In the Ottoman Empire, many members of the ruling elite were legally slaves of the sultan and therefore could, technically, be ordered to surrender their labor, their property, or their lives at any moment. Nevertheless, slavery provided a means of social mobility, conferring status and political power within the military, the bureaucracy, or the domestic household and formed an essential part of patronage networks. Ehud R. Toledano's exploration of slavery from the Ottoman viewpoint is based on extensive research in British, French, and Turkish archives and offers rich, original, and important insights into Ottoman life and thought. In an attempt to humanize the narrative and take it beyond the plane of numbers, tables and charts, Toledano examines the situations of individuals representing the principal realms of Ottoman slavery, female harem slaves, the sultan's military and civilian kuls, court and elite eunuchs, domestic slaves, Circassian agricaultural slaves, slave dealers, and slave owners. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East makes available new and significantly revised studies on nineteenth-century Middle Eastern slavery and suggests general approaches to the study of slavery in different cultures.

The first study to explore the lives of female slaves of the Ottoman imperial court, including the period following their manumission and transfer from the imperial palace. Through an analysis of a wide range of hitherto unexplored primary sources, Betul Ipsirli Argit demonstrates that the manumission of female palace slaves and their departure from the palace did not mean the severing of their ties with the imperial court; rather, it signaled the beginning of a new kind of relationship that would continue until their death. Demonstrating the diversity of experiences in non-dynastic female-agency in the early-modern Ottoman world, Life After the Harem shows how these evolving relationships had widespread implications for multiple parties, from the manumitted female palace slaves, to the imperial court, and broader urban society. In so doing, Ipsirli Argit offers not just a new way of understanding the internal politics and dynamics of the Ottoman imperial court, but also a new way of understanding the lives of the actors within it.

Born a slave, Frederick Douglass educated himself, escaped, and made himself one of the greatest leaders in American history. His three autobiographical narratives, collected here in one volume, are now recognized as classics of both American history and American literature. Writing with the eloquence and fierce intelligence that made him a brilliantly effective spokesman for abolition and equal rights, Douglass shapes an inspiring vision of self-realization in the face of monumental odds. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave (1845), published seven years after his escape, was written in part as a response to skeptics who refused to believe that so articulate an orator could ever have been a slave. A powerfully compressed account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation culture into which Douglass was born, it brought him to the forefront of the anti-slavery movement and drew thousands, black and white, to the cause. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), written after he had established himself as a newspaper editor, Douglass expands the account of his slavery years. With astonishing psychological penetration, he probes the painful ambiguities and subtly corrosive effects of black-white relations under slavery; and goes on to account his determined resistance to segregation in the North. The book also incorporates extracts from Douglass' renowned speeches, including the searing "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881, records Douglass' efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality in the years following the Civil War. Now a socially and politically prominent figure, he looksback, with a mixture of pride and bitterness; on the triumphs and humiliations of a unique public career. John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe are all featured prominently in this chronicle of a crucial epoch in American history. The revised edition of 1893, presented here, includes an account of his controversial diplomatic mission to Haiti. This volume contains a detailed chronology of Douglass' life, notes providing further background on the events and people mentioned, and an account of the textual history of each of the autobiographies.

Based on sweeping research in six languages, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War offers the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's greatest road not taken: the mass resettlement of African Americans outside the United States. Building on resurgent scholarly interest in the so-called 'colonization' movement, the book goes beyond tired debates about colonization's place in the contest over slavery, and beyond the familiar black destinations of Liberia, Canada, and Haiti. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated.

Entangled Otherness explores the dynamics of cross-dressing and gender performance in contemporary francophone Caribbean cultures through a range of visual and textual media. Original in its comparative focus on the islands of Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe and their diasporic communities in France, this study reveals how opaque strategies of crossing, mimicry and masquerade have enabled resistance to the racialised, gendered and patriarchal classifications of bodies that characterized Enlightenment thought during the French transatlantic slave trade. It engages with archival texts of pre-revolutionary Haiti to offer a historical understanding of current constructions of Caribbean gender most influenced by French colonial legacies. The author argues that cross-dressing, as a form of 'self-fabrication', complicates inherently entangled colonial binaries of identity and resists France's paternalistic gaze. The book's multidisciplinary approach to gender analysis weaves a dialogue between cross-cultural voices garnered from textual and historical analysis, ethnographic interviews and theoretical insight to foreground the continued need to decolonize Eurocentric readings of gender identity in the francophone and creolophone islands, and the Caribbean region more generally. Works of art, film, photography, carnival, performance, and dress, including depictions of fluid identities in the binary-resistant Afro-Creole religion of Vodou, are examined using contemporary performance, gender and social theory from within the region. Entangled Otherness thus makes a unique and timely contribution to the growing body of knowledge and debate in the areas of gender, sexuality and the body in Caribbean Studies.

The first book-length study of household servants and slaves, exploring a visual history over 400 years and four continents The first book-length study of both images of ordinary household workers and their material culture, Household Servants and Slaves: A Visual History, 1300-1700 covers four hundred years and four continents, facilitating a better understanding of the changes in service that occurred as Europe developed a monetary economy, global trade, and colonialism. Diane Wolfthal presents new interpretations of artists including the Limbourg brothers, Albrecht Durer, Paolo Veronese, and Diego Velazquez, but also explores numerous long-neglected objects, including independent portraits of ordinary servants, servant dolls and their miniature cleaning utensils, and dummy boards, candlesticks, and tablestands in the form of servants and slaves. Wolfthal analyzes the intersection of class, race, and gender while also interrogating the ideology of service, investigating both the material conditions of household workers' lives and the immaterial qualities with which they were associated. If images repeatedly relegated servants to the background, then this book does the reverse: it foregrounds these figures in order to better understand the ideological and aesthetic functions that they served.

Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.

Winner of the Casa de las America Prize for Brazilian Literature, The Story of Rufino reconstructs the lively biography of Rufino Jose Maria, set against the historical context of Brazil and Africa in the nineteenth century. The book tells the story of Rufino or Abuncare, a Yoruba Muslim from the kingdom of Oyo, in present-day Nigeria. Enslaved as an adolescent by a rival ethnic group, he was captured by Brazilian slave traders and taken to Brazil as a slave sometime in the early 1820s. In 1835, after being enslaved in Salvador and Rio Grande do Sul, Rufino bought his freedom with money he made as a hired-out slave and perhaps from making Islamic amulets. He found work in Rio de Janeiro as a cook on a slave ship bound for Luanda in Angola, despite the trans-Atlantic slave trade having been illegal in Brazil since 1831. Rufino himself became a petty slave trader. He made a few voyages before his ship was captured by the British and taken to Sierra Leone in 1841 for trial by the Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission to determine if it was equipped for the slave trade, since there were no slaves on board. During the three months awaiting the court's decision, Rufino lived among Yoruba Muslims, his people, and attended Quranic and Arabic classes. He later returned to Sierra Leone as a witness in a court case and attended classes with Muslim masters for almost two years. Once back in Brazil, he established himself as a diviner - serving whites and blacks, free and slaves, Brazilians and Africans, Muslim and non-Muslims - as well as a spiritual leader, an Alufa, in the local Afro-Muslim community. In 1853 Rufino was arrested due to rumors of an imminent African slave revolt. The police used as evidence for his arrest the large number of Arabic manuscripts in his possession, the same kind of material the police had found with Muslim rebels in Bahia thirty years earlier. During his interrogation, Rufino told his life story, which is used to reconstruct the world in which he lived under slavery and in freedom on African shores, aboard slave ships, and in Brazil. An extraordinary Atlantic history carefully pieced together from the archives, The Story of Rufino illuminates the complexities of slavery and freedom in Africa and Brazil and the resilience of ethnic and religious identities.

Equiano's narrative is the most significant autobiographical account of slavery to emerge from Britain's centuries as a slave trading and slave owning power. It remains as powerful today as it was when first published in 1789. It tells the story of Equiano's remarkable life, recounting his years of slavery, working on ships that carried him across the empire and into battle during the Seven Years War, and the extraordinary story of how he was able to purchase his own freedom. Travelling to Britain as a free man Equiano settled in London and there became a leading figure in the early abolition movement. The publication of his narrative was carefully timed to coincide with the first attempt to abolish the slave trade. Describing his own experiences of slavery as both victim and witness, the book became a sensation and its author the most famous black person in Georgian Britain. In this new edition, leading historian David Olusoga sets the book in its historical context helping us to understand this complex, spiritual, politically astute and deeply passionate man. Although Equiano did not live to see the abolition of the slave trade or slavery his voice was critical to that that long campaign.

One of the preeminent Black scholars of his era traces the life and bold aspirations of a man who devoted his life to opposing slavery at any cost. W.E.B. Du Bois examines John Brown as a man as well as a motive force behind the abolitionist sympathies that helped lead to the Civil War. He traces Brown's sympathy for slaves to an incident in his youth when he was warmly received by a family that treated their slave with casual brutality. At the time it was written, John Brown was widely considered a fanatic at best, a lunatic at worst, but here he is seen clearly as a man driven by his Christianity and his personal morals to oppose what he clearly perceived as a tremendous wrong in society, and to do so regardless of whatever toll it might take upon him. The author examines Brown's impact on the minds of those who understood that the abolitionist cause was supported primarily by Blacks, on the lives of Blacks who discovered a white man willing to fight and die for their freedom, and by the masses who found that slavery was not only an actionable moral issue, but one of deadly urgency. Originally published in 1909, on the 50th anniversary of Brown's execution, this is W.E.B. Du Bois's only work of biography. Although less known than the author's The Souls of Black Folk or Black Reconstruction in America, John Brown remains a classic distinguished by its author's deep understanding and eloquence. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of John Brown is both modern and readable.

Freedom's Captives is a compelling exploration of the gradual abolition of slavery in the majority-black Pacific coast of Colombia, the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by people of African descent. From the autonomous rainforests and gold mines of the Colombian Black Pacific, Yesenia Barragan rethinks the nineteenth-century project of emancipation by arguing that the liberal freedom generated through gradual emancipation constituted a modern mode of racial governance that birthed new forms of social domination, while temporarily instituting de facto slavery. Although gradual emancipation was ostensibly designed to destroy slavery, she argues that slaveholders in Colombia came to have an even greater stake in it. Using narrative and storytelling to map the worlds of Free Womb children, enslaved women miners, free black boatmen, and white abolitionists in the Andean highlands, Freedom's Captives insightfully reveals how the Atlantic World processes of gradual emancipation and post-slavery rule unfolded in Colombia.

Hierarchies at Home traces the experiences of Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery through the 1959 revolution. Domestic service - childcare, cleaning, chauffeuring for private homes - was both ubiquitous and ignored as formal labor in Cuba, a phenomenon made possible because of who supposedly performed it. In Cuban imagery, domestic workers were almost always black women and their supposed prevalence in domestic service perpetuated the myth of racial harmony. African-descended domestic workers were 'like one of the family', just as enslaved Cubans had supposedly been part of the families who owned them before slavery's abolition. This fascinating work challenges this myth, revealing how domestic workers consistently rejected their invisibility throughout the twentieth century. By following a group marginalized by racialized and gendered assumptions, Anasa Hicks destabilizes traditional analyses on Cuban history, instead offering a continuous narrative that connects pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba.

Trafficking in human beings (THB) has been described as modern slavery. It is a serious criminal activity that has significant ramifications for the human rights of the victims. It poses major challenges to the state, society and individual victims. THB is not a static given but a constantly changing concept depending on societal changes and opinions, economic situations and legal developments. THB occurs both transnationally and within countries. The complexity of THB is such that it requires a wide range of expertise fully to address the phenomenon. Edited by a team of leading international academics, the Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking will provide an interdisciplinary introduction to THB. It is aimed at academics, students, research universities and non-governmental organisations, as well as policy makers. It will review THB through the lens of law, anthropology, social and political science and will address statistical, data protection issues and showcase the most effective research methods, analyse the various actors and stakeholders and the different types of exploitation of trafficked persons. It will critically highlight and analyse the most pressing current challenges posed by THB.

Unraveling Somalia Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery Catherine Besteman "Besteman's well-written and important book is a fine example of how careful scholarship can expose the realities behind widely held beliefs."--"Choice" In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees. During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalia's disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare between various clans and subclans. In "Unraveling Somalia," Catherine Besteman challenges this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence--inflicted disproportionately on rural southerners--contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition. She contends that the dissolution of the Somali nation-state can be understood only by recognizing that over the past century and a half there emerged in Somalia a social order based on principles other than simple clan organization--a social order deeply stratified on the basis of race, status, class, region, and language. Catherine Besteman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. The Ethnography of Political Violence 1999 296 pages 6 x 9 11 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-1688-2 Paper $27.50s 18.00 World Rights Anthropology, History, African-American/African Studies Short copy: "Besteman's well-written and important book is a fine example of how careful scholarship can expose the realities behind widely held beliefs."--"Choice"

This book highlights newly-discovered and underutilized sources for the study of slavery and abolition. It features the contributions of scholars who work with Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Swedish materials from Europe, Africa and Latin America. Their work draws on legal suits, merchant correspondence, Catholic sacramental records, and rare newspapers dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Essays cover the volume of the early South Atlantic slave trade; African and African-descended religious and cultural communities in Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish circum-Caribbean; Eurafrican trade alliances on the Gold Coast; and public participation in abolition in nineteenth-century Brazil. These essays change and enrich our understandings of slavery and its end in the Atlantic World. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

In Between Slavery and Freedom, Julie Winch explores the complex world of those people of African birth or descent who occupied the "borderlands" between slavery and freedom in the 350 years from the founding of the first European colonies in what is today the United States to the start of the Civil War. However they had navigated their way out of bondage - through flight, through military service, through self-purchase, through the working of the law in different times and in different places, or because they were the offspring of parents who were themselves free - they were determined to enjoy the same rights and liberties that white people enjoyed. In a concise narrative and selected primary documents, noted historian Julie Winch shows the struggle of black people to gain and maintain their liberty and lay claim to freedom in its fullest sense. Refusing to be relegated to the margins of American society and languish in poverty and ignorance, they repeatedly challenged their white neighbors to live up to the promises of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Winch's accessible, concise, and jargon-free book, including primary sources and the latest scholarship, will benefit undergraduate students of American history and general readers alike by allowing them to judge the evidence for themselves and evaluate the authors' conclusions.

Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites aims to move the field forward in its collective conversation about the interpretation of slavery-acknowledging the criticism of the past and acting in the present to develop an inclusive interpretation of slavery. Presenting the history of slavery in a comprehensive and conscientious manner is difficult and requires diligence and compassion-for the history itself, for those telling the story, and for those hearing the stories-but it's a necessary part of our collective narrative about our past, present, and future. This book features best practices for: *Interpreting slavery across the country and for many people. The history of slavery, while traditionally interpreted primarily on southern plantations, is increasingly recognized as relevant at historic sites across the nation. It is also more than just an African-American/European-American story-it is relevant to the history of citizens of Latino, Caribbean, African and indigenous descent, as well. It is also pertinent to those descended from immigrants who arrived after slavery, whose stories are deeply intertwined with the legacy of slavery and its aftermath. *Developing support within an institution for the interpretation of slavery. Many institutions are reticent to approach such a potentially volatile subject, so this book examines how proponents at several sites, including Monticello and Mount Vernon, were able to make a strong case to their constituents. *Training interpreters in not only a depth of knowledge of the subject but also the confidence to speak on this controversial issue in public and the compassion to handle such a sensitive historical issue. The book will be accessible and of interest for professionals at all levels in the public history field, as well as students at the undergraduate and graduate levels in museum studies and public history programs.

The powerful story of two young men who changed the national debate about slavery In the 1820s, few Americans could imagine a viable future for black children. Even abolitionists saw just two options for African American youth: permanent subjection or exile. Educated for Freedom tells the story of James McCune Smith and Henry Highland Garnet, two black children who came of age and into freedom as their country struggled to grow from a slave nation into a free country. Smith and Garnet met as schoolboys at the Mulberry Street New York African Free School, an educational experiment created by founding fathers who believed in freedom's power to transform the country. Smith and Garnet's achievements were near-miraculous in a nation that refused to acknowledge black talent or potential. The sons of enslaved mothers, these schoolboy friends would go on to travel the world, meet Revolutionary War heroes, publish in medical journals, address Congress, and speak before cheering crowds of thousands. The lessons they took from their days at the New York African Free School #2 shed light on how antebellum Americans viewed black children as symbols of America's possible future. The story of their lives, their work, and their friendship testifies to the imagination and activism of the free black community that shaped the national journey toward freedom.

A century and a half after the abolition of slavery in the United States, survivors of contemporary forms of enslavement from around the world have revived a powerful tool of the abolitionist movement: first-person narratives of slavery and freedom. Just as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others used autobiographical testimonies in the fight to eradicate slavery, today's new slave narrators play a crucial role in shaping an antislavery agenda. Their writings unveil the systemic underpinnings of global slavery while critiquing the precarity of their hard-fought freedom. At the same time, the demands of antislavery organizations, religious groups, and book publishers circumscribe the voices of the enslaved, coopting their narratives in support of alternative agendas. In this pathbreaking interdisciplinary study, Laura T. Murphy argues that the slave narrative has reemerged as a twenty-first-century genre that has gained new currency in the context of the memoir boom, post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment, and conservative family-values politics. She analyzes a diverse range of dozens of book-length accounts of modern slavery from Africa, Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, examining the narrative strategies that survivors of slavery employ to make their experiences legible and to promote a reinvigorated antislavery agenda. By putting these stories into conversation with one another, The New Slave Narrative reveals an emergent survivor-centered counterdiscourse of collaboration and systemic change that offers an urgent critique of the systems that maintain contemporary slavery, as well as of the human rights industry and the antislavery movement.

Reviewed by Astrid Lustulin for Readers' Favourite: It is time to learn the stories of some nations in a more equitable way - not from the point of view of the conquerors but of the oppressed. This is why books like The Black History Truth: Jamaica by Pamela Gayle arouse great interest in a conscious reader. This book tells the story of 'The Sharpest Thorn in Britain's Caribbean Colonies,' focusing on the 16th to 19th centuries. Through extensive use of sources and images, Gayle sheds light on the injustices perpetrated by the British and analyses the stigmatization of Eurocentric historiography, which portrayed unfavorably behaviors and customs of groups of people it could not understand. Although the subject is complex, this book is clear and precise. Gayle tackles so many topics that she arouses the admiration of readers with her profound knowledge of Jamaica. She is very direct when she blames the British, but the evidence she brings is overwhelming. In The Black History Truth: Jamaica, you will not only find descriptions of struggles and injustices but also valuable information on local heroes and heroines, such as Nana Yaa Asantewaa and Queen Nanny, as well as customs that Europeans have misunderstood. Aft er reading this book, readers will understand why Jamaica was actually (as the subtitle describes it) "the sharpest thorn in Britain's Caribbean Colonies." I recommend this book to all those who want to see the history of humanity from a new perspective.

Born into but escaped from slavery, Frederick Douglass-orator, journalist, autobiographer; revolutionary on behalf of a just America-was a towering figure, at once consummately charismatic and flawed. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) galvanised the antislavery movement and is one of the truly seminal works of African-American literature. In this Lincoln Prize- winning biography, William S. McFeely captures the many sides of Douglass- his boyhood on the Chesapeake; his self-education; his rebellion and rising expectations; his marriage, affairs, and intense friendships; his bitter defeat and transcendent courage-and re-creates the high drama of a turbulent era.

This third edition of Stanley M. Elkin's classic study offers two new chapters by the author. The first, "Slavery and Ideology," considers the discussion and criticism occasioned by this controversial work. Elkins amplifies his original purpose in writing the book and takes into consideration the substantial body of critical commentary. He also attempts a prediction on the course of future research and discussion.

For over 1500 years before the Empire Windrush docked on British shores, people of African descent have played a significant and far-ranging role in the country's history, from the African soldiers on Hadrian's Wall to the Black British intellectuals who made London a hub of radical, Pan-African ideas. But while there has been a growing interest in this history, there has been little recognition of the sheer breadth and diversity of the Black British experience, until now. This collection combines the latest work from both established and emerging scholars of Black British history. It spans the centuries from the first Black Britons to the latest African migrants, covering everything from Africans in Tudor England to the movement for reparations, and the never ending struggles against racism in between. An invaluable resource for both future scholarship and those looking for a useful introduction to Black British history, Black British History: New Perspectives has the potential to transform our understanding of Britain, and of its place in the world.

Tracing the lives and experiences of 100,000 Africans who landed in Sierra Leone having been taken off slave vessels by the British Navy following Britain's abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this study focuses on how people, forcibly removed from their homelands, packed on to slave ships, and settled in Sierra Leone were able to rebuild new lives, communities, and collective identities in an early British colony in West Africa. Their experience illuminates both African and African diaspora history by tracing the evolution of communities forged in the context of forced migration and the missionary encounter in a prototypical post-slavery colonial society. A new approach to the major historical field of British anti-slavery, studied not as a history of legal victories (abolitionism) but of enforcement and lived experience (abolition), Richard Peter Anderson reveals the linkages between emancipation, colonization, and identity formation in the Black Atlantic.

A legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil is home to the largest number of African descendants outside Africa and the greatest number of domestic workers in the world. Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic research, the author examines the lives of marginalized informal domestic workers who are called 'adopted daughters' but who live in slave-like conditions in the homes of their adoptive families. She traces a nuanced and, at times, disturbing account of how adopted daughters, who are trapped in a system of racial, gender, and class oppression, live with the coexistence of extreme forms of exploitation and seemingly loving familial interactions and affective relationships. Highlighting the humanity of her respondents, Hordge-Freeman examines how filhas de criacao (raised daughters) navigate the realities of their structural constraints and in the context of pervasive norms of morality, gratitude, and kinship. In all, the author clarifies the link between contemporary and colonial forms of exploitation, while highlighting the resistance and agency of informal domestic workers.