First Published in 1989. Well over a million slaves were exported from Indian Ocean and Red Sea ports in Eastern Africa during the nineteenth century, and millions more were shifted around the interior of the continent and along the coast of East Africa. And yet we still know remarkably little about this great movement of people, particularly from an economic point of view. This is a collection of twelve essays looking at the economics of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea Slave trades of the nineteenth century.

First published in 1987. With the exception of Barbara Bush's contribution, all the papers and commentaries contained in this volume were presented at a conference at Thwaite Hall, University of Hull, 26-29 July 1983. The conference was organised to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, and was attended by over eighty scholars from Britain, Western Europe, the USA and the Caribbean.

The empires of Greece and Rome, two of the very few genuine slave societies in history, formed the core of the ancient world, and have much to teach the student of recent slave systems. Designed to bring the contribution of ancient history to a wider audience, this collection discusses the Classsical definition of slavery, the relationship between war, piracy and slavery, and early abolitionist movements as well as the supply and domestic aspects of slavery in antiquity.

Free Soil in the Atlantic World examines the principle that slaves who crossed particular territorial frontiers- from European medieval cities to the Atlantic nation states of the nineteenth century- achieved their freedom. Based upon legislation and judicial cases, each essay considers the legal origins of Free Soil and the context in which it was invoked: medieval England, Toulouse and medieval France, early modern France and the Mediterranean, the Netherlands, eighteenth-century Portugal, nineteenth-century Angola, nineteenth-century Spain and Cuba, and the Brazilian-Paraguay borderlands. On the one hand, Free Soil policies were deployed by weaker polities to attract worker-settlers; however, by the eighteenth century, Free Soil was increasingly invoked by European imperial centres to distinguish colonial regimes based in slavery from the privileges and liberties associated with the metropole.

This book was originally published as a special issue of "Slavery and Abolition."

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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Tracing the lives and experiences of 100,000 Africans who landed in Sierra Leone having been taken off slave vessels by the British Navy following Britain's abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this study focuses on how people, forcibly removed from their homelands, packed on to slave ships, and settled in Sierra Leone were able to rebuild new lives, communities, and collective identities in an early British colony in West Africa. Their experience illuminates both African and African diaspora history by tracing the evolution of communities forged in the context of forced migration and the missionary encounter in a prototypical post-slavery colonial society. A new approach to the major historical field of British anti-slavery, studied not as a history of legal victories (abolitionism) but of enforcement and lived experience (abolition), Richard Peter Anderson reveals the linkages between emancipation, colonization, and identity formation in the Black Atlantic.

In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba's Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba's intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago's Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize "This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways...African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett's analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have 'been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.'...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought." -Ron Charles, Washington Post For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal-the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark-in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people-all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity. Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene. "A gripping work...Bennett's lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read." -LSE Review of Books "These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics." -Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog "Tremendously illuminating...Refreshing and field-defining." -Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver

In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian.

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.

Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. These plantation regimes were, to adopt a metaphor of the era, complex "machines," finely tuned over time by planters, merchants, and officials to become more efficient at exploiting their enslaved workers and serving their empires. Using a wide range of archival evidence, The Plantation Machine traces a critical half-century in the development of the social, economic, and political frameworks that made these societies possible. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus find deep and unexpected similarities in these two prize colonies of empires that fought each other throughout the period. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue experienced, at nearly the same moment, a bitter feud between planters and governors, a violent conflict between masters and enslaved workers, a fateful tightening of racial laws, a steady expansion of the slave trade, and metropolitan criticism of planters' cruelty. The core of The Plantation Machine addresses the Seven Years' War and its aftermath. The events of that period, notably a slave poisoning scare in Saint-Domingue and a near-simultaneous slave revolt in Jamaica, cemented white dominance in both colonies. Burnard and Garrigus argue that local political concerns, not emerging racial ideologies, explain the rise of distinctive forms of racism in these two societies. The American Revolution provided another imperial crisis for the beneficiaries of the plantation machine, but by the 1780s whites in each place were prospering as never before-and blacks were suffering in new and disturbing ways. The result was that Jamaica and Saint-Domingue became vitally important parts of the late eighteenth-century American empires of Britain and France.

This book provides a fresh overall account of organised antislavery by focusing on the active minority of abolutionists throughout the country. The analysis of their culture of reform demonstrates the way in which alliances of diverse religious groups roused public opinion and influenced political leaders. The resulting definition of the distinctive `reform mentality' links antislavery to other efforts at moral and social improvement and highlights its contradictory relations to the social effects of industrialization and the growth of liberalism.

In seventeenth-century Spanish America, black linguistic interpreters and spiritual intermediaries played key roles in the production of writings about black men and women. Focusing on the African diaspora in Peru and the southern continental Caribbean, Larissa Brewer-Garcia uncovers long-ignored or lost archival materials describing the experiences of black Christians in the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial societies where they arrived. Brewer-Garcia's analysis of these materials shows that black intermediaries bridged divisions among the populations implicated in the slave trade, exerting influence over colonial Spanish American writings and emerging racial hierarchies in the Atlantic world. The translated portrayals of blackness composed by these intermediaries stood in stark contrast to the pejorative stereotypes common in literary and legal texts of the period. Brewer-Garcia reconstructs the context of those translations and traces the contours and consequences of their notions of blackness, which were characterized by physical beauty and spiritual virtue.

This is the true story of Louisa Carolina Colleton, whose tale could have flown from the pages of a gothic novel. In 1777, at the age of fourteen, after many adventures, the beautiful heiress inherited valuable estates on two sides of the Atlantic. As in every good gothic novel, Louisa's father died, and having been deserted by her mother, she went to live with her maternal uncle in his early Tudor manor in the depths of the Devon countryside. Eight years later she left England to salvage her inheritance, a journey which took her to the Bahamas, and then to South Carolina. On her return to England she married a dashing naval officer, with whom she had ten children. Her affairs were much commented on at the time by relations and friends: we can occasionally be privy to the chaos around her dining table, or her distress at the death of one of her children. She had another traumatic adventure on the Atlantic at the age of thirty-five, when her ship was captured by French privateers. Over the years, despite her best endeavours, her fortune was demolished by the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, corrupt lawyers, fraudulent deeds, a spendthrift husband and profligate son.

From David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, some of the most influential conceptualizations of the Atlantic World have taken the movements of individuals and transnational organizations working to advocate the abolition of slavery as their material basis. This unique, interdisciplinary collection of essays provides diverse new approaches to examining the abolitionist Atlantic. With contributions from an international roster of historians, literary scholars, and specialists in the history of art, this book provides case studies in the connections between abolitionism and material spatial practice in literature, theory, history and memory. This volume covers a wide range of topics and themes, including the circum-Atlantic itineraries of abolitionist artists and activists; precise locations such as Paris and Chatham, Ontario where abolitionists congregated to speculate over the future of, and hatch emigration plans to, sites in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean; and the reimagining of abolitionist places in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and public art. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

This important collection of essays examines the history and impact of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean World, a region stretching from Southern and Eastern Africa to the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and the Far East. Slavery studies have traditionally concentrated on the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. In comparison, the Indian Ocean World slave trade has been little explored, although it started some 3,500 years before the Atlantic slave trade and persists to the present day. This volume, which follows a collection of essays The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (Frank Cass, 2004), examines the various abolitionist impulses, indigenous and European, in the Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It assesses their efficacy within a context of a growing demand for labour resulting from an expanding international economy and European colonisation. The essays show that in applying definitions of slavery derived from the American model, European agents in the region failed to detect or deliberately ignored other forms of slavery, and as a result the abolitionist impulse was only partly successful with the slave trade still continuing today in many parts of the Indian Ocean World.

No community in the antebellum North better reflected the growing passion against slavery than Oberlin, Ohio. In many ways, this small college town represented the most advanced of Northern attitudes toward the issue of slavery and states' rights. Home to more than 300 anti-slave societies and a major stop on the Underground Railroad, it had long offered refuge and opportunity to many free blacks, who found a measure of equality there that was rare anywhere else in the United States. In his narrative, based on thorough primary research, Nat Brandt shows how the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue contributed directly to the tensions that led to the Civil War.

How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was-shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance. Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by Black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film-and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors. Beautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary Black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.

On the evening of April 15, 1848, nearly eighty enslaved Americans attempted one of history's most audacious escapes. Setting sail from Washington, D.C., on a schooner named the "Pearl," the fugitives began a daring 225-mile journey to freedom in the North--and put in motion a furiously fought battle over slavery in America that would consume Congress, the streets of the capital, and the White House itself.

Mary Kay Ricks's unforgettable chronicle brings to life the Underground Railroad's largest escape attempt, the seemingly immutable politics of slavery, and the individuals who struggled to end it. "Escape on the Pearl" reveals the incredible odyssey of those who were onboard, including the remarkable lives of fugitives Mary and Emily Edmonson, the two sisters at the heart of this true story of courage and determination.

A comprehensive bibliography dealing specifically with African slave trade. This volume has been sub-classified for easier consultation and the compiler has provided, where possible, descriptions and comments on the works listed.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, in February, 1818. From these humble beginnings, Douglass went on to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans. He was the most prominent African American activist of the 19th century. He remains important in American history because he moved beyond relief at his own personal freedom to dedicating his life to the progress of his race and his country. This volume offers a short biographical exploration of Douglass' life in the broader context of the 19th century world, and pulls together some of his most important writings on slavery, civil rights, and political issues. Bolstered by the series website, which provides instructors with more images and documents, as well as targeted links to further research, Frederick Douglass: Reformer and Statesman gives the student of American history a fully-rounded glimpse into the world inhabited by this great figure.

This edition also includes: The illustrations printed in the original book; Contemporary sources (1853-62), among them newspaper accounts of Northup's kidnapping and ordeal and commentary by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Thomas W. MacMahon; A Genealogy of Secondary Sources (1880-2014) presents twenty-three voices spanning three centuries on the memoir's major themes. Contributors include George Washington Williams, Marion Wilson Starling, Kenneth Stampp, Robert B. Stepto, Trish Loughran and David Fiske, Clifford W. Brown, Jr., and Rachel Seligman, among others. The 2013 film adaptation-12 Years a Slave-is fully considered, with criticism and major reviews of the film as well as Henry Louis Gates's three interviews with its director, Steve McQueen. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Focusing on the agency of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the South, this work argues for the systematic unveiling and recovery of subjugated knowledge, histories, and cultural practices of those traditionally silenced and overlooked by national heritage projects and national public memories. Jackson uses both ethnographic and ethnohistorical data to show the various ways African Americans actively created and maintained their own heritage and cultural formations. Viewed through the lens of four distinctive plantation sites--including the one on which that the ancestors of First Lady Michelle Obama lived--everyday acts of living, learning, and surviving profoundly challenge the way American heritage has been constructed and represented. A fascinating, critical view of the ways culture, history, social policy, and identity influence heritage sites and the business of heritage research management in public spaces.

Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking has become a cause celebre. Yet large numbers of researchers, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies in the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to how the problems are framed, and are skeptical of the "new abolitionist" movement. Why? This book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements head on. Champions and skeptics explore the fissures and fault lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders' use of history are accurate and appropriate.

Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking has become a cause celebre. Yet large numbers of researchers, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies in the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to how the problems are framed, and are skeptical of the "new abolitionist" movement. Why? This book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements head on. Champions and skeptics explore the fissures and fault lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders' use of history are accurate and appropriate.