This is a survey of pre-colonial West Africa, written by the internationally respected author and journalist, Basil Davidson. He takes as his starting point his successful textA History of West Africa 1000-1800, but he has reworked his new text specially for a wider international readership. In the process he offers a fascinating introduction to the rich societies and cultures of Africa before the coming of the Europeans.

This book explores the prejudice against slave descendants in highland Madagascar and its persistence more than a century after the official abolition of slavery. 'Unclean people' is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of Madagascar, and refers to people of alleged slave descent who are discriminated against on a daily basis and in a variety of ways. Denis Regnier shows that prejudice is rooted in a strong case of psychological essentialism: free descendants think that 'slaves' have a 'dirty' essence that is impossible to cleanse. Regnier's field experiments question the widely accepted idea that the social stigma against slavery is a legacy of pre-colonial society. He argues, to the contrary, that the essentialist construal of 'slaves' is the outcome of the historical process triggered by the colonial abolition of slavery: whereas in pre-abolition times slaves could be cleansed through ritual means, the abolition of slavery meant that slaves were transformed only superficially into free persons, while their inner essence remained unchanged and became progressively constructed as 'forever unchangeable'. Based on detailed fieldwork, this volume will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, African studies, development studies, cultural psychology, and those looking at the legacy of slavery.

Filling a significant gap in the historiography, the essays in this volume show that debt slavery has played a crucial role in the economic history of numerous societies which continues even today.

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of the slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty. As if Removal to Indian Territory weren't cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly free, they had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribal oversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers. Remarkably, they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged new relationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundation for survival. Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as pioneers of the American West equal to their Indian and other Plains sisters.

The exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural South is a central theme of black life and liberation in the twentieth century. A Mind to Stay offers a counterpoint to the narrative of the Great Migration. Sydney Nathans tells the rare story of people who moved from being enslaved to becoming owners of the very land they had worked in bondage, and who have held on to it from emancipation through the Civil Rights era. The story began in 1844, when North Carolina planter Paul Cameron bought 1,600 acres near Greensboro, Alabama, and sent out 114 enslaved people to cultivate cotton and enlarge his fortune. In the 1870s, he sold the plantation to emancipated black families who worked there. Drawing on thousands of letters from the planter and on interviews with descendants of those who bought the land, Nathans unravels how and why the planter's former laborers purchased the site of their enslavement, kept its name as Cameron Place, and defended their homeland against challengers from the Jim Crow era to the present day. Through the prism of a single plantation and the destiny of black families that dwelt on it for over a century and a half, A Mind to Stay brings to life a vivid cast of characters and illuminates the changing meaning of land and landowning to successive generations of rural African Americans. Those who remained fought to make their lives fully free-for themselves, for their neighbors, and for those who might someday return.

In Europe, the liberation of the serfs was a project initiated in 1806 with a scheduled completion date of 1810. It was obvious to those who planned the project that the liberation of the serfs involved a complete overhaul of agriculture as it was then known as Europe moved from feudalism to capitalism. For this reason, Prussia was careful in implementing the reform, and did not rush, after seeing the Kingdom of Westphalia perishing under its crushing debt accumulated in part from Napoleon's failed Russian campaign. The basic hypothesis of this book is that slave labor can never be efficient and will therefore disappear by itself. However, this process of disappearance can take many years. For instance, two generations after the importation of slaves to North America had ended, the states still fought over the issue, and this despite the fact that Ely Whitney had invented the Cotton Gin in 1793 and already then made slavery in cotton production literally superfluous. While there have been several books on the economics of American slavery, few studies have examined this issue in an international context. The contributions in this book address the economics of unfree labor in places like Prussia, Westphalia, Austria, Argentina and the British Empire. The issue of slavery is still a hotly debated and widely studied issue, making this book of interest to academics in history, economics and African Studies alike.

Running from Bondage tells the compelling stories of enslaved women, who comprised one-third of all runaways, and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. Running from Bondage broadens and complicates how we study and teach this momentous event, one that emphasizes the chances taken by these 'Black founding mothers' and the important contributions they made to the cause of liberty.

"Stunning."
"--Publishers Weekly"

"A well-researched study that neither allocates blame nor exonerates the participants in the peculiar institution, but puts to rest a pernicious anti-Semitic libel of recent coinage."
"--Kirkus Reviews"

"For anyone in search of ammunition to refute farfetched claims about Jewish culpability for the enslavement of Africans in America, this is the place to look."
"--Peter Kolchin, Los Angeles Times"

"Exhaustive. . . . A scholarly, careful work."
"--The Washington Post Book World (front page)"

In the wake of the civil rights movement, a great divide has opened up between African American and Jewish communities. What was historically a harmonious and supportive relationship has suffered from a powerful and oft-repeated legend, that Jews controlled and masterminded the slave trade and owned slaves on a large scale, well in excess of their own proportion in the population.

In this groundbreaking book, likely to stand as the definitive word on the subject, Eli Faber cuts through this cloud of mystification to recapture an important chapter in both Jewish and African diasporic history.
Focusing on the British empire, Faber assesses the extent to which Jews participated in the institution of slavery through investment in slave trading companies, ownership of slave ships, commercial activity as merchants who sold slaves upon their arrival from Africa, and direct ownership of slaves. His unprecedented original research utilizing shipping and tax records, stock-transfer ledgers, censuses, slave registers, and synagogue records reveals, once and for all, the minimal nature of Jews' involvement in the subjugation of Africans in theAmericas.

A crucial corrective, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade lays to rest one of the most contested historical controversies of our time.

Geography played a key role in Britain's long national debate over slavery. Writers on both sides of the question represented the sites of slavery - Africa, the Caribbean, and the British Isles - as fully imagined places and the basis for a pro- or anti-slavery political agenda. With the help of twenty-first-century theories of space and place, Elizabeth A. Bohls examines the writings of planters, slaves, soldiers, sailors, and travellers whose diverse geographical and social locations inflect their representations of slavery. She shows how these writers use discourses of aesthetics, natural history, cultural geography, and gendered domesticity to engage with the slavery debate. Six interlinked case studies, including Scottish mercenary John Stedman and domestic slave Mary Prince, examine the power of these discourses to represent the places of slavery, setting slaves' narratives in dialogue with pro-slavery texts, and highlighting in the latter previously unnoticed traces of the enslaved.

The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations addresses the history of the Freedmen's Bureau at state and local levels of the Reconstruction South. In this lively and well-documented book, the authors discuss the diversity of conditions and the personalities of the Bureau's agents state by state. They offer insight into the actions and thoughts, not only of the agents, but also of the southern planters and the former slaves, as both of these groups learned how to deal with new responsibilities, new advantages and disadvantages, and altered relationships. The period of Reconstruction was a troubling time in the history of the South. The Congress of the United States passed laws and the President issued edicts, but more often than not, the results of Reconstruction in a particular area depended primarily on the character and personality of an individual Bureau agent. The agents were on the front line of this postwar battle against hatred, bigotry, fear, ignorance, and helplessness. This work presents accounts, often in their own words, about how the agents and officers of the Freedmen's Bureau reacted to the problems that they faced and the people with whom they dealt on a day-to-day basis. Although the primary intent of Professors Cimbala and Miller is to enhance the research on post-Civil War Reconstruction and the role of the Freedmen's Bureau for the benefit of historians, the book is a good read for any lover of American history or armchair psychologist. Also, it has social value regarding the roots of the hatred, violence, and bigotry between the races that has come down through the generations to the present day. We are all products of our history, whether we are white or black, southern or northern. Only through an understanding of this history can we better approach the problems that remain to be solved.

American Mobbing, 1828-1861 is a comprehensive history of mob violence in antebellum America. David Grimsted argues that, though the issue of slavery provoked riots in both the North and the South, the riots produced two different reactions. In the South anti-slavery rioting was widely tolerated and effectively encouraged Southern support for slavery. In the North, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery riots were put down, often violently, by the authorities, resulting usually in a public reaction against slavery. Grimsted thus demonstrates that mob violence was a major cause of the social split that led to the Civil War.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE** A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK AND BARACK OBAMA SUMMER READING 2021 SELECTION 'A fine, lyrical novel, impressive in its complex interweaving of the grand and the intimate, of the personal and political' Observer Landry and Prentiss are two brothers born into slavery, finally freed as the American Civil War draws to its bitter close. Cast into the world without a penny to their names, their only hope is to find work in a society that still views them with nothing but intolerance. Farmer George Walker and his wife Isabelle are reeling from a loss that has shaken them to their core. After a chance encounter, they agree to employ the brothers on their land, and slowly the tentative bonds of trust begin to blossom between the strangers. But this sanctuary survives on a knife's edge, and it isn't long before a tragedy causes the inhabitants of the nearby town to turn their suspicion onto these new friendships, with devastating consequences. '[A] highly accomplished debut' Sunday Times Readers have been swept away by The Sweetness of Water: 'Such a powerful, magnificent book; I urge you to read it. The comparisons with Colson Whitehead are justified' ***** 'A staggering debut and a story that stays with you' ***** 'Thought-provoking and moving . . . a gripping and compelling novel that exposes flaws, mixed emotions and imperfect relationships, and yet it holds on with determination and hope. It fully deserves a 5-star rating' ***** 'Outstanding . . . A book that deserves widespread recognition and a wide audience' *****

The study of slavery in the Americas generally assumes a basic racial hierarchy: Africans or those of African descent are usually the slaves, and white people usually the slaveholders. In this unique interdisciplinary work of historical archaeology, anthropologist Katherine Hayes draws on years of fieldwork on Shelter Island's Sylvester Manor to demonstrate how racial identity was constructed and lived before plantation slavery was racialized by the legal codification of races. Using the historic Sylvester Manor Plantation site turned archaeological dig as a case study, Hayes draws on artifacts and extensive archival material to present a rare picture of northern slavery on one of the North's first plantations. The Manor was built in the mid-17th century by British settler Nathaniel Sylvester, whose family owned Shelter Island until the early 18th century and whose descendants still reside in the Manor House. There, as Hayes demonstrates, white settlers, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans worked side by side. While each group played distinct roles on the Manor and in the larger plantation economy of which Shelter Island was part, their close collaboration and cohabitation was essential for the Sylvester family's economic and political power in the Atlantic Northeast. Through the lens of social memory and forgetting, this study addresses the significance of Sylvester Manor's plantation history to American attitudes about diversity, Indian land politics, slavery and Jim Crow, in tension with idealized visions of white colonial community.

Salvage Work examines contemporary literary responses to the law's construction of personhood in the Americas. Tracking the extraordinary afterlives of the legal slave personality from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, Angela Naimou shows the legal slave to be a fractured but generative figure for contemporary legal personhood across categories of race, citizenship, gender, and labor. What emerges is a compelling and original study of how law invents categories of identification and how literature contends with the person as a legal fiction. Through readings of Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, Edwidge Danticat's Krik?Krak!, Rosario Ferre's Sweet Diamond Dust (Maldito Amor), Gayl Jones's Song for Anninho and Mosquito, and John Edgar Wideman's Fanon, Naimou shows how literary engagements with legal personhood reconfigure formal narrative conventions in Black Atlantic historiography, the immigrant novel, the anticolonial romance, the trope of the talking book, and the bildungsroman. Revealing links between colonial, civic, slave, labor, immigration, and penal law, Salvage Work reframes debates over civil and human rights by revealing the shared hemispheric histories and effects of legal personhood across seemingly disparate identities-including the human and the corporate person, the political refugee and the economic migrant, and the stateless person and the citizen. In depicting the material remains of the legal slave personality in the de-industrialized neoliberal era, these literary texts develop a salvage aesthetic that invites us to rethink our political and aesthetic imagination of personhood. Questioning liberal frameworks for civil and human rights as well as what Naimou calls death-bound theories of personhood-in which forms of human life are primarily described as wasted, disposable, bare, or dead in law-Salvage Work thus responds to critical discussions of biopolitics and neoliberal globalization by exploring the potential for contemporary literature to reclaim the individual from the legal regimes that have marked her.

During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countless slaves from culturally diverse communities in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia journeyed to Mexico on the ships of the Manila Galleon. Upon arrival in Mexico, they were grouped together and categorized as chinos. Their experience illustrates the interconnectedness of Spain s colonies and the reach of the crown, which brought people together from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe in a historically unprecedented way. In time, chinos in Mexico came to be treated under the law as Indians, becoming indigenous vassals of the Spanish crown after 1672. The implications of this legal change were enormous: as Indians, rather than chinos, they could no longer be held as slaves. Tatiana Seijas tracks chinos complex journey from the slave market in Manila to the streets of Mexico City, and from bondage to liberty. In doing so, she challenges commonly held assumptions about the uniformity of the slave experience in the Americas."

This book is a comprehensive history of slavery in Africa from the earliest times to the end of the twentieth century, when slavery in most parts of the continent ceased to exist. It connects the emergence and consolidation of slavery to specific historical forces both internal and external to the African continent. Sean Stilwell pays special attention to the development of settled agriculture, the invention of kinship, "big men" and centralized states, the role of African economic production and exchange, the interaction of local structures of dependence with the external slave trades (transatlantic, trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean), and the impact of colonialism on slavery in the twentieth century. He also provides an introduction to the central debates that have shaped current understanding of slavery in Africa. The book examines different forms of slavery that developed over time in Africa and introduces readers to the lives, work, and struggles of slaves themselves.

The ramifications of the trans-Saharan, trans-Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and domestic African slave trades are immeasurable, and they continue to disaffect black people from Africa to Haiti and Los Angeles to Lagos. Shackled Sentiments focuses on the memories and embodiments of slavery through case studies from western, eastern, and central Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The contributors to this collection examine the ways that memories of slavery have been internalized. Slavery and memory are assessed from multiple perspectives: as sets of ritual practices, community-based systems of spirit veneration, mechanisms of resistance and national pride, sacred languages informing personhood, and instruments for healing and well-being. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, history, religion, art, and linguistics.

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery's demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process-a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women. "Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States... The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today's Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States-especially the history of how slavery ended-is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change." -Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review

First published in 1992, Subject to Others considers the intersection between late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century British female writers and the colonial debate surrounding slavery and abolition. Beginning with an overview that sets the discussion in context, Moira Ferguson then chronicles writings by Anglo-Saxon women and one African-Caribbean ex-slave woman, from between 1670 and 1834, on the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves. Through studying the writings of around thirty women in total, Ferguson concludes that white British women, as a result of their class position, religious affiliation and evolving conceptions of sexual difference, constructed a colonial discourse about Africans in general and slaves in particular. Crucially, the feminist propensity to align with anti-slavery activism helped to secure the political self-liberation of white British women. A fascinating and detailed text, this volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students researching colonial British female writers, early feminist discourse, and the anti-slavery debate.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 'Alex Renton has done Britain a favour and written a brutally honest book about his family's involvement with slavery. Blood Legacy could change our frequently defensive national conversation about slavery/race' Sathnam Sanghera 'Utterly gripped - An incredible book. Alex's work is my book in practice' Emma Dabiri Through the story of his own family's history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. When British Caribbean slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The descendants of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today. A group of Caribbean countries is calling on ten European nations to discuss the payment of trillions of dollars for the damage done by transatlantic slavery and its continuing legacy. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter and other activist groups are causing increasing numbers of white people to reflect on how this history of abuse and exploitation has benefited them. Blood Legacy explores what inheritance - political, economic, moral and spiritual - has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved. He also asks, crucially, how the former - himself among them - can begin to make reparations for the past.

The year 2007 marked the bicentenary of the Act abolishing British participation in the slave trade. Representing Enslavement and Abolition on Museums- which uniquely draws together contributions from academic commentators, museum professionals, community activists and artists who had an involvement with the bicentenary - reflects on the complexity and difficulty of museums' experiences in presenting and interpreting the histories of slavery and abolition, and places these experiences in the broader context of debates over the bicentenary's significance and the lessons to be learnt from it. The history of Britain's role in transatlantic slavery officially become part of the National Curriculum in the UK in 2009; with the bicentenary of 2007, this marks the start of increasing public engagement with what has largely been a 'hidden' history. The book aims to not only critically review and assess the impact of the bicentenary, but also to identify practical issues that public historians, consultants, museum practitioners, heritage professionals and policy makers can draw upon in developing responses, both to the increasing recognition of Britain's history of African enslavement and controversial and traumatic histories more generally.

Winner of the Mark Lynton Prize in History-the story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history "A rich, roiling history that Thomas recounts with eloquence and skill. . . . The very existence of freedom suits assumed that slavery could only be circumscribed and local; what Thomas shows in his illuminating book is how this view was eventually turned upside down in decisions like Dred Scott. 'Freedom was local,' Thomas writes. 'Slavery was national.'"-Jennifer Szalai, New York Times "Gripping. . . . Profound and prodigiously researched."-Alison L. LaCroix, Washington Post For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation's capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.

During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants, laborers, and cottagers.

Eighteenth-century Britain was the world's leading centre for the slave trade. Profits soared and fortunes were made, but in 1788 things began to change. Bury The Chains tells the remarkable story of the men who sought to end slavery and brought the issue to the heart of British political life. 'Hochschild's marvellous book is a timely reminder of what a small group of determined people, with right on their side, can achieve. Carefully researched and elegantly written, with a pacy narrative that ranges from the coffee houses of London to the back-breaking sugar plantations of the West Indies, it charts the unlikely success of the first international human rights movement' Saul David, Literary Review 'Hochschild is such a gifted researcher and story-teller that he never fails to hold the reader's attention. . . For all its terrible theme, Hochschild's book is not in the least depressing, because it is suffused with admiration for the courage and enlightenment of the men and women who crusaded against this evil, and finally prevailed' Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph 'Thought-provoking, absorbing and well-written' Brendan Simms, Sunday Times 'Stirring and unforgettable' Economist