The Road through Africa: Imperial Nationalism and Diasporic Racial Consciousness in Post-slavery Barbados

Abstract

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the crisis over slave emancipation deepened, fissures appeared in the hegemonic order of Europe’s Atlantic slave-holding empires. Creole planters increasingly found themselves alienated from the imperial political establishment and popular metropolitan sentiment. Those most marginalized by the system of racial plantation slavery — slaves and free people of colour — immediately took advantage of these cracks and pressed for radical redefinitions of their place in the empire, with the most revolutionary demand being that of immediate slave emancipation. While the most dramatic and powerful example of this was the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution just two years into the revolution in France, such dynamics were a widespread feature of the colony-metropole relationships of the Caribbean after 1789. The ‘Age of Revolution’ was both fostered and sustained by fundamental transformations in the public order of the Atlantic world, part of a challenge to structures of aristocratic governance and new forms of intervention by the most dispossessed people of Europe’s slavery-based colonial system on the stage of imperial public life.3