Tag Archives: slavery

(1860s) Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine

https://cottonfaminepoetry.exeter.ac.uk/database/listfiles.html

This database from the University of Exeter brings together poems written in response to the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861-65.

The crisis was caused by the American Civil War and, as well as poems from British local newspapers, poems published in America are included commenting on the relationship between the US, Britain, cotton, and slavery.

Whilst not technically Three Acres And A Cow canon, it is a great resource and useful to get a sense of the way language is used in this period of history.

How Profits From Slavery Changed the Landscape of the Scottish Highlands

Money earned through enslavement played a key role in the eviction of Highlanders in the 18th and 19th centuries, study finds

Between roughly 1750 and 1860, wealthy landowners forcibly evicted thousands of Scottish Highlanders in order to create large-scale sheep farms. Known today as the Highland Clearances, this era of drastic depopulation sparked the collapse of the traditional clan system and the mass migration of Scotland’s northernmost residents to other parts of the world.

As Alison Campsie reports for the Scotsman, new research argues that this pivotal period in Scottish history had close ties to the enslavement of people in British colonies, with a cadre of individuals enriched by slavery evicting at least 5,000 people from their property and buying up more than one million acres of land relinquished during the clearances.

Read full article via https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-research-investigates-how-enslavement-profits-changed-landscape-scottish-highlands-180976311/

Natives by Akala

Race and class in the ruins of empire

We are major Akala fans here in the herd and regularly send his various short youtube videos over to folks for homework.

I’m not going to write about this book here because The Guardian’s book review does all really good job of inspiring you to read it.

After you’ve read this, The Many Headed Hydra is a great companion book to dive deeper.

Slavery and the foundations of modern day economics

The evolution of capitalism in England and resulting land grabs both here and abroad can be arguably simplified to sheep, slavery and fossil fuels…

I found this (long read) article an excellent overview of the abominable role slavery took in the founding of modern day economics.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-original-laissez-faire-economists-loved-slavery

The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson

eptThe Making of the English Working Class
by E.P. Thompson

Considered a definitive text for many years this book is dense, academically rigorous and utterly superb.

I needed a dictionary, wikipedia and a notebook to get myself through the first quarter but once up to speed with the authors style and concepts, it was as compelling a read as I have ever had.

This book has the advantage of being widely respected across all academic and historical fields in a manner which some of the other books I have read are not.

The Many-Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

hydraThe Many-Headed Hydra
by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

This book gives much food for thought, bringing a fresh perspective to number of themes such as slavery and pirates which help put English peasant struggles of the time in a wider context.

Whilst I would highly recommend it, I would also advise with some caution as the scholarship is not as widely respected as it might be.

This review from the Guardian does a good job and it worth a look – http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/27/historybooks