Imagining Transatlantic Slavery

This exciting interdisciplinary volume, featuring contributions from a group of leading international scholars, reflects on the long history of representations of transatlantic slaves and slavery, encompassing a broad chronological range, from the eighteenth century to the present day.

From 1501, when the first slaves arrived in Hispaniola, until the nineteenth century, some twelve million people were abducted from west Africa and shipped across thousands of miles of ocean - the infamous Middle Passage - to work in the colonies of the New World. Perhaps two million Africans died at sea. Why was slavery so widely condoned, during most of this period, by leading lawyers, religious leaders, politicians and philosophers? How was it that the educated classes of the western world were prepared for so long to accept and promote an institution that would later ages be condemned as barbaric? Exploring these and other questions - and the slave experience on the sugar, rice, coffee and cotton plantations - Kenneth Morgan discusses the rise of a distinctively Creole culture; slave revolts, including the successful revolution in Haiti (1791-1804); and the rise of abolitionism, when the ideas of Montesquieu, Wilberforce, Quakers and others led to the slave trade's systemic demise. At a time when the menace of human trafficking is of increasing concern worldwide, this timely book reflects on the deeper motivations of slavery as both ideology and merchant institution.

Between 1500 and 1870, European traders transported millions of Africans to the Americas to work as slaves—yet despite the wealth of scholarship on this period, many people remain uninformed about the history of the slave trade and its implications for the modern black experience. Published to accompany a permanent gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Transatlantic Slavery documents this era through essays on women in slavery, the impact of slavery on West and Central Africa, and the African view of the slave trade. Richly illustrated, it reveals how the slave trade shaped the history of three continents—Africa, the Americas, and Europe—and how all of us continue to live with its consequences.

In the eighteenth century, audiences in Great Britain understood the term ’slavery’ to refer to a range of physical and metaphysical conditions beyond the transatlantic slave trade. Literary representations of slavery encompassed tales of Barbary captivity, the ’exotic’ slaving practices of the Ottoman Empire, the political enslavement practiced by government or church, and even the harsh life of servants under a cruel master. Arguing that literary and cultural studies have focused too narrowly on slavery as a term that refers almost exclusively to the race-based chattel enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans transported to the New World, the contributors suggest that these analyses foreclose deeper discussion of other associations of the term. They suggest that the term slavery became a powerful rhetorical device for helping British audiences gain a new perspective on their own position with respect to their government and the global sphere. Far from eliding the real and important differences between slave systems operating in the Atlantic world, this collection is a starting point for understanding how slavery as a concept came to encompass many forms of unfree labor and metaphorical bondage precisely because of the power of association.

This important new contribution to the study of Atlantic history brings together eight original essays by such leading scholars as Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Paul Lovejoy, David Eltis, and Benjamin Schmidt on the many connections between the Old World and the New World in the early modern period. With an introduction by Wim Klooster, the four sets of paired essays examine the role of specific port cities in Atlantic history, aspects of European migration, the African dimension, and ways in which the Atlantic world has been imagined. Numerous maps and illustrations further enrich this vital new contribution to undergraduate and graduate courses of study in Atlantic history.

The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination brings together ten original essays that explore the many connections between the Old and New Worlds in the early modern period. Divided into five sets of paired essays, it examines the role of specific port cities in Atlantic history, aspects of European migration, the African dimension, and the ways in which the Atlantic world has been imagined. This second edition has been updated and expanded to contain two new chapters on revolutions and abolition, which discuss the ways in which two of the main pillars of the Atlantic world—empire and slavery—met their end. Both essays underscore the importance of the Caribbean in the profound transformation of the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This edition also includes a revised introduction that incorporates recent literature, providing students with references to the key historiographical debates, and pointers of where the field is moving to inspire their own research. Supported further by a range of maps and illustrations, The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination is the ideal book for students of Atlantic History.

While the memorialization of slavery has generated an impressive number of publications, relatively few studies deal with this subject from a transnational, transdisciplinary and transracial standpoint. As a historical phenomenon that crossed borders and traversed national communities and ethnic groups producing alliances that did not overlap with received identities, slavery as well as its memory call for comparative investigations that may bring to light aspects obscured by the predominant visibility of US-American and British narratives of the past. This study addresses the memory of slavery from a transnational perspective. It brings into dialogue texts and practices from the transatlantic world, offering comparative analyses which interlace the variety of memories emerging in diverse national contexts and fields of study and shed light on the ways local countermemories have interacted with and responded to hegemonic narratives of slavery. The inclusion of Brazil and the French, English, and Spanish Caribbean alongside the United States and Europe, and the variety of investigative approaches-ranging from cinema, popular culture and visual culture studies to anthropology and literary studies-expand the current understanding of the slave past and how it is reimagined today. This fascinating book brings freshness to the topic by considering objects of investigation which have so far remained marginal in the academic debate, such as heroic memorials, civic landscape, white family sagas, Young Adult literature of slavery, Latin American telenovelas and filmic narrations within and beyond Hollywood. What emerges is a multifarious set of memories, which keep changing according to generation, race, gender, nation and political urgency and indicate the advancing of a dynamic, mobilized memorialization of slavery willing to move beyond mourning towards a more militant stand for justice. This is an important book for those interested in African American, American, and Latin American studies and working across literature, cinema, visual arts, and public culture. It will also be useful to public official and civil servants interested in the question of slavery and its present memory.

Containing records of some 25,000 slaving voyages between 1595 and 1867, this data set forms the basis of most of the papers included in this collection. Other papers offer quantitative analysis in the ethnicity of slaves, mortality trends and slaves' reconstruction of their identities.