Slavery and Revolution

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Author Archives: Christer Petley

New Perspectives on Slavery and Emancipation

By Christer Petley |

New approaches to British imperial history and the rise of Atlantic history have had a strong influence on historians specializing in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean during the era of slavery. Caribbean scholars have always stressed the importance of transatlantic and colonial connections, but these new perspectives have encouraged historians to rethink the ways […]

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‘Devoted Islands’ and ‘That Madman Wilberforce’

By Christer Petley |

The debate about the reform and dismantling of the British-Atlantic slave system, which began in earnest during the 1780s, threatened more than the economic interests of the British-Caribbean planter class. The rise of humanitarianism was one aspect of a new mode of British imperialism that also challenged slaveholders’ self-image as loyal and free members of […]

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‘Home’ and ‘This Country’

By Christer Petley |

This article uses a case study of the transatlantic correspondence of Simon Taylor, a wealthy Jamaican planter, to examine the cultural identity of slaveholders in the British Caribbean at the end of the long eighteenth century. White settlers in the Americas faced metropolitan criticisms from as early as the seventeenth century. These became more pronounced […]

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‘Legitimacy’ and Social Boundaries

By Christer Petley |

This article explores relations between free people of colour and white men in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. Using evidence from wills and other contemporary sources, it considers the types of bequests that white slaveholders made to free people of colour and to white people. In a slave society divided by racialized boundaries of rule, slaveholders’ liaisons […]

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Horatio Nelson to Simon Taylor, 10 June 1805

By Christer Petley |

Horatio Nelson first met Simon Taylor during the American Revolutionary War, while stationed in Jamaica. The two remained in touch. As Nelson remarks towards the end of this letter, by 1805, they had been acquainted for about three decades. The letter was written while Nelson pursued the French fleet in the Caribbean, during the months […]

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