Revolts and Abolitionism

Slave No More ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 245-273
Author(s):  
Aline Helg

This chapter covers the various revolts and eventual emancipation of all enslaved people. Very few slave uprisings disrupted slaveholding regions in the Americas after 1815 because enslaved people understood the risks. It was therefore not by chance that the three largest uprisings over the subsequent fifteen years occurred in Great Britain's colonies: enslaved people could both rely on the abolitionist movement that had led to the end of the slave trade and give it renewed momentum by demanding the total and immediate emancipation of every slave in British America. These three slave revolts that erupted in the British colonies between 1816 and 1831 were prompted by rumors of emancipation or of improved living conditions for slaves. All three demonstrated that at least some enslaved men and women considered their situation to be unacceptable, inhuman, unjust, and revolting.

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Colwill

A definition of war limited to fields of battle orchestrated by monarchs or nation-states elides a primary form of state-sponsored violence at the heart of European wars of empire—slavery. It involved the forcible conversion of persons to chattel through the legal and military arms of the state—a conversion secured through the subjection of sexual, productive, and reproductive labor and the erasure of genealogies and family ties. In this sense, slavery could be seen as a protracted state of war. Armed conflict fueled the slave trade, slave revolts blended into “official” wars, and enslaved people sometimes spoke of slavery as a state of war. Soldiers and the state march front and center in the archives, their presence camouflaging the gendered implications of warfare for women, families, and statecraft. Yet armed conflict in the Age of Revolutions spilled beyond the battlefield, constructed distinct pathways to emancipation for men and women, and enshrined new, gendered forms of citizenship. These interrelated themes are the focus of this chapter.


Author(s):  
Francisco José Zamudio Sánchez ◽  
María Del Rosario Ayala Carrillo ◽  
Roxana Ivette Arana Ovalle

Las construcciones socioculturales sobre género permean todas las esferas de la vida humana generando diversas inequidades. Es necesario medirlas y proponer alternativas de solución o modificación de políticas que las atiendan. Usando una media harmónica sobre las condiciones en las que viven mujeres y hombres, se midieron atributos de once factores sociales disponibles a escala nacional. Los atributos fueron jerarquizados para cuantificar el diferencial en el cual estos factores se encuentran. No únicamente las mujeres están en condiciones de inequidad, aunque son más frecuentes y graves. Políticas públicas en seis factores deben atender, prioritariamente, a las mujeres y en cinco a los hombres. En cada factor identificamos los atributos más inequitativos para hacer posible la instrumentación de acciones pertinentes. Así, el diseño de las políticas, desde la planeación, cuenta con posibilidades de actuar en congruencia con las necesidades. Abstract Cultural constructions of gender permeate all areas of human life, generating diverse inequities. This requires knowledge of the situations in which men and women are in a particular one and, accordingly, propose solutions or policy change that pay attention to such inequities. Using a harmonic mean on the living conditions in which women and men are, attributes of eleven social factors were measured, available at national level. Such attributes were analytically nested to quantify the differential in which these factors are. Not only women are in inequity conditions, although they are more frequent and severe. Public policies in six factors should attend, mainly, to women and in five to men. We identified, inside each factor, the attributes with more inequity to make possible the implementation of appropriate actions. The corresponding design of policies has, from planning, possibilities of acting in line with the needs.


Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
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The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

In November 1841, the U.S. slaver Creole transporting 135 slaves from Richmond to New Orleans was seized by nineteen slave rebels who steered the ship to the British Bahamas, where all secured their liberation. Drawing from this well-known story as a point of departure, this chapter examines the understudied maritime dimensions of British free soil policies in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on how such policies affected the U.S. domestic slave trade and slave revolts at sea. In contrast to the more familiar narrative of south-to-north fugitive slave migration, this chapter sheds light on international south-to-south migration routes from the U.S. South to the circum-Caribbean.


2021 ◽  
pp. 144-188
Author(s):  
Ashley L. Cohen

This chapter explores a contradiction at the heart of the mainstream abolitionist movement: colonialism in India was promoted as a solution to the problem of slavery. It focuses on forms of unfreedom that trouble the geographical divide drawn in abolitionist discourse between slavery and freedom within the British empire. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Marianna Starke's pro-imperialism/antislavery drama (set in India), The Sword of Peace (1788). It then turns to Maria Edgeworth's anti-Jacobin short-story collection Popular Tales (1804), which features nearly identical scenes of slavery set in Jamaica and India. Edgeworth's fiction might seem worlds away from actual colonial policy; but by contextualizing her writing amid debates about the slave trade and proposals for the cultivation of sugar in Bengal, the chapter shows that her stories were important and highly regarded thought experiments in colonial governance. Finally, the chapter discusses an important historical instantiation of the Indies mentality that falls outside the time frame of this study: the transportation of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean in the 1830s.


Author(s):  
Michael B. A. Oldstone

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how viruses have caused geographic, economic, and religious changes. Smallpox alone, in the twentieth century, killed an estimated 300 million individuals, about threefold as many persons as all the wars of that century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, smallpox killed emperors of Japan and Burma as well as kings and queens of Europe, thereby unseating dynasties, altering control of countries, and disrupting alliances. In addition to propelling the establishment of Christianity in Mexico and Latin America, viruses played a role in enlarging the African slave trade throughout the Americas. In contrast to viruses such as smallpox and measles which are now harnessed by the innovations of healthcare, new viral plagues of fearful proportions have appeared. These include HIV/AIDS, sudden acute respiratory syndrome, Ebola, Zika, and bird flu. This book looks at the history of viruses and virology, which is also the history of the men and women who have worked to combat these diseases.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (S28) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard

AbstractHistorians have mostly ignored Kingston and its enslaved population, despite it being the fourth largest town in the British Atlantic before the American Revolution and the town with the largest enslaved population in British America before emancipation. The result of such historiographical neglect is a lacuna in scholarship. In this article, I examine one period of the history of slavery in Kingston, from when the slave trade in Jamaica was at its height, from the early 1770s through to the early nineteenth century, and then after the slave trade was abolished but when slavery in the town became especially important. One question I especially want to explore is how Kingston maintained its prosperity even after its major trade – the Atlantic slave trade – was stopped by legislative fiat in 1807.


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