Slavery Migrations And Transformations

From the historical movements of enslaved Africans to the Americas to newer migrations of Africans to spaces like Belgium and France, experiences of blackness on a global stage reflect themes of negotiation, persecution, isolation, unification, remembrance, and much more. Yet, it is impossible to minimize the complex experiences that make up the African diaspora throughout the world, as diasporic communities face a range of struggles, specifically related to the politics of identity and connections to the continent of Africa itself. This book is thus a timely and much-needed exploration of the intricate nature of culture and life in the African diaspora. It examines identities, collectivities, and relationships with Africa and Africans. It helps fill a gap in the field by illuminating the complex experiences of blackness in a manner that motivates readers to grapple with the nuances diaspora studies and African issues on a global stage. This book balances conceptualizations of diaspora by engaging with scholars exploring old African diasporas, newer migrations, and even regional movement within the continent of Africa itself. More importantly, the chronological breadth of the volume allows readers to explore historical matters alongside comparable contemporary issues as a way of assessing continuities and the ways in which communities continue to grapple with institutional racism, political marginalization, and negotiations between tradition and modernity on a global stage. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of the book offers diverse approaches for robust engagement with African diaspora studies.

Note: this is an abridged version of the book with references removed. The complete edition is also available on this website. From the historical movements of enslaved Africans to the Americas to newer migrations of Africans to spaces like Belgium and France, experiences of blackness on a global stage reflect themes of negotiation, persecution, isolation, unification, remembrance, and much more. Yet, it is impossible to minimize the complex experiences that make up the African diaspora throughout the world, as diasporic communities face a range of struggles, specifically related to the politics of identity and connections to the continent of Africa itself. This book is thus a timely and much-needed exploration of the intricate nature of culture and life in the African diaspora. It examines identities, collectivities, and relationships with Africa and Africans. It helps fill a gap in the field by illuminating the complex experiences of blackness in a manner that motivates readers to grapple with the nuances diaspora studies and African issues on a global stage. This book balances conceptualizations of diaspora by engaging with scholars exploring old African diasporas, newer migrations, and even regional movement within the continent of Africa itself. More importantly, the chronological breadth of the volume allows readers to explore historical matters alongside comparable contemporary issues as a way of assessing continuities and the ways in which communities continue to grapple with institutional racism, political marginalization, and negotiations between tradition and modernity on a global stage. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of the book offers diverse approaches for robust engagement with African diaspora studies.

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery's role in African history. The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves' assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe. This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.

Robert H. Gudmestad provides an in-depth examination of the growth and development of the interstate slave trade during the early nineteenth century, using the business as a means to explore economic change, the culture of honor, master-slave relationships, and the justification of slavery in the antebellum South. Gudmestad demonstrates how southerners, faced with the incongruity of maintaining their paternalistic beliefs about slavery even while capitalistically exploiting their slaves, coped by disassociating themselves from the brutality and greed of the slave trade and shifting responsibility for slavery’s realities to the speculators. In tracing the trans- formation of a troublesome commerce into a southern scapegoat, this pro- vocative work proves the interstate slave trade to be vital to the making—and understanding—of the paradoxical antebellum South.

Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Here, however, Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately, emancipation. Berlin's understanding of the processes that continually transformed the lives of slaves makes Generations of Captivity essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of antebellum America. Connecting the "Charter Generation" to the development of Atlantic society in the seventeenth century, the "Plantation Generation" to the reconstruction of colonial society in the eighteenth century, the "Revolutionary Generation" to the Age of Revolutions, and the "Migration Generation" to American expansionism in the nineteenth century, Berlin integrates the history of slavery into the larger story of American life. He demonstrates how enslaved black people, by adapting to changing circumstances, prepared for the moment when they could seize liberty and declare themselves the "Freedom Generation." This epic story, told by a master historian, provides a rich understanding of the experience of African-American slaves, an experience that continues to mobilize American thought and passions today.

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.

English colonial expansion in the Caribbean was more than a matter of migration and trade. It was also a source of social and cultural change within England. Finding evidence of cultural exchange between England and the Caribbean as early as the seventeenth century, Susan Dwyer Amussen uncovers the learned practice of slaveholding As English colonists in the Caribbean quickly became large-scale slaveholders, they established new organizations of labor, new uses of authority, new laws, and new modes of violence, punishment, and repression in order to manage slaves. Concentrating on Barbados and Jamaica, England's two most important colonies, Amussen looks at cultural exports that affected the development of race, gender, labor, and class as categories of legal and social identity in England. Concepts of law and punishment in the Caribbean provided a model for expanded definitions of crime in England; the organization of sugar factories served as a model for early industrialization; and the construction of the ''white woman'' in the Caribbean contributed to changing notions of ''ladyhood'' in England. As Amussen demonstrates, the cultural changes necessary for settling the Caribbean became an important, though uncounted, colonial export.