Articoli di riviste sul tema "Women slaveholders"

When Abraham Minis, merchant and tavern keeper, of Savannah, Georgia sat down to draw up his last will and testament he faced a heart-wrenching dilemma: how would he successfully provide for all of his eight children and also ensure that his beloved wife Abigail would have enough to live out the rest of her days in widowhood in comfort? Three years later, in spring 1757, Abraham died. When his will was read, there were thankfully no surprises for Abigail and their children – Abraham had followed Low Country custom regarding the division of family wealth. He gave his three sons his horses and mares and left five daughters all of his black cattle. It was Abigail, he explained, who was to inherit “all the rest of my Estate both real and personal” to be “enjoyed by her” so that she would be able to “maintain educate and bring up our children.” He sealed his love, approval, and trust in his wife's abilities to meet this request by nominating her his sole executrix. Any help that she might need when settling the affairs of his estate, he observed, would be provided by his loyal friends Joseph Phillips and Benjamin Sheftall, who would assist and advise her.

Abstract Lisa Bowens’s African American Readings of Paul provides a fascinating adventure for all those interested in reception history of Paul and/or the history of the Black Church in the United States. Although also engaging modern scholarship, Bowens allows the historic voices of the Black Church to speak for themselves, thus sometimes challenging paradigms established by earlier scholars working from more limited evidence. When enslaved persons read the Bible, they embraced its liberationist and justice-oriented principles, rescuing Paul from the counterreadings of the slaveholders. Bowens sympathetically highlights the spiritual experiences of historic African American readers, by which they appropriated Paul’s ethos more deeply. Applying the same principles, African American women recognized Paul’s appreciation for women ministry colleagues and so contextualized his apparent prohibitions of women in ministry. The figures treated in this book are of more than historical interest; they often provide models of faithful discipleship and faithful readings of Scripture for readers today.

ABSTRACT‘I was a few years back a slave on your property of Houton Tower, and as a Brown woman was fancied by a Mr Tumming unto who Mr Thomas James sold me.’ Thus begins Mary Williamson's letter, which for decades sat unexamined in an attic in Scotland until a history student became interested in her family's papers, and showed it to Diana Paton. In this article, Paton uses the letter to reflect on the history and historiography of ‘Brown’ women like Mary Williamson in Jamaica and other Atlantic slave societies. Mary Williamson's letter offers a rare perspective on the sexual encounters between white men and brown women that were pervasive in Atlantic slave societies. Yet its primary focus is on the greater importance of ties of place and family – particularly of relations between sisters – in a context in which the ‘severity’ of slavery was increasing. Mary Williamson's letter is a single and thus-far not formally archived trace in a broader archive of Atlantic slavery dominated by material left by slaveholders and government officials. Paton asks what the possibilities and limits of such a document may be for generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of those who were born into slavery.

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

Abstract This article deals with offences and crimes against female slaves, and those committed by female slaves, in Ottoman Istanbul (sixteenth-seventeeth centuries). Its main sources are imperial legislation and court records of the imperial capital, Istanbul, and its suburbs. Judicial archives remain the chief sources of early modern Ottoman historiography on gender. This contribution tackles slavery’s specificities regarding women, without ignoring the parallels with their male counterparts in the Ottoman Empire. By considering women as both objects and agents of legal violations and acts of violence, I simultaneously deal with the rights of slaveholders and slaves. Violations of these rights varied depending on the identity and juridical status of their authors, and were handled accordingly by the justice system. Thus, I consider violations committed by owners against their slaves, by slaves against their owners, and by third parties against the slaves of others. The rights and mutual obligations of masters and slaves were strictly defined in Ottoman law, although the judicial authorities upheld the preservation of private property above all. They dedicated themselves to fighting against the slightest doubt over masters’ quasi-absolute authority over their human possessions, whose unconditional obedience was required. Female slaves, in order to affirm their rights, had to provide irrefutable written proof or trustworthy verbal testimonies at the kadi courts.

Abstract This article examines postmortem inventories and notarial records from Brazilian slaveholders in southern Brazil in the nineteenth century. By discussing selected cases in detail, it investigates the relationship between “precarious masters” (especially the poor and/or disabled, widows without family, and single elderly slaveholding women and men) and their slaves and former slaves to whom they bequeathed, in their testaments and final wills, manumission and property. The article reads these documents as intergenerational contractual arrangements that connected the masters’ expectations for care in illness and old age with the slaves’ and former slaves’ expectations for compensation for their work and dedication. Following these uneven relationships of interdependence and exploitation as they developed over time, the article suggests a reassessment of the role of paternalism in Brazil during the country’s final century of slavery. More than a tool to enforce relations of domination, paternalism articulated with the dynamics of vulnerability and interdependency as they changed over the life courses of both enslaved people and slave owners. This article shows how human aging became a terrain of negotiation and struggle as Brazilian slave society transformed throughout the nineteenth century.

Drawing on thirty freedom suits from nineteenth-century eastern Cuba, this article explores how some slaves redefined slaveholders' oral promises of manumissions by grace from philanthropic acts into contracts providing a deferred wage payout. Manumissions by grace tended to reward affective labor (loyalty, affection) and to be granted to domestic slaves. Across Cuba, as in other slave societies of Spanish America, through self-purchase, slaves made sustained efforts to monetize the labor that they did by virtue of their ascribed status. The monetization of affective work stands out amongst such efforts. Freedom litigants involved in conflicts over manumissions by grace emphasized the market logics in domestic slavery, revealing that slavery was a fundamentally economic institution even in such instances where it appeared to be intertwined with kinship and domesticity. Through this move, they challenged the assumption that slaves toiled loyally for masters out of a natural commitment to an unchanging master-slave hierarchy. By the 1880s, through court litigation and extra-judicial violence, slave litigants and insurgents would turn oral promises of manumission by grace into a blueprint for general emancipation. Through their legal actions, enslaved people, especially women, revealed the significance and transactional nature of care work, a notion familiar to us today.

AbstractThis article examines why Boston's slave and free black population consisted of more than 1,500 people in 1750, but by 1790 Boston was home to only 766 people of African descent. This disappearing act, where the town's black population declined by at least fifty per cent between 1763 and 1790, can only be explained by exploring slavery, abolition, and their legacies in Boston. Slaves were vital to the town's economy, filling skilled positions and providing labor for numerous industries. Using the skills acquired to challenge their enslavement, Afro-Bostonians found freedom during the American revolutionary era. Nevertheless, as New England's rural economy collapsed, young white men and women from all over the region flooded Boston looking for work, driving down wages, and competing with black people for menial employment. Forced out of the labor market, many former slaves and their descendants left the region entirely. Others joined the Continental or British armies and never returned home. Moreover, many slave owners, knowing that slavery was coming to an end in Massachusetts, sold their bondsmen and women to other colonies in the Americas where slavery was still legal and profitable. Thus, the long-term legacy of abolition for black Bostonians was that Boston's original enslaved population largely disappeared, while the city became a hub of abolitionism by the 1830s. Boston's abolitionist community – many the descendants of slaveholders – did not have to live with their forefathers’ sins. Instead, they crafted a narrative of a free Boston, making it an attractive destination for runaway slaves from across the Atlantic world.

The slaves, especially women, are more vulnerable than the men to the oppressive system of slavery. It does not only seize the idea of self from a slave (which constitutes a human being, and slavery seeks support from and utilizes the existing laws by which all the legal rights of the slaves are hijacked) but also it puts them (women) into a constant struggle to negotiate, not just for the construction of their ‘selves’ but for their motherhoods and the right of being called wives of their husbands and so forth. The masters, the white, adopt numerous evil strategies which sabotage the slaves forming strong bondage between husband and wife; and parents and children. The masters and slaveholders separate the slaves to run slavery smoothly; for if they are kept together, there will grow a strong relationship among the slaves as they will share feelings, emotions, and sentiments, which may result in gathering a possible resistance against the entire slavery. In such a heavy check on the formation of family bondage, Jackobs’s spoke persona, Brent adopts several strategies, which not only help but also construct her identity and liberate herself as well as her children from the claws of slavery. Thus, this paper examines how the emergence of motherhood becomes the prime factor for negotiating and constructing self-identity, not for herself– Brent but also for her children, out of nothing– inheritance. Moreover, it has created awareness among the communities that despise slavery against slavery, afterward uprooting slavery forever.

AbstractThis article examines Cuba's long process of gradual emancipation (from 1868–1886) and the continual states of bondage that categorize the afterlife of Cuban slavery. The article addresses deferred freedom, re-enslavement, and maintenance of legal states of bondage in the midst of “freedom.” It contends with the legacy of the casta system, the contradictions within the Moret Law of 1870, which “half-freed” children but not their mothers, and it analyzes the struggle for full emancipation after US occupation, with the thwarted attempt of forming the Partido Independiente de Color to enfranchise populations of color. The article argues that the desire to control the labor of racialized populations, and in particular the labor of black and indigenous women and children, unified Cuban and US slaveholders determined to detain emancipation; and provides an analysis of the re-enslavement of US free people of color at the end of the nineteenth century, kidnapped and brought to the Cuba as a method of bolstering slavery. The article draws on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman and Shona Jackson to provide an assessment of the afterlife of Cuban slavery, the invisibility of indigenous labor, the hypervisibility of African labor in the Caribbean deployed to maintain white supremacy, and it critiques the humanizing narrative of labor as a means for freedom in order to address the ways in which, for racialized populations in Cuba, wage labor would emerge as a tool of oppression. The article raises an inquiry into the historiography on Cuban slavery to provide a critique of the invisibility of indigenous and African women and children. It also considers the role and place of sexual exchanges/prostitution utilized to obtain freedom and to finance self-manumission, alongside the powerful narratives of the social and sexual deviancy of black women that circulated within nineteenth-century Cuba.

Around 1790, two young sisters born into a slaveholding free black family began instructing Antiguan slaves in literacy and Christianity. The sisters, Anne (1768–1834) and Elizabeth (1771–1833) Hart, first instructed their father's slaves at Popeshead—he may have hired them out rather than using them on his own crops—then labored among enslaved women and children in Antiguan plantations and in towns and ports like St. John's and English Harbour. Soon the sisters came to write about faith, slavery, and freedom. Anne and Elizabeth Hart were moderate opponents of slavery, not abolitionists but meliorationists. When compared to their black American, British, and West African contemporaries, the Hart sisters illuminate the birth of a black antislavery Christianity in the late eighteenth century precisely because they never became abolitionists. The Hart sisters shared with their black contemporaries a vivid sense of racial identity and evangelical Christianity. Yet as meliorationists, the Hart sisters did not oppose slavery as an institution, but rather the vice it spread into the lives of blacks. The difference between the Hart sisters and their contemporaries such as Richard Allen, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Lemuel Haynes, and John Marrant—all luminaries of black abolitionism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—was that the abolitionists felt themselves citizens of a modern nation-state characterized by power that could be used against slave traders and slaveholders. The Hart sisters never thought of themselves as citizens and abjured political means, including revolution, of ending slavery. This essay aims to describe the Hart sisters' faith and antislavery activity and to analyze the difference between meliorationism and abolitionism in terms of a black writer's ability or inability to identify as a citizen of a modern nation-state.

Abstract This article examines two female slaveholders, one real and one fictional, to explore the relationship between gender and slave management in both history and popular culture. Annie Palmer, the “White Witch of Rose Hall” plantation in Jamaica, although the creation of folklore and journalistic exaggeration, has functioned for a century and a half as a symbol not only of the evils of slavery but of the idea that female slaveholders’ cruelty threatened the system of slavery in a way in which that practiced by males did not. In New Orleans, Delphine Lalaurie, an elite woman renowned for her elegance and piety, became a figure of monstrosity after a house fire of 1834 revealed that her French Quarter mansion held a chamber of horrors for the enslaved, and offered a similar example of the dangers of female power in slave societies. Examining these women’s continuing presence both as historical figures and as characters in novels, television shows, and other creative productions, this article illuminates the strange career of the slaveholding woman, a figure execrated in her own era and misunderstood or ignored in contemporary historiography, yet simultaneously the subject over centuries of prurient cultural fascination.

By contrasting how families who mobilized African-descent networks gained more autonomy than those who relied on slaveholder patronage, this article explores the interplay between kinship and manumission on the northern Peruvian coast from the mid-seventeenth century into the early eighteenth century. For enslaved and freed people, kinship did not constitute a status, but a series of exchanges that required legal or public recognition and mutual acknowledgment. Manumission was embedded in articulated kinships, or announced relations, as well as in silenced kinships that often occurred because owners refused to recognize their relationships with enslaved women.

The portrayal of the enslaved woman Fotis in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses exposes the intersection of gender, sexuality, and slavery. Apuleius’ novel allows a window into interactions beyond the relationship of slaveholder and the enslaved person over whom s/he claimed dominium. Centering Fotis in Apuleius’ narrative shows how a discourse of slavery worked: an enslaved woman is made present as a body that may be sexualized and surrounded with fantasies of sex and violence. The sexual episodes of Lucius and Fotis reveal an aesthetic, facilitated by the system of slavery, of consuming bodies, watching bodies consumed by violence, and framing effacement and degradation as romance, an operation of power at the core of chattel slavery.

With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slaves then. Noble had known the “peculiar institution” at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to embark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. Were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom? Between 1865 and 1869 Noble exhibited in northern cities a total of eight paintings with African American subjects. Two of these, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865, repainted ca. 1870) and Margaret Garner (1867), featured mixed-race women, or mulattos, as they had come to be called. From a young female up for auction, to the famous fugitive Margaret Garner, his portrayals show a transformation taking place within perceptions of biracial women in post-emancipation America. Opinions about mulattos surfaced in a range of theoretical discussions, from the scientific to the political, as strategists North and South envisioned evolving social policy.

The objective of this paper is to make the case that the United States became an economic super-power in the nineteenth century on the backs of African-American slaves and Native Americans.It was in 1619, when Jamestown colonists bought 20-30 slaves from English pirates. The paper starts with ‘The 1619 Project’ whose objective is to place the consequences of slavery--and the contributions of black Americans--at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation.Slavery was common in all thirteen colonies, and at-least twelve Presidents owned slaves. The enslaved people were not recognized as human beings, but as property: once a slave always a slave.The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1788, never mentions slavery, yet slavery is at the very heart of the constitution. The U.S. government used the Declaration of Independence as a license to commit genocide on the Native Americans, and to seize their land.Racist ideas have persisted throughout American history, based on the myth that blacks are intellectually inferior compared to whites. However, in a 2012 article in the Scientific American, the authors reported that 85.5% of genetic variation is within the so-called races, not between them. So, the consensus among Western researchers today is that human races do not represent a scientific theory, but are sociocultural constructs.After end of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery in America, and the 15th Amendment protected the voting rights of African Americans.However, in the Confederate South, Jim Crow laws legalized racial segregation between 1870-1968. In 1965, thanks to the Civil Rights movement, the Voting Rights Act was passed to overcome barriers created by Jim Crow laws to the legal rights of African Americans under the 15th Amendment.British and American innovations in cotton technology sparked the Industrial Revolution during the latter part of the eighteenth century. The British cotton manufacturing exploded in the 1780s. Eighty years later in 1860, Manchester, England stood at the center of a world-spanning empire—the empire of cotton. There were three pillars of the Industrial Revolution. One was the centuries-earlier conquest by Europeans of a colossal expanse of lands in the New World. It was the control of huge territories in America, that made monoculture farming of cotton possible. Second was that the Europeans drastically—and unilaterally--altered the global competitive landscape of cotton. They did it by using their military might, and the willingness to use it—often violently--to their advantage.The third—and the most important--was slavery: without which there would be no Industrial Revolution. America was tremendously suited for cotton production. The climate and soil of a large part of American South met the conditions under which the cotton plant thrived. More importantly, the plantation owners in America commanded unlimited supplies of the three crucial ingredients that went into the production of cotton: labor, land, and credit. And this was topped by their unbelievable political power.In 1793 Eli Whitney’s revolutionary cotton gin increased ginning productivity fifty times, and thus removed the bottleneck of removing seeds from cotton. Because of relying on monoculture farming, the problem the cotton planters were facing was soil exhaustion. So, they wanted the U.S. government to acquire more land. Surprisingly, in 1803 America was able to strike an unbelievable deal with the French--the Louisiana Purchase--which doubled the territory of the United States. In 1819 America acquired Florida from Spain, and in 1845 annexed Texas from Mexico.Between 1803 and 1838, under President Andrew Jackson, America fought a multi-front war against the Native Americans in the Deep South, and expropriated vast tracts of their land, that culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Deep South.With an unlimited supply of land—and slave labor--even soil exhaustion did not slow down the cotton barons; they just moved further west and farther south. New cotton fields now sprang up in the sediment-rich lands along the banks of Mississippi. So swift was this move westward that, by the end of the 1830s, Mississippi was producing more cotton than any other southern state. By 1860, there were more millionaires per capita in Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in America.The New Orleans slave market was the largest in America--where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold.The entry of the United States in the cotton market quickly began to reshape the global cotton market. By 1802 America was the single-most supplier of cotton to Britain.For eighty years--from the 1780s to 1865--almost a million people were herded down the road from the upper South to the lower South and the West, to toil on cotton plantations. The thirty-odd men walked in coffles, the double line hurrying in lock-step. Each hauled twenty pounds of iron, chains that draped from neck-to-neck, and wrist-to-wrist, binding them all together. They walked for miles, days, and weeks, and many covered over 700 miles.The plantation owners devised a cruel system of controlling their slaves that the enslaved called “the pushing system.” This system constantly increased the number of acres each slave was expected to cultivate. In 1805 each “hand” could tend to five acres of a cotton field. Fifty years later that target had been doubled to ten acres.Overseers closely monitored enslaved workers. Each slave was assigned a daily quota of number of pounds of cotton to pick. If the worker failed to meet it, he received as many lashes on his back as the deficit. However, if he overshot his quota, the master might “reward” him by raising his quota the next day.One of the most brutal weapons the planters used against the slaves, was the whip: ten feet of plaited cowhide. When facing the specter of an overseer’s whip, slaves were so terrified that they could not speak in sentences. They danced, trembled, babbled, and lost control of their bodies.When seeking a loan, the planters used slaves as a collateral. With extraordinarily high returns from their businesses, the planters began to expand their loan portfolio: sometimes using the same slave worker as collateral for multiple mortgages. The American South produced too much cotton. However, consumer demand could not keep up with the excessive supply, that then led to a precipitous fall in prices, which, in turn, set off the Panic of 1837. And that touched off a major depression.The slaveholders were using advanced management and accounting practices long before the techniques that are still in use today.The manufacture of sugar from sugarcane began in Louisiana Territory in 1795. In sugar mills, children, alongside with adults, toiled like factory workers with assembly-like precision and discipline under the constant threat of boiling hot kettles, open furnaces, and grinding rollers. To attain the highest efficiency, sugar factories worked day and night where there is no distinction as to the days of the week. Fatigue might mean losing an arm to the grinding rollers, or being flayed for not being able to keep up. Resistance was often met with sadistic cruelty.The expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence, drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the course of a single life time, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations, to a continental cotton empire. As a result, the United States became a modern, industrial, and capitalistic economy. This is the period in which America rose from being a minor European trading partner, to becoming the world’s leading economy. Finally, we hope that we have successfully been able to make the argument that America became an economic powerhouse in the nineteenth century not only on the backs of African-American slaves, but also on the genocide of Native Americans, and their stolen lands.

Abstract Why did fifteenth-century Genoese slaveholders insure the lives of enslaved pregnant women? I argue that their assessment of the risks associated with childbirth reflected their views on the connection between slavery, property, and lineage. Genoese slaveholders saw the reproductive labor of enslaved women as a potential contribution to their lineage as well as their property. Because their children by enslaved women might become their heirs, Genoese slaveholders were inclined to worry about and seek protection against the risk of maternal mortality. In the context of the commercial revolution and the rise of third-party insurance, they developed life insurance for enslaved pregnant women to complement the fines already required of those who illegally impregnated enslaved women and thereby endangered their lives.

AbstractThis article explores the intersections between gender, disability and care labour in the slaveholding societies of the British Caribbean from 1788 to 1834. Considered economic burdens by slaveholders, aged and disabled bondswomen were made productive through caring for their enslaved peers, many of whom were themselves temporarily unproductive due to pregnancy, illness, age or impairment. Although slaveowners devalued aged and disabled bondswomen, and assigned them inferior labour positions, in actuality, slaveowners concealed an economic logic: disabled and aged bondspeople were efficient but of a different kind, and their productivity was essential to the healthscape of the plantation. This article explores The History of Mary Prince as a first‐hand account of an enslaved woman who experienced episodic impairment and long‐term disability and who practiced self‐care and received care from multiple different women.

This article examines the manner and method of resistance against patriarchal power and privilege. Two types of power are contrasted. One is the violent, war-like and hierarchical power of an empire, and the other is the faithful resistance of Israel’s prophets. A further distinction is made between violent male power and non-violent female power. It is argued that Miriam was a prophet of the people and her prophetic witness is an example of the power and outcome of non-violent resistance. Her theology explicitly and specifically praises God not as a warrior. Hers is not a muscular, masculine God whose power seeks to match the power of empire. Her God has a power that through radical love for a slave people and taking sides with the enslaved overcomes the power of the slaveholder. In her theology, Miriam recalls the God of the exodus, who begins the acts of liberation with the women, to whose faithfulness, courage and defiant obedience, the freedom of the people is entrusted. From a feminist perspective it is argued that this style of non-violent, faithful prophetic witness has a greater impact than violent resistance associated with an empire-like power. It is suggested that black liberation theology should adopt this paradigm in its witness of and resistance against oppression.

Introduction Eating is one of the most quintessential activities of human life. Because of this primacy, eating is, as food anthropologist Sidney Mintz has observed, “not merely a biological activity, but a vibrantly cultural activity as well” (48). This article posits that the current awareness of climate change in the Western world is animating such cultural activity as the Slow Food movement and is, as a result, stimulating what could be seen as an evolutionary change in popular foodways. Moreover, this paper suggests that, in line with modelling provided by the Slow Food example, an increased awareness of the connections of climate change to the social injustices of food production might better drive social change in such areas. This discussion begins by proposing that contemporary foodways—defined as “not only what is eaten by a particular group of people but also the variety of customs, beliefs and practices surrounding the production, preparation and presentation of food” (Davey 182)—are changing in the West in relation to current concerns about climate change. Such modification has a long history. Since long before the inception of modern Homo sapiens, natural climate change has been a crucial element driving hominidae evolution, both biologically and culturally in terms of social organisation and behaviours. Macroevolutionary theory suggests evolution can dramatically accelerate in response to rapid shifts in an organism’s environment, followed by slow to long periods of stasis once a new level of sustainability has been achieved (Gould and Eldredge). There is evidence that ancient climate change has also dramatically affected the rate and course of cultural evolution. Recent work suggests that the end of the last ice age drove the cultural innovation of animal and plant domestication in the Middle East (Zeder), not only due to warmer temperatures and increased rainfall, but also to a higher level of atmospheric carbon dioxide which made agriculture increasingly viable (McCorriston and Hole, cited in Zeder). Megadroughts during the Paleolithic might well have been stimulating factors behind the migration of hominid populations out of Africa and across Asia (Scholz et al). Thus, it is hardly surprising that modern anthropogenically induced global warming—in all its’ climate altering manifestations—may be driving a new wave of cultural change and even evolution in the West as we seek a sustainable homeostatic equilibrium with the environment of the future. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed some of the threats that modern industrial agriculture poses to environmental sustainability. This prompted a public debate from which the modern environmental movement arose and, with it, an expanding awareness and attendant anxiety about the safety and nutritional quality of contemporary foods, especially those that are grown with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and/or are highly processed. This environmental consciousness led to some modification in eating habits, manifest by some embracing wholefood and vegetarian dietary regimes (or elements of them). Most recently, a widespread awareness of climate change has forced rapid change in contemporary Western foodways, while in other climate related areas of socio-political and economic significance such as energy production and usage, there is little evidence of real acceleration of change. Ongoing research into the effects of this expanding environmental consciousness continues in various disciplinary contexts such as geography (Eshel and Martin) and health (McMichael et al). In food studies, Vileisis has proposed that the 1970s environmental movement’s challenge to the polluting practices of industrial agri-food production, concurrent with the women’s movement (asserting women’s right to know about everything, including food production), has led to both cooks and eaters becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the links between agricultural production and consumer and environmental health, as well as the various social justice issues involved. As a direct result of such awareness, alternatives to the industrialised, global food system are now emerging (Kloppenberg et al.). The Slow Food (R)evolution The tenets of the Slow Food movement, now some two decades old, are today synergetic with the growing consternation about climate change. In 1983, Carlo Petrini formed the Italian non-profit food and wine association Arcigola and, in 1986, founded Slow Food as a response to the opening of a McDonalds in Rome. From these humble beginnings, which were then unashamedly positing a return to the food systems of the past, Slow Food has grown into a global organisation that has much more future focused objectives animating its challenges to the socio-cultural and environmental costs of industrial food. Slow Food does have some elements that could be classed as reactionary and, therefore, the opposite of evolutionary. In response to the increasing homogenisation of culinary habits around the world, for instance, Slow Food’s Foundation for Biodiversity has established the Ark of Taste, which expands upon the idea of a seed bank to preserve not only varieties of food but also local and artisanal culinary traditions. In this, the Ark aims to save foods and food products “threatened by industrial standardization, hygiene laws, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage” (SFFB). Slow Food International’s overarching goals and activities, however, extend far beyond the preservation of past foodways, extending to the sponsoring of events and activities that are attempting to create new cuisine narratives for contemporary consumers who have an appetite for such innovation. Such events as the Salone del Gusto (Salon of Taste) and Terra Madre (Mother Earth) held in Turin every two years, for example, while celebrating culinary traditions, also focus on contemporary artisanal foods and sustainable food production processes that incorporate the most current of agricultural knowledge and new technologies into this production. Attendees at these events are also driven by both an interest in tradition, and their own very current concerns with health, personal satisfaction and environmental sustainability, to change their consumer behavior through an expanded self-awareness of the consequences of their individual lifestyle choices. Such events have, in turn, inspired such events in other locations, moving Slow Food from local to global relevance, and affecting the intellectual evolution of foodway cultures far beyond its headquarters in Bra in Northern Italy. This includes in the developing world, where millions of farmers continue to follow many traditional agricultural practices by necessity. Slow Food Movement’s forward-looking values are codified in the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture 2006 publication, Manifesto on the Future of Food. This calls for changes to the World Trade Organisation’s rules that promote the globalisation of agri-food production as a direct response to the “climate change [which] threatens to undermine the entire natural basis of ecologically benign agriculture and food preparation, bringing the likelihood of catastrophic outcomes in the near future” (ICFFA 8). It does not call, however, for a complete return to past methods. To further such foodway awareness and evolution, Petrini founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences at Slow Food’s headquarters in 2004. The university offers programs that are analogous with the Slow Food’s overall aim of forging sustainable partnerships between the best of old and new practice: to, in the organisation’s own words, “maintain an organic relationship between gastronomy and agricultural science” (UNISG). In 2004, Slow Food had over sixty thousand members in forty-five countries (Paxson 15), with major events now held each year in many of these countries and membership continuing to grow apace. One of the frequently cited successes of the Slow Food movement is in relation to the tomato. Until recently, supermarkets stocked only a few mass-produced hybrids. These cultivars were bred for their disease resistance, ease of handling, tolerance to artificial ripening techniques, and display consistency, rather than any culinary values such as taste, aroma, texture or variety. In contrast, the vine ripened, ‘farmer’s market’ tomato has become the symbol of an “eco-gastronomically” sustainable, local and humanistic system of food production (Jordan) which melds the best of the past practice with the most up-to-date knowledge regarding such farming matters as water conservation. Although the term ‘heirloom’ is widely used in relation to these tomatoes, there is a distinctively contemporary edge to the way they are produced and consumed (Jordan), and they are, along with other organic and local produce, increasingly available in even the largest supermarket chains. Instead of a wholesale embrace of the past, it is the connection to, and the maintenance of that connection with, the processes of production and, hence, to the environment as a whole, which is the animating premise of the Slow Food movement. ‘Slow’ thus creates a gestalt in which individuals integrate their lifestyles with all levels of the food production cycle and, hence to the environment and, importantly, the inherently related social justice issues. ‘Slow’ approaches emphasise how the accelerated pace of contemporary life has weakened these connections, while offering a path to the restoration of a sense of connectivity to the full cycle of life and its relation to place, nature and climate. In this, the Slow path demands that every consumer takes responsibility for all components of his/her existence—a responsibility that includes becoming cognisant of the full story behind each of the products that are consumed in that life. The Slow movement is not, however, a regime of abstention or self-denial. Instead, the changes in lifestyle necessary to support responsible sustainability, and the sensual and aesthetic pleasure inherent in such a lifestyle, exist in a mutually reinforcing relationship (Pietrykowski 2004). This positive feedback loop enhances the potential for promoting real and long-term evolution in social and cultural behaviour. Indeed, the Slow zeitgeist now informs many areas of contemporary culture, with Slow Travel, Homes, Design, Management, Leadership and Education, and even Slow Email, Exercise, Shopping and Sex attracting adherents. Mainstreaming Concern with Ethical Food Production The role of the media in “forming our consciousness—what we think, how we think, and what we think about” (Cunningham and Turner 12)—is self-evident. It is, therefore, revealing in relation to the above outlined changes that even the most functional cookbooks and cookery magazines (those dedicated to practical information such as recipes and instructional technique) in Western countries such as the USA, UK and Australian are increasingly reflecting and promoting an awareness of ethical food production as part of this cultural change in food habits. While such texts have largely been considered as useful but socio-politically relatively banal publications, they are beginning to be recognised as a valid source of historical and cultural information (Nussel). Cookbooks and cookery magazines commonly include discussion of a surprising range of issues around food production and consumption including sustainable and ethical agricultural methods, biodiversity, genetic modification and food miles. In this context, they indicate how rapidly the recent evolution of foodways has been absorbed into mainstream practice. Much of such food related media content is, at the same time, closely identified with celebrity mass marketing and embodied in the television chef with his or her range of branded products including their syndicated articles and cookbooks. This commercial symbiosis makes each such cuisine-related article in a food or women’s magazine or cookbook, in essence, an advertorial for a celebrity chef and their named products. Yet, at the same time, a number of these mass media food celebrities are raising public discussion that is leading to consequent action around important issues linked to climate change, social justice and the environment. An example is Jamie Oliver’s efforts to influence public behaviour and government policy, a number of which have gained considerable traction. Oliver’s 2004 exposure of the poor quality of school lunches in Britain (see Jamie’s School Dinners), for instance, caused public outrage and pressured the British government to commit considerable extra funding to these programs. A recent study by Essex University has, moreover, found that the academic performance of 11-year-old pupils eating Oliver’s meals improved, while absenteeism fell by 15 per cent (Khan). Oliver’s exposé of the conditions of battery raised hens in 2007 and 2008 (see Fowl Dinners) resulted in increased sales of free-range poultry, decreased sales of factory-farmed chickens across the UK, and complaints that free-range chicken sales were limited by supply. Oliver encouraged viewers to lobby their local councils, and as a result, a number banned battery hen eggs from schools, care homes, town halls and workplace cafeterias (see, for example, LDP). The popular penetration of these ideas needs to be understood in a historical context where industrialised poultry farming has been an issue in Britain since at least 1848 when it was one of the contributing factors to the establishment of the RSPCA (Freeman). A century after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (published in 1906) exposed the realities of the slaughterhouse, and several decades since Peter Singer’s landmark Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983) posited the immorality of the mistreatment of animals in food production, it could be suggested that Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (released in 2006) added considerably to the recent concern regarding the ethics of industrial agriculture. Consciousness-raising bestselling books such as Jim Mason and Peter Singer’s The Ethics of What We Eat and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both published in 2006), do indeed ‘close the loop’ in this way in their discussions, by concluding that intensive food production methods used since the 1950s are not only inhumane and damage public health, but are also damaging an environment under pressure from climate change. In comparison, the use of forced labour and human trafficking in food production has attracted far less mainstream media, celebrity or public attention. It could be posited that this is, in part, because no direct relationship to the environment and climate change and, therefore, direct link to our own existence in the West, has been popularised. Kevin Bales, who has been described as a modern abolitionist, estimates that there are currently more than 27 million people living in conditions of slavery and exploitation against their wills—twice as many as during the 350-year long trans-Atlantic slave trade. Bales also chillingly reveals that, worldwide, the number of slaves is increasing, with contemporary individuals so inexpensive to purchase in relation to the value of their production that they are disposable once the slaveholder has used them. Alongside sex slavery, many other prevalent examples of contemporary slavery are concerned with food production (Weissbrodt et al; Miers). Bales and Soodalter, for example, describe how across Asia and Africa, adults and children are enslaved to catch and process fish and shellfish for both human consumption and cat food. Other campaigners have similarly exposed how the cocoa in chocolate is largely produced by child slave labour on the Ivory Coast (Chalke; Off), and how considerable amounts of exported sugar, cereals and other crops are slave-produced in certain countries. In 2003, some 32 per cent of US shoppers identified themselves as LOHAS “lifestyles of health and sustainability” consumers, who were, they said, willing to spend more for products that reflected not only ecological, but also social justice responsibility (McLaughlin). Research also confirms that “the pursuit of social objectives … can in fact furnish an organization with the competitive resources to develop effective marketing strategies”, with Doherty and Meehan showing how “social and ethical credibility” are now viable bases of differentiation and competitive positioning in mainstream consumer markets (311, 303). In line with this recognition, Fair Trade Certified goods are now available in British, European, US and, to a lesser extent, Australian supermarkets, and a number of global chains including Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds, Starbucks and Virgin airlines utilise Fair Trade coffee and teas in all, or parts of, their operations. Fair Trade Certification indicates that farmers receive a higher than commodity price for their products, workers have the right to organise, men and women receive equal wages, and no child labour is utilised in the production process (McLaughlin). Yet, despite some Western consumers reporting such issues having an impact upon their purchasing decisions, social justice has not become a significant issue of concern for most. The popular cookery publications discussed above devote little space to Fair Trade product marketing, much of which is confined to supermarket-produced adverzines promoting the Fair Trade products they stock, and international celebrity chefs have yet to focus attention on this issue. In Australia, discussion of contemporary slavery in the press is sparse, having surfaced in 2000-2001, prompted by UNICEF campaigns against child labour, and in 2007 and 2008 with the visit of a series of high profile anti-slavery campaigners (including Bales) to the region. The public awareness of food produced by forced labour and the troubling issue of human enslavement in general is still far below the level that climate change and ecological issues have achieved thus far in driving foodway evolution. This may change, however, if a ‘Slow’-inflected connection can be made between Western lifestyles and the plight of peoples hidden from our daily existence, but contributing daily to them. Concluding Remarks At this time of accelerating techno-cultural evolution, due in part to the pressures of climate change, it is the creative potential that human conscious awareness brings to bear on these challenges that is most valuable. Today, as in the caves at Lascaux, humanity is evolving new images and narratives to provide rational solutions to emergent challenges. As an example of this, new foodways and ways of thinking about them are beginning to evolve in response to the perceived problems of climate change. The current conscious transformation of food habits by some in the West might be, therefore, in James Lovelock’s terms, a moment of “revolutionary punctuation” (178), whereby rapid cultural adaption is being induced by the growing public awareness of impending crisis. It remains to be seen whether other urgent human problems can be similarly and creatively embraced, and whether this trend can spread to offer global solutions to them. References An Inconvenient Truth. 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