Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Demerara – History »

Reconstructs the business activities of the Scottish-born Liverpool merchant and plantation owner John Gladstone, placed within the context of slavery and the abolition of slavery, and the general colonial history of British Guiana, particularly in the Demerara colony. Author describes how Gladstone acquired several plantations with slaves in Demerara, and how he responded to the increasing criticism of slavery, and the bad conditions of slaves in these Demerara plantations. He describes how Gladstone was an absentee owner in Jamaica and Guyana, where he never set foot, and depended on information by his plantation attorneys or managers, who generally painted too positive a picture of the slaves' conditions, which in reality were characterized by high mortality rates, disease, and abuse of slaves. Also discusses the Demerara slave revolt of 1823 affecting some of Gladstone's plantations.

AbstractSir John Gladstone made a fortune as a Demerara sugar-planter and a key supporter of the British policy of amelioration in which slavery would be “improved” by making it more “humane.” Unlike resident planters in the British West Indies, who were firmly opposed to any alteration to the conditions of enslavement, and unlike abolitionists, who saw amelioration as a step toward abolition, Gladstone was a rare but influential metropolitan-based planter with an expansive imperial vision, prepared to work with British politicians to guarantee his investments in slavery through progressive slave reforms. This article intersects with recent historiography highlighting connections between metropole and colony but also insists on the influence of Demerara, including the effects of a large slave rebellion centered on Gladstone's estates (which illustrated that enslaved people were not happy with Gladstone's supposedly enlightened attitudes) on metropolitan sensibilities in the 1820s. Gladstone's strategies for an improved slavery, despite the contradictions inherent in championing such a policy while maintaining a fierce drive for profits, were a powerful counter to a renewed abolitionist thrust against slavery in the mid to late 1820s. Gladstone showed that that the logic of gradual emancipation still had force in imperial thinking in this decade.

Segmentation of the Guyanas continental margin of South America is inherited from the dual-phase Mesozoic rifting history controlling the first-order post-rift sedimentary architecture. The margin is divided into two segments by a transform marginal plateau (TMP), the Demerara Rise, into the Central and Equatorial Atlantic domains. This paper investigates the heterogeneities in the post-rift sedimentary systems at a mega-regional scale (>1000 km). Re-sampling seven key exploration wells and scientific boreholes provides new data (189 analysed samples) that have been used to build a high-resolution stratigraphic framework using multiple biostratigraphic techniques integrated with organic geochemistry to refine the timing of 10 key stratigraphic surfaces and three megasequences. The results have been used to calibrate the interpretation of a margin-scale two-dimensional seismic reflection dataset, and to build megasequence isochore maps, structural restorations and gross depositional environment maps at key time intervals of the margin evolution.Our findings revise the dating of the basal succession drilled by the A2-1 well, indicating that the oldest post-rift sequence penetrated along the margin is late Tithonian age (previously Callovian). Early Central Atlantic carbonate platform sediments passively infilled subcircular-shaped basement topography controlled by the underlying basement structure of thinned continental crust. Barremian–Aptian rifting in the Equatorial Atlantic, caused folding and thrusting of the Demerara Rise, resulting in major uplift, gravitational margin collapse, transpressional structures and peneplanation of up to 1 km of sediment capped by the regional angular Base Albian Unconformity. Equatorial Atlantic rifting led to margin segmentation and the formation of the TMP, where two major unconformities developed during the intra Late Albian and base Cenomanian. These two unconformities are time synchronous with oceanic crust accretion offshore French Guiana and in the Demerara–Guinea transform, respectively. A marine connection between the Central and Equatorial Atlantic is demonstrated by middle Late Albian times, coinciding with deposition of the organic-rich source rock of the Canje Formation (average total organic carbon 4.21%). The succession is variably truncated by the Middle Campanian Unconformity. Refining the stratigraphic framework within the context of the structural evolution and segmentation of the Guyanas margin impacts the understanding of key petroleum system elements.Supplementary material: Photographs of sandstone petrography thin sections (Fig. S1); calcareous nannofossil plates (Fig. S2); palynology reports for A2-1 and FG2-1 (Fig. S3); taxonomy description of new species; sample table and organic geochemistry results (Table S1); and nannofossil distribution charts (Table S2) are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5280490

This article examines the office of the Fiscal in Berbice (later British Guiana) between 1819 and 1834—a period encompassing amelioration and emancipation. It looks in particular at the lives and concerns of enslaved women as revealed in an extraordinary set of slave testimonies collected as part of the Fiscal’s duties. It outlines the peculiar nature of the Office of the Fiscal and how it allowed enslaved women a voice to complain about aspects of their treatment under slavery in a particularly harsh slave regime. It connects this office also to a developing ideology of “protection” to be extended to non-whites in the British Empire in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Using the concept of “moral economy” as developed many years ago by E.P. Thompson to analyse early nineteenth-century British working class culture and as extended by Emilia Viotta Da Costa to Demerara and Berbice, it suggests that enslaved women had clear expectations of what could be rightfully expected of them and what were unjust demands within a slave system designed to keep enslaved women in their place.

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Defence date: 22 February 2017
Examining Board: Professor Jorge Flores, European University Institute; Professor Regina Grafe European University Institute; Professor Cátia Antunes European University Institute; Professor Gert Oostindie, KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
When, in 1796, the British invasion fleet approached the Demerara River, its commanders were in for an unpleasant surprise. The expedition, arriving from Barbados with some 1,300 men, aimed to take possession of the Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Demerara on the Guiana coast of South America. Theoretically the British came to offer “protection” to the colonies in the name of the Dutch Stadtholder, in practice they were also keen on taking these lucrative colonies for themselves. The Dutch colonies of Essequibo and especially Demerara already had a high percentage of British planters, and their fertile soils carried the promise of great riches. The coffee, sugar and cotton planters could fuel the unfolding Industrial Revolution in Britain with the raw material for its machines and the consumer goods for its workforce.
Thesis chapter 4 'The commercial web : mercantilism, cash crops and captives as contraband' was previously published as and article in Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis (2013) and as a chapter in the book 'Beyond empires : global, self-organizing, cross-imperial networks, 1500-1800' (2016)