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Department of History

Bibliography

Scanned chapters are available via the Library Course Extracts for matriculated students here.

A key book to familiarise yourself with (we have an electronic copy at the library):

  • Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011

Primary Sources:

There is lots of potential to base a dissertation on this module as well as your primary source-based essay. Before you decide on a topic for either of these, you should familiarise yourself with the available primary sources. Because of the availability of primary sources in English, some topics will lend themselves much better to a dissertation than others.

Many of these sources will also serve you well for long essays, and you should consider incorporating them where appropriate.

Enslaved narratives, oral histories, and (auto)biographies:

Barnet, Miguel. Biography of a Runaway Slave, by Esteban Montejo, translated by Jocaster Innes. London: Bodley Head, 1963 [and many subsequent editions]

Juan Francisco Manzano, The Life and Poems of a Cuban Slave, ed. Edward J Mullen, 2014 [e-book at library]

Law, Robin, and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. The Biography of Mahomma Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. New Jersey: Marcus Wiener, 2001.

Rubiera Castillo, Daisy. Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century. Translated by Ann McLean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Oral history/ music/ song:

Cangoma Calling: Spirits and Rhythms in Brazilian Jongo Slavery Songs, edited by Pedro Meira Monteiro and Michael Stone. This is a fascinating collection of recordings made in the coffee plantation region of Vassouras, Brazil, in the 1940s by Stanley and Barbara Stein These jongo songs reflect the vital oral heritage of the last enslaved generation in Brazil. The book, transcriptions of the songs and translations, and the songs themselves, are all online.

Memories of Captivity, 2005 English subtitles, LABHOI, UFF, Brazil [documentary made by team of historians at Universidade Federal Fluminense, on the basis of oral testimonies with descendants of enslaved people in rural Rio de Janeiro; this one is based on memories of slavery, abolition, and the trade]

A Present Past: Afro-Brazilian Memories in Rio de Janeiro. 2011, English subtitles; LABHOI, UFF, Brazil) [documentary made by team of historians at Universidade Federal Fluminense, on the basis of oral testimonies with descendants of enslaved people in rural Rio de Janeiro; this one is based on memories of the illegal slave trade]

Jongos, calangos and folias: Black Music, Memory and Poetry (2007, English subtitles; LABHOI, UFF, Brazil) [documentary made by team of historians at Universidade Federal Fluminense, on the basis of oral testimonies with descendants of enslaved people in rural Rio de Janeiro; this one is based on traditions of dance and song]

The transatlantic slave trade: essays, estimates, data, African names:

  • The Transatlantic Slavery Database: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces Constantly being updated, this database is the result of collaboration between many historians. It provides the most definitive detailed information about records of slaving voyages and individual slave journeys, as well as estimates of numbers trafficked and a set of essays about the trade and how to use the database. Highly recommended for any quantitative aspects of your study.

Visual culture:

Enslaved daily life, law and legal struggles, family life, punishment, rebellion and resistance:

  • Conrad, Robert E., ed. Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983 [print copy in the library]
  • García, Gloria. Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth Century Cuba, translated by Nancy L. Westrate. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. [e-book at library] [This is a unique, extensive translated compilation of documents from Cuba's National Archives in Havana that offers the potential for analyses of slave life in towns and plantations, legal culture, punishment, rebellion, resistance and a range of other matters. Highly recommended.]
  • Digital Aponte website, NYU. Explores the life and times of Jose Antonio Aponte, a free carpenter of colour, member of the militia regiments, and alleged conspirator in 1812. http://aponte.hosting.nyu.edu/
  • Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, eds. Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo (Hackett, 2009) [compilation of translated primary sources and commentaries - mostly 1812 and before but nonetheless useful for our purposes]

Black Newspapers:

Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960, eds. Paulina Alberto, George Reid Andrews, and Jesse Hoffkung-Garskof (CUP, 2022). English translations of more than one hundred articles published in Black newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay from 1870 to 1960, annotated with contextual explanations

Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing:

There is lots of mileage in an essay or dissertation based on travel writing. This is a particular 'outsider' vision of American slave societies, providing a wealth of info, albeit from an often Eurocentric and outsider standpoint. Many of these are available online through, for example, Google Books.

For Cuba, a great compilation of travel writing is:

Examples among a wealth of travel writings are:

  • Agassiz, Louis, and Mrs Agassiz. A Journey in Brazil. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
  • Gallenga, Antonio Carlo Napoleone. The Pearl of the Antilles. London: Chapman and Hall, 1873.
  • Hazard, Samuel. Cuba with Pen and Pencil. Hartford, Connecticut, 1871.
  • O’Kelly, James. The Mambi-Land, or, Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1874.
  • Ward Howe, Julia. A Trip to Cuba. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860.

See the Mirror of Race website: http://www.mirrorofrace.org/index.php For images, exhibitions and critical interpretation, including essays by historian of slavery Maria Helena Machado and others (in English) on Louis Agassiz’s time in Brazil.

For some leads on Brazil, try also the following authors (approximate dates in brackets):

  • James Mawe (1812)
    Henry Koster (1817)
    Robert Southey (1819)
    Maria Graham (1824)
    George Gardiner (1846)
    James Wetherell (1860)
    James C Flether & Daniel P Kidder (1866)

For West Africa, you could look at:

  • Bowen, Central Africa. Adventures and Missionary Labors in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa, from
  • 1849 to 1856. (1857; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969)
  • Hugh Clapperton. Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo, to which is added The Journal of Richard Lander from Kano to the Sea Coast, Partly by a More Eastern Route (1829; reprinted, London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966)
  • William H. Clarke, Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland, 1854–1858, edited by and intro. J. A. Atanda (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1972)
  • Samuel Johnson The History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, 1921

Memoirs written by British officials who were involved in slave trade suppression in Cuba: These are quite widely available:

Madden, Richard, The Island of Cuba [Madden also translated and published the poems of liberated slave Francisco Manzano, listed elsewhere in the bibliiography]
Turnbull, David, Travels in the West

Other starting-points for online sources:

British diplomatic correspondence on slavery and the trade:

For those who are able to get there in person during their final year, the National Archives in London hold very extensive materials available on Latin America/ Caribbean /slavery/ slave trade/ emancipation; consular records; records of the British Mixed Commissions in Havana and Rio de Janeiro.

Many of these diplomatic and parliamentary records on Britain’s role in suppressing the slave trade are also accessible online (e.g. most of FO84, relating to British attempts to suppress the slave trade to Cuba, has been digitised). They contain a wealth of first-hand information about the British attempts to suppress the trade, and about the methods of illegal trading used both internationally and locally. There is plenty of material here that could make a good dissertation. For example:

Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Boa Vista relating to the Slave Trade, January 1, to December 31, Class A. London: R. G. Clarke, 1825.

• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Boa Vista relating to the Slave Trade, January 1, to December 31, 1844. Class A. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1845.

• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Boa Vista relating to the Slave Trade, January 1, to December 31, 1846. Class A. London: William Clowes & Sons, 1847.

• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Cape Verde Islands and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and Naval Officers relating to the Slave Trade, April 1 1848 to March 31, 1849. Class A. London: Harrison and Son, 1849.
• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Cape Verde Islands and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and Naval Officers relating to the Slave Trade, April 1, 1850, to March 31, 1851. Class A. London: Harrison and Son, 1851.

• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Cape Verde Islands and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and Naval Officers relating to the Slave Trade, April 1, 1851, to March 31, 1852. London: Harrison and Son, 1852.

• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Cape Verde Islands and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and Naval Officers relating to the Slave Trade, April 1, 1854 to March 31, 1855. Class A. London: Harrison & Sons, 1855.
• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Cape Verde Islands and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and Naval Officers relating to the Slave Trade, April 1, 1855 to March 31, 1856. Class A. London: Harrison & Sons, 1856.

• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Cape Verde Islands and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and Naval Officers relating to the Slave Trade, April 1, 1856 to March 31, 1857. Class A. London: Harrison & Sons, 1857.

• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Cape Verde Islands and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and Naval Officers relating to the Slave Trade, April 1, 1857 to March 31, 1858. Class A. London: Harrison & Sons, 1858.

• Correspondence with British Commissioner at Sierra Leone, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Jamaica, Loanda, and Cape Verde Islands and Reports from British Vice-Admiralty Courts and Naval Officers relating to the Slave Trade, April 1, to December 31, 1860. Class A. London: Harrison & Sons, 1860.

• Correspondence with British Ministers and agents in Foreign Countries and with Foreign Ministers in England Relating to the Slave Trade, April 1 1858 to March 31, 1859. Class B. London: Harrison & Sons, 1859.

• Correspondence with British Ministers and Agents in Foreign Countries and with Foreign Ministers in England relating to the Slave Trade, January 1 to December 31, 1864. Class B. London: Harrison & Sons, 1865.

Other Translated Collections of Primary Sources

  • Barnet, Miguel. Biography of a Runaway Slave, by Esteban Montejo, translated by Jocaster Innes. London: Bodley Head, 1963 [and many subsequent editions]
  • Chomsky, Aviva, Barry Carr and Pamela María Smorkeloff, eds. The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
  • Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho, eds. Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil: Correspondence 1880-1905. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2009.
  • Conrad, Robert E., ed. Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
  • García, Gloria. Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth Century Cuba, translated by Nancy L. Westrate. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. [e-book at library]
  • Katharine J McKnight and Leo J Garofalo, eds. Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009.
  • Law, Robin, and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. The Biography of Mahomma Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. New Jersey: Marcus Wiener, 2001.
  • Levine, Robert, and John Crocitti, eds. The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
  • Joaquim Nabuco, Abolitionism, trans. by Robert Conrad (1977)
  • Rubiera Castillo, Daisy. Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century. Translated by Ann McLean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
  • Shnookal, Deborah, and Mirta Muñiz, eds. The José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas. Ocean Press, 1999.

Secondary Sources

General: introductory works on Atlantic slavery and abolition:

  • Bergad, Laird W. The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
  • Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.,1998
  • Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1988.
  • Cottrol, Robert J. “The Long Lingering Shadow: Law, Liberalism and Cultures of Racial Hierarchy and Identity in the Americas.” Tulane Law Review, 76:11 (2001): 11-79.
  • Curtin, Philip. The African Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
  • Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.
  • _______. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.
  • ________. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford, 2006.
  • Degler, Carl N. Neither White nor Black: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1971.
  • Drescher, Seymour. From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999.
  • Engerman, Stanley. Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives (Baton Rouge, 2007)
  • Graham, Richard, ed. The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
  • Heuman, Gad, and James Walvin, eds. The Slavery Reader. Routledge, 2003.
  • Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York, 1994.
  • Marquese, Rafael, and Tâmis Parron. Slavery & Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790-1850. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016.
  • Omohundro Institute of early American History and Culture, “The Bloody Writing is Forever Torn: The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins, Effects and Legacies.” Two films produced following an international conference in Elmina, Ghana, in 2007, to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade. The University Library has a copy.
  • Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011.
  • Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York: Knopf, 1947.

Concepts: “Atlantic world,” “second slavery,” “diaspora,” space, place, mobility:

  • Ardener, Shirley, Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981
  • Barnes, Trevor J., and James S. Duncan, eds. Writing Worlds: Discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape. London: Routledge, 1992.
  • Rood, Daniel Brett. “Plantation Technocrats: A Social History of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830-1865.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2009. Introduction and Chapter Three: “Mapping an Atlantic ‘Now’: Technicians of Space-Time in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830-1865.”
  • Akerman, J.R., ed. The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
  • Bohls, Elizabeth A., Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770-1833. CUP 2017.
  • Elsner, Jas, and Joan-Pau Rubiés. Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel. Reaktion Books, London, 1999
  • Finch, Aisha K. Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-4. University of North Carolina Press, 2015 [e-book @Library]
  • Godlewska, Anne, and Neil Smith, eds. Geography and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
  • Lambert, David. “Taken Captive by the Mystery of the Great River’: Towards an Historical Geography of British Geography and Atlantic Slavery.” Journal of Historical Geography, 35 (2009): 44-65.
  • Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994.
  • Schmidt, Benjamin. “Mapping an Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English North America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54:3 (July 1997): 549-78.
  • Tomich, Dale W. “The Second Slavery: Bonded Labour and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century Economy,” in Rethinking the Nineteenth Century, ed. Francisco Ramírez (Stanford, 1988), 103-17.
  • ________. “Atlantic History and World Economy: Concepts and Constructions.” Protosociology, 20 (2004): 102-121.
  • Tomich, Dale W., and Michael Zeuske, eds. “The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World Economy, and Comparative Microhistories,” parts 1 & 2, special editions of Review: Journal of the Fernand Braudel Centre, 31:2 (2008) and 31:3 (2008).
  • Piper, Karen. Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
  • Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, [1992] 2008.
  • Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London 1993
  • Stoler, Ann, and Frederick Cooper, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. University of California Press, 1997
  • Women and Geography Study Group. Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997

  • Atlantic and internal slave trades:

Adderley, Roseanne Marion. New Negroes from Africa: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Barcia, Manuel. The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Trade. Yale University Press, 2020. [e-book @ library]

Bethell, Leslie. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Conrad, Robert E. World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

Curtin, Philip D. Migration and Mortality in Africa and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

Dorsey, Joseph C. Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815-1859. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

Eltis, David. “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Trade: A Reassessment.” William and Mary Quarterly, 58: 1 (2001): 17-47.

Eltis, David, et. al. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces [includes useful essays and estimates]

Dale T. Graden: "Slave Resistance and the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to Brazil in 1850," Historia Unisinos (Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil), 14:3 (Sept/Dec 2010)283-94. http://www.unisinos.br/publicacoes_cientificas/historia/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=124&menu_ativo=active_menu_sub&marcador=124

________. ________. “United States Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil, 1840-1858,” Afro-Asia , 35 (2007), 9-35. http://www.afroasia.ufba.br/edicao.php?codEd=88

________. Disease, Resistance and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014.

Johnson, Walter. The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

________. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Lovejoy, Paul. “Ethnic Designations of the Slave Trade and the Reconstruction of the History of Trans-Atlantic Slavery,” in Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, eds. Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman. London: Continuum, 2003.

Murray, David R. Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Needell, Jeffrey. “The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade in 1850: Historiography, Slave Agency and Statesmanship,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 33:4 (Nov. 2001): 681-711

Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History. London: John Murray, 2007.

Steinberg, Phillip. The Social Construction of the Ocean (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia, 17th to 19th Century, trans. Evelyn Crawford. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press,1976.

_______. Bahia and the West African Trade, 1549-1851. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1964.

Culture and society in the diaspora:

  • http://www.african-origins.org/about/
  • Castillo, Lisa Earl, and Luis Nicolau Parés. “Marcelina da Silva: A nineteenth-Century Candomblé Priestess in Bahia.” Slavery & Abolition, 31:1 (March 2010: 1-27.
  • Law, Robin, and Kristin Mann. “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: the Case of the Slave Coast.” William & Mary Quarterly, 56:2 (April 1999): 307-334.
  • Berlin, Ira. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53 (1996): 251-88.
  • Bilby, Kenneth M. True-Born Maroons. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008.
  • Caron, Peter. “Of a Nation which Others do Not Understand”: Bambara Slaves and African Ethnicity in Colonial Louisiana, 1718-60.” Slavery & Abolition, 18:1 (1997): 88-121.
  • Falola, Toyin, and Childs, Matt. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
  • Finch, Aisha K. Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-4. University of North Carolina Press, 2015 [e-book @Library]
  • Graham, Sandra Lauderdale. “Being Yoruba in Rio de Janeiro.” Slavery & Abolition, 32:1 (March 2011): 1-26.
  • Holloway, Joseph, ed. Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
  • Mann, Kristin, and Edna G. Bay, eds. Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil. London: Frank Cass, 2001.
  • Midlo Hall, Gwendolyn. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
  • Mintz, Sidney W., and Price, Richard. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon, 1992 [revised edition of 1976 essay “An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective”]
  • Morgan, Philip D. “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments.” Slavery & Abolition, 18 (1997): 122-45.
  • O’Toole, Rachel Sarah. “From the Rivers of Guinea to the Valleys of Peru: Becoming a Bran Diaspora within Spanish Slavery.” Social Text, 92, vol 25, no 3 (Fall 2007): 19-36
  • Price, Richard. First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
  • ________. To Slay The Hydra: Dutch Colonial Perspectives on the Saramaka Wars. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1983.
  • ________. Alabi’s World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
  • Soares, Mariza. People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Duke University Press, 2011.
  • Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
  • Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. CUP, 1998 (2nd ed.)

Geographies of “resistance”: the revolutionary Atlantic

Craton, Michael. Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean, Ian Randle, Oxford, 1997.

Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

________. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2005.

________, and John Garrigus. Slave Revolutions in the Caribbean 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

  • Finch, Aisha K. Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-4. University of North Carolina Press, 2015 [e-book @Library]
  • James, CLR. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, with an introduction by James Walvin. London: Penguin, [1938] 2001

Landers, Jane. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996 [3rd edition].

Scott, Rebecca, and Jean M. Hébrard. Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Gender, slavery and manumission:

Beckles, Hilary. Centering Woman: Gender Relations in Caribbean Slave Society. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999.

Cowling, Camillia. “Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in 1880s Rio de Janeiro.” Gender & History, 22:2 (August 2010): 284-301.

Cowling, Camillia. Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

________, eds. Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Colour in the Americas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Morgan, Jennifer L. Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Proctor III, Frank “Trey.” “Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 86:2 (2006): 309-36.

Scully, Pamela, and Diana Paton, eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Durham: Duke, 2005.

Shepherd, Verene, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, eds .Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. London: James Currey, 1995.

Wallach Scott, Joan. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 1053-75.

Abolition and post-emancipation:

  • Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1988.
  • Drescher, Seymour. From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999.
  • ________. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  • Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.
  • ________. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011.
  • Wood, Marcus. The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.

United States

  • Camp, Stephanie. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
  • Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. Oxford, 2005.
  • ________. “An “Abominable” New Trade: The Closing of the African Slave Trade and the Changing Patterns of U.S. Political Power, 1808–60,” William and Mary Quarterly, 66:4 (Oct 2009): 833-850.
  • Diouf, Sylviane A. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Du Bois, W. E. B. The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. Millwood, N.Y., 1973.
  • Freudenberger, Herman, and Jonathan B. Pritchett, “The Domestic United States Slave Trade: New Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21, no. 3 (Winter 1991): 447-478.
  • Gudmestad, Robert H. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge, 2003.
  • Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • ________. “Time and Revolution in African America: Temporality and the History of Atlantic Slavery.” Black Renaissance/ Renaissance Noire, 3:3 (2001): 84-101.
  • Franklin, John Hope, and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 131.
  • Guterl, Matthew Pratt. American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008
  • Horne, Gerald. The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: NYU Press, 2007).
  • Mason, Matthew E. “Slavery Overshadowed: Congress Debates Prohibiting the Atlantic Slave Trade to the United States.” Journal of the Early Republic, 20:1 (Spring 2000): 59-83.
  • McMillin, James A. The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783-1810. University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
  • Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders and Slaves in the Old South. University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
  • ________. “The Reputation of the Slave Trader in Southern History and the Social Memory of the South.” American Nineteenth Century History, 8:3 (2007): 247-271.
  • Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993

Brazil

  • Castilho, Celso T. Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

  • Collins, Jane-Marie. “Úteis a si e à sociedade: or a brief guide to creolisation in nineteenth-century Brazil: black women, mobility, marriage and markets in Salvador da Bahia (1830-1888).” European Review of History (Special Issue: Slavery, Citizenship and the State), 16: 3 (2009): 413-436.
  • ________. “Intimacy, inequality and democracia racial: theorizing race, gender and sex in the history of Brazilian race relations.” Journal of Romance Studies, 7:2 (2007): 19-34.
  • Conrad, ed. Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
  • Cowling, Camillia. “Negotiating Freedom: Women of Colour and the Transition to Free Labour in Cuba, 1870-1886.” Slavery and Abolition, 26:3 (December 2005): 373-87.
  • Drescher, Seymour. “Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 68:3 (August 1988): 429-60.
  • Ferreira, Roquinaldo. Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • Fischer, Brodwyn, and Keila Grinberg, eds., The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil. CUP, 2022.
  • Izeksohn, Vitor. Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State-Building in the United States and Brazil. University of Virginia Press, 2014.
  • Hawthorne, Walter. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • Naro, Nancy Priscilla. “Revision and Persistence: Recent Historiography on the Transition from Slave to Free Labour in Rural Brazil.” Slavery and Abolition, 13:2 (1992): 67-85.
  • ________. A Slave’s Place, a Master’s World: Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil. London: Continuum, 2000.
  • ________, ed. Blacks and Coloureds in the Formation of National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003.
  • Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, translated by Arthur Brakel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
  • Russell-Wood, AJR. The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808: A World on the Move. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Cuba

Barcia Paz, Manuel. Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

________. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.

________. The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Trade. Yale University Press, 2020. [e-book @ library]

Bergad, L.W. Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Castañeda, Digna. “The Woman Slave in Cuba during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.” In Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, eds. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, 141-54. London: James Currey, 1995.

Childs, Matt D. The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Cowling, Camillia. "Teresa Mina's Journeys: 'Slave-Moving', Mobility and Gender in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba," Atlantic Studies, 18:1 (February 2021): 7-30 [and see the other essays in this special edition on slavery and mobility in C19 Cuba]

De la Fuente, Alejandro. “Slave Law and Claims-making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited.” Law and History Review, 22:2 (Summer 2004): 339-67.

________. “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights: Coartación and Papel.” HAHR, 87:4 (November 2007): 659-92.

________ and Ariela J. Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Cambridge University Press, 2020. [e-book @ Library]

Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Funes, Reinaldo. From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492. UNC Press, 2008. Translated by Alex Martin.

García, Gloria. Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Documentary History, translated by Nancy L. Westrate. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Knight, Franklin. Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.

La Rosa Corzo, Gabino. Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Oppression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Paquette, Robert. Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown, Conneticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

Reid-Vázquez, Michele. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Colour in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Rood, Daniel B. The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labour, Race and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. OUP, 2017. [e-book at library]

Sartorius, David. Ever-Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. Duke University Press, 2013 [e-book @ Library]

Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labour, 1860-1899. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. [e-book at library]

Singleton, Theresa. Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation. University Press of Florida, 2015.

Tomich, Dale. “Anomalies, Clues, and Neglected Transcripts: Microhistory and Representations of the Cuban Sugar Frontier, 1820-1860,” in Small Worlds: Method, Meaning and Narrative in Microhistory, eds. James F. Brookes, Christopher R.N. DeCorse, and John Walton (New Mexico: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008), 225-246.

Emancipation and post-emancipation:

  • Beckles, Hilary McD. “Emancipation by War or Law? Wilberforce and the 1816 Barbados Slave Rebellion.” In Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916, ed. David Richardson, 80-104. London: Frank Cass, 1985.
  • Cooper, Frederick, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labour and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
  • Machado, Maria Helena. “From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of Jabaquara and the Problem of Citizenship in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 86:2 (2006): 247-74.
  • Scott, Rebecca J. “Exploring the Meaning of Freedom: Postemancipation Societies in Comparative Perspective.” HAHR, 68:3 (1988): 407-28.
  • ________. “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil and Louisiana after Emancipation.” American Historical Review, 99:1 (February 1994): 70-102.
  • ________. Degrees of Freedom: Cuba and Louisiana after Slavery. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005.

West Africa:

  • Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987)
  • Anderson, Richard, Abolition in Sierra Leone. Cambridge University Press, 2020. [e-book @ Library]
  • Bowen, Central Africa. Adventures and Missionary Labors in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa, from 1849 to 1856. (1857; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969)
  • Hugh Clapperton. Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo, to which is added The Journal of Richard Lander from Kano to the Sea-Coast, Partly by a More Eastern Route (1829; reprinted, London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966)
  • William H. Clarke, Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland, 1854–1858, edited by and intro. J. A. Atanda (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1972)
  • La Ray Denzer, ‘Yoruba Women: A Historiographical Study’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 27, no. 1 (1994)
  • Eugenia W. Herbert, Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
  • Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, edited by O. Johnson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966; first published 1921)
  • Richard Lander and John Lander, Journal of an Expedition to Explore the Course and Termination of The Niger with a Narrative of a voyage down that River to its Termination, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837).
  • Robin Law, The Oyo Empire, c. 1600-1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
  • P. C. Lloyd, ‘Osifekunde of Ijebu’, in Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1967),
  • Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
  • Onaiwu W. Ogbomo, ‘Esan Women Traders and Precolonial Economic Power’, in African Market Women and Economic Power: The Role of Women in African Economic Development, edited by Bessie House-Midamba and Felix K. Ekechi (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995)
  • Jake Subryan Richards, “Liberated Africans and Law in the South Atlantic, c.1839-1871,” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2020.
  • ________, "Anti-Slave Trade Law, 'Liberated Africans' and the State in the South Atlantic World, c.1839-1852," Past and Present, 241 (November 2018): 180-291
  • ________, "The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839-1870," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 62:4 (2020): 836-67.
  • Robert S. Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba. London: Methuen, 1976.