Sugarcoated Ethics : Children's Literature and Atlantic Enslavement

Unearthing the ethical entanglements of early children's books with the Atlantic slave economy. What ethical lessons are children taught when their books are funded by enslavement and their childhoods sweetened with sugar?In Sugarcoated Ethics, Courtney Weikle-Mills traces the intertwined histories of children's literature and the transatlantic slave economy, revealing how stories written for the young often masked the realities of enslavement, consumption, and colonial power. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this book examines how early British and US children's books emerged alongside and within a world built by enslaved labor.With many texts imported into the colonial Caribbean, the trajectory of children's literature was shaped by the unethical systems that it failed to fully acknowledge. And yet, in their frequent concern with care, interdependence, and moral formation, children's books also reflected and distorted the relational crises at the heart of enslavem