Slave No More

When the rapper Kanye West made the controversial remark in 2018 that 400 years of slavery sounded like a choice, those of us who teach the history of slavery heard the echoes of comments and questions that students raise, not infrequently, in our classrooms. Like those who rushed to address West's statement and the faulty thinking behind it, we have had to correct our students' incomplete knowledge about slavery, slave resistance, and emancipation. Slave No More, Aline Helg's comprehensive overview of the history of enslaved African and African-descended peoples' struggle for self-liberation in the Americas, gives a definite answer to the misguided question of why, being so many, the enslaved did not reject slavery. They did, repeatedly, relentlessly, creatively, and decisively. In the process, Helg argues, “they shook up the region from one century to another” (p. 275).Helg claims that her “long-term comparative study of the Americas reveals, for the first time, the breadth and success of actions taken by slaves to liberate themselves” (p. 12). Indeed, she provides, in rich detail, an exhaustive history of enslaved peoples' efforts to negotiate, claim, and demand freedom from slavery from the early sixteenth century to the 1838 final abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Slave No More is foremost a synthesis of the scholarship since the 1980s—with the occasional use of primary sources, as the author notes. Organized in four parts, it identifies four main strategies of self-liberation: flight and marronage, manumission, military service in exchange for individual emancipation, and mass revolt. Part 1 provides an overview of the Atlantic slave trade and of the various demographic and geographic realities of slavery in the Americas, highlighting the ubiquity of this race-based system of oppression in the region. Parts 2 through 4 explore Helg's four strategies of self-liberation in historical context and explain how the actions of enslaved people responded to and shaped events around them. These parts focus, respectively, on colonial expansion (from the early sixteenth century to the Seven Years' War), the Age of Revolutions (from the Seven Years' War to the Spanish American independence wars), and the rise of abolitionism.Slave No More importantly demonstrates that flight and manumission were the primary forms of rebellion against the system of slavery. While Helg examines episodes of revolt, with one chapter dedicated to the Haitian Revolution and another to its influence on other slave revolts, she admonishes scholars for presenting as revolts episodes that should be described as conspiracies or the imaginings of a suspicious and fearful white slave-owning class. During the period of colonial expansion, enslaved peoples often liberated themselves by running away, forming maroon communities, negotiating and purchasing legal manumission, or exchanging military service for freedom. As Helg reveals, the success rate of these strategies varied over time and in response to local and regional realities. The changing geographies and political organization of empires and later independent nations, for instance, at times allowed runaways to carve spaces of freedom and at others made flight too risky. Changes to legislation and to the political relationship between slave owners and governing authorities also affected enslaved people's ability to successfully secure their legal release from captivity. Nevertheless, flight, marronage, and manumission remained common strategies of self-liberation over the centuries, leading to the formation of a free black population that challenged the slave order by cultivating the possibility of black freedom.Helg ends her book by discussing revolts in the British circum-Caribbean in the early nineteenth century. In the context of rising abolitionism, influenced by Enlightenment ideas reified during the Age of Revolutions and notions of Christian brotherhood promoted during the Great Awakening, the violence unleashed by and against enslaved peoples during those revolts served to strengthen abolitionist resolve. But in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil, renewed commitment to plantation slavery meant that revolt served mostly to justify further repression and oppression. There, self-liberation remained for a longer time an individual effort, best pursued through the long-standing strategies of flight and manumission.Slave No More, with its impressive summary of historical events and rich bibliography, is an essential resource for students of slavery. However, because it often favors wealth of details over depth of analysis, it sometimes lacks the nuance and innovative content of other works on the topic. Additionally, though the book claims to tell a bottom-up story, it relies heavily on a European imperial historical narrative. Helg could have acknowledged more the insights offered by recent scholarship (some of which she references) into the intellectual, socioeconomic, and political resources that African and African descendants cultivated for themselves in their struggle for and articulation of freedom. Still, though these issues might frustrate the more demanding reader, most people will find useful content in the book and invaluable ammunition to tackle problematic classroom conversations

Abolitionism · Emancipation · Empire · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Scholarship · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law