| Edition |
Center Point Large Print edition. |
| Description |
392 pages ; 23 cm |
| Physical Medium |
large print rda |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-388) |
| Contents |
People as things: The slave trade -- Sinews of empire: Africans and the making of the American empires -- Slave defiance -- The slave owners' nightmare: Haiti -- The Friends of Black Freedom -- Freeing Britain's slaves -- The fall of US slavery -- The end of slavery in the Spanish empire -- The last to go: Brazil -- Abolition in the wider world -- Slavery in the modern age -- Conclusion. |
| Summary |
In the three centuries following Columbus's landfall in the Americas, slavery became a critical institution across swathes of both North and South America. It saw twelve million Africans forced onto slave ships, and had seismic consequences for Africa while leading to the transformation of the Americas and to the material enrichment of the Western world. It was also largely unquestioned. Yet within a mere seventy-five years, slavery had vanished from the Americas: it declined, collapsed and was destroyed by a complexity of forces that, to this day, remains disputed, but there is no doubting that it was in large part defeated by those it had enslaved. Slavery itself came in many shapes and sizes. It is perhaps best remembered on the plantations of the American south, but slavery varied enormously from one crop to another: sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee, cotton. And there was in addition myriad tasks for the enslaved to do, from shipboard and dockside labor, from factories to the frontier, through to domestic labor and child-care duties. Slavery was, then, both ubiquitous and varied. But if all these millions of diverse, enslaved people had one thing in common it was a universal detestation of their bondage. Most of these enslaved peoples did not live to see freedom. But an old freed man or woman in Cuba or Brazil in the 1880s would have lived through its destruction clean across the Americas. The collapse of slavery and the triumph of black freedom constitutes an extraordinary historical upheaval, one which still resonates throughout the world today. |
| Subject |
Enslaved persons -- Emancipation.
|
| Genre/Form |
History.
|
| Subject |
Slavery.
|
|
Large type books.
|
|
Slave rebellions -- History -- 19th century.
|
|
Slave insurrections.
|
|
Enslaved persons -- Emancipation -- History -- 19th century.
|
|
Slavery -- History -- 19th century.
|
| Chronological Term |
1800-1899
|
| ISBN |
1643584227 |
|
9781643584225 |
|
