A decade before the American Civil War, James Churchwill Vaughan (1828-1893) set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father's dying wish that he should leave America to start a new life in Africa. Over the next forty years, Vaughan was taken captive, fought in African wars, built and rebuilt a livelihood, and led a revolt against white racism, finally becoming a successful merchant and the founder of a wealthy, educated, and politically active family. Tracing Vaughan's journey from South Carolina to Liberia to several parts of Yorubaland (present-day southwestern Nigeria), Lisa Lindsay documents this ""free"" man's struggle to find economic and political autonomy in an era when freedom was not clear and unhindered anywhere for people of African descent. In a tour de force of historical investigation on two continents, Lindsay tells a story of Vaughan's survival, prosperity, and activism against a seemingly endless series of obstacles. By following Vaughan's transatlantic journeys and comparing his experiences to those of his parents, contemporaries, and descendants in Nigeria and South Carolina, Lindsay reveals the expansive reach of slavery, the ambiguities of freedom, and the surprising ways that Africa, rather than America, offered new opportunities for people of African descent.

The collective significance of the themes that are explored in Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa bridge the Atlantic and thereby provide insights into historical debates that address the ways in which parts of Africa fitted into the modern world that emerged in the Atlantic basin. The study explores the conceptual problems of studying slavery in Africa and the broader Atlantic world from a perspective that focuses on Africa and the historical context that accounts for this influence. Paul Lovejoy focuses on the parameters of the enforced migration of enslaved Africans, including the impact on civilian populations in Africa, constraints on migration, and the importance of women and children in the movement of people who were enslaved. The prevalence of slavery in Africa and the transformations of social and political formations of societies and political structures during the era of trans-Atlantic migration inform the book's research. The analysis places Africa, specifically western Africa, at the center of historical change, not on the frontier or periphery of western Europe or the Americas, and provides a global perspective that reconsiders historical reconstruction of the Atlantic world that challenges the distortions of Eurocentrism and national histories. Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa will be of interest to scholars and students of colonial history, African history, Diaspora Studies, the Black Atlantic and the history of slavery.

This volume offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied cases of slavery in six Italian cities-Naples, Caserta, Rome, Palermo, Livorno and Genoa-Giulia Bonazza investigates why slavery survived into the middle of the nineteenth century, even as the abolitionist debate raged internationally and most states had abolished it. She contextualizes these cases of residual slavery from 1750-1850, focusing on two juridical and political watersheds: after the Napoleonic period, when the Italian states (with the exception of the Papal States) adopted constitutions outlawing slavery; and after the Congress of Vienna, when diplomatic relations between the Italian states, France and Great Britain intensified and slavery was condemned in terms that covered only the Atlantic slave trade. By excavating the lives of men and women who remained in slavery after abolition, this book sheds new light on the broader Mediterranean and transatlantic dimensions of slavery in the Italian states.

In the first book-length study of Arkansas slavery in more than sixty years, A Weary Land offers a glimpse of enslaved life on the South's western margins, focusing on the intersections of land use and agriculture within the daily life and work of bonded Black Arkansans. As they cleared trees, cultivated crops, and tended livestock on the southern frontier, Arkansas's enslaved farmers connected culture and nature, creating their own meanings of space, place, and freedom. Kelly Houston Jones analyzes how the arrival of enslaved men and women as an imprisoned workforce changed the meaning of Arkansas's acreage, while their labor transformed its landscape. They made the most of their surroundings despite the brutality and increasing labor demands of the "second slavery"-the increasingly harsh phase of American chattel bondage fueled by cotton cultivation in the Old Southwest. Jones contends that enslaved Arkansans were able to repurpose their experiences with agricultural labor, rural life, and the natural world to craft a sense of freedom rooted in the ability to own land, the power to control their own movement, and the right to use the landscape as they saw fit.

An innovative and valuable resource for understanding women's roles in changing societies, this book brings together the history of Africa, the Atlantic and gender before the 20th century. It explores trade, slavery and migrationin the context of the Euro-African encounter. HONORABLE MENTION FOR AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW BEST AFRICA-FOCUSED ANTHOLOGY OR EDITED COLLECTION, 2019 While there have been studies of women's roles in African societies and of Atlantic history, the role of women in Westand West Central Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition remains relatively unexamined. This book brings together scholars from Africa, North and South America and Europe to show, for the first time,the ways in which African women participated in economic, social and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies. Focusing on diversity and change, and going beyond the study of wealthy merchant women, the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyse how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions; consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women and the strategies they employed to overcome them; the factors which fostered or restricted women's mobility,both spatially and socially; and women's economic power and its curtailment. Mariana P. Candido is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame; Adam Jones recently retired as Professor of African History and Culture History at the University of Leipzig. In association with The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame

On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, an event that soon became a bold statement of presidential power, a dramatic shift in the rationale for fighting the Civil War, and a promise of future freedom for four million enslaved Americans. But the document marked only a beginning; freedom's future was anything but certain. Thereafter, the significance of both the Proclamation and of emancipation assumed new and diverse meanings, as African Americans explored freedom and the nation attempted to rebuild itself. Despite the sweeping power of Lincoln's Proclamation, struggle, rather than freedom, defined emancipation's broader legacy. The nine essays in this volume unpack the long history and varied meanings of the emancipation of American slaves. Together, the contributions argue that 1863 did not mark an end point or a mission accomplished in black freedom; rather, it initiated the beginning of an ongoing, contested process.

This classic and controversial volume provides extensive coverage of slave resistance and revolt in Jamaica. This new reissue is now available worldwide. Hart's coverage of the slave rebellions and revolts in Jamaica documents that slavery did not eradicate the intellectual and creative powers of slaves; in fact, a great deal survived and was created by the slaves themselves. Hart avoids polemics and his most important point is that the Jamaican rebels forced the British government to reset the agenda for emancipation and the slaves gained their freedom sooner than anticipated. The work is an in-depth accessible study of the Maroon Wars and of the many slave revolts that were a standard feature of the Jamaican struggle against slavery.

Hart pulls the veil from an aspect of West Indian history that has been largely ignored -- if not consciously suppressed -- the slaves' own struggles to abolish slavery. This culmination of his life work and this long-awaited reprint is now widely available to a new generation of students and researchers.

The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful "history from below." Scott follows the spread of "rumors of emancipation" and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution. By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved. Though The Common Wind is credited with having "opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words," the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.

Virginia 1619 provides an opportunity to reflect on the origins of English colonialism around the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic world. As the essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient English colonists. Instead, the emergence of stable English Atlantic colonies reflected the deliberate efforts of an array of actors to establish new societies based on their ideas about commonwealth, commerce, and colonialism. Looking back from 2019, we can understand that what happened on the shores of the Chesapeake four hundred years ago was no accident. Slavery and freedom were born together as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. They did so in the face of rival ventures and while struggling to survive in a dangerous environment. Three hallmarks of English America-self-government, slavery, and native dispossession-took shape as everyone contested the future of empire along the James River in 1619. The contributors are Nicholas Canny, Misha Ewen, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Jack P. Greene, Paul D. Halliday, Alexander B. Haskell, Linda M. Heywood, James Horn, Michael J. Jarvis, Peter C. Mancall, Philip D. Morgan, Melissa N. Morris, Paul Musselwhite, James D. Rice, and Lauren Working.

Moving between Britain and Jamaica this book reconstructs the world of commerce, consumption and cultivation sustained through an extended engagement with the business of slavery. Transatlantic slavery was both shaping of and shaped by the dynamic networks of family that established Britain's Caribbean empire. Tracing the activities of a single extended family - the Hibberts - this book explores how slavery impacted on the social, cultural, economic and political landscape of Britain. It is a history of trade, colonisation, enrichment and the tangled web of relations that gave meaning to the transatlantic world. The Hibberts's trans-generational story imbricates the personal and the political, the private and the public, the local and the global. It is both the intimate narrative of a family and an analytical frame through which to explore Britain's history and legacies of slavery. -- .

Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic?
"Routes of Remembrance" tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade's absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the country's classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities.
Holsey's study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory.

This book delineates the discovery of a previously unknown manuscript of a letter from Granville Sharp, the first British abolitionist, to the "Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty." In the letter, Sharp demands that the Admiralty bring murder charges against the crew of the Zong for forcing 132 enslaved Africans overboard to their deaths. Uncovered by Michelle Faubert at the British Library in 2015, the letter is reproduced here, accompanied by her examination of its provenance and significance for the history of slavery and abolition. As Faubert argues, the British Library manuscript is the only fair copy of Sharp's letter, and extraordinary evidence of Sharp's role in the abolition of slavery.

In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln's place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners, both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery's westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they enslaved. The result would transform the South into a mere colony within the federal government and make white southerners reliant on antislavery outsiders for protection of their personal safety and wealth. Faith in American exceptionalism played an important role in the reasoning of the antebellum American public, shaping how those in both the free and slave states viewed the world. Questions about who might share the bounty of the exceptional nature of the country became the battleground over which Americans fought, first with words, then with guns. Carl Lawrence Paulus's The Slaveholding Crisis examines how, due to the fear of insurrection by the enslaved, southerners created their own version of American exceptionalism, one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at its forefront. Feeling a loss of power in the years before the Civil War, the planter elite no longer saw the Union, as a whole, fulfilling that vision of exceptionalism. As a result, Paulus contends, slaveholders and nonslaveholding southerners believed that the white South could anticipate racial conflict and brutal warfare. This narrative postulated that limiting slavery's expansion within the Union was a riskier proposition than fighting a war of secession. In the end, Paulus argues, by insisting that the new party in control of the federal government promoted this very insurrection, the planter elite gained enough popular support to create the Confederate States of America. In doing so, they established a thoroughly proslavery, modern state with the military capability to quell massive resistance by the enslaved, expand its territorial borders, and war against the forces of the Atlantic antislavery movement.

The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade has puzzled nineteenth-century contemporaries and historians since, as the British Empire turned naval power and moral outrage against a branch of commerce it had done so much to promote. The assembled authors bridge the gap between ship and shore to reveal the motives, effects and legacies of this campaign. This paperback edition is the first academic history of Britain's campaign to suppress the Atlantic slave trade in more than thirty years, and book gathers experts in history, literature, historical geography, museum studies and the history of medicine to analyse naval suppression in light of recent work on slavery and empire. Three sections reveal the policies, experiences and representations of slave-trade suppression from the perspectives of metropolitan Britons, liberated Africans, black sailors, colonialists and naval officers. -- .

One of Janet Maslin's Favorite Books of 2018, The New York Times One of John Warner's Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago Tribune Named one of the "Best Civil War Books of 2018" by the Civil War Monitor "A fascinating and important new historical study." -Janet Maslin, The New York Times "A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies." -Civil War Times The stunning, groundbreaking account of "the ways in which our nation has tried to come to grips with its original sin" (Providence Journal) Hailed by the New York Times as a "fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most," Denmark Vesey's Garden "maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country" (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822. As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, "Kytle and Roberts's combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston's history and empathy with its inhabitants' past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called "a stunning contribution, " Denmark Vesey's Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America's deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery's enduring legacy in the United States.

The Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen was a pioneering figure in early nineteenthcentury abolitionism and African American literature. A highly respected leader in the AME Zion Church, Rev. Loguen was popularly known as the ""Underground Railroad King"" in Syracuse, where he helped over 1,500 fugitives escape from slavery. With a charismatic and often controversial style, Loguen lectured alongside Frederick Douglass and worked closely with well-known abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman, William Wells Brown, and William Lloyd Garrison, among others. Originally published in 1859, The Rev. J. W. Loguen chronicles the remarkable life of a tireless young man and a passionate activist. The narrative recounts Loguen's early life in slavery, his escape to the North, and his successful career as a minister and abolitionist in New York and Canada. Given the text's third-person narration and novelistic style, scholars have long debated its authorship. In this edition, Williamson uncovers new research to support Loguen as the author, providing essential biographical information and buttressing the significance of his life and writing. The Rev. J. W. Loguen represents a fascinating literary hybrid, an experiment in voice and style that enlarges our understanding of the slave narrative.

International migration and migrants have long been among the most debated topics in Europe and around the globe. How do immigrant policies differ between different nation-states? How are migrants and refugees met? Conflicting opinions on migration are not new. History gives ample examples of varying solutions and views. In Reaching a State of Hope, the authors shed new light on refugee and labour immigration to twentieth-century Sweden. They focus on themes such as refugee policies, and refugee relief and reception. The discourse on the relation between refugees, labour migration, immigration, and the trade unions is another focus of this anthology. The essays are set against the background of the Swedish welfare state, from its first emergence before the Second World War until the 1990s. In 1930, Sweden had a population where only a fragment had foreign backgrounds, but seventy years later it had become a country of notable immigration. This is the first time historians have taken up the challenge of presenting the Swedish experience to an international audience, with distinguished Swedish and international historians collaborating to put the Swedish case into a European context. This is a significant contribution to the field of European migration history, and will make invaluable reading for scholars of history as well as anyone interested in migration politics and issues related to international migration and welfare states.

Translated into English for the first time, Andres Avelino de Orihuela's El Sol de Jesus del Monte is a landmark Cuban antislavery novel. Published originally in 1852, the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (which Orihuela had translated into Spanish), it provides an uncompromising critique of discourses of white superiority and an endorsement of equality for free people of color. Despite its historical and literary value, The Sun of Jesus del Monte is a long-neglected text, languishing for 150 years until its republication in 2008 in the original Spanish. The Sun of Jesus del Monte is the only Cuban novel of its time to focus on La Escalera, or the Ladder Rebellion, a major anticolonial and slave insurrection of nineteenth-century Cuba that shook the world's wealthiest colony in 1843-44. It is also the only Cuban novel of its time to take direct aim at white privilege and unsparingly denounce the oppression of free people of color that intensified after the insurrection. This new critical edition-featuring an invaluable, contextualizing introduction and afterword in addition to the new English translation-offers readers the most detailed portrait of the everyday lives and plight of free people of color in Cuba in any novel up to the 1850s.

Modern slavery, in the form of labour exploitation, domestic servitude, sexual trafficking, child labour and cannabis farming, is still growing in the UK and industrialised countries, despite the introduction of laws to try to stem it. This hugely topical book, by a team of high-profile activists and expert writers, is the first to critically assess the legislation, using evidence from across the field, and to offer strategies for improvement in policy and practice. It argues that, contrary to its claims to be 'world-leading', the Modern Slavery Act is inconsistent, inadequate and punitive; and that the UK government, through its labour market and immigration policies, is actually creating the conditions for slavery to be promoted.

Joaquim Nabuco, for more than three decades a dominant figure in the literary, intellectual and political life of Brazil, was born in Recife in the country's Northeast in 1849 and died in Washington in 1910. He was what we would now call a public intellectual, indeed given that he spent half his adult life in Europe and the United States a trans-national public intellectual and from a country on the periphery of the world system. Nabuco is best known as the inspirational leader of the campaign in the 1880s for the abolition of slavery in Brazil, which after abolition in the United States and Cuba was the last remaining slave state in the Americas. Eighteen months after slavery was finally ended in 1888 the Brazilian Empire was overthrown and Nabuco, a committed monarchist, believing--wrongly--that his public career was over (from 1899 until his death he was to serve the Republic with distinction as Brazilian minister in London and Brazil's first ambassador to the Washington), devoted himself in 'internal exile' to writing, including a series of newspaper articles on his education, his early intellectual development, his discovery of the world outside Brazil and his life as a young diplomat and politician. These articles, together with some later additions, were published as Minha Formacao (My Formative Years) in 1900. In twenty six chapters Nabuco examines (though not in chronological order): the first eight years of his life in Massangana, a sugar plantation in Pernambuco worked by slaves and his return there, as a student aged twenty, which he claimed determined his decision to devote himself to the abolition of slavery in Brazil; his education in the Law Faculties in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo; the influence of Walter Bagehot s The English Constitution (1867) on his political thinking; his introduction to French literature and history (besides Portuguese he wrote his first poems and plays in French); his first visit to Europe in 1873-4, primarily a Grand Tour of Italy and France but ending in London where, he wrote, he was touched by the beginnings of anglomania (he was to visit and reside in London on seven separate occasions during the next 20 year before his six years as Brazilian minister there); his two years (1876-8) as attache in the Brazilian legations in Washington and London; the beginning of his political career in Pernambuco, contesting and winning election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1878 at the age of 29 and becoming a self-styled 'English liberal in the Brazilian Parliament'; the influence of English and North American abolitionists on his thinking about slavery and abolition; and the eventually successful parliamentary struggle to end slavery. A concluding chapter ('The last ten years 1889-1899') briefly considers his life after the abolition of slavery and the fall of the Empire.

The abolitionist movement launched the global human rights struggle in the 18th and 19th centuries and redefined the meaning of equality throughout the Atlantic world. Even in the 21st century, it remains a touchstone of democratic activism-a timeless example of mobilizing against injustice. As famed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass commented in the 1890s, the antislavery struggle constituted a grand army of activists whose labors would cast a long shadow over American history. This introduction to the abolitionist movement, written by African American and abolition expert Richard Newman, highlights the key people, institutions, and events that shaped the antislavery struggle between the American Revolutionary and Civil War eras as well as the major themes that guide scholarly understandings of the antislavery struggle. From early abolitionist activism in the Anglo American world and the impact of slave revolutions on antislavery reformers to the rise of black pamphleteers and the emergence of antislavery women before the Civil War, the study of the abolitionist movement has been completely reoriented during the past decade. Where before scholars focused largely on radical (white) abolitionists along the Atlantic seaboard in the years just before the Civil War, they now understand abolitionism via an ever-expanding roster of activists through both time and space. While this book will examine famous antislavery figures such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, it will also underscore the significance of early abolitionist lawsuits, the impact of the Haitian Revolution on both black and white abolitionists in the United States, and women's increasingly prominent role as abolitionist editors, organizers, and orators. By drawing on the exciting insights of recent work on these and other themes, a very short introduction to the abolitionist movement will provide a compelling and up-to-date narrative of the American antislavery struggle