This collection addresses some of the injustices associated with modern European politics. It begins by addressing the evils of conquest, of Christian oppression and the crusades. Then follows a series of poems denouncing the human debasement and the immorality of slavery. Nationalism is decried. Some European defenders of peace and justice are cited, including Bartolomé de Las Casas, Fénelon, and Montesquieu. Their contribution to a more just history of humankind, described here as a natural history of humankind, is acknowledged. Prominent historical figures such as Vasco de Gama, Afonso de Albuquerque, Hernán Cortés, and Francisco Pizarro are condemned for their acts of conquest. A model of perpetual peace based on universal fairness, humaneness, and active reason is put forward as an alternative to that offered by Kant. On this basis, several practical dispositions to peace are given. The damaging effects of a history based on illusions of progress are described, and, with James Burnett, Lord of Monboddo, as an example, a non-teleological history is promoted. The collection ends with an appeal to true Christianity, which is seen as dictating the good of all humanity.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

This chapter analyzes the “Negro Plot” of New York in 1741, in which numerous black slaves and free people, as well as Catholic whites, were accused of conspiring with and corrupting others to commit a series of arsons in New York City over a bitterly cold winter and amid the threat of war. The chapter shows how corruption accusations surrounding the plot were “promiscuous,” in the sense that, as embedded in the colonial politics of the day, accusations made in terms of corruption escalated to increasingly implausible targets, even as they served to legitimate unlikely accusations. I show that this very promiscuity linked with the construction (and disintegration) of political narratives and official careers and was tethered to moralized visions of social order.

This chapter explores how the Declaration of Independence was drafted and ratified. Congress created and assigned the task of drafting a declaration of independence to a committee of lawyers. When the draft went to the Congress, lawyers like Edward Rutledge had their chance to weigh in. The draft document and the final version was a legal document designed to place rebellion on a legal foundation. Jefferson later recalled that his draft of the Declaration of Independence merely recombined ideas that had long been discussed, and terminology long adopted, by Congress. The Declaration assumed independence, otherwise it would have had no foundation. Following this logic, as the members did, surely Jefferson among them, the Declaration was simply stating the reasons – a justification like the Declaratory Act of 1766, by which Parliament explained its authority over the colonies – for an event already transpired. The ringing elaboration of the rights of mankind, various borrowings from John Locke, echoes of natural law, and the language of prior resolves and declarations were not really pertinent to a declaration for the independence of a continent, but make sense in the more limited framework of Virginia constitutional change.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

This chapter considers the afterlives of slavery in the Indian Ocean through Mauritian writer Shenaz Patel’s Le silence des Chagos (2005), about the expulsion of the inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago from their islands in the wake of late twentieth-century Indian Ocean militarization. Images and narratives circulating in the global media often portray the suffering of Chagossians as a human rights violation, abstracting the event from the particular legacies of slavery, colonialism, and anti-Blackness that continue to weigh on the displaced community. By contrast, Le silence des Chagos tells the story of their expulsion by adapting Chagossians’ testimonies into a novelistic form. Patel’s testimonial fiction constructs a repository of images that enables a sensory and subjective experience of the past. As a composite of these images, the exilic consciousness uncovers Chagossians’ most recent experiences of exile as an extension of the racialized violence in the past. The novel remaps the Indian Ocean enabling a position to critique geopolitical networks of power in the region and identify convergences with Black diasporic accounts of Atlantic crossings.

This chapter describes the close links between labor institutions in Britain and its colonies. It shows how the Masters and Servants Acts and the Poor Laws were transformed across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, giving rise first to indentured servitude and then to slavery. Differences were important, however, not only between the Atlantic and Asian possessions, but also within each colony. The differences will be explained, as will the gap between the British solution (more coercion in the colonies than on the mainland) and the Russian way (more coercion in the core than in the periphery).

Economic growth in France was effective in the eighteenth century; it was linked to that of agriculture, proto-industry and international markets. As in Russia and partly in Britain, it was a labor-intensive path of growth. Sugar also played an important role in the Caribbean, probably more so than in Britain because of the limitations of the domestic market in France. Consequently, the Revolution and the loss of Saint Domingue and other colonies had a devastating effect on France, at least until the mid nineteenth century, when finance and the Second Industrial Revolution, along with luxury goods, helped to revive the economy.

This chapter discusses the labor institutions in the consolidation of the Russian Empire: not only serfdom, but also slavery, war captivity and military conscription. It is shown that in contrast to the Western Empire, coercion was more pronounced in the Russian core than in the colonies. Analogies and differences between the colonies in the steppes and the occupation of Poland and Ukraine are detailed. Political, economic and legal reasons for the different outcomes are given.

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).

How did the abolition of slavery in the United States affect the fate of labor in the three empires examined here? It will be argued that the abolition of slavery in the United States led to a fundamental change in global capitalism. This change occurred not only in the terms already examined by Beckert (new supplies of cotton and forced labor around the world), but also in a new relationship between capitalism, labor and the state. It will be argued that the Second Industrial Revolution and the Great Transformation, as Polanyi called it, were the main outcomes of this process, although most historiographies of these topics have never linked these dynamics to the American Civil War.

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.