Contesting ‘Black’ Liberty and Subjecthood in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1730s–1780s

Abstract

Tracing the shifting meanings of British liberty and subjecthood in relation to persons of African descent in the West Indian colonies – from tentative acceptance and ambivalence in the early eighteenth century, to outright hostility after 1760 – this article argues that planter elites ultimately embraced a rigid, outmoded racial ideology in order to preserve white hegemony. In Jamaica in particular, the master class came to see free ‘black’ participation in civil society as a threat to their own birthright and privileged status as transplanted Britons. Yet non-white West Indians also made use of the English system of law and liberty in their efforts to affirm their identity as British subjects and to be considered as such by metropolitan Britons.