Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires

by James Walvin

Overview

The critically acclaimed author of Sugar explains one of the major shifts in Western history in the past five centuries—the end of the slave empires.

In this timely and readable new work, Walvin focuses not on abolitionism or the brutality and suffering of slavery, but on the resistance of the enslaved themselves—from sabotage and absconding to full-blown uprisings—and its impact in overthrowing slavery. He also looks at whole Atlantic world, including the Spanish Empire and Brazil, all of which revolved around slavery.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643132068
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	09/03/2019
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,137,943
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

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." (Praise for SUGAR)

The Wall Street Journal (Praise for SUGAR)

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

Booklist

"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." (praise for SUGAR)

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