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Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
Metropolitan Books
January 2014
On Sale: January 14, 2014
384 pages ISBN: 0805094539 EAN: 9780805094534 Kindle: B00EGJ7KX6 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction | Historical
From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of
a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America’s
struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of
Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a
remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a
New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish
ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were
slaves. They weren’t. Having earlier seized control of the
vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging
an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants.
When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally
realized the deception, he responded with explosive
violence. Drawing on research on four continents,
The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces
that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that
already inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece Benito
Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping
storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the
dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational
history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of
peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the
early 1800s.
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