Reparations for slavery and the slave trade
Subtitle: a transnational and comparative history
By: Ana Lucia Araujo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9781350010598; 9781350010604
Subjects: Reparations; African Americans; Slavery; History
Description: "Slavery and the Atlantic slave trade are among the most heinous crimes against humanity committed in the modern era. Yet, to this day no former slave society in the Americas has paid reparations to former slaves or their descendants. European countries have never compensated their former colonies in the Americas, whose wealth relied on slave labor, to a greater or lesser extent. Likewise, no African nation ever obtained any form of reparations for the Atlantic slave trade. Ana Lucia Araujo argues that these calls for reparations are not only not dead, but have a long and persevering history. She persuasively demonstrates that since the 18th century, enslaved and freed individuals started conceptualizing the idea of reparations in petitions, correspondences, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims, written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. In different periods, despite the legality of slavery, slaves and freed people were conscious of having been victims of a great injustice. This is the first book to offer a transnational narrative history of the financial, material, and symbolic reparations for slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing from the voices of various social actors who identified themselves as the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, Araujo illuminates the multiple dimensions of the demands of reparations, including the period of slavery, the emancipation era, the post-abolition period, and the present"--Page [4] of cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : reparations in the past and the present; title: "Greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears"; title: "And what should we wait of these brutish spirits?"; title: "We helped to pay this cost"; title: "What else will the Negro expect?"; title: "It's time for us to get paid"; title: Epilogue : unfinished struggle.