Dark work : the business of slavery in Rhode Island / Christy Clark-Pujara.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Clark-Pujara, Christy, author.

Series:

Early American places

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Slavery--Rhode Island--History.

Slavery.

Slave trade--Rhode Island--History.

Slave trade.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation--Rhode Island--History.

Enslaved persons.

Enslaved persons--Rhode Island--Social conditions.

Free African Americans--Rhode Island--History.

Free African Americans.

Race relations.

History.

Social conditions.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation--British colonies.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation--French colonies.

Rhode Island--Race relations--History.

Rhode Island.

Enslaved persons--Social conditions.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 205 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2016]

Summary:

Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. In Dark Work, Christy Clark-Pujara tells the story of one state in particular whose role was outsized: Rhode Island. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold supplies and slaves that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business as important as it was in Rhode Island. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for rum, which was their number one export, and more than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of "negro cloth," a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state; the business, organizational, and personal records of the enslavers; and the few firsthand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders, to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation, and circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as a southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allow for a dangerous fiction-that the North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past. Book jacket.

Contents:

The business of slavery and making of race

Living and laboring under slavery

Emancipation in black and white

The legacies of enslavement

Building a free community

Building a free state and nation.

Notes:

"Also available as an ebook"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-200) and index.

ISBN:

9781479870424

1479870420

OCLC:

926743484