The TUC,foreign labour and the labour government 1945–1951

In the early period of the Labour Government of 1945–1951, the British economy underwent a serious crisis, one dimension of which was a severe labour shortage in sectors identified as essential to national economic recovery. In an attempt to resolve this problem, the Labour Government recruited foreign labour from a number of different European sources, but was also required to gain the consent and co‐operation of the trade union movement for this initiative. This paper documents and explains the evolution of the policy of the Trades Union Congress towards this initiative, and the opposition that this stimulated within the trade union movement.     

Slavery,emancipation and the creole world view of Jamaican colonists, 1800–1834

Focussing on the early nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which white slaveholders in Jamaica developed a distinctive local ideology based on the institution of slavery. Whites were in a minority in Jamaican slave society, slaveholding was widespread amongst white settlers, and all white men experienced privileges in a society organised around racialised boundaries of rule. These factors helped to ensure that Jamaican colonists developed a distinctively local, or creole, world view characterised by the defence of slavery and a culture of white male solidarity. However, local slaveholders maintained close links with Britain and were militarily dependent on the metropole. Metropolitan culture influenced their ideology, and Jamaican slaveholders saw themselves as loyal subjects of the British Crown. They were therefore colonial creoles and, in spite of the rise of abolitionism in the metropole, they maintained that their local practices were reconcilable with their status as transplanted Britons. By the 1830s changed circumstances in Britain and Jamaica forced slaveholders to reach a compromise with the British Government and to accept the abolition of slavery, but in spite of the important changes that this entailed, the main features of their creole world view persisted.     

Quakers,colonies and colonials, 1938–48

Scholars have barely scratched the surface of the history of ‘Black’ peoples in the United Kingdom before the brief episode of immigration which began in 1948. For example, very little is known about the response of ‘white’ organizations, whether religious, philanthropic or political, to colonial issues or to ‘colonials’ in Britain. This article looks at the attitudes, as revealed by central committee minutes, of the Society of Friends, a religious body with a strong anti‐slavery and public service tradition.     

Master–Horse–Slave: Mobility,Race and Power in the British West Indies,c.1780–1838

This article examines a particular social practice that attracted attention from visitors to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British West Indies: enslaved footmen accompanying white riders on horseback, often seeking to keep up by holding onto the horses’ tails. Referred to here as ‘master–horse–slave’, this is interpreted as a ‘hybrid co-mobility’ (or co-present mobility involving humans and animals). The article argues that master–horse–slave was a manifestation of slavery as everyday social practice. More broadly, the article argues for the importance of practices of mobility as significant features of Caribbean slave societies and the place of animals in these.     

Beyond plantations: Indian and African slavery in the Illinois Country, 1720–1780

This article offers an analysis of Indigenous and African slavery in the Illinois Country during the eighteenth century. It shows that slavery did not operate as an institution and was not organized around plantation production, but that human bondage was a set of adaptable practices. Slavery took many forms, and masters had to adapt to that diversity and, in so doing, they forged a single, heterogeneous slave system. Frenchmen brought enslaved workers of African descent to the Illinois Country, and masters worked them on grain farms to sustain an export economy. In this way, Illinois’s economy shared much with the wider Atlantic World. Yet they had to revise their slaving practices in light of the reality that indigenous forms of bondage pre-dated their arrival. In Native North America, slavery operated as a kin-based system of captivity that could structure alliances and sustain local politics between diverse groups. Masters participated in this form of slavery, and incorporated Indigenous slaves into their economies. Rather than stressing the differences that existed between diverse forms of human bondage, this article moves beyond an institutional analysis of slavery to show how slavery’s many guises mutually defined each other across generations.     

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.     

Prisons,workhouses, and the control of slave labour in low country Georgia, 1763–1815

Engendering History. Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Edited by VERENE SHEPHERD, BRIDGET BRERETON, BARBARA BAILEY. London: James Currey, Kingston: Ian Randle. 1995. xxii, 406pp. £35.00 and £12.50.

Haiti, History and the Gods. JOAN DAYAN. Los Angeles; University of California Press. 1995. xxiii, 339pp. $35.00. ISBN 0–520–08900–6.

From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas. Edited by MARY TURNER. Kingston, Bloomington and Indianapolis, and London: Ian Randle Publishers, Indiana University Press, and James Currey. 1995. x, 309pp. £35.00 (cloth); £12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–253–32972–8; 0–253–21001–1.

The Black Loyalist Directory. African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution. Edited and with an Introduction by GRAHAM RUSSELL HODGES. New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1996. li. 318pp. $37.00. ISBN 0–8153–2172–4.

The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861. STANLEY HARROLD. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press ofKentucky, 1995. x, 245 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0–8131–1906–5.

The Salmon P. Chase Papers. Volume 2: Correspondence, 1823–1857. Edited by JOHN NIVEN. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994. xxv, 489 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0–87338–508‐X.

The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War. JAMES G. HOLLANDSWORTH, Jr. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1995. xiv, 140pp. £23.95. ISBN 0–8071–1939–3.

The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman's Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns. JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 (orig. pub. 1985). xvi, 318pp. £13.95. ISBN 0–80712028–6.

Caste &; Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880–1920. FON LOUISE GORDON. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995. xvi, 179pp. £31.50. ISBN 0–8203–1711‐X.

African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina. AMELIA WALLACE VERNON. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1995. xiii, 309pp. $16.95.

Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, 1821–1854. CARLOS AGU1RRE. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cató1ica del Perú, Fondo Editorial. 1993. 335pp. ISBN 84–89309–63–9.

Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800–1854. CHRISTINE HÜNEFELDT. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994. xi, 269pp. ISBN 0–520–08235–4 (cloth); 0–520–08292–3 (paper).

Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel. 1600–1850. JAMES L.A. WEBB, Jr. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xxvi, 227pp. £40.95 (cloth); £17.95 (paper). ISBN 0–299–14330–9.

From Slave Trade to ‘legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth‐Century West Africa. Edited by ROBIN LAW. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, African Studies Series 86. xi, 278pp. £35.00.

Slavery and Slaving in World History. A Bibliography. 1900–1991. JOSEPH C. MILLER. Millwood, NY. 1993. xvii, 556pp. $90.00. ISBN 0–527–63660–6.     

Kindling Backfires: Cultivating a National Antislavery Movement, 1836–1838

‘Kindling Backfires’ introduces the reader to a cohort of 70 white abolitionists who could be counted as members of the upwardly mobile, evangelical middle class in the USA of the 1830s. Instead of beginning in 1816 with the rise of the American Colonization Society and other voluntary reform associations, this study focuses on the roughly two-year period of greatest coordinated effort by 70 abolitionist agents to craft a national antislavery movement, 1836–1838. This brief period coincided with the largest expansion in numbers of local societies and enrollment of new members achieved by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS). The limited role of women as agents – and their essential role as the most active of recruits – also receives study. Finally, the myriad forms of opposition to the agency, from rowdy mobs to sexual scandal to national economic recession are plumbed as their cumulative effect compelled the AA-SS to discontinue most of their agents' commissions in late 1837.     

The globalization of production,national labour regulations and income inequality in the global North and South, 1980–2013

A central concern over global value chains (GVCs) is whether the integration of national firms into GVCs exacerbates income inequality within countries. However, despite decades of research, the distributional consequences of GVCs remain unclear in the empirical literature. Drawing on panel data from 96 countries between 1980 and 2013, we examine the effects of GVC integration on market income inequality and whether national labour regulations moderate these effects. We find integration increases inequality in the global North and South. More importantly, we find labour regulations amplify the inequality effects of integration in Southern countries by expanding the size of the informal sector while suppressing these effects in Northern countries by promoting unionization. This suggests institutional power from national labour regulations may enhance the bargaining power of labour in the North through increasing collective resources while disempowering labour in the South through reinforcing labour market segmentation between formal and informal sectors.     

‘With almost electric speed’: mapping African American abolitionists in Britain and Ireland, 1838–1847

African American abolitionists made an indelible mark on nineteenth-century transatlantic society: their lectures were held in famous meeting halls, taverns, theatres, churches, and the private parlour rooms of wealthy patrons across the British Isles. This article will demonstrate how digital mapping techniques reveal not only the extent of how far African Americans travelled, but also how visualizing their tours can lead to new avenues of research. Digital mapping can reinvigorate scholarship on transatlantic activism by providing original insights into journeys by men such as Frederick Douglass and Moses Roper.     

Negotiating freedom: Women of colour and the transition to free labour in Cuba, 1870–1886

This article argues that women of colour were central to the process of the legal transition to free labour in Cuba. Through an examination of legal appeals for freedom – which were often facilitated by new opportunities created by transition legislation – it shows that women were motivated by factors such as their families and frequently by their position as urban domestic servants. They could also make use of gendered understandings of slavery and freedom, which were socially prevalent although not legally enshrined. The paper argues that a focus on women and gender may have important implications for our understanding of Cuba's transition to free labour and of some of the constructions of citizenship and nationhood with which it was entwined.