Histories of Slavery and its Global Legacies – serie

Stephen C. Russell tells the story of the Bible's role in Jamaica's 1865 Morant Bay rebellion and the international debates about race relations then occupying the Atlantic world. With the conclusion of the American Civil War and arguments about reconstruction underway, the Morant Bay rebellion seemed to serve as a cautionary tale about race relations. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the book demonstrates how those participating in the rebellion, and those who discussed it afterward, conceptualized events that transpired in a small town in rural Jamaica as a crucial instance that laid bare universal truths about race that could be applied to America. Russell argues that biblical slogans were used to encode competing claims about race relations. Letters, sermons, newspaper editorials, and legal depositions reveal a world in the grips of racial upheaval as everyone turned their attention to Jamaica. Intimately and accessibly told, the story draws readers into the private and public lives of the rebellion's heroes and villains.

Stephen C. Russell tells the story of the Bible's role in Jamaica's 1865 Morant Bay rebellion and the international debates about race relations then occupying the Atlantic world. With the conclusion of the American Civil War and arguments about reconstruction underway, the Morant Bay rebellion seemed to serve as a cautionary tale about race relations. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the book demonstrates how those participating in the rebellion, and those who discussed it afterward, conceptualized events that transpired in a small town in rural Jamaica as a crucial instance that laid bare universal truths about race that could be applied to America. Russell argues that biblical slogans were used to encode competing claims about race relations. Letters, sermons, newspaper editorials, and legal depositions reveal a world in the grips of racial upheaval as everyone turned their attention to Jamaica. Intimately and accessibly told, the story draws readers into the private and public lives of the rebellion's heroes and villains.

In this ambitious study of the transition from slavery to freedom, Christopher Bischof explores the idealism that characterized imperial responses to emancipation. Employing a new analytical framework, he considers how British reformers used schemes of liberal humanitarian reform to encourage outcomes that were humane for freedpeople but also secured the continued prosperity of sugar plantations. Through wide-ranging case studies of free-labor abolitionism, special magistrates, elementary education, freeholding, and Chinese indentured labor, the cheap, light-handed humanitarian interventions designed to produce this outcome come into view. As Bischof argues, this idealistic vision helped to legitimize British imperialism at a key moment in its expansion and ideological consolidation. However, this ultimately proved insufficient as freedpeople pursued their own vision of freedom. Combining social, cultural, and political history, Bischof sheds light on the story underpinning this endeavor and the new forms of racism and imperial authority that emerged in its wake.