Networks,Communication and the Irish Protestant Diaspora in Northern England,c.1860–1914

This study seeks to explore transnational communication among migrants of the Irish diaspora through an examination of the Orange Order's networks. It draws upon rare local and district records and press accounts to explain the migratory links and social worlds of Orange emigrants from Ulster. The substance of the study echoes the findings of Canadian historians who have much richer records than exist in the public domain in Britain. It demonstrates how Orangemen in Ireland came to recognise the diasporic dimension of their movement, and how members used the Order to negotiate some of the pathways of migration that were an important feature of their lives, and in the lives of the working class more generally. The essay generally seeks to demonstrate that the Orange Order acted as a network of friendship, camaraderie and support for emigrants and immigrants in the British World in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

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.     

Child Slaves in Pre-colonial Nigeria,c.1725–1860

During the eighteenth century, the number of child slaves leaving the ‘Nigerian’ region for the Americas increased and almost doubled after 1820. While the increase reflected shifts in the operations of the Atlantic trade, it also revealed the significance of slavery in pre-colonial Nigerian societies, which historically retained more child slaves than were sold abroad, even when the productivity of some children was uncertain. With a focus on the internal (intra-Nigeria) slave trade, this article examines the attraction of child slaves, their modes of enslavement, treatment and status, and the impact of slavery on children.     

Colonial collaborators: Britain and the Catholic Church in Trinidad,c. 1820–1840

Trinidad, a predominantly Catholic and Francophone island, became a British colony in 1802. The lynchpin of the Catholic Church’s authority and influence in the region, Trinidad’s religious culture was defined by powerful racial tensions. Francis de Ridder, a Roman Catholic priest, was born in 1800 to a slave mother and a Belgian-born planter father. As a priest and free person of colour in Trinidad between 1825 and the early 1830s, his experience reveals much about the complex, yet collaborative relationship that existed between the Catholic Church and Britain’s colonial office. This relationship, which expanded significantly between 1820 and the early 1840s, was informed by demographic change and the reorganization of ecclesiastical structures. The de Ridder case is used here as a springboard for exploring some of the ways that slaves and free people of colour were excluded from religious practice and Church authority structures. In working closely with colonial officials on the ground in Trinidad, these Catholic leaders, who were often bishops or their coadjutors, embedded the Church within the governing structures of elite white society. What emerges is a picture of a Church whose missionary leadership actively pushed non-whites to the periphery of the story of its global spread.     

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.     

African Political Thinkers,Pan-Africanism and the Politics of Exile,c.1850–1970

This essay aims not only to detail the early history of African refugees in Britain but also to look at the political culture, ideas, writings, activities and organisations which African refugees and exiles from Africa and the diaspora developed while they were in Britain, and how this culture influenced wider political culture. It argues that further study of the histories of African migrants in Britain is required not just in order to provide an historical context to more recent concerns with transnational activities and diasporas but because to ignore the existence, struggles and political culture of those of African origin impoverishes and distorts our understanding of British political culture and Britain's historical past.     

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.     

Prisons,workhouses, and the control of slave labour in low country Georgia, 1763–1815

Engendering History. Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Edited by VERENE SHEPHERD, BRIDGET BRERETON, BARBARA BAILEY. London: James Currey, Kingston: Ian Randle. 1995. xxii, 406pp. £35.00 and £12.50.

Haiti, History and the Gods. JOAN DAYAN. Los Angeles; University of California Press. 1995. xxiii, 339pp. $35.00. ISBN 0–520–08900–6.

From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas. Edited by MARY TURNER. Kingston, Bloomington and Indianapolis, and London: Ian Randle Publishers, Indiana University Press, and James Currey. 1995. x, 309pp. £35.00 (cloth); £12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–253–32972–8; 0–253–21001–1.

The Black Loyalist Directory. African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution. Edited and with an Introduction by GRAHAM RUSSELL HODGES. New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1996. li. 318pp. $37.00. ISBN 0–8153–2172–4.

The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861. STANLEY HARROLD. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press ofKentucky, 1995. x, 245 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0–8131–1906–5.

The Salmon P. Chase Papers. Volume 2: Correspondence, 1823–1857. Edited by JOHN NIVEN. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994. xxv, 489 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0–87338–508‐X.

The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War. JAMES G. HOLLANDSWORTH, Jr. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1995. xiv, 140pp. £23.95. ISBN 0–8071–1939–3.

The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman's Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns. JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 (orig. pub. 1985). xvi, 318pp. £13.95. ISBN 0–80712028–6.

Caste &; Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880–1920. FON LOUISE GORDON. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995. xvi, 179pp. £31.50. ISBN 0–8203–1711‐X.

African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina. AMELIA WALLACE VERNON. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1995. xiii, 309pp. $16.95.

Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, 1821–1854. CARLOS AGU1RRE. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cató1ica del Perú, Fondo Editorial. 1993. 335pp. ISBN 84–89309–63–9.

Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800–1854. CHRISTINE HÜNEFELDT. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994. xi, 269pp. ISBN 0–520–08235–4 (cloth); 0–520–08292–3 (paper).

Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel. 1600–1850. JAMES L.A. WEBB, Jr. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xxvi, 227pp. £40.95 (cloth); £17.95 (paper). ISBN 0–299–14330–9.

From Slave Trade to ‘legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth‐Century West Africa. Edited by ROBIN LAW. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, African Studies Series 86. xi, 278pp. £35.00.

Slavery and Slaving in World History. A Bibliography. 1900–1991. JOSEPH C. MILLER. Millwood, NY. 1993. xvii, 556pp. $90.00. ISBN 0–527–63660–6.     

Peter Mandler and David Cesarani (eds.): Great Philanthropists: Wealth and Charity in the Modern World, 1815–1945

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

‘Upholding the Banner of Islam’: British Converts to Islam and the Liverpool Muslim Institute,c.1887–1908

Much has been written in recent years about the life of William Henry Abdullah Quilliam, late-Victorian propagator of Islam in Britain and founder of the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI). However, little attention has been given to Quilliam's fellow British Muslim converts, who constituted Britain's first indigenous Muslim community. This article briefly looks at the LMI as a missionary organisation. It then quantifies and examines the socio-demographics and post-conversion lives of the British Muslim community. It argues that individual commitment to both the LMI and Islam was affected by discrimination and misunderstanding of Muslims and their faith in society. However, by considering the fate of the Muslims following the LMI's demise, it is shown that a core of resolute converts held fast to their beliefs and played an important role in the consolidation of Islam in early twentieth-century Britain.     

‘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.     

‘What the country wanted’: The houses of parliament,the press and the origins of media management in Britain,c. 1780–1900

This paper considers a topic that has received scant attention in the historiography of public relations: official attempts to manage the press in Britain in the Houses of Parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Existing accounts of the emergence of government public relations in the UK have tended to focus on the civil service in the first half of the twentieth century, but this article sheds light on a series of earlier developments, including the allocation of seats for reporters in the viewing gallery of the Commons in 1803, the construction of dedicated Reporters’ Galleries in both parliamentary chambers in 1847–52 and the creation of a Westminster Lobby in 1884. Taken together, these reforms improved journalists’ access to parliament in an era in which direct governmental control over newspapers lapsed. Yet, they also allowed politicians to influence media commentary by determining who was permitted access to parliament and what type of content made its way into print. A case can thus be made that Westminster, not Whitehall, played host to the earliest official attempts to manage the media in Britain, and this has important repercussions for current understandings of public relations history.