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.

The Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas

Slave No More ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 17-40
Author(s):  
Aline Helg
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
American Continent ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The U.S

This chapter outlines the major phases of the slave trade in relation to colonization and the evolution of the institution of slavery. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Christian Western Hemisphere relied on the enslavement of Africans, and as a result, tens of thousands of men, women, and children were deported from Africa to the Caribbean and the American continent for nearly four centuries. This chapter covers slavery in Peru and Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This chapter also covers the topics of cotton, sugar, coffee, and chattel slavery in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and explores the similarities and differences in slave systems in the Americas.

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.

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.

Jamaica Ladies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Walker
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The People ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
Free Women ◽  
Free Status ◽  
Do So

Jamaica Ladies is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence. Female colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves socially and financially on the island. By owning others, they wielded forms of legal, social, economic, and cultural authority not available to them in Britain. In addition, slaveholding allowed free women of African descent, who were not far removed from slavery themselves, to cultivate, perform, and cement their free status. Alongside their male counterparts, women bought, sold, stole, and punished the people they claimed as property and vociferously defended their rights to do so. As slavery's beneficiaries, these women worked to stabilize and propel this brutal labor regime from its inception.

Some Recent Thinking on Slavery in Islamic Africa and the Middle East

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-162
Author(s):  
John Edward Philips
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western World ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Social Disabilities

Slavery and its effects will probably long remain among the most contentious of topics. Outlawed universally only recently, the institution is one of humanity’s oldest and most widespread forms of domination. It still exists, despite laws to the contrary, in some societies around the world. Social disabilities suffered by former slaves and their descendants are important legacies. And the lessons which the history of slavery can teach us have still not been fully elucidated or absorbed. It thus remains a topic of importance to teachers and researchers in every branch of humanities and social science.The literature on slavery has been dominated by the study of plantation slavery in the Western world, especially the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States. Studies of slavery in other areas and times have often been colored by biases and preconceptions based on American chattel slavery. Even when the intent of a scholar has been to contrast slavery in other societies with that in the Americas, the questions posed and the methods used have too often been shaped by the questions and methods of scholars working in the Americas. This has vitiated attempts at comparison.

Jamaica, Covid-19 and Black freedom

2021 ◽  
pp. 092137402110143
Author(s):  
Maziki Thame
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
World History ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
Caribbean Island ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Black Life

This essay is concerned with the conditions of Black life in the 21st century and the continued need to imagine Black freedom as projects of self-sovereignty, in the current moment of global protests centered on the socio-economic inequities that people especially those of color face, deepened by the devastating effects of Covid-19. The essay’s focus is on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. I highlight the articulation of race and class that springs from a world history of anti-blackness, historicized through plantation slavery. The essay addresses the enduring violence manifest in physical assaults and political projects of Development, that lead to widespread deprivation for lower-income Jamaicans. Yet the essay suggests that it is these very sordid conditions that generate alternative imaginaries for a sustainable re-ordering of life.

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.

Slavery and Christianity in the British West Indies

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Worthington Smith
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

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.

The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?

1974 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Walcott
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Caribbean Culture ◽  
The Caribbean

We live in the shadow of an America that is economically benign yet politically malevolent. That malevolence, because of its size, threatens an eclipse of identity, but the shadow is as inescapable as that of any previous empire. But we were American even while we were British, if only in the geographical sense, and now that the shadow of the British Empire has passed through and over us in the Caribbean, we ask ourselves if, in the spiritual or cultural sense, we must become American. We have broken up the archipelago into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity. Everyone knows that these are pretexts of power if such power is seen as political. This is what the politician would describe as reality, but the reality is absurd.

Baudelaire's Creole Gothic : A Postcolonial Afterlife for Les Fleurs du mal

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-34
Author(s):  
Mary Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Racial Difference ◽  
Social Death ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Poetic Representation ◽  
The City ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal ◽  
Hard Labour

Baudelaire’s verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection’s necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection’s representation of this ‘living death’ foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘social death’. As for the poetic representation of the ‘Undead’, this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless ‘living death’ of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire’s imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife.

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