Travelling Ideas of (the British) Empire: Translating the Caribbean World for the Eighteenth-Century German Stage

2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-111
Author(s):  
Birgit Tautz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Caribbean

scholarly journals The Cromwellian Protectorate and the languages of empire

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Armitage
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Intellectual History

AbstractThis article recovers some of the classical, constitutional, and religious languages of empire in early-modern Britain by a consideration of the period between the end of the first Anglo-Dutch war in 1654 and the calling of the second Protecloral Parliament in 1656. It examines in particular the strategic and political motivationsfor CromweWs ‘western design’ against the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and presents the response to thefailure of the design and the oppositiorud literature published around the second Protectoral Parliament as the immediate context for the publication of James Harrington's Oceana (1656). It is argued that Harrington's Machiavellian meditation on imperialism is intended as a critique of the expansion of the British republic, so placing Harrington more firmly within the oppositiorud bloc of the late Protectorate. A concluding section details the recovery of this moment of historical argument in the heat of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole during the early stages of Anglo-Spanish hostility in 1738—9, and leads to some wider refUctions both on the ideological uses of history in the aeation of the British empire and on the centrality of the languages of empire to an understanding of Anglo-American intellectual history up to the late eighteenth century.

Perish or Prosper: The Law and Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1700–1850

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kercher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Primary Method ◽  
Serious Crime ◽  
The World ◽  
Convict Transportation ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Fundamental Law

For over 150 years from the early eighteenth century, convict transportation was a primary method of punishing serious crime in Britain and Ireland. Convicts were first sent to the colonies in North America and the Caribbean and then to three newly established Australian colonies on the other side of the world. Conditions were very different between the two locations, yet the fundamental law of transportation remained the same for decades after the process began in Australia.

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.

scholarly journals Preparing for an Imperial Inheritance: Children, Play, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Troy Bickham
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Juvenile Literature ◽  
Supplementary Education ◽  
Board Games ◽  
Conscious Effort ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract In examining how children engaged with the British Empire, broadly defined, during the long eighteenth century, this article considers a range of materials, including museums, printed juvenile literature, and board games, that specifically attempted to attract children and their parents. Subjects that engaged with the wider world, and with it the British Empire, were typically not a significant part of formal education curricula, and so an informal marketplace of materials and experiences emerged both to satisfy and drive parental demand for supplementary education at home. Such engagements were no accident. Rather, they were a conscious effort to provide middling and elite children with what was considered useful information about the wider world and empire they would inherit, as well as opportunities to consider the moral implications and obligations of imperial rule, particularly with regard to African slavery.

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.

Sugar Rush: Sugar and Science in the British Caribbean

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-150
Author(s):  
Nicole A. Jacoberger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sugar Beet ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Cane Sugar ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Foreign Competition ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
A Site

This article examines the contrasting evolution in sugar refining in Jamaica and Barbados incentivized by Mercantilist policies, changes in labor systems, and competition from foreign sugar revealing the role of Caribbean plantations as a site for experimentation from the eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century. Britain's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century protectionist policies imposed high duties on refined cane-sugar from the colonies, discouraging colonies from exporting refined sugar as opposed to raw. This system allowed Britain to retain control over trade and commerce and provided exclusive sugar sales to Caribbean sugar plantations. Barbadian planters swiftly gained immense wealth and political power until Jamaica and other islands produced competitive sugar. The Jamaica Assembly invested heavily in technological innovations intended to improve efficiency, produce competitive sugar in a market that eventually opened to foreign competition such as sugar beet, and increase profits to undercut losses from duties. They valued local knowledge, incentivizing everyone from local planters to chemists, engineers, and science enthusiasts to experiment in Jamaica and publish their findings. These publications disseminated important findings throughout Britain and its colonies, revealing the significance of the Caribbean as a site for local experimentation and knowledge.

Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology in Eighteenth-Century Cuba

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián López Denis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Clear Picture ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Sugar Plantations

Between February of 1797 and July of 1798, Francisco Barrera y Domingo, a Spanish surgeon, wrote an extensive treatise on slave medicine in the Caribbean. Entitled Reflexiones Historico Fisico Naturales Medico Quirurgicas, this 894-page manuscript accounts for eighteen years of its author's professional practice in the region. It provides a clear picture of daily life in the sugar plantations as seen through the eyes of a modest surgeon, thus presenting us with an opportunity to explore the ideological and intellectual universe of this “invisible” category of colonial practitioners. Despite its importance, Barrera's Reflexiones remains almost unknown. Only a handful of scholars have even acknowledged the existence of the volume and no systematic analysis of its content is available in English.

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