Publishers Weekly
★ 01/31/2022
Tufts University historian Manjapra (Colonialism in Global Perspective) delivers a sweeping study of how emancipation processes in Africa, the Americas, and Europe “aggravated slavery’s historical trauma and extended white supremacist rule and antiblackness.” Contending that the officials who implemented abolition sought to preserve the racial caste system and “withdrew justice from the historical victims and appeased the perpetrators,” Manjapra documents how the heirs of British slaveholders—rather than descendants of the enslaved—received “lucrative state-funded reparations” up until 2015; how voter suppression and convict leasing programs helped preserve the racial hierarchy in the U.S.; and how European countries “imposed an order of imperialist rule and underdevelopment” on African nations. In addition to the forces that stunted equitable emancipation, Manjapra details Black resistance movements such as the Haitian Revolution and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Though Manjapra ranges widely across the history of the 19th century, he suffuses the narrative with vivid and often enraging details, describing, for instance, how a Union general decided to return a fugitive woman and her child to their enslaver, but “congratulated himself for at least not providing a military escort” back to the plantation. This is an essential contribution to understanding the legacy of slavery. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
"Black Ghost of Empire is a historical, literary masterpiece, which feels like the wrong word to describe a book so tangibly useful and appropriately terrifying. This book, as much as any I've ever read, is superglued to my consciousness, and literally changes how I understand every move in my life. This is different, and so so so necessary."
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"In this powerful retelling of the long story of emancipation, Kris Manjapra reveals why and how European and American nations worked to ensure that the end of slavery would deliver neither equality nor justice. It is a must-read that shatters self-flattering national myths."
—Craig Steven Wilder, author of Ebony and Ivy
“Brilliant, bold, and wise, Black Ghost of Empire is a groundbreaking intervention on the long history of global Black reparations for racial slavery. Spanning emancipationist histories in North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, historian Kris Manjapra offers a tour de force about the international and local implications of racial slavery’s afterlife. With careful attention to the way in which a global Black emancipationist project has offered humanity a way out of the dead end of white supremacist history and politics, Black Ghosts of Empire is an essential global history of the deep roots behind our contemporary racial and political reckoning.”
—Dr. Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and The Shield
"This book will be celebrated as the first deep drill into emancipation legislations.... The architects of these legislations were skillful craftsmen who sought to build walls to contain the freedom they did not wish to create. It was intended to be a project of delusion and deception....The Black Ghost of Empire is a massive contribution to the evidentiary basis for reparations. It shows that the enslaved blacks never surrendered; were never given the emancipation they demanded; never received the justice expected; and that their case for justice remains!"
—Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies
“Kris Manjapra's Black Ghost of Empire illuminates the global systems of coloniality and the persistence of colonial empires' logics as they animate our present. At the crux of Manjapra’s sedulous accounting is Black peoples’ always present radical confrontations with enslavement and provisional freedom. Also detailed are the juridical and narrative modes used by white supremacist states to delay, to alter, to get around demands for full reparation and accountability. Then and Now.”
—Dionne Brand, author of A Map to a Door of No Return
Library Journal
11/01/2021
Born in the Caribbean of African and Indian parentage and currently an award-winning history professor at Tufts, Manjapra argues that slavery is essentially still with us because emancipation was incomplete, reinforcing rather than destroying the racial caste system. He speaks not only of the United States but the entire Atlantic world, defining five emancipations from the 1770s to the 1880s: the Gradual Emancipations of North America, the Revolutionary Emancipation of Haiti, the Compensated Emancipations of European overseas empires, the War Emancipation of the American South, and the Conquest Emancipations of Sub-Saharan Africa. All failed to provide restorative justice, he says, and all affirmed the notion of white supremacy. With a 100,000-copy first printing.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-02-09
A pointed study of the dissolution of slave economies in emancipation and the exceedingly long tail between so-called freedom and justice.
Tufts University historian Manjapra identifies five categories of emancipation, none of them quite satisfactory inasmuch as “the emancipations—the acts meant to end slavery—only extended the war forward in time.” None ever effectively erased the color line, and then there’s “the ghost line,” an extension of personal ghosting into the social sphere, wherein the “ghostliner” simply ignores the experience of formerly enslaved and currently oppressed peoples and insists on “ ‘unseeing’ the plundered parts, and ‘unhearing’ their historical demands for reparatory justice.” The author, born in the Caribbean of mixed African and Indian heritage, considers the forms of emancipation practiced by the British and French governments that compensated slaveholders for the loss of their putative property. In Colonial New York, this played out in numerous ways. For example, when enslaved people were manumitted, their former owners were required to post a bond for them in case they should ever become public wards, a charge they passed on to the freed people. As such, “they were ‘freed’ into the condition of having to pay their oppressors.” In some instances, enslaved people emancipated themselves, as with the uprising that led to the establishment of Haiti, whose slaveholder class the French government repaid for their losses without considering that reparations were due the formerly enslaved. “In its most banal expression,” Manjapra writes, “white supremacy is merely the wish among groups who benefited from slavery to continue to enjoy its spoils and privileges long after its formal death.” This supremacist stance self-evidently endures nearly 160 years after slavery was formally ended in the U.S., and reparations are still yet to materialize. “The struggle for reparatory justice,” the author concludes meaningfully, “belongs to the history of slavery and emancipation itself.”
A worthy contribution to the controversial discussions around how to compensate for crimes past and present.
