Black Ghost of Empire

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts our society today, we must not only look at what slavery was, but the unfinished way it ended. We celebrate the abolition of slavery - in the British Empire in 1833, in Haiti after the revolution, in the United States during the Civil War. Yet in Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian Kris Manjapra reveals how during each of these supposed emancipations, the prevailing systems of social bondage were simply reconfigured, and Black people largely dispossessed by the moves that were meant to free them.

Moving around the Atlantic world, from New England to Jamaica, Britain to West Africa, Manjapra unearths the uncomfortable truths about this Age of Emancipation, 1780-1880. In Britain, reparations were given to wealthy slaveowners, not the enslaved, in vast sums that were only paid off in 2015. 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 'liberated' into a system of white supremacy and racial violence. As Manjapra argues, none of these emancipations involved atonement for wrongs committed, or restorative justice for the formerly enslaved - an omission that many grassroots Black organizers and activists are seeking to address, in a movement that is rightly gaining momentum.

Timely, lucid and original, Black Ghost of Empire shines a light into the wide gap between the idea of slavery's end and its actual perpetuation in various forms-exposing the shadows that linger to this day.