Search

The establishment in the1830s of the Indian indentured labour system as a cheap labour source for British sugar plantations provoked criticism from parliamentarians, missionaries and labour advocates who considered indenture the reintroduction of slavery by another name. Like slavery, the indenture system bonded into labour non-white, poor and unfree workers, already subordinated within the British empire. Like slavery, the Indian indentured labour system was structurally disabling. The development of colonial racial typologies of the ideal labourer embedded race into notions of the able bodied worker. While being of a preferred racial type was a condition of fitness to work it also exposed labourers to the disabling circumstances of being unfree labour on sugar plantations. Indenture practised in Fiji from 1879 to 1917 reflects the disabling effects of racial and economic subordination even in the late indenture period when labour conditions had improved. The development of systematic government measures to select workers as fit for the regulation of plantation labour and the disabling impacts of injury, illness, sexual and mental trauma experienced on the plantation, qualify the notion that modern western ideas of disability emerge primarily from urban industrializing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the construction of London's West India Docks in 1802, I argue that this project established a feedback loop with conditions of production in the Caribbean. Through an analysis of committee minutes, letters, parliamentary papers and visual art, I move beyond economic accounts of slavery's impact to demonstrate how geographies of security and surveillance—first developed on the sugar plantation—were imported into the design and function of London's port. As such, I argue that London's docks produced a geography of segregation which offers a unique insight into the workings of racial capitalism and its exploitation of group‐differentiated vulnerabilities. Positioning my discussion alongside London's contemporary landscape, I excavate Britain's repressed memories of slavery to illustrate how they still scar the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates Morocco's invasion of the West African Songhai Empire in 1591 within the global histories of race, slavery, and capitalism. Morocco's invasion, which took place during the height of the Sàdi dynasty (1554–1659), provided Morocco with an influx of capital through Black West African slave labour on Morocco's sugar plantations and its newfound control over the lucrative gold and salt mines of West Africa. Such wealth and power bolstered Morocco's regional and global position in the vital node where Africa, Europe, the Mediterranean, and Atlantic all converge. This paper will address the following questions: how did Morocco's shift from enslaving non-Muslims to enslaving Muslim West Africans from the Songhai based on their race lay down the foundations for centuries of anti-Black violence in North Africa? (2) how did Black slave labour from the Songhai allow Morocco to become England's primary source of sugar imports prior to the rise of sugar plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean? (3) how can we move beyond normative taxonomies that view North and West Africa as separate spaces instead of as regions whose conditions were shaped by one another? Ultimately, my paper will demonstrate how the Sàdi dynasty was an active player in the rise of racialized forms of slavery that eventually dominated the Atlantic for centuries and whose afterlives continue to endure on both sides of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on German participation in the transatlantic slave trade existed, can meanwhile no more than in a larger one measure controversial apply and role of German merchants in slave trade of the colonial powers. It mentions Central European sugar processing and general trade in colonial goods in the 18th and 19th centuries to a very considerable extent enslavement-based plantation economy. It also mentions large part of the voyages.

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Confluenze. Rivista di Studi Iberoamericani is the property of Universita di Bologna, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As more sources have been made available by the Legacies of British Slavery project, it is clear that ties between Atlantic world slavery and Queensland's sugar industry are considerably more extensive than previously understood. This article goes beyond looking at money and men to explore what this means for understandings of race, slavery and indenture on Australia's sugar plantations. It argues that slavery was understood in specific ways by West Indians after emancipation, and that race was increasingly used to bolster white supremacy, both of which adversely affected Pacific Islanders in Queensland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies how the governance of a colonial value-chain impacted upon the value-added created. The article focuses on the value-chain of colonial sugar produced in the slave plantation complex in the Americas. Previous research has suggested that British planters in the Caribbean were able to reap high profits because of a protected market for sugar in Britain. In this paper, it is argued that it was mainly British refiners that were able to profit from these protectionist policies. Wholesale prices of muscovado sugar are shown to have been more or less on a par with those prevalent under free-market conditions, whereas the price of refined sugar was considerably higher in Britain than it presumably would have been in a free-market. Limited competition and active collusion between refiners seem to have increased the mark-up on the refined sugar relative to the price of muscovado in Britain. Focusing only on the profitability on certain links in value-chains associated with the slave plantation complex in the Americas (most importantly the slave trade) might detract attention from how the governance structure of the value-chains allowed profits to be reaped elsewhere in the same value-chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparativ: Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und Vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung is the property of Leipziger Universitaetsverlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on Susannah Mingo was an enslaved woman of color. In the 1670s and 1680s, she labored on a Barbados sugar plantation before being taken to an English estate on the outskirts of London in 1686. It mentions her biography challenges scholarly assumptions about enslaved women's sexual coercion, the role of planter patriarchy in the English world, and early modern metropolitan life. It also mentions how enslaved people understood the racial slavery.

In the 1970s, a group of young historians took up the challenge of (re) writing historical narratives about Puerto Rico's 19th century. Most of the narratives focused on the economic and social history of the island's integration into the world economy via the export trades in sugar, coffee, and tobacco. No one was more influential than Andrés A. Ramos Mattei in breaking new ground on these historical topics. I contributed a study on the sugar plantation economy of the Ponce region--the island's largest-- during the first half of the century, a period when production fell largely in the hands of enslaved workers from Africa. The essay revisits the Sugar and Slavery book with the intention of placing it in a larger historiographical context, i.e., writings on the slave-holding Puerto Rican economy and society before and since the book's publication. It concludes that while it raised some significant points, there were also meaningful gaps and silences. I consider three of these (silence on gender and its intersectionalities, missed opportunities on the study of proto-peasantry, and little attention to culture-building) for further conceptualization, calling on future historians of Puerto Rico to take these up in new and more integral investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Caribbean frontier was dominated by agro-industrial sugar production. Localized adaptations of European designs for colonization in the Caribbean generated unique plantation landscapes. Before 1650, efforts throughout the region to create wealth from plantations did not achieve the scale of production that unfolded in the latter half of the 17th century as capitalism emerged. While tobacco farms briefly reaped rich rewards, for an adventurous and entrepreneurial few the prosperity of the colonies was ultimately sustained through a combination an increasing and seemingly unlimited demand for sugar, protectionist economic policies from the core state, and institutionalized slavery. A case study of agro-industrialism on the Bush Hill sugar estate on Nevis during the period of capitalism's ascendancy provides insights on the incremental integration of capitalism into the plantation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In southern Louisiana's Mississippi basin, the parishes upriver from New Orleans are home to multiple restored sugar plantations and museums focused on the history of plantation slavery and the culture of the region. This interview-essay is based on interviews conducted individually with slave plantation site and museum operators, artists, academics, and those between and beyond these categories. The interviews are presented as a staged dialogue on the dynamics of violence, commerce, identity, and agency that construct plantation slavery tourism in Louisiana in conflicting ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nesta nota de pesquisa apresentamos questões teóricas e metodológicas sobre uma investigação em arqueologia histórica iniciada recentemente, que visa analisar o cotidiano da escravidão, regimes demográficos, práticas culturais etc. Um levantamento de sítios arqueológicos em antigas senzalas e fazendas escravistas do Vale do Paraíba e norte fluminense está sendo realizado. Com a cooperação de historiadores, arqueólogos e antropólogos, registros da cultura material de populações escravas de origem indígena e depois africana estão sendo localizados nas escavações iniciadas na fazenda jesuítica do Colégio em Campos dos Goytacazes (RJ), administrada por religiosos e depois leigos nos séculos XVII, XVIII e XIX.These preliminary research notes present theoretical and methodological questions regarding a recently inaugurated investigation in historical archeology that intends to analyze daily life under slavery, demographic regimes, cultural practices, and so on. A survey of archeological sites on former 'senzalas' (slave quarters) and slave-owning fazendas in the Paraíba Valley and northern part of the state of Rio de Janeiro is currently in progress. With the cooperation of historians, archeologists, and anthropologists, records of the material culture of slave populations, which originally comprised indigenes and later Africans, are being located at excavations underway on the fazenda that is part of the Jesuit school in Campos dos Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro, first run by the clergy and later by members of the laity in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

This article analyzes the temporal and spatial regimes on early modern Caribbean sugar plantations by examining ways in which slaves spent their leisure hours. Drawing from travel narratives, letters, and historical works, it discusses how slaves engaged in activities of their choice, most of which took place at night and were shaped by conditions peculiar to night time. In discussing slaves' activities during their free time, this study argues that night time on Caribbean plantations created a particular kind of space. First, it created physical spaces that were profoundly different at night than they were by day, which to some extent levelled many of the daytime hierarchies inherent in slave work regimes. Second, time and place on Caribbean plantations merged to create entangled spaces in which the new global order dominated by the Atlantic economy, cultural expressions of that order, and the individual lives of slaves were all present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article examines wealth inequalities and social hierarchies that appeared among slave communities on sugar plantations in the British Caribbean. These inequalities in status and in material conditions among the enslaved were the product of the privileges that planters granted elite slaves, the collective survival strategies of smaller family groups and the energy demands of different working roles. Elite creole families emerged on sugar plantations and these slaves lived more privileged lives than the rest. African-born slaves and women were particularly disadvantaged. Inequalities in status and material conditions could create oppressive and discordant community dynamics within the slave community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Listy Cukrovarnicke a Reparske is the property of VUC Praha a.s. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Lead was ubiquitous on Caribbean sugar plantations, where it was used extensively in the production of sugar and rum. Previous studies suggest that skeletal lead contents can be used to identify African-born individuals (as opposed to Creoles) among slave burials found in the New World. To test this hypothesis, we measured lead concentrations in enamel samples from 26 individuals from the Newton Plantation cemetery in Barbados, which was in use from around 1660 to 1820, and compared the results with enamel 87Sr/86Sr measurements that had been previously obtained for the same population. Results show a clear association between low (i.e., below 1 ppm) enamel lead concentrations and higher enamel 87Sr/86Sr ratios which have previously been interpreted as being indicative of African birth, suggesting that individuals with low enamel lead levels were indeed born in Africa as opposed to the New World. Based on these results, we propose that enamel lead measurements provide an effective and inexpensive way to determine African birth from skeletal remains. Furthermore, the lead measurements can provide useful insights into the health status and childhood environment of enslaved Africans during the colonial period. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the scholarly literature on labour relations in the transition from slavery to freedom in Jamaica. Based on the plantation papers of the Goulburn family, who owned Amity Hall sugar estate in Vere parish, it traces the contested negotiations between apprentices and free blacks on the one hand and the absentee owner and his manager on the other in a period of two transitions, from slavery to apprenticeship in 1834 and from apprenticeship to a restricted freedom in 1838. This enables one to document the variety of ways in which this crucial period affected the conditions, hours and remuneration for work. Though Amity Hall had a less fractious transition out of slavery than some other Jamaican plantations, the article reveals the difficulties faced by planters in overcoming labour shortages, the bargaining power of Jamaicans at crop time, and the contests over wages, rents and provision grounds that shaped labour relations after 1838. By 1840, the owner and manager and the workers at Amity Hall had not bridged the clear division in their expectations and interests since the Emancipation Bill came into effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Barbadian sugar industry was interpreted by the English scientific community in the latter seventeenth century. In particular it focuses upon the spread of ingenios (sugar mills) to Barbados from Brazil, and how this process was understood and chronicled by England’s early scientific community of experimental philosophers. It then contrasts these narratives against archived plantation documents from this period, demonstrating how these writers, despite explicit claims to the contrary, were relatively unconcerned with creating an objective account of sugar-making. Rather, they highlighted specific elements of the industry in order to make the ‘invention’ of sugar appear congruent with their new experimental methodology. These scientific narratives thus ignore a host of factors within the early Barbadian industry, particularly the critical sugar-making knowledge embodied within the plantation’s servile workforce. Rather than illuminating this facet of the industry, experimental philosophers efface these workers and portray ingenios as the laudable product of a few ingenious, experimenting white planters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is presented about several papers discussed at a conference entitled "Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development," held April 4-9, 2011 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Topics discussed include slavery and economic development in New England, the slave trade and commercial shipping in the U.S., and economic ties between American colleges and Caribbean sugar plantations.

The article discusses the history of philosophy in the Caribbean. Particular focus is given to the philosophies of the peoples who lived and worked on sugar cane plantations, also called the canepiece. These include the Taíno people, enslaved Africans, indentured Indian and Chinese workers, and their descendants. Details related to Taíno ontology, the roles of slavery and liberty in Afro-Caribbean philosophy, and the role of labor in Indo-Caribbean philosophy are presented. Other topics include genocide, social harmony, and the relationship between the Enlightenment and colonialism.

On June 23 1855, Nicolas Tanco Armero (1830-1890) disembarked in Hong Kong after a voyage that took him through America, Europe, Africa and Asia. His departure point was Cuba, where he lived as an exile from his homeland, Colombia. His travelogue, Viaje de Nueva Granada a China y de China a Francia (1861), narrates his journey and three-year sojourn in China. Tanco Armero had been hired by the Cuban saccharocracy to work as a coolie trade agent in Amoy, a business which provided significant economic profit for the 25-year old entrepreneur. While he fervently critiques the institution of slavery in Cuba, he is a great admirer of the sugar plantations on which the Cuban economy thrived and which depended on the labour of the African slaves. This article is concerned with notions of racial and national identity negotiated by this white Creole male as they relate to the evident contradictions in his travelogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the late 1820s, Puerto Rico and Cuba had become Spain's only remaining colonies in the Americas and its major source of colonial returns. A decade later, however, the slave-based plantation system in Puerto Rico was beginning to show signs of stagnation due to the convergence of a number of domestic and international forces. In the late 1840s the Iberian colonial bureaucracy initiated a series of proposals to stimulate Puerto Rico's transformation into an agriculturally modern, diversified, free-labour economy. This initiative failed due to an adverse economic environment, administrative confusion and rivalries, and the failure of officials on the island to enlist the support either of local planters or those at the lower levels of society. This paper explores the reasons for this failure in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on the slave population of Campos dos Goitacazes during the sugar boom of the captaincy (later the province) of Rio de Janeiro. The author analyzes the effect the huge proportion of Africans in local slave population had on the marriage alliances established inside the slave groups. Topics on ethnicity, arranged marriages, demography, are discussed. Statistical charts are included.

From the 17th century, Glasgow grew from a local market centre to a merchant city. Much of the wealth of its leading merchants came from Atlantic trade. Before the city's celebrated connections with Virginia, great success was achieved from trade with the Caribbean. In the late 17th century, Glasgow had more than a hundred merchants, part of a ‘Great Company’ trading with the Americas, including the Caribbean islands.1 This was a two-way process, and various Glasgow pioneers operated at the colonial end. This article explores the hitherto hidden background of two of the city's earliest and most successful Caribbean merchants. This is achieved by an investigation of the upstanding archaeology on their sugar plantations on the Leeward Island of St Kitts (St Christopher). It will suggest that to put Glasgow's development in proper context, we must consider this neglected part of its history and archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Historia is the property of Universidad de Costa Rica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The plantation model in colonial Antigua was closely tied to the development of planter identity. The plantation system relied on slave labor across the board and by 1670 it was firmly established as the primary economic structure. Planters were the elite class on the island and controlled a majority of the political offices across the colony. In this way, they mirrored themselves upon English society, glorifying the role of mastering and cultivating the countryside as the pinnacle of noble status. The plantation model, however, differed significantly from the English model of tenants working the land for their lords. As much as planters sought to project themselves as honorable landlords, by the 1780s there was a growing disconnect between what planters said and what British writers heard or saw. Planters were slaveowners as well as landowners, and the evils of plantation slavery became a common pan-British conversation. The Antiguan response to the abolition movement reveals how their social and political framework on the island was inherently tied to their economic reliance on the sugar plantation system and the use of slave labor. It also demonstrates how they compared to the British metropole in their self-definition of landed gentility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the political ecology of water resources and the aspects of enslavement. Topics discussed include the impact of sugar estate in the Caribbean on the water sources, the scarcity of water in the colonialism era, and the factors which led to African slave trade. Also mentions the various facets of the materiality of water ways which shapes the human experiences.