Slave raiding

Abstract: Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900. By Walter Hawthorne. Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann, 2003. Pp. xvi, 259, illustrations. $24.95 paper. In Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, Walter Hawthorne examines the social and economic effects of the Atlantic trade system on the coastal communities of Guinea-Bissau, with special attention to the Balanta ethnic group. He begins with a macro analysis of the region and then turns to the Balanta communities in the last portion of the book. He draws on ethnographic and historical sources, administrators' and travelers' memoirs, Portuguese and Guinean archival sources, and oral testimony. It is one of the few English language historical studies of the precolonial history of Guinea-Bissau and the first historical study with a focus on the Balanta during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Hawthorne is particularly concerned with the role of "decentralized" or "stateless" societies in the Atlantic slave trade. He challenges Walter Rodney's thesis, which emphasized the role of centralized states as active participants in the raiding for and selling of slaves and the role of dominant social groups in organizing such activities. Hawthorne provides substantial evidence that decentralized and relatively unstratified societies, like the Balanta, were not simply victims of predatory states but were active participants themselves. Hawthorne demonstrates the ways in which small, decentralized communities successfully engaged in slave raiding and trading, to procure a steady supply of iron to fashion weapons to defend themselves and to make farm implements that could increase food production and sustain larger and more defensible communities. He provides a convincing argument that Balanta reliance on local intermediaries in the slave trade and the fear of early European traders to operate in Balanta areas accounts for the paucity of written records of Balanta involvement. Of particular interest is an oral narrative that Hawthorne recounts of a type of ant that lived in large colonies and attacked smaller groups, which were likened to the large Balanta community of Filim, which raided smaller and weaker neighbors for slaves and sold them into the Atlantic trade networks. The thrust of his argument is persuasive, but it could be strengthened through comparisons with existing literature, including my own work on Diola or Felupe involvement in the slave trade. Rodney specifically mentions the Diola as well as the Balanta as examples of communities that lacked slave-trading elites and were primarily victims of neighboring states. Such comparisons would have provided detailed materials on the social and religious consequences of decentralized societies' participation in the slave trade. Still, Hawthorne outlines a number of significant social and agricultural changes in Balanta societies. Increasing physical insecurity in scattered upland settlements, known as moranca, led Balanta to move into lowland areas and form larger settlements (tabancas) protected by mangrove swamps and thick forest areas. …

Abstract: First published in 1981, The Sulu Zone deals with a fascinating geographical, cultural and historical "border zone" centered on the Sulu and Celebes Seas between 1768 an 1898, and its complex interactions with China and the West. The author examines the social and cultural forces generated within the Sulu Sultanate by the China trade, namely the advent of organized, long distance maritime slave raiding and the assimilation of captives on a hitherto unprecedented scale into a traditional Malayo-Muslim social system. His work analyzes the dynamics of the last autonomous Malayo-Muslim maritime state over a long historical period and describes its stunning response to the world capitalist economy and the rapid "forward movement" of colonialism and modernity. It also shows how the changing world of global cultural flows and economic interactions caused by cross-cultural trade and European dominance affected men and women who were forest dwellers, highlanders, and slaves, people who worked in everyday jobs as fishers, raiders, divers and traders. Often neglected by historians, the responses of these members of society are a crucial part of the history of Southeast Asia.

Abstract: Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. Edited by Sylviane Diouf Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Pp. xxxvii, 242. $65.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. Sylviane Diouf, accomplished Atlantic and African historian, has undertaken a labor both of passion and of erudition in editing Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. In her introduction to this edited collection, she struggles to bring together an uneven set of conference papers with some success. In providing overarching themes for the strategies used by West Africans against the Atlantic slave trade, she reaches beyond "resistance" (p. x) in an attempt to understand how Africans acted to preserve self, family, and society. She challenges prevailing opinion that seeks to portray Africans as the "other" in the slave trade, pointing out that Europeans, after all, had deported their own as well, and making reasonable comparisons between the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust (pp. x-xi). Yet she does not seek to be an apologist for Africans, does not shy away from either the difficult question of "betrayal" of Africans by Africans (pp. xiii-xiv) or the African/African-American divide evident to those who have studied roots tourism in Ghana and elsewhere (p. xvi). In twelve chapters and an epilogue, Diouf has collected a far wider and sometimes more incisive set of analyses of West Africans' resistance to the depredations of the Atlantic slave trade than published previously. Despite the title, most of the papers do not describe armed struggle at all, but instead adopt approaches taken by James Scott and others in understanding resistance to colonialism in terms of less obvious strategies avoidance, self-interest, foot-dragging, and even exodus. The Africans in Fighting the Slave Trade flee to defensible or less penetrable environments such as forests and caves, they trade their own slaves and newly won captives to Europeans in exchange for their relatives, they change their cultivation habits, undertake informal boycotts, and give misinformation to raiders. They also engage in both planned and organic social transformations as a defensive measure. West Africans exposed to slave raiding alter their housing construction, village architecture, field arrangement, cultivation methods, settlement size, religion and rituals, central political institutions, and diplomatic arrangements. Many do fight the trade actively: several contributors point to evidence of the growth and increasing sophistication of armies, revolts by slaves within West African states, and revolts on board ships as evidence of a previously understated level, as well as range, of struggle against the transatlantic slave trade within and on the coast of West Africa. Equally gripping although less celebrated is evidence that West Africans chose to become slavers in an attempt to avoid becoming slaves. This is put forward most compellingly by Walter Hawthorne, who elaborates the controversial gun-slave cycle proposed by Joe Inikori and Paul Lovejoy in the early 1980s by suggesting that acephalous societies in Guinea-Bissau traded slaves for iron used in making melee weapons. Similar evidence of escapees and refugees becoming slavers is presented by Elisee Soumonni for Benin and in the oft-noted case of Masina, here simply but authoritatively set out by Martin Klein. Diouf herself notes counter-examples in which slave traders journeying to the coast were seized and themselves enslaved. This evidence, collected in a single volume, highlights the confusing and complex situation in West Africa during the slave trade, and hints at the need for further research. In developing this collection, Diouf has recreated the discourse on the strategies of West Africans in the uncertain times of the Atlantic slave trade in a new, more nuanced and expansive shape. Alas, the chapters themselves are somewhat uneven, as is often the case with such collections developed from conference papers. …

Abstract: First published in 1981, 'The Sulu Zone' has become a classic in the field of Southeast Asian History. The book deals with a fascinating geographical, cultural and historical 'border zone' centered on the Sulu and Celebes Seas between 1768 and 1898, and its complex interactions with China and the West. The author examines the social and cultural forces generated within the Sulu Sultanate by the China trade, namely the advent of organized, long distance maritime slave raiding and the assimilation of captives on a hitherto unprecedented scale into a traditional Malayo-Muslim social system. How are entangled commodities, trajectories of tastes, and patterns of consumption and desire that span continents linked to slavery and slave raiding, the manipulation of diverse ethnic groups, the meaning and constitution of 'culture,' and state formation? James Warren responds to this question by reconstructing the social, economic, and political relationships of diverse peoples in a multi-ethnic zone of which the Sulu Sultanate was the centre, and by problematizing important categories like 'piracy,' 'slavery,' 'culture,' 'ethnicity,' and the 'state.' His work analyzes the dynamics of the last autonomous Malayo-Muslim maritime state over a long historical period and describes its stunning response to the world capitalist economy and the rapid 'forward movement' of colonialism and modernity. It also shows how the changing world of global cultural flows and economic interactions caused by cross-cultural trade and European dominance affected men and women who were forest dwellers, highlanders, and slaves, people who worked in everyday jobs as fishers, raiders, divers or traders. Often neglected by historians, the responses of these members of society are a crucial part of the history of Southeast Asia.