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4 - Enslavement, Banishment, and Penal Transportation
Abstract
Chapter 4 analyses the banishment and penal transportation of enslaved people in the British Caribbean. The first part of the chapter shows the links between punitive mobility and the management of colonial labour. Magistrates sentenced and resold enslaved runaways, rebels, and lawbreakers to colonies like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and St Thomas. They also instigated mass banishments and transportations following so-called conspiracies and plots, and revolts, including to British settlements and colonies in Honduras, Sierra Leone and Australia. Such sentencing became a key element of the larger question of legal reform, following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the reform of the ‘Bloody Code’ in England in the 1820s, and the amelioration of enslavement (c. 1823-38). The second part of the chapter constructs a detailed narrative of the penal transportation of a group of over one hundred enslaved rebels following the Barbados Rebellion of 1816, via Honduras to their final destination, Sierra Leone. It views their journey as an allegory for a slave voyage in reverse, analysing the layers of connection between and the multi-directional circulations associated with enslavement, imperial governmentality, penal transportation, and other forms of colonial bondage and repression.
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During the early nineteenth century, a number of seemingly antithetical developments shaped the British Empire and the wider world, among them evangelical humanism, antislavery and emancipation, the invasion of indigenous peoples’ lands by waves of British settlers, the rapid expansion of the settler colonies, and the consolidation of British rule and designs for the redevelopment of India. Against this backdrop, this article draws attention to significant shifts in the nature of humane governance and opens up a theoretical intersection among life geography, colonial discourse analysis, and assemblage theory. It focuses on the career in British colonial governance of George Arthur, successively Aide de Camp in Jersey, Quarter Master General in Jamaica, Superintendent of Honduras, Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land, Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, and Governor of the Bombay Presidency. Situating Arthur as an individual component within emergent colonial governmental assemblages, I examine the ways in which an individual like Arthur could effect and be affected by shifts in humanitarian and governmental discourse and practice. The geographies of Arthur's entanglements in colonial discourses were paramount in affecting the nature and extent of his capacity to effect reformulation of those discourses. Arthur's personal performances and expressions of colonial government in different sites of empire and through specific episodes of contestation assisted in the deterritorialization of certain kinds of colonial governmentality and the reterritorialization of others. As Arthur moved from the West Indies to Van Diemen's Land to Upper Canada to India, so his person discernibly effected shifts from ameliorative through conservative humanitarian to developmental forms of imperial governance.
The French and Haitian revolutions forced the migration of over thirty thousand exiles throughout the Atlantic world in the two decades after 1789. Focusing on the earliest and largest waves of migration during the 1790s, this article employs concepts drawn from social network analysis and presents evidence to illustrate the interconnected nature of social networks in the Atlantic world. It argues that the relocation and temporary integration of émigrés and refugees in the United States was, for many, far from a haphazard process. Rather, these forced migrations often resembled the kind of chain migrations historians have witnessed in other contexts. This research also suggests the need to distinguish between the ability to survive exile and the exile experience itself. Despite their ability to survive coerced, trans-Atlantic migration intact, many exiles nonetheless carried the emotional and material scars of their exile experience: the loss of loved ones, property, and, for some, their identity as French men and women.
Before the 1820s, enslaved people in many of Britain's Caribbean colonies were regularly sentenced to the punishment of `transportation', which meant being sold into the slave trade within the Americas. For a short period ending in 1837 people sentenced to transportation in the Caribbean were sent to Australia via Britain. This article examines these successive systems of transportation and addresses the Colonial Office decision of 1837 to end transportation from the West Indies to Australia. It highlights the significance of an emerging racial and spatial politics of empire that coded Australia white and the Caribbean black, and tried to ensure that the two did not mix.
As Harry Washington faced a British military tribunal in 1800, he not may have appreciated the irony that his escape from enslavement to the leader of the rebellion in colonial America led inexorably to his trial for rebellion in Sierra Leone. Where General Washington was subsequently reified as father of the United States, Harry Washington lost everything in his attempt to forge an independent community in West Africa. The contrast between these two Washingtons could not be greater, yet they share a commitment to the transforming ideals of liberty and self-determination, albeit one played out very differently for George Washington than for the African man he purchased in 1863.