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The volume provides fascinating data on how sugar and cotton production shifted—or didn't—after legal emancipation. A Provocative Read for the Modern Scholar Leading historian James Walvin
Unlike many histories that focus strictly on European-driven colonial systems, Volume 4 dedicates substantial analysis to internal slave systems in Africa, the Ottoman Empire, South Asia, and East Asia. It details how indigenous forms of bondage persisted well into the twentieth century, sometimes adapting to or resisting European imperialist interventions. 4. The Twentieth Century and State-Sponsored Coercion
The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade led to a drop in slave prices within Africa. This sparked a boom in domestic slavery, where enslaved labor was used to harvest palm oil, cocoa, and rubber for European markets.
The authority of this volume comes from its four distinguished editors, each a giant in the field, and a stellar cast of contributing scholars.
As the transatlantic trade dwindled, internal African slave markets expanded, adapting to produce palm oil and other goods demanded by the global market. 2. Regional Adjustments and Emancipation
Covers 19th-century systems in Brazil, the U.S. South, Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and the Indian Ocean.
As the international slave trade was progressively outlawed by maritime powers like Great Britain, nations adapted. The volume highlights the massive scale of internal slave trades. In the United States, over one million enslaved people were forcibly relocated from the Upper South to the booming cotton fields of the Deep South. Similarly, Brazil saw a massive internal migration of enslaved labor from the declining northeastern sugar estates to the southeastern coffee plantations. 4. Non-Western Systems of Slavery
The volume also challenges the simplistic narrative that abolition was a linear march toward human progress. Instead, it reveals how the end of legal slavery frequently gave rise to new forms of coercion, such as sharecropping, convict leasing, and forced contract labor, proving that the legacy of bondage extended far past legal emancipation dates. How to Access the PDF Legitimately
Chapters 15-21 detail how abolition wasn't just a British or American event but a messy, global process involving the Haitian Revolution , Islamic Africa, and the emancipation of serfs in Europe. Gender and Labor:
A central theme of Volume 4 is that abolition was a protracted global process rather than a single breakthrough event. The editors and contributors analyze how the legal ending of slavery in the British Empire (1833), the United States (1865), and Brazil (1888) created massive economic vacuums. Landowners and colonial governments routinely looked for loopholes to maintain control over their workforce. 2. The Rise of "New Systems of Slavery"