This chapter examines the effort against the establishment of the West India Regiments in the 1790s. The spectre of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was a constant presence and critics of the regiments frequently likened them to Haitian soldiers, formerly enslaved insurgents, Maroons and other ‘brigands’ that opposed the British across the Caribbean in this period. Yet, White West Indians were not opposed to the arming of African men per se but favoured the use of irregular ‘black shot’, a form of military service that remained constrained by the bonds of slavery. In this way, the chapter not only explores the deeply held prejudices and phobias that made the West India Regiments so feared but also the contradictions in White West Indian and broader pro-slavery thought revealed by attitudes to military service.

This chapter covers the story of three enslaved people who used various poisons to slowly murder their owner in colonial Massachusetts.

The introduction presents an overview of the book’s argument and the theoretical framework that guides the project. It also lays out the contributions the book will make to the historical literature of slave resistance. The argument is that enslaved women resisted slavery with lethal force and when they did so, their own ideas about injustice were a central motivation. A new Black feminist theory is introduced and outlined: the Black feminist practice of justice. The core tenets of this philosophy includes the women prioritizing their perspective and how they defined justice, understanding the stark lack of justice in the judicial system, Black women’s rationality and prior planning, proportionality, a concept of “just deserts,” and their resignation to accept their fates for exercising lethal force.

This chapter examines the case of a teenaged term slave named Cloe who used her hands to strangle her owners’ young daughters a week apart in rural early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.

This chapter examines the curious case of a group of enslaved people who used a featherbed to smother their owner to death in colonial North Carolina.

The French gained and lost a vast empire in the New World from the sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. Mercantilism, a set of economic and political practices based on the assumption of limited wealth, underpinned that empire. French explorers founded colonies in North America based on trade in furs and fish. Few French ever to wanted move to the empire throughout its history. The French lost almost all their North American empire by 1763, mostly to Britain. But its colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean exploited slave mercantilism as effectively as any in the world. Terror made possible rule by a small white population. The edifice supporting that rule cracked with the French Revolution, beginning in 1789. By 1791, the enslaved population risen, overthrown the slave system, and begun a bloody war of independence that produced the first anticolonial hero, Toussaint Loverture. In the end, the enslaved would win their war, and establish independent Haiti in 1804. Napoleon would find his schemes for a rejuvenated empire based in the Caribbean and the Louisiana territories thwarted. As the nineteenth century dawned, the French empire would need not just new lands, but new ideological foundations.

In 1801-1802 Napoleon dispatched the largest colonial venture of his reign to Haiti. His goal was to remove the famous revolutionary Toussaint Louverture from office and, possibly, restore slavery. But within two years, the remnants of Bonaparte’s once-proud army were evacuated in defeated, and Haiti declared its independence.

This chapter focuses on those Madagascar Youths sent to the neighbouring Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. This group has received scant attention in the literature although they constituted the second largest group of Madagascar Youths despatched abroad for training under British supervision in the two decades following the British capture of the island in 1810. They numbered about thirty-five and were mostly males but included at least four females. In as much as the archives permit, the chapter examines their experiences on Mauritius where a substantial proportion of the slave population were Malagasy, and where the white population feared a Malagasy revolt.