“Slaves worked.” In Ira Berlin and Phillip Morgan’s famous formulation, slavery was a labor system. But what kinds of work did enslaved people in the Anglo-Atlantic world perform? Decades of scholarship implicitly assumed associated enslaved labor with physical work, including productive labor producing salable commodities and reproductive labor that structured the economy of slavery.
This panel brings together histories of labor, slavery, and expertise to interrogate enslaved people’s work and the appropriation of specialized knowledge. Collectively, these papers find that private businesses in the U.S. and Atlantic world relied on many kinds of enslaved people’s skills, from nursing to building and maintaining physical infrastructure, so much so that enslaved people’s skills were subject to state and imperial oversight. The state mediated the relationship between enslaved experts and enslavers’ access to their labor. At times, the state assisted individual enslavers and state institutions with mobilizing and maintaining control of specific enslaved people. And as evidenced by Dorner’s research into enslaved nurses at the Barbados Naval Hospital and Daly’s work on public infrastructure built by the King family, empires and states also directly benefited from this work. Hall’s paper on the regulation of skilled, enslaved workers finds a more ambivalent relationship between enslaved labor and the state, as local, county, and state governments tried to balance slaveowners’ property rights and profits against fears that enslaved experts threatened the white public.
These papers also consider what specialized meant to the people who possessed it. Skills did not ameliorate the experience of enslavement, as some historians claim. However, it did mean that enslaved people inhabited specific environments characterized by particular forms of coercion. The nature of their work had an enormous bearing on how they navigated enslavement and remained with their communities, as enslaved people deployed their knowledge to navigate spaces that simultaneously relied on and marginalized their work.