Slavery In Britain Research Articles

A Review of Modern Slavery in Britain: Understanding the Unique Experience of British Victims and Why it Matters

This article offers an original contribution to the field of victimization studies by investigating the current context of, and responses to, British nationals who are victims of modern slavery in the UK (BVs). Through the examination of National Referral Mechanism and Duty to Notify statistics, a current picture of specific experiences of BVs in the UK is illustrated with reference to identification and access to support. An exploration of the reasons for non-engagement of BVs with services and the detrimental impact this may have on their recovery highlights pertinent issues of mistrust, stigma and shame. Compounded by the current criminal justice approach towards modern slavery, the effects on the well-being of victims and survivors document the barriers to accessing services. A lack of engagement with the complexity of modern slavery; a lack of knowledge, training and expertise; and a lack of comprehensive guidance result in poor outcomes for BVs. Overall, the findings of this article are important in recognizing that the needs of BVs are currently not adequately met. A comprehensive investigation is required to examine the specific needs and experiences of BVs so that responses can be improved to effectively and appropriately support them into long-term and meaningful recovery.

Respecting Complex Personhoods: Translation Studies and British New Slaveries

This article has a double thematic concern, namely, contemporary forms of slavery in Britain and literary translation. On these premises, it reflects on which translation strategies can be most effective in conveying the narratives related to the phenomenon of new slaveries, by analysing almost all the fictional works in English which have been translated into Italian.Part 1 concentrates on Translation Studies with regard to both postcolonial literatures and narratives around British new slaveries. It brings to the fore Avery Gordon’s concept of ‘complex personhood’, emphasising the need to consider the enslaved subjects’ complex personhood in translating practices. Moving from Lawrence Venuti’s and Antoine Berman’s theories of translation to Douglas Robinson’s and Viktoria Tchernichova’s reflections on postcolonial translation, it is argued that this priority can be satisfied through techniques based on foreignisation. This point is tested on the Italian translations of Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand and Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans, which end up reducing two specific non-standard usages of English to caricatural representations.The second section of the article points to further unexplored aspects of the published Italian translations of these texts. Its focus is narrowed to four of their facets: titles, interlingualism, linguistic creativity, and the contexts of new slaveries. In the Italian versions of Ruth Rendell’s Simisola and Ian Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close, banalised titles operate to conceal fundamental aspects of the phenomenon of British new slaveries. Interlingualism is another common feature of these texts: reflecting on the case study of Abi Morgan’s play Fugee, this article connects its Italian version (which emphasises the polyglossia of the original text, considering it as another case of foreignisation strategies) with the stress on interculturalism and the polylinguistic nature of texts posited by translation theorists such as Berman, Robinson, Michael Cronin and Michaela Wolf. There follows a reflection on a crucial aspect of fictional literature, linguistic creativity, taking as its first example Ali Smith’s short story The Detainee’s Tale; starting from an analysis of the ways in which the Italian translation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go risks flattening the polysemic suggestiveness of the author’s pared-back language, it then focuses on the problems posed by neologisms through Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close and using the criterion of appropriateness, as suggested by Lance Hewson’s discussion of the role of creativity in translation. The final section of part 2 goes back to Lewycka’s Two Caravans, and its implicit references to historical facts around British new slaveries, to argue the importance for a translator to have a knowledge of the context of this historical phenomenon, alongside the required linguistic skills.By way of conclusion, Part 3 studies how Morgan’s Fugee and Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close fictionalise non-literary translation and interpreting, thus bringing to the fore the ethical and political dimension they entail, as theorised by Moira Inghilleri and Carol Meier. It is here argued that in literary translation, too, such an ethical approach is a necessary step to avoid dehumanising enslaved migrants and their complex personhood, by making reference to theoretical concepts such as Berman’s ‘ethical translation’, Robinson’s ‘subversive translation’ and Venuti’s ‘resistancy’, closely connected to the favouring of foreignising strategies.

Archives of the Dispossessed

Archives of the Dispossessed

The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States by Ira Berlin

Reviewed by: The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States by Ira Berlin Yael A. Sternhell The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States. By Ira Berlin. ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 227. $22.95, ISBN 978–0-674–28608-5.) Perhaps more than any other historian, Ira Berlin is responsible for shaping our vision of Civil War emancipation. As the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, he was the driving force behind Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, a portable archive of federal records documenting the drama of slavery's collapse in wartime. Over the years, the volumes in the series and the book of interpretive essays that accompanies them have served every historian writing on emancipation, and they are in many ways the basis of the field's shared knowledge of the emancipatory process. Thus, it is a good measure of our current historiographical moment that Berlin's new book abandons the war years as it strives to offer a fresh look at how slavery came to an end in the United States. The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States takes place largely above the Mason-Dixon Line and adopts an expansive chronological framework, starting in the late eighteenth century. With this approach, Berlin joins other prominent scholars, like Steven Hahn and Stephen Kantrowitz, who have also sought to move beyond an exclusive focus on the Civil War as the main act of American emancipation and reposition the 1861–1865 period as one episode, albeit a crucial one, in the black struggle for freedom, equality, and citizenship. This temporal approach is interlaced with a new geographical framing, in which the end of slavery in the United States is part of a transnational story that includes both the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1772 and Brazilian emancipation. Berlin's slender volume is composed of three essays that originated as the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University. The first essay rejects the common narrative that the antislavery movement in America progressed in "stages," with major breaks along the way (p. 27). Berlin sees the destruction of slavery progressing not sequentially but simultaneously, "as the opponents of slavery warred on all fronts. To a remarkable degree, antislavery sentiment remained constant over the long haul" (p. 27). This long and consistent struggle, Berlin argues, was shaped throughout by four elements: the leadership of slaves and former slaves; black people's aspiration not just for freedom but also for equality and citizenship; a commitment to the principles articulated by the Declaration of Independence and their potential for transforming America into a multicultural democracy; and the central role of violence as a means of fighting the violence of slavery. The second essay narrates the story of America's first emancipations from New England to Pennsylvania. Despite its slow and halting progress, Berlin claims, the gradual demise of slavery in the North was a crucial moment in the history of the nation and the world. Slavery ceased to be a [End Page 186] continental institution, and free labor became the defining feature of life in large swaths of the United States. The third essay positions the upheaval of Civil War emancipation within a long tradition of militant abolitionism led by black activists, most prominently Denmark Vesey and David Walker. The nineteenth-century battle against slavery was fought in northern cities and border states in the upper South, between black communities and "an unsavory crew of slave catchers, kidnappers, and complicit law officers who found profit and satisfaction in the enslavement of black people" (p. 149). In that sense as Berlin sums up, "[t]he Civil War changed nothing and everything" (p. 158). Wartime emancipation relied on the same means and strove for the same goals as prewar abolitionism, and "their long history can be understood as one piece" (p. 175). Berlin's new book came out almost simultaneously with two heftier works, Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, 2016) and Patrick Rael's Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777...

The Critical Years: Role of the Events of the 1780s in Strengthening the Abolitionist Movement of Britain

Much of the success that the British abolitionist movement had over the course of the late 18th century and early 19th century was a result of a transformation that took place in the abolitionist movement during the 1780s. As the decade progressed, the abolitionist cause became a powerful force and organization as a result of the rise in powerful and charismatic individuals, that provided a voice and guidance for the cause; the Quaker’s involvement in laying down the foundation for a unified abolitionist movement; and finally, the refinement of pro-abolitionist arguments that were used to counteract anti-abolitionist tracts. Though the British slave trade was not abolished until 1807, with slavery being outright abolished in the Empire in 1833, the 1780s saw abolitionist sentiments spread across the British Isles and British citizens becoming actively involved in the cause to free the slaves. By the end of the decade the debate over slavery had become a flash point in British politics that led to heated debates in Parliament as to what course of action should be taken. Though the end of the decade did not see slavery abolished it did lay the foundation for the eventual abolition of slavery in Britain and the Empire.

Blood, Money and Endless Paper: Slavery and Capital in British Imperial History

AbstractThe history of slavery in Britain and the British Empire has placed the legislative milestones of anti‐slavery – the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in 1833 – at the centre of historical inquiry. This essay considers why the passing of anti‐slavery laws, rather than the implementation of anti‐slavery reforms, has been so pivotal in the historiography. It asks what the history of slavery in Britain and the British Empire would look like if turned away from the bright line of emancipation, and toward the continuities between slavery and freedom. It places British approaches to the history of slavery into a wider historiographical context and considers how renewed emphasis on the physical experience and everyday routines of slavery and anti‐slavery, in tandem with a rigorous rethinking of the archives, might shape the future of the field.

Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama

This article explores the rhetorical comparison of naval sailors' exploitation to that of African slaves in pre- and early-Victorian discourses on naval reform. It is structured around an analysis of J.T. Haines's nautical melodrama My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), in which the hero, having been press-ganged by the navy, risks his life freeing enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage even though he considers himself a slave to his nation. This plot was both timely and provocative: first performed in the immediate aftermath of the illegalization of slavery in Britain's colonies, it dramatizes an analogy between slaves and sailors that was contested by campaigners for naval reform and their opponents. Ultimately, My Poll and My Partner Joe palliates radical commentary on sailors' rights, in its second and third acts, as the sailor patriotically celebrates his freedom in antithesis to African slavery. Rather than read its denouement simply as romantic escapism, I argue that it proposes resol...

Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade

Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern [T]hey were simply trying to master the racial disorder from which they had formed themselves. — Michel Foucault “The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them — You are welcome to torture me to death for your amusement, only allow me to amuse myself a little in the same style.” — Heathcliff London, 1 October 1771: James Sommersett, a black slave, “absented himself from the service” of his master “and absolutely refused to return.” Abolitionist Granville Sharp hired counsel, secured a writ of Habeas Corpus and pursued the case to trial. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield of the King’s Bench was asked to decide if a black slave who accompanied his master to England could be forcibly returned to the colonies for resale. The judge ruled reluctantly, encouraging both parties to reach an out of court settlement. Mansfield repeatedly asserted that the decision was narrow, but his language was unequivocal: “The state of slavery is of such a nature,... is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.” 1 Technically, the Mansfield decision abolished neither slavery in Britain nor involuntary transportation of slaves to the colonies, as newspaper accounts and correspondence by such notables as Hannah More testify. 2 But it did reverse the Yorke-Talbot opinion of 1729, define the crisis of slavery with new clarity, hearten its opponents, and alarm those with an investment in human capital. 3 Edward Long, the most famous advocate of the planter’s interest, wrote in Candid Reflections: “How far the late judicial sentence may be consistent with the spirit of English law, I will not take upon me to determine; sure I am, that it cannot be made compatible with the spirit of English commerce.” 4 The English city with the most spirited commerce in slaves was Liverpool. At mid-century Liverpool ranked third behind London and Bristol, but by the inter-bellum period (1763–1776) she had [End Page 171] eclipsed her competitors and was the premier slaving port in Britain. The New Exchange/Town Hall was ornamented with “busts of blackamoors and elephants, emblematical of the African trade.” 5 By 1764 Liverpool boasted more than twice the number of vessels engaged in the triangular trade than Bristol, and by 1804 Liverpool merchants were responsible for more than eithty-four percent of the British transatlantic slave trade. At the close of the eighteenth century, Britain accounted for nearly fifty-five percent of the traffic world wide, and the percentage grew until the month of its abolition. 6 It is little wonder that in 1804 Liverpool merchants, in response to a bill seeking abolition, petitioned Parliament to observe that “under the protection of the Legislature [the petitioners] embarked a considerable part of their property in that Trade, [and] will be very materially injured if the said Bill should pass into a Law,” nor is it surprising that none of the several versions and revisions of Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, increasingly popularized and polemic in the eighteenth century, ever appeared on a Liverpool stage. 7 According to C. P. Sanger’s chronology of Wuthering Heights, Mr. Earnshaw’s walk to Liverpool occurred at the “beginning of harvest” in 1771, the eve of the Sommersett case and the Mansfield decision. 8 In lieu of a whip for Cathy and a fiddle for Hindley, objects emblematic of the cruelty and indolence nurtured by institutionalized slavery, Earnshaw substitutes Heathcliff, “‘dark almost as if it came from the devil.’” 9 Earnshaw found “it... in the streets of Liverpool where he picked it up and inquired for its owner — Not a soul knew to whom it belonged” (WH, 45). Heathcliff’s racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute; Brontë makes that explicit. From the first and frequently thereafter he is termed a “gypsy” (WH, 6, 45, 48, 61); Mr. Linton recognizes him as “‘that strange acquisition my late neighbor made in his journey to Liverpool — a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway’” (WH, 62); Nelly encourages Heathcliff to “frame high notions of [his] birth” — his father might have been the “Emperor...

Evangelicals and the Defense of Slavery in Britain's Old Colonial Empire

Evangelicals and the Defense of Slavery in Britain's Old Colonial Empire