This chapter explores the representation of emotions in justifications of slavery during antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the rise of Atlantic slavery, paying close attention to the shift from the notion of “slavery to passions” in ancient Greco-Roman philosophy to the principle of “slavery to sin” in early Christian thought. This chapter concludes with an analysis of the role of emotional discourse in the globalization of racialized slavery.

This chapter explores the projection of passions and feelings in master–enslaved relations and the role of this projection in the development of body politics and power relations in the empires of the Atlantic world. The chapter recognizes links between ideas about emotions and the genocidal violence of Atlantic slavery. Particular attention is paid to the representation of enslaved resistance as a “passionate transgression,” focusing on the Haitian Revolution as a case study.

This chapter analyzes the representation of emotional difference in scientific racism during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. It examines the conceptualization of the “passions” in biological, geographical, and historical determinism, while also paying close attention to the implications of emotional discourse in eugenics.

This chapter examines the paradigmatic discourses about emotions of White abolitionism and during the “disintegration” of legal slavery in the Atlantic world. This chapter highlights the mutations of ideas of “feelings” in the "post-emancipation” era and their role in the continuation of slavery, while also addressing the escalation of emotional archetypes of race and slavery in twentieth-century media.

This chapter analyzes how emotions are expressed in the development of international law about contemporary slavery and in its current media coverage. This chapter also concentrates on the role of emotional concepts in the continued racialization of contemporary slavery and mass incarceration in the Atlantic world.