The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800

The production, acquisition, and use of consumer goods defines our daily lives, and yet consumerism is seen as increasingly controversial. Movements for sustainable and ethical consumerism are gaining momentum alongside an awareness of how our choices in the marketplace can affect public issues. How did we get here? This volume advances a bold new interpretation of the 'consumer revolution' of the eighteenth century, when European elites, middling classes, and even certain labourers purchased unprecedented quantities of clothing, household goods, and colonial products. Michael Kwass adopts a global perspective that incorporates the expansion of European empires, the development of world trade, and the rise of plantation slavery in the Americas. Kwass analyses the emergence of Enlightenment material cultures, contentious philosophical debates on the morality of consumption, and new forms of consumer activism to offer a fresh interpretation of the politics of consumption in the age of abolitionism and the Atlantic Revolutions.

“Ameliorating the Situation” of Empire: Slavery and Abolition in The Woman of Colour

In this essay, I examine how The Woman of Colour (1808) extends from the ameliorative context of the British slavery debates that were about reforming imperial rule overseas in the wake of the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade. By thinking alongside the work of Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents, I argue that The Woman of Colour abstracts plantation slavery while positioning the protagonist Olivia Fairfield, a mixed-race heiress of a Jamaican plantation, as a figure of British imperial tutelage. The abstraction manifests through Dido, a secondary character whose relationship to Olivia is ambiguously presented to readers. Although the representation of Dido is akin to the grateful slave trope, the novel represents her as a dedicated servant to Olivia, implying that their relationship is benign and harmonious. By turning to Dido’s characterization and the pedagogical objectives of the novel, I identify a liberal imperial project in The Woman of Colour: the novel envisions a paternalistic notion of emancipation in Jamaica while remaining heavily invested in colonial governance of Black people.

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

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.

John Woolman

John Woolman (b. 1720–d. 1772), a Quaker shopkeeper, tailor, and farmer from West Jersey, traveled extensively throughout colonial America as an itinerant minister and produced writings on the most important social problems of the era. Woolman was part of a group of ministers working for increased discipline and broad reform among Friends. He cared deeply about the right conduct and purity of Quaker meetings for worship, and these concerns informed his social thought, as did his various livelihoods. His experience selling goods from his store and the produce of his farm made him increasingly aware of how the transatlantic economy depended on enslaved labor, and in his early twenties he began to think seriously about enslavement as an evil with which Quakers needed to reckon. Witnessing plantation slavery on a journey to Virginia and North Carolina in 1746 reinforced Woolman’s concerns and inspired his first antislavery essay, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754). Woolman began composing a journal recounting his life for the moral and spiritual edification of Friends in 1756, during the violence of the Seven Years’ War. This imperial conflict radicalized many Quakers in colonial America, as Friends took a firmer stance against war, helped to negotiate on behalf of Indigenous people, and approved stricter measures against coreligionists who practiced enslavement. This trend can be seen in Woolman’s second antislavery essay, Considerations on Keeping Negroes . . . Part Second (1762), in which he took a stronger position against enslavement by focusing on the violence of the African slave trade. In the last decade of his life, Woolman would write about a growing range of social issues. His 1763 journey to the Native settlement of Wyalusing to visit the Munsee leader Papunhank made clear to him the plight of Indigenous peoples dispossessed from their land. As Woolman focused less on the business of storekeeping and more on farming, he also wrote against the oppression of tenant laborers by wealthy landowners. His last essay published during his lifetime, Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind (1770), is a theological reflection on social ills of wealth. Woolman died while traveling in ministry among Quakers in England, and his journal was published posthumously as part of The Works of John Woolman (1774). No other colonial American writer wrote with such clarity and theological conviction about the injustices of the transatlantic economy and the need for reforms to address them.

Reflections

This experimental ekphrastic essay meditates on the history of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century rice plantation slavery from the ecocritical perspective of the bobolink, or rice bird. The vignettes of a postbellum image of a Georgia plantation reveal the many facets of this avian migrant’s entanglement with Indigenous histories of wild rice and with Black labour and performance. Weaving in contemporary art and music, this essay explores how a prized songbird—and agricultural pest—developed its grain diet and flight patterns in tandem with the growth of plantation capitalism across the Americas and the Atlantic world.

Jamaica, Covid-19 and Black freedom

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.

King Labor

This chapter explores how the popular memory of the antislavery movement and emancipation proved central to Reconstruction era debates over land, labor, and political economy. Freedpeople were the first and most vocal laboring people to employ war memories to appeal for large-scale material redistribution. They anticipated the postwar period as one of revolutionary possibility. Meanwhile, trade unionists and agrarian radicals used cultural politics to frame postwar debates over land and labor as part of an antislavery tradition. They increasingly appropriated the legacy of African American bondage and liberation in order to confront “wage slavery” and articulate designs for “labor emancipation” in which the ruination of plantation slavery was but one step.

“Known To Be Equal to the Management”

Enslaved overseers have largely been neglected in the extant historiography of plantation slavery. At best they have been pushed to the margins of the literature, their numbers and their significance downplayed. Yet, as large plantations diversified over the latter years of the eighteenth century, and as relations between established planters and independently minded and aspirational white overseers became prone to mistrust and friction, many prominent modernizing planters, including both Washington and Jefferson, began to experiment with unfree managers. They often proved to be skilled, dependable and, even under the pressure of the Revolutionary War, resilient. Yet their presence raised serious questions within plantation society too; they challenged white racial hegemony, and their ‘loyalty’ was a conditional and contingent quality. They occupy a unique place in the story of plantation management, one that challenges orthodox conceptions of race and power in the slave South.