Children in Slavery through the Ages

Description

Significant numbers of the people enslaved throughout world history have been children. The vast literature on slavery has grown to include most of the history of this ubiquitous practice, but nearly all of it concentrates on the adult males whose strong bodies and laboring capacities preoccupied the masters of the modern Americas. Children in Slavery through the Ages examines the children among the enslaved across a significant range of earlier times and other places; its companion volume will examine the children enslaved in recent American contexts and in the contemporary/modern world. This is the first collection to focus on children in slavery. These leading scholars bring our thinking about slaving and slavery to new levels of comprehensiveness and complexity. They further provide substantial historical depth to the abuse of children for sexual and labor purposes that has become a significant humanitarian concern of governments and private organizations around the world in recent decades. The collected essays in Children in Slavery through the Ages fundamentally reconstruct our understanding of enslavement by exploring the often-ignored role of children in slavery and rejecting the tendency to narrowly equate slavery with the forced labor of adult males. The volume’s historical angle highlights many implications of child slavery by examining the variety of children’s roles—as manual laborers and domestic servants to court entertainers and eunuchs—and the worldwide regions in which the child slave trade existed. Contents Editors’ Introduction Section I: The Trades in Slave Children 1 Child Slaves in the Early North Atlantic Trade in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 2 Children and European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries 3 Small Change: Children in the Nineteenth-Century East African Slave Trade 4 The Brief Life of ‘Ali, the Orphan of Kordofan: The Egyptian Slave Trade in the Sudan, 1820–35 5 Traded Babies: Enslaved Children in America’s Domestic Migration, 1820–60 Section II: The Treatment and Uses of Slave Children through the Ages Part A. Children Acquired for Social, Political, and Domestic Roles 6 Singing Slave Girls (Qiyan) of the ‘Abbasid Court in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries 7 Becoming a Devsirme: The Training of Conscripted Children in the Ottoman Empire 8 The Third Gender: Palace Eunuchs 9 The Well-Being of Purchased Female Domestic Servants (Mui Tsai) in Hong Kong in the Early Twentieth Century Part B. Children in Commercial Slaveries 10 Slave and Other Nonwhite Children in Late-Eighteenth-Century France 11 The Struggle for Survival: Slave Infant Mortality in the British Caribbean in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 12 Left Behind but Getting Ahead: Antebellum Slavery’s Orphans in the Chesapeake, 1820–60 Contributors Index