ANTI-SLAVERY COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE BLACK ATLANTIC

Abstract

Black maritime labor was essentialto the capitalist world economy as European nations began to reconsolidate their Atlantic empires in the wake of the Haitian Revolution (1804) and Emancipation in the British West Indies (1838). British merchant vessels plying the waters of these lucrative Atlantic economies were often crewed by those colonial subjects whom they once held as commodities. Atlantic scholarship – most notably Paul Gilroy'sBlack Atlantic– has looked to the chronotope of the seafaring ship in its efforts to chart the cosmopolitan contours of the nineteenth century. For Gilroy, the ship gives figurative expression to a cultural and political remapping of modern racial formations that transcends the “boundaries and integrity of modern nation states” (4). Ships call to mind both the Middle Passage and the mercantile routes that joined the Americas with Europe, Africa, and the plantation zones of the Caribbean. For Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, black maritime circulation thus constituted one aspect of the “many-headed hydra” that unsettled the political sovereignty of European nation-states in the Atlantic world (31).