Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

by Alexander X. Byrd

Overview

Jamestown and Plymouth serve as iconic images of British migration to the New World. A century later, however, when British migration was at its peak, the vast majority of men, women, and children crisscrossing the Atlantic on English ships were of African, not English, descent. Captives and Voyagers, a compelling study from Alexander X. Byrd, traces the departures, voyages, and landings of enslaved and free blacks who left their homelands in the eighteenth century for British colonies and examines how displacement and resettlement shaped migrant society and, in turn, Britain's Atlantic empire.

Captives and Voyagers breaks away from the conventional image of transatlantic migration and illustrates how black men and women, enslaved and free, came to populate the edges of an Anglo-Atlantic world. Whether as settlers in Sierra Leone or as slaves in Jamaica, these migrants brought a deep and affecting experience of being in motion to their new homelands, and as they became firmly ensconced in the particulars of their new local circumstances they both shaped and were themselves molded by the demands of the British Atlantic world, of which they were an essential part.

Byrd focuses on the two largest and most significant streams of black dislocation: the forced immigration of Africans from the Biafran interior of present-day southeastern Nigeria to Jamaica as part of the British slave trade and the emigration of free blacks from Great Britain and British North America to Sierra Leone in West Africa. By paying particular attention to the social and cultural effects of transatlantic migration on the groups themselves and focusing as well on their place in the British Empire, Byrd illuminates the meaning and experience of slavery and liberty for people whose journeys were similarly beset by extreme violence and catastrophe. By following the movement of this representative population, Captives and Voyagers provides a vitally important view of the British colonial world—its intersection with the African diaspora.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807133590
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2008
Series:	Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Alexander X. Byrd is an assistant professor of history at Rice University, where he teaches African American history and the history of the African Diaspora.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Black Migrations 1

Part I Captives

1 The Slave Trade from the Biafran Interior: Violence, Serial Displacement, and the Rudiments of Igbo Society 17

2 The Slave Ship and the Beginnings of Igbo Society in the African Diaspora 32

3 White Power and the Context of Slave Seasoning in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica 57

4 Routines of Disaster and Revolution 86

Part II Voyagers

5 Social Movement and Imagining Freedom in the British Capital 125

6 Migration and the Impossible Demands of Leaving London 139

7 From Slaves to Free Subjects in British North America 154

8 Black Society and the Limits of British Freedom 167

9 The Effects of Exodus: Afro-Maritime Society in Motion 177

10 Arriving in Sierra Leone: Catastrophe and Its Aftermaths 200

Conclusion: Migration and Black Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World 244

Notes 253

Bibliography 313

Index 333

Editorial Reviews

from the citation for the Wesley-Logan Prize Committee, given jointly by the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). Sent by Byrd via email 2/2/10

"Africans enslaved from the Biafran interior to Jamaica and free blacks resettled from Great Britain and North America to Sierra Leone in West Africa are the subject of this beautifully written and tightly argued study achieved with breathtaking research on three continents. These two streams of migrants are placed within the same analytical space resulting in a nuaced study of migrant societies and the meaning of slavery and freedom for those in constant motion and resettlement. A stunning achievement."

LSU Press

From the Publisher

Well-researched, engagingly written, and provocative in its conclusions, Captives and Voyagers charts a new direction in the historiography of the peoples of African descent.

Colin A. Palmer

Crisply written, superbly researched, and avoiding overly pedantic theoretical models and jargon, Byrd’s work is a wonderful contribution to Atlantic world scholarship.

Choice