Era Of Abolition Research Articles

Ending slavery in imperial peripheries: Ottoman abolitionist policy in Trablusgarp and Benghazi provinces (1857–1911)

When Istanbul prohibited the trade of enslaved Africans in 1857, the Ottoman local authorities expanded efforts to curb human trafficking throughout the imperial realm. These endeavours also included Libya, which lies at the frontiers of the Greater Sahara, a major slave-raiding zone in the nineteenth century. The historiography devoted to modern Libya maintains that the Porte took action to curb slavery only in response to British pressure. In this article, I seek to situate the prohibition of human trade in Libya within the larger scope of the end of slavery in the imperial realm. I argue that the Ottomans conducted an abolitionist policy in Libya that was embedded in the reforms undertaken in these peripheral provinces, namely, to foster the Porte’s sovereignty at its imperial frontier. I further argue that the enslaved population gained agency in the manumission process and in their integration into Ottoman society after their liberation. This bottom-up approach to the end of human bondage reveals the entanglement of old and new patterns of manumission in the era of abolition as well as the social integration of these emancipated slaves into Ottoman society during the Reform period.

African Indentured Labor in Senegal and Ste. Marie, Madagascar, 1817–1830

ABSTRACT This work explores the forced indenture, or engagement, of Africans in the French empire after the 1817 abolition of slaving. Under this system, French merchants purchased captives from African traders, then offered the captives their freedom. Freedom came with a heavy price: the former captive would have to repay the price of his or her redemption from slavery by working on French plantations as indentured labourers for fourteen years. This article traces the beginnings of this labour system in the colonies of Senegal and Ste. Marie, Madagascar, and explores specifically how the system intersected with slaving and slavery. An examination of French and engagés’ perspectives reveals a developing discourse about the boundaries between slavery and free labour in the early nineteenth century. French officials insisted that engagement constituted a free labour practice that liberated engagés from African slaving markets. In contrast, engagés argued that they had been traded as captives and were enslaved to the French. Overall, a study of engagement offers an opportunity to study definitions of slavery and the slave trade in the era of abolition.

The Demography of Slavery in the Coffee Districts of Angola, c. 1800–70

AbstractThis article uses demographic data from nineteenth-century Angola to evaluate, within a West Central African setting, the widely accepted theory that sub-Saharan Africa's integration within the Atlantic world through slave and commodity trading caused significant transformations in slavery in the subcontinent. It specifically questions, first, whether slaveholding became more dominant in Angola during the last phase of the transatlantic slave trade; second, whether Angolan slave populations were predominantly female; and third, whether slavery in Angola expanded further during the cash crop revolution that accompanied the nineteenth-century suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Besides making a significant contribution to understanding the demographic context of slavery in the era of abolition, the article aims to display ways in which historians can use the population surveys the Portuguese Empire carried out in Africa from the late eighteenth century.

The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition by Katherine Paugh

Reviewed by: The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition by Katherine Paugh Brooke N. Newman (bio) The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition. By Katherine Paugh. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 304. $99.00 cloth; $57.77 ebook) In the final decades of the eighteenth century, as abolitionists in Britain campaigned for an end to the Atlantic slave trade, the ability of the slave population in the Caribbean colonies to reproduce itself through natural increase assumed crucial significance. Although the development of a plantation labor force capable of sustaining the British imperial economy hinged on enslaved women's reproductive capacity, the political and economic importance of Afro-Caribbean women's fertility during the abolition era has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Katherine Paugh's new book, The Politics of Reproduction, attempts to rectify this oversight by placing reproductive policy squarely at the center of political abolitionism. Paugh contends that abolishing the Atlantic slave trade was not designed to disrupt the Atlantic plantation system but rather to ensure the reliable, economical reproduction of a homegrown Afro-Caribbean labor force. In doing so, she offers a fresh perspective on the economic motivations for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, challenging arguments put forward by proponents of the "Williams thesis," particularly Seymour Drescher, that abolitionism was driven by humanitarian ideology and economically irrational. Instead, Paugh shows how abolitionists' promotion of slave breeding and monogamous Christian marriage was bound up with the development of global capitalism. Focusing on the overlap between abolitionists' evangelical worldview and pronatal plantation management policies designed to encourage slave increase, Paugh demonstrates how Afro-Caribbean women's reproductive potential underpinned the economic aspirations of British abolitionists, politicians, planters, and doctors. Chapter one provides a comparative analysis of concerns about slave demography in the West Indies and the American South in the decades prior to and immediately after the American Revolution. In contrast to fears of slave hyperfertility and overpopulation in North [End Page 104] America, which prompted calls to suppress the Atlantic slave trade, Paugh shows how in the Caribbean colonies the supply disruptions wrought by the American Revolution led to a new emphasis on Afro-Caribbean women's fertility as a means of easing planters' reliance on the slave trade. In chapter two, Paugh analyzes the little-known case of Mary Hylas, whose uncertain legal status as a married slave revealed the conflict between the law of slavery and the law of marriage. Shedding new light on the infamous Somerset trial of 1772, Paugh argues that the contractual nature of marriage posed problems for abolitionists seeking to at once promote marriage and condemn slavery. Chapter three focuses on attempts by abolitionists and British doctors to deploy Afro-Caribbean women's bodies as tools to reproduce the West Indian slave population. Micro-level power struggles between mixed-race women and white male plantation staff are the subject of chapter four. As Paugh reveals, both groups vied for control at the local level in response to broader political developments and geopolitical ruptures in the Atlantic world. Chapter five is concerned with plans to govern and reform Afro-Caribbean women's sexuality and reproductive practices to the benefit of the plantation economy during the age of abolition. The final chapter explores the role of missionaries on the ground in promoting Christian marriage as an alternative to concubinage that would maximize the Afro-Caribbean labor force at the expense of white men's sexual prerogatives and enslaved women's customary paths to material security. Paugh's attention to the medicalized bodies, lived experiences, and reproductive practices of enslaved women at the heart of the debate over the Atlantic slave trade brings Afro-Caribbean women and the politics of reproduction to the forefront of political abolitionism. Through analysis of a wide range of sources—plantation records, abolitionist texts and correspondence, legal cases, and medical tracts—Paugh connects local Caribbean case studies to broader political and economic developments in Britain and the Atlantic world. In sum, Paugh's book is well written, deeply researched, and compelling. [End Page 105] It makes an original contribution to the...

Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition, by Paula E. Dumas

Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition, by Paula E. Dumas

From Oppressive to Benign: A Comparative History of the Construction of Whiteness in Brazil in the Post Abolition Era

Author(s): Davis, Darien J | Abstract: This essay deconstructs the ways in which Brazilian patriotic intellectuals transformed the oppressive whiteness of the Portuguese colonial project to what I call “benign whiteness.” After providing a brief history of the development of whiteness and hybridity in Latin America, I highlight patriotism and racism in thinkers such as Cuban Jose Marti, Uruguayan Enrique Rodo, and Brazilian Euclides da Cunha. After World War I, Brazilian cultural elites, along with the bourgeois state, promoted and institutionalized cultural hybridity as a unique trait that bound Brazilians together in a superior way to the United States. The patriotic trope of hybridity masked white privilege while benign whiteness stymied racial solidarity even as it continued to marginalize non-white populations. I show how whites and many almost whites along with foreign intellectuals, helped propagate the idea of Brazilian benign whiteness, an ideology that continues to impact Latin Americans today.

Paula E. Dumas. Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition.

Paula E. Dumas. Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition.

Por uma cidadania de primeira classe: supremacia racial e o debate sobre integração na imprensa afro-americana na Primeira Guerra Mundial (1917- 1919)

O objetivo deste artigo é o de compreender a formação de hierarquias raciais no pós-abolição e o debate na imprensa negra sobre a integração da população negra nos Estados Unidos durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial. Os periódicos Chicago Defender e The Crisis expressaram os anseios do ativismo negro nas primeiras décadas do século XX, galvanizados pela atuação dos combatentes negros no conflito no Velho Continente. A Grande Migração e a participação dos negros na Primeira Guerra mundial foram consideradas dois eventos impulsionadores de uma cidadania de primeira classe para os negros.

The Cultural Contingency of Structure: Evidence from Entry to the Slave Trade In and Around the Abolition Movement.

The economic effects of social structure are dependent on culture and must be understood in their cultural context. The authors demonstrate this with an analysis of the Liverpool slave trade. They show that as abolitionism became more salient in British culture, connections in a coinvestment network to both slavers and nonslavers mattered much more for predicting entry into the slave trade. As abolitionism rose, nonslavers in that public network gained relatively more influence than slavers, but the reverse was true in the private network of an elite social club. Furthermore, the status of a potential slaver mattered much more during the abolition era, as the emergent clarity of norms against slaving constrained high-status traders less than middle-status traders. The authors present advice to network and status theorists as to how they can reflect cultural contingency even in studies conducted in stable cultural contexts, thereby creating a more integrated and robust economic sociology.

Going to Sea: Photographic Publics of the Free and Newly Freed

This essay traces the relationships between photography, migration and image-politics of work and labor in Ghana in the era of abolition. Concerns over who could move and work on their own behalf informed shifting senses of personhood and class; these were negotiated changes that inform the rapid proliferation of photographic audiences. In this case the fragmentary photographic records are expanded by oral history accounts and other public memories of migration. Though this narrative is rooted in Ghanaian diaspora to other parts of Africa, the implications for the social and historical senses of photography's relation to personhood provoke much larger questions.

Child Slaves in the Modern World by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph C. Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Child Slaves in the Modern World by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph C. Miller Colleen A. Vasconcellos Child Slaves in the Modern World. By Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. v + 281 pp. $24.95. Having already reviewed the first book in this two-volume set (JHCY volume 3, number 3), it was a pleasure to be given the same opportunity with this book. As with its companion, the editors of Child Slaves in the Modern World note that this is not a comprehensive anthology of child slavery in the modern world. Hopefully this assertion forces the reader to pause and think about the weight of that statement. Chapters on India’s child brides or the numerous children who labored in Stalin’s gulags are not included. Yet, this second volume does build upon the complex and fluid perimeters of childhood and slavery set by the first in order to show a blurry, somewhat subjective definition of childhood that is just as difficult to delineate in the modern world. This speaks as much to the ever-changing nature of childhood as to the environments and cultures in which these children lived and labored. While this second volume continues to force readers to rethink their definition and perception of slavery and childhood, Child Slaves in the Modern World also shows them how these boundaries continued to change once enlightened citizens began to push for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Divided into two sections, this book takes more of a chronological approach than the first. While the first section examines child slavery during the era of abolition, the final five chapters comprise a second section examining enslaved children in the modern era. Although the difference in size between the two sections makes the volume seem a bit imbalanced, each section has its strengths. Furthermore, that imbalance becomes more understandable as the reader delves deeper into the volume. The majority of the chapters contained in the first section focus on children enslaved in Africa from 1790 to 1914, adding more imbalance to the volume despite the editors’ promise of a wide geographical range. However, Sue Taylor’s examination of the complex negotiations between parents and the Caracas Courts over enslaved children and Nara Milanich’s discussion of tutelary servitude in Latin America challenge more traditional ideas of slavery in the Americas to show that children, and not always children [End Page 396] of African descent, were enslaved and used as labor outside of the conventional plantation setting. That said, Cicely Jones’s outstanding piece on plantation children in the British Caribbean challenges that traditional viewpoint further by showcasing child resistance and agency. In perhaps the most interesting chapter of the section, Benjamin Lawrence presents a fascinating discussion of the experiences of the four children captive aboard La Amistad, children who seem to have had more of an active role than Hollywood’s Cinque. The remaining five chapters of this section focus on children’s experiences in the slave trade and colonial Africa. Yet, despite this heavy focus on Africa, readers begin to understand this imbalance as they progress through the final chapters of this first section. Just as the editors challenge customary views of childhood and slavery, they also expand the more commonly used periodization of the Age of Abolition—a strategic move that forces readers to look into the twentieth century. As they point out in their introduction, many chapters included in this section discuss the experiences of enslaved children living in a time when abolitionists witnessed the increased emancipation of slaves throughout the Western world. However, slavery continued in Africa and still continues there today. Therefore, while William Clarence-Smith shows how lax Catholic policies were in ending slavery in central Africa, Trevor Getz discusses the ineptitude and cultural naiveté of the colonial administrators handling enslaved children in the early colonial Gold Coast. After reading about the state enslavement of children in post-emancipation Senegal, as discussed by Bernard Moitt, one is not surprised that the practice persisted. Hopefully these chapters push the reader to question those enlightened abolitionists of...

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present (review)

Salih, Sara. 2011. Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from Abolition Era to Present. New York: Routledge. $125 hc. $88 sc. 204 pp.In Representing Mixed Race, Sara Salih approaches her topic, she puts it, by working against contemporary academic grain, which has frequently sought to uncover and examine affect, interiority, psychic operations of racial identity, whether of oppressor or oppressed (3). Instead, she grounds her cultural critique in specific statutory laws and sort of overt and covert references to them found in British colonial and postcolonial texts, beginning with what she calls subject-constituting legal and nonlegal (eighteenth-century) discourses from Britain's Caribbean colonies. Salih's approach, which enables her to situate her discussion of mixed-race characters in relation to jurisprudential (human and civil rights) discourses of their day, handily suggests ways to apply her methods to other artworks from other places and different times. Her discussion of evolving presentation of mixed-race subject is greatly enriched by her frequent reference to present-day theorists and cultural critics, among them Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, E. K. Brathwaite, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, Orlando Patterson, and Ann Pellegrini.In her historico-theoretical introductory chapter (subtitled Mulatto in Law and Literature), Salih presents in considerable detail background information, legal documents, critical theory, and research questions conditioning her analysis of study's focal literary and cinematic texts. The chapters that follow engage in nuanced analyses of A Woman of Colour (Anonymous 1808), Marly: Or, a Planter's Life in Jamaica (Anonymous 1828), Dinah Craik's Olive (1850), Richard Hill's The Lights and Shadows of Jamaican History (1859), a range of writings by and about Mary Seacole (1805-1881), Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866), and two twentieth-century films, Mona Lisa (1985) and The Crying Game (1992). This wide array of legal and literary texts is not so sprawling at first it may appear, for Salih proposes in this volume to illustrate coherently the processes of normalization and consolidation of norms regarding legal status, nature, and character of persons of mixed race-and to do so over three centuries' worth of historical and cultural changes.Accordingly, her project requires that her focal texts align themselves not so much with each other with shifting contextual discourses dominant from era to era. Her first chapters, for example, examine impact of slavery- era laws on colonial fiction about tragic mulattos. Later, she treats influence of abolition and Darwin (among others) upon prevailing nineteenth- century discourses on racial evolution and degeneracy these relate to fictionalized treatments of mixed-race characters. Finally, she shows how-in later fiction and twentieth-century film-same-sex taboos condition popular images of mixed-race figures in sexual relationships with whites.In eighteenth century, Salih makes rigorous efforts to document with crucial but little-known archival evidence, social standing of mulattos in Caribbean became legally problematic in ways determined by their visibly mixed bloodlines and by precedent-setting, but often contradictory, legal rulings on personhood (as opposed to chattel status) and property rights of mixed-race offspring of land-owning white citizens. Salih's sophisticated discussion of Marly and A Woman of Colour is contextualized not only by historical and legal factors implicit in their specific storylines and jurisprudential systems and times, but also by recent theoretical and scholarly analyses of discursive violence visited upon slaves and their descendants by laws that pressured mixed-race persons as a collective to redefine themselves according to existing terms of law, rather than refusing and rejecting these terms altogether (21, emphasis in original). …

Why Did the British Abolish the Slave Trade? Econocide Revisited

Econocide. British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, by Seymour Drescher, Second edition, With a new preface by the author and a new foreword by David Brion Davis, xxxii + 279 pp, The University of ...

Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition, by Christer Petley

This slim, yet valuable, monograph explores the world of Jamaican slaveholders from the start of organised British anti-slavery campaigning during the 1780s until the coming of emancipation in the 1830s. During these turbulent years, as Christer Petley demonstrates, embattled Caribbean planters faced grave challenges from a myriad of interrelated and potent forces. They included mounting slave resistance, an increasingly vocal free black/coloured population, British humanitarianism, a wave of missionary endeavour, and a more activist imperial administration. Their principal response was to develop a powerful defence of their society's central institution that, while part of a wider Atlantic movement, was very much rooted in local Jamaican conditions. Its key defining features were an intense commitment to white supremacy allied to a strident opposition to outside interference in their own affairs. While there are clearly suggestive parallels here with the position later adopted by their Southern US counterparts, the outcome was markedly different. Jamaican slaveholders could not, and did not, anticipate North American planters’ road to secession because they were obliged to recognise their continuing dependence on British military and commercial support. As a result, they ultimately accepted emancipation in exchange for financial compensation and a say in how the transition to freedom was managed. In taking this step, they were also influenced by the earlier fate of white slaveholders in French St Domingue, which had brought the risks of overt rebellion against imperial authority into sharp focus. Looked at from the perspective of planters, then, the ending of British Caribbean slavery appears as a quintessential ‘middle era’ emancipation.

Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition - By Christer Petley

Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition - By Christer Petley

The Black Presence in England and Wales after the Abolition Act, 1807-1930

The Black Presence in England and Wales after the Abolition Act, 1807-1930⋆ Caroline Bressey (bio) 1. Black Historical Geographies The black people who oversaw the 'era of abolition' were diverse and the majority probably lived their lives as ordinary members of the working class. This essay aims to give an overview of some of the people who were a part of the continuous black presence in England and Wales during the 'era of abolition', throughout the long nineteenth century and into the last century. The essay ends with the formation of the League of Coloured People in 1930. The League sought to fight increasingly overt racism in Britain, realized especially through the entrenchment of the colour bar which impacted upon the lives of black people from the Edwardian era until well beyond the Windrush era. As Kathy Chater has illustrated in her paper for this volume, the ethnic origins of black people was not regularly recorded in official documents in Britain during the era of slavery. This pattern continued into the nineteenth century, and included the national census when it was introduced, and thus it is equally difficult to determine how large the black population in Britain was during this period. However, it seems that many historians have taken this absence of statistics of the black presence to mean an absence of black people themselves. Kenneth Little acknowledged that if the evidence of late nineteenth-century commentators was to be believed then by the 1870s the black man or woman had virtually disappeared except for crossing sweepers and an occasional black bishop.1 Peter Ackroyd's London biography confirmed this as their presence was accorded only ten lines (although this amounts to a paragraph which is ten lines longer than many other publications). The final sentence of that paragraph tells us that, in the nineteenth century black people 'rarely appear in novels or narratives, except as occasional grotesques, and their general fate seems to have been one of settlement among the urban poor'.2 As Jan Marsh's recent exhibition of black figures in visual culture between 1800 and 1900 illustrated, there are other mediums which can give us alternative references [End Page 224] to the black presence. These include images such as 'Victorian "crowd scenes" which characteristically include at least one black figure, in conscious tribute to urban diversity'.3 More ordinary characters have been revealed in studies such as Ian Duffield's research taken from the archive offices of New South Wales and Australia, among which he found 195 black men and six women, including Charlotte Claydon. An unmarried single parent, Claydon stole £6 in Bethnal Green and arrived in Sydney in 1837.4 In my own research I have used institutions with photographic archives as a means of accessing the archives of black people which led me to investigate the black presence in prisons, hospitals and children's homes. Others like Duffield have found similar records fruitful as occasionally the colour of a man or woman's skin is included in a description which accompanies their details. From such archives we know that William Cross Wasdon, a 'man of colour' who was a hawker in Exeter came into contact with the law for 'playing an unlawful game with 3 Thimbles and a Ball' when he was aged 19 in August 1823.5 However, the numbers of the nineteenth century's black working classes who avoided contact with the state because of poverty, illness or crime, are difficult to estimate and very difficult to calculate. They are to be found, as Chater has pointed out, in wills, baptism and other Church records, and newspapers. From such sources the presence of John Day in St Sidwells, Devon comes to light. A 'man of colour', he was a shopkeeper and known in his local neighbourhood as a waiter at dinner and evening parties. We only know about him because the Western Times reported his death in 1837.6 We know one young man was educated at the Gloucester British School in 1845, but his presence is highlighted because he was teased and had tricks played on him. Action was taken, offering rewards to boys who would give information on...

The Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Contextual Fictions of "Race" in the Abolition Era

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen chose to ignore the decisive historical events of her time. Where ... are the Napoleonic wars: the real current of history? But history has many currents, and the social history of the landed families, at that time in England, was among the most important.1 Although it would be difficult to argue that Sanditon (1817) is "historical" in any immediately obvious sense, it is nonetheless clear that the social history of England is central to Jane Austen's last, unfinished text. Critics appear to agree that the novel, which, as Warren Roberts points out, was written during a period of social turbulence in England, reflects anxieties about the shift from one socio-economic structure to another.2 Once a fishing village and agricultural community, Sanditon has been "perverted" into a resort, a "sandy town," where the sea is an exploitable resource and invalidism is a social activity engaged in by characters who are "urban, rootless, irresponsible and self-indulgent." As Tony Tanner puts it, "[Sanditon is] a little parable of change—supersession, supplanting, and substitution."3 These are certainly accurate characterizations, and yet the [End Page 329] majority of the novel's commentators overlook what Edward Said would call its "geographical problematic," the fact that the seaside resort is dependent on economic resources from outside—from other areas of England, and, it seems, from England's Caribbean colonies. I am referring to Miss Lambe, Austen's only "brown" character—so briefly invoked and so tantalizingly incomplete. Certainly, Miss Lambe does not take up much of Sanditon's eleven and a half chapters, and as my title suggests, she never utters a word. All the same, the characters' allusions to the "West India" contingent, along with Miss Lambe's presence in the text, certainly warrant closer critical attention than they have hitherto received. Analyses of Sanditon tend to focus on its local engagements with class, morality, economics, and social change, but as Said points out (twice) in his by-now notorious reading of Mansfield Park, morality in Austen's fictional world is inseparable from its local social basis (this is Raymond Williams's contention). The local social basis is highly dependent on "unnamed outside forces"—specifically, wealth derived from plantations in the Caribbean.4 These forces are quite obvious in Sanditon, where the characters' reactions to the news that "a rich West Indian [family]" is coming to town centre almost uniquely on the perceived economic benefits to the community. In this article, I want to dwell on the valences of the novel's references to "West Indians," along with Austen's brief description of the silent but eloquently suggestive figure of Miss Lambe. Sanditon's geographical and spatial engagements are not invoked with anything like the specificity in Mansfield Park (1814), but it is nonetheless possible to offer contextual readings of the novel that will begin to open the broad expanse of domestic imperialist culture within which it situates itself. Reading Sanditon in the context of widespread contemporary cultural anxieties about "West Indians" (especially "brown" ones) both at home and abroad, as well as fictional expressions of these concerns, will yield a more precise sense of the meaning behind Miss Lambe's appearance in the southern seaside town. I will draw from fictional and non-fictional sources in order to suggest some of the ideological paradigms available to Austen at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Once contextualized, it appears that, even in its unfinished state, [End Page 330] Sanditon departs from sentimentalized representations of "the mulatto" woman by focusing on her economic role in a society where money has superseded morality. Unlike Elaine Jordan (one of the few critics who has tackled the subject of Miss Lambe in any detail), I am not going to place this character alongside what Jordan identifies as a small group of nineteenth-century...

The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775–1810

Caribbean historian Selwyn H. H. Carrington’s painstaking and exhaustive archival research in the Caribbean and England over the last 30 years has finally culminated in the publication of his new book. In it he discusses the critical decline of the sugar plantation economy in the British West Indies followed by the outbreak of the American Revolution. In the foreword, Colin Palmer discusses the importance of Carrington’s work in Caribbean historiography. Lowell J. Ragatz’s The Fall of the Planter Class, 1763–1833 (1929) first argued that the economic decline of the British Caribbean preceded the abolition of the slave trade (1807). Ragatz’s thesis was elaborated further by Eric Williams in his classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Indeed, Carrington’s book has been written largely as a reaffirmation of this “decline-and-abolition thesis,” which was challenged and opposed by our contemporaries, most notably Seymour Drescher in his Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (1977).The book’s first four chapters discuss external factors of the West Indian sugar plantation economy from the pre–American Revolutionary period until after 1775. The author first discusses the establishment of the agro-export monoculture economy in the British Caribbean. The region depended on the metropolis, which imported most of their superior sugar, as well as on the British colonial mainland, which imported their rum and secondary crops while supplying them with foodstuffs and lumber. The outbreak of the American Revolution ended the seemingly well-balanced trade between the West Indes and the former British mainland, and the British government’s increasingly restrictive policy for the regulation of the West Indes trade further deteriorated the plantation economy of the Caribbean colonies. The middle part of the book is “chiefly concerned with internal issues” (p. 7); Carrington assesses the continued growth of planters’ debts at the end of the eighteenth century, despite their efforts at amelioration on individual plantations. The last four chapters analyze the continued decline in the colonial Caribbean economy between 1789 and 1810; the author demonstrates that the economy was in constant decline despite the seeming adjustments during and after the Haitian Revolution. Carrington accordingly concludes that the abolition of the slave trade was by no means the cause of the decline in the Caribbean sugar plantation economy.Carrington successfully presents a complex series of historical events in which important historical actors, both external and internal, took distinctive actions for their economic self-interests. Externally, England, after having lost its mainland colony, did not protect the sugar economy of her Caribbean colonies. Internally, the colonial elite continued to lose their economic power, and the colonial societies began to observe new problems. The steam engine and other technological innovations were not introduced in the West Indies until the sugar economy was in decline. Whereas Caribbean planters tried to resolve their financial problems by importing more female slaves for reproduction and by hiring their slaves out for wage earning, slaves themselves took advantage of the shaky plantation economy to find and create new and better socioeconomic opportunities. Some even managed to purchase their freedom. Their decisions and actions clearly illuminate the breakdown of slave society from inside, through the personal negotiations of power between the powerful (the absentee planters) and the powerless (the enslaved). This reader wonders if these middle chapters might have been developed into a separate monograph, which could appeal to a wide range of scholars and students of slavery and emancipation in the Americas.It should also be noted that the author tends to be repetitive in his arguments, and he does not discuss the abolition of the slave trade to any great extent. Furthermore, despite his statement that his study “has been fertilized by modern scholarship through historical investigation” (p. 10), his bibliography includes only a handful secondary works published after 1990. One wonders if that merely reflects a lack of interest in the topics this book deals with. Nonetheless, this book is clearly a valuable contribution to Caribbean history, studies of New World slave systems, the transatlantic slave trade, and emancipation, as well as to the growing field of Atlantic history. It will be well appreciated by historians who specialize in the economic history of major slave societies of the Americas. Carrington is also to be praised for his meticulous use of an amazing quality and quantity of primary sources, including abundant plantation papers that have never been presented before.

From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930

From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930

From slavery to neoslavery: the bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the era of abolition, 1827-1930

From slavery to neoslavery: the bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the era of abolition, 1827-1930