Paul Shirley
Freedom and Slavery in the Age of Revolution: State Manumission in the Bahamas, 1787–1793
The “Age of Revolution” coincided with a series of unprecedented challenges to Atlantic slavery. However, the relationship between these phenomena remains a contentious question. Many historians continue to be skeptical regarding the significance of the revolutions in Europe and the Americas for the development of antislavery movements and resistance by enslaved people themselves. This paper considers these questions by exploring how the Atlantic revolutionary crisis affected slavery in one relatively obscure setting during the final decades of the eighteenth century. From 1787–93, British colonial authorities in the Bahamas manumitted several hundred people held as slaves, by means of a judicial tribunal specifically instituted to investigate and verify the status of enslaved people with claims of wrongful enslavement or re-enslavement against masters. That this process was carried through in the teeth of fierce and concerted opposition from local slaveholders was largely a result of the stubborn determination of Bahamian Governor Lord Dunmore to “do everything in my power to give these poor people redress.” During the American Revolutionary War, thousands of enslaved African Americans had mobilized themselves in support of the British cause, encouraged by offers of protection or freedom from British commanders, including Lord Dunmore. At the war’s end, the legal position of these people often remained thoroughly ambiguous, as they became part of a Loyalist diaspora encompassing the full scope of the Atlantic world and beyond. In the Bahamas, their efforts to make new lives as free people ran directly counter to the aspirations of émigré Loyalist slaveholders to build a plantation slave society in the islands. The result was a pattern of mounting and increasingly violent conflict that prompted the colonial state to intervene in the status of enslaved black people in a way that had no real precedent in the eighteenth-century British empire. The Bahamian case offers one example of how the American Revolution’s potential impact upon slavery extended beyond the geographical and temporal bounds implied by accounts of the “creation of the American republic.” But it also illustrates the degree to which this impact was not simply a matter of the dissemination of revolutionary ideas and examples, but rather can be seen as a product of the volatile, complex and thoroughly unpredictable consequences of revolutionary upheaval itself.
Paul Shirley’s work explores the intersecting histories of empire, slavery, and revolution, especially in the context of the Americas and the eighteenth-century Atlantic. After studying in London and Cambridge, He was awarded a Ph.D. by UCL in 2012. As well as teaching at UCL, Royal Holloway and Queen Mary, Shirley has worked as a researcher and editorial assistant for several major research projects at UCL and elsewhere, including the Bentham Project and the recently completed “Images of America.” He is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of History at Warwick University, for the AHRC-funded project, “Empire Loyalists: Histories of Rebellion and Collaboration in the British Empire,” as well as preparing a monograph provisionally titled “Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic.”
