Abstract
The second half of the eighteenth century was “a difficult time for European imperialism,” perhaps especially as that international system was supported by slave labor in the New World.1 Communities of escaped slaves harassed their Dutch rulers in Surinam from the 1770s onward; slave rebellions periodically rumbled across Jamaica for most of the century, including a plot uncovered in 1769 in which a group of Kingston slaves allegedly planned to burn the city and kill all the white inhabitants; and most sensationally, in 1791, slaves in Haiti began a revolt that culminated in the overthrow of French rule and the establishment of the world’s first independent black republic.
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Notes
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 72.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944; rpt. 1994), was the first extended economic analysis of the end of slavery in the Caribbean. While not rejecting Williams’ conclusions about the economic factors driving amelioration and abolition, later historians such as David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1776–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) and Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988) have pressed interpretations that more strongly advance the role of ideas about race, abolition, and British and American politics in the slavery crisis at the turn of the nineteenth century.
On the West Indies’ economic dependence on the American mainland, see Selwyn H. H. Carrington, “The American Revolution and the British West Indies’ Economy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1987): 823–50.
Joan Hamilton, “Inkle and Yarico and the Discourse of Slavery,” RECTR 9.1 (1994): 17–33.
The classic account of eighteenth-century British responses to slavery and the development of abolitionist sentiment is Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-slavery Literature of the XVIII Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 25–100.
Lawrence Marsden Price’s Inkle and Yarico Album (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937) was the first collection of known versions of the story. Also see Frank Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World: An Inkle and Yarico Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and Sypher’s review of Inkle and Yarico texts, 122–44.
Martin Wechselblatt, “Gender and Race in Yarico’s Epistles to Inkle: Voicing the Feminine/Slave,” SECC 19 (1989): 197–223; Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), 69–90.
I cite the second edition of Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London: 1673), which reproduces the 1657 text without additions or changes. Here, 55.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 233–40, compares Ligon and The Spectator.
Scott Black, “Social and Literary Form in The Spectator,” ECS 33 (1999): 21–42.
Ibid., 57. On the early planters, see Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The Early Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Here, see Julie Ellison, “Race and Sensibility in the Early Republic: Ann Eliza Bleecker and Sara Wentworth Morton,” American Literature 65 (1993): 446. Julie Ellison’s “Cato’s Tears,” ELH 63 (1996): 571–601, also discusses the connections between male tears and political and racial discourse.
On the early history of the English in Barbados, from the arrival of the first settlers in the 1620s to the turn to large-scale sugar cultivation and the dominance of slave labor, see Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 22–72.
Richard S. Dunn, “The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,” William and Mary Quarterly 26 (1969): 3–30.
Anon, A Brief, but Most True Relation of the Late Barbarous and Bloody Plot of the Negro’s in the Island of Barbados (London, 1693), n.p.
Hilary McD. Beckles, “‘A Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 503–22. Also see his A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 35–40.
Beckles, History, 1–6; Philip D. Morgan, “The Caribbean Islands in Atlantic Context, 1500–1800,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 52–64.
Thomas Tryon, Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (London: 1684), 88.
Tryon, Friendly Advice, 89. On the association abolitionist rhetoric made between sugar and the blood of the suffering slaves who manufactured it, to the point where eating sugar became rhetorically and sometimes literally associated with eating human flesh, see Charlotte Sussman, “Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792,” Representations 48 (1994): 49–58. On Tryon’s use of the cannibalism trope, see Daniel Carey, “Sugar, Colonialism, and the Critique of Slavery: Thomas Tryon in Barbados,” SVEC 9 (2004): 310–16.
I cite George Colman, Inkle and Yarico an Opera. In Three Acts. As Performed at the Theatre-Royal in the Hay-Market (Dublin: 1787); here, s.d., 3 and 6.
Peter Hulme, “Black, Yellow and White on St. Vincent: Moreau de Jonnes’ Carib Ethnography,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 182–94.
See, for example, Shankar Raman, “Can’t Buy Me Love: Money, Gender, and Colonialism in Donne’s Erotic Verse,” Criticism 43 (2001): 135–68.
On this paucity of representation, see Joyce Green MacDonald, “The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn,” ELH66 (1999): 71–86. Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), links this absence from representation to black women’s role as helping to define and articulate white English identities, both male and female, 151–88.
On the distortion ascribed to slave women’s bodies by European observers in the period, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1700,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 167–92.
Daniel O’Quinn, “Mercantile Deformities: George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico and the Racialization of Class Relations,” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 389–409; Linda V. Troost, “Social Reform in Comic Opera,” SVEC 305 (1992): 1427–29.
Nandini Bhattacharya, “Family Jewels: George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico and Connoisseurship,” ECS 34 (2001): 207–26.
Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations: Or a True Account of Their Extreme Sufferings by the Heavy Impositions Upon Sugar and Other Hardships (London: 1689), 6.
Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery and the Hideous in Othello,” SQ40 (1989): 385–90.
Joseph Roach, “The Enchanted Island: Vicarious Tourism in Restoration Adaptations of TheTempest,” in ‘TheTempest’ andItsTravels, ed. Peter Hulme and William Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 60–70. I thank Gary Taylor for recommending Roach’s article to me.
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© 2007 Celia R. Daileader, Rhoda E. Johnson, and Amilcar Shabazz
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MacDonald, J.G. (2007). Miscegenation as Consolation in George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico . In: Daileader, C.R., Johnson, R.E., Shabazz, A. (eds) Women & Others. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607323_2
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