Displays

How should we as Britons remember transatlantic slavery? How has slavery been remembered in the past? 'Chords of freedom' sets out to answer these questions and, in doing so, traces the way in which British transatlantic slavery has been absorbed into the nation's collective memory. By combining two current historiographical preoccupations - the construction of public memory and British transatlantic slavery - this fascinating book focuses on the way in which the British traditionally have been taught to view transatlantic slavery through the moral triumph of abolition. The author traces the construction of this national history through a number of case studies, including visual images, literary memorials (the competing accounts of the anti-slavery movement produced by Thomas Clarkson and Robert and Samuel Wilberforce), monument-memorials, galleries and museums, and commemorative rituals from the nineteenth century to the present day. A separate chapter also considers how Britain's example in abolishing first the slave trade (1807) and then colonial slavery (1833-34) impacted on the rituals of the American anti-slavery movement, and served as a convenient symbol of the potential of freedom in the British West Indies.'Chords of freedom' offers valuable new insights into the way in which a 'culture of abolition' took root in Britain, and how our views of transatlantic slavery and figures like William Wilberforce have been revised and amended to reflect the changing demands of a series of 'present days'. Its cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to a broad spectrum of specialists, as well as to undergraduates and postgraduates.

Bringing together more than 400 poems and poetic excerpts on slavery by writers both famous and unknown, this landmark anthology charts the emergence of slavery in the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world. "The most definitive collection of anti-slavery sentiment in verse yet compiled, essential reading for historians and literary critics alike. . . . A major contribution."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University "An astounding literary and editorial achievement."--David Blight, Yale University "Comprehensive. . . . The illuminating introduction . . . sets forth, economically and helpfully, the larger historical context (material, religious, legal, political) that gave rise to these poems. . . . (Basker's) list of bibliographical sources . . . makes the book of permanent scholarly value. . . . The historical interest [of Amazing Grace] is exceptional."--Helen Vendler, New Republic "Monumental in scope, vision, and editorial skill."--Choice "A big, moving book, vital reading for any student of the subject."--Hugo Worthy, Antiquarian Book Review "Amazing Grace adds incomparably rich sources to our understanding of the cultural changes in the Anglo-American world that made antislavery movements both possible and eventually effective."--David Brion Davis, Yale University

A history of the rise and abolition of slavery in the Americas covers such topics as the plantation revolution of the seventeenth century, the emergence of anti-slavery thought, and the contributions of such figures as Thomas Paine and Frederick Douglass.
Zones of slave-based development and of slave resistance, c. 1770 -- Slavery and the West -- Empires and plantations. The Spanish conquest : destruction, enslavement, and the Baroque ; Mercantile empire and the slave plantation : Brazil leads, the Dutch, English, and French refine the formula ; Plantation hierarchy, social order, and the Atlantic system -- The subversive boom. Slavery and industrialization ; Black aspirations and the 'Picaresque Proletariat' ; The planters back colonial revolt ; From the critique of slavery to the abolitionist movement -- The Haitian pivot. Haitians claim the rights of man ; Results and prospects I : slave-trade abolition ; Results and prospects II : Latin America -- The age of abolition. Abolitionism advances, but slavery is resurgent ; Anti-slavery : its scope, character and appeal ; The keys to emancipation ; The spiral path : ambiguous victories, contested legacies.

Europeans, Africans, and American Indians practiced slavery long before the first purchase of a captive African by a white land-owner in the American colonies; that, however, is the image of slavery most prevalent in the minds of Americans today. This Very Short Introduction begins with the Portuguese capture of Africans in the 1400s and traces the development of American slavery until its abolition following the Civil War. Historian Heather Andrea Williams draws upon the rich recent scholarship of numerous highly-regarded academics as well as an analysis of primary documents to explore the history of slavery and its effects on the American colonies and later the United States of America. Williams examines legislation that differentiated American Indians and Africans from Europeans as the ideology of white supremacy flourished and became an ingrained feature of the society. These laws reflected the contradiction of America's moral and philosophical ideology that valorized freedom on one hand and justified the enslavement of a population deemed inferior on another. She explores the tense and often violent relationships between the enslaved and the enslavers, and between abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates as those who benefited from the institution fought to maintain and exert their power. Williams is attentive to the daily labors that enslaved people performed, reminding readers that slavery was a system of forced labor with economic benefits that produced wealth for a new nation, all the while leaving an indelible mark on its history. About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.

This collection of essays explores the ways that memories of African slavery and the slave trade persist into the present, as well as the effect those memories have in shaping political, social, economic, and religious behavior today. The articles take a range of approaches: several examine the stigma that slave origins engender; one pairs lamentations about slave raiders with songs that celebrate a community's victory over a major predator; another looks at the impact of slavery through the lens of tales told by children. One author examines the techniques used by descendants of slave traders and slave owners to overcome their guilt, such as worshiping the spirits of those enslaved by their ancestors, while another shows how democratic politics has made it possible for descendants of slaves to liberate themselves from their inferior social status. The authors use a variety of sources -- interviews, proverbs, songs, religious art, newspaper articles, and children's stories -- to illuminate not only how people remember the past but also how they struggle to liberate themselves from it.

Written with Bernardine Evaristo's customary wit and zeal, 'Blonde Roots' is at once a free-wheeling comic fantasy, a moving family saga and a testament to the strength of the human spirit.

Written by distinguished Scottish historian William L. Mathieson, this book is a study of British slavery and a narrative of the movement for its abolition, which began in 1823, succeeded partially in 1833, when slavery was said to have been abolished, and completely in 1838.

British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823-1838 focuses on slavery in the West Indian colonies—particularly British Guiana and British Honduras—which at the point of the book’s first publication in 1926 had not yet been covered comprehensively, as greater interest had been taken in American than in British slavery, “for it was far more extensive, lasted some thirty years longer, and culminated in a great civil war.”

Presenting a comprehensive and comparative account of the slave trade within the nations and colonial systems of the Americas the essays in this volume focus on the slave trades within Brazil, the West Indies and the Southern States of the United States after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade.

This 2007 book is an introductory history of racial slavery in the Americas. Brazil and Cuba were among the first colonial societies to establish slavery in the early sixteenth century. Approximately a century later British colonial Virginia was founded, and slavery became an integral part of local culture and society. In all three nations, slavery spread to nearly every region, and in many areas it was the principal labor system utilized by rural and urban elites. Yet long after it had been abolished elsewhere in the Americas, slavery stubbornly persisted in the three nations. It took a destructive Civil War in the United States to bring an end to racial slavery in the southern states in 1865. In 1866 slavery was officially ended in Cuba, and in 1888 Brazil finally abolished this dreadful institution, and legalized slavery in the Americas came to an end.

Highlights variations in representations of West Indian slavery by drawing on a range of testimonies, especially those of the enslaved themselves. This work focuses on representations based principally on first-hand experience or observation of slavery in the then British West Indies.

In the 'heroic' era of photojournalism a single image could define the greatest human dramas and catastrophes. Today, digital manipulation has undermined photography's claim to veracity; video is available on everyone's mobile; and artists and amateurs have taken over the territory of intimate revelation. What authority does documentary photography retain as a record of events and source of insight into the historical realities of the world? Featuring newly commissioned photo-essays by 8 internationally renowned Magnum photographers on diverse subjects including child labour in Bangladesh, sex slavery from Ukraine to Western Europe, and South Korean former sex slaves for Japanese troops during World War II. The plates will be accompanied by an introduction and commentaries on each section by the world's leading authority on contemporary slavery, Professor Kevin Bales, President of the US-based organisation Free the Slaves. Published to accompany the touring exhibition opening at the Southbank Centre, London, 26 September - 9 November 2008, and touring in 2009 to The Gallery, Peninsula Arts, University of Plymouth; University of Northumbria, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne; Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; and Aberystwyuth Arts Centre.

Inspired by a true story, this suspenseful and deeply moving book chronicles an incident of courage and rebellion that took place aboard a disease-riddled slave ship returning from Africa. The vessel is named Zong, and when illness threatens to infect all on board, the ship's captain orders his crew to seize the sick men, women, and children and thow them into the sea. But one female slave, Mintah, survives drowning and secretly climbs back onto the ship. From her hiding place, she attempts to rouse the remaining captives to rebel against the killings, becoming a dangerous force on the ship. Powerful and poetic, Feeding the Ghosts is an unforgettable testimony to the struggle against oblivion and a reminder of history overlooked and truth distorted.

Some works have examined the first and temporary abolition of French colonial slavery during the French Revolutionary era, but relatively little is known about the second French abolitionist movement that culminated in the freeing of a quarter of a million slaves in 1848. This book fills the huge gap in existing historiography by providing a detailed study of French anti-slavery forces during this period, explaining why France abolished colonial slavery fifteen years later than Britain but fifteen years before emancipation in the United States. It traces the largely political struggle of a cautious, elitist group of humanitarians against a well-organized colonial lobby and a largely indifferent July Monarchy government. The few radical, determined abolitionists, like the black Cyrille Bissette, were too marginal to move French public opinion and bring about abolition until the Revolution of 1848 brought the Second Republic to power.

This collection examines the effects of slavery and emancipation on race, class and gender in societies of the American South, the Caribbean, Latin America and West Africa. The contributors discuss what slavery has to teach us about patterns of adjustment and change, black identity and the extent to which enslaved peoples succeeded in creating a dynamic world of interaction between the Americas. They examine how emancipation was defined, how it affected attitudes towards slavery, patterns of labour usage and relationships between workers as well as between workers and their former owners.

Set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed, this novel follows the life of July, a slave girl, who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity.
You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed. July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity and it is her life that is the subject of this tale. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831, and she was also present when slavery was declared no more. My son says I must convey how the story tells also of July's mama Kitty, of the negroes that worked the plantation land, of Caroline Mortimer the white woman who owned the plantation and many more persons besides -- far too many for me to list here. But what befalls them all is carefully chronicled upon these pages for you to peruse. Perhaps, my son suggests, I might write that it is a thrilling journey through that time in the company of people who lived it. All this he wishes me to pen so the reader can decide if this is a book they might care to consider. Cha, I tell my son, what fuss-fuss. Come, let them just read it for themselves.

The two plots of this tragicomedy concern a black prince sold into slavery and two white women who are husband-hunting in Surinam. Through a discussion of the status of women in the period and of attitudes towards slavery, the editors demonstrated Southerne's complex attempt to explore a parallel between the conditions of slaves and women in contemporary society. They also consider the play in terms of Southerne's high Tory politics and in its own rights as effective drama. Based on a collection of seven editions published within Southerne's life-time, this modern edition includes a section on stage history, with an account of revisions and adaptations, and a detailed comparison between the play and its source in Aphra Behn's novella of the same name.

A landmark history -- the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early 20th century Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shatteringThe Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of eighteenth-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos.     Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light too on Indian enslavement of other Indians -- as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest.   The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history.  For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African-American slavery.  It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see.  

Philida is the mother of four children by Francois Brink, the son of her master. The year is 1832 and the Cape is rife with rumours about the liberation of the slaves. Philida decides to risk her whole life by lodging a complaint against Francois, who has reneged on his promise to set her free.

Representing Slavery explores the extensive collections of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, highlighting the unique insights they provide into the histories and legacies of slavery, the slave trade and abolition from the mid-16th until the early 20th centuries. Ten specially commissioned essays set the collections in their historical context, demonstrating the scale and brutality of slavery, the nature and extent of African resistance, and the widespread efforts to achieve abolition and emancipation.

This is the extraordinary account of Alex Haley's own 12 year search for his family's origins. Tracing his ancestry through six generations he discovered a 16 year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past.

The Routledge History of Slavery is a landmark publication that provides an overview of the main themes surrounding the history of slavery from ancient Greece to the present day. Taking stock of the field of Slave Studies, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades of study in this crucial field. Offering an unusual, transnational history of slavery, the chapters have all been specially commissioned for the collection. The volume begins by delineating the global nature of the institution of slavery, examining slavery in different parts of the world and over time. Topics covered here include slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean World, as well as the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In Part Two, the chapters explore different themes that define slavery such as slave culture, the slave economy, slave resistance and the planter class, as well as areas of life affected by slavery, such as family and work. The final part goes on to study changes and continuities over time, looking at areas such as abolition, the aftermath of emancipation and commemoration. The volume concludes with a chapter on modern slavery. Including essays on all the key topics and issues, this important collection from a leading international group of scholars presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of the field. It will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of slavery.

This book is a transnational and comparative study examining the processes that led to the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the second half of the twentieth century. Araujo explores numerous kinds of initiatives such as monuments, memorials, and museums as well as heritage sites. By connecting different projects developed in various countries and urban centers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the last two decades, the author retraces the various stages of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery including the enslavement in Africa, the process of confinement in slave depots, the Middle Passage, the arrival in the Americas, the daily life of forced labor, until the fight for emancipation and the abolition of slavery. Relying on a multitude of examples from the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, the book discusses how different groups and social actors have competed to occupy the public arena by associating the slave past with other human atrocities, especially the Holocaust. Araujo explores how the populations of African descent, white elites, and national governments, very often carrying particular political agendas, appropriated the slave past by fighting to make it visible or conceal it in the public space of former slave societies.

First published in 1976, work is a masterful analysis of the dynamics of slave labor in the economic growth of early-19th-century Jamaica. Discusses various characteristics of slave and free-colored population including mortality, birth rates, manumission, distribution, and structure, as well as jobs performed on island as a whole. Contains excellent statistical tables and new introduction by author.  -Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58

This book is a cross-cultural examination of slavery. It draws material from the many regions, and widely separated historical periods, in which slavery has existed - ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, the Muslim societies of the Middle East and Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. With such a wide geographic and chronological scope, Slavery will provoke historians and sociologists to make new connections and see old problems in a fresh light. Turley analyses three key themes in the history of slavery: the social and economic importance of slavery within societies, the experience of slavery by both the slaves and those who control them, and the means by which slavery was reproduced and maintained in different societies. Employing this thematic approach, Turley acknowledges the historical diversity of slavery and develops two models of slave societies - those in which slavery was primarily a domestic institution (societies with slaves) and in those in which it was the mode of production on which the dominant group depended for its position (slave societies). The book also explains how slavery was maintained by discussing the role of race, ethnicity and religious differences in the functioning of slave systems. Turley completes this wide-ranging analysis of slavery by examining emancipation, showing that both the early modern expansion of slavery and its ending were paradoxically connected to different phases of European imperialism.

This is the first book to explore national representations of slavery in an international comparative perspective. Contributions span a wide geographical range, covering Europe, North America, West and South Africa, the Indian Ocean and Asia.

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time. Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European--mainly British--life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks, Slavery and the Culture of Taste sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

This book examines the gradual decline of slavery in Northern Nigeria during the first forty years of colonial rule. At the time of the British conquest, the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in modern history. The authors have written a thoughtful and provocative book which raises doubts over the moral legitimacy of both the Sokoto Caliphate and the colonial state. They chart the development of British colonial policy towards resolving the dilemma of slavery and how to end it.

The contributions of the black population to the history and economic development of Puerto Rico have long been distorted and underplayed, Luis A. Figueroa contends. Focusing on the southeastern coastal region of Guayama, one of Puerto Rico's three leading centers of sugarcane agriculture, Figueroa examines the transition from slavery and slave labor to freedom and free labor after the 1873 abolition of slavery in colonial Puerto Rico. He corrects misconceptions about how ex-slaves went about building their lives and livelihoods after emancipation and debunks standing myths about race relations in Puerto Rico. Historians have assumed that after emancipation in Puerto Rico, as in other parts of the Caribbean and the U.S. South, former slaves acquired some land of their own and became subsistence farmers. Figueroa finds that in Puerto Rico, however, this was not an option because both capital and land available for sale to the Afro-Puerto Rican population were scarce. Paying particular attention to class, gender, and race, his account of how these libertos joined the labor market profoundly revises our understanding of the emancipation process and the evolution of the working class in Puerto Rico.

In this new and original interpretation of the barbaric world of slavery and of its historic end in April 1807, the parallel lives of three individuals caught up in the enterprise of human enslavement--a trader, an owner, and a slave--are examined. John Newton (1725-1807), best known as the author of Amazing Grace, was a slave captain who marshaled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame and contrition. Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) lived his life in a remote corner of western Jamaica and his unique diary provides some of the most revealing images of a slave owner’s life in the most valuable of all British slave colonies. Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) was practically unknown 30 years ago, but is now an iconic figure in black history and his experience as a slave speaks out for lives of millions who went unrecorded. All three men were contemporaries; they even came close to each other at different points of the Atlantic compass. But what held them together, in its destructive gravitational pull, was the Atlantic slave system.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all the slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, and they plot their escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her - but they manage to find a station and head north. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is not a metaphor - a secret network of tracks and tunnels has been built beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, where both find work in a city that at first seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens - and Ridgeway, the relentless slave-catcher sent to find her, arrives in town. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing journey, state-by-state, seeking true freedom. Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in states in the pre-Civil War era. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage, and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

This book challenges conventional wisdom regarding the political and economic motivations behind the final decision to abolish the British slave trade in 1807. Recent historians believe that this first blow against slavery was the result of social changes inside Britain and pay little attention to the important developments that took place inside the West Indian slave economy. David Beck Ryden's research illustrates that a faltering sugar economy after 1799 tipped the scales in favor of the abolitionist argument and helped secure the passage of abolition. Ryden examines the economic arguments against slavery and the slave trade that were employed in the writings of Britain's most important abolitionists. Using a wide range of economic and business data, this study deconstructs the assertions made by both abolitionists and antiabolitionists regarding slave management, the imperial economy, and abolition.

A timely and original look at the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European art Gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill, and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity. "Being there," indeed, became significant not only because of the empirical opportunities to document slave life it afforded but also because the imagery of the eyewitness was more credible than sketches and paintings created by the "armchair traveler" at home. Full of original insights that cast a new light on these highly charged images, this volume reconsiders how slavery was depicted within a historical context in which truth was a deeply contested subject. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The abolitions of slavery in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue in 1793 and in revolutionary France in 1794 were the first dramatic blows against an institution that had shaped the Atlantic world for three centuries and affected the lives of millions of people. Based on extensive archival research, You Are All Free provides the first complete account of the dramatic events that led to these epochal decrees, and also to the destruction of Cap Français, the richest city in the French Caribbean, and to the first refugee crisis in the United States. Taking issue with earlier accounts that claim that Saint-Domingue's slaves freed themselves, or that French revolutionaries abolished slavery as part of a general campaign for universal human rights, the book shows that abolition was the result of complex and often paradoxical political struggles on both sides of the Atlantic that have frequently been misunderstood by earlier scholars.