Archaeology in Dominica examines the everyday lives of enslaved and free workers at Morne Patate, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean plantation that produced sugar, coffee, and provisions. Focusing on household archaeology, this volume helps document the underrepresented history of slavery and colonialism on the edge of the British Empire. Contributors discuss how enslaved and free people were entangled in shifting economic and ecological systems during the plantation's 200-year history, most notably the introduction of sugarcane as an export commodity. Analyzing historical records, the landscape geography of the plantation, and material remains from the residences of laborers, the authors synthesize extensive data from this site and compare it to that of other excavations across the Eastern Caribbean. Using historical archaeology to investigate the political ecology of Morne Patate opens up a deeper understanding of the environmental legacies of colonial empires, as well as the long-term impacts of plantation agriculture on the Caribbean region and its people. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series.

Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven Award "Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully." -Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement "[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years." -The Nation "An important, arguably seminal, book...Always trenchant and learned." -Wall Street Journal A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism. When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton's dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale. But at the center of the story are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton-who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream. "Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor." -A. O. Scott, New York Times "River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write 'history from the bottom up.'" -Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of Books

The essays in this book demonstrate the importance of transatlantic and intra-American slave trafficking in the development of colonial Spanish America, highlighting the Spanish colonies' previously underestimated significance within the broader history of the slave trade. Spanish America received African captives not only directly via the transatlantic slave trade but also from slave markets in the Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, and Danish Americas, ultimately absorbing more enslaved Africans than any other imperial jurisdiction in the Americas except Brazil. The contributors focus on the histories of slave trafficking to, within, and across highly diverse regions of Spanish America throughout the entire colonial period, with themes ranging from the earliest known transatlantic slaving voyages during the sixteenth century to the evolution of antislavery efforts within the Spanish empire. Students and scholars will find the comprehensive study and analysis in From the Galleons to the Highlands invaluable in examining the study of the slave trade to colonial Spanish America.

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.

The edited volume aims to re-contextualize revolts in early modern Central and Southern Europe (Hungary, Croatia, Czech Lands, Austria, Germany, Italy) by adopting the interdisciplinary and comparative methods of social and cultural history. Instead of structural explanations like the model of state-building versus popular resistance, it wishes to put back the peasants themselves to the historical narratives of revolts. Peasants appear in the book as active agents fighting or bargaining for freedom, which was a practical issue for them. Nonetheless, the language of lord-peasant negotiation was that of religion, just as official punishments used Christian symbols. The approach of revolts as the events of collective violence also highlights the experiences and memories of participants. How did individuals and groups use remembering and forgetting as a means of forging an identity for themselves? Instead of the narratives of the powerful that became the normative stories of history, the perspective of the rebels uncovers the everyday faces of revolts more forcibly. Finally, contributors examine how later narrators used the rebels for their own purposes, in other words the subsequent representation of the revolts and their leaders in image, literature and historiography comes to the fore. The volume aims to overcome disciplinary boundaries by bringing together historians and scholars of related disciplines including the history of literature, the visual arts and anthropology. The central contention of the volume - the cultural imprint of peasant revolts - is fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently available literature.

Drawing on archival sources from six countries, Joseph Dorsey examines the role of Puerto Rico in slave acquisitions after the traffic in slaves was outlawed. He delineates the differences between Puerto Rican and non-Puerto Rican traffic, from procurement in West Africa to influx into the Caribbean, and he scrutinizes the tactics--including inter-Caribbean traffic and conflation of African and Creole identities--by which Puerto Rican interest groups avoided abolitionist scrutiny. He also identifies the extent to which Spain supported these operations. Dorsey reconstructs the slave trade in Puerto Rico, devoting special attention to the maritime logistics of slave acquisitions--in particular the West African corridors and the nuances of inter-Caribbean assistance. He examines the evidence for the true origins of these slave populations and considers forces beyond European and American politics that influenced the flow of slaves. He explains the complex conditions of the Upper Guinea coast and illustrates the impact of social, political, and economic forces endemic to West African affairs on the Puerto Rican slave market. Dorsey's meticulous pursuit of evidence unearths the routes and institutions that brought thousands of slaves from West Africa into the eastern Caribbean, turning them into "creoles" in official records. In a radical departure from present Puerto Rican historiography, he demonstrates that Puerto Rico was an active participant in the illegal slave traffic and exerted a great deal of control over numerous components of the acquisition process, without exclusive dependence on the larger slave-trading polities such as Cuba and Brazil.