Slavery and the Atlantic slave trade are among the most heinous crimes against humanity committed in the modern era. Yet, to this day no former slave society in the Americas has paid reparations to former slaves or their descendants. European countries have never compensated their former colonies in the Americas, whose wealth relied on slave labor, to a greater or lesser extent. Likewise, no African nation ever obtained any form of reparations for the Atlantic slave trade.
Ana Lucia Araujo argues that these calls for reparations are not only not dead, but have a long and persevering history. She persuasively demonstrates that since the 18th century, enslaved and freed individuals started conceptualizing the idea of reparations in petitions, correspondences, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims, written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. In different periods, despite the legality of slavery, slaves and freed people were conscious of having been victims of a great injustice.
This is the first book to offer a transnational narrative history of the financial, material, and symbolic reparations for slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing from the voices of various social actors who identified themselves as the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, Araujo illuminates the multiple dimensions of the demands of reparations, including the period of slavery, the emancipation era, the post-abolition period, and the present.
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Araujo's history offers a compelling review of the rationales made for reparations payments, the historical actors who made such claims, and historical events that motivated their political demands ... Reparations for Slavery and The Slave Trade is an insightful and expansive history of enslavement that reveals the interconnected nature of the Atlantic world from the origins of enslavement to the present day. * Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective * The book is absolutely indispensable and makes an important contribution to what Araujo concludes is an 'unfinished struggle.' * The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History * [Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade] is an accessible transnational history that is meticulously researched and argued. This makes it a remarkable contribution to the debates about reparations, and to Black social movement history, Black Atlantic history, and African Diaspora studies. * Bowling Green Daily News * What is so clear in this important and timely book is that many people keep making moral claims even as they are repeatedly, rudely, and firmly rejected by those in power ... While the focus of the book is on reparation claims, Araujo puts those claims in the context of the broader movement for economic and social empowerment of people of African descent. It is this comprehensive and broad story that makes Reparations the best book yet on reparations for slavery ... As others take up the difficult moral questions it raises, such as who should pay and why, this book will be at the center of discussions of ways in which the past burdens the present. * New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids * In this insightful and compelling study, Ana Lucia Araujo shows the importance of a transnational and comparative approach to examining the ways in which slave societies throughout the Americas presented the case for reparations. * The North Carolina Historical Review * Araujo has cemented herself as a senior historian thoroughly in command of her craft ... In addition to the U.S., nearly every country in Latin America and the Caribbean makes an appearance. While focused on reparations, the book also serves as a global primer on slavery and emancipation ... Overall, Araujo's book offers a valuable contribution to scholars of the African Diaspora. * Black Perspectives * A wide-ranging overview of the historical and contemporary struggle for reparations ... A book that will enrich current debates surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, controversial monuments and memorials to slave holders and Con-federate heroes, and the ongoing social inequalities along racial lines ... Readers of many varieties will bene?t from Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade as a classroom text, research tool, and narrative guide to the evolution of one of the most contentious issues of our times. It will broaden the scope of intellectual discussions because of its international orientation, and it will deepen readers' appreciation for the long history of the struggle. * The American Historical Review * In brisk, highly accessible prose, Araujo presents the reader with the story of this fragmented, discontinuous, transnational tradition of moral argument. * Journal of Modern African Studies * Araujo is the first scholar to examine reparations for slavery and the Atlantic slave trade comparatively and transnationally, drawing on a broad range of texts in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish ... An important book for all collections. Summing Up: Essential. All libraries. * CHOICE * This is a book I've been waiting for -- a timely and overdue account of the centuries-long cry for reparations, written by a gifted historian of transatlantic slavery. Ana Lucia Araujo has brought valuable context, perspective, and learning to one of the urgent issues of our time. * Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History, University of Pittsburgh, USA and author of The Slave Ship: A Human History (2008) * The trans-Atlantic debate about reparations for slavery has long needed a serious historical explanation. Now, in Ana Lucia Araujo's book, we have the answer. This original, sweeping study, grounded in meticulous research, explains how and why reparations have become so pressing a modern-day issue. It is essential reading for everyone concerned - whatever their viewpoint. * James Walvin, Professor of History Emeritus, University of York, UK and author of The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (2011) * Ana Lucia Araujo's book on slavery reparations movements reaches across time and space. She considers enslavement, emancipation, and the continued refusal of every single slave-owning society in the Atlantic world-the USA, Britain, France, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain, especially-to address the centuries of theft that made them wealthy and built the modern global political economy. Professor Araujo's erudition is unbounded, and her clear, readable prose will make this book an important and useful addition to the toolkits of academics, students, and activists. * Edward E. Baptist, Professor of History, Cornell University, USA and author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2016) *
Ana Lucia Araujo is Professor of History at Howard University, USA. She is the author of several works on the history and memory of slavery, including Shadows of the Slave Past (2014).
Autor*in
Howard University, USA
Introduction: Reparations in the Past and the Present
1. Greatest Riches from Our Blood and Tears
2. "And What Should We Wait of these Brutish Spirits?"
3. "We Helped to Pay this Cost"
4. "What Else Will the Negro Expect?"
5. "It's Time For Us to Get Paid"
Epilogue: Unfinished Struggle
Notes
Bibliography
Index
