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  3. Slaveries since Emancipation

Putting past and present in lasting dialogue, this series examines historical slavery's legacies, memory, and relationships to post-emancipation and contemporary forms of enslavement. Its books also investigate the persistence, varieties, and relevance of resistance to bondage, and place antislavery activism in historical context. The series takes a broad definition of 'emancipation' and welcomes books about resistance, rebellion, abolitionism, concepts of freedom, and processes of liberation before legal emancipation, as well as books about slavery's post-emancipation afterlife. The editors welcome multidisciplinary approaches that exhibit a deep engagement with history, and international approaches that are rooted in the Americas and the Atlantic World. The series is the official book series of Historians against Slavery and the series partner for the Gilder Lehrman Center (Yale University, Connecticut) and the Rights Lab (University of Nottingham).

  • General Editors: Randall Miller, St Joseph's University, Pennsylvania, Zoe Trodd, University of Nottingham

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10 results in Slaveries since Emancipation

Slavery in the International Women's Movement, 1832–1914
  • Memory Work and the Legacy of Abolitionism
  • Sophie van den Elzen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • In this book, Sophie van den Elzen shows how advocates for women's rights, in the absence of their 'own' history, used the antislavery movement as a historical reference point and model. Through a detailed analysis of a wide range of sources produced over the span of almost a century, including novels, journals, speeches, pamphlets, and posters, van den Elzen reveals how the women's movement gradually diverged from a position of solidarity with the enslaved into one of opposition, based on hierarchical assumptions about class and race. This inclusive cultural survey provides a new understanding of the ways in which the cultural memory of Anglo-American antislavery was imported and adapted across Europe and the Atlantic world, and it breaks new ground in studying the “woman-slave analogy” from a longitudinal and transnational comparative perspective. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Fragile Empire
  • Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645–1720
  • Justin Roberts
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Fragile Empire reinterprets the rise of slavery in the early English tropics through an innovative geographic framework. It examines slavery at English sites in tropical zones across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and argues that a variety of factors – epidemiology, slave majorities, European rivalries, and the power of indigenous polities – made the seventeenth-century English tropical empire particularly fragile, creating a model of empire in the tropics that was distinct from other English colonizations. English people across the tropics were outnumbered by their slaves. English slavery was forged in the tropics and it was increasingly marked by its permanence, inflexibility, and brutality. Early English societies were not the inevitable precursor to British imperial dominance, instead they were wrought with internal vulnerabilities and external threats from European and non-European competitors. Based on thorough archival research, Justin Roberts' important new study redefines our understanding of slavery and bound labor from a global perspective.

Jubilee's Experiment
  • The British West Indies and American Abolitionism
  • Dexter J. Gabriel
  • Published online:
    30 March 2023
    Print publication:
    06 April 2023
  • Dexter J. Gabriel's Jubilee's Experiment is a thorough examination of how the emancipated British Caribbean colonies entered into the debates over abolition and African American citizenship in the US from the 1830s through the 1860s. It analyzes this public discourse, created by black and white abolitionists, and African Americans more generally in antebellum America, as both propaganda and rhetoric. Simultaneously, Gabriel interweaves the lived experiences of former slaves in the West Indies – their daily acts of resistance and struggles for greater freedoms – to further augment but complicate this debate. An important and timely intervention, Jubilee's Experiment argues that the measured success of former slaves in the West Indies became a crucial focal point in the struggle against slavery in antebellum North America.

Bearing Witness
  • Contemporary Slave Narratives and the Global Antislavery Movement
  • Andrea Nicholson
  • Published online:
    22 September 2022
    Print publication:
    29 September 2022
  • Since the 1990s, modern slavery has been recognized as a global problem, with campaigners around the world providing assessments of its nature and extent, its drivers, and possible solutions for ending it. However, largely absent from the global antislavery movement's discourse and policy prescriptions are the voices of survivors of slavery themselves. Survivors' authentic voices are underemployed vital tools in the fight against modern slavery in all its forms. Through close readings of over 200 contemporary slave narratives, Andrea Nicholson repositions the history of the genre and exposes the conditions and consequences of slavery, and the challenges survivors face in liberation. Far from the trope of 'capture, enslavement, escape,' she argues that narratives are rich and vitally important sources that enable the antislavery community to be gain important insights and build more effective interventions.

Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking
  • History and Contemporary Policy
  • Edited by Genevieve LeBaron, Jessica R. Pliley, David W. Blight
  • Published online:
    18 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021
  • Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking has become a cause célèbre. Yet large numbers of researchers, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies in the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to how the problems are framed, and are skeptical of the “new abolitionist” movement. Why? This book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements head on. Champions and skeptics explore the fissures and fault lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders' use of history are accurate and appropriate.

Advocates of Freedom
  • African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles
  • Hannah-Rose Murray
  • Published online:
    07 September 2020
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020
  • During the nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War, scores of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper and Ellen Craft travelled to England, Ireland, Scotland, and parts of rural Wales to educate the public on slavery. By sharing their oratorical, visual, and literary testimony to transatlantic audiences, African American activists galvanised the antislavery movement, which had severe consequences for former slaveholders, pro-slavery defenders, white racists, and ignorant publics. Their journeys highlighted not only their death-defying escapes from bondage but also their desire to speak out against slavery and white supremacy on foreign soil. Hannah-Rose Murray explores the radical transatlantic journeys formerly enslaved individuals made to the British Isles, and what light they shed on our understanding of the abolitionist movement. She uncovers the reasons why activists visited certain locations, how they adapted to the local political and social climate, and what impact their activism had on British society.

American Slavery, American Imperialism
  • US Perceptions of Global Servitude, 1870–1914
  • Catherine Armstrong
  • Published online:
    17 August 2020
    Print publication:
    30 July 2020
  • Slavery casts a long shadow over American history; despite the cataclysmic changes of the Civil War and emancipation, the United States carried antebellum notions of slavery into its imperial expansion at the turn of the twentieth-century. African American, Chinese and other immigrant labourers were exploited in the name of domestic economic development, and overseas, local populations were made into colonial subjects of America. How did the U.S. deal with the paradox of presenting itself as a global power which abhorred slavery, while at the same time failing to deal with forced labour at home? Catherine Armstrong argues that this was done with rhetorical manoeuvres around the definition of slavery. Drawing primarily on representations of slavery in American print culture, this study charts how definitions and depictions of slavery both changed and stayed the same as the nation became a prominent actor on the world stage. In doing so, Armstrong challenges the idea that slavery is a merely historical problem, and shows its relevance in the contemporary world.

Human Bondage and Abolition
  • New Histories of Past and Present Slaveries
  • Edited by Elizabeth Swanson, James Brewer Stewart
  • Published online:
    10 August 2018
    Print publication:
    23 August 2018
  • Slavery's expansion across the globe often escapes notice because it operates as an underground criminal enterprise, rather than as a legal institution. In this volume, Elizabeth Swanson and James Brewer Stewart bring together scholars from across disciplines to address and expose the roots of modern-day slavery from a historical perspective as a means of supporting activist efforts to fight it in the present. They trace modern slavery to its many sources, examining how it is sustained and how today's abolitionists might benefit by understanding their predecessors' successes and failures. Using scholarship also intended as activism, the volume's authors analyze how the history of African American enslavement might illuminate or obscure the understanding of slavery today and show how the legacies of earlier forms of slavery have shaped human bondage and social relations in the twenty-first century.

The Captive's Quest for Freedom
  • Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery
  • R. J. M. Blackett
  • Published online:
    19 January 2018
    Print publication:
    25 January 2018
  • This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.

Child Slavery before and after Emancipation
  • An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies
  • Edited by Anna Mae Duane
  • Published online:
    02 March 2017
    Print publication:
    17 February 2017
  • If we are to fully understand how slavery survived legal abolition, we must grapple with the work that abolition has left undone, and dismantle the structures that abolition has left in place. Child Slavery before and after Emancipation seeks to enable a vital conversation between historical and modern slavery studies - two fields that have traditionally run along parallel tracks rather than in relation to one another. In this collection, Anna Mae Duane and her interdisciplinary group of contributors seek to build historical and contemporary bridges between race-based chattel slavery and other forms of forced child labor, offering a series of case studies that illuminate the varied roles of enslaved children. Duane provides a provocative, historically grounded set of inquiries that suggest how attending to child slaves can help to better define both slavery and freedom.