Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain

Plantation Ecologies

Daniel Lerpinière (1745–1785) after George Robertson (ca. 1748–1788)

A View in the Island of Jamaica, of the Bridge crossing the Cabaritta River, on the Estate of William Beckford Esqr., 1778

Etching and engraving with hand coloring

Published 25 March 1778 by John Boydell

 

William Beckford (1744–1799)

A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica

London: T. and J. Egerton, 1790, vol. 2

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

 

Jamaica planter and historian William Beckford endeavored to conjure idyllic images of plantation life. This print, a copy of which Beckford gave to Thomas Thistlewood, whose diary appears in this case, illustrates a river that ran through one of Beckford’s estates. Two enslaved men seem to engage in casual conversation as they fish from the bridge, and a washerwoman likewise converses with two men as they take a break from their labor. However, on a plantation, tarrying in one’s tasks meant punishment. Beckford’s Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) similarly crafts scenes of contented laborers, turning a brutal system into an object of aesthetic contemplation.

Louis Charles Ruotte (French, 1754–1806) after Agostino Brunias (1728–1796)

Blanchisseuse des Indes Occidentales / The West India Washer-Woman, ca. 1770

Engraving

Published 1770 by Depeuille, Paris

 

William Blake (1757–1827)

A Negro hung alive by the Ribs to a Gallows

Hand colored aquatint 

In John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam… 1772–1777

London: J. Johnson, 1796, vol. 1

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

 

Artist unknown, monogram J.F.

A West India Sportsman, 1807

Aquatint with hand coloring

Published 1 November 1807 by William Holland

Desire’s prospects in the British West Indies took many forms. The engraving after Brunias of partially nude washerwomen is both idyllic and eroticized. Desire also permeates ostensibly sympathetic portrayals of torture, such as the William Blake’s engraving in British-Dutch soldier John Gabriel Stedman’s 1796 Narrative. The man’s nudity and vulnerable, pained body figure him as an object for voyeuristic consumption. And, as in A West India Sportsman, satirists often depicted white male colonists as effeminate and hinted at homoerotic activities, suggested here by both men’s relaxed weapons and the scantily clad enslaved servant who stands close behind the foregrounded colonist.

Thomas Conder (1746/47–1831)

Plan of a regular Coffee Plantation, 1791

Engraving

Published 1 December 1791 by J. Johnson

 

William A.V. Clark

Planting the Sugar-Cane, 1823

Aquatint with hand coloring

London: Thomas Clay, Ludgate-Hill, 1823

Yale Center for British Art, Folio A 2010 10

 

This plan of a Surinam coffee plantation illustrates the meticulous accounting that attended empire’s prospects. Such images remove laboring bodies and present a colonial fantasy of complete order. Similarly, William Clark’s depiction of enslaved persons planting sugarcane cuttings emphasizes a rigidly gridded field in the foreground and makes the black male driver—pictured wearing a blue jacket and black top hat—the central figure as he monitors their labor. Enslaved persons would have performed this excruciating work from sunup to sundown, a reality that Clark’s idyllic imagery fails to capture. Antigua’s massive Fort George military station appears in the background.

Thomas Thistlewood (1721–1786)

Diary, 1768

Thomas Thistlewood papers

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

 

Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

Letter to Hannah More, ca. 10 September 1789

*image unavailable

 

Englishman Thomas Thistlewood arrived in Jamaica in 1750, worked as a surveyor and overseer, and purchased enslaved persons and a property where he raised crops and livestock. Here, he documents enslaved persons laboring in his renowned garden and a visit to the morass to determine a potential site for new provision grounds, plots assigned to enslaved persons so that they would grow their own food. Accompanying him are Lincoln, the first enslaved person whom he purchased, and Phibbah, an enslaved woman for whose domestic presence he paid £18 per year to her owner and with whom he had a son named John. Near the rocky caves in the current provision or “Negroe [sic]” ground, Thistlewood has raped an enslaved woman named Mirtilla, whom artist Joscelyn Gardner references in a lithograph featured in this exhibition. Thistlewood documents each of his serial rapes of enslaved women using a Latin formula. Another rape, which would have taken place in his bed, features Phibbah—“at Night Cum [with] Ph:”—and the entry indicates, in Latin, that she was menstruating at the time.

The response of English writer and politician Horace Walpole to a letter from English writer and philanthropist Hannah More (1745–1833) contemplates the destruction of the Bastille and the possible impact upon enslaved persons in the French colonies. Walpole suggests that their plight might be ameliorated, though he doubts that the French will abolish slavery. He contemplates the present mode of sugar production and its cruelty and wonders whether “human wit […] could devise some method of cultivating canes and making sugar without the manual labour of the human species.”