The issue of race has indelibly shaped the history of the United States. Nowhere has the drama of race relations been more powerfully staged than in the American South. This book charts the turbulent course of southern race relations from the colonial origins of the plantation system to the maturation of slavery in the nineteenth century, through the rise of a new racial order during the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the civil rights revolution of the twentieth century. While the history of race in the southern states has been shaped by a basic struggle between black and white, the authors show how other forces such as class and gender have complicated the colour line. They distinguish clearly between ideas about race, mostly written and disseminated by intellectuals and politicians, and their reception by ordinary southerners, both black and white. As a result, readers are presented with a broad, over-arching view of race in the American South throughout its chequered history. Key Features: *racial issues are the key area of interest for those who study the American South *race is the driving engine of Southern history *unique in its focus on race *broad coverage -- origins of the plantation system to the situation in the South today

The issue of race has indelibly shaped the history of the United States. Nowhere has the drama of race relations been more powerfully staged than in the American South. This book charts the turbulent course of southern race relations from the colonial origins of the plantation system to the maturation of slavery in the nineteenth century, through the rise of a new racial order during the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the civil rights revolution of the twentieth century. While the history of race in the southern states has been shaped by a basic struggle between black and white, the authors show how other forces such as class and gender have complicated the colour line. They distinguish clearly between ideas about race, mostly written and disseminated by intellectuals and politicians, and their reception by ordinary southerners, both black and white. As a result, readers are presented with a broad, over-arching view of race in the American South throughout its chequered history. Key Features: *racial issues are the key area of interest for those who study the American South *race is the driving engine of Southern history *unique in its focus on race *broad coverage -- origins of the plantation system to the situation in the South today

Jefferson's Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion explores the historical processes by which Virginia was transformed from a British colony into a Southern slave state. It focuses on changing conceptualizations of ownership and emphasizes the persistent influence of the English common law on Virginia's postcolonial political culture. The book explains how the traditional characteristics of land tenure became subverted by the dynamic contractual relations of a commercial economy and assesses the political consequences of the law reforms that were necessitated by these developments. Nineteenth-century reforms seeking to reconcile the common law with modern commercial practices embraced new democratic expressions about the economic and political power of labor, and thereby encouraged the idea that slavery was an essential element in sustaining republican government in Virginia. By the 1850s, the ownership of human property had replaced the ownership of land as the distinguishing basis for political power, with tragic consequences for the Old Dominion.

The region between the river Senegal and Sierra Leone saw the first trans-Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. Drawing on many new sources, Toby Green challenges current quantitative approaches to the history of the slave trade. New data on slave origins can show how and why Western African societies responded to Atlantic pressures. Green argues that answering these questions requires a cultural framework and uses the idea of creolization - the formation of mixed cultural communities in the era of plantation societies - to argue that preceding social patterns in both Africa and Europe were crucial. Major impacts of the sixteenth-century slave trade included political fragmentation, changes in identity and the re-organization of ritual and social patterns. The book shows which peoples were enslaved, why they were vulnerable and the consequences in Africa and beyond.

Russian rural history has long been based on a 'Peasant Myth', originating with nineteenth-century Romantics and still accepted by many historians today. In this book, Tracy Dennison shows how Russian society looked from below, and finds nothing like the collective, redistributive and market-averse behaviour often attributed to Russian peasants. On the contrary, the Russian rural population was as integrated into regional and even national markets as many of its west European counterparts. Serfdom was a loose garment that enabled different landlords to shape economic institutions, especially property rights, in widely diverse ways. Highly coercive and backward regimes on some landlords' estates existed side-by-side with surprisingly liberal approximations to a rule of law. This book paints a vivid and colourful picture of the everyday reality of rural Russia before the 1861 abolition of serfdom.

Providing a succinct yet comprehensive introduction to the history of the Atlantic world in its entirety, The Atlantic Experience traces the first Portuguese journeys to the West coast of Africa in the mid-fifteenth century through to the abolition of slavery in America in the late-nineteenth century. Bringing together the histories of Europe, Africa and the Americas, this book supersedes a history of nations, foregrounds previously neglected parts of these continents, and explores the region as a holistic entity that encompassed people from many different areas, ethnic groups and national backgrounds. Distilling this huge topic into key themes such as conquest, trade, race and migration, Catherine Armstrong and Laura Chmielewski's chronological survey illuminates the crucial aspects of this cutting edge field.

This book examines the political economy of the master-slave relationship viewed through the lens of consumption and market exchange. What did it mean when human chattel bought commodities, 'stole' property, or gave and received gifts? Forgotten exchanges, this study argues, measured the deepest questions of worth and value, shaping an enduring struggle for power between slaves and masters. The slaves' internal economy focused intense paternalist negotiation on a ground where categories of exchange - provision, gift, contraband, and commodity - were in constant flux. At once binding and alienating, these ties endured constant moral stresses and material manipulation by masters and slaves alike, galvanizing conflict and engendering complex new social relations on and off the plantation.

Drawing on both new and neglected evidence, this book reconstructs Old John Brown's aborted 'war' to free the 3.8 million slaves in the American South before the Civil War. It critiques misleading sources that either exalt Brown's 'heroism' and noble purpose or condemn his 'monomania' and 'lawlessness'. McGlone explains the sources of his obsession with slavery and his notorious crime at Pottawatomie Creek in 'Bleeding Kansas' as well as how the Harpers Ferry raid figured into Brown's larger vision and why he was captured in the federal armory there. John Brown's War against Slavery chronicles how this American apostle of violence on behalf of the 'downtrodden', this abolitionist 'fanatic' and 'terroriser', ultimately rescued his cause by going to the gallows with resolution and outward calm. By embracing martyrdom, John Brown helped to spread panic in the South and persuaded northern sympathizers that failure can be noble and political violence 'righteous'.

The enslaved population of medieval Iberia composed only a small percentage of the general populace at any given point, and slave labor was not essential to the regional economy during the period. Yet slaves were present in Iberia from the beginning of recorded history until the early modern era, and the regulations and norms for slavery and servitude shifted as time passed and kingdoms rose and fell. The Romans brought their imperially sanctioned forms of slavery to the Iberian peninsula, and these were adapted by successive Christian kingdoms during the Middle Ages. The Muslim conquest of Iberia introduced new ideas about slavery and effected an increase in slave trade. During the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, slave owners in Christian Spain and Portugal maintained slaves at home, frequently captives taken in wars and sea raids, and exported their slave systems to colonies across the Atlantic."Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia" provides a magisterial survey of the many forms of bound labor in Iberia from ancient times to the decline of slavery in the eighteenth century. William D. Phillips, Jr., examines the pecuniary and legal terms of slavery from purchase to manumission. He pays particular attention to the conditions of life for the enslaved, which, in a religiously diverse society, differed greatly for Muslims and Christians as well as for men and women. This sweeping narrative will become the definitive account of slavery in a place and period that deeply influenced the forms of forced servitude that shaped the New World.

A wealthy planter in the West Indies, Bryan Edwards (1743-1800) lived in Jamaica during the peak of its sugar wealth. Upon his return to England in 1792, he wrote several books on the West Indies, including a multi-volume history of the British colonies. The present work, first published in 1796, relates to the recent conflict between the British and Jamaicans descended from runaway slaves, known as Maroons. Living mostly in isolated mountain communities, the Maroons had been granted certain rights under a 1739 treaty. However, by 1795, with a new governor ruling the island, tensions re-emerged and resulted in another war. Prefaced by Edwards' extended discussion of the Maroons and the origins of the conflict, this collection of documents and letters represents a valuable source in the study of Jamaican history and that of British colonialism in the Caribbean.

Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics challenges the way historians interpret the causes of the American Civil War. Using Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas's famed rivalry as a prism, Robert E. May shows that when Lincoln and fellow Republicans opposed slavery in the West, they did so partly from evidence that slaveholders, with Douglas's assistance, planned to follow up successes in Kansas by bringing Cuba, Mexico, and Central America into the Union as slave states. A skeptic about 'Manifest Destiny', Lincoln opposed the war with Mexico, condemned Americans invading Latin America, and warned that Douglas's 'popular sovereignty' doctrine would unleash US slaveholders throughout Latin America. This book internationalizes America's showdown over slavery, shedding new light on the Lincoln-Douglas rivalry and Lincoln's Civil War scheme to resettle freed slaves in the tropics.

In the years preceding the American Civil War, religion was at the heart of the debate over slavery. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) had rejected the strict Calvinism of his background to become the leading Unitarian spokesman and preacher, and in later life he began to address the subject of slavery. Published in 1836, this work was Channing's most substantial contribution to the debate, revealing the real difficulties men such as Channing had in questioning a practice with which they had grown up. He vacillates between contempt for the institution and empathy for the slaveholders, writing, 'I do not intend to pass sentence on the character of the slave-holder.' He sees black slaves as humans, but not of equal status with white people. The final chapter is particularly prescient: 'There is a great dread ... that the union of the States may be dissolved by the conflict about slavery.'

When colonial slavery was abolished in 1833 the British government paid GBP20 million to slave-owners as compensation: the enslaved received nothing. Drawing on the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, which represent a complete census of slave-ownership, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the extent and importance of absentee slave-ownership and its impact on British society. Moving away from the historiographical tradition of isolated case studies, it reveals the extent of slave-ownership among metropolitan elites, and identifies concentrations of both rentier and mercantile slave-holders, tracing their influence in local and national politics, in business and in institutions such as the Church. In analysing this permeation of British society by slave-owners and their success in securing compensation from the state, the book challenges conventional narratives of abolitionist Britain and provides a fresh perspective of British society and politics on the eve of the Victorian era.

Sugar cane plantations had operated across almost every island in the West Indies since the seventeenth century. Run by British planters, they relied on slavery as their main source of labour. A surgeon and Anglican minister, James Ramsay (1733 89) witnessed at first hand the exploitation of African slaves in Britain's West Indian colonies. Working there for over twenty years, as both a Christian missionary and a practising surgeon, he became keenly involved in the campaign to improve the welfare of slaves. This extended essay, first published in 1784, was an early and highly influential contribution to the anti-slavery movement, generating both enlightened acclaim and deep opposition. Analysing the relationships between slaves and their masters, discussing the role of slaves in society, and proposing various measures to improve their lives, this work remains a relevant text in Caribbean and colonial history.

This 1786 publication is a translation of a prizewinning Latin essay written by Thomas Clarkson (1760 1846) at Cambridge the previous year. Clarkson's deep research into the Atlantic slave trade instilled in him a sense of duty, inspiring him to devote his life to abolitionism. The publication of the essay introduced Clarkson to like-minded campaigners, notably William Wilberforce (1759 1833) and Granville Sharpe (1735 1813), with whom he helped to establish in 1787 the pioneering Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Thoughts on the African Slave Trade (1788) by the sailor, slave trader and Anglican clergyman John Newton (1725 1807) is also reissued in this volume. Published thirty-four years after Newton's retirement from the slave trade, this pamphlet apologises for his 'too late' conversion to the abolitionist movement and describes the horrific conditions aboard slave ships during the Middle Passage.

The author and campaigner Granville Sharp (1735 1813) was born in Durham to a religious family. In 1765, a chance encounter with a slave, Jonathan Strong, sparked the serious interest in abolitionism that in due course saw him become a founding member of the London committee of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Due in part to his efforts and writings, the anti-slavery movement in Britain gained public attention and became a more focused and organised campaign. This tract, originally published in 1776, is one of several anti-slavery works that Sharp produced in that year. A rigorous defence of liberty and of 'the honour of holy Scriptures', it is a riposte to the idea that slavery is sanctioned by God, citing the biblical doctrines of 'Thou shalt not oppress a stranger' and 'Love thy neighbour as thyself'. Also included are several appendices of material relating to the abolitionist cause.

Nigerian-born Olaudah Equiano (c.1745 97), also known as Gustavus Vassa, was sold into slavery as a child and endured the horrors of the transatlantic slave ships. He later worked on board Royal Navy vessels, receiving an education and converting to Christianity. Buying his freedom in 1766, he embarked on several voyages before settling in London, where he became involved in the causes of anti-slavery and the welfare of former slaves. Published in 1789, this successful two-volume autobiography boosted the abolitionist cause, providing a first-hand account of the experience of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic. An important document in the history of slavery and immigration, it remains a classic work of black writing. Volume 2 recounts how Equiano achieved his freedom, his conversion to Christianity, his experience of shipwreck in the West Indies, and his life in England.

Britons may very well never be slaves, but British rule certainly meant slavery for others. Michael Jordan's book explores the personalities and the issues behind the movement to abolish first the slave trade and later the condition of slavery. When the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in 1787, the trade was at its height, with slave-grown goods flowing around the world and personal wealth accumulating for those who were involved in the trade. Within twenty years the abolitionists had achieved their aim. It is a dramatic and suspenseful story, with opposition from expected and unexpected quarters and internal squabbling and falling-out. MP William Wilberforce brought in a Private Member's Bill for the abolition of the slave trade every year for eighteen years, but it was the movement on the ground that turned public opinion. Yet still to come was the difficult struggle to abolish the condition of slavery.

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.

Nigerian-born Olaudah Equiano (c.1745 97), also known as Gustavus Vassa, was sold into slavery as a child and endured the horrors of the transatlantic slave ships. He later worked on board Royal Navy vessels, receiving an education and converting to Christianity. Buying his freedom in 1766, he embarked on several voyages before settling in London, where he became involved in the causes of anti-slavery and the welfare of former slaves. Published in 1789, this successful two-volume autobiography boosted the abolitionist cause, providing a first-hand account of the experience of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic. An important document in the history of slavery and immigration, it remains a classic work of black writing. Volume 1 begins with Equiano's background and kidnapping, and the Atlantic crossing. He recounts his adventures in the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and subsequent experiences of merchant trading in the Americas.

Prince Sanders (1775 1839) was an African-American teacher and advocate of black American emigration to Africa and Haiti. When Sanders was on a speaking tour of England he met abolitionist William Wilberforce, who encouraged him to go to Haiti and meet King Henri Christophe (1767 1820). Haiti during this time was divided, and Christophe ruled over the northern region. Sanders travelled to the island and was quickly hired as Christophe's adviser. In 1816 Sanders published this translation of documents, which include Christophe's land reforms, his establishment of a monarchy in Haiti, and some of his correspondence. This publication was part of an attempt by Christophe and Sanders to show white Europeans that former slaves could successfully run their own country without international interference. Although Haiti was reunited in 1820, after Christophe's death, these documents illustrate his efforts to protect the country during its fragile early years of independence.

The first Reader and Guide to the subject of slavery in America. It combines both an introduction to the field and a selection of core primary and secondary readings, covering the period from the early seventeenth century to the American Civil War. Divided into 12 sections, it maps on to the semester system, whereby each section can form the core of a particular week's teaching. The opening and closing sections follow a chronological structure, while the main body of the volume takes a thematic approach, covering the following key areas: * Slavery in the Old South * Slave Life * The Economics of Slavery * Slavery and the Law * Slave Resistance * Pro-Slavery Ideology * The Anti-Slavery Movement * Slavery and Expansion Primary documents are drawn from a wide variety of sources: extracts from diaries, letters, laws, debates, oral testimonies, travellers' accounts, inventories, journals, autobiographies, petitions and novels. Black and white, male and female testimony is drawn upon. The secondary readings have been selected for including important, provocative discussions, based on the editor's experience of what works well in a teaching environment. Where possible the secondary readings link with the primary documents. As well as an introduction to the volume, each section consists of an introduction, a secondary reading and a selection of shorter primary documents. The introduction to each section introduces the main points of historical discussion, raises important questions and indicates what other writings should be consulted. Key Features * The only combined reader and guide to the subject of slavery in America * Based on the author's extensive experience of teaching the subject * Includes primary and secondary readings * Covers colonial period and later years -- incredibly broad-ranging

Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in hislifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cerenoalong with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands that make up TheEncantadas and three more short stories: The Piazza, The Bell-Tower, and The Lightning-Rod Man. This edition places these stories in the context of nineteenth-century debates over slavery, free willand determinism, science and technology, and the nature and value of literary artistry. The stories in ThePiazza Tales demonstrate the global range of Melville's cultural and aesthetic concerns, as Melville sethis stories in locales ranging from rural western Massachusetts and Wall Street in the United States to thePacific coast of South America and southern Europe. This edition is especially concerned with Melville's engagement with both political questions related toslavery and imperialism and aesthetic questions germane to the short story tradition as developed by hisnear contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

The Christmas Rebellion (1831-2) saw the uprising of 60,000 Jamaican slaves, many of them followers of one Baptist preacher. Initially intended only as a peaceful strike, it escalated as estates were burned down and plantation owners killed. This 1832 pamphlet details the violence and persecution directed against nonconformists and missionaries, who were regarded as having been sympathetic towards the revolt. The materials were published by William Knibb, a Baptist minister, who in 1832 was summoned to appear before parliamentary committees investigating the state of the Caribbean colonies. His evidence and the rebellion itself are regarded as having quickened the pace of emancipation in Jamaica. The documents are reissued here with an 1837 narrative by James Williams, a youth who became an apprentice under the system that replaced slavery. He describes how conditions for former slaves were little improved, with many instances of harsh treatment and unjust imprisonment.

From its founding, Martinique played an integral role in France's Atlantic empire. Established in the mid-seventeenth century as a colonial outpost against Spanish and English dominance in the Caribbean, the island was transformed by the increase in European demand for sugar, coffee, and indigo. Like other colonial subjects, Martinicans met the labor needs of cash-crop cultivation by establishing plantations worked by enslaved Africans and by adopting the rigidly hierarchical social structure that accompanied chattel slavery. After Haiti gained its independence in 1804, Martinique's economic importance to the French empire increased. At the same time, questions arose, both in France and on the island, about the long-term viability of the plantation system, including debates about the ways colonists--especially enslaved Africans and free mixed-race individuals--fit into the French nation."Sweet Liberty" chronicles the history of Martinique from France's reacquisition of the island from the British in 1802 to the abolition of slavery in 1848. Focusing on the relationship between the island's widely diverse society and the various waves of French and British colonial administrations, Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss provides a compelling account of Martinique's social, political, and cultural dynamics during the final years of slavery in the French empire. Schloss explores how various groups--Creole and metropolitan elites, "petits blancs," "gens de couleur," and enslaved Africans--interacted with one another in a constantly shifting political environment and traces how these interactions influenced the colony's debates around identity, citizenship, and the boundaries of the French nation.Based on extensive archival research in Europe and the Americas, "Sweet Liberty" is a groundbreaking study of a neglected region that traces how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the Atlantic.