This collection examines the effects of slavery and emancipation on race, class and gender in societies of the American South, the Caribbean, Latin America and West Africa. The contributors discuss what slavery has to teach us about patterns of adjustment and change, black identity and the extent to which enslaved peoples succeeded in creating a dynamic world of interaction between the Americas. They examine how emancipation was defined, how it affected attitudes towards slavery, patterns of labour usage and relationships between workers as well as between workers and their former owners.
This groundbreaking collection provides the first comparative history of gender and emancipation in the Atlantic world. Bringing together essays on the United States, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, West Africa and South Africa, and the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, it shows that emancipation was a profoundly gendered process, produced through connections between race, gender, sexuality, and class. Contributors from the United States, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, and Brazil explore how the processes of emancipation involved the re-creation of gender identities—the production of freedmen and freedwomen with different rights, responsibilities, and access to citizenship. Offering detailed analyses of slave emancipation in specific societies, the contributors discuss all of the diverse actors in emancipation: slaves, abolitionists, free people of color, state officials, and slave owners. Whether considering the construction of a postslavery masculine subjectivity in Jamaica, the work of two white U.S. abolitionist women with the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War, freedwomen’s negotiations of labor rights in Puerto Rico, slave women’s contributions to the slow unraveling of slavery in French West Africa, or the ways that Brazilian abolitionists deployed representations of femininity as virtuous and moral, these essays demonstrate the gains that a gendered approach offers to understanding the complex processes of emancipation. Some chapters also explore theories and methodologies that enable a gendered reading of postslavery archives. The editors’ substantial introduction traces the reasons for and patterns of women’s and men’s different experiences of emancipation throughout the Atlantic world. Contributors. Martha Abreu, Sheena Boa, Bridget Brereton, Carol Faulkner, Roger Kittleson, Martin Klein, Melanie Newton, Diana Paton, Sue Peabody, Richard Roberts, Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva, Hannah Rosen, Pamela Scully, Mimi Sheller, Marek Steedman, Michael Zeuske
The contributors investigate the cultural consequences of manumission as well as the changing economic conditions that limited the practice by the eighteenth century to understand better the social implications of this multifaceted aspect of the system of slavery.
This volume reflects the main themes of research and publications on the sociology and economics of slavery, illustrating the dynamic relations between modes of production and social life. There is a focus on anti-slavery consciousness and politics.
In Rites of August First, J.R. Kerr-Ritchie provides the first detailed analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of August First Daythe most important annual celebration of the emancipation of colonial slavery throughout the British Empire. Spanning the Western hemisphere, Kerr-Ritchie successfully unravels the cultural politics of emancipation celebrations, analyzing the social practices informed by public ritual, symbol, and spectacle designed to elicit feelings of common identity among blacks in the Atlantic world.
During the era of revolution, independence, and emancipation in the north Atlantic, slavery and freedom were fluid and contested concepts. Individuals and groups turned to courts of law to define and enforce the status of indigenous Americans, forcibly imported Africans, and colonizing Europeans -- and their progeny. Legal institutions of the state manufactured and mediated a new, dynamic concept of freedom, inventing categories of race and codifying white privilege. In this collection of documents from the French, British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires, Peabody and Grinberg introduce the voices of slaves, slave-holders, jurists, legislators, and others who struggled to critique, overturn, justify, or simply describe the social order in which they found themselves. Discussion questions, illustrations, a glossary, and a bibliography allow students to analyze these rich documents and discern their lasting influences.
Winner of the Jerry H. Bentley Book Prize, World History Association The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland. These became the most prosperous slave economies in the Anglo-American Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity. Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders’ power that marked the evolution of these societies. Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other. In both Jamaica and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance and recurrent slave revolts. Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and state-sponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power. Yet slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by rising abolitionist sentiment and activity in the Anglo-American world. In South Carolina, slaveholders exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition and to expand slavery in the young republic. In Jamaica, by contrast, whites fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British abolitionists who acted through Parliament. Rugemer’s comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies in the Atlantic World.
Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, 'slave' and 'portraiture' as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Essays address this apparent paradox of 'slave portraits' from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, probing the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and exploring their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.
The last New World countries to abolish slavery were Cuba and Brazil, more than twenty years after slave emancipation in the United States. Why slavery was so resilient and how people in Latin America fought against it are the subjects of this compelling study. Beginning with the roots of African slavery in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberian empires, this work explores central issues, including the transatlantic slave trade, labor, Afro-Latin American cultures, racial identities in colonial slave societies, and the spread of antislavery ideas and social movements. A study of Latin America, this work, with its Atlantic-world framework, will also appeal to students of slavery and abolition in other Atlantic empires and nation-states in the early modern and modern eras.
Over the long nineteenth century, African-descended peoples used the uncertainties and possibilities of emancipation to stake claims to freedom, equality, and citizenship. In the process, people of color transformed the contours of communities, nations, and the Atlantic World. Although emancipation was an Atlantic event, it has been studied most often in geographically isolated ways. The justification for such local investigations rests in the notion that imperial and national contexts are essential to understanding slaving regimes. Just as the experience of slavery differed throughout the Atlantic World, so too did the experience of emancipation, as enslaved people’s paths to freedom varied depending on time and place. With the essays in this volume, historians contend that emancipation was not something that simply happened to enslaved peoples but rather something in which they actively participated. By viewing local experiences through an Atlantic framework, the contributors reveal how emancipation was both a shared experience across national lines and one shaped by the particularities of a specific nation. Their examination uncovers, in detail, the various techniques employed by people of African descent across the Atlantic World, allowing a broader picture of their paths to freedom. Contributors: Ikuko Asaka, Caree A. Banton, Celso Thomas Castilho, Gad Heuman, Martha S. Jones, Philip Kaisary, John Garrison Marks, Paul J. Polgar, James E. Sanders, Julie Saville, Matthew Spooner, Whitney Nell Stewart, and Andrew N. Wegmann.
