The Many Faces of Slavery - by Lawrence Aje & Catherine Armstrong (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

While the plantation accounts for 90% of slave ownership and experience in the Americas, its centrality to the common conceptions of slavery has arguably led to an oversimplified understanding of its multifarious forms and complex dynamics in the region. The Many Faces of Slavery explores non-traditional forms of slavery that existed outside the plantation system to illustrate the pluralities of slave ownership and experiences in the Americas, from the 17th to the 19th century.

Through a wide range of innovative and multi-disciplined approaches, the book's chapters explore the existence of urban slavery, slave self-hiring, quasi-free or nominal slaves, domestic slave concubines, slave vendors, slave soldiers and sailors, slave preachers, slave overseers, and many other types of "societies with slaves." Moreover, it documents unconventional forms of slave ownership like slave-holding by poor whites, women, free blacks, Native Americans, Jewish Americans, corporations and the state. The Many Faces of Slavery broadens our traditional conception of slavery by complicating our understanding of slave experience and ownership in slavery-practising societies throughout Atlantic history.

Review Quotes

Specialists will no doubt benefit from a discussion and debate over Klein's model and its various permutations upon emancipation. The short studies and clear presentation of methodology in the other essays of The Many Faces of Slavery enable the volume to serve as good introductory reading for undergraduate students.
H-Slavery

The plantation looms large in the historiography of American slavery. Yet, by focusing so heavily on plantation slavery, scholars have largely neglected numerous other forms of bondage ... The Many Faces of Slavery-an edited collection of 14 short chapters dedicated to different aspects of non-plantation slavery-is therefore a welcome addition to the historiography of American slavery.
Histoire sociale/Social History

This valuable study belongs in all academic libraries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.
CHOICE

About the Author

Lawrence Aje is Associate Professor of United States History at Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France.

Catherine Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in American History at Loughborough University, UK. She is the author of Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century (2007) and, along with Laura M. Chmielewski, The Atlantic Experience: People, Places, Ideas (2013).