42 pages • 1 hour read
Mary PrinceThe History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1830A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Sociohistorical Context: Slavery and Abolitionism
Abolitionism was an 18th- and 19th-century movement to end the institution of slavery and effect the emancipation of all enslaved people. This movement, particularly aimed at the liberation of enslaved Africans and people of African descent, had its most ardent support in Western Europe and the Americas. While the movement reached its height in the early-to-mid-19th century, action in opposition to enslavement began centuries earlier. In 1690 there was a Quaker protest against the African trade of enslaved people (Ferrell, Claudine L. The Abolitionist Movement. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005). Likewise, rebellions and resistance by enslaved people began in the earliest days of the slave trade. The roots of the formal abolitionist movement, however, lie in early-16th- and 17th-century Quaker activism. As the trade expanded, the population of enslaved people increased exponentially, especially in American colonies of European nations such as England, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. In response, various organizations and abolitionists organized lectures, petitions, publications of narratives by enslaved people, support for fugitives from slavery, and anti-slavery newspapers. Among these organizing institutions was the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, better known as the London Anti-Slavery Society. As the name indicates, abolitionists’ discourse included differing opinions on whether abolition should take place gradually to ease society into the change or immediately to grant enslaved people their freedom without delay. At the time of publication of The History of Mary Prince, Pringle was the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. Due in large part to abolitionist efforts, England abolished enslavement in its colonies in 1833.
Historical Context: England and the West Indian Slave Trade
The triangular slave trade entailed a transatlantic exchange of goods and enslaved people that provided participating nations with wealth. In this system, textiles and other items manufactured in Europe were transported to Africa for sale. Participating parties included various nations native to Africa that had arrangements with American and European slave traders. In exchange for goods and money, these predatory nations regularly targeted other African villages, captured the inhabitants, and sold them to white buyers on the West Coast of Africa. Then, these enslaved people were taken to the Caribbean and the Americas, where their labor produced sugar and other goods that were then shipped to Europe for sale, completing the triangle.
The “Narrative of Asa-Asa” makes mention of this process in Asa-Asa’s own account of capture. He describes the Adinyé people who attacked his home of Egie and sold him in exchange for goods, such as guns, salt, gunpowder, and clothes. This is not unlike the account of formerly enslaved African man Cudjo “Kossola Oluale” Lewis in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, which was published in 2018 but based on interviews from 1927. Lewis describes the predatory practices of the Dahomey soldiers who captured him for sale. While this is one way that Africans were taken captive, it is not the only way. Sometimes, European slave traders did the capturing themselves. In his historiography King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), Adam Hochschild details Belgian enslavement of Congolese people for natural resources like ivory and rubber. White traders purchased African people at the coast; Asa-Asa describes this period as his first encounter with white people. Enslaved Africans were then sold in the Americas to enslavers for a wide variety of labor, including agricultural work, domestic work, trades, and ship work. Most often, the products of slave labor—such as rice, tobacco, and sugar—were exported back to Europe for consumption. Colonies benefitted as well. For instance, Prince describes her years laboring in the salt ponds on Turk’s Island. The Turks and Caicos National Museum’s website explains that “about one sixth of the salt used in British North America before the American Revolution came from Grand Turk and Salt Cay” (“Salt Raking in the TCI”). Wealth from the British slave trade also went back into the British economy and increased the wealth of the British royalty, many of whom funded and sanctioned this system for many years. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 abolished this practice in Britain.
