Music and the Use of the Profits of the Anglo-American Slave Economy (ca. 1610–c. 1810)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hunter
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Financial Gain ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First Time ◽  
Musical Activities

During the era of the Anglo-American slave trade ca. 1610–ca. 1810, music itself offered few opportunities for immense financial gain. By contrast, the slave trade (transatlantic, intra-coastal, and local) and the use of slave labor (not just on plantations but also in manufacturing, small businesses, and domestically) provided profits to owners who put some of that surplus into fostering musical activities such as purchasing lessons, instruments, and scores; subscribing to opera and concert seasons; hiring musicians; and even buying a musical prodigy—Muzio Clementi—from his father in Rome. In addition to considering the opportunities afforded individual owners and families by slave-derived wealth, this chapter brings to the fore theories of the commercialization of consumption, capitalism, and the development of empire. It points to the use of slave-related products such as ivory on musical instruments. It demonstrates how significant slavery’s investors were to the establishment of the Royal Academy of Music in London, the first opera company to be chartered as a business. It identifies professional and amateur musicians who were slave owners. These previously unknown or disregarded links between slavery and the musical world of the nascent British empire are laid bare for the first time.

The Politics of Reproduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Labor Force ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
Caribbean Women ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

This book examines the history and politics of childbearing in the British Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. British politicians became increasingly concerned to promote motherhood among Afro-Caribbean women during the era of abolitionism. These politicians hoped that a homegrown labor force would allow for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade without any disruption to the pace of labor on Caribbean plantations. The plans for reform generated by British politicians were shaped by their ideas about race, medicine, demography, and religion, and so the book explores these fields of comprehension as they related to reproductive reform. While making a broad survey of the politics of reproduction in Atlantic world, the book also focuses in on the story of a Barbadian midwife and three generations of her family. The experiences of Doll and her female kin illustrate how the campaign to promote fertility affected Afro-Caribbean women, and also how they were able to carve out room to maneuver within the constraints of life in a Caribbean slave society.

Empire, Mission, Ecumenism, and Human Rights: “Religious Liberty” in Egypt, 1919–1956

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stuart
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Middle East ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Egyptian Government

Historians identify many connections between human rights and religion, including the influence of religious organizations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Protestant ecumenical movement and American Protestantism played important roles in this regard. Historical analysis has so far taken insufficient account of another contemporaneous phenomenon important in terms both of religion and of rights—the British Empire. Its authorities typically offered a “fair field” to Christian missionaries irrespective of their nationality or denomination. They might also offer protection to religious minorities. In Egypt the situation was complicated. An Islamic country and a vital part of Britain's “informal” empire in the Middle East, Egypt was also an important area of missionary activity. To Egyptian government and British imperial representatives alike missionaries asserted their right and that of Christian converts to “religious liberty.” Focusing in part on Anglican mission in Egypt, this article examines the complex interplay of empire and Anglo-American ecumenism in missionary assertion of religious freedom. It also shows how imperialism and debates about “religious liberty” in Egypt and the Middle East influenced both “universal” and Egyptian national ideas about freedom of religion up to 1956.

American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Illegal Immigration ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
National Character ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Anglo American

American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction traces three massive waves of immigration from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and analyzes the nature of immigration as a purposeful, structured activity, attitudes supporting or hostile to immigration, policies and laws regulating immigration, and the nature of and prospects for assimilation. There have been some dramatic developments since 2011, including the crisis along the southwestern border and the intense conflict over illegal immigration. The population of the United States has diverse sources: territorial acquisition through conquest and colonialism, the slave trade, and voluntary immigration. Many Americans value the memory of immigrant ancestors, and are sentimentally inclined to immigrant strivings. Alongside this sits the perception that immigration destabilizes social order, cultural coherence, job markets, and political alignments. The nearly 250 years of American nationhood has been characterized by both support for openness to immigration and embrace of a cosmopolitan formulation of American identity and for restrictions and assertions of belief in a core Anglo-American national character.

Empire by Imitation? US Economic Imperialism within a British World System

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-211
Author(s):  
Marc-William Palen
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Trade Policies ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Open Door ◽  
System P ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Economic Imperialism

Most comparative studies of the British and American empires focus on the pre-1945 British Empire and the post-1945 American Empire. The tendency to avoid contemporaneous studies of the two empires suggests that there may be more differences than similarities between them, particularly when examining their imperial trade policies from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. For those studies attempting such comparisons, the so-called Open Door Empire of the United States is commonly depicted as having copied the free-trade imperial policies of its estranged motherland by the turn of the century. Such studies then assert that these imitative imperial policies reached new Anglo-Saxonist heights following US colonial Caribbean and Pacific acquisitions from the Spanish Empire in 1898, followed closely by the fin-de-siècle Anglo-American ‘Great Rapprochement’. This chapter challenges this imitative imperial narrative by bringing to light the contrasting ways in which the American Empire grew in the shadow of the British Empire.

The English Department as Imperial Commonwealth, or The Global Past and Global Future of English Studies

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-176
Author(s):  
Joe Cleary
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
English Department ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Global English ◽  
English Departments ◽  
The World ◽  
Anglo American

Though canons and faculty have greatly diversified in recent decades, English departments around the world fundamentally prioritize English and American literatures. To this extent, they resemble the Anglo-American imperial commonwealths that some toward the end of the nineteenth century advocated for in order to stave off the decline of the British Empire and to shore up a permanent Anglo-American supremacy against all threats. Still, as the English language becomes “global,” English departments today founder for a variety of reasons and convey a persistent sense of crisis. Has the time come radically to decolonize the English department, not only at the level of curriculum but also in terms of its basic organizational structures to facilitate the study of anglophone literatures now planetary in reach? If so, how might this best be achieved in the British and American core countries and also in the more peripheral regions of Anglophonia?

Crime Concealment as an Element of the Method of Committing Slave Trade and Slave Labor Use

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-237
Author(s):  
Alexander N. Kalyuzhnyi ◽  
◽  
Nikolai G. Shurukhnov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Beauty Contests ◽  
Psychological Pressure ◽  
Illegal Activities ◽  
Travel Abroad

The authors examine the patterns of concealment of illegal activities in human trafficking and slave labor use, as well as patterns of the activities of law enforcement agencies in the disclosure and investigation of the analyzed crimes. The aim of the article is to substantiate the data on the concealment of the investigated crimes for their subsequent use in the disclosure and investigation of the analyzed illegal activity. In the research, the authors used legal, sociological and other methods of scientific knowledge: logical, comparative legal, statistical, modeling, and a number of others. The authors relied on the materials of 130 criminal cases on encroachments on human trafficking and slave labor use, the results of interviewing 320 law enforcement officers, scientific developments of other researchers on the issue under consideration, as well as statistical data from the Main International and Analytical Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia and the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. The study of the materials of criminal cases shows that the basis for the disclosure and investigation of perpetrators' criminal activities should be based on the regularities of the method of concealing the crimes under consideration reflected in the following typical forms: (1) concealment of the fact and traces of preparation for committing a crime: a) placing veiled ads with offers of employment, training, marriage services in the media, social networks, leaflets, etc.; b) holding fake “beauty contests”, “draw games”, and similar events, participants of which are offered work or study abroad; c) disseminating deliberately false information in order to attract future victims of slave trade and illegal exploitation in certain social groups: prostitutes, drug addicts, unemployed, homeless people, etc.; d) conspiring in finding accomplices, means of communication, places of detention of victims, means of physical and psychological pressure on the victim; (2) conspiracy of the direct commission of a crime: a) disguising it as legitimate; b) falsifying documents that allow victims to travel abroad; c) concealing places of detention of victims and organizing victim safe-keeping; d) seizing identity documents from victims; e) using SIM cards registered to unauthorized persons, f) veiled advertising of activities to search for consumers of sexual and other services; (3) disguise or destruction of traces of the committed crime: destruction of clothing and belongings of the victim, erasing the traces left. Thus, in the course of the analysis of the literature and criminal case materials on human trafficking and slave labor use, forensically significant data on the concealment of the investigated crimes were substantiated; the knowledge of these data should be used in the course of the disclosure and investigation of such crimes.

The Atlantic

2008 ◽  
pp. 19-48
Author(s):  
Mark C. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Equatorial Atlantic ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Naval Policy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Liberal Trade ◽  
Naval Structures ◽  
The Impact

This chapter places the goals and the naval structures of Britain and America into the context of economic development and international relations in the equatorial Atlantic. It introduces the economic status of the Atlantic region in the early nineteenth century, before detailing how British and American naval activity developed power within it. It explores ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and British imperialism in relation to naval policy-making; the free-trade mentality adopted by the British Empire in the middle of the century and the impact this had on trade with South America and West Africa. It discusses British naval strategy and deployment, American naval policy, and the economic basis of the Anglo-American relationship. It concludes that though America took a protectionist approach to commerce while the British objective sought liberal trade, they avoided diplomatic difficulty by utilising their respective sea powers in order to navigate maritime activity peacefully.

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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