Origins of the Black Atlantic (Rewriting Histories)

Between 1492 and 1820, about two-thirds of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were Africans. With the exception of the Spanish, all the European empires settled more Africans in the New World than they did Europeans. The vast majority of these enslaved men and women worked on plantations, and their labor was the foundation for the expansion of the Atlantic economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Until relatively recently, comparatively little attention was paid to the perspectives, daily experiences, hopes, and especially the political ideas of the enslaved who played such a central role in the making of the Atlantic world. Over the past decades, however, huge strides have been made in the study of the history of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world. This collection brings together some of the key contributions to this growing body of scholarship, showing a range of methodological approaches, that can be used to understand and reconstruct the lives of these enslaved people.

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'This excellent set of essays gathered and introduced by Laurent Dubois and Julius Scott will become a classic of its kind -- useful to scholars, teachers, and readers of history as long as we want to understand the world of race and class we live in.'

― Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History

'Any course on Atlantic revolutions would benefit from this anthology. It provides an important counter-weight to more Euro-centric accounts of the Age of Revolution by showing how enslaved people understood and re-imagined their role within the societies that had enslaved them.'

― John D. Garrigus, author of Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue

'Laurent Dubois and Julius Scott have put together an up-to-date collection of the most interesting literature on the formation of the Black Atlantic, which could easily form the core of a course on the subject. They have been particularly careful to find literature that reveals the dynamic nature of Afro-Atlantic culture and its engagement with the political and cultural dimensions of the Americas.'

― John Thornton

'An extraordinarily rich and skilfully assembled collection, and well suited to classroom use, this represents a valuable contribution to an increasingly sophisticated field.' – Journal of American Studies

Laurent Dubois is Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author of A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804.

Julius Scott is a Lecturer in the History department at the University of Michigan. He is also part of their Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.