War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850
Series Editors: Rafe Blaufarb (Tallahassee, USA), Alan Forrest (York, UK), and Karen Hagemann (Chapel Hill, USA) Editorial Board: Michael Broers (Oxford UK), Christopher Bayly (Cambridge, UK), Richard Bessel (York, UK), Sarah Chambers (Minneapolis, USA), Laurent Dubois (Durham, USA), Etienne François (Berlin, Germany), Janet Hartley (London, UK), Wayne Lee (Chapel Hill, USA), Jane Rendall (York, UK), Reinhard Stauber (Klagenfurt, Austria) Titles include: Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall (editors) WAR, EMPIRE AND SLAVERY, 1770–1830 Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson (editors) THE BEE AND THE EAGLE Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire, 1806 Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Jane Rendall (editors) SOLDIERS, CITIZENS AND CIVILIANS Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820 Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele and Jane Rendall (editors) GENDER, WAR AND POLITICS Transatlantic Perspectives, 1755–1830 Marie-Cécile Thoral FROM VALMY TO WATERLOO France at War, 1792–1815 Forthcoming: Michael Broers, Agustin Guimera and Peter Hick (editors) THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE AND THE NEW EUROPEAN POLITICAL CULTURE Alan Forrest, Etienne François and Karen Hagemann (editors) WAR MEMORIES The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe Leighton S. James WITNESSING WAR Experience, Narrative and Identity in German Central Europe, 1792–1815 Catriona Kennedy NARRATIVES OF WAR Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland, 1793–1815 Kevin Linch BRITAIN AND WELLINGTONíS ARMY Recruitment, Society and Tradition, 1807–1815
War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–54532–8 hardback 978–0–230–54533–5 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830
Edited by
Richard Bessel Professor of Twentieth Century History, University of York Nicholas Guyatt Lecturer in Modern History, University of York and Jane Rendall Honorary Fellow, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall 2010. All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-22989-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-31108-8 ISBN 978-0-230-28269-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230282698 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data War, empire and slavery, 1770–1830 / edited by Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt, Jane Rendall. p. cm. — (War, culture and society, 1750–1850) “This volume arises from the conference ‘War, Empire and Slavery, 1790– 1820’, held at The King’s Manor, University of York, UK, 16–18 May 2008” – Introd. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–22989–1 (alk. paper) 1. War – History – 19th century – Congresses. 2. Revolutions – History – 19th century – Congresses. 3. Slavery – History – 19th century – Congresses. 4. Imperialism – History – 19th century – Congresses. I. Bessel, Richard. II. Guyatt, Nicholas, 1973– III. Rendall, Jane, 1945– D361.W36 2010 909.7—dc22 2010009862 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Contents
Foreword to the Series vii Acknowledgements viii Notes on Contributors ix List of Maps and Illustrations xiii List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction: War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 1 Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall
Part I A World in Upheaval 1 The ‘Revolutionary Age’ in the Wider World, c. 1790–1830 21 C. A. Bayly
2 The Revolutionary Abolitionists of Haiti 44 Laurent Dubois
3 Race and Slavery in the Making of Arab France, 1802–15 61 Ian Coller
4 The Making of Warriors: The Militarization of the Rio de la Plata, 1806–07 81 Alejandro Martin Rabinovich
Part II Freedom and Captivity 5 The French Conspiracy of 1795: Paranoia and Opportunism on the Eve of Independence in Buenos Aires 101 Lyman L. Johnson
6 Armed with Swords and Ostrich Feathers: Militarism and Cultural Revolution in the Cape Slave Uprising of 1808 121 Nigel Worden
7 Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the Fate of Atlantic Antislavery during the Age of Revolutionary Wars 139 Marie-Jeanne Rossignol
v vi Contents
8 Borderlands of Empire, Borderlands of Race 157 Julie Winch
Part III Identity and Difference 9 The French Revolutionary Wars in the Spanish-American Imagination, 1789–1830 179 Rebecca Earle
10 Old Subjects, New Subjects and Non-Subjects: Silences and Subjecthood in Fédon’s Rebellion, Grenada, 1795–96 201 Caitlin Anderson
11 The Russian Empire: Military Encounters and National Identity 218 Janet Hartley
12 War, Empire and the ‘Other’: Iranian-European Contacts in the ‘Napoleonic’ Era 235 Joanna de Groot
13 Patriotism, Painting and the Portuguese Empire during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 256 Foteini Vlachou
Index 277 Foreword to the Series
Rafe Blaufarb, Alan Forrest and Karen Hagemann
The century from 1750 to 1850 was a seminal period of change, not just in Europe but across the globe. The political landscape was transformed by a series of revolutions fought in the name of liberty–most notably in the Americas and France, of course, but elsewhere, too: in Holland and Geneva during the eighteenth century and across much of mainland Europe by 1848. Nor was change confined to the European world. New ideas of freedom, equality and human rights were carried to the furthest outposts of empire, to Egypt, India and the Caribbean, which saw the creation in 1801 of the first black republic in Haiti, the former French colony of Saint- Domingue. And in the early part of the nineteenth century they continued to inspire anti-colonial and liberation movements throughout Central and Latin America. If political and social institutions were transformed by revolution in these years, so, too, was warfare. During the quarter-century of the French revo- lutionary wars, in particular, Europe was faced with the prospect of ‘total’ war, on a scale unprecedented before the twentieth century. Military hard- ware, it is true, evolved only gradually, and battles were not necessarily any bloodier than they had been during the Seven Years War. But in other ways these can legitimately be described as the first modern wars, fought by mass armies mobilized by national and patriotic propaganda, leading to the dis- placement of millions of people throughout Europe and beyond, as soldiers, prisoners of war, civilians and refugees. For those who lived through the period these wars would be a formative experience that shaped the ambi- tions and the identities of a generation. The aims of the series are necessarily ambitious. In its various volumes, whether single-authored monographs or themed collections, it seeks to extend the scope of more traditional historiography. It will study warfare during this formative century not just in Europe, but in the Americas, in colonial societies, and across the world. It will analyse the construction of identities and power relations by integrating the principal categories of dif- ference, most notably class and religion, generation and gender, race and ethnicity. It will adopt a multifaceted approach to the period, and turn to methods of political, cultural, social, military and gender history, in order to develop a challenging and multidisciplinary analysis. Finally, it will exam- ine elements of comparison and transfer and so tease out the complexities of regional, national and global history.
vii Acknowledgements
This volume arises from the conference ‘War, Empire and Slavery, 1790– 1820’, held at The King’s Manor, University of York, UK, 16–18 May 2008. This was one in a series of international conferences organized by the Anglo- German research group on ‘Nations, Borders, Identities: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in European Experiences and Memories’. It was also the Eighth Cultural History Conference of the Department of History, University of York. We would like to thank Mette Harder and Clare Bond for the skilled administration which made this such an enjoyable event. At the conference 35 scholars from 13 different countries presented papers, and for this volume we selected 13 to be rewritten for publication. We would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the History Department for the funding which made the conference possible. We would also like to thank all those who participated in it for their stimulating pres- entations and contributions to discussion, and the contributors to this vol- ume for their willingness to collaborate in the lengthy editorial process. We are grateful to Reginald Piggott for preparing the maps, to James Walvin for giving so generously of his time and expertise and to Alan Forrest for his support throughout the preparation of the book.
Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall
viii Notes on Contributors
Caitlin Anderson is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. She earned a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College. Her book, Law and Identity in the British Empire: The Origins of Citizenship, 1770–1870, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. It argues that ideas and practices of citizenship in the British Empire were transformed in the century after the Seven Years War. C. A. Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. He is currently working on the history of Indian liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent publications have included The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA, 2004), and, with Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London, 2007). Richard Bessel is Professor of Twentieth Century History at the University of York, UK. He is currently working on a general history of violence. His most recent books are Germany 1945: From War to Peace (London and New York, 2009); (ed. with Claudia Haake), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford, 2009); and Nazism and War (London and New York, 2004). Ian Coller is Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His book, Arab France, 1801–1831: The Making and Unmaking of an Identity is forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2010: it explores the history of the Egyptians and Syrians who emigrated to Marseille and Paris after the French occupation of Egypt. His current project investigates European com- munities living in the Ottoman Muslim world in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Laurent Dubois is Professor of History at Duke University, Durham, NC, where he teaches French, Caribbean and Atlantic History. He has recently published: Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004); A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); (ed. with John Garrigus), Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents (New York, 2006); and (ed. with Julius S. Scott), Origins of the Black Atlantic (New York, 2009), and has recently
ix x Notes on Contributors completed Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (forthcom- ing, University of California Press, 2010). He is now focusing on a book on the history of the banjo for Harvard University Press and is continuing to work on a collaborative general history of the Caribbean for University of North Carolina Press. Rebecca Earle teaches in the History Department of the University of Warwick. Her research concerns the cultural and intellectual history of colo- nial and independent Spanish America. She has published on the Spanish- American wars of independence, the connections between clothing, race and nation, the history of letter writing, and a variety of other topics. Her most recent book explores nineteenth-century nationalism’s engagement with the preconquest past: The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC, 2007). Her current research explores the construction of the Spanish body in the early modern Hispanic world. Joanna de Groot is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York, UK, and a member of the Centres for Eighteenth Century Studies and Women’s Studies there. Her main scholarly interests are in histories of empire and nation and of gender and women since 1700, with particular reference to the Middle East, especially Iran, to India, and to orientalism. She is cur- rently working on a book about the role of global and colonial influences in British history writing since 1750. Her recent publications include ‘Oriental Feminotopias? Montagu’s and Montesquieu’s “Seraglios” Revisited’, Gender & History, 18 (2006): 66–86; Religion, Culture, and Politics in Iran: From the Qajars to Khomeini (London, 2007); ‘Whose Revolution? Stakeholders and Stories of Iranian Constitutional Movements, 1905–12’, in The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, ed. H. E. Chehabi and Vanessa Martin (London, 2010). Nicholas Guyatt is a Lecturer in History at the University of York, UK. He is interested in the political and intellectual history of the Atlantic world before 1800 and in the history of the United States, and he has written on nationalism, religion, empire and race in Britain and America. He is the author of Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge, 2007). His current research examines the connections between racial ideology and non-white colonization in and beyond the early United States. In 2009–10 he held a faculty fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center. Janet Hartley is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has written extensively on the politi- cal, military, social and diplomatic history of Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her books include Alexander I (London, 1994); A Social History of the Russian Empire, 1650–1825 (London, 1999); Charles Whitworth: Diplomat in the Age of Peter the Great (Aldershot, 2002); Russia, 1762–1825: Military Power, the State and the People (Westpoint, CT, 2008). Notes on Contributors xi
Lyman L. Johnson is Professor of History and Latin American Studies at University of North Carolina, Charlotte. His recent publications include (with Zephyr Frank), ‘Cities and Wealth in the South Atlantic: Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro before 1860’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48/3 (2006): 634–668; ‘ “A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect”: Slaves and Their Masters in the Courts of Late Colonial Buenos Aires’, Hispanic American Historical Review 87/4 (2007): 631–657; and he has recently edited Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Politics of the Body in Latin America (Albuquerque, 2004). His current project, Workshop of Revolution: Plebeian Buenos Aires, 1776–1810, will be published by Duke University Press in 2010. Alejandro Martin Rabinovich is a PhD candidate in History and Civilization at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. At present he holds a research fellowship from the French Ministry of Defence’s Centre d’Etudes d’Histoire de la Défense. He specializes in the study of warrior cul- tures and, more precisely, in social practices in situations of extreme politi- cal instability and protracted warfare. His current research focuses on the problem of warfare in the Rio de la Plata region (South America) after the breakdown of the Spanish Empire (1806–52). Jane Rendall is Honorary Fellow in the History Department and Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York, UK. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and comparative women’s and gender history. Recent publications include (with Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, UK, 2000); (ed. with Mark Hallett), Eighteenth-Century York: Culture, Space and Society (York, 2003); (ed. with Alan Forrest and Karen Hagemann), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820 (Basingstoke, 2008) Marie-Jeanne Rossignol is a Professor in American Studies at the University Paris Diderot. Her current research focuses on North American antislavery activists from an Atlantic perspective, from 1760 to 1815. Her recent publica- tions on this topic include ‘Le contexte nord-américain de l’antiesclavagisme britannique: le débat atlantique sur l’esclavage et l’abolition (1688–1787)’, in Le débat sur l’abolition de l’esclavage en Grande-Bretagne (1787–1840), ed. Françoise Le Jeune and Michel Prum (Paris, 2008), 63–89. She has also pub- lished, with Jacques Portes, Nicole Fouché and Cécile Vidal, an essay on interactions between Europe and North America, Europe/Amérique du Nord: cinq siècles d’interactions (Paris, 2008). Foteini Vlachou is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Crete. She is one of the researchers on the project ‘Portrayals of the Peninsular War: from the Novel to the Screen’ (CETAPS, Universidade Nova de Lisboa). xii Notes on Contributors
Recent publications include ‘Between History and Art: Prints, Drawings and the Interpretation of the Peninsular War’, in A Guerra Peninsular: perspecti- vas multidisciplinares (Lisbon, 2008), vol. 2, 215–238; ‘Painting the Battle of Porto, March 29, 1809: The “desastre da ponte das barcas” in its Portuguese and French Context’, Revista de Estudos Anglo-Portugueses 18 (2009), forthcoming. At present she holds a scholarship from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Lisbon. Julie Winch is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is completing a study of the Clamorgans, a multi-racial fam- ily whose members fought an epic legal battle to claim a fortune in real estate in the American Midwest. Recent publications include A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (Oxford, 2002); ‘The Making and Meaning of James Forten’s Letters from a Man of Colour’, William & Mary Quarterly 64/1 (2007): 112–138; ‘Sarah Forten’s Antislavery Networks’, in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Age of Emancipation, ed. Kathryn K. Sklar and James B. Stewart (New Haven, 2007), 143–157. Nigel Worden is Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research has focused primarily on slavery at the Cape during the Dutch colonial period and he is currently director of a major research project on the forging of social identities in eighteenth-century Cape Town. His books include Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, UK, 1985); with Elizabeth van Heyningen and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town, 1998); The Making of Modern South Africa (4th edn, Malden, MA, 2007); ed. with Gerald Groenewald, Trials of Slavery (Cape Town, 2007); and Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World (Rondebosch, 2007). List of Maps and Illustrations
Maps
1 Africa, Asia and Europe xvi 2 The Americas xviii
Illustrations
9.1 La Carmagnole, French print, c. 1792. David L. Dowd, The French Revolution (New York, 1965) 188 9.2 Shield of the Republic of Cundinamarca, c. 1812. Pedro María Ibáñez, Crónicas de Bogotá (Bogotá, 1891) 189 9.3 Decorative sword presented to Simón Bolívar by the Municipality of Lima, 1825 (detail). Mundial (Lima, 1924) 190 9.4 Flag of the Insurgent 7th Infantry Regiment of Freedmen, Río de la Plata, c. 1813. Julio M. Luqui Lagleyze and María Cristina D’Andrea, ‘Hallazgo de la bandera del Regimiento Nº 7 de Infantería de Libertos, 1813−1816’, Regimientos de America
xiii xiv List of Maps and Illustrations
(Divisão de Documentação Fotográfica—Instituto dos Museus e da Conservação, photo José Pessoa) 262 13.3 José de Madrazo, The Death of Viriato, 1807, oil on canvas, 307 ϫ 462 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid 264 13.4 Domingos António de Sequeira, Allegory of the Virtues of the Prince Regent, 1810, oil on canvas, 151 ϫ 200 cm, Palácio Nacional de Queluz (Divisão de Documentação Fotográfica—Instituto dos Museus e da Conservação, photo José Pessoa) 267 13.5 Gregório Francisco de Queiroz and Domingos António de Sequeira (after a drawing by Sequeira), Sopa de Arroios, 1813, etching and engraving, 54 ϫ 85 cm, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon 269 13.6 José Aparicio, Famine in Madrid, 1818, oil on canvas, 315 ϫ 437 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid 270 List of Abbreviations
AGI Archivo General de las Indias, Seville AGN Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, AM Archives Municipales, Marseille AMG Archives de la Ministère de la Guerre, Vincennes AN Archives Nationales, Paris CPA Cape Provincial Archives, Cape Town MHS Missouri Historical Society, St Louis MOSA Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004) PSZ Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii, 45 vols (St Petersburg, 1830) RGADA Rossiiskii gosudartsvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow RGVIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, Moscow SLRD St Louis Recorder of Deeds, City Hall, St Louis UKNA National Archives, London
xv Map 1 Africa, Asia and Europe
Map 2 The Americas