Women and Slavery, Volume One: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic

by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph C. Miller

Overview

The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who-as these two volumes reveal-probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.

Women enslaved in the Americas came to bear highly gendered reputations among whites-as "scheming Jezebels," ample and devoted "mammies," or suffering victims of white male brutality and sexual abuse-that revealed more about the psychology of enslaving than about the courage and creativity of the women enslaved. These strong images of modern New World slavery contrast with the equally expressive virtual invisibility of the women enslaved in the Old-concealed in harems, represented to meddling colonial rulers as "wives" and "nieces," taken into African families and kin-groups in subtlely nuanced fashion.

Women and Slavery presents papers developed from an international conference organized by Gwyn Campbell.

Volume 1 Contributors
Sharifa Ahjum
Richard B. Allen
Katrin Bromber
Gwyn Campbell
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch
Jan-Georg Deutsch
Timothy Fernyhough
Philip J. Havik
Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan
Martin A. Klein
George Michael La Rue
Paul E. Lovejoy
Fred Morton
Richard Roberts
Kirsten A. Seaver

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821417249
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	09/28/2007
Edition description:	1
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Gwyn Campbell, Canada Research Chair in Indian Ocean World History at McGill University, is the author and editor of many works, including Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia and An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar.

Suzanne Miers is professor emerita of history at Ohio University. She is the author of Slavery in the Twentieth Century and coeditor of The End of Slavery and other books.

Joseph C. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Kings and Kinsmen, Way of Death, and works on the world history of slavery.

Table of Contents

A Tribute to Suzanne Miers   Martin A. Klein   Richard Roberts     ix
Preface     xv
Introduction: Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves Experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic   Joseph C. Miller     1
Women in Domestic Slavery across Africa and Asia
Women, Marriage, and Slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Nineteenth Century   Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch     43
Sex, Power, and Family Life in the Harem: A Comparative Study   Martin A. Klein     63
The Law of the (White) Father: Psychoanalysis, "Paternalism," and the Historiography of Cape Slave Women   Sharifa Ahjum     83
Women in Islamic Households
Mjakazi, Mpambe, Mjoli, Suria Female Slaves in Swahili Sources   Katrin Bromber     111
Prices for Female Slaves and Changes in Their Life Cycle: Evidence from German East Africa   Jan-Georg Deutsch     129
Women in Households on the Fringes of Christianity and Commerce
Thralls and Queens: Female Slavery in the Medieval Norse Atlantic   Kirsten A. Seaver     147
African Slave Women in Egypt, ca. 1820 to the Plague of 1834-35   George Michael la Rue     169
Female Inboekelinge in the South African Republic, 1850-80   Fred Morton     191
Women in Imperial African Worlds
Women, GenderHistory, and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Ethiopia   Timothy Fernyhough     215
Female Bondage in Imperial Madagascar, 1820-95   Gwyn Campbell     237
Internal Markets or an Atlantic-Sahara Divide?: How Women Fit into the Slave Trade of West Africa   Paul E. Lovejoy     259
Women, Household Instability, and the End of Slavery in Banamba and Gumbu, French Soudan, 1905-12   Richard Roberts     281
Women in Commercial Outposts of Modern Europe
From Pariahs to Patriots: Women Slavers in Nineteenth-Century "Portuguese" Guinea   Philip J. Havik     309
It All Comes Out in the Wash: Engendering Archaeological Interpretations of Slavery   Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan     335
Free Women of Color and Socioeconomic Marginality in Mauritius, 1767-1830   Richard B. Allen     359
Contributors     379
Index     385

Editorial Reviews

"...(Women & Slavery, Volume 1 clearly demonstrates that far from simply being a by-product of a trade in male slaves, in many societies women were the prime focus of the slave trade...."--Africa: The Journal of the IAI

"Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic offers an exciting addition to the scholarship on gender and slavery. Students and professors alike will find this volume provocative and useful in examining the role of women in slavery and slave trades.... This collection, and its sister publication, Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic, by the same editors, work masterfully together and could serve as the basis for an entire course on women and slavery."--International Journal of African Historical Studies

"I believe these essays have an audience among anyone interested not only in the intersecting histories of slavery and women, but also those who are intrigued more generally by the historian's craft."--Susan E. O'Donovan, coeditor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 and author of Slavery's Legacies: Becoming Free in the Cotton South

"All these contributions broaden and deepen the historian's craft as well as our understanding of the gendered nature of slave-life in each instance. We learn of queens and thralls struggling to survive, of the lives of slave-washerwomen, and the significance of 'maturity' among female slaves.... Measured in terms of (Sue Miers's) own career, this volume shows just what a long way the historiography of Africanist slavery has come and where it yet needs to go."--Slavery and Abolition

"The geographic and methodological diversity of the chapters constitute one of the collection's salient appeals.... The two volumes challenge us to reconsider women and slavery and appreciate the strongly gendered nature of servitude in world history."--African Studies Review

"Women and Slavery (Volumes 1 & 2) makes a significant contribution to our understanding of slavery in a global context" and "showing the centrality of women to slave systems around the world."
-- Journal of Global History

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