Invoking Slavery In The Eighteenth Century British Imagination

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.

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 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.

This book focuses on how Enlightenment ideas shaped plantation management and slave work routines. It shows how work dictated slaves' experiences and influenced their families and communities on large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia. It examines plantation management schemes, agricultural routines, and work regimes in more detail than other scholars have done. This book argues that slave workloads were increasing in the eighteenth century and that slave owners were employing more rigorous labor discipline and supervision in ways that scholars now associate with the Industrial Revolution.

Since medieval times, English literature has often demonized Muslims. The term ‘Islamophobia’ is recent, but the phenomenon is old. This survey of literature focusing on the modern period up to 1914 identifies negative ideas about Islam in novels and plays. Some works are iconic, some more obscure. However, the book highlights writers who challenged stereotypes and tended to see Muslims as equally capable of virtue and vice as Christians and others. The book deals with the role of the imagination in depicting others and how this serves authors’ agendas. The conclusion brings the book’s thesis into dialogue with the debate in the USA today between supporters of multiculturalism and its critics. Anyone interested in how stereotypes are formed, perpetuated and can be challenged will profit from this book. It is aimed at a non-specialist readership.

Comparisons not only prove fundamental in the epistemological foundation of modernity (Foucault, Luhmann), but they fulfil a central function in social life and the production of art. Taking a cue from the Practice Turn in sociology, the contributors are investigating the role of comparative practices in the formation of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The book conceives of social practices of comparing as being entrenched in networks of circulation of bodies, artefacts, discourses, and ideas, and aims to investigate how such practices ordered and changed British literature and culture during the long eighteenth century.

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position--in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works.