Following a story from the Caribbean to the colony of Georgia through debates over the abolition of the slave trade and finally to the antebellum South, The Nature of Slavery demonstrates the pervasiveness of a groundless theory about climate, labor, and bodily difference that ultimately contributed to notions of race.

Following a story from the Caribbean to the colony of Georgia through debates over the abolition of the slave trade and finally to the antebellum South, The Nature of Slavery demonstrates the pervasiveness of a groundless theory about climate, labor, and bodily difference that ultimately contributed to notions of race.

Following a story from the Caribbean to the colony of Georgia through debates over the abolition of the slave trade and finally to the antebellum South, The Nature of Slavery demonstrates the pervasiveness of a groundless theory about climate, labor, and bodily difference that ultimately contributed to notions of race.

Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

This study of slavery focuses initially on the drastic revisions in the historical debate on slavery and the present understanding of ?the peculiar institution.? It gives a concise explanation of the nature of American slavery and its impact on the slaves themselves and on Southern society and culture. And it broadens our understanding of the debates among historians about slavery; compares Southern slavery with slavery elsewhere in the New World; and shows how slavery evolved and changed over time?and how it ended. Peter Parish examines some of the important recent works on slavery to identify crucial questions and basic themes and define the main areas of controversy.