A Whig view of slavery,development and the world market∗

This essay offers an interpretation of an influential theory of the relation between slavery, national development, and international economics developed by the American Whig leader, H.C. Carey, over a period of years, but most fully expressed in a single text published in 1856. Although Carey was widely read at the time, his mode of opposition to slavery was unorthodox, and his political situation put him under certain rhetorical burdens. Consequently his text requires a close reading to be be understood.     

Another view of the “small world”

Coincidental re-introductions to established acquaintances suggest that one draws one’s acquaintances from a hypothetical, homogeneous “small world”, not to be confused with an acquaintance chain or an acquaintance volume. The world’s size can be estimated from the coincidences, given an estimate of the acquaintance volume. A typical Freeman–Thompson phonebook test score and a dozen coincidental introductions give an estimated “small world” of about 1,300,000 persons. Even single cities are much larger, so this result points to the fragmented and insular structure not just of acquaintanceship volumes, but of the milieux from which they are drawn. Conversely, assumptions about the size of the world from which acquaintances are drawn can be combined with information on coincidental introductions to shed light on the size of the acquaintance volume.     

Slavery and redemption in the Catholic missions of the Upper Congo, 1878–1909

The French Catholic Société des missionnaires d’Alger, also known as the White Fathers, sought to abolish slavery in the Upper Congo by creating mission outposts of liberated slaves. The missionaries purchased (‘redeemed’) young African slaves, captives, and dependents, and placed them in mission orphanages. The White Fathers claimed to have liberated these redeemed orphans, even while they ensured, often through force, that they remained alienated from their natal communities and subjugated dependents. In much the same fashion as domestic and Islamic slavery in the immediate environs, the slow integration of these orphans drove the expansion of Catholic mission communities. Through studying Catholic mission slave redemptions at the end of the nineteenth century, this article explores the interactions and development of pre-colonial African, Zanzibar Islamic, and European Christian ideas of slavery and freedom.     

Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700

This article argues that the terms of identity claimed by and ascribed to Africans and their descendants in the Americas during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade functioned less as claims of provenance than as complicated, shifting and highly contested languages of political logic. Focusing on the ‘Kromanti’ identity associated with all major acts of resistance and maroonage in the eighteenth-century British- and Dutch-colonized Caribbean, this article connects a strategy developed by the Asante state for coping with a particular moment of beheading of the body politic in 1717 to oath-taking strategies employed by maroons of diverse origins to reconstitute viable communities. Examining the ways in which political claims were made through a language of Obeah, or social health and healing, this article argues that ritual practices comprised the discursive field of political action for eighteenth-century Africans and their descendants in Jamaica and beyond.     

Slavery,Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840

This article delineates the economic frameworks that structured the slave trade in the Arabian Sea and traces their persistence beyond the supposed abolition of these traffics after 1873. The author argues that British officials entrusted with suppressing the slave trade in fact neglected the smuggling traffic, condoned those slave purchases which resembled kinship transactions, and privileged British businesses in transactions of ‘free’ labour. The assumption that labour was always transacted through markets permitted labour brokers to easily evade, accommodate and ultimately exploit abolitionist policies and profit from the traffic in coerced labour.     

Slaveholders and revolution: the Jamaican planter class,British imperial politics,and the ending of the slave trade, 1775–1807

This article re-examines the declining influence of Jamaican sugar planters within the British Empire during the period between the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 and Parliament’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Much of the existing scholarship emphasises the consequences of the American Revolutionary War and rise of abolitionism during the 1780s as pivotal to the fall of the planters. This article argues that those challenges did not determine the fate of the Jamaican planters. Rather, it was the radicalisation of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and the extended period of war that began in 1793, that led to their eventual defeat over the question of the slave trade.     

Remembering the imperial context of emancipation commemoration in the former British slave-port cities of Bristol and Liverpool, 1933–1934

This article considers the marking of the centenary of British emancipation in 1933 and 1934 in two former slave-trading provincial port cities, Bristol and Liverpool. Nationally, this centenary was used by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society to celebrate white abolition heroes and promote contemporary campaigns against ‘modern-day slavery’. However, in Bristol and Liverpool this picture was complicated by both cities’ particular historic involvements in transatlantic slavery and contemporary imperial and demographic contexts. Looking at ‘local’ dimensions to this ‘national’ commemorative occasion brings to the fore variations which emphasise the influence of civic identities, racial contestations and the distinctly imperial context of this memorial discourse seen through these interwar ports of empire.     

Sugar,Slavery and Productivity in Jamaica, 1750–1807

The article revisits one of the most significant questions in the historiography of British West Indian slavery and abolition. It examines the argument that the relatively weak state of the British West Indian economy from the 1780s onward was the main reason why Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. In confronting this question of decline, the article analyzes the largest and most important slave plantation economy – Jamaica – during the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using newly generated indicators such as total factor productivity and national income, the paper constructs a case for the dynamism and efficiency of the plantation system in Jamaica right up to abolition in 1807.