Barbaric traffic : commerce and antislavery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world
"When eighteenth century antislavery writers attacked the slave trade as "barbaric traffic"--A practice that would corrupt the mien and manners of Anglo-American culture to its core - they expressed a moral uncertainty about the nature of commercial capitalism. A major work of cultural criticism, Barbaric Traffic constitutes a rethinking of the fundamental agenda of antislavery writing from pre-revolutionary America to the end of the British and America slave trades in 1808. Studying the rhetoric of various antislavery genres - from pamphlets, poetry, and novels to slave narratives and the literature of disease - Gould exposes the close relation between antislavery writings and commercial capitalism. A challenge to the premise that objections to the slave trade were rooted in modern laissez-faire capitalism, his work revises - and expands - our understanding of anti-slavery literature as a form of cultural criticism in its own right."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2003
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2003
History
viii, 258 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780674011663, 067401166X
51878852
Introduction 1. The Commercial Jeremiad 2. The Poetics of Antislavery 3. American Slaves in North Africa 4. Liberty, Slavery, and Black Atlantic Autobiography 5. Yellow Fever and the Black Market Epilogue Notes Index