Abstract: In April 1816, the enslaved in their quest for freedom under Bussa, suffered a heavy military defeat. Hundreds were killed in battle and executed; their homes in the parish of St Philip were burnt and many were transported from the island. Yet, despite this military defeat, the enslaved continued to resist steadfastly, using a range of responses such as rebellion, the murder of enslavers, slave plots, marronage and demands for compensation. Using newspapers, governors’ correspondence and plantation records, this article discusses the resistance of the enslaved in the period 1816 to 1838 in their pursuit for freedom. It is argued that despite the heavy suppression of the 1816 rebellion by the military, enslaved people continued to be militant in the period leading up to emancipation in 1838. Furthermore, this militancy was influenced by anti-slavery political consciousness and notions of freedom delayed by the local enslavers amidst intense local and international political debates over amelioration and abolition.
Abstract: By using primary documents of the English Leeward Islands Colony, a more accurate and complete picture of frontier settlement in marginal areas of the Caribbean has been painted. The development of population, the English and later British governmental structure is traced, as well as trade in the island group today known as the British Virgin Islands, from a 1672 battle with a mixed group of settlers under the Dutch to the beginnings of a stable population by about 1700 and a meaningful government in the decades that follow. The English military action against the Dutch fort on Tortola in the year 1672, as part of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, is often presented in popular sources such as Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Brittanica as a kind of “founding moment” for the English settlement, akin to the capture of Jamaica in 1655. In reality, the early presence (and, sometimes, absence) of English-descended people, of those African people who they often forcibly brought with them, and of English government, society or military is more checkered. Though limited by the nature of the records, created by the white enslavers, the lives of those of African descent brought to these islands will be considered where possible.
Abstract: The British West Indies and its sugar industry emerge at the heart of wealth and power by the middle of the eighteenth century. When assessing this development and analysing how it connected Britain and the Americas there is the tendency to concentrate on those who made fortunes. This has shaped our understanding of the quality of life engendered and nature of the societies that were created on both sides of the Atlantic. Less emphasis is placed on the full range of the experiences of those who migrated temporarily or permanently to the region in the quest for fortune. The people involved included not just large and visible investors such as planters, merchants, bankers, manufacturers and members of government, but as Eric Williams noted in Capitalism and Slavery, members of the middle and working classes. This discussion shifts the focus from the “big planters and merchants” and exposes hidden lives and less visible people who became entangled in an increasingly compilated network, which supported movement from different groups in the society between both sides of the Atlantic world. By focusing on Scotland, with emphasis on the highlands and islands, this paper develops Williams’ contention that sugar and enslavement also affected the lives of “everyday people”. African enslavement made the British West Indies a land of opportunity not just for white planters and merchants, but also for white men from middle and lower-income groups.
