This groundbreaking volume addresses the enslavement and experiences of Black Africans in Spain and the Spanish Caribbean, particularly La Española (or Hispaniola) and Puerto Rico, two of the earliest colonies. Spanning nearly four hundred years and rooted in extensive archival research, Transatlantic Bondage sheds light on a number of relatively underexamined topics in these locales, including the development and application of slavery laws, disobedience and its consequences, migration, gender, family, lifestyle, and community building among the free Black population and white allies. In bringing together new and recent work by leading scholars, including two essays translated into English here for the first time, the book is also a call for further study of slavery in the Spanish Caribbean and its impact on the region.
The essays in this book provide statistical analysis of the transatlantic slave trade, focusing especially on Brazil and Portugal from the 17th through the 19th century. The book contains research on slave ship voyages, origins, destinations numbers of slaves per port country, year, and period.
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
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. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture, pamphlet campaigns, and artwork. Yet an important piece of this visual culture has gone unexamined: the popular and frequently reprinted antislavery illustrated books published prior to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) that were utilized extensively by the antislavery movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Illustrated Slave analyzes some of the more innovative works in the archive of antislavery illustrated books published from 1800 to 1852 alongside other visual materials that depict enslavement. Martha J. Cutter argues that some illustrated narratives attempt to shift a viewing reader away from pity and spectatorship into a mode of empathy and interrelationship with the enslaved. She also contends that some illustrated books characterize the enslaved as obtaining a degree of control over narrative and lived experiences, even if these figurations entail a sense that the story of slavery is beyond representation itself. Through exploration of famous works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as well as unfamiliar ones by Amelia Opie, Henry Bibb, and Henry Box Brown, she delineates a mode of radical empathy that attempts to destroy divisions between the enslaved individual and the free white subject and between the viewer and the viewed.
Davis begins with the dramatic "Amistad" case, and then looks at slavery in the American South and the abolitionists who defeated one of human history's greatest evils.
During the first generations of European settlement in North America, a number of interconnected Northeastern families carved out private empires. In Bound by Bondage, Nicole Saffold Maskiell argues that slavery was a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of this emergent aristocracy. Dynastic families built prestige based on shared notions of mastery, establishing sprawling manorial estates and securing cross-colonial landholdings and trading networks that stretched from the Northeast to the South, the Caribbean, and beyond. The members of this elite class were mayors, governors, senators, judges, and presidents, and they were also some of the largest slaveholders in the North. Aspirations to power and status, grounded in the political economy of human servitude, ameliorated ethnic and religious rivalries, and united once antagonistic Anglo and Dutch families, ensuring that Dutch networks endured throughout the English and then Revolutionary periods. Using original research drawn from archives across several continents in multiple languages, Maskiell expertly traces the origin of these private familial empires back to the founding generations of the Northeastern colonies and follows their growth to the eve of the American Revolutionary War. Maskiell reveals a multiracial Early America, where enslaved traders, woodsmen, millers, maids, bakers, and groomsmen developed expansive networks of their own that challenged the power of the elites, helping in escapes, in trade, and in simple camaraderie. In Bound by Bondage, Maskiell writes a new chapter in the history of early North America and connects developing Northern networks of merit to the invidious institution of slavery.
The first book-length history of the Fante people of southern Ghana during the Atlantic slave trade. Specifically, this volume provides a historical framework for the relationship between Ghana's coastal forts and castles and local African societies during this complex period.
This African slave trade history is a detailed account of Africa's slave history that started in the fifteenth century. It was started by the southern European Portuguese monarchs, the family of royal lineages. Portugal's golden age of discovery in sea exploration led Portugal to Africa by sea by the 1430s. Then later, in 1492, Christopher Columbus accidentally landed on the Native Indian American continent. Columbus's trip was sponsored by Spanish royal families. That was the period when the Roman Catholic nations, Portugal and Spain, were the dominant European nations. Spain liberated her whole territory from Islamic occupation in late 1400s. The Catholic Church was also very involved in signing treaties with their Roman Catholic spheres of influence nations. By then, Portugal already monopolized the African trade in African goods and human slave trade in the Portuguese-dominated African territories. Portugal first started shipping the African slaves to Europe. With Spain's possession of the Americas, this changed the African slave trade greatly. The American territory promoted the biggest international African slave trade and economic gains for European prosperity to this day. By the sixteenth century, Catholic religious theocracy became challenged by other northern European powers. The reformation movement in northern Europe led to the breaking away by northern European realms from the dominant Catholic religion and established their Protestant Christian religions. These new emerging northern European realms also challenged Portugal's domination and grip of Africa's territories and Africa's slave trade and goods. Based on the treaties signed between Portugal and Spain by Catholic popes, Portugal was supplying the slaves, and Spain was procuring and shipping the African slaves from Portugal's control and forced African slave labor to develop Spain's Americas through extended overseas colonies, and Portugal's Brazil new colony. Meanwhile, Spain's takeover was contracting with European mercenaries the conquistadors to capture the American land from the Native Indians, the original occupiers of the Americas. The paradigm or blueprint of this African slave trade pattern already established by the Portuguese was later replicated by other European realms in Africa and the Americas, and they continued the lucrative African slave trade for more than two hundred years. The establishing of extended overseas territories or colonies by Europeans to build their economies both at home in Europe and the Americas using forced African labor, goods, and repatriation of European colonists to establish the new overseas extended to the Americas. This book is information rich with the African slave trade history dynamics, the European realms, names of monarchs that participated, European slave wars, rivalries, slave laws, European merchants, African noblemen and merchants, slave ships, religions, European and African rituals, Main African territories, overseas sea routes used, African chiefs, merchants, European slave ships, ship captains' accounts, numbers of slaves shipped per trip, goods exchanged, major African tribes, stories of names of slave warriors, slave contracts, European slave treaties, African slave harbors, slave rebellions on land, on ships, the making of American colonies, America's Independence and Latin American countries, the making of the first British Crown, Freed slaves returned to the colony of Province of Freedom, Sierra Leone, etc.
As Britain’s dominant port for the slave trade in the eighteenth century, Liverpool is crucial to the study of slavery. And as the engine behind Liverpool’s rapid growth and prosperity, slavery left an indelible mark on the history of the city. This collection of essays, boasting an international roster of leading scholars in the field, sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery. The contributors tackle a range of issues, including African agency, slave merchants and their society, and the abolitionist movement, always with an emphasis on the human impact of slavery.
Words like colonialism and empire were once frowned upon in the U.S. and other Western mainstream media as worn-out left-wing rhetoric that didnt fit reality. Not anymore! Tatah Mentan observes that a growing chorus of right-wing ideologues, with close ties to the Western administrations war-making hawks in NATO, are encouraging Washington and the rest of Europe to take pride in the expansion of their power over people and nations around the globe. Africa in the Colonial Ages of Empire is written from the perspective that the scholarly lives of academics researching on Africa are changing, constantly in flux and increasingly bound to the demands of Western colonial imperialism. This existential situation has forced the continent to morph into a tool in the hands of Colonial Empire. According to Tatah Mentan, the effects of this existential situation of Africa compel serious academic scrutiny. At the same time, inquiry into the African predicament has been changing and evolving within and against the rhythms of this new normal of Colonial Empire-Old or New. The author insists that the long and bloody history of imperial conquest that began with the dawn of capitalism needs critical scholarly examination. As Marx wrote in Capital: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moment of primitive accumulation. Africa in the Colonial Ages of Empire is therefore a MUST-READ for faculty, students as well as policy makers alike in the changing dynamics of their profession, be it theoretically, methodologically, or structurally and materially.
