The cup of wrath is almost full -- Making sense of strangers: The invention of Anglo-American slave conspiracy -- Studying the horizon: The stories and circumstances that conjured demons -- Seeking truth through terror: Coercion and survival inside the courtroom and the jail -- The risk of relations: Community-seeking and the politics of association -- The accountants, the opportunists, and the rebels: Taking chances in the era of the Seven Years' War -- Governing in a world of fear: Political mobilization in the American Revolutionary era -- The transforming fires of the Haitian Revolution
Summary
"The conspiracy scare phenomenon emerged from a combination of enslaved people's traumatic experience of terror and enslavers' awareness of their culpability and exposure to the people whom they exploited. On at least ninety-six documented occasions before 1790, colonial officials in eastern North America and the British Caribbean believed that they discovered evidence of a "slave conspiracy"--A detailed plan for insurrection coordinated by a network of enslaved men--just in time to avert the uprising. Often they ended up convincing themselves that they regularly dodged ambushes at decoy fires and averted a world turned upside down. Two questions about conspiracy scares motivate The World That Fear Made. How and why did white colonists, with the coerced involvement of enslaved people, create these particular fears and come to believe in them? And how did people remake their societies in relation to fear and navigate the world that it conjured?"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes
Jason T. Sharples teaches history at Florida Atlantic University
