Arming Slaves : From Classical Times to the Modern Age

by Edited by Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan

• ISBN13: 9780300109009
• ISBN10: 0300109008
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2006-06-08
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

Arming slaves as soldiers is a counterintuitive idea. Yet throughout history, in many varied societies, slaveholders have entrusted slaves with the use of deadly force. This book is the first to survey the practice broadly across space and time, encompassing the cultures of classical Greece, the early Islamic kingdoms of the Near East, West and East Africa, the British and French Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America. To facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, each chapter addresses four crucial issues: the social and cultural facts regarding the arming of slaves, the experience of slave soldiers, the ideological origins and consequences of equipping enslaved peoples for battle, and the impact of the practice on the status of slaves and slavery itself. What emerges from the book is a new historical understanding: the arming of slaves is neither uncommon nor paradoxical but is instead both predictable and explicable.

Author Biography

CHRISTOPHER LESLIE BROWN is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. PHILIP D. MORGAN holds The Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professorship in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

Maps	ix
Acknowledgments	xv
Introduction	1	(13)
David Brion Davis
Arming Slaves and Helots in Classical Greece	14	(26)
Peter Hunt
The Mamluk Institution, or One Thousand Years of Military Slavery in the Islamic World	40	(39)
Reuven Amitai
Armed Slaves and Political Authority in Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade, 1450--1800	79	(16)
John Thornton
Making the Chikunda: Military Slavery and Ethnicity in Southern Africa, 1750--1900	95	(25)
Allen Isaacman
Derek Peterson
Transforming Bondsmen into Vassals: Arming Slaves in Colonial Spanish America	120	(26)
Jane Landers
Arming Slaves in Brazil from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth Century	146	(34)
Hendrik Kraay
Arming Slaves in the American Revolution	180	(29)
Philip D. Morgan
Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy
The Arming of Slaves in the Haitian Revolution	209	(24)
David Geggus
Citizen Soldiers: Emancipation and Military Service in the Revolutionary French Caribbean	233	(22)
Laurent Dubois
The Slave Soldiers of Spanish South America: From Independence to Abolition	255	(19)
Peter Blanchard
Armed Slaves and the Struggles for Republican Liberty in the U.S. Civil War	274	(30)
Joseph P. Reidy
Armed Slaves and Anticolonial Insurgency in Late Nineteenth-Century Cuba	304	(26)
Ada Ferrer
The Arming of Slaves in Comparative Perspective	330	(24)
Christopher Leslie Brown
List of Contributors	354	(2)
Index	356