Calamity's Empire: Slavery, Scarcity, and the Political Economy Of
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Calamity’s Empire: Slavery, Scarcity, and the Political Economy of Provisioning in the British Caribbean, C. 1775-1834 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Crawford, Nicholas. 2016. Calamity’s Empire: Slavery, Scarcity, and the Political Economy of Provisioning in the British Caribbean, C. 1775-1834. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33840679 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Calamity’s Empire: Slavery, Scarcity, and the Political Economy of Provisioning in the British Caribbean, c. 1775-1834 A dissertation presented by Nicholas Crawford to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge Massachusetts July 2016 ©2016—Nicholas Crawford All rights reserved. iii Dissertation Advisor: Professor Joyce Chaplin Nicholas Crawford Calamity’s Empire: Slavery, Scarcity, and the Political Economy of Provisioning in the British Caribbean, c. 1775-1834 Abstract This dissertation examines how practical and conceptual concerns over ensuring the basic needs of colonial subjects shaped the political economy of slavery and empire in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British Caribbean. Provisioning—here defined as food, clothing, shelter, and sometimes medical care—was the dominant lens through which early modern European empires viewed matters related to the health and bodily needs of soldiers, sailors, colonists, slaves, and other subjects. This dissertation offers the first focused study of provisioning in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Atlantic world and introduces the concept of overlapping British imperial “provisioning regimes” in order to examine how logistical and infrastructural matters related to provisioning shaped evolving conceptions of the material care and health of subjects under imperial rule. Utilizing an extensive array of primary sources—colonial governors’ correspondence, plantation letters and accounts, merchant papers, naval and military records, customs statistics, parliamentary debates and inquiries—this dissertation embeds quantitative data within a thematic framework attentive to the lived experience of slaves and other actors on several scales of analysis. Chapter One situates enslaved subsistence practices and other lifeways within an examination of where provisions consumed in the West Indies came from and how imperial trade restrictions constrained their flows. Chapter Two examines the iv provisioning regimes of the Royal Navy and the British Army in the wartime Caribbean in order to show how “heavy” institutions soaked up food and other resources in a region marked by scarcity. Based largely on the “ration” as the unit most proper to reckon human necessity, naval and military provisioning regimes affected other actors in the region including prisoners of war, refugees, and slaves through the immediate necessities of conducting warfare and feeding and sheltering mobile and displaced populations of permanent and transient subjects. Chapter Three reconstructs transatlantic and colonial provisioning supply chains as well as contemporary moral and political debates over the procurement of slave provisions through tenuous systems of debt-finance. Chapter Four scales down to West Indian properties and examines food cultivation and rationing within plantation provisioning and healthcare regimes holistically in order to show how subsistence functioned in the customary practices and formal laws that governed relations between masters and slaves. My research highlights in particular the ways in which slaves sought protections for customary rights related to provisioning by appealing to colonial magistrates, justices of the peace, protectors of slaves, and other authorities intended to intervene on their behalf in complaints against masters. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….vi List of Tables………….………………………………………………………………….ix Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………...x INTRODUCTION Empire’s Necessity………………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER ONE “All our Prospect of Provisions must in future come from the Ships:” Scarcity & Governance in the British West Indies………………………………………26 CHAPTER TWO Rations, Race, & Revolutions: Necessitous Subjects in the Wartime Caribbean………………………………………...95 CHAPTER THREE “In the Wreck of a Master’s Fortune:” Slave Provisioning and the Politics of Planter Debt……………………………………172 CHAPTER FOUR “Provisions is the Back-bone of a Negro property:” Provisioning, Punishment, & Power in West Indian Slavery…………………………..217 CONCLUSION Freedom’s Want………………………………………………………………………...261 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………276 vi Acknowledgements Throughout my time at Harvard, Joyce Chaplin was incredibly generous in providing advice and feedback on everything from grant proposals to chapter drafts. Aside from her own extraordinary knowledge and ability to mentor students from the idea stage to the finished dissertation, Joyce was unfailingly encouraging and patient with one advisee who perhaps switched topics a time or two too many—in other words, a model advisor. Vincent Brown has consistently set a high standard for writing history both creatively and with empirical rigor through his careful comments and advice on my work as well as through the example of his own scholarship. Walter Johnson enthusiastically joined the committee at an early stage, and his teaching and scholarship have spurred me to hone the conceptual scope and narrative shape of my research. Finally, Seth Rockman graciously agreed to serve as an outside reader and provided careful and extensive feedback on the final product that will prove enormously useful as I begin revisions. Also at Harvard, Maya Jasanoff, Emma Rothschild, and other members of the Department of History provided useful early feedback as this project was first taking shape. Further, my dissertation would be far poorer were it not for the guidance of a number of scholars outside of Harvard who often went above and beyond the call of duty in providing advice and kind support on a range of matters pertaining to academia, in particular Cathy Matson, Matthew Restall, Neil Safier, Anoush Fraser Terjanian, and Thomas Truxes. Finally, I have to credit the professors in the Department of History at vii NYU who first introduced me to the discipline and helped launch my graduate career, especially Lauren Benton, Ada Ferrer, and Martha Hodes. Generous research funding was provided by the Harvard History Department, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Program in Early American Economy and Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Huntington Library. Every historian is heavily indebted to the expertise of archivists and librarians, and I express my gratitude to the ultra-professional staffs at the British National Archives, Senate House Library at the University of London, the National Archives of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington, and Harvard University Libraries. Special thanks to Kim Nusco at the JCB for guiding me in my initial forays into the Brown Family Papers. And I’d like to single out the wonderful administrators at Harvard who have provided me with able support since my time in graduate school, including Dan Bertwell, Matthew Corcoran, Liana Demarco, Mary McConnell, and Arthur Patton-Hock. I’ve had the great pleasure of becoming colleagues and friends with brilliant and generous graduate students at Harvard and other places. For helpful comments on drafts, conversations on ideas-in-progress, and other forms of camaraderie and support, special thanks are due to Gregory Afinogenov, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Patrick Bringley, Kristen Keerma Friedman, Louis Gerdelan, Claire Gherini, Tom Hooker, Joseph la Hausse de Lalouviere, Hayley Negrin, Shaun Nichols, Mircea Raianu, Kathryn Schwartz, Joshua Specht, Caroline Spence, Sonia Tycko, Lydia Walker, Ben Weber, and Jeremy Zallen. I viii would also like to thank the members of Vincent Brown’s inaugural Atlantic History Dissertation Workshop for a stimulating discussion of a rough draft of Chapter Four. It’s a great feeling to finally be able to warmly acknowledge all of my non- academic friends in Boston, New York, and elsewhere who have shared road trips with me, offered couches and beds for me to crash on, and kept me generally sane throughout graduate school; special shout-outs to Sam Goetz, Mike Goetz, Ashley Wolfington, Marcia Liu, Patrick Bringley, and Jon Yi. Last, but certainly not least, I thank the members of my extended family in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, who in different ways have all been warmly supportive of me—and not to mention enormously patient with me as a son, brother, nephew, and cousin who was sometimes far too buried for his own good in the long process of researching and writing a dissertation. I would be remiss not to mention the steadfast support and friendship—and, in a pinch, expert copy-editing—of my