Illustrations  ix

Acknowledgments  xiii

Introduction. "Me No B'longs to Dem": Emancipation's Possibilities and Limits in Antigua  1

1. A Landscape That Continually Recurred in Passing: The Many Worlds of a Small Place  21

2. So Them Make Laws for Negro, So Them Make Law for Master: Antigua's 1831 Sunday Market Rebellion  57

3. But Freedom till Better: Labor Struggles after 1834  84

4. An Equality with the Highest in the Land?: The Expansion of Black Private and Public Life  117

5. Sinful Conexions: Christianity, Social Surveillance, and Black Women's Bodies in Distress  142

6. Mashing Ants: Surviving the Economic Crisis after 1846  167

7. Our Side: Antigua's 1858 Uprising and the Contingent Nature of Freedom  195

8. "My Color Broke Me Down": Postslavery Violence and Incomplete Freedom in the British Caribbean  224

Notes  233

Bibliography  287

Index  309

"By tracing the development of Antigua in the post-emancipation period, Lightfoot has produced a work that will interest scholars who study conceptions of freedom, working-class solidarity, labor, Antigua, and the wider Caribbean. Recommended." — J. Rankin, Choice

"Lightfoot’s Troubling Freedom sheds light on how freedpeople in Antigua negotiated the terms of their labor and the conditions of their freedom in Antigua....The book also illustrates that space and spatial relations were at the heart of Antiguans’ struggle for freedom after emancipation: between Antigua and Barbuda, the city and the country, the free villages and estates." — Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, American Quarterly

"By tracing the development of Antigua in the post-emancipation period, Lightfoot has produced a work that will interest scholars who study conceptions of freedom, working-class solidarity, labor, Antigua, and the wider Caribbean. Recommended." —J. Rankin, Choice

"Lightfoot’s Troubling Freedom sheds light on how freedpeople in Antigua negotiated the terms of their labor and the conditions of their freedom in Antigua....The book also illustrates that space and spatial relations were at the heart of Antiguans’ struggle for freedom after emancipation: between Antigua and Barbuda, the city and the country, the free villages and estates." —Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, American Quarterly

"Troubling Freedom is a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on the aftermath of emancipation. More than any other scholar, Natasha Lightfoot probes the daily lives of the former slaves, illuminating their family relations, work lives, religious practices, and quotidian struggles. The end of slavery emerges not as a revolutionary watershed but as a transition from one regime of inequality to another."  — Eric Foner, author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877

"In this carefully crafted, researched, and argued book of social history, Natasha Lightfoot probes the multilayered processes and problems of freedom in Antigua mainly through the voices, motivations, and experiences of the colony's former slaves who struggled against persistent influences of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, to give their own meanings to real freedom. Troubling Freedom makes a strong contribution to continuing debates about the political/ideological consciousness and agency of former slaves in the Americas in their demands and strivings for full realization of what they thought freedom should be."   — David Barry Gaspar, author of Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua

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