Episode 14: Slave Rebellions w/ Dr. Marjoleine Kars, Dr. Vincent Brown, and Dr. Sharika Crawford

4:46PM Mar 7, 2022

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Campus Connections

Jefferson Rivas

Sophia Possidente

Dr. Vincent Brown

Dr. Marjoleine Kars

Dr. Amy Froide

Keywords:

umbc

enslaved

people

dutch

colony

rebellion

revolt

jamaica

jefferson

book

caribbean

rebel

maddox

struggles

crawford

reverberations

sophia

slaves

slavery

slave revolt

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

Over the past 13 episodes of Retrieving the Social Sciences, we've had the good fortune to feature a brilliant assortment of faculty, students, and visiting speakers. These talented individuals have brought us deeply meaningful insights from across the social science disciplines. You know, I've learned so much over the past year from these interviews and lecture rebroadcasts, and I think that the experience has really affirmed the whole purpose of this podcast: to get more voices out there for all to hear. Speaking of voices, on today's episode I'm finally joined by a couple of people who have been quietly working to make this show happen on a week-to-week basis. First up, we have Jefferson Rivas, who has been a production assistant on this show since its inception.

Hello, Dr. Anson and Retrieving the Social Sciences listeners. I am happy to be here in audio form this time.

So glad to have you, Jefferson. And huge congratulations on your recent graduation from UMBC. Your degree was in Media Communication Studies. So what's next after this?

Thank you, Dr. Anson. I'm planning on working on either writing or editing media.

Great to hear, Jefferson and best of luck to you. We're also joined today by the newest member of our group, production assistant, Sophia Possidente.

Thank you for having me! I'm excited to join both of you on today's podcast.

So if you wouldn't mind Sophia, tell us a little bit about yourself. Like Jefferson, you're also studying Media and Communication Studies at UMBC. How far along are you in the program?

I'm currently in my second year of the program and I hope to graduate early next spring. Most of my electives have to do with video or audio production, but I also love writing and media analysis.

Dear listeners, you have heard it from the source. UMBC students are fantastic on and off the air. And I'm glad to have a couple of co-hosts on the mics today because today's lecture rebroadcast features not one, not two, but three fantastic panelists.

Today's episode features a rebroadcast of the 2021 Social Sciences Forum Low Lecture. For the first time the lecture was a roundtable bringing together three important historians to discuss slave rebellions in the Caribbean. Dr. Vincent Brown of Harvard University, Dr. Sharika Crawford of the U.S. Naval Academy, and Dr. Marjoleine Kars of UMBC.

Dr. Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History, and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Dr. Brown has published widely on the subject of slave rebellion, including important books like "The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery," and "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War." Dr. Brown has also produced a documentary for PBS entitled "Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness." His work has been nominated for and won dozens of top prizes from historical associations and institutes and has been placed on numerous best book lists by newspapers and journals.

Dr. Sharika Crawford is a Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy. Her voluminous research highlights topics such as Caribbean migration and the experience of Afro-Latin Americans. Dr. Crawford's recent book is entitled "The Last Turtlemen: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Crossing in the Maritime Caribbean." Dr. Crawford was recently the recipient of the Class of 1951 Distinguished Faculty and Research Excellence Award from the United States Naval Academy.

Dr. Marjoleine Kars is a professor in the UMBC Department of History, and an affiliate faculty member in Gender and Women's Studies, and Language, Literacy and Culture. Dr. Kars has published widely on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including the recent book entitled "Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast." "Blood on the River" was named an NPR best book for 2020 and has received multiple prizes from historical associations.

Thanks, Jefferson and Sophia for introducing our panelists. Their accolades certainly speak for themselves. And we're really delighted to bring you their conversation today. Let's jump right in.

So, I would like to turn things over now to our panelists for what I'm sure will be a fabulous discussion of race and rebellion in the Caribbean.

So let's pull back a little bit and just kind of start with 1760. In Jamaica, which was at the time, Great Britain's most profitable, most politically significant, and most militarily significant colony in the Americas. Of the 26 colonies that Great Britain had in the Americas, on the eve of revolution, Jamaica was by far the most profitable of them, right? So this slave revolt in their most important colony was an incredibly important event. On April, the night of April 7, into the morning of April 8, slaves rose up on the north side of the island. In what became a massive slave revolt that had various phases that lasted over the course of about 18 months. There were about 500 slave rebels were killed. Another 500 transported from the island for life, about 60 white planters were killed, and an unnamed, uh number of other people of color and enslaved people who were killed who were caught up in the crossfire. And then there were a number of reverberations of this revolt. Afterward, through the 1760s. I tried to trace out kind of how the landscape remained unsettled in Jamaica for that entire decade. And then what I thought were some of the consequences of the revolt itself for the British Empire. We also find that this revolt in Britain's most important colony was a spur to the kind of imperial reforms that Great Britain instituted for its entire empire. Those same reforms, which the North American colonists in the 13 colonies we know more about, revolted against, splitting the British Empire in 1776. So one can see Tacky's Revolt, and it's reverberations playing a role, right? in the the cascade of decisions that precipitated the American Revolution.

And in contrast, Berbice is a tiny colony. If there are about 100,000 enslaved people in Jamaica, in Berbice there may be 5000. It's kind of a backward colony, not terribly developed. But the Dutch, of course, had hopes they always had hopes. It's a colony that's owned by a company of investors in Amsterdam. So it's not directly ruled by the Dutch government. But the Dutch government, of course, backs this company. And this rebellion breaks out in February of 1763. It is almost instantly massive. The Dutch, it's a very long colony, it's about 100 miles. And so and the Dutch are concentrated in the middle and they begin to fear pretty quickly that they're going to be cut off from the coast and they'll all be murdered. There's only about 350 of them. And so they flee pretty quickly. And the Rebels are hot on their trail. And so within a week, basically, the formerly enslaved people have taken over the entire colony and they stay in control of it, the whole thing, basically, for more than a year. And so in the end, the Dutch with the help of native allies, whereas in Jamaica, it appears that the allies are mostly maroons, the Dutch are successful in stamping out this rebellion and long term reverberations are that the company loses an enormous amount of money. It costs the Dutch state a million dollars to get this colony back and then they get it back. It's bloodied. It's, most of the plantations are destroyed. A third to a fifth of the enslaved people have been killed, murdered, died in battle in this rebellion. And Dutch government begins to think maybe us bailing out these companies that are too big to fail but don't have enough money to help themselves is not really worth it. And so, over time, that feeling grows also because there's much rebellion in, in Surinam, particularly among maroons. The Dutch state is spending too much money on this and so in the 1790s they decide that they're going to do away with these private companies that had owned Berbice and own Surinam, and they take over these colonies as uh, as a state enterprise.

You know, people don't know a lot about slavery. You say slavery, and the enslaved almost kind of disappear, right? And we only think about their subjection to the institution. Because the ideology of slavery is such that those people are mere extensions of a slave holder or a slave owner's will. That they have no personhood of their own. That's the ideology of slavery. I think Professor Kars and I though kind of start from the basic premise that slavery and the history of slaves themselves, of the enslaved, are not the same thing. And I think a lot of people don't ever get past the history of slavery and what it does to people. What you know, and it is an absolutely brutal institution everywhere you find it, right? Its impulse is to obliterate the personhood, right? of the enslaved. And yet, right? when you're a social historian, I think the first thing you assume is that that's never a completely successful endeavor, right?The powerful are never able to impose their will on the world completely in just the way that they would like. And where we start from is where are the limits to power? And how do people explore and exploit those limits to power, right? And I think that's the kind of major conceptual shift one has to get into to, to begin where we begin, which is, let's think about the politics of the enslaved. They have politics. Let's think about slave revolt. Yes, they did revolt, right? Let's think about their own internal divisions, their own internal sense of hierarchy, and personhood, and struggle and beauty in a life of ugliness and pain and tragedy, right? One has to ask the question before one can even see it emerging from those sources. You'll never look for sources, if you don't think those are viable questions to ask. So we have to start there. If one starts from the perspective of the slaveholders, and the state or the empire, then one can see an undifferentiated mass of enslaved rebels, right? rising up against the duly constituted authority. But if one starts where we generally do, among those people trying to look at their aspirations, their struggles, not just their rejection of the powerful, but what they want, their positive aspirations. When one begins by study taking black politics seriously, taking working class politics seriously, one has to see those divisions. One has to see those fissures. One has to see those different aspirations, as well as the common rejection of, of imperial authority. So I do think that that in some ways, in some ways, that comes from our common trait, even though as you say, we had very different sources, and we were able to, to, you know, develop those ideas in different ways. I do think that we have similar assumptions that allowed us to see those things.

Yes, and to look well beyond seeing a rebellion of enslaved people as not just a conflict between slaves and masters. But, but as much just like the American Revolution was an anti-colonial struggle as much as a struggle among the people who were trying to reject that slavery and reject those Europeans.

What I found when I was, when I was looking at Tacky's Revolt, and what I see coming out through your book, too, is that there are wars within wars, struggles within struggles, right? So kind of one has that larger, you know, inter-imperial struggle between the Dutch and the Danish and the British and the French and the Spanish, right? That actually has its reverberations in these slave societies. But one also sees those enslaving wars in West Africa, the conflicts among Africans themselves, right, that produced so many captives for sale to the Europeans playing out in some ways in the Americas. And that's before you get to those struggles among Africans themselves in the Americas, and those struggles between the enslaved and the slaveholders. So you have kind of four wars all at once. And what I decided to kind of, you know, frame that as, as the kind of currents of warfare that eddied in the slave revolt in Jamaica in 1760 and 61.

I think in my case, because I had these 900 little mini slave narratives in a way, I had an easier time talking about what it was like for people to be in rebellion, and I was really intrigued by that question, because my students always used to say, why don't all enslaved- why don't all enslaved people rebel? Well, because the costs were enormous. And in my interrogations, people talk about their children dying of hunger, or their children being killed, or their children falling ill, or getting separated from their children, or not being able to find their husbands, or looking for their wives and getting captured, or being killed by Native Americans, or I mean it's, it's really astounding, what I found in those records. And so, because I have these 900 investigations in Berbice, I was able to write indeed, on it, you used the word intimate Professor Crawford, but a really intimate level about what it meant to people, and how people made their choices. And I was also really interested in showing that people who did not want to rebel were not merely just fearful, but that they had good reasons, and fear is a good reason, don't get me wrong, it's a very good reason. But people also had other reasons not to rebel. It had to do with families, it had to do with a different political vision. And so I'm able to tell many stories about many people in the book. Often just little stories, because I can't find them for very long. In some cases, I can tell a longer story that really shows you from many, many different perspectives of the enslaved what it was like. And when I give talks, I've given a number of talks on Zoom in Guiana, I have found there that, that people are both really eager to know more about their history, and upset that they don't have those records there. That those records are in the Netherlands, that they're in Dutch. And I've been able to do a little bit of brokering. And now it appears that the Dutch Archives are going to translate some of these trial records into English so they can go to Guiana. But I think we also need to educate young Guianese students in Dutch and give them the money to go to the Netherlands so that they can study their own history rather than merely take the vision of a middle aged white Dutch woman, you know. So, so it's not only that, that people are not always aware that enslaved people didn't have agency, but people also don't have equal access to the records. And so by writing this book for a popular audience, which means that I get less into historiography and less into abstract stuff, but tell a lot of stories, I'm hoping to both help people who have kind of a static view of slavery see how dynamic it was, and how much agency people did have even in situations of near impossible choices. And at the same time, I'm hoping to sort of change our minds about the Dutch and give a bit of history to the to the Guianese and entice them to go study that history themselves, if possible.

Campus Connections (6x)

Now it's time for Campus Connections, a part of the show where we connect today's feature to other work happening on UMBC's campus. Take it away Jefferson and Sophia.

When we think of storytelling and preserving history, the first thing that comes to mind is typically written or verbal communication. But on today's Campus Connection, we're taking a look at the research of Dr. Camee Maddox-Wingfield examining dance as a form of historical preservation of Caribbean culture. Dr. Maddox-Wingfield is an assistant professor in UMBC's Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health, whose primary field of study is dance and spirituality in the Caribbean and other African diasporas. Dr. Maddox-Wingfield's research on bèlè, a traditional style of folk dance, expands the definition of decolonization beyond physical rebellion. Dr. Maddox-Wingfield explains that she was drawn to this field in order to preserve the unique voices of African Caribbean communities who are often underrepresented in wider culture.

After becoming an overseas department of France in 1946, residents of the island Martinique are made to assimilate to French culture, identity, and ideals. Decades later, the modern revival of bèlè serves as many things to the community: a resistance to colonial homogenization, a reconstruction of collective identity, and a way to heal from the generational trauma of cultural genocide. Because of the inherently visual nature of dance, Dr. Maddox-Wingfield took a hands-on approach to her research, physically learning bèlè in addition to studying its history. Through this method, she hopes to continue the legacy of black anthropologists incorporating dance and performance into academic spaces.

Sophia and Jefferson, thanks so much for joining me on today's episode. And thanks for that fantastic summary of Dr. Maddox-Wingfield's important work. And thanks to you, dear listeners, for tuning in. Until next time keep questioning.