African ‘recaptives’ under apprenticeship in the British West Indies 1807–1828

Historical attention on African apprenticeship in the British West Indies has been focused traditionally on the period 1834 to 1838. Few scholars have written anything substantial on the earlier apprenticeship scheme which commenced in 1807. This scheme was devised by the British government to deal with those Africans imported into the British colonies in contravention of the British slave trade abolition acts and also abolition treaties signed between Britain and various countries. The Africans, though declared by the British government to be ‘liberated’, were really under a modified form of slavery, as was debatably the case with the later Apprenticeship System.     

The Problem of Freedom in a Mid Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Society: The Liberated Africans of the Anglo-Portuguese Mixed Commission in Luanda (1844–1870)

In the mid nineteenth century, the Anglo-Portuguese Mixed Commission in Luanda liberated 137 Africans from the slave trade. The liberated Africans then became apprentices for several years before they were granted complete freedom. This article argues that the in-between status of the liberated Africans was ambivalent and their very presence in a society where slavery continued to exist highly problematic. This was reflected not only in the way their bodies were shaped, but also in the fact that both colonial officials and liberated Africans sought ways to end the experiment. The article also argues that the conception and the vicissitudes of this civilising project were intimately linked to experiences with freed slaves elsewhere in the Atlantic world.     

Prize Possessions: Transported Material Culture of the Post-Abolition Enslaved – New Evidence from St Helena

This article examines the artefacts of personal adornment recovered during recent archaeological excavations of a graveyard associated with the nineteenth century, British-run ‘Liberated African Establishment’ in Rupert's Valley, on the South Atlantic Island of St Helena. It presents evidence for the transportation of pre-enslavement cultural material, and identifies factors that may have affected the ability of captive Africans to retain personal effects. It also discusses the interpretative constraints that exist in identifying transported – as opposed to acquired – material culture in the context of the post-Abolition Transatlantic slave trade.     

‘When he gets among his Countrymen,they tell him that he is free’: Slave Trade Abolition,Indentured Africans and a Royal Commission

The 1807 Act to abolish the British slave trade determined that those Africans seized by the British navy from illegally operating slave ships would be enlisted into the armed forces or indentured for a maximum of 14 years. In 1821, a Royal Commission was sent to the West Indies to investigate the ‘state’ and ‘condition’ of those Africans who had been indentured under the Act. This article focuses on the work of the Commission – as it became riven by a personal and political dispute – in Tortola. It pays particular attention to the testimonies of the indentured Africans documented in the records. Their dissident narratives further disrupted the inquiry as they refused to answer to either redemptive abolitionism or instrumental political economy – the overlapping discourses framing the ways in which alternatives to enslaved labour were conceptualised during the 1820s.     

Ethiopian and other African slaves in Greece during the Ottoman occupation

In the summer of 1748, authorities in colonial America issued a warrant for the arrest and imprisonment of a baker named Peter Johnson. Acting on these orders, the sheriff apprehended and detained Johnson ‘a negro man’ also known as Primus, for refusing to serve as the slave of George Massey. Massey claimed that he owned Johnson, swearing under oath that Johnson was a ‘slave for life’ and as such had no right to refuse to work for him. Having purchased Johnson for £43 from a man named Joseph Hicks, Massey argued that the slave's ‘stubborn and rebellious’ attitude was criminal. Johnson had to choose between submitting to Massey or remaining incarcerated until he could plead his case in court. He preferred the latter. Despite sworn affidavits and testimony to the contrary, Johnson maintained that he had never been a slave and was not obliged to submit to Massey or anyone else.¹     

Slave Crucibles: Interstate Migrants and Social Assimilation in the Antebellum South

Between 1800 and 1860 almost a million American slaves were forcibly removed from the Upper South and sent to the Lower South. An outpouring of historical research has greatly contributed to our understanding of the political, economic, demographic and business aspects of interregional slave migration in the antebellum period. As yet, however, relatively few studies have examined the assimilation process of interstate slave migrants. Cast into new slave communities, newcomers were often treated – and felt – like outsiders by their fellow bondspeople, and were forced to utilise various strategies to effect their integration. How did migrants experience the transition to new slave communities? How did they forge new relationships, and what were the bases of these relationships? What institutions and strategies aided in their integration process? And to what extent do their experiences reveal a broad ‘slave identity’ in the antebellum period? This study explores these questions for interstate newcomers in the antebellum South.     

The Registers of Liberated Africans of the Havana Slave Trade Commission: Implementation and Policy, 1824–1841

The Registers of Liberated Africans that were compiled in the course of British anti-slave trade suppression contain detailed biographical information for individuals who were liberated from slave ships according to international law. These records are invaluable for an analysis of the demography of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and hence it is necessary to assess critically their generation, including who made them and for what reasons. By focusing on the Havana Slave Trade Commission between 1824 and 1841, this essay provides an overview of the registration process of over 10,000 Africans, the structure of the Mixed Commission court, and details on the court officials, including a list of 162 African-born interpreters that resulted in the issuance of emancipation certificates to thousands of Liberated Africans who were subsequently subjected to terms of apprenticeship negotiated by the British and Spanish governments.     

The ‘African Colonists’ of Montevideo: New Light on the Illegal Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro and the Río de la Plata (1830–42)

New archival evidence from Montevideo reveals a twofold operation that brought enslaved Africans to Rio de Janeiro in the era of the illegal slave trade. This pattern emerged after the negotiation of the only – and largely unsuccessful – Anglo-Brazilian treaty against this traffic (1826) and the independence of Uruguay from Brazil (1825), which led to the foundation of the Uruguayan state in 1830. This operation also disguised the shipment of African slaves, mainly children, to Montevideo as ‘colonists’ in order to avoid both the constitutional ban on the slave trade as well as the British cruisers patrolling the Atlantic.     

Imaging Separation in Tom Feelings' The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo and Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

Graphic artist Tom Feelings and novelist Toni Morrison face similar challenges in representing the Atlantic slave trade. Feelings' The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo tells a wordless narrative in pictures. Morrison's Beloved portrays in contemporary narrative form, the devastating effects of forced transnational migration. Both artists confront conventional silences surrounding this aspect of slavery by presenting displaced Africans on their way to the Americas. Their texts both define Black literature of the late twentieth century, and trouble the status quo as experiments in aesthetic expression. Their works demonstrate the way a legacy of trauma is written into the fabric of US culture. I put forth a comparative methodology of representations of the Middle Passage in word and image, by examining the self-definition of a genre and the collapse of conventional medial distinctions between graphic, linguistic and musical expression. Feelings employs overt symbolism and more subtle modes of signifying in his treatment of individuals in crisis, forced into new subject positions when enslaved. Likewise, Morrison critiques identity formation while in bondage by stylising her language for particular effects. Parallel structures in word and image signify resistance to convention as African American literature makes its way into the broader realm of world literature.     

Global citizens,exotic others,and unwanted migrants: mobilities in and of Europe

This article reflects on Europe’s problematic relationship with its ‘others’, asking in particular how the idea of the ‘exotic’ – constituting one of Europe’s ‘imperial ruins’ – intersects with the figure of the Muslim migrant. The Muslim migrant has in the present become in Europe a potent marker of otherness, which reflects how some cosmopolitan aspirations are perceived negatively in European discourses, revealing how mobility itself is racilized and gendered. WoDaaBe Fulani migrants from Niger have historically occupied a subject position in Europe as identified with ‘the exotic’. The article discusses WoDaaBe temporary migration to Europe to supplement their income back home, and their intersecting positions as ‘exotic’, as Muslims and black Africans. While contemporary discourses tend to highlight Europe’s status as a site of equality, human rights, and cradle of civilization, some bodies are welcome within the space of Europe while others are not.     

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.     

‘It is Unjust for the Law of Marriage to be Broken by the Law of Slavery’: Married Slaves and their Masters in Early Colonial Lima

This article examines the conflicts between married slaves and their masters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima. An investigation of ecclesiastical court cases shows the role that slave marriage played in limiting masters’ authority by preventing sales and forced migration of married slaves. By citing the Church's insistence on marital cohabitation, slaves had success impeding their masters’ agendas. The sacrament of marriage, however, did not guarantee absolute slave autonomy. Instead, masters could also use the courts, as well as their finances, to subvert the Church's protection of slave marriage. In the end, this article demonstrates how the ecclesiastical tribunal served as a place for meaningful redress for slaves, while still providing masters with ways to maintain control over the enslaved population.     

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.     

Answering the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centres

This paper explores the daily, psychic journeys Indian call center agents undergo as they ‘virtually migrate’ between India and the US. A thin cable that runs half way around the globe bridges the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, connecting agents to faraway customers in real time. The new time-space relations generated by this virtual contact create conditions for these workers to undergo a global ‘migration’ from India and to America, even as their bodies remain bounded within the national homeland. To accommodate the US American workday, Indian agents often work the nightshift and sleep during the day, leaving them little time for family, friends, and cultural events. This temporal arrangement displaces them from the daily rhythms of Indian life, generating a sense of loss, longing, and nostalgia for ‘India’. Further, while agents experience a sense of distance from India, they also experience a movement toward ‘America’. Agents’ accounts suggest a feeling of living between worlds, yet their movement is decoupled from physical migration.     

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.     

Black Atlantic maritime networks,resistance and the American ‘domestic’ slave trade

This article on the formation and operation of maritime networks of resistance and solidarity during the United States ‘domestic’ coastal slave trade contributes to the history of Atlantic maritime radicalism in the Age of Revolution. After 1807, the legal trans‐shipment of enslaved people from the Chesapeake to the antebellum slave markets enclosed the seas along the Atlantic seaboard and into the Gulf of Mexico. The legal, geopolitical and physical limitations of slavery at sea turned the Florida Straits – a densely trafficked maritime chokepoint – into a contested space. Rather than viewing this globally significant maritime space as primarily a site of contestation between British imperial sovereignty and US internecine national politics, the focus is on the undercurrents of collective black Atlantic political action, memory and connection that shaped the Straits as a transnational maritime route from slavery to freedom.     

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.     

Managing ‘American Islam’

Focusing on the case of Islam in post-9/11 United States, this article highlights the particularity of how US secularism is enacted by the state. In much sociological theory, the United States has been understood to be a neutral and non-interfering state with regard to religion, thereby fostering a pluralist religious context of free consumer choice. Some Muslim reformists have argued that this context makes the US highly fertile ground upon which to reform Islam and to improve women's status in Islam. This article argues that, in the context of the US-led ‘war on terror’, the government has drawn on and amplified this discourse in the service of producing a representation of the US as tolerant, while also seeking to promote a concept of ‘true’ Islam and produce patriotic Muslim citizens. At the center of this discourse are contested portrayals of Muslim women as symbolic of a modern and liberated Islam that is uniquely ‘American’ and opposed to other presumably oppressive Islams. While this context may in fact promote the reform of Islam, it does so with state involvement rather than as a result of state neutrality.     

“Infiltrators” or Refugees? An Analysis of Israel's Policy Towards African Asylum-Seekers

This article adopts a genealogical approach in examining Israeli immigration policy by focusing on the situation confronting African asylum seekers who have been forced back into Egypt, detained and deported but who have not had their asylum claims properly assessed. Based on immigration policies formulated at the time of Israeli independence, whose principle objective was to secure a Jewish majority state, we argue that Israel's treatment of African asylum seekers as ‘infiltrators’/economic migrants stems from an insistence on maintaining immigration as a sovereign issue formally isolated from other policy domains. Such an approach is not only in violation of Israel's commitment to the Refugee Convention, it directly contributes to policies which are ineffective and unduly harsh.