Arming slaves : from classical times to the modern age / edited by Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Brown, Christopher Leslie.

Morgan, Philip D., 1949-

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Enslaved soldiers--History--Congresses.

Enslaved soldiers.

History.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Physical Description:

xvi, 368 pages : maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [2006]

Summary:

Arming slaves as soldiers is a counterintuitive idea. Yet throughout history, in many varied societies, slaveholders have entrusted slaves with the use of deadly force. This book is the first to survey the practice broadly across space and time, encompassing the cultures of classical Greece, the early Islamic kingdoms of the Near East, West and East Africa, the British and French Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America. To facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, each chapter addresses four crucial issues: the social and cultural facts regarding the arming of slaves, the experience of slave soldiers, the ideological origins and consequences of equipping enslaved peoples for battle, and the impact of the practice on the status of slaves and slavery itself. What emerges from the book is a new historical understanding: the arming of slaves is neither uncommon nor paradoxical but is instead both predictable and explicable.

Contents:

Arming Slaves and Helots in Classical Greece / Peter Hunt 14

The Mamluk Institution, or One Thousand Years of Military Slavery in the Islamic World / Reuven Amitai 40

Armed Slaves and Political Authority in Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade, 1450-1800 / John Thornton 79

Making the Chikunda: Military Slavery and Ethnicity in Southern Africa, 1750-1900 / Allen Isaacman, Derek Peterson 95

Transforming Bondsmen into Vassals: Arming Slaves in Colonial Spanish America / Jane Landers 120

Arming Slaves in Brazil from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth Century / Hendrik Kraay 146

Arming Slaves in the American Revolution / Philip D. Morgan, Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy 180

The Arming of Slaves in the Haitian Revolution / David Geggus 209

Citizen Soldiers: Emancipation and Military Service in the Revolutionary French Caribbean / Laurent Dubois 233

The Slave Soldiers of Spanish South America: From Independence to Abolition / Peter Blanchard 255

Armed Slaves and the Struggles for Republican Liberty in the U.S. Civil War / Joseph P. Reidy 274

Armed Slaves and Anticolonial Insurgency in Late Nineteenth-Century Cuba / Ada Ferrer 304

The Arming of Slaves in Comparative Perspective / Christopher Leslie Brown 330.

Notes:

Based on lectures from a conference in Fall 2000 at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0300109008

OCLC:

61651635

Publisher Number:

9780300109009

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description