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 the British Caribbean, evangelising among enslaved peoples was frequently met with rebuke during the eighteenth century, while nonconformists and other minority religious movements were some of the earliest campaigners for abolition. Religion in the Caribbean also repeatedly played a significant role in prominent enslaved rebellions, from Voudou and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), to the “Baptist War” in Jamaica (1831). In this seminar, we will consider the tensions surrounding religion and slavery, examining the perspective of enslavers, abolitionists, and enslaved peoples as well as the place of religious practices in post-emancipation societies. In the first half, we will engage with case studies from the Caribbean, including Obeah, Santeria, and Voudou. In the second half, we will consider the broader implications of the seminar questions in relation to your own work. We will think about different approaches posed by historians of slavery, from cultural to legal, the role of mobility, religious practice as resistance, and the historic relationships between religion and racialization.

Seminar Questions

• How did religion and race map onto each other across histories of enslavement?
• How have ideas about religion, race, and enslavement been codified in law?
• What sources can we use to study religion and slavery, and what approaches should we take as historians?
• How useful are terms like “survivals”, “syncretism”, and “resistance” to the study of religious belief in slavery and post-slavery societies?

Required preparation

• Please spend time exploring the web resource Obeah Histories. Read the case study “The ‘Woman of the Popo Country’, Jamaica, 1770s”. You may also wish to explore its sister sites Freedom to Believe and Caribbean Religious Trials.

• 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.

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

• Bethan Fisk, ‘Transimperial Mobilities, Slavery, and Becoming Catholic in Eighteenth-Century Cartagena de Indias’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 28.3 (2022), 345–70.

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 SaintDomingue 1797’, pp.46-50

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

John Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (2022)

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

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

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

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