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.     

Custom and law: The status of enslaved Africans in seventeenth-century Barbados

The island of Barbados provides an ideal case study to explore the beginnings of slavery and definitions of slave status in England's early American colonies. Africans and Europeans confronted each other earlier and on a larger scale in Barbados than in any other English colony. By tracing the development of slavery from the colony's settlement in 1627 this article argues that the legitimization or legalization of African slavery and the status of slaves were established in custom long before any slave laws were passed. Focus is on slave status as a point of analysis, implicitly defined by three major features: chattel property, lifetime (or permanent) servitude, and inheritance of slave condition from an enslaved mother. In examining the evidence for these features, the article contends they were part of the culture of the Euro-Atlantic world and English worldview by the time the island was settled. None of the features was ever defined in any law; rather, they were implicit in any Barbados law that mentioned slaves.     

Generation,resistance, and survival: African-American children and the Southampton Rebellion of 1831

The Southampton Rebellion of 1831, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, stands as the most famous slave rebellion in American History. Historians have studied the rebellion extensively often focusing on Turner’s biography, the incident’s violent sequence of events, and the wide social, cultural, and political impact of the rebellion. The most recent scholarship on the Southampton Rebellion focuses on the wider community that produced the violent event that resulted in the death of nearly 60 whites and an uncountable number of people of color. African-American children made up a significant demographic in antebellum Southampton. They were present everywhere, just as children were present in most antebellum communities. Yet their appearances in the trial records associated with the Southampton Rebellion are all but unstudied. The Southampton Rebellion was not the result of Nat Turner’s singular genius focused on immediate results. It was a rebellion constituted in the community with future liberation in mind. Children, the literal embodiment of slavery’s future, then were necessarily included and involved. This article engages the extensive court documents associated with the Southampton Rebellion’s aftermath to investigate the possible role of children in the rebellion and their significance to the resistance of enslaved communities.     

The Persistence of the slave market in seventeenth-century Central Mexico

This study, based on an extensive notarial database, demonstrates the significance of slavery in Central Mexico during the seventeenth century. Thousands of bills of sale from Mexico City and Puebla – the largest and most lucrative slave markets in the region – show that the slave trade did not collapse with the end of the Portuguese asiento in 1640. A growing population of American-born creoles sustained the market during the subsequent decades, along with a modest number of new African arrivals. In 1700, slavery remained integral to Central Mexico's economy.     

Rethinking runaways in the British Atlantic World: Britain,the Caribbean,West Africa and North America

This essay utilises four exceptional case studies to explore the various causes, experiences and results of escape from slavery in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Atlantic World. These are: Johnny Beckles in Barbados, Jamie Montgomery in Scotland, Castle Slaves at Cape Coast Castle on the West African Gold Coast; and Harriet and Beverly Hemings in Virginia. This essay illuminates the diverse forms of enslavement and escape, showing that while some sought escape from slavery and even their race, others sought sanctuary within slave society and even on plantations, while others used escape as a means of pressuring for changes in their lives and work as enslaved people.     

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.     

Laura Smalligan's Jonkonnu,a Jamaican Slave Dance: Contesting the African in African-American

Using insights from her field of West African art and ethnography, Laura Smalligan (in an earlier journal article concerning the Jamaican slave dance, Jonkonnu) opens up and renews challenging perspectives regarding the indispensable African content of New World slavery. Smalligan argues that the Connu slave pageant stemmed from a particular time, place and outlook (of slaves from the Bight of Biafra, modern Nigeria). Discussion here pivots on two comparisons: of dance, often accompanied by trance states (from West Africa to Anglophone plantation societies in the Caribbean and mainland North America); and, of the way contemporary scholars now – often smitten in this generation by the postmodern ‘literary turn’ – view, prematurely, slave ethnicity as heuristically vague and unmanageable, as opposed to local slave society people, black and white, then who in their ordinary talk and activities depicted certain slaves ethnically (and linguistically). These broad comparisons should deepen and advance understandings to that dimension of the African diaspora to the Americas known (fashionably) as ‘ethnogenesis’, that is, the process of becoming African-American.     

‘Coercive measures’: slave rebellion,torture, and sovereignty in Cuba, 1812–1844

This article examines the use of judicial torture against free and enslaved people of color in Cuba during the first half of the nineteenth century. Utilizing the records of legal processes relating to dramatic incidences of slave rebellion, it considers the broader implications of the use of judicial torture as the colonial state responded to increasing threats to Cuban slavery and the Spanish Empire by assuming a greater role in promoting insular security. The article argues that the use of torture against enslaved deponents articulated broader transformations in the constitution and expression of Spanish sovereignty in colonial Cuba.     

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.     

Creating Undiminished Confidence: The Free Population of Colour and Identity Formation in Mauritius, 1767–1835

Recent scholarship on free coloured militias in colonial Mexico and New Orleans, white and free coloured culture, identity and political activity in Barbados, and identity formation in Creole societies in the Caribbean highlights the need to explore the dynamics and consequences of free coloured identity formation elsewhere in the colonial slave plantation world. The Mauritian case study provides an opportunity to draw on the insights from sociological work on identity formation to examine how ethnicity, gender and class, as well as race, influenced the development of a distinctive sense of collective identity among the island's free persons of colour during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.     

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.     

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.     

‘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.     

‘A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’: The Amistad,Expert Testimony,and the Origins of Atlantic Studies

This article explores the role of testimony, expertise, and the academy in the production of knowledge about slavery in the context of the trials of the Africans aboard the slave ship La Amistad, 1839–1841. Testimony provided by enlisted self-professed experts formed the intellectual architecture to the legal argument as it advanced to the Supreme Court. When considered separately from the trials, and distinctly as a question of the production of knowledge, the role of expert testimony provides crucial insight into the function of the university in antebellum anti-slavery thought and action, the marginalization of the lived African slave experience, and the emergence of Atlantic studies in the contemporary present. Examining the relationship between the university and the marshalling of expertise – broadly understood as linguistic, political and cultural knowledge of slavery and the slave trade – suggests that the early use of expert testimony had an important albeit neglected role in the birth of Atlantic studies.     

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.     

Collecting for the cabinet of freedom: the parliamentary history of Thomas Clarkson’s chest

This article discusses a wooden chest used by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, to display samples of African natural resources and artefacts. It explores the role played by the chest during the 1788–1789 Privy Council enquiry into the slave trade, and suggests that the box (which is usually thought of as travelling showcase employed by Clarkson in public lectures and meetings) was in fact firmly embedded in – and spoke directly to – the 1788–1789 enquiry process. Its initial purpose was to conjure alternate cargoes in the minds of those debating the slave trade; to enable Parliament to visualise an Africa filled not with potential slaves, but with alternate resources, having a multitude of domestic and commercial uses.     

Repeat Teenage Pregnancy in Two Cultures–The Meanings Ascribed by Teenagers

This qualitative study charts the views, feelings and experiences of two diverse, yet in many ways similar, groups of respondents from two cultures – one group of 26 respondents from the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Barbados and the other group of 26 respondents from London, who have experienced repeat teenage pregnancies. The study uses a comparative approach to provide a psychosocial, emotional and economic understanding of the factors, which lead to repeat pregnancies. This study cautions against an over reliance on a mechanistic understanding and management of both single and repeat teenage pregnancies, and emphasises the fact that economic, social, psychological and emotional processes are also crucial to our understanding of repeat teenage pregnancies.     

Cohabitation registers and the study of slave families in Virginia

Virginia's cohabitation registers were compiled after the Civil War to legalize the unions that had formed between enslaved couples and to legitimize the children of those couples. They provide valuable demographic information about more than 13,000 couples and their children – well over 50,000 individuals – drawn from 23 counties across the state. The registers can be very useful to historians of slavery and slave families, but when using them it is essential to understand why and how they were created, what exactly they include, and what they omit.