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Thank you. Two hundred twenty years, 10 minutes.

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One slide. Here goes.

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I'm a historian of the Atlantic world and very much appreciate that slavery and race race relations change across time and space.

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I primarily look at French, Dutch, Spanish and English British expansions into the Americas and very much appreciate

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that that if we want to talk about slavery and resistance in race relations,

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it's very much rooted in change over time. And especially the work that formed the bedrock and shaped the colonies the environment.

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So Bermuda is no different. I would say roughly that we have three different Bermuda's during this period.

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And to understand the three different Bermuda is to understand three different blending forms of

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slavery and then the resistance that would be that would come to that slavery change across time.

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So for the first seven years of Bermuda, early Bermuda, this was an agricultural colony,

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started initially exclusively on tobacco, a cash crop grown on shares across in small 25 acre units across the island.

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But over time, the price of tobacco collapsed. The island shifted into diverse agriculture and also crafts and manufacturing, which were exported.

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This was when Bermuda and Bermuda made things and exported it.

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England also, we have three different British empires, if you will, in the 17th century,

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the colonies that Britain Britain created were largely independent and uncoordinated.

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We have incredible change in England itself. We have a civil war.

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We chop one king's head off, we get rid of another king. There really isn't an empire or it is forming in these years.

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And the important intellectual context is subject rights. People living in English colonies in the Caribbean, in Virginia, in New England, in Bermuda.

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They have subject rights and subject rights can be stripped away.

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So the slave codes we see being created by largely independent governments and colonies.

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This is the slave code we strip away the rights of English sorry of African people, people of African descent in the individual colonies.

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They have the rights equal to whites by default,

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and these are eroded by individual colonies to create the racism and the unfair discrimination within slavery.

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And England itself at home is very much in mess at very little oversight of this.

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So in some way, slavery is deliberately created differently in different English colonies, but largely unchecked.

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Bermuda is a tri racial society. Native Americans are brought in on the same ship as the first African in 16 16,

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and Native Americans are brought in throughout the 17th century as well.

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Perhaps 10 percent of this population is of African or African descent in the 16 20s,

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rising to about thirty three percent by the end of this drone from Angola,

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we can document and largely privateers are bringing them in from Spanish Caribbean locations.

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So the Iberian World Iberian tradition and system of slavery is very much relevant

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to understanding Bermuda's early period to resistance is difficult proportionately.

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Whites are very much the majority, and enslaved peoples are in white households very much dominated.

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There's a Puritan religious surveillance system also in this era, so resistance is difficult.

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Small size of island, very little trade, very little opportunities to run away.

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But it is practised on a daily level in terms of resisting every day the work that is put upon them.

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And there are several revolt plots that are detected and even some that that result in violence attacking the owners or masters of these people.

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Fast forwarding forward 60 90 is the Bermuda company is abolished.

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Bermuda shifts into a maritime period of shipbuilding of using those ships to trade, carry freight elsewhere, wrecking privateers.

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This is an age where male and female experiences become radically different.

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Men might travel 5000 miles in a year.

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Women in Bermuda, be they black or white, are living their entire lives without moving 20 miles from where they where they were born.

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So the male economy is highly diverse and highly sort of certainly atlantic wide.

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Whereas female work remains much more like the 17th century system England, the British colony, the British Empire is changing at this time.

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Sixteen nineties, we only start to kind of knit together and crystallise an empire and try to standardise things across time.

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We shift thanks to John Locke and other philosophers into a different situation.

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He argues that natural rights people live in a state of nature and they come together and they create a government.

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So natural rights pre-date an overarching subject rights, and this becomes start the the [INAUDIBLE] in creating and sustaining intellectually,

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politically a slave system start to fall into place, start to start to crystallise at this time.

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Bermuda in this maritime period becomes a biracial society Indian as an indicator drops away and historic records in the 18th century.

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And basically you have sort of white and non-white as binary categories and laws are created and practises are created by

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which essentially you are either white and you are therefore free or you are not white and therefore de facto a slave.

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There are laws whereby if you become free and you are not white, you have to leave the island bittersweet,

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transforming personal liberty and emancipation into exile from the country.

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You were born because almost all Bermuda ends. All of Bermuda is either white or black are native born by this time.

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Self-replicating populations, very few immigrants coming to the island, it's a very full,

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very crowded island resistance I find particularly takes the form of what I would say profit

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sharing and white masters would call theft in that you are appropriating the fruits of your labour,

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the things that you are making, you might be seen as stealing them.

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But in fact, you have created this. Slaves at the time have created this, and I turned to my archaeology.

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Historically, document wise, it's very difficult to get at the lived experiences of 18th century enslaved for medians,

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so archaeology becomes an alternate way.

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And on Smith Island, we have a slave, sorry, a cave site deliberately sculpted and we find butchered cow and pig bones.

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We find some rather expensive pottery, English pottery, imported pottery in the ground there.

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And this very much seems to be a social place where I would say enslaved Bermudian met together to socialise,

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to talk, to feast on the very bones that we have found maritime mariners, black, a black,

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enslaved sailors who could run away in foreign ports and in some cases, even women could get on ships and escape to other colonies,

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hopefully to better life, but not always through the large traffic of Bermuda's fleet.

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There's also the 1731 in 1762 slave plots.

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Sarah Bassett and in 1762, about which Professor Maxwell has written extensively and then the third period.

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Do I have much time left? OK, little bit. In the 1780s, as a result of the American Revolution, the empire's changed.

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The Atlantic world has changed. Bermuda's economy is is very much thrown into disruption and plunged into chaos

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and economic hardship in that the old maritime economy really collapses.

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Freight rates drop from unions cannot compete. Various areas of trade are shut from them.

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And this is the era in the sixteen, seventeen eighties and nineties where we get the creation of the plantations of the Turks islands.

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And I call it a plantation because we think of plantation labour as being time oriented,

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entirely coerced, entirely unpaid and uncompensated brutal work, unskilled work.

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This is the world that Mary Prince so tragically describes for us, and this is sort of arriving at this period in the 70s, 80s and 90s,

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as many of the traditional Bermudian economic activities collapse and this new alternative becomes developed and put into place.

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We go from a seasonal to a year round and multi-year element to this.

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The British military comes in garrisons the islands as a strategic stronghold.

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All of these forts that Professor Harris loves to to to write about this is many of these are products of this time.

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Some British military spending and employment in the various dockyards and catering to garrison needs becomes really in the early 19th century,

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the the bedrock of Bermuda's economy. We get after the lost city of thirteen of the twenty six colonies in America.

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We get now really a shift to India shift to a global empire.

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In the British case, the French Revolution changes the conversation to talk about human rights, human rights, liberté, fraternité, égalité.

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And these are not connected to a particular people in a natural world.

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But but basically, these are rights of everybody, regardless of ethnicity or colour.

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And slavery becomes potentially intellectually unsustainable, unjustifiable.

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When we shift to a rhetoric of natural rights and my time is up and I,

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the last bit will be addressed, I think very adequate, very skilfully by the rest of the panel.