Black Ghost of Empire
The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation
-
- £8.99
-
- £8.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory historical indictment of the long afterlife of slavery in the Atlantic world
To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended. We celebrate abolition - in Haiti after the revolution, in the British Empire in 1833, in the United States during the Civil War. Yet in Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian Kris Manjapra argues that during each of these supposed emancipations, Black people were dispossessed by the moves that were meant to free them. Emancipation, in other words, simply codified the existing racial caste system - rather than obliterating it.
Ranging across the Americas, Europe and Africa, Manjapra unearths disturbing truths about the Age of Emancipations, 1780-1880. In Britain, reparations were given to wealthy slaveowners, not the enslaved, a vast debt that was only paid off in 2015, and the crucial role of Black abolitionists and rebellions in bringing an end to slavery has been overlooked. In Jamaica, Black people were liberated only to enter into an apprenticeship period harsher than slavery itself. In the American South, the formerly enslaved were 'freed' into a system of white supremacy and racial terror. Across Africa, emancipation served as an alibi for colonization. None of these emancipations involved atonement by the enslavers and their governments for wrongs committed, or reparative justice for the formerly enslaved-an omission that grassroots Black organizers and activists are rightly seeking to address today.
Black Ghost of Empire will rewire readers' understanding of the world in which we live. Paradigm-shifting, lucid and courageous, this book shines a light into the enigma of slavery's supposed death, and its afterlives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tufts University historian Manjapra (Colonialism in Global Perspective) delivers a sweeping study of how emancipation processes in Africa, the Americas, and Europe "aggravated slavery's historical trauma and extended white supremacist rule and antiblackness." Contending that the officials who implemented abolition sought to preserve the racial caste system and "withdrew justice from the historical victims and appeased the perpetrators," Manjapra documents how the heirs of British slaveholders—rather than descendants of the enslaved—received "lucrative state-funded reparations" up until 2015; how voter suppression and convict leasing programs helped preserve the racial hierarchy in the U.S.; and how European countries "imposed an order of imperialist rule and underdevelopment" on African nations. In addition to the forces that stunted equitable emancipation, Manjapra details Black resistance movements such as the Haitian Revolution and Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Though Manjapra ranges widely across the history of the 19th century, he suffuses the narrative with vivid and often enraging details, describing, for instance, how a Union general decided to return a fugitive woman and her child to their enslaver, but "congratulated himself for at least not providing a military escort" back to the plantation. This is an essential contribution to understanding the legacy of slavery.
