War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830

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10.1057/9780230282698 - War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830, Edited by Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to MEDICAL LIBRARY NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIV. - PalgraveConnect - 2011-02-25


War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830

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War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850

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

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Series Editors: Rafe Blaufarb (Tallahassee, USA), Alan Forrest (York, UK), and Karen Hagemann (Chapel Hill, USA)


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

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Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall 2010. All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010. 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: 978–0–230–22989–1 hardback 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 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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 Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall

Part I

1

A World in Upheaval

1

The ‘Revolutionary Age’ in the Wider World, c. 1790–1830 C. A. Bayly

21

2

The Revolutionary Abolitionists of Haiti Laurent Dubois

44

3

Race and Slavery in the Making of Arab France, 1802–15 Ian Coller

61

4

The Making of Warriors: The Militarization of the Rio de la Plata, 1806–07 Alejandro Martin Rabinovich

Part II 5

6

7

81

Freedom and Captivity

The French Conspiracy of 1795: Paranoia and Opportunism on the Eve of Independence in Buenos Aires Lyman L. Johnson

101

Armed with Swords and Ostrich Feathers: Militarism and Cultural Revolution in the Cape Slave Uprising of 1808 Nigel Worden

121

Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the Fate of Atlantic Antislavery during the Age of Revolutionary Wars Marie-Jeanne Rossignol

139

v

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Contents

8

Contents

Borderlands of Empire, Borderlands of Race Julie Winch

Part III 9

10

157

Identity and Difference

The French Revolutionary Wars in the Spanish-American Imagination, 1789–1830 Rebecca Earle

179

Old Subjects, New Subjects and Non-Subjects: Silences and Subjecthood in Fédon’s Rebellion, Grenada, 1795–96 Caitlin Anderson

201

11

The Russian Empire: Military Encounters and National Identity Janet Hartley

12

War, Empire and the ‘Other’: Iranian-European Contacts in the ‘Napoleonic’ Era Joanna de Groot

235

Patriotism, Painting and the Portuguese Empire during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Foteini Vlachou

256

13

Index

218

277

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vi

Foreword to the Series

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 SaintDomingue. 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 revolutionary wars, in particular, Europe was faced with the prospect of ‘total’ war, on a scale unprecedented before the twentieth century. Military hardware, 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 displacement 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 ambitions 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 difference, 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 examine elements of comparison and transfer and so tease out the complexities of regional, national and global history.

vii

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Rafe Blaufarb, Alan Forrest and Karen Hagemann

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 AngloGerman 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 presentations and contributions to discussion, and the contributors to this volume 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

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Acknowledgements

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 communities 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

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completed Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (forthcoming, 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 colonial and independent Spanish America. She has published on the SpanishAmerican 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 currently 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 political, 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).

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x

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 cultures and, more precisely, in social practices in situations of extreme political 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 publications 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 published, 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).

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Notes on Contributors xi


Recent publications include ‘Between History and Art: Prints, Drawings and the Interpretation of the Peninsular War’, in A Guerra Peninsular: perspectivas 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 family 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).

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xii

Maps 1 2

Africa, Asia and Europe The Americas

xvi 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

Decorative sword presented to Simón Bolívar by the Municipality of Lima, 1825 (detail). Mundial (Lima, 1924)

190

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 (14 October 2009)

191

9.5

1823 Peruvian Quarto de Peso. Courtesy of Andrew H. Winger

191

9.6

1811 insurgent flag designed by Francisco de Miranda. William Spence Robertson, The Life of Miranda (1929; repr. New York, 1969)

192

Francisco Vieira Portuense, The Oath of Viriato, c. 1798–99, oil on canvas, 35 ⫻ 29.2 cm, Fundação Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva, Lisbon (photo PH3)

261

9.3

9.4

13.1

13.2

Francesco Bartolozzi after Francisco Vieira, The Oath of Viriato, 1 November 1799, etching and engraving, 49 ⫻ 39 cm, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon xiii

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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 ⫻ 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 ⫻ 200 cm, Palácio Nacional de Queluz (Divisão de Documentação Fotográfica—Instituto dos Museus e da Conservação, photo José Pessoa)

267

Gregório Francisco de Queiroz and Domingos António de Sequeira (after a drawing by Sequeira), Sopa de Arroios, 1813, etching and engraving, 54 ⫻ 85 cm, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon

269

José Aparicio, Famine in Madrid, 1818, oil on canvas, 315 ⫻ 437 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid

270

13.5

13.6

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xiv List of Maps and Illustrations

AGI AGN AM AMG AN CPA MHS MOSA ODNB PSZ RGADA RGVIA SLRD UKNA

Archivo General de las Indias, Seville Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Archives Municipales, Marseille Archives de la Ministère de la Guerre, Vincennes Archives Nationales, Paris Cape Provincial Archives, Cape Town Missouri Historical Society, St Louis Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004) Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii, 45 vols (St Petersburg, 1830) Rossiiskii gosudartsvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, Moscow St Louis Recorder of Deeds, City Hall, St Louis National Archives, London

xv

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List of Abbreviations


Map 1 Africa, Asia and Europe

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to MEDICAL LIBRARY NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIV. - PalgraveConnect - 2011-02-25 10.1057/9780230282698 - War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830, Edited by Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall 9780230_229891_01_prexviii.indd xvii

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Map 2 The Americas

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Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall

For historians, the six decades spanning the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century seem pivotal to the emergence of modernity. For Eric Hobsbawm, they formed an ‘age of revolution’; for Christopher Bayly, they witnessed a ‘world crisis’ and a series of ‘converging revolutions’; Reinhart Koselleck has described them as a ‘Sattelzeit’ (saddle period) during which modern ways of thinking took shape against a backdrop of accelerated political, economic and social transformation.1 These dramatic changes, including the emergence of new forms of statehood and of nationalism, and major shifts in global power relations, were partly forged in the crucible of imperial wars fought around the globe by European powers: principally France, Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. The Seven Years War might claim the distinction of being the first worldwide war. But the American War of Independence, in which the same European rivals were engaged, established an independent nation and a durable model of citizenship. As Jürgen Osterhammel observes in his recent panoramic history of the global nineteenth century, ‘the great conflict between the empires in the years between 1793 and 1815 did not remain limited to Europe. It was fought out on four continents: a true world war.’2 The military and political conflicts between France, Britain and their allies from 1793 to 1815 were larger and more diffuse than earlier wars, and were truly far-reaching in their effects and legacies.3 They triggered independence movements among black slaves in Saint Domingue and creole settlers in Portuguese and Spanish America, and their direct impact extended to Egypt, Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Java and the Philippines.4 But these years of war, and the reception of European ideas, have also to be understood in relation to parallel and separate developments elsewhere. The autonomous crises and tensions within the established empires of Asia had also to do with their military strengths and weaknesses, and with different forms of resistance, ideological and political, to imperial authorities. Across the world, governments were affected by the financial burdens of warfare.5 1

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Introduction: War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830


The aspirations and struggles of empires had worldwide ramifications. They changed the ways in which people understood their place in that world—not just in the form of reactions to new European conceptions of the state and the citizen, but also in complex interactions with different conceptions and aspirations across the non-European world. The revolutionary content of the age of revolution cannot be traced simply in terms of European political ideologies: these were also cultural revolutions (the word ‘culture’ was first used during the 1770s6) and revolutions in identity, brought about through decades of experience of war across the globe. Yet there were continuities as well as changes; in many areas of the globe, imperial authorities were strengthened and monarchies were reaffirmed. Social, racial and gender distinctions could be powerfully reinscribed as well as challenged. It was an age of complex transitions as well as of potential transformation. The themes of war, empire and slavery provide the framework and rationale for this book. The chapters are focused not on Paris, Berlin and Vienna, but on Buenos Aires, St Louis and Tehran; they are stories of how the global upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shaped and were shaped by individuals, societies and cultures around the world.

Part I: A world in upheaval A state of war is the historical context for the chapters included in this book and lies at the foreground of the lived experiences which they describe. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, European states had jostled for imperial advantage through military engagements in Europe, naval and military battles over imperial territories, and trading rivalries across the world. At the same time the land-based empire of Russia continued, at an accelerating pace, to extend its dominance through the absorption of new territories—including southern Finland, Ukraine, the Crimea, and successive Polish lands—and in settlements extending to the Pacific and beyond. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands had already established their maritime empires in Asia, Africa and America by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Their colonies took different forms, as in the extensive territories in South America formally governed by Spain, the trading outposts of Britain in India, or the plantation-based sugar islands of the French colonial system in the Caribbean. But as an essential part of their imperial enterprise, all these powers were involved in the trading of slaves and the expansion of slave-based plantation economies. By the time of the Seven Years War, fought between 1756 and 1763, the extent of global warfare and its related costs had come to affect both the prestige and the financial stability of the ancien regime governments of Europe. In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, that warfare assumed a new character, as it brought with it the mobilization of military and naval forces on an unprecedented


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scale, social upheaval and the migration of populations, and a complex association with an emancipatory ideology which appeared to threaten the very existence of the institution of slavery. Christopher Bayly has, in this volume, traced three revolutionary ‘surges’ between 1776 and 1830, which may be associated with the international conflicts which accompanied them. The first arose with the American Revolution, which broke the connection between Britain and thirteen of its American mainland colonies and established a new, independent nation (albeit one which owed its existence to the military and financial assistance of Britain’s imperial rivals, France, Spain and the Netherlands). The second surge, initiated by the French Revolution of 1789, was to bring about more than twenty years of worldwide conflict during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, ending only in 1815; in its early stages the French Revolution offered a model of citizenship which identified military and patriotic duties and which opened a window of possibility for slave emancipation in the French West Indies. When French leaders decided to restore Caribbean slavery in the late 1790s, the momentum of the Haitian Revolution secured national independence as well as emancipation. Even after Napoleon’s defeat in Haiti in 1804, his continuing military ambitions led indirectly to the third revolutionary ‘surge’, dating from the French invasions of Spain and Portugal in 1806 and 1807. Napoleon’s usurpation emboldened local elites throughout Spain’s extensive possessions in Latin America; the spread of nationalist aspirations made it impossible for Spain to resist these distant challengers even after the restoration of the monarchy in 1814. Meanwhile, the evacuation of the Portuguese court to Brazil in 1807 allowed for the survival of the royal house in exile, but eventually led to the establishment of an independent nation and a new imperial dynasty under the direction of the Portuguese prince regent, Dom Pedro. The familiar narrative of a clash of European empires and the emergence of new nations can be reoriented by considering the parallel histories of non-European powers. Bayly has noted the extent of the internal changes within the great Muslim empires—Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There, in the eighteenth century, the growth in power of provincial elites and the strength of local revolts—of Afghans in Persia and India, Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia and Sikhs in the Punjab—challenged established empires. It has been argued that these emerging regional dynasties helped to create a sense of local solidarity, culture and identity some time before western definitions of the ‘nation’ emerged.7 The outcome of collisions with European empires, and of the spread of revolutionary ideas, was conditioned as much by these developments as by European imperial initiatives. In this volume Joanna de Groot presents the 1790s as a period in which Iran’s Qajar rulers, successors to the Safavid


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Introduction 3


dynasty, consolidated and developed their rule to such an extent that they met the British and Russian expansion on their borders with confidence. In similar vein, Laurent Dubois suggests that knowledge of the histories of the different peoples of western and West Central Africa—including their attitudes to kingship, religion and African slave-trading—is essential to an understanding of military conflict and emancipation in the Caribbean during our period. Although slaves were distributed widely in the process of sale, where more than a few were concentrated together in the New World the possibilities for solidarity and cultural transfer were considerable. Throughout the Americas, the ethnic balance among different African peoples was a significant factor in determining the cultural and religious practices and political expectations of those enslaved. The African military experiences which slaves brought with them also helped to shape the success of runaway communities and the aspirations of rebels.8 The increased numbers of those transported from Africa in the eighteenth century, and especially from the 1770s, often ‘Africanized’ or ‘re-Africanized’ certain areas, although this varied widely depending on survival and reproduction rates and the proportion of creole to African-born in the population. John Thornton has emphasized that ‘African-born peoples, socialized and bearing African culture, were often the majority in American societies’.9 On the other hand, a relatively short-lived ‘African’ period, as was the case in much of North America, helped to encourage the growth of creole languages, which bridged those spoken by different African and colonial peoples and hastened the emergence of a native creole-speaking population.10 Although the conflicts and upheavals of these years of global war by no means affected all the participants equally, by 1830 many areas of the world appeared significantly changed. Some major powers could be counted, on balance, as winners from the experience. The Russian Empire had expanded very considerably; during the Napoleonic Wars, it won the whole of Finland, Georgia, Bessarabia and the Congress Kingdom of Poland. Though Russia also suffered the traumatic invasion of its territory, this experience strengthened a growing sense of national identity. The British Empire established a worldwide naval dominance and acquired new territories by conquest and treaty in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (including Ceylon, Mauritius and southern Africa). Britain’s rule, and indirect influence, in India and beyond continued to expand, as in the attack on Burma in 1824. The increasingly imperial and authoritarian nature of the British state was reflected in the new forms of government devised for such possessions. At the same time, the revolt of Haiti and the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 had significant effects on British prosperity: temporarily the British West Indian colonies benefited from the collapse of France’s most lucrative colony, and their superiority increased the contribution of the West India trade to British economic strength during wartime. But the events of the 1790s pointed towards the dangers of overdependence on the unstable


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islands of the Caribbean, while the growing agitation for the abolition of the slave trade suggested a precarious future for British commerce in the Americas. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars the future of British imperial expansion appeared to lie in a turn towards the east.11 The new nation of the United States also made clear territorial gains: in the Great Lakes, after wars with Britain in 1783 and 1815; the enormous area of western territory encompassed by the Louisiana Purchase (1803); and Florida (1810–1819). The expanding republic also succeeded in establishing a growing share in the regional trade of the Americas, and in international commerce more generally. The French colonial empire, on the other hand, had almost disappeared by 1815, with only two West Indian islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique; Senegal in West Africa; Bourbon in the Indian Ocean; and a few trading posts in India remaining under French control. France also suffered the loss of its naval power and the heavy burden of a war indemnity. The French invasion of Algeria in 1830 represented a delayed attempt to re-establish imperial standing. The Spanish Empire was similarly depleted by the conflicts. By 1815 many of the former Spanish colonies were already in a semiautonomous state, and the wars of independence over the next six years produced a cascade of new nations: Rio de la Plata (1816), Chile (1817), Gran Colombia (1819), Peru (1821) and Mexico (1821). Within 15 years of Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain’s vast empire had been reduced to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Portugal fared little better. Brazil renounced Portuguese authority in 1822, partly because the monarch Dom João—who had pledged to secure equality for Brazil within the empire during his exile in Rio—had been unable to keep his promise after his return to Portugal in 1821. João lost his largest imperial possession, but the Portuguese retained control over Angola and Mozambique, and also Timor, Macao, and a few Indian outposts including Goa. Although this was an era of sweeping changes and realignments in the posture and pretensions of European empires, these stories of territorial exchange tell us little of the complex ways in which wars were experienced. These wars were also local events, affecting not only soldiers—slave and free, white, black and mixed race—but also the enslaved more generally, indigenous populations, freed men and women, white settlers and civilians, and colonial elites. The impact of warfare could be catastrophic and dramatic. The mortality rates of European armies in the Caribbean campaigns of the 1790s were immensely high; of the 89,000 British soldiers deployed there between 1793 and 1801, over 45,000 died from disease.12 David Geggus has written that ‘the French Revolutionary War differed from previous wars in the Caribbean, partly because it combined traditional imperial rivalries with a bitter civil war and exceptional racial struggle’.13 The brutality of these conflicts, involving as they could torture, executions and massacres (as in the campaign fought by the Napoleonic Army against black soldiers


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Introduction 5


and guerrillas in Saint Domingue), was noted by contemporaries. Even for those not directly involved in war, defeat could bring forced removal. Thousands of American Loyalists, both white and black, left the newly independent United States in 1782 and 1783 for Canada, London or the Caribbean, among other places. And significant numbers of people, royalist and republican, black and white, fled Saint Domingue and Santo Domingo for other Caribbean and mainland destinations. Demobilized black soldiers were likely to be relocated without choice by Britain and Spain, frequently to Central America, rather than resettled as slaves. At the other side of the world, Cossacks were forcibly removed by the Russian government, and dispatched as military settlers to the Caucasus, Siberia, and the Chinese frontier. Nevertheless, not all the encounters traced in this volume took the form of direct armed conflicts, or were so obviously disruptive. They include the regular maintenance of ‘oases of Russianness’ such as the Far Eastern military garrison of Gizhiga, described here by Janet Hartley, and the echoes of events in France found in the revolutionary assemblies and radical groups in Indian cities such as Chandernagore and Calcutta, recalled by Christopher Bayly. Joanna de Groot draws upon the diplomatic missions exchanged between Iranian cities and the capitals of western Europe, which brought two-way reflections and perspectives on such cultural encounters. Recovering such local and individual experiences is a difficult enterprise, requiring sensitive reading of sometimes intransigent source-materials, including legal records and petitions, and the practices of popular rituals and festivals, as well as memoirs, diaries and correspondence, and the images of high art, to recover the histories of the less literate as well as the educated during years of war and social upheaval.14 The period discussed in this volume may be referred to as an ‘age of revolution’, yet it was also an age of continuing warfare, with associated patterns of social upheaval, enslavement, rebellion and the movement of populations. Alejandro Rabinovich here traces individual perceptions of the process of militarization that took place in the city of Buenos Aires with the arrival of a British expeditionary force in 1806, and the emergence of a ‘warrior society’ among the free population of the city, including black and mulatto free men. This volume focuses on the many different ways in which the wars of these years were experienced; on how that central imperial institution, slavery, was affected; and on the discursive construction of new identities—national, imperial, racial and gendered—in the course of war and upheaval.

Part II: Freedom and captivity Historians have long been fascinated by the coincidence of antislavery movements and political revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it is difficult to resist the lure of a direct connection between


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revolutionary ideology and emancipation. Antislavery campaigns in England and France developed in the 1780s alongside Enlightenment thinking about human rights and political equality, and the French Revolution set off a wave of revolts and citizenship struggles in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Meanwhile, slavery came under concerted attack throughout the northern United States in the two decades after 1783, when the rubric of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence caused even some southern slaveholders to question the longevity of their way of life.15 However, the chapters in this book warn against the assumption of a simple, causal relationship between revolutionary ideas and antislavery movements. War was the most important determinant of the uprisings and emancipations of this era. While transnational networks of abolitionism emerged between the American and French revolutions, uniting activists in London, Paris and Philadelphia around the idea that the institution of slavery was headed towards extinction, the wars that accompanied the struggles in France and America disrupted these networks and retarded the progress of a global antislavery movement. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol describes in this volume the career of Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the French intellectual who hoped to sustain the ‘great international movement against slavery’ but who struggled to coordinate his colleagues overseas in the face of resurgent nationalisms after 1790. Brissot’s dreams were eventually dashed by the hostilities between France, Britain and the United States, but warfare had a rather different effect on emancipation in a variety of local contexts between 1770 and 1830. If protracted conflict acted as a brake on the emergence of an antislavery international, it created numerous openings in which forced labour systems might be challenged on the ground. The French Assembly was effectively coerced by events into offering citizenship to gens de couleur (free people of colour) and freedom to slaves in Saint Domingue in 1793, and the British followed a pragmatic policy of military emancipation both in their attempts to suppress the American Revolution and in their Caribbean wars of the 1790s. In Virginia in 1775, or in South Carolina or Georgia after 1778, American slaves were more likely to regard the British than the Americans as the bearers of freedom. In Saint Domingue, meanwhile, the legacy of African experiences shaped the uprisings as surely as a European revolutionary impulse: around two-thirds of the slave population in 1789 had been born across the Atlantic, and what became the Haitian Revolution owed much to the diverse religious practices, cultural relations and military conflicts of late eighteenth-century West and Central Africa.16 In France and Britain, emancipation was set on a kind of double track during this period: alongside the formal efforts of Brissot, William Wilberforce in Britain and the Pennsylvania Quakers to curb the impact of slavery, either through the campaign against the slave trade or through an incipient abolitionism, politicians and commanders developed military emancipation into a crucial weapon. If Charleston or Le Cap might be secured by promising


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Introduction 7


freedom to blacks in return for imperial allegiance, slaves could be liberated in their tens of thousands without recourse to egalitarian or humanitarian arguments. Christopher Brown has traced the taproots of an ‘empire without slaves’ in the writing of late eighteenth-century British administrators, but the career of military emancipation suggests that the immediate pressure of warfare provided the most immediate context for the sweeping rebellions and manumissions of the period. Commanders and political leaders could not always control the slave revolts that took place throughout the European empires, but they were able to consider selective emancipation without imagining that the institution of slavery itself was obsolete.17 The French colony of Saint Domingue was the epicentre of the antislavery movement in this period. The emancipation of slaves en masse, culminating in a new nation governed by and for black people, was an arresting novelty both within and beyond the Americas. In the ensuing decades, fears of a Haitian-style rebellion spread wherever Europeans and creoles kept people in bondage: from the American South to Argentina, from Haiti’s neighbouring islands in the Caribbean to the British Cape Colony. In the supposed slavery conspiracy of Buenos Aires in 1795, described in this volume by Lyman Johnson, Spanish authorities grappled with a long-standing nervousness about French revolutionary ideology and a more immediate fear that Saint Domingue’s horrors might be reprised by their own loosely regulated slave population. Under these pressures, compounded by the commercial disruption of the war in Europe, Viceroy Nicolás de Arredondo set loose a campaign of snooping, informing and torture which realized the fears of its sponsors. Both here and in the Cape Colony revolt of 1808, described by Nigel Worden, the authorities restored order without undue difficulty. In the case of Buenos Aires, it is far from clear that there was any conspiracy to begin with. But the mythic power of slave uprisings had been transformed by Saint Domingue; or, more precisely, by the assumption that the French and the Haitian Revolutions had fed one another. The defenders of slavery and empire grappled with the fear that slave uprisings might culminate in independence, and that revolutionary ideas might be applied to non-whites as surely as to whites. The irony of this, as Laurent Dubois points out, is that the uprisings in Saint Domingue only became the Haitian Revolution after the disaffected groups on the island moved through a protracted period of negotiation with France. This process was complicated by the willingness of French representatives on the island to accommodate local concerns without always receiving sanction from Paris, and by the initial appeal of the French monarchy to black insurgents. Toussaint Louverture, the most iconic figure of the Haitian Revolution, was neither a slave nor a proponent of independence when the first uprisings broke out around Le Cap in 1791. He was working for the Spanish, who eyed the chaos in Saint Domingue from neighbouring Santo Domingo and looked to seize


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the colony while the French guard was down. The French commissioners on the island fought a desperate battle to appease both the gens de couleur and, later, the slaves; this effort resulted in the extension of citizenship to the former and the abolition of slavery throughout the colony by the end of 1793. When Louverture effectively took over Saint Domingue after 1794, he did so as a loyal servant of France. Similarly, thousands of former slaves fought under the French flag to defend the colony from British attack, even while their former masters crossed their fingers that the British invasion would succeed. In the complex and fiery battles over Saint Domingue, national identities and allegiances were dissolved and remade with extraordinary speed. By the end of the 1790s, as Napoleon attempted to overturn the policy of emancipation which had kept Saint Domingue French, Louverture and his associates finally embraced independence. But what emerged from their struggles was less an allegiance to a fixed form of politics or government—monarchy, republic, empire or nation—than ‘absolute adherence’, as Dubois puts it, ‘to the principle that no one should be a slave’. If the Haitian Revolution stands as the greatest antislavery achievement of this period, it was neither a simple triumph of radical ideology nor the prelude to a general emancipation. The modest British campaign against the slave trade achieved success in 1807 and France and the Netherlands also abolished the trade in 1814, but the slave regimes of the British and French Caribbean survived into the 1830s and 1840s respectively. In the United States, the momentum that had propelled gradual emancipation through Northern legislatures—and which had kept slavery out of the new Northwest Territory—began to dissipate even as Haiti achieved its independence. American legislators approved their own ban on the international slave trade in 1808, partly because slaveholders from the upper South imagined that this might inflate the value of their own property within the internal slave market, which thrived for another half century. And the slave societies in both the United States and Brazil continued to expand, in spite of the independence movements in both nations.18 With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that slavery had been challenged at the end of the eighteenth century by an unusual combination of humanitarian arguments and military imperatives: where these two were in tension with one another, as in the American Revolution, the priorities of war took precedence over abstract ideas about morality. And in the remaining areas of the Spanish Empire, especially Cuba, there was also continuing growth of plantation slavery and increased prosperity for sugar planters. Spain abolished the slave trade only in 1867, by which time the island was convulsed by an independence movement.19 Portugal remained a major slave-trading power until formal abolition in 1842. Slavery continued to be legal in the border states of the United States until after the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and survived in Brazil for a quarter century after


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Introduction 9


Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. At the celebration of the American centennial in Philadelphia in 1876, the crusading General (now President) Ulysses S. Grant welcomed Emperor Pedro II as his guest of honour in spite of the persistence of slavery (and monarchy) in Brazil. Pedro finally managed to free Brazil’s remaining slaves in 1888, and fell from power the following year partly because of the resentments that his action had created among Brazilian elites.20 The difficulty of imagining black people as political and social equals was felt most keenly in the new United States, in which the idea of equality had been promoted during the Revolution as a cornerstone of political identity. The combination of this revolutionary emphasis on equality and the proximity of large white communities to considerable numbers of slaves ensured that the American debate about emancipation looked very different from its European analogues. Thomas Jefferson, grappling in the early 1780s with the problems of Virginian slavery, noted the need for a double emancipation in the United States: blacks would be freed from slavery, but whites would then have to be freed from blacks. The effective collapsing of the distance between a free metropole and an enslaved periphery made the American experience very different from that of Spain, France or Britain. While Spain, for example, might take a fairly relaxed view of slavery in its distant colony of Missouri, US officials were more inclined to classify and regulate both the institution of slavery and those people who were caught up in it.21 Julie Winch’s chapter in this volume describes the career of Jacques Clamorgan, the French trader who moved between the Caribbean and the Spanish towns of New Orleans and St Louis during the twilight of imperial control. In 1784, Clamorgan seized Ester, a slave woman, from a ‘renegade Anglican minister’ near St Louis in lieu of a debt. He beat her, became her lover, and eventually freed her so that she could become his business partner in a series of byzantine land deals. He was less interested, however, in freeing the rest of Ester’s family. When the United States assumed sovereignty over the area in 1804, Clamorgan struggled to defend his extensive land claims, which had been made in Ester’s name. The Americans brought with them a harsh black code which made it much harder to free a slave, extended the definition of who might be considered one in law, and restricted the rights previously enjoyed by slaves in the Spanish system. Just as those who had sided with the British during the American Revolution concluded that Britain was a more likely sponsor of their emancipation, so the French and Spanish slaves of the Mississippi Valley at the turn of the nineteenth century viewed the onrush of the United States with considerable alarm. If the successful campaigns against the slave trade and the stunning achievement of independence in Haiti persuaded at least some observers that slavery was on the wane, the abolitionist impulse of this moment tended to hasten the emergence of new forms of difference and exclusion beyond


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slavery. As Ian Coller describes, the Egyptian refugees who found their way to Marseilles after 1801 were surprised to discover that their preference for the French nation over the Ottoman Empire was not rewarded with citizenship. Partly, the problem facing these refugees was an identity crisis within the highest echelons of the French regime about the kind of nation France wanted to be: an empire with subject peoples; a nation with extended territory and citizenship; or some combination of the two. But the response of the local authorities in Marseilles, who dwelt upon the colour of the refugees and cast aspersions on their citizenship potential, demonstrated that exclusion in a post-slavery society could operate both locally and nationally. A similar dynamic operated in the northern United States, where the abolition of slavery (whether immediate or gradual) coincided with the imposition of black codes that effectively prevented the achievement of racial equality or a race-blind citizenship after abolition, and also with the promotion of colonization and removal, often accompanied by promises of national equality for the new black colonies that would be located in Africa or elsewhere. It is important to note, then, that the cumulative success of antislavery in our period gave fresh impetus to racial distinctions and other markers of difference that might reinstate the hierarchies and segregation that slavery had previously ensured. In the process, ideas of citizenship and national identity became more important than ever.

Part III: Identity and difference This book examines the ways in which the experiences, traumas and upheavals of the period of warfare from 1770 to 1830 brought new forms of identity and the means of reworking older ones. The term ‘identity’ has in the Latin ‘idem’, the concept of ‘sameness’ as its root. Yet it also essentially invokes the exclusion of those who are different, and the definition of that difference. It is clear that individuals, both simultaneously and in the course of a life, may have multiple identities, relating to gender, status, race, religion, nationality, locality, and so on.22 Here we consider such multiple identities as they were produced through the discourses, narratives and social relations of war, conflict and civilian life in this period. The focus of the volume is primarily on the citizens and subjects of nations and of empires, and the ways in which race, gender and culture intersected consciousness of citizenship and national identity. Such identities interact in complicated and dynamic ways, and we do not suggest that they are necessarily cast in simple or binary terms. The problems of disentangling African-born and creole identities, and republican and royalist loyalties, among the free and newly freed peoples of colour of Haiti have been discussed above. Joanna de Groot signals the complexity of issues of cultural hybridity among the sophisticated and cosmopolitan group of travellers and diplomats, nominally ‘European’ and ‘Persianate’,


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Introduction 11


whom she discusses. Ian Coller demonstrates how a mixed and transnational community, mostly from Egypt, migrating to France, came to adopt what was partly forced upon it, an ‘Arab identity’. Identifications emerge from the detail of everyday life and from cultural interactions as much as from the drama of the battlefield or the details of the constitutions or statecraft. The locations of self-definition may include revolutionary and patriotic activism, travel and diplomacy, experiences of military mobilization, invasion and battle and the civilian struggle for survival in the midst of regime change and the subsequent reordering of social hierarchies. Janet Hartley, for example, examines a range of different locations on the edges of the Russian Empire, including military garrisons, civilian settlements and major trading ports: she is concerned mainly with the encounters and responses of Russians to the different ‘others’ they found on their frontiers. Joanna de Groot looks at the simultaneous responses of both Iranian and European travellers to the ‘others’ they encountered personally, in a period of changing geopolitical circumstances. While Iranians had reason for anxiety as they witnessed the expansion of European empires, they came from a self-confident and assertive culture and interpreted the European peoples and governments they encountered in ways that were embedded in that culture; yet they also responded analytically and reflectively. Though there were inequalities and disparities in such cultural exchanges, these are not to be understood in simple terms of dominance and subordination. Individuals constructed stories and narratives of their subjective identifications in different ways. The literate and educated wrote diaries, memoirs, correspondence, histories and travel literature. Here Rebecca Earle notes the transformation that took place in the diary of José María Caballero of Bogotá after the fall of the Spanish monarchy; it is transformed from a mostly mundane account of local events into a record of the changing political life of the colony, its militarization and the introduction of new political practices. Alejandro Rabinovich finds in the memoirs of the civilians of the Rio de la Plata (who witnessed defeat and occupation by the British in 1806 and subsequent mobilization) the emergence of ‘a new model of man’, one inspired by the identification of citizen and warrior. The literature of travel was another important site for the recording and rewriting of identities. Jacques-Pierre Brissot’s Nouveau voyage dans les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale (1791) recorded the new understanding of the conditions of American slavery that shaped a dedicated antislavery campaigner. And the expanding eighteenthcentury genre of travel writing offered new modes of categorization, of making sense of the differences encountered, whether through the scientific tools of natural history or the stadial approach which outlined the course of civilizational progress. (This placed Europeans at the highest point of development, but suggested that their accomplishments could


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be emulated by others.) Diplomats, travellers, soldiers and others all drew on what had become conventional modes of interpreting cultural differences. This could involve comparative comment on social institutions and particularly on discourses of gender, sexuality and marriage, as a way of indicating degrees of ‘otherness’; such comparative modes were used by both Iranian and European writers. Visual symbols, theatre and popular festivals could also provide a focus for identification. Liberty caps and liberty trees had been important rallying points in the course of the American Revolution. But it was in France, with the displacement of the Catholic Church, that new rituals were constructed for the regenerated nation, whether in the planting of liberty trees or in the more elaborate spectacles planned by the painter Jacques-Louis David for central Paris. Spanish-American insurgents appropriated French symbols of liberty after 1808 in the launching of their own revolutions, even though they were deeply opposed to the expansion of French power. In Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, civic festivals and state rituals helped to popularize the use of terms such as ‘liberty’ and ‘citizen’, and symbols were adapted to local purposes; the liberty tree in Bogotá in 1813 bore both a Phrygian cap and images of Jesus and Mary, and held out promises beyond the control of those who adorned it. All forms of representation, including painting and the theatre, provided ways of imagining identities in the process of transformation under the pressures of war and social upheaval. So a painting recording the coronation of Agustin de Iturbide as head of an independent Mexican state in 1822 evoked David’s famous representation of the coronation of Napoleon. And after the invasion of Portugal and flight of the imperial monarchy, representations of the Portuguese nation and its heroes were no longer rooted in a patriotic past, but relied on allegory to position patriotism as a virtue inherent in the Portuguese nation. Popular participation in the Peninsular War could not, however, later be celebrated, since the war saw the restoration of the old monarchical and aristocratic order. Here changing representations of a nation at war were invoked by that order as they re-created absolutism for the early nineteenth century. The identities of ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’ are among those frequently encountered in this volume. The word ‘citizen’ can be used to indicate the formal relationship of individuals to the state, defined by voting rights and rights of representation. One of the achievements of the American Revolution was a form of citizenship rooted in the discourses of early modern classical republicanism but incorporating formal political rights for the majority of white male citizens. The United States had effectively secured universal white male suffrage by 1830, but the exclusions of gender and race were more precisely delineated. In France, after 1789, as a new republican nation was constructed through the apparently universalizing Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the proclamation of the sovereignty of the people, the ideal of the male citizen-soldier emerged as a dynamic model that could be


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Introduction 13


reworked and transformed elsewhere. As described above, in Haiti, it was adapted by creole and African-born inhabitants, in ‘a radical vision of the principles of natural right’ as one which depended above all on the status of freedom.23 Its power in Spanish America has already been referred to. Nevertheless, as Bayly shows, in French Mauritius slave-holding creoles and free people of colour rejected the authority of the French Republic in order to maintain their own position as slaveholders. In imperial Russia and in Great Britain, on the other hand, there was no legal category of ‘citizen’ at all, only the ‘subjects’ of Tsar and monarch. In autocratic and multinational Russia the status of all subjects was carefully defined, from the different ranks of the nobility to the inhabitants of towns, state peasants and personal serfs. In Britain the rhetoric of early modern republicanism and the ideal of ‘natural right’ were important to independent, radical and liberal thinkers. Yet Caitlin Anderson’s chapter in this volume demonstrates how for Britain the legal identity of an individual remained throughout this period that of the subject, bound by allegiance to the Crown, whose participation in the formal political world was explicitly dependent on religion and wealth, and implicitly on gender. Full rights and privileges could not be gained by naturalization. Yet in practice the identity of subjecthood was subject to interpretation and local political imperatives. In the context of the Caribbean, where black slaves often outnumbered the free white population by ten to one, there might be a considerable incentive to give rights and privileges to white, formerly French, and Catholic inhabitants, as was the case in Grenada after 1763. But the subjecthood of slaves—especially rebellious slaves—was a point of contention. Were slaves capable of committing treason? In Grenada in 1796 they were deemed insufficiently full persons to be prosecuted for treason. However, in 1809, the law officers of the Crown, against the opinion of local creoles, ruled that slaves from the 12 black West India Regiments formed by the British Army were sufficiently legal persons to be entitled to give evidence in courts martial.24 The environment of war provided the fluidity for such reinterpretations. Identification as a ‘citizen’ was not the only way in which individuals in this period came to view themselves as part of a wider community. They might also see themselves in a broader sense as members of new nations, in ways which were not formally defined. Membership might indeed be partial and imagined, and of the social and cultural as well as the political nation. There was no single model of citizenship. Patriotism and a sense of national identity might accompany the politics of revolutionary republicanism, as they did in France. But they could also emerge through conflict with imperial governments or enemy forces, or indeed both, as in Rio de la Plata, even before the development of an autonomous state. The creole leadership of the new Spanish-American states, however, built upon existing administrative units in creating new nations, nations which incorporated existing social


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14

hierarchies; in Spanish America after 1811, the symbols of the French revolution were augmented by others which denoted the distinctiveness of these ‘imagined communities’, such as the feather-crowned Indian.25 National identities were not limited to new and revolutionary states, for this period of war also saw an intensification of patriotism and national feeling in ancien regime states such as Portugal, and in multinational empires. Janet Hartley shows how in the expanding Russian Empire, Russians forged their own sense of identity through sharply differentiating themselves from the ‘others’ on their frontiers. The Russian Orthodox faith was a very significant element in that identity, marked out from the Muslim or pagan inhabitants of the Far East and the Caucasus, and Catholic, Protestant and Uniate Christians on the western frontiers. The wars against the Ottoman Empire were presented as a conflict between Christianity and Islam. And the war against Napoleon and particularly the invasion of 1812 came to be preached, and united the nation, as a war of Christianity against the ungodly, with Napoleon as the Anti-Christ. It has been argued that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars also had a critical effect on the shaping of British national identity, as the different peoples of the British Isles came together as Britons to display patriotic, and Protestant, unity against the French.26 This did not, however, exclude a sense of pride in, for instance, distinctively Scottish contributions to imperial expansion. In such an empire national identities could coexist, though they might also incorporate differences and inequalities, as in the relationship between Great Britain and Ireland. Many would, however, be entirely excluded from membership of the British nation, as were slaves and aliens. Catholics might fight for Britain—and the British army was one-third Irish—though they did not enjoy equal rights or status. Women might identify with the imagined community of Britain, even though they were almost entirely excluded from formal politics.27 There were other kinds of identification, of the ‘civilized’ and the ‘European’, which might cut across the national. Russian officials and soldiers regarded the ‘primitive’ peoples of the Siberian frontier either with contempt or with a missionary zeal for improvement. British imperial administrators often, though not universally, worked with a paradigmatic notion of ‘civilization’ in which vastly ‘inferior’ populations might aspire to a progressive modernity. The expansion of missionary activity in this period closely associated civilization with Christianity. In contrast, there was no history of antagonism, and considerable mutual cultural respect, between French and Russian elites. British officers in the Peninsular War greatly respected the professionalism of their French counterparts, and were more likely to look down upon the ‘backwardness’ of their Spanish and Portuguese allies.28 During the first decades of the nineteenth century, more sharply defined notions of racial identity and difference began to emerge both in and beyond Europe. Generally speaking, the eighteenth-century interest in race


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Introduction 15


as a theological or biological conundrum, coupled with an Enlightenment emphasis upon civilizational progression and the innate potential of ‘primitive’ peoples, slowly gave way to a view of physical diversity as fixed, inherent and a basis for permanent hierarchies. It was perhaps no coincidence that this shift accompanied the political maturation of antislavery feeling in metropolitan circles. Consequently, the groundbreaking political rhetoric of male equality during this period undercut differences of class but came to permit racial exclusion. The scientific categories of natural history offered new ways of formalizing differences, as did moral philosophy, nineteenth-century theology and comparative anatomy.29 But even more significantly, as the abolition of the slave trade took place and the possibility of the complete abolition of slavery loomed, new nations constructed or fought over the barriers that would defend the domain of white citizenship. Empires, including territories of white settlement, preserved their dominance through the differentiation of subjects, classed according to racial categories. The years of upheaval, and of emancipatory movements, had paradoxically helped to generate a consciousness of racial identification, and a racialized interpretation of community in transatlantic nations and empires. The complex and, in many respects, contradictory histories of slavery, emancipation and race reveal perhaps better than anything else both the extent and the limitations of the profound changes that occurred around the world between 1770 and 1830. The experiences of war and of revolution brought revolutionary potential for individual lives. Political maps were rewritten, and new nations and identities were constructed in this period. But these also incorporated differences, of race and of gender, and new nations developed their own imperial ambitions. Old empires remained in place and grew in extent and influence, though they might offer new forms of belonging to those who remained imperial subjects; social hierarchies were redefined as racial differentiation became sharper in metropolitan and colonial territories. In the century that followed, European power expanded as never before; but the contours of that expansion were already in place in 1830.

Notes 1. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), 86–120; Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart 1972), vol. 1, pp. xiii–xxiii. 2. Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2008), 104. 3. See Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel (eds), The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1994).


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16

4. See C. A. Bayly in this volume. 5. See idem, Birth of the Modern World, 91; Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 105. 6. See Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 2–3, 96–100. 7. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1770–1830 (London, 1989), 52. 8. David Patrick Geggus, ‘Slavery, War and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean’, in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington, 1997) 1–50 (here 23). 9. John Thornton, Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1998), 319. 10. See the comments on the broader implications of such an approach in Steven Feierman, ‘Africa in History: the End of Universal Narratives’, in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, 1995), 40–65. 11. Michael Duffy, ‘The French Revolution and British Attitudes to the West Indian Colonies’, in Gaspar, A Turbulent Time, 78–101. 12. Duffy, ‘The French Revolution and British Attitudes’, 87. 13. Geggus, ‘Slavery, War and Revolution’, 22. 14. For a discussion of the concept of ‘experience’ in this context, see Alan Forrest et al., ‘Introduction: Nation in Arms–People at War’, in Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820 (Basingstoke, 2009), 1–22, 6–12. 15. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975); Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 1–122. 16. See the essays collected in Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven, 2006). 17. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). 18. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006), 141–174. 19. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, ‘The End of Slavery and the End of Empire: Slave Emancipation in Cuba and Puerto Rico’, in After Slavery: Emancipation and Its Discontents ed. Howard Temperley (London, 2000), 188–207. 20. Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge, 2007), 322. 21. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Paris, 1785), 264–265. 22. Steph Lawler, Identity: Sociological Perspectives (Cambridge, 2008), 2–5. 23. Laurent Dubois, ‘The Revolutionary Abolitionists of Haiti’, in this volume, 58. 24. Roger N. Buckley, ‘The Admission of Slave Testimony at British Military Courts in the West Indies, 1800–1809’, in Gaspar, A Turbulent Time, 226–250. 25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), ch. 4. 26. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992) 5. 27. John E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), 126–127; for women’s role in the political nation, see Kathryn Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–1867 (Oxford, 2009).


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Introduction 17


28. Catriona Kennedy, ‘John Bull Into Battle: Military Masculinity and the British Army Officer during the Napoleonic Wars’, in Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830 ed. Karen Hagemann et al. (Basingstoke, 2010). 29. Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999); Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000); William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago, 1960); and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (London, 2009).


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18

Part I Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to MEDICAL LIBRARY NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIV. - PalgraveConnect - 2011-02-25

A World in Upheaval

10.1057/9780230282698 - War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830, Edited by Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall 9780230_229891_03_cha01.indd 19

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to MEDICAL LIBRARY NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIV. - PalgraveConnect - 2011-02-25 10.1057/9780230282698 - War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830, Edited by Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall 9780230_229891_03_cha01.indd 20

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The ‘Revolutionary Age’ in the Wider World, c. 1790–1830 C. A. Bayly

Introduction This chapter interprets the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath as a series of events in global, rather than simply European or American history. It has three sections with complementary aims. First, I trace the impact and appropriation of revolutionary ideas and forms of government into the Asian world to parallel the well-developed idea of a EuroAtlantic revolutionary space. Second, I develop points made in The Birth of the Modern World, which characterized conjunctural developments in the Muslim, Indian and Chinese worlds as forms of ‘revolution’ in the broadest sense.1 Finally, I ask how revolutions were brought to an end at a transnational level and how a fragile ‘age of equipoise’ was achieved through both ideological and institutional compromise. Broadly, there were three revolutionary ‘surges’ after 1776. First, there was the American Revolution with its knock-on effects in Britain, Ireland and France. The second was, of course, the French Revolution itself, which had an immediate impact in Europe and in the French colonies in the Caribbean and Africa, notably Haiti. The third, least known, revolutionary surge—at least in British historiography—was also the one with a particularly marked effect on the wider world, especially Latin America and Asia. This was the series of events which followed the French invasion of Spain and Portugal in 1806 and 1807, the convening of the liberal Cortes in Cadiz in 1810 and the consequent revolutions and counter-revolutions in Iberia, the Iberian new world and in Asia. It is this third surge, which flowed on into the 1820s, that forms a major focus of this chapter. The implication of the three revolutionary surges for the central and southern Atlantic world—Spain, Portugal and their American colonies— has been intensively studied. In theory, free trade and free constitutions went hand in hand. 2 The freeing of Latin American trade became very early a rallying cry of publicists such as Mariano Moreno, a creole lawyer, who edited Rousseau’s Social Contract and published it in Buenos Aires. 21


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1


Another such revolutionary precursor was Francisco de Miranda of Caracas who began to urge the ejection of Spain from the New World. He conjured up the idea of Latin American independence during a visit to the United States in 1784. De Miranda later experienced radical political action personally, commanding a battalion in France during the revolutionary wars of 1792. In a valuable review article, Gabriel Paquette has noted that recent historiography has moved away from emphasizing long-term processes in Latin American independence.3 According to the new view, Spanish colonial government was neither as effective and interventionist as once thought, nor were creole nationalism and the ideology of the Enlightenment as pervasive as historians argued a generation ago. Instead, the collapse of the Iberian monarchies in 1808 is now seen as the turning point. Still, it surely remains clear that the crisis of legitimacy that struck both Spain and Portugal after Napoleon’s invasion released a range of tensions that had long been building up in metropolitan as well as colonial societies.4 After 1808, juntas spread across Latin America demanding independence and free trade. They were supported by wealthy creoles who resented the economic monopolies and stranglehold on office retained by native Spaniards and Portuguese. Mestizos and American Indians also broadly supported radical social change, especially in Mexico, where the movement for independence came closest to an indigenous social revolt. Critically, therefore, the revolutions outside Europe were revolts against racial as well as social disabilities, involving local elites, indigenous people and slaves.5 This was as true of Asia as the Americas. Ironically, it was the liberal Cortes, or parliament, of Cadiz, convened after the collapse of the royal governments of Spain and Portugal in 1808, which sparked off the first major revolts in the Iberian New World and Asia. The Cortes declared itself the embodiment of national sovereignty in 1810 and abolished Indian tribute and forced labour across the empire. In 1812 it issued a ‘mixed constitution’ for Spanish government, which melded features of the American constitution and the abortive Polish constitution of 1791. Yet the Cortes seemed at the same time determined to keep its hold on the colonies and devised means to exclude large sections of the mestizo and indigenous populations from the benefits of representation. If Iberia was the fulcrum of the third revolutionary surge, events in the colonies were clearly assessed and understood against the background of more specifically Latin American conceptions of representation and racial difference. This point can also be made about revolutionary change in Iberian, French and British Asia. Here I want to move to the first of the main points of this chapter. With the publication of Robert Palmer’s The Age of Democratic Revolution in 1959 and 1964, historians began to paint a more comprehensive picture of the interrelationship between the European and American revolutions.6 The slave revolt in Haiti and the career of Simon


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Bolivar, for instance, could be brought closer to the study of Napoleonic Europe.7 Here, however, I want to advance a parallel argument about the revolutionary age in Asia and the China Seas by bringing together a number of detailed studies. The path I will trace might seem idiosyncratic. It runs not from London and Paris to Calcutta, but from Rio de Janeiro and Oporto to Goa, Pondicherry, Calcutta and the Philippines It was the distant impetus given by the French Revolution and the Cadiz Cortes to indigenous forms of protest in Iberian, and to a lesser extent French and British Asia, which provides the narrative. The places which directly and initially recorded the shock of the Euro-American revolutions were colonial port cities, inhabited by Europeans and Asian compradors along with their immediate hinterlands. Yet these littoral shocks can be set in the context of much wider and longer-term transformations in the inland polities of the Middle East and Asia which also reflect revolutionary ideological and political changes in the broadest sense.

Asia’s revolutionary age What were the special features of the revolutionary shock in the Asian world? Historians of Euro-America have recently tended to retreat from the view that long-term social and economic processes ‘caused’ the French and Iberian revolutions.8 Instead, they picture a sudden chaotic political collapse spiralling out of control. This seems less applicable to Asia. Here, the revolutionary shock was recorded nearly a century after its early modern empires—the Ottomans, Mughals, Safavids and Qing—had already begun to unravel, or at least struggle under the pressure of imperial fiscal overstretch. This had been underscored by the emergence of new, universalizing ideologies which challenged these supremacies: Buddhist millenarianism, Islamic purism, Sikhism and Christian evangelism. Aggressive European mercantilist bodies had undermined earlier Eurasian patterns of free commerce and interaction, especially during the international wars of the 1740s and 1760s. In addition, when the European revolutions finally impacted on Europe’s existing Asian colonies after 1789, these had already seen a long-term escalation of tensions surrounding questions of racial exclusion and the conflicts surrounding the struggle of independent traders with violent commercial monopolies.9 Ultimately, the issue of whether war released revolutionary tensions, or whether mounting social tensions gave rise to revolution and war, seems relatively insignificant, even in the European case. The global crisis saw the entangling of both conditions. I begin with Portuguese India, the Estado da India, especially Goa. Before the French Revolution, Goa had already witnessed the development of a tradition of priestly protest against the authority of the Portuguese Crown. As everywhere else in the non-European world, the issue of popular rights was


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The ‘Revolutionary Age’ in the Wider World


already entangled with issues of race. Belying its reputation for liberality, Portuguese rule in Asia, as in the Americas, was racially exclusive. Mestizos and kanarins (Goan Indians) were excluded from most religious offices even when they were Christian. In the early seventeenth century, Mateus Castro Mahole had protested against racism and the treatment of Goan Christians as slaves.10 He attempted to use the Christian universalism of the Papal Propaganda Fidei against the rigid position of the Portuguese Crown and its ecclesiastical patronage, the Padroado. It is significant that Mahole expounded not only an archaic Iberian notion of rights, but also dwelt on the particular insult to the status of Brahmins conveyed by their exclusion from offices of state and Church. He appears to have been in secret communication with Muslim rulers in Western India, urging them to help liberate Goa from the Portuguese. Similar themes resurfaced in 1787, when a group of Goan priests and laymen were supposedly involved in a plot to raise the local Goan military regiments against the Crown and declare a republic, once again under the protection of Indian rulers.11 The plot failed, but it bore a resemblance to the rebellion that broke out in Brazil in 1789. Themes of modernization and reform, which had spread during Pombal’s autocratic rule in mainland Portugal, were mixed in the conspirators’ statements with the ideas of the French Enlightenment, including copious quotations from Voltaire. Again, this was to be a ‘revolt of the castes’, a protest by Christian Brahmins and mestizos against exclusion from office. This picture of Asia in the revolutionary age can also be filled out with material from the French colonies after 1789. Recent interpretations of the French Revolution have served to distance it even more from the bourgeois revolution depicted by scholars up to the 1980s. The picture has once again fragmented, leaving the sense that the revolution was a series of political explosions, which arose when members of the lower official classes attempted to design new forms of governance for France, as it struggled with transnational pressures as well as domestic attempts to reform old-style privilege. The revolution was a series of political shocks with varied economic consequences, rather than the culmination of social and economic change.12 This new formulation does not have the clarity or panache of its predecessor, but certainly fits better with events in ‘France Overseas’. The dramatic events in Haiti, the slave revolution followed by the emergence of the first black republic, with its many repercussions across the Caribbean and the Americas, were a true social, political and ideological revolution. Yet they were in many ways anomalous. If we move to the East, the picture is different. In French Mauritius, for instance, the revolution became a revolution of slaveholders against the French Republic. French society in Mauritius was a plantation and slave-holding society with a fringe of commercial entrepreneurs in slave and sugar trading. What occurred was a kind of municipal


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political revolution, resulting in the foundation of a General Assembly for the colony. Only when Thomas de Conway, the royal governor of Irish descent, and later a royalist admiral, attempted a counter-revolution was there significant violence. A ‘rabble’ of poor whites, soldiers and sailors took to the streets wearing tricolour cockades. Yet when the French Assembly abolished slavery in 1793, the creoles and free persons of colour repudiated the authority of the Republic, determined to hold on to their African, Indian and Malay slaves who made up at least 70 per cent of the island’s population.13 Ironically, they quoted Rousseau’s doubts about the diffusion of liberty to the Polish serfs in their defence.14 Later in 1803, Governor Decaen introduced into the island a conservative Napoleonic regime, abolishing the colonial assembly and recognizing slavery once again. Even after the British conquest in 1810, the authorities turned a blind eye to the slave trade, keen to placate the French and coloured elites of their new possession. Events in the mainland centres of French India displayed little more evidence of ideological radicalism or deep class conflict. In March 1790 a revolutionary committee was set up in Pondicherry to send delegates to the French national assembly. Later, a colonial assembly was instituted which was supposed to include delegates from Mahé and Chandernagore. The ‘revolution’ passed off here with little conflict, the local Tamil population being mainly concerned with the stability of its commercial relations with other parts of India. Dominant were ‘raisons de conflits personnels et d’argent (personal and economic reasons for change)’, as the most recent French scholar of these events puts it.15 Chandernagore in Bengal, a loading point for the opium production of British Bengal presented another picture, however. But it was one of violent factional conflict rather than revolutionary fervour. According to Bholanauth Chunder, an Indian traveller of the 1840s, the revolutionary ferment in Chandernagore was led by ‘a bankrupt merchant and a briefless barrister’ followed by ‘cast away seamen’, who tried to ‘outdo Robespierre’.16 Here the Assembly, led by one Deverine, managed to expel the governor who was rescued by Lord Cornwallis, the Governor General of British India, and given refuge in the nearby district of Gauhati. Yet, this is not to say that the ideological impact of the revolution was wholly insignificant in the longer run. Tipu Sultan, the anti-British ruler of Mysore to the south, contacted revolutionary France through Pondicherry and Mauritius. He hoisted the Cap of Liberty over his citadel of Srirangapatna.17 More significantly, the events in Chandernagore were later reinterpreted by Indians after 1820, as notions of the Rights of Man spread among the growing English-knowing student population of Bengal, Indian and mixed-race Indo-Portuguese and Anglo-Indians. There emerged in Chandernagore itself a radical political tradition that fed into dissidence in nearby Calcutta. For instance, Rash Behari Bose, a radical political leader during the 1900s, who later fled to Japan and established anti-British cells there, was brought up in Chandernagore and educated at Dupleix College there on stories of the


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French and American revolutions.18 He heard accounts of the events in India during the 1790s from his family. In 1830, radical students at the Calcutta Hindoo College raised the tricouleur on the Ochterloney monument in the city centre. Later, Bengal was galvanized by the sight of Chandernagore representatives, Indian and Indo-French, going off to join the revolutionary assembly in Paris in 1848. Whatever the actual form of the revolution, these French settlements in the heart of British India remained sites of revolutionary memory throughout the colonial period.

Rights and revolutions It is now a commonplace that the export of ideas of natural rights to the extra-European world, either in their revolutionary or constitutional liberal form, generally led to the exclusion of broad sections of slave and indigenous populations, just as the philosophes doubted that European serfs or the riffraff of the faubourgs really merited liberty. It was held, on the one hand, that slaves could have no rights and, on the other hand, that African, Indian or Chinese populations were childish, depraved by tyranny or mentally incapacitated from participation in forms of representation based on rights. Race, in fact, became a blocking mechanism to prevent the too-rapid expansion of liberty, a position adopted in different ways by de Tocqueville, Mill and FitzJames Stephen. This, in turn, gave race itself a new generalized meaning as a meta-narrative of progress. To revert to a concrete example: in Mauritius the governor gave way immediately in 1791 to the demand for a creation of a Colonial Assembly. Just as quickly, members of the white population set out to exclude ‘people of colour’ and suspicion of métis or creoles became very general.19 Yet this ideological blocking mechanism could never be completely successful. There were the freed blacks, mixed-race creoles and dependent populations such as the Kanarese and Malays in Mauritius, who exhibited features of ‘civilization’. They could hardly be denied rights, including the right to representation, without compromising the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity themselves. As ‘improvement’ became an ideological driver, notions of liberty as a positive force became pervasive. If the ‘native mind’ in the case of, say, Indians or Chinese had once created a vibrant culture and was capable of enhanced spirituality, as the missionaries were constrained to assert, then, at the very least, these races could aspire to liberty in the longer term. The blocking mechanism could only be temporary. At a wider level, the notion of individual emancipation became pluralized into that of general liberation. Noirs libres became gens de couleur: coloured citizens. If the revolutionary authorities could declare slaves and Africans free as categories of humanity without reference to any local structures of authority, then, evidently, universal human rights had already come into existence. The evidence of ballads and songs collected later also make it


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clear that the example of Saint Domingue caused a widespread stir among slave populations in Asia. For here was an example not merely of liberation from above, but of self-liberation. These propositions can be made at a more abstract level of political theory. The liberation of slaves clearly stands as a classic example of negative liberty, in the sense used by Isaiah Berlin and his many later commentators.20 Slaves were liberated from the constraints imposed on them by the slave traders and slave master. The planters and others who opposed emancipation could only do so by denying that slaves were fully human. They might also, and many did even in the nineteenth century, have recourse to Aristotle and argue that slaves were savage barbarians that must be coerced. Liberty could not be extended to them; slavery was a natural phenomenon. Yet the mechanism of individual emancipation already attested to the human competence of ex-slaves. Moreover, generalized notions of improvement emerging out of the Christian, Islamic and even Hindu ‘karmic’ universe, secularized by the Enlightenment, notably by Kant, created a slippage between negative and positive manifestations of liberty. Slaves—or colonial subjects who came to see themselves as slaves—needed liberty in order to reach their human potential. As Colin Bird has argued, the distinction between negative and positive liberty is very unclear.21 This means, as he says, that even when liberal notions of emancipation comprised new forms of coercion and discursive subjugation, they ‘do not deserve our contempt’. Ideas of liberty rapidly found new channels within which to run, even when diverted and dammed up by vested interests.

Patriotisms and liberty In addition to the effect of the revolutions and the European evangelical movements on both slaves and their masters, the worldwide convulsions also stimulated new forms of patriotism among formally free colonial subjects. The authorities in British India were alarmed by the events of the revolution. Richard Wellesley, the governor general, had two ‘Jacobin’ newspaper editors expelled from the East India Company’s territories. He had already been alarmed by the French invasion of his native Ireland and later pleaded with Dundas in London that the captured French colonies should not be returned to the hands of ‘democrats’ in the event of peace with France.22 The revolutions, however, had a good deal of support in India amongst free merchants, who resented the Company’s monopolies and Eurasians in the port cities who felt discriminated against in employment. It was presumably people such as this who bought, read and discussed amongst themselves the 1000 copies of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, which had been printed in Calcutta by 1805. Indians may also have become aware of the work and there is internal evidence that Rammohan Roy, the Bengali reformer, had read it before 1815. The connection between hostility to the


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East India Company’s monopolies and approval of aspects of the European revolutions was also apparent in domestic contexts, in the Company’s Court of Proprietors and in Parliament itself. For instance, Lord Lauderdale, an old enemy of the Company’s trading privileges, had denounced Governor General Cornwallis as a warmonger for his attacks on Indian rulers. In 1791, His Lordship turned up in the House of Lords to defend the French revolution dressed as a Jacobin.23 The patriotic wars against France and fear of the Indian rulers kept the revolutionary impetus well under control in British India until 1818. But after this date, when Governor General Lord Hastings removed some disabilities on the Indian press, agitations arose throughout coastal India for various forms of representation, parliamentary reform and an end to the East India Company’s monopolies. I have shown elsewhere how the first generation of Indian liberals, notably the great ‘reformer’, Rammohan Roy, linked in their mind the fate of the Iberian constitutional revolutions, events in Goa and the reform of the East India Company’s despotism.24 In Portuguese India, by the early 1820s, there had been several coups by constitutional liberals and reactions from supporters of the royal party ensconced in Rio. The radicals, now called ‘liberales’, were mainly Portuguese descendants and Christian Indians. Again, they used the political language of Rousseau, invoking the ‘general wish’.25 A number of locally resident mestizos were elected to the assembly in Cadiz, and later Lisbon as representatives of the ‘colonies’. Rammohan himself hosted dinners in the Calcutta Town Hall in 1823 where Brazilian, Filipino and Bengali Portuguese praised the liberals of Spain, Portugal and France, drank to the health of Jeremy Bentham and called for the freedom of the Indian press.26 The American connection also remained an important memory, especially in Calcutta. The Bengali, dubashes, or agents of American trade after 1783, had received a portrait of George Washington that became an icon for English-speaking Indians who revered the American’s rejection of the British Crown and the East India Company. The arrival of American Unitarian clergymen in Calcutta after 1813 and a great boom in American free trade to India and China amplified these sentiments. Rammohan himself held up the American revolutionary constitution as a fine example of the balance between central and local power.27 He also threatened Britain with the ‘separation’ of India should it fail to heed cries of distress in the subcontinent. The American example was clearly in his mind.

Revolution and reaction in the Philippines The Philippines, again an Iberian colony, provides a final example of the manner in which the themes of the revolutionary age were appropriated and transformed in an Asian as well as an American context. Here, direct responses to the Spanish and Portuguese revolutions from 1810 to 1823


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combined with global economic changes and distortions in indigenous social institutions to create a radical tradition. In the long term, Filipino radicals came to demand autonomy from the Spanish Crown along the lines of the American colonies. This tradition persisted through the nineteenth century to the American occupation of 1898, and beyond. Filipino self-assertion, even from an early period, had two faces: urban mercantile protests against the Crown’s commercial policies and racial exclusion and rural revolts led by the principales, remnants of the old village leaderships against taxation. Portuguese and Spanish commercial activity had tied Manila and Luzon to the commerce in India and on the China coast. A substantial Iberian creole, mestizo and Chinese merchant community established itself, spreading its influence through loans and purchases of estates into the countryside and outer islands between 1600 and 1800. The landholding Friars and the royal tobacco monopolies supported the official face of governance. By the 1760s, the islands were wracked by social conflict. Free merchants in Manila and other large cities chaffed against the royal monopolies. They now included British merchants, who had moved in on the coat tails of the East India Company. Inland, Chinese merchants vied with the Friars for control of land and produce. The pressure of revenue demand and usury capital on the indigenous population was breaking down co-parcenary village communities (with a joint form of property-holding). This resulted in a series of revolts, which often took up Christian messianic themes. One such revolt in Bohol lasted from 1744 to as late as 1829. This was a Philippine equivalent of the Andean revolts of Tupac Amaru, but much less well known. It is revealing that the issue that sparked off the rebellion was the refusal of a Spanish priest to give a Christian burial to a Filipino who had been killed in a duel.28 Meanwhile, in the outer islands, Moros—indigenous Muslims— were in almost perpetual revolt against the representatives of Spanish royal government. Their language, however, was indigenist rather than jihadist. As in other parts of the world, the Seven Years War deepened tensions and introduced new languages of politics. The British invaded and occupied Manila between 1762 and 1764. Following this sharp demonstration of the fragility of Spanish power, Diego Silang staged a revolt in Ilocos in 1763.29 His proclamation praised ‘the prudent and peaceable government of the English’ who neither levied tribute nor demanded personal service. He explicitly reaffirmed his obeisance to God and the Spanish Crown, but spoke nevertheless of ‘government by the Filipinos’. Creoles and mestizos mixed calls for the reinstatement, as they saw it, of old, free corporate institutions with calls for limitations on the power of the monarchy, British-style. Here an emphasis on the rights of the freeborn Spanish Filipino appears to have predated the indirect effects of the American and Spanish revolutions. This new language of politics was later elaborated in the works of a liberal churchman, Joaquin Martinez de Zuniga,


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who wrote a huge survey of the Philippines, which was published in 1800. De Zuniga denounced the oppression of the peasantry by the landholding Friars and railed against the royal monopolies.30 He was a kind of provincial Wilhelm von Humboldt and had clearly been influenced by moderate constitutional thought, which he saw as a bulwark against the atheistical revolutionaries. The lengthy debates of the liberal Cadiz Cortes of 1810–12 also registered themselves in the islands. A number of creole Filipinos resident in Spain were voted into the parliament along with Americans in 1810–13. This happened again from 1820 to 1823, and again from 1834 to 1837. But, as we have seen, the Cadiz liberals were less than liberal on matters of race, fearing that they would be swamped by half-castes and natives.31 For a time constitutional government seemed inevitable. But mestizos first became disillusioned when they heard that the Cortez had limited representation to ‘Spaniards and Indians or their children’, effectively disenfranchising persons of African, Filipino or Chinese descent. Later as royal absolutism was clamped down again in 1814, full-scale revolts broke out in the islands, led by creoles and mestizos, but supported for their own reasons by the peasantry. As in Goa, and indeed on a massive scale throughout Iberian Latin America, a series of coups and counter coups continued on into the 1820s and 1830s. In the medium term, the Filipino creoles did not go the way of their American counterparts. Like the Cubans, they were too weak and too dependent on the Spanish royal navy for aid against the Moros and local peasant revolts. The revolutionary era did, however, provide the islands with an inheritance of liberal constitutional political thought and a quasirevolutionary tradition, which flowered again under the liberal Governor de la Torre from 1869 to 1871, and under José Rizal in the 1890s.32 One important feature of the Filipino demands for autonomy was that, as in Goa and the Americas, indigenous secular priests played a key role in articulating it. The revolutionary wars had limited the immigration of Spanish and Portuguese clerics and the older Friars had dwindled in numbers. Secular Filipino priests came to occupy more and more of the livings and the benefices that supported them. There was, an English visitor reported, a ‘deadly jealousy’ between the Spanish expatriates and the Filipinos. The word was: ‘the land belongs to us the Indians.’ An official report of 1827 claimed that native parish priests were directors of elections in the villages and held ‘pretensions against the legitimate government of these islands’.33 When in 1826, the royal reaction against the second liberal Cortes was in full swing, the local government attempted to return Church land to the Friars, thus deepening the hostility of the Filipino priesthood and their supporters. We see then in the case of Goa, Manila and even Calcutta, the distant ripples of revolutionary thought and action. The revolutionary wave was neither a European nor even an Atlantic phenomenon; it was truly transnational.


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Nor were these Asian upsurges simply a matter of diffusion or imitation. The revolutionary language took root because it made sense of deep conflicts which arose both from the expansion of the European world-system and attempts by indigenous institutions and ideologies to respond to these massive changes.

Conjunctural revolutions There was another set of ideological and political struggles across the world during the revolutionary era in which the impact of the European revolutions and the expansion of the European world-system were reflected more distantly. One remarkable example, analysed by Peter Carey, was the revolt of 1825–30 of Prince Dipanagara on the Dutch island of Java.34 Attempts by this province of the Batavian Republic under Marshall Daendels to make the island more productive for war against the British, followed by Stamford Raffles’s five-year rule (1810–15), which commercialized the land revenue system, caused great social strains on Java. But, to empower his resistance, Prince Dipanagara summoned up the ideology of just rule in Javanese HinduMuslim style, rather than the ideologies of the European revolutions in this legitimist movement. He became the ratu adil, the ‘once-and-future king’, a figure of legend in Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim legend. Yet there were also cases where the impact of European government and the European world-system were even less in evidence.35 I take here two other examples: the revolt of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia and the Sikhs in India. It seemed to me that the Wahhabi revolt against intrusive Ottoman rule and the decline of proper religious observance in the cities of Saudi Arabia should be regarded as a variety of world revolution.36 In fact, in its long-term repercussions, it was one of the most important of all. Ibn Saud’s revolt began in the 1740s, before the American and European revolutions, but arose as an analogous response to the pressures of taxation and state interference in formerly independent communities. It was perpetuated by the strains put on the Ottoman Empire by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It was brought to an end in the medium term when a typical restoration military monarch—in this case, Muhammad Ali of Egypt—invaded the Hejaz in 1815. Yet the influence of Wahhabism persisted indirectly across the Muslim world, inspiring imitations and reactions among the Muslim Sufi brotherhoods of North and East Africa over the next hundred years. Analogous forms of Islamic piety were imitated and contested in India and amongst China’s southwest and northeast Muslims. The purist strain was spread by religious families of Hadhramauti Sayyids as far as Sumatra and Java in the Dutch East Indies.37 In this and other cases, the Euro-American revolutions interacted with conjunctural crises in the global system of states and empires.


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There is a more fundamental question here. How far should ideologically motivated revolts such as Wahhabism (or the Sikh movement in India, or the Buddhist millenarian uprisings against the Qing dynasty in China) be considered revolutions in a more precise sense? In other words, how far should we widen the lens, through which we observe the supposedly EuroAmerican revolutions after 1776? This is an important historiographical issue, with implications not just for research, but also for teaching. As far as the Islamic millennium is concerned, it is revealing that several recent social theorists, notably Foucault, have insisted that the recent Iranian and other Muslim upsurges should be considered revolutions in a true sense: political caesuras caused by an irrepressible desire for fundamental ideological and social change. This position refutes an older prejudice that saw Islamic movements as irrational or conservative responses to a West, which was always itself imbued with the capacity for ‘progressive’, rational, revolutionary or evolutionary change. Indeed, if the political language of Wahhabism and its coeval ideologies was expressed in terms of conservative Islamic civic virtue and hostility to distant sovereignty, this did not by any means set it apart from either the American or the European revolutions. It is only our tendency as historians and political commentators to put anything Islamic in a different box and to see Islamic ‘radicalism’ as a conservative force, as opposed to say, Robespierre or even Napoleon, that causes this myopia. Even if we examine the social roots of revolution, the word may be appropriate for these events within Islam. Of course, Najd, Mecca, Madina or Peshawar, for that matter, did not see the revolt of urban sans-culottes, barricades, public meetings or guillotines. But these were often revolts of underprivileged suburbanites, the semi-settled bedouin on the fringe of the Muslim urban economies. These revolts exemplified that perennial conflict between the nomad and the city noted by Ibn Khaldun in the Middle Ages, but the revolt of the fastnesses against the cities was one now fortified with the notion that the cities were the Trojan horses of empires ruled by the ‘corrupt of the earth’. If religious ideas were used, they expressed ideas of universal Islamic brotherhood in a reformed religion. As Dina Khoury points out, the Wahhabis opposed mysticism, emphasized outward demonstrations of belief including political activism, but also rejected inherited traditions of legal and theological thought.38 This movement, therefore, set itself against corrupt religious corporations that monopolized land grants and derogated from the unity of God by allowing saint worship. These corporations were as offensive to the Islamic Jacobins as Church lands were to the French ones. Somehow, Edward Gibbon instinctively understood the revolutionary potential of this type of Islam. Napoleon also sent an emissary to meet what he perceived as these Muslim fellow revolutionaries in 1808 in the hope of coordinating risings against the reactionary power of the Ottomans and Great Britain. And, as in Europe, this


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revolution in thought changed the nature of the establishment itself. More orthodox Sunni jurists reformulated their beliefs to oppose Wahhabism. They developed a polemic of exclusion which characterized the Wahhabis, not as Muslims misled, but as unbelievers and propagators of a new religion. As Khoury states, they ‘threatened the political and religious consensus of the dominant Sunni orthodoxy in the Ottoman Empire’.39 Wahhabism and similar purist Muslim movements also had the potential to destroy secular hierarchies. In the case of France, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the revolution as the culmination of a process by which the dependants of magnates, churches and nobles became freemen, joining the nation, or the revolution as individuals. Yet this process of ‘disintermediation’ can also be discerned in many purist movements amongst the Muslims. Men left the service of nobles or urban merchants to become ansar, to join the band of brothers in search of a godly republic. If the Islamic revolution often seemed like a massive looting expedition as when, in the 1800s, the Wahhabis attacked Mecca and Madina and Karbala, stripping the tombs of the Prophet and his companions of their gold leaf, was this so different from the French revolution depicted by Richard Cobb where the movement of les armées revolutionnaires in the countryside resembled a series of cattle looting raids?40 Only perhaps in the most abstract realm of political theory does the comparison between the Euro-American and the Islamic revolutions of the eighteenth century appear less convincing, though this is undoubtedly significant. Here, Alan Ryan’s recent discussion ‘[was] there liberalism in antiquity?’ has been suggestive for my question ‘could there be revolutions within an Islamic tradition, (or for that matter Sikh or Chinese Buddhist traditions)?’ Ultimately, Ryan answers the question negatively. Liberal toleration, for instance, says: ‘we don’t really like your way of doing religion, but, in the interests of social peace, we allow you as individuals the right to practice it.’41 Antiquity, in contrast, did not conceive religious pluralism as a dimension of individual rights, but as a question of different ethnicities performing their appropriate rites. By analogy, the Euro-American revolutions were represented in political theory, at least, as assertions by peoples of their collective rights as gatherings of individuals bonded by history, language and experience. In contrast, the emphasis in purist Islam was on the duties of believers to renew their submission to God and purge innovations from the path of Prophecy that had long since been laid out. Equally, when the rise of the Wahhabis raised the issue of ‘toleration’ in the Ottoman Empire and beyond, it was not the toleration of John Locke, based on the individual’s right to practise religion regardless of the stance of the state. The debate instead revolved around the nature of the majority in Islam and the cohesion of the community, with copious references to the debates of the Prophet’s times, as Khoury again shows.


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Of course, analogous religious and traditionalist elements existed in the European tradition. Mazzinian democratic nationalists and revolutionaries adopted the language of duties as well as rights and also alluded vaguely to a transcendental deity moving in history.42 Again, some French and American patriots represented their revolutionary ideals as a return to the pious republic in the ancient tradition of Cato or Brutus. Yet the assertion of the rights of the individual grouped in the collectivity, the people, does, in fact, mark out Euro-American revolutions at this level of abstraction. If the Muslim upsurges were indeed revolutions in the sense known to intellectual history, they were closer to Christopher Hill’s puritan revolution of the seventeenth century than to the ideals of Robespierre.43 I do not want to belabour the point, but I will take one final example: the case of the Sikhs of the Punjab.44 Indian historians, following early British officials, have long argued that the Sikh movement as it was transformed during the eighteenth century was both a revolt against the intrusive taxation of the Mughal Empire and also a movement of self-assertion by the middle caste Jat peasantry and commercial people against the hereditary Rajput village-controlling aristocracy. Sikhism also has an emancipatory and soteriological face. It absorbed people from low and even outcaste groups. It proclaimed spiritual equality through the teaching of the gurus. By standardizing dress and rites it created a spiritual brotherhood, which took on military features in the form of the Khalsa. It adapted the notion of jihad in Islam to oppose the Mughal rulers and their supposedly debased Islamic practices. In its appearance as a social force and in its contribution to the violent conjuncture of the late eighteenth century, Sikhism was indeed an Asian revolution. Even in its consequences, the Sikh movement seems oddly analogous to the Euro-American ones. After 1811, a Sikh kingdom under Ranjit Singh came into existence in the Punjab. As ruler of this restored monarchy, Ranjit tried to discipline and direct the populist energy of the Khalsa while at the same time rebuilding aspects of the old Brahmanical, and even Muslim hierarchy in order to hold his state together. To drive the point home, Ranjit employed in his army several officers from the European Napoleonic forces. Here again, though, the differences at the level of intellectual history have to be taken seriously. The ideological energy behind insurgent Sikhism and the Khalsa did not derive from any conception of individual rights, even if Sikh political leaders in the later nineteenth century appropriated such ideas. It derived at an abstract level from the notion that spirit moved through history and would manifest itself periodically through gurus or great teachers who could express the originary meaning of the universe.45 Devotion to the gurus rather than the rights of the Sikhs as an incipient people lay at the heart of its ideology. For this reason, the early expansive and proselytizing features of Sikhism gave way to a more exclusive form of the faith and its followers’ transformation into a more typical and largely endogamous Indian religious sect.


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The periods after the end of major wars are as creative of historical change as the stresses of war themselves. My inclination to take the analysis beyond 1820 arises from the fact that the Iberian constitutional struggles flowed on into this era; that the battle over the slave trade and the East India Company’s monopoly intensified; and that the discussions around slavery and the British reform bills were all critical in the wider history of European empires. They all signalled the end of the first revolutionary conjuncture. This section discusses some of the practical policy changes that stabilized the revolutionary wars, but ends with a consideration of how ideas of the ‘mixed constitution’ were employed in different ways to compromise the ideological conflict between democratic and royal powers. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath curtailed the imperial aims of France, Spain and Portugal. The archaic empires of universal kingship and their enemies, the empires of revolutionary levelling (this included the Wahhabi and the Sikh movements), were cut back into the empires of national states and allied entities.46 New quasi-national forms emerged in Latin America and in Belgium and Scandinavia. But there were also other, related transnational settlements that were also broadly part of the Vienna System, but are rarely mentioned in connection with it. Thus Britain retained Canada and accommodated the United States in the Pacific. In the Mediterranean, Greece emerged from its own revolution as a sovereign state in 1830, but even before this, Egypt under Muhammad Ali had defeated the Wahhabis and emerged as a new and expansive kingdom, virtually free of both Ottoman and British control. Qajar Persia established itself as a buffer kingdom between Britain and Russia, while the English East India Company sought, with only temporary success, to balance Ranjit Singh’s Punjab against a more state-like Afghanistan. Further east, Dutch control was restored in the Indies, but in return the British and Dutch governments eventually accepted the existence of the city-state of Singapore, intended by its British and Indian supporters as a bastion of free trade. State building in Thailand and Vietnam was subtly aided by European mercenaries and commercial entrepreneurs. Even within imperial territories, the tactic of indirect rule was used more frequently than it had been 40 years before. A second set of changes at world level was directed to limiting, at least, political damage from two issues that divided the restored or newly nationalized regimes from their potential supporters among the rising urban commercial groups. This involved an attempt to drain slavery of its most politically dangerous elements along with a determined assault on the weaker of the trade monopolies of the mercantilist period.47 The British abolition of the slave trade and the creation of the freed slave settlements of Liberia and Sierra Leone were the most striking of the former


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How to end revolutions


measures. But they were accompanied by both ameliorative and coercive measures in other parts of the world designed to limit the possibility of further slave rebellions on the lines of the Haitian Revolution. Attempts were also made to temper the most strident of the attacks from antislavery commercial interests in Britain, France and the United States. Slave conditions improved somewhat in the British and French West Indies and freed slaves were given some constitutional rights. In the East, the English East India Company and Spanish and Portuguese colonial governments also attempted to control the variety of semi-slave systems that ran across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal and systems of domestic servitude within India and Chinese Southeast Asia. This ‘cleaning up operation’ became more pressing in the case of India, when critics of the Company’s monopoly such as the radical, James Silk Buckingham, a friend of Rammohan Roy, explicitly accused it of maintaining a covert slave trade in eastern waters. In 1829, for instance, George Saintsbury published a treatise designed to show ‘that the East Indies were as much a slave colony as the West Indies’.48 Attacks on monopoly also became more strident across the world and regimes moved to buy in support from the commercial middle classes by making some concessions. The years after the American Revolution witnessed what might be called a silent bourgeois revolution with commerce underpinning the survival of states even during their most furious conflicts. Those new classes, whether in Sao Paolo or Calcutta, demanded a share in power and an expansion of commerce. Ideological tools were adapted to speed this process. The new independent regimes throughout Latin America abolished what had been monopolies of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, even though the newly empowered creole elites managed to maintain surreptitious trade privileges. In North America, the mood generally favoured the break-up of commercial monopolies. In the British colonial world, the 1813 and 1833 East India Charter acts were supposed to abolish the tyranny and monopolies of the Company directors and free British trade with the East to compete with what was increasingly seen as a serious American commercial threat. As one publication said in 1829: ‘[o] f all the evils which result from the monopoly of the East India Company, there is none so galling and injudicious as the stimulus which it has given to American competition.’49 The years after 1815 saw the beginning of British attempts to expand free trade by force. In the Crown colony of Ceylon, the 1820s witnessed the first moves by the government to free internal trade. The Dutch were faced down in the Straits of Malacca. Burma was attacked in 1824 in part because of its treatment of European merchants and the confrontation with Qing China began. The post-revolutionary world, therefore, witnessed not perpetual peace, but a wide range of violent, but limited upheavals. The ‘age of equipoise’ can best be described anew as the ‘age of turbulence’.


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This final section considers the ideological outcomes which emerged worldwide to put at least a temporary halt to the wars accompanying the revolutions. The changes in governance and commerce, just noted, arose from, but also consolidated these compromises in the realm of political thought. At the most basic level, the declarations of independence and the assertion of peoples’ rights affected intellectuals and radical politicians across the world. The discourse of rights became truly transnational along with what David Armitage called ‘the contagion of sovereignty’.50 As early as the 1820s, we find people not only in Ireland and Canada, but even in South Asia speaking of the ‘independence’ or ‘separation’ of their territories from Britain.51 As far as the form of government was concerned, the ‘mixed constitution’ advocated by late eighteenth-century French and Scottish theorists was the ideological tool used to reinsert a degree of stability. This took the form of constitutional monarchies in the Iberian world after 1812 and France after 1830. In Britain, the reform acts of 1832–33 saw the introduction of a larger degree of representation. Some of the oppressive measures of the wartime period were revoked and radicals assailed ‘the old corruption’. The press became freer and juries were at least formally opened up to indigenous people across the British Empire. The main point, however, is that the image of European and American democratic revolutions and particularly the revolutionary state acted more as a stimulant and as a demonstration of the techniques of intellectual change than as their origin. The wars of the axial age were global and the changes which emerged owed as much to indigenous evolutions as they did to the diffusion of Western ideas. Even in self-consciously modernizing regimes such as that of Muhammad Ali’s Egypt the adaptation of Napoleonic norms and institutions of state service went hand in hand with the reinvigoration of certain pre-existing aspects of Islamic law and the Islamic state.52 The revolution in Ottoman government after 1820 had precedents in the Ottoman renaissance of the sixteenth century as described by Cemal Kafadar.53 Indeed, throughout the Islamic world it was the statist aspects of the revolutionary European experience that particularly struck the rulers of the Tanzimat era of reform and it was in an Islamic guise that change took place. The individualist demand for rights was too closely associated with atheism and infidelity to God to be acceptable here. As one writer had it: ‘The French ... have abandoned all religion. They assert that all men are equal in humanity and alike in being men ... [They are] raving madmen [and have sown] sedition among religions and thrown mischief among kings and states.’54 The military reform in the Ottoman Empire, which began in the 1820s, and culminated in the famous Gulhane edict of 1839, certainly created an obligation to military service based on a version of citizenship. But,


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The ideological compromise


as Virginia Aksan points out, this did not even create a citizen’s army on the Napoleonic model, since it was limited to the Muslim population of the empire.55 What the revolutionary era established here in the longer run is better described as a common subjecthood, layered by religious confession. Even in Bengal, the seat of modern thought in Asia, during the early nineteenth century, the Persian newspaper owned by Rammohan Roy emphasized the role of farsighted kingship in political reform, rather than the rights of India’s colonial subjects, as did his English and Bengali editorials.56 Much the same could be said of Buddhist and Confucian Asia, where newly invigorated ‘para-colonial’ regimes came into existence after 1815. In the Punjab, as we have seen the popular radical impetus of the teaching of the gurus was mediated by a revived form of Indo-Islamic kingship in the state established by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. When Wahhabism made a reappearance in central Arabia in the 1820s, its leaders were keen to temper their spiritually levelling message with loyalty to the Ottomans, previously decried as the ‘corrupt of the earth’. Revived royal autocracy or regal presidencies made limited concessions to ideas of popular sovereignty. To return to the case of Latin America, radical American and French influences certainly percolated into public debate in Mexico, Peru and Argentina. They bonded with indigenous calls to revolution. In Mexico, there was a full-scale revolt of the castas, the coloureds, against the established order. José Morelos, a mixed-race man of artisan stock, published a declaration of independence in 1813. In a document called ‘The Sentiments of the Nation’ he announced the abolition of racial distinctions, urged the redistribution of wealth and called for a Congress representing the sovereignty of the people.57 In this and other radical documents, ‘America was for the Americans’. Bolivar, similarly, argued that the Spanish monarchy in the New World had been a form of despotism, similar to that of the Ottomans or the Mughals, although these Muslim regimes had at least employed native ministers. Bolivar argued for a local form of civic republicanism directed by the creole elite, but drawing strength from the support of the castas. Yet ‘promises of effective citizenship for Indians, mestizos and people of African descent remained largely unfulfilled’.58 Military and landed magnates (caudillos) dominated republican institutions. Earlier ideologies of racial, religious and political hierarchy legitimated the new order and constrained the concept of revolutionary citizenship. In the Indian case, early liberals sought a similar balance between custom and rights; government and popular indigenous representation; a strong centre and provincial autonomy. Their efforts were once again severely constrained by British racialism and conservatism. But they nevertheless helped to create a new political tradition of moderate radicalism. British liberals, supported by Indian voices, were able to abolish the Company’s


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monopoly. They also secured a limited degree of freedom in other respects. The press was ultimately given a wider scope. The Company’s government conceded expanded recruitment of Eurasians and Indians into government service and agitation secured, at least in principle, Indian representation on grand juries. A balance was achieved between the British Parliament, the East India Company’s government and the power of respectable local people. Rammohan Roy himself envisaged the past and future of this political compromise in terms of a ‘mixed’, ancient Indian constitution that had once incorporated all the castes, with the Rajputs as the executive and the Brahmins as legislators.59 Such a historicist legitimation of Indian freedoms and capacities bears a distant resemblance to the somewhat short-lived vision of the Aztec or Inca past promoted by the people Brading calls ‘creole patriots’ in the case of Iberian America.60 Thus an important aspect of this post-revolutionary ideological compromise in the world outside Europe was the manner in which it conferred very limited rights on small groups of non-whites. To one degree or another we see this in the former and surviving parts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Here battles between elites and governors, on the one hand, and liberal patriots, on the other, resulted in some degree of inclusion of Africans, Indians or mixed-race people into consultative bodies, even though this was severely limited. Across the British and American African world there were some analogies. In the colonies of former slaves, Sierra Leone and Liberia, local councils and juries came to be composed of people of African descent and even in the Caribbean freed slaves achieved some degree of recognition as subjects after 1818. In Sierra Leone, however, an early phase of black settler freedom gave way to rule by the Sierra Leone Company and then the Crown government.61 Here most of the resettled former slaves had adopted Christianity and they created their own local government institutions, electing headmen and founding local benefit societies. Yoruba ‘re-captives’ settled in the colony and even created a kind of constitutional monarchy under a ‘king’ to whom all Yoruba in the settlement supposedly gave allegiance. This was not officially recognized by the British. Nevertheless, a kind of ad hoc mixed constitution came into existence, fortified by the idea that Christianization could elevate Africans’ position in the human hierarchy. Again, though no formal representative bodies existed, blacks were admitted to serve on grand juries. In Liberia, meanwhile, black American colonists were allowed a miniature American constitution, albeit hedged around with executive vetoes. By 1830, James Russwurm, one of the first black men to graduate from an American university, had founded a newspaper, the Liberia Herald.62 The knowledge that freed slaves and ‘re-captives’ sat on juries in these African colonies, did much to encourage the first generation of Indian and Chinese radicals in their attempt to achieve similar privileges.


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In giving a broad overview of the ‘age of revolutions’ in the extra-European world, this chapter has attempted to highlight a number of issues which should concern both research and teaching in this field. First, we have tried to balance the notion of an Atlantic ‘space of revolution’, embracing America, France, Ireland, the Caribbean and Latin America, with a Middle East and Asian one, stretching broadly from Alexandria, through Goa, Calcutta and Batavia to Manila. Recent studies of the Latin American revolutions have tended to downplay long-term social and economic preconditions for the collapse of the Iberian Empire, emphasizing instead the consequences of Napoleon’s invasion of the Peninsula. In the Asian ‘revolutionary space’, like the Caribbean, protracted European contests for naval and commercial power and conflicts over issues of race provided clear long-term preconditions for the revolutionary storm. In addition, Asian powers, seeking to protect themselves against European encroachment, tried to benefit from the consequences of the collapse of imperial authority during the revolutions. The medium-term results of the European revolutions in the Asian sphere were largely conservative. The Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch empires survived and the British Asian Empire expanded following the revolutionary wars. The racial hierarchy was not significantly shaken. Creole elites gained greater powers in Goa and the Philippines, but faced with powerful European and Asian competitors, colonial authority persisted, in contrast to the situation in Latin America. Nevertheless, the period did see the emergence of a tradition of radical liberal politics in many Asian port cities. Demands for constitutional representation, freedom of the press and racial equality in employment were empowered by themes taken from revolutionary discourse in Europe and America. The first generation of Asian, African and Middle Eastern liberals blended these Euro-American ideological appropriations with themes taken from their own traditions: Hindu notions of freedom (mukti), Islamic ideas of the originary consultative body of Islam (the shura) and aspects of African religion. In Christianized parts of the Iberian empires older ideas of spiritual equality or the virtue of old religious and spiritual immunities were similarly blended with radical ideas to empower a liberal tradition. Histories of the progress of Asian civilizations began to be written, legitimizing these calls for liberty and representation. What resulted was a political and ideological compromise. Over much of the Asian and even African world, as in Europe, the theory of mixed constitutions—monarchies with an element of popular participation— proved a serviceable ideological tool with which to begin to build a functioning civil society. There began a limited recruitment of non-whites into institutions such as the jury or minor government office on the grounds of civilizational fitness. Thus the revolutionary surges diminished across the


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Conclusion

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world. Yet as Albert Camus once remarked, the ultimate beneficiary of all modern revolutions has been the state. In Asia, one could add: ‘the colonial state above all.’ Much of this chapter has concerned the impact of Euro-American events in Asia and the Middle East, even though it has stressed the limited agency of European settlers and non-Europeans in this encounter. But another aim has been to re-emphasize the manner in which these Euro-American revolutions intersected with and mutually influenced a range of powerful endogenous movements within the extra-European world. Arabian Wahhabism, Indian Sikhism and forms of Chinese millenarian Buddhism were all political and ideological movements which shattered empires and kingdoms during these years. In many respects, these social eruptions also deserve the title of revolution.

Notes 1. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004). In the present chapter I also try to develop the notion of revolution as a concept in political thought. 2. See David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 514–602. 3. Gabriel Paquette, ‘The Dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy’, Historical Journal, 52/1 (2009): 175–212. See also Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke, 2008). 4. See the chapter by Rebecca Earle in this volume 5. Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795–1830 (Pittsburgh, PA, 2008). 6. Robert Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, 2 vols (Princeton, 1959 and 1964). 7. David P. Geggus (ed.), The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001)). See also the chapter by Laurent Dubois in this volume. 8. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance and Reform; T. C. W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648–1815 (London, 2006); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (London, 2006). 9. Peter Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2007). The political conflicts of 1756–63 and 1776–83 interacted at a global level and profoundly affected Europe. 10. Pratima Kamat, Farar Far [Crossfire]: Local Resistance to Colonial Hegemony in Goa, 1510–1912 (Panaji, 1999), 41. 11. For the so-called Pinto revolt, see Kamat, Farar Far, 112. 12. Bailey Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2003). 13. William F. S. Miles, ‘The Creole Malaise in Mauritius’, African Affairs, 98 (April 1999): 211–228. 14. Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius (Durham, NC, 2005), 232. 15. Personal communication from Dr M. Gobalakichenane reporting on his thesis ‘La révolution française des Tamouls de Pondichery (1790–1793)’, mémoire de DEA (University of Nantes, 1997).


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16. Bholanauth Chunder, Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, 2 vols (London, 1869), vol. 1, 9–10. 17. Mohibbul Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan (Calcutta, 1971). 18. Uma Mukherjee, Two Great Indian Revolutionaries: Rash Behari Bose and Jyotindra Nath Mukherjee (Calcutta, 1966), 2–20. 19. Vaughan, Creole Island, 231ff. 20. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1970). 21. Colin Bird, An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Cambridge, 2006), 176–192. 22. Mornington to Dundas 16 March 1799, in Two Views of British India, ed. Edward Ingram (Bath, 1969), 123. 23. Annual Register 81 (1839): 364, cited Ainslie Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (London, 1962), 234. 24. C. A. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India’, in An Intellectual History for India, ed. Shruti Kapila, special issue Modern Intellectual History, 4/1 (April 2007): 25–41. 25. Bombay Courier, 19 January 1822. 26. Bengal Hurkaru, 27 August 1822. 27. ‘Ram Mohun Roy’, Asiatic Journal, NS 12 (1834): 212. 28. Usha Mahajani, Philippine Nationalism: External Challenge and Filipino Response, 1565–1946 (St Lucia, 1971), 24–26. 29. Ibid. 28–29. 30. Joaquin Martinez de Zuniga, An Historical View of the Philippine Islands, trans. John Maver (London, 1814). 31. James F. King, ‘The Colored Castes and American Representation in the Cortez of Cádiz’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 33/1 (1953): 33–64. 32. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London, 2007). 33. John N. Schumacher, Revolutionary Clergy: The Filipino Clergy and the Nationalist Movement, 1850–1903 (Quezon City, Manila, 1981), 3. 34. Peter Carey, The British in Java, 1811–16: A Javanese Account (Oxford, 1992) and Peter Carey, Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785–1885 (Leiden, 2008). 35. These events are discussed in Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 86–120. Here I consider the political theory of extra-European ‘revolutions’. 36. R. Bayly Winder, Saudi Arabia in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1965). 37. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (London, 2006). 38. Dina Rizk Khoury, ‘Who Is a True Muslim? Exclusion and Inclusion among Polemicists of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Baghdad’, in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge, 2007), 233–256. 39. Ibid. 261. 40. Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies : The Revolutionary Armed Instrument of the Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to Floréal Year II, trans. Marianne Elliott (New Haven, 1987). 41. Alan Ryan, ‘Newer than What? Older than What?’, in Liberalism: Old and New, ed. Ellen Paul et al. (Cambridge, 2007), 1–16. 42. See introduction and C. A. Bayly, ‘Mazzini and Early Indian Nationalism’, in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920, ed. Eugenio Biagini and C. A. Bayly (Oxford, 2008).


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43

43. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1962). 44. J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (Cambridge, 1994). 45. W. H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (Delhi, 1996); Jeevan Sing Deol, ‘Sikh Discourses of Community and Sovereignty in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2000). 46. Bibliographical references for this account can be found in Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 121–143. 47. On the persistence of the old regime in Latin America, see Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park, PA, 2002). 48. George Saintsbury, East India Slavery (2nd edn, London, 1829). 49. Oriental Herald, 22 (July-September 1829): 399–400. 50. See also David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 51. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy’, 32–3. 52. Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, 1997). 53. Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (London, 1995). 54. Cited in Bernard Lewis, The Middle East (London, 1995), 320. 55. Virginia H. Aksan, ‘Military Reform and Its Limits in a Shrinking Ottoman World, 1800–1840’, in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. idem and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge, 2007), 117–133 (here 133). 56. This was the Mirat-ul Akhbar, largely lost, but its opinions were regularly translated and reported in the Calcutta Journal, especially during 1822. 57. Brading, First America, 521; Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America: Empires and Sequels, 1450–1930 (Oxford, 1997), 375–380. 58. Gabriel Paquette, reviewing John Charles Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence (Oxford, 2008); Times Literary Supplement, 1 August 2008, 12. 59. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy’, 30; Bruce Carlisle Robertson, Raja Rammohan Ray (New Delhi, 1995). 60. Brading, First America; see also Rebecca Earle, ‘Sobre heroes y tumbas: National Symbols in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America’, Hispanic American Historical Review , 85/3 (2005): 375–416. 61. Monday B. Abasiatti, ‘The Search for Independence: New World Blacks in Sierra Leone and Liberia, 1787–1847’, Journal of Black Studies, 23/1 (1992): 107–116. 62. Christopher Fyfe, ‘Freed Slave Colonies in West Africa’, in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 5, From c. 1790 to 1870, ed. John E. Flint (Cambridge. 1976), 170–199 (here 193).


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The Revolutionary Abolitionists of Haiti Laurent Dubois

Introduction Slavery is a permanent state of grinding war, and throughout the history of the institution, many enslaved people declared war on slavery. But there is only one case in history of a successful slave revolution: the Haitian Revolution. This event was many things at once. It began as an insurrection, but soon became a war involving three empires and their armies and navies, along with much of the population in Saint Domingue itself. It was also, from its beginning, a social revolution, one with profound economic and cultural consequences. Yet it was also something else, though it is rarely categorized as such. It was an abolitionist movement, one of the largest and certainly the most immediately successful such movement in history. As a war and a revolution, it lasted 15 years—at least, for some might say it remains unfinished. However, as an abolitionist movement it was both startlingly radical and startlingly brief; it lasted slightly less than two years. In August 1791, a network of enslaved people in the Northern Province of Saint Domingue rose up in a coordinated assault on sugar plantations. By June 1793, they had successfully pushed the French representatives in the colony to decree a partial emancipation, one which applied only to those fighting in the ranks of the army of the French Republic. However, in the next two months, this initial decision expanded into a full-fledged, immediate and universal emancipation. The fact that slavery was abolished suddenly in the most profitable colony in the world was radical enough. But the form emancipation took was itself radical: it invented a form of emancipation that was more thorough and rapid than any imagined by the abolitionists of the day, for slavery came with political rights, and in 1793 a group of representatives chosen by a broadly inclusive assembly in Le Cap left the colony to take up seats in the National Assembly in Paris. Among them was a man named Jean-Baptiste Belley, born in West Africa, a free man before the Revolution, whose famous portrait was painted in 1797 by Anne-Louis Girodet. 44


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This chapter considers what it means to look at the wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century from the vantage point of Saint Domingue, and particularly from the perspective of the protagonists of its revolution. What, it asks, does the history of imperial conflict and revolutionary war in Europe look like, and what does it mean, from this perspective? Like Christopher Bayly’s chapter in this volume, it is partly an attempt to rethink our geography and chronology for the ‘age of revolution’, by placing the Caribbean and its population at the centre of the story. As part of this reorientation, it urges us to think more carefully about the part played by Africa and Africans in the making of the Haitian Revolution.

The slave society of Saint Domingue By 1789, about two-thirds of the slave population of the thriving French colony of Saint Domingue was African-born. Since the enslaved made up approximately 90 per cent of the population, this meant that people born in Africa were the largest group on the island. While some among this population had been put on slave ships in Africa as children, many of them were captured as young men and women. And many of the men had likely been captured because they were soldiers, fighting in a series of late eighteenthcentury wars that took place in West and Central Africa, in some cases sustained and encouraged by the Atlantic slave trade itself. These men, then, were what John Thornton has dubbed ‘African veterans’, having survived warfare in Africa but often having lost their freedom, and their homelands, because of it.1 The causes and course of late eighteenth-century African wars were complex and varied, but the question of slavery itself played an important role in many of them. In West Africa, religious conflict within Islam and between Islamic and non-Islamic groups shaped and was shaped by larger patterns of slave-trading. There were debates within Islam about the question of whether it was acceptable for Muslims to enslave other Muslims, with cultural and sometimes somatic distinctions helping to justify the enslavement of certain Islamized groups. Such debates were a part of the larger religious conflicts, sometimes referred to as the ‘Islamic Revolutions’, that took place in parts of West Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and notably during the decades before the Haitian Revolution. Many of those who participated in the military conflicts that were part of this larger process likely ended up in the Atlantic slave trade after having been captured as prisoners. In both Muslim and non-Muslim communities, of course, there were also shifting and sometimes conflicted processes that defined the particular ways in which masters and slaves should deal with one another, and the possibilities for manumission, some of them tied to religious education. There were also ongoing debates about the responsibilities of manumitted slaves to their former masters, as well as issues about the particular status of


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The Revolutionary Abolitionists of Haiti 45

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830

free men within the broader social hierarchy. While the question of slavery was of course just one part of a larger set of social and political questions, for those who ended up as slaves on the other side of the Atlantic the ideas, principles and conflicts that surrounded the institution of slavery could have, indeed probably would have, been an intellectual resource or at least a point of reference as they experienced and confronted enslavement. Untangling precisely how such African experiences shaped actions in the Americas is, of course, a difficult task, but if we are to understand the history of this period it is essential to acknowledge that the political and intellectual debates in the homes of enslaved Africans were part of the larger matrix that shaped the revolutionary transformations in Saint Domingue.2 John Thornton has forcefully argued for this approach in his explorations of the place of enslaved people from the Kongo in Saint Domingue. As he notes, the largest group of slaves in the colony came from West Central Africa, in the regions within and surrounding the Kingdom of Kongo. In the late sixteenth century, the king of Kongo (Alfonso II) converted to Catholicism as a result of contact with Portuguese missionaries, so that by the eighteenth century a complex and well-rooted Catholic practice and tradition had taken root in the region. This tradition became part of larger struggles over the legitimacy and meaning of kingship, notably through a remarkable messianic movement led by Beatriz Kimpa Vita who, possessed by the spirit of Saint Anthony, spoke out against the corruption of the world around her, including the ways in which the powerful in the Kongo were allowing their people to fall prey to enslavement. The conflicts in the Kongo often revolved around questions that also occupied European and North American leaders during the same period. What legitimated power? What should be the relationship between leaders and those they controlled? What was the responsibility of a king or other ruler to those they controlled but also served?3 While reconstructing the tenor and full content of such debates is difficult, they were a crucial part of the experience of many of those Africans who arrived in the Caribbean during the late eighteenth century. They carried with them a set of political, ideological and military experiences that had involved them in struggles over the meaning of power, representation, service, loyalty, virtue and rights. These experiences shaped their vision of, and action within, the plantation world of the Caribbean. In Saint Domingue, it also shaped the ways in which they watched, examined, participated in, and ultimately transformed the moment of revolutionary change that began in 1789. The plantation world was far different from the African societies in which the majority of the population of Saint Domingue had been born. Those who had been captured and enslaved in Africa specifically for sale into the Atlantic slave trade had, of course, experienced a dramatic and traumatic change in the months or years before they arrived in Saint Domingue. But


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even if they had been enslaved within Africa for some time before their shipment across the Atlantic, the slavery they experienced in the Americas was very likely different from anything they had experienced before, though in some cases there may have been important similarities and continuities. The social organization of the plantation colony of Saint Domingue seemed peculiar to say the least. It was a colony in principle controlled by invisible powers seated across a vast ocean, separated from those they supposedly commanded by several months journey, with a rigid but conflictual administrative structure, populated by emigrants who both reconstituted some aspects of French life and produced new forms of sociability among themselves even as they perfected and expanded the forms of terror and violence directed at their slaves. For almost all, the particular work of sugar cultivation would have been something completely new, though of course agricultural labour would not have been. Undoubtedly, the forms of confinement, punishment, and surveillance that had been established by the late eighteenth century in Saint Domingue would have been shocking in their intensity and oppressiveness. Mixed in with the unfamiliar, though, would have been the familiar. In fact, arrivals who were from or had spent time in the coastal areas of West and Central Africa would have found many things in the port towns of the Caribbean that were somewhat familiar, from the hustle and bustle of trade in goods and people on the docks to the groups, some of them of mixed European and African descent, who participated in and defined the dealings in the market-driven world of such towns. The ships they saw, of course, would have been essentially the same—in some cases, quite literally the same—as those that gathered in the slave-trading ports of Africa. The sailors who manned the ships, and who came ashore when they docked in harbour, would frequently have travelled to Africa, and some among them were themselves people of African descent, or African-born, both free and enslaved. More broadly, despite the very heterogeneous composition of the African population, the form of the slave trade meant that there were significant concentrations of people from particular regions in Africa within Saint Domingue. Many would have found at least some possibility for communication with others and shared language, performance and religious traditions, artistry, and political thought. For the enslaved field workers on large sugar plantations, the experience both of social control and of solidarity and sociability would have taken place within a world made up almost entirely of other enslaved people, for the commandeurs who oversaw the labour were themselves slaves. However, through Sunday travels to markets in port towns they would have also had contact with the world of merchants, sailors, soldiers and planters in the towns. Artisans and domestics, meanwhile, especially those in urban areas, would also have been in regular contact with a range of people in the population. The distance between


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plantations and towns was, throughout Saint Domingue, relatively small, although the coffee plantations that had multiplied in the mountainous areas were more isolated. On many of these, built during the second half of the eighteenth century, the population of slaves from the Kongo region was quite large. Among the languages spoken in Saint Domingue, French was important but not the dominant tongue. The Kréyol language, sufficiently established by the mid-eighteenth century that there were local plays written in the language, was perhaps the most commonly spoken language on the island, but African languages, especially Kikongo tongues, were probably nearly as widespread. The religion that emerged in Saint Domingue during the eighteenth century represents a powerful system of thought that both maintained connections with Africa and reflected on and refracted the experience of exile. In the midst of the brutalities of the plantation world, in the cane fields and sugar mills, as well as in the thriving towns of Saint Domingue, a remarkable process of cultural production unfolded over the course of the eighteenth century. Though obviously the thought and practice of the enslaved left few written traces, the religion of Vodou itself in many ways constitutes an archive of, and a reflection on, its own production. Among the songs sung in the religion in the twentieth century are several that refer in one way or another to the middle passage itself, such as a song called ‘Sou Lan Mè’— ‘On the Ocean’—which narrates the experience of being put in chains. ‘They took our feet/ They chained our wrists/ They dropped us in the bottom of the ship.’ The song is sung in the present tense, so that those who sing it in a sense return to the ship itself. But they also look forward to a time of reaction, perhaps revenge, calling on one of the lwa (gods) of Haitian Vodou—Agwé, governor of the sea—for support. The home of the lwa they call on is back in Africa, specifically in Oyo, a one-time empire in West Africa. ‘Agwé in Oyo’, the song calls, ‘there’s a time when they’ll see us’. It suggests that at some point the slaves will come back at the slave traders. As the song continues the ship sails into a storm, and threatens to sink. ‘In the bottom of the ship’, the song declares, capturing a sense of unity in the midst of terror, ‘we are all one’.4 Another song, transcribed by an ethnographer in the 1950s, also presents a powerful articulation of the way in which diverse enslaved people found a certain unity, or at least understanding. The singer repeats, ‘I am creole-congo’, bringing together the terms used for American-born and African-born slaves, suggesting that between the two could be continuity, even sameness, rather than conflict.5 Such religious practices were part of a larger social world that, by its very existence, militated against the plantation order. Masters strove to reduce the enslaved to the status of labouring machines, their lives organized by the demands of plantation work. But the enslaved were human, and they negotiated, pushed back against, and found ways to work around the insistence that they be nothing but embodied labour power. As in other slave societies,


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marronage (running away) was a fundamental part of daily life. Particularly what contemporaries and some historians have called ‘petit marronage’— short-term flight from the plantation rather than permanent escape, which sometimes ended with capture and punishment and sometimes with a negotiated return—was crucial in laying the foundation for revolution. For along with the mobility allowed the slaves on Sundays to sell in local towns the produce grown in their garden plots, petit marronage opened up the possibility for the creation of cross-plantation community and collusion. If the uprising of 1791 succeeded in Saint Domingue, it was because its leaders were able to make use of and mobilize such cross-plantation networks in order to plan a massive, coordinated attack.6 The Haitian Revolution, however, was also shaped in crucial ways by the participation of men and women of African descent who were free. Saint Domingue was a boom society in full expansion in the late eighteenth century. That expansion was based on brutal exploitation of the mass of slaves, but it also created opportunities for those among them who managed to secure their freedom, as well as for free people of colour born into freedom, sometimes a few generations away from slavery themselves. There were men and women, some African-born, who became successful merchants in the towns, and many free people of colour who owned plantations and significant fortunes. There were individuals born in the colony, like one Toussaint Bréda, who gained their freedom and rented and managed plantations, sometimes owned a few slaves themselves but were overseeing the work of slaves they did not own. It was a world in motion, with opportunities linked everywhere to oppression.7 It was such multiple, heterogeneous and conflictual experiences that the population of Saint Domingue brought with them into the moment in the late eighteenth century when, relatively suddenly, there were new kinds of opportunities, not just for individual advancement within a seemingly anchored system, but for a different kind of transformation.

The ‘Haitian Revolution’ The opportunity for attack came in 1791, and in an entirely unforeseen context: the French Revolution. How to understand the relationship between the French and Haitian Revolutions has intrigued and befuddled generations of historians. The most famous account of the Revolution, C. L. R. James’ classic The Black Jacobins (1938), involves a rich meditation on this problem (which the title of the book itself addresses). James shows beautifully how the two revolutions shaped one another, as well as how their histories illuminate one another. What his narrative suggests, and what subsequent historiography has urged us to contemplate, is that it may ultimately be extremely difficult to figure out where one revolution ends and the other begins. The 1790s saw a French Atlantic Revolution that played out on both


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sides of the Atlantic, and the currents of cause and effect were complex and varied but never unidirectional. In the Caribbean itself, there were multiple revolutions underway, for the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe also saw upheaval and transformation. And the revolution that took place in Saint Domingue really only became a ‘Haitian Revolution’ after 1802, when it aimed to create an independent nation. Before that, enslaved insurgents actually won their freedom by arguing for, and eventually achieving, a closer legal and political connection between France and the colony of Saint Domingue. The Revolution of 1789 in France shaped what happened in the Caribbean in many ways. First, and perhaps most important, it shook up the system of colonial governance and weakened its power, inviting protest and resistance. All social groups in Saint Domingue saw an opportunity in the French Revolution. For many planters, who had long chafed under the commercial regulations of the ‘Exclusif’ that required most trade in their plantation products to be with France, it was an opportunity to argue for greater economic freedom. For poorer whites in the colony, it was an opportunity to protest and fight against the social hierarchy within the colony that kept them marginalized and often landless. For free people of African descent, also called free people of colour (gens de couleur) and often described in the literature as ‘mulattoes’— although many were in fact not of mixed European and African ancestry—it was an opportunity to protest against decades of humiliating local legislation that constrained them politically, restricting them from practising certain professions as well as controlling other aspects of their life, some as minute as the kind of clothes they could wear and the means of transportation they could use. But if the French Revolution created an opening by undermining the central structure of authority and command in the colony, it also produced an outpouring of language and symbolism that could be powerfully mobilized. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man thus produced a charter that was both immensely powerful and immensely vague in its articulation. Free people of colour were particularly astute in the way in which they harnessed the new language of rights to long-standing grievances about racial discrimination. Presenting themselves as wealthy, educated patriots, elite free people of colour—led by figures such as Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé, both wealthy men with substantial holdings in land and slaves— argued that they should have access to political rights alongside whites in the colonies. They allied themselves with the nascent abolitionist movement in France to take on the privilege of white planters, which they dubbed the ‘aristocracy of the skin’. And they found that many were sympathetic to their arguments, which both drew on and buttressed the idea that a new era of equality was dawning in France. They also ran into strenuous opposition. Despite having powerful allies (among them Mirabeau, the Marquis de Condorcet, and the Abbé Grégoire),


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the gens de couleur ultimately failed to make headway in the National Assembly in Paris. In 1790, an angry and disabused Ogé returned to Saint Domingue, where he organized an armed uprising to demand political rights. Ogé and his men were defeated after a few engagements and he fled to Spanish Santo Domingo, from which he was extradited to be tortured and executed in Le Cap. His execution shocked many in France, turning the tide of opinion against French planters in the colony. It also left an impression among the enslaved, who would remember what had happened to Ogé a few years later when they negotiated with the French. As important, by the middle of 1790 the enslaved understood that they faced a major opportunity. The elite classes in Saint Domingue, including the free people of colour, were divided, fighting each other openly, and lacking support or even understanding from a government in Paris that was itself in the midst of serious conflict and confrontation. In the summer of 1791, a group of enslaved organizers decided to strike. Rising up at the same time on the sugar plantations of Saint Domingue’s northern plain, the richest sugar-growing region in the colony and indeed in the world, the insurgents rapidly turned cane fields and plantation houses to ash and smashed the sugar processing machinery on the plantations. They killed most whites they encountered, sending the rest fleeing towards the capital in Le Cap. Soot and smoke covered the sky, but at night the flames from the burning fields reached so high that according to one account you could read by the light of the fires outside the city in the harbour of Le Cap. If the uprising had gone completely according to plan, the insurgents might have actually taken Le Cap, where most of the prominent planters had gathered for a meeting of the local assembly. The insurgents did not take Le Cap, however. Yet they did gain control of the plain and of the mountains around it. They turned plantations into military camps, recruiting new followers, finding weapons and consolidating their territorial control. The French fought back, but the enslaved rebels were never defeated. Over the months, despite counter-attacks that took on some of the aspects of modern counter-insurgency campaigns—the French repeatedly slaughtered the old and infirm, along with women and children, who were captured when they overran insurgent camps—the rebel army remained strong, and grew steadily. They got help from the Spanish across the border, who began arming the insurgents in a bid to take over the valuable French colony. From among their ranks came a series of brilliant and remarkable leaders—Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, the Africanborn Sans Souci and Macaya, and most famously Toussaint Louverture. Louverture was born a slave in the northern plain of Saint Domingue, and worked as a coachman on his plantation, but gained his freedom in the 1770s. For a time he rented and managed a coffee plantation and oversaw the work of the enslaved there, and also briefly owned at least one slave himself. He seems to have joined the insurrection shortly after it began; not one of


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the prominent leaders at first, he worked his way up through the ranks and by 1792 was playing a crucial tactical role. By then, he was among those working closely with the Spanish to gain guns and ammunition, and also worked with some Spanish officers directly. The French leadership at the time was in the hands of two commissioners, François Polverel and Légér Félicité Sonthonax, who had been sent with the mission to quell the insurrection. They also brought, however, a decree from the National Assembly which, hearing news of the frightening insurrection, had at last agreed to give political rights to all free people of colour, in the hope that this would guarantee their support against the slave insurrection. It worked, but only partly, for as rapidly as the French commissioners gained allies among free people of colour they lost them among the planters, who were increasingly convinced that the French government was determined to destroy slavery. Some planters began negotiating with the British in Jamaica, hoping to secure a foreign occupation of the island that they hoped would preserve slavery and their position of power within the society. In September of 1792, the French transformed their constitutional monarchy into the French Republic, and in January 1793 the king was executed. France was soon at war with all the monarchies of Europe, and the British were eager to strike at their enemy’s most important colony. Many planters sympathized with the departed royal order and its representative, as well as with the ordered hierarchy it had stood for. They also deeply distrusted the radicals in France, whom they believed (with some reason but also with a large dose of paranoia) were rabid abolitionists. Their increasing alienation from the leadership in France set up the remarkable series of transformations that took place in the summer of 1793 in Saint Domingue, when the slave insurrection won, transforming colonial and French law and politics in the process. By the middle of 1793, the French commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel were in a desperate situation. The Spanish-supported insurgents were seemingly unstoppable, and many whites on the island were vociferously attacking their regime and, in many cases, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the British. In June, the anti-republican planter camp found a leader in a man named Galbaud, who, having been imprisoned in the Le Cap harbour by Sonthonax and Polverel, mobilized sailors and supporters in the town to try to overthrow their regime. The decisive intervention of units of soldiers of free people of colour, and notably of an African-born officer named JeanBaptiste Belley, saved the commissioners from being captured. But, desperate for support, they made a bold move: they offered the enslaved insurgents who were camped just outside of the city to join with them. In return, they promised freedom, and French citizenship. A band of insurgents under the command of an old African-born man named Jeannot agreed, and they rushed down into the town, defeating Galbaud and his partisans. As the fighting went on, fires were set and looting began in the city—both sides would trade accusations for years about


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precisely who was responsible—and much of Le Cap was burned to the ground. Terrified residents flooded onto ships in harbour, leaving—in many cases permanently—for North America, where they settled in Philadelphia, Charleston and New York. Sonthonax and Polverel had won, but only partially. There were some insurgents on their side now, but many more still fighting with the Spanish. In the following months the insurgents’ demands expanded, and some soon called for an outright abolition of slavery. In August of 1793, Sonthonax decreed slavery abolished in the Northern Province, while Polverel did the same in the following months in the other parts of the colony. It was a dramatic decision with profound ramifications. The commissioners had unilaterally, and with no encouragement or even indication of support from the National Convention in Paris, abolished slavery in France’s largest slave colony. Five hundred thousand slaves were emancipated. There was no period of transition and no indemnity given to planters, as there would be in later cases of emancipation. It was the first large-scale emancipation to take place in the Americas, and it was improvised on the ground in the Caribbean. It also represented the victory of the slave insurrection, which was transformed from a movement of people often characterized by the French as ‘brigands’ into one embraced by the local French administration. Some slave insurgents, including Toussaint Louverture, remained aloof from the French. Louverture seems to have been waiting confirmation that the decision taken locally would be approved by France. That happened in 1794, when a group of three representatives from Saint Domingue, including Jean-Baptiste Belley, spoke to the National Convention and explained what had happened in Saint Domingue, arguing that the abolition of slavery was both politically and militarily necessary. The National Convention, with little debate, ratified the decision taken in Saint Domingue, declaring slavery abolished and all men, of all colours, citizens of France. Emancipation, furthermore, was to be extended to other French colonies. Liberty was won by the slaves of Saint Domingue, then, not by attacking French metropolitan authority but by making an alliance with it against planters who were resisting colonial power. Slave rebellion found its ally in metropolitan colonial power. In the process, republican rights were expanded to those who had been completely excluded from all legal rights. After 1794, France and its colonies were united, in principle, under one set of laws that were understood as truly universal, as applicable on both sides of the Atlantic regardless of social or economic differences. For a time, racial hierarchy was defeated by assimilationist universalism. Racially integrated armies defended French colonies against the British, and even attacked British colonies in the Eastern Caribbean, playing a crucial role in the worldwide conflict between the two imperial powers.


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The decision of the National Convention helped secure the rallying to France of Toussaint Louverture, who in the following years became the de facto leader of the colony. His military brilliance earned him the rank of general, but it was his political brilliance both as a negotiator and as a charismatic leader that ultimately gained him the leadership role that he had secured for himself by the late 1790s. He loyally served France, turning against his former Spanish allies and driving them from the colony, and succeeded in expelling the British forces who had occupied parts of the island since 1794. But enemy forces were only part of the problem facing Louverture. He also had to oversee a large-scale transition from slavery to freedom, the first of its kind in the Americas, with no guidance and little support from the French metropole, and with no examples for how to proceed. He continued the policies set in place by Sonthonax and Polverel, which required former slaves to continue working on a plantation in return for a wage—paid as a portion of plantation production—and introduced some forms of democracy on the plantation, where workers could elect their managers and could also, under some conditions, move to another plantation. As time went on, Louverture increasingly used coercion to force workers to stay on plantations, depending on the army of ex-slaves he built and led to do so. For many ex-slaves, the situation was unsatisfactory if not unacceptable, and there was resistance against Louverture, sometimes violent, as many crafted an alternative vision of the future, one in which they would be landowners and work and grow food for themselves rather than for an export-oriented plantation economy. Louverture’s service in Saint Domingue was a huge boon to France, for he led an important part of France’s military campaigns in the Caribbean. The French, unlike the British, did not need to send troops across the Atlantic to fight, since the former slaves of their colonies provided large number of soldiers for the war. Louverture’s economic policies also were quite successful, rebuilding the coffee economy almost to pre-revolutionary levels, and even partially rebuilding the sugar economy, despite the fact that much of the machinery required for its production had been destroyed during the insurrection of 1791–92. But Louverture was always wary of the French government, concerned that it might ultimately reverse its support for emancipation. And he was, in a sense, ready for that possibility. His powerful army served France, but it was also a counterweight to French authority. In the late 1790s, just as Louverture had feared, the French government began a retreat from policies of emancipation. That retreat was accelerated with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte after 1801, and with the move towards an ultimately short-lived peace with the British in that year. Bonaparte, urged on by advisers and unchecked by parliament, some of whose members had in previous years eloquently supported emancipation in the Caribbean, decided to crush Louverture and his regime, and to reverse the effects of abolition. He re-acquired Louisiana from the Spanish in large part so the


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colony could serve as a source of wood and provisions for what he hoped would be a reborn slave plantation colony in Saint Domingue. French rulers sought to hide their intention to crush the black armies that had emerged in the Caribbean, but many in Saint Domingue understood what was happening. From their arrival, the French faced serious resistance in Saint Domingue, led by Louverture and his able generals, including Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The French troops suffered heavy losses, but ultimately Louverture surrendered, though smaller bands of fighters continued to battle against the French. Fearing that Louverture would once again join the resistance, the French imprisoned and deported him to a dank prison in the Jura mountains, where he died in 1803. JeanJacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, meanwhile, actually fought for the French for months. Eventually, though, as resistance expanded—spurred on by news that the French had re-established slavery in Guadeloupe—these generals turned against the French once again. Dessalines became the leader of the anti-French resistance, and after securing the final defeat of the French troops—only a few thousand of whom among the tens of thousands who had been sent left the colony alive—declared independence on 1 January 1804. His fiery declaration of independence, and the choice of the name Haïti— used by the indigenous people of the island who had been decimated by the Spanish centuries earlier—presented the victory of the revolution as an act of vengeance against years of oppression and slavery. The broader international situation, and particularly the conflict between Britain and France, weighed heavily on the final outcome of this process. In 1802, Bonaparte’s decision to send a mission to re-establish direct control over Saint Domingue was directly linked to the negotiations underway with the British. It would have been difficult to imagine sending such a large convoy across the Atlantic in the midst of naval warfare with the superior British navy. But with the prospect of peace, it was suddenly possible to imagine using troops to suppress Louverture rather than to battle the British. At the same time, Louverture’s military usefulness against the British in Saint Domingue, something touted by his defenders throughout the late 1790s, seemed suddenly less significant in 1802. Although Bonaparte would live to regret his decision, he came to regard Louverture as an inconvenience and an obstacle rather than as a potent ally who could help him achieve his larger strategic aims in the Americas. Peace with the British was, in any case, short-lived, and the renewed hostilities in 1803 helped to weaken the French in Saint Domingue, who now had to face attacks on the sea around the island as well as on land. In one remarkable painted depiction of the moment, a British warship attacks a French ship off the coast of Saint Domingue while in the top left of the painting a group of black observers, perched on a cliff along the edge of the water, look on in delight.8 Having built itself up through war with the British and Spanish in Saint Domingue, the revolutionary black army


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Conclusion Those who made this revolution transformed the broader Atlantic world, opening up new political possibilities, challenging and reconfiguring colonial governance, and ultimately creating a new state in the Americas. We know a great deal, and are learning more and more, about how their revolution appeared to many observers in the broader Atlantic world, many of whom vilified the insurgent slaves and the leaders of independent Haiti, casting them as a profound menace to civilization, while others (such as Thomas Clarkson9) sought to justify their actions and still others celebrated and championed the violent overthrow of slavery. But how did the larger period of war and revolution in the Atlantic world appear from within the Haitian Revolution? In the remainder of this chapter, I seek to reconstruct the view from within, with the idea that it can help us think in slightly different ways about the period, re-centring our geography and chronology around a Caribbean perspective. One part of this re-centring is to at least suggest that, for the majority of those who lived in Saint Domingue during the revolution and who had been born and raised in Africa, the conflicts in the Caribbean likely seemed in some ways either a parallel to or a literal extension of conflicts taking place in Africa itself. Their experience of enslavement, after all, had begun in their African homelands, the product of specific local conflicts and relations of power. The social and intellectual experiences they had as individuals and members of communities in crisis and transformation within Africa must have informed their vision of both the middle passage itself and of the enslavement they experienced in Saint Domingue. The scattered references to Africa we find in the archives of the Haitian Revolution suggest that it was a recurring point of reference in political debates, though unfortunately these references are often superficial and give us little detail about precisely what they signified. The archive of Haitian Vodou (notably in its songs), however, is replete with complex engagements with and references to the shifting meanings of Africa, of various affiliations with groups within Africa itself, and with the problem of maintaining a connection to those affiliations in the midst of a new context. Since this religion was in many ways deeply shaped, even formed, by the process of revolution, that archive, I would argue, speaks directly to the question of what the political philosophy of the revolution was.10 The Haitian Revolution, in other words, was not only about the complicated relationship between developments in France and the Caribbean, but was as much—as John Thornton has argued11—a conflict quite literally


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ultimately was able to navigate and take advantage of the broader currents of inter-imperial warfare to win victory for themselves, in the form of a bold new nation called Haiti.

constituted politically and intellectually by a triangle connecting Africa, the Americas and Europe. It was not just that the imperial conflicts driven by European rivalries shaped the pace and geography of the African slave trade, which they certainly did. The conflicts within Africa—shaped by local forces, rooted in long histories that stretched back before the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade, but also shaped by the transformations set in motion by that trade—became part of the age of Atlantic revolution through the choices, actions and perspectives of the masses of African participants in the Haitian Revolution itself. This perspective can help us better understand one aspect of the political culture of the Haitian Revolution that has long preoccupied historians—the intermingling of republican and royalist symbolism and discourse among the insurgents during the early 1790s. In presenting themselves and articulating their demands, insurgents sometimes made reference to the discourses of republicanism, particularly the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but more often they made use of royalist symbols. Yet rather than signifying a fragmented or contradictory set of political ideologies, the cohabitation of these forms provides us with a useful insight into the particularities of the Caribbean political culture embodied in the slave revolution of 1791–93. Indeed, to analyse the political culture of the insurgents in terms of dichotomies defined according to the specific European political context of the time is to obscure the complex realities of the Caribbean political context. Both royalist and republican discourses were deployed, indeed subsumed, by insurgents in the articulation of their central goal: a reform, and eventually, an abolition, of slavery. By laying claim both to the authority of the king and to the promises of republican rights emanating from the evolving metropolitan power structure, slave insurgents intervened in a long-standing conflict between colonial planters and the metropolitan administration, taking advantage of a new virulence in this conflict and ultimately deepening it.12 But as they evoked the figure of the French king, they were also often thinking about kingship itself in complex ways, a fact highlighted most forcefully in a famous proclamation by the insurgent Macaya in 1793. Having rallied to the commissioners of the French Republic in June of 1793, Macaya refused the offer to join them permanently in August of that year. ‘I am the subject of three kings: of the King of Congo, master of all the blacks; of the King of France who represents my father; of the King of Spain who represents my mother’, he announced. ‘These three Kings are the descendants of those who, led by a star, came to adore God made man.’ If he ‘went over to the Republic’, he concluded, he might be ‘forced to make war against my brothers, the subjects of these three kings to whom I have promised loyalty’. Through this fleeting source, we learn a great deal. For Macaya, loyalty to a king was not exclusive, clearly, for one could be the subject of three kings, something difficult to imagine at least for the theorists of royal power in Europe. Equally importantly, one could have loyalty to the subjects of three kings, creating a


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rich patchwork of complicated affinities and loyalties that rendered war and conflict particularly complex. It also suggests that Macaya’s own vision of the political organization of the world in which he lived spanned Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. As such, the quotation can serve to spur us to think historically in parallel ways, redrawing our map of the period as well.13 Evocations of the king on the part of insurgents were often combined quite comfortably with the use of republican symbols, which often evoked both the King and the National Assembly as authorities that they hoped would hear their demands. Biassou, for instance, wrote in late 1791 of his willingness ‘to serve his King, the nation and its representatives’. This was logical enough, since at the time both were centres of authority in Paris. But the combination of royalist and republican symbols continued into 1793, when one insurgent flew a tricolour flag decorated with fleur-de-lys. Over the course of 1793, however, as the conflict between republicanism and royalism became superimposed in a clearer way onto the conflict between pro-slavery masters and sympathetic republican administrators, many insurgents came to throw their lot in with the Republic and to embrace its symbols.14 In the process, of course, they were transforming the Republic to which they were adhering, pushing forward the claims towards universal rights that had been articulated in France but always with a clear caveat—sometimes articulated openly, sometimes not—that allowed for the denial of rights to most of the population of the Caribbean. It is with regard to the question of what political adherence meant that the perspective from Saint Domingue can, again, help us rethink some of our assumptions about the functioning of politics during this period. The affiliation of the enslaved insurgents of Saint Domingue with the French Republic was an intense one, and yet it was also predicated upon a particular kind of agreement that was forced on the Republic by the insurgents themselves. They adhered to the French Republic only in so far as that political body adhered to their demand for emancipation. It was, on one level, an adherence based on a radical vision of the principles of natural right written down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789—principles which many of the enslaved may of course have discussed, thought through, and debated without having read or heard of the document itself—in which the right to insurrection against tyranny was seen as a basic right. For most of the revolutionaries in Haiti, the right to freedom from slavery was the foundational political code, the root of political adherence. So it was that they could forcefully transfer their loyalties from an insurrection directed against France (with Spanish aid) to a revolution and war fought by France, against its Spanish and English enemies, once France embraced freedom. And so it was that when France stepped back from its side of the agreement, threatening to take away that freedom, the allegiance to the principles of republicanism shifted, taking the form of allegiance to a new nation called Haiti, one created out of conflict with France. This was not the kind of allegiance, of


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course, that bureaucrats and leaders in France particularly liked, but in a way it was a perfect embodiment of the principles that at least the republicans amongst them had espoused. For—as Jean-Paul Marat wrote insightfully in the early 1790s—if the people of metropolitan France had the right to overthrow a tyrannical king, and a tyrannical regime, then surely the enslaved of Saint Domingue had the right to overthrow the regime of their even more directly tyrannical masters. And surely, too, they had the right to overthrow an imperial system that sustained the power of those tyrannical masters. If the white residents of Saint Domingue had the right to reject ‘laws emanating from a legislator who was two thousand leagues away’ and proclaim independence, Marat wrote—as he believed they, like the North American colonists before them, did—the other groups in the colony also had, like all human beings, the right to resist oppression. The whites had made themselves ‘despotic masters of the mulattoes and tyrannical masters of the blacks’ and if the latter wished to ‘overthrow the cruel and shameful yoke under which they suffer, they are authorized to use any means available’, even ‘massacring their oppressors to the last’.15 Ultimately, then, the Haitian Revolution represented a kind of ultimate test, and ultimate challenge, for the principles of the ‘age of revolution’. Out of a society in which tyranny and oppression were exercised in a particularly open and brutal way came a movement that argued not just for the right to freedom but also for a strategic and political vision in which allegiance to empires and states should be founded on an absolute adherence to a principle, in this case the principle that no one should be a slave. Achieving that vision, of course, was a challenge, not least because in the process of pursuing liberation leaders within Saint Domingue and later independent Haiti produced and vigorously institutionalized forms of policing and sometimes violent coercion that represented a denial of the very principles of the revolution they purported to represent. But that, unfortunately, seems to be a feature of almost every revolutionary transformation. What is perhaps more significant from our perspective is the challenge presented—the gauntlet laid down—by this history, which forces us to step back and ask ourselves precisely how much we actually do know about what revolution meant to those who, in Saint Domingue, made it. Their world was, in a sense, wider than ours, and it behoves us to follow their example.

Notes 1. John Thornton, ‘African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution’, Journal of Caribbean History 25/1–2 (1991): 58–80. 2. See Christopher L. Miller, ‘Forget Haiti: Baron Roger and the New Africa’, Yale French Studies 107 (2005): 39–69. For discussions of slavery and Islam in West Africa see David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge, 2004), 65–69; John Ralph Willis, ‘The Torodbe Clerisy: A Social View’, The Journal of African History 19/2 (1978): 195–212; Bruce S. Hall, ‘The Question of “Race” in


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3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830 Pre-Colonial Southern Sahara’, The Journal of North African Studies 10/3–4 (2005): 339–367. See John Thornton, ‘ “I Am the Subject of the King of Kongo”: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution’, Journal of World History 4/2 (1993): 181–214; and on Beatriz Kimpa Vita, John Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1998). The song is recorded by Geronimo Records on Wawa & Rasin Kanga, The Haitian Roots 1 (Brooklyn, 1998). Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Odette Menesson-Rigaud Papers, Box 1, Folder 15. The classic work on marronage in Haiti before the Revolution is Jean Fouchard, Les marrons de la liberté (Paris, 1972); a more recent reconsideration of the question, which makes a critique of Fouchard’s thesis, is in David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, 2002), ch. 5; Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN, 1990), emphasizes the importance of petit marronage. For two excellent studies of free people of colour in Saint Domingue see Stewart King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens, GA, 2001) and John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York, 2006). Louis Philippe Crépin, Combat de la poursuivante contre l’Hercule (1803), Musée national de la Marine, reproduced in Common Routes: Saint-Domingue-Louisiana (Historic New Orleans Collection, 2006), 79. Thomas Clarkson, The True State of the Case Respecting the Insurrection at St. Domingo (Ipswich, 1792). There is much more to be learned here. Building on the work of scholars such as Joan Dayan and Karen McCarthy Brown, for instance, scholars might tie together historical developments in Africa and Haiti by linking them to the traces left within Haitian Vodou. See Colin Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, 1998) and Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley, 2001). See Thornton, ‘ “I Am the Subject” ’. For more on this see my ‘Our Three Colors: The King, The Republic and the Political Culture of Slave Revolution in Saint-Domingue’, Historical Reflections/ Réflexions Historiques 29/1 (2003): 83–102; see also my Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004), chs 4 and 5. Pamphile de Lacroix, La Révolution de Haiti, ed. Pierre Pluchon (1819; Paris, 1995), 167; Thornton, ‘ “I Am the Subject” ’, 181–183. Archives Nationales, Paris, DXXV 1, Folder 4, No. 20, Biassou to Commissioners, 23 December 1791; Moniteur générale ... de Saint-Domingue, 3/104 (28 February 1793): 419. L’Ami du Peuple, 624 (12 December 1791) in Jean-Paul Marat: Oeuvres Politiques, 1789–1793, ed. Jacques De Cock and Charlotte Goëtz, 10 vols (Brussels, 1989–95), vol. 6, p. 3788.


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Race and Slavery in the Making of Arab France, 1802–15 Ian Coller

Introduction On the night of 25 June 1815, violence broke out across the city of Marseille. An angry crowd surged through the streets baying for blood. At first it seemed that they were looking to settle political scores. But the violence quickly took on a different cast, one more troubling to any easy presumption that this violence was connected solely to immediate local and political concerns. The crowd accompanying the royalist militias began to focus their fury upon other targets, principally the ‘Egyptian refugees’ living in close quarters near the Place Castellane, on the outskirts of town. Later accounts suggest that these ‘Egyptians’ had created a kind of village of their own, with some similarities to the style and manner of the life they had lived before arriving in France. It was here that the crowd of enraged royalists arrived in the night, and began to butcher those inhabitants who were unable to flee. Hundreds took refuge in the mountains that rise on the northern edges of the town, and remained there without food or shelter until the violence finally came to an end. After two days the town’s authorities eventually put a halt to the killing and destruction, sending out the National Guard to find the survivors who had fled into the hills. The Egyptian village had been razed to the ground, leaving little evidence that it had ever existed. Of 483 individuals listed on the registers of the Depot of Egyptian Refugees, 13 were reported as having been murdered. But it is probable that others went unrecorded: as the Duchesse d’Abrantès insisted in her memoirs, ‘it was impossible to know how many were dead’.1 The names that appear represent those of the more prominent families—others may have disappeared without trace, above all those whose class or colour rendered their status insignificant in the eyes of the authorities, and even perhaps those of their own compatriots. These events in Marseille were a thunderbolt for the small Arab community in France. They brought a sudden and violent end to a mode of existence, and in particular to that visible difference which had remained part of the lives of these people. In this sense, they played a crucial role 61


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in shaping the lives, practices and destinies of French Arabs in the period between empires. Unexpectedly perhaps, the violence did not lead to the destruction or the dissolution of the community but helped to cement a stronger communal identification, although the survival of this community was predicated on its reduced visibility. But the strategies that allowed this community to maintain its presence in such a violently hostile environment were not improvised in 1815: their origins lie in the responses to earlier crises which tested and transformed their positioning in relation to the state. I have explored in detail elsewhere the communal practices, intellectual endeavours and forms of mobility that we might describe as constituting an ‘Arab identity’ emerging in France in this period.2 But the violence of 1815 troubles the sources and the borders of that identity, and reminds us that power too plays its part in shaping the processes by which communal and social identifications are formed. A return to the detail of these events, as revealed in the documents themselves, produces some surprising results.3 In particular it suggests that race played a considerably greater role in shaping the destinies of these people, and that slavery in particular was a kind of ‘secret sharer’ in the formation of a French Arab identity in this period. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, in her contribution to this volume, shows how transnational antislavery shaped the political ideas and commitments of key revolutionary figures in France and America. Other contributors emphasize that the colonial periphery was an important crucible in which metropolitan categories were tested and defined. This chapter asks similar questions from the perspective of a population which was neither metropolitan nor colonial, but transnational, taking its origins from the global crises of the late eighteenth century.

The global contexts of the Egyptian emigration of 1801 Although unleashed by immediate local circumstances, the events of June 1815 were also the point of intersection for a number of developments of national, continental and global importance. In his contribution to this volume, Christopher Bayly shows masterfully how the forces of revolution in North America, Europe and the Caribbean, themselves emerging out of a global context of change and contestation, provoked a third wave of revolutionary upheaval from South America to Southeast Asia. The presence of these ‘Egyptians’ in France was one consequence of these events: a Revolution that spanned the Mediterranean as much as the Atlantic. Indeed, Egypt and Syria were brought into the sphere of post-Revolutionary France earlier than much of Europe, while the newly constituted United States launched a strike on the ‘shores of Tripoli’ in North Africa. The occupation of Egypt and (more briefly) Palestine during the period 1798–1801 provided both Napoleon Bonaparte’s first experience of direct rule, and his first major defeats. It was immediately after the disastrous failure in the Palestinian


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city of Acre that Bonaparte sailed for France to seize executive power in the coup of Eighteenth Brumaire in 1799. The French occupation continued for two more years, until a provisional peace was signed in London. This treaty included a clause allowing for any Egyptian to embark on the British ships which were to evacuate the French troops. In the event, several thousand Egyptians, Syrians and others boarded the frigates bound for Marseille. The motivations for this emigration were a characteristic mixture of the political, the economic and the personal. While there were certainly some who had reasons to fear the consequences of their actions under the French occupiers, the reality as reported both by contemporary chroniclers and later historians shows remarkably few reprisals against collaborators. The restoration of Ottoman authority substituted one imperial ruler for another, a regime whose fragility favoured a policy of cooptation rather than a purge. It seems clear from the documents discovered in the early twentieth century by Georges Douin that the principal engine for the emigration was a group of notables from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, led by an unusual figure, himself the product of transformative forces within Egyptian society, both prior to and during the French occupation. Ya’qub Hanna was a Coptic Christian in a Muslim society structured according to a fabric of privileges. Long before the advent of republican isonomy under the French, his development reflected the late eighteenth-century instabilities and transformations that Bayly has described. Educated in Upper Egypt in the household of a Mamluk bey, one of the slave-born warrior class which had ruled Egypt for centuries, Ya’qub was trained to ride and use a sword, something forbidden to non-Muslims by Islamic law. After the death of his first wife, he married a Syrian Catholic woman, scandalizing the Coptic community. Thomas Philipp has written extensively about the role of these Syrian (or Melkite) Christians in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, as a highly mobile trading community establishing networks throughout the Mediterranean.4 At the same time, their schism from the Greek Orthodox Church in the early eighteenth century was primarily driven by their insistence on Arabic language and culture against Greek: indeed, they are certainly one of the forces in the early development of cultural Arabism. Yet Ya’qub was still bound within the framework of a traditional society in which a small elite among the Copts exercised great financial power, as the account keepers and tax collectors of the Beys, but could not seek political participation, military service or admission to the intellectual elite. For the French, desperate to fill their coffers after the destruction of their fleet at Aboukir Bay, the Coptic intermediaries were indispensable. At first, the new regime enthusiastically dismantled the system of privilege and restriction applying to minorities. But this only revealed nakedly the powerful role these people played, and enraged the poor Muslim underclass of Cairo. In successive uprisings in the city, the Christian quarters were increasingly


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Race and Slavery in the Making of Arab France


targeted. Breaking with tradition, Ya’qub established a Coptic Legion, bringing hundreds, even thousands of troops from Upper Egypt to fight for the French to whose fortunes the Coptic community seemed tied. But the attraction was not only pragmatic: many among the minorities were clearly drawn to the new model of isonomy, even if this meant the loss of privileges they had traditionally held. With the final collapse of the French regime in Egypt, Ya’qub was forced to choose: a contemporary account recounts his last-minute meeting with the Ottoman governor, who begged him to remain in Egypt. In choosing exile rather than a role in the restored Ottoman administration, Ya’qub made clear his commitment to a new idea of the nation. This idea was shared, according to the records of meetings held on board the British ship Pallas, by a diverse movement crossing religious and ethnic divisions, both those who composed the self-styled ‘Egyptian Legation’ on board, and those who had remained in Egypt. Ya’qub’s closest collaborator was a former Knight of Malta, Theodore Lascaris, who was later despatched on a mission to the Wahhabis of Arabia. Lascaris was a fervent partisan of the French colonial project, if his correspondence with the French authorities in Egypt can be believed. In contrast Ya’qub insisted that an independent Egypt would offer the best chance for stabilization of the region. He drew explicitly upon indigenous examples of good administration, such as that of Sheikh Hammam in Upper Egypt, rather than seeking to emulate European national ideas. The Legation was seeking communication at once with Britain and France, hoping to establish a strong negotiating position at the proposed peace conference. But this was not to be, for two reasons. The first was Ya’qub’s death on board the Pallas, which left the members of the Legation without a leader, and the thousands who had accompanied them unsure of their future. The Egyptian historian al-Jabarti recorded that many of the Copts abandoned the emigration and returned to their homes. As native Egyptians, many of them farmers, their exile had been painful from the first. Thus the largest group among those who disembarked in the lazaret of Marseille were the Syrian Catholics, whose commerce in the Mediterranean ports of Egypt had been irreparably damaged by the British blockade; many came from Palestine, where a period of relative autonomy during the late eighteenth century had been followed by a particularly brutal restoration of Ottoman authority. But hundreds of others came from other backgrounds: Copts of Ya’qub’s family, and many who had fought in the legion; Muslims who had served as auxiliaries or officials under the French occupation; servants and slaves who formed part of the households of notables, and a miscellany of other individuals. During their quarantine in the lazaret of Marseille, the Legation wrote to the French authorities on behalf of this multifarious population transformed from political exiles into refugees, in their words fi ‘ardak (on your honour), seeking asylum in France.5


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The second reason was France itself. These people had lived under the rule of the Revolution: they arrived in a Consulate soon to be crowned as an empire. After Brumaire, the new regime took a decisive turn away from isonomy, re-establishing many of the differentiated structures of privilege which had characterized the monarchy. The administrative achievements of the Revolution were maintained and even extended through the creation of the prefectoral system of administration, the drawing-up of the Civil Code and the national education programme of the Lycées, for example. But the radical anti-corporatism of the Jacobins was abandoned: the Concordat of 1801 restored the Catholic Church in the role of an intermediary, and parallel structures were created for Protestants and Jews. The Treaty of Amiens in 1802 restored the former French colonies in the Antilles lost during the Revolution. Just a few months after the arrival of the ‘Egyptians’ came a resounding blow to republican isonomy: the re-establishment of the legality of slavery in the colonies where its abolition had been obstructed by royalist resistance and British occupation.

Rebuilding slavery: the decree of 30 Floréal Year X (1802) Despite the limited nature of this re-institution of slavery, it tore down the illusion that Napoleon’s regime would accord formal equality to all those living within French dominion. Further, as Bernard Gainot has suggested, it re-established the differential between metropole and colony that the Revolution had dismantled.6 Bonaparte concentrated power in the metropole, indefinitely suspending parliamentary bodies and co-opting or exiling political opposition, and extended the boundaries of the Grande Nation into German and Italian lands. The principle of the empire was no longer that of the territorial nation: it was a number of peoples collected under the supreme power of a single ruler, as in the Hapsburg or Ottoman models. This was more or less the model that Bonaparte had adopted in Egypt, seeking to rally the peoples of the region under the banner of opposition to Mamluk tyranny. Indeed he had falsely claimed a mandate from the Ottoman Porte for the French action: in the wake of the loss of Egypt, the alliance with the Ottomans, still a powerful force in Europe, had to be restored at any cost. It was this factor more than any other that froze out any possibility of recognizing the Egyptian population as political exiles: they were to be settled in Marseille, far away from the centre of power. They needed to be made useful, and so an ‘oriental’ battalion was created. The Legation suggested naming this corps the ‘Arab Horsemen’; Napoleon personally insisted on the name ‘Mamelouks’, probably without any irony at all. In Arabic, the word mamluk means ‘owned’: that is to say, a slave. The difference of these ‘slaves’ in Egypt was that they were a ruling caste recruited through purchase rather than by heredity, like the Janissary


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corps in Turkey. Many were brought from the Caucasus, others from the Balkans, from Africa, even on occasion from Mediterranean islands like Corsica. In Europe, of course, ‘slavery’ meant the juridical status of a chattel, the alienable property of a master, although increasingly regulated, like other property relations, by the supremacy of the state. Perhaps more than any other, France’s economy under the ancien régime was bound to the Atlantic trade in slaves, and the production of luxury goods using slave labour in French Caribbean islands such as Saint Domingue and Guadeloupe. The statute of slaves was formalized by the Code Noir of 1685, which legally constituted the slave’s juridical difference before the law. While a master could not kill a slave, a slave who attempted escape would be physically branded with the fleur-de-lys, the royal emblem, and put to death on the third attempt. The lash and the fleur-de-lys were also mandated for slaves who gathered in assemblies of any kind. In this way, slavery was physically inscribed with the power of the sovereign, and not only the master.7 But this power was geographically constrained at the colonial periphery of the state: Sue Peabody has traced the delineations of the ‘freedom principle’ which held that to set foot in the metropole conferred emancipation.8 Her study reveals the legal struggles over the application of these principles to situations of increasing mobility during the eighteenth century, as the ‘sugar-islands’ became the principal source of wealth for a rising and powerful class who often wished to bring their servants with them to France. Interdependent revolutionary events in the metropole and the colonies led to the abolition of slavery first in Saint Domingue in 1793, and then by the Jacobin government in France in 1794. The republican principle of isonomy placed all citizens in the same relationship to the law: despite the early exclusion of women, Jews and slaves, its logic led to the progressive extension of the category of citizen, accelerated by pressure from radicals, and from the demands of the excluded. Revolutionary conceptions of the nation no longer recognized a difference between spaces, abolishing all corporate exceptionalisms and geographical peculiarities. Sovereignty was conceived as a plane extending regularly across the nation, across the newly created departments, the annexed Papal possessions, the nationalized royal and aristocratic estates, and the former properties of the Church: in principle, then, it extended across the former differentiation of metropole and colony. This process was hardly simple or uncontested even in France; indeed, the counter-revolution in the Vendée cost tens of thousands of lives. The abolition of slavery provoked parallel royalist uprisings in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean islands; British naval domination made the seizure of these rebellious colonies relatively easy. Thus, when Martinique and the Mascareignes, in the Indian Ocean, were returned to France in 1802, the abolition of slavery decreed in 1794 had never actually been implemented there. The Law of 30 Floréal Year X (1802)


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was promulgated to stabilize this ambiguity in the status of slaves and restore the French colonial economy. Although applying only to those colonies where slavery had been maintained, it was rapidly understood to apply in other islands, notably Guadeloupe.9 The polarized debate over Napoleon’s ‘racism’ is irrelevant here: ever since Brumaire his authoritarian regime had abandoned republican ideology for a pragmatic model using longestablished systems of governance on a more efficient footing, and slavery was no exception.10 It is telling that during the Hundred Days of his return from Elba, Napoleon adopted a slew of liberal reforms, including the abolition of the slave trade. This was not a sudden access of liberal conscience, but a repositioning of the regime to tap new sources of legitimacy. In this sense, the Napoleonic regime, as Louis Bergeron recognized long ago, must be understood in social and institutional rather than personal terms.11 The re-establishment of slavery re-created three fundamental structures of the ancien régime: the juridical distinction between slave and free, the association of colour with the absence of rights, and the distinction between metropole and colony. Battles were fought by emancipated populations in the Caribbean: whether achieving independence, like Saint Domingue/ Haïti, or forced to submit to the new law and its sequels, like Guadeloupe. But the metropole, too, was concerned by these laws. Once again constituted as the space whose freedom in itself sustained the exception of the colonies, the presence of those whose colour destabilized their status as subject was rendered troubling. The administration ordered a series of inquests into the ‘nègres et gens de couleur’ present in France, demanding registers of names and addresses from every arrondissement in France. Michael Sibalis has undertaken a comprehensive analysis of the results of these inquiries on a national scale, concluding that they proved of little use to the administration, gathering dust in piles of similar statistical reports.12 This may be true, but there seems little doubt from the documentary sources in Marseille that this process itself both reflected the changes in the status of colour in France and shaped administrative responses to the presence of people of colour. As Pierre Boulle has revealed, inquests into the presence of ‘people of colour’ in mainland France had been regularly conducted prior to the Revolution.13 In the 1770s, fears of the intermixture of blood in France and the exportation of dangerous ideas to the colonies combined to provoke a measure forbidding the entry of people of colour to the metropole. The decree of 1777 was explicit in declaring: The Negroes are multiplying every day in France. They marry Europeans, the houses of prostitution are infected by them; the colours mix, the blood is changing ... these slaves, if they return to America, bring with them the spirit of freedom, independence and equality, which they communicate to others.14


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In addition to forbidding people of colour from entering France, fining those who transported them and deporting those found in France, this decree mandated the creation of dépôts (depots) for the incarceration of black servants while their masters were in France. These spaces would provide a space of exception from the freedom principle: the inhabitants would remain slaves, while France maintained its ‘natural liberty’ of person through a legal fiction. In ordering their inquiries of 1806, the imperial authorities referred directly to the legislation of 1777, which they claimed was still in force. It is notable, therefore, that in response to the request by the heads of the Egyptian Legation in 1801 for the creation of a ‘Harem-Hospice’ in Marseille, which would cater for the needs of the population and offer private quarters for women and children as in Egypt, the authorities instead created a Dépôt des Réfugiés Egyptiens.15 Although this ‘Depot’ was not a physical construction, it was nonetheless intended to restrict the mobility of the refugees. The Ministry of War provided them with pensions as a means of subsistence, receivable only in Marseille (and later with special permission in Paris). This amorphous ‘Depot’ placed them in an anomalous, unstable category in relation to the local authorities and the population around them.

1806–07: the inquests on colour and the transformation of the Egyptian depot In 1806, the Imperial Guard was reformed, and the Mamelouks reduced in number to 109. Article 13 of the ‘New Organization of the Guard’ mandated that ‘the refugee Mamelouks, who are at Melun, will be sent to Marseille, where they will enjoy the same advantages, and will be paid in the same way as in the past’.16 In spite of this bureaucratic assurance that they would retain their status, these ex-soldiers found themselves transformed suddenly into refugees, belonging to a depot whose own status had never been determined by the authorities. Their arrival destabilized the relationship between the authorities in Marseille and the population of ‘Egyptian refugees’, creating a kind of moral panic which became a constant subject of correspondence between the municipal and prefectoral authorities, whose relations were already far from cordial. In 1806, Grachet, the mayor, wrote to the prefect Thibaudeau in 1806, on the arrival of 74 ‘individuals placed into the depot of Egyptian Refugees’: The city of Marseille, already full of refugee Jews from Algiers and Egyptian negresses—this last kind the worst of all—watches with alarm these foreigners collecting here in ever greater number. I have acted several times, above all against the women of colour, but within the limits of the police, by making them suffer a detention of several days. That is all the severity I can utilise.17


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The word Grachet used was ‘sévir’, a word applying to the action of a master against a subordinate, and often used in cases of abuse. His complaint was that the law constrained his treatment of these black women who exercised rights and protections under the law as ‘Egyptians’, while his categorization of them as ‘negresses’ implied a slave status, and the consequent absence even of a right to reside in France at all. The ‘negresses’ of Marseille were a mixed population whose origins are complex. A number of women arrived as wives, daughters or servants with the group that left Egypt in 1801. But among them were also a large number of former slaves, bought by French soldiers in Egypt as mistresses or servants, sometimes at a very young age, and brought to France with the army. Among the registers of ‘nègres et gens de couleur’ compiled in 1807 at the behest of the authorities are a number of women from Cairo, but others from places such as ‘d’Alfort’ and ‘Cy Narry’ or ‘Seinard’. Erick Noël has suggested that d’Alfort is a transcription of Darfour;18 Cy Narry/ Seinard is probably Sennar, also in Sudan. If that is so, it is notable that these women retained a strong sense of their origins, despite their double displacement. These origins, however, also included their status as slaves traded into Egypt: the freedom they received as the consequence of arriving on French soil did little to erase the connections made by their blackness.19 There is little evidence of their lives after their arrival, but some certainly seem to have recognized that they were no longer slaves in France, or were disposed of by their masters, and ended up in Marseille seeking to be enrolled onto the list of refugees. The relatively large group of women with the surname Alimé or Halimé would seem to suggest a French version of the Arabic term ‘alima (learned) meaning a courtesan or entertainer. Others had no patronymic and were simply known as Fatoumé or Gadidgé or had adopted a French translation such as Victoire. Throughout 1806, after the sudden increase in the Egyptian population in Marseille, the names of these ‘negresses’, as they are consistently described, appear regularly in the police reports, although this apparent frequency may be in part the effect of the gathering together of these reports independently of other police documents. Certainly the local authorities responded to these reports as an indication that these women were a threat to public order in the town. Reports of scuffles with the police and with one another, drunkenness, late-night celebrations, maltreatment of children, theft, default on rent came thick and fast, often from the same police commissioner, and it is impossible to determine the truth or falsity of the accusations. One report claimed that two women were fighting in the Canébière, the main thoroughfare of the town, one dressed as a man, with a large crowd gathered around. True or not, this report suggests the gendered anxieties produced by these confrontations, which often resulted in injury, and sometimes the disarming of the soldiers involved.


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These confrontations seem rarely to have resulted in prosecution. If the Mayor bemoaned the fact that he was forced to remain within the limits of the law, it was perhaps because the accused had committed no serious crime. One young woman of 15 years was sent to the prison for 24 hours, for ‘having been lacking in deference and submissiveness toward ... the captain commanding the depot of Egyptian Refugees’.20 Both the police and the Mayor began to press the Prefect to sanction the creation of a physical depot which would confine the Egyptians ‘forcing them, without too much rigour, to return home at an appropriate hour’.21 It became increasingly clear that the focus on the black women and their disorders was serving as leverage for the reclassification of the Egyptian population in a way analogous to the gens de couleur whose residence in France was temporary and subject to detention and eventually to deportation. In response, the Prefect demurred: It is not in my authority, M. le Maire, to place the Citadel of St Nicolas at your disposal to serve as a depot for the Egyptian and Algerian Refugees and others who were the subject of your letter of the 5th. I suggest, however, that you keep these refugees under close surveillance.22 But it seems clear from subsequent events that this threat was very real, and that the refugees remained aware that their liberty, indeed the statute of their residence in France, was in question. The chief notables of the depot wrote to the Mayor at first claiming that they had done their best to collect information on the ‘naigresse et fames blanche (negresses and white women)’ who were causing the trouble, but that it was impossible to know where they lived, as they were always changing their lodgings. By September, however, the situation had changed. The ‘Principal Egyptian Refugees Ex-Members of the Commission’ wrote officially to the Mayor (and this time in more accurate French) to submit a list of the ‘troublemakers, men and women, of our depot’: We thought we should anticipate the measures that your wisdom will order, M. le Maire, to act against them with severity, in the most effective way, through a permanent detention in one of the forts of Marseille.23 They proposed in this way the creation of a second depot, which would stabilize the status of their own. Almost all of the 26 individuals they nominated, however, were young men between 16 and 30: most were 20 to 25 years old. These men would have been 10 to 15 at the time of the French occupation of Egypt, and had come to France soon after. In this sense they were more ‘French’ than the families who had settled in Marseille and established leadership in the community. In addition, the names suggest a number of Muslims and Copts rather than Syrian Catholics. It may well have been these young men who displayed the fervour for Napoleon that


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their elders, like others in the town, scrupulously avoided. The notables’ letter offered to provide another list of the ‘black and white Egyptian women who lead a licentious and depraved existence’ but suggested instead the creation of a kind of hospice where they would be gainfully occupied and could learn a trade. After this flurry of correspondence, the scandal seems to have died down, perhaps as a new wave of conscription depleted the numbers of young Egyptian men in Marseille once again.24 Several of the names of those on the list for detention turned up in Paris around this time, and they may have left Marseille for these reasons. The decision by the ‘Principal Refugees’, as they now called themselves, demonstrated their choice to remain in France, and their adoption of a new identity, defined largely by their common Arabic language and culture. But this identity was not simply a choice. It was a response to the shadow of violence and slavery associated with colour, a choice which was again profoundly destabilized in the political transition of 1815.

‘I am not black’: race in the massacre of 1815 According to Léon Gozlan, the son of Algerian Jews who grew up alongside the Egyptian population in Marseille, a number of those fleeing on the night of 25 June 1815 had made signs to hang around their necks on which were written, in Provençal dialect, ‘Siou Pas Négré’— ‘I am not black.’25 Gozlan recounts this with a sad smile: the story seemed perhaps to confirm the artlessness of these ‘Orientals’ who had misconceived the reasons for their persecution, and engaged in the absurdity of a declaration whose self-evident truth or falsity could be determined by anyone with eyes. But Gozlan, writing retrospectively from a more stable set of colonial assumptions, failed to comprehend what these people might have meant by their carefully prepared declarations of colour. The immediate motivation of this murderous attack was to all appearances a political one. The ‘Mamelouks’, the former soldiers of the Imperial Guard living in Marseille, were accused of a violent partisanship for the Emperor, which they had acted out explicitly during the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return to France from exile. Many contemporary accounts sought to explain the violence in Marseille as at least in some part a response to the deliberately provocative behaviour of these Egyptian soldiers. Some claimed the ‘Mamelouks’ had committed crimes or murders during the return of the ‘Usurper’.26 Even the fervent Bonapartist Joseph Méry concurred with these accusations, although he attempted to excuse these foreigners through a more sympathetic presentation of the ‘ardour of their oriental enthusiasm for Napoleon their father’: During the Hundred Days, in every revue, at the head of every civic march, on the doorstep of every Bonapartist café, in the public square


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Indeed, the very word ‘Mamelouk’ had become a synonym for fanatical loyalty under the regime. It was an image cultivated by Napoleon after his return from Egypt through his costumed servants Roustam and Ali, and imitated by a number of other notables of the regime, who brought personal servants from Egypt, or hired them from among the refugees. The turban, the copious pantaloon and the scimitar had been used as important symbols of power, both in military parades and in paintings of Napoleonic battles. They denoted several things: Napoleon’s earliest exercise of power, in Egypt; the vastness and diversity of the imperial dominions; and the implicit threat of a ruthless Praetorian loyalty.28 By the 1820s the Mamelouk had become a free signifier: Chateaubriand even employed it as an epithet to vilify the revolutionary government of the 1790s. By the later years of the regime, the appearance was more important than the reality: most of the Mamelouks of the Guard were French, and Napoleon’s servant Ali was in reality Louis-Etienne Saint-Denis. Most of the Egyptians, like other French men serving in the army, had retired after a few years of military service, and were sent to the ‘Depot of Egyptian Refugees’ in Marseille, or the smaller Depot in Paris, where they were added to the lists of those receiving pensions. For many, this meant a considerable reduction of their military pay, greater than if they had been placed on a veteran’s allowance. Thus, Marseille in particular received a steady stream of young ex-soldiers, used to fighting and pillage, and with cause for discontent. Like many soldiers, however, they still identified the Emperor as their saviour against the machinations of the bureaucracy, local government or their own community. The administration of the first Restoration government sought to resume a political continuity with the past, retaining many administrative functions, while attempting to reduce expenditure by cutting pensions. It is not difficult to imagine the jubilation of these people at the news of the Emperor’s unexpected return. And if they had been an iconic sign of power, they also offered an easy focus for the fury of the strongly royalist population of the city. The political transition of 1814–15 was a cataclysm for many French men and women. As Alan Spitzer has observed, ‘in no era in modern French history, save possibly the post-Vichy era, have past political commitments been recollected with such ferocious intensity’.29 Daniel Resnick’s study of the ‘White Terror’, as it was called, identified political grievances stretching back to the Revolution as the chief motor of the violence: of the victims, he noted ‘some had held public office, others were marked as informers or simply as profiteers’.30 There is no clear evidence of whether these political executions were carried out by an ad hoc tribunal, by individuals or


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where the military bands played national songs, there were always a dozen or so Mamelouks who mingled menacing gestures, and a refrain of oriental insults against royalists listening nearby, with their patriotic songs.27

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crowds. What is surprising, however, in these analyses is that the murders of the ‘Egyptians’ should be included alongside the political assassinations as though the violence were driven by the same motives, and part of a larger whole. None of those Egyptians listed as murdered held any political or administrative position: they were not involved in such practices as enforcing conscription or the payment of taxes. It is improbable that they were closely embroiled in local politics; instead they were marked out for their distinctiveness from local culture. Like others, most had simply served in the army, and returned to civilian life. As veterans, a fervent political allegiance to Bonaparte would not have been unusual. In fact, despite the political motivations consistently produced to explain the violence, most of the reports agree the first victims of the violence were not in fact Mamelouks but black residents of Marseille. Ernest Daudet wrote that soon after the confrontation of the crowd with General Verdier’s soldiers, ‘a Negro, a former agent of the Toulon police ... was arrested in a hotel, hacked to death with a sword, and his bloody body dragged through the streets’.31 Augustin Fabre wrote that in front of the eyes of a town functionary, ‘A man leapt forward from the crowd and threw himself upon a Negro veteran who was passing by, forced him to shout “Vive le Roi!” and smashed in his head with the barrel of a gun.’32 It was only after these murders that Verdier decided to withdraw his soldiers, leaving the population defenceless and prey to the passions of the enraged crowd. The town’s notables formed a ‘Royalist Committee’ to take charge, although the Mayor remained in the city. These officials then rallied the people to their cause, declaring themselves enemies of the abdicated imperial authority. As one official report described the evening of 25 June, Everyone rushed to arm himself, and the Mayor and the Chief of the National Guard placed themselves at the head of these stout lads ... Later that night, the capitulation of General Verdier was announced to the people by the light of flaming torches, and the Mayor in person ordered the townspeople in the name of the King, to respect the sanctity of property and not to harm any soldier who had not been able to follow his commanders.33 The town’s authorities intervened to protect property and ensure the transition of power, but not to protect the people who were being targeted by the crowd. Indeed, as the murders continued into the next day, they announced that ‘Provence and all of the Midi will become a new Vendée if they must rather than fall once again under the yoke of despotism or the factions who have usurped the right to determine France’s destinies’.34 These words did nothing but inflame passions: as the Duchesse d’Abrantès wrote, ‘the authorities remained immobile, and a horrible silence was their only response to the agonized cries of the massacred victims’.35


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Shout Vive le Roi, the people said to her. No, she cried, Napoleon saved my life, Vive ... Dragged in the dust, she was stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet, and holding her hand to keep in her guts, she cried again, Scélérats! Vive ... They pushed her into the water, she sank to the bottom, then reappeared at the surface, repeating the same cry. A bullet struck her and she died.36 Joseph Méry, another witness of these events, insisted that the persecuted woman completed her cry of Vive l’Empereur! ‘When she disappeared under the water’, he wrote, ‘she held her hand raised above, as though to complete with her signs the cry that she had begun’.37 If Durand and Méry reported the woman’s death as a heroic act of Bonapartist martyrdom, Laurent Lautard, a royalist recruited to the National Guard, depicted it as the natural result of her racial, sexual and political depravity: Two Ethiopian negresses, disgusting and almost nude, disturbed the public square with unintelligible vociferations, mixed with the name of Bonaparte, their Providence and their God. The wildest of these women, the dregs of the Egyptian colony, as of the human race, howled after the deposed idol like the she-wolf after her wolf-cubs, provoking murder in her stupid frenzy, murder incarnate. Driven to the edge of the quay, she fell into the water, struggled convulsively, still crying out; a bullet struck her forehead and she disappeared.38 Lautard’s account reduced the cries of the women to inarticulate and animalistic screams, ‘incarnating’ her own murder, for which she thus becomes responsible. Their state of nudity confirmed their abjectness, their loss of political and social attributes, although as another witness of the events, Léon Gozlan, suggested, their clothing was in fact torn away in the violent lynching they experienced at the hands of the crowd. Others in the town began to fear reprisals: Durand was warned that he had been seen too often at the home of the Bonapartist General Brune.39 But the next target for the crowd was the Egyptian ‘village’ near the Cours Gouffé. A visitor who came to see Durand in hiding reported to him that ‘the massacre of the Mamelouks had been general; a large number of soldiers had been killed, several houses looted, corpses lay here and there in the streets and in the squares’.40 Looting and destruction were everywhere, but Joseph Méry wrote that he hardly noticed the damage to property ‘when the gutters were red with blood, when our feet stumbled against corpses,


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At noon on the 26th, near the port, the crowd cornered two black women, killing one and wounding the other. The woman’s horrible death was reported by Charles Durand:

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when the sight of the graveyard of Mamelouks, slaughtered in the Oasis of their village, met our eyes’.41 For those with limited economic means, the burning of their houses and the pillage of their small businesses was devastating.42 The remainder of the population fled into the mountains, where they were pursued by their attackers, and some accounts claimed that cartloads of bodies had been seen covered with the white Bourbon flag. Despite the frequent repetition in most accounts of terms such as ‘nègre’ and ‘négresse’, and other words emphasizing the colour of the victims, the authors were determined to interpret the events in political terms. Even the most sympathetic observer, Méry, while accusing the Marseillais of an unparalleled xenophobia and ‘hatred of foreigners’, identified the provocations of the Mamelouks as the real motivation behind the killing. Léon Gozlan, who, although living in Marseille, was too young to recollect the events first hand, seems to have collected the testimonies of those who were there. His account is further confused by the suggestion that the black women at the Old Port were not Egyptian at all, but rather former slaves from Saint-Lucie. ‘But’, he added ironically, ‘they were black, so they were Egyptian, and therefore they were Bonapartists’. The rumour then spread that the royalists were going to kill all the blacks. ‘From this moment’, Gozlan wrote, ‘all the blacks ceased to show themselves in town ... those too dark in colour, believing themselves exposed to a mortal threat, put signs on their backs on which they had written clearly in the Provençal dialect, “Siou pa négré”. To whom it may concern, please note: I am not black!’ Gozlan suggested that these Egyptians misunderstood the reasons for their persecution, imagining that they were being attacked for their colour. But, as the history of their experience in Marseille demonstrates, they had good reasons to understand their persecution as racially based. The attempt to declare what colour they were was not an absurdity: indeed it demonstrates a degree of comprehension that ‘black’ and its variants were not simply a question of skin colour, but rather of juridical status. Indeed, the word ‘négré’ should be interpreted in relation to ‘nègre’, a term which, in distinction to ‘noir’, implicated the bearer in the system of chattel slavery, and by extension therefore annulled the right to reside in France. In negating such an identification, the bearers of such placards, if they indeed existed, sought to claim a different and protected status as Egyptian refugees, even as this category itself came under political assault. Both the word ‘Mamelouk’ and the word ‘Egyptien’ had other connotations in early nineteenth-century France. In addition to its association with a different form of janissary slavery in the Muslim world, Frédéric Régent notes that in Guadeloupe the offspring of a white and a ‘Quarteron’ or quarter-black was referred to as a Mamelouk.43 The word ‘Egyptien’ also had another meaning equivalent to the corruption of the same word in English: ‘Gypsy’.44 Thus, the principal modes for identifying these people were racially charged, and suggested an unclear juridical statute. They


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were of diverse backgrounds, some from the Caucasus and more white than the typical Provençal, while others were from Upper Egypt with dark skin. When asked to provide a register of the ‘people of colour’ in his sections in 1802, one of the police commissioners replied that he could not, since ‘almost all the Egyptians have nègres with them who appear on no census’.45 Thus, while some ‘Egyptian Refugees’ were classified as nègres, they were not considered to belong to the category targeted by the administration. From the registers of 1807, on the other hand, it is clear that a number of ‘Egyptians’, and particularly women, did appear on the list of ‘Nègres et gens de couleur’, and this may have been in part a consequence of the decision by the ‘Principal Refugees’ to provide the details they had earlier claimed not to be able to furnish. It was a decisive act which distanced the ‘Egyptians’ from racialization on the basis of skin colour, and the threats of loss of even an unstable civic status in France through association with the juridical category of the slave. At least one of those killed in the massacre of 1815— Saad el Arag, a domestic servant—appeared on the list of ‘troublemakers’ provided by the refugee notables. But alongside him were members of notable families such as the Sidarious.46

After 1815: racialization and identity In the aftermath of the violence of June, thousands of people were imprisoned in the forts of Marseille, among them many from the Egyptian population. Joseph Nakacly wrote that ‘in 1815, because of his opinions, he was detained for several months at the Palais de Justice in Marseille with 3,500 other unfortunates of different classes and in the same situation as him’.47 It is possible that the prisons served as refuges for those in danger, but the authorities were loath to discharge the Egyptians: as Paul Gaffarel suggested, they were ‘still treated as suspects, and considered as criminals rather than victims’.48 Eventually they were discharged, but the administration continued to look for ways to detain segments of the population: a considerable number of Egyptian ‘troublemakers’ were imprisoned on the Ile Sainte Marguerite into the 1820s.49 The Depot in Marseille was maintained: in 1817, 39 ‘hommes de couleur’ from the Légion Corse were added to its lists.50 The notables of the Egyptian community, now styling themselves a ‘Council’ of the Depot, served on multiple occasions to bring official pressure to bear to support the petitions of other members of the Depot. Most significantly, perhaps, in 1818, George Sakakini travelled with Maryam Ni’matAllah (now known as Marie Namé), herself a substantial property-owner in Marseille, to Paris, to present a petition signed by him for ‘the widow of General Jacob, my Aunt, Delegate of the Dépôt of Egyptian Refugees’,51 on behalf of the poorest class of ‘refugees’, and particularly the women: ‘If the small pension accorded to [them] is taken away, these women will no longer


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be able to live in France, not knowing the French language, and having no trade to support them.’52 Most commentators, including Léon Gozlan, assumed that in the aftermath of the violence in Marseille, the ‘Egyptian refugees’ were eradicated or disappeared through some combination of assassination, emigration and assimilation. When Laurent Lautard, the royalist apologist for the massacre of 1815 described the population, he insisted that: A certain number of compromised Coptic merchants made their lives anew in Marseille: they carried on their trade with honour, and finally melted away into the population. The rest of this hotchpotch of emigrants consisted of a horde of miserable negroes and moors, the scum of the human race, who lived off the crumbs of their idol Bonaparte.53 Lautard made explicit the reciprocal relationship between status and colour: the ‘honour’ of the merchants rendered them whiter, and enabled them to ‘melt away’ into the population, while poorer members of the population were relegated to a social and political exclusion which made them ‘negroes’ and ‘moors’, at the very edge of the statute of rights. But Lautard was wrong. The community continued to exist, in ways that depended increasingly on their Arabic cultural commonality, the role of the Melkite Church (to which many of the Muslims converted) and mobility between Marseille and Paris, as well as across the Mediterranean to Livorno, Alexandria and Damascus. Their children studied Arabic at the Lycée in Marseille, and several went on to distinguish themselves in the Orientalist milieux of the 1820s. It is important to recognize that these people found ways to negotiate the complexities of identification, categorization and difference in France. At the same time, the identity that they developed, a sense of community and commonality, was shaped by the forces that surrounded them, forces which threatened to racialize them in violent ways. In particular, their unstable relationship with the re-established statute on slavery of 1802, and its association with colour, continued to threaten them. I have argued elsewhere that the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 marked a significant turn away from the liberal cosmopolitanism of the 1820s, and racialized Arabs in new and violent ways. However, the documents from Marseille suggest that race was already a significant factor in shaping the lives and identities of French Arabs, indeed in structuring this ‘Arab’ identification from the moment of their arrival. We can see from this that the effects of racial slavery and its re-establishment were felt not only by those directly concerned in the slave trade—the slaves themselves, slave traders, plantation owners—but also affected other segments of the population, and perhaps the population as a whole. This impact was not simply ideological or political, but could involve violence and death, in the metropole as well as in the colony. In this sense, we may begin to see ‘racialization’ not as a


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single process in progress or decline during this period, nor as one affecting a single segment of the population, but as a changing and historically determined system of juridical and social categories shaping the whole set of relationships within a society, across its complex spatial configurations, and shaped in turn by global forces.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the organizers of the conference ‘War, Empire and Slavery’, and Leora Auslander, whose probing questions about racialization and slavery were a key inspiration for this chapter.

Notes 1. Laure Junot Abrantès, Mémoires sur la restauration: ou Souvenirs historiques sur cette époque, la Révolution de 1830, et les premières années du règne de Louis-Philippe, 6 vols (Paris, 1835–36), vol. 3, 80. 2. Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831 (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming early 2011). 3. These documents, conserved in Marseille at the Archives Municipales (hereafter AM), were communicated at the request of Gaston Homsy, a descendant of one of the principal Arab families, who was researching a book on his ancestors. See Gaston Homsy, Le Général Jacob et l’expédition de Bonaparte en Égypte, 1798–1801 (Marseille, 1921). 4. See Thomas Philipp, The Syrians in Egypt, 1725–1975 (Stuttgart, 1985). 5. George A. Haddad, ‘A Project for the Independence of Egypt, 1801’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 90 (1970): 169–183 (here 183). 6. Bernard Gainot, ‘Métropole/Colonies: projets constitutionnels et rapports de forces 1798–1802’, in Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises: aux origines de Haïti, ed. Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny (Paris, 2003), 13–28. 7. See Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century France (Berkeley, 1998), 125. 8. Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (New York, 2002). 9. See Frédéric Regent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, la Révolution française en Guadeloupe (Paris, 2004). 10. See Jean-Marcel Champion, ‘30 Floréal Year X: The Restoration of Slavery by Bonaparte’, in The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (New York, 2003), 229–236 (here 230). For a defence of Napoleon, see Thierry Lentz, Napoléon, l’esclavage et les colonies (Paris, 2006). 11. Louis Bergeron, France under Napoleon trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton, 1981). 12. Michael D. Sibalis, ‘Les Noirs en France sous Napoléon: l’enquête de 1807’, in Bénot and Dorigny, Rétablissement de l’esclavage, 95–108. 13. Pierre H. Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 2007). 14. Quoted in William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington, 1980), 111.


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15. Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter AN), F17 1100 (Commission d’Égypte) Egyptian Legation to Minister of Interior, 1 Vendémiaire Year X. 16. A. Perrot and Cl. Amoudru, Histoire de l’Ex-Garde: depuis sa formation jusqu’à son licenciement, comprenant les faits généraux des campagnes de 1805 à 1815 (Paris, 1821), 82–83. 17. Quoted in Paul Gaffarel, ‘Les massacres de juin 1815’, AM, 19/I/1, 14. 18. Erick Noël, Etre noir en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2006), 219. 19. At least one ‘white slave’, a Georgian woman slave of ‘Adele Hanem, Princess of Egypt’ came to France with an officer, and later married a merchant of Marseille. Archives de la Ministère de la Guerre (hereafter AMG), Vincennes, XL 37 L Bongiovanni. 20. AM, 2 I 240, 13 June 1807, Commissioner of Sections 1 and 24 to Mayor of Marseille. 21. AM, 2 I 240, 5 July 1807, Mayor to Prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône. 22. AM, 2 I 240, 12 July 1807, Prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône to Mayor. 23. AM, 2 I 240, 29 September 1807, Mayor to Prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône, Principal Egyptian Refugees to Mayor. 24. One Egyptian in Marseille was reported as having attempted suicide when conscripted in 1809, according to Fouché’s secret police bulletin of 17 January that year: see Ernest d’ Hauterive (ed.), La Police secrète du premier Empire. Bulletins quotidiens adressés par Fouché à l’Empereur... Nouvelle série 1808–1809 (Paris, 1963), 507. 25. Léon Gozlan, ‘Les refugiés égyptiens á Marseille’, Revue contemporaine 149 (1866): 31–47 (here 42). 26. Julie Pellizzone, Souvenirs II (1815–1824), ed. Pierre and Hélène Echinard and Georges Reynaud (Paris, 1998). 27. Joseph Méry, L’assassinat: scènes méridionales de 1815 (Paris, 1832), 35. 28. The Mamelouks were frequently associated with the execution of the Duc d’Enghien. 29. Alan B. Spitzer, ‘Malicious Memories: Restoration Politics and a Prosopography of Turncoats’, French Historical Studies, 24/1 (2001): 37–61 (here 37). 30. Daniel P. Resnick, The White Terror and the Political Reaction after Waterloo (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 10. 31. Ernest Daudet, La terreur blanche: episodes et souvenirs de la réaction dans le Midi en 1815 d’après des souvenirs contemporains et des documents inédits (Paris, 1878), 183. 32. Augustin Fabre, Histoire de Marseille, 2 vols (Marseille, 1829), vol. 2, 669. 33. AN F7 9636, 25 November 1816, Mayor to Minister of Interior. 34. Quoted in Resnick, The White Terror, 15. 35. Abrantès, Mémoires sur la restauration, 80. 36. [Charles Durand], Marseille, Nîmes et ses environs par un témoin oculaire, 3 vols (Paris, 1818), vol. 1, 31. 37. Méry, L’assassinat, 37–38. 38. [Laurent Lautard], Esquisses historiques: Marseille depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1815, par un vieux Marseillais (Marseille, 1844), 360. 39. [Durand], Marseille, Nîmes, 18. 40. Ibid., 20. 41. Méry, L’assassinat, 39. 42. Saad Chaate, a former domestic servant to General Ya’qub, found the two tobacconist’s shops which he had rented ‘entirely looted by an uprising of the population’. AMG, XL 37 M Chaate, 1816. 43. Regent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, 17.


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44. Marseille has long been a principal site of pilgrimage for several peoples described as ‘Gypsies’. 45. AM, 2 I 240, 10 Messidor Year X, Police Commissioner of Sections 5, 6, 20 & 21 to Mayor of the Midy division. 46. Gabriel Sidarious took charge of the ‘Légion Copte’ after Ya’qub’s death. See Georges Spillmann, ‘Les auxiliaires de l’Armée d’Orient (1798–1801). La création de corps auxiliaires égyptiens et syriens’, Revue du Souvenir Napoléonien 304 (1979): 7–15, n. 3. 47. AMG, XL 37k Nakacly, 1816. 48. Paul Gaffarel, ‘Un episode de la Terreur Blanche: les massacres de Marseille en juin 1815’, La Révolution Française 40 (1905): 317–350 (here 337). For the mass imprisonments under the Restoration see Jean-Claude Vimont, La prison politique en France: genèse d’un mode d’incarcération spécifique XVIIIe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1993), 169. 49. This island would later be used for mass imprisonment of the supporters of the Emir Abd el Kader, the Algerian resistance leader, in the 1840s. See Mohammed Akroun (ed.) Histoire de l’islam et des musulmans en France du Moyen Age à nos jours (Paris, 2006), 568–573. 50. AMG, XL 37 L Bazile. 51. AMG, XL 37l Géneralités, Petition of February 1818. 52. Ibid. 53. Lautard, Esquisses historiques, 188.


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The Making of Warriors: The Militarization of the Rio de la Plata, 1806–07 Alejandro Martin Rabinovich

Introduction Over the past two decades, war studies have focused mainly on the processes of change in how wars have been waged. The most important and fruitful debates have been anchored by the concept of ‘military revolution’, which has been replaced recently by the concepts of military mutation or transformation. Consequently, case studies have mostly shown us either radical or progressive changes within a given form of war, or the passage from one type of war to another. This chapter will explore a different kind of change: one which takes place not in the way in which a particular society makes war, but in the advent of war itself as a social experience to a society that no longer had first-hand knowledge of war. Lawrence Keeley rightly argues that, except for a handful of ethnographic oddities, societies without any knowledge of war in fact have never existed.1 However, it is certainly possible to find historical configurations in which a given society, for whatever reasons, actually experiences the arrival of war as an absolute novelty that interrupts a peaceful state thought to be natural and permanent. That was exactly the case of the local population of the Rio de la Plata when it faced successive British invasions in 1806 and 1807.2 As we will see, the Spanish colonial military system quickly surrendered, leaving the task of repelling the invaders in the hands of the local population which from that point onwards was militarized in a durable and revolutionary fashion. On examining the abundant contemporary reflections on that particular military experience, we see that the sources unanimously speak of it as a social transformation which put an end to a secular, peaceful state. Spanish-American Dámaso de Uriburu, for instance, described the population of Rio de la Plata as ‘a defenceless people surprised by a martial display quite unknown to them, for they had lived in a state of uninterrupted peace for countless years’.3 Tulio Halperín Donghi, one of the most important 81


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Argentine historians, has raised the question of whether local witnesses were not exaggerating the contrast between their new warlike reality and their peaceful past.4 For the purpose of this chapter, however, the relevant question is not whether contemporary interpretations are historically accurate (that is, whether the local population was or was not telling the ‘truth’ when it presented its own experience). The important question concerns the historical conditions that made this experience possible in these particular terms, and the drastic consequences that this experience had over the following decades. More generally, the cases in which peaceful societies confront war are particularly important because they experience the outbreak of a war as a radical and massive social transformation. The sources produced in such contexts present war as something to be discovered anew, and bring to light all the social mechanisms that are put to work in order to militarize a society and make war, as if they were actually invented or established from scratch. Thus by studying the particular case of the Rio de la Plata we will be able to address, as in a small but brightly illuminated laboratory, some of the main aspects of the Napoleonic Wars.

A peaceful colonial society? In 1806, the life in the Spanish colonies of South America offered without doubt the most stark contrast to a Europe burning in the heat of war. Only faint echoes of battle reached the ears of a population which continued with their daily labours, interested, but mostly unconcerned, by the epic events taking place far away. Some calls of alarm were raised, but no significant defensive preparations were made, no mobilization of the population attempted. An anonymous manuscript, written in 1807 by a local witness, gives insight into the military state of the Rio de la Plata before the British invasions: Of all the Spanish territories, South America was probably the only one that was not suffering the effects of the long and terrible war [the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars]. Its inhabitants enjoyed a tranquillity that matched very well their character and the local climate. While the horrific sound of weapons had Europe in awe, it only struck their spirits as a curious novelty. And as the metropolis struggled to sustain the war effort, her colonies took pleasure in their state of peace. Accordingly, the fortification of cities or the preparation of a military force was the very last of their concerns. Everything exuded calm and peace. The unsuspecting local authorities focused on the internal security and happiness of their people, greatly fomenting commerce and the arts.5 This picture of a peaceful Rio de la Plata seems inconsistent with two very well-known elements of the local configuration: hostile Indian peoples


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along the southern and central frontiers, and Portuguese pressure on the territories of the eastern bank of the Rio de la Plata. Indeed, this combination should have produced a militarized society deeply concerned with defence and security issues.6 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the actual nature of the local society was quite the opposite. A brief look at the historical background should provide both an explanation of this apparent discrepancy and a deeper look into the social limits of military experience. In the late 1790s, the city of Buenos Aires, situated on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, was already an up-and-coming capital of an enormous viceroyalty. With more than 40,000 inhabitants and a flourishing economy, what had been a small village in the preceding century was now a city comparable to ‘cities of the second rank’ in peninsular Spain.7 Its peripheral position had spared it any major role in the schemes of European powers. However, the city had long struggled against its Portuguese neighbours, who challenged its regional supremacy with a commercial outpost of their own: the city of Colonia do Sacramento, on the opposite side of the river. This chronic conflict nevertheless failed to mobilize the local population consistently. Fearing the emergence of a potentially dangerous SpanishAmerican military elite, the Spanish Crown did not employ the locals on a massive scale, relying instead on expensive peninsular armies shipped from Europe for the occasion.8 These forces would cross the ocean, fight a number of battles and then return to their European bases upon the signing of a peace treaty. This ancien régime style of warfare served Spanish interests but relegated the colonial subjects to the role of spectators or mere auxiliaries. In 1777, when the decisive battle for supremacy in the Rio de la Plata was fought, the people of Buenos Aires played but a minor role. They passively looked on as a European Spanish army of 10,000 men arrived, triumphed and imposed the signing of a long-lasting peace. An analogous situation characterized the frontier with the Indians. The nomadic warrior societies of the Pampa had haunted the minds of the rural population ever since the foundation of the city. But as the border was pushed south and was progressively fortified, the conflict stabilized and the imminent danger to the city vanished. The whole of the eighteenth century came to be known locally as the ‘age of treaties’ due to the success with which the colonial authorities had been able to arrange a durable alliance with the Indians.9 The southern tribes acknowledged the sovereignty of the Spanish king, accepted a fixed frontier line and partially demobilized their warriors. Thus two distinct but complementary elements marked the Spanish defence system in the late eighteenth century. In the first place, it had consistently managed to eliminate the most immediate threats by a complex policy of negotiation, diplomacy and commerce. By 1806, almost thirty


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The Making of Warriors


years had passed since the last noteworthy military action in the region had taken place, and an entire generation had been raised without any first-hand experience of warfare.10 Second, even when conflict did arise, the defence system relegated the local population to a subordinate military position in which local elites rarely commanded the troops, did not determine the objectives of the war and were not supposed to wage any decisive military campaigns.11 These two elements combined to generate a local population notoriously renowned for its resistance to performing any kind of military service. The absence of immediate threats and the presence of a military institution which was not seen as an expression of the local society created a set of social attitudes quite the opposite of any ‘military spirit’. Each time the royal authorities tried to incorporate the locals into the defensive system, their initiatives failed miserably. Desertion and disobedience levels were so high that local recruitment for the regular regiments was eventually abandoned, and even militia units could not be relied upon.12 Military officers and witnesses regarded this issue as a problem of the nature of the local population.13 Future Viceroy Juan José de Vértiz, for instance, stated that ‘the sons of this country have a natural aversion to military service, and more so when they find ways to survive with more profit while they see that the troops are naked. Experience taught us that most of the recruits do not stay for long, because they have a natural propensity to desertion, stealing uniforms and weapons. In the end, no punitive or precautionary measures could limit the excessive and scandalous desertion, which forced me to stop the recruitment altogether’.14 This general ‘aversion to military service’ was not necessarily an aversion to warfare itself (war, strictly speaking, was already absent), but a reaction against a particular type of call to arms which was regarded simply as a disciplinary burden imposed by the colonial authorities. This was a social situation in which war and military concerns, although they were present, could not exceed a certain threshold. Below that line, military culture and values could not permeate the rest of society, and remained the privilege of a restricted, peripheral, and sometimes hated, professional elite. If our analysis of the historical context is correct, social attitudes towards the military—the ‘peaceful nature’ of the locals—in late colonial Rio de la Plata could be reversed by an important change in the two elements which sustained these attitudes in the first place. The first British invasion, by presenting an immediate threat, and by producing a completely different type of mobilization, offers the opportunity to reflect on how, for the first time, the military threshold was dramatically and unexpectedly crossed. To understand these consequences of the aggression, however, the nature of the invading force has first to be established.


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The British expeditionary force that invaded Buenos Aires under the command of Admiral Sir Home Popham and Colonel William Carr Beresford would ignite a fire destined to spread over a continent and last many decades. What was the master plan that brought these men to the distant shores of South America? By whose authority had this intercontinental operation of enormous consequence been launched? What interests, what motives and what rational calculations did the invaders serve? By answering these questions, we will have a brief opportunity to examine the dynamic forces of war more closely, and to consider how the war spread, how it crossed oceans and what patterns characterized its propagation. In fact, in the British Cabinet, plans to take over the Spanish colonies were numerous. For several years, merchants, diplomats and naval officers had presented their proposals for invading Buenos Aires based on the calamitous state of its defences and the economic potential of the South American market. In 1804, at William Pitt’s request, Popham and Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda presented yet another ambitious plan to seize control of all the Spanish-American colonies: this proposed that three coordinated task forces attack from the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific and the Atlantic, thus robbing Napoleon’s allies of their resources.15 The proposal was well received, but the increasing intensity of the European theatre of war forced its postponement and Popham was assigned instead to a force that would try to take the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch.16 The South African colony surrendered after a short struggle and, having fulfilled their mission, the idle troops awaited fresh orders. Up to this point, military events followed the normal path ascribed to imperial politics. Assessing costs and benefits, the British government had officially named and sent a regular expedition to take over a rival’s stronghold on African shores. From this point onwards, however, we shall see that war could follow a very different path. In fact, Popham and the other chief commanders garrisoned at the Cape had no further official instructions, and fresh orders from London took time to arrive.17 The British commanders relied on limited and inaccurate information about the development of the overall strategic situation. They did not know, for instance, that Pitt had died and that major changes were to follow in the conduct of war. Most of the reports they received were mere rumours spread by that gigantic and informal spy ring formed by the merchant community.18 The reports coming in from Buenos Aires told of the arrival of an immense treasure-trove of silver from the Peruvian mines, now awaiting shipment to Spain where it would serve mainly to pay the price of the French alliance.


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The spark


Considering that British military laws at that time were extremely liberal with regard to partaking in the spoils of war and that the troops were succumbing to the boredom of garrison life, it should not be surprising that Popham had little difficulty in convincing a number of officers about the desirability of storming Buenos Aires, even without orders. After brief negotiation with other commanders, the operation was agreed.19 They sailed with most of the fleet and a very good battalion of Highlanders;20 in all, only 1,600 men set sail to invade a city of 40,000 inhabitants in a whole enemy subcontinent. It may seem amazing today that a small group of officers were able to launch an intercontinental operation without official sanction or support of any kind. When we consider that these men would willingly embark on a seemingly suicidal mission, risking death and court martial for no apparent purpose other than that of action, booty and glory, we come to realize that war actually had an explosive potential that extended far beyond any strategic or political control. The necessities of war had made warriors of these men; they had been assembled, trained and armed in order to gather maximum strength.21 But now, after months of tedious drill, waiting and sailing, the primary objective of their mission had been achieved without fully testing their fighting capability. They needed to act. They needed to fight—not as a continuation of politics but for the sake of fighting itself. In his justification of the decision to invade Buenos Aires, Popham stated: I hope the view I have given their Lordships of my conduct, and the motives by which I was induced so strongly to press on Sir David Baird the expediency of undertaking a project of zeal, enterprise, and exertion, promising so much honour and prospects of advantage to the Empire, will be considered by their Lordships as far preferable to the alternative of allowing the squadron I have the honour to command to moulder away its native energy, by wintering in False Bay, and eventually become paralysed, after remaining so long as it has done in a state of cold defensive inactivity.22 Without warning, without orders and without a plan, this adventurous expedition landed thus on the shores of the Rio de la Plata.

The fire All the daily records demonstrate that in the open and completely undefended city of Buenos Aires, war was the last of the citizen’s concerns during the first months of 1806. Autobiographies address nothing but business, commerce and agriculture. The week before the events that would change this state of affairs, the minutes of the city council reveal that the main concern of the local elite was the choice of a new carpet for the floor of the city


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hall.23 Then, all of a sudden, on 25 June, the same records note that 11 sails had been spotted and that the alarm had been sounded. A silence of nearly one month follows. However, whereas the official accounts say nothing, that day saw an explosion of personal accounts, and even almost illiterate people chose to open their private diaries at the moment of the alert.24 Thus through the eyes of witnesses from every social background we can see in great detail the events that followed.25 As soon as the alert was sounded, hundreds of men—military and civilians alike—ran in disorder to the arsenals, seeking arms and orders. As we have seen, they lacked organization and training. Militia units were cobbled together as volunteers arrived and were sent to face the British column already marching towards the city. What ensued was not really a battle. When Spanish troops arrived within sight of the invaders, they either opened fire while completely out of range, or realized that they had been given bullets that did not match their guns. They disbanded with little loss of life upon hearing the roar of the first British volley and the sound of bagpipes. A few hours later the city surrendered, military and civilian authorities swore allegiance to the British Crown, and rich treasure was shipped to Britain. The capture of Buenos Aires may not have produced great feats of arms, but the British public rightfully celebrated it as a gallant victory, and The Times went so far as to call it ‘one of the most important events of the present war’.26 In the meantime, for the Spanish-Americans the novelty of military defeat would be less pleasant but have long-lasting consequences. Many personal accounts are available which reveal the impressions created by the triumphant entrance of the tiny column of red-coated soldiers into the city streets. They speak of an absolute shock, a collective trauma of immense proportions that would become a painful memory in personal life stories. Some witnesses even testify that men openly cried on the streets.27 They all speak of a mixture of anger, impotence and shame, with some of these men and women falling into a state of depression. The meaning of this collective disarray is very clear. At the sight of these professional soldiers marching proudly, the people of Buenos Aires could not but become painfully aware of the contrast with themselves. At their very first call to arms, they had been swept off the battlefield by a mere handful of warriors. The actual experience of their military incompetence suddenly made their peaceful past seem a period of decadence never to be repeated.28 The desire for revenge soon became universal, and the number of rebellious acts rapidly rose to an alarming extent. British sentries were attacked, officers were kidnapped, and insults and challenges followed the conquerors wherever they went. At first this was just a series of individual initiatives, but groups of partisans began to form and soon the British authority was challenged. Forty-five days after the city’s capture, regular Spanish reinforcements arrived from Montevideo and, with the addition of the locals, they attacked and eventually overwhelmed the British garrison in a battle


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fought in the central square of Buenos Aires. The invaders surrendered and were taken prisoner, and the people of the Rio de la Plata celebrated their first military victory. Many changes followed immediately. In order to prevent an imminent second invasion, for the first time the locals stripped the Viceroy of his military powers and elected a martial leader who was to plunge them into total militarization. British Major Alexander Gillespie, one of the most lucid witnesses of these events, observes: From this day we may date their military origin, and character, from that day they began to know their own importance and powers as a people, and although they have little cause to exult in the triumph over but one effective regiment, still the issue infused a general confidence in themselves, a new spirit of chivalry amongst all ... A few days only had elapsed from the surrender of the place, when a military enthusiasm broke forth in every rank of society. All the youths of the most respectable families hastened to enrol their names, and to submit to the laws of discipline. Recruiting parties daily paraded through the streets, beating up for volunteers.29 The very same men who a month and a half previously had scorned any form of military service now left their occupations to enlist willingly in militia units, paying for their own uniforms and risking their lives without any immediate compensation. Contemporary observers could not help but notice this remarkable change in social attitudes towards the military and began to speak of a ‘transformation’ in the character, or the spirit, of the people. In order to understand fully the scope of this transformation, it must be evaluated on several levels.

A city in arms The militarization process which began with the reconquest of the city was neither centrally planned nor directed from above. It sprang from the people, arising spontaneously from the energies that the battle had unleashed.30 Patterns become evident when the process is looked at closely as it unfolded day by day. What can be seen at the initial formation of every new militia unit is a small, informal gathering of a few men who shared pre-existing social attributes. At the risk of oversimplifying, two different types of gatherings can be singled out. The first type was that called into being by a person of a certain social and economic standing, though not necessarily a prominent member of the elite. He would start by calling his dependants, employees and family to arms. The new company thus would mimic the social structure, and carry the name of its founder, who personally would provide it with uniforms, horses, guns and sustenance.31


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The second type of gathering was horizontal, formed by peers with shared social status and background. Interestingly, the colonial regulations had envisaged the formation of militia units based on either occupational categories (thus units of butchers, farmers, merchants), or ethnic categories (thus corps of blacks, whites, Indians), but neither set of criteria predominated. Instead, men spontaneously organized themselves according to their geographical origins, forming companies of Catalans, Galicians, Asturians, clothing and arming themselves with funds from volunteer subscriptions.32 This kind of military mobilization implied a radical challenge to the traditional balance of social forces and quickly undermined imperial authority, encouraging revolutionary tendencies that eventually would put an end to the regime. In what was to be the very first democratic experience of the Spanish-American colonies, these men voted to elect their officers. Only afterwards, when the unit was already operational and counted between 50 and 200 men, was the company formally ‘presented’ to the governor, who could not but acquiesce to its formation and grant his protection and monetary support. Where the colonial recruitment failed, the new militarization from below proved extraordinarily effective.33 In less than a month, more than 7,000 troops were raised. When the number of men enlisted in every company is compared with the population figures as a whole, it can be seen that almost the entire free, adult male population was effectively enrolled.34 This implied dramatic changes in almost every aspect of social life. An impressive 95 per cent of the yearly viceregal budget was devoted to the war effort—half of it to the payment of these troops.35 For several months, other activities of the state were virtually abandoned. Schools were transformed into barracks, courts ceased to dispense justice, regular prisons were emptied.36 In order to feed the war effort, the city seized every public resource available and massive donations were collected in order to support the troops. But no society can survive without a delicate balance between dedication to the military on the one hand, and economic necessities on the other. How then was it possible for Buenos Aires to survive for a year with a militarization rate of well over 90 per cent? To begin with, one-third of the city’s population were enslaved Africans,37 and unlike in the independence period that was to follow, during the British invasions these slaves were not enlisted in large numbers.38 When the moment of battle finally arrived, the slaves fought valiantly as irregulars, and freedom was granted to many of them in reward.39 But in the interval between the invasions, they were mostly occupied with economic tasks while the freemen trained and drilled. Nevertheless, the massive mobilization of the citizens for the city’s defence comprised a serious disruption of the normal course of civilian affairs, and the organization of the space and time of social life had to be


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altered in order for the military transformation to occur. The opening times of shops and workshops were delayed for several hours to allow the early morning hours to be spent at training camps. The night hours were no longer devoted to rest, but were spent largely on patrolling and guard duties. Weekdays and holidays—everything—was subordinated to the military’s rhythm of preparation. This society was living ‘year one’ of a post-reconquest era. As for the city’s space, not only were the public buildings turned into military facilities, but every house became a fortified stronghold, every structural aspect of the city was now reassessed in terms of its defensive strong points or vulnerabilities. At every corner, on every street, in squares, vacant lots and market places, troops were practising manoeuvres, marching, shooting. From the daily accounts of Diario de un soldado we know that almost every three days a public military ceremony was held. The air was constantly filled with the sound of drums and the scent of powder; the spectacle of uniforms and banners was omnipresent; this once-normal city had suddenly been turned into a military camp. Furthermore, behind all these everyday changes lay a more subtle and profound transformation: behind the timetables and the financial considerations, social values were being shattered. The commercial and administrative city of Buenos Aires was rapidly becoming a warrior society, and social attitudes, discourses and accounts clearly reflected this. Personal letters, official statements, children’s games, and all forms of art produced during these months were dominated by the military values of courage, selfsacrifice and the pursuit of glory. A new model of man was taking shape. Old and new leaderships would henceforth be judged and legitimized with reference to military capability and combat prowess. The new bottom-up and voluntary defensive system was sustained by the force of emulation. Buenos Aires had been turned into an arena where military attributes enjoyed maximum visibility. In this context, as our anonymous militiaman put it, ‘the most important thing is to be renowned as the best warrior’.40 Once this point of transformation was reached, the identification of the citizen with the warrior was inevitable. Many men, mostly wealthy, had deserted the city after the first attack. They were now welcomed back by their fellow city dwellers in order to share the burden of its defence. If they chose not to return before the second invasion, all their possessions would be confiscated and their names erased from every public registry, reflecting their status as ‘bad citizens and traitors to the fatherland’.41

The test This was the state of the population of the Rio de la Plata in July 1807, when the anticipated second expedition finally arrived. Only this time it was no pirate-like adventure, but a full-scale invasion of 12,000 men. In fact, following what could be considered as a typical pattern of war escalation,


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after the initial capture of Buenos Aires by the small expedition, substantial reinforcements were needed to secure their position and extend the invasion further. Given the public enthusiasm aroused in Britain by the news of the victory, the British government could not help but commit its support. After the reconquest of Buenos Aires by the Spanish-Americans, the issue had become a matter of national pride. What had begun as an act of disobedience by a marine commander was turning into a major national objective. The cabinet sent several army divisions to the east bank of the Rio de la Plata, where every city had already been besieged and taken by force. This impressive army, under the command of Lieutenant-General John Whitelocke, launched the final assault on Buenos Aires only 11 months after the defeat of its predecessor. An indecisive battle took place at the city gates, and the defenders retreated in disorder to the central square, where they prepared barricades, strongholds and ambushes. When the British battalions entered the city in multiple columns, they were caught in terrible crossfire from every roof and window. The battle lasted for hours and was fought bravely. The attackers got within sight of the city centre, but were decimated and finally forced to surrender with a loss of over 2,500 men who were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.42 In his official report, Whitelocke attested that ‘every householder with his Negroes defended his dwelling, each of which was in itself a fortress; and it is not, perhaps, too much to say that the whole male population of Buenos Ayres was employed in its defence’.43 In fact, several witnesses state that they saw many women and children fighting, throwing stones and boiling water as the soldiers marched through the streets.44 The improbable outcome of this urban battle was thus the culmination of a rare extreme of total militarization. This extreme had been achieved through a type of mobilization that included a total commitment of every social and economic resource, a relative democratization of the military structure, a shift in the social configuration of time and space, a heightening of military emulation and, most profoundly, a radical transformation of social values. As a result, the new social configuration excluded as unworthy of citizenship those men who did not fit into the new warrior model and the new reality of war; to be a man of peace was no longer an option.

Conclusions This chapter has approached the problem of war as a social phenomenon, concentrating on how imperial warfare can affect a local, peripheral, society. In this sense, the case of Buenos Aires offers a striking example. Until 1806, the city had known neither external threats nor significant conflicts for more than a generation. Then, with no prior warning, it faced successive invasions in 1806, 1807 and a projected one in 1808.45 The sudden appearance of the first British force—one that would penetrate to the very centre of


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the city, unleashing war on the streets –shocked the local society, shattering established social attitudes regarding military life. The consequent military occupation of the city, the renewal of the external threat by the massive expedition of 1807, and the nearly launched third expedition of 1808 further developed the process, ensuring that the changes were profound and long-lasting. But this transformation of the local society cannot be explained by the presence of an external threat alone. The first British invasion did more than just conquer the city. It destroyed, to a large extent, the colonial defensive system itself—first by capturing most of the veteran officers who served in the capital, and then by irreparably damaging the prestige and legitimacy of the colonial military forces in the eyes of the civilian population. Under these circumstances, if the enemy was going to be driven from the city’s streets, the task inevitably would fall to the local population. The necessary mobilization was then attempted under a new model which differed from the colonial one. The improvised army was in large measure a direct expression of the city—with its geographical, ethnic and internal social structure—and it fought as such, for its own life and its own glory. Whereas the colonial army had struggled to enlist a few hundred willing soldiers, the city in arms could mobilize thousands of enthusiastic warriors. The British invasions of the Rio de la Plata thus showed the enormous power of war as a catalyst of change. In a matter of months, the city’s people had fought several dramatic pitched urban battles, each inhabitant fighting to defend his own house, life and family. This experience not only increased the willingness of the local population to participate in the military; it also unleashed a process that put warfare at the centre of social life for many decades. Many aspects of this process were still embryonic in the period covered by this chapter, but they nevertheless were important and prefigured some characteristics that would become dominant in the Rio de la Plata landscape. From a political perspective, for instance, the mere fact that most of the men in town were now armed and trained directly challenged the traditional power relationships of the colonial society. Not only did the men of this city in arms vote to elect the officers who would take them to combat but, in a pattern that would be repeated, they also had the strength and will to depose the designated authorities (for instance, the Viceroy) and replace them with their own military leaders. On the same note, political struggles would now be resolved increasingly by direct military confrontation between units adopted by different political factions.46 From a general perspective, the events examined here demonstrate that the spreading potential of war goes far beyond the will and control of political and military decision-makers. We have seen how war spread to South America with no official sanction of any government, but the process goes much further. The spark of war had been brought to the locals by fighters unwilling to remain idle at their posts; the newly mobilized South


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American warriors would not accept demobilization. The militia units formed to repel the British expeditions were to become the core of the revolutionary armies who fought the Independence Wars against the Spanish royalists; and then, when the newly formed republics were free of imperial rule, they fought each other for decades. The warrior society whose birth is described here was not to be easily dismantled. It found a way to perpetuate war as a natural state and created a new societal involvement in war that would dominate South American landscapes for half a century.

Notes 1. Lawrence H. Keeley, reviewing several of the most important multicultural studies available, concludes that less than 10 per cent of known human societies can be said ‘never or very rarely’ to have waged war. Moreover, most of these peaceful social groups can be placed in one of two categories: societies living in a situation of extreme geographical isolation (the Tikopians from Polynesia, the Cayapa from Ecuador); or ethnic minorities living under the administration of a modern State (the Gondi in India, the Lapps in Scandinavia). The obvious consequence of this data is that war is a constitutive element of human societies. See his War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford, 1997), 25–28. This thesis aroused a lively and fundamental debate; see Douglas P. Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (Oxford, 2007). 2. These two operations had sensational repercussions on the contemporary British public but, lost in the Napoleonic maelstrom, they aroused little interest from scholarly historians until recently. For a general account of the events, see Ian Fletcher, The Waters of Oblivion: The British Invasion of the Rio de la Plata, 1806–07 (Tunbridge Wells, 1991). For a wider analysis of British policy in the area, see Klaus Gallo, Great Britain and Argentina: From Invasion to Recognition, 1806–26 (Basingstoke, 2001). In Argentine historiography the British invasion understandably occupies a much more central place; for facts and figures, we follow the classic investigations of Carlos Roberts, Las invasiones inglesas del Rio de la Plata (1806–1807) (2nd edn, Buenos Aires, 2000), and Juan Beverina, Las invasiones inglesas al Río de la Plata (1806–1807) 2 vols (Buenos Aires, 1939). 3. Dámaso de Uriburu, Memorias, 1794–1857 (Buenos Aires, 1934), 15. The British Major Alexander Gillespie stated: ‘They had slept for centuries in peace, and knew not the meaning of an enemy, saving from the tradition of former times, which informed them that their frontiers had once been exposed to the inroads of savage neighbors ... ’ See Alexander Gillespie, Gleanings and Remarks: Collected during Many Months of Residence at Buenos Ayres and within the Upper Country (Leeds, 1818), 190. 4. Tulio Halperín Donghi stated: ‘This rise of the military is even more impressive when one considers the general dislike of the army as a career which, as almost all retrospective reports inform us, was dominant among the younger generation of the elite in Buenos Aires before 1806. “The sons of Buenos Aires have never been attracted by the military career; they preferred rather to be lawyers”—thus Mariquita Sánchez in her recollections of colonial times, and almost all witnesses, seem to agree with this remarkable lady. But are not these witnesses, impressed with the deep changes begun precisely in 1806, unwittingly exaggerating the contrast with earlier attitudes?’ Tulio Halperín Donghi,


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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 ‘Revolutionary Militarization in Buenos Aires 1806–1815’, Past and Present 40 (1968): 84–107. We found this anonymous manuscript from 1807 under the title Reconquista de Buenos Ayres y Sitio de Montevideo. Memoria histórica por un Imparcial, Museo Mitre, Buenos Aires, Archivo Colonial, ARM.E., C.2, P.I, N°18. For an interesting thesis on how ethnic frontiers favour the development of martial cultures, see Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations (New York, 2006), 31–55. This comparison is made by Halperín Donghi in Revolución y guerra: formación de una élite dirigente en la Argentina criolla (Buenos Aires, 1994), 41. Under the restrictive Spanish commercial regulations, Buenos Aires enjoyed the profitable position of sole, and obligatory, intermediary between the interior provinces and the metropolis. The many imported articles were paid for by the growing exports of hides and the steady flow of Upper Peruvian silver. Moreover, after the creation of the viceroyalty in 1776–77, the city became a very important bureaucratic centre, which in turn promoted the emergence of a wide range of complementary activities—of craftsmen, carriers, laundresses and so on. See Susan M. Socolow, The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: amor al real servicio (Durham, NC, 1987); Lyman Johnson, ‘The Artisans of Buenos Aires during the Viceroyalty, 1776–1810’, PhD diss. (University of Connecticut, 1974), and idem, ‘Estimaciones de la población de Buenos Aires en 1744, 1778 y 1810’, Desarrollo Económico, 19/73 (1979): 107–119. For the general lines of military colonial organization we are following, see Juan Beverina, El virreinato de las provincias del Río de la Plata: su organización militar (Buenos Aires, 1992), and for the campaigns against the Portuguese, 133–193. From 1741 on, the establishment of a border was negotiated with the southern indigenous peoples, and in 1790 a definitive peace treaty was signed. The Indians renounced violence, and in exchange their lands were respected and an important policy of ‘gifts’ and incentives was established. This peace lasted until the 1820s. Susana Bandieri, Cruzando la cordillera: la frontera argentino-chilena como espacio social (Neuquén, 2001); Raúl Mandrini, Vivir entre dos mundos: conflicto y convivencia en las fronteras del sur de la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2006). An overwhelming majority of the existing militia service records state that Río de la Plata militiamen had no military experience whatsoever, the only exceptions being peninsular officers over fifty years old. See the comprehensive database El ejército de América antes de la independencia: ejército regular y milicias americanas, 1750–1815: hojas de servicio y estudio historico, Juan Marchena Fernández (dir.), CD-ROM (Madrid, 2005). It would seem that a state of peace of 30 years was more than enough to erase the type of military experience that this society had. What we have is neither a society without war nor a population without any kind of military organization, but a region that had been pacified a generation previously. For an approach to the consequences of generational experiences in attitudes towards war, see Turchin, War and Peace, 233–234. Juan Marchena Fernández advances the thesis that the organization of militia systems succeeded only where local American elites directed the process, and faced terrible opposition when peninsular elites monopolized the officer positions. The Rio de la Plata case strongly backs up this thesis. Of all Spanish-American regions, it is the only one where the percentage of peninsular officers (and even of non-commissioned officers) substantially exceeds that of Americans over the entire 1760–1800 period. See Marchena, El ejército de América, 213–217.


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12. In a letter of 30 April 1781, Viceroy Vértiz wrote: ‘The militia units cannot offer any significant support in the case of an invasion ... Most of this people hate any kind of service, subordination or civilized life, for they are nomads and naturally vagrants. They even refuse to take arms when called upon to defend their families and properties. On the fields, the desertion rate knows no bounds.’ Beverina, El virreinato, 280. 13. This was indeed an important notion in the period we are examining. Consider the historical thesis of natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt on the peaceful state of Spanish America, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, 4 vols (London, 1811), vol. 4, 216. 14. José de Vértiz, ‘Memoria, 1784’, Revista del Archivo General de Buenos Aires 3 (1871): 432. 15. All these projects are presented in Roberts, Las invasiones, 59–104. 16. For the local consequences of this operation, see Nigel Worden, ‘Armed with Swords and Ostrich Feathers: Militarism and Cultural Revolution in the Cape Slave Uprising of 1808’, in this volume. 17. In fact the original instructions stipulated that part of the troops were to proceed shortly to India, while Popham was to sail to Saint Helena and await orders (‘Instructions to Sir Home Popham, 29 July 1805’). However, a subsequent order commanded him to remain at the Cape with all the troops and await further instructions (‘Copy of a letter to Sir Home Popham, 14 September 1805’), A Full and Correct Report of the Trial of Sir Home Popham (London, 1807), 7–8, 13, 82. 18. Popham received an order to send a frigate on a reconnaissance mission to the east coast of South America. However, the intention of the Admiralty was only to gather intelligence from a defensive perspective—that is, to verify that no threat to the Cape was being prepared by the Spanish. See ‘Copy of a letter to Sir Home Popham, 2 August 1805’, ibid. 13. 19. ‘Copy of a letter from Sir Home Popham, 13 April 1806’, ibid. 35–38. 20. The main infantry corps was the fine 1st Battalion of the 71st Regiment of Highland Light Infantry, which boasted an impressive record that included the Siege of Acre during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria. A rare first-hand account of the internal life of this corps, including the invasion of Buenos Aires and the subsequent Peninsular War, may be found in Journal of a Soldier of the 71st, or Glasgow Regiment, Highland Light Infantry, from 1806 to 1815 (Edinburgh, 1819). 21. For a general view of the British troops, J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (Oxford, 1981). For Scottish soldiers, Andrew Mackillop, More Fruitful than the Soil: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (East Linton, 2000). 22. A Full and Correct Report, 38. 23. 21 June 1806, Acuerdos del extinguido Cabildo de Buenos Aires. 1805 a 1807, 47 vols (Buenos Aires, 1907–34), vol. 2, 171. 24. One of these documents, written by an anonymous militiaman, is indeed extraordinary. With the most peculiar spelling, it gives us a day to day account of the major events: Diario de un soldado, 1806–1810 ([Buenos Aires], 1960). We follow it closely for the interpretation of local accounts. 25. The participation in the fighting against the British became a mandatory chapter in any personal memoir of that generation. A good sample of these texts is available in Biblioteca de Mayo: colección de obras y documentos para la historia Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1960– ), vol. 2. Dozens of militiamen were called upon by the Cabildo to report the deeds of their units. These declarations are


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26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 collected in Juan Coronado, Documentos inéditos para servir a la historia del Río de la Plata durante las invasiones de los generales ingleses Beresford y Whitelocke en los años de 1806 y 1807 (Buenos Aires, 1870). ‘Capture of Buenos Ayres’, The Times (London), 13 September 1806, 2. M. Moreno, ‘Vida y memorias de Mariano Moreno’, in Biblioteca de Mayo, vol. 2, 1187. A perfect example of these feelings is offered by militia captain Manuel Belgrano: ‘I confess I was infuriated. I felt so ashamed of ignoring even the most basic military principles. My embarrassment grew even stronger when I saw the enemy troops enter the city, and realized the insignificance of their number compared with that of the population of Buenos Aires. This haunted my mind and almost drove me into madness. It was so painful to see my country in such a state of degradation that it could be dominated by this corsair-like enterprise, led by the brave and honest Beresford whose courage in this perilous operation I will always admire.’ ‘Autobiografía’, in Biblioteca de Mayo, vol. 2, 958–959. Gillespie, Gleanings and Remarks, 100. On 5 September 1806, the government issued a proclamation inviting the people to form military units. This particular call to arms does not disprove the idea that these new mobilization patterns arose from below. On the contrary, the governor who issued this document was Jacques de Liniers, the military hero of the reconquest. The people in arms that vanquished the first British expedition had just made him military commander of the capital—in place of the Viceroy—so that he would promote these developments. Roberts, Las invasiones, 230. Buenos Aires received militia reinforcements from the interior provinces, but the main local fighting force was formed by volunteers who had enlisted willingly, above and beyond their legal obligations. Beverina, El virreinato, 333. Martín Rodríguez, ‘Memoria’, in Biblioteca de Mayo, vol. 2, 1507–1509, and Cornelio Zelaya, ‘Memoria de los pocos servicios ...’, in ibid. vol. 2, 1552–1556, offer good examples. During the first days of British occupation, each would first talk to friends and relatives and form an informal group of 5, 10, 20 partisans. A number of these groups would eventually coalesce into a single unit, put together by the prominent and wealthy local leader Martín de Pueyrredón. After the reconquest, this squadron and others would become the regular cavalry of the city, but they were still known as the ‘Hussars of Pueyrredón’. Relación de servicios del Tercio de Voluntarios de Galicia, 1807, Museo Mitre, Buenos Aires, Archivo Colonial, ARM.E., C.3, P.I, N°31; Relación de los meritos y servicios contraídos por el batallón de voluntarios urbanos cantabros de la amistad en Buenos Ayres (Buenos Aires, 1807). ‘While enlistments had remained at low levels and desertion rates had trended upward until 1806, the British invasions produced a dramatic alteration in local attitudes toward the military. Across the city’s social landscape, military vocations were discovered by the thousands.’ Lyman Johnson, ‘The Military as Catalyst of Change in Late Colonial Buenos Aires’, in Revolution and Restoration: The Rearrangement of Power in Argentina, 1776–1860, ed. Mark D. Szuchman and Jonathan C. Brown (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 27–53. The total population of the city was believed to range between 40,000 and 45,000 inhabitants; 30 per cent were slaves and the proportion of men to women was 1:10. Thus of the 16,000 men from which children under 16, men over 50 and the disabled must be subtracted, a figure of 8,000 free, able-bodied, adult males is left.


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35. For the year 1807, from the total budget of 3,372,709 pesos only 298,737 were assigned to political, economic and religious branches of the administration; 3,073,972 pesos were destined for the war effort. Militiamen received wages when fully mobilized, and the total payment of the troops called for 1,862,996 pesos. Juan Biedma (ed.), Antecedentes políticos, económicos y administrativos de la Revolución de Mayo de 1810 (Buenos Aires, 1910), vol. 1, 195. 36. Diario de un soldado, 72. 37. Lyman Johnson, ‘Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires, 1776–1810’, Hispanic American Historical Review 59/2 (1979): 258–279. 38. An important distinction has to be made between black slaves and black and mulatto free men. The latter, who comprised an important part of the urban lower classes, were involved in the general process of militarization. They were effectively organized in two ethnic units of ‘Indians, Black and Mulattos’, one of artillery and one of infantry, consisting of 426 and 352 men respectively. Roberts, Las invasiones, 232–233. George Reid Andrews, ‘The Afro-Argentine Officers of Buenos Aires Province, 1800–1860’, The Journal of Negro History 64/2 (1979): 85–100. There are no official accounts of a unit composed by slaves, but some documents show that knives and lances were prepared in order to arm them as a measure of last resort. Beverina, El virreinato, 339. 39. Up to 70 manumissions to reward the slaves that had played a distinguished role in the defence took place in very emotive ceremonies. The authorities considered that 686 slaves had seen action. Many slaves, who had not received weapons from the government, fought with those taken from fallen British troops, thus arousing immediate concern of the authorities, who called for these guns to be handed in. Irene Diggs, ‘The Negro in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata’, The Journal of Negro History 36/3 (1951): 281–301. 40. Diario de un soldado, 107. 41. 5 February 1807, 17 April 1807, Acuerdos del extinguido Cabildo, 142, 205. 42. The Trial At Large of Lieut. Gen. Whitelocke (London, 1808), 5. 43. ‘Copy of a letter from Lieut.-Gen. Whitelocke to the Right Honourable William Windham, Buenos Ayres, 10 July 1807’, ibid. 613–617. 44. ‘Those who had not muskets, were armed with long knives, very like half scythes; boys were formed into companies, officered by lads of their own age, and trained to the use of the rifle. I saw one who had shot several of our riflemen, he was scarcely two feet high, and excited more surprise in me at his being able to fire a gun off, then in killing a man. Women next in men’s clothes fought on the tops of the houses, which were covered with thousands of armed people.’ A Narrative of the Expedition to, and the Storming of Buenos Ayres, by the British Army, by an Officer Attached to the Expedition (London, 1807), 14. 45. After the disastrous fate of the second expedition, British strategists decided that further operations in South America should include an offer of independence. This offer should nevertheless be accompanied by a strong military force, which would crush the colonial authorities. In the case of Rio de la Plata, it was decided that an expeditionary force would first attack Montevideo in late 1808, and then try to achieve the surrender of Buenos Aires without entering the city. Arthur Wellesley himself was in charge of this project and the units assigned to the campaign were gathered at Cork. The Spanish uprisings against the French, and the calling for help from the juntas, changed the destination of this expedition to Peninsular Spain: the Peninsular War began. For the Rio de la Plata’s people, however, this aborted expedition still had important effects, since its menace


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forced the continuation of the military mobilization. Roberts, Las invasiones, 421–437. 46. As early as 1809, one half of the volunteer units created during the invasions fought the other in the central square of Buenos Aires to decide the continuity of Liniers’ government. A year later, the triumphant ‘American’ units would depose the Viceroy, beginning the revolution and the Independence War.


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Freedom and Captivity


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The French Conspiracy of 1795: Paranoia and Opportunism on the Eve of Independence in Buenos Aires Lyman L. Johnson

Introduction On 13 April 1795, guards took the Italian-born clockmaker Santiago Antonini from his cell in the city jail in Buenos Aires to a second-floor room where the municipal judge Martín de Álzaga showed him the instruments of torture. Born in Sardinia and married to a Spanish woman who had remained in Spain with his son, Antonini had lived in obscurity until implicated in a purported conspiracy to raise a slave rebellion. Arrested with most of his close friends, Antonini was one of two prisoners who had already endured torture at the hands of Álzaga 13 days earlier. When the first interrogation failed to reveal the suspected conspiracy, Àlzaga successfully sought permission from the audiencia (high court) to torture Antonini a second time.1 Police agents employed by Álzaga arrested 30 men between mid-January and the end of March. Antonini and most of the others arrested in 1795 were artisans, labourers or small shopkeepers. Most were European immigrants, although two were free blacks and two were slaves. Many of those arrested were French-speaking foreign-born residents of Buenos Aires and most were single or married men who had emigrated from Europe without their wives. While Álzaga only arrested two slaves, he found many of his most useful informants in the slave population.2 In a city roiled by both xenophobia and racism, a mounting fear of slave rebellion confounded logic by leading to the arrest of scores of free European immigrants. Buenos Aires was a major beneficiary of late eighteenth-century Spanish imperial reforms. In 1776 the Spanish Crown made it the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata that included the rich mining region of Alto Peru (Bolivia) as well as what is now Uruguay and Paraguay. Stimulated by trade reforms, expanding rural production and the efficient harvesting of the interior’s mineral production by a burgeoning colonial government, the city population grew from approximately 24,000 in 1750 to over 50,000 in 1790.3 101


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5


Most of this growth resulted from European immigration and an expanded slave trade.4 While these forces had unsettled many long-established social and cultural conventions, the free artisans and labourers of Buenos Aires had enjoyed nearly full employment and high wages. Powerful forces threatened this prosperity by 1795: in particular, a massive regional drought and the disruption of Atlantic trade due to the wars of the French Revolution.5 As competition from the rapidly expanding slave population drove down the wages of artisans and labourers, drought pushed up the price of food. Simultaneously, the city’s only two artisan guilds crumbled under the accumulated weight of a decade of ethnic rivalry and racial animosity. These threats and challenges to long-established colonial expectations and accommodations coincided with a transformed geopolitical reality ushered in by the French and Haitian Revolutions. Greed and fear intersected in unpredictable ways in the thriving slave markets of Buenos Aires. In these venues, the wealth generated by expanding livestock and agricultural frontiers, and by the transfer of Alto Peru’s silver via colonial fiscal institutions, helped to float the city’s insatiable demand for slave labour. Late colonial prosperity financed the city’s direct participation in the African slave trade and helped distribute slave ownership across nearly the whole society.6 Slaves were found in every artisan occupation and were employed in large numbers as labourers. While owners of the largest bakeries and factories owned an average of 20 slaves, the typical Buenos Aires slave owner had only one or two slaves.7 Hundreds of the city’s slave owners were men and women of very modest resources who lived lives that were materially indistinguishable from their slaves. Many poor widows and unmarried women were completely dependent on wages earned by their slaves.8 While the slave population grew and slave ownership spread to new sectors of the urban population, authorities also heard complaints about slave criminality, aggressiveness and rebelliousness. Many of those who clamoured for opportunities to purchase slaves, even powerful individuals harvesting large profits from slaving voyages to the African coast, also demanded that the city government do more to protect public order and property. In response the government banned African drumming and dancing, excluded slaves from gaming and drinking establishments and imposed harsh punishments on slaves found guilty of assault, theft or robbery. Even as fears of slave insurrection helped create the political context for Martín de Álzaga’s torment of Santiago Antonini, ever more slaves were brought to Buenos Aires.

Darkness perceived An expanding export of hides, tallow and dried beef to the plantation colonies of the Caribbean had contributed to the city’s commercial prosperity. The ships that carried dried beef and other products to the Caribbean


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depended on mixed crews of slave and free seamen. As these crews distributed the products of the Rio de la Plata and gathered tropical produce, especially sugar and tobacco, for the return voyage, they informally collected news about revolutionary events in Saint Domingue and noticed the mounting fear of slave insurrection elsewhere in the Caribbean. Once returned to the Río de la Plata, common seamen, ships’ officers and passengers disseminated this intelligence through the plazas, cafes and taverns of Buenos Aires. Early news of the French Revolution had provoked limited interest in Buenos Aires, although secular and ecclesiastical officials took every opportunity to condemn anti-clericalism and the regicide. Anti-French feeling intensified in 1793 when Spain went to war with France. While news from Saint Domingue was frightening, the French Revolution provided a more dramatic imaginary of the era’s revolutionary content to the residents of Buenos Aires. When Viceroy Nicolás de Arredondo took steps to impede the arrival of revolutionary propaganda, he referred to France and the enthusiasts of revolution as ‘the seductor nation and its proselytes’.9 The elite and propertied middle groups of Buenos Aires saw the French Revolution as an attack on civilization itself. Robespierre, more than Toussaint Louverture, was viewed as the demonic embodiment of the revolutionary age. Few knew of events in France in detail, but Robespierre was widely seen as the ‘evil motor’ and ‘bloody tyrant’ of the revolution. Both ecclesiastical and civil authorities took every opportunity to condemn Robespierre’s responsibility for the execution of priests and the desecration of churches. The potency of Robespierre as a symbol of revolution meant that when someone said, for example, ‘Robespierre was talented enough to be master of the globe’ or ‘the French had opened the eyes of other nations to the progress of liberty’, the statement carried a well-understood inventory of meanings certain to excite scandal.10 Even before the war with France, Spain had sought to prevent the introduction of books and pamphlets with revolutionary content into its colonies, but enforcement of these restrictions was difficult in a place like the Río de la Plata where contraband was deeply rooted. In a colonial world habituated to the importation of contraband products, from slaves to cloth, political contraband slid along well-worn paths and into common consumption. For example, on 19 June 1789 customs agents in Montevideo confiscated a shipment of medals struck with the motto ‘Libertas Americana’. More inflammatory still were coloured prints depicting the execution of Louis XVI that had circulated as far as Salta on the colony’s northwest frontier.11 Urged on by the Spanish government and supported by local fears, the viceroy constructed a dense web of controls to prevent the introduction of dangerous publications from France and ordered customs officials to impound any French ship found in regional ports.12 From the perspective of Spanish authorities the rising tide of gazettes and pamphlets from Europe arriving with virtually every ship was more


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The French Conspiracy of 1795


dangerous than the small number of books. These more ephemeral publications were produced in enormous volume in the period and were sought for their useful coverage of market conditions as well as for political news. While incapable of sustaining complex political argument, perhaps, they effectively packaged and transmitted the political symbols and important events of the French Revolution (and, to a lesser degree, events in Haiti) to a popular audience of literate artisans, mechanics and petty retailers. It was even more difficult to police the content of Spanish publications that summarized and glossed the banned ideas of Enlightenment thinkers or selectively discussed the actions of revolutionaries, even if only to condemn them. Popular fears had mounted when anonymous handwritten pasquines (lampoons) attacking the local authorities were pasted up around the city’s central plaza. Pasquines had long been a part of Spanish colonial political life and officials often found it difficult to identify authors and prosecute them. In the most common forms, these lampoons attacked officials or prominent residents in insulting terms for private scandals or unpopular political decisions. Early in 1795, a series of inflammatory lampoons warned of a planned slave insurrection and condemned Viceroy Arredondo for his failure to protect the public. In the end, a pasquín with a single handwritten word, LIBERTY, spread fear and outrage to the centre of colonial political authority. As police agents searched for the authors, a new round of pasquines excoriated the government for its inactivity and complicity in the face of the insurrectionary threat.13 While the military inadequacies of Spain were clear by 1794, the French Revolution was at best an indirect and distant threat to the Río de la Plata. The French Navy and French privateers dramatically increased the risks of shipping the region’s exports to Europe and the Caribbean, but could not effectively blockade Buenos Aires.14 However, the depredations of French vessels did provide a threatening geopolitical gloss to every scarcity, every price increase and every rumour of conspiracy. Since many of the city’s most successful bakers were French immigrants, popular opinion instinctively blamed them when the price of bread rose steeply in 1795.15 The fact that the city’s bakers relied on slave labour served to reinforce the appearance of a single, integrated threat, a slave insurrection connected to local agents of foreign aggression. France had provided powerful images of a world turned on its head, an executed king and priests driven from their churches, but the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue provided Buenos Aires with a revolutionary narrative that seemed to fit local facts. Did the masters of Buenos Aires more effectively control their slaves than had the slave masters of Saint Domingue? No one believed this. In fact the absence of supervision and discipline was the nearly universally understood signature of the Buenos Aires slave regime. Everywhere there seemed to be evidence of a city slipping into chaos. Pressured by public opinion, Viceroy Nicolás de Arredondo appointed Don Martín de Álzaga, a local judge of first instance, to investigate rumours of


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a planned insurrection in Buenos Aires.16 Álzaga quickly formed a team of agents and began his enquiries. Many slave owners testified about a new belligerence and aggressiveness in their servants. Some claimed that slaves no longer demonstrated the deference expected of them, failing to give way when passing in the street or when entering a public shop. One elderly woman told Álzaga that her female slave, when corrected for poor work habits, angrily stated, ‘soon I will hold the power’. Don Juan Angel Freire informed authorities that his elderly mother’s slave, Pasquala, claimed that she ‘would soon be dressed better than the most important people of the city’.17 More to the point, another slave told his employer that ‘on Good Friday we will all be French’.18 These rumours put the slave population on edge as well. Antonio, the slave of Don Francisco Yzarzabal, reported that he had gone to a dance where he heard ‘various blacks say they would rise up to escape the power of the Spanish’.19 In fact, the discussion of a planned insurrection was so widely circulated in Buenos Aires that the master carpenter Lazaro Ferri felt comfortable asking two of his own slaves if they were ‘implicated in the uprising’. They told him, with a similar absence of inhibition, that they were not involved, but admitted that other slaves had asked them to join the conspiracy.20 While frustrated by his inability to force the conspirators into the open, Álzaga believed that testimonies like those offered by Ferri’s slaves confirmed the threat faced by the city. This gathering cloud of rumour and fear suggests that news from Haiti increasingly framed the already contentious relationship between slaves and masters in Buenos Aires, providing slaves with an ominous new narrative of resistance and autonomy that had a predictably unsettling effect on the masters who sought to direct them. Haiti had demonstrated the fragile nature and essential vulnerability of the institution of slavery. While war with France created the immediate context for political action, it was the potent images of slave insurrection that would dominate the events of 1795 and ensnare men like Santiago Antonini. In this climate of uncertainty and suspicion, public attention began to focus on the city’s small population of French residents.21

The complex web of conspiracy The 38-year-old French merchant Juan Barbarín was the first person arrested. Residents who lived near the Plaza Mayor had reported a heated discussion about events in France in the barbershop of Juan Martín Carreto. Witnesses claimed that this barber permitted ‘free and confidential conversations’ that had led to a violent argument about revolutionary France. The barber’s Spanish clients had made a series of angry denunciations of France in the presence of the French merchant Juan Barbarín. As these denunciations


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escalated, Barbarín objected in strong words, provocatively claiming that the French people ‘had good reasons to imprison and execute Louis XVI’.22 Alone in defending the French and apparently provoked beyond endurance, Barbarín went on to suggest that ‘Spanish people might have good reasons to imitate the French’. Don Baltasar García, present during the argument, claimed that Barbarín also said that ‘it is unfortunate that the Spaniards had not done the same thing’. Some witnesses failed to confirm these detailed recollections. While the barber remembered only that ‘someone’ had attempted to justify the regicide, another witness, Don Fernando Díaz de la Ribera, added the tantalizing detail that a ‘Frenchman’ had said that Robespierre ‘was capable of being the owner of the world’.23 Additional testimony suggested that Barbarín maintained potentially subversive associations, thus placing his apparently spontaneous effort to defend the French regicide in a darker political context.24 Two neighbours informed Álzaga that French immigrants and other foreigners frequented Barbarín’s home. According to these witnesses, Barbarín had also ‘purchased gazettes with news of France’ and then shared these periodicals promiscuously with others. For Álzaga, several weeks into his investigation, the elements of formal conspiracy that had previously eluded him now seemed visible. Álzaga and his assistants fanned out to interview Barbarín’s neighbours and business associates. Many of those questioned spoke respectfully of the suspect, noting his honesty and good habits. Some informants, however, wondered about his very public interactions with the city’s slave community. Barbarín had drawn the attention of many neighbours and customers by allowing slaves to visit him in his home and by treating his own slave, Manuel, with surprising affection and generosity. More damning still, witnesses asserted that Barbarín regularly permitted slaves from the confraternity of San Benito to enter his home.25 Many of Barbarín’s neighbours remarked on the merchant’s intimacy with members of this slave brotherhood, an intimacy he had apparently maintained during his nearly ten-year residence in Buenos Aires. Repeated visits by Álzaga’s agents to Barbarín’s shop and home provoked doubts among neighbours and customers. Fearful of drawing attention or, alternatively, suspicious that Barbarín was in fact involved in some terrible conspiracy, once friendly neighbours and associates now avoided him, choosing to look the other way as he passed in the street and ignoring his greetings. Only a small circle of French immigrants and a handful of close friends continued their social contacts with him. As the investigation increased in intensity, even these loyal associates grew increasingly nervous when they met Barbarín in public. News of the intense enquiry made by the alcalde (municipal judge) into the affairs of the French merchant attracted a new wave of testimony. A sergeant attached to the local military garrison informed Álzaga that on numerous


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occasions he had witnessed Barbarín and his slave Manuel walking along the river front during the hours of siesta when nearly all the city’s residents sought relief from the summer heat indoors. This informant pointed out that the timing of these walks, a period when few pedestrians would be in the streets to overhear, and the pair’s apparent disregard for the local siesta custom appeared suspicious. What could the subject of these secretive conversations between master and slave have been? Once asked, the question seemed to produce its own answer.26 By the time Álzaga questioned Barbarín face to face, the Frenchman had been in jail for weeks. Álzaga pressed him to explain his apparent intimacy with the slave community. Barbarín testified that he had served as treasurer of the black religious organization, the confraternity of San Benito, but had recently resigned, fearful that his service had been linked to the anticipated slave uprising by rumour. As treasurer, Barbarín stated, he had supervised the dues and alms collected by members to pay burial costs and fund the brotherhood’s celebrations of San Benito’s feast day. He went on to remind Álzaga that his service with the black confraternity was not remarkable. Many other men of substantial means, he noted, had served in similar capacities with segregated organizations of slaves and free blacks in Buenos Aires. It was, in fact, the nearly universal custom throughout the Spanish Empire to appoint white officials to supervise elected black officers of black lay brotherhoods and guilds. White officers also commanded the city’s segregated black militia units. The brotherhood of San Benito was therefore only one of many organizations in Buenos Aires where white officials supervised black members. While this was true, Barbarín’s apparent egalitarian practice of receiving slaves in his home provoked Álzaga’s attention.27 According to testimony gathered from his neighbours and associates, Barbarín’s welcoming behaviour towards the slaves fell outside the boundaries expected of a man of property. Universally, members of Barbarín’s class kept slaves and free blacks at a distance. A number of witnesses confirmed that Barbarín often allowed members of the confraternity to enter his home when they delivered the alms they had solicited in city streets and markets.28 Although no one had felt it necessary to report these practices to authorities earlier and no customer or neighbour had raised objections to Barbarín’s behaviour previously, these actions and attitudes now appeared ominous, given the widespread fears of slave insurrection. With revolutionary events in Haiti dominating the public imagination, Barbarín’s familiar contacts with so many slaves seemed inherently subversive. Álzaga examined this novel intimacy and wondered, ‘who are the seducers and who the seduced?’ The unusual familiarity that Barbarín maintained with members of the black brotherhood of San Benito led to questions about his apparently warm relationship with his own slave, Manuel. Numerous informants suggested to Álzaga that the Frenchman treated his slave ‘with great demonstrations of


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affection and love’ and corroborated testimony that master and slave took walks along the banks of the Rio de la Plata. These informants told Álzaga that Barbarín seemed to treat the slave more like a friend than a servant. One informant commented in detail on the ‘intimacy and affection’ that characterized the conversations between this master and slave. Another reported that the slave Manuel had boasted to other slaves that his owner had recently promised him his freedom. In the light of these revelations, Álzaga wondered what Barbarín expected in return for this promised freedom. Had Barbarín offered the promise of freedom to recruit Manuel into the conspiracy? In the eyes of Álzaga, perhaps the most damning evidence against Barbarín was his decision to hire a young French immigrant, Pablo Mayllos y Marcana, to teach Manuel to read and write. It only took a few days for Álzaga to discover the background and habits of Manuel’s 28-year-old tutor. After arriving in Buenos Aires, Mayllos had struggled to support himself as a private tutor and letter writer for clients found among the city’s largely illiterate urban underclass. Mayllos earned very little from these tasks and was forced to take his meagre meals in taverns and share a rented room with another single man, Fermín Sotes. When questioned, Sotes, rather too eagerly, volunteered to Álzaga that Mayllos often returned to the room very late at night. A French immigrant who knew of the merchant’s desire to locate a tutor for Manuel had introduced the nearly destitute Mayllos to Barbarín. Mayllos had eagerly forfeited his unpredictable earnings as a letter writer to accept a wage of four pesos a month to provide private instruction for Manuel. As this relationship deepened, Mayllos had at times stayed in Barbarín’s home as a guest and had entered into the merchant’s social circle. Almost from the moment witnesses brought Mayllos to the attention of investigators, they had wondered if he could be the author of the revolutionary pasquines that had been distributed in the city. Álzaga noted in a report to the court that Mayllos’ hand seemed very similar to the hand that had written ‘LIBERTY’ on the papers scattered around the Plaza Mayor. Àlzaga’s later actions indicate that he saw Barbarín’s unusual decision to provide Manuel with a private tutor to be a political act. The deeply conservative Álzaga saw the bloody excesses of the French and Haitian Revolutions as predictable outcomes that inevitably followed intellectual assaults on religion and monarchy and, more specifically, on the hierarchy of master and slave.29 The bloodshed, property destruction and sacrilege unleashed by both revolutions had their roots, for him, in the era’s secularizing passions and the dangerous erosion of a divinely inspired social order. The familiar mixing of white and black, slave and free—as well as Barbarín’s desire to educate his slave—suggested a dangerous lack of respect for this God-given order as well as a wilful negligence of propriety.


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Having thoroughly interviewed most of Barbarín’s associates, Álzaga finally turned his attention to the slave. Under questioning, Manuel freely admitted that he and his master had occasionally taken walks together. He admitted that he was treated ‘with love and dressed well’ by his master. He insisted, however, that this treatment and the shared moments of leisure were completely innocent. He claimed that his master never talked about the revolutions in France or Haiti, but admitted that Barbarín had promised him freedom. According to Manuel, however, Barbarín had only promised manumission if he decided to return to Spain. Álzaga then questioned Manuel about his tutor. Why had his master paid a tutor to teach him to read and write? Manuel replied that his master wanted his help in managing the shop’s accounts. If he learned to read and write then Barbarín would be free to leave the shop when business demanded. What, the alcalde enquired, was Manuel reading? Manuel replied that he generally read accounts and letters relative to his master’s business, but that Barbarín was willing to have him read ‘any book’ to advance his instruction. Despite the explanations offered by Barbarín and Manuel, Álzaga clearly thought this relationship between slave and master was suggestive of revolutionary conspiracy. For him, the Frenchman’s willingness to compromise the expected hierarchy of master and slave was by itself a political provocation. On 26 February 1795, Álzaga ordered the arrest of Juan Barbarín and Manuel. A month later the French tutor, Mayllos, joined them in jail.

A slave’s angry voice Almost at the same time that Álzaga began his pursuit of Juan Barbarín, his investigators uncovered a new lead. For the first time, authorities heard evidence that the violent language of revolution had been spoken in the streets of Buenos Aires. Don Miguel García de Bustamante, a petty retailer, provided the crucial testimony. He reported that while visiting the home of Doña Cecilia Soliban, wife of a Spanish master artisan, they had talked about ‘the conspiracy that everyone thinks threatens the capital’.30 Doña Cecilia told Bustamante that her moreno (black) slave, José Albariño, knew details of the plot. She profitably employed José as a cook for the caulkers and ship carpenters who worked at the local shipyard. Recently, José’s supervisor at the shipyard had complained to her that during a break her slave had yelled at his free workmates who were teasing him that ‘on Good Friday they [the city’s slaves] would adjust accounts’. Once informed of this threat, she confronted José, but he passed the statement off as a joke. Her husband, Don Jacinto Albariño, however, was enraged. He loaded his shotgun and pointed it at José’s heart, telling him that death was ‘what a slave willing to conspire against his owner’s life deserved’. Desperate to placate his master and save his life, José offered to discover more about the planned Good Friday uprising.


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With the shotgun no longer pointed at his heart, José told his masters that his participation in the rising had been solicited by ‘a creole without office or employment but decent in his appearance’. While this description would eventually prove misleading, José’s claim that this revolutionary recruiter assured him that ‘decent people’ were committed to the conspiracy raised alarms. Álzaga sent agents to question José who volunteered to lead them to their quarry. This mysterious revolutionary turned out to be José Díaz, a married 62-year-old migrant from Corrientes who had lived in Buenos Aires for over a decade. In the numerous documents generated by the judicial process, he was at different times identified as a mestizo, a mulatto and a moreno. This lack of clarity was not uncommon in late colonial Buenos Aires, where authorities routinely assigned racial nomenclature in imprecise ways in judicial enquiries and even censuses. Díaz always referred to himself as a free moreno. Díaz, the slave José Albariño testified, had claimed to him ‘that the French would unite with blacks in a conspiracy that would offer liberty to everyone’. Hoping to illuminate the full plot, Álzaga urged Don Jacinto Albariño to have his slave try to identify Díaz’s co-conspirators. Álzaga’s first-order priority was the location of the arms and ammunition accumulated by conspirators and the discovery of other plotters. Approached again by the slave José, Díaz now said ‘that six thousand armed men are waiting for orders in the cities of Paraguay, Corrientes, and Santa Fe’. The slave, now in effect acting as Álzaga’s agent, recalled another damning incident. He remembered that when he had complained about his master’s treatment, Díaz had asserted that ‘masters forced their slaves to work too hard and this mistreatment is what led them to plan a rebellion’. According to the now pliant and talkative slave, Díaz had also stated that ‘the uprising would unite the French, Indians, mulattos, and blacks to achieve freedom for all.’ Díaz, the slave José asserted, had warned him to be prepared so that ‘when the shouts [announcing the uprising] are heard slaves should be prepared to kill their masters and their families and then go to the plaza with all the money and firearms they find in their masters’ homes’. Unwilling to rely on this cooperative slave’s amateur sleuthing, Álzaga now questioned José Díaz directly under oath, hoping to compel the discovery of additional details. Díaz denied knowing the imprisoned Juan Barbarín or his slave Manuel and claimed to know nothing of the ‘planned uprising of the French’. He tried to put as much distance as possible between himself and the slave of Jacinto Albariño, even denying he knew the slave by name. Unable to sustain this fiction, he admitted having a conversation in which José had told him that his master owned seven or eight firearms in good condition. On the basis of this testimony, Álzaga ordered the arrest of José Díaz. Álzaga then questioned María Ignacia, the second wife of the once widowed José Díaz in an attempt to find some link with Barbarín and other


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suspects. He demanded the names of those who frequented their home. Rather than a rich list of potential revolutionaries, she gave Álzaga a thin list of relatives and poor associates: ‘my sister Beata, two poor boys, and my uncle Jacinto who sometimes visits from his farm’. Did her husband have firearms? He had only a ‘knife and a small shotgun’. When asked if ‘a negro’ (the slave José) had come to the house looking for her husband, María Ignacia denied the visits, thus putting all of this damning testimony at risk. Her story, corroborating that of her husband, was that at the time the slave José claimed to have talked with Díaz about the conspiracy, she and her husband had gone to the Cathedral to hear the noon sermon and then retuned home for mate. According to María Ignacia, she and her husband later that day went to hear a second sermon delivered at the chapel of the Royal Hospital. While the slave José’s testimony had portrayed Díaz as a firebreathing revolutionary who urged slaves to murder their masters in their beds, María Ignacia presented Díaz as a religiously observant family man with a life dominated by homely routines. Had the slave José, questioned by authorities because of his own incendiary remarks, sought to deflect attention to Díaz to save himself? While Álzaga focused on Díaz, José’s master, Don Jacinto Albariño, continued to press for more details. Using a mix of threats and promises of rewards to extract details from José, Albariño passed on to Álzaga’s agents more information about the planned attack on Good Friday. His slave, he reported, now remembered that Díaz claimed that once the revolutionaries had taken the fortress and killed the garrison ‘the viceroy will be beheaded because he is a thieving dog who is sending all our silver to Spain’.31 Álzaga quickly found others to verify the outline of José’s damning testimony. Don Diego Alvarez remembered a conversation with Díaz in the home of Pedro Carrasco ‘more or less three months ago’. Díaz, he claimed, spoke with ‘too much pride’ that soon the ‘Spaniards would yield to the points of the lances and knives of the blacks and Indians’. Díaz had gone on to say that, after the revolt, ‘all the property of the Spaniards would be given to the Indians and blacks’. Pedro Carrasco, whose home served as the site for this outburst, and María Lorenza who was also present confirmed this damaging testimony. Despite the belligerent talk and bellicose attitude confirmed by many witnesses, a thorough search of the Díaz home on 22 March produced only the single knife and an old shotgun that Díaz’s wife had already mentioned. More frustrating still to Álzaga was the absence of any revolutionary documents in this humble home: no lists of conspirators, no manifestos and no plans of military fortifications. A slower moving enquiry might have paused to wonder how close to the centre of a conspiracy this illiterate, unskilled labourer with a reputation for drunkenness might be. When Álzaga returned to the jail to question Díaz again, he pressed for the names of everyone implicated in the ‘French insurrection’. Using sworn testimony gathered from others, Álzaga forced Díaz to admit a series of


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small lies in his earlier testimony. He acknowledged that he had spoken to the slave José on a number of occasions and that he had passed on rumours about the ‘uprising of the French and blacks’ in his conversations with others. Nevertheless, he continued to assert that he was ‘innocent of the planned insurrection’. Álzaga was convinced of Díaz’s involvement in the conspiracy, but he had reached a dead end. While it appeared that Díaz had recruited the slave José for the conspiracy and spoken to others of his plans, Álzaga still knew nothing of the conspiracy’s organization, leadership or membership. At this point, the alcalde summarized his findings to the prosecutor of the audiencia, noting that multiple witnesses testified that Díaz had talked about the planned insurrection for months and had threatened others with violence. With little prodding, Álzaga convinced the court on the 30th of March to authorize questioning Díaz under torture, a seldom used expedient in Buenos Aires.32 The next day at 8 pm two jailors brought Díaz from his cell to the secondfloor room in the city hall where authorities kept the instruments of torture. Waiting for him were Álzaga, the surgeon Bernardo Nogué and a Franciscan priest.33 Álzaga now read the standard judicial formula to Díaz, demanding that he reveal the ‘principal authors of the conspiracy’. When Díaz again insisted that he knew nothing more, Álzaga informed him that ‘whatever injury or mutilation of your body, even if death results, would not be the fault of the torturer because you have not confessed the truth’. At this point the jailors forced Díaz into a chair and restrained his arms and legs. The torturer then fastened knotted cords to the large muscles of his arms and legs and tightened one after another with a winch. Despite Díaz’s cries for mercy—‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph help me please!’—Álzaga pushed on until the surgeon intervened, reporting later to the high court’s prosecutor that Díaz had lost circulation in one leg and that his left arm had been dislocated. Given that the jail was located only 50 steps from the place of torture, Díaz’s screams certainly penetrated the cells of Barbarín and his slave Manuel. The Plaza Mayor, with its markets and food stalls, was only a few dozen yards from this scene of brutality. Even though only a few hundred remained in the plaza in the early evening, how many heard the screams? How long did it take for the story to spread across the city, entering every home and shop? In a city already on edge because of late-night police searches, increased military patrols and mounting arrests, the torture of Díaz must have created a sense of imminent threat and impending violence. The decision of Álzaga to use torture confirmed in the popular imagination the scale of the conspiracy and the grave dangers the city faced. The torment of Díaz produced neither names of other conspirators nor the location of a hidden arms cache. For Álzaga, his failure to break Díaz confirmed the prisoner’s perverse and criminal attachment to the conspiracy rather than his innocence. Now completely out of patience, Álzaga


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returned to the high court to seek permission to torture Díaz a second time. Without hesitation the court granted the alcalde’s request. Thirteen days after the first torment jailors returned Díaz to the second-floor room. With the surgeon and Franciscan priest again in attendance, Álzaga ordered the torture to proceed. José Díaz was strapped into a chair with broad arms and his hands forced into heavy leather gloves fastened to the arms of the chair, leaving the tips of his fingers exposed. At Álzaga’s command the torturer slowly forced a steel blade between the nail and flesh of each finger on the right hand, turning and twisting while Díaz begged for mercy and cried out to God to help him. The torment lasted 28 minutes but produced no new revelations. Unable to continue with the left hand because that arm had been dislocated in the previous torture, Álzaga suspended the torture and returned to the court to request permission for a third torture. With the city now on edge and with so little benefit extracted from the first two tortures, the court refused, noting the two ‘cruel’ tortures already inflicted on Díaz. Álzaga now turned his attention away from Díaz in order to follow the most promising lead yet uncovered by his investigators.

The slave Juan Pedro’s story On 8 March 1795, Álzaga sent his agents to the bakery owned by the French immigrant Juan Luis Dumont to interview his employees both slave and free. Among the first questioned was Juan Pedro, an African-born slave who had been purchased in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by a Spanish artillery officer who later sold him to Dumont. Juan Pedro’s testimony had an electric effect on the enquiry. He told the interrogator, and later Álzaga, that his master regularly held ‘meetings of Frenchmen’ in his home that lasted all afternoon. According to the slave, once Dumont and his visitors finished eating and drinking around 6 pm the group always toasted ‘Liberty’ before leaving for home. While Álzaga’s investigations of Juan Barbarín and José Díaz had led to their arrest, he had not been able to tie either man to a group of co-conspirators. Given Díaz’s bombastic narrative of planned attacks on the city’s military garrison and viceroy, Álzaga believed that there had to be large numbers of conspirators backed by significant resources. Now, with the testimony of Juan Pedro, Álzaga had what he believed was a first glimpse of this formidable conspiracy. Álzaga pressed Juan Pedro for details. Who attended these revolutionary meetings? Who was the leader? Where were the documents and arms? Juan Pedro was helpful. He revealed the group quickly. It included Dumont’s foreman Antonio Gallardo; Don Antonio, ‘the clockmaker’ (this was Antonini); Don Andres, ‘the tailor’ who lived near the Sergeant Major; Don Juan, ‘the cripple’, a tavern owner who lived near the Church of the Conception; and a ‘tall Frenchman’ who worked for Don Santiago Liniers. Just as a locomotive


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slowly gathers the momentum to set a chain of freight cars in motion, Juan Pedro patiently provided the alcalde with the convincing details that would focus the investigation on his master, Juan Luis Dumont.34 The cooperative Juan Pedro also remembered that, in late 1794, the usual afternoon meeting had broken up in a panic when a military patrol passed by Dumont’s home. According to Juan Pedro, the threatening appearance of the passing patrol led the group to move its meetings to a farm in the nearby countryside. With little effort, Álzaga discovered that the farm belonged to two members of a French noble family: the Count Liniers and his brother Santiago Liniers who held a commission in the Spanish Navy.35 The count held a royal licence to produce dried beef for the Spanish fleet and his brother managed the count’s assets in Buenos Aires. Here, for the first time, Álzaga could see suspects of a stature that might threaten the colonial regime, individuals influential enough to serve as conduits for the venomous content of the French and Haitian Revolutions. When asked about arms, Juan Pedro’s testimony suggested that his master owned what seemed like an inexplicable armoury for a baker: ‘two carbines, three shotguns, a sword and a wide-bladed lance as well as four pistols’. He also claimed that Dumont and his friends had tried to recruit him for the conspiracy. He recalled that Dumont had sent him to the Liniers estate with food in anticipation of a meeting of the conspirators. While there, he claimed to have seen arms hidden behind barrels of lard. He also remembered that the estate manager (later revealed to be Carlos Josef Bloud) had closely questioned him about his background and knowledge of weapons. Juan Pedro proudly repeated to Álzaga what he had told Liniers’s foreman: he had been a soldier in Guinea and had used firearms before his capture and transport to Brazil as a slave. He told Bloud that in Brazil he had gained additional experience with rifles and shotguns and learned to use a sword. According to Juan Pedro, Bloud then sent him back to his master with a note. After reading the note, Juan Pedro claimed, Dumont said ‘I purchased you for evil and, if you serve me as I command on a Thursday or Friday ... , I will set you free’. Two days after these revelations, Juan Pedro presented additional details of the planned uprising to Álzaga, confirming the slave José’s claim of a Maundy Thursday or Good Friday date for the attack on the garrison and the planned execution of the viceroy. Álzaga quickly swept up every member of the Dumont circle and searched their homes and businesses. The only person to escape arrest was Santiago Liniers who managed the estate Juan Pedro claimed was the conspiracy’s organizing centre. Liniers, who moved in the social circle of the viceroy, proved too connected and too powerful to question directly because of his noble status and his marriage to the daughter of Don Martín de Sarratea, one of the city’s wealthiest merchants. When Álzaga demanded the keys to his estate and to the strong boxes he kept there, Liniers waited days before answering and then wrote directly to the viceroy to complain that Álzaga


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had ignored the protocols required when treating a person of his rank and position. While Liniers escaped the dragnet, authorities arrested his foreman, Bloud, as well as two other employees.36 With 30 men now in jail, Álzaga collected testimony that seemed to confirm many of Juan Pedro’s claims. Dumont certainly was at the centre of a large group of artisans and shopkeepers, mostly European immigrants. They met three or more times a week to share meals in private homes or, sometimes, in restaurants or cafes. While Álzaga’s agents found no arms cache at the Liniers estate, the search of Dumont’s home yielded the formidable armoury reported by Juan Pedro. A small number of firearms were then uncovered at the homes of the other members of the Dumont circle. Additional witnesses confirmed Juan Pedro’s damning testimony of group toasts to ‘Liberty’. Álzaga was even able to establish a tenuous connection between the Dumont group and Juan Barbarín, the first suspect arrested in the enquiry: Pablo Mayllos, hired by Barbarín to teach his slave Manuel to read, shared a room with one of Dumont’s closest friends, the Italian clockmaker Santiago Antonini, who had resided illegally in Buenos Aires since 1792.37 A late-night search of Antonini’s room by Álzaga’s agents provided another link to the broad conspiracy. Hidden in Antonini’s bedclothes was a copy of an inflammatory pasquín with the words ‘Long Live Liberty’. Upon the discovery of this incriminating document, the terrified Antonini tried to save himself by offering a bribe to Álzaga’s lieutenant, a mistake that confirmed for his accusers that he was a ringleader. Struggling to pull the disparate threads of the investigation together, Álzaga suspected that Mayllos, Manuel’s tutor, had written the pasquín found among Antonini’s possessions. Álzaga now returned to the audiencia to request the opportunity to question Antonini, Dumont, Gallardo and Juan Polovio, a Sardinian tavern owner and friend of Dumont, under torture.38 The court granted permission to proceed with Antonini, the individual in possession of the damning invocation to liberty. Antonini’s torment closely followed the experience of José Díaz. Witnesses claimed that his cries were heard across the city as the knotted cords were tightened. The effect on his friends in the nearby cells must have been terrifying. Because Antonini provided nothing new, Álzaga asserted to the court that this form of torture was useless with a hardened revolutionist and committed conspirator. Following the course he had pursued with Diaz, Álzaga now received permission for a second torture: the use of steel points driven beneath the fingernails.39 This time jailors had to carry the terrified prisoner up the steps to face his interrogator. Antonini now broke. He admitted to Álzaga that he had participated in the conspiracy, naming Dumont as the prime organizer and naming his roommates and friends as co-conspirators. Álzaga finally had the confession that had eluded him in the preceding weeks. He pressed


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Antonini to connect the Dumont group to Liniers as well as to Díaz and Barbarín and demanded the location of the conspiracy’s arms caches. As Álzaga pushed for the details that would condemn his friends to the torment that now threatened him, Antonini somehow recovered his strength and disavowed his initial testimony. Antonini had to know that he was condemning himself to the awaiting torture. Dragged into the chamber and strapped into the chair, Antonini suffered 50 minutes of horror as the torturer forced his steel blade beneath each fingernail. Twisting and turning in pain Antonini begged God and the saints to save him, but offered no new information. Once again Álzaga had failed to crack open the conspiracy. This terrible event effectively ended the use of judicial torture in colonial Buenos Aires. When Álzaga returned to the high court to ask permission to torture Antonini a third time, the judges refused. Nevertheless, on May 3 the high court’s prosecutor announced he would ask for the death penalty for Antonini and others implicated with Dumont. This proved a hollow threat. With Álzaga’s enquiry exhausted and the court embarrassed by the tortures, defence lawyers pointed out the absurdities in Álzaga’s allegations. Could anyone imagine that the illiterate and often-drunk José Díaz was a threat to the colonial order? Where was the arms cache collected by Dumont according to Juan Pedro? Who were the leaders of the planned insurrection? Was there any evidence that Barbarín had conspired with anyone? What was this case based on, the lawyers asked? Álzaga had arrested 30 men and tortured two as a result of the testimony of two angry slaves: José, the shipyard cook, and Juan Pedro, the disgruntled slave of the baker Dumont. Don Pedro Medrano, Dumont’s lawyer, argued that Juan Pedro was notorious for his rebelliousness and violent temper. He was, according to Medrano, a chronic runaway and known thief who had actually faced down a military patrol sent to return him to Colonel Josef García Martinez de Caceres y Garre, his first master. His bad behaviour had finally forced his master to give him to Dumont for the nominal price of one loaf of bread a day. This, Medrano asserted, made it clear that Juan Pedro was so difficult and rebellious that his first owner had effectively given him away. Medrano then described what he claimed was the origin of Juan Pedro’s lies. Once under the authority of Dumont, Juan Pedro had run away again to visit his girlfriend. Determined to assert his authority, Dumont had had a cell constructed in the bakery and placed the slave in it each night. Unbowed, Juan Pedro had robbed the bakery’s cash box and fled again. When captured and returned to the bakery, Dumont had ordered a heavy iron collar riveted around Juan Pedro’s neck. Why, Medrano asked the court, would Álzaga believe this vengeful slave’s testimony? Medrano went on to explain the arms found in the bakery in ways that reveal the seldom appreciated character of slavery in Buenos Aires. There were ‘many weapons in the bakery’, he admitted, but bakers ‘were forced to work with slaves who were the vilest, most abusive and disposed to conspiracy


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against masters’. He claimed that ‘every baker’ in Buenos Aires ‘feared for his life’ and, as a result, took measures to protect himself from his slaves. ‘If you examined every bakery and similar shops you would encounter the same or greater numbers of arms’, he asserted.40 With the local situation altered by peace with France, the high court published its decision on 10 September 1795. It determined to send Barbarín and all the members of the Dumont group to Spain for the final disposition of their cases. The court also ordered their possessions seized and sold to cover court costs. Given that the prosecutor had sought the death penalty, it appears that some mix of mercy, political expediency and embarrassment led the court to pass final responsibility to Spain.41 Among those arrested, José Díaz, the 62-year-old free moreno already brutalized by two sessions with the torturer, was punished most severely, sentenced to ten years in the desolate Malvinas. While he was the least likely conspirator, he was the only prisoner who had publicly expressed revolutionary threats to colonial authorities. His sentence reflected his intemperate public words. Soon after authorities sent Díaz to the Malvinas, his wife died in Buenos Aires. After many failed petitions for mercy, his sister gained a small victory when authorities allowed Díaz to serve the remainder of his ten-year term in the city jail.42 Despite the high court’s order, Barbarín and the Dumont group were able to remain in Buenos Aires. The intervention of the French Ambassador to Spain may have proved influential. With peace re-established, he had appealed to Manuel de Godoy y Álvarez de Faria, the Prince of Peace, to demand justice for all the French citizens arrested and imprisoned in Buenos Aires. He dismissed the case against them as the product of xenophobia and malfeasance, claiming that Martín de Álzaga, ‘a petty magistrate’ and a ‘rich and superstitious, ambitious and vindictive man’ had concocted the cases to profit personally from the prosecution.43 While the result of this appeal is lost, we know that the Buenos Aires court dropped the prosecutions. Many of those implicated or arrested in 1795 reappear later in prominent positions. Barbarín’s slave, Manuel, gained his freedom for heroic action during the British invasion of 1807 and then served as a military officer until his death in 1831. Antonini’s strength in the face of torture helped forge strong ties with Santiago Liniers, who successfully led the local military defences that defeated the British invasions of 1806 and 1807. Following his success against the British, a grateful king named Liniers interim viceroy and granted him the title Count of Buenos Aires. While serving as local military commander, Liniers named Santiago Antonini Commissary General. Martín de Álzaga and Liniers clashed again in 1809. Claiming that Viceroy Liniers was supportive of Napoleon’s ambitions, Álzaga led a failed effort to create a local junta dominated by wealthy Spanish merchants. In a final irony, patriot juntas ordered the execution of Liniers (1810) and Álzaga (1812) as royalist conspirators.


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The context for the prosecution of this ‘French Conspiracy’ was provided by a long period of racial confrontation and conflict within the city’s artisan community and by fears induced by the city’s fast-growing slave population. The period’s rising prices and import shortages roiled labour relations and shocked an urban population complacent after nearly twenty years of growth and prosperity. While the catalysts for Álzaga’s enquiry were external—the French and Haitian Revolutions and Spain’s war with France—it was local experience that gave these external threats real traction in Buenos Aires.44 There is little reason to doubt the claims of innocence made by the prisoners and their lawyers in 1795. Yet it is clear that the powerful political and intellectual forces moving through the Atlantic world had gained purchase in late colonial Buenos Aires. Despite the colonial government’s efforts to control the flow of information, news from France and Haiti circulated across the class structure. Barbarín followed events closely and, when pressed, offered a provocative defence of the regicide and Robespierre. Antonini, Dumont and the other artisans were poorer and less educated, but had accessed news from these revolutionary centres through conversations in the city’s taverns, cafes and restaurants where they mixed with sailors and passengers brought to the city by long-distance trade. Even José Díaz, uneducated and poor, found in the era’s powerful narrative and its revolutionary vocabulary a new way to voice his frustration and anger with his colonial condition. The French, he asserted confidently, would make common cause with slaves, black freemen and Indians to sweep away Spanish rule. Slaves, he claimed, would murder their masters and execute the Spanish viceroy. Díaz would pay a high price for retailing these violent expressions, but he was hardly unique. As Álzaga’s enquiry made clear, slaves and servants across the city had discovered the power of this new vocabulary and had resorted to it instinctively when owners pushed too hard or demanded too much.

Notes This essay is a shortened and revised version of a chapter in my forthcoming book, Workshop of Revolution: Plebeian Buenos Aires, 1776–1810 (forthcoming early 2011, Duke University Press). 1. This and related documents are found in Ricardo R. Caillet-Bois, Ensayo sobre el Río de la Plata y la revolución francesa (Buenos Aires, 1929), apéndices, cx–cxi. 2. A useful short summary of these events is found in Boleslao Lewin, ‘La “conspiración de los Franceses” en Buenos Aires (1795)’, Anuarío 4/4 (1960): 9–57. For a more dramatic and colourful version, see Exequiel César Ortega, El complot colonial (Buenos Aires, 1947).


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Conclusion

119

3. I outline the rate of population growth in ‘Estimaciones de la población de Buenos Aires en 1744, 1778 y 1810’, Desarrollo Económico 73/19 (1979): 105–119. 4. For the effects of these large changes on the broader regional economy see Juan Carlos Garavaglia, ‘Economic Growth and Regional Differentiations: The River Plate Region at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Hispanic American Historical Review 65/1 (1985): 51–89. Garavaglia argues that the regional economy grew by 59 per cent between 1786 and 1802, 57. 5. For evidence of the drought see Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Cabildo de Buenos Aires, Correspondencia con el virrey, 1795–96, 10 December 1795. The cabildo, ‘finding in this city a notable shortage of wheat’, notes the ongoing wheat shortage and high prices and tells the viceroy that wagons would be sent to Lujan and more distant Santiago del Estero. 6. Buenos Aires also imported thousands of slaves from Brazil. Viceroy Arredondo provided a breakdown of slave imports for 1792 that suggests the enduring importance of Brazil. He stated that from 11 February 1792 to 16 March 1793 the city received 2,689 slaves; 425 directly from Africa and the rest from Brazil. Memorias de los virreyes del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1945), 394. 7. As early as 1778, the baker Juan Villa owned 20 slaves. By 1810, six bakeries in Buenos Aires together employed 171 slaves. See the census of 1810 in AGN, Sección Gobierno, Censo de 1810. For the 1778 case see Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Documentos para la historia Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1913– ), vol. 11, 235. 8. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Interior, legajo (bundle, hereafter ‘leg.’), 26 and expediente (folder, hereafter ‘exp.’), 4 and 25. 9. Memorias de los virreyes, 375. 10. Ibid. 69. 11. Caillet-Bois, Ensayo sobre el Río de la Plata, 32–46. 12. This led to the seizure of the Dragon in Montevideo. Found on board were scores of banned books. The captain, Alejandro Duclos Guyot, and the crew were detained until 1796. Duclos Guyot was back in the Río de la Plata at the time of the British invasions, probably as a Napoleonic agent, and was made an aide-decamp by Santiago Liniers. See Caillet-Bois, Ensayo sobre el Río de la Plata, 60–75. 13. See Ortega, El complot colonial, 55–57. 14. For a short summary see Gabriel A. Puentes, Don Francisco Javier de Elío en el Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1966), 13–16. 15. The ongoing struggle between the cabildo’s regulators and the bakers led to a new round of regulations and threatened fines in 1794. Juan Luis Dumont who was arrested in 1795 was among those on the list. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Archivo del Cabildo, 1794, 388–392. 16. See Ricardo R. Caillet-Bois, ‘La américa española y la revolución francesa’, Boletín de la Academia Nacional Historia 13 (1940): 159–216 (here 203). 17. These and many other testimonies are collected in AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Interior, leg. 38, exp. 1–19. 18. Caillet-Bois, Ensayo sobre el Río de la Plata, 75–76. 19. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Interior, leg. 38, exp. 1, 33. 20. Ibid. 36. 21. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Tribunales, leg. 60, exp. 6. In the judicial process discussed here one of the defence lawyers reminded the court that ‘public opinion had clamoured incessantly for the discovery, arrest, and punishment’ of those attempting to raise an insurrection in Buenos Aires. 22. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Interior, leg. 38, exp. 1, 16. 23. Ibid. 8.


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24. Ortega, El complot colonial, 86–87. 25. Ibid. 9–10. 26. The Barbarín case, including all interrogations and judicial actions, is found in AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Interior, leg. 38, exp. 1, 52. 27. Ibid. 61–67. 28. Ortega, El complot colonial, 127. 29. This connection between the revolutionary assault on monarchy and the church and the presumed authority of master over slave was explicitly asserted by Álzaga. See Archivo Historico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, ‘Barbarín por conspirador (1795)’, Real Audiencia, Criminal Provincial, Legajo 104. 30. The case of José Díaz is found in AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Interior, leg. 38, exp. 1. 31. Ibid. 32. This discussion is based on Archivo de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, La Plata, Argentina, 1–38. 33. The Franciscan’s name is not found in the documents. The physician, Bernardo Nogué, would be present for the two tortures of Díaz and later Santiago Antonini. At the end of the judicial process he demanded that his fees be paid by the prisoners. See AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Tribunales, leg. 60, exp. 6 for the cases of Antonini and Dumont. 34. Dumont’s passage to the Indies is found in Archivo General de las Indias (hereafter AGI), Seville, Casa de Contratación, pasajeros a indias, informaciones y licencias, 8 February 1780. 35. See Carl Ludwig Lokke, ‘French Designs on Paraguay in 1803’, Hispanic American Historical Review 8/3 (1928): 392–405. 36. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Cabildo de Buenos Aires, Correspondencia con El Virrey, 1795–96, letter from Martín de Álzaga to Nicolás de Arredondo, 12 March 1795. 37. Juan Luis Dumont testified that he had known Santiago Antonini in Cádiz before they both emigrated and that he had given Antonini a loan of 100 pesos when he arrived. See AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Tribunales, leg. 60, exp. 6. 38. Ibid. Testimony provided to Álzaga alleged that Dumont had offered a toast upon news of the execution of Louis XVI in the tavern of Polovio. 39. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Cabildo de Buenos Aires, Correspondencia con El Virrey, 1795–96. 40. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Tribunales, leg. 60, exp. 6. 41. Memorias de los virreyes, 375. Viceroy Arredondo’s memoir at the end of his viceregency notes that these cases were sent on to Spain for ‘final resolution’. 42. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Solicitudes Civiles, Libro F–G, 272–273. 43. AGI, Estado, 79, numero 104, letter sent 14 Thermidor Year 4 (1 August 1796). 44. AGN, División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Tribunales, leg. P12, exp. 18, tracks the growing controversy with the city’s bakers. By the middle of 1790 fines for poor quality or lightweight bread were doubled to 40 pesos and three bakers, unable to pay the fines, were placed in jail.


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Armed with Swords and Ostrich Feathers: Militarism and Cultural Revolution in the Cape Slave Uprising of 1808 Nigel Worden

Introduction On the evening of 27 October 1808 Lord Caledon, governor of the newly acquired Cape Colony, received an alarming report.1 Some 340 slaves were advancing on Cape Town from the Zwartland and Koeberg hinterland. During the preceding 24 hours, their leaders had attacked over thirty of the prosperous grain farms of the region, taken the farmers prisoner and persuaded the labourers to join them. They planned to ‘first take a battery and then ... write a letter to the Governor, to grant our freedom, and if that was refused we should fight ourselves free’.2 This marked both the first and the largest collective slave rebellion in the history of the Cape Colony, although it was swiftly crushed by two dragoon detachments, its leaders punished and its followers sent back to their owners.3 It has as a consequence not received due attention either in popular memory or in academic writing about slavery at the Cape. Where it has been noted by historians this has usually been in negative terms, emphasizing its weak organization or limited revolutionary consciousness.4 This view was part of the argument of historians in the 1980s that Cape slaves in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries lacked the means of effective mass revolt of the kind demonstrated by many of their transatlantic counterparts.5 However, now that historical interests have shifted towards examination of cultural markers of social identity, the 1808 events can be viewed in rather different ways. The revolt may have been brief and ineffectual in bringing about liberty, but it was certainly not random. Examination of 121


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6

features such as language, gesture, dress, use of space and gendered roles reveal militarized patterns and ritualized reversals that were an integral part of the era of war and revolution in the Atlantic world. The early nineteenth century was an age of ‘cultural revolutionaries’ and the Cape slave rebels can be fruitfully considered as part of this process.6

‘The English troops will fall in with us’7 Cape slaves originated from throughout the Indian Ocean world, brought by the Dutch East India Company from regions as diverse as Madagascar, south-east Africa, India, Sri Lanka and the Indonesian archipelago. However, the Cape was also a part of the Atlantic world. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Cape, in the words of Keletso Atkins, ‘far from being isolated from the broader Atlantic world during this period of immense events ... was strategically positioned at the southernmost end of a great commercial and information highway’.8 It had been much affected by the ‘first world war’ that had been raging since 1792, and had passed backwards and forwards between Dutch and British colonial rule. The latest shift had been in 1806, when British forces defeated the Batavian military Governor General Janssens at Blouberg and established a military-based administration that continued until final confirmation of British rule over the Cape in 1814. Slaves living in the Zwartland and Koeberg areas would have been acutely aware of such upheavals. The battle of Blouberg had only taken place two years before the revolt of 1808 and was within sight of many of the farms that were targeted. Indeed the rebels planned to ‘join altogether at the place where General Janssens encamped with the Dutch troops’ before marching on Cape Town.9 At least some of the rebels believed that they would receive a positive response from the new British rulers. In April 1808 the Westminster legislation ending the slave trade was implemented at the Cape, despite the objections of local slave owners. Although this did little to alleviate the position of slaves in the colony —indeed in some respects it made their lot worse—it raised expectations that the new government was more sympathetic to the slaves.10 The leaders of the Cape revolt were based in Cape Town, where they had contact with the diverse and itinerant population of a port city and would certainly have been aware of the momentous events taking place elsewhere in the Atlantic world. The principal leader, Louis van Mauritius, ran a small wine shop at the harbourside, where two Irishmen, James Hooper and Michael Kelly, told him that ‘there were no slaves in our country, neither in England, or in Scotland or in America’. Louis responded that ‘it was a bad thing that there should be slaves here’.11 They brought welcome confirmation of the hopes of Cape slaves that freedom was in the air. Hooper and Kelly were young Irish men who had drifted around the British Empire in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, coming into contact


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with its diverse social world of soldiers, sailors, servants and slaves. Hooper, aged 26, had been at the Cape for seven or eight months, having previously worked as a servant to a ship’s captain and been in Portsmouth, Spithead and the East Indies (Calcutta).12 Kelly, aged 24, was a soldier in the East India Company army in India who was invalided out and had spent some four or five months at the Cape working as a servant and on board coastal ships.13 Their ideas about the ending of slavery may not have been very accurate, but they did reflect the strong abolitionist sentiments that existed in the Ireland of their youth as well as the broadly radical and revolutionary atmosphere of the Atlantic ships, ports and harbours of the era.14 As a consequence, Louis van Mauritius demanded liberty and the removal of the slave owners to ‘another country’ since ‘I had heard that in other countries all persons were free, and there were so many black people here who could also be free, and that we ought to fight for our freedom and then Basta!’15 Freedom, he came to believe, belonged to the slaves of the British Empire by right and it seemed to him not unreasonable that the new Cape authorities would grant it with a little forceful persuasion. As one farm slave told his companions, ‘as soon as we get to Cape Town the English troops will fall in with us and form a company with us’.16

‘To procure the overthrow of the established order of things’17 Such speculations appealed to many. Abraham van de Caab and Adonis van Ceylon, the two Cape Town slaves who joined Louis, Hooper and Kelly in their expedition to the farmlands were initially typical of many slaves in the eighteenth century who deserted because of specific grievances against their owners. Such slaves usually joined runaway droster bands seeking to escape into the hinterland, rather than being inspired by new revolutionary ideals of overturning the Cape’s social order.18 Once part of the group, however, Abraham and Adonis became inspired by different notions: Abraham told Zwartland slaves that ‘they were going to fight for their freedom and that we must all stand together as comrades’.19 At the subsequent judicial hearings many rebels claimed that they had been misled by Louis into believing that the grooten heeren (great men) had ordered them to come to Cape Town with their owners in tow or else had intimidated them into joining him by threats of having their ‘heads chopped off’ if they refused. 20 However, these were all statements made after the defeat of the uprising and when they wished to make a good impression on those in authority over them. A rather different picture is revealed by other evidence in the testimonies. A group of rebels drinking at a local pondok near Salt River were overheard ‘swearing and ranting that they had been oppressed for long enough and that they should now swiftly become the masters’. 21 As one farm slave said to a farmer, ‘Your time is up’. 22


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Armed with Swords and Ostrich Feathers 123

These responses differed markedly from patterns of slave resistance in the eighteenth century, when slaves had often attacked owners or their property but had then run away. What was novel in this case was that instead of fleeing, the slave rebels captured the farmers, bound them with bridles or ropes and carried them off as prisoners. They then proceeded to other farms to repeat the process. The result was panic in the district. Men, sometimes with their families, as well as women on their own or with their children, fled their homes as rumours spread of the rebel activities. Godlieb Andreas Willer, after hearing from another farmer about the attacks, hid himself behind the wall of his vineyard, from where: at about midnight he saw a troop of about twelve blacks coming to his house who were making a great commotion for a couple of hours and forced their way into his house and after a couple of hours there they went away again; at daybreak a troop of blacks again came on horseback and forced themselves into the house and were there about half an hour before leaving; he came out of his hiding place and returned to his home and found that a mirror and some panes of glass were broken and his desk broken into and its contents strewn about though he couldn’t say in what quantity; four of his slaves were missing, Maart, Africa, Simon and America.23 This represents the world turned completely upside down. The owner of a farmstead runs away and watches helplessly while groups of slaves twice occupy his house and land and his own slaves desert him. Such role reversals were characteristic of the events of 27 October and they represented a new kind of radical challenge to the existing order. Slaves entered the world of the farmstead and took it over. The most evident episode of role reversal was one of deliberate deception. On their first night after leaving Cape Town, the rebel leaders sought overnight lodgings at Braakfontein, ‘but it was refused to them’ and they spent the night sleeping in their wagon in the open veld.24 It is not clear why they were refused, but it might have been that a combined group of slaves, poor whites and (ostensibly) free blacks were not granted the automatic hospitality that more respectable travellers received.25 However, before arriving at Vogelgezang, the farm of Petrus Louw, on the following evening they adopted new guises. They changed into clothes they had brought with them from Cape Town: Kelly and Hooper put on ‘brown frockcoats with a white dimity waistcoat’ and ‘white Chinese linen trousers’, a pair of boots, black neck scarves, round hats and silver epaulettes on their right shoulders. Louis changed into long white trousers, a blue jacket with red collar and gold epaulettes on the shoulders, while Adonis wore a blue jacket, long green trousers with black stripes, a blue scarf and a red hat.26 Thus garbed, they presented themselves at Vogelgezang. Louis was introduced as a visiting


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Spanish naval captain who was travelling in the area ‘for pleasure’ but who spoke no Dutch and therefore remained silent.27 Kelly and Hooper described themselves as lieutenants from the same ship, while Abraham masqueraded as Louis’s personal servant. This time they received better hospitality. Petrus Louw was away from the farm, and did not return that evening, but his wife, Jacomina Laubscher, offered them accommodation and supper. Her testimony and the court prosecutor went into great detail about what happened: The Englishman with the brown frock, intimated to the Spanish Captain to walk in and to sit down, the said Englishman went in first and was followed by the Captain & then by the one with the curled hair [Abraham] and I went also in after them: this pretended black Captain first went and sat down in my hall at a table, and afterwards the others also—they then asked for a bottle of wine, and I ordered it to be given them ... the said three persons supped at table with her that evening, in the clothes above described; sitting the pretended Spanish Captain between the two Englishmen opposite her and her children and were served by one of the slaves they had brought with them, whom she heard called by the name of Abraham whilst the other Englishman with the brown frock on paid very great attention to the pretended Spanish Captain at the table; after supper the three abovementioned persons went to sleep in one room.28 The slave thus became the guest of honour, assuming a prime position at table, ordering wine from the burgher wife who deferentially followed behind him, surrounded by his (white) lieutenants and attended at table by a personal servant. Meanwhile in the slave quarters, Abraham assumed the authority of a master or overseer by taking a sheep from the kraal and slaughtering it, saying that he acted ‘on the orders of the General’.29 During that night, Hooper and Kelly fled but Louis and Abraham assumed control the following morning, ordering Louw’s slaves to inspan the horses and overruling the protests of his wife. Throughout that day the rebels invaded over 30 farms in the region. Authority was now entirely asserted by slaves who, as the Dutch records frequently stated, ‘made themselves master’ of both the territory of the farmsteads and the persons of the farmers.30 In so doing, they acted as masters in numerous and often highly symbolic ways. They gave orders to the inhabitants of the farms they visited in a manner usually reserved for their owners. Adonis, for example, ‘went with Abraham among the slaves at the place where we were and always gave orders on the journey to put the horses before the wagon and spoke very rudely to the wagon drivers’.31 Such behaviour outraged the authorities, as the question to a slave at the subsequent hearings made clear: ‘Did you not know that Louis was a slave ... and that you should not have obeyed any orders given by him?’32


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Louis and other rebel leaders further emphasized their authority by appointing slaves to be their personal servants. Hooper had hired a young slave named Cupido van Mozambique ‘as a servant’, while Louis ordered Galant van Mozambique, a farm slave, to ride behind him ‘as his lijfjonge’ a word which could be translated as personal servant or slave.33 Similarly, the rebel leader Jonas appointed a 40-year old farm slave, Piquet van de Kaap, to be his lijfjonge, ‘and everywhere he went with his horse, I had to look after the horse’.34 As the new masters, the rebel leaders had their own servants. Other rebel actions echoed those of the slave owners. For example, they hunted down farmers who tried to escape, in a reversal of the hunt for slave runaways. Meij van de Kaap, a farm slave, was ordered by the rebel leader Jonas to ‘hunt for Nicolaas Mostert, which I did with my horse and gun and captured that man in the veld and brought him to the house ... at the farm of Mett van der Spuij we caught a slave in the wheat field and forced him to say where his master was, and we then found him and took him captive, and drove him to the house in front of the horses with his wife’.35 Not only were such farmers and their families captured by slaves, but they were also humiliatingly returned to their own farms as captives, on foot, and driven by slaves on horseback. Van der Spuij’s wife asked them in outrage ‘how they dared to drive Christian people in front of the horses like that’.36 Sometimes slaves gave commands while holding a sjambok, the quintessential symbol of the slave owner or overseer. Jan Basson Albertsz, a farm blacksmith, described how he was captured by three slaves, one of whom had a gun and bandolier but all three of whom carried a sjambok.37 Hendrick Grijling, an overseer on the farm of Jan Dreijer, was ordered by ‘a slave unknown to him (actually August van de Caab) who was holding a large sjambok in his hand’ to give him wine, and when he did so in a small glass said that ‘if he did not give him a large glass he would take the sjambok to him’.38 The rebel’s possession of a sjambok was particularly singled out in the sentence at his trial.39 August’s demand for a large glass suggests more than a desire for extra drink. It was an assertion of his authority and a reversal of the norms whereby slaves would be given tots of wine in amounts and at times chosen by the overseer. It was also a transgression of space. Grijling had been standing on the stoep (porch) of the house while the rebels had assembled the farm slaves in the werf (yard). August’s demand for a wine glass, and a large one at that, required Grijling to break the boundary between the ‘slave’ werf and the ‘farmer’ house and wine cellar. Such spatial invasions were a source of particular concern to the authorities in the trial records. A frequent pattern was that the rebels assembled all the slaves and their owners in the farmyard, while horses and wagons were commandeered. Orders were given to hand over guns and ammunition, and sometimes cash and food. Some slaves then entered the homestead itself, often (as above) with a standoff on the stoep at its entrance.40 At


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one level this was a plundering of the houses for food, ammunition, cash and clothing which were of practical use to the rebels.41 They also rifled through the contents of desks and chests to take or destroy papers and documents which represented the legal powers of property that landowners and slaveholders held over them.42 But the very passing over the threshold of the settler homestead without permission of the owner was a violation of the spatial order of the farmstead. The court was much concerned with the issue of who entered houses and who remained outside them.43 For example, Lodewijk van de Kaap stated in his defence that he ‘went up to the door of the house to tell the volk who were inside it that they should do no wrong’, carefully noting that he did not cross the threshold.44 Particularly outrageous was the invasion of bedrooms, the most private of spaces. Adriaan Louw was lying sick in his room when the slave Geduld burst in, walked twice around his bed and then stood at its foot pointing a gun at him and ordered him to be tied up.45 The rebels also showed no respect for the established hierarchies of language. Rebels swore at their opponents, calling them ‘verdoemde schelm’ (damned scoundrel) and ‘moerneucker’ (motherfucker).46 This was typical of the anger shown in many cases of slave resistance in the eighteenth century, although in this case it was made more shaming by the fact that it was done publicly, in front of everyone. Linguistic subversion went further. Louis rebuked one of Hendrick Albertus van Niekerk’s slaves for saying ‘Good day’ to him, with the comment, ‘What’s this with “Good day”? “Good days” are over now, we are Christians’.47 The time for deferential greeting was past as equality was asserted. Abraham van de Kaap told the slave Samina ‘not to cry for a Christian’ since ‘the insurgents the next day would hoist the bloody flag and fight themselves free, and that then the slave girls could in their turn could say jij to their mistresses (a disrespectful form in the language)’.48 Indeed in the testimonies given to the court, several of the farmers reported words uttered by the rebels to them using the familiar jij form. For example, it was reported that Geduld van Mozambique had said to one farmer’s wife, ‘dan moest je hebben hooren smeeken, op al jou praatjes kan jou niets helpen (all your entreaties and prattlings can do nothing to help you now)’.49 There were other examples of rebels silencing, mocking or subverting farmers’ words. Artend de Waal was told (also using the ‘disrespectful’ jij form), ‘Moerneucker, if you speak we’ll shoot you’.50 When Pieter van der Westhuisen Hijsbertsz cried out ‘O God what is happening to me’ as he was tied up, Louis hit him with the side of his sword saying (again with jij), ‘Think you now of God?’51 Verbal ridicule accompanied physical humiliation. The tying up of the ‘Christian’ prisoners emphasized the reversal of their physical power over the slaves. It was not the only bodily reversal that they experienced. Although Robert Ross has stressed that the uprising was remarkably peaceful with no serious physical injuries (apart from one rape, condemned by the rebel leaders), humbling threats to the bodies of


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the farmers and their allies were frequent. Adrian Louw was dragged from his bed by the hair. As we have seen, some were marched in prisoner files. Others were prodded with swords, threatened with guns and hit in the face. In one episode related at the inquest by Johannes Augustus Dreijer Gansz, ‘Abraham did not tie him up but he did hit him with a sword on the side of his hat which he was wearing on his head ... and that there was a small tear on the rim of his hat which he showed [the court] and there was a very small scratch on it’. The most serious blow here was to Dreijer’s dignity. Doffing a hat was expected of inferiors in the presence of their betters.52 It is tempting to speculate that Abraham was aiming to topple Dreijer’s hat from his head in order to emphasize his new-found superiority over the farmer. A major concern of the authorities throughout the hearings was who had been on horseback and who not. Riding, or even just sitting on, a horse was a sign of status and gendered authority.53 Indeed a key marker of male free burgher identity at the Cape was the ownership of a horse and gun.54 Slaves might ride horses, but they did not have the right to do so, and they were not supposed to have guns. However, all of the rebel leaders commandeered horses and Louis gave horses and guns to those he appointed as commanders under him.55 Louis and Abraham’s transition from slaves to free rebel leaders was marked by their progress from their wagon, hired in Cape Town, to horseback. Moreover, they rode horses while farmers were forced into the back of wagons. This was another symbolic marker of the world turned upside down. Much was therefore made in the subsequent trial records of slave rebels ordering farmers down from their horses and of demanding that they stay put in the wagons during the journey through the Zwartland.56 In their subsequent defence some slaves denied that they had ridden on horseback, while others insisted they had ‘been put’ on horses in a passive syntax that tried to minimize their active guilt in such a symbolic transgression of the social order.57 One was more willing to admit to possessing a gun than to riding a horse.58

‘The Captain ordered me to take a sword and to command the people’59 Not all of the rebels rode on horseback. There was a clear hierarchical structure among the rebels, with the leaders riding and other slaves manning the wagons and keeping guard over the captives. As one slave described it, ‘Those on horseback were always the ones who took charge’.60 These included ‘Captain’ Louis, Abraham and the ‘corporals’ whom Louis appointed to take charge of different groups when the rebels split up to attack different farms.61 Hugo de Villiers has cogently argued that much of the language used in the judicial records to describe the rebellion was strongly influenced by a military discourse.62 The list of farms visited was called a ‘march route’,


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leaders were described as ‘captains’ or ‘corporals’ and the whole uprising was represented as a military campaign, requiring counter attack and defeat. It is perhaps not surprising that the authorities of a colony under military command during this period of global warfare should see and depict the uprising in these terms. But what is of particular note is that the rebels also seem to have viewed themselves in this way and acted accordingly. This is not only evident from the discourse of the court records, but also from the symbolic forms of the rebels’ actions during the uprising. Both owed much to the military context of the time. This was marked in a number of ways. The most evident was the adoption by the leaders of the trappings of military authority: uniforms, weapons and horses. Louis, Abraham, Kelly and Hooper had changed clothing before they arrived at the Vogelgezang farm. The dress they adopted was designed to look like regimental uniform. Gold and silver epaulettes and large and small swords presented the wearers as officers. Ostrich feathers were ‘to be put on the hats of the principal persons’.63 The precise form of these costumes was dictated by Hooper: jackets with red collars and cuffs had been ordered from Lendor, a freed slave tailor in Cape Town, and the epaulettes, feather and swords obtained from ‘English shops’.64 The feathers were not worn straight away, but were intended to be placed on Louis’s hat when he was declared as ‘Governor of the blacks at the Cape’, possibly in conscious imitation of the feathered hat of Haitian slave rebel leaders.65 Each element was thus carefully chosen for maximum effect and to convey the necessary authority. The visual markers worked, not only in making Petrus Louw’s wife offer them hospitality but also in persuading other rebels to join them, or at least this is the excuse that they made in their later defence. For instance, the Khoi Dirk Jager said he followed Louis ‘because he was dressed as an officer and so were two other persons each with a silver tassle on their shoulders’.66 David, the wagon driver hired to take them from Cape Town to the Zwartland, believed that Louis must have been a free person since he changed into uniform and was able to ‘dress himself so beautifully’.67 When Hooper changed his mind about the practicality of the plan and abandoned Louis at Vogelgezang, he also removed the symbols of his anticipated power: he ‘took the new hat of Louis on which the feathers were with him and afterwards took the feathers off’. He also removed some of the epaulettes, clearly believing that this would diminish Louis’s power, or even incapacitate him altogether.68 That the rebels had obtained and used such ‘military dress’ was of considerable concern to the authorities, since it ‘served to disguise recognition of who they were’ and used the markings of military authority to ‘make mischief’.69 The uniforms held such potential power that the Fiscal felt the need to make a special request to the Council of Justice a month after the trial, asking what was to be done with the sword, gold and silver epaulettes of the ‘lately executed Louis van Mauritius’.70


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Louis conferred rank on those he appointed ‘corporals’ under him not only by naming them as such, but also by bestowing symbols in military fashion. Spadelle van Bougies described now he was made a ‘corporal’ by Louis the ‘captain’: ‘when we were at the farm of Jan Louw the Captain ordered me to take a sword and to command the people and told me that I must hit them if they misbehaved, and that if I didn’t do so he would shoot me in the head; then I took the sword’.71 Colair van Mozambique described how ‘the Captain forced me to take a horse and to sit on it and Isaac (belonging to Petrus Louw) put a sword in my hand and after I had to ride behind them to watch that people didn’t run away’.72 While we may be suspicious of such testimonies which stressed coercion (and hence tried to put the speakers in a better light with the authorities), it is clear that possession of the sword was a marker of superior command. Swords by this period served as much a ceremonial as a practical function and were used only in cavalry combat and by officers.73 They were also used by the rebel commanders to threaten farmers. Tiberius van de Kaap was accused of ‘setting a sword against the chest’ to force one off his horse, while Jan Dreijer’s hat (as discussed above) was cut by a sword stroke.74 The rebels also sought out guns on the farms they attacked and used them to threaten opponents, in another marker of the world turned upside down (slaves were not usually allowed to carry guns), although they lacked the status symbolism of swords. Uniforms, swords, horses and guns all gave the rebel leaders symbolic as well as actual power. They used this to good effect in exerting command over both the slaves that joined them and the farmers that opposed them. Indeed Loos has suggested that many of the slaves who joined the march to Cape Town followed Louis because of their ‘ingrained habits of obedience’ as much as ‘their latent desire to mutiny’.75 Spadelle van Bougies, for example, claimed as an excuse in his later cross-examination that ‘I am a slave and was given orders in the name of the grooten heeren, and I thought that I had to do it’.76 Louis in particular acted as a military commander, referring to himself variously as the ‘Captain’, ‘Governor of the blacks’, ‘General’ and, according to Hooper, aiming to make himself ‘the chief or king’ once he had taken possession of Cape Town and ‘let loose all the prisoners and set at liberty all slaves, who then undoubtedly would assist’.77 He justified his actions to those who questioned them (both slave and free) by claiming that he in turn was acting on the orders of the grooten heeren, specifying the Governor and Fiscal in particular, and when challenged waving around a piece of paper which he claimed gave him the authority to act as he did. Few of the slaves would have been able to read such instructions, which were in fact written by Hooper, but most were willing to be convinced by being told this was the case.78 Many of the farmers naturally questioned this more closely, although some seemed to accept it while most were overwhelmed by the force rallied against them.79


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For the slave leaders swiftly adopted the role of military commanders, issuing orders to be followed without question and threatening reprisals for disobedience. Orders followed a chain of command with Louis at the pinnacle (backed by his supposed authority from the grooten heeren) and his appointed ‘corporals’ under him who in turn issued orders in his name. Some of them used their authority to their own advantage: Abraham van de Kaap promised the daughter of Adriaan de Waal that if she gave him more wine ‘he was the corporal and could ensure that her father was set free’.80 Those slaves who disobeyed orders from the commanders were punished. Salomon van Mozambique stated at his cross-examination that he had initially tried to run away from the rebels but was recaptured, tied with a rein and forced to walk in front of a horse until he was tied up and placed in a wagon ‘just like the farmers’.81 When Rotterdam van Timor was unwilling to get off the wagon and round up other slaves, Louis stabbed him in the foot with his sword.82 He issued instructions that any slaves found drunk would be ‘hit with a sword’.83 The judicial authorities pointed out to the rebel prisoners that they should not have ‘taken orders’ from other slaves.84 Louis had duped them, just as he and Hooper duped Louw’s wife at Vogelgezang. Clearly, however, the slaves of the Zwartland were more willing to believe that the world was turned upside down and particularly since Louis and his associates backed up their authority by using the symbols and signs of military command, such as uniforms, horses and swords. As one of them commented afterwards, ‘it was done on the orders of my Captain who told us it was on the orders of the general and so did it, although we were so few in number’.85 This, after all, was a world at war.

‘Honest men stay in their homes’86 This militarized rebellion, like war, was men’s work. This too overturned the social order of Cape slave society. As several historians have shown, Cape slave men were emasculated by their status as slaves, unable to assert command in the workplace or patriarchal control within their own families.87 The male slave rebels of 1808 reversed this by asserting what was for them a new form of gendered power and control. It is tempting, albeit speculative, to particularly interpret Louis’s actions in this way. As a slave, Louis’s life was controlled by free women. He had been owned by Willem Kirsten, a man whose marriage broke down ‘as a result of which he became the property of his mistress’.88 He was then hired out to Anna, a free woman who was described as his ‘wife’, although formal marriage was forbidden for slaves. In contrast to the expected gendered role of a free man, Louis the slave’s employment, home, family network and relatively independent status in Cape Town were dependent on his free female partner. Robert Ross speculates that Louis might have been hoping for freedom, but that Anna’s


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illness (and subsequent death during the trial of the rebels) threatened this.89 To become a military commander and to fight for his own freedom was certainly a marked gendered reversal for Louis. We lack enough detail to know about the gendered circumstances of the slaves who joined Louis. What is clear is that their actions asserted a particularly clear notion of masculinity which was at odds with their position as slaves. Riding horses, owning guns and giving orders were characteristic markers of burgher men in Cape society and these were the models that the rebels followed. They also targeted burgher men, rather than women, doubtless because they perceived men to be their main opponents as the patriarchs of the farms. It was the men alone who were to be taken prisoner.90 Burgher women were left behind and, with the notable exception of the rape of Jacoba Baardhuijs, were not harmed. When Pluto van Bengalen threatened one farmer’s wife with a knife, his fellow slaves seized him and placed him in the wagon ‘because they thought I was going to stab the woman’.91 Indeed the absence of Petrus Louw at Vogelgezang on the first night of the revolt was cause of particular consternation to Louis and his companions, who had planned to seize Louw at the first opportunity. They repeatedly asked his wife, Jacomina Laubscher, when her husband was expected home and ‘walked ... backwards and forwards on the stoep’ discussing what to do. Kelly later reported that ‘because the master was not at home I said we should not begin and the wife and children would only be frighted to no purpose, and that we therefore ought rather to wait until the master returned’.92 This change of plan may have been the cause of Hooper and Kelly’s flight that night. The following morning, when Louw still had not returned, Louis and Abraham left Jacomina behind on the farm when they departed.93 Slave women seemed not to have actively participated in the rebellion. This may have been a deliberate choice by the leaders: Louis and Hooper only informed the male slaves at Vogelgezang of their plans in advance.94 Where women are mentioned they are usually presented as passive or loyal to their owners. Spacie, a slave on Dirk Verweij’s farm in the Koeberg, for example, hid the guns and ammunition under the bedding when she heard the rebels demanding them, and Janna, a ‘free Bastard Hottentot’ servant accompanied her mistress in their flight from the rebels and helped her to hide when they ran into them again at a neighbouring farm.95 This might support Robert Shell’s argument that many slave women worked within the household, unlike the male farm hands, and were bound more closely to their owners (and especially their mistresses) by paternalistic ties.96 But it also points to the exclusion of women from the masculine business of conducting rebellion. The rebellion not only changed male slave gendered roles, but it also overturned the gendered position of the farmers. Word soon got around that men were the targets of attack. As a result, settler males fled or hid,


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sometimes together with their families but sometimes leaving their wives and daughters behind to face the rebels alone.97 Several families took refuge in the dark away from the homesteads, and some were captured when they were betrayed by their slaves or by the barking of dogs (another role reversal since dogs usually alerted farmers to the presence of strangers or runaway slaves).98 Hiding in the bushes was hardly a manly action, as the rebels pointed out. When Mett van der Spuij was driven back to his farmhouse together with his wife and children, he was accosted by Goliath, one of the rebel slaves who told him that skulking in the dark was ‘the work of a scoundrel and honest men stay in their homes’.99 It took the slave to point out to the farmer his lack of bravery and masculine virtue. In contrast to this gendered humiliation of male farmers, some of the settler women adopted a more assertive role, perhaps because they had some greater room for manoeuvre since they were not the immediate target of attack. It was Mett van der Spuij’s wife who questioned with outrage why the slaves dared to drive her and her husband in front of horses.100 The elderly Elizabeth Laubscher, on discovering that her son had been taken prisoner, demanded to know which Fiscal it was that Louis claimed had ordered such action, denied that this could be true and insisted that he be released.101 And when Nicholas Mostert fled his farm together with his family, it was his wife who proposed bribing a slave to hide them in return for money and a silver watch.102 Slave men were in control and settler women dealt with them while their menfolk fled or lay tied up in the back of wagons.

‘Preserving the tranquility of this colony’103 Louis’s hope that the authorities would recognize the justice of his cause was misplaced. A detachment of cavalry overwhelmed one group of rebels late at night at Salt River, while another captured the rest the following morning in the Tijgerberg. The odds were stacked against them: the Cape garrison was at this time, according to Bill Freund, at a ‘swollen size ... at its peak [in 1810] numbering 6,407 men—more than were stationed at Gibraltar or Malta’.104 Louis’s operation had not gone according to plan—Hooper and Kelly had fled and did not reappear at Salt River as he had hoped, and there was no spontaneous uprising by the slaves of the town. The rebels were taken prisoner, with the first group placed at the Fort Knokke fortification at Cape Town and the rest detained at a farm in the Tijgerberg.105 Hooper and Kelly were also captured on the run, as was Louis who had fled to Wynberg. Although brief and swiftly suppressed, the revolt had turned the social order upside down. The authorities were concerned that it be swiftly set to rights. After five weeks of intensive examination of over 300 prisoners, the Fiscal recommended that 16 of the leaders be sentenced to death. In the end only five were hanged: the instigators Louis, Hooper and Abraham van de Kaap; Jephta van Batavia, who had formulated the plan with Louis to


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spread the revolt to the Zwartland; and the rapist Cupido van Java.106 Their bodies were to be publicly displayed in Cape Town and in the Zwartland and Tijgerberg regions. On the grounds that this was ‘a sufficient example to deter others from similar attempts’, the other executions were commuted by Caledon.107 Another 34 slaves received various sentences: life imprisonment on Robben Island, hard labour for 15 years, public whipping or a combination of these.108 Caledon expressed his hope that such verdicts would ‘long preserve the means of preserving the tranquility of this colony’.109 The state thus re-established its authority and indicated its ability to dispense both justice and mercy. The remainder, some 250 prisoners, were not sentenced by the Council of Justice but were returned to their owners. This served two purposes. It enabled the authorities to fix the blame on Louis by claiming, in the words of the Governor to the Colonial Secretary, that the majority of the rebels were essentially loyal slaves who were ‘deluded people [that] implicitly obeyed the dictates of one whom they looked upon as the harbinger of their good fortune’.110 This served to reassure the Colonial Office that the Cape was not facing a Haitian-style revolution. The slaves who escaped punishment by the Cape Town authorities were those who had not committed any ‘acts of violence’. But they were ‘released from detention, nevertheless to be subject to domestic correction on account of their preparedness to go with the band and to stay with them and to ride with them’.111 The Council of Justice did not therefore leave them unpunished but instead reinforced the authority of their owners to inflict retribution. At this stage there was little legislative control over the degree of domestic punishment that owners could impose on their slaves, short of murder or severe abuse. Only in the 1820s did the government try to limit the domestic authority of slave owners by restricting the levels of whippings that could be imposed.112 The large majority of the rebels were thus returned into the hands of their owners who were now able to reassert their control by punishing them directly. The gratitude of the farmers at this re-establishment of the natural order of the world as they viewed it was expressed in a letter which 42 of them sent to Caledon on 30 December, thanking him for the ‘paternal care with which your Excellency protected them’ from becoming ‘victims of the fury of the insurgents’. The farmers assured Caledon that they would continue to conduct themselves as ‘quiet, peaceful and obedient inhabitants’; and they ‘flattered themselves’ that they treated their slaves well and had been ‘no cause whatever for the revolt’.113 The British military authorities had thereby successfully secured the allegiance of their Dutch subjects.

Conclusion The uprising was short lived and swiftly subdued. Yet the events of late October 1808 had turned the world upside down not only by the ultimate


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goals of freedom characteristic of this revolutionary age but also by the militarized discourse and values of a world at war. In this, the revolt differed markedly in form and content from slave resistance of earlier decades in the Cape colony. This was reflected not only in the statements of the rebels given later to the authorities but also in their actions and gestures which, for one day at least, challenged the spatial and physical boundaries of the world of slavery. As Natalie Zemon Davis has commented in a different context, a world turned upside down may be set to rights, but not without undermining assent within the society that experienced it.114 The memory of such inversions of October 1808 would have lingered in the minds of those who witnessed them on the farms of the Cape Town hinterland. Despite the hopes and claims of the authorities, their world would never be quite the same again.

Notes 1. Cape Provincial Archives, Cape Town (hereafter CPA), CJ 515, 3. 2. CPA, CJ 516, 37. 3. For summaries of the events see Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, 1983), 97–105; and Jackie Loos, Echoes of Slavery (Cape Town, 2004), 69–73. 4. Ross, Cape of Torments; Karen Harris, ‘The Slave “Rebellion” of 1808’, Kleio (Pretoria), 20 (1988): 54–65. 5. An argument which, with some differences of emphasis, was made in Ross, Cape of Torments; Nigel Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, 1985) and Robert Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Johannesburg, 1994). 6. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, ‘Introduction: An Age of Cultural Revolutions?’ in The Age of Cultural Revolutions ed. Jones and Wahrman (Berkeley, 2002), 1–16. 7. ‘De Engelsche troupes zig bij ons zoude voegen’, CPA, CJ 516, 420. 8. Keletso Atkins, ‘The “Black Atlantic Communication Network”: African American Sailors and the Cape of Good Hope Connection’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 24/2 (1996): 23–25. 9. CPA, CJ 516, 76. 10. After 1808 a reduced number of slaves bore the labour burden of the expansion of the wine farming sector in the colony. Moreover slaves captured from Portuguese vessels were indentured at the Cape as ‘prize negroes’ for 25 years. Christopher Saunders, ‘ “Free, yet Slaves”: Prize Negroes at the Cape Revisited’, in Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, ed. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais (Johannesburg, 1994), 99–115. 11. CPA, CJ 516, 201–202. 12. CPA, CJ 516, 78–81. 13. CPA, CJ 516, 197–199 and 215. 14. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000); Kevin Whelan, ‘The Green Atlantic: Radical Reciprocities between Ireland and America in the Eighteenth Century’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson


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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 (Cambridge, 2004), 216–239; Nini Rodgers, ‘Ireland and the Black Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century’, Irish Historical Studies 32 (2000): 174–192. Nicole Ulrich (WISER, University of the Witwatersrand) is currently undertaking a suggestive doctoral study of the revolt in the comparative context of underclass resistance in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cape. CPA, CJ 516, 28, 412. CPA, CJ 516, 433. ‘Om verrewerping van de bestaande ordre van zaaken te verschaffen en te bewerken’, CPA, CJ 514, 269. For such patterns of slave resistance in the Dutch East India Company period, see Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa, 120–127; and Nigel Penn, ‘Droster Gangs of the Roggeveld and Bokkeveld, 1770–1800’, in Penn, Rogues, Rebels and Runaways (Cape Town, 1999), 147–166. ] CPA, CJ 515, 346. For examples of the former, CPA, CJ 516, 441, CPA, CJ 516, 692 and of the latter, CPA, CJ 516, 447. CPA, CJ 515, 369. CPA, CJ 515, 328. CPA, CJ 515, 251–252. CPA, CJ 515, 399. This was regularly commented upon by visiting travellers. For example, Otto Mentzel, A Geographical-Topographical Description of the Cape of Good Hope, 3 vols (Cape Town, 1921–44), vol. 3, 22–23. CPA, CJ 515, 400–401. CPA, CJ 516, 133; CPA, CJ 516, 25. CPA, CJ 515, 60–1 and 64. CPA, CJ 516, 412. For use of this phrase, see Hugo de Villiers, ‘Commanding the Archives: A Discourse Analysis of the 1808 Slave Rebellion at the Cape’, Historical Approaches (Historical Studies Department, University of Cape Town) 5 (2007): 1–8 (here 5). CPA, CJ 516, 212. CPA, CJ 516, 238. CPA, CJ 414, 30; CPA, CJ 516, 165; CPA, CJ 516, 463. For use of the term jongen see Nigel Worden and Gerald Groenewald (eds), Trials of Slavery: Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794 (Cape Town, 2005), 621. CPA, CJ 516, 610. CPA, CJ 516, 446. CPA, CJ 515, 327. CPA, CJ 515, 112. CPA, CJ 515, 286–287; CPA, CJ 516, 662. CPA, CJ 514, 204; CPA, CJ 802, 803. CPA, CJ 516, 533; CPA, CJ 516, 662. CPA, CJ 515, 421–436 and 439–440. CPA, CJ 802, 749; CPA, CJ 515, 265; CPA, CJ 515, 330. For example, CPA, CJ 516, 699. CPA, CJ 516, 630–631. CPA, CJ 515, 248. CPA, CJ 515, 172 and 353. CPA, CJ 515, 202. CPA, CJ 802, 759.


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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

CPA, CJ 515, 221. CPA, CJ 516, 349. CPA, CJ 515, 103. Nigel Worden, ‘Artisan Conflicts in a Colonial Context: The Cape Town Blacksmith Strike of 1752’, Labor History 46/2 (2005): 155–184 (here, n. 22). For discussion of this in Europe, see Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (London, 2007), 84–88. This is evident in the annual census returns for the colony, in which the horses and guns owned by free burghers were recorded. Male burghers in the rural districts, including unmarried sons and landless eenlopende personen (unattached persons), were regularly listed as possessing at least one horse and a gun. Vrijswarten (free blacks) did not usually possess guns. For example, CPA, CJ 516, 292, 514 and 622. For example, CPA, CJ 515, 184–185 and 172; CPA, CJ 516, 300. For example, CPA, CJ 516, 419 and 647; CPA, CJ 516, 670. CPA, CJ 516, 423. ‘De Captein mij belast een sabel te neemen en ‘t volk te commandeeren’, CPA, CJ 516, 474–475. CPA, CJ 516, 531. CPA, CJ 515, 40–1. De Villiers, ‘Commanding the Archives’. CPA, CJ 516, 228. CPA, CJ 516, 22–23 and 127–128. CPA, CJ 515, 11–12; CPA, CJ 516, 211. CPA, CJ 516, 507. This was considered important enough to be repeated by the Fiscal in his sententie, CPA, CJ 802, 788. CPA, CJ 516, 679. CPA, CJ 516, 209 and 211. CPA, CJ 802, 804; CPA, CJ 516, 255. CPA, CJ 90, 12 January 1809. CPA, CJ 516, 474–475. CPA, CJ 516, 602. Jeremy Black, Warfare in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1999), 118. CPA, CJ 516, 300. Loos, Echoes of Slavery, 72. CPA, CJ 516, 475. CPA, CJ 516, 76–77. For example, CPA, CJ 516, 284, 583, 698. CPA, CJ 515, 115. CPA, CJ 516, 537–538. CPA, CJ 516, 554; CPA, CJ 514, 183. CPA, CJ 516, 590. CPA, CJ 516, 430. For example, CPA, CJ 516, 238, 692. CPA, CJ 516, 522–523. ‘Braave menschen blijven in haar huis’, CPA, CJ 515, 327. Patricia van der Spuy, ‘Making Himself Master: Galant’s Rebellion Revisited’, South African Historical Journal 34 (1996): 1–28; Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth, NH, 1997). Loos, Echoes of Slavery, 70.


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89. Ross, Cape of Torments, 97. 90. On only one occasion, at the first farm visited by the rebels after Vogelgezang, there was some dispute among the rebels as to whether Elizabeth Laubscher, a woman in charge of the farm during her husband’s absence should be taken. She was initially tied up, but released soon after: CPA, CJ 515, 79. 91. CPA, CJ 516, 510–511. 92. CPA, CJ 515, 63; CPA, CJ 516, 206. 93. CPA, CJ 515, 61. 94. CPA, CJ 516, 164. 95. CPA, CJ 515, 295; CPA, CJ 516, 745. 96. Shell, Children of Bondage, 289–329. 97. CPA, CJ 515, 255–256. For an example of flight with a family, CPA, CJ 516, 773. 98. For example, CPA, CJ 515, 318, 325–326. 99. CPA, CJ 515, 327. 100. CPA, CJ 515, 327. 101. CPA, CJ 515, 77–79. 102. CPA, CJ 515, 301–302. 103. CPA, CJ 2498, 143. 104. William M. Freund, ‘The Cape under the Transitional Governments, 1795–1814’, in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (2nd edn, Cape Town, 1989), 329. 105. CPA, CJ 515, 3–4. 106. Sententie, 7 December 1808, George Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, 36 vols (Cape Town, 1897–1905), vol. 6, 440–441. 107. CPA, GH 23/2, Caledon to Castlereagh, 20 January 1809, 45. 108. CPA, CJ 802, 808–818. 109. CPA, CJ 2498, Caledon to Council of Justice, 29 December 1808, 143, reprinted in Records ed. Theal, vol. 6, 440. I am grateful to Nicole Ulrich for drawing my attention to this letter. 110. CPA, GH 23/2, Caledon to Castlereagh, GH, 11 November 1808. 111. CPA, CJ 516, 709–710. 112. John Edwin Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa (Charlottesville, VA, 2003), 48–51. 113. CPA, CO 11, letter 68. Loos, Echoes of Slavery, 73. 114. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), 131.


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Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the Fate of Atlantic Antislavery during the Age of Revolutionary Wars Marie-Jeanne Rossignol

Introduction Jacques-Pierre Brissot is best known as the leader of the Girondin faction during the French Revolution. His name is also usually associated with the beginning of the French revolutionary wars in 1792, and with the rise of the slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint Domingue from 1791 onwards. This is due in particular to his involvement in the first French antislavery society, the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks), which he founded and led. The name of the society (with its allusion to ‘Friends’) may be connected to Brissot’s earlier fascination with British and especially American Quakers, who provided the inspiration for his commitment to the ‘revolution’ of antislavery, as he called it. This chapter explores Brissot’s gradual involvement in a cause which was seen by proponents as very much in keeping with the liberal mood of the 1780s. We follow Brissot from London to Boston and Philadelphia, and from the various Parisian societies he founded to his speeches at the rostrum of the National Assembly. There, however, the tide of the French revolutionary events carried him away from the peaceful, cosmopolitan and universal ideals which he had held in such high estimation, to the war and nationalism that would also envelop many of his peers in Britain and the United States.

Brissot’s British connections, 1778–87: from the Bohème littéraire to the antislavery international1 Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville first developed connections with Britain in his twenties. A provincial law student with literary aspirations, the young Brissot (born in 1754) had moved from his native Chartres to Paris in 1774. By 1778, he had turned away from the law to work for the Scotsman Samuel 139


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Swinton, who published a newspaper, the Courier de l’Europe, which reported on British political affairs and enjoyed a wide readership in Europe. Brissot was supposed to prepare the French-language edition but his relationship with Swinton soured, and he was eventually fired. However, this British connection enabled him to make his first visit to London, a two-week stay in 1779.2 By 1784, Brissot had visited London again, this time to launch a philosophical club there (the ‘lycée’ or ‘lyceum’ in English), together with a newspaper, the Journal du lycée de Londres. He met Quakers who introduced him to other London Friends; and his wife, Félicité, who had spent time in England in her youth, introduced him to an old friend of hers, Miss Capper, who had converted to Quakerism. Miss Capper’s contempt for wealth, her serious conversations and rigorous morals made a great impression on Brissot.3 These combined personal influences may explain Brissot’s attraction to Quakers whose supposed virtues symbolized the new moral and political world he was hankering for. The young journalist was not the only Frenchman to harbour such idyllic views of Quakers: as Edith Philips has demonstrated, there was a ‘Quaker legend’ in pre-revolutionary France, dating from Montesquieu and Voltaire, if not before.4 Quakers (and American Quakers in particular) had been highly regarded in Enlightenment circles since Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734), in which the philosopher devoted his first four ‘Letters’ to the sect and the ‘freedom of conscience’ they had established across the Atlantic. Voltaire purred over the ‘golden age’ in which natives and settlers, under the influence of Quaker principles, had coexisted peacefully.5 Brissot’s personal encounter with British Quakers took place at a time (1782–83) when the Friends were reconsidering their commitment to antislavery, and strengthening it under the influence of American Quakers.6 English Quakers had expressed their disapproval of slavery as early as 1727, and by 1761 they had excluded from their community all slave-owning Friends.7 Brissot may have heard about the first British antislavery efforts during this London stay: a 23-member committee of British antislavery Quaker activists had formed as early as June 1783, followed by a smaller, more informal one, in July.8 His attraction to Quakers may thus have been reinforced by their taking up such a concrete, politically progressive cause. In November 1786, after publishing his Examen critique (Critical Examination)—which was a vigorous defence of Quakers against what he saw as ‘calumnies’—he wrote to a British correspondent, the philosopher David Williams, requesting more information on Quakers as he ‘did not want to abandon this cause, which appeared to be that of healthy morals and liberty’.9 His correspondence reveals that he remained in contact with James Phillips, the Quaker bookseller and a pillar of antislavery activity, after his London visit of 1782–84, which was evidently a turning point in his antislavery commitment.10 He also corresponded with Lord Mansfield, the famous magistrate, who had


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been responsible for the 1772 Somerset decision which established that escaped slaves could not be recaptured on British soil.11 Brissot’s lycée was not successful, and he returned to Paris only to find himself imprisoned in the Bastille on rumours of having published pamphlets against the Queen during his London sojourn. Famous friends on both sides of the Channel, including Mansfield, Priestley and Condorcet, pleaded on his behalf and he was released after two months.12 He continued to keep in touch with British campaigners, and he visited London again in the autumn of 1787 at a propitious moment. Indeed, Granville Sharp and other leading antislavery figures had recently founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.13 Among the twelve founding members (nine Quakers and three Anglicans) were Thomas Clarkson and James Phillips, regular correspondents of Brissot and Etienne Clavière, the two men who later started the Amis des Noirs. Brissot wrote in his Mémoires that Granville Sharp had enrolled him and Clavière in the British society during this visit.14 Brissot may have corresponded with the British Committee as early as August 1787, as the British antislavery movement looked to inspire a similar institution in France.15 True to his cosmopolitan and universalist beliefs, Brissot never hid the fact that the Amis des Noirs was connected to its British precursor, which later proved costly when French liberal fascination with British liberty gave way to hostility and war. Yet obviously, Brissot was no mere imitator or British spy, as he had long been openly connected with British abolition and vigorously supported British and American Quakers in his writings. On the contrary, he believed he was defending French interests by following the example set by the British in their campaign against the slave trade. In a speech delivered on 19 February 1788 on the occasion of the founding of the Amis des Noirs, Brissot defended the view that British support for the abolition of the slave trade was a wise commercial move. Instead of pillaging Africa for its men and women, Britain would open regular trade with that continent after ending the slave trade, thus benefiting merchants. France should do the same.16 Moreover, the adoption of antislavery aims would bring domestic benefits: Brissot later recalled that he had conceived of the Society as a way ‘to accelerate this revolution in France’ (my italics).17 Beyond these important connections with the British antislavery effort, the two societies shared universalist ambitions. A letter from Granville Sharp, read at one of the French society’s meetings, referred to the goal of replacing ‘rivalry for conquests’ with ‘an emulation to spread the blessings of peace and civilization on their immense possessions, and most particularly on the oppressed race of Africans’. The French society wanted members in one association automatically to be offered membership in the other.18 Antislavery had become a cosmopolitan creed on both sides of the Channel, and its strength lay principally in its international dimension. That does not mean the antislavery activists shared exactly the same goals: the British


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Brissot and the Fate of Atlantic Antislavery


group reacted to Brissot’s initial presentation of his society’s aims, which included emancipation of slaves, by stressing that they were focused on ending the slave trade instead. But even here, we can clearly trace the influence of these linked campaigns: the Amis des Noirs actually chose to follow suit in the short term.19

Brissot’s interest in the United States: the antislavery accomplishments of American Quakers and of the ‘free Americans’20 Although connections with Britain were central to the founding of the Amis des Noirs, it is obvious its creators, especially Brissot, were interested in developing and strengthening links with the former British colonies of North America, about which they entertained highly optimistic notions. In particular, they saw the United States as the cradle of antislavery activism. When Brissot and Clavière announced their intention to form a French antislavery society in January 1788 in Mirabeau’s Analyse des papiers anglais, they started with the erroneous proposition that ‘there is not a single slave now in all the northern states of America, and those in the South have agreed to prohibit any further importation of Negroes and to soften the fate of those whom they still employ in the cultivation of tobacco and rice’.21 In spite of the inaccuracy of the assumption that all American slaves had been freed in the North—emancipation was gradual in the middle states and had not yet been decided upon in such major states as New York— the two men rightly identified North America as the wellspring of antislavery activism. As early as 1763, American Friends such as Anthony Benezet had urged British Quakers actively to take up antislavery as a cause.22 In the wake of publications by John Woolman and by Benezet, American Quakers visited Britain between 1774 and 1783, contacting future leaders of British antislavery such as Granville Sharp and helping them organize committees on the slave trade and slave manumission.23 By 1775 the first antislavery society— the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage—was founded in Philadelphia, eight years before its British equivalent.24 Brissot had admired Britain’s civil liberties in the 1770s and the 1780s, yet like most French liberals he turned to the American model in the mid1780s as the successful culmination of the War of Independence inspired a spate of publications on the new nation in France. A number of enthusiastic writers informed the European public of America’s democratic institutions as well as its supposedly bucolic and egalitarian rural conditions.25 The most influential may have been Crèvecoeur, who had drawn a favourable portrait of the North American Friends in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). After discussions with Crèvecoeur, Brissot began to dream of going to the United States: he might escape from professional unhappiness and the crippling censorship of France, and provide a more stable environment for his


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wife and children.26 His brother-in-law, François Dupont, had been considering a move to the United States since 1783, and eventually settled there in 1789. Going to America was clearly a family affair for Brissot who—in a very unaristocratic way, typical of the rising middle class—considered his home as a haven of affectionate and sentimental bliss which he treasured and wanted to protect above all. Crèvecoeur’s Letters, published in French in 1784 in a much-altered version, contained a strong antislavery component. Crèvecoeur had inscribed the 1782 English-language edition to the Abbé Raynal, whose Histoire des deux Indes (1770) had widely publicized antislavery convictions through its many editions, and Crèvecoeur praised the Abbé for his support of ‘the cause of the poor Africans’.27 The French edition of 1784 began with praise for the American Quakers, their simple lifestyle and the emancipation of their slaves which they had been conducting since the mid-1770s. Anthony Benezet and Warner Mifflin received special praise.28 Crèvecoeur was in France between 1785 and 1787 and became Brissot’s close friend. It may be surmised that Crèvecoeur’s warm presentation of American Quakers, coming in the wake of Brissot’s first contacts with British Quakers, led to Brissot’s vibrant defence of American Friends in his Examen critique (1786).

The Examen critique, or Brissot’s defence of American Quakers and American liberty Brissot’s interest in the United States first became public in the summer of 1786, when he published a small volume in which he aimed at countering the Marquis de Chastellux’s supposedly erroneous views on the Americans.29 Chastellux was a liberal aristocrat, a friend of the Encyclopedists and of the leaders of the American Revolution. Nonetheless, Brissot accused him of unfairly criticizing ‘the Quakers, Negroes, and the People’ in his Voyages dans l’Amérique (1786).30 As is obvious to anyone reading Chastellux’s work, the marquis’s presentation of America was in fact very favourable, and his criticism of Quakers quite mild. Chastellux even praised Anthony Benezet, whom he met in Philadelphia, as a most benevolent and generous man, while he merely identified other Quakers as commercial-minded, a traditional criticism. As for his racist portrait of African-American slaves, it appears as a pale reflection of Jefferson’s own published views at the time: Notes on the State of Virginia had been circulating in Paris for two years and was probably not unknown to Brissot. Yet Jefferson himself never had to suffer such intense criticism from Brissot, who later accepted the Virginian’s excuses for not joining the Amis des Noirs without any negative comment. One may thus assume that Chastellux, who entertained high opinions of both Washington and Jefferson, merely echoed their views about imported Africans: slavery was wrong, Southerners were trying to eradicate it, but admitting blacks as equal was difficult.31


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Because Chastellux stressed both blacks’ supposed insensitivity and their inability to be assimilated into white society after emancipation, Brissot counter-attacked by asserting that all men were equal, being made in the same mould, and that slaves could be made equal by receiving freedom and equal political rights.32 This belief that blacks could be improved by freedom reflected Brissot’s adherence to a number of French philosophers who attributed slaves’ vices to their enslavement rather than to their nature.33 As for Chastellux’s supposedly demeaning views of ‘the people’ (the democratic American regime), they do not stand out in the book. Brissot did not even develop this point in his pamphlet, concentrating his polemical energy on defending Quakers and blacks and merely hinting that Chastellux was wrong to criticize the very democratic Pennsylvanians.34 Brissot’s passionate defence of the new nation and its antislavery activists, mainly Quakers, demonstrated both his attraction to the ideals of the new nation and his long-established antislavery convictions. Quakers provided the link between these sentiments. Although Yves Bénot has argued that American antislavery authors such as Anthony Benezet had very little impact in France, yet the decisions of American Quakers to stop taking part in the slave trade in the 1760s had been reported by Louis Sébastien Mercier in 1771 and the Abbé Raynal in 1780.35 In addition, the key role of Quakers in antislavery circles both in the United States and Britain was well known to Brissot and Clavière through their contacts with British Quakers. 36 In one major speech to the Amis des Noirs, Clavière described French antislavery activists as ‘mere imitators of the good Quakers’. 37 During the same meeting, Brissot reminded the members of the society that Quakers were known as having rejected slavery as a group even before the American Revolution. 38 Brissot’s Critical Examination, which caused quite a stir when it came out, suggests that defending Quakers and their principles could be a way to take an active part in the French intellectual debate in the 1780s.

From the Société Gallo-Américaine to the Société des Amis des Noirs: the antislavery impulse, 1787–88 After publishing the Examen critique in 1786, Brissot moved on to another book about the United States, collaborating with his friend Etienne Clavière. By January 1787, they were putting the finishing touches to De la France et des Etats-Unis, ou de l’importance de la Révolution de l’Amérique pour le bonheur de la France (Considerations on the Relative Situation of France and the United States of America), and launching at the same time the Société Gallo-Américaine (French-American Society).39 The Société was bound up with Brissot’s idea of moving to the United States in 1786: originally, he had planned to obtain a government posting in North America, but that project had developed into a journey to America which would be sponsored by the Société.40 Brissot’s


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American experiences would enable the Société to serve as an intermediary between the government and private enterprise, and to promote commercial relations between the two countries. Along with Brissot and Clavière, the co-founders of the Société Gallo-Américaine included Hector St John Crèvecoeur (back from various diplomatic postings in the United States and intent on developing commercial relationships between the two nations) and the Parisian lawyer Nicolas Bergasse.41 By now, Brissot’s connections extended to famous pro-American figures in France such as Lafayette.42 Beyond developing commercial relationships between the two nations in the wake of a successful military alliance, the Société Gallo-Américaine and its prospectus were aimed at spreading American principles and institutions to France. As Brissot’s British correspondents objected to the bilateral, and therefore exclusionary, dimension of the Société, its proceedings made clear that it would accept as members all those who would be willing or able to ‘give it universal ideas on the happiness of man and of societies’. Although ‘its apparent and particular goal was the interest of France and the United States, however, it embraced the happiness of mankind as part of its principal goal’.43 There was thus no hidden anti-British antagonism in this promotion of Franco-American ‘commerce’. Brissot and Clavière thought in resolutely cosmopolitan terms and believed France (or rather its liberal thinkers), the United States and Britain would guide the rest of the Western world towards economic and political progress.44 Brissot introduced the Société to Lafayette and Jefferson in this vein: he insisted that commercial liaisons could only become substantial between the two countries if they went together with the growth of enlightened views.45 However, by 3 April 1787 the activities of the Société Gallo-Américaine were interrupted by Crèvecoeur’s departure for the United States. On this occasion, Brissot summarized his major goals for the Société, which now had to be postponed: they were the incorporation of Britain into its activities and ‘the destruction of slavery, or helping in the Quakers’ destruction of it. I must submit a vast plan on this matter, which requires ardour and constancy not to be tired, disheartened by the obstacles put in our way’.46 In the same way the prospectus (soon to be published and sent to Britain and America) commended Quakers for having been instrumental in spearheading the freedom of slaves, which was again presented as one of the great achievements of the new nation.47 By the spring of 1787, before he heard of the effective launching of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain, Jacques-Pierre Brissot’s various activities (commercial and philosophical) were coalescing around the eradication of slavery. Quakers were his main inspiration: American Quakers for their achievements, British Quakers for their proximity and convergence of interests. The time was ripe for the creation of the Société des Amis des Noirs, which was formally launched on 19 February 1788.


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As we saw, even before the Amis des Noirs was launched in 1788, Brissot considered making a trip to the United States for the Société Gallo-Américaine. The United States was seen as the model for France and had to be experienced first hand. Such a journey was made all the more urgent by the founding of the Amis des Noirs, which continued in many ways the universalist work started by the French-American society. As Brissot wrote in his memoirs: ‘One of the purposes of the journey I made to America was to serve the cause of the blacks and to spread the branches of the Society I had just instituted in Paris’.48 Brissot sailed for the United States in the summer of 1788. To finance the trip, he had agreed to buy US public debt and western lands on behalf of a group of French financiers.49 But he also had more personal aims. Brissot was still interested in settling in the United States, and hoped that his voyage might increase his international reputation. He probably expected a warm welcome from New York consul Crèvecoeur, who, in fact, proved unwilling to resume their previous friendship. Lafayette penned a letter of introduction to George Washington and convinced Montmorin, the foreign secretary, to recommend Brissot to Count de Moustier, the French minister to the United States, who only entertained resentment towards such firebrands.50 Brissot also had ideological goals for his visit: he wanted to meet with some of the Quaker antislavery activists he had praised in his Examen critique (1786) and whom he considered the real instigators of the international antislavery movement. The translated Examen critique itself had been well received in the United States and had won admirers for Brissot.51 (The Quaker Warner Mifflin himself came to cheer an ailing Brissot in Philadelphia.) Before leaving for America, where he would learn more about the practical dimension of emancipation, Brissot explained what he hoped to achieve to the members of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Brissot was perhaps already sensitive to the criticism that would follow him to the grave: that the promotion of emancipation would disrupt or destroy the colonial economy of France. His response was to emphasize the commercial benefits of emancipation; the end of slavery would be accompanied by free trade between France, its Caribbean possessions and the new United States, leading to greater prosperity for all: There are two points on which I propose to gather the most authentic information. One is the emancipation of Blacks in the United States. I will investigate how safe it has proved to be, how useful it is in those countries [he probably meant states] where it is total, how it is purported to make it total in others. But my main preoccupation is to gain from the free Americans the best information on the situation of all the sugar


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Brissot’s journey to the United States in 1788: from antislavery to revolution


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The United States was not simply a country where enslaved blacks had been (and were being) emancipated without violence or major disruption of the economy, it was also the first country where the slave trade had been abolished, according to Brissot. He neglected to mention that a definitive ban had been postponed for 20 years by the new Constitution.53 Brissot published his travel narrative in 1791, more than two years after his return from America in December 1788, though he had summarized his journey to members of the Amis des Noirs as early as 3 February 1789, and published these remarks as a memoir later that year.54 Although his mission was meant to be principally commercial, a large part of Brissot’s Nouveau Voyage dans les Etats-Unis was dedicated to his visits to antislavery leaders throughout the new American states.55 Of the 46 letters contained in the book, at least 17 deal directly or indirectly with the topic of slavery.56 The antislavery struggle was undeniably one of Brissot’s dominant political passions in these years: his memoirs on the revolutionary period start with a whole chapter on the Amis des Noirs. As he waited for execution in 1793, he reflected sadly on the source of his political involvement in revolutionary affairs: ‘First of all, I want to speak about the famous Society of the Friends of the Blacks which I founded at the time. It has done enough good things on behalf of freedom, [and] it has caused me enough problems, or at least enough enemies, that I have a right to ponder it’.57 Compared to its British counterpart, the Amis des Noirs can hardly be considered successful. In its original form, it lasted only until the autumn of 1791 and gathered ever fewer members as time went by, without making much impact on French opinion. It issued few publications and never managed to press its agenda in the French National Assembly, especially on the issue of the prohibition of the slave trade. Yet, to this day it has been connected with the various insurrections in Saint Domingue: first the uprising of free mulattoes, then the insurrection of slaves themselves.58 Throughout his political career, Brissot was made to suffer for his early commitment to the cause of black freedom. This close connection between antislavery and revolutionary conviction in Brissot was clearly evident in one speech he gave to the Amis des Noirs on 8 April 1788 in which he enjoined his fellow members to defend the liberty of all men.59 As Leonore Loft has written, ‘his passionate embrace of the abolitionist cause also grew out of his personal identification with the oppressed and his rejection of the ancien régime’s hierarchical social structure’.60 In Brissot’s eyes, the revolution thus may have begun with the launching of the Amis des Noirs in January 1788. (Recall that Brissot presented the founding of the Society as a ‘revolution’.) Moreover, the second


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islands ... As I carry out this research, as I conceive the hope to offer freedom to Blacks, I conceive an even greater hope, that of contributing, and having our society contribute, to giving our islands freedom of trade.52

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volume of Brissot’s memoirs argued that the same people who supported planters in the colonies threatened democracy at home.61

Brissot’s voyage to America presented an opportunity to conduct a thorough survey of antislavery activities and societies in the United States. In his account of his travels, the French abolitionist seemed well informed about the situation in the United States: he knew about the discussions during the Constitutional Convention the year before, and complained about the dearth of antislavery societies in the South.62 Brissot’s vision of slavery in American society was characterized by a very perceptive vision of current problems as well as a rosy confidence about their eventual resolution. One problem he could not deny was Southern reticence at the liberation of slaves. Southerners were convinced they could not cultivate tobacco without slaves; more importantly, should slaves be liberated, they did not know ‘which rank to assign them in society’.63 The embarrassment of Southerners was echoed by Northerners who merely offered free blacks the status of second-class citizens and thus condemned them to a life of resentment and apathy.64 Another problem was the gradual emancipation pursued by Northern state legislatures: in Letter XXIII, after surveying the various gradualist solutions, Brissot wondered why slaves had not been freed directly.65 In an age when property was one of the main rights guaranteed by the new revolutions, he acknowledged the problem of compensation for slaveholders but he also questioned the notion of property as applied to human beings. Although Brissot was closely associated with financiers and bankers, it is clear that liberty prevailed over property in his thinking.66 Having talked with Northern abolitionists such as John Jay, Pennsylvania Quakers such as Warner Mifflin and Virginia planters such as George Washington, Brissot summarized their diverse approaches to the problem of slavery with few comments. But he remained highly optimistic about the future of antislavery in the United States. The new nation was based on the fight for liberty, and its founders realized that the slave trade and slavery were incompatible with the principles of their country. A free North eroded slavery in the South by providing a refuge for black runaways. Before long, planters would understand that free labour was economically preferable to bondage; in any case, the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 would seal the demise of the institution. Surely this optimism was not misplaced: as Brissot carefully noted, had not George Washington looked to the abolition of slavery in the South?67 As for the second-class status of free blacks in the North, Brissot considered two possibilities: blacks could be raised to the level of whites through careful education in special schools, such as the one that Anthony Benezet had started in Philadelphia; or they could be offered the opportunity of


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Slavery in America in Nouveau voyage

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starting a new life in Africa. He leaned towards the second solution, devoting an entire letter to the project of ‘rémigration ou de retransportation des Noirs des Etats-Unis, dans l’Afrique’ (‘remigration or retransportation of United States Blacks to Africa’).68 The bad news about the difficulties experienced by the first Sierra Leone settlers had not yet reached Brissot by 1791; since colonization promised to solve so many problems caused by mass emancipation in white-dominated societies, many abolitionists probably did not want to hear bad news in any case.69 Paradoxically echoing the very views Chastellux had expressed in 1786, and which he probably now heard straight from George Washington and other Southern leaders, Brissot doubted that any ‘sincere’ union could be effected between the two races even if blacks were given the same rights as other citizens. Blacks should instead be returned to what Brissot called their ‘country’ (patrie in French) in Africa.70 He was very supportive of the colonization plan put forward by the Quaker William Thornton, whom he had met in Philadelphia. Like British and American colonizationists, he anticipated positive consequences for Africa, which would thus be civilized even while the United States would be cleansed of an undesirable population.71 Brissot saw some specific reasons for optimism—such as the apparent decline in tobacco cultivation in the upper South—but he also believed that gradual emancipation was part of a wider movement towards freedom.72 By 1791, when Brissot published his Nouveau voyage in France, this seemed reasonable enough: the revolutionary general Horatio Gates had emancipated his slaves; the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, at the urging of Benjamin Franklin, had launched a campaign to overturn the 20-year extension of the slave trade in Congress; new antislavery societies had sprung up in several states, including Virginia.73 Brissot firmly believed that concerted international action on the part of all antislavery societies could pressure governments to bring about the end of the slave trade; perhaps it could end slavery itself. In 1788, as he described the joy of American antislavery campaigners at the foundation of the French antislavery society, he glimpsed the potential of this international effort: ‘They [the Americans] had no doubt that, should this society spread, brave obstacles and unite with that in London, the light thrown by them on the traffic in negroes and its useless infamy, would open the eyes of governments, and determine its suppression’.74 In February and March 1789, flush from his American voyage, Brissot journeyed to Holland and tried to found an antislavery society there as well.75

Brissot and the Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–93: from cosmopolitan antislavery to the defence of the nation The Revolution of 1789 was both an opportunity and a disaster for the Amis des Noirs. French absolutism had made it impossible for such protest societies to operate freely, but by the spring of 1789 the Society was able to petition


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the government directly.76 Although the country was preoccupied with other matters, the first skirmishes between colonial supporters of the slave trade and members of the Amis des Noirs took place in writing as early as 1788.77 In addition, the drafting of the Cahiers de doléances, those documents in which French people vented their grievances in the autumn of 1788, enabled the Society to engage French public opinion so that the abolition of the slave trade would become a priority on the national agenda. The Amis des Noirs sent letters all over France on the subject of the slave trade.78 A number of Cahiers—nearly 50 from some 600—reflected the agenda of the Society.79 And as the Estates General opened in Versailles in the spring of 1789 to confront France’s disastrous economic situation, finance minister Necker publicly, though ambiguously, condemned slavery and the slave trade.80 The Amis des Noirs became very active in the summer and autumn of 1789, with high hopes of triggering a parliamentary debate in the new French national assembly in the same way as Wilberforce had done in Britain.81 Indeed the Society was first and foremost a political lobby, and its goal was to redress wrongs through legislative action, in conjunction with fellow antislavery activists.82 Thomas Clarkson visited the French group in the hectic summer of 1789, staying until late January 1790 to witness French antislavery efforts. In the spring of 1790, the Amis des Noirs supported the British plan for a colony in Africa.83 The Pennsylvania Abolition Society played a similar role in 1790: with Benjamin Franklin as its chairman, it petitioned the First Congress as early as February 1790. Yet this window of opportunity for French antislavery activists quickly closed. The party of planters in the French national assembly (known as the Club Massiac) proved to be more than a match for the antislavery forces. Not only did the planters manage to prevent any public debate of the colonial question in 1790, but they also tried to accuse the Amis des Noirs of being unpatriotic (as they were close to the British) and of stirring slave revolts in the colonies. The charge of encouraging insurrection proved especially hard to dodge in the years ahead.84 The first French antislavery society declined rapidly between 1789 and 1791: its members soon rallied behind equal rights for mulattoes, and gave up their efforts against the slave trade.85 From 1789 to 1791, the news from Saint Domingue actually made the moderate antislavery agenda obsolete: mulattoes rebelled in 1790, and slaves followed in the summer of 1791.86 The Society also struggled to adapt to the turn of revolutionary events in France. Originally, it drew members from a broad political spectrum, including powerful liberal aristocrats like Lafayette, who had urged George Washington to end slavery in Virginia by resettling slaves in the west of the state, and who later bought a plantation in French Guiana in order to free slaves.87 But, by the summer of 1791, such men had parted political ways with Brissot and the Girondins.88 Meanwhile, the revolution had begun to alter Brissot’s priorities. On 18 September 1791 he was elected to the Legislative


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Assembly. He made his mark in the field of foreign policy, drawing upon his knowledge of Britain and the United States. But in spite of his favourable experiences overseas in the cause of antislavery, and his affinity with the Quakers, Brissot began to see war as the best way to resist foreign monarchical threats and to spread revolutionary ideas. He still retained a hope that a peaceful union between liberal nations—France, Britain and the United States—could bring about universal amity.89 But he supported the war against the Emperor of Austria that began in April 1792, against the wishes of Robespierre and the Jacobins. This prompted a press campaign against Brissot, in which he was accused of being responsible for the massacres in Saint Domingue. Brissot’s support for war also brought him into conflict with Lafayette, who supported peace with France’s neighbours.90 By September 1792, Lafayette had deserted and was imprisoned in autocratic Austria. While Brissot rejoiced at French victory in Valmy, Louis XVI was taken prisoner and France’s neighbours withdrew their ambassadors from Paris. Brissot’s single-minded pursuit of the Revolution was leading him and the nation away from the liberal and cosmopolitan ideas that had briefly flourished. As late as 1789, Thomas Clarkson had called Brissot ‘the Quaker’ during his visit to Paris.91 But Brissot and many of his friends came to embody a new nationalist agenda, as they pitted an army of citizens against the forces of tyranny. International antislavery, which had been a pillar of Brissot’s ideological make-up, was relegated to a complex footnote. In the wake of yet another report by Brissot, France declared war even against Britain, the former liberal model of the French Enlightenment, in February 1793.92 While regretting a war between two ‘free peoples’, Brissot urged the French to devote all their energy to a conflict which he knew would be ‘popularized [and] nationalized’ by the British Crown.93 In Britain, where the war against revolutionary France also dented support for abolition, William Wilberforce continued to introduce legislation to Parliament every year throughout the 1790s. On the other side of the Channel, membership in the French society remained meagre, and the Amis des Noirs did not manage to trigger the same kind of enthusiasm in the French population as the British society had stirred between 1787 and 1792.94 By the time that the Amis des Noirs formally resumed activities after the French abolition of slavery in February 1794, Brissot himself had died under the guillotine. Yet, as Leonore Loft has argued, the legacy of Brissot was clearly evident in the shift towards abolition in the Caribbean. Sonthonax, who had been sent by the Convention to Saint Domingue and who initially proclaimed freedom for slaves in August 1793, was a disciple of Brissot.95 As the ex-slaves had already gained their freedom, Sonthonax’s decision was principally intended to rally them against the British; but it led to a major commotion throughout the Caribbean region and the Americas. The ratification of Sonthonax’s decision in Paris in 1794 was no opportunistic rubberstamp, either. Although


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Brissot and the Girondins had been eliminated by then, the debates that they and the Amis des Noirs had triggered in the Legislative Assembly Jacobins, including Robespierre, rooted for the abolition of slavery as early as 1791. The Jacobins issued statements on behalf of equal rights and abolition in the spring of 1793, long before the news of Sonthonax’s August decision reached Paris. When the time came for the Convention to consider formalizing abolition, the groundwork had already been laid. The Convention did not simply recognize Saint Domingue’s freedom and revolution, but extended abolition to all French possessions. Only when conservatives regained control of the Convention in 1795 could they start a campaign to reinstate slavery in French colonies, which was taken up in 1802 by Napoleon.96 Only then did the French and Haitian Revolutions part ways.97

Conclusion Although the British, French and American antislavery movements were different in style and content, they partook of a common, Quaker-inspired, and cosmopolitan energy between 1788 and 1791: an energy which Jacques-Pierre Brissot enthusiastically embraced by travelling to Britain and the United States and entertaining correspondents in both nations. However, by 1799, Brissot had been dead a long time, and his dreams of a liberal international coalition of antislavery forces had been buried under the great national war he was instrumental in launching. Although some antislavery friendships survived the Terror and the Revolutionary wars, such as those between the Abbé Grégoire and Thomas Jefferson (if Thomas Jefferson can be counted among antislavery activists, which is debatable) or between John Jay and Thomas Clarkson, the great international movement against slavery lost its dynamic in the face of nationalism. As David Brion Davis has written, ‘the slavery issue could not be allowed to divide revolutionary alliances or to take precedence over such critical questions as military defence and political reconstruction’.98 He should have added ‘national construction’.

Acknowledgements Original research for this chapter was conducted thanks to a Fulbright grant which I spent in Philadelphia at the Library Company and at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. My thanks also go to Allan Potofsky, Jeanne-Henriette Louis and Denis Lacorne in Paris.

Notes 1. From the title in French of Robert Darnton’s book on the ‘literary underground’ of the eighteenth century: Bohème littéraire et révolution (Paris, 1983).


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2. Biographical information on Brissot is mainly derived from Claude Perroud’s ‘Notice’ in his edition of Brissot’s correspondence and papers: J.-P. Brissot, Correspondance et papiers précédés d’un avertissement et d’une notice sur sa vie (Paris, 1912), as well as from Brissot’s own memoirs which he penned in prison in 1793: Mémoires (1754–1793), publiés avec étude critique et notes, par Cl. Perroud, 2 vols (Paris, [18??]). 3. For Miss Capper, see Brissot, Mémoires, vol. 1, 375. 4. Edith Philips, The Good Quaker in French Legend (Philadelphia, 1932). 5. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques: derniers écrits sur Dieu, ed. Gerhardt Stenger (Paris, 2006), 91. 6. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 391–451. 7. Leonore Loft, Passion, Politics and Philosophie: Rediscovering J.-P. Brissot (Westport, CT, 2002), 207. 8. Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade (London, 1997), 22–24. 9. Brissot to David Williams, 29 November 1786, in Correspondance et papiers, 104. 10. James Philips to Brissot, 2 January 1787, in Correspondance et papiers, 107. 11. Brissot, Mémoires, vol. 1, 161, 374. 12. Perroud, ‘Notice’, XXIII, in Brissot, Correspondance et papiers. 13. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston, 2005), 110. 14. Brissot, Mémoires, vol. 2, 71. 15. Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot, in La Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–1799: contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris, 1998), assert that Brissot’s first letter to the British Committee dates from 18 August 1787, and derive this information from Mirabeau’s Analyse des papiers anglais 19 (31 January–1 February 1788): see 165, n. 240, and the documents on 296–298. Judith Jennings has confirmed this: The Business, 39. 16. See his ‘Discours sur la nécessité d’établir à Paris une Société pour concourir, avec celle de Londres, à l’abolition de la traite et de l’esclavage des Nègres, prononcé le 19 février 1788’, in La Ré volution française et l’abolition de l’esclavage, 12 vols (Paris, 1968), vol. 4, document 1. See also Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 21–23. 17. Brissot, Mémoires, vol. 2, 80. 18. The letter was read during the meeting of the Amis des Noirs on 4 March 1788. Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 87, my translation. The request for joint membership was voiced during the meeting of the Society on 18 March 1788, in ibid. 106. 19. Loft, Passion, 208. 20. According to Brissot, ‘free Americans’ referred to all the citizens of the United States. 21. Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 296, my translation. 22. Jennings, The Business, 22. 23. John Woolman, Some Considerations on Keeping Negroes: Recommended to the Professors of Christianity, of Every Denomination (Philadelphia, 1754); Considerations on Keeping Negroes [ ... ] Part second (Philadelphia, 1762); Anthony Benezet, A Caution and Warning to Great-Britain and her Colonies, in a Short Representation of the Calamitous State of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominions (Philadelphia, 1766).


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24. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, 1975), 219. For details of the American influence on British efforts, see Brown, Moral Capital, 391–432. 25. For a thorough bibliography, see Durand Echeverria and Everett C. Wilkie, Jr, The French Image of America: A Chronological and Subject Bibliography of French Books Printed before 1816 Relating to the British North American Colonies and the United States (Metuchen, NJ; London, 1994), vol. 1. Jacques Portes studied Brissot’s interest in and journey to the United States in his ‘Jacques-Pierre Brissot et les EtatsUnis’, in L’Amérique et la France: Deux Révolutions, ed. Elise Marienstras (Paris, 1990), 52–69. 26. Brissot’s project is confirmed by a draft 1786 letter to minister Calonne in which he requested an appointment in the United States: ‘Notice’, in Brissot, Correspondance et papiers, xl. On Brissot’s family anxieties, see F. Dupont to Brissot, 7 May 1783, in ibid. 90–91. 27. J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (1782; Harmondsworth, 1987), especially 37, 166–179. 28. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Lettres d’un cultivateur américain, vol. 1 (Paris, 1784), xiii–xiv. 29. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Examen critique des voyages ... de M. le marquis de Chastellux (London, 1786). This was translated into English as A Critical Examination of the Marquis de Chastellux’s Travels in North America (Philadelphia, 1788). 30. François-Jean de Chastellux, Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale dans les années 1780, 1781 et 1782. Préface du duc de Castries (1786; repr. Paris, 1980). 31. Ibid. 184–188, 359–363. 32. Brissot, Examen critique, 96–98. 33. Loft, Passion, 203. 34. Brissot, Examen critique, 112. Pennsylvania had the most democratic constitution of all the states, and Chastellux was merely echoing a common criticism among Washington and other Federalists rather than casting aspersions on the outcome of America’s revolutionary experiment. Chastellux, Voyages, 208–209. 35. Yves Bénot, ‘L’internationale abolitionniste’, Dix-huitième siècle 33 (2001): 265–279 (here 272). 36. Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 221. 37. Meeting of the French society, 8 April 1788, in Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 129. 38. Ibid. 136. Brissot thought that the first mission of the French antislavery society should be to translate Benezet’s works. 39. This was the title given to the English translation (London, 1788). 40. This modified project is to be found in Brissot, Correspondance et papiers, 92–93. 41. Ibid. 106. 42. ‘Notice’, in ibid. xliii. 43. Brissot, ‘Procès-verbaux de la Société Gallo-Américaine, du 2 janvier au 3 avril 1787’, in ibid. 109. 44. Marcel Dorigny, ‘Introduction’, in Marcel Dorigny (ed.), De la France et des EtatsUnis, ou de l’importance de la Révolution de l’Amérique pour le bonheur de la France (Paris, 1996), 16–20. 45. Brissot, ‘Modèle de letter à écrire à M. Jefferson; écrit le 8 mars 1787’, in Correspondance et papiers, 126. 46. Brissot, ‘Procès-verbaux de la Société Gallo-Américaine, Séance du 3 avril 1787’, in Correspondance et papiers, 134–135.


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47. Dorigny, De la France et des Etats-Unis, 324. 48. Brissot, Mémoires, vol. 2, 74. 49. Jocelyne Moreau-Zanelli has recently reviewed Brissot’s efforts to launch a land society in 1788–89 in Gallipolis: histoire d’un mirage américain au XVIIIè siècle (Paris, 2000). 50. For Moustier’s reaction and Lafayette’s letter: Brissot, Correspondance et papiers, 176–177, 191. 51. Brissot, A Critical Examination of the Marquis de Chastellux’s Travels, in North America in a Letter addressed to the Marquis: principally intended as a Refutation of His Opinions concerning the Quakers, the Negroes, the People, and Mankind (Philadelphia, 1788). 52. Brissot, ‘Séance du 4 mars 1788’, in Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 84 (my translation). 53. Ibid. 95. 54. Mémoire sur les Noirs de l’Amérique septentrionale, lu à l’assemblée de la Société des Amis des Noirs, le 9 février 1789, par Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (Paris, 1789). 55. Nouveau voyage dans les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale, fait en 1788; par Jacques-Pierre Brissot (de Warville), Citoyen Français, 3 vols (Paris, 1791). It was translated as New Travel in the United States of America. Performed in 1788. Containing the Latest and Most Accurate Observations on the Character, Genius, and Present State of the People and Government of That Country (London, 1792). 56. See letters I, V, VI and XIII in vol. 1, and letters XXI to XXVI, XXXIII, XXXVI to XXXIX in vol. 2. Volume 3 was devoted to general and practical considerations on Franco-American trade and did not bear on these issues. It reproduces Brissot’s 1787 book on Franco-American trade, De la France et des Etats-Unis. 57. Brissot, Mémoires, vol. 2, 71. 58. For a contemporary critique of the Society’s efforts, see the ‘Opinion de J.P Garran, député du départment de Paris, sur les causes et les remèdes des désastres des Colonies’, Pièces imprimées par ordre de l’Assemblée nationale, Colonies, Première et seconde partie (Paris, 1792), 4–5. For recent, contrasting, assessments, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World. The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004); and Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves: de la colonisation aux abolitions, 1620–1848 (Paris, 2007), 241. 59. Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 138. 60. Loft, Passion, 207. 61. Brissot, Mémoires, vol. 2, 111–113. 62. Brissot, Nouveau voyage, vol. 2, 14–15. These discussions had led to the prolongation of the slave trade at the urging of South Carolina and Georgia. 63. Brissot, Nouveau voyage, vol. 2, Lettre XXIII, 29. On the notion of which ‘degrees of freedom’ were to be applied to freed slaves in the aftermath of the American Revolution, see Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, 1998); and Gary Nash and Jean Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991). 64. Brissot, Nouveau voyage, vol. 2, 63–64. 65. Ibid. 25, 28. 66. Ibid. 26. 67. Ibid. 11, 12, 14, 16–18, 44. 68. Ibid. vol. 1, 346; vol. 2, 6. 69. On the struggles of the early settlers in Sierra Leone, see Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 177, 199–212.


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70. Brissot, Nouveau voyage, vol. 2, Lettre XXVI, 68–71. 71. Ibid. 245–246. On Thornton’s plan, see Gaillard Hunt, ‘William Thornton and Negro Colonization’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, NS 30 (1920): 32–61. 72. Nouveau voyage, vol. 2, Lettre XXIV, 43. Lettre XXIII, 28. 73. ‘Addition aux lettres précédentes, sur les travaux et progrès des diverses Sociétés d’Amérique depuis 1789’, in ibid. vol.1, 49, 50–54. 74. Ibid. vol. 2, 46–47 (my translation). 75. On the Dutch effort, which was ultimately unsuccessful, see ‘Assemblée du Comité réunie le 10 mars 1789’, in Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 209. 76. Lafayette visited Brienne (Louis XVI’s principal minister) to plead the cause of the Société. Brienne acknowledged the noble goals of the Société, but insisted it had to act prudently and reassure planters it would not go against their interests. See ibid. 109. 77. See Malouet’s writings and the answer by a member of the Society, in ibid. 199–200. 78. ‘M. de Condorcet a lu ensuite un modèle de lettre à envoyer aux bailliages et sénéchaussées du royaume pour les supplier de présenter la cause des Noirs aux Etats généraux afin que l’abolition de la traite y fût prise en considération’, in Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, ‘Assemblée générale de la société’, 3 February 1789, 196. 79. Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 97. 80. Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 223. 81. Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 153. 82. Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 31. 83. ‘Séance du 30 avril 1789’, in Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 285. 84. Loft, Passion, 212. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 48. 87. Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2000), 89. 88. Dorigny and Gainot, La Société, 48. 89. ‘Discours de J. P. Brissot, Député de Paris, Sur la nécessité d’exiger une satisfaction de l’Empereur, et de rompre le Traité du premier Mai 1756, du 17 janvier 1792’, in Pièces imprimées par ordre de l’Assemblée nationale. Diplomatie (Paris, 1792), 25. 90. Gonzague Saint-Bris, La Fayette (Paris, 2006), 265–272. 91. Loft, Passion, 244. 92. On Brissot’s actions in the Convention, see Suzanne d’Huart, Brissot. La Gironde au pouvoir (Paris, 1986), 132–197. See also J.-P. Brissot, Rapport sur les hostilités du Roi d’Angleterre et du Stadhouder des Provinces-Unies, et sur la nécessité de déclarer que la République Française est en guerre avec eux (Paris, 1793). 93. Ibid. 27. 94. Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 252, 119–121, 137–138. 95. Loft, Passion, 213. 96. Florence Gauthier, ‘La Révolution française et le problème colonial: le cas Robespierre’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 288 (1992): 169–192. 97. Loft, Passion, 213. 98. Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 344.


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Borderlands of Empire, Borderlands of Race Julie Winch

Introduction: contested terrain and imperial rivalries in the Mississippi Valley The year was 1783, and the time of year probably early autumn, before ice added to the hazards of navigating the Mississippi. For many weeks Jacques Clamorgan had been following the great river north to the town he had heard so much about back in New Orleans. He had come to make his fortune, but what he saw as his boatmen poled his flatboat close into the shore and began unloading all his worldly possessions can hardly have inspired him with confidence. Frankly, St Louis was not so much a town as a fortified trading post. The frontier settlement had been in existence for less than two decades. It boasted a cluster of homes and warehouses, a church, a few taverns and a population of less than one thousand.1 After the elegance and sophistication Clamorgan had been accustomed to in New Orleans, this brash new community had an unfinished look and its people, even the wealthiest of them, a decidedly ‘backwoods’ appearance. A closer survey restored his faith. St Louis was strategically located at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers. Everywhere there were drying racks festooned with the furs that the Iowa, the Osage, the Shawnee, the Sac and the Fox brought in to exchange for European goods. It might be possible to push further into the interior, establish commercial relationships with more distant Indian nations, and perhaps even challenge the monopoly of the all-powerful Hudson’s Bay Company. There might be other commodities worth dealing in besides furs. It was all a matter of opportunity, of talking to the right people and inevitably greasing a few palms. A man with vision and a modest amount of capital could do very well in St Louis, provided that he appreciated the imperial realities that had shaped the region, and that he played them to his advantage. Although the Clamorgan saga begins in 1783, when Jacques Clamorgan stepped ashore in a remote settlement thousands of miles from the great centres of power, it does not end there. In the momentous decades that 157


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followed Jacques’s journey up the Mississippi, decisions were made in Paris and Madrid, in London and in Washington that profoundly affected his fortunes and those of the women of colour he cohabited with and the children they bore him. The little village where the rivers met assumed an importance out of all relation to its size, and statesmen and military commanders came to see it as a prize worth contending for. Jacques Clamorgan and his heirs were pawns of the great powers that squabbled over possession of St Louis and the surrounding territory. On another level, though, the Clamorgans were active participants. Jacques and his children, and their children after them might not always be sure exactly where they stood, or indeed which nation they owed allegiance to at any one time. News took a long time to travel from the great metropolis an ocean away, or at least half a continent away. However, of one thing the members of the Clamorgan clan were certain. In an unstable world, where their remoteness and their mixed racial ancestry made them vulnerable, they would do whatever they had to in order to protect themselves and advance their own interests. From the moment he began gathering his trade goods and arranging to transport himself and them upriver from New Orleans, Jacques Clamorgan had a clear sense of the world he was venturing into. He was no simple backwoods trader living on the periphery of Spanish America and ignorant of the implications of war and revolution a continent away. Each upheaval— Britain’s loss of her American colonies, the overthrow of the French monarchy, the turmoil of imperial warfare, and the land-hungry policies of the new United States—gave him more to work with. Sophisticated, widely travelled and multilingual, he was ideally positioned to take advantage of every change of administration as this pivotal region of North America became by turns Spanish, then French, then United States territory. A man who knew no national loyalty, for decades Clamorgan would practise the art of coercing and cajoling the various officials saddled with the task of asserting their government’s control over the great Mississippi Valley and the wealth it represented. Clamorgan’s goal was to secure at least some of that wealth for himself. Empires might be traded away as a consequence of a defeat on a distant battlefield and borders might be redrawn by negotiators in the capitals of Europe. No matter. Jacques Clamorgan would exercise his ingenuity to exploit every one of those developments to his advantage and he would raise his children to follow in his footsteps. French authority over Louisiana came to an end as a consequence of the conflict known as the French and Indian War in North America and in Europe as the Seven Years’ War, but in fact the status of this vast expanse was far less clear-cut than that statement might imply. In the autumn of 1762, when the French knew they had lost the war in North America to the British, Louis XV secretly offered France’s ally, Spain, the whole of Louisiana, including the Illinois Country, the land on the eastern side of the Mississippi. Charles III did not immediately accept. France was getting rid


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of Louisiana because it had proven unprofitable, and he was not eager to be burdened with the maintenance of an expensive and unproductive colony. However, Spain was eager to expand its hold over Texas, and that could be jeopardized if France were forced to surrender Louisiana to Britain. On the advice of his ministers, Charles agreed to the transfer and signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau.2 The following year negotiators from Britain, France and Spain hammered out the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the war but complicated the earlier treaty. Once the dust settled, Spain was confirmed in its ownership of the territory west of the Mississippi, while the British claimed the Illinois Country. It need hardly be said that none of these arrangements sat well with French settlers on either side of the river. The British could be expected to become a formidable presence to the east, but there was reason to hope the Spanish Crown would never effectively exert its authority over the lands west of the great river. It was in 1764, while the future of the entire region was still very much in the balance, that a French merchant, Pierre Laclède Liguest, founded the trading post that grew into St Louis. The Spanish did indeed move slowly when it came to asserting their authority over Louisiana. In New Orleans the French residents rose up against the first Spanish governor, forcing him to flee to Cuba. Not until 1769 would the Spanish be able to consider themselves even nominally in control of that city.3 Establishing the Spanish hold over St Louis presented a still greater challenge. They could hoist their flag, make St Louis the administrative headquarters of what became the province of Upper Louisiana, and appoint officials to oversee that province, but they could not change its culture, or eradicate the hope of its white inhabitants, the majority of them from France or French Canada, that French power would eventually be restored. Jacques Clamorgan, a man who knew no loyalty to any imperial power, or indeed to anyone except himself, was ideally positioned to make money and win influence in a community in the heart of contested territory.

Jacques Clamorgan, frontier adventurer Just who was this man who would soon prove so adept at combining intrigue and commerce? The secondary literature on Jacques Clamorgan is confusing, to say the least. One source declares he was a Spaniard, another that he was Portuguese, another that he was Irish. He was Scottish, or possibly Welsh. He was a man of colour from the Caribbean. He was a member of this or that Indian nation.4 Among modern commentators the jury is out when it comes to the matter of his origins. Those who actually met him, though, knew him to be French by birth, if not necessarily by allegiance.5 Jacques Clamorgan’s family belonged to the minor nobility of Normandy. The Clamorgan clan was, in the words of one chronicler, ‘more distinguished for its antiquity than ... its achievements’, and indeed most of the


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Borderlands of Empire, Borderlands of Race


family did little to attract the notice of the wider world.6 Jacques was an exception. Rather than stay quietly in Normandy and superintend one or other of the Clamorgan estates, he headed off to the French West Indies and went into trade. Reportedly his first port of call was the island of Guadeloupe, and he may well have spent some years there, but that was not where he made his permanent home.7s Determining where Jacques Clamorgan was and what he was engaged in at any one time is a challenge. He was a moving target. This much one can say: by the 1770s, when he was in his early forties, he was dealing in any commodity likely to earn him a profit. In 1778 he was in Spanish New Orleans selling slaves.8 The conflict between Britain and her American colonies offered ample opportunities to an individual willing to take risks. During the War for Independence, Clamorgan became a privateer, running rum, sugar, molasses and coffee from Hispaniola to the American mainland aboard his sloop, the aptly named Hazard. His adventures ended abruptly in the spring of 1780, when two Royal Navy warships intercepted him off the coast of New Jersey and he lost his vessel, gear and cargo.9 Once he was out of the clutches of the British he returned to the West Indies, mustered what resources he had left and re-entered the slave trade. He reportedly had dealings with merchants in Kingston, Jamaica.10 Then he abandoned the Caribbean for New Orleans. After a year or two, he left the Crescent City for St Louis. In the decades ahead he would often return to New Orleans to deal in slaves, furs, land titles and that most invaluable commodity, information. But it was in St Louis that he built a home for himself and embarked on the establishment of a business empire. In St Louis, Jacques Clamorgan scented limitless opportunities. Aware of the weak hold Spain had on Louisiana, especially its northern reaches, he devised schemes for strengthening that hold. More importantly, he managed to convince Spanish officials of the viability of those schemes. The land to the west of the town, so he had learned, was ideal for cultivating hemp. He proposed bringing in settlers to grow it, process it and provide enough cordage to outfit the entire Spanish fleet in Havana. To accomplish that he needed land for farms, workshops and a rope-walk. The lieutenant governor in Upper Louisiana, Zenon Trudeau, passed on Clamorgan’s petition to his superior in New Orleans and Jacques Clamorgan got his land.11 The city of New Orleans was perennially short of salted provisions, especially beef. Fresh meat would spoil long before it could be transported downriver, but properly cured meat would last for weeks, even months. Clamorgan spoke to Trudeau and other officials about the potential for cattle-farming. He pointed out that on the Meramec, one of the tributaries of the Mississippi not far from St Louis, there were salines or salt deposits. If the Spanish Crown would give him a land grant, and include the salines, he could guarantee that the inhabitants of New Orleans need never again be without a supply of salt beef. His powers of persuasion were unrivalled. He got his land.12


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Jacques Clamorgan’s supreme achievement was the organizing of his fellow merchants in St Louis into the Company of Explorers of the Upper Missouri. The Company’s goals were to squeeze the British out of the lucrative fur trade among the powerful peoples of the upper Missouri and, eventually, to reach the Pacific Ocean by way of the Missouri river. Of course, the Company, which Clamorgan soon converted into a personal monopoly, would need to establish and maintain garrisons. The Spanish authorities promised Clamorgan a substantial yearly sum for that, and when the cashstrapped treasury could not pay, he accepted land instead.13 Love him or loathe him, Spanish officials, fellow traders, and virtually anyone with any degree of ambition or influence in Upper Louisiana learned that Jacques Clamorgan was someone they could not ignore. Eloquent, persuasive and a consummate schemer, he made a name for himself as a frontier promoter par excellence, and his remarkable career deserves far more attention than it has yet received. However, my focus is not so much on his commercial activities as on his personal life, although admittedly, in his case, business seldom took a back seat to anything, and certainly not to the intimacies of family life.

Bondage and freedom in colonial St Louis By the early twentieth century the history of colonial St Louis and its founders had become the stuff of legend. According to one of those legends, Don Santiago Clamorgan, a Spanish nobleman on his way to represent the king of Spain in the newly independent United States sometime around 1790, stopped off in Cuba and fell in love with Ester, a beautiful slave of mixed African and Spanish ancestry. He bought her, freed her and made her his common-law wife.14 Actually, Jacques Clamorgan acquired Ester in 1784 in the settlement of Kaskaskia, just across the river from St Louis, and there was nothing romantic in their meeting. Clamorgan had gone to Kaskaskia to collect a debt from Ichabod Camp, a renegade Anglican minister who had been driven out of Virginia during the American Revolution for his Loyalist leanings. Camp had loaded his entire household, including a dozen or so slaves, onto flatboats and they had worked their way down the Monongahela, Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the British-held town of Natchez. Not finding the bright prospects he had hoped for, Camp forced everyone to take to the water again and head back upriver to the Illinois Country. There he set himself up in trade in what had been a French settlement until it had been ceded to the British in 1763, and then captured in 1778 by American forces. Apparently, no one in Kaskaskia held Ichabod Camp’s pro-British sympathies against him: he failed in business simply because he was inept. Camp was soon beset by creditors, one of them Jacques Clamorgan. Clamorgan came looking for his money, spotted Ester, one of Camp’s slaves, and announced he would take


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her in lieu of cash.15 For Ester this meant a wrenching separation. Her young daughter, Siley, remained behind with the Camps for almost a year until Ester prevailed on Clamorgan to buy her.16 Lest one assume Siley’s purchase indicated Jacques Clamorgan had come to feel some affection for Ester and wanted to make her happy by restoring her child to her, it is worth looking at her treatment at his hands, at least in the short term. In 1786 she and Siley took refuge with Ichabod Camp’s widow, Ann, who had moved to St Louis after an enraged creditor killed her husband in a liquor-fuelled fight.17 Two of the Camp daughters recalled that Ester complained ‘that her Master ... had beat her and drove her out of his House’.18 Ultimately, though, she and Siley had to return to Clamorgan. As his property they had no choice. Over the ensuing years the abuse lessened and the nature of Ester’s and Jacques’s relationship changed. They were still master and slave, but they were also lovers and, in a sense beyond the purely physical one, partners. Ester ran Jacques’s household. Pascal Cerré, who often did business with Clamorgan, observed that Ester ‘seemed to have the control within the premises when [he] was absent and very much so when he was at home’.19 Although she never learned to read or write, Ester developed the linguistic facility she needed to manage Jacques’s other slaves, his various boarders, and the steady stream of visitors who came to consult with him on commerce, politics and a host of other matters. Merchant David Delany recalled that Ester ‘spoke English and French’ with equal fluency.20 She may also have acquired a smattering of Spanish. Ester was one of dozens of slaves in St Louis in the 1780s, although her growing influence over Jacques’s household meant she was more privileged than most. From the first, chattel slavery was woven into the social and economic fabric of the town and much of the surrounding area. The slave community was a diverse one. Africans and West Indians were transported upriver from New Orleans to toil alongside people who had been born into slavery in the region and others who had been brought down from Canada by their French-speaking owners. Then there were those, like Ester and Siley, from ‘the English nation’, as area residents referred to their neighbours to the east.21 Jacques Clamorgan’s business records mention dozens of slaves he owned over the years: men, women and children of all ages and of many different origins. He was unusual only in that he was a slave trader as well as a slave owner, but in seeing human beings as a valuable commodity in a setting where labour was scarce he was fairly typical.22 Those individuals in St Louis who purchased slaves expected them to be versatile. Virtually every white family had a tract or two of farmland in the Great or Little Prairie outside the town. Enslaved men worked the fields, served as boatmen on the river and mastered all manner of skilled trades. Women did domestic work as well as field labour, and in a frontier setting where white men far outnumbered white women, inevitably some of


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those women became the concubines of their white owners, giving birth to children who blurred the lines of racial demarcation. Not all of the enslaved were black and not all of the black residents of the region were enslaved. The Spanish were eager for good relations with the native peoples and outlawed Indian enslavement in 1769. There were howls of protest from the French settlers, including those in St Louis, and the authorities were forced to modify that order: those who had Indian slaves could keep them, but they could not acquire any more or transfer their property rights.23 For decades, though, Indians made up a significant portion of the slave population of St Louis and its vicinity, and their unions with whites and with bondmen and bondwomen of African descent further complicated the racial dynamic of Upper Louisiana. There was also a small but growing free community of colour. A free black couple was numbered among the earliest arrivals in St Louis.24 In the years that followed, they would be joined by other people who had somehow managed to extricate themselves from bondage, and by their children who had been born into freedom. Although both the French Code Noir (Black Code) and the Spanish siete partidas (Seven-Part Code) held that children born to enslaved women followed the condition of their mothers and were bound for life, owners did occasionally free their slaves, especially their concubines and their offspring, and the enslaved zealously searched for any route out of slavery. Spanish law gave bond-people a little more latitude than did the French code. They could hire themselves out on Sundays and saints’ days and try to scrape together enough money to purchase their freedom.25 And that is what, on the face of it, the enterprising Ester managed to do. Jacques Clamorgan was none too scrupulous when it came to abiding by Spanish law with regard to the physical and spiritual well-being of his slaves.26 He regarded them as his property, to do with as he pleased. Ester was apparently an exception. On 14 July 1793 he set her free. In a nod to coartacíon, the Spanish practice that permitted slaves to buy themselves by instalments, he acknowledged she had paid him most of her purchase price. He was waiving the balance out of ‘principles of religion and humanity’ and gratitude for her ‘faithful services’.27 Ester, it seemed, had won Jacques over. The brutal master had been transformed into the kind and caring lover. That was how later generations of Clamorgans depicted the relationship between Ester and Jacques, but reality does not bear out the romantic fiction they concocted.28 Freedom was not the reward a grateful master bestowed on the woman who had shared his bed and superintended his household. Whatever emotional attachment there was between them, Jacques Clamorgan saw Ester as someone he could exploit. He freed her for reasons having little to do with affection. By emancipating her he was ensuring she would be legally competent to petition for, buy, and hold real estate, although of course he had no intention of involving her in any of


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the transactions he planned to make in her name. In his business affairs he frequently courted bankruptcy, and he hoped to shield some of his assets by claiming they were not technically his but Ester’s. As a slave Ester was a chattel—an object, not a person. Bestowing personhood upon her served his needs rather than hers. Spain’s colonial land policy was shaped by the awareness that Britain, France and the aggressive new power to the east, the United States, were eager to seize control of Louisiana. Spanish officials wanted Spain’s borderlands occupied by people who acknowledged Spanish rule, and Clamorgan knew Lieutenant-Governor Trudeau would not turn down any reasonable request for a land grant in his jurisdiction. Race and gender were immaterial as long as the petitioner was free. In Ester’s name, but without her knowledge, Jacques asked Trudeau for two town lots and a large tract on the periphery of St Louis. He also engineered a land grant from a friend and he himself conveyed some real estate to Ester.29 Unaware of Jacques’s various dealings in her name, Ester went on with her life. She managed his household as faithfully and as efficiently as she always had done, and now that she was free she began to work on freeing her daughter. Several weeks after he emancipated Ester, Jacques transferred ownership of Siley to her, stipulating in the deed of manumission that Siley would get her freedom on her mother’s death. Ester authorized a white friend, Joseph Brazeau, to hand over to Jacques the sum of $400. Brazeau stated under oath that the money was not his, and hence he had no claim to Siley. It was ‘paid out of the earnings and industry alone of ... Ester’.30 Ester then set about freeing her grandson. In the summer of 1789, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, then an officer in the British army, had been dispatched with five companions on an intelligence-gathering mission. Their orders were to travel the length of the Mississippi to check on Spanish defences. Along the way they called in at St Louis, and during their brief sojourn Fitzgerald met and seduced 16-year-old Siley.31 Nine months later she gave birth to a son. One account has it that Fitzgerald paid Jacques Clamorgan to free his child, but this is unlikely. He cannot have been in St Louis more than a couple of weeks, given that it took his party just four months to make their way from the headwaters of the Mississippi to New Orleans.32 He probably had no idea when he parted from Siley that she was pregnant. Since Siley was Clamorgan’s slave at the time, the baby, named Edward, inherited her status, not his father’s. He did not get his freedom until 1793, probably through his grandmother’s influence. One is left to wonder whether, in the years that followed, the family Fitzgerald left behind in St Louis ever learned what had happened to him. He returned home to die a martyr to the cause of Irish independence.33 Jacques Clamorgan provided well for Edward even before he emancipated him. He had Edward baptized and persuaded fellow merchant Joseph Brazeau to become his godfather.34 Edward was obviously one of Jacques’s


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favourites. At this point Jacques had no children of his own—at least none he acknowledged—and Ester may have entertained the hope that he would adopt Edward. As it was, Jacques freed Edward shortly after he freed Ester. The boy was soon transformed from a slave into a slaveholder. Clamorgan sold Brazeau two slaves, whom he promptly gave to his godson, along with some land.35 By the autumn of 1793 prospects seemed bright for Ester’s family. Grandmother and grandson had their freedom, while Siley had passed from Jacques’s ownership to her mother’s. They joined a small but growing free community of colour in St Louis.36 Thanks to the gifts of land and slaves from Brazeau, Edward Fitzgerald, alias Clamorgan, could look forward to a prosperous future. Although Jacques kept her in ignorance of the fact, Ester, too, was a landowner. There were deeds on file showing that she was the rightful owner of real estate in and around the town worth a considerable sum of money. If she ever learned about the deals he had engineered in her name, and if the two of them ever had a falling-out, Jacques Clamorgan could expect trouble. He had emancipated Ester in order to make use of her, but in making her a free woman he had given her a degree of power she could use against him. In 1797, four years after she secured her freedom, Ester walked out on Jacques Clamorgan. John Hay, an American trader who boarded with Clamorgan, described what precipitated the break-up. Jacques’s temper had got the better of him. He and Ester quarrelled, and he ‘abused [her] by striking her and ... turned her out of doors’. He also beat Siley. What was the reason for the quarrel? Hay explained that Ester had often complained to him about Jacques’s behaviour. ‘She observed that ... she was ... desirous of serving ... Clamorgan as long as she lived but that she did not ... think it ... right that she should be ordered about by the ... negro wenches of the house’.37 Ester had never expected faithfulness from Jacques, only the respect she considered she deserved as the senior wife in what was essentially a polygamous household. Jacques obviously considered himself entitled to sleep with any of his female slaves, but no other woman had been allowed to challenge Ester as the female authority figure in his home. For more than a decade she had enjoyed that position of power, and Jacques had made sure his younger concubines deferred to her. By 1797, though, he was allowing his ‘negro wenches’ to treat Ester in a manner she found totally unacceptable. He was letting her know, in no uncertain terms, that her reign was over. Ester protested to Jacques and he responded as he had done at the start of their relationship—with his fists. Over the years Ester had raised crops and cattle on Jacques Clamorgan’s land, some of which, although she did not know it, was legally hers. She was a thrifty and efficient farmer, and she had accumulated money. Some of that money had gone to pay for Siley. Now she used what remained of her savings to buy her independence. Infuriated with Jacques Clamorgan,


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she packed her belongings, taking with her a sheaf of papers. Although she could not read what was written on them, she knew they were her own and Edward’s deeds of manumission and the document transferring ownership of Siley to her. Mixed in with those papers, as Jacques would subsequently discover, were the land concessions he had secured in Ester’s name. Ester left Jacques Clamorgan’s home, purchased a lot, and paid for the construction of a house for herself and her family. Eventually things were patched up between her and Jacques, and she occasionally went back to work for him, but she maintained her own home.38

Under three flags: the Louisiana territory, 1800–04 In the decade after Ester and Jacques separated, their lives, the lives of their family members, and in fact the lives of all the inhabitants of Spanish Louisiana changed profoundly. Jacques Clamorgan was better placed than most to hear about what was being discussed in the capitals of Europe and in Washington, DC. He was in New Orleans on business trips in 1800 and again in 1802.39 He was multilingual and he had a sophisticated intelligence network. He talked with all manner of people and picked up any scraps of information that came his way. Back in St Louis he encouraged traders and travellers to call on him and share the latest news. Little went on concerning Louisiana that he did not find out about from one or other of his sources. As Clamorgan and other well-informed St Louis residents realized, the war in Europe between revolutionary France and monarchist Britain had farreaching implications for the province of Louisiana. As the political landscape of Europe was being realigned, especially after Napoleon Bonaparte made himself master of France, the impact of that realignment was bound to be felt across the ocean in North America. In 1800, in the secret treaty of San Ildefonso, the Spanish undertook to cede Louisiana to France in return for Napoleon’s pledge to make the brother-in-law of King Charles IV the ruler of the Duchy of Tuscany. Napoleon reneged on his side of the bargain, but he still expected Spain to give up Louisiana. His vision for Louisiana was that it would serve as the breadbasket for the former French colony of Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti) once his forces had crushed the slave rebellion there and restored French control. With the failure of France’s armies to take back ‘the jewel of the Antilles’, Louisiana lost its strategic importance in Napoleon’s grand design and became a costly burden rather than an asset. It was at this juncture that President Thomas Jefferson, getting wind of the transfer from Spain to France, dispatched negotiators to Paris to buy the port of New Orleans for the United States. For years American farmers in the rapidly growing territories of the Midwest had been raging at what they perceived as the inaction of the authorities back east. The Mississippi was their lifeline. Without unimpeded access, how could they get their produce to market? And what had their


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government done to pressure the frequently uncooperative Spanish to give them access? Wrangling between Spain and the United States had come to an end in 1795 with the Treaty of San Lorenzo, which granted navigation rights on the Mississippi to Americans. But the treaty would mean nothing if the river, and the great port at its mouth, were no longer under Spanish control. Jefferson knew what he must do. While he had made it one of the goals of his administration to pay off the national debt, money allocated to buy New Orleans would be money well spent. It was the price to be paid to stamp out the fires of disaffection on the nation’s western frontier.40 Once Jefferson’s emissaries arrived in the French capital, they were stunned to be offered not just New Orleans but the entire Louisiana Territory. The price eventually agreed upon was $15 million. Napoleon had acquired Louisiana on the understanding that he would never trade it to another country, but he was eager to be rid of it and cheerfully broke his word to Spain.41 Three flags flew over New Orleans in three weeks. France took control from Spain in November 1803, and the following month the formal transfer to the United States occurred. Upriver in St Louis the transition was accomplished in 24 hours. Eager to avoid expense, the French government authorized Amos Stoddard, the representative of the United States, to take possession of Upper Louisiana from Spain on France’s behalf. On 9 March 1804, Stoddard replaced the Spanish flag with the flag of France. On 10 March that flag came down and the Stars and Stripes was hoisted in its place.42 The transition from Spain to France, and then from France to the United States threw so much into question. French-speaking subjects of the Spanish Crown had no time to adjust to being French again before they became American citizens. There were matters of land policy to be addressed. New regulations were imposed on the trade with the Indian peoples of the Mississippi and Missouri valleys.43 And then there was the vexed matter of slavery. St Louis became the de facto capital of the newly created territory of Missouri, which the United States placed initially under the governance of the Council of Indiana. Back in 1787, before the writing of the United States Constitution, when the nation was operating under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress enacted the Northwest Ordinance to determine the future of United States territory between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and south of the Great Lakes. One of the provisions of the ordinance was the banning of slavery from that territory, which included Indiana. Now that the Council of Indiana was overseeing Missouri, did that mean slavery was outlawed in Missouri? The uncertainty was soon ended in slavery’s favour. On 1 October 1804, the Council introduced a Black Code for Missouri modelled on those in force in Kentucky and Virginia. It defined as black anyone with at least one black grandparent, categorically stated that the child of an enslaved woman was a slave from birth, and by implication made freeing a slave far more difficult.44


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The Louisiana Purchase impacted on Jacques Clamorgan as a man of business. He found trading much tougher than it had been, and his titles to much of the land he had acquired from Spain came into question. The consequences of the Purchase with regard to slavery and the status of free people of colour impacted on him as a father. Those same consequences also profoundly affected the lives of his erstwhile mistress and her family.

Slavery, race and deception: the Clamorgan family Ester and Jacques’s 13-year union was apparently childless, but several of Jacques’s other concubines bore him children. Shortly after Ester moved out of Jacques’s home, one of her erstwhile rivals, Hélène, took her place. In 1799 she gave birth to a son, St Eutrope. At the child’s baptism Jacques claimed him as his ‘natural son’ and declared he had been ‘born free’, assuming that sufficed under Spanish law to guarantee the boy’s liberty.45 Hélène was followed by Susanne. In the spring of 1803 she gave birth to a daughter, Apoline. Jacques had the baby baptized and, according to the entry in the register, explicitly stated that she was free. Even so, he was concerned about the effect the impending sale of the Louisiana Territory might have. (Recall that Louisiana was to change hands twice within the next few months: from Spain to France in November 1803, then from France to the United States just a month later.) Given that her mother was a slave, was it enough to state that Apoline was free? He feared not and he decided to doctor the register. A strategically placed ink blot partially covers the word esclave (slave) after Susanne’s name.46 While Susanne was pregnant with Apoline, Jacques took another concubine, Julie. His child with her, Cyprian Martial, was born four months after Apoline. Clamorgan declared the boy free and again blotted the entry in the register. The priest had written esclave after Julie’s name. Clamorgan did his best to render the word unreadable.47 By April 1807, when Julie presented Jacques Clamorgan with another son, there was no question about which jurisdiction St Louis was under. Julie was a slave, and that meant Maximin was as well. Once more Jacques went to work on the baptismal register when the priest’s back was turned.48 Of course, had he freed Julie or any of his other slaves before they gave birth to his children, those children would unquestionably have been born free, but that was not the way Jacques Clamorgan treated his women. Shortly after Maximin’s birth, Ester re-entered Jacques’s life. In 1807 he began planning one of his boldest ventures yet, a trading expedition to Chihuahua, Mexico via Santa Fe. He had spoken to the right people in the new administration and had secured the right licences to trade with what was now a foreign nation. He knew he would be away from home for many months. Before he set off he asked Ester to move back into his home and assist the much younger Julie. Ester agreed. What she did not know was that


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she was infected with smallpox. Virtually the entire household caught it from her. All recovered except Julie.49 When Jacques eventually arrived back in St Louis and learned of Julie’s death he turned on Ester. Thanks to her his children were motherless.50 Aside from his grief and his concern for his children, he was grappling with the financial chaos that was threatening to bankrupt him. His business interests had turned sour while he was away.51 His best hope of paying his debts was to realize what he could on the land he held—land that was appreciating in value now that American settlers were pouring into Missouri—but he was running into problems. After acquiring the Louisiana Territory, the United States had appointed a Board of Land Commissioners whose unenviable task it was to attempt to sort out people’s claims under the Spanish administration. It was a nightmare. Grants had never been properly surveyed. Witnesses, the vast majority of them French-speaking, turned up to bolster or dispute every claim. Jacques Clamorgan made numerous appearances before the Board prior to his departure for Mexico. He had dozens of claims he wanted confirmed. The members of the Board were understandably suspicious, given the size of many of those claims and the vague descriptions in the concessions he submitted for inspection. Did he really have the right to half a million acres on the Missouri in what is now South Dakota? Had he ever actually farmed the 40-thousand-acre tract on the Mississippi he insisted the Spanish authorities had given him? The huge New Madrid grant was surely contingent on his establishing a rope manufactory, and he had not in fact done so. If his land claims beyond St Louis were suspect, surely those in the town and in the Little Prairie just outside the town were straightforward enough. There was just one difficulty: the grants had been made to Ester. Jacques told the Board she had sold him her rights, but the Board was sceptical.52 He needed convincing proof of ownership, and that meant getting Ester to cooperate. Ester learned for the first time about the transactions Jacques had engineered in her name. She discovered she had a legal right to several prime pieces of real estate. She could sell them or lease them out, live out her life in comfort and provide handsomely for her family, but Jacques demanded she execute deeds giving all the land to him and hinted at what he would do if she refused. He was prepared to use Ester’s family as bargaining chips. Without her knowledge, he had a deed drawn up saying she had sold Siley back to him!53 Although Ester’s family had been growing steadily over the years as a result of Siley’s various liaisons, Ester had seen no need to free her grandchildren. She had bought and paid for Siley back in 1793, and obviously had no intention of selling her own flesh and blood. However, if Siley was Jacques’s slave once more, as the spurious deed asserted, so were all of her children except Edward, whose freedom was a matter of record. To bolster the fake deed of sale for Siley, Jacques got his hands on the baptismal register again. The entry for Siley’s daughter Agatha said her mother was


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free. He wrote: ‘I declare that ... Silé ... is a slave’. After the entry for Aurore he scrawled one comment, crossed it through, and then wrote ‘The negress is not free’.54 Jacques was prepared for all eventualities. When Ester steadfastly refused to put her X on the property deeds he had prepared, he resorted to forgery. She found out and remonstrated with him. His response was sadly predictable. He beat her ‘and told her ... all she ever claimed was his and ... he was determined to take [her] daughter ... and her ... children and sell them at New Orleans’.55 Ester had had enough and she hired a lawyer. Virtually bankrupt, and fearing he might be jailed for forgery, Jacques Clamorgan took a step he hoped would do away with any lingering doubts about his children’s freedom. If there was any ambiguity about their status his creditors might try to sell them as slaves—the very fate with which he was threatening Ester’s family. On 6 September 1809, with Ester’s case about to go to trial, Jacques signed formal deeds of emancipation. Each was based on a legal fiction—that Hélène, Susanne and Julie had paid him for their children. If the children’s freedom had been purchased by their mothers, why did he feel the need to act now? He explained he wanted to comply fully with ‘the laws and customs of the United States relative to the liberty of slaves’.56 Back in 1803, Jacques and his friend Joseph Brazeau had put real estate in trust for Jacques’s three older children.57 Then, quite unexpectedly, Maximin came along. Although Jacques did not alter the deed of gift, he added injunctions on the back of each emancipation deed pressuring Maximin’s siblings to be generous. St Eutrope, Apoline and Cyprian Martial should share the Brazeau property with Maximin. If they did not, ‘I will be angry with you’. On Cyprian’s deed there was a very personal plea. ‘Remember ... never to abandon your brother ... I urge you to live in loving friendship with him because he and you were born of the same blood’.58 Ultimately, Jacques offered Ester’s lawyer one of the few pieces of real estate he had managed to get the Board of Land Commissioners to confirm and the man abandoned Ester’s case. However, although Jacques avoided jail, his business affairs did not improve. He also grew cynical about the power of brotherly and sisterly affection. It was better to provide outright for his two favourite children. In 1813 he recruited an ambitious young trader, Jean Eli Tholozan, and conveyed to him in a fictitious sale claims to four enormous tracts of land—well over a million acres—that he held title to. The Board had rejected his claims. Tholozan was to do whatever was needed to get those claims confirmed, after which he was to sell the land, and split the proceeds with Cyprian Martial and Maximin. Why did Jacques not leave the claims outright to his sons? Because, as he well knew, now that the Americans were in control, civil law was being phased out and replaced by common law, and he feared that would give his creditors more power to seize any land he died possessed of. He was also uncertain about


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A troubled legacy: the heirs of Jacques and Ester In October 1814 Jacques took to his bed. He was almost seventy years old: it was time to put his earthly affairs in order and complicate things even more. He summoned his lawyer (a Frenchman) and made his will. He left his children well provided for, but not equally well. St Eutrope and Apoline had shares in the gift of land from Brazeau. Cyprian Martial was to give half of his share to Maximin, but he would be compensated with a portion of all or any of the claims Tholozan could get confirmed. All four children would divide among themselves any other pieces of land that were considered part of Jacques’s estate.60 What Jacques Clamorgan could not do was to see that Tholozan abided by his part of the bargain the two had made. Once Jacques was out of the picture, Tholozan sold two of the four claims. It was a good deal: he had cash for land he had never really owned. For the Clamorgan heirs, however, it created a legal nightmare.61 After Jacques’s death the most pressing problem facing his executors was where and with whom to place his children, all of them minors. Into the breach stepped Ester.62 It says much for her generous nature that she took them and raised them with her own grandchildren, fully aware that they had inherited from their father pieces of real estate in and around St Louis that he had stolen from her. Property rights aside, what did the future hold for Jacques’s children and for Ester and her family? All were people of colour, as defined by Missouri law. All were bilingual. Between them, Jacques and Ester had ensured that. French was the first language of many St Louis residents, but the influx of American settlers was bringing about a change.63 Not to be able to converse with the newcomers, few of whom showed any inclination to learn French, was to isolate oneself from a host of opportunities. The Clamorgans had an additional survival tool. All four were literate. Jacques had seen to that.64 Ester and her progeny could only sign with an X. The Clamorgans were free because their father had formally emancipated them, but Ester was less certain about her family. Now that Jacques was dead she was not worried about the deed he had concocted so he could reclaim Siley. Nevertheless, the original deed of sale made Siley Ester’s slave for life, so technically all of Siley’s offspring belonged to Ester. Belatedly she realized that if she died owing anyone any money her family would literally pay the price. In 1817 she executed a formal deed of emancipation freeing her daughter, her grandchildren, the husband she had purchased for one granddaughter, and the three children born of that union.65 The prospects for people of African descent were not very promising. The St Louis she had


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the inheritance rights of illegitimate children under the new regime. If he sold the land to Tholozan, and Tholozan held it in trust for Cyprian Martial and Maximin, he might be able to outwit the American courts.59


known as a young woman was not the St Louis her family would know. Nor, for that matter, was it the St Louis in which her wards, the Clamorgan heirs, were coming of age. Even though St Louis retained much of its French character, it was becoming more Americanized by the day. More settlers from the east were arriving every day, bringing with them different attitudes about so many aspects of life. The Protestant faith was making incursions into what had been a solidly Catholic community. American business habits arrived, as did American laws, American governmental practices and American attitudes towards people of African descent, free and enslaved.66 As Ester and the other old-time black and mixed-race residents knew, before the handover to the United States St Louis, and for that matter the whole of Upper Louisiana, had not exactly been a paradise for people of African descent. Slavery had flourished, and as Jacques Clamorgan’s ‘chattel personal’ Ester had experienced—and doubtless witnessed—repeated acts of brutality. However, the laws of France and Spain had offered a little latitude. The laws of the new state of Missouri offered none. The Missouri Constitution presented to Congress in November 1820 authorized the legislature to ‘pass such laws as might be necessary to prevent free Negroes and Mulattoes from ... settling in this state’. That was objected to as being a violation of the ‘equal protection’ clause of the federal Constitution. After much wrangling, and an undertaking that the offending provision would not be put into force, Missouri entered the Union.67 None of the Clamorgans, nor any member of Ester’s clan, would be impacted if a racial exclusion law were passed, since they were already resident in Missouri. And yet, that such a law was even contemplated was an ominous sign of what might happen in a state where free people of colour were increasingly seen as an unwanted segment of the population. As for their financial standing, Ester and her family fared very differently from Jacques Clamorgan’s descendants. Once Jacques was in his grave and could no longer threaten her, Ester went after her double-dealing lawyer, William C. Carr. By the time she did so Carr was a judge, and the accusation that he had conspired to rob an illiterate black woman of her property was not one he relished. Embarrassment was one thing, but justice was another. Ester fought, and then her grandchildren fought, but Carr defeated them every time. And when it came to the land Jacques Clamorgan had robbed Ester of, for years the best they could do was to interest a couple of land speculators to pay them pennies on the dollar for their claims. Eventually, one businessman who naively thought he could capitalize on the so-called Ester claims handed over several thousand dollars.68 Jacques Clamorgan’s descendants had far more real estate to fight over. He had bequeathed to his children, albeit in unequal shares, not only the vast concessions he had received from the Spanish authorities, but also other pieces of land he had gobbled up in the belief that the United States


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would recognize all these claims. Like many other speculators, Jacques had run into problems with the Land Commissioners.69 And then there was the little matter of his indebtedness. Various people claimed to have secured judgements against him and to have acquired parcels of his land. His children, and their children after them, would have to fight for every inch of real estate, and take on individual claimants, the heirs of those claimants, and the people to whom they had sold land. Eventually they would confront the United States government, which declared some of Jacques Clamorgan’s most valuable real estate public domain. Back and forth the litigation went. Jacques died in 1814. His great-grandchildren were still fighting for their inheritance as the First World War ended. Had they ever received confirmation of, and compensation for, a fraction of the land claims Jacques had amassed, his descendants would have been very wealthy indeed. What had been the fringes of Spanish North America had become the American heartland. The Clamorgans, who redefined themselves over the generations, passing quietly and generally without question from black to white, were obsessed with what might have been. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat wrote of Jacques’s grandson on his death in 1883: ‘Those who knew him can hardly remember the time when [he] was not talking about some case ... in which he was interested. He passed the greater part of his life in expectation of judgments and decisions’.70 What was true of Henry Clamorgan was true of many other members of the Clamorgan clan. Charles Dickens’s fictional law case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, consumed generation after generation of litigants, and ultimately swallowed up the entire estate, but the real-life courtroom saga of the Clamorgan heirs versus an ever-changing roster of adversaries eclipsed it. And in fact as in fiction, justice delayed was justice denied. The transformation of St Louis from a French and Spanish colonial outpost to an American city is a story of political and diplomatic manoeuvring, but it is about much more besides. Individuals and families were caught up in that process of transformation, in some instances benefitting from it and in others suffering as a consequence of it. The intertwined stories of Jacques Clamorgan and Ester, of his descendants and hers, speak to the impact on people’s lives of the stroke of a pen in Paris or Washington, or the lowering of one flag and the raising of another in its stead. Collectively they are the human face of ‘regime change’.

Notes 1. Frederick A. Hodes, Beyond the Frontier: A History of St. Louis to 1821 (Tucson, AZ, 2004), 216. 2. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992), 198–199; François Furstenberg, ‘The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History’, American Historical Review 113/3 (2008): 647–677 (here 656). 3. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 200–202.


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4. Thomas James, Three Years Among the Indians and Mexicans (1846; repr. St Louis, 1916), 96; Missouri Republican, 20 March 1863; Claim of Heirs of Jacques Clamorgan (Washington, DC, 1910), 7; A. P. Nasatir, ‘Jacques Clamorgan: Colonial Promoter of the Northern Border of New Spain’, New Mexico Historical Review 17/2 (1942): 101–112 (here 104). Even Wikipedia weighs in on the matter, stating categorically that Clamorgan was an Irishman: (13 August 2009). 5. See, for example, Joseph J. Hill (ed.), ‘An Unknown Expedition to Santa Fe in 1807’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 6/4 (1920): 560–562. 6. Jean Canu, Les mille ans d’une famille normande: les Clamorgan, 1066–1980 (St Lô, 1980); Dictionnaire des familles françaises anciennes ou notables à la fin du XIXe siècle (Evreux, 1912), vol. 11, 19. 7. Kansas Magazine, February 1873, in Atichson (Kansas) Globe, 6 July 1891. 8. ‘Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy’ (10 April 2008). 9. New Jersey Gazette, 22 March 1780. 10. Nasatir, ‘Jacques Clamorgan’, 104. 11. Title Papers of the Clamorgan Grant of 536,904 Arpents of Alluvial Lands in Missouri and Arkansas (New York, 1837). 12. The Supreme Court eventually ruled on that grant in 1880 in United States v. Clamorgan; Clamorgan v. United States 101 US 822 (1879). 13. Hodes, Beyond the Frontier, 260–261; Nasatir, ‘Jacques Clamorgan’, 106–112; R. M. Price and C. F. DeLaurière, Petition of Clamorgan’s Representatives (Washington, DC, 1818), 13–14. 14. See, for instance, St. Louis Star, 11 June 1911. 15. Otto Lohrenz, ‘The Rev. Ichabod Camp, First American Preacher on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers’, Filson Club History Quarterly 65/3 (1991): 358–377; Illinois State Archives, Springfield, Kaskaskia MSS, 21 August 1784. 16. Ibid. 17 June 1785. 17. Lohrenz, ‘Ichabod Camp’, 381. 18. Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City (MOSA), Missouri Supreme Court Cases, folders 14 and 15, Box 24, F/1/3, Louisa Wherry and Catherine Dodge, in Ester, Free Mulatto Woman, vs. Jacques Clamorgan, 1809. 19. MOSA, Pascal L. Cerré, in Ester vs. William C. Carr, St Charles Circuit Court (1831), recapitulated in Missouri Supreme Court Cases, folder 20, Box 16, George Speers, Adm. of Ester, A Free Mulatto Woman, vs. William C. Carr, 1842. 20. David Delany, in ibid. 21. On the institution of slavery during the French and Spanish regimes see Lorenzo J. Greene et al., Missouri’s Black Heritage (Columbia, MO, 1993), 8–17. 22. For a sense of the different slaves Clamorgan owned see MOSA, Colonial Archives of St Louis, vol. 2, 269, 356, 368, 378, 379, 390, 549; ‘Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy’; and Teresa Blattner, People of Color: Black Genealogical Records and Abstracts from Missouri Sources (Bowie, MD, 1998), vol. 2, 135–141. 23. Greene, Missouri’s Black Heritage, 17. 24. Hodes, Beyond the Frontier, 77. 25. On the provisions of the Code Noir see Christine Williams, ‘Prosperity in the Face of Prejudice: The Life of a Free Black Woman in Frontier St. Louis’, Gateway Heritage 19/2 (1998): 4–11 (here 5, 7–8); and on the siete partidas see Hodes, Beyond the Frontier, 219. 26. The registers of St Louis’s Old Cathedral (microfilm, St Louis County Library) indicate Clamorgan occasionally paid for a slave’s baptism or funeral, but he


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27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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did not see to it that every one of his slaves received the sacraments, and he routinely ignored the injunction that slave owners try to keep family units together. MOSA, Ester vs. Carr. See, for example, Washington Post, 15 June 1911. Missouri Historical Society, St Louis (MHS), Missouri Land Records Collection, Livres Terreins, A1080, Book 4, 34, Book 5, 2, 10–11; MOSA, Colonial Archives, vol. 1, p. 451; vol. 2, 376; St Louis Recorder of Deeds, City Hall, St Louis (SLRD), St Louis Deeds, Book A, 205, Book B, 313, 318, Book E, 80. On Spain’s land policies see Judith A. Gilbert, ‘Esther and Her Sisters: Free Women of Color as Property Owners in Colonial St. Louis, 1765–1804’, Gateway Heritage 17/1 (1996), 17. MOSA, Colonial Archives, vol. 2, 380. Daniel Gahan, ‘Journey After My Own Heart: Lord Edward Fitzgerald in America, 1788–90’, New Hibernia Review 8/2 (2004): 84–105 (here 88, 99). Charles Van Ravenswaay, St. Louis–An Informal History of the City and Its People (St Louis, 1991), 70. Gahan, ‘Journey After My Own Heart’, 86–87; Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York, 2003), 115–116. For an account of Fitzgerald’s life see Stella Tillyard, Citizen Lord (New York, 1997). Old Cathedral, Baptisms (1769–1804), 45. MOSA, Colonial Archives, vol. 1, 403; vol. 2, 377; SLRD, St Louis Deeds, Book A, 219, Book F, 8. Hodes, Beyond the Frontier, 216. MOSA, Joseph Brazeau, Pascal Cerré and John Hay, in Ester vs. Clamorgan. MOSA, Elizabeth Hortez, in Minutes of the Board of Land Commissioners, vol. 6, 160–161; MOSA, Colonial Archives, vol. 1, 404. ‘Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy’. For an illuminating discussion of the vital significance of the Mississippi see Furstenberg, ‘Trans-Appalachian Frontier’, esp. 657–673. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 290–291. Hodes, Beyond the Frontier, 292. Ibid. 320–321. Lloyd A. Hunter, ‘Slavery in St. Louis, 1804–1860’, Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 30/4 (1974): 233–265 (here 237); Hodes, Beyond the Frontier, 310–312. Old Cathedral, Baptisms (1769–1804), 102. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 131. Ibid. (1804–1814), 20. MOSA, Testimony of Joseph Brazeau, John Cooms and Catherine Dodge in Ester vs. Clamorgan; Old Cathedral, Burials (1781–1832), 138. MOSA, Jacques Clamorgan to ‘Madame Ester’, 4 February 1809, in George Speers vs. William Myers et al., St Charles Circuit Court, June 1837 Term, case #2845. On some of his debts see SLRD, St Louis Deeds, Book B, 354–355. MOSA, Minutes of the Board of Land Commissioners, vol. 1, 423, 427, 483, 485. MOSA, Joseph Brazeau, in Ester vs. Clamorgan. Old Cathedral, Baptisms (1769–1804), 89, 141. MOSA, Affidavit of Ester, in Ester vs. Carr. SLRD, St Louis Deeds, Book B, 367, 368, 370. MOSA, Colonial Archives, vol. I, 175. MOSA, Transcriptions of deeds of manumission, in Landes et al. v. Perkins, 12 Mo 238 (October Term 1848).


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59. SLRD, St Louis Deeds, Book E, 457. 60. MOSA, Records of the St Louis Probate Court, file #168A, probate of the estate of Jacques Clamorgan. 61. MOSA, St Charles County Deeds, Book D, 94, 425. 62. MOSA, Jacques Clamorgan probate; Records of the St Louis Probate Court, Guardianship of St Eutrope, Apoline and Maximin Clamorgan, Box 1, folders 6 and 7. 63. John F. Darby, Personal Recollections of Many Prominent People Whom I Have Known, and Events–Especially of Those Relating to the History of St. Louis– During the First Half of the Present Century (St Louis, 1880), 5. 64. MOSA, Clamorgan to ‘Madame Ester’, in Speers vs. Myers et al. 65. SLRD, St Louis Deeds, Book F, 267. 66. On the political, economic and cultural transformations wrought by the transition to American rule see Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington, 2006), 148–185. 67. Hodes, Beyond the Frontier, 398–399. 68. MOSA, Records of the St Louis Probate Court, file #1065, probate of the estate of Ester, Free Mulatto Woman; SLRD, St Louis Deeds, Book Y, 274, Book T2, 74, 305, Book Z4, 317, 323. 69. On the Board and the rash of land speculation that swept Upper Louisiana in this period see Lemont K. Richardson, ‘Private Land Claims in Missouri’, Missouri Historical Review 50/2 (1956): 133–144; Richardson, ‘Private Land Claims in Missouri, Part II’, ibid. 50/3 (1956): 271–286; and Richardson, ‘Private Land Claims in Missouri, Part III’, ibid. 50/4 (1956): 387–399. 70. St. Louis Globe Democrat, 10 March 1883.


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Part III Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to MEDICAL LIBRARY NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIV. - PalgraveConnect - 2011-02-25

Identity and Difference


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The French Revolutionary Wars in the Spanish-American Imagination, 1789–1830 Rebecca Earle

Introduction: José María Caballero On 19 August 1808 a minor military official and small-scale trader in the Colombian city of Bogotá made an interesting entry in his diary. The diarist, José María Caballero, had since the 1780s maintained a sporadic record of important events in the city and its environs, in which he noted such occurrences as the inauguration of the cathedral’s new sacristy, the arrival of a new viceroy, earthquakes, heavy rainstorms and, especially, homicides. His entry for 23 May 1808, for example, reads ‘someone slit the throat of a maidservant named Inés who worked in the house of Don Pantaleón Gutiérrez’.1 Since the late eighteenth century, in other words, his diary had reflected the occasionally dramatic but extremely local goings-on in this colonial Spanish-American city. His chronicle was quintessentially provincial. Events in the summer of 1808 however transformed the nature of Caballero’s diary. The first indications of this transformation appeared in June. On 11 June 1808 Caballero noted that ‘news arrived of the coronation of Ferdinand VII as King of Spain’. He was careful to detail the celebrations that accompanied this happy event: the ringing of church bells, prayers and masses, and three days of public illuminations enlivened by music and fireworks. This entry is notable in that it was one of very few mentions in the diary up to that point of an event that occurred outside the confines of the Spanish colony of New Granada, and it hints at the overwhelming importance that events in Europe would soon have for Caballero and his fellow New Granadans. His attention, however, quickly returned to more parochial affairs. On 19 July he recorded the arrest of several people accused of witchcraft, and at the start of August he noted the death of his niece. The familiar litany of births, deaths, and local scandals was however rent asunder by the news that he recorded on 19 August 1808. On that day, he noted, ‘came the dreadful news of the imprisonment of our Catholic monarchs and the royal family and the 179


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fall of the Kingdom and all the States, committed by the French and of the danger menacing the Indies’.2 From this moment his diary was transformed from an unquestioning depiction of colonial life into a remarkable record of political events in both Europe and America to which Caballero stood witness. The capture of the Spanish monarchs by Napoleon, in other words, marked the start of Caballero’s interest in the political; politics, in this diary, is the direct—albeit delayed—result of the French Revolution, even though the events of 1789–99 passed without any mention whatsoever. The terrible news of 19 August was followed by the arrival of representatives from Spain insisting that the city’s residents swear loyalty to the imprisoned Ferdinand VII, and the declaration of war against Napoleon, whom Caballero labelled a ‘traitor and usurper’. ‘This infamous monarch’, he noted, had committed ‘the vilest act ever recorded in history’.3 Such language contrasts markedly with the tone Caballero had employed in registering even the most alarming of local homicides. In the autumn of 1808 and during 1809 Caballero still found time to record such events as the murder of a woman in Engativá, the discovery of a rabid bull on a nearby hacienda, and the fact that ‘Miss Caycedo married Don Francisco Morales’, but by 1810 such snippets of daily life were greatly outnumbered by a dense recording of political and military events in Europe and the Americas. The 1808 French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula had been followed by the outbreak of rebellion in Spain’s American colonies, which led to a decade of war and, ultimately, the independence of all of mainland Spanish America. In Colombia, a number of towns, including Caballero’s Bogotá, established patriotic, anti-French juntas, many of which had by 1811 declared independence from the metropolis. The years between 1811 and 1815 saw the outbreak of civil war between rival juntas, which proposed diverse models of government, and also between supporters and opponents of independence from Spain. In 1815 a substantial Spanish military force arrived in the Viceroyalty intent on quelling the insurgency, which by this time had acquired an unequivocally anti-colonial character. Warfare continued until the military defeat of the Spanish in the early 1820s.4 Caballero himself participated in the fighting that broke out between rival bands of insurgents in 1813 and witnessed the occupation of Bogotá by a succession of military forces both royalist and revolutionary. In addition to recording the increasing militarization of society, Caballero’s diary notes an ever-increasing accumulation of new political practices—in 1813 he watched the planting of liberty trees in the former viceregal capital—but it also bears witness to Caballero’s own transformation from fervent monarchist to convinced patriot. His account of the 1817 execution of Policarpa Salavarrieta, who was sentenced to death for her role in an anti-Spanish conspiracy, gives some flavour of the path he had travelled from 1808: So this is how they honour the general pardons: cruelly dismembering the tender breast of this heroine, this martyr for the Patria (fatherland),


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this constant and incomparable woman! And they say that in prison they told her to renounce and disown [her beliefs] and that they would pardon her, and she replied that under no circumstances would she renounce them, and that whether free or imprisoned she would seek ways to free her Patria. Such constancy! What an example for all patriots!5 The diary ends in 1819, the year, Caballero recorded, when ‘the Patria began’.6 Caballero’s diary reveals very well the transformation of daily life in this Spanish colony in the age of revolution. The advent of the political, or perhaps even of what the French scholar François-Xavier Guerra would have called ‘modernity’, can be traced through Caballero’s journey from chronicler to patriot. What is interesting for our purposes is the pivotal role that the French Revolution—or, more accurately, the Napoleonic Wars— played in inaugurating that transformation. In this chapter I would like to situate Caballero within a more panoramic vision of Spanish-American responses to the French Revolution and its aftermath. We shall see that Spanish Americans often sympathized with the iconographies and political symbolism associated with the French Revolution, even while opposing the political and international policies pursued by revolutionary France.

The French Revolution in Spanish America Let us begin with the official response of the Spanish Crown. That response was essentially to censor and control the spread of information about the unwelcome developments in Spain’s neighbour insofar as was possible. In December 1789 the Count of Floridablanca, Charles IV’s chief minister, prohibited the publication of any reference to events in France, and in February 1791 he imposed further restrictions on press freedom. The Inquisition was moreover charged with searching out and banning seditious publications. Banned items included Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1792), works by the Comte de Volney, Montesquieu, and a variety of other texts. These precautions extended to Spain’s American colonies. Governments across Spanish America were under orders to look for ‘seditious propaganda and suspicious Frenchmen’, and their responses suggest that officials were genuinely concerned about the subversive impact of news from France.7 For example, in December 1794 Mexico’s viceroy ordered the imprisonment of all French citizens living in viceregal territory.8 The Chilean governor Ambrosio O’Higgins went so far as to refuse permission to disembark to sailors on a French ship that had spent the last two months at sea searching for traces of the vanished botanical expedition headed by the French savant La Perouse.9 Priests and bishops meanwhile fulminated against the reading of books celebrating the ‘deplorable’ events in Paris, or, more subtly, praised the merits of divinely appointed monarchies and denounced unnamed ‘disorders’.10


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French Revolution in Spanish-American Imagination


It is clear that despite such efforts a great deal of news did penetrate Spain’s colonial cordon sanitaire. Banned texts appear to have circulated widely. Works by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau could be obtained even in such distant colonies as Chile, where it was also possible to read manuscript copies of the French Assembly’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. A hundred copies of this same work were printed in Bogotá by the journalist Antonio Nariño in 1793, although he paid a heavy price when viceregal officials learned of his audacity.11 Such texts were accompanied by other pieces of pro-revolutionary propaganda, such as the clock decorated with an inscription and image ‘alluding to the depraved liberty of the French’ seized in Guayaquil in 1793, or the revolutionary playing cards whose images of the decapitated French monarchs reduced the Mexican viceroy to tears.12 Letters too provided colonials with information about events in France, as did the many individual travellers who eluded the Spanish dragnet.13 Moreover, after the 1793 execution of Louis XVI and France’s declaration of war on Spain, readers in Spanish America did not need to resort to banned publications or private letters to follow new developments, because the Spanish state lifted the blanket censorship it had hitherto imposed on official publications.14 Newspapers in both Europe and the Americas accordingly began denouncing the execrable and impious actions of the French in a steady stream of articles and editorials. The Mexican Gaceta de México, the Peruvian Mercurio Peruano, the Colombian Papel Periódico de la Ciudad de Santa Fé de Bogotá, all reported regularly on events in France. The tone of these reports was uniformly hostile, as one might expect. The Mercurio Peruano, for example, condemned France’s behaviour unequivocally. ‘In the six thousand years that people have existed human history has never presented us with such scandalous deeds as those offered today by France’, the journal observed.15 The news conveyed by these sources was discussed by both the great and the small, much to the dismay of viceregal representatives. Mexican officials observed that although the inhabitants of Mexico were in general poorly educated, ‘they talked about the events in France as if most of the letters from Spain dealt with this subject’.16 Worse, in the view of many officials, these events appeared to evoke considerable sympathy. Mexico’s Viceroy Branciforte complained in 1794 of the influence of the ‘eulogists and panegyrists of the ideas and maxims of the Paris Convention and of those who propagate these among the unwary’.17 The historians Georges Baudot and María Agueda Méndez have uncovered dozens of ephemeral pro-revolutionary texts seized by the Mexican Inquisition between 1789 and 1818, and in 1794 a member of the Mexico City cathedral choir was arrested for singing several stanzas of the Marseillaise in public.18 Indeed, a number of Mexican priests were investigated by the Inquisition for possessing what was deemed revolutionary propaganda, or for making injudicious comments about events in Europe.19


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In some cases interest in the French Revolution extended beyond mere words. Diligent colonial officials uncovered a number of pro-French conspiracies, including some that probably never existed. For example, in New Granada in 1794, crown officials arrested a number of creoles who had allegedly aimed at ‘raising an insurrection in the Kingdom and adopting the form of government presently established in France’, but evidence for the existence of this plot is weak.20 Lyman Johnson has documented the investigation of an apparently non-existent pro-French conspiracy in Buenos Aires in the 1790s.21 On the other hand, it is clear that in some cases French officials in neighbouring colonies sponsored serious attempts at revolutionizing Spanish America. This occurred, unsuccessfully, in Florida in 1795, for example.22 Scholars are not in agreement about the extent to which members of Spain’s colonial elite supported such revolutionary ventures. The historian Víctor Uribe-Urán has recently argued that provincial elites who participated in late colonial riots were inspired ‘at least in part by the French Revolution’.23 The late French scholar of the Spanish-American revolutionary era, FrançoisXavier Guerra, was more sceptical about the degree to which local elites truly regarded the French Revolution as a source of inspiration.24 Perhaps, as Uribe-Urán claims, the French Revolution did inspire some members of the creole elite to challenge colonial rule. In October 1793, for example, Mexico’s Inquisition investigated an alleged pro-revolutionary conspiracy involving some thirty individuals, ‘including young students, graduates, and professors of theology and law’.25 The men were accused of gathering in various venues to discuss the principles and events of the French Revolution. Perhaps these men were genuine afrancesados, as admirers of the French Revolution were dismissively known. In other cases accused individuals appear to have made no real effort to promote rebellion, despite the authorities’ suspicions. Such was the case with 25-year-old Dr Juan Antonio Montenegro, arrested by the Mexican Inquisition in 1793 for being ‘very devoted to the French’. He had unwisely claimed to know of an (apparently non-existent) anti-colonial rebellion, and had told one Doña María de la Cruz Pantoja—while he was attempting to grope her—that he was a great admirer of the French. She denounced him to the Inquisition.26 For many elite Spanish Americans, the French Revolution was associated primarily with alarming perturbations of the social order. For example, in 1795 the Venezuelan province of Coro was the scene of a genuine lower-class revolt inspired by events in France. José Leonardo Chirino and José Caridad González, free blacks, launched a rebellion against creole landowners in which they proclaimed ‘the law of the French, the republic, the freedom of the slaves and the suppression of the alcabala and other taxes’.27 (The ‘law of the French’ most likely referred to the abolition of slavery decreed by the French Convention the previous year.) This revolt was easily suppressed, but Chirino and González were not isolated examples. Two years later Manuel


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Gual and José María España sought to implement a republican system in Venezuela, based again on ideas emanating from France.28 The most dramatic attempt to implement the principles of the French Revolution to the Americas occurred in Haiti, where between 1791 and 1803 a coalition of revolted slaves succeeded in ending French colonial rule, and also, much more alarmingly, in abolishing slavery.29 News of events in Haiti spread quickly through the Caribbean; David Geggus has shown that within a month of the first slave uprising in Saint Domingue, slaves in Jamaica were composing songs based on this event, and, as Jane Landers argues, it seems certain that slaves in other parts of the circum-Caribbean also learned of the uprising.30 Overall, Geggus has argued that between 40 and 50 slave revolts in the Caribbean in the period between 1789 and 1793, including the uprising in Haiti, may be linked to the French Revolution.31 The effect of such genuinely revolutionary movements from below tempered the response of both middling groups and elites to the French Revolution. Certainly, the great revolutionary leaders of Spanish America’s own independence movement were guarded in their response to the French regicides. In contrast, such individuals were often openly enthusiastic about the example provided by the American Revolution. The veteran anti-Spanish agitator Francisco de Miranda, who ended his days in prison as a result of his revolutionary activities, observed in 1799, ‘We have before our eyes two great examples, the American and the French Revolutions. Let us prudently imitate the first and carefully shun the second’.32 The Venezuelan insurgent Simón Bolívar, although an admirer of Enlightenment philosophers, expressed similar scepticism about the applicability of French principles to Spanish America. In his Manifiesto de Cartagena of 1812, for example, he condemned the disorder that had resulted in Colombia and Venezuela when cities had attempted to follow ‘the theory that all men and all peoples have the right to pick the government that they imagine suits them’.33 It is striking that after the advent of hostilities between Spain and its colonies in 1810, insurgents and royalists competed to accuse each other of supporting the French Revolution, as Guerra has observed.34 Admiring the French was what the enemy did.

Back to Caballero What impact did these dramatic events have on our Colombian diarist Caballero? Did he admire or denounce revolutionary plots? Did he read Rousseau? Did he discuss the latest news from France in a tavern or at home? In fact, as I noted, the entire French Revolution proper—the events that occurred between 1789 and 1799—passed entirely unremarked in Caballero’s diary. He made no mention whatsoever of the execution of Louis XVI, the most horrendous event in six centuries of human history (in the view of the Mercurio Peruano), and did not even note the declaration of war between


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France and Spain (although he did, incongruously, record on 27 November 1795 that ‘peace with the French was announced’).35 His diary does allude elliptically to the supposed 1794 revolutionary plot headed by Antonio Nariño, but Caballero does not in any way connect this plot with events in France.36 The alleged plot revolved around Nariño and his printer, who had prepared a translation of the Rights of Man into Spanish. In other words, during the 1790s Caballero was either utterly unaware of events in France, or was utterly uninterested in them. The wealth of information available in Spanish America about the French Revolution—recall that the Colombian Papel Periódico de Santa Fé de Bogotá published regular articles on the hideous actions of the French—had evidently passed Caballero by completely.37 Neither is there any discussion in his diary of the Enlightenment texts whose impact on fomenting revolutionary sentiment remains the subject of debate both for France itself and for Spanish America.38 With one exception, the only European works of which he makes mention are golden-age Spanish comedies performed at the Bogotá theatre in the 1790s.39 The exception is interesting in several regards. In 1815, as part of the celebrations of the anniversary of the independence movement, the city hosted a performance of Voltaire’s three-act tragedy The Death of Cesar, first performed in 1735. This work, based on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, had been performed regularly in Paris during the years of the Revolution, and is concerned essentially with the relationship between liberty and power. Caballero however failed to link the play in any way with France, and described it as a comedy. His only comment on the drama was that admission was free and that it was performed for two days running. It did not prompt him to any sort of philosophizing, in contrast to the dramatic monologue, also performed as part of the festivities, on the death of Antonio Ricaurte, an officer in the Venezuelan army who had blown himself up in order to prevent insurgent ammunition stores from falling into royalist hands. That performance prompted Caballero to note that Ricaurte possessed ‘admirable valour, but not to be imitated’.40 In fact, written texts of any sort are rare in Caballero’s diary. Aside from one enigmatic reference to some ‘histories’ he had read, which taught him that the arrival of invading troops was often preceded by false rumours that the invaders were bent on robbing churches and committing all manner of atrocities, he made no mention whatsoever of books.41 Newspapers figure more regularly, and on one occasion he alluded to the ‘gazettes and other printed things’ he kept together with his diary.42 He at times also mentioned news conveyed in ‘public papers from the Government’, but it seems that his principal sources of news were not printed.43 Letters figure occasionally, but his primary fonts of information appear to have been oral.44 Bandos— government proclamations, to which he often alluded—were issued in printed form but were generally publicized by town criers, and he referred frequently to gossip and to sermons.45 Indeed, he often framed the political events he witnessed within a Biblical context. He compared the sudden


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conversion of fervent patriots into devout loyalists following the 1816 entry of royalist troops into Bogotá to Christ’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor, for example.46 So Caballero was not getting either his information or his general interpretative framework from Rousseau. Yet his language, as we have seen, grew increasingly republican in the years after 1808. When in 1814 the insurgent government banned criticism of its actions, Caballero fumed: ‘Is this liberty? To deny citizens even the right to speak?!’47 How did his ideas about liberty and citizenship develop?

Phrygian caps and liberty trees The French Revolution was not only a political movement. It also generated an extraordinarily rich body of symbols and practices whose meanings were not tied strictly to the foreign policy of the French government—the aspect of revolutionary France that attracted most criticism in Spain and Spanish America. François-Xavier Guerra, who has done much to explore the impact of the French revolutionary symbolism on the Hispanic world, noted in 1992 that the French Revolution created a wealth of symbols, practices and ‘constitutional experiences’ that Spanish-American insurgents could—and did—imitate.48 He argued cogently in a number of important studies that the paradoxical thing about the Hispanic revolutions is that they used the language, imagery and at times even the ideology, of the French Revolution to launch a revolutionary process that was bitterly opposed to France. It should be remembered that the Spanish-American wars of independence were sparked by the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808. Civic organizations across both Spain and Spanish America denounced the French occupation and labelled Napoleon a tyrant. The increasingly independent actions undertaken by these groups were initially justified as a way of saving Spain, and Spanish America, from France’s greedy grasp. As a political movement, in other words, the Spanish-American wars of independence were essentially anti-French, but the same cannot be said about the ideology of Spanish-American independence. Many scholars concur on this point. Aside from rare individuals, both middling sorts and elites in Spain and the Americas were in large measure opposed to the actions of the French revolutionaries, but were attracted by the ‘political-theoretical foundations’ underlying them—to the language of liberty, citizenship and freedom.49 This section explores the penetration of French revolutionary language and symbols into Spanish America, because such an exploration can help us understand both Caballero’s relationship with the Revolution, and also his transformation into a Colombian patriot. Caballero’s political education, in other words, derived in part from the rhetoric of the French Revolution, but he acquired his understanding of republicanism and liberty not through studying it, but through the


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lived experience of a different revolutionary process—Colombia’s war of independence—that itself drew on the symbolism and language of French revolutionaries. As a number of scholars have shown, Spanish-American insurgents made generous use of both language and symbolism drawn from the French Revolution. We can see this very clearly in insurgent festivals. From 1811 insurgent governments adapted the traditions inherited from colonial and religious festivals to create an entirely new festive calendar of revolutionary celebrations, and also marked particular insurgent victories and other achievements with public festivities. In addition, recognizing the power of iconography to stimulate new sentiments and political affiliations, insurgents designed a range of new symbols to represent the new states they hoped to create. Revolutionary entities from Mexico to Argentina designed new coins, state shields and other ‘national’ emblems.50 Liberty trees, Phrygian hats, and other symbols popularized by the Revolution were employed across Spanish America in such venues, where they rubbed shoulders with feather-crowned Indians and other emblems of American autochthony. In addition, insurgents across the hemisphere used the language of citizenship, universal rights and liberty in their speeches and writings. In this chapter I will address the visual dimensions of this process, although the penetration of a new republican vocabulary was in my view equally important. Phrygian hats, for example, featured in revolutionary festivals, commemorative medals, and other insurgent venues across Spanish America. The planting of liberty trees was equally widely disseminated as a piece of revolutionary theatre. Both of these symbols derived from the iconography of the French Revolution. The bonnet rouge or Phrygian cap was, in the words of Jennifer Harris, ‘possibly the most potent symbol of freedom from tyranny’ to appear during the 1790s, and quickly came to form part of the uniform of the sans-culotte.51 With the fall of the Jacobins the red cap lost favour, replaced frequently by a white or tricolour bonnet, but the distinctive shape of the Phrygian cap remained a key marker of liberty. Writers of the revolutionary era often traced the cap’s origins to the headgear supposedly worn by freed slaves in ancient Greece, but it seems likely that its proponents were drawing on more recent iconographies as well: the Phrygian hat for example featured as an emblem of liberty in the US War of Independence. Nonetheless, the French Revolution was the force that disseminated the hat as a revolutionary symbol on a global scale. Liberty trees too combined an earlier pedigree with a distinctive revolutionary charge. Proto-liberty trees had been erected in various French towns and cities from as early as 1790 in the form of a ‘wild’ maypole, which, as Mona Ozouf has shown, bore an ominous similarity to a gibbet, and which symbolized a variety of oppositional attitudes. Liberty trees seem to have evolved out of this more plebeian form, and were used in more official revolutionary festivals from about 1792. Ozouf describes the liberty tree as a ‘codified, not to say sclerotic,


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form of representation’, compared to the more riotous maypole.52 The two emblems were often combined into a single, highly charged revolutionary symbol. Indeed, by 1792 it was almost obligatory for a liberty tree to be adorned with a Phrygian hat; Ozouf notes that ‘the tree of the cap of liberty’ was a synonym for arbre de la Liberté (Illustration 9.1).53 In insurgent Colombia, Caballero witnessed an ever-increasing deployment of this sort of revolutionary iconography at civic festivals and other public events. Within a year of the anti-colonial riot that sparked the war of independence, the government in Bogotá had organized what was intended to be an annual festival to honour the events of 20 July 1810. In July 1811 Caballero recorded that the local authorities had ordered three days of public illuminations to commemorate the anniversary of the ‘year of the Revolution’, which was also marked by a military parade and an ‘admirable’ sermon, preached by the Prior of the San Augustine convent.54 The first appearance of specifically revolutionary symbols in Caballero’s diary dates from March 1813, when he noted, without any explanation, the appearance of a tree decorated with ‘a liberty cap’.55 Liberty trees topped with

Illustration 9.1 La Carmagnole, French print, c. 1792. This revolutionary print shows a group of sans culottes dancing around a liberty tree, which is decorated with a Phrygian hat


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Phrygian caps were soon ubiquitous in Bogotá. For example, a few days later ‘the standard of liberty, with its hat’ was carried through the city in a patriotic procession, and in April the city witnessed an elaborate ceremony that combined the planting of a Phrygian-cap crowned liberty tree with the execution of a slave, who was paraded around the liberty tree prior to being shot.56 (We will return to this unfortunate slave in the conclusion.) Shortly thereafter the royal arms carved over the viceregal palace were replaced by a bas-relief of a Phrygian hat, which became the state seal of the new Republic of Cundinamarca, the short-lived revolutionary state created in central Colombia in 1812 (Illustration 9.2).57 Liberty trees and Phrygian hats continued to figure in Colombian festivals throughout the revolutionary period and beyond. In 1821, for example, the festivities commemorating the installation of the insurgent Congress of Cúcuta involved not only three days of public illuminations but also the planting of ‘the tree of liberty’ in the main plaza.58 From 1830 a Phrygian cap was moreover incorporated into the Colombian state shield (Illustrations 9.3–9.5).59 It is clear that Caballero did not in any way associate these symbols with the Revolution that had popularized them. A few days after he first noted— with approval—the planting of the Phrygian-cap-crowned liberty tree he recorded with disgust that ‘a wayward Frenchman arrived, who knows from where Satan vomited him up; beggarly adventurers who come here thinking to rule us’.60 Caballero was in other words able to absorb these revolutionary symbols while at the same time retaining his hatred for France. A similar situation obtained in regard to his use of terms such as ‘liberty’ and ‘citizen’. As the historian Hans-Joachim König has shown, the revolutionary

Illustration 9.2 Shield of the Republic of Cundinamarca, c. 1812. The shield of the ephemeral Republic of Cundinamarca, in present-day Colombia, showed a Phrygiancap crowned eagle clutching a sword and pomegranate, or granada (to commemorate the region’s colonial name of New Granada)


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Illustration 9.3 Decorative sword presented to Simón Bolívar by the Municipality of Lima, 1825 (detail). The ceremonial sword presented to Simón Bolívar by Lima’s city council in 1825 was embossed with a pair of Amerindians holding aloft a pike topped with a Phrygian cap

government in Colombia made extensive use of the language of citizenship, and scholars have made similar observations about other revolutionary Spanish-American states.61 We have already seen Caballero’s use of the word ‘citizen’, and, as König notes, in Colombia the term was used frequently in sites ranging from revolutionary proclamations to parish record books. By 1814, for example, most of the individuals mentioned in insurgent newspapers were described by the epithet ‘citizen’.62 These borrowings extended far beyond the simple use of single words. For example, virtually all of the revolutionary constitutions edited in Colombia between 1810 and 1819 lifted entire phrases from the French Constitution of 1795.63 The same was true of other Spanish-American revolutionary constitutions: the Mexican


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Illustration 9.4 Flag of the Insurgent 7th Infantry Regiment of Freedmen, Río de la Plata, c. 1813. The Phrygian cap on the flag of this insurgent regiment symbolized both the broader ideals of freedom the hat generally conveyed, and the specific fact that the regiment was composed of freed slaves

Illustration 9.5 Peruvian Quarto de Peso, 1823. This republican coin shows a llama basking in the Andean sunshine, as well as a disproportionately large Phrygian cap


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constitution of 1814, for example, included various clauses taken directly from the French Constitutions of 1791, 1793, 1797 and 1799.64 This sort of thing occurred, of course, because the revolutionary ideologues who composed these constitutions and who designed the new republican iconography were familiar with French revolutionary symbols. The Phrygian cap, for example, was probably introduced into Colombian insurgent iconography by Francisco de Miranda, who in 1811 was charged with designing new national emblems for the incipient Venezuelan republic. The new flag created by Miranda sported an Indian seated on a rock holding aloft a pike topped with a Phrygian cap (Illustration 9.6).65 Miranda had extensive contact with French revolutionary ideology and was undoubtedly familiar with its typical symbols and emblems, as he spent much of the 1790s in France, serving—rather ingloriously—as an officer in the republican

Illustration 9.6 Insurgent flag designed by Francisco de Miranda, 1811. Miranda’s design for a Venezuelan flag in 1811 combined the long-standing iconography used to represent the four continents, here present in the form of a fantastical indigenous figure complete with feather skirt and head-dress, with more recent imagery drawn from the French Revolution


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army.66 Similarly, Agustín de Iturbide, who became the head of an independent Mexican state in 1821, consciously employed the emblems of the French Revolution in his own revolutionary ceremonies. Iturbide, a royalist officer, in 1820 forged a surprise alliance with insurgent forces, and subsequently oversaw Mexico’s independence from Spain under a moderate programme that guaranteed the security of Spaniards, the supremacy of the Catholic Church, and other socially conservative measures.67 As the Mexican historian Enrique Florescano has noted, it was Iturbide ‘who transferred to Mexico the sumptuous ceremonial paraphernalia which from then on accompanied the army, as well as the emblems and political symbols born in revolutionary France. The military uniform, the arms and flags of the Trigarantine Army derived in large part from the French revolutionary tradition’.68 More generally, Florescano argued that Iturbide’s very idea of a theatre of power derived from his study of Napoleon’s career. The festivities that accompanied the 1821 declaration of Mexican independence, for example, employed a rich combination of civic ritual, religious ceremony and displays of military power, which in Florescano’s view reflected not only traditions established with the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz, but also the practices of revolutionary France.69 Iturbide’s 1822 coronation as emperor of Mexico was even immortalized in a painting based (loosely) on Jacques-Louis David’s well-known painting of the coronation of Napoleon. Nonetheless, Iturbide described Napoleon himself as a tyrant.70 If anything, Iturbide’s dabbling with Napoleonic imagery was exceeded by the civic rituals that surrounded the great Venezuelan liberator Simón Bolívar. Bolívar had imbibed these practices from their very source: France. As a young man, Bolívar had travelled to Paris, where he witnessed the celebrations following the 1804 coronation of Napoleon, which made a lasting impression on the young man. Describing Bolívar’s stay in Napoleonic Paris, his secretary Daniel Florencio O’Leary later recorded that ‘it is easy to imagine the impression that these events provoked in his ardent soul. The triumph of liberty, the new and philosophical institutions, the artistic marvels, the prodigies of genius with which he was daily presented captivated his imagination. But Bonaparte was the principal object of his admiration’.71 O’Leary, writing in the 1840s, stressed that Bolívar had subsequently rethought his youthful idealization of Napoleon, but the impact of those heady Paris years could not be entirely erased. As the French historian Georges Lomné has shown, Bolivarian state ritual was imbued with the language and symbols of revolutionary France, creating what Lomné called an insurgent liturgy.72 These men consciously employed revolutionary symbols, not so much out of admiration for the political trajectory France had followed post 1789, but in recognition of their power to evoke the dream of equality which most Spanish-American revolutionaries shared, despite their many doubts about the applicability of such notions to Spanish America.


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So, to return to Caballero, his familiarity with the language of liberty and citizenship probably derives from his participation in the revolutionary festivals, military recruitment drives, ceremonies celebrating insurgent victories, and the like, which employed this language and fostered a rhetoric of equality and freedom. This language and symbolism originated in part with the French Revolution, even if Caballero and his fellow Bogotanos did not recognize them as such. Thus it is difficult to sustain the view that the French Revolution did not influence the course of the Spanish-American wars of independence, for it contributed an entire vocabulary and imaginario whose power is clearly displayed in Caballero’s transformation from chronicler to patriot. At the same time, its ability to effect such transformations was due in large part to the fact that it had been almost wholly detached from its French origins, to the extent that Caballero could applaud the planting of liberty trees and condemn governments who oppressed their citizens while retaining a wholehearted hatred of all things French.

Conclusions: revolutions and iconography The example of Caballero hints, I think, at the extraordinary power of revolutionary iconography. The revolutionary festivals and other examples of political theatre that he witnessed between 1808 and 1819 provided him with an entirely new language for discussing the relationship between the individual and the state—a language of citizenship, liberty and patriotism. I do not mean to suggest that his experiences of warfare, violence and political strife were insignificant in shaping his new republican outlook, but rather that insurgent language and iconography provided him with a way of articulating his experiences into a (relatively) coherent world view that was radically different from the way he had understood social relations in, say, 1790. It is this sort of transformation that François-Xavier Guerra has identified as part of a movement towards what he called modernity. For Guerra, the years of revolution helped inaugurate a series of new political practices and forms of sociability that together defined a distinctively Spanish-American version of modernity, which he associated with the emergence of a public sphere and a rhetoric of individual equality. Of course, independence did not transform all aspects of Spanish-American society, and the period from 1750 to 1850 is characterized by a considerable degree of continuity in gender norms, social hierarchies and economic structures.73 Nonetheless, Caballero’s diary does suggest some of the ways in which the period of revolution transformed individual mental landscapes and provided new ways for individuals to understand their own relationship to the world around them. Indeed, the potency of these revolutionary symbols and practices was such that they continually threatened to slip beyond the control of their designers. I would like to end with an example of the struggle to fix and


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194

195

control the meaning of one of these emblems: the liberty tree whose planting in Bogotá in 1813 Caballero documented. For Caballero, the liberty tree seems to have represented a fusing of religious festive practices with a new civic ideology. He described the parade that marked the planting as passing through the ‘usual streets’, although this was of course the first event of its kind; he clearly associated this civic parade with the colonial, Catholic processions that he had witnessed in previous decades. Indeed, the tree itself was adorned with both a Phrygian hat and images of Jesus and Mary.74 Nonetheless, it seems that the ‘liberty’ that the tree represented was not understood in an identical fashion by all of the city’s residents. For Caballero and the city officials who designed the festival, the liberty commemorated by the tree was not intended to provoke a radical readjustment of the city’s social hierarchies. The city’s enslaved population, on the other hand, appears to have made a different reading of the tree’s symbolism. The night before the planting ceremony the unnamed mulatto slave of a French officer serving in the insurgent army murdered his master. When asked to explain his actions, the slave reported that his owner had tried to beat him, and that because of the liberty tree he was no longer required to endure such abuse. Indeed, local newspapers reported that ‘licentious people, and particularly slaves’ were spreading rumours that the liberty tree was a green light for committing ‘all manner of excesses’. Concerned that the liberty tree, which was decorated with sonnets condemning ‘slavery and despotism’, could be (mis)interpreted in this way, local authorities ordered that the slave’s execution be incorporated into the very festivities commemorating the tree’s planting. Prior to his death the slave was paraded around the newly planted tree, and officials reminded the large crowd that had gathered to witness these events that ‘true liberty consists of submission to the law’. The young slave was then shot by firing squad within sight of both the liberty tree and the assembled multitude.75 The wayward symbol thus returned to its proper place, the festival continued with a public ball. Liberty trees, in other words, were mere symbols, but therein lay their power.

Notes 1. José María Caballero, Diario, ed. Alfredo Iriarte (Bogotá, 1990), 57. 2. Ibid. 58. Caballero here alludes to the capture of the Spanish royal family at Bayonne in April 1808. 3. Ibid. 60. 4. For the general course of the Colombian war of independence see Rebecca Earle, Spain and the Independence of Colombia (Exeter, 2000). 5. Caballero, Diario, 238. For Salavarrieta see Catherine Davies et al., South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text (Liverpool, 2006), 150–152. 6. Caballero, Diario, 249. In August 1819 the royalist army suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Boyacá, which effectively ended colonial rule in central New Granada.


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7. Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 285 (quotation); Jane Landers, ‘Rebellion and Royalism in Spanish Florida: The French Revolution on Spain’s Northern Frontier’, in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington, 1997), 156–177 (here 156); and Christian Gazmuri Riveros, ‘Libros e ideas políticas francesas en la gestación de la Independencia de Chile’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 179–207 (here 203–204). 8. Frédérique Langue, ‘Les français en Nouvelle-Espagne à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: médiateurs de la Révolution ou “nouveaux créoles”?’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 37–60 (here 46). This followed the discovery of an alleged pro-revolutionary plot headed by French citizens resident in Mexico City. See John Rydjord, ‘The French Revolution in Mexico’, Hispanic American Historical Review 9/1 (1929), 60–98; and Víctor UribeUrán, ‘The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000): 425–457 (here 431). Similar measures were introduced in Spain itself. See Real cédula de S. M. y señores del Consejo por la qual se manda que todos los franceses ... se internen (Madrid, 1794). 9. Gazmuri, ‘Libros e ideas’, 204. 10. Rydjord, ‘The French Revolution’; Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, ‘Los catecismos políticos: de la Revolución francesa al México independiente’, in La Revolución francesa en México, ed. Solange Alberro et al. (Mexico, 1992), 65–80 (here 65); and Carlos Herrejón Peredo, ‘La Revolución francesa en sermones y otros testimonios de México, 1791–1823’, in ibid. 97–110. 11. Gazmuri, ‘Libros e ideas’, 180, 203; McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 285; and Rydjord, ‘The French Revolution’. Nariño was imprisoned and remained entangled in the Spanish legal system until he escaped captivity in 1796. 12. Gazmuri, ‘Libros e ideas’, 203; and Rydjord, ‘The French Revolution’. 13. On French travellers and their role in spreading propaganda see Anne PérotinDumon, ‘Révolutionnaires français et royalistes espagnols dans les Antilles’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 223–246. 14. The 23 March 1793 declaration is in Spain under the Bourbons, 1700–1833: A Collection of Documents, ed. W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley (Charlotte, SC, 1973), 172–175. 15. Jean-Pierre Clément, ‘La Révolution Française dans le Mercurio Peruano’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 137–151 (here 139); Kimberly Hanger, ‘Conflicting Loyalties: The French Revolution and Free People of Color in Spanish New Orleans’, in Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time, 178–203 (here 179); and Renan Silva, ‘La Revolución francesa en el Papel periódico de Santa Fé de Bogotá’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 165–178. 16. Rydjord, ‘The French Revolution’. See also Langue, ‘Les français’, 48. 17. Langue, ‘Les français’, 49. 18. Georges Baudot and María Agueda Méndez, ‘La Revolución francesa y la Inquisición mexicana. Textos y pretextos’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 89–105; and Langue, ‘Les français’, 47–48. The Marseillaise was also sung at private gatherings: ibid. 52–53. 19. Ibid. 48. 20. McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 285–293. 21. See Lyman Johnson’s chapter in this volume. 22. Landers, ‘Rebellion and Royalism’. 23. Uribe-Urán, ‘The Birth of a Public Sphere’, 429. 24. François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid, 1992), 37–41. See also Jaime E. Rodríguez O., ‘La Revolución


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25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

197

francesa y la independencia de México’, in Alberro, La Revolución francesa en México, 137–153 (here 151); and idem, The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 51, 160. Uribe-Urán, ‘The Birth of a Public Sphere’, 431. Carmen Castañeda, ‘El impacto de la Ilustración y de la Revolución francesa en la vida de México. Finales del siglo XVIII. 1793 en Guadalajara’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 61–87 (here 78). John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven, 2006), 13; Federico Brito Figueroa, ‘Venezuela colonial: las rebeliones de esclavos y la Revolución francesa’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 263–289; and Matthias Röhrig Assunção, ‘L’adhésion populaire aux projets révolutionnaires dans les sociétés esclavagistes: le cas du Venezuela et du Brésil (1780–1840)’, Caravelle 54 (1990): 291–313. Pedro Grases, La conspiración de Gual y España y el ideario de la independencia (Caracas, 1949). C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1963). Landers, ‘Rebellion and Royalism’, 158; Hanger, ‘Conflicting Loyalties’, 180; Geggus, ‘Slavery, War and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815’, in Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time, 1–50 (here 11–13); David Geggus, ‘Slave Resistance in the Spanish Caribbean in the Mid-1790s’, in ibid. 131–155; and Brito Figueroa, ‘Venezuela colonial’, 178, 283. Geggus, ‘Slavery, War and Revolution’, 11. Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 30. For Spanish-American reactions to the American War of Independence see Peggy Liss, ‘Atlantic Network’, in Latin American Revolutions: 1808–1826: Old and New World Origins, ed. John Lynch (Norman, OK, 1994), 263–277. Simón Bolívar, ‘Memoria dirigida a los ciudadanos de la Nueva Granada’, 15 December 1812 (Manifiesto de Cartagena), Escritos del libertador (Caracas, 1978), vol. 4, 120. For Bolívar’s attitude to the Enlightenment see John Lynch, ‘Introduction’, in idem, Latin American Revolutions, 29–34; and idem, Simón Bolívar, 28–38. Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, 39. Or see Marta Terán, ‘La Virgen de Guadalupe contra Napoleón Bonaparte: la defensa de la religión en el Obispado de Michoacán entre 1793 y 1814’, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 19 (1998): 91–129. For a Colombian example see El Argos de la Nueva Granada, Tunja, 2 December 1813. Caballero, Diario, 48. Ibid. 47. Caballero makes no mention of the French connection, describing the plot simply as a plan to ‘lift the yoke and proclaim our liberty’. In any event this entry is clearly a later addition to the diary, as it alludes to the future destruction of the Inquisition’s instruments of torture by ‘our new government’, an event which occurred in 1811. Caballero cites the Papel Periódico of 26 June 1796 in what appears to be another of his retrospective entries (Caballero, Diario, 37). For a recent criticism of the claim that the literature of the Enlightenment acted as a motor for liberalism in Spain and America see Roberto Breña, El primer liberalismo español y los procesos de emancipación de América, 1808–1824. Una revisión historiográfica del liberalismo hispánico (Mexico City, 2006). For the larger debate about the impact of the Enlightenment on the French Revolution see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC, 1991); and Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-revolutionary France (London, 1996). In insurgent Colombia, newspapers regularly alluded to Enlightenment


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39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 authors. For example, in 1811 one journal noted that ‘just as Descartes and Newton freed philosophy, so Montesquieu and Rousseau have taught us to base society on the eternal principles of justice’: Semanario Ministerial del Gobierno de la Capital de Santafe, Santa Fe, 18 April 1811. These are Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El José de las mujeres (1660); Agustín Moreto, Antonio Martínez de Meneses and Juan de Matos Fragoso, Oponerse a las estrellas (1654); and La misantropía: Caballero, Diario, 53. Caballero, Diario, 182; and Georges Lomné, ‘Invención estética y revolución política. La fascinación por la libertad de los antiguos en el Virreinato de la Nueva Granada (1779–1815)’, in Las revoluciones en el mundo atlántico, ed. María Teresa Calderón and Clément Thibaud (Bogotá, 2006), 100–120 (here 112). See also Voltaire, Le mort de César: tragédie de M. Voltaire (London, 1736). Caballero, Diario, 165–166. Ibid. 233. Ibid. 96 and 131 (quotation), and, for pasquinades, 98, 199. For letters and ‘post’ see ibid. 96, 126, 134, 138, 158, 202–203, 206; and Rebecca Earle, ‘Information and Disinformation in Late Colonial New Granada’, The Americas 54/2 (1997): 17–46. See Caballero, Diario, 108, 111, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 140, 142, 143, 147, 160, 164, 165, 168, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182–192, 199, 203, 205–209, 215 (for bandos); 96, 131, 142, 178, 189, 199, 202, 204, 210 (for gossip); 128 (for travellers); and 140, 157, 161, 175, 181, 206 (for sermons and speeches). Ibid. 213. Ibid. 164. Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, 35. See also François-Xavier Guerra et al. (eds), De los imperios a las naciones: Iberoamérica (Zaragoza, 1994); François Xavier Guerra and Mónica Quijada (eds), Cuadernos de Historia Latinoamericana, no. 2: Imaginar la Nación (1994); and Antonio Annino and François-Xavier Guerra (eds), Inventando la nación: Iberoamérica siglo XIX (Mexico, 2003). Gazmuri, ‘Libros e ideas’, 180. For insurgent festivals and state symbols see Rebecca Earle, ‘Padres de la Patria and the Ancestral Past: Celebrations of Independence in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America’, Journal of Latin American Studies 34/4 (2002): 775–805; and Rebecca Earle, ‘Sobre Héroes y Tumbas: National Symbols in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America’, Hispanic American Historical Review 85/3 (2005): 375–416. Jennifer Harris, ‘The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans, 1789–94’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 14/3 (1981): 283–312. See also Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880 (Cambridge, UK, 1981); Yvonne Korshak, ‘The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France’, Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1/2 (1987): 53–69; J. David Harden, ‘Liberty Caps and Liberty Trees’, Past & Present 146 (1995): 66–102; Andrée Corvol, ‘The Transformation of a Political Symbol: Tree Festivals in France from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, French History 4/4 (1990): 455–486; and Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford, 2002), 135–186. Mona Ozouf, Festivals of the French Revolution trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 240. Ibid. 252, 342. Caballero, Diario, 95.


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198

199

55. Ibid. 132 (3 March 1813). The insurgent press periodically published articles that explained the history and significance of these symbols. See for example ‘Rasgo sobre la libertad’, Gazeta Ministerial de Cundinamarca, Santa Fe, 22 April 1813; and ‘Arbol de la libertad’, Gazeta Ministerial de Cundinamarca, Santa Fe, 20 May 1813. For other examples of liberty caps from across Spanish America see Hans-Joachim König, En el camino hacia la nación: nacionalismo en el proceso de formación del estado y de la nación de la Nueva Granada, 1750–1756 (Bogotá, 1994), 267, 269; Session of 6 August 1825, Libro mayor de sesiones de la Asamblea de Representantes del Alto Perú (La Paz, 1926), 45; Escudo Nacional de la Asamblea General Constituyente de 1813, La revolución de mayo a través de los impresos de la época, primera serie, 1809– 1815, ed. Augusto E. Mallié, 6 vols (Buenos Aires, 1965), vol. 2, 223; José Emilio Burucúa et al., ‘Influencia de los tipos iconográfícos de la Revolución francesa en los países del Plata’, Cahiers des Amériques Latines 10 (1990): 147–157; José Emilio Burucúa and Fabián Alejandro Campagne, ‘Mitos y simbologías nacionales en los países del cono sur’, in Annino and Guerra, Inventando la nación, 437–438; and Chester Krause and Clifford Mishler, 1994 Standard Catalog of World Coins (Iola, WI, 1994), 111, 1585. 56. Caballero, Diario, 133, 135–136; and Pedro María Ibáñez, Crónicas de Bogotá (Bogotá, 1891), vol. 3, ch. 41, parts 2–3. See also Caballero, Diario, 139, 201. 57. Ibid. 144. See also König, En el camino, 256–274. 58. José Manuel Groot, Historia eclesiástica y civil de Nueva Granada, 5 vols (Bogotá, 1893), vol. 4, 157. 59. Pedro Julio Dousdebes, ‘Las insignias de Colombia’, Boletín de historia y antigüedades 24/274 (1937): 449–483; and Fernando Restrepo Uribe, ‘El escudo de Colombia’, Credencial historia 139 (2001) (4 December 2008). For the use of Phrygian caps on Colombian coinage see Krause and Mishler, 1994 Standard Catalog, 479–494. 60. Caballero, Diario, 136. 61. ‘Citizens!’ began the oration delivered in 1825 Buenos Aires to commemorate independence: ‘Arenga’, Buenos Aires, 25 May 1825, Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Colección Sánchez de Bustamante, 3026 (leg. 2), doc. 90. See also Hans-Joachim König, ‘Símbolos nacionales y retórica política en la independencia: el caso de la Nueva Granada’, in Problemas de la formación del estado y de la nación en Hispanoamérica, ed. Inge Buisson et al. (Cologne, 1984), 389–405; and König, En el camino, 274–313. See also Véronique Hebrard, ‘Ciudadanía y participación política en Venezuela, 1810–1830’, in Independence and Revolution in Spanish America: Perspectives and Problems, ed. Anthony McFarlane and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (London, 1999), 122–153; and Hilda Sábato (ed.), Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones: perspectivas históricas de América Latina (Mexico, 1999). 62. See, for example, El Argos de la Nueva Granada, Tunja, 24 February 1814. 63. Constitución de la República de Tunja, 1811, ca II; Constitución del Estado de Antioquia, 1812, sec. 3, art. 4; Constitución de la República de Cundinamarca, 1812, art. 28; Constitución del Estado de Mariquita, 1815, tít. II, art. 6; Constitución de la Provincia de Antioquia, 1815; y Deberes del Ciudadano, art. 4, all in Constituciones de Colombia, ed. Manuel Antonio Pombo and José Joaquín Gutiérrez, 4 vols (Bogotá, 1951); and Constitución de Angostura, 1819, sec. 2, art. 5, Actas del Congreso de Angostura, 1819–1820, ed. Roberto Cortázar and Luis Augusto Cuervo (1921; repr. Bogotá, 1989), 148.


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64. Ernesto de la Torre Villar, ‘La Revolución francesa y su influencia en la Constitución de Apatzingán de 1814’, in Alberro, La Revolución francesa en México, 155–160 (here 158). See also Grases, La conspiración de Gual y España, 79–156; Alejandro Guzmán, ‘El constitucionalismo revolucionario francés y las cartas fundamentales chilenas del siglo XIX’, in La Revolución francesa y Chile, ed. Ricardo Krebs and Cristián Gazmuri (Santiago, 1990), 225–245; and O. Carlos Stoetzer, ‘L’influence française au Río de la Plata á travers les régimes politiques et les textes constitutionnels. 1811–1848’, Cahiers des Amériques Latines 10 (1990): 65–80. 65. William Spence Robertson, The Life of Miranda, 2 vols (New York, 1969), vol. 1, 116. I am grateful to Beatriz González for this observation. 66. Karen Racine, Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, DE, 2003), 105–140. He was court-martialled as a result of his role in the unsuccessful 1792 French campaign in Holland. 67. See Agustín de Iturbide, Proclama del excmo. señor Don Agustín de Iturbide (‘Plan de Iguala’) (Iguala, 1821). 68. Enrique Florescano, ‘La fundación de la república y los tiempos de crisis política’, La Jornada, 1 July 2004, (8 November 2008). 69. For the 1821 celebrations see Javier Ocampo, Las ideas de un día: el pueblo mexicano ante la consumación de su Independencia (Mexico City, 1969). 70. See for example Agustín de Iturbide, Auxilios a la nación (Mexico City, 1822), 1. 71. Daniel Florencio O’Leary, Memorias, 3 vols (Bogotá, 1952), vol. 1, 16; and Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 22–31. 72. Georges Lomné, ‘La Revolución francesa y la “simbólica” de los ritos bolivarianos’, Historia Crítica: Revista del Departamento de Historia de la Universidad de los Andes 5 (1991): 3–17. 73. For examples of works that, in different ways, address issues of continuity and change from 1750 to 1850 see Stanley and Barbara Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York, 1970); Sarah Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park, PA, 1999); and Víctor Uribe-Urán (ed.), State and Society in Spanish America during the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, DE, 2001). 74. Caballero, Diario, 135–136. 75. ‘Arbol de la libertad’, Gazeta Ministerial de Cundinamarca, Santa Fe, 20 May 1813. On the genealogy of this vision of the relationship between laws and liberty see Lomné, ‘Invención estética y revolución política’, 111.


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Old Subjects, New Subjects and Non-Subjects: Silences and Subjecthood in Fédon’s Rebellion, Grenada, 1795–96 Caitlin Anderson

Introduction This chapter is part of a larger effort to understand British citizenship— perhaps better termed subjecthood—during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 For intellectual historians like J. C. D. Clark, British subjecthood has been a question about authority and allegiance best answered with reference to sermons, legal treatises and other canonical works of political theology; for new imperial historians like Kathleen Wilson or Catherine Hall, it is a question of identity and difference and the cultural politics of ‘subject positioning’.2 Yet these two modes of historical analysis seldom speak to one another. For all that has been written on eighteenth-century legal and intellectual history there is little on the laws of allegiance and authority in practice, while the growing body of work on the cultural history of empire tends to treat the law vaguely if at all. I argue, in contrast, that when eighteenthcentury Britons labelled certain individuals as British subjects and others as aliens, they triangulated between ancient doctrines of legal and political theology and the demands of new colonial circumstances. This chapter addresses late eighteenth-century policies and practices of subjecthood in the British colony of Grenada, won from the French in the Seven Years War (1756–63). A minor West Indian sugar island may seem an odd place to look for the meaning of late eighteenth-century British subjecthood. The West Indies as a whole was a place where adventurers hoped to make quick fortunes, not explore complex legal doctrines, and even among historians of the empire, Grenada gets short shrift in favour of Britain’s larger and older Caribbean possessions like Jamaica or Barbados.3 But the peculiar 201


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10


circumstances of late eighteenth-century Grenada made it one of the empire’s hottest crucibles of subjecthood, and a site from which it is possible to approach one of the most elusive topics of Atlantic history: the position of slaves in a colonial order that sought to silence them and suppress their personhood. In some respects, Grenada’s history presents an amplified version of the tensions that characterized Britain’s late eighteenth-century empire: territorial expansion and an increasing diversity that, as scholars are increasingly recognizing, unsettled and transformed British identity itself.4 There were few colonies that possessed a more fractured—and fractious—population than tiny Grenada. The island, until recently a French possession, had crisscrossing fault lines dividing Catholic and Protestant; French-speaking and Anglophone; slave and free; black, white, and mixed-race. These groups clashed repeatedly over the questions of who was to enjoy the rights of a British subject, and who was to shoulder its obligations. In 1795, slave and free coloured resistance incited by the French and Haitian Revolutions combined with simmering Anglo-French resentment on Grenada in Fédon’s Rebellion, a 16-month uprising that at its height boasted an estimated 7,200 adherents—black, white, slave and free—and controlled nearly all the island before its suppression in the summer of 1796. As with most episodes of slave resistance, the history of Fédon’s Rebellion is marked by profound silences. Most contemporary accounts characterized the uprising as the work of French revolutionary agents, traitorous francophone residents, or free persons of African descent whose liberty threatened the colonial order. The slaves who constituted the vast majority of Fédon’s forces were silenced; the possibility of their political personhood and independent agency suppressed. But if the nature of the sources make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to learn who engineered Fédon’s Rebellion, exactly why they wished to overthrow British rule and what sort of society they hoped to found on its ashes, they say a great deal about the ordering of the colonial society in which the uprising unfolded. An analysis of the events leading up to and surrounding Fédon’s Rebellion reveals the ways in which British metropolitan doctrines of sovereignty, allegiance and the subject’s relationship to the Crown were refashioned in colonial contexts to construct and identify British subjects and divide them from less-privileged outsiders. As such, this project sheds further light on the connections and disjunctions between metropole and colony that have preoccupied historians in recent years.5 The legal doctrines and practices that denied full personhood to Catholics and other nonconformists in the British Isles also supported the legal silencing of slaves and suppression of their personhood.

Subjecthood and allegiance in the British Isles In the eighteenth century, legal identity as a British subject—what we now call national citizenship, and I will call subjecthood—was understood as a


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function of the individual’s relationship to the monarch, and calculated in terms of the type and degree of allegiance owed to the Crown. In early modern Britain, allegiance was a multivalent concept. On the one hand, it was a quantifiable legal obligation most often acquired at birth as an obligation of natural law, either by birth in the king’s dominions or by birth to parents who were British subjects. This was the gist of the ruling in Calvin’s Case, a 1608 judgment arising out of the union of the crowns of England and Scotland, and the consequent confusion over the status, rights and responsibilities of James V’s Scottish subjects in his new English dominions.6 Would Scots and English be two different categories of subjects, or would all subjects of the Crown enjoy equal rights and responsibilities? In addition to handing down a decision in favour of equality for English and Scottish subjects, the justices constructed a theory of sovereignty and subjection that was not formally challenged until the last third of the nineteenth century, and continued to be influential well into the twentieth.7 Drawing on common law, a handful of medieval statutes, and natural law theory, the justices located the source of the status of British ‘subject’ in an individual’s birth within the king’s ‘ligeance’, or allegiance, either within the royal dominions or to a British father. The justices ruled further that the bond between sovereign and subject, like the bond between father and son, was a divine obligation of natural law, ‘written with the finger of God in the heart of man’, and thus prior to any human law or institution.8 ‘Ligeance’, or allegiance, Coke explained, is ‘the mutual bond between the King and his subjects, whereby subjects are called his liege subjects, because they are bound to obey and serve him, and he is called their liege lord because he should maintain and defend them’.9 Crucially, the theory of natural allegiance considered the moment of birth as final and decisive, forever binding the infant to ‘true and faithful obedience’.10 The doctrine of indelible allegiance, as it was called, had important implications for Britain’s laws of national status: because allegiance was indefeasible, and status was based on allegiance, national status was fixed and unchanging.11 Allegiance was not completely outside the realm of individual volition, however: it could also be acquired by formal naturalization, and, to be complete, had to be ratified by oaths affirming the British monarch as a spiritual as well as a temporal authority. The Test and Corporation Acts (1673 and 1663 respectively) pushed the test of fidelity a step further, requiring officeholders to take the Anglican communion and subscribe an oath rejecting transubstantiation, the invocation of the Virgin Mary, and other doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church as ‘superstitious and idolatrous’.12 The English, and later British, political and legal order granted rights and privileges to the individual on a sliding scale corresponding to the type and degree of allegiance that he (or she) owed to the Crown. In the context of the religious schisms of early modern Britain, this was most meaningful


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for religious nonconformists, who were marked as persons of compromised allegiance and their status and rights abbreviated accordingly. Though they were regarded as owing natural allegiance to the Crown, and thus not technically foreigners, their inability to acknowledge the monarch as spiritual as well as temporal leader placed limits on their rights as British subjects. Protestant dissenters, who substituted individual conscience for the spiritual authority of the Church of England, were one category of marginal subjects. Catholics were even further distanced from full legal and political rights. Ever since the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth I, papal doctrine had exempted Roman Catholics in the British Isles from their allegiance to their temporal sovereign.13 Accordingly, Anglo-Catholics were not regarded simply as different from their Anglican neighbours, but as a fifth column whose access to power must be curtailed at all cost. Using the oaths of allegiance and the Test and Corporation oaths as a bar, eighteenth-century statutes excluded professing Catholics from vast swathes of British public life. For much of the century they were barred from carrying firearms, teaching school, or owning a horse valued at over £5; they were excluded from the parliamentary franchise, the armed forces, the legal professions, the judiciary, membership in the parliaments of Britain or Ireland, or any other office of trust.14 The same logic that disfranchised Catholics for their affiliations to Rome assigned legal disabilities to foreign-born individuals, even those willing to take the Anglican sacrament, who were regarded as owing a degree of natural and indelible allegiance to the sovereigns in whose realm they were born. Persons born to British fathers outside the realm were deemed natural-born subjects—the gold standard of British subject status—but could not pass on their status beyond the second generation born abroad.15 There was a further drop in status from subjects owing a natural allegiance of birth (whether by place of birth or heritage) to those who had chosen it voluntarily. Naturalization earned an alien the right to lease or purchase property in land and exemption from the higher import-export duties imposed on foreign merchants, but the allegiance of a naturalized subject was always suspect. Though a subject of a foreign prince could undertake the obligations of allegiance to the British Crown, this was not seen as altering the allegiance he continued to owe to his sovereign of birth. This had material consequences, in addition to the taint of the turncoat. Naturalized subjects could not claim diplomatic protection in their country of birth, and the Act of Settlement (1701) denied them access to high public office or a grant of Crown lands.16 Such was the law on the books. In practice, however, the multivalent quality of eighteenth-century allegiance—as a circumstance of birthplace or heritage, an obligation assumed voluntarily, or the performance of acts of patriotism and loyalty—made British subjecthood a flexible and malleable category. The eighteenth century was a world where passports and other


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204

identity documents were the exception rather than the rule, and whether an individual was a British subject or an alien was not always fixed and known but was interpreted in disputes over particular rights and privileges.17 Moreover, the multiple and overlapping definitions of allegiance meant that authorities could usually find a justification for whichever outcome they wished to effect, and supposed British subjects with more tenuous claims to allegiance could in practice find themselves vulnerable to being marked as outsiders in spite of seemingly incontrovertible legal precedents to the contrary.18 If this was so in the heart of the kingdom, it was doubly the case on the edges of the empire.

His Britannick Majesty’s new subjects A Catholic in the Caribbean was not necessarily the same thing as a Catholic in the British Isles, however. In 1763, France signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years War and ceding to Britain several Caribbean islands and the vast territory of Quebec. Along with these new colonial possessions came new administrative headaches, however, for the inhabitants of these territories did not assimilate easily into the British Empire. On the one hand, the majority of ‘His Britannick Majesty’s new-adopted subjects’, as they were called, were French-speaking Catholics in a British Protestant empire in the midst of a period of more than one hundred years of intermittent war with Catholic France. No one was foolish enough to regard the Treaty of Paris as much more than a ceasefire. On the other hand, they were white bodies in colonies where British elites were vastly outnumbered by slaves, native peoples, and, after 1765, the rebellious American colonists. Faced with these two competing policy imperatives, British leaders and settlers on Grenada drew on notions of subjecthood and allegiance to the Crown to position the new subjects first within, then without, the community of full-fledged British subjects. Those who suggested that the new subjects should be regarded as British subjects were those who saw them as potential assets to the empire. In contrast to the recently arrived British settlers (‘persons of small property, of bad characters, and of low extraction ... refugees and adventurers from England, and from the several provinces of America’) the French inhabitants held the majority of the island’s wealth and property.19 A second reason to curry their favour was the urgency of the perceived need to increase or at least maintain the number of white bodies on the island. Eighteenth-century Britons had an acute sense of demographic disadvantage in relation to their more populous imperial rival, France.20 These anxieties were magnified a hundredfold in the extreme demographic conditions of the West Indies. At mid-century, blacks outnumbered whites ten to one on Grenada, and the gap was widening: between 1753 and 1788, the white population had declined from 1,262 to 996, while the slave population had nearly doubled, increasing


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from 11,991 to 23,926.21 With odds like these, the white population of the Caribbean and the many more people in Britain with a financial stake there lived, day in and day out, with the very real possibility of slave rebellion. Accordingly, Londoners with business interests in Grenada actively called for the conciliation of the French inhabitants.22 The strategy dominant during the 1760s and 1770s—particularly in metropolitan circles—was therefore to spare no effort to secure the loyalties of the French inhabitants of Grenada who chose to stay after the island became a British colony. Some of these efforts were largely symbolic gestures, like the knighthood conferred on Sir François Laurent in 1768, but others were more substantial.23 Not only were they granted the property rights of British subjects, and exempted from the higher commercial duties imposed on aliens, but the ministry also took the unprecedented step of liberating the new subjects of Grenada from almost all the disabilities imposed on Catholics elsewhere in the empire. The Royal Instructions to Grenada directed the colonial governor to allow Catholics to vote in elections for the island’s House of Assembly without taking the Test; in addition, seats in the governor’s Council, the Assembly and the commission of the peace were set aside for Roman Catholics. Catholics could also serve as officers in the militia and as judges in all but the highest courts.24 This was hardly full equality—the number of Catholics in positions of power was still below their proportional representation in the population, and access to offices was restricted by quota—but on paper, at least, they enjoyed a far more extensive political role than anywhere else in the British Empire. This was matched by efforts to construct the new subjects as loyal subjects, and hence entitled to the full rights and privileges of natural-born British subjects. This was no easy task. Of the various types and modes of allegiance operative in eighteenth-century Britain, the new subjects could lay claim only to one of the weakest: the voluntary allegiance of oaths and naturalization. Their natural allegiance of birthplace and heritage remained with ‘sa Majesté très Chrétienne’, the king of France, and as professing Roman Catholics most of them were unable to take the Test oath disavowing their spiritual allegiance to Rome. Accordingly, ceremonies of secular allegiance to George III received disproportionate emphasis. First, the French inhabitants acknowledged the sovereignty of the British Crown when they signed the articles of capitulation on the conquest of the island. Decades later, capitulants could produce certificates proving they had done so. They further confirmed their transfer of allegiance by staying put. Under the Treaty of Paris, those who wished to leave were allowed 18 months in which to sell their estates to British subjects.25 Those who remained after the 18 months had elapsed affirmed their choice a third time by taking the oath of allegiance and signing a document that still survives: a bilingual text of the oath in English and French followed by a list of 1,200 names ranging from the most prosperous men on the island to the mark of ‘Rochelle, a Charaib’.26


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In addition to emphasizing these formal and public demonstrations of allegiance, proponents of conciliating the new subjects also suggested that the Catholic new subjects, despite their ties of birth to the French Crown, actually owed a stronger allegiance to the king of England than did naturalborn Catholics in the British Isles. Adherents of this view cited the Gallican tradition in French Catholicism, a controversial doctrine that asserted the more or less complete freedom of the Catholic Church from the authority of the papacy, and with which a strain of the eighteenth-century Anglican Church felt a strong affinity.27 ‘The Roman Catholics of the Gallican Church are no papists’, insisted one pamphleteer. They deny the supremacy of the Pope, and all those damnable doctrines tending to inculcate, that the Pope can dispense with the allegiances of subjects to their sovereigns ... [They] are certainly less obnoxious, politically considered, than our own natural born Catholick subjects.28 There was, however, a second—and less optimistic—perspective on the value of the new subjects and their proper position in the empire. Deeply sceptical about the prospects of gaining the loyalties of the French inhabitants, many regarded them as not an asset but a liability. At the very least this group strove to keep the new subjects from positions of political power; at best they hoped to drive them from the colony altogether. In London, this perspective was associated with a group of radical Whig pamphleteers and political journalists led by Thomas Hollis, a wealthy London barrister, Unitarian, and radical Whig who promoted a transatlantic pamphlet war portraying the grant of political rights to Catholics in Grenada and Quebec as part of an empire-wide ministerial attack on the rights of Protestant Britons.29 Yet it would be a mistake to view the conflict on Grenada as a simple case of Protestant vs Catholic, for what worried the Britons who came to settle on the island about their new neighbours was not so much their religion as their Frenchness. Relatively few of the old subjects on Grenada conformed to the Church of England: most were Presbyterian or dissenting. Moreover, the inhabitants of eighteenth-century sugar islands were seldom particularly devout. There was neither a Protestant religious figure nor regular Protestant services on Grenada until after 1783, when imperial policy-makers began to see a greater role for the Anglican Church in maintaining the loyalty of its colonial possessions.30 The settlers’ fear was not their neighbours’ allegiances to Rome, but the possibility of treachery in the event of renewed conflict with France. This was a very real fear. The inhabitants of the eighteenth-century West Indies knew that the islands they lived on, particularly the smaller ones, like Grenada, were the subject of ongoing imperial rivalry. Military engagements in the Caribbean were frequent events and many islands experienced regular changes of government.


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Pamphleteers in London and Edinburgh prophesied the encroachment of ‘Romish superstition’ and the return of ‘a popish pretender on the throne’ if the franchise were extended to Catholics in Grenada or Quebec, but the Protestant inhabitants of Grenada themselves drew instead on the legal language of secular allegiance.31 Again and again, they cast aspersions on the French inhabitants’ claim to be considered British subjects, emphasizing the importance of a natural allegiance of birth and the dangers of weakening the strict application of the doctrine of indelible allegiance. A petition of 1764 to the island’s governor insisted that all the treaties and oaths in the world would be of no effect, for ‘the French, Roman catholic inhabitants of this island ... must still in the eyes of the law be considered aliens’.32 The old subjects considered their fears vindicated when French troops re-conquered the island in 1779 as part of the War of American Independence and many of the new subjects welcomed the return of French rule.33 Obviously, the appeasement of the new subjects had not been as generous as the British had thought. Once the island returned to British rule in 1783, the old subjects took the opportunity of exacting their revenge. Sir François Laurent, the new subject who had been knighted in 1768, ‘was hung in Effigie by the Mob’ for having ‘shewn strong attachments and prejudices in favour of the French Governor during their Possession of the island’.34 The legislature, purged of its contingent of French new subjects, passed a raft of measures to restrict Catholics’ religious freedom and reverse the extension of political rights to the new subjects and reduce them to the status of Catholics elsewhere in the empire, a decision ratified by the Privy Council in 1792.35 The penal laws and a tradition of anti-popery were the means of excluding the new subjects; ideas of natural allegiance were their justification. ‘[I]n this enlightened age it seems rather illiberal ... to keep alive this distinction merely on religious points’, admitted Alexander Symson, the speaker of the Assembly, in a letter to the colony’s London agent in 1787. ‘But if by the Treaty of Peace, these settlers ... have a Right, if they please, of becoming and enjoying the privileges of Subjects, it will be wise and Politic (considering what kind of Subjects they are) to circumscribe their privileges within as narrow bounds as the Laws of the Land will warrant’.36 The Catholic penal laws were a convenient way to ensure that these one-time Frenchmen were kept out of positions of power from which they could potentially betray their British neighbours. At the same time, the old subjects increasingly emphasized the deficiencies of the French subjects’ allegiance, and hence the slimness of their claim to the rights of British subjects. In 1786, Grenada’s assembly reasserted the principles of natural and indelible allegiance when it agreed ‘that it is a fundamental and established principle of Allegiance, in all Civilized Countries, that no man can divest himself of his Native Allegiance’.37 Once courted as possible loyal subjects of the Crown, the French Catholic inhabitants of


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Grenada were believed to have ‘acted in contravention to their allegiance’, and thus jeopardized that status.38

Compared with the white French-born new subjects, whose disputed status was the subject of hundreds of colonial dispatches, dozens of petitions, and a scattering of books and pamphlets, the legal position of Grenada’s slaves as subjects of the Crown is almost entirely absent in 30 years of the island’s historical record. Nor is the subjecthood of slaves a question that was extensively explored elsewhere in the empire. In the 1790s, however, two developments coincided on Grenada that give some hints as to a slave’s relationship to the Crown, and the subject status that relationship implied. The first was Fédon’s Rebellion, in which slaves joined white and mixed-race free men in political action against British rule. The second was the British rulers’ early and perhaps too hasty decision to define the rebellion as high treason, and thus engage with metropolitan doctrines of sovereignty and allegiance. In August 1795 the Grenada Assembly passed an Act of Attainder listing over 400 supposed rebels—French-speaking whites, free persons of colour and slaves—and declaring them guilty of high treason.39 An act or bill of attainder was an extraordinary legal instrument that essentially circumvented the judiciary, allowing a legislature to declare a person or group guilty without benefit of trial. The United States constitution banned the practice in both federal and state governments; even in Britain the practice was regarded as antiquated and morally dubious by the end of the eighteenth century.40 Just three years later, in 1798, the trials of accused British Jacobins would be the occasion of the last act of attainder passed in the British Isles.41 There were a number of consequences arising out of the use of this particular legal remedy. One was the silencing of the accused. A person named in the bill can enter only one of two pleas: he or she can plead guilty, or that he or she was not the person named in the Act. Consequently, there is no witness testimony from Fédon’s Rebellion. Accounts of the trials record the insurgents beginning a ‘general defence of [their] conduct’, then being silenced by the court.42 The proceedings of Grenada’s Court of Oyer and Terminer, a special court convened to hear the treason trials, are accordingly minimal: little more than lists of names, convictions and sentences.43 A second consequence of the legislature’s decision to define the rebellion as treason—rather than conspiracy or sedition—was to engage discourses of allegiance and subjecthood. In the eighteenth-century British Empire, treason was a statutory crime, modified by case law, defined as a breach of the allegiance an individual owed the sovereign. And, as has been shown, the quality and degree of allegiance the individual owed the Crown was also a load-bearing pillar of a person’s legal and political identity. Because


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Treason, subjecthood and allegiance


high treason implies allegiance, and allegiance implied subjecthood, convicting a person of treason carried with it the implication that he or she— and others like them—were rights-bearing British subjects in the first place. In the words of the Crown’s legal advisers early in the next century, ‘[t] reason ... consists in the breach of allegiance, and where no allegiance is due there can be no treason’.44 Just as Lisa Steffen has shown that definitions of treason can reveal the nature of the state, convictions of treason also worked to define the convict as a British subject.45 Because rebels could be punished more harshly when the perpetrator was a British subject, many who had once emphasized the foreignness and alienness of the French new subjects were now equally emphatic that they must be regarded as British. Gordon Turnbull, who had spent some time in the colonial legislature in the 1780s attempting to disfranchise the new subjects, now embraced them as his countrymen: ‘The wretches who have desolated the island, and assassinated their unsuspecting fellow-subjects in the hour of sleep ... are not foreigners who have landed in arms to make war; they are subjects of the King of Great Britain, many of them born under his government, and all bound to pay allegiance to his Majesty by the most solemn treaties and oaths’.46 John Hay described the rebels as ‘fellow-subjects in open rebellion against their natural sovereign’.47 In sum, many in the anti-French faction of the island were happy to regard the French inhabitants as British subjects when it meant they could be hanged and beheaded on the public marketplace. There were others, though, who had doubts. Some of these were concerned about the fairness of imposing the liabilities of subjecthood on persons who did not enjoy its benefits. Thomas Turner Wise, who was later to serve as counsel for the rebels at their trials, mentioned in early 1796 that the British residents of St George considered imprisoning ‘young de Suze’, one of the new subjects sent with a flag of truce four days after the rebellion broke out, but noted that as ‘they debated whether they should put [him] to death ... as being a British subject’; enough doubt on the question emerged that they allowed him to return to the rebels’ camp. And when, a month later, the government convicted Pierre Alexandre, a known alien, of treason and hanged him the next day, Wise noted that he and others disapproved of applying treason law to ‘a native of Thoulouse [sic] in France, [who] had never taken any oath of allegiance to the King of Great Britain, and was in no sense of the word a subject’.48 Yet, as the next section shows, other doubts about treating the rebels as British subjects for the purpose of the trials concerned not the fairness of convictions of treason, but the ramifications of setting a precedent. Convicting a person of treason created a precedent implying that he (or she)—and others like them—was formally capable of committing treason; in other words, they were British subjects with all the rights and privileges of that status. These reservations applied particularly to the participants in Fédon’s Rebellion whose role was most effectively effaced: the slaves.


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The Grenada rebellion was less than a week old when the first slave rebel was caught, convicted of treason and suffered the traditional penalty: hanging and quartering. He was, however, the last. When the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in the summers of 1796 and 1797, not a single slave seems to have come before it: as reticent as the court’s records are regarding the white and free rebels of colour, the silence and obscurity of the slaves is even more profound. Brief references in colonial correspondence makes clear that the punishments meted out to slave rebels—usually death or transportation, occasionally a lifetime in irons—were no less brutal than those of their free counterparts, but they were denied even the minimal dignity of a court of record.49 This final section suggests that the same discourses of allegiance that marked Catholics and the foreign-born as marginal persons, persons of compromised allegiance, also marked slaves as persons incapable of allegiance, and hence of treason. As a number of scholars have pointed out, using various legal idioms, one of the consequences of slavery was to render the slave legally invisible. One of these legal idioms was that of commercial law. In New World chattel slavery, the law regarded a slave as ‘living property’, a ‘person with a price’, and hence unable to bring a suit or give testimony.50 A second idiom was that of law and the community. In Orlando Patterson’s words, a slave ‘had no social existence outside of the master’ and was thus a ‘socially dead person’.51 Although many scholars have since shown that Patterson took his conclusion too far—in practice slave marriages, families, economic enterprises, and other community bonds could be resilient and rich in meaning—it remains an apt description of how the law sought to define enslaved Africans.52 Because a slave’s legal relationship with his master was of such overwhelming importance, any marital, familial, economic or other relationships he or she enjoyed were on sufferance only. With regard to the question of a slave’s subjecthood, however, the all-encompassing nature of the slave’s relationship with a master also seems to have foreclosed the possibility of any formal relationship with the sovereign, including that of allegiance. The abolitionist Thomas Burgess employed this line of reasoning to argue that slavery was foreign to the common law.53 Burgess, an Anglican clergyman, began by restating the political theology of sovereignty and subjection first set out in Calvin’s Case and which is prominent in Blackstone’s Commentaries of 1765–69.54 ‘In return for the allegiance, which the law exacts, every British subject is protected in the enjoyment of the absolute rights of personal security, personal liberty, and private property’, he explained. ‘Protection and allegiance are reciprocal’. The slave’s inability to participate in this fundamental relationship of protection and allegiance, he continued, threatened the very fabric of the British constitution. ‘The law therefore cannot tolerate slavery, which, by


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Silent subjects


placing the slave under the absolute authority of his master, supposes an exemption from this allegiance’.55 As Thomas Turner Wise pointed out, a master’s exclusive claim to his slave’s allegiance rendered it questionable that an enslaved participant in Fédon’s Rebellion had committed any sort of crime at all. The slave in question was ‘the negro of Bontems [or Bontemps] the Swiss’, a white estate manager who was known to be among the insurgents by the end of March 1795, and who was among the first dozen rebels who appeared before the Court of Oyer and Terminer in June 1796.56 Wise, who offered the only account of this incident, disapproved of the conviction of Bontemps’ slave as both cruel and illogical. Even if the slave in question had participated in the uprising, he asked rhetorically, ‘was it not probable that he only obeyed his master’s orders in doing so? And was not this understood to be the first duty of a slave? ... [I]t was quite as natural for him ... to support his own master, as it would have been for our slaves to have remained faithful and to have supported us’.57 By convicting Bontemps’ slave of treason, Wise suggested, the court implied that a slave owed allegiance not just to a master, but to the sovereign as well—with all the implications that entailed for legal and political personhood. Wise, like two judges in Virginia 15 years earlier, feared that a conviction for treason of a slave was a dangerous precedent that should not be allowed to stand. In 1781, a slave named Billy had been convicted of treason for voluntarily boarding a British ship and ‘wag[ing] and levy[ing] war’ against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Billy was ordered to be hung, but two judges dissented from the majority holding. ‘A slave in our opinion Cannot Commit Treason against the State’, they wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, urging him to intervene. ‘[N]ot being Admitted to the Priviledges of a Citizen [he] owes the State No Allegiance’.58 By their reckoning, it was preferable for Billy to go free than to set a precedent implying that slaves could be citizens of the state of Virginia. There is no way to be sure that the colonial government of Grenada shared Wise’s reservations. But it is notable that ‘the negro of Bontems the Swiss’ was the only slave convicted of treason for participating in Fédon’s Rebellion, and the others were disposed of in a manner that accorded better with their legal definition as chattel: they were confiscated, along with the rest of the property of convicted traitors.59 Alleged killers were hanged, but the island’s acting governor was reluctant to throw away the entirety of such a large stock of capital. In July 1796 he confessed he was ‘extremely puzzled—what to make of such Slaves’, and proposed to sell them to the Royal Navy, as ‘a number extraordinary might be sent to the unhealthy stations—to India’.60 But the Navy refused to take mutinous slaves at any price, and most were sentenced to banishment and abandoned en masse on the Caribbean coast of Central America.61 In the end, the punishments for enslaved and free insurgents differed little, but only free rebels were tried


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Compromised allegiance: aliens, Catholics and slaves in the British Empire The association between foreigners, Catholics and slaves has been a durable one on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout the long eighteenth century, ‘slavery’ and ‘popery’ were treated as synonymous terms: a Catholic was thought to be subject to the arbitrary authority of priests and the Pope just as a slave was subject to his master. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the suppression of the Jacobite risings were memorialized as ‘deliveries from slavery and popery’ in generations of anniversary sermons; in the Atlantic colonies, there were recurring panics of literal slave-Catholic collaboration, like the supposed plots of joint uprisings of slaves and Irish indentured servants in early Virginia, or New York’s ‘Great Negro Plot’ of 1741.62 This chapter has shown that these associations between slaves and Catholics were mirrored in legal doctrine. Just as Catholics and other religious nonconformists were denied full legal personhood thanks to their compromised allegiance to the Crown, a slave’s legal obligation of total obedience to a master was also a part of their fuller, and more violent, suppression as a legal person. The law marked aliens, Catholics and even slaves as outsiders in qualitatively similar, though quantifiably different, ways. Because an alien owed allegiance to a foreign sovereign, a Catholic owed allegiance to Rome, and a slave owed allegiance to a master, the allegiance to the British Crown of all three groups was regarded as compromised—and, in the case of slaves, virtually non-existent. Metropolitan legal doctrines and practices of subjecthood reinforced the legal silence of slaves and suppression of their personhood.

Notes 1. Subjecthood was not a word used by contemporaries. ‘Nationality’ is a nineteenth-century neologism, while ‘citizenship’ was a term reserved for membership in municipal corporations, or in reference to the republics of classical antiquity, revolutionary France or the United States, or occasionally to Britons in a very loose sense. Common lawyers refer to this branch of the law as ‘the law of subject and alien’, and I have resorted to the admittedly imperfect term ‘subjecthood’ to distinguish it from citizenship, which connotes a degree of legal equality, an emphasis on political participation and a bureaucratic quality that are absent in eighteenth-century ideas and practices of being—or not being—a British subject. 2. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, UK, 1985), 189–198; idem, ‘Protestantism, Nationalism, and National Identity, 1660–1832’, Historical Journal 43/1 (2000): 249–276; Kathleen Wilson, ‘Introduction’, A New Imperial


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and convicted as traitors who had violated their allegiance to the Crown. To try slaves as traitors would be to admit a legal and political personhood that colonial society could not countenance.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, ed. Wilson (Cambridge, UK, 2004), 1–26; Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2000); Andrew Sartori, ‘The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission’, Journal of Modern History 78/3 (2006), 623–642. Mark Quintanilla, ‘The World of Alexander Campbell: An Eighteenth-Century Grenadian Planter’, Albion 35/2 (2003): 229–256. P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century, IV: The Turning Outward of Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001): 1–15; idem, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005); H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics (Cambridge, UK, 1991); Kathleen Wilson, ‘Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720–90’, Eighteenth Century Studies 29/1 (1995): 69–96; Eliga Gould, ‘American Independence and Britain’s CounterRevolution’, Past & Present 154 (1997): 107–141; Dror Wahrman, ‘The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution’, American Historical Review 106/4 (2001): 1236–1262; Eliga Gould, ‘Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772’, William and Mary Quarterly 60/3 (2003): 471–510. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Introduction’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper and Stoler (Berkeley, 1997), 1–56. Edward Coke, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, 7 vols (London, 1777), vol. 4, 2–56 (hereafter Calvin’s Case); Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols (Boston, 1861–74), vol. 10, 307–325; [Sir Thomas Egerton], The Speech of the Lord Chancellor of England, in the Exchequer Chamber, Touching the Post-Nati (London, 1609). Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, A History of English Law, 2 vols (Cambridge, UK, 1895), vol. 2, 441–450; Polly J. Price, ‘Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship in Calvin’s Case (1608)’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 9 (1997): 73–146; Daniel J. Hulsebosch, ‘The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke’s British Jurisprudence’, Law and History Review 21 (2003): 439–482. Calvin’s Case, 25. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 4, 6, 7. T. S. Martin, ‘Nemo Potest Exuere Patriam: Indelibility of Allegiance and the American Revolution’, American Journal of Legal History 35/2 (1991): 205–218; Denver Brunsman, ‘Subjects and Citizens: Impressment and Identity Formation in the Anglo-American Atlantic’, Journal of the Early Republic (forthcoming; thanks are due to the author for providing me with a copy of the manuscript). Act for abrogating the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance, and appointing other Oaths (1689). David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester, NY, 1999), 47–55. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), 26. Clive Parry, Nationality and Citizenship Laws of the Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland, 2 vols (London, 1957–60), vol. 1, 6, 59, 64, 79; William Forsyth, Cases and Opinions on Constitutional Law (London, 1869), 339.


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214

16. Parry, Nationality, 6; Alexander Cockburn, Nationality, or the Law Relating to Subjects and Aliens, Considered with a View to Future Legislation (London, 1869), 106–116; Act of Settlement (1701), reaffirmed in 1 Geo. I, sess. 2, c. 4. 17. Compare Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, 2003), 2. 18. For local examples, see Parry, Nationality, 40; Jacob Selwood, ‘ “English-Born Reputed Strangers”: Birth and Descent in Seventeenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005): 728–753. 19. Anon., The Grenada Planter (London, 1768), 6. 20. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (London, 2002), 4–11; Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark, NJ, 1995). 21. R. Montgomery Martin, British Colonial Library, 10 vols (London, 1836–7), vol. 4, 267. 22. Minutes of 16 October 1767, Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations from April 1704 to December 1775, 14 vols (London, 1920–37), 424. 23. National Archives, London (hereafter UKNA), Grenada Correspondence, CO 102/15, Hillsborough to Melvill, 8 March 1768; [Thomas Turner Wise], A Brief Enquiry into the ... Insurrection in Grenada (London, 1796), 4. 24. George I. Brizan, Grenada, Island of Conflict: From Amerindians to People’s Revolution, 1498–1979 (London, 1984), 36–37. 25. ‘Treaty of Paris’, 10 February 1763, §IV. Avalon Project at Yale Law School: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, (16 June 2008), hereafter Treaty of Paris. John Bartlet Brebner, New England’s Outpost: Acadia before the Conquest of Canada (New York, 1973), 64–66. 26. ‘Oath of Allegiance to Geo. III’, Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, M166, undated [1763–72?]. 27. Peter M. Doll, Revolution, Religion, and National Identity: Imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795 (London, 2000), 22–29. 28. Anon., Audi Alteram Partem (London, 1770), 26, 53. 29. Caroline Robbins, ‘The Strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn’, William and Mary Quarterly, 7/3 (1950): 406–453; Philip Lawson, ‘ “The Irishman’s Prize”: Views of Canada from the British Press’, Historical Journal, 28/3 (1985): 575–596. 30. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/26, fos. 131–135, ‘Petition from the Council and Assembly of Grenada to the King relating to the Roman Catholic religion in Grenada’, enclosed in Mathew to Sydney, 7 April 1795; Doll, Imperial Anglicanism, 13. 31. Anon., ‘Strictures on the Conduct of two successive Administrations with Respect to the civil and religious Establishments in Canada and the Grenadines’, Political Register, 4/26 (May 1769): 257–73, for ‘Romish superstition’, 261, 262, 263, 271; for ‘popish pretender’, 259, 272. 32. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/10, ‘Memorial of the British Protestant inhabitants of the island of Grenada’, 28 December 1764. 33. Raymund Devas, The Island of Grenada (St George’s, Grenada, 1964), 87–91; ‘Proclamation of the Comte de Durat’, 7 July 1779, quoted in Brizan, Grenada, 50. 34. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/26, fo. 423, Committee of Correspondence to Charles Spooner, Agent for Grenada, 1 March 1786. 35. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/26, fos. 294–303, ‘Petition à son Honneur Wm Lucas’, undated [1786?]; J. Holland Rose et al. (eds), Cambridge History of the British Empire, 8 vols (Cambridge, UK, 1929), vol. 2, 52.


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36. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/27, fos. 165–168, Extract of a letter from Symson to ?, 11 January 1787. 37. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/26, fos. 308–309, ‘Resolution of the Assembly of Grenada’, 14 February 1786. 38. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/27, fos. 165–168, Extract of a letter from Symson to ?, 11 January 1787. 39. UKNA, Acts of Grenada Legislature, CO 103/10, ‘Act of 8 August 1795’. 40. Constitution of the United States of America, Art. I, §9, clause 3; The Times (London), 18 August 1796; UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/34, Duke of Portland to Kenneth Francis Mackenzie, 9 October 1795. 41. John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–6 (Oxford, 2000); John Barrell and Jon Mee (eds), Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–4, 8 vols (London, 2006–07). 42. The Times (London), 18 August 1796. 43. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/34, fos. 245–257, Enclosure in Houstoun to Secretary of State, 30 July 1796; UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/35, fo. 74, Enclosure in Green to Secretary of State, 19 June 1797. 44. ‘Joint opinion of Sir John Dodson, Sir John Campbell and Sir R. M. Rolfe, on the liability of foreigners invading His Majesty’s dominions to suffer the penalties of High Treason’, in Forsyth, Cases and Opinions, 199–200. 45. Lisa Steffen, Defining a British State: Treason and National Identity, 1608–1820 (New York, 2001). This is not to say that aliens could commit treason with impunity. To pre-empt this possibility, the judges in Calvin’s Case proposed the existence of a sort of ‘local allegiance’ that bound foreign subjects on English territory and thus nominally made them subject to treason law. In practice, however, the close association between subjecthood and treason remained, and colonial governments remained unwilling to prosecute foreigners for treasons. State Trials, vol. 18, 867; UKNA, Law officers’ reports on Colonial Acts, CO 323/54, fos. 319–331, Opinion of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 2 May 1839. 46. Gordon Turnbull, Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection in the Island of Grenada, 2nd edn (London, 1796), 109. 47. John Hay, Narrative of the Insurrection that Took Place in the Island of Grenada in 1795 (London, 1823), 39–40. 48. [Wise], Brief Enquiry, 74; also Henry Thornhill, Narrative of the Insurrection and Rebellion in the Island of Grenada, from the Commencement to the Conclusion (Barbados, 1798), 20. Similar questions emerged during the famous trial of Raja Nandakumar in Calcutta in 1775. Sudipta Sen, ‘Imperial Subjects on Trial: On the Legal Identity of Britons in Late Eighteenth-Century India’, Journal of British Studies 45/3 (2006): 532–555. 49. An act passed at the same time as the act of attainder made justices of the peace—untrained and unpaid judges with no obligation to keep records of their proceedings—responsible for punishing slaves accused of participation in the rebellion. See UKNA, Acts of Grenada Legislature, CO 103/10, fos. 42–44, ‘An Act to Secure and Detain Such Persons as shall be Suspected of Conspiring against His Majesty and His Government within these Islands ... and for the More Speedy Trial and Punishment of Slaves charged with the said Offences’. 50. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 1, 20, 218–220. 51. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 331, 338.


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52. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore, 1984); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974). 53. D. T. W. Price, ‘Burgess, Thomas (1756–1837)’, ODNB. 54. William Blackstone, Commentaries on English Law, 3 vols (Oxford, 1765–69), vol. 1, 357. 55. Thomas Burgess, Considerations on the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade, Upon Grounds of Natural, Religious, and Political Duty (Oxford, 1789), 119. 56. [Wise], Brief Enquiry, 50–52. But note that Francis Bontems (or Bontemps) was not among those convicted of treason, perhaps because as a Swiss subject he was not eligible. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/34, fo. 39, ‘List of inhabitants who have joined the insurrection’, enclosure in Mackenzie to Duke of Portland, 28 March 1795; Turnbull, Narrative, 160. 57. [Wise], Brief Enquiry, 50–52. 58. Lee and Carr to Jefferson, 11 May 1781, in Julian Boyd et al. (eds), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 29 vols (Princeton, 1950–2007), vol. 5, 641–642; see also Malik W. Ghachem, ‘The Slave’s Two Bodies: The Life of an American Legal Fiction’, William and Mary Quarterly 60/4 (2003): 703–742. 59. The value of confiscated slaves was estimated at between £40,000 and £47,000; at an average value of £100–120 per slave, that suggests a figure of 400. UKNA, Treasury Long Papers, ‘Grenada: forfeited estates, 1790–1840’, T 1/3806, bundle 336, part 1, Commissioners of Forfeited Estates to Green, 1 March 1799. 60. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/34, fos. 236–237, Houstoun to Secretary of State, 4 July 1796. 61. UKNA, Grenada Correspondence, CO 101/34, fos. 264–266, Houstoun to Secretary of State, 1 September 1796; CO 101/35, fos. 72–77, Green to Secretary of State, 24 June 1797. 62. B. Gravenor, A Sermon ... in Commemoration of Our Deliverance from Popery and Slavery (London, 1710); William Stephens, A Second Deliverance from Popery and Slavery (London, 1714); William Newton, A Thanksgiving Sermon for Our Double Deliverance from Popery and Slavery (Canterbury, 1722); Daniel Horsmanden, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York (New York, 1744); Thomas J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The ‘Great Negro Plot’ in Colonial New York (New York, 1985); Peter Charles Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (Lawrence, KS, 2003).


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The Russian Empire: Military Encounters and National Identity Janet Hartley

Introduction: the nature of empire In 1767, the preamble to Catherine II’s ‘Instruction’ stated that ‘Russia is a European State’. She was making a political and cultural statement rather than a geographical one. The ‘European’ expansion and strategic concerns of the Russian Empire, and for that matter the Soviet Union, have always concerned both Russia’s rulers and her international rivals more than her Asiatic ambitions. The expansion within Europe in the Napoleonic period was substantial and, at least in part, threatening to other states. To the north, Finland was taken over in 1809, after the south of the country had been acquired in 1721 and 1743. To the south, Georgia was absorbed in 1801 and Bessarabia in 1812, while Ukraine and the Crimea had become part of the empire between 1649 and 1792. To the west, the Congress Kingdom of Poland was ruled from Russia after 1815, after the eastern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian state had been acquired in the three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. Nevertheless, it was an empire which had expanded even more rapidly eastwards than in other directions in the two centuries before the period discussed in this volume, to the extent that Russian settlers had reached not only the far eastern seaboard but had also settled on the coasts of California and Alaska. In the 1730s the Ural mountains had come to be regarded as the border between European and Asiatic Russia, and a border which was a low range of mountains was—for troops, settlers and a whole range of deserters, fugitive serfs and others who wished to lose their identities—far easier to cross than an ocean. Several characteristics of the Russian Empire became determining factors in the creation of Russian identity. First, the empire had almost exclusively been acquired by force and by military conquest. The only exception here was Eastern Georgia, incorporated in a ‘union’ with Russia in 1801, after the death of King Georgi of Georgia, with whom negotiations had taken place, in part because the Christian Georgians sought protection from a fellow Christian state. In fact, the history of the rise of Muscovy from the 218


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11

fifteenth century is one of expansion by military force, be it against the Tatars, the Poles or the Ottomans. The consequences of this for the nature of the ensuing Muscovite and later Russian state have been the subject of much historical writing, if not soul-searching, over the extent to which this led to the crushing of individual freedoms and an assertion of the power of the ruler over his subjects. It has also been argued that this was one reason why Russian expansion, unlike American expansion to the West, failed to produce the same ‘freedom-loving’ frontiersmen in Russia.1 In terms of identity it meant that the army played a dominant role in first conquering territory and then controlling it in a complex network of garrisons, or ‘lines’, which were constructed across southern Russia, the Caucasus and then across Siberia to the Far East. Second, the absorption of new territory not only made the Russian Empire multi-ethnic but also meant that ethnic Russians fell to below 50 per cent of the population by 1782, and 45 per cent in 1833. The Slav population (including Belorusians, Ukrainians and Poles as well as Russians) was some three-quarters of the population at the late eighteenth century. One estimate in 1795 listed some 20 million Russians, 8 million Ukrainians, 3.4 million Belorusians and 2.5 million Poles. The largest minorities ( between 500,000 and one million) were Finns, Lithuanians, Tatars, Latvians and Jews. 2 Not only was the newly acquired population non-Russian, it was also non-Orthodox and could be non-Christian. The religious aspect in particular helped to forge the Russian identity in contrast to ‘the other’. In the north, Finns (including Swedish-speaking Finns) were Protestant, and Baltic Germans, Estonians and Latvians were in the main Protestant. In the west, the Poles were Catholics, Lithuanians could be Catholic or Uniate, and there was also a considerable Jewish population. In the south and southwest, Ukrainians were mostly Uniate although some were Catholic or Orthodox, and Bessarabians were mostly Rumanian Orthodox. Most of the population in the Caucasus were Muslim, but Russia in this period only controlled the northern Caucasus as far as the river Terek. Georgia was Christian, surrounded by Muslims to the north and south, but with Christian Armenians to the west. In the Far East the very small indigenous population was a mixture of Muslim, Buddhist and shamanistic tribesmen. Third, the military conquest of the territory and the need to control these territories led to forced as well as voluntary settlement. The ‘military estate’ in Russia comprised not only officers and soldiers but also whole social groups who could be loosely described as ‘military servitors’, with responsibilities primarily on Russia’s frontiers. Military settlement had taken place on the southern frontiers of Russia and Ukraine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, creating in the process a chain of fortified towns and a class of military servitors on the frontier—the so-called one-homesteader or odnodvortsy—with an anomalous status between that of nobleman and


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The Russian Empire 219

peasant (this social category was abolished only in 1868). The largest group of military servitors was the Cossacks, who were mostly found on the southern frontiers along the main rivers. The Russian government forcibly relocated Cossacks to the frontiers in the south and Far East. Cossacks were moved to the Caucasus from the Don and Volga area in the 1770s and 1790s; ‘excess’ Cossacks in Siberian towns were moved to the Chinese frontier in 1810.3 Voluntary settlers could mix uneasily with military settlers; Siberian towns became a melting pot of Cossacks, retired soldiers, officials, exiles, merchants and artisans. In the Caucasus, records of the kidnapping by Chechens of children of settlers included Scottish colonists and gypsies as well as Cossacks.4 Garrisons were small oases of Russianness amidst alien, often hostile, territory, the Russian equivalent of forts in the Wild West. It was under these difficult conditions that identity was formed. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries settlement took place by a combination of nobles receiving grants of land, often more productive than their existing estates, with peasants who became their serfs, together with the movement of fugitive peasants, many of whom settled on Cossack land, to the south, Jews who were only allowed to settle within a Western Pale of settlement, and foreign settlers. Odessa became a melting post of nationalities: Russians, Cossacks, Jews, Armenians, Greeks and Italians. Nobles also acquired estates in Lithuania, the Baltic provinces and, to a lesser extent, southern Finland. This contrasting pattern of settlement brings me to the fourth, and final, point of significance: namely the contrast between the cultural and political levels of the peripheries of the empire. In the west, and north, and to an extent in Ukraine, the Russian Empire acquired land which was often more economically productive, more populous and more prosperous, and a population, which was often more culturally sophisticated, than in the ‘core’ Russian heartland (in contrast to the English heartland of the British Empire and the German heartland of the Austrian Empire). The levels of education were higher in these areas, from the level of basic literacy through to grammar schools and universities. This disparity increased after 1815 as primary school education expanded in the Congress Kingdom of Poland and with the founding of the University of Warsaw in 1816.5 Dorpat, in Latvia, became a leading university, not least because it recruited talent from Germany.6 The main ports, and the urban groups which dominated the ports, were outside Russia proper and were often non-Russian speaking, including German-speaking populations in Riga and Reval, which had their own selfgoverning institutions. Different legal systems, although within a unified legal structure by the end of the eighteenth century, operated in the Baltic provinces, south Finland and Ukraine. Finland (the area under Swedish rule) and parts of Poland (after the introduction of the constitution of 1791, and then the Duchy of Warsaw) both had experience of representative


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institutions through their own diets, although, as we shall see, only Poland experienced a modern, French revolutionary and then Napoleonic-style constitution. This was quite different from the Russian perceptions of the peoples of the Caucasus and of Siberia. In these areas, the attitude towards the latter was superior, resting on assumptions that either imperial Russian troops were better than local troops and civilians, or that settled farmers were better than nomadic tribesmen and hunters, or that Christians were superior to non-Christians. This made Russian perceptions of ‘otherness’ quite different depending on the periphery, ranging from potential resentment of the ‘smart’ or crafty Pole or Baltic German to contempt for the pagan Koriak and Chukchi tribesman in the Far East.

Conflict and identity: the frontier The characteristics of empire cited above all contributed to forging a sense of Russian identity on the frontier. Identity was forged in several ways: through peaceful contact (personal and economic), through experience of different habits and institutions (from culture to forms of law and administration), from conflict (military campaigns or causal violence) and from an awareness of religious distinctiveness (Russian Orthodoxy or simply Christianity). I shall look at these in turn with particular reference to the evolution of a sense of ‘otherness’. At its simplest level, contact between Russians and non-Russians at the frontier came through love and marriage. This was easy, of course, if the intended spouse was Orthodox or even Uniate, as could be the case in Ukraine or Lithuania, but marriage between Russians and Catholic Poles was not uncommon (Constantine, Alexander I’s brother, was a notorious example), as were marriages between Russians and Lutheran Balts (Peter I’s second wife was an Estonian peasant). Marriage was less easy in nonChristian areas, but garrison soldiers could take wives or companions from indigenous people. The contrasting ages of some of the garrison troops in distant Gizhiga, a fort on the northern shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, and their wives suggest that these were late marriages between soldiers and local women, although the records do not specify this: in 1809 Il’ia Khudiarev, aged 57, had a wife of 24, and Stepna Nizhegorod, aged 82, had a daughter aged 16.7 The difference here is that it was exclusively male Russian soldiers who found native women as companions; in the north and west, Russian women, of whatever social estate, could settle and marry local men. The army could itself become a means of assimilation. Although the western regions of Russia originally had a number of privileges concerning conscription, these had largely been overridden by the Napoleonic period. Finnish peasants and artisans were conscripted to the navy in the early nineteenth century;8 Baltic German nobles were resented for seemingly


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dominating the officer corps of the Russian army. Muslim tribesmen joined the Russian army in the Caucasus and pagan Koriaks joined the army in the Far East. Some, but not all, Muslims converted at this point; pagan tribesmen in the Far East converted to Christianity at the point at which they joined Russian service. The Chernigov infantry regiment in the Caucasus in 1826 included Tatars, Mordvins and Chuvash. Only the Chuvash were noted as having being baptized; they had converted, presumably in order to join the army, like Koriaks in the Far East.9 Contacts at an economic level were more mixed. Agricultural techniques were more advanced in the Baltic provinces than in Russia. The Transactions of the Free Economic Society (founded 1765) published material on the Baltic provinces with the expressed intention of influencing reforming nobles in Russia, but it is not clear that these intentions were realized. Landowners and intellectuals in the Baltic provinces were at the forefront of the movement to abolish serfdom in the late eighteenth century, and Alexander experimented by abolishing serfdom there in the period 1816–19. But the poverty and disruption experienced by former serfs, who were freed without land, did little to encourage any enthusiasm amongst Russian nobles for emancipation in their own lands. Russian merchants had made use of the acquisition of ports on the Baltic—Riga in particular, but also Reval, Dorpat and Vyborg—for the export of goods, but there was little Russian penetration of the German-speaking institutions of local government in these towns. In 1820, a customs union was agreed between Russia and the Congress Kingdom of Poland, but competition between Russian and Polish merchants over textiles and agricultural products militated against genuine free trade. Russian coinage existed alongside Hanseatic, German and Polish coins in the Baltic provinces and Congress Kingdom.10 The situation was very different in the Caucasus and the Far East, where garrison soldiers and peasant settlers (not noble ones as in the north and west) came into contact with different forms of agriculture and local economies. In the Caucasus, there is some evidence that settlers had to adapt to local conditions in order to survive, and that meant adapting to local cultivation, growing maize rather than wheat or rye. The attempt to develop viticulture was not successful in this period and grain had to be imported. They had to rely on locals for the supply of foodstuffs and horses, adapt to local forms of construction of dwellings, and dress to resist the weather.11 Garrisons stimulated local trade and attracted settlers around them and could become a melting pot for foreign traders and settlers. In the Far East, in contrast, the economic relationship was almost entirely one of exploitation. The garrison existed in part to extract tribute, in cash or furs, from native hunters. Garrisons did require goods but these seemed to have been supplied in the main by Russian, and not native, traders. In reality, the garrison Cossacks could not survive economically in this hostile terrain. They depended on fishing, which was not alien to them, as many


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Cossacks on the Don and Volga had lived from fishing. When the fishing failed, as it did frequently in this period, then soldiers simply starved before supplies could reach them from inland Siberia. In 1817, a ‘great shortage’ was noted in the garrison of Gizhiga, and supplies were requested from distant Irkutsk, a journey which could take many months.12 Cultural contacts between Russians and local inhabitants on the periphery followed a similar pattern. The Russian government and rulers, if not local settlers, were prepared to learn from the more educationally and institutionally developed lands in the west. School reform in the reign of Catherine II was modelled on Austrian practice, but school reform in the early years of Alexander (that is, before the acquisition of Poland) was in part based on the curriculum of Vil’na educational district (including Lithuania and Belorus), which was written by Adam Czartoryski (a personal friend of Alexander I, who was a statesman in Russia and then in his native Poland). A new structure of six universities included two which were not Russian—Vil’na (which was largely Polish) and Dorpat (largely German)—an acknowledgement of the status of these institutions. There is some evidence that both Peter I and Catherine II looked to the Baltic provinces as at least one model for institutional structures for central and provincial administration in the eighteenth century. There was no attempt to impose Russian law on the territories acquired in the west (although Russian structures were imposed after 1775); this was not in itself a recognition that other legal systems—German, Polish, Swedish, Magdeburg Law and so on—were superior to Russian law but simply an assumption that this was a practical way of administering territories effectively. A rather different situation arose with the ‘constitutions’ of Finland and Poland.13 Finland’s constitution was a pre-French revolutionary Swedish form of government, with representation by separate social estates. Although it was formally confirmed in 1809 when Alexander confirmed Finnish rights and privileges, it was not used as a model for future constitutional developments in Russia and was, in effect, ignored; a Finnish diet was not summoned until 1863, in the reign of Alexander II. The Poles, however, had introduced their own form of revolutionary-style constitution on 3 May 1791. The constitution they then received from Alexander I in 1815 was Napoleonic in structure, even if it was restricted in both its electorate and its independence vis-à-vis Russia (not least as the tsar of Russia was to be the king of Poland). Although many of the educated elite in Russia admired French-style constitutions, many well-educated army officers, many of whom had fought and campaigned in western Russia and Poland, resented the fact that the ‘undeserving’ and treacherous Poles had been rewarded for invading Russia by being given a constitution whilst Russians who had sacrificed themselves in the Napoleonic wars ended up with nothing. As A. M. Murav’ev, who took part in the 1825 Decembrist Revolt, put it: ‘The


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Poles received a constitution and Russians as a reward for their exertions in the year 1812 got—military colonies.’14 The situation was quite different, of course, in other borderlands. Russia thought it had nothing to learn from the various forms of administration in the Caucasus which had simply led to the inability of Georgian, or other, rulers to defend themselves or govern effectively. Soldiers and settlers had nothing but contempt for the way of life of nomadic hunters of the Far East. This was in a period before Pushkin, Tolstoy and other writers discovered the wild, romantic view of the Caucasus and their peoples. Indeed, the more enlightened Russian officials saw it as their duty to improve the lives of the ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ people, whom they perceived as children, in the areas they had conquered.15 In the Far East, it was Mikhail Speransky who introduced administrative reforms in 1822. The aim of Speransky’s administrative changes in Siberia was to protect and improve the lot of ‘primitive’ native peoples (including an attempt to end slavery), as much as to improve the efficiency of Russian local government and open up Siberia’s economic potential.16 In fact, contact between Russians and non-Russians in the Caucasus and the Far East was characterized by violence. Natives were ‘savage’, and ‘wild’, and clearly the ‘other’, compared with the more civilized Russians. In the Caucasus the native population was described in official accounts as ‘the enemy’. The records of the army of the Caucasus line, for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are full of references to violent conflict, from attacks by ‘mountain people’ (Chechens) on parties of Cossacks to the kidnapping of Cossack and other settlers for ransom. The latter was, in effect, a form of slavery as those who were not ransomed were forced to serve their captors, in various capacities. Boys were kidnapped, and presumably could be used as fighters, but in 1818 a ransom of 100 silver roubles (Chechens never asked for ransom in paper roubles) was demanded for a ten-year-old girl.17 A report by a Major Zasetov noted that in the period 1805 to 1812, 33 settlers (mostly Cossacks) were killed, 25 wounded and 23 taken prisoner whilst 145 horses and 88 head of cattle were stolen.18 In 1812, the Russian garrison in the towns of Akmeti and Tianet were massacred with over one thousand casualties, and in the ensuing ‘pacification’ hundreds of peasants were killed.19 The garrison records of distant Gizhiga, in the Far East, referred in the same way to native Chukchi people as the ‘enemy’. Cossacks and soldiers were killed in Chukchi raids; indigenous peoples (Chukchi and Koriak) were also killed in turn. Between 1759 and 1774, 186 indigenous peoples (male and female) were recorded as killed, and 84 taken prisoner (by the Russians).20 The situation was complicated in the Far East by the fact that the army had to protect Koriaks (from whom they took tribute) from the more aggressive Chukchi people. The same physical conflict did not occur in the western regions under normal, peacetime conditions, although the


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year 1812 was an exception as far as Poles were concerned, as we shall see later. The ‘others’ were not only violent enemies, but also more primitive in customs and way of life. This did not mean, however, that all indigenous peoples were regarded as identical by the Russian government. The official identification of native peoples could be by their tribal group, but also by whether they paid tribute or whether they were eligible for military service. Speransky’s reforms in 1822 made the distinction between natives who were settled (treated in effect as if they were Russian peasants), nomads and ‘vagrants’.21 These distinctions were overlaid with religious identity: several groups, including Mari and Mordva, could be referred to as ‘Chuvash’ and this implied that they were tribute-paying non-Christians; ‘Tatar’ meant someone who paid tribute but was also a Muslim.22 The categorization of ‘otherness’ in the south and the Far East demonstrates that identity was inextricably bound up with religion and with the Christianity of the Russian soldiers and Cossacks as opposed to the Muslim and pagan tribesmen. Russian settlers in the Baltic provinces, Poland and southern Finland were also conscious that they were Orthodox and not Catholic or Protestant (or Uniate in Ukraine). Orthodox churches were built in the areas where Russians settled. In Georgia, the independence of the Georgian Orthodox Church was deliberately undermined by the Russian administration as it was seen as a potential rallying point for opponents.23 Proselytizing of the Uniate congregations in Lithuania and Ukraine was discouraged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (although this policy was reversed in the reign of Nicholas I). Contacts with nonOrthodox Christians were easier than with non-Christians, and did not have such an immediate impact on the sense of Russian identity, at least in peacetime. In non-Christian areas, the tsars were insistent that garrisons should build churches and that the troops should be ministered to by Orthodox priests. The latter was not easy—service in distant garrisons was not an attractive proposition for priests and was made worse by the fact that salaries were irregularly paid. A Senate report in 1785 noted that the lack of priests in distant garrisons meant that soldiers were dying without making a final confession and that children were not being christened. It instructed that priests should be sent to Kamchatka and other distant places.24 That this did not solve the problem can be seen by a further decree in 1822, when the Synod sent priests and assistants to Kamchatka, Gizhiga and Okhotsk, with supplementary salaries and allowances for provisions.25 Conversions of Muslims and pagans were encouraged, with incentives. In the reign of Peter the Great there were cash incentives for converted Tatars: 10 roubles for adult males, 5 roubles for a wife, 1.25 roubles for his children. In 1740, a special Agency for Convert Affairs was set up to encourage conversions in the provinces of Kazan’, Astrakhan’, Nizhnii Novgorod


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and Voronezh. But it always proved easier to convert pagans than Muslims and many of these conversions were not genuine (some non-Christians converted many times!).26 The same pattern occurred in the Far East among pagan Koriaks who sought sanctuary within the Russian garrison than it was among Muslims, although the list cited above of baptized soldiers in the Caucasus regiments suggest that Cheremis converted more willingly than others, perhaps for the same reason. Catherine II’s edict of toleration in 1764 reduced the pressure to convert (she was more concerned to introduce Russian administration to absorb and ‘improve’ her ‘wild peoples’) although efforts on the ground continued. There were special hopes of the Ossetians in the Caucasus, who were popularly regarded as ‘lapsed’ or ‘wayward’ Christians. The first missionary school for Ossetian children was founded in Mozdok in 1764 and children were offered a rouble to convert.27 A missionary office was set up in Mozdok in the 1780s.28 The Russian soldiers, and Cossacks, as far as one can tell given the lack of written records, remained conscious of their separate, Christian, identity, and voluntary or forced conversions would make little difference to this. Small settlements, as well as garrisons, had Orthodox churches. The names of some settlements were deliberately chosen to assert a separate, Christian, identity: Stavropol’, in the Caucasus, meant ‘the town of the cross’, and had been founded in the 1730s to settle Kalmyk converts.

Wars: conflict and national identity The Muscovite and then the Russian state was forged in conflict. The greatest threat to the Muscovite rulers after the Tatar invasion had been the invasion by Poles in the Time of Troubles (1612–13), a fact that was not forgotten in 1812, as we shall see. Russian identity was forged in eighteenth-century conflicts: against the Swedes in the Great Northern War (1700–21), when the last invasion of Russian territory before 1812 took place, and again in 1741–43 and 1788–90, and, more significantly, against the Ottoman Empire (1695–1700, 1710–11, 1735–39, 1768–74, 1787–91, 1806–12). Warfare, and in particular the campaigns against the Ottomans, consolidated and extended the forms of identity which had manifested themselves in frontier encounters and conflicts, namely, a sense of Christian, and to an extent Orthodox, identity against the ‘other’ which had now become also the ‘enemy’. This identification was strengthened by the rulers’ depiction of military triumphs as associated with their person and rule, with reference to past historical events and triumphs, and by the ways in which these were picked up in popular culture at the time. The link between national identity and warfare came to a climax, as might be expected, in the invasion of 1812. Identity forged by conflict against the Ottomans had deep roots in resistance to Muslim Tatars from the thirteenth century. Russian identity was bound up with perceptions of themselves as the true heirs of Byzantium,


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the ‘Third Rome’, and the only pure form of Christian belief following the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. Indeed, the western European perception of Russia before the exploits of Peter I was that she was only concerned with the East; when Peter arrived in England in 1698, a congratulatory poem referred to Russia’s ‘Glist’ning Sabre on proud Asia Gleams ... Its Conquering Steel shall to the East give Law’.29 Russia’s record against the Ottomans was mixed before the accession of Catherine II—Peter gained and then lost the port of Azov but it was gained again in 1739—but the two Russo-Turkish wars in the late eighteenth century led to considerable territorial gains in the south including the north coast of the Black Sea, the Crimean peninsula and the land stretching down to the river Dniester (and including the fort of Ochakov). Victories over the Ottomans were projected in terms of the triumph of Christianity over Islam, and also as a return of these lands to Christianity. Odes by the poet and administrator Gavriil Derzhavin referred to the return of Muslim lands to Russia as a fulfilment of Homer’s prophecy.30 Russian plays were staged which commemorated Russian victories over the Turks, but the historical precedents were not neglected either. Catherine II was herself an author and playwright. Her drama on Prince Oleg recounted his triumphant campaign against the Byzantine Empire in 900. When it was set to music and performed as a ballet in 1791, at the end of the second Russo-Turkish war, the programme notes portrayed Catherine as the heir of Oleg fighting for Constantinople.31 Catherine deliberately named her grandson Constantine in the hope that one day he would rule in a liberated Constantinople. Catherine commissioned paintings showing battle scenes from the RussoTurkish wars: Chesme Hall in the Peterhof palace featured great canvasses showing the success of the Russians at sea against the Turks. She also commissioned luxury goods, such as dinner services, portraying Russian triumphs. These, of course, could only be seen or purchased by the elite. But Chesme Palace, in St Petersburg, which was built to commemorate victory, and could be seen and appreciated by all city inhabitants, was deliberately designed with Turkish/Muslim artistic motifs. Catherine arranged elaborate celebrations in Moscow at the end of both Russo-Turkish wars. In Moscow, the first war was marked by the erection of a temporary Crimean scene replete with miniature ships and pavilions displaying forms of Ottoman architecture. But at a local level these could state the Christian nature of the triumph even more blatantly. A ceremony held in Vologda, a distant backwater, involved a procession by pupils from the seminary with a banner showing a genuflecting Turk offering thanks for peace, and concluded with a dialogue between pupils in verse in which a Turk rejected Islam and expressed the wish to convert to Christianity.32 The simple faith, and the superstitions, of Russian soldiers were remarked upon by foreigners in the eighteenth century. In Peter I’s reign, Friedrich


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Christian Weber commented that many soldiers died ‘and the more, because their Superstitions will not allow them to break their long fasts’33 and in the Ochakov campaign in the 1730s, Christoph Hermann von Manstein found that ‘though the Synod grants them a dispensation for eating flesh during the actual campaign, there are few that choose to take the benefit of it, preferring death to the sin of breaking their rule’.34 There is a long tradition in Russia of taking icons into battle. The ‘Virgin appearing in a vision to St Sergius’ is said to have accompanied Russian troops into battle over three centuries and served Alexis Mikahilovich, Peter the Great, Alexander I and Nicholas II. Kutuzov used the icon of Smolensk, Mother of God, at the battle of Borodino. Russian soldiers went into battle with crosses, icons and text amulets such as the ‘Dream of the Virgin’ up to the Revolution, if not beyond.35 When the Crimea was occupied by Russian troops in the 1780s, there was considerable destruction of religious sites, at least according to the account by a British traveller, Edward Clarke, who claimed that the Russian troops had: insulted the Tartars in their acts of public worship; torn up from the tombs the bodies of their ancestors, casting their relics on the dunghills, and feeding swine out of their coffins; annihilated all the monuments of antiquity; breaking up alike the sepulchres of Saints and Pagans, and scattering their ashes in the air.36 The pacification of the Crimea was brutal, and the native population diminished dramatically, either by death or emigration. There are no contemporary Russian accounts to support or dispute Clarke’s findings but religious antagonism between Russian troops and Crimean Muslim Tatars may have accounted in part for the savagery of the repression. In the wars against the Turks, as in conflicts against native people in the Caucasus and the Far East, this faith manifested itself as the conflict between Christianity and Islam. Soldiers’ ditties (undated) make this clear: For God and for the faith We crash against the savage In a new blaze of glory ... Bloodsuckers of the Orthodox! God punishes you through us Protectors of scum!37 In the Napoleonic period, the conflict with the Ottoman Empire was less significant than warfare in the West. But the sentiments were maintained and manifested themselves again at the outbreak of the Greek Revolt in 1821, when officers sympathized with fellow Orthodox Greeks against ‘cruel and


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barbaric’ Turks. One referred to the Greek as ‘our co-religionist Greeks’ who were ‘rising against Muslim tyrants’. Humanitarian aid for Greek refugees was collected through the Orthodox Church for their ‘brothers’.38 Russian attitudes to the Turks—either engendered officially or expressed as far as one can tell spontaneously by soldiers—were governed by their religious, Christian, identity vis-à-vis Muslims. Assimilation had proved easier in western borderlands. But armed conflict brought to the surface historic rivalry between the Poles and the Russians, made more intense not merely by rivalry and conflict in the past, but also by religious differences, and in this case by the Catholicism of the Poles. Catherine II’s own attitude towards Poland changed in the 1790s. Until then, Poland had been perceived as a weak neighbour, and one which could cause instability, but not a threat. However, the introduction of a French revolutionary-style constitution in 1791, at a time when Catherine was occupied in a war against the Turks, presented to her the spectre of a revolutionary regime on Russia’s doorstep, with all the challenge to the political and social order which that entailed. That the Poles implemented the constitution overnight also gave rise to the spectre of a sudden revolt anywhere, including even at home. The subsequent rebellion led by Kosciuszko confirmed that ‘revolutionary’ Poland was a threat to Russia which had to be crushed. The changes in the Polish constitution were a political, and social, threat to the Russian elite, but it was not difficult to arouse popular resentments against a traditional enemy when armed conflict ensued. The savagery of the behaviour of Russian troops in the Warsaw suburb of Praga in 1794, where it has been estimated some 13,000 were slaughtered, including many civilians, women and children, suggest that this was seen as more than simply a military campaign and more an act of revenge on hated neighbours. This seems to be confirmed by the popular soldiers’ song of the time which glorified General Suvorov’s role in this massacre: Our Suvorov gave us freedom To take a walk for just three hours. Let’s take a walk, lads, Our Suvorov has ordered it, Let’s drink his health.39 This antagonism was only strengthened in the Napoleonic period, when Poles allied with Napoleon established their own state in 1807 in the wake of the Russian defeat, and then contributed not unsubstantial numbers of troops for the invasion of Russia in 1812. It is no wonder that popular perceptions of Poles in 1812 were as, if not more, hostile than perceptions of the French. There were suggestions that Polish prisoners of war were treated worse than the other nationalities, including Frenchmen, in Napoleon’s multi-ethnic army.40 The loyalty of Polish-speaking nobility in


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the western provinces through which Napoleon passed was also suspect. This was also the view expressed by Russian memoirists of 1812, many of whom were more anti-Polish (or anti-Jewish for that matter) than antiFrench, and whose comments also displayed an anti-Catholic sentiment. One memoirist in Mogilev province claimed that Poles and Roman Catholic priests welcomed Napoleon; another claimed that in a village near Mogilev a ‘Catholic-shlachta’ (noble) Pole calmly sat and waited for the French as ‘his own brothers’.41 The reality was that few Polish landowners, as opposed to Polish officers in the Duchy of Warsaw, actively supported Napoleon (in selfinterest as much as anything else) but this was not the popular perception at the time. The perceived historical wrongs committed by Poles towards Russians, and their ultimate defeat, were also not forgotten during the Napoleonic wars. The exploits of Pozharskii and Minin in repelling the Poles in 1612 were popularly depicted in art forms. Minin, a Novgorod merchant, and Prince Pozharskii had organized the volunteer army against the Poles. The painting by G. I. Ugriumov of them saving the fatherland was commissioned in 1800.42 Their statue on Red Square was designed in 1804. In 1807, the dramas ‘Pozharskii’ and ‘Minin’ were performed in Moscow.43 There was no history of antagonism between the Russians and the French, as there was with the Poles; indeed French culture, and Napoleon, were widely admired amongst the Russian elites. Russia had not participated in the French revolutionary wars under Catherine II and by the time Paul I intervened the most radical phase of the Revolution had ended. The Napoleonic Wars were, however, portrayed in terms of the triumph of good over evil and of Christianity over godlessness. This was true before the invasion of 1812—the Orthodox Church anathematized Napoleon in 1806—but reached its apotheosis in that traumatic year. The invasion of 1812 brought these patriotic and religious sentiments together in a popular, as well as elite, and civilian as well as military, outburst which reflected a Russian sense of identity vis-à-vis the invader. This was the first time since the early eighteenth century that both soldiers and civilians had been subjected to attack from invading enemy forces. Priests encouraged peasants to regard the invading forces, in the words of Ségur, as ‘a legion of devils commanded by the Anti-Christ’.44 Armand Domergue commented that the people were encouraged by their priest to see Napoleon as ‘ungodly’ and determined to ‘overthrow’ their religion.45 Clergy donated money and goods to the cause in 1812 and many joined the militias and other regiments. This was in part, it has to be said, an opportunity to escape from their clergy status; the clergy were almost a closed caste in Russia and one way to escape was to become an officer. Some won medals for valour. The priest Vasilii Vasil’kovskii participated in the battle of Maloiaroslavets, marching in front of the regiment with a cross as an example to the troops to die fearlessly ‘for faith and the ruler’.46


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230

Ordinary people regarded Napoleon as the Anti-Christ. Peasant resistance to Napoleon can be portrayed as essentially limited and pragmatic but there is evidence of at least some xenophobic hatred of the foreigner, which was inextricably linked with religion. Kutuzov stated that the peasants considered this war to be just like the invasion of the Tatars.47 There are popular stories of ‘heroic women’ in 1812, who carried out savage attacks on French soldiers, including helpless stragglers retreating from Moscow, in defence of the fatherland. The most famous of these was an old peasant woman, Vasiliia, in Smolensk, whose patriotic savagery in murdering and burning to death Frenchmen was not only popularly recorded but also inspired dramatists. Popular prints showed the French as cowardly, effeminate and in rags, in contrast to the sturdy, brave Russian peasants (including a series of the ‘Russian Scaevola’, a Roman warrior transformed into a nineteenth-century Russian peasant). The image of Alexander I as angelic and as the bringer of peace was contrasted deliberately with that of the godless and warlike Napoleon. Derzhavin’s ode ‘Lyric-Epic Hymn on the Expelling of the French from Moscow’ depicted Alexander as the force of light overcoming the forces of darkness as struggle of good over evil. Alexander was depicted here as the apocalyptic lamb.48 After the Russian victory was assured, verse could depict Alexander as a god-like conqueror of all. A popular print showed Alexander entering Paris with the words, ‘Extol him as a Deity.’49 Manifestoes by Alexander I to his people in 1812 declared the link between the defence of the Orthodox faith, the fatherland and the Russian land. The great parade in Paris in 1814, in which some 150,000 Russian troops were said to take part, was combined with a Te Deum and Alexander knelt at the altar for the prayer service. Napoleon himself was, of course, the blackest enemy and verses composed at the time presented him in apocalyptic terms. Derzhavin’s ‘Lyric Hymn’ describes Napoleon as the prince of darkness (kniaz’ t’my).50 ... a beast of the mysterious number Who is the embodiment of Lucifer With crowns on his ten horns Will his foul days end.51

Conclusion Russian identity developed in contrast to the ‘other’, that is, the non-Russian and non-Christian population within the empire. The nature of the empire meant that contact and conflict on the frontier was central to the development of a Russian consciousness. Under peacetime conditions, it was easier for Russians to assimilate with neighbouring Christians in the north and the west of European Russia than it was to assimilate with Muslims in the Caucasus or


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pagans in the Far East. In these areas the consciousness of religious difference also merged with contempt for what Russians regarded as alien and primitive societies. War intensified this sense of difference. This most clearly manifested itself in wars against the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but it was also apparent in skirmishes and conflicts in the Caucasus and the Far East between Russian soldiers and settlers and indigenous peoples. War, however, also served to heighten popular antagonism towards neighbours in the West, and in particular towards the Poles who had not only been historic enemies but also Catholics. Religion—both Christianity generally and Russian Orthodoxy specifically— and ‘Russianness’ became inextricably linked during warfare and came to a climax in the Napoleonic Wars, but in particular during the invasion of 1812 in which both ‘godless’ French and Catholic Poles participated. This could be regarded as xenophobia rather than a fully mature nationalism but was nevertheless a powerful force in the development of Russian identity. As the traveller Robert Ker Porter commented on the atmosphere in 1812: ... to add its holy flame to the patriotic fire now kindled amongst his [Alexander’s] people. The religious principle being once introduced into the spirit of patriotism, is as the breath of immortal life breathed into its nostrils ... the war, in fact, became a religious war; a crusade in which the redemption of all that is clear to the patriot, and to the Christian, (who regards all mankind as brethren), was involved ... The whole Empire seemed to rise at once; and, with one animating sentiment, turned its gigantic force against the enemy.52

Notes 1. This is an attempt to apply the Turner thesis, which has itself in recent years been much disputed in US histories, to Russia: see Frederick J. Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 41 (1893): 79–112; for the attempt to apply it to a Russian situation, see Joseph L. Wieczynski, The Russian Frontier: The Impact of the Borderlands upon the Course of Early Russian History (Charlottesville, VA, 1976); and for a summary of recent American historiographical opinion, William Cronon et al. (eds), Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York, 1992). 2. Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, 1650–1825 (London, 1999), 10–11. 3. Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (hereafter PSZ) 45 vols (St Petersburg, 1830), no. 1304, vol. 19, 5–7, 22 January 1770, no. 17025, vol. 23, 305–306, no. 24331, vol. 31, 335–336, 26 August 1810. 4. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, Moscow (hereafter RGVIA), f. 13454, op. 1, d. 89, fos. 4–5, Army of the Caucasus Line, reports on mountain people, d. 290, fos. 1–5, petitions. 5. Frank W. Thackeray, Antecedents of Revolution: Alexander I and the Polish Kingdom, 1815–1825 (New York, 1980), 40–41.


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6. Edward C. Thaden, Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 (Princeton, 1984), 111. 7. Rossiiskii gosudartsvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow (hereafter RGADA), f. 1096, op. 1, d. 56, fos. 125–132, Gizhiga fortress, in-book, 1809. 8. Discussed in my book Russia 1762–1825: Military Power, the State and the People (Westport, CT, 2008), 44–47. 9. Mkrtich G. Nersisian (ed.), Dekabristy ob Armenii i Zakavkaz’e (Erevan, 1985), 267, 269–270, 272, 279, 299–305. 10. Ekaterina Pravilova, Finansy Imperii: Den’gi i vlast’ v politike Rossii na natsional’nykh okrainakh, 1801–1917 (Moscow, 2006), 58, 311. 11. Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700–1860 (Boulder, 1999), 33–35. For similar developments in a North American context, see Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992), 149; Cronon, Under an Open Sky, 12. 12. PSZ, no. 26931, vol. 34, 400–402, 19 July 1817. 13. This section is drawn from Janet M. Hartley, ‘The “Constitutions” of Finland and Poland in the Reign of Alexander I: Blueprints for Reform in Russia?’, in Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Michael Branch et al. (London, 1995), 41–59. 14. Quoted in V. A. Fedorov, Memuary Dekabristov. Severnoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1981), 124. 15. Michael Khodarkovsky, ‘Colonial Frontiers in Eighteenth-Century Russia: from the North Caucasus to Central Asia’, in Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber, ed. Marsha Siefert (Budapest, 2003), 138–139. The ambivalence of Russian perceptions of themselves as located between East and West in relation to the Caucasus later in the nineteenth century, as illustrated in the context of Russian literature, is discussed in Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, UK, 1994), 76; and Katya Hokanson, ‘Literary Imperialism, Narodnost’ and Pushkin’s Invention of the Caucasus’, Russian Review 53 (1994): 336–352. 16. Marc Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (Seattle, 1956), 62–63, 113–128. 17. RGVIA, f. 13464, op. 1, d. 180, fo. 3, Army of the Caucasus line, reports on kidnapped children. 18. RGVIA, f. 13454, op. 1, d. 89, fos. 42–46, Army of the Caucasus line, reports on mountain people. 19. Nikolas K. Gvosdev, Imperial Policies and Perspectives towards Georgia, 1760–1819 (Basingstoke, 2000), 132–133. 20. RGVIA, f. 14808, op, 1, d. 71, fo. 249v, Gizhiga fortress, various papers. 21. Raeff, Siberia, 166. 22. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and People, 1700–1917 (Bloomington, 1997), 22. 23. Gvosdev, Imperial Policies, 135–138. 24. PSZ, no. 16277, vol. 22, 467, 21 October 1785. 25. PSZ, no. 29221, vol. 38, 651, 19 November 1822. 26. Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, 2002), 193–195. 27. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 39. 28. N. A. Smirnov, Politika Rossii na Kavkaze v XVI–XIX vekakh (Moscow, 1958), 136. 29. Quoted in Janet M. Hartley, ‘Changing Perspectives: British Views of Russia from the Grand Embassy to the Peace of Nystad’, in Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives, ed. Lindsey Hughes (Basingstoke, 2001), 53.


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30. Andrei Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla ... literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVII–pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow, 2001), 102. 31. Isabel M. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1998), 536. 32. ‘Iz proshlago. Torzhestvo praznovaniia Kuchuk-Kairnardzkiiskago mira v gorode Vologde’, Russkii arkhiv (1903) no. 12: 513–517. 33. Friedrich Christian Weber, The Present State of Russia, 2 vols (1722–1723; repr. London, 1968), vol. 1, 54. 34. Christoph Hermann von Manstein, Contemporary Memoirs of Russia from the Year 1727 to 1744, ed. David Hume (1770; repr. London, 1856), 170–171. 35. William F. Ryan, ‘Magic and the Military in Russia’, in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joachim Klein et al. (Cologne, 2001), 85–86. 36. Edward D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, 6 vols (London, 1810–23), vol. 1, 472. 37. 12 soldatskikh pesen (St Petersburg, 1898), 12, 17. 38. Theophilus C. Prousis, Russian Society and the Greek Revolution (DeKalb, IL, 1994), 47–48, 55–59. 39. Quoted in John L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia 1462–1874 (Oxford, 1985), 216. 40. Janet M. Hartley, ‘Napoleonic Prisoners in Russia’, in Forging a Common Destiny: Liber Amicorum in Honour of William E. Butler, ed. Natalia Iu. Erpyleva et al.0 (London, 2005), 719. 41. Janet M. Hartley, ‘Russia in 1812: 1: The French Presence in the Gubernii of Mogilev and Smolensk’, Jahrbücher der Geschichte Osteuropas 38 (1990): 180–181. 42. Zorin, Kormia, 172. 43. N. N. Prokof’ev, ‘Otechestvennaia voina 1812 i russkaia dramaturgiia pervoi chetverti XIX veka’, in Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda i russkaia literature XIX veka, ed. V. Iu. Troitskii (Moscow, 1998), 203–204. 44. Philippe Paul de Ségur, Napoleon’s Russian Campaign trans. J. David Townsend (London, 1959), 51. 45. Armand Domergue, La Russie pendant les guerres de l’Empire (1805–1815): souvenirs historiques (Paris, 1835), 338–339. 46. L. V. Mel’nikova, Armiia i pravoslavnaia tserkov’ rossiiskoi imperii v epokhu Napoleonskikh voin (Moscow, 2007), 102–106, 117, 128, and idem, ‘Mesto i rol’ voennogo dukhovenstva v russkoi armii v 1812’, in Otechestvennaia voina 1812: Istochniki. Pamiatniki. Problemy, vol. 2 (Borodino, 2000), 167. 47. William C. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York, 1992), 212. 48. Michael A. Pesenson, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte and Apocalyptic Discourse’, Russian Review 65 (2006): 373–392 (here 386). 49. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols (Princeton, 1995–2000), vol. 1, 222. 50. Molly W. Wesling, Napoleon in Russian Cultural Mythology (New York, 2001), 5. 51. Pesenson, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’, 387. 52. Robert Ker Porter, Narrative of the Campaign in Russia during the Year 1812 (London, 1815), 38–39, 43, 46.


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War, Empire and the ‘Other’: Iranian-European Contacts in the ‘Napoleonic’ Era Joanna de Groot

Introduction In 1817 Moritz von Kotzebue, travelling from Russia in the ambassadorial suite of General Ermolov from Russia to meet the ruler of Iran, Fath ‘Ali Shah Qajar, after ten years of war between the Tsarist and Qajar regimes, noted with surprise that the shah’s son and heir ‘Abbas Mirza displayed portraits of Tsar Alexander and Napoleon in his palace in Tabriz.1 Granted that exchanges of portraits were a familiar diplomatic ritual in the period, this might just show the inexperience of a young officer, recently returned from war and imprisonment in campaigns against the French. We might speculate whether his surprise also rested on the assumption that a Qajar prince would be unlikely to grasp the importance of, or take an interest in, these European rulers. In reality Iranian elites were aware of the larger world within which they pursued their particular interests, and had been managing difficult relations with their Tsarist neighbour for a considerable time. It might be more helpful to note the rich transnational context of von Kotzebue’s remarks. A German-speaking officer in the Tsarist army, who had sailed round the world aged 16, the journey he recorded took him to Iran through newly occupied Caucasian territories where he could comment on Georgians, Lesghis, Armenians and Kazakhs now passing from Iranian to Tsarist control. His text was translated from German into English within a year, and later into French. The English translator commented on Iranian, English and Russian perspectives on this work, noting how useful it would be for English readers to understand Russian intentions in ‘Asia’, and ‘to view distant and strange objects through other minds than our own’.2 Kotzebue’s account of his experiences, like others discussed in this chapter, thus appears not as the record of some binary confrontation between ‘Russian’ and ‘Iranian’, or ‘east’ and ‘west’, but as the trace of a more complex phenomenon. 235


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12

One of the most stimulating developments in scholarship on the era of conflict, expansion and innovation in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been its growing globalization. Reassessments of the emancipation movement in Haiti, like studies of the embedding of new colonial relationships in India, or of autonomous regimes in central and southern America, have transformed accounts of revolution in France, of state and nation-making in the United States, and of war on various oceans and continents. Historians of the period now understand, first, that war, politics and diplomacy involved a diverse range of contacts between soldiers and civilians, women and men, intellectuals and politicians, locals and outsiders, or artists and audiences, across the globe. Second, they realize that such contacts were interactive, involving the agency of the subordinated and the marginalized (enslaved people, rank and file soldiers, colonial subjects, those disadvantaged by class or gender) as well as of prominent political, military and cultural figures. Moreover, as Christopher Bayly shows in this volume, this period of imperial expansion, reorganization, contestation and consolidation in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia can be placed in a global setting. Confrontations between Ottoman and Indian rulers and European powers in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provided political if not ideological inspiration for emergent Wahhabi, Sikh and Egyptian regimes. Similarly, Russian expansion into Georgia and the Caucasus region reshaped both Russian relationships with, and views about, the peoples over whom they now ruled, and also the responses of those peoples to the new imperial power.3 My contribution to this historiography explores Iranian and European responses to one another in a new global context for empire and war between the 1790s and the 1820s. While for Europeans this period is, understandably, labelled the ‘revolutionary and Napoleonic era’, for Iranians it was characterized by different phenomena which gave distinctive meanings to their contacts with Napoleonic envoys, Russian soldiers or British diplomats. This study will first describe the Iranian context into which such European outsiders intruded, and then examine various forms and narratives of ‘encounter’ which took place, before identifying some of the significant means whereby Iranians and Europeans chose to ‘read’ each other. The term ‘encounter’ is not intended to over-privilege or essentialize differences or conflicts between Iranians and Europeans, but rather to identify moments, modes or locations in which diplomacy, travel, war, business or social activity brought them together. These included riding expeditions in Azerbaijan or the Home Counties, diplomatic negotiation, the transfer of military expertise, and discussions on sex, astronomy and religion. Study of such activities highlights shared and overlapping experiences and outlooks as well as the conflicting views and vested interests of the participants. It will be seen that Iranians and Europeans used varied strategies to manage their diverse contacts, and that for all parties ‘otherness’ was a complex and unstable, albeit identifiable, issue.


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War, Empire and the ‘Other’

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Iranian perspectives on European diplomatic, military and colonial contests between the 1780s and the 1820s were shaped by the circumstances of Iranian society under its new Qajar rulers as much as by European great power rivalries. It is, therefore, appropriate to begin by sketching in those circumstances in order to appreciate the situation within which Iranians encountered European ‘others’. Unlike later periods when British and Russians carved out spheres of influence in Iran, in the 1790s Iranian society and government were entering a period of consolidation and development in which Europeans were relatively peripheral, even if they already posed incipient challenges to Iranian interests. Two significant features of the Iranian scene set the context for Iranian/ European contacts in this period.4 First, the regime of Fath ‘Ali Shah was successfully stabilizing its rule by linking the tribal military power which had enabled it to overcome regional warlords and external rivals to established cadres of bureaucratic authority and skill based in regional centres and office-holding families. This alliance between armed power and administrative order was buttressed by a blend of pragmatic negotiation and ideological creativity which strengthened Qajar dynastic authority. Fath ‘Ali and his predecessor Aqa Muhammad established mutually beneficial, if contested and delicate, relations with nomad leaders, religious specialists, urban commercial elites and influential landed or office-holding families, exchanging royal legitimation and patronage for their cooperation with and support for the regime.5 They created and managed a functioning if fragile network of power sharing and patronage distinctly different from the conflict and disorder of previous decades. This pattern of devolved authority, constantly renegotiated and policed, was very unlike the images of despotic or decadent ‘oriental rule’ regularly depicted by European observers or theorists of government in ‘the East’, or indeed notions of ‘ineffective’ Qajar rule found in more recent writing. The practical, sometimes violent, politics underpinning this structure were reinforced by religious, ideological and cultural reassertions of royal authority in ritual, as well as written and visual forms. The elaborate ceremonies described by Kotzebue, his French counterparts Paul Gardane and Pierre Amédée Jaubert, and the ‘Englishman’ James Morier, dramatized the revived charisma of the monarchy, evoking images of pre-Islamic Iranian kingship, and the prestige of the former Safavid dynasty (1501–1722). Second, while the reconstitution of royal government and regional power structures was by no means unchallenged, its success was manifest in the revival of rural and urban production and commerce, and of the social and cultural relations on which they depended, noted in various sources. This revival was visible in growing trade through the northwest entrepôt city of Tabriz (seat of the Qajar heir apparent) and the Gulf ports; in urban


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The Iranian context


renewal; and in the movements of nomads, bureaucrats, religious specialists and intellectuals from India, Iraq, the Caucasus or Arabia into the Qajar domains.6 Material regeneration was paralleled by renewal in religious life and literature. Although foreign observers noted the prominent role of Shi’a Muslim traditions and specialists (mullas, ‘ulama) in public life and popular culture, they had less grasp of the organizational restructuring and religious creativity developing in the early nineteenth century.7 The learned men (‘ulama) of Islam were re-establishing themselves in Iranian towns, building new networks of material support and social solidarity with merchants and office holders, and creating new structures of professional training and legal authority which enabled them to consolidate their corporate identity, political role and communal influence.8 This revival was matched by other new forms of religious creativity. From renewed activity by Sufi (mystic) orders and dissident Shi’a groups, to innovations in established Shi’a practice such as the growth of popular and elite involvement in ta’zieh (‘passion plays’ commemorating founding episodes of Shi’a Islam), cultural life in Iranian communities was characterized by energy and diversity.9 The Iranians who encountered Europeans between the 1790s and the 1820s had political, economic and social networks, which, however outsiders saw them, functioned responsively and creatively. Whatever their material and conceptual limitations, their reliance on ‘tradition’, or their resistance to external influences, these Iranians operated in systems of production, power and cultural life which were assertive and dynamic rather than ‘decaying’. While British and Russian contacts were undoubtedly significant, many elite Iranians were equally conscious of their place in a cosmopolitan ‘Persianate’ culture linking traders, religious specialists and elites in Iran to counterparts in India, Iraq and Central Asia.10 As will appear, there was little of the ‘cultural cringe’ in their curious, critical, even dismissive, views of Europeans who came to Iran, or whom Iranians met outside Iran at this time. While it is important to note that their responses were in part direct reactions to European successes and the associated threats to Iranian interests, which prefigured the later ‘colonial’ dynamic of relations between Iranians, Russians and British, it is helpful to keep in mind the rather different conditions of the period under discussion. One aim of this study is to establish an account of this more complex range of contacts between Iranians and Europeans, and to suggest that all parties were experimenting with new responses to new political and cultural dynamics.

New political and cultural configurations Among the new and challenging dynamics affecting the Qajar regime and its subjects by the 1790s were the changed geopolitical circumstances in western and southern Asia. To the north of the Qajar domains earlier opportunistic intrusions by Russians became a more systematized process


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of conquest and expansion as the Tsarist regime consolidated its grip on its southern territories from the 1770s, occupied Georgia during the 1790s, and began to probe the Caucasian khanates thereafter. To their south and east the emergence of organized British governance and ongoing expansion in north central India from the 1770s similarly intensified and extended earlier manifestations of East India Company interest and power, paralleled by the appearance of ambitious Sikh and Afghan regimes.11 From the perspective of Qajar rulers and officials, as for inhabitants of the eastern province of Khorasan or the Caucasian lands, these were challenges to the ‘historic’ control and boundaries of the ‘protected domains’ of previous Iranian dynasties, which had often dominated those areas. Like their predecessors, Nadir Shah Afshar, who ruled from 1736 to 1747, and the first Qajar shah, Aqa Muhammad, ruler from c. 1785 to 1797, campaigned to control these territories. The Russo-Iranian wars of 1804–13 and 1826–28 can be seen as continuations of those policies as well as expressing new configurations of Russian, Afghan and British power. European interest in Iran fluctuated with the vicissitudes of their own power struggles, as British and Tsarist diplomacy responded to the ebb and flow of warfare, alliance and renewed conflict between Napoleon and Russia between 1797 and 1812. Nonetheless, the growing number of policy debates, descriptions and analyses produced by European commentators indicate how such fluctuations were now understood within larger frameworks of concern with empire and global knowledge. Napoleon’s schemes and calculations, about the place of rulers of Egypt, Mysore and the Ottoman Empire in the grand planning of his European empire, sat alongside accounts from observers ‘on the ground’ like Guillaume Antoine Olivier, not unlike the multi-volume Description de l’Egypte produced by the scholars accompanying the French forces to Egypt in 1798. This paralleled British debates on the expansion and protection of their interests in India, and the scholarly and/ or picturesque depictions of William (‘Oriental’) Jones, or the artist William Hodges, and by Russian controversy over policy in the Caucasus alongside colourful commentary on its peoples. How might historians understand these developments? One key dimension was the increasingly ‘imperial’ perspective of Europeans, and the responses of the Qajar regime. Tensions between the ‘Indian’ and ‘European’ ambitions of contending British policy-makers, alongside conflicts between the views of those in London and those in India, focused on global and imperial strategy, albeit from varied perspectives. Similarly the complex dynamic between Tsarist generals in Tiflis (Tbilisi) and governments in Petersburg, like Napoleon’s grandiose, fluctuating, sometimes pragmatic, interest in the Ottoman, Qajar, Mysore or Egyptian regimes, involved confident, if rarely well informed, schemes to manipulate, cajole or threaten these ‘oriental’ governments.12 The Iranian cession of significant Caucasian territories conquered by the Russians between 1804 and 1828, like British conquests in


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northwest India, appeared to Russian and British policy-makers as military and diplomatic threats and opportunities to be managed in the imperial interests of Russia or Britain. Policy-making discussions often emphasized the military, technological or administrative deficiencies of the Qajars in Iran or Durranis in Afghanistan, commented on the violent or ‘decadent’ practices of courts and governments, seeing Iranians, Sikhs, Caucasians or Afghans as non-European ‘others’. Tsar Paul treated Fath ‘Ali Shah as an Iranian warlord rather than the ruler of Iran, addressing him as sardar (commander), not as a fellow monarch, and his general in the Caucasus, Tsitsianov, called Iranians and Caucasians ‘Asian scum’. Russian attempts to manipulate ruling families in the Caucasian khanates recall manoeuvres by the British in India. Early aspirations to acquire the linguistic, political and ethnological intelligence to assist the management of imperial and strategic ambitions became manifest in official discussions of ‘eastern’ states and societies, and in new relations between scholars and policy-makers.13 However, to present stories of Anglo/Iranian or Russo/Iranian contacts as simply those of dominant Europeans with subordinate Iranians would be to misread or ignore their fluidity and complexity. From the 1760s visitors and commentators from the Persianate cultures of Iran and northern India were commenting on European states, cultures, social customs and economies, just as European visitors to Iran interested themselves in antiquities, folklore and art in Iran as well as armies and manufactures. The analysis of Iranian and European responses to the ‘others’ with whom they were having new kinds of contacts will focus on 11 texts produced between 1800 and 1827 dealing with contacts made between the mid-1790s and 1817. Texts written by two Persianate visitors to Europe, the Iranian Mirza Abu’l Hasan Shirazi, and his north Indian counterpart Mirza Abu Taleb Isfahani14, will be set beside texts produced by four British visitors (Harford Jones [later known as Harford Jones Brydges], John Malcolm, James Morier and William Ouseley), three Germano-Russians (Moritz von Kotzebue, Frederika Freygang and her husband Wilhelm), and three Frenchmen (Paul Gardane, Pierre Amédée Jaubert and Guillaume Antoine Olivier).15 These authors combined diplomatic and/or scholarly careers with work as writers, and located their texts, whether travel accounts, histories, fiction or memoirs, in lived experiences of visits to the places about which they wrote. The texts discussed here depict many-sided engagements between travellers, officials, inhabitants, diplomats, courtiers and intellectuals with equally many-sided origins, outlooks and interests. William Ouseley had pursued orientalist studies in Paris and Leiden as well as a military career before joining the embassy led by his brother, Gore Ouseley, to Iran in 1809. Just as participation in that embassy aided the development of William Ouseley’s linguistic and antiquarian scholarship, Mirza Abu’l Hasan Shirazi’s activities as envoy to London in 1809 and 1819, and to Petersburg in 1813 and 1816, formed part of a varied and insecure career as a local governor,


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traveller and exile in India and Arabia, and as a government minister. As a member of an established office-holding family from southwestern Iran with royal connections he was at risk from the shah’s displeasure as well as having opportunities, becoming minister for foreign affairs from 1824 to 1834, and again from 1840 to 1846.16 James Morier had undertaken commercial and diplomatic work in Iran and the Eastern Mediterranean, and in Britain, before joining Gore Ouseley’s embassy. His connections to the aristocratic Waldegrave family and Smyrniot merchant background, like the Iranian background of Mirza Ab Taleb Khan and his political experience in Awadh and the East India Company, facilitated their careers and travels and their later achievements as writers and cultural commentators. Mirza Abu Taleb Khan ‘Isfahani’, the son of a service elite refugee from the turmoil in mid-eighteenth-century Iran, grew up at the Persianate courts of Lucknow (capital of Awadh) and of Murshidabad in Bengal, and worked for rulers in Awadh and for British officials in the 1780s and 1790s. After his European travels, he continued as an East India Company administrator and made a reputation as a poet, historian and literary commentator, just as Morier became best known for his novels.17 The texts of such authors are best understood in this complex context of professional, personal and intellectual ambition and outlook, as significant for Persianate commentators on Europe as it was for European commentators on Iran. Like their Persianate counterparts the authors of European texts brought a range of experience and aspirations to their travels in Iran and their writing. Paul Gardane and Pierre Amédée Jaubert had backgrounds or previous experience linking them to the Middle East, just as Jaubert and Olivier pursued scholarly as well as diplomatic and literary careers. Gardane came from a family with a history of service to French governments in the Ottoman Empire. Jaubert’s experience as an interpreter on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt had already involved him with Middle Eastern diplomacy and with useful contacts among Ottoman officials, and the linguistic skills and political connections which gained him his position took him on to senior posts as an ‘oriental’ specialist. Olivier had a scholarly career which embraced medicine and zoology as well as ‘orientalist’ expertise. The link between European scientific activity and the reconfiguring of their diplomatic and colonial power in ‘the east’ during the later eighteenth century can also be seen in the presence of staff with medical interests like Freygang on diplomatic missions or the astronomical training offered Kotzebue.18 If accounts of encounters in Iran and Europe are to be fully appreciated it is important to unpack the categories ‘Iranian’ and ‘European’ which are conventionally applied to their authors. The various ‘English’ diplomats who wrote about visits to Iran in the early nineteenth century were formed by a range of extensive experience outside England. Harford Jones worked from 1783 to 1806 as an EIC official in Basra, Baghdad, and Iran, just as Malcolm and Gore Ouseley had been soldiers and officials (and in Ouseley’s


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case also an entrepreneur) in India since the 1780s. Their adult lives were shaped by extensive involvement in the local politics of Iran, India and the Ottoman Empire, and by knowledge of the languages and urban societies there, including spells in Awadh which parallel the career of Mirza Abu Taleb. Malcolm’s Scottish origins, like the Anglo-Irish background of the Ouseleys and Jones’ Welsh connections, gave a distinctive flavour to any ‘British’ perspective they might offer. General Gardane, Napoleon’s ambassador to Iran from 1807 to 1809, was the grandson of a French agent active in Iran in the 1720s. James Morier, like some French counterparts, came from families of European merchants long settled in the Middle East. These families formed a distinctive subgroup of ‘Frank’ traders of European origin based in cities round the eastern Mediterranean from Alexandria to Athens. They competed, but also supported and intermarried with one another (Morier came of Dutch, French and Swiss descent) and lived multicultural lives in which a strong sense of European outsider status and connection to the ambitions of European governments and entrepreneurs sat beside involvement in local commercial and political life. These European ‘Levantines’ were indeed agents of European imperialism in various ways, but also inhabited their own specific polyglot and mobile cultures. This was paralleled by the movement of Iranian officials, traders, intellectuals and exiles across Persianate worlds extending from the shrine cities of Iraq to Calcutta. The flight of Abu Taleb’s father from Isfahan to Awadh, like Abu’l Hasan’s sojourns in Basra and northern India, relied on networks linking Iranians to the courts of Indian rulers and to Persianate intellectual, merchant, office holding and religious groups in Bombay, Iraq or Awadh. The ‘Persianness’ of such men, like Morier’s ‘Englishness’, was thus a complex and shifting matter. The cultural hybridity of the people whose experiences and narratives are discussed here is seen in the texts they produced. Although clearly dominated by assumptions about Iranians or Europeans as ‘others’, whether that was seen politically, culturally or ethnically, they contained many other elements. Iranian authors were stimulated to provide poetry and philosophic or religious reflection within their travel narratives, just as their European counterparts used such narratives to display learned expertise in the languages, archaeology and ethnography of those they met in Iran. European visual depictions of Iran included landscape, genre and portrait sketches (both humorous and edifying) as well as drawings of coins and ancient sculptures.19 The timbre and impact of both Iranian and European texts combined claims to the authenticity and authority of eyewitness reporting, with displays of scholarly and cultural expertise, and the pleasures of entertaining and humorous narrative. Just as Abu’l Hasan and Abu Taleb wrote for the cultured urban and court circles of Iran and Lucknow, Ouseley, Olivier and Morier engaged with politically and culturally curious and opinionated readerships in England and France. Morier’s later, better remembered,


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work as a novelist is paralleled by Abu Taleb’s work as a scholar of Persian poetry, Abu’l Hasan’s writing, Jaubert’s academic orientalism and Malcolm’s work as an official, author and diplomat. Writers like Malcolm, Olivier, Ouseley, Jaubert and Morier established canons of European ‘knowledge’ and imaginative repertoires for thinking about ‘the East’ which fed into the much discussed cultural resources of orientalism.20 Iranian authors like Abu Taleb and Abu’l Hasan inaugurated a genre of what Tavakoli-Targhi calls ‘Persianate Europology’ which was to shape Iranian reflection and debate about European cultures and governments into recent times.21 The convergences and divergences of these cultural enterprises will now be examined further. This examination of ‘encounter’ literature develops three themes. First, it explores the blend of anecdotal and systemic discussion used to present those ‘others’ who are the subject matter of the texts under discussion. Second, it considers some of the rhetorical strategies (comparison, humour, inversion, hierarchialization) employed to situate those ‘others’. Third, it draws attention to the powerful role of gender and sexuality both as topics of concern, and as a means to think about what the texts present as the differences between Iranians and Europeans. Consideration of these issues will illustrate the emergence of new cultural protocols embedding the politics of difference and hierarchy, of gender and of colonial encounter in the perceptions each had of the ‘other’ on their respective terrains of ‘modernity’.

Orientalism and ‘Europology’ It is a commonplace of scholarship on orientalism that its texts relied on combinations of vivid anecdote and systematic reflection to construct their visions of ‘eastern’ people, institutions and cultures, and examination of European texts on early nineteenth-century Iran bears out this view. The 21 chapters of Olivier’s account of Iran include narratives of travel and diplomacy (chs 1–6, 21), chapters on geography, history, society and economy (chs 7, 8, 10–20) and a chapter of systematic comparison between the ‘character’ and ‘civilization’ of Turks and Iranians.22 Ouseley’s text includes chapters on the ‘Parsi’ (Zoroastrian) religion and ancient remains in the southwestern province of Fars, with learned reflection thereon, and depictions of popular customs and practices, as well as descriptions of the port of Bushire and the transactions of the diplomatic mission of which he was a member. Kotzebue’s largely anecdotal account of his mission nonetheless refers to general theories of ‘oriental despotism’, and moves from satirical description of conversation with an Iranian astrologer to reflections on the contrasting Iranian and European natural philosophies. Freygang, Jones and Jaubert similarly intersperse colourful descriptions or close political narrative with reflections and analyses on Iranian society, culture and


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politics.23 Whether implicit or explicit, the descriptive material, both dry political economy and colourful reportage, is underpinned by strong conceptual frameworks deploying ideas of progress, climatic, stadial and cultural theories of human difference, and of ‘oriental’ politics and customs. Even Morier, who explicitly refuses to offer views on the ‘national’ character of Iranians, does not resist comments on Iranian ‘modes of thought’ and ‘national’ differences, and includes detailed drawings and discussions of ancient sites at Persepolis, Naqsh-i-Rustam and Pasargadae.24 While this is recognizable as a manifestation of the developing genre of ‘orientalism’, it should also be compared with the emergent ‘Europology’ of Iranians engaging with French or British societies. Abu’l Hasan and Abu Taleb interspersed their narratives of daily activities with broader reflections on the customs, institutions and politics of those societies, and offered more extended discussion of European ‘difference’. The anecdotal diary form adopted by Abu’l Hasan to recount his visit to England from 1809 to 1810 does not preclude comments on the education of upper-class children and the endemic love of pleasure among the British elite.25 Abu Taleb’s text contains separate sections on the vices and virtues of the English, and comparative discussion of the character and customs of the French and Ottomans. He moves from commentary to a systematic exposition and reflection on the underlying distinctions between societies and world views in Europe and the Persianate world. He lays out an argument that European notions of progress assume the possibility or norm of continuing improvement in the material world, contrasting this with Persianate ideas of a fixed standard of divine perfection as the goal towards which people strove. He also considers the particular European emphasis on the connections between individual and collective welfare and well-being. He critiques European materialism and consumerism, not as an ‘infidel’ characteristic but as evidence of arrogant lack of insight, providing an interesting comparison to contemporary European discourses on luxury (‘eastern’ or otherwise) and despotism.26 While very much an intellectual exercise written for a small cultured readership, it prefigured later more politicized debates comparing Iranian with European political, economic and cultural practices. The crucial point is that Iranian commentators on Europe are not ‘backward orientals’ gaping at an advanced culture, but interlocutors seeking to make sense of cultures, to establish ‘expert’ status as ‘Europologists’, and to test the relevance or otherwise of European examples for analysis of their own societies. Like their European counterparts, they deployed climatic and ethnographic discourses in their comparative discussions of different European peoples. Just as Olivier’s writing compared ‘Turks’ and ‘Persians’, Abu Taleb’s narrative examined differences between the French, English, Italians and Irish.27 The historic concerns and connections of Iranian elites with the Ottoman Empire, and with states and societies in northern India and Central Asia, which had shaped their politics and culture since the


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sixteenth century, were now disrupted by European rivalries and expansionism. Just as European texts on Iran produced, and were produced by, growing European involvement in ‘eastern’ affairs, so Persianate texts of the period produced and were produced by new Iranian interests in European power and practices. These encompassed rational cultural comparison, moral judgements and critical reflection on the relevance, or otherwise, of European ideas and practices to Iranian circumstances and interests. If one register in which they wrote was that of ‘wonder’ (incorporated into two of the titles chosen for these works), they also developed comparative ethnographic and analytical discourses.28 That this was not just the preserve of writers is glimpsed in Kotzebue’s report of remarks by the Iranian chief minister on the different forms of European and Kurdish or Iranian bravery and Harford Jones’ accounts of conversations with Iranian officials and farmers.29

Rhetoric, humour and the depiction of cultural contacts Another point of comparison is the use by both Iranian and European authors of rhetorical strategies to stage the meeting of persons from differing backgrounds and outlooks. At certain moments both groups of authors depict the individual writer as a spectacle for the host community. Abu’l Hasan describing those staring at him in London parks and parties, like Morier and Kotzebue on their reception in Iran, and Abu Taleb on his experiences in Dublin all deploy this device.30 Local reactions to ‘strangeness’ or ‘foreignness’ or ‘otherness’ are used as devices which relativize the positions of the visitor and the spectators, allowing the writer both to display a cool intellectual perspective on these categories, and to provide a note of humour to entertain readers. They also suggest that for both Iranians and Europeans extended contacts with ‘others’ challenged their sense of self, whether as individuals or as members of defined ethnic, status or religious groups. Abu’l Hasan’s brief mention of himself sitting in London, weeping as he recalls the annual mourning rituals of Muharram, and of other ‘homesick’ moments, can be compared with Ouseley’s passing reference to contact with British ‘friends’ when encamped on the Gulf coast as glimpses of that challenge. The use of what would now be called ‘human interest’ stories to connect with readers can be seen in Freygang’s account of the death of her child, and Ouseley and Morier’s reporting of Abu’l Hasan’s response to news of his son’s death.31 These devices sit within the larger framework of concern to situate the culture and society of the author’s origin in relation to those being visited and described. Iranians recounting contacts with Europeans sought to make sense of them in terms of their own cultural resources while recognizing the challenge of European ‘success’, while Europeans’ main interest was in establishing hierarchies of ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’.


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Humour plays a more general role in asserting and managing cultural difference within these texts. Kotzebue’s account of his encounter with an Iranian astronomer uses mockery to establish the superiority of his own (rather slim!) ‘modern’ astronomical knowledge, just as Abu’l Hasan jokes about encounters with Christian clergy, and the London ballet with a Tsar as a character.32 All the writers discussed find local court and diplomatic protocols a source of humour, although readers are more likely to note the common concern of Europeans and Iranians for the proper maintenance of the rituals and conventions of international diplomacy. Their accounts of local social activities combine comic effect and colourful reportage, and, as with the trope of ‘spectacle’, this serves a number of purposes: they provide amusement; they reinforce the presentation of ethno-cultural differences in these texts; and they display the intellectual skill and expert credibility of the writer. Such combinations appear in Abu’l Hasan’s accounts of London theatre performances, and Morier’s comments on court receptions and diplomatic negotiations in Tehran, as they do in Abu Taleb’s descriptions of public entertainment in Paris and Dublin and Ouseley’s vignettes of popular culture in southern Iran.33 If the desire to entertain is less visible in the uncompromisingly intellectual approach of Olivier, and anecdote more prominent than analysis for Abu’l Hasan, the multiple registers of the writing in the texts under discussion convey the complexity of the contacts they record.

Gendering and sexualizing accounts of cultural contact Within this complexity one very visible strand runs through texts which recount, and reflect on, European/Iranian contacts in this period. Gender roles, gender differences and gender norms are constant points of reference as topics for description and comment, but even more importantly as resources for cultural and political analysis of the European as well as the Iranian ‘other’. The role of gender in the construction of European views of society, morality and culture in ‘the east’ has been widely discussed in scholarly studies of empire and orientalism. During the eighteenth century, the expansion of fiction as well as of travel writing and learned disquisitions on seraglios, polygamy, and sexual mores and morals in ‘the orient’ embedded fantasies, theories and anecdotes of ‘eastern’ gender and sexuality in the European imaginary.34 In the period of contact at the turn of the nineteenth century this was matched by the interest in gender and sexual issues displayed in the Persianate travel texts dealing with Europeans. This new feature of Persianate writing was partly a response to European gendering and sexualization of cultural comparison, and to new levels of contact between Persianates and Europeans, but rapidly became a trope with its own characteristics rather than mirroring European discourse. Woven into the narratives of politico-cultural contact, and analyses of that contact, are


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strands of masculinist and patriarchal concern with the role of sexuality and of women in the ordering of polities, societies and moralities, whether Persianate or European. Most obviously accounts of the behaviour, dress and status of women, and of marriage practices and social and sexual conventions form significant ethnographic elements in the textual constitution of the ‘otherness’ of Iranians or Europeans. The appetite for accounts of ‘manners and customs’ of strange peoples, whether to assist scholarly cultural comparison or to provide entertaining depictions of the exotic, stimulated the prolific comments on seraglios, veiled women and the regulation of marriage and gender relations found in European texts on Iran. Such depictions, the staples of European discourse on ‘eastern’ women35, like Persianate comments on mixed gender participation in social activities and on women’s dress styles in Europe, acted as markers of ethnic difference, and occasions for the passing of intellectual and moral judgement. The social and political roles of influential women, whether elite English women as recounted by Abu’l Hasan and Abu Taleb, or female members of Fath ‘Ali Shah’s household as described by Morier and Olivier, were another recurrent theme.36 As elsewhere, these accounts combined instruction, entertainment and moral commentary, making gendered ethnography a core element in their constitution of ‘otherness’. Equally important is the way in which both Persianates and Europeans used gender and sexual discourses as analytical tools with which to think through issues of difference. As historians of European racial thought have shown, commentary on marriage, women’s status and conventions of gender conduct was used to establish narratives and theories of ‘progress’, cultural difference and ‘civilization’.37 This process did not merely take ‘evidence’ from a range of places and periods to illustrate arguments, but used global and temporal comparisons to shape those very concepts as they developed them. The social theory of Montesquieu, or stadial models of human social evolution advanced by Scottish political economists, and observers of Pacific exploration, were structured by references to sex and gender. Such practices were particularly significant in the racialization of British approaches to empire and global relationships, whether New World slavery, the annexation of land in Australia or intensified British involvement in India.38 More specifically, the images of ‘eastern decadence’ which framed European approaches to ‘eastern’ societies deployed depictions of sexual indulgence, polygamy and enclosed and oppressed women, whether in retellings of the Arabian Nights, discussions of Muslim beliefs and practices, travel writings or erotica. These depictions contributed to the conceptualization of the ‘ignorant’ or ‘depraved’ character of eastern societies in which old-established notions associating these features with Islam were supplemented by newer comparative ethnographies and categories of social analysis. Olivier’s and Kotzebue’s comments on the behaviour and treatment of women in Iran rely on just such ‘modern’ frameworks of cultural comparison.


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Persianates too established commentary on sex and gender issues as a key theme in their attempts to explore, understand and reflect on European societies, as well as to mark their ‘difference’ from Persianate norms. Like their European counterparts, their comments on the codes and practices shaping gender relations and conduct combined the anecdotal, the analytical and the judgemental. They blend the fascination and shock of the ‘other’ as seen by the ‘foreign’ visitor with discussion of the significance of European customs of courtship, of men and women meeting at social gatherings, and of the gendered patterns of social life. Abu Taleb’s chapter surveying English society includes several paragraphs on the ‘regulation’, as he terms it, of gender divisions of labour and of male supervision of women’s activities and marital fidelity. He ends with a self-conscious inversion of the discourse of English ‘liberty’, suggesting that the socio-sexual control of women is more thoroughgoing in England than among Muslims, a comparative approach to gender issues he continues when discussing French and Italian women.39 Abu’l Hasan’s comments on the trade in sexual services and the organization of dances, receptions and concerts in London, like his interest in children’s upbringing, also offer a general picture of social practice while conveying their ‘strangeness’ to the outside observer. Like a Persianate predecessor, Mirza Sheikh I’tisam al-din, recounting a visit to England in the late 1760s, Abu’l Hasan uses a blend of description and analysis as he evaluates the role of family aspiration, physical attraction and material interest in the making of elite marriages.40 While much comment on gender and sexual themes by Europeans and Persianates is anecdotal, the pervasiveness of judgements on women’s dress, sexual and marital practices and the male authors’ own gendered and sexual contacts both suggest the constitutive role of that material. Seeded through the texts, it anchors the reading of cultural distinctiveness, of travellers’ experiences and of comparative analysis in images of sex and gender. The theme of women’s presence in public places in Europe, and the sexual response of Persianate visitors to that presence and to the uncovered faces of European women becomes a persistent motif, rather as references to the head or face coverings of women in Iran surface regularly in European texts. The effect is to make the exposure or concealment of particular parts of women’s bodies a powerful signifier of the distinctiveness of another culture, rather than a colourful detail. It forms part of the discussions of progress and morality through which both European and Persianate texts sought to describe, interpret and compare different societies. One aspect of this discussion is the question of women’s subjection or independence, with Ouseley comparing practices among nomad pastoralists and urban groups, and Gardane contrasting the responses of Turkish and Iranian women to foreigners.41 This theme is discussed from Persianate perspectives in Abu Taleb’s ‘Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women’, published in English on his return to India, and in Abu’l Hasan’s questioning of English


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assumptions about his views and reflections on different means of ensuring female ‘chastity’. Their mix of defensive affirmation of Persianate practice with analytical and complimentary observations about European alternatives developed I’tisam al-din’s earlier comments, and is echoed by later Persianate texts.42 Both Persianates and Europeans read the status of women and the state of the societies they visit through the twin themes of female body coverings and female occupation of social space. Exclamatory comments by Persianates on the presence of women in parks, at theatres and at social events are prominent in their texts, registering an interesting blend of sexual excitement and moral concern. For Abu’l Hasan the sight of fashionable women in Hyde Park inspired description as ‘heavenly fields’ where ‘the houris of paradise blush with shame to look upon the rose-cheeked beauties of the earth below’, while Abu Taleb was moved to record his delight in English women using poetry with similar metaphors.43 Behind this enthusiasm lay concerns with the signification of these practices for civilization, corruption and social well-being. Abu Taleb explicitly argues through the threats and benefits which English customs pose for society, but also displays a more pervasive unease when recounting women’s public presence (and their access to handsome male servants), linking his choice of residence in London with comments on the urban sex industry. The less explicitly intellectual Abu’l Hasan likewise entwines description of professional women singers and dancers with accounts of socializing with elite English women.44 From hospitable aristocratic hostesses and glamorous young women at parties to opera artistes and sex workers, depictions of women are used in a series of sexualized and moralized scenarios of ‘other’ societies. Similarly European use of such tropes included gossip about Abu’l Hasan’s ‘Circassian’ female companion and Abu Taleb’s love affairs, shocked comment on the explicitness with which Iranian women discussed sexual or gynaecological issues, and criticism of the wasteful expenditure of Qajar princes on their harems.45 In both European and Persianate texts the discussion of sexual themes involves nuanced analysis of paradoxes between the ‘apparent’ and ‘real’ freedoms for, or restrictions on, women in the societies they are visiting. Morier quotes Abu’l Hasan’s description of the skill and education deployed by elite Iranian women in the management of their households, and makes similar points in relation to the seraglio of Fath ‘Ali Shah, just as Abu Taleb and Mirza Salih balance the role of education and veiling in shaping European and Persianate women’s lives. Malcolm too offers an interesting blend of orientalizing anecdote and reflective comment on the royal anderun (private household quarters) as well as a staged debate on the relative position of European and Iranian women in which Iranians out-argue their European interrogator.46 Conjoined to persistent male heterosexual comment on the visibility, attractiveness and availability of ‘other’ women,


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these approaches embed gender and sexuality in accounts of European and Persianate contacts with, and explorations of, ‘otherness’. However, this interest in ‘otherness’ was underpinned by shared masculine activities and understandings of heterosexual desires and practices. English friends warned Abu Taleb of the sexually disreputable character of the London street where he lodged, and he passed on opera tickets sent by English women to young male English friends, as well as participating in homosocial excursions to boxing matches, shooting parties and Masonic dinners. The Prince of Wales and others who socialized with Abu’l Hasan exchanged sexual banter with him, teasing him about his crushes on upperclass girls, telling crude anecdotes, comparing the attractiveness of various women and offering to arrange a ‘private evening’ with a girl ‘whose beauty would attract the envy of Venus’.47 Mutually understood disparaging jokes about nagging wives and ‘unattractive’ older women, like the ability to distinguish flirtation with social equals from admiration of women performers, or the role of female sex workers, bonded ‘foreign’ elite visitors with local male counterparts in a masculine cultural environment. The concerns with liberty and fairness which animate Abu Taleb’s ‘Vindication’ and Malcolm’s conversation with Iranian friends on women’s status express male concerns with the management of female roles, norms and expectations as well as contesting cultural differences, or establishing norms of ‘freedom’ and ‘civilization’. Repeated references to man-made laws, customs or religious precepts as legitimations for gender regulation embed such discussions in a patriarchal framework.

Conclusion Just as contacts between Persianate and European men revealed overlapping as well as conflicting areas of cultural knowledge and understanding, so their gender discourses constructed both cultural divergences and gendered convergences in their perceptions of the ‘other’ societies which they encountered. Tehran, Paris, Lucknow, Tiflis, Calcutta, Petersburg and Tabriz became ‘contact zones’ for new European expansionist ambition and competition, for Persianate responses to those ambitions, and for reconfigurations of power and culture in Iran and India, where new differences and interactions were emerging. Europeans sought to combine the acquisition and display of expertise with entertaining reportage and the construction of structured cultural hierarchies, while Persianates used knowledge and understanding of Europe to define and analyse their own culture, to demonstrate their ‘Europology’ and to explore the merits of European example. In this sense the texts considered here signal important shifts in the political, material and intellectual terms on which Iranian/European contact took place, differing significantly from the context of earlier writing on contact experiences. They also signal ways to understand the ‘Napoleonic era’ as


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involving not just European aims and assumptions, but also the ambitions and presuppositions of the Persianate world of Georgian, Afghan, Iranian or Indian rulers and vested interests. They thus contribute insights comparable to those offered by the discussions of Haiti, Egypt, Latin America or the Philippines elsewhere in this book. These Iranian and European texts are best understood as combining legacies from older patterns of contact between parties, each of whom was a rarely glimpsed ‘exotic’ for the other, with recognition of a new global order in which European interests played out on transcontinental stages where Iranians could no longer ignore them. When the Governor of Bombay, Jonathan Duncan, commissioned a long epic, the Jarj-nameh, celebrating British conquests in India under George III (‘Jarj’), from a leading Persianate writer, it signalled British patronage of Indian Persianate culture, trilateral contacts among Iranians, Indians and British and Iranian interest in the new imperial order.48 Closer consideration of the texts produced by and about Persianate/European contact between 1790 and 1820 suggests that overlap and hybridity entwined with the confrontational and unequal terms on which contact was taking place. Malcolm’s audiences had read Abu Taleb on European women, just as Abu’l Hasan found that he had previously met London acquaintances in Calcutta, and Abu Taleb identified himself as a colleague and peer of the gentry, learned men and East India Company officials whom he encountered in India or England. Conscious of Russian, French and British power, resources and influence, Persianate commentators on Europeans nonetheless drew on their own cultural resources to describe, critique and understand them, and had their own political and intellectual agendas. With hindsight they can be shown to have been at a disadvantage, but it should equally be appreciated that they made their own contributions to emergent discourses and perceptions of ‘otherness’ in a world of gendered and globalized, but also interactive, inequity.

Notes 1. Moritz von Kotzebue, Narrative of a Journey into Persia: In the Suite of the Imperial Russian Embassy, in the Year 1817, translated from the German (London, 1819), 164. 2. Ibid. iv. 3. See Janet Hartley’s chapter in this volume; Nikolas K. Gvosdev, Imperial Policies and Perspectives towards Georgia, 1780–1819 (Basingstoke, 2000); Michael Khodarkovsky, ‘Colonial Frontiers in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, in Extending the Frontiers of Russian History ed. Marsha Siefert (Budapest, 2003). 4. Abbas Amanat, ‘Fath ‘Ali Shah’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica (London, 1982) is a useful introduction; there is a limited synthesis in Gavin R. G. Hambly, ‘Iran during the Reigns of Fath ‘Ali Shah’ and Muhammad Shah’, in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, ed. William Bayne Fisher et al. (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 144–173. Translated Iranian sources for this period include ‘Abd al-Razzaq Beg Donbuli, Ma’thir al-Sultaniyeh (1827), trans. Harford Jones Brydges as The Dynasty of the Qajars (London, 1833). For regional perspectives see Hasan-e Fasa’i, Farsnameh-yi


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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 Nasiri, ed. Mansur Rastgar Fasa’i (Tehran, 1988), part 1, ed. and trans. Heribert Busse as The History of Persia under Qajar Rule (New York, 1972), 1–152; Charles E. Davies, ‘Qajar Rule in Fars prior to 1849’, Iran 25 (1987): 125–153. See Ervand Abrahamian, ‘Oriental Despotism: The Case of Qajar Iran’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974): 3–31; idem, History of Modern Iran (Cambridge, UK, 2008), 8–12; Colin Meredith ‘Early Qajar Administration’, Iranian Studies 4 (1971): 59–84; Christoph Werner, An Iranian Town in Transition: A Social and Economic History of the Elites of Tabriz, 1747–1848 (Wiesbaden, 2000), 42–59, 184–97. James Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor to Constantinople in the Years 1808 and 1809 (London, 1812), 103, 107, 170, 279; idem, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor to Constantinople between the Years 1810 and 1816 (London, 1818), 55, 131–132, 155–156, 203, 232; G. A. Olivier, Voyage dans l’Empire Othoman, l’Egypte, et la Perse, 6 vols (Paris, 1801–07), vol. 3, 13, 94, 421; Adrien Dupré, Voyage en Perse fait dans les années 1807, 1808, et 1809, 2 vols (Paris, 1819), vol. 2, 234, 239; William Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries of the East, more particularly Persia, 3 vols (London, 1819–23), vol. 3, 406; Fasa’i, History of Persia, 92, 146; Werner, Iranian Town in Transition, ch. 2; there is evidence of revived coinage production, confirming economic renewal, in H. L. Rabino, Coins, Seals, and Medals of Iran 1500–1925 (Hertford, 1945), 41, 52, 62, 65. John Malcolm, History of Persia, 2 vols (London, 1829), vol. 2, 238–239, 264–267, 292–299; Olivier, Voyage, vol. 3, 163–165. See Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam (Chicago, 1984), chs 11, 12; idem (ed.), Authority and Political Culture in Shi’ism (Albany, 1988), chs 5, 12; Robert Gleave (ed.), Religion and Society in Qajar Iran (London, 2005), chs 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11; Joanna de Groot, Religion, Culture and Politics in Iran: From the Qajars to Khomeini (London, 2007), 61–67, 87–97; Werner, Iranian Town in Transition, ch. 5. Abbas Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844–1850 (Ithaca, 1989), part 1; idem, ‘Between the madrasa and the Market Place: The Designation of Clerical Leadership in Modern Shi’ism’, in Arjomand, Authority and Political Culture, 98–112. The term ‘Persianate’ will be used in this discussion to refer to those who moved in circles where writing and speaking Persian were practised, whether in Iran, India, Central Asia or the Ottoman lands, and to their cultural activities and products. George A. Bournoutian, The Khanate of Erevan under Qajar Rule (Costa Mesa, CA, 1992); Muriel Atkin, Russia and Iran, 1780–1828 (Minneapolis, 1980); Malcolm Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, India and Afghanistan, 1798–1850 (Oxford, 1980). Ibid.; Iradj Amini, Napoleon and Persia: Franco-Persian Relations under the First Empire (Washington, DC, 1999); Atkin, Russia; Firuz Kazemzadeh, ‘Russian Penetration of the Caucasus’, in Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution ed. Taras Hunczak (New Brunswick, NJ, 1974), 238–263. See Atkin, Russia, ch. 4; Harford Jones Brydges, An Account of the Transactions of His Majesty’s Mission to Persia in the Years 1807–11 (London, 1834), 28–30, 63–69, 220–226; Edward Ingram, The Persian Connection, 1798–1828: Prelude to the Great Game in Asia (Oxford, 1992), 37–46, 76–83, 106–116, 150–151, 306–311; Amini, Napoleon and Persia, chs 7, 8, 10. Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, Ma’sir-i Talibi fi bilad-i Afrang (Calcutta, 1812); the MS, written in 1803, was translated by Charles Stewart as The Travels of Mirza Abu


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252

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

253

Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe during the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, and 1802, 2 vols (London, 1810), new edn, Westward Bound: The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan ... with an introduction by Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi, 2005), to which notes here refer. See also Ma’sir-i Talibi ya safarnameh-yi Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani, ed. Husayn Khadivjam (Tehran, 1983–1984); Mirza Abu’l Hasan Ilchi, Hayrat-nameh: safarnameh-yi Mirza Abu’l Hasan Khan be Landan, ed. Hasan Mursalvand (Tehran, 1984–1985), trans. and ed. Margaret Morris Cloake, A Persian at the Court of King George: The Journal of Mirza Abu’l Hasan Khan (London, 1988). In addition to Morier, Journey and Second Journey; Jones, His Majesty’s Mission; Ouseley, Travels; Kotzebue, Narrative; and Olivier, Voyage, use will be made of Pierre Amédée Jaubert, Voyage en Arménie et en Perse (Paris, 1821); Paul Gardane, Journal d’un voyage dans la Turquie d’Asie at la Perse fait en 1807 et 1808 (Paris, 1809); John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia (London, 1849); Frederika and Wilhelm von Freygang, Letters from the Caucasus and Georgia, [by Frederika] to which are added the Account of a Journey into Persia in 1812 and an Abridged History of Persia [by Wilhelm] (London, 1823). Morier, who travelled with Abu’l Hasan in Iran and the Ottoman Empire and accompanied him in London, sketches his life in Journey, 220–223; see also Fasa’i, History of Persia, 129, 146–147, 163, 172, 175–176, 184–185, 228; Abu Taleb, Travels, 2–6. See Henry Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys: James Morier, Creator of Haji Baba of Isfahan, and His Brothers (London, 1998), chs 1, 3, 5, 7, 15, 16; Morier was notable as the author of The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isfahan (London, 1824), still in print. For Abu Taleb see Travels, ‘Introduction’, xiii–xx, 2–6; he wrote poetry, and books on Indian poets, on the major fourteenth-century Iranian poet Hafez, on the government of Awadh and on astronomy; he died in 1806 while an East India Company official in Bundelcand. On Gardane, see Archives biographiques francaises (microform) ed. Susan Bradley (London, 1988–1990), fiche 433, 262–263, 268–280; for Jaubert see Archives biographique francaises, fiche 539, 300–303, 376–379, 382–383; Pierre Amédée Jaubert, Voyage en Arménie et en Perse, ed. M. Sedillot [Paris, 1860], ‘Notice sur l’auteur’, i–xxvii. For Olivier, see Archives biographiques francaises, fiche 794, 393–398. Wilhelm Freygang was a doctor’s son and officer, Ouseley, Travels, vol. 3, 399–400; Freygang, Letters, translator’s preface, vii. Morier, Journey, 90, 125, 127, 132, 138 (antiquarian), 58, 86, 106, 169, 186, 267 (scenic); 70 (ethnographic); Second Journey, 45, 50, 65, 80–81, 118, 190 (antiquarian), 74, 139, 140, 225, 255, 289, 305, 354, 374 (scenic), 92, 95, 169, 172, 182, 230, 252, 330, 335, 343, 393 (ethnographic); Jaubert, Voyage, 164, 209, 280 (ethnographic); Jones, His Majesty’s Mission, 48, 56, 74, 350, 120 (ethnographic), frontispiece, 264 (portraits); Ouseley, Travels, vol. 1, plates X, XIII, XIV (ethnographic), plates XI, XVIII, XX (scenic), plates VIII, IX, XII, XVII, XXI, XXII, XXIII (antiquarian); vol. 2, plates XXIV, XXVIII, XIX, XXXIV, XL, LI (scenic), plates XXI, XXIX, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXIX, XLI–XLIX (antiquarian). See note 19; Gore Ouseley was a founder of the Royal Asiatic Society and president of its translation fund (ODNB) while William produced translations of Persianate and Arabic works, papers on ‘oriental’ topics and language manuals; Olivier wrote on entomology and natural history; Jaubert, who succeeded his mentor Sylvestre de Sacy as head of the Ecole des Langues Orientales, published translations, grammars and travel writings until his death in 1847.


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21. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (Basingstoke, 2001), chs 3, 4; Faridun Adamiyat, Fekr-i Azadi va muqaddameh-yi nezhat-i mashrutiyyat-i Iran (Tehran, 1961), 21–92. 22. Olivier, Voyage, vol. 3, 562–566. 23. Ibid. ch. 9, and 63–68; Jones, His Majesty’s Mission, 231–235, 244–247, 294–299, 302–307, 401–438; Freygang, Letters, 330–331, 336–345, 355, 360; Jaubert, Voyage (1860), chs 23–35. 24. Morier, Journey, 248, 168, 364, and plates cited in note 21. 25. Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 154–155, 284. 26. Abu Taleb, Travels, 144–154 (vices); 155–157 (virtues); 151–153 (extravagance); 152–153 discuss the role of luxury and waste in the fall of empires, comparing Romans, Mughals and recent changes in France. 27. See Olivier, Voyage, ch. 9; Abu Taleb, Travels, 45–46, 54–55, 89, 179, 181. 28. One title of Abu’l Hasan’s journal was Hayrat-nameh (amazing tale), and I’tisam al-din’s account of his 1765 European travels was Shegerf-nameh (tale of wonders). 29. Kotzebue, Narrative, 28; Jones, His Majesty’s Mission, 262–263, 280–292, 294–299. 30. Abu Taleb, Travels, 55, 83; Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 28, 77, 88; Malcolm, Sketches, 18, 209; Morier, Journey, 13, 161; idem, Second Journey, 39, 129; Ouseley, Travels, vol. 1, 189, 271, vol. 2, 11; Jones, His Majesty’s Mission, 165; Jaubert, Voyage, 222. 31. Freygang, Letters, 239–246, for Frederika’s daughter’s death; Morier, Second Journey, 57–59, and Ouseley, Travels, vol. 2, 61–62 on Abu’l Hasan’s grief at the death of his son; ibid. vol. 1, 191, the Iranians’ tact on news of the death of his brother. 32. Kotzebue, Narrative, 235–244; Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 76–77, 112, 176–177; William Waldegrave, Lord Radstock, ‘A Slight Sketch of ... Abou’l Hassen, Envoy Extraordinary from the King of Persia to the Court of Great Britain in the Years 1809 and 1810’, Gentleman’s Magazine 90 (1820): 119–122. 33. See Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 92, 133–134, 165, 232, 278; Morier, Journey, 185–193, 198–205; Abu Taleb, Travels, 50–51, 183–184; Ouseley, Travels, vol. 1, 184, 233–234, 310–311. 34. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford, 2005); Joanna de Groot, ‘Oriental Feminotopias? Montagu’s and Montesquieu’s “Seraglios” Revisited’, Gender & History 18 (2006): 66–86; Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, 1995); Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, 1991); Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge, 1998). 35. Europeans used these terms, which did not necessarily correspond to local understandings of household space, to designate the private family quarters of elite Ottoman, Iranian or Indian households. 36. See Abu Taleb, Travels, 74–75, 78–79; Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 97–99, 128, 135–139, 167, 178–181; Olivier, Voyage, 144; Morier, Journey, 225. 37. Jane Rendall, ‘Tacitus Engendered: “Gothic Feminism” and British Histories, 1750–1800’, in Imagining Nations, ed. Geoffrey Cubitt (Manchester, 1998), 57–74; Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge, 2007). 38. Barbara Bush, Slave Women and British Caribbean Slavery (London, 1989), ch. 2; Beth Tobin, History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Athens, GA, 1994);


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254

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

255

Nussbaum, Torrid Zones; Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago, 2004). Abu Taleb, Travels, 110–112, 197, 201–202. Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 25, 64–65, 97–98, 103–104, 130, 135–138, 154–155, 158, 273, 284; Mirza Sheikh I’tisam al-din, Shigurfnameh- yi vilayet, trans. Kaiser Haq, The Wonders of Vilayet (Leeds, 2002), 66–67, 78–79, 114–115. Ouseley, Travels, vol. 1, 308, vol. 2, 239; Gardane, Journal, 40. See Abu Taleb, ‘Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women’ trans. D. Richardson, Asiatic Annual Register 3 (1801): 100–107, reprinted in Abu Taleb, Travels, appendix D, 297–304; Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 76–77, 111, 135, 168, 180–181; I’tisam al-din, Wonders, 100, 114. Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 78, 98–100, 169; Abu Taleb, Travels, 70, 75, 127. Abu Taleb, Travels, 63–64, 108, 111–112, 151, 159; Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 25, 135, 158, 186–187. Ibid. 110; Ouseley, Travels, vol. 1, 254, 308; Morier, Journey, 110. Ibid. 225, 369–370; Abu Taleb, Travels, 111–112, 115; Malcolm, Sketches, 161–167, 219–221. Abu Taleb, Travels, 63–64, 114; Abu’l Hasan, Journal, 131, 151–152, 154, 157–158, 245. This work was produced in 1807 by Mulla Firuz bin Kaus, famed as the publisher of the 1818 version of Desatir, an influential collection of ancient Iranian texts. I thank Professor Abbas Amanat for this reference.


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Patriotism, Painting and the Portuguese Empire during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Foteini Vlachou

Introduction ‘Which residence will be more advantageous for a Prince: the one in which he has to live precariously, waiting or fearing that every day he will be stripped of his crown, or the one in which he can sleep restfully and with no apprehension that he will be disturbed?’, the Portuguese diplomat Luís da Cunha asked in 1736. In suggesting that the king of Portugal should move to Brazil and assume the title of the Emperor of the West, da Cunha anticipated one of the most defining moments in Portuguese imperial history, the transfer of the seat of monarchy to Brazil in 1807.1 The precarious position of continental Portugal and its overseas empire was never more acutely felt than during the period that followed the French Revolution. This sense of vulnerability led to a renewed awareness of the importance of Portugal’s imperial legacy, that had in its turn a profound effect on contemporary Portuguese painting, created for and addressed to the royal family and aristocracy. A study of official imagery which takes into account its particular function and limited audience can significantly contribute to the understanding of how monarchy, empire and the nation were imagined, and subsequently visualized, during the crucial period between 1799 and 1815. Painting became, it is argued here, a privileged site of expression of a certain kind of patriotism, which referred exclusively to Portugal’s aristocratic, monarchical and imperial past, a past represented for the first time as a concrete historical reality. This transformation is brought into relief by comparing the official imagery produced before and after 1807. The social and political vacuum created by the departure of the royal family and court aristocracy resulted in the emergence of a different kind of iconography, one that relied mainly on allegory for timeless depictions of the monarchy and nation. Patriotism would also lose its exclusively aristocratic connotations 256


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after 1807, and it would come to be defined, mainly through contemporary pamphlets, as a virtue of the Portuguese nation as a whole. This chapter will discuss two paintings in order to illustrate the differences before and after 1807. Both paintings are representative of the official pictorial production of their time and, as such, they serve to demonstrate how this production was conditioned by changing political circumstances. The paintings under discussion are the Oath of Viriato (1799) by Francisco Vieira Portuense and the Allegory of the Virtues of the Prince Regent (1810) by Domingos António de Sequeira. The Viriato should be considered as the first significant example of a painting with patriotic content addressed to the nobility and royal family of Portugal, and the Allegory of the Virtues exemplifies the move from an aristocratic patriotism attached to the historical past of the empire towards the more abstract glorification of the monarch and the representation of the idealized figure of the ‘spirit of the nation’.

The transfer of the seat of monarchy, 1807: the empire in transition The international crisis created by the French Revolution and subsequent Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars deeply affected the Portuguese Empire.2 Even though the country was not embroiled in armed struggle till after the 1807 transfer, the financial and diplomatic pressures of the war increased tensions within the empire.3 The constant threat of territorial expansion posed by Spain, now again an ally of France after the San Ildefonso treaty of 1796, and fear that the British would directly attack Brazil in case the Portuguese decided to form an alliance with France (or, to use Valentim Alexandre’s term, the ‘structural vulnerability’ of the South Atlantic Portuguese Empire), led to the 1807 crisis.4 Although the proposal to transfer the seat of monarchy to Brazil, reintroduced by Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho (president of the Royal Treasury) in 1803, had been rejected,5 when Portugal later failed to satisfy French demands to adhere fully to the Continental Blockade, rendering the threat of invasion imminent, the plan was reconsidered and eventually adopted.6 French troops first crossed the Portuguese border on 19 November 1807, and the royal family, along with the court (estimates vary between a total of 10,000 and 15,000 people), set sail for Brazil on 29 November, just a day before General Junot entered the capital. The decision to move the seat of monarchy to Brazil was as much a direct result of the first French invasion as it was the culmination of a long line of Portuguese political and imperial discourse. It embodied a vision of empire founded on commerce and sustained morally and politically by the monarchy, moving beyond a narrow conception of the nation that prioritized the political and cultural distinctiveness of the fatherland, as opposed to the secondary and derivative nature of the colonies. As Alexandre observes, the fact that Portugal was the political and economic centre of the empire was


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Patriotism, Painting and the Portuguese Empire


not ‘ ... a situation imposed by the prevalence of national values, and therefore definitive, but the result of a reversible option, dependent on considerations of a geo-strategical order’.7 The transfer was also the result of heightened concern for the future fate of the Portuguese Empire, shared by members of the nobility despite individual and factional differences. Portuguese statesmen and diplomats, although divided between the so-called English and French parties, shared the same ideological premises.8 They restated the importance of monarchy for the imperial system, prompted by political and social change elsewhere and by fear of ‘contamination’ from the spread of revolutionary principles, both to the metropolis and to the colonies.9 Thus Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho would write, for example, in a speech of 1797, that it was [the] inviolable and sacrosanct principle of unity [between the monarchy and its overseas dominions] ... that should be guarded with the greatest envy, so that a Portuguese born in the four corners of the world thinks of himself as solely Portuguese and remembers only the glory and grandeur of the monarchy to which he is fortunate to belong.10

Painting, monarchy and empire, 1799–1807 It was precisely during this period of financial pressures, external threats and concern over the fate of the empire that the Portuguese aristocracy and the royal family sought to redefine their image. For this purpose they turned to Portugal’s illustrious past, commissioning (or encouraging) paintings that depicted events of the era of state independence and territorial aggrandizement. Royal commissions for the decoration of the Palace of Ajuda, for example, concentrated on events from the lives of kings important either for the origins of the monarchy, or for the territorial expansion of the empire. As a result, Portuguese painting, mostly characterized by religious and devotional iconography up to the end of the eighteenth century, was transformed in both style and subject matter. For the first time subjects taken from Portuguese history dominated the production of official imagery and became the vehicle through which a particular kind of patriotism was expressed.11 This patriotism referred exclusively to the monarchical and imperial past of Portugal and proclaimed fidelity to the monarchy above all else. Patriotic history painting cast noblemen (and, occasionally, noblewomen) as archetypal or paradigmatic patriots through the depiction of their unshaken loyalty to the monarch. It also invoked an aristocratic and monarchical vision of the Portuguese Empire, putting aside its more mundane aspects such as commerce and colonization, and promoting aristocratic and heroic achievement, especially through the depiction of battles and scenes of conquest. Many of these paintings were subsequently taken to Brazil, indicating that they were possibly viewed, by the Prince Regent and


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members of his court, as reminders of a common identity, a cultural and political point of reference in a new and largely unknown environment.12 The Oath of Viriato, painted by Francisco Vieira (1765–1805), known as o Portuense, was the first significant example of this kind of patriotic history painting. Although it bore no immediately recognizable reference to either monarchy or empire, the value of its invocation of the past could only be appreciated, at least in Portugal, in a monarchical and aristocratic context. The painting was exhibited in the Royal Academy of Arts in London in April 1799, accompanied by a note in the exhibition’s catalogue that explained its subject for the British public. The note describes how Viriato, the Lusitanian chief who fought the Romans in the second century BC ‘swears, by putting his hand, and those of his companions, in the wounds of the virgins yet palpitating, that they will not lay down their arms until they are revenged on the cruel invaders of their country, and on the perfidious enemy of the human race’.13 The episode referred to the oath of Viriato to take revenge for the treason of the Roman Galba, who lured the unarmed Lusitanian people with false promises of peace, only to slaughter them. Later, Viriato came to be identified as a national symbol and was frequently evoked by nationalist discourse throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.14 Yet any interpretation of the Viriato of 1799 as a national symbol, a portrait of a popular hero or an attack on Napoleon15 relies heavily on knowledge of subsequent events, from the Napoleonic coup d’état of Eighteenth Brumaire to the Peninsular War. Although this was the first instance of the subject in painting, Viriato drew upon an important tradition in Portuguese literature. The hero’s previous relationship to legitimist royal propaganda dates from the post-Restoration period, when Braz Garcia de Mascarenhas (1596–1656) wrote his epic poem Viriato trágico, published posthumously in 1699. Viriato, who is referred to in the poem as the ‘great Lusitanian monarch’, sees in a dream the ‘future monarchies’ up until the Restoration of the Portuguese monarchy in 1640 (including the acclamation of the new king, João IV), thus implying the continuous existence of Portugal throughout the ages, despite the periods of occupation by the Romans, the Arabs and the Spanish.16 Significantly, the post-Restoration period was also the only other time before the 1790s when an iconography of patriotic content emerged that served to legitimize a new monarch—the Duke of Bragança—and support the claim of Portugal’s independence from Spain.17 The period also witnessed an outburst of written propaganda treating similarly patriotic themes, which were only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be transformed from the ‘foundation of the social power of aristocratic families to a common patrimony’, according to Portuguese historian Fernando Dores Costa.18 Later, in the mid-eighteenth century, Viriato’s assassination by traitors in his camp was treated by leading playwright Manuel de Figueiredo.19 Sebastião


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José Xavier Botelho, writing on the same subject in his tragedy Viriato, in the midst of the convulsions of the Peninsular War, would present Viriato as a model for emulation: ‘I ask that the famous warrior Viriato’s memory be renewed; that it now awakes and regenerates the constancy and valour of the Portuguese. If that glory is achieved, the fame of the Poet does not interest me’.20 The Oath of Viriato was painted during Vieira’s stay in London (1797–1801) and was later offered to the Prince Regent of Portugal and hung in the Palace of Ajuda until it was transferred, probably to Brazil where all traces of it were lost.21 Today a preparatory sketch for the painting survives (Illustration 13.1), as well as a print engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi and published in London (1 November 1799) (Illustration 13.2). While in London, Vieira was patronized by the Portuguese ambassador, João de Almeida de Melo e Castro, one of the most prominent members of the so-called English party, who was to become Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs in 1801.22 Given the importance of this association for the painter’s social status and pictorial production, it might be assumed that the Viriato painting could also be seen as an indirect expression of the devoutly pro-British politics of Portugal, at least until 1803. Comparisons between the French and the Roman Empire were not uncommon during the period, and the Portuguese had claimed the Lusitanians as ancestors as early as the sixteenth century.23 Therefore the pictorial positioning of the Lusitanians as vehemently in opposition to the Romans could be interpreted by contemporary viewers as targeting the French on a symbolic level, and identifying the latter with the ‘perfidious enemy of the human race’. This is only one indication of the capacity of the painting to generate meaning in various cultural sites and for a number of different audiences, including the British public frequenting the Royal Academy exhibition, as well as the Portuguese royal family and aristocracy.24 Although the interest manifested by Vieira in history painting might have been influenced by the London art scene, as has been suggested,25 his production places him within the orbit of British influence while at the same time distinguishes him from it. His interest in history painting should also be seen in conjunction with his earlier artistic training in Italy and his aspirations to be a court painter, demonstrated by the fact that he was mentioned as a ‘history painter of his Majesty, the King of Portugal’ in the 1797 exhibition catalogue of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts, before any official titles were attributed to him.26 Most of Vieira’s paintings were either offered as gifts to or commissioned by church officials and members of the aristocracy and royalty. In particular, the history subjects taken from Portugal’s past were destined solely for display in and consumption by royal and aristocratic circles, and were not reproduced or otherwise diffused outside this restricted social environment. The print made after the Oath of Viriato constitutes, to our knowledge, the only example of graphic reproduction of this kind of subject, but even so, it should be seen as a luxury


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Illustration 13.1 Francisco Vieira Portuense, The Oath of Viriato, c. 1798–99, oil on canvas, 35 ⫻ 29.2 cm, Fundação Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva, Lisbon (photo PH3)


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Illustration 13.2 Francesco Bartolozzi after Francisco Vieira, The Oath of Viriato, 1 November 1799, etching and engraving, 49 ⫻ 39 cm, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon (Divisão de Documentação Fotográfica—Instituto dos Museus e da Conservação, photo José Pessoa)


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product, issued in a limited edition only, targeted to win the favour of the Prince Regent and flatter him with references to Portugal’s heroic past with which he could identify. It has often been claimed that the source of Vieira’s style and subject matter was British history painting.27 Yet this was often destined for mass reproduction, and through its wide diffusion it became the basis of a common set of visual references concerning the country’s past and facilitating popular identification with that past.28 The purpose and function of Portuguese history painting was very different. A closer examination of the print made after Vieira’s painting further illustrates this dimension. It bears an elaborate dedication to the future King João VI, who had been named Prince Regent in July 1799, not without some opposition.29 The dedication in Latin called João ‘Prince of Brazil’ (the official title of the heir to the throne) and ‘Regent of the Lusitanian Empire’, and asserted that the painter was devoted to His Royal Highness’s service. Although the subject of the oath of Viriato could have come from a number of sources,30 the dedication of the print reproduces a Latin passage describing the event, from an apocryphal writer called Laimundo. The choice may well demonstrate the painter’s desire to display his erudition and confer authority upon the representation, but it could also be meaningful in a different context. The Latin passage is quoted from the first part of the Monarquia Lusitana (Lusitanian Monarchy), which was otherwise written in Portuguese, a work that ‘contained the histories of Portugal since the creation of the world until the birth of our lord Jesus Christ’ (from the first page of the original edition). It was composed by Frei Bernardo de Brito in 1597, while Portugal was under the sovereignty of the Castilian Crown.31 The choice of such a source could be seen as an effort to integrate Viriato symbolically into a genealogy of Portuguese monarchy, asserting at the same time the continuity between the Lusitanian past and the Portuguese present under royal and imperial authority. This was also corroborated by the use of the term ‘Lusitanian’ instead of ‘Portuguese’, in the phrase ‘Regent of the Lusitanian Empire’. It is perhaps also significant that Viriato’s appearance was subtly transformed between the preparatory sketch and the engraving, which probably followed the lost painting more closely. His facial features in particular are more refined and sophisticated in the engraving, whereas in the sketch he appears to be rather rough. This could reflect a desire to erase any memory of the hero’s reputedly humble origins and insist instead on the valour and achievement that led to his elevation to the status of ‘a General, a Chief, almost a Prince’, making him more suitable as a mythical ancestor of the Portuguese monarchy.32 History painting was put to similar uses in neighbouring Spain. Although it never dominated Spain’s pictorial production, there was a limited but continuing tradition of history painting after the foundation of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1752, where triennial competitions (concursos) were held in which subjects taken from Spanish history amounted to 60 per cent of the total of the subjects proposed. Given the


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Academy’s direct dependence on royal patronage, it is no wonder that the principal aim of the subjects chosen was to exalt ‘fidelity to the Christian religion, country and king’ and praise the Bourbon dynasty.33 Subjects either referred to specific events from the country’s past or were allegorical reconstructions of recent and past events.34 With the activity of the Academy interrupted in 1808 because of the Peninsular War and not resumed until much later, the painting of similar history subjects was discontinued. It is in this context that a painting by José de Madrazo (1781–1859) depicting Viriato’s assassination should be considered (Illustration 13.3).35 Although the Death of Viriato was completed in 1807, according to Madrazo’s own inventory of his work, and, much like Vieira’s painting, had been clearly conceived in order to appeal to the royal and aristocratic elite of Spain,36 it came gradually to be identified as a response to and a symbol of the patriotism of the Spanish people in their fight against the French. This is exemplified in later interpretations such as that of Enrique Arias Anglés, who has suggested that Madrazo had originally chosen as his subject a theme from classical antiquity (Achilles mourning the death of Patroclus) and then switched the title to conform to the latest developments in Spain.37 While Madrazo had studied in Paris with Jacques-Louis David, the Death of Viriato demonstrates neither a ‘clear wish of mimetism’

Illustration 13.3 José de Madrazo, The Death of Viriato, 1807, oil on canvas, 307 ⫻ 462 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid


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through the choice of a subject from antiquity (close to the Greco-Roman themes that David himself preferred) nor glorifies the ‘country fighting against the invader’, as has been suggested for Spanish neoclassicists in general.38 Instead, it fits perfectly into Spain’s absolutist social frame, and within the existing tradition of ‘academic’ history painting, shaped under the influence of Anton Rafael Mengs. In their portrayals of what they perceived as their countries’ respective pasts, notwithstanding the differences with which they imagined and reconstructed these (which cannot be discussed in any detail here), both Vieira and Madrazo expressed their commitment to the ancien régime. The Oath and the Death of Viriato were only later invested with meanings they did not possess at the time they were created, meanings that in their turn constitute an indication of the various and varying contexts of the paintings’ reception and the multiplicity of reactions they generated.

Painting, propaganda and the Portuguese nation, 1807–14 The need to depict an identifiable historical past seems to have ceased following the transfer of the seat of monarchy in 1807. The absence of the king and court, successive French invasions of Portugal (in 1807, 1809 and 1810), and the Peninsular War had a transformative effect on the content and purpose of painting.39 The representation of heroic, patriotic noblemen and legendary kings that prevailed in painting before 1807 could no longer continue, not only because the primary recipients of this type of iconography were simply absent, but also because of the new realities created by the popular risings and the subsequent participation of the Portuguese in the Peninsular War. Significantly however, no paintings depicting contemporary events or celebrating the military actions and heroism of the Portuguese were produced between 1807 and 1815. On the contrary, the need to include the Portuguese nation in some way in official imagery was satisfied by the creation of abstract and idealized personifications of figures such as the Génio da Nação (Spirit of the Nation) or the Amor da Pátria (Love of Country), as we shall see below. Pictorial production resorted to the use of allegory, as opposed to the descriptive approach towards the historical past employed before 1807, in order to glorify the monarchy and the nation while avoiding any references to the present. As pictorial production continued, for the most part, to be addressed to those in power, this insistence on allegorical and idealized representations may be related to the nature of the first popular risings (June 1808) and the subsequent social unrest. Vasco Pulido Valente who, unlike the majority of Portuguese historians, interprets the risings as a primarily social revolt that sought to upturn the existing political order, observes that ‘the “people” nowhere acted, as was expected, with ... implicit respect for the established social differences’.40 But the revolt was quickly brought under the control of the


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dominant classes (Valente insists on the instrumental part played by church and clergy) and after the expulsion of the French in August 1808, Portuguese society returned to the status quo ante.41 The events of the period clearly did not afford appropriate material for representation, as pictorial production remained tied to official rhetoric and to the celebration of monarchy. During this period, the concept of patriotism also underwent some modifications although its content, in advocating fidelity to the monarchy, remained in essence the same in both painting and literature. But as the Portuguese were called upon by the authorities to fight against the French and restore their legitimate government and political and social order, patriotism was transformed from an aristocratic trait to a virtue inherent in the Portuguese nation.42 This transformation is nowhere more obvious than in the propaganda of the period 1808–11.43 According to estimates by António Pedro Vicente, 700 pamphlets were published by the Royal Press in Lisbon alone, overshadowing the activity of private publishing houses and the Royal Press of the University of Coimbra (a known total of about 140 texts).44 This unprecedented outpouring of official pamphlets played a significant part in shaping an image of the Portuguese as a nation of heroes and patriots naturally aligned to their monarch. This was the image conveyed, for example, by José Acursio das Neves, a staunch absolutist and one of the most important thinkers of the period, when in 1808 he wrote: Portugal was always a country of heroes; the Portuguese always rose above the ordinary through an unparalleled patriotism, through the valour which they deployed throughout the ages to repel oppression, and through their unalterable fidelity towards their legitimate Sovereigns, ever since in Ourique they planted the crown on the head of the first Afonso, and founded a Throne, cemented so many times with the blood of Sovereigns and their Vassals.45 But, even though the pamphlets often spoke for or in the name of the Portuguese nation, it is important to note that the participation of the middle and lower classes in the production and diffusion of this image was practically non-existent. This kind of propaganda (either written or pictorial) emanated from official circles and expressed the ideological needs and concepts (as well as patterns of national identification) of the leading intellectuals and the ruling classes, rather than those of the Portuguese nation as a whole. These pamphlets should be understood as a powerful weapon in the effort to steer the course and outcome of the fight against the French towards a conservative solution. For example, the Portuguese were called to arms in order to fulfill ‘their duty in the current circumstances of the Monarchy’, while being reminded that real liberty is identical with the most ‘exact obedience to the Orders of the legitimate Authorities’.46 At the same time, the line was constantly drawn between ‘true patriots’ and ‘true Portuguese’ and their opposites, in an effort to


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vilify those who entertained liberal and pro-French tendencies and so did not adhere to the only acceptable form of patriotism, implying fidelity to the ancien régime.47 In a similar vein, these texts glorified the monarchy and the absent Prince Regent and justified his decision to establish his court in Brazil.48 Neves, for example, defended the transfer, arguing that the American colonies would be the source of rebirth for the ‘oppressed metropolitan powers’, away from a revolution that threatened to reduce Europe to the ‘horrors of the barbaric times’, and that the Portuguese Empire, along with the Spanish possessions in America and the British Empire, would form a ‘colossal mass’ capable of counter-attacking Napoleon on the continent.49 This line of argument was also taken up in an obvious effort to counteract the popular feeling that the king had abandoned his people, a feeling that could encourage disobedience towards him. Official pictorial production was in accord with this kind of rhetoric, as can be seen, for example, in the overpopulated Allegory of the Virtues of the Prince Regent (Illustration 13.4), commissioned by the Baron de Sobral, and meant as a gift to the Prince Regent.50 It was painted by Domingos António de

Illustration 13.4 Domingos António de Sequeira, Allegory of the Virtues of the Prince Regent, 1810, oil on canvas, 151 ⫻ 200 cm, Palácio Nacional de Queluz (Divisão de Documentação Fotográfica—Instituto dos Museus e da Conservação, photo José Pessoa)


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Sequeira in 1810, soon after he was released from prison where he had been incarcerated mainly for painting an allegory that glorified Junot, allegedly after a request by the French general himself.51 The Allegory of the Virtues of the Prince Regent shows the prince seated in the clouds amidst a host of allegorical figures personifying the Virtues while others, on the ground, point and gesticulate towards him. The prince holds the sceptre of government in his right hand and rests his left on an open book that reads LIBER MANDATORUM DEI (Book of God’s Commandments). The Latin inscription on the marble pedestal on the right side of the painting identified the monument as a testimony of the gratitude of the Lusitanian people, after effusive praise of the absent ruler. Through this kind of imagery the prince was presented as desired by his people, appointed by God, and embodying all the positive qualities one could wish for in a sovereign. The high-minded style of the painting, sometimes inadequately described as neoclassical, was appropriate for the enhancement of the institution of monarchy during this critical period of its history, while the erudite elements of the work (Latin inscriptions, allegorical figures with obscure attributes, and so on) were calculated to appeal to the taste of the absent ruler and his representatives in Portugal. An anonymous description of the painting was published that same year, prefaced by a short introduction that further highlighted its purpose: The love of one’s sovereign and country, is the first and most inviolable duty for all the inhabitants of the state who can feel the powerful force of the sacred bonds that connect intimately all their particular interests to the glory of the ruler and the general prosperity of the monarchy. A loyal Portuguese, to whom this consideration is not unfamiliar, desiring to give proof of the candour of his feelings to the amiable prince that rules us, conceived the laudable project to erect a monument that perpetuates the memory of his eminent qualities, and brilliant virtues, that have earned him the love and adoration of his vassals.52 But this painting is also important for introducing figures such as the young male in the foreground holding the Portuguese royal arms and representing the Spirit of the Nation (Génio da Nação) or the other male figure with the royal arms emblazoned on his chest, representing Love of Country (Amor da Pátria). These idealized personifications were the only ways in which the Portuguese nation was represented in official imagery in this period. It was never seen to be defending the country and repelling the invader. One barely notices, for example, the armies of Portugal and Great Britain represented in diminutive scale, in the left background of the painting. This iconography, associating nation, country and monarchy (through the recurrent depiction of the royal arms) was closely related to the restoration of the political order as the war was being won for the allied forces of Portugal, Spain and Great Britain. Similar paintings were commissioned by


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other noblemen, such as the single standing figure of the Génio da Nação, also bearing the royal arms prominently, commissioned by the Baron de Quintela and painted by Sequeira in 1812.53 It is perhaps no accident that one of the rare official representations of the Portuguese people dating from this period depicts refugees resignedly waiting for the distribution of food, and extols the ‘laudable patriotism’ of the citizens of Lisbon who welcomed and sustained them. The print, called Sopa de Arroios (Illustration 13.5) after the place where the distribution of the soup for the poor was made, was published in Lisbon in 1813, but refers to events around the third French invasion in 1810, when thousands of people were forced to evacuate their homes and take refuge in the capital.54 Drawn by Sequeira and engraved by Gregório Francisco de Queiroz, the print was appropriately dedicated to ‘his Highness the Prince Regent, Our Lord, Augustus, Pius, Magnanimous, Father of the Country’. Sequeira himself signed with his full official title, as the first painter of the court. The subscription announcement refers to the refugees as the ‘worthy sons that preferred to risk being victims of famine, rather than subject themselves to the yoke of the Tyrant’.55 This kind of representation would have been especially suited as the official image of the Portuguese people, stressing their ‘positive’ qualities such as

Illustration 13.5. Gregório Francisco de Queiroz and Domingos António de Sequeira (after a drawing by Sequeira), Sopa de Arroios, 1813, etching and engraving, 54 ⫻ 85 cm, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon


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Illustration 13.6 José Aparicio, Famine in Madrid, 1818, oil on canvas, 315 ⫻ 437 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid

heroic resignation, rather than recalling their potential for subversion of the established order and disobedience towards the authorities. Similarly, the most representative image of the Spanish people during the war was for many decades the allegorical Famine in Madrid (Illustration 13.6), painted by José Aparicio (1770–1838) in 1818.56 The painting showed ‘Spanish constancy [during the] famine years of 1811 and 1812’, as is stated in the inscription (on the pillar, on the right) and exemplifies Spanish loyalty to their king by portraying the Spanish as willing to die rather than accept food from the French: ‘Nothing without Fernando’, concludes the inscription. It is not surprising that the iconic paintings by Goya that have indelibly marked the memory of the guerra de la independencia (war of independence) as the Peninsular War is usually called in Spain did not achieve their status as images of popular heroism until much later.57 When in 1854 a visitor to the Prado complained that Goya’s paintings were condemned ‘to a dark prison by the current director of the Museum’, the latter, none other than José de Madrazo, who 47 years earlier had painted the Death of Viriato, replied: ‘These paintings of the Second of May are definitely not those that immortalized his [the painter’s] name, nor should they be considered more than sketches made for pure practice; because they are at a considerable


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distance from that artistic merit that distinguishes him so much in many other works that he executed gloriously ... ’58 The time was not yet ripe either in Portugal or Spain for the reception and appreciation of an official imagery that would celebrate the actions of the nation in a struggle that eventually resulted in the restoration of the political order and the ancien régime. The Peninsular War might have given painters of the period ample opportunities to represent popular participation in the war. Instead, the predilection for allegory and the representation of the nation as a virile and heroic, but idealized, figure, as happened in Portugal, reflected the course and conservative outcome of the war, demonstrating at the same time the mentality of the dominant classes and those who catered to their needs. Although the royal family and court did not return from Brazil after the end of the war, monarchical authority was effectively represented by the governors of the kingdom and assisted by the continuing military presence of the British in Portugal. But the opening of the ports of Brazil to free commerce in 1808, the Anglo-Portuguese commercial treaty of 1810 and the elevation of Brazil to the status of kingdom in 1815 reduced Portugal to a marginal position within the empire and led to the gradual disintegration of the former colonial system. The loss of the exclusive trading privileges that this entailed caused the disgruntled mercantile bourgeoisie of Portugal to embrace an increasingly liberal and nationalistic ideology (with anti-British and anti-Brazilian overtones) and prepared the ground for the liberal revolution of 1820. It was the latter that forced the return of the king in 1821, though as a constitutional monarch and not as the absolute ruler he had departed. Ironically though, it seems that it was mostly concern over the reconstitution of the empire that led to the ‘failure of the first Portuguese liberal experiment’ and the return to absolutism in 1823, demonstrating the overwhelming importance of both empire and monarchy for Portuguese political realities and imaginary well into the nineteenth century.59

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their valuable comments and observations. I would also like to thank Conceição Amaral, Director of the Museu de Artes Decorativas (Fundação Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva, Lisbon), the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, the Divisão de Documentação Fotográfica of the Instituto dos Museus e da Conservação (Lisbon) and the Museo del Prado (Madrid) for providing the photographic material for the text and allowing it to be reproduced here.

Notes 1. The original spelling of the Portuguese titles has been preserved. All translations are made by the author, unless otherwise mentioned. D. Luís da Cunha, Instruções políticas, ed. Abílio Diniz Silva (Lisbon, 2001), 371 and 366. Although


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2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 the text was written in 1736, it remained unpublished, but appears to have been well known. Robert Southey, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (2nd edn, Bristol, 1799), 407–466, includes as an appendix an abridged translation of the text, without identifying the author. For a detailed analysis of Portugal’s political and diplomatic situation before 1807, see Valentim Alexandre, Os sentidos do Império: questão nacional e questão colonial na crise do Antigo Regime português (Porto, 1993), 93–164. Ibid. 88–89; Portugal participated, however, in the Roussillon campaign against the French (1793–94), and was later attacked by Spain in what became known as the War of the Oranges (May–June 1801). Ibid. 93–95. See Kenneth R. Maxwell, ‘The Generation of the 1790s and the Idea of LusoBrazilian Empire’, in Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil: Papers of the Newberry Library Conference, ed. Dauril Alden (Berkeley, 1973), 107–144 (here 137–141). For the history of the idea of the transfer, dating back to the sixteenth century, see also Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York, 2001), 15–37. For the deliberations of the Council of State prior to the move, see the documents for 26 August–24 November 1807 published in Enéas Martins Filho, O Conselho de Estado Português e a transmigração da Família Real em 1807 (Rio de Janeiro, 1968). Alexandre, Os sentidos do Império, 810–811. See also Maxwell, ‘The Generation of the 1790s’, 143. Alexandre, Os sentidos do Império, 102. For an analysis of the ideological and political positions of the two factions and their main representatives (Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho and António Araújo de Azevedo), see Graça and J. S. da Silva Dias, Os primórdios da maçonaria em Portugal, 2 vols (2nd edn, Lisbon, 1986), vol. 1, part 2, 422–450. Alexandre, Os sentidos do Império, 138. Southey, Letters, 401, mentioned the ‘dread they entertain of French principles’ in Portugal, and the determination of Portuguese custom-house officers to let ‘nothing about the French’ enter the country. See also in this volume, Rebecca Earle, ‘The French Revolutionary Wars in the Spanish-American Imagination, 1789–1830’, for the measures taken by the Spanish Crown to control the spread of information concerning the French Revolution. See the published document in Américo Pires de Lima, Memoria de D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho (1.º Conde de Linhares) ‘sobre o melhoramento dos domínios de S. Mag.e na América’ (Brasília, vol. 4; repr. Coimbra, 1948), 23–40 (here 25). See also the introductory pages of Coutinho’s speech to the Maritime Society of Portugal in 1802, in Marquez do Funchal, O Conde de Linhares: D. Rodrigo Domingos António de Sousa Coutinho (Lisbon, 1908), 129–130. Though the paintings of the period have invariably been characterized as ‘patriotic’ by Portuguese art historians the precise nature of this ‘patriotism’ still requires interpretation. The paintings taken to Brazil included the series of paintings by Domingos António de Sequeira depicting subjects from the life of Afonso Henriques and destined for the Palace of Ajuda. See Maria Alice Beaumont et al., Sequeira 1768– 1837: um português na mudança dos tempos, exhibition catalogue, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga ([Lisbon], 1996), 218–219, 222–223. Quoted in the entry for the Oath of Viriato by Dagoberto L. Markl, in Francisco Vieira, o Portuense 1765–1805, exhibition catalogue, Museu Nacional Soares dos


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14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

273

Reis, ed. Elisa Soares and José Alberto Seabra Carvalho [Porto, 2001], 209–210]. For the print after the lost painting, see ibid. 141. See also Nuno Saldanha, Tesouro das imagens (Lisbon, 1996), 44. See Amílcar Guerra and Carlos Fabião, ‘Viriato: genealogia de um mito’, Penélope. Fazer e Desfazer a História 8 (1992): 9–23 and ‘Viriato: em torno da iconografia de um mito’, Actas dos IV Cursos Internacionais de Verão de Cascais, 4 vols (Cascais, 1998), vol. 3, Mito e símbolo na história de Portugal e do Brasil, 33–79. The authors do not appear to know the painting by Vieira or the Bartolozzi engraving made after it, but discuss a rather harsh lithograph based on Vieira’s composition. The lithograph bears no mention of either Vieira’s or Bartolozzi’s name and was published as a frontispiece to the 1846 edition of Mascarenhas’ poem, cited in note 16. Flórido de Vasconcelos, ‘O Juramento de Viriato’, O Tripeiro 9: 10 (October 1990): 318; Markl, entry in Francisco Vieira, o Portuense, 210; Paulo Varela Gomes, Vieira Portuense (Lisbon, [2001]), 72. Braz Garcia de Mascarenhas, Viriato trágico: poema heróico em 20 cantos, 2 vols (2nd edn, Lisbon, 1846), vol. 2, 107 (Canto 13, stanza 31), and 157–184 (Canto 15). Vítor Serrão, ‘A pintura proto-barroca em Portugal, 1612–1657’, doctoral dissertation, 2 vols (Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, 1992), vol. 1, ‘O triunfo do naturalismo e do tenebrismo’, 419–431, 607–609. Fernando Dores Costa, A Guerra da Restauração: 1641–1668 (Lisbon, 2004), 20–21, 109–110. The tragedy was presented to the literary academy Arcádia Lusitana in 1757, and was published posthumously, in Theatro de Manoel de Figueiredo, 14 vols (Lisbon, 1804–1815), vol. 13 (1810), 192–252. [Sebastião José Xavier Botelho], Viriato: tragedia (Lisbon, 1809), 61. The play was printed with the indication ‘It can be presented on stage. Lisbon, November 22, 1808’. José da Cunha Taborda, Regras da arte da pintura, com breves reflexões criticas sobre os caracteres distinctivos de suas escolas, vidas, e quadros de seus mais célebres professores. Escritas na lingoa italiana por Michael Angelo Prunetti ... Accresce memoria dos mais famosos pintores portuguezes, e dos melhores quadros seus que escrevia o traductor (Lisbon, 1815), 246. See the biographical data of the painter compiled by Elisa Soares in Francisco Vieira, o Portuense, 277. The identification between Lusitanians and Portuguese was already in operation by the last decades of the sixteenth century. See Raul Miguel Rosado Fernandes, ‘Raízes do Nacionalismo Português em André de Resende’, in idem, Em busca das raízes do Ocidente, 2 vols (Lisbon, 2006), vol. 1, Cultura clássica, cultura portuguesa, 295–315. Mark Hallett suggested in conversation that the analogies between the representation of the female body in Vieira’s painting and Fuseli’s Nightmare (c. 1790–91, Goethe Museum, Frankfurt) would not have been lost on the British public. Paulo Varela Gomes, ‘Francisco Vieira, as suas relações com a Feitoria Inglesa no Porto e a sua visita a Londres’, in Portugal e o Reino Unido: A aliança revisitada, exhibition catalogue, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, ed. Angela Delaforce (Lisbon, 1994), 88. See the facsimile edition of the catalogue in Helmut Börsch-Supan (ed.), Die Kataloge der Berliner Akademie-Ausstellungen, 1786–1850 (Berlin, 1971), 26. Vieira


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27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 was also mentioned as a history painter twice in 1799, in the dedication of two prints addressed to the royal family of Portugal. See Francisco Vieira, o Portuense, 140, and Ernesto Soares, A colecção calcográfica da Universidade do Porto (Lisbon, 1952), nos 310 A–G. See, for example, Paulo Varela Gomes, ‘Vieira portuense e a arte do seu tempo’, MA thesis, 2 vols (Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1987), vol. 1, 111–137. The literature on British history painting and print reproductions is extensive. See, for instance, The Painted Word: British History Painting, 1750–1830, exhibition catalogue, Heim Gallery, London, ed. Peter Cannon-Brookes (Woodbridge, 1991). José Seabra da Silva was removed from the Council of State because of his opposition to the prince assuming the Regency without the summoning of the Cortes. For an overview of the period, see Ana Cristina Araújo, ‘As invasões francesas e a afirmação das ideias liberais’, in História de Portugal, gen. ed. José Mattoso, 8 vols (Lisbon, [1993–94]), vol. 5, O Liberalismo (1807–1890), ed. Luís Reis Torgal and João Lourenço Roque [1993], 17–43. For example, Damião António de Lemos Faria e Castro, História geral de Portugal, e suas conquistas: offerecida á Rainha Nossa Senhora D. Maria I, 20 vols (Lisbon, 1786–1804), vol. 1 (1786), 99–100, relates the same event in similar terms. Frei Bernardo de Brito, Monarquia Lusitana, parte primeira (1597; facsimile edition, Lisbon, 1973), 209–210. Faria e Castro, História geral de Portugal, 97. Isabel Azcárate Luxan et al., Historia y alegoría: los concursos de pintura de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (1753–1808), exhibition catalogue, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid, 1994), 261–262. Ibid. 189–191, 203–205, 239–241. Since the Roman province of Lusitania also included the Spanish region of Extremadura, the Spanish could–and did–claim Viriato as part of their past, although not to the same extent as the Portuguese. Javier Jordán de Urríes de la Colina, ‘José de Madrazo en Italia (1803–1819)’, Archivo Español de Arte 65/259–260 (1992): 351–370 (here 367, 359). For this painting, see the entry by José Luis Díez in The Nineteenth Century in the Prado, exhibition catalogue, Museo Nacional del Prado, ed. José Luis Díez and Javier Barón (Madrid, 2008), 116–119. Enrique Arias Anglés, ‘Influencias de John Flaxman y Gavin Hamilton en José de Madrazo y nueva lectura de La muerte de Viriato’, Archivo Español de Arte 58/232 (1985): 351–362 (here 360–361); idem, ‘La “dissidence” des disciples espagnols de David’, in Le néoclassicisme en Espagne (Thonon-les-Bains, 1991), 62–85 (here 79–80); idem, ‘La visión del mundo clásico en el joven José de Madrazo’, La visión del mundo clásico en el arte español: VI Jornadas de Arte (Madrid, 1993), quoted in Markl, entry in Francisco Vieira, o Portuense, 210. Anglés, ‘La “dissidence” des disciples espagnols’, 78. For an account of the war, see Charles Esdaile, The Peninsular War. A New History (2nd edn, London, 2003). See Vasco Pulido Valente, ‘O povo em armas: a revolta nacional de 1808–1809’, Análise Social 15/57 (1979): 7–48 (here 12). Ibid. 19–26. Lluis Roura, ‘La contre-révolution en Espagne et la lutte contre la France, 1793–1795, et 1808–1814’, in La contre-révolution en Europe, XVIII–XIXe siècles: réalités politiques et sociales, résonances culturelles et idéologiques, ed. JeanClément Martin (Rennes, 2001), 205–219 (here 210), makes a similar claim for Spain.


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274

275

42. The word ‘nação’ is defined in the Diccionario da Lingua Portugueza composto pelo Padre D. Rafael Bluteau, reformado, e acrescentado por Antonio de Moraes Silva, 2 vols (Lisbon, 1789), vol. 2, 107, as ‘the people of a country, or region, that have separate language, laws, and government’, while ‘patria’ (vol. 2, 170) simply means ‘native land’. 43. On the subject of pamphlets, see Nuno Daupias d’Alcochete, ‘Les pamphlets portugais anti-napoléoniens’, Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português 11 (1977): 507–515; António Pedro Vicente, ‘José Accursio das Neves, panfletário antinapoleónico’, Ler História 17 (1989): 113–127, and ‘Panfletos anti-napoleónicos durante a Guerra Peninsular: actividade editorial da Real Imprensa da Universidade’, Revista de História das Ideias 20 (1999): 101–130. See also Teresa Bernardino, Sociedade e atitudes mentais em Portugal (1777–1810) (Lisbon, 1986), 192–200. 44. Vicente, ‘Panfletos anti-napoleónicos’, 108–110. His estimate of a total of about 1,500 pamphlets for the period 1808–11 may be a little high. 45. José Acursio das Neves, A voz do patriotismo na restauração de Portugal, e Hespanha (Lisbon, 1808), 13–14. The passage quoted refers to the victorious battle of Ourique (1139) against the Moors. Afonso Henriques, commander of the Christian troops, became the first king of Portugal. 46. José Acursio das Neves, A salvação da pátria: Proclamação aos Portuguezes sobre a sua honra, e o seu dever nas actuaes circumstancias da Monarquia (Lisbon, 1809), 7–11. 47. See, for example, L. F. C. S., Voz do verdadeiro patriotismo aos egoístas, a fim de destruir toda a irresolução, que possa ainda haver em alguns restos da Nação Portugueza, na prompta, e constante determinação de correr ás armas contra o tyranno do universo (Lisbon, 1809), 12–13. 48. See, for example, Francisco Soares Franco, Reflexões sobre a conducta do Principe Regente de Portugal, revistas, e corregidas (Coimbra, 1808). 49. José Acursio das Neves, Historia geral da invasão dos Francezes em Portugal, e da restauração deste reino, 5 vols (Lisbon, 1810–1811), vol. 2 (1810), 6, 19. Neves’ Historia geral is an excellent source for the period, written from an absolutist point of view. 50. Entry by Alexandra Reis Gomes in Beaumont, Sequeira 1768–1837, 162–163. 51. The events that led to the painter’s imprisonment and trial, as well as his apology, are related by J. Ribeiro Guimarães, Summario de varia historia, 5 vols (Lisbon, 1872–1875), vol. 4 (1874), 102–115. 52. Anon., Explicação de hum painel offerecido por hum leal Portuguez a S.A.R. o Príncipe Regente Nosso Senhor, obra da invenção, e execução de Domingos António de Sequeira, Primeiro Pintor da Câmara do mesmo Senhor (Lisbon, 1810), iii. 53. The painting now belongs to the Museu da Cidade/Câmara Municipal de Lisboa. Entry by Alexandra Reis Gomes in Beaumont, Sequeira 1768–1837, 165. 54. For the print see ibid. 225. 55. The subscription announcement can be found in a compilation of various documents, in the Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, with the code H.G. 4543//54 A. 56. José Manuel Pita Andrade, Goya y sus primeras visiones de la historia (Madrid, 1989), 28. 57. The poster announcing the bicentenary commemorative exhibition, Mayo 1808– 2008. Un pueblo, una nación (Centro de exposiciones Arte Canal, Madrid), showed a detail of Goya’s painting The Third of May 1808 in Madrid (1814, Museo del Prado): the head of the central male figure wearing the white shirt.


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58. The complaint was published anonymously in the Madrid journal La Nación, under the section ‘Crónica de la Capital’; Madrazo’s reply was published in the same journal later the same year. Quoted in Pita Andrade, Goya, 28, n. 71. 59. The phrase belongs to Alexandre, Os sentidos do Império, 806. See also 420–440 (‘Da perspectiva imperial à afirmação nacionalista’) and his general conclusions, 795–815. See also Ana Cristina Araújo, ‘O “Reino Unido de Portugal, Brasil e Algarves”, 1815–1822’, Revista de História das Ideias, 14 (1992): 233–261.


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276

abolition of slavery, 9, 10, 16, 53–4, 57, 65–6, 123, 148, 184 in Brazil, 10 by Britain, 35 by France, 53–4, 65–7, 151–2, 183 in Portugal, 9 in Saint Domingue, 9, 53–4, 57, 66, 184 in United States, 9, 11, 148 abolition of the slave trade, 4–5, 16 by Britain, 4–5, 35, 141 by France, 67, 150 by Netherlands, 9 by Portugal, 9 by Spain, 9 by United States, 9, 148 abolitionists, abolitionist movement, 149, 211 in Britain, 141–2, 145, 151 in France, 50, 52, 139, 141, 147, 150 in Haiti, 44 in Ireland, 123 in United States, 142, 148–50 Aboukir Bay, 63 d’Abrantès, Duchesse, 61, 73 absolutism, 13, 30, 149, 271 Achilles, 264 Acre, 63, 95 Afghan revolt, 3 Afghanistan, 35, 239–40 rulers of, 252 Africa, 1–2, 4, 11, 21, 31, 45–8, 56–8, 65, 102 slaves starting new life in, 149 see also: Central Africa; North Africa; South-East Africa; West Africa African languages, 4 African peoples, people of African descent, 39 in America, 4 in Haiti, 14 African slaves, 25, 46 Africans, 26, 45, 162 in Buenos Aires, 89 disenfranchised in Spain, 30

Afshar, Nadir Shah, 239 age of revolution, 1, 2, 6, 40, 45, 59, 181 Agency for Convert Affairs (Russia), 225 agriculture, 86, 102, 222 see also: coffee plantations; sugar plantations; tobacco Agwé, governor of the sea, 48 Ajuda, Palace of, 258, 260 Akmeti, 224 Aksan, Virginia, 38 Alaska, 218 Albariño, Jacinto, 109–11 Albariño, José, 109–10 Albertsz, Jan Basson, 126 Alexander I, of Russia, 221–3, 228, 231, 235 Alexander II, of Russia, 223, 228 Alexandre, Pierre, 210 Alexandre, Valentim, 257 Alexandria, 40, 77, 242 Alfonso II, of Kongo, 46 Algeria, French invasion of, 5, 77 Jews from, 71 refugees from, 70 Algiers, 68 Ali, servant of Napoleon, 72 al-Jabarti, Egyptian historian, 64 Alto Peru (Bolivia), 101–2 Alvarez, Diego, 111 de Álzaga, Martín, 101–18, 120 Amaru, Tupac, 29 America, 2, 4, 40, 67, 122, 160 see also: South America; United States of America American Indians, 22 in North America, 157 in South America, 82–3, 89, 110–11, 118, 187 see also Mexican Indians American Revolution, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 21–2, 26, 28–9, 36, 143–4, 161, 184 American settlers in Missouri, 169, 171 American War of Independence (1775–83), 1, 142, 160, 187, 208 277

10.1057/9780230282698 - War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830, Edited by Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall 9780230_229891_16_ind.indd 277

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Index

Index

Amiens, see Treaty of Amiens ancien régime, 2, 15, 66–7, 83, 147, 265, 267, 271 Anderson, Caitlin, 14 Anglés, Enrique Arias, 264 Anglican Church, see Church of England Anglican communion, 203 Anglicans, 141, 204 Anglo-Catholics, 204 Anglo-Portuguese commercial treaty, 271 Angola, 5 anti-clericalism, 103 Antilles, 65, 166 antislavery campaigns and movements, 6–8, 10–11, 16, 62, 142, 146–7, 149, 151–2 in Britain, 7, 9, 36, 140–2, 144, 150, 152 in France, 7, 12, 36, 139, 141–4, 149–50, 152 in United States, 9, 36, 142, 144, 146–9, 152 see also: abolition of slavery; abolition of the slave trade; abolitionism Antonini, Santiago, 101–2, 105, 113, 115–18, 120 Aparicio, José, 270 Aqa Muhammad, 237, 239 ‘Arab identity’, 62 Arabia, 38, 64, 238, 241 see also Saudi Arabia Arabian Nights, 247 Arabic language, 63, 71, 77 Arabism, 63 Arabs in France, 61, 62, 77 occupied Portugal, 259 racialized, 77 el Arag, Saad, 76 Argentina, 8, 38, 187 see also: Buenos Aires; Rio de la Plata armées revolutionaires, 33 Armenians, 219–20, 235 armies, black, revolutionary, in Saint Domingue, 55 British, 14, 15, 164, 268 of ex-slaves, 54 of French Republic, 44 garrison life, 86 Indian, 34

Napoleonic, 5, 229 Portuguese, 269 racially integrated, 53 Russian, 222 Spanish, 268 Tsarist, 235 Venezuelan, 185 see also: demobilization; militarization; military; ‘military revolution’; mobilization; soldiers; veterans; women; and individual countries Articles of Confederation, 167 Aristotle, 27 Armitage, David, 37 de Arredondo, Nicolás, 8, 103–4, 119–20 artisans, 47, 101–2, 104, 115, 118, 220–1 Asia, 1, 2, 21–4, 27, 36–8, 41, 238 European colonies in, 23–4 Astrakhan’, 225 Asturians, 89 atheism, 37 Athens, 242 Atkins, Keletso, 122 Atlantic Ocean, 7, 50, 53–5, 62, 85, 122, 212 Atlantic revolution, 57 Atlantic slave trade, 45–7, 57, 66 Atlantic trade, 102 Atlantic world, 21, 56, 118, 122 Auslander, Leora, 78 Australia, 247 Austria, 151, 223 Austrian Empire, 220 autobiographies, 86 Awadh, 241–2, 253 Azerbaijan, 236 Azov, 227 Aztecs, 39 Baardhuijs, Jacoba, 132 Baghdad, 241 Baird, Sir David, 86 bakeries, 102, 116, 119 bakers, 104, 116–17, 119–20 Balkans, 66 Baltic, 222 Baltic Germans, 219, 221 Baltic provinces, of Russian Empire, 220, 222, 225 see also: Latvia; Lithuania


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278

Balts, 221 Barbados, 201 Barbarín, Juan, 105–18 Bartolozzi, Francesco, 260, 273 Basra, 241, 242 Bastille, 141 Batavia, 40 van Batavia, Jephta, 133 Batavian military Governor General, 122 Batavian Republic, 31 Baudot, Georges, 182 Bay of Bengal, 36 Bayly, Christopher, 1, 3, 6, 14, 45, 62–3, 236 Belgium, 35 Belgrano, Manuel, 96 Belley, Jean-Baptiste, 44, 52–3 Belorus, 223 Belorussians, 219 Benezet, Anthony, 142–4, 148 Bengal, 25–6, 38, 241 van Bengalen, Pluto, 132 Bengali Portuguese, 28 Bénot, Yves, 144 Bentham, Jeremy, 28 Beresford, Colonel William Carr, 85, 96 Bergeron, Louis, 67 Bergesse, Nicolas, 145 Berlin, 2 Berlin, Isaiah, 27 Bessarabia, 4, 218 Bessarabians, 219 Biassou, Georges, 58 Bird, Colin, 27 Black Code of Missouri, 167 Black Sea, 227 Blackstone, William, 211 Blouberg, battle of, 122 Bloud, Carlos Josef, 114–15 Bogotá, 12, 13, 179–80, 182, 185–6, 188–9, 195 Bohol (Philippines), 29 Bolívar, Simon, 22–3, 38, 184, 190 Bolivia, 101 Bombay, 242, 251 Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon Bonaparte bonnet rouge, see Phrygian caps Borodino, battle of, 228 Bose, Rash Behari, 25 Boston, 139

279

Botelho, Sebastião José Xavier, 259–60 van Bougies, Spadelle, 130 Boulle, Pierre, 67 Bourbon, 5 Bourbon dynasty, 264 Boyacá, battle of, 195 Braakfontein, 124 Brading, David, 39 Bragança, Duke of, 259 Brahmins, 24, 39 Branciforte, Miguel de la Grúa Talamanca, Marquis of, 182 Brazeau, Joseph, 164–5, 170–1 Brazil, 3, 5, 9, 10, 28, 113–14, 119, 257, 260, 263, 271 rebellion of 1789 in, 24 return of Portuguese monarchy from, 271 transfer of Portuguese monarchy to, 256–8, 267 Brazilian Portuguese, 28 Bréda, Toussaint, 49 Brissot, Félicité, 140 Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre, 7, 12, 139–52 Britain, 1–3, 5–7, 10, 14–15, 21, 32, 35–7, 55, 64, 87, 91, 139, 144–5, 150, 151, 152, 159, 164, 166, 240–1 Act of Settlement (1701) and American colonies, 158, 160 army, 14, 15, 122, 164 blockade by, 64 Cabinet, 85 in Cape Colony, 122, 134 and the Caribbean, 4, 36, 52–4 citizenship of, 201 Crown, 28, 87, 151, 203–6, 213 diplomats, diplomacy of, 85, 236, 239 in Egypt, 65 expeditionary forces of, 6, 85, 93, 97 Glorious Revolution of 1688 in, 213 government, 35, 85, 91 House of Lords, 28 identity, 15, 202 in India, 2, 4, 239–40 in Iran, 237–8 and Louisiana, 159 in Mauritius, 25 navy, 55, 66, 160, 212 occupation of Buenos Aires, 12, 87, 96 officers, 15


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Index

Britain – continued Parliament, 28, 39, 151, 204 public opinion in, 87 reform acts, 35, 37 and the Rio de la Plata, 81–2, 84, 87, 89–92, 95, 96, 117, 119 and Saint Domingue, 54 and Seven Years War, 158 ships of, used in evacuation from Egypt, 63 in Sierra Leone, 39 West Indian colonies of, 4, 36 see also George III British Empire, 4, 37, 40, 122–3, 202, 205–6, 209, 220, 267 British India, see India British Jacobins, 209 de Brito, Frei Bernardo, 263 Brown, Christopher, 8 Brumaire, see Eighteenth Brumaire Brune, General Guillaume, 74 Brutus, 34 Brydges, Harford Jones, see Jones, Harford Buckingham, James Silk, 36 Buddhism, 31–3 Buddhists, 219 Buenos Aires, 2, 6, 8, 21, 83, 85–4, 96–8, 101–19, 183, 199 see also Rio de la Plata Bundelcand, 251 Burgess, Thomas, 211 Burma, 4, 36 Bushire, 243 de Bustamente, Miguel García, 109 butchers, 89 Byzantine Empire, 227 Byzantium, 226 van de Caab, Abraham, 123, 125, 128–9, 132 van de Caab, August, 123, 125 Caballero, José María, 12, 179–81, 184–6, 188–9, 194–5, 197 de Caceres y Garre, Josef García Martinez, 116 Cádiz, 120, 193 Cadiz Cortez, 21–3, 28, 30 Cairo, 63, 69 Calcutta, 6, 23, 25–6, 28, 30, 36, 40, 123, 250–1

Hindoo College, 26 Town Hall, 28 Caledon, Lord, 121, 134 California, 218 Camp, Ichabod, 161–2 Camus, Albert, 41 Canada, 6, 35, 37, 162 Canébière (Marseille), 69 Capaya, 93 Cape Colony, 8, 121–3, 129, 131, 134–5 Cape garrison, 133 Cape of Good Hope, 85, 95 Cape Town, 121–4, 128–31, 133–5 Caracas, 22 Carey, Peter, 31 Caribbean, 2–10, 14, 21, 24, 39–40, 45–7, 50, 53–8, 62, 66–7, 85, 102–4, 146, 151, 159–60, 184, 201, 205–7, 212 Carr, William C., 172 Carrasco, Pedro, 111 Carreto, Juan Martín, 105 castas (coloureds of Mexico), 38 castes, 34 Castilian Crown, 263 Catalans, 89 Catherine II, 218, 223, 226–7, 229–30 Catholic Church, 13, 65–6, 193, 203, 207 Catholicism, 46, 172, 207, 229 Catholics, 15, 202, 204–8, 211, 213, 219, 225, 232 Syrian, 64, 70 Cato, 34 cattle-farming, 160 Caucasians, 240 Caucasus, 6, 15, 66, 76, 219–2, 224, 226, 228, 23–2, 235–6, 238–40 censorship, 142, 182 Central Africa, 7, 45, 47 Central America, 6, 212 Central Asia, 238, 244 Cerré, Pascal, 162 Ceylon, 4, 36 see also Sri Lanka van Ceylon, Adonis, 123–5 Chaate, Saad, 79 Chandernagore, 6, 25–6 Charles III, of Spain, 158, 159 Charles IV, of Spain, 166, 181 Charleston, 7, 53 Chartres, 139


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280 Index

de Chastellux, Marquis, 143–4, 149, 154 chastity, 249 Chateaubriand, René de, 72 Chechens, 220, 224 Cheremis, 226 Cherigov infantry regiment, 222 Chesme Palace, 227 Chihuahua, 168 children as slaves, 45, 162–3 captured by French in Saint Domingue, 51 fighting in Buenos Aires, 91 flee their homes, 124 killed in Warsaw, 229 upbringing of, 248 Chile, 5, 182 China, 6, 21, 28–9, 31, 32, 36, 220 China Seas, 23 Chinese, 26 disenfranchised in Spain, 30 merchants, 29 radicals, 39 Chirino, José Leonardo, 183 Christ, 186, 263 Christian clergy, see priests Christianity, 15, 24, 27, 221, 225, 227–8, 230, 232 adopted by former slaves, 39 conversion to, 222 see also evangelism Christianization, 39 Christians, Coptic, 63, 64 Goan, 24 Indians, 28 lapsed, 226 in Russian Empire, 221 Syrian (Melkite), 63 see also: Catholics; Orthodox; Protestants; Uniate Christians Christophe, Henri, 51, 55 Chukchi tribesmen, 221, 224 Chunder, Bholanauth, 25 Church of England, 204, 207 churches, 104, 157, 185 desecration of, 103 Chuvash, 222, 225 citizen-soldiers, 13 citizenship, 1, 11, 13–14, 16, 38, 52, 66, 186–7, 190, 194, 202, 213

281

British, 201 European conceptions of, 2 and the French Revolution, 3, 7 lack of in Russia, 14 and military service, in Ottoman Empire, 37 civic festivals, 13 Civil Code, of Napoleonic France, 65 civil liberties, 142 civilization, 12, 15–16, 26, 40, 56, 103, 141, 243, 245, 247, 249–50 Clamorgan, Henry, 173 Clamorgan, Jacques, 10, 157–66, 168–75 Clamorgan, Santiago, 161 Clark, J. C. D., 201 Clarke, Edward, 228 Clarkson, Thomas, 56, 141, 150–2 class, 16, 236 see also middle class Clavière, Etienne, 141–2, 144–5 Club Massiac, 150 Cobb, Richard, 33 Code Noir of 1685, 66, 163 coffee, 54, 160 coffee plantations, 48, 51 Coimbra, University of, 266 Coke, Edward, 203 Coller, Ian, 11–12 Colombia, 13, 180, 184, 188–90, 197 war of independence, 187 Colonia do Sacramento, 83 Colonial Assembly (Mauritius), 26 Company of the Explorers of the Upper Missouri, 161 comparative anatomy, 16 Concordat of 1801, 65 concubines, 163, 165 de Condorcet, Marquis, 50, 141 Congress, see United States Congress Kingdom of Poland, 4, 218, 220, 222 middle class (bourgeoisie), 143 conscription, 71, 73, 221 Constantine, brother of Alexander I, 221, 227 Constantinople, 227 Constitution of Cádiz, 193 Constitutional Convention, see United States constitutional monarchies, 37, 40, 52 Consulate, 64


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Index

Index

Continental Blockade, 257 Continental Congress, 167 conversion, 225, 226 de Conway, Thomas, 25 Coptic Christians, Copts, 63–4, 70, 77 Coptic Legion, 64 Cork, 97 Coro (Venezuela), 183 Cornwallis, Charles, Lord, 25, 28 Corrientes, 110 Corsica, 66 Cortez, 30 Cortez, parliament of Cadiz, see Cadiz Cortes Cossacks, 6, 220, 222–6 Costa, Fernando Dores, 259 Council of Indiana, 167 Courier de l’Europe, 140 courtesans, 69 courtship, customs of, 248 courts martial, 14 creole elites, 36, 38, 40 creole languages, 4 creole landowners, 183 creoles, creole settlers, 1, 4, 8, 11, 14, 22, 25–6, 29–30, 39, 48 Crescent City (New Orleans), 160 de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St John, 142–4, 146 Crimea, 2, 218, 228 Crimean Peninsula, 227 criminality, among slaves in Buenos Aires, 102 de la Cruz Pantoja, Mariá, 183 Cuba, 5, 9, 159, 161 Cubans, 30 Cúcuta, Congress of, 189 cultural encounters, 6 cultural revolutions, 2 cultural transfer, 4 Cundinamarca, Republic of, 189 de Cunha, Luís, 256 Czartoryski, Adam, 223 Daendels, Marshal, 31 Damascus, 77 Darfour, 69 Daudet, Ernest, 73 David, Jacques-Louis, 13, 193, 264, 265 Davis, David Brion, 152 Davis, Natalie Zeman, 135

The Death of Cesar (Voltaire), 185 Decaen, Charles, 25 Decembrist Revolt, 223 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 13, 50, 57–8, 182 declaration of independence (Haiti), 55 declaration of independence (Mexico), 38 Declaration of Independence (US), 7 Delany, David, 162 demobilization, 93 democracy, introduced on plantations, 54 Dépôt des Réfugies Egyptiens, 61, 68, 70, 72, 76 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 227, 231 Descartes, René, 198 deserters, 218 desertion, 84, 90, 95–6 by slaves, 123–4 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 51, 55 diaries, 6, 12, 179–81, 185, 194 Diario de un soldado, 90 Díaz, José, 110–18, 120 Dickens, Charles, 173 Dipanagara, Prince, 31 Dniester river, 227 Donghi, Tulio Halperín, 81, 93 Dom João, of Portugal, 5 see also Portugal, Prince Regent Dom Pedro, of Brazil and Portugal, 3 Domergue, Armand, 230 Don river, 220, 223 Dorpat, 220, 222–3 Douin, Georges, 63 Dreijer, Jan, 126, 130 drunkenness, 69 Dublin, 245, 246 Dubois, Laurent, 4, 8, 9 Duchy of Warsaw, 220, 230 Dumont, Juan Luis, 113–20 Duncan, Jonathan, 251 Dundas, Henry, 27 Dupleix College, Chandernagore, 25 Dupont, François, 143 Durand, Charles, 74 Durranis (in Afghanistan), 240 Dutch, 36, 85 Dutch colonial rule, 122 Dutch East India Company, 122 Dutch East Indies, 31, 35 Dutch empire, 40


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282

283

Dutch government, 35 see also Netherlands

exclusion, 11 executions, 5, 72

Earle, Rebecca, 12 East India Charter acts, 36 East India Company, 27–9, 35–6, 38–9, 123, 239, 241, 251, 253 see also Dutch East India Company East Indies, 36, 123 see also Dutch East Indies Ecole des Langues Orientales, 253 Ecuador, 93 Edinburgh, 208 Egypt, 1, 12, 35, 37, 62–5, 68–70, 72, 76, 95, 236, 239, 251 occupied by Napoleon, 62–3, 241 refugees from, 11–12 ‘Egyptian Legation’, 64–5, 68 ‘Egyptian refugees’, 61, 68, 70, 75–7 Egyptians, 63–5, 68–70 ‘Egyptians’, in France, 62, 69, 71, 73–6 allegiance to Bonaparte, 73 Egyptian village (Marseilles), 61 Eighteenth Brumaire, 63, 65, 67, 259 Elba, 67 elites, 94 Elizabeth I, 204 emancipation, 3–4, 7–10, 16, 27, 44, 53–4, 58, 66, 142–3, 145–6, 149, 170–1 Emancipation Proclamation, 10 Encyclopedists, 143 Engativá, 180 England, 7, 122, 140, 203, 227, 242, 244, 248, 251 English, 244 Enlightenment, 7, 16, 22, 24, 27, 103, 151, 184, 185, 197 equality, 7, 10–11, 16, 26, 34, 40, 50, 65, 67, 127, 193, 194, 203, 206, 213 Ermolov, Aleksey Petrovich, 235 erotica, 247 España, José Mariá, 184 Estado da India, see Portuguese India Estonians, 219 European imperialism, 242 European rivalries, 245 evangelism (Christian), evangelical movements, 23, 27 ex-soldiers, 68

Fabre, Augustin, 73 Falklands, see Malvinas False Bay, 86 Far East, of Russian Empire, 219–26, 228, 232 de Faria, Manuel de Godoy y Álvarez, 117 farmers, American, 166 in Argentina, 89 in Cape Colony, 121, 123–8, 130–4 in Egypt, 64 Iranian, 245 in Russian Empire, 221 Fars (Iran), 243 Fath 'Ali Shah, 235, 237, 240, 247, 249 Fédon’s Rebellion, 202, 209–10, 212 Ferdinand VII, 179, 180 Fernándey, Juan Marchena, 94 Ferri, Lazaro, 105 festivals, 6, 13, 187–9, 194 de Figueiredo, Manuel, 259 Filipino Portuguese, 28 Filipino priesthood, 30 Filipino radicals, 29 Filipinos, disenfranchised in Spain, 30 see also Philippines Finland, 2, 4, 218, 220, 223, 225 constitution of, 223 Finns, 219 First World War, 173 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 164, 165 fleur-de-lys, 58, 66 Florescano, Enrique, 193 Florida, 5, 183 Floridablanca, Count of, 181 forced labour, 7 abolished across Spanish empire, 22 former slaves, 9, 39, 54, 69, 75 Fort Knokke, 133 Foucault, Michel, 32 Fox (American Indians), 157 France, 1–14, 21–2, 27–8, 33, 35–7, 40, 50–6, 58–9, 61–71, 73, 77, 104–6, 117–18, 140–6, 150–1, 159, 164, 166, 172, 181–5, 189, 192–3, 205, 207, 210, 213, 242 in Caribbean, 9, 36, 146, 160


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Index

Index

France – continued citizens of, in Buenos Aires, 117 civic status in, 76 Civil Code, 65 colonial empire, 5, 24, 27, 53–4, 65, 184 Concordat of 1801, 65 constitutions, 190, 192, 221 Consulate, 64 Convention (French Assembly), 7, 24–5, 53–4, 151–2, 182–3 Crown of, 207 elites in, 15 Estates General, 150 government of, 52, 54, 186, 241 in Grenada , 206–8 invasion of Egypt, 62–4, 239 invasion of Portugal, 21–2, 257, 265–6, 269 invasion of Russia, 229–30 Legislative Assembly, 150–2 and Lousiana, 54, 158–9, 167–8 Ministry of War, 68 monarchy, 158, 182 nation of, 11 National Assembly, 25, 44, 51–2, 58, 139, 147, 150 National Guard, 61, 73, 74 navy, 104 officers, 15 public opinion in, 150 Republic of, 44, 52, 57, 58 right to reside in, 75 and Saint Domingue, 5–9, 44–59, 66–7, 103–4, 139, 147, 151–2, 166, 184 and Seven Years War, 158 soldiers of, 69 and Treaty of Paris, 205 at war with Spain, 103, 182, 184–5 see also: Louis XV; Louis XVI; Napoleon Bonaparte Franklin, Benjamin, 149, 150 fraternity, 26 free blacks, 101, 107, 124, 137, 148, 183 Free Economic Society, 222 free people of colour, see gens de couleur free trade, 21–3, 28, 35–6, 146, 222 freed slaves, 36, 39, 46, 49, 54, 55, 187, 191 see also former slaves

Freire, Juan Angel, 105 French America, 158 French Canada, 159 see also Quebec French Catholicism, 207 French, character of, 244 French Guiana, 150 French immigrants, in Buenos Aires, 104, 106, 110 French India, 25–6 French and Indian War, see Seven Years War French language, 48 French residents of New Orleans, 159 French Revolution (1789–1794), 3, 7–8, 15, 21, 23–4, 26, 28, 33, 44, 49–50, 65, 67, 72, 102–4, 108–9, 114, 118, 139, 149, 151–2, 180–1, 183–4, 194, 230, 256–7 accounts of, 236 admirers of, 183 iconography of, 187–8, 192 ideas, ideology of, 8, 184, 192 impact of in the Caribbean and Africa, 21, 44, 202 information about in Spanish America, 185 interpretations of, 24 language of, 186–7, 193–4 symbolism, symbols of, 186–7, 189, 192–4 see also: liberty trees; Phrygian caps French, Russian perceptions of, 229–30 French settlers, in North America, 159 Freund, Bill, 133 Freygang, Frederika, 240 Freygang, Wilhelm, 240–1, 243, 245 Friars, landholding in Philippines, 29–30 fur trade, 161 furs, 157, 160 Gaceta de México, 182 Gaffarel, Paul, 76 Gainot, Bernard, 65 Galbaud, 52 Galicians, 89 Gallardo, Antonio, 113, 115 gaming establishments, 102 Gansz, Johannes Augustus Dreijer, 128 García, Baltasar, 106 Gardane, Paul, 237, 240–2, 248


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284

Gates, Horatio, 149 Gauhati (India), 25 Geggus, David, 5, 184 gender, 164, 236, 243, 248 differences, 16, 246 discourses, 13 distinctions, 2 divisions of labour, 248 images of, 248 norms, 194 and political participation, 14 relations, 247 roles, 122, 132, 246 see also masculinity gens de couleur (free people of colour), 7, 9, 26, 50–2 in France, 67, 69–70, 76 George III, of Great Britain, 206, 251 Georgi, King of Georgia, 218 Georgia, 4, 218–19, 225, 236, 239 rulers of, 251 Georgia (North America), 7 Georgian Orthodox Church, 225 Georgians, 218, 235 German law, 223 Germans, see Baltic Germans Germany, 220 Gibbon, Edward, 32 Gibraltar, 133 Gillespie, Alexander, 88, 93 Girodet, Anne-Louis, 44 Girondins, 139, 150, 152 Gizhiga, 6, 221, 223–5 Glorious Revolution of 1688, see Britain Goa, 5, 23–4, 28, 30, 40 Gondi, 93 González, José Caridad, 183 Goya, Francisco, 270 Gozlan, Léon, 71, 74–5, 77 Grachet, mayor of Marseille, 68–9 Gran Colombia, 5 Grande Nation, 65 Grant, Ulysses S., 10 Great Britain, see Britain Great Lakes, 5, 167 Great Northern War (1700–21), 226 Greece, 35, 187 Greek language, 63 Greek Orthodox Church, 63, 229 Greek Revolt, 228

285

Greeks, 220, 228, 229 Grégoire, Abbé (Henri), 50, 152 Grenada, 14, 201, 202, 205–9, 211–12 House of Assembly, 206, 208–9 Grijling, Hendrick, 126 de Groot, Joanna, 3, 6, 11–12 Guadeloupe, 5, 50, 55, 66–7, 75, 160 Gual, Manuel, 183–4 Guayaquil, 182 Guerra, François-Xavier, 181, 183–4, 186, 194 guerrillas, 6 Guinea, 114 Guiana, see French Guiana Gulhane edict of 1839, 37 Gutiérrez, Pantaleón, 179 Guyot, Alejandro Duclos, 119 gypsies, 220 Hadhramauti Sayyids, 31 Haiti, 3, 4, 8–11, 14, 21, 22, 24, 44, 55, 56, 58–9, 67, 104–5, 107, 118, 129, 166, 184, 236, 251 see also Saint Domingue Haitian Revolution, 3, 7–9, 36, 44–5, 49–50, 56–7, 59, 102, 108–9, 114, 118, 134, 152, 202 Hall, Catherine, 201 Hallett, Mark, 273 Hanna, Ya’qub, 63–4 Hapsburg Empire, 65 ‘Harem-Hospice’, 68 Harris, Jennifer, 187 Hartley, Janet, 6, 12, 15 Hastings, Lord, Governor General, 28 Havana, 160 Hay, John, 165, 210 Hejaz, 31 Highlanders, Scottish, 86 Hill, Christopher, 34 Hindu notions of freedom (mukti), 40 Hinduism, 27, 31 Hispaniola, 160 Hobsbawm, Eric, 1 Hodges, William, 239 Holland, 149 Hollis, Thomas, 207 Home Counties (England), 236 Homer, 227 Homsy, Gaston, 78 Hooper, James, 122–6, 129–33


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Index

Index

Hudson’s Bay Company, 157 human rights, 7 von Humboldt, Alexander, 95 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 30 Hundred Days, 67, 71 Hyde Park (London), 249 Iberian Empire, 40 see also: Portuguese Empire; Spanish Empire Iberian monarchies, 37 collapse of, 22 see also: Portugal; Spain Iberian Peninsula, French invasion of, 5, 21, 22, 40, 180, 186 revolutions and counter-revolutions in, 21, 23, 28 see also: Portugal; Spain Ibn Khaldun, 32 Ibn Saud, 31 identity, 2, 6, 11, 12 Arab, 12 British, 15 Christian, 226 creole, 11 gendered, 6, 11 imperial, 6 national, 6, 11, 14–15 Orthodox, 226 political, 10 racial, 6, 11, 15, 16 and religion, 11 Russian, 218–19, 221, 225–6, 230–2 social, 121 and subjecthood, 14 Ignacia, María, 110–1 Ile Sainte Marguerite, 76 Illinois Country, 158–9, 161 Illinois River, 157 Ilocos, 29 imagined community, 15 immigrants, in Buenos Aires, 101, 104, 106, 115 Imperial Guard, in Marseille, 68, 71 Incas, 39 indentured servants, 213 independence movements, 9, 22 India, 2–4, 6, 21, 24–9, 31–2, 36, 38, 93, 122–3, 212, 236, 238–42, 244, 247–8, 250

British conquests in, 239–40, 251 press of, 28 radicals in, 39 rulers in, 251 Indian liberals, 28 Indian Ocean, 4–5, 36, 66, 122 Indian slaves in Mauritius, 25 Indians, 25–6, 38 Indians, American, see American Indians indirect rule, 35 Indonesian archipelago, 122 Inquisition, 181–2, 197 Iowa (American Indians), 157 Iran, 3, 6, 12–13, 235–43, 245–6, 248, 250 cession of Caucasian territories to Russia, 239 relations with Russia, 235 rulers of, 251 see also Persia Iranians, 12, 236–38, 240, 242–7, 249, 250–1 Iraq, 237–8, 242 Ireland, 15, 21, 27, 37, 40, 123, 204 independence for, 164 Irish, 244 servants, 213 Irkutsk, 223 Isfahan, 242 Isfahani, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, see Khan, Mirza Abu Taleb Islam, 15, 23, 27, 31–2, 34, 40, 45, 227–8, 238, 247 Islamic law, 37, 63 Islamic movements, 32 Islamic revolutions, 33–4, 45 Italians, 220, 244 Italy, 260 I’tisam al-din, Mirza Sheikh, 248–9 de Iturbide, Agustín, 13, 193 coronation as emperor of Mexico, 193 Jacobins, 28, 32, 65, 151–2, 187 British, 209 Jamaica, 52, 160, 184, 201 James V, of Scotland, 203 James, C. L. R., 49 Janissary corps, 65–6 Janssens, Governor General, Batavia, 122 Japan, 25


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286

Jarj-nameh, 251 Jat peasantry, 34 Jaubert, Pierre Amédée, 237, 240–1, 243 Java, 1, 31 van Java, Cupido, 134 Jay, John, 148, 152 Jeannot, insurgent in Saint Domingue, 52 Jefferson, Thomas, 10, 143, 145, 152, 166–7, 212 Jesus, 13, 195 Jews, 65–6, 68, 71, 219, 220 jihad, 29, 34 João IV, of Portugal, 259, 263 Johnson, Lyman, 8, 183 Jonas, rebel leader in the Cape Colony, 126 Jones, Harford, 240–3, 245 Jones, William (‘Oriental’), 239 Journal du lycée de Londres, 140 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 185 Junot, Jean-Andoche, 257, 268 juntas, 22, 97, 117, 180 Jura mountains, 55 juries, 37, 39, 40 van de Kaap, Abraham, 127, 131, 133 van de Kaap, Lodewijk, 127 van de Kaap, Meij, 126 van de Kaap, Piquet, 126 van de Kaap, Tiberius, 130 el Kader, Emir Abd, 80 Kafadar, Cemal, 37 Kalmyks, 226 Kamchatka, 225 Kanarese (in Mauritius), 26 kanarins (Goan Indians), 24 Kant, Immanuel, 27 Karbala, 33 Kaskaskia, 161 Kazakhs, 235 Kazan’, 225 Keeley, Lawrence, 81, 93 Kelly, Michael, 122–5, 129, 132–3 Kentucky, 167 Khalsa brotherhood, 34 Khan, Mirza Abu Taleb, 240–51 Khorasan, 239 see also Caucasus Khoury, Dina, 32–3 Khurdiarev, Il’ia, 221

287

kidnapping, 220, 224 Kikongo languages, 48 Kimpa Vita, Beatriz, 46 King of Spain, 161 kingship, 57–8 Iranian, 237 Kingston, 160 Kirsten, Willem, 131 Knights of Malta, 64 Koeberg, 121–2, 132 Kongo, Kingdom of, 46, 48 König, Hans-Joachim, 189–90 Koriak tribesmen, 221–2, 224, 226 Kosciuszko, Tadeusz, 229 Koselleck, Reinhart, 1 von Kotzebue, Moritz, 235, 237, 240–1, 243, 245–7 Kréyol language, 48 Kutuzov, Mikhail, 231 labourers, 101, 102, 121 Lafayette, Marquis de, 145–6, 150–1 Landers, Jane, 184 Lapps, 93 Lascaris, Theodore, 64 Latin America, 3, 21, 30, 35–6, 38, 40, 251 see also South America Latin American independence, 22 Latvia, 220 Latvians, 219 Laubscher, Jacomina, 125, 132 Lauderdale, Lord, 28 laundresses, 94 Laurent, François, 206, 208 Lautard, Laurent, 74, 77 Le Cap, 7–8, 44, 51, 53 legal records, 6 Légion Corse, 76 Leiden, 240 Lesghis, 235 Lettres philosophiques (Voltaire), 140 liberals, African, 40 Asian, 40 British, 38 French, 28 Indian, 38 Middle Eastern, 40 Portuguese, 28 Spanish, 28, 30 liberalism, 33, 197


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Index

Index

Liberia, 35, 39 Liberia Herald, 39 liberty, 13, 25–7, 40, 53, 68, 70, 103, 104, 108, 110, 113, 115, 121, 123, 140, 141, 147–8, 168, 170, 182, 185–7, 189, 193–5, 197, 202, 211, 248, 250, 266 caps, 13, 187 trees, 13, 180, 186–9, 194, 195 see also Phrygian caps Liguest, Pierre Laclède, 159 Lima, 190 Lincoln, Abraham, 10 de Liniers, Jacques, 96, 98 Liniers, Santiago, 113–17, 119 Lisbon, 28, 266, 269 Lithuania, 218, 220–21, 223, 225 Lithuanians, 219 Little Prairie, 169 Livorno, 77 Locke, John, 33 Loft, Leonore, 147, 151 Lommé, Georges, 193 London, 6–7, 23, 27, 63, 85, 139–41, 149, 158, 207, 208, 239–40, 245, 246, 248–51, 259, 260 Loos, Jackie, 130 looting, 33, 52, 74, 75, 127 Lorenza, María, 111 Louis XV, of France, 158 Louis XVI, of France, 151, 156 execution of, 52, 103, 106, 120, 182, 184 Louisiana, Louisiana Territory, 54, 158–60, 164, 166, 168–9 see also Upper Louisiana Louisiana Purchase, 5, 54, 167, 168 Louverture, Toussaint, 8–9, 51–5, 103 Louw, Adriaan, 127, 128 Louw, Jan, 130 Louw, Petrus, 124–5, 129–30, 132 Loyalists, American, 6 Lucknow, 241–2, 250 Lujan, 119 Lusitanians, 259–60, 263, 268, 273 Lutherans, 221 Luzon, 29 lycées, 65, 77, 140–1 lynching, 74 Macaya, rebel in Saint Domingue, 51, 57, 58 Madagascar, 12

Madina, 32–3 Madrid, 158 de Madrazo, José, 264–5, 270 Magdeburg law, 223 Mahe, 25 Mahole, Mateus Castro, 24 Malacca, see Straits of Malacca Malays, 24, 26 Malcolm, John, 240–3, 249–51 Maloiaroslavets, battle of, 230 Malta, 133 Malvinas, 117 ‘Mamelouks’, 65, 68, 71–5 Malmuks, 63, 65 Manifesto de Cartagena, 184 Manila, 29–30, 40 British occupation of, 29 Mansfield, Lord, 140–1 von Manstein, 228 manumission, of slaves, 8, 45, 97, 142, 164–5 Marat, Jean-Paul, 59 marriage, 13 elite, 248 practices, 248 regulation of, 247 see also polygamy marital fidelity, 248 marronage (running away, by slaves), 49 Marseillaise,182, 196 Marseille, 11, 61, 63–5, 67–73, 75–7 Martinique, 5, 50, 66 Mary, Virgin Mary, 13, 195, 203, 228 Mascareignes, 66 de Mascarenhas, Braz Garcia, 259, 273 masculinity, 132, 247, 250 Mauritius, 4, 14, 24, 26 van Mauritius, Louis, 122–33 Mayllos y Marcana, Pablo, 108–9, 115 Mazzinian nationalists and revolutionaries, 34 Mecca, 32–3 Mediterranean, 4, 35, 62–4, 66, 77, 241–2 Medrano, Pedro, 116 de Melo e Castro, João de Almeida, 260 Melkite Church, 77 Melun, 68 Méndez, Mariá Agueda, 182 Mengs, Anton Rafael, 265 Meramec River, 160 mercantilism, 23, 35


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288

mercenaries European, 35 merchants, British, 29, 85, 141 in Buenos Aires, 89, 114, 117 Chinese, 29 Coptic, 77 European, 36 in Middle East, 242 foreign, in Britain, 204 Indian, 27 Iranian, 238 in Kingston, Jamaica, 160 in Manila, 29 Polish, 222 in Saint Domingue, 47, 49 in Saint (St) Louis, 161 in Siberia, 220 Russian, 222 urban Muslim, 33 Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 144 Mercurio Peruano, 182, 184 Méry, Joseph, 71, 74, 75 messianism, Christian, 29 mestizos, 22, 24, 28–30, 38, 110 métis, 26 Mexican Indians, 38 Mexican Inquisition, 182–3 Mexico, 5, 13, 22, 38, 168–9, 181–2, 187, 193 constitution of 1814, 190–2 independence, 193 Mexico City, 182, 196 middle class (bourgeoisie), 143 Middle East, 23, 40–1, 63, 241–2 Mifflin, Warner, 143, 146, 148 Mikahilovich, Alexis, 228 militarization, 6, 12, 81–2, 88–91, 97 military British military laws, 86 discipline, 84 drill, 86, 90 reform, in Ottoman Empire, 37–8 resistance to military service, 84 values, 90–1 ‘military revolution’, 81 militias, in Argentina, 84, 87–9, 93–4, 97, 107 royalist, 61 Mill, John Stuart, 26 millenarianism, Buddhist, 23, 32, 41

289

mines, Peruvian, 85, 94 Minin, Kuzma, 230 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, Count, 50, 142 de Miranda, Francisco, 22, 85, 184, 192 Mirza, Abbas, 235 missionaries, 26, 46 missionary activity, 15 Mississippi River, 157–61, 164, 166–7, 169 Mississippi valley, 10, 158, 167 Missouri Constitution, 172 Missouri River, 157, 161, 169 Missouri, 10, 167, 169, 171–2 Missouri valley, 167 mobilization, 2, 12, 89, 91–2 and civil society, 82–4 modernity, 15 Mogilev province, 230 molasses, 160 Monongahela River, 161 Montenegro, Juan Antonio, 183 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, 140, 181–2, 198, 247 Montevideo, 87, 97, 103, 119 Montmorin, Armand Marc, 146 Morales, Francisco, 180 Mordvins, 222 Morelos, Jose, 38 Moreno, Mariano, 21 morenos, 109, 110, 117 Morier, James, 237, 240–7, 249 Moros (indigenous Muslims in Philippines), 29, 30 Moscow, 227, 230–1 Mostert, Nicolaas, 126, 133 Mount Tabor, 186 mourning rituals, 245 de Moustier, Count, 146 Mozambique, 5 van Mozambique, Colair, 130 van Mozambique, Cupido, 126 van Mozambique, Galant, 126 van Mozambique, Geduld, 127 van Mozambique, Saloman, 131 Mozdok, 226 Mughal empire, 3, 23, 34, 38 Muhammad Ali of Egypt, 31, 35, 37 Muharram, mourning rituals of, 245 mukti, see Hindu notions of freedom mulattoes, 6, 50, 59, 97, 110, 147, 150, 172, 195 Mumbai, see Bombay


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Index

Index

Murav’ev, A. M., 223 Murshidabad, 241 Muscovy, Muscovite state, 218–19, 226 Muslim beliefs, 247 Muslim society, 63 Muslim world, 21, 75 Muslims, 15, 24, 29, 31–3, 45, 70, 219, 225–6, 228–9, 248 in the Caucasus, 231 converted, 77 serving the French, 64 in Russian army, 222 Mysore, 25, 239 Najd, 32 Nakacly, Joseph, 76 Namé, Marie, see Ni’mat-Allah, Maryam Napoleon Bonaparte, 3, 5, 9, 15, 22, 32, 54–5, 62–3, 65, 67, 70–2, 77, 95, 166, 180, 193, 229, 230, 235, 242, 259, 267 as Anti-Christ, 15, 230, 231 conflict with Russia, 239 coronation of, 193 David’s representation of the coronation of, 13, 193 labelled a tyrant, 186, 193 name of invoked, 74 and reinstatement of slavery, 152 sells Louisiana Territory, 167 see also: Civil Code; Hundred Days Napoleonic norms and institutions of state, 37 see also Civil Code Napoleonic Wars, see Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Naqsh-i-Rustam, 244 Nariño, Antonio, 182, 185, 196 Natchez, 161 nation, definition of, 3, 66 nationalism, 1, 7, 139, 152, 232 creole, 22 naturalization, 14 naval battles, 2 naval forces, 2, 44 navy, British, 55, 66 French, 104 Russian, 221

Spanish, 30 Necker, Jacques, 150 Netherlands, 1, 2, 3, 9 colonial rule, 122 empire of, 40 government of, 35 see also: Dutch East India Company; Dutch East Indies; Holland das Neves, José Acursio, 266, 267 New Granada, 179, 183, 189, 195 New Jersey, 160 New Madrid, 169 New Orleans, 10, 157–60, 162, 164, 166–7, 170 New York, 53, 142, 146, 213 Newton, Isaac, 198 Nicholas I, of Russia, 225, 228 van Niekerk, Hendrick Albertus, 127 Ni’mat-Allah, Maryam, 76 Nizhegorod, Stepna, 221 Nizhni Novgorod, 225 Noël, Erick, 69 Nogué, Bernardo, 112, 120 nonconformists, 204, 213 Normandy, 159, 160 North Africa, 62 North America, 4, 53, 62, 142, 144, 158, 166 Northern Province, of Saint Domingue, 44, 53 Northwest Ordinance, 167 Northwest Territory, 9 Novgorod, 230 Ochakov, 227, 228 Ochterloney monument, Calcutta, 26 Odessa, 220 officers, see individual countries Ogé, Vincent, 50, 51 O’Higgins, Ambrosio, 181 Ohio River, 161, 167 Okhotsk, 225 Okhotsk, Sea of, 221 O’Leary, Daniel Florencio, 193 Olivier, Guillaume, Antoine, 239–44, 246–7, 253 Oporto, 23 orientalism, 243–4, 246 Orthodox Christians, 219, 221, 225 Orthodox Church, 225–6, 230 Orthodox faith, 231


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290

Osage (American Indians), 157 Ossetians, 226 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 1 Ottoman architecture, 227 Ottoman character, 244 Ottoman Empire, 3, 11, 15, 23, 31–3, 35, 37–8, 65, 218, 236, 239, 241–2, 244 restoration of rule in Egypt, 63–4 restoration of rule in Palestine, 64 rule in Saudi Arabia, 31 war with Russia, 226–8, 232 Ottoman Porte, 65 Ourique, 266 Ouseley, Gore, 240–2, 253 Ouseley, William, 240, 242–3, 245–6, 248, 253 Oyo (West Africa), 48 Ozouf, Mona, 187–8 Pacific Ocean, 35, 85, 161, 247 Paine, Tom, 27, 181 painting, paintings, 13, 55, 72, 193, 227, 230, 256–71 Pale of settlement, 220 Palestine, 62, 64 Pallas (British ship), 64 Palmer, Robert, 22 Pampa, 83 papacy, 207, 213 possessions of, 66 see also Pope Papel Periódico de la Cuidad de Santa Fé de Bogotá, 182, 185 Paquette, Gabriel, 22 Paraguay, 101, 110 Paris, 2, 7–8, 10, 13, 23, 26, 44, 51, 53, 58, 68, 71–2, 76–7, 139, 141, 143, 146, 151–2, 158, 166–7, 173, 181–2, 185, 193, 231, 240, 246, 250, 264 ‘Parsi’ religion, see Zoroastrian religion Pasargadae, 244 patriotism, 14–15, 27, 194, 256–8, 264, 266–7, 269 Patroclus, 264 Patterson, Orlando, 211 Paul I, Tsar of Russia, 230, 240 Peabody, Sue, 66 peasant revolts, 30 peasantry

291

Finnish, 221 Jat, 34 Philippine, 30 Russian, 225, 230–1 Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 10 Pedro, Juan, 113–16 Peninsular War, 13, 15, 95, 97, 259–60, 264–5, 270–1 Pennsylvania, 7, 148, 154 Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 149–50 pensions, 72 ‘people of colour’, 7, 14, 26, 49, 50–2, 67–8, 76, 168, 171–2 see also gens de couleur de La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, 181 Persepolis, 244 Persia, 3, 35 Peru, 5, 38, 94 Peshawar, 32 Peter I (the Great), of Russia, 223, 225, 227–8 Peterhof palace, 227 Petersburg, see Saint Petersburg Philadelphia, 7, 10, 53, 139, 142, 143, 146, 148, 149 Philippines, 1, 5, 23, 28–9, 30, 40, 250 Philips, Edith, 140 Phillip, Thomas, 63 Phillips, James, 140–1 philosophes, 26 Phrygian caps, 13, 186–91, 195 Pitt, William, 85 Place Castellane (Marseilles), 61 plantation colonies, 102 plantation economies, 2, 46, 50, 54–5 plantations, 44, 48 owners of, 77 slavery on, 9, 47–9 see also: coffee plantations; sugar plantations planters, 27, 50, 52, 53 flee Saint Domingue uprising, 51 plundering, see looting Poland, Polish lands, 2, 4, 218, 220, 222–3, 225, 229 abortive constitution of 1791, 22, 229 landowners of, 230 law of, 223 priests, 230 serfs, 25


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Index

Index

Poles, 218–19, 221, 223–6, 230, 232 establish own state, 229 police, in Buenos Aires, 101, 112 in Marseille, 68–70, 76 in Toulon, 73 polygamy, 246–7 political rights, given to free people of colour, 52 Polovio, Juan, 115, 120 Polverel, François, 52–4 Polynesia, 93 Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of, 24 Pondicherry, 23, 25 Pope, 207, 213 excommunicates Elizabeth I, 204 see also papacy Popham, Admiral Sir Home, 85–6, 95 popular sovereignty, 13 Porter, Robert Ker, 232 Portsmouth, 123 Portuense, Francisco Vieira, 257, 259–60, 263–5, 273 Portugal, 1–3, 5, 13, 15, 22, 24, 28, 35, 256–9, 266, 268, 271 abolishes slave trading, 9 aristocracy of, 256, 258 army of, 15, 268 claim of independence from Spain, 259 colonial governments, 36 court’s evacuation to Brazil, 3, 13, 28, 256–8 Crown of, 23–4, 36 French invasions of, 21–2, 257, 265, 269 King of, 260, 266 mercantile bourgeoisie of, 271 military threat to Rio de la Plata, 83 monarchy, 256–8, 263, 266, 268, 271 nation of, 13, 257, 265–6, 268 painting of, 256–71 Prince Regent of, 260, 263 pro-British policies of, 260 relations with France, 257 restoration of monarchy, 259 revolution in, 28 royal family, 256, 271 see also: Dom João; Dom Pedro; Iberian monarchies; Iberian Peninsula Portuguese America, 1, 267

Portuguese Empire, 39–40, 83, 257–8, 267 Portuguese India, 23–4, 28 see also Goa Portuguese missionaries, 46 Pozharskii, Dmitry, 230 Prado, 270 Praga (Warsaw suburb), 229 Presbyterians, 207 press British, 37 in India, 38 Priestley, Joseph, 141 priests, 24, 30, 104, 182, 230, 246 execution of, 103 Orthodox, 225 Polish and Roman Catholic, 230 ‘primitive’ peoples, 15–16 Prince of Wales, 250 prisons, 76 prisoners, property rights, 163, 171, 206 prostitution, 67 Protestants, 15, 65, 172, 201, 204, 207–8, 219, 225 Provence, 73 Prussian Academy of Fine Arts, 260 Puerto Rico, 5 de Pueyrredon, Martín, 96 Punjab, 3, 34, 35, 38 puritan revolution, 34 Pushkin, Alexander, 224 Qajar Persia, see Persia Qajar rulers, 3, 237, 239, 249 Qajar regime, 235, 237–40 Qing Dynasty, Qing Empire, 23, 32, 36 Quakerism, 140 Quakers, 7, 139–46, 151–2 Quebec, 205, 207–8 de Queiroz, Grégorio Francisco, 269 de Quintela, Baron, 269 Rabinovich, Alejandro, 6, 12 race(s), 15–16, 24, 26, 40, 62, 77, 164 animosity between, 102, 118 demarcation by race, 163 distinction/ differentiation by, 2, 5, 11, 16, 22, 38, 67, 75, 77 exclusions by 16, 23–4, 29 hierarchy of, 40, 53 persecution on grounds of, 75


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292

race(s) – continued restrictions by race, in United States, 11 slavery on grounds of, 77 racialism, racism, 67, 101 British, 38 Raffles, Stamford, 31 Raimond, Julien, 50 Rajputs, 34, 39 Raynal, Abbé (Guillaume-Thomas), 143–4 Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 263, 264 Red Square, 230 refugees, 11, 61, 64, 68–72, 75–7, 205, 229, 269 Régent, Frédéric, 75 regicide, 103, 118, 184 see also Louis XVI religion African, 4 assaults on, 108 Jewish community, see Jews and political participation, 14 in Saint Domingue, 48, 56 Zoroastrian, 243 see also: churches; Catholicism; Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Vodou representation, 13, 22, 26, 28, 30, 37–40, 46, 188, 206, 223, 257, 263, 265–6, 269, 271 republicanism, 13–14, 38, 57–8, 186 in Britain, 14 Resnick, Daniel, 72 Restoration governments in France, 72 in Iberian Peninsula, 13 in Portugal, 259 Reval, 220, 222 revolts, Andean, 29 Islamic, 33 in Mexico, 38 Muslim, 32 peasant, 30 rural, 29 slave, 36, 51 revolution, 21–3, 31–4, 37, 40–1, 58, 62 in Greece, 35 see also: American Revolution; French Revolution; Haitian Revolution revolutionary age, 23–4, 28, 103, 135

293

revolutionary ideas, 21, 34, 123 revolutionary wars, 22, 45 Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), 4–5, 21, 31, 35, 82, 102, 139, 152, 181, 223, 230, 232, 257 as ‘first world war’, 122 de la Ribera, Fernando, Díaz, 106 Ricaurte, Antonio, 185 rice, 142 Riga, 220, 222 rights, 23–4, 26, 34, 37, 39, 44, 46, 50, 52–3, 57–9, 187 and race, 67, 77 Rights of Man, 25 see also Declaration of the Rights of Man Rights of Man (Tom Paine), 27, 181 translated into Spanish, 185 Rio de Janiero, 5, 23, 28, 113 Río de la Plata, 5, 12, 14, 81–4, 86, 88, 90–2, 94, 97, 101, 103–4, 108, 119 see also Buenos Aires rituals, 6 Rizal, José, 30 Robben Island, 134 Robespierre, Maximilien, 25, 32, 34, 103, 106, 118, 151, 152 Roman Catholic Church, see Catholic Church Roman Empire, 260 Romans, 259 Rome, see papacy Ross, Robert, 127, 131 Rossignol, Marie-Jeanne, 7, 62 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, philosopher, 21, 25, 28, 182, 184, 186, 198 Roustam, servant of Napoleon, 72 Roy, Rammohan, 27–8, 36, 38–9 Royal Academy of Arts, 259 Royal Asiatic Society, 253 royalism, 58 royalists, 61, 72, 75, 93, 117, 184, 193 Rumanian Orthodox, 219 runaway slaves, see slaves, runaway rural revolts, 29 rural population, 83 Russia, 2, 4, 14, 35, 218–22, 224, 226–7, 231, 235, 240 conflict with Napoleon, 239


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Index

Index

Russia – continued contacts with Iran, 238 elites of, 15 expansion of, 4, 218–19, 236 French invasion of, 229, 231 government of, 6, 220, 223, 225 and identity, 218–19, 221, 225–6, 230–2 Iranian cession of Caucasian territories to, 239 law of, 223 memoirists of, 230 and occupation of Georgia, 239 soldiers, 15, 219, 221–32, 236 see also Tsars Russian Empire, 4, 12, 15, 218–19, 220 Russian Orthodox faith, 15, 221, 232 Russians, 219–25, 229–32 in Iran, 237 Russo-Iranian wars, 239 Russo-Turkish wars, 227, 229 Russwurm, James, 39 Ryan, Alan, 33 Sac (American Indians), 157 de Sacy, Sylvestre, 253 Safavid dynasty, empire, 3–4, 23, 237 sailors, 25, 47, 118, 123, 181 mobilized in Saint Domingue, 52 Saint-Denis, Louis-Etienne, Napoleon’s servant Ali, 72 Saint Domingue, 1, 6–9, 27, 44–56, 58–9, 66–7, 103–4, 139, 147, 150–2, 166 see also Haiti Saint George (Grenada), 210 Saint Helena, 95 Saint (St) Louis, 2, 10, 157–69, 171–3 St Louis Globe-Democrat, 173 Saint-Lucie, 75 Saint Petersburg, 239–40, 250 Saintsbury, George, 36 Sakakini, George, 76 Salavarrieta, Policarpa, 180 Salih, Mirza, 249 Salt River, 123, 133 Salta, 103 San Benito, 106–7 San Ildefonso, secret treaty of, 166 Sánchez, Mariquite, 93 sans culottes, 32, 187, 188

Sans Souci, rebel in Saint Domingue, 51 Santa Fe, 110, 168 Santiago del Estero, 118 Santo Domingo, 6, 8, 51 Sao Paolo, 36 Sardinia, 101 de Sarratea, Martín, 114 Sattelzeit, 1 Saudi Arabia, 2, 31 Scandinavia, 35, 93 Scotland, 122, 203 see also Highlanders Scottish colonists, in Caucasus, 220 de Ségur, Philippe Paul, 230 Sennar (Sudan), 69 de Sequeira, Domingos António, 257, 267–9 serfs, 25, 26, 222 servants 64, 66, 68–9, 72, 105, 118, 123, 126, 213, 249 of Napoleon, 72 Seven Years War, 1, 2, 29, 158, 201, 205 sex industry, 249 sex workers, 249–50 sexuality, 13, 74, 243, 247, 249, 250 Shakespeare, William, 185 Sharp, Granville, 141–2 Shawnee (American Indians), 157 Sheikh Hammam, 64 Shell, Robert, 132 Shi’a groups, 238 Shi’a Muslim practice, traditions, 237, 238 Shirazi, Mirza Abu’l Hasan, 240–51 shopkeepers, 101 Sibalis, Michael, 67 Siberia, 6, 15, 219–24 Sidarious, 76 Sierra Leone, 35, 39, 149 Sierra Leone Company, 39 siete partidas, 163 Sikhism, 23, 34, 41 Sikh movement, Sikh revolt, 3, 32, 34–5 Sikhs, 3, 31, 34, 236, 239–40 Sikh tradition3, 33 Silang, Diego, 29 de Silva, José Seabra, 273 silver mines, 85 Singapore, 35 Singh, Ranjit, 34–5, 38 slave markets, 102


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294

slave owners, 7, 9, 14, 24, 102, 104, 105, 122–4, 126, 134, 148, 162, 211 slave revolts, insurrections, 8, 22, 24, 51, 52–3, 57, 101, 104–5, 111, 147, 184 in Cape Colony, 121, 123–35 fears of, 102–3, 107, 150, 206 in Grenada, 202, 210–11 in Saint Domingue, 1, 8, 27, 44, 49–53, 59, 66–7, 103–4, 139, 147, 184 slave society, 131 slave trade, slave trading, 2, 4, 7, 9–10, 24, 27, 35, 45, 46–7, 57, 66, 77, 104, 144, 148, 160 abolished in the United States, 147 campaigns against, 10, 141–2, 144, 147, 149–50 legislation against, 122 supporters of, 150 see also: abolition of the slave trade; abolitionism slave women, 132 slaveholders, see slave owners slavery, 3, 6–11, 16, 25, 35–6, 44–7, 52–6, 62, 65, 71, 105, 123, 140, 143, 247 in Buenos Aires, 116 in Cape Colony, 121–2 juridical status, 66–7, 75, 77, 211 racial, 77 re-establishment of, 65, 67, 152 in Russian Far East, 224 in Saint Louis, 162–3 in the United States, 142, 148, 167, 172 see also: abolition of slavery; abolitionism slaves, 1, 2, 4–10, 14–15, 22, 24, 26–7, 36, 45, 47, 49, 64–5, 69, 75, 77, 144, 162, 170 in British colonies, 205 in Buenos Aires, 101–2, 104–11, 113, 117, 118–119 in Cape Colony, 121–34 in Colombia, 189, 195 as crew on ships, 103 fight as irregulars in Buenos Aires, 89, 97 fight for France, 9 in Grenada, 205–6, 210–11 Indian, 163

295

legal status of, 14, 66–7, 76, 141, 167–8, 170–2, 202, 209, 211–13 liberation of, 27 in Mauritius, 25 runaway, 123–4, 126, 133, 148 in Saint Domingue, 45, 47–51, 53, 56 sale of, 160 in the United States, 143, 148, 167–8, 170–2 see also: former slaves; manumission; marronage smallpox, 169 Smolensk, 228, 231 Smyrniots, 241 de Sobral, Baron, 267 Social Contract (Rousseau), 21 social control, 47 Société des Amis des Noirs, 139, 141–7, 149–51 Société Gallo-Américaine, 144–6 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 141, 145 Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, 142 soldiers, 5, 13, 25, 45, 47, 52, 54, 73, 123, 236, 241 Argentine, 92 black, 5–6 British, 5, 87, 91 disease among, 5 Egyptian, 71 French, 69, 72–3, 74 marriage of, 221 pay, 72 revolt in Mauritius, 24 Russian, 15, 219, 221–32, 236 see also: armies; demobilization; deserters; desertion; ex-soldiers; military; mobilization; women; and under individual countries Soliban, Cecilia, 109 songs, 26, 48, 56, 184, 228, 229 see also Marseillaise Sonthonax, Légér Félicité, 52–4, 151–2 Sotes, Fermín, 108 de Sousa Coutinho, Rodrigo, 257, 258 South, of United States, 9, 142, 148, 149 South African colony, 85 South America, 2, 62, 82, 85, 92–3, 95, 97 see also Latin America


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Index

Index

South Carolina, 7 South Dakota, 169 South East Africa, 122 Southeast Asia, 1, 36, 62, 236 Southern Africa, 1, 4 sovereignty, 22, 37, 38, 66, 83, 202–3 Soviet Union, 218 Spain, 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, 22, 28, 30, 35, 83, 85, 101, 109, 117, 120, 159, 160, 166, 167, 168, 172, 180–1, 270–1 abolition of slave trade, 9 ally of France, 257 aristocratic elite of, 264 army, 15, 83, 87 colonial governments, 36 colonial military, 81 commercial regulations, 94 constitution for, 22 criticism of French Revolution in, 186 designs on Texas, 159 ejection from the New World, 22 forces of, in Colombia, 180 French invasion of, 21–2, 97 government, 29 history painting in, 263 king of, 161, 270 and Louisiana, 54, 158, 161, 164, 166, 168 Mexico’s independence from, 193 military inadequacies of, 104 monarchy of, 12, 22, 83 navy, 30, 114, 160 officers of, work with Toussaint Louverture, 52 outlaws Indian enslavement, 163 relationship to Portugal, 257, 259 revolution in, 28–9 royalists, 93 in Saint Domingue, 53–4, 58 in Santo Domingo, 51 uprisings against the French, 97 war with France, 2, 1–2, 97, 103, 118, 182, 184–5, 264 see also: Charles III; Charles IV; Iberian monarchies; Iberian Peninsula Spaniards, 193 Spanish America, 1, 3, 15, 82, 158, 173, 181–3, 190, 193, 267 colonies of, 89

criticism of French Revolution in, 186 independence movement in, 184 information about French Revolution in, 185 insurgents of, 187 military elite in, 83 rebellion in, 180 revolutionaries of, 193 society of, 194 symbols of French Revolution in, 187 wars of independence, 194 see also Iberian Empire Spanish Americans, 87, 91, 181, 183 Spanish Crown, 29, 36, 83, 101, 159, 160, 167, 181 Spanish Empire, 5, 9, 39, 40, 82, 107 Speransky, Mikhail, 224–5 Spithead, 123 Spitzer, Ala, 72 van der Spuij, Mett, 126, 133 Sri Lanka, 122 see also Ceylon Srirangapatna, 25 Stavropol’, 226 Steffen, Lisa, 210 Stephen, James FitzJames, 26 Stoddard, Amos, 167 Straits of Malacca, 36 students, radical students in Calcutta, 26 subjecthood, 14, 38, British, 201–6, 209–10, 213, 216 slave, 14, 211 Sudan, 69 Sufi brotherhoods, orders, 31, 238 sugar, 103, 160 sugar economy, 54 sugar islands, 2, 66, 146–7, 201, 207 see also: Cuba; Grenada; Saint Domingue sugar mills, 48 sugar plantations, 44, 47, 51 sugar planters, 9 sugar trading, 24 Sultan, Tipu, 25 Sumatra, 31 Sunni jurists, 33 Suvorov, General Alexander, 229 Swedes, 226


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296

Swedish law, 223 Swinton, Samuel, 139–40 Symson, Alexander, 208 Syria, 62, 95 Syrian Catholics, 64, 70 Syrians, 63 Tabriz, 235, 237, 250 Tamils, 25 Tanzimat era, 37 Tatars, 219, 222, 225–6, 228, 231 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohammad, 243 taverns, 103, 108, 118, 120, 157 taxation, 29, 31, 34 Tehran, 2, 246, 250 Terek river, 219 Terror (France), 152 Test and Corporation Acts (Britain), 203–4 Texas, 159 Thailand, 35 theatre, 13 Thibaudeau, prefect, 68 ‘Third Rome’, 227 Thirteenth Amendment (US), 9 Tholozan, Jean Eli, 170–1 Thornton, John, 4, 45–6, 56 Thornton, William, 149 Tianet, 224 Tiflis, 239, 250 Tijgerberg, 133–4 Tikopians, 93 Time of Troubles (Russia), 226 The Times, 87 Timor, 5 van Timor, Rotterdam, 131 tobacco, 29, 103, 142, 148–9 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 26, 33 Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolayevich, 223 de la Torre, Carlos María, 30 torture, 5, 8, 101, 112–13, 115–17, 120 Toulon, 73 Toulouse, 210 trade, 5 travel writing, 12–13, 240, 246, 247 treason, 14, 209–12, 216–17, 259 Treaty of Amiens, 65 Treaty of Fontainebleau, 159 Treaty of Paris, 159, 205–6 Treaty of San Ildefonso, 257

297

Treaty of San Lorenzo, 167 Trigarantine Army, 193 Trudeau, Zenon, 160, 164 Tsars, of Russia, 14, 225, 246 see also: Alexander I; Alexander II; Catherine II; Nicholas I; Peter I Tsarist regime, 235, 239 Tsitsianov, Pavel, 240 Turkey, 66 Turks, 227–9, 243–4, 248 Turnbull, Gordon, 210 Tuscany, 166 Ugriumov, G. I., 230 Ukraine, 2, 218–21, 225 Ukrainians, 219 Uniate Christians, 15, 219, 221, 225 Unitarian clergy, American, 28 Unitarians, 207 universal rights, 58, 187 universalism, 53 Christian, 24 United Kingdom, see Britain United States of America, 5–7, 9–11, 22, 35–6, 62, 139, 142–6, 149, 151–2, 158, 161, 164, 166–7, 169, 172–3, 213, 236 abolition of slavery in, 9, 11 abolition of slave trade by, 147 abolitionism in, 142, 148–50 Board of Land Commissioners, 169, 170, 173 commercial interests, 36 Congress of, 149–50, 172 constitution of, 22, 28, 39, 147, 167, 172, 209 Constitutional Convention, 148 Continental Congress, 167 expansion of, 219 legal status of slaves in, 170 Liberian copying of constitution of, 39 occupation of the Philippines in 1898, 29 purchases Louisiana Territory, 167–8 revolutionary figures in, 62 slavery in, 12, 142, 148, 167, 172 suffrage in, 13 trade with India, 28


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Index

United States of America – continued see also: American Indians; American Revolution; American War of Independence universities, in Russian Empire, 223 University of Warsaw, 220 Upper Egypt, 64 Upper Louisiana, 159–61, 163, 167, 172 Ural mountains, 218 Uribe-Urán, Victor, 183 de Uriburu, Dámaso, 81 Uruguay, 101 Valente, Vasco Pulido, 265–6 Vali’kovskii, Vasilii, 230 Valmy, battle of, 151 Vendée, 66, 73 Venezuela, 13, 183–4, 192 Venezuelan Army, 185 Verdier, Jean-Antoine, 73 Versailles, 150 Verweij, Dirk, 132 de Vértiz, Juan José, 84, 95 Vicente, António Pedro, 266 Vienna, 2 Vienna System, 35 Vietnam, 35 Villa, Juan, 118 de Villiers, Hugo, 128 Vil’na, 223 Virginia, 7, 10, 149, 161, 167, 212–13 Vodou, 48, 56 Vogelgezang, 124, 129, 131–2 Volga, 220, 223 de Volney, Comte, 181 Vologda, 227 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 24, 140, 182, 185 Voronezh, 226 Vyborg, 222 de Waal, Adriaan, 131 de Waal, Artend, 127 Wahhabis, 3, 31–3, 35, 64 Wahhabi regime, 236 Wahhabi revolt, 3, 31, 35 Wahhabism, 31–3, 38, 41 Waldegrave family, 241 War of Independence, American, see American War of Independence Warsaw, 220, 229, 230

Washington, 158, 166, 173 Washington, George, 28, 143, 146, 148–50 Weber, Peter Christian, 227–8 Wellesley, Arthur, 97 Wellesley, Richard, 27 West Africa, 4–5, 7, 44–7 West India Regiments, 14 West Indians, 162 West Indies, 36, 160, 201, 205, 207 van der Westhuisen Hijsbertsz, Pieter, 127 Westminster, 122 Whigs, 207 ‘White Terror’, 72 Whitelocke, John, 91 widows, 102 Wilberforce, William, 7, 150–1 Willer, Godlieb Andreas, 124 Williams, David, 140 Wilson, Kathleen, 201 Winch, Julie, 10 Wise, Thomas Turner, 210, 212 witchcraft, 179 women, 15, 236 in Cape Colony, 131–3 captured by French in Saint Domingue, 51 of colour, 68–71, 74, 76, 158 dancers, 249 dress styles of, 247–9 English, 249 fighting in Buenos Aires, 91, 97 flee their homes, 124 French, 72, 248 Iranian, 247–9 Italian, 248 killed in Warsaw, 229 legal status of, 66 marital practices of, 248 noble, depicted in painting, 258 Russian, 221, 231 sexual practices of, 248 singers, 249 social and political roles of, 247 slave owners, 102 slaves, 45, 132, 141, 162–3 status of, 250 subjection of, 248 Turkish, 248


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298 Index

Index xenophobia, 75, 101, 117, 231 Yorubas, 39 Yzarzabal, Francisco, 105 Zoroastrian religion, 243 de Zuniga, Joaquin Martinez, 29–30 Zwartland, 121–3, 128–9, 131, 134


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women – continued victims of violence, 74 see also: concubines; courtesans; prostitution; widows Woolman, John, 142 Worden, Nigel, 8 Wynberg, 133

299

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to MEDICAL LIBRARY NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIV. - PalgraveConnect - 2011-02-25 10.1057/9780230282698 - War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830, Edited by Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall 9780230_229891_16_ind.indd 300

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War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830

Writings on Empire and Slavery

Writings on Empire and Slavery

Slavery and the British Empire

Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820—1865

Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865

British Empire and the Second World War

Greek and Roman Slavery

Slavery and Freedom

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2

Sunlight and Slavery

War and Slavery in Sudan (The Ethnography of Political Violence)

Capitalism and Slavery

War and Slavery in Sudan (The Ethnography of Political Violence)

Life Under Slavery (Slavery in the Americas)

And The War Came: The Slavery Quarrel And The American Civil War

Sweet Slavery

Slavery And South Asian History

Sweet Slavery

Questioning Slavery

Psychiatric Slavery

Lincoln on Race and Slavery

Slavery and South Asian History

Remnants of Empire in Algeria and Vietnam: Women, Words, and War (After the Empire)

Eternal Empire. The Ottomans At War

African Americans During the Civil War (Slavery in the Americas)

Empire Lost: Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War

War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830