Sea Control - Sea Control 530 - The Creole Archipelago with Dr. Tessa Murphy

Episode Date: June 22, 2024

Links1. The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean, by Tessa Murphy, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.2. Sea Control 227 – Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean with Dr. Sharika Crawford, CIMSEC, February 15, 2021.3. Sea Control 505 - Pirates of the Slave Trade with Dr. Angela Sutton, CIMSEC, March 28, 2024.4. Captives of Conquest - Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean, by Erin Woodruff Stone, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.5. Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower - The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War Against Revolutionary France, by Michael Duffy, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Tessa Murphy joins me to discuss her book, The Creole Archipelago, and we're going to explore some Caribbean history today. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab and learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Tessa Murphy, and we're going to discuss her book, The Creole Archipelago, Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. So Tessa, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about your background, please? Sure. Thank you so much for having me. As you mentioned, my name is Tessa Murphy. I'm an associate professor of early American history at Syracuse University in central New York. And up here, I'm teaching courses on topics like the colonial and revolutionary Americas, the Atlantic world, and comparative slavery and emancipation. Before coming to Syracuse, I earned a PhD in Caribbean history from the University of Chicago, and I did my undergraduate

work in history as well as French and anthropology at the University of Toronto, which is actually not too far from where I grew up in Canada. Well, thank you very much for coming on today. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. Can I ask, how did you get interested in the Caribbean before we even go into sort of what we have on here? Yeah, I love that question.

It really was a professor in undergrad. So the University of Toronto, which your listeners may not know, is a massive institution, has many, many different departments and programs, including Caribbean Studies program. And so I was fortunate enough in my last year of undergraduate to take a seminar with Professor Melanie Newton, who is a professor of the Caribbean. She's from Barbados. and it was just quite honestly the most fantastic class I had ever taken and she has continued to really be a support and a mentor to me and to many other people and she's kind of a gateway

to Caribbean history I think for a lot of people and so I was a history major but I didn't know what part of history I liked the most and it really was that seminar that kind of launched me into Caribbean waters. So for the listeners who aren't familiar where is the Creole Archipelago and why is it called that? Yeah, this is a great question because the Creole Archipelago is not a physical space. So it's not something you're ever going to see labeled on a map. It's a term that I came up with to describe a particular region and the shared culture that emerged as people moved through and across this region in ways that didn't align with how imperial powers wanted them to. So geographically, when I say the Creole Archipelago, I'm using it as kind

of a shorthand for a chain of islands in the Lesser Antilles, which are the small islands in the southern part of the Caribbean. And the islands in this part of the Lesser Antillian chain are all volcanic, and they're only about 20 to 25 miles apart. So you can usually see the peaks of one island from the next. And so here specifically, I'm talking about a chain that stretches from the island of Dominica in the north, down through Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, the Grenadines, and then all the way down to Grenada in the south. And obviously, in a book, it's a lot quicker to just write the Creole Archipelago rather than write out the names of all those islands every time. But I also thought it was really important to have a term for

the region because these islands are not usually thought of as part of an entity, a shared entity. They're more often examined either by themselves, right? So just St. Lucia or just Grenada, or as part of broader imperial groupings like the French Antilles or the British West Indies. And when I looked at what was happening in this chain of islands throughout the colonial era, I didn't think that those kinds of distinctions really captured how people living there would have made sense of the world that they were inhabiting. So residents of what I call the Creole archipelago, and here I'm talking about European colonists, I'm talking about enslaved Africans, free people of African descent, indigenous people, they were quite regularly traveling between these islands to do things like engage in trade, visit their family and friends, partake in religious rituals, and also evade the colonial state. And as they did this, they're forging economic and social and linguistic and informal political connections that didn't align with imperial boundaries. So talking about a Creole archipelago, rather than French colonies versus British colonies, was for me a way to highlight the experiences and realities of these historical actors rather than those of colonial administrators. this is a bit of a historian nerd question here i'm going to ask it anyways because i believe you mentioned it whether it was the intro or the first couple chapters what difficulties do you encounter trying to gather source material for this period so i will say like i had a really great time gathering source material um it was scattered

across a lot of archives so it did take me a very long time like for people who were thinking about a dissertation topic, I would not recommend needing to go to this many archives in this many places. The islands that I worked on, as I mentioned, were colonized by France and or Great Britain. So I got to spend a lot of time in the French colonial archives, which are in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, which is beautiful. And then the National Archives of the United Kingdom, which are in Kew, just outside of London. So obviously, those are both great places to spend time. And then I was able to complement what I found in those archives by doing work in Caribbean archives especially in Martinique which is a French overseas department

whose archives also contain materials about neighboring islands and in Dominica which has a really fabulous archive and then I also did some work in St. Lucia and Grenada and I'll say that all of these archives had more material than I expected to find or that I that I was told I would be able to find um a lot of it does take the form of like rumor or kind of reports on suspicious activities that are happening in the islands as people are moving there without the authorization of the colonial state um there was also a lot of really really rich material in church records because people this is a largely catholic region and so people would travel to places that had catholic churches in order to get married and baptize their children

So you get to see who's living where, who they're choosing as godparents to their children or witnesses to their weddings and really get a sense of their social connections. I will say that one big challenge is that a lot of the people that I'm most interested in as a historian, so enslaved people, free people of African descent, indigenous people, they weren't literate in the era that I didn't have access to literacy in this era. So they really didn't leave written records of their lives. And of course, archives in the Caribbean deal with all of these challenges of the natural environment, hurricanes, fires, insects, just the humidity leading any paper documents to just kind of mold or disintegrate. And so certainly, I mean, huge numbers of records have been lost. But my experience doing this research convinced me that there's actually a lot of sources available for this time and place. And it's been exciting to see so many historians work on this history. You wrote early on, and I quote, Kalinagos could not have predicted how profoundly their versatile maritime technology would shape the development of the colonial Caribbean, end quote. Who are the Kalinagos and what maritime technology were you referring to?

So the Kalinagos are the indigenous inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles. When Spanish explorers got to the Caribbean in 1492, they helped create this probably false dichotomy between the indigenous inhabitants of the Greater Antilles, which are the larger islands in the Northern Caribbean, like Jamaica, Hispaniola, and those of the lesser Antilles, who the Spanish claimed were inherently violent and savage, like they go so far as to say that they're cannibals, and the Spanish label them caribs. And so conveniently for the Spanish, because of their, their quote, unquote, savage nature, caribs were deemed by the Iberian crown eligible for enslavement. If you want to know more about Indigenous slavery in the Caribbean, I can highly recommend a book by Aaron Woodruff Stone called Captives of Conquest

that really exposes the scale and consequences of the Indigenous slave trade in the Caribbean. And so certainly some people still use this Spanish label, which has associations with cannibalism the term carib but present-day indigenous people in the western antilles refer to themselves as kalanago and so that's the term that i use as well so the kalanagos developed watercraft that they call kanaoa or canoes right so it's just like the word we use um and kalanago canoes are made out of a single copperwood tree so they would actually have these big ceremonies where they cut down a tree and they use fire to hollow out the center. And so the size of the canoe depends on the height of the tree. And it can be as large

as their descriptions of canoes that fit 75 men who are rowing these vessels. And so obviously, this kind of maritime technology is totally different from what Europeans bring when they show up in these huge sailing ships. And those European ships are great for getting across the ocean. But they're not nimble enough to get along the coastlines of the islands. They're dependent on wind, right? So as you probably know, if it's calm day, like they're not going anywhere. Whereas Kanaoas can go wherever their rowers have the strength to take them. And in a region where the sea is really the main thoroughfare, like these islands, again, are volcanic. So even today, you don't necessarily have a ton of roads, right? It can be very hard

to kind of get across the islands. And so having these nimble kana'oa means that anybody who's using this maritime technology, whether Kalanago or African or European, can get around the region in ways that colonial officials can't necessarily, or people who are dependent on sailing ships can't police their movement in the same way. Yeah, I guess what I would share for the listeners is that also the range of a canoe, as we think of it today,

is something entirely different than what these indigenous people were using. I can remember pulling into Palau in 2004 and the president of Palau came onto our ship and was talking about the insurgency on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines and then threw out just as sort of a non sequitur that that is within canoe range we had to look it up afterwards it was well over 500 miles distance and we all kind of looked at each other like canoe range across the open pacific ocean so when you talk about the mobility here it can cover those substantial ocean distances as well

as what you're talking about with the shallow draft ability to approach like the littoral area. One of the major events that you covered in some depth was the turn to sugar production in the Caribbean. How did that happen and what was the effect on the people? Yeah, the turn to sugar production in this region of the Caribbean happens fairly late, about a century after colonies like Barbados turned to sugar planting. And the reason is that the islands don't all come under European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War, which ends in 1763. So after 1763, St. Lucia becomes a colony of France, and then Dominica, St. Vincent, Grenada, and also Tobago are assimilated into the British Empire, and they become known as the Ceded Islands, because they are ceded to Great Britain at this time. And being assimilated into these existing empires means that the islands are now part of the trade networks of the respective French and British empires. And because they're part of these trade networks, French and British merchants start trafficking tens of thousands of West African people to the new colonies as enslaved laborers.

And so in the space of a single decade, this completely transforms the islands. It transforms their populations. We see enslaved people coming to outnumber free people by as much as 18 to 1 in some of these islands. um it transforms their landscapes enslaved people are forced to cut down native rainforests to plant sugarcane which obviously leads to soil erosion um it transforms their economies because wealthy planters are consolidating these big sugar estates um kind of consolidating maybe smaller cacao or coffee or provision plantations um and of course it completely transforms the society of the creole archipelago that i speak about in the earlier chapters so some of the defining features of the creole archipelago are challenged or even erased in this very short period of time after 1763 for example people who are used to moving between islands now find that when they when they

move from one island to another they're crossing an international border that wasn't there before and so they may be moving in ways that are not legal and certainly if they're carrying any goods with them, now they're smuggling when they're doing something that they've been used to doing for a long time. And I think the biggest changes pertain to the opportunities for people who are marginalized by the violence of plantation societies anywhere in the Americas. So indigenous Kalinagos who are used to having control over huge territories now find that settlers want to take their lands in order to convert them into plantations. And that is going to lead to multiple armed conflicts, including two all-out wars between Kalinagos and British

forces in Saint Vincent in the 1770s and again in the 1790s. And then African people and people of African descent find that any influence they previously had is seriously eroded by the creation of these slave societies that really depend on these binaries between black and white and enslaved and free. Enslaved Africans fight back against this through a series of armed conflicts, including what are called the Maroon Wars in Dominica, and Fedon's Rebellion in Grenada. And then free people of African descent push back against their increasing economic and political marginalization by moving to other islands, right, literally hopping in a canoe and relocating, um by using diplomatic means such as petitioning the british crown for their rights as british

subjects and ultimately by turning to violence so fidon's rebellion for instance is led by a man of french and african descent and what i think is so important about understanding the effects of the turn to sugar in the creole archipelago is because this is something that played out time and again, in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas, but because of the late date at which it happens in this region, it's much better documented here. And so we get this pretty nuanced look at all of the demographic and economic and environmental and social phenomena that accompanied the rise of plantation societies throughout the Americas, like Indigenous dispossession, the rise of African slavery, the narrowing of possibilities for anyone except the

wealthiest planters. And we get to really reflect on how these seemingly abstract phenomena affected individuals and families, sometimes across generations. So it becomes a very human story when we look at it in the Creole Archipelago. So before we move on to the last question for the listeners, what you referenced earlier, Aaron Woodruff Stone's Captives of Conquest, you'll find a link to that in our show notes. And then if you want to hear a little bit more about sort of the turn towards African slavery, I would recommend Sea Control 505, Pirates of the Slave Trade with Dr. Angela Sutton. Dr. Sutton goes pretty in-depth into how that came to be. So final question for you then, Tessa. The Kalinagos and French fought the British. You referenced the

1770s war. I'm going to ask you about what happened between March 1795 and June 1796. Why did they choose to go to war and what was the result of that? Yes. So to a certain extent, this conflict, which is known as the Second Carib War, is an outgrowth of the French and Haitian revolution. So there are wider military contests going on between the French and the British in the 1790s, as many of your listeners are probably aware. Michael Duffy wrote about this in an older book called Soldiers, Sugar and Sea Power. And people in the Lesser Antilles capitalized on this inter-imperial war and wider instability to try to oust British colonizers from the region. But for Kalinagos and St. Vincent, what's at stake is also their claim to land. So the British had been continually chipping away at Kalinago territory on the windward side of the island. especially after 1763, and the Kalinago understandably are not pleased to find themselves

more and more marginalized on these smaller patches of land. So in March 1795, at the same time that another anti-British uprising is underway in Grenada, Ferron's Rebellion, distracting the British forces in the region, Kalinago's rise up under the leadership of a man named Joseph Chateuyer, an indigenous man. Chateuyer is unfortunately killed very early in the conflict, but Kalinago fighters join with French troops who are stationed in nearby St. Lucian. They also have a stronghold in French Guadeloupe. And they continue to wage war against British forces in St. Vincent until the summer of 1796. And ultimately, the French and the Kalinago are defeated in St. Vincent, and the British transport almost 5,000 Kalinagos to a Grenadine

island called Baliso, which is just south of St. Vincent. The exiles are kept there for several months, and during that time, about half of those who were transported die. And the survivors are then exiled to a colony called British Honduras, which is present-day Belize, and their descendants come to be known as the Garifuna people who today live in Belize, as well as Guatemala and Honduras. St. Vincent and Baiso remain really important ancestral sites for Garifuna people in the present day, and Chateau is recognized as a national hero of St. Vincent. But those territories that the Kalinago held for centuries and that were so crucial to the creation of spaces and societies that remained beyond imperial control, ultimately also became sugar plantations. So that

windward side of St. Vincent became the site of huge sugar plantations. And so the story certainly ends on a very sad note, but it's one that I think is important to integrate into our broader understandings of the history of the colonial Americas. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. The book is The Creole Archipelago, Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Tessa Murphy. Tessa, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Well, thank you so much for a great conversation. I'm on Twitter as at Murphites, so Murphy T-E-S. And next up, I'm actually going back to school. I got a grant from the Mellon Foundation to pursue training in information studies because I've got this huge

amount of information about enslaved people in the 19th century British Empire. And as someone who really trained in the humanities, I have no idea how to work with that volume of information. So I'm going to take some courses and hopefully get a good grounding in how to work with this really rich material. Well, that sounds fascinating. We look forward to whatever is going to come out of that. And maybe we'll be able to bring you back once you're, if you have the time to synthesize some of all that.

But thank you again for joining us. To the listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Way, hey, put it in the alley There I met with Greasy Annie Put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm put it in the alley Way, hey, put it in the alley

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