Gwyn Campbell

Elizabeth Elbourne

Sexual exploitation was and is a critical feature of enslavement. Across many different societies, slaves were considered to own neither their bodies nor their children, even if many struggled to resist. At the same time, paradoxes abound: for example, in some societies to bear the children of a master was a potential route to manumission for some women. Sex, Power, and Slavery is the first history of slavery and bondage to take sexuality seriously. Twenty-six authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds look at the vexed, traumatic intersections of the histories of slavery and of sexuality. They argue that such intersections mattered profoundly and, indeed, that slavery cannot be understood without adequate attention to sexuality. Sex, Power, and Slavery brings into conversation historians of the slave trade, art historians, and scholars of childhood and contemporary sex trafficking. The book merges work on the Atlantic world and the Indian Ocean world and enables rich comparisons and parallels between these diverse areas. Contributors: David Brion Davis, Martin Klein, Richard Hellie, Abdul Sheriff, Griet Vankeerberghen, E. Ann McDougall, Matthew S. Hopper, Marie Rodet, George La Rue, Ulrike Schmieder, Tara Iniss, Mariana Candido, James Francis Warren, Johanna Ransmeier, Roseline Uyanga with Marie-Luise Ermisch, Francesca Ann Louise Mitchell, Shigeru Sato, Gabeba Baderoon, Charmaine Nelson, Ana Lucia Araujo, Brian Lewis, Ronaldo Vainfas, Salah Trabelsi, Joost Coté, Sandra Evers, and Subho Basu

Sex, Power, and Slavery

Slavery, sex, and dehumanization / David Brion Davis -- Sexuality and slavery in the Western Sudan / Martin A. Klein -- Sex and power in the Russian institutions of slavery and serfdom / Richard Hellie -- Concubinage, law, and the family Suria: concubine or secondary slave wife? The case of Zanzibar in the nineteenth century / Abdul Sheriff -- A sexual order in the making: wives and slaves in early imperial China / Griet Vankeerberghen -- "To marry one's slave is as easy as eating a meal": the dynamics of carnal relations within Saharan slavery / E. Ann McDougall -- Slavery, family life, and the African diaspora in the Arabian Gulf, 1880-1940 / Matthew S. Hopper -- "I ask for divorce because my husband does not let me go back to my country of origin with my brother": gender, family, and the end of slavery in the region of Kayes, French Sudan, 1890-1920 / Marie Rodet -- The fatal sorbet: an account of slavery, jealousy, pregnancy, and murder in a harem in Alexandria, Egypt, ca. 1850 / George Michael La Rue -- Intimate power: sexuality and slavery in the households of the Atlantic world sexual relations between the enslaved and between slaves and nonslaves in nineteenth-century Cuba / Ulrike Schmieder -- "This complicated incest": children, sexuality, and sexual abuse during slavery and the apprenticeship period in the British Caribbean, 1790-1838 / Tara A. Inniss -- Strategies for social mobility: liaisons between foreign men and slave women in Benguela, ca. 1770-1850 / Mariana P. Candido -- Sex trafficking and prostitution: Japanese brothel prostitution, daily life, and the client: colonial Singapore, 1870-1940 / James Francis Warren -- Body-price: ambiguities in the sale of women at the end of the Qing Dynasty / Johanne Ransmeir -- Sex slavery and human trafficking in Nigeria; an overview / Roseline Uyanga with Marie-Luise Ermisch -- The realities and rise of female sex trafficking in Thailand and Cambodia in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century / Francesca Ann Louise Mitchell -- The Japanese army and comfort women in World War II / Shigeru Sato -- Art, sexuality, and slavery: hidden geographies of the Cape: shifting representations of slavery and sexuality in South African art and fiction / Gabeba Baderoon -- Innocence curtailed: reading maternity and sexuality as labor in Canadian representations of Black girls / Charmaine Nelson -- Gender, sex, and power: images of enslaved women's bodies / Ana Lucia Araujo -- Queering the study of slavery: "To lever's on soap!": Roger Casement, slavery, and sexual imperialism / Brian Lewis -- Sodomy, love, and slavery in colonial Brazil: a case study of Minas Gerais during the eighteenth century / Ronoldo Vainfas -- Eunuchs, power, and slavery in the early Islamic world / Salah Trabelsi -- Legacies: discourse, dishonor, and labor: slaves, coolies, and garrison whores: a colonial discourse of "unfreedom" in the Dutch East Indies / Joost Coté -- Lure of the impure: sexuality, gender, and agency of "slave" girls in contemporary Madagascar / Sandra J.T.M. Evers -- Wages of womanhood: managers and women workers in the Jute Mill industry of Bengal, 1890-1940 / Subho Basu.

Sex, Power and Slavery

Level 3-1

Soft Pillow for an Armadillo

In Blood Ground Elizabeth Elbourne looks at the relationship between the Khoekhoe, the British empire, and the London Missionary Society in the early nineteenth century, a time of intense conflict in which different groups competed to mobilize Christianity for their own political ends. She explores the social history of the early missionary movement as well the political impact of British evangelicals, arguing that religious change in southern Africa can only be understood in the material context of ethnic conflict and bitter struggles over land and labour. In doing so she reintegrates the history of religion into the mainstream historical narrative of South Africa, offering a view of Christianity not as a monolithic system but as a language subject to interpretation and highly politicized conflicts over meaning.

Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Caoe Colony and Britain, 1799-1853

Blood Ground

Blood Ground traces the transition from religion to race as the basis for policing the boundaries of the "white" community. Elbourne suggests broader shifts in the relationship of missions to colonialism B as the British movement became less internationalist, more respectable, and more emblematic of the British imperial project B and shows that it is symptomatic that many Christian Khoekhoe ultimately rebelled against the colony. Missionaries across the white settler empire brokered bargains B rights in exchange for cultural change, for example B that brought Aboriginal peoples within the aegis of empire but, ultimately, were only partially and ambiguously fulfilled.

Elizabeth Elbourne

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