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  • © 2018

Revisiting Slavery and Antislavery

Towards a Critical Analysis

Palgrave Macmillan
  • Addresses issues of old and new slaveries together in one volume
  • Develops a critique of ‘modern slavery’ discourse
  • Gathers together critical voices from a number of different disciplinary perspectives including philosophy, political theory, sociology, anthropology, and literature

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
  2. Past

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
    2. Slavery and the Revival of Anti-slavery Activism

      • Laura Brace, Julia O’Connell Davidson
      Pages 3-34
    3. Contextualizing Slavery’s Wrongness

      • Tommy Lott
      Pages 35-63
    4. The Liberty of Naming

      • Mary Nyquist
      Pages 65-96
  3. Revisiting the Politics of Antislavery

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 261-261
    2. Abolition Terminable and Interminable

      • Jared Sexton
      Pages 305-325
  4. Back Matter

    Pages 327-335

About this book

Despite growing popular and policy interest in ‘new’ slavery, with contemporary abolitionists calling for action to free an estimated 40 million ‘modern slaves’, interdisciplinary and theoretical dialogue has been largely missing from scholarship on ‘modern slavery’.

This edited volume will provide a space to reinvigorate the theory and practice of representing slavery and related systems of domination, in particular our understandings of the binary between slavery and freedom in different historical and political contexts. The book takes a critical approach, interrogating the concept of modern slavery by exploring where it has come from, and its potential for obscuring and foreclosing new understandings.

Including contributions from philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and English literature scholars, it adds to the emerging critique of the concept of ‘modern slavery’ through its focus on the connections between the past of Atlantic World slavery, the present of contemporary groups whose freedoms are heavily restricted (prisoners, child labourers in the Global South, migrant domestic workers, and migrant wives), and the futures envisaged by activists struggling against different elements of the systems of domination that Atlantic World slavery relied upon and spawned. Revisiting Slavery & Antislavery will be of indispensable value to scholars, students, policy makers and activists in the fields of human rights, modern history, international politics, social policy, sociology and global inequality.

Editors and Affiliations

  • School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Laura Brace

  • School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Julia O'Connell Davidson

About the editors

Laura Brace is Associate Professor in Political Theory, University of Leicester, UK. Her work focusses on the politics of property in political thought, and the ways in which it is inflected by class, race and gender. 



Julia O’Connell Davidson
is Professor of Social Research, University of Bristol, and Co-Director of Bristol Institute of Migration and Mobility Studies (BIMMS), a founder member of Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS).


Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access