War, Empire and Slavery c.1790-1820

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War, Empire and Slavery c.1790-1820

Veranstalter
University of York, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies/ Department of History
Veranstaltungsort
University of York, King's Manor
Ort
York (Great Britain)
Land
United Kingdom
Vom - Bis
16.05.2008 - 18.05.2008
Website
http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/cecs/conf/war/warabout.htm
Von
Rendall, Jane

The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars are frequently interpreted as a European phenomenon, closely intertwined with the process of political and cultural nation- building across Europe, and the first wars fought by all combatant parties as "national wars". Yet they were also part of what could be called the first world war, a war which touched every continent of the globe. They saw the fatal weakening of the Dutch and the Spanish, and eventually the French empires, yet the continuing expansion of the British, Russian and North American empires. The impact of the warfare of this period can only be fully understood if this global dimension is given full weight, and if the experience of these wars is placed in the context of the parallel developments taking place in the political, military and economic systems of Asia and Africa, in the Mogul, Persian, Ottoman and other empires. In relation to Britain, the 'new imperial history' has focussed on categories of difference as critical to the shaping of identities; and in the circumstances of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, from 1790-1820, those differences were most sharply experienced in the diverse and multicultural sites of both military and imperial conflict.

The focus of the research project based at the University of York, 'Nations, Borders and Identities' lies in the comparative study of the experiences of European men and women in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, from 1790-1820. It asks how these wars were experienced by men and women of different ethnic backgrounds, religious affiliation, political outlook, age and familial status, as soldiers, sailors or civilians, abroad and at home. It considers which factors most shaped experiences and perceptions of the wars and how far these became a part of individual and collective identities, with particular reference to gender, class, race and nation. It is an essential part of the project to examine the kinds of military, political and cultural encounters which took place not only within Europe and those overland empires on the edges of Europe, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, but across the world, in southern India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, St Domingue, Canada, Brazil, Surinam, and elsewhere. These wars were related to, but cannot be simply correlated with, the expansion of worldwide economic relationships which characterised the period, in the global exchange of goods and peoples. In particular, the slave trade and the resulting slave economies of North America became entangled in complex ways with the conflicts of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. French revolutionary ideology promised freedom and citizenship to all. British evangelical initiatives brought the abolition of the slave trade, though British resistance to revolutionary ideas of citizenship and economic interests meant continuity in the institution of slavery. In the West Indies European powers were engaged in military and naval confrontations which recharted the map of imperial dominance, but also profoundly affected the future of slavery. In the garrisons of the West Indies, British and French troops and their civilian followers interacted with black populations, slave and free, to a greater extent than ever before.

We hope that this conference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds as well as those with specialised knowledge of the different geographical areas of these wars. Charting the experiences of the men and women engaged in the conflicts requires not only discussion of the conventional sources of military and political history, but critical examination of personal and autobiographical writings and their cultural and imaginative contexts. The visual dimension, in the representation of war in both high art and popular propaganda, is essential to the understanding of such contexts. We would hope also that the conference will address the ways in which the wars were remembered and commemorated in their immediate aftermath, as new narratives of experience were constructed from different national perspectives.

Programm

Friday, May 16

12.00-1.15 Plenary speaker:
Christopher Bayly (University of Cambridge): An End to Revolution: 'Reform' and 'Reaction' in the Colonial World, 1790-1830.

2.15-4.15: Parallel Sessions
1) War, Slavery, and Rebellion I
Caitlin Anderson (University of Cambridge): Old Subjects, New Subjects, and Non-Subjects: Race, Religion and Citizenship in Grenada’s Fedon Rebellion, 1795-96

Curtis Jacobs (University of the West Indies): Fédon’s Rebellion in Grenada (1795-1796)

Nigel Worden (University of Cape Town ): Changing Slave Consciousness in the Age of War and Revolution: the Cape Colony, c.1790-1808

2) Mobilising for imperial/ national warfare
Alejandro Rabinovich (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris): Building the Warrior. The Spanish-American Repelling of the British Invasions of Rio de la Plata, 1806-1807

Michael Rowe (King’s College London): German Soldiers for Napoleon: their Experiences, Identities and Social Impact

Seth Meisel (University of Wisconsin – Whitewater): Slavery, Emancipation and Nationhood in the Río de la Plata, 1807-1852

4.45- 6.00 Plenary speaker: Laurent Dubois (Michigan State University): The Revolutionary Abolitionists of Haiti

Saturday, May 17
9.30-10.45 Plenary speaker: Janet Hartley (LSE): The Russian Empire: Military Encounters and National Identity

11.15-1.15 Parallel Session
1) Visual representations: war, revolution and patriotism
Laurence Brown (University of Manchester): War and Visual Culture in Revolutionary Saint Domingue, 1791-1805

Foteini Vlachou (University of Crete, Greece): “Cruel invaders of Country, Perfidious Enemy of the Human Race”: Patriotism, Painting and Propaganda in the Iberian Peninsula during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Valerie Mainz (University of Leeds): Signing up - for Peace?

2) Extending the pathology of war
Thomas Dodman (University of Chicago): Identity and Non-identity: Soldiers’ Nostalgia during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars

Catherine Kelly (Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford): Medicine and the Egyptian Campaign

Neil Ramsey (Australian National University): “Destructive, ruinous war”: Thomas Jackson, Benjamin Harris and the Cultural Imaginary of the Napoleonic Wars

3) Abolishing slavery: international perspectives
Kirsten McKenzie (University of Sydney): Caterpillars on the Tree of Liberty: Prize Slaves and Imperial Rivalries at the Cape of Good Hope

Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Université Paris 7): John Jay, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and the Fate of Atlantic Anti-Slavery during the Age of Revolutionary Wars

Julie Winch (University of Massachusetts-Boston): Borderlands of Empire, Borderlands of Race

2.15-4.15 Parallel Sessions
1) War, Slavery, and Rebellion II
Matthias Röhrig Assunção (University of Essex): From the Dissolution of the Portuguese Empire to the ‘Horrors of Haiti’: Maranhão, Northern Brazil, 1820-25

Carmelina Gugliuzzo (University of Messina): The Uprising of Peasants: Simple People against the Napoleonic Empire [Malta]

Lyman L. Johnson (University of North Carolina, Charlotte): The French Conspiracy: Paranoia and Opportunism on the Eve of Independence in Buenos Aires

2) Expanding imperial governments: the wider impact of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars
Karl Hack (Open University): Napoleon and Raffles: European War and Europe in the Malay World

Donald Hickey (Wayne State College): The Impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on the United States, 1793-1815’3) Military encounters and the ‘other

Ruth Leiserowitz (Free University of Berlin): Russia pushes toward the West: the New Imperial Peripheries 1801-12

3) Military encounters and the ‘other’
Joanna de Groot (University of York): War, Empire, and the ‘Other’: Iranian-European Encounters in the ‘Napoleonic’ Era

Leighton James (University of York): ‘A wild looking people’: German Encounters with the ‘barbaric East’

Lars Peters (Free University of Berlin): “England was the bravest as well as the most generous of nations”: Racial and Cultural Difference in the Nautical Novels of Frederick Marryat

4.45– 6.00 Plenary speaker: Geoff Quilley (National Maritime Museum): Between Servant, Slave and Revolutionary: the Image of Jack Tar, c.1790-1830

Sunday, May 18
9.15-10.45 Parallel Sessions

1) Visual representations: theatre and spectacle
Troy Bickham (Texas A&M University): Virtual Imperialism in Eighteenth-century Britain

Kate Marsh (University of Liverpool): Staging the Fall of Mysore: French Representations of British and Indian Others

2) Novels of war and slavery
Sharon Murphy (University of Dublin, Trinity College): “War’s sweet to them that never tried it”: Representations of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels

Barbara Witucki (Utica College): ‘Identity and Ourika’

11.15-12.30 Plenary speaker: Rebecca Earle (University of Warwick): The French Revolutionary Wars in the Spanish American Imagination, 1810-1830

1.30-2.45 Parallel Sessions
1) Visual representations of war: armies and their train
Mary Zundo (University of Illinois): ”Horses for the Holy War”: Arabic Equestrian Culture in Early 19th-Century French Art

Margaret Vining / Barton C. Hacker (Smithsonian Institution): Drawing Women In: Images of Women’s Military Work in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Armies

2) Remembering national heroes and imperial wars
Oliver Schulz (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf): Permanent Turmoil, Imperial War and National Heroes: the Representation of Stojan Indže Vojvoda and the Haiduks from Thrace in Folk Tradition and Historiography

John McAleer (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich): “Eminent Service”: War, Slavery and Public Recognition in the British Caribbean

3) War and minority populations

Ian Coller (University of Melbourne): Making Arab France: The French occupation of Egypt and its consequences

John McNish Weiss (London): The Early Workforce of the Royal Naval Dockyard at Bermuda: African Americans in Transit from Slavery to Freedom

2.45-4.00 Final plenary session: Round table: Miles Taylor (University of York), Karen Hagemann (University of North Carolina), Jim Walvin (University of York)

Kontakt

Conference organiser: Jane Rendall
Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies
The King's Manor
Exhibition Square
York YO1 7EP (Great Britain)
Fax: 01904 434989
Email: war@events.york.ac.uk

http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/cecs/conf/war/warabout.htm
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