为什么我们需要一个关于奴隶制的全球叙事？

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为什么我们需要一个关于奴隶制的全球叙事？

12月21日，2022年

作者：吉姆-沃尔文，《一个被改变的世界》的作者。美洲的奴隶制和全球权力的起源

像大多数历史学徒一样，我在一个特定的、狭窄的研究领域学习我的技能：一个牙买加奴隶种植园的历史。当时，在60年代末，奴隶制并不是英国历史学家普遍感兴趣的话题。加勒比海地区有丰富的、不断扩大的文献，由CLR James和Eric Williams发起，并由Douglas Hall领导的西印度群岛大学的杰出历史学家们继续研究。此外，美国的奴隶制历史学家--特别是尤金-吉诺维斯--正在对美国的奴隶制进行惊人的历史重估。但英国历史学家还有其他更多的地方性（甚至是狭隘的）目标。当时占主导地位和最有影响力的英国历史学家--从《过去与现在》中发表的作品来看--仍然专注于国内、岛屿问题。在这一学科中，奴隶制被视为在地理上和知识上都很遥远--一个最好留给非洲、海洋事务或美洲的历史学家的话题。

显然，这在我们对英国历史的理解中留下了一个令人沮丧的空白。因此，我在各种书籍中着手探索英国与奴隶制之间的关系。

然而，在英国之外，我们也需要一个更大的、全球性的奴隶制故事，考虑到数百万被奴役的非洲人的劳动是如何导致世界各地的巨大社会变化的。当时的大部分工作仍然扎根于国家身份：美国、牙买加和巴西的奴隶制。所有这些独特的地理和民族研究在哪里合适？或者，换句话说，奴隶制在全球环境中的定位是什么？随着全球化研究的出现，以及知识界和政治界对全球趋势的解释的出现，这个问题变得更加紧迫。

我的新书《转变的世界》就是在这些关于如何在全球环境中定位奴隶制的问题中产生的。这本书不仅仅是关于世界各地的奴隶制--它是一项研究，解释了数百万非洲人被奴役是世界范围内问题的一个决定性因素。

以奴隶生产的商品的情况为例。我们知道糖、朗姆酒、烟草和棉花是如何从奴隶种植园中脱颖而出，成为全球消费生活的核心内容。但是，来自更广泛的贸易体系--例如亚洲和印度洋--的商品在大西洋世界的奴隶制的产生和发展中发挥了什么作用？所有这些在西方生活的物质提升中发挥了什么作用？

当然，这些具体问题中的许多问题以前已经被探讨过了。但我的目的是将这些研究汇集成一部在全球范围内有意义的历史叙事。一个被改变的世界》解释了被奴役者在一个繁荣的现代西方世界的出现中所扮演的角色，并提出了更广泛的世界深深依赖于大西洋世界的奴隶制度的方式。

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Why We Need a Global Narrative of Slavery

December 21, 2022

By Jim Walvin, author of A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

Like most apprentice historians, I learned my trade on a specific, narrow area of study: the history of a single Jamaican slave plantation. At that time, in the late 60’s, slavery was not a common topic of interest to historians of Britain. There was a rich and expanding body of literature in the Caribbean, launched by CLR James and Eric Williams and continued by a brilliant coterie of historians at the University of the West Indies under Douglas Hall. In addition, US historians of slavery — notably, Eugene Genovese — were engaged in an astonishing historical reassessment of slavery in the USA. But British historians had other more local (parochial even) objectives in view. The dominant and most influential British historians of the time — as seen in the work published in Past and Present — remained focused in domestic, island issues. Within the discipline, slavery was seen as geographically and intellectually far away—a topic best left to historians of Africa, of maritime affairs or of the Americas.

Clearly this left a frustrating gap in our understanding of British history. Thus I set out, in various books, to explore the relationship between Britain and slavery.

Yet looking beyond Britain, there was also a need for a larger, global story of slavery which took into account how the labor of millions of enslaved Africans led to massive social changes around the world. Most of the work at the time remained rooted in national identities: slavery in the USA, in Jamaica, in Brazil. Where did all these distinct geographic and national studies fit? Or, put another way, where did slavery fit in a global setting? That question became more pressing with the emergence of the study of globalisation, and of the intellectual and political search for explanations of global trends.

My new book, A World Transformed, emerged from these questions of how to locate slavery in a global setting. The book is not simply about slavery around the world — it is a study that explains the enslavement of millions of Africans as a defining factor of world-wide issues.

Take the case of slave-produced commodities as one example. We know how sugar, rum, tobacco, and cotton emerged from the slave plantations to become central aspects of consumer life across the globe. But what role did commodities from wider trading systems — in Asia and the Indian Ocean for example — make possible in the creation and development of slavery in the Atlantic world? And what role did all this play in the material enhancement of Western life?

Of course, many of these particular questions have been explored before. But my aim was to bring those studies together into a narrative history that made sense on a global scale. A World Transformed explains the role played by enslaved people in the emergence of a prospering modern Western world, and suggests ways the wider world was deeply dependent on the slave system of the Atlantic world.