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What was the cultural legacy of enslaved Africans in the American South, and how has that legacy been handed through generations?For author Deirdre Foreman, this question is a very personal one: in this book, she explores the cultural legacy of enslaved Africans in the American South through an ethno-autobiographical reflection on her own African-American identity and family heritage. Through storytelling and personal narratives, the author describes her family's cultural practices and how they are directly rooted in those of the enslaved Africans on the southern plantations. Known as “cultural survivors,” enslaved Africans established cultural customs and norms out of resistance to the control of white slaveholders to maintain their independence and pride.Ideal reading for students of Black studies, African American studies, Africana studies, and related courses, this autoethnography humanizes and personalizes concepts that are crucial to the understanding of Black culture and Black history.

The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver's Story, Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these men—and sometimes women—at the heart of the plantation world. What, Browne asks, did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of one's fellow enslaved laborers?In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism, Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas, drivers were at the center of enslaved people's working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and confronted the resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers, aiming to maintain a position that helped them survive in a world where enslaved people were treated as disposable. Drivers also protected the people they supervised, negotiating workloads and customary rights to essentials like food and rest with white authorities. Within the slave community, drivers helped other enslaved people create a sense of belonging, as husbands and fathers, as Big Men, and as leaders of diasporic African “nations.” Sometimes, drivers even organized rebellions, sabotaging the very system they were appointed to support.Compelling and original, The Driver's Story enriches our understanding of the never-ending war between enslavers and enslaved laborers by focusing on its front line. It also brings us face-to-face with the horror of capitalist labor exploitation.

Would there have been a Frederick Douglass if it were not for Betsy Bailey, the grandmother who raised him? Would Harriet Jacobs have written her renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, if her grandmother, a free black woman named Molly Horniblow, had not enabled Jacobs'escape from slavery?In Black Elders, Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction.Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, including slave narratives, plantation records, letters, diaries, meeting minutes, and state and federal archives, Knight also examines how blacks and whites, men and women, the young and the old developed competing ideas about age and aging, differences that shaped social relations in coastal West and West Central Africa, the Atlantic and domestic slave trades, colonial and antebellum Southern slave societies, and emancipation in the North and South.Black Elders offers a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged around their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom.

El ascenso del capitalismo estadounidense se presentó al mundo bajo la bandera de la libertad, la democracia y la prosperidad. No obstante, las prácticas del «América first», que incluían genocidios, explotación laboral y saqueo bélico de bienes ajenos, no desaparecieron, sino que fueron modernizadas. La Primera Guerra Mundial se convirtió en el primer gran negocio global, en torno al cual los aliados fueron sometidos. Después de la guerra, las corporaciones estadounidenses invirtieron en Europa Occidental. Mussolini fue inundado de créditos. Empresas estadounidenses suministraron armamento a Franco y equiparon a la Wehrmacht alemana para una guerra contra «Rusia». El nuevo banco central liderado por EE. UU. en Suiza blanqueó oro saqueado por los nazis. Se ignoró la persecución de los judíos. Con el lanzamiento de dos bombas atómicas sobre la población civil, comenzaron nuevas guerras contra nuevos enemigos, en sistemática violación del derecho internacional. Werner Rügemer (1941), Dr. en Filosofía, publicista e intervencionista político.Desde los años 1980, ha publicado sobre la decadencia político-moral de la sociedad estadounidense, el extremo contraste entre ricos y pobres, la interconexión entre el ejército, los servicios de inteligencia y la alta tecnología, así como la destrucción ambiental y los daños a la salud de los trabajadores migrantes en los sectores de salarios más bajos.

Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery's Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism, and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.

Uncovering a little-known system of bound labor in the post-Reconstruction South After the constitutional end to slavery in the United States, southern white landowners replaced labor by enslaved people with systems of bound labor in which people worked to pay off debts or legal fines. Through the story of a labor camp in Georgia, Thomas Aiello takes a close look at the Deep South's dependence on debt peonage and convict leasing systems during the post-Reconstruction era and draws attention to a form of bound labor that has not been discussed by scholars of racialized incarceration. At the center of this study is the Kinderlou labor camp, which was owned by the prominent white McRee family of Valdosta. In south Georgia and north Florida, debt peonage and felony convict leasing operated separately from an often overlooked third system: misdemeanor convict leasing. This system was largely unregulated by prison officials, leading to abuses of persons with convictions working in the turpentine industry and the kidnapping of many Black residents of the area who had never been charged with crimes. Unlike other work camps, Kinderlou deployed all three systems to bolster its workforce, making it a unique manifestation of the region's exploitative labor operations. Through deep archival research, Aiello uncovers injustices that drove local individuals who were imprisoned to work with federal prosecutors to seek relief and publicize the abuses they saw and experienced. The nexus of racism, work, and incarceration seen at Kinderlou is shown here to have been a form of slavery a half century after slavery's official “end.” It also casts a long shadow on today's carceral system. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A concise, reasoned, practical case for why Britain should pay reparations for historic wrongs to present Caribbean inhabitants. Britain owes reparations to the Caribbean. The exploitation of generations of those trafficked from Africa, or born into enslavement, to work the immensely profitable sugars plantations, enriched both British individuals and the British nation. Colonialism, even after emancipation, perpetuated the exploitation. The Caribbean still suffers, and Britain still benefits, from these historic wrongs. There are some fairly standard objections to reparations --'slavery ended a long time ago';'Britain should be celebrating its role in abolishing slavery';'slavery was legal back then and we shouldn't judge the past by the standards of the present';'you shouldn't visit the sins of the fathers on the sons'; and so on. And there is a sense that the practical problems of who should pay what to whom are immensely difficult. Michael Banner carefully considers and answers these objections. He argues that reparations are not about punishment, but about the restoration of wrongful gains. In Reparations Now! he makes a specific and practical proposal regarding reparations, picking up on the programme suggested by Caribbean countries (through CARICOM), and taking as a starting point the nearly £20 million paid as compensation by the British government at abolition, not to those who had suffered slavery, but to those who lost enslaved labourers. Reparations Now! discusses what can be done, here and now, by individuals and institutions, to advance the case for reparations between national governments.

A look at the origins of British abolitionism as a problem of eighteenth-century science, as well as one of economics and humanitarian sensibilities How did late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as unnatural, a “dread perversion” of nature? Focusing on slavery in the Americas, and the Caribbean in particular, alongside travelers'accounts of West Africa, Brycchan Carey shows that before the mid-eighteenth century, natural histories were a primary source of information about slavery for British and colonial readers. These natural histories were often ambivalent toward slavery, but they increasingly adopted a proslavery stance to accommodate the needs of planters by representing slavery as a “natural” phenomenon. From the mid-eighteenth century, abolitionists adapted the natural history form to their own writings, and many naturalists became associated with the antislavery movement. Carey draws on descriptions of slavery and the slave trade created by naturalists and other travelers with an interest in natural history, including Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, Griffith Hughes, Samuel Martin, and James Grainger. These environmental writings were used by abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano to build a compelling case that slavery was unnatural, a case that was popularized by abolitionist poets such as Thomas Day, Edward Rushton, Hannah More, and William Cowper.

What is the nature of slavery as practiced and at times reintroduced over the past two centuries in the Middle East and North Africa? In spite of the rich regional diversity of the areas studied – from Morocco to the Indian Ocean to Iran – this anthology demonstrates clear commonalities across the super-region. These include the regulation of slavery by Islam and local traditions, the absence of a rigid racial hierarchy as in North American slavery, the management of the sexuality and reproductive capacity of female slaves, and views on identity and heritage among descendants of slaves. Authors also examine the economic and theological underpinnings of contemporary slavery and human trafficking.The book is among the first to focus on slavery across the Islamic world from the 19th century to the present – a period constituting the endgame of institutionalized slavery in the region but also the persistence of forms of de facto enslavement. Each chapter scrutinizes from a different vantage point – institutions, economics, the abolitionist movement, literature, folklore, and the moving image – creating a multi-dimensional picture of the phenomenon. The authors have mined government archives and statistics, memoirs, interviews, photographs, drawings, songs, cinema and television. Not only are Arabic, Persian and Turkish sources leveraged, but a variety of materials in minor and endangered languages, such as Soqotri, Balochi and Sorani Kurdish, in addition to European languages.

This book examines the impact of the African slave trade and colonialism on political, civil, economic, social, and environmental human rights. Using multiple combined data sets, the book demonstrates that many contemporary human rights issues stem from the impact of the African slave trade and subsequent colonialism as well as the disruption of economic and political development in colonies.Unlike other books concerning human rights, this book views contemporary human rights issues from both historical and sociological vantage points. This important book will be of interest to students studying in courses covering human rights, Africa and Africana studies and history, comparative ethnic studies, historical sociology, and global studies of the African slave trade.

In late November of 1858 two enslaved Black women—Celia Grayson, age twenty-two, and Eliza Grayson, age twenty—escaped the Stephen F. Nuckolls household in southeastern Nebraska. John Williamson, a man of African American and Cherokee descent from Iowa, guided them through the dark to the Missouri River, where they boarded a skiff and crossed the icy waters, heading for their first stop on the Underground Railroad at Civil Bend, Iowa. In Journey to Freedom Gail Shaffer Blankenau provides the first detailed history of Black enslavement in Nebraska Territory and the escape of these two enslaved Black women from Nebraska City. Poised on the “frontier,” the Graysons'escape demonstrated that unique opportunities beckoned at the confluence of Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas, and their actions challenged slavery's tentative expansion into the West and its eventual demise in an era of territorial fluidity. Their escape and the violence that followed prompted considerable debate across the country and led to the Nebraska legislature's move to prohibit slavery. Drawing on multiple collections, records, and slave narratives, Journey to Freedom sheds light on the Graysons'courage and agency as they became high-profile figures in the national debate between proslavery and antislavery factions in the antebellum period.

This engaging history presents the extraordinary lives of Patty Cannon, Anna Ella Carroll, and Harriet Tubman, three'dangerous'women who grew up in early-nineteenth-century Maryland and were vigorously enmeshed in the social and political maelstrom of antebellum America. The'monstrous'Patty Cannon was a reputed thief, murderer, and leader of a ruthless gang who kidnapped free blacks and sold them back into slavery, whereas Miss Anna Ella Carroll, a relatively genteel unmarried slaveholder, foisted herself into state and national politics by exerting influence on legislators and conspiring with Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks to keep Maryland in the Union when many state legislators clamored to join the Confederacy. And, of course, Harriet Tubman--slave rescuer, abolitionist, and later women's suffragist--was both hailed as'the Moses of her people'and hunted as an outlaw with a price on her head worth at least ten thousand dollars. All three women lived for a time in close proximity on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, an isolated region that thrived on tobacco and then lost it, procured slaves and then lost them, and produced strong-minded women and then condemned them. Though they never actually met, and their backgrounds and beliefs differed drastically, these women's lives converged through their active experiences of the conflict over slavery in Maryland and beyond, the uncertainties of economic transformation, the struggles in the legal foundation of slavery and, most of all, the growing dispute in gender relations in America. Throughout this book, Carole C. Marks gleans historical fact and sociological insight from the persistent myths and exaggerations that color the women's legacies, and she investigates the common roots and motivations of three remarkable figures who bucked the era's expectations for women. She also considers how each woman's public identity reflected changing ideas of domesticity and the public sphere, spirituality, and legal rights and limitations. Cannon, Carroll, and Tubman, each in her own way, passionately fought for the future of Maryland and the United States, and from these unique vantage points, Moses and the Monster and Miss Anne portrays the intersecting and conflicting forces of race, economics, and gender that threatened to rend a nation apart.

An incomparably rich source of period information, the second volume of The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a representative and extraordinary sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to county courts between the American Revolution and Civil War. These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. The collection records with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics and legal restrictions that shaped southern society.

In many popular depictions of Black resistance to slavery, stereotypes around victimization and the heroic efforts of a small number of individuals abound. These ideas ignore the powers of ordinary families and obscure the systematic working of racism. Tending to the Past: Selfhood and Culture in Children's Narratives about Slavery and Freedom examines Black-authored historical novels and films for children that counter this distortion and depict creative means by which ordinary African Americans survived slavery and racism in early America. Tending to the Past argues that this important, understudied historical writing—freedom narratives—calls on young readers to be active, critical thinkers about the past and its legacies within the present. The book examines how narratives by children's book authors, such as Joyce Hansen, Julius Lester, Marilyn Nelson, and Patricia McKissack, and the filmmakers Charles Burnett and Zeinabu irene Davis, were influenced by Black cultural imperatives, such as the Black Arts Movement, to foster an engaged, culturally aware public. Through careful analysis of this rich body of work, Tending to the Past thus contributes to ongoing efforts to construct a history of Black children's literature and film attuned to its range, specificity, and depths. Tending to the Past provides illuminating interpretations that will help scholars and educators see the significance of the freedom narratives'reconstructions in a neoliberal era, a time of shrinking opportunities for many African Americans. It offers models for understanding the powers and continuing relevance of the Black child's creative agency and the Black cultural practices that have fostered it.

Deeply researched and scrupulously even-handed, this work provides readers with a clear and accurate understanding of human trafficking and related issues related to socioeconomic inequality, human rights, and international law. In doing so, it exposes falsehoods, half-truths, and distortions about trafficking that have gained traction in America's political and cultural discourse. When warranted, it also confirms the veracity of other claims about the nature and infrastructure of trafficking networks and the harrowing experiences of women, men, and children trapped in those dehumanizing systems.Special areas of focus include chapters devoted to quantifying the scope and reach of human trafficking around the world; prosecution and prevention strategies; the experiences of trafficking survivors and the important role they play in anti-trafficking efforts; and the successes and failures of anti-trafficking initiatives carried out by governments and law enforcement agencies around the world.

'Tremendously impressive, the result of a lifetime of learning. Historical writing at its best.'—Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave ShipA history of 19th century slavery in the US, Brazil and Cuba from a critically acclaimed historian of slavery in the Americas The Reckoning offers the first rounded account of the rise and fall of the Second Slavery—largescale plantation slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, Cuba and the US South. Robin Blackburn shows how a fusion of industrial capitalism and transatlantic war and revolution turbo-charged racial oppression and the westwards expansion of the United States. Blackburn identifies the new territories, new victims and new battle cries of the Second Slavery. He emphasises the role of financial credit in the spread of plantation agriculture, traces the connections between slavery and the US Civil War, and asks why Brazil threw off Portuguese rule whereas Cuba became one of imperial Spain's final outposts. The Second Slavery faced a fearful reckoning in the 1860s and after when the supposedly invincible Slave Power was defied by extraordinary cross-class, international and interracial alliances. Blackburn narrates the abolitionists'difficult victory over the enslavers, while documenting the racial backlash which brought on Jim Crow and cheated the freedmen and freedwomen of the fruits of their struggle.

Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable, Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”. Ali Anooshahr here uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a'subaltern Mughal author'offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist'rise of the self'but as alienation.

The dramatic biography of a slaveship turned freedom-fighter—which brings new insights into Britain's involvement in the end of the trade in enslaved people In 1827 the Royal Navy purchased a Baltimore clipper and renamed her the Black Joke. Assigned to the Preventative Squadron, she patrolled the west coast of Africa and freed 3,692 captives from enslavement. Beloved by seafarers and celebrated by the public, the Black Joke would become the most famous weapon in the campaign for abolition. But in her previous life as the Henriqueta, the Black Joke had been a slave ship. Through the experiences of slavers and abolitionists, captives and crew, Stephen Taylor charts the vessel's extraordinary double life. As the Henriqueta she operated as an engine of atrocity, trafficking over 3,000 captives to plantations in Brazil. But subsequently manned by British seamen and Liberian Kru, the Black Joke became the scourge of Spanish and Brazilian slavers. She did so despite limited resources, neglect, and even obstruction by the authorities at home. Taylor offers a gripping account of the world of the transatlantic trade, through the eyes of its perpetrators—and those who sought its end.

Solomon Northup's 12 Years A Slave: A True Story is a memoir of gripping intensity that recounts his kidnapping and enslavement in 19th-century America. Northup's candid account of the unspeakable horrors he was made to endure during his 12 years in captivity provides a chilling look into the brutality and dehumanization of slavery. His narrative, which is both harrowing and inspirational, showcases the strong resilience of the human spirit in the face of injustice, leaving readers with a haunting understanding of the human cost of slavery. A true account of strength, survival, and resilience.?Offers a raw and authentic account of Solomon Northup's experiences with a genuine insight into the horrors of slavery.?Provides a valuable glimpse into the realities of American slavery.?The memoir presents Northup's unfiltered perspective- the full extent of the brutality he endured.?Prompts reflection and examination of the deep-rooted societal issues surrounding slavery.?A thought-provoking book that raises awareness of the lasting effects of such institutionalized injustice.

A bold rereading of Augustinian thought for a world still haunted by slavery Over the last two decades, scholars have made a striking return to the resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship, virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not sufficiently attended to Augustine's embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder. To confront a racialized world, the modern Augustinian tradition of political thought must reckon with its own entanglements with the afterlife of the white Christian master. Drawing Augustine's politics and the resources of modern Black thought into extended dialogue, Matthew Elia develops a critical analysis of the enduring problem of the Christian master, even as he presses toward an alternative interpretation of key concepts of ethical life—agency, virtue, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery. Amid democratic crises and racial injustice on multiple fronts, the book breathes fresh life into conversations on religion and the public square by showing how ancient and contemporary sources at once clash and converge in surprising ways. It imaginatively carves a path forward for the enduring humanities inquiry into the nature of our common life and the perennial problem of social and political domination.

Keith M. Finley's From Slavery to Segregation explores the key features shaping southern politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as explained in the South's defense of its racial systems. It treats slavery and segregation as part of the same whole rather than as discrete institutions rooted in different periods. In the process, the book uncovers the deep historical origins of the region's states'rights philosophy and the unfortunate persistence of a culture dominated by calls for white supremacy. While highlighting the broad overview of southern racial and political thought, Finley underscores the larger American struggle with racial injustice, which, although most pronounced in the South, afflicted the entire nation. The South's defense of chattel slavery became a natural model for the region's defense of segregation during the Jim Crow era. Through a comparative analysis of the rhetoric employed in the justification of both racial institutions, Finley reveals elements of continuity and change in the region's identity. Ultimately, he shows how the history of the twentieth-century South is irreparably linked to the century before it. For instance, one cannot understand the ferocity of resistance to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board decision without being aware of how and why the South emerged as it did after the Civil War. The Old South and the New South shared a similar constellation of ideas that informed arguments advancing their respective race-based social orders, which took the form of a commonality of perception regarding race, a sense of being assailed by outsiders, and a series of appeals to the highest secular authority in the pantheon of regional and American beliefs—the Constitution. Discontinuity, however, marked the long-term strategies of both the prewar and postwar South. Although segregationists sought to preserve the racial status quo as did their forebears, they ultimately relented when confronted with federal power and grudgingly shifted toward a narrative that less often foregrounded race when championing states'rights.

Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. While historians have generally acknowledged that patriot leaders assembled in response to postwar economic chaos, the threat of popular insurgencies, and the inability of the states to agree on how to fund the national government, Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests that scholars have discounted Americans'desire to compel Britain to return fugitives from slavery as a driving force behind the convention.During the Revolutionary War, British governors offered freedom to enslaved Americans who joined the king's army. Thousands responded by fleeing to English camps. After the British defeat at Yorktown, American diplomats demanded the surrender of fugitive slaves. When British generals refused, several states confiscated Loyalist estates and blocked payment of English creditors, hoping to apply enough pressure on the Crown to hand over the runaways. State laws conflicting with the 1783 Treaty of Paris violated the Articles of Confederation—the young nation's first constitution—but Congress, lacking an executive branch or a federal judiciary, had no means to obligate states to comply. The standoff over the escaped slaves quickly escalated following the Revolution as Britain failed to abandon the western forts it occupied and took steps to curtail American commerce. More than any other single matter, the impasse over the return of enslaved Americans threatened to hamper the nation's ability to expand westward, develop its commercial economy, and establish itself as a power among the courts of Europe. Messer-Kruse argues that the issue encouraged the founders to consider the prospect of scrapping the Articles of Confederation and drafting a superseding document that would dramatically increase federal authority—the Constitution.

How can a Black man and white woman, linked by ancestries in enslavement, use their uniquely different pasts to create space for a common reparative path toward the future?In 2019, Sarah Eisner contacted Randy Quarterman, the great-great-great-grandson of a man her great-great-great-grandfather had enslaved. Building a friendship allowed them to rediscover their family histories and reckon with their own life paths, which diverged and dovetailed to ultimately lead them back to Savannah, Georgia.Together, they worked to preserve a plot of land deeded from Keller to Quarterman in 1890, which was still held by the Quarterman family but in danger of being taken by eminent domain. The two created The Quarterman & Keller Foundation and The Reparations Project with the goals of supporting Black education, Black land preservation, and Black art. A story of a challenging, close, and mutually healing friendship, this book is ideal reading for students of Black Studies, History, Civil Rights, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, History, and Politics.

How medieval-inspired racial feudalism reigned in early America and was challenged by Black liberal thinkersThough the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America's resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst—and transformed the nation's founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country's commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism.American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University Award-winning historian David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, answers the call to investigate Yale University's historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. This narrative history demonstrates the importance of slavery in the making of this renowned American institution of higher learning. Drawing on wide-ranging archival materials, Yale and Slavery extends from the century before the college's founding in 1701 to the dedication of its Civil War memorial in 1915, while engaging with the legacies and remembrance of this complex story. The book brings into focus the enslaved and free Black people who have been part of Yale's history from the beginning—but too often ignored in official accounts. These individuals and their descendants worked at Yale; petitioned and fought for freedom and dignity; built churches, schools, and antislavery organizations; and were among the first Black students to transform the university from the inside. Always alive to the surprises and ironies of the past, Yale and Slavery presents a richer and more complete history of Yale, the third-oldest college in the country, showing how pillars of American higher education, even in New England, emerged over time intertwined with the national and international history of racial slavery.

'A masterly analysis of slavery and republicanism from the left. A stunning achievement'Gerald Horne, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776'In explaining the role of self-interest in the abolition work of the founding generation, Timothy Messer-Kruse broadens debates'Beverly Tomek, author of Colonization and Its DiscontentsTimely and controversial, The Patriots'Dilemma confronts longstanding interpretations of U.S. history that emphasize a fundamental conflict between pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests. By 1776, influential American patriots acknowledged that slavery was incompatible with the ideals of the republic. But a republic for whom?As Timothy Messer-Kruse argues, their real motivations have been misinterpreted for more than 200 years. The Framers were primarily concerned with the protection and betterment of the white community, not the liberation of enslaved black people. The conundrum was that slavery had to end because it created what they saw as a dangerous population, but it could not be abolished without endangering their (white) republic.Their solutions included schemes to banish former slaves to the western frontier or overseas, to exclude them from the category of'citizen', to make their emancipation gradual, and to tightly police African American communities. Timothy Messer-Kruse is Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He is the author of The Haymarket Conspiracy and The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists, which was named'Best Labor History Book'by the journal Labor History.

A Hudson Valley Reckoning tells the long-ignored story of slavery's history in upstate New York through Debra Bruno's absorbing chronicle that uncovers her Dutch ancestors'slave-holding past and leads to a deep connection with the descendants of the enslaved people her family owned. Bruno, who grew up in New York's Hudson Valley knowing little about her Dutch heritage, was shaken when a historian told her that her Dutch ancestors were almost certainly slaveholders. Driven by this knowledge, Bruno began to unearth her family's past. In the last will and testament of her ancestor, she found the first evidence: human beings bequeathed to his family along with animals and furniture. The more she expanded her family tree, the more enslavers she found. She reached out to Black Americans tracing their own ancestry, and by serendipitous luck became friends with Eleanor C. Mire, a descendent of a woman enslaved by Bruno's Dutch ancestors.A Hudson Valley Reckoning recounts Bruno's journey into the nearly forgotten history of Northern slavery and of the thousands of enslaved people brought in chains to Manhattan and the Hudson Valley. With the help of Mire, who provides a moving epilogue, Debra Bruno tells the story of white and Black lives impacted by the stain of slavery and its long legacy of racism, as she investigates the erasure of the uncomfortable truths about our family and national histories.

A sweeping history of how Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements in Europe and the AmericasThe Age of Reconstruction looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln's assassination set off a dramatic international reaction that drove European empires out of the Americas, hastened the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignited a host of democratic reforms in Europe.In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a “United States of Europe.” Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this “new birth of freedom” was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy—and a very different kind of model to the world.At home and abroad, America's Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.” The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.

Asks how we can better understand a politics of refusalWriting a new story of Black politics, Jump emerges from the practice of enslaved Africans jumping overboard off their slavers'ships. Reading against the narrative that depoliticizes and denigrates the leaps of the enslaved as merely suicidal symptoms of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, Sam C. Tenorio demonstrates how bringing these jumps to bear on the foundations of Black politics allows us to rethink a politics of refusal.In a period of increasing political mobilization against police brutality and mass incarceration, Jump attends to the layers of confinement that constitute the racial and gendered hierarchies of the antiblack world. Centering radical acts too often relegated to the periphery of Black politics, Tenorio proposes a Black anarchist politics of refusal that helps us to think dissent anew.Tracing iterations of the jump through the carceral wake of the slave ship, Tenorio explores the voyages of the Black Star Line in defiance of the bordered authority of the nation state, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 against the property relation of ghettoization, and Assata Shakur's abscondence from prison to Cuba. Ultimately, Tenorio argues that considering the jump as a progenitor of Black politics deepens and widens our conceptualization of the Black radical tradition and introduces a paradigm-shifting attention to Black anarchism.

The remarkable story of the man behind the book that helped spark the Civil War, in a stunning historical detective story“I love this research.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr., at a Hutchins Center presentation of Susanna Ashton's findingsIn December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression: drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.A Plausible Man unfolds as a historical detective story, as Susanna Ashton combs obscure records for evidence of Jackson's remarkable flight from slavery to freedom, his quest to liberate his enslaved family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. This fresh and original work takes us through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the restoration of white supremacy—where we last glimpse Jackson losing his freedom again on a Southern chain gang.In the spirit of Tiya Miles's prizewinning All That She Carried and Erica Armstrong Dunbar's Never Caught, Susanna Ashton breathes life into a striving and nuanced American character, one unmistakably rooted in the vast sweep of nineteenth-century America.

From an award-winning biblical scholar, the “monumental and eye-opening” story of how enslaved people created, gave meaning to, and spread the message of the New Testament, shaping the very foundations of Christianity in ways both subtle and profound (Reza Aslan). For the past two thousand years, Christian tradition, scholarship, and pop culture have credited the authorship of the New Testament to a select group of men: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. But hidden behind these named and sainted individuals are a cluster of unnamed, enslaved coauthors and collaborators. These essential workers were responsible for producing the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament: making the parchment on which the texts were written, taking dictation, and refining the words of the apostles. And as the Christian message grew in influence, it was enslaved missionaries who undertook the arduous journey across the Mediterranean and along dusty roads to move Christianity to Rome, Spain, and North Africa—and into the pages of history. The impact of these enslaved contributors on the spread of Christianity, the development of foundational Christian concepts, and the making of the Bible was enormous, yet their role has been almost entirely overlooked until now. Filled with profound revelations both for what it means to be a Christian and for how we read individual texts themselves, God's Ghostwriters is a groundbreaking and rigorously researched book about how enslaved people shaped the Bible, and with it all of Christianity.

Slavery is one of humanity's most ancient and persistent inequities. It predates the rise of civilization, played a key role in the growth of Western and Islamic cultures and was an integral part of the emergence and global spread of capitalism. Given its historical significance, it is not surprising that the problem of slavery is still passionately debated today and that modern-day trafficking and forced servitude remain key issues of public concern.In Enslavement: Past and Present, historical sociologist Orlando Patterson casts a wide net to examine the social, political, and economic complexities of slavery across different eras and societies. Patterson examines slavery at several levels of abstraction, from micro-level relations of domination to the macro-structures of entire societies. Building on the'bundle of rights'perspective, he reevaluates the definition of slavery, exposing its variegated fabric of iniquities across tribal and advanced pre-modern societies as well as our modern globalized age. Patterson also examines the critical role of women in the history of slavery, the significance of manumission in the formation of Christian doctrine, and the devastating toll of genocide and undaunted revolt of slaves in Jamaican slave society. Concluding with an investigation of contemporary slavery and other forms of servitude, this book urges readers to reckon with the brutal legacies of the past and its alarming modern-day persistence.Enslavement: Past and Present deepens our understanding of the broad spectrum of evil and human bondage throughout history, an understanding that is essential for contemporary struggles to build a more inclusive society for all.

This study examines how authors responded to the Haitian Revolution with revisionist narratives that seek to support empire or rebellion, while focusing on the ethical ramifications of colonialism and slavery in the Americas. Narrative texts include Leonora Sansay's Secret History, or the Horrors of Santo Domingo, Germaine de Stael's Mirza, Fanny Burney's The Wanderer, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Sanditon, Harriet Martineau's The Hour and the Man, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems,'A Curse for a Nation'and'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point.'Additional authors include Lucien Bonaparte, Chateaubriand, Raynal, Edmund Burke and Rousseau. Each author's narrative is examined within the context of the cultural and political factors that influenced the author, as well as their personal ties to the abolitionist movement or to the institution of slavery.

Elizabeth Heyrick fought fiercely for the rights of oppressed people. After a disastrous marriage, she became a prolific pamphleteer, a Quaker and one of the most outspoken anti-slavery campaigners of her time. Despite renewed contemporary interest in slavery, and in the stories of those who opposed it, female abolitionists are still much less well known than their male counterparts. Yet they were often more radical and more daring. Heyrick defied male authority and she led others in challenging William Wilberforce and his colleagues to fight for the immediate rather than the gradual abolition of slavery.This book is the first full length biography of Elizabeth Heyrick and it sets her life in the context of the British anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She was a woman who dared to put her head above the parapet and to call out those responsible for one of the worst abuses of human rights in history. She was courageous, loyal and uncompromising, and did not suffer fools gladly. It was not until long after her death in 1831 that her contribution to the anti-slavery cause started to be recognized and even today, she remains hidden in the shadows of the movement. Using archival records and recently unearthed family materials, as well as contemporary fiction and memoirs, the author creates a compelling account of an unsettled life set in turbulent times.

A sweeping and original look at American slavery in the early nineteenth century that reveals the gamble slaves had to take to surviveImages of American slavery conjure up cotton plantations and African American slaves locked in bondage until the Civil War. Yet early on in the nineteenth century the state of slavery was very different, and the political vicissitudes of the young nation offered diverse possibilities to slaves. In the century's first two decades, the nation waged war against Britain, Spain, and various Indian tribes. Slaves played a role in the military operations, and the different sides viewed them as a potential source of manpower. While surprising numbers did assist the Americans, the wars created opportunities for slaves to find freedom among the Redcoats, the Spaniards, or the Indians. Author Gene Allen Smith draws on a decade of original research and his curatorial work at the Fort Worth Museum in this fascinating and original narrative history. The way the young nation responded sealed the fate of slaves for the next half century until the Civil War. This drama sheds light on an extraordinary yet little known chapter in the dark saga of American history.

The Age of Revolution (1776-1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a'Second Slavery'surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a system of financial credit that leveraged the value of the slaves. By 1860, more than 6 million captives of African descent toiled to produce the cotton, sugar and coffee craved by global consumers. This'Second Slavery'mimicked capitalist disciplines, intensified slavery's racial character and launched half a century of headlong economic growth.On the eve of the American Civil War, the Slave Power seemed invincible. The slaveholding elite entrenched their'peculiar institution'in the fabric of the Union only to risk everything on secession. Nobody solicited the slaves'wishes until it became clear that, wherever they could, they were deserting the plantations and joining the Union forces.Abolition radicals destroyed the Second Slavery and victory for the North also spelled defeat for slavery in Cuba and Brazil. But in each of these societies racial oppression was to be reconfigured by'Black Codes', Jim Crow and toxic doctrines of racial destiny.Slavery leaves an indelible mark on many Atlantic nations. The Reckoning charts the historic impact of slavery and anti-slavery, of black and white activists, of fugitive slaves, feminists, writers, clerics and soldiers. Notwithstanding much unfinished business, the anti-slavery struggle retains its capacity to illuminate and inspire.

This volume explores the intersections of diaspora and gender within the diasporic and Indian imagination. It investigates the ways in which race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality intersect with concepts of home, belonging, displacement and the reinvention of the nation and of self.Positioning itself as a companion to Kala Pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th century Migrations from India's Perspective (Routledge, 2021), the present book examines whether indentureship and diasporic locations marginalised women and men or empowered them; how negotiations or resistances have been determined by race, class, caste, or ethnicity; how traditional standards of Indianness and gender relations have been reshaped; how ideas of home, self and the nation have been impacted in the diaspora and in India after the 19th and early 20th century indentureship migration; and what 21st century Indians stand to gain by theorizing the legacy of 19th century indenture through a gender framework. To understand how fiction and non-fiction writers have negotiated the legacy of indentureship to create spaces where normative practices can be interrogated and challenged, the book gives pride of place to interviews with writers such as Cyril Dabydeen, Ananda Devi, Ramabai Espinet, Davina Ittoo, Brij Lal, Peggy Mohan, Shani Mootoo, and Khal Torabully.Thus rooted in critical analyses but also in subjective and creative perspectives, this volume is a major intervention in understanding Indian indenture and its legacy in the diaspora and in India. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, history, Indian Ocean studies, migration and South Asian studies.

'O where are the sympathies of Christians for the slave and where are their exertions for their liberation?... It seems as if the church were asleep.'David Ingraham, 1839In 2015, the historian Chris Momany helped discover a manuscript that had been forgotten in a storage closet at Adrian College in Michigan. He identified it as the journal of a nineteenth-century Christian abolitionist and missionary, David Ingraham. As Momany and a fellow historian Doug Strong pored over the diary, they realized that studying this document could open new conversations for twenty-first-century Christians to address the reality of racism today. They invited a multiracial team of fourteen scholars to join in, thus launching the Dialogue on Race and Faith Project.Awakening to Justice presents the groundbreaking work of these scholars. In addition to reflecting on Ingraham's journal, chapters also explore the life and writings of two of Ingraham's Black colleagues, James Bradley and Nancy Prince. Appendixes feature writings by all three abolitionists so readers can engage the primary sources directly.Through considering connections between the revivalist, holiness, and abolitionist movements; the experiences of enslaved and freed people; abolitionists'spiritual practices; various tactics used by abolitionists; and other themes, the authors offer insight and hope for Christians concerned about racial justice. They highlight how Christians associated with Charles Finney's style of revivalism formed intentional, countercultural communities such as Oberlin College to be exemplars of interracial cooperation and equality.Christians have all too often compromised with racism throughout history, but that's not the whole story. Hearing the prophetic witness of revivalist social justice efforts in the nineteenth century can provide a fresh approach to today's conversations about race and faith in the church.

Slavery and the Atlantic slave trade are among the most heinous crimes against humanity committed in the modern era. Yet, to this day no former slave society in the Americas has paid reparations to former slaves or their descendants. Ana Lucia Araujo shows that these calls for reparations have persevered over a long and difficult history. She traces the ways in which enslaved and freed individuals have conceptualized the idea of reparations since the 18th century in petitions, correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims. Taking the reader through the era of slavery, emancipation, post-abolition, and the present day and drawing on the voices of various of enslaved peoples and their descendants, the book illuminates the multiple dimensions of the demands of reparations.This new edition boasts a new chapter on the global impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, the seismic effect of the killing of George Floyd, calls for university reparations and the dismantling of statues. Updated throughout, this edition includes primary sources, further readings, and many illustrations.

How children helped abolish slaveryDuring the antebellum period, several abolitionist figures, including William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator; Susan Paul, an African American primary school teacher; Henry Clarke Wright, a white reformer; and Frederick Douglass, the internationally renowned activist, consistently appealed to the sympathies of children against slavery. In 1835, Garrison proclaimed, “If... we desire to see our land delivered from the curse of PREJUDICE and SLAVERY, we must direct our efforts chiefly to the rising generation.” This rallying cry found a receptive audience and ignited action.Despite their limited scholarly exploration, children occupied a crucial position within the US abolition movement. Through a reexamination of archival materials including antislavery newspapers, correspondence, and autobiographies, Young Abolitionists is the first book to center children's participation in the campaign to eradicate slavery in the United States.Michaël Roy uncovers how young advocates—Black and white alike—confidently delivered antislavery speeches within their schools, enrolled in juvenile antislavery societies, and contributed to the editorial process of antislavery newspapers. They aided fugitive slaves, attended antislavery fairs, and engaged in activities commemorating John Brown's legacy. They even affixed their signatures to antislavery petitions, thus challenging the boundaries of their own citizenship.Abolitionists saw childhood as a force for social change. With the help of parents and teachers, children acted in concrete ways against slavery and made a meaningful contribution toward its demise. Young Abolitionists honors their contributions and reminds us that children can—and must—be included in the fight for a better world.

In this sequel to his landmark study, historian Peter Kolchin compares the transition to freedom after American emancipation with the Russian Great Reforms The two largest transitions from unfree to free labor of the many that occurred in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth century took place in the United States and in Russia. Both occurred in the 1860s, and in both the former slaves and serfs strove to maximize their autonomy and freedom while the former masters worked to preserve as many of their prerogatives as possible. Both were partially—but only partially—successful. In this magisterial and long-awaited work, historian Peter Kolchin shows that a more radical break with the past was possible in the United States than in Russia, with the Southern freedpeople coming to enjoy republican citizenship, whereas Russian peasants remained subjects rather than citizens. Both countries saw conservative reactions triumph in the late nineteenth century. While this conservatism was common in most emancipations, it was especially strong in Russia and the American South, in part as a reaction against the major efforts to restructure the social order that went by the name of Reconstruction in the United States and the Great Reforms in Russia.

With a new introduction, Northup's memoir reveals the living truth of slavery, poverty and racism in a world set apart from elite metropolitan lifestyles.The 1853 memoir and slave narrative by Solomon Northup as told to and written by David Wilson. Northup, a black man who was born free in New York, relates his tale, of being tricked to go to Washington, D.C., where he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South. He was in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana before smuggling information to friends and family in New York, who in turn secured his release with the aid of the state. Northup's account provides extensive details on the slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, and describes the cotton and sugar cultivation and slave treatment on major plantations in Louisiana.Foundations of Black Science Fiction. New forewords and fresh introductions give long-overdue perspectives on significant, early Black proto-sci-fi and speculative fiction authors who wrote with natural justice and civil rights in their hearts, their voices reaching forward to the writers of today. The series foreword is by Dr Sandra Grayson.

By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological culture. In Memorializing the Unsung, Elochukwu Uzukwu uses the framework of this “ancient” Kongo Catholicism to explore European dependence on enslaved Kongo Catholics and the unconscionable Capuchin and Spiritan participation in the slave trade at large—a practice denounced by the lone voices of Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans and Spiritan Alexandre Monnet. Reconstructing the church that missionaries and Kongo Catholics built together on the foundations of local religion, Memorializing the Unsung contrasts the dignity denied the Kongo Catholics with the freedom they nonetheless performed. Uzukwu is particularly deft in tracing the agency of Kongo elites and laypeople from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, carefully evaluating their deliberate engagements with southern Europeans, the role of the maestri (translator-catechists) in guiding the faithful, and the ultimate development of a unique theological vocabulary endorsed by the Kikongo catechism.Without the support and creativity of these unsung lay Catholics across west-central and eastern Africa, Uzukwu shows, the European missions in the region would have failed. Even while enslaved, the Kongo Slaves of the Church and the eastern African Slaves of the Mission served as mediators, co-creators, and reinventors of their world.

From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every space of the commercial South Atlantic. Navigating this kaleidoscopic world required a remarkable cosmopolitanism—the chameleonlike ability to adapt to new surroundings by developing sophisticated medicinal, linguistic, and navigational knowledge. Mary E. Hicks shows how Portuguese slaving ship captains harnessed and exploited this hybridity to expand their own traffic in human bondage. At the same time, she reveals how enslaved and free Black mariners capitalized on their shipboard positions and cosmopolitan expertise to participate in small-scale commodity trading on the very coasts where they themselves had been traded as commodities, reshaping societies and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, as Hicks argues, the Bahian slave trade was ruthlessly effective because its uniquely decentralized structure so effectively incorporated the desires and financial strategies of the very people enslaved by it. Yet taking advantage of such fraught economic opportunities ultimately enabled many enslaved Black mariners to purchase their freedom. And, in some cases, they became independent transatlantic slave traders themselves.Hicks thus explores the central paradox that defined the lives of the captive cosmopolitans and, in doing so, reveals a new history of South Atlantic slavery centered on subaltern commercial and cultural exchange.

Fantasies of white slavery and the narratives of victimhood they spawn form the foundation of racist ideology. They also obscure the lived experience of trafficked servants and sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gunther Peck moves deftly between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds to discover where and when people with light skin color came to see themselves as white. Separating fact from fiction, and paying close attention to the ideological work each performs, Peck shows how laboring women and men leveraged their newfound whiteness to secure economic opportunity and political power.Peck argues that whiteness emerged not as a claim of racial superiority but as a byproduct of wide-ranging and rancorous public debate over trafficking and enslavement. Even as whiteness became a legal category that signaled privilege, trafficking and race remained tightly interwoven. Those advocating for the value of whiteness invoked emotionally freighted victimhood, claiming that so-called white slavery was a crime whose costs far exceeded those associated with the enslavement of African peoples across the Americas. Peck helps us understand the chilling history that produced the racist ideology that still poisons our politics in the present day.

The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (1850-1888) offers a compelling exploration of how one of the world's most entrenched systems of forced labor unraveled over the course of decades. Through meticulous research, the book examines the interplay of economic pressures, international influence, and abolitionist efforts that led to the gradual decline of slavery in Brazil, culminating in its abolition in 1888. Authoritatively written, it delves into the regional disparities that shaped attitudes toward slavery, the critical role of the coffee-producing regions, and the pivotal impact of laws like the 1871 Law of the Free Womb. Readers gain a deep understanding of how external pressures, such as British diplomatic campaigns, and internal shifts in economic necessity eroded slavery's dominance in Brazilian society. This insightful study not only charts the collapse of slavery but also captures the broader socio-political changes of the time. With vivid storytelling, it highlights key figures like Joaquim Nabuco and Castro Alves, whose abolitionist advocacy helped galvanize the movement for freedom. Beyond liberation, the book examines the unfulfilled hopes for national reforms that would address education, political representation, and landholding inequalities. By combining narrative history with sharp analysis, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery is an essential read for those interested in the complexities of abolition and the ongoing legacy of slavery in shaping modern societies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

Racial justice is never far from the headlines. The Windrush scandal, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, and racism within the police have all recently captured the public's attention and generated legal action. But, although the ideals of the legal system such as fairness and equality seem allied to the struggle for racial justice, all too often campaigners have been let down by the system. This book examines law's troubled relationship with racial justice. It explains that law's historical role in creating and perpetuating racial injustices continues to stifle its ability to advance the cause of racial justice today. Both a lawyer's guide to antiracism, and an antiracist's guide to legal action, it unites these perspectives to help both groups understand how to use the law to tackle racial injustices.

This book provides a contemporary overview of migrant smuggling and trafficking in Southern Europe, focusing on Spain, Italy and Greece. It considers how criminal players increase such activity and investigates institutional and structural constraints to legal migration in Southern Europe. Migrant workers satisfy the need for a cheap workforce to sustain Southern Europe's economy, and laws to counter irregular migration alter smuggling routes and expose migrants to forms of exploitation upon reaching their destination. Revealing institutional, economic and criminal factors, the book explains the persistence of migrant smuggling and trafficking.

This thought-provoking collection brings together academics from a range of disciplines to examine modern slavery. It illustrates how different disciplinary positions, methodologies and perspectives form and clash together through a kaleidoscopic view to contribute a unique insight into critical modern slavery studies. Providing a platform to critique the legal, ideological and political responses to the issue, experts interrogate the construct of modern slavery and the anti-trafficking discourse which have dominated contemporary responses to and understandings of exploitation. Drawing on a range of global real-world examples, this is a vital contribution to the study of modern slavery.