Letter from Britain

As this issue of Uncommon Sense goes to press, academics throughout Britain are sighing with relief, as each department, faculty, and university has by now completed its submission for the 2007 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Frequently described as U.K. academe’s peculiar parlor game, the ever-controversial RAE attempts to evaluate the quality and quantity of published research produced in all fields of study. The decisions of its panels have significant consequences in terms of the prestige and finances of each university and its constituent departments and programs, since government funds in support of scholarly research are allotted based on each unit’s evaluation by the relevant panel of peer reviewers. The results of the 2007 exercise will be published toward the end of 2008, with the result that many departments will hold off on making new hires or beginning other endeavors until those results are in.

But though “RAE years” are often thought of as one long waiting game, 2007 was an exceptionally active time for scholars of early American history and culture within the United Kingdom. It was, after all, a triple anniversary: the 400th of the first English settlement at Jamestown, the 300th of the Act of Union between England and Scotland, and the 200th of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. From a British perspective, this last event was the subject of the broadest popular interest, with seemingly every region, city, museum, historical organization, and university hosting events, exhibitions, or conferences relating to slavery, abolition, and emancipation. Fifteen years ago the city of Liverpool touched off national controversy when it opened the first permanent museum exhibition in Britain devoted to the history of slavery, particularly to the nation’s involvement in the slave trade and plantation production. This summer saw the dramatic expansion of this exhibition, formerly part of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, into an institution of its own, the International Slavery Museum, an event appropriately marked by Marcus Rediker’s lecture based upon his new monograph, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007). On England’s east coast, the North Sea port of Hull became home to the new Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), named for the Hull-born leader of parliamentary abolitionism and directed by the University of Hull’s David Richardson. Eight museums in northwest England, centering on Manchester, participated in the yearlong “Revealing Histories” project, which focused on the links between Atlantic slavery and the Industrial Revolution, and several major museums, including the British Museum, displayed Beninese artist Romuald Hazoume’s La Bouche du Roi, an installation based on the physical experience of African captives during the Middle Passage.

During the past year, a series of international conferences held at venues across the United Kingdom focused partly or entirely on slavery. Just after the New Year, the annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, usually a fairly Anglocentric event, devoted many of its panels to topics relating to slavery, including “Abolitionist Verse,” “Slavery on Stage,” “Silver-Fork Slaveries: Re-Presenting Enslavement in Fashionable Highlife,” “Slavery and Abolition in France,” “Slavery and Abolition in Northern and Eastern Europe,” and “Discourses of Slavery in Scotland and India.” March brought a conference called “Imagining Transatlantic Slavery” at Hampshire’s Chawton House Library—once home to Jane Austen’s brother and now a library dedicated to women’s literary production—which hosted presenters from the United States, Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands as well as British scholars Brycchan Carey (Kingston), Michael Farrell (Oxford), Anna Fitzer (Hull), Douglas Hamilton (Hull/WISE), and Moi Rickman (Southampton). Over the three-week Easter holiday, the University of York hosted “Abolitions 2007: Ending the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World,” which drew presenters and attendees from nearly a dozen countries and featured no fewer than six plenary lectures, presented by James Campbell (Portsmouth), Vincent Carretta (Maryland), Catherine Hall (University College London), Joseph Inikori (Rochester), Philip D. Morgan (Johns Hopkins), and Verene Shepherd (West Indies, Mona), as well as papers by scholars including Jean Allain (Queen’s), Manuel Barcia (Leeds), Carey, Madge Dresser (University of the West of England), Kate Ferris (University College London), Dick Geary (Nottingham), John Oldfield (Southampton), Christer Petley (Leeds Metropolitan/Southampton), Shaun Regan (Queen’s University, Belfast), Amalia Ribi (Oxford), Alan Rice (Central Lancashire), Anita Rupprecht (Brighton), Marika Sherwood (Institute of Commonwealth Studies), Susan Skedd (English Heritage), and Christopher Webb (York). Barely a month later, “Slavery: Unfinished Business” convened at the new WISE; sessions dealt not only with slavery’s past but also with contemporary topics such as “Slave Memories and Anthropological Perspectives,” “Genocide and Slavery,” “Boundaries of Freedom and Coercion,” and “African-Caribbean Communities in Britain.” Other papers discussed such subjects as human trafficking, museum representations of slavery, child domestic labor, and ritual performance and the memory of slavery. Participants from British universities included James Aldige (Oxford), Henrice Altink (York), Trevor Burnard (Sussex/Warwick), Carey, Bryan Claxton (London), Kenneth Cozens (Greenwich Maritime Institute), Daniel Englund (Durham), Eric Graham (Edinburgh), Will Pettigrew (Oxford), David Richardson (Hull/WISE), Suzanne Schwarz (Liverpool Hope), Tristan Stubbs (Cambridge/Sussex), Sasha Turner (Cambridge), James Walvin (WISE), and Helen Weinstein (York). The Wilberforce Emancipation Lecture was presented by Desmond Tutu, former Archbishop of Cape Town and a leader in the struggle against apartheid. In July the University of Warwick hosted “Free at Last,” featuring keynote speakers Gad Heuman (Warwick), Akosua Perbi (University of Ghana), and Shepherd, and in October the Northern Network of the Society for Caribbean Studies held an event at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery that included a tour of its Equiano Project exhibition. The Society’s annual conference, held in London in July, featured a number of panels on slavery and abolition; British presenters included David Lambert and Bertie Mandelblatt (both Royal Holloway), Petley, and Carry Van Lieshout (King’s College).

Although the commemoration of slave-trade abolition captured the lion’s share of public attention this past year, the other anniversaries were not ignored. In May the Cunliffe Centre for Atlantic Studies and the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex held a one-day symposium on Jamestown; presenters included Trevor Burnard on “Jamestown and the Beginnings of English Imperialism in the Americas,” Manchester Metropolitan’s Jesse Edwards on “Improving America: From John Smith to John Locke,” Sheffield’s Simon Middleton on “Reconsidering the Political Histories of Early Settlement Communities in North America,” and Oxford’s Peter Thompson on “Built and Unbuilt Virginia.” Peter Mancall (University of Southern California) also visited the Cunliffe Centre to give a presentation entitled “Richard Hakluyt in Early America.” From March to June, the British Museum displayed John White’s original drawings from the Roanoke settlement in an exhibition called A New World; a June symposium linked to this show, “European Visions, American Voices,” included papers by Stephanie Pratt (Plymouth) and Joan-Pau Rubies (London School of Economics) as well as Mancall, Karen Kupperman (New York), and Joyce Chaplin (Harvard). Meanwhile, the Act of Union was commemorated in the annual workshop of the Women’s Committee of the Economic History Society, held in November at the University of Edinburgh. Organized by Edinburgh’s Nuala Zahedieh, its topic was “Scotland, Union and Empire,” and it included papers by Esther Breitenbach of Edinburgh, Felicity Donohoe and Claire Swan of Glasgow, and Douglas Hamilton.

2007 was a vibrant year for early American scholarship on a plethora of topics beyond those relating to the triple anniversary. As always, the seminar programs at London’s Institute of Historical Research (IHR) included a great variety of papers on subjects relating to colonial America and the Atlantic world. The American Seminar hosted James Campbell on urban slavery and the law in the Americas, Catherine Clinton (Queen’s) on “Sexual Hypocrisy from Thomas Jefferson to Strom Thurmond,” and Frank Cogliano (Edinburgh) on Jefferson’s empire of liberty. A seminar on Seventeenth-Century British History included talks by Levente Juhasz (University of Szeged, Hungary) on Johannes Kelpius and radical religion, and that on the Economic and Social History of the Premodern World, 1400–1800, heard from Will Pettigrew on politics and the demise of the Royal African Company. Pettigrew also gave a paper to the seminar on Parliaments, Representation, and Society, the subject of which was the relationship between Parliament and the slave trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The History of Political Thought group hosted Anne McLaren (Liverpool), speaking on John Hales and Tom Paine in the early Republic, and in the Imperial History Seminar, Francisco Bethencourt (Charles R. Boxer Professor at King’s College) spoke on race relations in the Atlantic world; John G. Reid (Saint Mary’s, Halifax) gave a paper entitled “Interpreting Early Modern Northeastern North America: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Considerations”; Richard J. Ross (Illinois) compared legal communications and imperial governance in British and Spanish America; and David Richardson analyzed the economic context of slave trade abolition. Richardson also visited the seminar in British Maritime History to present his findings on estimating mortality rates on slave ships. A “new imperial history” seminar, Reconfiguring the British, heard from Christopher Leslie Brown (Columbia) on the origins of abolitionism, Barbara Bush (Sheffield Hallam) on African women and the transatlantic slave trade, Diana Paton (Newcastle) on the topic “The Afterlives of Three-Fingered Jack: Representing an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Outlaw,” and Marcus Wood (Sussex) on historical memory at Baltimore’s Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Last but far from least, the Socialist History Seminar hosted Marcus Rediker, discussing The Slave Ship. The IHR’s annual Anglo-American Conference, held in July, centered on the topic “Identities: National, Regional, and Personal” and included a full complement of papers on early American and Atlantic topics. The conference featured panels entitled “The American Revolutionary War in a Global Context” (chaired by UCL’s Stephen Conway, with papers by Holger Hoock, Kate Marsh, and Eve Rosenhaft, all of Liverpool), “Maritime Identities in the Atlantic World” (including a paper by Nottingham Trent’s Timothy Fulford), “Dissenting Identities: Lollards, Puritans, and Congregationalists” (chaired by Simon Middleton), and “Islands and Identities” (with papers by Trevor Burnard and James Livesay of Sussex).

The Oxford and Cambridge seminar series were also replete with scholarship on early American topics. At the former, Oxford’s J. H. Elliott gave a talk to the Early Modern Europe seminar entitled “Contrasting Empires: Britain and Spain in America,” and William Doyle (Bristol) spoke on the American Revolution and European nobility. The Commonwealth History group hosted Gad Heuman on apprenticeship in Jamaica, Stirling’s Robin Law on international law and the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, Virginia’s Joseph Miller on slaving in world history, Will Pettigrew on the  Africanization of Virginia’s labor force, and the Bodleian Library’s John Pinfold on that library’s collections relating to the slave trade debate. The Graduate Seminar, 1680–1840, also heard from Pettigrew and his cosupervisor Perry Gauci on William Beckford’s life in imperial politics. His other co-supervisor, Peter Thompson, debated the usefulness of the term “Early Modern America” in the American Seminar. The seminar on Early Modern British History heard from Miranda Kauffmann, another Oxonian, on the status of Africans in Tudor and Stuart England. Tim Lockley of Warwick spoke to the seminar on the Social, Cultural, and Economic History in the British World, c. 1350–1800, about his new project on runaway slave communities in antebellum South Carolina, and the Rothermere American Institute was treated to papers by Sarah Pearsall (Northwestern) on polygamy in early North America, by Steve Sarson (Swansea) on the Glorious Revolution in America, and by the hardest-working man in early American history, Pettigrew. At Cambridge the American History seminar was visited by former Keasbey Fellow William Henry Foster (Redlands/Cambridge), who presented a paper titled “White Slaves and Atlantic Empires”; Sharon Monteith (Nottingham), who spoke on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings; and another former Cambridge Fellow, Emily Clark (Tulane), who described her new project on the quadroon in Southern history and culture. Several seminars on early modern European and British history included talks by Cantabrigians David Abulafia (on race relations in the early modern Atlantic), Edward Holberton (on the Cromwellian Atlantic), and Sarah Irving (on natural philosophy and the origins of the British Empire), as well as a paper by Victor Enthoven of the Royal Netherlands Naval College (on military violence and slavery in the Atlantic world). Francisco Bethencourt presented another Atlantic paper to the seminar in World History.

Although the universities of London, Oxford, and Cambridge are sometimes referred to as the “golden triangle” of British academe, they are not the only venues for early American scholarship. Throughout the spring, the University of York sponsored a series of four workshops on “Empire and Landscape in the Long Eighteenth Century,” the first of which centered on transimperial estate management in Britain and the West Indies and included papers from Jon Finch (York), Julian Munby (Oxford), Susanne Seymour (Nottingham), and James Walvin. In Bristol, home to the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Peter Marshall (emeritus, King’s College) presented a keynote address to the conference “Defining the British World,” asking attendees to imagine the British world without America. That same month, the University of Sussex hosted a three-day conference on British Asia and the British Atlantic, 1500–1820: Two Worlds or One?” Organized by John Reid and Elizabeth Mancke (Akron), the event included papers by Trevor Burnard, Joseph Inikori, Kenneth MacMillan (Calgary), and Mancke and marked the beginning of a collaborative project between Burnard and Huw Bowen (Swansea), on which they gave a progress report to the IHR’s Imperial History seminar in November.

Though the above may have encouraged readers to think that British early Americanists did nothing this past year but present seminar papers or attend conferences, in fact our community has produced a large number of single-author monographs in the last couple of years. These included Catherine Armstrong (Manchester Metropolitan), Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century: English Representations in Print and Manuscript (Aldershot, Eng., 2007); Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (Dundee), eds., Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807 (Woodbridge, Eng., 2007); Tim Lockley, Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South (Gainesville, Fla., 2007); Ben Marsh (Stirling), Georgia’s Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (Athens, Ga., 2007); Gwenda Morgan (Sunderland), The Debate on the American Revolution: Issues in Historiography (Manchester, Eng., 2008); Marika Sherwood, After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807 (London, 2007); Simon Smith (WISE), Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge, 2006); and James Walvin, The Trader, the Owner, the Slave (London, 2007). Stephen Shapiro (Warwick), in partnership with Philip Barnard (University of Kansas), has produced annotated editions of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, Arthur Mervyn, Wieland, and Alcuin, all published by or forthcoming from Hackett Publishers, and his monograph, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System, has recently been published by Pennsylvania State University Press. Simon Middleton won the British Association of American Studies Book Prize for From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (Philadelphia, 2006), and Diana Paton’s work in progress, “Colonial Rule and Spiritual Power: Obeah, the State, and Caribbean Culture,” was rewarded with a major research fellowship from the  Leverhulme Trust. Kenneth Morgan (Brunel), who spent part of the 2006–2007 academic year as a visiting professor at the University of Sydney, published Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America and The Bright-Meyler Papers: A Bristol–West India Connection, 1732–1837 (both Oxford, Eng., 2007).

Although many departments will wait until after the publication of RAE results to make new hires, a number of early Americanist positions opened up this past year. Last autumn William Henry Foster returned to the University of Cambridge to take up a lectureship at Homerton College, and recent Cambridge Ph.D. Tristan Stubbs was appointed to a tutorial fellowship at Sussex. Edinburgh Ph.D. Finn Pollard became a lecturer in North American history at Newcastle, and Catherine Armstrong completed a fellowship at Warwick and began a lectureship at Manchester Metropolitan. A number of long-term members of our community, particularly those working on West Indian history, changed jobs within Britain: Christer Petley departed Leeds Metropolitan for Southampton, Douglas Hamilton went from a curatorial post at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to a position at WISE, York’s Simon Smith was appointed Professor of Modern History and Diaspora Studies at WISE, and Trevor Burnard, after nearly a decade in southern England, first at Brunel and then at Sussex, made the big move north this summer to become Professor of the History of the Americas at Warwick. Burnard and his new colleague Tim Lockley are forming a European Group in Early American History, whose Second Biennial European Conference in Early American and Atlantic History, “Amity, Enmity, and Emotion in Early America and the Atlantic World,” will be held December 12–14, 2008, at Warwick’s palazzo in Venice. Trevor and Tim can be contacted at t.g.burnard@warwick .ac.uk and t.j.lockley@warwick.ac.uk.

Since I was on research leave last fall, I was unable to attend the 2007 British Group for Early American History annual conference, hosted by Steve Sarson at the University of Wales, Swansea. 2008’s BGEAH will be held September 12–14 at the University of Manchester. Please feel free to contact me at natalie.a.zacek@manchester.ac.uk with any questions.

See you in Manchester and/or Venice!

Natalie Zacek
University of Manchester