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.

Imposing Identity: Death Markers to ‘English’ People in Barbados, 1627–1838

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-80
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Evans
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Caribbean Island ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Death Culture ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The headstones and epitaphs marking the death of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish settlers on the Caribbean island of Barbados provide one of the earliest and most complete examples of British death culture overseas. Whilst the island was dominated by plantation slavery during the period in question, the surviving memorials from this period reveal little trace of the chattel slavery that made the island of great geopolitical importance to the British Empire. Instead the memorials examined here demonstrate a deep attachment to the ‘English’ identities of those who died in diaspora. The chapter compares such death culture with that of Jewish settlement on the island, a stream of evidence that demonstrates the island was a sanctuary for Jewish men, women and children from numerous countries during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Imperatives, Impossibilities, and Intimacies in the Imperial Archive: Chinese Men and Women of Colour in Early Nineteenth-Century Trinidad

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-205
Author(s):  
Catherine R. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Chinese Men ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Chinese Migration ◽  
Extant Population

In this article, I elaborate on Lisa Lowe’s “intimacies as method” by examining the case of 198 Chinese men conscripted to Trinidad in 1806. I argue that tracing Chinese migration to the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century demonstrates that the British empire began to imagine new hierarchies of unfreedom for people of Asian and African descent before the abolition of chattel slavery. British imperial actors hoped that Chinese men would assume a mediating function between white planters and the extant population of colour in Trinidad. This vision was predicated on the assumption that the migrants would partner with women of colour to form heterosexual intimacies while also refraining from other forms of socio-political contact with Afro-Trinidadians. Lowe’s intimacies as method guides my navigation of the imperial archive and, in particular, compels me to think relationally about differentially colonized and racialized sub jects in early nineteenth-century Trinidad, both as they were positioned in the colony and as they refused these stereotypes, brokering their own transactions and collaborations.

Colonial Modernists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Modernist Fiction ◽  
Emily Carr

This chapter looks at a range of colonial fiction up to 1950 by writers native to Australia, New Zealand, India, the Caribbean, and Canada, which in some way develops and inflects modernist aspiration and practice. The old paradigm, that European models of literary modernism were disseminated to outposts of the British Empire, possibly via such cultural missionaries as E. M. Forster or D. H. Lawrence, and then belatedly imitated, or that artists from the colonies travelled to the metropolitan centre to discover and be transformed by the avant-garde, is evidently undermined by a cursory glance at colonial writing at the end of the nineteenth century. The colonial modernist fiction to 1950 discussed in this chapter is inflected by intimate experience of imperial power, as in the case of Mulk Raj Anand and Claude McKay, and by awareness of an alternative aesthetic and morality in the work of Emily Carr and Katherine Susannah Prichard.

scholarly journals An Intolerance of Idleness

2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 201-230
Author(s):  
Oscar Webber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Disaster Response ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Humanitarian Relief ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
Caribbean Population ◽  
Minority Control

Abstract Despite the fact that disasters, usually induced by hurricanes, were a near-annual experience in the nineteenth-century British-controlled Caribbean, the immediate response of white elites (plantation owners and colonial officers) to these events has remained largely underexamined. This article fills that lacuna by examining the concerns that, across the long nineteenth century, informed British responses to some of the most devastating nature-induced disasters in this period. Though the damages wrought by these events always necessitated some form of humanitarian relief, across the period 1831–1907 the survival of labor regimes and the plantation economy always remained the paramount concern of British officials. White elites viewed their minority control over colonies in the region as contingent on their ability to make African-Caribbean people labor for them. Consequently, because disasters so often destroyed plantations and other sites of labor, colonial responses to disaster were primarily informed by a desire to coerce the African-Caribbean population back to work. Reflecting a preoccupation with “idleness” that was mirrored in domestic poor relief and disaster relief throughout the British Empire, white elites often attempted to withhold needed foodstuffs and materials for rebuilding from the African-Caribbean population until they re-engaged in labor for the colonial state. This article, through showing that a preoccupation with idleness remained central to colonial disaster response, reveals an underexamined continuity between the eras of slavery and emancipation.

Humanitarianism, Human Rights and Biopolitics in the British Empire, 1890–1902

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Clark
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Personal Rights

The 1890s were a key time for debates about imperial humanitarianism and human rights in India and South Africa. This article first argues that claims of humanitarianism can be understood as biopolitics when they involved the management and disciplining of populations. This article examines the historiography that analyses British efforts to contain the Bombay plague in 1897 and the Boer War concentration camps as forms of discipline extending control over colonized subjects. Secondly, human rights language could be used to oppose biopolitical management. While scholars have criticized liberal human rights language for its universalism, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberals did not believe that rights were universal; they had to be earned. It was radical activists who drew on notions of universal rights to oppose imperial intervention and criticize the camps in India and South Africa. These activists included two groups: the Personal Rights Association and the Humanitarian League; and the individuals Josephine Butler, Sol Plaatje, Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, and Bal Gandadhar Tilak. However, these critics also debated amongst themselves how far human rights should extend.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

Reading Stratigraphical Woodscapes in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 210-223
Author(s):  
Anna Burton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local History ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Geological Work ◽  
Gideon Mantell ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Visual Cultures

In The Woodlanders (1887), Hardy uses the texture of Hintock woodlands as more than description: it is a terrain of personal association and local history, a text to be negotiated in order to comprehend the narrative trajectory. However, upon closer analysis of these arboreal environs, it is evident that these woodscapes are simultaneously self-contained and multi-layered in space and time. This essay proposes that through this complex topographical construction, Hardy invites the reader to read this text within a physical and notional stratigraphical framework. This framework shares similarities with William Gilpin's picturesque viewpoint and the geological work of Gideon Mantell: two modes of vision that changed the observation of landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This comparative discussion at once reviews the perception of the arboreal prospect in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures, and also questions the impact of these modes of thought on the woodscapes of The Woodlanders.

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