The Public History of Slavery in Dublin

This article positions Ireland as a significant literary and political space for fugitive slaves, and for black anti-slavery activism more generally. William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet and Amanda Smith were amongst those who visited and wrote about Ireland in the antebellum and postbellum periods. Their writing portrays Ireland and their Irish experience quite differently, but in ways that help position Ireland within the wider political currents of slavery, anti-slavery and empire. It considers Ireland as a literary space which facilitated the publication of black and abolitionist literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article also evaluates some of the literary and historical opportunities that exist to elaborate the theme of Ireland, slavery, anti-slavery and empire, and situates the following articles as examples of this emerging body of work.

2006

2007 marks the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, While it was a landmark act, it did not bring an end to the institution of slavery which continued to flourish in the Americas for another half-century. This article gives an overview of historical slavery, from the slavery of ancient societies to the commerce in enslaved Africans that contributed to European prosperity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It examines the role of Ireland and the Irish in this trade and looks at the development of the abolitionist movement. The persistence of slavery as part of today's globalised economy is discussed and some suggestions are made to facilitate the exploration of this topic with students.

2005

This publication provides the reader with a sample of the varied topics that our Three Continents, One History: Birmingham and the Transatlantic Slave Trade project addressed at the Afro-Caribbean Millennium Centre, Birmingham, England over a period of fifteen months in 2007- 08. Activities were varied: workshop presentations, radio broadcasts (Newstyle Radio) and international simulcasts, summer school, curriculum material (KS3), dramatisations and conferences. The project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The book starts with the period before the trafficking in Africans to provide an overview of Africa’s often neglected past. Chapter 2 provides an insight into the breadth and depth of European involvement in the trafficking. The deportation and enforced migration across the Atlantic Ocean – the Middle Passage - have in many respects come to symbolise the experiences of millions of Africans. The slaving ship was effectively a carceral regime in which Africans were considered as nothing more than good or bad ‘parcels’ that could be ‘tight packed’ like sardines and subjected to a panoply of technologies of discipline. The Middle Passage served only to prepare Africans for a plantation and mining regime in the Americas whose sole motive was money/profit. If the process was designed to make a ‘slave’ of the African, it was equally designed to make the European into a ‘master’. It must be said, though, that despite the social, psychological and sexual domination imposed by Europeans, Africans resisted in varied ways at every stage of the journey from the interior of Africa to the plantation in the Americas. In this book, particular attention has been paid to the musical landscape of the Caribbean in allowing us to explore the rich heritage that Africans were able to preserve and recreate. The heart of our project was to use local archives to disclose the threads that bound the city of Birmingham (UK) to Africa and the Caribbean through the Triangular Trade. The book appropriately references the manufacturing connection and the emergence of Birmingham as the premier industrial city of Europe. The gun industry has come to symbolise this connection; Birmingham made and assembled the guns that armed the slave trade. The names of these ‘Brummagem ware’ quite often revealed the area of the West African coast where they were destined to be used (Bonny guns, Barbary guns, Angola guns, Windward muskets). There was even a dedicated gun for putting down slaveship insurrections: the swivel blunderbuss There were companies within the city that specialised in providing the one-stop service necessary for a successful slaving voyage: guns, fetters and shackles, articles of everyday consumption, decorative ornaments. In the 1790s, the pre-eminent gun-maker, Samuel Galton Jr, was belatedly put on trial by the Quakers for ‘fabricating instruments for the destruction of mankind’. The production of steam engines benefited another leg of the Triangular Trade. There has never an empire in history without an accompanying army to defend it. The book explores the particular role that regiments from the West Midland region, sometimes recruited in Birmingham, played in the preservation of the Caribbean slave order. Particular attention is paid to the Haitian Revolutionary Period when it seemed that conflagration threatened. The irony is that a number of those who were at the forefront in bringing about the industrial progress of the city and indeed sponsoring Olaudah Equiano’s ‘Narratives’ during his visit to the city in 1790 appeared also to express support for the Abolitionist cause, gradual abolition that is. Belatedly it fell to women in the city to take a more radical stance on the abolition of slavery.

The Journal of Economic History, 2000

Mill's comment that the British Caribbean was really a part of the British domestic economy, because almost all its trade was with British buyers and sellers, is used to make a new assessment of the importance of the eighteenth-century slave systems to British industrialization. If the value added and strategic linkages of the sugar industry are compared to those of other British industries, it is apparent that sugar cultivation and the slave trade were not particularly large, nor did they have stronger growth-inducing ties with the rest of the British economy. ow important were the slave systems of the Americas to the economic H development of Europe, and more specifically Britain? In 1788, after the initial attack on the British slave trade, Parliament held hearings on and collected information about all aspects of the trade in Africa, the West Indies, and Great Britain. Among those testifying or writing letters to Parliament were merchants in the trade, whose arguments against abolition included claims of overall importance to the British economy. James Penny, a principal owner of dozens of Liverpool slaving ventures, stated that "[s]hould this trade be abolished, it would not only affect the Commercial Interest, but also the Landed Property of the County of Lancaster, and more particularly the Town of Liverpool, whose fall, in that case, would be as rapid as its Rise has been astounding." The Committee of Merchants Trading to Africa added that "the effects of this trade to Great Britain are beneficial to an infinite Extent. .. [and]. .. there is hardly any Branch of Commerce in which this Nation is concerned that does not derive some advantage from it." Further, "were this country to agree that [the slave trade] shall be abolished, it would deprive us of the Benefit of fitting out annually, a great number of Ships, to a very great Detriment to our Manufacturers, and terminate in the Ruin of our British Settlements in the West Indies."'

2023

When the 'Studies in Imperialism' series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that 'imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies'. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. 'Studies in Imperialism' is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship. To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https:// manche ster univ ersi typr ess.co.uk/ ser ies/ stud ies-in-impe rial ism/ .

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