BARBARIC TRAFFIC by Philip Gould ( 9780674037854 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

BARBARIC TRAFFIC
COMMERCE AND ANTISLAVERY IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ATLANTIC WORLD

By:

Format:

Electronic book text

List price:	£47.95
We believe that this item is permanently unavailable, and so we cannot source it.

ISBN 10:

0674037855

ISBN 13:

9780674037854

Publisher:

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

31 July, 2009

Pages:

272

Synopsis:

Eighteenth-century antislavery writers attacked the slave trade as barbaric traffic--a practice that would corrupt the mien and manners of Anglo-American culture to its core. Less concerned with slavery than with the slave trade in and of itself, these writings expressed a moral uncertainty about the nature of commercial capitalism. This is the argument Philip Gould advances in Barbaric Traffic. A major work of cultural criticism, the book constitutes a rethinking of the fundamental agenda of antislavery writing from pre-revolutionary America to the end of the British and American slave trades in 1808. Studying the rhetoric of various antislavery genres--from pamphlets, poetry, and novels to slave narratives and the literature of disease--Gould exposes the close relation between antislavery writings and commercial capitalism. By distinguishing between good commerce, or the importing of commodities that refined manners, and bad commerce, like the slave trade, the literature offered both a critique and an outline of acceptable forms of commercial capitalism. A challenge to the premise that objections to the slave trade were rooted in modern laissez-faire capitalism, Gould's work revises--and expands--our understanding of antislavery literature as a form of cultural criticism in its own right.

Illustrations:

6 halftones

Publication:

Imprint:

Harvard University Press

Returns:

Non-returnable

Some other items by this author:

A NEW YORKER'S STORIES

BARBARIC TRAFFIC (HB)

CAJUN MUSIC AND ZYDECO

CAJUN MUSIC AND ZYDECO (HB)