Note to Self: Slavery Course Topics

Emily Eisner asked me: What would you teach if you were to teach an entire course on slavery and the shadows it cast? So I dusted out my "unfreedom" file from the "courses I have never taught" box, & updated the topics:

 

Ancient & medieval slavery & serfdom


Hierarchy and patriarchy to 1000 BC

Inequality, slavery & the poisoned chalice of agriculture
Horses, wheels, chariots, & nobles
High patriarchy & polygyny

Slavery and serfdom in the early classical world

Managing the household
���Slaves by nature���
Slavery & empires

Inequality, domination, and the market in the classical efflorescences

War booty
Plantation & mine slavery
Slaves ���skilled in literature & music���

Did slavery prevent a Hellenistic or Roman industrial revolution?

Gaining wealth and power in the classical world
Merchants, princes, & oligarchs
Culture & work: keeping your hands clean & getting them dirty

From slavery to serfdom: late antiquity & after

Manumission & its opposite
Honestiores & humiliores
Barbarians, thralls, knights, & raids
High feudalism

Slave raids & slave trades in the Old World 500-1500

Slaves from Ireland, England, & Russia
Slaves from France, Italy, Ukraine, & the Caucasus
Slaves from Africa

Slaves on horses

The creation of Islamic polities
Sultans, amirs, clans, & slaves
Eunuchs & households
Mamelukes & janissaries

The Black Death & the end of the first serfdom, 1300-1600

Serfdom on the eve in 1345
The class struggle in western Europe
Ending feudal tenures & privileges

The Commercial Revolution & the coming of the second serfdom, 1300-1900

Cash crops & domination
Nobles, czars, & cossacks
Ending serfdom in eastern Europe

Conquistadores & enslaving Amerindians

Genocide
Forced labor
Long-term political-economy consequences for Latin America

 

Modern & capitalist slavery


The Atlantic slave trade, 1500-1780

Guns in Africa
Sugar islands and the middle passage
Calories & luxuries to Britain & elsewhere

Slavery & cotton

Who profited from cotton slavery?
Westward expansion & the Slavepower
The financial calculus of emancipation

Consequences of slavery for Africa

The political economy of African slave trades
Nathan Nunn���s correlations
African growth retardation

Modes of New World slavery

���Like a poor third cousin���
Industrial & craft slavery
Plantation slavery under the slave trade
Plantation slavery after the slave trade
Selling people south and west

The political & moral economy of a slave society

Thomas Jefferson
Cassius Clay
Roger B. Taney
Jefferson Davis
Abraham Lincoln

 

Post-slavery North American ���herrenvolk��� democracy


Abolitionism, abolition, & ���reconstruction��� 1820-1880

The Selling of Joseph & Uncle Tom���s Cabin
Wartime ���necessity���
40 acres & a mule���not

Jim Crow 1865-2020

The corrupt bargain of 1876
���Separate but equal���
Disenfranchisement & disempowerment

���Race science��� & eugenicism 1850-2020

���Survival of the fittest���
���Improving the race���
The need to believe in racial hierarchies

Civil rights 1920-2020

The appeal to American ideals
The opportunity of 1965
The corruption of the Republican Party

The Great Migration & the Great Redlining 1920-2020

Other immigrant ghettoes in America
How the Black inner city was different
Long-term consequences of the great redlining

Mass incarceration & policing

White fear & flight
Crack & incarceration
���Aggressive policing��� & Black Lives Matter

The ���declining significance of race���? 1970-2020

Roads to upward mobility
The coming of the second gilded age
The mockery of "equal opportunity"

 

Other dimensions of unfreedom


Master & servant

The duties of a servant
The duties of an employee
Employer monopsony power

The arrival of modern feminism

Being female in the agrarian age not for sissies
Eating for two & ���women���s work���
The demographic transition
Institutions & opportunities
Gender & identity

Wage slavery

Marx���s vision
Forcing people to enslave themselves
The Polanyian view of the market

Gilded ages

���I can hire half the working class to shoot the other half���
Pinkertons & porters
Mass media & the public sphere
Monopoly capitalism

.#economichistory #highlighted #inequality #notetoself #slavery #2020-06-16