Colonial laws maintained the social and physical security of English settlements in the New World. This essay compares those laws that attempted to define and regulate servants and labour in seventeenth-century Virginia and Jamaica. The laws reveal differences in the social composition of their early populations and in the relationships each colony had with the imperial government. Earlier laws reflect a greater concern with the economic value of labour. In the last two decades, however, the laws defined new social constructs that would dominate slave laws in the next century. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
Mouser,Bruce L. (Author) and Mouser,Bruce L. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2002
Published:
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Based on Samuel Gamble’s ship’s log entitled ’A journal of an intended voyage, by God’s permission, from London towards Africa from hence to America in the good ship Sandown" by me Samuel Gamble Commander.Captain Samuel Gamble's log contains the record of a slaving venture to Africa and Jamaica that nearly failed. It is one of the best firsthand narratives of the slave trade to survive. Bruce Mouser's faithfully transcribed and carefully annotated edition of Gamble's log provides a haunting perspective on slave trading at the end of the 18th century. Gamble was captain of the British merchant Sandown. During 1793—1794, the ship embarked on a commercial venture from England to Upper Guinea in West Africa to buy slaves and transport them for sale in Kingston, Jamaica. Gamble describes shipping at the beginning of the Anglo-French war in 1793, naval and nautical procedures for the English-African-West Indian trade, and the slave-trading patterns and institutions on the African coast and at Kingston, Jamaica. He recounts as well a yellow fever epidemic that swept the Atlantic and crippled commerce on both sides of the ocean. Mouser's extensive annotations place Gamble's account in historical context and explain for the reader Gamble's observations on commerce, disease, and African peoples along the Upper Guinea coast; Based on Samuel Gamble’s ship’s log entitled ’A journal of an intended voyage, by God’s permission, from London towards Africa from hence to America in the good ship Sandown" by me Samuel Gamble Commander.
112 p., On Wednesday October 11th, 1865, a group of malcontented men and women in Jamaica, a British colony, began a rebellion whose aftershocks echoed well beyond the confines of Morant Bay, the small town where it started. Although the initial rebellion lasted for just a few days, its brutal suppression and the implications that it held for the British Empire sparked a controversy that touched on some of the deepest fissures in British society at that time. At its heart, the rebellion highlighted the contested notions of power within the British imperial system. In Jamaica, disenfranchised local peasants rebelled to challenge a political system that excluded and oppressed them.
