The Empire of Necessity : : Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
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Call Number: 306.362 Gr
On Shelf At: Downtown Library
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306.362 Gr | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
Documents an early nineteenth-century event that inspired Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno," tracing the cultural, economic, and religious clash that occurred aboard a distressed Spanish ship of West African pirates.
One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans who appeared to be slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception--that the men and women he thought were slaves were actually running the ship--he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, historian Greg Grandin explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event--an event that inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Here, Grandin uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.--From publisher description.
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PUBLISHED
New York : Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2014.
Year Published: 2014
Description: xiv, 360 p., 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm.
Language: English
Format: Book
ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
9780805094534
0805094539
SUBJECTS
Delano, Amasa, -- 1763-1823.
Slavery -- South America -- History -- 19th century.
Slave trade -- South America -- History -- 19th century.
Slave insurrections -- South America -- History -- 19th century.