Suchergebnisse

In the early nineteenth century, both Britain and the United States had passed laws prohibiting further transatlantic slaving. Yet the trade covertly carried on. In the summer of 1813, near what is now Liberia, a compound of pens full to bursting with sick and anguished captives was guarded by other African slaves. As a British patrol swooped down on the illicit barracoon, the slavers burned the premises to the ground, hoping to destroy evidence. This story can be told because of an exceptional trove of court documents that provides unparalleled insight into one small link in the great, horrific chain of slavery. Emma Christopher follows a trail of evidence across four continents to examine the lives of this barracoon's owners, their workers, and their tragic human merchandise. She reveals how an American, Charles Mason, escaped justice; while Robert Bostock and John McQueen were taken prisoner and exiled to Australia. Later, when they appealed their arrest in court, British agents collected the testimony of five African men--Tamba, Tom Ball, Yarra, Noah, and Sessay--whose words bear witness on behalf of 233 nameless Africans liberated in the 1813 raid. These men, women, and children, who were relocated to Freetown, Sierra Leone, endured lives of "freedom" much harsher than we would like to imagine. From the fragmented facts of these lives, Christopher also sheds fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia and the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade

Since Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, the fate of British convicts has burned brightly in the popular imagination. Incredibly, their larger story is even more dramatic--the saga of forgotten men and women scattered to the farthest corners of the British e.

Slaving merchants and merchant seamen -- The multiracial crews of slave ships -- The bloody rise of western freedom -- Life in the white man's grave -- Sea changes -- Lives for sale

This article argues that Pacific Islander labour in Australia was not analogous to earlier Atlantic world slavery and can better be understood as its 'illegitimate offspring'. Through case studies that connect the Caribbean to Australia, it reveals how the idea of Pacific Islander labour was forged in an environment where the abolitionist battle had been won, but where the interconnected and changing racial constructions of the time, and arguments about what constituted free labour, were very much ongoing. Money, values and personnel moved from the Caribbean and Mauritius to Australia, as explored through the stories of James Williams, a convict of African origin who grew Australia's first sugar, and Benjamin Boyd, the son of an Atlantic slave trader who first introduced Pacific Islanders to Australia. The final case study is that of Louis Hope, whose mother's family, the Wedderburns, had previously gained considerable notoriety in the Atlantic world for the way that they treated their enslaved people. Hope was the first person in Australia to employ a large Pacific Islander workforce on his sugar plantation.

This groundbreaking book presents a global perspective on the history of forced migration over three centuries and illuminates the centrality of these vast movements of people in the making of the modern world. Highly original essays from renowned international scholars trace the history of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, bonded soldiers, trafficked women, and coolie and Kanaka labor across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. They depict the cruelty of the captivity, torture, terror, and death involved in the shipping of human cargo over the waterways of the world, which continues unabated to this day. At the same time, these essays highlight the forms of resistance and cultural creativity that have emerged from this violent history. Together, the essays accomplish what no single author could provide: a truly global context for understanding the experience of men, women, and children forced into the violent and alienating experience of bonded labor in a strange new world. This pioneering volume also begins to chart a new role of the sea as a key site where history is made