Montpelier, Jamaica

Montpelier, Jamaica PDF Author: B. W. Higman
Publisher: University of the West Indies Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
This detailed study of the life of a Jamaican plantation community during slavery and the post-emancipation period is based on archaeological investigations as well as more traditional documentary sources. The family and household structure of the slave population is analysed and linked to the physical layout of the village. A comprehensive picture of the material culture of the plantation workers is facilitated by sources, and covers everything from foodways to clothing, ornament and architecture.

Montpelier, Jamaica

Montpelier, Jamaica PDF Author: B. W. Higman
Publisher: University of the West Indies Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
This detailed study of the life of a Jamaican plantation community during slavery and the post-emancipation period is based on archaeological investigations as well as more traditional documentary sources. The family and household structure of the slave population is analysed and linked to the physical layout of the village. A comprehensive picture of the material culture of the plantation workers is facilitated by sources, and covers everything from foodways to clothing, ornament and architecture.

Plantation Slavery, Jamaica and Absentee Ownership

Plantation Slavery, Jamaica and Absentee Ownership PDF Author: RICHARD C. MAGUIRE
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837651248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
An economic history of the Burton family of Norfolk, and their enslaved workers on the Chiswick sugar estate. While the Atlantic plantation economy covered vast areas of the globe and saw the largest forced movement of people in human history, any global history is the sum of myriad local stories. This book recounts one of them. It is the story of a Norfolk family, the Burtons, who owned the Chiswick sugar estate on the island of Jamaica. The family inherited the estate in 1788 and for fifty-eight years ran it from Norfolk and Suffolk as 'absentee' landlords. Drawing on new archival research in Britain, the United States and Jamaica, this book makes an important intervention to our understanding of key debates in the economic history of plantation slavery: the decline of the planter class, the importance of British abolitionism, the way in which plantations were operated, the mechanics of absentee ownership, and, importantly, the lives of the enslaved people whose exploitation sustained the entire system. Although the story of Chiswick's enslaved workers before the late 1820s is difficult to reconstruct, its traces can be gleaned from the accounting records and letters of the estate's owners. Their story illuminates the economic data and managerial letters and reveals that Chiswick's workers were crucial in shaping the history of the estate. From the 1830s the workers' activity became central, as they responded to emancipation by gradually asserting their rights. In the end, it was the action of the formerly enslaved workers that made the Burtons' continuing ownership of the Chiswick estate economically unviable. While the wider context of abolition made this possible, it was the response of these workers, including strike actions, which decided the fate of the absentee-owned Chiswick sugar estate. RICHARD C. MAGUIRE is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of History, UEA. He is the author of Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833 (Boydell Press, 2021).

A Tale of Two Plantations

A Tale of Two Plantations PDF Author: Richard S. Dunn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674735366
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 553

Get Book Here

Book Description
Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families.

Plantation Jamaica, 1750-1850

Plantation Jamaica, 1750-1850 PDF Author: B. W. Higman
Publisher: University of West Indies Press
ISBN: 9789766402099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
Aalyses the important but neglected role of the attorneys who managed estates, chiefly for absentee proprietors, and assesses their efficiency and impact on Jamaica during slavery and freedom. This work charts both the extent of absentee ownership and the complex structure of the managerial hierarchy that stretched across the Atlantic.

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves PDF Author: Trevor Burnard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663924X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
"As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because to speak bluntly it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy."--

Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833

Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833 PDF Author: Richard Maguire
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783276339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
What were the lives of Africans in provincial England like during the early modern period? How, where, and when did they arrive in rural counties? How were they perceived by their contemporaries? This book examines the population of Africans in Norfolk and Suffolk from 1467, the date of the first documented reference to an African in the region, to 1833, when Parliament voted to abolish slavery in the British Empire. It uncovers the complexity of these Africans' historical experience, considering the interaction of local custom, class structure, tradition, memory, and the gradual impact of the Atlantic slaving economy. Richard C. Maguire proposes that the initial regional response to arriving Africans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not defined exclusively by ideas relating to skin colour, but rather by local understandings of religious status, class position, ideas about freedom and bondage, and immediate local circumstances. Arriving Africans were able to join the region's working population through baptism, marriage, parenthood, and work. This manner of response to Africans was challenged as local merchants and gentry begin doing business with the slaving economy from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Although the racialised ideas underpinning Atlantic slavery changed the social circumstances of Africans in the region, the book suggests that they did not completely displace older, more inclusive, ideas in working communities.

Traders, Planters and Slaves

Traders, Planters and Slaves PDF Author: David W. Galenson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521894142
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the operation of the Atlantic slave trade industry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, focusing on the market behaviour of the Royal African Company - the largest English company engaged in the slave trade - and the sugar planters of the Caribbean.

The World the Slaveholders Made

The World the Slaveholders Made PDF Author: Eugene D. Genovese
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819562043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
A seminal and original work that delves deeply into what slaveholders thought.

Capitalism and Slavery

Capitalism and Slavery PDF Author: Eric Williams
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469619490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

Contested Bodies

Contested Bodies PDF Author: Sasha Turner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081229405X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.