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"Slavery -- Africa, West -- History -- 19th century"
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The West African slave plantation : a case study
Mohammed Bashir Salau addresses the neglected literature on Atlantic Slavery in West Africa by looking at the plantation operations at Fanisau in Hausaland, and in the process provides an innovative look at one piece of the historically significant Sokoto Caliphate.
eBook
West African warfare in Bahia and Cuba : soldier slaves in the Atlantic world, 1807-1844
\"Examines the extent to which a series of African-led plots and armed movements that took place in western Cuba and Bahia between 1807 and 1844 were the result--or a continuation--of events that had occurred in and around the Yoruba and Hausa kingdoms in the same period.\"--Book jacket
Book
A Civilised Savagery
In the two decades before World War One, Great Britain witnessed the largest revival of anti-slavery protest since the legendary age of emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than campaigning against the trans-Atlantic slave trade, these latter-day abolitionists focused on the so-called 'new slaveries' of European imperialism in Africa, condemning coercive systems of labor taxation and indentured servitude, as well as evidence of atrocities.
A Civilized Savagery illuminates the multifaceted nature of British humanitarianism by juxtaposing campaigns against different forms of imperial labor exploitation in three separate areas: the Congo Free State, South Africa, and Portuguese West Africa. In doing so, Kevin Grant points out how this new type of humanitarianism influenced the transition from Empire to international government and the advent of universal human rights in subsequent decades.
eBook
Barracoon : the story of the last \black cargo\
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. Based on those interviews, which feature Cudjo's unique vernacular, this book illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it.
Book
Freedom Burning
After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of \"anti-slavery\" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority to other civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave trade, while the Royal Navy enforced abolition worldwide and an anxious public debated the true responsibilities of an anti-slavery nation. This crusade was far from altruistic or compassionate, but Richard Huzzey argues that it forged national debates and political culture long after the famous abolitionist campaigns of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had faded into memory. These anti-slavery passions shaped racist and imperialist prejudices, new forms of coerced labor, and the expansion of colonial possessions.
In a sweeping narrative that spans the globe,Freedom Burningexplores the intersection of philanthropic, imperial, and economic interests that underlay Britain's anti-slavery zeal- from London to Liberia, the Sudan to South Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, and the British East India Company to the Confederate States of America. Through careful attention to popular culture, official records, and private papers, Huzzey rewrites the history of the British Empire and a century-long effort to end the global trade in human lives.
eBook
Barracoon : adapted for young readers
\"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.\" -- Publisher's website.
Book
Distant freedom
This book is an examination of the island of St Helena’s involvement in slave trade abolition. After the establishment of a British Vice-Admiralty court there in 1840, this tiny and remote South Atlantic colony became the hub of naval activity in the region. It served as a base for the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, and as such became the principal receiving depot for intercepted slave ships and their human cargo. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century over 25,000 ‘recaptive’ or ‘liberated’ Africans were landed at the island. Here, in embryonic refugee camps, these former slaves lived and died, genuine freedom still a distant prospect. This book provides an account and evaluation of this episode. It begins by charting the political contexts which drew St Helena into the fray of abolition, and considers how its involvement, at times, came to occupy those at the highest levels of British politics. In the main, however, it focuses on St Helena itself, and examines how matters played out on the ground. The study utilises documentary sources (many previously untouched) which tell the stories of those whose lives became bound up in the compass of anti-slavery, far from London and long after the Abolition Act of 1807. It puts the Black experience at the foreground, aiming to bring a voice to a forgotten people, many of whom died in limbo, in a place that was physically and conceptually between freedom and slavery.
eBook
Slavery and the Culture of Taste
It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary,Slavery and the Culture of Tastedemonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time.
Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European--mainly British--life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure.
Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks,Slavery and the Culture of Tastesets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.
eBook