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Slavery and the Enlightenment in Jamaica and the British Empire, 1760–1772: The Afterlife of Tacky’s Rebellion and the Origins of British Abolitionism

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Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

How did abolitionism move from the margins of British society to a more central position by 1772? During the 1760s, some Britons came to see West Indian planters as especially vicious and West Indian slavery as particularly immoral. Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760 – the most serious slave revolt in British imperial history – was a galvanizing event showing the moral degradation of West Indian slavery. The horrific repression that followed the revolt shocked a growing humanitarian audience in Britain. They translated slave rebel sufferings into Christian terms. Thus, slave rebels were seen as Christian martyrs, an iconography that aided a developing belief that West Indian slaves were cruelly treated and that something needed to be done to stop the wickedness of planters.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31 (2006): 1–14.

  2. 2.

    Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 102–107. For Williams, see John Gilmore, “The British Empire and the Neo-Latin Tradition: the Case of Francis Williams,” in Classics and Colonialism, ed. Barbara Goff (London: Duckworth, 2005), 92–106.

  3. 3.

    Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. 4, From the American Revolution to World War One (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 19; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 234–239; Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 192–194.

  4. 4.

    Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 192.

  5. 5.

    Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer, eds., Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism – a Debate with Joȃo Pedro Marques (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 1–92. For the theoretical utility of agency, see Walter Johnson, “Agency: A Ghost Story,” in Slavery’s Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation, ed. Richard Follett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 8–30 and Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 173–193.

  6. 6.

    Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

  7. 7.

    For martyrdom, see Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 152–156. See also Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  8. 8.

    James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  9. 9.

    An important pioneer on the differences between African and Creole-led slave rebellions is Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

  10. 10.

    Drescher and Emmer, Who Abolished Slavery?, 99–100.

  11. 11.

    Drescher and Emmer, Who Abolished Slavery?, 14, 71–72, 185.

  12. 12.

    Drescher and Emmer, Who Abolished Slavery?, 15; Theresa Urbainczyk, Slave Revolts in Antiquity (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008); Alexandre Popovich, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the Third/Ninth Century, trans. Léon King (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  13. 13.

    Drescher and Emmer, Who Abolished Slavery, 15.

  14. 14.

    David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 90.

  15. 15.

    Drescher and Emmer, Who Abolished Slavery, 167.

  16. 16.

    For a more balanced treatment, see John Stauffer, “Abolition and Antislavery,” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 556–577.

  17. 17.

    Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5–8.

  18. 18.

    Marjoleine Kars, “Dodging Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763,” American Historical Review 121 (2016): 42, n.10.

  19. 19.

    Philip D. Morgan, “The Black Experience in the British Empire, 1680–1810,” in Black Experience and the Empire, ed. Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 107.

  20. 20.

    Drescher and Emmer, Who Abolished Slavery?, 13.

  21. 21.

    Kars, “Dodging Rebellion,” 68–69.

  22. 22.

    Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 127–136, 138–145, 147–154.

  23. 23.

    Michael Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 112.

  24. 24.

    Edward Long, History of Jamaica; or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island, with Reflections On its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Goverment; Ill. with Copper Plates (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 2: 447.

  25. 25.

    For an eye witness account, see Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaica World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 170–174.

  26. 26.

    Burnard and Garrigus, Plantation Machine, 138–145, 147–154; Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 36–64.

  27. 27.

    Burnard and Garrigus, Plantation Machine, 147–154; Lynne Oats, Pauline Sadler and Carlene Wynter, “Taxing Jamaica: The Stamp Act of 1760 & Tacky’s Rebellion,” eJournal of Tax Research 12 (2014): 162–184.

  28. 28.

    Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the West Indies, with a Continuation to the Present Time (London: Miller, 1819), 3: 7–11.

  29. 29.

    Trevor Burnard, “Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolition,” Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 185–198.

  30. 30.

    Sarah Yeh, “Colonial Identity and Revolutionary Loyalty” in British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Stephen Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 203–205.

  31. 31.

    Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture.

  32. 32.

    James G. Basker, “‘The next Insurrection’: Johnson, Race, and Rebellion,” The Age of Johnson 11 (2000): 37–49.

  33. 33.

    Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 93.

  34. 34.

    David Hempton, “Popular Evangelicalism and the Shaping of British Moral Sensibilities,” in British Abolitionism and the Question of Moral Progress in History, ed. Donald A. Yerxa (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 59–66.

  35. 35.

    Brown, Moral Capital, 18–19; Stauffer, “Abolition and Antislavery,” 558–560.

  36. 36.

    Brown, Moral Capital, 19; Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture.

  37. 37.

    Brown, Moral Capital, 1–3, 17–18.

  38. 38.

    Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 154. See also Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martydom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  39. 39.

    D. Bruce. Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  40. 40.

    Burnard, Planters, Merchants and Slaves, 166–168.

  41. 41.

    The key theoretical text is Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 303–334.

  42. 42.

    Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (2001): 923–954; Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 137–144, 148–155.

  43. 43.

    Bryan Edwards, Poems Written Chiefly in the West Indies (Kingston: A. Aikman, 1792), 67–68.

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  1. School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Trevor Burnard

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  1. Philosophische Fakultät I, Martin Luther Universität , Halle, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany

    Damien Tricoire

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Burnard, T. (2017). Slavery and the Enlightenment in Jamaica and the British Empire, 1760–1772: The Afterlife of Tacky’s Rebellion and the Origins of British Abolitionism. In: Tricoire, D. (eds) Enlightened Colonialism. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54280-5_11

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