The commencement of the Victorian period in the 1830s coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery in the British colonies. Consequently, modern readers have tended to focus on how the Victorians identified themselves with slavery’s abolition and either denied their past involvement with slavery or imagined that slave past as insurmountably distant. “Willing Slaves: The Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery” argues, however, that colonial slavery survived in the Victorian novel in a paradoxical form that I term “willing slavery.” A wide range of Victorian novelists grappled with memories of Britain’s slave past in ways difficult for modern readers to recognize because their fiction represented slaves as figures whose bondage might seem, counterintuitively, self-willed. Nineteenth-century Britons produced fictions of “willing slavery” to work through the contradictions inherent to nineteenth-century individualism. As a fictional subject imagined to take pleasure in her own subjection, the willing slave represented a paradoxical figure whose most willful act was to give up her individuality in order to maintain cherished emotional bonds. This figure should strike modern readers as a contradiction in terms, at odds with the violence and dehumanization of chattel slavery. But for many significant Victorian writers, willing slavery was a way of bypassing contradictions still familiar to us today: the Victorian individualist was meant to be atomistic yet sympathetic, possessive yet sheltered from market exchange, a monad most at home within the collective unit of the family. By contrast, writers as diverse as John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot located willing slavery in a pre-Victorian history where social life revolved, they imagined, around obligation and familial attachments rather than individual freedom. Rooted in this fictive past, the willing slave had no individual autonomy or self-possession, but was defined instead by a different set of contradictions: a radical dependency and helpless emotional bondage that could nonetheless appear willing and willful, turning this fictional enslavement itself into an expression of the will. For Dickens, willing slavery provided an image of social interdependency that might heal the ills of the modern world by offering what one All the Year Round author described as “a better slavery than loveless freedom.” For novelists such as Brontë and Eliot who were no less critical of Victorian individualism, however, fantasies of willing slavery became the very fiction that their work aimed to dissolve. Chapter One argues that Frances Trollope’s groundbreaking antislavery fiction mirrors West Indian slave narratives in describing the slave plantation as coldly mechanical, and then extends this vision to portray early industrial England as an emotionally deprived social world similarly in need of repair. In the second chapter, I argue that Dickens responds to that emotional deprivation, and the replacement of traditional family bonds with what he describes as the “social contract of matrimony,” by producing a nostalgic account of willing slavery’s dependencies that draws on discourses of slavery found in British case law, where attorneys could exhort the slaveholder to “attach [slaves] to himself by the ties of affection.” The last two chapters argue that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda ironize this earlier nostalgia through female characters who grapple with the archetype of the willing slave. As their characters adopt and then discard the theatrical pose of willing subjection embodied by melodramatic heroines such as Dion Boucicault’s “octoroon” Zoe, Brontë and Eliot draw attention to the contradictions inherent to willing slavery, reframing it as a fantasy enjoyed exclusively by white Britons intent on shoring up the familial intimacies that helped preserve their social and economic dominance. These ironic reframings reveal a final paradox: though willing slavery helped create an analogy between African chattel slaves and British family members in fiction, this trope ultimately highlights the differences between the chattel slavery of Africans abroad, where the disruption of kinship bonds was a crucial method for exploitation and domination, and the imagined household subjection of English characters, rooted in the putatively binding qualities of family feeling.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Christine Gallant, committee chair; Paul Schmidt, LeeAnne Richardson, committee members. Electronic text (130 p. : ill., some col.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 20, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-130).

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2003. / Originally issued in electronic format. Includes bibliographical references. Also available via the World Wide Web.

My dissertation examines the transmission and establishment of the institution of slavery from medieval Iberia into the expanding Spanish Empire and its subsequent development. This involves understanding the dynamic interactions between the law, imperial institutions, slave owners, and the enslaved. I embarked upon this subject in response to a lacuna of historical knowledge of the transition and development of slavery as it moved between the Iberian Kingdoms and took root in the expanding Atlantic Empires. Without understanding the medieval background of imperial law it is impossible to understand the particular development of the institution of slavery in Spanish America. / History

This thesis reinterprets the letter to Philemon as a letter exhorting a new loving relationship for a slave by applying Vernon Robbins’ socio-rhetorical interpretation framework in light of the new institutional economics. Based on the runaway hypothesis, the letter has long been read as written by Paul to beg Philemon’s forgiveness for Onesimus. This thesis argues that the runaway hypothesis is based on a biased view of the slave trade, as well as incomplete consideration of the first century slave-master relationship and Pauline theological and ethical thought; therefore, it is not sufficiently justified. In turn, we argue that, instead of approaching the text based on an a priori hypothesis or the occasion of the letter, the framework of socio-rhetorical analysis provides a step-by-step method for producing mutual dialogue between different disciplines to analyze the letter. / Beginning with an analysis of the inner texture, we can see—through the word analysis, epistolary analysis, and rhetorical analysis—that a relational problem is the major concern of the letter. The analysis also demonstrates that there is a need to incorporate other textures to help them understand what problem is more likely for Paul to address and what ground he bases this on in the letter. Then, in chapter 3, we investigate the theological and ethical thought of Paul as an intertextual texture. With Paul’s theological thought in mind, reconstructed from his other undisputed letters, we can start to re-read Phlm through the structure of love. The intertextual texture helps us to see how Paul would see the problem and how to read the letter in light of Paul’s understanding of love. At the end of the chapter, we also see the need for a contextual analysis of Roman slavery to provide us with a more specific explanation of the slave-master relationship in light of the apparently contradictory practice and the complicated institutions that upheld Roman slavery. / In chapter 4, we first argue the relevance and applicability of NIE to help us to analyze Roman slavery. Then, we introduce the framework of new institutional economics (NIE), arguing that it can give a more comprehensive explanation of how ideology, law and institutions related to Roman slavery together served the economic interests of slave owners. These insights from NIE will be brought into the interpretation process in a socio-rhetorical framework. Based on the three textures— inner texture, intertexture, and economic texture—chapter 5 will show that the body of the letter exhorts a transformation of the relationship from economics to one of loving brotherhood, from master and slave to the household of the church. More specifically, we will demonstrate how Paul argues rhetorically both for a loving relationship and against the slave-master economic relationship. / 本論文是利用弗農羅賓斯(Vernon Robbins)社會修辭批判學(Socio-rhetorical interpretation)的框架，配合新制度經濟理論對羅馬奴隸制度分析的貢獻，對腓利門書提出一個新的解釋。本文的主旨是，腓利門書一方面不是一封為一個逃走奴隸而寫的求情信，相反是保羅根據他一貫的神學及倫理思維而向腓利門提出的一封勸告信，希望腓利門能根據過往保羅對愛的教導，修正他與阿雷西母的關係，由原來由經濟主導的奴僕關係，轉化成由愛主導的弟兄關係。 / 本文由文本研究層(inner texture)開始，透過字詞、書信格式及修辭分析，初步總結出，保羅在這信中的重心是要處理由阿雷西母回到腓利門的家所引申的關係衝突問題。但同時在這章亦指出，單從文本分析是不足的，要提出一個新的解釋，我們必須依賴另外兩個研究層來幫助分析文本所沒有提供的資料及保羅的立場。本文的第三章是文本互參研究層(intertextual texture)，這研究層主要是透過保羅其他另外六卷沒有爭議的書信來重構保羅在有關方面的神學與倫理思想，再利用這結構來幫助理解保羅如何理解信中隱含的問題，及解釋信中保羅提出的理據。在這章的結論我們亦會提出，我們需要另一個研究向度來幫助我們更深入地理解在第一世紀時的奴僕關係。 / 第四章是本論文其中一個主要的貢獻，就是利用經濟研究層(economic texture)，來幫助處理錯綜複雜的奴僕關係。本研究層主要是利用新制度經濟理論來分析在羅馬不同層次的制度中，如何互相配合地來幫助奴隸主人及整個社會，利用奴隸不同方面的經濟功用，來達致其最大經濟效益。本章首先論述利用新制度經濟理論來研究第一世紀奴隸制度的合法性，繼而利用該理論分析有關奴隸制度的正式與非正式的制度(formal and informal institutions)，當中包括當時的宏觀經濟狀況、哲學、法律制度及用來管理奴隸的主要合約條件。最後，我們會利用這章的分析來總結出當時由經濟考慮而主導的奴隸關係的主要特徵。 / 第五章是綜合二、三及四章的研究所得，對腓利門書的主要勸導部分進行重讀。本章首先會利用各章的結論重構保羅在這信要處理的問題，最後，會總結出這信是一方面透過勸導腓利門有關愛的關係的重要，另一方面針對當時根深柢固由經濟主導的奴僕關係，來勸導腓利門選擇改變他與阿雷西母的關係。 / Ip, Hon Ho. / Thesis Ph.D. Chinese University of Hong Kong 2014. / Includes bibliographical references. / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on 06, October, 2016). / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida State University, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-185).

Although human trafficking continues to be a growing problem around the world, there are scarce quantitative methodologies for evidence-based research because it is hard to gather reliable and comparable data on human trafficking. It is also difficult to track patterns in human trafficking on a regional or global scale because the victims are a vulnerable population. Using Datta and Bales conceptualization of modern slavery as the theoretical foundation, the primary purpose of this study was to establish a baseline measurement of trafficking predictors in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) as well as understand the statistical relationship between measurements of corruption, democracy, state of peace, and terrorism on the prevalence of contemporary slavery in the MENA region. Data were collected from the 2016 Global Terrorism Index, 2016 Democracy Index, 2016 Corruption Perception Index, 2016 Global Slavery Index, and the 2016 Global Peace Index and analyzed using multiple linear regression. The results of the study showed that corruption (p=.017) and state of peace (p=.039) were significant predictors for contemporary slavery in the MENA region. Whereas, terrorism and democracy were not significant predictors. The positive social change implications of this study include recommendations to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to create a central repository for the archival of human trafficking data. The creation of this archive will promote a more accurate accounting of a vulnerable population such as victims of trafficking, thereby increasing awareness of contemporary slavery among law enforcement, policy makers, and scholars.

This study argues that the so-called Sicilian Slave Wars are best understood as two differing instances of civic disquiet, social disorder and provincial revolt in Sicily, rather than as slave wars. Both events are reconnected to their Sicilian context geographically, politically and socially, and shown to have arisen from those contexts. This thesis is demonstrated in seven chapters. Chapter I reassesses the principle evidence for the kingdom established by the rebels in the first war: their numismatic issues. This evidence is best understood in the context of contemporary Sicilian numismatics and emphasises the Sicilian nature of the uprising. It is argued that the insurgency was contingent on the support of certain parts of the (free) Sicilian populace. Chapter II presents a reinterpretation of Diodorus’ text from a narratological point of view. The text is shown to be highly rhetorical and constructed with a view to demonise the leaders of the first war, Eunus and Cleon, through reference to Hellenistic stereotypes of femininity, cowardliness, magic and banditry. Chapter III argues that Diodorus’ explanation of the origin of the war is anachronistic and shows evidence of narratorial intervention and invention, thereby rendering his interpretation unreliable. Chapter IV considers Cicero’s Verrine Orations and shows that his engagement with the two wars in the text cannot be used as a reliable indicator of historical fact because of the text’s continual engagement with history. Chapter V argues that the two leaders of the so-called Second Slave War, Salvius/Tryphon and Athenion, were described using the same matrix of ideas that were present for Eunus and Kleon, for the same rhetorical and narratological effect. Chapter VI analyses Diodorus’ narrative of the origin of the war, and shows that Diodorus only provides a chronology of coincidental events, and beyond a single connective narrative line, demonstrates no connection between these events. Finally, Chapter VII suggests that the best context in which to understand this war is that of a general breakdown of social order on Sicily at the end of the second century B.C. caused by internal political problems in the cities of Sicily. Further, the insurgency led by Salvius/Tryphon and Athenion is shown to be only part of a broader crisis on Sicily that stretched from 106-93 B.C., part of an extended stasis for the island. In sum, I argue that the events typically referred to as the Sicilian Slave Wars are better understood through a focus on the historical contexts provided by the Hellenistic milieu in which the wars arose and the development of the Roman provincial system – rather than through the (preconceived) lens of slavery: instead of servile unrest, there was civic disquiet, social disorder and provincial revolt on Sicily in the 2nd century BC.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the narratives of five formerly enslaved men and women in order to understand how they used this literary form to insert their voices into the anti-slavery discourse. These slave narratives were important for the advancement of the anti-slavery movement, both because they provided glimpse into the realities of the system of slavery from individuals who experienced it, and because these texts questioned the very ideologies they were meant to uphold by highlighting their inherent racial prejudices. Ultimately, the slave narrative allowed these formerly enslaved authors to demonstrate their autonomy through the act of authorship.

An evil spiritual being, often called the devil, is an antagonist in several religious traditions. The religious ideology among enslaved Africans in America allowed for the devil to play an important, and sometimes ambiguous, role in their lives. Through the examination of conversion narratives, this research intends to argue that their conversion experiences are heavily impacted by and mirrored the reality of slavery. Therefore, the enslaved people’s accounts of the devil are influenced by the power and honor attributed to the institution of slavery. The data from gathered from the narratives will be interpreted through a poststructuralist lens of power and honor. Poststructuralist theories of power and honor will reveal the significance of the devil in conversion narratives and unearth an African American understanding of the devil that is created and sustained by the systems of power and honor in American slavery.