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Manuscripts (preferably in English) should be 90,000 to 180,000 words in length and may include illustrations. The editors would be interested to receive proposals for specialist monographs and syntheses but may also consider multi-authored contributions such as conference proceedings and edited volumes, as well as thematic works and source translations.
To term an act ‘punishment’ is to presuppose its legitimacy. Punishment implies an existing relationship of power and authority between the person punished and the person doing or authorizing the punishing. Punishment has across many times and places been understood as a legitimate aspect of a relationship of domination: of parent over child, husband over wife, teacher over pupil, monarch over subject, judge over (accused) criminal—and slaveowner over enslaved. Describing something as a ‘punishment’ is to assert that it is a response to wrongdoing. It is also to group it with an enormous range of potential other actions, that may
Abstract
Despite the successful maneuvers of many runaways to escape slavery in the slaveholding South, considerable numbers did not make it and were apprehended by slave patrols, civilians, or watchmen. What happened to those among them who were subsequently not reclaimed by their legal owners? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the punishment and forced employment of runaway slaves by city and state authorities rather than by individual slaveholders. It follows enslaved southerners into workhouses, chain gains, and penitentiaries, thereby connecting different institutions within the nineteenth-century penal system. Exploring collaboration and clashes between slaveholders and the authorities, it will discuss how the forced employment of runaways fitted in with the broader understanding of Black labor and the restructuring of labor demands in the antebellum US South.
Paola A. Revilla Orías,
Paola Revilla Orías has written an important study of the relationships of unfreedom that were foundational to the labor history of Charcas, the province of the southern Andes oriented around the silver mines of Potosí and the city of La Plata under Spanish colonial rule. While the book has some shortcomings, it is an important intervention in colonial history, which has, with some exceptions, tended to treat Indigenous and Black
Abstract
Historically, French Guiana was an anomaly in the French Americas, neither a settler colony nor an economically successful slave-based plantation colony like its wealthy Antillean counterparts. Sporadically governed, underpopulated, and generally neglected by the metropole, it was considered a backwater of the French empire. However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, the punishment of fugitive slaves had become fundamental to how the colony of French Guiana conceptualized itself. The struggle between owner and state about who had the right to punish, and by what means, caused ferocious repercussions over who could claim sovereignty over slaves and their potential labor. The issue of flight came to signify the legal and political battle between settlers and the state. Indeed, the desire of the French state to control the terrain of French Guiana through the recapture—and punishment—of the enslaved echoes what would occur in the latter half of the nineteenth century as French Guiana became the world’s most notorious penal colony. This paper will explore these issues in nineteenth-century French Guiana through the fugitive figure of the enslaved and subsequently that of the runaway convict.
Erika Denise Edwards,
A year and a half passed between the publication of Edwards’ book and its arrival at my hands in Argentina. A worldwide pandemic and Rioplatense courier problems combined in such ways that by the time this review is being written,
Abstract
This special issue explores how enslaved workers of African descent were punished in the Americas. It studies punishment inside and beyond the criminal justice system, investigating its legitimation and implementation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collectively, the articles address three main themes: the relationship between the enslaved, the slaveholders, and the state; the shifts in modalities of governance across space and time; and the entanglement of modes of punishment across geographies. This perspective illustrates the broader implications of punishment for issues of labor supply and labor control, and helps us understand how slavery was produced and reproduced in different, yet connected, regions of the Americas.
Abstract
In February 1660, supercargo Laurens de Sille sailed from New Amsterdam (Manhattan) to Curaçao aboard the galliot Nieuwer Amstel. Tasked with maintaining a record of the cargo, De Sille kept a journal of the four-month journey to Curaçao and back. While keeping a journal was common practice on Dutch ships, few survive from the seventeenth century. De Sille’s journal offers a unique insight into mid-seventeenth-century shipping activities at Curaçao, as his account captures day-to-day proceedings during a period for which there are only sparse extant sources on the island’s history. More importantly, De Sille’s chronicle of his two-month stay on the island depicts Curaçao as it emerged as a hub for the Dutch transatlantic slave trade.