Writing the History of Slavery

Description

Exploring the major historiographical, theoretical, and methodological approaches that have shaped studies on slavery, this addition to the Writing History series highlights the varied ways that historians have approached the fluid and complex systems of human bondage, domination, and exploitation that have developed in societies across the world. The first part examines more recent attempts to place slavery in a global context, touching on contexts such as religion, empire, and capitalism. In its second part, the book looks closely at the key themes and methods that emerge as historians reckon with the dynamics of historical slavery. These range from politics, economics and quantitative analyses, to race and gender, to pyschohistory, history from below, and many more. Throughout, examples of slavery and its impact are considered across time and place: in Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Europe and the Muslim world, colonial Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and trades throughout the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Also taken into account are thinkers from Antiquity to the 20th century and the impact their ideas have had on the subject and the debates that follow. This book is required reading for students and scholars at all levels who are interested in not only the history of slavery but in how that history has come to be written and how its debates have been framed across civilizations. Cover Contents List of figures List of contributors Introduction: Writing the History of Slavery David Stefan Doddington and Enrico Dal Lago, Cardiff University and National University Ireland Galway Part I Global approaches 1 Defining slavery in global perspective David Lewis, University of Edinburgh 2 Writing global histories of slavery Michael Zeuske, University of Cologne (Köln), University of Bonn, Universidad de la Habana 3 Slavery and empire Trevor Burnard, University of Hull 4 The ‘Great Divergence’: Slavery, capitalism and world-economy Dale Tomich, Binghamton University 5 Approaches to global antislavery Seymour Drescher, University of Pittsburgh 6 Comparative and transnational histories of slavery Enrico Dal Lago, National University of Ireland Galway Part II Themes and methods 7 Political and legal histories of slavery Sue Peabody, Washington State University 8 Writing national histories of slavery Lewis Eliot, University of Oklahoma 9 Writing the religious history of the enslaved in the Atlantic World Matt D. Childs, University of South Carolina 10 What historians of slavery write about when we write about race Jacqueline Jones, University of Texas at Austin 11 Gender history and slavery David Stefan Doddington, Cardiff University 12 Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive Marisa J. Fuentes, Rutgers University, Introduced by Elizabeth Maeve Barnes, University of Reading 13 Slavery, postcolonialism and the colonial archive Andrea Major, University of Leeds 14 Imagining slavery in Roman antiquity K.R. Bradley, University of Notre Dame 15 Quantitative histories of slavery Andrea Livesey, Liverpool John Moores University 16 Psychohistory and slavery Patrick H. Breen, Providence College 17 Material culture, archaeology and slavery Lydia Wilson Marshall, DePauw University 18 Slavery and the cultural turn Raquel Kennon, California State University, Northridge 19 Re-tooling memory and memory tools: America’s ongoing re-memory of slavery Marcus Wood, University of Sussex 1. The ‘Anti-Yoke’ Church, Whitney Plantation 2. Sculptures of Slave Children in ‘Anti-Yoke’ Church’s Chapel 3. Slave Angel with Wings in the ‘Field of Angels’, Whitney Plantation 4. The ‘Wall of Honour’, Whitney Plantation 5. The ‘Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’, Whitney Plantation 6. The Memorial to the 1811 Louisiana Slave Revolt, Whitney Plantation Index