For your footnotes, use this link to clarify:
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html
My Paper, to be used as a reference only (the margins are off, but you should have 1in on all sides) :
During the
colonial era, enslaved Africans and their British captors transformed old-world
marketing
practices into a system of local commerce that was unique
to the American South. Both European
and African women were expected
to participate in small-scale food trade in order to maintain
their households,
and the sight of women selling homegrown vegetables, cooked foods, and
other
perishables throughout the Atlantic World was common. Prior to industrialization,
British
women were responsible for the buying and selling of the majority of food in
the
urban and rural areas of England but they rarely engaged in the importing
and exporting
of sugar, tobacco, or cotton.[1] In large West African cities like Eko, Ouidah,
and Kano
women also controlled vending in the local markets but unlike England,
elite African
women also dealt with large-scale trade in commodities like slaves,
cloth, and salt.
In the American South, social mores kept the unmarried
sisters and widows of slave-owning
men in a type of urban purdah and they
rarely engaged in market activities, but their
relationships with certain
enslaved domestics allowed both groups of women to profit
off of the gendered
nature of the urban food trade. African and African American
women utilized their strangely privileged positions in the
market place to reinforce a
type of internal economy and to create a version of
southern commerce that reflected
African customs.
Like both their enslaved and free
West African counterparts, bondwomen in the
Low
Country established economic
relationships between themselves and their mistresses, but
also among groups of
people on multiple plantations. The task
system encouraged
enslaved laborers to
grow corn, yams, and gourds in addition to keeping hogs,
chickens, and
cows. A property map of the plantation locations
on a modern map
creates visual depiction of the movements of enslaved people
from rural areas to the
Charleston marketplace. The WPA map identifies “negro
grounds” where certain plantation
owners, like the Maybank, Phillips, and Manigault
families, allowed their enslaved workers
to maintain independent fields for the
cultivation of their own crops. Gabriel Manigault’s
trusted laborer Cudjo travelled
up to 24 miles on Sundays, an accustomed free day, to sell
surplus produce in
urban marketplaces.[2]
Enslaved men were frequently seen by
foreign travelers moving throughout the
lowcountry with permission from their masters
to sell surplus food crops in
local marketplaces. These men were provided with the
opportunity to move about
the countryside unmolested and were the people who linked the
plantation to the
urban market.
Borrowing from West African
traditions, female vendors would meet these suppliers
along specific routes in
or around urban centers and purchase surplus
goods. Bondwomen
used this strategy to control the rates of particular items, like corn
or yams, and influenced
their prices. In
1772, a concerned citizen wrote to the South Carolina Gazette describing this
practice, noting that “I have seen the country negroes take great pains, after
having been first
spoke to by those women to reserve whatever they chose to sell to them only, either by
keeping
the particular article in their canows, or by sending them away and pretending
they
were not for sale.”[3] Market women were so adept
at these transactions the citizen
proclaimed that “the wenches so briskly
hustle them about from one to another that in
two minutes they could no longer
be traced.”[4]
Trade networks allowed bonded laborers
and market women to profit without
having to include the dominant class in any monetary
transactions. Through
these processes, urban women and rural plantation workers organized
a
distinctive informal economy in southern slave society.
[1]
E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of
the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 50
(1971);
Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth
Century, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920).
[2]
Philip Morgan, “Work and Culture: The
Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700 to 1880,”
The William
and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1982): 565; Genovese, Roll , Jordan
“Markets Without a Market
Revolution: Southern Planters and Capitalism,” Journal of the Early Republic
24 (2004): 212.
[3]
South Carolina Gazette, September 24,
1772.
[4]
South Carolina Gazette, September 24,
1772.
No comments:
Post a Comment