Disability and Slavery in England and the Caribbean, 1500-1834

‘Remembered in the Body’: Disability and Slavery in England and the Caribbean, 1500-1834 by Stefanie Dawn Kennedy A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by Stefanie Dawn Kennedy (2015) ‘Remembered in the Body’: Disability and Slavery in England and the Caribbean, 1500-1834 Stefanie Dawn Kennedy Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of History University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This dissertation explores the constitutive relationship between disability, anti-black racism, and slavery in the English Atlantic World, from the early stages of colonization to the abolition of the slavery in 1834. It argues that Atlantic slavery, specifically the sugar- producing colonies of the English Caribbean, were key to the development of modern understandings of disability and the disabled body. It was in the specific historical context of the establishment of England’s American colonies, the introduction of sugar to the European economy, and the rapid expansion of the slave trade that the English began increasingly to argue that blackness was an inheritable and racial form of monstrosity. This argument eventually served to normalize and mute opposition to African dispossession in the English Atlantic World. Plantation slavery in the English Caribbean was a disabling system of human exploitation and degradation. The processes of capture, forced march, imprisonment, and forced migration that characterized the slave trade, together with the hostile labour and living conditions of Caribbean sugar plantations, often resulted in emotional, psychological, sensory, and physical impairment. The slave laws of the English Atlantic World deliberately constructed the enslaved as both human and animal, and yet not fully either. By not resolving ii this tension between the human and the animal, lawmakers and slaveowners could recognize the humanity of the enslaved but effectively disable it by treating the enslaved like animals. The very real spectre of revolutionary emancipation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World is key to understanding the place of disability in both anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric. Abolitionist representations of the supplicant, disabled bondsperson contrasted with whites’ fear of the threatening, able-bodied, armed, black male revolutionary and anti-slavery rebel. These two images embodied different paths to emancipation – the choice between revolutionary and armed rebellion on the one hand, exemplified by the Haitian Revolution, and emancipation as a process of imperial and legislated reform on the other. This thesis attempts to retrieve a history of disability in the colonial Caribbean from the archive of English Atlantic slavery and demonstrate that concepts of monstrosity, race, disability, and enslaveability were inextricably linked during the colonial period. iii Acknowledgments Researching and writing a doctoral dissertation is not an individual pursuit. It is, I have learned, a collaborative effort of friends, family, and colleagues. I am most indebted to my supervisor, Melanie J. Newton. I began my graduate studies as a historian of eighteenth- century England, but I came to question many of the silences about the empire. Partway through my first year of doctoral studies, with very little knowledge of colonial history, I met with Melanie for the first time. When I told her about my idea to explore the relationship between disability and slavery in the English Caribbean, Melanie expressed enthusiasm. From our very first meeting, she continued to support this project and have faith in my scholarly abilities. With the heart of a true mentor, Melanie deepened my understanding of the larger processes and movements of history and refined my skills as a scholar as she read each chapter with an eye sharpened by her deep engagement with Caribbean scholarship. This thesis has benefited enormously from Melanie’s intellectual generosity and unceasing kindnesses. She has been a wonderful teacher, colleague, and friend through the good and the bad. I would also like to thank the members of my committee and professors at the University of Toronto for their support and invaluable feedback. Nick Terpstra read my dissertation with lightening speed and provided challenging and engaging feedback. Over the years he has given me sound advice on my research and on the job market and, most importantly, he has offered his friendship. Madhavi Kale joined my committee in the latter years of my PhD and jumped in without hesitation. She has been a generous and supportive third reader, who read my work with a theoretical eye and with insight gained from her own work. Thank you to Anne McGuire, my go-to disability scholar, for her intellectual support iv and for believing in the importance of my work. To Sean Hawkins, who served on my comprehensive exam committee, thank you for challenging me to think deeper about the question of the human/animal as it related to the histories of race and disability. I have had the good fortune to receive financial assistance over the past six years, for which I am very grateful. The Ontario Graduate Scholarship provided me with enough funding to take two consecutive years off from teaching to focus on research and writing. Thank you to the University of Toronto Funding Package, the Kathleen Coburn Graduate Admission Award, the Jerome Samuel Rotenberg Memorial Graduate Scholarship, and the New College Senior Doctoral Fellowship for their generosity. I am indebted to the many archives and archivists who helped me discover disability in their archives, which at times felt like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Thank you to the staff at the British Library, the Library of the Religious Society of Friends, the Royal College of Surgeons, the National Archives at Kew, Faculty of Law Library and the Main Library at the University of West Indies at Cave Hill, the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, the Bridgetown Public Library, the Barbados Department of Archives, the National Library of Jamaica, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the John Carter Brown Library (especially Kimberly Nuscoe). A special thank you to Velma Newton for showing my husband and me the sights in Barbados, for having us to her home for lunch, and for taking us to Oistins for a night out on the town. My gratitude goes out to my close friends and colleagues who added much needed laughter and perspective when the pressures of the “Ivory Tower” became too much to bear. To Jennifer Evans, Frances Timbers, Kirsten James, and Benjamin Landsee, thanks for your v companionship, intellectual feedback, and encouragement. Thank you to Kathryn Segesser, my travel companion in the UK and US, for providing me a home-away-from-home on nights when I needed a place to crash in Toronto. Thank you to my dear friend and fellow PhD mama, Sarah Kastner, who shared her experiences of motherhood and academia with me and offered sound advice and a listening ear when I, too, became a mother. Thank you to Emma Malcolm for reading earlier drafts of my chapters and for great conversation, laughter, and wine. Thank you to Benjamin St. Louis for his friendship, love, and prayers. Most especially, I want to thank my best friend, Tristana Martin-Rubio, who has walked alongside me in academia since our undergrad. Thank you, Tristana, for your friendship, practical advice, good humour, intellectual comradeship, and steadfast support. My extended family and in-laws are too many and support me in ways too numerous to mention here, but they are always in my thoughts. I am grateful for their sustained interest in my studies and their prayers. To my immediate family, who I suspect are as happy as I am that I have finished this dissertation. In spite of never fully understanding the world of academia, you always put in a solid effort to ‘get it.’ Thanks to my siblings – Jessica, Linz, Kyle, Abbie, Ali, Brit, Andy, and Blue – for providing a lively, loud, and loving distraction from the often isolated world of dissertating. Thank you to Ali for volunteering to listen to my conference papers. Thank you to Jessica for singing my praises. Thank you to Linz for her professional advice and countless library trips to Toronto (disguised as shopping trips). Her optimism and constant faith in me as a scholar and teacher has made an otherwise daunting PhD surmountable. To my biggest fans: my parents, David and Ellen. During my PhD studies, when I wasn’t immersed in secondary or primary literature, I could often be found reading historical vi fiction about slavery. Both my parents read these novels alongside me and, in this way, they entered the world in which I study. We had long conversations about Atlantic World slavery and shared in the joys of the fictions that brought this world to life. Thank you, Dad, for listening to and being captivated by the histories I have told you over the years of researching and writing this thesis. Your passion for history rekindles my own. Mom, when I was 19 years old, I suffered an identity crisis and planned to enroll in jewelry-making school. You foresaw an inevitable waste of money and a soiled passion. You whispered in my ear that what I really wanted to do was teach in academia. I sincerely thank you for that. Thanks for providing grocery bags of food when graduate funding wasn’t cutting it, and for driving me to and from bus and train stations. Thanks for the pride I hear in your voice when you tell someone that your daughter is doing her doctorate. I also want to thank you, Mom, for introducing me, by way of example, to the politics of disability and the need to change societal perceptions of people with disabilities. The writing of this dissertation will be bookended by the births of my two children.

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