Christer Petley
Biographic Data
| ID | 972369 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christer Petley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christer |
| FAMILY NAME | Petley |
| SIGNATURE | PETLEY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0616-1871 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Michelle Faubert, Granville Sharp’s Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre
Jamaica Ladies
Christine Walker's Jamaica Ladies begins with the tale of Elizabeth Keyhorne writing her will in the burgeoning port of Kingston, in 1713.It is possible that Keyhorne had first arrived in Kingston on board a slave ship from Africa, trafficked via the notorious transatlantic Middle Passage.Since some of her own children were enslaved people, Keyhorne had almost certainly also been enslaved for part of her life.But by 1713 she was free.Not only tha…
Managing “Property”
Probate inventories helped to support the established social and economic order in colonial Jamaica. These documents were part of the legal process of winding up an estate after a death and presented an account of personal possessions that had belonged to a decedent. They facilitated the transfer of property to heirs and identified those parts of an estate that were available for the repayment of debts. The inventories contain lists of enslaved p…
Surviving slavery in the British Caribbean
It is universally acknowledged that slavery entailed violence and conflict. But the scholarship has generally emphasised the violence of masters towards enslaved people and conflict between masters
Slavery Hinterland
At the height of the anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon presented the idea that Europe was the creation of its colonies—that the wealth which smothered the Continent was violently taken from distant territories and non-European peoples. And Fanon’s was not the only ‘third world’ voice to articulate this characteristic of Europe’s relationship with the wider world. The Trinidadian historian, Eric Williams, proposed, in 1944, that the roots of mu…
Victorian Jamaica
Contested Bodies
White Fury
The sugar planter Simon Taylor, who claimed ownership of over 2,248 enslaved people in Jamaica at the point of his death in 1813, was one of the wealthiest slaveholders ever to have lived in the British empire. Slavery was central to the eighteenth-century empire. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were brought from Africa to the Caribbean to toil and die within the brutal slave regime o…
Slaveholders and revolution
This article re-examines the declining influence of Jamaican sugar planters within the British Empire during the period between the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 and Parliament’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Much of the existing scholarship emphasises the consequences of the American Revolutionary War and rise of abolitionism during the 1780s as pivotal to the fall of the planters. This article argues that those chal…
Introduction
This chapter introduces the chapters that follow, foregrounding the crucial role of the Royal Navy in creating and consolidating the British Atlantic in the second half of the eighteenth century. It outlines the closely entwined connections between the nurturing of naval supremacy, the politics of commercial protection, and the development of national and imperial identities—all crucial factors in the consolidation and transformation of the Briti…
Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World, C. 1750-1820
The Royal Navy, the British Atlantic Empire and the Abolition of the Slave Trade
British patriotic identity and British military policy were closely entwined during the eighteenth century. The navy had a prominent role in both. One eighteenth-century vision of the Atlantic empire emphasised the interconnection between maritime colonial trade and British naval strength. The argument went that British transatlantic trade, including the slave trade, constituted a nursery for British seamen and that Britain’s status as a leading …
The Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World, c. 1750–1820
This book foregrounds the role of the Royal Navy in creating the British Atlantic in the eighteenth century. It outlines the closely entwined connections between the nurturing of naval supremacy, the
A tale of two plantations
This book has been a long time in the making. Richard Dunn first began researching the enslaved communities of Mesopotamia estate in Jamaica and Mount Airy plantation in Virginia some four decades
The Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition in the British Caribbean
Introduction to a special edition of the journal Slavery & Abolition, 'Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition in the British Caribbean', co-edited by Christer Petley and Stephan Lenik
Plantations and Homes
This article is about the wealth and material culture of the Jamaican elite during the age of abolition. The planter class had a huge material investment in plantation slavery, and wealth derived from this allowed it to live ostentatiously and to consume conspicuously. Those who did not migrate away from Jamaica were drawn towards colonial towns, many of them taking up residence in, or at the edges of, urban centres. Lists of personal property fo…
Agency of the Enslaved
The idea of ‘slave freedom’ is at the centre of this book about slavery and its abolition in Jamaica. It is an idea resting on the assumption that enslaved people refused to accept the status impos
Scandal of Colonial Rule
In 1806, General Thomas Picton stood trial at the court of King’s Bench accused of having ordered the torture of Louisa Calderon, a young mixed-race woman, during his time as governor of the British colony of Trinidad some five years previously. The charges were brought by William Fullarton, who had been at the head of a commission sent out to replace Picton’s governorship. The trial, as James Epstein shows in this absorbing study, was a dramatic…
Proslavery Priest
Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, 1729–1788." Slavery & Abolition, 34(4), pp. 681–682
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas
This Web site is a vast archive of 1,280 images related to the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. According to the creators, the collection “is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public.” It does not seek to interpret the sources or offer extended commentary on their origins, nor does it enter into discussion of the accuracy or authenticity with which they repres…
Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776, by Natalie A. Zacek
The principal arguments of this study of a small but important part of the British Caribbean are summarised in its title. Natalie Zacek seeks to demonstrate that, despite the brutalities of their slave systems, islands such as St Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat, which made up the English Leewards, were settled societies whose white colonists aspired, with some success, to English norms. As such, Zacek’s is a work of revision. The study seek…
War, Fire, and Rebellion in Jamaica
Throughout the year of 1760, repeated uprisings by enslaved people in Jamaica threatened to overthrow the white power structure of the island, presenting one of the most serious threats to the Brit
An Ulster slave-owner in the revolutionary Atlantic
An Ulster slave-owner in the revolutionary Atlantic: the life and letters of John Black." Slavery & Abolition, 41(4), pp. 874–875
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times
Lucky Valley
The Reaper's Garden
The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, by Vincent Brown, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2008, xviii, 340 pp. $35.00. ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02422-9
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas
This Web site is a vast archive of 1,280 images related to the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. According to the creators, the collection “is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public.” It does not seek to interpret the sources or offer extended commentary on their origins, nor does it enter into discussion of the accuracy or authenticity with which they repres…
Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean
Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites t…
Home” and “this country”
This article uses a case study of the transatlantic correspondence of Simon Taylor, a wealthy Jamaican planter, to examine the cultural identity of slaveholders in the British Caribbean at the end of the long eighteenth century. White settlers in the Americas faced metropolitan criticisms from as early as the seventeenth century. These became more pronounced in the period after the American Revolution with the development of an organised British …
Legitimacy’ and social boundaries
This article explores relations between free people of colour and white men in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. Using evidence from wills and other contemporary sources, it considers the types of bequests that white slaveholders made to free people of colour and to white people. In a slave society divided by racialized boundaries of rule, slaveholders’ liaisons with non-white concubines and the existence of mixed-race children had the potential …
Rethinking the fall of the planter class
This issue of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, and funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this issue, to bring together scholars currently working on the history of the British West Indian planter class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to discuss how, when, and why the fortunes of the planters went into decline. As this introduction notes…
New Perspectives on Slavery and Emancipation in the British Caribbean
New approaches to British imperial history and the rise of Atlantic history have had a strong influence on historians specializing in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean during the era of slavery. Caribbean scholars have always stressed the importance of transatlantic and colonial connections, but these new perspectives have encouraged historians to rethink the ways that Caribbean colonies and the imperial metropole shaped one another …
Slaveholders and revolution
This article re-examines the declining influence of Jamaican sugar planters within the British Empire during the period between the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 and Parliament’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Much of the existing scholarship emphasises the consequences of the American Revolutionary War and rise of abolitionism during the 1780s as pivotal to the fall of the planters. This article argues that those chal…
The Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World, c. 1750–1820
This book foregrounds the role of the Royal Navy in creating the British Atlantic in the eighteenth century. It outlines the closely entwined connections between the nurturing of naval supremacy, the
Slavery, emancipation and the creole world view of Jamaican colonists, 1800–1834
Focussing on the early nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which white slaveholders in Jamaica developed a distinctive local ideology based on the institution of slavery. Whites were in a minority in Jamaican slave society, slaveholding was widespread amongst white settlers, and all white men experienced privileges in a society organised around racialised boundaries of rule. These factors helped to ensure that Jamaican colonists…
Managing “Property”
Probate inventories helped to support the established social and economic order in colonial Jamaica. These documents were part of the legal process of winding up an estate after a death and presented an account of personal possessions that had belonged to a decedent. They facilitated the transfer of property to heirs and identified those parts of an estate that were available for the repayment of debts. The inventories contain lists of enslaved p…
Devoted Islands’ and ‘That Madman Wilberforce’
The debate about the reform and dismantling of the British-Atlantic slave system, which began in earnest during the 1780s, threatened more than the economic interests of the British-Caribbean planter class. The rise of humanitarianism was one aspect of a new mode of British imperialism that also challenged slaveholders' self-image as loyal and free members of an extended British world. Questions of national identity, patriotism and the British co…
The Americas
Seymour I. Schwartz, The Mismapping of America . Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that shaped a Nation . Daniel Vickers (ed.), A Companion to Colonial America . Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 . Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African‐American Slaves . Peter H. Wood, Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America . Francis J. Bremer, …
Legitimacy’ and social boundaries
This article explores relations between free people of colour and white men in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. Using evidence from wills and other contemporary sources, it considers the types of bequests that white slaveholders made to free people of colour and to white people. In a slave society divided by racialized boundaries of rule, slaveholders’ liaisons with non-white concubines and the existence of mixed-race children had the potential …
Slavery, emancipation and the creole world view of Jamaican colonists, 1800–1834
Focussing on the early nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which white slaveholders in Jamaica developed a distinctive local ideology based on the institution of slavery. Whites were in a minority in Jamaican slave society, slaveholding was widespread amongst white settlers, and all white men experienced privileges in a society organised around racialised boundaries of rule. These factors helped to ensure that Jamaican colonists…
No Bond but the Law
Caribbean Connections
Slaveholders in Jamaica
The Atlantic slave economy was crucial to Britain’s colonial enterprise during the eighteenth century but, after the 1780s, abolitionist campaigns helped to undermine the influence and power of British slaveholders. As inhabitants of the largest and most lucrative of the sugar islands in the British empire, slaveholders in Jamaica found themselves at the centre of a transatlantic conflict over the future of slavery, facing vehement political oppo…
Home” and “this country”
This article uses a case study of the transatlantic correspondence of Simon Taylor, a wealthy Jamaican planter, to examine the cultural identity of slaveholders in the British Caribbean at the end of the long eighteenth century. White settlers in the Americas faced metropolitan criticisms from as early as the seventeenth century. These became more pronounced in the period after the American Revolution with the development of an organised British …
The Reaper's Garden
The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, by Vincent Brown, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2008, xviii, 340 pp. $35.00. ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02422-9
Mosquito Empires
Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 . By J. R. McNeil . Cambridge University Press . 2010 . xvii + 371 pp. £16.99 . Mosquitoes helped to make history in the Americas. In this study of ecology and war in the ‘Greater Caribbean’ between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, J. R. McNeil contends that the outcome of military encounters were shaped to a large degree by ‘differential immunity’ to mosquito-borne…
British Trade with Spanish America, 1763-1808
In this book, Adrian Pearce argues that the volume of trade between Britain and the Spanish colonies rose rapidly between 1763 and 1808. His estimate that this trade grew by about 300 to 400 per cent during this period strongly suggests that extensive British commerce with the colonies was already established before their independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century. Britain and Spain were at war for much of this period, with conflict …
Livestock, sugar and slavery
West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783-1807, by David Beck Ryden
Journal Article West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807, by David Beck Ryden Get access West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807, by David Beck Ryden (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2009; pp. xviii + 332. £45). Christer Petley Christer Petley University of Southampton [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXVI, Issue 519, April 2011…
Short Notices
Devoted Islands’ and ‘That Madman Wilberforce’
The debate about the reform and dismantling of the British-Atlantic slave system, which began in earnest during the 1780s, threatened more than the economic interests of the British-Caribbean planter class. The rise of humanitarianism was one aspect of a new mode of British imperialism that also challenged slaveholders' self-image as loyal and free members of an extended British world. Questions of national identity, patriotism and the British co…
New Perspectives on Slavery and Emancipation in the British Caribbean
New approaches to British imperial history and the rise of Atlantic history have had a strong influence on historians specializing in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean during the era of slavery. Caribbean scholars have always stressed the importance of transatlantic and colonial connections, but these new perspectives have encouraged historians to rethink the ways that Caribbean colonies and the imperial metropole shaped one another …
Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776, by Natalie A. Zacek
The principal arguments of this study of a small but important part of the British Caribbean are summarised in its title. Natalie Zacek seeks to demonstrate that, despite the brutalities of their slave systems, islands such as St Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat, which made up the English Leewards, were settled societies whose white colonists aspired, with some success, to English norms. As such, Zacek’s is a work of revision. The study seek…
From Africa to Jamaica
From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775–1807, by Audra A. Diptee, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2010, xviii + 188 pp., US$69.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8130
British Online Archives
British Online Archives (BOA) is a website that allows students and scholars remote electronic access to large manuscript collections. At the time of writing there are eighteen collections of documents available. Five of these make up a series entitled ‘British Records on the Atlantic World, 1700–1900’, which includes records relating to Caribbean plantations, the transatlantic slave trade and mission work in America. This review is concerned wit…
Rethinking the fall of the planter class
This issue of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, and funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this issue, to bring together scholars currently working on the history of the British West Indian planter class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to discuss how, when, and why the fortunes of the planters went into decline. As this introduction notes…
Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean
Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites t…
British Fortunes and Caribbean Slavery
This essay offers a critical appraisal of Nicholas Draper's The Price of Emancipation. Draper's book enhances our understanding of the processes by which enslaved people in the British Empire gained juridical freedom during the 1830s, and in its focus on absentee slaveholders living in the metropole it offers a new and important analysis of the character of British slave ownership on the brink of emancipation. Questions raised by Draper's work ab…
Proslavery Priest
Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, 1729–1788." Slavery & Abolition, 34(4), pp. 681–682
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas
This Web site is a vast archive of 1,280 images related to the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. According to the creators, the collection “is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public.” It does not seek to interpret the sources or offer extended commentary on their origins, nor does it enter into discussion of the accuracy or authenticity with which they repres…
The Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition in the British Caribbean
Introduction to a special edition of the journal Slavery & Abolition, 'Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition in the British Caribbean', co-edited by Christer Petley and Stephan Lenik
Plantations and Homes
This article is about the wealth and material culture of the Jamaican elite during the age of abolition. The planter class had a huge material investment in plantation slavery, and wealth derived from this allowed it to live ostentatiously and to consume conspicuously. Those who did not migrate away from Jamaica were drawn towards colonial towns, many of them taking up residence in, or at the edges of, urban centres. Lists of personal property fo…
History (39 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (30 works) · History (29 works) · Political science (27 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Economic history (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Ancient history (14 works)