Jamaica In The Age Of Revolution

"The book focuses on the history of Jamaica during the years between Tacky's Revolt, the American Revolution, and the beginnings of parliamentary abolitionist legislation in 1788"--

La 4e de la jaquette indique : "The story of the struggle over slavery in the British empire - as told through the rich, expressive, and frequently shocking letters of one of the wealthiest British slaveholders ever to have lived."

From 1795 through 1800, a series of revolts rocked Curaçao, a small but strategically located Dutch colony just off the South American continent. A combination of internal and external factors produced these uprisings, in which free and enslaved islanders particiapted with various objectives. A major slave revolt in August 1795 was the opening salvo for these tumultuous five years. While this revolt is a well-known episode in Curaçao an history, its wider Caribbean and Atlantic context is much less known. Also lacking are studies sketching a clear picture of the turbulent five years that followed. It is in these dark corners that this volume aims to shed light. The events discussed in this book fall squarely within the Age of Revolutions, the period that began with the onset of the American Revolution in 1775, was punctuated by the demise of the ancien régime in France, saw the establishment of a black state in Haiti, and witnessed the collapse of Spanish rule in mainland America. All of these revolutions seemed to converge by the late eighteenth century in Curaçao. The seven contributions in this volume provide new insights in the nature of slave resistance in the Age of Revolutions, the remarkable flows of people and ideas in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean, and the unique local history of Curaçao.

A renowned historian offers novel perspectives on slavery and abolition in eighteenth-century Jamaica Between the start of the Seven Years' War in 1756 and the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, Jamaica was the richest and most important colony in British America. White Jamaican slaveowners presided over a highly productive economic system, a precursor to the modern factory in its management of labor, its harvesting of resources, and its scale of capital investment and ouput. Planters, supported by a dynamic merchant class in Kingston, created a plantation system in which short-term profit maximization was the main aim. Their slave system worked because the planters who ran it were extremely powerful. In Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, Trevor Burnard analyzes the men and women who gained so much from the labor of enslaved people in Jamaica to expose the ways in which power was wielded in a period when the powerful were unconstrained by custom, law, or, for the most part, public approbation or disapproval. Burnard finds that the unremitting war by the powerful against the poor and powerless, evident in the day-to-day struggles slaves had with masters, is a crucial context for grasping what enslaved people had to endure. Examining such events as Tacky's Rebellion of 1760 (the largest slave revolt in the Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution), the Somerset decision of 1772, and the murder case of the Zong in 1783 in an Atlantic context, Burnard reveals Jamiaca to be a brutally effective and exploitative society that was highly adaptable to new economic and political circumstances, even when placed under great stress, as during the American Revolution. Jamaica in the Age of Revolution demonstrates the importance of Jamaican planters and merchants to British imperial thinking at a time when slavery was unchallenged.

Toussaint L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide demonstrates L’Ouverture’s profound contribution to the struggle for equality.

Transcending geographic and cultural lines, From Toussaint to Tupac is an ambitious collection of essays exploring black internationalism and its implications for a black consciousness. At its core, black internationalism is a struggle against oppression, whether manifested in slavery, colonialism, or racism. The ten essays in this volume offer a comprehensive overview of the global movements that define black internationalism, from its origins in the colonial period to the present. From Toussaint to Tupac focuses on three moments in global black history: the American and Haitian revolutions, the Garvey movement and the Communist International following World War I, and the Black Power movement of the late twentieth century. Contributors demonstrate how black internationalism emerged and influenced events in particular localities, how participants in the various struggles communicated across natural and man-made boundaries, and how the black international aided resistance on the local level, creating a collective consciousness. In sharp contrast to studies that confine Black Power to particular national locales, this volume demonstrates the global reach and resonance of the movement. The volume concludes with a discussion of hip hop, including its cultural and ideological antecedents in Black Power. Contributors: Hakim Adi, Middlesex University, London Sylvia R. Frey, Tulane University William G. Martin, Binghamton University Brian Meeks, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica Marc D. Perry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Lara Putnam, University of Pittsburgh Vijay Prashad, Trinity College Robyn Spencer, Lehman College Robert T. Vinson, College of William and Mary Michael O. West, Binghamton University Fanon Che Wilkins, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan

In a tumultuous era of Atlantic revolutions, a remarkable group of African-born and African-descended individuals transformed themselves from slaves into active agents of their lives and times. Through prodigious archival research, Landers alters our vision of the breadth and extent of the Age of Revolution, and our understanding of its actors.

Winner of the 2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful “history from below.” Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved. Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.