Capitalizing on the rich historical record of late antiquity, and employing sophisticated methodologies from social and economic history, this book reinterprets the end of Roman slavery. Kyle Harper challenges traditional interpretations of a transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, arguing instead that a deep divide runs through 'late antiquity', separating the Roman slave system from its early medieval successors. In the process, he covers the economic, social and institutional dimensions of ancient slavery and presents the most comprehensive analytical treatment of a pre-modern slave system now available. By scouring the late antique record, he has uncovered a wealth of new material, providing fresh insights into the ancient slave system, including slavery's role in agriculture and textile production, its relation to sexual exploitation, and the dynamics of social honor. By demonstrating the vitality of slavery into the later Roman empire, the author shows that Christianity triumphed amidst a genuine slave society.

Compelling work traces the formidable journey of an Igbo prince from captivity to freedom and literacy and recounts his enslavement in the New World, service in the Seven Years War with General Wolfe in Canada, voyages to the Arctic with the Phipps expedition of 1772-73, six months among the Miskito Indians in Central America, and a grand tour of the Mediterranean as a personal servant to an English gentlemen. Skillfully written, with a wealth of engrossing detail, this powerful narrative deftly illustrates the nature of the black experience in slavery.

Conceived as a literary form to aggressively publicize the abolitionist cause in the United States, the African American slave narrative remains a powerful and illuminating demonstration of America's dark history. Yet the genre's impact extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel investigates the shaping influence of writings by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other former slaves on British fiction in the years between the Abolition Act and the Emancipation Proclamation. Julia Sun-Joo Lee argues that novelists such as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative-from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists used these tropes in an attempt to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. Through a deft use of disparate sources, Lee reveals how the slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to British culture.

'...a fully grown man utterly broken by what he had experienced, physically and mentally exhausted with physical evidence showing the overt signs of the abuse he had been through.' This is how Kate Garbers met Riso, a man who had been trafficked and in forced labour for months, with no way out. Modern slavery is far closer than we think. Yet it is largely unseen and unknown to most of us - a crime against humanity hidden in plain sight. In this revealing expose, Kate Garbers shares moving stories of survivors she has met and shares insights she has gained through over a decade of anti-slavery work. Survivor stories are complemented by a forensic account of how modern slavery works and the many forms it can take - from forced labour to organ harvesting - and how it is enabled to continue by our current laws and systems. Unseen Lives also provides a vision of hope for those looking to challenge and dismantle modern slavery, laying out what changes we need to make as individuals and as a society in order to effectively tackle modern slavery and improve the support of survivors.

Despite the inherent brutality of slavery, some slaves could find small but important opportunities to act decisively. The Hierarchies of Slavery in Santos, Brazil, 1822-1888 explores such moments of opportunity and resistance in Santos, a Southeastern township in Imperial Brazil. It argues that slavery in Brazil was hierarchical: slaves' fleeting chances to form families, work jobs that would not kill or maim, avoid debilitating diseases, or find a (legal or illegal) pathway out of slavery were highly influenced by their demographic background and their owners' social position. By tracing the lives of slaves and owners through multiple records, the author is able to show that the cruelties that slaves faced were not equally shared. One important implication is that internal stratification likely helped perpetuate slavery because there was the belief, however illusionary, that escaping captivity was not necessary for social mobility.

"This may be the most important story ever written by a slave woman, capturing as it does the gross indignities as well as the subtler social arrangements of the time."-Kirkus Review "Of female slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is the crowning achievement. Manifesting a command of rhetorical and narrative strategies rivaled only by that of Frederick Douglass, Jacobs's autobiography is one of the major works of Afro-American literature"-Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl, the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, was initially written with the intention of illuminating white abolitionists to the appalling treatment of female slaves in the pre-Civil War South of the United States. The book was later rediscovered in the 1960's, and it was not until the 1980s that it was proved to be an extraordinary work of autobiographical memoir as opposed to fiction. In this astonishing book, Harriet Jacobs uses the pseudonym of Linda Brent to recount her story as a slave, a mother, and her eventual escape to the north. Born into a relatively calm life as a young child to slaves, she is taken into the care of a kind mistress when her mother dies. Linda is taught to read and write, and is generally treated with respect. When the mistress passes away Linda is handed over to Dr. Flint. He is a negligent and cruel new master who subsequently pressures Linda for sexual favors, yet she resists his demands for years. In an attempt to circumvent the situation, Linda enters into a relationship with Mr. Sands, a white neighbor who ends up fathering her two children. Expecting that she and her children will be sold to Mr. Sands, Dr. Flint instead decides to subject them to further degradation. Linda escapes and goes into hiding in a small attic, and her children are eventually sold to Mr. Sand. For over seven years, Linda remains in hiding, until she ultimately escapes North to be reunited with her children. Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl is a devastating yet empowering document that uniquely focuses on the psychological and spiritual effects that bondage had on women slaves and their families. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is both modern and readable.

A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, Deliver Us from Evil illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the period from the drafting of the federal constitution in 1787 through the age of Jackson. Drawing heavily on primary sources, including newspapers, government documents, legislative records, pamphlets, and speeches, Lacy K. Ford recaptures the varied and sometimes contradictory ideas and attitudes held by groups of white southerners as they tried to square slavery with their democratic ideals. He excels at conveying the political, intellectual, economic, and social thought of leading white southerners, vividly recreating the mental world of the varied actors and capturing the vigorous debates over slavery. He also shows that there was not one antebellum South but many, and not one southern white mindset but several, with the debates over slavery in the upper South quite different in substance from those in the deep South. In the upper South, where tobacco had fallen into comparative decline by 1800, debate often centered on how the area might reduce its dependence on slave labor and "whiten " itself, whether through gradual emancipation and colonization or the sale of slaves to the cotton South. During the same years, the lower South swirled into the vortex of the "cotton revolution, " and that area's whites lost all interest in emancipation, no matter how gradual or fully compensated. An ambitious, thought-provoking, and highly insightful book, Deliver Us from Evil makes an important contribution to the history of slavery in the United States, shedding needed light on the white South's early struggle to reconcile slavery with its Revolutionary heritage.

Newly available in paperback, this edition is an important volume of international significance, drawing together contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field and edited by a team headed by the acclaimed historian David Richardson. The book sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery and addresses issues in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery, including African agency and trade experience. Emphasis is placed on the human characteristics and impacts of transatlantic slavery. It also opens up new areas of debate on Liverpool's participation in the slave trade and helps to frame the research agenda for the future.

In 1850, America's plantation economy reigned supreme. U.S. cotton dominated world markets, and American rice, sugarcane, and tobacco grew throughout a vast farming empire that stretched from Maryland to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans toiled the fields, producing global commodities that enriched the most powerful class of slaveholders the world had ever known. But fifty years later-after emancipation demolished the plantation-labor system, Asian competition flooded world markets with cheap raw materials, and free trade eliminated protected markets-America's plantations lay in ruins. Plantation Kingdom traces the rise and fall of America's plantation economy. Written by four renowned historians, the book demonstrates how an international capitalist system rose out of slave labor, indentured servitude, and the mass production of agricultural commodities for world markets. Vast estates continued to exist after emancipation, but tenancy and sharecropping replaced slavery's work gangs across most of the plantation world. Poverty and forced labor haunted the region well into the twentieth century. The book explores the importance of slavery to the Old South, the astounding profitability of plantation agriculture, and the legacy of emancipation. It also examines the place of American producers in world markets and considers the impact of globalization and international competition 150 years ago. Written for scholars and students alike, Plantation Kingdom is an accessible and fascinating study.

'I am a woman's rights. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I am as strong as any man that is now' A former slave and one of the most powerful orators of her time, Sojourner Truth fought for the equal rights of Black women throughout her life. This selection of her impassioned speeches is accompanied by the words of other inspiring African-American female campaigners from the nineteenth century. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, farmers, and artisans. Some were themselves enslaved. They and their wives, with whom they often formed supervisory partnerships, were caught between disdainful planters and defiant enslaved labourers, as they sought to advance their ambitions. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex power struggles and interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.

A gripping and deeply revealing history of an infamous slave rebellion that nearly toppled New Orleans and changed the course of American history

In January 1811, five hundred slaves, dressed in military uniforms and armed with guns, cane knives, and axes, rose up from the plantations around New Orleans and set out to conquer the city. Ethnically diverse, politically astute, and highly organized, this self-made army challenged not only the economic system of plantation agriculture but also American expansion. Their march represented the largest act of armed resistance against slavery in the history of the United States.

American Uprising is the riveting and long-neglected story of this elaborate plot, the rebel army's dramatic march on the city, and its shocking conclusion. No North American slave uprising--not Gabriel Prosser's, not Denmark Vesey's, not Nat Turner's--has rivaled the scale of this rebellion either in terms of the number of the slaves involved or the number who were killed. More than one hundred slaves were slaughtered by federal troops and French planters, who then sought to write the event out of history and prevent the spread of the slaves' revolutionary philosophy. With the Haitian revolution a recent memory and the War of 1812 looming on the horizon, the revolt had epic consequences for America.

Through groundbreaking original research, Daniel Rasmussen offers a window into the young, expansionist country, illuminating the early history of New Orleans and providing new insight into the path to the Civil War and the slave revolutionaries who fought and died for justice and the hope of freedom.

During the 1850s and 1860s more than 100,000 people escaped slavery in the American South by following the Underground Railroad, a complex network of secret routes and safe houses. This inexpensive compilation of firsthand accounts offers authentic insights into the Civil War era and African-American history with compelling narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and lesser-known refugees.
Thirty selections include the story of Eliza Harris, "The Slave Woman Who Crossed the Ohio River on the Drifting Ice with Her Child in Her Arms," whose experience inspired a memorable scene in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Other accounts include that of Henry "Box" Brown, who hid in a crate mailed to Philadelphia abolitionists; Theophilus Collins's escape after "A Desperate, Bloody Struggle--Gun, Knife and Fire Shovel, Used by Infuriated Master"; excerpts from Harriet Jacobs's 1861 narrative, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"; and the remarkable flight of William and Ellen Craft, "Female Slave in Male Attire, Fleeing as a Planter, with Her Husband as Her Body Servant."

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book details how France's most profitable plantation colony became Haiti, Latin America's first independent nation, through an uprising by slaves and the largest and wealthiest free population of people of African descent in the New World. Garrigus explains the origins of this free colored class, exposes the ways its members supported and challenged slavery, and examines how they shaped a new 'American' identity.

Before the Civil War, America's slave states were enmeshed in the modernizing trends of their time but that history has been obscured by a deeply ingrained view of the Old South as an insular society with few outward connections. The Old South's Modern Worlds looks beyond this myth of an isolated and backward-looking South to identify some of the many ways that the modern world shaped antebellum southern society. Removing the screen of southern traditionalism turns up new stories about slaves as religious missionaries, Native Americans as hard-driving capitalists, cotton cultivators as genetic scientists, proslavery politicians as nationalists, and planters as experimenters in sexuality. The essays gathered in this volume not only tell these jarringly modern tales of the Old South, they also explore the compatibility of slavery-the defining feature of antebellum southern life-and cultural and material markers of modernity such as moral reform, cities, and industry. The Old South emerges from this volume in a new relationship to national and global histories. Considered as proponents of American manifest destiny, antebellum southern politicians look more like nationalists and less like separatists. Southerners' enthusiasm for humanitarian missions and their debates with moral reformers across the Atlantic bring out the global currents that cut against the localism of southern life. The roles that cities played in marketing, policing, and leasing slaves counteracted the erosion of slave discipline in urban settings. The turmoil that changes in Asian and European agriculture wrought among southern staple producers show the interconnections between seemingly isolated southern farms and markets in distant lands. Diverse and riddled with contradictory impulses, antebellum southerners encounters with modernity reveal the often discomforting legacies left by the Old South on the future of America and the world.

Russian rural history has long been based on a 'Peasant Myth', originating with nineteenth-century Romantics and still accepted by many historians today. In this book, Tracy Dennison shows how Russian society looked from below, and finds nothing like the collective, redistributive and market-averse behaviour often attributed to Russian peasants. On the contrary, the Russian rural population was as integrated into regional and even national markets as many of its west European counterparts. Serfdom was a loose garment that enabled different landlords to shape economic institutions, especially property rights, in widely diverse ways. Highly coercive and backward regimes on some landlords' estates existed side-by-side with surprisingly liberal approximations to a rule of law. This book paints a vivid and colourful picture of the everyday reality of rural Russia before the 1861 abolition of serfdom.

Transatlantic slavery, just like the abolition movements, affected every space and community in Britain, from Cornwall to the Clyde, from dockyard alehouses to country estates. Today, its financial, architectural and societal legacies remain, scattered across the country in museums and memorials, philanthropic institutions and civic buildings, empty spaces and unmarked graves. Just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British people continue to make sense of this 'national sin' by looking close to home, drawing on local histories and myths to negotiate their relationship to the distant horrors of the 'Middle Passage', and the Caribbean plantation. For the first time, this collection brings together localised case studies of Britain's history and memory of its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery. These essays, ranging in focus from eighteenth-century Liverpool to twenty-first-century rural Cambridgeshire, from racist ideologues to Methodist preachers, examine how transatlantic slavery impacted on, and continues to impact, people and places across Britain.

Thomas Clarkson (1760 1846) was a leading campaigner against slavery and the African slave trade. After graduating from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1783, Clarkson with Granville Sharp (1735 1813) founded the Committee for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade in 1787, which increased popular support for abolition and was the main campaigner behind the abolition of the slave trade. These volumes, first published in 1808, contain a unique contemporary account of the abolition movement from one of its major leaders. Clarkson describes in great detail the Quaker background to the abolitionist movement and the parliamentary debates leading to the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The contemporary arguments both in support and in opposition to abolition and the researches and actions of the abolition movement's members are described, creating an important historical record of the movement. Volume 2 describes the campaign from June 1788 until March 1808.

The year 2007 marked the bicentenary of the Act abolishing British participation in the slave trade. Representing Enslavement and Abolition on Museums- which uniquely draws together contributions from academic commentators, museum professionals, community activists and artists who had an involvement with the bicentenary - reflects on the complexity and difficulty of museums' experiences in presenting and interpreting the histories of slavery and abolition, and places these experiences in the broader context of debates over the bicentenary's significance and the lessons to be learnt from it. The history of Britain 's role in transatlantic slavery officially become part of the National Curriculum in the UK in 2009; with the bicentenary of 2007, this marks the start of increasing public engagement with what has largely been a hidden history. The book aims to not only critically review and assess the impact of the bicentenary, but also to identify practical issues that public historians, consultants, museum practitioners, heritage professionals and policy makers can draw upon in developing responses, both to the increasing recognition of Britain 's history of African enslavement and controversial and traumatic histories more generally.

Thomas Clarkson (1760 1846) was a leading campaigner against slavery and the African slave trade. After graduating from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1783, Clarkson with Granville Sharp (1735 1813) founded the Committee for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade in 1787, which increased popular support for abolition and was the main campaigner behind the abolition of the slave trade. These volumes, first published in 1808, contain a unique contemporary account of the abolition movement from one of its major leaders. Clarkson describes in great detail the Quaker background to the abolitionist movement and the parliamentary debates leading to the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The contemporary arguments both in support and in opposition to abolition and the researches and actions of the abolition movement's members are described, creating an important historical record of the movement. Volume 1 contains the early history of the abolition movement until July 1788.

This book covers the full spectrum of daily life among slaves in the Antebellum South, giving readers a more complete picture of slaves' experiences in the decades before emancipation. In their daily struggles to forge lives of dignity and meaning within an inhuman system, slaves in the Antebellum South demonstrated creativity, resilience, and an insatiable desire to be free. The Daily Life of African American Slaves in the Antebellum South focuses on their struggles to create lives of meaning and dignity within a brutal and repressive system. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of the institution of slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. Readers can explore the family life, religious beliefs, political activities, intellectual aspirations, material possessions, and recreational pursuits of enslaved people. The book shows that enslaved people were tightly constrained by the harsh realities of the oppressive system under which they lived but that they found ways to forge lives of their own. The book synthesizes the latest and best literature on slavery and gives readers the opportunity to examine history through the lens of daily life using primary source documents created by slaves or former slaves. Provides readers with an understanding of the daily lives of enslaved African Americans Depicts how slaves struggled to create lives of dignity and meaning within a system designed to dehumanize them Points out important ways in which slaves resisted slavery Links the history of slavery to the larger history of Antebellum America Uses primary source documents and slave narratives to provide a supporting voice to the text

In 1889 the Jesuit Richard F. Clarke published this biography of Charles Lavigerie (1825-1892), the French cardinal and Primate of Africa. From the moment of his arrival in Algeria in 1868, Lavigerie became a key, if sometimes controversial, figure in organising Catholic missions in Africa. In 1874 he founded the Society of Missionaries for Africa, otherwise known as the White Fathers after the white Arab dress they wore. Lavigerie's later career was devoted to the battle against slavery and in 1888 he conducted a campaign in several European capitals denouncing the practice. Clarke's book, which appeared a year after Lavigerie's visit to London, provides an account of the cardinal's career in France and Africa up to that date. It emphasises and praises Lavigerie's anti-slavery message, referring to him in the preface as 'the apostle of the slaves of all Africa'.

When it was first published fifteen years ago, this startling--and bestselling--first-person history of slavery was heralded as "powerful and intense" ("Atlanta Journal Constitution") and "invaluable" ("Chicago Tribune"). Drawing from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writers' Project, this astonishing collection makes available the only known recordings of people who lived through the enormity of slavery. The groundbreaking interviews with former slaves collected in the original book-and-audio set of "Remembering Slavery" are now available for a new generation of readers and listeners in both affordable paperback and enhanced audio e-book.

Madeline C. Zilfi s latest book examines gender politics through slavery and social regulation in the Ottoman Empire. In a challenge to prevailing notions, her research shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries female slavery was not only central to Ottoman practice, but a critical component of imperial governance and elite social reproduction. As Zilfi illustrates through her graphic accounts of the humiliations and sufferings endured by these women at the hands of their owners, Ottoman slavery was often as cruel as its Western counterpart. The book focuses on the experience of slavery in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, also using comparative data from Egypt and North Africa to illustrate the regional diversity and local dynamics that were the hallmarks of slavery in the Middle East during the early modern era. This is an articulate and informed account that sets more general debates on women and slavery in the Ottoman context.

They baked New England's Thanksgiving pies, preached their faith to crowds of worshippers, spied for the patriots during the Revolution, wrote that human bondage was a sin, and demanded reparations for slavery. Black women in colonial and revolutionary New England sought not only legal emancipation from slavery but defined freedom more broadly to include spiritual, familial, and economic dimensions.
Hidden behind the banner of achieving freedom was the assumption that freedom meant affirming black manhood The struggle for freedom in New England was different for men than for women. Black men in colonial and revolutionary New England were struggling for freedom from slavery and for the right to patriarchal control of their own families. Women had more complicated desires, seeking protection and support in a male headed household while also wanting personal liberty. Eventually women who were former slaves began to fight for dignity and respect for womanhood and access to schooling for black children.