From the 1787 Wedgwood antislavery medallion featuring the image of an enchained and pleading black body to Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (2013), slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world.
Manumission-the act of freeing a slave while the institution of slavery continues-has received relatively little scholarly attention as compared to other aspects of slavery and emancipation.
Laws and cultural norms militated against interracial sex in Virginia before the Civil War, and yet it was ubiquitous in cities, towns, and plantation communities throughout the state.
Josephine Brown presents a detailed biography of her father, William Wells Brown, who was born on a plantation but escaped to become a successful abolitionist.
An investigation of US participation in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, from the American Revolution to the Civil War While much of modern scholarship has focused on the American slave trade’s impact within the United States, considerably less has addressed its effects in other parts of the Americas.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade was considered to be a necessary and stabilizing factor in the capitalist economies of Europe and the expanding Americas.
Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
Colonial Sequence 1930-1949 (1967) presents a valuable body of evidence for the enquiry into Britain's colonial actions, written at a time when Britain was retreating from empire.
Freedoms Mirage traces the exceptional life of Virgil Bennehan, born in bondage in 1808 in Piedmont North Carolina, who rose to become an enslaved doctor on one of the Souths largest plantations and to view himself as a friend to Black and white people alike.
This book focuses on alternative types of slave narratives, especially courtroom testimony, and interrogates how such narratives were produced, the societies (both those that were majority slave societies and those in which slaves were a distinct minority of the population) in which testimony was permitted, and the meanings that can be attached to such narratives.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NONFICTION CROWN AWARD 2024GUARDIAN: BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024'GRIPPING' THE TIMESThis is an immersive and revelatory history of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last ship of the Atlantic slave trade, whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.
In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night.
Under policies instituted by the Confederacy, white Virginians and North Carolinians surrendered control over portions of their slave populations to state authorities, military officials, and the national government to defend their new nation.
Slavery in Small Things: Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits isthe first book to explore the long-range cultural legacy of slavery through commonplace daily objects.
Madeleine's Children uncovers a multigenerational saga of an enslaved family in India and two islands, Runion and Mauritius, in the eastern empires of France and Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Christa Dierksheide argues that "e;enlightened"e; slaveowners in the British Caribbean and the American South, neither backward reactionaries nor freedom-loving hypocrites, thought of themselves as modern, cosmopolitan men with a powerful alternative vision of progress in the Atlantic world.
Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in February 1818, but from this most humble of beginnings, he rose to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans.
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers.
The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration.
The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts analyzes a large corpus of early Christian texts and Pseudepigraphic materials to understand how the authors of these texts used, abused and silenced enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions.
James Smith (1989) is study of this hitherto-neglected maker of colonial culture, and traces the rise and decline of the transplanted ideas and values that Smith and many of his fellow immigrants to Australia upheld.
This unique and rich collection of narratives, written or dictated by formerly enslaved Africans between 1820 and 1876, offers a rare snapshot of African voices in the history of slavery.
Originally published as a collection in 2006, the essays in this volume discuss the reasons for the end of the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself.
Invisible Voices explores the intersection of criminology and history as a way of contextualizing the historical black presence in crime and punishment in the UK.
Provides a comprehensive overview of 10 major slave revolts and examines how those uprisings and conspiracies impacted slaveholding colonies and states from 1663 to 1861.
An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees.
Clive, Proconsul of India (1976) examines the life of the man held by many to be one of the main originators of European imperialism in Asia in the eighteenth century.
This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890.
The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade has puzzled nineteenth-century contemporaries and historians since, as the British Empire turned naval power and moral outrage against a branch of commerce it had done so much to promote.
