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Title
Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council Appointed for the Consideration of all Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations Submitting to His Majesty's Consideration the Evidence And Information They Have Collected In Consequence of His Majesty's Order In Council, Dated the 11th of February 1788, Concerning the Present State of the Trade to Africa, And Particularly the Trade In Slaves; And Concerning the Effects And Consequences of This Trade, As Well In Africa And the West Indies, As to the General Commerce of This Kingdom: Part 3
Creator
Great Britain (Board of Trade)
University of Michigan
HathiTrust
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Title
Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council Appointed for the Consideration of all Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations Submitting to His Majesty's Consideration the Evidence And Information They Have Collected In Consequence of His Majesty's Order In Council, Dated the 11th of February 1788, Concerning the Present State of the Trade to Africa, And Particularly the Trade In Slaves; And Concerning the Effects And Consequences of This Trade, As Well In Africa And the West Indies, As to the General Commerce of This Kingdom: Part 1
Creator
Great Britain (Board of Trade) (Author)
Abstract/Description
The British Board of Trade, formerly the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, delivered this report to the British House of Commons as "the outcome of the first parliamentary enquiry into the slave trade" dated February 11, 1788. The 900-page parliamentary report is sourced from the testimonies of slave traders, planters, colonial agents and a few abolitionists, but no slaves or former slaves are included on the record. This text has been split through our archive, this is part I of III.
Publisher
First Edition - London, England : Great Britain, Parliment, 1789
Language
English
Subjects and keywords
Reports
Testimonials
Obeah Narratives
Fuller, Stephen
Edwards, Bryan
Burdett, William
Earle, William Jr.
Jamaica
Barbados
Antiqua
Permanent URL
Date created
February 11, 1788
Citation
Great Britain. Board of Trade. Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council appointed for the Consideration of all Matters relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations. London. February 11, 1788.
Use and reproduction
The digital edition is freely available for public download and non-commercial redistribution.
Restriction on access
This digital edition has limited access restrictions. View the terms of access at http://ecda.northeastern.edu/
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Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council (1789): A Scholarly Introduction

By: Elizabeth Polcha

The Board of Trade, formerly the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, delivered this report to the British House of Commons as “the outcome of the first parliamentary enquiry into the slave trade” dated February 11, 1788. The 900-page parliamentary report is sourced from the testimonies of slave traders, planters, colonial agents and a few abolitionists, but no former slaves (Paton 50). The report covers a wide range of topics, from “the present state of those parts of Africa from whence Slaves have been exported” in Part I, to the “view of evidence concerning the Manner of carrying Slaves to the West Indies” in Part II. The largest section, part III, concerns the “Treatment of Slaves in the West Indies, and all Circumstances relating thereto.” Part III has particular interest for the ECDA as it is the section that contains the most material on obeah. The last section, Part IV, provides extensive charts detailing the imports to and exports from the West Indies, and is titled “the several Accounts which have been called for, in order to shew the Extent of the Trade in all its Branches, and the Number of White People and Slaves in each of the Islands in the West Indies.”

The third section of the report on the “Treatment of Slaves” focuses on the following West Indian islands: Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Christopher, Grenada, Dominica, St. Vincent, Bermuda, and the Bahamas. Scholars have largely cited this section of the report as a resource on obeah and obeah practitioners. While the report provides details on obeah in several of the West Indian islands, the most prominent obeah testimony is on Jamaican obeah sourced from Jamaican planters. Diana Paton notes that the report “may well be the most influential description of obeah that has ever been produced” (45). Srinivas Aravamudan includes an excerpt from this section in an appendix to his edition of Obi or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack (168-181). In addition to a resource on obeah, scholars of the Atlantic slave trade such as Richard Sheridan and Joseph Inikori have cited the report as a resource on the size of slave populations.

The narrative on Jamaican obeah includes a testimony by Stephen Fuller, Edward Long, and James Chisholme, which became a source for Bryan Edwards’ the History, Civil and Commercial, of the West Indies (1793). William Earle Jr. quotes Edwards’ description of obeah in Obi or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800), as does William Burdett in Life and Exploits of Mansong, Commonly Called Three-Fingered Jack (1800). Fuller, Long, and Chisholme’s testimony thus became more widely known as it circulated through multiple editions of Edwards’ History as well as in Burdett’s and Earle’s texts.

Bibliography

Bilby, Kenneth M. and Jerome S. Handler. “Obeah: Healing and Protection in West Indian Slave Life.” The Journal of Caribbean History, vol. 38 no. 2, 2004, pp. 153-183.

Inikori, J. E. “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey.” The Journal of African History, vol. 17 no. 2, 1976, pp. 197–223.

Paton, Diana. The Cultural Politics of Obeah. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Jaudon, Toni Wall, and Kelly Wisecup. “Interview: Obeah’s Cultural Politics—A Conversation with Diana Paton.” Atlantic Studies, vol. 12 no. 2, 2015, pp. 251–257.

Sheridan, Richard B. “Africa and the Caribbean in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” The American Historical Review, vol. 77 no. 1, 1972, pp. 15–35.

Secondary Bibliography

Earle, William. Obi; Or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack. Edited by Srinivas Aravamudan. Broadview Press, 2005.

Jaudon, Toni Wall. “Obeah’s Sensations: Rethinking Religion at the Transnational Turn.” American Literature, vol. 84 no .4, 2012, pp. 715-741.

How to Cite This Scholarly Introduction:

Polcha, Elizabeth. “Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council Appointed for the Consideration of All Matters Relating to Trade And Foreign Plantations (1789): A Scholarly Introduction.” Early Caribbean Digital Archive. Boston: Northeastern University Digital Repository Service, 2016.