Sugar Islands Research Articles

Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley

Reviewed by: Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley April Spisak Boulley, Angeline Warrior Girl Unearthed. Holt, 2023 [400p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250766588 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781250766595 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 9-12 This stand-alone novel takes place in the same world as Firekeeper’s Daughter (BCCB 08/21), but ten years later and with a focus on Daunis’ now teen nieces, particularly narrator Perry Firekeeper-Birch. Perry and her twin Pauline (an ambitious rule-follower) are both working at Sugar Island Ojibwe Tribe’s summer internship program, though Perry would initially rather be anywhere else than cleaning display cases in the tribal museum. She quickly learns that there is far more to this work than tidying, however, as her boss brings her along to tense meetings with institutions that are resisting the return of cultural items (and some even more unsettling—actual bones, teeth, and bodies of tribal ancestors). Perry is also troubled, as is everyone, by the continued disappearance of Indigenous women, and while she does not mean to stumble into a desperate situation where her own life is in danger, she believes that the answers she may find are worth far more than her own safety. Perry is not one for seeing nuance, and her life trajectory initially seems driven by her own impulsivity as much as anything; her eventual increased perspective and more layered understanding of the world are refreshing in their hard-earned authenticity, especially as she takes a forgiving approach overall to the limitations of all people, including herself. This novel is many things at once: a coming-ofage story of twins who are each struggling to find their places, a murder mystery, a culturally driven exploration of home and belonging, and the same thoughtful, expansive, and careful examination of what it means to be Anishinaabe as Boulley [End Page 321] offered in the previous novel. There’s no illusion that all of this can be captured fully, even within a lengthy text, but that is never the book’s point, instead emphasizing that the world is a place with far more questions than answers. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Sexuality and the Second Slavery: Figuring Sexuality in Racialized Labor Formations

AbstractFrom the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, sexuality was a key factor in the reorganization of New World slavery through the period described as the Second Slavery. With the early nineteenth century bans on the transatlantic slave trade initiated by the United States and the British Empire, there was a corresponding transition from prior plantation economies focused on US Upper South tobacco and Caribbean sugar islands toward more differentiated forms of labor based on hiring out in domestic services, manufacture, and the expansion into new frontiers of accumulation in the New South of the Mississippi Delta, Cuba, and Brazil. This qualitative change and expansion of New World slavery carried gendered understandings based on the sexuality and reproductive capabilities of enslaved people. Using Tomich's conception of the Second Slavery, I incorporate an analysis that demonstrates how conceptions of sexuality were integral to racializing and gendering processes of subordination that reveal the heterogeneity of the historical and economic moment.

From the Atlantic to the Manchu: Taiwan Sugar and the Early Modern World, 1630s–1720s

Taiwan, the first post-Dutch-colonial society in Asia, experienced an exponential growth of sugar production in the six decades following the Siege of Fort Zeelandia (1661–1662) and emerged as a world-leading sugar producer in the 1720s, overshadowing any single sugar island in the contemporary Caribbean region. This unprecedented expansion of a non-western sugar frontier encourages us to revisit the existing theories about sugar and early modern globalization, which represent highly productive offshore sugar islands as a unique product of the expansion of the European capitalist economy in the Atlantic World. The case of Taiwan sugar instead shows how a former European colony in East Asia with a nascent sugar economy was first militarily occupied by a non-western maritime power, then politically incorporated by a non-western empire, and eventually economically integrated by a non-western consumer market. Combining Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and English sources, in this article, I investigate the rise of Taiwan sugar in a global context from a sugar crisis of the Atlantic system in the 1630s to the Pax Manjurica in the China Seas region in the early eighteenth century.

Sugar Island

The Spring 2021 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares "the Triton among minnows."

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Reviewed by: Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Boulley, Angeline Firekeeper’s Daughter. Holt, 2021 [496p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250766564 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781250766571 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 7-10 Eighteen years ago, Daunis’ birth was a bit of a scandal, the result of a much-frowned-upon relationship between her white mother and her Anishinaabe father, but now, even as an unenrolled member of Sugar Island’s Ojibwe Tribe, she finds comfort and community in her father’s Firekeeper relatives. Everything goes to hell, however, when her best friend Lily is killed by her drugged-up boyfriend, and Jamie, the new guy Daunis has just started a relationship with, turns out to be an FBI agent investigating meth distribution in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Daunis agrees to go undercover to help Jamie find out where the drugs might be coming from, but as she digs deeper, she realizes her discoveries might irreparably damage her Ojibwe community. A perfectly calibrated pace and a constantly shifting list of suspects keep the tension high, and several red herrings are effectively deployed to surprise even the savviest of sleuthing readers. Unfortunately, the dialogue is frustratingly stiff, often serving more as exposition than realistic interaction, and too many disparate threads (including Daunis’ sexual assault by a friend’s father) are left unaddressed, crowding out the major plotline. Daunis makes an effective guide, however, through her Ojibwe community and traditions, and the tribe’s emphasis on the past informing the present plays out both thematically and in the action. Despite the book’s flaws, Boulley, an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, provides an #ownvoices thriller that may intrigue. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Remembering and forgetting: How France's slaving ports have come to terms with their past

AbstractIn the decades before the French Revolution, France's Atlantic ports grew rich on the profits of colonial trade with the Americas, not least through the triangular trade in slaves between France, West Africa and the Caribbean. But by the end of the century, that prosperity was threatened. The French Revolution, leading to the first abolition of the slave trade in 1794, was partly responsible; but so were long years of war and blockade; the loss of France's richest sugar island, Saint‐Domingue, to slave insurrection; and the growth of a new moral conscience which challenged the rights of Europeans to sacrifice the freedom of others for their own economic advantage. After 1815, the Atlantic ports were condemned to long years of economic decline, when merchants looked back nostalgically on a world they had lost. In this article, I examine how the revolutionary era left an uneasy memory of the slave trade and suggest how these cities have belatedly come to terms with their past as public memory has evolved to reflect the changing balance of French society.

Outside Options, Coercion, and Wages: Removing the Sugar Coating

AbstractIn economies with a large informal sector firms can increase profits by reducing workers’ outside options in that informal sector. We formalise this idea in a simple model of an agricultural economy with plantation owners who lobby the government to enact coercive policies—e.g., the eviction and incarceration of squatting smallhold farmers—that reduce the value to working outside the formal sector. Using unique data for 14 British West Indies ‘sugar islands’ from 1838 (the year of slave emancipation) until 1913, we examine the impact of plantation owners’ power on wages and coercion-related incarceration. To gain identification, we utilise exogenous variation in the strength of the plantation system in the different islands over time. Where planter power declined we see that incarceration rates dropped, and agricultural wages rose, accompanied by a decline in formal agricultural employment.

Slavery and Abolition: A Napoleonic Blind Spot?

Napoleon prided himself on being a modernizer, bringing a new sophistication to the lands he conquered by building on the reforms of the French Revolution and introducing French standards of governance, justice and education. But in one sphere, that of colonial policy, that image is tainted. In 1794 France had been the first country in the world to abolish not only the Atlantic slave trade but the institution of slavery itself, proclaiming that the rights of man applied to African slaves as it did to the rest of humanity. It did so in response to war and slave insurrections in France’s Caribbean possessions, which led in turn to the loss of the world’s richest sugar island, Saint-Domingue; and Napoleon was faced with huge military, economic and moral dilemmas. From his very ambivalent response one must conclude that for him colonies were simply a source of profit, and that the issue of slavery and abolition did not deeply concern him. He listened to the colonial lobby and tried to enforce mercantilist solutions; he sent an army to the Caribbean to try — unsuccessfully — to quell the rebellion; and he showed little interest in condemning the slave trade after it was abolished in Britain and the United States. Only in 1815, following his return from Elba, did he sign a decree unambiguously embracing abolition, but by then he was burnishing his liberal credentials in an attempt to woo public opinion. It was a matter of politics, not of belief or morality.

Sugar Islands in the Pacific in the Early Twentieth Century

Sugar Islands in the Pacific in the Early Twentieth Century

Cotton and Salt: Swedish Colonial Aspirations and the Transformation of Saint Barthélemy in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract The environmental history of the Caribbean has been strongly associated with the consequences of sugar cane agriculture and extreme weather phenomena. Consequently, other aspects of environmental change at play in the Caribbean region have remained less known. However, islands such as Anguilla, Barbuda, and Saint Barthélemy had no or very few sugar plantations. The fact that non-sugar producing islands had to find other ways of supporting themselves shaped their environmental history in ways that differed from that of the sugar islands. These alternative environmental histories deserve to be highlighted when presenting the historiography of the Caribbean. In this article, the island of Saint Barthélemy serves as a case study of an island where sugar cane agriculture was absent and tropical storms and hurricanes were of lesser consequence. In outlining the environmental history of Saint Barthélemy during the first decades of Swedish colonial rule, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the article shows that the Swedish takeover resulted in environmental changes. Sweden's ambitions and expectations concerning the improvement of the island were initially high and much effort was put into the development of the economy. The rationale for the Swedish plans was to exploit the few and scarce resources of the island, but it was the harbour that became the most successful endeavour.

The <em>Gauolet</em> Uprising of 1710: Maroons, Rebels, and the Informal Exchange Economy of a Caribbean Sugar Island

The Gauolet Uprising of 1710:Maroons, Rebels, and the Informal Exchange Economy of a Caribbean Sugar Island Brett Rushforth (bio) It's not just conspiracies that are accompanied by silence, not just coronations that have their procession of reasons. —Wisława Szymborska, "No Title Required"1 For Laurence, an escaped slave living in a small maroon settlement in Martinique's dense northern woods, the morning of September 17, 1711, would have seemed unremarkable. More than a year earlier, she had fled a slave labor camp run by her master, a Sieur Gallet, after he had flown into such a rage that he set her cabin on fire in an apparent attempt to kill her. Fearing for her life, she kept a safe distance but did not go far. Joined by friends who had run from neighboring plantations, Laurence and her small band of perhaps twenty fugitives searched for a suitable place to build a few modest dwellings and plant a garden. They settled on a secluded portion of land owned by the prominent Sainte-Marthe family, a risky location but one that kept them close to their families and friends still held in slavery. Through weeks of hard labor, as they cleared a patch of ground [End Page 75] and waited for new plants to grow, Laurence and her companions survived however they could. They stole bananas and dug roots. They caught fish and bartered for vegetables. They returned at night to their former plantations for help from loved ones. But for many months now the small community had enjoyed a reliable harvest of cabbages, cucumbers, plantains, sorrel, and parsley from their gardens, trading surpluses for manioc flour and other necessities. Laurence tended the garden with two older companions: Margot, a forty-year-old creole woman from Antigua; and Maude, a fifty-five-year-old woman born, like Laurence, in Martinique. Their lives, if always in some danger, had taken on a routine.2 When a friend and former community member named Michau stepped into the clearing that September morning, however, Laurence sensed that their fortunes were about to change. Are they after us? she remembered them asking. Were you followed? She knew that Michau understood the dangers facing them. Even a passing glance at his body would show that this was not his first time in the woods. There were his ears, which had been partially cut off several years earlier as both a punishment for escape and a mark to warn others of his rebellious character. Each of his shoulders bore a large scar in the shape of the fleur-de-lis, which had been burned into his skin after two previous escapes. He almost certainly walked with a limp, the result of having his hamstring severed at the order of his master. In the months following Laurence's escape, when Michau had helped establish the maroon settlement, the knowledge he had acquired during these previous stays in the woods helped the group avoid capture, starvation, and other hazards. But if his scars were evidence of valuable experience, they were also indicators of vulnerability. He had been caught before, and it could happen again. And many people were looking, hoping to collect a bounty recently offered by the governor: three hundred livres for producing Michau's severed head, six hundred for returning him alive. Colonial authorities had declared him one of the two most wanted men in all of Martinique.3 [End Page 76] The other, Laurence knew, was her husband, Jérôme.4 The previous summer, the two men had been implicated in a series of attacks by enslaved people that witnesses claimed were meant to culminate in a coordinated insurrection targeting specific colonial leaders and setting fire to Saint-Pierre, the island's busiest port city and the hub of the sugar and slave trades. The uprising had been orchestrated by members of a secret society called the Gauolet, which linked as many as two hundred enslaved and free people of color from the countryside with their counterparts in Saint-Pierre.5 Many times in the weeks before the rebellion, Jérôme and Michau had walked from their maroon settlement to the city...

The Nanziatticos and the Violence of the Archive: Land and Native Enslavement in Colonial Virginia

The Nanziatticos and the Violence of the Archive:Land and Native Enslavement in Colonial Virginia Rebecca Anne Goetz (bio) Between 1704 and 1706, English Virginians destroyed the Nanziattico nation. First, they used an oyer and terminer trial to hang several of its young men, and then they separated Nanziattico children from their parents and bound the children out as indentured servants. Finally, they sold the surviving Nanziattico adults in the English sugar island of Antigua. These events occurred at the brutal intersection of many colonial histories—Native dispossession and land seizure, Native enslavement, the Atlantic slave trade, and the creation of archives that minimized this colonial violence. In this way, the story of the Nanziatticos is not merely a tale of the early eighteenth century; instead, it is rooted in the previous century of English colonialism in Virginia and in a long and dire history for Native people attempting to navigate the dangers of colonialism. The English removed the Nanziatticos in the service of two desires—control of land and the erasure of Native claims to Virginian spaces—thus underscoring that Native enslavement was not always about labor. Though historians generally present the trade in enslaved Native people in the Southeast either as the result of coordinated slave raids made by the English and their Native allies or as the result of diplomatic or trade encounters, in this case the English used their courts and the language of justice to dispossess and to enslave. In how they told (or did not tell) the story of the Nanziatticos, the English quietly eliminated an entire nation, an event seen only with difficulty in the archive. The trial transcripts, while long on the damage that Nanziattico men allegedly did to English bodies, are short on witness statements and the names of any Nanziatticos who were not executed. Virginia's colonial government reported even less to the Board of Trade and [End Page 33] Plantations in London, sending only a perfunctory account of the trial and its resolution (which the Lords of Trade approved with no questioning of colonial actions). The English effectively banished the Nanziatticos, first from Virginian land and then from the archive. The story of the Nanziatticos exemplifies what Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes as a "silencing … due to uneven power in the production of sources, archives, and narratives." The English produced sources that elided their destruction of the Nanziatticos, saved those sources in an archive dedicated to bolstering English claims to land, authority, and domination, and created narratives of Native perfidy and vanishing that celebrated the English remaking of the landscape. If these sources inscribed "the insignificance of the story," as Trouillot would have it, the historian's task must be to resignify the Nanziatticos—their lives and their deaths.1 As one historian of Native Virginians has put it, "there is very little record remaining on the Nansiatico," an indicator of the difficulty of reading those sources that remain to correct a colonial record that was indifferent to the suffering of Native people.2. Recent historical and anthropological work shows that English involvement in the slave trade in the Deep South destroyed and remade [End Page 34] Native societies in the space of two generations.3 Yet this new and growing scholarly interest in Native enslavement is still at the edges of Virginia historiography. More specifically, historians have made few efforts to understand what happened to the Nanziatticos.4 Though the Nanziatticos shared the experience of enslavement with many other Native people across time and space, the sudden and complete destruction of an entire town and its people was less common. While many incidents of Native enslavement connected Anglo-Indian warfare, the [End Page 35] complexities of the trade in skins, furs, and guns, and an insatiable English demand for labor on their tobacco plantations, the enslavement of the Nanziatticos was fundamentally different for two reasons. First, in 1705 the Nanziatticos were tributary Indians—that is, they were in a treaty relationship with the English that subordinated them to English authority but protected, to a certain degree, their reservation. While it was illegal to enslave tributary people, these groups did have to live close to expanding English settlements...

Once a Slave..., Not Always a Slave: Acquiring Freedom on São Tomé Island

The island of Sao Tome, located off the west-central coast of Africa, became a template for slave-based sugar islands elsewhere in Africa and in the West Indies. The common assumption is that slaves, taken to the island from the nearby African mainland, remained so forever, as did their descendants. In fact, many slaves won their freedom, through manumission, purchase, royal proclamation and, especially, rebellion. By the mid-16th Century, ex-slaves and their descendants actually ruled the island, both economically and politically, even though slavery still remained the basis of the island's economy and social structure. This paper looks at the origins and evolution of Sao Tomean society, noting the ways in which enslavement could be overcome or ended, and what the practical effects of this were for the island's social, economic, and political future. It reviews the many violent rebellions produced by the slave system and how these altered the lives of those who still remained enslaved.

Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism by Christopher Taylor

Reviewed by: Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism by Christopher Taylor David B. Ryden Christopher Taylor. 2018. Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. 320 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-7115-1 Economic historians, such as myself, are often struck by the combination of moral bankruptcy with modern market sophistication found among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Caribbean planters and merchants. For those interested in managerial and financial developments in the New World, the British settlers proved to be quintessential capitalists, whose economic pursuits spurred the development of long-distance credit, insurance, and business practices that made the Atlantic World an unparalleled epicenter of international trade. The sugar and slave trades both supported and fueled critical institutional developments that mitigated investor risk and maximized investor return. Further, the hyper-capitalist milieu of the British plantation supported a labor system that was unregulated in any meaningful way, thereby transforming Africans and their decedents into nothing more than ledger entries in the eyes of the law and of their owners: market behavior shaped and defined the elite creole culture of the West Indies. Planters were generally uninterested in becoming paternalists or lords of the manor. The most successful elites (1) harnessed the labor of hundreds of workers; (2) strove to improve efficiency and productivity, and (3) pored over financial forecasts in order to capitalize on the most advantageous markets. For all intents-and-purposes, these men (and a handful of women) supplied a highly competitive commodity market, with no individual or collective economic power over the aggregate supply or price of sugar. For many economic historians, the continuity between the early modern capitalism and our own day is worth stressing. This approach, of course, does not sit well with scholars who embrace the cultural turn and emphasize the striking difference—in both epistemology and mentalité—between those of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century and those of our (post-)modern world. Christopher Taylor stakes out a kind-of-middle ground, exploring the significance of global capitalism in shaping elite creole identity in Jamaica and in other parts of the the greater Caribbean. Unlike neoclassical economic historians, however, Taylor does not limit his focus to plodding through the story of British Caribbean economic decline. Instead, he explores how planters and their figurative and actual [End Page 207] decedents processed the fact that the West Indian sugar islands no longer held the interest of imperial policymakers and commentators. As the title suggests, by at least the 1840s, if not well before, the West Indian quarter of the Empire slipped into metropolitan irrelevance as free-trade policy edged-out the protectionist ideology of the previous century. But Taylor argues that imperial "neglect" was not an unthinking decision, but rather one that was deliberately pursued under the seemingly positivist economic guise of liberal free trade-ism. Echoing the fury of Eric Williams, Taylor argues that neither the theoretical superiority of free labor found in economic liberalism nor genuine antislavery were part of the project to rationalize the U.K. Economy. Alternatively, the application of the Smithian policy was focused solely on freeing intentional trade, with little or no concern about the un-free labor regimes found within the economies of new trading partners. In other words, free-trade ideology of the mid-nineteenth century only strengthened the connection between capitalism and slavery, as British markets incorporated the produce of Brazilian, Cuban, and North American slave plantations. What interests Taylor is how West Indian writers—in their personal letters, memoirs, and fiction—responded to the imperial neglect that was part-and-parcel of the liberal political economic policies of the nineteenth century. Incredibly, these West Indian writers did not directly respond to free-tradism in formal, political-economic tracts or books. Gone were the Edward Longs and the Sir William Youngs of the eighteenth century, who appealed to data and argued for preferential duties and taxes that would assist the West Indian sugar economy, generally, and the old West Indian islands particularly. The new generation of West Indian voices simply ceded the political-economic battlefield to the likes of J.S. Mills and...

The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government by Steve Pincus

Reviewed by: The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government by Steve Pincus Nasser Behnegar (bio) The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government steve pincus New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016 207 pp. It is a pleasure to find a compact historical monograph in a fluid, clear, and engaging style by a writer who shows mastery of the art of narration. But it is a boon when such a work also sheds new light on well-studied events, making us rethink the relevance of the past to contemporary political debates. Steve Pincus's study of the Declaration of Independence is such a work. The well-crafted title of the work that plays on the two meanings of heart ("the inner core of a thing" and "the organ of love or sympathy") expresses its thesis. Today reverence for the American founders is more common among conservatives than left-leaning liberals who tend to look askance at the founders with, at best, ambivalent eyes; Pincus's work, insofar as it intends to influence contemporary affairs, tries to give the liberals a reason for appropriating the founders as their own. According to him, "the Declaration of Independence is—and should remain—'American Scripture'" (2), not so much because of its articulation of abstract principles for which it is so famous but because it addresses "quintessential issues of the modern era" that deal with immigration, race, and especially economics. Of course, the declaration would not deserve this status simply for addressing these issues. Pincus suggests that it addresses them in the right way or in the right spirit, and he interprets his American Bible less through an exegesis of the text than through the recovery of its historical background, and ultimately of a partisan political position, of which the declaration was one expression. [End Page 230] Pincus takes issue with the opinion that "American Patriots founded their new nation … in defense of small government and of local American culture against foreign imposition" (92). He questions the second part of this opinion by arguing that the American Revolution was a consequence of British partisan politics. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Whigs had ceased to be a unified party, splintering into two factions over questions of taxation and imperial politics. One side, the side that came to dominate the government first under Robert Walpole and later under George Grenville, "believed that John Locke … had shown that labor created property, and therefore any productive workforce, whether free or unfree, would generate economic prosperity" (30). The other side, who called themselves the Patriots, also followed Locke but argued that "economic prosperity was created not through production alone, but by means of dynamic interaction of human production and human consumption" (32). The establishment Whigs "privileged the British Sugar Islands," preferred a pacific policy toward the Spanish Empire to protect trade with these islands, and sought tax relief for landowners at home. The Patriots wished to promote the manufacturing sector and saw the potential of a prosperous North America as a market for British goods. They sought to promote this prosperity by encouraging immigration to the colonies and by forcing the Spanish to open their markets to American colonies. After the Seven Years' War, the tension between the followers of Grenville and the Patriots intensified as the former sought to reduce the debt incurred by the war by taxing the colonies while the latter argued for measures that would stimulate the economy of the colonies. The American Revolution, Pincus argues, was the result of despair over the failure of Patriot politics in England and the hope that it could be implemented in North America. Throughout, Pincus persuasively shows the links between American founders and English Patriots, including some curious anecdotes. We learn, for instance, that George Washington's elder brother renamed their family estate, "the Little Huntington Creek Plantation," Mount Vernon in honor of the Patriot admiral and vocal critic of Walpole Edmund Vernon, and he did so in honor of not a victory but a defeat, the disastrous but honorable attempt to conquer the city of Cartagena in the War of Jenkins' Ear (Jenkins was a captain...

Charity and terror in eighteenth-century Jamaica: The Kingston Hospital and Asylum for Deserted ‘Negroes’

ABSTRACTThe Hospital and Asylum for Deserted Negroes in Kingston, Jamaica, was a major site of care for indigent blacks in one of the most densely populated urban centers on one of Britain's most valuable sugar islands. When the hospital opened, sometime after 1788, blacks outnumbered whites ten to one in Jamaica, and the island's whites continued to enact oppressive measures to control the colony's restive black population. This article shows how the Hospital and Asylum for Deserted Negroes became a strategic component in this scheme, joining an expansive network of workhouses and gaols the colonial government used to instill racialized law and order. From its early inception, one of the hospital's unspoken goals was to prevent lawlessness in a space marred by slave resistance. Finally, this article demonstrates how the early development of Jamaica's public health medical infrastructure was, in a large part, nurtured by the slave system.

The South’s Other Slavery: Recent Research on Indian Slavery

The South’s Other SlaveryRecent Research on Indian Slavery Denise I. Bossy (bio) Betty was just seven years old when Indian slave raiders from Carolina attacked her Florida mission community sometime in the 1690s. Surrounding the town, the raiders waited as the terrified inhabitants used up their few bullets and arrows. Then they moved in. In the midst of the attack, Betty’s mother attempted a daring escape. She scooped Betty up, put her on her back, and fled to the nearby river. But her effort was in vain. The raiders soon swarmed the riverbank, and Betty’s mother was shot and killed before her young daughter’s eyes. Betty was taken to Carolina with a number of other captives. From that day forward, Betty would remain a slave and be counted among the estimated fifty-one thousand southeastern Indians who shared her fate.1 Betty carried with her the memory not only of her enslavement but also of her identity as she was sold to a series of English men who took her from Carolina to Rhode Island to Connecticut. She and everyone else in her life—from her son, to her owners, to their white neighbors—knew that Betty was a “Spanish Indian.” But scholars, particularly historians of the South and of Atlantic world slavery, have struggled to figure out how to meaningfully fit stories like Betty’s—and Indian slavery—into their studies.2 Betty’s identity was no secret. In fact, it became the focal point of her son’s freedom suit in 1750. And her enslavement was all too common. Not just in New England and South Carolina but across the Americas, Indians were enslaved by the millions.3 New Englanders tried to camouflage their dependence on Indian slavery by creating a system of judicial enslavement that rendered Indians (and often their children) perpetual servants. Meanwhile in Virginia and South Carolina, Indian enslavement was part and parcel of colonization, fueling [End Page 27] colonial economies and geopolitical expansion and leading to a major export in Indians to the British sugar islands and throughout the mainland colonies. Efforts to restrict and control the Indian slave trade were thwarted by southern assemblies that increasingly authorized and legalized Indian slavery and by both colonists and high-ranking officials who invested heavily in the trading and ownership of Indian slaves. Yet only in the last fifteen years has the subject gained any lasting traction. Though a number of twentieth-century scholars authored articles, theses, and (a couple of) books on Indian slavery in the British colonies, especially in South Carolina, it was only in 2003 that it became impossible for southern and slavery historians to continue to relegate Indian slavery to footnotes.4 That year the Bancroft Prize was awarded to two books (and only two books), both focused squarely on Indian slavery: Alan Gallay’s stunning study of the Indian slave trade that swept across the South like an infection between 1670 and 1715, and James F. Brooks’s sensitive social analysis of Indian slave trading networks in and around New Mexico through the nineteenth century.5 As Gallay and Brooks amply demonstrate, Indian slavery was far more than a frontier phenomenon. In the South the enslavement of Indians fundamentally reshaped the geopolitics of the region, both leading to the destruction of numerous Indian communities (and even entire regions) and catalyzing the rise of powerful new Indian confederacies like the Creeks and Choctaws. As the Carolinians learned to loosely direct Indian slave raiding from their fragile colony, they not only enriched themselves but also undermined their Spanish and French colonial competitors, nearly destroying the entire Spanish Indian mission system by 1706 and severely restricting French settlement and trade ambitions in Louisiana. While the Indian slave trade led to tremendous regional instability and two major Indian wars against the Carolinians—the second of which, the Yamasee War (1715–17), brought the colony to the brink of collapse—it paved the way for the rise of the Old South, complete with plantation slavery (and with plantations that included Indian slaves). And across New Mexico, as Brooks reveals, indigenous and Spanish practices of captivity led to a trade in Indian...

Hubs of empire: the southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean

In Hubs of Empire, Matthew Mulcahy argues that it is useful to view Barbados, Jamaica, and the British Leeward Islands, along with the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, as a single region. Separated by thousands of miles of ocean but united by shared history and economic interest, these territories formed the Greater Caribbean. Although the Greater Caribbean does not loom large in the historical imaginations of many Americans, it was the wealthy center of Britain's Atlantic economy. Large-scale plantation slavery first emerged in Barbados, then spread throughout the sugar islands and the southeastern mainland colonies, allowing planters to acquire fortunes and influence unmatched elsewhere - including the tobacco colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Hubs of Empire begins in the sixteenth century by providing readers with a broad overview of Native American life in the region and early pirate and privateer incursions. Mulcahy examines the development of settler colonies during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, explores diverse groups of European colonists, and surveys political, economic, and military issues in the decades before the Seven Years War. The plantation system achieved its fullest and harshest manifestation in the Greater Caribbean. The number of slaves and the scale of the slave trade meant that enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans in all of the affiliated colonies, often by enormous ratios. This enabled Africans to maintain more of their traditions, practices, and languages than in other parts of British America, resulting in distinct creole cultures. This volume is an ideal introduction to the complex and fascinating history of colonies too often neglected in standard textbook accounts.

Monsieur Georges par Roland Monpierre

Reviews 247 respecté, voire mis en exergue. Une bibliographie d’une demi-page et un index de sept, facilitent ce voyage à travers le temps et l’espace jalonné de références, comme points de repère. Il est recommandé de consulter le site où l’on trouvera une panoplie d’exercices interactifs supplémentaires. En somme, rien n’a été laissé au hasard dans ce précieux outil. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey Monpierre, Roland. Monsieur Georges. Tome 1. Achères: Dagan, 2013. ISBN 978-2919612 -41-3. Pp. 62. 15 a. Given the popularity of graphic novels among American youth, a wonderful means of introducing students to French literature with an Afro-centric twist is via Monpierre’s bande dessinée inspired by Georges (1843), the only novel Dumas wrote that addressed a slave rebellion. Set on Isle de France (now Mauritius) from 1810 to 1825, race and racism are at the center of the story, a particularly sensitive and rarely broached topic for Dumas because of his part-African ancestry. Using rich color designs and deftly weaving the essence of Dumas’s original prose, Monpierre integrates all the ingredients, from an engrossing plot to multifaceted characters, which are characteristic of Dumas’s novels. For example, the main protagonist Georges is a lightskinned mulatto who is readily mistaken as white. His father Munier is a wealthy mulatto plantation owner with slaves. Georges’s older brother Jacques becomes a slavetrader and a pirate captain. As a child, Georges witnesses the British attempt to gain control of the island. Since Munier is a mulatto, the white plantation owners will not fight alongside him. Consequently, he leads a group of blacks against the impeding British attack. Greatly embarrassed by the fact that a mulatto, or worse yet in their eyes, a man of color, saved them, the white plantation owners ignore Munier’s success against the British. In preparation for reading Monpierre’s Monsieur Georges, teachers will want to include a study of Dumas, the author, and his father, General Davy de la Pailleterie, who had been born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), himself the mixed-race son of the marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman and commissaire général in the colony’s artillery, and MarieCessette Dumas, a slave of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. This pre-reading preparation will allow students to gain insight into why Dumas rarely if ever addressed the issue of slavery in France or in its colonies—but for one story, Georges. In addition, teachers may want to ask students, depending on their grade level and maturity, to research the history of France’s slave trade as well as the economic, social, and cultural impact it had on native cultures in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, and other sugar islands. Finally, teachers will want to explore with students the role that the French Revolution plays in the story. Beyond an investigation of the fascinating characters and its reallife connections to the little-known history of the Caribbean and African Diaspora cultures, there is tremendous cross-cultural learning that can be generated from reading Monsieur Georges as one cannot help but draw comparisons to the American slave trade. Even the most reticent of young readers will be engrossed by this entertaining bande dessinée and will benefit from the crucial lessons on race and tolerance that it instills. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Film edited by Michèle Bissière Baecque, Antoine de, et Noël Herpe. Éric Rohmer: biographie. Paris: Stock, 2014. ISBN 978-2-2340-7561-0. Pp. 604. 29 a. This biography of the director of the Contes moraux, Comédies et proverbes, and Contes des quatre saisons cycles is based on unpublished archival documents and some eighty original interviews. Baecque and Herpe enjoyed unfettered access to Rohmer’s artistic collaborators as well as to the small family circle that Maurice Schérer (1920– 2010) kept separate from his directorial activities, all signed under pseudonym. Unlike the unruly, peripatetic Truffaut, Rohmer was a faithful family man who led an austere life, free from brushes with the law, amorous escapades, or calculated public appearances . Though...

Materialism, slavery, and the history of Jamaica.

This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on "race science" with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in-the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between "salt-water" and "creole" Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long's polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.