British West Indies Research Articles

Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner

Reviewed by: Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner Joseph P. Reidy (bio) Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. By Michael A. Schoeppner. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 252. $59.99.) Among the historical works on the relationship between African-descended people and the sea, W. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks: African [End Page 401] American Seamen in the Age of Sail (1997) continues to command respect for its interpretive insight and stylistic grace. In one particularly effective chapter, Bolster explores the perilous interactions between free seamen of color and the institution of slavery by focusing on the Negro Seamen Acts, which the states along the southern Atlantic and the Gulf coasts enacted from the 1820s through the 1850s. Despite their differences, these laws all required the confinement of black seamen whenever they entered port, a form of quarantine nominally designed to prevent the visitors from spreading sedition among the enslaved population. Michael A. Schoeppner’s Moral Contagion builds effectively on Bolster’s work and that of scholars such as Philip M. Hamer, Harold D. Langley, and Martha S. Putney, upon which Bolster relied. At one level, Moral Contagion may be approached as a thorough legal history of the acts and their impact, but it is much more. By focusing closely on challenges to the laws, Schoeppner tells two tales. One traces the off-again, on-again attempts by commercial interests for whom the laws posed an inconvenience and by government officials—in Washington, assorted northern states, and the British Foreign Office—for whom the laws presented jurisdictional disputes over the limits of a state’s authority. The other story follows black sailors who, with their families, home communities, and assorted allies, claimed citizenship rights that superseded the laws and therefore rendered their enforcement invalid. These largely unheralded activists pressed their claims via mass meetings, letters to editors, and petitions to government officials at every level. Their advocacy helped to make “national citizenship and federal citizenship rights an important element of antebellum constitutional thought and politics” (213). The history of the Seamen Acts begins in South Carolina following Denmark Vesey’s abortive insurrection of 1822, when state lawmakers mandated the incarceration of free black seamen while their ships were in port. A group of prominent citizens, styling themselves the South Carolina Association, first lobbied for passage of the law and then worked to guarantee its strict enforcement. For the next three decades, the association actively stoked the ideological fires, employing such episodes as publication of David Walker’s Appeal in 1829, the abolitionist mail campaign in the mid-1830s, and northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, to demonize black seafarers as threats to the social order that rested on slavery. Over time, other coastal states jumped on the quarantine bandwagon in response to perceived threats, and Cuba did too. Schoeppner perceptively surveys the experience of British sailors, both before and after abolition in the British West Indies. At various points in time, officials invoked the Commercial Convention of 1815 to protest the [End Page 402] laws, often citing commercial or diplomatic concerns but never squarely challenging the abridgement of the sailors’ rights as free persons. Instead, consuls tried to achieve local amelioration (including by obtaining the release, in one case, of a ship’s officer of African ancestry and, in another, of a female steward who had been sexually assaulted by a jailor). Most strikingly, the British Foreign Office left unquestioned Attorney General Roger B. Taney’s 1833 opinion in support of the South Carolina law on the grounds that black subjects of the British Crown were not recognized as citizens when the convention was signed. Taney’s view that “constitutional modernity was strictly a Caucasian accomplishment” (90) intended for the sole benefit of Caucasians, Schoeppner caustically observes, guided his jurisprudence steadily from then through the Dred Scott case of 1857. Northern states also found federal authorities unsympathetic to claims that the acts violated federal authority over maritime commerce and flouted constitutional protections of the rights that citizens of any one state enjoyed in the several states—most notably, freedom. When Massachusetts...

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 by Daniel Livesay

Reviewed by: Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 by Daniel Livesay Olivia Carpenter Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early Americah History and Culture; Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2018). Pp. 432; 12 half-tones, 4 figures, 3 graphs, 4 tables. $45.00 cloth. Daniel Livesay's beautifully researched 2018 monograph Children of Uncertain Fortune further enlivens an ongoing conversation in our field about the British eighteenth century's complicated relationship to race. Before, during, and after race comes to be associated with notions of an indelible, biological, and bodily phenomenon, we see eighteenth-century British literature and culture struggling to come to grips with how best to categorize, define, and control human difference. Livesay's book engages scholarly methods in the study of race in the eighteenth century that pay particular attention to the ways race was constructed across the Atlantic. Children of Uncertain Fortune thus speaks to the work of scholars like Nicole Aljoe, whose 2012 monograph Creole Testimonies invites consideration of eighteenth-century race and racism, among other things, through the lens of slave narratives and testimony in the British West Indies. Marisa Fuentes also demands a transatlantic look at race in the eighteenth century when she invites her readers to imagine the lives of enslaved Caribbean women and the spaces they inhabited in Dispossessed Lives (2016). Sharon Block's Colonial Complexions (2018) posits race in the period as a process of stripping African-descended and enslaved subjects of personal specificity in media circulating in British North America. Children of Uncertain Fortune joins these scholars in thinking in both transatlantic and trans-historic ways about race, while also focusing on the ways the concept is constructed outside of, and beyond, any fixed bodily category. Family dynamics as we find them in archival documents such as wills, assembly records, and letters provide the primary lens through which Livesay investigates race in Children of Uncertain Fortune. Livesay introduces crucial nuance to the ways we think about race in the eighteenth century by mapping out, in wonderfully rich detail, the unique case of the small but substantial portion of [End Page 311] mixed-race Jamaicans of African descent who were acknowledged and supported by white families in both Jamaica and Great Britain. This research presents readers with a fascinating set of case studies that, together, convince us just how profoundly the dauntingly hegemonic discourse of eighteenth-century racism contains points at which its power begins to break down. After all, Livesay's text foregrounds the chosen few mixed–race Jamaicans who were able to benefit from these very points, special cases in which kinship connections and affective bonds trumped the brutal ideological and economic commitments most at work in colonialism and chattel slavery. This special case of a group navigating "an awkward position between an enslaved class defined primarily by African ancestry and a ruling class open almost exclusively to those of supposedly pure Christian European heritage" (3) illuminates a pressure point in a British empire that perpetually renegotiated and reinvented itself through its all too fraught relationship with colonial politics. Livesay's sharp, insightful writing brings to life the points at which the unique colonial situation in Jamaica bred its own particular narratives of race and politics, complementary to but in many ways divergent from contemporaneous discourse on race in Great Britain. Putting this small, privileged group of well–educated and often well–traveled individuals in historical context, Livesay considers their fraught relationship with the issues of chattel slavery and Abolitionism, early fights against racist legal structures, and struggles for Black rights. Moving chronologically from the early eighteenth century all the way to British emancipation in 1833, Livesay traces the fates of several mixed-race Jamaicans of African descent who show up in a diverse set of archives and puts their stories in conversation with shifting attitudes surrounding race as well as discourses of kinship, politics, and inheritance. Livesay's introduction is a gem, making a solid and compelling case for familial, interpersonal, and intimate relationships as a crucial lens through which...

Carl Campbell: A Quiet Enabler

Carl CampbellA Quiet Enabler Aleric Josephs (bio) For the last several years Professor Carl Campbell has been my colleague. While that has been so for decades, I still relate to him as teacher. In fact, the roles overlapped in time. And as I reflect on our association, I can only think of how he quietly had an impact on my life as I moved from student to colleague. I met Carl Campbell as an undergraduate. I doubt he recalls that encounter as it was a brief one; he was coordinator of the then Caribbean Research Paper which was required by all final year students in the Faculty of Arts and General Studies. I am grateful that he saw my desire to do a history of the high school I attended as a viable project. Having approved it, and having assigned me a supervisor, that was the extent of our contact for a while. I was privileged to encounter him in my postgraduate years which merged into/overlapped with my years in the department as a tutor and then Lecturer. As my teacher and colleague, my association with Carl has enriched my life. My reflection on this association has led me to recognize that he has quietly encouraged and enabled me over the last several years. He was a part of the team that taught my batch of MA students the historiography of the British West Indies. He taught with no hype or fanfare, but left an ineffaceable understanding of historiographical analysis in general, and of the free coloureds of the British Caribbean in particular. He quietly pointed me in the right direction when as a graduate student I had to approach the then Board for Higher Degrees to negotiate an extension of time to complete my research. And no, he was not my supervisor; he might have been in the chair as Head of Department, but his guidance was so quietly stated that its wisdom could have been overlooked. I went to complain and got a single sentence, brief and to the point, and that was all I needed. His quiet guidance and assurance as part of my supervisory team, as he reviewed my work for consideration of readiness for submission, and [End Page 122] his quiet conversational inquiry during the oral examination, helped me to release my anxiety, caused from attending the oral examinations of others. I had come to expect confrontational and aggressive investigation, but his vastly opposite demeanour led to calm and ready responses to his no less incisive questioning. I worked with Carl Campbell as tutor in Atlantic World and Caribbean History courses. In that experience I learnt that he was a quiet enabler, something that seemed to have come naturally to him. He taught me through informal discourse to appreciate the dynamics of understanding the diverse community of students and their classroom/tutorial delivery as I worked with them to achieve their potential. It was his unassuming review of my grading of scripts/assignments that helped me to moderate the strict criterion marking I was wont to apply, without lowering the standards. He enabled me in producing my first academic piece, published in 1991, when he encouraged me to do an article from my MA history paper on Mary Seacole. At the time I was not even aware of the importance of publication in my academic career. I recall with new understanding those informal conversations as we met in the department offices and talked about my life’s journey. Of course, I did not see it as such then. We were just having conversations, but those brief encounters helped me to understand my own journey, to make sense of what I did, the path I took to become an academic in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies. As I reflect on those brief conversations, I recall what a student once told me chuckling: Professor Campbell was called the “fifteen minutes man” as his lectures rarely lasted longer. His exchanges were brief, but no doubt said much, as I carried on the conversation with myself and so enhanced my understanding of my obviously different journey in academia. The understanding brought...

The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon ed. by Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore

Reviewed by: The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon ed. by Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore Liam Riordan The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon. Edited by Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 333. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-61117-950-7.) This collection of fifteen essays about Loyalists honors the scholarship and mentorship of Robert McCluer Calhoon, known especially for his sweeping The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973) and Political Moderation in America’s First Two Centuries (New York, 2009). The essays in The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon are organized in two equal parts: “Perceptions,” a key concept from Calhoon’s work, stressing Loyalists’ ideologies, motivations, and self-understandings; and “Moderation,” a core value for some Loyalists as well as for their postwar reintegration into U.S. society. Coeditor Rebecca Brannon’s introduction notes that “the umbrella term of disaffected” usefully “covers a wide variety of people” who were motivated by an “incredible diversity of issues” (p. 2). In her view, many individuals “have been dumped under the capaciously large category of Loyalism,” which can override important matters of individual agency (p. 3). Not all Loyalists became so by choice, and they certainly did not do so for identical reasons. From a welter of causes and experiences, one common theme that unites many of the essays and that reflects a recent trend in the field is a strong awareness of the American Revolution as a “civil war” and of the idea that “the American nation was born in violence” (p. 2). The volume also stresses “a long-standing moderate strain in American politics,” yet moderation can be hard to square with the emphasis on violent civil war (not to mention our present Trumpist moment) (p. 7). The collection accurately reflects the current contours of Loyalist studies with an especially even geographical representation of the regions that would become the United States and with three essays on Canada, though a lack of attention to the British West Indies is notable. While slavery and Native Americans are discussed in several essays, African Americans (perhaps better, [End Page 447] Afro-Britons) and Indigenous people do not occupy center stage in any essay. Interestingly, only one essay deals substantially with the prewar period; thus, the war itself and the postwar era, especially, receive the greatest attention. Also striking is the biographical approach in many of the essays as well as an emphasis on intellectual, ideological, and cultural assessments. The essays are all quite short, all are scholarly (with robust citations), and all show a good balance of primary and secondary source research. Four essays focus on southern subjects, a pair each on intellectual and military history, and merit closer attention for readers of this journal. The opening (and longest) essay, by Taylor Stoermer, compares moderate Loyalist John Randolph as an “Augustan and metropolitan,” a constitutionalist dedicated to the parliamentary supremacy of 1688, with his cousin Thomas Jefferson as one of the “provincial cosmopolitans” (pp. 11, 19). While lacking a pointed argument, the learned essay sketches a sound “transformation” in Virginia “from a political culture of constitutional sense to one of revolutionary sensibility” (p. 15). Eileen Ka-May Cheng’s assessment of how Patriot historian David Ramsay built on and transformed the work of Loyalist historian Alexander Hewatt provides close readings of passages about natural history, Native Americans, and slavery. Cheng stresses Anglo-American affinities that Ramsay deployed to portray South Carolina as a cosmopolitan country with an exceptional role to play in world history. While Stoermer looks back to common British values of the eighteenth century that diverged, Cheng sees that shared culture as foundational for a U.S. nationalist “cosmopolitan humanitarianism” that simultaneously denied its British roots and excluded Indians and people of African descent (p. 227). Carole W. Troxler assesses six backcountry Loyalist recruiters to test the validity of British general Charles Cornwallis’s complaints about the failures of southern Loyalists in arms. She persuasively argues that Cornwallis failed to grasp the severe circumstances that backcountry Loyalists faced, and she chides historians for...

Recycled insular phosphates and coated grains: Case study from Little Cayman, British West Indies

AbstractPhosphatic limestones on the west end of Little Cayman, at an elevation of 3 to 4 m above sea level and ca 320 to 550 m inland of the coast, lie on top of a phytokarst surface that defines the upper boundary of the Pedro Castle Formation (Pliocene). These phosphatic limestones are formed of phosphatic lithoclasts, detrital phosphate grains, coated grains (glaebules), composite coated grains, biofragments and phosphate rafts that are held in a matrix that is formed of micrite, calcite cement, and non‐crystalline masses formed of P, Al, Si and Fe. The phosphate in these limestones is primarily hydroxylapatite, whereas the overlying soils, found in some areas, are formed of hydroxylapatite, crandallite and minor amounts of boehemite, kaolinite and quartz. Textures in the lithoclasts and detrital phosphate grains indicate that they were derived from older insular phosphates that that were largely removed by mining in 1890 to 1895. The coated grains (glaebules) typically have nuclei formed of a detrital phosphate grains that are encased by non‐crystalline cortical laminae that are composed primarily of Al with their variable red colour reflecting the variable Fe content. The phosphatic limestones developed in a low‐lying coastal area where the guano produced by a large seabird colony that was close to or mixed with terra rossa and marine carbonates that were washed onshore during storms/hurricanes. The Al, Fe, Si and rare earth elements found in the phosphatic limestones came from the terra rossa. Critically, this study documents the complex depositional regimes and diagenetic processes that can exist at the interface of marine carbonates, coastal phosphates and terrestrial soils as sea‐level fluctuations control phases of sediment accumulation that were periodically interrupted by periods of non‐deposition.

Subsidy from Nature: Green Sea Turtles in the Colonial Caribbean

Subsidy from Nature:Green Sea Turtles in the Colonial Caribbean Karl Offen throughout their careers, archie Carr, James Parsons, and Bernard Nietschmann—the latter two were early and influential members of the Conference of Latin American Geographers (CLAG)—asked challenging questions about human-environmental relations and, in so doing, highlighted the essential relationship between the green sea turtle and human activities in the colonial Caribbean. They interrogated the fundamental linkages between specific ecosystems and the sociopolitical and economic developments to which these links contributed. Today we may call this sort of research coupled human-environment systems, but exemplary cultural-historical geography has always strived to analyze the mutual entanglements uniting society with environment. The purpose of this commentary is to encourage Latin American geographers to continue this vein of research, and specifically to do so in a way that elucidates the broader significance of society-environment relations. I do this here by following up on the powerful historical implications suggested throughout the works of Carr, Parsons, and Nietschmann. Geographers have long analyzed how subsidies from nature allowed particular patterns of human settlement and resource use, and the intrepid scholarship of Carr, Parsons, and Nietschmann was no exception.1 Although their work with Chelonia mydas, or the green sea turtle, is well-known among marine ecologists and conservation biologists today (Rieser, 2012), the far-reaching significance of their historical deductions have been largely overlooked. This is unfortunate because their assertions suggest that Chelonia's abundance and lifecycle ecology undergirded settler colonialism, plantation agriculture, piracy, portions of the slave trade, and intra-imperial conflicts throughout the Caribbean basin and from the earliest days of the European presence. Despite this claim, much of the work by Carr, Parsons, and Nietschmann remains unknown or underutilized by historians of the colonial Caribbean. The abundant, predictable, and easily taken Chelonia provided an essential and nutritious food source for early Europeans in the Caribbean basin, allowing piracy and commercial enterprises built upon the exploitation of human labor to take root. Notice of the indispensable subsidy from nature was made as early as 1954 by Archie Carr, who opined that "all early activity in the new world tropics–exploration, colonization, buccaneering and the maneuverings of naval squadrons–was in some way dependent on the [sea] turtle.… More than any other dietary factor the green turtle supported the opening up of the Caribbean" [End Page 182] (Carr, 1954, p.17). Shortly thereafter, James Parsons (1962) sustained and reinforced this observation in his classic The Green Turtle and Man by highlighting the strong connection between piratical activity and the wide abundance of Chelonia throughout the western Caribbean. Taking mostly a cultural ecology approach, Bernard Nietschmann (1973, 1979a, 1979b) illustrated the pivotal role of Chelonia in bringing the Miskitu people into allied relations with buccaneers and early English settlers in the far western Caribbean, groups that decisively altered the human geography of that region for 200 years and helped explain the rise of non-Spanish colonies in the region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In spite of these compelling and prescient conjectures, only a few historians of the colonial Caribbean have engaged with this aspect of their work. A recent article by the historian Mary Draper (2017) illustrates how these earlier studies remain poorly known but also why they should be more widely appreciated. Draper examines the role of timber and green sea turtle acquired in the "maritime hinterlands" of early English Barbados and Jamaica, respectively. She found that available surpluses of these off-island resources were essential for urban and capitalist development in the English West Indies. In the case of Jamaica, she illustrates how the harvesting of Chelonia from surrounding ecosystems allowed for the rise of Port Royal as a critical entrepot for piracy and smuggling. Her work suggests, but does not fully develop the implications of, the centrality of Chelonia for provisioning the enterprises which provided the start-up capital necessary for commercial agriculture, sugar mills, and the purchase of enslaved labor in Jamaica (Draper, 2017; see also Zahedieh, 1986, 1990; Crawford & Márquez-Pérez, 2016). Though her study is fundamentally ecological and geographic, Draper does not reference the decades-long and wide-ranging work of...

Capitalism and the Shift to Sugar and Slavery in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Barbados

The origins of capitalism in the British West Indies began as part of the revolutionary shift to sugar and slavery in Barbados in the second quarter of the 17th-century. This study examines the origins of capitalism in Barbados through the exploration of the historical record and archaeological findings from Trents Plantation and other early colonial estates in Barbados. The expansion of agro-industrial sugar production into the English colony of Barbados set in motion a dramatic shift in social and economic structures. Social and economic change resulted from the intersection of access to investor capital, dramatic profits rapidly amassed through the production of a commoditized cash crop, sugar, and a related shift in the labor force to a reliance on large numbers of enslaved laborers from Africa. The change took place rapidly during a period of political turmoil in England that resulted in laissez-faire governance and a void in administrative oversight in the West Indies. The social and economic changes seen in the archaeological record at Trents, and actuated across Barbados, had a dramatic impact on the broader Atlantic World, inclusive of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and their trading partners across the globe.

The last Goldfish

A few years before filmmaker Su Goldfish’s father, Manfred Goldfish, died she interviewed him on camera. He was reluctant to talk about the uncomfortable truths of his past, his previous marriage, his two other children and the persecution and murder of his family in Germany. “You can watch all that in a documentary”, he used to say to her. The Last Goldfish (Su Goldfish, 2017) became that documentary. This article contains three responses to the film. The first section, “Losing Harry”, written by Su Goldfish, focuses on the impact Manfred’s experiences had on his son Harry, connecting that experience to the despair of children currently held in the Australian Regional Processing Centre on Nauru. The second part, “Internment”, is written by historian Dr Joanna Newman whose research on refugees in the British West Indies grounds Manfred’s reluctant memories of rescue and internment in Trinidad in historical fact. The third section of this composite reflection, “Citizen of the World”, is a response from curator and scholar Julie Ewington who reflects on the film’s unravelling of hidden traumas and the unspoken histories in families.

The Problem of Liberal Empire Reconsidered

This review essay situates Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) in the context of the two-decade-long debate about the emergence of a liberal imperialism during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the political economy of emancipation in the British West Indies, Taylor recasts the problem of liberal imperialism by decentering its justificatory discourses in the metropole to examine its practical effects in the colonies. In this turn, he provides an important and missing “materialization” of liberal empire that makes the deep connections between free trade and freeing slaves legible. The practical and theoretical coincidence of these nineteenth-century developments as well as Taylor’s reconstruction of a West Indian tradition of political economy provide a new way of conceptualizing colonial economic violence elaborated as the product of a neglectful empire. It is in this tradition of critiquing and resisting a neglectful empire that we find critical and normative resources to think beyond the terms of our own entrapments within the terms of liberal political economy.

Atom Probe Tomography Analysis of Exsolved Mineral Phases.

Element diffusion rates and temperature/pressure control a range of fundamental volcanic and metamorphic processes. Such processes are often recorded in lamellae exsolved from host mineral phases. Thus, the analysis of the orientation, size, morphology, composition and spacing of exsolution lamellae is an area of active research in the geosciences. The conventional study of these lamellae has been conducted by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and more recently with focused ion beam (FIB)-based nanotomography, yet with limited chemical information. Here, we explore the use of atom probe tomography (APT) for the nanoscale analysis of ilmenite exsolution lamellae in igneous titanomagnetite from ash deposits erupted from the active Soufrière Hills Volcano (Montserrat, British West Indies). APT allows the precise calculation of interlamellar spacings (14-29 ± 2 nm) and reveals smooth diffusion profiles with no sharp phase boundaries during the exchange of Fe and Ti/O between the exsolved lamellae and the host crystal. Our results suggest that this novel approach permits nanoscale measurements of lamellae composition and interlamellar spacing that may provide a means to estimate the lava dome temperatures necessary to model extrusion rates and lava dome failure, both of which play a key role in volcanic hazard mitigation efforts.

A descent into Hellshire: Safety, security and the end of slavery in Jamaica, 1819–1820

ABSTRACTHistorians of slavery in the Americas have focussed on major revolts such as Haiti in 1791 to explain emancipation, and ignored smaller clashes. A close study of one such clash in Jamaica in 1819 between slave runaways in the Hellshire Hills and the colonial state offers a new perspective. Planters used the cooperation of free and enslaved people of colour to carry out a “descent” that destroyed the runaways in the region. Yet the descent cost over £3,000, piling financial pressure onto a slave society that was already overburdened with high rates of taxation and a declining economy. The descent into Hellshire in 1819 is therefore an important example of the more routine and less prominent police operations that appeared to cement the authority of local planters but also gradually and cumulatively undermined the capacity of white planters in the British West Indies to resist imperial pressure for emancipation.

Conversion and Curriculum: Nonconformist Missionaries and the British and Foreign School Society in the British West Indies, Africa and India, 1800–50

This article examines the ways in which Nonconformist missionary societies worked hand in hand with the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) to provide them with pedagogic training in the British System and BFSS teaching manuals and resources, as part of their evangelical mission of conversion in the British West Indies, Africa and India in the nineteenth century. The BFSS appealed to Nonconformist missionaries because it was based on unsectarian pedagogy, pioneered by the educationalist Joseph Lancaster. The article explores the various obstacles these missionaries faced, including the religious persecution they experienced in teaching an unsectarian system and the educational difficulties they experienced in persuading parents and local governments of the value of elementary education. It also draws attention to the ways in which they fought race and sex prejudice in the teaching of Africans, slaves and young girls. The current literature on missionary activities in the early nineteenth century pays scant attention to their role as educators: the article reveals the degree of their educational ambition and zeal and the lengths they went to in order to implement a progressive system of unsectarian elementary instruction in key parts of the British empire during the nineteenth century.

Slavery, capitalism, incorporation and the Close Harbour Company of Jamaica, circa 1800

Levels of incorporation of joint-stock companies were far lower between 1790 and 1860 than in the American South, let alone New England and the British Isles, suggesting that slavery had a direct and proportional impact on patterns of incorporation and wider economic development. Examining the foundation of the Close Harbour Company of Jamaica between 1795 and 1803, the first joint-stock company chartered by a colonial legislature in the British West Indies, shows that potential entrepreneurs did not face legal or political obstacles, but rather a range of exogenous and endogenous economic factors arising in part from the conditions of a slave society which discouraged company formation. The effect may have been to exacerbate existing levels of economic backwardness in these islands by cutting off the supplies of capital needed for modernisation, thereby contributing to their underdevelopment.

Liberal subjects: elementary education and native agency in the British West Indies, c. 1834–1860

ABSTRACTThis article argues that missionaries in the British West Indies conceived of elementary education as a key element of the transition from slavery to freedom in the 1830s and 40s. They suggested that elementary schools and teacher training colleges could not only teach Christianity and literacy, but also create a black middle class, inculcate the values of capitalism in the free black population more broadly, and even lay the foundation for an educational and religious mission to Africa led by free blacks. However, these utopian hopes were short-lived. By the 1850s, frustration and anger over the perceived slow pace of change and financial difficulties set in among both missionaries and the black teachers who had once been so central to missionaries’ hopes for the future of the Atlantic world.

Aestheticizing Blackness in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Abolitionist Poetry

This essay explores how Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and “A Curse for a Nation” extend beyond the issue of American slavery to address British racism. Representing blackness as a signifier of artistic creativity, EBB’s antislavery poems aesthetically challenge essentialist notions of black inferiority in a mid-Victorian society troubled by post-abolition economic decline and colonial unrest in the British West Indies. The poems thus work to liberate blackness from the chains of racial essentialism and draw on black performativity to expand the language of the poet’s social criticism.

Diagenetic processes associated with unconformities in carbonate successions on isolated oceanic islands: Case study of the Pliocene to Pleistocene sequence, Little Cayman, British West Indies

The youngest part of the Neogene carbonate succession on Little Cayman is a thin (<3 m), unconformity bounded package of friable Pleistocene grainstones that belong to Unit D of the Ironshore Formation. The basal unconformity separates it from the underlying Pliocene grainstones of the Pedro Castle Formation, whereas the upper bounding unconformity is the present-day land surface. The limestones in both formations have undergone extensive diagenesis with micritization and variable cementation of the grainstones in both formations, the creation of dissolution cavities and tunnels that are commonly filled with internal sediments (including terra rossa) or flowstone in the Pedro Castle Formation, rootcrete-lined plant-generated cavities in both formations, and terra rossa-filled fractures that cut through the entire succession. The negative δ18O and δ13C values of the grainstones and the diagenetic fabrics indicate diagenesis mediated by CO2-charged groundwater. Rare earth element (REE + Y) concentrations are low in the Pedro Castle Formation, higher in the limestones of the Ironshore Formation, and highest in the terra rossa. The REE profiles indicate that the REE in the limestones were derived from the overlying terra rossa via downward-percolating groundwater. Collectively, the diagenetic fingerprints found in this succession provide clear evidence of freshwater-mediated diagenesis, at all scales, that occurred during the sea level lowstands. Critically, the unconformity at the top of the Pedro Castle Formation acted as an aquitard that resulted in the REE being concentrated in the limestones of the overlying Ironshore Formation. These results highlight the complex processes that control the depositional and diagenetic evolution of limestones on isolated oceanic islands.

Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal by Caitlin Rosenthal

Reviewed by: Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal by Caitlin Rosenthal Kathleen E.A. Monteith (bio) Caitlin Rosenthal. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018, xiv + 295 pp. US$35.00. ISBN 978-0-674-97209-4. Hardcover. Caitlin Rosenthal's Accounting for Slavery is an analysis of accounting procedures on sugar estates in the West Indies and cotton plantations in the antebellum South in the USA in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries based on an assessment of plantation journals kept by their managers and owners. The work successfully establishes how the history of American slavery fits into the larger history of American capitalism, and in so doing, firmly establishes plantation history within the field of American business history. As pointed out by the author, American historians and scholars have long struggled with the idea of seeing production units based on enslaved labour, as capitalistic enterprises. As a result, the history of the plantation slave enterprise in general has remained outside the realm of American business history. To a large extent this also had to do with the way in which business history, and particularly American business history emerged in the early twentieth century, and how it has evolved since then. On the other hand, scholars of Caribbean history, and more specifically, those who specialize in West Indian economic/business history, have long recognized plantation enterprises worked by enslaved labour as capitalistic enterprises. One of the early pioneers in this regard, was Douglas Hall, whose case study of the Grenadian sugar estate Westerhall discussed the problems associated with the calculability of profitability in the West Indian sugar industry using Max Weber's "Formal Rationality of Capital Accounting".1 It is also well established in West Indian historiography that the region was the site of some of the world's first large-scale industrial production units in terms of both capital and labour with the respect to sugar industry, and that beginning in the eighteenth century, a multi-divisional type form of organizational structure was developed, with systems of management and control [End Page 266] being put in place. In addition to the large industrial sugar producing ventures, the region was also the site of small business enterprises both during and after slavery ended. Indeed, by and large Accounting for Slavery covers much of what has already been established within the historiography on plantation management slave systems and enterprise for the British colonial Caribbean, with similar terminology, analyses, and conclusions.2 Nevertheless Accounting for Slavery has much to offer the history of West Indian plantation slavery, as it provides a systematic assessment of plantation records within the framework of the concept, scientific management. Rosenthal, whose background is in management consultancy, has brought fresh interpretations and analysis, and in so doing, placed plantation enterprise based on enslaved labour firmly within the context and framework of American business history, and business history itself. Rosenthal's book is essentially about the systems of plantation management that were implemented on sugar estates and cotton plantations during slavery, as demonstrated in the records created and maintained by owners and managers of these properties. Five chapters, a conclusion and a postscript make up the book. Chapter one, "Hierarchies of Life and Death: Accounting and Organizational Structure in the British West Indies", begins in Jamaica and Barbados, discussing the organizational structures prevalent on the large scale industrial sugar estates, recognizing the managerial and labour organizations manifest in the industry being similar to the multidivisional or M-form, which was to take root among American industrial enterprise in the early twentieth century. The second chapter, "Forms of Labor: Paper Technologies in Comparative Perspective", discusses the development of pre-printed forms leading to the standardization of record keeping in the journals used in the management of production and labour. Rosenthal notes that planters, overseers and bookkeepers, often became the "vectors for the transmission of plantation technologies, moving methods across the Atlantic, and between the colonies. Through this circulation, knowledge of accounting moved both north to south and south to north, and in both directions across the Atlantic. Information practices crossed boundaries between slave and free and between different regions of slaveholding" (75–75...

Canadian Banknotes for the British West Indies, 1900-1950

Between 1900 and 1950, five of Canada’s domestic banks issued bank notes for circulation in the British West Indies. This article is about these Canadian banknotes. It starts with some background on the Canadian participation in the BWI bank sector and the circumstances that led to the issuance of the first Canadian banknotes. We then provide a description of the twelve different series of Canadian banknotes that circulated in the BWI with, where possible, some information on the size of those issues. We also consider aspects of the rivalry between the Canadian banks and the incumbent Colonial Bank (established in the region in 1836) as banknote issuers and the role the colonial authorities played in managing the relationship between them. The article concludes with a description of the events that led to the withdrawal of the notes of commercial banks in 1950 and their replacement with government issues.

“The Race to Modernization”: Film Culture in the British West Indies Around the Mid-Twentieth Century

“The Race to Modernization”: Film Culture in the British West Indies Around the Mid-Twentieth Century

Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. ByCaitlin Rosenthal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. xiv + 295 pp. Photographs, illustrations, notes, tables, index. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN: 9780674972094.

Caitlin Rosenthal's Accounting for Slavery is a study of accounting practices in the large plantations of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British West Indies and United States. The first two chapters, which review plantation accounting positions and techniques, reveal the early existence of rich and multifaceted information systems in the plantation economy of the British West Indies. The institution of slavery protected planters against the turnover of labor that industrial factories experienced in the North of the United States, and this, Rosenthal argues, facilitated the turning of human lives into numbers—not just in the prescriptive literature but in everyday plantation management. Such quantification allowed absentee planters to act at a distance. It morally desensitized the managers and tied together the different modalities of control that they enjoyed over enslaved people's lives. [first paragraph]