“The lungs of a ship”: Ventilation, acclimatization, and labor in the maritime environment, 1740–1800

2021 ◽  
pp. 007327532110464
Author(s):  
Paul E Sampson
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
The West ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Tropical Environments ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Maritime Environment

This article examines the connection between projects for shipboard ventilation and the shifting medical discourse about acclimatization in the British Empire during the eighteenth century. I argue that the design, use, and disuse of a class of shipboard “ventilators” proposed by natural philosopher Stephen Hales helps us to trace changing ideas about the ability of European bodies to acclimate, or “season,” to tropical environments. These ventilating machines appealed to British administrators because they represented an embodiment of providential and enlightened ideas that validated the expansion of overseas empire. In addition, they promised to increase labor efficiency by reducing the mortality and misery experienced by the sailors and enslaved people during long sea voyages. As skepticism about acclimatization grew in response to stubbornly high mortality rates in the West Indies, Hales’ ventilators fell out of favor – a development underscored by their dismissal as a potential solution for the appalling conditions found in the transatlantic slave trade. By examining ventilators’ nearly fifty-year career in naval and slave ships, this article will show the role of technology and the shipboard environment in the transition from enlightened optimism about acclimatization toward later attitudes of racial and environmental essentialism.

Mutinies and Ethnicity

2021 ◽  
pp. 214-307
Author(s):  
Keith Grint
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Military Establishment ◽  
The West ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Foreign Labour ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
The Military

The complexity of the causes of mutinies are captured in this chapter that focuses upon the role of ethnicity. Starting with the British West India Regiment in 1801, we examine the importance of the slave trade in supporting the recruitment to the British Army in the West Indies and consider how the ‘alternatives’ of slavery or forced recruitment are not regarded as alternatives by many ex-slaves. The chapter then moves on to the largest event to rock the early British Empire, the ‘mutiny’ or ‘1st War of Independence’ in India between 1857 and 1858. The nomenclature is a signal of the meaning of the events for different actors involved, and this ambiguity runs into the Curragh ‘Incident’ that has all the hallmarks of a mutiny, except it is staged by the military establishment not by the military subordinates. And if the British thought 1858 was the last time they would see Indian soldiers or sailors mutinying against them, they were wrong: in Singapore in 1915 and then in the Royal India Navy in 1946, the British Empire is forced to look at itself—but chooses not to. Finally, we consider the way British Foreign Labour Battalions were treated in France, compared to the treatment meted out to domestic units, and then consider the role of racism in the Port Chicago mutiny of 1944 which has echoes of the contemporary situation in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Slavery and Christianity in the British West Indies

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Worthington Smith
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Slavery in the British Empire was always centered in the British West Indies. To a greater degree than in the Southern Thirteen Colonies, economic life in the West Indies depended upon Negro slavery, and the population of the islands soon became predominantly Negro. With the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after 1775, slavery within the British Empire became almost entirely confined to the Caribbean colonies. Until the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, British eyes were focused upon the West Indies whenever slavery was mentioned.

The Vice-Admiralty Court

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Prize Money ◽  
Ship Building ◽  
The People ◽  
Slave Ships

This chapter examines the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, the first court in the British empire with an explicit mandate to release enslaved people from slavery. In practice, the Court and its officers paid little attention to the people the Court called ‘captured Negroes.’ Instead, the Court became the hub of a brisk trade in seized slave ships, which were renovated and resold at auction for the coastal trade. British officers, sailors and soldiers received ‘prize money,’ shares of the auction value of property they captured. Many settlers and European merchants were engaged in trades related to the Court, from victualling and rum-selling to surveying and ship-building. The antislavery businessman Zachary Macaulay had a controlling stake in many colonial businesses. This chapter also examines the role of the Royal African Corps, a regiment of white convicts and former slaves, and their place in the colony.

Historicizing Slavery in West Indian Feminisms

1998 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary McD. Beckles
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
Feminine Identity ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Feminist Writing ◽  
Gender Neutrality

This paper traces the evolution of a coherent feminist genre in written historical texts during and after slavery, and in relation to contemporary feminist writing in the West Indies. The paper problematizes the category ‘woman’ during slavery, arguing that femininity was itself deeply differentiated by class and race, thus leading to historical disunity in the notion of feminine identity during slavery. This gender neutrality has not been sufficiently appreciated in contemporary feminist thought leading to liberal feminist politics in the region. This has proved counter productive in the attempts of Caribbean feminist theorizing to provide alternative understandings of the construction of the nation-state as it emerged out of slavery and the role of women themselves in the shaping of modern Caribbean society.

Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Political Connection ◽  
The West ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Comprehensive Plan ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Personal Level

In the later eighteenth century the West Indian sugar islands were a source of conspicuous wealth for some individuals and an important addition to the resources of Great Britain. They were generally reckoned to be the most valuable of Britain’s imperial possessions, a view which Burke fully endorsed. This book examines his long involvement with the West Indies, at a personal level through the ambitions of his brother and some of his closest friends, as a politician and what contemporaries called ‘a man of business’ in the management of a great national asset and in trying to win the support of powerful West Indian interests for his political connection. He became a participant in debates about the ethics of enslavement and the slave trade. Burke deplored both slavery and the trade, but he recognized that the plantation economy of the West Indies depended on them and that therefore they played a crucial role in Britain’s immensely valuable Atlantic commerce. The policies that he advocated for the further development of the West Indian and African trades inevitably involved more enslaved Africans in the British Empire and on occasions he was drawn into implicitly endorsing the slave trade. Except for a few years from 1788 to 1791, Burke was not prepared to countenance immediate abolition of the trade, but he did devise a comprehensive plan for reforming both it and the institution of slavery, that in the very long term would make both redundant.

Doldrums

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-186
Author(s):  
Deirdre Coleman
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Rice Cultivation ◽  
Wet Season ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The West ◽  
Slave Ships

Smeathman returns to the Bananas where, instead of collecting, he cultivates a large provision garden for the slave ships. His chief staples were Palma Christi, pepper, and Guinea rice but rice cultivation was James Cleveland’s preserve. Cleveland also objected to Smeathman’s attempts to intensify the women’s methods of growing and harvesting the rice. In the end Cleveland’s cattle destroy Smeathman’s garden. Broken in health, and dreading the oncoming wet season, Smeathman joins a fully slaved and leaky ship bound for the West Indies. As a passenger unconnected to the trade, Smeathman’s experience of the middle passage offers new perspectives and insights.

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