TROUBLING MEMORIES: NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIES OF THE SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 147-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hall

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the memories and histories of the slave trade and slavery produced by three figures, all of whom were connected with the compensation awarded to slave owners by the British government in 1833. It argues that memories associated with slavery, of the Middle Passage and the plantations, were deeply troubling, easier to forget than remember. Enthusiasm for abolition, and the ending of ‘the stain’ upon the nation, provided a way of screening disturbing associations, partially forgetting a long history of British involvement in the slavery business. Yet remembering and forgetting are always interlinked as different genres of text reveal.

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Mary Wills

This chapter examines officers’ contributions to the metropolitan discourses about slavery and abolition taking place in Britain in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Furthering the theme of naval officers playing an important part in the social and cultural history of the West African campaign, it uncovers connections between the Royal Navy and domestic anti-slavery networks, and the extent to which abolitionist societies and interest groups operating in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century forged relationships with naval officers in the field. Officers contributed to this ever-evolving anti-slavery culture: through support of societies and by providing key testimonies and evidence about the unrelenting transatlantic slave trade. Their representations of the slave trade were used to champion the abolitionist cause, as well as the role of the Royal Navy, in parliament, the press and other public arenas.


Author(s):  
Iain Walker

Chapter four recounts the arrival of Malagasy leaders on the islands of Mwali and Mayotte in order to profoundly shape the history of the latter island, sold to France to become a colony in 1841. The political maneuvers between France, Britain, Madagascar and Zanzibar had significant consequences on the three smaller islands, particularly as the British tried to suppress the slave trade, the fulcrum of local economies and the source of labor for French plantations on Mayotte. Only Ngazidja remained apart, until finally, towards the end of the century, both Britain and Zanzibar renounced their claims to and influence over the archipelago and France declared protectorates over the three westernmost islands. The development of struggling plantation economies on all the islands and the loss of their historical economic mercantile activities would spell economic disaster for the islands.


2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Brown ◽  
Gabriel Paquette

The independence of Latin America from colonial rule in the first decades of the nineteenth century is generally held to have broken the bonds which had linked Europe to the Americas for three centuries. This article contends that a re-examination of the decade of the 1820s reveals the persistence, as well as the reconfiguration, of connections between the Old World and the New after the dissolution of the Iberian Atlantic monarchies. Some of these multi-faceted connections are introduced and explored, most notably commercial ties, intellectual and cultural influences, immigration, financial obligations, the slave trade and its suppression, and diplomatic negotiations. Recognition and appreciation of these connections has important consequences for our understandings of the history of the Atlantic World, the ‘Age of Revolutions’, and Latin American Independence itself.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (S28) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard

AbstractHistorians have mostly ignored Kingston and its enslaved population, despite it being the fourth largest town in the British Atlantic before the American Revolution and the town with the largest enslaved population in British America before emancipation. The result of such historiographical neglect is a lacuna in scholarship. In this article, I examine one period of the history of slavery in Kingston, from when the slave trade in Jamaica was at its height, from the early 1770s through to the early nineteenth century, and then after the slave trade was abolished but when slavery in the town became especially important. One question I especially want to explore is how Kingston maintained its prosperity even after its major trade – the Atlantic slave trade – was stopped by legislative fiat in 1807.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Heather Andrea Williams

Slavery had long existed in Europe and Africa, but the history of the Atlantic slave trade begins in the 1440s with Portuguese exploration of West Africa. ‘The Atlantic slave trade’ charts the increased demand for slave labor in Portugal and the Christian justification of African enslavement. In the 1490s, the journeys of Christopher Columbus to the Caribbean and North and South America opened up mineral-rich and fertile lands on which European countries planted their flags and the Christian cross. More than 12 million Africans boarded the ships, but nearly 2 million died during the Middle Passage. Of those who survived, only about 5 percent went to North America, with most going to South America and the Caribbean.


1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill R. Dias

In Angola, climatic instability contributed to maintaining a precarious balance between food resources, population and disease long before the nineteenth century. Periods of exceptionally irregular rainfall, lasting several years, were preceded or accompanied by plagues of locusts which caused famines at least once every decade. The coastal lowland and the extreme south were especially vulnerable. Prolonged hunger crises led to malnutrition, lowered resistance to disease and epidemic outbreaks, especially of smallpox. A rhythm of drought and smallpox can be discerned in Angola, at least since the seventeeth century. From the 1830s the gradual decline of the overseas slave trade and rise of commerce in raw materials and cash crops brought important demographic changes. These contributed to the worsening famines and epidemic crises of the late nineteenth century. Commercial instability and rural depopulation hindered the growth of Portuguese plantation prosperity. Soon after, however, similar crises aided Portuguese military conquest in Angola by weakening African ability to mobilize effective resistance. In the twentieth century malnutrition continued to be the most widespread problem of Angola's Africans and on occasion it drove them to revolt.


1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell

As a contribution to the history of Britain's campaign for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century this article examines, first, the creation of various mixed commissions for the adjudication of vessels captured on suspicion of trading in slaves after the trade had been declared illegal; secondly, the composition of these mixed commissions and the way in which they functioned, with special reference to the several commissions sitting in Sierra Leone which for 25 years dealt with the majority of captured slave vessels; and thirdly, the reasons why after 1839, and especially after 1845, captured ships were increasingly taken before British vice-admiralty courts with the result that the mixed commissions were gradually allowed to run down, although most of them were not abolished until the Atlantic slave trade had been finally suppressed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Susan Martin-Márquez

AbstractThis article studies the reformulation of Black Legend, Middle Passage andconvivenciadiscourses in nineteenth-century narratives published by Cubans sent to Spain's de facto penal colony on Fernando Po. Contextualised with archival sources, this reading highlights how deportees condemned Spain's perpetuation of the slave trade while struggling to negotiate their own positioning within the racially-stratified practices of late-imperial space. Those negotiations often exacerbated traditional divisions between different communities within the Spanish colonial system. In some instances, however, the deportees’ encounters with citizens and colonised subjects from distant territories may have bolstered and expanded intra-imperial identification and solidarity.


Author(s):  
Paul Huddie

This chapter will show that the Crimean War was perhaps the most positive chapter in Ireland’s nineteenth century history of governance, agitation and conspiracy and society’s relationship with the executive. It will do this by illustrating that between the Famine and the rise of the IRB Irish people demonstrated an aversion for political upheavals, and that this was especially manifest during the Russian campaign. This will be shown to have stemmed from several factors, including a lack of external support and internal organisation, which ensured that there could be no nationalist response comparable to the Great War in the case of those involved in the Easter Rising. It will also be shown that, due to the rampant anti-British rhetoric and apparent active preparations of Irish-Americans to invade Ireland, precautions were taken the British government in Ireland – Dublin Castle. A specific policy was pursued in order to ensure that nothing disturbed what was deemed by the Irish authorities to be a prosperous, loyal and peaceful country. Finally, it will be shown that those positive attributes were also eagerly fostered and encouraged by the lord lieutenant of Ireland, through speeches, visits to invalided Irish soldiers and orchestration of a national banquet.


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