preferences for slaves more likely to be immune.

To conclude, the evidence for the USA points to a robust influence of past slavery on inequality, while the influence on current income levels is somewhat weaker. The main channel of transmission is to be found in the unequal access to education and the accumulation of human capital for the descendants of slaves. The political mechanism behind the local provision of funding for schools determined an inferior level, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the education inputs accessible for black children, with lingering consequences to the present day.

Despite the fact that the Civil Rights movement and legislation have removed the most visible vestiges of slavery half a century ago, the debate of the consequences of slavery in the USA is still open. Julian L. Simon influentially contributed to it by proposing a calculation of the black reparations bill, which he estimated to amount to about $58 billion, i.e., about 7 % of annual GDP (Simon 1971 ). The awareness that the lingering influence of the history of blacks in America runs through the human capital channel is witnessed by the declared goals of recent federal education programs, from Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Obama’s Race to the Top, which have aimed at the removal of the racial and ethnic educational gaps that persistently afflict the American society. At the same time, however, the fact that in the USA inequality displays a strong racial component has not been sufficiently emphasized in the recent debate on the long-term evolution of income and wealth inequality, propelled by the book by Piketty ( 2014 ). Indeed in his analysis of inequality, Piketty ( 2014 ) only very briefly mentions the racial gap in wealth, despite the fact that—as reported by The Economist ( 2015 )—the median white family in 2013 owned net assets almost thirteen times larger than the median black family. Likewise, Putnam ( 2015 ) stresses the widening divide in attitudes toward nurturing children within all racial groups, thus shifting the focus from race to class as a driver of differences in educational achievement. He claims that achievement gaps between rich and poor pupils belonging to the same race are now larger than those between races of the same income level. In other words, according to his analysis, the class gap has been growing within each racial group, while the gaps between racial groups have been narrowing. However, his conclusions can be challenged on the ground that they are driven more by the worsening performance of poor whites rather than by the improvement of that of blacks.

5 Conclusions

In his book “It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years” (published posthumously as Moore and Simon 2000 ), Julian L. Simon listed the decline of slavery and serfdom around the world—from 75 % of the population in 1750 to 10 % in 2000 (figures are from Engerman 1996 )—as one of the major achievements of civilization. Nevertheless, the evidence I reported clearly documents the lingering influence of past slavery on contemporary outcomes, both for the sending countries in Africa and the receiving countries in the Americas. This pervasive influence spreads across the economic, institutional, political, and cultural spheres.

African slavery has represented one of the largest—albeit coerced—migration experiences in history. Some of the contributions described in this paper do consider some aspects of its specific link with the analysis of migration. Namely, in Bertocchi et al. ( 2015 ), my coauthors and I focus on the link between slave trades and contemporary attitudes toward citizenship acquisition for migrants across African countries. For the USA, in Bertocchi and Dimico ( 2012a ), we look at the association between the distribution of the slaves disembarked along the North-Atlantic coast and the intensity of slavery in 1860, while Chay and Munshi ( 2013 ) emphasize the relationship between plantation slavery and the Great Migration. However, a systematic investigation of the potential links between African slavery and contemporary migration flows and policies is still lacking, and therefore represents a promising area for future research.

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This paper has been prepared for presentation as the Julian Simon Lecture at the 12th IZA Annual Migration Meeting in Dakar in April 2015. I would like to thank conference participants, the editor of this journal and an anonymous referee, for comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Arcangelo Dimico, with whom I co-authored many of the papers that are cited in this paper.

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Undocumented immigrants at work: invisibility, hypervisibility, and the making of the modern slave

• Paulina Segarra   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1710-4458 1 &
• Ajnesh Prasad 2  

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The undocumented immigrant represents a socio-legal category, referring to a subject who does not have legal standing to be in the country in which they are located. Extending from their lack of legal standing, undocumented immigrant workers in the United States occupy spaces marked by extreme conditions of vulnerability, which were exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. The aim of this ethnographic study is to make sense of the experiences of undocumented immigrants under a particularly vicious political rhetoric. Studying the lives of Latinx undocumented immigrant workers in the U.S., our findings capture how the dynamic interplay between the types of labor that they undertake and the socio-legal identity they are attributed function together to systematically disenfranchise them. Specifically, we explicate how doing invisible labor while, at the same time, occupying a hypervisible identity culminates in extreme conditions of vulnerability. In addition to developing the concept of hypervisible identity, we also inform theory on the idea of modern slavery. We contend that without the existence of invisible labor and hypervisible identity performing as interlocking, constitutive precursors, some forms of modern slavery would be negated.

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The undocumented immigrant represents a socio-legal category, referring to someone who does not have the legal standing to be in the country in which they are located. A lack of legal standing is critical in defining undocumented immigrants’ lived experiences. Among other things, it determines “who they are, how they relate to others, their participation in local communities, and their continued relationship to their homeland” (Menjivar, 2006 , p. 1000). While this specific circumstance has a deep impact on the lives of undocumented immigrants, it is an invisible attribute that has a deep impact on their lives.

Extending from not possessing legal standing, undocumented immigrant workers in the United States occupy precarious social and organizational spaces (Heyman, 1998 ; Mehan, 1997 ; Young, 2017 ). The precarity experienced by undocumented immigrant workers was only exacerbated with the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th American president (Giroux, 2017 ). Indeed, the polemical discourse that fermented during the campaign—coupled with the policies that were proposed and enacted in the aftermath of the presidential election—engendered more frequent and more disturbing incidents of symbolic and physical violence against those who embody (and, at times, those who are merely perceived to embody) the category of the undocumented immigrant (Huber, 2016 ).

Several researchers have identified the pressing need to account for the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the backdrop of an increasingly hostile political climate (Chomsky, 2017 ; Ngai, 2017 ). This political climate has established a “war culture” of “normalized violence” (Giroux, 2017 ), with one commentator observing that it is representative of “virulent adherence to white supremacy that opens the discursive doors of public discourses to engage in more overt and violent practices of racism that targets people of color in the U.S. and particularly Latinx immigrants” (Huber, 2016 , p. 216). In response, scholarship published since the presidential election offers preliminary findings into the detrimental outcomes created by political moves towards right-wing populism on the experiences of undocumented immigrants (Romero, 2018 )—especially on critical aspects of life such as health (Gostin and Cathaoir, 2017 ; Reardon, 2017 ) and education (Sulkowski, 2017 ; Talamantes and Aguilar-Gaxiola, 2017 ).

The question of agency is one that frequently arises when talking about immigrants. Mainwaring ( 2016 ) has highlighted the importance of agency when studying migration and asserted that this is a central concept that academics and policymakers should not disregard. On this matter, Schweitzer ( 2017 ) has highlighted the importance of understanding how migrants’ agency has been portrayed as integration and argues that “much of this agency resembles popular understandings and expectations of ‘integration’, that is, of how newcomers, in general, can and should become part of, and accepted by, the receiving society, whether through participation, incorporation or assimilation” (p. 320). Given the substantive and enduring repercussions that the recent transformations in the realm of politics have had on the lives of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., more research on this population is needed.

The aim of this ethnographic study is to understand the experiences of undocumented immigrants under a particularly vicious political rhetoric. Our main research question was: how do Latinx undocumented immigrants experience vulnerability, and how has this condition been exacerbated in the era of Donald Trump’s presidency? Our data collection was guided specifically by the following questions:

What are the lived experiences of undocumented Latinx immigrants in the United States at work and non-work contexts?

What have been the effects of Donald Trump’s rhetoric on undocumented Latinx immigrants’ identities?

What are the effects that precarious work has on undocumented Latinx immigrants’ identities?

This study allowed us to hear the voices of those Latinx immigrants who have left everything behind, hoping to achieve the “American Dream.” In our attempt to understand the extreme conditions of vulnerability under which undocumented immigrants work, we were purposeful in not limiting the scope of our examination predominantly to the nature of the work that they do (Moyce and Schenker, 2018 ; Orrenius and Zavodny, 2009 ) or to the absence of legal standing (Heyman, 1998 ; Menjivar, 2006 ), as has often been the case in extant research on the topic. Instead, we sought to ascertain a nuanced understanding of the myriad of processes occurring in work and non-work contexts by which members of this population are subjugated. Analyzing our data led us to one main discovery, which is this paper’s central contribution: populist rhetoric made the identities of undocumented immigrants hypervisible, and when that new identity is taken in tandem with the types of work that they usually have access to due to their legal—or lack thereof—legal status in the country (i.e., invisible work), has led to conditions of what could be considered modern slavery (Crane, 2013 ).

The remainder of this article unfolds in five substantive sections. First, we offer the theoretical foundation for our study. To capture the contours of life that make work—and other—experiences precarious for undocumented immigrants, we draw upon Butler’s’ ( 2004 ) articulation of vulnerability. Second, we provide a description of the methods of our ethnographic study. In this section, we detail the research context, data collection strategy, and approach to data analysis. Third, we present our findings. Our findings reveal the process by which undocumented immigrant workers experience extreme conditions of vulnerability. Fourth, we discuss the contributions of our study and identify directions for future research. Following our grounded theory approach, our contributions focus on developing a theory on the phenomenon of undocumented immigrants at work. Finally, in the fifth section, we close the article with some concluding remarks.

Theoretical foundations

Judith Butler is a contemporary social theorist whose ideas have meaningfully informed the works of scholars from disciplines across the social sciences and the humanities. Since 9/11, she has devoted much of her attention to conceptualizing the idea of vulnerability. Butler’s ( 2004 ) idea of vulnerability is a germane starting point from which to make sense of the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as it engages the very questions that define their existence—national borders, state violence, and cultural intolerance.

Butler ( 2004 ) conceives vulnerability as the ubiquitous presence of insecurity, exploitation, and exclusion. For Butler, all lives are vulnerable, though vulnerability is not evenly distributed—thus, making some lives more vulnerable than others. She elaborates that within the paradigm of neoliberal capitalism, a value-laden set of social, political, and economic factors render certain lives to merit protections against vulnerability; and, concomitantly, other lives that would not merit such protections. Moreover, Butler specifies which lives need protecting and which lives do not by linking these questions to the discourses perennially invoked in U.S. politics about how to create and maintain invulnerability for its citizens. As she stated in an interview in which she was asked to expand on her position:

And it seems to me that implicitly what’s being promised is that, as a major First World country the US has a right to have our borders remain impermeable, protected from incursion, and to have our sovereignty guarantee our invulnerability to attack; at the same time, others, whose state formations are not like our own, or who are not explicitly in alliance with us, are to be targeted and presumptively treated as expungable, as instrumentalizable, and certainly not as enjoying the same kind of presumptive rights to invulnerability that we do. (Bell, 2010 , p. 147)

Butler elucidates how vulnerability is both socially and corporeally fabricated inasmuch as it ideologically positions certain subjects as others . Once these subjects have been othered, it gives license to cast disproportionate amounts of vulnerability onto them. Indeed, based on this vulnerability, it constructs their lives as “expungable” (insecurity), “instrumentalizable” (exploitation), and not entitled to “presumptive rights” (exclusion).

Interestingly, the bodies of one segment of the population that Butler explicitly qualifies as occupying extreme conditions of vulnerability are undocumented immigrants. Indeed, “illegal immigrants” represent “bodies (that is, human capital) …as becoming increasingly disposable, dispossessed by capital and its exploitative excess, uncountable and unaccounted for” (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013 , p. 29). This assertion is consistent with how extant research has characterized the lived realities of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Indeed, prior scholarship has identified the plethora of ways through which undocumented immigrants are relegated to the margins of society (e.g., Fusell, 2011 ; Passel, 1986 ) and, how this relegation, engenders myriad forms of physical, symbolic, and legal violence (e.g., Menjivar and Abrego, 2012 ; Raj and Silverman, 2002 ).

We seek to extend prior studies on this group by unraveling the various repertoires of social life—and, as importantly, the interrelationships between them—that define extreme conditions of vulnerability in the lives of undocumented immigrant workers in the U.S. In other words, we seek to make sense of the specific processes occurring at work and non-work contexts by which extreme vulnerability is inscribed into their experiences. In the following section, we describe the research setting and methods of our empirical study.

Research setting and methods

To develop a theory around the experiences of undocumented immigrants at work in the United States, we followed a grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006 ; Corbin and Strauss, 2008 ; Glaser and Strauss, 1967 ). This approach allowed us to inductively make sense of our data. In this section, we describe the study’s research context, data collection strategy, and data analysis approach.

Research context and empirical setting

The researcher arrived in Southern California in September 2016, a mere couple of months before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. When Donald Trump was, in fact, elected on 8 November 2016, the researcher noticed how Latinx immigrants immediately became even more vigilant and worried. In fact, her fieldnotes reflect the concerns that she noticed the day after Trump’s election. The notes mention how 9 November 2016 was the quietest day she had experienced while she had been in Southern California since everyone around her seemed to be shocked by the news and the changes this would bring to their lives.

Choosing Southern California to perform a study on undocumented immigrants was not a coincidence. Through research aiming to find the most suitable place to develop a study on undocumented Latinx immigrants, the researcher found that the U.S. is home to approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants, 78% of whom are of Latin American origin (Hayes and Hill, 2017 ). While undocumented immigrants are dispersed across the country, a study by the Pew Research Center has found that southern California houses more undocumented immigrants than any other region in the United States (Passel and Cohn, 2017 ).

Data collection

The researcher adopted an ethnographic approach, relying on fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and documentary data. The data collection for this study occurred between September 2016 and May 2017. After almost nine months in the field, theoretical saturation had been achieved. Even when the stories and observations that participants were sharing were still undoubtedly interesting, they had become repetitive. The researcher’s participation in the ‘Resist’ protest, which occurred on May 1st in Los Angeles, marked the conclusion of the data collection process.

Gaining, securing, and maintaining access to research participants is particularly challenging when studying a highly vulnerable population. Undocumented immigrants are ostensibly vulnerable as they are under constant fear of arrest, prosecution, and deportation for not possessing legal documents to be in the country (Fussell, 2011 ; Hernandez et al. 2013 ). Access was a significant consideration for this study, given that undocumented immigrants were encountering a new wave of political and social backlash during the period of data collection. Namely, at the start of data collection, the leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was running on a xenophobic, anti-immigrant campaign. A couple of months into the commencement of data collection, Trump was elected as president. Making matters even more uncertain for the target population of the study, once he was inaugurated as president, among the first actions Trump took was the issuing of two executive orders that targeted refugees and undocumented immigrants.

The researcher was born and raised in Mexico and is fluent in Spanish. These facts offered her an initial level of legitimacy with the target population—Latinx undocumented immigrants. She also took several other steps to increase her legitimacy. Heeding Pettica-Harris, DeGama, and Elias’ ( 2016 ) observation that modifying physical appearance is an important factor in gaining access, the researcher darkened her hair and dressed modestly to be more esthetically relatable to the research participants. Ultimately, her cultural background, language skills, and esthetics increased her status of “insiderness” (Labaree, 2002 , p.102). A methodological advantage of a researcher being an insider is that it lowers the probability of encountering distrust, aggressiveness, and exclusion (Geertz, 1991 ).

Being an insider, namely, speaking the same language and aiming to somehow look like the research participants, allowed the researcher to eventually become part of the community. When reflecting on the implications that making such changes had on both the researcher and research participants; it was not done with the intention to deceive them but aiming to fit in an already vigilant community. The researcher always presented herself as a doctoral student from Mexico and when people asked more questions regarding her degree, she was always happy to answer.

Ethnographic approach

To build trust with the target population, the researcher volunteered at a large Church in Southern California that attended a Latinx congregation. This Church has a dedicated social services office that serves undocumented immigrants, the elderly, and the homeless. The social services office employed one full-time staff member, who was an undocumented immigrant herself.

In her role as a volunteer, the researcher participated in all the activities of the social services office by working closely with the full-time staff member, working 8-hour shifts at least 4 days a week, starting by the end of her first month in the field. A regular presence at the Church’s social services office allowed her to interact with and earn the trust of undocumented immigrants who sought the services of the office—and who would have likely otherwise viewed her with suspicion.

Through one of the research participants she originally met at the Church, the researcher also volunteered at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). CHIRLA was founded in 1986 as a response to the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which made the hiring of undocumented immigrants a crime (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, n.d. ). At CHIRLA, the researcher became an active participant in the organization. On occasion, she also did office hours at CHIRLA’s offices, where she would pick up phones and provide basic information to immigrants who contacted the agency. Alongside these activities, dozens of informal conversations were carried out with fellow CHIRLA members, which were recorded as fieldnotes.

In order to interview undocumented immigrants who made a living as day laborers, the researcher visited five Home Depot locations. Day laborers typically gather in and around Home Depot parking lots awaiting potential jobs. Given that day laborers at these locations were exclusively men, at CHIRLA, she recruited the assistance of an older man who was himself an undocumented day laborer. He introduced her to the day laborers in and around the parking lots. The presence of this person—as both a man and an undocumented immigrant who was known to some of the day laborers—provided another layer of legitimacy to this population.

In sum, physical and social access to the target population was enabled by “gatekeepers” at various sites who “offered efficient and expedient routes to participants that would otherwise be difficult to access” (Clark, 2011 , p. 489). These gatekeepers were paramount in this study as they created trust between the researcher and the research participants by mitigating suspicion (Clark, 2011 ).

Finally, to achieve a deeper understanding of the scope of the work that undocumented immigrants perform, the researcher joined some of the participants during their work shifts at various locations. For example, on three separate occasions, she went with the Church’s social office worker, who held a second job as a cleaner, on her overnight shifts at a local Best Buy. While participating at these work sites, the researcher not only observed the participants’ work, but also performed many of the activities herself.

Semi-structured interviews

During the fieldwork stage of the study, the researcher conducted 62 interviews with undocumented immigrants from Latin America, each of which lasted between 45 minutes and two hours. While language preference for the interviews was left to the discretion of the research participants, all participants elected to have their interviews conducted in Spanish. These interviews were audio-recorded and later transcribed into verbatim text. This text was subsequently translated into English. The research participants were mostly cleaners, domestic workers, and day laborers, whom the researcher met at the Church, CHIRLA, Home Depot parking lots, and through the adoption of the snowballing technique. The questions in the interviews mostly revolved around research participants’ life and work circumstances in their countries of origin and in the U.S., as well as the challenges they encountered as a result of being undocumented immigrants. The interviews took place at different locations; sometimes, people would agree to talk with the researcher at the Church’s basement, other times on the streets while day laborers were waiting for a job, and she was once invited to one of the participants’ homes to have lunch and interview some of her friends.

Documentary data

Documentary data were collected during data collection, which included meeting minutes of CHIRLA, ‘Know Your Rights’ workshop materials, flyers which were provided by the Mexican consulate, ‘Preparing Your Family for Immigration Enforcement’ documents provided by the Roman Catholic Diocese, and ‘Lobbying Guidelines’ provided by CHIRLA from the Sacramento visit. In order to capture how undocumented immigrants were being represented in the media during the data collection period, targeted searches of newspapers, magazines, and websites were also conducted. Specifically, Time Magazine , the CNN website, The Wall Street Journal , and The Guardian were scanned to ascertain a national perspective, while the Los Angeles Times and the Voice of San Diego were examined to acquire a local perspective. In addition, Univision News was also scanned as it represents a widely consumed media outlet by the American-based Latinx population. The search yielded a total of 26 media articles that were considered relevant to the phenomenon under study. This collection of documentary data provided us with a real-time set of documents that illuminated the most pressing issues confronting undocumented immigrants in the wake of Trump’s presidential nomination and election.

Data analysis

In Footnote 1 following the tradition of grounded theory, hypotheses were not developed prior to the data being collected (Corbin and Strauss, 2008 ). Data analysis was performed in an iterative manner, which commenced while the researcher was in the field. As initial interviews and documentary evidence were collected and analyzed in the early stages of fieldwork, unforeseen aspects of the undocumented immigrant experience emerged. The interview guide evolved as a result (Charmaz, 2014 ) and, whenever possible, the researcher went back to previously interviewed research participants with new questions.

Grounded theory charges researchers with the task of observing data in ways that allow them to develop theoretical insights by conceptualizing the connections between the ideas revealed by the data, of which research participants themselves might not be aware (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton, 2013 ). After reading the interview transcripts, a list of relevant concepts and themes was developed, which sought to identify passages in which research participants spoke about their thoughts and feelings, their lives in the U.S., and their experiences at work.

NVivo software was used to analyze data comprehensively and systematically. This process reduces the opportunities for data not to be captured during analysis (Bazeley and Jackson, 2013 ). Using NVivo allowed the authors to apply the approach to the grounded theory proposed by Gioia et al. ( 2013 ). More specifically, during the first phase of data analysis, transcripts were analyzed with the intent to allow codes to surface. Comparative analysis (Corbin and Strauss, 2008 ) was then used in order to find connections and dissimilarities between the identified passages. While comparing these quotes, we aimed to find the most prevalent issues raised by the research participants, which led us to first-order concepts. Focused coding (Charmaz, 2006 ) further allowed us to use the most meaningful initial codes to distill and classify data. Additionally, axial coding allowed us to build links between our data (Charmaz, 2015 ). Subsequently, second-order themes were ascertained based on the similarities between the first-order concepts, leading to more “theoretically revelatory” categories (Eury et al. 2018 , p. 833). Table 1 provides illustrative excerpts representative of second-order themes. As Gioia and colleagues ( 2013 ) suggested, performing this type of analysis allows for the conflation of informants’ and researchers’ voices, which links the data and allows for the emergence of new concepts and processes.

We went back and forth between the selected excerpts we identified from a set of core themes, which captured three aggregate dimensions: invisible labor , hypervisible identity , and modern slavery . We analyzed the dimensions in pursuance of the attainment of integration (Corbin and Strauss, 2008 ), which entails making sense of how the aggregate dimensions are related. This procedure allowed us to build an inductive model, which illuminates the connections between data and theory (Gioia et al. 2013 ). Our inductive model, which we explicate in our discussion, lends authenticity to our findings as it identifies how the aggregate dimensions are linked. Figure 1 offers the data structure that inductively emerged from the analysis.

Figure 1 identifies what constitutes invisible labor and the process by which hypervisible identity is socially constructed. The model depicts how the doing of invisible labor while, at the same time, occupying a hypervisible identity engenders a form of modern slavery.

The corpus of the data emanating from this study—including the ethnography, documentary evidence, and interviews—was theoretically revealing. The theoretical revelations inform the process model offered in Fig. 1 , which we use, following Eury and colleagues ( 2018 ), to structure this section. Figure 2 illuminates which themes emerged from our data analysis and shows the relationship(s) between the emergent themes. Specifically, Fig. 1 identifies what constitutes invisible labor and the process by which hypervisible identity is socially constructed. The model then depicts how the doing of invisible labor while, at the same time, occupying a hypervisible identity engenders a form of modern slavery.

Figure presents the data structure, showing first-order codes, second-order themes, and aggregate dimensions.

Figure 2 presents the data structure, showing first-order codes, second-order themes, and aggregate dimensions. To contextualize our claims and to underscore the interplay between second-order themes and aggregate dimensions, throughout this section, we will include some exemplary quotes from the interviews as well as other sources of data.

Invisible labor

Undocumented immigrants are habitually relegated to doing invisible labor. Invisible labor represents work that is largely unseen and meaningfully underappreciated by others; labor that is taken for granted and is only noticed when it is not performed. The fact that undocumented laborers are not taken into consideration most of the time renders them invisible to American society, which benefits from their work. As Herod and Aguiar ( 2006 , p. 427) observe when discussing cleaners, “most of us know when somewhere has not been cleaned but few of us…stop to think much about the laboring process which goes into maintaining spaces as clean.” Invisible work is especially tenable under circumstances when work is performed outside the formal labor market—such work is classified as not constructively contributing to the national economy (Daniels, 1988 ; Leonard, 1998 ). In our study, research participants reflected on the kind of jobs that are available to them, considering their lack of legal status. Invisible labor performed by undocumented immigrants manifested in two forms: (i) devalued work and (ii) dirty work.

Devalued work

How someone attributes meaning to the work that they do is intersubjectively constructed through the interactions between the individual who does the work and those with whom the individual is socially and professionally related (Wrzesniewski et al. 2003 ). Also, how a worker is treated by others will inform how they make sense of the value of their work as well as their professional worth (Dutton et al. 2016 ). Research participants appeared cognizant of the fact that the work that they do is not valued by others with whom they interact in the community, including those for whom they perform the work. As Rosa, a 43-year-old restaurant worker from El Salvador described, “that’s what they don’t see, it’s what these presidents don’t see…our effort. They think only about their own well-being, but they don’t think about the well-being of Latinx undocumented immigrants.” Rosa had been living in the United States for over 8 years after crossing the Rio Grande using car tires as makeshift rafts.

Undocumented immigrants undertaking devalued work is an established fact in the United States, with the well-recited proverb, undocumented immigrants do the work that Americans refuse to do , only adding veracity to the point. When asked about the reason for why undocumented immigrants do devalued work, Miguel, a Guatemalan day laborer responded: “They charge less, they take the toughest jobs, that’s why Latinxs are chosen. Gabachos (Americans) are going to take longer and will charge more money.” Edgar, a 30-year-old Guatemalan farm worker bitterly stated while waiting for a job at a street corner during a warm day in sunny California: “ Gabachos ( Americans) don’t want to do these jobs because it’s too tough…they’re afraid of the sun.”.

Research participants elaborated on feeling devalued by illuminating what Chang ( 2016 ) refers to as, their own disposability. Oscar, a Mexican man who had previously worked a factory, said: “We [undocumented immigrant workers] are disposable, once one doesn’t perform as needed, they can just bring another one.” This participant had first-hand experience of “feeling disposable” as he was replaced immediately after he had a work accident, which did not allow him to work anymore.

Further, devalued work was personally experienced by the researcher when she accompanied one of the participants on her shift as a janitor at Best Buy. The researcher reflected in her fieldnotes:

I followed her around while she skillfully worked a ghostbuster looking vacuum, leaned down to pick garbage up and pulled a 60 ft. cable around…all at the same time. Incredibly, other Best Buy’s workers wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence and would, nonchalantly, step on the cable. Others would just jump over the cable without even looking at who was cleaning the store.

The term “dirty work” refers to those “tasks and occupations that are likely to be perceived as disgusting or degrading” (Hughes cited in Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999 , p. 413) and are culturally tainted (Ashforth et al. 2017 ; Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021 , 2022 ). Participants engaged in a wide array of what they referred to as dirty work, including house cleaning, caretaking, and landscaping. One of the participants, Estela, a Mexican woman who had been living in the U.S. without legal documents for a decade, shared one of her worst experiences with doing dirty work when she reflected on working as a janitor at a large store:

I found that one of the toilets in the men’s room was clogged with a lot of toilet paper. [Once I tried to remove the toilet paper] I saw that it was clogged with the security device that is attached to merchandise to prevent theft…It looked like someone had tried to steal something and when the alarm broke it started to make noise. In order to stop the noise, the person must have thrown the alarm into the toilet. You could still hear a very faint noise. I imagine someone else tried to use the toilet and when he flushed it, it all flooded…When I saw what happened, I cried! I looked at all the mess and thought, ‘I’m going to have to clean it, how am I going to do it?’

Individuals who perform dirty work typically experience some form of social stigmatization for doing such work (Bosmans et al. 2016 ; Duffy, 2007 ). In the study, participants explained how they were ontologically marked; that because they did dirty work, employers considered them to be dirty themselves. While riding the bus to go lobbying in Sacramento along with undocumented immigrants seeking to speak to state senators regarding immigrant rights, the researcher spoke to Claudia, a Mexican cleaning lady who recalled: “Once, a lady told me ‘you can’t use the restroom, but if you must use it, you have to clean it afterwards’…I felt humiliated. I’m not dirty!” Rocío, another Mexican cleaning lady, described an incident experienced by her husband: “They wouldn’t let him sit on the couch because they thought that he was dirty—that he smelled bad.” These denigrating comments have the effect of diminishing the undocumented immigrants’ perception of who they are, which has a lasting effect on their sense of self-worth and their idea of being helpless in a country where they have found opportunities amidst hardships.

The participants were cognizant of the fact that the dirty work they did represented the labor that no one else would want to do. As Claudia, who had previously worked as a seamstress when she arrived in the United States over two decades before, described: “No one wants to do the work that we [undocumented immigrants] do. Not cleaning, sewing, fast food jobs, or working the field.” Similarly, Oscar, a Guatemalan day laborer, who had lived in California for over a decade, asserted: “If Trump is set on getting rid of all illegal people, I don’t think an American is going to go wash toilets for minimum wage.” In both quotes, participants suggest that the “dirty jobs” that they undertake would not be performed by American-born citizens or others with legal residency status would do it for a considerably higher amount of money.

Hypervisible identity

Foucault ( 1977 ) used subjectivity to conceptualize how individuals devise their sense of self (i.e., identity). For Foucault, subjectivity is a discursive, identity-forming project that establishes how individuals perceive themselves, which, in turn, determines how they relate to others. Butler ( 1997 ) adopted Foucualt’s meaning of the term to argue that subjectivity is only possible when one’s identity is recognized in social discourse—that is, when one is recognized by others. Extending the works of Foucault and Butler, we define hypervisible identity as the sense of self that is formed when the recognition from others is cast with the intent to discursively and juridically control one’s existence by rendering their subjectivity to be readily available for social and political interrogation. The study reveals that hypervisible identity emerged as the corollary of three interrelated social phenomena directed towards undocumented immigrants: (i) targeting them in political rhetoric, (ii) moral panic, and (iii) ubiquitous surveillance.

Targets of political rhetoric

While undocumented immigrants have often been the targets of political rhetoric in the U.S., Trump’s toxic anti-immigrant and xenophobic discourse only heightened their vulnerability (Giroux, 2017 ). When announcing his bid for the Republican nomination for president on 16 June 2015, Trump stated: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Koplan, 2016 ). Trump echoed his claim in the following tweet directed at undocumented immigrants: “Illegal immigration costs the United States more than 200 billion Dollars a year. How was this allowed to happen?” In another tweet, he added: “Mexico is not our friend. They’re killing us at the border and they’re killing us on jobs and trade. FIGHT!” Note how Trump makes a call for action (‘FIGHT!’) that was directed at undermining any sense of security of immigrants who crossed the border into the US illegally. In fact, as Saramo ( 2017 ) has stated, “the rise of Donald Trump…has relied on emotional evocations of violence—fear, threats, aggression, hatred, and division” (p.1).

Trump reified his anti-immigrant and xenophobic discourse by signing executive orders shortly after being inaugurated as president. On 25 January 2017, two executive orders were signed that ostensibly targeted undocumented immigrants. Trump justified his executive orders by asserting: “[A] nation without borders is not a nation…I just signed two Executive Orders that will save thousands of lives, millions of jobs, and billions of dollars” (Smith, 2017 ).

Research participants described the uncertainty engendered by being the targets of political rhetoric. One month after President Trump took office, the researcher had the chance to speak with several women who were part of the domestic workers coalition. During one interview, Rocío, an undocumented cleaning lady originally from Mexico poignantly said:

Now with what’s happening with the president…he made all the people who were already racist to come out. He made these hidden people to come out and feel with the freedom to reject us, disrespect us, yell at us, offend us. He encouraged this.

Similarly, others commented: “I never thought a crazy man would be president…he is encouraging the people who are racist like him” (Edgar) and “the new president wants to separate us from our kids” (Maru).

Being targeted in political rhetoric had direct and far-reaching effects on the undocumented immigrant community. Los Angeles Police Chief, Charlie Beck, cited one such detrimental outcome. Beck stated that undocumented immigrants were refraining from reporting incidents of sexual assault and domestic violence due to the fear that engaging with the police would lead to deportation (Queally, 2017 ).

Moral panic

Being targeted in political rhetoric functioned as a precursor to moral panic. Moral panic refers to “[a] condition, episode, person, or groups of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” (Cohen, 1972 , p. 9). During moral panics, societal harm may either be “alleged but imaginary” or “real but exaggerated” (Goode & Ben Yehuda cited in Laws, 2016 , p. 12). Moral panic developed against undocumented immigrants, who were portrayed as job-stealing criminals whom the citizenry needed urgent protection (Stupi, Chiricos, and Gertz, 2016 ; for a related argument on the outcome of this phenomenon on legal immigrants, see Zatz and Smith, 2012 ). Moral panic against undocumented immigrants is not grounded in any such reality. Extant research has consistently shown undocumented immigrants do not commit disproportionately higher rates of crime than others in the U.S. (O’Brien et al. 2019 ; Wang, 2012 ); in fact, statistically speaking, undocumented immigrants engage in lower rates of crime relative to others (Light and Miller, 2018 ).

Although this moral panic is not based in fact, it did have material consequences on the experiences of undocumented immigrants—and others who were perceived to be “one of them.” Indeed, there was a proliferation of violence against undocumented immigrants from members of the public who perceived them as threats to the existing social order. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, Univision News reported that they received hundreds of cases of anti-immigrant physical and non-physical violence (Weiss, 2017 ). A candid example of this violence was offered by CNN in a report about a homeless man of Latin descent being assaulted and urinated on by two men with one of them declaring: “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported” (Ferrigno, 2015 ).

During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he invoked the death of Kate Steinle, a young woman who had allegedly been murdered in San Francisco by a Mexican undocumented immigrant. Trump stated, “This senseless and totally preventable act of violence committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another example of why we must secure our border immediately…This is an absolutely disgraceful situation, and I am the only one that can fix it” (Schleifer, 2015 ). Trump even made a point of meeting with family members of people killed by undocumented immigrants as a part of his political campaign (Gray, 2015 ). When José Inés García Zárate, the man accused of Steinle’s death, was acquitted in late November 2017, Trump responded with two tweets that aggrandized the fear of undocumented immigrants that the American population was already experiencing: “A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people in our Country are so angry with illegal immigration” and “The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court. His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice. BUILD THE WALL!” (Tatum, 2017 ). While conducting fieldwork, the researcher noticed the conspicuous apprehension felt by some Americans who, fostered by toxic political rhetoric, interpreted undocumented immigrants to be an omnipresent threat. This apprehension among Americans was captured during a conversation with a Mexican day laborer who said that after Trump’s statements, he was getting fewer jobs since employers were afraid to take him to their homes, fearing that their physical well-being and their property would be at risk. Trump had previously been seen as a celebrity and a successful businessman, so there were people eagerly willing to follow his ideas (Mollan and Geesin, 2020 ).

The outcomes of moral panic against undocumented immigrants were also represented in the interviews. One of the research participants, María, a woman from Honduras, described how she had been verbally attacked on the streets: “Once I was walking by, and someone said, ‘oh, look! All of them illegal immigrants, all of them, all those people are shit. They are trash.’” Another participant described his experience while waiting for a job as a day laborer: “The gabachos (Americans) go by and say, ‘those are the ones who need to be deported’” (Edgar). In the construction of this moral panic, undocumented immigrants are configured as deviants whose extrication from the country (“need to be deported”) will establish the proper social order.

Ubiquitous surveillance

Political rhetoric and moral panic, when taken collectively, establish ubiquitous surveillance in the lives of undocumented immigrants. Surveillance of this group manifested ubiquitously through two distinct, though mutually constituting, forms: social constructions and discursive constructions. That is, for undocumented immigrants, it involved being both surveilled by others and surveilling themselves. The latter phenomenon is perhaps best reflected in Foucault’s ( 1997 ) idea of the panopticon—the gaze under which subjects monitor their behavior through internalized governance.

The first form of ubiquitous surveillance appeared to be socially constructed. Immediately following Trump’s inauguration, there were some high-profile raids by ICE agents in Southern California. The chilling effects of these raids were felt immediately among undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants became fearful of being constantly watched by authorities who might at any time raid a residence or place of employment to arrest them. The uncertainty of arrest (and subsequent deportation) was evidenced by the numerous individuals who spoke with the researcher when they visited the Church’s social office and CHIRLA seeking advice about what they should do in case of arrest. At the Church, among other things, the full-time employee (and the researcher) handed out a flyer entitled “Preparing Your Family for Immigration Enforcement,” which was prepared by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The document detailed the necessary precautions that undocumented immigrants should take given the increasingly hostile climate towards them (e.g., have an emergency plan, what to do during a raid, what to do if immigration officers visit your home, what your rights are under detention). Similarly, CHIRLA workers would furnish “rights cards” to undocumented immigrants, which they were to provide to ICE officers in case of arrest. The card read:

I am giving you this card because I do not wish to speak to you or have any further contact with you. I choose to exercise my constitutional right to remain silent and refuse to answer your questions. If you arrest me, I will continue to exercise my right to remain silent and refuse to answer any of your questions. I want to speak to a lawyer before answering your questions. I would like to contact this attorney or Organization:

Interestingly, documents such as these only further inculcated, among undocumented immigrants, the omnipresent sense that they are being watched and at risk of arrest.

The second form of ubiquitous surveillance was, in essence, caused by the first form. Specifically, the social construction of ubiquitous surveillance was shown to be experienced discursively. In assuming that they were being watched, undocumented immigrants internalized the surveillance and began to change how they behaved in meaningful ways. For instance, several research participants quit their jobs in fear of encountering ICE. Out of necessity, others kept working, though the fear remained significant. While being interviewed at a Home Depot parking lot, Juan, a 22-year-old day laborer who had arrived in the U.S. only a month before, said:

I’m afraid to come to work because if Immigration [an ICE officer] sees me…I want to be honest with the law. I want to abide the law, what the law says but, how am I supposed to eat now? I have to work, I have to fight for my daughter, for my wife.

Similarly, Roberto, another Mexican day laborer recalled: “On the subway, you do not see so many Latin people that come to work anymore… It has been a problem for me since I am afraid that I might run into an immigration agent in a subway station.”

The discursive effects of ubiquitous surveillance were associated with psychological problems such as anxiety and paranoia. Victoria, an undocumented immigrant of Mexican origin who continuously volunteered at CHIRLA, felt detrimentally impacted by the new stories about the ongoing ICE raids, which instilled into the participant that fear of imminent raid. As she explained:

I don’t want to go out, even yesterday I was locked in all day…I didn’t even want to go to the grocery store which is very close. I didn’t want to go out at all. I heard people going upstairs and I quickly looked through the window to check who it was. I was anxious, completely anxious and on edge…I am taking pills to feel calmer since we heard the news about the raids.

The routines of Victoria’s life were altered dramatically as she internalized the (fear of) ubiquitous surveillance. The following account from her further underscores this point:

Even now when I left the house, I saw someone who was talking, a man who was speaking English with someone and I thought I better went back [home]. I went back because I thought maybe he was talking to someone. And he [my son] is also scared, every time he hears someone knocking on the door, he runs to the bedroom.

Modern slavery

Even after the legal abolition of slavery around the world, slavery is a phenomenon that has not entirely dissipated (Bales, 2012 ). The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that currently, forty million people are under some form of slavery that exacts from them, forced labor (United Nations, 2018 ). Forced labor refers to:

[W]ork that is performed involuntarily and under the menace of any penalty. It refers to situations in which persons are coerced to work through the use of violence or intimidation, or by more subtle means such as manipulated debt, retention of identity papers or threats of denunciation to immigration authorities. (ILO, 2012 )

This definition is adopted by Crane ( 2013 , p. 51) in the field of management and organization studies, who describes modern slaves as satisfying the following criteria: “(1) people [who] are forced to work through threats; (2) owned or controlled by an “employer” typically through mental, physical or threatened abuse; (3) dehumanized and treated as a commodity; and (4) physically constrained or restricted in freedom of movement.” Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. all too often meet the conditions of modern slavery. The conditions of modern slavery experienced by undocumented immigrants—as well as their concomitant outcomes—emerged in the study in four distinct ways: i) wage theft, ii) precarious work conditions, iii) workplace bullying, and iv) no recourse.

Latinx undocumented immigrants leave their homelands due “devastating social, political, and economic conditions” (Segarra and Prasad, 2020 : 176) and are desperate to secure a living when they illegally arrive in the United States. In theory, undocumented immigrants in the United States, have the same rights as every other worker with some exceptions such as unions and unemployment insurance; furthermore, the same wage and hour laws apply to every worker, and they have the right to file a wage claim and to collect State Disability Insurance (Legal Aid at Work, 2023). The Immigration Control and Reform Act (IRCA) bans the conscious hiring of undocumented immigrants but does allow them to work independently. This puts workers in vulnerable positions since often, they get precarious jobs and do not know the rights they are entitled to while working in the United States. As García Quijano (n.d.) has asserted, “undocumented workers often lack, in practice, the rights and protections enshrined in the laws that could benefit them.”

Wage theft is defined as “the failure of employers to pay their employees the full amount they have earned” (Galvin, 2016 , p. 325). Wage theft is a common form of victimization encountered by undocumented immigrants (Fussell, 2011 ). Undocumented immigrants experience wage theft extending from the fear of being reported to ICE, and other government authorities, by unscrupulous employers who want to avoid paying them for their work (Bobo, 2011 ).

Research participants described how some employers went as far as to explicitly tell them that their immigration status was the reason why they were not being paid. Luis, a Mexican day laborer who had been in the U.S. for over 12 years recalled such an experience: “The worst experience is that they take you, you work, and there’s no money. They tell you, ‘you can do whatever you want, I’m a citizen, you are an illegal.’” In this situation, the employer even challenged the undocumented immigrant worker (“you can do whatever you want”), knowing that he will not go to the police because of what Fussell ( 2011 ) has termed, ‘the deportation threat dynamic’. During a different interview, Gustavo, a man who had just got back into the U.S. after being deported, agreed to be interviewed at the Church’s basement. He got very emotional while expressing the feelings conjured when employers refused to pay him:

They didn’t pay me because they knew I’m illegal and just like that, nothing happened. They just said they would be right back to pay, and they didn’t come back. I trusted them, and they didn’t return. They do it because you can’t defend yourself…Once I cried because I wasn’t paid… I had plans with that little money and yes, I cried…. I don’t want to remember that.

Another moving response came from María, a homeless woman who described how she felt after not getting paid:

The worst thing is not getting paid because I’m excited, I’m hungry, sometimes asking for money to take the bus to go to work. Then, when I don’t get paid, I let down the person I borrowed the money from…I know what being hungry is like. [When I don’t get paid] I cry all night, I cry and wonder if it’s God’s punishment.

Together these quotes reflect the devastating impact that wage theft has on undocumented immigrant workers, as they often do not have accrued savings upon which they can depend during financial exigencies.

Victoria used to work as a house cleaner and she further elaborated on the cruel reality of wage theft for undocumented immigrants:

My brother and I painted houses, and we painted many. When we were about to finish the job, they would kick us out not to pay us…We would tell them we were there to finish the job, and the owners would say: ‘Who are you? If you don’t leave now, we are going to call the police.’ We would ask: ‘What do you mean you don’t know us? If we came to work yesterday, we were working!’ They would reply: ‘No, go! Otherwise, we will call the police!’

Precarious work conditions

While earlier we described how undocumented immigrants do culturally devalued and dirty work, it is equally important to note that they do such work (and others) under precarious work conditions. Precarious work conditions involve “employment that is uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg, 2009 , p. 2). This definition is extended by Vosko ( 2010 , p. 2), who describes precarious work as, “work for remuneration characterized by uncertainty, low income, and limited social benefits and statutory entitlements.” Precarious conditions often characterize the work done by undocumented immigrants, a claim that has been confirmed in a study by Orrenius and Zavodny ( 2009 ). The authors conclude that undocumented immigrants not only do low-skilled work but also physically dangerous and riskier jobs relative to legal residents.

While working under precarious conditions, undocumented immigrants often become victims of workplace accidents. This is vividly captured by Roberto, a young day laborer who, while sitting on the sidewalk next to the researcher at a Home Depot parking lot, described an accident he had at work:

I got hit by a leaf blower… At first, I wasn’t taken to a clinic…Maybe about two hours later he [the employer] said he would take me to a clinic to get stitches…I got 28 stitches on my head and asked him to help me get an MRI. He said he didn’t have money and that it wasn’t necessary…I couldn’t work for ten days and when pay day came, he refused to pay me.

While Roberto was the victim of a significant workplace injury, he was in no way compensated for the days that he could not work as a direct result of that injury.

Edgar, a 30-year-old day laborer from Guatemala, described a workplace accident in which he was involved and linked it to the consequences of being undocumented:

I tripped with a machine, I used to spray a vineyard in Malibu… I hurt my back while spraying chemicals, I got asthma. They didn’t pay for the hospital, and I was getting the bill. In order to get disability, you need to have social [security number] and if you don’t get a lawyer, you get nothing.

No remuneration was offered to the victim as he would need to get a lawyer and make a legal case against the employer, which would only heighten threats of arrest, prosecution, and deportation.

Precarious work conditions are made more problematic by the fact that most undocumented immigrants do not have access to health insurance. In the specific case of the state of California—a state that is relatively more liberal towards undocumented immigrants than others—health insurance is available for undocumented immigrants only if they are either under twenty years of age or pregnant (Covered California, 2019 ). Not having access to health insurance and knowing that employers will not assume financial responsibility for workplace injuries, Carolina, a Mexican domestic worker, described the need to be especially cautious while on the job and even being advised by employers to be careful: “You have to go upstairs and downstairs carefully… [employers say] ‘be careful! Don’t hurt yourself because here there is no insurance!’”

Workplace bullying

Workplace bullying takes place when someone is “teased, badgered, and insulted, and perceives that he or she has little recourse to retaliate in kind…bullying may take the form of open verbal or physical attacks on the victim” (Zapf and Einarsen, 2001 , p.370). At the crux of workplace bullying is the question of power; namely, one’s ability to exercise power over another in efforts to demean. Given how power is central to workplace bullying, it appears commonly in asymmetrical power relationships where highly skewed levels of power are held by the parties involved, including, especially, between employers and employees.

The participants described workplace bullying to manifest in the form of abuse both on their body and their dignity. Carolina, a domestic worker who kindly hosted the researcher so that she could interview other domestic workers at her home, recalled the following experience:

I knelt down, and I was scraping [the floor]. Then she [my boss] kicked something at me and said: ‘It’s done with this because you are going to stain the floor with that type of cleaner!’ I felt so bad there that I started crying…It was the pain of not being able to say anything or not knowing what to say… I kept scraping and then she grabbed me by the hair and said, ‘don’t tell me that you are crying!’

This was hardly shown to be an isolated incident as similar stories were shared by others—especially house cleaners. While talking with the researcher at one of CHIRLA’s empty call-center offices, Lupita, another 65-year-old Mexican woman, teared up while recalling an appalling event that she experienced during a day at work:

Once my boss asked me to clean silver. I didn’t do it well and she got very mad because I scratched it. I didn’t know how to do it properly. She got the cleaning rag and scratched my hand and said: ‘Look! Now you can feel how my scratched silverware feels!’ I started to cry but I didn’t want her to see my tears because I felt very bad.

Here, the interviewee was not only physically abused by her boss but was verbally attacked when she had her hand scratched, comparing it to what she had done to the owner’s utensils.

Other undocumented immigrants described the bullying at work that they experienced as unmitigated derogation. Dionisio, a young man who often volunteered at the Church, recalled: “When I started to work, I was afraid to say something back…They would call me pinche puto [fucking faggot] and pinche illegal [fucking illegal].”

Participants described how they acquiesced to workplace bullying. Angel, who had worked as a plumber in the U.S. for over 10 years said: “Sometimes people will mistreat you…the best thing to do is keep silent because you are undocumented. It’s better to keep silent… It is humiliation.” Ana, a 40-year-old Mexican woman working as a seamstress, went to the church one day seeking legal help since she was about to be evicted from her home. She agreed to talk to the researcher about her experiences in the United States and poignantly described how she endured bullying to make a living for herself and her family:

They [employers] abuse us [undocumented immigrants] too much because they know that since we’re undocumented, we can’t lose the job and we want to be able to say ‘today, I’m getting money for my kids.’ That’s why you stand so many humiliations.

No recourse

The Department of Labor represents the American government at the ILO and is responsible for ensuring that worker rights are assured. Such rights pertain to, among other things, the elimination of discrimination, occupational health, and safety, as well as wages and hours of work (U.S. Department of Labor, 2019 ). As the previous sub-sections have shown, as a direct outcome of not possessing legal standing, undocumented immigrants are bereft of these rights. Except for a small minority of cases, the deportation threat dynamic effectively thwarts undocumented immigrants from seeking redress to the different types of violations occurring at work (Fussell, 2011 ).

While undocumented immigrants recognized that they frequently had their basic rights violated by employers, they expressed that they did not have any recourse by which to rectify such violations. José, a Guatemalan day laborer, described how impotent he had felt after not being paid for his work and not being able to do anything about it due to his undocumented status:

A few years ago, I went to work in San Francisco to change beds at a hotel. We worked there for seven days. They [the employer] took us there. When we got back, they told us we would get paid the next day because it was late…they ran away without paying us. At the time we wanted to do something, to get a lawyer. But the first thing we were told was, ‘you don’t have papers, there’s nothing you can do.’ So, we didn’t do anything.

Luis, a Mexican day laborer who even described his experience in the United States, as the “American nightmare” expressed sentiments more directly, with one interviewee declaring: “The way I see it, if you don’t have papers, you don’t have rights.”. Lidia, a young woman of Mexican origin working as a caregiver of Mexican origin, explained some of what being denied worker rights means for her in practice: “The most difficult part of being in the United States is not having rights to have paid days off, sick leaves, holidays…that’s the most difficult part.”

Overall, the research participants pointed to how not possessing legal status meant that they did not have access to the same labor rights afforded to other workers. There is no recourse available to them when they encounter any number of work-related violations. From the interviews, it became abundantly clear that no recourse functions as the antecedent that provisions for specific work-related violations to occur, three of which were captured in this study—wage theft, precarious work conditions, and bullying. Undocumented immigrants described acquiescence and silence to be the normative response to gross mistreatment at work. Indeed, having no recourse translated, for undocumented immigrants, into a form of indentured servitude, wherein they worked without basic protections that workers in the U.S. (and most other countries) are assured.

Based on a rich dataset that included 9-month ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and myriad sources of documentary evidence, our grounded study revealed several important theoretical insights for understanding undocumented immigrants at work. These theoretical insights are visualized in Fig. 1 . This grounded study developed the concept of hypervisible identity, which is not only new to the extant literature but is, at face value, contradictory to what is known about the social identities of undocumented immigrants. In particular, existing studies suggest that these individuals possess social and professional identities that are largely invisible because of their undocumented status and because they do invisible work Bell et al. 2010 ). This study moves beyond such a reading of undocumented immigrants’ identity by showing that their identity can be made hypervisible for ideological purposes. To add veracity to this position, we identify the external and the internal process mechanics by which this hypervisible identity is socially and intersubjectively constructed.

The study also demonstrates the possibilities for hypervisible identity to engender modern slavery when the former intersects with invisible labor. Namely, there is a dynamic interplay between the types of labor that undocumented immigrants undertake and the socio-legal identity that they are attributed to function together to systematically disenfranchise them. The study depicts how the denial of legal and non-legal recourse is crucial in explaining the prevalence and the types of workplace violations that undocumented immigrants regularly encounter.

We now turn to discuss, in-depth, our three main, though interrelated, theoretical contributions that emerged from this study. Following this discussion, we identify limitations and future research directions.

Invisible labor and hypervisible identity

Our study identifies the imbricated, yet seemingly contradictory nexus between doing invisible labor and possessing a hypervisible identity. Buchanan and Settles ( 2019 ) have argued that invisibility and hypervisibility work in tandem “to maintain a social hierarchy where marginalized groups are constrained to the periphery” (p.2). Indeed, while researchers have studied how historically marginalized subjects do devalued and dirty work, they tend to point to how doing such work renders their identity invisible to others (e.g., Dutton et al. 2016 ; Herod and Aguiar, 2006 ; Rabelo and Mahalingam, 2019 ). This is especially the case for undocumented immigrants whose work and identity are routinely unseen by others (Bell et al. 2010 ; Samers, 2003 ). Our findings move against the current of perspective by revealing how extreme conditions of vulnerability (Butler, 2004 ) are tenable when the identity of undocumented immigrants is made hypervisible for ideological purposes.

Our findings also illuminate the specific process by which the subjugated identity is made hypervisible and the implications that emerge thereof. As Fig. 1 depicts, undocumented immigrants become targets of political rhetoric. This political rhetoric is invoked with the intention to allow their racialized bodies to be easily located and, from there, to make them available for interrogation by the disciplinary gaze of the state. Once undocumented immigrants have been targeted in political rhetoric, which represent them as an imminent danger to the proper social order, moral panic develops among the citizenry. This moral panic achieves two outcomes: (i) it legitimates the public to engage in castigatory actions against targeted subjects, and (ii) it creates public demands on the government to eliminate what is perceived to be an existential threat. There is historical evidence to support this position. For instance, during the era of Nazi Germany, Hitler targeted Jews through political discourse. Moral panic ensued, resulting in public backlash against Jews as well as calls for more laws to be created in an effort to protect the German population from the demonized group (Marti and Fernandez, 2013 ). As such, political discourse and moral panic should be read as being mutually reinforcing.

Moral panic catalyzed by political rhetoric foregrounds a culture of ubiquitous surveillance. That is, undocumented immigrants begin to conceive of omnipresent monitoring from both authorized enforcers of the state (e.g., ICE) as well as others in the community (e.g., neighbors, co-workers). It merits underscoring that ubiquitous surveillance is as much a discursive phenomenon as it is one that is enacted by external actors. In other words, it is undocumented immigrants who regulate their own behavior as they believe that they are constantly being watched. There may be little veracity upon which such an assumption is predicated. Indeed, as recent reports have shown, even with Trump’s enactment of draconian measures on undocumented immigrants, there has not been “any surge of arrests or activity or round-ups” (Valencia, 2019 ). Nonetheless, simply the belief that ubiquitous surveillance exists is enough for undocumented immigrants to meaningfully alter their behavior in efforts to abscond arrest and deportation.

Another theoretical contribution emerging from our study informs the notion of modern slavery. While modern slavery is illegal worldwide (Sigmon, 2008 ), it continues to prevail across myriad sites and manifests in different forms of human exploitation (Walk Free Foundation, 2018 ). The phenomenon is certainly not relegated only to countries that are predicated on relatively illiberal values and is clearly present not only in impoverished countries, but it is part of the reality of developed ones (Crane et al. 2019 ). Indeed, the Global Slavery Index estimates that there are more than 400,000 modern slaves in the U.S. alone (Walk Free Foundation, 2018 ). Crane ( 2013 ) has introduced the idea of modern slavery to the field of management and organization studies. Specifically, he conceptually examined the ways in which management practice and various institutional factors together allow modern slavery to occur and to be sustained. Crane called for rigorous empirical study of the mechanics that enable modern slavery and explication of how exactly such mechanics function. This study heeds Crane’s call for more empirical inquiry into the phenomenon in the management literature. We also observe Harrison et al.’s ( 2019 ) call to develop research focused on immigrant employees.

Through our study of undocumented immigrants, we offer insights into some of the precursors and the catalysts that perform as boundary conditions to certain manifestations of modern slavery. Namely, we contend that doing invisible work and occupying a hypervisible identity function, concomitantly, as interlocking, constitutive properties for modern slavery in cases when affected individuals are not considered to be legal persons from the perspective of the state. We contend that without the existence of these constitutive properties, conditions of modern slavery currently being experienced by non-legal persons would be negated.

Moreover, we identify some of the process dynamics that sustain and shape modern slavery. As Crane ( 2013 , p.61) notes, slavery enterprises “need to develop capabilities that enable them to carry out the institutional work that sustains favorable contexts and shapes unfavorable ones.” For Crane, these capabilities consist of moral legitimization and domain maintenance. That is, the existence of modern slavery is dependent on slave enterprises rationalizing such an immoral phenomenon (moral legitimization) by managing various stakeholders—through either placating or coopting them—in efforts to sustain it (domain maintenance) (Crane, 2013 ). Caruana et al. ( 2021 , p.258) have identified how modern slavery is also enabled by a “supply chain of workers” which puts people in a position in which their basic rights are denied. Our study reveals how moral panic is critical to rationalizing modern slavery within the communities in which it operates. Although the outcomes of modern slavery identified in this study would unequivocally be considered morally illegitimate in ordinary circumstances, when moral panic is cast against target subjects, they become dehumanized. Dehumanization results in them not being considered as worthy of the same basic rights and freedoms afforded to everyone else (Segarra and Prasad, 2018 ). In the study, we also see evidence of how actors of authority, who are charged with the responsibility of curtailing illegal acts like modern slavery, come to perform in the service of modern slavery. Such was the case of Los Angeles County sheriff Jim McDonnell opposing California Senate Bill 54, which would have offered some safeguards to undocumented immigrants.

Undocumented status

Finally, our study also illuminates how, for undocumented immigrants, it is, specifically, their lack of legal status that provisions for invisible labor and hypervisible identity to engender modern slavery. If not for being undocumented, these individuals would ostensibly have some agency to evade, what we identified to be, the defining features of modern slavery. Namely, they would have access to types of legal and non-legal recourse when encountering work-related violations. When an employer improperly withholds an employee’s wages, for instance, the employee with legal standing can seek financial (and punitive) redress from the local labor board or industry ombudsman. It is in the case of the employee being undocumented that systems of recourse are undermined if not entirely rendered inaccessible. Indeed, having no recourse explains why undocumented immigrants remain silent when they experience even fundamental violations of their dignity. As the model depicts, having no recourse foregrounds specific types of workplace violations, including wage theft, precarious work conditions, and bullying.

While this point would return us, once more, to the matter of not qualifying as a legal person in the eyes of the state, it is critical to note, here, the paradoxical circumstances that emerge when an individual is undocumented. Menjivar and Abrego’s ( 2012 ) analysis of legal violence that is enacted against members of this group is insightful for articulating the nature of this paradox. As they explain, immigration and criminal law function, in tandem, “to punish the behaviors of undocumented immigrants but at the same time push them to spaces outside the law” (Menjivar and Abrego, 2012 , p.1385). This is a meaningful paradox in the lives of undocumented immigrants insofar as it defines their experiences in virtually all critical aspects of life, including work. That is, punitive criminal laws subject undocumented immigrants to the juridical purview of the state, which is enabled when the identity of the target subject is made hypervisible. However, by not having legal status, complementary immigration laws compel affected individuals to engage in invisible labor that, by necessity, operates outside of the purview of the formal economy. There are numerous cases of how this phenomenon is operationalized in practice. For example, in June 2018, when ICE agents raided Corso’s Flower and Garden Center in Ohio, over 100 undocumented immigrants, and low-skilled workers were arrested for violating immigration law as they did not have the legal right to live or work in the US. These same undocumented immigrants would be charged under criminal law with identity theft and tax evasion (Schmidt, 2018 ).

In short, undocumented immigrants must acquiesce to the existing laws of the country yet are not entitled to any of the rights and protections that these laws afford. Without these rights and protections, unscrupulous employers are permitted to exploit the labor and undermine the dignity of undocumented immigrants with impunity. Indeed, this is the logical corollary of no meaningful recourse being available for redress.

Limitations and future research directions

This study was limited in several ways. These limitations can be redressed in future research. First, the ethnography was conducted during a specific time period (September 2016 to May 2017). The timing was particularly useful in understanding the role of political rhetoric in informing the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as it represents periods of time immediately before and immediately after Trump’s election. It would be interesting to study undocumented immigrants in light of the proposed and newly enacted public policies that affect this population. For example, it was only after the completion of fieldwork that California Senate bill SB 54 was ratified, which presumably offers greater protections to undocumented immigrants. Likewise, the potential suspension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy would expectedly worsen existing vulnerabilities of undocumented immigrants. Future research can offer empirical insights into how specific laws and public policies influence the experiences of this group.

Second, this study did not limit its scope to undocumented immigrants in the U.S. from a particular country or region—though it did solely focus on individuals from Latin America. As such, there were different motivating factors that caused research participants to leave their country of origin and assume the undocumented immigrant status in the U.S. For instance, one of the informants from Mexico identified extreme poverty and better job opportunities as the main reasons for migrating to the U.S., while informants from El Salvador identified violence posed by local guerilla groups and gangs as the primary reason for migrating. It would be useful for future research to comparatively account for how the geopolitical determinants of migration shape the undocumented immigrants’ experiences in the U.S.

Third, this study was conducted in Southern California and, thus, only considered the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. It would be beneficial to pursue cross-country studies on how undocumented immigrants—and other non-legal populations—experience and negotiate vulnerability. For example, many European countries today are seeing an influx of refugees entering and settling within their geographical boundaries. Cross-country studies would explicate how a country’s historical background and institutional arrangements’ structure and pattern the experiences of non-legal persons living there. Such studies could also reveal the different mechanisms by which non-legal persons are regulated around the world as well as potential opportunities for ameliorating the constitutive properties of modern slavery identified in this article.

To conclude, it seems apropos to return to Butler. Butler ( 2012 , p. 134) has considered the ethical obligations we have, specifically to those with whom we live in what she calls “unwilled adjacency.” By unwilled adjacency, she refers to individuals or groups who live in geographical proximity by circumstances beyond their willful choice. Legal citizens (and other legal residents) residing within the same community as undocumented immigrants are, perhaps, the quintessential example of unwilled adjacency in practice. For Butler, unwilled adjacency impresses upon us, as an ethical obligation, to recognize the humanity of whom we did not choose “to inhabit the earth…[who] we may not love, those we may never love [and] do not know” (p. 150). This study has illuminated the process dynamics by which extreme conditions of vulnerability are enacted and to which undocumented immigrants are subjected. In doing so, we hope that this study contributes to ongoing debates about the ethical obligations that are owed to this vulnerable population—which ought to inform their treatment in society.

Data availability

As research participants with whom interviews were conducted were assured anonymity, we are unable to provide access to raw data. Metadata is available upon request.

For the data analysis and the findings presented in this paper, all of the informants’ names have been changed to respect their anonymity.

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Segarra, P., Prasad, A. Undocumented immigrants at work: invisibility, hypervisibility, and the making of the modern slave. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 45 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02449-5

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• Slavery and Economic Migration: The Movement of Enslaved Individuals
• Slave Revolts and Rebellions: Causes, Strategies, and Outcomes
• Abolitionist Literature: Narratives of Freedom and Empowerment
• The Role of Religion in the Abolitionist Movement: Faith and Advocacy
• The Underground Railroad and Its Impact on African American Communities
• Slavery and Women’s Rights: Intersectionality and Activism
• The Role of Free African Americans in the Abolitionist Movement
• Slave Songs and Music: Expressions of Resistance and Identity
• Slave Codes and Laws: The Legal Framework of Enslavement
• Slavery and Education: Restrictions, Access, and Agency
• The Role of International Diplomacy in Abolitionist Efforts
• Slavery in Art and Literature: Representations and Interpretations
• The Influence of African Cultures on Slave Communities
• Slavery and Memory in Visual Culture: Museums, Monuments, and Memorials
• The Impact of Slave Narratives on Cultural Awareness and Empathy
• Slavery in Folklore and Oral Traditions: Stories of Survival and Resilience
• Slavery and Music: Contributions of Enslaved Africans to American Music
• The Legacy of Slavery in Language and Linguistics: Words and Expressions
• Slavery and Food: Culinary Traditions and Adaptations
• The Representation of Slavery in Films and Media: Stereotypes and Revisionist Narratives
• Slavery’s Influence on Fashion and Clothing: Textiles and Identity
• The Politics of Memory: Commemorating and Memorializing Slavery
• Slavery and Public History: Interpretation and Controversies
• The Role of Confederate Monuments in Shaping Historical Narratives
• Slavery and Heritage Tourism: Ethics and Responsibilities
• The Memory of Slavery in African American Communities: Cultural Expressions
• The Debate over Confederate Symbols and Names: Renaming and Removals
• Slavery and Education: Teaching Difficult Histories in Schools
• The Role of Historical Reenactments in Representing Slavery
• Slavery in Family Histories: Genealogy and Ancestral Connections
• The Future of Slavery Studies: Research Directions and Challenges

This comprehensive list of slavery research paper topics serves as a gateway for students to explore the multifaceted dimensions of slavery across different epochs and societies. From ancient civilizations to the present day, slavery has been a pervasive and deeply troubling institution that has shaped human history in profound ways. By examining these carefully selected topics, students can gain a deeper appreciation for the historical, social, economic, and cultural complexities surrounding slavery. Moreover, delving into these research paper ideas opens avenues for critical thinking, fostering empathy, and raising awareness about the enduring legacy of slavery in contemporary society. As we engage with these slavery research paper topics, it is crucial to approach them with sensitivity and a commitment to shedding light on the human experience, even in the darkest chapters of history.

Slavery: Exploring the History, Impact, and Legacies

Slavery stands as a harrowing chapter in human history, marked by its profound impact on societies, economies, and the lives of countless individuals. This article delves into the complex and troubling history of slavery, tracing its origins, evolution, and far-reaching consequences on both local and global scales. Additionally, it sheds light on the enduring legacies of slavery, as its shadows continue to cast a long and influential reach into the modern world. By examining the historical context of slavery and its multifaceted impact, we can better understand the challenges faced by enslaved people and the enduring repercussions felt across generations and continents.

The Origins of Slavery: Tracing the Roots

The history of slavery can be traced back to ancient civilizations, where individuals were subjected to forced labor and bondage. Exploring the origins of slavery illuminates the early forms of human exploitation and the development of slave systems in various societies, from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome. Understanding the earliest manifestations of slavery helps contextualize its transformation over time and its role in shaping societies.

Slavery in Medieval Times: Continuity and Change

As the world transitioned into the medieval period, the institution of slavery adapted and persisted. This topic examines the continuity of slavery in medieval Europe, Africa, and Asia, and delves into the changes and variations that occurred during this era. The rise of serfdom, indentured servitude, and chattel slavery all played significant roles in shaping the medieval world’s social, economic, and political landscape.

Islamic Slavery: Unraveling the Narrative

Islamic history also saw the presence of slavery, with a diverse range of experiences and practices within the Islamic world. This section explores the nuances of Islamic slavery, challenging misconceptions and providing a more nuanced understanding of its historical context. The discussion encompasses the role of slavery in Islamic societies, the treatment of enslaved people, and the Quranic teachings related to slavery.

Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Dark Era

One of the most infamous chapters in slavery’s history is the transatlantic slave trade, which forcibly transported millions of Africans to the Americas. This topic delves into the grim reality of the slave trade, analyzing its economic, social, and humanitarian ramifications. The harrowing journey of enslaved Africans, the brutal conditions of the Middle Passage, and the impacts on African societies are essential aspects of this exploration.

Slavery and Abolition Movements: Struggle for Freedom

The fight against slavery was met with resistance from enslaved individuals and abolition movements worldwide. This section examines the courageous efforts of abolitionists, enslaved rebels, and humanitarian activists in challenging the institution of slavery. The works of prominent figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William Wilberforce, and Sojourner Truth are exemplars of the determination to end slavery.

Impact on Culture and Identity

Slavery profoundly influenced the cultural fabric and identities of both enslaved and enslaving societies. This topic investigates how cultural expressions, traditions, and identities were shaped by the institution of slavery, leaving indelible marks on the collective consciousness. From African cultural retentions in the Americas to the enduring legacy of slavery in shaping national identities, this section delves into the power of culture in preserving and challenging the past.

Slavery’s Economic Legacy: Prosperity Built on Exploitation

The economic impact of slavery cannot be underestimated, as it fueled the growth of industries and economies in different regions. This section delves into the economic repercussions of slavery, exploring its role in the accumulation of wealth and its lasting influence on global trade. The exploitative labor practices that underpinned the economies of plantation-based societies and their connection to contemporary economic systems are crucial aspects of this examination.

The Long Road to Emancipation: Legacies of Struggle

Even after the abolition of slavery, the legacy of oppression persisted through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and systemic racism. This topic examines the legacies of slavery’s aftermath and the ongoing struggles for equality and justice. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and similar movements worldwide demonstrate the enduring efforts to dismantle the structures of racism and discrimination.

Slavery in the US: A Tumultuous History

Focusing on the United States, this category explores the unique history of slavery in the nation. From its early colonial beginnings to the Civil War and beyond, the United States grappled with the profound impact of slavery on its development. Examining slave narratives, the Underground Railroad, and the Emancipation Proclamation, this section highlights the complexities of slavery’s legacy in the US.

Slavery in the Modern World: Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

Despite its historical abolition, slavery has not been eradicated entirely. Modern slavery, including human trafficking and forced labor, continues to affect millions worldwide. This section sheds light on the modern manifestations of slavery and the challenges of combating this global issue. The examination includes efforts by international organizations, governments, and NGOs to address this ongoing human rights violation.

By examining these critical aspects of slavery, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the history, impact, and enduring legacies of this tragic institution. Through rigorous research and compassionate inquiry, we aim to honor the experiences of those who suffered under slavery while striving to create a more just and equitable world for all.

How to Choose Slavery Research Paper Topics

Choosing slavery research paper topics requires thoughtful consideration and a deep understanding of the historical, social, and cultural complexities surrounding this dark period in human history. While the topic selection process can be challenging, it is essential to find a subject that not only interests you but also allows for a comprehensive exploration of the issues related to slavery. Here are ten tips to guide you in selecting the most compelling slavery research paper topics:

• Conduct Preliminary Research : Before settling on a specific topic, conduct preliminary research to familiarize yourself with various aspects of slavery. Read books, scholarly articles, and historical accounts to gain insight into different angles and perspectives. This will help you identify gaps in the existing literature and potential areas for further exploration.
• Define Your Scope : Given the vastness of the subject, it is crucial to define the scope of your research paper. Consider the time period, geographic location, and specific themes you want to delve into. Whether you choose to focus on a particular region, a specific era, or a comparative analysis of different slave systems, defining your scope will provide clarity and direction.
• Explore Different Perspectives : Slavery has left an indelible mark on various societies and individuals. Consider exploring different perspectives, such as the experiences of enslaved individuals, the role of slaveholders, the impact on economies, and the cultural and social repercussions. This multi-faceted approach will enrich your research and foster a comprehensive understanding of the subject.
• Select a Specific Theme or Question : Rather than opting for a broad topic, narrow down your focus by selecting a specific theme or research question. For instance, you could investigate the resistance strategies employed by enslaved people, the economic motivations behind the transatlantic slave trade, or the role of women in slave societies. A focused approach will allow for in-depth analysis and a more cohesive research paper.
• Consult with Your Instructor or Advisor : If you are struggling to choose a research paper topic, don’t hesitate to seek guidance from your instructor or academic advisor. They can offer valuable insights, suggest potential slavery research paper topics, and provide feedback on the feasibility of your ideas.
• Consider Understudied Topics : Exploring less-discussed or understudied topics can be a rewarding endeavor. Look for aspects of slavery that have not received as much scholarly attention and consider shedding light on these lesser-known areas. This can contribute to the broader understanding of the subject and make your research paper stand out.
• Use Primary Sources : Incorporating primary sources in your research can add depth and authenticity to your paper. Letters, diaries, interviews, and official documents from the time of slavery provide firsthand accounts and perspectives, enriching your analysis and providing a more nuanced understanding of historical events.
• Stay Ethical and Sensible : Slavery is a highly sensitive and traumatic subject. When choosing a research paper topic, ensure that you approach it with sensitivity and respect for the individuals who suffered under this institution. Avoid trivializing the experiences of enslaved people or using offensive language in your research.
• Consider Comparative Studies : Comparing the experiences of enslaved people in different regions or exploring how slavery intersected with other historical events can yield fascinating insights. Comparative studies can highlight similarities and differences, providing a broader context for understanding the complexities of slavery.
• Follow Your Passion : Ultimately, choose a slavery research paper topic that genuinely interests you. A passionate approach to your research will drive your motivation, commitment, and enthusiasm throughout the writing process. Embrace a topic that ignites your curiosity and allows you to make a meaningful contribution to the field of historical research.

In conclusion, selecting a research paper topic on slavery requires careful consideration of various factors, including scope, perspective, and sensitivity. By conducting thorough research and defining a focused theme or question, you can explore the depths of this complex historical period and contribute to a deeper understanding of the enduring legacies of slavery. Remember to seek guidance from your instructor, utilize primary sources, and stay passionate in your pursuit of knowledge. With these tips, you can embark on a compelling research journey that sheds light on the history, impact, and ongoing relevance of slavery in our world.

How to Write a Slavery Research Paper

Writing a slavery research paper requires careful planning, extensive research, and a thoughtful approach to address the complex historical, social, and cultural dimensions of this topic. Here are ten essential tips to guide you through the process of writing an engaging and well-structured slavery research paper:

• Develop a Strong Thesis Statement : A compelling thesis statement is the foundation of your research paper. It should present a clear argument or claim that you will explore and support throughout your paper. Your thesis statement should be specific, concise, and indicative of the main focus of your research.
• Conduct In-Depth Research : Thoroughly research your chosen topic using both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include historical documents, letters, diaries, interviews, and other firsthand accounts from the time of slavery. Secondary sources encompass scholarly books, articles, and analyses that provide context and interpretations of historical events.
• Organize Your Research : Organize your research material systematically to facilitate a coherent and logical structure for your paper. Create an outline that outlines the main sections and arguments you plan to cover. This will help you maintain a clear flow of ideas throughout your research paper.
• Provide Historical Context : Begin your research paper by providing essential historical context. Explain the background of slavery, its origins, evolution, and global impact. Offer insights into the economic, social, and political forces that influenced the growth and sustenance of slavery in different regions.
• Explore Various Perspectives : Dive into the multifaceted perspectives related to slavery. Consider the experiences of enslaved individuals, slaveholders, abolitionists, and the broader society. By exploring diverse viewpoints, you can present a well-rounded analysis of the complex issues surrounding slavery.
• Analyze Primary Sources Critically : When using primary sources, analyze them critically to identify biases, gaps, and limitations. Interrogate the perspectives of the authors and the context in which the sources were created. Critical analysis of primary sources strengthens the authenticity and credibility of your research paper.
• Utilize Comparative Analysis : Consider adopting a comparative approach to enrich your research. Compare and contrast different forms of slavery in various regions or analyze the impact of slavery on different social groups. Comparative analysis enhances the depth of your research and offers valuable insights.
• Address the Legacy of Slavery : Acknowledge the ongoing implications of slavery in the modern world. Examine how slavery has shaped contemporary social, economic, and political structures. Addressing the legacy of slavery demonstrates the relevance of this historical topic in today’s society.
• Cite Sources Properly : Ensure that you cite all your sources properly and adhere to the required citation style (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago). Accurate citation gives credit to the original authors, validates your research, and helps avoid plagiarism.
• Revise and Edit Thoroughly : The final step is to revise and edit your research paper thoroughly. Review the content for coherence, clarity, and logical flow of ideas. Check for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Consider seeking feedback from peers or instructors to gain different perspectives on your work.

In conclusion, writing a slavery research paper demands meticulous research, critical analysis, and careful consideration of the historical context and its impact on contemporary society. By developing a strong thesis statement, organizing your research, and exploring various perspectives, you can create an engaging and comprehensive research paper on this crucial aspect of human history. Remember to acknowledge the ongoing legacy of slavery and cite your sources accurately. With dedication and attention to detail, you can produce a research paper that sheds light on the complexities of slavery and its enduring significance.

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