By the mid-eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade was considered to be a necessary and stabilizing factor in the capitalist economies of Europe and the expanding Americas. Britain was the most influential power in this system which seemed to have the potential for unbounded growth. In 1833, the British empire became the first to liberate its slaves and then to become a driving force toward global emancipation. There has been endless debate over the reasons behind this decision. This has been portrayed on the one hand as a rational disinvestment in a foundering overseas system, and on the other as the most expensive per capita expenditure for colonial reform in modern history.
In this work, Seymour Drescher argues that the plan to end British slavery, rather than being a timely escape from a failing system, was, on the contrary, the crucial element in the greatest humanitarian achievement of all time. The Mighty Experiment explores how politicians, colonial bureaucrats, pamphleteers, and scholars taking anti-slavery positions validated their claims through rational scientific arguments going beyond moral and polemical rhetoric, and how the infiltration of the social sciences into this political debate was designed to minimize agitation on both sides and provide common ground. Those at the inception of the social sciences, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, helped to develop these tools to create an argument that touched on issues of demography, racism, and political economy. By the time British emancipation became legislation, it was being treated as a massive social experiment, whose designs, many thought, had the potential to change the world.
This study outlines the relationship of economic growth to moral issues in regard to slavery, and will appeal to scholars of British history, nineteenth century imperial history, the history of slavery, and those interested in the history of human rights.
The Mighty Experiment was the winner of First Prize, Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

Recounts Weld's intense childhood, his stormy religious conversion, his entry into the world of reform, and finally, his rejection of public life.

The story of the anti-slavery movement in Ireland is little known, yet when Frederick Douglass visited the country in 1845, he described Irish abolitionists as the most 'ardent' that he had ever encountered. Moreover, their involvement proved to be an important factor in ending the slave trade, and later slavery, in both the British Empire and in America. While Frederick Douglass remains the most renowned black abolitionist to visit Ireland, he was not the only one. This publication traces the stories of ten black abolitionists, including Douglass, who travelled to Ireland in the decades before the American Civil War, to win support for their cause. It opens with former slave, Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped as a boy from his home in Africa, and who was hosted by the United Irishmen in the 1790s; it closes with the redoubtable Sarah Parker Remond, who visited Ireland in 1859 and chose never to return to America. The stories of these ten men and women, and their interactions with Ireland, are diverse and remarkable.

Independence Day, 1861. The schooner S. J. Waring sets sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later, it limps back into New York's frenzied harbor with the ship's black steward, William Tillman, at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has, almost unbelievably, been lost to history. Now reclaiming Tillman as the real American hero he was, historian Brian McGinty dramatically returns readers to that riotous, explosive summer of 1861, when the country was tearing apart at the seams and the Union army was in near shambles following a humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run. Desperate for good news, the North was soon riveted by reports of an incident that occurred a few hundred miles off the coast of New York, where the Waring had been overtaken by a marauding crew of Confederate privateers. While the white sailors became chummy with their Southern captors, free black man William Tillman was perfectly aware of the fate that awaited him in the ruthless, slave-filled ports south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Stealthily biding his time until a moonlit night nine days after the capture, Tillman single-handedly killed three officers of the privateer crew, then took the wheel and pointed it home. Yet, with no experience as a navigator, only one other helper, and a war-torn Atlantic seaboard to contend with, his struggle had just begun. It took five perilous days at sea-all thrillingly recounted here-before the Waring returned to New York Harbor, where the story of Tillman's shipboard courage became such a tabloid sensation that he was not only put on the bill of Barnum's American Museum but also proclaimed to be the "first hero" of the Civil War. As McGinty evocatively shows, however, in the horrors of the war then engulfing the nation, memories of his heroism-even of his identity-were all but lost to history. As such, The Rest I Will Kill becomes a thrilling and historically significant work, as well as an extraordinary journey that recounts how a free black man was able to defy efforts to make him a slave and become an unlikely glimmer of hope for a disheartened Union army in the war-battered North.

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of the slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty. As if Removal to Indian Territory weren't cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly free, they had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribal oversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers. Remarkably, they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged new relationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundation for survival. Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as pioneers of the American West equal to their Indian and other Plains sisters.

"Invaluable."--Eric J. Sundquist in The New York Times Book Review

Sea and Land provides an in-depth environmental history of the Caribbean to ca 1850, with a coda that takes the story into the modern era. It explores the mixing, movement, and displacement of peoples and the parallel ecological mixing of animals, plants, microbes from Africa, Europe, elsewhere in the Americas, and as far away as Asia. It examines first the arrival of Native American to the region and the environmental transformations that followed. It then turns to the even more dramatic changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the fifteenth century. Throughout it argues that the constant arrival, dispersal, and mingling of new plants and animals gave rise to a creole ecology. Particular attention is given to the emergence of Black slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system, an unholy trinity that thoroughly transformed the region's demographic and physical landscapes and made the Caribbean a vital site in the creation of the modern western world. Increased attention to issues concerning natural resources, conservation, epidemiology, and climate have now made the environment and ecology of the Caribbean a central historical concern. Sea and Land is an effort to integrate that research in a new general environmental history of the region. Intended for scholars and students alike, it aims to foster both a fuller appreciation of the extent to which environmental factors shaped historical developments in the Caribbean, and the extent to which human actions have transformed the biophysical environment of the region over time. The combined work of eminent authors of environment and Latin American and Caribbean history, Sea and Land offers a unique approach to a region characterized by Edenic nature and paradisiacal qualities, as well as dangers, diseases, and disasters.

A Concise History of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive interpretation of the history of the Caribbean islands from the beginning of human settlement to the present. It narrates processes of early human migration, the disastrous consequences of European colonisation, the development of slavery and the slave trade, the extraordinary profits earned by the plantation economy, the great revolution in Haiti, movements towards political independence, the Cuban Revolution, and the diaspora of Caribbean people. In this second edition, Higman covers the political, social, and environmental developments of the last decade, offering sections on insular politics, Cuban communism, earthquakes, hurricanes, climate change, resource ecologies, epidemics, identity and reparations. Written in a lively and accessible style, and current with the most recent research, the book provides a compelling narrative of Caribbean history essential for students and visitors.

Today the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo is one of the world's most advanced agricultural, industrial, and urbanized regions. Its historical evolution, however, is poorly understood. Most scholarly attention has been paid to the period after 1850, when coffee rose to economic dominance, or to the period since 1880, when large-scale European immigration turned the city of Sao Paulo into one of the largest metropolises in the world. This book thus provides the first comprehensive portrait of the economy and people of Sao Paulo during the critical transition from the traditional eighteenth-century colonial world to the modernizing world of the nineteenth century. The result is a major rethinking of the history of early slavery in Brazil-it shows that, contrary to previous beliefs, slavery was as deeply entrenched and exploited in Sao Paulo as elsewhere in Brazil, and that the state's early economic growth (as the world's leading coffee-producing region after 1850) was made possible by an expanding African slave labor force. This raises many questions about Sao Paulo's supposed "exceptionalism" and challenges the standard account of the state's economic history, which has been strongly shaped by ideas of path dependence. In addition to studying the slave-owning class, the authors investigate the economic role of free whites and colored who did not own slaves, and compare Sao Paulo's slave society and economy with other such regions in the Americas.

Between 1820 and 1913, approximately 16,000 black people left the United States to start new lives in Liberia, Africa, in what was at the time the largest out-migration in US history. When Tolbert Major, a former Kentucky slave and single father, was offered his own chance for freedom, he accepted. He, several family members, and seventy other people boarded the Luna on July 5, 1836. After they arrived in Liberia, Tolbert penned a letter to his former owner, Ben Major: "Dear Sir, We have all landed on the shores of Africa and got into our houses.... None of us have been taken with the fever yet." Drawing on extensive research and fifteen years' worth of surviving letters, author Susan E. Lindsey illuminates the trials and triumphs of building a new life in Liberia, where settlers were free, but struggled to acclimate themselves to an unfamiliar land, coexist with indigenous groups, and overcome disease and other dangers. Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia explores the motives and attitudes of colonization supporters and those who lived in the colony, offering perspectives beyond the standard narrative that colonization was driven solely by racism or forced exile.

There Are No Slaves in France examines the paradox of political antislavery and institutional racism in the century prior to the French Revolution. In vividly told vignettes, Peabody examines the actual court cases that decided the fates of petitioning slaves to demonstrate the ever increasing tensions arising between an ancient juridical commitment to freedom and a growing national belief that blacks were an inferior race. Through studying the confrontations between the principal of freedom and the fact of slavery, the book examines how French national myths concerning liberty and race were transformed by the presence of enslaved blacks in the metropolis.

Today the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo is one of the world's most advanced agricultural, industrial, and urbanized regions. Its historical evolution, however, is poorly understood. Most scholarly attention has been paid to the period after 1850, when coffee rose to economic dominance, or to the period since 1880, when large-scale European immigration turned the city of Sao Paulo into one of the largest metropolises in the world. This book thus provides the first comprehensive portrait of the economy and people of Sao Paulo during the critical transition from the traditional eighteenth-century colonial world to the modernizing world of the nineteenth century. The result is a major rethinking of the history of early slavery in Brazil-it shows that, contrary to previous beliefs, slavery was as deeply entrenched and exploited in Sao Paulo as elsewhere in Brazil, and that the state's early economic growth (as the world's leading coffee-producing region after 1850) was made possible by an expanding African slave labor force. This raises many questions about Sao Paulo's supposed "exceptionalism" and challenges the standard account of the state's economic history, which has been strongly shaped by ideas of path dependence. In addition to studying the slave-owning class, the authors investigate the economic role of free whites and colored who did not own slaves, and compare Sao Paulo's slave society and economy with other such regions in the Americas.

Richard Newman provides a 25-page introduction to a revised autobiography of Henry Box Brown, a fugitive slave who in 1849 devised his own escape to freedom by shipping himself in a wooden crate from Virginia to an anti-slavery office in Philadelphia. This edition includes a total of six illustrations.

Written for young adults, this biography of Frederick Douglass covers the life of the most famous black abolitionist and intellectual of the 19th century. Frederick Douglass: A Biography explores the life of the most famous black abolitionist and intellectual of the 19th century. The book covers the major developments of Douglass's life from his birth in 1818 through his time as a slave and his rise to prominence as the most famous black voice for freedom of his time. The biography discusses Douglass's relationships with such figures as John Brown, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and five presidents of the United States, including Abraham Lincoln. It analyzes his role in national politics before, during, and after the Civil War, and examines the way his life is tied to significant local, regional, and national events. By focusing on the importance of spirituality in Douglass's life, this revealing work adds to our understanding of the man, the way he saw himself, and the many things he accomplished. Original documents include recent sources about Douglass's activities in Pennsylvania and in Europe Presents photographs of Douglass, his family, and other important figures in his life

This book explores the growing importance of prisons, both lay and ecclesiastical, in western Europe between 1000 and 1300. It attempts to explain what captors hoped to achieve by restricting the liberty of others, the means of confinement available to them, and why there was an increasingly close link between captivity and suspected criminal activity. It discusses conditions within prisons, the means of release open to some captives, and writing in or about prison.

This book tells the extraordinary story of a village of peasants and miners in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cuba who were slaves belonging to the king of Spain and whose local patroness was a miraculous image of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre. In reconstructing this history, the book reveals that in Cuba's eastern region, slavery to the King became a very ambiguous form of slavery that evolved into forms of freedom unprecedented in other colonial societies of the New World. The author studies the relations that developed between the Virgin, the King, and the royal slaves as the enslaved villagers imagined and negotiated social identity and freedom in this Caribbean frontier society. In the process, she examines several dimensions of the royal slaves' daily and imaginary lives. Drawing on a range of cultural, social, political, and economic sources, this book presents a multisided history of enslaved people as they remade colonial spaces and turned them into a new homeland in El Cobre. As they produced social memory and appropriated popular religious traditions centered on the Virgin of Charity, they reinvented their past and present as a new people within the structures and strictures of Spain's colonial world.

In The Lie of 1652, influential blogger and history activist Mellet retells and debunks established pre­colonial and colonial land dispossession history. He provides a radically new, fresh perspective on South African history and highlights 176 years of San/Khoi colonial resistance.

Contextualising the cultural mix of the Cape, he recounts the history of forced and voluntary migration to the Cape by Africans, Indians, Southeast Asians, Europeans and the African Diaspora in a new way.

This provocative, novel perspective on 'Colouredness' also provides a highly topical new look at the burning issue of land, and how it was lost.

In "Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America," Kenneth Morgan shows how the institutions of indentured servitude and black slavery interacted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He covers all aspects of the two labor systems, including their impact on the economy, on racial attitudes, social structures and on regional variations within the colonies. Throughout, overriding themes emerge: the labor market in North America, the significance of racial distinctions, supply and demand factors in transatlantic migration and labor, and resistance to bondage.

This is an ideal introduction to an area that is crucial for understanding not just Colonial American society but also the later development of the United States.

The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. "In the Shadow of Slavery" provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods - millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the 'Asian' long bean, for example - are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots - 'botanical gardens of the dispossessed' - became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation's first HBCUs In The Devil's Half Acre, New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who blazed a path of liberation for thousands. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the "Devil's Half Acre." When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into "God's Half Acre," a school where Black men could fulfil their dreams. It still exists today as Virginia Union University, one of America's first Historically Black Colleges and Universities. A sweeping narrative of a life in the margins of the American slave trade, The Devil's Half Acre brings Mary Lumpkin into the light. This is the story of the resilience of a woman on the path to freedom, her historic contributions, and her enduring legacy.

Reopening an investigation into the death of a plantation overseer (Duncan Skinner) almost a century and a half ago, Death of an Overseer is part murder mystery, part essay on the art of historical detection, and part seminar on the history of the slavery and the Old South. In this skillfully written book, Michael Wayne uses a complex murder case to teach readers the art of historical evidence and allows them to weigh competing interpretations and come to their own conclusions.

In a remarkable feat of historical detective work, David Robertson illuminates the shadowy figure who planned a slave rebellion so daring that, if successful, it might have changed the face of the antebellum South. This is the story of a man who, like Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X, is a complex yet seminal hero in the history of African American emancipation.

Denmark Vesey was a charasmatic ex-slave--literate, professional, and relatively well-off--who had purchased his own freedom with the winnings from a lottery. Inspired by the success of the revolutionary black republic in Haiti, he persuaded some nine thousand slaves to join him in a revolt. On a June evening in 1822, having gathered guns, and daggers, they were to converge on Charleston, South Carolina, take the city's arsenal, murder the populace, burn the city, and escape by ship to Haiti or Africa. When the uprising was betrayed, Vesey and seventy-seven of his followers were executed, the matter hushed by Charleston's elite for fear of further rebellion. Compelling, informative, and often disturbing, this book is essential to a fuller understanding of the struggle against slavery.

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom. Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash. Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

Ghana-for all its notable strides toward more egalitarian political and social systems in the past 60 years-remains a nation plagued with inequalities stemming from its long history of slavery and slave trading. The work assembled in this collection explores the history of slavery in Ghana and its legacy for both Ghana and the descendants of people sold as slaves from the "Gold Coast" in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. The volume is structured to reflect four overlapping areas of investigation: the changing nature of slavery in Ghana, including the ways in which enslaved people have been integrated into or excluded from kinship systems, social institutions, politics, and the workforce over time; the long-standing connections forged between Ghana and the Americas and Europe through the transatlantic trading system and the forced migration of enslaved people; the development of indigenous and transnational anti-slavery ideologies; and the legacy of slavery and its ongoing reverberations in Ghanaian and diasporic society. Bringing together key scholars from Ghana, Europe and the USA who introduce new sources, frames and methodologies including heritage, gender, critical race, and culture studies, and drawing on archival documents and oral histories, Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora will be of great interest to scholars and students of comparative slavery, abolition and West African history.

The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination brings together ten original essays that explore the many connections between the Old and New Worlds in the early modern period. Divided into five sets of paired essays, it examines the role of specific port cities in Atlantic history, aspects of European migration, the African dimension, and the ways in which the Atlantic world has been imagined. This second edition has been updated and expanded to contain two new chapters on revolutions and abolition, which discuss the ways in which two of the main pillars of the Atlantic world-empire and slavery-met their end. Both essays underscore the importance of the Caribbean in the profound transformation of the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This edition also includes a revised introduction that incorporates recent literature, providing students with references to the key historiographical debates, and pointers of where the field is moving to inspire their own research. Supported further by a range of maps and illustrations, The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination is the ideal book for students of Atlantic History.