A New History of Slavery

Slavery in Europe and the Americas was not abolished by the enlightened popular movements. It was destroyed by the resistance and countless rebellions by the enslaved people. A New History of Slavery traces the institution of human bondage from antiquity to the present day, revealing how profoundly it has shaped global history and, above all, setting the record straight on how the horror of Atlantic slave trade was eliminated.

The story of slavery’s end has too often been told as a triumph of Christian morality or industrial progress. The factor that has often been almost completely erased from histories, is the role of the enslaved themselves. A New History of Slavery restores their agency. Through rebellion, sabotage, escape, and everyday acts of defiance, enslaved people relentlessly resisted their oppression. Across North America alone, more than 300 slave uprisings erupted, with many more in the Caribbean and roughly one in every tenth ship that sailed from Africa towards the America with a cargo of slaves. Every one of these thousands of rebellions was a declaration of humanity in the face of dehumanization.

A New History of Slavery forces everybody to ask, whether the 1801 and 1805 constitutions of St Domingue/Haiti were only footnotes of history, or whether they should be considered equal or even more important universal steps in humanity’s progress as the US constitution in 1776 and the French revolution in 1789.

Slavery is not a closed chapter of history. It is a deep, brutal wound whose scars still shape the world we live in. The issue has suddenly become more current and acute because even open and legalized slavery might make a comeback into the world via fundamentalist movements like Taliban and Boko Haram.