Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean

Early American Studies

By: Randy M. Browne

Narrated by: Tom Sleeker

In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the 19th-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive.

Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death.

The book is published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"An outstanding contribution to our understanding of the legalities of Atlantic slavery and the varieties of lived experience among the enslaved." (Journal of Social History)

"Illuminating...the best portrait of the slave driver to be found in the literature." (Social History)

"Browne's unparalleled examination of the difficult lives of enslaved people makes Surviving Slavery required reading for historians of Atlantic slavery." (Journal of the Early Republic)

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