NOTES
1Throughout the sixteenth century the
Portuguese dominated this trade in human cargo. Their first market for slaves was
the sugar plantations of Brazil. The English plantations became a market around 1650
with the development of the sugar plantation in Barbados. By this time, the Portuguese and
the Dutch, who had competed with them, were in decline. England was thus able “to
break into the Guinea Trade on her own behalf.” See William D. Phillips,
Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 173-185.
2The growing dominance of sugar to the
Jamaican economy meant that by 1720 she had overtaken Barbados as the leading
sugar-exporting colony to Britain, and by 1750 she “became the largest sugar producer
in the English West Indies.” David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters , and Slaves;
Market Behaviour in Early English America (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 7.
3Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of
Colonial Slavery 1776-1848. (New York: Verso, 1988), 8.
4Edward Long, for example, only saw the
enslaved’s free time on a Sunday afternoon as “being uselessly dissipated in
idleness and lounging…” Edward Long, History of Jamaica, New ed., vol. 2,
Book III, Chap. V, Sect. II, Distributive and Munerary (London: Frank Cass
and Company, Ltd., 1970), 492.
5Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy
and Material Culture of Slaves; Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamiaca and
Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 26.
6John F. Campbell, “Always
Free.” Master's Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1997), 36-38.
7This belief of the enslaved in their right to their own free
space, even in the midst of Caribbean ‘chattel’ slavery, is discussed under the
heading of ‘ideological clarity.’ For a full explanation of the concept, see
John F. Campbell, “Always Free.(Master's Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1997),
79-83.
8Martin Klein and Paul E. Lovejoy,
"Slavery in West Africa," in The
Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, eds.
Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 183.
9Thornton’s point concerns the
extensive and influential role of slaves as stewards of the master’s business and
recognition of kinship ties and autonomy that acknowledged the right of enslaved
personhood, even within the context of worker/master subordination. John Thornton, Africa
and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 74.
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