Abstract
The role of Irishmen and women in the Atlantic slave trade has become an increasingly prominent topic of scholarly investigation. We now know a lot more about the Irish slave owners who were compensated by the Westminster parliament after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, while we are beginning, through the work of Finola O’Kane, Nicholas Draper and others to get a greater insight into how fortunes generated in the Caribbean colonies were re-invested in Irish estates and enterprises. The relationship between Irish merchants and slavery first sketched out in Nini Rodgers’ pioneering work has been fleshed out with attention paid not just to connections with the British Atlantic world but also its French, Spanish and even Danish counterparts. Central to this increased understanding of Ireland's role in the networks of connections that made up the Atlantic trading and commercial systems has been the exploitation of rich seams of personal and commercial correspondence. Jonathan Wright's book adds to this literature to offer a fascinating insight into the world of one of the many Ulstermen who helped to shape and was shaped by the currents of the Atlantic world during the revolutionary decades either side of the end of the eighteenth century.
Wright presents the full text of twenty letters written by John Black, a Trinidad plantation owner, back to his family in Belfast. This is more than just a scholarly edition however; the letters are contextualised in a lengthy introduction as well as through the careful annotation of people, places and products. The quality of the scholarly apparatus presented here is a credit to both Wright and his publisher. The footnotes are exhaustive and draw on an extraordinary range of sources and could be mined very profitably by historians of Trinidad and Belfast, as well as of Atlantic trade. The presentation of the letters meanwhile maintains the original spelling and emphases while the inclusion of brief italicised abstracts helps to guide the reader through what are in places quite long and challenging pieces of correspondence.
The letters are wonderfully informative on a range of topics and this is where we come to an assessment of the value of this edition. Of critical importance is the geography of the correspondence. John Black was a member of a prominent Belfast Anglican mercantile family whose network extended to Bordeaux, Dublin and Edinburgh, as well as the Caribbean. The family's rich archive has been exploited by previous scholars to document the Bordeaux-Belfast connection, particularly through the vivid letters of John Black's grandfather, also John Black. This particular cache however focuses on the experience of a one not especially prominent family member in Trinidad – Wright succinctly describes him as a ‘nobody’ in Ireland but a ‘somebody’ in Trinidad (p. 16). Black's importance lies in the fact that he is a comparatively well-documented member of the Ulster diaspora in the Caribbean, a phenomenon that has been underrepresented in historiography that has focused on Ulster’s connections with the North American colonies. The vibrancy of this Ulster presence in the Caribbean and the web of interconnected interests involved can clearly be discerned in the wealth of references made by John Black to encounters with members of other Belfast mercantile families. This crucially allows these letters to be used as a source not just of one man’s experience but of a wider phenomenon.
Here, John Black’s role as an unapologetic slave owner is especially important not least because his references to his slaves – often enumerating them amongst his other commodities – are so banal and matter-of-fact that they point effectively to not only his mentality but also to those of his recipients – his brother George and the extended Black family circle in Belfast who shared his acceptance of the everyday nature of the slave economy. This is important to recognise, especially considering the modern tendency to focus on heroic narratives of abolitionism and anti-slavery rather than the complicity of so many Irish merchants and consumers in the practice. Wright's introduction expertly locates Black within a Belfast middle-class community where slavery was a legitimate and recognised commercial activity that brought little opprobrium upon its practitioners. He draws out the family and patronage relationships that shaped Black's access to opportunities for advancement in first Grenada and then Trinidad. Although Wright's account of mid to late eighteenth-century Belfast is unsurprisingly surefooted, his careful delineation of Black's slightly documented career in Grenada and his departure for Trinidad in 1784 shows excellent historical detective skills. Black's arrival in Trinidad, an unstable frontier zone between the Spanish, French and British empires, marked a new phase in his Caribbean adventure, he was escaping creditors and seeking to make a new life for himself.
It is from Trinidad that all of Black's surviving letters were written and they reveal much about the life of a plantation owner and aspirant politician and the ways in which correspondence could be used to strengthen bonds with home while simultaneously carving out a future far from home. So, for example, we learn much about Black's continued reliance on Belfast connexions including George Macartney and Lord Castlereagh to secure positions of influence in Trinidad. More interesting however are the ways these letters reveal the need to maintain the connection with ‘home’ even as Black realises he probably will never see Belfast again. His correspondence is full of reminiscences of old acquaintances, of family members and spaces, including his grandfather's country residence in Co. Armagh. He also arranges for his Trinidad-born daughters to be welcomed by his Belfast family and this together with his determination to keep up with family news and affairs emphasises the important role that correspondence combined with occasional personal encounters played in reinforcing the bonds of kinship even as families were separated by the ocean. Although John Black often dreamed of returning home, he never did, and instead made his life in Trinidad where he prospered, if not quite as spectacularly as he might have liked. The trials and tribulations of a plantation owner in an uncertain climate are well illustrated in his letters where he bemoans the impact of bad weather, sickness and anti-slavery legislation on the fortunes of his plantation. There is a chilling quality to the casual references to ‘180 prime slaves’ listed alongside investments in sixty mules and new sugar boilers, and even more so when he describes burying thirty-six slaves in a six-month period, referring to them as his ‘very best and most valuable people’ (pp. 84, 98). Such references give us a glimpse into the mentality of a slave owner running a middling sugar plantation and read together with his accounts of local political disputes, solicitations for assistance in his determination to acquire local office and the reminiscences of his school days they provide a vivid view into the world of John Black, one that is now alien to us and yet was perhaps more familiar to his contemporaries than we sometimes allow. Jonathan Wright in expanding our horizons of the world of this Belfast man and his family greatly increases our understanding of how embedded Irish society was in the Atlantic world in the age of revolution and ascendant capitalism.