In the late eighteenth century, planters in the Caribbean and the American South insisted that only Black people could labor on plantations, arguing that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to cultivate crops in hot climates. Historians have mainly taken planters at their word, assuming that they observed differences in health between Black and white bodies and that these differences underpinned the maintenance of an enslaved Black plantation labor force. In The Nature of Slavery, Katherine Johnston disrupts this longstanding claim about biological racial difference. Drawing on extensive personal correspondence, colonial records, and a wealth of other sources, she reveals that planters observed no health differences between Black and white people. They made their claims about people's ability to labor in spite of their experiences, not because of them. For planters and physicians, local environments, much more than skin color, affected bodily health. Moreover, they thought that all bodies-African, European, and creole-responded similarly to various environmental conditions on plantations. Yet when slavery and their economic livelihoods were at stake, slaveholders and slave traders promoted a climatic dichotomy, in which Africans' and Europeans' bodies differed significantly from one another. By putting the health of enslaved laborers at significant risk, planters' actions made environmental racism a central part of Atlantic slavery. White plantation owners contributed to historical myths about enslaved bodies that permeated the public imagination and became accepted as natural. In doing so, The Nature of Slavery contends, they helped to construct and circulate a pervasive and groundless theory of race across the Atlantic world.

For more than a century and a half the real story of Scotland's connections to transatlantic slavery has been lost to history and shrouded in myth. There was even denial that the Scots, unlike the English, had any significant involvement in slavery. Scotland saw itself as a pioneering abolitionist nation untainted by a slavery past. This book is the first detailed attempt to challenge these beliefs. Written by the foremost scholars in the field, with findings based on sustained archival research, the volume systematically peels away the mythology and radically revises the traditional picture. In doing so the contributors come to a number of surprising conclusions. Topics covered include national amnesia and slavery, the impact of profits from slavery on Scotland, Scots in the Caribbean sugar islands, compensation paid to Scottish owners when slavery was abolished, domestic controversies on the slave trade, the role of Scots in slave trading from English ports and much else. The book is a major contribution to Scottish history, to studies of the Scots global diaspora and to the history of slavery within the British Empire. It will have wide appeal not only to scholars and students but to all readers interested in discovering an untold aspect of Scotland's past.

A condensation and updating of his African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (1984), noted scholar of antebellum black writing and history Dr. Allan D. Austin explores via portraits, documents, maps, and texts, the lives of 50 sub-Saharan non-peasant Muslim Africans caught in the slave trade between 1730 and 1860.

This study presents new information about the four Quaker businessmen who helped found the London Abolition Committee in 1787 and remained active in the late anti-slave trade movement throughout their lifetimes. Drawing on previously unused primary sources, the study traces the close personal, business, social and religious ties binding the men together and shaping their abolition activities and arguments. By closely examining the lives of Joseph Woods, James Philips, George Harrison and Samuel Hoare, the study presents a new view of the factors shaping the arguments and strategies of abolitionism in Britain.

This study presents new information about the four Quaker businessmen who helped found the London Abolition Committee in 1787 and remained active in the late anti-slave trade movement throughout their lifetimes. Drawing on previously unused primary sources, the study traces the close personal, business, social and religious ties binding the men together and shaping their abolition activities and arguments. By closely examining the lives of Joseph Woods, James Philips, George Harrison and Samuel Hoare, the study presents a new view of the factors shaping the arguments and strategies of abolitionism in Britain.

An Open Access edition of this book will be made available on publication on our website and on the OAPEN Library, funded by the LUP Open Access Author Fund. The Persistence of Memory is a history of the public memory of transatlantic slavery in the largest slave-trading port city in Europe, from the end of the 18th century into the 21st century; from history to memory. Mapping this public memory over more than two centuries reveals the ways in which dissonant pasts, rather than being 'forgotten histories', persist over time as a contested public debate. This public memory, intimately intertwined with constructions of 'place' and 'identity', has been shaped by legacies of transatlantic slavery itself, as well as other events, contexts and phenomena along its trajectory, revealing the ways in which current narratives and debate around difficult histories have histories of their own. By the 21st century, Liverpool, once the 'slaving capital of the world', had more permanent and long-lasting memory work relating to transatlantic slavery than any other British city. The long history of how Liverpool, home to Britain's oldest continuous black presence, has publicly 'remembered' its own slaving past, how this has changed over time and why, is of central significance and relevance to current and ongoing efforts to face contested histories, particularly those surrounding race, slavery and empire.

First published in 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois's biography of abolitionist John Brown is a literary and historical classic. With a rare combination of scholarship and passion, Du Bois defends Brown against all detractors who saw him as a fanatic, fiend, or traitor. Brown emerges as a rich personality, fully understandable as an unusual leader with a deeply religious outlook and a devotion to the cause of freedom for the slave.

This new edition is enriched with an introduction by John David Smith and with supporting documents relating to Du Bois's correspondence with his publisher.

First published in 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois's biography of abolitionist John Brown is a literary and historical classic. With a rare combination of scholarship and passion, Du Bois defends Brown against all detractors who saw him as a fanatic, fiend, or traitor. Brown emerges as a rich personality, fully understandable as an unusual leader with a deeply religious outlook and a devotion to the cause of freedom for the slave.

This new edition is enriched with an introduction by John David Smith and with supporting documents relating to Du Bois's correspondence with his publisher.

Seymour Drescher's regular, deeply-thought and carefully nuanced arguments have periodically reshaped how we think of the subject of the history of slavery itself. He has discussed the impact of economic and cultural factors on human behaviour and has shown that historical evidence does not lead to easy answers. He has changed the way in which we now look at abolitionism and has destroyed the linear explanation of economic decline. This books gathers together some of Drescher's key essays in the field.

By teasing apart the history of slavery into its major components and by examining those themes that recent historians have brought to the fore, this book makes sense of what has become a confused and confusing historical debate.
Each chapter offers a guide to the most recent scholarship. The themes chosen - race, gender, resistance, domination and control - are those that currently engage the attention of the most innovative scholars in a range of disciplines. The comparative analysis of slavery throughout the English-speaking Americas gives new perspectives on the phenomenon.
Written in a clear and lively style, Questioning Slavery is an up-to-date guide to slavery, to black historical experience and to on-going historical debates.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203442873

"Serfdom and Slavery" compares the two forms of legal servitude in cultures in Western civilization, in Europe and the New World from ancient times to the modern period. Within a tightly controlled framework of general contextual chapters followed by specific case studies, a distinguished team of scholars offers 17 specially written essays that illuminate the nature, development, impact and termination of serfdom and slavery in European society. While the case studies range form classical Greece to early modern Brandenburg, and from medieval England to nineteenth-century Russia, the volume as a whole is closely integrated. It makes an important contribution to a topic of increasing international interest.

The seven contributions contained in this collection address various forms of manumission throughout the American South as well as the Caribbean. Topics include color, class, and identity on the eve of the Haitian revolution; where free persons of color stood in the hierarchy of wealth in antebellum

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this narrative, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous--few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as Jenny Martinez shows in this novel interpretation of the roots of human rights law, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade. Originating in England in the late eighteenth century, abolitionism achieved remarkable success over the course of the nineteenth century. Martinez focuses in particular on the international admiralty courts, which tried the crews of captured slave ships. The courts, which were based in the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and Brazil, helped free at least 80,000 Africans from captured slavers between 1807 and 1871. Here then, buried in the dusty archives of admiralty courts, ships' logs, and the British foreign office, are the foundations of contemporary human rights law: international courts targeting states and non-state transnational actors while working on behalf the world's most persecuted peoples--captured West Africans bound for the slave plantations of the Americas. Fueled by a powerful thesis and novel evidence, Martinez's work will reshape the fields of human rights history and international human rights law.

This title focuses on the post-emancipation period in the Caribbean and how local societies dealt with the new socio-economic conditions. Scholars from Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, England, Denmark and The Netherlands link this era with the contemporary Caribbean."

Through diversity, America has grown strong as a nation. Although all segments of the population share certain life patterns and basic beliefs, there are many differences in traditional lifestyles and cultures among ethnic groups. Respect for such differences is a benchmark of a democratic nation. Migrants, Immigrants, and Slaves documents the fact that all American ethnic groups have been both the oppressed and the oppressors. The book is written for introductory American history, ethnic studies, and sociology courses. Special attention is given to the immigration patterns and cultural contributions of more than 50 ethnic groups.

In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia.
"Tell This in My Memory" opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted--or not--the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.

This volume examines the prevalence, function, and socio-political effects of slavery discourse in the major theological formulations of the late third to early fifth centuries AD, arguably the most formative period of early Christian doctrine. The question the book poses is this: in what way did the Christian theologians of the third, fourth, and early fifth centuries appropriate the discourse of slavery in their theological formulations, and what could the effect of this appropriation have been for actual physical slaves? This fascinating study is crucial reading for anyone with an interest in early Christianity or Late Antiquity, and slavery more generally.

Contents:
Acknowledgements Foreword Isobel Armstrong Introduction Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring 1. Looks That Kill: Violence and Representation In Aphra Behn's Oroonoko Anne Fogarty 2. Sex, Slavery and Rights in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications Jane Moore 3. That Mild Beam: Enlightenment and Enslavement in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion Steven Vine 4. Silent Revolt: Slavery and the Politics of Metaphor in Jane Eyre Carl Plasa 5. Anglo-American Connections: Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Iron of Slavery Elizabeth Jean Sabiston 6. Painting by Numbers: Figuring Frederick Douglass Betty J.Ring 7. Perilous Passages in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Jon Hauss 8. The Irony of Idealism: William Faulkner and the South's Construction of the Mulatto David Lawrence Rogers 9. Prophesying Bodies: Calling for a Politics of Collectivity in Toni Morrison's Beloved Notes on Contributors Index

Think of maritime slavery, and the notorious Middle Passage - the unprecedented, forced migration of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic - readily comes to mind. This so-called 'middle leg' - from Africa to the Americas - of a supposed trading triangle linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas naturally captures attention for its scale and horror. After all, the Middle Passage was the largest forced, transoceanic migration in world history, now thought to have involved about 12.5 million African captives shipped in about 44,000 voyages that sailed between 1514 and 1866. No other coerced migration matches it for sheer size or gruesomeness. Maritime slavery is not, however, just about the movement of people as commodities, but rather, the involvement of all sorts of people, including slaves, in the transportation of those human commodities. Maritime slavery is thus not only about objects being moved but also about subjects doing the moving. Some slaves were actors, not simply the acted-upon. They were pilots, sailors, canoemen, divers, linguists, porters, stewards, cooks, and cabin boys, not forgetting all the ancillary workers in ports such as stevedores, warehousemen, labourers, washerwomen, tavern workers, and prostitutes. Maritime Slavery reflects this current interest in maritime spaces, and covers all the major Oceans and Seas. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

This collection of essays examines the different forms of unfree labour that contributed to the development of the Atlantic world and, by extension, the debates and protests that emerged concerning labour servitude and the abolition of slavery in the West.

Between 1500 and 1900, the various parts of the Atlantic world became increasingly integrated into an expanding capitalist economy. This collection of essays examines the different forms of unfree labour that contributed to the development of this world and, by extension, the debates and protests that emerged concerning labour servitude and the abolition of slavery in the West. Comparative in perspective, the essays focus on particular regions (Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and Amerindia) and on specific types of labour (slavery, pawnship, impressment, tribute, indentured and contract labour) in ways that transcend traditional areas of specialization. Together they offer new insight into the patterns and intensity of labour servitude in the West and into the relationships between core and peripheral areas of the first capital world economy.

Between 1500 and 1870, millions of Africans were transported across the Atlantic by European traders to work as slaves in the Americas. They were shipped in conditions of great cruelty to lead lives of hard, unremitting labour, subject to degradation and violence. The products of their labour - primarily sugar, coffee and tobacco - were sent back to Europe and the profits derived from slavery helped fuel European economic development in the 18th and 19th centuries. The cost in lives and human suffering was enormous. First published to accompany a permanent gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, this reissue of Transatlantic Slavery with new material documents this era through essays on women in slavery, the impact on West and Central Africa, and the African view of the slave trade. Richly illustrated, it reveals how the slave trade shaped the history of three continents-Africa, the Americas, and Europe-and how all of us continue to live with its consequences.

The transition from chattel slavery to forced labour in Africa and the Caribbean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has commanded increasing attention from scholars in recent years. The Wages of Slavery tackles this subject from a protoproletarian perspective, studies new labour regimes in Africa and the Caribbean, and discusses work practices before and after emancipation the nature of the working week, subsistence and surplus for slaves and free person, and labour negotiations and confrontations.

Truth's landmark slave narrative chronicles her experiences as a slave in upstate New York and her transformation into an extraordinary abolitionist, feminist, orator, and preacher. Based on the complete 1884 edition, this volume includes the "Book of Life," a collection of letters and sketches about Truth's life written subsequent to the original 1850 publication of the Narrative, and "A Memorial Chapter," a sentimental account of her death.

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history. Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood. Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States. Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.