Women and Slavery, Volume Two
The Modern Atlantic

“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

“Nicely, (Women and Slavery, Vol. 2) reads as a conversation—among people who disagree—about the 'second sex' and slavery…. The collection should be commended for its panoply of concerns and authors and its breadth and depth of historical research. ”

University of Toronto Quarterly

“(T)he anthology raises a number of important questions and provides scholarship of the highest quality on a subject that has too often been omitted from early studies of slavery.”

The Historian

“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

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.

Volume 2 Contributors
Henrice Altink
Laurence Brown
Myriam Cottias
Laura F. Edwards
Richard Follett
Tara Inniss
Barbara Krauthamer
Joseph C. Miller
Bernard Moitt
Kenneth Morgan
Claire Robertson
Marsha Robinson
Felipe Smith
Mariza de Carvalho Soares

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.   More info →

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.   More info →

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.   More info →