The Decline of Caribbean Smuggling

1963 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore C. Hinckley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
African Slave ◽  
The North ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
High Esteem

In the 1760's, the commerce of the British West Indies followed four general channels: (1) the trade with the Mother Country; (2) the exchange of goods and money with continental sister colonies to the north; (3) the African slave trade; and (4) the illegal intercourse with Spain's New World possessions. So extensive was the last that Josiah Tucker referred to it as “that prodigious clandestine trade.” This paper will explore one facet of that traffic: its eclipse in Jamaica in the years immediately after the 1763 Peace of Paris.Throughout most of the eighteenth century, only Bridgetown in Barbados and Kingston in Jamaica were markets of “conspicuous size and wide commercial connections.” The unloading of only a few cargoes would glut the capital towns of the lesser islands. Notwithstanding this fact, these islands held a coveted position in the Empire. London's high esteem for these possessions rested on their agricultural value, their importance in the crucial bullion exchange, and their utility as naval bases.

scholarly journals Looking for Agency in Transnational Refugee Trajectories during the Second World War - Eric T. Jennings. Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. 308 pages. ISBN: 9780674983380, $36. - Megan Koreman. The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 410 pages. 9780190662271, $29,95. - Joanna Newman. Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. 306 pages. 9781789206494, $29,95.

Itinerario ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-187
Author(s):  
Rosa de Jong
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
New World ◽  
French Caribbean ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
The Government ◽  
Flight Route

AbstractThe authors of three recent monographs, The Escape Line, Escape from Vichy, and Nearly the New World, highlight in particular the relevance of transnational refugee and resistance networks. These books shed new light on the trajectories of refugees through war-torn Europe and their routes out of it. Megan Koreman displays in The Escape Line the relevance of researching one line of resistance functioning in several countries and thereby shifts from the common nationalistic approach in resistance research. In Escape from Vichy Eric Jennings researches the government-endorsed flight route between Marseille and Martinique and explores the lasting impact of encounters between refugees and Caribbean Negritude thinkers. Joanna Newman explores the mainly Jewish refugees who found shelter in the British West Indies, with a focus on the role of aid organisations in this flight.

Catawba

Fit for War ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Fitts
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Charles Town ◽  
The Core ◽  
The North

Chapter 3 documents the emergence, composition, and political interactions of the Catawba Nation through the mid-eighteenth century. Between the Spanish incursions of the 1560s and the establishment of Charles Town in 1670, a group of Catawba Valley Mississippians known as Yssa rose to become the powerful Nation of Esaws that formed the core of the eighteenth-century Catawba Nation. In the late seventeenth century this polity was a destination for European traders as well as American Indian refugees fleeing hostilities associated with the Indian Slave trade and settler territorial expansion. While many of these refugees were from the Catawba River Valley, others—most notably the Charraw—were Piedmont Siouans who fled southward from the North Carolina-Virginia border. The incorporation of refugees had significant implications for Catawba politics and daily life, which are explored in subsequent chapters.

The Making of the Free Ports Act

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
British System

Burke became involved with West Indian issues at the very beginning of his political career. The brief Rockingham administration of 1765–6 was committed to measures to improve flows of trade around the British Atlantic, of which the West Indies was a crucial component. As the prime minister’s secretary, Burke was deeply involved in these measures. The main problem which they sought to remedy was the inability of the British West Indies to produce commodities needed in other parts of the Atlantic in sufficient quantities. These commodities were principally sugar and raw cotton for Britain and molasses for British North America. The remedy chosen was to allow foreign supplies of these commodities to enter the British system through what were called free ports in two British islands—Dominica and Jamaica. Burke was particularly influential in the provisions of the act relating to Dominica, whose ports were intended to draw in produce, especially raw cotton, from French islands that the British had occupied during the war. In return, they would export British manufactures and slaves to foreign colonies. Getting the act through Parliament required the careful balancing of interests, notably those of the North American colonies and of the West Indies. Burke was in the thick of these negotiations, forming many contacts with merchants. The act, by letting in foreign produce to British islands, marked a significant breach in the hitherto sacrosanct doctrine of imperial self-sufficiency.

scholarly journals Some Account of Barrettia, a New and Remarkable Fossil Shell From the Hippurite Limestone of Jamaica

The Geologist ◽  
1862 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 372-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. P. Woodward
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Rio Grande ◽  
Geological Survey ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
Blue Mountains ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Bivalve Shell ◽  
Back River ◽  
Fossil Shell

The fossil represented in the accompanying figures is one of that kind whose discovery severely tests the faith of the naturalist in his previous conclusions, and may appear to raise a suspicion not only respecting the sufficiency of his data, but even as to the correctness of his method of investigation. Almost any person, at first sight of the specimen, would think he was looking at a coral, and it would seem like an attempt to impose on one's credulity to say it was a bivalve shell, like an oyster or a clam.Yet there is no doubt it is a kind of Hippurite, although the rays give it a novel and extraordinary character. The discoverer had quite satisfied himself on this point before he brought it to England and placed it in our hands. It was found last year (January, 1861), by Mr. Lucas Barrett, F.G.S., Director of the Geological Survey of the British West Indies, in the parish of Portland, in the north-east of Jamaica. This part of the island, lying to the north of the principal range of the Blue Mountains, which run east and west, is itself mountainous, rising to the height of 7000 feet. The hippurite limestone is well seen on the banks of the Back river, a tributary of the Rio Grande, at about fifteen miles from the coast.

GLADSTONE AND SLAVERY

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROLAND QUINAULT
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early Years ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Passionate Commitment ◽  
British Colonial

ABSTRACTWilliam Gladstone's views on slavery and the slave trade have received little attention from historians, although he spent much of his early years in parliament dealing with issues related to that subject. His stance on slavery echoed that of his father, who was one of the largest slave owners in the British West Indies, and on whom he was dependent for financial support. Gladstone opposed the slave trade but he wanted to improve the condition of the slaves before they were liberated. In 1833, he accepted emancipation because it was accompanied by a period of apprenticeship for the ex-slaves and by financial compensation for the planters. In the 1840s, his defence of the economic interests of the British planters was again evident in his opposition to the foreign slave trade and slave-grown sugar. By the 1850s, however, he believed that the best way to end the slave trade was by persuasion, rather than by force, and that conviction influenced his attitude to the American Civil War and to British colonial policy. As leader of the Liberal party, Gladstone, unlike many of his supporters, showed no enthusiasm for an anti-slavery crusade in Africa. His passionate commitment to liberty for oppressed peoples was seldom evident in his attitude to slavery.

“In the Free”: The Work of Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean Historical Novel

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
CANDACE WARD
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
Hundredth Anniversary ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Caribbean Writers

The concluding words of Erna Brodber'sThe Rainmaker's Mistake, a novel prompted in part by the two-hundredth anniversary of the 1807 Act to Abolish the Slave Trade in Britain's Caribbean Colonies, affirm its engagement with history and historiography, emphasizing the need for Caribbean writers of the twenty-first century to search the past – uncover its traumas, its mysteries, and its treasures – in order to make sense of the present and project a future “in the free.” Brodber's work, of course, is part of a much larger and longer conversation among Caribbean novelists about what it means “to search and to reproduce and to cultivate,” literally and metaphorically. To explore the implications of this conversation, my essay focusses on this various and vexed cultural work as performed in three key Caribbean novels: E. L. Joseph'sWarner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole, published in 1838, the year that “full freedom” was granted by the British Parliament to the enslaved population of the British West Indies after a four-year apprenticeship period; Paule Marshall's 1969The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, produced during a period of independence for many Anglo-Caribbean nations, including her parents' native Barbados in 1968; and, finally, Brodber's 2007 “Afrofuturistic” novelThe Rainmaker's Mistake.

The London Committee and mobilization of public opinion against the slave trade

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Life ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Late Eighteenth

AbstractDuring the late eighteenth century organized anti-slavery, in the shape of the campaign to end the African slave trade (1787–1807), became an unavoidable feature of political life in Britain. Drawing on previously unpublished material in the Josiah Wedgwood Papers, the following article seeks to reassess this campaign and, in particular, the part played in it by the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. So far from being a low-level lobby, as historians like Seymour Drescher have suggested, it is argued here that the Committee's activities, both in terms of opinion-building and arranging for petitions to be sent to the house of commons, were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement. Thus while the provinces and public opinion at the grass roots level were undoubtedly important, not least in the industrial north, it was the metropolis and the London Committee which gave political shape and significance to popular abolitionism.

The Horse and Slave Trade Between the Western Sahara and Senegambia

1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246
Author(s):  
James L. A. Webb
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
North African ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Black African ◽  
Western Sahara ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Following the late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cavalry revolution in Senegambia, the horse and slave trade became a major sector of the desert-edge political economy. Black African states imported horses from North Africa and the western Sahara in exchange for slaves. Over time, under conditions of increasing aridity, the zone of desert horse-breeding was pushed south, and through crossbreeding with the small disease-resistant indigenous horses of the savanna, new breeds were created. Although the savanna remained an epidemiologically hostile environment for the larger and more desirable horses bred in North Africa, in the high desert and along the desert fringe, Black African states continued to import horses in exchange for slaves into the period of French colonial rule.The evidence assembled on the horse trade into northern Senegambia raises the difficult issue of the relative quantitative importance of the Atlantic and Saharan/North African slave trades and calls into question the assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was the larger of the two. Most available evidence concerns the Wolof kingdoms of Waalo and Kajoor. It suggests that the volume of slaves exported north into the desert from Waalo in the late seventeenth century was probably at least ten times as great as the volume of slaves exported into the Atlantic slave trade. For both Waalo and Kajoor, this ratio declined during the first half of the eighteenth century as slave exports into the Atlantic markets increased. The second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in predatory raiding from the desert which produced an additional flow of north-bound slaves. For Waalo and Kajoor – and probably for the other Black African states of northern Senegambia – the flow of slaves north to Saharan and North African markets probably remained the larger of the two export volumes over the eighteenth century. This northward flow of slaves continued strong after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and was only shut down with the imposition of French colonial authority.

The Stamp Act Crisis in the British West Indies

1977 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna J. Spindel
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indians ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
American Continent ◽  
North American Continent ◽  
The North ◽  
Stamp Act

Traditionally, colonial scholars have focussed their attention on the North American continent, where dramatic conflicts with Britain culminated in Revolution. No major article or book has yet dealt with British West Indians as active participants in the pre-Revolutionary struggle. This study attempts to correct that situation. Focussing on the Stamp Act crisis, it seeks to clarify the role of island colonists during the pre-war period and argues for a comprehensive appraisal of that role.

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