Slavery

This is not a book for Scott Morrison, who, as prime minister, declared that Australian history was free of the stain of slavery. Santilla Chingaipe proves otherwise. As she states in her introduction, a key theme of Black Convicts is the exploration of ‘how slavery shaped modern Australia’. In the context of this book, ‘slavery’ is both a specific and an umbrella term for different forms of labour exploitation pursued by the British empire between the 1600s and the 1800s. Chingaipe argues that slavery, convictism, and indentured servitude were linked through a fundamental premise: the abuse and exploitation of people for financial gain. Her primary focus is on convicts, as the title suggests, and how Black men, women, and children transported to Australia ultimately were victims of the same system that enslaved their forebears. These convicts were not chattel slaves – many had once known liberty, and would again – but the direction of their lives, in common with the lives of Black people kept as property and forced to labour on plantations in the Americas, was shaped by colonial masters who placed profit over morality.

‘To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended.’ This premise guides the third book of Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian of African and Indian descent and history professor at Massachusetts’s Tufts University. As Manjapra invites us to see, the ‘voids’ in his family’s history reflect the pernicious afterlife of five hundred years of Atlantic slavery; his loss just one of its manifold legacies.

Until about twenty years ago, historians of colonial North America were writing about it as ‘this strange New World’. Whether because of distance or a native frontier, inflated (or skewed) visions, J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s new man, the American, was thought to have been born on an unknown and therefore malleable physical and institutional landscape. Everything could, as it were, begin from scratch – and that’s the way the Americans wanted it. Today, historians have repositioned the colonies within the seventeenth – and eighteenth – century Atlantic World. In these studies, North American colonials simply lived English, Dutch and French lives overseas. It was not just that they replicated the home country’s customs and institutions in Philadelphia, Charleston or Montreal: that we’ve known. They used an available Atlantic World: black slaves ran to British ships on the Atlantic and served as sailors; New England merchants travelled to the Caribbean; Dutch New Netherlanders as assiduously carried on business with Amsterdam wholesalers as with retailers on Manhattan Island; British soldiers stationed on the African coast found themselves shipped to South Carolina.