Missionaries,Evangelical Identity,and the Religious Ecology of Early Nineteenth‐Century South Carolina and the British Caribbean

This article examines a critical question that fraught contemporaries throughout the Atlantic system in the early nineteenth century: could slavery be ameliorated and, thus, by implication, could slaves be ‘improved’? Despite strong eighteenth‐century connections through trade and as provincial outposts of the British Empire, South Carolina and the British Caribbean differed markedly on this issue by the early 1800s. But the reasons for this divergence cannot be adequately explained by the effects of the American Revolution. South Carolina slaveholders believed that slavery could be ameliorated through the adoption of evangelicalism. West Indian proprietors, however, believed that the introduction of evangelical religion among their slaves would only incite them to rebel. Thus, evangelical missionaries were often crucial figures in defining the character of slaveholding societies in South Carolina and the West Indies. These missionaries illustrated South Carolinians' paternalistic, benevolent sense of a permanent slave society, while itinerants in the West Indies described a violent, lawless, and temporary society beyond the pale of British standards of civility and humanitarianism.     

Production Activities in the Household Economies of Plantation Slaves: Barbados and Martinique,Mid-1600s to Mid-1800s

Formerly British and French colonies, the eastern Caribbean islands of Barbados and Martinique were major players in the early development of European overseas empires dependent on African slave labor and the large-scale production of sugar. Utilizing documentary and archaeological data we discuss and compare the independent production activities or household economies of plantation slaves on these two islands. The household economy was one of the more prominent aspects of plantation slave life throughout the Caribbean, and in this paper we examine the multiple adaptive production strategies slaves employed to ameliorate the poverty of their material and economic lives.     

Gender,Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Caribbean World

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo‐Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth‐century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio‐sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.     

Royal slaves in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies 1792–1848: Living in autonomy

A group of slaves owned by the King of Denmark-Norway, termed Royal Slaves, performed essential and specific functions in the urban colonial society of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. This article traces the development of this group of slaves and examines their standard of living and level of skills compared to plantation slaves in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. The article argues that the Royal Slaves, through their access to provision grounds, had opportunities for a better life and developed a particular group identity, and that particular Royal Slaves possessed skills which led them to have positions of substantial social status in the social hierarchy of colonial society. Lastly, the article compares the conditions of living of the Danish-Norwegian Royal Slaves to Royal Slaves in other contemporary slave communities in order to further assess how, and if, the Danish-Norwegian Royal Slaves lived and worked under considerably different conditions than other Royal Slaves across the Caribbean.     

Creole Cultures of the Caribbean: Historical Archaeology in the French West Indies

Historical archaeology is a relatively recent development in the French West Indies, in contrast to the Anglophone Americas where for over 30 years, historical archaeologists have investigated the sites of plantation villages in the United States and in the Caribbean to seek insights into the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted to and survived the horrors of slavery, and created unique and vibrant Creole cultures. Although plantations have been archaeologically investigated in the former French possessions of the United States, their Caribbean counterparts, and particularly the enslaved population who labored on them, have only recently become a focus of archaeological research. Yet the historical setting and development of plantation slavery in the French colonies of the Caribbean was necessarily distinct from both the British Caribbean and from North American French colonial establishments. This paper discusses the state of historical archaeology in the French West Indies, with particular reference to plantation archaeology in Guadeloupe and Martinique. This research identifies some of the unique aspects of the economic and historical context of slavery on French Caribbean plantations.     

‘[A] Mere Cloak for their Proud Contempt and Antipathy towards the African Race’: Imagining Britain’s West India Regiments in the Caribbean, 1795–1838

This article examines opposition to the creation and presence of the West India Regiments in Britain’s Caribbean colonies from the establishment of these military units in the mid-to-late 1790s to the formal ending of slavery in the region. Twelve regiments were originally created amid the twin crises associated with Britain’s struggle with Revolutionary France and the horrendous losses to disease suffered by British forces in the Caribbean. Their rank-and-file were comprised mainly of men of African descent, most of whom had been bought by the British Army from slave traders or, after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, recruited from among people ‘liberated’ by the Royal Navy. While there was nothing new in using men of African descent, free and enslaved, in the service of the European empires in the Americas, such enrolments had tended to be for fixed or limited periods. Thus, the establishment of the West India Regiments as permanent military units, whose soldiers were uniformed, armed and trained along European lines, was unprecedented—and bitterly opposed by West Indian colonists. Indeed, although white West Indians were concerned about the protection of the colonies from both external and internal foes, they were highly sceptical about whether arming (formerly) enslaved people of African descent would serve to promote their security or might, in fact, imperil the system of racial slavery on which they relied.

The tensions arising from the establishment of the West India Regiments have been examined by other historians. However, much of the previous focus has been on the political conflict between the British authorities and local colonial legislatures, and on legal challenges to the regiments, especially during the early years of their existence. In contrast, this article takes a wider view of opposition to the regiments over a longer period up to the formal ending of slavery. In so doing, it examines how the regiments’ rank and file were viewed by white West Indians and the deep anxieties this reveals among colonists. The article also considers the efforts made by the regiments’ proponents and commanders to promulgate more favourable images of black soldiers, images that became more prominent by the 1830s. The more general argument is that this struggle around how the West India Regiments’ rank and file should be viewed was part of a broader ‘war of representation’ over the image of ‘the African’ during the age of abolition.     

Freedom and migration in the Leeward Caribbean, 1838–1848

At emancipation in the British Caribbean in 1838, newly freed blacks in larger territories established “reconstituted peasantries” on non-plantation lands. Similar village adaptations were impossible on some smaller islands where planters continued to control all of the islands' lands. In St Kitts and Nevis landless freemen emigrated to Trinidad by the hundreds to establish individual independence and to support kinsmen and friends left behind. Within a decade most migrants from St Kitts and Nevis had returned. They had thus carved out a “migration adaptation” in response to planter oppression at home and livelihood opportunity elsewhere by expanding individual livelihood spaces across the Caribbean Sea. They thereby began to establish extra-island networks of potential labour destinations while at the same time resisting permanent commitments in any one direction except for periodically returning home. Migration and return has persisted as a widespread livelihood strategy among individuals of small Caribbean islands who continue to face economic and ecological uncertainties, conditions similar to those on St Kitts and Nevis at emancipation. Individual adaptability, not group behaviour, has always been important in migration and return in the Lesser Antilles.     

Indentured servitude and convict labour in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, 1671–1755

The article explores how indentured servitude and the use of convict labour began and evolved in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in the period 1671–1755. It examines the intentions and realities behind indentured servitude and convict labour on the islands, and compares these with the workings and use of indentured servants in the British West Indies.

Similar to conditions in the British West Indies, the lowest social strata of white society in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies consisted of a small population of convicts and indentured servants. The use of these groups as part of the labour force took place from the onset of colonisation in 1672 until 1755, the period in which the islands were governed by the West Indian and Guinean Company, WIGC (Vestindisk-Guineisk Kompagni). The analysis reveals that the importation and deployment of indentured servants and convicts can be divided into two distinct periods. Until 1700, the objective of the WIGC was to provide cheap labour for the colony. After 1700, however, the aim was to recruit qualified personnel and to secure the planters against slave rebellion by increasing the white Danish population. As convicts provided neither qualifications nor security, convict transportations to the Danish-Norwegian West Indies ceased after 1700. After 1755, when the Danish-Norwegian Crown purchased the colonies from the WIGC, Danish convict labour and indentured servants were no longer imported to the colony. By contrast, in the British West Indies, imports of indentured servants and convicts continued to play a significant role.

The article explores the physical and legal conditions of the indentured servants and convicts, who constituted the lowest social group in white colonial society and were in some respects considered slaves.     

Jazzing Sheiks at the 25 Cent Bram: Panama and Harlem as Caribbean Crossroads,circa 1910–1940

Both Harlem and Panama were, in the early twentieth century, crossroads of the Caribbean. This essays traces the musical echoes of that fact, arguing that British West Indians had a central but often unrecognized role in the exchanges driving Black cultural innovation in the interwar metropoles. Hundreds of thousands of British West Indians came to and through Panama at the start of the twentieth century, creating a Pan-Caribbean space where the rhythms of son, tango, mento, cumbia, and ragtime rang out. From there many would travel onward. The lives of Panama-born, New York-based performers like Vernon Andrade, Luis Russell, Teófilo Alfonso ‘Panama Al’ Brown, and Estelle Bernier show how British West Indians shaped by the Greater Caribbean’s borderlands crossed boundaries within New York as well. Multilingual and multicultural, they moved easily within Harlem’s ‘Latin Quarter’ of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speakers, helping to bring rhythms and styles from the Hispanic Caribbean to the Afro-American listening and dancing public. Stories of the working-class dance halls of 1920s Panama and of the Latin connections of British Caribbean performers in New York together point to tropical circuits of music and moves rarely recognized as part of the metropolitan Jazz Age.     

The Post-Colonial Constitutional Order of the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Endurance of the Crown and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

ABSTRACT

Amongst Britain's former colonies the independent countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean represent something of an anomaly in so far as the majority of them remain constitutional monarchies and continue to retain the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) as their final appellate court, even though the region has had its own final appellate court – the Caribbean Court of Justice – since 2006. This is in marked contrast to Britain's former colonies in Africa and South Asia, the majority of which switched to republicanism soon after independence and at the same time abolished rights of appeal to the JCPC. This paper seeks to uncover the reasons for this anomaly by examining how the path that led to independence was shaped by a particular conception of Dominion status and by the willingness of nationalist leaders to embrace a dual identity: equal parts West Indian nationalist and Empire loyalist. It will also examine the phenomenon of the ‘postcolony’; being the persistence of the colonial order following the acquisition of constitutional independence. The paper has three aims. Firstly, to contribute to a better understanding of the impact of Dominion status and all that it symbolised in a region which is often overlooked in the scholarly literature on this topic. Secondly, better to understand the competing political forces that led three countries in the region to adopt republicanism, but inhibited its adoption elsewhere in the region. Thirdly, and finally, to enhance discussion of the complex nexus between republicanism and the abolition of rights of appeal to the JCPC where political and juridical considerations do not neatly align.     

Capital,Illegal Slaves,Indentured Labourers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation Economy in Mauritius, 1810–60

Previous studies of British plantation colonies, including the island of Mauritius in the south-western Indian Ocean, have paid little attention to the economic dimensions of the transition from slave to free labour that occurred during the early nineteenth century. Reports by Mauritian colonial officials make it possible to reconstruct the transformation of the island's economy between 1810 and 1860 from one oriented towards trade and commerce to one dominated by the production of sugar for the British imperial market. This transformation occurred in the midst of a series of interconnected developments that included an illegal trade in slaves between 1811 and circa 1827, changes in imperial tariff policy in 1825, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, the advent of the modern system of indentured labour in 1834 and the suspension of Indian emigration to the island between 1838 and 1842. The importance of domestically generated and controlled capital in shaping the Mauritian economy during this period highlights the need to examine the extent to which and the ways in which domestic capital framed the contours of social and economic life elsewhere in the nineteenth-century colonial plantation world.     

Atlantic consumption of French rum and brandy and economic growth in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean

Why did the production of rum in the French West Indies not achieve the same success within the French Atlantic as it did in the British Atlantic world? Surveying the history of rum production in the French Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article contends that the reason why no regional trade in rum developed in French North America resulted from fierce industrial and institutional competition from brandy producers in metropolitan France. Rum, nevertheless, remained significant within the culture and economy of Native Americans and African Americans. This article seeks to add nuance to the wider debate of the ability of the trans-border diffusion of new ideas to stimulate and institutionalize industrial and economic growth in the Atlantic world. French entrepreneurs were no less ‘entrepreneurial’ than their British counterparts, but real constraints on consumption on both sides of the Atlantic created insufficient demand.     

Monarchism,an Emerging Canadian Identity,and the 1866 British North American Trade Mission to the West Indies and Brazil

In 1865, the colonies of eastern British North America created a joint commission to investigate the possibility of reciprocal trade agreements with other parts of the Western hemisphere. In early 1866, the commissioners visited the West Indies and the Empire of Brazil, where they met officials and business leaders. No actual tariff agreements resulted from the commissioners’ travels, the main concrete result of the 1866 trade mission being the establishment of a direct steamship service between Canada and the West Indies. The study of contemporary discussions of the trade mission deepens our understanding of the history of relations between the British West Indies and British North America in the aftermath of emancipation and the end of the ‘Old Colonial System’. Moreover, these discussions reveal different elements of an emerging Canadian identity. Discourse of Britishness influenced the 1866 trade mission, but so did a sense of affinity linking Canada to the other monarchical territories in the Western hemisphere, such as the Empire of Brazil. For their part, some contemporaries in the West Indies welcomed the Canadian trade initiative because they wished for a counterweight to the growing influence of the United States in the region. The article also presents new information about British policy towards Latin America, particularly Mexico and Brazil, as well as British commercial diplomacy more generally. The article is based on materials in archives in the United Kingdom and Canada as well as a range of printed primary sources.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

Colonial Research and the Social Sciences at the End of Empire: The West Indian Social Survey, 1944–57

After the ending of slavery the West Indian colonies were marginalised in British imperial consciousness but the major disturbances of the 1930s jolted the complacency of colonial administrators and aroused more widespread concern over lack of development. At the same time, there was greater official recognition of the academic social sciences in formulating policies to promote colonial development and counter mounting threats to empire. This article focuses on a major study carried out in Jamaica in the late 1940s, the West Indian Social Survey, whose main brief was to research aspects of African Caribbean culture that acted as a barrier to progress. It evaluates the context, origins and conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the project, looks at problems encountered by the researchers during the survey and in publishing the findings and, finally, considers the impact of the research on academic knowledge and policy making. A key theme is the relationship between the Colonial Office, the academics on the Colonial Social Science Research Council who sponsored and supervised the project, and the research team in the field. Problems in the inception and management of the project and publication of research findings raise questions as to who were the gatekeepers of academic knowledge and how such knowledge was constructed and disseminated.     

Foreigners under U.S. Occupation in the Caribbean

This article investigates the experiences of third-country diplomats, private citizens, and subjects during U.S. occupations in the Caribbean, specifically in Haiti (1915–34) and the Dominican Republic (1916–24). It asks how their treatment by occupation forces and others might have affected the occupations and finds that they did so negatively. Although important differences marked the experiences of white Europeans - Germans, Spaniards, French, and British - members of all groups suffered in some ways from U.S. occupation and led many to grow disenchanted and even join in negative public denunciations. In the case of the French and British, this anti-occupation sentiment contradicted their governments’ official stance. Non-whites and non-Europeans - Haitians in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Ricans, Syrians, and West Indians - were far greater in number and suffered largely because of their race. Even in the rare case where the metropole presented their case before Washington, non-white victims of abuse could not obtain justice. The overall frustrations of foreigners eventually turned many against U.S. occupations in the Caribbean.     

Standing Upon a Volcano: Cincinnati’s Newspapers Debate Emancipation, 1860–1862

Newspaper editors in Cincinnati saw the abolition question on a spectrum before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. Most favored some form of confiscation of Confederate slaves for use in the Union war effort; some favored emancipation of slaves as a means to weaken the Confederacy; but almost all vociferously opposed any idea that unrestrained black freedom might be an outcome of the Civil War. While it appears to historians that there was an “inexorable logic” in the development of Union war aims, it is clear from the point of view of Cincinnati that the inexorability of that logic was heavily contested.     

Home-grown slaves: women, reproduction, and the abolition of the slave trade, Jamaica 1788-1807

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.     

The admission of former slaves into churches and monasteries: reaching behind the sources

Religious institutions in early medieval Europe were both recipients of former slaves and instigators of manumissions. By drawing on recent work concerning the admission of former slaves into churches and monasteries, the present paper identifies dominant strands in the historiography from Marc Bloch to the present, which are then re-evaluated in light of a close examination of core sources. The paper argues that while the contention that such institutions were the primary beneficiaries of manumissions can indeed be sustained, there are also important moderating nuances to take into account. These include slaves of churches who were freed but continued to live on the churches' lands; alternatives to ‘formal' manumission; distinctions between churches and monasteries in regard to the admission of former slaves; convergences between Roman law and canon law; and, in the sixth century, the direct involvement of both the papacy and the imperial court in establishing a regulating template for admitting former slaves.     

The Free Negro Company of Christiansted: Struggles for equality, 1773–1799

This article examines the so-called Free Negro Company in the town of Christiansted on the island of St. Croix in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in the latter part of the 18th century. It examines the range of practices and social strategies developed by these men to obtain recognition as free subjects and position themselves in the social space of a racially divided Caribbean society.

The article shows that well before the more well-known instances of coordinated collective action in the beginning of the 19th century, the men of the Free Negro Company developed and applied a variety of social strategies. They challenged the social order that defined their place in society; challenges that took place in physical encounters with Euro-Caribbeans both in the streets and in courtrooms. These free Afro-Caribbean men continuously attempted to expand their space of action, and to emphasize to Euro-Caribbeans that they were free citizens and should be treated as equals. They challenged the distinctions created by the Euro-Caribbeans whilst at the same time setting themselves apart from the enslaved population.

The article focuses on the period prior to the first British occupation of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in 1801, in order to look for signs of opposition to the social order and attempts to achieve a better position in society. The article investigates the militia-like Free Negro Company from the first instance of its members tentatively challenging the racialized social order in 1773 until 1799, when the last mention of a similar case is found in the archival material examined. The Free Negro Company held a central position in the society, and an examination hereof provides the opportunity to get closer to the free Afro-Caribbeans, as individuals and as a group. The role and function of the Company in Danish-Norwegian West Indian society meant that its members came into regular contact with both Euro-Caribbeans and enslaved labourers, and that they often found themselves in situations marked by conflict.