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The rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas fostered environments where bondspeople and commoners in West Africa and the British Caribbean had more in common with each other than the slave-owning elites. An emergent class consciousness and similar concepts of freedom intersected with the evolving landscape of power and oppression, opportunity, and restriction in West Africa and the West Indies to inform how enslaved peoples navigated bondage in the British Caribbean from the late eighteenth century to abolition in 1838. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon Wayne Modest’s work on the representation of Caribbean and enslaved people in the British Museum, this article examines the representation of Caribbean plantations in several British establishments, the Museum of London Docklands, the National Maritime Museum, the Mshed Museum, the Georgian House, and the International Slavery Museum. Drawing on Black feminist works on race, geography and identity, I argue that these museums create a homogenised vision of the Caribbean, which results in a homogenised depiction of enslaved peoples. Specifically, resistance to slavery is presented as a largely masculine endeavour and taking place only in terms of military conflict. Indeed, representations of enslaved women are largely absent in many of these museums. Only the International Slavery Museum achieves a complex rendering of the Caribbean by pushing against the limitations of abolitionist produced representations of the Caribbean and incorporating models and a multifaceted range of testimonies, including that of enslaved women.

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Beginning in the 1780s, British Caribbean plantocracies faced the looming threat of slave trade abolition which would end the flow of enslaved labour fundamental to colonial plantation economies. Enslaved women’s function as the source of blackness and legal slave status made their wombs essential to a future without readily available slave imports. The general narrative centring the intensifying colonial domination of enslaved women’s wombs highlight abolitionists and slave owner’s deployment of slave women’s reproductive labour in a slave-breeding program that would produce a self-sustaining source of labour. This narrative neglects the agency enslaved women exerted in exacting control over their sexuality, marriage status, pregnancies, childbirth experience, and child-rearing process that jeopardised the institution of slavery in “gynecological revolt.” This essay privileges the feminized, unarmed, sexual, bodily defiance of enslaved women within the greater, often masculinized Caribbean slavery scholarship to argue that the womb was a site of intensifying colonial domination in the Age of Abolition but more significantly a site of women’s revolutionary struggle against slavery.

By January 1804, Saint-Domingue—the ‘pearl of the Antilles’—had been lost to colonial France and the independence of the newly-named ‘Haiti’ had been declared. This paper argues that where the majority of contemporary observers framed the Haitian Revolution in discussions of slavery, others emphasised the perceived failures of the French as evidence that the New World represented a geo-political space in which traditional forms of governance demanded re-evaluation. This paper focuses on the work of two writers who witnessed the Revolution first-hand and who argue that the biggest mistake France made was appointing leaders who were ill suited to the unique demands of the New World. For these two authors, the perceived mishandling of the Revolution by the French drastically called into question what constituted effective and legitimate governance in the Americas and served to provide pertinent lessons for leadership in Britain’s colonies and the early American republic.

We know relatively little about enslaved men, especially African-born men in British West Indian slave societies, in their roles as fathers and husbands within slave households. A generation of scholarship on gender in slave societies has tended to neglect enslaved men, thus allowing old understandings of enslaved men as not very involved with families drawn from biased planter sources to continue to shape scholarship. This article instead draws on a rich set of records (both quantitative and qualitative) from Berbice in British Guiana between 1819 and 1834 to explore enslaved men’s roles within informal marriages and as husbands and parents. We show not only that enslaved men were active participants in shaping family life within British West Indian slave societies but that they were aided and abetted in achieving some of their familial objectives by a sympathetic plantation regime in which white men favored enslaved men within enslaved households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book forum focuses on Trevor Burnard's book, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015). In his book, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic. While plantations required racial divisions to exist, their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Ranging over nearly two centuries, from Guyana to the Chesapeake, the book provides many new insights and offers a revisionary interpretation of the connection between slavery and the American Revolution. The three reviewers in general praise the empirical research that underpins the book but challenge some of the conclusions. They also draw attention to a few points that, in their opinion, the author underem­phasized or where he could have expanded his argument, for instance the role of support from the British Empire to the plantation system and the role of religion in shaping attitudes to slavery and the plantation system. In his response, Burnard argues against some of the criticism, such as the impact of the fear of slave revolts. In particu­lar, Burnard stresses that his understanding of slavery in the colonial period of American history is that of an outsider to American politics. As such, he argues, his book does not speak to contemporary concerns about rising evidence of racial hatred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the laws devised by the imperial government to dismantle the slave labor system in the period 1823-38 in order to locate the moment of articulation between chattel and wage slavery. According to the author, the distinguishing feature of these new laws was that the workers lost the right to labor bargaining. Abolition brought free status and civil rights, but the new labor system was not less rigorous.

Analysis of a century of (evolutionary) socio-economic transition in the British Caribbean. According to the author, this process demonstrated aspects of a continuum, rather than sharply marked phases and abrupt changes. Before the abolition of slavery slaves behaved as proto-peasants and proto-proletarians and many aspects of slavery survived the abolition.

This paper examines the ambiguous place of medical assistants--dispensers--in a post-slavery British Caribbean colony, British Guiana, from the end of slavery in the 1830s to the early twentieth century. Although the latter were crucial to the functioning of the colonial medical system, local physicians resented them, complaining about the economic threat they posed and at times condemning them as quacks. These attacks were part of a wider discussion about the composition of the medical profession and the role of medical auxiliaries in colonial society, and to an extent, they echoed debates conducted in other jurisdictions in this period. But in the British Caribbean, this discussion was significantly different. There, long-standing views about obeah--an Afro- Creole medico-religious practice--as a particularly dangerous and uncivilised type of quackery was part of the discursive context. That those participating in this debate included African-descended physicians whose arrival in the medical profession was recent and contested demonstrates the vexed and complex nature of professionalisation in a post-slavery society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]