Skip to Main Content

Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island

Online ISBN:
9781479822898
Print ISBN:
9781479870424
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island

Christy Clark-Pujara
Christy Clark-Pujara
University of Wisconsin
Find on
Published:
30 August 2016
Online ISBN:
9781479822898
Print ISBN:
9781479870424
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

This book is about slavery, emancipation, and black freedom in the North, and Rhode Island in particular. It uses an economic lens to explore the ways the business begets experience, specifically investigating how the business of slavery (economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of the slaveholding in the Americas such as the buying and selling of people, food, and goods) shaped the establishment and growth of life-long inheritable bondage in the North. Moreover, it explores how those businesses affected the process of emancipation, and black freedom. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders invested in the business of slavery; however, nowhere was this business more important. During the colonial period, West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses the key ingredient for their number one export—rum. Moreover, more than sixty percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. In the antebellum era, Rhode Islanders were also the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. This book argues that business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom; nevertheless, enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close