Hi. I'm a history student, and I've been given an assignment to write a paper. We got to choose the topic for ourselves, so I've chosen to write about differences between Caribbean, North American and Arab slave trade/slavery. Ideally, it would've been good to find a brief guide to history of slavery of all three of listed areas, since the paper shouldn't get too detailed and it's due to day after tomorrow, so I don't have time to do a bunch of reading. The basic idea is to explore certain ideas such as: different economic and political incentives for the divergency in slave practice, cultural prepositions behind the treatment of slaves, and how did eventual abolition fold out.
If none of our experts on slavery shows up, it would be nice if someone gave me a guide to the Albingensian Crusade, as well as some narrative sources regarding the endeavor. Thanks!
Hey there!
So, uh. You need to pick a new topic. Like, really. It sounds mean, and I'm sorry, but there is really no way you can write a good essay on the topic you've chosen, at all, if you know nothing about the topic and you have no sources lined up and it's due in two days. I say this not as an expert on slavery, but as a former student, as someone with a great deal of experience in last minute essay writing and as a moderator here. You won't make this paper work and if you try, it will be a bad paper.
What you have here is a potentially fascinating topic. I suspect you will be hard-pressed to find any in-depth comparative studies of the Albingensian Crusade versus the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and I would suggest at a glance that the two movements are so very different that their comparison could be problematic. Comparing the Arabic Slave Trade to Continental and Transatlantic slavery may be much more fruitful. That said, I am an expert on neither so that's neither here nor there. Perhaps /u/sowser or /u/freedmenspatrol would have more to say on the historiography.
What I can absolutely say, however, is that you haven't left yourself enough time to do this, and that it sounds like it would be far too big an undertaking for the assessment you're writing even if you had all the time in the world. The scope of the piece you've outlined is enormous, and I would expect to find it discussed in a 10k+ word thesis at the least,. It sounds like you're writing either a high-school or an undergrad essay, and even if you had lots of time on your hands to research the topic and write about it immaculately, I just don't think you could do it justice inside any realistic word limit.
I strongly suggest that you shelve the topic which you have outlined here and save it for a major assessment or potentially an honours project. I would also suggest that you pick a much more narrow topic, and that it be a very unoriginal one with enormous amounts written about it in textbooks and academic papers. You simply do not have the time to do original research here, and you should plan accordingly.
I have to agree with /u/Elm11 here. Even taking out the Albigensian crusade, you want a short book or review essay which will compare three arenas of slavery, all of which have important differences and similarities, and you want to take them from cradle to grave, as it were, complete with a history of ideas and economics. That's a subject broad enough that I don't know that any scholar has attempted to do it in a single book, let alone a short one. Maybe the closest is Slavery and Social Death, which examines worldwide slaveries to parse out the unique things that make slavery slavery rather than another form of unfree labor. It's a very good book, but I don't think you could use it to do half of what you want. Patterson doesn't write a whole lot there about abolition, for example. His classic text is also pretty dense and dry to read in a hurry.
My advice, as a formerly overambitious and last minute student writer myself, would be to pick a slavery and write toward one of the brief survey, economic or political incentives within it, cultural ideas around the treatment of enslaved people, and abolition subjects.