Pamphlets and books about slavery and slave trading from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / author, Laura Rosanne Adderley (Tulane University).

Format:

Website/Database

Author/Creator:

Adderley, Laura Rosanne, author.

Contributor:

Adam Matthew Digital (Firm), contributor, commissioning body, digitiser.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Research.

Methodology.

Genre:

Case studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Marlborough, Wiltshire : Adam Matthew Digital, 2021.

Summary:

This case study examines the theme of "Slavery and Abolition" between the early 1500s and the mid-1800s, focusing on the racialized enslavement of Africans and their descendants around the Americas. The era which began with European incursion into the Americas in the 1490s saw the rise of claims about European cultural, political, and social superiority and related ideas of ethnic or even biological inferiority among non-European groups. The documents explored originate in the years between 1700 and 1860, decades often considered the height of the Atlantic slave trade and systems of slavery in North and South America and the Caribbean. While some European voices questioned the mistreatment of Africans and indigenous populations in the Americas from the earliest days of European arrival in the Caribbean in 1492, serious anti-slavery political and social movements mostly gained strength after the 1760s; and even then, among white populations, abolitionists formed a minority. The term "abolition" itself had different meanings at different times with some earlier abolition activists first calling only for the ending of the Atlantic slave trade, rather than the abolition of slavery itself. Around the Americas during the 1700s and 1800s the term "slavery" most often called to mind the enslavement of Africans brought across the Atlantic as captives, and their descendants who inherited enslaved status under colonial laws. Indigenous American populations had been decimated by unfamiliar diseases brought from Europe and Africa, and by widespread mistreatment at the hands of European colonizers. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, some nationalist movements which overturned European colonialism also initiated emancipation processes which ended slavery in multiple newly independent American territories. But slavery survived on a large scale into the second half of nineteenth century. Both pro- and anti-slavery voices of this era contemplated the long history of different forms of slavery in human society, as well as the unique characteristics of racial slavery as it was imposed mostly on Black populations. The texts explored in this case study relate both to their own era as well as to discussions in the 20th and 21st centuries concerning how the history of slavery contributed to the development of global anti-black racism. Issues raised in the documents analyzed can also be related to discussions of more modern systems of coerced labor and human exploitation.

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on August 17, 2022).

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.