Tag Archives: Conference

Prelude to an Open Access Presentation

This week is the eighth annual Open Access Week, and people all over the world are hosting events and liberating archives. For me, on this particular week, open access means sharing a conference paper. Earlier this month, I was privileged to attend a gathering of young scholars at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, in Hull, England. Part of the Antislavery Usable Past, a multifaceted, multiyear project funded by the British Government, the workshop brought together those working on both historical and contemporary forms of enslavement. The organizers asked us to reflect on the “lessons and legacies” of previous abolitionist movements. The topics ranged from slavery in the Middle Ages through present-day anti-trafficking and reparations campaigns, and the participants were super friendly and supportive. I got to meet some new European colleagues, and I even got to hang out with Shamere McKenzie, who runs an NGO for slavery survivors. My paper, entitled “John Brown in Africa,” looked at capitalism and the lessons of missionary abolitionism.

Under normal circumstances, I would never publish a conference presentation. They are works-in-progress, lacking proper citations, full of half-baked ideas and assumptions, and directed at a small group of experts – hardly appropriate for the unwashed masses. The paper that follows is no different. Yet the conference message of learning from the past to inform the struggle against slavery (and its legacies) in the present, deserves a wider audience. And the fortuitous conjunction with Open Access Week convinced me to cast aside my objections in this case. So, with all of the customary apologies for its flaws and in the spirit of open access, I will post the full text of my presentation as a separate article. Links embedded in the text will point to some of the original slides that I used in my talk (or the occasional outside reference). And, as always, your comments are welcome.

Elihu Yale was a Slave Trader

anonslaveNext week, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Yale Center for British Art are co-hosting a major international conference on slavery and British culture in the eighteenth century. The art exhibit associated with the conference is remarkable for many reasons, not least because it features a portrait of Elihu Yale being waited upon by a collared slave (euphemized as a “page” in the original listing). The painting is related to one held by the University Art Gallery, showing the same scene from a different perspective. And it is similar to another portrait of Yale with yet another collared slave (this time euphemized as a “servant”). This latter portrait, even more ominous and imperial than the first, is not a part of the exhibit. And that is a shame, because these paintings, and the larger conference of which they are a part, offer an opportunity to revisit the controversial and entangled history of slavery and universities.

Historians have long pointed out that Yale (the University) is deeply implicated in the institution of slavery. Many of its prominent buildings are named after slaveholders or slavery apologists. It housed so many southern students that it briefly seceded from the Union at the start of the Civil War. 1 Craig Wilder’s wonderful book Ebony & Ivy, published last year, shows that Yale is not alone in this regard. All of early America’s leading universities, both north and south, promoted and profited from slavery, racism, and colonialism. 2 At the same time, college campuses were battlegrounds where antislavery students and faculty engaged in dramatic confrontations with their opponents and developed new political movements. 3 Oddly enough, none of the scholarship on these issues mentions that Elihu Yale, the namesake of this august and venerable institution, was himself an active and successful slave trader.

As an official for the East India Company in Madras (present-day Chennai), Yale presided over an important node of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Much larger in duration and scope than its Atlantic counterpart, the Indian Ocean trade linked southeast Asia with the Middle East, the Indonesian archipelago, and the African littoral. On the subcontinent, it connected with and drew upon traditions of slavery and servitude that had flourished for generations. 4 In the 1680s, when Yale served on the governing council at Fort St. George on the Madras coast, a devastating famine led to an uptick in the local slave trade. As more and more bodies became available on the open market, Yale and other company officials took advantage of the labor surplus, buying hundreds of slaves and shipping them to the English colony on Saint Helena. Yale participated in a meeting that ordered a minimum of ten slaves sent on every outbound European ship. 5 In just one month in 1687, Fort St. George exported at least 665 individuals. 6 As governor and president of the Madras settlement, Yale enforced the ten-slaves-per-vessel rule. On two separate occasions, he sentenced “black Criminalls” accused of burglary to suffer whipping, branding, and foreign enslavement. 7 Although he probably did not own any of these people – the majority were held as the property of the East India Company – he certainly profited both directly and indirectly from their sale.

Some sources (including Wikipedia) portray Elihu Yale as an heroic abolitionist, almost single-handedly ending the slave trade in Madras. 8 This is incredibly misleading. During his tenure as governor, Yale made an effort to curb the stealing of children and others for the purpose of export. But a close reading of company documents reveals that it was anything but an act of humanitarian altruism. It was, in fact, the local Mughal government, which held more power than the tenuous English merchants, that insisted on abolition. Yale’s decree of May 1688 curbing the transport of slaves from Madras argued that the trade had become more trouble than it was worth. The surfeit of slaves from the previous year’s famine had dried up, and the indigenous government had “brought great complaints & troubles…for the loss of their Children & Servants Sperited and Stoln from them.” 9 With no profit left for the company and a hostile Mughal overlord demanding abolition, Yale was happy to comply.

Only one year later, in October 1689, Yale had no problem issuing orders for a company ship to travel to Madagascar, buy slaves, and transport them to the English colony on Sumatra. When they arrived by the hundreds, these unfortunate individuals were put to work as masons, carpenters, smiths, cooks, maids, gardeners, and porters. A select few even served as soldiers. In addition to free labor, they provided a strategic buffer against European rivals and further consolidated the company’s political and economic power. 10 African slaves in India and Indonesia, Indian slaves on St. Helena, rival empires jostling for control – the Indian Ocean trade was a complicated and convoluted melange. And Elihu Yale was right in the thick of it, directing it, turning it to his own advantage, and growing fat and rich from its spoils. This wealth, in the form of diamonds, textiles, and other luxury goods, enticed the founders of Yale College to pursue the famous merchant and to name their school in his honor. 11

Apologists might counter that Yale was a man of his time. Slavery was impossible to avoid, nobody opposed it, and most rich and successful people had a hand in it. None of that is true. In April 1688, less than a year after Yale became governor of Madras, a group of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, issued a statement condemning slavery in the colony: “There is a saying that we shall doe to all men licke as we will be done ourselves; macking no difference of what generation, descent or Colour they are. and those who steal or robb men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alicke?” Quakers shed their ties to slavery during the eighteenth century while building a reputation as profitable and successful merchants. And they were hardly the only ones to protest the institution. In 1712, a major slave rebellion erupted in New York City, in which at least nine Europeans and twenty-seven Africans lost their lives. Several years later, when Yale College took its present name, opposition to slavery was endemic across the British Empire. 12 This was the broader world in which Elihu Yale worked, schemed, and built his fortune.

The evidence establishing Yale’s involvement in the slave trade is clear and compelling. Thanks to the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Duke University, almost all of the official records of Fort St. George are available online, and even more documents await future researchers. Those looking for further information can follow my footnotes. Hopefully other scholars will build on this record to paint a more complete picture of the stoic British gentleman and his dark, diminutive servants, forever bound together in those disturbing oil portraits.

 

Notes:

  1. Antony Dugdale, J.J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, Yale, Slavery and Abolition (New Haven: The Amistad Committee, 2001); Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Feb. 2, 1861. See also http://www.yaleslavery.org.
  2. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). See also http://slavery-and-universities.wikispaces.com.
  3. Wilder touches on this subject briefly in his final chapter, and I have been working on an article that will (hopefully) expand the narrative.
  4. Gwyn Campbell (ed.), The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2004); Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (eds.), Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015).
  5. Records of Fort St. George: Diary and Consultation Book of 1686 (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1913), 48; Records of Fort St. George: Diary and Consultation Book of 1687 (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1916), 8.
  6. Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640-1800: Traced from the East India Company’s Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office, and from Other Sources, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1913), 545.
  7. Records of Fort St. George: Diary and Consultation Book of 1688 (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1916), 30, 137; Records of Fort St. George: Diary and Consultation Book of 1689 (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1916), 99.
  8. See, for example, Hiram Bingham, Elihu Yale: The American Nabob of Queen Square (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1939), 167.
  9. Diary and Consultation Book of 1688, 19, 78-79.
  10. Records of Fort St. George: Letters from Fort St. George for 1689 (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1916), 58-59; Records of Fort St. George: Letters from Fort St. George for 1693-94 (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1921), 12. On imperial rivalry, especially as it developed over the next century, see Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772-1843 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 49-84.
  11. Gauri Viswanathan, “The Naming of Yale College: British Imperialism and American Higher Education,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 85-108.
  12. Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Kenneth Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, 45 (Jan. 1961), 43-74; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

Digital Humanities as a Universal Language

One of the nice things about the meta-discipline of the digital humanities is that it’s also an international movement. As Carol pointed out in her post on the global digital divide, this is not an easy feat to accomplish. The asymmetrical shape of economic development over the past several centuries has influenced the technological backbone that connects different parts of the world. As a result, digital humanities work tends to mirror the starkly divided, core-periphery dynamic of contemporary globalization. Marginalized regions remain bit players, while the wealthiest countries retain their gravitational pull as the center of life for the academic elite. At the same time, though, I have noticed a sharp increase in the global consciousness and outreach among the digerati. Recent and forthcoming conferences in Australia, England, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland offer proof that the digital humanities need not be conducted along narrow nationalist lines. And the historic HASTAC conference held this year in Lima, Peru, proves that this work does not have to be exclusively Anglo or Eurocentric, either. Around DH in 80 Days, which maps a select number of projects globally, is one of the best introductions to this emerging field.

The translatability of the digital humanities, its broad and easy appeal across conventional boundaries of ethnicity, class, culture, and nation, is one of its most amazing features. At its most basic level, it functions as a kind of universal language, like HTML or mathematics or heavy metal music. Little kids can do it. Your grandmother can do it. Able-bodied people can do it. Disabled people can do it. Privileged people can do it. Oppressed and marginalized people can do it. Even birds and bees do it. Although there is still a long way to go, I think the digital humanities hold the potential to accomplish that magnificent thing to which the traditional humanities have always aspired, but rarely achieved – a truly comprehensive and inclusive representation of humanity.

As one small contribution to this project, I will offer a completely shameless plug for a one-day conference at Paris Diderot University (Paris 7) in October. Focused on recent digital history projects, the event will bring together practitioners and researchers from the United States and France (and maybe elsewhere) to initiate a dialog. I will present on some of my experiences connecting research and teaching, with a special focus on my experimental digital history course and RunawayCT.org. Constance Schulz, Professor Emerita at the University of South Carolina, will present on her NEH-funded scholarly editing project about two remarkable early American women. Additional details, including a map and schedule, are available here. I think it will be a wonderful opportunity to grow digital history work internationally, and if you happen to be in the area, I hope you will attend.