Get It Now Slave Law And The Politics Of Resistance In The Early Atlantic World Crafted By Edward B. Rugemer Available Through Digital Edition

of the Jerry H, Bentley Book Prize, World History Association



The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland.
These became the most prosperous slave economies in the AngloAmerican Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity.
Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders' power that marked the evolution of these societies.
Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other.


In both Jamaica and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance and recurrent slave revolts.
Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and statesponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power, Yet slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by

rising abolitionist sentiment and activity in the AngloAmerican world, In South Carolina, slaveholders exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition and to expand slavery in the young republic.
In Jamaica, by contrast, whites fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British abolitionists who acted through Parliament.


Rugemer's comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies in the Atlantic World.
Edward B. Rugemer is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University, A historian of slavery and abolition, Ed Rugemer grew up in Balti, Maryland, and graduated from Fairfield University in.
He received his doctorate in History from Boston College inand joined the faculty at Yale in, His first book The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War Louisiana State University Press,explores how the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean shaped the coming of the American Civil War.
The book won the Avery Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians for the most original book on the Civil War era the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize from Yale U Edward B.
Rugemer is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University, A historian of slavery and abolition, Ed Rugemer grew up in Balti, Maryland, and graduated from Fairfield University in.
He received his doctorate in History from Boston College inand joined the faculty at Yale in, His first book The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War Louisiana State University Press,explores how the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean shaped the coming of the American Civil War.
The book won the Avery Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians for the most original book on the Civil War era the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize from Yale University and was co winner of the Francis B.
Simkins Award of the Southern Historical Association for the best first book in southern history, His second book, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World Harvard University Press,, explains how organized slave resistance shaped the formation of Atlantic slavery through a comparative history of Jamaica and South Carolina from their colonial origins until thes.
The book won the Jerry H, Bentley Book prize of the World History Association, and the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize of the Yale MacMillan Center.
Rugemers current projects include editing the Cambridge History of the Caribbean, and a book length project on Charles Douglas, a Scottish migrant to Jamaica in thes who became a resident slaveholder and superintendant of the Moore Town Maroons.
Rugemer has also published articles in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Slavery and Abolition, s in American History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.
At Yale, Professor Rugemer teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels on slavery and abolition in the Atlantic World from aboutto.
Previous to his career as a historian he served as a Jesuit volunteer, teaching at St, Georges College, a Jesuit high school for boys in downtown Kingston, Jamaica, from, He continues to work with youth as a Little League baseball coach in New Haven, sitelink.