Planter Class Research Articles

Blurring Disciplinary Boundaries: The Material Culture of Improvement during the Age of Abolition in Barbados

This article uses plantation archaeology to explore white Barbadian responses to the British anti-slavery campaign during the late eighteenth century. By blurring disciplinary boundaries between history and archaeology, we examine how competing British and Caribbean images of West Indian planters were contested through material culture. Drawing on an archaeological case study at St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation, St. Peter, Barbados, we highlight how the landscape of slavery was transformed with the emergent, English ideal of ‘improvement’. This early Barbadian response to anti-slavery was a form of political mobilization deployed by the planter elite, allowing for the construction of new racial and cultural identities.

Plantations and Homes: The Material Culture of the Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Elite

This article is about the wealth and material culture of the Jamaican elite during the age of abolition. The planter class had a huge material investment in plantation slavery, and wealth derived from this allowed it to live ostentatiously and to consume conspicuously. Those who did not migrate away from Jamaica were drawn towards colonial towns, many of them taking up residence in, or at the edges of, urban centres. Lists of personal property found in probate inventories show how planters cultivated separate spheres of activity on the plantations and at their peri-urban homes, putting physical and cultural distance between themselves and the sources of their wealth.

Unsettled Houses: The Material Culture of the Missionary Project in Jamaica in the Era of Emancipation

This article examines the role of material culture, particularly clothing, houses and furniture, in the lives of nonconformist Protestant missionaries in Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century, in relation both to the lifestyles of the missionaries and their families and their encounters with enslaved people. While these missionaries hoped to improve the lives of the slaves and help them negotiate their transition to freedom, their visions of the material lives to which the formerly enslaved should aspire shows them to have been in some ways as intent as the planter class in denying agency to people of colour and mandating that they conduct their lives in accordance with English ideas regarding class, labour, religion, gender and sexuality.

McNeill’s Rangers in the Public Memory of Hardy County, West Virginia

McNeill’s Rangers in the Public Memory of Hardy County, West Virginia Richard A. Hulver This article uses the McNeill’s Rangers of Hardy County, West Virginia, as a case study that demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting the past of a divided public. The McNeill’s Rangers were a group of partisan Confederate soldiers who, using Hardy County as their main headquarters, fought a guerrilla war against the Union. Following the war, a heroic memory developed within Hardy County, due in part to the rangers, and their supporters, actively reporting their own version of the war. The heroic memory dominated early histories of the rangers and still exists today. In the late 1930s, the state of West Virginia placed a wayside marker in Moorefield, West Virginia, commemorating the rangers. This marker perpetuates the heroic memory and fails to place the rangers within broader context of guerrilla war or Civil War memory. The following article will place Hardy County in its historic context, briefly explain the service of the McNeill’s Rangers in the Civil War, demonstrate how initial memories of the rangers were formed, and discuss contemporary efforts to revise these early romanticized interpretations. Place: Hardy County, West Virginia Those who take ownership of history greatly influence that history. History of place, local demographics, culture, and popular memories are influences that persistently work on a history. Hardy County, West Virginia, is located in the eastern portion of the state and borders Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Much of its culture and economy is connected toward places outside West Virginia. The South Branch of the Potomac River flows through the county, creating a fertile farming valley primarily centered on livestock and grain production. Areas of the county east and west of the South Branch Valley are more mountainous and remote. The agriculture industry, primarily poultry farming, remains the predominant industry in Hardy County today. Poultry farmers throughout the region send their livestock to large processing and distribution plants in Rockingham County, Virginia, and in Moorefield, Hardy County’s [End Page 21] seat. As of 2013, the population of Hardy County stands slightly under two-million people—95 percent white, 3.5 percent Latino, and 2.9 percent African American.1 Significant numbers of Moorefield’s minority groups provide labor to poultry plants.2 Today’s diverse geography and economy of Hardy County also influenced its historical trajectory. Hardy County played a critical, yet understudied role in the Civil War and West Virginia’s contested statehood. Large, fertile tracts of land within the South Branch Valley fostered farms labored on by slaves, which, on the eve of the Civil War, were just less than ten percent of the county’s population.3 Wealthy landowners in the region, who dominated the politics of the county, used slave labor to tend to crops and large cattle herds through the Revolutionary and antebellum eras. Yeomen farmers in the mountainous regions tended their smaller farms primarily with the labor of family and neighbors. When war came to Hardy County, the population had divided loyalties. Some supported the planter class and slave system of Old Virginia, while others remained loyal to the Union. The area remained predominately pro-Confederate throughout the war, but citizens took up arms for both armies. The abundant agricultural resources offered by the South Branch Valley made it a location coveted by both the Union and Confederacy. Additionally, its close proximity to important cities in the Shenandoah Valley gave Hardy County strategic and logistic value. Residents of Hardy County regularly saw armies of both the Union and Confederacy inhabit their towns, confiscate their property, and harass enemies. They lived among violence, and often fought among themselves depending on their loyalties. Nationally, the county was removed from the United States and became a part of the Confederacy in the first stages of the war. Then, it was stripped from Virginia and returned to the Union through what many residents would consider an illegitimate West Virginia. Locally, citizens of the county remained split between the planter mentality and pro-Union sympathizers.4 After the war, the very pro-Union western portion of the county became Grant County, named for the famed Union general. Reporting the basic...

Book Review: The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War, by Debra Reddin van Tuyll

The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War. Debra Reddin van Tuyll. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 344 pp. $99.95 hbk.Debra Reddin van Tuyll of Georgia Regents University is an accomplished historian, and her study of the Confederate press during the Civil War is based on primary sources-newspapers, Confederate government records, letters and personal commu- nications, and contemporary documents of all kinds. Author or editor of several other books, Professor van Tuyll has written a superb book that will have its readers enthralled by the pace and delights of its story and impressed by its documentation. Consuming The Confederate Press is rather like eating a piece of roasted corn from the outside toward the middle.This book goes a long way to solving that conundrum of not knowing what you do not know. Probably few readers have read the J. Cutler Andrews volumes about the Civil War coverage by the Northern and Southern presses. The Civil War historian Gary Gallagher has estimated that there were approximately ten thousand battles, from the First Manassas through the Seven Days, to the fall of Atlanta and retreat to Appomattox, if all the skirmishes and small battles in the flatter lands to the West, the mountains and swamps of the East, and along the rivers with their forts, and elsewhere are included. There has been on average, Gallagher estimates, the publication of a book, article, news story, pamphlet, film, novel, or other such media product every day since the opening of the war at Fort Sumter in April 1861. The Civil War goes on. The literature on the war and its causes are vast and growing. But the literature on the press is really neither. This is an important and overdue addition to the literature produced by American historians.Professor van Tuyll presents newspapers in a comprehensive way. The book is not just a review of how battles were covered but examines how hard it was for newspa- pers to hold onto printers and journalists who were drawn to the patriotic attractions of duty at the front (early in the war). The study presents a case of study of newspaper subscribers (from whom editors found it challenging to collect payment). One in fifty was of the planter class, while one in ten was a merchant, and about four of ten were farmers. Those planters' views, though, permeated-or contaminated, depending on your perspective-the region and propelled the nation to war. Of course, railroads spread across the North far more than in the South, and mail was slower in rural regions. Still, Southern newspapers published stories that had appeared in Northern newspapers in a week or less. Of course, the reverse was true, but battles took place along the Mississippi and in Virginia and other border states in the beginning.As in the North, Southern military leaders often kept reporters at a distance for fear that they would leak important military information, through a contempt of journalists that remains. Southern newspapers, like the region as a whole, cherished individual freedom-ironically, despite slavery-and there was no shortage of criticism of President Jefferson Davis as Davis gathered more power in the presidency in the late war years. A few newspaper editors, especially in North Carolina and Georgia as well as in the Confederate capital, were thorns in the side of Davis, along with the gover- nors of those two states. Some newspapers sought to find peace, but not surrender, with the North. Because the South eschewed political parties, the criticism seemed individual and uncollected-and dangerous. But for the most part, it was tolerated. Throughout the war, editors and correspondents balanced what they could say versus what they should say, in-generally-an atmosphere that favored a good degree of press freedom but a respect for authority. …

The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere

The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere

Labor, Rematerialized: Putting Environments to Work in the Americas

The late Guyanese historian and political activist Walter Rodney began his posthumously publishedA History of the Guyanese Working People 1881–1905(1981) by analyzing the “physical environment and class interests” in coastal Guyana. Writing against narratives that privileged the roles played by European capital and technology, Rodney argued that working people made large contributions to the “humanization” of the Guyanese environment. He noted that a powerful planter class placed severe constraints on working people who were “in no position to control the available technology or to initiate environmental intervention.” Political power was important, but Rodney noted that the environment played “a determining role in limiting the activities ofallsections of the population [original emphasis].” Writing an “intelligible narrative” of Guyana's history then, was “impossible” without an understanding of Guyana's environment.

Disability, Reactionary Appropriation, and Strategies of Manipulation in Simms's Woodcraft

Disability, Reactionary Appropriation, and Strategies of Manipulation in Simms's Woodcraft Taylor Hagood (bio) One of the most useful things about studying a politically reactionary text such as William Gilmore Simms's Woodcraft: Or, Hawks About the Dovecoat is that doing so can reveal the rhetorical maneuvers used to convey and promote its ideological platform. Scholars have long considered Woodcraft to be an "anti-Tom" novel designed to counteract the powerful depiction of slavery as a social and cultural evil in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.1 What has not been sufficiently analyzed are the narrative and rhetorical strategies Simms employs to defend race-based slavery in the United States. A particularly productive approach to identifying and understanding these strategies is that of disability studies, with its relentless efforts to expose constructs of normality in the context of politics surrounding the human body. What such an approach makes clear is how central corporeality is to the novel's rhetorical, political, and thematic fabric. Specifically, Simms uses disability and abnormality to manipulate the reader into moral conflicts designed to normalize slavery and the white southern aristocracy's values, a maneuvering that has the ultimate effect of appropriating a progressive vision of race and class equality only to employ it in the service of a reactionary aim. [End Page 39] The specific technique of manipulative maneuvering in the novel mirrors the combat-engagement technique that gives the novel the title by which it is most often remembered (more on its original title, which is very relevant to the topic at hand, later). A large section of the first half of the book presents a detailed account of the techniques of what Simms calls "woodcraft." In chapters ten through eighteen, the evil poor white Bostwick and his criminal companions ambush the widow Eveleigh, her son, and her overseer Fordham on their way home from a trip to Charleston to recover property from the British after the Revolution. When Fordham and young Eveleigh manage to escape Bostwick and his crew, there follows a protracted episode in which the opposing figures position and reposition themselves in the woods in order to gain an advantage. The section is fascinating if tedious, as each participant employs tricks of various kinds to locate the enemy while obfuscating his own position. There are some classics of this kind of deception: at one point, a character puts his hat on a ramrod and lifts it over some bushes to fool the opponent into thinking he is shooting at an actual head. More importantly, the episode is larger than the sum of its parts—it is not only meant to be entertaining but also instructional on multiple levels. Throughout the section Fordham teaches Eveleigh's son the maneuvers of woodcraft (chapter fourteen is actually entitled "Lessons in Woodcraft"). I think it fair to say that Eveleigh is not the only intended pupil: the reader should take instruction from the section too, not just for any possible military situations but also for other settings, not the least of which is the act of reading. Understanding Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to be a skillfully constructed text that uses sentiment in order to help advance an antislavery platform, Simms seeks to engage readers emotionally in his justification of slavery. In short, the woodcraft section can serve as a treatise on what Simms is doing in his novel, a metaphor for the warfare for public sentiment in which he sees himself and Stowe engaged. Metaphorically, Simms is Fordham, Stowe Bostwick. In elaborating on Simms's novelistic woodcraftery, it is important to see that the various maneuvers he employs are directed to one end—the normalization of slavery. Presented within Stowe's moral and familial framework slavery emerges as monstrous, so Simms must offer a different moral and familial framework. He sets about devising ways to show slavery as a natural and necessary moral good that sustains family and community in the face of morally reprehensible British and poor white enemies (the latter adversary, interestingly enough, he shares with Stowe). [End Page 40] Central to this normalization process is a complex relational positioning of bodily abnormality that lays out a discourse...

Uma leitura sobre o Império do Brasil no contexto do século XIX: diálogo com Ricardo Salles

Resumo O presente artigo analisa o texto O Império do Brasil no contexto do século XIX. Escravidão nacional, classe senhorial e intelectuais na formação do Estado, procurando ressaltar a sua contribuição para o debate historiográfico acerca da construção do Estado Imperial brasileiro durante o Segundo Reinado.

O Império do Brasil no contexto do século XIX. Escravidão nacional, classe senhorial e intelectuais na formação do Estado

Resumo O ensaio analisa as relações entre a formação do Estado nacional brasileiro, no período entre 1847 e 1889, e a formação e desenvolvimento históricos da classe senhorial nucleada em torno da Bacia do rio Paraíba do Sul. Para efetuar esta análise, lança mão de categorias gramscianas, tais como intelectuais, classe nacional, hegemonia, e situa a experiência histórica do Império do Brasil com outras experiências similares do século XIX, particularmente aquela da Itália.

A Moral Man: Eugene Genovese, 1930-2012

A Moral Man:Eugene Genovese, 1930-2012* David Moltke-Hansen The doorbell rang at the South Carolina Historical Society in the spring of 1987. When I opened it, the couple standing there asked if David Moltke-Hansen were in. Then Gene and Betsey introduced themselves and said they had just stopped by to say how much they admired something I had written and to meet me. That night I told my wife to shoot me; it would never get better than that. Fifteen or so years later, I was visiting with Gene and Betsey in Atlanta. Gene was distraught, almost frantic. It was Betsey's birthday, and the flowers he had ordered had not come. Betsey reassured him that she knew he was always thinking of her—except, of course, during baseball games and when he was reading and writing. That, I thought to myself, doesn't leave much time except in dreams, at meals, and in the car, with Betsey driving, because Gene never learned. Until the last couple of years, when his health deteriorated even further, Gene worked incessantly. Witness the three books he saw through the press after his beloved Betsey's death five years and nine months ago. In addition, he worked on the five volumes of Betsey's selected, uncollected writings, read manuscripts, and went through four newspapers a day. He worked like that for nearly sixty years. That abiding drive hints at another that animated those years. Gene always was a moralist, whether as a Marxist or as a Catholic. He recognized the evil that men and women do through the acquisition and abuse of power, and he wanted to understand and combat that evil. At one point scientific socialism seemed the way, but then communism failed and failed him, even as Marxism continued to influence what and how he wrote. Last year, rereading old political pieces of his from the 1960s and 1970s, he noted wryly: my reasoning was impeccable, just not my premises. Uncompromising in his moral judgments, Gene thought it unforgivable weakness to quail from necessary action because of possible collateral damage. And he was entirely ready to see me become such damage. Once he told me (after just having handed me a new book that he had dedicated to me) that I should and would die at the revolution. Which revolution, I asked? Any worth its salt, he said. Liberals, social democrats, and other mealy-mouthed, intellectually flaccid temporizers, the implication was, need to be eliminated; or at least have power wrested or kept from them. He was not fond of libertarians either, thinking radical individualism radically wrong in the face of the collective challenges posed by power's corruption. Now, when I become president, now when I become pope, Gene would say—suggesting he should be both—things will be different. The sad difference is that we no longer can hear him say that. We shall remember, however, more than his humor and passion and moral drive. We can still celebrate a brilliant interpreter of American slavery and the planter class, a tough colleague, and a generous friend. [End Page 27] Footnotes * This eulogy originally appeared on the Historical Society blog, http://histsociety.blogspot.com. Copyright © 2012 The Historical Society

The Dogs of War: 1861 by Emory M. Thomas (review)

Reviewed by: The Dogs of War: 1861 by Emory M. Thomas Mark F. Miller The Dogs of War: 1861. Emory M. Thomas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-1951-7470-0, 128 pp., cloth, $14.95. Emory Thomas, one of the deans of Civil War historians, has offered a provocative slender volume on the coming of war through the summer of 1861. Thomas describes his work as "a think book" of revisionist history in which he proposes to "ask new questions of essentially well-known facts" (ix). Thomas asks and concludes, feigning a sense of disbelief, "What were they thinking?" He suggests that "the Civil War happened because nearly no one had a clue about what they were doing" (ix). In his opening chapter, Thomas analyzes the "Martial Moment" and samples prewar attitudes of the leading contenders north and south. Amazed by the "downright stupidity" of most of the principal combatants, Thomas finds several different points of view as the country faced off through the winter and spring of 1861 (8). Many [End Page 377] felt that should there be war, it would be a single engagement or a brief campaign. However, Thomas also finds many in the South who longed for "an apocalyptic answer" to cleanse the landscape once and for all; likewise, an element in the North argued the therapeutic efforts of a war that would be "good for us"(ix). A fourth and final faction and the largest contingent of all believed that war would never happen because the cowards on the other side would just run away. Throughout his treatment, Thomas's informal style is engaging as he moves from first person to third and back again. His seminar-like approach works nicely as he quotes himself from earlier works and effortlessly integrates the contributions of other historians, demonstrating his easy command of the secondary literature. Thomas worries at one point about "anachronistic applications," but the reader is treated to countless references to historical analogies and modern day examples. The reader can expect to find parallels to "don't ask, don't tell," mosh pits, Abu Ghraib and Andersonville, the Viet Cong, the Iraq wars, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban. There are lessons to be learned from these historic antecedents. Additionally, Thomas is happy to posit a number of questions and leave them unanswered; the "think book" works on a number of levels. Thomas examines the senior military leadership of both sides through a series of penetrating sketches and concludes that most military experts understood what a long and costly war this might be, but amazingly, most politicians did not consult or take their advice when they did. In particular, Winfield Scott's advice was broadly dismissed as too political; the general offered his president four options: accept the Crittenden Compromise, guaranteeing slavery and therefore avoiding war; avoid confrontation by collecting tariffs offshore; wage war by raising three hundred thousand troops over three years, leaving "fifteen devastated provinces . . . held for generations by heavy garrisons . . . and to what good?"; or allow the South to depart (42). Thomas has parallel chapters on Lincoln and Davis. Lincoln's primary weakness was his inability to understand the southern resolve to fight. He was convinced that rank-and-file southerners would not follow the planter class and was, as a result, dismissive of secession arguments. Davis grasped better the demands of the office and, although outplayed at Fort Sumter, understood the consequences of war but felt duty and honor required him to do it. He thought the South would win with his "offensive defensive" strategy and even if conditions deteriorated over time he could always refight the American Revolution and employ guerrilla tactics as a last resort. In a final chapter, Thomas follows that action to Bull Run. Using two regiments as his guide, the 5th Wisconsin and the 8th Georgia, Thomas charts the initial excitement and exuberance of the "phony war" through the picnics and parades to the deadly consequences of First Manassas. The "unintended consequences" of letting out the dogs of war seemed too predictable. Throughout this volume, Thomas is quick to suggest the timeliness of an examination of the Civil War. The war still...

The Black Atlantic as Dystopia:

The Black Atlantic as Dystopia:

The rise of a new planter class? Some countercurrents from British Guiana and Trinidad, 1807–33

This article interrogates the notion of the fall of a single “planter class” in the British colonies and argues that in the new slave territories of British Guiana and Trinidad, the slave economy flourished between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in the 1830s. The wealth extracted in these colonies from the labor of enslaved people, especially in British Guiana, largely flowed to a group of absentee slave owners in Britain and created a new fraction of the planter class in the metropole, outside the conventional sphere of the established Jamaican planters. Using the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, appointed to oversee the distribution of £20 million in compensation to the slave owners under the Abolition Act of 1833, the article traces the dimensions of this grouping of new men, many of them concentrated in the mercantile elites of Glasgow and Liverpool. Such men had demonstrable political weight in Britain, and the article argues that only by acknowledging their role and influence can we make sense either of the structure of the emancipation settlement, which favored slave owners in the new territories over the old plantocracy, or, more profoundly, of the continued vigor of the West Indians in negotiating that settlement, a vigor which troubled Eric Williams, given his view that, by the 1830s, the West Indian planters were “[a]n outworn interest whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in historical perspective.”

Rethinking the fall of the planter class

This issue of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, and funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this issue, to bring together scholars currently working on the history of the British West Indian planter class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to discuss how, when, and why the fortunes of the planters went into decline. As this introduction notes, the difficulties faced by the planter class in the British West Indies from the 1780s onwards were an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. The American historian Lowell Ragatz published the first detailed historical account of their fall. His work helped to inform the influential arguments of Eric Williams, which were later challenged by Seymour Drescher. Recent research has begun to offer fresh perspectives on the debate about the decline of the planters, and this collection brings together articles taking a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social history.

Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean

Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites to dominate and control the enslaved majority. By the end of the eighteenth century, British metropolitan observers had an entrenched opinion of Caribbean whites as gluttons. Travelers reported on the sumptuous meals and excessive drinking of the planter class. Abolitionists associated these features of local society with the corrupting influences of slavery. Excessive consumption and lack of self-control were seen as symptoms of white creole failure. This article explores how local cuisine and white creole eating rituals developed as part of slave societies and examines the ways in which ideas about hospitality and gluttony fed into the debates over slavery that led to the dismantling of slavery and the fall of the planter class.

The decline of Jamaica's interracial households and the fall of the planter class, 1733–1823

The theory of planter decline traditionally implied that social and sexual chaos in the West Indies produced a middle caste of mixed-race individuals who destabilized colonial life. This article contends that for most of the eighteenth century, interracial relationships were normative unions that did not undercut the central function of the sugar and slave economy. In Jamaica, colonial regulations against free people of color came with individual exemptions that allowed mixed-race elites to skirt the very laws intended to keep them marginalized. Despite differences of color, these personal and familial connections between free coloreds and white fathers helped to maintain strong social hierarchies among the island's wealthiest ranks. Abolitionist attacks against these family units, however, along with the ever present threat of enslaved revolt, changed conceptions of the Jamaican household at the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, as Jamaica's mixed-race population grew and became more endogamous, personal connections to whites dwindled, escalating political conflict on the island. Interracial relationships, therefore, did not herald planter decline, but rather forestalled it.

Ideal Communities and Planter Women's Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

For New English settlers, seventeenth-century Ireland offered opportunities for career advancement and economic reward. But moving to Ireland also entailed the establishment of new social connections. For members of the planter class, writing was a means of building networks and consolidating a minority community that was often diffuse and spread across the country. Equally, the act of imagining community prompted their writing. The letters of Susan Montgomery, who arrived in Ulster on her husband's appointment as bishop of Derry, are a primary example of the aspiration to ideal community, envisaged in epistolary writing. The community available to Montgomery in Ulster and its evolution through the petitionary writing of the next generation are discussed. This is then related to the literary strategies of the poet, Anne Southwell, whose construction of ideal community is illuminated by new research on her friend, Cicely, Lady Ridgeway.

‘Devoted Islands’ and ‘That Madman Wilberforce’: British Proslavery Patriotism During the Age of Abolition

The debate about the reform and dismantling of the British-Atlantic slave system, which began in earnest during the 1780s, threatened more than the economic interests of the British-Caribbean planter class. The rise of humanitarianism was one aspect of a new mode of British imperialism that also challenged slaveholders' self-image as loyal and free members of an extended British world. Questions of national identity, patriotism and the British constitution were central to the trans-imperial controversy over slavery. Private letters and contributions to public debates demonstrate that proslavery reactions to abolitionism were deeply rooted in a set of assumptions about the symbiotic relationship between colony and metropole, in which white slaveholders in the West Indies helped to prop up prosperity and order throughout the transatlantic British world. Slaveholders claimed that reforms to the slave system were dangerous acts of betrayal and affronts to their status as freeborn Britons. Focusing on these issues sheds fresh light not only on the abolition debate and late-eighteenth century tensions about the future of the empire, but also on the broader theme of imperial conflicts over settler rights and white colonists' claims to British liberties.

Contesting ‘Black’ Liberty and Subjecthood in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1730s–1780s

Tracing the shifting meanings of British liberty and subjecthood in relation to persons of African descent in the West Indian colonies – from tentative acceptance and ambivalence in the early eighteenth century, to outright hostility after 1760 – this article argues that planter elites ultimately embraced a rigid, outmoded racial ideology in order to preserve white hegemony. In Jamaica in particular, the master class came to see free ‘black’ participation in civil society as a threat to their own birthright and privileged status as transplanted Britons. Yet non-white West Indians also made use of the English system of law and liberty in their efforts to affirm their identity as British subjects and to be considered as such by metropolitan Britons.