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From Memory to Mastery charts the development of commercial numeracy and accounting in America and the English-speaking Atlantic world between 1750 and 1880. Over this period, accounting evolved from a system of recordkeeping into a multifaceted instrument of control and analysis—from an aid to memory to an instrument of mastery. The traditional story of modern management begins in the factories of England and New England, extending only much later to the American South. This dissertation draws on textbooks and manuscript account books to argue that southern and West Indian plantations also influenced the development of bookkeeping. Scientific planters adopted sophisticated accounting practices, foreshadowing the rise of scientific management in the late nineteenth century. Their sophistication was not just incidental to the use of forced labor. Rather, the control of planters over their slaves made data easier to collect and more profitable to use. New methods were, in a sense, a byproduct of bondage. By contrast, the mobility of labor in the North made detailed recordkeeping necessary for keeping track of wages but relatively futile for detailed benchmarks and comparisons. Early northern factories distinguished themselves not by analyzing productivity but by mediating between firms and the market. They developed hybrid practices that bridged management hierarchies and market exchange. Commercial colleges educated clerical workers, accountants, and bookkeepers, providing the staff for a revolution in the organization of information. Though the rise of accounting helped planters and manufacturers to organize and control their expanding workforces, numeracy was not always class-biased. Textbooks and common schools spread numerical knowledge across a wide range of people, enabling them to turn the language of accounts to their own purposes. Account books reflect the power of their keepers, but bookkeeping is also a creative language that can be used by all kinds of people. This study bridges history and economics, blending qualitative and quantitative methods. The dissertation closes with a statistical analysis of accounting practices among Massachusetts corporations in the 1870s. Both these data and close readings of account books elsewhere in the dissertation suggest that practices were incredibly diverse but also fundamental to firm survival. Keeping accounts was a creative, narrative process that helped eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans to navigate the increasingly complex world around them.

Transforming Trauma: Memory and Slavery in Black Atlantic Literature since 1830 examines the interplay between remembering and forgetting in literary and cultural engagements with the trauma of transatlantic slavery. The dissertation considers how intergenerational, trans-temporal trauma becomes re-narrativized and re-envisioned over time in four symbolic sites of slavery (five countries)—Africa (Ghana and Mozambique), the Caribbean (Cuba), Brazil, and the United States—with the goal of exposing differences and emphasizing ruptures. Each chapter functions like a slave schooner arriving at an outpost of the African Diaspora, touring an eclectic transatlantic archive of slavery including art, public space, newspaper clippings, telenovelas, monuments (both imagined and built), song, and advertising copy, then dropping an anchor to explore a more traditional cross section of literature from each national context, juxtaposing canonical and non-canonical works. Taken together, the chapters probe the ways nineteenth and twentieth century Inter-American and African “texts,” broadly defined, register the trauma of slavery in the Black Atlantic. Chapter 1 discusses Brazilian author Bernardo Guimarães’ short novel, A Escrava Isaura (1875) and its wildly popular telenovela adaption in 1976 as an example of one of slavery’s twentieth century kitsch manifestations. The theme of Exodus in African American literature is considered in chapter 2 with a reading of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1869 poem, “Moses,” followed by an extended exploration of the early twentieth century Mammy cult including the 1922 statue proposal. Chapter 3 explores scenes of racial violence and offers a reading of the horrific American ritual of lynching in Jean Toomer’s “Kabnis” and “Portrait in Georgia” in Cane (1923) followed by textual analysis of Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (1962, 1966). Chapter 4 focuses on the Brazilian collective memory of the old historic district of Pelourinho in Salvador, Bahia as the former site of punishment at the pillory (whipping post) for enslaved Africans. Close readings in this chapter include Castro Alves’s classic epic poem, “O navio negreiro” from Os Escravos (1883) and Carolina Maria de Jesus’s diary of favela life, O Quarto de Despejo (1960) in addition to shorter readings of the poetry of Alzira Rufino, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Francisco Alvim, and a short novel by Dudda Seixas. Chapter 5 engages with the charged metaphor of sugar and compares the only extant nineteenth century Cuban slave narrative, Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo (1839) with a twentieth century account of maroon Esteban Montejo’s slave narrative as related to anthropologist/writer Miguel Barnet in Cimarrón: Historia de un esclavo (1966). The final chapter addresses the so-called literary African amnesia around slavery and examines vestiges of the memory of slavery in three African texts: Noémia de Sousa’s “Negra” (1949), Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973).

"Christian Slavery" shows how Protestant missionaries in the early modern Atlantic World developed a new vision for slavery that integrated Christianity with human bondage. Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries arrived in the Caribbean intending to "convert" enslaved Africans to Christianity, but their actions formed only one part of a dialogue that engaged ideas about family, kinship, sex, and language. Enslaved people perceived these newcomers alternately as advocates, enemies, interlopers, and powerful spiritual practitioners, and they sought to utilize their presence for pragmatic, political, and religious reasons. Protestant slave owners fiercely guarded their Christian rituals from non-white outsiders and rebuffed the efforts of Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries to convert the enslaved population. For planters, Protestantism was a sign of mastery and freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. The planters’ exclusive vision of Protestantism was challenged on two fronts: by missionaries, who articulated a new ideology of "Christian slavery," and by enslaved men and women who sought baptism for themselves and their children. In spite of planter intransigence, a small number of enslaved and free Africans advocated and won access to Protestant rites. As they did so, "whiteness" emerged as a new way to separate enslaved and free black converts from Christian masters. Enslaved and free blacks who joined Protestant churches also forced Europeans to reinterpret key points of Scripture and reconsider their ideas about "true" Christian practice. As missionaries and slaves came to new agreements and interpretations, they remade Protestantism as an Atlantic institution. Missionaries argued that slave conversion would solidify planter power, make slaves more obedient and hardworking, and make slavery into a viable Protestant institution. They also encouraged the development of a race-based justification for slavery and sought to pass legislation that confirmed the legality of enslaving black Christians. In so doing, they redefined the practice of religion, the meaning of freedom, and the construction of race in the early modern Atlantic World.Their arguments helped to form the foundation of the proslavery ideology that would emerge in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Africans forcibly brought to the Americas during slavery came from very diverse cultural groups, languages, and geographical regions. African-derived creole cultures that were subsequently created in the Americas resulted from the interaction of various traditional African forms of knowledge and ideology, combined with elements from various Indigenous and European cultural groups and materials. Creating within the context of slavery, these complex set of experiences and choices made by Africans in the Americas resulted in an equally diverse range of fluid and complex relationships between various African-descended groups. In a similar vein, Africans in Jamaica developed and exhibited a multiplicity of cultural identities and a complex set of relationships amongst themselves, reflective of their varied cultural, political, social, and physical origins (Brathwaite 1971; Joyner 1984). In the context of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Buff Bay, Jamaica, most Africans were enslaved by whites to serve as laborers on plantations. However, a smaller group of Africans emerged from enslavement on plantations to form their own autonomous Maroon communities, alongside the plantation context and within the system of slavery. These two groups, enslaved Africans and Maroons, had a very complex set of relationship and identities that were fluid and constantly negotiated within the Jamaican slave society that was in turn hostile to both groups. Using historical (archival), oral, and archaeological sources of data, this dissertation attempts to do two things: first, it examines the daily life conditions of enslaved Africans at a Jamaican coffee plantation, Orange Vale, in order to understand settlement patterns, house structures, access to goods, informal trade networks, and material culture in their village. With constraints on their freedom and general confinement to the plantation, how did enslavement affect the material world of the enslaved Africans at Orange Vale? What materials did they have access to, and how did they use them? Second, I examine their cultural, social, and political identities alongside their autonomously freed Maroon “kin,” the neighboring Charles Town Maroon community. Using a popular origin myth, I attempt to show how descendents of both groups explain the origin of their relationship, as well as use the myth to simultaneously create political bonds based on their blackness and differentiate themselves. I also examine how their various origin, experiences, and worldview were manifested late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century Buff Bay and its place in the revolutionary Atlantic world, on the eve of emancipation. / text

The most influential communities in modern Caribbean history have been the enslaved Africans and their descendant populations. As such, historical archaeology in the Caribbean has often focused on black lifeways under British, Dutch, and Spanish colonial powers. The utilization of various research strategies have included but not restricted to ethnoarchaeology, historical documents, material culture, oral history sources, settlement patterns, stable isotopic study, and burial practices. As one of the first historical faunal studies of the French Antilles, my work attempts to provide a contribution to the study of slave foodways. This dissertation examines the interrelationship between foodways and identity formation during the early modern French transatlantic expansion. My material evidence, exemplified via faunal remains, was retrieved from the slave village at Habitation La Mahaudière, once a prosperous sugar plantation in Guadeloupe established during the mid-18th century, whose domestic occupation spanned over 150 years and is currently a well-preserved archaeological site that offers the potential for understanding diachronic social and cultural processes of the French plantation system. My zooarchaeological results in combination with primary and secondary sources that discuss colonial subsistence practices will assist in establishing how slave foodways and French Antillean identity is created by and shaped one another. / text

This dissertation examines the ways that slaves and free blacks participated in and shaped the Bourbon Reforms in New Spain (Mexico and Central America) during the period of 1750-1808. By framing the Bourbon Reforms in this part of the Americas through an Atlantic World perspective, centered on the importance of slavery to European empire-building efforts in the eighteenth century, this dissertation argues that the politics of difference was vital to these imperial ambitions even in places where the slave population was relatively small. In the context of the slave and free black populations, the Spanish Empire determined its politics of difference on prejudices against blacks informed by skin color. Slaves and free blacks, nonetheless, actively participated in Bourbon imperial projects through litigation, forcing negotiations by escaping slavery, giving service in the militias defending the frontiers, borderlands, and imperial cities, and forging important kinship ties that shaped their identities and social networks that they used to negotiate their position in the imperial order. I argue that a pivotal moment when racism exacerbated the relationships of slaves and free blacks with the Crown was the Haitian Revolution. Although racist attitudes were already present against blacks, the Haitian Revolution demonstrated that slaves could eradicate slavery and the colonial order associated. The impact of this revolution was profound and even affected regions of the Americas that had small slave populations.

I argue that William Wells Brown’s narrative, Clotel, is informed by the white racism inherent in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and reveals evidence of the trauma it has fostered transgenerationally. By examining Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I assert that the trauma of slavery is transmitted transgenerationally in the black female body. I develop my argument using trauma theory, postulated through the work of Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Diana Miles, Abraham and Maria Torok, and William Cross. My purpose is to reveal the relevance and lasting significance of the legacy of slavery in contemporary American society. Thomas Jefferson’s white supremacist ideas, along with the system of slavery which nurtured them, continue to plague contemporary American thought and continue to shape African American female identity.

This study aims to construct the legal rights and duties of slave-owners in the first century AD as context for the exhortations in the New Testament directed at slave-owners. The central theoretical argument has been that the legal context of the first readers is essential for a valid interpretation of these exhortations, and that taking into account this legal context makes a valid interpretation possible. The study applies philological and comparative methods as well as analysis, interpretation and synthesis of the collected material. Chapter 1 provides an outline of the study. Chapter 2 first defines a search filter to delimit the vast collection of material on slavery in antiquity, and then describes ancient slavery as general context to the texts and the New Testament exhortations analysed in subsequent chapters. In chapter 3 the legal context has been constructed by way of analysis of primary texts from Greek, Roman, and Jewish law. Chapter 4 deals with primary texts on the philosophical underpinnings of slavery in the three worlds under investigation. In chapter 5 Greek, Roman, and Jewish primary texts dealing with the conduct of slave-owners in respect of their slaves have been analysed. In chapter 6 the New Testament exhortations to slave-owners have been analysed utilising the contexts constructed in the preceeding chapters. Chapter 7 summarises the findings and conclusions of the study. The study has concluded the New Testament writers’ acceptance of the legal and social reality of slavery in the first century AD. Their writings, however, contain unique features with a direct bearing on the rights and duties of slave-owners namely their persistent placement of the slave-owner – slave relationship in the context of the believing slave-owner and/or slave’s relationship with Jesus Christ. Within this framework, the study points towards diverging viewpoints within the New Testament on a continuum between social separation and acculturation. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Greek))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011

This study aims to construct the legal rights and duties of slave-owners in the first century AD as context for the exhortations in the New Testament directed at slave-owners. The central theoretical argument has been that the legal context of the first readers is essential for a valid interpretation of these exhortations, and that taking into account this legal context makes a valid interpretation possible. The study applies philological and comparative methods as well as analysis, interpretation and synthesis of the collected material. Chapter 1 provides an outline of the study. Chapter 2 first defines a search filter to delimit the vast collection of material on slavery in antiquity, and then describes ancient slavery as general context to the texts and the New Testament exhortations analysed in subsequent chapters. In chapter 3 the legal context has been constructed by way of analysis of primary texts from Greek, Roman, and Jewish law. Chapter 4 deals with primary texts on the philosophical underpinnings of slavery in the three worlds under investigation. In chapter 5 Greek, Roman, and Jewish primary texts dealing with the conduct of slave-owners in respect of their slaves have been analysed. In chapter 6 the New Testament exhortations to slave-owners have been analysed utilising the contexts constructed in the preceeding chapters. Chapter 7 summarises the findings and conclusions of the study. The study has concluded the New Testament writers’ acceptance of the legal and social reality of slavery in the first century AD. Their writings, however, contain unique features with a direct bearing on the rights and duties of slave-owners namely their persistent placement of the slave-owner – slave relationship in the context of the believing slave-owner and/or slave’s relationship with Jesus Christ. Within this framework, the study points towards diverging viewpoints within the New Testament on a continuum between social separation and acculturation. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Greek))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011