The British Empire before the American Revolution, Volume V. Zones of International Friction: The Great Lakes, Canada, the West Indies, India, 1748-1754

1944 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 321
Author(s):  
Bruce T. McCully ◽  
Lawrence Henry Gipson
1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Worthington Smith

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.


Author(s):  
Deirdre Coleman

Smeathman arrives in the West Indies mid-1775, just as the American revolution begins. He makes numerous comparisons between tropical nature in its ‘rude’ (African) state and its ‘cultivated’ (West Indian) version, He also observes the various societies of the different islands and, appalled by the cruelty of plantation slavery, starts to reconsider Quaker Fothergill’s plans for ‘legitimate’ African commerce. The flogging of slaves in public places shocks him into sketching two of these scenes, one of which is particularly chilling because it is conducted by a white woman. Smeathman decides to return to England and compile his ‘Voyages and Travels’, a book which would reveal the truth about ‘those little known and much misrepresented people the Negroes’.


Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds

After 1820, the day-to-day duties of the United States Navy involved dealing with smugglers, pirates, and the illegal slave trade and so deploying the large ships of the line was deemed unnecessary. Also, the successful completion of treaties with both England and Spain demilitarized the Great Lakes and stabilized the country’s southern border, easing concerns about a future foreign war. ‘A constabulary navy: pirates, slavers, and manifest destiny (1820–1850)’ describes the peacetime navy activities carried out by small squadrons of sloops and schooners acting as a constabulary force on distant stations abroad, mainly in the Mediterranean, but also in the West Indies, off Africa, in the Pacific, off Brazil, and in the East.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 763
Author(s):  
Bart J. Koet

It is the thesis of this article that a secular form of the biblical Exodus pattern is used by Woody Allen in his Broadway Danny Rose. In the history of the Bible, and its interpretation, the Exodus pattern is again and again used as a model for inspiration: from oppression to deliverance. It was an important source of both argument and symbolism during the American Revolution. It was used by the Boer nationalists fighting the British Empire and it comes to life in the hand of liberation theology in South America. The use of this pattern and its use during the seder meal is to be taken loosely here: Exodus is not a theory, but a story, a “Big Story” that became part of the cultural consciousness of the West and quite a few other parts of the world. Although the Exodus story is in the first place an account of deliverance or liberation in a religious context and framework, in Broadway Danny Rose it is used as a moral device about how to survive in the modern wilderness.


Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall

In the later eighteenth century the West Indian sugar islands were a source of conspicuous wealth for some individuals and an important addition to the resources of Great Britain. They were generally reckoned to be the most valuable of Britain’s imperial possessions, a view which Burke fully endorsed. This book examines his long involvement with the West Indies, at a personal level through the ambitions of his brother and some of his closest friends, as a politician and what contemporaries called ‘a man of business’ in the management of a great national asset and in trying to win the support of powerful West Indian interests for his political connection. He became a participant in debates about the ethics of enslavement and the slave trade. Burke deplored both slavery and the trade, but he recognized that the plantation economy of the West Indies depended on them and that therefore they played a crucial role in Britain’s immensely valuable Atlantic commerce. The policies that he advocated for the further development of the West Indian and African trades inevitably involved more enslaved Africans in the British Empire and on occasions he was drawn into implicitly endorsing the slave trade. Except for a few years from 1788 to 1791, Burke was not prepared to countenance immediate abolition of the trade, but he did devise a comprehensive plan for reforming both it and the institution of slavery, that in the very long term would make both redundant.


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