Relying mainly on the manuscript records of the Royal African Company, we explore the factors that contributed to the large gap between slave prices in Africa and the Caribbean. Twenty-two voyages from the mid-1680s are analyzed. These were conducted with hired ships and the payments to the shipowners and captains were recorded. In addition to transport costs, mortality and morbidity had a big effect on slave prices; while the earnings from the trade in gold and ivory had a moderating influence. The effect of mortality and transport costs on slave prices during the eighteenth century is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
In this article, I explore the impact of slavery and the Slave trade on the most fundamental relationship in human societies, the bond between mother and child. Firstly, I review European accounts of motherhood and childrearing (pre-enslavement) in the African cultures of origin. Secondly, I address the traumas of dislocation and enslavement during the Middle Passage. This is followed by some insights into the experiences of women and children in Caribbean Slave societies where I argue that, despite the harsh conditions, African-derived conceptualisations of motherhood and parenting endured. I conclude with a brief consideration of the reverberations of slavery into the post slavery era, specifically in relation to European attempts to change African-derived practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];.
Archaeologists are studying changes in slaves' lives in the Caribbean and the United States. Some 57,000 artifacts have been recovered from Papine, ranging from tools to ceramics to glass bottles to beads. A number of ackee trees grow on the site, and oral tradition has it that ackee and other fruit trees are good indicators of historic habitation sites.
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."
First, the two armies all but destroyed the French plantocracy on the island then they defeated a Spanish force and huge English and French armies. In Adam Hochchild's book Bury the Chains, we learn that then-U. S. President George Washington and then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners, sent "a thousand muskets, other military supplies, and eventually some $400,000" of U. S. aid to quell the revolt now known as "the Haitian Revolution." Randall Robinson reveals more in his book, An Unbroken Agony: "Some . . . had been brought to Haiti [St. Domingue] from other Caribbean slave colonies men like the storied Boukman from Jamaica and the legendary Makandal from Trinidad, and the great general, Henri Christophe, who was born in Grenada." Blacks who escaped plantations in the United States also joined L'Ouverture's armies. Robinson reports that L'Ouverture had been the intellectual, "the African humanist, the military strategist, the administrator and, not insignificantly, the conciliator." Robinson also writes that [Jean-Jacques Dessalines] "had been, first and last, the hard-nosed soldier who believed that an enemy as manifestly unsalvageable as the French had to be, wherever possible, obliterated."
According to historical records and stories passed down by the griots in Haiti, Christophe was born around October 6, 1767 in Grenada and brought to Haiti (then Saint Domingue) as a slave.
Yes, we owe Haiti. Unfortunately, we have shown little appreciation. My generation has witnessed Haiti in a multi-decades long downward spiral. There have been the dirty Papa Doc regime; the dirty Baby Doc regime; the dirty Aristide regime and dirty everyone else who supposedly had the trust of the people. The United States has sent troops there on various occasions but it was not to strengthened or liberate the people. Preference should be given to Haitian owned businesses in this rebuilding. Partnerships with Haitian and African Americans should be allowed. The money generated from these contracts should stay in Haiti and be taxed by the Haitian government. All, I mean ALL jobs, should be offered first to Haitians with the first right of refusal. It is noble for the world to come to the aid of Haiti but there must be a strategy that will empower the people of Haiti during and afterwards. For the first time in history, we have a chance to make Haiti independent, self sustaining and free.
227 p., Considers the often-silenced, tangible traces that the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery have left in the greater Caribbean as they emerge in contemporary cultural productions. The author looks at national trends in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica in order to formulate an understanding of the uses of gendered images of slavery and blackness in modern nation-building campaigns. Critically assesses what is left out of these narratives and how these gaps serve specific purposes. Argues for the centrality of the Caribbean in any true understanding of the history of modernity and the contemporary nation-state by investigating the after-shocks of the Haitian Revolution and of radical anti-slavery.
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.
In this article, I analyse patterns of classifications and naming of African "nations" in colonial Cuba. Based on parish records, I suggest possible interpretations of African patterns of classification, identities and social arrangements during the formation of Cuban plantations over the course of the eighteenth century. I discuss some of the methodological implications that can be explored regarding marriages of enslaved people in Cuba based on ecclesiastical sources, chiefly in the case of Guanabacoa. I have furthered the social/demographic analysis of "nations" in Cuba, underscoring how Africans could have been the agents of networks and alliances through organizational strategies and the formation of identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
