In "Slavery and Reform in West Africa," Trevor Getz demonstrates that it was largely on the anvil of this issue that French and British policy in West Africa was forged. With distant metropoles unable to intervene in daily affairs, local European administrators, striving to balance abolitionist pressures against the resistance of politically and economically powerful local slave owners, sought ways to satisfy the latter while placating or duping the former.
The result was an alliance between colonial officials, company agents, and slave-owning elites that effectively slowed, sidetracked, or undermined serious attempts to reform slave holding. Although slavery was outlawed in both regions, in only a few isolated instances did large-scale emancipations occur. Under the surface, however, slaves used the threat of self-liberation to reach accommodations that transformed the master-slave relationship.
By comparing the strategies of colonial administrators, slave-owners, and slaves across these two regions and throughout the nineteenth century, "Slavery and Reform in West Africa" reveals not only the causes of the astounding success of slave owners, but also the factors that could, and in some cases did, lead to slave liberations. These findings have serious implications for the wider study of slavery and emancipation and for the history of Africa generally.

In the long course of late imperial Chinese history, servants and concubines formed a vast social stratum in the hinterland along the Grand Canal, particularly in urban areas. Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China is a survey of the institutions and practice of concubinage and servitude in both the general populace and the imperial palace, with a focus on the examination of Ming-Qing political and socioeconomic history through the lives of this particular group of distinct yet associated individuals. The persistent theme of the book is how concubines, appointed by patriarchal polygamy, and servants, laboring under the master-servants hierarchy, experienced interactions and mobility within each institution and in associating with the other. While reviewing how ritual and law treated concubines and servants as patriarchal possessions, the author explores the perspectives available for individual concubines and servants and the limitations in their daily circumstances, searching for their "positional powers" and "privilege of the inferiors" in the context of Chinese culture during the Ming-Qing time period. For a list of the book's tables and their sources, please see: http://www.wou.edu/wp/hsiehb/

Slavery transformed Africa, Europe and the Americas and hugely-enhanced the well-being of the West but the subject of slavery can be hard to understand because of its huge geographic and chronological span. This book uses a unique atlas format to present the story of slavery, explaining its historical importance and making this complex story and its geographical setting easy to understand.

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"[DeCaro] provide[s] a concise, sympathetic, and, on occasion, dramatic and compelling account of Brown."
--"The Journal of American History"

"Readable and well-researched."
--"Journal of the West"

"The biography nicely integrates the moral imperative of the Brown family, particularly the ideal of racial egalitarianism, with increasing sectional tension. Engagingly written."
--"American Historical Review"

"In this biography, Louis A. DeCaro reveals the religious integrity of a man whom others have seen as a criminal, a lunatic or a study in contradictions."
--"Christian Century"

"""Fire from the Midst of You"" is the first major religious biography of John Brown...should become a classic religious biography...no future work on Brown can be complete without a serious consideration of its many claims and insights."
--"Journal of the American Academy of Religion"

"DeCaro's challenging book depicts [John Brown] as a man ahead of his time...From its title (a line from Ezekiel) to its last line, "Fire From the Midst of You" brings to life an austere time when America saw itself as a Christian nation and fire-and-brimstone gospel shaped the populace."
--"Philadelphia Inquirer"

"Handsomely produced and fluently written, the book is based on extensive research: a very worthwhile addition to the scholarship relating to John Brown."
--"Journal of American Studies"

"A welcome addition to the literature of John Brown."
--"Publishers Weekly"

aDecaro sets out to establish Brownas legacy as one grounded in an alternative evangelical tradition that decried pacifism, developed a doctrine of holywar, and called any church that did not actively work for abolition anti-Christian. He places Brown in his religious milieu, reforming the legacy of this religious extremist.a
--"Library Journal"

"DeCaro mines a wealth of information about Brown and the black community, showing that Brown was a well known antislavery activist and ally long before the Harper's Ferry raid of 1859."
--"Oakland Post"

John Brown is usually remembered as a terrorist whose unbridled hatred of slavery drove him to the ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Tried and executed for seizing the arsenal and attempting to spur a liberation movement among the slaves, Brown was the ultimate "cause celebre" for a country on the brink of civil war.

"Fire from the Midst of You" situates Brown within the religious and social context of a nation steeped in racism, showing his roots in Puritan abolitionism. DeCaro explores Brown's unusual family heritage as well as his business and personal losses, retracing his path to the Southern gallows. In contrast to the popular image of Brown as a violent fanatic, DeCaro contextualizes Brown's actions, emphasizing the intensely religious nature of the antebellum U.S. in which he lived. He articulates the nature of Brown's radical faith and shows that, when viewed in the context of his times, he was not the religious fanatic that many have understood him to be. DeCaro calls Brown a "Protestant saint"-an imperfect believer seeking to realize his own perceived calling in divine providence.

In line with the post-millennial theology of his day, Brown understood God as working through mankind and the church to renew and revive sinful humanity. He read theBible not only as God's word, but as "God's word to John Brown," DeCaro traces Brown's life and development to show how by forging faith as a radical weapon, Brown forced the entire nation to a point of crisis.

"Fire from the Midst of You" defies the standard narrative with a new reading of John Brown. Here is the man that the preeminent Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called a "mighty warning" and the one Malcolm X called "a real white liberal."

This tale starts in 1830 on the West Coast of Africa during the latter days of the slave trade when "palm oil ruffians" began trading in the swamps of the Niger delta, bartering their coloured beads and cases of gin for the golden oil and ivory which, if they did not die first from black water fever, malaria or dysentery, would make them rich.
This book is about their struggles in the area now known as Nigeria that led to the formation of the Royal Niger Company Chartered and Limited with its private army in 1886, the takeover of the Company by Lever Brothers Ltd in 1920 and its amalgamation in 1929 with its rival, the African and Eastern Trade Co-operation to form the United Africa Company, which then became the largest trading organization of its type in West Africa, if not in the world.
Obviously, the old trading methods of Nigeria had to give way eventually, not only to more modern techniques, but also to the pressures of national independence, and so the book is finished by recording the affairs of the latter day agents and managers as they diversified the Company's activities and restructured its establishment until by 1971, when the book ends, it had been able to sell off its large river fleet, which had been for so long the backbone of its enterprise in Nigeria, but was now redundant, and yet still remain the leading commercial conglomerate in both Nigeria and West Africa.

Making Slavery History focuses on how commemorative practices and historical arguments about the American Revolution set the course for antislavery politics in the nineteenth century. The particular setting is a time and place in which people were hyperconscious of their roles as historical actors and narrators: Massachusetts in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. This book shows how local abolitionists, both black and white, drew on their state's Revolutionary heritage to mobilize public opposition to Southern slavery. When it came to securing the citizenship of free people of color within the Commonwealth, though, black and white abolitionists diverged in terms of how they idealized black historical agency.
Although it is often claimed that slavery in New England is a history long concealed, Making Slavery History finds it hidden in plain sight. From memories of Phillis Wheatley and Crispus Attucks to representations of black men at the Battle of Bunker Hill, evidence of the local history of slavery cropped up repeatedly in early national Massachusetts. In fixing attention on these seemingly marginal presences, this book demonstrates that slavery was unavoidably entangled in the commemorative culture of the early republic-even in a place that touted itself as the "cradle of liberty."
Transcending the particular contexts of Massachusetts and the early American republic, this book is centrally concerned with the relationship between two ways of making history, through social and political transformation on the one hand and through commemoration, narration, and representation on the other. Making Slavery History examines the relationships between memory and social change, between histories of slavery and dreams of freedom, and between the stories we tell ourselves about who we have been and the possibilities we perceive for who we might become.

In 1831, Nat Turner launched a violent slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia. In his confession, Turner recounted a spiritual world of revelation, visions, scripture, and signs which led him to revolt against slavery. This book explores the theological principles which created the rebellion in conversation with Old Testament views of prophetic violence and Jesus' politics of violence in the New Testament, proposing that Turner's uniquely Christian violence of the oppressed was also prophetic violence that conformed to the values of freedom, justice, liberation, and equality associated with the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven.

On the eve of the Revolution, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry argues that the two were intimately connected: both resulted largely from the dominance of rice cultivation on plantations using imported African slave labor. This development began in the coastal lands near Charleston, South Carolina, around the end of the seventeenth century. Rice plantations spread north to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and south to Georgia and northeast Florida in the late colonial period. The book examines perceptions and realities of the lowcountry disease environment; how the lowcountry became notorious for its 'tropical' fevers, notably malaria and yellow fever; how people combated, avoided or perversely denied the suffering they caused; and how diseases and human responses to them influenced not only the lowcountry and the South, but the United States, even helping to secure American independence.

The Slavery Reader brings together the most recent and essential writings on slavery. The focus is on Atlantic slavery - the enforced movement of millions of Africans from their homelands into the Americas, and the complex historical story of slavery in the Americas. Spanning almost five centuries - the late fifteenth until the mid-nineteenth - the articles trace the range and impact of slavery on the modern Western world. Key themes include:
* the origins and development of American slavery
* work
* family, gender and community
* slave culture
* slave economy
* resistance
* race and social structure
* Africans in the Atlantic world.
Together with the editors' clear and authoritative commentary and a substantial introduction, this volume will become central to the study of slavery.

Intended for high school and undergraduate students, this work provides an engaging overview of the abolitionist movement that allows readers to consider history more directly through more than 20 primary source documents. The Abolitionist Movement: Documents Decoded collects primary sources pertaining to various aspects of the American anti-slavery movement in the 18th and 19th centuries and presents these firsthand sources alongside accessibly written, expert commentary in a visually stimulating format. Making use of primary source documents that include pamphlets, articles, speeches, slave narratives, and court decisions, the book models how scholars interpret primary sources and shows readers how to critically evaluate the key documents that chronicle this major American movement. The work begins with an essay that contextualizes the documents and guides readers toward perceiving the narrative that comes into focus when the seemingly disparate elements are read as a collection. Annotations throughout the book translate difficult passages into lay language, suggest comparisons of key passages, and encourage the reader to cross-reference documents within the volume. This book will illuminate American abolitionism and U.S. history prior to the Civil War while helping readers improve their ability to analyze and interpret primary source information-a key skill for both high school and undergraduate level students. Includes a concise introduction that summarizes the critical points in the history of slavery and abolition Provides carefully selected key documents that represent the full range of American thoughts on slavery Supplies useful annotations that guide the reader's analysis and shows how historians deconstruct documents Presents information and materials that help readers to understand the forces that supported and opposed slavery, thereby giving students a better grasp of American history in general

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.

A collection of new essays, "Imagining Transatlantic Slavery" offers the latest research and thinking on current debates about the representation - past and present - of transatlantic slavery. Building on the interest generated by the bicentenary in 2007-8 of the end of British and American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, our volume is interdisciplinary, drawing on history, literature and museum and heritage studies. Its focus is on the transatlantic nature of slavery and abolition, and the essays range from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Its distinguished contributors offer a critical view of the histories leading up to the defining decisions of 1807-08 and its complex legacies over the last two centuries. Essays on notable figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Hannah More, Benjamin Flower, and William and Ellen Craft are juxtaposed with those on early Quaker writing and the use of photography in abolitionist discourse. The last part of the book on 'Remembering and Forgetting' addresses debates surrounding the representation of slavery in drama, visual culture, museums and galleries, and appraises the importance of recent research to public understanding of slavery today.
Contributors: Brycchan Carey, Vincent Carretta, Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Eileen Razzari Elrod, Catherine Hall, Douglas Hamilton, Cora Kaplan, HollyGale Millette, John Oldfield, Jessie Morgan-Owens, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace and Marcus Wood

One of the most heavily travelled migration routes from Old World to New was the trajectory of slave ships that left the coast of West Africa along the Bight of Benin and landed their human cargo in Brazil. An estimated two million persons over the course of some 250 years were forced migrants along this route, arriving mainly in the Brazilian province of Bahia. Earlier generations of scholars studied this southern portion of the slave trade simply as an east-west movement of enslaved persons stripped of identity and culture, or they looked for possible retentions of Africa among descendants of slaves in the Americas.

In 1773, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral became the first book of poetry by an African-American author to be published. At the tender age of seven, Phillis had been brought to Massachusetts as a slave and sold to the well-to-do Wheatley family. There, she threw herself into education, and soon she was devouring the classics and writing verse with whatever she had to hand - odes in chalk on the walls of the house. Once her talent became known, there was uproar, and in 1772 she was interrogated by a panel of 'the most respectable characters in Boston' and forced to defend the ownership of her own words, since many believed that it was an impossible that she, an African-American slave, could write poetry of such high quality. As related in the 1834 memoir by an outspoken proponent of antislavery, B.B. Thatcher, also included in this volume, the road to publication was not straight, and while it became clear that such a volume could not be published in America at the time, Phillis was recommended to a London publisher, who brought out the book - albeit with an attestation as to her authorship, as well as a 'letter from her master' and a short preface asking the reader's indulgence. This edition includes the attestation, the 'letter from her master' and notes from the original publishers as an appendix, so that the twenty-first-century reader can discover Phillis Wheatley as she should have been read - as a poet, not property.

During the past decade, the problem of British slave emancipation has generated considerable historiographical debate. Yet, until now, this debate has emphasized the relative importance of ideals and material self-interest in the British emancipation movement. In Moral Imperium, Ronald Richardson offers a new assessment of the relative importance of ideas, religious enthusiasm, national interest, and political circumstances. Arguing that historians have yet to develop an understanding of the impact of the Afro-Caribbean population on the development of British anti-slavery thought in general and the anti-slavery movement as a whole, he contends that abolition and emancipation were carried out in the context of British rule and were designed to create a social environment that would be receptive to British needs.

Modern Slavery: A Reference Handbook provides a thorough treatment of the evolving scope, nature, and contexts of modern slavery and a discussion of prevention and abolition efforts in an accessible format for high school and college readers. Modern Slavery: A Reference Handbook addresses essential questions about slavery in its contemporary manifestations. The book examines the growing epidemic and recent contexts of modern slavery in the United States and throughout the world, and describes in detail what caused it, whom it impacts, and what can be (and is being) done about it. It also explores the various contributing factors and how governmental and nongovernmental agencies can better engage in prevention and eradication. The volume opens with chapters providing information on contemporary slavery, followed by a discussion of the causes, consequences, and possible solutions. The next chapter includes essays from a diverse range of contributors, providing useful perspectives to round out the author's expertise. The book concludes with a collection of data and documents; an overview of important people, organizations, and resources relating to the issue; a chronology; and a glossary of key terms. Provides a foundation for general readers who want to learn more about the evolving nature, scope, and context of modern slavery in an easy-to understand fashion Allows arguments to be heard from a variety of individuals, including policy experts, victim advocates, and survivors, in a perspectives chapter Gives general readers a better of understanding of who is involved in combating modern slavery, and provides a foundation for further research in profile and references chapters

In 1792, 400,000 people put their signature to petitions calling for the abolition of the slave trade. Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery explains how this remarkable expression of support for black people was organized and orchestrated, and how it contributed to the growth of popular politics in Britain. In particular, this study focuses on the growing assertiveness of the middle classes in the public sphere and their increasingly powerful role in influencing parliamentary politics from outside the confines of Westminster. The author also argues that abolitionists need to be understood not as 'Saints' but as practical men who knew all aobut the market and consumer choice. This pioneering book examines the opinion-building activities of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the linkage between abolition, consumption and visual culture - cameos, trade tokens, prints, etc. - and the dynamics of abolition at the grass-roots level. A separate chapter on Thomas Clarkson reconsiders his role in the mobilisation of public opinion against the slave trade. Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery offers valuable new insights into the movement outside Parliament, its origins and the reasons for its vast popular appeal. Its cross-disciplinary approach will make it welcome to a broad spectrum of specialists and students.

In this book, Ana Lucia Araujo argues that despite the rupture provoked by the Atlantic slave trade, the Atlantic Ocean was never a physical barrier that prevented the exchanges between the two sides; it was instead a corridor that allowed the production of continuous relations. Araujo shows that the memorialization of slavery in Brazil and Benin was not only the result of survivals from the period of the Atlantic slave trade but also the outcome of a transnational movement that was accompanied by the continuous intervention of institutions and individuals who promoted the relations between Brazil and Benin. Araujo insists that the circulation of images was, and still is, crucial to the development of reciprocal cultural, religious, and economic exchanges and to defining what is African in Brazil and what is Brazilian in Africa. In this context, the South Atlantic is conceived as a large zone in which the populations of African descent undertake exchanges and modulate identities, a zone where the European and the Amerindian identities were also appropriated in order to build its own nature. This book shows that the public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the South Atlantic is plural; it is conveyed not only by the descendants of the victims but also by the descendants of perpetrators. Although the slave past is a critical issue in societies that largely relied on slave labor and where the heritage of slavery is still present, the memories of this past remain very often restricted to the private space. This book shows how in Brazil and Benin social actors appropriated the slave past to build new identities, fight against social injustice, and in some cases obtain political prestige. The book illuminates how the public memory of slavery in Brazil and Benin contributes to the rise of the South Atlantic as an autonomous zone of claim for recognition for those peoples and cultures that were cruelly broken, dispersed, and depreciated by the Atlantic slave trade. Public Memory of Slavery is an important book for collections in slavery studies, memory studies, Brazilian and Latin American studies, ethnic studies, cultural anthropology, African studies and African Diaspora. Araujo sheds light on the paradoxical understandings of the slave trade in southern Benin and the unintended results of some international efforts to recognise the history of slavery and the slave trade. ...] makes a useful addition to the literature because the reader is only reminded how much Africans and descen- dants of Africans have shaped this vast Atlantic world territory through divergent processes of exchange and recreation, occurring both within and beyond the gaze of Western dis- course. (Itinerario, November 2011) The book is broad ranging and provides an introduction to numerous subjects (...) Recommended. (Choice, June 2011)

Antebellum Missouri's location at the intersection of North, South, and West makes it a location that allows one to examine regionalism in the United States in one location since Missouri contained characteristics of each region. Missouri also provides a view of how religion functioned for people in the antebellum United States. The institution of slavery transformed evangelical Christianity in the South from an influence with potential to erode slavery into an institution that was a bulwark for slavery. For African Americans, religion constituted part of their cultural resistance against the dehumanization of slavery. Through conjure, their traditional religion, they sought control over their own lives and practical tools to aid them with everyday issues. Christianity also provided control over their destiny and a belief system, that in their hands, affirmed the sinfulness of slavery and confirmed that it was their right and their destiny to be free.

Britain's 19th-century diplomatic efforts for abolition of slavery took contemporary pre-eminence over most questions and almost sparked war with France in 1845. Kielstra examines the issue in Anglo-French relations: how conflicting moral, economic, and nationalist pressures and lobby groups affected domestic politics and high diplomacy. To preserve peace and their positions, statesmen had little margin for error as they framed policies which attacked the trade and satisfied mutually incompatible domestic opinions.