HIS 234: The Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery
NEW
: Seminar groups now onlineNEW
: Lecture handouts and OHPs now onlineIntroduction
Lectures
Seminars
Film Screenings
Trip to Wilberforce House Museum
Assessment
Core Reading
Course Outline
Seminar Briefings
Essay Questions
The Presentation and Review Essay
Reading List
Part One: Additional Reading for Presenters/ Review Essay Writers
Part Two: Reading to Accompany Lectures
Part Three: General Reading List
Between c. 1500 and 1900, around 11 million Africans were forcibly taken from their places of birth and brought across the Atlantic to the Americas to be slaves. This forced migration had enormous economic, social, cultural, ideological and political consequences, playing a major role in the constitution of the modern world. This course has two major purposes: to examine Atlantic Slavery from its establishment until its abolition, and to explore the political and cultural significance of slavery for our own times.
In order to achieve the aims of the course, you will need to take responsibility for your own learning: you will have to read widely and carefully in order to achieve the intended learning outcomes. If you do, then by the end of the course, you will have a good understanding of the subject matter covered, including an in-depth knowledge of the topics on which you write your essay and do your seminar presentation. You will also have thought about whether and why slavery matters in the contemporary world, and about how it is represented today. Your work on this course will develop generic abilities and skills as do all history courses: practice in reading widely and critically, organizing presentations for seminars, writing essays, and taking exams. You will also spend time watching films, and will need to develop skills in critical film-watching.
The course has four components: lectures, seminars, film-screenings, and a trip to a museum. Participation in the first three is essential and required. Participation in the fourth is optional but very strongly recommended.
Lectures: 3 every two weeks; lectures will take place on Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 am in odd-numbered weeks, and on Mondays at 10 am only in even-numbered weeks. (See course outline.) Lectures will be held in Lecture Room A in the history department.
Seminars: There will be five seminars over the course of the semester. At each one except the last, there will be a core reading, usually one book. (The final seminar will focus on the films we have watched and the museum we have visited.) The library has a maximum of 3 copies of these books, which should be on 4-hour reserve. This will mean a great deal of pressure on books. I suggest you arrange with other students in the class to share the cost and the books. They are all available at Waterstones on Grey Street, and at Blackwells. Many can also be purchased through online bookshops such as bol.com.
At each seminar except the first, there will be a student presentation. Each student will be responsible for making one of these four presentations, as part of a group of three or four students. The purpose of the presentation is to set the seminar’s core reading in context, comparing it to other work on similar topics. The presentation itself will not be marked. However, after the seminar you will write a review essay, based on the reading you do for the presentation. This will count 12.5% towards your final mark.
Film Screenings: There will be five film screenings throughout the course. These will take place on Wednesdays in room G11 in the Percy Building, beginning at 5 pm. If you are unable to attend the film screenings, you should arrange with me to borrow the video tape, which you can watch at your own convenience. There are VCR stations in the Robinson Library, which you can use.
Trip to Wilberforce House Museum of Slavery: This will take place on April 25th and will last all day. It will cost £5, which covers part of the cost of the coach. Further details will be given nearer the time.
Assessment of this course is by two methods:
You are strongly advised to read one of the following general histories of slavery:
David Turley, Slavery. (Thematically organized; covers ancient, Muslim, and African slavery as well as the Americas.)
James Walvin, Black Ivory. (Mainly on slavery in the British colonies, although also includes material on the US.)Peter Kolchin, American Slavery 1619-1877. (An excellent overview of slavery in the US, but does not deal with other areas.)
For the seminars, you will need to read the following:
Seminar 1: John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. (This is the 2nd edition; 1st edition, with different dates in the title, is also acceptable.)
Seminar 2: Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas.
Seminar 3: Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro OR Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South.
Seminar 4: Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823.
Seminar 5: No core reading. Instead attend the film screenings and the museum trip.
You will need to do additional reading for your seminar presentation/ review essay, and for your other essay. See reading lists later in this document. There is also additional recommended reading to accompany the lectures.
Slavery has been a popular subject for writers of fiction, poetry, and drama. The following are some of the best and most significant fictional works about slavery. Reading at least one of them is recommended; it will help you reflect on the popular representation of slavery, in the recent and more distant past:
Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Works:
Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdes (in Spanish).
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko.
Recent novels:
Toni Morrison, Beloved.
Charles Johnson, Crossing the River.
Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger.
David Dabydeen, A Harlot’s Progress.
Alex Haley, Roots.
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Week beginning |
Lectures (M, W, 10-11 am, Lecture Room A) |
Seminars (M in lecture room B, W in room 1.27, 11.15-12.45 am) |
Films (W, beginning at 5 pm, Percy Building G11) |
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29 January |
29: Introduction: Defining Slavery |
No seminars |
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5 February |
5: The African Context |
Africa and the Rise of Atlantic Slavery (groups 1 and 2) |
7 Feb: Quilombo (114 minutes) |
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12 February |
12: Why slavery? |
Africa and the Rise of Atlantic Slavery (groups 3 and 4) |
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19 February |
19: The impact of Atlantic slavery on Africa |
Slavery as a system of labour (groups 1 and 2) |
21 Feb: Roots, episode 2. |
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26 February |
Part 2: Living in a Slave Society |
Slavery as a system of labour (groups 3 and 4) |
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5 March |
5 March: African into African |
Gender and Family in Slave Societies (groups 1 and 2) |
7 March: Beloved. |
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12 March |
12: Maroons and Rebels |
Gender and Family in Slave Societies (groups 3 and 4) |
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19 March |
19: Race in slave societies: the |
Slave Resistance and Rebellion (groups 1 and 2) |
21 March: The Last Supper |
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26 March |
EASTER |
BREAK |
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23 April |
Part 3: The Fall of Atlantic Slavery |
No Seminars |
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30 April |
30: From St. Domingue to Haiti |
Slave Resistance and Rebellion (groups 3 and 4) |
2 May: Daughters of the Dust |
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7 May |
7 May: Abolitionism and Abolition. |
Representing Slavery (groups 1 and 2) |
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14 May |
14: Slavery in the Contemporary |
Representing Slavery (groups 3 and 4) |
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Seminar 1: Africa and the Rise of Atlantic Slavery. 5, 7, 12 or 14 February.
Why was slavery established? How did it come to be connected to race? Why were African people prepared to sell other Africans into the Atlantic slave trade? Why were Europeans prepared to buy them? This seminar will investigate these questions through reading a work by a leading historian of Africa: John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World.
Seminar 2: Slavery as a System of Labour. 19, 21, 26, or 28 February.
Although historians have been very interested in the cultures that slaves created, slavery was introduced and perpetuated because it was a system of labour. The work that slaves had to do was probably the most important factor in determining what their day-to-day lives were like. Slaves’ work extended beyond the cultivation of plantation crops: many also spent long hours growing, and trading for, their own food—a practice that has led to extensive debate among historians. In this seminar we will examine some recent essays about slavery and work, collected in Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan’s edited book, Cultivation and Culture.
Seminar 3: Gender and Family in Slave Societies. 5, 7, 12 or 14 March.
Slavery was inherited from one’s mother, and denied slaves the legal right to build families. Did slaves, then, have no families? If slaves did have families, what was their significance? Did they allow slaves to resist slavery, or tie them to it? How did the experience of slavery differ for women and men? For this seminar you will read either Sandra Lauderdale Graham’s book about women slaves and servants in Brazil, House and Street or Deborah Gray White’s study of enslaved women in the US South, Ar’n’t I a Woman?
Seminar 4: Slave Revolts and Resistance. 19, 21 March, 30 April, or 2 May.
Planters throughout the Americas were terrified of slave revolt, and almost every slave society in the Americas experienced at least one major slave rebellion. In what circumstances were slaves able to rebel? What do rebellions tell us about slave societies more generally? For this seminar you will read one of the finest studies of a slave rebellion ever written: Emilia Viotti da Costa’s Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood.
Seminar 5: Representing Slavery. 7, 9, 14, or 16 May.
The topic for the final seminar is the representation of slavery in contemporary society. Does slavery still matter? To whom, and why? How do representations of slavery in popular culture and in public history (eg. museums) differ from historians’ accounts? Why? This seminar will focus on the films we have watched throughout the semester, and on the trip to the Wilberforce House Museum of Slavery. Presenters will also be able to access the catalogues of other museums in the library, and do additional reading on the representation of slavery. They may also choose to visit additional museums and watch additional films.
Write a 2,000 word essay on one of these topics. You may also develop your own topic. While I strongly encourage you to come up with a topic of your own choice, you MUST talk with me about it in advance, to check that it is appropriate.
The Presentation and Review Essay
Your review essay (2,000 words) is due a week after you make your presentation. If you make your presentation on 12 February, your review essay must be handed in by 4pm on 19 February, and so on.
Your seminar presentation will be done as part of a group, usually of three students. The seminar group as a whole will have done the core reading (or, in the case of the final seminar, have seen the films and been to the Hull museum.) The purpose of the presentation is to give the other participants in the seminar insight into how the core reading is related to other work on similar topics. Appropriate reading is listed in part 1 of the reading list in this course handbook.
As a group, you should decide on what you are planning to cover: ideally, between 4 and 6 items in addition to the core reading. In your presentation, try to convey what is important about the additional reading you have done as a group, and how the additional readings relate to both the core reading and to each other.
Whereas you should work on your presentation as a group, you should write your review essay individually. This gives you a chance to expand on the work you have done for the presentation, as well as to take into account the discussion that has taken place in the seminar. In your review essay you may refer to a broad range of reading, but the main focus should be on the core reading plus two or three additional items.
A review essay is both similar to and different from a book review. As in a book review, a review essay should provide an assessment of the contribution of each item considered to our understanding of a particular subject. It should include a summary of the main point (the thesis) of each book or article, together with the reviewer's judgement of how well the author has sustained that main point--in other words, whether the author's evidence supports his or her thesis. But a review essay is not simply a compilation of several discrete book reviews. Rather, a good review essay relates the items under consideration to one another. At the very least in its introduction and conclusion, and preferably at points throughout the essay, the author of a review essay makes an argument about the collective contribution of the several items under consideration. The collective contribution can be understand in several ways, for instance:
I strongly advise you to read some review essays before writing yours. Review essays can be found in many periodicals. Publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement publish several major review essays each week. The following examples all deal with slavery. All can be found online on JSTOR.
Gloria Graves Holmes, "Recontextualizing Black Resistance: A Review Essay," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28, 1 (1994): 141-144.
John Hope Franklin, "Afro-American History: State of the Art," The Journal of American History, 75, 1 (1988): 162-173.
August Meier, "Whither the Black Perspective in Afro-American Historiography?" The Journal of American History, Vol. 70, No. 1. (Jun., 1983), pp. 101-105.
Richard H. King, "Marxism and the Slave South" American Quarterly 29, 1. (1977): 117-131.
For further useful advice on writing book reviews, also helpful for review essays, see the handout for Dr. Standen’s course on Imperial China (to which this advice is indebted): http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/naomi.standen/impchina/bkrevs.htm
This reading list is divided into three parts.
These lists are not exhaustive. There are other ways of finding reading material. You can:
You are likely to find that many books or articles you want are not held by the Newcastle library. If this happens, you have several options: order the item on Inter-Library Loan; check the library catalogues of Northumbria and Durham to see if the item is held there; try to purchase the book through local or internet bookshops; or find something else to read on a similar topic.
Part 1: Additional Reading for presenters/ review essay writers.
Seminar 2
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. 1998.
Dunn, Richard. "A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799-1828," WMQ 34 (1977): 32-65.
Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. (1996)
McDonald, Roderick A. The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (1993).
Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. 1985.
Morgan, Philip D. "Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Low Country Blacks, 1700-1800," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 39 (1982): 563-99.
Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Maryland. 1998.
Schwartz, Stuart. Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (1996)
Stein, Stanley. Vassouras, a Brazilian Coffee County: The Roles of Master and Slave in a Plantation Society. (1985).
Turner, Mary. From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves, especially Introduction and article by Turner.
Walsh, Lorena. From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: the History of a Virginia Slave Community. (1997).
Seminar 3:
Bardaglio, Peter W. Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. 1995.
Beckles, Hilary McD. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados. 1989.
Bleser, Carol, ed. In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1900. 1991.
Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838. London: James Currey, 1990.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. 1988.
Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. 1996.
Hine, Darlene Clark, Wilma King, and Linda Reed. We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History. New York: Carlson, 1995. [articles by ???]
Hünefeldt, Christine. Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves, 1800-1854. 1994.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. 1985.
Kierner, Cynthia A. Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700-1835. 1998.
McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. 1995.
Martinez-Alier, Verena. Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society. 1989 [1974].
Morton, Patricia, ed. Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past. 1996.
Shepherd, Verene, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey. Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. 1995.
Seminar 4:
Craton, Michael. "Proto-Peasant Revolts? The Late Slave Rebellions in the British West Indies 1816-1832." Past and Present 85 (1979): 99-125.
Davis, Thomas J. A Rumor of Revolt: The 'Great Negro Plot' in Colonial New York. 1985.
Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. 1993.
Fick, Carolyn. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. 1990.
Gaspar, David Barry. Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua. 1993.
Genovese, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. 1980.
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 1980.
Jordon, Winthrop. Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy. 1990.
Mullin, Gerald. Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. 1972.
Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810. 1997.
Thornton, John K. "African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion." American Historical Review 96, 4 (1991): 1101-15.
Turner, Mary. Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834. 1982.
Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. 1974.
Seminar 5:
There is less directly relevant available written material available for this seminar than for the others. I suggest you take one of three approaches.
1) Review the Hull museum that we will visit on April 24 alongside one or more other museum galleries that deal with slavery. The ‘Trade and Empire’ Gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, is related to slavery; there is also a ‘Transatlantic Slavery’ Gallery at the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, Liverpool, and a gallery on ‘Bristol and the Transatlantic Slave Trade’ at the Bristol Industrial Museum. (There may also be others that I don’t know about—if you find any, please let me know.) If you live near London, Bristol, or Liverpool, a visit to one of these museums during the Easter break could provide you with sufficient material for discussion, if used alongside some of the following reading.
On slavery specifically:
Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (2000).
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995).
Tibbles, Anthony, and National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside. Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity (1994).
Handler, Richard and Eric Gable. The New History at an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. 1997.
On museums more generally:
Maleuvre, Didier. Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (1999).
Simpson, Moira. Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era. 1996.
Karp, Ivan et al. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. 1992.
Henderson, Amy and Arienne Lois Kaeppler, eds. Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian. 1997.
Karp, Ivan and Steven Lavine. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. 1991.
2) Focus on one or two of the films we are watching, and discuss them alongside some other films dealing with slavery. For example:
Amistad (1997).
Roots (episodes we are not watching).
Spartacus (1960).
Burn! (1969).
Many of these films are usefully discussed in:
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (2000). NB: This book is not available in the library; I have a copy that I will lend to presenters, who may also want to purchase the book.
3) Compare some of the filmic and museum representations of slavery with European representations of slavery in the past, using the following reading.
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolitionism, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (1993).
Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (1992).
Baum, Joan. Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets (1994)
Plasa, Carl, and Betty Ring, eds. The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (1994).
Part 2: Reading to Accompany Lectures
The Rise of Atlantic Slavery
Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (1997).
Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996).
Dunn, Richard. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (1973).
Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000).
Manning, Patrick. Slavery, Colonialism, and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960 (1982).
Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (1990)
Mannix, Daniel. Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865. 1976.
Miller, Joseph. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 (1988).
Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985).
Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, 1975.
Solow, Barbara, ed. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. 1991.
Schwartz, Stuart. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (1985).
Living in a Slave Society
(See also additional reading for presenters, seminars 2 and 3)
Cohen, David, and Jack Greene, eds., Neither Slave Nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World Slave (1972).
Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1975).
Gomez, Michael. Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998)
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1995).
Karasch, Mary. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (1987).
Knight, Franklin. Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (1970).
Mintz, Sidney and Richard Price. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Approach to the African American Past (1992).
Palmié, Stephen, ed. Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery (1995)
Patterson, Orlando. The Sociology of Slavery (1967).
The Fall of Atlantic Slavery
(See also additional reading for presenters, seminar 4)
Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (1988)
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975)
Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (1999)
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)
Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (1992)
Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860. 1998.
Saville, Julie. The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Labourer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (1994)
Sawyer, Roger. Slavery in the Twentieth Century. 1986.
Scott, Rebecca, et al. The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil (1988)
Scott, Rebecca. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (1985)
Scully, Pamela. Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853. 1997.
Viotti da Costa, Emilia. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (2000, revised ed), chapters 5 and 6.
Reference material
Finkelman, Paul, and Joseph Calder Miller. Macmillan encyclopedia of world slavery. 1998. 2 Vols.
Rodriguez, Junius P. The Historical encyclopedia of world slavery.1997. 2 vols
Miller, Randall M., and John David Smith. Dictionary of Afro-American slavery.1997.
General List
Austin-Broos, Diane J. Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Order. 1997.
Bardaglio, Peter W. Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. 1995.
Beckles, Hilary McD. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados. 1989.
Bender, Thomas, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. 1992.
Berlin, Ira and Philip Morgan, eds. Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas. 1993.
Berlin, Ira, ed. Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War. 1992
Berlin, Ira, et al, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. 1982-. Multiple volumes.
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. 1998.
Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800. 1997.
Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. 1988.
Blackett, Richard. Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolition Movement.
Blanchard, Peter. Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru1992.
Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. 1977.
Blassingame, John. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South.1972.
Bleser, Carol, ed. In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1900. 1991.
Bolt, Christine, and Seymour Drescher, eds. Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey.
Bowser, Frederick P. The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650. 1974.
Brereton, Bridget and Kevin Yelvington, The Colonial Caribbean in Transition. 1999.
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. 1996.
Burn, W. L. Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies. 1937.
Burton, Richard D. E. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean1997.
Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838. 1990.
Butler, Kathleen Mary. The Economics of Emancipation: Jamaica & Barbados, 1823-1843. 1995.
Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. 1996.
Cohen, David, and Jack Greene, eds., Neither Slave Nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World Slave. 1972.
Cohen, William. At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1875. 1991.
Conrad, Robert Edgar, ed. Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. 1983.
Conrad, Robert. The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888. 1972.
Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the 'Vulgar' Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. 1993.
Cover, Robert M. Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. 1975.
Crane, Susan. Museums and Memory. 2000.
Craton, Michael, and James Walvin. A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park 1670-1970. 1970.
Craton, Michael. "Proto-Peasant Revolts? The Late Slave Rebellions in the British West Indies 1816-1832." Past and Present 85 (1979): 99-125.
Craton, Michael. Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica. 1978.
Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. 1969.
Curtin, Philip D. Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830-1865. 1955.
Curtin, Philip. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. 1990 and 1998.
Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. 1984.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. 1975.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture.1966.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. 2000.
Davis, Thomas J. A Rumor of Revolt: The 'Great Negro Plot' in Colonial New York. 1985.
Degler, Carl N. Neither black nor white : slavery and race relations in Brazil and the United States.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Multiple Editions.
Drescher, Seymour. Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective. 1986.
Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. 1977.
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713. 1973.
Dunn, Richard. "A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799-1828," WMQ 34 (1977): 32-65.
Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. 1996
Edwards, Laura F. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. 1997.
Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. 1993.
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