EARLY MODERN
HISTORY
What Price Souls: Slavery and Antislavery in the South Atlantic
In the seventeenth century, the Catholic religious order of Capuchins developed a transAtlantic presence in the heavy slaving zones of Kongo-Angola, Central Africa; Pernambuco, Brazil; and Havana, Cuba. Capuchins had served on Mediterranean slave galleys for almost a century, and brought Mediterranean ideas about slavery to bear in Atlantic settings.
Capuchins responded with compassion and horror to the enslavement of subSaharan Africans and began to articulate moral objections. Integrating Thomist natural rights doctrine, by 1679, Capuchins preached that African slaves were the inalienable owners of their own freedom and demanded that masters free all slaves and compensate them for back wages. Without reserve, Capuchins condemned the buying, selling, and/or owning of even a single African slave.
What Price Souls uses Arc-GIS to track the intersection of Capuchin travels and slaving networks. It shows the concomitance of global slavery and world capitalism in the seventeenth-century Atlantic, and shows how as against new discourses of commodification, Capuchins developed counterdiscourses of compassion and activism. The project has important implications for our understandings of how conceptions of slavery and of 'race' grew intertwined, considerations of antislavery, and the origins of human rights.
Italian Capuchins were sent to West-Central Africa after 1640, when the Portuguese and Spanish crown split. This image is from the famous Cavazzi-Araldi MS in Modena. Click here for a link to John Thornton's MS apparatus.
Both at the port of Loanda and in the hinterlands, they witnessed many atrocities committed by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and Africans. Click here for a paper describing some of what Capuchins saw.
Capuchins wrote about their experiences to their superiors at the Propaganda Fide, and many of these accounts were published and widely read throughout Europe. Click here for one of the most famous of these accounts, courtesy of Hathi Trust.
Critical to the Capuchin perspective was their comparison of Mediterranean slavery, which was not supposed to be permanent, to Atlantic, in which deportation made slavery effectively. permanent. For Mediterranean slavery's relations with Atlantic, click here.
To reach Congo-Angola, Capuchins made long stops in Pernambuco. Brazil, where many Africans were sent to work in the sugar engenhos. French and Spanish Capuchins fanned out all over the Iberian Atlantic. These transnational networks led to a French and Spanish Capuchin preaching vehemently against slaving in 1681 Cuba.
Very few accounts and representations of slaving have survived from the 17th century. Bringing their Mediterranean training to bear in the Atlantic, Capuchins responded to the volume of enslavement they witnessed, its brutality, and its permanence.