Against the Odds (Routledge Studies in Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures)

1996 signed and inscribed copy, Frank Cass (London), 5 7/8 x 8 1/2 inches tall trade paperback in glossy pictorial covers, illustrated with black-and-white charts and maps, xiii, 158 pp. Slight rubbing and edgewear to covers, with creasing to the upper tip. Warmly inscribed by the editor on the half title page to the prior owner, Murdo J. MacLeod (b. 1935), a Scottish historian of Latin America, who published extensively on the history of colonial-era Central America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world. Otherwise, a near fine copy - clean, bright and unmarked. ~R~ [1.5P] In the circum-Caribbean, nuclear and extended families played an important role in moving people out of slavery and in protecting them from legal and social discrimination. Some of the families studied in this volume were virtual representations of the colonial social order, including the free, the enslaved, white and black. The economic status of family members ranged from slaves without property to planter elites. While miscegenation facilitated manumission for a few, particular for women of colour in Louisiana and Saint-Domingue, more important was the support of other black and coloured family members. This volume examines free black communities in Senegal, South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, Cuba, Saint-Domingue, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Suriname to compare the genesis of a free black class within Senegalese, British, French, Spanish and Dutch slave systems. Contents: Becoming free : manumission and the genesis of a free black community in South Carolina, 1740-90 / Robert Olwell; Colour, class, and identity on the eve of the Haitian revolution : Saint-Domingue's free coloured elite as colons ame?ricains / John D. Garrigus; Patronage, property, and persistence : the emergence of a free black elite in Spanish New Orleans / Kimberly S. Hanger; The limits of privilege : where free persons of colour stood in the hierarchy of wealth in antebellum New Orleans / Paul Lachance; Acquisition and loss on a Spanish frontier : the free black homesteaders of Florida, 1784-1821 / Jane G. Landers; Free blacks and coloureds in plantation Suriname : the struggle to rise / Rosemarijn Hoefte; Shades of freedom : Anna Kingsley in Senegal, Florida, and Haiti / Daniel L. Schafer. …