Christine E. Sears

Dr. Sears specializes in 18th and 19th century US history, US slavery, and comparative slavery. Her first book, American Slaves and African Masters (2012), explores the slavery that Americans captured by Barbary pirates or shipwrecked in the Western Sahara endured. These slaveries differed markedly from antebellum US slavery, though they mirrored older practices of Mediterranean and Ottoman slaveries, neither of which were lifelong, racial, or hereditary. This monograph illuminates flexibility of slavery as an institution. http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137268662

Dr. Sears co-edited New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community and Comparisons in Slave Studies (LSU Press, 2015). The twelve contributors extend trends in current slavery scholarship, particularly major themes of commodification, community, and comparison. Dr. Sears’s chapter, “‘In Algiers, the City of Bondage’: Comparative Slavery in the Urban Context,” challenges the notion that slavery was ill suited to urban environments. The Algerian system of enslavement seemingly allowed a “quasi freedom” to those held in bondage, but that “quasi freedom” was an instrument of control. Thus, while historians of the American South regard slaves’ urban market activity as a source of independence and autonomy, in Algiers masters managed slaves’ market participation in ways that permitted them to profit from their slaves while maintaining control. http://lsupress.org/books/detail/new-directions-in-slavery-studies/