Slavery,Empire and Civilization: A Luso-Brazilian Defense of the Slave Trade in the Age of Revolutions

This article examines a defense of the slave trade mounted in the 1790s by the Luso-Brazilian Bishop Azeredo Coutinho. While Azeredo's defense has been interpreted as a function of his slave-owning family's interest, this article provides a broader analysis of Azeredo's writings on the slave trade and the Portuguese empire within the contexts of eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian intellectual culture and transatlantic debates about empire, commerce and historical transformation. His writing on the imperial economy and the slave trade included both appeals to an eighteenth-century ideal of civilization as a process predicated upon the universality of humanity as well as defense of empire as the rational, just and necessary exploitation of the barbarous by the civilized.     

Merchant networks,the guarantee system and the British slave trade to Jamaica in the 1790s

This paper contributes to the literature on payments for slave sales in the later phase of the British slave trade. It analyses the procedures used in the ‘guarantee’ system in transatlantic slaving whereby merchants in British ports forged close connections with African factors in British America and with British businessmen who guaranteed to pay the factors’ bills presented as payments for slave sales. This was an important institutional procedure in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Though the ‘guarantee’ system has been explained in outline in previous studies, the case study presented here offers the most detailed appraisal of this system. Examining the British slave trade to Jamaica in 1790s, then the most significant disembarkation centre for enslaved people taken on British vessels, the paper explains the coordination necessary between groups of British merchants, their African factors in Jamaica and their British guarantee in order to secure payments for slave sales at a time of considerable volatility in the demand for slaves in Jamaica. The paper suggests that cooperation between merchants in different British ports in connection with the slave trade is as worthy of investigation as the rivalry between the British ports involved in the ‘Guinea’ traffic.     

Florence Hall's ‘Memoirs’: Finding African Women in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This essay presents the previously unpublished ‘Memoirs’ of Florence Hall, an African-born woman enslaved in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. The brief text describes Hall's childhood in Igboland (now southeastern Nigeria), her enslavement and journey to the Atlantic coast, her experience of the Middle Passage, and her arrival in Jamaica. There, the narrative abruptly cuts off. Evidently, the pages containing the rest of her story were lost. The text was likely written in the early nineteenth century, mediated by planter Robert Johnston, in whose papers the surviving text was found. As one of the only slave trade narratives from an African woman anywhere in the Americas, Hall's ‘Memoirs’ offer a rare opportunity to consider the transatlantic slave trade at its peak from the viewpoint of a female captive.     

Sexuality and the Second Slavery: Figuring Sexuality in Racialized Labor Formations

From the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, sexuality was a key factor in the reorganization of New World slavery through the period described as the Second Slavery. With the early nineteenth century bans on the transatlantic slave trade initiated by the United States and the British Empire, there was a corresponding transition from prior plantation economies focused on US Upper South tobacco and Caribbean sugar islands toward more differentiated forms of labor based on hiring out in domestic services, manufacture, and the expansion into new frontiers of accumulation in the New South of the Mississippi Delta, Cuba, and Brazil. This qualitative change and expansion of New World slavery carried gendered understandings based on the sexuality and reproductive capabilities of enslaved people. Using Tomich's conception of the Second Slavery, I incorporate an analysis that demonstrates how conceptions of sexuality were integral to racializing and gendering processes of subordination that reveal the heterogeneity of the historical and economic moment.     

The transnational work of kinship and caring: Bengali–British marriages in historical perspective

Abstract In this article, based on ongoing research carried out in Bangladesh since the mid‐1980s and field‐work in London in the late 1990s, I take a historical approach to the analysis of transnational Sylheti marriages. By showing how the form of these marriages has changed since the mid‐twentieth century, I argue that transnational migration is itself highly fluid. The role of wives in maintaining transnational links is central to the account. I focus in particular on the wives of ‘first‐generation’ migrant men who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose families were generally reunited in Britain by the 1980s. By describing the household and caring work of these wives both in Sylhet and London, I demonstrate that rather than being ‘dependants’ of their migrant husbands, women have been central to the success of migrant households. The rewards of transnational connectedness have, however, come at a cost — long‐term separation from loved ones. Isolation and loneliness have been hallmarks of the experiences of these earlier generations of women.     

Nineteenth-Century Coastal Slave Trading and the British Abolition Campaign in Sierra Leone

The Sierra Leone Colony was Britain's main base in its campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, slavers supplied external and internal demand by trafficking people along the coast near to and even within the Colony. Although some officials strove to eradicate slaving, others feared that aggressive actions could threaten the Colony's economic and political interests. Administrators debated what constituted trafficking and applied different policies in different treaty zones. Moreover, the expanding commercial system encouraged slave trading, and slavers had the means to evade patrols. Ultimately, officials ended slaving by stopping war and raiding, interdicting traffic and punishing slavers, but enslaved people also contributed by escaping from bondage.     

Enlightenment,Scientific Exploration and Abolitionism: Anders Sparrman's and Carl Bernhard Wadström's Colonial Encounters in Senegal, 1787–1788 and the British Abolitionist Movement

By the late eighteenth century, leading British abolitionists credited two Swedish scholars – Anders Sparrman and Carl Bernhard Wadström – with important contributions to the breakthrough of the British abolitionist movement. After witnessing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade during a journey to Senegal, both scholars came to be explicit critics of this trade. In this article, I argue that the two Swedes contributed to the abolitionist cause particularly because of their status as academic scholars. This enabled a science-based rhetoric to complement the sentimental rhetoric of most other abolitionists at the time.     

Slavery: Current bibliographical supplement (1986)

Despite the considerable distance and danger in transporting slaves from the southwestern Indian Ocean region to the Americas, ships carried nearly 550,000 slaves to the Americas between 1624 and 1860. Prior attempts to understand the place of the Indian Ocean in the transatlantic slave trade have been limited in scope, but the transatlantic slave trade database provides us with access to unprecedented statistics and estimates that shed new light on this forced migration. The study of this slave trade also offers insights into the much larger movement of slaves across the Indian Ocean as a whole.     

Conflicts over knowledge transfer across the border: Korean international students and the conversion of cultural capital

It is common knowledge that international students are a major conduit of international knowledge transfer and that they become transnational managerial elites and highly skilled migrants. However, few studies show how this transfer occurs. Moreover, people often assume that knowledge transfer is a smooth process. Drawing on in‐depth interviews of former and current Korean international students and non‐migrant Koreans in the United States and South Korea, my study shows that knowledge transfer can, in fact, be highly conflictual. I argue that conflicts in the country of origin between international students (the transferors) and non‐migrants (the recipients) mediate knowledge transfer. I see the conflicts as struggles over the conversion of cultural capital from the Global North into local power and wealth, which reworks Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital for transnational social fields. In so doing, I develop a framework that links knowledge transfer and transnational social reproduction.     

The role of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade

The recent controversy instigated by Leonard Jeffries has prompted discussion of the relationship between the development of the transatlantic slave trade and European Jewish communities. Closer attention to the role played by Jews in the development of the trade, and its associated enterprises, suggests that little direct involvement can be identified. In the Dutch slave trade Jews can be said to have had tangible significance, but even here their involvement was relatively marginal. Through detailed analysis of the historiography of slavery, the ‘conspiracy theory’ approach to the issue is substantially challenged and disproved.     

Are Latin America's corporate elites transnationally interconnected? A network analysis of interlocking directorates

Conflicting perspectives appear when thinking about the emergence of a cohesive transnational corporate network in Latin America. On the one hand, regional political integration, foreign investment growth, increased cross‐border mergers and acquisitions, and cultural and linguistic homogeneity may have fostered transnational networks among Latin America's corporate elites. On the other hand, domestic‐based business groups, family control and trade orientation to the USA may have hindered the emergence of a cohesive transnational corporate network in Latin America. Based on a network analysis of interlocking directorates among the 300 largest corporations in Latin America, I ask whether the region's corporate elites interconnect at the transnational level and form a cohesive transnational corporate network. I found few transnational interlocks, a lack of cohesion in the transnational corporate network and no regional leaders. Corporate elites in Latin America are not transnationally interconnected and so a cohesive transnational corporate network has not emerged. I discuss implications and avenues of future research.     

Service outsourcing and labour mobility in a digital age: transnational linkages between Japan and Dalian,China

In this article, I examine the transnational mobility of digital workers and the control of their labour across multiple production sites. The digitalization of work has progressively allowed businesses to outsource IT‐enabled service jobs to cheaper production sites offshore. The growth of the ‘offshore outsourcing' of white‐collar service jobs in East Asia has produced the mobility of cheap digital labour from Japan to Dalian in northeast China. They work at call centres and other Japanese‐speaking workplaces in the lower echelons of the city's IT sector, typically earning salaries in Chinese yuan at, or even below, the average Japanese minimum wage. Based on ethnographic findings, I argue that in the global digital economy, digital services are rendered exploitable through their transnational mobility and that this form of labour migration has developed because of the partial, fluid and contingent nature of the transnational links between the two locations. I analyse how the neoliberal logic of exception underpins the creation of IT parks in China and the casualization of labour in Japan to enable new forms of transnational labour control and capital accumulation.     

The travail of Delaware slave families in the early republic

Largely ignored in histories of the American slave trade, Delaware provides a unique case study of a state that attempted to carve out its identity as the notions of a free North and a slaveholding South emerged in early America. Delaware’s small slaveholdings and relatively small geographic area created unique challenges for its enslaved population. Aided by Quaker and Methodist abolitionists, slaves fought against kidnappers, slave sales, and distance to build and maintain families. Using heretofore unexamined tax records, the travail of enslaved families in Delaware at the close of the eighteenth century is analyzed in great detail.     

The saviour and the revolutionary: Afro-Caribbean responses in a Queensland/New Guinea kidnapping case

The recruitment of Pacific Island labourers for Queensland, Australia, 1863–1904, has often been seen through comparisons to the transatlantic slave trade. Yet the fact that men from Antigua, Barbados and Jamaica pushed for justice after one of the most notorious atrocities of the trade has very rarely been noted, their involvement mired by racist reporting of the case. If seen from the perspective of their Caribbean homelands, their words and actions, often misinterpreted by Queensland's courts and media, can be seen as latter-day resistance to enslavement, oppression and racism.     

Slavery and Bristol's ‘golden age’

Bristol's eighteenth century ‘golden age’ has conventionally been linked to the rise of slavery in British America after 1660. This paper seeks to add substance to this linkage by exploring Bristol's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, without which slavery in the Americas could not have developed to the level it did, and goes on to explore the impact of slave trafficking and the trades in slave-produced goods such as sugar and tobacco on income levels in the city in the 1780s. It suggests that in the late eighteenth century at least 40 per cent of the income of Bristolians derived from slavery-related activities. The paper concludes by offering some brief reflections on the relationship between slavery and British metropolitan development.     

East European assimilation and (re)integration: the interwar legacies of transatlantic migration and “Russian” Orthodox conversion (1918–1939)

In the 1920s and 30s, mass conversion movements to “Russian” Orthodoxy emerged among Greek Catholics in Czechoslovakia and Poland, comprising a new chapter in a continuing saga of conversion which began in the late nineteenth century, in what was then Austria–Hungary. Pre-1914 conversion movements arose in large part due to transatlantic migration – especially return migration – between Austria–Hungary and the Americas. Americanists have generally treated the 1920s and 30s as the era when transnational migration’s impact waned owing to US immigration restrictions, while East Europeanists have minimized or ignored the impact of transnational migration upon East European regions. Interwar Catholic-to-Orthodox conversions, however, are not merely attributable to historical legacy: transatlantic migration continued to influence the dynamics of conversion as an active, contemporary force. As had been true prior to World War I, returning migrants and their families comprised the most significant constituency of the movements after the war; migrants remaining in the Americas supported the East European movements with economic and social remittances, and activists on either side of the Orthodox/Catholic divide treated the conversions as transnational phenomena. This essay analyzes the impact of transnational migration upon shifting ethnoreligious identifications, in the context of shifting social, national, and geopolitical circumstances, 1918–1939.     

Transnational class formation and spatialities of power: the case of elite competition in Bolivia

In this article, I argue that the neoliberal and counter‐neoliberal transitions in Bolivia secured the power of transnational capital within the country. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bolivia's mining elite used neoliberal strategies to undermine the interests of the country's agricultural elite and pursued a marriage of convenience with transnational capital that allowed both to enter state‐monopolized spaces of investment in mutually beneficial ways. In Bolivia's counter‐neoliberal turn, leftist social movements and political parties removed the elite from power but were dependent on transnational firms to help them use the country's natural resource wealth to fund programmes of socioeconomic change. Engaging theories of the transnational class formation, I assert that scholars need to acknowledge how different capitalist class fractions have distinct spatialities of power. In particular, it is necessary to distinguish between global elites that participate in local circuits of accumulation and local elites that participate in global circuits of accumulation.     

The spatial politics of the past unbound: transnational networks and the making of political identities

In this article I consider the relations between historical and contemporary forms of transnational political networks. I contest accounts that counterpose a networked present against a more settled and bounded past, arguing that this contrast rests on a problematic temporalization of difference in the construction of political identities. I consider how this temporalization produces particular accounts of relations between space, politics and identity. Drawing on the insurgent imaginative geography of resistance in C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, I argue for a focus on the dynamic geographies of connection formed through transnational networks. I develop this position through a discussion of the relations of the London Corresponding Society, formed in London in 1792, to transnational routes of political activists, organizational forms and ideas. This account highlights the multiple political identities crafted through transnational political networks. I conclude by outlining elements of a ‘usable past’ for contemporary counter‐global struggles.     

Consuming the transnational family: Indonesian migrant domestic workers to Saudi Arabia

Abstract There is heated debate in contemporary Indonesia about the rights and regulation of transnational women migrants, specifically about the ‘costs to families’ of women working overseas, but little attention has been given to women migrants' own views of family or women's own motivations for migration. In this article, which is based on field work in a migrant‐sending community in West Java, I focus on migrant women's narratives of transnational migration and employment as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. I contribute to the literature on gender and transnational migration by exploring migrants' consumption desires and practices as reflective not only of commoditized exchange but also of affect and sentiment. In addition, I show in detail how religion and class inflect low‐income women's narrations of morally appropriate mothering practices. In conclusion, I suggest that interpreting these debates from the ground up can contribute towards understanding the larger struggles animating the Indonesian state's contemporary relationships with women and Islam.     

‘Ways of Remembering’: Transatlantic Connections and African Diaspora's Homecoming in the Republic of Benin

Abstract

Since the seventeenth century, the Atlantic ‘perimeter’ has been characterised by exchanges of commodities, bodies and cultural productions. Within this space, West Africa has established itself as an ‘ancestral land’: a pivotal physical and imagined location for its diaspora. Exploring how a ‘homeland’ is constructed, the article analyses practices of homecoming in the contemporary Republic of Benin. It argues that the particular historical conjuncture of the early 1990s, mainly characterised by the democratic transition, has allowed the restoration of Atlantic connections. Aspiring to establish a vibrant tourism industry, the new government strongly encouraged African American homecomings, commemorating the slave trade and celebrating diasporic cultures. The Vodun religion, because of its propagation across the New World through the slave trade, became the core symbol of this reunion, the very evidence of the strength of ancestral linkages and a foundation for black commonality. Reframing notions of ancestry and transnational belongings, the article examines how the insertion of Benin into global, economic and cultural circuits has led to the emergence of new cultural practices, meanings and subjectivities, both related to national and diasporic spaces.