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Empire of Brutality - Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World
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Empire of Brutality - Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World
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In the early modern British Atlantic world, the comparison of
enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses,
was a common device used by enslavers to dehumanize and otherwise
reduce the existence of the enslaved. Letters, memoirs, and
philosophical treatises of the enslaved and formerly enslaved bear
testament to the methods used to dehumanize them. In Empire of
Brutality, Christopher Michael Blakley explores how material
relationships between enslaved people and animals bolstered the
intellectual dehumanization of the enslaved. By reconsidering
dehumanization in the light of human–animal relations, Blakley
offers new insights into the horrific institution later challenged
by Black intellectuals in multiple ways. Using the correspondence
of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific
papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals,
and diaries kept by slaveholders, Blakley describes human–animal
networks spanning from Britain's slave castles and outposts
throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and
American Southeast. They combine approaches from environmental
history, history of science, and philosophy to examine slavery from
the ground up and from the perspectives of the enslaved. Blakley's
work reveals how African captives who became commodified through
exchanges of cowry sea snails between slavers in the Bight of Benin
later went on to collect zoological specimens in Barbados and
Virginia for institutions such as the Royal Society. On
plantations, where enslaved people labored alongside cattle,
donkeys, horses, and other animals to make the agricultural
fortunes of slaveholders, Blakley shows how the enslaved resisted
these human–animal pairings by stealing animals for their own
purposes--such as fugitives who escaped their slaveholder's grasp
by riding stolen horses. Because of experiences like these, writers
and thinkers of African descent who survived slavery later attacked
the institution in public as fundamentally dehumanizing, one that
corrupted the humanity of both slaveholders and the enslaved.
General
Imprint: |
Louisiana State University Press
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Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
August 2023 |
Authors: |
Christopher Michael Blakley
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Dimensions: |
229 x 152mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
256 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8071-7886-7 |
Categories: |
Books
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LSN: |
0-8071-7886-1 |
Barcode: |
9780807178867 |
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