A firsthand account of a woman's life on a coastal Georgia plantation; As the wife of a frequently absent slaveholder and public figure, Anna Matilda Page King (1798-1859) was the de facto head of their Sea Island plantation. This volume collects more than 150 letters to her husband, children, parents, and others. Conveying the substance of everyday life as they chronicle King's ongoing struggles to put food on the table, nurse her ""family black and white,"" and keep faith with a disappointing husband, the letters offer an absorbing firsthand account of antebellum coastal Georgia life. Anna Matilda Page was reared with the expectation that she would marry a planter, have children, and tend to her family's domestic affairs. Untypically, she was also schooled by her father in all aspects of plantation management, from seed cultivation to building construction. That grounding would serve her well. By 1842 her husband's properties were seized, owing to debts amassed from crop failures, economic downturns, and extensive investments in land, enslaved workers, and the development of the nearby port town of Brunswick. Anna and her family were sustained, however, by Retreat, the St. Simons Island property left to her in trust by her father. With the labor of fifty bondpeople and ""their increase"" she was to strive, with little aid from her husband, to keep the plantation solvent. A valuable record of King's many roles, from accountant to mother, from doctor to horticulturist, the letters also reveal much about her relationship with, and attitudes toward, her enslaved workers. Historians have yet to fully understand the lives of plantation mistresses left on their own by husbands pursuing political and other professional careers. Anna Matilda Page King's letters give us insight into one such woman who reluctantly entered, but nonetheless excelled in, the male domains of business and agriculture.

Among the most infamous U.S. Supreme Court decisions is Dred Scott v. Sandford. Despite the case's signal importance as a turning point in America's history, the lives of the slave litigants have receded to the margins of the record, as conventional accounts have focused on the case's judges and lawyers. In telling the life of Harriet, Dred's wife and co-litigant in the case, this book provides a compensatory history to the generations of work that missed key sources only recently brought to light. Moreover, it gives insight into the reasons and ways that slaves used the courts to establish their freedom.
A remarkable piece of historical detective work, Mrs. Dred Scott chronicles Harriet's life from her adolescence on the 1830s Minnesota-Wisconsin frontier, to slavery-era St. Louis, through the eleven years of legal wrangling that ended with the high court's notorious decision. The book not only recovers her story, but also reveals that Harriet may well have been the lynchpin in this pivotal episode in American legal history.
Reconstructing Harriet Scott's life through innovative readings of journals, military records, court dockets, and even frontier store ledgers, VanderVelde offers a stunningly detailed account that is at once a rich portrait of slave life, an engrossing legal drama, and a provocative reassessment of a central event in U.S. constitutional history. More than a biography, the book is a deep social history that freshly illuminates some of the major issues confronting antebellum America, including the status of women, slaves, Free Blacks, and Native Americans.

African slavery was pervasive in Spain's Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and conflict. The international group of scholars brought together in this volume explain Spain's role as a colonial pioneer in the Atlantic world and its latecomer status as a slave-trading, plantation-based empire. These contributors map the broad contours and transformations of slave-trafficking, the plantation, and antislavery in the Hispanic Atlantic while also delving into specific topics that include: the institutional and economic foundations of colonial slavery; the law and religion; the influences of the Haitian Revolution and British abolitionism; antislavery and proslavery movements in Spain; race and citizenship; and the business of the illegal slave trade.

Providing a unique critical perspective to debates on slavery, this book brings the literature on transatlantic slavery into dialogue with research on informal sector labour, child labour, migration, debt, prisoners, and sex work in the contemporary world in order to challenge popular and policy discourse on modern slavery.

..". a significant contribution to the vast and rich international literature on abolitionism, its causes and consequences, main events and historical processes. Well-informed and up-to-date in relation to the most pressing debates on the abolition of slave trade, ...the study provides a much-needed counterpoint (and counterbalance) to an Anglocentric leaning that overwhelmingly dominates this field of studies." . e-Journal of Portuguese History

"This book is the culmination of decades of careful research, and assumes an important place on a historiographical pitch steamrollered by an over-concentration on British perspectives." . European History Quarterly

"This work elucidates, with clear prose and abundant evidence, a new and important finding: the top slave trading nation of the nineteenth century did not act only upon British will, but developed its own antislavery attitudes within a nationalistic context." . Enterprise & Society

"His is a uniquely authoritative voice on abolition in Portugal, a far remove from the 'enlightened will of the masters' approach...that long dominated the historiography. The book is a spell-binding narrative with scholarship of the highest order. Marques is to be congratulated on breaking the silence surrounding the abolition of the slave trade of Portugal and bringing a Portuguese voice t6o international debates on abolition." . The International History Review

" Marques] offers an important contribution not only for those interested in the Atlantic slave trade but also enriches generally the transnationally or globally oriented historiography. " . H-Net, Clio-online Portugal was the pioneer of the transatlantic slave trade, the ruler of both Brazil and Angola - the all time champions of that trade -, and one of the last western countries to decree the abolition of slaving institutions. Paradoxically, and in spite of the overwhelming number of works devoted to the problems of slavery produced in recent decades, little was known about the way Portugal dealt with the twilight of the age of slavery and, most of all, with abolitionism. This book offers the first study of the abolition of the Portuguese slave trade, covering the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid-1860s, and bringing to life a dark and silenced corner in the history of the odious commerce. Based on a thorough examination of Portuguese and British historical sources - most of them never used before -, and on his awareness of the international scholarship in the field in which he writes, it investigates not only the Portuguese pro and anti-abolitionist attitudes but also the underlying ideologies, and whether and how those attitudes and ideologies changed over time and in the light of events in the political, economic and social spheres.

In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. This timely book, the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem. Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.

This book is a study of the literature and visual arts concerned with the many and diverse forms of slaveries produced by globalisation in Britain since the early 1990s. Starting from the sociological and political analyses of the issue, it combines postcolonial and Holocaust studies in a twin perspective based on the recurrent images of the ghost and the concentration camp, whose manifold shapes populate today's Britain. Discussions focuses on a wide range of works: novelists and crime writers (Chris Abani, Chris Cleave, Marina Lewycka, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell), film directors (Nick Broomfield), photographers (Dana Popa), playwrights (Clare Bayley, Cora Bissett and Stef Smith, Abi Morgan, Lucy Kirkwood) and dystopian artists such as Alfonso Cuaron, P. D. James and Salman Rushdie. The book will appeal to both students and scholars in English, postcolonial, Holocaust, globalisation and slavery studies. -- .

"Discourses of Slavery and Abolition" brings together for the first time the most important strands of current thinking on the relationship between slavery and categories of writing, oratory and visual culture in the "long" eighteenth century. The book begins by examining writing about slavery and race by both philosophers and by authors such as Aphra Behn. It considers self-representation in the works of Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, James Williams and Mary Prince. The final section reads literary and cultural texts associated with the abolition movements of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, moving beyond traditional accounts of the documents of that movement to show the importance of religious writing, children's literature, and the relationship between art and abolition.

American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond provides an up-to-date summary of past and present views of American slavery in international perspective and suggests new directions for current and future comparative scholarship. It argues that we can better understand the nature and meaning of American slavery and antislavery if we place them clearly within a Euro-American context. Current scholarship on American slavery acknowledges the importance of the continental and Atlantic dimensions of the historical phenomenon, comparing it often with slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America. However, since the 1980s, a handful of studies has looked further and has compared American slavery with European forms of unfree and nominally free labor. Building on this innovative scholarship, this book treats the U.S. "peculiar institution" as part of both an Atlantic and a wider Euro-American world. It shows how the Euro-American context is no less crucial than the Atlantic one in understanding colonial slavery and the American Revolution in an age of global enlightenment, reformism, and revolutionary upheavals; the Cotton Kingdom's heyday in a world of systems of unfree labor; and the making of radical Abolitionism and the occurrence of the American Civil War at a time when nationalist ideologies and nation-building movements were widespread.

SLAVERY, SMALLHOLDING AND TOURISM explores the political economy of development in the British Virgin Islands - from plantations, through the evolution of a smallholding economy, to the rise of tourism. The study argues that the demise of plantation economy in the BVI ushered in a century of imperial disinterest persisting until recently, when a new "monocrop" - tourism - became ascendant. Using an historical and anthropological approach, O'Neal reveals how the trend toward reliance on tourism and other dependent industries affects many BVIslanders called the Belongers in ways that echo their historical and economic heritage. From the new Foreword: "Read in the historical context of tourism and Caribbean research, O'Neal's work stands out as an early and significant contribution. But even apart from its pioneering status, this is an important book. A quarter of a century after the original research, the work is fresh, innovative, and ethnographically rich... an in-depth account of the transformations activated by tourism, as they are happening." - Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Professor of Anthropology & Women's Studies, Vassar College; author, 'Take Me to My Paradise' From the new Afterword: "O'Neal's book is a story of tourism, not finance. But it was written right at the beginning of the emergence of this 'second pillar' of the British Virgin Islands' economy-financial services-and the tantalizing references to that industry in this book, as well as the rich discussion of the enduring influence of the plantation complex, provide...commentary on value, its circulation, and its deep histories, histories that O'Neal's volume helps us better to discern." - Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology & Law, University of California, Irvine; author, 'Recharting the Caribbean'

Think of maritime slavery, and the notorious Middle Passage - the unprecedented, forced migration of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic - readily comes to mind. This so-called 'middle leg' - from Africa to the Americas - of a supposed trading triangle linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas naturally captures attention for its scale and horror. After all, the Middle Passage was the largest forced, transoceanic migration in world history, now thought to have involved about 12.5 million African captives shipped in about 44,000 voyages that sailed between 1514 and 1866. No other coerced migration matches it for sheer size or gruesomeness. Maritime slavery is not, however, just about the movement of people as commodities, but rather, the involvement of all sorts of people, including slaves, in the transportation of those human commodities. Maritime slavery is thus not only about objects being moved but also about subjects doing the moving. Some slaves were actors, not simply the acted-upon. They were pilots, sailors, canoemen, divers, linguists, porters, stewards, cooks, and cabin boys, not forgetting all the ancillary workers in ports such as stevedores, warehousemen, labourers, washerwomen, tavern workers, and prostitutes. Maritime Slavery reflects this current interest in maritime spaces, and covers all the major Oceans and Seas. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

The slave, Saidiya Hartman observes, is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way, and with figures from the past, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.

In Mastering Slavery, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistress, slave adults and slave children on the sense of identity of individual slave narrators. She explores the ways in which our of the social, psychological, biological--and literary--crossings and disruptions slavery engendered, these autobiographers created mixed, dynamic narrative selves.

This book puts psychological trauma at its center. Using psychoanalysis, it assesses what was lost, how it was lost and how the loss is compulsively repeated over generations. There is a conceptualization of this trauma as circular. Such a situation makes it stubbornly persistent. It is suggested that central to the system of slavery was the separating out of procreation from maternity and paternity. This was achieved through the particular cruelties of separating couples at the first sign of loving interest in each other; and separating infants from their mothers. Cruelty disturbed the natural flow of events in the mind and disturbed the approach to and the resolution of the Oedipus Complex conflict. This is traced through the way a new kind of family developed in the Caribbean and elsewhere where slavery remained for hundreds of years.

Colonialism, Slavery, Reparations and Trade: Remedying the Past Addresses how reparations might be obtained for the legacy of the Trans Atlantic slave trade. This collection lends weight to the argument that liability is not extinguished on the death of the plaintiffs or perpetrators. Arguing that the impact of the slave trade is continuing and therefore contemporary, it maintains that this trans-generational debt remains, and must be addressed. Bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, diplomats, and activists, Colonialism, Slavery, Reparations and Trade provides a powerful and challenging exploration of the variety of available legal, relief-type, economic-based and multi-level strategies, and apparent barriers, to achieving reparations for slavery.

This collection of primary documents and previously published essays introduces students to the principal themes in recent scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Old South. The twelve essays cover a variety of topics including the relative modernity of the Old South, the proslavery defense of servitude, gender relations, southern honor and violence, the slave trade, the slaves' economy and community, and the histories of southern women - both black and white. The documents - including court cases, personal letters, diaries, travel accounts, newspaper stories, advertisements, and slave narratives - have been drawn directly from the essay sources in order to illustrate how historians construct arguments. Smith provides a detailed main introduction to the collection to help students situate the readings and documents within the larger context of the antebellum South. In addition, there are brief introductions to each document and essay, study questions, suggestions for further reading, a map, and a chronology of significant events.

En face bilingual edition of only extant Latin American slave narrative written during slavery era. Original Spanish punctuation, spelling, and syntax corrected and modernized by Schulman; translation is of this new version of text. Introduction, notes, chronology give extensive background. Excellent for undergraduate classroom use. Scholars may prefer original text"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

This is a reprint of the original 1845 book about the scriptural legitimacy of slavery. ""Domestic Slavery"" originated in the nineteenth century as a literary debate between two Baptist leaders over the Bible's teachings on slavery. The chapters were originally letters published in a Baptist newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts. Southern pastor Richard Fuller and Northern educator Francis Wayland were each able defenders of their respective positions. These men were also good friends who believed that a difference of opinion about slavery should not necessitate a breaking of Christian fellowship. Unfortunately, these two Baptists leaders proved naive in this regard. Just weeks after the publication of the correspondence in book form, Fuller's Southern Baptist Convention broke away from the larger Baptist denomination and formed a new ecclesiastical body. A number of issues factored into the division, though the slavery debate was what ultimately led to the creation of a separate Baptist denomination in the South. Historians of Southern religion consider ""Domestic Slavery"" to be one of the major contributions to the nineteenth-century debate over the peculiar institution. This critical edition of ""Domestic Slavery"", which includes annotations and an appendix of related documents, represents the first reprint of this important work to be published since the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars of Southern culture and religious history will benefit from a close examination of what was undoubtedly the most significant Baptist contribution to the slavery debate in the years leading to the Civil War.

The Routledge History of Slavery is a landmark publication that provides an overview of the main themes surrounding the history of slavery from ancient Greece to the present day. Taking stock of the field of Slave Studies, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades of study in this crucial field. Offering an unusual, transnational history of slavery, the chapters have all been specially commissioned for the collection. The volume begins by delineating the global nature of the institution of slavery, examining slavery in different parts of the world and over time. Topics covered here include slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean World, as well as the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In Part Two, the chapters explore different themes that define slavery such as slave culture, the slave economy, slave resistance and the planter class, as well as areas of life affected by slavery, such as family and work. The final part goes on to study changes and continuities over time, looking at areas such as abolition, the aftermath of emancipation and commemoration. The volume concludes with a chapter on modern slavery. Including essays on all the key topics and issues, this important collection from a leading international group of scholars presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of the field. It will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of slavery.

The shocking first-hand account of one man's remarkable fight for freedom; now an award-winning motion picture. 'Why had I not died in my young years - before God had given me children to love and live for? What unhappiness and suffering and sorrow it would have prevented. I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman's chain was round me, and could not be shaken off.' 1841: Solomon Northup is a successful violinist when he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Taken from his family in New York State - with no hope of ever seeing them again - and forced to work on the cotton plantations in the Deep South, he spends the next twelve years in captivity until his eventual escape in 1853. First published in 1853, this extraordinary true story proved to be a powerful voice in the debate over slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. It is a true-life testament of one man's courage and conviction in the face of unfathomable injustice and brutality: its influence on the course of American history cannot be overstated.