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Lord’. T. S. Winn, A speedy end to slavery in our West India colonies by safe, effectual and equitable means for the benefit of all parties concerned (London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1825), p. 112 In 1812 George became Agent for Jamaica – a role he had long desired and which it had taken him ten
undertook long journeys motivated by his evangelical work and desire to extend his own knowledge of human society in the conviction that the ‘light of the soul’ should be pursued with Bible reading but also through experience. During the months he spent in Barbados in 1671, the English preacher ‘discovered’ the cruelty of slavery, which he witnessed directly. The experience he had in the Caribbean islands was translated into the recommendations – quoted in the epigraph to this chapter – that Fox addressed to his followers, exhorting them to imagine themselves slaves in
5 Slavery and the diaspora: Temporal and spatial articulations Our relationship to the past is not a simple process; it mixes, in a complex way, a linear history-time with a memory-time that makes the past an experience lived in the present. Events that produce meaning, in particular when they have not been “resolved,” never stop “surviving”; in the case of the African diaspora, the past of slavery still makes sense today, as if the slaveships were still crossing the Atlantic each day, over and over again. Indeed, memory is not a linear phenomenon. It uses
4 From slavery to indenture: scripts for slavery’s endings Anita Rupprecht Having arrived in Jamaica as one of the Special Magistrates sent from England to oversee the passing of the 1833 Emancipation Act, Richard Madden observed that, the late change which has taken place in the condition of the negro population of these islands, must necessarily lead to great alterations in the mode of managing plantations. It requires as little knowledge of human nature, as of political economy, to be assured that no man will labour without reward, who can avoid it. Hitherto
Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean draws together essays and arguments from a diverse group of contributors who seek to explore the many and varied ways in which Ireland and the Caribbean share an interlocking Atlantic history. This shared history is not always a comfortable one. Despite being victims of the first English empire, Irish people enslaved others throughout this period, and can be found at the cutting edge of extractive colonialism. They profited, exploited, traded, and trafficked with the very worst of European opportunists. Irish merchants and enslavers operated in the grey zone between empires. They could be found trading within the Danish, French and Dutch empires, as well as within the British empire, with which they were more properly connected. Irish people also shared an experience of colonialism themselves, and this opens a series of interesting avenues and rich ironies for the contributors to untangle and interrogate. The Caribbean had an outsized impact on Ireland itself, as many of the chapters argue. Irish estates were modelled or named for Caribbean precursors, just as the colonial engineering of the Irish landscapes affected those in Jamaica, Trinidad and elsewhere. The relationship was reciprocal and complex. This collection builds on the sterling work of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project at University College London, as well as the pioneering scholarship of Nini Rodgers. It brings together literary scholars, architectural historians, historians of colonialism, and art historians. The result is a novel exploration of the deep and complex relationship between two island archipelagos in a period of peak colonialism.
face; I cannot raise these fetter’d arms for thee, To ask that mercy heav’n denies to me; Yet let thy tender breast my sorrows share, Bleed for my wounds, and feel my deep despair. 2 Thomas Day, ‘The Dying Negro’ ( 1775 ) The early abolitionist Granville Sharp regarded slavery as a form of civil death, which
The British saw Egypt as a major route to India where their interests could be threatened in alarming ways. This book sheds light on the formation of English national identities in relation to Islam as understood in the context of the British imperial mission. It focuses on the late nineteenth century, a period that marks a new departure in Anglo-Muslim relations in the context of the British Empire shifting the ground on which British identity politics operated. The role of the British Government and English activists respectively in the campaign to suppress slave traffic in Egypt and surrounding areas is discussed. Government officials and British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) members redefined English culture and proper English gender roles. Anti-slavery campaign had as much to do with English domestic as it did with Egyptian and British imperial politics. The book examines the relationships between activism in England, the implementation of government policy in Egypt and imperial encounters, as well as the production of identities and ideologies associated with these efforts. References to the East, Islam and the harem were used to define the behaviour that the English feminists sought to eliminate from their own society as un-English. The poem 'British Turk' focuses on the oppression of English women, on the burdens associated with marriage. The book also explains how the concept of the English nation as the centre of an empire helped to establish a place in England for Islam.
2 Slavery, the slave trade and economic growth: a contribution to the debate Pat Hudson In April 1831 Alexander Baring, of Baring Brothers, claimed that slave emancipation threatened to destroy ‘all the capital now employed in that branch of commerce’.1 At that time Barings had £250,000 invested in mortgages on West Indian estates, which amounted to half of its capital.2 In 1833 Baring Brothers lodged claims to several thousand pounds of emancipation compensation. The Bank also invested in slave-produced American cotton, which in that year represented a quarter
2 Stowe’s sunny memories of Highland slavery Judie Newman [They], counting the natives as their slaves and their prey, disposed without scruple of them and all that they had, just as it suited their own interest or convenience, reckless of the wrongs and misery they inflicted on these simple, unresisting people . . . removed from their comfortable houses and farms in the interior.1 An almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilisation.2 Two descriptions of the same system: one
This article considers the allusions to classical statuary in Matthew G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1816). Drawing on John Barrell’s account of civic discourse on the fine arts after Shaftesbury, I explain and contextualise the centrality of the Venus de’ Medici statue to Lewis’s representations of male desire and male virtue. Images of Venus, both in The Monk and in the Journal, function as tests of civic virtue and articulate the conditions of Lewis’s entitlement to hold and govern slaves in Jamaica. Lewis’s colonial inheritance underpins the narratives of desire in The Monk, and inflects his authorship more generally.