The Restructuring of the British Empire and the Colonization of Australia, 1832–8

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Lester ◽  
Nikita Vanderbyl
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Vested Interests ◽  
The Caribbean

Abstract Analysing a comprehensive shift in the governance of the British Empire in the mid 1830s, this article introduces the context for the following three articles in the Feature, ‘Legacies of Slave Ownership’. This shift included the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, upon which these articles concentrate, but also the restructuring of the East India Company. A reformed British parliament introduced transitions in the western and eastern halves of the Empire in a concentrated burst of legislation between 1833 and 1838. While vested interests were protected, not least by facilitating a surge in the colonization of Australia, the transition produced the template of a liberal Empire.

African Caribbean Residents of Edinburgh in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Scotland is gradually coming to terms with its involvement in slavery and colonialism as part of the British Empire. This article places the spotlight on the lives of African Caribbean people who were residents of Edinburgh during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I discuss their varied experiences and contributions: from runaways and men fighting for their freedom in the Scottish courts to women working as servants in city households or marrying into Edinburgh high society. The nineteenth century saw activism among political radicals from abolitionists to anticolonialists; some of these figures studied and taught at Edinburgh University. Their stories reflect the Scottish capital’s many direct connections with the Caribbean region.

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

Slavery and Christianity in the British West Indies

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Worthington Smith
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Slavery in the British Empire was always centered in the British West Indies. To a greater degree than in the Southern Thirteen Colonies, economic life in the West Indies depended upon Negro slavery, and the population of the islands soon became predominantly Negro. With the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after 1775, slavery within the British Empire became almost entirely confined to the Caribbean colonies. Until the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, British eyes were focused upon the West Indies whenever slavery was mentioned.

The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?

1974 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Walcott
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Caribbean Culture ◽  
The Caribbean

We live in the shadow of an America that is economically benign yet politically malevolent. That malevolence, because of its size, threatens an eclipse of identity, but the shadow is as inescapable as that of any previous empire. But we were American even while we were British, if only in the geographical sense, and now that the shadow of the British Empire has passed through and over us in the Caribbean, we ask ourselves if, in the spiritual or cultural sense, we must become American. We have broken up the archipelago into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity. Everyone knows that these are pretexts of power if such power is seen as political. This is what the politician would describe as reality, but the reality is absurd.

East Meets West

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Jeppesen
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Quantitative Survey ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
East And West

This chapter breaks down the artificial historiographical and archival dichotomy between ‘east and west’ by exposing the multiple and intricate connections that facilitated the systematic transfer of people, capital and goods between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. It will suggest that if we reorient our gaze from the economic structures of slavery and focus instead upon the family as a lens through which to explore Britain’s imperial engagement during this period, it is possible to reveal a far more interconnected and intimate vision of empire than is often credited. It will offer both a qualitative and quantitative survey of the scope of connections between the Caribbean, Britain and East India Company, alongside a consideration of how the structure of the archive can be negotiated in order to explore these questions. Finally, to provide substance and depth to these claims the chapter will offer a detailed case study of the Martins of Antigua.

Imperial Pressures, 1800–1812

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Interracial Relationships ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Institutional Pressures ◽  
High Class ◽  
Class Standing ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter chronicles the institutional pressures put on mixed-race migrants in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Although families continued to assist relatives of color—which included helping get them into the East India Company to advance their social standing—constricting notions of kinship and political wariness of African-descended people made it challenging for Jamaicans of color to thrive in Britain. Their attempts to assimilate were made more difficult by the growing calls of abolitionists and pro-slavery supporters to curtail interracial relationships in order to create a demographic separation between blacks and whites in the Caribbean. Within this abolitionist debate, Trinidad’s governor Thomas Picton went to court for having tortured a mixed-race girl named Louisa Calderon. Her arrival in Britain prompted a flurry of accusations that she had become pregnant by a Scottish protector, escalating the general public’s concern about mixed-race migrants and their impact on British demography. This chapter contends that by the early nineteenth century, high class standing and genetic connections to prominent Britons were losing their social power for Jamaican migrants of color.

The Geography of Freedom in the Age of Revolutions

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-188
Author(s):  
Ashley L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Story Collection

This chapter explores a contradiction at the heart of the mainstream abolitionist movement: colonialism in India was promoted as a solution to the problem of slavery. It focuses on forms of unfreedom that trouble the geographical divide drawn in abolitionist discourse between slavery and freedom within the British empire. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Marianna Starke's pro-imperialism/antislavery drama (set in India), The Sword of Peace (1788). It then turns to Maria Edgeworth's anti-Jacobin short-story collection Popular Tales (1804), which features nearly identical scenes of slavery set in Jamaica and India. Edgeworth's fiction might seem worlds away from actual colonial policy; but by contextualizing her writing amid debates about the slave trade and proposals for the cultivation of sugar in Bengal, the chapter shows that her stories were important and highly regarded thought experiments in colonial governance. Finally, the chapter discusses an important historical instantiation of the Indies mentality that falls outside the time frame of this study: the transportation of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean in the 1830s.

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