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Dark Work - The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (Paperback)
Loot Price: R601
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Dark Work - The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (Paperback)
Series: Early American Places
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave
trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written
expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early
American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode
Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained
plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this
business so important. During the colonial period trade with West
Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key
ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent
of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode
Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the
leading producers of "negro cloth," a coarse wool-cotton material
made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South.
Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business,
organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the
few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode
Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of
slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to
circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed
back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their
freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of
slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of
the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of
slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction-that
North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford
such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.
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