Material things mattered immensely to those who engaged in daily struggles over the character and future of slavery and to those who subsequently contested the meanings of freedom in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Throughout the history of slavery, objects and places were significant to different groups of people, from the opulent master class to enslaved field hands as well as to other groups, including maroons, free people of colour and missionaries, all of who shared the lived environments of Caribbean plantation colonies. By exploring the rich material world inhabited by these people, this book offers new ways of seeing history from below, of linking localised experiences with global transformations and connecting deeply personal lived realities with larger epochal events that defined the history of slavery and its abolition in the British Caribbean. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition.

"A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren". So reads Noah's curse on his son Ham, and all his descendants, in Genesis 9:25. Over centuries of interpretation, Ham came to be identified as the ancestor of black Africans, and Noah's curse to be seen as the biblical justification for American slavery and segregation. In this book Stephen Haynes examines the history of the American interpretation of Noah's curse. He begins with an overview of the prior history of the reception of this scripture and then turns to the distinctive and creative ways in which the curse was appropriated by American pro-slavery and pro-segregation interpreters. He argues that the story of Noah's curse was compelling for antebellum white Southerners because it resonated with the themes of antiquity, domesticity, race, and sin.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

'There are no two things in the world more different from each other than East-Indian and West Indian-slavery' (Robert Inglis, House of Commons Debate, 1833).
In Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772-1843, Andrea Major asks why, at a time when East India Company expansion in India, British abolitionism and the missionary movement were all at their height, was the existence of slavery in India so often ignored, denied or excused? By exploring Britain's ambivalent relationship with both real and imagined slaveries in India, and the official, evangelical and popular discourses which surrounded them, she seeks to uncover the various political, economic and ideological agendas that allowed East Indian slavery to be represented as qualitatively different from it trans-Atlantic counterpart. In doing so, she uncovers tensions in the relationship between colonial policy and the so-called 'civilising mission', elucidating the intricate interactions between humanitarian movements, colonial ideologies and imperial imperatives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The work draws on a range of sources from Britain and India to provide a trans-national perspective on this little known facet of the story of slavery and abolition in the British Empire, uncovering the complex ways in which Indian slavery was encountered, discussed, utilised, rationalised, and reconciled with the economic, political and moral imperatives of an empire whose focus was shifting to the East.

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they have been definitive for subsequent discussions of the significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

African slavery was pervasive in Spain's Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and conflict. The international group of scholars brought together in this volume explain Spain's role as a colonial pioneer in the Atlantic world and its latecomer status as a slave-trading, plantation-based empire. These contributors map the broad contours and transformations of slave-trafficking, the plantation, and antislavery in the Hispanic Atlantic while also delving into specific topics that include: the institutional and economic foundations of colonial slavery; the law and religion; the influences of the Haitian Revolution and British abolitionism; antislavery and proslavery movements in Spain; race and citizenship; and the business of the illegal slave trade.

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

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.

This comprehensive study of women anti-slavery campaigners fills a serious gap in abolitionist history. Covering all stages of the campaign, Women Against Slavery uses hitherto neglected sources to build up a vivid picture of the lives, words and actions of the women who were involved, and their distinctive contribution to the abolitionist movement. It looks at the way women's participation influenced the organisation, activities, policy and ideology of the campaign, and analyses the impact of female activism on women's own attitudes to their social roles, and their participation in public life. Exploring the vital role played by gender in shaping the movement as a whole, this book makes an important contribution to the debate on `race' and gender.

This book is a transnational and comparative study examining the processes that led to the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the second half of the twentieth century. Araujo explores numerous kinds of initiatives such as monuments, memorials, and museums as well as heritage sites. By connecting different projects developed in various countries and urban centers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the last two decades, the author retraces the various stages of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery including the enslavement in Africa, the process of confinement in slave depots, the Middle Passage, the arrival in the Americas, the daily life of forced labor, until the fight for emancipation and the abolition of slavery. Relying on a multitude of examples from the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, the book discusses how different groups and social actors have competed to occupy the public arena by associating the slave past with other human atrocities, especially the Holocaust. Araujo explores how the populations of African descent, white elites, and national governments, very often carrying particular political agendas, appropriated the slave past by fighting to make it visible or conceal it in the public space of former slave societies.

The public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, which some years ago could be observed especially in North America, has slowly emerged into a transnational phenomenon now encompassing Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and even Asia - allowing the populations of African descent, organized groups, governments, non-governmental organizations and societies in these different regions to individually and collectively update and reconstruct the slave past. This edited volume examines the recent transnational emergence of the public memory of slavery, shedding light on the work of memory produced by groups of individuals who are descendants of slaves. The chapters in this book explore how the memory of the enslaved and slavers is shaped and displayed in the public space not only in the former slave societies but also in the regions that provided captives to the former American colonies and European metropoles. Through the analysis of exhibitions, museums, monuments, accounts, and public performances, the volume makes sense of the political stakes involved in the phenomenon of memorialization of slavery and the slave trade in the public sphere.

A Second Appeal: A Consideration of Freedom and Social Justice engages in an analysis of the ideals of freedom and social justice. It does so with an eye towards the development of universally applicable concepts of each. Rolle examines the work of David Walker, author of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, who, in his own writing, appeals to the slave to embrace a particular theologically based understanding of freedom and participate in insurrectionist activities to overthrow slavery. A Second Appeal considers whether Walker was mistaken in his conception of freedom or merely constrained by the very particular time and circumstances in which he was writing. Rolle's work asserts the goal-oriented concept of freedom that shapes David Walker's Appeal is not sufficient for current concerns. A Second Appeal prompts readers to rethink these ideals.

Previous histories on O'Connell have dealt predominantly with his attempts to secure a repeal of the 1800 Act of Union and on his success in achieving Catholic Emancipation in 1829, Kinealy focuses instead on the neglected issue of O'Connell's contribution to the anti-slavery movement in the United States.

Explores the social composition of the Jamaican slaveholding class during the era of the British campaign to end slavery, looking at their efforts to maintain control over local society and considering how their economic, cultural and military dependency on the colonial metropole meant that they were unable to avert the ending of British slavery.

This is the first book to explore national representations of slavery in an international comparative perspective. Contributions span a wide geographical range, covering Europe, North America, West and South Africa, the Indian Ocean and Asia.

"His rich volume takes up the complex and strategic discourses that circulated around the truth of slave testimony....actively engaging."
--"American Literature"

Even the most cursory review of black literary production during the nineteenth century indicates that its primary concerns were the issues of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics and liberation. How did the writers of these narratives "bear witness" to the experiences they describe? At a time when a hegemonic discourse on these subjects already existed, what did it mean to "tell the truth" about slavery?

Impossible Witnesses explores these questions through a study of fiction, poetry, essays, and slave narratives from the abolitionist era. Linking the racialized discourses of slavery and Romanticism, it boldly calls for a reconfiguration of U.S. and British Romanticism that places slavery at its center.

Impossible Witnesses addresses some of the major literary figures and representations of slavery in light of discourses on natural rights and law, offers an account of Foucauldian discourse analysis as it applies to the problem of "bearing witness," and analyzes specific narratives such as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," and "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano."

A work of great depth and originality, Impossible Witnesses renders traditional interpretations of Romanticism impossible and places Dwight A. McBride at the forefront of studies in race and literature.

Traces; slave names, the islands and cities into which we are born, our musics and rhythms, our genetic compositions, our stories of our lost utopias and the atrocities inflicted upon our ancestors, by our ancestors, the social structure of our cities, the nature of our diasporas, the scars inflicted by history. These are all the remnants of the middle passage of the slave ship for those in the multiple diasporas of the globe today, whose complex histories were shaped by that journey. Whatever remnants that once existed in the subjectivities and collectivities upon which slavery was inflicted has long passed. But there are hints in material culture, genetic and cultural transmissions and objects that shape certain kinds of narratives - this is how we know ourselves and how we tell our stories. This path-breaking book uncovers the significance of the memory of the slave ship for modernity as well as its role in the cultural production of modernity. By so doing, it examines methods of ethnography for historical events and experiences and offers a sociology and a history from below of the slave experience. The arguments in this book show the way for using memory studies to undermine contemporary slavery.

Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Union-occupied Lower South. The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored "contraband camps," as wage laborers on plantations and in towns, and in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. Together with the editors' interpretative essays, these documents portray the different understandings of freedom advanced by the many participants in the wartime evolution of free labor--former slaves and free blacks; former slaveholders; Union military officers and officials in Washington; and Northern planters, ministers and teachers. The war sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume documents an important chapter of that contest. Ira Berlin is the Director of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland.

The Dred Scott decision of 1857 is widely (and correctly) regarded as the very worst in the long history of the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision held that no African American could ever be a U.S. citizen and declared that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional and void. The decision thus appeared to promise that slavery would be forever protected in the great American West. Prompting mass outrage, the decision was a crucial step on the road that led to the Civil War. Dred Scott and the Dangers of a Political Court traces the history of the case and tells the story of many of the key people involved, including Dred and Harriet Scott, President James Buchanan, Chief Justice Roger Taney, and Abraham Lincoln. The book also examines in some detail each of the nine separate Opinions written by the Court's Justices, connecting each with the respective Justices' past views on slavery and the law. That examination demonstrates that the majority Justices were willing to embrace virtually any flimsy legal argument they could find at hand in an effort to justify the pro-slavery result they had predetermined. Many modern commentators view the case chiefly in relation to Roe v Wade and related controversies in modern constitutional law: some conservative critics attempt to argue that Dred Scott exemplifies 'aspirationalism' or 'judicial activism' gone wrong; some liberal critics in turn try to argue that Dred Scott instead represents 'originalism' or 'strict constructionism' run amok. Here, Judge Ethan Greenberg demonstrates that none of these modern critiques has much merit. The Dred Scott case was not about constitutional methodology, but chiefly about slavery, and about how very far the Dred Scott Court was willing to go to protect the political interests of the slave-holding South. The decision was wrong because the Court subordinated law and intellectual honesty to politics. The case thus exemplifies the dangers of a political Court.

This work explores the dynamic issues of race and religion within the Cherokee Nation and to look at the role of secret societies in shaping these forces during the nineteenth century.

First Published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Dealer of Old Clothes: Philosophical Conversations With David Walker showcases the philosophical endeavors of David Walker, an abolitionist and intellectual who was situated in the midst of America's turbulent period of unrest just prior to the Civil War. In this text, Scriven treats Walker as a philosophical sage of sorts. He poses philosophical questions regarding race, resistance, and the problems of evil and solicits answers via Walker's text. The book contains five main chapters with three appendices containing the three respective self-edited versions of Walker's appeal, material that has never appeared together in one volume. This piece contributes to the growing body of African-American philosophy housed with the American philosophical tradition and is the first book-length philosophical treatment in Walker scholarship.

This volume examines the evolution of the depictions of black femininity in French visual culture as a prism through which to understand the Global North's destructive relationship with the natural world. Drawing on a broad spectrum of archives extending back to the late 18th century - paintings, fashion plates, prints, photographs, and films - this study traces the intricate ways a patriarchal imperialism and a global capitalism have paired black women with the realm of nature to justify the exploitation both of people and of ecosystems. These dehumanizing and speciesist strategies of subjugation have perpetuated interlocking patterns of social injustice and environmental depletion that constitute the most salient challenges facing humankind today. Through a novel approach that merges visual studies, critical race theory, and animal studies, this interdisciplinary investigation historicizes the evolution of the boundaries between human and non-human animals during the modern period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, critical race theory, colonial and post-colonial studies, animal studies, and French studies.

With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1833, Britain seemed to wash its hands of slavery. Not so, according to Marika Sherwood, who sets the record straight in this provocative new book. In fact, Sherwood demonstrates that Britain continued to contribute to the slave trade well after 1807, even into the twentieth century. Drawing on government documents and contemporary reports as well as published sources, she describes how slavery remained very much a part of British investment, commerce and empire, especially in funding and supplying goods for the trade in slaves and in the use of slave-grown produce. The nancial world of the City in London also depended on slavery, which - directly and indirectly - provided employment for millions of people. "After Abolition" also examines some of the causes and repercussions of continued British involvement in slavery and describes many of the apparently respectable villains, as well as the heroes, connected with the trade - at all levels of society. It contains important revelations about a darker side of British history, previously unexplored, which will provoke real questions about Britain's perceptions of its past

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday's Slave with Tomorrow's Robot is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to investigate and speculate about the relationship between technology and human nature. It is a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society. This text interrogates how the domestic slaves of the past are being re-imaged as domestic robots of the future. Hampton asserts that the rhetoric used to persuade an entire nation to become dependent on the institution of chattel slavery will be employed to promote the enslavement of technology in the form of humanoid robots with Artificial Intelligence. Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture makes the claim that science fiction, film, and popular culture have all been used to normalize the notion of robots in domestic spaces and relationships. In examining the similarities of human slaves and mechanical or biomechanical robots, this text seeks to gain a better understanding of how slaves are created and justified in the imaginations of a supposedly civilized nation. And in doing so, give pause to those who would disassociate America's past from its imminent future.