The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
about who Venis was and where she came from. That leap is based purely on probabilities. About sixty percent of the people shipped to Virginia in the early 1700s were Igbo—or at least that is how the English identified them, perhaps less than accurately—and the numbers shipped from Biafra increased with time. The result was that most of the people growing tobacco in the Chesapeake had arrived on ships coming from ports on the Bight of Biafra, and most Igbo being shipped out of Africa were shipped from the Bight.8 Though in general many more men than women were sold to the Americas rather than kept as domestic slaves locally, an unusually high proportion of the people shipped from the Bight were women.9 This all makes it somewhat more likely that Venis came from Igboland rather than elsewhere in West Africa. If so, then she probably went through the hands of the Aro, as did a great many Igbo.10 The Aro traders from the periphery of Igboland organized the slave trade through the Bight during this period, using a highly developed network for creating debtors and criminals for sale, as well as for wars and raids to produce captives who could be sold.
Actually, Venis could have been born in Virginia. Africans who survived shipment to Virginia in the 1700s generally lived long enough to reproduce.11 This was very different from what happened to Africans (and English indentured servants) who were shipped to the West Indies. There, conditions were so awful that it took three imports to raise the population permanently by one—they died too fast, and women were mostly too overworked and underfed for successful pregnancies.12 So if Venis’s parents had arrived in Virginia in the early 1700s, they could well have lived to produce a healthy baby who would also survive. I’m guessing that this is not what happened, however, judging by her name. Owners commonly gave African arrivals classical names such as Caesar or Pluto, much as owners might name a dog or horse. Baptismal records in one Virginia parish rarely include such names. Babies born in Virginia to Africans were named by their parents, with the owner’s consent, or by negotiating with the owner, who had ultimate naming rights, and were often recorded with names that were diminutives of English names—Tom, not Thomas, Betty, not Elizabeth. African names were quite rare, although the family may have used them privately.13 So it is likely that Venis (or Venus) was named for a Roman goddess after her arrival; Adam, with a common English name, on the other hand, was probably born in Virginia. As for the timing of her arrival, there were importation peaks in Virginia in 1725, with 3,500 people, and in 1735, with 3,000.14 Of these, at least 1,600 a year came from Biafra.15
AFRICANS WERE AT FIRST ONLY ONE of several sources of coerced unfree labor in the developing Atlantic world, but by the 1700s they were the primary source. Enslaved Africans by then had outstripped the temporarily enslaved English indentured and enslaved Native Americans. Trading in human lives was hardly new; the business of the production and sale of unfree labor was probably the world’s first globalized business. Arguably, it was at the epicenter of a developing capitalism and funded the take-off of the Industrial Revolution.16
But long before capitalism had anything to do with it, people were selling each other all over the world.17 Slavery was often the punishment for crime. Often, particularly in somewhat less stratified societies, this slavery was tempered with some rights and with the possibility of earning freedom, as it was for Igbo household slaves before the burgeoning of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1600s.18
War captives were sold pretty much wherever people fought wars and had social structures that were sufficiently unequal that one person could benefit from the labor of others—labor in either sense of the word, whether the labor of reproduction or the labor of production. Male war captives were bought and sold in societies able to mount such a believable threat of force that owners assumed these well-trained fighters, now enslaved, would be too intimidated to kill them in their sleep. Greece and Rome, for instance, pulled this off, but there were male war captives in smaller numbers throughout much of Europe, along with many other people in various forms of unfree labor—serfs in Europe, “untouchables” in India, bound peasants in China.19 Coerced labor was the basis of wealth creation in all societies whose elites could muster the force to get away with it. However, in societies where the use of force was less centralized, where rapid and sure punishment by some form of police or military action wasn’t available, most male war captives were killed, often with ceremony.20 At least some groups of Venis’s Igbo, for instance, gained respect by bringing home the heads of men they killed in war for ceremonial display—they didn’t leave them rotting dishonorably in public on posts as the English were wont to do.21
Women and children captured in war or raids were a far safer bet. Women could be quickly tethered by children, particularly if their children were given rights within the household or kin group that owned them. This was quite common in societies where having a large household and many kin and clients gave status. “Wealth in people” was what counted, as it did for the Powhatan, and as we will encounter again in the Scottish Highlands. Being able to support lots of followers marked the abundance you controlled.22 A bought woman could provide domestic labor; her children, fathered by men of the household, could be absorbed into the kin group or could be freed to become grateful retainers or clients. In some cases, she could also be eventually freed to function as an additional wife. For women, none of this was particularly unusual around the world, except in Europe with its formal and unusual insistence on monogamy—supplemented by rampant prostitution, kept women, and considerable winking at infidelity, at least among the elite and for men more generally.
Thus, that many African societies had slaves, like much of the rest of the world, should be no surprise. Most were women, but there were also men who were born as slaves or who were captured as children. Slaves performed a wide variety of tasks, from mining to farming to accounting to transportation to soldiering. The Igbo apparently had relatively few slaves, unlike some of their neighbors.23 But even where slavery was more common in polities in what became Nigeria, it was not the basis of the political and economic structure of these polities in the 1700s. That changed in some areas after the British outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and African elites needed another source of income. They turned to plantation production, such as the palm oil industry in Nigeria. So African elites continued buying and selling slaves, but instead of selling them to American elites, they used the slaves’ labor themselves.24 This, of course, is long after Venis or her ancestors had left Africa. In her time and place, it was the Aro who organized the trade that would have carried Venis to the coast, to be used elsewhere.
IF VENIS ARRIVED IN VIRGINIA in her late teens or early twenties, the most common age for enslavement, she would have been old enough to have been thoroughly involved in the life of the Igbo village from which she came. Unfortunately for my story there was very little contemporary reporting about Igbo life in the 1700s. Although a lot was written by contemporary Africans and Europeans about the coastal kingdoms through whose ports Igbo captives were shipped, hardly anything was written about the inland villages where they had been captured. Europeans waited on the coast for African traders to deliver people to purchase, having negotiated the permission to do so with the local kings, who taxed them and restricted their movements.25 Not that the European traders had much interest in going up the rivers of the Niger Delta to capture or purchase slaves themselves. They thought the coast was healthier.
The result was that African kings and traders determined the form taken by the slave trade just as much as did the Europeans. For a while Europeans recognized African sovereignties, just as they had recognized Powhatan sovereignty.26 Africans maintained the political independence of what is now Nigeria into the mid-1800s, when the British began establishing protectorates. The first Europeans did not see anything at all of Igboland until 1830. And it wasn’t until the end of the 1800s that they penetrated much beyond the rivers. Missionaries were operating in what they referred to as that “Citadel of Satan” by the mid-1800s, but when the British declared a Protectorate over all of what is now southern Nigeria in 1906, there were still sections of the Igbo interior that had yet to see a European.27 Thus for Venis’s time there are no recorded Igbo oral histories, no missionary reports, no travelers’ tales, no European traders to describe Igboland markets; nor did the international traders and historians from the Mediterranean world have much to say, although they did earlier.
There are detailed reports on the earlier