Maurice Aymard - Böcker

Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground by focusing on slave experiences on small plantations in the Upper South. She argues that a region was not buffered from the political, economic, and social impacts of enslavement simply because it was characterized by low black population density and small slaveholdings. By drawing on a massive statistical data base derived from antebellum census manuscripts and county tax records of 215 counties in nine states, on a vast array of slaveholder manuscripts, and on regional slave narratives, she pinpoints several indicators that distinguished Mountain South enslavement from the Lower South. These include a higher incidence of ethnic mixing between African and Native American slaves, heavier reliance on the field labor of women and children, and more frequent assignment of slaves to non-agricultural occupations. Dunaway also calls into question the notion that large numbers were necessary before slaves could engage in community building and resistance.

In The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, Wilma Dunaway calls into question the dominant paradigm of the US slave family. She contends that US slavery studies have been flawed by neglect of small plantations and export zones and exaggeration of slave agency. Using data on population trends and Slave narratives, she identifies several profit-maximizing strategies that owners implemented to disrupt and endanger African-American families, including forced labor migrations, structural interference in marriages and childcare, sexual exploitation of women, shortfalls in provision of basic survival needs, and ecological risks. This book is unique in its examination of new threats to family persistence that emerged during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Throughout the seventeenth century, Holland was the unrivalled centre of world trade and banking. This economic success fascinated contemporaries, and questions about it still exercise historians today. Is it appropriate to view the economic position of the Dutch during this period in terms of 'supremacy', or, as Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, of 'hegemony'? If so, how is this to be explained, as well as measured? Did it mark a radically new stage in the history of international trade? Was the role of Amsterdam really more important than that of Antwerp and Venice together? And how did such a dominant position, once gained, come to be lost to England, who in turn surrendered it to the United States? These questions remain crucial to anyone wishing to understand the dynamics of the development of capitalist world economy in the modern period, and in this book some thirty historians attempt to provide answers to them.

In The Capitalist World-Economy Immanuel Wallerstein focuses on the two central conflicts of capitalism, bourgeois versus proletarian and core versus periphery, in an attempt to describe both the cyclical rhythms and the secular transformations of capitalism, conceived as a singular world-system. The essays include discussions of the relationship of class and ethnonational consciousness, clarification of the meaning of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the utility of the concept of the semi peripheral state, and the relationship of socialist states to the capitalist world-economy. This book is the first in a three volume collection of Wallerstein's essays. The Politics of World-Economy (1984) elaborates on the role of states, the antisystemic movements and the civilizational project. Geopolitics and Geoculture (1991) analyses both the events leading up to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the subsequent process of perestroika in the light of Wallerstein's own interpretations, and the ways in which the renewed concern with culture is a product of the changing world-system.

Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground by focusing on slave experiences on small plantations in the Upper South. She argues that a region was not buffered from the political, economic, and social impacts of enslavement simply because it was characterized by low black population density and small slaveholdings. By drawing on a massive statistical data base derived from antebellum census manuscripts and county tax records of 215 counties in nine states, on a vast array of slaveholder manuscripts, and on regional slave narratives, she pinpoints several indicators that distinguished Mountain South enslavement from the Lower South. These include a higher incidence of ethnic mixing between African and Native American slaves, heavier reliance on the field labor of women and children, and more frequent assignment of slaves to non-agricultural occupations. Dunaway also calls into question the notion that large numbers were necessary before slaves could engage in community building and resistance.