This book tackles a hitherto neglected topic by presenting Ireland as very much a part of the Black Atlantic world. It shows how slaves and sugar produced economic and political change in Eighteenth-century Ireland and discusses the role of Irish emigrants in slave societies in the Caribbean and North America.
Although the significance of transatlantic currents of influence on slavery and abolition in the Americas has received substantial scholarly attention, the focus has tended to be largely on the British transatlantic, or on the effects of American racial politics on the emergence of Irish American political identity in the US. The specifics of Ireland’s role as a transnational hub of anti-slavery literary and political activity, and as deeply imbricated in debates around slavery and freedom, are often overlooked. This collection points to the particularity and significance of Ireland’s place in nineteenth-century exchanges around slavery and anti-slavery. Importantly, it foregrounds the context of empire – Ireland was both one of the ‘home’ nations of the UK, on many levels deeply complicit in British imperialism, and a space of emergent anti-colonial radicalism, bourgeois nationalism, and significant literary opportunity for Black abolitionist writers – as a key mediator of the ways in which the conceptual and practical responses to slavery and anti-slavery took shape in the Irish context. Moving beyond the transatlantic model often used to position debates around slavery in the Americas, it incorporates discussion around campaigns to abolish slavery within the empire, opening up the possibility of wider comparative discussions of slavery and anti-slavery around the Indian Ocean and the African continent. It also emphasizes the plurality of positions in play across class, political, racial and national lines, and the ways in which those positions shifted in response to changing social, cultural and economic conditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies.
The story of the anti-slavery movement in Ireland is little known, yet when Frederick Douglass visited the country in 1845, he described Irish abolitionists as the most ‘ardent’ that he had ever encountered. Moreover, their involvement proved to be an important factor in ending the slave trade, and later slavery, in both the British Empire and in America. While Frederick Douglass remains the most renowned black abolitionist to visit Ireland, he was not the only one. This publication traces the stories of ten black abolitionists, including Douglass, who travelled to Ireland in the decades before the American Civil War, to win support for their cause. It opens with former slave, Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped as a boy from his home in Africa, and who was hosted by the United Irishmen in the 1790s; it closes with the redoubtable Sarah Parker Remond, who visited Ireland in 1859 and chose never to return to America. The stories of these ten men and women, and their interactions with Ireland, are diverse and remarkable.
The abolition of slavery across large parts of the world was one of the most significant transformations in the nineteenth century, shaping economies, societies, and political institutions. This book shows how the international context was essential in shaping the abolition of slavery.
In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.
Kidnapped from Galway, Ireland, as a young girl, shipped to Barbados, and forced to work the land alongside African slaves, Cot Daley's life has been shaped by injustice. In this stunning debut novel, Kate McCafferty re-creates, through Cot's story, the history of the more than fifty thousand Irish who were sold as indentured servants to Caribbean plantation owners during the seventeenth century. As Cot tells her story-the brutal journey to Barbados, the harrowing years of fieldwork on the sugarcane plantations, her marriage to an African slave and rebel leader, and the fate of her children—her testimony reveals an exceptional woman's astonishing life.
Bronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history, applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery colonization movements of Britain and America.
Although the significance of transatlantic currents of influence on slavery and abolition in the Americas has received substantial scholarly attention, the focus has tended to be largely on the British transatlantic, or on the effects of American racial politics on the emergence of Irish American political identity in the US. The specifics of Ireland's role as a transnational hub of anti-slavery literary and political activity, and as deeply imbricated in debates around slavery and freedom, are often overlooked. This collection points to the particularity and significance of Ireland's place in nineteenth-century exchanges around slavery and anti-slavery. Importantly, it foregrounds the context of empire - Ireland was both one of the 'home' nations of the UK, on many levels deeply complicit in British imperialism, and a space of emergent anti-colonial radicalism, bourgeois nationalism, and significant literary opportunity for Black abolitionist writers - as a key mediator of the ways in which the conceptual and practical responses to slavery and anti-slavery took shape in the Irish context. Moving beyond the transatlantic model often used to position debates around slavery in the Americas, it incorporates discussion around campaigns to abolish slavery within the empire, opening up the possibility of wider comparative discussions of slavery and anti-slavery around the Indian Ocean and the African continent. It also emphasizes the plurality of positions in play across class, political, racial and national lines, and the ways in which those positions shifted in response to changing social, cultural and economic conditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies.
A history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone and how the British used its success to justify colonialism in Africa British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the slave trade was abolished, anti-slavery activists in England profited, colonial officials in Freetown, Sierra Leone, relied on former slaves as soldiers and as cheap labor, and the British armed forces conscripted former slaves to fight in the West Indies and in West Africa. At once scholarly and compelling, this history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone draws on a wealth of archival material. Scanlan’s social and material study offers insight into how the success of British anti-slavery policies were used to justify colonialism in Africa. He reframes a moment considered to be a watershed in British public morality as rather the beginning of morally ambiguous, violent, and exploitative colonial history.
This is the forgotten story of the million white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale. Using the firsthand testimony of a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow, Giles Milton vividly reconstructs a disturbing, little known chapter of history. Pellow was bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco who was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of enormous scale and grandeur, built entirely by Christian slave labour. As his personal slave, he would witness first-hand the barbaric splendour of the imperial court, as well as experience the daily terror of a cruel regime. Gripping, immaculately researched, and brilliantly realised, WHITE GOLD reveals an explosive chapter of popular history, told with all the pace and verve of one of our finest historians.