Discussion Topics and Reading List: Semester One
Note: These reading lists are cumulative. Although I have placed material under the most appropriate week, you will often find useful material under reading lists for earlier weeks. These lists are also NOT EXHAUSTIVE: you are expected also to use the library to find additional material.
Primary sources marked * are not included in the packet; they will either be distributed in class or you I will tell you how to get hold of them.
Go straight to: September 26 October 3
10 17 24
31 November 14
21 28 December
5
Primary Source:
*Mathew Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, kept during a residence in the Island of Jamaica (1999), 117-119 and 125-127, distributed and discussed in class.
3 October: Slave Societies in the 1820s
Seminar Question: What were the basic differences in geography, history, and demography among Britain’s slave colonies by the 1820s? What are the likely implications of these differences for the process of emancipation?
This question will be addressed collectively, through compiling students’ research on as many colonies as possible.
Primary Source:
General Antigua and
Barbuda Bahamas BarbadosBelize
(British Honduras) British Guiana
Cape Colony JamaicaMauritiusTrinidad
and Tobago Windward Islands
James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London: Fontana Press, 1993).
Walvin, James. Slaves and slavery : the British colonial experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.
J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750-1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838 (London: James Currey, 1990).
Morrissey, Marietta. Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989.
Mullin, Michael. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Rubin, Vera, and Arthur Tudin, eds. Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies. New York: Academy of Sciences, 1977.
Mary Turner, ed. From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas (London: James Currey, 1995), Introduction and section 1.
Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, ed., Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World 1999.
David Barry Gaspar, "Slavery, Amelioration, and Sunday Markets in Antigua, 1823-1831," Slavery and Abolition 9, no. 1 (1988), pp. 1-28.
David Barry Gaspar, "Sugar Cultivation and Slave Life in Antigua before 1800" in Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan (eds), Cultivation and Culture: Labour and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas.
David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (1993).
Lazarus-Black, Mindie. Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994,
Howard Johnson, "The Emergence of a Peasantry in the Bahamas during
Slavery," Slavery and Abolition 10, no. 2 (1989), pp. 172-186.
Jerome Handler, Plantation Slavery in Barbados: An Archeological and Historical Investigation (1978).
Robert C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1838 (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994)
Nigel Worden and Clifton C. Crais, Breaking the chains : slavery and its legacy in 19th century South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994)
Clifton C. Crais, "Slavery and Freedom along a Frontier: the Eastern Cape, South Africa 1770-1838," Slavery and Abolition 11, no. 2 (1990), pp. 190-215
Elizabeth A. Eldredge and Fred Morton, Slavery in South Africa : captive labor on the Dutch frontier (Boulder, Colo: Westview, 1994)
Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997), chs. 1 and 2.
Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967)
Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)
Mary Turner, "Slave Workers, Subsistence and Labour Bargaining: Amity Hall, Jamaica, 1805-1832," Slavery and Abolition 12, no. 1 (1991), pp. 92-105
Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).
Richard S. Dunn, "Sugar Production and Slave Women in Jamaica" in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993).
Richard Allen, "Economic Marginality and the Rise of the Free Population of Colour in Mauritius, 1767-1830," Slavery and Abolition 10, no. 2 (1989), pp. 126-150
Richard Blair Allen, Slaves, freedmen, and indentured laborers in colonial Mauritius, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Richard B. Allen, "Marronage and the Maintenance of Public Order in
Mauritius, 1721-1835," Slavery & Abolition 4, no. 3 (1993),
pp. 214-31
Eric Williams, A History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. 1964.
Seminar Question: Was anti-slavery a consequence of the rise of capitalism?
Primary:
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, (Book III ch 2, book IV, ch 7 parts 1 and 2)
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975, esp. ch. 10.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. London: Andre Deutsch, 1967 (1944), esp. ch. 7-10.
Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.
Drescher, Seymour. "The Decline Thesis of British Slavery since Econocide." Slavery and Abolition 7, no. 1 (1986): 3-24.
Midgley, Clare. "Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture." Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (1996): 137-162.
Stanley L. Engerman and David Eltis, "Economic aspects of the Abolition Debate." In Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, ed. Christine Bolt, and Seymour Drescher. Folkestone, Kent: Dawson Archon, 1980.
Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain. London: Routledge, 1994, esp. chs 3 and 6.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
(The following works are not on the paper reading list).
Engerman, Stanley. "Slavery and Emancipation in Comparative Perspective: A Look at Some Recent Debates" Journal of Economic History 46, 2 (1986): 317-339. Available online at JSTOR. (This link may not work if you are not on campus.)
Temperley, Howard. "Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology." Past and Present 75 (1977): 44-118.
Drescher, Seymour. Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective. London: Macmillan, 1986.
Drescher, Seymour. "British Way, French Way: Opinion Building and Revolution in the Second French Slave Emancipation" American Historical Review 96, 3 (1991): 709-734. Available online at JSTOR. (This link may not work if you are not on campus.)
Bender, Thomas, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism
as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992.
NOTE: This book includes important extracts from Davis, Problem
of Slavery. Apart from these extracts, the articles in this book
were first published in the American Historical Review: two by Thomas
Haskell in vol. 90, nos. 2 and 3 (1985); responses by David Davis, John
Ashworth, and Thomas Haskell in vol 92, no 4 (1987). All are available
online through JSTOR.
Anstey, Roger T. "Capitalism and Slavery: A Critique." Economic History Review 21 (1968): 307-20.
Seminar Question: Examine the differences in rhetorical strategy among abolitionists. What difference does the race and/or gender of the writer make to what they write?
Primary Sources:
*Robert Wedderburn, "The Axe Laid to the Root or a Fatal Blow to Oppressors, being an Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica, No 1" in The Horrors of Slavery, ed., Iain McCalman, 81-88.
*Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (London: Pandora Press, 1987); or online as part of the Schomburg Digital Library of Black Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century: http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/digs/wwm97262/@Generic__BookTocView;hf=0
Midgley, Clare. Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870. London: Routledge, 1992, parts 1 and 2. (Prince and Heyrick.)
NEW Davis, David Brion. "The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Anti-Slavery Thought." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (1962-63): 209-30. (Brief discussion of Heyrick. Available online.)
NEW Davis, David Brion. "James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1823-1833." Journal of Negro History, 46, 3. (1961): 154-173. (Brief discussion of Heyrick. Also useful for previous week's topic. Available online.)
NEW Corfield, Kenneth. "Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker." In Religion in the Lives of English Women, ed. Gail Malmgreen. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. "The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince." African American Review 26, no. 1 (1992): 133-146. (Prince. Available online).
Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834. New York: Routledge, 1992, chs. 12 (Heyrick) and 13 (Prince).
NEW Hine, Darlene Clark, et al, eds. 'We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible': A Reader in Black Women's History. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1995. Article by Alonzo on Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs.
McCalman, Iain. "Anti-Slavery and Ultra-Radicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century England: The Case of Robert Wedderburn." Slavery and Abolition 7, no. 2 (1986): 99-117. (Wedderburn.)
NEW Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: A History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1984. (Wedderburn.)
NEW McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. (Background for Wedderburn)
Other work on abolitionism:
Turley, David. The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860. London: Routledge, 1991.
Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, chs 8 and 9.
Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, part 2.
Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1988, chs 1, 4, 8, 11.
Eltis, David, and James Walvin, eds. The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. (Not in library, sorry.)
Bender, The Antislavery Debate.
Seminar Questions: How was the Jamaican slave rebellion of 1831 different from and similar to other slave rebellions in the Americas? Why?
Was the Jamaican rebellion responsible for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire?
Primary Sources:
Henry Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery (1853), pp. 25-37, 110-120
Link to abstracts of selected articles available at Newcastle.
On Jamaica 1831:
Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982, ch 22.
Mullin, Michael. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992, part III.
Bakan, Abigail B. Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990, ch. 2.
NEW Craton, Michael. "Proto-Peasant Revolts? The Late Slave Rebellions in the British West Indies 1816-1832." Past and Present 85 (1979): 99-125.
NEW Reckord, Mary (formerly and subsequently Mary Turner). "The Jamaica Slave Rebellion of 1831." Past and Present 40 (1968): 108-25.
NEW Gordon, Shirley. God Almighty Make Me Free: Christianity in Preemancipation Jamaica. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Genovese, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. [Highly Recommended; see also the responses to Genovese in the separate articles list.]
Guha, Ranajit. "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency." In Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, 1-42. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Also in Selected Subaltern Studies.
Geggus, David. "The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions." William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. April (1987): 274-99. (Available online.)
NEW Patterson, Orlando. "Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, Jamaica 1655-1740." Social and Economic Studies 19 (1970): 289-325.
Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood. [Highly Recommended]
Paquette, Robert L. Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.
Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Translated by Arthur Brakel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Gaspar, David Barry. Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua: With Implications for Colonial British America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Schuler, Monica. "Ethnic Slave Rebellions in the Caribbean and the Guianas." Journal of Social History 3, no. 4 (1970): 374-85.
NEW Thornton, John K. "African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion." American Historical Review 96, 4 (1991): 1101-15.
NEW Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Norton, 1974.
NEW Jordon, Winthrop. Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
NEW Davis, Thomas J. A Rumor of Revolt: The 'Great Negro Plot' in Colonial New York. New York: Free Press, 1985.
NEW Sales, Maggie Montesinos. The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
NEW Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
NEW Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
NEW Mullin, Gerald. Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
NEW Fick, Carolyn. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
NEW James, C. L. R. The
Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.
London: Allison and Busby 1980. [Highly recommended, but long.]
Seminar Question: What do the plans for apprenticeship and emancipation tell us about the assumptions of the designers of emancipation?
Primary sources:
Speech of Edward Stanley, to House of Commons, Hansard, May 14 1833, pp. 1192-1262
Enclosure in (E) and (F) [Guidelines for Colonial Governors], 19 Oct. 1833, PP 1835 (177) L, pp. 16-24.
Essay by Holt in Cooper et al, Beyond Slavery.
Burn, W. L. Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies. London: Jonathan Cape, 1937, chs. 1-3.
Green, British Slave Emancipation, ch. 4.
Paton, Diana. "Decency, Dependence, and the Lash: Gender and the British Debate over Slave Emancipation, 1830-1834." Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (1996): 162-184.
Davis, Slavery and Human Progress.
14 November: Apprenticeship in Practice
Seminar Question: What were the most significant causes of conflict during apprenticeship?
This question will be addressed collectively, by compiling results of all students’ research.
Primary Reading:
No centrally assigned primary reading this week: each student will take responsibility for a specific colony and use the Parliamentary Papers to research apprenticeship in that colony.
Suggested Secondary Reading for this week and next week:
Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship, chs. 4-10.
Green, British Slave Emancipation, ch. 5.
Hall, Douglas. "The Apprenticeship Period in Jamaica, 1834-1838." Caribbean Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1953): 142-66.
Hall, Douglas. Five of the Leewards, chs 1 and 2.
Scully, Pamela. Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997, ch. 3.
Wilmot, Swithin. "Not 'Full Free': The Ex-Slaves and the Apprenticeship System in Jamaica, 1834-1838." Jamaica Journal 17 (1984): 2-10.
Marshall, W. K. "Apprenticeship and Labour Relations in Four Windward Islands." In Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916, edited by David Richardson, 203-224. London: Frank Cass, 1985.
Shelton, Robert S. "A Modified Crime: The Apprenticeship System in St. Kitts." Slavery and Abolition 16, no. 3 (1995): 331-345.
Shepherd, Verene. "The Apprenticeship Experience on Jamaican Livestock Pens, 1834-38." Jamaica Journal 22, no. 1 (1989): 48-55.
Emmer, Pieter. "Between Slavery and Freedom: The Period of Apprenticeship in Suriname (Dutch Guiana), 1863-1873." Slavery and Abolition 14, no. 1 (1993): 87-105. NB: Available in Michael Twaddle, ed., The Wages of Slavery.
NEW Curtin, Philip. Two
Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1995 (1955). Part 1.
Seminar Question: What did the Colonial Office understand to be the role of the stipendiary magistrates? How did this compare with the expectations of former slaves and former slaveholders?
Primary sources:
*Woodville Marshall, ed., The Colthurst Journal, pp. 74-108.
PP 1837 (521) LIII: pp. 290-305 (complaints heard by SMs Ramsay and Fishbourne).
Secondary reading: see previous week.
28 November: Antigua, Bermuda, Cayman Islands: colonies without an apprenticeship phase
Seminar Question: Did the lack of an apprenticeship period in these colonies benefit the former slaves there?
Primary sources:
Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 (1838), pp. 63-72.Suggested Secondary Reading:McGregor to Spring Rice, 4 Oct. 1834, plus enclosures, PP 1835 (278-II) L.
Appendix B, Colonial Laws, PP 1835 (278-II).
Antigua: Appendix, No. 117: Vagrancy Act, PP 1836 (166-II) XLIV.
Hall, Five of the Leewards, ch. 2. (Not in library--available from me.)
Skim-read Green, British Slave Emancipation, and Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship, for discussion of these colonies.
Seminar Question: Why was apprenticeship abolished two years earlier than initially planned?
Primary Reading:
Memorial Addressed to Her Majesty’s Government relative to the system of Negro Apprenticeship, 16 Nov. 1837, and reply, PP 1837-38 (27) XLVIII.
Baptist Missionary Society, Freedom in Jamaica, or, the First of August, 1838.
The British Emancipator, 22 August 1838.
Suggested Secondary Reading:
Temperley, Howard. British Antislavery 1833-1870, London. Longman, 1972, chs. 1-2.
Tyrrell, Alex. "The Moral Radical Party and the Anglo-Jamaican Campaign for the Abolition of the Negro Apprenticeship System." English Historical Review 99 (1984): 481-82.
Tyrrell, Alex. Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain. London: Christopher Helm, 1987.
Hurwitz, Edith F. Politics and the Public Conscience: Slave Emancipation and the Abolitionist Movement in Britain. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973.
August, Thomas. "Rebels with a Cause: The St. Joseph Mutiny of 1837." Slavery and Abolition 12, no. 2 (1991): 73-91.
Higman, Barry. "Slavery Remembered: the Celebration of Emancipation in Jamaica." Journal of Caribbean History 12 (1979).
Brereton, Bridget. "The Birthday of Our Race: A Social History of Emancipation Day in Trinidad, 1838-88." In Trade, Government and Society in Caribbean History, 1700-1920, edited by B. W. Higman, 69-83. Kingston: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1983.
Lewin, Olive. "Emancipation Songs and Festivities." Jamaica Journal 17, no. 3 (1984): 18-23.
Hall, Catherine. "Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s." In White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, 205-54. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
Beckles, Hilary, and Verene Shepherd, eds. Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1993, article by Marshall in section 1.