Numeracy and Archival Fragments in Understanding the Black Atlantic

In Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, Jennifer L. Morgan grapples with the fraught records of capitalist numeracy at the unspoken heart of slavery studies. She is interested in exploring how early modern political arithmetic dovetailed with and influenced the development of the transatlantic slave trade and European understandings of racial difference, kinship, and commerce. Adopting a gendered interdisciplinary approach rooted in Black feminist theory and cultural criticism, she breathes fresh life into logbooks and ledgers that transformed women of African origin and descent into objects of trade and stripped them of their humanity and intimate ties to kinfolk. At the same time, this book pushes readers to question the long-standing historiographical distinction between economic and ideologically focused histories of slavery. Fully assessing the rise of capitalism and African enslavement, Morgan argues, means simultaneously considering the extent to which numeracy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—specifically the “new frameworks that valued and commodified human beings”—shaped emergent taxonomies of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (12). This is a worthwhile and challenging task. The successful outcome of the centuries-long process that transformed individuals into racialized chattel has obscured the ideas and circumstances that made such a dehumanizing system at once possible and profoundly effective.

Archaeology · Capitalism · Commodification · Economy · Historiography · Ideology · Kinship · Literacy · Numeracy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law