Introducing the Forum on Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley

Reviewed by: Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean by Randy M. Browne Matthew Blake Strickland (bio) Browne, Randy M. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, 279 pp. ISBN 978-08122-490-8. Randy Browne states, "The basic premise of this book is that the struggle to survive was at the center of enslaved people's experience." Enslaved people lived in a milieu between the violence of white masters, harsh labour conditions, and the dictates of colonial administrators, all of which held considerable control over them. Taking the reader to the oft-ignored Berbice on the South American coast, Randy Browne uses an amazing treasure trove of documents to illuminate many of the actions and motivations of enslaved black people as they struggled to survive their bondage. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean is a welcome instalment in the historiography of slavery, British Empire, and Caribbean history. Although he does not challenge the historiography of resistance and rebellion by enslaved people, Browne does indicate that his work is meant to add more nuance to the lived experiences of enslaved people living in the British Caribbean. Abstract ideas of "freedom" were not the primary thoughts held by enslaved people; day-to-day struggle often involved coping with their current situation as chattel. The institution of slavery shaped actions and relationships. As enslaved people made decisions and connections, survival was often the foremost thought. Because of this, Browne's research examines actions and relationships in a new and intriguing way. Particularly, Surviving Slavery examines the lives of enslaved people during a period of amelioration in the British Empire. This was a time marked by greater metropolitan debate and intervention regarding the treatment of enslaved people living and working in the British Caribbean. In six chapters, Browne shows the ways and the multiple arenas in which enslaved people attempted to survive their enslavement in Berbice during amelioration in the 1820s. In chapter one, Browne provides background information about Berbice. A large number of books written about the British Caribbean have [End Page 177] tended to focus on Jamaica and Barbados. Berbice, a Dutch colony until the late 1790s, had a unique legal system that provided a few more protections to enslaved people than the British legal system. The fiscal and protector of slaves were colonial officials tasked with hearing and investigating complaints made by enslaved people, primarily against their masters. Because of these offices, Berbice holds a unique place in the study of slavery in the British Caribbean. With these offices present in the colony, white planters were often the subject of complaints made by enslaved people. As he elucidates in chapter two, Browne shows that enslaved people and their masters were at odds about the way in which black people were treated. This included complaining to the protector about physical abuse, neglect, and overwork. Working on plantations was immensely harsh. However, complaining to the protector was not the only way to escape some of the more terrible conditions on plantations. Continuing into the third chapter, one means by which enslaved black men could increase their standing in the eyes of their masters was to take on the role of a driver. Drivers were enslaved black men who helped maintain control of other slaves on plantations. Black men chose to become drivers even though it put them at odds with other slaves because there were certain perks and advantages to having a leadership role on a plantation. In the sources used by Browne, black drivers were often the subject of contempt for their role in doling out violent punishments. Chapter four turns to the more personal connections formed between enslaved people by examining marriages and sexual relationships formed between enslaved people. Monogamous marriage was not prevalent among enslaved people in British slave societies. Polygamy–primarily polygyny–flourished among the enslaved population and was a clear West African tradition that survived the dreaded Middle Passage. In forming sexual relationships, men had fewer options for finding a partner than women. The demographic in Berbice and many other plantation societies found more males than females. For this reason, women often left relationships they considered to be abusive. Browne has also found...

Many scholars—perhaps too many—have analyzed the conditions of slavery at the expense of exploring the survival strategies of the enslaved. The historical record documents state and private violence, the threats and favors, and the lies and bogus theories required to keep people in their supposed place. This somber recital encourages scholars to see only social death in the place of social history, a deferral of Black history that acts as a kind of disavowal. It becomes too easy to forget—to deny and refuse and then repress—the possibility that Black people worked out strategies and tactics to confront the scope, force, and direction of racial capitalism in their own time, and that Black people now might be guided in their own decisions by the example of their ancestors. Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) is a timely call to understand and redress the racial capitalism that the planter-historian Edward Long worked to create and sustain.

Catherine Hall has helped to rewrite British history, turning attention to gender, colonialism, and racial capitalism. This presents an in-depth interview with Hall, surveying her career from the late 1960s to the present, starting with her recent work unearthing the history of British slaveowning in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably in working to build the archive, The Legacies of British Slavery, as well as writing a case study of the slaveholder and early historian of Jamaica, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the history of racial capitalism (2024). Such a focus contributes to what Hall calls a ‘reparative history’. Overall, the interview recounts Hall’s path as an historian, responding to cultural and political movements, especially to feminism and anti-racism. Influenced by radical historians, such as E.P. Thompson, who drew attention to the working class, Hall turned attention to the role of gender in making the English class system, notably in Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (co-authored with Leonore Davidoff and Hall 1987). Through the 1980s and 90s, she focused more concertedly on the nation, race, and colonialism in books such as Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (2002). In addition, Hall also reflects on history writing itself, as well as comments on her lifelong partnership with Stuart Hall, in particular the time in Birmingham during the 1960s and 70s while he was directing the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Introduction - Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland Part I: Formations of capital: beyond 'merchants and planters' 1. The scope of accumulation and the reach of moral perception: slavery, market revolution and Atlantic capitalism - Robin Blackburn 2. Slavery, the slave trade and economic growth: a contribution to the debate - Pat Hudson 3. Slavery and Welsh industry before and after emancipation - Chris Evans Part II: From slavery to indenture 4. From slavery to indenture: scripts for slavery's endings - Anita Rupprecht 5. Re-examining the labour matrix in the British Caribbean, 1750-1850 - Heather Cateau 6. After emancipation: empires and imperial formations - Clare Anderson Part III: The imperial state 7. Imperial complicity: indigenous dispossession in British history and history writing - Zoe Laidlaw 8. Concepts of liberty: freedom, laissez faire and the state after Britain's abolition of slavery - Richard Huzzey Part IV: Public histories, family histories 9. Family history: history's poor relation? - Alison Light 10. Writing Sugar in the Blood - Andrea Stuart 11. Legacy and lineage: family histories in the Caribbean - Mary Chamberlain Part V: Reparations, restitution and the historian 12. The Mauritius Truth and Justice Commission: 'eyewash', 'storm in a teacup' or promise of a new future for Mauritians? - Vijaya Teelock 13. Jamaica and the debate over reparation for slavery: an overview - Verene A. Shepherd Index

This essay argues that Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) offers a new model for the study of racial capitalism by examining Atlantic slavery’s core antagonisms. By thoroughly interrogating the often hidden ideological and material basis of Jamaica’s plantation economy through its most famous slaveholder and proponent, Hall has written a new history of Jamaica, the Atlantic world, and the development of modern racism.

Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, by Catherine Hall

Reviewed by: Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage by Sowande' M. Mustakeem Alex Borucki (bio) Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. By Sowande' M. Mustakeem. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Pp. xvii, 262. $95.00 cloth; $25.95 paper) This innovative book broadens the emergent scholarship on the slave trade by emphasizing the experiences of women and children [End Page 113] who endured the forced Atlantic crossings alongside adult African men. Inspired by the works of Stephanie Smallwood, Saidiya Hartman, and Marcus Rediker, this book situates the slave vessel at the center of the process of commodification of humans, or as the author defines it, the "making and unmaking of black bodies" (p. 7). Thus, this work provides new interpretations about the intersection of violence and capitalism in the history of the slave trade. The structure of this book follows others that often begin in Africa, continue with sections about African experiences in slave ships, and finish with the sale of captives in the Americas. The first chapter examines the process of enslavement in Africa, where the interaction of white merchants and African elites led to the "production of terrorizing environments" (p. 34). There, the white quest for financial gains as well the transformation of these profits into political power by African elites fractured African social and normative ways of reverence for human life. Chapter two, which focuses on how white merchants and captains marketed black bodies, examines white imaginings of slaves as commodities rather than the African experiences of starvation, cruelty, and death in slave vessels, all of which the author analyzes later in the third chapter. Entitled "Blood Memories," chapter four portrays slave ships not only as floating prisons but also as "mobile battlefields," as it provides details about slave resistance and particularly the role of captive women in these insurrections (p. 77). Chapter five moves to one the most extreme forms of resistance, suicide in slave vessels, through the examination of familial separation of captives and the gendering of psychological instability. The following chapter enriches our understanding of Africans experiencing diseases in these ships. Often deemphasized by other studies, an examination of the violent environment surrounding the sale of captives in the Americas after disembarkation forms the final chapter of the book. This concluding chapter focuses on less-studied populations like children and aged captives, who could become "refuse slaves" in the brutal market of human flesh. This excellent work illustrates the paradoxical significance of U.S. [End Page 114] slavery studies in relation to the larger African Diaspora. Even though the importance of slavery studies in the United States has encouraged scholarship on this subject in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, normative U.S. understandings of the African experiences in the Atlantic world sometimes mischaracterize these historical processes. For instance, the use of the term "Middle Passage" in this book, to encapsulate the experiences of captives in all slave vessels, exemplifies these Anglo-American normative views. As readily available research shows, more enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil than in the British Caribbean and the United States combined, and the same is true for the Spanish Americas, where more captives arrived than in the British colonies. Neither the Atlantic crossing of captives to Brazil or to the Spanish Americas fit the term "Middle Passage" based on the triangular trade, given that most of the slave voyages arriving in Brazil were bi-modal (departing from Brazil to Africa and then back to Brazil). And for the slave voyages arriving in the Spanish colonies, most of them involved some intercolonial and transimperial routes (e.g., from British Jamaica to Spanish Veracruz) in combination with forced treks across Mexico and South America. Even Cuba was part of these complicated slave trade networks before the emergence of the nineteenth-century Cuban-based traffic. This may be seen as a critique about the scope rather than the interpretation of this book, as the analysis of this work pushes new, exciting boundaries for scholars examining the slave trade outside of the United States and the British Caribbean. To be fair, the author acknowledges her lack of engagement with the history...

Reviewed by: Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic Worldby Andrew T. Fede Jeannine DeLombard Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic World. By Andrew T. Fede. Southern Legal Studies. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 343. $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5112-4.) In Federalist PapersNumber 54 (1788), Publius adopts the voice of "one of our Southern brethren" to explain the logic of article 1, section 2, of the U.S. Constitution—the notorious three-fifths clause. As a result of forced labor, commodification, physical restraint, and coercion, Publius acknowledges, "the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank, and classed with those irrational animals which fall under the legal denomination of property." "In being protected," Publius continues, "in his life and in his limbs, against the violence of all others, even the master of his labor and his liberty," as in his or her own criminal culpability, "the slave is no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society." Slavery studies, for the most part, has been preoccupied with the first component of the slave's "mixed character" ( Federalist54). After all, it is the property status of the enslaved that arguably distinguishes this form of servitude from other sorts of unfreedom. Recently, heightened awareness of racial profiling, mass incarceration, and police brutality has directed attention to the criminalization of race and the racialization of crime as the enduring legacy of U.S. slavery. Outside of scattered accounts in local, state, and regional histories of slavery, however, little has been said of the status of enslaved people as officially recognized victims of violent crime. As Joan (now Colin) Dayan has trenchantly observed of the slave's "retractable personhood," "the dead slave gets the protection of positive law, but at great cost" (Dayan, "Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies," in Russ Castronovo and Dan D. Elson, eds., Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics[Durham, N.C., 2002], 80, 66). [End Page 722] Dayan, of course, alludes to the prohibitive cost of such retroactive, formal redress to the enslaved victim. But as Andrew T. Fede demonstrates, meaningful legal protection of enslaved lives would have extracted too great a cost from the slave system to be feasible. His comprehensive survey of "the comparative law of slave killing" briefly considers ancient Rome, medieval Europe, and the British Caribbean before settling into a comparative analysis of slave homicide in colonial and then state jurisdictions throughout what would become the United States (p. 1). Here, as in other aspects of American slave law, variation across time and place was the norm. Still, from colonial Pennsylvania to Civil War–era Texas, one fact remained constant: slave owners were hardly ever legally punished for their role in the violent deaths of their slaves. Some were prosecuted, fewer were convicted, and fewer still expiated their crimes by capital punishment or even lengthy prison sentences. Fines, short-term incarceration, pardons, and community-assisted escapes were far more frequent. Significantly, the story changes considerably when the white killer was not of the slave-owning class. Although still rare, these prosecutions revealed the class divisions among white people in slaveholding communities. More to the point, the differential liability of owners and other white slave-killers gives the lie to Federalist54's tidy division of slaves' mixed character into property under civil law and persons under criminal law, for it was to protect the value of slave property as much as to preserve social order that nonslaveholding white people were held responsible for the deaths of enslaved people. In this way, Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic World,Fede's third book, confirms the arguments of his first book, People Without Rights: An Interpretation of the Fundamentals of the Law of Slavery in the U.S. South(New York, 1992). Drawing on original research as well as an impressive array of secondary sources, Fede here offers a granular view of the legislation and litigation pertaining to slave homicide but little synthetic analysis. Nevertheless, Fede's comprehensive overview...

Reviewed by: Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal Susan C. Greenfield (bio) Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver; pp. vii + 348. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008, $55.95, $9.95 CD-ROM. This anthology opens with two related reminders about domestic history. The first is that the image of the full-time, self-sacrificing, and sexually compliant mother is a modern invention that “gained its full ideological force in the nineteenth century”; the second is that the image was illusory and that no mother then or now has met its saintly standards. “In this sense,” Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver write, “all mothers are other mothers” (1). The volume’s fifteen essays address an array of historical, social, and geographical contexts, but each also takes the idealization and impossibility of maternal norms as a starting point from which to explore a variety of specific representations and experiences. Rosenman and Klaver suggest that despite the general homage Victorian studies has paid to the problematic ideals of maternity, relatively few scholars treat motherhood itself as a central object of inquiry. There are “important exceptions” here (8), and the editors pay special tribute to the works of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Carolyn Dever, Jill Matus, Mary Poovey, Ellen Ross, and Sally Shuttleworth. But they stress that most relevant scholarship tends to place motherhood “at the center of [End Page 140] constructions of femininity and domesticity” (1)—to mention and then subsume it “into a more general analysis of gender roles” (2). In redressing this oversight and dedicating itself to direct discussions of maternity, Other Mothers offers a valuable addition to Victorian and gender studies. The anthology’s theoretical agenda is less ambitious. For despite their interest in specifying maternity’s role in gender studies, Rosenman and Klaver repeat one of the field’s most well-rehearsed theories: the idea that gender, along with race, class, and nationality, are mutually constitutive and contextually determined positions. That gender identity is neither stable nor singular is likely to be a familiar conceit to many readers, and none of the authors here offers much critical perspective on it. Instead, the volume’s goal is to insert maternal identity into this familiar paradigm and to chart its variability. At its best, Other Mothers charts this very well. The individual contributors trace the categories and contradictions underwriting a particular representation or experience, and together they document the multiple possibilities—and impossibilities—of maternal identity. Many different kinds of mothers start to emerge. Some are historical figures: the prolific Margaret Oliphant who outlived all her children; Lady Duff Gordon, the self-professed mother of her Egyptian servants and slaves; Frances Knorr, executed in Australia for allegedly murdering two children; the Jamaican born Mary Seacole who “mothered” British soldiers during the Crimean War. The vast majority of the volume’s “other mothers” appear in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction. There are essays on the fallen mother in Felix Holt, The Radical (1866); alcoholic mothers in Hesba Stretton’s temperance publications; pregnant mothers in stories by indigenous Australian women; and mothers who give birth to texts instead of children in fin-de-siècle books. An essay on Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) analyzes a middle-class mother’s reaction to her baby’s death from opium (often used in children’s medicine). And one of the volume’s early essays, which focuses on the selfish elderly mothers in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48), is intriguingly off-set by a later one on fat and nurturing maternal surrogates in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and David Copperfield (1849–50). The editors divide the collection into four relatively equal parts. The first, “Beyond the Maternal Ideal,” echoes the book’s subtitle and opens with Deidre D’Albertis’s smart and lively account of the commercialization of maternal standards in Victorian times and our own. Victorian mothers were the “producers” and “curators” of “an empire of things” (29), which today includes organic baby food, Baby Einstein DVDs, and limousine strollers. In both cases, D’Albertis argues, purchasing the right accoutrements is what most...

This essay reviews Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024)—an economic and intellectual history of the Jamaican enslaver and author Edward Long—emphasizing the way the book weaves together economic and intellectual history. It draws particular attention to how Lucky Valley treats Long’s thinking about race, arguing that Hall’s account allows us to see this idea emerging and changing in relationship with the specific economic and imperial conjuncture of the mid- to late eighteenth century. It likewise highlights Hall’s usage of the psychoanalytic idea of splitting as a way to understand how Hall seems to have projected onto Africans and enslaved peoples elements of Long’s fears and desires.

This essay is a study of Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) and reflects on Hall’s use of the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal to analyze the construction of racist ideas by the enslaver and historian Edward Long, whose three-volume book, The History of Jamaica, first published in 1774, has remained among the most definitive texts on the history of slavery, Jamaica, and Black people. The essay brings Long’s mother, Mary Tate, into the same analytic frame as the enslaved woman Queen Cubah and shows how the details of Cubah’s life that Long chose to narrate through caricature bear a striking resemblance to pivotal but painful aspects of Long’s mother’s life. The author shows how Hall connected the personal and family dramas of White people to how they viewed and wrote about Black people. The tone of Long’s racialism, particularly its rigid morality and acridity, was refined and sustained by things tragically rooted in his own family heartbreak and loss. The essay also contemplates the role of the unconscious in history, including historical production as a site of disavowal.

Slave registers are a major source for the study of British colonial slavery in its final two decades, yet they have been little used by historians. The article employs two case studies to show how these records allow us to reconstruct a collective profile of the enslaved and to sketch fuller portraits of individual persons. The first is James Blair’s Blairmont estate in Berbice, where slave registration records provide valuable insight into family structures. The second case study considers John Gladstone’s Success estate on neighbouring Demerara, epicentre of a major slave revolt in 1823. Here registers, correlated with other sources, yield a fuller picture of the insurgents and enable us to place them in the foreground of the story. We conclude that slave registration records can be used for purposes for which they were never intended, to write richer histories of people and place in the British Caribbean.

Gender studies in India have witnessed significant developments over the past few decades, with a shift in paradigms reflecting the evolving understanding of gender dynamics in Indian society. This article aims to provide an overview of the current paradigms in gender studies in India by examining key themes, theoretical frameworks, and emerging research trends. The article begins by discussing the historical context of gender studies in India, highlighting the initial focus on women's empowerment and feminist activism. It then explores the transition towards more intersectional and multidimensional approaches, acknowledging the interconnectedness of gender with other social categories such as caste, class, religion, and sexuality. One of the key paradigms in contemporary gender studies in India is the recognition of diverse gender identities and the inclusion of transgender and non-binary perspectives. The article examines the emergence of transgender studies as a distinct field within gender studies and the challenges faced by transgender individuals in Indian society. Furthermore, the article explores the intersection of gender with caste, highlighting the unique experiences and struggles of Dalit women and the need for an intersectional understanding of oppression. It also delves into the impact of globalization and neoliberalism on gender dynamics, addressing issues such as the feminization of labor and the commodification of women's bodies. The article discusses the role of academia and research institutions in promoting gender studies in India, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary collaborations and community engagement. It also highlights the importance of decolonizing gender studies by incorporating indigenous knowledge systems and perspectives.

In this interview, Professor Catherine Hall considers the impact and legacy of Edward Long’s three-volume History of Jamaica, published in 1774. Long—slave-owner, planter and supporter of a racial-based slave economy—drew on a range of contemporary thinking in politics, economics and natural sciences, and on his own detailed experience of Jamaica, to make a case for the ‘naturalness’ of African enslavement and of what is now termed ‘racial capitalism’. Professor Hall considers the uncomfortable contexts and longevity of this seminal 18th-century book and its influence on racial thinking that still resonates today.

The thesis will examine the portrayal of women and their roles in courtship and marriage in three nineteenth-century novels: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), showing how gender differences played a significant part in Victorian society and more significantly, in the private sphere of the family. The significance of gender roles and how men and women interact with each other in the private sphere will be analysed in the social and historical context of the early to the mid-nineteenth-century England, using the historical criticism provided in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (1987) which examines the significance of gender roles in the life of the provincial English middle class. According to Davidoff and Hall, gender roles are a basis for the construction of the provincial middle class’s values, outlook, family life, religious ideology and economic structure (29). They observe that in historical texts and studies of the age, women are almost always neglected and they argue that women played as much part in shaping history as men did, giving evidence of women’s subtle influence, which often goes unrecorded or overlooked by other historians, in shaping the political, economic and philanthropic actions of men. This thesis will seek to explain that within the restricted social expectations, female writers of the nineteenth century have portrayed some of the strictest institutions of all, courtship and marriage, as a form of female empowerment against the dominating patriarchal world.