“Carbon Conscripts: Enslaved Women’s Labor and the Origins of Climate Change in the Colonial Chesapeake”

• In Event: Energy, Climate, & Insurgent Ecologies: New Directions in Black Environmental History

Abstract

Before the twentieth century, agriculturally-driven deforestation—-not the burning of fossil fuels—-was dominant source of human greenhouse emissions, both globally and within the United States. And few forms of agriculture cleared as many forests, and as quickly, as enslaved-based plantations. This paper estimates the carbon emissions from slave-based agricultural commodities in the colonial period and compares them to non-slave-based agricultural commodities, demonstrating that slave-based plantations—-and tobacco production in particular—-was by far the largest source of commercial emissions before the American Revolution. It argues that the carbon intensity of enslaved-based tobacco plantations was not only rooted in the exploitation of Black people’s labor, but the exploitation of Black women’s labor in particular. By comparing the emissions of indenture-based to slave-based tobacco plantations in the colonial Chesapeake, it contends that enslavers’ conscription of enslaved Black women into the fields, alongside Black men and children, was central to the dramatic expansion of the embryonic nation’s carbon footprint. It ultimately contends that enslaved Black laborers were among the first “carbon conscripts”—-racialized workers whose coerced labor drove the early expansion of the United States’s carbon footprint.

Author

• Eric Herschthal, University of Utah