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Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery
In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these same intercontinental actions produced a movement that successfully challenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Within another century a new surge of European expansion constructed Old World empires under the banner of antislavery. However, twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system of slavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system of New World slavery. This book examines these dramatic expansions and contractions of the institution of slavery and the impact of violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.
484 pages, Paperback
First published July 27, 2009
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About the author
Seymour Drescher
25 books1 followerSeymour Drescher is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. His numerous publications include From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (1999), The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor vs Slavery in British Emancipation (2002), and Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge, 2009).
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September 5, 2021
Book: Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery
Author: Seymour Drescher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (27 July 2009)
Language: English
Paperback: 484 pages
Item Weight: 660 g
Dimensions: 15.24 x 2.77 x 22.86 cm
Price: 1731/-
With the cave in of the Roman Empire in the late 4th century, slavery became much more marginal in most European regions. While, some families continued to maintain small numbers of slaves, often as domestic servants, widespread agricultural slavery generally gave way to serfdom, especially in Northern and Western Europe (including England, Scandinavia and France).
The principal difference between serfs and slaves was that serfs were bound to the land; they could not be traded away from the manorial estate to which they were born. Slaves, by contrast, were ‘chattel property’ that could be bought and sold; their legal existence was mediated through their masters.
Islam, being religiously and linguistically distinct from Christian Europe, expanded a preexisting slave system in the 7th and 8th centuries during its foremost conquests from Europe’s Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) to the frontier of China. The Islamic Empire, like Rome, allowed for the incorporation of conquered people into its own population through various absorption mechanisms, including slavery.
The Arabic language the dominant language of the original Muslims provided bureaucratic and cultural unity to elites while many vernacular languages and customs persisted.
Yet the religion of Islam gave legal, cultural and linguistic unity at least at the elite administrative level to a diverse and cosmopolitan empire.
Slavery under Islamic regimes, however, differed from Roman slavery in two main ways:
A) It was not a central feature in agricultural production as slavery had been to the Italian peninsula; most slaves held by Muslims were employed in domestic service;
B) The great majority of slaves in early Islamic states were women and children male prisoners of war who resisted were more likely killed than enslaved. However, male slaves came to be used by the thousands as soldiers and administrators in later empires, like those of the Mamluks of Egypt and of the Ottomans.
Another important feature of Islamic slavery, from the perspective of early modem Europe, is the development of transom slave routes and an emerging discourse associate blackness with slavery.
While, Muslims enslaved an extremely diverse range of peoples1 from the blond and blue-eyed Caucasians to the ebony skinned Zani of East Africa, a literary trope emerged around 675 – 725 under the Umaad dynasty, connoting inferiority to those with dark skin.
The Muslim world also supplied the Iberian Peninsula with slaves, so that by completion of the conquista in the 15th century, there was a stable community of several thousand blacks of sub Sahara African descent in the major cities of Portugal and Castile.
Constantius II (ruled 337—361), the Christian Emperor of Rome, had decreed in 339 that Jews were not permitted to hold Christians as slaves. During the Middle Ages, a new policy barring the enslavement of fellow Christians — possibly in imitation of similar Muslim prohibitions against the enslavement of coreligionists—served to win pagan converts to the expanding Christian feudal order.
Most of the Western European languages’ words for slave are etymologically related; ‘Slave’ (English), Skiave (German), esciave (French), esciavo (Spanish), schiavo (Italian) and even the Arabic saqaliba are all based upon the ethnic term ‘Slave’ and refer to the Southern Balkan peoples who were one of the chief sources of slaves during the ancient and medieval periods.
Europeans were not only slaveholders in the early modern period; they were also slaves. From at least the 16th century, thousands of Europeans were captured by Muslim privateers in or along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean or North Sea and sold into slave markets from Alexandria, Egypt to Meknes, Morocco. Seamen, fishermen, traders, travelers and soldiers were the most vulnerable to seabome raiders.
On land, with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, peasant families were just as subject to enslavement as were combatant soldiers.
Some Christian captives converted to Islam and made new lives for themselves, others were ransomed by their relatives, escaped or died in captivity.
Some were pressed into service as galley slaves on Muslim ships. Many observers noted that their treatment there was better than on the French, Italian or Spanish galleys. In general, slavery in the Ottoman Empire was reportedly milder than slavery elsewhere and manumission (the individual freeing of slaves) was a common, even expected, form of charity for observant Muslims.
In the second half of the 17th century, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the chief minister to France’s king Louis XIV, expanded a system of galley slaves as punishment for many different kinds of crimes. More than 1500 Protestant dissenters were condemned to the French galleys.
During the same period, the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I (ruled 1658—1705), in conjunction with Louis XIV, suspended the religious freedom guaranteed by the Hungarian constitution and sent some sixty Protestant ministers to be sold to the Spanish galleys; twenty-six surviving prisoners were released in 1676.
The French galley penal system continued until 1748.
In the same period, from the end of the 17th century until the end of the 18th the seisure of war captives for ransom or labour became a fixture of warfare between the Russian and Ottoman Empires.
However, in contrast to the Ottomans, whose slaves were overwhelm mingle non-Muslim outsiders, Russia drew most of its slaves from its own domestic population, many of whom sold themselves to escape famine or destitution.
Slavery persisted in Russia until the early 18th century, when the tsarist state redefined domestic slaves as serfs, so that they might be taxable. The line between serf and slave, however, was often blurred in practice. Slavery in Ottoman Europe continued in reduced form through the 19th century until its formal abolition at the end of the century.
The history of abolition is an incorporated story even though it is typically not told in that manner. Black abolitionists were integral to the broader, interracial milieu of the movement. To read them out of the abolition movement is to overpoweringly miss the part they played in defining traditions of American democratic radicalism.
The subtle divide between white thought and black activism that pervades some books on abolition is both racialist and inaccurate. There was no such racial division of political labor in the abolition movement. Early African American literature, black abolitionists’ intellectual response to the pseudo science of race, and debates over citizenship and emigration performed the work of political protest.
The theoretical sophistication of black abolitionist thought should finally put to rest the influential yet glib view of it as imitative, mired in the strictures of middle-class reform and elitism, and divorced from the plight of southern slaves and northern masses. Black and white abolitionists also went beyond a simple appeal to the American republican tradition that sought to include African Americans in its promise.
They generated a powerful critique of the slaveholding Republic and constructed a counternarrative that highlighted its origins in the slave trade and slavery.
At the end of the 18th century, this forceful transoceanic system entered a new epoch of challenge, spearheaded by the emergence of another northwestern formation – organized antislavery.
On both sides of the Atlantic, residents of the world's most dynamic and efficient labor systems were also among those most committed to the extension and consolidation of the freedom principle. In the course of little more than a century, between the 1770s and the 1880s, that vast transoceanic extension of slavery created after 1450 was dismantled.
The transatlantic slave trade that had once loaded more than 100,000 Africans per year was abolished. By the 1880s, the institution of slavery was abolished throughout the New World.
Then, in a second wave of European expansion from the 1880s to the 1930s, imperial dominion operated under the banner of antislavery, not slavery.
Viewing these centuries of slavery, this book poses four key questions:
1) How did societies with the least involvement in slavery “at home” manage to create overseas extensions with the highest percentages of human chattel in the history of the world?
2) How did new civil and political formations within and beyond Europe turn the tide of human affairs against that slave system at the very peak of its performance?
3) How did a second age of empire-building in the Old World construct a more indefinite emancipation strategy under the banner of imperial antislavery?
4) How did antislavery's vanguard continent reconstruct slavery in the twentieth century?
Into four sections the book has been divided.
Part One entitled ‘EXTENSION’ contains the following chapters:
1. A Perennial Institution
2. Expanding Slavery
3. Extension and Tension
Part Two entitled ‘CRISIS’ contains the following chapters:
4. Border Skirmishes
5. Age of the American Revolution, 1770s–1820s
6. Franco-American Revolutions, 1780s–1820s
7. Latin American Revolutions, 1810s–1820s
8. Abolitionism without Revolution: Great Britain, 1770s–1820s
Part Three entitled ‘CONTRACTION’ contains the following chapters:
9. British Emancipation
10. From Colonial Emancipation to Global Abolition
11. The End of Slavery in Anglo-America
12. Abolishing New World Slavery – Latin America
13. Emancipation in the Old World, 1880s–1920s
Finally, Part Four entitled ‘REVERSION’ contains the following chapters:
14. Reversion in Europe
15. Cycles Actual and Counterfactual
What did I learn from this book? Well, I learnt the following:
1) The movement to abolish slavery has roots in European urban culture, elite European religious and intellectual movements and African-American slave resistance. Yet, it was not until the late 18th century that all of these forces combined to create a sustained attack on the institution of slavery itself and not until the 19th century that the Atlantic slave trade and then American slavery, were finally abolished.
2) Since, at least the 13th century, urban centers in France, such as Toulouse and Pamiers, became refuges from the most extreme forms of bondage by adopting charters that freed slaves upon entrance to the village.
3) In England, a Russian slave was freed in 1567 on the grounds that ‘the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.’ In 17th century France, local traditions supporting liberty were extended to the French kingdom in the maxim, “All persons are free in this kingdom and as soon as a slave had arrived at te borders of this place, being baptised, is freed.”
4) As the Atlantic slave system began to expand, some critics argued for limitations on the excesses of slavery and the slave trade throughout the early modern period. In 16th and 17th century Spain and Spanish America, some Catholic clergy voiced their concerns, including Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474—1566), who opposed the enslavement of Indians and Tomás de Mercado and Alonso de Sandoval, who challenged the most extreme cruelties of the slave trade.
5) In 1646, the Capuchin missionary order was expelled from the French Antillean colony of Saint-Christophe, allegedly because they preached the idea that once baptised, blacks could no longer be held as slaves since ‘It is an unworthy thing to use one’s Christian brother as a slave.’
6) In 1688, several Dutch-speaking Quakers of Germantown, Pennsylvania, chastised their coreligionists for owning and trading slaves, for they “have. . as much right to fight for their freedom as you have to keep them as slaves.” Yet, many Christians also stressed the virtue of slaves’ obedience to their masters, and the suspension of reward until the hereafter, thus implicitly sanctioning slavery and inequality in the here and now.
7) In the 18th century, more secular voices began to critique savry on the grounds of natural law and the linkage of personal slavery with political despotism. Scottish Enlightenment writers Francis Hutcheson and George Walls were among the first to attack both slavery and the slave trade as violations of ‘Natural justice’ and ‘Humanity.’ French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778) drew directly from Wallace to challenge the right of slaves to sell themselves into bondage in his on the social contract.
8) By 1762, there was a sufficient body of antislavery thought for the Pennsylvania Quaker Anthony Benezet to publish the first title devoted solely to the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, a collection he titled a short account of that Part of Africa Inhabited by Negroes, which was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.
9) By the early 20th century, the institution's former quasi-universal status as a normal element of human existence had been revisioned as an institution fated for inexorable extinction. A world without slaves was now a casually accepted premise of human progress.
That was hardly the end of the story. During the second quarter of the 20th century, slavery spectacularly reappeared on the very continent that had prided itself as humanity's engine of liberation against a “crime against humanity.”
For a brief moment, Europe housed the largest single slave empire in five centuries of modern history.
The reader would do well to remember that ‘Abolitionists’ were original and critical thinkers on democracy, not simply romantic reformers who confined themselves to appeals to the heart. The movement against slavery made a signal contribution to the discourse of both human rights and humanitarianism. The depiction of abused black bodies in abolitionist print culture, from slave narratives dripping with blood to abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets, has appeared to many scholars as bourgeois sentimentality, voyeuristic pornography, and racist objectification of the enslaved.
This scholarly gaze, the vast condescension bestowed on the very real history of black suffering under the political economy of a harsh slave regimen, leads people astray. It is based on a whitewashed understanding of abolition that reads out the black presence in it completely.
Its roots lie in slaveholders’ defensive response to abolitionist criticism, and it fundamentally misreads abolitionist agitation, the attempt to evoke radical empathy from an audience whose very comforts were reliant on the exploitation of those deemed substandard and nonessential.
Those lessons remain useful today.
A fascinating read! Grab a copy if you choose.
Author: Seymour Drescher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (27 July 2009)
Language: English
Paperback: 484 pages
Item Weight: 660 g
Dimensions: 15.24 x 2.77 x 22.86 cm
Price: 1731/-
With the cave in of the Roman Empire in the late 4th century, slavery became much more marginal in most European regions. While, some families continued to maintain small numbers of slaves, often as domestic servants, widespread agricultural slavery generally gave way to serfdom, especially in Northern and Western Europe (including England, Scandinavia and France).
The principal difference between serfs and slaves was that serfs were bound to the land; they could not be traded away from the manorial estate to which they were born. Slaves, by contrast, were ‘chattel property’ that could be bought and sold; their legal existence was mediated through their masters.
Islam, being religiously and linguistically distinct from Christian Europe, expanded a preexisting slave system in the 7th and 8th centuries during its foremost conquests from Europe’s Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) to the frontier of China. The Islamic Empire, like Rome, allowed for the incorporation of conquered people into its own population through various absorption mechanisms, including slavery.
The Arabic language the dominant language of the original Muslims provided bureaucratic and cultural unity to elites while many vernacular languages and customs persisted.
Yet the religion of Islam gave legal, cultural and linguistic unity at least at the elite administrative level to a diverse and cosmopolitan empire.
Slavery under Islamic regimes, however, differed from Roman slavery in two main ways:
A) It was not a central feature in agricultural production as slavery had been to the Italian peninsula; most slaves held by Muslims were employed in domestic service;
B) The great majority of slaves in early Islamic states were women and children male prisoners of war who resisted were more likely killed than enslaved. However, male slaves came to be used by the thousands as soldiers and administrators in later empires, like those of the Mamluks of Egypt and of the Ottomans.
Another important feature of Islamic slavery, from the perspective of early modem Europe, is the development of transom slave routes and an emerging discourse associate blackness with slavery.
While, Muslims enslaved an extremely diverse range of peoples1 from the blond and blue-eyed Caucasians to the ebony skinned Zani of East Africa, a literary trope emerged around 675 – 725 under the Umaad dynasty, connoting inferiority to those with dark skin.
The Muslim world also supplied the Iberian Peninsula with slaves, so that by completion of the conquista in the 15th century, there was a stable community of several thousand blacks of sub Sahara African descent in the major cities of Portugal and Castile.
Constantius II (ruled 337—361), the Christian Emperor of Rome, had decreed in 339 that Jews were not permitted to hold Christians as slaves. During the Middle Ages, a new policy barring the enslavement of fellow Christians — possibly in imitation of similar Muslim prohibitions against the enslavement of coreligionists—served to win pagan converts to the expanding Christian feudal order.
Most of the Western European languages’ words for slave are etymologically related; ‘Slave’ (English), Skiave (German), esciave (French), esciavo (Spanish), schiavo (Italian) and even the Arabic saqaliba are all based upon the ethnic term ‘Slave’ and refer to the Southern Balkan peoples who were one of the chief sources of slaves during the ancient and medieval periods.
Europeans were not only slaveholders in the early modern period; they were also slaves. From at least the 16th century, thousands of Europeans were captured by Muslim privateers in or along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean or North Sea and sold into slave markets from Alexandria, Egypt to Meknes, Morocco. Seamen, fishermen, traders, travelers and soldiers were the most vulnerable to seabome raiders.
On land, with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, peasant families were just as subject to enslavement as were combatant soldiers.
Some Christian captives converted to Islam and made new lives for themselves, others were ransomed by their relatives, escaped or died in captivity.
Some were pressed into service as galley slaves on Muslim ships. Many observers noted that their treatment there was better than on the French, Italian or Spanish galleys. In general, slavery in the Ottoman Empire was reportedly milder than slavery elsewhere and manumission (the individual freeing of slaves) was a common, even expected, form of charity for observant Muslims.
In the second half of the 17th century, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the chief minister to France’s king Louis XIV, expanded a system of galley slaves as punishment for many different kinds of crimes. More than 1500 Protestant dissenters were condemned to the French galleys.
During the same period, the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I (ruled 1658—1705), in conjunction with Louis XIV, suspended the religious freedom guaranteed by the Hungarian constitution and sent some sixty Protestant ministers to be sold to the Spanish galleys; twenty-six surviving prisoners were released in 1676.
The French galley penal system continued until 1748.
In the same period, from the end of the 17th century until the end of the 18th the seisure of war captives for ransom or labour became a fixture of warfare between the Russian and Ottoman Empires.
However, in contrast to the Ottomans, whose slaves were overwhelm mingle non-Muslim outsiders, Russia drew most of its slaves from its own domestic population, many of whom sold themselves to escape famine or destitution.
Slavery persisted in Russia until the early 18th century, when the tsarist state redefined domestic slaves as serfs, so that they might be taxable. The line between serf and slave, however, was often blurred in practice. Slavery in Ottoman Europe continued in reduced form through the 19th century until its formal abolition at the end of the century.
The history of abolition is an incorporated story even though it is typically not told in that manner. Black abolitionists were integral to the broader, interracial milieu of the movement. To read them out of the abolition movement is to overpoweringly miss the part they played in defining traditions of American democratic radicalism.
The subtle divide between white thought and black activism that pervades some books on abolition is both racialist and inaccurate. There was no such racial division of political labor in the abolition movement. Early African American literature, black abolitionists’ intellectual response to the pseudo science of race, and debates over citizenship and emigration performed the work of political protest.
The theoretical sophistication of black abolitionist thought should finally put to rest the influential yet glib view of it as imitative, mired in the strictures of middle-class reform and elitism, and divorced from the plight of southern slaves and northern masses. Black and white abolitionists also went beyond a simple appeal to the American republican tradition that sought to include African Americans in its promise.
They generated a powerful critique of the slaveholding Republic and constructed a counternarrative that highlighted its origins in the slave trade and slavery.
At the end of the 18th century, this forceful transoceanic system entered a new epoch of challenge, spearheaded by the emergence of another northwestern formation – organized antislavery.
On both sides of the Atlantic, residents of the world's most dynamic and efficient labor systems were also among those most committed to the extension and consolidation of the freedom principle. In the course of little more than a century, between the 1770s and the 1880s, that vast transoceanic extension of slavery created after 1450 was dismantled.
The transatlantic slave trade that had once loaded more than 100,000 Africans per year was abolished. By the 1880s, the institution of slavery was abolished throughout the New World.
Then, in a second wave of European expansion from the 1880s to the 1930s, imperial dominion operated under the banner of antislavery, not slavery.
Viewing these centuries of slavery, this book poses four key questions:
1) How did societies with the least involvement in slavery “at home” manage to create overseas extensions with the highest percentages of human chattel in the history of the world?
2) How did new civil and political formations within and beyond Europe turn the tide of human affairs against that slave system at the very peak of its performance?
3) How did a second age of empire-building in the Old World construct a more indefinite emancipation strategy under the banner of imperial antislavery?
4) How did antislavery's vanguard continent reconstruct slavery in the twentieth century?
Into four sections the book has been divided.
Part One entitled ‘EXTENSION’ contains the following chapters:
1. A Perennial Institution
2. Expanding Slavery
3. Extension and Tension
Part Two entitled ‘CRISIS’ contains the following chapters:
4. Border Skirmishes
5. Age of the American Revolution, 1770s–1820s
6. Franco-American Revolutions, 1780s–1820s
7. Latin American Revolutions, 1810s–1820s
8. Abolitionism without Revolution: Great Britain, 1770s–1820s
Part Three entitled ‘CONTRACTION’ contains the following chapters:
9. British Emancipation
10. From Colonial Emancipation to Global Abolition
11. The End of Slavery in Anglo-America
12. Abolishing New World Slavery – Latin America
13. Emancipation in the Old World, 1880s–1920s
Finally, Part Four entitled ‘REVERSION’ contains the following chapters:
14. Reversion in Europe
15. Cycles Actual and Counterfactual
What did I learn from this book? Well, I learnt the following:
1) The movement to abolish slavery has roots in European urban culture, elite European religious and intellectual movements and African-American slave resistance. Yet, it was not until the late 18th century that all of these forces combined to create a sustained attack on the institution of slavery itself and not until the 19th century that the Atlantic slave trade and then American slavery, were finally abolished.
2) Since, at least the 13th century, urban centers in France, such as Toulouse and Pamiers, became refuges from the most extreme forms of bondage by adopting charters that freed slaves upon entrance to the village.
3) In England, a Russian slave was freed in 1567 on the grounds that ‘the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.’ In 17th century France, local traditions supporting liberty were extended to the French kingdom in the maxim, “All persons are free in this kingdom and as soon as a slave had arrived at te borders of this place, being baptised, is freed.”
4) As the Atlantic slave system began to expand, some critics argued for limitations on the excesses of slavery and the slave trade throughout the early modern period. In 16th and 17th century Spain and Spanish America, some Catholic clergy voiced their concerns, including Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474—1566), who opposed the enslavement of Indians and Tomás de Mercado and Alonso de Sandoval, who challenged the most extreme cruelties of the slave trade.
5) In 1646, the Capuchin missionary order was expelled from the French Antillean colony of Saint-Christophe, allegedly because they preached the idea that once baptised, blacks could no longer be held as slaves since ‘It is an unworthy thing to use one’s Christian brother as a slave.’
6) In 1688, several Dutch-speaking Quakers of Germantown, Pennsylvania, chastised their coreligionists for owning and trading slaves, for they “have. . as much right to fight for their freedom as you have to keep them as slaves.” Yet, many Christians also stressed the virtue of slaves’ obedience to their masters, and the suspension of reward until the hereafter, thus implicitly sanctioning slavery and inequality in the here and now.
7) In the 18th century, more secular voices began to critique savry on the grounds of natural law and the linkage of personal slavery with political despotism. Scottish Enlightenment writers Francis Hutcheson and George Walls were among the first to attack both slavery and the slave trade as violations of ‘Natural justice’ and ‘Humanity.’ French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778) drew directly from Wallace to challenge the right of slaves to sell themselves into bondage in his on the social contract.
8) By 1762, there was a sufficient body of antislavery thought for the Pennsylvania Quaker Anthony Benezet to publish the first title devoted solely to the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, a collection he titled a short account of that Part of Africa Inhabited by Negroes, which was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.
9) By the early 20th century, the institution's former quasi-universal status as a normal element of human existence had been revisioned as an institution fated for inexorable extinction. A world without slaves was now a casually accepted premise of human progress.
That was hardly the end of the story. During the second quarter of the 20th century, slavery spectacularly reappeared on the very continent that had prided itself as humanity's engine of liberation against a “crime against humanity.”
For a brief moment, Europe housed the largest single slave empire in five centuries of modern history.
The reader would do well to remember that ‘Abolitionists’ were original and critical thinkers on democracy, not simply romantic reformers who confined themselves to appeals to the heart. The movement against slavery made a signal contribution to the discourse of both human rights and humanitarianism. The depiction of abused black bodies in abolitionist print culture, from slave narratives dripping with blood to abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets, has appeared to many scholars as bourgeois sentimentality, voyeuristic pornography, and racist objectification of the enslaved.
This scholarly gaze, the vast condescension bestowed on the very real history of black suffering under the political economy of a harsh slave regimen, leads people astray. It is based on a whitewashed understanding of abolition that reads out the black presence in it completely.
Its roots lie in slaveholders’ defensive response to abolitionist criticism, and it fundamentally misreads abolitionist agitation, the attempt to evoke radical empathy from an audience whose very comforts were reliant on the exploitation of those deemed substandard and nonessential.
Those lessons remain useful today.
A fascinating read! Grab a copy if you choose.
October 24, 2014
This book is another good synthesis of the history of slavery and anti-slavery, and the author manages to refer to quite a lot of primary material. It is clearly written and the analysis is generally sure-foot, though religious history is perhaps not the author's forte. The chapter on Nazi and Soviet-style slavery was also quite interesting, and it is useful to remind Commies/Marxists that their ideology resulted in a system that resembled the British West Indies, though with a few more murders!!!
March 9, 2014
A really good survey of slavery it pays equal attention to abolition as it does to enslavement and even includes a chapter on its 20th century return as forced labour under the Soviets and Nazis
April 10, 2019
A narrow, conventional take on what the school manual teaches the children who are free to go to school or face being put into a foster home by the lovely named Child Protection.
Slavery was bad. Slavery happened when the schoolbook says. And it ended how it's written there. And there is no other truth than the truth mandated by the governmental pensioners like Drescher.
Slavery was bad. Slavery happened when the schoolbook says. And it ended how it's written there. And there is no other truth than the truth mandated by the governmental pensioners like Drescher.
November 29, 2016
As other reviews mention, this book contains a wealth of information regarding the rise and fall (and swansong) of slavery as well as the workings of the abolition movement. I learnt alot from the book, and was impressed that it managed to thoroughly investigate such a long span of history and also giving space to countries that weren't in the Americas.
The final chapter which summarises the book is well written and gives overarching perspective on the success of the abolition movement. When I mentioned to a friend that I was reading a book about slavery he remarked that it must be a very depressing read. That is true in a sense, but it is also a book of hope in detailing one of the most successful movements in human history that triumphed on ethical grounds. We all owe a great deal to those abolitionists in Britain, particularly the women who bravely went beyond the norms of society at that time to have a public voice.
I feel, however, that the book has several significant weaknesses:
- It is in sore need of a good editor and proofreader. A good proofreader or two could pick up the typos, the repeated words, the repeated sentences (that occur in different paragraphs), while an editor could have helped tighten the structure of the book and its narrative flow. Sometimes while you're reading it you get lost in the tangents and the jumping back and forth in history.
- The book glosses over detailing the conditions of those in slavery. This is clearly the author's intention, but I would have found that information very helpful as I am new to the subject and had to rely on depictions of slavery in popular media (12 years a slave etc.) to frame my reference. More importantly, it would be useful to know whether average conditions of those in slavery changed over time or were different between countries / regions. The only part of the book that mentions much of anything about conditions was when describing the forced labour and concentration camps of Nazi Germany right at the end.
- On a related note, I feel the author missed a great opportunity in conveying the passion (whether religious or humanistic) in those abolitionists who agitated for change. As the book correctly notes there was no real economic reasons for someone to be an abolitionist, so where did the motivation come from, what type of arguments did they convey, and are there any choice passages from their literature to share? I would have liked to see all of those.
In the end, the book is long enough as it is and not missing on detail. It just puts extra focus on areas I could personally live without and little focus on other areas I would have found interesting. All reviews are subjective and other readers may feel differently.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the subject matter and is not highly bothered by any of the weaknesses I note.
The final chapter which summarises the book is well written and gives overarching perspective on the success of the abolition movement. When I mentioned to a friend that I was reading a book about slavery he remarked that it must be a very depressing read. That is true in a sense, but it is also a book of hope in detailing one of the most successful movements in human history that triumphed on ethical grounds. We all owe a great deal to those abolitionists in Britain, particularly the women who bravely went beyond the norms of society at that time to have a public voice.
I feel, however, that the book has several significant weaknesses:
- It is in sore need of a good editor and proofreader. A good proofreader or two could pick up the typos, the repeated words, the repeated sentences (that occur in different paragraphs), while an editor could have helped tighten the structure of the book and its narrative flow. Sometimes while you're reading it you get lost in the tangents and the jumping back and forth in history.
- The book glosses over detailing the conditions of those in slavery. This is clearly the author's intention, but I would have found that information very helpful as I am new to the subject and had to rely on depictions of slavery in popular media (12 years a slave etc.) to frame my reference. More importantly, it would be useful to know whether average conditions of those in slavery changed over time or were different between countries / regions. The only part of the book that mentions much of anything about conditions was when describing the forced labour and concentration camps of Nazi Germany right at the end.
- On a related note, I feel the author missed a great opportunity in conveying the passion (whether religious or humanistic) in those abolitionists who agitated for change. As the book correctly notes there was no real economic reasons for someone to be an abolitionist, so where did the motivation come from, what type of arguments did they convey, and are there any choice passages from their literature to share? I would have liked to see all of those.
In the end, the book is long enough as it is and not missing on detail. It just puts extra focus on areas I could personally live without and little focus on other areas I would have found interesting. All reviews are subjective and other readers may feel differently.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the subject matter and is not highly bothered by any of the weaknesses I note.
May 5, 2015
Well done. Definitely with a heavy "British centric" approach, but it's still valuable and very well argued. Using this with books from Davis and others provides a good balance of approaches to the topic, to be sure. Books this extensive and that try to cover this much ground will surely give preference to some areas and have "gaps" in other areas, as well as have a few missteps (some of his chronology in the Caribbean is off), but again, it's mostly a fantastic read and those are only a few caveats to a great book.
June 15, 2013
As one blurb said, there were 'startling insights' on nearly every page. Best about the book is the global overview of slavery and abolition, especially Europe before the 16th century, and Latin America. Anything I've read before has been only about the US.
The book was marred by bad proofreading and copy editing -- from Cambridge University, no less.
The book was marred by bad proofreading and copy editing -- from Cambridge University, no less.
June 17, 2015
Este livro conta a história da escravatura mundial e do movimento abolicionista. Decidi lê-lo porque quero aprender mais sobre movimentos sociais. Sem dúvida que a obra alterou em muito a visão simplificada que eu tinha da instituição escravatura. Aconselho!
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