Thank you. Two hundred twenty years, 10 minutes.
One slide. Here goes.
I'm a historian of the Atlantic world and very much appreciate that slavery and race race relations change across time and space.
I primarily look at French, Dutch, Spanish and English British expansions into the Americas and very much appreciate
that that if we want to talk about slavery and resistance in race relations,
it's very much rooted in change over time. And especially the work that formed the bedrock and shaped the colonies the environment.
So Bermuda is no different. I would say roughly that we have three different Bermuda's during this period.
And to understand the three different Bermuda is to understand three different blending forms of
slavery and then the resistance that would be that would come to that slavery change across time.
So for the first seven years of Bermuda, early Bermuda, this was an agricultural colony,
started initially exclusively on tobacco, a cash crop grown on shares across in small 25 acre units across the island.
But over time, the price of tobacco collapsed. The island shifted into diverse agriculture and also crafts and manufacturing, which were exported.
This was when Bermuda and Bermuda made things and exported it.
England also, we have three different British empires, if you will, in the 17th century,
the colonies that Britain Britain created were largely independent and uncoordinated.
We have incredible change in England itself. We have a civil war.
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.
And the important intellectual context is subject rights. People living in English colonies in the Caribbean, in Virginia, in New England, in Bermuda.
They have subject rights and subject rights can be stripped away.
So the slave codes we see being created by largely independent governments and colonies.
This is the slave code we strip away the rights of English sorry of African people, people of African descent in the individual colonies.
They have the rights equal to whites by default,
and these are eroded by individual colonies to create the racism and the unfair discrimination within slavery.
And England itself at home is very much in mess at very little oversight of this.
So in some way, slavery is deliberately created differently in different English colonies, but largely unchecked.
Bermuda is a tri racial society. Native Americans are brought in on the same ship as the first African in 16 16,
and Native Americans are brought in throughout the 17th century as well.
Perhaps 10 percent of this population is of African or African descent in the 16 20s,
rising to about thirty three percent by the end of this drone from Angola,
we can document and largely privateers are bringing them in from Spanish Caribbean locations.
So the Iberian World Iberian tradition and system of slavery is very much relevant
to understanding Bermuda's early period to resistance is difficult proportionately.
Whites are very much the majority, and enslaved peoples are in white households very much dominated.
There's a Puritan religious surveillance system also in this era, so resistance is difficult.
Small size of island, very little trade, very little opportunities to run away.
But it is practised on a daily level in terms of resisting every day the work that is put upon them.
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.
Fast forwarding forward 60 90 is the Bermuda company is abolished.
Bermuda shifts into a maritime period of shipbuilding of using those ships to trade, carry freight elsewhere, wrecking privateers.
This is an age where male and female experiences become radically different.
Men might travel 5000 miles in a year.
Women in Bermuda, be they black or white, are living their entire lives without moving 20 miles from where they where they were born.
So the male economy is highly diverse and highly sort of certainly atlantic wide.
Whereas female work remains much more like the 17th century system England, the British colony, the British Empire is changing at this time.
Sixteen nineties, we only start to kind of knit together and crystallise an empire and try to standardise things across time.
We shift thanks to John Locke and other philosophers into a different situation.
He argues that natural rights people live in a state of nature and they come together and they create a government.
So natural rights pre-date an overarching subject rights, and this becomes start the the [INAUDIBLE] in creating and sustaining intellectually,
politically a slave system start to fall into place, start to start to crystallise at this time.
Bermuda in this maritime period becomes a biracial society Indian as an indicator drops away and historic records in the 18th century.
And basically you have sort of white and non-white as binary categories and laws are created and practises are created by
which essentially you are either white and you are therefore free or you are not white and therefore de facto a slave.
There are laws whereby if you become free and you are not white, you have to leave the island bittersweet,
transforming personal liberty and emancipation into exile from the country.
You were born because almost all Bermuda ends. All of Bermuda is either white or black are native born by this time.
Self-replicating populations, very few immigrants coming to the island, it's a very full,
very crowded island resistance I find particularly takes the form of what I would say profit
sharing and white masters would call theft in that you are appropriating the fruits of your labour,
the things that you are making, you might be seen as stealing them.
But in fact, you have created this. Slaves at the time have created this, and I turned to my archaeology.
Historically, document wise, it's very difficult to get at the lived experiences of 18th century enslaved for medians,
so archaeology becomes an alternate way.
And on Smith Island, we have a slave, sorry, a cave site deliberately sculpted and we find butchered cow and pig bones.
We find some rather expensive pottery, English pottery, imported pottery in the ground there.
And this very much seems to be a social place where I would say enslaved Bermudian met together to socialise,
to talk, to feast on the very bones that we have found maritime mariners, black, a black,
enslaved sailors who could run away in foreign ports and in some cases, even women could get on ships and escape to other colonies,
hopefully to better life, but not always through the large traffic of Bermuda's fleet.
There's also the 1731 in 1762 slave plots.
Sarah Bassett and in 1762, about which Professor Maxwell has written extensively and then the third period.
Do I have much time left? OK, little bit. In the 1780s, as a result of the American Revolution, the empire's changed.
The Atlantic world has changed. Bermuda's economy is is very much thrown into disruption and plunged into chaos
and economic hardship in that the old maritime economy really collapses.
Freight rates drop from unions cannot compete. Various areas of trade are shut from them.
And this is the era in the sixteen, seventeen eighties and nineties where we get the creation of the plantations of the Turks islands.
And I call it a plantation because we think of plantation labour as being time oriented,
entirely coerced, entirely unpaid and uncompensated brutal work, unskilled work.
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,
as many of the traditional Bermudian economic activities collapse and this new alternative becomes developed and put into place.
We go from a seasonal to a year round and multi-year element to this.
The British military comes in garrisons the islands as a strategic stronghold.
All of these forts that Professor Harris loves to to to write about this is many of these are products of this time.
Some British military spending and employment in the various dockyards and catering to garrison needs becomes really in the early 19th century,
the the bedrock of Bermuda's economy. We get after the lost city of thirteen of the twenty six colonies in America.
We get now really a shift to India shift to a global empire.
In the British case, the French Revolution changes the conversation to talk about human rights, human rights, liberté, fraternité, égalité.
And these are not connected to a particular people in a natural world.
But but basically, these are rights of everybody, regardless of ethnicity or colour.
And slavery becomes potentially intellectually unsustainable, unjustifiable.
When we shift to a rhetoric of natural rights and my time is up and I,
the last bit will be addressed, I think very adequate, very skilfully by the rest of the panel.