Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0144039x.2023.2239019
M. Smith
the survivors of enslavement. Without exception, the chapters are rigorously researched, providing readers with a wealth of suggestions for further reading and analysis. The encyclopaedic referencing to both theatrical works and scholarly studies enables the collection to serve both as a historical account of, and vital sourcebook to, theatre of or about eighteenth-century French colonialism. The book has the merit of including scholars not only from the Anglophone world but also from France and the French-speaking Caribbean and the additional labour for editors of overseeing the translation of chapters cannot be underestimated. Translations of French quotations into English are often, though not always, provided. Under pressure from marginalized demographics who are now rightly claiming dignity and recognition, language is changing at a pace that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with. Perhaps, therefore, the collection went to press before the transition to describing people as ‘enslaved’ in order to emphasize the violence to which they were subjected. Notwithstanding, this book provides an exemplary model for any eventual examinations of British, Spanish or Portuguese colonial and postcolonial theatre. Ever since the Enlightenment, there have been critics of its hypocrisy. The modern inventor of democracy, human rights, progressive universalist ideals and emancipation, the Lumières oversaw genocide in the Americas, forced migration from Africa to the Caribbean, and mass enslavement that provided free labour and vast capital gain for European colonial powers. This book provides a glimmer of hope for humanity by identifying those in the Caribbean who, for over three centuries, have battled for emancipation from enslavement and its legacies and those in Europe – France’s Olympe de Gouges providing one of the loudest voices – who have condemned the ‘the moral rot at the centre of [Europe’s] prosperity’ (p. 4).
{"title":"Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915","authors":"M. Smith","doi":"10.1080/0144039x.2023.2239019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2023.2239019","url":null,"abstract":"the survivors of enslavement. Without exception, the chapters are rigorously researched, providing readers with a wealth of suggestions for further reading and analysis. The encyclopaedic referencing to both theatrical works and scholarly studies enables the collection to serve both as a historical account of, and vital sourcebook to, theatre of or about eighteenth-century French colonialism. The book has the merit of including scholars not only from the Anglophone world but also from France and the French-speaking Caribbean and the additional labour for editors of overseeing the translation of chapters cannot be underestimated. Translations of French quotations into English are often, though not always, provided. Under pressure from marginalized demographics who are now rightly claiming dignity and recognition, language is changing at a pace that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with. Perhaps, therefore, the collection went to press before the transition to describing people as ‘enslaved’ in order to emphasize the violence to which they were subjected. Notwithstanding, this book provides an exemplary model for any eventual examinations of British, Spanish or Portuguese colonial and postcolonial theatre. Ever since the Enlightenment, there have been critics of its hypocrisy. The modern inventor of democracy, human rights, progressive universalist ideals and emancipation, the Lumières oversaw genocide in the Americas, forced migration from Africa to the Caribbean, and mass enslavement that provided free labour and vast capital gain for European colonial powers. This book provides a glimmer of hope for humanity by identifying those in the Caribbean who, for over three centuries, have battled for emancipation from enslavement and its legacies and those in Europe – France’s Olympe de Gouges providing one of the loudest voices – who have condemned the ‘the moral rot at the centre of [Europe’s] prosperity’ (p. 4).","PeriodicalId":46405,"journal":{"name":"Slavery & Abolition","volume":"44 1","pages":"573 - 575"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42658177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203017
Philip Hahn
{"title":"Beyond Exceptionalism: Traces of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Early Modern Germany, 1650–1850","authors":"Philip Hahn","doi":"10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46405,"journal":{"name":"Slavery & Abolition","volume":"44 1","pages":"412 - 414"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45488039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203015
Jennifer L. Nelson
{"title":"Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling and Chocolate","authors":"Jennifer L. Nelson","doi":"10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46405,"journal":{"name":"Slavery & Abolition","volume":"44 1","pages":"411 - 412"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44750987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203014
Amy Cools
self-emancipators – of the Upper South, the inertia and racism of a complacent white majority worked to slow and qualify the trajectory toward freedom in Pennsylvania. Tomek’s fifth and sixth chapters cover the era of the early republic. Chapter 5, one of her longer chapters titled ‘The First Reconstruction,’ deals with a long post-revolutionary northern reconstruction, emerging in recent literature as counterpoint to a short post-Civil War southern Reconstruction. White Pennsylvanians were not really ready to end the benefits of slavery and accept African Americans as fellow citizens, and the legal structure of gradual abolition required the slow arduous work of the PAS to defend black rights. Chapter 6 breaks some new ground in describing the work of antislavery emissaries from Pennsylvania in proselytizing for abolition around a relatively fluid early republic. One of the particularly eye-opening stories is that of the role of Warner Mifflin and other Pennsylvanians in the 1782 passage of Virginia’s manumission act. Readers may be more familiar with the involvement of Pennsylvanians later in the period in the founding and development of the American Colonization Society, the subject of Tomek’s first book, Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania. (New York University Press, 2011). Tomek’s final two chapters carry us through the rise of immediatism to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her discussion of the immediatists reviews familiar ground rooted in a now long pattern of ambiguities. Radical Quakers created a space for women and African Americans, but were too radical for the majority of white society, culminating in the horrific blow of the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838, and the division of the movement the following year. Chapter 7 ends with a quick account of the emergence of the vigilance committees, the Underground Railroad, and the Christiana Riot. Chapter 8 moves briskly through the Civil War recruitment of African American regiments, and the struggles over voting rights, streetcar access and education during the Reconstruction years. Here one wonders whether Tomek fades with the immediatists, as they retreat in the late 1830s. Her coverage of the 1840s to the 1870s seems thinner than that of the 1760s to the1830s, perhaps reflecting the wider historiographical divide between the histories of abolitionism and those of political antislavery, war, and Reconstruction. Manisha Sinha has divided the history of abolitionism into first and second waves; one wonders whether we need to put a third wave on an equal footing. But these ruminations aside, Tomek has given us an excellent overview of an important story.
{"title":"The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson","authors":"Amy Cools","doi":"10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203014","url":null,"abstract":"self-emancipators – of the Upper South, the inertia and racism of a complacent white majority worked to slow and qualify the trajectory toward freedom in Pennsylvania. Tomek’s fifth and sixth chapters cover the era of the early republic. Chapter 5, one of her longer chapters titled ‘The First Reconstruction,’ deals with a long post-revolutionary northern reconstruction, emerging in recent literature as counterpoint to a short post-Civil War southern Reconstruction. White Pennsylvanians were not really ready to end the benefits of slavery and accept African Americans as fellow citizens, and the legal structure of gradual abolition required the slow arduous work of the PAS to defend black rights. Chapter 6 breaks some new ground in describing the work of antislavery emissaries from Pennsylvania in proselytizing for abolition around a relatively fluid early republic. One of the particularly eye-opening stories is that of the role of Warner Mifflin and other Pennsylvanians in the 1782 passage of Virginia’s manumission act. Readers may be more familiar with the involvement of Pennsylvanians later in the period in the founding and development of the American Colonization Society, the subject of Tomek’s first book, Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania. (New York University Press, 2011). Tomek’s final two chapters carry us through the rise of immediatism to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her discussion of the immediatists reviews familiar ground rooted in a now long pattern of ambiguities. Radical Quakers created a space for women and African Americans, but were too radical for the majority of white society, culminating in the horrific blow of the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838, and the division of the movement the following year. Chapter 7 ends with a quick account of the emergence of the vigilance committees, the Underground Railroad, and the Christiana Riot. Chapter 8 moves briskly through the Civil War recruitment of African American regiments, and the struggles over voting rights, streetcar access and education during the Reconstruction years. Here one wonders whether Tomek fades with the immediatists, as they retreat in the late 1830s. Her coverage of the 1840s to the 1870s seems thinner than that of the 1760s to the1830s, perhaps reflecting the wider historiographical divide between the histories of abolitionism and those of political antislavery, war, and Reconstruction. Manisha Sinha has divided the history of abolitionism into first and second waves; one wonders whether we need to put a third wave on an equal footing. But these ruminations aside, Tomek has given us an excellent overview of an important story.","PeriodicalId":46405,"journal":{"name":"Slavery & Abolition","volume":"44 1","pages":"422 - 424"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45689830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203016
Katherine Burns
{"title":"Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom","authors":"Katherine Burns","doi":"10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46405,"journal":{"name":"Slavery & Abolition","volume":"44 1","pages":"418 - 419"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43339333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2023.2199723
Hannah Farber
ABSTRACT In the late eighteenth century, slave trade insurance was a lucrative and visible business in British and American slave trading towns. Abolition, however, proved difficult. United States laws were patchwork and never reached the federal level. Britain banned slave trade insurance in 1807 alongside the slave trade, but enforcement remained scattershot and ineffective. This article offers three reasons for this state of affairs. First, the marine insurance business’s transnationality, the dispersion of its paperwork, and its sometimes deliberate obscurity produced a profound information problem for abolitionists that impeded both legislation and enforcement. The second reason has to do with the evolution of abolitionists’ priorities and strategies in a complex international environment. Third, there was an enduring problem in the relationship between insurance and the law. Napoleonic-era commercial law was characterized by reversals, exceptions, gray areas, and sovereignty dilemmas. This produced a vast realm of legal uncertainty – a domain in which insurers, accustomed to assessing legal risks, had always thrived. Insurers, therefore, are not best characterized as obeying or defying a single thing called ‘the law’ in this period. Rather, they were co-creators of a domain of legality within which slave trade insurance could be sold profitably for years after abolition.
{"title":"Slave Trade Insurance in the Age of Abolition: Archives, Politics, and Legalities","authors":"Hannah Farber","doi":"10.1080/0144039X.2023.2199723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2023.2199723","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the late eighteenth century, slave trade insurance was a lucrative and visible business in British and American slave trading towns. Abolition, however, proved difficult. United States laws were patchwork and never reached the federal level. Britain banned slave trade insurance in 1807 alongside the slave trade, but enforcement remained scattershot and ineffective. This article offers three reasons for this state of affairs. First, the marine insurance business’s transnationality, the dispersion of its paperwork, and its sometimes deliberate obscurity produced a profound information problem for abolitionists that impeded both legislation and enforcement. The second reason has to do with the evolution of abolitionists’ priorities and strategies in a complex international environment. Third, there was an enduring problem in the relationship between insurance and the law. Napoleonic-era commercial law was characterized by reversals, exceptions, gray areas, and sovereignty dilemmas. This produced a vast realm of legal uncertainty – a domain in which insurers, accustomed to assessing legal risks, had always thrived. Insurers, therefore, are not best characterized as obeying or defying a single thing called ‘the law’ in this period. Rather, they were co-creators of a domain of legality within which slave trade insurance could be sold profitably for years after abolition.","PeriodicalId":46405,"journal":{"name":"Slavery & Abolition","volume":"44 1","pages":"350 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49099782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203013
Gurminder K. Bhambra
{"title":"Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century","authors":"Gurminder K. Bhambra","doi":"10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2023.2203013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46405,"journal":{"name":"Slavery & Abolition","volume":"44 1","pages":"414 - 416"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41908781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2023.2203018
J. Giesen
{"title":"Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South","authors":"J. Giesen","doi":"10.1080/0144039X.2023.2203018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2023.2203018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46405,"journal":{"name":"Slavery & Abolition","volume":"44 1","pages":"420 - 421"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49064969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}