Books in the Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 series

These recovered histories of entrepreneurial women of color from the colonial Caribbean illustrate an environment in which upward social mobility for freedpeople was possible. Through determination and extensive commercial and kinship connections, these women penetrated British life and created success for themselves and future generations.

Uses theories of the body to detail the ways colonial states and their agents appropriated physicality to debase the black body, assert the inviolability of the white body, and demarcate the social boundaries between them.

Considering Baltimore and Philadelphia as part of a larger, Mid-Atlantic borderland, this book shows that the antebellum effort to secure the rights of American citizenship was central to black politics - it was an effort to exploit the ambiguities of citizenship and negotiate the complex politics in which that concept was determined.

Examines the differing ideas of freedom held by white evangelical abolitionists and freed people in Jamaica, and explores the consequences of their encounter for both American and Jamaican history. The book makes creative use of available sources to unpack assumptions on both sides of this American-Jamaican interaction.

Highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records, Jessica Millward brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre.

Representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict the women as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and offer evidence of the means to their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. Lisa Ze Winters contends that these representations conceal the figure's centrality to the practices and production of diaspora.

Shows how literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape France's post-revolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. The stories of these women reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

In this study of antebellum African American print culture in transnational perspective, Erica L. Ball explores the relationship between antislavery discourse and the emergence of the northern black middle class.