Questions:

“Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of slaves.” (Samuel Johnson). Discuss.

“Early colonial Jamaica was much more than a failed settler society; it was an abundant garden of power and terror.” Discuss

To what extent can the relations between whites and blacks in antebellum Virginia be considered through the prism of paternalism?

Readings:

Jack P. Greene, “Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies,” Slavery and Abolition, 21 (2000), 1-31.

Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 17-59

William Dusinberre, Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 73-120