Jennifer Morgan has devoted her life to trying to understand the role of gender and reproduction in the emergence of racial capitalism. Reckoning with Slavery is the perfect title for her insightful and provocative new book, which reads less like a traditional monograph than a sweeping attempt to reckon with the major historical questions that have haunted her throughout her life. How and why were African women erased from the archives? What did this erasure mean for these women and their kin? How did it shape the world we live in today? And how might we refuse to let it continue to do so? These are not easy questions and Morgan does not aspire to give definitive answers—rather, the book feels almost like a long-form meditation, in which readers are invited to reflect on topics ranging from the role of numeracy in the making of modern racism to the centrality of fertility control as a form of resistance within the Black radical tradition. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery is broken up into six chapters, which I briefly summarize below.
Chapter 1 opens with the broad question of how the presence of African women shaped the origins of capitalism and slavery. Morgan points out that the words negro and slave were gendered male in the earliest records of European contact with explorers (p. 34). Ship captains often declined to record the age and sex of enslaved captives even as they transported hundreds of thousands of women and children across the Atlantic (p. 49). Morgan sees the “erasure of gendered categories” from these ship logs as a “crucial originary moment” for the “racialized logic of modernity” (pp. 46–49). She contends that merchants deliberately portrayed Africans as kinless, “rationalizing the slave trade by embedding it within a narrative from which no recognizable women or children could emerge” (p. 37). Thus, she concludes, “the very data through which specificity can be achieved are part of the technology that renders Africans and their descendants outside the scope of modernity.” This basic insight, she insists, remains “fundamentally absent from the scholarship on the demographics of the slave trade” (p. 43).
Chapter 2 continues her investigation of the ways that “normative processes of violence are embedded in numerical evidence” (p. 55). In this chapter, she argues that “numeracy begat race-based thought” (p. 91). To support this claim, she draws on the writings of Thomas Hariot, John Graunt, and William Petty—three English mathematicians who helped promote demography as a tool of statecraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (pp. 91–108). These men, according to Morgan, insisted that “to know the numbers was to know specific facts rather than opinions” (pp. 96–97). That did not stop them from using their data to assert who should, or should not, be considered an “unfit subject” of the English crown (p. 97). For Morgan, the emergence of this “ability to couch moral judgment in secular rationality” was a crucial step in the rise of modern racism (p. 91). The next step took place in Africa (p. 113). Chapter 3 argues that European travelers in early modern Africa erased evidence of African numeracy from their published narratives in order to justify racial slavery (pp. 123, 126). Europeans simultaneously portrayed Africans as “indifferent parents” who produced children for “sale or murder” (pp. 126, 131). The supposed failures of Africans to recognize the value of kin ultimately produced an image of a continent “ripe for the taking” (p. 131).
Chapter 4 changes gears. Morgan opens the second half of her book with a new question: what does it mean to frame an examination of the Middle Passage with the story of individual female captives? (p. 143). One of the most haunting images from this chapter—and the entire book—is of an unnamed African woman who, “being very fond of her Child, Carrying her up and downe, wore her[self] to nothing by which means fell into a feavour and dyed” (p. 166). Morgan suggests that this mother’s unbearable grief reveals “the growth of a critical comprehension among captive Africans about the relationship between the disruption of family and the production of children for a marketplace” (p. 160). Chapter 5 argues that African women carried this comprehension with them as they left the slave ships, bringing “knowledge of markets, commodities, currency, valuations, and of course, kinship” to plantations (p. 171). These women knew that “the terms of their labor were not distinct from their sexual availability and reproductive future” (p. 185). The final chapter takes up the “question of refusal” (p. 207). Here, Morgan considers a range of ways to locate enslaved women’s oppositional consciousness in the archives despite white attempts to erase the evidence. I was fascinated by Morgan’s call for a new history of “fertility control” as a “form of strike” (p. 222). She argues that such acts by African women constituted “the origins of the Black radical tradition” (p. 254).
Some of the stories in this book are so tragic and disturbing that you will never forget them. The writing is sometimes beautiful—I lingered over the final sentence: “The refusal to relinquish a child to the market…[was] a refusal felt so powerfully and clearly that it ‘wore you down to nothing’ and left you dead with your claim to family, to kin, clenched forever in your arms” (p. 255). At other times, though, the clarity of the text suffers when Morgan introduces concepts which she then immediately discards. I was not convinced that the book benefited from, for instance, a discussion of “agnotology,” or the history of questions that remain unasked (p. 217). I also wondered at times about the rapid way that Morgan moves between “European” and “English” in the text. She alludes in several chapters to a distinct history of Iberian relations with Africa, including that “historians of the Iberian Atlantic have done much to disrupt this narrative arc by clarifying the mutual recognition of sovereignty that characterized much of the first decades of contact” (p. 108). Any sense of what this “mutual recognition” entailed is absent from the book, making it difficult to assess whether Morgan is describing a truly “European” process of racialization or a specifically English one. A deeper engagement with this literature might also trouble the central contention of Black Marxism—Morgan’s theoretical pillar—that European racism gave rise to capitalism, and not the other way around (p. 16). Still, these are critiques around the margins. I would recommend spending a long time sitting with Reckoning with Slavery, and coming back to it again and again.
Professor Payne is a historian of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. She is currently working on her first book, The Last Atlantic Revolution (under contract with University of North Carolina Press), which explores the Atlantic history of Reconstruction in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil.
