This groundbreaking book presents a global perspective on the history of forced migration over three centuries and illuminates the centrality of these vast movements of people in the making of the modern world. Highly original essays from renowned international scholars trace the history of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, bonded soldiers, trafficked women, and coolie and Kanaka labor across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. They depict the cruelty of the captivity, torture, terror, and death involved in the shipping of human cargo over the waterways of the world, which continues unabated to this day. At the same time, these essays highlight the forms of resistance and cultural creativity that have emerged from this violent history. Together, the essays accomplish what no single author could provide: a truly global context for understanding the experience of men, women, and children forced into the violent and alienating experience of bonded labor in a strange new world. This pioneering volume also begins to chart a new role of the sea as a key site where history is made.

Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Volume 5)

History

Christopher, Emma

Rediker, Marcus

PYBUS, Cassandra

Americas

University of California Press

We hardly had our feet on the soil, when almost the first objects that greeted our vision were gibbets, and men toiling in the most abject misery, looking more degraded even than so many dumb beasts. Such sights, and the supposition that such might be our fate, served to sink the iron still deeper in our souls. American Citizens, British Slaves tells the strange story of almost a hundred United States citizens who were transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1839-40. As members of the Patriot Army that had conducted border raids into the colony of Upper Canada in 1838, they saw themselves as courageous republican activists. Instead of heroic liberators, they became political prisoners of Her Majesty's government. Sent to Van Diemen's Land by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, the Patriot exiles endured years of harsh treatment before they were eventually pardoned. Not being British subjects, their transportation was almost certainly illegal. This vivid and intimate story of political exile and punishment provides a window into the everyday life of the many thousands of forgotten men and women who endured the calculated cruelties of penal transportation.

American Citizens, British Slaves

Arts & Photography

Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish

Architecture

Melbourne University

White Rajah: A dynastic intrigue

University of Queensland Press

Follows McAuley's life from his student days at Sydney Uni through the war years, his conversion to Catholicism, his anticommunist activities during the Cold War period, and his editorship of Quadrant, with revelations about CIA funding and involvement with ASIO. A controversial new political biography.

The Devil and James McAuley

Australia & Oceania

Univ of Queensland Pr

This is a stylish, confronting and marvellously written biography. When it was first published, this controversial study of McAuley attracted a storm of protest. Cassandra has extended and strengthened her argument in this revised paperback edition.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their own lives. This alternative narrative of freedom fought for and won is uniquely compelling; historian Cassandra Pybus's groundbreaking research has uncovered individual stories of runaways who left America to forge difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Harry, for example, one of George Washington's slaves, escaped from Mount Vernon in 1776, was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, and eventually relocated to Sierra Leone in West Africa with his wife and three children. Ralph Henry, who ran away from the Virginia firebrand Patrick Henry in 1776, took a similar path to precarious freedom in Sierra Leone, while others, such as John Moseley and John Randall, were evacuated with the British forces to England. Stranded in England without skills or patronage during a period of high unemployment, they were among thousands of newly freed poor blacks who struggled just to survive. While some were relocated to Sierra Leone, others, like Moseley and Randall, found themselves transported to the distant penal colony of Botany Bay, in Australia. Epic Journeys of Freedom, written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, is a fascinating insight into the meaning of liberty; it will change forever the way we think about the American Revolution.

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

Africa

Beacon Press

During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled from their masters to find freedom with the British. Having emancipated themselves--and with rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears--these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their lives. This alternative narrative includes the stories of dozens of individuals--including Harry, one of George Washington's slaves--who left America and forged difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, this pathbreaking work will alter the way we think about the American Revolution.

Community & Culture

In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas’s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
Dorothy Thomas’s story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered in Enterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain’s Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.

Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 Ser.)

Candlin, Kit

University of Georgia Press

In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas’s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
Dorothy Thomas’s story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered in Enterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain’s Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.

In this compelling new book, distinguished historian and writer Cassandra Pybus reveals that black convicts were among our first fleet settlers—a fact which profoundly complicates our understanding of race relations in early colonial Australia. Most of these black founders were originally slaves from America who had sought freedom with the British during the American Revolution only to find themselves abandoned and unemployed in England when the war was over. Pybus' stories include the notorious runaway 'Black Caesar', who became our first bushranger, and the wonderfully subversive Billie Blue, who was the first ferryman on Sydney Harbour, after whom Blues Point is named.

Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers

University of New South Wales Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PYBUS, Cassandra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by PYBUS, Cassandra

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PYBUS, Cassandra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Volume 5)

American Citizens, British Slaves

White Rajah: A dynastic intrigue

The Devil and James McAuley

The Devil and James McAuley

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 Ser.)

Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 Ser.)

Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers