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 Drawing on previously unpublished papers found in private collections and various archives in the UK and abroad, this book examines the personal and cultural experiences of the naval officers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 Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination brings together ten original essays that explore the many connections between the Old and New Worlds in the early modern period. Divided into five sets of paired essays, it examines the role of specific port cities in Atlantic history, aspects of European migration, the African dimension, and the ways in which the Atlantic world has been imagined. This second edition has been updated and expanded to contain two new chapters on revolutions and abolition, which discuss the ways in which two of the main pillars of the Atlantic world-empire and slavery-met their end. Both essays underscore the importance of the Caribbean in the profound transformation of the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This edition also includes a revised introduction that incorporates recent literature, providing students with references to the key historiographical debates, and pointers of where the field is moving to inspire their own research. Supported further by a range of maps and illustrations, The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination is the ideal book for students of Atlantic History.

"C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain" chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James's intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned from liberal humanism to revolutionary socialism. Rejecting the "imperial Britishness" he had absorbed growing up in a crown colony in the British West Indies, he became a leading anticolonial activist and Pan-Africanist thinker. Christian Hogsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieus in which James wrote works including his magisterial study The Black Jacobins. First published in 1938, James's examination of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. Hogsbjerg contends that during the Depression C. L. R. James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora and emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists in Britain.

A collection of essays in which every contributor focuses upon some aspect of slave emancipation with the aim of assessing to what extent the outcome met with expectation. The hopes and disappointments that characterized the transition from slavery to freedom are depicted.

Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays of wide historical and geographic scope which engages the legacy of diaspora, colonialism and slavery. The contributors explore the confrontation between Africa's forced migrants and their unwelcoming new environments, in order to highlight the unique individual experiences of survival and assimilation that characterized Atlantic slavery. As they focus on the African or Afro-diasporan populations under study, the chapters gauge the degree to which formal independence, coming out of a variety of practices of opposition and resistance, lasting centuries in some cases, has translated into freedom, security, and a "good life." By foregrounding Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Francophone African and Afro-descendant concerns, over and against an often Anglo-centric focus in the field, the book brings a more representative approach to the area of diaspora or Black Atlantic studies, offering a more complete appreciation of Black Atlantic cultural production across history and across linguistic barriers.

Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 investigates the impact of warfare on the history of Africa in the period of the slave trade and the founding of empires.
It includes the discussion of:
: * the relationship between war and the slave trade
* the role of Europeans in promoting African wars and supplying African armies
* the influence of climatic and ecological factors on warfare patterns and dynamics
* the impact of social organization and military technology, including the gunpowder revolution
* case studies of warfare in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Benin and West Central Africa

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy "Stunning."-Rebecca Onion, Slate "Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present."-Parul Sehgal, New York Times "Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective."-Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of "negro cloth," a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction-that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.

Following the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, nineteenth-century liberal economic thinkers insisted that a globally hegemonic Britain would profit only by abandoning the formal empire. British West Indians across the divides of race and class understood that, far from signaling an invitation to nationalist independence, this liberal economic discourse inaugurated a policy of imperial "neglect"-a way of ignoring the ties that obligated Britain to sustain the worlds of the empire's distant fellow subjects. In Empire of Neglect Christopher Taylor examines this neglect's cultural and literary ramifications, tracing how nineteenth-century British West Indians reoriented their affective, cultural, and political worlds toward the Americas as a response to the liberalization of the British Empire. Analyzing a wide array of sources, from plantation correspondence, political economy treatises, and novels to newspapers, socialist programs, and memoirs, Taylor shows how the Americas came to serve as a real and figurative site at which abandoned West Indians sought to imagine and invent postliberal forms of political subjecthood.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Reveals the lived experience of slaves in eighteenth-century Boston Instead of relying on the traditional dichotomy of slavery and freedom, Hardesty argues we should understand slavery in Boston as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In this context, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of oppression, including Native American slavery, indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and pauper apprenticeship. In this hierarchical and inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment and honor than with emancipation, as they pushed for autonomy, protected their families and communities, and demanded a place in society. Drawing on exhaustive research in colonial legal records - including wills, court documents, and minutes of governmental bodies - as well as newspapers, church records, and other contemporaneous sources, Hardesty masterfully reconstructs an eighteenth-century Atlantic world of unfreedom that stretched from Europe to Africa to America. By reassessing the lives of enslaved Bostonians as part of a social order structured by ties of dependence, Hardesty not only demonstrates how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of their enslavement, but also tells the story of how marginalized peoples engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society.

In the post-Cold War era, economic globalization has resulted in the buying and selling of human beings. Poverty, social instability, lawlessness, gender biases, and ethnic hostility have entrapped millions in the world of modern day slavery, with the result that human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world. Every year, men, women, and children from across the globe are transported within or across borders for the purpose of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Despite the plethora of journalistic articles written on human trafficking there is a need for more rigorous academic analysis of the phenomenon. Although groups from many different ideologies have embraced policies to end human trafficking, there are still many gaps and unanswered questions, particularly with regard to the amount of, and nature of the phenomenon. This book provides an insight into the complexity of human trafficking by addressing both how the scope of globalization impacts the sex industry and forced labor, and how vulnerability is a growing cause of human trafficking, affecting traditional diasporic and migratory patterns. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

This long overdue, vivid and wide-ranging examination of the significance of the resistance of the enslaved themselves - from sabotage and running away to outright violent rebellion - shines fresh light on the end of slavery in the Atlantic World. It is high time that this resistance, in addition to abolitionism and other factors, was given its due weight in seeking to understand the overthrow of slavery. Fundamentally, as Walvin shows so clearly, it was the implacable hatred of the enslaved for slavery and their strategies of resistance that made the whole system unsustainable and, ultimately, brought about its downfall. Walvin's approach is original, too, in looking at the Atlantic world as a whole, including the French and Spanish Empires and Brazil, as well as Britain's colonies. In doing so, he casts new light on one of the major shifts in Western history: in the three-hundred years following Columbus's landfall in the Americas, slavery had become a widespread and critical institution. It had seen twelve million Africans forced onto slave ships; a forced migration that had had seismic consequences for Africa. It had transformed the Americas and materially enriched the Western world. It had also been largely unquestioned - in Europe at least, and among slave owners, traders and those who profited from the system. Yet, within a mere seventy-five years during the nineteenth century, slavery had vanished from the Americas: it had declined, collapsed and been destroyed by a complexity of forces that, to this day, remains disputed. As Walvin shows so clearly here, though, it was in large part overthrown by those it had enslaved.

This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market.Smallwood's story is animated by deep research and gives us a startlingly graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. Ultimately, "Saltwater Slavery" details how African people were transformed into Atlantic commodities in the process. She begins her narrative on the shores of seventeenth-century Africa, tracing how the trade in human bodies came to define the life of the Gold Coast. Smallwood takes us into the ports and stone fortresses where African captives were held and prepared, and then through the Middle Passage itself. In extraordinary detail, we witness these men and women cramped in the holds of ships, gasping for air, and trying to make sense of an unfamiliar sea and an unimaginable destination. Arriving in America, we see how these new migrants enter the market for laboring bodies, and struggle to reconstruct their social identities in the New World.Throughout, Smallwood examines how the people at the center of her story-merchant capitalists, sailors, and slaves-made sense of the bloody process in which they were joined. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.

A survey and interpretive study of one of the defining issues in America's past Americans have vigorously debated and interpreted the role of slavery in American life for as long as enslaved people and their descendants have lived in North America. Contemporaries and later writers and scholars up to the present day have explored the meaning of slavery as a system of labor, an ideological paradox in a "free" political and social order, a violent mode of racial exploitation, and a global system of human commodification and trafficking. To fully understand the various ways in which slavery has been depicted and described is a difficult task. Like any other important historical issue, this requires a thorough grasp of the underlying history, methodological developments over time, and the contemporary politics and culture of historians' own times. And the case of slavery is further complicated, of course, by changes in the legal and political status of African Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries. Slavery: Interpreting American History, like other volumes in the Interpreting American History series, surveys interpretations of important historical eras and events, examining both the intellectual shifts that have taken place and various catalysts that drove those shifts. While the depth of Americans' historiographical engagement with slavery is not surprising given the turbulent history of race in America, the range and sheer volume of writing on the subject, spanning more than two centuries, can be overwhelming. Editors Aaron Astor and Thomas Buchanan, together with a team of expert contributors, highlight here the key debates and conceptual shifts that have defined the field. The volume will be an especially helpful guide for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, professional historians new to the field, and other readers interested in the study of American slavery.

Archetypal Grief: Slavery's Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss is a powerful exploration of the intergenerational psychological effects of child loss as experienced by women held in slavery in the Americas and of its ongoing effects in contemporary society. It presents the concept of archetypal grief in African American women: cultural trauma so deeply wounding that it spans generations. Calling on Jungian psychology as well as neuroscience and attachment theory, Fanny Brewster explores the psychological lives of enslaved women using their own narratives and those of their descendants, and discusses the stories of mothering slaves with reference to their physical and emotional experiences. The broader context of slavery and the conditions leading to the development of archetypal grief are examined, with topics including the visibility/invisibility of the African female body, the archetype of the mother, stereotypes about black women, and the significance of rites of passage. The discussion is placed in the context of contemporary America and the economic, educational, spiritual and political legacy of slavery. Archetypal Grief will be an important work for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, archetypal and depth psychology, archetypal studies, feminine psychology, women's studies, the history of slavery, African American history, African diaspora studies and sociology. It will also be of interest to analytical psychologists and Jungian psychotherapists in practice and in training.

Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean explores the early modern genre of European Barbary Coast captivity narratives from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. During this period, the Mediterranean Sea was the setting of large-scale corsairing that resulted in the capture or enslavement of Europeans and Americans by North African pirates, as well as of North Africans by European forces, turning the Barbary Coast into the nemesis of any who went to sea. Through a variety of specifically selected narrative case studies, this book displays the blend of both authentic eye witness accounts and literary fictions that emerged against the backdrop of the tumultuous Mediterranean Sea. A wide range of other primary sources, from letters to ransom lists and newspaper articles to scientific texts, highlights the impact of piracy and captivity across key European regions, including France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Scandinavia, and Britain, as well as the United States and North Africa. Divided into four parts and offering a variety of national and cultural vantage points, Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean addresses both the background from which captivity narratives were born and the narratives themselves. It is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern slavery and piracy.

In Illegible Will Hershini Bhana Young engages with the archive of South African and black diasporic performance to examine the absence of black women's will from that archive. Young argues for that will's illegibility, given the paucity of materials outlining the agency of black historical subjects. Drawing on court documents, novels, photographs, historical records, websites, and descriptions of music and dance, Young shows how black will can be conjured through critical imaginings done in concert with historical research. She critically imagines the will of familiar subjects such as Sarah Baartman and that of obscure figures such as the eighteenth-century slave Tryntjie of Madagascar, who was executed in 1713 for attempting to poison her mistress. She also investigates the presence of will in contemporary expressive culture, such as the Miss Landmine Angola beauty pageant, placing it in the long genealogy of the freak show. In these capacious case studies Young situates South African performance within African diasporic circuits of meaning throughout Africa, North America, and South Asia, demonstrating how performative engagement with archival absence can locate that which was never recorded.

In Two Captains from Carolina, Bland Simpson twines together the lives of two accomplished nineteenth-century mariners from North Carolina-one African American, one Irish American. Though Moses Grandy (ca. 1791- ca. 1850) and John Newland Maffitt Jr. (1819-1886) never met, their stories bring to vivid life the saga of race and maritime culture in the antebellum and Civil War-era South. With his lyrical prose and inimitable voice, Bland Simpson offers readers a grand tale of the striving human spirit and the great divide that nearly sundered the nation. Grandy, born a slave, captained freight boats on the Dismal Swamp Canal and bought his freedom three times before he finally gained it. He became involved in Boston abolitionism and ultimately appeared before the General Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1843. As a child, Maffitt was sent from his North Carolina home to a northern boarding school, and at thirteen he was appointed midshipman in the U.S. Navy, where he had a distinguished career. After North Carolina seceded from the Union, he enlisted in the Confederate navy and became a legendary blockade runner and raider. Both Grandy and Maffitt made names for themselves as they navigated very different routes through the turbulent waters of antebellum America.

Anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries have long turned to dialectical thought as a central weapon in their fight against oppressive structures and conditions. This relationship was never easy, however, as anticolonial thinkers have resisted the historical determinism, teleology, Eurocentrism, and singular emphasis that some Marxisms place on class identity at the expense of race, nation, and popular identity. In recent decades, the conflict between dialectics and postcolonial theory has only deepened. In Decolonizing Dialectics Geo Maher breaks this impasse by bringing the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery. This is a decolonized dialectics premised on constant struggle in which progress must be fought for and where the struggles of the wretched of the earth themselves provide the only guarantee of historical motion.

In Illegible Will Hershini Bhana Young engages with the archive of South African and black diasporic performance to examine the absence of black women's will from that archive. Young argues for that will's illegibility, given the paucity of materials outlining the agency of black historical subjects. Drawing on court documents, novels, photographs, historical records, websites, and descriptions of music and dance, Young shows how black will can be conjured through critical imaginings done in concert with historical research. She critically imagines the will of familiar subjects such as Sarah Baartman and that of obscure figures such as the eighteenth-century slave Tryntjie of Madagascar, who was executed in 1713 for attempting to poison her mistress. She also investigates the presence of will in contemporary expressive culture, such as the Miss Landmine Angola beauty pageant, placing it in the long genealogy of the freak show. In these capacious case studies Young situates South African performance within African diasporic circuits of meaning throughout Africa, North America, and South Asia, demonstrating how performative engagement with archival absence can locate that which was never recorded.

Volume 1 in the new Cambridge World History of Slavery surveys the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world. Although chapters are devoted to the ancient Near East and the Jews, its principal concern is with the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. These are often considered as the first examples in world history of genuine slave societies because of the widespread prevalence of chattel slavery, which is argued to have been a cultural manifestation of the ubiquitous violence in societies typified by incessant warfare. There was never any sustained opposition to slavery, and the new religion of Christianity probably reinforced rather than challenged its existence. In twenty-two chapters, leading scholars explore the centrality of slavery in ancient Mediterranean life using a wide range of textual and material evidence. Non-specialist readers in particular will find the volume an accessible account of the early history of this crucial phenomenon.

The purpose of Granville Sharpe's Cases on Slavery is twofold: first, to publish previously unpublished legal materials principally in three important cases in the 18th century on the issue of slavery in England, and specifically the status of black people who were slaves in the American colonies or the West Indies and who were taken to England by their masters. The unpublished materials are mostly verbatim transcripts made by shorthand writers commissioned by Granville Sharp, one of the first Englishmen to take up the cause of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself. Other related unpublished material is also made available for the first time, including an opinion of an attorney general and some minor cases from the library of York Minster. On the slave ship Zong, there are transcripts of the original declaration, the deposition by the chief mate, James Kelsall and an extract from a manuscript that Professor Martin Dockray was working on before his untimely death. The second purpose, outlined in the Introduction, is to give a social and legal background to the cases and an analysis of the position in England of black servants/slaves brought to England and the legal effects of the cases, taking into account the new information provided by the transcripts. There was a conflict in legal authorities as to whether black servants remained slaves, or became free on arrival in England. Lord Mansfield, the chief justice of the court of King's Bench, was a central figure in all the cases and clearly struggled to come to terms with slavery. The material provides a basis for tracing the evolution of his thought on the subject. On the one hand, the huge profits from slave production in the West Indies flooded into England, slave owners had penetrated the leading institutions in England and the pro-slavery lobby was influential. On the other hand, English law had over time established rights and liberties which in the 18th century were seen by many as national characteristics. That tradition was bolstered by the ideas of the Enlightenment. By about the 1760s it had become clear that there was no property in the person, and by the 1770s that such servants could not be sent abroad without their consent, but whether they owed an obligation of perpetual service remained unresolved.

This book traces the journey of new Muslims as they joined the early Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the society in which they lived but whose slave background rendered them somehow alien. How did these Muslims at the crossroads of insider and outsider find their place in early Islamic society? How did Islamic society itself change to accommodate these new members? By analysing how these liminal Muslims resolved the tension between belonging and otherness, Conquered Populations in Early Islam reveals the shifting boundaries of the early Islamic community and celebrates the dynamism of Islamic history.

A fascinating portrait of Jewish life in Suriname from the 17th to 19th centuries Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland just north of Brazil. Suriname was home to the most privileged Jewish community in the Americas where Jews, most of Iberian origin, enjoyed religious liberty, were judged by their own tribunal, could enter any trade, owned plantations and slaves, and even had a say in colonial governance. Aviva Ben-Ur sets the story of Suriname's Jews in the larger context of Atlantic slavery and colonialism and argues that, like other frontier settlements, they achieved and maintained their autonomy through continual negotiation with the colonial government. Drawing on sources in Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Spanish, Ben-Ur shows how, from their first permanent settlement in the 1660s to the abolition of their communal autonomy in 1825, Suriname Jews enjoyed virtually the same standing as the ruling white Protestants, with whom they interacted regularly. She also examines the nature of Jewish interactions with enslaved and free people of African descent in the colony. Jews admitted both groups into their community, and Ben-Ur illuminates the ways in which these converts and their descendants experienced Jewishness and autonomy. Lastly, she compares the Jewish settlement with other frontier communities in Suriname, most notably those of Indians and Maroons, to measure the success of their negotiations with the government for communal autonomy. The Jewish experience in Suriname was marked by unparalleled autonomy that nevertheless developed in one of the largest slave colonies in the New World.