The Problem of Poverty in the Anglo-American Age of Slave Emancipation, 1780-1865

FAIN: FT-291869-23

Christopher Michael Florio
Hollins University (Roanoke, VA 24020-2000)

Writing a book on responses to poverty across the Anglo-American world in the wake of slave emancipation. 

My project examines the history of slave emancipation from a new perspective by unpacking poverty’s central and multi-layered significance to the Anglo-American emancipation process. The history of this process has long been told as the story of a transition from slavery to freedom. Yet my work argues that any such narrative is incomplete without an understanding of how the problem of poverty and attempts to respond to it shaped the conceptualization, implementation, and experience of emancipation throughout the Anglo-American world. This project thus traces the historical relationship between slavery’s abolition and the emergent forms of racialized and global inequality that began to coalesce in slavery’s wake. It uncovers how poverty left its mark on the world that slave emancipation made.