In this lecture, we will consider the economic, cultural and spiritual lives that African-Caribbean people fashion in the shadow of the plantation.

Reading

Beckles, Hilary and Verene Shepherd (eds), Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (London, 2000), chapters in Section 11.

Berlin, Ira and Philip D. Morgan (eds), The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London, 1991).

Browne, Randy M., Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

Dunn, Richard S., A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

Heuman, Gad, The Caribbean (London, 2006), chapter 3.

Mintz, Sidney Wilfred, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974).

* Morgan, Philip, ‘Slave Cultures’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 245-260.

Morgan, Philip, ‘The Black Experience in the British Empire, 1680-1810,’ in Peter J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 2 – the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 465-486.

Ono-George, Meleisa, 'By her unnatural and despicable conduct': motherhood and concubinage in the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press, 1830–1833,’ Slavery & Abolition (April 2017), pp. 356-372.

Shepherd, Verene A. and Glen L. Richards (eds), Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture (Kingston, Jamaica, 2002).

Turner, Mary, ‘Religious Beliefs’, in Franklin W. Knight (ed.), The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, UNESCO History of the Caribbean, vol. 3 (London, 1997), pp. 287-321.

Walvin, J., Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London, 1992), part 4.

Additional resources

You can find the full version of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting narrative here…

Equiano, O., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa the African (Harlow, 1994).

Taylor, Y. (ed.), I was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives. Vol. 1, 1770-1849 (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 29-181.

You can also find more about Olaudah Equiano (including the extracts we looked at in the lecture) at the following web-site, which has been put together by another University of London lecturer, Brycchan Carey:

http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/index.htm (12 September 2018)

For other examples of slave narratives, see…

Section 13 of Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (eds), Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (London, 2000).