Review of “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation”

David Eltis’s essay, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation” challenges the notion that New World slavery was mostly due to economics. He states that economics, “narrowly defined, is no more capable of explaining its origins than its abolition” (Eltis 1400). His essay focuses instead on how groups of people identify themselves and other groups as being or not being “eligible for enslavement” and how that eligibility changes as time passes (Eltis 1400). Eltis contends that the groups in power gradually changed their perceptions about the other groups they were in contact with or control.

In order to support his argument, Eltis begins by establishing the status of eligibility, “insider” and “outsider” (1400) and then goes on to give several socio-historical examples of how each status was defined. To discredit the role of economics as the reason for slavery, Eltis makes an argument for the cheapness of European slaves over African ones but argues that perception, not economics, was the deciding factor. Eltis explains how there were social stratifications and economic institutions that allowed for Europeans to enslave other Europeans but that they did not do so, and that race was possibly a bigger factor because it was such an “outsider” trait to Europeans. He supports this idea by explaining how European society saw its cultural “outsiders,” such as convicts and prisoners of war, and how their technology and ideology allowed them to feel morally okay with enslaving outsiders from different cultures and races. Eltis then argues that as Europeans broadened their perception of which cultures included “insiders,” slavery was gradually abolished.

Personally, I found the strongest part of his argument to be the discrediting of economics as a major factor for slavery. That argument was focused and well laid out, and the examples were clearly defined, whether talking about the costs associated with transporting slaves or the different market factors that would have contributed to cheaper slavery had Europeans used other Europeans. He provided many examples from different European countries in order to support the broad claim of “Europe” acting a certain way, which kept the essay from being overgeneralized. I also became more thoughtful about race relations and how our perceptions of the race could be constrained by the traditional ways we have viewed slavery and its ending, and I appreciated the argument.

The part of the essay that was weakest for me was Eltis’s inability to articulate what caused slavery then if it was not economic factors. The argument he makes for changing social and cultural perceptions of insiders versus outsiders was interesting but not as concrete or definitive, in my opinion, and he did not support an alternative theory nearly as strongly as he critiqued the theory of economics as the driving force behind slavery. I also thought the essay was repetitive in places, especially in how it repeated claims that were already well-argued or established. His explanation for how a culture, such as the British, that were least likely to make slaves of their own citizens would be the harshest to outsiders. Eltis, in my opinion, did not connect that line of thinking to his central argument very well.

Work Cited

Eltis, David. "Europeans and the rise and fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation." American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 5, 1993, pp. 1399–1424.