Blood Never Dried

A People's History of the British Empire

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• Publisher: Bookmarks E Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781905192120
• eBook ISBN: 9781909026216
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Newsinger challenges the claim that the British Empire was a kinder, gentler empire and suggests that the description 'rogue state' is more fitting. In a wonderful popular history of key episodes in British imperial history, he illustrates the darker side of the glory years - Britain's deep involvement in the Chinese opium trade; Gladstone's maiden parliamentary speech defending his family's slave plantation in Jamaica - paying particular attention to the strenuous efforts of the colonised to free themselves of the motherland's baleful rule.

Notes

Introduction: The Blood Never Dried

1 N Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003); Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London, 2004). Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a short-story writer, novelist and poet (his best known work today is The Jungle Book). Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) glorified the British Empire.

2 N Ferguson, Empire, pxiv.

3 For Orwell and the British Empire see my Orwell’s Politics (Basingstoke,1999).

4 See M Leven, “‘Butchering the brutes all over the place’: Total war and massacre in Zulu land, 1879”, History, 84 (1999), for an overview, and more particularly A Greaves, Rorke’s Drift (London, 2002), pp140-144.

The Jamaican rebellion and the overthrow of slavery

1 For the Antiguan conspiracy see D B Gaspar, “The Antigua Slave Conspiracy of 1736: A Case Study of the Origins of Collective Resistance”, The William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978). See also D B Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Durham, NC, 1993).

2 R B Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies 1623-1775 (Kingston, 1994), p256.

3 A Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion (Montreal, 1990), p22.

4 R Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and its Ritual Expression on British West Indies Plantations (Gainesville, 1987), p161.

5 H Beckles, “The 200 Years War: Slave resistance in the British West Indies”, Jamaica Historical Review, 13 (1982).

6 See J Rawley with S Behrendt, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (Lincoln, 2005).

7 J Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London, 1992), p57.

8 H S Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999), pp158, 159, 182.

9 J Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London, 1996), pp50-51, 57.

10 As above, pp233, 234, 235. See also L Greene, “Mutiny on the Slave Ships”, Phylon, 5 (1944); W McGowan, “The Origins of Slave Rebellions in the Middle Passage”, in A O Thompson (ed), In The Shadow of the Plantation: Caribbean History and Legacy (Kingston, 2002); and R B Sheridan, “Resistance and Rebellion of African Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade before Becoming Seasoned Labourers in the British Caribbean 1690-1807”, in V Shepherd (ed), Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom (Kingston, 2002).

11 For a discussion of the Zong episode see I Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance, Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History (Durham NC, 2005).

12 R B Sheridan, “Resistance and Rebellion of African Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade before Becoming Seasoned Labourers in the British Caribbean 1690-1807”, pp24-25.

13 E Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1965), pp130, 133.

14 B Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1835 (Oxford, 1990), p44.

15 P Wright, Knibb The Notorious: Slaves’ Missionary 1803-1845 (London 1973), p60.

16 D Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica 1750-1786 (London, 1989), p72.

17 B Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1835, p44.

18 R Coupland, Wilberforce (Oxford, 1923), p460.

19 See J Andrew, The Hanging of Arthur Hodge (New York, 2000). Hodge’s defence was that “a negro being property, it was no greater offence in law for his owner to kill him than it would be to kill his dog” (p18).

20 R Dirks, The Black Saturnalia, pp161-162.

21 R Blackburn, The Overthrow of British Slavery 1776-1848 (London, 1988), p20.

22 H Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, p158.

23 R B Sheridan, “Resistance and Rebellion of African Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade before Becoming Seasoned Labourers in the British Caribbean 1690-1807”, p254. “Seasoning” was the process where the African slaves were prepared for the new life that faced them on the plantations. It could last for two or three years.

24 As above, pp166-169; B Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1835, p15.

25 E V da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (Oxford, 1994), pp115, 173.

26 O Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War 1655-1740”, Social and Economic Studies, 19 (1970), p289.

27 For the Jamaican Maroons see in particular M Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica 1655-1796 (Trenton, 1990). See also R Price, Maroon Societies (New York, 1973).

28 M Craton, Testing The Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, 1982), pp127, 136-137; M Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the Black Caribbean (Urbana, 1994), p41. See also R Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery (Kingston, 2002), pp130-156.

29 O N Bolland, Colonialism and Resistance in Belize (Belize, 2003), p29. He quotes Edward Despard, the superintendent of the settlement, to the effect that slaves deported from Jamaica to the Hondur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: the blood never dried
• The Jamaican rebellion and the overthrow of slavery
• The Irish famine
• The Opium Wars
• The Great Indian Rebellion, 1857-58
• The invasion of Egypt, 1882
• The post-war crisis, 1916-26
• The Palestine revolt
• Quit India
• The Suez invasion: losing the Middle East
• Crushing the Mau Mau in Kenya
• Malaya and the Far East
• Britain and the American Empire
• Notes
• Index