Micro?

I really enjoyed this book and look forward to using it in my teaching when I teach high school. A large section of the beginning was about the background and set up of the Diligent's voyage. I was excited when the ship arrived in Africa and Durant's journal discussed contact with the cultures. I love geography and new there was math involved somewhere (I hate math) but was fascinated reading about how they calculated longitude and latitude. The portions describing the European forts that lined the west African coast, the various African tribes, etc., was all new history for me. I was hoping for a detail description of the experience of the African "slaves" as told from the perspective of Durant. But the book seemed to veer into the political and economic structures of African and European contact. It was evident how Europeans influenced the slave trade within Africa and created a dependence on European goods for King Agaja and the Dahomey. However, I became disappointed that the book covered a broader sphere than just the Diligent's journey. The Dahomey story explained what was going on and why the Diligent didn't stop there to purchase slaves, but as a microhistory it almost seemed like a side bar. Other stories felt this way as well. Maybe because the back of the book promised "an intimate understanding of a horrifying world." I felt that when it described the underground holding cells, but otherwise it felt more like a history of the triangular trade than a microhistory about one ship's journey through the middle passage.

Pespectives on the Atlantic Slave Trade(s)

This week we have two works from authors who provide different perspectives on the expanding Atlantic economy. In doing so they both accomplish what a good micro-history should do in demonstrating the impact of local conditions in shaping the broader context, and conversely how the broader context influences local conditions.

Robert Harms' work The Diligent, uses the journal of slave ship officer Robert Durand to provide a window into the mind's of people who participated in the slave trade. This communicates well with other themes from the period. In France the merchants and bourgeoisie were persistent in efforts to change the nature of the trade from a mercantilist model to a more capitalist one, which in turn provided people like Durant with the kinds of opportunities that would aid in his, "struggle to rise above his family's station." (95) These things are told in a narrative style that emphasizes the event but also the people who participate in them. Once the focus turns to West Africa this style is used to great effect in detailing all the conflicts and disparaging interests that surrounds the slave trade at the European forts which dot the costline. Given the multitude of players involved it is easy to see why the author chooses to put the focus on plurality of motives necessary for the slave trade. In doing so he also asserts the relatively weak position of the Europeans, "who were well aware that their continuing presence in Whydah depended on the good will of the king." (158) Even on their ship the slavers often appear as helpless in the face of circumstances as their captives.

In The Two Princes of Calabar, Randy Sparks examines the story of two 'creolized' West African slave traders who are enslaved in an ambush called the Massacre of 1767, sold into slavery in Virginia, then escape to Britain where they are eventually freed and then return to Calabar where they resume their slave trading activities. Sparks wants show how their story is, "an important reminder that not all native Afticans sold as slaves on the Americas fit the stereotype of the 'outlandish' African, who knew nothing about European language and culture." (7) The two Robin Johns constantly use their knowledge of Europeans to try and secure their freedom. This presents a conflict of sorts because while they are depicted as having agency they are in fact at the mercy of European captors for most of the story. This leads me to question some of the attitudes presented in the narrative as euphemisms.         

Overall these two works capture the complexity of the slave trade with a balancing of perspective that was surely difficult. Does the narrative style of micro-history provide the best approach for understanding local perspectives?

The Diligent

The Diligent gives context and a voice to something that is normally described in one sentence in normal history books - slave voyages. Even in slave narratives, the atrocities that are usually described are the ones that are suffered after the slave has made their way across the sea. Certainly, I've heard the conditions of these ships described, and I think everyone has seen those horrible diagrams of the way that ships were packed full of slaves as though they were barrels of fish, but an actual descriptive narrative? I don't think that I've ever heard of one that focuses almost exclusively on the trip over, and especially not one that focuses on the people that carry them over.

In history, and, more prominently, in literature, slaveowners are given two casts - either two dimensionally evil or angelically kind. The angelically kind people are generally women that are entrapped in the system as well, or men that benevolently own them. If the people that deal with them  - auctioneers, overseers, and brokers - are depicted, it is usually as one dimensionally evil characters. Durand is actually a far more interesting actor, simply because how boring he is. He's a company man, just doing his job. His prose is dry and detached, the same as a modern officeworker doing inventory. It's frightening because this was how the slave trade was perpetuated - through company men just doing their jobs to make a good living.

The Diligent: A glimpse at globalization already in place linking Africa, Europe, and colonial Americas in the 1730s.

I thought Robert Harm’s The Diligent – A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade was a wonderful example of the inter-connectedness via trade and commerce of Europe, the African coast, the Atlantic Ocean, and the colonies of the Americas.  Although Harms relies heavily on the mariner Lt. Robert Durand’s journal of the 1731-32 voyage of the French slave ship Diligent, the book is about much more than a single trading voyage, as the author connects all of the elements of a complete slaving voyage while giving the reader a detailed account of triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the colonies in the Americas.  Harms uses the voyage of the Diligent (a modest grain ship converted to slave trade) to take us through the political and social interactions (web) that puts colonial trade and commerce into context.  Just as important as what Durant’s journal says, is that which it doesn’t say.  Harms recognizes the silences in Durand’s journal and remarks that the mariner only mentions African captives twice during the 66 days of the middle passage, and then only to record deaths.  Harms does confront the absences in the journal and seems to logically “reconstruct” events in order to flesh out a narrative, although it seemed to be more “filling in the blanks,” the likes of which we’ve consistently seen this semester.  So many lives, and so much history was lost to slavery, and the middle passage experience is no exception.  Ultimately, I think Harms is effective as he uses a wide range of archival sources to round out Durand’s account.  In contemplating / researching the role of the historian and writing about absences, silences, and missing information I came across a quote attributed to Toni Morrison in reference to her handling of the middle passage in her Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved:  “a historian is not a novelist, and arguably only a novelist (or a poet) can represent the unrepresentable trauma of the middle passage.”  Food for thought / discussion.     

On Microhistories and the Antlantic Worlds

Robert Harms The Diligent forced me to return to my argument in my previous blog and class discussion on Kongolese St. Anthony and the nature of microhistories. As a caveat, I must say that I don't think the caveats and specifics of genres are too important to harp over, but the issue has interested me, so I'm going to harp over it nevertheless. At the end of the blog post, I will discuss more substantive issues of the book, specifically its fascinating vision of the Atlantic Worlds (notice "worlds" is plural).

I essentially argued that Kongolese St. Anthony was not a microhistory because it used the contextual information to explain the event rather than the event to explain the context. Some students argued the the order of the book made it seem that way, but John Thornton simply provided much of the context, which other authors weaved into the narrative, preceding the discussion of the actual event of the Antonian Movement. The Diligent has caused me to move closer to the latter camp. Robert Harms provides immense context to the story of the Diligent's voyage. Some chapters rarely discuss the voyage of the Diligent, but provide back story to one of the ports that they visited such as the war between Dahomey and Whydah for instance (chs. 20-22). The background is used to explain the experience of Robert Durand and his colleagues during their trip similarly to that of Kongolese St. Anthony. Yet, I consider The Diligent a microhistory, so I wonder how much the order influenced me on Kongolese St. Anthony.

The two books remain very different, however, despite their order. I do think that Thornton's goal is to explain the Antonian Movement for which contextual information is used significantly to explain it. Harms's focus is on "the Worlds of the Slave Trade" as the sub-title explains. The voyage of the Diligent and its crew provides him the opportunity to discuss how the particular historical environments in the very different parts of the Atlantic World of Vannes, the slaving states of central west Africa, and Martinique influenced and shaped the actions of the Diligent, its crew, and its owners, and perhaps more importantly the slave trade generally while largely remaining independent of one another.

This brings me to my second point. Harms here presents a very interesting vision of the Atlantic World in that it was not a singular world at all, but a group of separate worlds that acted independently of one another while also influencing one another. Or, as he writes, "the slave trade was really a kaleidoscope of diverse national and local endeavors that was constantly changing over time" (xiv). Perhaps I am reading too much into this (since he does use the term Atlantic World (sans s), but nevertheless, his vision is one of localization without a "global" context.

Assumptions, The Void, and Scholarly Caulking

I very much enjoyed reading The Diligent by Robert Harms. I was very much stricken by what I have decided to call his scholarly caulking. There are plenty of voids created by Robert Durand’s journal for its purposes are clearly professional rather than personal. This seems to drive Harms bonkers for he is practically begging to hear more about Durand’s personal opinions and more intricate aspects of his ventures. He opens with ‘How could Robert Durand outline such an evil mission in such impersonal prose?’. (5) However, Harms must already know the answer to this. Slavery was a profitable business and slaves seen as a commodity. Harms even highlights the massive amalgamation of European ignorance towards African culture and slavery. Most noticeably this comes into play through the lack of inner African geography and the convenient ‘truth’ that they were saving the African from themselves. This is liberation through enslavement. Harms cites such a materialistic perspective through the words of Robert Durand in stating that slave trading is only a means to make a living and he was ‘simply doing his job’ (250).

Returning to such scholarly caulking created by the void of information, Harms turns his attention, when appropriate, to other such sources to give interpretations of events that ‘must have’ happened. A great example comes into play with the Carnivalesque tradition that took part on ships when celebrating promotions and initiating new sailors to the African trade. (106) Harms goes into great detail with what other scholars have called the steam-valve theory that comes into play with the inversion of social hierarchy. Harms describes how the crew called the shots, to some extent, on these days and the tub of seawater initiation practices. Such secondary source inclusions very much help to illuminate the voids created in the limitations of Durand’s journal. Such practices, I consider, to be staples of a good historian.

With such caulking however, one has to be transparent about where statistical probability ends and assumption takes root. There are many times in which he approaches such a gap in stating ‘perhaps’ or ‘could have’ which I find to be an appropriate undertaking. There are also those times in which Harms blurs the lines between what Durand said and what Harms thinks must have happened based off secondary source accounts. In these situations I find that such choices are made on the basis of literary conventions rather than historical accuracies. This theme tends to crop up time and time again in these micro-histories that we are reading. Do we want something that sounds captivating or something that is accurate? Are they mutually exclusive? I would assume not.

One example of such assumptions is that he states how Pauline Villeneuve, the slave freed through religious convention, felt. In fact, Harms makes profound assumptions in stating what she learned, what she felt and her inclinations. (8) Knowing that it was improbable she has any extant firsthand accounts looking at Harms citations confirms such a notion. This is something we have dealt with before and seems to be a byproduct of creating a relationship between the author, material, and the reader. But do such assumptions do more Harm than good?

Finally, Harms makes interesting claims in the introduction. I interpreted them in a very micro-historical fashion. He seemed to be saying that large historical trends are the byproducts of small local/regional interactions. However, upon reading more of his work I think that he might be speaking more towards the varying interactions of the European, American, and African worlds. The ship clearly seems to sail through all three and give vast insight to each on their own and the ramifications of their confrontations.  To that end, Harms seems to be illustrating more of a proto-Globalization account. Even that statement is imbued with baggage because I believe Harms is correctly trying to illustrate how our conceptions of globalization are flawed. These sorts of connections, conflicts, and synergy have been going on for a very long time.

 

The Prius of Microhistories

Before I begin writing about Robert Harms’ The Diligent, I should explain that despite the title of my blog post, I am not trying to be flippant about this important book. Harms has told a difficult story and shared a painful history with amazing detail and depth. He has gone to incredible lengths to examine the unimaginable world of slavery from every angle, and has facilitated a greater understanding of slavery’s dark origins and transatlantic growth than I thought was possible.

A military history colleague of mine once told me that the old adage was wrong – history isn’t written by the victors; it’s written by the historians. Most often it is written by the victor’s historians, of course, but the point is that each historian has the unusual opportunity and responsibility for writing the history that she or he chooses to write, in the way they want to write it. Robert Harms wanted to write about slavery on his own terms – digging into the origins, ideologies, and impetus for the “peculiar institution” on both sides, the African and the European, to find out how it started, how societies came to accept it, and how it was allowed to grow to the point where millions of lives were shattered by it. Harms didn’t want to write the story of the Diligent, he wanted to write the story of slavery. As it happened, the detailed diary of First Lieutenant Robert Durand provided a convenient mechanism for telling this story. Not necessarily a “lens,” as we have seen with other microhistories, but more of a supportive witness to the events of a much larger phenomenon. The Diligent and her crew were not the main focus of the book, they were characters that floated in and out. They were a single thread in a vast tapestry.

I don’t see The Diligent as a microhistory along the lines that we have (perhaps vaguely) defined that genre, although it certainly could have been. A different historian, wanting to tell the story in a different way, could have taken Durand’s diary and built a very compelling narrative around it the way Ulrich did with Martha Ballard’s diary. Harms took a very different approach, creating a sort of hybrid history. His main thesis is a traditional, macro-style history of slavery, but he incorporates the micro-viewpoint of the Durand and the Diligent at those points where they can highlight specific details. The first slaves do not set foot on the ship until 250 pages into the book, but the details that accompany their arrival in the story could not have been provided without this micro-view. There are long sections of the book that do not even mention Durand and his crewmates, and at times the reader may forget that the Diligent is part of the story, let alone being the titular vessel. But then they drift in again, providing an eyewitness account to support Harms’ larger narrative.

Harms slides between historical genres smoothly and easily, with the result being a book that provides the best qualities of both traditional and microhistory. He has created the ideal historical hybrid.