Despite growing popular and policy interest in ‘new’ slavery, with contemporary abolitionists calling for action to free an estimated 40 million ‘modern slaves’, interdisciplinary and theoretical dialogue has been largely missing from scholarship on ‘modern slavery’. This edited volume will provide a space to reinvigorate the theory and practice of representing slavery and related systems of domination, in particular our understandings of the binary between slavery and freedom in different historical and political contexts. The book takes a critical approach, interrogating the concept of modern slavery by exploring where it has come from, and its potential for obscuring and foreclosing new understandings. Including contributions from philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and English literature scholars, it adds to the emerging critique of the concept of ‘modern slavery’ through its focus on the connections between the past of Atlantic World slavery, the present of contemporary groups whose freedoms are heavily restricted (prisoners, child labourers in the Global South, migrant domestic workers, and migrant wives), and the futures envisaged by activists struggling against different elements of the systems of domination that Atlantic World slavery relied upon and spawned. Revisiting Slavery & Antislavery will be of indispensable value to scholars, students, policy makers and activists in the fields of human rights, modern history, international politics, social policy, sociology and global inequality.

Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism

Slavery and the Atlantic slave trade are among the most heinous crimes against humanity committed in the modern era. Yet, to this day no former slave society in the Americas has paid reparations to former slaves or their descendants. Ana Lucia Araujo shows that these calls for reparations have persevered over a long and difficult history. She traces the ways in which enslaved and freed individuals have conceptualized the idea of reparations since the 18th century in petitions, correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims. Taking the reader through the era of slavery, emancipation, post-abolition, and the present day and drawing on the voices of various of enslaved peoples and their descendants, the book illuminates the multiple dimensions of the demands of reparations. This new edition boasts a new chapter on the global impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, the seismic effect of the killing of George Floyd, calls for university reparations and the dismantling of statues. Updated throughout, this edition includes primary sources, further readings, and many illustrations.

Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

Essays challenging conventional understandings of the slave economy of the nineteenth century. The essays presented in New Frontiers of Slavery represent new analytical and interpretive approaches to the crisis of Atlantic slavery during the nineteenth century. By treating slavery within the framework of the modern world economy, they call attention to new zones of slave production that were formed as part of processes of global economic and political restructuring. Chapters by a group of international historians, economists, and sociologists examine both the global dynamics of the new slavery, and various aspects of economy-society and master-slave relations in the new zones. They emphasize the ways in which certain slave regimes, particularly in Cuba and Brazil, were formed as specific local responses to global processes, industrialization, urbanization, market integration, the formation of national states, and the emergence of liberal ideologies and institutions. These essays thus challenge conventional understandings of slavery, which often regard it as incompatible with modernity.

A comprehensive collection of Emerson's writings against slavery and the subjugation of American Indians - writings that reveal Emerson's deep commitment to social reform. Included are 18 works by Emerson, including speeches and lectures, on the subject of slavery, written between 1838 and 1863.

A stimulating analysis of the society and economy in the slave south.

In 1822, White authorities in Charleston, South Carolina, learned of plans among the city's enslaved and free Black population to lead an armed antislavery rebellion. Among the leaders was a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey. After a brief investigation and what some have considered a dubious trial, Vesey and thirty-five others were convicted of attempted insurrection and hanged. Although the rebellion never came to fruition, it nonetheless fueled Black antislavery movements in the United States and elsewhere. To this day, activists, politicians, writers, and scholars debate the significance of the conspiracy, how to commemorate it, and the integrity of the archival records it left behind. Fugitive Movements memorializes this attempted liberation movement with new interpretations of the event as well as comparisons to other Black resistance throughout the Atlantic World—including Africa, the Caribbean, and the Northern United States. This volume situates Denmark Vesey and antislavery rebellion within the current scholarship on abolition that places Black activists at the center of the story. It shows that Black antislavery rebellion in general, and the 1822 uprising by Black Charlestonians in particular, significantly influenced the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. The essays collected in this volume explore not only that history, but also the ongoing struggle over the memory of slavery and resistance in the Atlantic World. Manisha Sinha, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, provides the foreword.

From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an antislavery war. In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the bourgeoning black press, and the formation of militia groups, black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. Drawing on the precedent and pathos of the American and Haitian Revolutions, African American abolitionists used violence as a political language and a means of provoking social change. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War. Force and Freedom takes readers beyond the honorable politics of moral suasion and the romanticism of the Underground Railroad and into an exploration of the agonizing decisions, strategies, and actions of the black abolitionists who, though lacking an official political voice, were nevertheless responsible for instigating monumental social and political change.

Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.