Children in European systems of slavery: Introduction

Abstract

This special edition on children in western systems of slavery 1 follows last year's special edition of Slavery & Abolition on women in western systems of slavery in moving beyond the conventional tendency to cast slaves stereotypically as adult males. At many, perhaps most, times and places most slaves were women and children, even in the Americas. While more males than females entered the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas, the age and sex ratios varied geographically and over time. The surviving populations enslaved in the Americas tended to approach sexual parity more often than the general literature acknowledges and involved more sharply gendered dynamics than suggested by the assumption of adult masculinity. Moreover, in nearly all other societies with slaves in world history, women greatly outnumbered men. 2 Except on the West Indian sugar plantations, where intensive demand for field labour heavily favoured adult males, elsewhere -including in Brazil at certain times and places, and especially in North America -women created and sustained the familial and social networks that sustained slaveries in the Americas. They also figured centrally in the fevered imaginations of their masters, both as objects of sexual obsession and as symbols of maternal nurturance. For their sometimesjealous mistresses they were rivals for husbands' attentions, if not affections, and mothers of children who, if recognized, would compete for their fathers' legacies. Since slave status throughout the Americas was inherited through the mother, women were literally the life blood of the mature systems of slavery everywhere, particularly as new imports of men from Africa ceased in the nineteenth century. In Brazil, they were symbolic 'mothers' of the national culture, and even in the United States, they were unacknowledged partners even of founding 'fathers' of the nation. Women's strategies of surviving enslavement, as workers and as mothers, not only differed from those of men but also channelled the political economy and historical dynamics of slavery in the western hemisphere. 3 Although the commercial demands of slavery in the Americas rendered some of their sisters infertile from overwork and lack of prenatal care, the children these women bore and also the younger people imported from Africa whom they helped raise were the 'generations [born or raised in] captivity' who made American slaves the distinctively reproducing populations they became.

Growth faltering in a skeletal sample of enslaved nonadult Africans found at Lagos, Portugal (15th–17th centuries)

“…The trade of children in slavery was relatively ignored until recent years, when this topic became the focus of academic research (Campbell et al, , ). However, it prevails widely unknown for the early North Atlantic trade period, chronology of the Lagos's osteological sample.…”

“…On the other hand, only adult slaves had to pay the full export duty. Individuals less than 13–14 years of age paid only half the tax, with exception of breastfed children who were untaxed (Campbell, Miers, & Miller, ; Mendes, ). It is worthwhile to notice that age was estimated by the children's height, hence, being arbitrary.…”