A Black British Racial Formation

This chapter uses the Indies mentality to relearn British racial discourse, focusing on Julius Soubise, the Afro-British assistant of celebrity fencing master Domenico Angelo. During his own lifetime, Soubise's celebrity rivaled that of his better remembered Afro-British contemporaries, Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho. Soubise's “life geography” overflowed the borders of the Black Atlantic: born in Saint Kitts, he grew up in London and spent the last two decades of his life in Calcutta. The chapter first details his time in London, where he catalyzed tropologies of Eastern royalty in order to fashion himself as a “Black Prince,” thereby carving out a racialized but still exalted place for himself in the beau monde. It then follows Soubise to Calcutta, tracing how his racial self presentation altered in his journey from metropole to colony, from the circum-Atlantic to India. While British ideas about race certainly traveled from the former to the latter, India's colonial racial formation was also shaped by Mughal precedents. Indeed, aspects of the subcontinent's Indo-Persian racial formation even migrated westward through imperial networks, influencing the evolution of racial ideologies in the British Atlantic world.

Leisure in the British Atlantic World

Play and recreation are sometimes considered to be less significant elements of culture in general and of individual societies than aspects such as work, politics, religion, the arts, and domestic life, but archaeological excavations and textual sources alike indicate that leisure pastimes have been and remain ubiquitous in past and present human societies. Because the very term “play” implies an activity that is the province of children, or which, when applied to adults, is inherently frivolous, or, within some religious or cultural contexts, even sinful, the historical and sociological study of this concept is not as developed as those that relate to what are widely believed to be more important subjects in the study of individual or communal life of the past. Yet even societies as regimented with respect to daily life and as concerned with the proper use of time as that of Puritan New England have been revealed to have included forms of recreation for children and adults alike. The historiography of the early modern Atlantic world includes numerous monographs, journal articles, and other types of scholarly works that depict practices of play and recreation throughout the colonial Americas, and among people of European, African, Native American, and mixed heritage in rural and urban contexts alike. The sources that are listed in this article describe activities and sites of leisure that range from wrestling matches between enslaved men on Southern plantations to fishing trips undertaken by elite Philadelphia clubmen to civic festivities in colonial Peru, and they depict the importance of such activities both among those whose lives centered on labor (free or unfree) and among those who were able to dedicate themselves to the enjoyment of leisure.

Limited Liberties: Catholics and the Policies of the Pitt Ministry in an Early Modern Context

This article contributes to current debates about the role of religion in governance in the late eighteenth century British Atlantic world by examining the Pitt ministry's policies regarding Catholic subjects in England, Quebec, and Ireland in an early modern context. Starting with an overview of early modern attempts to find a compromise between Catholic subjects and their Protestant rulers, this article shows how the Pitt ministry reused these earlier approaches in its efforts to respond to Catholic subjects during of the age of revolution. Focusing on the English Catholic Relief Act of 1791, the Canada Constitutional Act, and the ministry's unimplemented plans for Catholic emancipation, the article argues that these policies were all shaped in part around the idea that Catholic subjects could be allowed greater freedoms, and even access to political influence in some cases, if their faith was contained through Gallican-style restrictions. These restrictions varied from requiring new oaths to attempting to establish the government's right to select Catholic bishops. Each policy resulted in notably different outcomes based on the location and potential power of the Catholic subjects that they affected. The common goal, however, was to attenuate the Catholics’ connection to the papacy and increase government influence over the Catholic Church in British territory while also upholding the ultimate supremacy of the Anglican Church.