Parliamentary Authority over Creditors’ Claims

2021 ◽  
pp. 74-90
Author(s):  
Claire Priest
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Legal Regime ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
The West ◽  
Staple Crops ◽  
English Law ◽  
Debt Recovery ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Recovery Act

This chapter describes the history and impact of Parliament's Debt Recovery Act of 1732, which created a legal regime strengthening creditors' remedies against land and slaves throughout the British colonies in America and the West Indies. Parliament enacted the Debt Recovery Act in response to concerns among English creditors that the colonists were defeating their efforts to collect on debts by invoking traditional English legal protections to land. The merchants were interested in the laws of Virginia and Jamaica, where planters relied on credit to purchase an increasing supply of slave labor. With some exceptions, colonies relying heavily on slave labor to produce staple crops were more likely than other colonies to uphold the English protections to land and inheritance from unsecured creditors. A second concern driving Parliament's enactment of the Debt Recovery Act was that colonial legislatures might at any time enact laws characterizing slaves as “land” and thereby make the slaves legally immune from seizure by creditors under English law.

British Industry and the West Indies Plantations

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Darity
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The West ◽  
British Industry ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
British Colonies

Is it not notorious to the whole World, that the Business of Planting in our British Colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce? And the greater the Number of Negroes imported into our Colonies, from Africa, will not the Exportation of British Manufactures among the Africans be in Proportion, they being paid for in such Commodities only? The more likewise our Plantations abound in Negroes, will not more Land become cultivated, and both better and greater Variety of Plantation Commodities be produced? As those Trades are subservient to the Well Being and Prosperity of each other; so the more either flourishes or declines, the other must be necessarily affected; and the general Trade and Navigation of their Mother Country, will be proportionably benefited or injured. May we not therefore say, with equal Truth, as the French do in their before cited Memorial, that the general Navigation of Great Britain owes all its Encrease and Splendor to the Commerce of its American and African Colonies; and that it cannot be maintained and enlarged otherwise than from the constant Prosperity of both those branches, whose Interests are mutual and inseparable?[Postlethwayt 1968c: 6]The atlantic slave trade remains oddly invisible in the commentaries of historians who have specialized in the sources and causes of British industrialization in the late eighteenth century. This curiosity contrasts sharply with the perspective of eighteenth-century strategists who, on the eve of the industrial revolution, placed great stock in both the trade and the colonial plantations as vital instruments for British economic progress. Specifically, Joshua Gee and Malachy Postlethwayt, once described by the imperial historian Charles Ryle Fay (1934: 2–3) as Britain’s major “spokesmen” for the eighteenth century, both placed the importation of African slaves into the Americas at the core of their visions of the requirements for national expansion. Fay (ibid.: 3) also described both of them as “mercantilists hardening into a manufacturers’ imperialism.” For such a “manufacturers’ imperialism” to be a success, both Gee and Postlethwayt saw the need for extensive British participation in the trade in Africans and in the maintenance and development of the West Indies.

African Merchants, Notables and the Slave Trade at Old Calabar, 1720: Evidence from the National Archives of Scotland

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 37-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt ◽  
Eric J. Graham
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Detailed List ◽  
British Colonies

In late 1719 the brigantine Hannover sailed from Port Glasgow on a slaving voyage to the Guinea coast. Shipowner Robert Bogle jr. and partners hired surgeon Alexander Horsburgh as supercargo to supervise their trade for provisions and slaves along the Windward Coast, Gold Coast, and at Old Calabar. The Hannover arrived off the Windward Coast in early March 1720, and during three weeks Horsburgh purchased two tons of rice and 21 enslaved Africans on Bogle's behalf. From 5 April to 2 May he traded on the Gold Coast, loading 75 chests of corn and an additional 22 slaves. The Hannover then proceeded to Old Calabar, and from late May to early July Horsburgh purchased 75 more slaves and 11,400 yams—stowing 6,000 tubers in the week before departure to the Americas. Horsburgh also purchased sixteen slaves on his own account—eight along the Windward and Gold Coasts and eight at Calabar. Illness and death followed the Hannover on its “unaccountable long passage” to the Portuguese island Anno Bom (31 August-4 September) and British colonies Barbados (arriving 31 October) and St. Kitts (November-December).Eighty-seven of 134 Africans survived the voyage, only to be sold as slaves in the West Indies.The journey of the Hannover, noteworthy as one of the few Scottish-based voyages in the British slave trade, is important for Africanists because the surviving ship's accounts contain the first detailed list of African traders and notables in Old Calabar history.

Making a Labour Shortage in Post-Abolition British Guyana

Itinerario ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-72
Author(s):  
Madhavi Kale
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
Labour Shortage ◽  
Sugar Plantations ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Shipping Agency

On 4 January 1836, less than two and a half years after Parliament abolished slavery in British colonies, John Gladstone, Liverpool merchant and father of William Ewart Gladstone, dictated a letter to his nephew at the Calcutta shipping agency Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co. Gladstone explained that he had heard that the firm had recently sent ‘a considerable number of a certain class of Bengalees, to be employed as labourers, to the Mauritius’, and that he was interested in exploring the possibility of making similar arrangements for certain colonies in the West Indies, where he himself owned sugar plantations.

The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis

1984 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Galenson
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
The West ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Over Time

Indentured servitude appeared in Virginia by 1620. Initially a device used to transport European workers to the New World, over time servitude dwindled as black slavery grew in importance in the British colonies. Indentured servitude reappeared in the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century as a means of transporting Asians to the Caribbean sugar islands and South America following the abolition of slavery. Servitude then remained in legal use until its abolition in 1917. This paper provides an economic analysis of the innovation of indentured servitude, describes the economic forces that caused its decline and disappearance from the British colonies, and considers why indentured servitude was revived for migration to the West Indies during the time of the great free migration of Europeans to the Americas.

IV. British West India Commerce as a Factor in the Napoleonic War

1929 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Holland Rose
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
West Indies ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
Leeward Islands ◽  
The World ◽  
British Colonies

The decline in prosperity of the British West Indies after 1815 was so rapid as to obscure their importance during the Napoleonic War; but of their commercial pre-eminence among British colonies at that time there are many proofs. Thus, on 12 September 1804, while watching Toulon, Nelson, who knew them well, wrote in a lately published letter, “…I think the French will some day send their fleets to sea, and that the West Indies … is (sic) more likely for them to hurt us in than this country. We have but few troops to defend our islands and recent conquests; 10 or 12,000 French troops would injure us more there than in any other part of the world.” Herein he agreed with Dundas, who in August 1796 stated to Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, that far more harm would result to our commerce and credit from a French invasion of Jamaica than of Great Britain or Ireland. As is well known, Nelson in April 1805 acted on his conviction recorded above, and, despite the perilously scanty news as to the course of the Franco-Spanish fleet, he chased it to the West Indies because of his conviction of the immense importance of those colonies. Lord Barham, now First Lord, approved his action; for he himself had come to the conclusion from the French moves against those colonies, “that depredation and the destruction of our trade is their grand object,” and that the invasion of England was now a secondary object. This view was for the present somewhat exaggerated; for Napoleon, who overworked his admirals even more than his generals, expected Villeneuve and Gravina first to devastate our Leeward Islands (with Tobago thrown in) and then to fly back, along with Ganteaume's fleet, to cover the invasion of England.

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