Chapter 5 addresses a major demographic puzzle concerning thousands of New York slaves who seem to have gone missing in the transition from slavery to freedom, and the chapter questions how and if slaves were sold South. The keys to solving this puzzle include estimates of common death rates, census undercounting, changing gender ratios in the New York black population, and, most importantly, a proper interpretation of the 1799 emancipation law and its effects on how the children of slaves were counted in the census. Given an extensive analysis of census data, with various demographic techniques for understanding how populations change over time, I conclude that a large number of New York slaves (between 1,000 and 5,000) were sold South, but not likely as many as some previous historians have suggested. A disproportionate number of these sold slaves came from Long Island and Manhattan.

Chapter 6 is a history of emancipation in New York that stresses the combined importance of economic and legal pressures on slavery in areas of Dutch control. The gradual legal freedoms slaves gained after the Revolution served as a foot in the door towards eventual emancipation. When slaves were routinely given the ability to choose new masters, to seek work on their own, and to make money on their own (with some repayment to the slave owners), they made a crucial first step into a world of freedom. Voluntary slave manumission and self-purchase emancipations were the result of a process of negotiating the terms of slavery’s demise one person at a time. This dispersed, on-the-ground struggle was shaped by statutory law, as others have recognized, but, arguably, it was the common law that demonstrated and determined New Yorkers’ changing attitudes about slaveholding. Courtroom decisions about interpreting the states’ laws on slavery guaranteed that the freedoms won through slaves’ negotiations with their enslavers would be protected by the courts.

This chapter addresses the contributions of the Black scholar W. E. B. DuBois, one of the most important American intellectuals of the twentieth century. His influence on historical scholarship through The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935) created a field in Black history. Souls of Black Folk introduced the idea of the “two-ness” of the Black experience in the United States, and lent the DuBois prestige he used as a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Black Reconstruction challenged the existing literature emphasizing the democratic achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. DuBois’ work inspired impressive later work on slave resistance, slave communities, slave religion, the slave family, and slave political awareness, as well as a reinterpretation of the Reconstruction era as one of expanding democracy. DuBois’ work stood as the basis for an anti-triumphalist interpretive thrust to American history, a thrust which persists down to the present day.

The chapter begins with an effort to explain the book’s starting-point in the Enlightenment. Moving from historiography to the events of the time, it begins by telling the tale of the essay competition on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Moses Mendelssohn came first, followed by Immanuel Kant. Mentioning that some 200 years later, the French post-modernist historian-philosopher Michel Foucault wrote yet another essay under the same title, in which he explicitly combined German and Jewish history, the chapter moves once again from historiography to history, concentrating on the biography of Moses Mendelssohn, especially on his repeated confrontation with the religious intolerance of some of his enlightened colleagues and then, stressing the ambivalence of the situation, typical of the German Enlightenment as a whole, the chapter ends with a comment on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.

This chapter concentrates on the painful zigzag course of Jewish emancipation during the first half of the nineteenth century. It begins with the Prussian legislation of 1812, with special emphasis on the attitude of the national-liberal movement in the various parts of Germany with regard to emancipation but also to other relevant issues of the time. It then tells of the emerging new kind of antisemitism at the time, beginning with Fichte’s ambivalence, through Wilhelm von Humboldt’s principled stand on equality and the outright antisemites, Fries and Rühs. The upheavals known as the Hep-Hep attacks on the Jews in 1819 are then briefly described, followed by quotes regarding ongoing integration in the following decades. Finally, the ambivalent situation of young Jewish scholars, who could now study at the best institutions, but were refused academic posts, is described through the biography of Eduard Gans and the changing fortunes of the young Heinrich Heine.

This chapter explores the interplay between Christian ambivalence and the law from the late Middle Ages to the period of emancipation. I begin my discussion by exploring how theological arguments about Jewish inferiority and difference entered both canon law and secular laws during the late medieval period, turning Christian supersessionism into Christian domination in the sociolegal realm. I also consider the increasing racialisation of Jewish difference through the purity of blood doctrine that solidified boundaries between Jews and Christians in Spain at a time when large numbers of Jews had converted to Christianity. Focusing on the crucial period of Jewish emancipation, I then trace how Christian ambivalence further seeped into the secular legal imagination, shaping ideas about what constitutes a proper ‘religion’ in the modern secular nation state. Throughout this chapter, I explore some of the shifting dynamics of conversion and assimilation and their intersections with the racialisation of Jewish difference, which cast doubt on the possibility of Jewish equality.

This chapter moves to the last phases of the French occupation in parts of Germany and to the improved position of the local Jews in these regions. It then concentrates on the efforts to legalize Jewish equality in the constitution of the new German Bund, discussed in a special committee at the Congress of Vienna, and within this context, it examines the position of a number of important German politicians towards Jewish emancipation. While Wilhelm von Humboldt’s liberal approach is relatively well known, but appears to be more complex on taking a closer look, it is interesting to observe the position of another Prussian politician, Karl August von Hardenberg, and especially that of the Austrian foreign minister chairing the entire congress, Metternich. Both were much more conservative, but still supported Jewish equality, insisting it must apply to Germany as a whole. In the end, this question remained undecided, like so many other issues relating to the planned constitution, mainly because of the pressure from the presumably much more liberal bourgeoisie in the various cities of the new Bund.

This is the first of two chapters concerned with the Jewish practice of infant male circumcision. In this chapter, I trace the history of circumcision as a trope for Jewish difference in European Christian thought and consider its symbolic role in debates about the legal equality of Jews. Christian thinkers spent much time pondering Jewish circumcision and what it told them about the supposedly ‘carnal’, particularistic, and anachronistic nature of Jews. Apart from constituting a trope for what differentiated Jews from Christians, the bodily sign eventually also became enmeshed in discussions about the possibility of Jewish emancipation where it offered a site to debate the fitness of Jews to become citizens. However, regardless of how much Christians disdained circumcision, they mostly respected the Jewish right to circumcise and due to a curious twist of history, some Christian societies eventually even embraced circumcision themselves. More recently, circumcision has emerged as a human rights issue and I explore the role of Christian ambivalence in contemporary calls for a ban on the practice in the name of children’s rights and gender equality.

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?