Abstract
In the wake of the conquest of Jamaica in 1670, the English, and then British, developed the third largest island in the Caribbean into an economically vital sugar-producing powerhouse. Scholars have spent decades studying how the colonization of Jamaica transformed the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, including foundational work by Dunn (1972) and more recent studies such as Pestana’s (2017) exploration of the conquest itself. Central to any story of Jamaican history are the enslavement, violent trafficking, fatal punishments, torture, and overworking of African slaves. Plantation owners in the West Indies established slave agriculture as the cornerstone of economic growth within the British Empire, and this system of labor provided the foundation of a trans-Atlantic trade network so influential that, according to Eric Williams (1994, p. 52), it created a “triple stimulus to British industry” and helped spur on the Industrial Revolution a century later. But slavery was not an institution built on stable ground, and the violent and oppressive regimes of white overlords were answered in kind by armed resistance from the enslaved. During over two centuries of British rule in Jamaica, a series of violent clashes between the enslavers and the enslaved erupted, and each played a substantial role in shaping the history of the island. They also had a role in the broader history of the British Empire. This paper seeks to understand how two of those moments of resistance, the 1760 uprising by African slaves known as Tacky’s Rebellion and the 1832 upheaval of Afro-Jamaicans known as the Christmas Rebellion or the Baptist War, played a role in shaping how observers thousands of miles away understood slavery, race, and empire.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Brown, L., 1985. Victorian News and Newspapers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brown, V., 2008. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Burnard, T., 2004. Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Burton, R. D. E., 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Campbell, M. C., 1988. A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal. Granby, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey.
Craton, M., 1982. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Dunn, R. S., 1972. Sugar and Slaves : the Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press
Gatrell, V., 1994. The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Greene, J., 2013. Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, A., 1996. Power of the Press: Newspaper, Power, and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England. Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing.
MacKenzie, J. M., 2004. The Press and the Dominant Ideology of Empire. In: S. J. Potter, ed. Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: REporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Mullin, M., 1995. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736–1831. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Newman, B., 2011. Contesting ‘Black’ Liberty and Subjecthood in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1730s–1780s. Slavery & Abolition, 32(no. 2), pp. 168–183.
O’Shaughnessy, A. J., 2000. An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Pestana, C. G., 2017. The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell's Bid for Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Reckord, M., 1968. The Jamaica Slave Rebellion of 1831. Past & Present, Issue No. 40, pp. 108–125.
Reynolds, R. C., 1972. Tacky and the Great Slave Rebellion of 1760. Jamaica Journal, June.6(No. 2).
Starn R. 1971. Historians and ‘Crisis’. Past & Present Issue No. 52, pp. 3–22.
Williams, E., 1994. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Wilson, K., 1998. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Primary Sources
From the British Newspaper Archive: https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
Bristol Mercury: February 22, 1832; February 28, 1832; April 28, 1832.
Caledonian Mercury: July 9, 1760; July 19, 1760; July 27, 1764; August 9, 1760; September 7, 1760; October 1, 1760; March 13, 1762; February 20, 1832.
Cheltenham Chronicle: April 26, 1832.
Chester Chronicle: May 11, 1832.
Coventry Herald: May 4, 1832.
Derby Mercury: June 20, 1760, August 1, 1760.
Drogheda Journal: March 10, 1832.
Dublin Courier: August 6, 1760
Durham County Advertiser: February 24, 1832.
Fife Herald: May 10, 1832.
Hampshire Advertiser: April 14, 1832.
Hereford Journal: April 11, 1832.
Leeds Intelligencer: July 1, 1760; July 29, 1760; October 27, 1761.
Liverpool Mercury: February 24, 1832.
London Evening Standard: February 22, 1832.
Manchester Mercury: July 1, 1760.
Oxford Journal: July 26,1760; August 23, 1760.
Sussex Advertiser: July 7, 1760.
The Examiner: February 26, 1832.
From the British National Archives in Kew, London
“Council Meeting Notes,” December 18 1760, Colonial Office and predecessors: Jamaica, Original Correspondence, CO 137 /32.
“The Humble Address to the Council,” Colonial Office and predecessors: Jamaica, Original Correspondence, CO 137/181.
“Council Meeting Notes,” December 18 1760, Colonial Office and predecessors: Jamaica, Original Correspondence, CO 137 /32.
“My Lords,” February 1762, Colonial Office and predecessors: Jamaica, Original Correspondence, CO 137 /32.
“Letter from the Jamaican Assembly,” February 3, 1832, CO 137/181.
“West Indian Colonies: Slave Insurrection,” No. 2, CO, 137/185.
“West Indian Colonies: Slave Insurrection,” No. 17, CO, 137/185.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Day, T. (2019). Resistance and the Enslaved. In: Winterdyk, J., Jones, J. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63192-9_3-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63192-9_3-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63192-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63192-9
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Law and CriminologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences