Chapters 1 and 2 suggest that prostitutes not only had a significant presence in the north Indian military cantonment, especially in the hybrid space of the sadr bazaar, but exercised an outsized degree of social influence. This is confirmed by police records from north Indian cantonment towns, including Meerut, examined in this chapter. While the historical literature on colonial India to date has emphasized the official subjection, suppression, and immiseration of prostitutes, especially in the wake of the contagious disease acts of the 1860s, a survey of police records from the 1850s suggest that prostitutes possessed a secure place in the cantonment, and in the official mind, and were even deemed worthy of official protection from criminal persecution. These points are situated in the context of violent crime against women generally, in which the state took an active interest, as well as the officially disfavored slave traffic in girls and young women. The 1850s emerges as an extended moment of transition between the early-modern figure of the urbane tawāif (courtesan) and the marginalized, scandalous figure of the cantonment kasbi (prostitute).

This chapter examines the ways in which Victorian industrial novels, which emerged on the British literary scene in the early 1840s, revealed – and in many ways concealed – the imperial and racial structures that were fundamental to nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Also termed “condition of England” novels, these narratives critiqued current social hierarchies while guarding themselves from appearing to promote working-class revolts. In addition, they had to negotiate how (or whether) to represent the extent to which British imperialism fueled industrialism’s acts of dehumanization and violence. Focusing on industrial novels written by authors including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, the essay explores two central ways in which these texts addressed these connections to race and empire: first, through representations of British factory workers in terms that evoked transatlantic slavery and imperial otherness; and second, through British spaces and colonial objects that called forth the imperial stories and identities often suppressed in industrial novels.

This chapter asks how Mexicans remembered the histories of slavery, abolition, and Afro-descendants once independence was achieved, slavery abolished, and calidad classifications prohibited by law. Through an examination of the Mexican press between 1821 and 1860, this work traces the creation of historical narratives that downplayed the importance of slavery for Mexican history, while at the same time used the figure of Afro-Mexicans to cement different political projects. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to document that these subjects remained being part of Mexican public life through the press. More than restoring these questions’ visibility in Mexican history, the relevance of an analysis such as this rests on exposing the political uses and rhetorical power these themes had during that period. Slavery, abolition, and Afro-Mexicans’ presence in the country were points of reference in the creation of national identities and historical narratives that still bear weight in modern Mexican society.

After gaining independence in 1821, the Mexican government passed laws that abolished the transatlantic slave trade to Mexico in 1824 and the institution of slavery in 1829. While these dates are concrete, the process and implementation of both laws entailed more complexity than these firm dates suggest, and created real and perceived consequences for inhabitants in Mexican territories. This chapter argues that abolition was a contentious social and political process that placed settlement, citizenship, and freedom at the forefront of discussions for the nascent nation in the 1820s and 1830s. The chapter also argues that the process of abolishing slavery in Mexico was steeped in colonial history and set the stage for contentious individual and collective action through the national government in Mexico City and the state/local government of Coahuila y Tejas from 1821 to 1836.

Britons and British subjects with family members deeply involved in the transatlantic economy were an important feature of University life. These students, who grew in number due the increasing profits of the slave economy and the underdeveloped state of tertiary education in the colonies, were accepted and nurtured by fellows and masters who, in many cases, owned plantations, held investments in the slave trade, or had family members serving as governors in the North American colonies. In following the experiences of these students, the chapter details the lives and struggles of undergraduates, particularly those who traveled abroad to Cambridge, and the emotional and personal bonds that fellows and their young charges developed. The chapter is a reminder that, when considering institutional connections to enslavement, political economy was but one side of the story – the emotional, social, and cultural bonds between the sons of enslavers and their fellow Britons were also integral.

The end of the American Revolution energised concerns about the political, economic, and moral state of an empire that had become inextricable from the plantation economy and the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. Intent on forging an empire without slave-trading, some Cambridge students and fellows took a leading role in attacking the slave economy, enslavers, and the consumption and production of goods tied to the plantation economy. Other past and present Cambridge fellows, however, were emboldened by defeat in the Revolution to support enslavers, arguing that enslavement was the principal foundation of Britain’s rapidly growing economy and should remain entrenched in the British Caribbean. The problem of the slave trade was particularly evident in Britons’ engagement with West Africa, where antislavery activists, colonisers, and explorers had to negotiate and collaborate with local slave-traders and imperial companies to achieve their aims. These conflicts reveal the challenges and limitations of idealism when confronted with the realities of Britain’s slave empire.

This chapter locates the emergence of the Greco-Roman city state within a process that saw the expansion of sedentary peasant populations across the Afro-Eurasian world. This was a process accompanied by a wider range of epidemic diseases, the spread of militaristic ‘warring’ states and intensification of slavery. Too often, the rise of the Greeco-Roman city-state has been studies in isolation. This chapter presents the city-state and its ability to mobilize the peasantry for war as one response to the dynamics and constraints of sedentary peasant society and urbanization that increasingly manifested as the dominant form of social organization in a band stretching from East to West across the Afro-Eurasian world from the beginnings of the Iron Age. The chapter starts with demographic growth and the ecological constraints of peasant agriculture, including discussion of Ester Boserup, James C. Scott and the recent work of Graeber & Wengrow. It then moves on to state formation, war-making and military mobilization before analyzing ancient slavery within a continuum of varieties from the early-modern Caribbean to the Islamic world.

US founders sought to build a republic of citizens who improved themselves and their nation, free of unearned aristocratic entitlements, but that fostered an unfamiliar mobility. Reactions against aristocratic idleness elevated the importance of self-improvement and work for winning cultural esteem as well as for material well-being. Benjamin Franklin led in promoting these values to nurture useful citizens; only after his death did a revised version of his autobiography portray him as having “raised myself.” Although mobility came to be expected of White men, legal and cultural presumptions marginalized most others, who were subject to harsh physical and social penalties if they attempted to claim self-agency or to seek self-improvement and work that brought respect. Georgia’s early history illustrates how self-serving stories about work and initiative both defended enslavement and closed off opportunities for poor White people. The elderly George Washington was among the rare citizens who took seriously Revolutionary-era rhetoric about equality, and he came to appreciate how the work of enslaved people made his self-improvement and prosperity possible.

Anglican missionaries took advantage of the spread of the empire to prosleytise to Native Americans and African Americans. Motivated by a desire to bring the gospel to so-called heathens and halt the spread of Catholicism, Cambridge men travelled to North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India to spread Protestantism. If they chose not to head abroad, they instead provided donations to missionary organisations, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, or assisted in the administration of plantations owned by these organisations. As Cambridge missionaries and dergymen encountered enslavement, prominent University figures became increasingly interested in debates concerning and morality the efficacy of Indigenous and African slavery. Some fellows were actively sceptical of the moral grounds for slavery, whilst others believed that enslavement was grounded in Christian belief. Rather than emerging in the era of abolition, scepticism and debate about the moral foundations of enslavement were consistent features of British intellectual life for over a century.

The slavery debates at Cambridge did not end with the emancipation of enslaved people in the Caribbean and India in 1843. In fact, undergraduates, fellows, and professors increasingly turned their attention to enslavement in the United States of America. Cambridge-educated abolitionists, such as Edward Strutt Abdy and Alexander Crummell, sought to mobilise opinion in both America and Britain against the persistent power of the enslaver class in the Southern United States. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–1865) inspired growing sympathy amongst educated British elites, including those at Cambridge, towards the Confederate cause, with many comparing American enslavers to landed British gentry in order to build camaraderie between British and American elites. The Confederacy, in turn, sought to lobby university men and mobilise student opinion in their favour to further the cause of Confederate diplomatic recognition in Britain.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

Following the abolition of the slave trade, Cambridge men turned their intellectual attentions to the institution of slavery as a whole. Nevertheless, students, alumni, and fellows were torn on how best to create an empire of free labour and on the prospects for freed people of colour in post-emancipation societies. The early nineteenth century was a colorful era of experimentation as Cambridge activists sought to gradually achieve abolition without precipitating the violence and rebellion that characterized the Haitian Revolution, whilst Black and radical white abolitionists advocated for an immediate end to racial slavery. Historians have long ignored this phase of Cambridge debate on enslavement post-1807, which has resulted in a historiography of Cambridge abolitionism which overemphasizes its radical nature. In reality, a growing conservatism dominated this period of abolitionist thought at Cambridge – particularly as some Cambridge fellows and alumni continued to eschew pro-slavery rhetoric.

Following the colonisation of Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, British society, politics, and the economy were forever transformed by the growing transatlantic empire. The University of Cambridge was intimately connected to that Atlantic world. The introduction provides context on Cambridge’s history and the long-term development of racial slavery, examining how enslavement and the plantation economy were of incredible significance to British life from the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the end of the American Civil War and beyond. More than a history of plantation owners purchasing stately homes or consumers eagerly consuming sugar, a case study of Cambridge’s town and gown communities highlights the vast spectrum of connections, ties, and interests that many Britons held to a slave empire.

I begin by highlighting three characteristics that ancient elites imagined that enslaved persons ought to have: usefulness, loyalty, and property. I start by noting how discourses of enslavement and utility are intertwined. The Shepherd’s concern for utility is most clearly expressed in its two visions of a tower under construction, in which enslaved believers are represented as stones who will be useful (or not) for the construction of the tower before the eschaton. Second, I turn to the concept of loyalty (pistis), suggesting that the Shepherd uses such language in a way that encourages God’s enslaved persons to exhibit loyalty to God at all costs. Finally, I point to how enslaved persons in antiquity were often characterized as commodified by placing the Shepherd alongside inscriptions about enslaved people from Delphi and documentary correspondence. Not only does the Shepherd portray its protagonist Hermas as lacking bodily autonomy while being exchanged between divine actors, but the text also calls on God’s enslaved persons to purchase other enslaved people who are imagined to be their physical property (e.g., as houses, fields) when they arrive in God’s city.

The introduction sets the scene at the catacombs of San Gennaro in Naples, where our only early Christian fresco from the Shepherd of Hermas is painted on a tomb wall. I lay out the thesis and roadmap for the book, namely, that the Shepherd crafts obedient early Christian subjects within the ancient Mediterranean discourse of enslavement. A brief overview of the Shepherd’s content is provided, as well as regarding its popularity and transmission history across the ancient, late ancient, and medieval worlds. I especially note how the Shepherd became a pedagogical tool in late antiquity, and that the Shepherd’s teachings are even placed in Jesus’s own mouth by some late ancient writers, heightening the stakes for understanding how enslavement is utilized in a text used to shape Christian thought and practice for centuries after its composition. Also provided is a brief introduction to slavery in antiquity to situate the reader, as well as outline some of the major influences on my approach to reading the text, especially womanist translational theory and Chris de Wet’s concept of doulology.

In this chapter, I set the stage for understanding how the Shepherd conceptualizes God as an enslaver and the role of the holy spirit in the maintenance of the enslaved–enslaver relationship. I begin by demonstrating how the Shepherd portrays the holy spirit as a somatic entity sent by God that dwells within the bodies of God’s enslaved persons and is called “the enslaver who dwells within you,” who is capable of influencing behaviors, reporting back to God, and leaving the body if frustrated. The human body itself is imagined to be a porous entity in which various spirits, including the holy spirit and other passion-causing spirits, can dwell. I explore how the Shepherd portrays the body of God’s enslaved persons as a vessel with a limited amount of space, within which spirits compete for room and control and upon which God’s enslaved are encouraged to act obediently in order to remain under the purview of the enslaving holy spirit.

The final chapter explores the problems of agency and conformity among the enslaved at both individual and communal levels. I situate the Shepherd among ancient Mediterranean writers who understood enslaved persons to function as extensions of their own personae, as well as in conversation with Africana, feminist, postcolonial, and slavery studies on the agency of enslaved and possessed individuals. I suggest that God’s enslaved persons, as possessed instrumental agents of God, are imagined to be empowered by the enslaver to take particular actions and acquire particular virtues that contribute both to their enslaved obedience and their salvation. I then turn to the construction of a tower, the most lengthy visionary account in the Shepherd. Placed alongside Vitruvius’s On Architecture and Sara Ahmed’s scholarship, I argue that the Shepherd portrays the bodies of the enslaved as (ideally) uniformly shaped pieces of a monolithic ecclesiastical whole. Being “useful for the construction of the tower” is made manifest by how the various stones are shaped, reshaped, or rejected from being used to build a tower that is said to represent both God’s house and the Christian assembly itself.