Ring Shout, Wheel About

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Dance ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Rich Variety ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Ring Shout

This book examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. The book shows how these performances informed white European and American understandings of race, influenced interactions between whites and blacks, and often held conflicting meanings in enslaved people's lives. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, the book explicates how black performances in music and dance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved. As the book shows, however, blacks' “backstage” use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion. The book shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.

scholarly journals The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-867
Author(s):  
Jake Subryan Richards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Coercive Intervention

AbstractWhat were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

The Slave Trade, Quakers, and the Early Days of British Abolition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Walvin
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Hard Evidence ◽  
Empirical Investigations

This chapter assesses the Quaker impact on the early British anti-slave trade campaign and, in particular, the influence Quaker writings and networks had on the early career of Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson pioneered the abolitionists' research into the slave trade and the slave ships. It was his empirical investigations among slave captains, sailors, and slave ship rosters that teased out the hard facts and figures about life—and more important, of death—on board the slave ships. In the wake of his pioneering investigations, discussion about the slave trade switched to a detailed analysis of the data. Clarkson and subsequent abolitionists ensured that the debate about abolition was not merely a recitation of moral outrage or religious disapproval but more about the facts. And once those facts were rehearsed in public, they proved irresistible. It was the hard evidence, culled from the belly of the slave ships, that both shocked and persuaded.

Legal Practitioners

2021 ◽  
pp. 48-65
Author(s):  
Fabian Klose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Member State ◽  
International Cooperation ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
National Interests ◽  
International Courts ◽  
International Jurisdiction ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Atlantic Area

In the wake of the efforts to fight the transatlantic slave trade during the nineteenth century the first system of international jurisdiction emerged, the so-called Mixed Commissions for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. These courts sought to guarantee the conviction of captured slave ships by a uniform set of practices, functions, and procedures for all of the commissions established throughout the Atlantic area. However, the Mixed Commissions were far from being a body of frictionless international cooperation. Instead, they were a fiercely contested place, where each member state sought to enforce its competing national interests concerning abolition. The aim of this chapter is to focus on this rather ambiguous character of the Mixed Commissions and its members. It focuses on the ambiguous roles of the commission members as legal actors, diplomats, and advocates in order to present the first system of international courts as a fiercely contested body of early international cooperation.

Repairing Damage: The Slave Ship Marcelin and the Haiti Trade in the Age of Abolition

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (3) ◽  
pp. 869-898
Author(s):  
Mary Dewhurst Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Trade ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commodity Trading

Abstract Between 1814 and 1831, French slave traders trafficked approximately 200,000 individuals. Among those, a small but still surprising number stopped over in Haiti on their return voyage after selling captives elsewhere in the Americas. Using the case of the brigantine the Marcelin as its prime example, this article shows how legitimate commodity trading with Haiti served as a cover for illicit French slaving in the era of slave-trade abolition. The article situates the Marcelin within a “second slave trade,” which emerged as European countries abolished the transatlantic trade on paper but continued it in practice. Because the second slave trade was illegal, it left a very limited historical trace. This article reconstructs its contours from fragmentary archival evidence, while arguing that, ultimately, the archive itself does violence to the history of the nineteenth-century slave trade.

Circuits of wealth, circuits of sorrow: financing the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the age of suppression, 1850–66

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. E. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Financial Arrangements

AbstractSlave traders forced more than 1.65 million captive Africans aboard illegal transatlantic slave ships during the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the final phase of this brutal traffic, between 1850 and 1866. It argues that slave traders sustained their illicit industry, in large part, by strategically coordinating their financial arrangements against a rising tide of international suppression. One key tactic was for slave trade investors in the United States, Cuba, Africa, and Iberia to lower the risks of interdiction by joining forces and co-financing voyages. Another was to combine with an international cast of merchants and bankers, who helped them launder slave trade capital and transmit it to their distant allies. This capital was concealed within broader currents of global commerce, which was, in turn, spurred by the growth of free trade in the nineteenth century. These myriad alliances and capital flows undergirded the trade until its final extinction in the 1860s.

To Each Body a Spirit: Jewett and African Americans

2011 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-158
Author(s):  
Terry Heller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Essay Tests ◽  
Fictional Representations

Many contemporary scholars accept that, until near the end of her career, Sarah Orne Jewett participated in the American construction of the superiority of whiteness by affirming almost universal nineteenth-century essentialist beliefs about racial hierarchy. This essay tests that interpretation by examining her fictional representations of African Americans.

Representing the Slave Trader: Haley and the Slave Ship; or, Spain's Uncle Tom's Cabin

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 768-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Surwillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Caribbean

Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the foremost texts of the American abolitionist movement, but its impact on politics was international. This article traces the reception of Stowe's novel in Spain, the last European empire with a slave economy, during the mid–nineteenth century. As an imperial power, Spain was the political and economic force behind the transatlantic slave trade; but as a nation of readers, it imported a narrative back across the Atlantic in order to fictionalize and contemplate the effects of its slave policies in the Caribbean. One such adaptation converted the novel into a play about a slave trader and recast Stowe's story of slavery in the Atlantic world in terms of Spain's role in the slave trade and in the imperial control of Cuba.

Apprentices of freedom: Atlantic histories of the africanos livres in mid-nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Ethnic Boundaries ◽  
Ethnic Solidarity

This article examines the journey undertaken by the slave ship Brilhante, captured by a British anti-slave trade patrol off the coast of Brazil in 1838. The ship and its crew were engaged in slave trafficking in contravention of international treaty agreements. In accordance with prize law the Brilhante was condemned by the Anglo-Brazilian mixed commission court in Rio de Janeiro and the slaves on-board were freed and apprenticed for a prescribed number of years. This article argues that during their apprenticeships not only were these Africans treated in the same way as slaves, but they formed similar bonds for survival. Both ethnic solidarity and shipmate bonds, which transcended ethnic boundaries, allowed them to forge new identities. The article demonstrates how the liberated Africans from the ship, who belonged to a larger marginalised group of “recaptives” within the Atlantic World, were thus able to facilitate the achievement of their eventual freedom, and improve the conditions in which they lived.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

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