Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?

Between the beginnings of the African slave trade to the New World, shortly after 1500, and the abolition of slavery in the last New World territories where it had remained legal (Puerto Rico: 1873–1876; Cuba: 1886; Brazil: 1888), probably more than 9,000,000 enslaved Africans were shipped westward across the Atlantic. ¹ The institution embodied in the capture, sale, transportation, and exploitation of African slaves in the western hemisphere thus lasted nearly four hundred years, and was legal for centuries, in large and much differentiated regions within the Americas. Many different European powers were involved in the sale, use and, often, resale of enslaved Africans. Local practices in these matters varied widely, and were usually subject to metropolitan codes of law and metropolitan bureaucracies (though these never were the last word in regulating the treatment, care, and defense of the enslaved). Hence to try to address generally the nature of slavery as it existed in the New World, or its common features 306as an institution in the New World setting, is a risky and frequently unprofitable undertaking. Not only was slavery different in the colonies of one power from what it was in those of another, but even within one imperial system, there were often significant differences in the slavery institution from colony to colony. Moreover, time and circumstance deeply affected the way slavery worked in particular milieux. Demography mattered; as did the prevailing form of work at which slaves were employed; whether the slaves were “creolized” – seasoned to the slavery regimen, or born into it, acculturated to the New World conditions, or caught up in the meaning and memories of a distant life – all these, and many other factors, much influenced what slavery was, and how it was experienced.