Slavery, rhetoric, and race: a British Atlantic perspective on the meaning of slavery and race in Nova Scotia, 1791-1833

• Main Author: Levesque, Gabriel Louis
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@UMaine 2013
• Subjects: Blackness; Racial ideology; British ideals; loyalist emigrants; William Wilberforce; black agency; European History; Other International and Area Studies; Race and Ethnicity; United States History; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/1887; https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2916&context=etd

The meaning of blackness in the British Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was complex and contradictory. It was beyond binary simplification and its significance varied depending on location and circumstance. Nova Scotia, a seemingly peripheral location in the North Atlantic, experienced a convergence of experiences that provided insight into the ways in which people constructed racial ideology within a larger empire. Its relationship to the Caribbean allowed for an understanding of race that was necessarily tied to chattel slavery and economic production. Its relationship to British metropolitan ideology, including the tenets of enlightenment society, sometimes acted as a counterweight to the pull of the Caribbean by espousing philosophical rhetoric committed to ideals of British justice and equality. Adding to the complexity of this dynamic was the relationship of the United States to Nova Scotian history. The United States sent several thousand loyalist emigrants, including a large free and enslaved population, to the province in the wake of both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. These people brought cultural understandings and identities that joined with preexisting Nova Scotian conceptions of race that formed a new dialectical understanding of blackness. This thesis explores this difficult construction of race in three components. The first focuses on rhetoric surrounding British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce’s initial arguments for the empire’s abandonment of the slave trade in 1791. It focuses on the ways in which Nova Scotian public discourse matched discussions in London, and how these conversations changed trajectories due to Nova Scotia’s North American location. Chapter two examines the story of the Maroons who were transported from Jamaica to Nova Scotia in the wake of a failed rebellion. The examination of the Maroons illuminates a sense of race that was hierarchical, yet open for negotiation. It also demonstrates the conception of race among elites ...