The Scots made a unique though not fully recognized contribution to the destruction of black slavery. This book begins with a Virginian slave seeking his freedom in Scotland in 1756 and ends with the ...abolition of the apprenticeship scheme in the West Indian colonies in 1838, including many stories told here for the first time.
‘There are no two things in the world more different from each other than East-Indian and West Indian-slavery’ (Robert Inglis, House of Commons Debate, 1833). In Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in ...India, 1772–1843, Andrea Major asks why, at a time when East India Company expansion in India, British abolitionism and the missionary movement were all at their height, was the existence of slavery in India so often ignored, denied or excused? By exploring Britain's ambivalent relationship with both real and imagined slaveries in India, and the official, evangelical and popular discourses which surrounded them, she seeks to uncover the various political, economic and ideological agendas that allowed East Indian slavery to be represented as qualitatively different from its trans-Atlantic counterpart. In doing so, she uncovers tensions in the relationship between colonial policy and the so-called 'civilising mission', elucidating the intricate interactions between humanitarian movements, colonial ideologies and imperial imperatives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The work draws on a range of sources from Britain and India to provide a trans-national perspective on this little known facet of the story of slavery and abolition in the British Empire, uncovering the complex ways in which Indian slavery was encountered, discussed, utilised, rationalised, and reconciled with the economic, political and moral imperatives of an empire whose focus was shifting to the East.
This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, ...nations, and faith backgrounds show how Quakers often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about slavery itself and the best path to emancipation. Far from having monolithic beliefs, Quakers embraced such diverse approaches as benevolent slaveholding, both gradual and comprehensive abolition, and consumer boycotts of slave-produced products. These evolving and uneven conceptions of slavery and emancipation were similar to the varied views Quakers had on racial integration. Offering a nuanced interpretation of these controversial topics--one that often diverges from existing scholarship--contributors discuss how Quakers attempted to live out their faith's antislavery imperative. Essays address Quaker missions in Barbados; the interplay between African-American and Quaker communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; transatlantic correspondence between a colonialist Quaker and a freed slave who "returned-to-Africa" as a Liberian colonist; and the impact of Quaker-authored frontier literature. Not surprisingly, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. Focusing on Great Britain, France, and the United States, contributors show how Quaker antislavery actions and writings influenced revolutions and antislavery in those countries. Yet the Quaker contribution is also a hidden one because it so rarely receives substantive attention in modern classrooms and scholarship. This volume faithfully seeks to correct that oversight, offering accessible and provocative new insights on this key chapter of religious, political, and cultural history. Contributors include Dee E. Andrews, Kristen Block, Brycchan Carey, Christopher Densmore, Andrew Diemer, J. William Frost, Thomas D. Hamm, Nancy A. Hewitt, Maurice Jackson, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner, Gary B. Nash, Geoffrey Plank, Ellen M. Ross, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, James Emmett Ryan, and James Walvin.
Carey investigates in detail the origins of antislavery thought and rhetoric within the Society of Friends. The book shows how the Quakers turned against slavery in the first half of the eighteenth ...century and became the first organisation to take a stand against the slave trade. Through meticulous examination of the earliest writings of the Friends, including journals and letters, it reveals the society's gradual transition from expressing doubt about slavery to adamant opposition. The book shows that while progression toward this stance was ongoing, it was slow and uneven and that it was vigorous internal debate and discussion that ultimately led to a call for abolition.
Ryan P. Jordan explores the limits of religious dissent in antebellum
America, and reminds us of the difficulties facing reformers who tried peacefully to
end slavery. In the years before the Civil ...War, the Society of Friends opposed the
abolitionist campaign for an immediate end to slavery and considered abolitionists
within the church as heterodox radicals seeking to destroy civil and religious
liberty. In response, many Quaker abolitionists began to build comeouter
institutions where social and legal inequalities could be freely discussed, and
where church members could fuse religious worship with social activism. The conflict
between the Quakers and the Abolitionists highlights the dilemma of liberal religion
within a slaveholding republic.
In the colonial and antebellum South, black and white evangelicals frequently prayed, sang, and worshipped together. Even though white evangelicals claimed spiritual fellowship with those of African ...descent, they nonetheless emerged as the most effective defenders of race-based slavery.As Charles Irons persuasively argues, white evangelicals' ideas about slavery grew directly out of their interactions with black evangelicals. Set in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state and the hearth of the southern evangelical movement, this book draws from church records, denominational newspapers, slave narratives, and private letters and diaries to illuminate the dynamic relationship between whites and blacks within the evangelical fold. Irons reveals that when whites theorized about their moral responsibilities toward slaves, they thought first of their relationships with bondmen in their own churches. Thus, African American evangelicals inadvertently shaped the nature of the proslavery argument. When they chose which churches to join, used the procedures set up for church discipline, rejected colonization, or built quasi-independent congregations, for example, black churchgoers spurred their white coreligionists to further develop the religious defense of slavery.
Through their teaching of early Christian history and theology, Elizabeth A. Clark contends, Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological ...Seminary functioned as America's closest equivalents to graduate schools in the humanities during the nineteenth century. These four Protestant institutions, founded to train clergy, later became the cradles for the nonsectarian study of religion at secular colleges and universities. Clark, one of the world's most eminent scholars of early Christianity, explores this development inFounding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. Based on voluminous archival materials, the book charts how American theologians traveled to Europe to study in Germany and confronted intellectual currents that were invigorating but potentially threatening to their faith. The Union and Yale professors in particular struggled to tame German biblical and philosophical criticism to fit American evangelical convictions. German models that encouraged a positive view of early and medieval Christianity collided with Protestant assumptions that the church had declined grievously between the Apostolic and Reformation eras. Trying to reconcile these views, the Americans came to offer some counterbalance to traditional Protestant hostility both to contemporary Roman Catholicism and to those historical periods that had been perceived as Catholic, especially the patristic era.
Africans to Spanish America expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the ...connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. Editors Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, and Ben Vinson III arrange the volume around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, contributors offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America. _x000B__x000B_Contributors are Joan C. Bristol, Nancy E. van Deusen, Leo J. Garofalo, Herbert S. Klein, Charles Beatty-Medina, Karen Y. Morrison, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Frank "Trey" Proctor III, and Michele Reid-Vazquez.
An authoritative history of the Coptic Papacy from the
Ottoman era to the present day, new in paperback This
third and final volume of The Popes of Egypt series spans the five
centuries from the ...arrival of the Ottomans in 1517 to the present
era. Hardly any scholarly work has been written about the Copts
during the Ottoman period. Using court, financial, and building
records, as well as archives from the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate
and monasteries, Magdi Guirguis has reconstructed the authority of
the popes and the organization of the Coptic community during this
time. He reveals that the popes held complete authority over their
flock at the beginning of the Ottoman rule, deciding over questions
ranging from marriage and concubines to civil disputes. As the
fortunes of Coptic notables rose, they gradually took over the
pope's role and it was not until the time of Muhammad Ali that the
popes regained their former authority. In the second part of the
book, Nelly van Doorn-Harder analyzes how with the dawning of the
modern era in the nineteenth century, the leadership style of the
Coptic popes necessarily changed drastically. As Egypt's social,
political, and religious landscape underwent dramatic changes, the
Coptic Church experienced a virtual renaissance, and expanded from
a local to a global institution. Furthermore she addresses the
political, religious, and cultural issues faced by the patriarchs
while leading the Coptic community into the twenty-first
century.
