(Source: HUP)
Harvard
University Press is publishing a book of comparative history on two-hundred
years of slave law and resistance in the Early Atlantic World.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The success of
the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative
sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of
Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland.
These became the most prosperous slave economies in the Anglo-American
Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity.
Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals
the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders’ power that
marked the evolution of these societies. Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle
led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case
and through violent civil war in the other.
In both Jamaica
and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave
masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance
and recurrent slave revolts. Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and
state-sponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power. Yet
slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by rising abolitionist sentiment
and activity in the Anglo-American world. In South Carolina, slaveholders
exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition
and to expand slavery in the young republic. In Jamaica, by contrast, whites
fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British
abolitionists who acted through Parliament.
Rugemer’s
comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political
resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies
in the Atlantic World.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward B.
Rugemer is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale
University.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue: At the
Heart of Slavery
1. England’s
First Slave Society, Barbados
2. Animate
Capital
3. The
Domestication of Slavery in South Carolina
4. The
Militarization of Slavery in Jamaica
5. The
Transformation of Slavery’s Politics
6. The
Slaveholders Retrench
7. The Political
Significance of Slave Resistance
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
More information
here
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