Based on lectures from a conference in Fall 2000 at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Arming slaves and helots in classical Greece / Peter Hunt --The mamlūk institution, or one thousand years of military slavery in the Islamic world / Reuven Amitai -- Armed slaves and political authority in Africa in the era of the slave trade, 1450-1800 / John Thornton -- Making the Chikunda : military slavery and ethnicity in southern Africa, 1750-1900 / Allen Isaacman and Derek Peterson -- Transforming bondsmen into vassals : arming slaves in colonial Spanish America / Jane Landers -- Arming slaves in Brazil from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century / Hendrik Kraay -- Arming slaves in the American revolution / Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy -- The arming of slaves in the Haitian revolution / David Geggus -- Citizen soldiers : emancipation and military service in the revolutionary French Caribbean / Laurent Dubois -- The slave soldiers of Spanish South America : from independence to abolition / Peter Blanchard -- Armed slaves and the struggles for republican liberty in the U.S. Civil War / Joseph P. Reidy -- Armed slaves and anticolonial insurgency in late nineteenth-century Cuba / Ada Ferrer -- The arming of slaves in comparative perspective / Christopher Leslie Brown.

Arming slaves as soldiers is a counterintuitive idea. Yet throughout history, in many varied societies, slaveholders have entrusted slaves with the use of deadly force. This book is the first to survey the practice broadly across space and time, encompassing the cultures of classical Greece, the early Islamic kingdoms of the Near East, West and East Africa, the British and French Caribbean, the United States and Latin America. To facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, each chapter addresses four crucial issues: the social and cultural facts regarding the arming of slaves, the experience of slave soldiers, the ideological origins and consequences of equipping enslaved peoples for battle, and the impact of the practice on the status of slaves and slavery itself. What emerges from the book is a new historical understanding: the arming of slaves is neither uncommon nor paradoxical but is instead both predictable and explicable.