This chapter identifies the longstanding correspondence between the Anglo-Irish novelist, Maria Edgeworth, and the Jewish-American schoolteacher, Rachel Mordecai, as a transnational conduit of ecological inquiry. By teasing out the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of this transatlantic relationship (which lasted almost a quarter of a century), this chapter renders visible a minor tributary of transnational exchange that operated at the peripheries of the nineteenth century’s global power nexus. Both Edgeworth and Mordecai inhabited anomalous social positions and geographical locales, yet their shared ecological interests enabled them to contribute to wider channels of knowledge and experience in the period. Rather than celebrate their relationship as a triumph of lateral transnational exchange, however, the chapter exposes the complex power dynamics that simultaneously undergird and undermine their ecological collaboration. The correspondents’ mutual commitment to Enlightenment ecology may have engendered an invigorating intellectual exchange, but its limits and exclusions are witnessed most acutely in their nervous reflections upon slavery in the wake of the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831. Even in its attempts to process and interpret Black resistance to slavery, their correspondence colludes to suppress the revolutionary potential of Turner’s alternative ecology.

This chapter explores the intersection between American horror and religion and how our understanding can benefit from an approach that recognizes how both subjects wrestle with what happens when human experience goes sideways, how people attempt to understand things beyond their experience, and how they address questions pertaining to why they are here and where they think they are going. While both clearly confront such key questions of human existence, religion frequently addresses them within expectations tied to core doctrines, beliefs, and practices, while horror more often reaches beyond those limits. And yet there are moments in which both kinds of texts overlap in that they share an interest in the kinds of overwhelming questions people ask in times of concern or crisis. This chapter explores several of those moments in a survey that ranges from American Puritan literature to Spiritualism, and then to the rise of modern Pentecostalism.

The American Revolution, and the principles of liberty and equality which it was believed to have embodied, precipitated a wave of revolutions in France, Haiti, and Spanish America which occurred over the roughly fifty-year period between 1775 and 1825. In each of those revolutions, slaves pushed for freedom and equality, and they often rebelled, the clearest indication of their refusal to accept the inhumanity of chattel slavery. Enslavers feared slave insurrection, and they worked diligently to tighten control over slaves. Although large-scale rebellions became less likely to succeed during the Age of Revolutions, slaves throughout the Atlantic World continued to resist their oppressors. Slaves relied on an extensive communication network, and they were well aware of the revolutions and independence movements transpiring in the Atlantic World.

The 1830s saw a reconsideration of the institution of slavery across the South, in which the sense of slavery as an anomalous institution within a republican society gave way to the articulation of more aggressive claim of slavery as a positive good. As southern intellectuals and polemists shifted from apology for slavery to celebration of it, the sanctity of property rights both in slaves and more generally came to be interpreted as a measure of the Southern States’ success in balancing freedom and order. Alongside that shift, the importance of constitutions within the Southern imaginary grew. This chapter traces the constitutionalization of slavery that these developments gave rise to. In the first instance, slavery as an issue was “constitutionalized” through an overt association of slavery with constitutional rights. At a second level, constitutionalization proceeded in a greater attachment to extant constitutions and a call for their preservation as central objects of political life. This chapter shows how these two developments, placed together, resulted in a conflux of slavery and constitution that made defense of each imperative to the other.

Chapter Four shows how slaveholding elites across jurisdictions responded to the growth of the free population of color during the Age of Revolution with fear and repression. They feared large-scale slave revolts, the rise of abolitionism, and the assertiveness of free people of color. Beginning in the 1830s, and with increasing fervor in the 1840s and 1850s, white slaveholding elites across the Americas sought to crack down on free people of color and manumission. They also looked for ways to remove free people of color from their midst through various “colonization” schemes, to realize the old dream of a perfect, and perfectly dichotomous, social order of blacks and whites, enslaved and free. This chapter explores the growing restrictions on manumission and free people of color in Louisiana and Virginia during the antebellum era, which stand in contrast to the significant but less successful efforts of Cuban slaveholders to limit the rights of free people of color. By 1860, these jurisdictions were on truly divergent paths concerning race and freedom. Black freedom was described as an anomaly or a legal absurdity in Virginia and Louisiana, but not in Cuba.

If war seems fantastic, does this remove all forms of violent resistance? This chapter argues that it does not. It examines the case for armed struggle against global poverty in the form of terrorism and sabotage. It recognises the intuitive repugnance of terrorism, but argues that we cannotbegin from definitions of political violence that are already moralised. If terrorism and sabotage are directed at agents that are not ordinarily legitimate targets, there needs to be a strong justification as to why they are liable to violence. It is argued that there whether one thinks the average citizen in the Global North is responsible, vicariously liable, or innocent there is not a case for subjecting them to terroristic violence. However, when it comes to sabotage, the arguments against a full prohibition do not work. Violent disruption of the transnational system may be permitted if it does not target the lives of innocent people. This does not amount to a blank cheque as there will usually be strong pragmatic reasons to abstain from violence, such as the necessary cooperation to build human rights respecting institutions.