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.

Larry Gragg challenges the prevailing view of the seventeenth-century English planters of Barbados as architects of a social disaster. Most historians have described them as profligate and immoral, as grasping capitalists who exploited their servants and slaves in a quest for quick riches inthe cultivation of sugar. Yet, they were more than rapacious entrepreneurs. Like English emigrants to other regions in the empire, sugar planters transplanted many familiar governmental and legal institutions, eagerly started families, abided traditional views about the social order, and resistedcompromises in their diet, apparel, and housing, despite their tropical setting. Seldom becoming absentee planters, these Englishmen developed an extraordinary attraction to Barbados, where they saw themselves, as one group of planters explained in a petition, as 'being Englishmentransplanted'.

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.

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.

A sweeping and original look at American slavery in the early nineteenth century that reveals the gamble slaves had to take to survive Images of American slavery conjure up cotton plantations and African American slaves locked in bondage until the Civil War. Yet early on in the nineteenth century the state of slavery was very different, and the political vicissitudes of the young nation offered diverse possibilities to slaves. In the century's first two decades, the nation waged war against Britain, Spain, and various Indian tribes. Slaves played a role in the military operations, and the different sides viewed them as a potential source of manpower. While surprising numbers did assist the Americans, the wars created opportunities for slaves to find freedom among the Redcoats, the Spaniards, or the Indians. Author Gene Allen Smith draws on a decade of original research and his curatorial work at the Fort Worth Museum in this fascinating and original narrative history. The way the young nation responded sealed the fate of slaves for the next half century until the Civil War. This drama sheds light on an extraordinary yet little known chapter in the dark saga of American history.

White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain's American colonies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide "breeders" for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock. Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history. This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.

The connection between Renaissance ideas about the character of individual nations and the presentation of stage characters of various nationalities in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is examined in this volume.

The proceedings of a conference on Caribbean slavery and British capitalism are recorded in this volume. Convened in 1984, the conference considered the scholarship of Eric Williams & his legacy in this field of historical research.

Annamaboe--largest slave trading port on the Gold Coast--was home to wily African merchants whose partnerships with Europeans made the town an integral part of Atlantic webs of exchange. Randy Sparks recreates the outpost's feverish bustle and brutality, tracing the entrepreneurs, black and white, who thrived on a lucrative traffic in human beings.