'Walvin synthesises this complex global history with skill and ingenuity. Freedom is beautifully written and clearly organised . . . thought-provoking, rich in detail and imbued with an emotional intelligence that pushes us to imagine what slave life meant, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.' J. R. Oldfield, University of Hull, Family & Community History, Vol. 22/3, October 2019 'A wide-ranging history of resistance during the Atlantic slave trade that reminds us how captives fought their miserable fates every step of the way.' David Olusoga, BBC History Magazine 'A sobering reminder of the trade's cruelty and scope . . . but also, through resistance, rebellion and riots, the power of individual people to change the world against the odds.' History Revealed In this timely and very readable new work, Walvin focuses not on abolitionism or the brutality and suffering of slavery, but on resistance, the resistance of the enslaved themselves - from sabotage and absconding to full-blown uprisings - and its impact in overthrowing slavery. He also looks that whole Atlantic world, including the Spanish Empire and Brazil. In doing so, he casts new light on one of the major shifts in Western history in the past five centuries. In the three centuries following Columbus's landfall in the Americas, slavery became a critical institution across swathes of both North and South America. It saw twelve million Africans forced onto slave ships, and had seismic consequences for Africa. It led to the transformation of the Americas and to the material enrichment of the Western world. It was also largely unquestioned. Yet within a mere seventy-five years during the nineteenth century slavery had vanished from the Americas: it declined, collapsed and was destroyed by a complexity of forces that, to this day, remains disputed, but there is no doubting that it was in large part defeated by those it had enslaved. Slavery itself came in many shapes and sizes. It is perhaps best remembered on the plantations - though even those can deceive. Slavery varied enormously from one crop to another- sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee, cotton. And there was in addition myriad tasks for the enslaved to do, from shipboard and dockside labour, to cattlemen on the frontier, through to domestic labour and child-care duties. Slavery was, then, both ubiquitous and varied. But if all these millions of diverse, enslaved people had one thing in common it was a universal detestation of their bondage. They wanted an end to it: they wanted to be like the free people around them. Most of these enslaved peoples did not live to see freedom. But an old freed man or woman in, say Cuba or Brazil in the 1880s, had lived through its destruction clean across the Americas. The collapse of slavery and the triumph of black freedom constitutes an extraordinary historical upheaval - and this book explains how that happened.

Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana examines the political economy surrounding the use of enslaved laborers in the capital of Spanish imperial Cuba from 1762 to 1835. In this first book-length exploration of state slavery on the island, Evelyn P. Jennings demonstrates that the Spanish state's policies and practices in the ownership and employment of enslaved workers after 1762 served as a bridge from an economy based on imperial service to a rapidly expanding plantation economy in the nineteenth century. The Spanish state had owned and exploited enslaved workers in Cuba since the early 1500s. After the humiliating yearlong British occupation of Havana beginning in 1762, however, the Spanish Crown redoubled its efforts to purchase and maintain thousands of royal slaves to prepare Havana for what officials believed would be the imminent renewal of war with England. Jennings shows that the composition of workforces assigned to public projects depended on the availability of enslaved workers in various interconnected labor markets within Cuba, within the Spanish empire, and in the Atlantic world. Moreover, the site of enslavement, the work required, and the importance of that work according to imperial priorities influenced the treatment and relative autonomy of those laborers as well as the likelihood they would achieve freedom. As plantation production for export purposes emerged as the most dynamic sector of Cuba's economy by 1810, the Atlantic networks used to obtain enslaved workers showed increasing strain. British abolitionism exerted additional pressure on the slave trade. To offset the loss of access to enslaved laborers, colonial officials expanded the state's authority to sentence deserters, vagrants, and fugitives, both enslaved and free, to labor in public works such as civil construction, road building, and the creation of Havana's defensive forts. State efforts in this area demonstrate the deep roots of state enslavement and forced labor in nineteenth-century Spanish colonialism and in capitalist development in the Atlantic world. Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana places the processes of building and sustaining the Spanish empire in the imperial hub of Havana in a comparative perspective with other sites of empire building in the Atlantic world. Furthermore, it considers the human costs of reproducing the Spanish empire in a major Caribbean port, the state's role in shaping the institution of slavery, and the experiences of enslaved and other coerced laborers both before and after the beginning of Cuba's sugar boom in the early nineteenth century.

Ben Wright's Bonds of Salvation demonstrates how religion structured the possibilities and limitations of American abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three largest Protestant denominations in the 1840s, this comprehensive work lays bare the social and religious divides that culminated in secession and civil war. Historians often emphasize status anxieties, market changes, biracial cooperation, and political maneuvering as primary forces in the evolution of slavery in the United States. Wright instead foregrounds the pivotal role religion played in shaping the ideological contours of the early abolitionist movement. Wright first examines the ideological distinctions between religious conversion and purification in the aftermath of the Revolution, when a small number of white Christians contended that the nation must purify itself from slavery before it could fulfill its religious destiny. Most white Christians disagreed, focusing on visions of spiritual salvation over the practical goal of emancipation. To expand salvation to all, they created new denominations equipped to carry the gospel across the American continent and eventually all over the globe. These denominations established numerous reform organizations, collectively known as the ""benevolent empire,"" to reckon with the problem of slavery. One affiliated group, the American Colonization Society (ACS), worked to end slavery and secure white supremacy by promising salvation for Africa and redemption for the United States. Yet the ACS and its efforts drew strong objections. Proslavery prophets transformed expectations of expanded salvation into a formidable antiabolitionist weapon, framing the ACS's proponents as enemies of national unity. Abolitionist assertions that enslavers could not serve as agents of salvation sapped the most potent force in American nationalism Christianity and led to schisms within the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. These divides exacerbated sectional hostilities and sent the nation farther down the path to secession and war. Wright's provocative analysis reveals that visions of salvation both created and almost destroyed the American nation.

Worldwide supplies of sugar and cotton were impacted dramatically as the U.S. Civil War dragged on. New areas of production entered these lucrative markets, particularly in the South Pacific, and plantation agriculture grew substantially in disparate areas such as Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii. The increase in production required an increase in labor; in the rush to fill the vacuum, freebooters and other unsavory characters began a slave trade in Melanesians and Polynesians that continued into the twentieth century. ""The White Pacific"" ranges over the broad expanse of Oceania to reconstruct the history of ""blackbirding"" (slave trading) in the region. It examines the role of U.S. citizens (many of them ex-slaveholders and ex-confederates) in the trade and its roots in Civil War dislocations. What unfolds is a dramatic tale of unfree labor, conflicts between formal and informal empire, white supremacy, threats to sovereignty in Hawaii, the origins of a White Australian policy, and the rise of Japan as a Pacific power and putative protector. It also pieces together a wonderfully suggestive history of the African American presence in the Pacific. Based on deft archival research in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, the United States, and Great Britain, ""The White Pacific"" uncovers a heretofore hidden story of race, labor, war, and intrigue that contributes significantly to the emerging intersectional histories of race and ethnicity.

As negentienjarige ryloper in Spanje beland Frank Westerman toevallig in die dorpie Banyoles, waar ’n opgestopte “Kalahari-Boesman”, slegs bekend as El Negro, uitgestal word. Sy indrukke bly hom by – en wanneer hy dekades later weer van El Negro lees, die keer in ’n Franse koerant, is dit die begin van ’n ondersoeksreis wat belangrike vrae oor rasopvattings en die Westerse beskawing na vore bring. Wie was hierdie naamlose man? Wat se sy opgestopte “museumteenwoordigheid” oor Europese denke oor slawerny, rassisme en kolonialisme – en bied hy slegs ’n spieel op ’n vergange tyd, of ook op die hede?

Americans wrote fiercely during the Civil War. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans' words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary-wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day-was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance-and the limits-of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past, demonstrating how these plain, first-draft texts can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.