Part I centers Italy in British heritage discourse, showing how nineteenth-century writers used Italy (especially Pompeii, Rome, and Florence) to redefine their own historical and political identities. Amid political resurgence and ongoing unification efforts, the long tradition in British writing of depicting Italy as culturally and politically dead faltered. In response to the Risorgimento, British writers deployed fractal and syncretism – two temporal forms that afford nonlinear historicisms. Rather than the timelines that locate Italy in a distant past, fractal and syncretism connect past and present. One result is a redefined political liberty that can transcend national, gender, class, and race boundaries, as I explore through forgotten transnational figures including the writer Susan Horner and the abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond.

Even after the soldiers of the West India Regiments helped to suppress enslaved uprisings in Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823), they continued to be objects of suspicion. This chapter examines the efforts that commanding officers and supporters of the regiments made to challenge such opposition by seeking to manage the image of their Black soldiers and portray them in a favourable light. What emerged was the ‘steady Black soldier’, an ambiguous racial-martial figure that was simultaneously soldierly yet passive. This theme is explored through both the predominant representation of the soldiers as standing ‘ready for inspection’ and the elision of any active military role. This image is placed in the context of wider debates about the figure of the Black subject that characterised the contemporaneous controversy over slavery and it will be argued that the steady Black soldier represents the military equivalent to the kneeling enslaved figure promulgated by anti-slavery advocates.

Amid epidemics, droughts, and a bourgeoning abolitionist wave in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Brazilian Empire internalized migration protocols long in the making. Crucial to the development of new migration policies was the Sociedade Central de Imigração (SCI), a new association midway between a corporation and a literary club. The SCI and its abolitionist members, which included conservative noblemen and republican professionals, synthesized the lessons learned by three generations of political elites, and avidly lobbied for reform policies pertinent to land surveying and distribution, naturalization, and immigration promotion. Dismissed by scholars as a bourgeois and largely failed experiment in immigration advocacy, the SCI in fact furnished the policy tools for the Brazilian government to counter German and Italian interdictions on migrations to Brazil, which, as the chapter demonstrates, had more to do with commercial and geostrategic concerns than with immigration issues themselves. Ultimately, the SCI laid the building blocks for the new Republican government to welcome exponentially growing cohorts of migrants despite the persistence of international prohibitions in Italy.

Social scientists recently claimed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is a racist text; that Darwin’s racism blinded him, impacting his science. Biologists and philosophers countered that Darwin’s work should be championed because it undercut slavery-justifying polygenism (independent origins for human races). Others extol Darwin for his emotional condemnation of slavery when he first encountered it on the Beagle voyage. This essay systematically explores Darwin’s views on human race expressed in Descent and then digs through a half-century of Darwin’s correspondence with prominent scientists to answer the question: what were Darwin’s views not just on the human torture involved in the enslavement process but on human race more broadly?

The Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 delineated territorial settlements, coronated several newly independent monarchs and resulted in an official declaration on the abolition of the slave trade, but it did not treat the issue of piracy. This paradox is the key concern of this chapter. Vienna’s Final Acts were the end product of these talks, and though they did not mention ‘Barbary piracy’, their conclusion would nevertheless have a great impact on the international treatment of this newly perceived threat to security. The years 1814–1815 were an important turning point because they initiated a period of transition. The congress created an international context in which North African corsairing could be reconceived as a threat to security. This new perception of threat hinged upon misconceptions of the supposed fanaticism and irrationality that allegedly characterised North African privateering. It also disregarded the long history of diplomatic and commercial contact between both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

This chapter explains how and why Topsy – a “little negro girl” featured in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – became a symbol of artificial life during the long wake of slave emancipation in the United States. It begins by recontextualizing Stowe’s abolitionist melodrama in relation to arguments about human–machine difference in the industrial North. Because the automated Black slave girl was a perfect foil to the autonomous white man, Topsy could critique slavery while affirming the race and gender hierarchies of white bourgeois society. Turning to the material history of plush “Topsy” dolls – the handicraft of enslaved women turned into factory-made commodities – the chapter argues that Topsy as doll gained its cultural power as a reaction to fears of Black autonomy in the South and white automatization in the North. It concludes by considering Topsy’s unruly afterlife in the “technopoetics” of Black modernism in the Jazz Age.

The conclusion opens with interwar debates on the deportation of women working in prostitution, highlighting how for many reformers, trafficking was a migration problem to be solved through migration controls. Rather than protecting vulnerable women, however, anti-trafficking policies that relied on exclusion and expulsion safeguarded the perceived vulnerability of national borders instead. The conclusion then turns to contemporary examples in which humanitarian efforts to protect “trafficking victims” serve as punishments instead, particularly if individuals are unable to rehearse the script of ideal victimhood, and embody its accompanying form of gendered sexual respectability. It closes with a discussion of French prostitution policy in the postwar period, including the abolition of regulationism in two stages, in 1946 and 1960; the domestic security law of 2003; and the criminalization of sex buyers (the “Nordic Model”) in 2016. In each of these examples, advocates framed the respective laws as humanitarian, progressive, and protective of sex workers. Yet all were efforts to moralize public space, promote law and order, and comply with a larger infrastructure of migration controls.

Around the 1880s, the issue of “white slavery” – the ostensibly coerced prostitution of young women – first emerged as a moral problem of international concern. Social reformers, journalists, politicians, and the public debated whether migrant women involved in prostitution had been trafficked, or if they willingly left their homelands for work in the sex trade. I show that trafficking discourse, framed in terms of coercion, passivity, and gendered moral reform, conceals the migration story at the heart of these journeys: most importantly, the search for better paying work, but also the quest for adventure and self-discovery. However, agency and exploitation are not mutually exclusive possibilities. Migrants’ lives unfolded on the spectrum between coercion and choice, and in the interstices of illicit and licit economies. This book seeks to explain why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of global prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice. It offers a provocative account of France’s role in modern world history: as an exporter of the theory and practice of state-regulated prostitution; of purportedly French sexual practices; and desirable or undesirable French women migrants, depending on point of view.

Britain had a substantial Atlantic empire during the era of the Atlantic Revolutions. Only some of their Atlantic colonies joined in the colonial rebellion that led to the creation of the United States. The end of the American Revolution signaled a new period in the history of the British Empire, but it was far from a period in which the Empire’s geographic center moved decisively to the East from the West. The British colonies in the Atlantic World that either remained or were acquired during the Atlantic Revolutions were vital parts of a changing geopolitical and economic order in which Britain solidified its global dominance in the period economic historians have termed the Great Divergence (when the West overtook the East in economic power). The British West Indies and Canada were central to the Atlantic Revolutions from the period of the Seven Years’ War until the end of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834. Expansion in the British Atlantic after 1783 showed how valuable West Indian colonies continued to be to British geopolitical and economic policies and how Canada was rapidly becoming a set of colonies that were developing into vibrant settler societies.

Populism’s use of democratic practices and sources of authorization to undermine liberal institutions is the latest incarnation of a much older pattern, one inherent to popular sovereignty. I compare historical moments in which the principles of democratic rule and liberalism have been in tension or even seemingly incompatible with each other, the nineteenth-century United Kingdom and United States. By the time democratization appeared in the UK, liberalism was firmly entrenched as a public philosophy, and British liberals accordingly sought to limit the authority of “the people” through exclusions and an insulated and empowered state. In America, a founding moment in the construction of a liberal tradition came after the principle of democracy had been established as a defining principle of the regime. Many of the activists in the abolitionist movement sought to secure liberal principles not by restricting popular influence but by expanding and redefining “the people” so that it would undergird a more liberal political community. Neither of these efforts was successful, but are useful for thinking through similar tensions today.

Adopting a sociological perspective, Chapter 1 examines the rise of the professional public moralist and situates early India reformism among concurrent campaigns such as transatlantic abolitionism, free trade, and aboriginal protection. It addresses the reformers’ acquisition of social and symbolic capital, the possibilities for “link-ups” between groups, and the controversies that inhibited cooperation. Agents of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, for instance, clashed with the reformers over their approach to the abolition of indigenous slavery in India and their connections to the heterodox American Garrisonians. Delving into these conflicts demonstrates that early advocates of “conservationist” reform were an embattled lot, contending with the obstructionism of a reactionary Company-state and the derision of detractors within the metropolitan philanthropic community as well.

This chapter seeks to illuminate the development of racialized subjectivities as an historical problem in nineteenth-century Brazil. It analyzes the letters and writings of the Afro-descendant engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças (1838–1898), with special attention to the role of racial silence in Rebouças’ personal diary and in the edited papers of his father, lawyer and statesman Antônio Pereira Rebouças (1798–1880). The self-narratives André Rebouças left to posterity are powerful testimony to the significance of transnational politics for universalist Black intellectuals in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In exploring them, this chapter illuminates the racialized subjectivization engendered by the stigma of slavery and portrays the ways in which its politicization was shaped by a collective transnational experience.

This chapter centers the liberated African Adelino Mwissicongo’s biography from slavery to apprenticeship and from apprenticeship to incarceration for theft in the context of the struggles for “full freedom” by liberated Africans between 1850 and 1864, the radical transformation of Rio’s urban economy and social landscape, and the discourse on vagrancy and criminality that distinctly identified free people of color and Portuguese immigrants as objects of police surveillance in the last decades of slavery in Brazil. The chapter places Adelino’s story in relation to the problem of petty criminality and poverty as Rio underwent a rapid demographic transformation that saw a significant decrease in its slave population to under 17 percent by 1872, according to the first national census. I argue that the penitentiary became complicit in constructing a pathologizing discourse that branded liberated African men and women as “incorrigible” by collecting and providing documentary support for the denial or concession of freedom certificates.

This chapter explores the history of Recife’s abolitionist newspaper O Homem and the bold racial politics of its founder, offering a fresh perspective on how the ferment of the abolition debates set in motion important shifts in racial subjectivities. Yet O Homem’s story calls attention to the important nineteenth-century history of racial silencing, which was an ideology and cultural process that shaped power relations. The paper’s founder, Felipe Neri Collaço, illuminated the racialized work that this ideology did in suppressing debates on hierarchy, politics, and, by extension, slavery. O Homem’s history also helps us better understand how the “breaking of this silence” sparked noticeable shifts in racial subjectivities, thus rewriting the racial narrative.

The conclusion clarifies the main contribution of the book, which is the seamless transformation of Brazil’s ex-slaves into a captive and criminalized population in the country’s evolving prison system, which defined the terms of freedom for the enslaved and free poor at the height of the slave economy. The author invites the reader to remember the trajectory of different individuals who lived and died within the walls of the Casa de Correção as part of a microglobal history of slavery and punishment in the Atlantic World. The chapter reaffirms that by the time Brazil abolished slavery in its territory in 1888, a robust police and prison system was fully operationalized to punish unruly individuals from the poor, slave and free, especially people of African descent, who violated the terms of freedom. It asserts that the difference in the prison population before 1888 and after was only the diversity of legal status of the convicts during slavery, not race; and that the penitentiary was an important site of racialization of the multiethnic poor as a criminalized underclass.

Focusing on the life trajectory of Brazilian engineer Teodoro Sampaio, this chapter discusses the possibilities for social transformation available to men of color during and after Brazilian abolition. Sampaio lived through a time when the dismantling of slavery coincided with a racialization of social status, justified by the postulates of scientific racism. His trajectory thus illuminates how an educated son of a freed mother could make his way through a society that was reinventing socio-racial hierarchies even as slavery lost its legitimacy. This chapter aims to elucidate the intricate network of relationships and endeavors engendered by a pardo, born on a large slave property, who managed to become an engineer and manumit his three brothers, who were enslaved on the same plantation where Sampaio himself was raised free. Based on Sampaio’s autobiographical texts, books, articles, and private correspondence – as well as on what his contemporaries wrote about him – this chapter will reflect on what we can learn from Teodoro Sampaio’s life about what it meant to be a free, lettered pardo man during the dismantling of Brazilian slavery.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This chapter provides an understanding of how an Anglo-Atlantic antislavery movement and the prospect of emancipation in the British West Indies unleashed a growing debate on its impact on the United States. This followed from a history of fears of foreign “moral contagion” on the issue of slavery, and similar domestic anxieties — including slave rebellion in Virginia and an emergent abolitionist movement. Highlighting anti-abolitionist riots in New York in 1833 and 1834, it situates these events within trepidations of national and racial boundary crossings that grew out of anxieties over British Emancipation in its Caribbean colonies and its influence on America.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book. It charts the origin of the antislavery concept of Jubilee and the concept of British Emancipation as a "mighty experiment." It discusses the major themes of the book as well as its influences, including historiographies of British slavery and empire, the post-emancipation Anglo-West Indies, as well as American slavery and abolitionism. It also lays out the methodologies utilized in the study and concludes with a summation of each chapter.