21nov

Slave Emancipation in the British Empire: For 21 November

Click here to go down to info for 28 November

You should come to the seminar ready to work through the Monthly Returns of Complaints before Special Justices William Ramsay and Edward Fishbourne (from Jamaica): PP 1837 (521) LIII, pp. 290-305.

To do this effectively in the time available, you will all need to have read through and thought about all the cases.

Before you start, allocate one or two people to be minute-takers for the session. They will be responsible for submitting a report on the session’s conclusions to me. (By e-mail or on paper.) The report should also include the names of everyone in attendance.

Work out the answers to the following quantitative questions (give figures in answer to each question except the last--you will need to make a table to do this):

Who brings more of the cases, apprentices or planters?
Which group is more likely to have cases they bring resolved in their favour?
Are male or female apprentices more likely to be involved in these cases?
What types of punishments are used, a) for apprentices and b) for planters/ ex-slaveowners?
Are there noticeable differences in the decisions of Ramsay and Fishbourne?

You may want to divide the cases up and work in groups to work out the preliminaries, then get together to combine your results.

Having analyzed the material, discuss the following questions/issues:

Were any of the cases hard to categorize in terms of who won? If so, why? How did you make the decision?
What do the results tell us about how apprenticeship worked?
What light do the results shed on the conflicts (discussed at the November 14 seminar) between planters and the British Government, and between planters and apprentices?
Pick one or more cases that are particularly interesting, and discuss what is interesting about it/them.

For 28th November

We will discuss the primary document on Jamaica that we didn’t get to on the 14th.

We will have two presentations, from James and Kate on the questions listed for 21 November, and from Melissa and Polly on the question listed for 28 November.

Polly and Melissa will be responsible for presenting a summary of the contents of the Antiguan laws in the reading material (pages 136-144, my handwritten numbers).

Everyone should have read

The extract from the Colthurst Journal, distributed in seminar on Nov 14.
The extract from Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837.
The Parliamentary Papers relating to Antigua, pp 133-155, (my handwritten numbers).

NB: John Colthurst was a special magistrate in Barbados; most of his journal was published in The Liberator, a US-based abolitionist newspaper.
You are responsible for knowing who Sturge and Harvey were. Information about them is in lots of the assigned reading—use the indexes!

Please also be ready to discuss the difference in perspective between Burn and later writers, and whether the differences you detect result from different evidence, or different analytic perspectives or sympathies.

You should also bring to the seminar on the 28th your essay title, brief outline, and bibliography.
One or two pages is sufficient.