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.     

Liberty,slavery, and the transformation of British identity in the eighteenth‐century West Indies

This article challenges the notion that black militias were of little consequence in the antebellum United States. The establishment, personnel and equipment of these militia units, and their importance for local black organization, has largely escaped scholarly attention. The significance of armed companies of young black men at a time when they were not officially sanctioned by federal and state authorities has also not been explored.

The article makes three arguments. First, there was a trajectory towards militarization from vigilance committees to independent companies to enrolment in union armies. Second, links between self-defence and rights of citizenship were already being struggled over at local and state levels before the more famous national expression in black union soldiers fighting for the union. Third, national narratives concerning the origins of the American civil war, African American slavery, and British Canadian history, obscure the multiple roles played by people of African descent during this period. It is only through transnational approaches towards fugitives, military formation and antislavery mobilization that we realise the role of blacks in challenging American slavery in the Atlantic world.

The organization of the article is as follows. It begins with fugitives and the organization of vigilance committees of self-defense in North America. It continues with states rights of self-defence, the exclusion of black men from these rights, and the resulting organization of independent companies. The public parade of these black militias on West India Day, the most important commemoration by Americans of African descent between the early 1830’s and 1860’s, is the next section. It concludes with the continental destruction of American slavery and its consequences for the post-emancipation era.

This article has several objectives. It examines important black institutions hitherto unexamined. It aims to broaden the conventional temporal and spatial dimensions of the civil war era. The third task is to reveal the limitations of nationalist narratives by seeking out connections among people of African descent as well as in the ways in which individuals and organizations provide alternative means for comparison. Finally, this article is part of a broader project examining political mobilization against slavery in the Atlantic world.     

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.     

Liberal subjects: elementary education and native agency in the British West Indies,c. 1834–1860

ABSTRACT

This article argues that missionaries in the British West Indies conceived of elementary education as a key element of the transition from slavery to freedom in the 1830s and 40s. They suggested that elementary schools and teacher training colleges could not only teach Christianity and literacy, but also create a black middle class, inculcate the values of capitalism in the free black population more broadly, and even lay the foundation for an educational and religious mission to Africa led by free blacks. However, these utopian hopes were short-lived. By the 1850s, frustration and anger over the perceived slow pace of change and financial difficulties set in among both missionaries and the black teachers who had once been so central to missionaries’ hopes for the future of the Atlantic world.     

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.     

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.     

‘Chords of Freedom’: Commemoration,Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery

The antislavery activity of the religious fringe of Atlantic Presbyterianism, Covenanters, has been neglected. Covenanters produced longstanding articulations of antislavery rooted in seventeenth-century Scotland. In America, Covenanters created an ignored alternative to traditional paradigms of slavery debates. They were antislavery Biblical literalists. In the American South, their support of the American Colonization Society (ACS) was an attempt to maintain their faith, and they believed the ACS was their brainchild. Everywhere, Covenanters utilized antislavery to maintain connection to their Old World religious traditions.     

British Perceptions of Concubinage and the Patriarchal Arab Household: The Reluctant Abolition of Slavery in Zanzibar, 1890s–1900s

This article explores the reluctant manumission of concubines in the British protectorate of Zanzibar. Informed by the sultan and the Arab oligarchy, the British regarded concubinage as a most common practice and concubines as central figures in the Arab household. Considering concubines who gave birth to children by their owners as wives, they surmised that the patriarchal Muslim family would disintegrate if concubines left their owners and children. The legal status of slavery was abolished in 1897, yet the colonial government postponed the inclusion of concubines in the abolition decree until 1909 because of concerns about social stability and the ambiguous legal status of freed concubines and their children.     

‘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.     

‘The Slavery of East and West’: Abolitionists and ‘Unfree’ Labour in India, 1820–1833

This article explores abolitionist treatments of East Indian slavery in the 1820s. It argues that rather than resulting from a lack of information or a conception of the qualitative difference between East and West Indian slavery, ambivalent and muted abolitionist responses to this issue prior to 1833 were conditioned by the wider imperatives of the anti-slavery campaign. Abstentionist substitution of ‘free-grown’ East India sugar for morally tainted West Indian produce, together with wider economic arguments about the equalisation of the sugar duties and the potential of India to provide a free labour alternative to the West Indian slave system, marked points of intersection between abolitionist and East India economic interests that relied on the assumption that labour in India, however cheap, was fundamentally ‘free’. As a result, rather than engaging with the various forms of slavery in India, abolitionists focused on discursively distancing them both from sugar production and from their campaign. This response suggests that abolitionist ideology was intersected by pragmatic political, economic, and discursive imperatives that precluded the universal application of humanitarian anti-slavery ideals.     

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.     

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.     

Frank Travels: Space,Power and Slave Mobility in the British Leeward Islands,c. 1700–1730

By tracing the regional and trans-Atlantic travels of an enslaved man named Frank, this article examines the relationship between slave mobility, space and power in the British Leeward Islands from 1700 to 1730. Comprising Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, Saint Kitts and several of the Virgin Islands, the British Leewards rest in close proximity to each other. In turn, plantation slaves like Frank lived in a world where acculturation to slavery involved adapting to an archipelagic context. Relying on private letters sent between Frank's plantation manager and his absentee owner, colonial legislation and government correspondence, this article argues that the geography of the Leeward archipelago shaped master–slave relations in the region and, in turn, influenced the ways slaves used their knowledge of the environment as a source of power and even liberation.