Oceanic Intimacies

In this essay, I explore what intimacies might be revealed if we trace oceanic entanglements created by eighteenth-century maritime routes and journeys in historical and contemporary imaginative reconstructions of such histories. I respond to Lisa Lowe’s proposal to use “intimacies as a heuristic,” and to decentre the European notion of “the human” constructed by colonial epistemologies. To do so, I offer two counter-histories, embedded in and through different waters, which challenge imperial two-dimensional epistemologies. “Porous Intimacies” discusses the seafaring part of Sheikh I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet (1765), one of the first travelogues written by an Indian about Europe. “Immersive Intimacies” analyzes David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1995), which imaginatively reconstructs the middle passage of captured Africans on British slave ships bound for the Caribbean. Rethinking former historical accounts within and outside colonial and liberal frameworks, I analyze new intimacies through oceanic connections.

“The lungs of a ship”: Ventilation, acclimatization, and labor in the maritime environment, 1740–1800

This article examines the connection between projects for shipboard ventilation and the shifting medical discourse about acclimatization in the British Empire during the eighteenth century. I argue that the design, use, and disuse of a class of shipboard “ventilators” proposed by natural philosopher Stephen Hales helps us to trace changing ideas about the ability of European bodies to acclimate, or “season,” to tropical environments. These ventilating machines appealed to British administrators because they represented an embodiment of providential and enlightened ideas that validated the expansion of overseas empire. In addition, they promised to increase labor efficiency by reducing the mortality and misery experienced by the sailors and enslaved people during long sea voyages. As skepticism about acclimatization grew in response to stubbornly high mortality rates in the West Indies, Hales’ ventilators fell out of favor – a development underscored by their dismissal as a potential solution for the appalling conditions found in the transatlantic slave trade. By examining ventilators’ nearly fifty-year career in naval and slave ships, this article will show the role of technology and the shipboard environment in the transition from enlightened optimism about acclimatization toward later attitudes of racial and environmental essentialism.

The Bridge Connecting Silkworms to Mosquitos

This chapter relates the history of sugar, a thread that links the Silk Roads, Portuguese sailors, Atlantic islands, endangered seals, the African slave trade, and yellow fever, all because of our physiological need for glucose, which we satisfy with sugar. The chapter tells how from its origin in Southeast Asia, sugarcane, later called “Creole cane” and processing technology moved along the Silk Roads to Western Asia, then to Mediterranean islands. To begin with, Portuguese colonists transformed the Atlantic island of Madeira into a large sugar producer using slave labor until ecological and economic collapse forced production to move to São Tomé, using Angolan slave labor. After Portugal discovered Brazil, colonists took sugarcane with them, creating large plantations and initiating the enslavement and trans-Atlantic movement of millions of Africans. As the chapter shows, sugar production moved into the Caribbean and Central America, and African slave ships inadvertently carried yellow fever and yellow fever mosquito to the Americas.

Yellow Fever in the United States

This chapter focuses on yellow fever, which inspired dread in the United States when epidemics occurred in the 1700s and 1800s. The 1878 epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee, triggered an exodus from the city of frightened people who often took the disease with them and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 20,000 people in the southern United States. As the chapter relates, the cause of the disease was unknown at the time, bringing fear and ineffective attempts to prevent or cure it. An early effort in biowarfare even attempted, unsuccessfully, to use clothing soiled by yellow fever victims to infect President Abraham Lincoln. The chapter goes on to describe how yellow fever, classified as a flavivirus, is transmitted by Aedes aegypti, both native to East Africa. Yellow fever arrived in the Americas because of a sequence of unlikely events that allowed the mosquito, virus, and susceptible victims to be transported to there on slave ships, a sequence traceable to the Silk Roads.

British Antislavery and West Africa

Resistance to slavery within African societies was as complex and heterogeneous as slavery itself. For enslaved Africans and their descendants taken by force to Europe’s colonies in the Americas, antislavery was an existential struggle. Among European states, Britain was among the first imperial powers to pass laws abolishing its slave trade (in 1807) and slavery in its colonies (in 1833). Antislavery was a transnational phenomenon, but Britain made suppressing the Atlantic slave trade an element of its foreign policy, employing a Royal Navy squadron to search for slave ships, pressing African leaders to sign anti-slave-trade treaties as a condition of trade and coordinating an international network of anti-slave-trade courts. And yet, for many leading British abolitionists, “Africa” was an ideological sandbox—an imagined blank space for speculation and experiment on the development of human societies and the progress of “civilization.” In the 18th century, early British critics of the transatlantic slave trade argued that “Africa” presented an unparalleled commercial and imperial opportunity. Although the slave trade—and the plantations in the Americas that slave ships supplied with labor—were profitable, some argued that slave-trading regions could, with enough investment, produce goods and commodities that would be many times more lucrative. Moreover, if Britain were the first European power to abolish the slave trade, it might also be among the first to gain a territorial foothold on African soil. Over time, these arguments coalesced into the concept of “legitimate commerce.” A combination of Christian teaching, slave-trade suppression, and commercial incentives would persuade slave-trading polities to give up the practice and instead produce other goods. Legitimate commerce intertwined with a theory of civilization that held that any society that enslaved people was so degenerate in its social development that nearly any reform or intervention was justifiable. By the end of the 19th century, antislavery became a justification for European conquest. There were at least three broad reform projects launched by British officials and merchants in Africa in the name of antislavery. First, drawing on critiques of the slave trade from the 18th century that emphasized the commercial potential of legitimate commerce, antislavery activists and politicians argued for replacing the slave trade with new kinds of export-oriented commerce. Second, in two colonies, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Britain and the United States experimented with the possibility of using Black people from the African diaspora as settlers and missionaries. In Sierra Leone, more than seventy thousand people, usually known as “Liberated Africans,” were repatriated from slave ships into the small colony. Third, in the mid-19th century, as the transatlantic slave trade declined, Britain and other European powers invested heavily in African plantation agriculture, particularly in cotton and palm oil monocrops.

In the Waste: On Blackness and (Being) Plastic

“In the Waste: On Blackness and (Being) Plastic” is an homage and response to Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Sharpe proposes wake work as an analytic to methodologically reorient Black living in the afterlife of slavery, a “past that is not yet past.” Waste work here enters to explore the continuities of slave ships and plantations, genocidal clearings, toxic wastes, objects, and disposable bodies, providing an opening to re/consider the relationship between Blackness, animals and (other) abjects, namely plastic. If abjects can co-conspire in one another’s disposability, how can these fraught relations of ejection be reconfigured on new terms? By tending to the multifold deaths and disposals that exist along the subject-eject-object continuum in the wake of the slave ship and the extractive, settler colonial state, I argue that otherwise ways of living and dying emerge beyond the linear ecocidal model, perhaps ones that refuse disposability altogether.

Rethinking Mutiny

This chapter begins with defining mutiny and exploring its origins. It considers the nature of military relationships across time before focusing upon the British Army Act (1955) and the American Uniform Code of Military Justice. The issues of mutiny as a collective act, and the active or passive role of those involved in mutinies, are used to illustrate the intricacies of the legal framework which then flows into using cases of mutiny on slave ships to highlight the importance of the historical context. The nature of sovereign power is then used to illustrate both the coercive control over military subordinates and the fragility of that very same coercion. This leads into the way the act of mutiny is socially constructed—in other words, what counts as ‘mutiny’ is a subjective not an objective construction. The chapter concludes with two sections, the first of which lists the ‘Refrains of Mutiny’: the patterns that recur across space and time, from the social construction of mutiny to the importance of establishing who the enemy is, the role of antecedence, the default response of the authorities, the importance of scapegoating, the omnipresence of the phenomena, the role of the heroic leader, the impact of serendipity, the relational nature of leadership, and finally the role of enthralment. The final section focuses on various explanations of mutiny, using material drawn from political revolutions and industrial relations to highlight the similarities and differences between these and mutinies, and relates such disputes to the difference between agonism and antagonism.

Legal Practitioners

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.

Liberated Africans

“Liberated Africans” refers to a group of African-born men, women, and children intercepted by naval forces from slave ships and slave trading factories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans as part of the 19th-century campaign to abolish the transoceanic slave trade from Africa. Following the passage of Britain’s 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the British Royal Navy patrolled both the Atlantic and Indian oceans in order to suppress the external trade from Africa. Captured vessels were taken to a series of Vice-Admiralty courts, and later Mixed Commission courts, located in Freetown, Sierra Leone; Havana, Cuba; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Tortola; Cape Town, South Africa; James Town, St. Helena; Luanda, Angola; and Port Luis, Mauritius. Naval interdiction by Brazil, Portugal, the United States, and other powers resulted in a smaller number of cases brought before unilateral anti-slave-trade tribunals. Between 1808 and 1896, this complex tribunal network “liberated” approximately 214,000 Africans who survived the Middle Passage. Perhaps 75,000 of these individuals were settled in Sierra Leone; the remainder were settled in the British Caribbean, Brazil, Cuba, Liberia, and British colonies and outposts from the Gambia, Cape Colony, and Mauritius, to Mombasa, Zanzibar, and Bombay. The arrival of an estimated 192,000 Liberated Africans into Atlantic ports continued through the demise of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1860s. In the Indian Ocean, approximately 22,000 Liberated Africans disembarked in East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and India as a result of a highly uneven British naval campaign from 1808 into the 1890s. Many Liberated Africans experienced very liminal freedom. Adults and children were apprenticed to colonial inhabitants for periods of up to fourteen years. Men were conscripted into the British West India Regiments and Royal African Corps. Many women were forcibly married to strangers soon after arrival. Approximately one out of every four Liberated Africans underwent a second oceanic passage, most of them forcibly relocated to the British West Indies. The settlement of Liberated Africans—referred to by British officials as their “disposal”—represented a sizable involuntary African migration into and across the British Empire in the decades after the abolition of the British slave trade. Their arrival brought with it a lasting linguistic and cultural impact in many colonial societies. The descendants of Liberated Africans remain identifiable communities in many postcolonial societies from Africa to the Caribbean.