Not all merchants were rich; smaller traders faced both poor defaulting customers and rich exploitative ones, and inter-imperial war took its toll even on larger operators. Merchants did not dominate society; landed elites and officeholders were the politically dominant groups. Their wealth was much more easily transmitted to heirs, whereas a large part of a merchant’s assets was immaterial and highly attached to the person (e.g. his or her “credit”). Women, or members of religious minorities such as Jews, were operating under extra constraints, and even more so servants and unfree laborers, with slaves and freed blacks in the colonial plantation complex at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Still, non-merchant groups fought everywhere to contain merchant power through counter-discourses delegitimizing merchant profit, from religious strictures on greed to moral economy rules limiting profit-making through social pressure and market regulations, or Physiocratic and free-market policy proposals. The resulting sociopolitical equilibria were highly variable, ranging from wealthy metropolises in Western Europe to marginalized areas in Eastern Europe or in colonies overseas.

This chapter introduces readers to the formative ideas and debates of nineteenth-century African American political thought. This period covers the era of antislavery activism before the US Civil War (1861–65), which abolished slavery, to the immediate aftermath of that period, known as Reconstruction (1865–77). It was in this latter period in which the US federal government intervened militarily and economically in the US South to ensure newly emancipated Black citizens would have their freedoms protected. Through figures such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany, readers will learn how Black thinkers confronted slavery, racial hierarchy, and gender oppression while generating some of the most influential theories of freedom and equality in American history.

A central learning objective of this chapter is to show how political theory emerges not only from institutions but also from lived experience, moral outrage, and collective struggle. By the end of the chapter, readers will be able to explain how African American political thought identified the contradictions at the heart of American democracy and articulated powerful visions for racial justice and human liberation.

This chapter lays the foundation for the book by providing a brief overview of colonization, racialization, and coercive labor mechanisms in British Guiana. The entangled histories of dispossession, enslavement, and indenture frame this chapter’s exploration of how difference was produced, how “divide and rule” operated, and how the sugar industry came to dominate the political life of the colony. The chapter closes with a discussion of the 1928 decision to adopt Crown Colony government. A small white elite, fearing the expansion of a tiny but growing electorate of color, opted out of the then barely representative system of government and placed decision-making firmly in the hands of the Crown. Through an examination of colonial correspondence, the politics of the census, legal documents, newspaper articles, and missionary records, this chapter provides an analysis of the nature of British colonialism in the first third of the twentieth century, which contends that the racialization of the laboring population developed from governance built on dispossession, captive labor, segregation, taxonomy, and law.

Chapter 4 develops a core claim about “war powers of necessity”: When national self-preservation becomes paramount, the constitutional focus shifts from whether to make war to how far each branch may go in adopting – and later unwinding – extraordinary measures. The chapter shows how Civil War strategy and constitutional argument became mutually reinforcing. Lincoln’s early actions – mobilization, blockade, and detention – highlight the problem of unilateral executive initiative when Congress is absent, while Congress’s later ratification and responsive legislation demonstrate how legislative approval can legalize, channel, or defer resolution of the deepest separation-of-powers questions. The chapter then broadens from emergency action to the constitutional mechanics of sustaining mass war. It shows how “military necessity” operated less as a law-free exception than as a mode of legal reasoning that expanded the scope of both Article I and Article II powers, as the war’s means—including conscription and economic mobilization—merged with its ends, above all preservation of the Union and emancipation. Courts appear not as consistent referees but as sites of competing constitutional models. The chapter concludes by examining war termination, showing how the Civil War blurred the boundary between war and peace and made unwinding extraordinary authority a constitutional problem in its own right.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how Theodoret of Cyrrhus appropriated discourses of Roman masculinity in his Historia religiosa (ca. 440–444 CE), with the purpose of making the monks more acceptable, more marketable, to his would-be readers. Masculinity was a tactical appropriation that signified social worth. The study analyses four discourses related to masculinity in the Historia religiosa, all functioning with the purpose of showcasing the interior struggle between the soul and body of the monk. These discourses are warfare, athletics, slavery and medical discourse (health and illness). All function to show the superiority of the souls of the monks. By proving that the souls of the monks have universally dominated their bodies, they are also qualified to exercise external social, political and religious control. Hence, because of their total inner domination, Theodoret’s masculine monks can show dominance against foreign armies and raiders, generals and governors, and even an emperor. As literary characters, they become quite marketable to more reserved and conservative would-be readers.

Tells the story of Andrew Johnson’s presidency and how he used the pardon power in an attempt to impose his vision of post-Civil War Reconstruction in place of the version of Reconstruction legislated by Congress.

Phillis’s brief life coincided with one of the most consequential periods in American – indeed world – history, spanning the years between the accession of George III and the establishment of the United States. She survived the Middle Passage. The vessel that brought her from Africa to America became her namesake when John and Susanna Wheatley purchased her. Phillis arrived in Boston at the beginning of the reign of George III and during the transatlantic evangelical Christian movement known as the Great Awakening. Susanna Wheatley felt obligated her to enable Phillis to read the Bible and to become an evangelist herself. Colonial demands during the American Revolution for liberty from tyranny, based on natural rights, were often expressed as calls for freedom from political enslavement. Challenges to metaphorical enslavement inevitably led to questions about whether colonial enslavers could justify the actual chattel enslavement of people of African descent.

Explores President Abraham Lincoln’s use of presidential clemency powers during the Civil War. Examines Lincoln’s pardons in ordinary criminal cases and in cases of military crime or crimes of allegiance. Focuses particularly on Lincoln’s offers of clemency to former Confederates or Confederate sympathizers as a tool of wartime policy and attempted reconciliation. Notes tension between Lincoln and Congress over which branch controlled general pardons or amnesties.

Phillis rose from an obscure origin in Africa to become an internationally celebrated author before she was twenty years old. The Great Awakening, the transatlantic slave trade, the abolitionist movement, and the American Revolution, affected Wheatley Peters’s life and writings. Recent discoveries about Phillis’s marriage to John Peters may give us significant insight into her personality and ambitions. Phillis’s trip to London in 1773 enabled her to transform her legal, social, and political identities as well as her literary identity. Rather than seeing her works, including her surviving correspondence, as transparently autobiographical, we must remember that she is always a rhetorician. Particularly noteworthy are her shifts in agency, voice, and subjects in her writings before and after she gained her freedom in 1773. Phillis played a far more active role is establishing her African American identity than has previously been recognized.

Before Susanna Wheatley’s death in March 1774, Phillis had used personas to address the subject of slavery covertly. Once free, Phillis became the unofficial prophet and poet laureate of the new United States, turning toward more secular and political subjects, using an increasingly patriotic and self-confident tone in her writings. In 1778 Phillis married the formerly enslaved John Peters, an ambitious entrepreneur. Phillis Wheatley Peters’ life and career seemed secure. Despite the optimism and joy Phillis expresses in Liberty and Peace, her 1784 poem celebrating the conclusion of the American Revolution, by then she and John had fallen on hard times in the post-Revolution depression. He was probably in jail for debt when Phillis Wheatley Peters died in relative obscurity on December 5, 1784, three months after her last attempt to find subscribers for a second book. The manuscript of Phillis’s proposed second book, which was to include correspondence, remains unfound.

John Henry Wigmore described the hearsay prohibition as “a rule which may be esteemed, next to jury-trial, the greatest contribution” of the common law “to the world’s jurisprudence of procedure.” Like most of Wigmore’s pronouncements the praise is overblown, but it fits the traditional view of hearsay regulation as a noble, if imperfect, enterprise. That view is changing, however. David Sklansky recently argued: “The hearsay rule, as a genuine rule as opposed to a flexible principle, has its origins, in significant part, in American slavery.” Others agree, explaining that “the rigidness of hearsay rules – the bane of many a law student – owes much to the [Supreme] Court’s discomfort with permitting enslaved people to petition for their freedom.”

Chapter 2 explores 300 years of St. Augustine history, from its founding in 1565 until the end of the Civil War in 1865. The chapter demonstrates the city’s many connections to American slavery—well beyond the Slave Market in the center of the Plaza. These include:

• An argument that the first slaves in land that became the United States arrived in St. Augustine in 1565, rather than in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.

• The fact that St. Augustine had a free community of former slaves more than a century before the end of the Civil War, in Fort Mose.

• The fact that a public slave sale in the center of the city was witnessed—and written about—in the 1820s by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• The fact that St. Augustine fought on both sides of the Civil War. First, St. Augustine was part of the Confederacy, but Union troops took control of the city in 1862.

• One consequence of that was that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation actually freed slaves in St. Augustine before the war ended—something that was written about in colorful fashion in The New York Times.

Introduction: Using “The Lord is my shepherd” as a point of entry, this chapter rethinks domestication as a shared condition forming both human and animal lives rather than a practice imposed only upon nonhuman creatures. By exposing how ancient, human-centered frameworks of subjugation obscure the mutual confinement of humans and animals within long-standing systems of power, it reveals domestication as a pervasive and largely unrecognized structure of social life.

Chapter 7 explores alternatives to exploitative domination by turning to themes of the Biblical Sabbath, starting in the Genesis primeval history (Gen 2:2-3) and continuing to laws later in the Torah (Exod 16; 20:8-11; 23:12; Deut 5:12-15) that depict freedom from labor for humans (including enslaved humans) and animals alike as a counter to domination. It argues that resisting this system necessitates collective cultivation of more genuinely social forms of relation, knowledge and spirituality that affirm the intrinsic worth of all beings rather than reducing life to utility.

Chapter 5 turns to focus on the story of Noah and his sons (Gen 9:20–27) as a prism for examining inter-human domination, both the slavery that it focuses on itself (and has been used to legitimate) and other forms of inter-group human domination along race, class and other lines.