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.

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.

Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daina Ramey Berry ◽  
Nakia D. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Kinship Bonds

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.

The Politics of Quadrille Performance in Nineteenth-Century Martinique

2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique O. Cyrille
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Caribbean Islands ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Social Dances ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
Strong Resemblance ◽  
The Caribbean

Much has been said of the tradition of quadrille dancing that exists in the Caribbean. This dance and music repertory was first introduced there in the late eighteenth century by European colonists who wanted to recreate some of the aristocratic lifestyle they would have enjoyed in their country of origin. But soon after its introduction, people of African descent whom the Europeans had forcibly introduced in the Caribbean appropriated the dance and transformed it to fit the new environment.In his overview of Caribbean music, Kenneth Bilby noted that the most ubiquitous music traditions of the Caribbean seem to be the ones that grew out of the European social dances and music genres of an earlier era (1985, 195). Establishing a parallel with the Creole music of the Seychelles, which bears strong resemblance to Caribbean forms, John Szwed and Morton Marks (1988) suggested that the French contredanse and quadrille were instrumental to the emergence of the Creole repertories, primarily because, just like many of the Caribbean islands, the Seychelles were French colonies in the eighteenth century.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Auerbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Many ◽  
At Home

Beginning with George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days and its portrait of the boredom and lethargy that characterized British colonial life in the 1930s, the introduction poses the question of when and why the British Empire became so monotonous and melancholy. It presents the book’s main argument: that despite the many and famous tales of glory and adventure, a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment. It provides an overview of boredom’s historical and psychological origins, and summarizes the chapters that follow. It asserts that the empire came to be constructed as a place of adventure, opportunity, and picturesque beauty not so much because British men and women were seeking to escape from boredom at home, as has often been surmised, but because the empire lacked these very features.

Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
Full Independence ◽  
The Caribbean

This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. The book begins with an exploration of the discourse of race—from the nineteenth-century belief that “race is everything” to the more recent argument that there are no races. It focuses on how English observers constructed the “native” and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity—in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. The book pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.

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.

Transformation in homespun: Power and creativity in early nineteenth-century Hawaiian cloth manufacturing

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Kuaiwa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Foreign Bodies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Cloth Production ◽  
Hawaiian Kingdom ◽  
Do So

Between 1837 and 1840, governor and chief John Adams Kuakini engaged in cotton farming and cloth production, the first Hawaiian to ever do so. His success in running a cloth-making operation was not done alone, however, but with the guidance from New England Congregationalist missionaries who introduced homespun to Kuakini and hired foreigners and makaʻāinana men and women labourers. This article explores Kuakini’s motivations for investing in cloth-making through the lens of his chiefly power, with special attention to the ways in which Kuakini asserted dominance over those who challenged him and those he believed were subservient to him. I examine Kuakini’s motivations and foray into cloth-making, which differed greatly from Congregational Christian ideas about cloth-making, further demonstrating how Kuakini’s power in the early Hawaiian Kingdom extended over both native and foreign bodies.

Western Science in India before 1850

1962 ◽  
Vol 94 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 62-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. J. C. Larwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Science Education ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
European Science ◽  
Growth Of Science

The establishment and consolidation of the British Empire in India occurred at a time of expanding interest and achievement in science in Europe. In India there was certainly an appreciation of the importance of this European science, for the growth of science education there in the early nineteenth century compares not unfavourably with that in England. But what kind of scientific interests and activities were to be found in India up to about 1850, and who were the men who pursued them ?

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