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As the Preface states, this book is a result of a research project for the History Department of the University of the West Indies. It is a work which sought to examine the way in which the slave policy of the British government was implemented in a new slave colony. Faced with recalcitrance on the part of the older West Indian colonies, the Colonial Office did not accord Trinidad an independent legislature because it felt it could more easily implement its slave policy. Trinidad proved to be no more compliant than the other colonies, and logistically was not easy to supervise. No study has previously been done of the slave process in Trinidad. A statistical analysis of the registration was undertaken by A. Meredith John in 1988. The present study is important because it has focussed on an area that needed to be examined, and one which illustrates that one cannot generalise on the West Indies. It shows how easily a policy can fail, if administrators are not in sync - as those in London were not during this seminal period. The baneful effects of the British experiments extended to persons like the free coloured and black people, who were on the periphery of the system, but who were materially affected by it. This book is significant because it fills a gap in knowledge about an important aspect of the island's history. It also affords an opportunity to look at the attempt to make changes in a society that, for the most part, was not English. As such it stands as a warning of the need to understand the cultures of those for whom systems are devised before they are imposed.
The last stages of slavery in the British Empire revolved around the Amelioration Policy, a program aimed at improving the quality of life for the individual slave and transforming the institution into a more benign social entity. Rather than preserving the institution of slavery, the Amelioration Policy accelerated its decline. The implication of the legal and economic aspects of the policy led to demographic changes in Mauritius and was a major motivating factor in the Great Trek of 1834. From this study, historians will be able to learn about the problems of translating eighteenth-century humanitarian concepts into practical policy. This book illustrates a long neglected aspect of European imperial activity: the diffusion of Western culture among Third World peoples. The Amelioration Policy established the methods by which Westernization took place in the European colonial empires.
Christa Dierksheide argues that "enlightened" slaveowners in the British Caribbean and the American South, neither backward reactionaries nor freedom-loving hypocrites, thought of themselves as modern, cosmopolitan men with a powerful alternative vision of progress in the Atlantic world. Instead of radical revolution and liberty, they believed that amelioration—defined by them as gradual progress through the mitigation of social or political evils such as slavery—was the best means of driving the development and expansion of New World societies. Interrogating amelioration as an intellectual concept among slaveowners, Dierksheide uses a transnational approach that focuses on provincial planters rather than metropolitan abolitionists, shedding new light on the practice of slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic world. She argues that amelioration—of slavery and provincial society more generally—was a dominant concept shared by enlightened planters who sought to "improve" slavery toward its abolition, as well as by those who sought to ameliorate the institution in order to expand the system. By illuminating the common ground shared between supposedly anti- and pro-slavery provincials, she provides a powerful alternative to the usual story of liberal progress in the plantation Americas. Amelioration, she demonstrates, went well beyond the master-slave relationship, underpinning Anglo-American imperial expansion throughout the Atlantic world.
Excerpt from On the Amelioration of Slavery In this speaking of the insurrection at Barbadoes, I have argued as if the statements of the advocates of slavery respecting the causes of it were correct, that is, that the rising proceeded from the evitation of the question of the Registry Bi'll. But it, is far from being proved that this quesnon had more than a partial bearing upon the cause of the commotion. The insar rection was far from being general, and appears to have only taken place on a few estates. What may be the result of farther evidence it would be premature to say. In the mean time the accounts already received contain nothing which renders it necessary to assume that the whole mischief did not originate in a revolt of Mr. Scott's negroes against their immediate masters or managers, excited by some local and peculiar cause; and which in its progress may possibly have been aggravated by the impressions the negroes may have received from the intemperate representations of their masters respecting the tendency of the Registry Bill. Remarks on the in 3urrection in Barbadoes, &c. P. 7. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Skillfully weaving an African worldview into the conventional historiography of British abolitionism, Claudius K. Fergus presents new insights into one of the most intriguing and momentous episodes of Atlantic history. In Revolutionary Emancipation, Fergus argues that the 1760 rebellion in Jamaica, Tacky's War -- the largest and most destructive rebellion of enslaved peoples in the Americas prior to the Haitian Revolution -- provided the rationale for abolition and reform of the colonial system. Fergus shows that following Tacky's War, British colonies in the West Indies sought political preservation under state-regulated amelioration of slavery. He further contends that abolitionists' successes -- from partial to general prohibition of the slave trade -- hinged more on the economic benefits of creolizing slave labor and the costs of preserving the colonies from destructive emancipation rebellions than on a conviction of justice and humanity for Africans. In the end, Fergus maintains, slaves' commitment to revolutionary emancipation kept colonial focus on reforming the slave system. His study carefully dissects new evidence and reinterprets previously held beliefs, offering historians the most compelling arguments for African agency in abolitionism.