Jamestown and Plymouth serve as iconic images of British migration to the New World. A century later, however, when British migration was at its peak, the vast majority of men, women, and children crisscrossing the Atlantic on English ships were of African, not English, descent. Captives and Voyagers, a compelling study from Alexander X. Byrd, traces the departures, voyages, and landings of enslaved and free blacks who left their homelands in the eighteenth century for British colonies and examines how displacement and resettlement shaped migrant society and, in turn, Britain's Atlantic empire. Captives and Voyagers breaks away from the conventional image of transatlantic migration and illustrates how black men and women, enslaved and free, came to populate the edges of an Anglo-Atlantic world. Whether as settlers in Sierra Leone or as slaves in Jamaica, these migrants brought a deep and affecting experience of being in motion to their new homelands, and as they became firmly ensconced in the particulars of their new local circumstances they both shaped and were themselves molded by the demands of the British Atlantic world, of which they were an essential part. Byrd focuses on the two largest and most significant streams of black dislocation: the forced immigration of Africans from the Biafran interior of present-day southeastern Nigeria to Jamaica as part of the British slave trade and the emigration of free blacks from Great Britain and British North America to Sierra Leone in West Africa. By paying particular attention to the social and cultural effects of transatlantic migration on the groups themselves and focusing as well on their place in the British Empire, Byrd illuminates the meaning and experience of slavery and liberty for people whose journeys were similarly beset by extreme violence and catastrophe. By following the movement of this representative population, Captives and Voyagers provides a vitally important view of the British colonial world -- its intersection with the African diaspora. Captives and Voyagers traces the departures, voyages, and landings of enslaved and free blacks who left their homelands in the eighteenth century for British colonies and examines how displacement and resettlement shaped migrant society and, in turn, Britain's Atlantic empire. Alexander X. Byrd focuses on the two largest and most significant streams of black dislocation: the forced migration of Africans from the Biafran interior of present-day southeastern Nigeria to Jamaica as part of the British slave trade and the journeys of free blacks from Great Britain and British North America to Sierra Leone in West Africa. By paying particular attention to the social and cultural effects of transatlantic migration on the groups themselves and focusing as well on their place in the British Empire, Byrd illuminates the meaning and experience of slavery and liberty for people whose movements were similarly beset by extreme violence and catastrophe.

Jamestown and Plymouth serve as iconic images of British migration to the New World. A century later, however, when British migration was at its peak, the vast majority of men, women, and children crisscrossing the Atlantic on English ships were of African, not English, descent. Captives and Voyagers, a compelling study from Alexander X. Byrd, traces the departures, voyages, and landings of enslaved and free blacks who left their homelands in the eighteenth century for British colonies and examines how displacement and resettlement shaped migrant society and, in turn, Britain's Atlantic empire. Captives and Voyagers breaks away from the conventional image of transatlantic migration and illustrates how black men and women, enslaved and free, came to populate the edges of an Anglo-Atlantic world. Whether as settlers in Sierra Leone or as slaves in Jamaica, these migrants brought a deep and affecting experience of being in motion to their new homelands, and as they became firmly ensconced in the particulars of their new local circumstances they both shaped and were themselves molded by the demands of the British Atlantic world, of which they were an essential part. Byrd focuses on the two largest and most significant streams of black dislocation: the forced immigration of Africans from the Biafran interior of present-day southeastern Nigeria to Jamaica as part of the British slave trade and the emigration of free blacks from Great Britain and British North America to Sierra Leone in West Africa. By paying particular attention to the social and cultural effects of transatlantic migration on the groups themselves and focusing as well on their place in the British Empire, Byrd illuminates the meaning and experience of slavery and liberty for people whose journeys were similarly beset by extreme violence and catastrophe. By following the movement of this representative population, Captives and Voyagers provides a vitally important view of the British colonial world -- its intersection with the African diaspora. Captives and Voyagers traces the departures, voyages, and landings of enslaved and free blacks who left their homelands in the eighteenth century for British colonies and examines how displacement and resettlement shaped migrant society and, in turn, Britain's Atlantic empire. Alexander X. Byrd focuses on the two largest and most significant streams of black dislocation: the forced migration of Africans from the Biafran interior of present-day southeastern Nigeria to Jamaica as part of the British slave trade and the journeys of free blacks from Great Britain and British North America to Sierra Leone in West Africa. By paying particular attention to the social and cultural effects of transatlantic migration on the groups themselves and focusing as well on their place in the British Empire, Byrd illuminates the meaning and experience of slavery and liberty for people whose movements were similarly beset by extreme violence and catastrophe.

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead reveals how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. Michael Lawrence Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean. The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often of degree rather than kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives’ need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. It was in these urban slave communities—within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk—that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives.

This work explores a neglected aspect of the forced migration of African laborers to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of captive Africans continued their journeys after the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Colonial merchants purchased and then transshipped many of these captives to other colonies for resale. Not only did this trade increase death rates and the social and cultural isolation of Africans; it also fed the expansion of British slavery and trafficking of captives to foreign empires, contributing to Britain's preeminence in the transatlantic slave trade by the mid-eighteenth century. The pursuit of profits from exploiting enslaved people as commodities facilitated exchanges across borders, loosening mercantile restrictions and expanding capitalist networks. Drawing on a database of over seven thousand intercolonial slave trading voyages compiled from port records, newspapers, and merchant accounts, O'Malley identifies and quantifies the major routes of this intercolonial slave trade. He argues that such voyages were a crucial component in the development of slavery in the Caribbean and North America and that trade in the unfree led to experimentation with free trade between empires.

“[A] well-written exploration of the cultural and legal meanings of slave suicide in British North America . . . far-reaching, compelling, and relevant.” —Choice The history of slavery in early America is a history of suicide. On ships crossing the Atlantic, enslaved men and women refused to eat or leaped into the ocean. They strangled or hanged themselves. They tore open their own throats. In America, they jumped into rivers or out of windows, or even ran into burning buildings. Faced with the reality of enslavement, countless Africans chose death instead. In The Power to Die, Terri L. Snyder excavates the history of slave suicide, returning it to its central place in early American history. How did people—traders, plantation owners, and, most importantly, enslaved men and women themselves—view and understand these deaths, and how did they affect understandings of the institution of slavery then and now? Snyder draws on an array of sources, including ships’ logs, surgeons’ journals, judicial and legislative records, newspaper accounts, abolitionist propaganda and slave narratives to detail the ways in which suicide exposed the contradictions of slavery, serving as a powerful indictment that resonated throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world and continues to speak to historians today.

A revealing look at how antislavery scientists and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders’ scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines—from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology—to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor-saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor. While historians increasingly highlight slavery’s centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of slavery’s backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science, abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.