Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c.900-1900 explores the Black Sea region as an encounter zone of cultures, legal regimes, religions, and enslavement practices. The topics discussed in the chapters include Byzantine slavery, late medieval slave trade patterns, slavery in Christian societies, Tatar and cossack raids, the position of Circassians in the slave trade, and comparisons with the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This volume aims to stimulate a broader discussion on the patterns of unfreedom in the Black Sea area and to draw attention to the importance of this region in the broader debates on global slavery. Contributors are: Viorel Achim, Michel Balard, Hannah Barker, Andrzej Gliwa, Colin Heywood, Sergei Pavlovich Karpov, Mikhail Kizilov, Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, Maryna Kravets, Natalia Krolikowska-Jedlinska, Sandra Origone, Victor Ostapchuk, Daphne Penna, Felicia Rosu, and Ehud R. Toledano.

The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the III/IX Century is the only full-length study on the revolt o f the Zanj. Scholars of slavery, the African diaspora and th e Middle East have lauded Popovic''s work. '

Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250-1900 is the first collection of studies to focus on slavery and related forms of labor throughout Asia. The 15 chapters by an international group of scholars assess the current state of Asian slavery studies, discuss new research on slave systems in Asia, identify avenues for future research, and explore new approaches to reconstructing the history of slavery and bonded labor in Asia and, by extension, elsewhere in the globe. Individual chapters examine slavery, slave trading, abolition, and bonded labor in places as diverse as Ceylon, China, India, Korea, the Mongol Empire, the Philippines, the Sulu Archipelago, and Timor in local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. Contributors are: Richard B. Allen, Michael D. Bennett, Claude Chevaleyre, Jeff Fynn-Paul, Hans Hagerdal, Shawna Herzog, Jessica Hinchy, Kumari Jayawardena, Rachel Kurian, Bonny Ling, Christopher Lovins, Stephanie Mawson, Anthony Reid, James Francis Warren, Don J. Wyatt, Harriet T. Zurndorfer.

What would it mean to ""get over slavery""? Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? Should we perceive the psychic hold of slavery as a set of mental manacles that hold us back from imagining a postracist America? Or could the psychic hold of slavery be understood as a tool, helping us get a grip on the systemic racial inequalities and restricted liberties that persist in the present day? Featuring original essays from an array of established and emerging scholars in the interdisciplinary field of African American studies, The Psychic Hold of Slavery offers a nuanced dialogue upon these questions. With a painful awareness that our understanding of the past informs our understanding of the present - and vice versa - the contributors place slavery's historical legacies in conversation with twenty-first-century manifestations of antiblack violence, dehumanization, and social death. Through an exploration of film, drama, fiction, performance art, graphic novels, and philosophical discourse, this volume considers how artists grapple with questions of representation, as they ask whether slavery can ever be accurately depicted, trace the scars that slavery has left on a traumatized body politic, or debate how to best convey that black lives matter. The Psychic Hold of Slavery thus raises provocative questions about how we behold the historically distinct event of African diasporic enslavement and how we might hold off the transhistorical force of antiblack domination.

Africa Reimagined is a passionately argued appeal for a rediscovery of our African identity. Going beyond the problems of a single country, Hlumelo Biko calls for a reorientation of values, on a continental scale, to suit the needs and priorities of Africans. Building on the premise that slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid fundamentally unbalanced the values and indeed the very self-concept of Africans, he offers realistic steps to return to a more balanced Afro-centric identity.

Historically, African values were shaped by a sense of abundance, in material and mental terms, and by strong ties of community. The intrusion of religious, economic and legal systems imposed by conquerors, traders and missionaries upset this balance, and the African identity was subsumed by the values of the newcomers. Biko shows how a reimagining of Africa can restore the sense of abundance and possibility, and what a rebirth of the continent on Pan-African lines might look like. This is not about the churn of the news cycle or party politics – although he identifies the political party as one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism. Instead, drawing on latest research, he offers a practical, pragmatic vision anchored in the here and now.

By looking beyond identities and values imposed from outside, and transcending the divisions and frontiers imposed under colonialism, it should be possible for Africans to develop fully their skills, values and ingenuity, to build institutions that reflect African values, and to create wealth for the benefit of the continent as a whole.

In The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves, Lucio de Sousa offers a study on the system of traffic of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean slaves from Japan, using the Portuguese mercantile networks; reconstructs the Japanese communities in the Habsburg Empire; and analyses the impact of the Japanese slave trade on the Iberian legislation produced in the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries.

The slave, Saidiya Hartman observes, is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way, and with figures from the past, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.

In this book Jukka Korpela offers an analysis of the trade in kidnapped Finns and Karelians into slavery in Eastern Europe. Blond slaves from the north of Europe were rare luxury items in Black Sea and Caspian markets, and the high prices they commanded stimulated and sustained a long-distance trade based on kidnapping in special robbery missions and war expeditions. Captives were sold into the Volga slave trade and transported through market webs further south. This business differed and was separate from the large-scale raids carried out on Crimeans for enslavement in Eastern Europe, or the mass kidnappings characteristic of Mediterranean slavery. The trade in Finns and Karelians provides new perspectives on the formation of the Russian state as well as the economic networks of official and unofficial markets in Eastern Europe.

Atlantic Crossings in the Wake of Frederick Douglass takes its bearings from the Maryland-born former slave Frederick Douglass's 1845 sojourn in Ireland and Britain-a voyage that is understood in editors Mark P. Leone and Lee M. Jenkins' collection as paradigmatic of the crossings between American, African American, and Irish historical experience and culture with which the collection as a whole is concerned. In crossing the Atlantic, Douglass also completed his journey from slavery to freedom, and from political and cultural marginality into subjective and creative autonomy. Atlantic Crossings traces the stages of that journey in chapters on literature, archaeology, and spatial culture that consider both roots and routes-landscapes of New World slavery, subordination, and state-sponsored surveillance, and narratives of resistance, liberation, and intercultural exchange generated by transatlantic connectivities and the transnational transfer of ideas. Contributors Lee M. Jenkins, Mark P. Leone, Katie Ahern, Miranda Corcoran, Ann Coughlan, Kathryn H. Deeley, Adam Fracchia, Mary Furlong Minkoff, Tracy H. Jenkins, Dan O'Brien, Eoin O'Callaghan, Elizabeth Pruitt, Benjamin A. Skolnik and Stefan Woehlke

Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery nationwide. Rael immerses readers in the mix of social, geographic, economic, and political factors that shaped this unique American experience. He not only takes a far longer view of slavery's demise than do those who date it to the rise of abolitionism in 1831, he also places it in a broader Atlantic context. We see how slavery ended variously by consent or force across time and place and how views on slavery evolved differently between the centers of European power and their colonial peripheries-some of which would become power centers themselves. Rael shows how African Americans played the central role in ending slavery in the United States. Fuelled by new Revolutionary ideals of self-rule and universal equality-and on their own or alongside abolitionists-both slaves and free blacks slowly turned American opinion against the slave interests in the South. Secession followed, and then began the national bloodbath that would demand slavery's complete destruction.