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"Pybus, Cassandra"
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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
Many middle passages
This groundbreaking book presents a global perspective on the history of forced migration over three centuries and illuminates the centrality of these vast movements of people in the making of the modern world. Highly original essays from renowned international scholars trace the history of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, bonded soldiers, trafficked women, and coolie and Kanaka labor across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. They depict the cruelty of the captivity, torture, terror, and death involved in the shipping of human cargo over the waterways of the world, which continues unabated to this day. At the same time, these essays highlight the forms of resistance and cultural creativity that have emerged from this violent history. Together, the essays accomplish what no single author could provide: a truly global context for understanding the experience of men, women, and children forced into the violent and alienating experience of bonded labor in a strange new world. This pioneering volume also begins to chart a new role of the sea as a key site where history is made.
eBook
Jefferson's Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution
The number of slave defections that occurred during the American Revolution is highly debatable. Thomas Jefferson's statements related to the matter have only made it more difficult to ascertain.
Journal Article
Patriot Exiles in Van Diemen’s Land
In the aftermath of the rebellion and invasions of 1837–8, 102 political prisoners were sent out of Upper Canada to be transported to a penal colony in the antipodes. Ninety-two men – participants in the cross-border raids at the Short Hills, St Clair, Windsor, and Prescott – were transported to Van Diemen’s Land (VDL), the former name of Tasmania, Australia.¹ The lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, Sir George Arthur, had extensive experience with penal transportation as the previous governor of VDL, and he saw this option as the most effective way of curtailing further border disturbance.² He was also urged to
Book Chapter
Recovered Lives as a Window into the Enslaved Family
On November 25, 1783, a war-weary George Washington finally laid claim to thirteen colonies of America, marching his victorious army through Manhattan streets packed with cheering patriots, their hats and bonnets adorned with ribbon cockades or sprigs of laurel. The public jubilation lasted for days, culminating in a spectacular display of fireworks to celebrate Washington’s victory. Yet, for all his great victory, Washington’s satisfaction was diminished by the magnitude of the loyalist exodus that saw 60,000 people leave America, including many thousands of runaway slaves.¹ At Staten Island, just beyond his reach, hundreds of runaways were stowed aboard the last
Book Chapter
“One Militant Saint”: The Much Traveled Life of Mary Perth
Cautiously making her way out of the town, she would walk for about ten miles to the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp.1 Here, in the woods, she would exhort her fellow sufferers to open their hearts to salvation, so that their spirits could be freed from bondage.2 At some time in her life Mary had gained some literacy, so she knew the Book of Exodus, with its promise to deliver the enslaved from bondage, and could read St. Paul's advice to the Galatians: \"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.\"
Journal Article
Billy Blue: An African American Journey through Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century
This article traces the remarkable life of William Blue, who was probably born into slavery in colonial New York about 1737 and who died a much-celebrated founding figure in the colony of New South Wales (present-day Australia) in 1834. Like the recent biography of Equiano, so carefully researched by Vincent Carretta, the recovered life of William Blue allows us to consider the competing claims of slave owners and the military for the labor of expropriated Africans, the complex strategies of resistance and survival that these Africans could employ, and the shifting constructions of race and class within the complex and interconnected sphere of the Anglo colonial world in the long eighteenth century.
Journal Article
Every path tells: Traversing the landscape of memory
When I was in my middle thirties, I abruptly abandoned a long-term relationship and impulsively moved from Sydney to Melbourne, having accepted a job as a senior policy advisor on affirmative action for which I was manifestly unfit.
Journal Article