Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Public ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The Social ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Free People

All parts of the Caribbean were shaped by similar forces, including race-based chattel slavery, sugar, capitalism, and the tropical and sometimes deadly natural environment. Within these commonalities, however, is also a great deal of diversity. Large sugar plantations populated by hundreds of enslaved Africans rightfully receive a great deal of attention from archaeologists, historians, and the public. The authors in this volume, however, use innovative techniques and perspectives to reveal the stories of places and times where the rules of this system did not always apply. Collectively, the chapters focus on the spaces in-between, alternate views of plantation landscapes, and the complex dynamics at play in the days following slavery. The authors assess these threads through the analysis of lesser known contexts, such as Dominica, St. Lucia, and the Dominican Republic, and the reexamination of more familiar places, like Jamaica and Barbados. Despite grueling work regimes, and the social and economic restrictions of slavery, people held in bondage carved out places at the margins of plantation societies. In similar fashion, the lives of poor whites, soldiers, and free people of color demonstrate that binary models of black slaves and white planters do not fully encompass the diverse landscape of Caribbean identities before and after Emancipation. The studies in this volume employ innovative research tools to integrate data from a variety of historical and archaeological sources to better understand these alternate stories within and beyond the sprawling sugar estates.

Beyond Sugar

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane I. Seiter
Keyword(s):  
People Of Color ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Lime Kilns ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Develop Land ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Landscape Survey ◽  
Free People

Much has been written about the “sugar revolution” sweeping the islands of the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Recent work by archaeologists, however, has challenged this overarching narrative. On the island of St. Lucia, a program of landscape survey joined with a close analysis of maps and census records has revealed a very different pattern of landscape development. Underneath the remains of vast sugar estates with their monumental surviving architecture—the curing and boiling houses, lime kilns, windmills and water wheels—lies evidence of an earlier phase of small-scale plantations growing a surprising diversity of crops. Building on a legacy of subsistence agriculture inherited from the Amerindians, European settlers on St. Lucia carved out a patchwork of small holdings cultivating cotton, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, ginger, cassava, indigo, and bananas. The comparative absence of large sugar plantations allowed people without much capital to purchase and develop land, creating new opportunities for free people of color to amass wealth and gain political power. The emergence of this class of free black landowners had a profound impact on St. Lucian society, which in turn greatly affected the larger political struggles that rocked the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century.

New Struggles and Old Ideas, 1813–1833

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Race ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White Population ◽  
Mixed Ancestry ◽  
Social Marginalization ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Free People

This chapter explores the immediate years leading up to the emancipation of Britain’s enslaved population in 1833 and that period’s effect on mixed-race migrants. It contends that Britain was an increasingly hostile place for Jamaican migrants of color, as family and class position no longer sufficiently modified racialized oppression. This is seen in both family correspondences as well as in the experiences of political radicals such as Robert Wedderburn, whose mixed ancestry and social marginalization informed his activist ideologies in London. In Jamaica, however, mixed-race migrants who had returned to the Caribbean made advancements. Not only did the assembly improve the legal position of free people of color, but it promoted British-trained individuals of color in anticipation of the emancipation of enslaved Jamaicans. In particular, emancipation appeared to spell the doom of a permanent, growing white population. A British-educated class of color was now seen as the proper replacement for a declining white cohort.

Beyond Freedom's Reach: An Imperfect Centering of Women and Children Caught within Cuba's Long Emancipation and the Afterlife of Slavery

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 122-144
Author(s):  
Karina L. Cespedes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African Women ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Sexual Deviancy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Free People

AbstractThis article examines Cuba's long process of gradual emancipation (from 1868–1886) and the continual states of bondage that categorize the afterlife of Cuban slavery. The article addresses deferred freedom, re-enslavement, and maintenance of legal states of bondage in the midst of “freedom.” It contends with the legacy of the casta system, the contradictions within the Moret Law of 1870, which “half-freed” children but not their mothers, and it analyzes the struggle for full emancipation after US occupation, with the thwarted attempt of forming the Partido Independiente de Color to enfranchise populations of color. The article argues that the desire to control the labor of racialized populations, and in particular the labor of black and indigenous women and children, unified Cuban and US slaveholders determined to detain emancipation; and provides an analysis of the re-enslavement of US free people of color at the end of the nineteenth century, kidnapped and brought to the Cuba as a method of bolstering slavery. The article draws on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman and Shona Jackson to provide an assessment of the afterlife of Cuban slavery, the invisibility of indigenous labor, the hypervisibility of African labor in the Caribbean deployed to maintain white supremacy, and it critiques the humanizing narrative of labor as a means for freedom in order to address the ways in which, for racialized populations in Cuba, wage labor would emerge as a tool of oppression. The article raises an inquiry into the historiography on Cuban slavery to provide a critique of the invisibility of indigenous and African women and children. It also considers the role and place of sexual exchanges/prostitution utilized to obtain freedom and to finance self-manumission, alongside the powerful narratives of the social and sexual deviancy of black women that circulated within nineteenth-century Cuba.

Manumission on the Land: Slaves, Masters, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century Mompox (Colombia)

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 511-543
Author(s):  
Edgardo Pérez Morales
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Caribbean Sea ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Panthera Onca ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Magdalena River ◽  
Free People ◽  
The Town

In the mid-1700s, the town of Mompox flourished in the Spanish viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada, today part of the Republic of Colombia. Built on the banks of the northern Magdalena River, an important waterway connecting the Andean interior with the Caribbean Sea, Mompox constantly buzzed with travelers and trade alike. Mompox was home to a community of merchants who profited handsomely from both legal trade and smuggling, their networks reaching places as far away as Lima in Peru and Cádiz in Spain. These merchants were frequently also slaveholders and landowners. On haciendas outside of town, slaves cultivated the land and tended large herds of cattle. They gathered wood and resins and hunted for game and jaguars (panthera onca) that preyed on livestock. Along with free people of color, slaves also worked as artisans, journeymen, and oarsmen on boats transporting goods and people up and down the river (see Figure 1).

Policing the Black Criminal

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-186
Author(s):  
Adam Malka
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Black People ◽  
State Power ◽  
White Men ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Free People

This chapter argues that white Baltimoreans acted on their fears of free black crime all the time, often violently and usually with the municipality’s approval. In the process, it shows that the compatibility between professional and popular policing manifested not only in job-busting attacks and home invasions but also in more prosaic moments, such as when an ordinary citizen arrested a black man or protected him from harm. The public authorities were nominally engaged in a broader project of seizing legitimate force for the state alone, but the policing of free black Baltimoreans relied upon informal white power no less than it did upon formal state power. Police officers did not always protect them. Prisons did not always house them. In the age of slavery, Baltimore’s officials preferred to leave the fates of free people of color to ordinary white men. When it came to policing black people, white vigilantes were the police.

This Liberal City

2021 ◽  
pp. 114-124
Author(s):  
Laura Arnold Leibman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Religious Leader ◽  
The South ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Free People ◽  
Northern City

In July of 1820, Isaac Lopez Brandon and his mother landed in Philadelphia, where they joined the growing community of wealthy free people of color who flocked to the northern city from the South and the Caribbean. As in New York, in Philadelphia gradual emancipation led to new opportunities and instigated a racial backlash. While some Jewish Philadelphians worked on behalf of abolition, others owned the print shops and newspapers that published articles fomenting anti-Black ire. Money would ease the Brandons’ path. Philadelphia would be the first place that Isaac’s mother positioned herself not as Lopez or Gill, but as Mrs. Brandon, despite the fact there is no evidence she married Abraham Rodrigues Brandon. Behind the scenes, Abraham helped his niece’s husband secure a job as hazan (religious leader) of the congregation. As in New York, Sarah’s in-laws helped smooth their transition into Jewish life.

Your Word Is Your Bond

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Private Property ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Debt Collection ◽  
Free People ◽  
Debt Recovery ◽  
Natchez District

Debt actions represented one the most common types of lawsuits people of color initiated. Black moneylenders were regular participants in the credit economy of the slave South. Free people of color, in particular, repeatedly extended loans in various amounts to both white and black people. When the sums went unpaid, free black creditors sued borrowers to recoup the money owed. In the Natchez district, a world in which blackness symbolized dependency and whiteness independence, white debtors were bound to black creditors. The legal mechanisms involving debt collection favored lenders—even when those lenders were black. Under such circumstances, the courts could serve as a place where the social and racial relations of a slave society were temporarily suspended, insofar as their suspension furthered the goal of preserving private property. This chapter examines debt recovery from its inception (the loan) to its discharge (whether through payment or execution). The process itself was loaded with symbolic weight, for in the antebellum South, it invoked a set of highly charged ideas about virtue, ethics, membership, and race.

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