|
|
|
Book Review
| Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860. By HARVEY AMANI WHITFIELD. Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006. 200 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
|
|
The African diasporas represent one of the most significant historical phenomena involving the mass movement of humans across time and space. Framed by the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas, historians have documented the presence of African people in North America with considerable insight and erudition. By attending to the geography, range of labor regimes, social institutions, and politics of slavery, they have detailed the experience of black people as racialized subjects in the context of white supremacy. At the same time, the orientation of this literature in relation to the nation-state has overshadowed the experience of bonded people who contested the boundaries of slavery through emigration. This is the case of black refugees in British North America between 1815 and 1860. Although the black presence in the British Empire predated the Revolutionary War, their numbers grew as British officials on the ground used the promise of freedom to encourage bonded blacks to defect in 1776 and again during the war of 1812. Britain and its territory became a symbolic and practical destination for freedom when Parliament abolished the trade in slaves in 1807 and slavery in 1833. The United States Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 only reinforced the perception of Canada as this new law mandated federal authorities to participate in the return of fugitive slaves to owners. Indeed, during the antebellum period black settlement patterns shifted from the east to west in British Canada as their numbers grew. |
. . . |
There are about 459 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
