Troubling Freedom

Troubling Freedom PDF

Author: Natasha Lightfoot

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0822375052

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In 1834 Antigua became the only British colony in the Caribbean to move directly from slavery to full emancipation. Immediate freedom, however, did not live up to its promise, as it did not guarantee any level of stability or autonomy, and the implementation of new forms of coercion and control made it, in many ways, indistinguishable from slavery. In Troubling Freedom Natasha Lightfoot tells the story of how Antigua's newly freed black working people struggled to realize freedom in their everyday lives, prior to and in the decades following emancipation. She presents freedpeople's efforts to form an efficient workforce, acquire property, secure housing, worship, and build independent communities in response to elite prescriptions for acceptable behavior and oppression. Despite its continued efforts, Antigua's black population failed to convince whites that its members were worthy of full economic and political inclusion. By highlighting the diverse ways freedpeople defined and created freedom through quotidian acts of survival and occasional uprisings, Lightfoot complicates conceptions of freedom and the general narrative that landlessness was the primary constraint for newly emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.

Slavery, Freedom and Gender

Slavery, Freedom and Gender PDF

Author: Brian L. Moore

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9789766401375

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A collection of lectures delivered between 1987 and 1998. The book is divided into two sections: slavery and freedom, which features critical research on slavery and post-emancipation society, and gender.

Island on Fire

Island on Fire PDF

Author: Tom Zoellner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0674984307

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From a New York Times bestselling author, a gripping account of the slave rebellion that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder. While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic. The daring and suffering of the Jamaicans galvanized public opinion throughout the empire, triggering a decisive turn against slavery. For centuries bondage had fed Britain’s appetite for sugar. Within two years of the Christmas rebellion, slavery was formally abolished. Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of this transformative uprising. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner goes back to the primary sources to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and tasted liberty for a few brief weeks. He provides the first full portrait of the rebellion's enigmatic leader, Samuel Sharpe, and gives us a poignant glimpse of the struggles and dreams of the many Jamaicans who died for liberty.

The Freedom of Speech

The Freedom of Speech PDF

Author: Miles Ogborn

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 022665768X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The institution of slavery has always depended on myriad ways of enforcing the boundaries between slaveholders and the enslaved. As historical geographer Miles Ogborn reveals in The Freedom of Speech, no repressive tool has been as pervasive as the policing of words themselves. Offering a compelling new lens on transatlantic slavery, this book gathers rich historical data from Barbados, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, and North America to delve into the complex relationships between voice, slavery, and empire. From the most quotidian encounters to formal rules of what counted as evidence in court, the battleground of slavery lay in who could speak and under what conditions. But, as Ogborn shows through keen attention to the narratives and silences in the archives, if slavery as a legal status could be made by words, it could be unmade by them as well. A masterful look at the duality of domination, The Freedom of Speech offers a rich interpretation of oral cultures that both supported and constantly threatened to undermine the slave system.

Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean

Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean PDF

Author: Lynsey A. Bates

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2018-09-12

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1683400712

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Caribbean plantations and the forces that shaped them--slavery, sugar, capitalism, and the tropical, sometimes deadly environment--have been studied extensively. This volume brings together alternate stories of sites that fall outside the large cash-crop estates. Employing innovative research tools and integrating data from Dominica, St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Barbados, Nevis, Montserrat, and the British Virgin Islands, the contributors investigate the oft-overlooked interstitial spaces where enslaved Africans sought to maintain their own identities inside and outside the fixed borders of colonialism. Despite grueling work regimes and social and economic restrictions, people held in bondage carved out places of their own at the margins of slavery's reach. These essays reveal a complex world within and between sprawling plantations--a world of caves, gullies, provision grounds, field houses, fields, and the areas beyond them, where the enslaved networked, interacted, and exchanged goods and information. The volume also explores the lives of poor whites, Afro-descendant members of military garrisons, and free people of color, demonstrating that binary models of black slaves and white planters do not fully encompass the diversity of Caribbean identities before and after emancipation. Together, the analyses of marginal spaces and postemancipation communities provide a more nuanced understanding of the experiences of those who lived in the historic Caribbean, and who created, nurtured, and ultimately cut the roots of empire. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Slavery from Africa to the Americas

Slavery from Africa to the Americas PDF

Author: Christine Hatt

Publisher: Evans Brothers

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13: 9780237531928

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An illustrated history of slavery in Africa and the Americas from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.

The Empire of Necessity

The Empire of Necessity PDF

Author: Greg Grandin

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1429943173

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.