Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States, 1750–1850, 1st ed. 2019 Italian and Italian American Studies Series

This volume offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied cases of slavery in six Italian cities?Naples, Caserta, Rome, Palermo, Livorno and Genoa?Giulia Bonazza investigates why slavery survived into the middle of the nineteenth century, even as the abolitionist debate raged internationally and most states had abolished it. She contextualizes these cases of residual slavery from 1750?1850, focusing on two juridical and political watersheds: after the Napoleonic period, when the Italian states (with the exception of the Papal States) adopted constitutions outlawing slavery; and after the Congress of Vienna, when diplomatic relations between the Italian states, France and Great Britain intensified and slavery was condemned in terms that covered only the Atlantic slave trade. By excavating the lives of men and women who remained in slavery after abolition, this book sheds new light on the broader Mediterranean and transatlantic dimensions ofslavery in the Italian states.

1. Historiographical Perspectives.- 2. The Reverberations of the Abolitionist Debate in the Italian States.- 3. Forms of Slavery in the Pre-Unitarian Italian States (1750–1850).- 4. The Memory of Slavery.

Giulia Bonazza is a fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome, Italy, and former Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Offers the first comprehensive study of slavery in the Italian states from 1750 to 1850 Examines the international abolitionist debate and post-abolition survival of slavery in the Italian states Appeals to scholars of Italian history, the history of slavery, Atlantic history, global history, and imperial history