1,720,961 research outputs found
The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870
Full text linkWhat were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast
The bonds of freedom: liberated Africans and the end of the slave trade
No full textThe story of the long fight for freedom of African captives rescued from the illegal slave trade only to be forced back into bondage The Bonds of Freedom tells the forgotten story of people seized from slave ships by maritime patrols, “liberated,” then forced into bonded labor between 1807 and 1880. Using extensive archival research from Sierra Leone, South Africa, Brazil, Cuba, the United Kingdom, and the United States, historian Jake Subryan Richards uncovers the contrasting ideas and practices of authoritarianism and freedom that empires and liberated Africans developed during the protracted end of the illegal slave trade. Following the Africans’ journeys from enslavement to liberation, Richards recounts their capture and embarkation on ships that participated in the vast slave trade to Brazil and Cuba, the maritime seizure of those ships, and the adjudication that assigned freed captives to bonded labor. The captives fought against their bondage as state agents limited their freedom of choice and movement. The liberated Africans’ story shows that, far from following a straightforward path to freedom, these men and women navigated anti-slave-trade laws that both subjected them to authoritarian control and provided a domain for them to create their own visions of freedom. Through meticulous research and engaging narrative, Richards sheds light on their legal battles, community-building efforts, and ongoing quest for justice and autonomy in the face of enduring challenges
Political culture in Jamaica before anticolonial nationalism
No full textThis paper considers scholarship on political culture in Jamaica in 1865, the year of the Morant Bay rebellion. It situates the historiography of political culture in relation to three trends: first, an older historiography that envisaged the rebellion as indicative of nationalist consciousness; second, a more recent focus on the local politics of protest in the period 1838–1900; and third, another recent approach of explaining political culture through the dynamic relationship between metropole and colony. The paper then goes on to suggest that the latter two approaches are congenial to analysing the Underhill Meetings, a set of key political discussions prior to the rebellion which nevertheless have been underutilized in the historiography. The paper concludes by considering the possible linkages between the Underhill Meetings and the reform initiatives of the post‐rebellion colonial state. Overall, it argues for the possibility of island‐wide political consciousness without the need for ethno‐nationalism or “imagined communities
Anti-slave-trade law, “liberated Africans” and the state in the South Atlantic world, c.1839–1852
No full textFrom 1807 onwards, bilateral slave-trade treaties stipulated how naval squadrons would rescue slaves from slave ships, and how states should arrange the settlement and apprenticeship of these slaves, to transform them into ‘liberated Africans’. Comparing interactions between the state and liberated Africans at sea along the South African and Brazilian coasts, and in the port towns of Cape Town and Salvador, reveals how the legal status of liberated Africans changed over time. Current scholarship has framed liberated Africans in terms of whether they were attributed rights or suffered re-enslavement, and thus focused on their solidarity through claiming rights, ‘ethnic survivals’ or creolization. Instead, this paper argues anti-slave-trade legislation ascribed to liberated Africans a set of unguaranteed entitlements – promises regarding status and treatment without obligating states to uphold that status or treatment. By focusing on the precise aspects of legislation that operated at each point in the process of anti-slave-trade activity – rescuing slaves from slave ships, transportation to a port, processing through a court, and apprenticeship – this paper unearths how the law came into force in the encounter between state officials and liberated Africans, as part of the complex transition from slavery to free labour
Captivity’s collections: science, natural history, and the British transatlantic slave trade, by Kathleen S. Murphy
No full textKathleen S. Murphy, Captivity’s Collections: Science, Natural History, and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. xiv + 239 pp. (Paper US$ 29.95
New stories from the Black Atlantic
No full textThe exhibition and accompanying book Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, edited by Jake Subryan Richards and Victoria Avery, examines the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery and resistance movements through a selection of paintings from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In this excerpt from the book, Jake Subryan Richards unpacks what several 17th- and 18th-century Dutch paintings reveal about slavery, trade and empire. Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance. Jake Subryan Richards and Victoria Avery. Philip Wilson Publishers. 2023
Ecologies in flight: black environmental knowledge and human-bird interactions between the Caribbean and Britain
No full textPeople interacted with birds and created ecological knowledge about them while enslaved and during the transition to emancipation from 1848 onward in the Danish colony of St Croix. These Black ecologies can be reconstructed through a close reading of the archives of two of the leading ornithologists of the period: Alfred and Edward Newton. Their notebooks, correspondence, and publications are contextualized alongside plantation records and missionary accounts. These sources provide the basis for a new analytic frame: “ecologies in flight” in which flight refers to bird migration, escape from enslavement, circum-Caribbean passages, and ephemeral sources. Through ecologies in flight, this paper makes two connected claims. First, freed Black people developed ecological knowledge, which by its very existence transcended the plantation, and enabled freed people to spend time doing things outside the plantation economy. Kalinago and maritime maroon people provided precedents for ecologies in flight. Second, connections with the more-than-human provided support to oppressed people in ways not fully captured by colonial scientific research. Ecologies in flight became a method for humans and birds to survive the plantation regime that continued from the era of slavery to that of emancipation
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