• The Humanisation of Slavery in Old Testament Law by David L. Baker • Slavery, Human Dignity and Human Rights by John Warwick Montgomery • Slavery in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and Today by Thomas Schirrmacher Three scholars discuss slavery in the Old Testament and a Christian view of slavery. They argue, that slavery in the OT had not much in common with Roman- Greek, Muslim or modern European slavery, as the slaves where protected by the legal system. They believe that there is a road from the humanisation of slavery in the OT through the soft opposition against slavery in the New Testament to the abolition of slavery by Christians and in Christian nations. The last essay contains a longer section on “The Role of Evangelicals in the Abolition of Slavery“, that summarizes the research of the last decades showing that the uncorrupted oppositions by pious people and the power of the masses without direct political influence changed history, the first major human rights campaign of history.
If We Must Die examines nearly five hundred shipboard rebellions that occurred over the course of the entire slave trade, directly challenging the prevailing thesis that such resistance was infrequent or insignificant. As Eric Robert Taylor shows, though most revolts were crushed quickly, others raged on for hours, days, or weeks, and, occasionally, the Africans captured the vessel and returned themselves to freedom. In recounting these rebellions, Taylor suggests that certain factors like geographic location, the involvement of women and children, and the timing of a shipboard revolt, determined the difference between success and failure. Taylor also explores issues like aid from other ships, punishment of slave rebels, and treatment of sailors captured by the Africans. If We Must Die expands the historical view of slave resistance, revealing a continuum of rebellions that spanned the Atlantic as well as the centuries. These uprisings, Taylor argues, ultimately helped limit and end the traffic in enslaved Africans and also served as crucial predecessors to the many revolts that occurred subsequently on plantations throughout the Americas.
Provides a new view and fresh interpretation of the world of slavery by focusing on the lives of the trader, John Newton (1725-1807), author of 'Amazing Grace', the owner, Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) and the slave, Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797).
The trade in slaves is perhaps the most notorious feature of the era of European expansion. Though begun in ancient times, and continued well after 1800, in the early modern period there developed a particular nexus in which it boomed. This volume distinguishes between procurement and trade, and the exploitation of settled slaves (the subject of a separate volume in the series, edited by Judy Bieber), and underscores the importance of the slave trade as a factor in world history. A rank redistribution of wealth and power, it permitted the exploitation and reconstruction of much of the globe. The articles address issues of the volume and flow of trade, the various populations enslaved, factors of sex, age, and ethnicity, and its impact on economic change, as in the monetization of Africa or economic growth in England.
Religious activity flourished in the eighteenth-century navy; this book examines the reasons why and its manifestations. The Evangelical Admiral Gambier, notorious for distributing tracts to his fleet in a theatre of war, is commonly seen as a misfit in a fighting service that had scant time for fervent piety. In fact, the navy of the Revolutionaryand Napoleonic Wars showed a level of religious observance not seen since the days of Queen Anne. Evangelical laymen provided one dynamic for this change: concentrating first on public worship, they moved to active proselytism insearch of converts amongst sailors, and in a third phase developed a loose network of prayer groups in scores of ships, uniting officers and seamen in voluntary gatherings that transcended rank. This book explores the effect this new piety had on discipline and human governance, on literacy, on the development of chaplains' ministry and on the mindset of the officer corps. It also looks at the larger question of how its values were absorbed into the ethos of the navy as a whole. It draws on sources both familiar and unusual - logs, letters, minutes, memoirs, tracts and sermons, Regulations - to explain how evangelical influence affected officer corps, lower deck andAdmiralty, showing how a movement that began by promoting public worship at sea became an agency for mass evangelism through literature, preaching and off-duty gatherings, where officers and men met for shared Bible reading and prayer a mere decade after the great Mutinies.
The quest for a theological connection with the heinous transatlantic chattel slave trade in Africans is an academically and intellectually lignum vitae nut to crack. It must be cracked by all means necessary to do a measured dose of justice to the subject of the slave trade that British academic and encomium scholars have been treating for centuries with impunity that it has no relevance theologically and philosophically, ignoring the historical and racial facts that British proslavery groups defended and opposed the abolition of the brutal and immoral forced enslavement of Africa on biblical grounds with a bent theology and misleading hermeneutics. (The notebook of Rev. Dr. James Ramsay is a solid evidence of how British proslavery movement operated.) This attitude was false, groundless, deceptive, and above all, a massive cover-up of the iniquities and abomination of the slave trade in Africa by an extraordinary committee of presidium syndication, which I shall deal with during the evolution of this significant thesis.
Endorsements: Dr. Montgomery's latest book is one that every serious reader interested in clear Christian thinking should have on a table near her most comfortable reading chair. It is filled with a wide variety of bite-sized essays that are absolutely delightful --knowledgeable, fun, witty, and unexpected. If you have never read the work of J. W. Montgomery before, you are in for a treat. This is a book that brings together his best writing from the past with his latest essays. It's a Christian feast of ideas that celebrates our Lord and His unfailing Word. --Craig J. Hazen, Ph.D., Director, MA Program in Christian Apologetics, Biola University What makes J. W. Montgomery tick? What has driven him over a massively productive career to such wide-ranging interests as computers and Chemnitz, legal theory and apologetics, human rights and Christology, Dawkins and Duchamp? The answer is clear: the gospel of Jesus Christ and its defense, articulation, and application to the real world in which the Word became flesh, died, and rose again as the Savior. Many of our best confessional-era theologians, both Lutheran and Reformed, were ""Renaissance men,"" but that's rarely the case today. Dr. Montgomery is a glaring exception and this book is a wonderful display of that full scope of his remarkable insights. While being an ardent defender of the Lutheran confession, he is far from parochial. Even in places where one might disagree, the clarity, logic, and relentless rigor of his arguments will kindle fires in hearths that we didn't even know we had and make us better advocates for the gospel. --Dr. Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologtics, Westminster Seminary California About the Contributor(s): John Warwick Montgomery is Professor Emeritus of Law and Humanities, University of Bedfordshire, England, Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Christian Thought, Patrick Henry College (Virginia, U.S.A.), and Director, International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights (Strasbourg, France). He holds ten earned degrees besides a Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Chicago, the Doctorat d'Universit from Strasbourg, France, and the LL.M. and LL.D. from the University of Cardiff, Wales/UK. A frequent contributor to Christianity Today, Dr. Montgomery has been honored by inclusion in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in France, and The Dictionary of International Biography. He is the author of some thirty books in the areas of theology, philosophy, and church history. He pleads cases before the European Court of Human Rights and has received the Patriarch's Medal of the Romanian Orthodox Church for his efforts in behalf of religious liberty. He is an ordained Lutheran pastor. Websites:, .
From the celebrated historian and author of Europe: A History, a new life of George II George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover, came to Britain for the first time when he was thirty-one. He had a terrible relationship with his father, George I, which was later paralleled by his relationship to his own son. He was short-tempered and uncultivated, but in his twenty-three-year reign he presided over a great flourishing in his adoptive country - economic, military and cultural - all described with characteristic wit and elegance by Norman Davies. (George II so admired the Hallelujah chorus in Handel's Messiah that he stood while it was being performed - as modern audiences still do.) Much of his attention remained in Hanover and on continental politics, as a result of which he was the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle, at Dettingen in 1744.
The Untold Story of a Nigerian Royal Family presents the story of the Urhobo ruling family of Okpe Kingdom and its political power in Nigeria. It traces the origins and history of the Okpe people and their social and political organization. Topics include: - The Okpe revolution of the sixteenth century and the assassination of Esezi I - British Colonial rule of the kingdom, late 1800s-1960 - Civil war between the Okpe and Olomu of Itsekiri and the palm oil trade rivalry - Urhobo-Itsekiri collaboration in the slave trade, and slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Okpe. - The political role played by traditional chiefs - Feminists who campaigned for women's rights to participate in the council of elders - The effort by HRH Esezi II to promote the democratic system of government within the Okpe council. - The story of the uncrowned king of Okpe Kingdom, including a brief history of the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70 - The reign of HRH Orhoro I. - The story of the author's candidacy for Okpe King after the death of Orhoro I - Nigeria oil policy - Muslim-Christian strife and human rights abuses
The groundbreaking history of the Atlantic slave trade, winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and the J. Russell Major Prize. In The Diligent, acclaimed historian Robert Harms reveals the complex workings of the slave trade by drawing on the private journal of First Lieutenant Robert Durand to recreate the macabre journey of a French slave ship. The Diligent began her journey in Brittany in 1731, and Harms follows her along the African coast where her goods were traded for slaves, then to Martinique where her captives were sold to work on sugar plantations. He brings to life a world in which slavery was carried out without qualms: the gruesome details of daily life aboard a slave ship, French merchants wrangling for the right to traffic in slaves, African kings waging epic wars for control of slave trading posts, and representatives of European governments negotiating the complicated politics of the Guinea coast to ensure a steady supply of labor for their countries' colonies. By combining the detailed story of an expedition with an exploration of the significant personalities and events that were shaping Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean in the early eighteenth century, The Diligent provides an intimate understanding of a horrifying world.
