scholarly journals “Known To Be Equal to the Management”

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-178
Author(s):  
Laura Sandy ◽  
Gervase Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Plantation Management ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Racial Hegemony ◽  
Plantation Society

Abstract Enslaved overseers have largely been neglected in the extant historiography of plantation slavery. At best they have been pushed to the margins of the literature, their numbers and their significance downplayed. Yet, as large plantations diversified over the latter years of the eighteenth century, and as relations between established planters and independently minded and aspirational white overseers became prone to mistrust and friction, many prominent modernizing planters, including both Washington and Jefferson, began to experiment with unfree managers. They often proved to be skilled, dependable and, even under the pressure of the Revolutionary War, resilient. Yet their presence raised serious questions within plantation society too; they challenged white racial hegemony, and their ‘loyalty’ was a conditional and contingent quality. They occupy a unique place in the story of plantation management, one that challenges orthodox conceptions of race and power in the slave South.

Imperial Commerce, Gender, and Slavery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Novel ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Full Humanity ◽  
At Home

This chapter explores the twinned emergence in the British novel of a critique of plantation slavery and commercial imperialism with a proto-feminist questioning of the ‘commerce of the sexes’. The discourses of racial and sexual oppression resonate with one another, helping to establish connections between inequalities at home and the sufferings of distant others. It has been argued that novelistic representations of violence and suffering are central to an ‘imagined empathy’ which in turn assisted the development in the eighteenth century of humanitarian sentiment. While it might be charged that the mid-eighteenth-century novel failed to grant full humanity to the enslaved and that it was somewhat instrumentalist in its handling of slavery reform, it can be demonstrated that the versatility of the figure of slavery enabled fuller characterization of the colonized and enslaved, as well as the more explicit imagining of colonial violence.

2. America and the transatlantic Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
New World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Living Things ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
And Gender

‘America and the transatlantic Enlightenment’ explores how America played an important role in the making of the Enlightenment. The New World offered a startling new picture of the natural world and all the living things in it. America catalyzed new ideas about science, natural history, and human nature, which both shaped and were shaped by Enlightenment thought. British Americans drew on classical republican thought and contemporary ideas about natural law and this coalesced into a revolutionary republicanism—the nexus of ideas that animated the Revolutionary War. Though many of the ideas to emerge out of eighteenth-century America promised a radical new world of freedom and human possibility, they were also blinkered by long-standing racial and gender prejudices.

New England’s Peculiar Institution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Almost All

The chapter provides a history of slavery in New England and an interpretation of the origins and evolution of racism and racist practices. Although the first African Americans arrived in New England in the 1630s, their numbers remained small throughout the seventeenth century and almost all lived in some form of servitude. They faced discrimination largely because of their place in the hierarchy rather than their ethnic origins. A significant change occurred in the early eighteenth century when the number of people of African descent, almost all slaves, increased significantly. That growth was met by a host of racist laws. Slavery took various forms, but most slaveholders held one or two slaves. The exceptions were western Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut where plantation slavery took hold, and it would distinguish that part of New England by its extreme racism even after slavery disappeared.

The Worlds of the Plantation

Freedom Roots ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 53-92
Author(s):  
Laurent Dubois ◽  
Richard Lee Turits
Keyword(s):  
New Order ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Global History ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Plantation Society ◽  
Racial Slavery

By first retracing the long history of slavery in Europe, this chapter explores the rise of plantation slavery in the Caribbean as a key moment in global history. It shows how economic, cultural, and social forces converged in the creation of this new order based on racial slavery. It also emphasizes the complex contradictions of plantation society, notably through an exploration of the plantation gardens and provision grounds that enslaved people cultivated and sought to turn to their own ends, and which lay the foundation for agricultural autonomy in the post-emancipation period.

Jacques Laffitte and the Beginnings of Investment Banking in France

1948 ◽  
Vol 22 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 137-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fritz Redlich
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Investment Banking ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Foreign Correspondents ◽  
Banking Business ◽  
Napoleonic Era

At the close of the Napoleonic era, the banking business of France except in one respect had not advanced much over what it had been in 1789. At that time it had been dominated by Protestant Swiss, the best known of whom was Necker. Some of them like the Mallets, Delesserts, and Thélussons, descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Geneva and other places and in a later generation returned to France as Swiss. The business of these bankers consisted in lending their own funds and those entrusted to their care to worthy applicants for loans, probably merchants as well as noblemen. They administered fortunes for their owners, which is especially true of the court bankers who were charged with the financial affairs of the king and his family. In addition, like all eighteenth-century bankers they had a flourishing business in bills of exchange, including the accepting of drafts of bankers and merchants in other cities and countries. Necker is said to have organized these bankers and their foreign correspondents so as to provide by a system of short-term drafts the funds for French participation in our Revolutionary War.

scholarly journals Antoine Lavalette, Slave Murderer: A Forgotten Scandal of the French West Indies

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-55
Author(s):  
Andrew Dial
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
French West Indies ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Planter Class

Abstract The name Antoine Lavalette (1708–67) is infamous within the Society of Jesus. The superior of the Martinique mission in the mid-eighteenth century, he is known for triggering the 1764 expulsion from France. Less known is his torture to death of four enslaved men and women. The visitor sent to investigate Lavalette’s commercial activities, Jean-François de la Marche (1700–62), discovered these murders and reported them to Rome. This paper analyzes La Marche’s account of the atrocities within their Caribbean context. It demonstrates that Lavalette’s killings were within the established norms of the planter class. It further argues that his actions were part of the Society’s attempts to reconcile its religious calling with the gruesome realities of plantation slavery.

“Undistinguished Destruction”: The Effects of Smallpox on British Emancipation Policy in the Revolutionary War

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 865-885 ◽  
Author(s):  
GARY SELLICK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Source Material ◽  
American Continent ◽  
British Military ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The Impact

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to any African American who fought for the British cause against the colonial rebels in his province. Dunmore's plan to reconquer Virginia with his “Ethiopian Regiment” ended in failure, not due to a lack of willing volunteers but because of a familiar eighteenth-century killer: smallpox. Five years later, similar proclamations were issued in South Carolina. Yet smallpox again hindered British designs, devastating the eager African Americans who flooded to their lines. This paper uses primary source material and research on smallpox to analyze the experiences of African Americans who actively sought freedom with the British during the Revolutionary War. Focussing on the differing regions of Virginia and South Carolina this paper will assess the impact of smallpox on British military designs for runaway slaves while also evaluating the reasons why the disease had such a devastating effect on African Americans during the period. Overall, this paper will show how smallpox, so common in eighteenth-century Europe, put a fatal end to the first widespread push for emancipation on the American continent and helped derail one of Britain's best hopes for turning the tide in the Revolutionary War.

scholarly journals The Paragraph as Information Technology: How News Traveled in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (02) ◽  
pp. 253-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Slauter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Reports

The newspapers of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world copied, translated, and corrected each other. Part of the technology facilitating the transmission of international news was the paragraph, a textual unit that was easily removed from one source and inserted into another. In eighteenth-century London the paragraph became the basic unit of printed news, relaying political messages and also providing the means by which these messages could be analyzed. Subject to a whole range of editorial interventions, the form and content of news reports evolved as they circulated from one place to the other. Integrating scholarship on journalism in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States, this article compares reports in French, English, and Spanish-language newspapers in order to understand the process of newsmaking. Two detailed examples from the American Revolutionary war demonstrate how political news in the Revolutionary age was a collaborative process linking printers, translators, readers, and ship captains on both sides of the Atlantic. In doing so it highlights the importance of the paragraph as an object of historical study.

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