
- 448 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Fantasies of white slavery and the narratives of victimhood they spawn form the foundation of racist ideology. They also obscure the lived experience of trafficked servants and sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gunther Peck moves deftly between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds to discover where and when people with light skin color came to see themselves as white. Separating fact from fiction, and paying close attention to the ideological work each performs, Peck shows how laboring women and men leveraged their newfound whiteness to secure economic opportunity and political power.
Peck argues that whiteness emerged not as a claim of racial superiority but as a byproduct of wide-ranging and rancorous public debate over trafficking and enslavement. Even as whiteness became a legal category that signaled privilege, trafficking and race remained tightly interwoven. Those advocating for the value of whiteness invoked emotionally freighted victimhood, claiming that so-called white slavery was a crime whose costs far exceeded those associated with the enslavement of African peoples across the Americas. Peck helps us understand the chilling history that produced the racist ideology that still poisons our politics in the present day.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Race Traffic, Past and Present
- Chapter One: The Origins of Race Traffic
- Chapter Two: Ransom Traffic and Antislavery in the Mediterranean
- Chapter Three: Novel Ways of Seeing Race
- Chapter Four: Atlantic Slave-Servant Conspiracies
- Chapter Five: Nationalizing Emancipation in the Mediterranean
- Chapter Six: War, Traffic, and Race across the British Empire
- Chapter Seven: Trafficking, Freedom, and Race in the Age of Revolution
- Chapter Eight: Antislavery Nationalism and Race
- Conclusion: The Radical Challenge to Race Traffic
- Appendix A: The Colonial State Papers
- Appendix B: Early English Books Online
- Appendix C: Eighteenth Century Collections Online
- Appendix D: Daniel Horsemanden’s Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy (1744)
- Index