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Hearing Enslaved Voices
This book focuses on alternative types of slave narratives, especially courtroom testimony, and interrogates how such narratives were produced, the societies (both those that were majority slave societies and those in which slaves were a distinct minority of the population) in which testimony was permitted, and the meanings that can be attached to such narratives. The chapters in this book provide valuable information about the everyday lives-including the inner and spiritual lives-of enslaved African American and Native American individuals in the British and French Atlantic World, from Canada to the Caribbean. It explores slave testimony as a form of autobiographical narrative, and in ways that allow us to foreground enslaved persons' lived experience as expressed in their own words.
eBook
Commerce and Credit: Female Credit Networks in Eighteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica
Recent work on white women in Jamaica has shown that they were active participants in Jamaica’s slave economy. This article adds to this recent literature through an innovative use of social network analysis (SNA) to examine the credit networks in which women operated in the thriving eighteenth-century British Atlantic town of Kingston, Jamaica. In particular, it uses closeness and centrality measures to quantify the distinctive role that white women had in local credit networks. These were different from those of men involved in transatlantic trade, but were vital in facilitating female access to credit enabling domestic retail trade. White female traders in particular facilitated female access to credit networks, acting as significant conduits of money and information in ways that were crucial to the local economy. Their connectedness within trade networks increased over time, despite their greater exposure than larger traders to economic shocks. We therefore demonstrate that white women were active protagonists in the developing economy of eighteenth-century Jamaica.
Journal Article
The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica, and the Territories thereon Depending
Between 1737 and 1746, James Knight-a merchant, planter, and
sometime Crown official and legislator in Jamaica-wrote a massive
two-volume history of the island. The first volume provided a
narrative of the colony's development up to the mid-1740s, while
the second offered a broad survey of most aspects of Jamaican life
as it had developed by the third and fourth decades of the
eighteenth century. Completed not long before his death in the
winter of 1746-47 and held in the British Library, this work is now
published for the first time. Well researched and intelligently
critical, Knight's work is not only the most comprehensive account
of Jamaica's ninety years as an English colony ever written; it is
also one of the best representations of the provincial mentality as
it had emerged in colonial British America between the founding of
Virginia and 1750. Expertly edited and introduced by renowned
scholar Jack Greene, this volume represents a colonial Caribbean
history unique in its contemporary perspective, detail, and
scope.
eBook
Slavery and the new history of capitalism
The new history of capitalism (NHC) places a great deal of emphasis on slavery as a crucial world institution. Slavery, it is alleged, arose out of, and underpinned, capitalist development. This article starts by showing the intellectual and scholarly foundations of some of the broad conclusions of the NHC. It proceeds by arguing that capitalist transformation must rely on a global framework of analysis. The article considers three critiques in relation to the NHC. First, the NHC overemphasizes the importance of coercion to economic growth in the eighteenth century. We argue that what has been called ‘war capitalism’ might be better served by an analysis in which the political economy of European states and empires, rather than coercion, is a key factor in the transformation of capitalism at a global scale. Second, in linking slavery to industrialization, the NHC proposes a misleading chronology. Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South. During early industrialization, sugar, not cotton, was the main plantation crop in the Americas. Third, the NHC is overly concentrated on production and especially on slave plantation economies. It underplays the ‘power of consumption’, where consumers came to purchase increasing amounts of plantation goods, including sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. To see slavery’s role in fostering the preconditions of industrialization and the Great Divergence, we must tell a story about slavery’s place in supporting the expansion of consumption, as well as a story about production
Journal Article
The Routledge History of Slavery
The Routledge History of Slavery is a landmark publication that provides an overview of the main themes surrounding the history of slavery from ancient Greece to the present day. Taking stock of the field of Slave Studies, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades of study in this crucial field.
Offering an unusual, transnational history of slavery, the chapters have all been specially commissioned for the collection. The volume begins by delineating the global nature of the institution of slavery, examining slavery in different parts of the world and over time. Topics covered here include slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean World, as well as the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In Part Two, the chapters explore different themes that define slavery such as slave culture, the slave economy, slave resistance and the planter class, as well as areas of life affected by slavery, such as family and work. The final part goes on to study changes and continuities over time, looking at areas such as abolition, the aftermath of emancipation and commemoration. The volume concludes with a chapter on modern slavery.
Including essays on all the key topics and issues, this important collection from a leading international group of scholars presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of the field. It will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of slavery.
eBook
Tropical Hospitality, British Masculinity, and Drink in Late Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
White Jamaicans developed a drinking culture that drew on British precedents, but which mutated in the tropics into a form of sociability different from how sociability operated in mid-eighteenth Enlightenment Europe, where civility was a much-aspired-to norm. In this article, I use works by eighteenth-century social commentators on Jamaica – Edward Long and especially J. B. Moreton – to explore how white Jamaicans developed a form of sociability which in Long was praised as showing Jamaicans as a generous and hospitable people but which in Moreton was described, more accurately, as a distinctive and unattractive form of debauchery, oriented around excessive drinking and sexual exploitation of enslaved women and free women of colour. The overwhelming importance of slavery in Jamaica accentuated the trends towards a debauched version of hospitality that stressed white male pleasure over everything else as a central animating value in society.
Journal Article
Making a Whig Empire Work: Transatlantic Politics and the Imperial Economy in Britain and British America
Mercantilism has been an important organizing concept not only for Atlantic and early American history but for the disciplines of sociology, economics, and political science as well. What do scholars mean by mercantilism? This article demonstrates that while there are a variety of definitions, most include two concepts. Most scholars argue that before the era of free trade there was a widespread consensus about economic goals. And, second, they contend that all mercantilists insist on the finite nature of the world’s wealth. Atlantic historians and early American historians have by and large maintained that because there was a mercantilist consensus in Europe the differences among empires had to do with the different endowments that the Europeans encountered on the periphery. They have also suggested that deviance from mercantilist goals must have derived from the structural weakness of early modern states. The British Empire in particular, we are told, was incapable of enforcing its mercantilist economic legislation. Against these claims, I suggest that there was a lively debate within the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about political economic issues. Far from accepting the finite nature of wealth, many Britons argued that property was based on human labor and that therefore there was the possibility for limitless economic growth. Because there was no mercantilist consensus about political economy, imperial policy both in Britain and the colonies was necessarily a politically contested issue. This essay contends therefore that Atlanticists and early Americanists need to reinsert accounts of party political debates over imperial political economy, both in the metropolis and in the colonies, into their accounts of Atlantic development and the origins of the American Revolution.
Cathy Matson, Christian J. Koot, Susan D. Amussen, Trevor Burnard, and Margaret Ellen Newell comment on Steve Pincus’s essay. The Forum concludes with Pincus’s reply.
Journal Article
