Bread and arsenic: Citizenship from the bottom up in Georgian London

Journal of Social History

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2005, Pages

  Land, Isaac ^a,b  

^a INDIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Department of History ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 26844530559     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2005.0109     Document Type: Review

References (142)

1. James Stephen Taylor, Jonas Hanway, Founder of the Marine Society: Charity and Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1985), 180-1. Hanway's monument can still be viewed in the Abbey today, behind the racks of folding chairs stacked in front of it. Sic transit gloria mundi.
2. Taylor, Hanway, 171.
3. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), 13-151.
4. John Pugh, Remarkable Occurences in the Life of Jonas Hanway, Esq. (1787), 211.
5. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992), 365.
6. The literature responding to Colley is now vast. The most sustained and elaborate critique so far is Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003).
7. P.A. Buckner, "Making British North America British, 1815-1860," in C.C. Eldridge, ed., Kith and Kin: Canada, Britain, and the United States from the Revolution to the Cold War (Cardiff, 1997), 11-44;
8. Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000);
9. S. J. Connolly, "Varieties of Britishness: Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in the Hanoverian State," in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom?: The Making of British History (London, 1995), 193-207.
10. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000);
11. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2004).
12. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge, 2000), 13.
13. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1998);
14. Ann Dummett and Andrew Nichol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London, 1990);
15. Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789-1870 (New York, 2000).
16. For the quarrel over labels like "American" and "British" as a proxy for claims of citizenship and rights, see P.J. Marshall, "A Nation Defined by Empire, 1755-1776," in Grant and Stringer, eds. Uniting the Kingdom?, 208-222;
17. T.H. Breen, "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising," Journal of American History 84:1 (June 1997), 13-39;
18. Stephen Conway, "From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739-1783," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 59:1 (January 2002), 65-100.
19. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 87.
20. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Block: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968).
21. Jordan, White Over Black, 20, 27.
22. Jordan, White Over Black, 97.
23. Jordan's antecedents, critics, and defenders are surveyed in Alden T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York, 1995), 136-176.
24. Jordan, White Over Black, 221.
25. Jordan, White Over Black, 158-159, 579.
26. Jordan, White Over Block, 489.
27. James Campbell and James Oakes, "The Invention of Race: Rereading White Over Black," Reviews in American History 21:1 (March 1993), 172-183.
28. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995);
29. Laura Tabili, "Race is a Relationship, and Not a Thing," Journal of Social History 37:1 (2003), 125-130.
30. The constructions of whiteness and blackness uncovered in Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992)
31. and Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000) are especially pertinent and relate closely to Ignatiev's thesis.
32. Wheeler, Complexion, 141, 188. Wheeler is also critiquing earlier scholarship such as Folarin Shyllon, Block People in Britain, 1555-1833 (London, 1977). She acknowledges important debts to intellectual histories by
33. Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, 1967)
34. and Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989). For a critique of Wheeler from an intellectual history perspective,
35. see Benjamin Braude's review of her book in the William and Mary Quarterly 59:3 (July 2002), 742-746.
36. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 97-98.
37. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 95.
38. Jordan, White Over Black, 485.
39. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 83-86, 122-126.
40. Wheeler, Complexion, 259.
41. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978);
42. Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998).
43. For some instructive starting points, see: Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660-1760 (Newark, DE, 1995);
44. Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, 1998),
45. Catherine Hall, "The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class, and Empire in the Making of the 1832 Reform Act," in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), 107-136;
46. Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000).
47. J.S. Bromley, ed. The Manning of the Royal Navy: Selected Public Documents, 1693-1873 (London, 1974).
48. Public Record Office, T 1/631, Henry Smeathman's petition to the Treasury (17 May 1786).
49. Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London, 2002);
50. Norma Myers, "The Black Poor of London: Initiatives of Eastern Seamen in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in Diane Frost, ed., Ethnic Labour and British Imperial Trade: A History of Ethnic Seafarers in the UK (London, 1995), 7-21;
51. Shompa Lahiri, "Patterns of Resistance: Indian Seamen in Imperial Britain," in Anne J. Kershen, ed., Language, Labour and Migration (Aldershot, UK, 2000), 155-78;
52. Shompa Lahiri, "Contested Relations: the East India Company and Lascars in London," in H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, eds., The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge, 2002), 169-181.
53. Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600-1857 (Delhi, 2004).
54. James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555-1945 (London, 1973);
55. Folarin O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London, 1974) and Black People in Britain;
56. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984);
57. Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain, 1780-1830 (London, 1996);
58. Ian Duffield, " 'I Asked How the Vessel Could Go': the Contradictory Experiences of African and African Disapora Mariners and Port Workers in Britain, c. 1750-1850," in Anne J. Kershen, ed., Language, Labour, and Migration (Aldershot, UK, 2000), 121-154;
59. W. A. Hart, "Africans in Eighteenth-Century Ireland," Irish Historical Studies, 33:129 (2002), 19-32.
60. Walvin, Black and White, 56, 64;
61. Seymour Drescher, "Manumission in a Society without Slave Law: Eighteenth Century England," Slavery and Abolition 10:3 (December 1989), 85-101;
62. Douglas A. Lorimer, "Black Slaves and English Liberty: A Re-examination of Racial Slavery in England," Immigrants and Minorities 3:2 (July 1984), 121-50;
63. William R. Cotter, "The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England," History 79:255 (February 1994), 31-56.
64. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991), 172-205;
65. John W. Pulis, ed., Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (New York, 1999).
66. Stephen J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London's Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786-1791 (Liverpool, 1994), 64-5, 67;
67. Dictionary of National Biography s.v. John Julius Angerstein;
68. Standish Meacham, Henry Thornton of Claphom, 1760-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
69. T 1/632, CRBP Minutes, 7 June 1786;
70. T 1/635, account of CRBP spending, late August-early September 1786.
71. T 1/633, CRBP Minutes, 10 July 1786.
72. James Walvin, An Africans Life: The life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797 (London, 1998), 138.
73. Braidwood, Black Poor, 70, 270;
74. Taylor, Hanway, 73.
75. Walvin, Black and White, 51-2, 58, 198;
76. Shyllon, Black People, 29, 120;
77. Lorimer, "Black Slaves and English Liberty," 132-3;
78. Braidwood, Black Poor, 27, 63, 70;
79. T 1/632, CRBP Minutes of 7 June 1786. For a discussion of why so many African-Americans found seafaring an attractive occupation,
80. see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
81. For the context of this legislation, see Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830 (Philadelphia, 1979).
82. Jonas Hanway, A Review of the Proposed Naturalization of the Jews (London, 1753; third edition), 28-9, 30-2, 36-7, 39, 42, 58-9, 68-9, 81, 146-7, 162-3. For the larger European debate about whether Jews could or should be conscripts, see
83. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (Oxford, 1995), 15, 35-6, 40, 43, 49, 115, 130, 145.
84. Hanway, Review, 39;
85. Letters Admonitory and Argumentative (London, 1753) 22. Italics in the original.
86. Walvin, African's Life, 140.
87. For more nuanced views of charity and philanthropists, see Donna Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1989);
88. Mary Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712-1830 (Oxford, 1990);
89. David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley, 2002), 207-236.
90. Phinizy Spalding, Oglethorpe in America (Chicago, 1977);
91. Betty Wood, "James Edward Oglethorpe, Race, and Slavery: A Reassessment," in Phinizy Spalding and Harvey H. Jackson, eds., Oglethorpe in Perspective: Georgia's Founder after Two Hundred Years (Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1989), 66-79.
92. In addition to Taylor's work, the other modern biography is John Harold Hutchins, Jonas Hanway, 1712-1786 (London, 1940).
93. Shyllon, Black People, 142 (quoting Morning Post, 22 December 1786).
94. Braidwood, Black Poor, 70;
95. T 1/631, letters from B. Johnson dated 27 May and 1 June 1786.
96. Braidwood, Black Poor, 71-83.
97. Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1964);
98. Braidwood, Black Poor, 11, 15-17, 89;
99. Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 16-17, 19, 42-3;
100. Meacham, Henry Thornton, 94, 96-7.
101. Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History, vol. 1 : The Beginning (Oxford, 1997), 37-58, 171, 230, 296.
102. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York, 2003), 226.
103. T 1/632, CRBP minutes of June 7, 1786;
104. see also Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Penguin, 1999), 104-105.
105. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 106.
106. T 1/631, CRBP Minutes of 10 May 1786;
107. T 1/632, CRBP Minutes of 7 June 1786.
108. T 1/633, CRBP minutes for 5 July 1786.
109. T 1/633, CRBP minutes for July 5, July 10, July 15, 1786;
110. T 1/634, CRBP minutes for July 26, July 31 (and letters from shipping firms), August 4, 1786,
111. also George Peters' letter of July 31, 1786;
112. T 1/635, CRBP minutes for August 25, 1786;
113. T 1/636, CRBP Minutes for July 28, 1786.
114. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 229.
115. Shyllon, Black Slaves, 33.
116. Jordan, White Over Black, 549-553.
117. John Thomas Smith, Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London (London, 1817), 33.
118. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), 163;
119. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, (New York, 1983), 220;
120. Colley, Britons, 33.
121. Bolster, Black Jacks, 65-7, suggests that Johnson's headdress may have had an African symbolism as well, connecting it to "John Canoe" mummers in religious festivals in West Africa and the Caribbean. For other black mendicants who deployed maritime outfits or accessories, see Cruikshank's illustration of the Cadgers in
122. Pierce Egan, Life in London (London, 1821), facing 346;
123. see also Minutes of the Evidence Taken before the Committee ... to Enquire into the State of Mendicity and Vagrancy in the Metropolis (London, 1815), 69-71 ("those sailors who may be seen about dragging a ship"), 76-81.
124. See, for example, the debate on the Great Cat Massacre. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1985), 75-106;
125. Roger Chartier, "Text, Symbols, and Frenchness," Journal of Modern History 57 (1985), 682-695;
126. Harold Mah, "Suppressing the Text: The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darnton's Great Cat Massacre," History Workshop 31 (Spring 1991), 1-20.
127. Ian Duffield, "Daylight on Convict Lived Experience: The History of a Pious Negro Servant," Tasmanian Historical Studies 6:2 (1999), 29-62.
128. John Brewer, "Theater and Counter-Theater in Georgian Politics: The Mock Elections at Garrat," Radical History Review 22 (Winter 1979-80), 7-40.
129. T 1/632, CRBP Minutes of 7 June 1786.
130. Braidwood, Black Poor, 138;
131. T 1/638, CRBP Minutes of 24 October 1786;
132. also two letters from George Peters to George Rose at the Treasury (same date).
133. Both lists are in T 1/638.
134. T 1/638: letter of 6 December 1786 from Samuel Hoare, Jr. to George Rose at the Treasury.
135. Braidwood, 136-143. Equiano's roster of February 1787 (T 1/643) took pains to note the marital status of the women, although he was less discriminating about ethnicity, identifying people only as "black" or "white." His single largest category was 290 black men. After this came the 63 white women married to black men. The 43 black women were divided into 25 who were apparently single, and the 18 who were married to white men. There were 20 children aboard, 11 black and 9 white; some of the white children shared last names with the white women listed as married to black men. 24 white men were also on the passenger list, representing a variety of crafts and trades needed in the new settlement. One was simply a "passenger." 4 white women were listed as married to white men, while 7 additional white women were "to be married." Perhaps Equiano took such pains to clarify who was married because rumors that the white women were prostitutes had surfaced even at this early date. This story is dismissed as without foundation by the recent students of the topic. For a summary, see Norma Myers, "In Search of the Invisible: British Black Family and Community, 1780-1830," Slavery and Abolition 13:3 (December 1992), 166-7.
136. T 1/632, CRBP minutes 7 June 1786.
137. Fryer, Staying Power, 70-1, 155, 161, 200;
138. Ian Duffield, "Skilled Workers or Marginalized Poor? The African Population of the United Kingdom, 1812-1852," in David Killingray, ed., Africans in Britain (London, 1994), 49-87.
139. Public Record Office, HO 28/45: 6 November 1816, John Haythorne, Mayor of Bristol, to Lord Sidmouth.
140. Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge, 1979); 54 Geo. III c.134; 4 Geo. IV c. 80; 2 & 3 Will. IV c. 84;
141. see also Walvin, Black and White, 194, 198.
142. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, xviii. Carretta has raised questions about whether Equiano was in fact born in Africa, but that issue is not pertinent here.