Viola Franziska Müller. Escape to the City. Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill (NC) 2022. xii, 248 pp. Ill. Maps. $99.00. (Paper: $32.95; E-book: $22.99.)
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: a transnational or global perspective.None of these comments diminishes the achievements of Jean's book, especially her efforts to write a microglobal history of labor, incarceration, and politics in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World.They reveal only the challenges of Jean's ambitious agenda to integrate different scales and variables with a global historical approach.In conclusion, Policing Freedom offers important contributions to the historiography of slavery and the slave trade, the lives of liberated Africans, and the intersection between national politics and the making of criminal justice and prison systems in nineteenth-century Brazil.Among those contributions, it is worth highlighting the connection between the illegal transatlantic slave trade and Rio de Janeiro's Casa de Correção, and Jean's hypothesis that the Brazilian racialized police and prison system matured in the age of slavery, and not in the aftermath of emancipation.Finally, Policing Freedom invites other scholars to learn about the Brazilian experience and accept her challenge to envision a global history of capitalism, labor, and prison that includes the life experiences and perspectives of subaltern people.
Author: Marcelo Rosanova Ferraro
Institution: Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4406340797