Capitalism after slavery?: The French slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic, 1500–1900

La traite des Noirs; Bastilles négrières et velléités abolitionnistes. SERGE DAGET. Editions Quest‐France Université, 1990. 300 pp. 132 Ffr 70.

Esclaves et Citoyens, les Noirs à la Guadeloupe au XIXe siècle dans le processus de résistance et d'intégration, 1802–1910. JOSETTE FALLOPE. Basse Terre: Société d'Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1992. 713 pp.     

A Whig view of slavery,development and the world market∗

This essay offers an interpretation of an influential theory of the relation between slavery, national development, and international economics developed by the American Whig leader, H.C. Carey, over a period of years, but most fully expressed in a single text published in 1856. Although Carey was widely read at the time, his mode of opposition to slavery was unorthodox, and his political situation put him under certain rhetorical burdens. Consequently his text requires a close reading to be be understood.     

Underwriting slavery: insurance and slavery in the Dutch Republic (1718–1778)

This article shows that slavery was more connected to Dutch society and economy than has been previously assumed. It does so by investigating the people involved in Dutch slavery insurance in the period 1718–1734, when the Dutch slave trade was monopolized by the state-chartered West India Company (WIC) and the period 1763–1778, when the private slave trade reached its peak and slavery insurance was more common. This article analyzes a variety of primary sources that have not been studied in this light before. The analysis shows that a large and varied group was involved and that slavery insurance was not a regional institution that only affected the Dutch colonies.     

Women,vigilance committees,and the rise of militant abolitionism, 1835–1859

This essay explores the activism and resistance of the women abolitionists and runaways associated with vigilance committees. Vigilance committees were urban antislavery organizations dedicated to helping slaves along the Underground Railroad. Women intervened decisively in all the activities of the committees. Hundreds of female fugitives revealed to committee members the specific ways slavery oppressed women. Women activists, fugitive, and free, did most of the work for the committees both aboveground and underground. In the process, these activists taught other abolitionists that the resistance and experiences of enslaved women were central to the abolitionist movement and to the early women’s movement.     

Beyond plantations: Indian and African slavery in the Illinois Country, 1720–1780

This article offers an analysis of Indigenous and African slavery in the Illinois Country during the eighteenth century. It shows that slavery did not operate as an institution and was not organized around plantation production, but that human bondage was a set of adaptable practices. Slavery took many forms, and masters had to adapt to that diversity and, in so doing, they forged a single, heterogeneous slave system. Frenchmen brought enslaved workers of African descent to the Illinois Country, and masters worked them on grain farms to sustain an export economy. In this way, Illinois’s economy shared much with the wider Atlantic World. Yet they had to revise their slaving practices in light of the reality that indigenous forms of bondage pre-dated their arrival. In Native North America, slavery operated as a kin-based system of captivity that could structure alliances and sustain local politics between diverse groups. Masters participated in this form of slavery, and incorporated Indigenous slaves into their economies. Rather than stressing the differences that existed between diverse forms of human bondage, this article moves beyond an institutional analysis of slavery to show how slavery’s many guises mutually defined each other across generations.     

Land of hope and dreams: slavery and abolition in the Dutch Leeward islands, 1825–1865

The asymmetry of laws concerning the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves in the Atlantic world in the early-to-mid nineteenth century led to a range of responses on the part of inhabitants of the Dutch Leeward islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin. These ranged from activism, adaptation, accommodation to, as this article highlights, maritime marronage on the part of the enslaved population of these islands. The Dutch Leeward islands have been understudied in the historiography of abolition and emancipation but, as this article will argue, they should be included into the larger story of how abolition was experienced on the local, regional, Atlantic, and international stages.     

Technology,slavery and the Falmouth Water Company of Jamaica, 1799–1805

Slave societies such as Jamaica were among the earliest regions to adopt new technologies, suggesting that slavery was not synonymous with economic backwardness. This article uses the efforts of the Falmouth Water Company to adopt the new hydraulic ram between 1799 and 1805 to show that this process was also not restricted to the plantation sector and that the island possessed an unexpected capacity for technological adaption. This was based on local skills in mechanical and civil engineering derived from the plantation sector, and a wider political and financial background that supported innovation when the right conditions were in place.     

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.     

Evolution,salvation and history in the rise of the ethnographic monograph in Southern Africa 1860–1920∗

The ethnographic monograph, despite its particularistic content, is a universalizing symbolic form that confirms the existence of human universals. It arose in the period 1860–1920 in response to intellectual and moral concerns of missionaries in Africa and intellectuals in European, universities. Temporal concepts of evolution, salvation and history, central to Victorian social and religious thought, all played a role in shaping the genre. It is argued that much more research in the history of anthropology in South Africa is necessary and likely to be enlightening.     

‘By her unnatural and despicable conduct’: motherhood and concubinage in the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press, 1830–1833

ABSTRACT

From the spring of 1830, the Kingston-based newspaper, Watchman and Jamaica Free Press, published a series of articles discussing the prevalence of interracial concubinage throughout the island of Jamaica. While many discussed concubines as the victims of white men’s lust, equally discussed was the role that mothers had in the continuation of this practice and the degradation of their children. Amid the movement for the abolition of slavery, respectable members of the free community of colour discussed concubines who engaged in interracial sex as unfit mothers and a hindrance to the social progress of the larger community of colour.     

Independence for those without freedom: slavery and manumission in Mérida,Venezuela, 1810–1854

This article examines slavery and manumission in the state of Mérida in western Venezuela from the wars of independence (1810–1821) until abolition in 1854. It argues that slavery was preserved during the insurgency and reinstituted after independence through the continuation of Iberian slave law and the implementation of republican manumission legislation, which served to prolong slavery rather than hasten its demise. Slaves also used the corporate legal rights of colonial law to seek manumission and protection from abuse after 1821. Iberian legislation, though, was reinterpreted within the ideological and institutional framework of the liberal nation-state. Thus, competing legal frameworks and political interests, the growing influence of liberal doctrine and the selective and often arbitrary application of property, slave and manumission laws constituted important aspects of struggles over slavery and manumission in the early republican era.