Black Ghost of Empire

The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation

De: Kris Manjapra

Narrado por: Robin Miles, Kris Manjapra

If the 1619 Project illuminated the ways in which life in the United States has been shaped by the existence of slavery, this “historical, literary masterpiece” (Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy) focuses on emancipation and how its afterlife further codified the racial caste system—instead of obliterating it.

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights and universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt.

In this paradigm-altering book, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipations across the globe and reveals that their perceived failures were not failures at all, but the predictable outcomes of policies designed first and foremost to preserve the status quo of racial oppression. In the process, Manjapra shows how, amidst this unfinished history, grassroots Black organizers and activists have become custodians of collective recovery and remedy; not only for our present, but also for our relationship with the past.

Black Ghost of Empire will rewire listeners’ understanding of the world in which we live. Timely, lucid, and crucial to our understanding of contemporary society, this book shines a light into the gap between the idea of slavery’s end and the reality of its continuation—exposing to whom a debt was paid and to whom a debt is owed.

©2022 Kris Manjapra. All rights reserved. Excerpt from "The Sea Is History" from "The Star-Apple Kingdom" by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1979 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (P)2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Heart Break

It took me some time to finish this book. It is so sad to read about the treatment of a people just because of the color of their skin. This mistreatment is still going on today. Only the continent of Africa has apologized for their role in sending their people into slavery. England,France,Spain and all the other countries involved in the slave trade including America have never apologized. It amazes me that the people that enslaved people are paid but the people who were enslaved are given nothing. The shipping companies and the banks that supported slavery are still in business today but they have not paid one penny to the descendants of the enslaved but continue to pay the descendants of the enslavers.

Novel framing of ‘how did we get here’

Lots of information new to me on how ‘failure of emancipation’ and recompense to enslavers took place in different countries. Expanded my knowledge of who worked to perpetuate the status quo and who worked with less success to try to make it right for the enslaved their descendants.