Review of *The Trade In The Living*

In 1585, Jesuit father Balthazar Afonso reporting to his superiors in Lisbon described a raid in Angola that he organized to confiscate or destroy the food supplies of a village deep in the interior resisting the expansion of the slave trade into its region:

It happened that a father with his son were running away from our people, and seeing that he would not be able to save his son, he turned to our people and discharged as many arrows as he had, until he was killed, standing fast where he was, so that his son could hide.  Then the father died and went to Hell. [quote on p. 171]

The Jesuits sent Afonso to Angola to direct the order’s participation in the slave trade.  He oversaw efforts to convert newly captured slaves to Christianity, but Jesuit priests, relying on income from the sale of enslaved African labor to support missionary work in Asia and the Americas, were deeply involved in the practical activities of the slave trade.  From Afonso’s perspective, freedom fighters in Angola were twice damned.  First, they resisted the servitude that the Church insisted was just compensation for the opportunity for eternal salvation.  Beyond that, anyone against slavery sabotaged the church’s global work, hence opposed redeeming humanity from original sin.  Afonso’s account, related with remarkable absence of charity, of a father sacrificing his life so that his child might escape being sent to America as a slave is one of many illuminating and moving details that fill Luiz Felipe de Alencastro’s epic study of the first two centuries of the Atlantic slave trade.

Slaves and others who resisted enslavement are, however, not the primary characters in a book examining the construction of slavery as an international business enterprise.  The main figures in the book are what we today might call managers, who in the early modern period could be priests like Afonso, naval and military officers, royal governors and their subordinates, merchants and their agents, or learned men charged with finding solutions for obstacles retarding trade.  Collectively they built a system capable of linking disparate markets in almost every part of the globe a sailing vessel could reach.  The African slave trade provided the labor needed to produce basic commodities, largely but not exclusively produced in the western hemisphere, to be sold in every part of the globe, with China, India, and other wealthy Asian countries the most important and reliable customers.  In 1455 and 1481, two papal decrees limited Christian participation in the slave trade to subjects of the Portuguese crown; the degrees also required adequate documentation for the slaves the Portuguese acquired establishing that their status conformed to the laws of the African nation supplying the slave.  The papal grant made sailors, adventurers, merchants, and imperial administrators from a poor, semi-peripheral country central figures in the rise of modern capitalism.

Alencastro builds upon but also critiques Fernand Braudel’s studies of capitalism from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century found in the three volumes of Civilization and Capitalism, to give greater importance to the global nature of capital formation in the early modern period, equally dependent on American commodities, African slave labor, the priorities of Asian buyers, and the credit that during the early days of the slave trade, bankers in Italy, Germany, and Flanders provided.  This book first appeared in Portuguese and French editions in 2000.  The translation of Alencastro’s most important work into English at last makes a book that many historians have deemed an essential contribution to the history of slavery, the Atlantic world, and the formation of Brazil as a distinct society, more accessible to international scholars.  For this translation, Alencastro updated many sections to take into account research published over the last twenty years.

Following the proposition in world systems theory that semi-peripheral societies, such as Portugal or England at the beginning of the early modern era, are primary sites for innovation, Alencastro stresses the centrality of South Atlantic trade routes for the emergence and growth of the global slave trade.  Brazil was indeed the single largest recipient of African slaves.  Of the 5.6 million Africans currently known to have been transported between 1550 and 1850, 3.3 million were shipped in vessels originating in Brazil, 4.8 million landed in Brazil, which initially operated primarily as a training ground for subsequent export to the rest of the western hemisphere (cited on p. x). The centrality of Brazil was in part due to the relative ease and safety of the trade routes with the Angolan and west African coasts, but also followed from the virtual monopoly over the slave trade that the Portuguese maintained until the mid-seventeenth century.

Even though Alencastro makes only occasional references to British North America and the United States, his study has direct relevance for the history of North American slavery by deepening its history and more clearly placing slavery in the English-speaking world within a world system.  The book ends with the alliance that Portugal and England formed in the mid-seventeenth century as the two kingdoms were both engaged in decades-long wars with Spain and the Dutch Republic.  The Portuguese in particular lacked the resources to reclaim independence from Spain and defend their slave empire from Dutch incursions.  The Anglo-Portuguese alliance allowed Portugal to secure both goals.  In exchange, Britons and North Americans took over and maintained the international slave trade system that the Portuguese had built, while Portuguese and Brazilians reserved for themselves the profitable routes linking Brazil to Africa and Asia.  Portuguese monopoly ended, but the system they built survived intact under British management for another two centuries, a development that gave English-speaking merchants and financiers critical advantages in the global markets that the slave trade had made possible.

The opening chapters carefully reconstruct the beginning of Portuguese participation in the African slave trade in the fifteenth century.  As Portuguese navigators charted the African coast and moved east across the Indian Ocean to Asia, they entered profitable exchange circuits that included the sale of captured prisoners.   Portuguese marine transportation proved to be more reliable and less expensive than centuries-old land caravan routes, and many Africans were eager to do business with the newcomers from the north.  Portuguese merchants were particularly drawn to the Akan empire (in modern Ghana), which at the time had the richest goldfields in the world.  Initially, the Portuguese acquired gold by selling guns and munitions to the Akan, but the African kingdom needed more slaves to expand its mining operations.  The Portuguese supplied that demand by turning to trading partners far to the south in the kingdoms of Angola and Congo, both of which had long sold enslaved labor to other parts of Africa and across the Indian Ocean basin.  The Portuguese expanded the market in human beings to countries outside Africa by selling slaves in Iberia as household servants.  Well before the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were selling slaves to landowners who needed additional workers on sugar plantations on Atlantic and Mediterranean islands.  Demand for slaves inside Africa had been steady but relatively small.  Demand for slaves by Europeans was new and remained uncertain until Iberian conquests in the Americas created a new and larger demand for laborers that the collaboration of Africans and Portuguese were able to meet.

That demand did not become voracious until the mid-sixteenth century, at which point trade in human beings suddenly exploded and continued growing through the turn of the nineteenth century.  In the 1540s and 1550s, the Spanish crown suppressed revolts by the sons of the conquistadors challenging royal authority in Mexico and Peru.  In the aftermath, Spanish officials determined that reliance on indigenous American labor gave Spanish colonists in the western hemisphere too much autonomy from imperial control.  New policies granted charters guaranteeing land grants, self-governance, and royal protection to established Indian communities that accepted the sovereignty of the Spanish crown.  Slave labor from Africa was the most accessible alternative work force, and Portuguese traders expanded their operations to supply increased Spanish demand.  African labor was more expensive than either indigenous American levées or indentured servants brought over from Europe, but potentially more profitable if used to produce high volumes of basic commodities (agriculture, lumber, mining) for sale internationally.  Alencastro notes that Spanish landowners in America grew increasingly dependent on the crown the more they integrated into a global trading system that provided slave labor, customers for what slaves produced, and credit to pay for a new market model requiring considerably more upfront investment than producing primarily for local consumption.  The slave trade provided the antidote to localism that the Spanish crown desired, but undermined “self-sufficiency” and reinforced “dependency” upon economic activity in other parts of the world.  Including even basic food production: the cost of slaves and the profit potential for basic commodities was so great that slave workcamps produced one commodity in large numbers and imported everything else, including most of the food slaves ate.  After the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in 1580, the Spanish government reaffirmed an absolute Portuguese monopoly over the slave trade, disrupted only by small-scale raiding by northern Protestant mariners, lawless pirates and parasites in the eyes of the Iberians.

The economic and political stability of the Spanish empire rested on Portuguese networks in Africa that were able to provide a continuing supply of humans for forced labor at rates exponentially exceeding all previous African practices.  The Portuguese understood the distinction between the two empires.  In 1608, Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos, retired from his governorship of Angola and returned to Lisbon as an advisor to the crown on imperial affairs, reflected on a century and a half of Portuguese overseas expansion: “No more than vain glory was achieved in the conquest of India, where, instead, we should prefer the usefulness; and so, we should not try to control more than just that which was necessary for a safe trade.” [quoted on p. 323]

While Portuguese slave traders occasionally engaged in raids, the volume of humans being traded could be sustained only with systematic organization and division of labor.  The Portuguese relied on African suppliers, whose autonomy and self-government was essential for the system to work. Reliance on local elites in Africa diluted Portuguese control but assured continuous supply of slaves for sale in the Americas.  Exchange points were established in a series of coastal enclaves where the Portuguese placed small military garrisons and holding facilities for human cargo awaiting shipment.  African slave traders arrived at strictly scheduled intervals to trade newly captured slaves for goods and money.  They received contracts for new shipments with specified delivery dates and locations.  Both sides in the trade grew wealthy and developed cultures and lifestyles based on conspicuous displays of wealth and power.  Alencastro notes that the value of Africa for the Portuguese had initially been less important than the Asia trade, but grew to be the foundation of the Portuguese empire, organized around a system of alliances with states and non-state raiding organizations able to meet the challenge of supplying the labor demands of American landowners.

In the process, expanding existing African markets in slaves at the levels the Portuguese demanded radically challenged all African communities.  Several states that historically refused to participate in the slave trade successfully resisted and retreated into self-sufficient enclaves.  Depending on their location, however, states that refused to cooperate with the slave trade could block expansion of slaving into territories deeper in the interior of the continent.  Warfare quickly became continuous and far-flung, eliminating opposition wherever it appeared but also increasing potential for harvesting the living.  The wars were largely fought between African armies, with the slave-trading side having the advantage of the guns and artillery that the Portuguese supplied.   A handful of African states, such Dahomey and the Akan kingdoms in western Africa, prospered as trade increasingly pivoted around the specific requirements of human trafficking.  In southern Africa, a non-state, deterritorialized and deethnicized military group, the Jagas, played a particularly important role in supplying slaves to Angolan and Mozambican ports.  The expansion of military-based polities transformed the politics of Africa, while everyday life changed with the suppression of Africa’s manufactures and crafts, which could not compete with slave trading as a source of wealth, nor could African wares be produced at prices competitive with the European and Asian products that the Portuguese offered.

Alencastro demonstrates that as the slave trade expanded, violence and brutality were programmed into the formation of a marketable slave.  Portuguese traders required that their suppliers march slaves overland for a minimum of two months before delivering them.  As slave raiders expanded the range of their activities across the African continent, newly captured slaves could endure as much as six months of forced marches before being delivered to a trading port.  Captives were often imprisoned at the harbor for several months before embarking for the Americas.  The voyage to depots in Brazil took two months.  Once in the western hemisphere, captives were transferred to prison camps for instruction in the basic tools and methods of the work planned for them.  Those not sold in Brazil were shipped to Spanish colonies, another voyage that typically took four months.  By the time slaves arrived at their eventual worksite and probable grave, they had been in captivity for at least a year, frequently longer, stored in conditions of extreme privation and cruelty introduced explicitly for the purpose of breaking down resistance and weeding out militants with abilities to organize rebellions.

Records suggest that 10 to 15 percent of captives died during the transport over the Atlantic.  The Portuguese viewed the high mortality rates of the Middle Passage as acceptable, even necessary, not a source of waste that a search for increased profit ought to curtail.  Alencastro reports the absence of records documenting the numbers of captives who died during the overland marches to the Atlantic coast of Africa.  He assumes that the death rate was likely at least as high as the Middle Passage, a possibility that suggests fully a quarter of captives died before they arrived at the slave block in the western hemisphere.  He describes were a minimum of five exchange transactions in the course of moving a captive from the site where they were first seized to delivery to a farm, mine, or lumber camp.  Alencastro notes that the complexity of the system built to transport slaves linked depersonalization to security and price: “The farther captives were from their country, the less prone they were to escape, and therefore the higher their value” (144).  Standard practice, recommended by the authorities, was that each slave on arriving at a new home be flogged in order to demonstrate that nothing limited the will of the owner.  The breaking up of families was introduced into the process in order to keep captives in a state of disorientation and chronic depression.  Whatever statements of regret might be uttered (or even felt) expressed sentimental excess, a lingering ideal of human connection evaporating before the urgency of economic logic.

The process of producing a slave was expensive.  The high prices charged for slave labor, and the paucity of practically competitive alternative workforces for large-scale commodity production, whether Indian captives or European migrants, pushed slave purchasers to work slaves brutally.   Generally landowners bought slaves on credit, assuring that they had to run operations to assure quick returns or risk their mortgages falling into foreclosure.  Most slaves died within seven years.  Landowners gave no special considerations to protect pregnant women or children.  Every slave worked until he or she died.  Outside British North America, slave populations did not reproduce themselves, nor did slave owners see any incentives to ameliorate work conditions so that they might.   Inhuman treatment was economically sustainable because commodity production generated generous profits and replacements were readily available from Africa.  The reliance on slaves reproducing themselves that marked British North America is not evidence of greater humanitarian spirit.  Slaveowners north of the Caribbean arrived at a unique strategy for reproducing labor in response to the marginal position the thirteen colonies occupied within the world system before the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Other indications of marginality, Alencastro argues, were reliance on indigenous labor, as with the fur trade, or on endentured servants and free immigrant labor.  Alencastro identifies elements in the global economy that did not generally use African slaves, though other forms of forced labor were often involved: the fur trade, fishing, whaling, salt mining, wine production, dairy farming, horticulture.  For many across the world, slavery was a known feature of modern life but stood apart from the work they themselves did.  Products that had little directly to do with slave labor still benefitted from the markets that slavery and basic commodity production consolidated.  This is a critical addition to Alencastro’s discussion of Braudel’s story of the growth of capitalism.  The arguments of Alencastro and Braudel are not in conflict, but when the picture shifts from the growth of European institutions to a global system that required a range of innovations in every part of the world, the focal point of global transformation shifts from imperial centers to the South Atlantic.

Alencastro concludes the book with the wars of the second half of the seventeenth century that realigned the slave trade so that Britons and British North Americans took over the structures and system that the Portuguese had built.  He presents the transition more as a merger than a hostile takeover.  The Portuguese retained control of the slave trade for their own colonial possessions.  Between 1650 and 1800, Brazil was the final destination point for slightly more than half the slaves coming out of Africa.  After 1800, the vast majority went to Brazil to work there.  That trade, vital for the Portuguese economy, relied on English warships for protection, and British merchants increasingly invested in Brazil, learning more from how the Portuguese ran their enterprises and applying that knowledge to British colonies in the Caribbean, North America, and the Indian Ocean.  Through the eighteenth century, British slave traders worked with Portuguese and African partners to provide slaves for growing markets in the Caribbean and elsewhere, but without significantly changing the structures or the system that the Portuguese had built.   What had been a monopoly for the first two centuries of the global slave trade gave way to a partnership for the concluding two centuries, with Portugal and its overseas possessions continuing to playing a pivotal role, both as a market for slaves but also as the origin of practices and theories.

This is a long, detailed book, with many fascinating details and discussions outlining sea routes, the origins of the laws governing slavery, diplomatic relations Europeans developed with African and Native American societies, changes in banking practices and the transformation of capital investment to take advantage of the profits the slave trade offered.  Both folklore and intellectual history are represented in the book as Alencastro recounts how the growth of slavery challenged pre-existing conventions of all the peoples involved.  The process was full of contradictions.  Bartolomé Las Casas, justifiably famous for his vigorous defense of Indian rights in America, appears in this book primarily as a defender of African slavery, a troubling doubling that Alencastro notes was typical of the Catholic Church.  Jesuit fathers built missions in the borderlands between the Rio de la Plata and southern Brazil, which have largely been remembered as prototype utopian communities.  The Church often fiercely protected Native American peoples from those who would exploit them, but in Africa, the Church defended slavery by every means at its disposal, including, as Father Afonso’s account shows, directly organizing military action against African peoples who resisted the expansion of the slave trade.  A particularly interesting section in the book details the use of the Inquisition and charges of heresy or hidden Judaism to liquidate merchants offering labor sources that seemed competitive with the African slave trade.

In tandem with his narrative account, Alencastro engages in a running critical dialogue with an international historiography, evaluating arguments a broad range of historians regarding the histories of Africa, the Atlantic World, capitalism and global trade, empires and imperial competition, in light of what primary documents from a variety of locations say.  Maintaining the global overview of linked trading circuits is central to Alencastro’s methodological claims.  Historians, he notes, are trained to focus on a given location or, alternatively, a “field” and thus see developments primarily through the actions of only one set of actors engaged in an activity.  The nature of global exchange networks is an interplay of factors that may not be evident to all participants simultaneously even if the effects of decisions made in China or Mexico have results that impact government officials, bankers, traders, or peasants in Brazil, Mozambique, or Portugal—and vice versa.  A trans-regional, interdisciplinary history has to figure out how to reveal connections, to respect local or professional divergences while clarifying the limitations of purely “endogenous” explanations.  This involves reconstructing how networks operated at different locations.

In a chapter focusing on a half-century of increased war in the seventeenth century centered in the region linking Congo, Angola, and Mozambique, conflict that led to the collapse of long-established kingdoms, Alencastro presents what can be learned from the marriages Portuguese merchant families contracted.  He finds increased ties with Asian merchants.  These connections, sealed in the union of the children of ambitious families, opened up new consumer markets beyond the Indian Ocean and increased pressure on slave traders to find the labor needed to satisfy the opportunities the marriages consolidated.  The Kingdom of Congo fell before the pressure of a determination to increase the scale of slaving in south central Africa.  The kingdom did not oppose the slave trade, indeed had been a critical participant in the international expansion of African slavery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Nonetheless, their state interests in maintaining the stability of the region of the region pushed them to resist what they considered a reckless increase in the slave trade.  They insisted on the rules regulating the slave trade be followed scrupulously.  Preferable to an organized kingdom inhibiting the immediate economic interests of Portuguese merchants was reducing the region that the kingdom had stabilized to a state of anarchy.

Alencastro also follows the fuller trajectories of prominent figures as they move from one part of the world to another in the course of their careers.  One Portuguese slave trader retired to Lisbon after working in the business for twenty years.  He became a leading figure at the court and a patron of numerous philanthropic and religious institutions.  Alencastro notes that, as was common with other figures with similar histories, his background in the slave trade was never mentioned, even in passing, in documents from after his return to Portugal, evidence that the amnesia of imperial plunder has a long-standing history.  Nobody wanted to know or highlight the source of the wealth he lavishly shared, which was generally attributed, much as it might be today, to “individual enterprise.”

For U.S. historians of slavery, Alencastro’s focus on “dissocialization” as a key strategy slave traders used to produce a marketable slave problematically echoes arguments by Stanley Elkins and other mid-twentieth-century historians of U.S. slavery. They described slaves as psychologically dependent upon the master and overseers for basic survival.  Slaves lost the ability to resist, they could not imagine much less plan for the future, they were perpetually traumatized victims who formed close relationships only with great difficulty.  These claims were empirically false, as indepth readings of antebellum documents in John Blassingame’s The Slave Community (1972) and other comparable studies of everyday life among slaves revealed.  Instead of falling into a state of psychological alienation, slaves forged a strong sense of community that was vital for their long-term survival.  By the 1970s, U.S. historians of slavery recognized that the slave community’s resistance and agency powerfully counteracted slave owners’ mechanisms for control.  Slave resistance made abolition a practical solution for the social and political instability of slave-based societies.  U.S. scholars of slavery also abandoned ideas that slaves lost their African cultural roots as they documented the roots of their resistance in the pan-African values and practices they synthesized as they formed a community in captivity.

In Brazilian historiography of slavery, resistance has long been understood as a constitutive element in the formation of the Brazilian nation.  The Portuguese suppressed armed slave revolutions with difficulty.  Escaped slaves, armed and experienced in warfare moved deep into the interior, where they built self-governing communities, most small but some occupying considerable territory.  The most famous and the greatest threat to Portuguese rule in Brazil was the Republic of Palmares, established in the hinterlands in 1605.  It endured until 1694, a magnet for escaped slaves, and even a place of refuge for increasing numbers of poor whites running away from coastal farms and cities.  Its forces defeated every military force the Portuguese sent until a large army relying on Native American allies overwhelmed Palmares’ defenders. The importance of African cultural transfers into every aspect of Brazilian life is also taken for granted, though at times in an alluring if ultimately false stereotype that Brazil so honors its African cultural heritage that the nation became a “racial democracy,” the world’s most effective model for multiculturality.

The use of “dissocialization” in Brazilian scholarship has examined how mechanisms developed for controlling slave labor shaped political and economic relations in post-emancipation Brazil—leading to a society where elites face few obastacles to an arbitrary exercise of their will on subordinates, a tradition of legal impunity that protects the wealthy and the politically connected when they choose to violate laws, and minimal checks on corruption in business or government or on the use of violence by the powerful.  Alencastro’s contribution to this discussion has been to insist that the slave trade, and not simply slavery, provides the key for understanding practices of power in contemporary Brazil and the country’s profound social and economic inequalities that historically have been among the highest in the world.

In Alencastro’s discussion, “dissocialization” is a political and economic category, not one that is psychological or cultural.  Dissocialization is a process for producing and reproducing groups of people with limited, perhaps no civic rights, no claims on mutuality as a basic principle of community life.  As with felons today in the United States, the legal status of slaves in the system that the Portuguese created was officially one of “civil death.”  Their continued organic existence required satisfying the needs of others fully endowed with social rights including a right to agency, a right to a will.

“Dissocialization” remains a particularly relevant category for discussions of the relationship of slavery to capitalism and to democracy.  Alencastro’s book strongly supports the conclusion that slavery and capitalism had already merged by the end of the fifteenth century.  Divergences and the possibility of abolition as reform instead of revolution emerged three centuries later during the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism.  The contradiction between slave and free labor that Alencastro emphasizes revolves around incentives for technical innovation. A distinctive feature of slave production was that “production can increase independently from productivity by means of the simple multiplication of the slave producers” (147).  As long as the slave trade could continue expanding, investment in technological innovation was unnecessary for increasing production, hence a diversion of resources that all but very few slave owners avoided.  As a result, expanding production through improving machinery occurred in semi-peripheral areas within the global slave economy: the English Midlands, New England, in the Brazilian case, São Paulo.  These locations were in no way divorced from the slave economy.  New Englanders, for example, were active participants in every aspect of the slave trade. Paulistanos grew much of the food that slaves in central Brazil consumed and expanded their reliance on slave labor in the early nineteenth century as coffee became a valuable export commodity.  Elites in semi-peripheral societies shared in the profits the slave trade generated, but for a variety of practical reasons were unable—and in many cases, for a variety of moral, philosophical, and religious reasons, unwilling—to implement a fully mature slave-production economy.  As a result, economic investment in domestic industries in these locations favored enterprises that increased the hourly productivity of workers instead of the numbers of laborers deployed.  In Alencastro’s model, the conflict between slave and free labor was never a contest between pre-capitalist (patriarchal or feudal) and capitalist modes of production, but entirely between groups that were equally capitalist, but with competing ideas about the ideal balance between variable and fixed capital.

If slave production did not incentivize machinery that increased output per worker, it nonetheless dramatically innovated management techniques and did so from the earliest stages of the global slave trade.  Recent literature in the United States has explored how slave-owning entrepreneurs in the antebellum United States were pioneers in insurance, more accurate accounting techniques, and the use of statistics—all in order to manage slave production more efficiently and predictably.  Alencastro’s book shows in detail that the primary contribution of Portuguese merchants to the growth of a global economy was managerial as they figured out predictable procedures for linking different markets and guaranteeing on-schedule delivery of a broad variety of products in the expected quantities.  One of the first management challenges the Portuguese faced was to codify the legal standards governing the slave trade.  Above all, what it meant to be a “slave,” that is, an active contributor to society while civilly dead, thus fictionally in no way a member of the community anything whatsoever in return for his or her contributions.  To achieve this useful fiction, the Portuguese needed to synthesize their interpretations of diverse African customs and laws with Roman laws on slavery, largely been moot for a thousand years, to develop stable and enforceable standards for determining who was a “slave” instead of a “captive,” a “servant,” a “dependent,” or a free, contracted worker.   By 1500 basic practices and concepts were in place that continued well into the nineteenth century.  European states adopted the norms the Portuguese codified as slavery became a defining feature of the modern economy. The critical role of the Portuguese is evidence that globalization was both a decentered and decentering process, initiating displacements of power among a variety of centers competing to reorganize connections among localities.

The evidence for slavery as a constitutive element of modern capitalism, rather than a contradiction, can be found in the echoes of the slave production system that continued after abolition: the reliance in specific industries on immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, or homeless migrant workers, all socially constructed groups with reduced rights whose economic participation depressed wages; the social restrictions of Jim Crow, Asian exclusion, and other racializing legal codes; or in contemporary society the political and economic centrality of “undocumented”/“illegal” workers in the United States and, indeed, most other industrial countries, including many in the global south.  Markets for “free labor” around the world continue to involve processes that Alencastro terms “dissocialization.”  A tension within capital continues to this day, with managers and investors torn between competing strategies for securing market advantage.  Is it more profitable and predictable to rely on labor that has been rendered vulnerable by reducing or, the ultimate dream realized with prisoners and illegals, eliminating effective access to citizenship rights? or should an enterprise look to automation, digital technology, and a goal of increased technical efficiency?  The two generally go hand-in-hand, witness Apple relying on factories in China to produce the iPhone, or the ways in which automation deskills entire sectors of the labor force.

To the degree that modern capitalism has required dissocialization, regulating participation in self-government would be a strategy for reproducing a society with hierarchies distinguished by a variety of limited rights, with civil death as the ideal type of “absolutely unequal” maintained only in extreme but limited situations.  The contradiction between slavery and democratic government was obvious to many during the revolution of 1776, but distinction of groups through exclusion from rights was not a problem solely for British settler societies.  The legacy of “black Spanish” myths may predispose many U.S. readers to assume that the Iberian monarchies were arbitrary and cruel authoritarian states.  Attentive reading of Alencastro’s accounts reveal clearly the difficulties plaguing Spanish and Portuguese elites as they tried to regulate slavery in empires that they also imagined as free unions of self-governing peoples.  Neither kingdom viewed itself as a tyranny.  Spaniards and Portuguese feared anarchy, but they took for granted that consent of the governed was essential for political stability, and both empires had mechanisms allowing subjects to make their preferences known to policymakers.  To recognize, codify, and respect the rights of subjects remained a vital concern of political theory in both kingdoms, but it was also a practical necessity for governments stretching around the world.  Communications between Madrid, Lisbon, and colonial capitals took many months, followed by additional months, if not years, before decisions and guidances worked their way to every locality.  In both empires, as in the United States, the institution of slavery had to be integrated into ideas of a just government protecting the personal liberty of virtuous subjects/citizens, operating with ideals of justice and charity that modern Europeans imagined separated civilization from barbarism.  Racial ideas were a particularly important strategy, but only one of many, for evading the contradiction that slavery posed to anyone who did not care to confront the inherent cruelty of modern life.  Despite the limited discussion the book contains directly related to either British North America or the United States, the book has much to say to historians whose focus is the United States because it provides a model for rethinking the place of slavery in the creation of the modern world that necessarily by-passes the always present but generally hidden traps of U.S. exceptionalism.