Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires - Couverture rigide

Walvin, Professor James

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1472141423 ISBN 13 : 9781472141422

Editeur : Robinson, 2019

Synopsis

'Walvin synthesises this complex global history with skill and ingenuity. Freedom is beautifully written and clearly organised . . . thought-provoking, rich in detail and imbued with an emotional intelligence that pushes us to imagine what slave life meant, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.'
J. R. Oldfield, University of Hull, Family & Community History, Vol. 22/3, October 2019

'A wide-ranging history of resistance during the Atlantic slave trade that reminds us how captives fought their miserable fates every step of the way.'
David Olusoga, BBC History Magazine

'A sobering reminder of the trade's cruelty and scope . . . but also, through resistance, rebellion and riots, the power of individual people to change the world against the odds.'
History Revealed

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

In doing so, he casts new light on one of the major shifts in Western history in the past five centuries. 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. It led 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 during the nineteenth century 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 - though even those can deceive. 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 labour, to cattlemen on the frontier, through to domestic labour 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. They wanted an end to it: they wanted to be like the free people around them.

Most of these enslaved peoples did not live to see freedom. But an old freed man or woman in, say Cuba or Brazil in the 1880s, had lived through its destruction clean across the Americas. The collapse of slavery and the triumph of black freedom constitutes an extraordinary historical upheaval - and this book explains how that happened.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

JAMES WALVIN is the author of many books on slavery and modern social history. His book, Crossings, was published by Reaktion Books in 2013 and he is the author of Sugar: The World Corrupted, from Slavery to Obesity (Robinson, 2017). His first book, with Michael Craton, was a detailed study of a sugar plantation: A Jamaican Plantation, Worthy Park, 1670-1970 (Toronto, 1970). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006, and in 2008 was awarded an OBE for services to scholarship.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

'Long before the friends of African freedom had begun to agitate for black freedom, the enslaved themselves had created their own strategies of resistance. In time, their defiance was to prove the crucial final factor in bringing down slavery itself'
Freedom, James Walvin

Praise for James Walvin's Sugar:
'Shocking and revelatory . . . no other product has so changed the world, and no other book reveals the scale of its impact.' David Olusoga

'A brilliant and thought-provoking history of sugar and its ironies'
Bee Wilson, Wall Street Journal

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, How Sugar Corrupted the World raises fundamental questions about our world.' Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University and the author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History, New York Times

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

This long overdue, vivid and wide-ranging examination of the significance of the resistance of the enslaved themselves - from sabotage and running away to outright violent rebellion - shines fresh light on the end of slavery in the Atlantic World.

It is high time that this resistance, in addition to abolitionism and other factors, was given its due weight in seeking to understand the overthrow of slavery. Fundamentally, as Walvin shows so clearly, it was the implacable hatred of the enslaved for slavery and their strategies of resistance that made the whole system unsustainable and, ultimately, brought about its downfall.

Walvin's approach is original, too, in looking at the Atlantic world as a whole, including the French and Spanish Empires and Brazil, as well as Britain's colonies. In doing so, he casts new light on one of the major shifts in Western history: in the three-hundred years following Columbus's landfall in the Americas, slavery had become a widespread and critical institution. It had seen twelve million Africans forced onto slave ships; a forced migration that had had seismic consequences for Africa. It had transformed the Americas and materially enriched the Western world.

It had also been largely unquestioned - in Europe at least, and among slave owners, traders and those who profited from the system.

Yet, within a mere seventy-five years during the nineteenth century, slavery had vanished from the Americas: it had declined, collapsed and been destroyed by a complexity of forces that, to this day, remains disputed. As Walvin shows so clearly here, though, it was in large part overthrown by those it had enslaved.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Robinson
• Date d'édition: 2019
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1472141423
• ISBN 13: 9781472141422
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Robinson; biuro@robinson.pl; ; Lajkonika 34; Bielsko-Bia?a; 43-382; Pologne