This issue marks forty years since I became an editor of Slavery & Abolition. It therefore seems an opportune moment to reflect on some of the themes that have been most significant in that period. I want to do so by pointing to some of the articles that have helped to shape the journal as well as the field of slave and post-slave studies. It is also worth highlighting just how small the journal was in its early days: typically, a handful of articles in each issue, reflecting the relatively lower level of interest in the field in the early 1980s. Contrast that with this issue, consisting of an impressive Special Issue on Slavery in Byzantium and the Medieval Islamicate World, several articles and book reviews, and the Annual Bibliography.
During this period, the aim of the journal has remained unchanged: to discuss the demographic, socio-economic, historical, and psychological aspects of human bondage from the ancient period to the present as well as the dismantling of the slave systems and the legacy of slavery. In terms of significant themes, some of the most innovative work has been on the Atlantic Slave Trade: this has consisted of important quantitative studies but also research on the cultural implications of the slave trade and the significance of the ethnicities of the enslaved caught up in it. One of the most cited articles in the journal was by Philip Morgan, ‘The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments’ (1997); another, in a very different vein and linking film, biography and culture, was by Hannah Durkin, ‘Finding Last Middle Passage Survivor Sally “Redoshi” Smith on the Page and Screen’ (2019). There have also been other interesting attempts to recover the lives of enslaved women who survived the Middle Passage based on scattered archival fragments: one of the recent articles that does this is by Randy M. Browne, Lisa A. Lindsay, and John Wood Sweet, ‘Rebecca’s Ordeal, from Africa to the Caribbean: Sexual Exploitation, Freedom Struggles, and Black Atlantic Biography’ (2022).
Another abiding theme has been the resistance of the enslaved to their enslavement. This has taken many forms: I organised the first Special Issue of Slavery & Abolition on the theme of slave resistance in 1985, Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World, and others have gone much further and in many different directions. Stephanie Camp’s article, ‘“I Could Not Stay There”: Enslaved Women, Truancy, and the Geography of Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Antebellum Plantation South’ (2002), has inspired a great deal of subsequent research on the self-emancipation of the enslaved. Others, such as the article by Richard Price, ‘Subsistence on the Plantation Periphery: Crops, Cooking, and Labour among Eighteenth-Century Suriname Maroons’ (1991), have concentrated on the Maroon communities across the Americas, communities that consisted of the enslaved who established independent settlements away from the plantations.
Gender – and more specifically the study of enslaved and free women - has been a continuing theme in the journal. One of the earliest articles was by Barbara Bush, ‘White “Ladies”, Coloured “Favourites” and Black “Wenches”: Some Considerations on Sex, Race and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean’ (1981). More recently, Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Diana Paton and Emily West have produced a fascinating Special Issue on Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies (2017), elaborating on Saidiya Hartman’s comments about enslaved women that Motherhood was a ‘social relation without legal recognition’. The article by Sasha Turner in this collection is a sophisticated example of this work on Motherhood: ‘The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery’ (2017). Another much earlier Special Issue, The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (1991) edited by Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, was very important in highlighting the significance of the independent economic activities of the enslaved. In addition, work on Brazil in the past 40 years has been transformed: this has included studies of Brazilian slavery as well as the links between Brazil and West Africa. One of the most innovative of these articles was by Ana Lucia Araujo, ‘Dahomey, Portugal and Bahia: King Adandozan and the Atlantic Slave Trade’ (2012).
Work on Emancipation and Post-Emancipation societies has been another significant theme in Slavery & Abolition. Some of the research in this area has concentrated on the protests in the wake of emancipation: for this, see the article by Mimi Sheller, ‘Quasheba, Mother, Queen: Black Women’s Public Leadership and Political Protest in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834–65’ (1998). But it has also included treatment of the world-wide phenomenon of indentured labour: this is exemplified in the article by Clare Anderson, ‘Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century’ (2009). Links to the Black Lives Matter protests have also been significant; in 2021, Trevor Burnard organised an important Forum on Black Lives Matter and Slavery & Abolition. In the Forum, Daina Ramey Berry addressed a crucial theme in the Black Lives Matter protests and for enslaved people in ‘Soul Values and American Slavery’ (2021).
There is much that remains to be done. We need more work on the complex nature of slave resistance, on wider studies of gender, and on the global slave trade. We also need work that shows the continuities and discontinuities of slave and post-emancipation societies more generally. It is my hope that Slavery & Abolition will remain at the heart of these studies and continue to publish path-breaking research on all aspects of slave and post-slave societies and cultures.