Imperial Pressures, 1800–1812

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Interracial Relationships ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Institutional Pressures ◽  
High Class ◽  
Class Standing ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter chronicles the institutional pressures put on mixed-race migrants in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Although families continued to assist relatives of color—which included helping get them into the East India Company to advance their social standing—constricting notions of kinship and political wariness of African-descended people made it challenging for Jamaicans of color to thrive in Britain. Their attempts to assimilate were made more difficult by the growing calls of abolitionists and pro-slavery supporters to curtail interracial relationships in order to create a demographic separation between blacks and whites in the Caribbean. Within this abolitionist debate, Trinidad’s governor Thomas Picton went to court for having tortured a mixed-race girl named Louisa Calderon. Her arrival in Britain prompted a flurry of accusations that she had become pregnant by a Scottish protector, escalating the general public’s concern about mixed-race migrants and their impact on British demography. This chapter contends that by the early nineteenth century, high class standing and genetic connections to prominent Britons were losing their social power for Jamaican migrants of color.

The Early Life and Career of the "Black Patti": The Odyssey of an African American Singer in the Late Nineteenth Century

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Graziano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Caribbean

The early career of the African American singer Matilda Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933), known as the "Black Patti," was unique in nineteenth-century America. Reviewers gave high praise to her singing, and she attracted large mixed-race audiences to her concerts across the country. Her fame was such that, during the early 1890s, she appeared as the star of several companies in which she was the only black performer. This article documents her early life in Portsmouth, Virginia, and Providence, Rhode Island; her two tours, in 1888 and 1890, to the Caribbean and South America; and her varied concert appearances in the United States and Europe up to the formation of the Black Patti Troubadours in the fall of 1896.

Natural Children, Country Wives, and Country Girls in Nineteenth-Century India and Northeast Scotland

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-58
Author(s):  
Eloise Grey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Domestic Lives ◽  
History Of Empire ◽  
Scottish History

This article takes a history of emotions approach to Scottish illegitimacy in the context of imperial sojourning in the early nineteenth century. Using the archives of a lower-gentry family from Northeast Scotland, it examines the ways in which emotional regimes of the East India Company and Aberdeenshire gentry intersected with the sexual and domestic lives of native Indian women, Scottish farm servant women, and young Scottish bachelors in India. Children of these relationships, White and mixed-race, were the focus of these emotional regimes. The article shows that emotional regimes connected to illegitimacy are a way of looking at the Scottish history of empire.

Early Abolitionism and Mixed-Race Migration into Britain, 1762–1778

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Family Formation ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Interracial Relationships ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
High Class ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family

This chapter examines how the demographic debates over interracial relationships in Jamaica, outlined in Chapter 1, became relevant in Britain in the 1760s and 1770s. The arrival into Britain of enslaved servants from the colonies aroused panic about British family formation, especially after the Somerset decision of 1772, which gave habeas corpus rights to enslaved people in England. But, while British observers grew nervous about the poor and enslaved people of color in their midst, they held relatively little reservations about elite mixed-race Jamaicans who were arriving. This chapter argues that the family standing and high-class position of these migrants of color made them more socially acceptable to Britons, despite a general rising tide of racism.

India

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel O’Connor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South India ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Indian People ◽  
Evangelical Movement ◽  
The Church

The East India Company was the exclusive vehicle for bringing Anglicanism to India until the nineteenth century. The company appointed some 500–600 chaplains in this period, ministering initially only to British employees on its voyages and in its factories, though some chaplains and company officials were mission-minded. In the eighteenth century, some Indian and mixed-race employees joined the Church. Militarization of the company at this time considerably increased these numbers, in the form of the children of British soldiers and Indian and mixed-race women. In 1813, the episcopate and an Indian ecclesiastical establishment were introduced, while, chiefly under the influence of the Evangelical movement, missionaries began to be admitted and to evangelize Indian people. In South India, congregations of Lutheran converts were transferred to the Anglican community.

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.

Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Times ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the 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.

scholarly journals Mass Petitioning, Education Reform, and the Development of Political Culture in Madras, 1839–1842

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Scott Travanion Connors
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Creation

Abstract This article explores the emergence of reformist sentiment and political culture in Madras in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it contributes to, and expands upon, the growing body of literature on colonial petitioning through a case-study of a mass petition demanding education reform. Signed in 1839 by 70,000 subjects from across the Madras presidency, the petition demanded the creation of a university that would qualify western-educated Indians to gain employment in the high public offices of the East India Company. Through an analysis of the lifecycle of this education petition, from its creation to its reception and the subsequent adoption of its demands by the Company government at Fort St George, this article charts the process by which an emergent, politicized public engaged with, and critiqued, the colonial state. Finally, it examines the transformative effect that the practice of mass petitioning had on established modes of political activism and communication between an authoritarian colonial state and the society it governed.

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