Black Ghost of Empire

A revelatory historical indictment of the long afterlife of slavery in the Atlantic world To understand why the shadow of slavery haunts society today, we must look at the unfinished way it ended. We celebrate abolition – in Haiti after the revolution, in the British Empire in 1833, in the United States during the Civil War. Yet in Black Ghost of Empire, Kris Manjapra reveals how during each of these supposed emancipations, Black people were in fact dispossessed by the moves that were meant to free them. Ranging across the Americas, Europe and Africa, Manjapra unearths uncomfortable truths about the Age of Emancipations, 1780-1880. In Britain, reparations were given to wealthy slave owners, not the enslaved. In Jamaica, Black people were freed only to enter into an apprenticeship period harsher than slavery itself. In the American South, the formerly enslaved were ‘freed’ into a system of white supremacy. Across Africa, emancipation served as an alibi for colonization. None of these emancipations involved atonement by the enslavers and their governments for wrongs committed, or reparative justice for the formerly enslaved. Timely, original and courageous, Black Ghost of Empire shines a light into the enigma of racial slavery’s supposed death, and its afterlives.]]>