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.     

Transnational advocacy in the eighteenth century: transatlantic activism and the anti‐slavery movement

Abstract In this article, I assess how a transnational campaign against the slave trade developed in the eighteenth century, focusing on the seminal role of Quakers. Building on Keck and Sikkink's study of the international campaign against slavery in America in the mid‐nineteenth century, I show how one can identify transnational advocacy on this issue more than half a century earlier. I examine the features of Quakerism ‐ specifically the close links between American and English Quakers ‐and the historical circumstances that gave rise to the campaign. In particular, I assess the role of transatlantic correspondence and travel among individual Quakers and the close organizational links between the society's branches on either side of the Atlantic. I analyse the development of anti‐slave trade activism according to Khagram, Riker and Sikkink's model of network development and find that this model is broadly applicable. I note, however, the change within the campaign from truly transnational (transatlantic) to predominantly domestic (British) as it changed from a coalition to a broader social movement, and as the campaign began to interact with the state, thus suggesting that the development of transnational networks is neither linear nor inevitable.     

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.     

SLAVERY: ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT (2005)

Based on life stories of ex-slaves from Ethiopia now living in Israel, the present article attempts to uncover complex relationships and conceptions of intimate domination and subjugation. The dramatic passage of masters and slaves from rural Ethiopia to the democratic State of Israel enables their stories to emerge.

Hearing these personal stories became possible when continuous slavery taken for granted in one particular cultural context became alien and unbearable in another. Key images at the basis of Ethiopian slavery constitute an ample reservoir for new interpretations, in which hidden aspects are brought into relief within a new reality. The present article focuses on cows as an organising image through which complex master–slave (Choa–Barya) relations are decoded. It explores the centrality of this image for these exploitative, complex relations, both in Ethiopia and following the move to Israel. The cow figures prominently as the embodiment of a range of concrete and symbolic meanings, particularly in the most intimate details of master–slave power relations and hierarchies.     

Africa or old Rome? Jamaican slave naming revisited

The article argues that a detailed reading of plantation inventories, supplementing statistical analyses, can provide new perspectives on who (re-)named the enslaved in eighteenth century Jamaica, and what the new names meant. Produced by slaveholders, inventories are strongly biased toward representing owners and managers as responsible for the names they record; yet they can also provide glimpses of slave self-naming. The uneven and sometimes contradictory ways in which the names’ meanings evolved precludes any single generalization about who gave them. The ubiquitous Akan-derived day-names, rapidly domesticated and widely adopted, must be considered separately from other names originating in Africa.     

Calvinism,Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw

In the autobiography of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, the first black author to be published in Britain, slavery was represented at best neutrally and at worst as spiritually and socially beneficial. Re-reading Gronniosaw's Narrative in the context of the Calvinist and Dutch Reformed confessional networks facilitating its composition and publication enables us to understand how and why a former slave would produce a text apparently advocating proslavery ideology. Gronniosaw's case demonstrates that black intellectuals, far from being solely concerned with abolitionism, participated in a broad array of political, religious and social movements during the eighteenth century, occasionally even those that supported slavery.     

From guest‐motif to lost homeland and re‐found exile: the development of a paradigmatic motif in the assimilatory process in Russian‐Jewish literature

Jews were strangers when they started to live within the borders of Tsarist Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, and they continued to be outsiders even when the integration, acculturation and assimilation process went on. The guest‐motif is an essential element of the home and exile dichotomy, often quoted in general terms, but rarely investigated closer in the texts. This motif may represent a special interest in Russian‐Jewish literature as one of the more emblematic topics of literature on assimilation that became a paradigm. The panoramic overview of the motif includes prose works by Iakov Rombro, Grigory Bogrov, Aleksandr Kipen, David Aizman, Andrei Sobol, Lev Lunts, Isaak Babel, Vladimir Jabotinsky and Friedrich Gorenshtein.     

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.     

On the semantics of the motif “three hares chasing each other in a circle” on Jewish monuments in Eastern Europe

“Three hares chasing each other in a circle” is one of the most common and peculiar motifs in the murals of Eastern European wooden synagogues. This motif was not an invention of Jewish craftsmen, but rather was borrowed and adapted by them from European art. In the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century this motif appears in various Ashkenazi ritual objects and on the tombstones of Eastern European Jews in the same region, and even in those places where there were painted synagogues. What is the reason for the appearance of this strange motif on Jewish monuments? On some monuments the motif of the “three hares” paradoxically replaces the “three overlapping fish” which are depicted as the zodiacal sign of the month Nisan. On the tombstones the image hints at the name of the deceased. But its central place in the composition of murals is evidence that this motif has an important universal meaning. This analysis of the motif shows that it became an integral part of an artistic tradition and that its semantics were determined within a well-defined geographical and chronological framework.     

CULTURAL STUDIES IN GERMANY REVISITED

By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin Circle, this paper explores the extent to which the public sphere can open up possibilities for resistance to dominant social relations through ‘traces of meaning’. The author wishes to show how a public space for execution in seventeenth and eighteenth century London opened up a place at different levels of abstraction for a popular plebeian public sphere to flourish. When this public sphere disappeared in 1783, it is shown how its traces of meaning still survived in popular culture. These traces of meaning were re-combined through a royal crisis by more political labouring movements in the early nineteenth century that, in the main, unintentionally re-accentuated the same seventeenth- and eighteenth century-public space in London. By exploring the changing form of this public sphere it is shown how a dominant discourse changes over time and how this dominant discourse can be rendered in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin as ‘heteroglossic’ and refracted into modes of public resistance in specific spaces. To demonstrate this, the ideological form of the public sphere in early nineteenth century Britain is outlined and is then shown how it became refracted within the royal scandal which, in turn, came to be refracted within a specific space in London.     

The Many Faces of Rural Capitalism

The territorial growth and capitalist development of the United States that began in the late eighteenth century entailed ‐‐ among other things ‐‐ a massive expansion of agriculture that continued until the 1920s. Though based on private, freehold property in land there was no single pattern to this agrarian growth or to agriculture's integration into national and global flows of commodities, finance, and labor. Slave and non‐slave systems expanded in parallel until 1860, but even the destruction of slavery during the Civil War and the subsequent emergence of industrial and finance capitalism did not impose uniformity on American agriculture or undermine independent, household‐based farming.     

The Eugenic Atlantic: race, disability, and the making of an international Eugenic science, 1800-1945

In this analysis the authors fold disability into a cross-national equation by including disabled people as part of a trans-Atlantic discussion of otherness. In naming this new cultural space the 'Eugenic Atlantic', we take up Paul Gilroy's analysis of cultural crossings in order to recognise the social construction of marginalised populations designated by virtue of their presumed biologically-based inferiorities. The analysis of a 'Eugenic Atlantic' seeks to analyse disability and race as mutual projects of human exclusion, based upon scientific management systems, successively developed within modernity. From the end of the eighteenth century to the conclusion of World War II, bodies designated as defective became the focal point of violent European and American efforts to engineer a 'healthy' body politic. While fears of racial, sexual and gender-based 'contamination' served as the spokes of this belief system, disability, used as a synonym for biological (or in-built) inferiority, functioned as the hub that gave the entire edifice its cross-national utility.     

On the backs of blacks: The Barbados free‐coloureds’ pursuit of civil rights and the 1816 slave rebellion

Free‐coloured groups were to be found in most West Indian societies during the eighteenth century. Whereas most academic research has concentrated on the social status, legal rights and economic achievements of the free‐coloureds, this paper examines their political responses in Barbados at the time of the 1816 slave rebellion. Relations between slaves and free‐coloured groups were full of tension and this was reflected both at the time of the rising and during the rest of the time that slavery prevailed on the island.     

Reporting Atrocities: A Comparison of the Zong and the Trial of Captain John Kimber

The trial of Captain John Kimber has received almost no scholarly attention despite a substantial newspaper record. Instead, scholars have focused on the slave ship Zong as the most evocative symbol of abolitionist discourse. This article examines the newspaper record of both events in order to understand their impact on the slave-trade debate in the late eighteenth century. The wealth of material on Kimber's trial makes it equally important to abolitionist discourse. Moreover, newspaper accounts of Kimber's arrest, trial, and the aftermath reveal the rich dialogue between proslavery and abolitionist writers as each sought to claim the idea of ‘humanity’.     

Reframing the History of the Competition Concept: Neoliberalism,Meritocracy, Modernity

This paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English language dictionaries and encyclopaedias, using a method of ‘conceptual history’. I show how the concept, its grammatical forms, and characteristic associations have evolved substantially since the eighteenth century. This finding is placed in a broader explanatory context, arguing that it is the combined rise of a set of core institutions of modernity, not just capitalism but also democracy, adversarial law, science, and civil society, that deeply embeds competition in the modern world. The decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the national subordination of martial power, opened the way for more ‘liberal’ forms of society in which authority is routinely contested through competition, across economy, politics, culture and beliefs. Appreciating this is a necessary step towards truly grappling with the effects of competition on modern life.     

Child Slaves in Pre-colonial Nigeria,c.1725–1860

During the eighteenth century, the number of child slaves leaving the ‘Nigerian’ region for the Americas increased and almost doubled after 1820. While the increase reflected shifts in the operations of the Atlantic trade, it also revealed the significance of slavery in pre-colonial Nigerian societies, which historically retained more child slaves than were sold abroad, even when the productivity of some children was uncertain. With a focus on the internal (intra-Nigeria) slave trade, this article examines the attraction of child slaves, their modes of enslavement, treatment and status, and the impact of slavery on children.     

‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic

This article explores the Gothicisation of the Haitian Revolution in the transatlantic discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As it argues, the Gothic mode has to be understood as a reaction to the profound challenges that the Haitian Revolution posed to a transatlantic world built on the slave economy. Pro-slavery and pro-colonialist authors demonised this successful slave revolution and one of the first anti-colonial revolutions in modern history by resorting frequently to the ‘hegemonic Haitian Gothic'. By contrast, early Haitian leaders and some Black Atlantic radicals appropriated this mode, turning it into the ideologically contrary ‘radical Haitian Gothic'.     

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.     

Slave owning overseers in eighteenth-century Virginia and South Carolina

This article examines the position and experiences of plantation overseers in Virginia and South Carolina in the eighteenth century who, whilst themselves employed by planters to supervise their slaves, were also slave owners in their own right. The current historiography often does little more than dismiss the overseer as a figure drawn from the lower stratum of white society. Notwithstanding the reputation of overseers as poor whites who were dependant, shiftless, and villainous, for many of these hard-working and determined individuals, working as an overseer was a transitory phase. Slave-owning overseers and those who acquired slaves while working as overseers demonstrated their long-term aspirations and the opportunities for social and economic mobility that this employment presented. This study is based upon a range of archival sources from plantation records such as diaries, letter books, account books, legal deeds and contracts.