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.
Francis Humberston Mackenzie of Seaforth (1754-1815) was a Highland proprietor in what has become known as 'The First Phase of Clearance', was governor of Barbados (1801-6) in the sensitive period immediately before the abolition of the British slave trade and was himself a plantation owner in Berbice (Guiana). It is suggested that his concern for his Highland small tenants was paralleled by his ambition in Barbados to make the killing of a slave by a white a capital offence, by his attempts to give free coloureds the right to testify against whites and by his aim to provide good conditions for his own enslaved labourers in Berbice.
Pagliaro,Harold E. (Author) and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1973
Published:
Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
468 p, Includes Leon G. Campbell's "Racism without race: ethnic group relations in late colonial peru," pp. 323-333; and David Lowenthal's "Free colored West Indians: a racial dilemma";
