Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie. Freedom's Seekers

Traffickers transported between 12.5 and 13 million enslaved Africans to the Americas in 35,000 unique slaving voyages between 1514 and 1870. Of these, perhaps 11 million survived the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. Five million of those Africans arrived in Brazil, five million in the Caribbean islands, four hundred thousand in the United States, and the remainder in various locales in South America. African slaves labored on farms and plantations, in mines, in port cities, and at sea. They resisted enslavement in various ways, including rebellion, self-liberation (such as flight from an owner), and the creation of wide-ranging networks of communication. Focusing on the “century of emancipation” (1780s–1888) (p. xii), Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie points to the necessity of comparative analyses of the macrohistories of liberation and the “thousands of small emancipations across the nineteenth-century Americas” (p. 54). A major problem in the teaching and publications related to slave emancipations in the nineteenth century has been a focus on the North Atlantic world and on “conventional spatial, temporal, and conceptual categories” (p. xvii). As one example among many, numerous U.S. universities offer courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction with minimal attention to the critical role of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) in giving animus to defenders and critics of the institution of slavery in the U.S. South. This lacuna occurs even in courses devoted to African American histories and cultures, which tend to focus on North America. Many factors have contributed to such an approach, including a pervasive sense of U.S. and British exceptionalism (heroic abolitionists, seizures of slave vessels by the British Squadron between 1817 and 1870, the “unfinished revolution” of U.S. Reconstruction [1865–1875], etc.) and the difficulties of integrating research from diverse regions in the Atlantic world (such as reading and interpreting primary documents written in Spanish and Portuguese).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic slave trade · Economic history · Emancipation · Ethnology · Institution · Middle Passage · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies