Freedom's Seekers: Essays on Comparative Emancipation

Seekers: Essays on Comparative Emancipation. By Jeffrey R. KerrRitchie. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2013. Pp. 272, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $35.95).Freedom's Seekers: Essays on Comparative Emancipation, by Jeffrey R. KerrRitchie, looks at slaves and self-emancipated slaves in a global perspective, cutting a broad swath chronologically, geographically, and topically. Kerr-Ritchie examines the eighteenth century and the age of revolutionary emancipation through the final abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil during the late nineteenth century.... The epilogue extends the analysis into our contemporary era (pp. xi-xii). The author explores five continents, including North South Europe, Africa, and Asia, although the principal focus is upon the African diaspora in North primarily in the United States. Ritchie opens with a question, which is also the title of the introduction: Was U.S. Emancipation Exceptional? Fie addresses this questions in six chapters entitled Self-Emancipation across North America, Slave Soldiers, Slave Revolt across Borders, Ward and the Making of an Imperial Subject, Freedwomen and Freed Children, and Freedom's First Generation. The epilogue Freedom's Seekers Today looks at millions of unfree workers throughout the world, including those currently in the United States. Throughout the work, Kerr-Ritchie challenges earlier scholars' assertions that U.S. experiences of slavery and emancipation were unique. He argues that viewing these subjects across national boundaries reveals that the American experience of slavery and emancipation were similar in many respects to those in other countries, although there were important differences as well.Kerr-Ritchie notes that slaves in the United States crossed into the free lands of Spanish Florida, Canada, and Mexico in search of freedom, while slaves in coastal West Africa escaped to Lagos, a free, British-controlled port city. Whether in North America or Africa, some escaped slaves sought to assist others in attaining freedom whether by aiding individual escapees or by becoming involved in organized abolitionist activism. Escaped slaves Samuel Ringgold Ward and Henry Bibb, as well as freeborn Mary Ann Shadd, left the U.S. and moved to Canada, where all three became important figures in the abolitionist movement that assisted slaves from the U.S. to gain their freedom and settle in Canada.The author finds that women and children who gained their freedom were larger proportions of the population than were men in various countries of the Caribbean, Indian Ocean nations, and the United States. As well, once free, women and children were less likely than men to work producing cash crops; they were more likely than men to produce for home consumption and for the local marketplace. …

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