American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond

The U.S. "Peculiar Institution" in International Perspective

Enrico Dal Lago

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317263784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond provides an up-to-date summary of past and present views of American slavery in international perspective and suggests new directions for current and future comparative scholarship. It argues that we can better understand the nature and meaning of American slavery and antislavery if we place them clearly within a Euro-American context. Current scholarship on American slavery acknowledges the importance of the continental and Atlantic dimensions of the historical phenomenon, comparing it often with slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America. However, since the 1980s, a handful of studies has looked further and has compared American slavery with European forms of unfree and nominally free labor. Building on this innovative scholarship, this book treats the U.S. "peculiar institution" as part of both an Atlantic and a wider Euro-American world. It shows how the Euro-American context is no less crucial than the Atlantic one in understanding colonial slavery and the American Revolution in an age of global enlightenment, reformism, and revolutionary upheavals; the Cotton Kingdom's heyday in a world of systems of unfree labor; and the making of radical Abolitionism and the occurrence of the American Civil War at a time when nationalist ideologies and nation-building movements were widespread.

INDEX

AASS (American Anti-Slavery Society), 126–127, 134

Abolition (Drescher), 7–8

Abolitionism, 123–144; American, 126–127, 133–135; British, 127–129, 135–136; entangled histories, 144; Euro-American context, 177; European revolutions (1848), 142–143; French, 131–133; Irish, 129–130, 136–137; Italian, 137–139; nationalism, 139–144; overview, 123–125; peak of, 101; progressives, 133–139; World’s Anti-Slavery Conventions, 140–142

AFASS (American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society), 127

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Thornton), 9–10

African ethnicities: Brazil, 32–33; British Caribbean, 34; “clustering of ethnicities,” 32, 37–38; South Carolina, 35–37; Virginia, 35

African slave culture, 44–45, 83–91; overview, 83–84; Sokoto Caliphate, 89–91

African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (Klein and Vinson), 9

African societies: basis of, 20–21; slavery within, 21

The Age of Capital (Hobsbawm), 170

Agency Committee, 128–129

Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Dal Lago), 10, 96–97

Agrarian modernization: American South, 77–78, 105–106; Atlantic plantation zone, 76–81; Brazil, 79–81; Cuba, 78–79; southern Italy, 117–118; Spain, 117–118

Agronomy: American South, 105–106; Italy and Spain, 118; Russia and Prussia, 112–113

Akan/Aja ethnicity, 34, 45–46

Alden, Dauril, 58

Alexander II, 162

Allgemeine Agrarwissenschaften (Annals of Agriculture), 112

Ambrosio, Kingdom of, 58

Amelioration: American South, 50; Brit...