Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation

Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation by Kris Manjapra

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights and universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt.

In this paradigm-altering book, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipations around the globe -- gradual emancipations in the American north, compensated and retroactive emancipations in the Caribbean, emancipation by war in the American South, and emancipation as pretext for massive colonialism in Africa -- and reveals how their perceived failures were not failures at all, but the predictable outcomes of policies designed first and foremost to preserve the status quo of racial oppression.

Black Ghost of Empire will rewire readers' understanding of the world in which we live. Abolition was not a line, once established, that marked the end of slavery and the beginning of a new world order. And yet, the formerly enslaved rebelled and fled oppression, tended to their ancestors, and fed and nourished their communities. They lived, made art, and loved.

Timely, lucid, and crucial to our understanding of contemporary society, Black Ghost of Empire shines a light into the gap between the idea of slavery's end and the reality of its continuation -- exposing to whom a debt was paid and to whom a debt is owed.

SCRIBNER, HARDCOVER, 1ST EDITION, 1ST PRINTING, 2022.