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Ireland and the Black Atlantic in the eighteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Nini Rodgers
Nini Rodgers*
Affiliation:
School of Modern History, Queen’s University of Belfast
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Extract

In the second half of the twentieth century few subjects have excited more extensive historical debate in the western world than black slavery. American investigation has centred upon the actual operation of the institution. An impressively wide range of historical techniques, cliometrics, comparative history, cultural studies, the imagination of the novelist, have all been employed in a vigorous attempt to recover and evaluate the slave past. In Britain, the first great power to abolish the Atlantic trade and emancipate her slaves, the emphasis has been on the development of the anti-slavery movement, described by W. E. H. Lecky in 1869 as ‘a crusade’ to be rated ‘amongst the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations’, and therefore an obvious candidate for twentieth-century revision. Any discussion of black slavery in the New World immediately involves the historian in economic matters. Here the nineteenth-century orthodoxy launched by Adam Smith and developed by J. S. Mill and his friend J. E. Cairnes, author of The slave power (1862) and professor of political economy and jurisprudence in Queen’s College, Galway, saw slavery as both morally wrong and economically unsound, an anachronism in the modern world. Since the 1970s this view has been challenged head-on by American historians arguing that, however morally repugnant, slavery was a dynamic system, an engine of economic progress in the U.S.A. Such a thesis inevitably revives some of the arguments used by the nineteenth-century defenders of slavery and has equally inevitably attracted bitter anti-revisionist denunciation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 126 , November 2000 , pp. 174 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2000

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48 Ibid., pp 105-25.

49 Ibid., iii (1783), p. 83; Lammey, ‘Free trade’, p. 282.

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53 Ibid., i (1781), p. 92; Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 1-3 Sept. 1791.

54 Hibernian Magazine, 1781, p. 112.

55 Belfast News-Letter, 11 Jan., 1 Feb., 16 Sept. 1785.

56 Hibernian Magazine, 1781, pp 55, 168; Parl. reg. Ire., iii (1783), p. 74.

57 Petition of the merchants and traders of the city of Dublin concerned with the importation and refining of sugars, 30 Nov. 1765 (P.R.O.N.I., T/1060/9/3868); Watson’s Dublin directory, or the gentleman’s and citizen’s almanack, 1765 (Dublin, 1765).

58 Petition from the sugar refiners of the city of Dublin, [May?] 1780 (P.R.O.N.I., D/562/8416A). The names listed in order were Edward Byrne, Thomas Sherlock, Patrick Long, Joseph Green, John Maquay, John Sutton, Peter Galan, Andrew Maziere, Peter Canier, Patrick Sweetman, Garrett Geoghan, John Taurow, Samuel Collins, John Green, George Maquay, John Nairic, John Canier, John Maryland, John Byrne, Bartholomew Maziere, Patrick Kavanagh, John McMahon, John Morain, William Field, Samuel Canier, William Sweetman, Thomas Nowlan, Elias Tardy (Edwards, ‘Catholic Committee minute book’, pp 3-89).

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