Narrative and servitude

This chapter explores the tools that were available to early commentators for understanding Atlantic slavery, and what textual and graphic strategies can reveal about the knowledge about, and responses to, slavery. Early accounts of the colonies reflect shared understandings of the social, ecological and religious domains to various extents. These accounts also had recourse to the Graeco-Roman tradition, particularly Roman slave law, and to Scripture to understand slavery, though not without significant interrogations. Colonial-era narratives were historicising narratives, relying on shared understandings of human agency, chronology and knowledge, but excluding Amerindian and African peoples from these domains. Knowledge about slaves, which was produced in a polemical climate in which the script had considerable power to inform and to edify, was essentially oblique. Colonial-era texts that are self-consciously representative can also be instructive about human space and the perception of human coexistence. Engravings of slavery testify to some prescriptive potential, and can also illustrate what was gratifying about plantation power.