A sweeping narrative history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas.
 
During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhuman conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them on shore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles grapples with this history by emphasizing the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.
 
Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. It is also deeply informed by African history, and it shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources including both artworks and artefacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas; building families and cultivating affective ties; congregating and recreating their cultures; and organizing rebellions.
 
Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.

This book explores the relationship between women and property in the Greek lands and their broader social position in the century that culminated with the establishment of the national Greek state (1750–1850). Evdoxios Doxiadis focuses on the status and rights of Greek women in the later Ottoman period, the decade-long Greek War of Independence, and the first decades of the Greek state, seeking to reveal the impact that the pursuit of modernization by the early Greek governments had on women. Through the systematic examination of numerous legal documents in notarial archives from four distinct regions (Naxos, Mykonos, Athens, and Leonidio), the position of women in Greek societies of the period is illuminated in all its complexity and regional diversity. Special emphasis is placed on women’s ability in some areas to defend their property rights and be active economic agents.

Although the Greek revolutionaries and the Greek state did not curtail the rights of women with respect to property, the very institutions that were fundamental in the creation of the Greek state transformed the established relationship between women and property. Doxiadis shows that modernization proved to be an oppressive force for Greek women—though in a much more clandestine fashion than perhaps expected in other European states.