Representing the Slave Trader: Haley and the Slave Ship; or, Spain's Uncle Tom's Cabin

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 768-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Surwillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Caribbean

Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the foremost texts of the American abolitionist movement, but its impact on politics was international. This article traces the reception of Stowe's novel in Spain, the last European empire with a slave economy, during the mid–nineteenth century. As an imperial power, Spain was the political and economic force behind the transatlantic slave trade; but as a nation of readers, it imported a narrative back across the Atlantic in order to fictionalize and contemplate the effects of its slave policies in the Caribbean. One such adaptation converted the novel into a play about a slave trader and recast Stowe's story of slavery in the Atlantic world in terms of Spain's role in the slave trade and in the imperial control of Cuba.

scholarly journals The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-867
Author(s):  
Jake Subryan Richards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Coercive Intervention

AbstractWhat were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

The United States and the Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil, 1831–1856

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo Marques
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Traders

Chapter 5 discusses the forms of U.S. participation in the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil during the illegal era. It shows how Portuguese and Brazilian slave traders employed multiple U.S. resources in the traffic and the political tensions generated by the multiple forms of U.S. participation in the slave trade.

scholarly journals O Atlântico enfermo e os agentes da saúde no período do tráfico ilegal

Afro-Ásia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaori Kodama
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade

<p>Resenha de:<br />BARCIA, Manuel. <em>The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade</em>. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2020. 269p.</p>

Abolitionism and the Back-to-Africa Movement in Britain: The Sierra Leone Experiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Penal Colonies ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Black Poor

The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.

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.

Revolution

Atlantic Wars ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 252-273
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Plank
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Common ◽  
Moral Superiority

Chapter 11 traces the common origins and consequences of revolutions in various regions of the Atlantic world. In Europe and much of the Americas, a new military ethic developed, promoting patriotic and loyal service and condemning mercenaries and foreign interventionists. Campaigners against the transatlantic slave trade sought to dissociate Europeans and Americans from African violence. In the Americas, revolutionary conflict fuelled racial and communal animosity. Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries sensed their own moral superiority and showed contempt for their opponents. Anger, fear, and the desire for vengeance fed on each other, in some places leading to genocidal violence. In the early nineteenth century the United States condemned British aid to indigenous American warriors and expressed general opposition to European military intervention in the newly independent American republics. National and imperial policies adopted in the revolutionary era broke the early modern pattern of transatlantic war.

The Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-112
Author(s):  
Iain Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Economies ◽  
History Of

Chapter four recounts the arrival of Malagasy leaders on the islands of Mwali and Mayotte in order to profoundly shape the history of the latter island, sold to France to become a colony in 1841. The political maneuvers between France, Britain, Madagascar and Zanzibar had significant consequences on the three smaller islands, particularly as the British tried to suppress the slave trade, the fulcrum of local economies and the source of labor for French plantations on Mayotte. Only Ngazidja remained apart, until finally, towards the end of the century, both Britain and Zanzibar renounced their claims to and influence over the archipelago and France declared protectorates over the three westernmost islands. The development of struggling plantation economies on all the islands and the loss of their historical economic mercantile activities would spell economic disaster for the islands.

scholarly journals Fifty Shades of Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-68
Author(s):  
Ryan Espersen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Illicit Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Traders

Abstract From 1816 to the 1830s, the islands of St. Eustatius, Saba, St. Thomas, St. Maarten, and St. Barts were actively engaged with illicit trade in ships, prize goods, and the transatlantic slave trade. Ships’ crews, governors, and merchants took advantage of the islands’ physical, political, and legal environments to effectively launder goods, ships, and people that were actively involved in these activities. St. Thomas stands out due to the longevity of its status as a regional and international hub for illicit trade at the end of Atlantic and Caribbean privateering and piracy. Within this social and political environment, this paper will unveil the tensions between international, regional, and local interests that drove merchants and colonial officials on St. Thomas to engage with illegal transatlantic slave traders, privateers, and pirates, during the early nineteenth century. Secondly, this paper will reveal the processes through which these relations occurred.

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