Slavery’s Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives

How do we redress the ongoing violence of slavery’s archive and its effects on our present? Thinking with three recent articles that address the history of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world, the following short reflection considers different approaches to contextualizing Black lives in the past and present.1 Two of the three articles, by Stephanie E. Smallwood and Saidiya Hartman, critically engage Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.”2 The third article, Simon P. Newman’s “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780,” explores hundreds of eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for runaway enslaved (and “servant”) men and women in England and Scotland. For vastly different audiences and to different ends, Hartman, Smallwood, and Newman contend with the erasures of enslaved people from the archives and national or imperial historiographies. Seemingly disconnected by geographies, methods, and fields, these articles, brought together in conversation, invite us to consider the state of historical research on Black lives and how to approach their erasure in the field of history.In the wake of her previous work and a summer of intense police brutality, Hartman writes about the stakes of engaging slavery’s archive in the enduring context of Black death, the seemingly unchanged patterns of anti-Black violence, and how we must make room for the ways in which Black people live, mourn, and steal away to grieve in the midst of this ongoing terror.3 Smallwood, in revisiting “Venus in Two Acts,” reassesses her own book, Saltwater Slavery, to demonstrate the method of exploring the “counter-factual”—what is in the archive but is denied—as the starting point to writing histories of slavery (or the slave trade). Smallwood also offers us an incredibly thorough historiography of the uses of slavery’s archive from the early twentieth century—when the planter’s perspective prevailed in authority and objectivity—to the 1970s, when social historians shifted their method to “bottom up” by using an “abundance” of archival material to tell the enslaved story. What Smallwood points out, important to us for this short reflection, is the move to quantitative methods—the counting and tallying and charting of bodies, demographics, and geographies that gave historians “evidence” that enslaved people shaped their environments and families and enacted resistance. However, these data did little to elaborate the social and intimate lives of enslaved people. Smallwood explains, “What is lost in uncritical celebration of the new approach is attention to how it also helped to sediment a theory of historical knowledge production that figured the archive as merely a repository of free-floating empirical facts to be lifted off the page by the researcher.”4 This critique provides the entry point for a closer look at Newman’s article.Newman uses quantitative methods to examine eighteenth-century newspapers from Scotland and England for evidence that legal slavery existed and persisted in the United Kingdom despite the absence of explicit laws. With hundreds of runaway ads (and others for sale) attempting to reclaim people in the language of “property,” Newman argues that slavery existed in the United Kingdom for people of African descent and was distinct from other forms of servitude in the region. More than this, he asserts that the threat of New World slavery—of being sent to the Caribbean plantation system—was ever present, making servitude for Africans and their descendants in the United Kingdom unique among the servant classes. Newman convincingly makes the case that slavery was pervasive in the eighteenth-century United Kingdom. The corpus of runaway ads exposes the violence and surveillance against enslaved people in the region. But we must still ask: What are the consequences of reproducing archival representations of enslaved people as “quantitative data” to prove these points? This method raises larger questions about the disavowal of slavery’s existence in the UK historical guild and the demands for a particular kind of empiricism required to make Black lives visible.Both Hartman and Smallwood call for a crucial encounter with the broader structures of knowledge production and the effects that histories of racial subjugation have on our present. Therefore, why does the historiography deny the existence of slavery in the United Kingdom? Is it because it threatens the “mystique of British anti-racism” that represents Britain as the bastion of abolition activism, liberalism, and multiculturalism?5 Or perhaps it would force a reckoning with the continued marginalization and underrepresentation of Black British scholars in the UK academy?6 In what ways does the disavowal of slavery’s legality in the United Kingdom help the continued denial of the responsibility of the UK to its Black subjects and citizens, many of whom have been part of the state/empire since the time Newman explores if not well before? What would it mean to acknowledge this history? Is there a fear of being made fiscally responsible for its harm and violence?7 Hartman makes plain the unequivocal links between the past and our present conditions—the precarity, incarceration, early death—that make imperative the need to ask questions of the historical guild and society that go beyond the empirical.8 For it matters little what “evidence” one marshals to prove Black existence when Black people have been demanding recognition since their arrival in the western Atlantic world. Following Smallwood, “We might say . . . that what is at issue in the writing of histories of modern racial slavery is not the archive per se, but rather the critical philosophical assumptions that shape and structure our understandings of history.”9

Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Media studies · Middle Passage · Newspaper · Servant · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History

• Legacies of British Slave-Ownership

  Open Access•Catherine Hall, Keith Mcclelland et al.•Legacies of British Slave-Ownership•2014

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• London is the Place for Me

  Kennetta Hammond Perry•London Is the Place for Me•2016

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• Britain's Black Debt

  Hilary Mcd Beckles, Hilary Beckles•Britains Black Debt Reparations…•2013

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• The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved

  Stephanie Smallwood•History of the Present•2016

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• The Dead Book Revisited

  Saidiya Hartman•History of the Present•2016

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• Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780

  Open Access•Simon P Newman, Simon Newman•The English Historical Review•2019

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• Venus in Two Acts

  Ellen Carol Dubois, Saidiya Hartman et al.•Unequal Sisters•2023

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