Manumission, the freeing of a slave from bondage, has served as a powerful incentive for slaves throughout history. It was common enough in ancient times that economic historians have gone as far as to describe the Roman labor system as a functioning labor market: manumission was common enough that it encouraged slaves to work cooperatively with their owners. This paper develops a simple contra...

Lovejoy argues that sufficient information exists about individuals taken as captives in the slave trade to allow historians to dispense with a generalized notion of a "traditional" African background for New World blacks and, accordingly, to articulate the African-ness of the black diaspora with ethnic and historical specificity. Lovejoy concedes there are difficulties involved with absorbing ...

Marionette is a system for distributed parallel programming in an environment of networked heterogeneous computer systems. It is based on a master/slave model. The master process can invoke worker operations (asynchronous remote procedure calls to single slaves) and context operations (updates to the state of all slaves). The master and slaves also interact through shared data structures that c...