Slavery on the Periphery focuses on nineteen counties on the Kansas-Missouri border, tracing slavery's rise and fall from the earliest years of American settlement through the Civil War along this critical geographical, political, and social fault line. Kristen Epps explores slavery's emergence from an upper South slaveholding culture and its development into a small-scale system characterized by slaves' diverse forms of employment, close contact...

Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when...

In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these...

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

This Element shows that existing models of global slavery derived from sociology and modelled closely on antebellum American slavery being normative should be replaced a global slavery that is less American and more global. It argues that we can understand the global history of slavery if we connect it more closely to another important world institution - empires in ways that historicise the study of history as an institution with a history that changes...

Volume 3 of The Cambridge World History of Slavery is a collection of essays exploring the various manifestations of coerced labor in Africa, Asia and the Americas between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of the new nation of Haiti. The authors, well-known authorities in their respective fields, place slavery in the foreground of the collection but also examine other types of coerced labor. Essays are organized both nationally...