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Diverse Good Causes

Manumission and the Transformation of Urban Slavery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Whitman Stephen
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In many slave societies manumission coexisted with perpetual bondage, often featured by self-purchase by slave artisans, a practice that some societies monitored through recognition of the slave's legal personality as a contracting party. Manumission played a comparatively minor role in shaping North American slavery, with debatable exceptions in the mid-Atlantic region; historians of slavery there have portrayed manumitters as individuals of conscience and/or economic maximizers seeking profitable exits from a locally declining labor institution. This contrast was first noted by Frank Tannenbaum, who characterized slavery in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America as milder than in British America, and targeted differences in religion and in the European history of slavery of each society as key explanatory factors.

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Social Science History , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , Fall 1995 , pp. 333 - 370
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Copyright © Social Science History Association 1995 

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