This dissertation tells the story of the abolition of chattel slavery in Colombia, currently the country with the third largest population of African descent in the Western Hemisphere (after the United States and Brazil). In Colombia, as in the vast majority of Latin American nations and the northern United States, the abolition of slavery occurred through a gradual emancipation law. Enacted in 1821 in the aftermath of the Wars of Independence against Spanish colonial rule, this law banned the international slave trade, established local civic councils to manumit “deserving” slaves, and included a Free Womb law that declared the children of slave mothers to be born free, yet bonded them to their mothers’ masters until the age of adulthood. My project unravels the struggles over freedom and bondage during this protracted process of gradual emancipation in the households, courtrooms, streets, and gold mines of the Pacific Coast of Colombia, the region with the highest concentration of slaves and the gold mining center of the former Spanish Empire. "To The Mine I Will Not Go" fundamentally rethinks the nineteenth century project of emancipation by arguing that the freedom generated through the gradual abolition of slavery constituted a modern form of rule that paradoxically birthed new forms of racial domination while consolidating de facto slavery.

"The Science of Antislavery" explores the critical though rarely studied role scientists played in the early antislavery movement. It argues that scientists not only helped legitimize abolitionism but also helped create the myth that slavery was a backward institution. During the Age of Revolution (1770-1830), when antislavery societies first took root, abolitionism attracted many scientific supporters. Though their refutations of scientific racism are perhaps better known, they also made many arguments that went beyond race. Chemists argued that new chemical techniques would fertilize the soil more effectively, which would in turn reduce the need for slave labor. Botanists touted the natural environments of new British colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia, contending that they would make ideal free labor alternatives to Caribbean plantations. Geologists argued that the western American frontier, with its unique mineral deposits, was best suited to free white agricultural settlements rather than slavery’s expansion. Even by the 1830s, when the movement was taken over by a more radical, less elite multiracial coalition, scientific arguments continued to influence antislavery arguments. From the 1830s until the Civil War, antislavery supporters on both sides of the Atlantic argued that slaveholders’ alleged refusal to adopt new machinery was evidence of their backwardness. Today, as a new generation of historians demonstrate how modern slavery in fact was, The Science of Antislavery shows how the idea that it was somehow never modern came into being.

This study considers the social and economic lives of free women in Jamaica from 1760 to 1834. Throughout the period studied Jamaica was Britain's most important imperial holding. The colony's slave economy, driven by the labour of hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women, generated incredible wealth. Still, Jamaica was the deadliest place to live in British America. Due to the endemic nature of tropical disease and atrocious mortality rates, neither the enslaved population nor the white population maintained itself naturally prior to emancipation. However, an environment characterized by death and demographic crisis engendered heightened opportunities for women to take part in tropical enterprise and to shape the futures of their families. Inheritance norms were weakened by the omnipresence of death, precipitating more generous inheritance bequests for women and a greater role given to wives and daughters-both white women, and those of mixed-race descent-in tropical commerce. Additionally, as slave ownership was not limited by gender or race, free women of all races took part in the slave economy. Free women's visibility in the island's formal as well as informal economies, and the wealth accumulated by some, was unsurpassed in a British American context. However, in this slave society, free women's prosperity rested upon the exploitation and oppression of others. In contrast to familiar historical trajectories that have presented Caribbean participation in Atlantic markets of slavery and capital as male-driven ventures, this study argues that free women of all races were vital participants in the slave economy and principle beneficiaries of plantation profits. This project moves beyond previous studies on women in colonial Jamaica by revealing how women's enterprise and relations with one another shaped the nature of this economy and society, including the commercial, familial and kin networks that bound it together. In doing so, it enhances our understanding of this colony and the operation of race and gendered power within it.

In my dissertation, I explore the connection between cultural membership and moral responsibility. In particular, I consider what sorts of mitigating excuses, if any, are available to perpetrators of what we take to be serious wrong action due to their unique cultural circumstances. I utilize real-life case studies, and apply various philosophical theories of moral responsibility to these examples. One such theory--offered by Susan Wolf--suggests that these "cultural defendants" may not be responsible for their participation in morally wrong practices due to the possibility that they may have been rendered by their cultures unable to recognize and/or appreciate that these practices were in fact wrong. This would supposedly allow us to claim that they were not culpable for their resulting ignorance or for their morally wrong actions which resulted from acting in accordance with their (actually false) beliefs. I argue that this approach to understanding the relation between moral responsibility and cultural membership is seriously flawed, and provides us with counter-intuitive results about the case studies in question. Consequently, I next examine theories of responsibility which suggest that responsibility may be mitigated not because of an alleged inability to recognize the truth, but rather due to the alleged reasonability of the beliefs of the perpetrators. Lawrence Vogel and Neil Levy offer versions of this strategy. They argue that, because certain morally wrong practices (such as slavery) were endorsed by the societies of certain individuals, their resulting beliefs in the propriety of their actions were epistemically reasonable. It is argued that these persons should not be considered culpable for holding their actually false beliefs or for acting in accordance with them. I argue that the strategy is in many ways preferable to Wolf's inability thesis, yet it nonetheless suffers from ambiguity. The final portion of my project explores the connection between the epistemic status of a belief and a person's moral culpability for holding and acting upon it. I outline the grounds upon which the subjects in the case studies can be held morally culpable for their epistemic mistakes and for their failure to develop and exercise epistemic virtues.

This thesis examines directly the development of Catholic social teaching in respect of the rights and duties of the worker. Beginning with the Old Testament, the thesis compares the attitude of the Hebrew people as expressed in Scripture to those who performed the tasks associated with the crafts or with labour. This shows how the attitude of the Hebrews to workers, in comparison with the attitude of surrounding peoples, was ameliorated by their belief in a just God who spoke to them in Scripture and through the prophets. In its examination of the New Testament, the thesis extracts gospel references to the worker and extracts from the Epistles, particularly from the Pauline texts, on the subject. The changes in attitude to the worker as expressed in the New and Old Testaments are noted. Next examined are the writings of the Church Fathers and their application to the worker. It can be seen from this examination that the early Church Fathers, whilst not directly developing a body of teaching in respect of the worker, developed a philosophical platform for its later development. It will be shown how the teachings of the Church Fathers, in their application of teaching of Jesus in the Gospels to the prevailing attitudes of Roman society contributed to the further amelioration of the condition of slaves in the later Empire. When speaking of the worker in Greco-Roman society, one is in effect speaking about the institution of slavery. The thesis then discusses the further changes in attitude to the worker that followed the decline of imperial authority in the west. It examines the role of the Church and its teaching regarding the dignity of the human person and the place of work in the scheme of redemption, and how it had an ameliorating effect on the treatment of slaves in the various Barbarian kingdoms which arose in the west following the extinguishing of Roman authority. The thesis argues that it was the influence of Christianity which ultimately led to the evolution of the condition of slavery as it was known in the Roman Empire and Carolingian period, to that of the serfdom of the Middle Ages. Next discussed is the 'Guild System' of regulating and controlling the crafts. The Guilds were a society, in part co-operative but mainly composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self governing, and was designed to check competition between its members in order to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. The thesis examines how the Guilds functioned and explains why some Catholic writers such as Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton regarded the Guilds as an excellent example of the practical application of Christian principles to work and economics. The thesis then examines the effects of the Reformation and the rise of liberal capitalism from the Guild system and how they both contributed to its decline. Following the decline of the Guild system and the onset of liberal capitalism, society came to be divided into two classes, the capitalist class, and the proletariat. This thesis examines how this development occurred and the factors which contributed to it. It shows how the division of society into capitalist and proletariat, haves and have-nots, resulted in the development of a class war and the antagonism between capital and labour. The thesis shows how under the liberal capitalist system, the conditions of the working class came to resemble in the words of Leo XIII, 'a yoke, almost of slavery'. Next developed and analysed is the manner in which the antinomy between capital and labour gave birth to the philosophy of Marxism in 1848 following the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. It shows how the development of these two antagonistic classes was viewed by the Church as an aberration or distortion of the social order and how in response to the rise of the philosophy of Marxism, Leo XIII countered with his great social encyclical Rerum Novarum, promulgated on the 15th May 1891, which was to earn him the title of 'The Workers' Pope'. The thesis then deals sequentially with the social teachings and encyclicals of Popes Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. All of these Popes, in some way, expanded upon and developed the social teaching of the Church regarding the workers. In many ways it could be said that the later encyclicals have 'fleshed out' Rerum Novarum. During this period, numerous advances have been made in the fields of technology and there has been a considerable improvement in the conditions and wages of workers. In its consideration of the social encyclicals since Rerum Novarum, this thesis discusses the way in which the Popes have developed and expanded Catholic social teaching in respect of the workers as changes in technology and various structural changes to the financial system threw up new and complex challenges to the creation of a just social order in which the dignity and the rights of workers are fully respected. It is shown how the Popes since Leo XIII have confronted the injustices associated with these developments and detailed recommendations for action, some of which would be viewed by many as quite radical. Later in this thesis deleterious effects upon the rights of workers of global neo-liberal capitalism are identified. It is demonstrated that in the early years of the twenty-first century, there are already signs that some of the less desirable traits of laissez faire or liberal capitalism, are once again rearing their heads. This is seen in such developments as the 'hollowing out' of the middle class and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands. It is also seen in the slow but sure erosion of the working conditions of workers and in their level of remuneration. It is seen in developed countries, in the trend towards longer working hours and the increasing casualisation of the workforce. This thesis shows that in the context of the world economy, a gap continues to widen between the developed and undeveloped nations, whilst inequitable trade agreements tend to confine the developing nations to the status of providers of raw materials to the industrialised world, an inequity, which, more often than not finds itself imposed upon the working men and women of the developing nations in the form of long hours, low wages and poor conditions. It is a tenet of this thesis that the social teaching of the Church directly the challenges and confronts the philosophy of neo-liberal capitalism and its associated philosophy of globalism in respect of the attaining of a just distribution of the world's goods, the dignity of work and the mutual dependence of capital and labour.

<p>The intention with this essay is to examine the symbolic meaning of trees in Toni Morrison’s <em>Beloved</em>. Trees are repeatedly mentioned throughout the novel and in this essay the trees are claimed to carry various meanings. A main usage of tree imagery is argued to be in connection to the life and death struggles of the main characters. The relation between tree imagery and slavery, and the effects of this relation, is also analysed.</p>

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves. The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States. In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy. The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.

The intention with this essay is to examine the symbolic meaning of trees in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Trees are repeatedly mentioned throughout the novel and in this essay the trees are claimed to carry various meanings. A main usage of tree imagery is argued to be in connection to the life and death struggles of the main characters. The relation between tree imagery and slavery, and the effects of this relation, is also analysed.

Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River deals with European colonialism and the consequences of it. Crossing the River is a novel which embraces characters from colonized cultures as well as characters from colonizing cultures. Following a timeline that begins in 1752 and ends in 1963, the novel shows slavery in progress as well as what transpires in the aftermath of slavery        In this essay I will argue that Caryl Phillips demonstrates the complexity of colonialism and slavery in his novel Crossing the River; he approaches the two concepts from different perspectives and shows us that colonialism and slavery are complicated concepts. Caryl Phillips uses narrative to demonstrate the negative sides of colonialism and slavery, to show that the negative aspects of the two concepts can affect not only the colonized people but also the colonizing people.        Colonialism, in its traditional sense, is present in some of the novel’s episodes but slavery, in different forms, appears in all episodes. Nevertheless, all episodes in Crossing the River have a common origin; which Phillips reminds us about by using the relationship between plot and story. Diversity is an important theme in the novel. From a narrative perspective, Crossing the River has a diversity of narrators who tell their stories as well as other persons’ stories. There are female narrators as well as male ones; some narrators are known while other narrators are unknown. The ways the episodes are told are diversified. Some of the episodes follow a chronological line (“The Pagan Coast” and “Crossing the River”) while other episodes jump back and forth in time (“West” and “Somewhere in England”). The forms of narration are diversified, not only between the individual episodes but also within some of the episodes. Crossing the River plays with diversity in several layers. The structure of the novel is as diversified as the number of narrators, a diversity of ways of dealing with the main themes results in a diversity of fates for Phillips’s characters. Caryl Phillips combines structure with content to demonstrate that colonialism and slavery are problematic concepts: the negative consequences of the two concepts can, in different ways and in different degrees, affect colonized people as well as those responsible for colonialism.

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves. The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States. In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy. The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.