What Is a Slave Society?

What Is a Slave Society? PDF Author: Noel Lenski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110863320X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery's manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slave-holding groups as either 'genuine slave societies' or 'societies with slaves'. This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five 'genuine slave societies' in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalogue of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.

What Is a Slave Society?

What Is a Slave Society? PDF Author: Noel Lenski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110863320X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book Here

Book Description
The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery's manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slave-holding groups as either 'genuine slave societies' or 'societies with slaves'. This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five 'genuine slave societies' in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalogue of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.

Politics and Power in a Slave Society

Politics and Power in a Slave Society PDF Author: J. Mills Thornton
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807159158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
More than three decades after its initial publication, J. Mills Thornton's Politics and Power in a Slave Society remains the definitive study of political culture in antebellum Alabama. Controversial when it first appeared, the book argues against a view of prewar Alabama as an aristocratic society governed by a planter elite. Instead, Thornton claims that Alabama was an aggressively democratic state, and that this very egalitarianism set the stage for secession. White Alabamians had first-hand experiences with slavery, and these encounters warned them to guard against the imposition of economic or social reforms that might limit their equality. Playing upon their fears, the leaders of the southern rights movement warned that national consolidation presented the danger that fanatic northern reformers would force alien values upon Alabama and its residents. These threats gained traction when national reforms of the 1850s gave state government a more active role in the everyday life of Alabama citizens; and ambitious young politicians were able to carry the state into secession in 1861. Politics and Power in a Slave Society continues to inspire scholars by challenging one of the fundamental articles of the American creed: that democracy intrinsically produces good. Contrary to our conventional wisdom, slavery was not an un-American institution, but rather coexisted with and supported the democratic beliefs of white Alabama.

Caribbean Slave Society and Economy

Caribbean Slave Society and Economy PDF Author: Hilary Beckles
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781565840850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Because the institution of slavery has exerted such momentous force in shaping the socioeconomic and political history of the Caribbean, much of the region's historical writing has focused on slavery. Caribbean Slave Society and Economy brings together into one volume the main themes of the recent research on slavery, and explores the patterns and forms of socioeconomic life and activity that molded the region's heterogeneous slave societies.

Foul Means

Foul Means PDF Author: Anthony S. Parent Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807839132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Challenging the generally accepted belief that the introduction of racial slavery to America was an unplanned consequence of a scarce labor market, Anthony Parent, Jr., contends that during a brief period spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a small but powerful planter class, acting to further its emerging economic interests, intentionally brought racial slavery to Virginia. Parent bases his argument on three historical developments: the expropriation of Powhatan lands, the switch from indentured to slave labor, and the burgeoning tobacco trade. He argues that these were the result of calculated moves on the part of an emerging great planter class seeking to consolidate power through large landholdings and the labor to make them productive. To preserve their economic and social gains, this planter class inscribed racial slavery into law. The ensuing racial and class tensions led elite planters to mythologize their position as gentlemen of pastoral virtue immune to competition and corruption. To further this benevolent image, they implemented a plan to Christianize slaves and thereby render them submissive. According to Parent, by the 1720s the Virginia gentry projected a distinctive cultural ethos that buffered them from their uncertain hold on authority, threatened both by rising imperial control and by black resistance, which exploded in the Chesapeake Rebellion of 1730.

The First Black Slave Society

The First Black Slave Society PDF Author: Hilary Beckles
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789766405854
Category : Barbadians
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Book describes the brutal Black slave society and plantation system of Barbados and explains how this slave chattel model was perfected by the British and exported to Jamaica and South Carolina for profit. There is special emphasis on the role of the concept of white supremacy in shaping social structure and economic relations that allowed slavery to continue. The book concludes with information on how slavery was finally outlawed in Barbados, in spite of white resistance.

Slavery and Society at Rome

Slavery and Society at Rome PDF Author: Keith Bradley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131613914X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book, first published in 1994, is concerned with discovering what it was like to be a slave in the classical Roman world, and with revealing the impact the institution of slavery made on Roman society at large. It shows how and in what sense Rome was a slave society through much of its history, considers how the Romans procured their slaves, discusses the work roles slaves fulfilled and the material conditions under which they spent their lives, investigates how slaves responded to and resisted slavery, and reveals how slavery, as an institution, became more and more oppressive over time under the impact of philosophical and religious teaching. The book stresses the harsh realities of life in slavery and the way in which slavery was an integral part of Roman civilisation.

Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans

Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans PDF Author: Thomas N. Ingersoll
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572330245
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
"Since Louisiana fell under the administration of France and Spain before becoming a U.S. territory in 1803, the case of New Orleans offers an opportunity to test the long-standing thesis that slave regimes under the French, Spanish, and Anglo-Americans were significantly different. Ingersoll finds that, by contrast, the city's development was remarkably continuous, affected mainly by the changing volume of its slave trade between 1719 and 1808 and thereafter primarily by urban conditions."--Couv.

Slave Society in the City

Slave Society in the City PDF Author: Pedro L. V. Welch
Publisher: James Currey
ISBN: 9780852559994
Category : Barbados
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This is one of the first specialised treatments of an Anglophone Caribbean port-town by a contemporary historian. Having adeptly mined the existing archival data and statistics on Bridgetown, Pedro Welch shares with the reader these nuggets of information that contribute immensely to our understanding of the way slave societies functioned in the Caribbean. This book shows how life in the urban slave society departed significantly from that of the rural plantation. There is considerable evidence indicating that slaves and freed persons found and utilised 'room to manoeuvre options' in that urban context, which allowed some of them to amass small fortunes and landholdings, act relatively freely and independently and occasionally be acknowledged almost as the equal of their white counterparts. Several areas of urban social formation are analysed in the study. Demographic, trade and free coloured communities receive detailed treatment. Publication of this work is timely, coinciding as it does with the 375th anniversary of the founding of Bridgetown, Barbados

Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838

Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 PDF Author: Barbara Bush
Publisher: James Currey
ISBN: 9780852550588
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In this text the author sets forth and then evaulates the images of slave women accumulated in published sources and folklore.

Caetana Says No

Caetana Says No PDF Author: Sandra Lauderdale Graham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521893534
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This 2002 book presents the true and dramatic accounts of two nineteenth-century Brazilian women - one young and born a slave, the other old and from an illustrious planter family - and how each sought to retain control of their lives: the slave woman struggling to avoid an unwanted husband; the woman of privilege assuming a patriarch's role to endow a family of her former slaves with the means for a free life. But these women's stories cannot be told without also recalling how their decisions drew them ever more firmly into the orbits of the worldly and influential men who exercised power in their lives. These are stories with a twist: in this society of radically skewed power, Lauderdale Graham reveals that more choices existed for all sides than we first imagine. Through these small histories she casts new light on larger meanings of slave and free, female and male.