Thesis (M.A.)--Wheaton College Graduate School, Wheaton, IL, 2004. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-107).

No final do século XVIII, o poderio econômico da França repousava essencialmente sobre o comércio que o país realizava com as suas colônias. Graças, principalmente, ao açúcar e ao café de São Domingos, a \"pérola das Antilhas\", o comércio colonial francês atingia o seu auge no mesmo momento em que o país rumava para um processo violento de transformação de suas instituições. Ao mesmo tempo, havia, na metrópole, questionamentos a respeito da gestão de colônias cada vez mais povoadas de escravos, arrancados de seus lares para exercer o cultivo nas plantations. Nesse contexto, em 1788, formou-se a primeira organização antiescravista francesa, a Sociedade dos Amigos dos Negros. Sob a liderança de alguns dos principais personagens do período revolucionário, como Brissot, Clavière, Mirabeau, La Fayette e Condorcet, essa sociedade de nobres, homens de letras e financistas procurou introduzir a questão do tráfico negreiro na ordem do dia dos debates políticos que marcaram a Revolução francesa. Procuramos, no presente trabalho, retraçar a atividade desses homens, cuja moderação contrasta com o rumo que a questão colonial tomou, a partir da grande insurreição dos escravos em São Domingos, de agosto de 1791. Acreditamos que o estudo dos limites do discurso antiescravista do final do século XVIII e da política colonial das assembleias revolucionárias traz consigo ensinamentos sobre os limites da própria Revolução francesa. / At the end of the 18th century, France\'s economic power relied foremost on trade with its colonies. Thanks to the sugar and coffee produced in Saint-Domingue, the \"pearl of the Antilles\", French colonial commerce reached its peak at the very moment the country was moving toward a violent process of radical institutional transformation. At the same time, it was a moment of interrogations about the administration of colonies whose slave population was in continuous increase. In this context, in 1788, the first French antislavery organization was created, the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Under the leadership of some of the key-characters of the revolutionary period, like 7 Brissot, Clavière, Mirabeau, La Fayette and Condorcet, this society of nobles, intellectuals and financiers endeavored to bring the issue of slave trade to the political debate that marked the French Revolution. We intend, with this study, to retrace the activities of those men, whose moderation of principles was in contrast with the turn of events that marked the colonial space, with the slave insurrection of August 1791, in Saint-Domingue. We hope that, by approaching the limits of the antislavery program of the late-18th century and of the colonial policies of the revolutionary assemblies, this study might offer teachings on the limits of the Revolution itself.

This dissertation reveals the origins of one of early US history’s most frequently evoked concepts: the northern “free state.” Beginning in the colonial era and ending with the Civil War, “Slavery Is Slavery: Early American Mythmaking and the Invention of the Free State” follows two threads simultaneously: first, the changing meaning of the term “free state,” and, second, the politics of enslavement and freedom in New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, the three states whose relationship to slavery seemed most unsure at the Founding. Relying on the methods of conceptual history, this dissertation reveals that for the first several decades of US history, “free state” signified a self-governing, republican entity, and the phrase only came to be associated with slavery after around the year 1820. Even then, the exact geography it represented remained contested, especially in the lower Mid-Atlantic. The confluence of a developing free labor economy and growing northern antislavery sentiment combined to create the conditions for the “free state” to take on a new meaning—the one historians have inherited and continue to employ today.

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This dissertation examines the evolution of institutions and legal rules regulating and prohibiting the slave trade into a global regime for the regulation of international labor migration between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, the spread of anti-slavery norms increased Western demand for African and Asian contractual workers; but it also upturned labor recruitment networks in the Senegal River valley and the Pearl River delta, which relied on coercive practices that Western governments now prohibited. As a result, imperial powers, indigenous authorities, and labor-source communities competed to set and enforce new rules for the lawful recruitment of West African and Chinese laborers for Western enterprises. I argue that jurisdictional competition between these groups produced legal regimes that determined mobility and economic opportunity for Asian and African workers. As novel legal arrangements both facilitated and restrained African and Asian migration to worksites across the globe, labor-source societies in West Africa and China grew conscious of their shared existence within a Western-dominated world order and engaged in global debates over slavery, labor, and civilization. I trace the origins of these debates to two phenomena: the early modern global trade expansion and the subsequent emergence of the anti-slavery movement. These developments transformed political ideologies not only in Western imperial metropoles, but also in Sahelian West Africa and across the South China Sea. I also uncover African and Asian critiques of domination, discrimination, and inequality in international and imperial legal orders. This project thus elucidates how labor mobilization produced new identities and solidarities across Africa and Asia. It further reveals how the regulation of migration produced global disparities of wealth and sovereignty.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / In the following thesis I have attempted to illustrate words of a hundred years ago with appropriate photographs of present-day remains of an era. The years covered in the major sections are 1831 to 1848; the subject is slavery and abolition in New England. The Liberator was the most renowned antislavery paper. Selections from it form the text of the major part of this thesis. Complete bound editions of The Liberator may be found in the Boston Public Library, Main Branch, Copley Square. With the permission of the Supervisor I was able to photograph portions of the paper.

The British Unitarians, a "sect everywhere spoken against" said Joseph Priestley, were a small, highly educated, financially respectable, politically aggressive and articulate denomination, which exerted an influence far beyond what their numbers ordinarily would command. They possessed an unbounded enthusiasm for reform and took part in almost every movement for social justice, one of which was particularly attractive to them the antislavery movement. Sadly, much of what they wrote and tried to accomplish has been ignored by scholars. This study is the story of their involvement in the thirty years war against the "master sin of the world" andndash; American slavery. In eight chapters, the thesis focuses on the antislavery writings opinions, and contributions of the British Unitarians, particularly a group of abolitionist stalwarts called Garrisonians. It also describes their racial views as revealed in their writings and in their conduct towards black people; and it describes their attitudes towards the American Civil War. The thesis is based on extensive manuscript, pamphlet, and periodical material, much of which has not been previously utilized in historical and religious monographs. The thesis makes several observations. The British Unitarians in their antislavery activity were devoted to the common welfare of the human race, to racial tolerance, and to participation in reform as an ecumenical endeavor. Their motivations for antislavery reform in particular, and reform in general, arose out of a liberal theology which sought to prove its moral superiority; a minority status and consciousness which sought acceptance; a strange and surprising evangelical warmth (typical of only some Unitarians and alien to the denomination as a body) that fired an emotive drive against social evils; a capitalist ideology that believed in a liberating progress; a political philosophy that favored freedom, honesty, and benevolence in government; a nationalism within an internationalism that proclaimed England's manifest destiny to be the protection and encouragement of human liberty at home and abroad; and a familial attachment to the members of their faith and reformers of their persuasion that was mutually supportive and rewarding. This study seeks to prove that the nineteenth century Unitarians are worthy of scholarly investigation and analysis, and suggests that the study of their motivation, commitment, vitality, and perseverance in the fight against American slavery can enhance our understanding of the role of religion in reform.

Thesis (M. A. in History)--Vanderbilt University, May 2010. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

PhD (English) / Department of English / See the attached abstract below