Chapter 6 is concerned with the role of the West India Regiments in maintaining and expanding Britain’s African empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The particular focus is the 1873-74 Anglo-Asante War, the first colonial campaign to capture the British public’s imagination and one which made a household name of commanding officer Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833-1913). The Asante were among Britain’s most consistent antagonists in the imperial theatre and held a long-standing place within European discourses of African ‘savagery’. Warfare against them was cast as an interracial struggle. However, the involvement of the West India Regiments complicated this picture and the chapter compares the depiction of the regiments’ soldiers with that of Britain’s Asante enemies and local Fante allies. It also considers the military role allotted to the West India Regiment soldiers as the campaign developed, including the fact that they were used as baggage-handlers for the White regiments during the final march on Kumasi and were not permitted to enter the Asante capital. This shows that the way in which their constrained martial image, such that they were neither White ‘soldiers’ nor African ‘warriors’, had consequences in the military field.

This chapter explores the impact of the Reformation on Jewish–Christian relations and the Protestant return to Hebrew Scripture. Documents show the beginnings of modernity and its offspring: toleration, emancipation and antisemitism.

This chapter surveys forms of status by which legal systems assign rights, obligations and capacities to various categories of person. Though such discussions have tended to restrict themselves to statuses recognized in Roman law (the hierarchical birth-based statuses that Maine contrasted with the contractualism of later Western systems), cross-cultural comparison requires a wider lens. Hence, the chapter covers status within the polity, official or military status, unfree or servile status, putatively ‘natural’ statuses, status in the family and status as member of a voluntary or professional association. Special attention is given to the mechanisms involved in change of status, and to status as a factor in legal penalties. It is proposed that, in systems of religious law (which often operate parallel to civil law in a legal-pluralist context and across borders), status within the ‘ecclesial’ polity is comparable to civil status (citizen, resident alien, etc.) within a territorially defined polity.

This chapter discusses Slavic literary micro-languages, language forms typically used by Slavic minority groups with (to some extent) established traditions of literacy. In the past, these languages were often dealt with under dialectology, with a special note that a given dialect has a written form. The status of those minority languages is often disputed, in the sense that there are discussions – often politically oriented – on whether to give them the status of languages of their own, or of dialects of a language X, or some status between the two (with or without a written form). This chapter presents geographical distribution, status, and other characteristics of these languages and goes on to generalize their status and features into broader, theoretically relevant patterns.

The introduction begins with the crisis of republicanism in France today. It asks what republicanism is for the French and why exclusion lies at the center of its crisis. It then presents the characteristics of French republicanism (in particular, its universalism and its emancipatory dimension), its place in the broader republican tradition, and in the neo-republican revival. Finally, it introduces the theoretical paradoxes that led republicans to justify exclusionary practices despite their endorsement of emancipation.

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.

Chapter 2 confronts the gender, race, and class composition of state violence in the American Revolution. General Washington attempted to exclude women and non-White men from the military - moves that foreshadowed similar exclusions from military work and political participation in the United States. At the same time, the work, at times violent work, of marginalized individuals in and around American military establishments was essential. The army also needed money - and the interdependence of state finance, state violence, and military discipline was key. Failed finances led to deplorable army condition. Thirty percent of Continental Army soldiers rebelled in January 1781. Washington was infuriated by the protest, but he was even more upset when political leaders negotiated with the men. Disobedient soldiers, he believed, responded best to physical chastisement. Much like recent work that highlights how American nationalism was forged in violent acts against Loyalists, so too this chapter shows how it was forged in military discipline: violent acts against Continental Army soldiers.

The centrality of slavery in the North and South, Black resistance, and the greatest shift in the domestic use and formation of federal force form the foundation of Chapter 7. Here, the likes of Robert Smalls, an enslaved boat pilot in South Carolina, the hundreds of thousands of Civil War slave fugitives, Union and Confederate military leaders, President Abraham Lincoln, President Jefferson Davis, and others address the consequences of one question: should the United States deploy its forces, its violence, in support of slaveholders or freed slaves?

Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.

This chapter analyzes Black writing from the leadup to the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, works that shored up the literate voice long denied to enslaved people, and explores how the pre-emancipation essay served to determine freedom. The century’s standout Black orator, Frederick Douglass, became a print phenomenon, advancing a strong first-person voice that spoke for the conscience of the nation. However, it was left to younger writers to tackle the meaning of freedom at a time when emancipation seemed like a hollow promise. The works of activist journalist Ida B. Wells highlight the synergy between investigative reporting and essay writing during the period. The chapter concludes by comparing the prose works of two towering figures: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. The ideological split in their views on civil rights is registered in their different writing styles, with Washington stressing action and advocacy and Du Bois embracing introspection and contemplation. Between them, these figures register the suite of oratorical, journalistic, and literary resources that will be bequeathed to twentieth-century practitioners of the African American essay.

This chapter focuses on the essayistic contribution of women writers before the American Civil War. Antebellum women exploited the essay’s openness to write in formats that conformed approximately to conventions of men’s writings but that took shape in host genres, frequently letters, or in generic hybrids as they negotiated gender prescriptions. Conduct manuals, schooling, and published lecture-essays advised on composing essays yet encouraged cultivation in cognate genres of conversation and the familiar letter, social “accomplishments” ceded as the sole literary “arts” in which women might excel. Conversational culture also spawned associations in which women circulated manuscripts and could offer access to periodical publishers in need of materials for audiences growing as literacy spread. Publishing compositions became almost a rite of passage for middle-class white women. Poverty and racist practices posed obstacles to education, publication, and fame for other women who nonetheless composed essays and published outside mainstream venues. They figure among those who produced an extensive body of essays whose range, merit, and impact remain inadequately acknowledged.

Old Age and American Slavery reveals how antebellum southerners adapted to, resisted, and failed to overcome changes associated with age, both real and imagined, and the extent to which these struggles intersected with wider concerns over control, exploitation, resistance, and survival in a slave society. In doing so, it asks future scholars to rethink static hierarchies among Black and white southerners, to incorporate age into their work as a category of analysis and as a relation of power, and to address the contingent and contested networks of solidarity and support among enslavers and enslaved in the American South. Age shaped slavery, both as a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, in crucial ways. Albeit never on equal terms, both Black and white southerners had to grapple with the realization that “old age [was] creeping up on me so fast,” and their efforts to do so were entwined in the wider struggles within and against slavery. The ravages of time came for all, and the conclusion reiterates how recognition of this fact shaped the dynamics of American slavery, and the lives of enslaved people and enslavers alike.

Intergenerational disputes shaped by white southerners’ hopes to profit from slavery did not end with the death of an enslaver. These contests became particularly virulent when the matter revolved around posthumous manumissions, and this chapter shows how elderly enslavers who sought to emancipate enslaved people in wills had their actions challenged by rivals who utilized the discourse that conflated old age with weakness, both of body and mind, to diminish their reputation and deny their mastery. The aging process had public and political ramifications in a slave society built on dominance and mastery, and a focus on emancipation and age serves as a fitting end to this study which underlines the wider importance of age as a vector of power in the antebellum south. Contests over emancipations underscore how far understandings of aging as a period of declining force led to conflict between white southerners looking to rise at another’s expense. White enslavers looked to their aged peers who sought to free their slaves as reduced in authority and status, and as figures whose claims to mastery must be usurped for the good of both private and public interests associated with slavery.

The introduction to The Jewish Imperial Imagination provides an overview of Baeck’s life, and of the book’s ventral argument. It shows how the Jewish Question – the discussion about emancipation and the place of Jews in modern society – was intertwined with other questions throughout the nineteenth century, including the questions of colonialism and imperial expansion. Instead of focusing on the nation-state, it shows the need to look at the imperial context. This is valid for Baeck’s thought, and German-Jewish thought more broadly. Finally, the introduction offers a theoretical framework for such analysis by developing the concept of “Jewish imperial imagination” as a way of moving beyond a simple dichotomy of ascribing to or resisting hegemonic narratives.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was a key turning point in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The most successful rebellion by enslaved people in world history, it prompted the first direct colonial representation in a European legislature and created the second independent state in the Americas. Broad-based liberation from slavery won on the battlefield, ratified with the emancipation decrees of 1793-1794, and secured with the 1802-1803 war of independence, served as a continuing reminder of the possibility of emancipation while pressing key questions about the proper structure of post-slavery reconstruction. Haiti was also the first independent state in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the first in the Western Hemisphere to be led by people of African descent. Haitian approaches to governance also paralleled French, Latin American, and U.S. debates about monarchy and authority, liberty and empire, and popular sovereignty and social order. Meanwhile, white U.S. and French responses to Haiti’s successes prompted many revolutionaries in those countries to curtail their ideas about the universalism of revolution.

The introduction problematizes the interpretation of postemancipation Brazil from the perspective of slavery’s abolition in May 1888 as a temporal watershed to explore the making of race, nation, and citizenship for people of African descent and their intersection with policing, crime, and punishment. It reframes the history of nineteenth-century Brazil through the lens of policing freedom, which reckons with the systematic implementation of criminal justice reforms that defined the terrain of freedom and citizenship for racialized Brazilians of African descent while slavery thrived in Brazil. It brings attention to the significance of the penitentiary in incubating changes in labor relations in nineteenth-century Brazil and its deployment as a site for the racialization of the poor, while anchoring these local developments within a broader global transformation of the labor regime of the Atlantic World by historians of the “second slavery.”

The introduction begins an exploration of abolitionist jurisprudence and the judges who practiced it. It explains the difference between emancipation and abolition and the way the book uses and builds on existing abolitionist theory. It maps the books argument: that legacies of slavery survive in private law, which modern abolitionists have missed.