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Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of 'abolition' and 'emancipation' and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students' meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more profound, analytic focus. He explains why a change--continuity angle emerged as more meaningful and sets out why and how he situated the events in a longer-time scale and much broader historical context.

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The article revisits one of the most significant questions in the historiography of British West Indian slavery and abolition. It examines the argument that the relatively weak state of the British West Indian economy from the 1780s onward was the main reason why Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. In confronting this question of decline, the article analyzes the largest and most important slave plantation economy – Jamaica – during the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using newly generated indicators such as total factor productivity and national income, the paper constructs a case for the dynamism and efficiency of the plantation system in Jamaica right up to abolition in 1807. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Customarily, studies of urbanization in early British America have concentrated on its northern mainland seaports. This article moves beyond a thirteen colonies perspective to define and explore a Greater Caribbean urban world, with Charleston, South Carolina, at its most northerly point. In particular, the authors’ comparison of the internal dynamic of Charleston and Kingston, Jamaica, reveals an urban world that was no more dominated by the demands of the plantation sector than the northern seaports were beholden to their agricultural interiors. Significantly, however, these rich internal urban economies relied on, and were profoundly shaped by, the institution of slavery. In light of these findings, the authors thus characterize this Greater Caribbean urban zone as constituting one strand of urbanization in a larger British Atlantic world that experienced an overall expansion and diversification of the urban form across the early modern period. Most specifically, Charleston and Kingston achieved a growth rate and an economic complexity comparable to other English-speaking towns through their embrace of enslaved people and their labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the Seven Years' War, Jamaican planters were in an extremely strong position within the British Empire. Immensely wealthy, geopolitically important and constitutionally assertive, Jamaican planters used their strong position to win a series of political battles against colonial governors in the 1750s and 1760s. In doing so, they justified their self-asserted claims to being entitled to British rights and privileges. Nevertheless, contemporaneous developments in metropolitan thinking about empire and white people's place in empire undermined planters' fond estimation of their position within empire. British thinkers came to see British West Indians, especially during and after the American Revolution, not as fellow citizens but as imperial subjects. The result was a cultural and ideological crisis for Jamaican planters as abolitionism emerged as a powerful political force, in which their insistence that they were British and entitled to the rights and privileges of Britons was not accepted. Thus, white Jamaicans became the first in a long line of settler peoples of British descent to have their claims to Britishness denied by metropolitan opinion. This article thus contributes to a developing discussion about settler constitutional rights within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focussing on the early nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which white slaveholders in Jamaica developed a distinctive local ideology based on the institution of slavery. Whites were in a minority in Jamaican slave society, slaveholding was widespread amongst white settlers, and all white men experienced privileges in a society organised around racialised boundaries of rule. These factors helped to ensure that Jamaican colonists developed a distinctively local, or creole, world view characterised by the defence of slavery and a culture of white male solidarity. However, local slaveholders maintained close links with Britain and were militarily dependent on the metropole. Metropolitan culture influenced their ideology, and Jamaican slaveholders saw themselves as loyal subjects of the British Crown. They were therefore colonial creoles and, in spite of the rise of abolitionism in the metropole, they maintained that their local practices were reconcilable with their status as transplanted Britons. By the 1830s changed circumstances in Britain and Jamaica forced slaveholders to reach a compromise with the British Government and to accept the abolition of slavery, but in spite of the important changes that this entailed, the main features of their creole world view persisted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article assesses the book "Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867," by Catherine Hall from the perspectives of a historian. He says that the book offers a rich insight into the ideas and mores of mid nineteenth-century provincial English midlands society and how those beliefs were translated as practice to Jamaica, a slave economy that then moved through apprenticeship to new forms of racial paternalism. In the book, the reader is introduced to Christian, notably Baptist, views of Jamaica, ideas about and notions of slavery, race, class, color, culture, colonialism, and empire.

The article comments on study about the British slave trade to Jamaica. There have been significant developments in the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade. Scholars such as Philip D. Curtin, J.E. Inikori, and Roger Anstey have improved our understanding of the volume and character of the trade, and have stimulated further inquiry into the topic as a consequence of the variance in their findings. Another contribution to this investigation is Herbert Klein's "The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade," in which he continues to develop the important comparative perspective of slave-trade scholarship. This is a work of great scope, and despite Klein's impressive scholarship, lacunae in the data remain. However, in the case of the Jamaican slave trade it is possible to fill some of the gaps. In both value and volume, the slave trade to Jamaica reached its peak between 1783 and 1808. Within this period, the years from 1789 to 1801 witnessed the largest volume of imports. It is here, however, that several lacunae are apparent in Klein's study.

This article evaluates the British legislative resolution for Negro education grant, sanctioned by the British House of Commons for the period between 1835-1845, and its application in the case of present-day Jamaica. The fifth resolution introducing the debate on the abolition of slavery in the House of Commons on May 14, 1833, was that the Supreme Power be enabled to defray any such expense as may incur in establishing an efficient stipendiary magistracy in the colonies and in aiding the local legislatures in providing for the religious and moral education of the Negro population to be emancipated. Expenditure on English education, however, was calculated to maintain an old established social framework, on the argument of well-worn religious precepts, which might be threatened by new conditions of living. The first distribution of the Negro Education Grant was delayed until 1835, and it ended in 1845. The ten year subsidy was intended by the British Government to provide nothing short of a popular system of education in the colonial territories. The applicability of that grant in Jamaican society is contradicted here.