Morris, Michael (2013) Atlantic Archipelagos: A Cultural History of Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, c.1740-1833. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3863/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Atlantic Archipelagos: A Cultural History of Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, c.1740-1833. Michael Morris Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of English Literature School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow September 2012 2 Abstract This thesis, situated between literature, history and memory studies participates in the modern recovery of the long-obscured relations between Scotland and the Caribbean. I develop the suggestion that the Caribbean represents a forgotten lieu de mémoire where Scotland might fruitfully ‘displace’ itself. Thus it examines texts from the Enlightenment to Romantic eras in their historical context and draws out their implications for modern national, multicultural, postcolonial concerns. Theoretically it employs a ‘transnational’ Atlantic Studies perspective that intersects with issues around creolisation, memory studies, and British ‘Four Nations’ history. Politically it insists on an interrogation of Scottish national narratives that continue to evade issues of empire, race and slavery. Moving beyond a rhetoric of blame, it explores forms of acting and thinking in the present that might help to overcome the injurious legacies of the past. Chapters include an examination of pastoral and georgic modes in Scottish-Caribbean texts. These include well-known authors such as James Thomson, Tobias Smollet, James Grainger, Robert Burns; and less well-known ones such as John Marjoribanks, Charles Campbell, Philip Barrington Ainslie, and the anonymous author of Marly; or a Planter’s Tale (1828). Chapters two to four highlight the way pastoral and georgic modes mediated the representation of ‘improvement’ and the question of free, bonded and enslaved labour across Scotland, Britain and the Caribbean in the era of slavery debates. The fourth chapter participates in and questions the terms of the recovery of two nineteenth century ‘Mulatto- Scots’, Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. Bringing ‘Black Atlantic’ issues of race, class, gender, empire and rebellion to the fore, I consider the development of a ‘Scottish-Mulatto’ identity by comparing and contrasting the way these very different figures strategically employed their Scottish heritage. The final chapter moves forward to consider current memorialisations of slavery in the Enlightenment- Romantic period. The main focus is James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003) that engages with Walter Scott’s seminal historical novel Waverley (1814) to weave issues of racial slavery into the familiar narratives of Culloden. Robertson also explores forms of solidarity that might help to overcome those historical legacies in a manner that is suggestive for this thesis as a whole. 3 Chapters Introduction— Reflections on Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, c. 1740-1833………………………………….……………p5 Chapter 1—Theoretical Orientations: Transnationalism in the Atlantic World....................p27 Chapter 2— Transnational Investments, Scotland, Britain and the Caribbean, c.1740-1785………………………………………………………p67 Chapter 3— Robert Burns: Slavery, Freedom and Abolition, 1786-1800………………….p95 Chapter 4— Not Immediate but Gradual: Abolition to Emancipation, 1800-1833……….p136 Chapter 5— Recovering ‘Mulatto-Scots’ from the Caribbean……………...…………….p164 Chapter 6— Joseph Knight: History, Fiction, Memory…………………………………...p190 4 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Nigel Leask for his guidance and encouragement since my Masters in 2007. Many staff and students at Glasgow and elsewhere have helped in various ways. I would like to mention Katie Gough, Karina Williamson, Willy Maley, Sheila Kidd, David Shuttleton, Karen Salt, James Robertson, Graham Fagen, Stephen Shapiro, Brycchan Carey, Alex Benchimol and the members of the Scottish Romanticism Research Group, the Society for Caribbean Studies UK, and Caribbean Research Seminar Series in the North. I would also like to express my gratitude for the Arts Faculty Scholarship at the University of Glasgow which made this research possible. Part of the pleasure of this research has been to put Glasgow ‘on the map’ in terms of ‘Black Atlantic’ and Caribbean studies through a series of public talks that brought together local activists, interested individuals and academics. I would therefore like to thank all participants in the Glasgow University Caribbean Discussion Group. Special thanks to Lorna Burns, Fiona Darroch, David Featherstone, Graham Campbell, Eric Graham, and Stephen Mullen. The CDG gave rise to an enjoyable international conference on ‘Caribbean Enlightenment’ held at the University of Glasgow in April 2010. Special thanks to Doris Garraway, Paget Henry, Charles Forsdick, Nick Nesbitt and Kei Miller. The CDG continues to put on public talks for Black History Month every October in Glasgow. Special thanks to David Howard, Christine Geraghty, Jane Webster and Andy Smith. This research was greatly enhanced by a research trip to University of the West Indies, Mona, in Kingston, Jamaica. This trip was made possible by funds from the MacRobertson Travelling Scholarship and the Tannahill Fund for which I’m very grateful. I would like to thank the hospitality and support of staff at UWI, in particular Nadi Edwards and James Robertson, as well as the Staff at the National Library of Jamaica, the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, and the National Archives of Jamaica in Spanish Town. I would like to thank the hospitality of The Caledonia Society of Jamaica especially Ian Murphy and Arthur Bogues. Greetings and blessings to Andrea Morrison, Velma Pollard, Anthea Dempster, Julie Ricketts and D’Oyen Williams and Colonel Wallace Sterling of Moore Town. Above all, I would like to thank my family, mum and dad, Stephen and Alex, for all the support over the years. It is very much appreciated. And most of all this is for Julie, who makes it all worthwhile. 5 Introduction: Reflections on Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, c.1740-1833 Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings. Ben Okri, Birds of Heaven A quotation from Ben Okri’s Birds of Heaven (1995)—written in the context of a Nigeria wrestling with post-colonial nation building—opens James Robertson’s historical novel Joseph Knight (2003). The epigraph seems apposite for the Scottish nation that voted for a devolved parliament in 1997 and is given greater currency in the current momentum towards a referendum on independence, scheduled for 2014. The changed landscape produced by a degree of national autonomy in the political and economic arena is understood as at once being inspired by, and reciprocally holding significance for, Scotland’s cultural fabric. In 1998 Christopher Whyte contended that, ‘in the absence of an elected political authority, the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers’. He suggested that ‘the setting up of a Scottish parliament [would] at last allow Scottish literature to be literature first and foremost, rather than the expression of a nationalist movement’.1 Indeed, Berthold Schoene’s recent Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (2007), published to mark the ten year anniversary of the referendum, builds on calls for post- devolution perspectives that re-evaluate the category of the national to engage with a plurality of forms.2 These include: ‘class, sexuality and gender, globalisation and the new Europe, cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality, as well as questions of ethnicity, race and postnational multiculturalism’.3 This plural vision is nurtured by the prevalent form of Scottish nationalism that has moved away from a ‘blood-and-soil’ ethnocentrism towards a more modern, 1 Christopher Whyte, ‘Masculinities in Contemporary Scottish Fiction’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 34, 2, (1998), p. 285. 2 For example, Scotland in Theory, ed. by Eleanor Bell and Gavin Miller, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004); and Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature, ed. by Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie and Alistair Renfrew (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). 3 Berthold Schoene, ‘Going Cosmopolitan: Reconstituting “Scottishness” in Post-Devolution Criticism’, The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Schoene, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) p. 2. 6 sophisticated, postcolonially aware form of ‘civic nationalism’. This has been bolstered by streams of influence from ‘left nationalism’ and ‘anti-colonial nationalist’ thought. Michael