Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference by Jenny Shaw

Reviewed by: Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies by Anna Suranyi Nicole K. Dressler Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies. By Anna Suranyi. States, People, and the History of Social Change. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. 292 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The role of indentured servitude was central to critical debates concerning state building, capitalist development, and the nature of unfreedom in the British Atlantic world. In the 1940s, Abbott Emerson Smith and Richard B. Morris conducted key studies on white colonial servitude with special attention to servants' legal and socioeconomic conditions.1 Especially since the 1980s, historians have made great strides in advancing understandings of indentured servants, convict servants, and redemptioners, revealing important demographic and economic data and uncovering illuminating accounts of servants' lived realities. Scholars have also examined the transition from indentured servitude to the brutal, perpetual, and racialized practice of African chattel slavery that burgeoned in the eighteenth century.2 Though African slavery was unequivocally unlike other forms of bound labor because of the chattel principle, recent historians have increasingly studied servitude on a continuum of unfreedom, illuminating the complexity of labor, race, and coercion in the British Atlantic.3 Anna Suranyi's Indentured Servitude builds on this scholarship by encouraging readers to understand servitude as a critical element in the conceptualization of citizenship in the early British Atlantic world. Above all, Suranyi seeks to show the widening distinctions in legal categories of servitude and slavery by addressing how indentured servants influenced notions of participatory membership in the body politic over the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though historians have long debated the periodization and transition from servitude to slavery, Suranyi challenges the long-held contention that Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676 was the major impetus encouraging [End Page 350] colonists to distance categories of servitude from slavery.4 Instead, she argues that "from the beginning of the seventeenth century, colonial governments as well as settler communities strove to delineate servants and enslaved people, not only to define divergent forms of labour bondage but also to define different categories of people" (9). Though early English subjects did not understand their roles as "participatory citizens" the way they would come to in the mid-eighteenth century, she shows how in the seventeenth century they viewed "themselves as rights-bearing individuals" (14). This status entailed maintaining certain social responsibilities and entitlement to some privileges, such as voting and jury participation. The clarification of servants' legal rights—which, for example, allowed them to request courts to hear their complaints and seek redress for legal wrongs—vitally informed developing ideas of citizenship in the British Empire. Suranyi begins by outlining how people became servants—sometimes voluntarily, other times not. As David W. Galenson, Hilary McD. Beckles, and others have noted, economic interests were a key motive in expanding unfree labor.5 Many of the poor servants who went to the Americas often signed fixed-term contracts. England's royalist and parliamentary governments alike viewed banishment and such tenures of servitude as a means to remove the poor, criminals, rebels, and others deemed undesirable from local communities, at one stroke reducing the costs of imprisonment and populating the colonies. With the Transportation Act of 1718, moreover, English authorities widened and institutionalized the punishment of transportation, sentencing certain criminals to seven or fourteen years of banishment. Shippers and merchants sold many in this position as convict servants in the American colonies. Government-sponsored contractors, as well as those who transported people as servants illegally—"spirits" (xi), as these career kidnappers were called—found that shipping these unfree laborers was quite profitable. The increasing practice of forced indentures ushered in [End Page 351] critical debates on labor and coercion while unsettling comparisons of temporary servitude with African chattel slavery. Concurrently, this discourse prompted broader and crucial discussions on the meaning of rights for freeborn Britons. Using an array of court records, legal documents, fictionalized narratives, and servant accounts, Suranyi details the difficult, sometimes brutal, living circumstances servants faced in the colonies. Many found inadequate provisions, encountered neglect, and suffered vicious beatings. The majority landed in the Chesapeake, Barbados...

The African Atlantic: West African Literatures and Slavery Studies Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi BOOKS REVIEWED Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism ByMatthew J. Christensen Albany: State U of New York P, 2012. xiv + 188 pp. 9781438439709 paper. Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature By Laura T. Murphy Athens: Ohio UP, 2012. ix + 243 pp. 9780821419953 paper. SLAVERY STUDIES, COLONIALISM, AND AFRICAN LITERATURES Within African literary and cultural studies, work on the representations of domestic West African slavery or the historical slave trades across the Atlantic and the Sahara has been sparse. Laura Murphy and Matthew [End Page 149] Christensen address this paucity in two books with strikingly different perspectives and outcomes. Whereas Murphy focuses on metaphorization and veiled communications in representations of slavery, Christensen emphasizes direct contestations of slavery’s meanings and overt appropriations of symbolic narratives and icons that critique enslavement and its legacies of political and cultural dispossession. In his explicitly transnational study, Christensen examines the memorializations of the 1839 Amistad slave revolt in the United States and Sierra Leone as a site of contestation over the meanings of emancipation and political independence. Murphy studies representations of the slave trade in Ghanaian and Nigerian literatures. Both scholars examine texts and events from about the third decade of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. In reading these contributions together, I frame my observations within an appraisal of the disjunctures among a globalizing slavery studies, African literary scholarship, studies of slavery narratives in the North Atlantic world, and the much researched study of slavery in the Americas. This wide gesture is necessary because as much as these books can be read as studies in African and African American literatures, they beckon toward larger cross-disciplinary conversations about the histories and representations of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Hitherto, most of the work on slavery in Africa has been produced outside literary scholarship. Such work, produced by historians, anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and archeologists on the historical and contemporary practices of capture, enslavement, and bondage constitutes the cross-disciplinary field of slavery studies. Although much of the work in the field through the last three decades of the twentieth century was historical, the rise of contemporary slavery studies, the attention to human trafficking, and the increasing recognition of globalized labor exploitation have transformed historical slavery studies into contemporary global slavery studies. Increasingly, the slave trade is recognized as a globalizing force with multiple historical locations and participants. New and forthcoming journals and book series—such as the Journal of Global Slavery or Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery—continue to transform the field. It is thus imperative for scholars to historicize their studies of any form of slavery and slave trade within a larger landscape and temporality of co-extensive practices of enslavement and freedom. The transformations I list above influence my reading of Murphy and Christensen. While a simple Google search will reveal countless conferences and publications on the histories and forms of slavery and bondage in Africa, it will produce far fewer search results on the representations of slavery in African literatures. This disjuncture is historical. Slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and abolition are acknowledged as catastrophic and traumatic events in Caribbean and American literatures. Hence, scholars studying representations of slavery in the Americas find a ready body of codified literatures overtly addressing its traumatic legacies. There is also a great interaction between scholars of Caribbean and American literatures of slavery and scholars of slavery studies in the Americas. Colonial conquest reconfigured Africa’s internal relationship to domestic slavery and the internal slave trades such that scholars of slavery in African literatures must take into account how colonialism impacted how slavery is remembered and represented. That is to say that all accounts of slavery and slave trade must be provincialized, i.e., taken out of any singularizing (North Atlantic or putatively global) narrative [End Page 150] and rescaled within a local nexus of meanings and historical mechanisms.1 For West African literatures, such provincializing gestures must take account of colonialism and its successor or related projects such as anticolonialism, independence, arrested decolonization...

Reviewed by: Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett Scott Heerman (bio) Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade. By Sharla M. Fett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 312. Cloth, $35.00.) Sharla Fett's splendid book on illegally enslaved Africans is at once readable and accessible, while making several key contributions to scholarship on slavery, the slave trade, and emancipation in the nineteenth century. The book will interest a wide cast of scholars and would be appropriate for advanced undergraduate students. Before a few years ago there was relatively little scholarship on the slave trade after its abolition took effect in 1808, and historians have actively been working to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Fett is one of them, and her most recent book helps fill a crucial one. The book offers a tight chronology, mostly between 1857 and 1861, and traces the experiences of roughly eighteen hundred captive African slaves on four vessels: the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota. All four vessels embarked from Africa and were intercepted on the high seas, whereupon the human cargo was detained in various U.S. ports and the [End Page 650] would-be slaves were returned to apprenticeship, and eventually freedom, in Liberia. While Fett's narrative and argument are confined to a handful of ships over a few short years, the book is anything but narrow. Fett uses this history to offer different ways to conceptualize slavery and freedom in the wider Atlantic world. First among these is her framework for understanding the captives' harrowing journey. During the nineteenth century, African shipmates like those on the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota were typically called "liberated Africans," or emancipados, to mark their movement from slavery to freedom. Yet Fett's story confounds this simple binary and offers a careful history of enslaved people's experiences after their capture, detention, and repatriation. Fett prefers the term "recaptured Africans," which emphasizes "the constraints of death and suffering, containment and racialization, that African shipmates endured" (4). With this conceptual innovation, Fett analyzes the liminal zone that recaptured Africans occupied, and brings a deep knowledge of slavery in West Africa to bear on the history of emancipation in the Americas. The result is an erudite transnational history of the complexities of human bondage and emancipation. A second key conceptual contribution is the way in which Fett's study of the slave trade informs the history of U.S. slavery. Often, historians separate the Atlantic trade in African captives from the history of plantation production in the U.S. South. Yet Fett convincingly shows that slave smuggling "exerted a significant impact on nineteenth-century U.S. public debates and popular culture" (6). She situates the politics of slavery globally, highlighting that the 1850s was a period when slavery retreated in newly independent Latin American nations and in the British and French Caribbean, while also seeing an unprecedented reinvention that birthed new plantation complexes in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. The simultaneous abolition and expansion of slavery shaped debates over race and racial hierarchy, which in turn propelled the rise of scientific racism and theories of polygenesis to justify the institution of slavery. By examining the experiences of these recaptive Africans, Fett unearths new dimensions of this history. She does the bulk of that work in chapters 2 and 3. First she looks at the slave trade tourism at Fort Sumter, which brought paying tourists into close contact with the recaptives. Next, in chapter 3, she offers a careful reading of print culture. Looking in particular at Harper's Weekly, De Bow's Review, and other prominent publications of the time, she shows how recaptives' experiences in detention provided fodder for proslavery ideologies. In this way it becomes evident that the politics of race and slavery went beyond the halls of Congress and the statements of lawmakers, into popular print and culture. [End Page 651] After opening chapters that set out the contours of the illegal slave trade after 1808, the second half of the book focuses on...

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

This special edition on children in western systems of slavery1 follows last year's special edition of Slavery & Abolition on women in western systems of slavery in moving beyond the conventional t...

Reviewed by: A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Douglas R. Egerton (bio) A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. By Kay Wright Lewis. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. 281. $64.95 cloth; $28.95 paper; $27.50 ebook) Even before the arrival of large numbers of enslaved Africans into the British mainland colonies, English colonists were experienced in the tactics of exterminatory warfare. In battles against Irish Catholics and Indigenous Americans, settlers learned how to eradicate some enemies while enslaving others. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Kay Wright Lewis argues in this provocative study, Americans mastered the rhetoric of race war, and a good many of both races, she convincingly demonstrates, regarded it as a serious threat. Even after emancipation, African American fears of racial extermination continued, reemerging in the writings and speeches of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. Southern whites and Caribbean masters learned that racially based conflicts often cut in both directions. As French refugees fled the revolt in Saint Domingue and settled in Charleston, they carried with them stories of the formidable capacity of Black soldiers. Those fears [End Page 341] nearly became reality in South Carolina in 1822 when former bondman Denmark Vesey orchestrated a plot to liberate the enslaved through bloodshed before sailing for Haiti. When questioned by one of his lieutenants over the necessity of wholesale slaughter, Lewis observes, Vesey replied by remarking that "nits make lice," a term earlier used by white settlers regarding southern Indians. These mainland revolts were initially isolated and quickly failed, the author notes, but thanks to the internal slave trade, stories of Vesey and Nat Turner traveled across the South and were passed from one generation to the next, keeping alive ideas of a war to the death. On occasion, Lewis's determination to fit all of her data into her larger theory appears forced. When discussing the late antebellum efforts of lower South fire-eaters to reopen the Atlantic slave trade, the author suggests that the debates—which in fact divided Carolina planters from their Virginia brethren, who wished to sell their surplus laborers to the fresh lands of the frontier South—"set the stage for future ideas about Black labor and Black disposability" (p. 141). Although it was true enough that white southerners united in claiming that abolition would result in a race war and the extermination of freedmen, advocates of the traffic in Africans insisted that it would reduce the price of enslaved labor enough for middle-class farmers to buy and carry bondmen into the western territories. Far from thinking in terms of "disposability," writers such as Louisianan James De Bow argued that modern steamships could quickly ferry captured Africans to the South with little loss of life. De Bow's editorials embraced the language of paternalism and insisted that Africans were better off enslaved by Christian masters than left on their own in the old world, a ghastly argument shared by a good many white Americans regardless of section. Lewis returns to form in her final chapters, however, as the Civil War years witnessed a rebirth of the language of extermination. Northern Democrats, who worried that Black military service would lead to demands for citizenship and voting rights, warned their Black neighbors that Confederates planned to chop captured African [End Page 342] American soldiers into "mincemeat, or [be] quartered and pickled" (p. 179). Conservative Democrats had their agenda, of course, but they were right enough in thinking that Jefferson Davis and his Congress threatened to enslave or execute Black prisoners of war. Even without orders from Richmond, Confederates at Fort Pillow in Tennessee and Marks Mills in Arkansas slaughtered both Black combatants and civilians. Lewis's prose is clear and strong and only rarely lapses into jargon. Although most of her sources are published rather than archival, her dense footnotes reveal both secondary literature and often obscure pamphlets and newspaper editorials. Wisely, Lewis lets these past voices speak for themselves through ample quotations, demonstrating the centrality of fears of mass extermination among both...

Reviewed by: Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation by Natasha Lightfoot Lawrence Celani Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation. By natasha lightfoot. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 336pp. $94.95 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). Antigua has always held a unique place in the history of the Caribbean and in the history of Atlantic slavery more generally. In few places in the Leeward Islands or in the greater Caribbean, was slavery so dominant and pervasive. Antigua was also the only British colony in the Caribbean to move directly from slavery to freedom, when Antigua’s legislature emancipated the island’s slaves in 1834. Natasha Lightfoot’s book Troubling Freedom details the history of Antigua and its unique position within the British Empire, both before and after emancipation. As historians of slavery undoubtedly know, emancipation created a whole new set of issues with which the British Parliament was unprepared and ill-equipped to deal. While emancipation [End Page 298] guaranteed the bodily freedom of the enslaved people of Antigua, emancipated blacks became even more embedded in the colonial regime, and now were accountable to a state that disenfranchised them, both politically and customarily. In Antigua, both blacks and whites struggled to understand freedom on their own terms, and both engaged in a political struggle to assert their specific definition of the term. With emancipation, blacks were legally free but were still forced to engage in actions to secure their material and financial well-being. Lightfoot centers her study around the quotidian actions of enslaved and formerly enslaved blacks, whom she terms freedpeople, from actions to secure better labor and working conditions, to negotiating with their masters for the freedom to attend and participate in the island’s Sunday market, to attempts by the Moravian church to regulate the cultural and sexual lives of the black community, and freedpeople’s reactions against that. Long before formal black political and economic institutions were formed, “everyday life in postslavery Antigua was the laboratory for black working people’s politics” (p. 4). Lightfoot presents an unromanticized portrait of Antigua and of the island’s black population. A real strength of the book is her depiction of the many uncomfortable aspects that historians often overlook when portraying slave or free black communities because of the uneasiness it engenders in those who study it. Lightfoot humanizes everyday enslaved and freedpeople by portraying them as human beings who were forced to find meaning within a colonial system not of their making and the often contradictory and violent ways they went about to secure their own liberty. The black community in Antigua, both in slavery and in freedom, was neither unified nor idyllic, and Lightfoot is right to portray them as people sometimes working against the interests of other members of their community in their efforts to expand freedom’s meaning. Lightfoot, associate professor of history at Columbia University, builds on the work of a multitude of other scholars who have contributed to the historiography of abolition and newly freedpeople’s experiences in navigating that system. Historians of the Caribbean such as Rebecca Scott and Thomas Holt, to works by Steven Hahn and Eric Foner on Reconstruction in the United States provide a crucial framework for her study.1 While labor and politics is one focus of this [End Page 299] work, Lightfoot is more concerned with the everyday struggles of freedpeople, and joins a recent trend of scholars, like Melanie Newton, Roseanne Adderley, among others, who emphasize the daily struggle of freedpeople who worked to extend the narrow and incomplete freedom granted to them by the British Government.2 Her first chapter serves the purpose of orienting the reader into the social, cultural, and legal context of Antigua and its sister island of Barbuda in the period directly preceding emancipation. Much of the difficulties that followed emancipation can be traced to the limits of the island’s scarce land resources and geography. Slaves formed what she terms a “rival geography and alternative social milieu” (p. 55), where slaves expanded the spatial limits of their freedom, which helped to differentiate the island from others in the British Caribbean. The 1831 Sunday Market Rebellion is...

Reviewed by: Esteban: The African Slave Who Explored America by Dennis Herrick Andrew Husa Esteban: The African Slave Who Explored America. Dennis Herrick. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. Pp. 304, black & white maps, illustrations. $39.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8263-5981-0. Esteban: The African Slave Who Explored America is a fascinating biography of one of history's most extraordinary and underappreciated explorers. Author Dennis Herrick goes to great lengths to accurately portray Esteban, who is practically nonexistent in American history [End Page 246] literature despite being the first person from the Old World to travel across the North American continent and the first to enter the modernday American Southwest in the sixteenth century. Due to his status as a Spanish slave, Esteban's feats have largely been downplayed or even completely ignored by historians and writers. Herrick writes Esteban back into the historical record, righting Esteban's reputation and helping secure his rightful place in American history. The book begins by introducing the myths and mysteries that surround Esteban while offering the audience the most likely truths. This includes an unprecedented detailed account of Esteban's life, including his early years in Morocco before becoming enslaved by the Spanish and his trip across the Atlantic Ocean with his owner, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, to the island of Hispaniola in 1527. Before Esteban arrives at Hispaniola, Herrick provides context by explaining the conquest mentality of the Spanish as their reasoning for invading the islands and surrounding lands of the Caribbean Sea in the sixteenth century. This context proves to be an excellent introduction to the planning and undertaking of the infamous Narváez expedition, and how Esteban found himself on a boat headed for Florida. While it is well known that Esteban and the rest of the Spanish were headed toward disaster in Florida, Herrick gives readers plenty of insight into why the expedition was doomed to fail from the beginning. After wandering around Florida's Gulf Coast for several miles and weeks, starving for gold and for food, the feeble Spanish were no match for the tribes of native Florida. Herrick provides an exciting tale of escape that keeps the reader turning the pages as Esteban, his owner, and two other Spaniards flee into the Gulf in a small boat, stranding themselves at sea for weeks before finally making landfall near present-day Galveston, Texas. Esteban's story continues with the natives of southern Texas and northern Mexico enslaving the group of four. This is a fascinating chapter describing how the three Spaniards suffered mightily while enslaved, while Esteban coped much better, having already experienced life as a slave. This experience, along with his ability to form strong relationships with their native captors, raised Esteban's rank to the leader of the group of four. Esteban's elevated status followed the group after they escaped their enslavement and made their way to the Spanish-controlled city of Tenochtitlan, where present-day Mexico City is located. [End Page 247] On reaching Tenochtitlan, Herrick does a brilliant job of capturing the fluidity of Esteban's status as he is once again reverted back to slavery. Fortunately, the reader sees Esteban get a second chance to experience freedom after being assigned to guide an expedition in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. This expedition would result in Esteban becoming the first person from the Old World to enter the presentday southwestern United States, entering what would become Arizona and New Mexico. The search for the Seven Cities of Gold is not as well documented as the earlier failed Narváez expedition and escape from Florida, but Herrick does an outstanding job of working with multiple sources to create a solid timeline and entertaining narrative. While many historians and writers have concluded that Esteban's life came to an end during this expedition, Herrick offers a detailed explanation of the alternate possibility that Esteban may have staged his death to gain his freedom from the Spanish. Both possibilities are explored in great detail in the book's later chapters, leading into a fascinating discussion on how myth has often become fact concerning Esteban's life. Herrick argues...

Reviewed by: Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling by Benjamin N. Lawrance Craig Hollander (bio) Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. By Benjamin N. Lawrance. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. 376. Cloth, $85.00.) Many scholars are already familiar with the saga of the Africans from La Amistad. But don’t let such familiarity with the episode keep you from reading Benjamin N. Lawrance’s new book, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. Focusing on African child slaves, the book provides a fresh perspective on both the Amistad affair and the illegal African slave trade to Cuba during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With good reason, Lawrance takes issue with those who characterize the period as an “age of abolition.” On the contrary, he argues that it constituted “the beginning of an age of child enslavement” (7). In 1997, the superstar director Steven Spielberg released the film Amistad, which portrayed the ordeal of 53 African slaves who staged a successful insurrection onboard a Cuban slave ship called La Amistad in 1839. Although the Africans sought to sail the ship to Africa, they wound up near Long Island. They were detained in Connecticut and then subjected to a drawn-out legal battle for their liberty. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Africans, enabling 35 of them to journey back to Africa in 1842. Not surprisingly, Spielberg’s spotlight on the Amistad affair drew both popular and scholarly attention. David Brion Davis began his book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006) with a description of the famous revolt and the various legal issues surrounding it. And it was only a couple years ago that Marcus Rediker published The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, 2013). Lawrance recounts in Amistad’s Orphans the same narrative as previous works concerning the Amistad affair. And, at times, he tries to relitigate the case on behalf of the Africans (perhaps if only to demonstrate his exhaustive research into African dialects). For the most part, though, Lawrance’s book is only about the Amistad affair insofar as it produced sources about six children from Sierra Leone: Covey, Antonio, Ka’le, Te’me, Kag’ne, and Margru. Lawrance employs the extant information about these children—“Amistad’s orphans,” as he refers to them [End Page 846] collectively—to explore “the African child slave experience and [reevaluate] the centrality of child mobility to the massive illegal trafficking enterprise undergirding the nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic slave trade” (5). “With the requisite contextual information,” he assures, “the lives of Amistad’s orphans can, and do, speak to the broader experience of tens of thousands of others enslaved during the nineteenth century” (46). In Amistad’s Orphans, Lawrance asserts that the experience of African child slaves in the illegal slave trade has been “misunderstood” (5). He is being too generous. Few scholars have ever sought in earnest to understand whether African child slaves experienced the traffic differently than their adult counterparts. Yet children comprised a significant portion of the African slave trade (roughly one-fifth of the total number of captives). Moreover, the percentage of children in the traffic increased over time. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century—when the African slave trade to Cuba was purportedly illegal—children constituted more than a third of the total number of captives. Several scholars have suggested that this demographic shift must have resulted from a change on the supply (African) side. After all, wouldn’t most slave traders prefer to purchase adult males, rather than women and children? Not so, says Lawrance. “Slave children,” he contends, were “highly prized, specifically targeted, and exceptionally valuable investments” (29). The question, then, is why would traffickers want them? According to Lawrance, slave traders sought to purchase African children because they viewed child slaves as more “coercible” than adults— meaning that they were easier to enslave, more controllable, and less likely to rebel. It also stands to reason that such “coercibility” became more desirable during the illegal...

Inscribed on the outside walls of Quito's Cathedral is a list of the men who invaded, occupied, and ultimately renamed the Inka city of Quito for Saint Francis on August 28, 1534. Listed among these individuals are two blacks—Juan (de color negro), and Anton (negro).2 Juan and Anton represented the hundreds (and perhaps thousands by this date) of blacks, explorers, conquistadors, slaves, and squires who had come to the Americas during the age of conquest (1492-1550).3 Although the biographical records for Juan and Anton are sketchy, sources indicate that they were freemen. [End Page 81] Like many of their black counterparts throughout the Americas, Juan and Anton must have earned the prestige of founding a colonial city the hard way—shedding blood, sweat and tears in early conquest battles. Perhaps they fought at Cajamarca, or in that infamous battle against the Inka general Rumiñavi, which occurred just south of the city of Quito in Puruhá near Mount Chimborazo.4 In either case, Juan and Anton must have contributed significantly to the conquest effort of the north highlands because their Spanish counterparts bestowed upon them the title of fundador of the city of Quito.5 Yet, even as Spaniards envisioned a society where black men could gain notoriety and even serve as founders of colonial cities, they were also laying the foundation for what historian David Eltis calls the "slave-free paradox" (the simultaneous rise of modern notions of freedom and New World slavery) in early colonial Spanish America.6 Relying upon a body of literature that has highlighted the period between 1550 and 1640 followed by an emphasis upon the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, historian David Eltis has argued that the slave-free paradigm experienced a false start in mainland Spanish America, and that African slavery was on the wane by the late seventeenth century. Yet, the case of the Kingdom, or Audiencia of Quito suggests otherwise (see Map 1).7 Indeed, Quito was a quintessential Spanish American slave society. There, elites made foundational movements towards the "slave-free paradox" during the early years of the seventeenth century. As the century ended, Quito's elite turned evermore aggressively towards African slavery, not away from the institution.8 No Quito sub-district illustrates this more than the Gobernación of Popayán. Destined to remain a colonial outpost, isolated at Quito's northern frontier, gold and the enslaved Africans who mined it transformed the Gobernación of Popayán into a slave society par excellance. While this process [End Page 82] Click for larger view Map 1 Kingdom of Quito. Map drawn by Shannon Schmidt. spanned much of the seventeenth century, early decisions by elites to employ ethnic Africans in the hunt for gold positioned slavery as the bedrock of Popayán's economy. Not only did slavery and slave ownership signal status and wealth in Payanese society, slave labor quickly became the chief method for acquiring and maintaining wealth and elite status in early colonial Popayán. Although Popayán held marginal importance to the greater Quiteño economy for most of the sixteenth century, gold production surged during the last quarter of the century peaking in the early years of the seventeenth century. These events led to sizeable tax profits for the highland-based audiencia, increasing Popayán's importance in the kingdom's socioeconomic milieu. The increase in gold outputs helped to forge strong [End Page 83] commercial links between mine owners based in the Gobernación of Popayán and merchants in the city of Quito, even as the highland economy turned quickly to producing woolen textiles for the mining camps of Peru.9 By the end of the century, Popayán would be both the kingdom's largest producer of gold and the principal slave-trading center for the north Andes. Detailing colonial elites...

Reviewed by: Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. by William B. Kurtz Christian B. Keller (bio) Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. By William B. Kurtz. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. 236. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $35.00.) William Kurtz's new study of Catholics in the Civil War era and how the conflict contributed to the creation of a separate Catholic identity justifies the lavish praise found on the book's back cover. It is a solidly researched study, balancing a healthy amount of archival sources and printed primary sources, period newspapers, and the best (although by no means all) of the secondary sources available. Kurtz, like Susannah Ural before him with her well-known The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865 (2006), conducted a sizable amount of research overseas in Irish repositories, and he even managed to plumb the famous Auswandererbriefesammlung in Gotha, Germany, which was the source for Walter Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich's edited and translated letter collection, Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (2006). But Kurtz also demonstrates in his work a careful rereading [End Page 333] of tried-and-true domestic primary source materials, especially ethnic and religious newspapers like the Boston Pilot and the Catholic Herald of Philadelphia. In so doing, he continues the trend of strong research that is evident in recent titles published by Fordham's series on the North in the Civil War. The book, which is also well written with a crisp prose that drags only in a few sections, is divided into eight chapters, a useful introduction and conclusion, and appendices on the known Catholic newspapers, priests who served as chaplains in the Union army, and female Catholic organizations that contributed nurses to the Federal cause. Kurtz's major thesis is that antebellum anti-Catholic nativism, borne of Anglo-Americans' fears of Irish and German Catholic immigrants changing American culture, prompted most northern Catholics initially to support the Union war effort to prove their loyalty and defend their faith through patriotism. But as the war progressed, casualties among Catholic soldiers mounted, emancipation and the draft became contentious issues (especially among Irish Catholics), and prejudice against Catholic immigrant soldiers continued unabated. Thus, by the end of the war, northern Catholics overall had undergone an alienating experience that only reinforced their allegiance to their faith and, in some areas, retarded their assimilation process into greater American society. In the postwar decades, Irish Catholic veterans attempted to varnish their often unpleasant wartime service by celebrating a more optimistic memory of their experiences under arms, one that frequently fused with a greater celebration of Irish ethnic contributions to the war. Kurtz explains how and why Catholics enlisted in Irish and nonethnic regiments alike, priests and nuns volunteered as chaplains and nurses, bishops politically bolstered home-front fervor for the Union, and newspaper editors became barometers (or directors) of Catholic opinion on the northern war effort. His first chapter, on the Mexican War and nativism against Catholics, is a significant contribution to the literature in its own right and sets the stage nicely for the rest of the book. The second chapter examines Catholic motivations and responses during the secession winter and first year of the war, including the lively dissension that existed among antiwar editors and clergy and those supporting the Lincoln administration. There is not a great deal of new material here that has not already been covered elsewhere, but Kurtz's inclusion of German Catholics in his analysis is refreshing and novel. Throughout the book, in fact, he carefully includes German Catholic perspectives wherever possible, even if the evidence base is weak or was difficult to access (which is no fault of the author). The third chapter, on Catholic soldiers in the Union army, is highly satisfying on one level and frustrating on another. Kurtz offers a superb analysis [End Page 334] of how Irish Catholics in blue felt about major wartime issues, such as the advent of black soldiers and prejudice exhibited by Protestants, but falls short in evaluating their actual battlefield...

American Jewish History 91.2 (2003) 233-267 [Access article in PDF] Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York During World War II Stephen H. Norwood In October 1943 , the New York newspaper PM declared that bands of Irish Catholic youths, inspired by the Coughlinite Christian Front, had for over a year waged an "organized campaign of terrorism" against Jews in Boston's Dorchester district and in neighboring Roxbury and Mattapan. They had violently assaulted Jews in the streets and parks, often inflicting serious injuries with blackjacks and brass knuckles, and had desecrated synagogues and vandalized Jewish stores and homes. The New York Post stated that the "beatings of Jews" in Boston were "an almost daily occurrence." State Senator Maurice Goldman, representing 100 ,000 Jews, residing mostly in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, joined by four state representatives from those areas, declared to Governor Leverett Saltonstall that their constituents were living "in mortal fear." Many Jews could not leave their homes, even in daylight, frightened of being beaten by youths from adjacent Irish Catholic neighborhoods like South Boston, Fields Corner, and the Codman Square area, who deliberately entered Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan to go "Jew hunting." The New York Yiddish daily The Day called the antisemitic violence that had occurred in Dorchester during the previous year "a series of small pogroms."1 Neither Boston's police nor its Catholic clergy made any serious effort to discourage the antisemitic violence. Jewish victims of the attacks had repeatedly complained about them, "only to be insulted and beaten again by the police themselves." One Jewish leader in Dorchester stated that the Boston police, largely Irish American, not only took no action to prevent antisemitic violence, but "would just as soon encourage it." The Christian Front, during the middle of World War II, distributed inflammatory antisemitic literature throughout Boston, "without the slightest interference by the police." Frances Sweeney, a prominent Boston Irish Catholic anti-fascist, denounced both city and state authorities and [End Page 233] Boston's Catholic Church at all levels for their lack of concern about the antisemitic outbreaks: "The attacks on Jew[s] . . . are the complete responsibility of Governor Saltonstall, Mayor [Maurice] Tobin, the [Catholic] church, and the clergy-all of whom . . . ignored this tragedy."2 The PM articles, written by Arnold Beichman, drew on documents supplied by the American Jewish Congress (AJ Congress), the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Dorchester Record, as well as by Frances Sweeney. Dr. Samuel Margoshes, editor of The Day, declared that he had carefully reviewed the sworn affidavits of fifty Dorchester Jews—men, women, and children—who reported that they had been attacked on the streets. He had also spoken personally to several of the victims. Margoshes concluded that the affidavits, collected by the Boston AJ Congress, verified that PM was "one hundred per cent right."3 There were far more Jewish victims of beatings and vandalism than these affidavits revealed, but many feared retaliation if they made a public complaint. PM published sixteen of the signed affidavits from Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury over two days, a random sample which revealed that many Jewish children and adults had sustained serious injuries in the attacks.4 Arthur Derounian, one of the nation's leading authorities on hate groups, an Armenian American who wrote under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson, reported in the New York Post that he had visited Jewish victims in Boston and received their signed complaints of antisemitic assaults and property damage. He interviewed sixty-nine-year-old Samuel Rudofsky, bed-ridden after youths blackjacked him from behind, and [End Page 234] noted his blood-stained garments and numerous head stitches. Rudofsky told Carlson that, in his eighteen years residing in Dorchester, he had never seen anything as frightening as the current antisemitic violence. Many of the affidavits were signed by Jewish teenagers who had been surrounded by gangs of youths, who hurled antisemitic epithets and badly beat them. Carlson referred to one that detailed the breaking...

An Irish Informer in Restoration England:David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679-81 John Gibney (bio) Personal histories from the early modern era are often obscure, and David Fitzgerald's is no exception. But for a brief period his life comes to light, attracting attention as one of a number of dubious Irishmen to allege before the English parliament in November 1680 that the Catholic Irish, organized and funded by the Catholic Church, intended to massacre Irish Protestants and assist a French invasion of Ireland, after which a combined Franco-Irish force was to attack England and embark upon a similar massacre of English Protestants. The supposed existence of a conspiracy for an Irish rebellion had been part of the allegations made in August 1678 by Titus Oates, a highly dubious figure whose essentially criminal career "included lying, cheating, blasphemy, and sodomizing young boys."1 Oates had been an Anglican preacher, a naval chaplain, and a convert to [End Page 249] Catholicism; he was expelled from two continental seminaries before returning to England to concoct his fabulous if terrifying story. Oates's allegations precipitated and underpinned the Popish Plot in England, the outburst of anti-Catholic fervor prompted by his revelations about a Catholic conspiracy to wipe out Protestantism in the Stuart kingdoms. The most obvious Irish dimension to these events would be the execution in London of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic primate and archbishop of Armagh, in July 1681. Plunkett was convicted on spurious charges of attempting to facilitate a French invasion of Ireland, but even aside from this infamous case, allegations of Irish Catholic plots had been a recurring theme in the events that had unfolded.2 Over time the Popish Plot gave way to the so-called Exclusion Crisis, the intense political struggle that arose between 1679 and 1681 over the vexing question of who would succeed Charles II as king. In 1678 the heir to the throne was a Catholic: Charles's younger brother James, Duke of York, who had been tainted by Oates's allegations. In an atmosphere of intense anti-Catholicism, York's faith was inevitably contentious, and over the next two years a campaign to alter the succession would be conducted both inside and outside the English parliament. This eventually became a concerted effort specifically to exclude York from the succession, and one notable element in this campaign would be the promotion of ostensible Irish informers who could supposedly prove the existence of a plot involving an Irish Catholic rebellion. The reasoning behind this was straightforward: the Catholic Irish had rebelled before, and in 1641 it was believed that they had done so in an appallingly brutal and sectarian manner. Vastly exaggerated accounts of the torture and massacre of British Protestant settlers became the stock perceptions of the 1641 rebellion as it came to occupy a special place in the Protestant imaginations of both Britain and Ireland.3 If the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis rested upon the [End Page 250] assumption that a Catholic attack on Protestants in the Stuart kingdoms was imminent, these perceptions of 1641 as a wholesale sectarian massacre made it an obvious model for what this might entail. When in January 1679 an informer alleged that the French and the papacy had plans for an invasion of Ireland at the expense of the Protestant interest there, these claims carried a particular resonance, according to Gilbert Burnet, for "the memory of the Irish massacre was yet so fresh as [to] raise a particular horror at the very mention of this."4 What Burnet had in mind was 1641. The exclusion campaign ultimately rested upon fears of a Catholic monarch derived from a more general fear of an international Catholic threat across Europe, especially in the form of an expansionist Catholic France.5 This dovetailed with a rich vein of English anti-popery that drew upon the memory of critical events in Protestant history in order to illustrate the persistent danger that England faced from Catholicism.6 The Popish Plot could be (and was) incorporated into a pattern of Catholic threats and providential deliverance stretching from the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s, through...

Meyerhold and the RevolutionA Reading through Henri Lefebvre's Theories on "Everyday Life" Stefan Aquilina (bio) In the memoirs of his work with Vsevolod Meyerhold, the actor Mikhail Sadovsky wrote how the director "aimed at wrenching the spectator out of the familiarity of everyday existence, attempted to rip off his comfortable house slippers."1 Ilya Ehrenburg, one of Meyerhold's literary collaborators, writes similarly: "Meyerhold hated stale water, yawning emptiness: he often resorted to masks precisely because he was terrified by them—and what he found terrifying in them was not some mystical fear of nonbeing, but the petrified vulgarity of everyday life."2 Signaled in these quotations is "everyday life," a critical area of knowledge that steadily gained importance throughout the twentieth century. Within pertinent critical discourses, everyday life is now treated not as a trivial and undistinguishable domain, what "we routinely consider unremarkable and thus take for granted," but as "the basis of meaningful experience."3 In this understanding of the everyday, daily activities such as walking, eating, and communicating become imbued with a sense of purpose that belies their repetitive and undistinguishable status. A crucial figure within these debates was Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), and the aim of this essay is to apply his theories to an evaluation of Meyerhold's place within the political and theatrical scenarios that developed in the first years after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. This essay draws together for the first time the work of these two personalities, arguing that a Lefebvrian framework makes visible the tension between Meyerhold's support and critique of the emerging political status quo. It also repositions his aesthetic techniques and Biomechanical system as sites of body-based resistance. [End Page 7] The reading of Meyerhold's theatre through Lefebvre's theories qualifies this essay as an example of what Jackie Bratton refers to as "theorized theatre history," that is, an application of critical theory as a historiographical tool to challenge, partner, and ultimately interpret the historical content.4 Theoretical framing within historical studies has recently given rise to some constructive debate. For example, Thomas Postlewait is wary of historical studies that are, to his mind, excessively rooted in theory, which becomes an all-too-restrictive channel that binds rather than informs: "There are…scholars who champion a reigning idea, derived from this or that theory. All events are illustrations of the theory, which defines the contexts and controls the interpretation."5 Jim Davis, on the other hand, argues that theory is so ingrained in contemporary scholarship that it simply cannot be ignored; consequently, it is "far better to acknowledge the ideas that are influencing one's own opinions…than to assume naively that one is untouched by theoretical positions."6 This essay keeps an over-rigorous application of theory in check by identifying both congruencies and conflicts between Lefebvre and Meyerhold. In other words, Meyerhold's work will not always fit neatly within Lefebvre's theories, as the emphasis here will be less on establishing links between the two and more on contributing another layer to our understanding of the Russian director's work. In Lefebvre's theories, everyday life is a complex rather than straightforward phenomenon because it embraces "a wide range of tensions of contradictions."7 A similarly complex picture of Meyerhold's encounter with the revolution will emerge here, wherein certain actions of his will be seen as directly supporting the new regime even as others already contained the seeds of confrontation and resistance. This clarification of Meyerhold's complex rather than straightforward placement within the embryonic Bolshevik state is the first result of applying Lefebvre's theories. It will be supported by several sources by Meyerhold that are unavailable in English translations. The English-speaking world has been slow to add to Eduard Braun's Meyerhold on Theatre collection, which remains the most popular source of Meyerhold's texts and therefore deserved a recent reissue. Though traversing the director's whole career, Meyerhold on Theatre collects only some thirty texts, speeches, and rehearsal transcripts, a fraction compared to, for example, the four-volume collection edited in French by Beatrice Picon-Vallin.8 The Italian translations of Meyerhold's texts...

The Windrush Scandal: A Review of Citizenship, Belonging and Justice in the United Kingdom This article points out that the UK Human Rights Act, 1998 does not have a clear provision guaranteeing a person’s right to a nationality. Instead, this right is buried in the European Court of Human Rights decisions of Smirnova v Russia, 2003 and Alpeyeva and Dzhalagoniya v. Russia, 2018. In these cases, the Court stretched the scope of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, 1953 on non-interference with private life by public authorities to extend to nationality. The humanitarian crisis arising from the Windrush Scandal was caused by the UK Government’s decision to destroy the Windrush Generation’s landing cards in the full knowledge that for many these slips of paper were the only evidence of their legitimate arrival in Britain between 1948 and 1971.The kindling for this debacle was the ‘hostile environment policy’, later the ‘compliant environment policy’ that operated to formally strip British citizens of their right to a nationality in flagrant violation of international and domestic law. This article argues that the Human Rights Act, 1998 must be amended to include a very clear provision that guarantees in the UK a person’s right to a nationality as a portal to a person’s inalienable right to life. This balances the wide discretion of the Secretary of State under Section 4 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, 2002 to deprive a person of their right to a nationality if they are deemed to have done something seriously prejudicial to the interests of the UK.This article also strongly recommends that the Preamble to the UK Human Rights Act, 1998 as a de facto bill of rights, be amended to put into statutory language Independent Advisor Wendy Williams’ ‘unqualified apology’ recommendation in the Windrush Lessons Learned Report for the deaths, serious bodily and mental harm inflicted on the Windrush Generation. This type of statutory contrition is in line with those of countries that have carried out similar grievous institutional abuses and their pledge to prevent similar atrocities in the future. This article’s contribution to the scholarship on the Human Rights Act, 1998 is that the Windrush Generation Scandal, like African slavery and British colonization, has long-term intergenerational effects. As such, it is fundamentally important that there is a sharp, comprehensive and enforceable legal mechanism for safeguarding the rights and interests of citizens as well as settled migrants of ethnically non-British ancestry who are clearly vulnerable to bureaucratic impulses.