The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbe

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The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World

History > Caribbean & West Indies - General

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PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139780226657684
PublishedApr 14 2020
Dimension8.9 X 5.9 X 0.7 inches
Weight 1.35 pounds
BISACHistory > Caribbean & West Indies - General
Categories(Single Author) Asian American
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

The institution of slavery has always depended on enforcing the boundaries between slaveholders and the enslaved. As historical geographer Miles Ogborn reveals in The Freedom of Speech, across the Anglo-Caribbean world the fundamental distinction between freedom and bondage relied upon the violent policing of the spoken word. Offering a compelling new lens on transatlantic slavery, this book gathers rich historical data from Barbados, Jamaica, and Britain to delve into the complex relationships between voice, slavery, and empire. From the most quotidian encounters to formal rules of what counted as evidence in court, the battleground of slavery lay in who could speak and under what conditions. But, as Ogborn shows through keen attention to both the traces of talk and the silences in the archives, if enslavement as a legal status could be made by words, it could be unmade by them as well. A deft interrogation of the duality of domination, The Freedom of Speech offers a rich interpretation of oral cultures that both supported and constantly threatened to undermine the slave system.

Author Bio

I am an historical geographer concerned with understanding the relationships between power, space and knowledge (or communication) in a range of mainly eighteenth-century contexts. My work has dealt with the new geographies of eighteenth-century London, and trying to understand them as Spaces of Modernity (1998). It has also investigated the ways in which the English East India Company used a variety of forms of writing (Indian Ink, 2007) to construct a global trading network and territorial empire in India from 1600 to 1800.

This was the same broad timespan for my attempt to write an introduction to global history through biography in Global Lives (2008). My most recent book (The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World, 2019) investigates how different forms of talk – such as evidence giving in court, discussions of the plants that grew on the islands, and communications with the world of gods and spirits – demonstrate the complexities of the power relations of slavery and empire (see my discussion of ‘Slavery, Freedom and the Jamaican Landscape’ on the British Library’s Picturing Places webspace).

One element of this work was presented in the session on Historical and Cultural Geographies of Story and Storytelling at the RGS-IBG conference in Exeter in September 2015. It is a paper called ‘We cannot but speak the thing, which we have seen and heard: believing stories in Caribbean slave societies’. Hear it here: Stories in Caribbean slave societies

You can hear me talking about some of the broader themes here: VODCAST "What is Intellectual Geography?" Miles Ogborn's keynote address to the Intellectual Geography Conference, Oxford, September 2011.

Source: Queen Mary University of London

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