Finding Charity's Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman's reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women's future interactions with the state.

A masterful survey based on Ottoman and European sources, this book is a major contribution to the comparative study of slavery. Erdem explores the distinguishing feature of the Ottoman institution of slavery, most interestingly from the perspective of the slaves themselves. One of the book's chief contribution lies in its treatment of the community of freed slaves in Istanbul. Organized in lodges, presided over by a matriarch who also served as spiritual head of cult whose practices, disparaged by the Muslim orthodoxy, might well be traced back to the Yoruba in West Africa. By this discovery, Erdem links one of the sub-cultures of Ottoman slavery to the broader study of African slavery.' - Dr Eugene Rogan, St Antony's College, Oxford

How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production of South Carolina's state space-its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post-War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights the surprising ways enslaved men and women sat at the center of South Carolina's earliest political development, materially producing the state's infrastructure and early governing practices, while also challenging and reshaping both through their day-to-day movements, from the mundane to the rebellious. Focusing on slaves' lives and labors, Quintana illuminates how black South Carolinians not only created the early state, but also established their own extra-legal economic sites, social and cultural havens, and independent communities along South Carolina's roads, rivers, and canals. Combining social history, the study of American politics, and critical geography, Quintana reframes our ideas of early American political development, illuminates the material production of space, and reveals the central role of slaves' daily movements (for their owners and themselves) to the development of the modern state.

In this broad-ranging book, the pre-eminent authority on the history of slavery meditates on the origins, experience, and legacy of this "peculiar institution." David Brion Davis begins with a substantial and highly personal introduction in which he discusses some of the major ideas and individuals that have shaped his approach to history. He then presents a series of interlocking essays that cover topics including slave resistance, the historical construction of race, and the connections between the abolitionist movement and the struggle for women's rights. The book also includes essays on such major figures as Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as appreciations of two of the finest historians of the twentieth century: C. Vann Woodward and Eugene D. Genovese. Gathered together for the first time, these essays present the major intellectual, historical, and moral issues essential to the study of New World slavery and its devastating legacy.

Essays draw on quantitative and qualitative evidence to cast new light on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as well as on the origins and development of the African diaspora. Drawing on new quantitative and qualitative evidence, this study reexamines the rise, transformation, and slow demise of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. The twelve essays here reveal the legacies and consequences of abolition and chronicle the first formative global human rights movement. They also cast new light on the origins and development of the African diaspora created by the transatlantic slave trade. Engagingly written and attuned to twenty-first century as well as historical problems and debates, this book will appeal to specialists interested in cultural, economic, and political analysis of the slave trade as well as to nonspecialists seeking to understand anew how transatlantic slavery forever changed Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Philip Misevich is assistant professor of history at St. John's University, and Kristin Mann is professor of history at Emory University.

Solomon Northup was born a free man in New York State. At the age of 33 he was kidnapped in Washington D.C. and placed in an underground slave pen. Northup was transported by ship to New Orleans where he was sold into slavery. He spent the next 12 years working as a carpenter, driver, and cotton picker. This narrative reveals how Northup survived the harsh conditions of slavery, including smallpox, lashings, and an attempted hanging. Solomon Northup was among a select few who were freed from slavery. His account describes the daily life of slaves in Louisiana, their diet and living conditions, the relationship between master and slave, and how slave catchers used to recapture runaways. Northup's first person account published in 1853, was a dramatic story in the national debate over slavery that took place in the nine years leading up to the start of the American Civil War.

Analyses the relationships among the socio-historical contexts, generic forms, and rhetorical strategies of British West Indian slave narratives. Grounded by the syncretic theories of creolisation and testimonio it breaks new ground by reading these dictated and fragmentary narratives on their own terms as examples of 'creole testimony'.

Slavery and the trade that fuelled it underpinned Britain's economic position throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unsurprisingly, when the abolition of the slave trade was first mooted opinion was widely divided. The majority of the British public were either apathetic about the plight of black Africans in the American colonies or firmly against any change. Much of the establishment, including the Anglican Church, robustly supported the Afro-Caribbean slavery. The Great Abolition Sham is the first book to explore the real personalities and issues behind the popular rhetoric which surrounds the abolitionist movement. Documentary evidence confirms the shocking duplicity of the British government, which protected the slave trade after its formal abolition in 1807, and exposes the levels of hypocrisy that made a mockery of the Emancipation Act of 1834.

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.

Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents-including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases-the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates.

This work shows the extent to which the shipping of Africans to the Americas continued after the Abolition Act of 1807.

"The Dutch Atlantic" investigates the Dutch involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and assesses the historical consequences of this for contemporary European society. Kwame Nimako and Glenn Willemsen show how the slave trade and slavery intertwined economic, social and cultural elements, including nation-state formation in the Netherlands and across Europe. They explore the mobilization of European populations in the implementation of policies that facilitated the slave trade and examine how European countries created and expanded laws that perpetuated colonization. Addressing key themes such as the incorporation of former slaves into post-slavery states and contemporary collective efforts to forget and/or remember slavery and its legacy in the Netherlands, this is an essential text for students of European history and postcolonial studies.

After Britain's Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, a squadron of Royal Navy vessels was sent to the West Coast of Africa tasked with suppressing the thriving transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on previously unpublished papers found in private collections and various archives in the UK and abroad, this book examines the personal and cultural experiences of the naval officers at the frontline of Britain's anti-slavery campaign in West Africa. It explores their unique roles in this 60-year operation: at sea, boarding slave ships bound for the Americas and 'liberating' captive Africans; on shore, as Britain resolved to 'improve' West African societies; and in the metropolitan debates around slavery and abolitionism in Britain. Their personal narratives are revealing of everyday concerns of health, rewards and strategy, to more profound questions of national honour, cultural encounters, responsibility for the lives of others in the most distressing of circumstances, and the true meaning of 'freedom' for formerly enslaved African peoples. British anti-slavery efforts and imperial agendas were tightly bound in the nineteenth century, inseparable from ideas of national identity. This is a book about individuals tasked with extraordinary service, military men who also worked as guardians, negotiators, and envoys of abolition.

The Southern Caribbean was the last frontier in the Atlantic world and the most contested region in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolution. As well as illuminating this little-understood region, the book seeks to complicate our understanding of the Caribbean, the role of 'free people of colour' and the nature of slavery.

Engaging the past, the present, and the future, African Sovereigns shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary undertaking interrogates the definition of Diaspora but mainly emphasizes the term's use. Mario Nisbett demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool. He shows how Jamaican Maroons inform resistance to abjection, a denial of full humanity, through claiming their African origin and developing solidarity and consciousness in order to affirm black humanity. The book establishes that present-day Jamaican Maroons remain relevant and engage the African Diaspora to improve black standing and bolster assertions of sovereignty.

This book focuses on human trafficking in Europe for labour and sexual exploitation. It includes empirical work on trafficking throughout Europe, identifying underlying causes in globalisation, migration policies and gender inequality. It questions whether European responses-from policy makers or civil society are adequate to meet the challenge.