David Lambert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226078069
- eISBN:
- 9780226078236
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226078236.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
This introductory chapter sets out the central argument that Atlantic slavery – as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth and a focus of political struggle – was entangled with the production, ...
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This introductory chapter sets out the central argument that Atlantic slavery – as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth and a focus of political struggle – was entangled with the production, circulation and reception of geographical knowledge. Three historical contexts for the argument are examined: the struggle between proslavery and antislavery forces over the future of slavery in the British Empire; the intensified interest in West Africa and West African geography, including the effort to explore and map the River Niger; and the emergence and institutionalisation of geography as a distinct discourse and field of knowledge. All three are associated with the period from the 1780s to 1830s. The chapter then goes on to provide a biographical sketch of the life of the geographer, plantation manager, Glasgow merchant and proslavery propagandist, James MacQueen (1778-1870), who is the focus of the book. The chapter ends with a summary of each chapter.Less
This introductory chapter sets out the central argument that Atlantic slavery – as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth and a focus of political struggle – was entangled with the production, circulation and reception of geographical knowledge. Three historical contexts for the argument are examined: the struggle between proslavery and antislavery forces over the future of slavery in the British Empire; the intensified interest in West Africa and West African geography, including the effort to explore and map the River Niger; and the emergence and institutionalisation of geography as a distinct discourse and field of knowledge. All three are associated with the period from the 1780s to 1830s. The chapter then goes on to provide a biographical sketch of the life of the geographer, plantation manager, Glasgow merchant and proslavery propagandist, James MacQueen (1778-1870), who is the focus of the book. The chapter ends with a summary of each chapter.
Angela Naimou
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823264766
- eISBN:
- 9780823266616
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823264766.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This introduction considers how the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the legal persons it has wrought shapes contemporary literary responses to global capitalism and legal personhood. It ...
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This introduction considers how the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the legal persons it has wrought shapes contemporary literary responses to global capitalism and legal personhood. It examines writings by Saidiya Hartman, Stephen Best, and M. NourbeSe Philip, in which the legal archive of slavery is a site of loss that confounds available narrative modes. Arguing that the legal archive of slavery inheres in present categories of juridical personhood, the introduction reviews such cases as the Zong slave killings, the civil death of convicts, U.S. and Haitian Constitutions, and legal identities caught between citizenship and statelessness. It addresses limitations to both legal liberalism and death-bound theories of personhood, exemplified by Giorgio Agamben’s writing on the biopolitics of bare life and the refugee. It considers how literary responses to exceptional legal personhood evoke wasted or bare life while salvaging the person from its complex and often ruinous legal histories.Less
This introduction considers how the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the legal persons it has wrought shapes contemporary literary responses to global capitalism and legal personhood. It examines writings by Saidiya Hartman, Stephen Best, and M. NourbeSe Philip, in which the legal archive of slavery is a site of loss that confounds available narrative modes. Arguing that the legal archive of slavery inheres in present categories of juridical personhood, the introduction reviews such cases as the Zong slave killings, the civil death of convicts, U.S. and Haitian Constitutions, and legal identities caught between citizenship and statelessness. It addresses limitations to both legal liberalism and death-bound theories of personhood, exemplified by Giorgio Agamben’s writing on the biopolitics of bare life and the refugee. It considers how literary responses to exceptional legal personhood evoke wasted or bare life while salvaging the person from its complex and often ruinous legal histories.
Christine Walker
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781469658797
- eISBN:
- 9781469655284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469658797.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
The introduction uses a single document, the 1713 will of Elizabeth Keyhorne, a widowed free woman of African descent living in Kingston who was both a slaveholder and had children who were still ...
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The introduction uses a single document, the 1713 will of Elizabeth Keyhorne, a widowed free woman of African descent living in Kingston who was both a slaveholder and had children who were still enslaved, to illustrate the book’s key themes. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a remarkably diverse group of free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent helped to make Jamaica the wealthiest and largest slaveholding colony in the British Empire. As slaveholders, female colonists augmented their wealth, status, and legal independence on the island. Yet, many, like Keyhorne, maintained complicated and ambiguous relationships with enslaved people.Less
The introduction uses a single document, the 1713 will of Elizabeth Keyhorne, a widowed free woman of African descent living in Kingston who was both a slaveholder and had children who were still enslaved, to illustrate the book’s key themes. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a remarkably diverse group of free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent helped to make Jamaica the wealthiest and largest slaveholding colony in the British Empire. As slaveholders, female colonists augmented their wealth, status, and legal independence on the island. Yet, many, like Keyhorne, maintained complicated and ambiguous relationships with enslaved people.
Dale Tomich
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628462425
- eISBN:
- 9781626746985
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628462425.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This chapter illustrates how the analysis of Capitalism and Slavery, one of Eric Williams’ contributions to Caribbean and post-colonial historiography and political economy, is an engagement with its ...
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This chapter illustrates how the analysis of Capitalism and Slavery, one of Eric Williams’ contributions to Caribbean and post-colonial historiography and political economy, is an engagement with its critics. It analyzes the historical and textual methodologies used by Williams, noting the unique ways in which he revealed the past through prose. The chapter specifically reevaluates Williams’ arguments about the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, as well as the critiques they received, from the perspective of Atlantic slavery and the world economy. By examining the issue from a more comprehensive analytical perspective, it is possible to more effectively recover Williams’ emphasis on the economic causes of slave emancipation and reformulate the terms of the debate within the broader historical processes of the Atlantic and world economies.Less
This chapter illustrates how the analysis of Capitalism and Slavery, one of Eric Williams’ contributions to Caribbean and post-colonial historiography and political economy, is an engagement with its critics. It analyzes the historical and textual methodologies used by Williams, noting the unique ways in which he revealed the past through prose. The chapter specifically reevaluates Williams’ arguments about the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, as well as the critiques they received, from the perspective of Atlantic slavery and the world economy. By examining the issue from a more comprehensive analytical perspective, it is possible to more effectively recover Williams’ emphasis on the economic causes of slave emancipation and reformulate the terms of the debate within the broader historical processes of the Atlantic and world economies.
Justin E. H. Smith
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691153643
- eISBN:
- 9781400866311
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691153643.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying ...
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People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, this book charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. The book demonstrates how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature's universality and the rise of biological classification. The racial typing of human beings grew from the need to understand humanity within an all-encompassing system of nature, alongside plants, minerals, primates, and other animals. While racial difference as seen through science did not arise in order to justify the enslavement of people, it became a rationalization and buttress for the practices of trans-Atlantic slavery. From the work of François Bernier to G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and others, the book delves into philosophy's part in the legacy and damages of modern racism. With a broad narrative stretching over two centuries, the book takes a critical historical look at how the racial categories that we divide ourselves into came into being.Less
People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, this book charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. The book demonstrates how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature's universality and the rise of biological classification. The racial typing of human beings grew from the need to understand humanity within an all-encompassing system of nature, alongside plants, minerals, primates, and other animals. While racial difference as seen through science did not arise in order to justify the enslavement of people, it became a rationalization and buttress for the practices of trans-Atlantic slavery. From the work of François Bernier to G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and others, the book delves into philosophy's part in the legacy and damages of modern racism. With a broad narrative stretching over two centuries, the book takes a critical historical look at how the racial categories that we divide ourselves into came into being.
Hoang Gia Phan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814738474
- eISBN:
- 9780814738931
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814738474.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This book demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. It illuminates the ...
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This book demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. It illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. The book argues that in the age of emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. It situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts alongside Black Atlantic texts. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution's “slavery clauses,” the book recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. It demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, the book challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.Less
This book demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. It illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. The book argues that in the age of emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. It situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts alongside Black Atlantic texts. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution's “slavery clauses,” the book recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. It demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, the book challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.
Christine Walker
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781469658797
- eISBN:
- 9781469655284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469658797.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
Chapter Two focuses on the urban and seafaring pursuits of a diverse group of women living in early eighteenth-century Kingston. Women of European, Euro-African, and African descent comprised a ...
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Chapter Two focuses on the urban and seafaring pursuits of a diverse group of women living in early eighteenth-century Kingston. Women of European, Euro-African, and African descent comprised a considerable portion of the city’s free population. They worked in a range of occupations. Some were wealthy merchants who participated in privateering ventures while others operated small-scale shops and taverns. The majority of Kingston’s women entrepreneurs were also enslavers. After gaining a monopoly on the slave trade with the Spanish Empire, the South Sea Company made Kingston its base. The city’s female inhabitants readily exploited their access to the burgeoning market in captive Africans. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaveholding was nearly ubiquitous among Kingston’s free and freed women, who treated enslaved people as crucial laborers and as valuable property.Less
Chapter Two focuses on the urban and seafaring pursuits of a diverse group of women living in early eighteenth-century Kingston. Women of European, Euro-African, and African descent comprised a considerable portion of the city’s free population. They worked in a range of occupations. Some were wealthy merchants who participated in privateering ventures while others operated small-scale shops and taverns. The majority of Kingston’s women entrepreneurs were also enslavers. After gaining a monopoly on the slave trade with the Spanish Empire, the South Sea Company made Kingston its base. The city’s female inhabitants readily exploited their access to the burgeoning market in captive Africans. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaveholding was nearly ubiquitous among Kingston’s free and freed women, who treated enslaved people as crucial laborers and as valuable property.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310508
- eISBN:
- 9781846315848
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846310508.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter examines the history of New Orleans as part of the French Atlantic. It explains that New Orleans and Louisiana have been similarly marginalized within French culture and suggests that ...
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This chapter examines the history of New Orleans as part of the French Atlantic. It explains that New Orleans and Louisiana have been similarly marginalized within French culture and suggests that the French Atlantic played a part in the creation of New Orleans rhythm and blues. It discusses the role New Orleans as the pivot or nodal point of the French Atlantic and contends that it was the most distinctly and uniquely marked by Atlantic slavery and its aftermath.Less
This chapter examines the history of New Orleans as part of the French Atlantic. It explains that New Orleans and Louisiana have been similarly marginalized within French culture and suggests that the French Atlantic played a part in the creation of New Orleans rhythm and blues. It discusses the role New Orleans as the pivot or nodal point of the French Atlantic and contends that it was the most distinctly and uniquely marked by Atlantic slavery and its aftermath.
Christopher P. Iannini
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807835562
- eISBN:
- 9781469601922
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807838181_iannini
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, this book connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world—the emergence and growth of the ...
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Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, this book connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world—the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. It argues that these transformations were not only deeply interconnected, but that together they established conditions fundamental to the development of a distinctive literary culture in the early Americas. In fact, eighteenth-century natural history as a literary genre largely took its shape from its practice in the Caribbean, an oft-studied region that was a prime source of wealth for all of Europe and the Americas. The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, the author argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, the author recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.Less
Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, this book connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world—the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. It argues that these transformations were not only deeply interconnected, but that together they established conditions fundamental to the development of a distinctive literary culture in the early Americas. In fact, eighteenth-century natural history as a literary genre largely took its shape from its practice in the Caribbean, an oft-studied region that was a prime source of wealth for all of Europe and the Americas. The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, the author argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, the author recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.
Christine Walker
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781469658797
- eISBN:
- 9781469655284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469658797.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
Chapter One explores the gendered nature of the imperial policies that shaped early English settlement of Jamaica after the island’s seizure from Spain in 1655. Strategists in London and Jamaica ...
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Chapter One explores the gendered nature of the imperial policies that shaped early English settlement of Jamaica after the island’s seizure from Spain in 1655. Strategists in London and Jamaica envisioned women playing important roles in their capacities as wives and mothers on the island. They sought to attract families, not single men, to Jamaica. However, the colony’s entrepreneurial focus and its lax enforcement of sexual behavior thwarted metropolitan plans to establish well-ordered patriarchal households and enforce normative gender roles there. In the 1670s and 1680s, a motley group of wives, widows, indentured servants, and prisoners migrated to the island. These settlers seized on the economic opportunities on offer in Port Royal. Female inhabitants helped to turn Port Royal into the epicenter of licit and illicit trade in the Caribbean. Foreshadowing what was to come, this initial group of women also invested in Atlantic slavery. Soon after they settled on the island, women began acquiring slaves. In doing so, they ensured the participation of future generations of female islanders in slaveholding.Less
Chapter One explores the gendered nature of the imperial policies that shaped early English settlement of Jamaica after the island’s seizure from Spain in 1655. Strategists in London and Jamaica envisioned women playing important roles in their capacities as wives and mothers on the island. They sought to attract families, not single men, to Jamaica. However, the colony’s entrepreneurial focus and its lax enforcement of sexual behavior thwarted metropolitan plans to establish well-ordered patriarchal households and enforce normative gender roles there. In the 1670s and 1680s, a motley group of wives, widows, indentured servants, and prisoners migrated to the island. These settlers seized on the economic opportunities on offer in Port Royal. Female inhabitants helped to turn Port Royal into the epicenter of licit and illicit trade in the Caribbean. Foreshadowing what was to come, this initial group of women also invested in Atlantic slavery. Soon after they settled on the island, women began acquiring slaves. In doing so, they ensured the participation of future generations of female islanders in slaveholding.
