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"Candlin, Kit"
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The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795-1815
The Southern Caribbean was the last frontier in the Atlantic world and the most contested region in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolution. As well as illuminating this little-understood region, the book seeks to complicate our understanding of the Caribbean, the role of 'free people of colour' and the nature of slavery.
eBook
Enterprising Women
In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas's mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
Dorothy Thomas's story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered inEnterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain's Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.
eBook
Sir John Gladstone and the Debate over the Amelioration of Slavery in the British West Indies in the 1820s
Sir John Gladstone made a fortune as a Demerara sugar-planter and a key supporter of the British policy of amelioration in which slavery would be “improved” by making it more “humane.” Unlike resident planters in the British West Indies, who were firmly opposed to any alteration to the conditions of enslavement, and unlike abolitionists, who saw amelioration as a step toward abolition, Gladstone was a rare but influential metropolitan-based planter with an expansive imperial vision, prepared to work with British politicians to guarantee his investments in slavery through progressive slave reforms. This article intersects with recent historiography highlighting connections between metropole and colony but also insists on the influence of Demerara, including the effects of a large slave rebellion centered on Gladstone's estates (which illustrated that enslaved people were not happy with Gladstone's supposedly enlightened attitudes) on metropolitan sensibilities in the 1820s. Gladstone's strategies for an improved slavery, despite the contradictions inherent in championing such a policy while maintaining a fierce drive for profits, were a powerful counter to a renewed abolitionist thrust against slavery in the mid to late 1820s. Gladstone showed that that the logic of gradual emancipation still had force in imperial thinking in this decade.
Journal Article
TRANSIENT WOMEN OF THE SOUTHERN CARIBBEAN 1790-1820
Candlin talks about free women in the Atlantic world and in particular those in the southern Caribbean between 1790 and 1820. He stresses that this is a study that points to a greater degree of autonomy for women than existing works have suggested. Furthermore, he cites that this is a study that unites the southern and northern Atlantic World by focusing on cross-cultural groups, groups which linked all of Europee empires in the region. Decades of struggle for South American Independence sent asylum seekers, many of them women, across the Atlantic world. The lives of a surprising number of these women were characterized by a self reliant independence and a high degree of mobility. An analysis of what is known of their lives, largely drawn from records kept on Trinidad, gives an unexpected picture of women in the early-nineteenth-century imperial world. By demonstrating that women had considerable agency when violent disruptions liquefied the seemingly solid, social elements of societies, he indirectly confirms the insight that it is existing restrictive metropolitan structures that deprive women of agency. At the same time, he demonstrates that this fluidity and the idea of this type of immigrant were not exceptional but very much the norm for several decades in the transatlantic world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He also argues that free women of all classes and ethnicities were far more autonomous than previously has been concluded from studies of white middle-class women in the second half of the century.
Journal Article
By Labors and Fidelity
Judith philip knew a thing or two about slaves; slavery had been part of her life since birth. For most of her adult life she personally had owned well over two hundred people. By 1833 she was one of the most successful planters in Grenada and the matriarch of an extended family that possessed many acres and hundreds of slaves spread throughout the region.¹ Indeed, Judith Philip was one of the most successful slaveholders in the Caribbean.² Her largest plantation was 250 acres overlooking Tyrrel Bay on the outlying island of Carriacou, a place that she had inherited from her
Book Chapter
The Free Colored Moment
While the seven years’ war raged across the Atlantic world, a motley collection of British speculators, financiers, merchants, and other hopefuls bided their time. With the ink on the Treaty of Paris of 1763 barely dry, they fell over themselves to divide the spoils from defeated France. Bringing great fortunes and even greater credit to bear, they inundated the British government with proposals, suggestions, and advice in order to secure a share in the new prosperity.¹ Provinces in India, the whole of explored Canada, the Floridas, and four brand-new colonies in the Caribbean: the Seven Years’ War had been good
Book Chapter