(British) Caribbean Plantation Histories

This dissertation examines how practical and conceptual concerns over ensuring the basic needs of colonial subjects shaped the political economy of slavery and empire in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British Caribbean. Provisioning—here defined as food, clothing, shelter, and sometimes medical care—was the dominant lens through which early modern European empires viewed matters related to the health and bodily needs of soldiers, sailors, colonists, slaves, and other subjects. This dissertation offers the first focused study of provisioning in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Atlantic world and introduces the concept of overlapping British imperial “provisioning regimes” in order to examine how logistical and infrastructural matters related to provisioning shaped evolving conceptions of the material care and health of subjects under imperial rule. Utilizing an extensive array of primary sources—colonial governors’ correspondence, plantation letters and accounts, merchant papers, naval and military records, customs statistics, parliamentary debates and inquiries—this dissertation embeds quantitative data within a thematic framework attentive to the lived experience of slaves and other actors on several scales of analysis.

This essay contextualizes Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plan of systematic colonization of Australia within the social and political economic debates surrounding the process of slave emancipation in the British West Indies from the 1830s onwards. Wakefield’s proposal to induce wage labour by preventing the labourers from becoming independent producers and proprietors was an important expression of a pan-imperial concern on the relation between the extension of the “field of employment” and the concentration of the labour force; this issue also troubled the architects of the abolition, charged with the unprecedented task of turning over six hundred thousand West Indian slaves into free labourers without ruining plantation economy. Analysing a wide range of political, economic, and administrative sources related to the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean through the lens of Wakefield’s theory, this essay sheds light on the interconnectedness between the different parts of the British Empire and makes a critique of some crucial categories of political thought, such as the liberal concepts of freedom and labour, as well as the very notion of emancipation.

This article is the translation of the originally published Dutch-language article "19e-eeuwse muzikale vooroordelen over De West: Henriëtte Kegges muzikaliteit als stereotype in Hildebrands Camera Obscura". The article appeared in Neerlandia, Volume 120 (2016), no. 4, pp. 22-23
(ISSN 0028-2383). Neerlandia is the magazine of the Algemeen-Nederlands Verbond (ANV).

As becomes clear from his diaries too, the Dutch University of Leiden student Nicolaas Beets who had his book “Camera Obscura” (Hildebrand, 1900) published in 1839 under the pseudonym Hildebrand, did not express a high opinion of the then Dutch overseas colonies.
Nor had he a high esteem of performers of music, whether they were amateurs or professional musicians. In case a musical talent also came from the West Indies, like his book character Henrietta Kegge, Hildebrands characterization deserves special attention.

Dutch text with permission adapted and translated into English © 2016, 2018 Koos Jaap van Zwieten