Slaves and Slavery in Kingston, 1770-1815

Burnard, Trevor

Abstract

© 2020 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis. Historians have mostly ignored Kingston and its enslaved population, despite it being the fourth largest town in the British Atlantic before the American Revolution and the town with the largest enslaved population in British America before emancipation. The result of such historiographical neglect is a lacuna in scholarship. In this article, I examine one period of the history of slavery in Kingston, from when the slave trade in Jamaica was at its height, from the early 1770s through to the early nineteenth century, and then after the slave trade was abolished but when slavery in the town became especially important. One question I especially want to explore is how Kingston maintained its prosperity even after its major trade-the Atlantic slave trade-was stopped by legislative fiat in 1807.

Citation

Burnard, T. (2020). Slaves and Slavery in Kingston, 1770-1815. International Review of Social History, 65(S28), 39-65. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859020000073

• Journal Article Type: Review
• Acceptance Date: Oct 1, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Feb 21, 2020
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: May 28, 2021
• Journal: International Review of Social History
• Print ISSN: 0020-8590
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-512X
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 65
• Issue: S28
• Pages: 39-65
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859020000073
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3579600