Freedom
About this book
In this timely and readable new work, Walvin focuses not on abolitionism or the brutality of slavery, but the resistance of the enslaved themselvesāfrom sabotage and absconding to full-blown uprisingsāand its impact in overthrowing slavery. Following Columbus's landfall, slavery became a critical institution across the New World. It had seismic consequences for Africa while leading to the transformation of the Americas and to the material enrichment of the West. It was also largely unquestioned.Yet within seventy-five years slavery vanished from the Americas: it declined and collapsed by a complexity of forces that, to this day, remains disputed, but there is no doubting that it was in large part defeated by those it had enslaved. Slavery itself came in many shapes and sizes. It is perhaps best remembered on plantations, but slavery varied enormously by crop (sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee, cotton), and there was enslaved labor on ships and docks, in factories and the frontier, as well domestically. But if all these millions of diverse, enslaved people had one thing in common it was a universal detestation of their bondage. The end of slavery and the triumph of black freedom constitutes an extraordinary historical upheaval, one which still resonates throughout the world today.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Contents
- Map: Significant Slave Revolts & Rebellions in Freedom
- Introduction
- 1. People as Things: The Slave Trade
- 2. Sinews of Empire: Africans and the Making of the American Empires
- 3. Slave Defiance
- 4. The Slave Ownersā Nightmare: Haiti
- 5. The Friends of Black Freedom
- 6. Freeing Britainās Slaves
- 7. The Fall of US Slavery
- 8. The End of Slavery in the Spanish Empire
- 9. The Last to Go: Brazil
- 10. Abolition in the Wider World
- 11. Slavery in the Modern Age
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography and Further Reading
- Acknowledgements
- Index
- Also by James Walvin
- Copyright