Further Reading:
Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation

In this bibliography I offer a few titles for further reading on slavery, abolition, and emancipation. Historians and literary scholars have produced huge quantities of material on this subject, and I do not intend to survey the entire literature on the subject. Instead, this bibliography suggests a few titles, arranged in small groups, which should be enough to get you started. Any serious scholar of slavery and abolition will notice many omissions. Likewise, students will not always find all of these titles in their library. However, most of these works are generally available, and should provide a good introduction to the subject.

Some of the books mentioned below are in print and on sale. For more information, see The Bookshop which gives reviews and assessments of books in print on slavery, abolition, and related topics.

General Studies of Slavery

• Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997)
• Davis, David Brion, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
• Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966)
• Kolchin, Peter, American Slavery: 1619-1877 (London and New York: Penguin, 1995)
• Louis, W.R., ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998-1999)

General Studies of the Slave Trade

• Curtin, Phillip D, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969)
• Klein, Herbert S., The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• Reynolds, Edward, Stand the Storm: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (London: Allison and Busby, 1985)
• Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (London: Picador, 1997)
• Walvin, James, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London: HarperCollins, 1992)

• Anstey, Roger, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760-1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975)
• Blackburn, Robin, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1988)
• Brown, Christopher Leslie, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
• Carey, Brycchan, and Peter Kitson, eds, Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007)
• Hochschild, Adam, Bury the Chains: The First International Human Rights Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005)
• Temperley, Howard, British Antislavery: 1833-1870 (London: Macmillan, 1972)
• Turley, David, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860 (London: Routledge, 1991)

The Economics of Slavery

• Bender, Thomas, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Oxford: University of California Press, 1992)
• Drescher, Seymour, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977)
• Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (London: André Deutsch, 1964)

Women and Antislavery

• Ferguson, Moira, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (London: Routledge, 1992)
• Midgley, Clare, Women against Slavery: the British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London: Routledge, 1992)

Slave Resistance

• James, C.L.R., The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) 3rd edn (London: Allison and Busby, 1980)

Slavery and Literature

• Baum, Joan, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1994)
• Carey, Brycchan, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment,and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
• Carey, Brycchan, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, eds, Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
• Carey, Brycchan, and Peter Kitson, eds, Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007)
• Dabydeen, David, ed., The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985)
• Ellis, Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
• Ferguson, Moira, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (London: Routledge, 1992)
• Fulford, Tim, and Peter J. Kitson, eds, Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Innes, C.L., A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
• Sypher, Wylie, Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942)

Black Self-Representations

• Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, eds, Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001)
• Costanzo, Angelo, Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)
• Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Slave's Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)
• Edwards, Paul and David Dabydeen, eds, Black Writers in Britain 1760-1890 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991)
• Sandiford, Keith A., Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing (London: Associated University Presses, 1988)
• The Olaudah Equiano website
• The Ignatius Sancho website
• The Quobna Ottobah Cugoano website

The Black Atlantic

• Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, eds, Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001)
• Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (London: Verso, 1993)
• Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker, The many-headed hydra. sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000)
• Schama, Simon, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London: BBC Books, 2005)

British Abolitionists

• Aitken, Jonathan, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace (London: Continuum, 2007)
• Hague, William, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-slave Trade Campaigner (London: HarperPress, 2007)
• Jackson, Maurice, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
• Shyllon, Folarin, James Ramsay: The Unknown Abolitionist (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1977)
• Wilson, Ellen Gibson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography, 2nd edn (York: William Sessions, 1996)
• British Abolitionists Website

Africans in Britain

• Chater, Kathleen, Untold Histories: Black people in England and Wales during the period of the British Slave trade, c. 1660-1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)
• Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984)
• Gerzina, Gretchen, Black England: Life Before Emancipation, (London: John Murray, 1995)
• Shyllon, Folarin, Black People in Britain 1555-1833 (London: Oxford University Press, for the Institute of Race Relations, 1977)

Anthologies of Writing About Slavery

• Basker, James G., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660-1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
• Caretta, Vincent, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996)
• Kitson, Peter, et al, eds, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999). A collection of facsimile material.

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* This page last updated 4 March 2011 *