Imperiled and Perilous: Exploring the History of Childhood Sexuality

This article explores the dominant cultural constructions of the child and its sexuality that emerged over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the Anglophone west. Examining how the child and its sexuality were constructed within reform and institutional discourse, we illuminate the social and political implications of frameworks of protection. We argue that discourses of protection foreclose the possibility of the sexual agency of children. The regulation, management and protection of childhood sexuality in various cultural contexts are key themes in the articles featured in this special issue on the history of sexuality of childhood and youth.     

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.     

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.     

Sexuality Education

Summary

Sexuality education is described as an ecological phenomenon, reflecting a variety of dialectical tensions in the context of U.S. society. A brief overview of sexuality education highlights historical trends in the past century. After disclaiming the notion that history repeats itself, I outline seven tentative “lessons,” or guiding principles, for planning future sexuality education efforts.     

Slavery: Annual bibliographical supplement (1983) Part I

Author: ELTIS, DAVID; The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas; Reviewer: Stuart Schwartz; Author: GOMEZ, MICHAEL A.; Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South; Reviewer: Philip Morgan; Author: WALVIN, JAMES; Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora; Reviewer: Howard Temperley; Author: NEWTON-KING, SUSAN; Masters and Slaves on the Cape Eastern Frontier; Reviewer: Clifton Crais; Author: ROSS, ROBERT; Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870; Reviewer: Clifton Crais; Author: MORRISON, MICHAEL A.; Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War; Reviewer: S-M. Grant; Editor: INSCOE, JOHN C.; Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation; Reviewer: Tim Lockley; HODGES, GRAHAM RUSSELL; Root &; Branch: African Americans in New York &; East Jersey, 1613-1863; Reviewer: Edward Countryman; Author: YOUNG, JEFFREY ROBERT; Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837; Reviewer: Ingeborg Dornan; Author: JEFFREY, JULIE ROY; The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement; Reviewer: Christopher L. Brown; Author: SMITH, JOHN DAVID; Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro; Douglas Ambrose; Author: KOUSSER, J. MORGAN; Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction; Reviewer: Stephen Tuck     

Ancient slavery and modern ideologies: Orlando Patterson and M. I. Finley among the dons

In 1978 and 1979, while a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, Orlando Patterson engaged in a number of conversations about slavery with Cambridge ancient historian M. I. Finley. Both men were at the time writing influential books on slavery that would mark important benchmarks in their careers and defined two approaches to the study of slavery, one fading in significance, the other introducing a comparative approach to the institution more focused on dynamics of power and social alienation. At the end of 1978, Finley delivered at the Collège de France four lectures that summarized his thinking on the topic over more than thirty years; two years later they appeared in print under the title Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. In 1982 Patterson published Slavery and Social Death, a ground-breaking study that to this day remains unparalleled in its attempt to establish a globally valid definition of slavery applicable to some sixty-six slave-owning societies across three millennia. This article explores the intersection of these two works, the intellectual currents of the times in which they were produced, and the influence each exerted on the study of slavery in subsequent decades, as models and paradigms of two approaches to understanding the significance of the institution.

     

Brazilian slavery: A survey from the cape of recent literature in English

This article surveys some of the rich historical writing on slavery in Brazil which has appeared in English over the past twenty years. This work has made important modifications to the notion that Brazilian slavery was part of a benign seigneurial society, markedly different from that of other New World colonies. By selecting five themes ‐ the transition from indigenous Indian to imported African slavery; slavery and rural production; slaves on the mines and in the towns; treatment of slaves; and the causes of emancipation ‐ the article draws attention to features of comparative interest to slavery elsewhere and particularly to that at the Cape.     

Early Anti-Slavery Sentiment in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1765–1817

This article examines the dynamics of slavery and anti-slavery in the Spanish Empire prior to the Independence of the Spanish American mainland. Rather than focusing on the Spanish Caribbean and the ‘late’ period of slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century, it explores slavery and abolition in the colonial period from an imperial perspective, using early abolitionist texts, records from the Spanish Cortes of 1810–1812, and various royal decrees pertaining to slavery. Although Spain did not abolish the slave trade until 1817, and only did so with intense outside pressure, the prevailing notion that there was no native anti-slavery movement in the Spanish Empire overlooks a more complex reality. Early anti-slavery movements were relatively quiet in the late Spanish Empire, yet outlining their contours helps to illuminate the pragmatic nature of Spanish imperial rule in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article also shows how the development of pro-slavery and anti-slavery ideologies highlights the transatlantic nature of intellectual and political projects in this period.     

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.     

‘Moral electricity’: Melvil-Bloncourt and the trans-Atlantic struggle for abolition and equal rights

Little known to historians, the Guadeloupean-born antislavery and equal rights activist Sainte-Suzanne Melvil-Bloncourt exemplified the complex trans-Atlantic networks forged for the abolitionist cause across the nineteenth century. As a contributing journalist for a Parisian political and literary publication, Melvil-Bloncourt produced numerous pieces on the history and politics of slavery and emancipation around the Atlantic world. The American Civil War especially galvanized Melvil-Bloncourt into more fervent antislavery action, prompting him not only to connect with activists based in New Orleans and the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but also to raise money in France for former American slaves. This project explores the depth of Melvil-Bloncourt’s emancipationist sensibilities and activism, guided by what he deemed ‘moral electricity,’ highlighting the influence of the otherwise overlooked Francophone world in the age of emancipation.     

‘A milder type of bondage’: Brazilian slavery and race relations in the eyes of American abolitionists, 1812–1888

This article examines how American abolitionists educated themselves about Brazilian slavery and race relations. Beginning with the Iberian–American Revolutions and ending with James Redpath’s 1867 influential exposé on Brazil, this article explores how American abolitionists viewed Brazil and how their understandings about Brazilian slavery and race relations changed over the course of the nineteenth century. These changes were not a progressive march by abolitionists toward a deeper and better understanding of Brazil but, instead, reflect how antislavery writers emphasized various aspects of Brazilian slavery and culture at different periods in order to further their own ideological and political agendas. At the same time, these agendas led abolitionists to pioneer some of the earliest methods for the comparative study of slavery on a global scale.     

Sailing through Suez from the South: The Emergence of an Indies‐Dutch Migration Circuit, 1815–19401

This paper shows the importance of colonial garrisons and colonial migratory circuits in the history of European migration. During the nineteenth century the overwhelming majority of European‐born migrants to the Dutch East Indies were military personnel. Rapidly decreasing mortality rates and a large influx of European military personnel in the decades of colonial wars were responsible for the remarkable growth of the European colonial population throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. As a consequence an extensive colonial‐metropole migration circuit emerged. Contrary to expectations, neither the opening of the Suez Canal nor imperialist expansion resulted in a significant increase of white civilian emigration to colonial Indonesia in the late nineteenth century. Instead, sailings through Suez went north as frequently as south. It was only at a much later stage, following the end of World War I, that the tobacco and rubber plantations as well as the oil industry of the Outer Regions of the Indies archipelago generated an unprecedented demand for expatriate labor.     

‘Never be free without trustin’ some person’: networking and buying freedom in the nineteenth-century United States

The strengthening economy of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States further solidified the commodification of the enslaved and their labor. In response to these forces some African-Americans looked to use slavery’s market to buy their freedom. Self-purchase was a crucial path to freedom for African-Americans throughout the nineteenth century. This article examines how African-Americans created economic opportunities, formed networks, and accumulated both social and economic capital as they worked to buy freedom.     

Policing native pleasures: a colonial history

The moral modality of colonial power is still with us when it comes to the recreation of sexual norms of traditional or feudal society. We can examine the emergent properties of colonial knowledge anew by exploring how the colonial regime's strategic attention of regulating brothels in India differed from the analytic of power Foucault described for sexuality in European society. It turns out that amongst other things, public anxieties about the failure of adaptation by South Asians are incapable of leaving sexuality aside as a key interpretive device for their culture. The British preoccupation with reproducing the dynamics of the bourgeois matrimonial market on foreign soil in the mid‐nineteenth century similarly necessitated a sociological pretext for racial purity. However, the kind of knowledge a typical traveller and employee of the East India Company brought to the Victorian public from his own researches in the brothels and streets of colonial India, which revealed how popular prostitution was as a vice amongst the officer class, was also more than a welcome imaginary relief from Christian morality; it was an alternative vision of modernity.     

Gendering mastery: female slaveholders in the Colombian Pacific lowlands*

This article examines the lives and power exercised by female slaveholders in the frontier lowlands of the Pacific coast of Colombia during the first half of the nineteenth century. Utilizing records from the Independence era to the abolition of slavery in 1852, it explores the varied economic activities, wealth management strategies, and administrative methodologies of lowlands mistresses in order to demonstrate their centrality in the preservation of slavery in Colombia’s Pacific frontier. The article argues that the possession of enslaved people was a powerful if contentious avenue for women to assert rights during a period of political instability and transition.     

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.     

From slave revolts to social death

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson’s contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson’s previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery.

     

‘Everyone Knows that Laws Bring the Greatest Benefits to Mankind’: The Global and Local Origins of Anti-Slavery in Abyssinia, 1880–1942

Literature on the development of the Slavery Convention of 1926 often gives Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as the test case and primary target of the international convention against slavery. For the most part, the Abyssinian side in the legal debates is obscured and a strong narrative of helplessness in the face of European pressure to abolish the legal status of slavery emerges. This paper seeks to re-centre the history of specifically Abyssinian legal knowledge about slavery and argue that Abyssinian anti-slavery policy developed in interaction not only with European-led international law but also with a non-Western discourse of modernisation drawn from the example of Japan. In addition, the paper argues that anti-slavery legislation was an integral part of the imperial modernising project.