Arming Slaves

From Classical Times to the Modern Age

Christopher Leslie Brown, Philip D. Morgan

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780300134858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Arming slaves as soldiers is a counterintuitive idea. Yet throughout history, in many varied societies, slaveholders have entrusted slaves with the use of deadly force. This book is the first to survey the practice broadly across space and time, encompassing the cultures of classical Greece, the early Islamic kingdoms of the Near East, West and East Africa, the British and French Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America.

To facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, each chapter addresses four crucial issues: the social and cultural facts regarding the arming of slaves, the experience of slave soldiers, the ideological origins and consequences of equipping enslaved peoples for battle, and the impact of the practice on the status of slaves and slavery itself. What emerges from the book is a new historical understanding: the arming of slaves is neither uncommon nor paradoxical but is instead both predictable and explicable.

Christopher Leslie Brown is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. Philip D. Morgan holds The Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professorship in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Arming Slaves and Helots in Classical Greece
• The Mamlūk Institution, or One Thousand Years of Military Slavery in the Islamic World
• Armed Slaves and Political Authority in Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade, 1450–1800
• Making the Chikunda: Military Slavery and Ethnicity in Southern Africa, 1750–1900
• Transforming Bondsmen into Vassals: Arming Slaves in Colonial Spanish America
• Arming Slaves in Brazil from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth Century
• Arming Slaves in the American Revolution
• The Arming of Slaves in the Haitian Revolution
• Citizen Soldiers: Emancipation and Military Service in the Revolutionary French Caribbean
• The Slave Soldiers of Spanish South America: From Independence to Abolition
• Armed Slaves and the Struggles for Republican Liberty in the U.S. Civil War
• Armed Slaves and Anticolonial Insurgency in Late Nineteenth-Century Cuba
• The Arming of Slaves in Comparative Perspective
• Contributors
• Index