Skillfully weaving an African worldview into the conventional historiography of British abolitionism, Claudius K. Fergus presents new insights into one of the most intriguing and momentous episodes of Atlantic history. In Revolutionary Emancipation, Fergus argues that the 1760 rebellion in Jamaica, Tacky's War -- the largest and most destructive rebellion of enslaved peoples in the Americas prior to the Haitian Revolution -- provided the rationale for abolition and reform of the colonial system. Fergus shows that following Tacky's War, British colonies in the West Indies sought political preservation under state-regulated amelioration of slavery. He further contends that abolitionists' successes -- from partial to general prohibition of the slave trade -- hinged more on the economic benefits of creolizing slave labor and the costs of preserving the colonies from destructive emancipation rebellions than on a conviction of justice and humanity for Africans. In the end, Fergus maintains, slaves' commitment to revolutionary emancipation kept colonial focus on reforming the slave system. His study carefully dissects new evidence and reinterprets previously held beliefs, offering historians the most compelling arguments for African agency in abolitionism.

The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights. But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new forms of coercion and racial exclusion, even as newly freed slaves struggled for a fuller freedom. In 1802, the experiment in emancipation was reversed and slavery was brutally reestablished, though rebels in Saint-Domingue avoided the same fate by defeating the French and creating an independent Haiti. The political culture of republicanism, Dubois argues, was transformed through this transcultural and transatlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. The slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights.

In this thought-provoking history, Gilbert illuminates how the fight for abolition and equality - not just for the independence of the few but for the freedom and self-government of the many - has been central to the American story from its inception."--Pub. desc.

The Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Going beyond the selective emancipation of white adult male property owners, the Haitian Revolution is of vital importance, the author argues, in thinking today about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and, above all, human freedom. He explores the invention of universal emancipation both in the context of the Age of Enlightenment (Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) and in relation to certain key figures (Ranciere, Laclau, Habermas) and trends (such as the turn to ethics, human rights, and universalism) in contemporary political philosophy.

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution as both an islandwide and a circum-Caribbean phenomenon, Graham Nessler examines the intertwined histories of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti, and Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic. Tracing conflicts over the terms and boundaries of territory, liberty, and citizenship that transpired in the two colonies that shared one island, Nessler argues that the territories' borders and governance were often unclear and mutually influential during a tumultuous period that witnessed emancipation in Saint-Domingue and reenslavement in Santo Domingo. Nessler aligns the better-known history of the French side with a full investigation and interpretation of events on the Spanish side, articulating the importance of Santo Domingo in the conflicts that reshaped the political terrain of the Atlantic world. Nessler also analyzes the strategies employed by those claimed as slaves in both colonies to gain liberty and equal citizenship. In doing so, he reveals what was at stake for slaves and free nonwhites in their uses of colonial legal systems and how their understanding of legal matters affected the colonies' relationships with each other and with the French and Spanish metropoles.

"By examining how ordinary Virginia citizens grappled with the vexing problem of slavery in a society dedicated to universal liberty, Eva Sheppard Wolf broadens our understanding of such important concepts as freedom, slavery, emancipation, and race in the early years of the American republic. She frames her study around the moment between slavery and liberty - emancipation - shedding new light on the complicated relations between whites and blacks in a slave society." "Wolf argues that during the post-Revolutionary period, white Virginians understood both liberty and slavery to be racial concepts more than political ideas. Through an in-depth analysis of archival records, particularly those dealing with manumission between 1782 and 1806, she reveals how these entrenched beliefs shaped both thought and behavior. In spite of qualms about slavery, white Virginians repeatedly demonstrated their unwillingness to abolish the institution." "The manumission law of 1782 eased restrictions on individual emancipation and made possible the liberation of thousands, but Wolf discovers that far fewer slaves were freed in Virginia than previously thought. Those who were emancipated posed a disturbing social, political, and even moral problem in the minds of whites. Where would ex-slaves fit in a society that could not conceive of black liberty? As Wolf points out, even those few white Virginians who proffered emancipation plans always suggested sending freed slaves to some other place. Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 led to a public debate over ending slavery, after which discussions of emancipation in the Old Dominion largely disappeared as the eastern slaveholding elite tightened its grip on political power in the state." "This well-informed and carefully crafted book outlines important and heretofore unexamined changes in whites' views of blacks and liberty in the new nation. By linking the Revolutionary and antebellum eras, it shows how white attitudes hardened during the half-century that followed the declaration that "all men are created equal.""--BOOK JACKET.