In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic. Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers-and racist mobs-did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice. John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles. The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

Many people today have never heard of the Comoros, but these islands were once part of a prosperous economic system that stretched halfway around the world. A key node in the trading networks of the Indian Ocean, the Comoros thrived by exchanging slaves and commodities with African, Arab and Indian merchants. By the seventeenth century, the archipelago had become an important supply point on the route from Europe to Asia, and developed a special relationship with the English. The twentieth century brought French colonial rule and a plantation economy based on perfumes and spices. In 1975, following decades of neglect, the Comoros declared independence from France, only to be blighted by a series of coups, a radical revolutionary government and a mercenary regime. Today, the island nation suffers chronic mismanagement and relies on foreign aid and remittances from a diasporic community in France. Nonetheless, the Comoros are largely peaceful and culturally vibrant--connected to the outside world in the internet age, but, at the same time, still slightly apart. Iain Walker traces the history and unique culture of these enigmatic islands, from their first settlement by Africans, Arabs and Austronesians, through their heyday within the greater Swahili world and their decline as a forgotten outpost of the French colonial empire, to their contemporary status as an independent state in the Indian Ocean .

Roman comedy evolved early in the war-torn 200s BCE. Troupes of lower-class and slave actors traveled through a militarized landscape full of displaced persons and the newly enslaved; together, the actors made comedy to address mixed-class, hybrid, multilingual audiences. Surveying the whole of the Plautine corpus, where slaves are central figures, and the extant fragments of early comedy, this book is grounded in the history of slavery and integrates theories of resistant speech, humor, and performance. Part I shows how actors joked about what people feared - natal alienation, beatings, sexual abuse, hard labor, hunger, poverty - and how street-theater forms confronted debt, violence, and war loss. Part II catalogues the onstage expression of what people desired: revenge, honor, free will, legal personhood, family, marriage, sex, food, free speech; a way home, through memory; and manumission, or escape - all complicated by the actors' maleness. Comedy starts with anger.

"Chronicles in unrelenting detail the role of the law in the enslavement and subjugation of black Americans during the colonial period. No attempt to summarize the colonial experience could convey the rich and comprehensive detail which is the major strength of Judge Higginbotham's work."--Harvard Law Review

Slavery in Small Things: Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits isthe first book to explore the long-range cultural legacy of slavery through commonplace daily objects. * Offers a new and original approach to the history of slavery by an acknowledged expert on the topic * Traces the relationship between slavery and modern cultural habits through an analysis of commonplace objects that include sugar, tobacco, tea, maps, portraiture, print, and more * Represents the only study that utilizes common objects to illustrate the cultural impact and legacy of the Atlantic slave trade * Makes the topic of slavery accessible to a wider public audience

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

By 1860, the value of the slave population in the United States exceeded $3 billion--triple that of investments nationwide in factories, railroads, and banks combined, and worth more even than the South's lucrative farmland. The slave was not only a commodity to be traded but also a kind of currency and the basis for a range of credit relations. But the value associated with slavery was not destroyed in the Civil War. In Black Market, Aaron Carico reveals how the slave commodity survived emancipation, arguing that the enslaved person--understood here in legal, economic, social, and embodied contexts--still operated as an indispensable form of value in national culture. Through both archival research and lucid readings of literature, art, and law, from the Fourteenth Amendment to the first western, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery's political economy in America after 1865. Ultimately, Carico explains how a radically incomplete--and fundamentally failed--abolition enabled the emergence of a modern nation-state, in which slavery still determined--and now goes on to determine--economic, political, and cultural life.

This book represents the final instalment of research and analysis by one of the Caribbean's foremost historians. In this volume, Eric Williams reflects on the institution of slavery from the ancient period in Europe down to New World African Slavery. The book also includes other forms of bondage which followed slavery, including Japanese, Chinese, Indians and Pacific peoples in many locations worldwide. The book points ways in which this bondage led to European and American prosperity and the manner in which bonded peoples created their own spaces. This they did through the preservation and revival of the transported culture to the new locations. The book makes a significant contribution in that it moves beyond African slavery. It continues the narrative after abolition by showing how the capitalist impulse enabled Europe and the United States to devise other (non-slavery) ways of further exploitation of non-African people in third world countries. These nations fought this further exploitation in banding together to create the south-to-south nonaligned movement which gave mutual assistance in a number of areas. Most other works tend to separate these issues or deal with them on a regional basis. Eric Williams offers a comprehensive view, tying up many themes in a vast compendium.

Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. Michael Vorenberg tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation happened after, not before the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by previous historians, and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution. Michael Vorenberg is an assistant professor of history at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a research assistant to David Herbert Donald for his prize-winning biography, Lincoln, and he is a contributor to the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Reader's Companion to the American Presidency. This is his first book.

Slavery in the Development of the Americas brings together new work from leading historians and economic historians of slavery. The essays cover various aspects of slavery and the role of slavery in the development of the southern United States, Brazil, Cuba, the French and Dutch Caribbean, and elsewhere in the Americas. Some essays explore the emergence of the slave system, and others provide important insights about the operation of specific slave economics. There are reviews of slave markets and prices, and discussions of the efficiency and distributional aspects of slavery. New perspectives are brought on the transition from slavery and subsequent adjustments, and the volume contains the latest work of scholars, many of whom have been pioneers in the study of slavery in the Americas.

Frontiers of Citizenship is an engagingly-written, innovative history of Brazil's black and indigenous people that redefines our understanding of slavery, citizenship, and the origins of Brazil's 'racial democracy'. Through groundbreaking archival research that brings the stories of slaves, Indians, and settlers to life, Yuko Miki challenges the widespread idea that Brazilian Indians 'disappeared' during the colonial era, paving the way for the birth of Latin America's largest black nation. Focusing on the postcolonial settlement of the Atlantic frontier and Rio de Janeiro, Miki argues that the exclusion and inequality of indigenous and African-descended people became embedded in the very construction of Brazil's remarkably inclusive nationhood. She demonstrates that to understand the full scope of central themes in Latin American history - race and national identity, unequal citizenship, popular politics, and slavery and abolition - one must engage the histories of both the African diaspora and the indigenous Americas.

Wilma Dunaway contends that studies of the U.S. slave family are flawed by the neglect of small plantations and export zones and the exaggeration of slave agency. Using data on population trends and slave narratives, Dunaway identifies several profit-maximizing strategies that owners implemented to disrupt and endanger African-American families. These effective strategies include forced labor migrations, structural interference in marriages and childcare, sexual exploitation of women, shortfalls in provision of basic survival needs, and ecological risks. This book is unique in its examination of new threats to family persistence that emerged during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people today are still enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. This book is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh who founded their own town of Azad Nagar-Freedomville-after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed it as a non-violent "silent revolution" that inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Laura T. Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar's success. Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling-a complex, constantly changing narrative of a murder that captures better than any sanitized account just why it is that slavery continues to exist in the twenty-first century. Freedomville's enormous struggle to gain and maintain liberty shows us how realistic it is to expect radical change without violent protest-and how a global construction boom is deepening and broadening the alienation of impoverished people around the world.

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.

Celebrated for her courageous exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century America's most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman? To John Brown, leader of the Harpers Ferry slave uprising, she was General Tubman. For the many slaves she led north to freedom, she was Moses. To the slaveholders who sought her capture, she was a thief and a trickster. To abolitionists, she was a prophet. Now, in a biography widely praised for its impeccable research and its compelling narrative, Harriet Tubman is revealed for the first time as a singular and complex character, a woman who defied simple categorization.

Contrary to popular perception, slavery persisted in the North well into the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in New Jersey, the last northern state to pass an abolition statute, in 1804. Because of the nature of the law, which freed children born to enslaved mothers only after they had served their mother's master for more than two decades, slavery continued in New Jersey through the Civil War. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally destroyed its last vestiges. The Ragged Road to Abolition chronicles the experiences of slaves and free blacks, as well as abolitionists and slaveholders, during slavery's slow northern death. Abolition in New Jersey during the American Revolution was a contested battle, in which constant economic devastation and fears of freed blacks overrunning the state government limited their ability to gain freedom. New Jersey's gradual abolition law kept at least a quarter of the state's black population in some degree of bondage until the 1830s. The sustained presence of slavery limited African American community formation and forced Jersey blacks to structure their households around multiple gradations of freedom while allowing New Jersey slaveholders to participate in the interstate slave trade until the 1850s. Slavery's persistence dulled white understanding of the meaning of black freedom and helped whites to associate "black" with "slave," enabling the further marginalization of New Jersey's growing free black population. By demonstrating how deeply slavery influenced the political, economic, and social life of blacks and whites in New Jersey, this illuminating study shatters the perceived easy dichotomies between North and South or free states and slave states at the onset of the Civil War.

This book considers the impact of slavery and Atlantic trade on British economic development during the beginning of British industrialization. Kenneth Morgan investigates five key areas within the topic that have been subject to historical debate: the profits of the slave trade; slavery, capital accumulation and British economic development; exports and transatlantic markets; the role of business institutions; and the contribution of Atlantic trade to the growth of British ports. This stimulating and accessible book provides essential reading for students of slavery and the slave trade, and British economic history.

However urban slave societies might have differed from their rural counterparts, they still relied on a concerted assault on the psychological, social, and cultural identity of their African-descended inhabitants to maintain power and control. This ambitious book looks at how people of African descent in two such societies--Havana and New Orleans in the nineteenth century--created and maintained their own forms of cultural resistance to the slave regime's assault and, in the process, put forth autonomous views of sell and the social landscape. In Havana's annual Dia de Reyes festival and in the weekly activities that took place at New Orleans's Congo Square, author Daniel Walker identities specific cultural beliefs and activities that Africans brought to the New World and modified in order to withstand and contest the dehumanizing effects of oppression. "No More, No More crosses disciplinary boundaries as well, elucidating the economic, social, cultural, and demographic operations at work in two cities and the wide-scale efforts at cultural resistance embodied in public performances.

A bold new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. In the Matter of Nat Turner penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution. Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner's notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. Christopher Tomlins provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. Tomlins also undertakes a deeply critical examination of William Styron's 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots. A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, In the Matter of Nat Turner is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.

The Slave Coast, situated in what is now the West African state of Benin, was the epicentre of the Atlantic Slave Trade. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, it was this coastline that witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relation-ship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organised? And how did the locals react to the opportunities these new trading relations offered them? The Kingdom of Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Fuglestad's book seeks to explain the Dahomean 'anomaly' and its impact on the Slave Coast's societies and polities.

From Slavery to Aid engages two major themes in African historiography, the slow death of slavery and the evolution of international development, and reveals their interrelation in the social history of the region of Ader in the Nigerien Sahel. Benedetta Rossi traces the historical transformations that turned a society where slavery was a fundamental institution into one governed by the goals and methods of 'aid'. Over an impressive sweep of time - from the pre-colonial power of the Caliphate of Sokoto to the aid-driven governments of the present - this study explores the problem that has remained the central conundrum throughout Ader's history: how workers could meet subsistence needs and employers fulfil recruitment requirements in an area where natural resources are constantly exposed to the climatic hazards characteristic of the edge of the Sahara.

Boubacar Barry is one of the leading figures in West African historiography. His authoritative study of 400 years of Senegambian history is unrivalled in its detailed grasp of published and unpublished materials. Taking as its subject the vast area covering the Senegal and Gambia river basins, this book explores the changing dynamics of regional and Atlantic trade, clashes between traditional African and emergent Muslim authorities, the colonial system and the slave trade, and current obstacles to the integration of the region's modern states. Professor Barry argues cogently for the integrity of the Senegambian region as a historical subject, and he forges a coherent narrative from the dismemberment and unification which characterised Senegambia's development from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. This newly-translated study is a vital tool in our understanding of West African history.

This edited volume determines where slavery in the Islamic world fits within the global history of slavery and the various models that have been developed to analyze it. To that end, the authors focus on a question about Islamic slavery that has frequently been asked but not answered satisfactorily, namely, what is Islamic about slavery in the Islamic world. Through the fields of history, sociology, literature, women's studies, African studies, and comparative slavery studies, this book is an important contribution to the scholarly research on slavery in the Islamic lands, which continues to be understudied and under-represented in global slavery studies.

Boubacar Barry is one of the leading figures in West African historiography. His authoritative study of 400 years of Senegambian history is unrivalled in its detailed grasp of published and unpublished materials. Taking as its subject the vast area covering the Senegal and Gambia river basins, this book explores the changing dynamics of regional and Atlantic trade, clashes between traditional African and emergent Muslim authorities, the colonial system and the slave trade, and current obstacles to the integration of the region's modern states. Professor Barry argues cogently for the integrity of the Senegambian region as a historical subject, and he forges a coherent narrative from the dismemberment and unification which characterised Senegambia's development from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. This newly-translated study is a vital tool in our understanding of West African history.