On the evening of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner and six men launched their infamous rebellion against slaveholders. The rebels swept through Southampton County, Virginia, recruiting slaves to their ranks and killing nearly five dozen whites-more than had ever been killed in any slave revolt in American history. Although a hastily assembled group of whites soon suppressed the violence, its repercussions had far-reaching consequences. In The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, Patrick H. Breen uses the dramatic events in Southampton to explore the terrible choices faced by members of the local black community as they considered joining the rebels, a choice that would likely cost them their lives, supporting their masters, or somehow avoiding taking sides. Combining fast-paced narrative with rigorous analysis, Breen shows how, as whites regained control, slaveholders created an account of the revolt that saved their slaves from white retribution, the most dangerous threat facing the slaveholders' human property. By probing the stories slaveholders told that allowed them to get non-slaveholders to protect slave property, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood reveals something surprising about both the fragility and power of slavery.

President Abraham Lincoln freed millions of slaves in the South in 1863, rescuing them, as history tells us, from a brutal and inhuman existence and making the promise of freedom and equal rights. This is a moment to celebrate and honor, to be sure, but what of the darker, more troubling side of this story? "Slavery's Ghost" explores the dire, debilitating, sometimes crushing effects of slavery on race relations in American history.

In three conceptually wide-ranging and provocative essays, the authors assess the meaning of freedom for enslaved and free Americans in the decades before and after the Civil War. They ask important and challenging questions: How did slaves and freedpeople respond to the promise and reality of emancipation? How committed were white southerners to the principle of racial subjugation? And in what ways can we best interpret the actions of enslaved and free Americans during slavery and Reconstruction? Collectively, these essays offer fresh approaches to questions of local political power, the determinants of individual choices, and the discourse that shaped and defined the history of black freedom.

Written by three prominent historians of the period, "Slavery's Ghost "forces readers to think critically about the way we study the past, the depth of racial prejudice, and how African Americans won and lost their freedom in nineteenth-century America.

Following the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, nineteenth-century liberal economic thinkers insisted that a globally hegemonic Britain would profit only by abandoning the formal empire. British West Indians across the divides of race and class understood that, far from signaling an invitation to nationalist independence, this liberal economic discourse inaugurated a policy of imperial "neglect"-a way of ignoring the ties that obligated Britain to sustain the worlds of the empire's distant fellow subjects. In Empire of Neglect Christopher Taylor examines this neglect's cultural and literary ramifications, tracing how nineteenth-century British West Indians reoriented their affective, cultural, and political worlds toward the Americas as a response to the liberalization of the British Empire. Analyzing a wide array of sources, from plantation correspondence, political economy treatises, and novels to newspapers, socialist programs, and memoirs, Taylor shows how the Americas came to serve as a real and figurative site at which abandoned West Indians sought to imagine and invent postliberal forms of political subjecthood.

Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography considers the operations of slavery and of abolition propaganda on the thought and literature of English from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Incorporating materials ranging from canonical literatures to the lowest form of street publication, Marcus Wood writes from the conviction that slavery was, and still is, a dilemma for everyone in England, and seeks to explain why English society has constructed Atlantic slavery in the way it has.

Art historian Henry M. Sayre traces the origins of the term "value" in art criticism, revealing the politics that define Manet's art. How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, "high in value" and "low in value"? Henry M. Sayre traces the origin of this usage to one of art history's most famous and racially charged paintings, Edouard Manet's Olympia. Art critics once described light and dark in painting in terms of musical metaphor-higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. Sayre shows that it was Emile Zola who introduced the new "law of values" in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola's essay and of several related paintings by Manet, Sayre argues that Zola's usage of value was intentionally double coded-an economic metaphor for the political economy of slavery. In Manet's painting, Olympia and her maid represent objects of exchange, a commentary on the French Empire's complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas. Expertly researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet's painting bears. Locating the presence of slavery at modernism's roots, Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of art history.

The Slavery Reader brings together the most recent and essential writings on slavery. The focus is on Atlantic slavery - the enforced movement of millions of Africans from their homelands into the Americas, and the complex historical story of slavery in the Americas. Spanning almost five centuries - the late fifteenth until the mid-nineteenth - the articles trace the range and impact of slavery on the modern western world. Key themes include:
* the origins and development of American slavery
* work
* family, gender and community
* slave culture
* slave economy
* resistance
* race and social structure
* Africans in the Atlantic world.
Together with the editors' clear and authoritative commentary and a substantial introduction, this volume will become central to the study of slavery.

First appearing in 1845 The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, with its painfully vivid depiction of life in bondage, was both a bestseller in its day and one of the most powerful, authoritative texts lending support to the abolitionist movement. The author traces his life from an infant born into slavery and taken from his mother at birth, to a displaced child hungry for knowledge, to an abused and beaten laborer seeking freedom and a chance to marry the woman he loved. Offering bright, cameo glimpses into a world that should not be forgotten, Douglass chronicles both the cruel violence of a system that saw him as little more than livestock, and the brighter moments of success, of courageous support from friends and allies. Initially greeted by some with doubt that it could have been written by a black man and former slave, the book had a profound effect on American society, making the author something of a celebrity and his cause less an abstract ideal and more of an urgent human concern. Solemn, powerful and passionate The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is more than an important historical document-it is a personal account of striving for human freedom in a world where the author was regarded as neither free nor human. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is both modern and readable.

'Black but Human' is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves. The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers, and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. The 'Black but Human' topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a 'black nation' forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings, and sketches for costume books.

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.

In the late eighteenth century, planters in the Caribbean and the American South insisted that only Black people could labor on plantations, arguing that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to cultivate crops in hot climates. Historians have mainly taken planters at their word, assuming that they observed differences in health between Black and white bodies and that these differences underpinned the maintenance of an enslaved Black plantation labor force. In The Nature of Slavery, Katherine Johnston disrupts this longstanding claim about biological racial difference. Drawing on extensive personal correspondence, colonial records, and a wealth of other sources, she reveals that planters observed no health differences between Black and white people. They made their claims about people's ability to labor in spite of their experiences, not because of them. For planters and physicians, local environments, much more than skin color, affected bodily health. Moreover, they thought that all bodies-African, European, and creole-responded similarly to various environmental conditions on plantations. Yet when slavery and their economic livelihoods were at stake, slaveholders and slave traders promoted a climatic dichotomy, in which Africans' and Europeans' bodies differed significantly from one another. By putting the health of enslaved laborers at significant risk, planters' actions made environmental racism a central part of Atlantic slavery. White plantation owners contributed to historical myths about enslaved bodies that permeated the public imagination and became accepted as natural. In doing so, The Nature of Slavery contends, they helped to construct and circulate a pervasive and groundless theory of race across the Atlantic world.

Winner of the Conference on Latin American History's 2010 Mexican History Book Prize.
"The Black Middle" is the first full-length study of black African slaves and other people of African descent in the Spanish colonial province of Yucatan. Matthew Restall makes expert use of Spanish and Maya language documents from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, found in a dozen different archives. His goal is to discover what life was like for a people hitherto ignored by historians. He explores such topics as slavery and freedom, militia service and family life, bigamy and witchcraft, and the ways in which Afro-Yucatecans (as he dubs them) interacted with Mayas and Spaniards. Restall concludes that, in numerous ways, Afro-Yucatecans lived and worked in a middle space between--but closely connected to--Mayas and Spaniards. The book's "black middle" thesis has profound implications for the study of Africans throughout the Americas.

Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. These plantation regimes were, to adopt a metaphor of the era, complex "machines," finely tuned over time by planters, merchants, and officials to become more efficient at exploiting their enslaved workers and serving their empires. Using a wide range of archival evidence, The Plantation Machine traces a critical half-century in the development of the social, economic, and political frameworks that made these societies possible. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus find deep and unexpected similarities in these two prize colonies of empires that fought each other throughout the period. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue experienced, at nearly the same moment, a bitter feud between planters and governors, a violent conflict between masters and enslaved workers, a fateful tightening of racial laws, a steady expansion of the slave trade, and metropolitan criticism of planters' cruelty. The core of The Plantation Machine addresses the Seven Years' War and its aftermath. The events of that period, notably a slave poisoning scare in Saint-Domingue and a near-simultaneous slave revolt in Jamaica, cemented white dominance in both colonies. Burnard and Garrigus argue that local political concerns, not emerging racial ideologies, explain the rise of distinctive forms of racism in these two societies. The American Revolution provided another imperial crisis for the beneficiaries of the plantation machine, but by the 1780s whites in each place were prospering as never before-and blacks were suffering in new and disturbing ways. The result was that Jamaica and Saint-Domingue became vitally important parts of the late eighteenth-century American empires of Britain and France.

Lane here illuminates the African-American experience through a close look at a single city, once the metropolitan headquarters of black America, now typical of many. He recognizes that urban history offers more clues, both to modern accomplishments and to modern problems, than the dead past of rural slavery. The book's historical section is based on hundreds of newly discovered scrapbooks kept by William Henry Dorsey, Philadelphia's first black historian. These provide an intimate and comprehensive view of the critical period between the Civil War and about 1900, when African-Americans, formally free and increasingly urban, made the biggest educational and occupational gains in history. Dorsey's tens of thousands of newspaper clippings and other sources, detail records of high culture and low, success and scandal, personal and public life. In the final chapters Lane outlines the urban situation today, the strong parallels between past and present that suggest the power of continuity and the equally strong differences that point to the possibility of change.

In this study of literature and law from the Constitutional founding through the Civil War, Hoang Gia Phan demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. Bonds of Citizenship illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. Phan argues that in the age of Emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. He situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Brockden Brown alongside Black Atlantic texts by Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution's "slavery clauses," Phan recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. Bonds of Citizenship demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, Bonds of Citizenship challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.

This book provides critical perspectives on the multiple forms of 'mothering' that took place in Atlantic slave societies. Facing repeated child death, mothering was a site of trauma and grief for many, even as slaveholders romanticized enslaved women's work in caring for slaveholders' children. Examining a wide range of societies including medieval Spain, Brazil, and New England, and including the work of historians based in Brazil, Cuba, the United States, and Britain, this collection breaks new ground in demonstrating the importance of mothering for the perpetuation of slavery, and the complexity of the experience of motherhood in such circumstances. This pathbreaking collection, on all aspects of the experience, politics, and representations of motherhood under Atlantic slavery, analyses societies across the Atlantic world, and will be of interest to those studying the history of slavery as well as those studying mothering throughout history. This book comprises two special issues, originally published in Slavery & Abolition and Women's History Review.

People, young and old, need stars to guide them. They need models to construct their own identity, to build their self-esteem, to change the way they see the world and to overcome their own and others' prejudice. During my childhood, many stars were pointed out to me. I admired them, dreamt about them: Socrates, Baudelaire, Einstein, Marie Curie, General de Gaulle, Mother Teresa... But nobody ever spoke to me about black stars. The world of my education was white, from the colour of the school walls to the pages of my textbooks. I knew nothing about my own ancestors. Slavery was the only black subject ever mentioned. In this vision, the history of Black people could only ever be a vale of tears and strife. Can you tell me the name of a black scientist? A black explorer? A black philosopher? A black pharaoh? If you don't know the answer to these questions, then, whatever the colour of your skin, this book is for you. Because the best way to fight racism and intolerance is to educate ourselves and to broaden our imaginations. The portraits of the men and women in this book are a product of my own reading and my interviews with scholars. Starting with Lucy and ending with Barack Obama, and along the way meeting Aesop, Dona Beatrice, Pushkin, Anne Zingha, Aime Cesaire, Martin Luther King and many others. These stars have allowed me to reject the idea that I am a victim, to renew my faith in mankind and, above all, to believe in myself. - Lilian Thuram This translation of Lilian Thuram's bestselling 2010 volume, Mes Etoiles Noires, by Laurent Dubois (University of Virginia), finally brings his anti-racism work to the attention of an English-language audience (the book has already been translated into several European languages). At a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us of the need to tell more complex stories about our shared past, this volume constitutes a timely intervention by a prominent black sporting figure.

'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.

Anton de Kom's We Slaves of Suriname is a literary masterpiece as well as a fierce indictment of racism and colonialism. In this classic book, published here in English for the first time, the Surinamese writer and resistance leader recounts the history of his homeland, from the first settlements by Europeans in search of gold through the era of the slave trade and the period of Dutch colonial rule, when the old slave mentality persisted, long after slavery had been formally abolished. 159 years after the abolition of slavery in Suriname and 88 years after its initial publication, We Slaves of Suriname has lost none of its brilliance and power.

The brutal story of African slavery in the British colonies of the West Indies and North America is told with clarity and compassion in this classic history. James Walvin explores the experiences which bound together slaves from diverse African backgrounds and explains how slavery transformed the tastes and economy of the Western world.

Although written for readers with no prior knowledge of the subject, Walvins's account is based on detailed scholarship, drawing on a body of work from the USA, the West Indies and Britain. All aspects of African slavery up to 1776 are covered; the situation of women, flight and rebellion, disease and death, the conditions on the slave ships, the abolition campaign and much more. The narrative is enlivened and personalised by frequent reference to individual lives.

For this revised edition, the author has incorporated recent scholarly findings and updated the notes and bibliography in order to keep the book current.

Katherine Franke makes a powerful case for reparations for Black Americans by amplifying the stories of formerly enslaved people and calling for repair of the damage caused by the legacy of American slavery. Repair invites readers to explore the historical context for reparations, offering a detailed account of the circumstances that surrounded the emancipation of enslaved Black people in two unique contexts, the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Davis Bend, Mississippi, Jefferson Davis's former plantation. Through these two critical historical examples, Franke unpacks intergenerational, systemic racism and white privilege at the heart of American society and argues that reparations for slavery are necessary, overdue and possible. Katherine Franke is one of the nation's leading scholars writing on law, racial justice, and African American history. Her first book was Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. She is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University and chair of the board of Trustees of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Madeleine's Children uncovers a multigenerational saga of an enslaved family in India and two islands, Reunion and Mauritius, in the eastern empires of France and Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A tale of legal intrigue, it reveals the lives and secret relationships between slaves and free people that have remained obscure for two centuries. As a child, Madeleine was pawned by her impoverished family and became the slave of a French woman in Bengal. She accompanied her mistress to France as a teenager, but she did not challenge her enslavement there on the basis of France's Free Soil principle, a consideration that did not come to light until future lawyers investigated her story. In France, a new master and mistress purchased her, despite laws prohibiting the sale of slaves within the kingdom. The couple transported Madeleine across the ocean to their plantation in the Indian Ocean colonies, where she eventually gave birth to three children: Maurice, Constance, and Furcy. One died a slave and two eventually became free, but under very different circumstances. On 21 November 1817, Furcy exited the gates of his master's mansion and declared himself a free man. The lawsuit waged by Furcy to challenge his wrongful enslavement ultimately brought him before the Royal Court of Paris, despite the extreme measures that his putative master, Joseph Lory, deployed to retain him as his slave. A meticulous work of archival detection, Madeleine's Children investigates the cunning, clandestine, and brutal strategies that masters devised to keep slaves under their control-and paints a vivid picture of the unique and evolving meanings of slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean world.

During the age of empire, European and American colonists perpetrated one of history's most monstrous crimes: slavery. Millions of Africans were subjected to forced abduction, misery and death as part of the brutal Atlantic slave trade. However, since the perpetrators are long dead, should current generations make reparation for this historic injustice? In this book, Janna Thompson uses three case studies - France's treatment of Haiti, Britain's role in the African slave trade, and the plight of African Americans - to address these questions. She makes a nuanced case for the necessity of reparations, but argues that the exact form they take should vary from case to case, depending on factors both principled and practical. This engaging book is a highly readable introduction to the issues for students and general readers grappling with the complexities of reparative justice and our responsibility for the darkest aspects of our past.