Religion, Slavery and Resistance

Liz Egan

Religion occupies a fractious place in histories of enslavement and abolition throughout history. In the Ottoman empire, religion shaped who could be legally enslaved (White 2022), while conversion in the Spanish empire might also offer a route to freedom (Fisk 2022; Ireton 2020). In this seminar we will focus on the circum-Caribbean as a religious contact zone, examining the perspectives of enslavers, abolitionists, and enslaved peoples. In the British Caribbean, evangelising among enslaved peoples was frequently met with rebuke during the eighteenth century while nonconformists were some of the earliest campaigners for abolition at the metropole. Religion in the Caribbean also repeatedly played a significant role in prominent enslaved rebellions, from Vodun and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), to the Baptist War in Jamaica (1831). In this seminar, we will build on the previous week’s discussion about the relationship between religion and imperialism to delve deeper into the tensions surrounding religion and slavery, and in particular the place of religion in abolitionism and post-slavery cultures. We will engage with theories of syncretism, acculturation, and creolisation to think about the evolution of religious practices in the Americas during and after slavery, and in doing so return to questions about how we define “religion”.

During our seminar, we will engage with case studies from the Caribbean, primarily obeah and Vodun. I will provide a printed handout of “The ‘Woman of the Popo Country’, Jamaica, 1770s”. There will be time during the seminar to read this, but you may wish to take a look beforehand as well as explore the web resource Obeah Histories, and/or its sister sites Freedom to Believe and Caribbean Religious Trials.

Required Reading

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Joseph M. Murphy, and Margarite Fernandez Olmos, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo (New York: New York University Press, 2011), pp.1-20

AND a chapter of your choice (from chapters 2-7). Come to the seminar prepared to discuss.

Sylvia R. Frey (2008) ‘The Visible Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau’, Slavery & Abolition, 29:1, 83-110, DOI: 10.1080/01440390701841083

Katharine Gerbner, ‘“They Call Me Obea”: German Moravian Missionaries and Afro-Caribbean Religion in Jamaica, 1754–1760’, Atlantic Studies, 12.2 (2015), 160–78

Seminar Questions

• How were religious epistemologies transformed by the experience of enslavement?
• How did colonial and/or enslaved subjects use religion for resistance?
• How useful are terms like “survivals”, “syncretism”, and “resistance” to the study of religious belief in slavery and post-slavery societies?

Further Reading

Caribbean Creolised Religions

Kenneth Bilby et al., Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)

Vincent Brown, ‘Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society’, Slavery & Abolition, 24.1 (2003), 24-53

Randy M. Browne, ‘The “Bad Business” of Obeah: Power, Authority, and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean’, William and Mary Quarterly, 68:2 (2011), 451–80

Colin Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 1995)

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Joseph M. Murphy, and Margarite Fernandez Olmos, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo (New York: New York University Press, 2011)

Diana Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Ch 2: ‘Spirits of a Mobile World: Worship, Protection, and Threat at Home and Abroad, 1900s-1930s’, pp.64-96

Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the law: Voudou and power in Haiti (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011)

John Thornton (2022) ‘African Traditional Religion and Christianity in the Formation of Vodun’, Slavery & Abolition, 43:4, 730-757, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2022.2101598

David Trotman, ‘Reflections on the children of Shango: an essay on a history of Orisa worship in Trinidad’, Slavery & Abolition: a journal of slave and post-slave studies 28:2 (2007), 211-234

Kelly Wisecup and Toni Wall Jaudon, ‘On Knowing and Not Knowing about Obeah’, Atlantic Studies, 12:2 (2015), 129-43

Religion, Rebellion, and Abolition

See recent Slavery & Abolition special issue: Slavery & Abolition, Volume 46, Issue 1 (2025), Forum: Catholicism and Antislavery: Connecting Histories in the Atlantic World. Guest Editors: Miriam Franchina and Damien Tricoire

Michael Craton, Testing the chains: resistance to slavery in the British West Indies (Cornell, 2009), Ch 3, and Part V.

Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of glory, tears of blood: the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (OUP, 1997)

Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)

Stephen C. Russell, A Lesson on Race: The Bible and the Morant Bay Rebellion in the Atlantic World, Histories of Slavery and Its Global Legacies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (London: University of Illinois Press, 1982)

General

Vincent Carretta, ‘Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley Peters, and the Black Evangelical Experience’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism, ed. Jonathan Yeager (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 603–21

Bernard Capp, ‘Faith and Identity: Christians, Renegades, and Apostasy’, in British Slaves and Barbary Corsairs, 1580-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp.63–88

Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Bethan Fisk, Black Catholic worlds: religious geographies of eighteenth-century Afro-Colombia (CUP: 2025)

Chloe L. Ireton, ‘Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire’, Renaissance Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2020): 1277–1319

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2004)

Joshua M. White, ‘Slavery, Freedom Suits, and Legal Praxis in the Ottoman Empire, ca. 1590–1710’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 65, no. 3 (July 2023): 526–56

Some Select Primary Sources:

William Burdett, Life and Exploits of Mansong, Commonly Called Three-Finger'd Jack, the Terror of Jamaica (Sommers Town: A. Neil, 1800)

William Earle, Obi; or the History of Three-Fingered Jack; In a Series of Letters from a Resident in Jamaica to his Friend in England (London: John Nichols, 1800)

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or Gustavus Vassa, the African (Cambridge, [1789])

Esteban Montejo, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (Bodley Head, 1968), pp. 125-156

Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/Saint Martin’s, 2016) – See 1. ‘Macandal Saved! 1758’, pp. 42-44; 3 ‘Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau De Saint-Méry, Description . . . of the French Part of the Island of Saint Domingue 1797’, pp.46-50

Herbert T. Thomas, Something about Obeah (Kingston, 1891), <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102485043>