Understanding Of Slavery Research Articles

What ‘The Books … Would Tell’: Slavery, Freedom, and History in Slave Traders’ Archives

ABSTRACT During the American Civil War, abolitionists and their allies gathered an extraordinary amount of written material from the abandoned offices of slave traders. Though engaged in the common practice of relic hunting, they also intended these letters and ledgers to convey the significance of slavery’s demise. As reconciliation shaped white Americans’ attitudes toward the war in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these materials disappeared from the public eye. A century later, however, the archives abolitionists created from slave traders’ records re-emerged, with transformative effects for the study and understanding of slavery and emancipation in the United States.

3 - Slavery as a Human Institution

Scholars of slavery have long been divided between those who define slaves primarily as human property and those who define slaves primarily as kinless outsiders. This article reconciles these competing definitions by using the new understanding of definitions popularized by George Lakoff in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. The two formal definitions that have been offered are really two sides of the same coin. Slaves in Africa were property because they were kinless outsiders, while slaves in the United States were kinless out- siders because they were property. Slaves in other societies also had this dual character as both property and kinless outsiders. Slavery is a human institution that began in the psychological dependence caused by the shame of kinlessness experienced by isolated individuals. It was thus a mechanism for the incorpora- tion of new members into a society. It spread and developed in human societies, coming to have various extensions in different societies, but always so recog- nizably similar that slaves could easily be transferred between cultures that had very different understandings of slavery.

Currents in Biblical Research Slavery and the Enslaved in the Roman World, the Jewish World, and the Synoptic Gospels

Scholars have recently noted a reluctance in New Testament scholarship to accept and apply the most recent historical scholarship on ancient enslavement to our readings of the biblical texts. The last century has seen developments in historical and classical scholarship that have moved those disciplines away from an understanding of ancient slavery as benevolent and toward a recognition of the institution's violent and coercive nature. A similar movement can be seen in the study of enslavement among first-century Jewish communities, with recent scholars arguing that Jewish enslavement practices were not as uniquely benign as was once thought. In spite of these developments, scholars of the Synoptic Gospels continue to utilize outdated models for understanding slavery in the biblical texts as a benevolent institution. A handful of New Testament scholars are charting a new course, challenging the rest of us to adopt the new historical consensus and to see biblical enslavement for what it was. Allowing these new critical works to lay the foundation for our understanding of slavery as it appears in the Synoptic Gospels will move us away from tired clichés and toward a more accurate picture of the worlds in and behind these texts.

The Future of Progressive Politics in a Post-Fordist World

The Future of Progressive Politics in a Post-Fordist World

Slavery and Its Transformations: Prolegomena for a Global and Comparative Research Agenda

AbstractThis article argues that we need to move beyond the “Atlantic” and “formal” bias in our understanding of the history of slavery. It explores ways forward toward developing a better understanding of the long-term global transformations of slavery. Firstly, it claims we should revisit the historical and contemporary development of slavery by adopting a wider scope that accounts for the adaptable and persistent character of different forms of slavery. Secondly, it stresses the importance of substantially expanding the body of empirical observations on trajectories of slavery regimes, especially outside the Atlantic, and most notable in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction. Thirdly, it proposes an integrated analytical framework that will overcome the current fragmentation of research perspectives and allow for a more comparative analysis of the trajectories of slavery regimes in their highly diverse formal and especially informal manifestations. Fourth, the article shows how an integrated framework will enable a collaborative research agenda that focuses not only on comparisons, but also on connections and interactions. It calls for a closer integration of the histories of informal slavery regimes into the wider body of existing scholarship on slavery and its transformations in the Atlantic and other more intensely studied formal slavery regimes. In this way, we can renew and extend our understandings of slavery's long-term, global transformations.

Eustache’s ‘Amazing Ruses:’ Loyalty and Liberty in Saint-Domingue During the Haitian Revolution

ABSTRACT Stories abound of enslaved people who remained faithful to their owners during crises, but few offer critical insights into their motivations. This article offers alternative understandings for the appearance of slave loyalty through a close study of the life of Eustache Belin, who was born into slavery in Saint-Domingue just before the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions. He navigated the revolutionary era in ways that contemporary planters and later metropolitan observers defined as ‘loyal,’ and in 1832, received the Académie Française’s prize for virtue for his purportedly ‘faithful’ and selfless actions. However, this article argues for a different interpretation that considers how his embeddedness in a wider context of diverse social relations reveals a more nuanced understanding of slavery and freedom, without diminishing his capacity for affection, kindness, and sacrifice.

Tribute to Professor Emeritus Frederick Hickling

Tribute to Professor Emeritus Frederick Hickling

Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery by Calvin Schermerhorn

Reviewed by: Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery by Calvin Schermerhorn Kelly Houston Jones (bio) Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery. By Calvin Schermerhorn. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 258. Paper, $24.99.) Historian Calvin Schermerhorn, known for his work tracing American capitalism's rise via the business of slavery, has produced in Unrequited Toil a readable, compact story of American slavery. This accessible, affordable book comes at the perfect moment to serve not only academics but also readers whose interest in the history of slavery has been stoked by recent media like the New York Times' 1619 Project. Characterized by punchy topic sentences and an absorbing pace, the book emphasizes what was robbed from enslaved people—not only stolen wages but also stolen lives and legacies. This approach, which highlights the calculations of the system's managers at every turn, does not, however, translate into a cold interpretation void of bondspeople's culture and humanity. Rather, Schermerhorn tells a dynamic history with rich detail. Even familiar individuals' travails, such as the ones of Frederick Douglass and Charles Ball, are imbued with new narrative power in Schermerhorn's hands. Schermerhorn builds his narrative by drawing together established and recent themes in the historiography of American slavery. He gracefully synthesizes established concepts like Atlantic Creole society, set out by the recently departed Ira Berlin, with more recent scholarly contributions, such as historian Bonnie Martin's notion of the "hidden engine" [End Page 595] of slave mortgaging and Daina Ramey Berry's work on the value placed on enslaved bodies.1 By integrating the work of scholars of slavery and capitalism, Schermerhorn infuses his topical survey with new terminology. For instance, he profitably employs Sven Beckert's "war capitalism" to tell a story that includes whites' expulsion of Native peoples from their ancestral lands to force African-descended people onto that acreage as chattel. He also makes use of Edward E. Baptist's "labor camp" rather than "plantation." This term signals how Schermerhorn leans toward Baptist's argument that although improved cotton varieties played a role in the rising yields on southern cotton operations, it was the increasingly brutal coercion by enslavers and their overseers that did more to increase productivity, a finding that is still hotly contested by some economists of agriculture.2 Schermerhorn's masterful fusion of the latest scholarship also shifts the geography of American slavery. He expands the scope of the book beyond the boundaries of the United States, integrating topics like the Haitian Revolution and the imperial designs of slaveholders into the story of American slavery as told by historians like Walter Johnson and Matthew Karp.3 Unrequited Toil offers a deep and welcome exploration of the gendered aspects of enslaved people's treatment and the role of gender in their own constructions of family and community. In such a relatively brief volume, an entire chapter devoted to sexual violence might strike some readers as surprising, but it is an essential part of the exploitation of enslaved people. As Schermerhorn explains: "sexual assault established mastery" (111). The rape and abuse of enslaved men and women was [End Page 596] not simply an effect or symptom of their status but a fundamental scaffolding in the structure of exploitation. Unrequited Toil's accessible treatment of this topic will do much to integrate it into the public's understanding of slavery. One small point of Schermerhorn's work might trip up readers who are new to the topic of American slavery. More than once the author mentions slavers' calculation that it was cheaper to purchase adult men and women as slaves than it was to raise them from children. This could be more clearly explained for readers who might assume that this assessment contradicts the fact that the enslaved population of the United States reproduced itself and that some slavers attempted "slave breeding," which Schermerhorn also addresses. While these facts are not necessarily exclusive of slavers' neglect of children—and it is clear that slaveholders did not want to "waste" resources on them—the author could have offered more clarification in the relationship between these facts. This is a minor bump in a smoothly...

Slavery at the Gendered Crossroads of the Revolutionary Era: First Ladies and Their Bondspeople

Slavery at the Gendered Crossroads of the Revolutionary Era:First Ladies and Their Bondspeople Brenda E. Stevenson (bio) Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. New York: Atria Books, 2017, xvii + 253 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $26.00. Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017, 420 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. As I walk attentively through the mansion houses at Mount Vernon, Montpelier, and Monticello as part of a series of plantation research outings during annual sojourns to my home in Virginia, my questions hover everywhere, but two in particular push to the forefront. What was it really like to work and live—young and old, male and female—within these beautifully conceived and adorned spaces, among the most powerful and privileged of one's age, with so limited an opportunity to insist on one's own humanity? How can historical narratives constructed today ever truly contain the truths of those captives' lives? Erica Armstrong Dunbar's Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge and Marie Jenkins Schwartz's Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves have powerful, even moving, stories to tell about some of these men, women and children. These engrossing monographs concern the institution of slavery in the eras of the American Revolution and the early Republic and how elites as well as those whom they enslaved shaped the margins of the nation's founding ideals of liberty and democracy. The stories told in Ties That Bound and Never Caught indeed are not new ones, but Marie Jenkins Schwartz and Erica Dunbar have profoundly enhanced our knowledge of these people and events and, as a result, deepened our understanding of slavery, particularly the gendered relations within the domestic worlds of elite slaveholding households. There is much to appreciate in Marie Schwartz's Ties That Bound. Its most significant contributions are found both in its content and analysis. It is certain, [End Page 189] for example, that enslaved women routinely described slaveholding women as "devils" and "hellcats," particularly when they spoke of their own physical abuse by these women and the sale and abuse of their children. From this perspective, slaveholding women were no better than their husbands not only because of the ways that they treated their slaves directly, but also because they willfully hid, excused, enabled, and took part in the physical and psychological terrors visited upon black bondspeople and their families. This phenomenon is a nuanced lesson in Marie Jenkins Schwartz's Ties that Bound. Schwartz's well-researched monograph is a discourse on the relationships of four of the most elite women in the early United States—Martha Washington, Martha Wayles Jefferson and her daughter Patsy, and Dolly Madison—with their slaves. The stories of these women take us through their transition from girlhood to matron status in the nation's largest slave society at the time, Virginia. This point is important because Schwartz quickly establishes for at least Martha Washington and the Jefferson women that they were socialized from birth to accept the privileges of slaveholding as a financial anchor and social marker for their households and their descendants. As girls, they learned that black people were meant to serve them without question and had no right—inherent or otherwise—to freedom, personal wellbeing, or happiness. Their childhood socialization also included learning that the men in their families routinely demanded the sexual services of enslaved girls and women; how to discount biracial kin; that slave domesticity could be tolerated as long as it did not undermine the operative racial hierarchy; that masters and mistresses must compel their slaves to work hard and be obedient; and that slaves, regardless of their age, gender, or importance within their own social worlds, were the most useful form of portable property that whites could possess. A slaveholding woman's right to barter, sell, use as collateral, loan, give, or rent a bondsperson for the most petty of economic concerns, such as to buy an article of clothing—even more than their command of slave domestic labor as...

The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus

Reviewed by: The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus Michael E. Woods (bio) The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. By Carl Lawrence Paulus. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 311. $49.95 cloth) When proslavery southerners evoked "the horrors of St. Domingo," they conjured images of a world turned upside down, in which blacks violated white bodies, seized white property, and demolished white supremacy. From 1791 through the secession winter, the Haitian Revolution shaped American slaveholders' memories of the past and expectations for the future. Carl Lawrence Paulus persuasively shows that fears of slave rebellion—darkened by Haiti's shadow; quickened by the thwarted conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner; and intensified by the transatlantic abolitionist movement—decisively shaped American proslavery politics. Southern [End Page 111] statesmen first responded by seeking to dominate the federal government, using its legal and military might to defend slavery against home-grown abolitionists and foreign, especially British, meddlers. Simultaneously, they conducted a broader political and cultural campaign to define abolitionism as a dangerously un-American movement and to make slavery's preservation an overriding national priority. Only upon the failure of this two-pronged effort to embed slavery in notions of America's national purpose and exceptional nature did slavery's champions resort to secession. By exploring the interrelated politics of fear and exceptionalism, Paulus contributes to a broader shift in historians' understanding of slavery, nationalism, and sectionalism in the nineteenth-century United States. Paulus covers events and issues that will be familiar to specialists. Based mainly on published primary sources, his narrative flows from Haiti to the major U.S. insurrection plots and thence to British West Indian emancipation, debates over abolitionist mailings and petitions, and the escalating conflict over slavery's expansion, particularly concerning Texas annexation and the Wilmot Proviso. But Paulus's steady focus on the political implications of slave rebellion invigorates his analysis of well-known issues. By foregrounding the specter of revolt, Paulus avoids overemphasizing the legal and constitutional abstractions which can obscure what precisely was at stake in the sectional struggle. Thus, the Wilmot Proviso controversy highlighted slaveholders' dread that a bottled-up slave population would someday explode into a Haitian-style inferno. Similarly, proslavery politicians' determination to gag abolitionist petitions represented a brazen attempt to co-opt the federal government, and seduce northern support, by branding antislavery activism as treason. From this useful vantage point, proslavery politics appears aggressive, not defensive, and national in ambition rather than purely regional. Paulus joins scholars such as Matthew Karp and Robert E. Bonner in documenting proslavery leaders' often successful efforts to make slavery a cornerstone of American national identity and its protection a centerpiece of federal policy. Implicitly, he also reinforces recent [End Page 112] studies that demonstrate how slave agency fomented sectional strife. Contests over American exceptionalism provide a second, if less robust, narrative thread. In several chapters this theme sharpens Paulus's analysis, as when he shows how southern (and northern) critics denounced abolitionists as fanatical Anglophiles who conspired against the ostensibly proslavery American Union. Antislavery agitation, they argued, threatened to destroy America's unique republican experiment. But elsewhere, particularly when fear of revolt offers the most compelling explanation for slaveholders' political demands, the exceptionalism theme seems somewhat forced. A clearer definition of the concept would have strengthened the overall argument for its influence. Paulus associates exceptionalism variously with patriotism, nationalism, republicanism, federalism, collective destiny, national security, and territorial policy. In modern usage, "exceptionalism" is certainly a malleable term, and here it becomes even more plastic because antebellum Americans did not use it. Exceptionalism may not offer the best lens through which to examine each and every one of the diverse political disputes covered in this book. At its best, however, Paulus's analysis demonstrates that the tactic of claiming "real" Americanism has a very long, and equally troubled, history. Michael E. Woods MICHAEL E. WOODS is an assistant professor of history at Marshall University. He is the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (2016) and Emotional...

"Slavery, Race, and Freedom on the Spanish Anglo Borderlands"

"Slavery, Race, and Freedom on the Spanish Anglo Borderlands" Christian PinneniD On a cool, crisp fall day, the free black man James appeared in front of the Spanish governor of Natchez during court day in 1781. The settlement was an outpost built on—and below—bluffs that oversaw the mighty waters of the Mississippi river dissected by muddy roads following a haphazard pattern. It was home to many other African men and women, the overwhelming majority of whom were slaves. James, however, had recently been freed and now sought to prove to everyone in town that indeed he deserved to be treated as a free man. To do so, James had to demand from the governor that two white men pay the debt owed to him. There are many things we do not know of the encounter. How did James address the governor? After all, the man was an official of the Spanish empire that had only recently brought the English settlers of Natchez into its fold during the American Revolution, and the language of the court was Spanish, not the English James likely spoke. How did the Spanish governor receive James? Did he accept his case as any other, or did he hesitate in light of the racial identity of the other petitioners and claimants that day, assuredly all white? Did the governor understand the importance of the case for the next decade and a half of Spanish stewardship in Natchez, or did he simply follow the letter of the law? Whatever the case, James, a former slave, received justice. The two white men, Clement Dyson and John Staybraker, were ordered to pay their debt.1 With this decision, the governor of Natchez had brought the full leverage of Spanish law to an Anglo-American white population and their black slaves, and this would have tremendous consequences for the following decade. James's actions might not appear revolutionary in the Age of Revolutions that had recently swept up the remote district in its wake, but in many ways they can be read as such. James, a black man who had no rights under the previous government, had asserted his rights under Spanish law as he approached the Spanish governor with his case. For the first time in the eight-decade-old European history of the District—which had previously been held by France (until 1763) and then Great Britain—whiteness no longer appeared as the exclusive marker of citizenship or defining aspect of freedom and liberty in the burgeoning plantation society. This step of agency, self-preservation, and justice undertaken by James, presents an important marker in the historical record of Natchez. By extension, James' [End Page 551] and other people of color's stories that claimed these rights need to be unearthed to complete our picture of race relations at the margins of the American Republic to aid our understanding of slavery and race in the emerging United States. The Natchez District, the outpost of three empires in the eighteenth-century Gulf South, was not a topic in any of the essays chosen for Richmond Brown's Coastal Encounters, the most useful collection of essays on the borderlands in the colonial South to date. In the words of Brown, Natchez, and the entire region, is "a significant but heretofore relatively neglected subject."2 Unfortunately, not much has changed over the last decade. This article draws on the intellectual approaches to southern borderlands in Brown's attempt to chip away at the blank spots of the region's history and to emphasize the importance that borderland studies play in understanding early American history in general, and the history of race and slavery in particular. Outside of the traditional focal points for race and slavery studies of colonies like Virginia and South Carolina, historians are able to test the conclusions drawn by scholars of the aforementioned areas. Usually, the borderlands complicate the genesis story of slavery in the United States, and thereby adds to our understanding of the role that black men and women played in the development of the American Republic. Most recently, Kathleen DuVal, in her acclaimed Independence Lost, argues that the Gulf Coast "sheds new light...

Hobbesian Slavery

Although Thomas Hobbes’s critics have often accused him of espousing a form of extreme subjection that differs only in name from outright slavery, Hobbes’s own striking views about slavery have attracted little notice. For Hobbes repeatedly insists that slaves, uniquely among the populace, maintain an unlimited right of resistance by force. But how seriously should we take this doctrine, particularly in the context of the rapidly expanding Atlantic slave trade of Hobbes’s time? While there are several reasons to doubt whether Hobbes’s arguments here should be taken at face value, the most serious stems from the highly restricted definition that he gives to the term “slave,” one that would seem to make his acceptance of slave resistance entirely hollow in practice. Yet a closer examination of Hobbes’s theory indicates that his understanding of slavery is less narrow than it might initially appear—and thus that his argument carries a genuine political bite.

Sex Robot Matters: Slavery, the Prostituted, and the Rights of Machines

Slavery is the coercive and controlled use of another human. Contrary to the belief that the practice ended in the 1800s, slavery still persists today. There are many different terms used to describe slavery including, debt bondage (a person's pledge of labor for a debt or obligation), sale and exploitation of children, and human trafficking (forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation). Sexual exploitation is the most commonly identified form of human trafficking (79%) followed by forced labor (18%) [52]. To be held in slavery is to be held in miserable conditions and have a form of power over you that denies you a life of freedom. For most people in Europe and North America slavery is not a visible problem, and one could think slavery is somehow less important, and less violent today than in the past. This is not the case. The United Nations estimates that almost 21 million people are currently victims of slaver y [25]. A staggering $150billion in profits is generated from forced labor and 168 million girls and boys are in child labor [25]. Central to our understanding of slavery and its related forms is that a person is recast, often without bodily integrity, as property that can be bought, sold, and accessed by others with more power, status, and money.

The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 by James J. Gigantino (review)

Reviewed by: The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 by James J. Gigantino Jonathan Mercantini (bio) Keywords New Jersey, Slavery, Emancipation, Abolition, Labor The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865. By James J. Gigantino, II. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 359. Cloth, $39.95.) The history of slavery in New Jersey has always defied easy explanation. The peculiar institution in the Garden State possessed similarities to slavery in the Upper South and the Border States, as well as New England. Even the geography of slavery was reversed. The northern and northwestern parts of the state, particularly Bergen, Morris, Essex, and Hunterdon Counties that were tied to New York City, possessed considerable numbers of slaves. Conversely, slavery was of declining importance even before the American Revolution in the heavily Quaker southern counties where abolitionism was embraced early. New Jersey’s legacy as the only state that did not secede and yet which failed to vote for Abraham Lincoln in either the 1860 or 1864 presidential election has long been used as a shorthand to show the strength of slavery or at least of southern sympathy in the state after most of the industrializing north had abandoned this form of unfree labor. James J. Gigantino II’s new book on the subject is, therefore, a welcome addition that greatly improves our understanding of slavery in New Jersey. Gigantino’s findings are also useful for understanding the contradictions and complexities of abolition in neighboring states. Abolition and then emancipation were both gradual processes in New Jersey and were shaped by persistent white animosity toward blacks. Many slave owners actively subverted gradual abolition by selling slaves out of state or by creating new categories of unfree labor. Overall, the author finds a strong commitment to slavery and to various forms of pseudo-slavery throughout the state from the Revolutionary era through the election of Lincoln. [End Page 195] Several notable national trends are apparent in New Jersey. Gigantino finds that, rather than leading to calls for black liberty and freedom, the disruption and destruction of the War for Independence in New Jersey served to strengthen the institution of slavery as whites feared a black revolt. The state’s central location—the ‘‘Crossroads of the American Revolution’’—therefore contributed to New Jersey’s status as the last northern state to pass an act for gradual emancipation. This legacy of the American Revolution remained important throughout the long and winding path toward emancipation, but for Gigantino that legacy was mixed. He argues that, ‘‘Slavery’s destruction in New Jersey then did not occur as an immediate by-product of the American Revolution, but of the Civil War’’ (250). Slavery continued to grow at a rate of approximately 20 percent from 1790 to 1800 in the northern counties of the state. While the Revolution did eventually lead to gradual emancipation, the African American freedom struggle required much more than the words and actions of the Revolutionary era. Moreover, as Gigantino shows, gradual emancipation did little to end slavery; it simply modified the institution into other forms of unfree labor. While the state’s 1804 gradual emancipation act did offer avenues to freedom for Jersey slaves and especially their children, mostly it created ‘‘slaves for a term.’’ The ambiguities of the law together with the grudging acceptance by some whites, and the resistance to the emancipation by many, led to the persistence of slavery well into the nineteenth century. During the first decades of the new nation, one can see slavery evolving into a flexible system, with regional and even local variations in New Jersey and other states as they struggled to construct a system to manage African American labor. It is important, Gigantino tells us, to understand that abolitionism, in both its gradual and its eventual immediate forms, was consistently contested as whites feared black liberty, economic competition, and potential political power, and relied on white supremacy to locate themselves in a changing America. These trends will be readily recognizable to scholars of slavery elsewhere in the United States. In New Jersey, they serve to reinforce the extent to which the state was...

Does Slavery Have a History?

In the last decade the landscape of slavery studies has changed radically. Novel developments raise major new challenges for the global study of slavery. This article is an attempt to take stock of these significant developments for rethinking the history of slavery from a global viewpoint. I will be arguing that we need to set aside the essentialist understanding of slavery and the ahistorical typology of slave societies and societies with slaves in favor of an understanding of slavery as a temporally—and spatially—changing outcome of the entanglement of various processes. If slavery has no essence, but an open-ended global history, we need a new framework for conceptualizing how such a history can be written. I hope to offer an outline of such a framework, as well as a discussion of the kinds of historical change that such a narrative should include.

Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820

This book forum focuses on Trevor Burnard’s book, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015). In his book, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic. While plantations required racial divisions to exist, their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Ranging over nearly two centuries, from Guyana to the Chesapeake, the book provides many new insights and offers a revisionary interpretation of the connection between slavery and the American Revolution. The three reviewers in general praise the empirical research that underpins the book but challenge some of the conclusions. They also draw attention to a few points that, in their opinion, the author underemphasized or where he could have expanded his argument, for instance the role of support from the British Empire to the plantation system and the role of religion in shaping attitudes to slavery and the plantation system. In his response, Burnard argues against some of the criticism, such as the impact of the fear of slave revolts. In particular, Burnard stresses that his understanding of slavery in the colonial period of American history is that of an outsider to American politics. As such, he argues, his book does not speak to contemporary concerns about rising evidence of racial hatred.

Slavery as Contract: Betty's Case and the Question of Freedom

This article offers a theoretical reading of the 1857 freedom suit, Betty's Case, wherein a slave woman, Betty, declared free by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, returned to Tennessee with her owners. Based on the case's enduring question of whether the freedom to contract should include the freedom to be a slave, the article argues that this question is foundational for the ever-present jurisprudential problem of negotiating the empirical development of the idea of free will with the transcendental right of freedom in modern contract law. This deeper understanding of slavery as contract deconstructs and builds on critical legal studies of slavery that have largely focused on the legal constitution of the slave as property.

Introduction: the body as a site for politics: citizenship and practices of contemporary slavery

This special issue of Citizenship Studies brings the meaning of citizenship into dialogue with recent work on the body and with practices of contemporary slavery. In bringing the concepts of citizenship, bodies and slavery into collision, we highlight the need to couple slavery with possibilities of citizenship as an alternative to the way in which, as Paddy McQueen below puts it, ‘citizenship and slavery are mutually exclusive: one can be either a citizen or a slave, not both’. Recent ideas about the body as a site for politics, where the body is understood in terms of embodied relationality in a situation – a necessarily social category – are a means for bringing about a richer encounter between the concepts of citizenship understood as political subjectivity (as developed in the work of Engin Isin), bodies and slavery. Practices of slavery deny relationality, based instead on a binary master/slave logic of power relations. This introduction connects citizenship with slavery, by identifying citizenship as embodied political subjectivity and slavery as one of the conditions in which the very possibility of this is denied. Taking embodied relationality into account, recognising the necessarily social embodiment of concepts and abjuring an abstract, disembodied sphere of concepts, thus disrupts the standard understanding of slavery as rights violations.

Seeing beyond the local context: the understandings of slavery and the slave trade of students in Reunion Island schools

In the new millennium model of low definition curriculum, teachers have professional latitude to deliver prescribed disciplinary content through a range of pedagogical and assessment orientations. The rhetoric is that with carefully crafted practice, the goal of high quality/high equity learning outcomes can be achieved for all students. This paper is focused on the experiences of teachers and students from one large multicultural, multilingual, low socio-economic status community from Reunion Island, a remote French department in the Indian Ocean. In their history and geography lessons, the topic of study is a contentious one and closely connected to the students’ personal histories, that of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using an analytical lens that combines the sociological work of Bernstein and Maton, and utilises ranking questionnaires, this study examines the complexity and tensions inherent in teachers’ choices and the implications for students’ short- and long-term learning outcomes.

An Angry God in the Hands of Sinners: Enslaved Africans and the Uses of Protestant Christianity in Pre-Revolutionary Boston

This article contends that slaves were able to successfully appropriate Christian institutions to decode the Euro-American world they arrived in and resist the dehumanization associated with African slavery in the Americas. Looking beyond religiosity, eschewing the teleological obsession with freedom that obfuscates our understanding of slavery, and using Boston—an Atlantic port city full of churches and slaves—as a case study, we are able to see how enslaved Africans were able to use what they learned in Boston's churches, including the ability to read and write and a powerful Christian vocabulary, in order to meet the master class and other whites on their own terms and challenge the boundaries of slavery.