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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2011

CHRISTER PETLEY*
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
*
Humanities (History), University of Southampton, Southhampton SO17 1BJc.petley@soton.ac.uk

Abstract

New approaches to British imperial history and the rise of Atlantic history have had a strong influence on historians specializing in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean during the era of slavery. Caribbean scholars have always stressed the importance of transatlantic and colonial connections, but these new perspectives have encouraged historians to rethink the ways that Caribbean colonies and the imperial metropole shaped one another and to reconsider the place of the Caribbean region within wider Atlantic and global contexts. Attention to transatlantic links has become especially important in new work on abolition and emancipation. Scholars have also focused more of their attention on white colonizing elites, looking in particular at colonial identities and at strategies of control. Meanwhile, recent calls for pan-Caribbean approaches to the history of the region are congruent with pleas for more detailed and nuanced understandings of the development of slave and post-slave societies, focusing on specifically Caribbean themes while setting these in their wider imperial, Atlantic, and global contexts.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 The categorization, ‘British-colonized Caribbean’, strikes me as the most appropriate for those parts of the Caribbean under British rule. It is somewhat unwieldy, however, and I have tended to use British Caribbean as serviceable shorthand.

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69 Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, pp. 208–15; Verene A. Shepherd, ‘ “Petticoat rebellion”? the black woman's body and voice in the struggles for freedom in colonial Jamaica’, in Alvin O. Thompson, ed., In the shadow of the plantation: Caribbean history and legacy (Kingston, 2002), pp. 17–38, at p. 34.

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73 Diana Paton's observation that the fact that all people living in Jamaica were creoles ‘does not mean that all Jamaicans shared a culture’ seems appropriate to this case-study. Paton, Diana, No bond but the law: punishment, race, and gender in Jamaican state formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, NC, and London, 2004), pp. 189–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Trevor Burnard, ‘Thomas Thistlewood becomes a creole’, in Bruce Clayton and John A. Salmond, eds., Varieties of Southern history: new essays on a region and its people (Westport, CT, 1996), pp. 99–118. In some respects, these analyses bear common features with the idea of the West Indies as ‘plural society’, divided along racial lines, a model that Brathwaite criticized. See Smith, M. G., The plural society in the British West Indies (Berkeley, CA, 1965)Google Scholar; Brathwaite, The development of creole society, p. 310.

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77 Paton, No bond but the law, quote at p. 5. For examples of other recent studies that seek to explore continuities between slavery and freedom, see Sheller, Mimi, Democracy after slavery: black publics and peasant radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, FL, 2000)Google Scholar; Eudell, Demitrius, The political languages of emancipation in the British Caribbean and the US South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002)Google Scholar; Hall, Civilising subjects; Newton, Melanie, The children of Africa in the colonies: free people of color in Barbados in the age of emancipation (Baton Rouge, LA, 2008)Google Scholar.

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87 For example, Mimi Sheller has explored ‘subaltern masculinities’ and gendered power dynamics within communities of former slaves, concluding that ‘freedmen in Jamaica strategically articulated their rights of citizenship in relation not only to white men, but also to other subaltern groups such as black women and indentured foreigners’. Mimi Sheller, ‘Acting as free men: subaltern masculinities and citizenship in postslavery Jamaica’, in Scully and Paton, eds., Gender and slave emancipation, pp. 79–98, quote at p. 80. See also Diana Paton, ‘The flight from the fields reconsidered: gender ideologies and women's labor after slavery in Jamaica’, in Gilbert M. Joseph, ed., Reclaiming the political in Latin American history: essays from the north (Durham, NC, 2001), pp. 175–204.

88 Newton, The children of Africa in the colonies, quotes at pp. 9–10.

89 Trevor Burnard, ‘ “The grand mart of the island”: the economic function of Kingston, Jamaica in the eighteenth century’, in Monteith and Richards, eds., Jamaica in slavery and freedom, pp. 225–41; Burnard and Morgan, ‘Dynamics of the slave market’.

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92 Knight, The Caribbean; Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean transformations (Chicago, IL, 1974); Mintz, Three ancient colonies. For some examples of edited collections and work on the Haitian Revolution, see Gaspar, David Barry and Geggus, David Patrick, eds., A turbulent time: the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN, 1997)Google Scholar; Heuman, Gad and Trotman, David V., eds., Contesting freedom: control and resistance in the post-emancipation Caribbean (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Fischer, Sibylle, Modernity disavowed: Haiti and the cultures of slavery in the age of revolution (Durham, NC, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scott, ‘ “Negroes in foreign bottoms”’.

93 Juan Giusti-Cordero, ‘Beyond sugar revolutions: rethinking the Spanish Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in George Baca, Aisha Khan, and Stephen Palmié, eds., Empirical futures: anthropologists and historians engage the work of Sidney W. Mintz (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), pp. 58–83, at p. 70.

94 Sheller, Mimi, Consuming the Caribbean: from Arawaks to zombies (London and New York, NY, 2003), pp. 12Google Scholar.

95 The term ‘ghost acres’ is used by Pomeranz in The great divergence, pp. 275–6.

96 Scott, ‘Modernity that predated the modern’, p. 202.

97 Brown, Reaper's garden, p. 9.