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#The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies
philosophybits · 1 year
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If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.
Frederick Douglass, "The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies (1857)"
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sexypinkon · 8 months
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Today,emancipation day here in Trinidad and Tobago is a timely occasion to announce a significant commission I was chosen to be part of earlier this year.The St James’s Church Piccadilly, London has commissioned me to create  four new paintings which will be installed permanently at the entrance of the church.The commission marks the 250th anniversary of the baptism of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, a prominent abolitionist of the time and a significant figure in the history of Britain. He was baptised at the church, on 20th August 1773.The fist thing that struck me is that I knew nothing about Cugoano and his life and work as major abolitionist. 
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That in itself speaks volumes about how history has been told.I am humbled to discover who he was and more than honoured to be chosen to commemorate his life and what he stood for.This will be the first permanent art commission to commemorate Cugoano’s life anywhere in the world.Ottobah Cugoano was born around 1757 in that part of west Africa now known as Ghana. At the age of 13, he was kidnapped by slave traders before being shipped to the West Indies. Cugoano was sold to a plantation owner in Grenada. In 1772 He was bought by an English merchant and brought to the UK, gaining his freedom that same year.Cugoano was very active in the ‘Sons of Africa’ group which condemned the practice of slavery and campaigned for its abolition. They lobbied public figures and wrote regularly to the newspapers. Cugoano became a forthright critic of slavery and his influential book, ‘Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery’ (1787) is still in print today.“ 
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Lovelace’s work not only connects with the geographies and legacies of the abhorrent Transatlantic slave trade but also evokes an honest, lyrical, sun-filled exaltation of what a vibrant future with open acknowledgement of these histories might look like. Thinking through what the act of Baptism means in theological terms, there is a sense of emerging out of water into a new tomorrow that the paintings capture.“The unveiling ceremony for the event will be held on September 20th 2023.
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fatehbaz · 2 years
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Imperial use of science/academia to construct what appears “natural’. Militarization of environmental sciences. Examples from biogeography research in nineteenth-century British empire in the North Atlantic.
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Over the last few years, Atlantic Canada has been treated to ‘unusual marine visitors’ from the tropics, ranging from Gray Triggerfish, Tropical Sunfish, to rare Seahorses (Anon., 2012, Anon., 2014). Attributed to increases in warmer water temperatures, Neotropical species have become regular visitors to the shores of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, delighting, surprising, and concerning people over climate change and impacts to native flora and fauna. While these allegedly tropical visitors are generally perceived to be out of place in the Nearctic region, research scientists are showing that, in fact, the presence of some tropical fish in Canada’s east coast is not a new phenomenon. Some species are present because of their northern distribution ranges, while others hitch ‘a ride on the Gulf Stream’ (Anon., 2012), illustrating the ways in which migrating species and larger marine systems transcend national, international, and zoogeographic boundaries. [...] Mobile fauna have become significant geopolitical actors in the politics of climate change, natural resources, and national security, as well as active agents in unsettling zoogeographic regions, distributions, and human values [...]
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[N]ineteenth-century Britain established a defence network of squadrons, fortifications, and bases to secure economic and colonial control in the Atlantic, and to prevent the United States from invading Canada, since ‘Bermuda, conjointly with Halifax, [held] in check the whole Atlantic coast of the United States’ (Godet, 1860, p. 3). Known as the North America and West Indies Station (NAWI), the British military secured strategic ports and waterways, while the Royal Navy commanded the sea. Halifax, Nova Scotia, served as the summer headquarters while Bermuda held the winter station. From this network emerged the collection, documentation, and surveillance of natural phenomena – birds, fish, whales, ocean currents, weather systems – by British navy and military officers who were patrolling and garrisoning Atlantic Canada, Bermuda, and the West Indies. [...]
Moreover, Britain’s Admiralty, War Office, and Ordnance Department took active roles in establishing Humboldtian science as part of British naval and military culture (Reidy, 2008), which helped colonial officials contemplate the ‘habitability’ (Zeller, 2006) of imperial stations across the British Empire during a time when anxieties over climate, racial health, and military efficiency were prevalent; it also naturalized ‘northern forms… that successfully “invaded” southerly lands and moved in as “denizens”’ [...].
Considering that the NAWI Station was divided into two separate divisions in the British North Atlantic – Bermuda-Halifax and West Indies Divisions – how did colonial officials think about the differences between these two regions? Did these boundaries overlap with gendered and racial ideologies, and climatic and zoogeographical thinking of the time period (e.g. Old and New Worlds, Nearctic and Neotropical regions)? And how did migratory fauna, and other mobile ‘natures,’ animate and challenge these regional categories? [...]
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[T]he production of biogeography by these individuals helped to map a climatic and zoogeographical boundary line between the temperate North Atlantic (Nearctic region) and the tropical West Indies (Neotropical region). These imperial environmental imaginaries, albeit contested, positioned Bermuda as part of the North America (Nearctic region) rather than the Caribbean (Neotropical region) as it had been in the pre-emancipation era. Furthermore, such imaginaries helped to naturalize a mobile imperial force that moved between Bermuda and Halifax in order to protect trading routes and to safeguard the region from the United States. Zoogeographic region-making [...], therefore, encompassed the discursive and material practices involved in attempting to make visible a unified militarized and zoogeographical region through Humboldtian science. [...]
In the Atlantic world, biogeography helped European naturalists observe differences between the ‘Old’ and ‘New World’ faunas for colonization and resource extraction [...]. The French naturalist, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), was one of the first to define geographic regions as possessing different forms of life based on climatic conditions. [...] Buffon determined that ‘New World’ animals had degenerated from their ‘Old World’ form, exhibiting smaller physiques and slothful dispositions, which extended to Indigenous peoples of North America. [...]
As Julie Cruikshank (2005) has stated, ‘natural’ boundaries or borders can furnish clues for thinking about social order. In other words, they can illuminate how an ‘imagined “Nature” can become swept into the formation of nations’ [...].
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Text above by: Kirsten Greer. “Zoogeography and imperial defence: Tracing the contours of the Neactic region in  the temperate North Atlantic, 1838-1880s.” Geoforum Volume 65. October 2015. [Italicized first line/heading in this post added by me. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]
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stratharchives · 2 years
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The Lang Papers: Dr Hugh Lang and slavery in the Danish West Indies
Jennifer Gray, our research intern, shares some more of her research into Hugh Lang in this second of a series of three blog-posts.
The Lang Papers, held at the University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, aid in exposing the Lang family’s enslavement of black peoples in St. Croix in the Danish West Indies. Although abolition of slavery occurred in the Danish Caribbean in 1849, ‘slave lists’ for the estates Adventure and Paradise – which the Lang family owned or part-owned - from 1818 and 1835 illustrate that the Lang family’s fortune was rooted in the exploitation of enslaved persons. These lists are available online through the Danish National Archives. Furthermore, details given in the Lang Papers highlight the significant labour shortage experienced in the decades following Danish emancipation and the ways in which the white planter community attempted to overcome the labour deficit.
The 1818 ‘slave list’ for the estate Adventure named Robert Lang, Dr Hugh Lang’s brother, as the co-proprietor of the estate, alongside a Mr. McCormack. According to the list, which can viewed here, 90 individuals of African descent were enslaved on the estate. Categorised by age and trade, the list confirms the Lang family’s registered ownership and exploitation of enslaved persons.1 Furthermore, the 1835 records for the estate Adventure, which can be viewed here, reveal an expansion of this ownership, with a total of 165 men, women, and children listed as being enslaved there. This highlights that prior to Danish abolition, the Lang family’s participation in slavery was increasing. The disregard shown toward the humanity of enslaved individuals is depicted by descriptions of their ‘moral character’, which included acute judgements such as ‘stupid’ and ‘insolent’. Moreover, the records group enslaved labourers by their place in the gang system, a particularly merciless structure of labour management that was utilised throughout the slave-holding West Indies.2
A similar pattern of increasing ownership of enslaved persons is apparent for the estate Paradise in 1818 and 1835. Crucially, the 1818 record, which can be viewed here, reveals that Dr Hugh Lang was residing on the estate.3 This is significant as it confirms Lang’s place of residence in St. Croix in 1818 and portrays his close association with his brother’s estates. Living on a working sugar plantation, it is certain that Lang actively observed and overseen the enslavement and violent treatment of black peoples in the plantation. Although the ‘slave lists’ do not feature the remainder of Dr Lang’s estates, William, Mon Bijou and Good Hope, discussed in the Lang Papers, it is highly probable that enslaved labour was also exploited on these plantations. An 1862 valuation of Dr Lang’s estate, William, within the Lang Papers, recorded a village previously utilised to house enslaved labourers, which consisted of 80 rooms.4 The probability of multiple enslaved families living in each residence testifies to the number of persons who were likely enslaved at William prior to Danish abolition and provides further evidence of Dr Lang’s intrinsic involvement in the enslavement of Black peoples. Robert Lang died in Largs on 30 July 1849 and appointed Dr Lang ‘factor or manager of the whole properties’ in his possession.5 They became two of at least five estates in Lang’s portfolio by 1860.
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Robert Lang’s Will and his instruction regarding Dr Hugh Lang
The Lang Papers also highlight the severe labour shortage in St. Croix in the decades following the Danish abolition in 1849. The first reference to issues relating to a dwindling labour force are made in April 1861 in a letter to Dr Lang from Mr. Peebles, who managed Lang’s estates in St. Croix after Dr Lang had returned to Scotland in 1831. He advised that, at the estate, William, they supported seven labourers who were unable to work and a number of children who were too young to work in the fields or as tradespeople.6 Widespread protest from planters was subsequently reported by Peebles in June of the same year, when at a meeting of the Burgh Council, a member threatened to break through the current labour regulations if the government would not aid the bringing of indentured labourers to St. Croix. Furthermore, he ‘at the same time said that not less than 5,000 labourers would have the desired effect’.7 The crippling effects of the labour shortage on sugar production and the subsequent profitability of plantation ownership were reported in another letter in the collection. In February 1862, Mr James McFarlane reported to Dr Lang that ‘since the emancipation here the island has delivered fully one third less sugar in the ten years after than before’.8 Evidently, the emancipation of St. Croix’s enslaved population thirteen years earlier had significantly reduced the profitability of the colony’s plantations as they could no longer exploit unwaged enslaved labour. Replacing this labour force with an alternative source of low-wage labour became a prime concern for St. Croix planters.
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Valuation of the Estate William. (T-LA/86).
Lang and other planters’ resolution to resolve the labour shortage is revealed in letters at the latter end of the collection, where Mr. Peebles discusses ‘Coolie immigration’.9 This derogatory term refers to the coerced importation of indentured labourers from Asia, particularly China and India, who were brought to the West Indies and Americas to labour in the plantations previously worked by enslaved persons. This was another form of brutal racial exploitation, where Asian labourers lived and worked in poor conditions under a harsh labour regime for which they received very low wages. 10 Dr Lang’s engagement in the trade highlights that following Danish emancipation, planters went on to target Asian labourers and exploit them as another form of inexpensive labour.
It is imperative to highlight the Lang Papers links to transatlantic slavery and redefine what was previously known about Dr Hugh Lang. Although he lived an affluent life and died a wealthy and respected gentleman, his personal fortune and that of his family was generated through the enslavement and exploitation of African and African-descended labourers in Danish St. Croix. Crucially, as the Lang family’s estates were in the Danish Caribbean, their active participation in slavery continued for sixteen years after the British Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. This highlights the necessity of looking beyond solely the British empire when considering the role and legacies of Scottish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economy. The legacy of Dr Lang’s involvement in Danish slavery will be touched on in my next blog, where I will discuss Lang’s family and descendants.
1 Danish National Archives, West Indian Government, Subject Files: Land Tax Register Forms for Plantations. https://www.sa.dk/aosoegesider/en/billedviser?epid=17241563#209939,39589945. (Consulted Friday 6 August 2021).
2 Danish National Archives, West Indian Government, Subject Files: Land Tax Register Forms for Plantations. https://www.sa.dk/ao-soegesider/en/billedviser?epid=17241563#209940,39590300. (Consulted Friday 6 August 2021).
3 Danish National Archives, West Indian Government, Subject Files: Land Tax Register Forms for Plantations. https://www.sa.dk/ao-soegesider/en/billedviser?epid=17241563#209940,39590327. (Consulted Friday 6 August 2021).
4 University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, The Lang Papers, T-LA/86.
5 Legal Records- Will and Testaments. https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/ (Consulted Friday 6 August 2021).
6 University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, The Lang Papers, T-LA/17.
7 University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, The Lang Papers, T-LA/30.
8 University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, The Lang Papers, T-LA/74.
9 University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, The Lang Papers, T-LA/85.
10 M.H. Jung, ‘Outlawing “Coolies”: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation’, American Quarterly, 57:3 (2005), p.677-701.
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galleryofunknowns · 4 years
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Unknown Artist, 'Portrait of a Man', oil on canvas, late 1700s, American?, currently in the collection of the Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain.
The portrait, formerly attributed to Gilbert Stuart (b.1755 - d.1828), was previously thought to be of Hercules Posey (b.1748 - d.1812), an enslaved cook in the employ of George Washington. Below the cut is an edited version of of a Philadelphia Inquirer article written March, 2019, on the life of Hercules and the research undertaken in the portrait.
“This is very different from how Stuart would have done it,” said Dorinda Evans, a Gilbert Stuart scholar and professor emerita at Emory University, who was certain that both the painter and subject had been misidentified.
The other scholars, curators, and conservators appeared unanimous. But there was one more blockbuster twist. The hat, perceived to be a chef’s toque for as long as the painting has been known to modern viewers, was in fact not a cook’s hat at all, Evans said, but a Caribbean headdress similar to one worn by free Dominicans in the West Indies depicted in paintings by the Italian artist Agostino Brunias.
The experts’ verdict: The painting is genuine to the late 1700s, and the unknown subject was a person of noble importance. But it wasn’t painted by Stuart. And the subject wasn’t even a chef — definitively ruling out Hercules and setting in motion a cascade of implications for historians at a moment when interest in him and others enslaved by the Washingtons remains high.
In fact, the conclusions of this meeting of experts, conducted in private two years ago but made public only now, helped spur a researcher last month to discover what might in fact be a record of the elusive chef’s burial place.
That chef just wasn’t the man in this painting.
“No American cook in the colonies dressed like that,” said Evans, noting that the now-familiar chef’s toque did not appear until the 1820s. “It’s a fantasized image of what people want, because people want to have an image of Hercules. And people see the things they want to see.”
The painting, long held as a potential key to the chef’s story, turned out to be a false clue, another myth in a Washington universe full of them, “like the cherry tree and the wooden teeth,” said Mount Vernon senior curator Susan P. Schoelwer, who coordinated the study day along with associate curator Jessie MacLeod.
“There is a real possibility of a sense of loss there. It’s such a powerful portrait,” she said. “There is a real hunger for a dignified portrait of an enslaved person we can identify with as an individual. But when I weigh that against something that … really isn’t what it was supposed to be, I’m always going to opt for being a seeker after truth.”
Hercules the man was very real. He was sold to George Washington as a teenage “ferryman” in 1767 by a neighbor, John Posey, as payment for a debt. And his labors for the Washingtons were well-documented at Mount Vernon and in Philadelphia, where he was renowned for the feasts he cooked at the President’s House between 1790 and 1796. He escaped from Mount Vernon in 1797 — on George Washington’s birthday — and was never captured.
These facts, drawn from house accounts, farm logs, letters, and reminiscences, have fashioned the chef as a hero whose culinary talents earned him special privileges from the Washingtons and an income from selling kitchen scraps that afforded him a notable sartorial style. He was recalled by Washington’s stepgrandson, George Washington Parke Custis, as a “great master-spirit” in the kitchen who, after the meal, would don fine black silks and a gold-headed cane for evening promenades down High Street.
Though he was dressed stylishly, walking the streets of an abolitionist-minded city known as a haven for free blacks, Hercules was still an enslaved man — and he was eventually left in Virginia and set to hard plantation labor.
What became of Hercules after his dash for freedom has long remained a mystery. This painting, now owned by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, was long thought to be a clue.
But fundamental questions about the painting’s relationship to Hercules persisted. They were definitively dispelled in the ultraviolet light of the private study day two years ago when the painting was removed from the walls of Mount Vernon after an exhibition in preparation to be returned to Spain. Paloma Alarcó, the Thyssen-Bornemisza curator who attended, agreed to the examination (and my attendance) under the condition its results not be made public until the museum could conduct its own follow-up studies.
She said that time has now come; the museum has hit a dead end: “We are blind, we must confess. … Maybe we will never know who this guy is.”
This is hardly the first old painting to be misidentified in the often shadowy world of art collecting. Its identification as Washington’s cook was likely added in the mid-20th century to increase the value on a work already misidentified earlier in the century as by Stuart, who famously painted the president in 1796. It remained in private hands and largely unstudied by scholars until it was sold in 1983 to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, whose massive collection became the museum, which simply cataloged its previously ascribed provenance as the painting arrived.
But Hercules, as one of the most visible individuals enslaved during that era, in part due to this image, carries extra cultural significance because of the growing dialogue about the founding fathers and their troubling involvement with slavery. And as I shared news of the painting’s removal from the record, it brought a mix of disappointment and resignation.
“Although we always questioned it, it’s kind of devastating to find out it’s not him,” said Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a professor of history at Rutgers University whose book, Never Caught (Atria, 2017), documents the escape of Ona Judge from the President’s House in Philadelphia, where she was enslaved alongside Hercules and seven others. “We don’t have any other such portraits of the enslaved who lived at Mount Vernon.”
On Dec. 15, 1801, Martha Washington wrote to Richard Varick, the mayor of New York City, to thank him for looking into the whereabouts of “my Old Cook Hercules. … I have been so fortunate as to engage a white cook who answers very well. I have thought about it therefore better to decline taking Hercules back.”
What Martha Washington did not mention was that she had already freed her husband’s slaves in January of that year, acting early upon a wish from George’s will with an emancipation that also applied to Hercules.
That New York correspondence has long been the last known clue to Hercules’ fate. And it’s a thread that Ganeshram and Sara Krasne, a colleague at the Westport Historical Society where the novelist is executive director, began to pursue in February with a startling new discovery — a New York City death notice that just might be him.
They looked back to John Posey, Hercules’ previous owner, for more clues. They found one. Krasne uncovered the burial record for Hercules Posey, a Virginia native born in 1748 who was listed in the 1812 city directory as a laborer who lived at 33 Orange St. and who died of consumption on May 15, 1812. He was buried at the Second African Burying Ground in Lower Manhattan — a grave that Ganeshram believes is still under the Christie Street sidewalk on the Lower East Side.
“What are the odds with all these factors — being named Hercules and Posey, being black from Virginia and more or less the same age — of it not being him?” Ganeshram said. “People chose to believe the painting was him [despite all the doubts]. I think this evidence is much stronger.”
A pair of historians agreed.
“She may really be onto something,” said Mary V. Thompson, the Mount Vernon research historian who is soon set to publish her own book on slavery at Mount Vernon. “The name, age, and birthplace information are really compelling.”
“[They] may have found the needle in the haystack,” Dunbar, the Rutgers professor and author, concurred. “I would feel totally comfortable speculating that it was him.”
And so, 222 years after Hercules’ daring escape, the great chef may have been found.
“The portrait was not Hercules, but look what popped up instead,” Dunbar said. “He’s totally not trying to go away — he wants you to know.”
“To think he was right there, and may still be, gives me chills,” Ganeshram said. “Hercules is bigger than the painting, and he always has been.”
LaBan, Craig (2019, March 1). 'George Washington's enslaved chef, who cooked in Philadelphia, disappears from painting, but may have reappeared in New York', Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved from https://www.inquirer.com/food/craig-laban/george-washington-slave-chef-cook-hercules-gilbert-stuart-painting-wrong-20190301.html.
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sciencespies · 2 years
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Before Rhode Island Built Its State House, a Racist Mob Destroyed the Community That Lived There
https://sciencespies.com/history/before-rhode-island-built-its-state-house-a-racist-mob-destroyed-the-community-that-lived-there/
Before Rhode Island Built Its State House, a Racist Mob Destroyed the Community That Lived There
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Photo of 1982 excavation at North Shore site Snowtown Project
On a pair of folding tables in the basement of the Public Archaeology Laboratory (PAL) in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, four metal trays display an unusual assemblage of artifacts. Humble ceramic tableware. Iron padlocks. Dominoes carved out of bone. A cut-glass tumbler. A diminutive bottle of French hair tonic. The headless body of a porcelain doll. A Spanish coin. A redware pot with drizzles of blue, black, yellow and green paint frozen in time on its sides.
These are the vestiges of Snowtown, a poor but vibrant mixed-race community that was once part of the state’s capital city, Providence. Moreover, it stood on the grounds where the state’s imposing capitol building now sits. Though no visible traces of the neighborhood remain, its history—including a deadly mob attack in 1831—is now being resurrected by the Snowtown Project.
The initiative began as an outgrowth of a Rhode Island State House Restoration Society subcommittee that was tasked with telling lesser-known stories about the capitol building and its grounds. Marisa Brown, who chairs the subcommittee and is an adjunct lecturer at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, says, “There’s a disconnect between the accuracy of what happened in the past and what our landscapes tell us. There are just too many places that we have lost.”
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1849 map of Providence, Rhode Island. Snowtown stood just north of the Cove, near the center of the map.
Harvard University, Harvard Map Collection
In 2019, the subcommittee emailed colleagues to gauge interest in researching Snowtown. Over the course of three meetings, a handful of people blossomed first into a group of 30 and now a cohort of more than 100 historians, archivists, archaeologists, teachers, storytellers, artists and community members.
After the American Revolution, Rhode Island experienced rapid population growth driven by the international “Triangle Trade”—of enslaved people, sugar products and spirits—through the port of Providence. The state’s distilleries had a special knack for turning imported sugarcane and molasses from the West Indies into rum, which was traded for enslaved labor. But by the 1830s, as the population surpassed 16,000, the manufacturing of textiles, jewelry and silverware had supplanted the merchant trade as the city’s primary economic driver.
The state’s Gradual Emancipation Act of 1784 had allowed children born to enslaved women to be freed once they reached adulthood. Within decades, a new population of free Black people had emerged, but they, along with indentured servants, Indigenous people, immigrants and impoverished white people, were pushed into marginalized communities.  Many of these groups were denied the opportunity to work in the burgeoning manufacturing industry.
They lived in places like Snowtown, a settlement of shabby homes and businesses with little in the way of conveniences. It was home to between two and three dozen households, but the population ebbed and flowed. Some residents toiled as domestic servants in the homes of Providence’s elite, or in trades like carpentry and sewing. The most successful owned small businesses or boarding houses. Even for the latter, life in Snowtown was difficult.
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View south from Smith Hill with downtown Providence in the background and residential buildings in the foreground, 1885
Providence Public Library under CC BY-SA 4.0
Pollution in Providence made conditions even worse. The Great Salt Cove, a tidal estuary that had been significant to local Indigenous tribes, just below the sandy bluff where Snowtown was located, became a dumping ground for sewage and industrial waste. Real estate in the village was undesirable; rents were cheap; and “disreputable” businesses aimed at sailors coming through port—brothels, saloons and dance halls—proliferated.
In 1831, sailors newly arrived from Sweden aboard the steamer Lion started a brawl at a tavern in Olney’s Lane, a neighborhood adjacent to Snowtown that was also home to an assemblage of non-white communities. According to an account in the Rhode Island American and Gazette, the sailors gathered reinforcements and attacked a home occupied by “blacks of a dissolute character.” Two Black men fired on the sailors, slaying one and wounding three. The white mob, shouting “Kill every negro you can!” advanced uphill into Snowtown, where the shooter was believed to had fled.
Over the course of four days, 18 buildings in Snowtown and Olney’s Lane were damaged or destroyed. Eventually, the state militia, ill-equipped to handle the scene, fired to disperse the mob, killing four.
Though residents rebuilt, by the late 1800s, Snowtown and its Black residents had been displaced by industrial progress. Rhode Island had grown into the wealthiest state per capita. In part as a monument to its prestige, the state commissioned renowned architects McKim, Mead & White, of Pennsylvania Station and New York Public Library renown, to design a massive State House on the bluff above Great Salt Cove. Construction was completed in 1904.
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1828 lithograph showing view looking south from Smith’s Hill, with some of the buildings along the north shore of the Cove in the mid-ground
Yale University Art Gallery
Today, all traces of Snowtown and its sister communities are obscured beneath railroad tracks, a small park commemorating state founder Roger Williams, and the ornate neoclassical capitol and its rolling green lawns.   
Still, says Chris Roberts, a Snowtown Project researcher and an assistant professor at Rhode Island School of Design, “If you’re researching slavery in Providence, Snowtown comes up. If you’re looking at the history of women in Providence, Snowtown shows up. If you’re looking into the city as a commercial hub, it comes up. Snowtown is a character in so many different histories of the city.”
Uncovering Snowtown has not been without challenges. For starters, the record is incomplete. Census data, for example, documents the names of heads of households, with only numbers to indicate women and children. “We often have to grapple with these archival silences,” says Jerrad Pacatte, a Snowtown research committee member and a PhD candidate at Rutgers University. “These were people who were not considered worthy of being counted.”
Physical evidence of entrepreneurship, creativity and personal care persist in a collection of about 32,000 artifacts. The artifacts were unearthed, and about 30 percent cataloged, in the early 1980s, when the Federal Railroad Administration undertook rail-improvement projects in the Northeast, including in Providence.
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Assorted artifacts found during digs in the Snowtown neighborhood
Snowtown Project
According to Heather Olson, the lab manager for PAL and a Snowtown Project researcher, the materials were then archived and shipped to what is now the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission. They remained there for 35 years, largely untouched, save for a few inquiries related to doctoral theses and a small exhibit in 1988; those items subsequently went missing.
The remaining artifacts were turned over to the PAL in 2013. The organization has digitally cataloged the entire collection—everything from writing slate and pencils to crucibles for metal working, woodworking tools and children’s toys. (Some of these digitized objects will hopefully be publicized online when the project is completed.)
Kitchen items are the most common, and they reflect a curious intermingling of status. Alongside unadorned plates and servingware, the collection includes pricey Blue Willow transferware, Chinese porcelain and an 18th-century feldspathic stoneware teapot. Olson says, “I don’t know if these arrived as clean fill from somewhere, if it was something bought secondhand, or if this was something that had been given to the people”—for example, to a domestic servant employed by the city’s wealthy.
Other artifacts give clues about the residents’ health. The large number of bottles for digestive tonics, for instance, speaks to the contaminated nature of the water supply. For Olson, the collection is an opportunity to examine a hidden history. “What can you identify? What can you say about people who were, for the most part, invisible?” she says.
If the complex work of the Snowtown Project shines a spotlight on a single truth, it’s that “written history belongs to the winners,” says Joanne Pope Melish, a retired University of Kentucky historian; the author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860; and co-chair of the project’s research committee.
“History, and the doing and the telling of history, is a product of the politics of the moment in which the telling of the story is happening and of the moment in which the story took place,” she explains.
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Rooftop view of Providence from City Hall, looking north over railroad tracks, Providence Cove, and buildings in the distance, circa 1880. Snowtown is visible in the distance at top left.
Providence Public Library under CC BY-SA 4.0
White supremacy was alive and well above the Mason-Dixon Line. Newly freed African American people traded the physical oppression of enslavement for the societal oppression of classism and historical effacement. Mentions of Snowtown are infrequent in contemporaneous newspapers. They begin to reemerge only in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement brought the neighborhood back into public consciousness.
This awareness has accelerated over the past decade, in direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Modern media retellings of vanished histories have also helped, such as the episode of HBO’s “Watchmen” that dramatized the events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Before Tulsa, according to Pope Melish, white mobs attacked northern Black neighborhoods 144 times between 1820 and 1850. While the Oklahoma attack was far deadlier, these assaults present two sides of the same coin. Pope Melish says, “It parallels the impossibility of being a ‘perfect’ enslaved person or free person of color. If you’re poor, you’re disgusting. If you’re successful, you’re uppity. Both cause hostility.”
Traci Picard, a public historian who co-chairs the Snowtown Project research team, has been working to unearth personal histories. She has sifted through thousands of seemingly mundane materials, including writs and warrants—an early version of small-claims court. “Every single thing is built by someone,” she says. “I don’t mean designed by someone, or who gets the credit for building it. Every single block, every single brick, every single building—we’re surrounded by people’s lives and experiences and stories.”
Planning is underway to present those stories in an exhibition at the State House, as well as a digital publication featuring maps, photos and documents. Snowtown History Walks debuted in June, and public art installations and signage for self-guided tours are also being discussed. 
Playwright and actor Sylvia Ann Soares, a programs team member and a Cape Verdean descendant of the Portuguese slave trade in Providence, is working on a Snowtown-themed play set to premiere next year. She believes that involvement of artists in the earliest stages of the project is integral to its retelling. “The results will be richer,” she says. “Many people will not read a scientific journal or go to a talk, but if it’s dramatic, if there’s some music, some songs of that era, it brings it alive.”
Soares adds, “I intend to [use the play to] speak out as an inspiration for advocacy against present-day injustice.”
For Pacatte, it’s also an opportunity to broaden our understanding of a part of American evolution that has been swept under the carpet of white history. “Snowtown is a microcosm for the very messy and prolonged process of emancipation that people in the North experienced before the Civil War,” he says. “It’s the story of African Americans [in the U.S.]: They were resilient and kept rebuilding their lives.”
African American History
American History
Death
Digitization
Exhibitions
Indigenous Peoples
Industrial Revolution
Maps
Race and Ethnicity
Racism
Slavery
#History
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southwarkcofe · 3 years
Text
Remembering Slavery and Emancipation: Reparation and Restitution
The Venerable Dr Rosemarie Mallett, Archdeacon of Croydon, writes...
Paul’s words to the Galatians, “For you are all one in Christ Jesus”, reminds us of our common humanity. For many in and of the Caribbean, August is our month of remembrance of the inhumanity of slavery and human trafficking, and the sin of racism. On August 1st, 1834, British slaves were “given” their “freedom” a year after the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act was passed. Every year in the Caribbean and Canada, August 1st is commemorated as Emancipation Day, and in some countries, there is also a bank holiday on the first Monday in August.
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A funny thing happened to me this August. Somehow, I decided that the beginning of August was the same here as it was in the Caribbean, and not only did I mark Emancipation Day, as usual, but I also transposed the bank holiday and took the day off (assisted by the fact that it’s a bank holiday in Scotland and so marked in most UK diaries). I think I have to blame my discombobulation on the pandemic, as I was due to be in Barbados on holiday this year, but due to the exigencies of international travel at this time, I am on staycation in the UK. So, with a clear diary, I spent the day in bittersweet reflection on the past, present and the future challenges which continue on from the legacy of historic slavery and the role the church in its establishment and continuation, as well as in its abolition. I say bittersweet because that August liberation day turned into a four year transitional apprenticeship period in order to give the slaveowners time to adjust to their new circumstances, preserving the planters’ access to a poorly paid labour force while keeping the ex-slaves in subservient conditions.
Since 1998, the United Nations has designated the 23rd of August as the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its abolition, in recognition of the day on which the Santo Domingo (today the twin island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) uprising began in 1791, a date that would play a critical role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Therefore, the whole of august is consecrated as a month of remembering historic slavery and its terrors, celebrating abolition, and acknowledging the substantial changes and challenges in the lives of people of the African diaspora.
I was born in Barbados and have always been aware of my small island’s significance in the history of British Atlantic slave trading. Barbados was the first British “slave society” and the most profitable for 100 years. The British arrived in Barbados in the 1620s, and after first experimenting with indentured white labour planting cotton, indigo and tobacco to no great profit, the colonists and traders hit on the highly profitable crop of sugarcane using the free ‘easily disposed and replaced’ labour of stolen and enslaved Black African people. More than 12 million enslaved African people were transported during the three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade to the Caribbean and North and South America, especially Brazil. Without a doubt, many individuals and companies in the UK amassed great wealth and benefited from the profits of slavery. This was also true of many Christians and the church itself. Despite the work of Christian abolitionists who demonstrated a radical resistance to the institution of slavery and racial bigotry, many Christians supported the institution of slavery and colluded with it until its enforced end. Even the oldest Anglican theological college in the Americas, Codrington College, was founded in 1714 with the profits from the bequest of Christopher Codrington, who in his will left portions of his sugar cane plantations to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts to establish a religious college in Barbados. Over 44 million descendants of African slaves now live in the Caribbean, and countless millions live in the Americas or have migrated worldwide, especially in the former colonial countries of Britain and Europe. Some have even made their way back to Africa. Many of those descendants are now calling for reparations.
Reparation is the act of making amends, and of giving satisfaction for wrongs, injuries, loss, or disadvantages caused. These can involve material and social repayment made in recognition of the harm done. Given its history, it is no surprise that Barbados has been at the centre of the Caribbean debate about reparations, led by Barbadian historian Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of University of the West Indies. In 2013, Caricom, the Caribbean states’ regional body established the Caribbean Reparation Commission with a focus on reconciliation, truth, and justice for the victims of slavery and their descendants. In the UK, a petition was put to Parliament in summer 2020 calling on the Government to compensate all African and Caribbean descendants to achieve a more equal society. The government response was that while reparations for the transatlantic slave trade are not part of the Government’s approach, they fully recognised the strong sense of injustice and the legacy of slavery.
The debate about reparations for historic slavery is fuelled not only by the fact that African people were stolen, and their labour appropriated but also by the post-abolition injustice perpetrated on slaves and descendants of slaves, where they were required to repay colonists for the “loss” of slave labour after emancipation. Haiti, which achieved emancipation in 1804, had to take out a loan in order to compensate the French colonists. The exorbitant interest from the debt meant it was not paid off until 1947, resulting in impoverished Haitians paying out more than twice the value of the colonists’ claims. In the UK, it took until 2015 for British taxpayers, including those of African and Caribbean descent, to finally pay off the loan of 20 million which is equivalent of billions of pounds in today’s money to former slave owners to compensate them for losing their slaves in 1834. The shocking irony of a formerly enslaved people being forced to compensate those who had enslaved them cannot be underestimated.
Those calling for reparations are drawing on a deep well of social justice, where it is not enough to simply apologize, but to acknowledge a moral duty as such to repair the damage of the wrongs committed. Since the abolition of slavery there has never been a concerted attempt to redress the wrongs of historic slavery or to make reparations for the damage and trauma done to people of African descent and heritage. Two recent examples in calls for reparations demonstrate divergences of responses. In 2019, the University of Glasgow acknowledged the fact that they had gained significant financial benefits in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries through donations and bequests with their roots in slave ownership and the trade in slave-produced goods. They became the first UK university to acknowledge this with the publication of a comprehensive report, Slavery, Abolition, and the University of Glasgow, and have launched a major plan of reparative justice which includes working collaboratively with the University of the West Indies and raising £20 million to establish a Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research. However, when in July 2021, protesters in the UK and the Caribbean demanded that a British MP hand over his 621-acre sugar plantation to the people of Barbados as compensation for his family’s 200 years of slave owning and trading on the island the response was very different. Mr Richard Drax, MP for Dorset South, said the while role of his ancestors was “deeply, deeply regrettable” he resisted their demand for reparations. Richard Drax’s family, like many other colonists, had become incredibly rich from their slave plantations and not only continued to hold those Caribbean estates but also purchased large estates in the UK also and continue to benefit from their slave trade accumulated wealth.
The fight for reparations is not new, for reparations are fundamental to a Christian understanding of repentance, where we turn away from past negative actions, showing remorse and commit ourselves to future actions that demonstrate a turning to God, and the promise to walk in his ways. As we turn away from the wrong, we also act to right the wrong. Reparations are simply the biblical principle of restitution taught throughout Scripture. Reparations are a matter of penance, restoration, and reconciliation. As it says in Isaiah 58, Christians must be the “repairers of the breach” between the past and continuing injustice and God’s just future. Reparations should be intentional redemptive actions of the church. The divide and the damage caused by the breech of slavery and racism remains evident in the inequities between communities of different skin colours worldwide, and especially for those of the African diaspora. Many of those calling for reparations or compensation are not calling for one-off payments but rather a strategic response to the injustice of historic slavery. The recently adopted Anti-Racism Charter of the Diocese of Southwark, is one small step along the road to repair, restoration, and restitution.
Find out more about the Southwark Antiracism Charter at southwark.anglican.org/antiracism.
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azeeshanfan · 4 years
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Antigua & Barbuda wants Harvard Law School to ‘make amends’ for the gains it enjoyed from slavery
Will Harvard's “additional steps” to atone for slavery include reparations?
The Harvard Law School Library, decorated for Commencement in 2011, when the contentious Royall seal — a shield with three sheaves of wheat, representative of the donor's connection to slavery — still represented the school. Photo by NKCPhoto, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Three months after the signing of a historic reparations agreement between the University of Glasgow and the University of the West Indies, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, wrote to Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow, asking the Ivy league university to live up to its responsibilities and pay his country reparations for the school's historical ties to — and profiteering from — the transatlantic slave trade.
Although the £20 million ($24,308,500 USD) University of Glasgow agreement was the first major act of making amends to the descendants of people enslaved by the British since full emancipation was declared in 1838, and was seen as a symbolic gesture towards the entire Caribbean region, Prime Minister Browne felt that reparations were owed to Antigua and Barbuda specifically, on account of the fact that Isaac Royall Jr., an American slave trader and landowner who also operated in Antigua, bequeathed money to Harvard to establish its first law professorship, which later led to the creation of the Harvard Law School in 1817.
Further, to celebrate the university's tercentenary in 1936, Harvard Law turned Royall's shield into the school's official seal. It proved a hugely controversial decision, due in no small part to the fact that in 1736, Antigua's then colonial government burned at the stake as many as 77 slaves convicted of conspiracy to revolt. In 2016, Harvard students protested to have the crest removed, calling it “a glorification of and a memorial to one of the largest and most brutal slave owners in Massachusetts.”
One opinion piece in The Harvard Crimson, a student-run newspaper, made no bones about calling the Royall family's Antigua sugar plantation “one of the most notorious strongholds of the slave trade”:
In the mid 1730’s, a string of natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and a drought made water scarce on the island. […]
Driven to desperation by starvation and thirst, these brave people made a plan to rebel for their freedom in 1736. The Royall family helped to foil that plan and together with the white, landowning government […] burned 77 human beings at the stake, including Hector, the Royall family’s head slave. Six people were hanged and five people were broken on the wheel.
The horrors of the slave trade often seem to be whitewashed when talk of reparations surfaces, but the editorial was not falling prey to this:
Changing the seal does not take us further away from history. It shows that we truly understand that history and grasp the deep, immoral significance of racism, slavery, torture, and mass murder. […]
Symbols are an expression of who we are as a community, and who we are today is inextricably linked to our history. Symbols that memorialize people like Royall sanitize our history of slavery. If the Law School does not confront its history, then it is contributing to a continuing culture of subjugation and oppression.
The seal was eventually removed, and Harvard's former president, Drew Faust, declared the university's ongoing commitment to acknowledging its ties to slavery, a fact that the current president mentioned in his response to Browne, adding:
Harvard is determined to take additional steps to explore this institution's historical relationship with slavery and the challenging moral questions that arise when confronting past injustices and their legacies. Harvard is also committed to working with other educational institutions to study slavery and its legacy.
What these additional steps are is, at the moment, unclear, but Prime Minister Browne, in keeping with previous letters sent by Antigua and Barbuda’s Ambassador to the United States, Sir Ronald Sanders, is asking for reparations to be put towards education — specifically the University of West Indies at Five Islands:
Ambassador Sanders pointed out that […] the reputation that Harvard enjoys internationally is intertwined with the dark legacy of Royall's Antigua slaves who died in oppression, uncompensated for their lives in slavery and their death in cruelty. In this context, he sought a genuine effort by Harvard to make amends to the people of Antigua for the gains Harvard enjoyed at the expense of their kinfolk.
Brown has suggested that University representatives meet with the government of Antigua and Barbuda to discuss the issue, but thus far there has been no confirmation as to whether or not Harvard intends to follow the example set by the University of Glasgow.
In fact, a Harvard Crimson editorial suggested:
While we agree that Harvard should aspire to atone for its discomfiting history with slavery, we do not believe that pursuing Antiguan-specific reparations is the most efficacious approach. As a university with ties to many historical injustices, Harvard ought not to be pursue debts of symbolic merit. Rather, it should be tackling continued, systematic injustices with broad, systematic solutions. Harvard’s imperative of institutional change dwarfs the particularities of this injustice.
Still, precedent has already been set with the University of Glasgow taking the “moral high ground” with regard to reparations, and the Caribbean community seems to agree that Harvard should also be leading the charge on the issue.
As Facebook user Alfanso Jerry Simon observed:
Admitting that Harvard benefited greatly from the backs of slaves in Antigua and making a few token changes to a plaque or a shield does nothing to correct the grave injustice. Harvard now needs to provide true and tangible reparations to Antigua and Barbuda. They can start by making meaningful and measurable assistance to the University of the West Indies campus based in Antigua.
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bloggingbri-blog · 5 years
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Day four,
Word of the day: Natafelen (verb)
Definition: Talking/socializing after dinner
In today’s lecture we talked about the reasons for the Dutch Republic’s economic success, 17th century flourishing industries in Amsterdam, Dutch expeditions and oversees trade, The Dutch East India Company, the West India Company, The Dutch Colonial Empire in Suriname, North America, and Curacao, and lastly the Dutch East Indies.
Over the course of the past few lectures, I’ve noticed Immigration appears to be a common historical occurrence in the Netherlands. We first talked about the influx of Jewish and Catholic communities, and today that discussion was built upon with the history of Indo and Surinamese communities coming to the Netherlands. On Monday I noticed a huge group of black people celebrating, waving flags while on the train ride to Museum square. Because of lecture today, I now know that was the Surinamese community celebrating their Emancipation Day at Oosterpark because July 1st, 1863 marked the abolition of slavery in Suriname.
The shipbuilding industry in Amsterdam has significant historical importance, as it was one of the main flourishing industries at the time because of its prime location near the sea. Zaanstreek was the center of the shipbuilding industry in 17th century Amsterdam and today I was able to see replicas of ships that could have been floating across the Atlantic Ocean during the 1600s. 
The VOC’s initial purpose was to trade spices between the Netherlands and present day Indonesia. The WIC’s main purpose on the other hand was initially for piracy and to arm themselves against the Spanish, but the resulting purpose ended up being deeply involved in the trading of Africans slaves throughout the Americas. The slave trade, colonization of Indonesia and Suriname have had a long lasting impact on the demographics of the Netherlands. This history helps to explain the vast racial and ethnic diversity in Amsterdam. 
The Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam had replicas of 17th century ships, historical paintings, and an entire section dedicated to the Oranje, the largest and fastest ship ever built in an Amsterdam shipyard. 
The porcelain figure pictured above is called the “Figure of an African Man” and it was commissioned by a wealthy European but created in China. I thought it was an appropriate object to pick since we began talking about the slave trade in class today. This object represents the various perceptions Europeans and Asians held about Africans during the 1700s. The red lips, wide eyes, and minimal clothing were all stereotypes associated with Africans and continued to be shown in racial characters of Black people throughout history.
Till next time,
Bri
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buckiegotit · 5 years
Text
ink to Statement: https://gallery.mailchimp.com/bb7c8b2d02cf287e7132078a2/files/bbf158af-8b48-4bb6-b02c-a10d83baba63/PM_Harris_Emancipation_Statement_August_5th_2019.pdf Statement by Prime Minister of St. Kitts and Nevis, Dr. the Hon. Timothy Harris On the Occasion of Emancipation Day/August Monday 2019 Monday, August 5th, 2019 We, a people of predominantly African ancestry who have historically been pillaged, conquered and confined, must proudly and solemnly celebrate today, August Monday as our Emancipation Day, which marks the 185th anniversary of The Abolition of Slavery Act coming into effect. Since August 1st, 1834, the journey towards true emancipation has been elusive and hard-fought, but well worth the sweat and struggle. On August 1st, 1834, an Apprenticeship System was introduced as a modified version of slavery whereby there would be a transition period to freedom. During the transition, apprentices were required to work without wages for 45 hours per week for a period of four to six years in order to purchase their freedom from their masters; household slaves were apprenticed for a four-year period and field slaves for six years – an arrangement that promoted greater disunity and discord between the two classes of slaves. Essentially, the Apprenticeship System served to further compensate the slave owners who had been granted generous cash payments; the British government made available £20 million to pay 47,000 claims by slave owners for the loss of human property. In sharp contrast, the apprentices received no compensation in return for their years of servitude. Indeed, the dawn of August 1st, 1834 brought chaos instead of celebration for the apprentices. Distinguished historian Douglas Hall wrote that, “In St. Kitts there were riots. Martial law was declared and a naval force sent from Antigua.” Moreover, a great many of the apprentices in St. Kitts participated in organized strikes and some of them were punished for refusing to work without pay. In these organized protests, the planter class was confronted with the collective visage of a determined, sturdy people who were in the nascent stages of establishing a formidable working-class movement. The apprentices eventually rallied to victory in 1838 when on August 1st the Apprenticeship System ended prematurely in the face of vocal public opposition and agitation leveled against it by the Anti-Slavery Society and other abolitionists. Roughly 100 years later in St. Kitts, the plantation workers’ political consciousness had become highly evolved as evidenced by the Buckley’s Uprising of January 28th and 29th, 1935. The landmark uprising saw cane cutters at Buckley’s Estate mount a protest that grew island-wide after being denied a pay increase from eight pence to one shilling (12 pence) for every ton of cane that they had cut. The Buckley’s Uprising gave rise to autonomous leadership that sprung from the ambitions, hopes and dreams of the ordinary estate workers. Recognizing the gigantic potential of the people’s yearning for more, Marcus Garvey stoked the fire in their collective belly with his words. Two years after the Buckley’s Uprising, Garvey delivered a powerful address in St. Kitts in November 1937 at the hall of the Mutual Improvement Society. Garvey told the packed room, “Man is a product of his mind. If you do not train and protect your mind, men with trained minds will subjugate you. People only liberate themselves through their state of mind.” The skilled orator from Jamaica who inspired the Rastafarian Movement also implored the people of St. Kitts to “Try to own something.” Marcus Garvey continued: “Make St. Kitts your Garden of Eden. If you don’t do it then other men will do it for you…Watch your steps. If there is natural wealth around, somebody is coming after it…Your country can be no greater than yourselves…Your St. Kitts will be no greater than your minds…If there is progress, it will be because of your minds.” Thirty-one years later in 1968, the first Premier of our country, the Honourable Robert L. Bradshaw, while delivering a speech at the University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago, issued “A Challenge to the Black West Indian,” as his address was titled. Premier Bradshaw’s assessment was that, “True enough, the black man has been a very successful crusader for political and social reform in the West Indies, and we have gained and maintained political power using it literally to change the face of islands as well as to compel recognition of human worth.” However, Bradshaw concluded “the black man has failed to take advantage of the economic opportunities brought about by his own political achievements,” while noting, “He seems quite satisfied - even happy - to labour for all and be master of none, seeking jobs here and there instead of trying to create them for himself. This failure constitutes perhaps his greatest challenge today.” Fast-forward to 2019, my Team Unity administration understands that failure is no longer an option; the people of St. Kitts and Nevis have too much to lose and too much at stake, and as we have seen just this year our citizenry ought to be wary of disreputable buccaneers who would want nothing more than to conquer our natural wealth and for us to play a menial role in its future development. Your Team Unity Government has therefore gone ahead and reduced the prices of land for commercial properties from $7.00 to $4.50 per square foot in several designated areas, presenting an opportunity for over 200 persons to benefit from this special offer over the next 12 months. Reflecting the popular will of the people, we are also moving ahead to grant legislative approval for, and to regulate the use of, cannabis for medicinal, religious and recreational purposes. Last week, we introduced in Parliament a Bill to amend the prohibitive Drugs (Prevention & Abatement of the Misuse and Abuse of Drugs) Act, Cap. 9.08, which forbade the cultivation, possession and use of marijuana. Those prohibitions dated back to a predecessor law of 1937. Of particular note is the insertion of a new subsection (3) in section 7. This new subsection states, “Subject to subsection (1), a person may apply to the Minister, through the Council, for a licence to cultivate cannabis for personal use and shall be guided by Regulations made under this Act.” It could not have come at a better time than close to Emancipation Day, an emotionally significant day that signifies our freedoms and rights. Sadly, too many of our youth have been criminalized and incarcerated in relation to cannabis, and as a result they have lost out on job and travel opportunities, opportunities to study abroad, a good future and a good name. Thankfully, your Team Unity Government has introduced a Bill to expunge the records of those criminalized. We offer a fresh start to our people in a new era of enlightenment and engagement with cannabis. We are committed to decriminalizing marijuana and in the near future expunging criminal records for related offences of a certain degree while ensuring that the health and welfare of our nation’s children are protected. In his iconic poem Harlem, Langston Hughes pondered on the question: “What happens to a dream deferred?” He asked: “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?...Or does it explode?” On this occasion of celebrating Emancipation, there is no better time to acknowledge our painful history, take stock of where we are and make amends for past mistakes. We owe it to ourselves, to the memory of our forebears and to our future generations. May God Bless St. Kitts and Nevis.
ink to Statement: https://gallery.mailchimp.com/bb7c8b2d02cf287e7132078a2/files/bbf158af-8b48-4bb6-b02c-a10d83baba63/PM_Harris_Emancipation_Statement_August_5th_2019.pdf Statement by Prime Minister of St. Kitts and Nevis, Dr. the Hon. Timothy Harris On the Occasion of Emancipation Day/August Monday 2019 Monday, August 5th, 2019 We, a people of predominantly African ancestry who have historically been pillaged, conquered and confined, must proudly and solemnly celebrate today, August Monday as our Emancipation Day, which marks the 185th anniversary of The Abolition of Slavery Act coming into effect. Since August 1st, 1834, the journey towards true emancipation has been elusive and hard-fought, but well worth the sweat and struggle. On August 1st, 1834, an Apprenticeship System was introduced as a modified version of slavery whereby there would be a transition period to freedom. During the transition, apprentices were required to work without wages for 45 hours per week for a period of four to six years in order to purchase their freedom from their masters; household slaves were apprenticed for a four-year period and field slaves for six years – an arrangement that promoted greater disunity and discord between the two classes of slaves. Essentially, the Apprenticeship System served to further compensate the slave owners who had been granted generous cash payments; the British government made available £20 million to pay 47,000 claims by slave owners for the loss of human property. In sharp contrast, the apprentices received no compensation in return for their years of servitude. Indeed, the dawn of August 1st, 1834 brought chaos instead of celebration for the apprentices. Distinguished historian Douglas Hall wrote that, “In St. Kitts there were riots. Martial law was declared and a naval force sent from Antigua.” Moreover, a great many of the apprentices in St. Kitts participated in organized strikes and some of them were punished for refusing to work without pay. In these organized protests, the planter class was confronted with the collective visage of a determined, sturdy people who were in the nascent stages of establishing a formidable working-class movement. The apprentices eventually rallied to victory in 1838 when on August 1st the Apprenticeship System ended prematurely in the face of vocal public opposition and agitation leveled against it by the Anti-Slavery Society and other abolitionists. Roughly 100 years later in St. Kitts, the plantation workers’ political consciousness had become highly evolved as evidenced by the Buckley’s Uprising of January 28th and 29th, 1935. The landmark uprising saw cane cutters at Buckley’s Estate mount a protest that grew island-wide after being denied a pay increase from eight pence to one shilling (12 pence) for every ton of cane that they had cut. The Buckley’s Uprising gave rise to autonomous leadership that sprung from the ambitions, hopes and dreams of the ordinary estate workers. Recognizing the gigantic potential of the people’s yearning for more, Marcus Garvey stoked the fire in their collective belly with his words. Two years after the Buckley’s Uprising, Garvey delivered a powerful address in St. Kitts in November 1937 at the hall of the Mutual Improvement Society. Garvey told the packed room, “Man is a product of his mind. If you do not train and protect your mind, men with trained minds will subjugate you. People only liberate themselves through their state of mind.” The skilled orator from Jamaica who inspired the Rastafarian Movement also implored the people of St. Kitts to “Try to own something.” Marcus Garvey continued: “Make St. Kitts your Garden of Eden. If you don’t do it then other men will do it for you…Watch your steps. If there is natural wealth around, somebody is coming after it…Your country can be no greater than yourselves…Your St. Kitts will be no greater than your minds…If there is progress, it will be because of your minds.” Thirty-one years later in 1968, the first Premier of our country, the Honourable Robert L. Bradshaw, while delivering a speech at the University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago, issued “A Challenge to the Black West Indian,” as his address was titled. Premier Bradshaw’s assessment was that, “True enough, the black man has been a very successful crusader for political and social reform in the West Indies, and we have gained and maintained political power using it literally to change the face of islands as well as to compel recognition of human worth.” However, Bradshaw concluded “the black man has failed to take advantage of the economic opportunities brought about by his own political achievements,” while noting, “He seems quite satisfied – even happy – to labour for all and be master of none, seeking jobs here and there instead of trying to create them for himself. This failure constitutes perhaps his greatest challenge today.” Fast-forward to 2019, my Team Unity administration understands that failure is no longer an option; the people of St. Kitts and Nevis have too much to lose and too much at stake, and as we have seen just this year our citizenry ought to be wary of disreputable buccaneers who would want nothing more than to conquer our natural wealth and for us to play a menial role in its future development. Your Team Unity Government has therefore gone ahead and reduced the prices of land for commercial properties from $7.00 to $4.50 per square foot in several designated areas, presenting an opportunity for over 200 persons to benefit from this special offer over the next 12 months. Reflecting the popular will of the people, we are also moving ahead to grant legislative approval for, and to regulate the use of, cannabis for medicinal, religious and recreational purposes. Last week, we introduced in Parliament a Bill to amend the prohibitive Drugs (Prevention & Abatement of the Misuse and Abuse of Drugs) Act, Cap. 9.08, which forbade the cultivation, possession and use of marijuana. Those prohibitions dated back to a predecessor law of 1937. Of particular note is the insertion of a new subsection (3) in section 7. This new subsection states, “Subject to subsection (1), a person may apply to the Minister, through the Council, for a licence to cultivate cannabis for personal use and shall be guided by Regulations made under this Act.” It could not have come at a better time than close to Emancipation Day, an emotionally significant day that signifies our freedoms and rights. Sadly, too many of our youth have been criminalized and incarcerated in relation to cannabis, and as a result they have lost out on job and travel opportunities, opportunities to study abroad, a good future and a good name. Thankfully, your Team Unity Government has introduced a Bill to expunge the records of those criminalized. We offer a fresh start to our people in a new era of enlightenment and engagement with cannabis. We are committed to decriminalizing marijuana and in the near future expunging criminal records for related offences of a certain degree while ensuring that the health and welfare of our nation’s children are protected. In his iconic poem Harlem, Langston Hughes pondered on the question: “What happens to a dream deferred?” He asked: “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?…Or does it explode?” On this occasion of celebrating Emancipation, there is no better time to acknowledge our painful history, take stock of where we are and make amends for past mistakes. We owe it to ourselves, to the memory of our forebears and to our future generations. May God Bless St. Kitts and Nevis.
Published 5 August 2019
Buckie Got It, St. Kitts and Nevis News Source
Link to Statement: https://gallery.mailchimp.com/bb7c8b2d02cf287e7132078a2/files/bbf158af-8b48-4bb6-b02c-a10d83baba63/PM_Harris_Emancipation_Statement_August_5th_2019.pdf
Statement by Prime Minister of St. Kitts and Nevis, 
Dr. the Hon. Timothy Harris  On the Occasion of Emancipation Day/August Monday 2019  Monday, August 5th, 2019
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philosophybits · 11 months
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The general sentiment of mankind is, that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, nor put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up.
Frederick Douglass, "The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies (1857)"
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This July 4, let’s not mince words: American independence in 1776 was a monumental mistake. We should be mourning the fact that we left the United Kingdom, not cheering it.
Of course, evaluating the wisdom of the American Revolution means dealing with counterfactuals. As any historian would tell you, this is a messy business. We obviously can’t be entirely sure how America would have fared if it had stayed in the British Empire longer, perhaps gaining independence a century or so later, along with Canada.
But I’m reasonably confident a world in which the revolution never happened would be better than the one we live in now, for three main reasons: Slavery would’ve been abolished earlier, American Indians would’ve faced rampant persecution but not the outright ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders perpetrated, and America would have a parliamentary system of government that makes policymaking easier and lessens the risk of democratic collapse.
The main reason the revolution was a mistake is that the British Empire, in all likelihood, would have abolished slavery earlier than the US did, and with less bloodshed.
Abolition in most of the British Empire occurred in 1834, following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. That left out India, but slavery was banned there, too, in 1843. In England itself, slavery was illegal at least going back to 1772. That’s decades earlier than the United States.
This alone is enough to make the case against the revolution. Decades less slavery is a massive humanitarian gain that almost certainly dominates whatever gains came to the colonists from independence.
The main benefit of the revolution to colonists was that it gave more political power to America’s white male minority. For the vast majority of the country — its women, slaves, American Indians — the difference between disenfranchisement in an independent America and disenfranchisement in a British-controlled colonial America was negligible. If anything, the latter would’ve been preferable, since at least women and minorities wouldn’t be singled out for disenfranchisement. From the vantage point of most of the country, who cares if white men had to suffer through what everyone else did for a while longer, especially if them doing so meant slaves gained decades of free life?
It’s true that had the US stayed, Britain would have had much more to gain from the continuance of slavery than it did without America. It controlled a number of dependencies with slave economies — notably Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies — but nothing on the scale of the American South. Adding that into the mix would’ve made abolition significantly more costly.
But the South’s political influence within the British Empire would have been vastly smaller than its influence in the early American republic. For one thing, the South, like all other British dependencies, lacked representation in Parliament. The Southern states were colonies, and their interests were discounted by the British government accordingly. But the South was also simply smaller as a chunk of the British Empire’s economy at the time than it was as a portion of America’s. The British crown had less to lose from the abolition of slavery than white elites in an independent America did.
The revolutionaries understood this. Indeed, a desire to preserve slavery helped fuel Southern support for the war. In 1775, after the war had begun in Massachusetts, the Earl of Dunmore, then governor of Virginia, offered the slaves of rebels freedom if they came and fought for the British cause. Eric Herschthal, a PhD student in history at Columbia, notes that the proclamation united white Virginians behind the rebel effort. He quotes Philip Fithian, who was traveling through Virginia when the proclamation was made, saying, “The Inhabitants of this Colony are deeply alarmed at this infernal Scheme. It seems to quicken all in Revolution to overpower him at any Risk.” Anger at Dunmore’s emancipation ran so deep that Thomas Jefferson included it as a grievance in a draft of the Declaration of Independence. That’s right: the declaration could’ve included “they’re conscripting our slaves” as a reason for independence.
For white slaveholders in the South, Simon Schama writes in Rough Crossings, his history of black loyalism during the Revolution, the war was “a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery.”
Slaves also understood that their odds of liberation were better under British rule than independence. Over the course of the war, about 100,000 African slaves escaped, died, or were killed, and tens of thousands enlisted in the British army, far more than joined the rebels. “Black Americans’ quest for liberty was mostly tied to fighting for the British — the side in the War for Independence that offered them freedom,” historian Gary Nash writes in The Forgotten Fifth, his history of African Americans in the revolution. At the end of the war, thousands who helped the British were evacuated to freedom in Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and England.
This is not to say the British were motivated by a desire to help slaves; of course they weren’t. But American slaves chose a side in the revolution, the side of the crown. They were no fools. They knew that independence meant more power for the plantation class that had enslaved them and that a British victory offered far greater prospects for freedom.
Starting with the Proclamation of 1763, the British colonial government placed firm limits on westward settlement in the United States. It wasn’t motivated by an altruistic desire to keep American Indians from being subjugated or anything; it just wanted to avoid border conflicts.
But all the same, the policy enraged American settlers, who were appalled that the British would seem to side with Indians over white men. “The British government remained willing to conceive of Native Americans as subjects of the crown, similar to colonists,” Ethan Schmidt writes in Native Americans in the American Revolution. “American colonists … refused to see Indians as fellow subjects. Instead, they viewed them as obstacles in the way of their dreams of land ownership and trading wealth.” This view is reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which attacks King George III for backing “merciless Indian Savages.”
American independence made the proclamation void here. It’s not void in Canada — indeed, there the 1763 proclamation is viewed as a fundamental document providing rights to self-government to First Nations tribes. It’s mentioned explicitly in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada’s Bill of Rights), which protects “any rights or freedoms that have been recognized by the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763” for all aboriginal people. Historian Colin Calloway writes in The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America that the proclamation “still forms the basis for dealings between Canada’s government and Canada’s First Nations.”
And, unsurprisingly, Canada didn’t see Indian wars and removals as large and sweeping as occurred in the US. They still committed horrible, indefensible crimes. Canada, under British rule and after, brutally mistreated aboriginal people, not least through government-inflicted famines and the state’s horrific seizure of children from their families so they could attend residential schools. But the country didn’t experience a westward expansion as violent and deadly as that pursued by the US government and settlers. Absent the revolution, Britain probably would’ve moved into Indian lands. But fewer people would have died.
Robert Lindneux
None of this is to minimize the extent of British and Canadian crimes against Natives. “It’s a hard case to make because even though I do think Canada’s treatment of Natives was better than the United States, it was still terrible,” the Canadian essayist Jeet Heer tells me in an email (Heer has also written a great case against American independence). “On the plus side for Canada: there were no outright genocides like the Trail of Tears (aside from the Beothuks of Newfoundland). The population statistics are telling: 1.4 million people of aboriginal descent in Canada as against 5.2 million in the USA. Given the fact that America is far more hospitable as an environment and has 10 times the non-aboriginal population, that’s telling.”
Independence also enabled acquisition of territory in the West through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War. That ensured that America’s particularly rapacious brand of colonialism ensnared yet more native peoples. And while Mexico and France were no angels, what America brought was worse. Before the war, the Apache and Comanche were in frequent violent conflict with the Mexican government. But they were Mexican citizens. The US refused to make them American citizens for a century. And then, of course, it violently forced them into reservations, killing many in the process.
American Indians would have still, in all likelihood, faced violence and oppression absent American independence, just as First Nations people in Canada did. But American-scale ethnic cleansing wouldn’t have occurred. And like America’s slaves, American Indians knew this. Most tribes sided with the British or stayed neutral; only a small minority backed the rebels. Generally speaking, when a cause is opposed by the two most vulnerable groups in a society, it’s probably a bad idea. So it is with the cause of American independence.
Honestly, I think earlier abolition alone is enough to make the case against the revolution, and it combined with less-horrible treatment of American Indians is more than enough. But it’s worth taking a second to praise a less important but still significant consequence of the US sticking with Britain: we would’ve, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one.
And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones. They’re significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don’t lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature. They lead to much less gridlock.
In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours. In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that’s literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than with presidential systems.
This is no trivial matter. Efficient passage of legislation has huge humanitarian consequences. It makes measures of planetary importance, like carbon taxes, easier to get through; they still face political pushback, of course — Australia’s tax got repealed, after all — but they can be enacted in the first place, which is far harder in the US system. And the efficiency of parliamentary systems enables larger social welfare programs that reduce inequality and improve life for poor citizens. Government spending in parliamentary countries is about 5 percent of GDP higher, after controlling for other factors, than in presidential countries. If you believe in redistribution, that’s very good news indeed.
The Westminister system of parliamentary democracy also benefits from weaker upper houses. The US is saddled with a Senate that gives Wyoming the same power as California, which has more than 66 times as many people. Worse, the Senate is equal in power to the lower, more representative house. Most countries following the British system have upper houses — only New Zealand was wise enough to abolish it — but they’re far, far weaker than their lower houses. The Canadian Senate and the House of Lords affect legislation only in rare cases. At most, they can hold things up a bit or force minor tweaks. They aren’t capable of obstruction anywhere near the level of the US Senate.
Former Canadian Governor General Michaëlle Jean. Sophia Paris/MINUSTAH via Getty Images
Finally, we’d still likely be a monarchy, under the rule of Elizabeth II, and constitutional monarchy is the best system of government known to man. Generally speaking, in a parliamentary system, you need a head of state who is not the prime minister to serve as a disinterested arbiter when there are disputes about how to form a government — say, if the largest party should be allowed to form a minority government or if smaller parties should be allowed to form a coalition, to name a recent example from Canada. That head of state is usually a figurehead president elected by the parliament (Germany, Italy) or the people (Ireland, Finland), or a monarch. And monarchs are better.
Monarchs are more effective than presidents precisely because they lack any semblance of legitimacy. It would be offensive for Queen Elizabeth or her representatives in Canada, New Zealand, etc. to meddle in domestic politics. Indeed, when the governor-general of Australia did so in 1975 it set off a constitutional crisis that made it clear such behavior would not be tolerated. But figurehead presidents have some degree of democratic legitimacy and are typically former politicians. That enables a greater rate of shenanigans — like when Italian President Giorgio Napolitano schemed, successfully, to remove Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister due at least in part to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s entreaties to do so.
Napolitano is the rule, rather than the exception. Oxford political scientists Petra Schleiter and Edward Morgan-Jones have found that presidents, whether elected indirectly by parliament or directly by the people, are likelier to allow governments to change without new elections than monarchs are. In other words, they’re likelier to change the government without any democratic input at all. Monarchy is, perhaps paradoxically, the more democratic option.
John Singleton Copley depicts a black loyalist soldier in “The Death of Major Peirson.”
Original Source -> 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake
via The Conservative Brief
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fatehbaz · 4 years
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Me, @ the wealthy imperial British landowners in the 1790s in the Caribbean who, despite living near diverse communities of residents with knowledge of the land and despite technically controlling vibrant tropical ecosystems, were still fixated on sugarcane and so they purposely ignored local ecology and native island vegetation, and purposely ignored advice from both their own imperialist scientists and local plant experts to diversify the plants growing in the soil, in order to maximize profit from their non-native or unsustainable industrial-scale monoculture crops like sugarcane, but they ended up destroying the soil, ostracizing their best political allies, creating a trade war with their closest business partners, doubling the price they had to spend on imports, and bankrupting themselves before then being too prideful to eat anything other than European food, refusing to cultivate “tropical” or “native” food plants, so then they panicked and lost even more money desperately trying to import other redundant European plants unsuitable for the climate, which also inadvertently inspired slaves to create their own autonomous food gardens and informal markets which allowed women, the enslaved, and the poor to build independent foodsheds and social networks that supplied the foundation for eventual uprisings, rebellion, and emancipation: “Congratulations, you played yourself.”
Imperialists will be like “let’s ignore local ecology for the sake of profit.” But then sometimes they’re too prideful or oblivious to respect local ecology even when it’s clearly in their best interest and would actually grant them much more money and power. And then: “Oh no, there’s a rebellion.”
Like this:
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This is a story of the Caribbean’s globalization, but it’s all the more remarkable for the planter’s resistance to becoming local to the tropical environment. Far from embracing the plant diversity of the tropics, wealthy European planters homogenized the landscape in a process of early environmental globalization. They perceived a crisis in the food supply because of their own inability to adapt their consumption practices to the ecology of the local landscape.
[T]he environmental and social transformation of the Caribbean sugar islands is instructive here -- by the time the English had wrested Jamaica from the Spanish in the seventeenth century [...] the island’s flora and fauna had been radically transformed with the introduction of sugar cane, plantains and bananas, coffee, indigo, and other crops from African trade routes. Few of the remaining indigenous plants were utilized in an expanding external market economy with the exception of small plots of cassava, sweet potato, and the pimento. As sugar cane is one of the most demanding crops in terms of its consumption of labor and soil, even in the more diverse ecologies such as Jamaica, it consumed most of the island’s resources. [...]
Their construction of sugar monoculture contributed to their dependence on imported food items that ranged from pickled beef and pork, onions, potatoes, corn, flour, and salt cod. From Havana they obtained their cattle and horses, and from across the Atlantic they imported iron tools for plantation agriculture as well as their supplies of wool, leather, glassware, paints, paper and tobacco. As such, this particular class consumed and produced in British parochial terms rather than acclimating to the Caribbean’s diverse social and environmental spaces. [...]
Caribbean planters had no interest in diversifying their environment or economy when sugar was so lucrative. Lowell Ragatz has argued that having stacked the British Parliament with their interests, the Jamaican Assembly had created a trade war in the Atlantic to ensure that they had no competition from other sugar colonies, effectively destroying their own regional trade networks. [...] [lmao]
[T]e planter-historian Edward Long published his History of Jamaica (1774), which included an extended critique of the island’s dependence on external trade [...] [T]o facilitate the process, bounties were offered for the import of economic food plants. Banks’ Royal Society offered prize awards and gold medals for anyone who could improve the plant economy in the West Indies by importing consumable items such as olives, opium, cinnamon, nutmeg, indigo, safflower, sesame, vanilla, cloves, peppercorn and mango. [...]
The plantation slaves who cultivated indigenous and African staples in their provision grounds during their few precious moments away from the cane fields had little choice butto be imbricated in a globalization process. European planters cultivated African linguistic diversity in the fields, using globalization as a tool to establish mutual unintelligibility to reduce slave insurrection. Yet Caribbean planters were largely dependent upon the African and indigenous crops of the provision grounds, which were a vital component of the islands’ internal economies and were integral to the region’s transition to emancipation and independence. Fearing the process of tropical acclimatization associated with moral and cultural decay, the planters consumed European staples, perhaps to sustain a myth that they had not left temperate shores. [...]
Yet they also inadvertently supported a vibrant internal market economy in which slaves provided the majority of the region’s sustenance and gained significant amounts of currency, autonomy, and even freedom. By growing African and indigenous cultigens, the slave provision grounds and their internal markets contributed a vibrant, alternative economy to the monoculture of the plantocracy. Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan estimate that by the late eighteen century, over 10,000 Jamaican slaves attended the Kingston market on a weekly basis. The success of the markets caused planters to complain that a fifth to a half of the currency in Jamaica and the Windward Islands was in slave hands. Miles beyond the Euclidean geometries of the plantation, Barry Higman has explained, slaves were able to cultivate alternative concepts of spatial order [...].
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Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.” 2008.
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djgblogger-blog · 6 years
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Prison records from 1800s Georgia show mass incarceration's racially charged beginnings
http://bit.ly/2IBcRYw
A Georgia penitentiary in 1911. Library of Congress
Henry Minter was working as a farm laborer in Georgia in the 1870s when he met Mary Dotson, a young black servant girl. The couple never married – which would have been illegal at the time – but they stayed together until Henry’s death.
Mary, who was left with their four children, then became a washerwoman in Atlanta. Their daughter, Florence, tried to raise funds by making moonshine. Caught in 1920, she served three years for illegally making liquor.
When Florence’s father was born in the 1850s, the state prison population was largely white. But, by the time she was imprisoned, the majority of prisoners were black.
Newly digitized records from the 19th and 20th centuries reveal the names and the stories of thousands of prisoners like Florence – as well as the racially charged beginnings of mass incarceration in the U.S.
Mass incarceration
In 2016, in the U.S., about 1.5 million people were in prison. Approximately 12 to 13 percent of the national population is African-American, but this group makes up over one-third of prisoners.
Why does the American prison system disproportionately imprison black men? Some analysts blame the war on drugs. But that wasn’t the start of the connection between race and imprisonment. Previous historical research shows that, after the Civil War, there was a significant rise in imprisonment of former slaves in the U.S.
The end of slavery also saw a rise in prison populations across the British Empire. Before the abolition of slavery in 1833, the West Indies had a prison population of approximately 1,000 inmates. By 1835, it had risen eightfold.
As in the British West Indies, the end of slavery in the U.S. was accompanied by a desire to incapacitate “problem” populations in other ways. As the future governor of Mississippi’s penitentiary stated at the time, “Emancipating the negroes will require a system of penitentiaries.”
Georgia’s prisoners
Ancestry.com has uploaded prison records to the internet, to satisfy genealogists searching for ancestors who may have been imprisoned. Thousands of digitized prison records are now available for not just the U.S., but also for Canada, the U.K., Australia and other countries.
We presented our research on digitized records of Georgia’s penal system at a workshop on prison history at the University of Georgia on April 10. Our analysis of nearly 25,000 prison register entries shows how connections between race and imprisonment started in the 1860s.
The records’ range of information for Georgia is impressive, running for 200 years from 1817. In addition to the name of the prisoner, the offense and details of the sentence, the records also include details like eye color, height, birthplace and place of conviction, as well as whether the prisoner was subsequently pardoned or escaped.
Before the Civil War, an average of 40 people a year were sent to prison in Georgia. Samuel W. Whitworth from Jones County was a typical prisoner. The blond and blue-eyed cotton farmer was jailed for causing “mayhem” – probably some drunken violence – on March 1, 1817. Sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, he managed to escape on Christmas Eve 1820. He was later recaptured and hanged in South Carolina.
As a white man, Whitworth was part of the majority at a Georgia prison. Between 1817 and 1865, records reveal that a fifth of inmates were described as “black,” “dark” or “copper.” The range of descriptors used to describe “complexion” – later swapped out for the category of “race” in 1868 – were impressionistic and casually derogatory. About 900 people in our sample were described as being the color of “ginger cake.”
In 1864, just seven former slaves were imprisoned in Georgia. By 1868, this had risen to 147.
From the 1870s to the 1900s, sentenced prisoners were forced to labor in the fields, rather than stay inside prison walls. When this convict leasing system ended, the figures again rose inexorably upwards. The number of prisoners rose from 42 in 1900, to over 500 in 1910, to over 1000 by 1920.
Our research shows that the huge upswing in Georgia prison numbers throughout the 19th and early 20th century was caused by sweeping young black men through the prison gates. The increase in numbers was primarily due to a rapid and sustained influx of African-Americans between ages 18 and 22.
Stories in the data
Statistics can only take us so far. Using methods developed in a previous project on British convicts, Digital Panopticon, we have started to match together digitized trial reports, census records, prison documents and family histories in order to reconstruct prisoners’ lives before and after they were imprisoned in the system. Ultimately, we hope to make this research freely available online.
In our view, these people should not be defined either by their status as former slaves or as prisoners. They spent time in prison, but then were released to build their lives again.
For example, Rose Jackson, with 15 siblings, born in 1856, was convicted of stealing from her employer’s house in Muscogee, Georgia. She served six years inside the prison before resuming her life, never to be in trouble with the courts ever again.
James Wimley – described as a 5’ 4" black man – was convicted of theft at age 15 in Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta. Despite serving six years in custody, he went on to work on a farm, got married and had children. In 1909, he was still living with four of his children as a widower in the area now known as Cartersville City.
Prisoners like Jackson and Wimley often led successful lives on release, despite the inequalities of the system that had locked them up. When searching for employment and a place to live today, former prisoners of African or Hispanic descent may face similar problems to those faced by former slaves 150 ago.
Black prisoners matter, even if historians have sometimes been blind to that. Thanks to these newly digitized records, researchers can now compare the lives of people who were imprisoned in Alcatraz, Kansas Leavenworth, Eastern State Penitentiary, and so on. Historians like ourselves are now equipped to reveal the names and stories of thousands of forgotten prisoners.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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onlineeflteacher · 7 years
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If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
--Frederick Douglass "The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857
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philosophybits · 1 year
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The man who limits his admiration of good actions to the country in which he happens to be born ... or to the nation or community of which he forms a small part, is a most pitiable object. With him to be one of a nation is more than to be one of the human family.
Frederick Douglass, "The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies (1857)"
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