African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
282 p., Prior tO 1640, When the Regular Slave Trade to New Spain ended, colonial Mexico was the second largest importer of slaves in the Americas. Even so, slavery never supplanted indigenous labor in the colony, and by the second half of the 17th century there were more free Afromexicans than slaves in Mexico.
The article discusses discrimination against free blacks and colored (mixed-race) people in the justice system of 18th-century Curaçao, then a colony of the Netherlands run by the Dutch West India Company. Two examples are examined, that of the Dutch prosecutor Hubertus Coerman, who complained of the situation to company directors in 1766, and the Curaçaoan free black woman Mariana Franko, who complained to the directors in the same year after being falsely accused of theft and banished from the colony. Differences between the administration of justice in the Netherlands and in the Dutch West Indies are then discussed.
this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of 'whiteness' in Anglo-Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth-century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio-sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.
The French called the Island St. Domingue, and began importing thousands of African slaves to clear much of the land and build plantations. By the late 1700s, there were over half a million African slaves in St. Domingue, and dose to 40,000 whites, as well as almost as many "mulattos." (The word "mulatto" derives from the Spanish term meaning a young mule.) They were the "free people of color," the result of white men taking many slave women. [Adam Hochchild] goes on to tell us how very rich France became through its plantocracy on St. Domingue alone: "The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States." White planters and merchants on the island lived a life of luxury unrivaled in "the New World." Hochchild tells us that on that fateful August night "a large group of slaves representing many plantations met under the night sky in a remote spot called Alligator Woods..." and these are the words reportedly shouted to the throng by a revolt leader: '"Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears, and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us."
Argues that free African and African-descended women participated in Spain's colonization of the Caribbean to a degree that has not been fully recognized. Regularly described as vecinas (heads of household) and as spouses to Iberian men in key port cities, free women of color played active roles in the formation and maintenance of Spanish Caribbean society during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not as peripheral or marginalized figures, but as non-elite insiders who pursued their own best interests and those of their families and associates.
