Freedom

by James Walvin

Overview

In this timely and readable new work, Walvin focuses not on abolitionism or the brutality of slavery, but the resistance of the enslaved themselves—from sabotage and absconding to full-blown uprisings—and its impact in overthrowing slavery. Following Columbus's landfall, slavery became a critical institution across the New World. It had seismic consequences for Africa while leading to the transformation of the Americas and to the material enrichment of the West. It was also largely unquestioned.Yet within seventy-five years slavery vanished from the Americas: it declined and collapsed 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 plantations, but slavery varied enormously by crop (sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee, cotton), and there was enslaved labor on ships and docks, in factories and the frontier, as well domestically. But if all these millions of diverse, enslaved people had one thing in common it was a universal detestation of their bondage. The end of slavery and the triumph of black freedom constitutes an extraordinary historical upheaval, one which still resonates throughout the world today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643132730
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	09/03/2019
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

James Walvin is the author of several books on slavery and modern social history. including Crossings and A Jamaican Plantation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2008 he was awarded an OBE for services to scholarship. He lives in England.

Table of Contents

Map: Significant Slave Revolts & Rebellions in Freedom viii

Introduction xi

1 People as Things: The Slave Trade 1

2 Sinews of Empire: Africans and the Making of the American Empires 25

3 Slave Defiance 52

4 The Slave Owners' Nightmare: Haiti 74

5 The Friends of Black Freedom 96

6 Freeing Britain's Slaves 124

7 The Fall of US Slavery 142

8 The End of Slavery in the Spanish Empire 174

9 The Last to Go: Brazil 200

10 Abolition in the Wider World 233

11 Slavery in the Modern Age 243

Conclusion 261

Notes 269

Bibliography and Further Reading 279

Acknowledgements 285

Index 289

Editorial Reviews

07/15/2019

In this lucid work, historian Walvin focuses on the rapid decline of slavery in the Western world. Toward the end of the 18th century, European nations and their colonies in the Americas were strongly committed to this intensely profitable institution, but less than a century later it had become widely condemned and outlawed in the U.S. and Britain. Walvin’s goal is to depict how and why this situation changed so rapidly; while he is careful to stress the political and legislative initiatives involved, he emphasizes that “slaves were the critical element in securing their own freedom.” He asserts that traumatized Africans, who stepped off slave ships transformed in legal terms from human beings into objects of property, were committed to resisting enslavement in any way they could, making the history of slavery into “a complex story of slave defiance.” Walvin identifies the Haitian slave insurrection of 1791–1804 as having a “tsunami-like” effect on the foundations of colonial slavery and spotlights lesser-known insurrections and many smaller acts of daily resistance practiced by enslaved people in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. This account, which illuminates a topic that remains widely misunderstood, merits a wide readership. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A brilliant and thought-provoking history of sugar and its ironies. Walvin writes with fresh and righteous shock.

The Wall Street Journal (Praise for SUGAR)

A roller-coaster ride through 500 years of history. Sugar is an entertaining, informative and utterly depressing global history of an important commodity. By alerting readers to the ways that modernity’s very origins are entangled with a seemingly benign and delicious substance, Sugar raises fundamental questions about our world.

The New York Times Book Review (praise for SUGAR)

Shocking and revelatory.

David Olusoga

Walvin makes it abundantly clear that slaves actively pursued their liberation, rather than passively accepting their fate.

Booklist

2019-06-30
A British historian charts the rise and collapse of the slave empires of Europe's New World colonies.

There is irony in the fact that Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the slave revolt that established the free state of Haiti, was himself an owner of slaves. The revolt that he led resulted in a wholesale replacement of characters but not of social structures, as former lieutenants became estate holders and former slaves became forced laborers—and sometimes even slaves again. So observes Walvin (Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity, 2018, etc.), a scholar who has done extensive work on the Caribbean slave economy. Here, he widens his view to embrace enslavement throughout North and South America, with all its grim specifics—for instance, he writes that "Africans often spent longer on board a slave ship anchored off the coast of Africa than in crossing the Atlantic," those ships serving as horrific floating prisons until they were full enough for the captain to make a profitable trip across the ocean. Brazil is an important case study. As the author notes, 2.8 million Africans embarked as slaves from Angola alone, most bound for Brazil, joining millions of other Africans, and there they took roles in every sector of society. As with L'Ouverture, there were bewildering intersections: "most perplexing of all to modern eyes, we know of Brazilian slaves who themselves owned slaves." Walvin also documents Britons who never set foot in slaveholding territories but yet owned slaves at long distance. For all its puzzles, the slave economy lasted for three centuries but then disappeared over the course of a few decades as abolitionist and liberation movements arose in the 19th century. Even so, notes the author in closing, slavery has never disappeared. In fact, he observes, given the lamentably massive number of impoverished people around the world, "present-day slaves cost only a fraction of the price of slaves bought in the US South before 1860."

A solid contribution to studies of slavery in the Americas, providing useful rejoinders to other more comprehensive accounts.

Kirkus Reviews