Slave Research Articles

The Metaphors “Human-Animal”, “Animal-Human” in T. Morrison’s Novel “Beloved”

Introduction. The study investigates the role of the metaphors “human-animal”, “animalhuman” based on the novel “Beloved” by T. Morrison. The relevance of the research lies in the lack of knowledge of the linguistic specifics of this landmark novel for modern American literature, in the absence of research to identify and analyze key metaphors reflecting the author's conceptualization of reality.Methodology and sources. The authors of this article, relying on semantic and cognitive approaches, consider metaphor as a combination of two planes: linguistic and mental. To describe the mechanism of metaphorical transfers, the article uses the proposed by J. Lakoff and M. Johnson, terms characterizing the interaction of two knowledge structures: the source sphere and the target sphere.Results and discussion. The study showed that the metaphor “man-animal” becomes one of the most productive in the novel. This metaphorical structure includes the following elements of the source sphere: animal names; animal properties; animal body parts; objects characterizing animal activities; actions carried out in relation to animals and animals themselves; people performing actions in relation to animals. The relevance of this metaphor and the variety of sources of transference is dictated by the theme of the novel, comprehending one of the most acute problems of American history – the theme of slavery. The disenfranchised position of a human slave, his “animal” dependence on the slave owner forms the conceptual basis of most metaphorical transfers within this lexical and semantic field. The metaphor “animal-human” is used less often and serves, first of all to enhance the contrast between the life of a human slave and an animal who sometimes feels more confident and freer. This metaphorical structure includes the following elements of the source sphere: forms of addressing a person, the names of the characters in the book, the title of a person, human actions, human properties, objects associated with a person.Conclusion. In the novel “Beloved” by T. Morrison, the metaphor is a significant element of the textual structure reflecting the author's linguistic picture of the world. Especially productive are the mutual likenesses of man and animal, figuratively interpreting the life and attitude of a human slave who is regularly subjected to physical and moral violence.

The Lost Clause: Reinterpreting the Declaration’s Silence on the Atlantic Slave Trade

Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence condemned King George III for maintaining the international slave trade. The clause denounced the “execrable trade” for violating enslaved people’s “rights of life & liberty,” thus alienating slave-trading congressional delegates, who forced Jefferson to cut the clause. Generations of scholars have mourned this deletion. This essay offers an alternate reading of the clause. In drafting the clause, Jefferson reframed colonial legislatures’ slave importation bans—intended to control and promote the domestic slave trade—as a statement of antislavery principle. Specifically, Virginia’s colonial legislature had proposed protectionist tariffs to decrease the supply of enslaved people, lowering the likelihood of slave revolt while increasing the value of enslaved people remaining within the colony. Jefferson drafted several of these nonimportation resolutions, from which later he drew the Declaration’s clause, reframing the economic concern as a moral one. The resulting clause sandwiched a protectionist nonimportation argument, largely neglected by scholars, in the more famous language of antislavery moral appeal. By comparing the clause to other colonial nonimportation resolutions, the essay shows how this deleted section of the Declaration affirmed the interests of slaveholders.

Calculating a life: classification, valuation and compensation in the British abolition of slavery

PurposeThis paper examines the calculative practices used by the Slave Compensation Commission to value a slave for the purposes of compensating slave owners on the abolishment of slavery across the British colonies in 1833. It contributes to accounting research in the field of valuation, particularly to understanding the practices of valuing human life.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology is primarily archival and draws on the records of the Slave Compensation Commission held at the British National Archives (Kew).FindingsThe paper makes two contributions to the literature. Firstly, it contributes to the valuation studies literature by suggesting the significance of understanding the practice of valuation as a product of the dynamics of strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). Secondly, it contributes to the theory of strategic action fields by revealing the role of calculative technologies in supporting the organizational apparatus of valuation within the Slave Compensation Commission, and therefore suggests the powerful role of accounting in stabilizing a strategic action field.Originality/valueThe paper provides novel insights into the monetary commensuration of life and the role of calculative technologies in that valuation process.

:Metal Finds and Coins: Final Publications from the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project II

:<i>Metal Finds and Coins: Final Publications from the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project II</i>

Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker

Reviewed by: Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker Viola Franziska Müller Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. Edited by Timothy D. Walker. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 231. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-62534-593-9; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-62534-593-6.) Slave flight is firmly back at the center of scholarly attention, and while publications on overland escapes have multiplied over the past several years, Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad makes a long overdue intervention by bringing the maritime world onto the stage. Timothy D. Walker's introduction and historiographical essay in chapter 1 both convincingly argue that, over time, we have come to disregard the importance of sea and water travel in U.S. history. This neglect has in turn contributed to the overlooking of maritime routes in the study of the Underground Railroad. Yet as this book makes clear, escapes by boat and ship were frequent in the antebellum era, and they firmly connected southern regions of departure with northern zones of refuge. One crucial observation, which runs through all the chapters, is the centrality of work. Enslaved and free Black people—especially men—often performed jobs and held positions in the maritime economy that enabled them to strategically build networks, broaden their horizons, and eventually plan and conduct escapes, be it for themselves or as allies of freedom seekers. To be sure, many of the networks of ferrymen, sailors, and stevedores discussed in this book are truly impressive. But the chapters do more than just illustrate how people used the context of work to facilitate escapes. They place Black Americans at the heart of antebellum maritime and economic life in both the southern and the northern states. As the backbone of a regional and national economy, Black maritime laborers encumbered the attempts of southern slaveholders to keep them confined. This heavy commercial dependence on Black maritime workers prevented large-scale restrictions on their mobility, as strict slave badge regulations, limits on hiring out, and increased surveillance of ports would by definition hamper economic activity. And so, the execution of these laws—practically the sole tool slaveholders had at their disposal—remained frequently ineffective. Over time, the growing volume of trade [End Page 771] increased the number of ships leaving southern ports, creating more opportunities for enslaved people to abscond. Contributions by Michael D. Thompson, David S. Cecelski, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, and Cheryl Janifer LaRoche explore slave flight from Charleston, coastal North Carolina, Norfolk, and Maryland, respectively. The authors do an excellent job of explaining the geographic characteristics of waterways and the sea and show that, no matter how challenging or peculiar the natural and social environment, many enslaved people found ways to slip through cracks in surveillance and onto boats and vessels that carried them out of slavery. Halfway through the book, the perspective shifts to the North, as Mirelle Luecke, Elysa Engelman, Kathryn Grover, and Len Travers focus on New York City, Connecticut, eastern Massachusetts, and New Bedford, as either destinations or places of transit. As these contributors vividly demonstrate, the maritime economy gave rise to sizable Black communities that fought on the front lines to rescue enslaved people and protect them from reenslavement. After all, despite the involvement of allies from all racial and social backgrounds, African Americans were the most important agents in these escapes. Collectively, Sailing to Freedom is an account of Black self-determination and successful resistance, which is truly remarkable since it also shows that obstacles, risks, and mutual suspicion among freedom seekers and their allies loomed large along these maritime routes. With a geographic focus on the East Coast, all cases presented deal with escapes to the northern states and Canada. Other routes of maritime flight, for instance, into the Caribbean or Mexico, are not covered in detail. Strictly speaking, the temporal scope also goes beyond the Underground Railroad, with some chapters discussing informal networks in the early republic. The contributions are first-rate. Drawing on personal accounts wherever possible and usually taking the perspective of the freedom seekers, each essay keeps lived experiences...

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

This richly illustrated and engaging comparative study focuses on visual representations of plantations in three frontier zones of economic expansion during the nineteenth century: the world of cotton in the lower Mississippi Valley of the United States, sugar plantations in the interior of Cuba, and the coffee zone in the Paraíba Valley of Brazil. Each region became a world leader in the production of their respective crops during what one of the authors (Dale Tomich) has called the “second slavery,” the period after 1800 when increased technological and transportation developments, new forms of land management, and new systems for organizing labor resulted in a significant increase in commodity production and the mass movement of enslaved peoples into these regions. The authors emphasize that “world economic conditions” such as industrialization, population growth, and urbanization drove demand for these crops and fueled agricultural expansion in the three regions, but that local environmental conditions and the demands of different crops gave rise to distinct plantation forms and landscapes in each.In outlining economic forces and agricultural developments, the authors synthesize clearly and effectively the rich literature on cotton, sugar, and coffee plantations that has emerged over the past several decades. What distinguishes their work in this book, of course, is the attention to images of the landscapes that resulted from these developments: the maps, plats, paintings, lithographs, and photographs of plantations, buildings, machinery, and enslaved people, many reproduced in full color. Their goals are twofold: to explore “how visual documents help us to understand these landscapes” and to examine what “such landscapes tell us about the history of the commodity frontiers of the second slavery” (145). In doing so, they move beyond what they see as a limitation of many existing landscape studies, namely the focus on “landscape” as an abstract idea divorced from “any specific material, social, or historical content or context” (5). Such studies may call attention to how landscapes (and representations of landscapes) can articulate power relations, but they do not explore fully the specific historical circumstances in which those relations emerged. That is the focus here.The book is divided into two sections, each with three chapters, one for each region. The first section focuses on the development of plantations and plantation agriculture. The authors make excellent use of regional maps to illustrate different patterns of landholding, the expansion of commodity frontiers across space, and the transportation networks (river and boats, trains, and mules) needed to link plantations to markets. The second section explores the economic and spatial layout of plantations. The analysis of the images here is especially rich. There are some maps, but paintings and photographs are more prominent. The authors offer clear and insightful commentary on these various images as they explain how the spatial layout of plantations and plantation buildings reflected the physical and environmental conditions needed to grow various crops, the labor routines involved in production, and the technological developments that facilitated rapid increases in output. Images of work logs and gin houses in the Mississippi Valley, steam engines and vacuum pans in sugar ingenios, and the drying terraces on coffee fazendas in Brazil all dramatically illustrate new modes and spaces of production on plantations. Even familiar images, such as scenes from a cotton plantation that appeared in Harper's Weekly in the 1860s, are analyzed in the context of work, space, and labor control.While the discussion of images of plantations and plantation operations in each region is illuminating, the comparative framework makes the book especially valuable. Maps of the Cuban and Brazilian plantations, for example, depict a group of structures at the center of those estates that were central to the production process while no such grouping appears on maps and plats of cotton plantations. Likewise, images of barracks housing enslaved people on coffee plantations, which developed in response to the expanded scale of production, and the placement of those barracks differed significantly from the individual structures that housed enslaved people and the spatial layout of cotton estates. In short, the authors' focus on how global economic forces interacted with local environments to reshape the landscapes of these three regions, and their argument that critical attention to images can reveal how those transformations played out on the ground, make an important contribution to our understanding of the period of the second slavery in various parts of the Americas.

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.