Slave Research Articles

Poe in Richmond: Creating a Virtual Poe Collection

Poe in Richmond: Creating a Virtual Poe Collection

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage

Unhousing the Archives Around theZong, Again

Unhousing the Archives Around the<i>Zong</i>, Again

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

Kebijakan Cina Melakukan Boikot Terhadap Ritel Fesyen Multinasional H&amp;M Terkait Isu Perbudakan Kapas di Xinjiang

Multinational fashion retailer H&amp;M expressed concern over alleged forced labor carried out by China against ethnic Uighurs in the Xinjiang region. The Chinese government has repeatedly denied the allegations, but China's anger at H&amp;M intensified after other countries sentenced China over the issue. Then the boycott policy was shown to H&amp;M, which has contributed to the Chinese economy with its investment in more than 500 stores across China and as one of the major consumers of Chinese garment companies. This article aims to answer the question, "why is China boycotting H&amp;M on the issue of cotton slavery in Xinjiang?" using the framework of economic coercion analysis. The research method used is qualitative through the analysis and interpretation of secondary data. The results showed that China carried out the boycott policy against H&amp;M to punish H&amp;M, harm H&amp;M, and force H&amp;M to change its policy after H&amp;M harmed China's national interests. The conclusion is that China's coercive policy through a boycott of H&amp;M has proven effective in forcing H&amp;M to submit to China.

“A Dead Silence” of Slavery in Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park

Adapting Jane Austen’s 1814 novel to film, Mansfield Park (1999), Patricia Rozema transforms Austen’s Fanny Price into an active, witty, and rebellious heroine and centralizes the theme of slavery. The film’s fidelity has been earnestly debated, but Rozema claims that her film is faithful to the original source. As she points out, the seemingly incongruent link—between Austen and slavery—is not new. Austen’s Mansfield Park has been widely examined regarding the issue of slavery and Fanny has been commonly read as a character who represents the Other, women and slaves. These readings, however, reveal an uneasy relationship between feminism and post- colonialism by conceptualizing white women as a homogenous group of the powerless and oppressed. The relationship becomes more problematic when they readily equate Fanny with the non-white exploited racial Other, the slaves in Antigua. Analyzing the limitations of Austen’s representation of slavery, I examine how Rozema not only faithfully reproduces the limitations but also silences the Black Other—the slaves in Antigua—who only appear in Tom’s sketches of Antiguan slaves and sculptures of Black servants at Mansfield Park.

‘Despite the Fear’: Emancipation Trajectories in Libya, 1890–1930

AbstractChallenging the Eurocentric belief that abolitionism was a top-down process issued by colonial powers, this article explores the emergence of personal and group strategies for the emancipation of Black enslaved people in Libya. During the late Ottoman period, Italian antislavery activities operated in Libya and established a mission in Benghazi to host manumitted children referred to as ‘Moretti’ (‘little Moors’). The goal was to make these Moretti a group of local people close to the Catholic Church and the Italian government. The failures of the missionaries to accomplish these aims reveal the strategies and trajectories of Moretti as they negotiated their role in society, especially after Italian occupation in 1911. Historical sources reveal an informal web of solidarity using antislavery societies and creating forms of urban and social autonomy. This article details actions of solidarity among Black enslaved persons that took place in late Ottoman and Italian colonial Libya, which challenges Eurocentric antislavery narratives.

Conflicting agencies in the “Juntas”: “patronas”and“patrocinadas” in Cuba (1880-1886)

The gendered aspects of slavery in Cuba were key in the anticipated dismissal of the forced apprenticeship (the patronato) implemented to orchestrate the transition from slavery to coexisting forms of dependencies. This article explores the role that petitions brought forward by formerly enslaved women (patrocinadas) against their former female slave owners (patronas) had in this process. On the one hand, the characteristics of their enslavement in urban and domestic settings gave patrocinadas relative room for manoeuvre to acquire the social and material resources needed to file a lawsuit. On the other hand, patronas were resolute in trying to maintain control over their prerogatives, and privileges, which patrocinadas were an integral part of. Nonetheless, “property” in enslaved people by well-off and non-affluent women still needs to be thoroughly examined by the historiography on slavery in Cuba. This contribution highlights how the legal quarrels between patrocinadas and patronas could represent a significant primary source for studying this relevant occurrence. Moreover, the same sources might point to the pivotal role these conflicting demonstrations of agencies had in the gradual chipping of the patronato system.

The political ecology of slavery: Edmund Ruffin and the simbi of South Carolina

ABSTRACT In the early months of 1843, Edmund Ruffin began a geological tour of South Carolina to survey the landscape and the current state of plantation farming across the region. Commissioned by governor James Hammond, Ruffin’s survey aimed to diagnose the decline in plantation productivity in the state. In the diary that he kept during his tour, Ruffin describes stories of nature spirits called “simbi,” whom enslaved and indigenous inhabitants believed guarded limestone springs in the south-east of the state. This paper argues that in the accounts of simbi, which are embedded in a geological survey that aims to increase the efficiency of resource extraction, Ruffin’s reader glimpses a competing geology composed of stratified historical, environmental, and phenomenological meanings. The paper recontextualizes simbi in order to suggest how truly destabilizing a simbi metaphysics is to Ruffin’s own ecological project. By drawing on a rich body of recent religious studies of the African diaspora, the paper suggests possible ecological claims being made in these simbi stories, and that these claims are deeply rooted in knowledge about land use, sustainability, inheritance, and privatization that unsettle the plantation system. The paper aims, in other words, to more thoroughly perceive the network of relationships between enslaved persons, the fountains, spirits, the dead, and the African continent co-present with Ruffin’s geology. It also examines the interpenetration of Ruffin’s political and geo-agricultural writings in order to illustrate how he grounds his racial politics in his understanding of ecology.

A Church’s Broken Heart: Mason-Dixon Methodism

Over the past generation, no figure has shaped the study of American Methodism as much as Russell Richey. His latest book adds to his legacy by examining missional developments in the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, on the eve of the Civil War. Focusing upon a careful study of the minutes of Ohio and Kentucky annual conferences—two states on the border of America’s sectional divide over slavery—Richey constructs an analysis of late antebellum Methodism, providing portraits into “the programmatically complex ways in which leaders and laity structured congregations and conferences” (xix). Focusing upon the missional characteristics of Ohio and Kentucky Methodism, Richey offers a unique interpretation of how the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, crafted their mission on the eve of the Civil War. Even as both branches of episcopal Methodism effectively recalibrated their missions and ultimately merged in the twentieth century, “unity came with a racist price” (xxv), manifested in Methodism’s ongoing struggles to reconcile its mission with the realities of racism that continue to fragment the church and the nation.Richey’s scholarship stresses the centrality of conferencing as the way that Methodists structure mission. Reminiscent of his earlier work The Methodist Conference in America (Kingswood 1996), he casts a specific eye on how Ohio annual conferences (representing the Methodist Episcopal Church) and Kentucky annual conferences (representing the Methodist Episcopal and Methodist Episcopal Church, South) adapted and expanded their ministries, in the aftermath of the regional split over slavery at the 1844 General Conference. Richey lays out a template of three interconnected emphases that form the basis of Methodism’s mission: connection, formation, and outreach. Through these themes, he explores the ways that border Methodists responded to issues of itineracy, education, evangelism, and, particularly, slavery and racism. Richey spotlights how Methodists “modeled a ground-up, conference-out” strategy, whereby Methodist conferencing revolved around efforts to provide resources to different segments of the church. He affirms the adaptability of Methodism, noting how its successes—in publishing, manifested in periodicals and journals aimed at all segments of the church; education, embodied in the expansion of Sunday Schools and the building of colleges; and outreach, represented through initiatives toward immigrants, Native Americans, and slaves—facilitated Methodist growth. Richey notes Northern and Southern Episcopal Methodism’s dexterity in its ability to resource different components of the church, as seen through expansion of missions, such as outreach to German Methodists; a plethora of church publications, for example, Ladies Repository and Sunday School Advocate; and the founding of biblical institutes and colleges, including the Cincinnati Conference’s establishment of the historically African American Wilberforce College in 1855–1856.At the same time, Richey is not telling a story of triumphant Methodism. Noting that Methodism frequently preferred action over careful theological reflection, he points out the ways that Ohio and Kentucky Methodists, mirroring Northern and Southern Methodists of the time, were hampered by an inability to take prophetic stands against slavery. His research underscores Methodist whiteness, whereby white Southerners continued to offer theological justifications for slavery with Northerners frequently viewing the missional formation of Black Methodists of secondary importance, as well as facilitating the development of a segregated annual conference structure after the Civil War. Although he admires individual prophetic examples of Mason-Dixon Methodism (spotlighting the ministry of the Northern minister, James B. Finley), he laments an institutional history that, with a few exceptions, fell short of the ideals laid out by Wesley, Thomas Coke, Francis Asbury, and other early architects of American Methodism.One of the curiosities of the book is despite the title’s reference to a “church’s broken heart,” this phrase seldom appears in the text. Yet this theme is clearly in Richey’s mind in his autobiographical postscript that candidly discusses his own engagement with racial justice issues. Growing up a preacher’s kid in the segregated South, he discusses his father’s efforts to dismantle racism, his subsequent education in the North, and his involvement in causes of Civil Rights—as an activist, teacher, and historian. I suggest that the reader begin with this postscript; hearing Richey discuss his own efforts to come to terms with American racism, one hears his personal lament for a church he loves and has repeatedly fallen short of its mission of spreading scriptural holiness. As twenty-first century United Methodists once again face the prospect of schism, Richey’s work reminds us of the chasm existing between prophetic ideals of the Wesleyan/Methodist heritage with institutional manifestations of that tradition. The reader of this judiciously researched and quite personal book will not only gain insight into the painful realities of Methodism’s past institutional failures, but perhaps glimpse hope in ways that the people called Methodists might ultimately find the prophetic voice to combat racism—as well as other injustices confronting the church.

Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour

The built environment remains a comparatively overlooked aspect within the historiography of the Nazi period, despite its importance to the regime. During the war years, Organisation Todt oversaw a vast network of over a million forced and slave labourers working on infrastructure and engineering projects that stretched across Europe. However, unlike other agencies such as the SS, neither the extent to which Organisation Todt’s activities underpinned the mechanics of the regime’s operation, nor the terrible abuses it perpetrated, were recognized at Nuremberg. Charles Dick’s Builders of the Third Reich seeks to address this. Rather than attempting the daunting task of compiling the definitive organizational account, the text is carefully positioned as a history. Five thematic chapters guide the reader through a considered exploration of how the Organisation functioned within the structure of the regime. The first examines how Organisation Todt was instrumental in realizing Nazism’s imperial goals; the second considers the process of extracting raw materials from occupied countries; the third situates the Organisation within the Nazi system and explores the cooperation and competition with other agencies and state bodies. The fourth section focuses on the experiences of slave and forced labourers across its vast network, and the fifth looks at the motivation of perpetrators.

Legal Status of Migrants From Kyrgyzstan in Russia

A study by the International Labor Organization has confirmed that 10-20% of migrants from the CIS countries working illegally in Russia are subjected to such forms of exploitation and slave labor as seizure of documents, isolation and violation of the right to free movement, psychological abuse, threats, deceit, debt dependence, the impossibility of dismissal, and so on. To eliminate these risk factors, it is necessary that citizens of Kyrgyzstan leaving for work should at least know the internal migration legislation of Russia, the rules for carrying out labor and entrepreneurial activities, legalization, crossing borders, money transfer operations and others issues of life of migrants. Given that external migration is the most important social process that affects all aspects of public life, the Kyrgyz Republic has formed a legislative framework for regulating migration processes.

Survival and transformation of the sugar industry in the Eastern of Cuba at the end of the 19th century

The sugar industry was progressively concentrated in the western half of Cuba during the 19th century, due to the fact that the eastern was less populated and economically exploited, which also made it difficult for it to access slave labor and modernize it. This study shows that, nevertheless, in the second region, sugar mills survived and were transformed due to such conditions, and were generally larger and more efficient than those in the west, although grouped in dispersed areas and with substantial differences between them and in the responses that they gave to the need to modernize and lower its costs derived from the abolition and the increased of international competition. The research also shows that the explanation for this lies in the different context in which they had to operate in each of these regions.

Pearling and the Language of Freedom

Abstract As international anti-slavery pressure on the British increased in the early twentieth century, officials in the Persian Gulf began to manumit a growing number of enslaved persons. Enslaved pearl divers needed to physically approach the British in order to start their manumission application. In this process, their memories and history would be typically condensed into a one-page document. I argue that not just imperial archival methods influenced these statements, but the memory of British imperial experience with slavery influenced the ways in which they approached, understood, and targeted slavery in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The manufactured English-language applications in the archive corresponded with British conceptions of slavery, but the interpretations of slavery placed on Persian Gulf communities didn’t conform to local understandings of the institution. I demonstrate the process of translation, in which local realities of enslavement were transformed into British understandings of freedom.

SLAVERY RELATIONSHIP INFORMATION IN ARCHIVE DOCUMENTS OF THE XIVA KHANATE

This article analyzes the archival documents on the issue of slavery in the Khiva khanate (in the Manuscripts Fund of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, the National State Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and the Khiva Ichon-Kala Museum-Reserve, as well as the Orenburg Region State Archives of the Russian Federation). The question of the relationship that has been studied. The documents mainly covered the sale of slaves and the release of slaves. The customs of gifting slaves and maids in the Khiva khanate and the documents on the gift of slaves were also studied, on the basis of which the issue of the role of Islam in the social and spiritual life of the Khiva khanate was analyzed. One of the measures to free slaves and maids from slavery in the Khiva khanate was to get free for money, and this issue is also reflected in some archival documents. Based on the study of documents from the Orenburg Regional State Historical Archive on the liberation of Russian slaves, the level of political relations between the Khiva Khanate and Russia, as well as the measures taken by the Russian government to free slaves were also discussed. In general, this article tries to reveal the existing documents on slavery kept in the archives, not only the role of slavery in the social life of the Khiva khanate but also the political and economic relations of the khanate with Russia.

‘I Hope it Tastes Good’: Gender, Race and Class in Colonial Kitchens in the Dutch Indian Ocean Empire

AbstractThis article examines the intersections between gender, domestic slavery, maritime empires and food in the early modern world, focusing on the Dutch East India Company's empire in the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth century. It traces the stories of three very different women in the Dutch Indian Ocean Empire and shows how food provisioning, preparation and consumption intersected with their gendered, racialised and classed roles in European colonial kitchens. In different ways, these women exerted sovereignty over food in colonial households which highlights their role as active participants in both shaping and contesting the social hierarchies of empire.

On the Sublime and Beautiful: Edmund Burke, Ottobah Cugoano, and Reverberations of Eighteenth-Century Racial Aesthetics

This article examines Edmund Burke and Ottobah Cugoano's aesthetic thought in relation to eighteenth-century racial slavery. It interrogates their ideas of the sublime and beautiful which contribute to their different political positions on the abolition of slavery: whereas the former advocated the gradual abolition of the slave trade and distant emancipation, the latter sought the immediate abolition of the trade and rapid emancipation. It contends that Burke's discussions of the sublime and beautiful were racialized, his advocacy of white authority on plantation slavery was rooted in his aesthetics, and his evocation of the Black sublime throughout his long career fit well with attempts to ameliorate, reform, and gradually abolish slavery. In contrast, Ottobah Cugoano's discussion of the sublime, the beautiful, and rejection of white authority supported his advocacy for the immediate abolition of the slave trade and rapid emancipation of enslaved peoples. The article also examines the reverberation of the logics of eighteenth-century racial aesthetics in current contexts.

The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

The relationship between the struggle against slavery and the Constitution remains a fraught historical subject. The Constitution was written by political elites who were fiercely divided over the question of slavery, and the legal groundwork for slavery it provided in the antebellum era remained ambiguous. As a text, the Constitution undeniably enabled a proslavery interpretation of federal law, but the debate about the role of constitutionalism in enabling or undermining slavery as political conflict over slavery's legitimacy escalated has remained contentious.In The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, James Oakes accounts for the complexities and contradictions of constitutional thought, but nevertheless cuts through this debate with impressive clarity. He frames constitutionalism as a set of competing political traditions that took form through activism and fierce political struggle. In Oakes's view, antislavery constitutionalism constituted the foundations of the ideology underlying political battles against slavery, and he takes seriously the prolonged, fiercely contested construction of this constitutional tradition as a significant political force in the fight for abolition.Oakes quickly moves beyond debates over the text of the Constitution itself and instead examines antislavery constitutionalism as a political tradition that emerged from active legal and political conflict. Starting from the 1787 Constitutional Convention, he identifies consistent efforts by political opponents of slavery to pressure the federal government to undermine slavery through Constitutional power. Antislavery constitutionalists, both politicians and grassroots activists, vied to make the Constitution a legal foundation for antislavery politics. They strategically targeted legal tensions regarding the rights of enslaved persons, such as due process and other rights of citizenship, in political battles over policy ranging from state constitutions to the Fugitive Slave Act to the legitimacy of slavery on international waters. Through these political struggles, opponents of slavery worked to reframe the Constitution under a new mantra: “freedom is the rule, slavery is the exception.”The remainder of the book positions Abraham Lincoln and his Republican administration firmly within this tradition of antislavery constitutionalism. Examining Lincoln's consistent commitment to abolishing slavery and extending citizenship rights to Black people in the territories, protecting due process for fugitive slaves, and making slavery the exception under federal sovereignty, Oakes argues that Lincoln's allegiance to the political project of emancipation was more enduring and persistent than previous scholars have acknowledged. As threats of secession and the subsequent Civil War opened new opportunities to confront slavery, Lincoln's presidential administration advanced toward emancipation by using military contraband practices to free slaves through martial power and dismantling fugitive slave law enforcement. In his final chapter, Oakes reexamines Lincoln's fixation on encouraging gradual abolition in border states early in the war, arguing that this gradualist strategy was not rooted in hesitancy about abolition but rather fit into an aggressive strategy of joint military and political pressure to secure emancipation through constitutional means. State-by-state pressure for local emancipation created the groundwork to pursue national abolition with the thirteenth amendment.Much of The Crooked Path to Abolition retreads well-explored territory, focusing on a relatively narrow set of political actors. Oakes's framework of antislavery constitutionalism allows for a broad view of political struggle that accounts for grassroots movement-building and activism, but grassroots pressure breaks up his history only intermittently. Most of the text focuses on battles waged by political and military leadership. The book's principal attention to Lincoln fits into an exhaustive historical literature on the president that has debated his commitment to emancipation and racial equality for decades.Still, Oakes makes an impressive intervention into this crowded scholarship. His significant contribution is not in his recovery of Lincoln's character; indeed, he acknowledges extensively the limitations of Lincoln's ideological commitment to racial equality. Rather, he shows that Lincoln's dedication to emancipation emerged from a complex political tradition that was powerfully committed to the end of slavery. Slave states seceded not as overreaction to an undefined abolitionist bogeyman but in response to a persistent, strategic political project of emancipation with Lincoln at its head. With the Confederacy and the Civil War still raging sites of conflict in popular memory today, James Oakes provides a timely, valuable perspective. His book is an accessible, incisive examination of Lincoln and the Civil War that accounts for the murky nuances and contingencies on the path to emancipation while nevertheless unapologetically framing radical structural conflict over slavery as the central impetus for secession and war.

About the Authors

About the Authors

Child Trafficking Leading to Child Labor in India

Enslavement is traditionally associated with human smuggling, which entails the selling and transport of human people as animals, seeing them as objects that may be traded and purchased. Modern slavery is the act of recruiting, transferring, transporting, harbouring, or receiving a child below the age of 18 for exploitation purpose. The Indian constitution expressly outlaws child trafficking and slave labor, and both violations are penalised under Art 23(1) of the Indian Constitution. Unemployment, a scarcity of work and school possibilities, the disintegration of social systems, and other factors contribute to child trafficking. According to international law, trafficking individuals cannot be prejudiced against solely because they are non-nationals. Humanitarian Rights extends to everybody inside a Particular geographical region or authority, irrespective of nationality or status or how they arrived there. Anti-trafficking actions must be taken globally, particularly in human smuggling areas, both remote and metropolitan.