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MASTER THESIS: REMINDER
The roots of resistance: the anti-
slavery/colonial movement
Prof. Isaline Bergamaschi
Sessions 4 & 5
The abolition of slavery: Key dates,
Van der Linden (ed., 2011)
Key datesin Martin van der Linden (ed.)
(2011)/Thibaud (2021)
1760-1820: surge & climax - “second slavery”
in the XIXth c. with the industrial revolution in
the US, Cuba and Brazil
Paradox: rise of liberal values
1772 : London Society : idea of a boycott (1791)
Society for the Relief of Free Negroes (US, 1775), Society for Effecting
the Abolition of the slave trade (UK, 1787)
American (1775-89) & French Revolution,
Independence in LA (1808-25), rebellion in
Santo Domingo/creation of Haiti (1791-1804)
The complex relations btw revolutions & abolition
(Ibid.)
1803: Denmark banned the slave trade; France abolished it
in 1794 but Napoléon re-established it in 1802. UK (Act of
1807)
1808: De la littérature des nègres, abbé Grégoire (Vidal, 2021:
937-8)
1812: End of encomiendas (Cadiz) but nothing on slavery
1815 : Congress of Vienna : slave trade as ‘repugnant’.
End of the slave trade: gradual after 1815, real only late XXth c.
Focus on England, the US (1862), Brasil (1888)…
J. Wedgwood’s seal (1787)
Why abolition? Thesis
The traditional (Eurocentric) view David T.
Huw: « Transnational advocacy in
the eighteenth century:
Transatlantic activism and the
anti-slavery movement” (2007)
Focus on the Quakers: George Fox
The Enlightenment (Thibaud, 2021: 959)
A limited account – other key contributions:
local rebellions & international wars, ideas &
revolutions
Motley crews and slave wars
The agency of slaves
Tacky: Reassesing its roots and meaning
« It was an extension of wars on the African
continent; it was a race war between black
slaves and white slaveholders; it was a
struggle among black people over the terms
of belonging, effective control of local
territory, and establishment of their own
political legacies; and it was, most
immediately, one of the hardest-fought
battles of a titanic global conflict between
Britain and its European rivals. » (Brown,
2020)
Resistance & RebellionCéline Vidal (2021: 655-
96)
Acts of resistance & arrangement
Diversity: the impact of age, gender
Riot/rebellion: definition, length, size
Favorable circumstances: concentration, rural
areas, external factors (25% of slaves freed
themselves or were freed during Independence in the U.S.)
The role of social, ethnic & religious identities
Meaning & objectives: ‘Resistance’?
Empire was FORCED to respond
« In the presence of the sailor, the Negro feels as a man » (R. Wedderburn)
‘Motley crew’, citizens of the world; a multiethnic, « cosmopolitan » proletariat
Vincent Brown writes war and empire into the history of slavery | Harvard M
agazine
Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761 (axismaps.com)
Three Key Notions
Reverberation : « What goes around, comes
around, by the circular winds and currents of
the Atlantic » (Rediker and Linebaugh, 2000)
« Reversed pedagogy » (Gopal, 2019)
The slave trade and colonisation as states of
permanent war
A process
Required hard work, learning and un-learning, and
collective organisational efforts, difficult
solidarities, new ways of relating, effort to create
political communities, to forge common interest,
to share without eluding differences, intellectual
journeys, transnational moral communities, moral
inquiries, combinations of cultural differences and
moral universals, alliances between metropole and
periphery (adapted from Gopal, 2019)
THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION (1741-1776)
« American Thermidor »
Declaration of Independence (1776)
« The motley crew had helped to make the
revolution », but in the 1770s and 1780s,
merchants, patriots landowners and artisans
increasingly condemned revolutionary crowds,
trying to move politics into legislative chambers, in
which the propertyless have no vote and no
voice. » (Rediker & Linebaugh, 2000)
Not in the DDHC - but impact in Martinique & Santo Domingo – nor the Declaration of
Independence (1776) & the Federal Constitution (1787) but Constitution of
Pensylvania (1780), New Hampshire, Vermont & Virginia (1777)…
First abolitionist societies in the North/ war in the South (Thibaud, 2021: 955)
Tacky’s revolt reverberated in North
America after 1765. How?
1) Direct participation
2) Response: Stamp Act of 1765: a more
centralized and more extractive colonial policy -
that helped to provoke the American Revolution
3) The abolitionist movement: Granville Sharp,
James Somerset (1772), James Otis, J. Philmore,
Clarkson (Cambridge) and John Dean
Focus: BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Zong Massacre (1793)
(1766)
The original Black power, the most radical political revolution of the age,
the first successful workers’ revolt in modern history.
… AND BACK TO THE
CARIBBEAN: HAÏTI (1791-1804)
New phase of slave resistance
Bermuda and Nevis (1761), Suriname (1762,
63, 68-72), Jamaica (1765, 66, 76), British
Honduras (1765, 68, 73), Grenada (1765),
Montserrat (1768), Saint Vincent (1769-73),
Tobago (1770, 71, 74), St. Croix and St Thomas
(1770 and after), St Kitts (1778)
Haiti: Revolution led by Toussaint Louverture;
slavery abolished in 1794 (Thibaud, 2021: 956)
Abolition bypassed: apprenticeship, sharecropping, debt bondage,
convict labour, « free » labour, indentured labour
Slave routes changed
From abolition to colonisation… « the way it could be legitimised (…)
was determined by the anti-slavery campaign »
ABOLITION: THE OUTCOME OF A
LENGTHY, NON-LINEAR, CO-
CONSTRUCTED & UNFINISHED PROCESS
Conclusing remarks (Rediker and Linebaugh, 2000)
« The globalizing powers have a long reach and endless patience.
Yet the planetary wanderers do not forget, and they are ever ready
from Africa to the Caribbean to Seattle to resist slavery and restore
the commons »
« Transatlantic circulation of experience (…) represented the
grandest possibility of both their age and ours. The 1790s were an
expansive time for redefining what it meant to be a human being. But
that time would not last (…) racism spread through society. This was
(…) when the biological category of race was being formed and
disseminated in Britain and America, and no less the moment of the
formation of the political and economic category of class (…) The
working class became national, English. With the rise of pan-
Africanism, the people in diaspora became a noble race in exile »
