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Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning Black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx's support for emancipation was conditional on the level of 'civilisation' attained by Black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx's racist defence of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx's nineteenth-century epithets. This is important because the alleged anti-Black racism of Marx and the place Black workers occupy in his historical-materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualising the relationship between Marxism and Black liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses two books, "Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery" by Kate Phillips and "The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy: Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775–1838" by Stephen Mullen, which explore Scotland's involvement in slavery and the slave trade. The author criticizes Phillips' book for its lack of original manuscript sources and superficial approach, pointing out errors and unsupported claims. Mullen's book is praised for its scholarly apparatus but criticized for not citing previous works, particularly a 1971 doctoral thesis by Tom Devine. The article emphasizes the importance of careful and rigorous research in contributing to the understanding of slavery and its legacies. [Extracted from the article]

"Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica" by Celia E. Naylor is a critical examination of the public narrative surrounding Rose Hall Plantation in Jamaica. The book focuses on the lives of enslaved people at Rose Hall who have been largely silenced in the presentation tour at the heritage site. Naylor uses archival records and storytelling techniques to shed light on the experiences of enslaved women and children at Rose Hall, challenging the power dynamics that operate through the silencing of alternative narratives. The book offers insights that are relevant to other historic plantation museums and will appeal to Caribbean historians, anthropologists, gender studies specialists, and literary critics. [Extracted from the article]

How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the "seasoning" of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica's Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally "tame" Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two female slaveholders, one real and one fictional, to explore the relationship between gender and slave management in both history and popular culture. Annie Palmer, the "White Witch of Rose Hall" plantation in Jamaica, although the creation of folklore and journalistic exaggeration, has functioned for a century and a half as a symbol not only of the evils of slavery but of the idea that female slaveholders' cruelty threatened the system of slavery in a way in which that practiced by males did not. In New Orleans, Delphine Lalaurie, an elite woman renowned for her elegance and piety, became a figure of monstrosity after a house fire of 1834 revealed that her French Quarter mansion held a chamber of horrors for the enslaved, and offered a similar example of the dangers of female power in slave societies. Examining these women's continuing presence both as historical figures and as characters in novels, television shows, and other creative productions, this article illuminates the strange career of the slaveholding woman, a figure execrated in her own era and misunderstood or ignored in contemporary historiography, yet simultaneously the subject over centuries of prurient cultural fascination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]