This thesis examines the Royal Navy’s efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade between 1807 and the mid-1860s. The role of the West Africa squadron in detaining slave ships embarking from the West African coast was instrumental in the transformation of Britain’s profile from a prolific slave trading nation to the principal emancipator of enslaved Africans. The wider framework for naval suppression encompassed international law, official policy and diplomacy, but at the operational frontline of the campaign were naval personnel. This history of suppression shifts the emphasis from political and diplomatic contexts to the experiences of naval officers tasked with the delivery of the anti-slavery message, positioning them at the heart of Britain’s abolitionist campaign on the West African coast. Through officers’ narratives and personal testimonies – found in letters, journals, report books and diaries – it examines the reactions, relations and encounters of these agents of change, and their contributions to the exchange of information crucial to Britain’s anti-slavery efforts in West Africa. The personal, social and cultural experiences of naval officers provide insight into attitudes towards the key themes of Britain’s abolitionist mission, namely anti-slavery beliefs, burgeoning empire, and national identity. In their responsibilities to confront the human trauma of the slave trade and liberate enslaved Africans, officers engaged with humanitarian ideals and anti-slavery rhetoric. These ideas had significant impact on how they conceived their identity as Britons and the nature of their duty as naval personnel, but could be undermined by their disgust at the conditions of service on the West African coast. Officers were also at the forefront of Britain’s broader anti-slavery assault on shore, intended to reform West African society to European, ‘civilised’ standards. In their encounters with slavery and African peoples, officers faced numerous concerns, including concepts of racial identity, paternalism and the true meanings of freedom.

This study was prompted by the need to fill a gap within the labour historiography of the English speaking West Indies. From the 1950s, the number of works dealing with Black and Asian indentured servitude have been rapidly increasing. In this upsurge of interest in West Indian history the study of white indentured servitude, the basis of the early plantation economy, remained largely unworked. This study attempts to evaluate the importance of white indentured labour to plantation development in Barbados, the most valuable colony within the English mercantile system of the seventeenth century. The use of indentured labour, which was recruited from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland for commodity production in the first half of the century, provided the basis for the gradual transition to Black slavery. This process is analysed to show the development of the ideologies of race and colour, and their application to the division of labour in the West Indies. The transformation of the English institution of indentured servitude, with its pre-industrial, moral, paternalistic superstructure, into a market system of brutal servitude, is a central theme of the work. The contradictions of white labour in a Black slave economy and society, at the levels of ideology and entrepreneurial economic thinking, are analysed to show the failure of the white servants to entrenched themselves in the West Indies, either as peasants or as a proletariat. Finally, the study explores the West Indian dimension of the European labourers' experience in the New World, where the majority found a life more oppressive and fruitless than that which they had left behind.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in History." Includes bibliographical references (p. 395-456).

This dissertation looks at slavery in early Mesopotamia (ca. 3200-1595 BC) in the longue durée and establishes theoretical foundations for interpreting the data preserved in the extant sources. Rather than attempting to define slavery, the forms the social institution took from proto-history into the historical era of early Mesopotamia are contextualised, while identifying the broader social changes which might explain the non-linear evolution of the practice. After considering the difficulty of defining the term ‘slave’ in relation to early Mesopotamia in general and numerous attempts to approach the problem, this work moves beyond definition, attempting to historicise slavery. To achieve this, slavery in early Mesopotamia is considered in the high points of the record in relation to key diagnostic features. The acquisition of slaves is studied alongside the release of slaves, demonstrating the numerous ways people in early Mesopotamia could be reduced to some form of bondage or slavery, while there remained relatively few means by which a person could experience upward movement out of slavery, opportunities which were reduced further for foreign and houseborn slaves. The following discussion of the economics of slavery seeks to place the question in an historical context of modern scholarship before assessing the motivations, benefits, and risks of owning slaves in early Mesopotamia. After this chapter which looks at slavery from the perspectives of the elite, the subsequent chapter attempts to move beyond the elite bias of the documentation to understand history from the bottom, by studying flight and the related means of coercion. By considering the ways in which runaways were pursued and the risks members of the lower stratum community were willing to take for a change in status, the discussion presents a way forward to understanding slavery in early Mesopotamia. These diagnostic features of slavery reveal a traceable non-linear evolution of slavery in early Mesopotamia.

This paper seeks to explain the existence of wealthy and socially influential slaves in the fourth century BCE at Athens, Greece. I describe what went on at Athens from the late seventh century until the early third century and show that transformation in the land to labor ratio combined with cultural, legal and political changes led to a period of time where slaves acquired wealth and power. First, changes in the land to labor ratio at a time when Athens was going through vast political change led to a culture where it was socially unacceptable for a free Athenian to work for another free Athenian. Slaves could then work in sectors unavailable to free Athenians, which led them to gain wealth and eventually societal power.