Thanks to the Germans! Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia

The article explores the context of the Estonian law on cultural autonomy from February 1925. It argues that the Jewish minority was an unintended beneficiary of the concession granted by the Estonian government to the Baltic Germans whose land ownership had been previously revoked. Unlike the ethnic Germans, who considered cultural autonomy a tactical retreat, the Jews took full advantage of the opportunity to strengthen communal bonds. Cultural autonomy was upheld throughout the 1930s mainly due to the strenuous desire of the authoritarian regime that ceased power in Estonia in 1934 to avoid a conflict with Nazi Germany. As for the Jews, the lack of irredentist tendencies ensured that they could preserve their status.     

Edmund Burke on slavery and the slave trade

This article reconstructs Edmund Burke’s thoughts on slavery from his Account of the European Settlements in America to his parliamentary speeches in the late 1700s. It seeks to demonstrate that Burke’s program for slave reform, Sketch of a Negro Code, was one of the earliest plans for gradual abolition and gradual manumission formulated in eighteenth-century England and, quite possibly, the first ever in modern British history whose scheme was detailed and comprehensive. This article further explains how the plan reflected both Burke’s antipathy to slavery and his unusually wide comprehension of the many obstacles to abolition. It concludes by stressing Burke’s belief that Africans were not condemned to servitude by their background.     

Cohabitation registers and the study of slave families in Virginia

Virginia's cohabitation registers were compiled after the Civil War to legalize the unions that had formed between enslaved couples and to legitimize the children of those couples. They provide valuable demographic information about more than 13,000 couples and their children – well over 50,000 individuals – drawn from 23 counties across the state. The registers can be very useful to historians of slavery and slave families, but when using them it is essential to understand why and how they were created, what exactly they include, and what they omit.     

Constructing autonomy: the significance of architecture in creating and manifesting autonomy in protest camps

ABSTRACT

This study examines how autonomy in protest camps is enabled by and manifested through architecture. Although the importance of space for the struggles for autonomy in protest camps has been recognized in recent research, their architecture has not been widely examined in this respect. This study uses empirical data collected from four different protest camps during 2015–2017 to examine the role of architecture for the struggles for autonomy. The study found that architecture is essential in creating protest camps’ autonomy from the status quo. Furthermore, the results suggest that protesters engage especially with Do-It-Yourself -architecture to organize their lifeworlds in a way that allows, enforces, and reflects their alternative societal structures and practices, thus also enforcing their autonomy as a prefigurative praxis. Overall, the findings of this research suggest that architecture plays a significant role in both creating and manifesting autonomy in protest camps, thus adding architecture as a significant element to be analyzed in protest camps and expanding the existing field of research.     

The role of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade

The recent controversy instigated by Leonard Jeffries has prompted discussion of the relationship between the development of the transatlantic slave trade and European Jewish communities. Closer attention to the role played by Jews in the development of the trade, and its associated enterprises, suggests that little direct involvement can be identified. In the Dutch slave trade Jews can be said to have had tangible significance, but even here their involvement was relatively marginal. Through detailed analysis of the historiography of slavery, the ‘conspiracy theory’ approach to the issue is substantially challenged and disproved.     

The Persistence of the slave market in seventeenth-century Central Mexico

This study, based on an extensive notarial database, demonstrates the significance of slavery in Central Mexico during the seventeenth century. Thousands of bills of sale from Mexico City and Puebla – the largest and most lucrative slave markets in the region – show that the slave trade did not collapse with the end of the Portuguese asiento in 1640. A growing population of American-born creoles sustained the market during the subsequent decades, along with a modest number of new African arrivals. In 1700, slavery remained integral to Central Mexico's economy.     

The travail of Delaware slave families in the early republic

Largely ignored in histories of the American slave trade, Delaware provides a unique case study of a state that attempted to carve out its identity as the notions of a free North and a slaveholding South emerged in early America. Delaware’s small slaveholdings and relatively small geographic area created unique challenges for its enslaved population. Aided by Quaker and Methodist abolitionists, slaves fought against kidnappers, slave sales, and distance to build and maintain families. Using heretofore unexamined tax records, the travail of enslaved families in Delaware at the close of the eighteenth century is analyzed in great detail.     

Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of slavery

The American law of slavery was structured around two conceptions of what a slave was: a legal person and a form of property. Neither conception preceded the other; neither outlasted the other; neither could be reduced to the other; neither was reluctantly stated; and neither was accidental. Scholars have often treated this double character of the slave in law as a mark of contradiction or incoherence. But the case of South Carolina, examined through state-level statutes and appellate-court decisions, demonstrates that in fact both conceptions were essential to a legal regime intended at root to establish and preserve white control.