Commodity, Labour, and Capital in Experiences of Enslavement in Africa

In this blog post, Kate Ekama of Stellenbosch University and Bronwen Everill of Princeton University introduce their research project funded by an award from the Carnevali Small Research Grants Scheme.

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In recent years, the significance, scope and legacies of slavery in the British Empire have been examined in a variety of academic projects. Historical slavery has largely been understood as a form of highly exploitative labour extraction embedded in a socially and often racially stratified society. A growing body of academic scholarship is highlighting fruitful research avenues which bring in this wider view of slavery which engages with the idea that enslaved people were simultaneously labour, commodities, and assets, and that this was crucial to the societies in which slavery was practiced. We still understand surprisingly little about the ways that slavery and the economic consequences of abolition contributed to development and underdevelopment in the global economy.

We can see this in the case of Louison Picard, who was a Senegalese business woman, and the daughter of a French notary and a Wolof mother. Bronwen Everill and Khadidiatou Diedhiou recently wrote about this case in Business History Review. Notarial contracts from the archives in Dakar show that Louison was using the enslaved people she and her children owned to raise money using a hybrid approach that mixed together Wolof rules about pawning with the emerging French use of notaries for financial transactions. She had taken out loans guaranteed by pawning five captives to another Gorée resident, Caty Michelle. The enslaved captives were described as being held as surety against the loan. At the end of the terms of the loan, the five enslaved people were then “resold” from Caty Michelle to Louison Picard to discharge Louison’s debt to Caty.

But what happens to those human capital assets when slavery was legally abolished as it was by the French in 1848? French abolition was decreed in the Revolution of 1848.  It set aside 6 million francs in cash, 6 million in annuities bearing 5 percent interest, with one-eighth of the compensation package set aside for the establishment of colonial banks. In total, over 365,000 francs was awarded to the claimants in Senegal. Louison’s extended family claimed over 6,000 francs.  Could compensated emancipation indemnity payments prevent a shock from abolition?

Despite Louison’s concern that the compensation would be insufficient to account for the debts of Gorée’s slaveholders, many members of her family fared well in the new economic landscape. Most notably, her daughter rented out property in Gorée to her formerly enslaved workers, who had nowhere else to sell their labour and who worried that moving to the mainland, beyond French rule, they would risk re-enslavement.

In urban Senegal, labour as a capital asset was replaced by investment in urban property because rental income from real estate replaced the income streams from hiring out of enslaved workers. With nowhere else to live, formerly enslaved labourers in Saint-Louis were forced to live with their former owners and pay them rent. Did the replacement of enslaved people with other forms of capital exacerbate inequality within states, as well as between them?

This is one of the questions that forms the core of our new collaboration, funded by the EHS Carnaveli Fund. This collaboration will build on Kate Ekama’s work on manumission and on the uses of enslaved people as collateral in the Cape Colony. Cape Colony slaveholders had been using enslaved people to secure private credit agreements from at least the early 1700s. A century later, the two colonial banks were also accepting human capital assets to secure loans. By the 1830s slaveholders across the colony were deeply concerned about the impact of abolition on credit agreements. The compensation offered them by the British Government – cash payments and four years of forced labour by the formerly enslaved – ensured their continued, short-term access to credit. Mortgages secured on enslaved people continued after de jure abolition in 1834 and new loans were agreed on future compensation payments. When those payments arrived in the colony, facilitated by agents who took a cut, they went first to the mortgage holders to cover outstanding debts, and the remainder to the slaveholders. Like Picard’s daughter, some of these recipients of compensation and their families went on invest in rental properties in urban Cape Town.

We are interested in the ways that slavery affected economic development broadly around the Atlantic World, through the interaction of its three core functions: as a commodity, as labour, and as a capitalized asset. How did these three aspects affect the experiences of enslaved people? How did they shape abolitionist interventions? And what was the impact of slaveholder responses?

This project will be the start of a collaboration that seeks to put these African experiences into dialogue with wider Atlantic discussions of the relationships between enslavement, its economic functions within the economy, its experience by enslaved people, and the processes of capitalism’s development across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

To contact the authors:

Kate Ekama

kateekama@sun.ac.za

Stellenbosch University

Bronwen Everill

bronwen.everill@princeton.edu

Princeton University