The 20th issue of the Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire will be published at the end of 2022. 

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« Subversions, emancipation and abolitions »

 

The N°20 of the collection of collective works published each year by the Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire proposes to evoke the long and complex process of extinction of the slavery of African populations in the Americas, which gradually collapsed during the 19th century. This system of economic production and social organization, built from the sixteenth century onwards and which reached its peak during the eighteenth, carried within it its own destruction, since it was based on the servitude of individuals subjected to forced labor under the status of slaves, with no regard for their human dignity. This explains why it was eventually defeated, even if it was able to continue for a long time.

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We propose to publish authors who have worked on the various forms of rejection of this system by the slaves themselves through individual or collective escapes and revolts, including that of Haiti which was a liberation by the slaves themselves. These constantly threatening insubordinations ended up being profoundly destabilizing for the whole system.

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At the same time, the huge scandal of slavery was not ignored by the populations of the European slave-owning nations, even if indignation and awareness of its archaism had little influence in the face of the strength of state and private interests and the demand of consumers of colonial products such as sugar and coffee. But an abolitionist consciousness gradually spread in Europe and the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards until it became structured and finally won out in the nineteenth century, when the trade of enslaved people and slavery lost all legality. This vast movement began in England and we wish to publish authors who have worked on the English and American abolitionist movements. The French abolitionists participated progressively and were supported by the Haitian revolution during the French revolution of 1789. The complexity of the long process of the abolition of slavery, definitively proclaimed in 1848 by the French authorities, will finally be evoked.