Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants

Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants PDF Author: A. Stanziani
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113744844X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Slaves, convicts, and unfree immigrants have traveled the oceans throughout human history, but the conventional Atlantic World historical paradigm has narrowed our understanding of modernity. This provocative study contrasts the Atlantic conflation of freedom and the sea with the complex relationships in the Indian Ocean in the long 19th century.

Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants

Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants PDF Author: A. Stanziani
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113744844X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
Slaves, convicts, and unfree immigrants have traveled the oceans throughout human history, but the conventional Atlantic World historical paradigm has narrowed our understanding of modernity. This provocative study contrasts the Atlantic conflation of freedom and the sea with the complex relationships in the Indian Ocean in the long 19th century.

Democracy’s Slaves

Democracy’s Slaves PDF Author: Paulin Ismard
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674973801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The ancient Greek statesman is a familiar figure in the Western political tradition. Less well known is the administrator who ran the state but who was himself a slave. Challenging the modern belief that democracy and bondage are incompatible, Paulin Ismard directs our attention to the cradle of Western democracy, ancient Athens, where the functioning of civic government depended crucially on highly skilled experts who were literally public servants—slaves owned by the city-state rather than by private citizens. Known as dēmosioi, these public slaves filled a variety of important roles in Athenian society. They were court clerks, archivists, administrators, accountants, and policemen. Many possessed knowledge and skills beyond the attainments of average citizens, and they enjoyed privileges, such as the right to own property, that were denied to private slaves. In effect, dēmosioi were Western civilization’s first civil servants—though they carried out their duties in a condition of bound servitude. Ismard detects a radical split between politics and administrative government at the heart of Athenian democracy. The city-state’s managerial caste freed citizens from the day-to-day responsibilities of running the state. By the same token, these public servants were unable to participate in the democratic process because they lacked the rights of full citizenship. By rendering the state’s administrators politically invisible, Athens warded off the specter of a government capable of turning against the citizens’ will. In a real sense, Ismard shows, Athenian citizens put the success of their democratic experiment in the hands of slaves.

The Making of Asian America

The Making of Asian America PDF Author: Erika Lee
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476739404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
"In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as ... historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"--Jacket.

Labor on the Fringes of Empire

Labor on the Fringes of Empire PDF Author: Alessandro Stanziani
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319703927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
After the abolition of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Africa, the world of labor remained unequal, exploitative, and violent, straddling a fine line between freedom and unfreedom. This book explains why. Unseating the Atlantic paradigm of bondage and drawing from a rich array of colonial, estate, plantation and judicial archives, Alessandro Stanziani investigates the evolution of labor relationships on the Indian subcontinent, the Indian Ocean and Africa, with case studies on Assam, the Mascarene Islands and the French Congo. He finds surprising relationships between African and Indian abolition movements and European labor practices, inviting readers to think in terms of trans-oceanic connections rather than simple oppositions. Above all, he considers how the meaning and practices of freedom in the colonial world differed profoundly from those in the mainland. Arguing for a multi-centered view of imperial dynamics, Labor on the Fringes of Empire is a pioneering global history of nineteenth-century labor.

Union Jacks

Union Jacks PDF Author: Michael J. Bennett
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Historians have given a great deal of attention to the lives and experiences of Civil War soldiers, but surprisingly little is known about navy sailors who participated in the conflict. Michael J. Bennett remedies the longstanding neglect of Civil War seamen in this comprehensive assessment of the experience of common Union sailors from 1861 to 1865. To resurrect the voices of the "Union Jacks," Bennett combed sailors' diaries, letters, and journals. He finds that the sailors differed from their counterparts in the army in many ways. They tended to be a rougher bunch of men than the regular soldiers, drinking and fighting excessively. Those who were not foreign-born, escaped slaves, or unemployed at the time they enlisted often hailed from the urban working class rather than from rural farms and towns. In addition, most sailors enlisted for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons. Bennett's examination provides a look into the everyday lives of sailors and illuminates where they came from, why they enlisted, and how their origins shaped their service. By showing how these Union sailors lived and fought on the sea, Bennett brings an important new perspective to our understanding of the Civil War.

Capital and Ideology

Capital and Ideology PDF Author: Thomas Piketty
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674980824
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1105

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Book Description
A New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system. Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity. Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.

Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire

Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire PDF Author: Stephan Conermann
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847010379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire offers a new contribution to slavery studies relating to the Ottoman Empire. Given the fact that the classical binary of 'slavery' and 'freedom' derives from the transatlantic experience, this volume presents an alternative approach by examining the strong asymmetric relationships of dependency documented in the Ottoman Empire. A closer look at the Ottoman social order discloses manifold and ambiguous conditions involving enslavement practices, rather than a single universal pattern. The authors examine various forms of enslavement and dependency with a particular focus on agency, i. e. the room for maneuver, which the enslaved could secure for themselves, or else the available options for action in situations of extreme individual or group dependencies.

Across Colonial Lines

Across Colonial Lines PDF Author: Devyani Gupta
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350327034
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Across Colonial Lines takes a multi-perspective approach to the study of empire and commodities, and encourages readers to look at commodity histories in alternative spatial and temporal contexts. It offers a comparative understanding of commodities in the Venetian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Empires. Highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks, this book situates commodities like gold, coffee, tea and indigo, to name a few, within pre-existing networks of labour, consumption and knowledge production. It explores the nexus between the local and the global, and highlights the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and even consumers in creating regional circulations within a global political economy. In this volume, commodity networks are not just sites of production and trade, but also of political control, social organisation and consumption choices. They provide the impetus for globalisation from as early as the thirteenth century. Each chapter takes an individual commodity to illustrate the history of commodity transmission within imperial contexts. From early modern Venetian commerce to the trade networks of the Eurasian world; from the trading ambitions of British sailors to Portuguese global imperial ambitions; from the cross-imperial knowledge networks of indigo to the assertion of indigenous agency in Angola; and from the commodification of labour to the experience of tourism in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean World, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire building across varied yet connected geographies and chronologies.

Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean

Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean PDF Author: Hideaki Suzuki
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319598031
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This book examines how slave traders interacted with and resisted the British suppression campaign in the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean. By focusing on the transporters, buyers, sellers, and users of slaves in the region, the book traces the many links between slave trafficking and other types of trade. Drawing upon first-person slave accounts, travelogues, and archival sources, it documents the impact of abolition on Zanzibar politics, Indian merchants, East African coastal urban societies, and the entirety of maritime trade in the region. Ultimately, this ground-breaking work uncovers how western Indian Ocean societies experienced the slave trade suppression campaign as a political intervention, with important implications for Indian Ocean history and the history of the slave trade.

Outsourcing African Labor

Outsourcing African Labor PDF Author: Jeffrey Gunn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110680416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
By the late eighteenth century, the ever-increasing British need for local labour in West Africa based on malarial, climatic, and manpower concerns led to a willingness of the British and Kru (West African labourers from Liberia) to experiment with free wage labour contracts. The Kru’s familiarity with European trade on the Kru Coast (modern Liberia) from at least the sixteenth century played a fundamental role in their decision to expand their wage earning opportunities under contract with the British. The establishment of Freetown in 1792 enabled the Kru to engage in systematized work for British merchants, ship captains, and naval officers. Kru workers increased their migration to Freetown establishing what appears to be their first permanent labouring community beyond their homeland on the Kru Coast. Their community in Freetown known as Krutown provided a readily available labour pool and ensured their regular employment on board British commercial ships and Royal Navy vessels circumnavigating the Atlantic and beyond. In the process, the Kru established a network of Krutowns and community settlements in many Atlantic ports including Cape Coast, Fernando Po, Ascension Island, Cape of Good Hope, and in the British Caribbean in Demerara and Port of Spain. Outsourcing African Labour in the Nineteenth Century: Kru Migratory Workers in Global Ports, Estates and Battlefields structures the fragmented history of Kru workers into a coherent global framework. The migration of Kru workers in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, in commercial and military contexts represents a movement of free wage labour that transformed the Kru Coast into a homeland that nurtured diasporas and staffed a vast network of workplaces. As the Kru formed permanent and transient working communities around the Atlantic and in the British Caribbean, they underwent several phases of social, political, and economic innovation, which ultimately overcame a decline in employment in their homeland on the Kru Coast by the end of the nineteenth century by increasing employment in their diaspora. There were unique features of the Kru migrant labour force that characterized all phases of its expansion. The migration was virtually entirely male, and at a time when slavery was widespread and the slave trade was subjected to the abolition campaign of the British Navy, Kru workers were free with an expertise in manning seaborne craft and porterage. Kru carried letters from previous captains as testimonies of their reliability and work ethic or they worked under the supervision of experienced workers who effectively served as references for employment. They worked for contractual periods of between six months and five years for which they were paid wages. The Kru thereby stand out as an anomaly in the history of Atlantic trade when compared with the much larger diasporas of enslaved Africans.