Slave naming patterns : onomastics and the taxonomy of race in eighteenth-century Jamaica

Every year, slave owners responsible for managing estates were required by Jamaican law to submit to the local vestry an account of the whites, slaves, and livestock on their properties. Whites were listed by first name and surname; slaves were denoted by first name, sometimes accompanied by a modifier referring to age, occupation, or ethnicity; and stock were merely enumerated. Thus, on July 3, 1782, Thomas Thistlewood, penkeeper and proprietor of Breadnut Island Pen, rode to Savanna La Mar and handed to his fellow vestrymen the names of his thirty-two slaves. The list began with the first slave that he owned—an Ibo slave called Lincoln—and ended with his most recent addition— Nancy, the one-year-old daughter of Phoebe, a Coromantee slave purchased in 1765. He also noted that he owned thirty unnamed head of cattle

Caribbean slavery, British abolition and the cultural politics of venereal disease in the Atlantic world

Venereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alik

Teaching in Europe and researching in the United States

No abstract available

Commerce and Credit: Female Credit Networks in Eighteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica

Recent work on white women in Jamaica has shown that they were active participants in Jamaica’s slave economy. This article adds to this recent literature through an innovative use of social network analysis (SNA) to examine the credit networks in which women operated in the thriving eighteenth-century British Atlantic town of Kingston, Jamaica. In particular, it uses closeness and centrality measures to quantify the distinctive role that white women had in local credit networks. These were different from those of men involved in transatlantic trade, but were vital in facilitating female access to credit enabling domestic retail trade. White female traders in particular facilitated female access to credit networks, acting as significant conduits of money and information in ways that were crucial to the local economy. Their connectedness within trade networks increased over time, despite their greater exposure than larger traders to economic shocks. We therefore demonstrate that white women were active protagonists in the developing economy of eighteenth-century Jamaica

The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica

Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. These plantation regimes were, to adopt a metaphor of the era, complex "machines," finely tuned over time by planters, merchants, and officials to become more efficient at exploiting their enslaved workers and serving their empires. Using a wide range of archival evidence, The Plantation Machine traces a critical half-century in the development of the social, economic, and political frameworks that made these societies possible. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus find deep and unexpected similarities in these two prize colonies of empires that fought each other throughout the period. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue experienced, at nearly the same moment, a bitter feud between planters and governors, a violent conflict between masters and enslaved workers, a fateful tightening of racial laws, a steady expansion of the slave trade, and metropolitan criticism of planters' cruelty.The core of The Plantation Machine addresses the Seven Years' War and its aftermath. The events of that period, notably a slave poisoning scare in Saint-Domingue and a near-simultaneous slave revolt in Jamaica, cemented white dominance in both colonies. Burnard and Garrigus argue that local political concerns, not emerging racial ideologies, explain the rise of distinctive forms of racism in these two societies. The American Revolution provided another imperial crisis for the beneficiaries of the plantation machine, but by the 1780s whites in each place were prospering as never before—and blacks were suffering in new and disturbing ways. The result was that Jamaica and Saint-Domingue became vitally important parts of the late eighteenth-century American empires of Britain and France

Eating Paradise: Food as Coloniality and Leisure

Sandals Resorts’ Gourmet Discovery Dining programme continues the company’s practice of marketing difference by combining tourism with the commodification of food from non-Western cultures (Dodman and Rhiney 2008). The article draws on bell hooks’ (1992) concept of ‘eating the other’ and the analysis undertakes an interdisciplinary approach that combines visual analysis with Anibal Quijano’s (2007) concept of modernity/coloniality. The discussion explores the trends of global multiculturalism that have been adopted by Sandals in a hybridized cut and mix approach to selling a packaged ideal of the Caribbean. The visual techniques devised to create a culinary holiday package are overlaid onto a manufactured and homogenised or McDonaldized (Ritzer and Liska 1997) Caribbean that provides insight into the way in which global neoliberal multiculturalism is framed by ongoing colonial relations after formal colonial rule has ended in the Caribbean region

Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean

Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites to dominate and control the enslaved majority. By the end of the eighteenth century, British metropolitan observers had an entrenched opinion of Caribbean whites as gluttons. Travelers reported on the sumptuous meals and excessive drinking of the planter class. Abolitionists associated these features of local society with the corrupting influences of slavery. Excessive consumption and lack of self-control were seen as symptoms of white creole failure. This article explores how local cuisine and white creole eating rituals developed as part of slave societies and examines the ways in which ideas about hospitality and gluttony fed into the debates over slavery that led to the dismantling of slavery and the fall of the planter class