‘In the wreck of a master's fortune’: slave provisioning and planter debt in the British Caribbean

This article traces how debates over the ability of indebted West Indian planters to adequately provision their slaves influenced the politics of slavery in the British Empire in an era of abolitionism and amelioration projects. Specifically, the article examines the promulgation of colonial laws establishing priorities for debts incurred for the purchase of slave provisions over mortgage debts in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Debt-priority laws and contemporary responses to them suggest the ways in which both proslavery and antislavery interests defined and contested the moral as well as material dimensions of West Indian commerce and finance. A detailed quantitative case study provides information on provisioning and other expenses on two Tobago sugar estates (1807–1815).     

A Theory of Moral Outrage: Indignation and Eighteenth-century British Abolitionism

Indignation was an essential but neglected affective component of British abolitionism. Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and other opponents of the slave trade appealed to indignation in order to arouse public support for abolition. They drew upon prevailing understandings of indignation as a moral sentiment related to, but distinct from, benevolent feelings such as sympathy. According to moral sense theorists like Thomas Hutcheson and Adam Smith, sympathy for victims inspired righteous indignation against victimizers. This in turn promoted political reform. The essay traces philosophical connections between sympathy and indignation, and then explores how abolitionists successfully inspired righteous indignation against planters, slave traders and their apologists.     

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.     

Robert Monroe Harrison,British Abolition,Southern Anglophobia and Texas Annexation

This article contributes to the larger project of situating the United States' struggle over slavery within the Atlantic World. Based on the public and private writings of Southern political leaders and the diplomatic correspondence of Robert Monroe Harrison, consul to Kingston, Jamaica, from 1831 until 1855, the article argues that Southern Anglophobia was a dominant factor in the movement to annex Texas to the United States. Britain's abolition of colonial slavery in her West Indian colonies was a seminal event for the American South. This was especially true for Harrison, a ‘native born Virginian’, who had a fearful personal experience with the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. Harrison came to believe that British abolitionism would be turned against American slavery and he shared his views with the State Department. He even feared that the British would use the West Indies as a staging ground for an attack on America with an emancipated black army that would sow insurrection in the South. Moreover, when several American ships involved in the coastal slave trade wrecked in the Bahamas, British colonial authorities freed the slaves, validating Harrison's central accusation. In 1842, on the slave ship Creole, a group of young men to be sold in New Orleans rebelled, seized control of the ship and made their way to the Bahamas. They had heard through the grapevine of the freedom to be gained there. The white South was outraged. From their perspective, Britain had not only expropriated American property, but now had also instigated violent rebellion. Southern political leaders within the Tyler Administration, especially the Secretaries of State Abel Upshur and then John Calhoun, were deeply concerned with British intentions. They believed that the Republic of Texas was the next target of British abolitionism, and in order to defend civilisation as they knew it, they launched the movement to annex Texas to the United States to protect and expand American slavery. They succeeded in 1845.     

‘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.     

‘Book don’t feed our children’: Nonconformist missionaries and the British and Foreign School Society in the development of elementary education in the British West Indies before and after emancipation

This study examines the ways in which Nonconformist missionaries joined with the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) to provide elementary instruction to enslaved and emancipated children in the nineteenth-century British West Indies. Using predominantly untapped historical sources from the BFSS archive’s newly catalogued West Indian collection, this article seeks to address a long-standing historiographic gap regarding the pedagogic methods and practices employed by Nonconformist missionaries in the British Caribbean. In so doing, it highlights the combined impact that local conditions and global currents of missionary and educational fervour had on establishing an effective elementary system during the emancipation era.     

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.     

In the Name of Reason: Colonial Liberalism and the Government of West Indian Indentureship

One year after the first importation of coolie labourers from India to Trinidad in 1845 there were numerous reports of physical, occupational, and psychic abuse perpetrated by planters and estate managers against indentured labourers. This paper presents a genealogical footprint of the tormented existence of these labourers under a system of quasi‐slavery paradoxically at a moment when British colonial governance aimed to reinvent itself via the indentureship scheme, as humanitarian, benevolent and indispensable to the improvement of Indian subjects. Based on the court testimonies of a case concerning planter brutality against coolie, the paper foregrounds a legal‐administrative recalculation and redistribution of the semiotics of disciplinary power in an effort to consolidate the sovereignty of the liberal colonial state.     

Stifled at birth: Private emigration from Bombay to British Guiana in the mid‐nineteenth century

The article commences with a general analysis of the labour problems confronting Guianese planters at emancipation and their efforts to tap the seemingly inexhaustible source in India. Its main thrust is to ascertain why, despite repeated clamour by the sugar planters for these invaluable labourers, Indian immigration was confined to the Bengal and Madras Presidencies. It concludes that the attempt to introduce labour from the Bombay Presidency by private enterprise failed not because of a clash of interests between Bombay mill‐owners and colonial planters but purely because the Bombay authorities deplored emigration overseas whatever the economic advantages.     

Peter's War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution

The emergence of the British abolitionist movement has often been conceived as a direct response to the trauma of the American Revolutionary War. There is little evidence that the British public embraced abolitionism as a response to such a loss – either politically, culturally or psychologically. On the contrary, British anti-slavery mobilisation against the slave trade emerged and flourished in moments of national optimism and confidence. It is therefore as important to understand the contextual pressures that operated in accounting for the emergence of this powerful political movement as it is to understand the motives and methods of its entrepreneurs.     

The black earnings gap: discrimination or culture

This paper explores the earnings gap between West Indians and African Americans that cannot be explained by observable characteristics and is often interpreted as a measure of discrimination or unobservable cultural endowments. The earnings gap advantage has lead to many perceptions and some unsubstantiated implications as to the reasons why West Indians perform better than African Americans in the labor market. This is an attempt to sort out the implications and to put the West Indian/African American earnings difference in prospective.     

‘Setting the captive free’: Thomas perronet thompson,british radicalism and the west indies, 1820s–1860s

This article explores the aims and agitation of British radicals who interested themselves in the West Indies during the early and mid nineteenth century. It analyses debates about slavery, race, empire, free trade, sugar and the conduct of those who hold power at home and in the West Indian colonies, using lines of inquiry suggested by the conduct, speeches and writings of Thomas Perronet Thompson, the radical MP and political economist who devoted much of his public career to colonial and particularly West Indian matters. Thompson can be taken to represent a body of opinion that wanted significant changes in the economic and constitutional relationship between Britain and the West Indies, and he was no less committed to a radical reform of the political, economic and social make up of the colonies themselves. Radicals frequently disagreed with each other on the West Indies, however, and Thompson's role in these disputes also reveals a great deal about the context within which the aforementioned debates proceeded.     

Brazilian Gold,Cuban Copper and the Final Frontier of British Anti-Slavery

This paper concerns the problems that transnational mining companies posed for British abolitionists in the years after emancipation in Britain's Caribbean empire. British-owned mines, operating in Cuba and Brazil, were the largest slave enterprises in the western hemisphere c. 1840. Abolitionists were, of course, outraged by the existence of London-based companies that exploited slave labour, but an attempt in 1843 to prohibit the owning of slaves by British subjects anywhere in the world, regardless of local jurisdiction, proved ineffectual. This paper explores the reasons for this failure and raises questions about the potency of abolitionism within early Victorian political culture.     

‘Of equal or of more service’: black soldiers and the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean

This essay examines the British military’s deployment of black soldiers in the West Indies during the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Seven Years’ War. It analyzes two subjects that remain neglected despite the recent upsurge of interest in mid-eighteenth-century global imperial war: the vicissitudes of these conflicts in the Caribbean and their meaning for the lives of enslaved and free blacks. It contends that black soldiers’ martial exploits convinced British officials that they were essential weapons with which to secure and expand the Empire in the Atlantic: a conviction that led British officials to clash with southern mainland North American slaveholders during the War for American Independence.     

GENDERED SPECTRE

The focus of this essay is gendered collective memory of the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, at the time of Independence from British rule. The essay addresses the question of whether there are similarities between trauma studies that developed within a Western Freudian psychoanalytic framework and the anti-colonial theory practiced by decolonizing nations. Taking two women's texts, the essay examines how gender manifests itself within the framework of trauma and how it is played out in collective memory of partition. The texts chosen raise interesting questions about gender, trauma and the nation and provide an alternative non-Western framework through which the trauma of partition can be read. The essay points to how the category of memory and its meanings vary in their national, cultural and historical specificity.     

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.     

British policy towards Indian princes in late nineteenth and early twentieth‐century Britain

This article examines the factors which induced Indian princes to visit Britain, the background and implementation of British initiatives on princely travel and the vocal response they produced. It also explores the impact of residence in Britain and the ambiguity of Indian princes’ status within British society. The last part of the article focuses more closely on official British attempts to restrict foreign travel to England. The study concludes by highlighting the contradictory nature of British attitudes towards Indian princes in Britain. Clearly, official attitudes towards South Asians in Britain were much more complex than is sometimes suggested.     

Slave dealers,women, pregnancy,and abortion: The story of a circassian slave‐girl in mid‐nineteenth century Cairo

Revd Richard Price was one of the leading intellectual lights of Rational Dissent in late eighteenth-century Britain and was prominent in campaigns for religious and parliamentary reform. Hailed as an ‘Apostle of Liberty’ by the American and French Revolutionaries, Price was also an early subscriber to the Abolition Society in London. While prominent among British Enlightenment figures he had, however, a low profile as an abolitionist and is seldom mentioned in scholarship on abolition. This study discusses the nature of Price's antislavery and his relationship with Americans such as Thomas Jefferson. It sheds more light on the degree to which the emergence of abolitionism depended upon circumstances and how well it combined with other aims and priorities.     

‘Their Coats were Tied Up like Men’: Women Rebels in Antigua's 1858 Uprising

This paper presents the story of the 1858 riot and its primary causes, including Antigua's economic downturn since emancipation in 1834 and the dissatisfaction which black working people had with the post-slavery social order. The disturbance originated between dockworkers from both Antigua and Barbuda competing for jobs in Antigua's capital, but expanded to involve hundreds of working-class Antiguans assailing Barbudans, white planters, Portuguese immigrants, and black and mixed-race policemen. As many Antiguan women formed the forefront of the uprising, the article concentrates on the gendered dimensions of the violence, from the brutal acts Antiguan women perpetrated against Barbudan women to their masculinisation in the press and the trial, being alleged to have dressed and carried themselves ‘like men’ during the fray. The study raises critical questions about the hardships of Antiguan freedwomen in the post-slavery period seeking to maintain their lives and livelihoods, and how those hardships drove them to the front lines of the conflict. Overall, the essay examines the goals of the Antiguan rioters and investigates the changing targets of their violence during the insurgency, as a way to engage their conceptions, however contradictory, of what freedom was and who should enjoy its privileges.