Slave Revolt Research Articles

Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

Reviewed by: Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie Michael A. Schoeppner (bio) Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade. By Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 345. Cloth, $99.99; paper $29.99.) Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s book is not the first study of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the Creole, but it is the best. While it includes the story of the nineteen individuals who led the revolt and the story of the diplomatic exchanges by well-known American and British politicians, neither group occupy center stage as they do in previous works. Rather, Kerr-Ritchie’s is an ensemble cast. He provides painstaking detail for his wide range of characters: the slave traders who invested in the American maritime slave trade, the Creole’s crew and “cargo,” the black Bahamians who escorted the formerly enslaved people ashore, British colonial officers, American and British diplomats, and even the lawyers who later litigated the insurance claims in Louisiana’s courtrooms. [End Page 258] Kerr-Ritchie deploys this large cast of characters to situate the Creole revolt within a broad political, social, and economic context. In the first and third chapters, for example, he explains the divergent trajectories of the American and British empires with regard to the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. The geographic proximity of the two empires, especially the British Caribbean and the American South, meant that these diverging political regimes were in frequent contact. The Creole, then, did not just sail the treacherous waters between Florida and the Bahamas, it traveled between two starkly different and increasingly antagonistic political regimes. Likewise, the second chapter situates the fateful Creole voyage within the broader scope of the American maritime slave trade. Kerr-Ritchie aptly demonstrates the continuity of the maritime slave trade before and after 1808. Enslaved people’s experiences of detachment, dread, and violence in the transatlantic slave trade had their counterparts in the interstate maritime trade. The fourth chapter traces the actual brig Creole from its initial construction to its ultimate demise in 1842. The boat was constructed to be an ideal interstate conveyor of enslaved people. Slave trading was big business, and merchant houses, insurance companies, and banking institutions all contributed to its maintenance. So, while readers have to wait more than one hundred pages to reach the actual revolt, they are better prepared to understand it. The Creole rebels might have been an aberration insofar as successful slave “mutinies” go, but the diplomacy of slavery and the interstate maritime slave were anything but aberrational; they sat at the heart of antebellum America. All of this contextual work lays the foundation for Kerr-Ritchie’s recounting of the rebellion and its massive reverberations. While much of the actual revolt is well known, Rebellious Passage offers the reader something important and new by placing people of color at the center of the postrevolt story, not just at the violent climax. The rebels who overtook the ship chose to head for British territory. Once reaching Bahamian waters, the formerly enslaved people decided to leave the vessel and seek protection from British authorities. The British West Indian regiment of black soldiers secured the vessel while diplomats debated the appropriate course of action. Everyday black Bahamians, many working on small watercraft, facilitated the enslaved people’s flight from the ship and forced the hand of the British state. Thus, while white officials at the time put themselves at the center of the Creole’s story of slavery and freedom, Kerr-Ritchie explains that their actions were always in response to people of color on the ground, on the waves, and on the ship itself. This is one of Rebellious Passage’s key contributions; the British state did not free the slaves of the Creole. Rather, [End Page 259] the self-emancipated allowed the British state, itself compelled by its black subjects, to protect the liberty they already held. Rebellious Passage, then, is self-consciously history from the “bottom upward” (xxv). The final four chapters move away from the Bahamas and are largely situated in diplomatic parlors and Louisiana courtrooms...

Firey Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History by Maurya Wickstrom

Reviewed by: Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History by Maurya Wickstrom Rosa E. Schneider FIERY TEMPORALITIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE: THE INITIATION OF HISTORY. By Maurya Wickstrom. Methuen Drama Engage series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018; pp. 264. At the nexus of phenomenology, theatre/performance studies, and the philosophy of time, Maurya Wickstrom’s excellent and finely detailed Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History offers a new politics of time that rejects the sense of a stable and triumphant march forward, while imagining a new orientation toward the future and disrupting imperialist and racist histories along the way. For theatre scholars, her book shifts focus from the way performances end (the climax, the denouement, the “11 o’clock number”) to how performances initiate new beginnings and create moments of extended possibility in place of endings. These possibilities depend on Wickstrom’s three theories of time: the new present, penultimate time, and kairos. All three challenge the notion of finite endings as well as, in the case of the second chapter, revolution. As Wickstrom rightly argues, if the conception of time is altered, so the definition of history is transformed. History, in her estimation, is not a narrative of events or movements, but a state of possibility that can bring about new conditions of justice. This reframing is particularly intriguing for the theatre, as plays about history and historical subjectivity have entered a new renaissance—for example, in the works of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Paula Vogel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Naomi Wallace, and Lynn Nottage. Although Wickstrom does not engage with these plays specifically, her theories of temporality are particularly useful for explaining how plays that are concerned with history manipulate time not only in their dramaturgies, but also in their approach to historical periodization. Although her claims about temporality are complex, she expertly illuminates them through thickly described performance analyses that range over a variety of forms. Wickstrom’s first chapter is a detailed introduction, outlining her theoretical concepts, guiding principles, and terminology. She begins to explore the new possibilities offered by her theories of time in chapter 2, in which she reads a pair of plays on the Haitian revolution through Alain Badiou’s theory of the “new present.” Badiou’s argument is that when revolutionary ideals reappear in different forms in different moments in time, they produce “new presents.” Wickstrom reads C. L. R. James’s Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History and Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe as successful stagings of the triumph of this new present. For example, in James’s second scene, which dramatizes the beginning of the revolution in a voodoo ceremony, the leaders of the new rebellion harness the energy of both a previous slave rebellion led by a slave named Mackandal and the more recent French Revolution, as Dessalines declares that his comrades’ password shall be “Liberty or Death.” This moment mingles three revolutionary moments by bringing the present and the past onto the stage simultaneously. The “new present” reframes both these plays from tragedies of failure to resurgences of revolutionary possibility. This refocus takes advantage of the theatre’s process of embodiment, by which audiences see these revolutions play out before their eyes again and again. If chapter 2 reinvents the way we see the past, the third chapter uses several performance analyses to reveal how theatre can stretch out the moments before the end. While the previous chapter is inspired by Badiou, this one takes its cue from Giorgio Agamben and his conception of penultimate time—the time before the end (her colloquial example is the time between a diagnosis of terminal cancer and the moment of death). While penultimate time does not prevent death for Wickstrom, the theory changes the way that we understand the meaning of life. Death is no longer the culmination [End Page 121] of life, but existence becomes measured by the time we have to change time. For theatre studies scholars, this perspective shifts attention away from endings and toward process. Wickstrom details her theory of penultimate time using a richly described performance of Gob Squad’s 2016...

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 Colleen A. Vasconcellos Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833. By Daniel Livesay. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. vii + 411 pp. Cloth $45, paper $29.99, e-book $29.99. In Children of Uncertain Fortune, Daniel Livesay investigates the lives, experiences, and migrations of 360 mixed-race individuals in a very complex intellectual history of the changing nature of race and family in the British Atlantic world during what he describes as the long eighteenth century. By focusing on a hundred-year period between 1733 and 1833, Livesay expertly demonstrates how the conceptualization of race in the Atlantic world changed from a very fluid idea to one that became increasingly obtuse, as individual households navigated and negotiated both colonial and metropolitan attitudes toward what became normalized as the “Atlantic family.” At the start of Livesay’s analysis, we see white Britons placing their faith upon mixed-race elites who were thought to be the “vanguard of a new type of colonial settlement” (398) in the absence of a large white settler population in Jamaica. Yet, privilege became the exception as the increased passage of laws designed to control a steadily growing free population of color only eroded political rights and limited financial freedom. Marriage reforms and inheritance caps imposed even more barriers to legitimacy, striking a major blow to anyone of African descent living in the empire. After Tacky’s Rebellion ended in June of 1760, ideas of race and family began to narrow even further as abolitionist sentiment against the transatlantic slave trade gained traction in Parliament. The increased migration of mixed-race elites to England further complicated the issue, as they increasingly attended prestigious schools, [End Page 309] took prized apprenticeships, married into prominent families, and ultimately became more visible within polite English society. Negotiations in both public and private spheres based on geographical and genealogical factors encompassed family on both sides of the Atlantic, as concerns of kinship, race, and belonging increasingly challenged Britain’s need to compartmentalize their racial classifications and social hierarchies. By the 1780s, caught in a backlash against enslaved revolt and American independence, migrants of color quickly came to symbolize the breakdown and instability surrounding British hegemony in the Atlantic world. Deemed an improper fit and a stain on English society, their presence was problematic and vexing to white Britons on many levels. Yet, most felt that mixed-race elites compromised the existence of legitimate families and threatened the purity of English culture and society. In the wake of the numerous revolutions and slave revolts spreading throughout the Atlantic during this period, many saw these individuals as being not only a danger to British households, but to Caribbean social stability as well (345). As Livesay notes, open ideas of kinship in the Atlantic meant that “conceptions of race were not singular and unmitigated” (248). Imperial pressures, increased abolitionist sentiment, and complicated family dynamics lead to the whitewashing and rejection of mixed-race family members, as public discourse forced a reconsideration of their place within the larger vision of empire. With each chapter, Livesay exposes the increased anxiety among white Britons, who continuously reorganized and reassessed their ideas and definitions of race and family while struggling to control an ever-changing society moving toward what they feared most—colonial anarchy within an empire in crisis. Interestingly, mixed-race elites seem to come full-circle with emancipation in 1833, once again relied upon by white Britons to help construct a new Jamaica in the absence of a stable white settler community on the island. Yet, while Livesay establishes that mixed-race families were less dependent upon white patronage during this transition from slavery to freedom, and blanket rights began to replace the exemptions and preferential treatment granted before Tacky’s Revolt, class distinctions began to disappear and race became the only defining factor. Prejudice worsened, tolerance faded, and blackness was no longer stratified. In the new post-Emancipation Atlantic, obtuse definitions of black and white guided the debate. Truly Atlantic in scope, Children...

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs

Reviewed by: The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs Don H. Doyle (bio) The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic. By Gregory P. Downs. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 212. Cloth, $27.95.) In the preface to this provocative book, Gregory Downs confesses he set out to take risks, and that he has done. The result is a genuine intervention in historical debates that for ages have remained confined to a nation-bound narrative sealed off from the fascinating world stage on which Civil War–era history played out. [End Page 419] Downs invites readers to see the American Civil War as a revolutionary event whose causes and consequences were linked to Cuba and Spain in ways few have imagined. He is dissatisfied with the way historians have “whitewashed” the conflict as a brothers’ war and celebrated the Union’s survival and the emancipation of four million enslaved as a self- congratulatory narrative of national success. The problem, Downs explains, is that “assumptions about continuity shape how people see the country and how scholars analyze its past. These assumptions constrain our political history and our political imagination” (15). The book begins with a strong argument for the war as a violent revolution that, instead of preserving the Union, overthrew it. The old Constitution of the Founders, having proven inadequate to the challenge of slavery, was effectively replaced, not just amended. This marked the death of America’s First Republic and the birth of its Second Republic. No sooner does his interpretation of revolutionary change settle in, however, than Downs insists the revolution failed for lack of nerve. Instead of a sweeping transformation to set America right, Republican leaders settled for a “reluctant, managerial revolution.” The author calls it “bloody constitutionalism,” a halfway revolution that sought to limit violence, return to peace and national unity, then “whitewash” its history as an optimistic narrative of national perseverance (6). There was “no greater example of this whitewashing than the Gettysburg Address,” in which Abraham Lincoln portrayed the war as a fulfillment of the nation’s founding ideals and the means to a “new birth of freedom.” The Civil War “was defanged long before it was completed,” Downs protests (51). Chapter 2, “The Civil War the World Made,” decenters the familiar national focus on the causes of the war to locate its origins in Cuba. Downs wants to do for the Spanish Caribbean something like what Edward Rugemer did for the British Caribbean by linking turbulence in a neighboring slave regime to the heightened tensions inside the United States.1 Although events in Cuba “seem a world away from the Civil War, the road from Santiago to Fort Sumter . . . reveals the political and ideological fractures in global affairs that turned isolated rebellions into interconnected revolutions, a general American crisis that disrupted the Gulf World and the surrounding Caribbean” (59). Cuba experienced nothing so dramatic as the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt of 1831–32 or Britain’s subsequent decision to abolish slavery, which served Rugemer’s case for the Caribbean origins of the war. As a site for southern imperialist ambitions, however, we see Cuba playing a crucial role in mounting sectional tensions within the United States. [End Page 420] In chapter 3, “The World the Civil War Might Have Made,” the author returns to Spain and Cuba to illustrate the failure of the U.S. Civil War to transform the world. Spanish liberals were elated by the U.S. victory in 1865. Men like Emilio Castelar, an ardent republican (and brilliant historian), admired America as a model Spain might emulate. The chance to do so came in September 1868, when a revolutionary cabal of generals and politicians drove Queen Isabella II into exile and set about building a new liberal state. At the same time, Cubans, fed up with Spanish exploitation, seized their chance to break with Spain. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a wealthy sugar planter imbued with revolutionary ideals, proclaimed independence in October 1868 and issued vague promises of freedom to slaves...

"The fate of St. Domingo awaits you": Robert Wedderburn's Unfinished Revolution

Robert Wedderburn, an Afro-Jamaican radical involved in popular activism in the 1810s and 1820s, published a short-lived periodical, The Axe Laid to the Root, that prophetically conjures a world after revolution. Wedderburn frames the work of revolution as an ongoing struggle against property, possession, and slavery. But his speeches and writings linger in a particular tension, where the Haitian Revolution–often called the "first successful slave revolt"–offers new avenues for envisioning an anticolonial nation, but did not (or could not) fully transform a transnational order. This essay explores Wedderburn's proficiency in deploying prosopopoeia, or layered narratives where he speaks as or through an absent person, as a flexible ventriloquist practice. In particular, in his performances as his half-sister Elizabeth Campbell, he restlessly dislocates prophetic speech from any single voice, signaling that others should speak even if he perishes, a casualty of state execution or revolutionary upheaval. Through prosopopoeia, The Axe Laid to the Root as a text reclaims finitude and tragedy as constitutive of revolution–and of the world after world revolution.

De rebellen van Berbice

Abstract In the preface to his neoclassical tragedy Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf (1774), Nicolaas Simon van Winter advocates for the gradual abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. He declares that he wrote this play in reaction to the brutal executions of African rebels after the nearly successful slave revolt in the Dutch colony of Berbice. The plot, however, centers around the enslavement of the Mexicans by Hernán Cortés in the early sixteenth century. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of ‘silencing’ the past (1995), this article explores the absence of the Dutch Atlantic in Monzongo. Van Winter’s choice to present enslaved Amerindians under a Spanish yoke, I will argue, is strongly connected to late-eighteenth-century ideas about suppression, the legitimacy of revolt, and ‘race’ in the Dutch Republic.

Construção discursiva do ethos da autoridade institucional: poder, vigilância e revoltas escravas na Bahia

O artigo tem o objetivo apresentar reflexões sobre o ethos discursivo da autoridade institucional do Império e da Província contra as revoltas encabeçadas por escravizados, como enfrentamento das condições aterrorizantes da escravidão. Para tanto, o ethos é analisado a partir do discurso da administração da Bahia no século XIX, considerando-se o texto histórico, com a finalidade de observar como o sujeito enunciador se articula com outros discursos, a partir da relação dialética entre identidade e alteridade. Os discursos oficiais são mediados pelos Oficiais da Secretaria do Governo da Bahia, enunciadores do discurso político do poder institucional, e materializados em Resolução da administração pública. Nesse viés, o ethos discursivo é um olhar sobre a cena. O leitor é convidado a participar do reconhecimento desse estado de vigilância para as revoltas escravas, que eram consideradas um problema de segurança.

Orlando Patterson, his work, and his legacy: a special issue in celebration of the republication of Slavery and Social Death

The reissue of Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death provides an opportunity to reflect on developments in studies of slavery, postcolonial sociology, and comparative-historical sociology since the book’s initial release in 1982. In this special issue of Theory and Society, contributors from ancient history, anthropology, and sociology examine the book’s broader intellectual significance by situating it in Patterson’s corpus, covering a range of works including his fiction and scholarly publications, early work on Jamaican slave revolts, and private correspondence with key thinkers. The volume’s ambit, then, is not a single book but rather a broader field of social thought. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, the concepts and theories introduced by Patterson are still vital. In some ways, we argue, a Pattersonian sociology has only recently come to its full fruition, thanks to ongoing developments in postcolonial studies, critical race studies, anthropological and historical study of slavery, globalization studies, and feminist theory.

From slave revolts to social death

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson’s contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson’s previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery.

Uma lei para os libertos: recrutamentos e território quilombola no Recôncavo da Bahia, 1800-1860

Este artigo analisa a ação repressiva das autoridades coloniais e provinciais sobre os escravos e libertos da Bahia, que viviam nas franjas do condado de Nazaré das Farinhas, na primeira metade do século XIX. Também são analisadas as diferentes estratégias levadas a cabo por homens livres para burlar o recrutamento militar, especialmente a formação de quilombos e a construção de territórios negros. O estudo enfatiza o movimento de escravos fugitivos que estavam tentando sobreviver nas cidades e nos distritos da região, as revoltas que protagonizaram e sua relação com a comunidade de homens livres suspeitos. Além do uso de uma bibliografia atualizada, a pesquisa se baseou em documentos expedidos pelos Juízes de Paz, os censos do governo da Capitania, relatos de viajantes, correspondências da Presidência da Província e municipais, ordenanças, acordos e regulamentos do período colonial, processos criminais, assentamentos em livro batismal e documentos emitidos pela polícia da época.

The Skeptic's Guide to the Genealogy

This paper seeks to evaluate Nietzsche’s positive ethical vision through a focus on the plausibility of his moral-historical account as it appears in On the Genealogy of Morals. It is then argued that Nietzsche’s account of the “slave revolt in morality” contains shortcomings that necessitate further inquiry into Nietzsche’s consequent ethical vision. Furthermore, the paper goes on to demonstrate that if a proper historical context for the “slave revolt in morality” cannot be identified, or if it cannot be shown that Nietzsche’s ethical vision can stand without such a context, then a neo-Nietzschean ethic must be set aside.

The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space

The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space

Leitura crítico-filológica de Resolução de 1822: revoltas, vigilância, violência e punição na Bahia do século XIX

O artigo apresenta um estudo crítico-filológico, a partir da edição semidiplomática e dos comentários paleográficos, da Resolução de 1822, procedente de Cachoeira – Bahia, que registra a necessidade de gestão do controle social da população negra no Brasil, com vistas à repressão dos movimentos de revoltas escravas. Cachoeira foi um dos núcleos urbanos mais importantes do Recôncavo Baiano no século XIX e, portanto, palco de constantes sublevações de escravos. Decerto, os nossos heróis negros deixaram, nos registros jurídicos, vestígios de luta e resistência, visto que representavam um problema de segurança, que demandava vigilância e medidas legais por parte do governo imperial e provincial. Essas medidas legais dialogam com as reivindicações sociais e políticas, por parte daqueles que executavam ações violentas e punitivas, em relação aos frequentes atos de enfrentamento e resistência promovidos pelo povo negro. Nesse viés, a atividade filológica de editar textos sobre as revoltas na Bahia requer uma pesquisa criteriosa e argumentativa. E, portanto, é preciso escavar a memória dos grupos oprimidos e lembrar os corpos dissidentes, descontentes e silenciados pelos contextos de escravatura, propondo a reflexão dessas narrativas a partir da crítica-filológica.filológica.

Afro-Creole Revelry and Rebellion on the British Stage: Jonkanoo in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800)

Scholarship on John Fawcett and Samuel Arnold’s Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (Haymarket, 1800) has largely focused on how the pantomime (and its later melodrama adaptation by William Murray) were performed and received relative to maturing debates about slavery, abolition and emancipation. My essay contributes to this ongoing investigation by shifting the emphasis away from the heroic agency embodied by Obi’s eponymous ‘Three-Fingered Jack’ in order to explore the politics of black resistance activated by the minor, but important, character of ‘Jonkanoo’. In its recovery of the Jamaican Christmastime festivities that lent this character his name, my essay reinterprets Obi in light of a performance tradition infused with subversive energies. It argues that the pantomime must be understood in the context of the slave revolution in Saint Domingue (1791–1804)—a cataclysmic event poignantly described by the historian Robin Blackburn as ‘the only successful large-scale and generalized slave revolt known in history’—and examines to what extent Obi’s Jonkanoo character might serve as an index for the ambitions as well as limitations of early nineteenth-century acts of cultural transposition.

The Priestly Slave Revolt in Morality

Abstract In this essay I evaluate a new and influential interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of the slave revolt in morality. This interpretation was first proposed by Bernard Reginster and has since been extended by R. Lanier Anderson and Avery Snelson. Citing textual evidence from Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, these scholars have argued for the counterintuitive view that nobles, not slaves, instigated the slave revolt in morality. This is because Nietzsche says that nobles create new values, introduces priests as nobles, and claims that priests began the slave revolt. However, against this new approach I argue that these scholars neglect important evidence from these same texts in which Nietzsche claims that the psychologically slavish can also create values, assumes that politically subordinated nobles can lose their psychological nobility, and asserts that the slave revolt was instigated by psychologically slavish priests. I also argue that these scholars ignore Nietzsche’s related claims that the priestly peasant Luther renewed the Jewish slave revolt against re-ascendant Roman nobles and that the plebeian philosopher Socrates led a slave revolt in morality against the Athenian nobles. Thus, it turns out that none of the leaders of the slave revolt were noble and that one of them was not even priestly. I conclude with a defense of the traditional and straightforward view that Nietzsche always conceived of the slave revolt in morality as an act of revenge by oppressed people who are politically and psychologically ignoble.

Making freedom work: the long transition from slavery to freedom during the Haitian Revolution

ABSTRACTThe 1791 slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the first French abolition of slavery in 1793–1794 are generally seen as epochal events that redefined labor relations in the French Caribbean. But a close analysis of the labor codes promulgated during and after the Haitian Revolution indicates that elites were eager to reconcile the ideal of universal freedom with the needs of plantation agriculture, resulting in a succession of oppressive labor systems that subsisted until the 1820s.

The origins of a source: Edward Long, Coromantee slave revolts and The History of Jamaica

ABSTRACTSince the 1960s, historians of the early-modern era have been working with colonial sources to uncover the ways that Africans with connections to the Gold Coast – often known as ‘Coromantees’ in the Anglo-American colonies – shaped the history of the Atlantic World. One of the most influential primary sources used in this literature is a 32-page section of the second volume of The History of Jamaica, written by the planter-historian Edward Long in 1774. ‘The origins of a source’ uses Long’s life and works, both published and unpublished, to tell the story of this source’s creation. In doing so, it provides a detailed case study for how a prominent and controversial intellectual acquired knowledge of African culture, and then repurposed and deployed that knowledge as a tool in the abolitionist debates. It argues that the political context of abolition is essential to understanding Long’s writings on the Coromantee.

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

“Their power has been broken, the danger has passed”

In February 1763 one of the largest and longest slave revolts erupted in the Dutch colony of Berbice. As the majority of the white population fled, colonial authorities were left behind with few, and mostly ill soldiers, and in no time the insurgents controlled the colony almost completely. This rebellion did not only shake the colonial government to the core, but also made a significant (media) impact in the Dutch Republic. For the duration of the Berbice rebellion substantial reports on the revolt appeared in the Dutch press, and other print media, such as pamphlets and news digests, also devoted attention to the issue. This article studies the rebellion through newspaper reports and provides a glimpse of the reception of the Berbice revolt in the Dutch Republic. This shows that slavery was already a public affair around the middle of the eighteenth century and not, as it is often presented, a limited, mostly scholarly debate. It will explore whether the extensive coverage affected the public perception of slavery in the Dutch Republic. Did it reinforce support for the institution of slavery or did it raise awareness of the problems surrounding it, breaking ground for the later abolitionist movement?

‘Weapons from their land’: arming strategies and practices among West African-born soldiers in early nineteenth-century Bahia and Cuba

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the essential issue of weaponry and war paraphernalia used by West African men and women in Bahia and Cuba throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that it was due to the similarities existing between their African and American environments that they were able to reproduce the ways in which they had acquired the weapons necessary to undertake their military actions. Moving away from the concept of slave revolt, and considering these movements as actions of war, also allows for a more in-depth examination of the question of weaponry. Were the weapons they used African or Western? How were West African practices associated with the arming of military forces reproduced in the new setting provided by plantation societies in Bahia and Cuba? These, among other questions, are addressed in this article.