Genres of History and the Practice of Loss

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-174
Author(s):  
Marisa J. Fuentes
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Coffee Plantation ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Book Discussion ◽  
The Caribbean

This book discussion essay addresses critical questions concerning historical methodologies when working with the archives of Atlantic-world slavery. Thinking with Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the essay considers the power of historical memoir to narrate the violence of the British empire through family stories. The long-intertwined histories of England and the Caribbean inevitably lead to slavery’s archives, and in the final section of the book, Carby describes the lives of her earliest ancestors on a Jamaican coffee plantation. In response, the essay author revisits her hesitations regarding slavery’s archive and the stakes of approaching the silences of enslaved people in the records. Drawing on pivotal work in black feminist studies, this essay rearticulates the nuances of Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to bring attention back to archival boundaries and the limits of historical methodologies that make certain imaginings most difficult.

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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Slavery in Puritan New England

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-313
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Pleck
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early America ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Staple Crops

Wendy Warren’s deeply researched New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America depends on investigation of handwritten texts rather than the several new databases about slavery and the slave trade. Warren has tracked down references in the extant literature and added research in unpublished court cases, wills, probate inventories, and private papers in New England as well in London. With her ability to convert a line or two in a court deposition or a will into an argument about the nature of New England slavery, Warren successfully circumvents the illegibility of the archive. The theme of this highly accessible study is how the immoral conjunction of cultivating staple crops for export and racialized slavery reshaped the entire Atlantic world, beginning with a fateful exchange of goods and people between the Caribbean and New England.

“Primed with Flip and Toddy”

2020 ◽  
pp. 195-210
Author(s):  
Charlotte Goudge
Keyword(s):  
Economic Model ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Historic Period ◽  
British Caribbean ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Major Industry

The commoditization and manufacture of rum has been a major industry in the Caribbean since the inception of the plantation as a means of amplified production to fill consumer needs. Still houses can be analysed to reflect the major economic processes active in the wider Atlantic theater. Betty’s Hope is a perfect example of the British microcosm of production, displaying themes which become archetypal within the socio-economic model of the British Caribbean and wider Atlantic world, during the historic period. These themes, exampled by the impact of that technology in the form of industrial steam manufacture, are dramatically displayed within the documentary survey and archaeology of the still house.

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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