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This book examines both the social and the political history of slavery. James Polk — President of the United States from 1845 to 1849 — owned a Mississippi cotton plantation with about fifty slaves. Drawing upon previously unexplored records, this book recreates the world of Polk's Mississippi plantation and the personal histories of his slaves, in what is arguably the most careful and vivid account to date of how slavery functioned on a single cotton plantation. Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk's tenure as absentee slavemaster. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But this book suggests that the president's political stance toward slavery — influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system — may actually have helped to precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.

This book challenges the notion that the 17th-century English planters of Barbados were architects of a social disaster. These planters were not simply profligate, immoral, and grasping capitalists who exploited their servants and slaves in a quest for quick riches in the cultivation of sugar. To be sure, they quickly transformed the island's economy from one of semi-subsistence to the most successful plantation economy in the seventeenth-century English empire. Yet, they, like English emigrants to other regions in the empire, transplanted many familiar governmental, religious, and legal institutions; eagerly started families; sought to abide by traditional views about the social order; and resisted compromises in their diet, apparel, and housing, despite their tropical setting. In short, they were more than rapacious entrepreneurs. Seldom becoming absentee planters, these Englishmen developed an extraordinary attraction to Barbados, where they saw themselves, as one group of planters explained in a petition, as ‘being Englishmen transplanted’. The book draws heavily upon material from the Public Record Office and the Barbados Archives.

Providing an interdisciplinary and global perspective on immigration to the United States, this book represents an important step forward in the development of immigration studies. The book aims to help redirect thinking on the subject of immigration by giving a summary of the current state of immigration studies and a coherent new perspective that emphasizes the international dimensions of the immigrant experience from the time of the slave trade to present-day movements of Asian and Latin American peoples. This book challenges ethnocentric American or European perspectives on immigration, disputes the classical assimilation model of a linear progression of immigrant cultures toward a dominant American national character, questions human capital theory as an explanation of ethnic group achievement, reveals conflicting ethnic and racial attitudes toward immigration restriction, and examines the revival of interest in oral history, immigrant autobiographies, and other subjective documents.

Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state—all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, this book tackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? The book looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives. Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, the book considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and it explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, the book also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions, the book illuminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste—the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics—existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, this book demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, the book illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time. The book focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European—mainly British—life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. It explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, the book engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and it emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks, the book sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

This book is a transdisciplinary analysis of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in England in 1789. It was one of the earliest and remains to this day one of the best-known English language “slave” narratives. This now famous work was not really meant to be in any simple respects autobiographical; and it does not unproblematically register the several interests and motivations of a slave, spiritual, or travel narrative. Notwithstanding the inclusion of some formal elements of all these genres, it is best read as something else altogether—as a reflexive social-political commentary and criticism disclosed by a simple narratological framework. What Equiano wrote was not so much his life story as it was his creative effort to describe, critique, and reshape dominant society through his mimetics of what he, as strategically positioned “stranger,” understood to be—and named as—the “magic” that was the (British-inflected) practice of scripture reading, reflected within the structure of discourse and power relations that the author calls “scripturalization”. The book uses Equiano’s narrative to think with; it is a site for historical and contemporary social-critical excavation, using scriptures as social-cultural phenomenon and dynamics as analytical wedge. This scripturalizing mimetics open an analytical window onto the dynamics and structuring of British (and by extension Euro-American) civilization as a kind of ideological-discursive and social-psychological slavery, the representations of which are the deeper interest of this book. The form of enslavement identified as scripturalization in turn poignantly raises the possibility—with Equiano the ex-slave as model—of a particular type of negotiation or escape: ideological-psychological marronage, if not freedom in absolute terms. In Equiano’s reflexive thinking and discursive are the elements for the construction of “the African,” or “the Ethiopian,” the complex self within a reconceptualized modern, pluralistic society.

At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. This book examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, the book draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. The book identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today.