Slaves and Englishmen
Slaves and Englishmen

Author: Michael Guasco

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2014-01-11

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0812209885

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Technically speaking, slavery was not legal in the English-speaking world before the mid-seventeenth century. But long before race-based slavery was entrenched in law and practice, English men and women were well aware of the various forms of human bondage practiced in other nations and, in less systematic ways, their own country. They understood the legal and philosophic rationale of slavery in different cultural contexts and, for good reason, worried about the possibility of their own enslavement by foreign Catholic or Muslim powers. While opinions about the benefits and ethics of the institution varied widely, the language, imagery, and knowledge of slavery were a great deal more widespread in early modern England than we tend to assume. In wide-ranging detail, Slaves and Englishmen demonstrates how slavery shaped the ways the English interacted with people and places throughout the Atlantic world. By examining the myriad forms and meanings of human bondage in an international context, Michael Guasco illustrates the significance of slavery in the early modern world before the rise of the plantation system or the emergence of modern racism. As this revealing history shows, the implications of slavery were closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English in the Atlantic world.

A Comparison of American and British Slavery (Classic Reprint)
A Comparison of American and British Slavery (Classic Reprint)

Author: Wm Hagadorn

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2018-01-12

Total Pages: 38

ISBN-13: 9780428949570

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Excerpt from A Comparison of American and British Slavery Well, we have stated some reasons for not opposing the institutions of our sister States, but we know of no such reasons for not opposing British Slavery. We know of no compact by which we are bound to support British institutions, nor do the English people, apparently, feel bound to support ours. Indeed, just the contrary seems to be the case. We shall go on, therefore, with our remarks, and enquire, in the first place, who are the British Slaves, and then Whether British Slavery really is Slavery, according to the universally received dehui tions of the term. In order to get at a proper reply to the question, Who are the British Slaves 3 it is well, in the first place, to inquire who are the British freemen, of whom the world hears so much? We remember seeing an article in Blackwood's Magazine, some time since. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Sugar and Slavery
Sugar and Slavery

Author: Richard B. Sheridan

Publisher: Canoe Press (IL)

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9789768125132

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This book covers the changing preference of growing sugar rather than tobacco which had been the leading crop in the trans-Atlantic colonies. The Sugar Islands were Antigua, Barbados, St. Christopher, Dominica, and Cuba through Trinidad. Jamaica has been by far the major producer of sugar, but The Lesser Antilles had the advantage of a shorter sea trip to deliver produce and rum to the European Markets during the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Slaves for Peanuts
Slaves for Peanuts

Author: Jori Lewis

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1620971577

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Finalist, James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship A stunning work of popular history—the story of how a crop transformed the history of slavery Americans consume over 1.5 billion pounds of peanut products every year. But few of us know the peanut’s tumultuous history, or its intimate connection to slavery and freedom. Lyrical and powerful, Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. Author Jori Lewis reveals how demand for peanut oil in Europe ensured that slavery in Africa would persist well into the twentieth century, long after the European powers had officially banned it in the territories they controlled. Delving deep into West African and European archives, Lewis recreates a world on the coast of Africa that is breathtakingly real and unlike anything modern readers have experienced. Slaves for Peanuts is told through the eyes of a set of richly detailed characters—from an African-born French missionary harboring runaway slaves, to the leader of a Wolof state navigating the politics of French imperialism—who challenge our most basic assumptions of the motives and people who supported human bondage. At a time when Americans are grappling with the enduring consequences of slavery, here is a new and revealing chapter in its global history.

Rough Crossings
Rough Crossings

Author: Simon Schama

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13:

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Set against the backdrop of the American Revolution and its aftermath, ROUGH CROSSINGS is the gripping, astonishing epic of the struggle for freedom by tens of thousands of slaves who believed that their future as free men and women was bound up with staying British, not becoming American. The decision to offer slaves who defected to the British their liberty began in military strategy, but it unleashed the greatest mass uprising in American history by tens of thousands of slaves - Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom even when they knew that the English were far from being saints when it came to slavery. With powerfully vivid story-telling, often spoken through the voices of the blacks themselves, as well as the white abolitionists who became their emancipators and protectors, Schama follows the odyssey of the escaped blacks into the fires of the war, the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, and into inhospitable Nova Scotia where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed in their promises to receive land. Along the way, ROUGH CROSSINGS keeps company with a cast of extraordinary characters: Granville Sharp, the flute-playing father-figure of slave freedom; David George, runaway slave and Baptist preacher; Thomas Peters, sergeant in the British Black Pioneers and the first true African-American politician. Most compelling of all, there is Lieutenant John Clarkson, young, passionate, resourceful and high-strung, the 'Moses' of this, one of the great Exoduses in British history. Clarkson's journal of the 'ingathering' in Nova Scotia, the ocean crossing and the harrowing experience of the first year in Sierra Leone is one of the most powerful documents of the history of liberty. Although the extraordinary story that unfolds in ROUGH CROSSINGS would ultimately prove to be bitterly tragic, it was not without its moments of redemption, promises kept as well as betrayed. If there is heartbreak waiting in its pages there is also rejoicing. No one who reads it will ever feel the same way again about what it means to be British, American - and black.

Rough Crossings
Rough Crossings

Author: Simon Schama

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-04-28

Total Pages: 750

ISBN-13: 0061914606

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“The most dramatic account so far of the extraordinary expeience of slaves in and after the American Revolution. . . . Schama’s gift for plunging us into the very center of the action makes reading an exhilarating and often moving experience.”—Daily Telegraph If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history. Told in the voices of the slaves and the white abolitionists who aided them, Simon Schama vividly details the odyssey of these escaped blacks, shedding light on an extraordinary chapter in America’s birth.

British Slaves and Barbary Corsairs, 1580-1750
British Slaves and Barbary Corsairs, 1580-1750

Author: Bernard Capp

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-04-07

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0192671804

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British Slaves and Barbary Corsairs is the first comprehensive study of the thousands of Britons captured and enslaved in North Africa in the early modern period, an issue of intense contemporary concern but almost wholly overlooked in modern histories of Britain. The study charts the course of victims' lives from capture to eventual liberation, death in Barbary, or, for a lucky few, escape. After sketching the outlines of Barbary's government and society, and the world of the corsairs, it describes the trauma of the slave-market, the lives of galley-slaves and labourers, and the fate of female captives. Most captives clung on to their Christian faith, but a significant minority apostatized and accepted Islam. For them, and for Britons who joined the corsairs voluntarily, identity became fluid and multi-layered. Bernard Capp also explores in depth how ransoms were raised by private and public initiatives, and how redemptions were organised by merchants, consuls, and other intermediaries. With most families too poor to raise any ransom, the state came under intense pressure to intervene. From the mid-seventeenth century, the navy played a significant role in 'gunboat diplomacy' that eventually helped end the corsair threat. The Barbary corsairs posed a challenge to most European powers, and the study places the British story within the wider context of Mediterranean slavery, which saw Moors and Christians as both captors and captives.