Moses, Muhammad and Their Laws in Transatlantic Slave History: From West African Captivity to the American Cotton Kingdom, 1440-1830

This book engages the way Christian, Jewish, Muslim and secular-progressivist actors used Mosaic and Islamic law and ethics in relation to slavery in American, West African and transatlantic history from 1440 to 1830. It focuses on how various groups marshalled these religious-legal traditions to respond to questions of enslavement, amelioration, emancipation and abolition in the face of ever-transforming social, religious-cultural, legal and political contexts over several centuries. The study offers a vital corrective to secularized histories of slavery by showing that sacred law was not peripheral but ever-central to the making--and unmaking--of American slavery, with legacies that reverberate through Reconstruction, segregation and modern civil rights debates.

R. Charles Weller, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History (Career), Washington State University, USA, and Senior Research Fellow, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Kazakhstan. He has also been a visiting fellow at Yale University (2010-11), a non-residential visiting researcher at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (2014-2019) and Affiliate Faculty of History (Research) at George Mason University (2021-22). Among a number of works in both English and Kazakh, this present volume, and his most recent book with Palgrave Macmillan, Moses, Muhammad and Nature’s God in Early American Religious-Legal History, 1640-1830: A Global Crosscultural Perspective (2024), are part of a multi-volume study.