A Slave Between Empires

A Slave Between Empires PDF Author: M'hamed Oualdi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In June 1887, a man known as General Husayn, a manumitted slave turned dignitary in the Ottoman province of Tunis, passed away in Florence after a life crossing empires. As a youth, Husayn was brought from Circassia to Turkey, where he was sold as a slave. In Tunis, he ascended to the rank of general before French conquest forced his exile to the northern shores of the Mediterranean. His death was followed by wrangling over his estate that spanned a surprising array of actors: Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II and his viziers; the Tunisian, French, and Italian governments; and representatives of Muslim and Jewish diasporic communities. A Slave Between Empires investigates Husayn’s transimperial life and the posthumous battle over his fortune to recover the transnational dimensions of North African history. M’hamed Oualdi places Husayn within the international context of the struggle between Ottoman and French forces for control of the Mediterranean amid social and intellectual ferment that crossed empires. Oualdi considers this part of the world not as a colonial borderland but as a central space where overlapping imperial ambitions transformed dynamic societies. He explores how the transition between Ottoman rule and European colonial domination was felt in the daily lives of North African Muslims, Christians, and Jews and how North Africans conceived of and acted upon this shift. Drawing on a wide range of Arabic, French, Italian, and English sources, A Slave Between Empires is a groundbreaking transimperial microhistory that demands a major analytical shift in the conceptualization of North African history.

A Slave Between Empires

A Slave Between Empires PDF Author: M'hamed Oualdi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
In June 1887, a man known as General Husayn, a manumitted slave turned dignitary in the Ottoman province of Tunis, passed away in Florence after a life crossing empires. As a youth, Husayn was brought from Circassia to Turkey, where he was sold as a slave. In Tunis, he ascended to the rank of general before French conquest forced his exile to the northern shores of the Mediterranean. His death was followed by wrangling over his estate that spanned a surprising array of actors: Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II and his viziers; the Tunisian, French, and Italian governments; and representatives of Muslim and Jewish diasporic communities. A Slave Between Empires investigates Husayn’s transimperial life and the posthumous battle over his fortune to recover the transnational dimensions of North African history. M’hamed Oualdi places Husayn within the international context of the struggle between Ottoman and French forces for control of the Mediterranean amid social and intellectual ferment that crossed empires. Oualdi considers this part of the world not as a colonial borderland but as a central space where overlapping imperial ambitions transformed dynamic societies. He explores how the transition between Ottoman rule and European colonial domination was felt in the daily lives of North African Muslims, Christians, and Jews and how North Africans conceived of and acted upon this shift. Drawing on a wide range of Arabic, French, Italian, and English sources, A Slave Between Empires is a groundbreaking transimperial microhistory that demands a major analytical shift in the conceptualization of North African history.

Slavery and Antislavery in Spain's Atlantic Empire

Slavery and Antislavery in Spain's Atlantic Empire PDF Author: Josep M. Fradera
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857459341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
African slavery was pervasive in Spain’s Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and conflict. The international group of scholars brought together in this volume explain Spain’s role as a colonial pioneer in the Atlantic world and its latecomer status as a slave-trading, plantation-based empire. These contributors map the broad contours and transformations of slave-trafficking, the plantation, and antislavery in the Hispanic Atlantic while also delving into specific topics that include: the institutional and economic foundations of colonial slavery; the law and religion; the influences of the Haitian Revolution and British abolitionism; antislavery and proslavery movements in Spain; race and citizenship; and the business of the illegal slave trade.

The Inner Life of Empires

The Inner Life of Empires PDF Author: Emma Rothschild
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
The birth of the modern world as told through the remarkable story of one eighteenth-century family They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the Johnstones--four sisters and seven brothers who lived in Scotland and around the globe in the fast-changing eighteenth century. Piecing together their voyages, marriages, debts, and lawsuits, and examining their ideas, sentiments, and values, renowned historian Emma Rothschild illuminates a tumultuous period that created the modern economy, the British Empire, and the philosophical Enlightenment. One of the sisters joined a rebel army, was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and escaped in disguise in 1746. Her younger brother was a close friend of Adam Smith and David Hume. Another brother was fluent in Persian and Bengali, and married to a celebrated poet. He was the owner of a slave known only as "Bell or Belinda," who journeyed from Calcutta to Virginia, was accused in Scotland of infanticide, and was the last person judged to be a slave by a court in the British isles. In Grenada, India, Jamaica, and Florida, the Johnstones embodied the connections between European, American, and Asian empires. Their family history offers insights into a time when distinctions between the public and private, home and overseas, and slavery and servitude were in constant flux. Based on multiple archives, documents, and letters, The Inner Life of Empires looks at one family's complex story to describe the origins of the modern political, economic, and intellectual world.

Final Passages

Final Passages PDF Author: Gregory E. O'Malley
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469615347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807

Bury the Chains

Bury the Chains PDF Author: Adam Hochschild
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618619078
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
This is the story of a handful of men, led by Thomas Clarkson, who defied the slave trade and ignited the first great human rights movement. Beginning in 1788, a group of Abolitionists moved the cause of anti-slavery from the floor of Parliament to the homes of 300,000 people boycotting Caribbean sugar, and gave a platform to freed slaves.

A Spectrum of Unfreedom

A Spectrum of Unfreedom PDF Author: Leslie Peirce
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633864003
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts. Unfree persons comprised two general populations: slaves and captives. Mostly household workers, slaves lived in a variety of circumstances, from squalor to luxury. Their duties varied with the status of their owner. Slave status might not last a lifetime, as Islamic law and Ottoman practice endorsed freeing one’s slave. Captives were typically seized in raids, generally to disappear, their fates unknown. Victims rarely returned home, despite efforts of their families and neighbors to recover them. The reader learns what it was about the Ottoman environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that offered some captives the opportunity to improve the conditions of their bondage. The book describes imperial efforts to fight against the menace of captive-taking despite the widespread corruption among the state’s own officials, who had their own interest in captive labor. From the fortunes of captives and slaves the book moves to their representation in legend, historical literature, and law, where, fortunately, both captors and their prey are present.

Empress of the East

Empress of the East PDF Author: Leslie Peirce
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The "fascinating . . . lively" story of the Russian slave girl Roxelana, who rose from concubine to become the only queen of the Ottoman empire (New York Times). In Empress of the East, historian Leslie Peirce tells the remarkable story of a Christian slave girl, Roxelana, who was abducted by slave traders from her Ruthenian homeland and brought to the harem of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul. Suleyman became besotted with her and foreswore all other concubines. Then, in an unprecedented step, he freed her and married her. The bold and canny Roxelana soon became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women, from Isabella of Hungary to Catherine de Medici, increasingly held the reins of power. Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

This Vast Southern Empire

This Vast Southern Empire PDF Author: Matthew Karp
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674973844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Winner of the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Winner of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table Book Award Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. “At the close of the Civil War, more than Southern independence and the bones of the dead lay amid the smoking ruins of the Confederacy. Also lost was the memory of the prewar decades, when Southern politicians and pro-slavery ambitions shaped the foreign policy of the United States in order to protect slavery at home and advance its interests abroad. With This Vast Southern Empire, Matthew Karp recovers that forgotten history and presents it in fascinating and often surprising detail.” —Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal “Matthew Karp’s illuminating book This Vast Southern Empire shows that the South was interested not only in gaining new slave territory but also in promoting slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.” —David S. Reynolds, New York Review of Books

Empires in the Sun

Empires in the Sun PDF Author: Lawrence James
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681774992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
The one hundred year history of how Europe coerced the African continent into its various empires—and the resulting story of how Africa succeeded in decolonization. In this dramatic (and often tragic) story of an era that radically changed the course of world history, Lawrence James investigates how, within one hundred years, Europeans persuaded and coerced Africa into becoming a subordinate part of the modern world. His narrative is laced with the experiences of participants and onlookers and introduces the men and women who, for better or worse, stamped their wills on Africa. The continent was a magnet for the high-minded, the adventurous, the philanthropic, the unscrupulous. Visionary pro-consuls rubbed shoulders with missionaries, explorers, soldiers, big-game hunters, entrepreneurs, and physicians. Between 1830 and 1945, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Italy and the United States exported their languages, laws, culture, religions, scientific and technical knowledge and economic systems to Africa. The colonial powers imposed administrations designed to bring stability and peace to a continent that appeared to lack both. The justification for occupation was emancipation from slavery—and the common assumption that late nineteenth-century Europe was the summit of civilization. By 1945 a transformed continent was preparing to take charge of its own affairs, a process of decolonization that took a quick twenty years. This magnificent history also pauses to ask: what did not happen and why?

Empire's Crossroads

Empire's Crossroads PDF Author: Carrie Gibson
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802192351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
A “wide-ranging, vivid” narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean (The Observer). Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba and its rich, important history. After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. These fraught years gave way to a booming age of sugar, horrendous slavery, and extravagant wealth, as well as the Haitian Revolution and the long struggles for independence that ushered in the modern era. Gibson tells not only of imperial expansion—European and American—but also of life as it is lived in the islands, from before Columbus through the tumultuous twentieth century. Told “in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes,” Empire’s Crossroads provides an essential account of five centuries of history (Foreign Affairs). “Judicious, readable and extremely well-informed . . . Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; [Gibson] takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost