American Revolution – Wilberforce Institute Blog

Professor Trevor Burnard

Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation and Director of the Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull.

T.G.Burnard@hull.ac.uk

In today’s blog, Professor Trevor Burnard reflects on the recent workshop held at the Wilberforce Institute on the subject of the American Revolution and imperial history.

On 3 March, the Wilberforce Institute hosted a small and highly successful workshop to consider how the American Revolution was, in the words of the keynote speaker, Stephen Conway, of UCL, an event usefully seen through an imperial perspective.

The American Revolution is an important event in not just American history but in the history of the world. One of the ways in which it has an enduring importance is its role in redefining the British Empire in the late eighteenth century so that by the nineteenth century British imperialism was different to what it been in the previous century. We sometimes think of the empire with America as the first British Empire. Even though historians have been anxious to show that imperialism did not change all that much after the loss of the American colonies (to become the United States of America), it is clear that it was an event of truly historical importance in the history of imperial Britain. At a stroke, a major part of the population of the British Empire – including most of the people of that empire who were White Protestants and who thought of themselves before 1776 as Britons living overseas rather than foreigners to British customs and practices – departed the empire. The American Revolution was the first successful settler revolt in history, a counterrevolution against actions by the imperial government, which American Patriots considered tyrannical. It was also very much an imperial event, being part of a whole set of policies enacted by Britain after the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) to reconfigure a new and greatly enlarged empire.

Now is a good time to connect imperialism with the American Revolution and see the links between them. Imperial history has suddenly come back into favour after having been considered in the second half of the twentieth century as irredeemably old-fashioned and irrelevant. That has changed in the twenty-first century. As Krishan Kumar argues in Visions of Empire (2017), `the study of empires, for all their faults, engages current beliefs in multiculturalism, diaspora, migration and multinationalism.’(p. 3) In addition, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 is getting closer, encouraging us to rethink the American Revolution in the light of contemporary matters and an ever-changing historiography.

The workshop was designed to engage with the connection between this event and British imperialism, which is the subject of a forthcoming book by Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy, former director of research at Monticello and professor at the University of Virginia. Andrew, who is currently a fellow at the Wilberforce Institute, will be applying his great knowledge of the imperial dimensions of the American Revolution to this joint effort. He published The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire in 2014.

Trevor and Andrew were joined by scholars from France, Germany and Britain, who presented papers on military aspects of imperialism in the American Revolution and participated in two workshops on the wider European contexts of the War of American Independence and on recent trends in the writing on empire and revolution.

The workshop was extremely stimulating, and at times provocative, and served as a first event in the four-year lead-up to the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution under the auspices of the British Group in Early American History. It is also part of America2026, a large-scale European grouping of scholars who are determined to see the American Revolution as an intrinsic part of European and European imperial history. Andrew will continue the involvement of the Wilberforce Institute with America2026 on 10 March at a seminar in Paris on ‘Transnationalismes, Crises and Révolutions’.

John Trumbull‘s painting, Declaration of Independence, depicting the five-man drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War.

Professor Trevor Burnard

Director of the Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

trevor.burnard@hull.ac.uk

Today Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute, provides a summary of two of his recent articles on Jamaican history.

‘Slaves and Slavery in Kingston, 1770-1815,’ International Journal of Social History 65 (2020), 39-65

If you wander down to the magnificent Kingston waterfront, you will see nothing which marks the fact that Kingston was the `Ellis Island’ of African American life in British America. It was the place where nearly 900,000 Africans were landed to begin a usually miserable and often foreshortened life as slaves working on sugar and other plantations and occasionally enjoying a slightly better life as an urban enslaved person in Kingston. Slavery and the slave trade were central to eighteenth-century Kingston and in turn Kingston is vital as a place to study so that we understand Jamaican and Atlantic slavery in the period of the Atlantic slave trade. But our knowledge of Kingston and its slaves is very limited. This article looks at slavery in Kingston from when the slave trade was at its height, between the early 1770s, through to the immediate aftermath of the ending of the slave trade in Jamaica in 1807.

This article summarizes what we know about slavery in Kingston already and provides some empirical data which can be helpful in drawing attention to Kingston’s importance in the history of slavery. The Atlantic slave trade in Kingston was easily the largest business in eighteenth-century British America and had a very distinctive character. Contrary to popular legend, African captives were seldom sold directly from ships in what was described as a `scramble’, when potential buyers pushed and shoved each other in order to acquire valuable property. Slaves cost too much money for any factor selling slaves to allow such chaos to occur. Instead, Africans were purchased in large lots by carefully selected merchants and were moved to merchant houses where they were corralled (`like sheep’, Olaudah Equaino lamented) and then sold usually in small lots to planters. In short, the slave market in Kingston harbor was a wholesale market and was followed by retail sales. Everyone took their cut at all times and the money that flowed was so substantial as to make Kingston and its slave merchants very wealthy.

The manner of slave sales meant that enslaved Africans experienced the transformation of themselves into ‘commodities’ first in Kingston. That was a profound, and profoundly disturbing, human moment. From Kingston, they were dispersed throughout Jamaica, in ways that made enslaved populations very polyglot – Africans from various ships from various places in West Africa were purchased together and sent to very ethnically diverse plantations. Some enslaved people, of course, stayed in Kingston, and I discuss what they did as tradespeople, domestics and sailors in the article.

One would think that the end of a lucrative slave trade would spell disaster for Kingston and its wealthy merchant class. Surprisingly, this did not happen. Why not? What seems to have occurred, although much more work needs to be done on this subject, is that Kingston moved quickly from being a major slave trading entrepot to being the centre of trade with Spanish America. It was a depot from which British manufactured goods were dispersed throughout the Spanish American empire. In an ironic restatement of the famous thesis by Eric Williams that slavery created capitalism, after 1807 capitalism remade slavery as capitalism in the form of British manufactured goods stimulated the slave system and slave economy in places like Cuba.

The slave trade ended in 1807 but slavery remained in Kingston, I finish this article with the perspective of the enslaved, and their participation in festivals, such as Jonkunnu. A spatial inversion occurred during these carnivals, during which black entertainers invaded the spaces of white authority. Slavery was complicated and diverse in Kingston, as in the rest of Jamaica.

James Hakewill (1875), A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica: Kingston and Port Royal

***

‘Security, Taxation, and the Imperial System in Jamaica, 1721-1782,’ Early American Studies 18, 4 (Fall, 2020)

Aaron Graham of Oxford and myself have written an article, soon forthcoming in Early American Studies, which examines the question of how white Jamaicans ensured their security in a colony where the majority of the inhabitants were enslaved people who hated them and which was periodically subject to severe challenges to white authority coming from black people. The most serious eighteenth-century challenges were the first Maroon War in the 1730s and Tacky’s Revolt in 1760-61. These challenges were existential threats to the Jamaican state and the people – in Britain and among colonial elites – who ran that state. What these threats showed was that Jamaica was a society at war. Societies at war needed to be well funded – something Britain was very good at in the eighteenth century as it developed and perfected a fiscal-military state, designed to fight wars without incurring state bankruptcy.

White Jamaicans welcomed a strong fiscal-military state as the basis for colonial rule because they realized the perilous nature of their rule in their peculiar society. White Jamaicans were willing to pay relatively high rates of taxation to support a powerful and assertive state in schemes of settlement and security. The schemes for settlement did not work, mainly due to dire demographic conditions for white people, but white Jamaicans’ security concerns were generally answered, leading to a settler society that was reasonably content with what the state offered (unlike in the settler societies developed by their American cousins, which opted for rebellion in the 1770s) right up until the end of the American Revolution. White Jamaicans paid relatively high taxes willingly because they were satisfied with what they received from the state and because they were wealthy enough to afford high rates of taxation. Furthermore, in this period white Jamaicans believed that they had a significant stake in the processes by which taxes were collected and spent. Jamaica provides a case study of how the imperial state worked satisfactorily for imperial rulers and those colonists whom they ruled when both the state and colonial settlers shared common beliefs and where negotiations made it clear that the interests of all parties coincided.

Though an extreme example, by virtue of its exposed strategic position, the demographic imbalance between whites and blacks, and its economic importance, Jamaica differed in degree rather than kind from other colonies and territories of the British Atlantic. Eighteenth-century statesmen as different as Charles Townshend, Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Burke understood these imperial realities. Less sophisticated thinkers like Lord North and George Grenville, however, were seduced by plans that forced the empire into one colonial model and thought that the same solutions were applicable to the problems throughout the empire. The American War of Independence resulted from a failure to understand this fundamental reality about the need to treat colonies within an imperial framework according to their local circumstances, rather than as if they were all Jamaica and equally committed to the expansion of the colonial fiscal-military state.

Tag: American Revolution

Imperial History and the American Revolution

Summary of author’s recent publications