Empire of Brutality by Christopher Michael Blakley ISBN 9780807181010, 9780807181003, 0807181005, 0807181013 instant download

Empire of Brutality by Christopher Michael Blakley ISBN 9780807181010, 9780807181003, 0807181005, 0807181013 instant download

"Christopher Blakley's Empire of Brutality is a human-animal history of slaving and slavery in the Atlantic World between the end of the seventeenth century and the abolition of the Atlantic trade in 1808. His multidisciplinary study examines how varied relationships between enslaved people and animals led to the dehumanization and racialization of people of African descent in the Americas. His analysis provides a better understanding of why enslaved people emphasized in their writing how slaveholders compared them to animals, suggesting that critiques of slavery as dehumanizing by people of African descent were to a marked degree the result of these material human-animal networks and linkages. Blakley's study brings together disparate geographies-including the castle trade in Atlantic Africa, slave depots in New Spain, and plantations in the British Caribbean and Chesapeake worlds-to build on the emerging literature of human-animal studies and new scholarship in early American environmental history. His work is among the first to approach human-animal networks under slavery systematically and comprehensively.