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166 books match the query 'Enslavement' and 4 start with j

cover of Jamaica in 1850: or, The Effects of Sixteen Years of Freedom on a Slave Colony

Jamaica in 1850

or, The Effects of Sixteen Years of Freedom on a Slave Colony

John Bigelow Introduction by Robert J. Scholnick

University of Illinois Press, 2000

A reporter's firsthand portrait of formerly enslaved Jamaicans in the years after emancipation

John Bigelow’s Jamaica in 1850 provided an important document in the antislavery movement in the United States and Great Britain. Jamaica’s economy had collapsed after the 1838 emancipation. American supporters of enslavement used the Jamaican example to argue that abolition at home would unleash economic and social chaos. Bigelow’s vivid eyewitness reporting undermined that widely held view by proving Jamaica’s problems originated in the incompetence of absentee white planters and an obsolete colonial system. As Bigelow showed, many once-enslaved Jamaicans had in fact become successful small-scale landowners in the twelve years after emancipation while the large plantations languished.

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cover of Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions

Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions

Paul E. Lovejoy

Ohio University Press, 2016

In Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions, a preeminent historian of Africa argues that scholars of the Americas and the Atlantic world have not given Africa its due consideration as part of either the Atlantic world or the age of revolutions. The book examines the jihād movement in the context of the age of revolutions—commonly associated with the American and French revolutions and the erosion of European imperialist powers—and shows how West Africa, too, experienced a period of profound political change in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Paul E. Lovejoy argues that West Africa was a vital actor in the Atlantic world and has wrongly been excluded from analyses of the period.

Among its chief contributions, the book reconceptualizes slavery. Lovejoy shows that during the decades in question, slavery expanded extensively not only in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil but also in the jihād states of West Africa. In particular, this expansion occurred in the Muslim states of the Sokoto Caliphate, Fuuta Jalon, and Fuuta Toro. At the same time, he offers new information on the role antislavery activity in West Africa played in the Atlantic slave trade and the African diaspora.

Finally, Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions provides unprecedented context for the political and cultural role of Islam in Africa—and of the concept of jihād in particular—from the eighteenth century into the present. Understanding that there is a long tradition of jihād in West Africa, Lovejoy argues, helps correct the current distortion in understanding the contemporary jihād movement in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.

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cover of Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil: Correspondence 1880-1905

Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil

Correspondence 1880-1905

Edited by Leslie Bethell and Murilo De Carvalho

University of London Press, 2009

A little-studied aspect of the struggle to abolish slavery in Brazil in the 1880s is the relationship between Joaquim Nabuco, the leading Brazilian abolitionist, and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. The correspondence between Nabuco and Charles Harris Allen, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and other British abolitionists throughout the decade and beyond reveals a partnership consciously sought by Nabuco in order to internationalize the struggle. These letters provide a unique insight into the evolution of Nabuco's thinking on both slavery and abolition. At the same time, they offer a running commentary on the slow and (at least until 1887-88) uncertain progress of the abolitionist cause in Brazil.
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cover of John Brown: A Biography

John Brown

A Biography

W. E. B. Du Bois

Westholme Publishing, 2024

In the preface to his biography of John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois writes that the book “is at once a record of and a tribute to the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” Du Bois alludes to this in Souls of Black Folk when he describes John Brown’s actions: “led by [Charles Lenox] Remond, [William Cooper] Nell, [William] Wells-Brown, and [Frederick] Douglass, a new period of self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown’s raid was the extreme of its logic.” First published in 1909, the same year Du Bois helped found the NAACP, John Brown is a studious account of the fiery abolitionist’s life, while throughout are asides intertwined in the narrative that provide additional insights into Du Bois’s thoughts on race and America. The life of John Brown carries a message that still resonates in twenty-first century, and Du Bois makes it his refrain throughout this volume: “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
            This edition is introduced by John Brown scholar William S. King, who provides the background to the writing of the biography which took place during a turbulent time of race relations and competing visions from Booker T. Washington and Du Bois for the future of Black Americans. “Du Bois,” King reminds us, “remains one of the best writers on this phase of American history, which is still at our core.”
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