Eighteenth-century Caribbean Research Articles

Afterword: Looking backwards in time from the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic world

Afterword: Looking backwards in time from the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic world

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, ed. Misty Krueger

<i>Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843</i>, ed. Misty Krueger

Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795–1874 by Tim Lockley

Lockley’s Military Medicine and the Making of Race explores the ways in which medical observations of Black colonial soldiers shaped ideas about race in the nineteenth century. Directing his attention to the exceedingly well-documented West India Regiments, transatlantic companies of Black regulars in the British colonial army, Lockley combines methods of social history and the history of medicine with statistical analysis to probe evolving racial attitudes in the anglophone world. The book draws upon a rich cache of military and medical sources, from British War Office manuscripts to medical journals and military magazines.Lockley expertly layers the on-the-ground observations of military medics and officers with the contemporary nineteenth-century publications of physicians, scientists, and racial theorists. The result is a compelling and informative study that offers a fresh perspective on the inextricable relationship between race and empire.The first part of the book traces the foundations of the West India Regiments and delineates the specific ways in which Black soldiers were deployed by the white officers who commanded the corps. The British army, Lockley shows, raised the West India Regiments in large part because Black troops had consistently proven more resistant to the tropical diseases that decimated white regiments in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Beginning in the late 1790s, British officers stationed Black soldiers across numerous swampy and sickly colonial batteries in an effort to preserve white lives. In tropical garrisons, officers subjected Black soldiers to remarkably abusive treatment and harsh military and non-military labor, believing Black people to be innately suited to toil in the tropics. Such uses and abuses endured by Black troops, Lockley demonstrates, influenced both racial and medical thinking, as military doctors attached to the West India regiments filled journals and reports with observations about “superhuman” Black soldiers who survived brutal conditions in the Caribbean.In 1838, the statistician Alexander Tulloch published a lengthy report about British troop mortality in the Caribbean that turned the notion of Black “superhumanity” on its head. Tulloch posited instead that mortality rates in the predominantly African West India Regiments were still higher than they should have been, concluding that these soldiers were poorly suited for service anywhere outside their “countries” of origin.The second half of the book centers Tulloch’s Report and its outsized impact on racial thinking in the mid-nineteenth century. Lockley shows, for example, that ethnologists in the United States voraciously consumed Tulloch’s statistics and conclusions regarding the West India Regiments, which they spun to support a mid-nineteenth-century “American school” of polygenesis that viewed Europeans and Africans as distinctly different species. Ethnologists like Josiah Nott, drawing from—and, in some cases, misreading—Tulloch’s work, stressed that each “race” had its own space on earth in which it was best suited to survive. Lockley concludes with a medical analysis of the Asante campaigns of the 1860s and 1870s. Warfare on the Gold Coast, he illustrates, effectively demolished any lingering ideas of Black military superiority as soldiers from the West India Regiments took ill in camp and on campaign and died at alarming rates.A particular strength of Lockley’s book is its meticulous analysis of contemporary sources. The fourth chapter, which is devoted to army medical statistics, builds a rich discussion of race, climate, and health from seemingly mundane records. Furthermore, Lockley’s scrutiny of the methodologies (and errors) of nineteenth-century statisticians, ethnologists, medics, and others provides a powerful demonstration of the ways in which ideas about race and Blackness were developed, challenged, misunderstood, and invented. Focusing on the anglophone Atlantic world by design, Lockley successfully draws the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, and the coast of West Africa into his analysis, though some comparative attention to evolving racial attitudes in the French, Dutch, and other Atlantic empires may have enriched this study even more. This minor quibble, however, does not diminish the strength of Lockley’s arguments and analysis. This book should be of interest to scholars of race and racism, the history of medicine, and British Atlantic and imperial history.

Free to Bury Their Dead: Baptism and the Meanings of Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

ABSTRACT This essay closely examines the testimonies of maritime maroons who fled Jamaica to seek religious sanctuary in Cuba. The case unfolded during the mid-eighteenth century, a peak time for sugar production in the British colony. Across the Caribbean Sea, the southern shores of Cuba offered possibilities that contrasted with the reality of plantation life in Jamaica. A well-established and active marine underground linked the two islands, bringing information about different slave systems and religious traditions, while also serving as escape routes for enslaved Africans trying to survive Atlantic slavery. Taking into account African and especially Akan funerary rites, and considering the differences between Spanish and British colonial realities, this article asks what role religious sanctuary in general, and baptism in particular, might have played in seaborne escapes. In doing so, the article offers a unique window into the lived experiences of maritime maroons and the ways in which they interpreted the benefits religious sanctuary had to offer. I argue that the testimonies of these self-liberators reveal multiple conceptions of freedom, including the freedom to give dignified burials to their dead.

The Jamaican airs: An introduction to unpublished pieces of musical notation from enslaved people in the eighteenth-century Caribbean

ABSTRACT “The Jamaican airs” is a paper introducing an unpublished primary source from the C. E. Long Papers at the British Library in London. Although much of the source’s content was originally printed in 1797, in a periodical called The Columbian Magazine, about half has never been published. This half features the most extensive pieces of musical notation from the early-modern era of songs that were composed and performed by enslaved people. The present article is an early step in an ongoing and collaborative effort to share this music with people interested in studying Caribbean history and culture. It introduces the pieces of notation by contextualizing the larger primary source in which they are embedded. This is done in three parts: overall description, provenance and archival context, and preliminary analysis. The complete primary source has been made available to the public in an online exhibit with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive.

Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Londa Schiebinger

Reviewed by: Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Londa Schiebinger Rana Hogarth Londa Schiebinger. Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2017. xvi + 234 pp. Ill. $24.95 (978–1–5036–0291–5). For many scholars the eighteenth-century Caribbean represents a contentious space shaped by European colonization and Atlantic World slavery. For others it is a geographic space where cultures and knowledge collided. Londa Schiebinger’s latest book, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century [End Page 120] Atlantic World, combines these views and offers a new perspective: the eighteenth-century Caribbean as a site of medical innovation, experimentation, and knowledge production. She sees its indigenous and African inhabitants as skilled healers—experts on local plants and herbs—and stewards of highly sought-after medical knowledge. As Schiebinger notes early on in the text, “Fine educations in Europe could not guarantee success on the ground in the tropics” (p. 5). As such, European practitioners relied on enslaved healers’ knowledge or knowledge shared with them from indigenous sources. Her book then is devoted to exploring the transfer of knowledge from enslaved African practitioners to European physicians and the contentious relationships between these two groups set against a backdrop of Atlantic World slavery. Indeed, Schiebinger recounts how European physicians resorted to spying on enslaved healers to learn of their secret cures and running “trials” in which European treatments were pitted against local or indigenous ones to test their efficacy. Her book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 examines the experimental impulse in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. In this chapter, Schiebinger demonstrates how white physicians took advantage of their new surroundings and their exposure to black Africans in unfamiliar climates to explore questions about racial difference, the origin of black skin color, and the effect of climate and place on bodily temperature through experimentation. Chapter 2 traces how European practitioners gained access to African and indigenous American plant based therapies. Schiebinger balances cautious speculation with textual sources to outline the transfer of knowledge from indigenous sources to African ones, and African ones to European. African slaves not only practiced medicine, but adopted indigenous knowledge and adapted their own healing customs to treat ailments that proved too challenging for European physicians. She draws these points out in her discussion of yaws—a contagious, painful, disfiguring skin condition that left slaves unable to work. Chapters 3 and 4 explore principles of medical ethics and medical experimentation as it was understood and practiced in the metropole and the colonies. Schiebinger carefully puts experimentation on enslaved populations in the broader context of experimentation that took place in Europe and in the colonies on the poor, prisoners, and other wards of the state. These groups, Schiebinger contends, were vulnerable to medical experimentation. Unlike slaves, however, they did not carry a value as property—a status that Schiebinger notes could shield slaves from reckless experimentation. That said, slaves faced having their humanity acknowledged and dismissed. When it suited a physician’s experimental aims, slaves’ bodies could be interchangeable with whites. In other cases, they were viewed as innately different, but close enough substitutes. Chapter 4 stands out for its descriptions of exploitative experiments conducted on enslaved populations. Schiebinger examines John Quier’s dangerous experiments with smallpox inoculation that involved more than eight hundred slaves in Jamaica during the 1760s. This chapter clearly highlights the long and still understudied history of the medical subjugation of Africans and their descendants across the Americas. The fifth chapter rounds out the narrative by exploring the [End Page 121] underlying tensions between white medical interventions and slaves’ use of spirituality in healing as was the case with obeah and vodou. European practitioners and colonial officials, Schiebinger notes, dismissed enslaved people’s healing practices as witchcraft or quackery. Some went as far as citing such practices as propagating rebellion (p. 128). Schiebinger acknowledges that her narrative does “privilege European-style experimentation”—in both the sources used and the ways “experimentation is conceptualized” (p. 15), but she clearly gestures toward the limitations of such sources. The reader does...

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean by Daniel B. Rood

Reviewed by: The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean by Daniel B. Rood Robin Blackburn (bio) The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. By Daniel B. Rood. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 272. Cloth, $74.00.) This highly informative book illuminates the impact of technology, competition, and resistance on the major slave economies of the nineteenth-century Americas—those of the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. Daniel Rood vividly conveys how slavery was interwoven with sugar making, wheat growing, flour kneading, cotton baling, railroad construction, maritime navigation, and other laborious and complex processes. He explains how "racial capitalism" conscripted a captive labor force of African descent, and how the slaveholders exploited the ingenuity and knowledge of their slaves. Industrial methods intensified this slaveholder capitalism. Among those whose activities Rood studies are the adventurer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who tracked the Atlantic currents; Joseph Anderson of the giant Tredegar Ironworks; Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper; and Norbert Rillieux, the free man of color who perfected the vacuum-pan method of extracting sucrose from cane juice (the crushed [End Page 304] cane husks—bagasse—were used to fuel the mill's furnace). Maury, the navigator, believed that slavery would prevail only if the slaveholders of the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil worked together. Rood tracks the collaboration of scores of experts and entrepreneurs across the three slave zones and the wider Atlantic. The first half of the book is largely devoted to sugar, the second half to coffee and wheat. Cotton and tobacco crop up from time to time but are not central to the story. While cotton slavery is now fairly well covered, research into sugar has been relatively neglected. Rood's study helps to redress the balance. Sugar continued to play a central part in the new food industries, brewing, and baking as well as confectionary and sweetened beverages. The northern and western farmers were drawn into the "market revolution" as much by their sweet tooth as by the appeal of cotton cloth. Rood includes a fascinating discussion of the color coding of the division of labor and racial identity. There was an assumption that "white" products—sugar, flour, cotton—were purer and should be processed until all impurity was eliminated. A doctrine of "plantation vitalism" held that the microscope revealed the ferment in the world of fermentation and the threat of inversion/subversion in the sugary syrups of refining (43). Rood supplies a compelling account of the lively trade of flour for coffee between Rio de Janeiro and Richmond, Virginia. That wheat flour was a major slave-produced good is rarely appreciated. Here Rood shows how the Richmond millers went to great lengths to ensure maritime access to their city and to ward off the danger of spoilage en route to Rio. This turns out to have involved a hybrid labor force, partly enslaved, partly free. A welcome feature of The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is that its arguments and evidence are derived from documents and secondary works drawn from the "greater Caribbean," with Cuban and Brazilian sources drawn upon as freely as U.S. materials. Rood makes relevant comparisons but also brings attention to the incipient planter alliances. The latter were encouraged by the alarm provoked by the uneven advance of slave resistance and abolition. Rood also situates his work in the context of the "second slavery" of the nineteenth century, successor to the colonial slavery of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Caribbean and Brazil. This was to see a sustained boom in slave-produced staples in conditions of greater security. From 1804 to 1815, the Atlantic slave trade and slavery were under attack and had lost some important battles. But just twenty years later vast new zones were being opened up to slave planting—the Mississippi valley, the Paraiba valley, and Cuba's central plain. According to the "second slavery" perspective, the new plantations answered to an industrial rhythm, leaving behind [End Page 305] the artisanal practices of the eighteenth-century tobacco plantation or sugar ingenio. The productivity and profit of the slave plantation meant that governments were keen...

Black skin, red coats: the Carolina corps and Nationalism in the revolutionary British Caribbean

ABSTRACTThe Carolina Corps straddled the liminal boundaries of military–civil society in the highly racialized eighteenth-century British Caribbean. Although former slaves, the men of the Corps were nonetheless crucial to the defense of the region. This gave the men opportunities and legal standing that was unattainable to most other blacks in the British West Indies. The Carolina Corps leveraged their position to ensure they achieved the greatest possible level of social advancement. In addition, these black troops helped to change the racial perceptions of many white commanders, laying the groundwork for the later expansion of black units within the British Caribbean.

Parallel motion: shared histories of war, reform, and power in the eighteenth-century Caribbean

Far greater than preceding battles, the Seven Years’ War transformed the eighteenth-century world. Its astonishing reach swept across empires, determining events from Ottawa to Calcutta. The war’s ...

A Political Ecology of Water and Enslavement: Water Ways in Eighteenth-Century Caribbean Plantations

Recent headlines about Michigan, California, and India have disabused a public conventional wisdom that water is free of charge. Cases such as these, where human needs directly compete with institu...

Representing Race in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean: Brunias in Dominica and St Vincent

This essay looks at the complexity of the representation of racial otherness in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, focusing on the work of the painter Agostino Brunias, who worked mainly in Dominica, which was an island recently taken over by the British from the French. The essay argues that such representation cannot be reduced to colonial propaganda or anthropology, but depends on a wide range of factors involving geography, the different forms of slavery, and sharp conficts of attitude among the dominant colonial settlers towards the racial mixture endemic in the Caribbean colonies.

Virtue in Corruption: Privateers, Smugglers, and the Shape of Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

Violent encounters between Spanish American guarda costas and British vessels during the early decades of the eighteenth century sparked the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739, a war that started in the Caribbean over issues of inter-imperial contraband trade. Despite the causes of the war, Spanish American guarda costas out of port cities such as Cartagena de Indias outfitted their ships through illicit British supply chains. Moreover, the maritime violence leading up to the declaration of war helped the Spanish official José Patiño push for British acquiescence to Spain’s territorial designs on the Italian peninsula. Sent to the Caribbean to seek revenge for Spanish depredations against their shipping, the British Royal Navy also engaged in contraband trade so they could fully equip their vessels in the competitive environment of the eighteenth-century maritime world. Contraband trade in the circum-Caribbean served as a tool in Britain’s and Spain’s political economy while simultaneously producing the need for more smuggling and eventual conflict. For Spanish America, moreover, British contraband supplies in places such as Cartagena de Indias proved invaluable for its defense against invasion by British forces during the war itself.

Det svenska kolonialprojektets komplexa rum: om slaveri under svensk flagg i slutet av 1700-talets karibiska och atlantiska värld

The Complex Space of the Swedish Colonial Project: Slavery under the SwedishFlag in the Late Eighteenth-Century Caribbean and Atlantic WorldWhen Sweden took over Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean in 1784, the island was inhabited by French colonists and their slaves. As the island was too small and barren for large-scale plantations, the Swedish authorities decided to declare it a free-port, outlined the site for a new town, and issued an invitation to traders and merchants of any nationality to settle on the island. Within the space of a few years, a Swedish cosmopolitan town, Gustavia, was in place beside La Campagne, the French-dominated countryside. This essay takes a critical look at the first twenty years of the Swedish era on the island. A special focus is placed on the question of slavery and the coloured division of space on the island. Similar to all other late eighteenth-century Caribbean slave societies, the Swedish island simultaneously contained a hegemonic white space and a dominated and controlled black space. It was a multiracial and multi-ethnic society inhabited by white naturalized citizens and burghers, visiting white foreign merchants and émigrées, second-class semi-citizens comprised of freed slaves and gens de couleur, and African and Creole slaves. While the first two groups enjoyed certain rights, the lives of the latter two groups were controlled and regulated by slave laws and other legal restrictions.

The constitution of empire: place and bodily health in the eighteenth-century Atlantic

For eighteenth-century British Atlantic colonists, bodily health depended in large part on the surrounding environment. Aware that the West Indies and the Georgia and Carolina lowcountry had climates very different from Britain's, voyagers who traveled to the tropical and semitropical climates of the Americas believed that their bodies would need to adapt to the new environment. While much of the existing scholarship emphasizes the unhealthy nature of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, this article examines the importance of health as crucial to the formation of the British Atlantic world. Rather than seeing these hot climates as uniformly unhealthy for British bodies, planters and other colonists held a much more nuanced view of the land, taking into account both microclimates and individual differences among people's bodies and constitutions. Settlers and government officials considered the local environment and evaluated particular places for their effects on people's health as they determined the locations and layouts of towns, cities, and residences. Charleston, Carolina's capital city, moved a few miles from its original location in accordance with the Lords Proprietors' demands that settlers find a healthier spot, and the location of Jamaica's seat of government was the subject of heated debate during the 1750s. Health proved to be a crucial variable in the establishment of towns, and it also determined where individual people chose to settle – some found their bodies did not suit the Caribbean climate, while others determined their health was better in the heat than it had ever been in England. It was far from unusual for people to travel around the empire for health reasons, and considerations of health helped to direct the movement and settlement of people around the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.

Iron sails the seas: a maritime history of African diaspora iron technology

This paper explores the maritime history of ironworking in the African diaspora. Although iron metallurgy is usually thought of as a landlocked activity, blacksmiths were onboard most transatlantic voyages. Ships and dockyards became critical sites of this mobility and the resultant technology transfer. Apart from the necessary tools on voyages, every ship had a blacksmith, the highest paid among its specialist craftsmen. By the eighteenth century, iron-clad ships carried cargoes of iron and slag, as well as the enslaved ironworkers, across the Atlantic. Evidence for the African-derived technologies and the smiths who traveled the seas are found in the artifacts, archival records, and performance arts of the Atlantic world. Archaeological evidence presented from three different types of eighteenth-century British Caribbean sites confirms that the working of iron was critical to activities on land and sea and produced a high demand for specialized craftsmen, including African metallurgists.

The Absentee Planter and the Key Slave: Privilege, Patriarchalism, and Exploitation in the Early Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

The Absentee Planter and the Key Slave: Privilege, Patriarchalism, and Exploitation in the Early Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

Climate and catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic world in the age of revolution

From 1750 to 1800, a critical period that saw the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution, the Atlantic world experienced a series of environmental crises, including more frequent and severe hurricanes and extended drought. Drawing on historical climatology, environmental history, and Cuban and American colonial history, Sherry Johnson innovatively integrates the region's experience with extreme weather events and patterns into the history of the Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world. By superimposing this history of natural disasters over the conventional timeline of sociopolitical and economic events in Caribbean colonial history, Johnson presents an alternative analysis in which some of the signal events of the Age of Revolution are seen as consequences of ecological crisis and of the resulting measures for disaster relief. For example, Johnson finds that the general adoption in 1778 of free trade in the Americas was catalyzed by recognition of the harsh realities of food scarcity and the needs of local colonists reeling from a series of natural disasters. Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. |From 1750 to 1800, a critical period that saw the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution, the Atlantic world experienced a series of environmental crises, including more frequent and severe hurricanes and extended drought. Drawing on historical climatology, environmental history, and Cuban and American colonial history, Sherry Johnson innovatively integrates the region's experience with extreme weather events and patterns into the history of the Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world.

Atlantic consumption of French rum and brandy and economic growth in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean

Why did the production of rum in the French West Indies not achieve the same success within the French Atlantic as it did in the British Atlantic world? Surveying the history of rum production in the French Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article contends that the reason why no regional trade in rum developed in French North America resulted from fierce industrial and institutional competition from brandy producers in metropolitan France. Rum, nevertheless, remained significant within the culture and economy of Native Americans and African Americans. This article seeks to add nuance to the wider debate of the ability of the trans-border diffusion of new ideas to stimulate and institutionalize industrial and economic growth in the Atlantic world. French entrepreneurs were no less ‘entrepreneurial’ than their British counterparts, but real constraints on consumption on both sides of the Atlantic created insufficient demand.

Marronage, Manumission and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean

This article analyses the permeable boundaries between slavery and freedom which developed in the context of illicit inter-imperial trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Caribbean, focusing on ties between the Dutch island of Curaçao and the neighbouring northern coast of Spanish South America. As smuggling opened opportunities for enslaved people to cross political borders, it spurred authorities to develop flexible legal frameworks to meet the challenge of conducting free trade in colonial slave societies. The evidence indicates that, even in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, slavery sometimes existed along a legal continuum, rather than as an immutable, absolute category.

Natalie Zemon Davis: An E-mail Interview with Martyn Lyons and Monica Azzolini

In this interview with Monica Azzolini and Martyn Lyons of the University of New South Wales, Natalie Zemon Davis talks about her passion for history, and forthcoming publications. These take her into such diverse contexts as early modern Islam, the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Rumanian-Yiddish literature.Natalie Zemon Davis began her career as a specialist in the history of Reformation France, and is well- known for her contribution to the successful movie The Return of Martin Guerre. In this work and in more recent projects, she has explored the history of impostors, immigrants and cultural crossovers, and the ways in which individuals have fashioned their own identities. She has also made a distinguished contribution to the history of women in the early modern period. Having had a long-term association with Princeton University, she is now retired and based in Toronto. It was a major disappointment that sudden illness made it impossible for her to participate in the 20th International Congress for Historical Sciences in Sydney last July. Nevertheless, Professor Davis very generously agreed to conduct our planned interview by email.