Originally published in 1985, and available for the first time in paperback, Bondmen & Rebels provides a pioneering study of slave resistance in the Americas. Using the large-scale Antigua slave conspiracy of 1736 as a window into that society, David Barry Gaspar explores the deeper interactive character of the relation between slave resistance and white control.
Commanding a vast historiography of slavery and emancipation, Aline Helg reveals as never before how significant numbers of enslaved Africans across the entire Western Hemisphere managed to free themselves hundreds of years before the formation of white-run abolitionist movements. Her sweeping view of resistance and struggle covers more than three centuries, from early colonization to the American and Haitian revolutions, Spanish American independence, and abolition in the British Caribbean. Helg not only underscores the agency of those who managed to become "free people of color" before abolitionism took hold but also assesses in detail the specific strategies they created and utilized. While recognizing the powerful forces supporting slavery, Helg articulates four primary liberation strategies: flight and marronage; manumission by legal document; military service, for men, in exchange for promised emancipation; and revolt—along with a willingness to exploit any weakness in the domination system. Helg looks at such actions at both individual and community levels and in the context of national and international political movements. Bringing together the broad currents of liberal abolitionism with an original analysis of forms of manumission and marronage, Slave No More deepens our understanding of how enslaved men, women, and even children contributed to the slow demise of slavery.
Gender was a decisive force in slave society. Slave men's experiences differed from those of slave women, who were exploited in both reproductive and productive capacities. They did not figure prominently in revolts because they engaged in less confrontational methods of resistance, emphasizing creative struggle to survive dehumanization and abuse.
Rodney Hilton's account of the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 remains the classic authoritative text on the 'English Rising'. Hilton views the revolt in the context of a general European pattern of class conflict. He demonstrates that the peasant movements that disturbed the Middle Ages were not mere unrelated outbreaks of violence but had their roots in common economic and political conditions and in a recurring conflict of interest between peasants and landowners. Now with a new introduction by Christopher Dyer, this survey remains the leading source for students of medieval English peasantry.
Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England bridges the disciplines of literature and history by examining various kinds of literary language as examples of social practice. Readings of both English and Latin texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are grounded in close textual study which reveals the social positioning of these works and the kinds of ideological work they can be seen to perform. Distinctive new readings of texts emerge which challenge received interpretations of literary history and late medieval culture. Canonical authors and texts such as Chaucer, Gower, and Pearl are discussed alongside the less familiar: Clanvowe, anonymous alliterative verse, and Wycliffite prose tracts.
Gabriel's Rebellion tells the dramatic story of what was perhaps the most extensive slave conspiracy in the history of the American South. Douglas Egerton illuminates the complex motivations that underlay two related Virginia slave revolts: the first, in 1800, led by the slave known as Gabriel; and the second, called the 'Easter Plot,' instigated in 1802 by one of his followers. Although Gabriel has frequently been portrayed as a messianic, Samson-like figure, Egerton shows that he was a literate and highly skilled blacksmith whose primary goal was to destroy the economic hegemony of the 'merchants,' the only whites he ever identified as his enemies. According to Egerton, the social, political, and economic disorder of the Revolutionary era weakened some of the harsh controls that held slavery in place during colonial times. Emboldened by these conditions, a small number of literate slaves--most of them highly skilled artisans--planned an armed insurrection aimed at destroying slavery in Virginia. The intricate scheme failed, as did the Easter Plot that stemmed from it, and Gabriel and many of his followers were hanged. By placing the revolts within the broader context of the volatile political currents of the day, Egerton challenges the conventional understanding of race, class, and politics in the early days of the American republic.
So central was labor in the lives of African-American slaves that it has often been taken for granted, with little attention given to the type of work that slaves did and the circumstances surrounding it. Cultivation and Culture brings together leading scholars of slavery- historians, anthropologists, and sociologists- to explore when, where, and how slaves labored in growing the New World's great staples and how this work shaped the institution of slavery and the lives of African-American slaves. The authors focus on the interrelationships between the demands of particular crops, the organization of labor, the nature of the labor force, and the character of agricultural technology. They show the full complexity of the institution of chattel bondage in the New World and suggest why and how slavery varied from place to place and time to time.
This volume (the first one published) begins with an overview of the slave trade. African slavers and the demography of the Caribbean up to 1750. Scholars go on to study the demographic and social structure of the Caribbean slave societies in the 18 and 19 centuries, their evolution and significance, the social and political control in the slave society and forms of resistance and religious beliefs, as well as Maroon communities in the circum-Caribbean. The phenomenon of pluralism and creolization is analysed. The volume closes with a study of the distintegration of the Caribbean slave systems.
The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo presents the history of the nation's forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey. It also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America's most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. Jeroen Dewulf rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a "slave king" as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, Dewulf identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and he traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa. Dewulf's focus on the social capital of slaves follows the mutual aid to seventeenth-century Manhattan. He suggests a much stronger impact of Manhattan's first slave community on the development of African American identity in New York and New Jersey than hitherto assumed. While the earliest works on slave culture in a North American context concentrated on an assumed process of assimilation according to European standards, later studies pointed out the need to look for indigenous African continuities. The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo suggests the necessity for an increased focus on the substantial contact that many Africans had with European--primarily Portuguese--cultures before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas. The book has already garnered honors as the winner of the Richard O. Collins Award in African Studies, the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award, and the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize.
