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Handbuch Geschichte der Sklaverei: eine Globalgeschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart By Zeuske Michael . Berlin : de Gruyter , 2013. Pp. lx+725. [euro]129.95/US$182.00, ISBN 978-3-11-027880-4 .
Reviews
To cut a long story short: this book needs to be discussed! Not only is it the first serious attempt by a single researcher to write 'a monographic world and global history of slavery' (p. 57), but it also adds a new perspective to current debates on how to define and explore the phenomenon of slavery in a global perspective. The goals set by the author are as ambitious as they are provocative and, although the way in which these goals are achieved do not fully live up to the reader's expectations, the arguments presented in this study need to be taken seriously.
Michael Zeuske, a specialist in Latin American history who has contributed to a micro-historical view on slaves and slave agency in Spanish America, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean for more than twenty years, has written a 'handbook of the history of slavery' and he has chosen a rather unusual approach for a historian. The conceptual starting point of his 'global history from the beginnings to the present' is the globalized world of today's 'human capitalism' or 'bio capitalism', as he calls it (p. 571). Roughly about two hundred years after the abolition of the 'great slavery' 'in the nineteenth-century "West" ' (p. 219), very old forms of slaving are constantly regaining ground today, according to Zeuske. He argues that these forms of slaving exist and have always existed beyond the institution of slavery and a legally fixed slave status. They had been forced back to a local and hidden level on the ground by the British (and European) anti-slavery campaigns (p. 13) until the effects of the age of globalization allowed those very local forms of slaving to interact...