The origins of plantation slavery: Professor Simon Newman
Issued: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 11:07:00 BST
For nearly 10 years, Professor Newman has been investigating the origins of plantation slavery as it existed in British America. Recently, he has written a book that explores the circumstances that led to the movement of white labour from the British Isles to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations in the late 1620s.
‘These weren’t people who had chosen to go,’ says Professor Newman. ‘These were people who were sent from England, and then increasingly from Scotland and Ireland, in chains. It was the period of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Civil War, so lots of people had been captured. When Cromwell captured Drogheda in Ireland, for example, those he didn’t kill he sent straight to Barbados and Jamaica where the life expectancy was about three years.
‘The English learned how to use labour very differently. Everyone in London was preoccupied with the Civil War and didn’t really care how the new colonies made their huge profits. By the 1650s, when African slaves had become affordable and the supply of white people from the British Isles was drying up, a switch was made and the English started using slavery as they’d learned to use white people in a certain way.’
According to Professor Newman, Britain was the centre of the seventeenth century world, so it makes sense to study this era of American history from a British vantage point. Since so many Scots were involved in running the Caribbean and its plantations, as merchants and as plantation managers, Scotland is likely to have even more relevant records in its archives than England.
‘If you studied British America at a university in America, you’d have to travel more than if you came here,’ says Professor Newman. ‘Glasgow has a very good research environment. Here, we treat postgraduate students as fellow researchers, who very quickly become part of our community.’
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