Search

This article examines the term 'new slavery', short for 'a new form of slavery', as used by Liberal British Parliament members and white South African trade unionists in opposition to the recruitment of Chinese indentured labourers to work in the Transvaal gold mines. The recruitment of Chinese indentured labourers emerged following the South Africa War (1899-1902) in response to African 'native' labourers' refusal to return to the mines. This article explores how the Transvaal's distinct indentured labour system, characterized by coercive features akin to those in the Indian indentured labour system, and further defined by mandatory repatriation, fines for assisting labourers in contract violation and the establishment of a Chinese consulate for fair treatment, set a precedent for global labour programmes. These specific conditions of the Transvaal system influenced the development of subsequent labour initiatives, particularly the Chinese Labour Corps during World War I. The article provides an overview of the overlaps between these programmes and highlights the enduring impact of the Transvaal system on the evolution of global labour practices including modern guest worker programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years prior to legal emancipation, British officials enacted a series of laws intended to ameliorate the condition of those held in slavery in their colonies. This article investigates the impact of amelioration on the islands of the Seychelles immediately prior to emancipation. While the legal changes, including the dispatch of a Protector of Slaves to the Seychelles, were limited in terms of effectiveness, their implementation offered people new avenues to protest mistreatment and engage directly with the language of abolition. Reports filed by the protector highlight people's uncertainty and isolation during the years leading up to emancipation. While there is evidence of resistance through uprisings, desertions, and the filing of formal complaints, people in the Seychelles faced significant challenges as owners used the islands' distance from colonial oversight to maintain control through violence and patriarchal structures of domination. As remote 'island laboratories', however, the islands offer unique insights into the ways in which people managed to leverage British abolitionism to their advantage even on such isolated islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacob D. Green's speaking career in England (1863-66) is an exploration of how an independent, self-financed Black speaker became a networked abolitionist building on the achievements of other expatriate African American activists like Moses Roper and James Watkins. Born enslaved in Maryland, Green made serial escapes from enslavement in Kentucky and elsewhere in the United States, sojourning in Toronto before arriving in Lancashire at about age forty-eight with evidently few funds. Green appealed to cotton and woollen mill town residents to oppose enslavement and the Confederate States of America from where most of North-West England's cotton originated. He initially lectured under the sponsorship of nonconformist ministers in Yorkshire and built a network that included ministers in the United Methodist Free Church, Congregational Union, capitalists, and tradespeople. Nonconformist sponsorship led to an 1864 move to Heckmondwike in the centre of his lecture circuit. He connected with those who sponsored other Black abolitionists, burgeoning his network by speaking in West Yorkshire towns and cities that had hosted African American orators before. As a networked abolitionist, he earned income from speaking and publishing an autobiography and may have died in England in 1866. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a systematic and localized analysis of how female anti-slavery activity in the North-East of England influenced and impacted the transatlantic campaign to abolish slavery in the West Indies and then the United States. Female anti-slavery societies in Newcastle and Darlington organized local meetings with prominent African American anti-slavery campaigners, leading regional and national conversations about abolition and wider discussions about race and slavery. This article argues that regional conceptions of race and identity were shaped by local religious dissenting cultures and the unique professional relationships formed between African American abolitionists and North-East women's societies. This study is nonetheless critical of the way white female anti-slavery activism often envisioned emancipation as a fulfilment of maternal and imperialistic duties, arguing that the notion of a 'transatlantic sisterhood' espoused by British and American female abolitionists only served to further subjugate those who had previously been enslaved, delaying any unified political response from women on both sides of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the eighteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island stood at the centre of the Transatlantic slave trade, producing commodities like rum to be traded for African captives from Senegambia, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra, and the Bight of Benin. These captive men, women and children were then transported to South America, the West Indies, the Chesapeake, Charleston, and Savannah. Those who were not sold in these markets, were labelled as 'refuse,' and endured a second or third voyage to the north to be sold in markets in New York, Newport, or Boston. Through an examination of a court case between prominent Newport merchant, John Banister and wigmaker, David Cummings, this article queries the life of a sick African girl, bought by David Cummings, but rendered useless because of her rapidly declining health due to the 'great pox,' also known as yaws. What conditions allowed for her enslavement? How did she become ill and how was she treated? Lastly, how did the law commodify her bonded existence? By examining the mechanisms that allowed for her enslavement, a young life that was reduced to a monetary value, and the bare labour she was forced to provide, is brought to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Black freedom seekers in New York City gained recognition from the British military as refugees in the twelve months between the signing of the provisional Treaty of Paris, agreed on 30 November 1782, and the departure of the last Black refugees from the city on 30 November 1783. It focuses on the British evacuations from New York in 1783 as moments when the distinction between being a refugee from slavery and gaining the acknowledgement of refugee status became most acute. This article argues that historians have not considered how the Black refugee experience in New York City both differed from and was shaped by the earlier evacuation from Charleston. It demonstrates how Black refugees in New York pushed Sir Guy Carleton toward a more expansive policy of refuge through the collective and cumulative weight of their testimony. Gaining recognition as a refugee depended on the British military's willingness to accept that status. British recognition of Black sanctuary status, however, was circumscribed by several factors, including enslavers' wartime allegiances, the gendered contours of British conceptions of refuge, and Black refugees' mobility and military service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details a trade in Indigenous slaves that was controlled by the Miskitu, a group indigenous to the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and Honduras. During the eighteenth century, the Miskitu targeted other Indigenous communities from the Yucatan to Panama, capturing thousands of individuals whom they sold as slaves in the British Caribbean. This frustrated the Spanish government, who tried to stop these raids by advocating for increasingly harsh policies, including the extermination of the Miskitu. The British, on the other hand, ignored this slave trade until they were forced to confront it because of legal reasons (which happened three times from 1741 to the 1820s). The Miskitu’s slave trade uprooted, relocated, and forced enslavement upon an enormous number of Indigenous people across Central America. This article details the immense scope of Miskitu attacks, lends insight into the many Indigenous groups impacted by these raids, and explores how European powers were forced to react. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Sino-Portuguese efforts against the slave trade in China from 1557 to 1639, highlighting the complexities and challenges faced in enforcing anti-slavery measures. Despite shared intentions to suppress the trade, divergent strategies and the pursuit of trade profits by local Chinese officials, merchants, and the business community in Macao hindered effective enforcement. By leveraging Chinese, Portuguese sources, including official memorials, Jesuit manuscripts, and royal decrees, the article offers new insights into the geopolitical and economic contexts shaping the slave trade. It underscores the need to understand the varied strategies and considerations employed by different entities in addressing slavery, contributing to a more nuanced narrative of global history and early globalization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comprises a biography of George Freeman, an African boy ‘liberated’ from enslavement in West Africa and relocated to the countryside of Berkshire, UK. The article contributes to scholarship on the long-term presence and lived experiences of Black people in Britain, using digital humanities techniques and parochial records from the county of Berkshire to map the presence of Black people (and other minority ethnicities) in rural English counties. It also uses Freeman’s biography to engage in wider discussions concerning the precarious experiences of ‘Liberated Africans’. These two research areas are combined to construct Freeman’s biography as a global microhistory, adding to the growing scholarship that aims to overcome these areas of archival silence within histories of slavery and abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the historical significance of two important works on slavery and post-emancipation labor studies. It argues for a reevaluation of indentured labor studies, urging researchers to examine the global migrant labor system in a broader context. The article emphasizes the need to consider factors such as gender relations, immigrant women, and the diverse experiences of indentured laborers beyond agricultural work. It also discusses the role of different populations in the development of plantation sectors and the marginalization of certain groups in indentured labor historiography. The text suggests incorporating disciplines like archaeology and anthropology to gain a deeper understanding of indentured laborers' experiences and highlights the importance of understanding the legacy of indentured labor in modern systems of slavery. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the struggle of an enslaved mother, Catherine Whitfield, and adult daughter, Ann King, to seek legal redress for their abuse while working as domestic servants to a leading Jamaican magistrate. While well-publicized in its time, this case was often narrated through framings which emphasized spectacular violence and suffering and minimized attentions to Whitfield’s and King’s own strategies of resistance and survival. Centring the women’s agency allows a nuanced analysis of modalities of resistance specific to their situation as a mother-daughter pair, as enslaved domestic servants, and as women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the re-establishment of slavery has become better known, the process by which this return was effected remains understudied. While scholars have examined the return of colour prejudice and the reactionary nature of civil law reforms, criminal justice has received little attention. Nevertheless, criminal tribunals, both exceptionally established and permanent, played an important role in the transition from a de jure regime of emancipation, in spite of de facto limits, to a renewal of the regime of enslavement. An examination of these court records reveals how long the government considered the colony needed jurisdictions of exception to deal with threats of rebellion; the variety of crimes that were considered 'rebellious'; and the transition from a regime of exception based on the emergency of rebellion to one based on the particularity of the slave system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how formerly enslaved people in the early colonial French Soudan (today Mali) negotiated and contested the meanings of marriage at the 'end of slavery'. Because the abolition of slavery in this region was unexpected, no one knew what the legal rules for marriages between emancipated slaves should look like after it occurred. But formerly enslaved people made their opinions known. This piece examines how former slaves' ideas about marriage clashed and converged, drawing primarily on one exceptionally detailed marriage annulment dispute from a nascent Catholic community called Patyana. Doing so, it illustrates how emancipated slaves went through inchoate processes of forging new identities in slavery's wake by migrating, changing their names, and converting to new religions, including Christianity and Islam. Bringing these complex identities before legal adjudicators, former slaves determined the meanings of marriage in a time and place marked by great legal ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did property in persons manifest itself in late eighteenth-century Bombay? This article uses judicial records to explore how the master-slave relationship could be inverted: a woman sued a man who claimed to 'own' her for the money she spent on maintaining him. These records provide a unique insight into the biography and everyday life of an urban slave in this period and the intertwining of domesticity, caste, religion and kin-building. Jaffer Mahomed claimed that Assa was a slave and collateral on a debt and produced a deed of sale and a mortgage bond. Assa claimed she had maintained him and produced an itemized account of everyday expenditure and a manumission document. Through an analysis of the documents produced in court, interrogations, complaints and rejoinders, this article demonstrates how judicial sources can help understand the strategic choices and horizon of possibilities available to urban slaves in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines slavery and abolitionism in Brazil in the mid-1880s and thereby contributes to historiography and expands our understanding of the Brazilian Empire's political conflicts in its final decade. It contends that abolitionism was not only compatible with liberal reformist ideas, but also impelled the Liberal Party to endorse an expanded interpretation of citizenship (civil and political) and the role of the state in protecting the rights of citizens, including those emerging from slavery. This convergence provoked a virulent anti-institutional reaction among Conservative and pro-slavery hardliners that proved fatal to the emerging democratic stream of Brazilian liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a product of the first complete survey of British public representational monuments in the U.K. related to transatlantic slavery, available online at . Identifying over 900 monuments, it brings this survey to bear on current public and policy debates about such monuments' history, significance and meaning vis-à-vis slavery, art and heritage. Examining the monuments at scale, we identify the monuments' patterns of production and provide data-led answers to specific questions such as what Britain's most significant monumental legacies of slavery are; how enslaved people appear in British public monuments; and how this data might support rethinking these monuments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hard labour, toil, and the pain and suffering of social and corporeal violence branded enslaved experiences in the slaveholding world of the plantation South. But enslaved people were also simultaneously in constant motion in the making of insuppressible alternative worlds that fundamentally endangered the fragile system of chattel slavery. In everyday acts of self-interest and refusal, enslaved people built and sustained a competing world of fugitive consciousness and practice that was often bolstered, emboldened, and reinforced by the consumption and possession of spirituous liquors. This essay treats Black people's relationships with alcohol during the period of enslavement as an analytic for locating contestations of power and Black social life – or, an often overlooked yet revealing window into the transgressive underworlds of enslaved and fugitive making. Despite great efforts to control their bodies, movement, and intake, enslaved people poured, drank, and put alcohol to use in their creation of uncapturable moments and spaces of self-making, pleasure, sociality, and resistance. Whether joining outlaw parties, trading in forbidden clandestine economies, fleeing the confines of plantation borders, living maroon lives, or plotting and executing revolt, those sharing in these fugitive pursuits viewed alcohol as a valuable ingredient in the advancement of free life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the few written documents left behind by those who escaped slavery, the analysis of African agency in the transfer of crops and knowledge in the successful establishment of Maroon communities benefits from other disciplines, such as oral history, ethnobotany and linguistics. In this article, we report the way stories of enslaved women, who escaped in the early periods of slave rebellion in Suriname, live on in the names of specific rice varieties. Such stories pay tribute to the crucial role women played in ensuring food security for their runaway communities. We combined information from ethnobotanical surveys, Maroon oral history, archival documents and published accounts to show how Maroon farmers today safeguard their agricultural diversity and cultural heritage by planting rice varieties that still carry the names of their female ancestors. We focus on a selected number of rice varieties named after the Saamaka ancestors Seei, Yaya and Paanza, Tjowa of the Matawai, Sapali, Ana and Baapa of the Ndyuka, and describe the stories attached to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the efforts of early-twentieth-century abolitionists in Lagos, Nigeria who campaigned against the Native House Rule Ordinance/Proclamation, a colonial law perceived as perpetuating indigenous slavery in the Niger Delta region. The study enriches the corpus of African abolitionist literature by revealing how a network of Lagos elites employed a strategic top-down approach to advocate for the law's repeal, which they believed sustained a form of slavery instituted by British colonialism. The research utilizes an extensive range of primary sources, including local Nigerian newspaper publications, correspondence, petitions, and archival documents from both Nigerian and British repositories. The paper contextualizes the Native House Rule system, explores the Lagos campaigners’ strategies and arguments against the ordinance, and discusses the law's amendment and eventual repeal. Through detailed case studies and the examination of African-led initiatives, the study acknowledges the previously understated contributions of African activists, thereby rectifying a significant oversight in historical literature. This paper underscores the importance of recognizing indigenous agency in historical narratives, particularly in the context of abolition and resistance to colonial policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth century, abolitionists felt entitled to use all possible means to save the African victims of the slave trade. As European imperialism rose, abolitionism legitimized interventionism. This article explores how a major humanitarian movement could sanction colonial occupation and the violence that accompanied it. It also examines the position of African slaveholders who resisted the entrenchment of European rule and defended an order in which slavery was common. It focuses on two main actors: French Captain Leopold Joubert, Catholic royalist and former pontifical Zouave who supported Cardinal Lavigerie's Missionaries of Africa and Belgian King Leopold II's allegedly abolitionist endeavours; and Tippu Tip, a trader and slaver who, like Joubert, worked for self-styled abolitionists such as Leopold II and the Sultan of Zanzibar. The connected microhistories of these men show how the international problematization of African slavery fuelled both European imperialism and anti-colonial resistance, while also creating circumstances in which enslaved persons emancipated themselves. The article investigates the moral perceptions of individuals whose sense of self was predicated upon values embodied by Europe's monarchies, the papacy of Rome, and the sultanate of Zanzibar. Faced with what they perceived as existential threats to these institutions, they responded with rising radicalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades the public and private documents of enslavers have been examined to produce seminal studies of slavery. This article explores the interval between public and private, exposing it as a liminal space of emotional direction for the enslaving elite of nineteenth-century South Carolina and Cuba. Consulting confidential correspondence, periodicals, and published proclamations gathered from archives across Cuba, Spain, and the U.S., this study focusses upon instances when enslavers strategized as to how their violence, words, architectural surroundings, legal codification, and press should best buttress what they regarded as the necessary emotional balance for maintaining their dominance: white confidence and Black fear. Analyzing these words and actions using History of the Emotions methodologies and principles including emotionology, emotional regimes, and the emotional politics of slavery, this article contributes the theorization of the 'confidence script', a performative narrative style deployed by proslavery elites to publicly assert unalloyed white composure regardless of tangible unrest among the enslaved population, or furtive admissions of slaveholder dread. Its conclusion asserts that the silences and proclamations surrounding racialised white fear and performative confidence in Cuba and the U.S. continue to propagate and justify nefarious white violence and injustice against Black Cubans and Americans today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on William Reddy's framework of emotional regimes and refuges to assess marginalized emotionality in colonial Cuba and to position Día de Reyes as an important emotional refuge. Día de Reyes, or 'Day of Kings,' in colonial Cuba marked not only a holy day on the Catholic sacred calendar, but also a holiday for the island's Afro-Cuban population. On this day each year, the enslaved were granted their freedom and allowed to celebrate throughout Havana. This article argues that in their observance of Day of Kings, enslaved peoples maintained a sense of identity and agency through embodied emotional performances that inverted public space and social roles. Their sanctioned celebration yielded a collective emotional experience that allowed them to rewrite normative emotion scripts and freely express indignation, happiness, pride, or sadness. The resulting refuge demonstrates the role of emotion in both wielding power and resisting it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses enslaved men's emotive responses to slavery's sexual economy in the antebellum U.S. South. It joins the growing historical literature on everyday forms of resistance and refusal, shedding light on the intimate dimensions of enslaved men's resistance. Using the framework of 'emotional regimes', this article shows that enslaved men strategically dissembled within, evaded, and defied slavery's culture of paternalism and strict emotional regime. It argues that enslaved men desired, sought, and valued strong intimate and affective relationships as an everyday life-affirming practice. While slavery's sexual economy routinely undermined enslaved romantic unions and emotional bonding, enslaved men typically showed their strength through vulnerability, emotional resilience, and emotional caretaking in intimate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enslavers utilized various methods of physical and psychological violence to effect emotions of terror and fear in their African captives in order to create and maintain systems of enslavement throughout the Atlantic World. But these methods also produced emotions in the victims which could act against the systems of enslavement. One such emotion was anger and its visible display towards the enslavers was forbidden throughout the Atlantic World. But the extreme domination of enslavement also resulted in challenges to the system. In this article, I will document and analyse visible displays of the emotions of anger and vengeance by the enslaved in the colonies that became British Guiana. The emotion of vengeance in these cases was conducted through open insults which allowed slaves a way to assert themselves and belittle their enslavers. This study is based on documented complaints of the enslaved during the nineteenth century in the colony of British Guiana, housed at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. These documents are unique in the annals of British West Indian slavery as they give voice to the enslaved on a variety of topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds light on a rarely considered aspect of colonial reality: trials of enslavers. The focus lies on lawsuits against members of the slaveholding elite in which enslaved people appeared as witnesses. These sources represent a moment of confrontation within colonial society which allows for an exploration of power relations through the eyes of the enslaved rarely discovered so far. This article discusses some methodological issues of working with this type of source as well as considering how the testimonies can be used and analysed through the lens of the History of Emotions. Reading the testimonies, we encounter a wide range of emotions, from anger, jealousy, and fear up to relief and gratitude. Some of the enslaved defended the accused enslaver by expressing gratitude for food and medicine. Others denounced their enslaver using their testimony as a way of spelling out their grievances. Their accounts, even though highly mediated, not only show how existing legal and social structures were contested, but also how the enslaved opened up spaces of resistance to make their voices heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines formerly enslaved people's use of Information Wanted advertisements to reconnect with lost family after the American Civil War. This article argues that physical reunification with loved ones was not the sole purpose of the advertisements of the post-emancipation era, since the advertisements both testified to the cruelty of family and kinship group separations and were radical first-person observations recording – and bearing witness to – the suffering of loved ones in enslavement. In safeguarding Black genealogies through the use of the advertisements, formerly enslaved people asserted family strength and power by publicly memorializing those they had lost. Formerly enslaved people thus employed emotion as a mechanism of resistance, within the advertisements, to protest the white emotional regime of the post-emancipation era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When enslaved people were accused of poisoning enslavers, it was newsworthy throughout the antebellum United States. Part of the broad appeal of such articles was their malleability; as reports of supposed poison plots or arsenic in a planter's coffee travelled from newspapers in slave states to the pages of Northern publications, the articles morphed in form, purpose, and emotional tone. Southern readers looked to stories about thwarted poison plots to assuage their fears of a similar fate and present a brave united front. Meanwhile, Northern newspapers invited a host of other emotions from their audience, from enjoyment and schadenfreude to sympathy and anger. This article on messaging about slavery, poison, and fear in the antebellum United States builds on my monograph, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, to focus on the emotional politics of fear. Examining how news about enslaved poisoners circulated and shapeshifted sheds light on the relationship between the antebellum press and collective emotions, and on the role of fear in defenses and critiques of slavery. While the Southern press framed stories about enslaved poisoners to address and manage members of the slaveocracy's fears, the abolitionist press worked to invoke and amplify that terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is intended both as a methodological intervention and as a provocation. It calls on us to think very carefully about how, why and (ultimately) if we should do this work of combining the history of slavery and the history of emotions. There is a danger that, without thinking through the ethics of researching and writing about the intimate, inner lives of the enslaved, the field will replicate the extractive nature of transatlantic slavery and contribute to the perpetuation of the very same emotional standards that Black people were subjected to under slavery. Thinking alongside Black Studies scholars and Black feminist theory, this article explores the following questions: whose emotions are we talking about and given the extractive nature of transatlantic slavery, how can we avoid this field perpetuating the emotional standards the regime created? It argues that considering the emotions of researchers and descendants of the enslaved is vital, as is careful consideration of the ethics and limits of the historian's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June of 1788, nine enslaved children in French-colonial Haiti identified as 'orphans' were leased by their enslaver alongside enslaved adults. How might these enslaved people have described their relationship to each other? While enslavers found biological families a category of sufficient economic importance to record in words, leasing contracts omit the broader familial connections African diasporans made. Under slavery's logic of human commodification, enslavers used the human beings they enslaved as conduits through which their investment capital could travel to increase in value. Aspects of enslaved African descendants' humanity became relevant to enslavers only inasmuch as those aspects could increase profits. But what if non-biological family connections were important enough to affect the economics of leasing even if enslavers failed to record those relationships in words? Embracing a Black digital humanistic approach, this article uses statistical regression to read 'along the bias grain' of leasing contracts to argue that the so-called 'orphaned' children were, in fact, cared for by the adults in their lease. Engaging with histories of the African diaspora, this article argues that Marguerite and Augustine, the adult women in the lease, may have occupied community positions that incorporated elements of the Yoruba concept of 'Public Mothers'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paraguay was one of the last states to abolish slavery in the Americas. Yet the history of slavery in this landlocked republic remains understudied. Through a systematic examination of judicial evidence, this article analyzes the unique political relationship that enslaved servants built with dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. The article foregrounds enslaved people's role in denouncing an elite conspiracy to overthrow the government in 1821 and later expressions of discontent coming from enslavers. This collaboration with the government impacted master-slave relations, as enslaved people increasingly sought the dictator's personal intervention to confront slaveholders and spread rumours that the dictator supported them. Meanwhile, confiscations of dissidents' properties led to the expansion of state slavery, which reverberated inside households as enslaved people appealed to this institution to deny enslavers' property rights over them. Through these diverse strategies, enslaved people made the government's power visible in everyday life within elite households. At the same time, by upholding Francia's rule, they gained leverage to contest slaveholders' authority. By illuminating the unique mechanisms through which slavery produced obedience to the government in Paraguay, this article proposes new ways to understand the uses of slavery for governance and state-building in the Atlantic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the idea and practice of slavery reflected in Bactrian documents. Bactrian documents are found in various parts of modern-day northern Afghanistan, a region broadly corresponding to late antique Bactria. The article discusses the definition of slavery and the slave's social status reflected in these documents. It shows that slavery was a practice that was authorized within the Bactrian legal system, where two types of slavery were recognized. The first type was that of the slave who was born in the owner's possession (χοβο νιζαδαγο μαρηγο), while the second was that of the slave who was purchased for money (δδραχμο χιρσιγο). In both cases, the slaves were regarded as personal property, with their owners having total authority over them. The Bactrian legal system allowed a slave to purchase his freedom by paying his full price and also permitted families to sell their children into slavery in times of difficulty. The legal documents were produced in the court of law, where some officials witnessed and sealed them, providing evidence that slavery was widely practised in late antique Bactria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies tombstones from eighth- to tenth-century CE Egypt that are designed to mark the grave of a Muslim slave. These funerary inscriptions are unusual in that they do not marginalize the enslaved as much as do other early Islamic sources. Furthermore, they reveal otherwise undocumented attitudes towards persons who died as slaves. Offering a thick description of an unpublished tombstone for a ninth-century concubine-mother (umm walad), the present article analyses tombstones for slaves from two perspectives. It first studies the representation of the enslaved and the specific terminology that tombstones used to designate the deceased as enslaved. It then turns to the commemorative context of tombstones, arguing that tombstones of slaves served similar purposes and used similar illocutionary strategies to those used by contemporary tombstones for free Muslims. Despite these similarities between tombstones of free and enslaved persons, we see that deceased slaves were commemorated as members of the Muslim community as well as the legal property of their owners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article challenges current perspectives on slavery as 'unfreedom' and proposes to examine the enslaved within a socio-political dynamics of power relations. An analysis of four Byzantine documents from the eleventh century and the place they accorded to slaves and manumitted slaves reveals the way enslavement and manumission served together as a means to acquire socioeconomic independence and private authority by turning the enslaved persons into private subjects: men and women exclusively subordinated to the authority of their owners. Private authority was based on a total subordination towards the enslaver and challenged the public imperial authority over people. An analysis of the place accorded to slaves and manumitted slaves in the private domain as seen from juridical and economic documents from the central Middle Ages from different regions of the Byzantine Empire shows slaves as social capital and slavery as a means to gain socioeconomic independence as part of the power game in a medieval society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the Sasanian era (224-650/1 CE), Zoroastrian Fire Foundations were some of the most significant landowners in Iran. The sources represented in this study reveal that Fire Foundations were among the most prominent organizations in late antique Iran, actively utilizing slaves and their labour in various social, economic and religious contexts. This article studies the religious, social, legal, and economic aspects of slaves in general, and slaves of Fire Foundations in particular throughout the Sasanian period. Drawing on Middle Persian legal and religious texts, the article examines three interrelated themes: the Fire Foundations characterized as slavers, and the function of priests in mobilizing their immense landed estates, income, and the utilization of slave labour; the relationship between free persons and slaves; and the link between the Fire Foundations and slaves. Analyzing these key questions and the considerable involvement of clerics in all these aspects enables us to discern the structural role of priests in Fire Foundations' use of slavery and within the broader framework of the Sasanian economy. Through this analysis, the article highlights the close administrative and financial ties binding the priesthood and the monarchy during Sasanian Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Al-Ḥakam I (154-206 AH/771-822 CE) is one of the most controversial characters in the history of al-Andalus. Despite the fact that the extant chronicles of the Umayyad emirate and caliphate in al-Andalus are fundamentally pro-Umayyad, their authors nevertheless depict the emir as a cruel and pitiless character and are never at a loss in finding harsh terms to describe his political and military actions. The personality of the emir is especially evident in the descriptions that the chronicles make of his treatment of the slaves in his court. Firstly, this article seeks to underline the importance that slaves had in the court of al-Ḥakam and, secondly, it provides an analysis of the historians' depictions of the emir based on the relationship he had with both his male and female slaves. Even though slaves in the Umayyad court have often been treated as secondary characters, their role is fundamental both in the narration of events and in the portrayal that Arab historians present of the sovereigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces several studies published in the issue on the history of slavery in the greater Mediterranean basin, the Near East and the Iranian world during the second half of the first millennium CE.

This article, by focusing on Crimean slavery, aims to enhance our understanding of the social and economic nature of slavery that underwent a remarkable change between the conquest of Caffa (1475) and the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), both of which marked a turning point in the history of slavery in Crimea. With the conquest of Caffa by the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Peninsula turned into a 'slaving hub' in Pontic-Danube steppe land for nearly 200 years. In this period, slaves became a basic commodity employed by a wide range of people in Crimea from different backgrounds from urbanites to peasants and from those who were wealthy to those who were penniless. By contrast in the aftermath of Caffa, however, the Treaty of Karlowitz caused a rapid depletion of slaves and consequently a sharp decline in revenues that Crimean Tatars derived from slavery which was accompanied by high inflation in slave prices and therefore a huge labour shortage. Using a micro-global perspective, this article examines these two political occurrences, which are described as a 'turning point' and 'beginning of the transformation' in Crimean society and explores the nexus between the political contexts and the changes in economic and social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illuminates pivotal moments in the lives of eighteen—enslaved and free—African descent peoples listed as mulatto from 1732 to 1803 in New Spain's north frontier. The records consulted reveal that both enslaved and free peoples employed the legal system to petition abuses and request transfers of ownership in places such as San Luis Potosí, Saltillo, Monclova, and San Antonio de Béjar, Texas. Two instances of manumission are detailed below. This article also highlights one escape from a semiliterate enslaved man who voluntarily returned to Saltillo, illuminating emotional ties to friends and family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the illegal slave trade between the United States and Brazil evolved in the 1860s–1880s into novel forms of captive mobility that closely resemble modern day human trafficking. It does so by examining the experiences of two Black families who were trafficked by an American 'Confederado' colonist. Through a close reading of a diverse array of sources, including government records, newspaper correspondence, passenger lists, and rich oral histories, it pushes back against the enslaver narrative in which these families are portrayed as willing travel companions. Instead, it narrates a counter-history that exposes how their enslaver used subterfuge, diversion and coercion to traffic them in plain sight and retain their enslaved labour against the tide of emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reveals the counter-history of the 'countervoyage' in the Luso-Atlantic world. Scholarly attention has recently concentrated on the Middle Passage, the westward West African-New World voyage of enslavement for millions of Africans. However, this article exposes constant captive maritime mobilities sailing east towards Europe from the Americas, conceptualized as the countervoyage, and explores how archival silences have obscured the multiplicity of captive geographic mobilities that resisted pre-defined routes for Black bodies. It examines how Black female place-making redefined the technology of Portuguese ocean-going vessels through corporeal positioning and use of Luso-Atlantic maritime space. Employing import tax collections, Inquisitorial processes and petitions for legal marriage to locate Afro-Brazilian women living in Portugal, this article argues that the countervoyage was particularly transformative in the lives of enslaved women in the Luso-Atlantic world, enabling them to chart alternate cartographies of transimperial diasporic activity. It concludes by considering how we might begin theorizing the counter-history of countervoyages to form a future conceptual and analytical tool (the 'counter-voyage') that effectively utilizes South Atlantic epistemologies for broader application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on ways of thinking productively about Indigenous freedom litigation suits, how scholars read that documentary record, whether we can give voice to the voiceless, and how ways of reading litigation records that included records from the 'deep archive', namely notorial and parish records, can inform epistemological seeing and knowledge mobilization. It is a cautionary tale that encourages a careful approach to slavery's archives as sites that constitute, validate, and activate historical evidence about Indigenous slaves who litigated for their freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black Africans who were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean experienced myriad forms of coercion alongside the Middle Passage. This article centres on mobilities of Manuel Francisco Zapata, a Black man of Wolof descent, born and raised a Muslim in Meknes, Morocco. Captured and enslaved by the Spanish, he lived for several years in Seville, and was then trafficked to Cartagena de Indias and Panama City before being tried by the Inquisition for 'Apostatic, Judaic propositions.' His life narrative allows a glimpse of the multiplicity of captive mobilities—coerced movement through military labour, capture, imprisonment, the trans-Atlantic voyage, arrest, and exile—that enslaved Africans endured. Captivity on the move was central to the condition of enslavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the journeys of eleven African captives up to their arrival in the province of Antioquia in the northern part of the New Kingdom of Granada, where Spanish enslavers had introduced thousands of enslaved people, especially after the 1580 discovery of large gold deposits in Zaragoza. Based on the proof of sales provided in a lawsuit filed in 1589, the article traces the trans-Atlantic and intra-American journeys and, drawing on the terms used as surnames to distinguish the captives, examines the socio-political and economic contexts of the Upper Guinea Coast and Angola from which they came. Moreover, it analyzes the official and unofficial captive mobilities used by enslavers in the last decades of the sixteenth century to forcibly transport Africans through intra-American ports such as Concepción, Tolú, Santa Marta or Mompox to the newly discovered gold mines of Zaragoza in Antioquia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics concerning slavery, freedom, and captivity in Latin America, Africa, and the South Atlantic region.

Historians of human rights have not had much to say about America's anti-slavery movement. Scholars tend to focus instead on the early enlightenment or how ideas of human rights emerged over the twentieth century. This essay, however, makes a case for why American abolitionists should be considered early rights pioneers and progenitors of what we know as human rights. It argues that though different factions of the movement had particular conceptions of rights, the movement itself mobilized around a shared rights vision and made this vision of human rights a centre piece of America's anti-slavery crusade. As a result, the essay intervenes in existing debates about how unified the abolitionists were and what made their thinking 'modern,' but it also speaks to the history of human rights by offering the field a new origin story to contend with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an extensive documentary database, this study charts the evolution of the slave market in seventeenth-century Guadalajara. The case of colonial Guadalajara offers a fascinating contrast to the better-known markets of Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz. Contrary to what happened in those cities, the local slave trade to Guadalajara peaked after 1640. Slavery thus remained significant for the economy of the region until at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. The study shows how the slave market of Guadalajara transitioned from more enslaved Africans being sold at the beginning of the century to mostly American-born slaves sold at the end of the period; from mostly enslaved negros sold to a majority of enslaved mulatos; and from more enslaved men being sold at the beginning of the century to more enslaved women sold at the end. These processes happened in the midst of gradually decreasing slave prices across the whole period. By shifting away the focus from Central Mexico to a lesser-known place, this article nuances our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade to Mexico and offers a reinterpretation of the history of colonial Guadalajara's slave market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1814, an enslaved woman named Antoinette was abducted in Berbice and lived for eleven years in a Maroon camp in Demerara (both parts of what became British Guiana, now Guyana). The camp was well established by the early 1800s and probably continued until emancipation in 1834. The persistence and strength of Maroon settlements throughout Guyana led the colonists to resort not only to force but also to negotiations and amnesties in order to mitigate the threat they posed. The Maroon's weakness lay in being constrained by alliances between the Amerindians and the white authorities which restricted them geographically to a generally marshy hinterland behind the coastal plantations. Despite a continuing war of attrition with the white colonists, Maroons in Guyana developed complex systems of forest agriculture, trade, and social systems which may reflect some aspects of Akan (and presumably other) cultures. The experience of Antoinette, in as far as it can be recovered, is a reminder that life as a Maroon was difficult and that, for many, other ways of surviving slavery might have had greater appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Metropolitan Museum's Portrait of a Man in Armour with Two Pages, painted a sixteenth-century portrait by the Venetian artist Paris Bordone, has been of great interest to art and cultural historians studying the depiction of Black subjects in early modern portrait art, because it is the earliest known work to depict a Black page attending a White male subject. It influenced the development of a distinct European portrait type in which aristocratic white sitters were represented with enslaved Black attendants in which their unequal power relations underscored by the rigid hierarchies of their proximities. Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal observe that the result of this motif is 'the paradoxical presence and erasure of the enslaved subject in portraiture' as material subjects that are seen but not acknowledged. Such a voluntary 'erasure' of what is clearly present also applies to the ways we have read archival documents about enslaved people from the point of view of the colonizer. Here, I re-read both the painting and the documents to restore the identities of both the main soldier subject and his Black slave, Francisco of Ethiopia, by drawing attention to our encoded methods of reading racialized subjects in the gallery and in the archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]